Wait Until Tomorrow

by Pat MacEnulty

  But where is that line? Where is the line at which you say, “You’re right. Better to leave the party now before the police come and throw everyone in jail.” This is what we need to figure out and we only have two or three decades to do it. Not much time. Not much time at all before you’re there, before it’s you.

  The next morning I get an email from Theo. His mother passed away peacefully in the night. She was eighty-four. She’d been sick for a couple of months and Theo and his brothers each had spent some time with her in recent weeks. Now she’s gone.

  Halloween day. I’m motivated to clear out some space in Hank’s office for an extra bed so that Lorri can have a place to sleep when Emmy comes home. In order to do that, I need to clear off a table covered with nails, levels, clamps, tools, and paint cans, move the table out of there, and put it in his room in the hopes that someday the half-demolished bathroom will be fixed—by somebody. As I stand in Hank’s room, I am filled with an ineffable sense of sadness. I can’t bring to mind all the things he said or did that hurt me so deeply this past year. I can only feel a deep regret for how unhappy he was. I have a sense that I didn’t try hard enough, didn’t care enough. I simply let him be. I had the life I wanted and that was all I cared about.

  Of course, I couldn’t force him to participate in life, in my life. I tried to get him to go on trips with us, but at some point I gave up. We ate dinner together, we shopped for groceries together. That seemed like enough.

  Standing in this large room with the poplar tree all yellow outside his big bay window, I realize I will never again celebrate Halloween with my husband and child, watching our favorite movies, making caramel apples, trying to keep the dog from sneaking off with the candy. Those years are over. I run a finger through the dust on his armoire. Finally, with my barge of a heart, with the beat of lost love still thrumming in my veins, I walk out of the room and close the door.

  That night I go see a movie with a friend, and leave Lorri to give out candy to the few little groups of children who brave the wet night in search of sweets.

  EIGHT

  THANKSGIVING 2009

  When I learned that my friend Michael Gearhart had died of congenital heart failure in 1996, I felt as though I’d fallen through ice into freezing waters. My phone had rung at seven that morning as I was getting my young daughter ready for school. When I picked up the phone, my friend Mary Jane said in a soft voice, “Pat, have you heard? About Mike?”

  “Heard what?” I asked. I remember feeling annoyed. That was my response to the creeping fear I felt.

  “He’s dead,” she answered. “It’s in the paper.”

  “No,” I told her. “No, that’s not true.”

  I hung up the phone and tried Mike’s phone number. I got his answering machine and heard his voice. See, he can’t be dead, I thought, there’s his voice. And yet I knew that only meant that he wasn’t there to pick up the phone. I put on my flannel bathrobe and went outside. The night before, my family and I had stood outside in the street with our neighbors looking through a telescope as the moon turned a deep ruddy color during a full lunar eclipse.

  My newspaper lay folded up at the end of my driveway on that sparkling September morning. I sat down on the concrete drive and opened up the local section. I found the article that told of my friend’s death. He’d been driving his antique Ford pickup truck and had an accident two blocks away from my house at the same time I was gazing up at the eclipse of the moon. A witness said he had slumped against the wheel before hitting the other car. I looked up at the sky. A black balloon hovered over the pine trees in the yard across the street. I watched as the balloon floated away, and I understood that my friend was gone.

  It had been a long time since I’d experienced the death of someone close to me. It seemed as if a giant hand had torn a hole in the universe. A grief the size of Nebraska engulfed me. My friends and I clung to each other for days in stunned disbelief. Mike was young, healthy, funny, and handsome—admired by men and desired by women. Now he was gone. One day here. The next day deleted.

  I think of the shock of that sudden death now, contrasting it to my mother’s slow tortuous slide into the abyss.

  Thanksgiving 2009. Hank and I have been separated for nearly a year, and Lorri has become a part of my new makeshift family. Emmy is coming home from college for the break. Hank never enjoyed entertaining, so I am looking forward to having Thanksgiving dinner with friends at my house for the first time ever. But I don’t want to do all that work—roasting turkey, peeling potatoes, etc. Emmy hates turkey anyway, and it has been at least a year since I’ve eaten meat. Not to mention, I’m not much of a cook.

  So I order a big spinach lasagna from Pasta & Provisions; make a salad with romaine, arugula, edamame beans, shrimp, avocado, and candied pecans; steam some asparagus; and bake pecan pie bars for dessert. One of my former students, a fantastic chef, delivers the most incredible soup (see recipe below) and broccoli gratin the day before. My friend Darryl is bringing over a turtle cheesecake. Not a traditional Thanksgiving dinner but a feast nonetheless.

  The guests include four friends of mine, along with Lorri, Emmy, and my ninety-one-year-old mother. That’s the Olympic challenge—getting my mother out of her assisted-living place and over to my house. She used to go a little crazy staying in one place, but now she doesn’t like to leave. I know she is going to balk when it comes time to go, but I’ve already steeled myself for that. It’s kind of like taking the cat to the vet, except that once my mother gets to wherever I’ve made her go, she realizes she wanted to do this all along—as opposed to my cat who goes psycho and tries to eviscerate the doctor. Mom was so happy I’d dragged her out last year to vote, and was eventually delighted when I made her go to the mall with me and my brothers last summer to buy her a dress. She loved it when we went to the symphony in the park—after we got there. And I figure this will be no different. She’ll make all kinds of noise about getting in and out of the car (not easy when your legs don’t work), but once she’s at the house she will be happy as a bluebird in a tree.

  I arrive at the assisted-living place at two thirty. My mom wears a pretty red dress and a coat—it is plenty cold outside. Although she looks spry, she has a vicious cough. She keeps hacking up phlegm and spitting into a napkin. As we approach the car, just as I expected, she panics.

  “Oh, I don’t know about this,” she says in a weak, frightened voice.

  “You don’t have to go,” I answer. You know how you can say something and mean just the opposite? She gets my drift. I angle her wheelchair inside the open car door, put on the brakes, tell her to grab the top of the car door, and help her get up. Then I deftly unbrake the chair, pull it out of the way, and help her pivot onto the car seat. I lift her legs (one of them is in an enormous black boot to protect the ankle which was fractured a couple of months earlier), tug the seat belt around her waist, shut the door, and proceed to load the wheelchair into the back of my car.

  I live about fifteen minutes away, and want to make sure I get there before the guests arrive. I pull into the driveway, extricate the wheelchair, reverse the actions, and wheel her down the winding leaf-strewn walkway to the steps at the front of the house. Standing at the bottom of the three rickety wooden steps I realize I forgot that Hank had removed the handrails to the steps in a fit of “renovation.” We are facing three steps and she has nothing to hold onto.

  My mother wears the facial expression of someone hanging over a cliff.

  Not to worry. My strong nineteen-year-old daughter is here, and Lorri is fairly strong as well in spite of a bum knee. Surely we can maneuver one little old lady up these steps and into the house. My mother clutches the wheelchair.

  “What do I do?” she asks.

  “Let go of the wheelchair first,” I instruct.

  We get her up, but she isn’t supporting herself at all. She doesn’t know how to. The mechanics of movement have become foreign to her.

  “Come on, Mom,” I say, helping
her to lift one leg and then the other. Miraculously we get her onto the first step. But the next step is impossible. She can’t or won’t lift her legs on her own even with us supporting her. She gets heavier by the second. We’re at an impasse. We have to retreat.

  “Go back,” I say. My mother’s rear end begins to lower but her feet stay planted on the step. Disaster looms.

  “No, no!” all three of us yell.

  “I meant step back, Mom!” I say, trying to hold on to her and pull the chair under her descending body. Then to heap insult onto her injuries, I start to laugh. I can’t help it. It’s all so terrible, my mother is going backwards, and we can’t stop her. Emmy catches the giggles from me and Lorri follows suit. Which just enrages my mother who yells at Emmy, “It’s not funny!”

  Emmy glares at me at the same time that my mother lands halfassed on the wheelchair. But by then I am laughing so hard I’ve peed on myself, which brings on the idea that maybe my mother isn’t the only one who needs “extra protection.” Fortunately, Darryl and his very strong friend Eric arrive at that moment. They lift up my mother, wheelchair and all, and cart her up the steps onto the front porch. Eric, who took care of an elderly couple for several years when he first moved to the United States from Poland, pulls the wheelchair over the last step and across the threshold while I run upstairs to clean up and change clothes. All’s well that ends well, right?

  Maybe it’s because she’s sick with the cough, but my mother’s listless and confused from our pre-dinner gathering in the living room for appetizers through dinner. Like all of us, she does make special mention of the splendid soup. While the rest of us talk about various topics (Eric from Poland fills the Americans in on Abe Lincoln’s connection to Thanksgiving and how he established the holiday for morale), my mother’s eyes droop. I worry about whether she needs to go to the bathroom and if that is possible in the tiny first-floor “powder room.” A couple of times she tries to keep up with the conversation but her hearing has gone and not everyone knows to speak loudly to her. She does, however, notice the lace tablecloth and the place settings—remnants of her mostly vanished life.

  After dessert, we waddle like hippos back into the living room, where Emmy lights a fire in the fireplace and entertains us with stories of riding back to school recently on a train packed with drunken football fans. Darryl, Eric, and Steve wax philosophical. Lisa informs us of the real skinny on 2012. Lorri laughs at the jokes. I watch my mother.

  Her head slowly lowers, eyes shut, and she peacefully dozes until suddenly—as if she were falling—she screams, “Ooooh!” and her body jerks upright. The conversation skids to a halt every time it happens. I find myself wishing the festivities would just end so I can get her back to the assisted-living place where she has an accessible bathroom and her adjustable bed. Finally at about seven thirty I tell my guests I have to take her back home. Steve and Eric carry the wheelchair to the sidewalk, and I wheel her back to my car.

  Unlike my friend Mike, my mother’s life has ended in degrees. Tonight, I realize, we’ve lost a few more of them. This will be the last time I’ll bring her over to my house. I don’t have the income to build a ramp and retrofit my bathroom. Besides, if it isn’t enjoyable to her, what is the point? I decide I will not force her out again. The thing that worries me is the requiem performance. The date is set for February 21. Everything is a go. But how will I ever get her there? I’m thinking we might have to do it without her. I shut this awful thought out of my mind.

  Mom surprises me on the way home.

  “What a lovely evening,” she says.

  “It was nice, but I’m so tired,” I admit.

  “Well, don’t fall asleep before you get me home,” she says. And I laugh. Though my mother’s long slow decline saddens me more than I can say, I feel grateful that she still has that spark of humor, that I’ve been able to have one more Thanksgiving with her in my house with the old lace tablecloth that belonged to her grandmother and the beautiful hand-painted plates that belonged to my grandmother, and that back at my house, a large pot of leftover Thanksgiving soup will keep me warm for the coming days.

  Here is Greg’s recipe, with his permission:

  Greg Guthrie’s Absolutely Delicious

  Butternut Squash and Lentil Soup

  VEGETABLE STOCK: Mirepoix:

  2 parts onion

  1 part celery

  1 part carrots

  6 garlic cloves

  Bouquet garni:

  1 bunch of thyme (handful)

  1 bunch parsley stems (leaves make it bitter)

  10 whole black peppercorns

  3 bay leaves

  Cover with water two inches above solids and simmer for at least an hour

  SOUP: Butternut Squash, cubed and roasted

  Lentils, cooked separately with vegetable stock

  Onions, brunoise

  Carrots, brunoise

  Celery ribs, brunoise

  Garlic, minced

  Ginger, minced

  Cremini mushrooms, diced

  Shiitake mushrooms, diced

  Fresh oregano

  Fresh flat-leaf parsley

  Fresh cilantro

  Curry powder

  Shaved nutmeg, tiny bit

  CILANTRO GARNISH: Cilantro, chopped

  Parsley, chopped

  Garlic, minced

  Lemon zest

  Orange zest

  Sauté vegetables until tender, adding each vegetable one at a time: onions, celery, carrots, garlic, ginger. Deglaze with vegetable stock or dry white wine. Add vegetable stock and simmer for half hour. Add mushrooms, curry, cooked lentils, and squash and cook for another half hour. Finish with fresh herbs and nutmeg. Salt and pepper to taste. Add garnish when serving. Can drizzle truffle oil or olive oil to taste.

  NINE

  WINTER 2010

  I am traveling across North Carolina in an Amtrak train—warehouses of brick and corrugated steel, tanks, leafless trees and evergreens, brown or pale yellow lawns, small clapboard houses with metal carports attached to the sides, factories, anonymous brick buildings, trucks. We pass over highways and see people heading to work, cell phone towers, roofing businesses. I love the train, the easy forward momentum. These trains don’t seem to rock the way trains used to. They glide like steel serpents.

  A blue-suited steward comes through collecting tickets. We pass small towns; I notice a faded painted sign “Central Grocery” on old brick. We pass enormous steel water towers like spaceships gleaming in the blighted rural area. An old man in a Stetson hat creakily gets out of a truck. Some houses still have their Christmas decorations up. The houses are tiny. I wonder who lives in them. A brown-and-white dilapidated trailer, more manufacturing plants where something happens but I can’t imagine what. An electrical forest of towers and wires. Backyards and apartment complexes. A college campus—brick buildings with white porticoes—where I once tried to get a job. I’m glad I didn’t. The train blowing its one chord, sometimes long, sometimes short—an indecipherable Morse code.

  I’m on my way home to Charlotte after visiting Emmy at college. As we walked across the campus, she told me about the phone call she recently had with Hank, how the conversation was unstrained and happy, how they laughed together. The two of them seem to be finding their way back to each other.

  The train continues west and the sun slides by in window-sized patches as we round bends. Outside I watch the scenery: farmland, wetlands, a tiny log cabin, a blue tractor in a shed, a strip shopping center, a brick Baptist church, a hawk scouring the land for breakfast, a landfill with a dump truck spilling black dirt, and a backhoe with its head on the ground as if it is sleeping.

  I’m worried about the requiem performance. Everyone is expecting Mom to be there. They have a different idea of who she is. They think she will be happy and honored. I think so too, but I think that it will be her ghost who is happy and honored. I believe that her former self still lingers near her body. I believe that even though she ma
y fall asleep during the performance, some part of her consciousness will register this homage to her work.

  I haven’t been able to do much to make sure the performance goes the way it should. My brother Jo has taken the reins, and I’m glad for it. But he is trying to make all the arrangements long distance. There’s a committee of Mother’s old friends working to make it happen, and apparently there have been unspecified problems. Have we imposed too much, I wonder. We don’t have money to pay for anything. The most important thing to me is getting a good recording of it, but so far I haven’t had much luck finding someone who can do it. I have to trust that Jo will make it happen. He seems pretty confident.

  We’re pulling into Greensboro—a small, pretty city with a few midsized buildings. A lone cargo trailer sits by the side of the tracks. I wonder how long it has been there, if it’s been forgotten.

  At least Mom has been better mentally, more alert, more like her old self since she got over her cold. And I know I have no choice now. She has to go to Jacksonville where the requiem will be performed. The only hitch in the plans is that Emmy can’t come with us, so I’ll have to get my other brother and his son to help me transport my mother. She’s so afraid of travel now and of leaving the confines of the Sanctuary. I will have to find some way to convince her.

  “Mom, you know how much you love me?” I will ask. “I need you to do this for me. I need you to not be afraid, to be strong and to be happy. Please do this for me.” If I can just frame it that way and tap into that old drive of hers, then she’ll do it. She’ll go to the ends of the earth. All my life I have known this, that if I really needed my mother to do something for me, she would battle dragons. I once used this power to persuade her to get drugs for me from her friend the dentist. I still feel bad about that.