This Is Not for You

by Jane Rule

  “Where’s Mother? Where’s Grace?” she asked over and over again.

  I did mind the nurses’ humoring of her, accepting her confusion. I was patient with it, but I wanted to assert myself against it with rational reassurances. Because she did know me, because clear questions about the running of the house did occur to her, I was sure that gradually her own childhood would settle again into memory But, as the days passed, she more and more often begged me to take her home. I had promised, she reminded me, and, though this hotel was pleasant enough—she had no serious complaints about the service—she really wasn’t well enough to stay. I always answered with the explanation that she was at home. Sometimes she agreed, admitted that her mind was unclear. Sometimes she simply turned away. Gradually she developed craft in her persuasion. She would ask me about particular flowers and trees in the garden, and, when I answered inaccurately, she was triumphant with proof that she was not at home, but that pleasure would almost immediately dissolve into a child’s pleading, “I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home.”

  As her mind grew more and more confused, her body grew stronger. She was able to get out of bed, and, though she dragged her left leg and had no strong use of her left arm, she could work her way around the furniture of her room and out into the hall without help. It was not safe to leave her alone for even a few minutes, and she was strong and willful enough so that neither the housekeeper nor the maid by themselves could control her. Sometimes even one of the nurses had to call for help. Mother seemed most restless in the early hours of the morning. The night nurse, a small, nervous woman, occasionally called me at four in the morning to calm Mother down. I was usually already awake because, too directly crossed, Mother would shout. Sometimes she threatened to commit suicide, but more often she was full of accusations. The night nurse was a pervert. I had at least three men in my room every night, and she simply couldn’t sleep. Her father was on the roof killing eagles and cats. I could quiet her if I could distract her. I often sang to her songs she had sung to me when I was a child. I talked to the doctor about sedatives. We had to balance carefully the dangers to her heart of more medication and more emotional strain.

  Yet, after one of these nights, when I couldn’t believe her heart could stand her tantrums of confusion and fear a moment longer, I would find her in the morning, lying quietly in bed chatting with the nurse about what she might put on for the afternoon. I would bring her her jewelry cases just as I had when I was a child, and we’d sit together, trying on rings, bracelets, earrings, pins.

  “It’s a nuisance not being able to do this for myself any more,” she’d say, “but, on the other hand, I feel rather queenly having it done for me. Do you want this sapphire when I’m dead, Kate, or shall we give it to Ann?”

  I’d go off to afternoon lectures I was attending reassured, but by dinnertime she had mild complaints about the number of animals that had been in her room.

  “I never knew you to be so interested in zoos when you were a child, Kate. I don’t really mind, but we are going home soon, aren’t we?”

  It must have been early March, a time when I had begun to accept and despair of Mother’s condition, that you telephoned from New York.

  “I’ve been home since Christmas,” you said. “I kept meaning to write, but the point is that I needed to talk with you. I think I want to be in California, and Mother’s agreeable. Anyway, I’d like to come out and look around. Could you see me?”

  I didn’t know whether to ask you to stay or not, for your sake really. Mother was by now accustomed enough to the comings and goings of nurses so that one more person would probably not upset her. But I wondered how hard her sometimes extraordinary conversations would be for you, how alarming the occasional scenes in the middle of the night. Perhaps I felt a little protective of Mother, too. You had met her only briefly on several occasions. The possibility of your seeing her the way she was now sharpened my own sight, but exposing Mother to you was less important than seeing you myself.

  For all the things you weren’t able to do, for all the problems you couldn’t understand or deal with, you had with my mother’s madness no difficulty at all. The morning you arrived, she remembered that you were coming. She sat in the chair by her window, the uncertain side of her face away from the light, her hair combed, perhaps even a little rouge on her cheeks, in a new, pale blue dressing gown. When I brought you in to her, I saw for a moment the person I had already lost. She greeted you with the gentle tentativeness and curiosity she had always had and remembered all the ritual questions a hostess asks of a guest. It was the first time she seemed quite certain that she was at home. It didn’t last, but in those more difficult conversations you neither humored her as the nurses did nor asserted your reality against hers as I did. Rather you shared her interests and concerns. You agreed that living in a hotel was difficult without ever agreeing that she now lived in one. You asked her to tell stories about her sister, Grace, and her mother when she called for them or said she had just seen them. But the most extraordinary thing you did was to sketch her hallucinations for her or make them out of cardboard, paper clips, and bits of jewelry. These representations of what she saw comforted and delighted her as nothing else could. With you she found a way out of her loneliness. She sometimes called you Grace or Mother, and once, when she heard me call you little dog, she laughed and said, “We have an everybody in the house.” And then deliberately she called you by many names, knowing it was a game.

  She did not have a bad night until nearly two weeks after you arrived, but that was very bad. When it was over, the night nurse gave notice, explaining to me that I needed to find someone stronger, someone with more psychiatric training if I intended to keep my mother at home. Intend I did, and within a week I had hired Olga Hanser, a German woman in her forties who was strong and sensible and gruffly kind. Mother treated her to a number of verbal abuses and wild stories for the first several nights, but after that she seemed content enough, gradually even fond, for she called Olga Hanser “Mac” with some amusement. I began to call her Mac, too. We all did.

  During those days which turned into weeks, I began to hear about your life in London after I left, even before I left; and I could imagine, as I had refused to before, how hard it had been because now we were together again, leading as orderly and public a life as we had at college. I needed to do nothing but listen. You did not make a soul’s trial of it, though it had been a soul’s trial. Instead you were taking what you had learned from it to plan something better.

  “I think I can live alone here, and I know I can work alone. That’s what I want to do.”

  “But not yet, E.”

  You knew that I was not being generous, that I wanted and needed you with me. Our chess games now were for the benefit of no audience. They could take my mind off Mother, off my uncertainty about my own work, off all the decisions I could not make. You brought home books and records I would otherwise not have had the mind for. And because you were there, I could even sit in the sun sometimes, doing nothing but keeping you company. Occasionally we went to a movie, but I never liked to be away from the house for long. You set up a workshop in the garage where you occupied yourself when I was with Mother or doing my own work. The housekeeper liked you because you had an appetite for the cookies she loved to bake, and the maid didn’t mind the chaos of your room because you let her talk to you about her boyfriends. The nurses, of course, loved you because you were so good with Mother.

  “That friend of yours should be a psychiatrist,” Mac said to me one night when I went in to check for the last time before going to bed.

  The idea amused me, but I answered seriously enough.

  “It’s too bad she can’t draw a few pictures for you,” Mac said.

  “You have one patient, Mac.”

  “Well, I’ll soon have two if you don’t begin to get a little sleep. Your light was on until three-thirty again last night, and you were up before I left in the morning.”
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br />   “I never sleep a lot.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Do you?”

  Mac gave me a look that was both amused and reprimanding. “Why don’t you go to bed before I put you to bed?”

  Once I was in my room I thought of bundling a quilt over the crack under my door or turning out the light and reading by my radio light as I had when I was a child. In my nightgown and robe, I started into the hall to go to the bathroom just as you came out of your room. Mac, sitting at a small desk at the other end of the hall, looked up and smiled at our confusion. You retreated. I went into the bathroom furious. I sat on the toilet, staring at myself in the chrome knobs of the built-in chest in front of me. I began to make faces, wide mouths vanishing into my ears, fat-eyed squints. The old monster! When I left the bathroom, I turned and glared at Mac’s profile and said, in a very soft voice, “Bugger you!” She did not look up. I went back into my bedroom and tried, in no louder a voice, “You’re fired.” Then I got into bed and snapped out the light. You went into the bathroom. When you came out, I could hear your voice with Mac’s. Suddenly I tightened into a different kind of anger—fright. Was there no safety anywhere? I heard your bedroom door click shut and relaxed again. I was talking to myself. I was telling myself all the sane, quiet things I knew to tell. That kind of lecture always takes a while, and I was wide awake when it was finished. I was calm, but I wanted a cigarette. I turned my light back on, smoked and began to read.

  In the morning I did not get up until after Mac had left. I avoided her out of embarrassment. But the next night she was as gruff and amiable as ever. I was impressively adult, friendly, but with an order or two framed as suggestions, one of which was that we set up the desk in Mother’s dressing room where there was more space and also a comfortable chair.

  “Good idea,” she agreed.

  It was two or three days before I could force myself to begin the process of sending you away. I did not know how I would cope, once you were gone, with a house run to accommodate madness. As we sat with Mother playing therapeutic games, I had rested in your immunity to her sudden sexual references, cats copulating on her dresser, the mailman naked at the door, our own night adventures. I could let them seem as natural a part of the conversation as references to travel, friends, the garden, and the weather. When we weren’t with her, we could talk of other things, but I wasn’t immune to such a permissive limbo. My mind and body ached with obscenities of their own.

  “E.,” I finally did say, “you’ve given me six weeks. I don’t have to tell you how much you’ve helped. But you mustn’t stay any longer. This is going to get worse. And, when it does, it would be better for me, too, if you had a place nearby, some place I could get away to occasionally.”

  You looked at me as if you were going to protest, but you didn’t. Two evenings later, at dinner, you told me you’d found an apartment with a marvelous space for work about ten minutes’ walk away. I canceled the pain, which was almost panic, at the old ease of parting. It was going to be as simple as that. Did you see it? Probably. You came into my room late that night, no more than a trace of apology in your voice.

  “I think we should talk about it, just once,” you said. “I think you should tell me about it, just once. And I think you should tell me the truth. I won’t argue with you about anything, but I have to know. I have to know why I’m being sent away, because it’s the last time.”

  Had I somehow imagined that there wouldn’t be a last time, that always you’d be there when I looked for you, unquestioning, undemanding? Of course not. Had I imagined then that I would resist this confrontation until it occurred and then resist no longer, let all the years of resistance go to pay whatever impossible debt there would be? Perhaps. For I reached out to you as if to touch, to embrace, just as I heard myself say, “I’ll lie to you as long as I live, little dog, and you’ll go on believing me.”

  “You do love me. You do want me.”

  “No.”

  “Or you would have let me come to you years ago.”

  “No.”

  “How do I begin. Where do I touch you? Kiss you?”

  I took you in my arms to stop you, held you gently until you were a crying child to be comforted. We did talk then for an hour or more, but I didn’t explain anything. We talked our way back to where we had always been, simply a little more firmly established there than before.

  On the twenty-fifth of May (it was your twenty-fourth birthday), you moved into the apartment you had found, again without my help, though you did take a small truckload of furniture from the storage room—chairs, card tables, bookcases, another single bed.

  Already in that incredible apartment were two refrigerators, a hot plate, a grand piano, and a double bed mattress, things forceably left behind by the previous tenant who had not paid his rent and finally, the legend went, shot it out with the FBI. There were bullet holes in the wall. Space the place did have. There were a large living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and two baths. The rent was fifty dollars a month, which was too much. I don’t know what floor the apartment was on because I was never able to figure out the basic structure of the building. It sat just behind a row of shops with an outside staircase, at the bottom stone and then metal and then wood, which didn’t open onto all levels. Most of the windows of the apartment opened onto something between the fifth and sixth floors of a hotel on the other side of the block. One of the problems was that not only the windows opened that way but the whole wall of the shower in one of the bathrooms. There simply wasn’t an outer wall, but you weren’t troubled because there was another bathroom to use. The kitchen must have been twenty feet long, but it was only three or four feet wide. Opening the door of a refrigerator completely shut off one end of the room. That was convenient. You could leave the door open to shut off the area that became your study, at the end of which was a stained-glass window. There was no heat, and the roof leaked, but you had dealt with both these problems in London where the climate was not nearly so kind. Space was what you wanted, the kind you didn’t have to worry about, and no one had ever worried about this. You had running water and electricity. These were all you needed. You left the piano and the double bed mattress in the larger of the two bedrooms, tucked the single bed into the smaller one (which was really no more than a storage space under the eaves to be shared with the spiders), furnished one end of the living room with chairs, table, and bookcases, and left the largest space for your work.

  Soon after you were settled you enrolled in several courses, not at the university but at the trade school where you intended to learn to use power tools. Before you had been settled a month, you had permission from the landlord to install heavier wiring to accommodate your new collection of drills and saws and soldering irons. Questioned about the noise, you explained that the young man just below you was a composer of electronic music and not only didn’t mind but was delighted by the opportunity to extend as well as demand patience. Sound, you said, was your new dimension, and you bought a motorcycle. The costumes for these new skills were elaborate. You had half a dozen kinds of helmets, variously inarticulate gloves, boots of several heights and resistances. But even in these alarming garments, you were never a dykish terror. You were a little girl playing Buck Rogers with the humorless intensity that belongs to an imaginative child.

  If I had ever hoped for a haven of escape from my own decorous madhouse, this was not it, but I went there often enough just the same. I never climbed into your apartment without for a moment thinking that you were in the process of moving. It was simply not the sort of mess I could get used to. One day the furniture would all be piled right at the head of the stairs, perhaps because you had decided to scrub the floor and then forgot about it or had been interrupted by something more important; or you were making room for a large building project; or you were having a party. When the furniture was in place (a loose idiom for how objects ever lived with you), there were large piles of scrap metal, wood, glass. One day I found all your cl
othes on top of the piano because you had temporarily turned the closet into a darkroom for a friend.

  Most of the people you discovered came first to the apartment below you, which was even larger than yours and not quite as disreputable because the young man in it seemed to have a number of ex-wives who occasionally cleaned the place up. I suppose most of those visitors were harmless enough or grew up to be. I might not have taken them so seriously if you hadn’t. I probably wouldn’t have taken them at all. But I have never chosen my human environment. I have always borrowed it from someone like you or Monk or Doris. I should, therefore, try not to complain.

  They all seemed to do a lot of talking. The vocabulary resembled our own in some categories. More of the proper names were French and many more of the superlatives were improper. Their subject matter was different. God had only negative things to do with it. They were interested in a kind of petty criminality that they called freedom. Stealing was a basic act, but there were individual rules about it. One stole only food he didn’t need, another only food he did. Some bought nothing but materials for their work; others stole nothing but. Some restricted their victims to people they knew, others to strangers. One would not take anything for himself. Another sold all he took. What mattered was the existential rule-making, the creative morality. You and I began to argue about it when you began to defend it, and that happened almost immediately.

  “It isn’t just a game,” you insisted. “It’s a philosophy, a serious philosophy. I mean, have you really read Gide?”

  “I’ve been even more experimental than that. I’ve stolen light bulbs and American flags and road signs, but not since I was ten.”

  “There is innocence in it,” you said thoughtfully.

  “You know, conversations around here are beginning to compete with Mother’s.”

  “You can’t want everyone to accept your reality, Kate.”