Elsewhere: A Memoir

by Richard Russo

  “How long will I be staying with you, then?” she wanted to know.

  “As long as you need to.” We’d been over this before, of course. She was in withdrawal, and the next few days were bound to be so ugly that she’d need companionship and support to survive them.

  “Is there a lot to do at the apartment?”

  “Very little,” I assured her, which was true. I told her again how, in addition to Barb and me, the girls had pitched in to get everything ready for her, the clothes hung up in the closet, her dishes and glasses in the cupboards. She’d told us where she wanted things, and we’d followed these instructions she now couldn’t remember giving. The aluminum foil and plastic wrap and wax paper rolls were safe in the oven, an appliance she had no other use for, relying on the microwave to warm her frozen dinners. She and Barbara had already arranged her bedroom, and we’d hung her pictures and mirrors on the walls. The television was hooked up, the cable turned on, the phone service activated. She and I would need to go grocery shopping soon, and she’d no doubt want to make a few cosmetic changes, but otherwise she was good to go. “And of course we’ll have to reset all the clocks,” I added.

  For her, that had been the scariest detail of all. In the hospital, after the fog had lifted, I told her about how we sat on the edge of the bed the morning of her first doctor’s appointment and she asked why the hands of the clock only went forward when she wanted to make them go back. “I must’ve been in la-la land,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief.

  Now, at my mention of the clocks, she grew pale again, so I said, “The worst is behind you, Mom.”

  She took a deep breath, hoping, I could tell, that I was right. As a general rule, I wasn’t.

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS proved every bit as rough as predicted. “I feel like I’m coming out of my skin” was how my mother put it. Clothes were insupportable, so she stayed in her nightgown and robe all day long. Unable to get comfortable, she moved between rooms like the ghost of someone who’d died a sudden, violent death. The girls, though glad their grandmother was recovering, were also grateful that their restaurant jobs got them out of the house. Barbara and I had no such refuge, and at the end of each day we huddled in our bed in the apartment above the garage, out of earshot for a few hours and thankful she couldn’t possibly negotiate the stairs. By the end of the week, though, her appetite returned, and she was clearly feeling better. She thought maybe the time had come to return to Woodland Hills. Her doctor agreed. So did Barbara. So did I.

  The first thing she saw when she entered the apartment, as if for the first time, was the piece of paper on which she’d scratched 8:45 and then REAL TIME. I couldn’t tell what scared her more, the message itself or that her beautiful Palmer Method handwriting was a barely legible scrawl. She pulled one of the chairs out from the dinette and sat down in it heavily, suddenly drained. The plan had been to take inventory of her kitchen, make a list of everything she’d need, and hit the supermarket, but I could tell she was done for the day.

  “Is it too soon?” I said, trying to imagine what it must be like to return to a “home” she hadn’t yet lived in and couldn’t remember.

  She shook her head. “I have to do it sometime.”

  “How about we make out a small list of stuff for the next day or two, and I’ll go to the store? We can save the big order for later in the week.”

  “Whatever,” she said, and paused. “Do you honestly think Mark saved my life?”

  “I’m certain of it.”

  She was staring at the refrigerator now. “What am I supposed to do with all those frozen dinners?” A true child of the Depression, she hated few things more than wasting food.

  “It’s not that you can’t have frozen dinners anymore,” I reminded her. “Just that you have to eat some other things, too.”

  “No,” she said, never one for half measures. “We’ll toss them out.” Next she turned her attention to the living room. “You did such a nice job with my books. You know just where everything goes. It’s perfect.”

  We both knew it wasn’t, of course. Over the next days and weeks, she’d find things that were out of place and rearrange them, making them, as she liked to put it, “just right.” But she wanted to pay me a compliment, and I was pleased to accept it.

  What she said then surprised me. “Do you think I’ll ever be able to read again?”

  She hadn’t read anything at our house, which was predictable if you thought about it at all. How can you read when you can’t sit still? Worse, there wasn’t much inducement, our shelves sagging under the weight of Anita Brookner and her truth-telling ilk. What my mother really wanted to know wasn’t whether she’d be able to read again but if that could ever again be a reliable means of escape. At the possibility that it might not, I felt my own spirits plummet in sympathetic dread.

  She looked around aimlessly once again, though in a new way. “I hate it here,” she said sadly. “I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t, but I do.”

  Though normally I’d have pointed out that she hadn’t been there long enough to render such a judgment, I was weary of such futile nonsense. She was going to hate it, and we both knew it. “We’ll keep your name on the other lists,” I assured her.

  Actually, I’d driven by Megunticook House when she was in the hospital and noticed the exterior was being painted, so I stopped by and added her name to their list as well. (Later in the year a vacancy would come up, and this time my mother loved the place. In fact, the painting had transformed it so completely that she insisted I’d never taken her there before. She would’ve remembered, she said, because it was perfect, just what we’d been looking for, so much better than Woodland Hills.)

  “You look exhausted,” she said now, taking my hand. “What a long haul this has been for you.”

  I started to say that it’d been a tough few days, all right, but then realized she was going all the way back to Arizona, maybe even to Helwig Street. “I just wish you could be happy, Mom.”

  “I used to be,” she sighed, and in her inflection was the same profound mystification I’d heard the week before when she asked me to explain why, despite her formidable will, the hands of the clock would only go in one direction. “I know you don’t believe that, but I was.”

  Here and There

  IT WOULD’VE TAKEN about forty minutes to drive out-island from Edgartown in the summer, but in late December, with so few tourists on the island and no mopeds or cyclists clogging the narrow, two-lane roads, it took about half that long. To me, the winter landscape was starkly beautiful, but I found myself wondering if my mother would agree. Given that the alternatives were Gloversville and coastal Maine, she’d wholeheartedly embraced the idea of scattering her ashes in Menemsha Pond, a place the rest of us would regularly visit, but today it wasn’t hard to imagine her taking one look at the frigid, windswept, gunmetal-gray landscape and saying, What an awful, awful place. Was the island simply the last in a series of wrong places for her? Is that what the previous night’s dream, in which I’d carried her through the streets of that nameless town in search of an unknown destination, was trying to tell me?

  Emily and Kate both planned to speak at this interment, and driving out there I found myself wondering what they’d say. Their approaches to dealing with my mother had always been different, Emily infinitely patient and loving and accommodating, Kate deeply sympathetic to her isolation and loneliness but far less able to surrender to her unreason. In Illinois, when they were still young and Barbara and I had obligations at the university or just needed a night out, my mother had been their occasional babysitter. Once we were out the door, the three of them would caucus in the living room and decide on a theme for the evening’s entertainment, after which, while my mother watched TV or read, the girls would raid my wife’s closet for costumes, practice their lines in their bedrooms, then stage a play or musical for my mother’s edification and critical evaluation. Both girls had fond memories of such evenings, of having the undivided attention of
an appreciative adult, though things had changed by the time we moved to Maine. As teenagers, they weren’t so malleable or as easily delighted. More important, by then the roles were reversed. On those rare occasions when Barbara and I both had to be absent for a few days, my mother would come over to the Waterville house to look after them, but they both understood without having to be told that it was their responsibility to keep an eye on her. We’d tried hard not to undermine their affection for their grandmother, but of course they’d borne witness to her mood swings and meltdowns, not to mention our difficulties in keeping her relatively calm and stable.

  Though they’d been told a good deal about my mother as a young woman, her yearning for a life of dancing and clever repartee and nice clothes and personal freedom, the old GE photo we found after her death had knocked both girls for a loop, and I knew they were still trying to reconcile it with the grandmother who later in life made them sit still when they visited her apartment and instructed them not to touch anything; whose shirts and slacks and sweaters hung in the closet sheathed in plastic, nothing allowed to touch anything else for fear of wrinkles; whose refrigerator reflected the same obsessive distance, the milk carton always a respectful three inches from the orange juice. As a young woman, my mother had in many ways been ahead of her time, determined to make it on her own in a man’s world. Back then, GE was almost exclusively male, and the men she’d worked for and with had both accepted and admired her. In this respect she wasn’t so different from the brave, trailblazing women our daughters had studied in their college courses, who helped to institute workplace reform and equal-pay-for-equal-work legislation. How could this woman in the photo be the same person who’d lectured them so tirelessly, and often inappropriately, on highly conservative gender roles (This is what the man does and That is what the woman does). To prepare them for marriage, my mother had given them to understand that in every relationship, one partner or the other had to rule the roost, and that in good marriages the roost was ruled by the rooster. As the girls grew older, it became clear to her that these lectures were falling on deaf ears. Kate in particular worried her, and my mother had warned us throughout her adolescence that we were allowing her to grow up headstrong, that her unflinching independence was decidedly unfeminine. In the end, despite having fewer sharp temperamental edges and always lavishing on her grandmother such generous forbearance, Emily fared little better. When she fell in love with Steve, our shy, brilliant son-in-law-to-be, my mother wondered out loud if he’d be man enough to tame and rule her. (“I suppose I could slap you around a little,” he’d offered, when Emily reported this concern to him, “if that would make her feel any better.”)

  We’d timed our arrival for sunset. Tom, Kate’s husband, a talented photographer, had brought along a camera to document an occasion whose exact nature we’d not discussed, preferring spontaneity. Menemsha, a hive of activity in season, was deserted now, which suited us fine given that what we intended, though unscripted and benign, was quite possibly illegal. A few fishing vessels bobbed in the swell against a nearby dock, and every now and then a voice or two would be borne in on the wind. Somewhere out in the harbor a buoy clanged, surely the loneliest sound in the world. A pickup truck rumbled by, its driver leaning forward for a better view of six well-dressed out-of-towners congregated at the water’s edge. It wouldn’t have required much imagination for the fellow to guess our purpose, though I suspect he’d have been surprised to learn that the person whose ashes we meant to scatter had been to the island only once, for a single week some fifty years before, determined to show the little boy she had in tow that beauty existed in the world.

  With the sun hovering a few inches above the western horizon, I clambered down, urn in hand, over jagged rocks that were wet and slippery with moss to where the water was lapping the shore, thinking to myself that it would be about right if I broke my ass trying to accomplish one last foolish thing on my mother’s behalf. Not much is left of a human professionally reduced by heat and flame, and it took me just a few seconds to scatter that biblical dust in the churning waves, where it swiftly mingled with sand and silt and tiny pebbles. By the time I scrambled back up the embankment, the sun was sitting on the western waves, large and red but without the power to warm. Emily spoke first, thanking her grandmother for the gift of this island that over the years had played such a magical role in the lives of our whole family; then Kate recalled with bittersweet affection her grandmother’s ability to imagine vividly a happier, better future, even if she couldn’t quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins “Fear no more the heat o’ the Sun,” partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved shore, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I’d felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother’s death—Kate had gotten married, I’d finally published another book and gone on tour with it—some sort of internal-pause button had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I’d specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we’d barely spoken of her. After thirty-five years, for the first time, we were alone in our marriage, and neither of us seemed to have the heart to discuss what that meant. There might have been more to say if the girls had been around, but Emily was living in Amherst and Kate in London, and the rest of my family still in upstate New York.

  We therefore scheduled a family memorial service for the following summer in Gloversville, the sort of gathering my mother would’ve liked—just family and friends and food and swapping stories, like the one about the Christmas when she, all dressed up, was trapped astraddle a snowbank, everybody laughing too hard to help her get unstuck. But in the meantime, not much had been said; and when you say nothing, it speaks volumes.

  The last year of my mother’s life had been particularly grueling. The specialist who’d diagnosed her congestive heart failure had explained how things would likely go over the year or possibly two that remained to her. Given how hard her heart was now working, she might suffer a major heart attack, but it was far more likely that her decline would be gradual. For a while, at least, she’d continue to feel sluggish and tired, nothing more. Over time, though, she’d be increasingly short of breath, especially when she exerted herself. Every now and then there’d be days when she’d feel better, even energetic, her breathing less labored, and he advised her to stick with her normal routines for as long as she could, to continue her weekly trips to the supermarket and to the hairdresser. Eventually, however, her good days would be fewer and farther between; she’d become housebound, then bedridden. Toward the end she’d require morphine, not for pain, but to make her breathing easier. I was the one choking back sobs as the doctor delivered this grim prognosis. My mother accepted it with near-perfect equanimity. She was being told what would happen, not what might, and certainty never frightened her, even certain catastrophe. She wasn’t scared to die. As we drove home, she actually comforted me.

  Living, on the other hand, in the greater scheme of things a relentless march of inconsequential minutiae, continued over the ensuing weeks and months to generate crises. Appearances, as always, weighed far more heavily on her decisions than they should have. No doubt recalling the enormous oxygen tank that stood sentry behind my grandfather’s chair on Helwig Street, the one my grandmother used to glare at homicidally every time he got up to leave the room, muttering “Ugly” beneath her breath, my mother wasn’t anxious to start on oxygen. Her living room was arranged just so, to accentuate her “pretties,” the menagerie of small, ornate objects (a ballerina, a cut-glass bowl, etc.) she’d been collecting down through the years, and a few were given pride of place on th
e sill, where they made it difficult to open or close the windows. As the perimeter of her world continued to contract, it was imperative for her to keep control over what remained, and an oxygen tank, unsightly and utilitarian, represented a serious breach of taste. Of course the technology had come a long way, and the small, boxlike oxygen machine we eventually rented could be tucked away behind an end table, but that didn’t matter; she knew it was there, unwanted, a violation. We also got her a small, portable tank for when she needed to leave the house, but she’d seen people out in public with such unwieldy contraptions, and she didn’t want to be one of them. She would use it when she came to our house, but refused to be seen in stores or restaurants with a breathing apparatus. The plastic tubing, once inserted, made her nose look like a pig’s snout, or so she claimed, and she couldn’t bear to be seen looking like that. Hearing she was ill, people at Megunticook House were concerned, but after going on oxygen, she let it be known that she didn’t want visitors, even people she liked. And so, in short order, her world shrank to her own two rooms, the apartment of her one good friend across the hall and, when she was feeling up to it, our house across town.

  For what seemed like a very long time, my own world wasn’t much larger. With few exceptions, I declined speaking engagements and canceled personal appearances. Except for visiting our daughters in London and Amherst, we stuck close to home. Faced with an undefined period of staggering health-care expenses, I hunkered down with the novel I was working on, while Barbara, who’d recently gotten her real-estate license, kept busy learning the ropes of a new profession. For a while I did most of what needed doing—shopping for my mother’s groceries, making small repairs in the apartment, taking care of trash and recycling—but before long it became necessary to hire professionals to help with more intimate duties. Moving her in with us was something I refused to even consider because it would have made a nurse of my wife, and besides, what my mother seemed most adamant about was keeping things just as they were for as long as possible, especially her apartment, so I promised to make that happen.