by Nancy Rue
I switched the phone to the other ear. “What are you thinking?”
“Nothing. I’m not thinking. I don’t want to think. But you go over there, Jill. You check on her.”
“What do you want me to do, dismantle the garbage disposal? You went through everything. She’s obviously not drinking at home.”
“It’s not that.”
“What then?”
The usual rich tenor of his voice was thinning out until it was almost shrill.
“I got her talking about her work,” Max said. “And she says to me—you won’t believe this, Jill—I couldn’t believe it myself—”
“Try me.”
“She says ‘I was looking through the…the…oh, that thing, that instrument we use to see things magnified.’”
“The microscope.”
“Yeah. Exactly. That’s what I had to say. She talked all around the word, and that wasn’t the only time.”
“But she wasn’t drunk.” I said. “You’re sure?”
“You know what I think? I will tell you what I think. I think she’s depressed.”
“That’s everybody’s answer to every malady they can’t figure out,” I said.
“No, depression affects the mind, the powers of concentration. I know musicians who suffer—oh, it’s terrible—they can’t even tune an instrument.”
“She’s not some melodramatic artist—no offense—but she would never let herself fall into something like that. You’ve never heard her lecture about antidepressants and support groups? She could’ve pulled Sylvia Plath right out of the oven with that one.”
“Then show me I’m wrong,” Max said. “Go over there and find out I’ve built another mountain out of a mole hill. I will kiss your feet. I’ll cook you whatever you want. You want lo schinco? You always loved my schinco.”
“You don’t have to ply me with food,” I said. “I’ll go over there. When did she say we were having lunch?”
“She was vague. Next week was what she said.”
“Okay, so maybe I’ll just drop in Saturday. You think she’ll be home?”
“That I know. She’s always home on the weekends. She won’t put her nose out unless I carry her.”
“I have a life-sized picture of that,” I said, sarcasm dripping.
“You’ll call me when you’ve seen her?”
“Yes.”
“Day or night. You have my number?”
“Yeah, Max.”
“Don’t make me wait. I won’t sleep until I know.” C’mon, Max, I thought as we hung up. I thought I was obsessing. A little Valium wouldn’t hurt you any.
I got through the rest of the week by keeping things in their proper cubbyholes. I prepped for and taught classes and held office hours and tutored Tabitha during the day, and then after my Loop run—during which I didn’t run into Socrates again, thank heaven—I stayed up most of the night figuring out how to expand my research to reach a new conclusion. When I did sleep it was sprawled out on the couch in my apartment, my laptop blinking at me from the coffee table so I wouldn’t actually go into REM and lose my train of thought.
I was bleary-eyed by Saturday morning, but I had the new proposal done and safely tucked into my desk drawer at the office, ready to be delivered to Nigel on Monday. It was so invitingly quiet in the building that I was tempted to prop myself up at my desk with a cup of Earl Grey and get work done. No Tabitha. No Jacoboni or Peter or Rashad or Deb or bevy of second-year grads. If there were a heaven, that would be it.
But Max would never let me sleep again if I didn’t go over to my mother’s. My only hope of avoiding verbal bombardment came from knowing that she’d actually told Max she was going to see me again. That is, if Max was telling me the truth. I was beginning to think he’d do just about anything to make sure my mother didn’t drop out of his life—short of selling his pasta maker and his conducting baton.
I knew Max hadn’t been lying to me or even exaggerating a little when I pulled my Miata—bought secondhand from Max—up to the house on Mayfield. He had, in fact, left out the most important information. The oleanders had grown past the lower windows and were on their way up to the second floor. The grass hadn’t been cut since probably July—and it was October. There was a soggy Sunday paper lying in the middle of the lawn.
Okay, so the yardman quit. Big deal, I told myself firmly as I retrieved the paper and plopped it into the large garbage can that was still parked at the curb. If memory served me correctly, trash pickup was on Wednesday. Yardman or no yardman, Liz McGavock always had the trash can back behind the garage before the truck got to the other end of the street.
I knocked on the front door, a “courtesy” I had been paying my mother since the first time I’d gone there when I moved back to Palo Alto four years ago. I had opened the door and called out, “Mother, I’m home!” Her initial greeting had included, “From now on, wait for me to answer the door.”
That had been my first clue that her encouragement to quit my teaching job in Trenton and at least apply for a fellowship at Stanford had been purely in the interest of my career, not because she missed me and wanted me close to her. There had been no argument when I said I wanted to live in graduate housing at Escondido Village rather than move back in with her, but she’d definitely kept close tabs on me the first two and a half years—only because she wanted to supervise my studies and oversee my friendships and keep surveillance over my activities, just as she’d always done. She said she wanted to guide me in becoming, as she put it, a strong, independent, intelligent, well-educated, and culturally astute woman. Nothing more. When she’d stopped calling six months ago, I’d told myself I was better off beyond her scrutiny.
Now, as the front door swung open, Mother greeted me in a half-open bathrobe. Black bikinis and a white bra did more than peek out from under it. The sight of me didn’t seem to surprise her or prompt her to cinch up the robe. She just smiled vaguely at me and said, “Oh. Come on in.”
“Did I wake you up?” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m up at dawn—you know that.”
I also know you stood over the yardman with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass, but look what happened to that.
“I was at the office early, so I thought I’d come by,” I said. “I figured you’d have the tea made.”
“No, as a matter of fact, I don’t,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Do you mind if I make a cup?”
“Help yourself.”
“You want any?”
“Any what?” Tea.
As I trailed behind her to the kitchen, I tried not to wonder whether she’d be any more alert if I offered her a gin and tonic. I glanced back at the foyer and craned to see into the living room. So far everything looked, as usual, compulsively neat and orderly. The Hans Hofmann and Willem de Kooning prints were still on the walls. I caught a peek of the baby grand piano—my mother’s only frivolous possession. Everything else in her house was rigid and decidedly unfeminine. She preferred clean lines, she’d always said. Everything uncluttered, unfussy.
So it still seemed—until I got to the kitchen and saw a mound of dirty dishes the size of Mt. Shasta in the sink. I pretended not to see it as I opened a cabinet to get a mug, but it was empty and I was forced to paw through the pile to locate one to recycle.
“Did you have a dinner party last night?” I said.
“No. Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It was Friday night—you like to entertain—” And you have enough dirty dishes in here to have served the entire Santa Clara Valley.
I found the English breakfast tea and pretended to be choosy about which bag I picked from the box as I mentally groped for another approach. I was so bad at being subtle.
“So…Max said he was over for dinner this week,” I said finally.
“Yes, and he talked insheshantly.”
“Incessantly,” I corrected automatically.
“That’s what I said.”
�
��Just confirming. What was he going on about?”
“Music-school politics—about which I could care less and he knows it. Why he felt it nesheshary to tell me that the chairman—no, don’t use that!”
I stopped with my hand on the door to the microwave, tea mug ready to go in.
“Why not?” I said. “Is it broken?”
“I can’t tolerate the noise it makes,” Liz said.
“What noise? Is there something wrong with it?”
“It beeps. I said I can’t—can’t—”
“Tolerate it,” I said.
“Do not finish my sentences for me. I am perfectly capable of expressing my own—”
She was cut off by the ringing of the phone, which caused her to jump as if the thing had exploded. Then she snatched up the receiver and said into it, “What is it?”
I set the mug of still-cold water with its floating tea bag on the counter and worked at keeping my teeth from falling out of my mouth. My mother had never been known for her phone cordiality, but it was beneath her to be outright rude. What the heck was going on? She couldn’t stand the microwave beeping? She was jumping at the telephone ringing?
I paused and listened. Except for Mother snapping into the receiver, there wasn’t a sound in the house. Normally on a Saturday morning, she had NPR on, but a glance at the radio revealed the plug dangling from the shelf. If she didn’t like what was on, she would at least put some classical music on the CD player. In fact, the only thing close to bizarre I ever saw the woman do was stand in the living room and conduct a concerto that was coming through the speakers. But the place was completely silent. I didn’t even hear the clock ticking in the foyer.
I’m blowing this whole thing out of proportion, I thought. Max has got me freaked out.
I made myself go into the entrance hall to look at the black-oak grandfather clock that kept stern tabs on the comings and goings of the McGavock house. The pendulum hung motionless behind the glass door. It wasn’t like Mother to let it run down. By now, I strongly suspected she’d stopped it on purpose.
I got back to the kitchen just in time to hear Liz say, “I do not have time for this. Under no shircumshtances are you to call here again!” She then yanked the phone set off the wall and dumped it into the trash can.
“I need a cup of tea,” she said to me. “Fix me a cup while you’re doing yours, would you?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll put a kettle on the stove.”
When I turned on the faucet, I saw my hand shaking.
I spent the rest of the day over there. Mother went back to bed after she took two sips of the tea. I didn’t comment that it was only 10:00 A.M. I just did the dishes, made some sandwiches for lunch out of what wasn’t moldy or shriveled in the refrigerator, and did my own search for telltale signs of alcoholism—or even drug abuse. It never seemed to occur to my mother that it was unusual for me to hang around her house like that. In fact, half the time, I wasn’t sure she was even aware I was there.
But I was aware of her. How could I not be?
Saturday afternoon, she kept asking me what time it was, even though she was wearing a watch and there were three clocks in the kitchen alone.
Saturday night, she rambled on about campus politics—something she’d claimed that morning to care nothing about. She went nonstop for forty-five minutes without once looking at me.
The next morning, I called to tell her I’d be there at noon so we could go to lunch. When I got there, she’d already eaten and was napping on the living room couch. I put on a CD of Bach fugues and she came up off the sofa shrieking, “Turn that off! I can’t stand that noise!”
Yet there were stretches of time when she seemed normal. She talked about a new resident at the lab who didn’t seem entirely committed to his work, something she abhorred. I was relieved to see her straighten the CD cases because she was always a control freak about tidiness. In the midst of one rambling monologue she said, “I am quite happy with my current state of affairs, and if anyone has a problem with who I am that is unfortunate, because I have no intention of changing.” I was sure then that the whole idea of her somehow losing it had been a figment of my imagination, if not a total hallucination.
But then she would abruptly get up and go to the refrigerator and stare into it, or wander off to take her fourth nap of the day. I was left wondering, Who is this erratic woman, and what has she done with my mother?
The most telling thing of all was that not once during the entire weekend did she ever say a word about me. There wasn’t a single attempt to exert control or even question my most recent moves, decisions, or choice of lip gloss.
I knew it was time to find out what was going on.
FOUR
I stayed up half the night Sunday, surfing the Net. No, actually, I was ransacking it. If I didn’t find some kind of answer by morning, I was going to be bald.
I bit the bullet and started with Alzheimer’s. The minute it crossed my mind I went into major denial, but it was the only thing I could think of that might even remotely explain the changes in my mother’s behavior. After scanning one Web site, I was sure I was on the wrong track.
Alzheimer’s involves a loss of memory. Mother was losing words and being somewhat absentminded, but she didn’t seem completely forgetful. The things she was doing were deliberate—like not using the microwave because she couldn’t stand the noise and being outright rude to people on the phone instead of just coldly brusque. And there was nothing under Alzheimer’s disease about slurring words—or showing up at the front door in your underwear and casually exposing yourself to the neighborhood. This whole thing with Mother was about language and behavior—and just plain judgment.
I hate to admit it, I thought, but maybe Max is right. Maybe it is a bad case of depression.
There was a vague sense of relief, but even as I tried to get a few hours’ sleep and then attempted to move into my dissertation compartment for a possible meeting with Nigel, I couldn’t shake the nagging thought that there was something more fundamentally wrong with my mother than the blues.
My biggest clue was the abyss that had formed itself between us. I’d always complained about the distance she kept from me emotionally. We’d never been affectionate with each other—I couldn’t imagine anything more phony. And we’d certainly never “bonded”—a word I disdained anyway. But in the past when we’d been together, she had always focused her attention on me. Sure, she was usually critical, but at least she saw me. There had been a connection, even if it made me want to scream.
Right now there was no connection at all. Throughout my hike from Escondido Village to Sloan Monday morning, I couldn’t fix Nigel and the new thesis proposal in my head. All I could picture was the look on my mother’s face when I left the night before. She was sitting in her study reading when I finished the supper dishes and went in to say good-bye. She looked up at me from the book in her lap, and I fought not to gasp. For a moment, the vibrant intelligence that had always given her eyes life was gone. Her face looked absolutely flat.
The moment had passed then, but it wouldn’t leave me alone now. And it had to. I had Nigel’s face to worry about.
He wasn’t in his office yet when I got there, so I put my new proposal in his box and tried to jam myself into the teaching-class compartment. Nothing doing. Tabitha showed up about five minutes after I got back to my desk. There was evidence in the puffed-up slits that she’d been bawling her eyes out. However, crying hadn’t slowed down her speech patterns any.
“Hi, Ms. McGavock,” she said. “I know I don’t have an appointment, so if you have other stuff you have to do right now I can come back later, but I thought I’d try to catch you before you got too busy because I really need to talk to you.”
“Sure,” I said, giving the stack of yet-to-be-looked-at homework papers only one pointed glance. “What’s up?”
“I’m just—” The gangly arms flapped as if the poor kid were trying to take flight. I motioned toward
the chair.
“The tutoring’s not helping?” I said as she skated her way over.
“Oh, no, I think it is. You’ve been so supportive and everything and I think I’m getting the problems better—but I thought if I could just, like, talk to you about this other thing, it might help me concentrate better because I’m just really freaked out.”
“I can see that,” I said dryly.
I opened a drawer and pulled out a purse-size package of Kleenex, which she accepted gratefully. She managed to get a tissue out and blew her nose.
What am I now, a guidance counselor? I thought. Don’t they have people with master’s degrees to handle this kind of stuff?
“Did you try what I suggested?” I said. “Did you find a study carrel in the library?”
She nodded, fingers still pinching the Kleenex over her nostrils.
“Didn’t help, huh?”
“Oh, yeah, it did! Like I said, you’re so good at all this. That’s not the problem. The problem is, I’m so homesick!”
I groaned inwardly. Maybe if I looked at my watch about twenty times she’d get the hint that I did not want to play Mommy this morning. I restrained myself and nodded. Active listening, my mother had always called it.
“I knew I’d be a little bit homesick. You know, miss my parents and my brother and my dog and all my friends and some of my teachers—”
“Uh-huh.”
“But I thought I’d make friends here and be over it by now. I mean, it’s, like, October.”
“It is October,” I said.
“But there’s nobody here like me. I’m not expecting people to be my clones or anything, but everybody here is so into dating and partying and competing for grades, and I’m not—so—”
In my experience those had been the usual reasons for going to college, but I kept nodding. If I said anything else, the girl was likely to get hysterical.
“So, like, this whole weekend, I studied in my room and I ate all my meals by myself and everybody else was out doing—well, I don’t know what they were doing—and then yesterday in church I was praying about it and suddenly I just started crying and I couldn’t stop. I haven’t stopped since. I slept in the lounge last night so my roommate wouldn’t hear me.”
