Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  “Lots of leg room,” she said in my Jeep when I drove her to the supermarket, her tiny legs barely reaching the floor. She told me how proud she was of Julian and Harry and, fantasizing a little, described how she’d knitted baby clothes for Charlie in the weeks before Mona and I gave him away. The baby clothes were fictional; she’d been hard on me, as I have described; but she wished to create a rosy glow from that episode, and now I was well past blaming her for making me miserable. I claimed to Floyd that I was writing for money, but money was a negligible part of it: I wrote to give order to my life, I wrote to ease my mind, I wrote to forget.

  “Gloria is good to Floyd,” Mother said, and, “She sews, she cooks, she’s an excellent painter.” No irony, no bitterness. “I miss Dad,” she said. He’d been dead for more than fifteen years. “He was good to me. He loved me. He had such a kind heart.” Then a glance out the window. “The magnolias are in bloom”—it was May. “My favorite flower.”

  “How are you?” I’d ask in a call or a visit.

  “No complaints.”

  Always a book in her hand or a newspaper in her lap, or a ball of yarn. She was sweeter, she was quieter—more silences. She was smaller, half the size she’d been at the time of Dad’s death. These days—baffling to me—I was consoled by seeing her.

  After a visit, I might get a call from Floyd or Rose: “I saw your Jeep at Ma’s. Did she give you anything? Did you take anything?”

  “Someone’s sneaking food out of Ma’s fridge,” Hubby said to me. “Is it you?”

  “Don’t even think about getting Mumma’s diamond engagement ring,” Franny said. “She promised it to me.”

  “I paid for that grandfather clock,” Floyd said. “It’s a Seth Thomas chimer. I know my antique timepieces. I should winch it out of there before it gets stolen by the daughters.”

  Still the family growling, but in all this Mother was serene, growing ever smaller, her dusty glow deepening with sunset touches. I had trouble fitting this woman to the image of the fierce empress who had created such turbulence in the family.

  On one of my visits I looked into her refrigerator to see whether any of it seemed plundered. Far from any diminishment, the thing was full, every shelf jammed with food and bottles and plastic containers. “Dog food, chanklings,” Floyd had once said of the contents of the refrigerator. It was an accumulation of leftovers, graying meat and aging vegetables and softening fruit, cheese whiskery with mold, sour clotted milk, tubs of soup with stagnation on the surface in scummy disks.

  “Are you eating all right, Ma?”

  “When I’m hungry.”

  She spoke in a feeble whisper from her chair. And with only her reading lamp on, the rest of the parlor was in darkness.

  “I could microwave you something—maybe heat up a can of soup.”

  “I had crackers for lunch.”

  “Crackers? Is that all?”

  “With peanut butter.”

  “Ma, you’ve got to do better than that.”

  She smiled at me for nagging her. “You sound just like my mother.”

  That night I called Floyd. I told him I was worried about Mother.

  “Worried!” He laughed so hard in a mirthless mocking way I had to lift the phone from my ear. “So you visited the holy of holies. What did you boost off the shelves?”

  “Nothing. Look, she’s skinny, she looks weak, she doesn’t eat.”

  “It’s me you’re talking to, sonny!” he shouted. “Do you think for a minute that I’ve forgotten the sight of your prehensile fingers trawling through her gewgaws? What is this note of concern I hear that sounds so much like the braying of an ass?”

  And he hung up.

  Jeered at and abused by the others for visiting her, suspected of rifling her drawers or of soliciting favors—and the ones who’d gotten money from Mother in the past were the most suspicious—I now drove to Mother’s in secret and, self-conscious, went less often. What did the others do? We had never shared confidences unless it was gossip, so I had no idea when they visited or whether they went at all.

  My novel of the captive, a book about confinement and misguided intentions, began to catch fire. I worked on my kitchen table, among the breakfast breadcrumbs and the patches of sticky marmalade, –and I was exhilarated, because my writing lifted my spirits and dignified this simple place. It was no longer a shingled bungalow set on a slab in sand on a side road in Centerville, with a narrow bed, a creaking floor, a gummed-up microwave, and a screen door that slapped shut on the twang of its rusty spring. It was an abode of bliss where I sat with a pen in my hand, forming sentences in black ink on good paper, making something new, all my own, my secret, my hope, my joy. Absorbed in this, I took little notice of the small house or the cluttered table, except at the end of the workday, when I pushed my papers aside and thought, I am happy, feeling that the room, the whole house, was hallowed by this writing.

  Without realizing it, in my contentment, I stayed away from Mother. We children took pride in believing we were different from one another—serious Fred, apostrophizing Floyd, practical Hubby, and the others, each distinct, even as a physical type—fat, thin, tall, short, bald, shaggy. But in Mother’s post-century, her hundred and first year, we were alike in our thinking. I wasn’t the only one who stayed away; the others did too, discovering as I had a measure of contentment in their solitude.

  So it was a shock when I, and then the others, did visit her, seeing her afresh after many weeks, perhaps a month or more. It was like visiting a dying animal.

  “Ma, are you all right?”

  She lay canted sideways in her chair, her mouth half-open, her eyes glazed, her skinny hands in her lap, her fingers crooked and intertwined, as though she was clutching a dead bird or the fragment of an ossuary. I could not understand her whisper. I asked her to repeat it.

  “No complaints.”

  But she was weak, she hardly moved, her tongue was green and gummy, she was dehydrated.

  “I’ll get you a drink of water.”

  The kitchen was tidy. Too clean; no one had cooked for days.

  Mother lapped at the water like a spaniel while I held the glass, and she drank with difficulty, as if she was losing her swallowing reflex, as starving people do. I sat with her, making sure she finished the water, though she resisted.

  “I’m fine,” she said, but without conviction.

  She wasn’t fine. She seemed near death.

  I called Hubby from her study, out of her hearing. I told him what I’d seen and asked him when he’d last visited Mother.

  “I’ve been drywalling my basement,” he said. “It looks fabulous.” Like me, he’d discovered contentment in his own work. “And I’ve been working nights at the hospital. I figured you’ve been looking after Ma.”

  “I’m with her. She looks terrible. I don’t think anyone’s been visiting. Please come over, Hub. She needs help.”

  “Then help her, dick-wad.”

  “You have medical training. I don’t.”

  “Probably needs electrolytes. No fried food, nothing heavy. There’s Ensure in the fridge.”

  “You don’t get it—she looks like she might be dying. Do something.”

  “What about Floyd?”

  “I’ll call him. I’m calling everyone. She needs attention. Jesus!”

  I hung up. Approaching Mother from the study, I had the feeling, from her slack posture, that she had died. She lay against her chair, her head to one side, her greenish tongue slightly protruding.

  “Ma?”

  “What is it now?”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  She did not say anything. She smiled a familiar lopsided smile of contempt.

  “If you’re so worried about me, why did you just show up today?” She hacked out one of her dry coughs, raising her hand as though to cover her mouth but not succeeding, only coughing onto the tips of her bony fingers. “How many weeks has it been?” And she coughed again, or maybe it was a bitter laugh. �
��So I bet dollars to donuts you’re not all that worried.”

  I had no excuse. I did not try to think of one. I said, “I want to help.”

  “That’s what everyone says. But they don’t do anything.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Leave me in peace.”

  “I’m afraid”—and here I chose my words carefully, I didn’t want to mention death—“you’ll get sick.”

  “It doesn’t matter. No one cares.”

  “I care. We all care.”

  Her indignation seemed to give her strength, because in a mocking voice she said, “Then where has everyone been?” And she laughed, a choking noise that she spat out, nodding, “Remember? Everyone dies. I’m not special.”

  She had decided to die.

  “What happened to that woman who was helping you?”

  “Helping me? That’s a laugh. I fired her. She was a dizzy blonde.”

  In the way that Mother had once decided to defy us with her sickness, and then rose again as a survivor, now, out of spite, she had set her mind on dying. In some folk societies people willed themselves to death. Followers of the Jain religion of India (those people who don’t kill flies), hundreds of them every year, killed themselves, refusing all food in a ritual of starvation that helped them attain moksha, ultimate soul freedom. And it was just as common everywhere on earth for melancholics to expire in the same way, curling up in a ball, as Mother seemed to be doing.

  Mother was alone, and from her resentful voice it was easy enough for her to take herself to the other side. It occurred to me that she was planning to starve herself, so that one of us would find her dead in her chair. It was not the bid for attention of some suicides, but a spiteful decision.

  Seeing me sizing her up, frantic in my way, seemed to give her a little joy. See what your neglect has done to me? On the brink, slipping away, she seemed gladdened by my alarm.

  A clattering at the door, the clump of work boots—Hubby, his arms whitened with plaster dust.

  “You clown,” he said. “Hi, Ma!”

  “Another one,” Mother said. “Which one are you?”

  Hubby took her pulse, shone a small flashlight in her eyes, roved with his stethoscope. “She needs a drip. I’ll set up an IV,” he said. “You’re going to be all right, Ma,” he called out as he left the house, heading home for his equipment.

  “What difference does it make?” Mother said with a grim smile, powerful even in this extreme moment.

  She was our luck and our longevity. It was essential that she survive. She had to live, for our sake.

  53

  The Unknown

  Crises had always brought out the worst in us: Fred’s stroke, Marvin’s death, Floyd’s gallbladder, Hubby’s diabetes, any mention of hemorrhoids—jokes, gibes, wisecracks, whispers.

  Were we softening? In the weeks after Mother’s near-death experience, we clamored to visit her, taking turns, never meeting, often delivering food or flowers, a potted narcissus or the chocolate she loved, anything to keep her alive, to rekindle her interest in living. We feared losing her; we realized how close we’d come to her slipping away forever. Our greatest fear was contemplating life without her. Just as acute was the awful thought that we, her children, would have to deal with one another. Who were we without Mother as referee? We didn’t know. We were reluctant to find out, and so we clung to Mother.

  She knew this and, as usual, seemed way ahead of us. Extreme as her self-starvation was—shrinking to a wisp, apparently conscious that she was at death’s door—it occurred to me that it was calculated. Mortifying her flesh in a devout fast, the famished Saint Thérèse (one of Mother’s favorites), whose self-denial sent her into ecstasies, prayed before a ripe peach. In the following weeks, Mother received us individually, keeping the needle of Hubby’s IV drip in her arm long after it was needed, as though impressing us with the wound it left, a sort of stigmata.

  “They might have to put a gusset in my body,” she said, “for me to be fed with a tube.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Hubby. It’s a normal procedure in intensive care.”

  “Ma, you’re not in intensive care.”

  “I almost was.”

  She said this with a stern smile of reproach.

  Hubby said, “I never told her she needed a gusset. I said ‘grommet.’ She asked me for the worst-case scenario. I hooked her to an IV. I got her rehydrated. And for this I get flak!”

  To replace the cleaning woman who had been glad to go, we hired a Thai woman, Poon—mild, hardworking, two children. Mother took to her and treated her like a pet. Poon discovered Mother’s fondness for jelly donuts, hot chocolate, and lobster bisque. For any favor of this kind, Mother gave Poon a dollar. The arrangement seemed perfect.

  Poon had worked as a cleaner in a nursing home on the lower Cape, Arcadia, in Chatham. The experience had given her a hatred of such places.

  “No send Mummy to a home,” she said. “The people so roney. They say to me, ‘Pease he’p me.’ They faw down. They cry, ‘I want to go home.’”

  “Of course Poon’s going to say that,” Fred said. “She’s protecting her job. She wants to keep this gig with Ma.”

  “Ma likes her.”

  “We need a backup plan. Arcadia could be part of it.”

  Fred sent one of his lawyerly memos to the rest of us with the subject heading “Options.” In it he outlined the various courses of action: keep Poon as a helper, find a professional caregiver, put Mother in a place such as Arcadia, and more. It was a severe edict, set out in his usual long-winded way, with a section about doing nothing followed by a subsection suggesting action; a section acknowledging that Mother was unwilling to move to an old folks’ home was followed by paragraphs describing how, by subterfuge, she might be persuaded. A “What if she falls?” section, undercut by a “What if she outlasts us?” section. A whole page was devoted to possible schedules for visits by us, by nurses, by dietitians, by the local police for their “Reassurance Program”—a once-a-day call from a concerned cop, to ask, “You okay?”

  Mother was not okay, but would not admit it. A place like Arcadia was the answer—preliminary visits by her might ease her into agreeing to a room with a view—but Fred’s memo, the dancing around Mother’s stubbornness, indicated the futility of its options, because Mother, wasting away, with as yet no intention of moving, would continue to be an unsolvable problem.

  Pages of this, and at the end Fred asked for our thoughts, but before anyone replied, he fired off a second memo, briefer than the first, explaining at length that he had several interactions with Arcadia’s director. The place was clean, well run, not far away, and had a medical wing for residents who were ill, demented, or incapacitated. He urged us to see it for ourselves.

  “They have,” he wrote, “a weekly ‘Chowder Day’ for prospective clients.”

  Put off by the name, busy with my book, I avoided Chowder Day—free soup—and the get-acquainted tour of Arcadia. Let the others decide, I thought. I’d go on visiting Mother as often as I could at her house, where she seemed content with Poon, healthier than before, knitting and reading again, doing the daily crossword, and no longer hooked up to a drip.

  “Have you heard what they want to do with me?” she said one day.

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  She leaned forward and, with her teeth clenched for the emphasis of a dramatic hiss, said, “They want to stick me in a home.”

  “That place, Arcadia?”

  “You know about it!”

  “Fred mentioned it. I haven’t seen it.”

  “But I have. Chowder Day.” Mother made a face. But she was so small it was undefinable.

  “Were they nice to you?”

  “Of course they were. They want my money—although, God knows, I have very little,” she added quickly. “They want me to sign up and move in.” She called out “Poon!” and then coughed from the effort.

  The Thai woman appeare
d at the bedroom door. “Yah?”

  “Arcadia. Good or not good?”

  “Not good,” the woman said.

  Mother said, “See?” And then, “All they did was smile.”

  Mother’s suspicion of anyone who was overly pleasant verged on paranoia. Snakes might smile, but snakes were cruel too. Most people were snakes, which was why it was wise to stay in the security of your own home.

  “They want me to leave all this!”

  “All this” didn’t look like much. The furniture was worn, the carpets were threadbare, the clutter on the coffee table dated from when Dad was alive. Mother refused to improve the house because she no longer owned it, and Franny did nothing because she didn’t live there. The filled bookshelves may have given the illusion of scholarship and seriousness, but many were our old school textbooks or library discards, with stained covers and brittle pages mildewed by the Cape’s humidity—sunned, as book dealers said; foxed, hinges loose, jackets torn, spines cocked. Nor had they ever been removed from the shelves and dusted, so, sitting in the red armchair near the shelves, I always found myself gagging, my skin prickling with the peculiarly irritating dust that accumulates on unread and browning books.

  The kitchen was small, and it had its own family smell of Mother and stale bread—the same odor, really—the counters sticky to the touch. Mother in her frugality washed her own dishes in a plastic basin in the sink, though Poon might have been doing it these days. In the center of the kitchen table, in one of Dad’s souvenir saucers (The Old North Church, One if by land, two if by sea), were the salt and pepper shakers, a jar of mustard, a bottle of ketchup, a jar of jam all bearded and crusted with residue, a small quiver of toothpicks, a button, and some paperclips.

  And cushions, comforters, shawls, tissues: Mother’s nest, penetrated by Mother’s odor – the odor that met you like cobwebs draping your face as soon as you opened the front door.

  “Don’t let them do it to me, Jay,” Mother said. “I’m happy here. Don’t make me leave.”