Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  She watched from the bedroom door as my mother practiced getting up out of the bed and onto the toilet, using the wall grip.

  “It’s just like Las Villas, Mom,” I said, hearing myself sound like a high school baseball coach.

  “I’m scared,” she said, reaching up tentatively. After several unsuccessful attempts she finally managed it. I had her practice it several times before I could be confident she could do it without supervision.

  “You got it now, you think, Mom?”

  “I think so,” she said, a quaver in her voice betraying acute nervousness over the prospect of self-toileting, without me or the stout nurses at Las Villas, winding up on the floor, crying out in the night. “I’ll try,” she said, focusing intently on the wall mount, her voice already steadying. She threw me a sideways glance and a wry smile.

  “You can do it, Mom. You can do it for me.”

  With great resolve, and the fear of another Las Villas in her eyes, she performed the maneuver unerringly and I found myself clapping.

  “That’s great, Mom.”

  She smiled like a kid who had just won the 4-H ribbon for her prized pig. Alice, looking on, wore a sour expression, as if she had just witnessed her retirement in miniature.

  Undaunted, I transferred my mother back into her chair and wheeled her back to the living room. Alice was in the kitchen, preparing sandwiches. She brought out a plate for my mother: baloney, white bread, and potato chips. I declined the lunch, stopping instead at a burger joint on my way back to the motel, where I was hoping to buy some sleep before the handyman showed.

  I lay once again on the bed, shut my eyes and tried to nap. The gossiping voices of the maids in the hall seeped into the room. Early afternoon traffic rumbled outside. If I didn’t sleep, I was hellbound for a stress-induced breakdown. But my mother and Alice still needed me, so the breakdown would have to wait.

  Abandoning hope of a nap, I phoned two of the numbers the agency had provided for in-home caretakers. The first shunted me to voicemail. The second was answered by a middle-aged woman with a husky voice. Greta, per the info I had scrawled on the hotel notepad. She agreed to swing by the Sheboygan Hotel for a chat. If that went even half well, I’d take her right to Alice’s and introduce her to the Golden Girls.

  Greta showed–thank you, wrecked economy!–right on time. A heavyset woman of Germanic looks that went with her name, she was dressed plainly in slacks and a blouse. She had grown up in Sheboygan, she told me, had worked for all the hospitals in the area and was semi-retired. She seemed qualified, and wasn’t in a hurry to be anywhere, so we caravanned to Alice’s.

  When we pulled up in front of the house, Greta’s Ford Escort swinging in right behind me, the handyman was applying a cloth tape measure to the steps. Alice was looking down from the doorway, these retrofits to her house not something she had bargained for in agreeing to take over the care of her sister.

  The handyman, Dave–a beer-bellied guy with a graying pate–and I exchanged introductions. “It shouldn’t be too severe an angle,” I noted, “so Alice can push her up and down without any trouble.”

  “Won’t be a problem,” Dave said, lighting a cigarette.

  “What do you estimate?”

  He pulled out a pencil and a pocket spiral notebook, wrote down some numbers and did the arithmetic. “Maybe like five or six hundred.”

  “Deal,” I said. “When can you get started?”

  He thumbed through the grease- and paint-stained pages of his appointment book. “I could start next Monday,” he said.

  “Not sooner?”

  “Afraid I’m booked up. Fall’s coming,” he explained.

  I gestured to my mother. “Dave, we have a situation here. It’s important that this happen now. I’m willing to make it worth your while. I mean, come on, how many hours will it take you to build a handicapped ramp?”

  Dave cleared his throat. “Well, maybe I could move one of these roofing jobs…”

  “Great,” I said, chopping him off. “See you tomorrow?”

  “All right,” Dave said, a little bamboozled, but counting dollars in his head.

  We shook hands and he walked back to his mud-spattered white van and clattered off.

  I led Greta up into the living room and introduced her and my mother.

  “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Raymond,” Greta said, bending at the waist to my mother’s level and extending her hand. My mother took Greta’s hand, shook it briefly, and smiled. Circumspect with strangers, as had always been her way, she said nothing.

  Alice reappeared from the kitchen with a pot of her coffee and a plate of cookies, looking more than a little relieved that reinforcements had been called in. We all sat and talked, but I was soon impatient to leave. My mother seemed to be reassured by Greta’s credentials, but I saw Alice looking around at her tiny house, in which she had everything in order, and foresaw it being reluctantly transformed and claustrophobically crowded by my mother’s enormous needs and the infrastructure that threatened to crop up willy-nilly around her.

  “Could you start today, Greta?” I asked. “I’m going to make a stop at the bank, and we might as well start your salary right now.”

  I don’t know if she interpreted my over-eagerness as desperation, but her expression made it clear she had things other than work on her mind. However, she agreed to stay the afternoon and make sure my mother got to bed okay.

  I led her into the bedroom with my mother and showed her the ropes. For Greta, stronger than Alice and a decade younger, the transfers were relatively easy-once my mother got over her insecurities about having a new person minister to her.

  I left the three women to get acquainted and drove back to the motel.

  Another half a Xanax knocked me out cold and bought me four or five jagged hours of sleep. I might have gone all night but for the ringing of my cell. It was, as I expected–not Laura, not Natalie, not Jack–my mother.

  “Hi, Miles,” she said.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “I just wanted to thank you for everything you’re doing for me.”

  “How’s Greta working out?”

  “She’s good, I think,” she said, sounding upbeat.

  “That’s good.”

  “I just wanted to say good night.”

  “Good-night, Mom.”

  “I love you.”

  “Good-night, Mom.”

  chapter 19

  The next morning dawned gray and breezy as if an early fall storm were approaching from across the lake. I braved breakfast at a dingy coffee shop and drove over to Alice’s. Alice answered the door, and it was abundantly clear from her haggard appearance she hadn’t slept much. She looked greatly relieved to see me.

  In the living room my mother sat in her wheelchair looking sad and sluggish, as if she, too, had endured a particularly rough night. From the greasy, matted texture of her hair I inferred that Alice hadn’t managed to bathe her.

  “Phyllis fell last night when she tried to go to the bathroom,” Alice said.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Were you hurt, Mom?”

  She shook her head, but her expression betrayed a tension that was brewing between her and her sister.

  “It was difficult to get her back into bed,” Alice said in an excitable tone, “but I managed.”

  I glanced at my watch and asked, more to myself, “Where’s Greta?”

  They both looked at each other and shrugged.

  “It’s ten o’clock. She should be here by now.” I got out my iPhone, found Greta’s number in my contacts and tapped it.

  She answered on the fourth ring. In a speciously apologetic tone she said that she couldn’t work for my mother, adding only, “She doesn’t like me.”

  “You can’t do a couple of days?” I pleaded, “Just until I can get someone full time.”

  “She should be in a home,” Greta said sharply, and brusquely concluded the call, leaving me feeling shitty.

  Both my mother and Alice took note of my
heavy sigh, the load of our mutual problem compounded now.

  “Can you take me for a drive?” my mother asked.

  “Sure. Let’s give Alice a break.”

  I dollied my mother down the steps, soon with a bit of luck to be a ramp, and steered her to the dirt-streaked Rampvan, which I had been hoping to unload, as it was costing me a fortune. “Where do you want to go, Mom?” I asked, after I had gotten her up into shotgun.

  “I’ll take you around to all my old haunts,” she said sweetly.

  “Okay, Mom. Let’s do that.” I felt acutely sorry for her that it wasn’t working out like we had fantasized.

  Her memory of Sheboygan was startling, almost crystalline in its recall. She directed me to the small downtown where she once hung out and smoked cigarettes and flirted with the boys, she told me, a vestige of the hometown coquette twinkling in her milky blue eyes. We drove slowly by a brown concrete department store called Prange’s. “And I used to work there when I was in high school,” she recalled.

  “Oh, yeah. I want to see the tavern your parents owned.”

  “Okay. I’m not sure it’s there anymore,” she said wistfully.

  She directed me away from downtown, drawing deeply from the recesses of her memory the directions. Next to a small business park we found a white, two-story clapboard A-frame with a faded green awning. Printed on the awning in elaborate script was “Grey Gables.” Jutting out from the second floor was an old neon Schlitz sign. Above three canopied windows, in more neon lettering, the name of the tavern appeared again.

  I parked out front and tried the door. The place was shuttered. The breeze had picked up and the tattered awning flapped like a pennant in a buffeting wind. I returned to the Rampvan and stood next to the open passenger window where my mother gazed out at the place her parents once owned.

  “A lot of memories there, I’ll bet, huh?”

  “Oh, yes,” my mother said, staring at it through watery eyes. “We had a big chicken dinner every Sunday that my mother would cook and everyone”–her voice soared rhapsodically to a singsong–“came from all over.”

  “Sounds like quite a time.”

  “And my dad would get horribly drunk. Then beat my mother.” A scowl disorganized her face and she shook her head to ward off the memory.

  “Good and bad memories, huh?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. She pointed her index finger at the sky and shook it at some invisible ogre. “He was a mean man.”

  I circled round the front of the car and got back in. “Where would you like to go now, Mom?”

  “Let’s go to the quarry,” she said.

  “Do you know how to get there?”

  She nodded confidently.

  “What happened with Greta?” I said as I started up the Rampvan and followed her amazingly accurate directions to the quarry.

  “She’s no good,” my mother said sharply. There was a pause, then she said, “No one takes care of me like you,” she sniffled.

  “I can’t stay here, Mom. My life isn’t here.”

  “I know,” she said, resignation in her voice.

  “You can’t alienate these people like Joy. I don’t know if Alice can take care of you all by herself or not.”

  “I’m such a burden.”

  We crossed the Sheboygan River and, following my mother’s directions, as if she had a roadmap indelibly imprinted on her memory, miraculously, I got us to the quarry.

  I got her out of the passenger seat and pushed her close to the rim, looking out over the huge rectangular pit, as deep as it was wide. While I saw just stone and dirt my mother traveled back in time and witnessed a part of her childhood, perhaps some of her happiest times.

  “This used to be filled with water,” she said. “We would swim in there.”

  “Were you a good swimmer?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  We sat in silence, looking. The freshening wind rustled the brittle dead leaves still in the trees.

  “I can feel fall,” she said, shivering histrionically. “Brrr.”

  “It’s coming early.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  “Hey, Mom, I had a wild idea.”

  “What?”

  “You want to go play nine holes of golf? I think I can get you into the cart. There’s this great course just up the lake.”

  “Oh, that would be heaven,” she enthused. “I want to get out of the car. I don’t want to sit in some restaurant.”

  “Okay, let’s do it.”

  We drove a few miles north of Sheboygan to Whistling Straits, an extraordinary tract that has hosted two PGA Championships. It’s nestled along two miles of a bluff on the Lake Michigan shoreline. Not technically a links course, it has very much a linksland feel. It’s got a rugged, almost ragged, windswept look, with nearly a thousand (!) bunkers and waste areas. There are almost no trees. Whistling Straits is composed of wild native grasses, mounds and knolls and radically sloping greens slippery as ice.

  It was mid-week and off-season, so it wasn’t difficult to get on. I didn’t have my clubs so I had to rent a set. The course manager, when I explained the situation about my mother, was kind enough to assist me in transferring her into our cart. It wasn’t easy. But once we got her in, her face lit up. She’d been quite the athlete in her youth and fiercely competitive. In college, she was the number one ranked player on the woman’s golf team. She might even have been able to go pro. She gave it up to raise a family. When I was about nine my parents joined a modest country club. My father played, but it was my mother who took me to the course almost every day after school. I got involved in junior golf and enjoyed a bit of success. But at 14, called by the ocean and the lure of surfing, I gave it all up. I didn’t touch a club for twenty years. It wasn’t until Victoria and I divorced that I rediscovered the game. It was one of the only ways I had of dealing with my depression.

  We rolled up to the first tee and I set the brake on the cart. The first hole was a stunning par-four. I corkscrewed out of the cart, pulled my rental driver, unsleeved a new ball and jammed a bunch of tees into my pocket.

  “Are you going to play the back tees?” my mother called out.

  “I don’t know, Mom. This course is rated 76.7 from the tips. I’ve never played a course this hard.”

  “Play it from the tips,” she urged. “What have you got to lose?”

  I chuckled. When I was young she always pushed me to play from the back tees. In junior golf she would petition the organizers to move me up to the higher age divisions, so I’d face stiffer competition and become a better player. “Okay, Mom, I’m going to play it from the tips. Just for you. How’re you doing over there? Are you cold?” The wind was freshening off the lake. It was mid-afternoon and the sun was arcing away.

  “No! I’m fine. Let’s go. I want to see you hit one.”

  I teed up a Titleist, took a few practice swings, as was my routine, and then addressed the ball. Shockingly, I flushed one about 260 yards down the left side of the fairway.

  My mother clapped. “Nice shot, Miles.”

  “That’ll probably be the last one you see from me today.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “You’ve still got a good swing.”

  We played on. With the rental clubs and the fact I hadn’t played much in the last year, my game was rusty. The extreme difficulty of the course–especially from the pro tees–and the wind that was now buffeting off Lake Michigan didn’t make things any easier. But that didn’t diminish my enjoyment. Not only my enjoyment in playing a little golf, but in seeing how happy my mother was to be out there, on this gorgeous course, watching me play a game she loved.

  As we rode in the cart we reminisced. “Remember that time you were twelve and you shot 75 and won the Stardust Invitational?” my mother said.

  “Wow, your memory’s amazing. Day to day, moment to moment, you’re like some Alzheimer’s person, but your faraway memory is incredible.”

  “That was a great day,” she sai
d. “I was so proud of you.”

  “It was probably the highlight of my life winning that 13-14 age division as a 12-year-old.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “You have more highlights.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, feeling drained, the trip having emptied me of so much.

  “You could have gone pro,” my mother blustered.

  “I didn’t have the patience for it,” I said. “All the practice. You know.…”

  “You could have won the U.S. Open!”

  “Oh, I seriously doubt that,” I said.

  “Why’d you quit?” she said. “You were so talented.”

  “The kids in the neighborhood thought I was gay.” Our family was the only one in the neighborhood that belonged to a country club and playing golf was considered sissy.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Those kids were so mean. I tried to get Rusty to move to La Jolla, but he was so cheap.” She started to tear up. “Our lives would have been so different.”

  “Don’t cry, Mom.”

  She crooked her finger at the sky. “I was born here,” she said. “No one would have ever thought there’d be such a beautiful golf course like this some day.” She nodded in reflection. “Oh, I wish I could play,” she lamented. “I wish I could get up from that damn wheelchair and walk again!”

  I slung my arm around her shoulder. “Are you cold, Mom? Do you want to go back in?” We had made it to the seventh hole, a staggeringly beautiful par-three, dubbed Shipwreck, that required a shot across a little inlet of the lake to a green that was perched right on the edge of the water. An errant shot, right or left, and you were poleaxed. Waves lashed the cliffs. The wind bent the pin sideways. There were no houses, no cookie-cutter condos, just pure, pristine golf.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t want to go back. I’m having the best time of my life!”