One True Thing

by Anna Quindlen

  There was a long silence, and I thought she was thinking about what I had asked. And then quietly she said, “I can’t see the words.”

  “I know,” I said, “it’s getting so dark.” I turned on the table lamp. “You should have told me to turn it on earlier.”

  She shook her head, a shower of red glints, and she let the book slip from her grasp and onto the rug. “I can’t see the words on the page anymore. I can’t read anymore. My eyesight is going. Like an old woman.” She sighed deeply and then there was a sound, like a bone caught in her throat.

  We sat in silence and finally she said, “It’s hard for me to believe that any woman would willingly leave her child.”

  “Not for love?”

  “That is love,” she said. She reached down and picked up the book.

  “I’ll get you a magnifying glass,” I said.

  “A pill,” she said. “I need another pill.”

  Later I told Teresa about my mother’s eyesight, and she told me she was not surprised, that it might be some unusual side effect of the medication and the deterioration. “We had a book club,” I started to say, and then I made that same sound my mother had, that swallowed sob.

  “You will have to move on to something else,” Teresa said.

  “I’m scared shitless,” I said, putting my face in my hands.

  “Of course you are,” Teresa said. “You are doing all of the right things. And that is the right thing now.”

  “I can’t stand this much longer,” I said.

  It was quiet, so that I could hear the hands of the kitchen clock clicking round their inexorable orbit. Teresa waited a long time, and finally she said softly, with the first hint of sympathy or real softness I had ever heard in her voice, “You will stand it as long as you need to.”

  If it had not been for Teresa Guerrero I am not sure that I ever would have bathed or dressed. Like Baby Jane and her poor sister, my mother and I would have sat in the living room, in bathrobes and greasy hair. But because of Teresa, because I needed to make myself seem all right for her, I rose early, showered, cleaned last night’s detritus off the kitchen counter, the plate from the leftover meal my father had taken from the oven faintly warmed by the tiny blue pilot, the plate from the cherry pie I had eaten before bed.

  I was getting heavy; the only pants that fit anymore were the ones with the elastic waists. But my father looked just the same, drawn and distinguished, although some days he seemed better than others, and I always wondered if those were the days after the nights when he had had some associate professor, some administrative aide, on the creaky leather couch in his office. When I wondered that an anger as powerful as pain jumped in my gut, but I put it down because I could not afford it. I needed all my energy to get through the days now, now that my mother had begun to die in earnest.

  Perhaps I was being romantic, but I think she made it happen herself, the slide, after the boys left. I remember how she had said “To hell with Easter,” and I think that maybe for a long time she had struggled toward Christmas, toward the old traditions and the time together, that she had made up her mind she would marshal her strength for that time, in its way the apogee of the kind of life she had tried so hard to construct in that small and pretty white house, the life of family meals and pleasant rituals and pretty things.

  She was so often gay during those two weeks, that sort of feverish gaiety they say people sometimes wrap around themselves for a moment’s warmth before they put a gun into their mouths or step into the long tunnel of air from roof to pavement. I think that when Jeff had loaded his army surplus duffel next to Brian’s in the back of his jeep, after he grabbed the roll bar and vaulted into the front seat, both of them packed in down and wool against the gray January morning, after my mother had held Brian’s head on her shoulder, smoothing his tears away with the flat of her hand, after we two stood and waved good-bye—I think it was then that my mother gave herself permission to give up.

  “I think she’s lost the will to live,” I said to Teresa one day a week later. “Is it that simple?”

  “It is,” she said with that faint curve of a smile, which in the beginning I believed was distant and a little condescending and now I saw simply as a dignified expression of understanding. “Your mother has been able to lead at least part of her life these last few months in the way she is accustomed to and loves. Perhaps now she realizes that is no longer true, that more and more she will become an invalid. They teach us there are stages in terminal illness: denial, anger. At the end comes reconciliation.”

  “Fuck reconciliation, Teresa.”

  “Not for you, Ellen. For her. I would not expect you to be reconciled.”

  Teresa came three times a week by then. One day Jules called when she was there, and when I called Jules back I told her I’d been with the nurse.

  “Oh, that must be a day at the beach,” said Jules, who had just broken off with a painter who said she was too needy because she complained when he tried to pick up waitresses at the restaurants where they ate together.

  “No, she’s great, Jules,” I said. “She’s like a combination shrink-priest.”

  “Some combination,” said Jules. “And she takes good care of your mom?”

  “She takes care of me, too. She talks to me. She keeps me sane. Sometimes I wonder which of us is her patient, actually. You and she are my links to the outside world. Or maybe you’re my link to the outside world and she’s my link to the inside world.”

  “You sound like you’re in therapy,” Jules said, chewing on something on the other end of the phone.

  “Oh, please,” I said, imitating Jules herself, who always said you could tell the people in therapy by how crazy they were.

  “I think I might be changing my mind about that,” Jules said softly. “I think I might need someone to talk to.”

  “You can talk to me.”

  “I know, sweet. But I can’t tell you my troubles because my troubles are no troubles compared to your troubles.” In the silence I could hear Jules chew and swallow. “Relative troubles, that’s what we’re looking at here. Does Teresa listen to your troubles without telling you hers?”

  “I don’t really think Teresa has troubles.”

  “God bless her,” Jules said. “What a life.”

  Instead Teresa told me about other people’s troubles in a way that was strangely soothing, that made me feel part of a great sorority of pain and suffering. She told me of how the woman with cancer of the pancreas had died in her husband’s arms in bed, how the woman with breast cancer and the two small children had had a remission and didn’t need Teresa anymore. “Will you have to go back to their house someday?” I said, wanting, like Scrooge, to see some scene of happiness connected with a death, and Teresa said with her eyes suddenly burning, “I pray not.” Sometimes I forgot that there were other lives entwined with hers as intimately as were our own.

  “Do you see someone?” I asked her one morning.

  “I am seeing a man who lives in the city,” she said. “But it is difficult to have a relationship at such a distance.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “How did you meet him?”

  “At church. My mother knows his mother. Until two years ago, I lived not far from him in Brooklyn.”

  “You used to live in the city? I had no idea. How did you wind up out here?”

  “There is a camp for disadvantaged children about thirty miles from here. It is called Camp Dream. I went there when I was a child. Once we came to Langhorne for the movies. When I looked at it from the bus window I thought it looked like the sort of place I would like to live someday.”

  “So you just picked up and came here?”

  “There is a shortage of nurses everywhere.”

  “But why did you leave the city? I love the city. When I slept in the city for the first time in my apartment, I remember feeling as if I was home for the first time in my entire life. Sometimes people say, oh, how can you sleep, all the noise? I l
isten to the horns and the ambulances, and it’s like, life. Real life, right outside.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “So why did you leave?”

  “How you love New York? That is how I hate it. The noise, the dirt. The real life. I have enough real life. When I am in my apartment here, I can hear the trees moving in the night. I will never go back to the city.”

  “Not to visit?”

  “There is no one to visit. My mother died when I was eighteen. And the answer to your question is no, not of this illness and that is not why I do what I do. She was hit by a gypsy cab on Nostrand Avenue while she was on her way to work. The driver was very, very sorry, and so was I, and I left the city and came here. If the man I am seeing is interested enough, he will follow. If not, not.”

  “We have something in common. Our mothers, I mean.”

  “My mother was a hard woman who had lived a hard life.”

  “In what way?”

  “I think I will leave that alone for now. There is no good way to tell people that they are lucky in their relations.”

  “I know that,” I said. I looked over the living room, the piano and the prints and the framed photographs on the piano.

  “I have never met your father,” Teresa added. “I imagine he is an interesting man.”

  “Don’t you ever wonder why you haven’t met him?” I asked.

  “He is at work when I am here.”

  “But don’t you ever wonder why he isn’t here, why he doesn’t at least come by to meet you?”

  “It sounds as if you are doing the wondering for both of us. And one of the things that it is important someone in my job understand is that illness brings out different qualities in different people. Some are enriched by it—yes, I know, you do not want to consider the possibility, but it is true, and I have seen it. Some people have a talent for it and some rise to the occasion. And some are diminished by their fear. They often deny, or withdraw.”

  “Jeff is right—you should be a shrink.”

  “Your brother is a very interesting person. I imagine your father is much like him.”

  “You imagine wrong. My father is much like me. Or I am much like him. Or at least I was. Right now I’m not much like myself, if you know what I mean.”

  Teresa smiled again, such a small smile that sometimes you saw it in her eyes before her mouth, like something on a hospital monitor. “Suffering transforms,” she said.

  “Suffering sucks,” I said.

  “I agree. With both conclusions, actually.”

  No one came to see us. No one, except for the UPS man when Jules sent me books from the office, and manuscripts, too, so I wouldn’t lose my editing touch. I stacked them in the corner of my bedroom and continued with Anna Karenina, even though I knew very well how it ended. I felt as though I had an obligation to go on until the train thundered out of the station.

  Sometimes, when I went out to buy groceries or some books or a bouquet of daisies, because such things gave my mother pleasure out of all proportion to the act, I would run into some old friend, one of the Minnies, a faculty wife, and I could almost see the sentence forming in their minds before they said it: “I’ve been meaning to stop by, but …”

  Another small spark of anger would flare in my chest, then die through lack of oxygen, except for the afternoon when I went into the bookstore to buy a magnifying glass. Teresa said she thought it was the medication affecting my mother’s vision. But I think it was just one more part of her too tired to go on.

  When Mrs. Duane began to say she’d been meaning to stop by, I looked into her clear blue eyes, the color of sky, wise and so aware of the duplicity of what she was saying that they darted away from my own, and without thinking I interrupted, “Then do it. Don’t tell me about it. Don’t regret that you didn’t. What she has is not catching.”

  “Ellen—”

  “Don’t,” I said, my voice getting higher and louder. I realized that people in the store had stopped to listen but I didn’t care. “No one has come to see my mother since the week before Christmas. She’s lonely and she’s sad and she thinks that everyone’s forgotten her, and all because it’s too uncomfortable for anyone to deal with anything deeper than winter ski plans and shopping for dinner.” And I picked up my packages and left without paying.

  I came home and put the magnifying glass on the table in the living room next to Anna Karenina. But I saw no evidence that it was being used. Still, I would not put her book back on the shelf with the two others. I would not declare the Gulden Girls Book and Cook Club defunct.

  The next day Mrs. Duane called and asked if she could come over for lunch. I fixed chicken sandwiches and she and my mother ate at a properly laid table in the dining room—“placemats, Ellen,” my mother had said. Mrs. Duane scarcely met my eyes. She gossiped with my mother about whose children were doing what and the January slump on Main Street.

  I noticed that she assiduously avoided discussing the shortcomings of men, perhaps the greatest talking point when Jules and I had lunch together. And I wondered whether that was yet another difference between women of my mother’s age and women of my own, or whether it was a difference between women who were single and women who were married and therefore had much, much more invested in their men than we did. Or perhaps it was because of how her friends felt about my mother and what they knew about my father. I wondered whether Mrs. Duane and the women like her had always done that around my mother, or whether they did it as a matter of course, not certain that any of their marriages were safe from being served up with the spinach salads and the iced tea.

  My mother let me help her from her wheelchair into the dining-room chair in which my father usually sat, the one with arms, and that was where she was when Mrs. Duane arrived. She was wearing a sea-green turtleneck with a crewneck sweater in the same color, but the collar of the one and the bulk of the other could not quite hide her frailty.

  The morning after her “lovely lunch,” as she called it when she spoke of it to my father, she slept late and I was in the kitchen cleaning when I heard her faint footfalls on the old pine floors above me. There was the sound of the water running, the faint wailing of our pipes like a small and halfhearted banshee, the muffled closing of drawers and doors and then silence.

  I sat down at the table with one of my mother’s magazines, looking at spring perennials, although where I was going to plant perennials and why, when gardening bored me so, I could not have told you. I read the recipes and the instructions for making a bedskirt for a crib. Perhaps my mother was saving it for Halley, whose daughter must be overdue. From above me I heard a sound that I thought at first must be the pipes again, or a child calling from down the street, or perhaps a sudden bad-tempered fit of winter wind whipping around the dormers. It came again and I lifted my head. Again, and I went to the foot of the stairs.

  “Ellen,” came the cry.

  I ran up those stairs as I had not run up since I was in high school, running to see if my father was in early, to tell him news and make it real—“I got into Princeton!” “I won the essay contest!” “I’m valedictorian!” How many times had I run in, banging doors, breathless, to tell him something and had to settle for her instead? How plain had it been on my face?

  “Ellen,” came the cry again.

  Her bedroom was empty, the covers thrown back. Before my mother was sick I think the only time I had seen my parent’s bed unmade was when they were in it, when I came in frightened after a bad dream, when I stuck my head in to tell them I had gotten home safely at one in the morning. A pair of knit pants and a tunic were on the chair, which had been moved closer to the bathroom door so that my mother could walk, stopping for a handhold as she went, from bed to table to chair to bath. The bathroom door was closed, and I knocked softly.

  “You have to come in,” my mother said with a catch in her voice.

  The room was warm and smelled rank, the smell of perspiration and something sweeter, deeper. My mother lay in the t
ub, her arm across her eyes, perhaps practicing the child’s fiction of believing that if she could not see me I could not see her.

  “I can’t get out,” she said.

  Silently I picked up the towel that was on the bench just next to the tub—she had made the bench from a kit, I remember, then painted it and sanded some of the paint down so it would look old—and hung it over my arm. I took her by the hands and tried to pull, but her legs scrabbled helplessly in the water, slick with bath oil, finding no purchase on the smooth porcelain of the tub. Then I reached around her chest and, with one great tug, pulled her over the edge and onto the bench. I was panting and the front of my denim shirt was wet with bathwater and, perhaps, perspiration. She weighed nothing, but felt so heavy.

  I had never before and have never since set about a task which required me so completely to act without thinking. My mother leaned her elbow on the edge of the tub and her head on her hand and wept as I toweled off her poor ravaged body. I took it piece by piece, bit by bit, because I knew that if I allowed myself to really look at her, at what she had become, I would be done for.

  But she knew, and while I couldn’t speak, she couldn’t keep silent. Suddenly she wiped her face with her hand and said, “I never wanted you to see me like this. I should have just stayed there until your father got home. I couldn’t figure out what was worse, having you see me like this, or him.”

  “I would have come up eventually,” I said, drying her shoulders.

  “I would have died before I would have let you see me like this. Just … rotten. That’s what I look like now, like a peach when it’s all rotten. Like bad fruit. Why can’t I just die and be done with it? It’s a crime for a human being to have to live like this. Rotten like this.” And she let her head drop down again.

  It was an apt description. Her skin was slack on her body in places, like soft fruit when it’s past its prime, on the insides of her thighs, her upper arms. But most of her flesh was stretched tight over her bones, a faint shroud for the skeleton: the two long bones running parallel beneath the skin of her arms and legs, the cage of pelvis and ribs. In her face every bit of skull was visible where the flesh had gone, leaving only the clear outlines of the understructure, the yawning Os of the eye sockets, the sharp peaks of the cheekbones, the hinge of the jaw, from which all the padding had disappeared. Her breasts were flat and sagging, like those of old women I’d seen in pictures of primitive tribes, and her pubic hair was nearly gone.