Beverly
Beverly wanted to keep the two bottles on top of her chest of drawers, where she could gaze on them, eyes no matter how blurry fixed on her deliverance. Suzanne objected. “The aides can see them there. It’s important that they not be aware you have the pills. Elena could get into trouble.”
Beverly had a project. She was an actress playing her last role. She was persuading the caretakers that she was weaker than she was. She faked apparent sleep even oftener than she lapsed into that druggy stupefaction that overwhelmed her frequently. She saw no reason to per
form exercises that were unpleasant and pretended she could no longer do them. Two of the aides told Suzanne Beverly was getting worse and should see her doctor. Suzanne made an appointment for the last week in February. They would do tests to determine if she had undergone another small stroke or if she were suffering from some other complication. Beverly was determined not to endure more tests. That was the deadline, three weeks away.
She felt weirdly expectant and cheerful. Knowing that it would all end soon made everything more bearable, like the pain in her leg that had no feeling. It was impossible the leg should hurt, but it did. The doctor called it phantom pain. Well, he should feel it, then he’d know what a phantom it wasn’t. The pain in her head that came and went and came back again. The pain in her back from lying in bed too much, from sitting up in bed, from lying in awkward positions because half her body was dead wood. The pain in her bowels from the severe constipation she supposed came from lack of exercise. The pain in her kidneys from the medications they had her on. The pain when she did attempt mild exercise. The fearful effort of doing anything whatsoever, from putting on a Velcro-fastened sweater to going to the bathroom. The shock when she saw herself, that scrawny twisted-face hag in the mirror. The heroic effort it took to speak a coherent fragment. The total boredom of getting through each empty day and long night. The humiliation when she could not get to the toilet in time, as happened increasingly. The smell of her own body, the smell of the bed she was condemned to. All about to finish.
She felt young inside, knowing that her exit was under her own control. This was the first power she had enjoyed after months of being helpless and at the complete mercy of others. She would not wait too long. She did not want more tests, more invasion, more time in the hospital. She hated the doctors who treated her like an idiot. She would escape them all. She saw herself as the woman she had been, slender yes but shapely, with her red hair and green eyes, with her laugh and her wit and her husky voice, with her ability not only to speak like a human being but to move rooms and crowds. She saw that woman rising up from this ruined body and escaping. It did not matter that she did not believe in an afterlife. She believed that at the moment of death she would be restored to her full ability. She would die as herself.
She would do it all correctly. She would not waver. She wanted silence, she wanted peace, she wanted out. Each time Elena brought an installment of the pills, she kissed her granddaughter’s hands. Every day when she wakened in the morning, instead of despair and a return of pain, she opened her eyes to hope. It would not hurt, what she read promised her. She would pass away quietly. There would be no more awakenings to a burnt-down life. She would slide into a sleep of real peace and never waken again.
Every day she asked herself if it should be today. It had to be the weekend, when the aides were gone. She could not take the chance of one of them finding her in a coma, her secret fear. She had seen a woman who had tried to kill herself but had not taken enough pills. She was brain damaged, kept alive on machines—as punishment, Beverly supposed. She would do it right. She had been bold and efficient all her life, and she would seize the opportunity the pills gave her and make an exit under her own control.
Elena came in to sit with her. It was morning. “What day?”
“Monday, Grandma.”
She felt a stab of panic. Somehow the weekend had slipped past. With her new confidence in the pills, she was letting the days slide by under her. Nothing seemed as terrible now that she knew she could call a halt. But next week was the doctor’s appointment. She would have to go into the hospital for tests. She had pretended deterioration too convincingly, and now she must act.
She made a simple chart on her pad of paper. 11111. She would cross out each, starting with the first one for Monday, so she did not forget again what day it was. She must do it Friday night or Saturday night. “El….”
“Yes, Grandma. Do you need something?”
“Fri…Sat…Time.”
She thought Elena could not possibly understand what she meant. To make it clearer, she jerked her head toward the shelf where the pills were hidden inside a nightgown. “This coming Friday or Saturday night?” Elena asked. “Or just some Friday or Saturday night?”
“Coming.”
“Are you sure you want to?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll have to go to work anyhow, Grandma. It would look too suspicious if I didn’t.”
“Suzanne…be here.”
“We’ll have to make sure with Mother that she will be.”
She would rather have Elena on hand. Maybe she could do it before Elena left for work or wait till she came home. So many practical arrangements to be made. “Give…book.”
Elena of course knew exactly which book she was talking about. “Oh, you want the Bible.”
Beverly did not think that was funny. “Not religious.”
Elena grinned, handing her
Let Me Die Before I Wake
. Beverly loved to read about those peaceful deaths. They kept the book hidden with the pills. Now she waved Elena away so she could read her favorite account again. Everything had to be done right. She had made Suzanne and Elena both read several chapters. This was her final piece of work as an organizer, organizing her own death—with dignity. Under her own power.
“Grandma, I’ll miss you so much. And so will Mother. I love you, Grandma.”
“Miss…both.” Of course she wouldn’t. Silence and peace. The great comforting nothing. She would allow them to be a little sentimental, as long as they didn’t try to stop her and as long as they didn’t insist too much that she go along with the mushiness. She had always been hard-headed and wasn’t about to change at the end. She had heard of deathbed conversions, but she had contempt for them. The values someone lived by should be sufficient to sustain them in dying. She had the same contempt for rational people who suddenly called for a priest or a rabbi as she did for those old fellow travelers or party members who went leaping to the other side and became as fanatical right-wingers as they had been fanatical on the left. Nobody seemed to undergo a conversion to tolerance and the understanding they didn’t have every last penny of truth in their particular piggy bank. Religion had never interested her, and it didn’t now. Politics and the economy as they impacted on ordinary people, justice and equality, those had been her passions, but she was past being able to have an effect. Time to let go, of everything.
“Grandma…are you asleep?”
“Thinking.”
“About what?”
“What believe? You.”
Elena was puzzled for a minute. “Do you mean you believe in me? Or are you asking what I believe in?”
“Both.” She had actually meant the second possibility, but she did have faith in Elena.
Elena scrunched up her face. “You ask hard questions, don’t you? Not much. I guess there’s some power behind everything, but I can’t imagine getting into a personal relationship with whatever it is. Sort of like thinking whether electricity likes you or not.”
Beverly nodded, pleased.
“I guess I believe in trying to be good—a recent thing for me.” Elena laughed self-consciously. “I mean, I haven’t got much of a track record, do I?”
“Good to me.”
“Well, maybe you’ve had an influence on me. I mean, I think it’s cool how you were trying to help people all your life.” Elena rose and paced. Beverly thought she looked as beautiful and swift as a panther. “You were cool and you had a good time anyhow. I want to do something right. I guess I really have to, to like myself. I’ve done so much damage. I’ve broken a lot of people’s dishes.”
Beverly motioned Elena near and squeezed her hand. She stared into her face. That face was one of the few things she would miss, her beautiful bold granddaughter. “Don’t…lose…bold…. Dare.” Glossy black hair worn unstylishly long. Long large eyes almost as dark as her hair. Full sensuous mouth and cheekbones like her own. A face that could be a tragic mask or a seductress, except it was too animated, too alive from within.
“Grandma, I don’t think that’s my problem. It’s not thinking things through. Not being clear what I’m doing. Not guessing consequences but just driving over the cliff to see what happens.”
She wanted so much to tell Elena how precious she was, and how she must value herself. How even if she made messes and even the occasional catastrophe, she was vital and glorious. She must not be tamed. She must not give up and become mediocre and gray. Beverly had never in her life loved anyone more than she loved Elena. “Love you…as…you are.”
“I know, Grandma,” Elena said, her voice breaking, “but I don’t.”
In that moment, Beverly decided: it would be Saturday night. It would be more convenient for Elena if she did it then. A last little gift of timing for her beloved, not to cause her any more trouble than she had to. Then, then, she would finish. She would have her own death and be done.
Suzanne
“Getting divorced is such a lot of work. I don’t wonder I never went into that kind of law.” Marta lay on her couch, her belly rising majestically above her.
“Everybody’s wrong and nobody’s right. But can’t this stop while you have your baby? Can’t you call a time-out?”
“Three weeks. She says it’ll have to be a C-section.”
“They do a lot more of those now. Did you get a second opinion?”
Marta sighed heavily. “Could you give me a back rub if I lie on my side? If I can still lie on my side.”
“Sure. Where’s the oil you like?”
“In the bedroom, on the dresser.”
The green gym bag was no longer there. The room looked different with Jim’s things gone. Marta had Adam move the bed against one wall, to make more room for the baby’s crib and bassinet until she could make over Jim’s office into the baby’s room. Marta wanted to make the house over completely, but the divorce was impoverishing her, as Beverly’s illness was doing to Suzanne. Neither of them had money to waste on new curtains or rugs. Suzanne found the almond massage oil and brought it back to the couch.
“Now that it’s coming close to time, do you miss Jim?”
Marta shook her head. “Honestly, no. I realize how much time I spent stepping carefully around his ego. I want this baby. It may be self-
indulgence, it may be middle-age folly, it may be the fastest way to total exhaustion known to woman, but I want her.”
Jake’s lawyer called at eight that evening. “The jury’s back.”
“What were their findings?”
“Guilty on all counts.”
“No!” she said. “I can’t believe it.”
“I told you, with the judge’s instructons, there was no other possible outcome.” He sounded irritated.
“Can Jake call me?”
“I think he’s disappointed in you. He hoped you would come out.”
“My mother’s in terrible condition. I can’t leave her now. She’s been deteriorating rapidly since her second stroke. My daughter and I are doing most of the caretaking, and I can’t get away. I just can’t! Try to make him understand. I don’t know how much longer she can hang on.” In one sense, she was telling the truth. In another, she was lying. She was gradually sinking in a mud hole of guilt, sinking like the creatures whose remains she had seen in the museum by the La Brea tar pits in LA. She had no idea why she should think of that—a place she had visited with Sam when Rachel was just four and Elena, nine. She felt guilty she was not in California for Jake; she felt guilty about her mother in all aspects, in all scenarios, at all times.
“I’ll tell him, but you know, he’s facing prison. They got him on all the misdemeanor charges, then on conspiracy to disrupt commerce. That’s the big one. The lumber companies are the big employers up here and the big contributors and they get most of what they want—and they wanted Jake’s hide.”
“I understand. I’ll be available for the appeal, I promise. That’s what I do best.”
“He’s still going to be serving time, even if you start the appeal tomorrow—which I understand you can’t do.”
“Just get me the transcripts as soon as they’re available….”
Suzanne had all the instructions in front of her. The two types of pills were to be ground up together and put into a small amount of liquid. Beverly requested fresh orange juice. Elena did the grinding before she left for work, but it would be up to Suzanne to prepare the “cocktail”
just before Beverly consumed it. “Saturday! Saturday!” Beverly had been saying all week: beaming as if she were looking forward to a date or a party. Suzanne kept going into her own room and weeping. Her stomach was lead. How could she really go through with it? It seemed to Suzanne that her mother and she had finally been communicating at least semi-well for the first time in decades. Why couldn’t they continue? She had always wanted her mother’s respect, and lately, she seemed to be getting at least a little of it. She felt the finality of death as a sentence on her as well as Beverly.
“I won’t put the plastic bag on,” Suzanne said to Elena. “I can’t smother her. If she takes the pills and they stay down and work, that’s her choice. But I won’t put a plastic bag over her head.”
Elena was dressed for work, all in black but for a red scarf. “If the pills don’t work by early morning, I’ll put the bag on.”
“I’m going along with this because she wants it and that’s her right. But I can’t smother her and you shouldn’t. If she wakes up, that’s how it is.”
“I’ll be home by one at the latest.”
“I’m going to sit up with her.”
“So will I.”
Suzanne had not felt as close to her older daughter since Elena had been a little girl. She could place their first bad fights around the time Elena was twelve—around the time of the divorce from Sam. Her home life had become a battleground, and she had responded by throwing herself into work. She needed the money, but more, she was happiest in court and most miserable while fighting with Elena. Oh, there had been a few nasty scenes with Sam, but only a few. Their divorce was probably as amicable as it was possible for such a cleavage in four lives to be. But life with her daughter had become hard fought, an unending screaming match and duel. She knew Elena had begun to lie to her constantly, unwaveringly, with an air of triumph. What could she do about it? Only throw herself further into work until the catastrophe arrived. Her beautiful daughter had become a hostile stranger who hated her and to whom nothing she said or pleaded or threatened had any meaning. Much of the time, she did not even know where Elena was, and if she asked, Elena boldly lied.
Now after the summer’s mess, they had made a rapprochement. Su
zanne did not understand why but she was too glad to question it. Elena had been more affectionate toward her than since she was a little girl, permitting Suzanne more expressions of her love. She even let herself be touched on occasion, hugged.
Suzanne sat beside Beverly’s bed, holding her mother’s withered hand. How much she had aged in the past year, as the strokes pinched and twisted her. Elena had been dyeing Beverly’s hair, but the red coiffure looked incongruous around her wizened face. She had lost weight in spite of their best efforts to stuff her. Her muscles had slackened and shrunk. The biggest change was the fire gone from her eyes. Her eyes looked out but could not see much. The doctor had told Suzanne that Beverly had cataracts in both eyes, in addition to the blurring of her vision caused by the second stroke, but that he could not recommend an operation. Suzanne hoped they would be able to put this death over on the doctor, to persuade him it was natural. She prayed he would not probe, just simply sign the death certificate and let everything slide by. The hand in hers felt cold. Since Beverly’s second stroke, medical interest in her condition had waned. Suzanne had tried to prepare the way by telling the doctor and aides how weak Beverly had become. She looked into her mother’s eyes, eyes that had always seemed a clearer, harder green than her own. She must have inherited her myopia from her father, since Beverly had not worn glasses till she needed them for reading after she turned fifty. She had always loved Beverly’s clear passionate gaze.
“How are you feeling?”
Beverly smiled. “Hopeful.”
“What do you hope for?”
“De…liv…rance.”
“Do you still want to go through with this tonight? There’s plenty of time to change your mind.” Suzanne could not keep the pleading from her voice.
“No!” Beverly shook her head from side to side three times. “Do…it.”
What would it feel like to lie there in the bed Beverly was so weary of, and know that she would die in a matter of hours? Like a condemned prisoner, but Beverly was self-condemned. She did not see death as punishment or something to be feared, but as a release. Suzanne wished
she could look out through her mother’s eyes for just an hour to know if this was really what Beverly must have. Last night Suzanne had lain awake going through agonies of guilt, wondering if she had somehow let Beverly know indirectly how much it was taking out of all of them to care for her, what an enervating financial burden her support was, how overstretched Suzanne had been feeling. She had done her best to keep these feelings to herself, but she could never be sure she had succeeded. She was so tired all the time, exhausted beyond any hope of repair in the brief hours of sleep she could steal. Perhaps she had not concealed her fatigue as well as she had imagined. She could not bear to think that.
“Want…first act…
Mam…Butter…
”
Suzanne rose and put on the CD. In the summer, she had put a speaker into this room so that Beverly could listen to music. That, and a little TV that could be operated from the bed. She had tried to make Beverly comfortable, she had tried. As she returned to sit by the bed in the flood of Puccini, she thought how weird it was that her mother’s favorite opera should be about a submissive woman who killed herself for the love of a jerk. Suzanne did not care for opera: too rich, full-blown, overwrought for her tastes. She would rather listen to jazz or baroque music or Mozart. She had always found it out of character that Beverly should love opera. Beverly used to go to the City Opera or get cheap seats at the Met with a friend of hers who taught at City College. They would talk about tenors the way some women talked about movie stars or basketball players. Now the flood of passion seemed appropriate.
Beverly was lying back against her pillow with her eyes closed, waving her good hand languidly to the music. Mao lay curled on her belly.
“Isn’t he heavy?”
“Keeps…warm.”
When the first act had finished, Beverly motioned for her to get moving. Suzanne brought a tray with toast and broth. A light meal was supposed to prevent the stomach from rejecting the pills.
“Now we’re supposed to wait half an hour.”
“Play…second.”
Suzanne put on the second act of the opera. She decided she would bury it with her mother, but then remembered that Beverly had already set up her cremation, making all her arrangements over the past two
months, during the time she had been talking about wanting to die. “Want…tidy,” she had said repeatedly. Beverly had little to leave. Her meager savings were long gone. The clothes she could no longer wear had been donated to Good Will months ago. She had given Elena her jewelry, mostly out-of-date costume jewelry except for an opal pendant and an onyx cat pin with tiny chips of emerald for eyes. To Suzanne, she left Mao. To Rachel, she bequeathed her own mother’s wedding ring. She confided to Suzanne that she had worn it only when she was checking into hotels with various men. It was a wide lustrous gold band with a Hebrew inscription Suzanne could not read—but Rachel would be able to.
Laboriously Beverly printed on the pad, TELL R SORRY NOT WAIT.
“I know she’d want to say good-bye to you.”
Beverly only gave her a crooked smile. “Time…now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure.” Beverly glared imperiously. “Bring…drink.”
Suzanne dragged herself into the kitchen and mixed the ground-up pills into a mug of orange juice. She used a mug so that she could better mix the grainy white stuff into the juice. Finally she had it in suspension and experienced the strong impulse to wash it down the sink. Her hands were trembling. If she accidentally dropped it, that would be that. Finally she carried the mug in to Beverly, walking as slowly as she was able. She began to cry and stopped to snuffle back her tears, as she knew crying would anger Beverly. If this was going to be their very last time together, she did not want to taint it.
Beverly reached out. Suzanne slowly handed it to her. Beverly tasted it and made a face. “Ecch.” However, she smiled wanly and drank it a gulp at a time. She reminded Suzanne of someone trying to cure hiccups by taking small sips of water. She took only sips but she kept at it, gagging once, pausing then for a minute. Finally she consumed the whole mug of drugged juice.
“There.” She sighed. “Help me lie down.”
“Do you want the music on?” Suzanne watched her mother carefully. Beverly could still throw up, and then it would be over. They could not go through getting all those drugs a second time. Her body might well
reject the poison she was feeding it, and then Beverly would have to give this up.
“Let it…”
She took her mother’s hand and held it. Their hands were exactly the same size, the same shape. She might never see or touch her mother’s hand again. For a while, it seemed as if the pills would have no effect, and Suzanne had half an hour of hope that it was not going to happen. Perhaps Elena had mistaken the chemicals or the dosages. Beverly hummed occasionally along with the opera. She nodded to Suzanne and then freed her hand and petted Mao, who had moved to a position against her side. Her eyes fluttered shut, opened again, looked around once and again, then slowly the lids slid down. Her breathing grew more regular and deeper. Suzanne stared, wondering how she could tell the difference between normal sleep, for she often saw Beverly dozing open-mouthed in the daytime, and a mortal sleep. Suzanne would have liked to turn off the opera, but she did not want to wake Beverly by moving around the room. It felt as if it continued for an hour, but it was only twenty minutes. Then the conclusion came and silence arrived. She took Beverly’s slack hand in her own. It felt a little cooler than normal and she chafed it gently. A shapely hand, still. Beverly had always been vain about her hands but never had a manicure in her life, never wore polish.
More or less silence. It was Saturday night and cars were careening up the hill and down again, local kids. A dog was barking hysterically. Someone was walking along the street calling a cat. “Max! Max!” Mournful appeal. She imagined calling after her mother, “Beverly! Beverly! Come back.” It did not seem possible, what was happening, that she should be sitting here holding her mother’s hand as her mother was leaving her, steadily, gradually, moving beyond the sound of her voice and the touch of her hand. She gazed at Beverly’s gaunt face and felt she had never loved her as much. It could not end like this. The slight curve in her mother’s nose, the way one eyebrow was more arched than the other, the softness of her unpierced earlobes, her high, fine cheekbones—all to be lost? She could not bear it. She had not spent enough time looking at Beverly, not enough time.