When I walk into the kitchen the next morning, my mother gives me some last-minute instructions, a therapy update from Dr. Cupp, and heads out the door. I pour the cereal, milk, and juice. My father, seated at the table, asks me if I’ll drive him into town, and I tell him I don’t think it’s a good idea.
“Why don’t we hang out here today,” I say. “After breakfast, after I get the dishes put away, we could go for a walk.”
He squints at me, holds his watch to his ear, and asks me if I know the time. I glance at the clock thinking I know some of what it’s like to have a stroke. Suddenly nothing in your life makes sense, even though people keep telling you what’s going on. You try to figure out your life, to restart it, and go looking for the part of you that seems like it’s missing. You may or may not ever find it. Like Dr. Cupp says, we’ll know when we know.
I tell my father what time it is and remind him that I’ll look at his watch if he’ll just let me. He turns his head away and drops the watch into the pocket of his robe.
I carry our breakfast to the table and take my place across from him. I start eating, and he does too, lifting each spoonful carefully, going out of his way not to spill. It takes him a long time to finish, but he’s looking proud and a little smug like he’s won something, proven he’s still got some of the old magic because I’m still sitting at the table waiting.
DON’S MOM’S PLACE
For many years, through fits and rages, Don’s mom had lived alone, making enemies out of bill collectors, store clerks, and telephone operators. Her only visitors were several generations of stray cats. She’d put out food for them and let them in and out of her house at all hours, all the while complaining that they were running her ragged and eating up what little money she had. She left the bathroom window open, even in the winter, in case the cats got cold or needed to escape from some dog or other danger. She’d argue with the cats, shout at them, pick them up by the scruffs of their necks and throw them around, and then make up to them. Some nights they’d sleep piled up on her and other times they’d hiss at her, jump out at her, with claws slashing as she walked by.
Don and his mother had been on the outs for a long time, talking on the phone briefly every month or two at most. Then, out of the blue, she started calling him once a week, then more often than that. Don would answer and turn pale, jump up from dinner or climb out of bed, shuffle off, and talk to her in a low voice. At first, he wouldn’t tell me what the problem was, only grumble it was his mother again, what the fuck? He’d raise his eyebrows and roll his eyes like he had something to be embarrassed about. I’d never met her, and of course I was full of curiosity about the other important woman in his life, even though I knew he’d had a hard time with his parents, and his childhood wasn’t his favorite subject. We’d been together six years, and I was well aware he buried the things that cut him the deepest. In fact, a lot of our life together had already involved getting him to loosen up and unravel himself. Trying to, anyway.
But the calls kept coming, and Don finally admitted she’d been getting lost. She’d drive to the store and not remember how to get home. She’d have her cell phone with her and she’d call Don. His number was probably the only one she had left.
Sometimes she’d call him at night after she’d been driving around all day. She’d have forgotten she was lost, but kept on driving, hoping something would come to her, that she’d figure out why she was in the car and how to get back where she belonged. She’d get hungry and it would start getting dark. Nothing anywhere looked familiar, just more curving country roads, taking her in one direction, then another. It would finally come to her that she was lost, she had to call someone.
Don would have to talk his mother back home using his memory of the landscape from when he’d lived there years before, throwing out names like Sparky’s Garage and Gable’s Drug Store, sometimes referring to places that no longer existed, and there would be lots of confusion, arguing, and shouting. His mother would complain that this was happening because she lived alone, she didn’t have anybody to talk to so her mind had gone to pot. She’d say other old people had children to take care of them, but he’d gone off a thousand miles away. Don would be furious, his guts all knotted up, but he’d have to hold his anger in. He’d beg his mother to settle down and listen.
“What are you seeing now?” he’d say, trying to keep his own voice down. “You’re parked in front of a store? Look at the sign then. Tell me the name of the store.”
I’d turn the TV down so Don could concentrate. I wanted to contribute something, at least comfort Don, rub his shoulders or hold him. Sometimes he’d let me. More often he’d stiffen up and shake my touch away.
If he wanted to be left alone, I’d head back to the bedroom to watch TV or read. Don would stay out on the couch with the phone, talking his mother home, and when he’d come to bed he’d be wide awake and pissed off over things that had happened thirty and forty years earlier. It wasn’t fair, he said, that she couldn’t remember what they’d been through, and it was her own fault she was alone, the hateful old woman.
“I’m sorry I got you into this,” he said.
“It’s alright, honey,” I said. “I’m here because I want to be. You let it all out.”
“She expects more from me,” Don said. He laughed derisively and shook his head. “Can you believe it, after everything that’s happened? She expects it to be like nothing happened.”
I said that regardless of the past, there was only so much he could do over such a long distance anyway. She expected him to go back there and live, but he didn’t want to. How could he? So what was he supposed to do?
“She knows about me, doesn’t she?” I said. “Doesn’t she know you’ve got your own life?”
“I’ve told her,” he said. “I’ve told her a thousand times.”
I loved Don, and I worried about what all this was doing to him. I worried about what it was doing to both of us. We talked on and on about the situation, just like we talked about one day getting married, skirting the details. Both of us were middle aged, had been in failed marriages, and we were careful to respect each other’s boundaries, each other’s baggage. Luggage, we called it. Don said he was keeping his in a storage unit. He’d grin and say he wasn’t telling me where it was.
That was the truth. But what would happen when his mother’s mind got worse? And of course it did.
The day we turned up the steep incline that was their driveway and drove under the overhanging trees, his mother had been gone from the house for a week. Don had told me stories of how his dad had lost several cars to that driveway, how the emergency brake wore out, or probably his dad had forgotten to put the brake on and blamed it on the wearing, and they’d look out the kitchen window and catch a glimpse of the car flying down the driveway backwards. Sometimes it would veer off into the yard or hit one of the trees by the driveway. A couple of times it sailed all the way down into the road.
“The cars knew he was leaving before he did,” I said.
“Thankfully, nobody was driving along the road,” Don said. “Can you imagine, minding your own business and some car careens out of the dark at you?”
I was thinking that was the way all accidents happened, or at least that was the way they seemed to the person who got hit.
Don pulled the emergency break as tight as it would go, and we climbed out of the car. This was in the late fall, and at the heat of the day it was maybe fifty, cool and crisp. The overhanging trees were almost bare, and the grass in the yard was long. I could see where his mother’s rock garden had been, but the whole yard was overgrown. For years, some distant cousins had come and mowed a few times in the summer, but eventually his mother had fought with them like she had with everyone.
The house Don had grown up in was a one-story house with red brick, probably built in the late fifties. At the back of the house, a path led up to a shed and a fence that marked the end of his mother’s property, and the beginning of the woods that spre
ad across the top of the hill.
Don had outlined our mission. He wanted to see his mother in the hospital, and he wanted to clean the place up, whether she was coming back there or not. Somebody would eventually be selling the house, and things there had to be dealt with.
He wasn’t in a talking mood, and I was giving him some distance. I followed along, hands in the pockets of my parka. Inside, the house was chilly. The bathroom window had been left open, and there was cat shit or some kind of animal shit under the furniture and in the corners, and all the baseboards had been pissed on. Plastic dishes of decayed cat food littered the dirty kitchen floor. We walked through all the rooms, Don glancing around like he was afraid something hidden in the walls or under the floor might spring out at him.
Don’s childhood bedroom had been turned into an office for keeping boxes of bills, tax forms, family pictures, and paperback books. The only bed in the house was in his mother’s room, and it had been stripped. On it lay the threadbare clothes from her closet. The clothes were still on their hangers like someone had broken in, and seeing what was there, felt sorry and left without taking anything.
There was a disarray of sheets and quilts on the living room couch, and Don explained that for years she’d slept out there, so she could hear if somebody came up the driveway in the night. The couch was stained and torn, and it smelled of neglect and decay like everything else. I could see why she’d want to sleep out there, though, living alone like she did.
Later that afternoon, we started to work cleaning the house.
I started to work on it. I kept hoping Don would get into the work and loosen up a little. I cleaned and cleaned. It seemed like the right thing to do, and the work took some of my worries away from me. Don would work little corners of rooms for a while, then he’d wander off. I’d find him pacing the house or the yard.
The cleaning improved the smell enough that we were able to save a few dollars and sleep in the house, although I think Don still would have preferred the motel. He refused to sleep in his mother’s bed, so we slept on an air mattress in the kitchen. We took showers and dried off with the cheap new towels we’d bought. After dark, we tried out the old woman’s TV set. She didn’t have cable, but the aerial picked up some local channels, including one that ran old shows like The Rifleman, Daniel Boone, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and M*A*S*H round the clock. Neither of us was in the mood for any of that. I turned on the radio instead—a local fifties station—lit some candles I found, and poured up some wine I’d bought when I’d picked up a few groceries.
“She thinks they’re just going to let her go,” Don said, after a few glasses. “She thinks she’s going to come back here and live, and I’m going to come back and live with her.”
I said my grandmother, who had dementia, had been in a nursing home and everybody in the ward with her had acted the same way. All you had to do was look at somebody and they’d ask you for a ride home. Or for a dime so they could call a cab.
“Maybe she could stay with us,” I said.
Don shook his head and refilled his glass.
“You know that wouldn’t work.”
I knew it wouldn’t. When we’d been at the hospital, he’d barely acknowledged his mother directly. He’d stood over her and talked over her, to me and to the doctor, but he’d not said more than a few gruff words to her. She watched him from her wheelchair the whole time we were there. One of her eyes was bandaged up but the other one stayed on him. I thought she was so drugged up she couldn’t talk, but as we were leaving she’d called out to him.
“Don,” she said, her voice raspy from years of smoking. “Hey, Donnie, take me out of here.”
I said to Don, “Why don’t you say something to her, Don? She’s talking to you.” He said it was pointless to encourage her. When we were out in the hall, the doctor said that that was the only time she’d seemed interested in anything, the only time she’d perked up, and Don said that just showed how not herself she was.
Sitting there in her living room with the wine, I thought we were getting somewhere.
“It’s like she’s a different person, a lost person,” he said.
“That’s just what she is,” I said. I went on to say that he ought to go back and try to talk to her, even if she was different. It might make him feel better if he spent a little more time just talking to her—even nonsense, even lies—just so he could feel like he’d gotten somewhere with her, made some progress in their relationship. I hated to use the word closure, because it sounded so fake, but that’s what I said he might get, if he opened up to her.
“Even if she’s not the mom you remember,” I said. “And maybe that’s good. Maybe this mom can replace that mom.”
“I know what you’re saying,” he said. “But there’s no replacing who she was before. That was the real her before. That person she is now is empty, a shell.”
I said it was important to remember that no matter what, all of these issues involved the past, and we were in the present.
“It’s hard to see it that way right now, given where we’re sitting and all. But we’ve got our own lives to work on.”
Don nodded and said he knew that as well as I did. The way he looked at me, I thought we were going to make love. We hadn’t made love since we’d been there, and I was wishing it would happen. I guess it didn’t seem like the right moment to Don, maybe it was inappropriate in his mom’s place, or he just didn’t feel like it, he had so many other things moving through his blood.
In the morning, an animal control truck pulled up the driveway. The animal control officer was a tall blond lady in a gray uniform. She’d come by several times before, she said, to talk to Don’s mother about the cats, about getting them fixed. She wanted to know where Mrs. McCutchins had gone. She wanted to know what had happened to the cats.
Yes, where were they? I hadn’t seen one cat since I’d been there. I’d thought about it before, but we’d been so busy.
“Guess they followed the gravy train,” Don said. “Went where there was something else to eat because it ran out here.” He said the house had been full of cat shit when we’d gotten there, but it was hard to say if it was fresh. He wasn’t exactly a connoisseur of cat shit.
The woman studied us with her hard blue eyes like we might be squatters, even while Don explained who we were and where his mom was. I could understand why. I’d once dated a man who’d bought a house in the country, little more than a cabin that was overrun by feral cats. He’d gone in there with a rifle, and by the end of the day there were forty dead feral cats to cart away. He’d bragged about doing this.
“Don’t you think they’d come back since there are people here now?” she said. “Your mom’s only been out of here a short while, as you say.”
He shrugged and said he didn’t know the answer.
The animal control lady asked us to please call her if the cats came back, and Don said we would. He took her card.
By this time, we were going through his mom’s personal things, old movie magazines, mystery books, and sad, broken keepsakes. Don’s mother had a knack for breaking things. There was a statuette of Snoopy playing a piano with broken legs, a dusty-haired Kewpie doll with a missing eye and a missing arm, and one of those bird clocks you order from the back pages of magazines, only hers had been busted and taped back together, with Scotch tape no less. It produced a low gurgle on the hour, rather than a song. Her collection of paperback books was faded and mildewed like everything else. Nothing in the house was worth having, not even to Don, who’d study the fractured collector plates and pillboxes with missing lids, walk around with them in his hands, and then suddenly sideways pitch them into one of the trash bags.
Around four or so the next morning, after lying awake and thinking, I got up without waking Don. I went outside with a flashlight and poked around the yard, shining the light on the brush, on old appliances, on other trash on the hill behind the house, and on the fallen down poles that’d held up her clothesline. I saw
a few skunks out there that didn’t seem to be afraid of anything, probably in search of food. I walked up the hill to the shed and shined my light inside, past a door that hung on one hinge. The air stunk in there too, and I could see snakeskins hanging from the rafters. There were Clorox bottles, paint cans, and boxes of rat poison, empty and fairly new.
I walked a short way into the woods. I could hear high pitched sounds, but didn’t know what they were. Maybe the sounds came from a night bird or some other animal in pain somewhere. I felt like I was being watched by many eyes that could find me in the dark, although I couldn’t find them.
When I returned, Don was standing on the back porch, under the light in his pajamas and his down jacket. As I walked up the steps and he looked at me, I said, “I can’t get it out of my head. I’d like to know what happened to them.”
He just stared at me.
“I saw some rat poison in the shed on the hill.” I said. “You think they might have chewed into it?”
He shook his head, but he knew what I was talking about. After a minute, he said, “I saw it the other day, when we first got here.”
I looked at his face and even when he tried to hide it, I knew what he was thinking because he was so ashamed, so angry. He’d been thinking it the whole time he’d talked to the animal control lady.
“No way,” I said, “you don’t think she’d do that. They were her pets, her only friends.”
“She gets mad,” he said, “and the ones closest to her suffer the most.”
I shook my head, but he looked sure of it. It made me wonder how he could be so sure.
“What, you don’t believe it?” he said.
“I do,” I said even though I didn’t know what to believe. Where would their bodies be? Everybody knows what a decomposing animal smells like, so why hadn’t we smelled them? I didn’t want to believe it, but I had no good reason to doubt Don. She was his mother, and he knew her better than anyone.
Dispensations Page 16
