by Lori Weber
The courtyard outside my grandmother’s apartment building is the most decorated one on the block; hot pink peonies hug the wall, tiger lilies sit on either side of the walkway, and wild rose bushes line the lawn along the sidewalk. Today, though, I’m convinced the janitor has gone too far when I look up to see a giant stuffed parrot tied to the trunk of a skinny birch tree near the entrance.
“Like my bird?” he asks, sitting on a lawn chair. When I was a kid he’d give me candies and my mom always made me wash the wrappers first. For her, the world is one big teeming pool of germs just waiting to invade the bodies of people she loves.
“Very nice,” my mom says. I nod, trying not to laugh.
The stairwell that leads to the basement apartment is poorly lit. The damp air carries a whiff of ammonia and cigarettes, smells that will overwhelm me once we’re inside. I take a deep breath and clutch the railing, careful not to let the shopping bag I’m carrying bang against the wall. In it are gifts we brought back last week from our trip to Austria.
My mom knocks lightly and I hear the familiar shuffle of my grandmother’s slippers. I know she’ll crack the door first, to check that we aren’t strangers, before sliding the chain out of its track.
“Hi Joan, hi Kathy,” my grandmother says, opening up. We step into the dark apartment. My mom is always trying to talk her brother, Doug, who lives with my grandmother, into moving upstairs to a brighter place, but he says they’re happy in the cool basement. My grandmother gives us each a peck on the cheek and I watch as my mom’s eyes slip down to my grandmother’s chest, which is covered by a flannel housecoat.
“Did you have a nice time?” my grandmother asks as we follow her to the kitchen. The upstairs apartments have hardwood floors, but this one is tiled. Easier to wash when Angel piddles, my grandmother is always pointing out.
“Yes, it was nice,” my mom replies. I catch her looking at the needlepoint she made my grandmother last Christmas. A log cabin sits in an evergreen forest. In the background, pointy white mountains pierce the top of the frame. Their snowy peaks have already begun to yellow from all the cigarette smoke.
We sit around the small kitchen table, which is cluttered with ashtrays, grocery store fliers, and half-finished crossword puzzles. The cupboards on the opposite wall have so many layers of paint they don’t close properly. I know this upsets my mom. I catch her staring at the two-inch gaps. Through them, we can see how meager my grandmother’s belongings are, like Old Mother Hubbard’s. Over the years, my mom has tried to stock the shelves with better dishes, but these always break or disappear. Angel’s food is dumped into some bone china, another gift from my mom, on the floor.
“So, Ma, how are you feeling?” my mom asks. This is, after all, the real reason for our visit. To check up on my grandmother, who had breast cancer surgery just two weeks before we left.
“Not too bad, honey. Like that, you know?” My grandmother fills a yellow kettle and lights the gas burner, standing a little too close. “So, what did you do in Austria?”
“Not much, really. Mostly visited with Henry’s folks,” my mom answers. She always downplays her life around her mother, as though she can’t let on that good things happen to her. She could tell her about the castle tour we took or the gondola ride into the Alps. These outings were huge accomplishments for someone with agoraphobia. But I don’t interfere. I promised myself before we left home that I wouldn’t.
My grandmother bends to light a cigarette on the flames shooting up the sides of the kettle. She once singed her eyelashes this way, turning them orange. Then she leans over the flame to get down the tea-tin.
“Watch your housecoat,” my mom cries.
My grandmother smiles, joining us with the tea at the table.
“So, you’re feeling better?” my mom asks again.
“Well, Joannie, to tell you the truth, I feel like I have a tennis ball stuck under my arm. It’s more uncomfortable than sore, if you know what I mean.”
But my mom doesn’t know, and neither do I. How could you, unless you’d had the same operation? I did think of my grandmother while we were away. I tried to see the ornate castle through the eyes of someone who’d just lost a breast, but I couldn’t. I was having too much fun skating around the grand hallways in the paper slippers that all the tourists had to wear.
“And then, too, it’s so awful hot here. You feel like meat gone bad in heat like this, don’t you?” My grandmother looks to me for support, but I just make a face. I can tell my mom’s picturing her mother hanging from a meat hook, her skin turning mossy green.
“Are you eating all right?” my mom asks next. My grandmother nods, then stuffs a whole oatmeal cookie into her mouth, without biting first. Her cheeks puff out like a gopher’s.
“How does your bedroom look?” My mom organized the redecoration of my grandmother’s room while she was in the hospital.
“Nice. Come see.” We follow my grandmother down the back hall. When we pass my uncle’s bedroom my grandmother says, “Angel’s been so good. I hardly notice she’s here.” My mom tried to convince my uncle to give the dog away while my grandmother was in the hospital, but he refused. He had brought the dog home from a tavern a few weeks earlier. She’s blind, so when she walks she feels the walls with her square terrier nose, leaving a trail of dog drool just above the baseboards. Plus, she was never trained and does her business on newspapers laid out along the floors.
“See?” My grandmother switches on the light, a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The blue paper lamp-shade that my mom hung up is nowhere in sight. The new, delicately flowered wallpaper that my mom talked my father into hanging is completely hidden by a clothesline strung up across the room. A few dishtowels and some socks and underwear hang from it, drip drying onto newspapers that cover the floor.
“What happened to the bed?” my mom gasps. An extra mattress has been sandwiched in between the new mattress and box-spring set.
“Well, I had nowhere to put it and I didn’t want to throw it out.”
“But it’s your old mattress. Doug was supposed to get rid of it.”
“Well, I didn’t let him. I might need it one day.”
“But this is too high for you,” my mom says. I picture my grandmother climbing into bed at night, clutching the layers like the rungs of a ladder. Later, she’d sit high on top like the princess and the pea, looking smug.
“It’s okay, honey. It’s comfy, really.”
The flowered bedspread my mom bought to match the wallpaper is now way too short and doesn’t cover the striped material of the box spring.
I watch my mom’s face fall in disappointment. I remember how excited she was when we put the final touches on the room, how much she thought her mom would love it. How she hoped it would make the room more pleasant. I have a sudden urge to rip the clothesline down. It wouldn’t be hard, just a flick of my wrist. But I don’t. It wouldn’t make a difference anyway. My grandmother has already left the room.
I HAD TO go to the hospital with my mom the day my grandmother was booked in.
“What if we just forgot about it now? What if we just packed up and took her home?” my mom asked the doctor. “I mean, she is seventy-five. Is it really worth going through all this?” My mom said it broke her heart to see her mother in a white hospital gown with a slit exposing her down the back.
“Well, if you do that, she’ll die. If we operate successfully, I see no reason why your mother won’t live to be a hundred. Providing we get it all,” the doctor added.
“I think Gran wants to die anyway,” I said to my mom later that day in the cafeteria. The walls around us were painted bright orange, like in a fast food restaurant, probably to keep people perky. “She’s always going on about how fed up she is, and she’s bored to death half the time.”
“That’s not true,” my mom said, forcing down a spoon full of pea soup.
“Yes, it is. She hates playing Bingo. That’s all the old fogies in her building do. And she can’t ju
st whip downtown anymore. I think she wants to die,” I repeated, biting into my ham sandwich. “The only thing she likes to do is read. And she’s read every book she likes ten times over. I’d want to die too if I were her.” I knew I was being cruel, but I couldn’t stop myself. I get tired of tiptoeing around my mom, of being so careful about what I say, of always having to avert an anxiety attack. Sometimes, I just want to be able to open my mouth without thinking and say what’s on my mind, even if I regret it later.
“She could do more if she wanted to. I’d take her downtown,” my mom said weakly.
I nearly choked. How would she do that? I’d have to start carting two women around instead of just one. I pictured us holding hands like a nursery school chain on a field trip.
The day of the operation, we sat in the lounge, waiting. Even though my uncle hadn’t been to work that day, the tips of his fingers were still grease-stained, his nails navy blue crescents. I didn’t know much about my uncle, except that he was a mechanic and an alcoholic. And that he’d never left home. That day, for the first time, I wondered why. Was it because he’d never fallen in love? Had the years just slipped by without his noticing and one day he’d woken up to find himself forty and still living at home? What if I ended up like him? I felt myself choking as I saw myself, gray-haired and stooped over, pushing my mom around in a wheelchair, wondering what life was like on the outside.
“You know the first thing I’m gonna do for Ma, eh Joan?” my uncle said. “You know? I’m gonna bust up our old furniture. Christ, I hate that stuff.” He shook his head fiercely, as if he was tossing something from it. “I’m gonna take a hammer and break it up into little pieces and throw the whole goddamn works out. It’s junk. You know what I mean? Junk.”
My mom nodded, not looking up. I’m sure she didn’t want to be thinking about junk. She’d be thinking more along the lines of lace curtains and a nice new bedspread.
“She likes crap, though. You know what I mean? I never met anyone who likes junk as much as Ma does. Every square inch of our cupboards is taken up with crap. Our cupboards are full of boxes of old elastics and rusted paperclips. Last week I found a jar of Vaseline so old it was hard as rock, and orange.”
I thought of the orderly walk-in closets my mom was forever rearranging in our house. Sometimes I wondered if she was adopted.
“It’s taking an awful long time, don’t you think?” my mom said to my dad, who sat perched on the edge of his seat, craning his neck to see outside.
“She’s not the only one being operated on, you know?” my dad responded. “They’re probably doing a dozen in a row.”
My mom made a face. I knew she was picturing her mother and eleven other women on a conveyor belt, the doctor standing above them, slicing off breasts as they went by. It was just the type of image we had to protect my mom from, or else she’d spend weeks inside.
“I’ll take it out and put it on the other side of the street in the middle of the night,” my uncle continued. “Then no one’ll know where it came from. You know, Henry?”
My dad was now standing at the window, staring at the opposite wing of the hospital. “Look at the nice brickwork,” he said, to no one in particular. “You don’t see fancy brickwork like that anymore. Now everything’s slapped together, like that.” He clapped his hands like he was throwing together a salami sandwich.
“That’s right. That’s how that furniture is made. I bet I could tear it apart with my own hands,” my uncle jumped in.
I fixed my eyes on a sign — Surgery Bay. What an odd name! I pictured the operation taking place in a large murky pond, my grandmother floating on some giant lily pad, the sound of croaking filling the air around her. I had to shut out the voices around me, and all the talk of how things were put together and torn apart. I was hearing it through my mom’s ears and by the terror-stricken look on her face, I knew her anxiety was mounting.
I got up, feeling, as I always do, that I shouldn’t leave my mom’s side. When I passed the nurses’ station, I overheard two nurses talking about Florida.
“We went to the Everglades. Man, you should’ve seen the alligators. Tom wanted to stop the car and get out. I said no bloody way. I could just see my leg getting chomped off.” She raised a white-nyloned leg and the other nurse laughed.
It occurred to me that I too was a nurse, only I hadn’t had any formal training. I had learned by experience, beginning at the age of four, holding my mom’s hand when we went downtown. Even then I could tell that she was the one doing the holding and that my small hand was her anchor. Once, at a large department store, she had to go to the bathroom. I waited outside her stall, trying to see the traffic through the open window. It was taking her a long time. Eventually, I called her name, but she didn’t answer. I tried to open her door but couldn’t. I left and wandered in and out of the racks of clothes until I found a saleslady. I pointed to the bathroom and gestured. When we got there, my mom was splashing water on her face at one of the sinks. She shrieked when she saw me with the strange woman and pulled me to her side, like I’d been kid-napped. It never occurred to her that she was the one who had abandoned me.
The buzzer sounded and the nurses rolled their eyes. “Probably Mrs. Benezra wanting to pee again,” one of them said.
I turned back to the lounge.
THE DAY AFTER the operation, my mom wanted to stop to buy an African Violet at the gift shop. “It’ll be dead in a week,” I said, but she didn’t believe me, so I headed up to my grandmother’s room alone. I told myself my mother would be fine navigating the elevator up to the seventh floor without me. Besides, she could text me if she needed help and I’d come down to get her.
My grandmother was lying on her side, the sheet pulled up to her chin. Her face was puffy, like it had been blown up. A plastic tube connected to a container filled with two red balls drew my attention on her bedside table. I picked it up and blew into it, sending the balls floating up to the top.
“What’s this, Gran?” I asked.
“A lung exerciser, sweetie. I’m supposed to blow into it once an hour. Kathy … have you seen Doug?”
“Yes,” I lied. “He’s here somewhere.” I actually hadn’t seen him since yesterday, but knew she’d be frantic if I told her so.
My grandmother closed her eyes and fell asleep. When my mom walked into the room, I was blowing into the lung exerciser. She gasped and called out, “Kathy, put that thing down. How can you touch it?” I knew she was picturing it being passed around the cancer ward, collecting more and more deadly germs as sick people blew into it.
“It’s not gonna kill me, Mom.”
“Did she wake up yet?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, what did she say?”
“Nothing. She just said hello.”
“Did she ask to see me?”
“I told her you were on your way up,” I lied again.
“Are you sure she heard you?”
“Well, I guess she did. She nodded, then fell asleep.”
My mom looked at the floor, dejected.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, my grandmother was sitting up in bed. The blinds were sealed tight, shutting out the sunlight.
“How are you feeling?” my mom asked, squeezing her mother’s hand.
“Well, like that, I guess.” There were splotches of dried blood on her neck. A clear plastic tube came out from behind her waist, dark red clumps of blood from her wound draining into it.
“You should ask the nurse to open your blinds a little,” my mom said. The African Violet sat on the sill, its lilac flowers already a little withered. My grandmother just shrugged.
Then my uncle showed up. I could smell the alcohol on his breath.
“Hey, little one,” he said to his mother. “How’s it going?”
“Okay, my honey,” my grandmother answered, brightening.
“Doug, promise me you’ll let Joan take you home, eh? No going out tonight, promise me.”
“She’s such a little wo
rrier,” my uncle said to us in a childish voice, as though his mother were a cute little poodle. “Yeah, yeah, don’t worry. I’ll go home with Joannie. I’ll just go get a coffee, okay, little one?” He began filling his pipe with tobacco as he walked out. I knew we wouldn’t see him again today.
“Do you like the flowers, Ma?” my mom asked softly.
“Yeah, they’re pretty, Joan,” my grandmother said without looking at them, her voice heavy and dis-tracted. She looked up at my mom. “You’ll take Doug home, won’t you, Joan?”
My mom nodded, as if taking him home were really a possibility. Did my grandmother think we had come by car? Did she even know that my mom couldn’t drive anymore? That I had brought her to the hospital on three connecting buses because she couldn’t take the metro either? That with each bus my mom had grown more reluctant, her weight increasing against me, as though she were collapsing?
“So?” my mom asked. I knew she wanted to bring up the operation. My grandmother hadn’t asked us about it yet. I knew my mom was dying to reassure her, to tell her that the doctor had said everything was going to be fine.
“Please, Joan, go and find him,” my grandmother said finally. She turned her head so quickly that the draining tube puckered, sticking up like a V beside her chest. My mom sighed. I hoped she wouldn’t try to flatten it herself.
“Come on, let’s go Mom,” I called firmly. “There’s no point in staying.” I pulled her arm up and she rose with it, completely pliable. At the door, we turned back to look at my grandmother, whose eyes were already closed.
SHE’S NOT OUT of the woods yet,” was an expression my mom used a lot the following week. She used it the day I brought cards to the hospital to play gin rummy with my grandmother. She used it the day my uncle brought up a CD player so she could listen to her favorite Irish and Scottish folk songs. And she said it when my dad reminded her that we had plane tickets to Austria in a week, tickets that had been purchased long before my grandmother had even discovered the lump.
