Animal, Mineral, Radical

by BK Loren

  “I got a positive response from the agent I told you about,” I say.

  “The one in New York?” she says.

  “Yes. I’m going there Friday to meet her.”

  “Going where?”

  “New York.”

  She stares out the window. She looks hard at the horses in the field behind my home that used to be her home. She looks as if she is trying to remember something. She fails.

  “Why are you going to New York?” she asks.

  I reiterate. She remains quiet and places her right hand on her left to still the tremble.

  The doctors tell my mother she has the heart of a child, 60 strong beats a minute at rest, 130 on the cardio machines and she’s not even maxed. She was eating sprouts and yogurt when the rest of America was drowning in mayo and iceberg lettuce. The doctors tell my mother, “You’re in great shape.” She comes home and says, “I don’t have Parkinson’s. The doctors say I’m in great shape.”

  “You can be in great shape and have Parkinson’s.” I bark this sentence at her like a Doberman, then I hate myself for being the one who must remind her of her disease. Occasionally, I hate her for having it, then I hate myself more, and it goes on like this until I accept the world for exactly what it is: unfair, mean, graceful, luscious, and magically illogical.

  My mother defends, “They don’t even know what causes Parkinson’s, so how can they know I have it?” She is also magically illogical.

  It’s been three years since her diagnosis, three years since she first sat at my kitchen table and lost the thread of an easy conversation, her face staring and expressionless, her arm shaking, her eyes that tell two stories narrowing now to none.

  Before my mother moved out of this home and into the mobile home that she and my father chose reluctantly, she had a garage sale. She sold things dear to her for reasons I could not understand. She said, “I got this Hummel for only three dollars. And this original oil painting for twenty.” I could not tell if it was the object she loved most or the bargain marked by the object. She sold these things for a significant profit. I’m talking a couple thousand dollars overall.

  This weekend she is having another garage sale. It will be at her new home in the mobile home park called “Happy Hills,” for seniors only. They’re sponsoring the all-tenant sale. She spends weeks getting ready, pricing items, doing nothing less than a stock inventory.

  When the day arrives, everything is priced and recorded on a tally sheet. At six in the morning, people start knocking on her door, and she is ready. She steps outside and lifts the plastic wraps from the sale tables, unveiling a masterpiece. You could mistake your shopping experience in my mother’s carport for a pleasant day at the local outdoor mall, the way the dresses hang elegantly on the makeshift racks, the way the jewelry is still in its original box, velvet, satin, lush, ten dollars, firm, but she’ll take five. She misses her days in retail; you can tell by the way she greets each garage-saler individually, cradles each purchase in bubble wrap, places it in a box, and says, “Thank you. Enjoy!”

  Inside, my father sits in his La-Z-Boy. He’s been sick recently. His kidneys have failed, and his heart pumps like a locomotive just to push a hairline of blood through the dark and narrowing tunnel of his veins. In addition to cleaning, cooking, doing laundry, and shopping, my mother now has to give extra care to my father. Though she’s squeamish about needles, she has to administer his insulin shot. She washes sheets that are often bloody due to my father’s blood thinners. “I am not a nurse,” she says. And my father, a military man to the bone, has devised a ritual around administering his shot. The syringe must rest on the counter before use. The insulin bottle should never touch porcelain. The nurse who taught him how to give this shot mentioned he should insert the needle at a twenty-two-and-a-half-degree angle. His compulsion to “do the right thing” has a military precision to it, and he has translated that twenty-two-degree angle into an absolute that he asks my mother to adhere to without fail. My mother wears tie-dyed scarves, rainbow socks, and Dr. Martens sandals. Neither my mother nor my father is malicious or mean; they are simply as made-for-each-other as Rush Limbaugh and Shirley MacLaine.

  My father rises from his chair at ten in the morning and calls my mother in from the sale. “I need to take my shot,” he says. Then he disappears into the bathroom. Moments later, I go inside to ask my mother how low she will go on her pewter collection. As I enter, I watch her place the hypodermic needle on the counter. Her body quivers like a tree in a sharp, undecided wind. “Is that right?” she says, and my father adjusts the needle slightly, then nods, yes. He says to her, “Don’t do too much, today, Marge.” He says to me, “I worry about her. She’s not well, you know. She needs rest.” An hour later he rises from his La-Z-Boy, pokes his head outside, finds my mother in the middle of a group of people, collecting money, socializing, saying, Thanks, enjoy! and he says, “Marge, aren’t you going to make lunch?”

  Five years ago, before Mom had Parkinson’s, my partner and I took her to Sea Ranch, a quiescent stretch of beauty nestled in the redwoods along the Sonoma coast. We rented a small house with an ocean view, and daily we walked through shaded woods laced with ferns and mossy creeks that meandered, like us, toward the sea. At the base of the steep hill a collection of boulders demanded we scramble on all fours to reach the sea. I thought Mom would turn back, but she laughed when I doubted her agility. She negotiated the tangle of rocks easily, showing less fear and more grace than I.

  At night, as the California sun turned to cool, gray fog, we made popcorn and hot chocolate and watched old black-and-white flicks: Bogie and Bacall, Tracy and Hepburn. “It’s a shame about Katharine Hepburn,” my mother said. “Her Parkinson’s.”

  My mother has always been good at pity. I have not. “I don’t think her shaking is from Parkinson’s,” I said. “Anyway, she handles it well. She still takes part in plays.” My mother nodded, her eyebrows growing more asymmetrical as she watched Kate in all her glory.

  Last week, we returned to Sea Ranch a second time, a sort of rendezvous to see if what we had gained there the first time—peace of mind, rejuvenation—was still available to us. My mother did not walk down to the ocean on the wooded trail this time; she did not scramble over the rocks, and I did not pity her, but instead, found a new path to the same ocean.

  Instead of watching old movies, we lay in front of the picture window and watched the sky turn to night. Twice she saw what she said was a star stuck in a black hole. “See the way it moves so quickly—like a race car bumping up against the edge of that black hole?”

  “I don’t see it,” I told her.

  “Yes, look! It’s like a black whirlpool, and that crazy star’s just frantic, trying to get out, but the black hole just sucks it down.”

  I looked up. The sky, to me, remained only an endless theory of possibility. The stars were so lush it was difficult to separate one from the other; they blended together and milked the sky with light, only the brightest among them adding texture and points. I never saw the star stuck in the black hole, desperately trying to get out.

  When I returned home, I researched, again, the symptoms of Parkinson’s. I learned it is more than a tremor, more than a crooked body that cannot easily find a point of balance. It is a smorgasbord of symptoms that, along with its more recognizable traits, includes memory loss, disorientation, and dementia. Hallucinations and schizophrenic behaviors can be side effects of many of the medications used to manage the disease. Like a smorgasbord, however, the person with Parkinson’s does not necessarily have all of these symptoms; each symptom exists as a mere possibility.

  Throughout the trip, though, my mother saw UFO-like stars trapped in black holes. She listened to foghorns one evening when there were no ships in the bay; she remembered, in detail, things that had never happened, and on occasion, she failed to recall what did take place. On the way back into San Francisco, a city in which she lived for several years, she asked, “Do we have to go over that one
bridge?”

  While at Sea Ranch, we ventured out into the world of commerce on a few occasions, and my heart ached as my mother searched for souvenirs, trinkets, anything to help her remember the event. But it was more than memory loss that drove her. She shopped here with the same urgency she displayed when buying bargains at home. When we returned from a day at the ocean, she clung to her new sweatshirt the same way she held to her discount at Joslin’s, as if her experiences would be lost if not made tangible, as if her discount illustrated, in no uncertain terms, the amount of love she felt for her family and friends—if only she could give them what they were worth, if only she could grasp and hold on to what she was worth. But she could not.

  It occurred to me then that in no other time in history and in no other place but America would I have this experience of losing a parent so slowly, so ethereally, so painfully in exactly this manner. In my mother’s day, choice meant three makes of automobiles (if you had the money), one brand of tennis shoe, two brands of coffee, and marriage at eighteen. Today, the definition of choice would not fit on this page, nor in this volume. Overwhelmed as she is (as we all are) with the ease of fulfilling her external desires, she seems to have mistaken them for her dreams—or perhaps she has simply learned to mistrust what she dreamed.

  Suddenly it makes sense to me that my mother wants desperately to get more than she paid for. In what other realm of her life has she ever been given such a break? In what other realm has she ever been marched into an arena and told, “This can be yours, or perhaps you’ll choose this.”

  I fantasize this happening for her now: She is eighteen again, and suddenly she can choose to be married or not; she can choose to have children whenever and if ever she wants; she can walk over to this rack and pick up a college degree, a few “self-improvement” courses, or a selection of art classes; she can go to this display case and decide if this marriage is working out; she can go to counseling if it is not, and if it still does not work, she can choose to make it on her own. At some point in her life, she can choose to live by herself if she wants. She does not have to live under her parents’ roof, then under her husband’s roof, then under her children’s roof, and in her final years she does not have to spend every ounce of spare energy she has caring for her husband, keeping her vows because she is loyal and good, and so is he. I fantasize she is Katharine Hepburn, and in spite of her place in history, her gender, her class, she was able to make choices, and she chose well, and because of choosing well, she can go gently into that good night—or, if she chooses, she can rage against the dying of the light. I fantasize that the black hole has finally released that crazy star.

  But this is one of the accomplishments my generation has made: the overwhelming ability to choose. Because I live it, I have never truly recognized it, and recognizing it now, I want only to be able to deny that it was ever otherwise, because we all want to believe, in America, that our fates are cut by chisels we hold in our own hands, that circumstances do not limit, that time and culture do not dictate. But they do. My generation has nothing if not choice. But what void will we feel at our deaths? What easy pill will ease our pain, or slow time enough for us to question who our daughters and sons are, who we are, who our parents were. Though the world itself may end in either a whimper or a bang, an individual’s life does not. In America, it ends like a metronome whose ticking we did not hear, at least until the last measure of the song.

  I hear my mother’s metronome ticking, and I want nothing more than for the music to grow louder, to drown out the easy comforts that quell her desires and overshadow her authentic dreams.

  Five days after our return from Sea Ranch, there is a knock on my door. I open it. It’s Mom. She’s dressed in jeans and T-shirt, and her hat of the day is a ball cap with her short pony tail hanging out the back hole.

  “There’s a sale at Joslin’s,” she says. “They’ve been bought out. This could be the last sale where I’ll get my discount.”

  I know the gravity of this situation. I know what not getting that discount will mean, what it will do to her self-esteem, and silly as I seem to myself, I share her desperation about the loss. I gather my wallet and comb my hair. As I get ready to go, however, I’m suddenly pleased. This “no discount” may offer a time for my mother to discover her worth in something other than dollars and cents. It will open a space, perhaps, for her to see that I would love her and remain by her until death (and beyond) if she gave me only an ugly rock for my birthday. I want to hold up my Liz Claibornes next to the life and good mothering she has given me and say, “Thanks,” not for the clothes.

  On the way to Joslin’s, my mother unfolds, like the village storyteller, the decline in prices she witnessed firsthand (she stopped by the store before she came to my house). “This jacket was on the two-dollar rack. It had been ninety-eight dollars, then it was forty-eight, and then twenty-four. It’s a Ralph Lauren, and I got it for two dollars, plus my discount, plus my VIP. Came to a dollar twelve.”

  I pat her on the back. “That’s great, Mom. It’s a great jacket,” and as jackets go, it is kind of cool, especially for a buck give or take a few cents.

  But my heart is still aching. Her body is still crooked, and her eyes are still hazed with cataracts and wild with desire. What I want to do is pull to the side of the road or get back on the plane and sit in a room with her by the ocean and listen, for hours on end, to her real stories, to the stories she would tell if both her eyebrows could talk, not only the innocent brow, but the one that is arched sharply and does not understand the world, the one that sees something unjust but cannot name it. But my mother, like all mothers, is a one-sided creature. You either get the kind of mom who sugarcoats everything for you, or you get the kind who criticizes the air you breathe. In your little role as the offspring, you do not get the luxury of watching your parents become their own, oddly whole human beings with quirks and jaggedly adorable imperfections. As soon as you no longer depend on them, you blame them, and as soon as you learn that blaming them for who you are or whatever pain you feel is ridiculous because you are just fine the way you are and pain accompanies every ecstasy of life anyway, just at that moment, you wake up and see that your parents have entered into a whole new territory called old age. You cannot go there. You cannot meet them. You cannot enter.

  I look at my mom. Her gray hair beneath her cap is a little wild this morning. She can barely reach the gas pedal. Her face, beautiful to me, is also somehow foreign. When did she become old? At what point did the laugh lines around her eyes turn to effort? At what point did her every tomorrow fill itself with question rather than with promise?

  Suddenly, and as if lunacy is a common experience for me, I say, “Mom, I have to take you to see the avocets.”

  “Do they carry avocets? I’ve never seen avocets in the store.”

  “No. You’ve got to turn around. They’re not in the mall; they’re in a marsh.”

  “Marsh? I don’t know where there’s any marsh.”

  Eventually, I convince her. “We can come back to the store right after we see them. I promise.”

  She says, “Well, okay. But they have some really good buys in there, and this is the last sale where I will get my discount.”

  I take over the driver’s seat. I drive away from the shopping mall, down the boulevard of strip malls, and onto some back roads that lead to an open space. The marsh is a mile walk on flat terrain, a distance of which I know my mother is capable.

  I park the car and get out. Mom remains seated, her eyes creased with worry. “Is it okay to be here?”

  “Yes, it’s okay. Why wouldn’t it be okay?”

  “It’s so empty. Is this somebody’s land? We’re not trespassing, are we?

  “No, we’re not trespassing, Mom. Let’s go.”

  Cautiously, looking in all directions, she gets out of the car. We enter the trail as if it is foreign terrain, an illicit journey into what has always been possible. In moments we are surrounded with trees, s
waying cottonwoods that give voice to the wind. In a window of sky between the green, the bent figure of a great blue heron passes, his movements deliberate, graceful. My mother knows these birds; they hunted on the small pond behind her used-to-be-home. She says, “There’s big blue. That was big blue, wasn’t it? I didn’t know he was still here.”

  “He’s still here,” I say, and we continue walking. Though the earth is loose and uneven, my mother’s gait is fairly steady, her posture almost upright. Meadowlarks sit on mullein stalks and sing as we pass. She had forgotten, too, that meadowlarks were so abundant in our neck of the woods. And we see, as well, the quick flight of hundreds of swallows, the seemingly labored flight of several magpies, the occasional sign of coyotes and foxes, and a brief flash of bright yellow and red of a western tanager. She says, “I’ve never seen that bird before. It looks tropical. I didn’t know we had tropical birds here.”

  The trees open up to a small lake, and we round the bend and walk toward the marsh. The land is less verdant here, more mucky. She says, “This should be taken care of. This is not very pretty. Don’t you want to go back to the lake and see big blue?”

  I stop on the dry land, and I point. The marsh is golden, the morning sun still angled on the horizon. “Look.”