Women Drinking Benedictine

by Sharon Dilworth

  THE FAMILY BLAMED ME WHEN MY mother tried to kayak over Tahquamenon Falls last spring. It was a stupid and dangerous stunt, and they thought that I had somehow encouraged her to attempt the fifty-foot drop. The waterfall, the second largest east of the Mississippi, is in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula outside a town called Paradise. My mother knew the area from books she read about Michigan rivers and campgrounds and was well aware that, at maximum flow, fifty thousand gallons of the Tahquamenon River roar over the precipice every second. It was only the first day of April, but the temperature was close to fifty degrees when she unloaded her plaid-bottomed kayak and put off just above the tongue of the river. The root-beer-colored water, overflowing and cold, tumbled onto land as it made its way out to Whitefish Bay in Lake Superior, and my sisters, Nina and Megan, were convinced that I had helped plan my mother’s so-called suicide run.

  “You might just as well have given her a bottle of Elavil or locked her in the garage with the car running,” Megan said to me over the phone after the police had called to inform her of the “accident.”

  I told her I was in a hospital and couldn’t hear her.

  “Tied the noose around her neck,” Megan yelled. “Put her head in the oven and held it there.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “Don’t I?” Megan shouted. I held the phone away from my ear as if to solicit complaints, but the hospital was empty of people that afternoon.

  “No. You really don’t,” I said, then hesitated, since there was no sense denying that I had spent the last few days vacationing with my mother in the Upper Peninsula. We had left Detroit early Wednesday morning full of plans for a spring camping trip. My mother insisted on bringing her kayak even though a late March storm had recently dumped ten inches of snow over the entire state. This was nothing unusual—no reason to panic. My mother had been taking her kayak with her ever since those first lessons in the pool at Schoolcraft Community College two years ago. Since then she had conquered local rivers, even won a trophy for her Indian rollovers in rapid water. We had tied the awkwardly shaped kayak to the roof and had driven slowly in traffic around Detroit. The highway cleared as we got farther north, and we would have forgotten all about the kayak except for the bow, which hung over the windshield casting elongated, almost animal-like shadows on the road in front of us.

  “You helped her plan this, and then you sat back and watched her do it.” Megan was starting to repeat herself. “We’re talking about the woman who gave you life, the woman who brought you into the world.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic, Megan.” I could see my mother’s room from where I stood. She was asleep. They had not sedated her. She was simply exhausted. The nurse had already assured me that her concussion was minor, and except for a few signs of frostbite near both big toes, she was fine.

  “The police told me that no one has ever made it over the Falls.” Megan was at work. She’s an environmental engineer for General Motors in suburban Detroit. She sometimes wears a hard hat and drives a golf cart when she goes out to new sites. The plant was loud, and Megan often comes home hoarse from shouting over the roar of machinery. Things were quiet on her end of the line that day, but she was furious with me, so she was yelling.

  “They said no one tries it,” I said. “It’s illegal,” I said. “There are signs everywhere warning you that you’ll be arrested if you try it.”

  “So what was wrong with Mom? Couldn’t she see the signs?”

  “That’s why she did it,” I explained. “Because she knew it was illegal. She wanted to be the first.” A siren started up outside. I twisted the phone cord in my fingers and pulled the receiver to the window. A few seconds later the noise subsided. Perhaps a false alarm.

  “They would have found her body out in Lake Superior,” Megan said. Her voice caught and I could tell she was crying. I told her I was sorry.

  “There are just so many times when I can’t believe that you’re my sister,” Megan said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.” Megan and I are only a year apart, but we have never been as close as we pretend to be.

  A few minutes later we hung up. Megan and my younger sister, Nina, were leaving as soon as they could. I had lost my wallet months before and had never bothered to replace anything. Since I had no I.D., the police wouldn’t believe I was related to my mother. They didn’t think she was quite right in the head and wanted someone from the family to be with her.

  My mother was still in shock when the DNR guys dragged her from the river. I think she rolled over on purpose just as their motorboat approached the kayak. She would never have allowed them to tow her in to shore with that odd-colored rope they threw her. She must have hit her head on a rock, maybe on the bottom of the kayak, but she quit fighting and they pulled her to the far shore. The thick-planked cedar footbridge was wet with the turbulent spring waters, and it took me some time to cross over. I knew they could see me. The Day-Glo colors of my wind-breaker were visible within at least a three-mile radius—probably more in the thin, gray branches of the new Michigan spring.

  Instead of taking her to the local hospital, they transported her across the Mackinac Bridge to Petosky. I think they thought she was really crazy and wanted her to be as close to home as possible. Since I had no license, the police made me leave my car in the parking lot and ride downstate in the ambulance.

  “Why not?” I asked when the driver refused to let me sit with my mother.

  “You might do something stupid,” he told me. “I can’t keep an eye on you both.” The guy held the steering wheel tightly, as if his grip was keeping us on the road.

  “I’m not going to do anything,” I promised. “I just want to sit back there so she won’t be alone.” I didn’t want her to be frightened if she came out of shock while we were still in the ambulance.

  “She doesn’t seem to be the kind of person who scares easily,” he told me. “They caught her trying to kayak over the falls. Even the Indians got out and walked around when they heard the sound of rushing water.”

  I stared out the window at the rainclouds the spring winds were moving in. The storm caught us as we were crossing the Mackinac Bridge. White lightning darted over Lake Michigan while the sky above Lake Huron stayed bright with the disappearing sun.

  And though I wanted to believe that my mother would be scared if she woke up in the back of an ambulance, I knew the driver was right. My mother was not this kind of person. I don’t know when or why she lost her fears. I don’t think it happened all at once. Maybe she watched too much television. She spent so many nights alone in that four-bedroom house in suburban Detroit. After my sisters and I went off to college, my father continued to travel on business during the week and left her alone. The darkness and silence of those empty rooms made her turn to the television for company. She hated sitcoms, and made-for-television-movies bored her. The endings were too predictable, she said, the people too beautiful. One night, flipping through the channels on the remote control, she found the twenty-four-hour sports channel and started watching the Pistons. A hometown team: She got hooked. She loved the emotions of the players, their excitement on the court and in the locker room during the postgame interviews. She was impressed by the players’ tears and gratitude as night after night they thanked their mothers, their coaches, their wives, their gods. At first I thought she felt maternal about these young guys, but gradually I came to understand that she didn’t want to be their mothers—she wanted to be one of them.

  “Your mother likes sports,” my father told me a few months before he died. He was in Beaumont Hospital, three days out of intensive care, and these were not the kinds of things I wanted him to concentrate on. The painkillers made him spacey, and he had to struggle to put together a complete sentence.

  “I certainly hope they have a good season,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” I asked. The hospital room was warm. I was wearing my winter coat, and my skin, underneath the thick wool, was p
rickly and uncomfortable. But there was no place to put it except on the bed, which seemed rude, so I kept it on.

  “The Pistons,” my father said. “For your mother’s sake, I hope the Pistons have a good year.”

  “Really?” I asked and stared out the window at the skeleton structure of the new hospital wing. The construction workers had finished the top floor. The undecorated Christmas tree stood at the very edge of the building.

  “Yes,” my father nodded. “I want her to be happy.” He did not say after he was dead and I’m not sure that that’s what he meant, but I nodded to show him I understood and then he asked me to go to the gift shop and find something for him to read. He was bored, and it was obvious to the family—and probably to the doctors and nurses—that my father saw his days in the hospital not as a time of recuperation but as a time of vacation. He saw them as days when he could catch up on his reading and take long afternoon naps whenever he pleased. He was ignoring his illness just as he had always ignored his health.

  This was my father’s second heart attack. The doctor had already warned the family that he was not a cat—he could not have another heart attack and live. I wanted to talk to him about the family, to talk about my mother, about what he thought she should do if he died. There was the house, the two cars, the property up north, all those bills, but when I came back upstairs with a bagful of paperbacks—some thrillers, which he hated, some mysteries, which he had probably already read—he started in again about my mother and the Pistons.

  “You should ask her about the team. Percentage shots, rebounding records, previous teams. She knows all those kinds of things.” He sat up and sorted through the stack of books, obviously unhappy with my choices.

  “What if I don’t care?” I asked. “What if I just don’t care about basketball?”

  “We’re not talking about you,” he said and handed me back half the stack. “This is about your mother. Not about you.” His hair was almost all gray that afternoon. I remembered he once told me he wanted me to remember him as a younger man, but now even after I look at photographs of him, I can’t remember him without the gray streaks in his hair. “Ask her about the postseason games last year. She watched every game.”

  I was not living in Detroit at the time and had no idea how important the Pistons or their season would become for my mother. I did not know then that my father would come home from the hospital seemingly healthy, with plans for a new diet and exercise program, only to die in his sleep one night. My mother was right beside him and didn’t realize he was dead until she reached across the bed to turn him over. She thought she heard him snoring, but it was morning and he was gone. That spring we were all glad that my mother was interested in basketball. The Pistons kept her occupied and gave us something else to talk about. We thought she’d gradually come to accept my father’s death, and there seemed nothing wrong with her obsession with basketball. And that June when the Pistons lost to the Lakers in the seventh game overtime, Isaiah Thomas limping down the court with a swollen ankle, the buzzer sounding way too early, my sisters and I cried with her.

  My mother and I hadn’t slept much during our camping trip. The nights were cold, and our sleeping bags got soaked with the early dew long before we were ready to get up.

  I went into her hospital room and stretched out in the chair beside her bed, anxious for a few hours’ sleep. I wanted to be alert when Nina and Megan arrived.

  A nurse shook me awake just as I was drifting off.

  “That’s my mother,” I said, hoping she would close the blinds and leave me alone. There was no sun, but the gray light made me cold. I was still wearing the clothes from that morning, and I was chilled. The nurse explained that it was nap time for the hospital—all visitors were to leave. I didn’t think I would be disturbing this activity, but she refused my request to stay.

  “There’s a reception area downstairs,” she said, adjusting the blankets around the foot of my mother’s bed. “They serve coffee all afternoon.”

  I took my time putting on my coat, and that’s when I saw my mother’s wet suit in the trash can. The sleek, black material was already dry, and I held it up for the nurse. “What’s this doing here?” I asked. She shrugged and said she had no idea.

  “This is her lucky suit,” I explained. “The one she’s worn from the beginning. She’d never forgive you for throwing it out.” I tried several times to roll the suit into a ball, but the rubbery material, used to the shape of my mother’s body, would not let me reduce its size. I spread it out on the nightstand, where the arms stretched over the corners of the thin wood dresser, the legs barely touching the floor.

  The year after my father’s death was hard for everyone. Prompted by a rush of Megan’s phone calls, all warning that my mother was losing her mind, I went over to the house one Saturday afternoon in late September to have a talk with her. “Find out what she’s doing,” Megan directed. “I think we should know what she’s up to.”

  “What makes you think she’ll talk to me?”

  “She probably won’t,” Megan said. “But it’s worth a try.” Megan believed my mother was going crazy with a grief that never seemed to lessen.

  I found my mother sitting in the living room eating pretzel sticks and sipping red wine. The radio was turned up. The music prevented her from hearing the back door slam shut when I let myself in. I stood in the kitchen door and watched. She was involved in some sort of conversation with the love seat. She turned her head toward the armchair and smiled. Someone was sitting over there as well. She laughed and made a large circle with her free hand as if illustrating a point. Her lips were painted rose red, the shade she wore when she went out at night. She held the wineglass up to her lips and drew her tongue around the rim. It was a flirtatious movement, and even in her navy blue sweatsuit she looked sexy and pleased with her imaginary cocktail party.

  I wasn’t surprised to find my mother drinking so early in the morning. I didn’t think it meant that Megan and Nina were right, that she was having some sort of nervous breakdown. But I saw as clearly as I ever had the depth of my mother’s loneliness. I saw her desperation for company—her longing to be around interesting people—people who were interested in her life and the things she had to say. I had no idea who was at her party, though I hoped my father was there and that they were enjoying talking to each other again. If he wasn’t there, then I hoped it was someone intelligent, someone sensitive, who would convince my mother that she was happy—that she had had and was still having a good life.

  “I’m drinking because I’m frustrated,” she told me later that day even though I hadn’t said anything about the wine.

  “I’m bored. Just bored out of my skull,” she continued. “It’s so frustrating to be so bored.” I told her she didn’t have to account for her actions—that wasn’t why I was there—though I suppose it was exactly why I was there.

  We talked about what she might do besides drink. The world’s largest flea market was at the Pontiac Silverdome that weekend. Mrs. Henshaw, the neighbor from across the street, had been trying to get my mother over for some authentic Icelandic cooking since her return from an around-the-world cruise.

  “You should get involved in something,” I told her because, back then, I was sure that being with other people would keep her from being so lonely. I suggested volunteer work or maybe working in one of the several retail shops in the area. I imagined her making friends, having them over for tea, planting tulip bulbs when the ground was moist with spring rain.

  “I feel like I’m living out the epilogue of my own life,” my mother told me. “I’ve had my husband. I’ve had my kids. There’s nothing left for me to do.”

  “You’re not that old. It’s ridiculous to talk this way.”

  “I’m tired of looking backward,” she said. “Tired of remembering everything. But I can’t see anything ahead. I don’t see much changing in my future.” The wine filled her body with black shadows that I could not get rid of so easily.
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  “Winter’s almost here,” I said. “And then it will be spring.” The day was gray, as it always is in Detroit in October. The trees had lost most of their leaves, their thin bare branches melted into the thick cloud cover. I searched for things I could promise her. “Little Barry will be walking soon. Think what a terror he’s going to be once he starts getting around on his own.” Barry was Megan’s youngest son, ten months old. My mother used to call him her dream child because he was so beautiful.

  “Maybe,” my mother drifted away from the conversation.

  She was staring out the window and nodding as if she were listening to me, though her thoughts were clearly somewhere else. She might have been thinking about her abandoned cocktail party. Outside two squirrels ran in circles around the thick pole holding the birdhouse. Their hyper, energetic behavior kept the birds away, but I suspected my mother threw birdseed on the ground specifically for the squirrels.

  “I’ve already had my kids,” she said when she finally drifted back into the conversation.

  “I know that,” I told her. “All I’m saying is that you have grandkids who love you. They’re a part of your future.”

  “I spent all those years raising my own kids. I don’t think I want to do it again.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” I said. “Megan’s going to do all the work. She’ll take the responsibility for her own kids. You can just sit back and enjoy them.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, and I knew that she wasn’t denying her grandchildren or their growing up. She was denying something else, something she wasn’t articulating just yet. I poured more wine into each of our glasses, and she drifted back into her daydreams. I turned on the radio and started cleaning up the kitchen. I fried up two turkey sausages, and around noon we ate them with celery sticks and finished off the jug of wine. Sometime that afternoon we decided that a long walk around the neighborhood would lift our spirits.