Everything depends on my mother behaving well in the interview. The more independent she is, the less the cost; the more independent she is, the less traumatic the transition, we hope. Afraid of a scene, we walk her out to the patio, where the director greets us. He goes into his sales pitch, which really is of no importance to my mother, who is fixed on one thought: getting the hell out of there. As he urges my mother to “merely answer a few questions,” a parade of demented elders pass behind my mother’s back and across the patio. I quickly recognize them as being from the memory unit, Expressions. This is the dementia-care program we are trying desperately to avoid, if only Elvira would cooperate. The residents march past happily enough, their faces made-up like cartoon animals, sporting pointed ears and painted-on whiskers.
At first, I am confused by their outfits, and then remember it is Halloween. Holding hands, they move along with that telltale small-stepped shuffle that I would later recognize in my own mother. I instinctually move behind her to block her from turning in the parade’s direction. Still, some part of me can’t help but laugh inside at the absurdity of the moment. I recall the late-sixties French film The King of Hearts, in which Alan Bates, during World War I, happens upon a French town that has been abandoned to the suddenly liberated inmates of an insane asylum. Who really are the crazy ones here? the film asks, as do I. Certainly not my mother, who fights to keep the last vestiges of her identity intact.
My mother begs the kind director’s understanding. He does not know the full extent of the abuse she endures, the insufferable laziness of my father, the neglect from my sister. I try to intervene, fearing the more my mother talks, the closer she is to failing her “entrance exam” to Prestige. She turns on my sister, assuming (correctly) that she is the principal conspirator behind this latest movida to render her life worthless.
“And you, what about your own daughters?” she says to JoAnn with complete disdain. “They’re good for nothing.” Her tone is suggestive, lewd. My sister is speechless. My mother adores JoAnn’s daughters, especially her firstborn, Erin, who as the eldest spent the most time with her grandmother, making mud pies in the backyard, sharing teatime and talking about their “no-good husbands.” Erin es la consentida entre los nietos, y la Rebecca su “baby.” Pero ni modo, because this is an old tune for my mother. When she had no other way to stop us, she tried to stop us with our sex.
I would have to become a mother myself to finally comprehend that my mother’s vulgar rampages against us as young women were prompted by her raw fear of losing control of us and of her own life. That day on the patio of Prestige Assisted Living, more than thirty years later, there was no mistaking it for anything else.
“That’s enough, Mom,” I say to cut her off from her crude tirade against JoAnn and her daughters.
She storms out the patio, through the lobby, and out the front doors of the building. As in her meetings with the psychiatrist, she does not wander. How could she? Wander means to move about aimlessly. There is nothing aimless in my mother’s being. She stands riveted to the railing outside the front door of the building; she is fixed in her intention to resist.
“I’ll go talk to her,” I say to JoAnn.
I go outside. I make her sit down with me. She grips the arms of the wrought-iron chair, her knuckles white with fear. I give it all that I’ve got.
“Do you believe that I love you?” I must convince her that I am the exception, that she can trust me; that I alone will make sure she is not harmed. “Do you trust me?” I ask. And she has to say yes, because without me, at that moment, she has nothing and nowhere to go beyond that railing. She knows where home is, and right now it resides inside whatever shred of confidence she has left in her youngest daughter.
“Just answer the man’s questions, Mom. That’s all I ask, please. Just do this for me.” And she does. For me, her youngest. “The only one who really knows how to love.”
Putting her “strangers’ face” back on, my mother passes her interview with flying colors. Both my father and my mother would be able to come and go from their apartment as they pleased, while having their laundry and housekeeping done by the staff, meds administered and monitored by professionals, and meals provided in the main dining room. Prestige is only two miles from my sister’s new home, and we would no longer have to worry about Elvira burning the house down or finding her laid up on the couch in a drug-induced stupor. The house would be put on the market at a price good enough to secure a two-bedroom apartment at Prestige. At least for the time being, my mother would have her own room and bed and this might just ward off any further anxieties she holds about my father’s encroachment.
All this, our most “prestigious” and never-to-be-realized dream plan.
A MOTHER’S DICTUM
“Vera…”
She is backed up against the kitchen sink, holding a steak knife in front of her. “Don’t touch me,” she warns. “I’ll kill you.”
“Honey, don’t,” Joseph implores, but he is not her husband, not in Vera’s mind.
He doesn’t know how they got to this place, this nightmare of their whole life together denied or obliterated or unremembered. He doesn’t know which.
* * *
His wife had been asleep for hours. Turning off the evening news, Joseph rises from the couch with difficulty. He drags his slippered feet across the hardwood hallway floor toward their bedroom. Tonight, he is encouraged to see that his wife has gone to sleep in their shared bed. Maybe in the morning she will be better, he thinks. Maybe Vera will have forgotten her weeks-long standoff against him. He had not protested her departure from their bed. He missed her, but knew there was no point in protesting.
He silently removes his bathrobe and maneuvers his way under the covers on his side of the bed. It is difficult to get in without disturbing her. His shattered hips refusing to comply, he cannot really slide nor lift them completely. Still, he manages to find a spot where both hips settle themselves more or less comfortably. He contemplates the steady sound of his wife’s breathing.
As she sleeps, he can imagine Vera returned to him, nagging and easily irritated, but also lighthearted and full of so much to say about people, the small injustices of life; she, always the protagonist of the highest standards. He used to enjoy their conversations, coming in for lunch from the garage-office at noontime to catch The Young and the Restless over a tuna sandwich and a cup of coffee. He had never thought he could like soap operas, but once they hooked him, that was it. It was something they shared. He remembers this, as her light snoring sends him off to sleep.
“Get the hell out of my bed!” He is suddenly awakened to the bright light overhead and his wife’s constricted face hovering above him. “What are you doing in my bed? Get out! Get out!”
She pummels his face and chest with her fists. He tries to grab her flailing arms, but she is too quick for him. She runs into the kitchen. He hears a drawer open and slam shut. He struggles to get out of the bed, but the stiffness in his hips paralyzes him. He finally hurls himself up and at the door, stumbling into the kitchen.
He goes to her, easily overpowers her, separating her grip from the knife. She, equally easily, slips away from him because he has never held her against her will. “If you ever hit me, I’ll leave you.” He remembers her refrain from their early years. “I’ll take the kids.” Elvira rushes out the back door and flies up the steps to the backyard apartment, her adrenaline giving her wings. She pounds on the door of the neighbor, a MexicanAmerican woman in her thirties, a “nice girl” whom Elvira has come to trust and who, by sheer physical proximity, has been witness to many of her rampages against her husband.
“He’s trying to kill me,” she cries.
Joseph hears this and does not follow her; the steps up to the second-story apartment are too much for him. He waits for the neighbor to come down to talk.
“I didn’t touch her,” he says when she meets him at the bottom of the stairs; and then adds, “I think we should call my dau
ghter.”
They telephone my sister, the lionhearted one. She reminds our father that the doctor had prescribed a tranquilizer in case of an emergency. Could he find it in the cupboard? With the neighbor holding the phone, he locates the drug on a high shelf in the kitchen. Hanging up, the good neighbor talks my mother into taking the pill, and moments later, Elvira is calm enough to return to the guest bed in the back of the house. But Joseph cannot sleep knowing that he cannot live like this anymore; that even losing the house, his small tax business, his life as he knows it, would be preferable to this, the worst day of his life.
* * *
JoAnn called it “the worst day of my life,” the day she had to institutionalize our mother. A harsh word, but one that accurately describes our decision to relinquish our mother into a system of strangers, who could never know the nuances of her pain regardless of its cause—amyloidal plaque in the brain o una vida de puro resentimiento.
That morning, my mother had awakened from her tranquilizer-induced sleep, disoriented but rested. Per the doctor’s instructions, my sister came to pick her up to admit her into Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, for psychiatric anxiety and paranoia. My father complied with the plan, staying out of our mother’s way and remaining in the hospital waiting room for long hours, both relieved to not have to witness his wife’s incarceration, for he knew it would be against her will, and also disturbed that it had come to this.
The fact that our father, our mother’s daily companion, would serve as the object of her deepest fear and derision continued to rack our minds and hearts. To her daughters, our mother’s response was at once perfectly logical, the culmination of a half century of complaint; and, at the same time, witnessing our father’s sorrow, it seemed horribly cruel and unthinkable. But the reality was that our mother was suffering without reprieve. Her rages would end up killing her or someone else. Her pitiful assault against my father had forced us to act.
For the first hour or so, admission to Huntington Hospital went peaceably enough. My mom was sequestered in a private room where my sister continued to try to entertain her, assuring her all would be okay. But as time passed without word from hospital staff (they were trying to find a vacant bed for my mom in the psychiatric wing), my mother’s anxiety mushroomed. Over the course of many hours, my sister left the room several times in an attempt to communicate with a hospital staff that remained unresponsive.
One time, the last time, she had stayed away too long. By the time JoAnn returned, my mother had torn up the room that had been locked from the outside, raging that she had been abandoned by everyone, even her own ingrata daughter, who had just dumped her like a sack of potatoes. If she could only find her pocketbook, she’d call a taxi right now. Where did they put her money? They stole it. She knew they stole it. When she got outta there, she was gointu get her own place. She was tired of it all. She didn’t give a damn no more what people thought of her. She was getting out.
I didn’t see my mother’s face when JoAnn stepped back into that room, but I can picture it. Since childhood, I had seen that look of utter contempt thrown at my father and sister so many times, many more times than it was hurled at my brother or me. It is a look that freezes the heart; and when it comes at you, your heart scrambles for the warmth of one good thought to keep the organ pumping, loving. Because to be on the receiving end of that look, where in my mother’s eyes you are beyond redemption, you think you may never love again.
I don’t know why my mother was so hard on my dad and sister, maybe because she could be, maybe because they didn’t fight back. At least, that was the case with my father, and I suspect it is one of the reasons Elvira resented him so.
I remember after my mother became ill, Auntie Eva confided in me that my mother had been hit only once in marriage. “She had slapped him first,” referring to my mother’s first husband. “She had it coming to her.” I didn’t know if this was my auntie’s version of the story or my mother’s, who always said she’d leave any marriage if a man laid a hand on her. And, apparently, the fight was precisely about that, about leaving him. The fact that the man must have outweighed my mother by nearly a hundred pounds made it sound like an unfair match to me.
But I believed it, believed there was a longing in my mother to be put solidly in place, to be relieved of herself, of being so damn in charge, so right about so much and yes, that first husband had been a womanizer, a military man with a woman for every furlough, and yes, she would have to leave him. But it seems he desired her, and that was something. To be taken in that way, not by a man who was good for you, not by a man who would give you children and stick around to support those children, but just by someone who unequivocally wanted you and was not afraid to show it.
Thinking of Elvira’s romances as a young woman, Celia goads me, “C’mon, Cherríe, you don’t really believe your mom was a virgin until she was married in her late twenties, do you?”
Yes, I answer. Because she said so.
Because it mattered so much to her—to hold the example for her younger siblings, while neither her mother (after her husband’s death and still in her forties) nor her divorced sisters felt similarly obliged. Perhaps my mother’s virginity until marriage was a technicality; perhaps abstinence was simply required to ward off an unwanted pregnancy in a woman who was the primary support of her familia. One thing is for sure, her virginity was not for lack of passion.
Speaking of my parents’ troubled years in the early 1960s, my mother once admitted, “I shouldn’t have turned away from your father for so long. One time, I put my feet close to him in the bed, just to touch him, and he pulled away from me. And that was it.” But was that it? Surely it was not her last gesture to connect. But who was this woman, beneath all the raging, that was so vulnerable to a man’s rejection?
In his wish to write a story of desire between my parents, my brother once recounted how, as a grown man, he had, without calling first, dropped in on them unexpectedly, only to find them nervously coming out of the back room. They were “undone” in a way that suggested sex. I don’t doubt the sex, at least in the early years. I regularly remember the fresh smell of vinegar in the bathroom on early mornings and encountering my mother’s “women supplies” in the bottom drawer that held the vinegar bottle, the red rubber douche bag, the white snakelike tubing: the ritual elements of my mother’s postcoital hygiene.
I like the story of it as well; to picture our parents beyond middle age, generating some fire in their relationship. But perhaps it wasn’t exactly fire that endured between them, as much as warmth, a spontaneous warmth I witnessed in those years—before the loss of cognition and ruined hips—when money was plentiful enough and Grama Dolores, along with the world of worry she had brought into their lives, had passed on.
* * *
On a balmy summer night, my parents stare out onto the Caribbean waters and contemplate the moon’s reflection from a cruise ship deck. They are alone at that midnight hour, standing side by side, warmed by nostalgia and a few after-dinner cocktails. They had taken to the dance floor earlier in the evening, Vera limber and straight-backed in the knowing arms of her husband. They glide and spin about the dance floor to a big-band sound in full throttle, a could-be Ella Fitzgerald extemporizing to “How High the Moon.”
Peering into the moonlit sea, Vera says to her husband, “I never thought I’d ever get to see something so beautiful like this.”
She remembers a long-ago fortune-teller prophesying, “You will travel all over the world.”
There was a kind of romance in this moment for both my parents. He saw it as shared with her. She felt it as a singular part of her own private destiny.
I often wondered why my mother ended up marrying white. Elvira had had other loves before the two gringo marriages. Mexican men—mujeriegos and sweet-talkers—who possessed the beauty, charm, intelligence, and deceit of her father and eldest brother. Perhaps she just ran out of time or hope; for some part of her would always experience Anglos
as “others”; not foreign exactly, but just a cavernous hyphen between cultures.
* * *
With wild animal eyes, Elvira searches the hospital room for an exit. She sees my sister, standing frozen before her, yet another jailer in the way of her escape. She grabs JoAnn’s purse, begins to frantically rummage through it.
“What is it, Mom? What do you want?”
She pulls out her address book, and trying to regain her calm, begins to methodically count out the letters. She reads, “M … O … N … T … E … B…” Flipping pages, she goes on, reading the letters of names and addresses: “G … A … R … C … I … A.” They do not form words. Another page: “C … H … A…”
“I shoulda taught myself,” she cries. “I shoulda made myself learn.”
This prison is her fault, she thinks. Had she educated herself, she wouldn’t be in this situation, powerless among the gringos. She couldn’t even last a few weeks in adult school. Pendeja. That was what was wrong with her brain: not her memory, but education. Had she gone back to school, she coulda written her way out of this prison.
Or so she desperately needed to believe. Elvira was no victim.
JoAnn was shocked to see that our mother could no longer recognize the written names of people and places she had known for decades. Yes, Elvira had little formal education, but she could at least read and write that much; as she could read the recipes of the Betty Crocker Cookbook when she needed to and, after a lifetime of pieced-together learning, even the front page of the L.A. Times.
Nearing fifty, my mother used to sit in the kitchen and hold the newspaper away from her at a full arm’s length, straining to decipher the letters through failing eyesight. Resolute, Elvira silently mouthed the words as she read; in the same way she picked out the Hallmark cards from the hundreds displayed at the nearby Save-On; in the same way she signed birthday and Christmas cards in a strained cursive for her children and grandchildren.
Native Country of the Heart Page 13
