by Bob Tarte
“She did better at memorizing a list of words than I did,” Joan had said.
So instead of diagnosing the Alzheimer’s disease that Joan, Bett, and I had feared, and starting her on medication that might slow its progress, Dr. Doering informed Joan that Mom suffered from mild dementia. Since dementia could have a variety of causes, he couldn’t prescribe a treatment beyond diet and exercise. Dissatisfied, Joan contacted a geriatric specialist and described Dr. Doering’s approach. The specialist told Joan that Mom’s doctor was following proper protocols and that he wouldn’t necessarily do anything differently.
A faint scraping from the far wall interrupted my brooding. Apparently my conscience had less power to nag me in the living room, because the commotion was too weak to keep me awake. The perpetrator wouldn’t be a clamorous squirrel or caribou but one of the endless series of mice that invaded the nooks and crannies of our house with the tenacity of a hidden purse. I did what I could for my mom, I told myself. I visited her twice a week, paid her bills, and alternated with Joan taking her to Sunday Mass. Bett, who drove up about once a month from Fort Wayne to spend a weekend at the old house, enjoyed a natural rapport with Mom that eluded me. I felt closest to Mom not when I struggled to make conversation but when I shut off the outdoor water faucets for the winter, lugged the trash out to the curb, or pounded in a nail to accommodate an indoor thermometer. One afternoon, following an exhaustive round of thermometer hanging, I curled up on her couch for a nap. She tossed an afghan over me. A few moments later, as she puttered around in the kitchen, I heard her humming. This passed for quality time between us.
I had to wonder why it sometimes seemed easier for me to respond to an animal in distress. Apart from helping with essentials, I was uncertain how to provide my mom with whatever else she needed. Showing love was the obvious approach, but I didn’t know how to switch to caregiver mode after years of having been mother-henned. That was the crux of things, and my mom’s declining mental condition muddied matters further. With animals, no such psychological complexities applied. They had no expectations, no emotional baggage, and their vulnerability made responding feel like second nature, especially since an animal couldn’t ask for help—though it would gleefully let you know when it had made a home inside your walls.
• • •
WE WEREN’T THE ONLY victims of home invasion. Our neighbor Roswitha sat reading the Grand Rapids Press at the kitchen table when she heard a tapping at the door. Snowy branches waved to her when she turned in her chair and glanced outside, but no one hailed her from the porch. When the tapping came a second time, she got up and opened the door. Accompanying a blast of cold air, a pigeon walked into her living room. It marched across the rug and started pointedly pecking at the nap.
“This bird was obviously asking me for help,” Linda’s German-born friend told her on the phone. “And, oh, was that guy hungry. I put some sunflower seed on the doormat and, dit, dit, dit, he ate up every bit of it. But now I don’t know what to do with him. Can you come and get the bird?”
Pigeons didn’t hang out in our neck of the woods. They preferred spaces with a view of open ground, as opposed to our usual weed-choked swampy thicket. For similar reasons, we didn’t get European starlings or house sparrows, either—two species of so-called nuisance birds, whose roles as pests were eagerly taken on by squawking Ollie, foot-biting Dusty, and bell-ringing Stanley Sue. A solitary pigeon wouldn’t casually leave its flock to visit our area, unless the bird had found itself in serious trouble, which worried Linda. Suiting up for the perilous trek across the frozen wastes of the front yard to her car, she drove down the hill through wind-whipped ice fields to Roswitha’s house on the river, then retraced her eight-hundred-foot drive back to the house.
“She seems okay,” she said as she examined the towel-wrapped bird in our bathroom.
“There’s a tiny little scrape on the edge of the wing,” I said.
“She was flapping around in the carrier,” Linda told me. “She probably did that then.”
Satisfied that the bird had most likely gotten separated from its fellow pigeons by a hawk or owl and lost its way, we decided to feed it, keep it overnight, and release it the following afternoon—forgetting for a tiny, yet crucial moment a hard-and-fast rule about taking in wild birds in cold weather. That rule would flutter back to haunt us soon. Not wanting to introduce any avian cooties to our healthy indoor birds, we installed the pigeon in a cage in the office off the living room, where Linda studied the Bible, did her church’s bookkeeping, kept track of her housecleaning business, and charred the ceiling with a decorative candle.
“That bird is lucky to be indoors,” I said.
As Linda prepared dinner, I bundled up to head out to the backyard duck pens. I should have known better than to venture outside of the house when every wild beast in the woods was trying to sneak indoors. In the past week, the overnight low had plummeted to three degrees. To keep the slushy water in the two wading pools from congealing into gigantic ice discuses by morning, I needed to slosh out the water with my trademark push broom. Months ago we had moved the girl ducks to Stewart and Trevor’s pen, and I emptied their pool first, noting that almost as soon as I leaned the broom against the wire, the wet bristles froze to the pen floor. Latching the door behind me, I trudged toward the entrance to the geese’s adjoining suite. As I opened their door, I remarked to myself that I ought to move carefully, since the ground beneath my feet seemed to be glare ice.
The bare boughs of the apple tree wheeled overhead as a distant comb of cirrus clouds raced toward the opposite horizon. A fat conjunction of three stuck-together snowflakes hovered in front of my nose, reversed direction, and hopped onto an eyelash. My legs flailed like flags in a stiff wind. My arms stretched in search of a solid surface. Bobbing in a warm salt sea, my mind tacked leisurely between a tropical island called Uh-Oh-Here-I-Go and a bone-colored coral reef populated by blood-red fish. A blue whale surfaced directly under me. Bad luck. Its stiff spine jolted me at both poles.
I believe, I told myself, I believe I’ll just lie here for a little while. I believe that’s what I’ll do. Status lights winked on one by one. A foot untwisted. A hand uncurled. I accounted for my ribs. The right elbow felt numb. Was that a stone beneath my head? A skin of water on the ice soaked into my pant legs. Just relax. I stared up at the apple tree. Just enjoy this fine brisk afternoon from ground level.
A menacing rasp raised me partway up. Liza—the African goose that Linda and I had nursed through a serious illness on our front porch, carried in our arms for four weeks when she couldn’t walk on her own, and fed fresh dandelion leaves plucked one by one on hands and knees from our lawn—Liza, yes, that Liza, opened her serrated beak, waggled her thin pink tongue, and hissed at me. Her sister Hailey joined in. I struggled unsteadily to my feet. “It’s okay,” I assured them, hugging the doorpost, wheezing, slamming the door shut, and hobbling back to the basement, the push broom my cane. My head chimed the hour as I limped upstairs.
“Something’s upsetting Stanley Sue,” Linda told me from the stove. My wife had missed my brief aerial ballet, but the parrot had taken it in from her perch on top of Walter’s cage. She waggled her head at me in disapproval. “Maybe she saw a hawk,” Linda added, dumping onions into a pan.
STUMBLING OUT OF BED the next morning, I didn’t need a thermometer to tell me that the mercury hadn’t simply plunged overnight, it had fallen off a cliff. The tip-off came when Linda tried to coerce the kitchen faucet to issue water. The prescient individuals who had constructed our house in 1907 had apparently enjoyed a draught of cold water so much, they had created a special basement air space within the east wall with the foresight that the next generation of residents would route water pipes through this otherwise useless passage. My preference was that we wait until July and the frozen-water problem would take care of itself, but Linda displayed her usual impatience on this issue.
If nothing else, balancing on the rim of the laundry tub a
llowed me to take a fresh inventory of my aches and bruises from my parrot-witnessed spill of the previous afternoon as I jammed the nozzle of a hair dryer into the frigid air tunnel. The vibration of the motor jarred the blow dryer loose from its niche and knocked it into the dry laundry sink, providing me with a second daybreak test of elbow flexibility and knee-joint range of motion. As my body began to slow to hibernation metabolism, Linda shouted downstairs to inform me that the waters flowed freely once more—leaving the thawing job finished except for the painstaking picking of Styrofoam insulation pellets out of the back end of the hair dryer.
A warm front crashed into western Michigan while I sat at my workplace writing catalog descriptions of home-theater gizmos. Ordinarily I would have welcomed any mitigation of the cold. But the heat wave hijacked a cargo of moisture from Lake Michigan and returned it to us as a huge dumping of snow.
I considered taking advantage of the bad weather and the throbbing in my limbs as an excuse for putting off a visit to my mom. While I didn’t expect to do another backflip on a patch of glare ice at the entry to her house, I worried about being emotionally upended by her bad mood. But the roads had been reasonably well plowed and, truth be told, I didn’t feel any worse than I ever did.
My visit hit a snag when I turned off a clean north-south artery onto the clogged east-west vein of my mother’s street and immediately embedded my car in a trackless waste. After trying to inch forward toward my mom’s driveway and failing to gain even a millimeter of progress, I found myself unable to reverse and rejoin the other corpuscles puttering along. A ten-year-old boy wearing a fluorescent orange stocking cap slogged to my aid from the house on the corner and silently handed me a snow shovel. He seemed unwilling to do the excavation for me, even after I had grabbed his cap as a bargaining tool. After not that many sweaty minutes, I managed to clear the crown of the road and, with my mother’s house in view through the driver’s side mirror, set off for home with my newly acquired shovel dripping untidily on the upholstery.
“I felt terrible. I was only a half a block away, but I didn’t dare just leave my car in the middle of the street,” I told Linda.
“Visit her tomorrow. It’s supposed to be sunny.”
“That reminds me. Is this a good day to release the pigeon? Or should you do it tomorrow morning?”
“We forgot something,” Linda said. “You can’t subject a bird to anything greater than a twenty-degree temperature drop when you release it, and we’ve had the pigeon indoors where it’s warm.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, although I knew the answer all too well.
“It means she has to live with us until the spring.”
MY MOM’S STREET still hadn’t been plowed the following day, but enough SUVs had barreled through to provide a choice of tire ruts to follow. As I stomped the snow off my boots in the vestibule, my mother told me, “The furnace isn’t working.” An ineffective wiggle of the thermostat wheel in the living room produced no response from the giant basement octopus. Downstairs, I squinted at the beast from several angles under the light of a bare bulb, trying to determine which scary-looking valve from the Calvin Coolidge era held the least promise of blowing us sky-high.
“Dad would sometimes push that red button,” my mother finally pointed out.
Inside an inky black shadow near the isinglass faceplate crouched a lozenge-shaped utility box that some mustached gent had undoubtedly installed during the Herbert C. Hoover years while converting the behemoth from a coal to a natural-gas diet. A promising yet intimidating red button whose dustless surface spoke of frequent use begged me to depress it, but I hesitated. “This button?” She nodded. “You’re sure this is the one?” After determining that no competing button concealed itself to ridicule me later, I reluctantly gave my mother’s choice a stab, figuring there were worse ways to leave the planet. A startling chuff of safely contained fire rewarded my bold action.
“There we go!” my mother cried. “Now we’re cooking with gas.”
Her use of that old catchphrase from the Harry S. Truman era led me to ask her about her youth as I paid a few bills at the dining room table and drank a cup of tea. She didn’t find a sure footing for spinning a tale until my mention of her 1937 trip to Cuba brought an excited glow to her eyes.
“Well, I think I told you before that I went with four other girls, including May Heaver, who was my boss at Mueller Brass in Port Huron, and her cousin Kathy, who was an epileptic. But I probably didn’t mention that when we landed in Havana, we were met by Mr. José Ollio himself.”
“Who’s José Ollio?”
“He was the head of the José Ollio Company,” my mother beamed. “He was an important man, but he gave us gals the royal treatment, because he did a lot of business with Mueller Brass.”
I didn’t mind that I had heard most of the Cuban anecdotes before. I loved the idea of my mom as an adventurous girl just out of high school taking a trip that her father didn’t approve of. Many years later she convinced my dad to forgo their annual four-thousand-mile-long asphalt oval in favor of a trip abroad instead. He ended up enjoying the bus tour of England so much and relished sharing stories and influenza bugs with his fellow bus passengers to such a degree that encapsulated trips to Spain, Germany, Morocco, Thailand, and China followed.
I mentioned to my mom that I was fond of Cuban music, and she told me that José Ollio had taken them to Havana nightclubs. “The orchestra would play one set of American songs, then after an intermission they’d play Latin numbers.” She also mentioned a cab driver who had committed an unnamed naughty indiscretion that resulted in all five of the girls bolting from the taxi at a traffic light.
“How did you find your way back to the hotel?” I said, laughing.
“I don’t remember that,” she said. “I think we just waited for another cab.”
My mom’s good mood carried over until the following afternoon, when her furnace stopped again. Bett remembered that a close friend of Mom and Dad’s used to inspect furnaces for the City of Grand Rapids and knew the older models inside and out, so she gave him a call.
“Mike found the problem,” Mom told me on the phone after dinner. “He even had the right part at home, and he said he was saving the box to remind him of the part number in case it goes ka-flooey again.”
All seemed well until the phone rang an hour later and my mom asked me, “The next time you stop by, would you please bring back the package that was on the countertop? I didn’t get a chance to open it yet.”
“What package would that be?”
“I don’t what it was, but Mike dropped it off.”
“You’re thinking of the furnace part he replaced,” I told her.
“Is that what it was?”
“He didn’t even leave it. He showed you the box and took it with him.”
This answer satisfied her for about forty minutes. “I’m sorry to bother you again,” she said. “But I need the package that you took from the countertop.” When I ran through my explanation about Mike and the furnace part, she insisted that he had also dropped off a package for her. While we talked, Dusty muttered in the background in a perfect imitation of my telephone manner, “Uhhuh. Oh? Hmm. Okay. Bye-bye,” until I hung up.
“Maybe he did bring her something, and she hid it,” Linda suggested.
Just to be on the safe side, Dusty and I called Mike and asked him if he had indeed left anything with my mom. He told me no, but he suggested that we consider replacing the furnace. He didn’t think he’d be able to fix it the next time it went ka-flooey.
BUSINESS HAD APPARENTLY gone ka-flooey at the Weigh and Pay. As Bill Holm and I approached the cash register with our food plates ready for the scale, Bo pointed at a sheet of paper taped to the wall announcing a new pricing policy in a rainbow of computer typefaces. “No more of that weighing bull,” he informed us. “I finally convinced Dad to just charge one price like a normal buffet, so go back and load up your dish.”
I shook m
y head. “I don’t eat very much.” In an apparent concession to Bo’s father, golden oldies from the 1960s showered us from the ceiling speaker in place of heavy metal.
“I’ll be back for seconds,” Bill told Bo as we headed for a booth along the wall under the scrutiny of the only occupied table in the restaurant. From the expressions on the gawkers’ faces and the lettering on the yellow bus parked outdoors, these were residents of a home for the developmentally disabled who had never witnessed anyone eating food before. Each forkful that rose to my mouth received silent scrutiny from diners that weren’t doing much dining themselves. A taste of my au gratin potatoes suggested a reason why.
“They’re doing interesting things with leather these days.”
“You should try the chicken,” said Bill. “It’s older than Eric Burdon.”
Between slowly swallowed mouthfuls, I described the recent spate of phone calls from my mother. “The accusations are unrelenting. In the past, she’d call me once or twice suggesting that I’d stolen something of hers, and that would be it. But I’ve heard from her every day this week about the package I was supposed to have taken.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to bring it back?”
“I would if I could. But this has got to be about my father, and I’m a miserable substitute. Maybe that’s what’s supposed to be in the package.”
“The missing ingredients—so to speak?” Bill poked unhappily at a dollop of macaroni and cheese. “It certainly doesn’t need more salt.”
I spoke quietly so that the vigilant Bo didn’t overhear. “Any word from Bobo?”
“Just ‘Beep Beep.’”
“Why ‘Beep Beep’?”
“That’s the question. Carol and I were driving to her brother’s house, and she had the radio on. It was playing Nilsson’s ‘Don’t Leave Me.’ “
Here we go, I thought. Another Nilsson rant.
“You know, his parody of dramatic loss-of-love songs.”
“Yes, I kind of remember it,” I mumbled to my mashed potatoes.
