Susan and I drive into the city; we turn it into a date night. Dinner at Buvette, where we had been married in the tiny courtyard a few years earlier, and where we asked the chef, Jody Williams, to cook whatever she wanted to make. Friends and family came; my mother sat at the head of the table. Platters of French comfort food arrived: roast chicken and herbs, green beans vinaigrette. Rosé was poured, bottle after bottle. Our wedding cake was a tarte Tatin. I’m happy, my mother said, as Susan and I sliced through the layers of caramelized apple and sweet, buttery pastry.
At the apartment, we look for my mother’s makeup. Susan takes my mother’s bathroom; I take the hallway powder room.
“Can you come here for a minute?” Susan yells from the bedroom bathroom.
Lined up in her medicine cabinet like Tory soldiers on the battlefield at Lexington are thirty-one tubes of Clinique lipstick in various stages of light use. Some of them are still in their little green boxes, the silver tubes wrapped in sheets of flowered Kleenex.
In the hallway powder room, I get down on my hands and knees on the cold white tile and open the vanity doors. I find a brightly flowered zippered tote bag stuffed with fifteen plastic Clinique powder compacts, each one barely touched.
We do the math: more than a thousand dollars.
We sit down on her bed; I pick up the phone. My hands shake.
“Ma, we found your makeup. You have a problem—”
My throat closes up. I fight off tears. She’s been found out. Her lifeline will be cut, the switch flipped. Without beauty, she will die. There will be addiction specialists, therapists, family meetings; she will be forced, at last, to tell the truth.
“Good—” she says. “So you’ll bring them tomorrow?”
“Ma—we found thirty-one tubes of lipstick. And fifteen powder compacts—”
“That’s right,” she says. “Bring them all—”
“All of them?”
Susan mouths All of them?
“I might need them,” she says. “Why can’t you ever understand that.”
The unendurable: the specific moment when I can hold her fear in my hands like a snow globe, and shake it, and turn it to the light, and see the pieces of her life fall like flakes. I will be the one to say no, to kill her, to rob her of her beauty, to give her over to time.
* * *
• • •
“YOUR HOME WILL BE ABSOLUTELY perfect for her,” Betty says across the conference room table. “We can hook you up with Visiting Nurse and set you up.”
“My client is not interested in what you think about her home,” my attorney says. She is young, kind-faced, soft-spoken, take-no-prisoners.
Although Betty will not tell us how many days of rehab my mother’s bare-bones insurance has agreed to cover, she has taken the initiative to Google-map my home to make an accessibility determination.
Susan and I have paid our attorney to obtain one single piece of information with which the rehab is not willing to part, and without which they can compel my mother—compel me—to agree to pay for her entire stay out of pocket, to keep her there, keep her safe, and teach her how to walk again so that she can get back to her life. How many days will they pay for before she is kicked out and sent home—to my home? to her home?—where she will need a round-the-clock caregiver to help her bathe, dress, do laundry, cook, get to and from appointments, none of which is covered by insurance.
How many days?
She’ll be your responsibility.
* * *
—
Susan has measured the width of our hallway, our bathroom doors, the entrance to the guest room. None of them is wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair or a walker.
“We can get a transit chair if we have to,” Susan says, making notes on a legal pad. “They’re smaller. We’ll need a riser for the toilet, and grab bars. Maybe a hospital bed for the den if we can’t get her into the guest room.”
I sit on the couch drinking Scotch.
I envision the two of us lifting my mother on and off the commode and wiping her like an infant once she’s out of the Depends that she will refuse to wear during her recuperation. I see us settling her on a white plastic shower chair in our bathroom, one of us naked and washing her hair, her head tilted back like a little girl’s, her eyes closed, water dripping off her body in beads. I see us riding in the jump seat of an ambulette hurtling toward Bloomingdale’s and wheeling her through the makeup department, where she greets all the clerks. She looks up at me while I set the brake on her chair; she’s wide-eyed and wanting, pleading for a fix. I need a few new eye pencils, I imagine her saying as her favorite saleswoman bends down to ask what she’s looking for today.
“You don’t have to do this,” a social worker friend tells me. “It’s not inevitable. There are places she can go.”
“I can’t,” I tell her.
“You might have to,” she says.
“We don’t do that kind of thing in my family,” I say.
When Gaga’s mother was dying of emphysema in 1948, she was brought into my mother’s childhood apartment along with an oxygen tank and tent. There was no question that she would live there and die there, which she did. When Susan’s grandmother could no longer stay on her farm, she was moved into Susan’s bedroom, where she lived until her death at 103. The human tribe; the smoothing of the way. The Mongolian woman whose people flew from the other side of the world to sit with her. The lowest common denominator of humanity.
“You might have to,” my friend repeats. “It might be a matter of your health.”
I envision it straight out of the movies my mother is obsessed with: She is sitting in a hallway, a city hospital, full makeup. She is wild-eyed, manic, restrained. I imagine them coming at her with a giant glass syringe, and she is weeping and swaying her head back and forth: No no no no. She is living and dying in filth because I, her only child, enjoying her settled middle-aged life in her tidy home in Connecticut, cannot have her move in with me, into a room that, in my dreams, might have been meant for a baby.
We sit across the conference room table, the cross around Betty’s neck glimmering under the lights.
“Your mother is refusing to do any physical therapy,” Betty says. “We asked her what she does want to do, and she says she just wants to lay in bed, play with her makeup, and watch television all day, like she does at home.
“This is a problem,” Betty continues, “and if she doesn’t start to show any interest in improving her situation, her insurance will cut her off.”
“How many days, Betty?” I ask.
This is all we want to know in order to prepare, to change our lives, to find a way to welcome her in.
17
SUSAN AND I HAVE FALLEN in love with a small, discreet farmhouse in Camden, Maine. It is perfect for us: not too much property, a fenced-in yard for the dog, a recently renovated kitchen that occupies the entire back of the house. Walkable to the beautiful village where we have many friends—Camden lies between lush Mount Battie and the great expanse of Penobscot Bay, the color of slate—the house feels right.
One early morning before seven, we harness Petey, pack hot coffee in our canteens, and hike to the top of the mountain. We are not in good shape, and much older people pass us coming down the trail without so much as a huff: An aching back has lately prevented me from running, and Susan’s job requires her to be sedentary for most of the day. But parts of the hike are thoughtfully paved for people of every level, and done slowly, it becomes a walking meditation at the top of which is air and sea, for miles.
It is a weekday, well past tourist season, getting chilly. We face the harbor. Millay’s words give my steps cadence; they dance in my head like a nursery rhyme: All I could see from where I stood / Was three long mountains and a wood; / I turned and looked the other way / And saw three islands in a bay. Strung together in the distance, pale as
a bruise, lie Isleboro, Vinalhaven, North Haven. Lobster boats head out to pull in their traps. A line of sea kayakers snakes out into the water with a guide, weaving between three-masted tourist schooners and smaller sailboats, paddling their long, narrow boats against the current, heading for breakfast on Curtis Island; we will do this tomorrow after dinner tonight with dear friends we rarely get to see.
Neither of us says it, but we both know: After almost twenty years together, this is our next place, our next step. The third season of our lives.
We will make an offer on the little house in town.
* * *
—
Early on, the subject of our first conversations was place; the fact of it, and how it can translate into safety or danger, if only by association to love and event. Susan adored the Southwest, for the sky and the space. After a bad breakup in the eighties, she went on a vision quest trip to New Mexico; there was a hike with a sixty-pound pack, a three-day fast, a thunderstorm while she was camping at the top of a mountain in the Sangre de Cristos. We both loved Marin: the weather, the hills. I loved Colorado; it was easy to be healthy there. She loved Seattle for the city and the water; her best friend from college lives in Friday Harbor. Susan once spent a month in the Pacific Northwest without her mother ever knowing. Helen hated it when her daughter just went in to Manhattan for a few hours; how could she possibly tolerate her only child being thousands of miles away for so long? Susan didn’t tell her. She called her every morning from her cell phone as though she were right around the corner. A sin of omission. A matter of self-preservation.
Do you think less of me? she asked when she told me the story.
At the time, her mother was in her seventies and in good health. Susan knew how to love her mother but also protect herself. I didn’t think less of her; I envied her.
* * *
—
When I met Susan, she kept a small stack of books on her nightstand: Donald Hall’s Without, Jane Kenyon’s A Hundred White Daffodils, M.F.K. Fisher’s Last House.
“Don’t think I’m a depressive,” she laughed.
“I think you’re just looking for home,” I said. “What it’s like to have it.”
“Or not,” she said.
It was early afternoon at the start of our life together; we dozed in bed, reading. I loved Kenyon’s taut essays about the ordinary: her local five-and-dime, her garden, her move to Hall’s ancestral New Hampshire home, becoming her church treasurer and not knowing how to balance her checkbook. Susan read Hall’s elegy for his late wife, who had, he wrote, come into her beauty at forty as into a fortune. There was Fisher’s last book, titled for the final place she lived after three marriages, a long writing career, caregiving a difficult aging parent, raising her children on her own. I dipped in and out of it; two chapters about her elderly father, “Rex I” and “Rex II,” whiplash from delight in the older man’s presence to venomous bile. A light here requires a shadow there.
The books stayed on Susan’s table until we moved four years later, their spines cracked. A triptych. Love, loss, the passage of ordinary time.
The rooms in the little Camden farmhouse were suddenly too small, the stairway too narrow. It was seven hours from New York, and hard to get to. Would it be our last house? Could we grow older there?
If my mother came, would she—could she—ever leave?
We signed the papers and handed over the deposit and days later retracted it. I was not ready to go, and I would never cross the threshold again.
18
THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT, ACCORDING TO the Talmud and the Shulchan Aruch, the Code of Jewish Law, and the New Testament: Thou shalt honor thy mother and thy father, that your days may be long upon this land that God has given you. The first commandment that comes with a promise, a condition attached to it by the apostle Paul while preaching to the Ephesians: Be a good child throughout the course of your parents’ life, he says, and you will find favor and dwell in the holy land.
I don’t dwell in the holy land; I dwell in Connecticut, in a small ranch house.
Dora, my mother’s round-the-clock caregiver and a devout Christian, interprets the words for me while my mother naps in her den.
“The Holy Land is your holy land—the kingdom of your heart,” Dora says. “Honor her and your heart will be saved.”
Dora is a petite, pleasant woman, dressed in brightly colored surgical scrubs, the Jamaican-born mother of two grown sons she is putting through college. Susan and I have found her through an old sleepaway camp friend whose difficult father needed in-home care over the last four years of his life. During our interview over white ceramic bowls of café au lait at Pain Quotidien around the corner from Susan’s office, Dora tells us that this is her calling, the reason why she was put on this earth: to care for the old, the infirm, the difficult.
“I am here,” Dora says plainly, “to ease their pain, and yours.”
“Bullshit artist?” I ask Susan after our meeting.
“I don’t think so,” Susan says.
* * *
• • •
DURING THE WEEKS MY MOTHER was in rehab, a wild-eyed, white-haired woman in her early nineties lived in a room down the hall from my mother’s, near the elevators. She had fallen and broken a hip; the drugs had taken a toll and pitched her into a dementia that she hadn’t arrived with. She experienced sundowning: late-day confusion, agitation, restlessness, suspicion, all exacerbated by surgery and medication, a change of place and atmosphere where the lights were on all the time and the voices in the hallway outside her room terrorized her. Every day, her daughter, a middle-aged woman, heavyset and prone to panting—a bank teller and a single mom with two teenagers; good kids, I heard her tell a nurse—arrived at her mother’s bedside at exactly the same time. She spent hours grooming her like a baby: She combed her mother’s thinning silver hair. She painted her mother’s fingernails and clipped her hard, yellowing toenails. She applied her makeup, instructing her to look down when it came time for the mascara, and to purse your lips for the lipstick. Once the older woman was satisfied, her daughter covered her mother’s legs with a woolen blanket and wheeled her out into a bland fluorescent-lit common area decorated in shades of mauve and cornflower blue, where together they gazed out the window at the New England countryside. In a little while, she wheeled her mother back to her room, settled her in bed with the help of a nurse, fed her dinner, and left. The next day and the day after that and the one that followed, she did the same thing. This was their routine despite the fact that the older woman no longer recognized her daughter. She could have been an orderly or a nurse. A complete stranger.
One early evening, the bank teller and I stood together in the lobby, still decorated for Christmas, looking through the glass doors out at the parking lot; we considered the snow. We put on hats and gloves and fished car keys out of bags. She was weary; she sighed.
“I see you here all the time,” she told me. “Your mother is a very beautiful woman. It’s clear how much you love each other.”
“I wish I could do for her what you do for yours,” I said. “I hate this.”
“Everyone hates this,” she said. “I hate everything about it. But when it’s my turn, my children will do the same for me. And yours will do the same for you.”
* * *
• • •
“I HAVE AN APARTMENT,” MY mother announced, “and I am going home to it.”
Unable to stand, walk, bathe herself, make a cup of coffee, use the bathroom, organize her pills, or navigate her space in a wheelchair, my mother was released from rehab. An adjuster working for her insurance company and located in an office seven thousand miles away in Pakistan had decided, based on his review of Betty’s documents, that it was safe for her to leave.
“Sorry,” Betty said in a phone call, “your appeal for an extension of stay has been denied by your mother’s insura
nce company. You need to get her in two days.”
She wanted to go home; we were relieved. We didn’t beg; we didn’t argue. Her doctors were in New York. The best physical therapists in the city were down the street from her. She could receive in-home care; I could work. She would heal; we would not kill each other. I would fix her insurance situation and get her back on Medicare and have a private handyman install grab bars in both bathrooms, in the shower and the tub. I would visit her twice a week to manage the caregiver who would fall into our laps as if by magic and whom I would pay out of pocket. That caregiver would be Dora: from the time she set foot in her apartment, my mother hated her.
* * *
—
On this day, my mother, still in a wheelchair, a round brush and Vuitton makeup bag in her lap, has blow-dried her own hair and applied her lipstick. She has wheeled herself into the den, where she is ensconced on the sofa, dressed in her leopard print fleece pants and a Boston University football jersey, her two atrophied legs outstretched in front of her on the Lucite and patent leather desk chair where I once wrote term papers on Charlotte Brontë’s fiction and its impact on nineteenth-century feminist theology during my holidays from college. Enormous hammered gold earrings through which one might shoot a basketball graze her shoulders. The television is on; Perry Mason. My mother has spent all of her money on makeup, and has been living on nothing; she presents well. We await the arrival of a community Medicaid examiner. My mother leans back against a black velvet pillow embroidered in fraying gold script with the words You can never have too much luxury.
Between the hours of nine and eleven, with Dora hovering over her, my mother will be visited by representatives of a subsidized prescription drug plan; a physical therapist sent by the office of the orthopedic surgeon who repaired her ankle; a healthcare consultant who will help us navigate the waters of the community Medicaid application, since my mother’s copays will bankrupt her in a month; three different visiting nurses; and a divisional case manager, a tall, unsmiling woman named Tenzin.
Motherland Page 13
