Lying with the Dead

by Michael Mewshaw

  “You’re probably too young to be familiar with the procedure,” he tells me. “What you do is drop your trousers and bend over the examining table. In goes the glove, and the moving finger having rooted around should promptly move on. But my doctor has offices at a teaching hospital, and in his plummiest bedside manner he said, ‘Hope you don’t mind, but our urology students are making the rounds today. They’d like to observe.’ What he meant was they’d like to do more than observe. He pulled his finger from my bum, and in wriggles one student’s, then another and another.”

  This time, Mal guffaws. Fortunately there’s no wine in his mouth. I suspect that they’re both brewing to ask about my greatest embarrassment. On this score I have a rabid aversion to sharing. It’s nobody’s business, my hoard of childhood humiliations. My father’s death, my jailbird brother, my crippled sister, my brutal mother who bitch-slapped me into manhood, I hold them as close to the vest as a bluffing cardsharp holds his hand.

  I sip the wine, followed by a glass of water. I finish my salad, then my pasta, and mop the plate clean with bread. By the ceremonial gravity of my gestures I cast myself in a classical mode, a man who doesn’t welcome personal disclosures. Refusing coffee, not tarrying to watch which one of them picks up the check, I step outside La Gaffe and into blinding sunlight. Down on Flask Walk in the tobacco-scented warmth of Keith Fawkes’s bookshop, I buy a used copy of the Oresteia.

  Before I had Hampstead or my house and its conservatory and garden, books were my refuge, words my first love and last line of defense. Mom claims this came from her side of the family—a clutch of long-winded, loudmouthed, poetry-spouting Irish. I wouldn’t know. My encounters with my relatives tended to be brief and bruising, and I regarded reading as a way of avoiding them and everything else that pained me. But I don’t see myself sinking blissfully into this Penguin paperback. It’s not simply because it’s freighted with scholarly footnotes, a glossary of Greek vocabulary, and a ninety-page introduction. From college I remember my deep unease at Aeschylus, my shock of recognition at the House of Atreus. Too close to home, too close to home, I had thought, and tried to shut the tragedy from my mind even as I mechanically kept turning the pages.

  Yet now what choice do I have? No matter the terms of the contract Mal manages to negotiate, I can’t imagine turning down the part. As Ian put it, it’s the role of a lifetime, the one I was born to play.

  Candy

  Days when I take Mom Communion—that would be every Sunday and holy day of obligation—I attend Mass carrying what’s called a pyx. It’s round and gold-plated, about the size of a pillbox, and has room in it for half a dozen Hosts. In our parish you have to sit in a front pew and really push forward if you hope to receive the sacrament from a priest. Lots of times I wind up with a layperson, a Eucharistic minister, no different from me, and I whisper, “Two please,” like I’m at Dunkin’ Donuts.

  I hold out the pyx in the palm of my left hand, its lid open so there’s no mistaking where I mean for one wafer to go. The second goes in my mouth. These Eucharistic ministers, they’re trained to deal with communicants carrying pyxes. Still, some of them get flustered and they’ll forget to say, “The Body of Christ.” Or else they’ll mumble, “The Body of Christ,” when they put a Host in the pyx, but not when they put one on my tongue. I don’t suppose it makes much difference.

  I tuck the pyx into a zippered compartment in my purse, completely separate from the mess of my keys, credit cards, and loose change. For the rest of the Mass, I’m hyper-alert to it on my lap. When the pastor taught me the prayers for the Communion of the Sick, he emphasized—as if he needed to!—the solemnity of what I was doing. He discouraged me from chatting with friends after church or stopping along the highway to shop or fill the car with gas. “Be mindful,” he said, “that you’re more than a mere delivery boy.” Blushing, he changed that to “delivery girl” and added, “Candy, you’re as close to having priestly powers as a woman is ever privileged to come.”

  True enough. With a consecrated Host in the womblike safety of my purse, I feel, I don’t know, somehow nearer to God than I do when I have Him in my mouth slowly melting. Strange.

  Another oddity, this one even stranger, is that as I leave church, driving through the traffic jam on the parking lot, petrified I’ll have a crash and drop the Host, I often find myself thinking about Dad, dead now all these decades. Maybe because his life was a car wreck, or maybe because I’m tense at bringing Mom Communion, I remember what I used to bring him and the tension I felt then.

  “Candy, do your daughterly duty,” he’d holler from the armchair where he sprawled in front of the TV.

  This was my signal to sprint to the kitchen, snatch a bottle of beer from the fridge, pry off the cap, grab a glass and race back to the living room. Dad studied the second hand on his wristwatch and timed me like he did horses at the track. While I tipped the glass as he had taught me to do so the head didn’t foam up too high or, God forbid, spill over, he tapped his foot. When I did it the way he wanted, it made me feel like I was his favorite.

  If I finished the job in less than thirty seconds, he let me have the first cold, bitter sip. I never cared for the taste of beer. But I liked pleasing him, and when he was in a good mood and had had a run of luck that day with the horses or cards or numbers, he lifted me onto his lap, lit a cigarette, and blew smoke rings in my face. The feel of the smoke pouring back over my forehead and through my hair was like what I imagined a lover’s caress would be. Remembering that gives me shivers. Part pleasure, part something else.

  With Dad there was always that “something else,” that downside that Mom complained made him hell to live with, then worse hell to live without. I don’t think she ever minded covering for him, even lying for him, telling the neighbors he worked the night shift at the Census Bureau, and that’s why he came and went at odd hours. But she never tried to fool me that he was anything except a full-time gambler. She had a soft spot for bad boys, and he was the worst.

  She never asked me to pray for him to reform. That was just my instinct. Where another person might find strength in a bottle, I naturally depended on God. I still do. Of course, He doesn’t always answer our petitions like we expect. Once Dad was dead, I was stricken with worry and wondered whether I had sent the wrong signal with my offered-up Masses and Communions. I prayed that he’d become a better man, not that he’d fold his cards for good.

  This particular Sunday morning in January, when I leave church and head for Mom’s, a hard freeze has glazed the windshield of my Honda with what look like big white ferns. While I hunch at the steering wheel waiting for the defroster to work, sunlight stings my eyes. The air is almost too cold to breathe. At least it’s not sleeting or snowing. In the western corner of the state, out in Garrett County, Marylanders may know how to drive in foul weather, but here, close to the Chesapeake Bay, not a man, woman, or child doesn’t lose all common sense when the roads turn slick.

  Because of my bad leg I’m leery of walking on ice, and in the car I drive defensively. Still, ever since I caught polio as a kid, winter has been my favorite season because I get to wear boots and never draw a second glance. Back when girls were forbidden to show up for school or church in slacks, I was shy about my limp and hated wearing dresses and having people stare at my stringy calf. Nowadays I have a dozen pairs of boots that I value mostly for their camouflage. Seeing me hobble, people probably guess I twisted an ankle. Nobody pegs me as a poster girl for the March of Dimes.

  In Mom’s neighborhood, the frost has melted everywhere except in the shady places. Where the sun shines, the brown grass and leafless shrubs look dead. Back in the shadows every blade and branch looks starchy with life.

  The scene’s jumbled, and so are my emotions. Whenever I go home, I feel mixed up and can’t tell whether I’m sick to my stomach because I’m stressed out or because I’m straining so hard to believe that my childhood wasn’t all bad. I don’t want to look at my life in stark black or white. I’d
like to see Mom in shades of gray, too, but that’s not easy. She doesn’t really give you a choice.

  Her thirty-year-old Chevy Nova sits in the driveway, like a hillbilly lawn ornament. The whole neighborhood used to be like that—a haven for white trash, a subdivision of folks who hated blacks and fled Washington, D.C. All during my childhood every house on the block seemed to have car or motorcycle parts spread over the front yard. But when blacks started moving to the suburbs, the area actually improved and now Mom’s Nova is a last reminder of the way it used to be.

  She quit driving after she had an accident on Ritchie Highway. Witnesses said she sailed through a red light and T-boned a VW van. Mom denied this and accepted no blame. She simply couldn’t account for the damage to her car or how the van wound up turned turtle in a ditch.

  “All I know,” she swore to me, “is I woke up with a bump on my forehead and watched these little yellow people crawl out of the VW, like ETs from a spaceship that crash-landed. I thought I was dead or having a dream. I couldn’t understand how these aliens got to be so shriveled and yellow. Then the ambulance came, and they gave me smelling salts and told me I hit a van full of Vietnamese. There must have been a dozen of them, all crying and caterwauling and pointing at me. It was awful.”

  For Mom the worst part was that the Washington Post published her age, then seventy-seven, for everybody in the Metro area to gloat over. She parked the Nova for good and depended on me to deliver her groceries and prescriptions. Except for doctors’ appointments every few months, she never leaves the house now.

  Eventually the car battery died, the tires went flat, and the door locks rusted shut. Still, Mom won’t have it towed away. She considers the broken-down Chevy a kind of scarecrow against burglary. She’s convinced that thieves, seeing it in the driveway, will steer clear.

  Ever since integration, she’s regarded herself as under siege. But she would never sell out and move. She swears she won’t give “them” the satisfaction. When Asians and Hispanics arrived hard on the heels of the blacks, she wouldn’t give them the time of day either. She locked her doors, drew her curtains, and never acknowledged that her new neighbors were better than the riffraff they replaced. Instead of installing an alarm, she pinned holy cards over every window in the house—as if the Lord conspires in her racism.

  Lawrence Leonard, my boss and best friend for the past twenty years, and my lover since his wife died, finds this and most of Mom’s foibles knee-slappingly funny. He can’t accept that she’s not a comedian and that I have no stomach for playing her straight man. Dentists aren’t famous for a sense of humor, but Lawrence has a big heart and a kindly knack of looking on the bright side and laughing—whereas I stew and steam, then break down and cry.

  Of course, Lawrence doesn’t have to deal with her day to day. After one ugly run-in, he backed off big time. He’s learned that contact with Mom can be like tangling with a loose live wire.

  A couple of years back, Lawrence ran a program on his computer and cranked out a plan to save Mom a chunk of money by refinancing her house. But when we sat down with her to go over the numbers, she behaved like we were aluminum siding salesmen out to cheat her. She hunched like a cat that’s been backed into a corner. My brother Quinn describes her in this state as having her ass up on her shoulder blades.

  “Why don’t you two mind your own damned business,” she snarled.

  “Just trying to help.” Lawrence spoke in a calm, reassuring voice like he does to root canal patients.

  “I ever need your help,” she said, “I’ll ask for it. Don’t hold your breath.”

  Lawrence and I left, and I couldn’t speak until we were on the road to his house. Then I let go, gushing tears and apologizing and explaining that it had been this way all my life. Even now with Mom whittled down by age and listing to one side, she strikes terror in my heart. “She’s lost the strength to haul off and slap me,” I told Lawrence. “But she’s got a mouth on her that’s as bad as a fist.”

  “She hit you?” he asked. Stopping on the side of the road, he gathered me in his arms. “In the face?”

  “She used to.”

  “That’s awful. Jesus, baby, you should have told me.”

  “Well, over the years as it went from child abuse to adult abuse, it humiliated me more than it hurt.”

  “Why did you put up with it?”

  That’s a question I couldn’t answer. Not on the side of the road with trucks rocketing past. Not unless I let Lawrence in on a whole raft of family secrets that I was afraid would chase him away.

  Luckily, he filled the silence with sympathy, then with suggestions about how to cope with Mom and at the same time protect myself. On second thought, he said, it didn’t make sense to refinance her house. She should sell it and plow the equity into a unit in an assisted living community. Then as if solving the last practical problem, he said that as soon as Mom was settled in a comfortable situation, the two of us should retire and marry and move to North Carolina, where he owned a condo on a golf course.

  My reaction … my reaction was to burst out sobbing again. This was what I wanted, what I had been praying for since Lawrence’s wife died. No, much longer than that—ever since I was a girl and yearned for someone to love me. But I went on blubbering because I knew it was impossible. Mom would never go to assisted living. And as for Lawrence’s idea that we have her declared incompetent and commit her against her will, that would cause the kind of vicious, soul-scarring fight that’s my family’s signature, the brand burned into our flesh.

  With my shoulder I wing open the door of the Honda, lift out my bad leg, and balance on my good one. After reaching back for my purse with the precious pyx inside it, I teeter there, collecting myself. Christ is tucked next to my heart. I need to focus on that. I’m here to bring Mom Communion, not wallow in self-pity.

  I used to worry I’d show up one Sunday morning and find her dead in her bed or crumpled on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. But that fear’s been replaced by one that she’ll never die.

  I’m sure I’ll be punished for thinking this. I’ll spend centuries in purgatory paying for my sins. But I’m fifty-five years old and stuck with a mother who never loved me, who hates Lawrence, and won’t set us free. It’s time for Mom to die. I just don’t want to be the one to kill her. I’m convinced she’s been hinting at it for months. But I’ll be damned if I’ll do it.

  I slam the car door, press the chirping gizmo on the key lock, and clomp in my boots up the sidewalk to the house. A gray-shingled Cape Cod like the others on the block, it looks much too small. How did the four of us ever fit in here? How could these warped wooden walls contain all that chaos? I almost expect there to be a plaque out front with a skull and crossbones. Instead, there are rosebushes and azaleas, dead in this season. And in back, where there was once a forest, there’s a fringe of trees. The bare upper branches thrash like witches’ brooms at the sky.

  Crowded as it was for Dad, Mom, Maury, and me, and later when it was just Mom, Quinn, and me, the house is now more than Mom needs and more than she can take care of. To save her the hard climb upstairs to her bedroom, Quinn has offered to pay to make over the ground floor. But whenever I mention that she’d be better off sleeping in the dining room and having a closet rebuilt as a bathroom, Mom refuses.

  That’ll be the motto on her tombstone: I refuse. She refuses to quit smoking. “Let ’em kill me if they will,” she says. She refuses to use a walker. “I’m old, not crippled.” She won’t wear Depends. Won’t wear her hearing aid. “It’s like plugging a Mexican band into my head.” Won’t have a cleaning girl. Won’t eat Meals on Wheels. Won’t cook for herself and won’t take any nourishment except Ensure, candy, and ice cream. Won’t do a damn thing any doctor, lawyer, priest, social worker, therapist, or her own children recommend. She means to die as she has lived—strictly on her own terms. To hell with everybody else.

  And here I am bringing her Communion. I don’t know why I bother. I don’t know why s
he bothers! She hasn’t set foot in church in years. She begs off with the excuse that she can’t make it through Mass without having to pee two or three times. She claims she hates disturbing the congregation, crawling in and out of the pew. But I know better. I know she can’t abide the new liturgy, now over fifty years old—the Mass in English, the singing and guitar strumming and tambourines, the handshaking and wishing your neighbor peace, the sweet upbeat homilies that she calls omelets. She misses fire-and-brimstone sermons. She’d phone in her confession if they’d let her. Grudgingly she accepts a monthly visit from a Filipino priest she accuses of being a homo, and just as grudgingly she depends on me to deliver Communion.

  I knock at the door in the secret code she insists on. Three rapid knocks, a pause, and another rap. I start off lightly tapping my knuckles, but since Mom’s hard of hearing, I end up pounding the wood with the heel of my hand.

  At last she answers, but doesn’t open the door. “I feel awful,” she whispers in a ghostly voice. “It’s one of my spells”—which is how she refers to what have been diagnosed as panic attacks. “I’m going to take a pill and go back to bed.”

  “You don’t want a Xanax, Mom. Not at ten in the morning. You’ll feel better after Communion.”

  “I’m not up to it, Candy. Leave it out there and I’ll get it later.”

  “Leave it where? In the mailbox? On the doorstep?” My voice rises in outrage. “I’ll do no such thing with the Body and Blood of Christ.”

  The security chain jangles, the dead bolt unclicks, and the door creaks open an inch, like she intends to stick her tongue through the crack. Instead, her hand drops from the knob and the door swings wide and she stands there small as a rag doll, her face red from crying. Or is it from a steely refusal to cry? Her eyes are mismatched, and not just because her glasses have lenses of drastically different strengths. She has a condition called heterochronica iridium—one blue eye, the other brown.