The next day I am flying home, back to my mundane life, and I’m feeling so grateful to my mother for insisting that I go on this adventure. I’m not sure if I’m any closer to enlightenment. I doubt it, but she was right: I will never regret this trip. My gratitude extends beyond my mother as well. Emmy had promised not to have any emergencies while I was incommunicado, and she didn’t. Even Hank contributed in his own way by vacating my life.
The day I get home, I drive over to the Sanctuary. When I walk inside I hear my mother improvising on the piano. Unaware that I am watching, she drifts into that world where I can never follow except on the backs of the notes she plays. While I was in India, Sadhguru told us about a guru who became wise through loving attention to his elderly parents. I begin to realize that the years I gave to my mother were really a gift to me.
THREE
SPRING 2009
It may seem absurdly obvious to say that ending a twenty-fiveyear marriage is not easy. But you never know until you try to do it. Sometimes I feel as if I am trying to amputate my own arm.
Since he left, Hank and I rarely communicate, but when we do, I feel like I’m in a Quentin Tarantino movie. One afternoon, we have it out. He’s angry about everything, and his rage is like a sledgehammer, shattering my psyche. Me, I’m too tired to be angry. I’m tired of defending actions that I don’t believe are wrong. But I pull out any ammunition I think I have. He pulls out his. We aim, fire. We take no prisoners. Finally, I tell him I can’t talk to him anymore. I hang up the phone and refuse to think about what has just happened. I refuse to acknowledge the fact that my best friend is no longer that. I go to bed as if everything is the same as it ever was.
But in the morning, I find I cannot get out of bed. My blood has been replaced with some kind of thick sludge. I’m sure that glue has been affixed to my skin. I roll this way and that, but I am effectively paralyzed. What am I going to do, I wonder. I could reach for the phone, call a friend, and ask her to come help me get out of bed, but how would she get in the door? I ponder my situation. I am like a three-quarters dead woman. I will have to get up. I will have to go to the bathroom. I will have to eat something. It takes a long time, but eventually I push the lavender comforter off of myself and coax my recalcitrant body, my crushed spirit, my noodle spine into an erect position.
Without allowing myself to think, I move forward, stumble into the hall, into the bathroom, go through the morning motions, and then find I am downstairs where I fall into the couch, the same place where the phone call took place. And then I cry like a wounded animal. How long? I don’t know. I crawl across the floor to the windows that look out upon the spring day. There are three of them—floor-to-ceiling windows. After five days of steady rain, the sun is beaming its godly face onto the brilliant wet green of the woods outside my window. And in the midst of this hellish pain I feel a warmth, a weird, totally inappropriate joy. The birds outside are going nuts. A woodpecker taps on the trees. Cardinals streak by like red comets. Blue jays are on the prowl, and a tiny yellow bird comes flitting over the back deck, and it occurs to me as the yellow bird flits past me that I’m going to be okay. I repeat the thought: I’m going to be okay. And the bird flits past me once again. So one more time, I say it—this time out loud.
“I’m going to be okay.”
The bird flits by one more time.
I get the message. I know it will be hard as hell but I get it. I will be okay.
Still, I can’t help thinking of all the times I wasn’t there for someone, a friend, when they may have been wounded. I think of how selfishly I live my life, wrapped up in my world of mothering, daughtering, and writing. Okay, perhaps those aren’t the most selfish activities. The point is that when my friends have been grieving, I have not always recognized the depth of their pain. Sometimes it seems that it’s only about me, my pain, my drama.
I vow right then that I will be more sensitive to the needs of others—and not just those who are related to me by blood. I stand up, feeling I have resolved something, my tears dried, a sense of having been washed ashore after a wicked storm.
I’ve been invited to give some workshops at the Tallahassee Writers Conference in April. I’m delighted. My university is paying to fly me down, and I’ll have a chance to see my oldest and dearest friends in the college town I’ll always consider home.
It’s spring in Tallahassee, and the azaleas are blooming. I stay with my friends Pam and Gary in their A-frame in the woods by a pond that otters occasionally visit. In some essential way Pam reminds me of my mother. It is her combination of kindness and wide-ranging intelligence. She knows books, art, cooking, movies, different cultures. And somehow she manages not to make other people feel stupid.
Other friends join us and we laugh and toast to nothing as we salivate over Pam’s delicious dinner made with crushed mushrooms from her backyard.
The next day at the conference, I’m seated between two writers. They want to know what I’ve written lately. That’s always the question.
“Not much,” I answer. “I’ve been taking care of my elderly mother for the past few years. It’s not so bad now that she’s in assisted living, but still . . .”
I don’t have to tell them. Soon both of them are weeping over their pasta primavera, talking about their fathers, how these men they loved got sick, what their mothers could or could not do, and the wrenching loss.
“Jesus,” I say. “I’m so sorry.” The three of us sit there, morosely recounting our parents’ demises the way we once would have sat and gossiped about the boys we liked or later about our children.
The second day of the conference I find vendors in the lobby of the hotel selling handmade soaps, imported clothing, and jewelry. I’m trying to conserve my cash and so I propel myself past the shiny objects, but a carousel of greeting cards lands a hook in me, and I stop to look at a card with a picture of a bright, blue butterfly on the front.
“I made the card from my photographs,” the eager seller says.
I can’t think of any reason I need this card, but I do like butterflies.
“How much?” I ask.
“Four dollars.”
A lot for a card, but not much for a work of art. I buy the card.
The conference ends and I leave, wondering what to do with my time. Pam and Gary are at the beach with friends from Scotland. I’ve already been down to the water the night before and had dinner with my friend Dean. We spent most of it talking about the death of his wife, our beloved poet Wendy Bishop. I remembered the love poems she had written for him, and how happy he was when they finally got together. I was sad that Dean had lost her, but also envious that he had known such unequivocal love. It seemed that Hank and I had always held something back from each other. What would it be like to give yourself wholly to another person the way Dean and Wendy had?
Since I’ve got some time, I decide I will go see Kitty’s mother, Cathy. Kitty died of breast cancer in 2001, and I try to visit Cathy whenever I am in Tallahassee. I think Cathy likes to have someone to talk with about Kitty.
To my surprise, Kitty’s sister Martha, who lives in California, stands on the porch, leaning against the wrought-iron trellis. Her red hair is pulled back from her thin, pretty face, and I can see shades of Kitty in her features.
“Mom is in the hospital,” Martha says.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Martha and I have not always been on the best of terms, but today she treats me like an old friend.
“You don’t know what happened, do you?” she asks after apologizing for her unfriendliness the last time we met.
I shake my head and follow her inside the red brick ranch house.
Through Kitty I had met Martha, but there was another sister that I’d never met. This sister, according to Martha, had swooped in one night with her husband, both of them in the military, and in a domestic coup they had deposed the matriarch of the house. They took her to a place that Martha described as a “locked ward” and cleaned out her
house.
“They couldn’t sell the house because, unbeknownst to me, Mother had put it in my name as well as hers,” Martha confides. By now we are sitting in the living room which had once been quite comfortable with overstuffed couches and chairs. Now Martha is perched on a spindly-looking white settee, holding Cathy’s poodle on her lap. Her eyes are weary, and her mouth held tight against a storm of betrayal.
“They destroyed all the books,” she says and indicates the barren shelves. My God, I’m thinking, they were like Nazis getting ready for a book burning. “And pried those antique mirrors off the wall.” I see two blank spots I hadn’t noticed before.
This story seems incredible to me. How could someone do this?
“They took all the china and silver, too,” Martha says. I get up and go into the dining room where once upon a time I ate blueberry pancakes with Kitty and her mother and Emmy. I look in the china cabinet where I had often stopped to admire Cathy’s collection. I liked those plates and cups and saucers so much because they were the same pattern that I had chosen when I was seventeen and embarked on a misguided marital adventure with the heroin addict next door. The marriage ended soon after the wedding, but to this day I still own one beautiful blue-and-gold-trimmed plate.
The china cabinet is empty. I sit back down, stunned. Martha continues.
“They put her in a locked ward,” she reiterates. “With crazy people screaming all night. She wasn’t out of her mind. She knew exactly where she was. She called me every day and said if she didn’t get out, she’d kill herself. I spent every cent I had on lawyers and finally got a court order to have her released.”
My disbelief turns into horror and sorrow.
“I don’t remember meeting your other sister,” I say to her. “Was she at Kitty’s funeral?”
“No,” Martha answers. “She took her kids to Disney World instead.”
We sit quietly for a moment while I absorb that piece of information.
“Where is Cathy now?” I ask.
“In the cardiac intensive care unit at the hospital. Six months in that place broke her, Pat,” she says.
“Will they let me see her?”
“Yes, she’d like to see you, I’m sure.”
On the way to the hospital I think about getting some flowers, but I’m in a hurry to see her. Martha had mentioned that the doctors were talking about getting her into hospice, which was where we watched Kitty die. Then I remember the card in my briefcase.
I place the butterfly card on the rolling table at Cathy’s bedside where she can look at it. She looks so frail, with her bruised arm and the bandage wrapped around the IV needle. It takes a moment for her to recognize me. I can tell the state of her health is not the best topic, so I tell her about Emmy.
“She’s in college now, taking honors courses, and she has a cute little apartment near campus.” Cathy’s eyes light up.
“Oh, that’s so wonderful,” she says in her soft, lilting voice.
A nurse comes in to draw blood. He’s gentle and friendly. Cathy seems tired, and I’m not sure how long I should stay. I clasp her hand. Her hair is a white crown surrounding her lovely face. Kitty always said, “Isn’t she precious?”
Yes, I’m thinking now, our precious mothers.
Before I leave Tallahassee, a few of us go over to our friend Theo’s house, which is tucked under enormous Spanish-moss-laden live oaks. I’ve known Theo since graduate school, where he was admired for his dry wit and whiskey. I remember his wedding. I even remember scouring the local antique stores for a wedding present and finding a soup tureen that seemed like a weird enough gift to give the two coolest people I knew. We hadn’t seen each other much over the years, and so I had only recently learned that Theo’s wife left him about a week before Hank got on that train to California. We commiserate a bit about how odd it is to be suddenly single after years of marriage.
Lately, I’ve been wondering if I’ll ever be attractive to anyone again. A sociologist named Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot describes the years between fifty and seventy-five as the third chapter. She says these years are transformative and regenerative, a time for passion, risk, and adventure. But to me, it’s looking scary and sad. It’s looking like years of going to bed at nine thirty with a book and my cat. It’s looking like maybe being alone and sometimes screaming out loud just to see if anyone hears.
Everyone but me is drinking wine, but I might as well be drunk as I show off the scar from my surgery. I’ve become rather proud of my brief fling with cancer, and my friends are dutifully impressed. Then we’re winding down. Gary, Amy, and Mark are talking music. Pam falls asleep on the couch. I am sitting on the other end of the couch bundled up in a paisley blanket. When I look up, Theo is smiling at me, and it occurs to me that the third chapter of my life might not be so bleak after all.
FOUR
MAY 2009
I am sitting at the Caribou coffee shop with my friends for our biweekly writers get-together. As we’re waiting for everyone to arrive and eat a quick lunch, I notice Tamara’s big, boxy emerald ring with two diamonds on either side.
“Wow, that’s beautiful,” I remark.
“Thank you,” she says. “It’s my engagement ring. I love emeralds.” Tamara’s husband is a doctor and makes a pretty decent salary—a lot of which gets donated to various causes that Tamara believes in, but I guess he gets to spoil her a little when she lets him.
“I gave Emmy an emerald ring for Christmas a couple years ago,” I tell her. I bought it at the jewelry store in this same shopping center.
“That’s right,” she says. “I remember that.”
“She lost it,” I say. We both laugh. Emmy is notorious for being unable to hold onto things—her cell phone which she left at a bus stop in the Bronx, her little lilac winter coat (brand-new) that she left in a Taco Bell when she was eleven, her backpack and keys in high school. The list is long.
“Someday,” Tamara says, “you should give her a map with a red pinpoint of everywhere she’s lost something.”
After I leave the coffee shop, I head over to the Sanctuary to see Mom. The manager takes me aside as soon as I walk in. I’m worried he’s going to tell me that they’ve decided to raise her rent. But instead he asks if I’ve heard that Mom has lost her ring. My heart sinks. It’s a beautiful amethyst ring in a big gold setting that my brother David gave her. How could she have been so careless, I wonder. She knows that there are always people around who will lift what you leave behind. She never locks her apartment, of course, and has even complained that people come in and take her cookies, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t happen. Still, it would seem that if she thinks there are cookie thieves out there, she would surely guard the one thing she has of any value.
When I find my mother in her room, she’s distraught. I do an exhaustive search, but no ring. Overall, I’m pretty sure the employees here are an honest bunch, but the economy is bad right now and one of them might have been unable to resist the temptation. Or maybe my mother managed to drop it in such an obscure place that it will never again be found. Regardless, she’s going to have to suck it up.
“Let it go, Mom,” I tell her. “There are worse things than losing a ring.”
“I just feel so guilty,” she says.
“Please don’t. It happens,” I say. I want to chastise her the way I chastise the forever-losing-something Emmy, but it serves no more purpose than her purposeless guilt.
I push her wheelchair outside and we sit on the little patio area in the sun, facing the parking lot. I relish the spring sunshine and this moment free from grief and worry. I am filled with gratitude and not a little relief that I can be here with her today, and because today the worst thing that has happened to us is the loss of a ring.
Emmy comes home from college for a short visit. I was thinking we’d spread out the comforters in front of the TV and get reacquainted with Woody Allen. But she can’t stay for a second night. She has four papers to write and decides to go back to sch
ool to finish them. It has begun to happen. This house is more storage, more of a way station for her. In a different course of events, Hank and I would be rekindling our love life about now. I would not be living in this big empty house alone without even a dog. But Hank is gone, Merlyn is dead, and my next ship hasn’t come sailing over the horizon.
So instead of watching Woody Allen, I’m visiting my mom. When I walk into her room, she’s got a helpless look on her face. She’s just rung her pendant for someone to come help her get to the bathroom.
“I’ll help you, Mom,” I say. As often happens, she has a big wet spot on the back of her dress. So I help her change into something else.
Mom is in good spirits today. She doesn’t complain of pain. I wheel her into the courtyard where we slowly circumnavigate, stopping to admire the flowers. She’s always liked flowers, but now she seems to derive a special delight in them.
After we’ve toured the small courtyard, I park her wheelchair catty-corner to one of the mesh chairs and sit down. I tell her about a movie I’ve recently seen. She likes to hear about what’s going on out there, but it doesn’t hold her interest for long. Soon her conversation veers to the past.
Somehow we get on the topic of “The War.” Both of her brothers served. Bob went out and shot a rabbit before enlisting and realized he simply couldn’t kill a person, so he joined the Merchant Marines. Dave was in the Navy and served in the Pacific. He made one cryptic and pained comment that Mother never forgot: “All the terrible things that they say the Japanese did to us are true. But we were no better to them.”
“Daddy never served in the military,” I say.
“No, he got out of it because of his eyes,” she replies.
“So after Yale, the two of you went to Vermont?”
Wait Until Tomorrow Page 19
