White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  “With a new baby?” my uncle snapped. “I don’t think so. This place is a health hazard for an adult. It’s not safe for an infant. Besides, mice and bats aren’t the only reason I’m calling. There’s more.”

  More? My heart raced.

  “Like what?” I asked. I heard the fear in my voice as I said the words.

  “I don’t know how to put this,” my uncle said hesitantly, “so I’ll just ask you straight out. What do you know about where your mother uses the bathroom?”

  “The bathroom?” I asked, confused by the question. “The house has two bathrooms. There’s one upstairs and one down.”

  “Have you seen the bathrooms lately?”

  “No,” I said, growing more confused. “You know that. My mother hasn’t let me in the house in years.”

  “I know.” My uncle sighed. “I guess I’m asking—­did the bathrooms work when you last saw them?”

  “The shower in the upstairs bathroom always was a problem—­but—­”

  “Not the shower,” my uncle interrupted. “The toilet.”

  My heart began to pound loudly in my chest. “Uncle Al, what are you trying to get at? Are you telling me that my mother doesn’t have a working toilet?”

  My uncle, the usually stately former IBM executive, always calm and serene in the face of pressure, sighed nervously. “Yes. It would appear to be that way.”

  “That can’t be,” I said. “I’m sure she just doesn’t want you to use it. She’s probably just embarrassed by the mess and doesn’t want you to see the bathrooms.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. So I’ve worked out a system of never using her bathroom on my visits. I’ve always waited and gone back to the hotel or made a trip into town. But then I began to get suspicious and did some investigating. Mary Elizabeth, neither of your mother’s bathrooms works.”

  “They must,” I said, stroking Augie’s hair. “They have to.”

  “I’m telling you they don’t.”

  “They must—­”

  “Mary Elizabeth, listen to me: they don’t.”

  “That’s her home,” I said, my voice rising. Augie, feeling the tension, began to cry. “Where does she go?”

  My uncle was silent for a beat. “I don’t know. But that might explain . . .”

  An air of awkward tension filled the line.

  “The smell,” I said softly, finishing his sentence. My uncle had repeatedly noted the smell of the place in his calls to me. It had grown so bad he’d invested in a mask that he wore sometimes when he cleaned. A lack of a toilet—­a makeshift chamber pot or outhouse—­might explain the horrible smell.

  It all made sense. Maybe that’s why some of the boxes she’d sent in the mail to us, full of seemingly new baby clothes with the tags still attached, smelled so horrible. One box was beyond the point of repair. Even after multiple washings, the baby clothes still had a bad odor. We’d had to throw out everything in the box.

  The lack of working bathrooms, too, might explain some of my mother’s strange habits from the past two years. Without notice, she’d go to stay at a hotel near the school where she taught for one, two, even three or four nights in a row.

  “It’s nice to get away sometimes,” she’d say when she called to tell me she was staying at the AmericInn. Again.

  Now I knew she likely meant it was nice to be able to have access to indoor plumbing.

  I started to cry, holding a fussy Baby Augie to me as I did so.

  “How can she live like that?” I asked my uncle. “Uncle Al, she’s not an animal. Really she’s not.”

  “I know,” my uncle said softly.

  “She’s a teacher,” I said. “She’s educated. She brings home a decent paycheck. Her students love her. She puts herself together and goes to work and goes to church and you saw her—­she looked beautiful at our wedding. So lovely. So composed. How can she not have a running, flushing toilet?”

  “Mary,” my uncle said. “You know I know how brilliant your mother is. This toilet thing—­you know it’s just a symptom of—­”

  I nodded. “I know. It’s just a physical manifestation of what’s going on inside her.” He’d said this to me before. It was an extension of the depression that was ravaging her.

  Her toilets needed fixing. And she did, too.

  “Uncle Al, I’ll talk to her,” I said at last. “I’ll handle this. I’ll call her tonight.”

  “No,” said my uncle softly. Firmly. “You can’t.”

  “But I can—­I want to—­I have to—­”

  “If you do,” he interrupted, “it’ll kill her. I promise you—­the knowledge that you know—­that her daughter, whom she adores, knows—­that humiliation—­it’ll kill her. Don’t tell her you know. What I want you to do instead is this: if she asks for your advice about whether you think she ought to get a new bathroom in the next few days, the one that I’m going to pressure her to get, just politely encourage her to go along with my prodding. But don’t tell her you know about anything else.”

  I nodded, the tears streaming down my cheeks.

  “But I want to help,” I said, my voice breaking. I not only wanted to help—­I felt like I should be equipped to help. If only she would let me.

  “I need to help!” I cried, to further underscore my point. “Why can’t I help her?”

  “Mary Elizabeth, you are helping. You’ve told her for years you’ve stood ready to help. You called me and we’re working to help her together,” my uncle said. “You are doing something. But her knowing that you know—­that will only make matters worse.”

  “Okay,” I said at last, hugging Augie to me. “Okay.”

  With my uncle’s help, my mother agreed to allow a new toilet to be installed on the main floor of the house. It was just one of many small victories my uncle would score.

  Another victory came in July 2010 when Dean and I were finally invited to visit my mother at the house. It was Dean’s first chance to see where I’d grown up, and my first time home in ten years. The invitation came about as a result of my high school reunion. We were attending and booked a room at a hotel a mile from my mother’s house for several nights. I knew staying at the house was out of the question. But I hoped a visit was not.

  It wasn’t easy to arrange. For the first two days of our stay in Beaver Dam, my mother remained a nervous wreck, insisting upon meeting us at our hotel or the nearby Applebee’s. She came armed with toys and books for the boys and with an insistence that we remain away from the house. But on day three, she caved.

  “Would you maybe like to come over to the house later on?” she asked timidly on a Sunday morning.

  “Absolutely!” Dean and I told her.

  “Great,” she replied. “Why don’t you stop over after Mass?”

  It wasn’t much of a visit in the traditional sense. When we pulled into the driveway, my mother stood waiting with Uncle Al and made clear that she didn’t want Dean or the kids—­or even me—­to enter the home.

  “It’s so nice out,” she said of the eighty-­something-­degree day. “I thought it would be fun if we all had a seat outside.”

  She directed us to a circle of lawn chairs she’d set up in the driveway. They were essentially front-­row seats to her pride and joy: her recently overhauled garage. The garage door was open so that we could admire the transformation. Where there had once been mountains of junk five and six feet high, there were now nice, neat rows of shelves lined with equally neat rows of boxes and lawn equipment. Best of all, after all those months of Dumpster dashes, there was actual room in the garage for my mother to park her car—­something she had been unable to do for years.

  “Isn’t it neat?” my mother said, offering us cans of Diet Coke that she’d placed in the garage in advance of our visit. She smiled proudly.

  “It’s great, Anne,” said Dean
. “It’s really terrific.”

  Knowing how hard my mother had worked to create an outdoor living room, Dean and I settled into the webbed lawn chairs beneath the hot sun in a way normal visitors to normal homes would plop down onto a comfortable sofa: we worked to make ourselves at home.

  But while we worked to mask the awkwardness we felt over our inability to enter the house, our oldest son, Roman—­who was three at the time—­did not. “When do we go inside Oma’s house?” he asked repeatedly when he grew tired of looking at the toys my mother had set out in the garage for him. “Why are we only sitting on the outside of Oma’s house?”

  Thankfully, Uncle Al ran interference. “Why would you want to see a house when you can take a walk around the block with me?” he asked, taking Roman by the hand to lead him on a tour of the neighborhood.

  But even after a walk around the block, young Roman remained perplexed. “I don’t understand, Mama. When can I see your room? Didn’t you say you had a room in this house?”

  “I used to,” I said, looking Roman in the eye. “But my room isn’t important now. Visiting with Oma is.”

  Pulling Roman onto my lap, I encouraged him to tell my mother about preschool, about his favorite things about the hotel room, about anything to make the visit feel more normal—­and to make me feel less sad. Dean and I went on to talk with my mother about local politics, the age of different trees in the yard, what I was like as a baby.

  For two hours, I managed to keep the tears at bay. But all my efforts came crashing down when I discovered Augie’s dirty diaper.

  Changing a diaper on the road is ordinarily no big deal: fetch the diaper bag from the car, lay the baby down on a blanket on a clean patch of grass, and presto change-­o! Problem was, while I’d come to the house armed with diapers, I’d left the baby wipes back in the hotel room. In any other setting, at any other house, I would have run into the kitchen and wet some paper towels and the problem would have been solved. But this was no ordinary house. I couldn’t run inside. Doing so would unnerve my mother. And even if she allowed me to enter the forbidden zone, I knew the odds were great that there would be no paper towels to be found.

  “I forgot the wipes,” I said to Dean, emptying the contents of the diaper bag for a second time on the front lawn to see if there was something—­anything—­that could work as a wipe. We were kneeling with Baby Augie beneath my old honey locust tree.

  “And I can’t—­I mean, we can’t—­I mean, she can’t—­”

  “It’s okay.” Dean squeezed my hand.

  “Really, Mary,” he repeated, “it’s going to be okay.”

  He wore a brown Izod polo shirt that matched his beautiful brown eyes. They were so warm.

  So was his touch. All of it was too much. I began to cry.

  “This was my house,” I whispered to Dean, ducking my head so that my mother, who remained on her lawn chair throne next to the garage, wouldn’t see.

  “It still is,” he said, gently rubbing my back.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. I looked up at the house’s familiar red siding and the yellow trim and the black shutters. I’d drawn them all countless times in kindergarten with a twenty-­four-­pack of Crayola crayons. “Not anymore.”

  The outside of the house was just the way I remembered it. But the feelings that the house conjured up within me had changed. The structure that had once made me feel solid and safe in the wake of my parents’ divorce, my father’s temper, now made me feel unspeakably sad. Those walls that had once sheltered me from the chilly elements of Wisconsin winters were the same walls that had swallowed my mother whole.

  “God, Dean,” I whispered, sniffling. “I just want to go home.”

  Later that night, Dean and I sat in a booth across from my mother at Ben Venuto’s, my mother’s favorite restaurant in Beaver Dam. After our day in the hot sun of her driveway, my mother insisted that she wanted to treat us to a good dinner. And the Italian establishment, which featured a bar and a large pizza oven, was what my mother declared was hands-­down “the best restaurant in town.”

  Dean and I had hired a babysitter, a local high school student my old band director had recommended, to take care of the boys at the hotel so that we could dine alone with my mother. The outing was intended to give all of us a moment to collect our breaths and to talk in sentences that weren’t interrupted by the inevitable wail of a child.

  At first, the dinner was a lighthearted affair. My mother peppered me with questions about my class reunion, which had taken place the night before. She delighted in the details of who I’d seen, how they’d looked, who’d married whom. From the reunion, she went on to address her other favorite topics: the countdown to a new school year, the coming season for the Packers, her excitement over the fact that a Wisconsin native —­Timothy Dolan—­was on track to be New York City’s next cardinal.

  Dean and I smiled and listened and added to the conversation when appropriate. But when my mother at last paused, I decided to make my move as Concerned Daughter. “Mom, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about you and the house.”

  “Don’t do that,” my mother said quickly as she reached for her soupspoon. “Why don’t you let me worry about my house and you worry about yours?”

  I licked my lips, ignoring her attempt to change the subject. “Mom, how would you feel if maybe Dean and I helped you find someplace else to go for a ­couple of months? Maybe an apartment? Someplace brand new that you could try out temporarily—­to see if you liked it?”

  This was a new idea Dean and I had been floating. My mother and my uncle were making some headway on the house, but the progress was painstakingly slow, due in large part to my mother’s presence. If she moved out temporarily—­and allowed a professional cleaning crew to come in—­we could likely turn the house around in just a ­couple of months. We’d been in touch with old family friends—­Gail and Charlie Fakes—­who owned a series of apartment buildings as well as an assisted-­living facility in Beaver Dam. They were open to the idea of offering my mother a short-­term lease at a reduced cost. Moving someplace clean, we reasoned, might enable her to clear her mind, part with some of the baggage that was literally and figuratively weighing her down. And it would enable us to help her make the house again a clean and safe place in which to live.

  “A new apartment?” my mother asked, with a tone that suggested she was both offended and intrigued. “Who’s going to pay for that?”

  “Dean and I could help,” I said gently. “And it’s not like it would cost that much.”

  “What do you mean by ‘not that much’?” my mother asked defensively. “I don’t have that much.”

  Discussing money with any parent is tough. But it had become increasingly difficult to do with my mother since the fall of 2007, when my brother lost his job at a prominent Houston law firm. By early 2008, my mother was sending my brother and his wife monthly checks. Shortly thereafter, she started sending two or three checks a month. Then came the additional mortgages she took out on the house so that she could send him still more money.

  I knew my mother’s finances were tight. That’s why she adamantly refused to retire even as she approached her seventy-­fifth birthday. I also knew money wasn’t the primary reason my mother was reluctant to leave the house.

  “Mom,” I said, putting down the fork that I’d been using to pick at a plate of salad. “Forget the money. Why won’t you leave the house?”

  “I won’t leave because I want you and your brother to have a place to come home to,” she said. “That house is your safe haven. It’s your nest egg.”

  At this, I pushed my plate away from me. “A nest egg? A safe haven? Mom, are you insane?”

  “I’m not insane,” said my mother calmly, studying her cheese soup. “I’m sincere.”

  I leaned over the table, staring intently at my mother.

  “Mom, yo
u haven’t let me into that so-­called safe haven for ten years. I’ve been here in Beaver Dam for three days and you wouldn’t even let me in the front door today. Not even to change your grandson’s diaper! That’s not a ‘safe haven.’ That house is a fucking albatross.”

  “That house is your home,” said my mother, wiping her mouth gingerly with a napkin.

  “Was,” I said, fighting back tears. “Was. It was my home. But now it’s not. You wouldn’t even let me show Roman my room today.”

  “I didn’t know it meant that much to you,” my mother said. Her tone was sincere. It broke my heart to hear how sincere she sounded. It was so confounding. She was so brilliant and in control one moment—­and then, at moments like this, she sounded like a seven-­year-­old.

  “It does mean a lot to me, Mom. All of my awards—­all of my old dolls and toys—­I’d love to show them to my son. I’d love to see them for myself. But I can’t—­because of your situation.”

  “What situation?” my mother asked. Again, the tone was innocent, like that of a child.

  “The hoarding,” I said at last in a whisper. I marveled at my timidity. I’d proudly and loudly said “fucking” to my mother’s face moments ago at a public restaurant. But when it came to “hoarding”—­the dreaded H word—­I whispered.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” my mother said, reaching again for her napkin.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Mary,” Dean said softly, speaking at last. He reached his hand under the table to hold mine. “It’s okay—­maybe we should change the subject.”

  “No, Dean,” said my mother softly. “It’s not okay. I know what Mary’s getting at. I’ve seen those reality shows on TV. Those hoarding shows. That’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it?”

  I nodded in surprise. She’d seen the shows? She watched something other than Law and Order?

  “But you need to know,” my mother continued, “that those shows are nothing like me. That’s not my situation. I just haven’t had time to pick things up. I’ve just been . . .”