Last Rights

by Lynne Hugo

  “I’m sorry to be disagreeing with you,” she said, only the edge of her voice blurred with coyness. “I just can’t see it. The applications are expensive, you know. I think she should apply to Columbia early decision, and if she gets in, that will save the time and money that would go into other applications.”

  “Well, I hate to admit it, but I do see your point. Ruth, what do you think? Could you settle for Columbia?” He had played my mother the way she played her flute.

  “I think so, if that’s what Mother thinks is best.”

  And so it was settled. Before Roger came home for Christmas, bam, I’d applied and been accepted to Columbia, two and a half hours to Grand Central Station by the New York, New Haven and Pennsylvania Railroad, with one change of train in New Haven. With another bam, I was awash with ambivalence. Who would take care of Mother? Who would take care of me?

  Ambivalence became as pervasive a theme for my senior year as Thanks for the Memories was for the senior prom, something else I had thought I wanted desperately. At least I’d wanted it desperately until I began talking to Suzanne Kline, who was in my Spanish IV class and who I’d begun sitting next to in the cafeteria at lunch at Mr. VanFrank’s suggestion; she, too, was going to Columbia. Suzanne was some thirty pounds overweight, which, I thought, was her excuse for not being invited to the prom, but as I got to know her, I was captivated by her confidence and rich, loamy laugh, which she laid over my shallow attempts at conversation like topsoil, in which anything—anyone—might grow.

  “The hell with the stupid prom,” she said. “Thanks for the Memories? No, thanks. High school guys have all the desirability of Howdy Doody and are just about as intelligent. I’d worry about myself if one of them wanted to take me.” This wasn’t a new light on an old problem—probably every gawky adolescent girl switches it on and then back off—but the strange thing was that I absolutely believed her. “Why don’t you come over to my house? We’ll look at all the stuff Columbia has sent us, and have a brownie orgy while we watch Perry Mason. I love that show. You can spend the night if you want.”

  I was not very good at having friends; there had been too much to hide. None had ever pursued me, either. Not that Suzanne pursued me, but she steadily invited me. She had eyes so dark brown they were nearly black and her hair was the same color, short and naturally curly, unlike the long, ironed blond hair that was the standard of beauty then. Suzanne didn’t care what the standard of beauty was, nor the standard of social success and by inviting me to her house invited me not to care, either. I was nearly ready for her.

  “Okay.” Then I warmed up, my emotions lagging behind whatever I said, as always. “Yes, that sounds great.” I hadn’t even asked Mother, who, it meant, would spend a weekend night alone, for which I knew I’d pay. But right then, I was feeling braver than anytime since I’d had Roger to lean on. Maybe things would be all right. After all, Roger had come home for Christmas and even if things were strained at first, he’d survived, and Mother had taken him back, so to speak. In the only brief privacy we’d had, no mention was made of what had happened between us, but he took my hand and said go for it. I knew exactly what he meant, and, I admit, what I was seeing did encourage me to take heart. I didn’t yet realize the cycles of disaster and hope, how they climb on the backs of black and white horses and gallop in circles around you, only one in front of your eyes at a time no matter which way you turn.

  Like most of my insights, the one I received from Suzanne, she of the hair so lustrous I took to brushing mine a hundred strokes a night, didn’t last. Ronny Turley, a sophomore barely a quarter inch taller than I and cursed with an enormous mouthful of braces, asked me to the prom. Was I in the least bit interested in Ronny? Even though he didn’t have acne, the particular plague of much of the male population in our school except for the haloed ones already going steady with cheerleaders, the answer was a resounding no. I had no idea why he asked me, either; we’d had no particular relationship other than that we sat at the same table in seventh period study hall. I didn’t have enough sense or pride to grasp what he meant when he said, “A senior girl shouldn’t miss her prom,” a sweet but insulting sentiment coming from a sophomore boy.

  “I’d love to, thanks,” I said, and immediately was sorry. The demon ambivalence again: I should take this chance to be normal, I thought, but Suzanne had made our evening sound so cozy, a different kind of normal. For the first time, I began to realize that I was a sucker for men, not because I liked them so much, but because they always seemed to have what I didn’t—themselves, and the freedom to leave. Maybe I thought if I glommed on to one, some of it would rub off on me.

  Suzanne was nice about it, which made it all the worse. “Of course, I understand,” she said. “You want to go to the prom, too, and that was your first choice….” Knowing that she really didn’t made me envy her clarity.

  “I guess,” I said, and miserably banged my locker door shut. “It’s not like I like Ronny or anything, though.”

  “Oh, God, I guess not,” she said and let loose a cascade of mirth like a waterfall. It would be years before I had times of knowing my own mind, when what I truly wanted shone like mica out of rock. Even now, I batter myself with indecision, the constant practice of trying to please Mother still obscuring my will long after she’s gone. Yet I can’t blame this one on Mother: I said yes to Ronny because I thought I should, I should want a real date before I graduated even if something else appealed to me more. It was that simple. And that miserable.

  Mother took the notion of my going to the prom with surprising alacrity, and for the first time, it occurred to me maybe she had wanted to go to her prom, and that, with her recent de facto defeat with regard to Roger’s school, she might be trying the tack of vicarious living. So much the better. I’d not yet lost the habit of hope for her. We went to the Goodwill store for a dress. “Look, this will fit you like a dream and it’s only got this small tear in the bottom of the skirt. Looks like someone caught it in a car door. There’s plenty of material—all it needs is to have the skirt removed, cut the tear out, reseam it and reattach it. I could do it myself if I had a machine.” Much as I had dreaded the notion of a gown from Goodwill, this one was beautiful. Floor-length and full skirted, it was fashioned of a gauzy, off-white material. Tiny pleats and gathers puckered across the bodice, making me look much more shapely than I was. When I tried it on, the magical sweep of the skirt made me feel nearly beautiful. This is the truth: I loved that dress. Cinderella lives, I thought, in one of my more dramatic fantasies, and considered the possibility that even though I would be with Ronny, someone else might notice me. I began to be glad I was going.

  But the night of the prom, the glow began to diminish before Ronny even knocked on the door, his mother waiting out in the car. When I slid the dress over my head, settled the skirt over my waist and hips and had Mother zip it up, the image in the mirror didn’t match what I remembered at all. The skirt no longer had its graceful sweep, but was much narrower. A neighbor with a sewing machine had been kind enough to repair the tear by re-cutting and reattaching the skirt, just as Mother had said could be done. I hadn’t realized how much the line and shape of the dress would be changed to something ordinary, or worse, drab. The light in Mother’s bedroom made it look grayish instead of warm, and my hair seemed garish in contrast. At the last minute, I applied lipstick with a heavy hand and dotted some on each cheek, rubbing it in vigorously in the hope I’d appear less ghostly.

  Trying to recapture the way I’d felt when I first put the dress on, I poufed the fabric out to the side and held it that way as I walked out to greet Ronny. Mother had let him in and was asking him questions that sounded coy and ridiculous to me, but he was responding like a trooper.

  “You look beautiful,” he said when he saw me, coached by his mother, I was sure. He handed me a corsage of white chrysanthemums, which, of course, was all wrong with the gown.

  “Doesn’t she, though! Goodness, these flowers are just lovely, a
ren’t they, Ruth?” Mother chimed, pinning the corsage to my chest. “Come here, you two.” I couldn’t imagine what was coming. “Give me your hands.” Each of us obediently extended a hand. She lowered her head. “Bless these children, oh, dear God. Light their path and instruct their hearts. Amen.” I was dying, right there and then. What must Ronny think?

  I wasn’t to know. He spoke, covering our mutual fluster. “We’d better go—my mom is waiting in the car.” Yet another humiliation. Here I was, a senior so pathetic that I was attending the prom with a sophomore whose mother was waiting in the car while my mother prayed over us. She completed the scene by etching a cross into the air as though she were the pope, as we headed for the door. I tried to regain some grace by holding my dress out to let it resemble its own royal memory.

  “Leave your skirt alone, Ruth, you look like you’re holding a hot air balloon under there,” Mother called after me. “And have a good time, you two.”

  11

  THAT WAS MY MOTHER’S LAST good year. Even at the time, when I was doing a verbal waltz with Mr. VanFrank and a jerky fox-trot with Ronny at that terrible prom, I had days, perhaps weeks, when my life approximated a normal one. Some part of me attributed it to Roger, as if he had intuitively divined not only what was best for him, but best for us all. And maybe he did. Even now, I really don’t know what was ever best for anyone. All I know is that in our own way, we each did the best we could.

  After I graduated, another summer without Roger rolled over Mother and me flattening us with its speed as it gathered momentum toward my departure. It seemed that every cent Mother let me keep out of my waitressing check went for college expenses, and college hadn’t even started. I worked on a broader smile and more casual chitchat, hoping to increase my tips. But most of our customers at the coffee shop were regulars who’d come between eleven and one, wiping the sweat sheen from their foreheads and calling, “Just the regular, Ruthie, extra ice in the tea, huh?” and I’d know if that meant tuna or chicken salad on white or rye or wheat, or a burger with or without cheese and fries. The tips didn’t vary more than the orders.

  I was still in the habit of examining strange men, wondering if one of them looked or acted like my father. Local merchants in sports shirts who came in for an early or late lunch. Occasionally I’d get an attorney in a white shirt and silk tie, his damp jacket folded over his arm. Once in a while some school administrators came in a group, and it was strange to hear them laughing and talking about their children. One Tuesday in July, Mr. VanFrank appeared at the counter while I was wiping crumbs from a recently vacated pie and coffee order. He wore an open-necked knit shirt that nearly matched his eyes, and I realized, when he gave me a smile so large that dozens of little folds appeared around them, how glad I was to see him. How kind he had been to me, how thoroughly encouraging. What would it have been like to be his daughter?

  “You’ll let me know how it goes at Columbia?” he asked as he paid for his iced coffee to go.

  “I promise.”

  “And don’t let anything get in your way. You have a right to this…education, Ruth.” He wanted to say something other than education.

  I didn’t know that I had any rights, but murmured an assent.

  As if I thought I did, though, I made another try at asking about my father on the excuse of paperwork for Columbia. “Uh, Mother…I need to know, I mean this form has blanks about medical history. Um, I know what your parents died of…but, ah, is there any information about the…other side?”

  She bore down on me with her eyes. “No,” she said, in a tone daring me to ask more.

  I took in another breath. “I’d like to know about him,” I said.

  “You were meant to be, that’s enough,” she answered. This time, though, she averted her eyes and left the kitchen. At the table, I wrote “not available” in half of the blanks, bottled rage leaking down my cheeks.

  MOTHER WASN’T GOING to make it easy to go. After agreeing to Columbia with Mr. VanFrank, she’d had little to say about it, but I’d tried to do my part by mentioning it rarely and asking for nothing. The unraised topic was part of the ongoing illusion of my senior year, trailing like a vine across the summer. Of course, it couldn’t go on forever. Some things had to be decided, like how I’d get there. I didn’t really want her to take me to school; I had an image of her blessing my roommate, or getting a bad feeling in the dorm and deciding I couldn’t stay. On the other hand, how could I manage a trunk, a suitcase and a portable typewriter on the train?

  “The traffic, Ruth. You made your bed, now lie in it. Don’t think I’ll be coming back and forth to get you.”

  Finally I called Suzanne. “Would it be possible for me to go with you and your parents? My mother’s been quite sick.” There was an obvious hesitation. I knew I was intruding, and that it would involve cramping them if they could fit me in at all.

  “What do you need to bring?” she asked when she called back. “My parents don’t think there’s room. I have a trunk, how about you?”

  “I only have a big suitcase and a typewriter. I’d really appreciate it,” I continued on hastily, deciding on the spot to jettison the trunk and make do. It was still better than going on the train. I’d put my heaviest things in the suitcase and get a ride there, then come home the first weekend and bring back lighter weight clothing by train.

  I’d not reckoned on Mother, puffy-eyed and pale, taking to her bed the morning they came to get me. She’d drawn the curtains and remained in her darkened room while I steeled myself, folding skirts and blouses over the heavy items I’d arranged on the bottom: an iron, an umbrella, shoes and the like. Before I was finished, I heard her in the bathroom. She passed me, holding a wet cloth to her head and using the wall to support herself.

  “Mother! Here, let me help you.”

  “Leave me alone. You’ll be gone in an hour and I’ll have to manage, no matter what. You knew that when you made your decision.”

  She wouldn’t kiss me goodbye when Suzanne knocked at the door, accompanied by her father, who carried my suitcase out and secured it to the car roof on a luggage rack I was afraid they’d rented. Her mother said, “We’re so sorry your mother is sick. Is there anything we can do for her?” One thing I’ve learned: there are good people everywhere and the trick is not to ask too much of any one of them. Then you’ll get by.

  As we pulled out of the driveway, I saw Mother’s bedroom curtain move. Her swollen face was like a wooden apparition there, marking my departure. I waved, but she was unmoving.

  12

  ALL THE WINDOWS WERE BARRED, even in the staff residence, which had been the old intake building before it was converted. I thought I had just taken movies with titles like The Snake Pit too seriously, but there they were: black, iron, at four-inch vertical intervals across the one window in the small grim room that would be mine for twelve weeks.

  I’d arrived by bus, straight from my freshman year at Columbia for a summer internship in the hospital’s Occupational Therapy department. Had Mr. VanFrank been clear that the summer internships were required for the first two years? Doubtless, he’d known it very well. I certainly hadn’t grasped it, but then again, I don’t suppose I would have wanted to.

  I’d lurched and staggered through the year, going home to be with Mother almost every weekend, when I didn’t study at all, but gave my time to her projects. My grades had been lower than ever in my life, and I felt as out of place with the other girls as I had in high school. Loneliness overtook me many times; my roommate, Mary, gave up on me quickly and joined a group that went out together regularly. After the first two weeks, they stopped inviting me.

  And now, this: Mother, tight-lipped, saying, “I should have expected you’d do as your brother has,” and knowing by that she meant “you betrayer,” as she withdrew behind the veils she lowered over her eyes to shut me out.

  “I’ll keep coming home weekends, Mother. I don’t have to work weekends,” I promised, even though now the trip involved
a bus back into the city, then another to Grand Central, then the two trains. I took on the guilt of it when I told her how desperately I wanted to come home to be with her, but secretly I was glad I wouldn’t be directly under her scrutiny all summer.

  “What do you think you know about mentally ill people anyway?” she demanded another time.

  Actually, I’d been reading a good deal, trying to match Mother’s behavior against symptom lists in an abnormal psychology book, praying I wouldn’t find a match, praying I would. I’d asked to be placed in a psychiatric facility. At the time, I believed that I wanted to learn something about my mother, to place her in the universe. In retrospect, I think that more than that, I wanted to be convinced that I was all right.

  Anyway, they were supposed to train us. How hard could it be? That was how I looked at it then; now I see the story as an onion, growing layers around the pearly core where lodged the questions I didn’t dare ask. I must have reassured myself by believing that sanity was like breathing, always on one side or the other of a dividing line, either inhaling or exhaling, breathing or not breathing, but never both at the same time.

  “LOOK, IT’S NOT HARD. Lick your fingers, rub the thread between them and pull. See? That’s a French knot,” the instructor said to me with elaborate patience. The other four interns and I had a week to learn embroidery, copper tooling, ceramics, sand and clay sculpting, leather work and lesser crafts; we’d be expected to teach the patients to express themselves in these mediums. Someone looking through the barred window from the outside would doubtless have thought we were a group of patients, especially if he could glimpse the nervous effort of a slight, redheaded girl with too many freckles, who breathed as though the air in the stifling room were already used up. I made a pathetic wallet, a childlike embroidery sampler on which were displayed scraggly rows of uneven stitches, the names of which—other than French knot and chain—I have long since banished from memory, and a coiled clay pot that listed so badly it looked like the Tower of Pizza. Did I wonder about the mess of my French knots, falling apart as they did? Did I notice how the coiled clay pot might put someone in mind of a sleeping snake’s impossible dream of rising? If so, I have no memory of it, and I was saved at the end of the week, by the copper tooling project. Although the design—a boat in full sail on stylized wind-whipped water—was traced, the piece (which I fashioned into a plaque by neatly nailing it to a pine square I sanded, stained and varnished) was the only craftwork I’d ever done that turned out well, and it encouraged me so much that I thought briefly about changing my major to Art.