Back home, Hank cooks refried beans and tortillas. Emmy grates the cheese and sets the table. I cut up the onions, lettuce, and tomatoes and chop cilantro. Emmy makes the guacamole the way her dad taught her to with cilantro, cumin, salt, and tomatoes. After we eat, we all clean the kitchen and then sit down to watch the movie. My mother is left to her own devices. I am with my family, and I’m thinking of the rainbow Hank and I saw in California when I was a couple months pregnant—one of those arching textbook rainbows. Our kid was the pot of gold.
“Your mother’s wheelchair has got to go,” the head nurse at the Sanctuary tells me. My heart sinks and my spirit turns a sickly yellow color.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Yes, the other residents are complaining. They’re afraid of her,” she says. “Not only that, she knocked the glass door at the front of the building off its rail. We’ve ordered a manual wheelchair for her.”
I’m trying not to imagine a glass door shattering over my mother’s head.
The next day I head up to her room on the third floor. She’s got that frantic confused look on her face that is so common to her now. She’s in a small black manual wheelchair, and I’m shoving the motorized wheelchair into her closet.
“I don’t know why you have to take it away from me. I’ve been very careful, very careful,” Mom says.
“Because you knocked the glass doors at the front of the building off the track and cracked one of them. Because you dragged a chair out of the activities room all the way to your bedroom, clearing everything in your path. Because the other residents are terrified of getting run over by you. Which you may recall happened to me not that long ago when you pinned me against a car,” I tell her.
“But I’ve gotten better. I really have.” My mother is frustrated to the brink of tears. “This one is so hard. It’s so hard to push it with my arms. Can’t we move somewhere else?”
“No.”
“No?”
Now I am frustrated to the brink of tears. I want my mother. My real mother.
“Where did they take it? Will I get it back? When do you think I’ll get it back?” she queries.
“Mom, it’s here in your closet. I don’t know when you can use it again.”
Right then, in my imagination, my real mother, handsome and vibrant, enters the room.
“Hello. Who are you?” my fifty-year-old mother asks.
I feel such relief. I want to fall into her arms, but she doesn’t know who I am.
“It’s me, Pat. Your daughter.”
“Pat? What are you doing here?”
“Taking care of you.”
“Taking care of me? Are you still taking heroin?”
“No, Mom. I cleaned up more than twenty-five years ago. I’m a mother. I’m a college teacher. But I had to take a leave of absence when you went in the hospital. When you got out of the hospital, I had to bring you here.”
“Well, that’s wonderful. I thought you’d be dead by now. You made it. I won!”
“Yes, you did. And now you are exacting your revenge. You’re whacked out on pain medication most of the time. You whine and complain constantly. You call me three, four, five times a day. No, Mother, I’m not dead, and you aren’t either.”
“God, how awful. How old am I?”
“Ninety.”
“Ninety? Impossible.”
Reality breaks in on my imagined conversation with my mother. My real mother.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” my impostor mother says, “but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. It’s in there, isn’t it?”
I miss my fifty-year-old mother right now. I miss her so much. She never complained about anything. She was the life of the party. We talked almost every day. We laughed even when things were awful. She always said she felt so lucky that she didn’t just love her children, she liked us, too.
I allow myself a moment of bitterness, thinking of my two brothers, far away with their new girlfriends.
“I really need help. I can’t figure out how to move my feet. I need to go to the bathroom. Pat, what are you doing?”
“Talking to you,” I tell her.
She was always afraid that I would die. Now I understand why it was so important to keep me alive. She must have known.
I get the walker and help my mother transition from the wheelchair to the walker. Then I pull up her dress and pull down the disposable underpants while she balances precariously before falling backwards onto the toilet. I go into the bedroom and wait for her to call me when she’s done. My phantom mother waits for me by the window, looking out into the parking lot below.
“I’m sorry about all this,” she says. “Terribly sorry. But I do love you.”
“I know. I love you, too,” I tell her. “I always love you even when I think I don’t.”
Then she’s gone, and I hear my mother calling from the bathroom.
“Pat? Pat? I’m ready.”
THREE
SUMMER 2008
The biggest favor the universe has done me is putting my mother at the Sanctuary, where there are people to help her, listen to her play the piano, talk to her, and eat meals with her. My life is about to crack wide open.
Emmy has decided she won’t go to college right after high school. She wants to work with an experimental theater company for a few months and defer college for a semester. I like this plan. I was never in favor of going straight to college. As a university professor, I’ve watched many eighteen-year-olds flounder in their first year, taking pointless classes, flunking out, getting depressed, getting drunk, spinning around completely clueless. At the theater company she’ll be working with adults on a professional level, and when she isn’t doing theater, she’ll be doing farmwork.
But when Hank hears about this scheme, he explodes. Hank is not a halfway kind of guy. He’s the sort to pull out the cannons when a water pistol might do.
I start throwing things in a suitcase. My MO is always to disappear. When I was about three years old and my drunken father came home, I took off for the woods behind my house. My brothers had to go out and find me. I may have been just three years old, but I knew danger when I saw it.
But Hank knows this about me, and he reins in his anger enough that we don’t bolt. It’s only a temporary truce, however. This is a fight to the death. It isn’t about whether or not Emmy goes to college in the fall or sometime later. There’s something deeper, more fundamental going on. Twenty years worth of resentments and disagreements boil to the surface.
Hank and I battle like Titans.
“Why can’t you be on my side?” he asks.
“Because I think your side is wrong,” I tell him.
No matter how many times we get in the ring to duke it out, neither of us wins. We just get bloodier.
Emmy has become a zombie. Neither of us can eat. We live on smoothies. I decide she’s got to get out of this toxic atmosphere while I figure out what to do, so I send her to New York to visit a friend.
That night I lie in my bed in the dark and push into the pliant flesh below the curve of my belly, an inch or so above the ridge of my right hip bone. My body reports back to me in a language I don’t understand. What is it telling me? Hank is in his room, asleep. Now that he has a machine for his sleep apnea and a prescription for Ambien, he sleeps at night like the rest of the world.
I contemplate the demise of my marriage as I lie in bed. Most marriages break up because of infidelity, substance abuse, someone going wild with the credit cards, or just plain boredom. But in our case none of the above applies. Are we really breaking up because of an eighteen-year-old’s possible career choice? I can’t help but wish he’d had me for a kid. Then he’d have something to be pissed off about.
“I’d rather see her be a prostitute than an actress,” Hank says bitterly.
When Hank thinks “actress,” he thinks bankruptcy, drugs, suicide. But Emmy is not even sure she wants to act. She has no cotton-candy movie-star dreams. She’s intere
sted in theater as a means of communication. And she’s interested in a lot of other things, too—politics, art, music, history. But Hank won’t hear of it. In his narrative, I have corrupted his child, infusing her with illusions of glory to make up for my own rotten childhood.
History is filled with such stories. St. Francis’s father rejected him when he became a monk. Gay friends tell me of being turned out of their parents’ homes. My own father preferred a mediocre piano student to his own children.
As I lie there poking around my belly at the source of this mysterious pain, I wonder if there’s more at work here than this eruption over Emmy and her desire to live her own life. I realize I’ve been living in a comfortable cage for a long while, and now suddenly it looks like the door is open. And maybe that’s what Hank is thinking too, deep in the far reaches of his subconscious. We are both so dependent in this relationship. We have become each other’s drug. And we are stagnating. I wonder, is Emmy the sacrificial lamb that allows us to break free of each other? The one point on which neither of us will budge?
The next day the “gone child grief” overwhelms me.
“Let’s go to the beach,” I tell Hank. I’ve got to get out of this house with all its memories cascading over me. Maybe at the beach, Hank and I can talk. Maybe we can find a way out of this hole we’ve dug for ourselves.
We pack up some things and throw them in the car.
Just as I’m pulling out of the garage, I notice that odd little phrase coming from inside my body. What the hell is it?
I turn to Hank and ask, “Where is the appendix located?”
“In your lower right abdomen,” he says. “Why?”
“I have a pain there. In fact, I’ve had a pain there for a few days.”
“It could be appendicitis,” he says.
“It could be gas,” I reply, remembering once when I was a child, my aunt taking me to the doctor because I had stomach pains which were nothing more than gas. Besides, I don’t get things like appendicitis. I’m the healthy one here, the nonsmoking vegetarian yogi who doesn’t consume alcohol or caffeine.
But we decide not to take a chance. So instead of going to the beach, we wind up in the emergency room for eight hours. At one point I have to drink a few gallons of some orange crap and go into a little room where they inject me with stuff that makes me feel like I have to pee and then we wait some more. Fortunately, I have brought along a copy of War and Peace, which I read aloud to him while we await the results of my CAT scan. We don’t mention Emmy or the ongoing battle. Instead we’re friends again. But I get tired of reading and tired of waiting.
“Fuck this,” I say. I get off the gurney and demand a nurse come unhook me from the diabolical machines. I hate hospitals. I am determined never to be like my mother, never to obey these people who act like demigods. They barely manage to placate me until a friendly doctor with a gray beard comes into the curtained room where we wait.
“It’s not appendicitis,” he tells us. “You have a tumor on your appendix.”
He shows us the CAT scan, which Hank is able to read but which looks like abstract art to me. “You’ll need to have an operation to remove it. The surgeon will probably want to take out a third of your colon as well to check the lymph nodes for cancer.”
There it is: the C-word. Hank and I look at each other. His heavy eyebrows are raised as if to say, I knew it. I knew the worst was yet to come. He has lost his sister and his father, and now they say that his wife might have cancer. I want to hold him, comfort him, but we’ve crossed some invisible boundary in our relationship. We can be friends, but we can’t be lovers. We cannot touch each other.
I don’t tell my mother that I might have cancer. I simply tell her that I have to get my appendix removed.
Emmy comes back home. At this point, she’s like a refugee. She’s numb to the news. She’s lost her father and now she might lose her mother. She finds a little summer job and mostly stays with friends at night. I worry about her being at loose ends, not having a place where she feels safe, a place to call home. I think about moving out, getting an apartment somewhere, but now is obviously not a good time.
A few days before the operation I dream that I am in the ocean. My body is rigid like a piece of driftwood as I twirl out to sea. I am just past the breakers when I hear Hank’s voice calling me back to the shallow water. So I begin twirling back, back through the waves toward the sound of Hank’s voice. When I get to shore, I climb a set of stone steps and sit next to Emmy.
On June 24, Hank takes me to the hospital. I am put into a hospital gown, laid on a gurney, and told to start counting. The next thing I know I am floating, pleasantly drifting. I am conscious of worried voices, but I am not worried. I hear the voices as if they are on the other side of a thick curtain of fog.
“She should have come back by now. She’s not breathing.”
Then I hear Hank’s voice. I don’t know what he’s saying. I am utterly at peace until suddenly I am not at peace. Instead a violent upheaval wracks my belly. Pain sears my abdomen. Now the voices are explaining something to me: “We had to give you Narcan. You were under too long. You had a bad reaction to the Dilaudid. Your respiration . . .”
“Stop!” I scream at the blurry faces now sharply coming into focus. “Stop giving it to me. It’s making me puke.”
I would not normally say the word “puke” to people I don’t know or any vulgarity for that matter, but after I relentlessly vomit the thimbleful of fluid in my stomach into a small plastic pan, I collapse against the plastic side of the hospital bed and whimper, “Fuck.”
“That doesn’t look comfortable,” Hank says. “Should we move her?”
“No,” I croak. I equate the least movement with staggering pain.
The irony is not lost on me even in this crumpled state. Dilaudid had been my drug of choice in my early twenties, when I had helped my boyfriend break into drugstores to get pills. I had done time for the love of this synthetic narcotic. Then I met Hank, who, for whatever reason, was the first person to be more important to me than a drug. He was an engineer who could fix anything, including me. He was my anchor.
Because of my reaction to the Dilaudid, the doctor switches me to morphine and the nurse hands me a button to click whenever I need more. At first I don’t click it all, but the pain after three and a half hours of abdominal surgery feels like the knife is still stuck inside me, so I start clicking and the pain eases and then almost disappears.
That night Hank sleeps in the chair by my bed with his sleep apnea machine quietly chugging fresh air through his mask. A small plastic tube pumps oxygen to my nose, and I doze off into a drugged sleep. Hank’s presence soothes me, and I imagine our dreams blending together like blood with blood. Here we are at the end of our relationship, and Hank and I are finally sleeping in the same room. I have never loved or needed him more.
After a while I notice I am forgetting to breathe. I let go of the button and force myself to stay awake until the morphine wears off a bit. These drugs that I loved so much as a teenager—I hate them now. How could I ever have enjoyed that feeling, I wonder. Of course, back then I had a death wish. Now, I’d rather live with the pain. Now I want to be awake. Now I want life.
Not only do I hate the drugs, I hate the hospital. I hate the hard, plastic bed; the stiff, uncomfortable chair; the catheter that makes me feel as if I constantly have to pee; the tasteless food. The thing I hate the most is the chemical stench that emanates from my body. I reek. When they finally take out the catheter, the disgusting odor of my own urine makes me wilt. The blessed bowel movement that signals I am ready to leave the hospital is a toxic tar.
As the days pass, Hank, who is generally fairly antisocial, makes friends with the nurses. He learns about their families, where they went to school, all sorts of things that hold no interest for me. He chats pleasantly with my friends when they come to visit. He examines my scar and helps me get out of bed and walk around. He monitors what I eat and how much. H
e tells the nurse when my Foley bag is full.
He does not, however, speak to Emmy once during the whole ordeal. He manages to leave for a long enough time each day for her to visit me. The truce he and I have achieved does not include her.
Four days after entering the hospital, I am able to go home. We still haven’t learned whether or not the tumor was cancerous.
At home I spend my days on the couch or in the recliner. Once when I can’t make the recliner work I wind up screaming at it and crying until Emmy rushes in to help me. When my brain finally starts functioning again, I spend my time reading magazines several years old. Emmy stays nearby, and Hank locks himself in his room. He still refuses to speak to her. He thinks he can “win” if he takes a hard line. He is willing to go to whatever lengths are necessary to get her to do what he thinks is right. But he is going to lose us both.
At night Emmy and I watch movies. Our favorite comfort movie is 101 Dalmatians. She huddles next to me on the couch.
“I miss him,” she tells me. “He doesn’t love me anymore.”
“He loves you,” I reply, an answer I know to be true. I am sure, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that he does love her. “He just doesn’t know how to let you go.”
“Are you going to be okay?” she asks.
“Yes,” I answer, but of this I am not so sure.
Pongo and Purdy dash through the snow to find their puppies.
The next week Hank and I go back to see the surgeon. By now I am eating and shitting regularly, and I realize that all the things I thought were more important than those two vital functions are practically meaningless. Otherwise, I’m still not feeling great. I walk slowly, a little hunched over, skinnier than I’ve been in decades.
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