by Ann Beattie
“No, but this time if you say you’re going to do it you have to do it. We can’t have people holding doors open all day. People need to get where they’re going.”
“Listen to the things you say! They’re so obvious, I don’t know why you say them.”
She is looking through her purse. Just below the top of her head, I can see her scalp through her hair. “Ma,” I say.
“Yes, yes, coming,” she says. “I thought I might have the card with that hairstylist’s name.”
“It’s Eloise.”
“Thank you, dear. Why didn’t you say so before?”
I call my brother, Tim. “She’s worse,” I say. “If you want to visit her while she’s still more or less with it, I’d suggest you book a flight.”
“You don’t know,” he says. “The fight for tenure. How much rides on this one article.”
“Tim. As your sister. I’m not talking about your problems, I’m—”
“She’s been going downhill for some time. And God bless you for taking care of her! She’s a wonderful woman. And I give you all the credit. You’re a patient person.”
“Tim. She’s losing it by the day. If you care—if you care, see her now.”
“Let’s be honest: I don’t have deep feelings, and I wasn’t her favorite. That was the problem with René: Did I have any deep feelings? I mean, kudos! Kudos to you! Do you have any understanding of why Mom and Dad got together? He was a recluse, and she was such a party animal. She never understood a person turning to books for serious study, did she? Did she? Maybe I’d be the last to know.”
“Tim, I suggest you visit before Christmas.”
“That sounds more than a little ominous. May I say that? You call when I’ve just gotten home from a day I couldn’t paraphrase, and you tell me—as you have so many times—that she’s about to die, or lose her marbles entirely, and then you say—”
“Take care, Tim,” I say, and hang up.
I drive to my mother’s apartment to kill time while she gets her hair done, and go into the living room and see that the plants need watering. Two are new arrivals, plants that friends brought her when she was in the hospital, having her foot operated on: a kalanchoe and a miniature chrysanthemum. I rinse out the mug she probably had her morning coffee in and fill it under the faucet. I douse the plants, refilling the mug twice. My brother is rethinking Wordsworth at a university in Ohio, and for years I have been back in this small town in Virginia where we grew up, looking out for our mother. Kudos, as he would say.
“Okay,” the doctor says. “We’ve known the time was coming. It will be much better if she’s in an environment where her needs are met. I’m only talking about assisted living. If it will help, I’m happy to meet with her and explain that things have reached a point where she needs a more comprehensive support system.”
“She’ll say no.”
“Regardless,” he says. “You and I know that if there was a fire she wouldn’t be capable of processing the necessity of getting out. Does she eat dinner? We can’t say for sure that she eats, now, can we? She needs to maintain her caloric intake. We want to allow her to avail herself of resources structured so that she can best meet her own needs.”
“She’ll say no,” I say again.
“May I suggest that you let Tim operate as a support system?”
“Forget him. He’s already been denied tenure twice.”
“Be that as it may, if your brother knows she’s not eating—”
“Do you know she’s not eating?”
“Let’s say she’s not eating,” he says. “It’s a slippery slope.”
“Pretending that I have my brother as a ‘support system’ has no basis in reality. You want me to admit that she’s thin? Okay. She’s thin.”
“Please grant my point, without—”
“Why? Because you’re a doctor? Because you’re pissed off that she misbehaved at some cashier’s stand in a parking lot?”
“You told me she pulled the fire alarm,” he says. “She’s out of control! Face it.”
“I’m not sure,” I say, my voice quivering.
“I am. I’ve known you forever. I remember your mother making chocolate-chip cookies, my father always going to your house to see if she’d made the damned cookies. I know how difficult it is when a parent isn’t able to take care of himself. My father lived in my house, and Donna took care of him in a way I can never thank her enough for, until he…well, until he died.”
“Tim wants me to move her to a cheap nursing home in Ohio.”
“Out of the question.”
“Right. She hasn’t come to the point where she needs to go to Ohio. On the other hand, we should put her in the slammer here.”
“The slammer. We can’t have a serious discussion if you pretend we’re talking to each other in a comic strip.”
I bring my knees to my forehead, clasp my legs, and press the kneecaps hard into my eyes.
“I understand from Dr. Milrus that you’re having a difficult time,” the therapist says. Her office is windowless, the chairs cheerfully mismatched. “Why don’t you fill me in?”
“Well, my mother had a stroke a year ago. It did something…. Not that she didn’t have some confusions before, but after the stroke she thought my brother was ten years old. She still sometimes says things about him that I can’t make any sense of, unless I remember that she often, really quite often, thinks he’s still ten. She also believes that I’m sixty. I mean, she thinks I’m only fourteen years younger than she is! And, to her, that’s proof that my father had another family. Our family was an afterthought, my father had had another family, and I’m a child of the first marriage. I’m sixty years old, whereas she herself was only seventy-four when she had the stroke and fell over on the golf course.”
The therapist nods.
“In any case, my brother is forty-four—about to be forty-five—and lately it’s all she’ll talk about.”
“Your brother’s age?”
“No, the revelation. That they—you know, the other wife and children—existed. She thinks the shock made her fall down at the fourth tee.”
“Were your parents happily married?”
“I’ve shown her my baby album and said, ‘If I was some other family’s child, then what is this?’ And she says, ‘More of your father’s chicanery.’ That is the exact word she uses. The thing is, I am not sixty. I’ll be fifty-one next week.”
“It’s difficult, having someone dependent upon us, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes. But that’s because she causes herself so much pain by thinking that my father had a previous family.”
“How do you think you can best care for your mother?”
“She pities me! She really does! She says she’s met every one of them: a son and a daughter, and a woman, a wife, who looks very much like her, which seems to make her sad. Well, I guess it would make her sad. Of course it’s fiction, but I’ve given up trying to tell her that, because in a way I think it’s symbolically important. It’s necessary to her that she think what she thinks, but I’m just so tired of what she thinks. Do you know what I mean?”
“Tell me about yourself,” the therapist says. “You live alone?”
“Me? Well, at this point I’m divorced, after I made the mistake of not marrying my boyfriend, Vic, and married an old friend instead. Vic and I talked about getting married, but I was having a lot of trouble taking care of my mother, and I could never give him enough attention. When we broke up, Vic devoted all his time to his secretary’s dog, Banderas. If Vic was grieving, he did it while he was at the dog park.”
“And you work at Cosmos Computer, it says here?”
“I do. They’re really very family-oriented. They understand absolutely that I have to take time off to do things for my mother. I used to work at an interior-design store, and I still sew. I’ve just finished some starfish costumes for a friend’s third-grade class.”
“Jack Milrus thinks your mother might bene
fit from being in assisted living.”
“I know, but he doesn’t know—he really doesn’t know—what it’s like to approach my mother about anything.”
“What is the worst thing that might happen if you did approach your mother?”
“The worst thing? My mother turns any subject to the other family, and whatever I want is just caught up in the whirlwind of complexity of this thing I won’t acknowledge, which is my father’s previous life, and, you know, she omits my brother from any discussion because she thinks he’s a ten-year-old child.”
“You feel frustrated.”
“Is there any other way to feel?”
“You could say to yourself, ‘My mother has had a stroke and has certain confusions that I can’t do anything about.’ ”
“You don’t understand. It is absolutely necessary that I acknowledge this other family. If I don’t, I’ve lost all credibility.”
The therapist shifts in her seat. “May I make a suggestion?” she says. “This is your mother’s problem, not yours. You understand something that your mother, whose brain has been affected by a stroke, cannot understand. Just as you would guide a child, who does not know how to function in the world, you are now in a position where—whatever your mother believes—you must nevertheless do what is best for her.”
“You need a vacation,” Jack Milrus says. “If I weren’t on call this weekend, I’d suggest that you and Donna and I go up to Washington and see that show at the Corcoran where all the figures walk out of the paintings.”
“I’m sorry I keep bothering you with this. I know I have to make a decision. It’s just that when I went back to look at the Oaks and that woman had mashed an éclair into her face—”
“It’s funny. Just look at it as funny. Kids make a mess. Old people make a mess. Some old biddy pushed her nose into a pastry.”
“Right,” I say, draining my gin and tonic. We are in his backyard. Inside, Donna is making her famous osso buco. “You know, I wanted to ask you something. Sometimes she says ‘desperate.’ She uses the word when you wouldn’t expect to hear it.”
“Strokes,” he says.
“But is she trying to say what she feels?”
“Does it come out like a hiccup or something?” He pulls up a weed.
“No, she just says it, instead of another word.”
He looks at the long taproot of the dandelion he’s twisted up. “The South,” he says. “These things have a horribly long growing season.” He drops it in a wheelbarrow filled with limp things raked up from the yard. “I am desperate to banish dandelions,” he says.
“No, she wouldn’t use it like that. She’d say something like, ‘Oh, it was desperate of you to ask me to dinner.’ ”
“It certainly was. You weren’t paying any attention to me on the telephone.”
“Just about ready!” Donna calls out the kitchen window. Jack raises a hand in acknowledgment. He says, “Donna’s debating whether to tell you that she saw Vic and Banderas having a fight near the dog park. Vic was knocking Banderas on the snout with a baseball cap, Donna says, and Banderas had squared off and was showing teeth. Groceries all over the street.”
“I’m amazed. I thought Banderas could do no wrong.”
“Well, things change.”
In the yard next door, the neighbor’s strange son faces the street lamp and, excruciatingly slowly, begins his many evening sun salutations.
Cora, my brother’s friend, calls me at midnight. I am awake, watching Igby Goes Down on the VCR. Susan Sarandon, as the dying mother, is a wonder. Three friends sent me the tape for my birthday. The only other time such a thing has happened was years ago, when four friends sent me Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion.
“Tim thinks that he and I should do our share and have Mom here for a vacation, which we could do in November, when the college has a reading break,” Cora says. “I would move into Tim’s condominium, if it wouldn’t offend Mom.”
“That’s nice of you,” I say. “But you know that she thinks Tim is ten years old? I’m not sure that she’d be willing to fly to Ohio to have a ten-year-old take care of her.”
“What?”
“Tim hasn’t told you about this? He wrote her a letter, recently, and she saved it to show me how good his penmanship was.”
“Well, when she gets here she’ll see that he’s a grown-up.”
“She might think it’s a Tim impostor, or something. She’ll talk to you constantly about our father’s first family.”
“I still have some Ativan from when a root canal had to be redone,” Cora says.
“Okay, look—I’m not trying to discourage you. But I’m also not convinced that she can make the trip alone. Would Tim consider driving here to pick her up?”
“Gee. My nephew is eleven, and he’s been back and forth to the West Coast several times.”
“I don’t think this is a case of packing snacks in her backpack and giving her a puzzle book for the plane,” I say.
“Oh, I am not trying to infantilize your mother. Quite the opposite: I think that if she suspects there’s doubt about whether she can do it on her own she might not rise to the occasion, but if we just…”
“People never finish their sentences anymore,” I say.
“Oh, gosh, I can finish,” Cora says. “I mean, I was saying that she’ll take care of herself if we assume that she can take care of herself.”
“Would a baby take care of itself if we assumed that it could?”
“Oh, my goodness!” Cora says. “Look what time it is! I thought it was nine o’clock! Is it after midnight?”
“Twelve-fifteen.”
“My watch stopped! I’m looking at the kitchen clock and it says twelve-ten.”
I have met Cora twice: once she weighed almost two hundred pounds, and the other time she’d been on Atkins and weighed a hundred and forty. Bride’s magazine was in the car when she picked me up at the airport. During the last year, however, her dreams have not been fulfilled.
“Many apologies,” Cora says.
“Listen,” I say. “I was awake. No need to apologize. But I don’t feel that we’ve settled anything.”
“I’m going to have Tim call you tomorrow, and I am really sorry!”
“Cora, I didn’t mean anything personal when I said that people don’t finish sentences anymore. I don’t finish my own.”
“You take care, now!” she says, and hangs up.
“She’s where?”
“Right here in my office. She was on a bench in Lee Park. Someone saw her talking to a woman who was drunk—a street person—just before the cops arrived. The woman was throwing bottles she’d gotten out of a restaurant’s recycling at the statue. Your mother said she was keeping score. The woman was winning, the statue losing. The woman had blood all over her face, so eventually somebody called the cops.”
“Blood all over her face?”
“She’d cut her fingers picking up glass after she threw it. It was the other woman who was bloody.”
“Oh, God, my mother’s okay?”
“Yes, but we need to act. I’ve called the Oaks. They can’t do anything today, but tomorrow they can put her in a semiprivate for three nights, which they aren’t allowed to do, but never mind. Believe me: once she’s in there, they’ll find a place.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“Hold on,” he says. “We need to have a plan. I don’t want her at your place: I want her hospitalized tonight, and I want an MRI. Tomorrow morning, if there’s no problem, you can take her to the Oaks.”
“What’s the point of scaring her to death? Why does she have to be in a hospital?”
“She’s very confused. It won’t be any help if you don’t get to sleep tonight.”
“I feel like we should—”
“You feel like you should protect your mother, but that’s not really possible, is it? She was picked up in Lee Park. Fortunately, she had my business card and her beautician’s card clipped to a shopping lis
t that contains—it’s right in front of me—items such as Easter eggs and arsenic.”
“Arsenic? Was she going to poison herself?”
There is a moment of silence. “Let’s say she was,” he says, “for the sake of argument. Now, come and pick her up, and we can get things rolling.”
Tim and Cora were getting married by a justice of the peace at approximately the same time that “Mom” was tracking bottles in Lee Park; they converge on the hospital room with Donna Milrus, who whispers apologetically that her husband is “playing doctor” and avoiding visiting hours.
Cora’s wedding bouquet is in my mother’s water pitcher. Tim cracks his knuckles and clears his throat repeatedly. “They got upset that I’d been sitting in the park. Can you imagine?” my mother says suddenly to the assembled company. “Do you think we’re going to have many more of these desperate fall days?”
The next morning, only Tim and I are there to get her into his rental car and take her to the Oaks. Our mother sits in front, her purse on her lap, occasionally saying something irrational, which I finally figure out is the result of her reading vanity license plates aloud.
From the backseat, I look at the town like a visitor. There’s much too much traffic. People’s faces inside their cars surprise me: no one over the age of twenty seems to have a neutral, let alone happy, expression. Men with jutting jaws and women squinting hard pass by. I find myself wondering why more of them don’t wear sunglasses, and whether that might not help. My thoughts drift: the Gucci sunglasses I lost in London; the time I dressed as a skeleton for Halloween. In childhood, I appeared on Halloween as Felix the Cat, as Jiminy Cricket (I still have the cane, which I often pull out of the closet, mistaking it for an umbrella), and as a tomato.
“You know,” my mother says to my brother, “your father had an entire family before he met us. He never mentioned them, either. Wasn’t that cruel? If we’d met them, we might have liked them, and vice versa. Your sister gets upset if I say that’s the case, but everything you read now suggests that it’s better if the families meet. You have a ten-year-old brother from that first family. You’re too old to be jealous of a child, aren’t you? So there’s no reason why you wouldn’t get along.”
