The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  Still, though my father had deplored the notion of cruises, my mother’s cruises weren’t quite the kind he’d been deploring. Hers didn’t dip into warm ports filled with Hermès boutiques; they dipped around the coastline of Alaska, or Antarctica. Her boats weren’t luxury liners; they were freighters, fitted up with a few plush cabins and a small fancy dining room where the twenty or so passengers who’d paid heavily to travel alongside containers filled with frozen fish or scrap metal could eat consommé and rib roast and talk about the day’s scenery. My mother liked the wildness of what they saw, and the safety of the place from which they saw it. She saw birds, and bears, and seals, and penguins, and she met men.

  By this point she was in her mid-seventies. She was very large, as she had been all her life; and after years of dyeing her hair black and then a series of odd blondish shades, she’d finally let it go gray. She got short of breath when she walked even a few steps. But she still had a racy, juicy candor that switched on in social situations. She liked men, and wanted them to like her. She had a sizzle that said, “How about it?” and a comforting, matronly warmth that said, “No, of course I don’t mean really,” and a wicked self-aware twinkle that acknowledged the contradiction of these two guises—the vamp and the matron—and said, “Doesn’t the ambiguity intrigue you?”

  She came home from each cruise talking about a man. The purser, who still secretly dreamed of trying to make it as a painter. “I told him to do it! It’s his dream—he should go for it!” my mother said. She bought sketchbooks in Tierra del Fuego, one for him and one for her, and they’d sat together at the ship’s bow each morning, making drawings. Then there was a man who was married—but, said my mother, “His wife is such a cold bitch!” This man also had a secret desire to do something other than what he’d actually done with his life. They all did, according to my mother: they were bankers who’d hoped to be Shakespearean actors, or airline pilots who wanted to write poetry. My mother listened with passionate attention and asked questions and cheerled them out of their pessimistic certainty that they’d made their beds long ago and had to lie in them. (That my mother emphatically believed in this new vision of herself as a muse of thwarted dispirited men made a kind of sad and nutty sense to me, even though it also drove me crazy.)

  She would talk about each man for a few months, maybe correspond with him. Then, “I don’t know,” she would tell me. “He sort of dropped out of the picture.”

  I wondered if her romantic intensity put them off. If what had seemed charming for a week at sea alarmed them when she adhered to it over time. If she took offhand, slightly drunk ship’s-cocktail-party answers to her insistent, provocative (but not drunk, she never drank) questions—“Come on, if you hadn’t gone into mechanical engineering, what would you have done?”—and then held them to it, writing to them for months afterward to press them to enroll in a sculpture studio, or to ask how the violin was going.

  Or maybe she simply couldn’t stay merry. That subversive, candid merriment of hers was enchanting, electric; but it was a social phenomenon. It was something elicited by, and dazzling to, a new acquaintance. It was like makeup: it looked good in public, but in private, sooner or later it had to come off.

  There was one man, a widower from England, with whom things got more serious. Of the others, my mother had said, “I liked him”; but this man she was “seeing.” The seeing happened mostly in the form of hearing; their relationship, after the cruise, was conducted in transatlantic phone calls, initiated by him, because by the time my mother’s rates went down at five, he was asleep in Hertfordshire. He didn’t call often enough, she felt.

  The high point came when she invited him to visit her in Connecticut, and he said yes. She redid her guest room in blue-and-white stripes—“crisp and masculine” was how she described it. “Of course I’m not really sure which room he’ll sleep in,” she told me, with a delicious shiver that suggested she both feared and hoped it would not be the guest room.

  “My ‘friend,’” she called him, when she told people he was coming, managing to endow the word “friend” with enough burlesque innuendo that her listeners would have been incredulous to learn there was the slightest uncertainty about which room he would be sleeping in.

  “He did sleep in the guest room,” she told me after the visit, her voice carefully neutral. I couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or relieved, and I didn’t ask; the speculation about where he might sleep, and the revelation of where he had slept, was already more than I’d wanted to know.

  For Christmas he sent her an early French guide to Paris, which, he said, he had found in an old bookshop in the Strand. She said to me: “A book? An old book? That’s his idea of a Christmas present?” I said I thought it was a romantic gesture, an acknowledgment that he knew Paris was her favorite city; but she kept saying, “An old book?” She thought it should have been a piece of jewelry, or an alligator bag. Then she started telling me that he was under his daughter’s thumb. That he spent too much money on the daughter and too much time with her. He was planning to take his next cruise with the daughter and her husband. “He said I could come if I wanted to,” she told me. “But not really an invitation. Not, ‘Of course you will come with me.’ And besides, do I really want to tag along on their cruise? Shouldn’t he and I be taking our own cruise?”

  A month or two after that, she told me he’d dropped out of the picture. She said she thought he wasn’t really over his wife’s death. And she said again that he was under his daughter’s thumb. She said, “And such a cowardly way to do it. He just stopped calling me. No explanation. Don’t you think that’s cowardly?”

  “I do,” I said, though I wondered what sort of explanation he could possibly have given her.

  She said, “He abandoned me. Like Daddy did. And Ted. Why do they always abandon me?”

  3. Her idea of herself as invincible

  One morning, after she been living in her condo about five years, she woke up, tried to get out of bed, and fell. She had no sensation in her legs. A friend called an ambulance. It was Election Day. The whole time they were carrying her on a stretcher down the two steep staircases in her condo, my mother was yelling, “But I have to vote! How am I going to vote?” She made such a fuss that they sent a state trooper to bring a ballot into the emergency room that afternoon. An extremely handsome state trooper. When she called me that night, she was more elated by his looks than she was worried about her paralysis. “Gorgeous,” she kept saying. “You know that kind of Adonis handsome—so gorgeous that it’s not quite real?” She called him “My trooper,” and told me several times that he’d been impressed by how eager she was to vote.

  I recognized the mode she was in: spunky and invincible. It was something I’d first seen in her (and felt, sometimes, in myself) right after my father’s death. A denial of feeling that was possible because the thing that had happened was too weird, too extreme, to be felt. It was as if someone said, “Okay, from now on you’re going to speak only in Farsi” and there was no higher authority to whom you could say, “Excuse me but none of us know Farsi,” so what could you do but be silent for a moment while considering your options—none—and then laugh nervously and keep speaking in the only language you knew?

  Who would imagine that my father would die that way? Who would expect that my mother would be carried out of her condo in her nightgown one Election Day and would never go back?

  “Why me?” she would ask, when spunky and invincible failed her and she was in what she referred to always as “the black place.” I never knew what to say. It could only have been a rhetorical question, but I always felt that she was pressing me for an answer. Or a response, anyway; she wanted me to hold her while crooning, “I don’t know, I don’t know, it’s not fair.” But I couldn’t bring myself to do this. It felt too angrily demanded, too scripted. A drama of familial love that was as fake in its way as the drama of spunk and invincibility. A wailing, a rending of garments. Wasn’t there something in the mid
dle? Something that was neither falsely brave nor grandiosely tragic? Some way she could talk without demanding and I could listen without feeling mugged? “Why can’t you be real?” I might have asked, if I’d felt like voicing my own over-the-top rhetorical question.

  In fact, we were real. Our reality was a bitchy, edgy, tense back-and-forth picking on each other that went on constantly, and mystified and repelled the few observers who were permitted to see it (my sister, who could only deal with my mother’s histrionics by withdrawing; and my husband, who’d grown up believing that any yelling within a family meant divorce). Yet somehow, in some perversely bracing way, it was this squabbling that kept order between us.

  We could do it over anything. A sandwich. “Bring me a ham and cheese.”

  “But Mom, doesn’t cheese upset your stomach?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “But the last time you had it—”

  “I’m lying in this bed paralyzed from the waist down. Do you know what the doctor called me yesterday? A paraplegic. Can you believe he said that word to me? And now you won’t even let me have the sandwich I want?”

  “I’m sorry he called you that. But it doesn’t change the laws of cause and effect. Cheese disagrees with you. If you eat it now, you’re going to be miserable later.”

  “I’m miserable all the time! Don’t you understand? I’m miserable every minute of the day. And now my daughter is telling me I can’t have a slice of lousy Swiss cheese?”

  “Fine. I’ll bring you ham and cheese.”

  I would bring it. She might eat the cheese, or she might ostentatiously remove it from the sandwich and lay it aside before taking a bite. Either way we wouldn’t say anything; we would maintain an injured, charged silence. Neither of us would say the word “sorry.”

  But eventually, she would say, “This is just really hard.”

  And I would say, “I know.”

  After she’d been in the hospital a while and the paralysis hadn’t gotten any better, they moved her to a rehab place. They told her she probably wouldn’t walk again.

  “Screw them, they don’t know you,” I said. Spunky and invincible. She smiled at me from her wheelchair, where she was sitting in a rumpled sweatshirt and too-short pants, feebly lifting a one-pound weight over and over again.

  At the end of a hundred days, her Medicare coverage would run out. The physical therapists told her she couldn’t go back to her condo, because of the stairs; and she told them she was going back anyway.

  “What do they know, they’re the ones who told me I’d never walk again,” she said to me. By this point she was able to shuffle along a little bit with a walker, a step and then a stop and then another step.

  “You’re doing great,” I cheered.

  “So tell them I’m going back to the condo.”

  “You can’t.”

  She stopped in mid-step, gripping her walker and glaring at me. “You’re supposed to support me, not undermine me.”

  “I’m not undermining you, I’m just trying to be realistic. They won’t discharge you to go back to the condo.”

  “So then let them keep me until I can go back there.”

  “They won’t.”

  “They can’t make me leave. What are they going to do, lift me bodily and deposit me on the sidewalk?”

  I went out and looked at assisted living places. She said I was betraying and abandoning her. She wanted to go back to the condo. Her physical therapists drove over and looked at it, and agreed that no amount of conversion could make it habitable for her.

  “Hire help!” she said to me. “Hire big strong male aides to carry me up and down the stairs.”

  “Mom,” I said.

  “What? You promised you’d never put me in one of those places.”

  “It’s temporary,” I said. The director said she could move in for a three-month trial period. My mother said she would not take any of her furniture to that place. There was no point, she said, in moving it in when she was only going to have to move it out again. “Three months,” she said to me, “that’s what you’re promising me. Ninety days and not one day longer.”

  The stakes were different, but it was the same fight we’d been having since my father died. She was mad because I couldn’t fix it; I was mad because she expected me to.

  On the day my mother moved in, the director of the assisted living place sat her down in a conference room to sign papers and go over the new-resident’s questionnaire.

  “Any special stories you’d like to tell us regarding your childhood?” the director asked.

  “No,” my mother said.

  “Religious affiliation? Favorite songs? Hobbies?”

  “Drinking coffee and reading The New York Times,” my mother said, shooting me a look of canny contempt: are you satisfied, now that you’ve enrolled me in this senile kindergarten?

  “And your husband,” the director said, pen hovering over the form, “is he still living?”

  My mother shook her head. “No.”

  “Would you like to tell me a little about him?”

  “No.”

  We took my mother upstairs in a wheelchair, the director chatting brightly about how the dining room was just like a fine restaurant, and about the afternoon bus that took residents to Kmart and Walgreens. Then we came to a door labeled with my mother’s name, with balloons floating from a ribbon tied to the doorknob. My mother said, “Oh, Jesus,” under her breath and started to cry.

  The director knelt by the wheelchair. “This is hard for you, isn’t it?”

  “It’s terrible,” my mother whispered.

  They talked for a few minutes, in low murmurs. I moved away. I felt the way I had when my sons were little and I’d held them in my lap while the doctor gave them a shot, as if I had to detach and float above this thing that was happening in order to be able to stay there.

  After a while the director patted my mother’s hand and stood up again, and we went into the room. It was large, with two windows that looked out over a garden. “And as you requested, we’ve put a little furniture in here for you,” the director said.

  There was a hospital bed, and a La-Z-Boy reclining chair; a pale veneered dresser and a couple of rickety lamps. My mother gazed at it all furiously.

  “You’re not happy,” the director said.

  “My daughter told me you were going to put in some model furniture,” my mother said. “This is not what I think of when I think of model furniture.”

  “Maybe the term ‘model furniture’ was misleading—” the director began.

  “‘Model’ means ‘nice,’” my mother said. “Like what you have in your lobby. Not this—this depressing old—”

  “I’m sorry,” the director said. “We don’t generally furnish the units at all, since most people prefer to bring their own things from home. But since you didn’t want to bring your own things—”

  “—because this is temporary,” my mother interjected.

  “—because this is temporary, we found a few things to put in here for you. I’m sorry you don’t like it; it’s clearly not what you’re used to—”

  “I’m used to antiques,” my mother said. “Beautiful European pieces from my husband’s family. Museum-quality pieces.” She paused to let this sink in. Then she looked at me. “Why don’t you say something? You’re supposed to be my advocate.”

  “Oh, dear.” The director looked at her watch. “Listen, I have to go downstairs now, but why don’t I ask them to bring you up something on a tray, some tea and cookies maybe—”

  I followed her out into the hall. “I’m sorry she wasn’t happy with the furniture,” she whispered, “but you know we don’t really have furniture, these are just a few pieces that were left after someone died—”

  “No, no, I understand. She’s just having a hard time, she’s not really like this,” I said.

  We both kept fluttering, apologizing to each other. I said I would arrange to have some of my mother’s furniture
moved from the condo the next day.

  When the director left, I stood outside my mother’s door. I wanted a cigarette, though I hadn’t had one in years. Her accusation of betrayal (You’re supposed to be my advocate) stung. I wanted her to be graceful. And yet if she had been, it would have been completely fake and out of character. I was glad she wasn’t meek, proud of her for not going gentle—but it had never occurred to me that not going gentle might take the form of a tantrum about model furniture.

  I should have gone in and crooned and held her hand. Instead I stood there and thought Fuck you, and fantasized about not going in at all.

  As I stood there, a tiny brittle woman, bent almost double over the handlebar of her walker, came inching toward me; as she reached me she smiled slightly, vaguely, but she obviously needed all the concentration she could muster just to make her way down the hall. She was beautifully dressed, in a knit wool suit and nylon stockings, with gold earrings beneath carefully waved white hair. I thought of my mother, messy and cornered and smoldering and terrified behind the closed door of her “temporary” new home. And of how we both kept repeating the word “temporary,” each of us endowing it with our own stubborn nuance. Hers was defiant, sarcastic, daring me to keep pretending that “temporary” wasn’t the piece of bullshit we both knew it to be. Mine was apologetic, craven, pleading with her to pretend—or to stop pretending, to stop insisting on the word at all, to tell me frankly that she hated this but recognized there wasn’t an alternative and that she didn’t blame me.

  I took my car key and used it to make holes in the balloons, squeezed all the air out of them, and put them into my pocket. Then I went back into my mother’s room.

  4. A new man

  My mother met a man in her assisted living place.

  “He’s eighty-two,” she said. “I’m not sure why he’s in here”—as if it might have been for either armed robbery or murder.