Memoir of the Sunday Brunch

by Julia Pandl

  That little exchange between my father and me happened a hundred times that day. He pointed to or picked up a thing, raised his eyebrows for approval, and I nodded. It began with the flyswatter, of course—because it was just wrong to pack that with bedsheets and bath towels—and it grew to include the dead geraniums in the plant room, broken rakes, rusty handsaws, a box of tangled fishing tackle, and a dusty stack of phone books in the workshop next to the garage.

  It was a Saturday in October 1999, and my parents were moving from Oostburg back to Milwaukee. In the weeks, months, even years leading up to the move, I had watched my parents slide past their prime and into old age. I had come and gone, finished high school, attended college, worked at the restaurant and elsewhere, but the fact that they were growing older always compelled me to stay nearby. I guess I figured at some point they might need me, and a little part of me knew they wouldn’t be around forever.

  My father had retired and unretired at least fifteen times. He sold the restaurant to my brother Jimmy, in 1987, my junior year in high school, and retired. Six months later, he bought a restaurant in Chilton, Wisconsin, and within two years the place had gobbled up his and my mother’s life savings. It wasn’t pretty, watching my father fail. It left him shell-shocked, broken. For months he walked around befuddled, fretting about how to get the place sold while my mother buried statues of St. Joseph and said novenas. Years later, he told me that the day he used the last of my college education fund to pay his bills was the day he decided to close the restaurant’s doors.

  It’s interesting how much light a little darkness can shed. Even back then, as a senior in high school and a freshman in college, I saw it. The notion of my parents’ impending financial doom made me nervous, so I watched. Plus, it was just the three of us, so what else was I going to do? We cursed that restaurant in Chilton daily. My mother cursed the drive, the town, and everyone in it, but the business and its demise had a lasting purpose in my father’s life. He stumbled and fell while doing what he had done his entire life, doing what he did best, and it changed him. I watched, and I saw him stand up and choose humility over bitterness in the face of failure.

  Lest you think I was wise beyond my years, I have to confess this insight was helped along by the fact that the same year my father bought the restaurant in Chilton, I flunked chemistry. I was cocky and I thought I knew things. Accustomed to classes that required a certain amount of bullshitting, I just didn’t believe my teacher when he said we had to learn the periodic table in order for anything else to make sense. Turned out, he wasn’t bullshitting. I know it’s not the same—fiscal disaster in your midsixties and flunking eleventh-grade chemistry—but tell that to any high school junior and see what he or she says, especially these days. If you’re a parent, you might want to have your checkbook ready for the therapist. At any rate, my father made me take chemistry again my senior year, so I was familiar with the concept of humility riding on the heels of failure. I got a C the second time around, and with that, I crossed scientist and engineer off my list of possible careers.

  After the debacle in Chilton my father retired again, but it didn’t take, so he got a volunteer job delivering phone books for the town of Wilson, just east of Oostburg. He thought it would be a nice part-time gig, something to do when he wasn’t reading and in those times when Terry needed him out of her hair. Two days into the job, on a ruthlessly cold and snowy January evening, I found him in the garage. His butt poked out of the open driver’s side door as he leaned in and searched around the floor under the steering wheel.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah.” His voice was muffled underneath the hood of his big winter coat.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I lost my goddamned glove.”

  “Huh?”

  He pulled himself out. His hair twisted in a brittle, wiry pile, a combination of frozen sweat and whatever men’s hair gel was on sale at Walgreens. “Well,” he said, gesturing with his gloved hand to the phone books scattered across the backseat, “I was delivering the phone books, and I hit a patch of ice on the road and slid the car into a row of goddamned mailboxes. Look at this.” He slammed the door, walked around the car, and pointed to where the mailboxes had left a messy white gash in the paint above the wheel well. The side mirror dangled from two thin wires. He lifted it and let it drop.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.”

  “What about the mailboxes?”

  “I tried to fix them. I stood out there for half an hour, but it’s colder than hell, and I lost my glove. I thought I was gonna freeze to death.”

  “So, did you leave the mailboxes in a pile or what?”

  “I stood them up in the snowbank. They’re fine,” he said, opening the back door and grabbing a stack of phone books. “Here, help me with these.”

  “What are you going do with them?”

  “Stack ’em up in the workshop.”

  I already knew the answer, but I asked anyway. “Are you ever going to deliver them?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. Absolutely not. Absolutely not.” He slapped the single soft brown leather glove on the roof of the car. “This ridiculous job has already cost me a pair of expensive gloves, wrecked my car, and damn near killed me. Who needs new phone books anyway? They can use their old ones.”

  That was it. The stack of phone books collected dust, spiderwebs, and mouse droppings in the corner of the workshop, and they stayed behind when my parents moved from Oostburg back to Milwaukee. Perhaps they’re still there.

  The new people didn’t need the phone books, of course, or any of the other crap, but neither did Terry and George. They were downsizing to a one-level ranch-style house in Bayside, one that had wide hallways with plenty of room for my mother’s wheelchair, one that was closer to the restaurant, one that was closer to us kids. The new house came on the heels of the amputation of my mother’s left foot. Diabetes had brought a swift and decisive end to the long debate regarding the move back to Milwaukee. The very thing that allowed her to move from one place to another had been cut off, and that—that—finally caused them to make the move. The irony, it kills me.

  BY THE TIME moving day rolled around we were all exhausted. My father and I wheeled Terry down the flagstone walk and helped her pivot into the passenger’s seat of my car. I tossed the wheelchair and her temporary prosthetic in the backseat, buckled myself in next to her, and said, “You ready?”

  Her voice quivered when she said, “I guess so.”

  I looked over and saw tears welling up in her eyes. Having so little left to offer, and afraid something as sardonic as “snap out of it” might come out of my mouth, I put the car in reverse and backed onto the gravel drive. We were in a hurry. That’s what I told myself. I had to drive her into Milwaukee and drop her off at the new house, where Katie and Peggy were waiting, and then drive back out to Oostburg and help George and the movers pack up the old house. That was all true, but there was something else in the urgency I felt. I think it was fear, ragged and raw. Fear that I had squelched since the day she first mentioned the sore, and I saw the look in her eyes.

  She held her hand out as we weaved our way through the trees. I gave it a quick squeeze and pulled mine away to make the turn onto Wilson Lima. The road was empty, as always. Dry cornstalks, waiting to be harvested, leaned over in the north wind.

  “Are you sad?” I asked.

  “A little bit, yes.”

  “I’m surprised.”

  “Me too.” She pressed her fist into her left thigh, rubbing it back and forth.

  “Are you scared?”

  “I am a little.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. I was haunted by my own ignorance. She had mentioned the sore and then showed it to me a few days later. I drove her to the doctor; he put her on antibiotics and sent her home. I didn’t know a tiny sore, the size of a pencil eraser, could, despite hefty antibiotics, become something so hideous, so gruesome. Th
e fight that ensued defied description.

  I steadied the steering wheel. Glancing over my right shoulder to switch lanes, I caught a glimpse of the fake foot, wearing her tennis shoe.

  The day we knew the fight was over, I was the one who made the call. It sticks with you, making that kind of judgment call. I wanted to curl up in the corner and suck my thumb; instead, I stood next to my father and watched the visiting nurse unravel puffy loops of white gauze. I remember she had kinky blond hair and wore gold-rimmed glasses. A stethoscope hung around her neck, and a blood pressure cuff spilled from the pocket of a corduroy blazer. She had a pink binder with my mother’s name written in the top right corner, and a pen advertising something called Detrol LA. All the right instruments required for taking and recording one’s state of being. None of it mattered, though. Terry had been spiking fevers—102, 103, 104 degrees—throughout the previous couple of days, which we thought meant a new infection was brewing somewhere. As soon as the nurse peeled the last bits of dressing off my mother’s foot, we knew.

  It didn’t bleed. That was the problem. Infection, followed by a barbaric process called debridement, had literally swallowed pieces of my mother’s foot in random yet measured increments.

  “It looks good, huh?” the nurse said.

  “Good?” I gasped. What looked good to her, to this very day, makes me want to cover even my mind’s eye.

  “Yeah, look here.” She pointed with her pen to a taut yellow tendon.

  George twitched, pulled his lips between his teeth, and clasped his hands behind his head. My mother looked down at her foot, looked up at him, and then at me. Her face was round, waxy, and pale. Her lips, usually never without a perfect whisper of pink, were thin and colorless. She pleaded, not out loud, but with her eyes.

  “It’s going to be okay, Mom.” I smiled and nodded.

  She had not been herself—she had not been my mother—for months. Pain medication, infection, and worry mugged her little by little every day, stealing her confidence, her wit, her soul. I had not seen her smile in a week. She was fidgety and obsessed about where things were and what time it was. She carried a travel alarm clock around in her pocket and checked it every ten minutes. Her rosary had to be placed just so on her nightstand, every night, despite the fact that she couldn’t concentrate long enough to get through the first sentence of a Hail Mary.

  I looked down the length of her skinny calf and saw angry red streaks creeping up toward her knee. There was no noise except my heart beating in my eardrums.

  “Dad,” I said, turning to him, “we’re calling the doctor.”

  He stared at me. His brow furrowed.

  I took his elbow and pulled him into the kitchen. “If we don’t do something about that foot, Dad, she’s going to die. This is it. We can’t fight it anymore. Today’s the day.”

  He just stared at me.

  “Dad.”

  “Okay. Call.”

  So I grabbed the phone off the kitchen wall, found the doctor’s number scribbled on a piece of loose-leaf paper on the counter, and called. Then I went downstairs, used the phone outside the laundry room to call Katie, and told her to meet us at the doctor’s office.

  A week later, when we stood in a semicircle around her hospital bed and Terry made a wisecrack about getting a half-price pedicure, my insides finally stopped shaking.

  WHEN WE PULLED into the driveway at the new house, Katie and Peggy were outside on the patio, sitting in broken plastic chairs the previous owner had left “for the new people.” The house was empty except for a few boxes of small stuff and some breakables that we had already moved. It smelled like dog. I wondered how long it would take before I walked in and smelled them—citrus, vanilla, and Ammens powder. I wheeled Terry into the family room and parked her next to the Wedgwood lamp. “I’m going to go back out and help Dad with the movers. We should be here late this afternoon.”

  “Where’s my leg?”

  “It’s right here, Mom.” Katie held it up and set it in the bay window that faced the patio. “Let’s put the lampshade on it.”

  Terry burst out laughing and said, “Oh, you kids are such brats.”

  It was unlucky timing, and circumstance, really, me being the one who had to make that call. Always and forever the baby, though, I took mental and verbal measurements against what my siblings might have done. Everyone agreed it was the right thing to do. Clearly there was no question. We got her back, for a while anyway, not the whole of her, but the best parts—the spirit, the smile, and the wit. Truth be told, though, none of us was completely whole again; at least I wasn’t. The loss of that foot somehow left me unbalanced. Never again did I lean on my mother for help with anything. I simply decided she couldn’t handle the weight.

  11

  Shalimar

  My mother peed in a pot last night. Well, it’s not a pot, exactly; it’s a stainless steel bowl with a handle and units of measurement on the side. She straddled the pot/bowl that my sister Katie held so carefully, so accurately.

  We brought her home from the hospital, Katie, George, and I. He banged around the kitchen while we watched Wheel of Fortune. I hate Wheel of Fortune now. It was so much better when the contestants had to spend their winnings on leather furniture, fake floral arrangements, and ceramic dogs. “I’ll take the his-and-hers matching jogging suits for one thousand, Pat.” Terry loves it, though, so what are you going to do? My parents are in their seventies now, older, so the TV is loud enough to wake the dead.

  We had my mother’s foot propped up on a wooden chair with wheels from the kitchen table. We cushioned it with a throw pillow, embroidered with blue hearts and daisies, a gift from Mary, my artsy-craftsy sister-in-law. It was wrapped in gauze, that foot, like a giant Q-tip. As soon as George closed the bathroom door, she had to go.

  Naturally, the knob on the bathroom door was broken.

  I had one foot on the ground outside the window and one foot on the first rung of the ladder, a hammer in one hand and a wrench in the other. My father quietly fiddled with the knob while Terry cried and peed.

  I hope against hope, keep my fingers crossed, I cross my heart and hope to die.

  But I’m already in a place where I know better.

  In the morning I can hear them talking above me, she and my father. Their bedroom is just above mine.

  Mumbling.

  I wonder if they’re lying in bed, holding hands, hoping. Or maybe they don’t need hope; maybe they just know that everything will be all right. After all, everything always has been.

  My room is cold and dark except for my flannel sheets pulled over my nose and a stream of morning sunlight pouring in from the window in the corner. I don’t sleep at home that often anymore, only when they need me.

  I can’t need them anymore.

  It’s safe down here in the basement, my bunker, my cocoon. The world stays still; it’s quiet except for the mumbling. It’s their sound, waking up together yet again. How many days have they done this? Forty-six years’ worth of days and then some, I think. They chat. I don’t know what about. It’s warm in their bed too; I’ve been there—flannel sheets, down comforter, and the warmth of my father holding my mother’s hand. Maybe they chat about me, maybe they chat about the other kids, maybe they chat about the restaurant or the Catholic church. I don’t know, but I know they chat and hold hands.

  IT’S A DIABETIC ulcer on the ball of that foot, the left one, below the big toe, where the energy from the kidneys flows. A few weeks ago, as we waited for my father to bring the car around, she said, “I have a thing on my foot.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “I don’t know, a little sore.”

  That’s when I lost her. My mother disappeared right in front of me, standing on the curb outside the Broadway Theater, waiting for my father to bring the car around. I saw the worry in her eyes, gray and green, churning like the lake toward shore on a windy fall day. That worry she had always reserved for us; those eyes were on her now. It was icy
cold, February 1999. The wind took our breath away.

  I worried too, then, and made my mother disappear.

  MY MOTHER TOLD me she’d watch over me from up above. Then I brushed her hair.

  My mother took me to look at colleges. We smoked cigs, drank Diet Pepsi, and drove across Iowa on I-80.

  My mother has pneumonia again.

  My mother was lonely.

  MY MOTHER HAD her foot amputated yesterday. I asked what they did with amputated feet. No one answered.

  My mother died this morning.

  My mother made peace in our family. She farted, little putt-putts during tense family meetings about the restaurant, and we laughed.

  My mother had a lung biopsy today, and died on the table, but only for a minute.

  MY MOTHER HAD a heart attack today.

  My mother married my father in 1952. He proposed in front of the Marian Shrine on Sixty-eighth Street in Milwaukee. He gave her a rosary and she said yes.

  My mother let me skip school today. She took me shopping and out to lunch.

  My mother was lonely.

  SHE PRAYED TO St. Thérèse, the Little Flower. The roses always came, yet George doubted.

  She mailed a care package to Peggy at college. She filled it with Mrs. Becherer’s underwear. Found forgotten in a drawer in the Cedar Grove house. No cookies, no candy, just big beige granny panties.

  She smoked. She loved smoking and she loved smokers.

  My mother smelled pretty, like Shalimar.

  She wore lipstick every single day, and not on her teeth. She blotted it on a single sheet of tissue and dropped it in the toilet, like a floating kiss.