Plan B (4 page)

 

I
n a superhuman show of spiritual maturity, I moved my mother's ashes today from the back of the closet, where I'd shoved them a few weeks after she died. I was going to put them on the bookshelf, next to the three small pine boxes that held the pebbly ashes of our pets, now reincarnated as percussion instruments. My mother's ashes, by contrast, were returned in a brown plastic box, sealed, with her name spelled wrong: Dorothy Noraht Wyles Lamott; her middle name was Norah, not Noraht. She hated the name Norah, which I love, and she didn't go by Dorothy, which she also hated. She was called
“Nikki,” the name of a character on a radio show that she had loved as a child in Liverpool.

I put the brown plastic box in the closet as soon as it came back from the funeral home, two years ago, thinking I could at
last
give up all hope that a wafting white-robed figure would rise from the ashes of my despair and say, “Oh, little one, my darling daughter, I am here for you now.” I prayed for my heart to soften, to forgive her, and love her for what she did give me—life, great values, a lot of tennis lessons, and the best she could do. Unfortunately, the best she could do was terrible, like the Minister of Silly Walks trying to raise an extremely sensitive young girl, and my heart remained hardened toward her.

So I left her in the closet for two years to stew in her own ashes, and I refused to be nice to her, and didn't forgive her for being a terrified, furious, clinging, sucking maw of need and arrogance. I suppose that sounds harsh. I assumed Jesus wanted me to forgive her, but I also know he loves honesty and transparency. I don't think he was rolling his eyes impatiently at me while she was in the closet. I don't think much surprises him: this is how we make important changes—barely, poorly, slowly. And still, he raises his fist in triumph.

I've spent my whole life trying to get over having had Nikki for a mother, and I have to say that from day one after she died, I liked having a dead mother much more than having an impossible one. I began to call her Noraht as her
nom de mort
. I prayed to forgive her but didn't—for staying in a fever dream of a marriage, for fanatically pushing her children to achieve, for letting herself go from great beauty to hugely overweight woman in dowdy clothes and gloppy mask of makeup. It wasn't black and white: I really loved her, and took great care of her, and was proud of some heroic things she had done with her life. She had put herself through law school, fought the great good fights for justice and civil rights, marched against the war in Vietnam. But she was like someone who had broken my leg, and my leg had healed badly, and I would limp forever.

I couldn't pretend she hadn't done extensive damage—that's called denial. But I wanted to dance anyway, even with a limp. I know forgiveness is a component of freedom, yet I couldn't, even after she died, grant her amnesty. Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep
hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare—which is the tiny problem with our Israeli and Palestinian friends. And I guess I wasn't done.

I stored her in the closet, beside her navy blue purse, which the nurses had given me when I checked her into a convalescent home nearby, three months before she died. I'd go pick up the ashes from time to time, and say to them, grimly, “Hello, Noraht.” Then I'd put them back. My life has been much better since she died, and it was liberating to be so angry, after having been such a good and loyal girl. But eighteen months after her death, I still thought of her the same way I do about George Bush—with bewilderment that this person could ever be in charge, and dismay, and something like hatred. I decided to see whether I could find some flecks of light. Friends told me to pray, and to go slowly, because otherwise, with my rage so huge, how would I be able to see fireflies in the flames? I should try to go as safely, and as deeply, as I could into the mystery of our relationship. I couldn't scatter the ashes—the box was sealed. So I went through my mother's purse.

It looked like a doctor's bag, worn and dusty, with two handles, the sort of purse Ruth Buzzi, of
Laugh-In
fame, might hit you with. I opened it, and began pulling out
Kleenex like a magician pulling endless scarves from his sleeve. This was very distressing. My mother's Kleenex had been distressing to me my whole life. They always smelled like the worst of her, all her efforts to disguise herself—the makeup, the perfume and lotion and lipstick and powder, all gone rancid. And she'd swab you with Kleenex to clean you up, with her spit. It was disgusting. In her last years, she fumbled for them, and finding them, not remember why she'd needed them. My mother almost never cried—her parents were English—so the Kleenex weren't to wipe her tears; and she had drowned in those uncried tears.

Uncried-tears syndrome left my mother hypervigilant, unable to settle down into herself, and—to use the clinical term—cuckoo.

Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away. It was also health and preparedness, filled with anything you might need. For instance, there were a lot of Band-Aids. You never know when you'll need one, only that in this world, you will. There were pads of Post-its; they gave her confidence that she could keep track of things, if only she could remember to write things down and stick the Post-its somewhere. And then remember to look at them.

There were house keys, which made me feel such grief that I had taken away her freedom. But my mother had an unbelievable life for someone so sick with Alzheimer's and Type II diabetes, and so poor, for as long as my brothers and I could pull it off. We helped her have independence and a great view, and her cat, and her friends, until the very end. When we put her in the home, her freedom was gone anyway. She had only the freedom, when the nurse left at night, to fall when she tried to get up to pee; to lie in wet sheets; to get stuck on the balcony and not remember how to get back in.

There were mirrors in her purse, so she could see that she was still there: Am I still here? Peekaboo! There I am. There were a dozen receipts from Safeway, which was right across the street from her retirement community. She was supposed to be on a strict low-carbohydrate diet to help control her diabetes, but every single receipt was for bread and cookies, which she'd sneak out to buy when the nurses or I were off doing the laundry. I kind of like that in a girl. She also bought dozens of tubes of Crystal Light, intensely flavored diet drink flakes you mix with water. She must have hoped they'd fly straight into her brain, like Pop Rocks, and energize it like Tinkerbell.

There were a number of receipts from our HMO in her purse, handed to her over time; she had been told to hold on to them until she was called, and so she did, because she was a good girl. She loved the nurses, and she loved her doctor, so the receipts were like love letters she'd never throw away. She had a card with the direct line of a nurse who helped her clip her terrible rhino toenails. People always gave her special things, like their direct lines, because she was so eager and dignified and needy, and everyone wanted to reward and help her. People lined up to wait on her, to serve her, her whole life.

There was also a large, heavy tube of toothpaste in the purse. Maybe she had bought it one day at Safeway, and never remembered to take it out. Maybe she liked people to sneak peeks of it in her purse: it said of her, I may be lost, but my breath is fresh, or could be. There were three travel-size containers of hand lotion, a lipstick, a compact, and six cards from cab companies—Safe, Friendly, Professional. Just what you need in this world. She could always get home when she got lost, which she did, increasingly.

I kept putting off opening her wallet. There would be pictures inside. Finally I opened it, and found it filled
with cards. She had library cards from thirty years ago, membership cards for the Democratic Party and the ACLU and the Sierra Club. There were two credit cards, which had expired before her mind did. She had an insane, destructive relationship to money, like a junkie. There was never enough, so she charged things, charged away a whole life, to pump herself out of discomfort and fear. She assault-shopped.

There were photos of my nephew Tyler, my older brother's son, and of Sam. She loved being a grandmother. And there was an old picture of herself, a black-and-white photo from when she was twenty-one or so. She was a beautiful woman, who looked a little like Theda Bara, white face, jet-black hair. She had dark eyes, full of unflinching intelligence and depression and eagerness to please. In this photo, she looked as if she was trying to will herself into elegance, whereas her life was always hard and messy and full of scrabbling chaos. Her frog-stretched mouth was trying to smile, but she couldn't, or maybe wouldn't, because then she would look beautiful and triumphant, and there would be no rescue, no one to help or serve or save her.

She'd kept all of her cards from the years she spent practicing family law in Hawaii—a state bar association
card, and her driver's license, which expired in 1985. In the license photo, she was brown from the Hawaiian sun, soft and rosy, as if she had risen through warm water, but her eyes were afraid, as though she might have been about to sink to the bottom again. And she did, and clung to our necks to save her.

Her purse said, “I'm a liberal, and a grandmother, and I keep my teeth clean and my skin soft. If I can't remember something, I can write it down. If I get a cut, I'll bandage it right away.” Her purse made my heart ache. I threw away most of the contents that day—the Kleenex, the lotions, the toothpaste—and the purse itself. It was a dusty navy blue organ she didn't need anymore. I kept her wallet and the things in it, even the old library cards. I glanced in a small mirror she carried. It scares me how alike we look. I wear glasses now, as she did. I look tired—I am tired. And I have a pouch below my belly, whereas I had a thin waist before. Now there's this situation down there, low and grabbable. If it had a zipper, you could store stuff in it, as in a fanny pack.

I put the wallet back in the closet, next to my mother's ashes. I said a prayer, to Jesus: “Here. Could you watch her a while longer?” I left her ashes there for another six months. It was during that time that my three pets died. I
was inconsolable. You want a great mother, I'll show you a Labrador-retriever mix. Yet there was great happiness, too, because I fell in love. I went to Hawaii with my boyfriend but got very worried beforehand about how I'd look in a swimsuit. My friend Robyn suggested that I rub lotion lovingly into my thighs, so they would feel cared for, and that I decorate them with small flower tattoos. It helped, and while I did not quite look like Brigitte Bardot in her heyday, I felt better, and this, on a beach, can be a miracle.

I had that on my mind when I got up this morning, for no particular reason—the lotion, and the rose tattoos. After breakfast, I went and got the brown plastic box of ashes out of the closet. I couldn't very well rub lotion into it, but I sat with it in my lap. The pouch on my belly is nice for holding children, so I let my mother sit there for a few minutes. Then I wrapped the box in birthday gift paper, lavender and blue with silver stars, and taped a picture of a red rose on it. I got a little carried away—hey, late Happy Birthday, Noraht—because the thing is, I don't actually forgive her much yet. Besides, only part of a day had passed, and I was definitely not hating her anymore. Grace means you're in a different universe from
where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.

When it happens—when you stop hating—you have to pinch yourself. Jesus said, “The point is to not hate and kill each other today, and if you can, to help the forgotten and powerless. Can you write that down, and leave it by the phone?” So I picked up my mother's ashes, and put them on a shelf in the living room, and stood beside them for a while.