Habit

by Susan Morse

  —I know, but there isn’t enough room for any more full-length graves. Just two little spots are left, near Mummy.

  —How about a nice urn?

  —He’ll be fine with the box from the funeral home. You know Daddy; he was a rebellious dresser and wouldn’t want a big fuss.

  —At the Redeemer, with all those huge monuments, surrounded by the crème de la crème of Philadelphia’s old guard? You’re going to just stick him into the ground with his mother-in-law in a cardboard BOX??

  After some reflection, it made a tiny bit of sense. Granny and Daddy did get along well (they shared a fondness for cigarettes, crossword puzzles, and whiskey), and Ma would eventually join them.

  Or so we thought, until our mother became Orthodox and a whole new, more elaborate set of rules kicked in. Orthodox Christians are even more allergic to cremation than traditional Roman Catholics and Ma seemed to have no intention of taking chances with her own remains. They also can’t be embalmed, and they have to be buried in an Orthodox plot.

  Ma’s even got her own personal Orthodox shroud. It’s a special white baptismal robe she was given to wear when they dunked her in the River Jordan. She brought it to a family picnic at the Penllyn Club after she got back from the Holy Land because she wanted all the grandchildren and great-grandchildren to see what she’d be buried in. She made them pose for a picture: All of them lined up next to her on the grass in their dripping swimsuits and water wings, holding her death shroud spread out between them like they’ve been shaking sand off a big white beach blanket. Ma is beaming. Everyone else looks sort of spooked.

  So our family had to adjust to the idea that Daddy would spend eternity with his mother-in-law and a bunch of highbrow strangers. I’m thinking Felix should take Ma’s empty slot if he doesn’t get around to marrying anyone else so there will be at least one blood relative to keep Daddy company. We decided that while Ma’s funeral was going to be tricky, it was manageable, but that was before she and Photini switched from the local Orthodox church to Saint Mark of Ephesus, two hours upstate in Carlisle. That’s when I suggested it might be helpful if she gave me some clear instructions.

  —What sort of instructions?

  —Well, if you can’t be embalmed and you can’t be cremated, and the church is out in the middle of nowhere—

  —So sorry to be such a burden to you.

  —No, it’s okay.

  —I want all my descendants to go to my funeral together. That’s the most important thing.

  —Right, Ma, that shouldn’t be a problem. As long as they’re not having an ice storm in Vermont. And Colette will just have to somehow zap herself here from England before you start to sm—

  —If that happens, just go ahead with it anyway. You can have a big party after everyone gets here. I’m sure you’ll all have a wonderful time.

  —That’s nice; your own children won’t be at your funeral because it’s more important you obey a bunch of wacked-out religious—

  —Susie.

  —I’m sorry. I know this is important to you. I really do want to get it right for you.

  —It’s very important, Susie, and you should be thinking about it, too.

  —Yeah, well, David and I are going to be scattered on Mount Desert Island.

  —Oh (dripping with an unvoiced opinion) . . .

  —I don’t want to hear it, Ma.

  —Well, I’m sure you’ll be very happy there, and your children will never know how to find you.

  —What do Orthodox people do if they die on vacation overseas? God forbid, I screw it up so badly that you end up in the wrong heaven. . . .

  Ma did all the research and came up with a detailed contract from a funeral home near her new church that knew how to make Orthodox preparations. I paid for the burial plot and filed the particulars. But I balked at emergency evacuation insurance for the remains of vacationing Orthodox types when Ma admitted the priest said rules could be bent a little for extenuating circumstances. I also refused to put down a nonrefundable deposit with the funeral home, on the basis that she had a solid track record of switching religions. Who was to know whether Ma wouldn’t have something else in mind when the moment was upon us?

  My lack of faith in her faith made Ma quite indignant despite my assurance that I would definitely adapt to her wishes according to whatever the religion du jour was when she took her last breath. I was presented with several long handwritten pages of rambling explanation about why this church was indeed the Final Definitive Answer To Everything, which I think I filed somewhere, too. But I didn’t budge on the down payment, and apparently she shared her version of our standoff with Father Basil. He drew his own conclusions about my fears based on his past experience with concerned family members, and sees this as his chance to finally reassure me.

  —Oh, that, I say. No, we definitely don’t think you’re running a cult. My mother’s an idiot, but she’s not completely stupid.

  —It’s good you feel that way, he says dubiously.

  —No, it’s just that she switches around so much. No offense. If she wants to be buried in Carlisle, that’s fine; none of us will have a problem. But she’s like a dog with a bone with each religion, and we’ve been through too many different bones. It makes her really mad when we don’t just sign right up.

  —Oh, he says. I’m always advising my wife to go easy on our kids about that, too.

  My mother may be a little nuts, I think to myself, as Father Basil and I bound back down the hall like two old buddies to see how the test went. But at least she’s not a Moonie. And she does know how to pick her priests. Father Basil has class.

  7.

  The Walk

  THERE’S THIS THING I hate hate hate having to even think about, and now it’s time to do it.

  Colette and I have talked it to death over the years:

  —I won’t be able to do it, Coco. Kissing her good-bye and walking out of the room and down the hall. That’s the killer: the part where I walk down the hall and home to my family.

  —Well, maybe one of us will be there with you.

  —Oh gosh. That would be SO helpful.

  But nobody’s here.

  The whole idea of this assisted-living place I’ve found is that Ma can stay here for a month or so while she’s having her radiation treatment. She won’t have to fix her own meals, and if she needs a shower or something, they will help her. Then when she’s back on her feet, she can go home. That’s the idea.

  That’s not so bad, right?

  So, the new place. Grammy and Grampy’s Happy Hide-Away (or whatever the hell it’s called). It’s a good one, we hear. The other inmates seem comfortable. They’re all trundling cheerfully around with their oxygen caddies, and the dining room has linen napkins and a pretty view of the woods. There are friendly notices on the bulletin board about Saint Paddy’s parties and visiting day from the elementary school; pictures of happy, smiling old ladies making cute little crafts.

  There are even people here that we know: Mrs. Martinelli—her husband was Daddy’s doctor once and I used to play with her daughter. When I came for the tour, there was Mrs. Martinelli. She looked so fit, I figured she must be visiting somebody, but then it seemed to take her a minute or two to figure out who I was.

  The occupational therapist at the hospital gave Ma her first walker. It works really well. It’s red, with four wheels and a padded seat, so if you get tired you can stop and sit. The seat opens up with a hinge to a basket underneath into which you can fit a lot of other things like a purse or a bunch of bibles.

  I began to believe that Happy Hide-Away was necessary when I stopped at the post office box on the way home from the hospital yesterday, the day before Ma’s release. There among the heaps of mail I hadn’t gotten around to collecting, was a notice from the school about Sam. He’s all messed up and behind in his schoolwork, and I didn’t even know.

  The kids are smart enough and they work hard, but David’s been away so much and I’ve barely been a
ble to focus on them. According to Sam, his latest research paper stumped him; it just froze him right up. He says he sat staring at the computer in a trance for three nights in a row, and it was like dominoes. All the other work got neglected, and now he’s in a real jam. I get the feeling if I, his actual mother, had been there checking in now and then, he might have snapped himself out of it.

  It’s ninth grade and the GPA counts. Sam’s in the generation of kids where college acceptance is at its most cutthroat. I simply won’t let this crisis mess up his chances. So Sam is moved to the top of my list for now.

  I’ve got to check in with his teachers, which is difficult because they’re busy, too, and during the day, I really need to work on Operation Ma, picking up what she needs at her apartment and organizing rides to radiation when I can’t do it and stuff. I have this new compulsive relationship with my cell phone. It rings all the time now, and I can’t resist answering it even when I’m driving, which is unsafe. There’s no time to shop for a Bluetooth gadget, but we have an old headset that connects with a wire, and I wear it all day, clipped to my waistband. That way, when I’m in the sporting goods store looking for the spandex bicycle shorts Ma’s physical therapist thinks will help support her back, I don’t have to stop what I’m doing when Sam’s advisor finally calls.

  This is why I don’t have a job. This is my job. I know there are people who manage it, single working mothers with aging parents. I just don’t know how. How do they take care of the kids, the parents, and then go to an office or wherever and accomplish anything anyone would actually pay them to do? Honestly, it’s beyond me to even understand, much less be capable of it.

  And this place, this place, this place, it’s not working out very well. I don’t understand why everyone else here looks okay, because Ma’s just not. Maybe we’re not assisted-living material. When we arrived this morning, they didn’t have sheets on the bed and people kept coming in with paperwork, saying where are the sheets? And we’d say yes, where are they? and they’d say it’s not my job. So fine, Ma sat on her padded seat in the middle of the room until finally somebody whose job it wasn’t took pity on us and found some sheets.

  This got me thinking. Ma’s using her first walker ever, and it’s hard to get out of bed quickly. She just came off massive laxatives. Bed linens are hard to come by in this place for some reason. Put that all together, and it seems like I’d better make sure they know it would be a good idea, for the first night or two, to have some extra sheets handy for heaven’s sake and maybe a person available whose job it is to get them if something were to happen in the middle of the night. So I ask the head nurse if she is prepared. She says of course, not a problem and puts it in the notes for the night nurse to see when she comes on tonight.

  It’s hard to figure out who to talk to about things. There are lots of women walking around in scrubs, laughing in the hallway, but when I ask them things like who do I talk to about my mother having breakfast in her room on a tray, they say I’m private duty, and that seems to mean they don’t really work here. What’s that all about?

  I’m determined to get all this settled in time to be home for dinner and homework.

  We have a geriatric psychologist who said make sure your mother has familiar comfort things like family pictures, so I’ve brought some of those and a couple of her icons. And because I can’t just keep it simple, I grabbed our little portable DVD player and a handful of movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which I hear is a huge hit with the little old ladies, especially future Orthodox nuns.

  I’ve made several thousand trips back and forth from the car. It’s funny because everywhere I go, I see Mrs. Martinelli.

  I get in the elevator to go downstairs from Ma’s room and it stops at the second floor and Mrs. Martinelli gets in. I say hello, it’s Susie von Moschzisker, which seems to ring more of a bell for her, so that’s who I’ll have to be. Oh, hello, Susie, how are you? (We already established how I am this morning, but anyway.)

  We travel down to the lobby together. I go out to the car to collect the next load of stuff: a quilt and the DVD player. Everything is getting a little tangled up with the wire from the phone headset, which gets somehow shut in the car door. And when I try to walk away, my earpiece is ripped off my head and the phone yanks off my waistband and lands on the pavement and the battery clatters out, but it still seems to work, thank God, and I hook everything back up again and I go back in and push the elevator button and after a while the door opens and out pops Mrs. Martinelli.

  —Hello again, Mrs. Martinelli, it’s Susie von Moschzisker.

  —Oh, hi, Susie, how are you?

  I wonder which of Mrs. Martinelli’s kids has my job. Maybe we can have coffee sometime and talk each other out of killing ourselves.

  When I get back to the third floor, Ma announces that Father Nectarios will be here any second to give her communion, and isn’t that nice because I will get to meet him finally.

  —So nice, I say.

  Nice for her but help. I don’t have time to wait around for that to get done, it’s almost time for dinner and I’m going to have to pick up some takeout as it is. The kids really need a calm meal before homework. I show Ma the DVDs. She’s being uncharacteristically decent about everything, which sort of makes it hard for me to feel inclined to take any of my monkey-in-a-cageness out on her, which is a good thing.

  I’m trying to figure out how to get the DVD player to work. This gadget belongs to the boys, and they know how to work it, but I have not got a clue. I’ve got the directions, but half of it is in Spanish and the other half is an obvious translation from some other language altogether, using one of those word-for-word programs on the Internet:

  Making to Play: Please be setting the proper input button on your DVD device. Wires installed correctly will to avoid hazard instead.

  So I’ve laid all the different wires and batteries and things on the floor, and I’m slowly making some sense of them all when Father Nectarios and his wife, Matushka, arrive. This business about Matushka took some concentration. Father Basil and Father Nectarios are at the same church. They both have wives named Matushka, because apparently that is what your name is when you are married to an Orthodox priest. (You get your own special Orthodox name when you’re baptized. Photini used to be something much simpler. They call Ma Anna now instead of Marjorie, which could be hard for Mrs. Martinelli to get the hang of if it ever comes up.)

  Anyway, Father Nectarios and Matushka are here, and I’m still figuring out how to be setting the correct AV cable to acquire proper according to the output frequency of this component or something, but I drop everything and shake everyone’s hands and ask if they would rather I come back tomorrow.

  But Ma wants to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding in bed tonight. So we decide I’ll just keep on sorting the DVD player out while Father Nectarios and Matushka do whatever it is they do. This turns out to involve a lot of walking around with candles and decanters of wine and special cloths on Ma’s head and some very long and drawn-out chanting. I have to discreetly climb around them with all my wires while they do all this stuff.

  I get the thing working, and I sort of hover till they come to some kind of break in all the chanting and walking around, and it feels rude, but I ask:

  —I’m sorry, is it okay if I just go over this with Ma I mean Anna for a second before I go home?

  Not a problem, so I show her how to turn on the power and put in the disc and what to push for play and pause, and I kiss Ma and I shake everyone’s hands and thank them, and thank God I got that taken care of so Mrs. Martinelli and I can grab a minute to catch up on things in the elevator on the way down to the lobby.

  What’s amazing is that there is so much going on, I don’t even pause for a second to register the fact:

  That walk down the hall I was dreading?

  I just did it.

  I kissed Ma good-bye and walked out the door. And surprise surprise, she wasn’t alone like I had always imagined. She ha
d Father Nectarios and Matushka, and Holy Communion, and she was kind of happy.

  And yes, I did that walk down the hall by myself, but in my recurring horror fantasy I never pictured Mrs. Martinelli waiting for me in the elevator, a reminder that this kind of thing happens to lots of people whose children are not selfish jerks any more than I am. Maybe we’re all going to manage.

  So we have an excellent stew from the take-out place, and Sam and I get to talk about his situation. I sort of pace around all evening trying to think about what else could go wrong and how to stop it. David calls and gets an earful and he wants to speak to Sam, and then he starts to wonder if he should pass on this Broadway play he was thinking of doing, which is really a bummer but maybe that’s the thing to do.

  —Maybe not, I say. Don’t pass yet. I think it may be under control.

  I call Ma first thing in the morning to see how the night went, and yikes.

  —I have to go home now.

  —What happened?

  —There is something very very wrong with this place.

  —What? What happened?

  —Well, a person came into my room in the middle of the night and woke me up and started yammering.

  —Oh my gosh, was it Mrs. Martinelli?

  —Who?

  —Never mind, who was it?

  —I have no idea. A nurse.

  —What did she want?

  —She was shrieking what’s all this about having to change the sheets all the time. I’m not set up for this!

  —What?! Wait, you needed the sheets changed?

  —No, I didn’t need the sheets changed, I was asleep. I didn’t need anything.

  —Are you sure you hadn’t been bothering them?

  —No, I hadn’t been bothering anyone. I didn’t have anything to bother anyone about. It’s completely unnecessary for me to be here.

  —Well, what did she want?

  —She had a chart and she was waving it at me and howling. I was quite frightened, but I didn’t want to wake you.