by Sue Miller
Nancy parked in the driveway, and they walked to the side steps, the ones that led into the kitchen. It was dark, they'd forgotten to leave the outside light on, and Delia stumbled over something. Nancy caught her elbow and continued to hold it as they came up the back stairs to the door. When they went in, Delia reached over in the black kitchen and switched on the lamp over the table. Blinking in the light, Nancy looked exhausted.
Why, she's old, Delia thought, looking at the deep, bitter grooves around her daughter's mouth, the lines in her forehead. She spoke gently to her. “Well, we seem to have made a plan then.”
THE REHAB CENTER was about forty minutes from Williston. Delia drove slowly along the two-lane highway, watching anxiously for the signposts and turns she'd written down when she called for directions. She'd just come past the rotary and the yellow farmhouse when she saw it, as described, on a hill to the right.
“Rather imposing,” the woman on the phone had said, and it was—a grand old mansion, Georgian. On either side of it, low two-story brick buildings stretched out, back into the woods that pushed up toward the top of the hill.
She drove under a bright blue canopy by the front door and parked in the asphalt lot marked for visitors. Inside, there was a wide entrance hallway. Just visible behind a blond wood counter, a receptionist smiled up at her. She had flyaway gray hair. Delia told her the name she'd been given, and then sat down to wait, looking around her.
Everything was of a fine quality for what it was, and what it was was deliberately bland, painstakingly inoffensive. The color scheme was gray and a deep green—restful to the eye, she supposed. The pictures on the walls were anonymous pastoral scenes or framed posters from shows at art museums. Haystacks by Monet. Out in the hallway, flowers by O’Keeffe.
Walking with Mrs. Davidson minutes later, Delia was both impressed and oppressed by the place. The doors stood open to many of the little apartments off the long corridors, and Mrs. Davidson called out hello to various residents who seemed to be just sitting there idly, waiting for an invitation to talk. She was a pretty woman, perhaps in her fifties, slightly overdressed for her job—a purple suit, a big scarf knotted at her shoulder. She looked like a high-school principal, Delia thought.
She pointed out to Delia that the residents had their own furniture, their own pictures on the walls and mementoes set out. And Delia could see these as they passed slowly by—the figurines arranged on a table, the Victorian chair, the family photos cluttering a wall, the Persian rug spread over the institutional floor covering. The remnants of a full life led elsewhere.
This was where they would hope Tom could be moved in due time, Mrs. Davidson said.
Delia took all this in, commenting politely. As they moved around, she looked at the residents, old, like Tom, but ambulatory for the most part. Once they saw a young man walking the corridor ahead of them with an aide who was holding his hand. Delia asked Mrs. Davidson about him.
“He's one of our boys,” she said. “They're the other part of our population. When you're talking about neurological damage, there are two main culprits, and those are a stroke, and trauma. A few other illnesses, a few other possibilities. But mostly stroke and some violent event. And the population most likely to invite a violent event—to have a motorcycle accident with no helmet, to dive into a quarry without knowing where the rocks are, to drive too fast, to pass on a hill—those are, of course, young men. We try to offer them more discipline, more physical activity. And we actually house them in a different wing—they can be disruptive to the older population. I can show you if you wish.”
“No, no. It's not necessary,” Delia said.
They went next to the rehab and nursing-care wing, where Tom would be, at least at first. Delia saw the elaborate equipment he would work out on to build his strength, the rooms where his speech therapy would take place.
In the open main room here, a birthday party was in full swing. There was a speechless old woman slouched off center in a wheelchair at the head of the table, her mouth open as if in permanent shock at what had become of her, a little pointed hat held to the top of her head by an elastic band running under her chin. Ten or twelve other residents sat around the table with nurses or helpers next to most of them, a few being fed, more helping themselves—some competently, some as awkwardly as little children. Many of them too wore hats. A young woman wearing a flowered smock was chattering as she cut the cake, explaining, as you do with small children: “We're having ice cream. It's vanilla, vanilla ice cream. And look! Here's some cake! Two cakes. This cake has chocolate, and that one doesn't. So if you don't like chocolate . . .”
There was a kind of din under this, the noise of the patients’ conversation in response, taking place in a different rhythm, a different style.
Delia's main thought as they left the ward, as she walked back with Mrs. Davidson down the enclosed corridors with their slightly floral smell, as she sat listening to her talk about finances in her office, was that Tom would be appalled. And then, sitting there, nodding at Mrs. Davidson as she spoke, she realized that she was thinking of another Tom, one who would have walked with her through this place in one of his suits, a beautiful tie at his neck, his hand at her back, at her elbow, looking at her from time to time, commenting privately on things to her with the slightest wry twist to his mouth, an almost invisible lift of his eyebrows.
The Tom who existed now was used to this, to his compatriots in the new country he lived in. He probably wouldn't notice any of the things that so disturbed her. He would be in them. Of them. He would be one of them. It seemed almost unbearable. She didn't want to think of him this way. She wouldn't think of him this way. She couldn't.
And then she remembered something from the literature they'd sent her. She interrupted Mrs. Davidson in the middle of what she was saying. “You have a day-care program too, don't you?”
OVER THE NEXT week or so, Mrs. Davidson and the staff at Putnam managed the details. They coordinated with the hospital in Washington, where Tom was still doing his poststroke rehab. Together they agreed on another ten days of work there. Then he'd come to Putnam for at least a week as an inpatient. Then, if he was progressing as well as he had seemed to be, he could come home, home to Delia. He could live with her and continue to use the rehabilitation facility, but as an outpatient.
Delia mentioned none of this to Nancy when they talked. She just spoke of the quality of the place, of the programs, of the various levels of care. She couldn't face another struggle with her daughter right now. She let Nancy believe she was implementing the plan they'd agreed on, which was, of course, already a compromise on Nancy's part, as Nancy saw it. The time to tell her, Delia thought, would be when it was a fait accompli, when Nancy could see how well it was going.
In the meantime, Delia was busy with her own arrangements. She hired a driving service to take Tom over and back to his five days at Putnam each week once he'd come to stay with her. She called the student employment agency at the college and listed a caregiver's job for the afternoons starting in mid-June—she wanted to go on working at the Apthorp house this summer, so she'd need someone to come and stay with Tom then—there was a gap of about an hour and a half between the time he would come home from Putnam and the time she'd get back from her docent's job. Also she'd need help getting Tom upstairs for a shower a few times a week at the minimum, and there might be odd tasks around the house she could think of.
She decided to conduct interviews for the job—it seemed important the person be someone that Tom might like. There were three young men who called her in response to the ad. She arranged to have them come seriatim on a Wednesday afternoon.
She was nervous ahead of time. She dressed carefully—a white linen shirt and black slacks, sandals. She chose bangle-y jewelry for her wrists—youthful jewelry, as she thought of it. She knew this was ridiculous, but she felt she ought to try. She didn't want them discouraged too much by her in advance of what was bound to be discouraging about Tom. She spiff
ed the room up a bit, and bought Coke and chips, which not one of them touched.
She had decided beforehand that she would choose on the basis of two qualities, physical strength and the degree of relaxation the young men had around her.
But they were all enormous, and they all said they did one sport or another. All strong then, she assumed. Two of them, though, were formal and embarrassed in her company, each in a different way—one too polite and ingratiating, the other too distant, as though a person as old as she was somehow a different species, not amenable to idle conversation or laughter. Talking with them was exhausting to Delia, since she had to do all the work.
The third one, Matthew, seemed unafraid and curious, and he'd heard of Tom. Tom would like that. And though he was shy, though he kept calling her Mrs. Naughton even after she'd asked him several times to call her Delia, he was, in his youthful fashion, interesting. He also didn't know what he wanted to be or do as an adult, and Delia liked that. Young people ought to be more indecisive, she thought, since they knew so little.
She told him a bit about Tom, about how he hadn't known either what he wanted when he was Matthew's age, how he'd traveled around the country as a young man, doing pickup work. How he'd fought fires and worked briefly as a boxer in a border town in Texas. As she was describing this, she had a momentary vision of the young Tom, that tall brave boy, off on his own.
“That is so cool,” Matthew said. He had a big square head and a face that might be handsome in a few years if what gave it thickness now was just baby fat—you couldn't tell about that.
“Hardly,” Delia said. “It always sounded to me a bit like a cockfight. They just threw them into the ring together for the pleasure of betting on it. The bloodier the better. He got five dollars if he won, and nothing if he didn't. Of course five dollars was a great deal in the Depression.”
“But nothing was nothing then too,” he answered.
Delia laughed, and he looked so pleased—he blushed!—that that was it for her. They made their arrangements, they talked about a salary.
A few days later, Matthew and a friend of his came to rearrange things in the house for her. They carried the dining room table and chairs to the basement, and they moved a double bed into the dining room from one of the guest rooms. They brought a bureau down too, and the rocker from the living room, replacing it with a wing chair from Delia's bedroom. There were a few extra lamps in the basement that Delia had them cart up, and two bedside tables. They put a little chest in the first-floor lavatory so Tom would have a place to keep his toiletries, and Delia cleared all the old coats out of the hall closet so she could hang his clothes there.
In addition, she had bought what she thought of as a booster chair for the toilet from a medical supply house, and a tray with fold-down legs on it so he could eat in bed if he was tired.
And every fourth or fifth day through all this she flew to Washington to see Tom, to arrange with her lawyer and Tom's for her to take over the decision making, the finances, to talk to his doctors and his therapists about how he was doing.
What she heard about his state, and what she could see for herself, was that his progress was steady. He was walking, with a cane on good days, with his walker when he was tired. He was eating well, and swallowing real food, which was important. If he went very slowly, he was able to read simple texts. He could print with his right hand, though it looked like the work of a child. His speech lagged behind, but he knew what he wanted to say and understood what others were saying to him if they spoke slowly and simply. The focus of his ongoing rehab would be speech therapy and increasing his strength.
But what was most important to Delia in all of this was that he seemed to be there again, in his gestures, in his face. That he could signal to her his pleasure when she came into his room, that his mouth tightened sometimes in the old way—ruefully, wryly. That he reached to push her hair off her face when she bent to help him. He was himself. He was becoming himself.
ON MAY 31, four weeks to the day after his stroke, Delia flew back to New England with Tom. A driver met them at the airport and took them directly to Putnam. When they pulled up under the blue canopy and the driver came around to help Tom out of the car, he was confused. He seemed suddenly lost. He grabbed her arm.
“Hoooom,” he said to Delia insistently. She had told him she was bringing him home, but she'd also told him about Putnam.
“In a week or so,” she said. “In a week or so I'll take you home.”
“Hoomm, nao.” Home now. It was like lowing, the noise he made, and Delia felt on the edge of tears.
But he fell silent once he was in the wheelchair, and he said nothing as Mrs. Davidson greeted him, as they rolled him down to the rehab ward, as the driver settled him into a chair in his room. Delia was talking to him off and on through this, explaining over and over that he wouldn't be long here, that it would be only days, really, until he could be in Williston.
He wouldn't, or couldn't, answer. When she left him, he was sitting in the dark green armchair in his room, his face haggard with exhaustion. He didn't meet her eye when she said good-bye.
Even so, Delia was excited, full of the same fierce energy that had carried her through these weeks, these days, the trips back and forth, the work of making the house ready for Tom. She had felt—she felt now—that she was living in the past, the present, and the future all at once, a sense of elation at returning to a happy time in her life. She knew she was wound up, she knew she should try to tame it, but she didn't want to.
On the way home, she asked the driver to stop and wait for her at the gourmet shop. Inside, she bought some triple crème cheese, some olives, and the crackers she liked best.
At home, after she'd prepared her plate and poured a glass of wine, she started to carry them to the living room, where she often sat to eat her minimal supper, but changed her mind as she passed the open door to the transformed dining room. She went in and set the plate down on the tray table by the rocker. She turned on the radio. On the jazz show she liked, someone was playing boogie-woogie piano. She sat in her rocker in the half-light. Slowly, enjoying the ritual of it, she spread a cracker with the buttery cheese and bit into it. Self-indulgence, Delia knew, the cheese so rich you could imagine it clogging your arteries even as you swallowed it. She sipped the wine and tilted back in the rocker.
The sky outside was pinkish through the black leaves of the oak tree. She looked slowly around the room. The sheets were neatly tucked in on the bed, the pillows stacked just so. Her father's antique maps, those other versions of the world, were dimly visible on the walls, strange organic shapes, like amoebas. In a week she would have Tom here. He would be home, truly home, for the first time in more than twenty years.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Meri, May 1994
THE OUTSIZE, flat cardboard box was leaned against the curve of the windows next to the front door when Meri arrived home from the grocery store. It was the morning after her last half day of work—a half day, for what would have been the point of staying for the planning meeting when she wasn't planning anything?
She read the return address. It was the crib. Meri had ordered it from one of the many baby catalogs that had been arriving in the mail, unbeckoned, unsolicited, for months now. She had said to Nathan that it was as though the U.S. government had wiretapped her uterus and notified the postal service of its condition before she had even the slightest idea that she was knocked up.
He had laughed and told her how his father, in his last illness, had thought his catheter had been implanted by the IRS and was the means by which they were accessing all his money.
“Citizenship,” she'd said. “It isn't all it's cracked up to be.”
But how timely this arrival was, she thought now, leaving the box on the porch as she went inside. The due date was just ten days off, and they hadn't even really started organizing anything having to do with this baby. Nathan was still finishing up his semester at school, and she had just gotten
through her most intensive month at work yet. In addition to her regular load, she'd tried to set up a dozen or so pieces ahead of time—mostly in the arts, since these didn't have to be so tightly connected to the news cycle.
After she'd taken the groceries to the pantry and put them away, she went back out onto the front porch and tilted the box, testing it. It was heavy, but she thought she could manage to get it through the door if she slid it. Bracing her legs apart, she lifted one edge of it up onto the doorsill; and felt a liquid spurt wet her pants.
Meri was immense. Last week, as she'd come into the room where everyone had their cubicles, Jane had looked up at her and said in a tone of mock surprise, “Gosh, Meri, just when I think you couldn't possibly get any bigger, what do you go and do?” And several people standing around chimed in: “You. Get. Bigger!”
Meri had given them all the finger. But the truth was that even she was surprised by how huge she was. And by everything else about her that had changed. Her belly button had popped out and was clearly visible under the four maternity dresses she'd bought early this spring—she'd finally had to give up on Nathan's shirts and sweaters. In these last weeks, her ankles and feet had swollen so much that all she could wear were rubber thong sandals. Her immense breasts rested on her huge belly, and she actually had a rash where they all touched each other constantly. She treated this with cornstarch, which gathered unattractively in her flesh's creases, like some exuded grayish matter. Like smegma, the all-time ugliest word in the world. In the grocery store just now she'd had to ask someone to lift the cereal down from a not-very-high shelf—her arms couldn't reach that far past her stomach.
And for the last month there had been incontinence, this added blow to her sense of herself as an adult human in charge of her own body. Every time she sneezed or laughed hard, or even sometimes just moved too suddenly, her body released a little trickle of urine.
