by Sarah Willis
I get her into pajamas, watch her take her pills, tuck her in, pull up the rails, turn down the lamp with the dimmer switch that Todd installed, go back to her bed. Every night I say the same things to her before I leave the room, a little litany of reminders: I’m her daughter, she’s in my house and I hope she’s comfortable, that we love her and care for her, and that she shouldn’t try to get out of bed until I come back in the morning. But tonight I pull up a chair. I will try talking very calmly, hypnotize her with slow peaceful words. See if I can find my mother if I lull just the Alzheimer’s to sleep.
I go backward in my story of her, before my father’s death. I have missed so much about back then, but that’s only an excuse—before my father’s death is the time I would go to, if I had this disease. But I don’t believe in Alzheimer’s. If I don’t believe in it, it won’t be true.
“A long time ago, when everything was good.” I stop there, remembering what Jazz said, try to shake it off. “You had a garden, remember, with iris, and mums, and black-eyed Susans, and vegetables? Peas, and tomatoes, and lettuce, and zucchini.” I make a long list with all the things I can remember in the garden, using a steady, rhythmic pace, making even me sleepy. “And actors would come to our house for parties, and they’d rehearse plays in our yard.” I list their names, my voice getting softer, slower, the pauses longer. After a while I get the actors confused with the characters they played and know I’m tired and lost when I mention Hamlet. My eyes are getting heavy and I feel my head bob up and down once. I look at my mother, and her eyes are heavy lidded. I don’t want her asleep quite yet so I skip a few things. I know where I’m headed, even if I don’t want to go there. “And you cooked soup, and you taught me to cook, and then Daddy died.
“The funeral was in the theatre, and so many people came, like that lady you liked who always walked the terrier by our house, and the doctor—it was so nice of him to come. But no one came from your family, just Aunt Celia, and afterward—”
“They came,” my mother says.
“Who came?” I say it gently, trying not to scare her away.
“Everyone. My brothers and sisters. All of them.”
“No, just Aunt Celia. I remember how mad you were.”
“You’re wrong. They came. They stayed at the Hilton.”
I can’t believe her Alzheimer’s is making up facts like the Hilton. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“But I thought you were mad that they—”
“You were mad.”
“No, I was sad Daddy—”
“You don’t get sad. You took the easier way. You got angry. Just made it hell for everyone else.”
No, she’s wrong. I was sad. I just got mad when everyone else stopped being sad, when they thought it wasn’t the time for being sad anymore.
“I didn’t want another father.”
“Well, you didn’t get one,” she says. “Happy?”
“No.” I close my eyes. I have no answer. I like the quiet. Suddenly my head jerks. I open my eyes. My mother is sound asleep, breathing slowly though an open mouth. Did I fall asleep? When?
But we were just talking, and she was making sense. Weren’t we just talking? And what was that about the Hilton? Now I vaguely remember something about the Hilton. Maybe her brothers and sisters did come to the funeral. Maybe I wasn’t even talking to my mother. I’m too tired to know. I close my eyes again. The chair is very comfortable.
My mother was right—or the mother I made up just now was right—I got angry. Anger was something that helped me deal with my father dying, and I didn’t know how to give it up. I didn’t know how to back down from the hill I had made to defend myself.
A year and a half after we move to Cleveland Heights, my mother buys a house. It’s not far from the duplex we rented, and we’re still in the same school district, which helps because I’m finally beginning to make friends—not friends my mother likes, but they’re my friends, not hers. The house is small, just three bedrooms, so I get the attic. She says we have enough money for the down payment, but we need to be frugal. We get some old furniture out of storage that belonged to Grandmother Francine, and my mother frames posters of distant countries that she buys at Woolworth’s. The night we move in, we toast the new house with ginger ale, pretending it’s champagne, and play a Roger Miller record, turning up the music as loud as it will go. Peter, Betsy, and I sing, “‘I’m a man of means by no means, King of the road!’” as we hold hands and dance in a circle.
“It’s a new beginning,” my mother says, and I stop having fun. This is when I notice there is nothing of my father here in this house. “To Daddy!” I shout above the music, holding my glass up high. Then I throw it against the fireplace and it shatters. It’s meant to be a grand gesture of love. No one smiles. It’s me against them. Daddy and me against them.
My mother is forty years old and very pretty. She’s lost weight, and skirts are short. Her curly hair falls to just below her shoulders and she pulls it back with a silver clip. The married women at the public relations firm where my mother works make it a project to find her a good man. She tells them to forget it. I hear her on the phone. “No, Gerty, I am not going to be fixed up with some nice man you know. I don’t need to be fixed. I’m fine, thank you.” Her words slur. “I don’t care if you’ve had it set up for a month, I’m not coming.” She’s sounding a bit nasty, but I’m all on her side. How dare they? My dad just died. He’s still here in the house. I can feel him just behind me, like a shadow with weight.
But a month later she’s getting dressed on a Friday night, and we have a baby-sitter, which is stupid, since I’m fourteen. It’s all stupid. She’s too old to be dating, and I don’t need another father. I tell her that her skirt is way too short and she has on too much makeup and Daddy is watching her. Her eyes rim with tears, and I don’t feel bad at all. “Just don’t go!” I shout.
“I have to,” she says. “I’m stuck, this time. It got planned before I knew what it was all about. Don’t worry. I’m not getting married.” She says it so sadly, so honestly, right to me, that I believe her.
“Just come home early,” I say.
“I will,” she says.
But she doesn’t. I should have known. She was wearing perfume.
The next date, two weeks later, she doesn’t even apologize.
But I know how to stop this. I find the photos of Daddy she can’t bear to look at that are still in a box in her closet. I stick them to the walls of her bedroom with tape. I pretend to be sleeping when she comes home. She opens her door, and I hear a gasp, a glass breaking on the floor. Then I hear sobs. She must know it was me, but she doesn’t come up to my room. In the morning the pictures are gone. She doesn’t say anything about them. Her eyes are as red as eyes can get, and I think, good. She doesn’t go on a date for another two months.
The next time she tries to trick me. She says she’s going to the Art Museum for the evening with some friends, but she wears eye shadow and perfume, and I know better. While she’s gone, I have a séance with Peter, Betsy, and the baby-sitter, who’s seventeen and thinks it’s a cool idea. She has no clue. I turn off all the lamps, and in the dim glow of a candle, I call the dead. Then I pretend to have a seizure. My eyes roll back in my head. I talk in a deep voice. “I am the spirit of Michael Morgan,” I say. “Where is my wife?” Betsy’s too frightened to speak. “She’s not here right now,” Peter says, so seriously I almost lose it.
“Why not?” I say.
“I don’t know,” Peter says, his voice beginning to tremble.
“Well, she should be here,” I say. I am doing a pretty good imitation of my father. I begin to think I really am summoning him, so I get a little scared, too. The tremble in my voice makes it sound ghostly. “I love Rose. I need her. But she doesn’t love me anymore. She wants another man, and I am angry! Bring me my wife!”
By the time my mother gets home, my sister has been crying for an hour, my brother is in a state of shock, and th
e baby-sitter says she is never coming back.
“Oh, Jesus,” my mother says when Betsy tells her that our father’s ghost is angry with her. She sits on the steps to the second floor and weeps, holding my sister in her arms. I don’t get any hugs, even though by now I believe I really was possessed by my father’s ghost. I will speak for you, I tell him. I feel him nod and smile. At least he loves me.
One night, a few days later, she comes up to the attic. “We need to talk,” she says, walking over to my record player to turn the music off. “What’s going on? Why are you doing this to me?”
I don’t know what she’s talking about. “What?”
“Not letting me go out. With men. What are you so afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid of anything. I just don’t need another father. I already have one. How can you forget him already?”
My mother sighs and looks around my room. The words to my favorite songs are written on the walls with Magic Marker, along with drawings of large eyes, the only thing I can draw. I expect her to forget about my question and start in harping about the walls, but she just shakes her head and sits next to me on the bed. “I haven’t forgotten him, Jennifer. I never will. But life goes on. My life goes on. I want to be happy again.”
“So you’re not happy now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that, you aren’t happy.”
“Well, no.”
“So we don’t make you happy? Peter, Betsy, and me. We’re not enough to make you happy.” I don’t say it like a question. It’s not. It a simple fact.
“Oh, Jesus, Jennifer, of course you kids make me happy, but there’s something more than . . .” She looks away. “I’d like the chance to be in love again. I’m still young. I don’t want to be alone.”
“Well, you and Peter and Betsy are good enough for me! That’s all I’m trying to say! We’re a family! Us and Daddy, even though he’s dead. I don’t want someone else sleeping in your bed!” I jump up and walk away, toward the stairs. I don’t want to have this conversation. I don’t want her to say something that will make me say I’m sorry.
“Jennifer, no one’s sleeping in my bed but me, not for a long time. But I deserve a life! I’m the adult here. I am allowed—”
“Over my dead body!” I shout, and run downstairs. “You go out with other men, and I’ll kill myself! Just see if I don’t!”
It was in the newspaper just yesterday about a teenager hanging himself. I know I won’t really do it, but it sounds so good, I repeat myself. “I’ll kill myself, and you’ll be sorry!” I hear her coming down the stairs, and I run into the bathroom and slam the door. Lock it. I think she’s going to pound on the door, tell me not to kill myself, but she doesn’t.
It’s a little less than three years after my father’s death that she meets Simon Burton at a fund-raiser for University Hospitals. I’m almost fifteen, and she hasn’t dated for a while. My guard is down.
For their first date she gets dressed in a pale yellow skirt and a white blouse. She ties an orange scarf around her neck, wears new earrings I have never seen.
“He’s a pediatrician at University Hospitals,” she tells me as she stands in front of the mirror putting on too much blush.
“So that means he likes kids, and I should like him?” I say, not hiding my sarcasm.
“Yes.” She sighs. “That’s exactly what I meant. You’re so smart.” Her sarcasm matches mine exactly, and we stare at each other in the mirror.
“What’s he look like?” Betsy asks. She’s thirteen now, and both overly serious and helplessly naive.
“He has brown hair. A great smile. He’s very nice.”
“Another nice guy,” I say. He may not be a threat after all. The nice guys never make it. Not as long as I’m around.
My mother glares at me. “Please, Jennifer. Give me a break.”
“He’s here!” Peter shouts from the TV room. Peter’s not happy about my mother going out but only because I’m baby-sitting. When Peter asked if he could stay at a friend’s, she said no, and we both knew it was because he’s really baby-sitting, that she would never leave me alone with my sister. The last time I rolled Betsy up in the braided rug and sat on her. She’s a skinny little thing.
“Okay!” my mother shouts back to Peter, then lowers her voice. “Be good now.” This is obviously said to me, even though my sister is standing right here, too.
The doorbell rings, and my mother takes a deep breath and rolls her shoulders. This relaxation exercise is a theatre thing. She is using something she learned from my father to date another man.
Simon comes in and says hi to all of us, using our names. She must have told him our names and he remembered them. This doesn’t endear him to me as well as he might think it does. I don’t believe pediatricians really like kids.
Simon has curly brown hair like my mother, but the curls are tight all over his head like a helmet. He looks Irish, like she does, with a few freckles on his nose. He’s wearing a plaid jacket with wide lapels. A real dork.
“We’re going to the Top of the Town,” my mother says, gloating just a little as she looks at me. “I won’t be home too late. Eleven?” She says this last to Simon. He nods and takes her elbow. I can’t stand him.
“I expect Betsy to be in bed by then, and the two of you ready to get into bed as soon as I get home.”
Yeah, right, I think. She’s trying to impress him with her motherly skills. I haven’t gone to bed by eleven on a weekend night for well over a year.
“I really appreciate your taking care of your brother and sister so we can go out, Jennifer,” Simon says. “Thank you.”
I just nod.
“Good night, then.” He leads my mother out the door, still holding her arm.
I look at my brother and sister, and go up to the attic to smoke pot. I have just started smoking pot and I like it a lot, although every now and then it makes me slightly paranoid. I am asleep when my mother comes home. She wakes me up.
“Why are your windows open?” she asks.
“It got hot up here,” I say.
“I’m not paying to heat the outdoors,” she says, closing my windows.
“Did you have a good time?” I need to know.
She turns and smiles, a big, helpless smile. “Yes, I did. Thank you for asking.”
Now I am paranoid, and it’s not the pot. It’s my mother’s smile.
Before I know it, he’s around all the time.
They sit on the couch and discuss Nixon. He says her name constantly. “I think your right about that, Rose.” “What do you think about this Kissinger, Rose?” “Well, Rose, we have to fight for democracy sometimes.” She still drinks, and I hear them discussing that. “I’m worried you’re drinking too much, Rose,” he says. “Let me help you.” Trying to hear better, I step down one more step and it creaks. They stop talking. I don’t know how he plans on helping her. If I can’t get her to stop drinking, how can he?
They go out every Friday and Saturday night, and sometimes he comes to our house for dinner on Tuesdays. She’ll rush home and make something expensive, like steak and twice-baked potatoes and asparagus; she knows better than to ask me to make these dinners. He joins right in, talking and making jokes, asking for seconds. One day he brings us a microscope to keep, and sets it up in the basement where my brother does his experiments. He shows Peter and Betsy how to see the cellular makeup of plants. I’d have to join in on the big huddle to see what they’re doing. I don’t. I go back upstairs and turn up my music. I can figure out how to use a microscope on my own, if I want. One Tuesday after dinner, he touches my mother’s cheek with a finger, saying, “Look, an eyelash. We can look at your mother’s eyelash!” and they all troop downstairs to the basement. I want to puke.
It takes me a while to realize just how serious they’re getting—I have become distracted by pot. It’s a lovely thing, and makes everything nice. I go downstairs to the basement when no one is around and look at my own eyel
ashes, fingernails, and pubic hairs under the microscope. I write poetry that I think is really great. Other times I watch Simon and my mother as if they are a B movie with the sound track turned off, until I get some Dexedrine from a friend, and suddenly I am wary. This man is trouble.
Lately, I think they may be talking about me. About my bad grades. My bad moods. How I got caught stealing lipstick from Woolworth’s. He’s a pediatrician and looks at me funny, like he’s taking my temperature with his eyes. How dare she talk about me to him?
The first Monday in March my mother tells me that Simon and she are going to go to the Allegheny Mountains for three days, leaving this coming Sunday morning and coming home Tuesday night. A neighbor, a widow named Mrs. Layman, is going to come stay with us. My mother doesn’t look me in the eye when she tells me this. Simon has never slept here, and she’s never stayed overnight at his house, but I am old enough to know they are not going to the mountains to sleep in separate rooms.
I make a plan of my own.
Two nights before they leave, I pack up a small suitcase and sneak out of the house. It’s snowing heavily, and the world is white and soft.
My friend Lisa thinks I am so cool to run away. She appropriates her parents’ car while they’re sleeping and drives me to a friend of hers, who is older than us both and lives in an apartment by herself. She has cast off her given name, and calls herself Moonglow Sunshine. I am supposed to say the whole thing, she tells me, because that completes the circle of light. After dropping me off, Lisa goes home so she won’t get in trouble.
Moonglow Sunshine is into transcendental meditation. The windows are shrouded with cotton paisley sheets, the room illuminated with the flicker of candles stuck in wine bottles, the air thick with the aroma of patchouli incense. It’s cold outside, but the radiators are on full blast, hissing at us like fat coiled snakes. We cross our legs and chant “Ohmm,” sending good vibrations out to the poor and suffering. We do this for days and find ourselves dizzy with the power of our minds. We eat cinnamon toast because that’s all there is. On the forth day I walk to the store to get more bread and maybe a few apples. I’m picked up by the police for being truant. The police officer is a sadist who grins wickedly at me in the backseat of the cruiser. “They might send you to juvenile home for this, little lady,” he says. I glare at him, but my lips tremble. Besides being scared shitless, I’m starving. When my mother picks me up from the police station, she offers to take me to McDonald’s. I say, “I’m sorry,” and she cries as I eat a cheeseburger and fries. For some reason, she stops dating Simon and stays home a lot. She teaches me how to play gin rummy.
