Ordinary Life (6 page)

She smiles down at me with her terrible dimples. “What?” Her voice seems borne by the breeze, carries far, stays alive for a long time—it is just that kind of day, perfect for thumb sucking. Angered by a new surge of desire, I ask again, irritably, “How did you know?”

“Oh,” she says. “Well, a pixie told me.”

I look around uneasily. I don’t see any trace of her. “How did
she
know?”

My mother has remembered her work, and she is pulling back into the house. “She watches you,” she tells me, and disappears.

I sit on my blanket, disgruntled. I wonder if this pixie also knows what I am thinking. Oh, it can’t be.

Last week when I came to see my mother, she was wearing a housecleaning kerchief as in the old days, covering her now silver hair. Her dress was buttoned one button off, and she was wearing only one slipper. I found the other one on top of the stove. My stomach lurched. “Mom,” I said, as gently as I could, “why is your slipper here?”

She stared at it blankly. “Why, I don’t know.” A robin came into the tree near the kitchen window where we stood. My mother saw him and said, “Oh, look. Look at his fat orange breast.”

We sat at the little kitchen table with the embroidered tablecloth and I asked what she’d had for breakfast. She traced a blue daisy with her fingertip and began to cry. “I don’t remember. Ask your father.” My father died four years ago. On his last day, he was fixing a stuck wheel on my son’s bicycle. He clutched his chest, my mother later told me, looking quite surprised. Then he stared at her, sitting in her lawn chair a few feet away from him, and, with a look of extreme clarity and love, neatly died. She dropped the peas she’d been shelling onto the ground and never let anyone pick them up. For a whole year after my father’s death, you could still find some, if you looked carefully enough.

Now, I said what I’d imagined saying for nearly a year. I said, “Mom, I’m worried about your living here alone. I think you need other people around.”

She gasped. “Oh, no. I don’t want to go to a nursing home. There are some things worse than dying, and that’s one of them.” She began to cry in earnest then, and clutched my hand with both of hers. “Oh, please,” she said, shaking her head and squeezing my hand so hard it hurt.

Over her badly buttoned dress she was wearing a blue print apron featuring various types of kitchen paraphernalia. Spatulas, knives, wall clocks, and mixing bowls floated dreamlike across her bosom, down her back. She reached into the pocket for a wadded-up Kleenex. I wished hard for the first time in my life for a brother or a sister—this was too hard for one person. I went over to her and held her against me, and she stopped crying. We were both still, waiting. “Mom,” I said finally, to the delicate part
on the top of her silver head. “Please just come home with me tonight. Stay over. Joey would love to see you—he got his first high school report card yesterday. We’ll have a nice dinner.”

She twisted her wedding ring on her hand, and I hoped she wouldn’t say again to ask my father. She didn’t. She stood up and said she would get her purse and overnight bag. She seemed full of dignity and pleasant anticipation now—we might have been going to the opera. “Would you help me with my coat?” she asked when she reappeared in the kitchen. I said that I would, but asked if she would like to take her apron off first. “For heaven’s sake,” she said, looking down at herself and laughing. “Holy buckets.”

I am seven, riding in the backseat of the car while we take a trip across country. It is summer, and it feels as though we will all be free of obligation forever. We drive until we are distracted by something, and then we stop. We eat in restaurants with place mats that are maps, with stars for cities. They tell us where we are, and we trace on them where we think we’ll go, though we are never definite. My father is irresponsible when it comes to filling up—it is my mother who always notices that we are almost out of gas. “Holy buckets, Fred,” she says. “Find a gas station, will you?” And we do, always just in time, and then while my father does the manly thing and stands by the car to chat with the attendant, my mother and I go to “freshen up,” as she calls it. In the almost airless, tiled bathroom, we deliberate in front of the vending machines. I am allowed one thing. Sometimes it is an Ace comb in a black plastic holder. In the finest places, there are things like tiny dolls in baskets, or twin Scottie dogs on a gold chain. I am also fond of little tubes of toothpaste.

When I am tired, I stretch out on the backseat to stare at the constant blue sky through the rear window. Sometimes I hear my father ask my mother to rub his shoulders and neck, which embarrasses me. I hear them talk adult talk, tell stories with endings I don’t understand. Sometimes I pretend I am asleep and hope that they will talk about me, and often they do. They tell each other tales of various achievements of mine, or they express admiration for what they insist are my good looks, or they recount things I’ve said that they found amusing. I must be careful not to smile with them.

I like the monotonous drone of the tires on the pavement, the containment in one small space of everything I need in my life. I will be safe forever—I can tell by the simple sight of the back of my parents’ heads. They are up: alert, careful, and making the right decisions. I can stare into the sky until I sleep for real, worryless.

When we arrived at my house, my mother saw Joey first. He was coming down the sidewalk from school. “Well, that’s Joey, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Sure is.” I called to him to help me unload groceries.

Joey greeted his grandmother hesitantly. He was uncomfortable around my mother lately because he found her newly unreliable. At thirteen, his fear of embarrassment was acute, and he knew that at any given moment my mother might do something to make him quite uncomfortable—astounded, even. “She’s wacked out now,” he’d recently said, petulantly, and I had angrily sent him to his room. Later, I sat on his bed and apologized. “I feel bad for her,” I’d said. “It makes me really angry to hear you talk about her that way.”

He sat at his desk and spun his globe around. “But all I meant is that she’s
changed
,” he said. “That’s true, isn’t it?”

They are going out for the evening to someplace very special. My father wears a suit and looks proper but boring. My mother, though, wears her white formal that lives in a zippered plastic bag in her closet. It has what I believe are diamonds all across the bodice. I have spent much time standing in my mothers closet so that I may be close to such a wondrous thing. Once, I unzipped the bag to rub my hand against the diamonds.

My mother comes down our long staircase with the dress floating around her as though it is alive, and with her hair in a French twist. She is wearing rouge tonight. I stare at her, my mouth dry with admiration. I want to tell her how wonderful she looks. “Here comes the bride,” I say. She touches my cheek, and I smell her perfume. “Thank you,” she says. Her voice is so gay, so full of life. At parties she is always in some large group of people, making them laugh, making them like her. When I am introduced to my mother’s friends, they tell me they hope I’ll be just like her. I stare up at them while I shake their big adult hands, muted by my fervent longing—can’t they see?—to do just that.

Joey took three bags and my mother told him how strong he was. He shrugged. “They’re light.”

Inside, while I unpacked the bags, my mother and Joey sat at the kitchen table together. “You look pretty good, Gram,” Joey said. “How’ve you been?”

“Well, I’ve been just fine,” she told him. “Of course, I can’t do what I used to do.”

He looked down at the table. “No.”

“But I get along. I’m here for dinner,” she added.

“Oh yeah? That’s nice.”

My mother opened her purse and took out a tube of lipstick. She pursed her lips and applied it slowly It was wildly off the mark. Then, staring straight ahead, she began to sing and to keep time by slapping the table gently with the palm of her hand. I saw Joey shift his weight uncomfortably on his chair. “Well,” he said, “I’ve got a lot of homework.” He was begging me, in his way.

“Go ahead up to your room,” I told him. “We’ll see you at dinner.”

Joey is three, and having a tantrum. He doesn’t want to leave my mother’s house. “No!” he screams. “I want to stay here! I love
Grandma
!” I pull him outside with me, while he protests with wails that escalate in direct proportion to his distance from her side. “You can come
back
, Joey,” I hear my mother say “I’m not going anywhere!”

My husband came through the door into the kitchen and saw my mother. “Oh—Peg!” He put down his briefcase to hug her. “How are you?”

“I came for dinner.”

“Uh-huh. Good. I haven’t seen you for a while.”

My mother chewed her lip. “Oh?”

Jim paused. “Well, I mean, what’s it been? Couple weeks or so?”

She looked bewildered. “Well, I just don’t know.”

Jim put his hand on her shoulder. “It doesn’t matter—I’m just happy to see you.” He turned to me. “Want me to start the grill?”

I nodded yes. I thought she was worse. Every time I saw her, I thought she was worse.

We ate in silence, for the most part. Joey showed my mother his report card at my request, and seemed happy when she said, “Why, Joey! This is excellent! I believe you’re even smarter than your mother was!” But then during the course of the meal she asked three times what the salad was. I can’t stand this, I thought, as I cut my steak into unnecessarily small pieces. I thought of Jim’s suggestion to put her into a home of some kind. “There are some good ones,” he’d said. “I think we can afford it. But I just don’t think it would work if she lived here. I mean, do you?”

I am nine, swinging from the clothesline pole, kicking my legs to make myself higher and higher. Suddenly, I slip off and land flat on my back on the concrete below. I stand up and realize that I cannot breathe. I am terrified, and run into the house. My mother is on the telephone, but she says, quickly, “I’ll call you back,” and hangs up. I run into her arms, thinking myself a baby but thinking also that I am dying. And then my breathing comes back. I take in huge gulps of air and sob, “I thought I was dying! I couldn’t breathe!”

My mother pulls me down onto her lap. “I am too old to do this,” I say into her shoulder, humiliated but comforted.

She hugs me tightly. “You will never be too old for this,” she tells me. “Don’t you know that I will always take care of you?”

After dinner, I took my mother into the guest room. “I forgot a nightgown,” she said. I told her she could use one of mine. I gave her towels, some she had given me. “Aren’t these nice—wherever did you find such pretty towels?” she asked, and I thought she could be teasing me. And she was. “Don’t I have good taste?” she asked, and smiled.

We talked in the living room after we’d both changed. “Mom,” I began, in what I hoped was a very reasonable tone of voice. “It’s hard to live alone, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be nice for you not to have to worry about making your own meals or doing your own cleaning? There are residential communities, you know, that aren’t really nursing homes.”

She looked down. “I would like to stay in my own house.”

I sighed, angry. “Look, I know you would. But it’s just not safe anymore, Mom. You had a
slipper
on top of your stove, right next to a burner!”

She frowned at me. “I did not.”

It wasn’t going to work to try to talk her into anything. When she was diagnosed, I was given power of attorney. Now was the time for me to be her caretaker. I changed the subject. “What have you been reading?” I asked her, and she stared at me, silent. “Mom?”

“Oh, I don’t read,” she said. “Never have.”

I am fresh out of the bathtub, dressed in clean cotton pajamas and a red chenille robe with big silver buttons that I believe to be quite sophisticated. My mother has combed out my hair, a gruesome ordeal for both of us, and my reward for not complaining is my clown book. My mother puts on her reading voice and though we have heard the book one hundred times, we enjoy it again, both of us. At the end, a clown pops up. I admire most about him his extraordinary red hair. I fold him carefully back inside, and then put the book back in its special place, the far right-hand side of the lowest shelf on the bookcase. I whisper good night to it arid gently caress its deteriorating spine. I love my books passionately, as does my mother. She reads in her bed every night following a
certain protocol: She props herself up on two pillows. Then, while she reads at an astonishingly rapid rate, she slowly eats one piece of fruit and one candy bar, believing that one makes up for the other. She usually picks apples as the fruit, and a Mars or Heath bar for the candy. I believe that these candy bars are for adults only, and I aspire to someday being able to lie in my own adult bed with my own adult books and eat them. My mother never reads just one book at a time—my father complains about books all over the nightstands. They have fallen on him in the middle of the night. Sometimes they have replaced him. Often, my mother stays up much too late reading, and then she is tired in the morning when she makes my breakfast. “I just couldn’t stop,” she tells me.

“I’m going to bed, Mom,” I told her. “I’ll see you in the morning.” When Jim climbed into bed beside me he said, “It’s so sad. I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe she should live here.”

I stared out the window. “I don’t know. I don’t know! I mean, think of how it would be. She’s getting worse all the time. Last week her car was parked in the middle of the street with the keys still in it. And remember how I told you about how her pot holders were scorched? Today she had a
slipper
on top of her stove! What if she starts a fire?” Jim reached for my hand. I sighed. “Sometimes I think about all these floating spirits in heaven, like new recruits. They’re deciding whether to come to earth and be human. As the last part of their orientation, they get to look down and see life in progress, see how it’ll go. And they really see it—the diseases, the accidents, the utter arbitrariness of it all, and then the inevitability of death. Oh, it’s awful, when you think about it, isn’t it? Still, I think that seeing that, all those spirits
would want to come anyway.” I paused for a moment, and then added, “And I would, too.”