Wait Until Tomorrow

by Pat MacEnulty

  We’re too engrossed in the dismantling of our mother’s Edenton existence to absorb the finality of it. The moment one of us begins to feel it, we close our mouths, lips tight together. Almost everyone at some point, I suppose, realizes they must face a time like this. We know that our parents cannot go on doing whatever it is they do forever. Change must come. We see it happening to the parents of our friends. The inevitable. But when that particular experience comes your way, it is more wrenching than you felt possible. My mother will never again live on her own, I realize, as I empty the kitchen drawers of her old silverware. She will not play the organ every Sunday as she has for most of the past seventy years. She will not put together shows. She will no longer shelter a choir in her living room on Wednesday nights.

  “Her first organ-playing job was at the age of fourteen or maybe thirteen,” I say out loud as I stack piles of music into boxes. But my brothers know this. As I’m packing away her music, I find about ten or so copies of An American Requiem in old tattered black folders. Something tells me to keep these scores. Someday maybe we’ll get enough money to hire someone to put the requiem in computer format and submit it to a publisher. I’m pretty sure this is the one thing I need to hang onto.

  In spite of what we are doing, the fact that my brothers and I are together is a rare and happy enough event that it keeps us from becoming morose. Besides, we are packing and cleaning machines now. The ants abandoning the ant farm after the queen is gone.

  We’ve advertised a yard sale for the next day, and Sandy has offered to help. We’re hoping that the furniture will sell. It’s going cheap. A few of Mother’s acquaintances drop by on Friday while we’re in the midst of packing and deciding what to sell, what to keep, what to give away. I mistakenly think they’re visiting with us, but really they’re nosing around our mother’s belongings early, trying to stake their claims. David is irritated with them, but we go ahead and get rid of a few things. One woman wants to buy the little books of Shakespeare plays that are probably a century old. I’ve lived my whole life knowing those little books were always available if I needed them (although I’d long ago absconded with her tattered copy of The Collected Works). Once, I actually performed a reading of the entirety of Romeo and Juliet for my mother, using one of those little books. And she, saintly woman, sat on the living-room couch (this same couch now in need of a new home) and served as my audience. I have no idea if the books are worth anything, but I’m so tired of packing and the truck I’ve rented hasn’t even an inch of space left. So I sadly, regretfully, let them go for a few dollars, knowing I’ll never feel good about doing that.

  Friday night, we go to the only Italian joint in town. We talk politics and though we are all on the same side, for a moment it gets heated between my two brothers.

  “Bush is an idiot,” David says.

  “Bush is not an idiot,” Jo says angrily. I don’t get it. Jo is definitely no Republican.

  “He is, too!” David says and his generally deep voice cracks in righteous indignation.

  I have a feeling their anger has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with why we are here, or maybe it’s just an eruption from some long-ago childhood battle that happened before I was born. The argument subsides, and we move back into that place where we know and understand each other better than anyone else ever can. I idolized my big brothers when I was a child, and I still hold them in high regard though now I can acknowledge their imperfections, too. And they seem to love me as if I were still the long-haired, laughing little girl they tossed back and forth between them as brawny teenage boys.

  We have been with each other through a lifetime of mistakes, miracles, and accolades. We are each other’s biggest fans. When I was in prison, I would call David almost every week for my allotted phone call. He told me later that someone, who was supposedly an expert on fucked-up people such as myself, had told him to cut me off. “Once a junkie, always . . .” this genius told him. And what did my brother know? He had never been a drug addict. But he was always there when I called, willing to talk to me, willing to laugh or be horrified by my observations of prison life, whichever was appropriate.

  “You wouldn’t believe how many thieves there are in this place,” I once told him without a trace of irony, and he burst out laughing. He also made sure I got the Sunday New York Times every week, which was one of the things that probably saved me. It gave me a connection to a world that I could aspire to, a world of educated banter and beautiful clothes, far away from the raucous, simple-minded bullying and poorly made prison uniforms that constituted my life at the time.

  For some reason I was not in regular communication with my other brother, Jo, during those years. He was dealing with issues of his own—a divorce, illness, and too much time spent on a barstool before he found AA. But years later when I’d gotten into an unfortunate relationship, he was the one to drive twelve hours to where I lived and handle the hostilities. Whenever he visited, which became fairly frequent in recent years, we would meditate together, I would listen to his poems, and he would read my stories.

  My brothers and I have always been united by love and admiration for our mother and bitterness toward our father. Our father is living in Jacksonville Beach, beset by dementia. We rarely see him.

  The next morning, the vultures arrive. We have one absolutely beautiful vase for which I am asking fifteen dollars. It’s probably worth seventy-five. Some white-haired crone tries to bargain me down on the price. But I am tired of haggling, and I refuse. I’ll keep the damn thing first. Behind my back she convinces Sandy to let her have it for five dollars. When I realize what has happened, I want to snatch it out of her hands and smash it to little porcelain bits on the sidewalk. That’s how I feel at the end of the day of bargaining away my mother’s life.

  When the apartment is emptied, we scrub and mop every inch of the place, and then we drive away. Jo takes off in his loaded van with Ralph Nader stickers on the bumper. David takes off in Mother’s old Buick, loaded with boxes and lamps. And I drive away in the filled-to-the-brim rental truck. Even the cab is filled with her belongings. How I am going to unload that truck by myself I have no idea. When I get back to Charlotte, I dragoon Emmy into helping me. Hank will have no part of it.

  I spend the next day unloading. Emmy and I somehow get Mother’s small but very heavy Clavinova onto a hand truck, through the delivery entrance, and into Mother’s new room. I hang up the pictures and try to make it look like “home,” but my mother is not home and she knows it. Then we swallow back our tears and play a game of Scrabble.

  I’m not placing bets on her lasting much longer. How can she survive without that busy admiring world of hers? The change is cataclysmic.

  THREE

  VARIATIONS ON A THEME

  Remember thy servant, O Lord.

  He was not ready to leave us,

  Nor were we ready to see him go.

  The dark scissors of death have separated us.

  He accepted danger. Its strong and shining thread

  Led him from this tangled maze.

  Help us, Lord, in thy great wisdom

  To accept his acceptance.

  Rosalind MacEnulty

  An American Requiem

  ONE

  SUMMER 2009

  Emmy and I are in Carolina Beach to stay for a night at a rented condo with my niece, Sharen, her husband, son, and mother, Camille, and Camille’s husband. Camille is Jo’s first wife. I had not spent any significant amount of time with Camille since I’d lived for a year with her and Jo when I was fifteen. Yet I still feel great affection for her.

  “Mom’s not much of a cook,” Emmy explains to the group as we sit around the glass table noshing on snacks.

  “Except for pancakes,” I tell them.

  “That’s right. She makes great pancakes.”

  “And you know who I learned how to make pancakes from?” I ask. Then I nod over at Camille. Camille and I share a glance. She seems pleased that her brie
f stint as my stand-in mother has left a mark.

  Camille knows that I’ve been taking care of my mom for a while. Her mother lived with them up until about a year ago when they finally moved her to a nursing home; she died there last May.

  Later, as we stand on the balcony and watch the Atlantic knit itself upon the shore, Camille says, “It wasn’t until my mother died that I realized I had finally relinquished that role—the daughter role. For years I was constantly tethered, afraid to go anywhere without my cell phone, constantly on the alert for the next emergency.”

  She could easily be describing my life.

  FALL 2004

  I go to see my mother every day at the Oaks. I take her out often. My social life, which wasn’t too active to begin with, dries up completely. If I’m not taking Emmy to choir or some school function then I am with my mother, playing Scrabble or just driving her somewhere so she can be out.

  But God she complains.

  “The food in this place is awful. They put the sandwich on the same plate with the fruit cocktail and the bread gets soaked. It’s terrible. The quality of the food is so cheap. It’s practically inedible.”

  The lunch when I first visited the place to check it out was pretty good, but soon after she moves in, some corporation in California buys the place and slashes the budget. Somebody’s getting rich, but it’s not the people who work here.

  “This is the Republican vision for the world,” I tell her.

  She also complains about her fellow inmates. At the dinner table, one woman can only talk about her dead husband. Another woman, younger than most of the rest, has had a stroke, cries all the time, and rails against the family who has “dumped” her in this place. Someone else enlivens the mealtime conversations with accounts of her bowel movements. The worst thing for my mother is when they use double negatives. She’s a grammar snob.

  Once when I am out of town for a day, Hank and Emmy go to visit my mom. Hank later reports that she was down in the parlor vociferously complaining that the other residents wouldn’t shut up about their insipid grandchildren while he and Emmy grinned and hoped that all the hearing aids in the vicinity were broken.

  My mother likes the staff, but seeing how they are treated by the distant corporate entity infuriates her. They fire people for no apparent reason. They expect part-timers to work full time but don’t pay them for the work or give them benefits.

  Meanwhile the cost of her room is about four hundred dollars a month more than her Social Security check. I’m wondering how we’re going to cover that, since my income is so sporadic. On top of everything, Mom’s Steinway is supposed to arrive, but the transport date keeps getting postponed.

  She’s been there about six weeks when I take her out with me to do some errands. As we pull into the parking lot of her new “home,” she chokes back a sob that slices me open.

  “It’s just so depressing,” she says. “They’re all so old and sick.”

  I want to scream out in frustration. I want to stab myself in the brain. I have tried so hard to make things right for her, to make her happy. I don’t know what else to do.

  We walk into the building, she slowly on her walker and me forcing myself to take small slow steps. Inside the main room, a volunteer is playing a game with some of the residents to keep their minds stimulated.

  “What language would a Hispanic person speak besides English?”

  As we wait for the elevator, I listen to see if anyone has the answer. Silence. Mom is right. She doesn’t belong here.

  A few nights later my mother says, “I don’t think I need assisted living. What about one of those independent living places?”

  We are only now learning about the different categories of places: independent living, assisted living, nursing homes, memory care units. But just thinking of moving her again exhausts me, makes me long for a padded cell and a Valium drip. Besides, she’s made a couple of friends at this place. Her new friends are both smokers and she sits outside with them on the smoking porch, like the bad kids who skip class in high school and make snide remarks about all the other kids.

  As I’m hoping Mom will settle in, I’m also hoping Emmy will adjust to her new school. Every day at three thirty I pull into the pickup line at the school, my dented 1999 Taurus wagon like an elephant in a line of jaguars. Everyone else drives a Volvo, a Beemer, a Benz, a Jag, a Suburban, or an Escalade. I’ll see my girl sitting off by herself or with the one other girl who, it turns out, did come from her old school.

  “How did it go?” I ask when she plops down in the seat with her enormous book bag in her lap. She shrugs. A fairly large group of kids from her middle school went to the other private school down the street. She’s wishing desperately she had chosen differently. In fact, the other girl is already lobbying her parents. Please, dear child, I’m thinking, don’t ask me to try to transfer you. I’m getting used to doing the impossible but that one seems a bit too daunting.

  Two days after my mother’s plea to move, I emerge from yoga class at the Y—the one thing I insist on doing for myself—and pick up a magazine for senior living. I find an ad for an independent living place called the Landings just a ten-minute drive from my house. And the price for an apartment is actually four hundred dollars less than my mother’s Social Security check.

  The next day, Mom and I go to look at the place. Instead of the small room she has in assisted living, she would have a small twobedroom apartment with a kitchen. Of course, there aren’t any med-techs on staff, and if you fall, you’re on your own. There’s a big difference between independent and assisted living. At the Landings, they only serve one meal a day and not even that on weekends, but Mom is still able to prepare some meals for herself, and I can bring dinner or take her out on weekends. The clincher is that the living room is just large enough to comfortably fit the piano, which is supposed to arrive on Tuesday.

  We write a check that day.

  TWO

  OCTOBER 2004

  I learn very quickly that the management at the Landings is not dissimilar to some of the more coldhearted fascists who ran the women’s correctional institution where I spent eleven months of my wayward youth. The main dame in charge is a tall blond with Doberman-white teeth and high heels that could puncture an old man’s jugular if he got in her way.

  “We just love our seniors,” she says.

  What happens is this: I need a truck for two reasons. The first reason is that I’m going to Tallahassee to retrieve a bed for my daughter. Emmy’s godmother, Kitty, who died of breast cancer back in 2001, wanted Emmy to have her gorgeous antique fourposter bed. But I had never been able to figure out a way to get the bed up to Charlotte, so it was getting dusty in Kitty’s mother’s garage. About this time I come up with a plan. I will ride down to Tallahassee with a friend who happens to be going there for a conference. I will rent a truck, pick up the bed, bring the bed to Charlotte, unload the bed, take the truck to the assisted-living place, load up my mother’s things, take them over to the Landings, unload the truck again, and then deposit it at a U-Haul place in Charlotte, all for the weekend rate. It’s brilliant!

  I didn’t, however, check my horoscope for the weekend, which probably read: “People hate you, and they’re going to let you know it.”

  The ride to Tallahassee is uneventful. I get dropped off at Kitty’s mother’s red-brick ranch house. I go around back past the garden, where Kitty used to grow fresh mint, to the back door, which is the way I always went to Kitty’s mama’s house. Kitty had her own house a few blocks away, but we spent a lot of time over here. Kitty loved her mother, a feisty Democrat who had a fierce reputation among her former high school English students.

  But Cathy, Kitty’s mother, is not the one who answers the door. Instead Kitty’s sister looks at me through the screen. I stand on the steps, holding my little overnight bag like a hobo looking for a little hospitality.

  “What do you want?” she asks.

  “Is Cathy here?” I ask.


  “She’s not available. What do you want?”

  “I’m here for the bed.”

  “Now? You want the bed now?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  After an extremely unpleasant exchange, I get the idea that Kitty’s sister is angry because I’ve left the bed in the garage for three years. It’s not that it’s taken up all that much space—it’s only a headboard and a footboard. But somehow this minor imposition has evolved into a major transgression. Kitty’s sister insists that I get Kitty’s executor to oversee the transfer of the bed from the garage into the truck, which I still haven’t picked up yet.

  Fortunately, Cathy comes out and rescues me. We hop into her pickup truck with Kitty’s precious poodle—the irrepressible Mythos—and go run some errands. Cathy has the softest, gentlest Southern voice. It’s like someone drawing you a warm bath on a chilly day. We go get some lunch and some gas for Cathy’s truck, and I think about Kitty and wish she were with us today. How much lighter and less alone in the world I might feel.

  Cathy drops me off at the rental place where I pick up a truck; Kitty’s executor comes over and with a roll of her eyes, signs a piece of paper and then helps me load the bed. Then I complete the eight-hour drive in the truck with the bed. I get home, unload the bed, and drive immediately over to my mother’s place to start getting her things out of there. I’m loading up clothes, books, lamps, small pieces of furniture, boxes of music, including the old black requiem folders, and the Clavinova, which weighs as much as a brick outhouse. I do it by myself and with the help of a maintenance guy when I can find one.

  Sunday afternoon I drive over to the Landings with the truck full of goods. I go to the front desk and ask them for the key to my mother’s apartment. The piano has already arrived and is in the apartment. I’ve given the people a deposit, but apparently we haven’t signed the lease yet.