Wait Until Tomorrow (16 page)

She still wants me at her side, but more than that, she wants what she has always wanted: for me to be happy. And sometimes that desire is strong enough to override her need to have me with her—at least temporarily.

I never liked the children's book
The Giving Tree
, by Shel Silverstein, because it reminded me too much of my mother: the way she helped me whenever I needed money; the way she always took my side no matter how wrong I might have been; the way she
forgave me, and continues to forgive me, for my sharp tongue. She never put anyone ahead of me. Whatever I needed or wanted, she got for me, if she could. Her generosity has been both a blessing and a source of guilty irritation.

At one point my mother told me that she had reached her life's coda—a musical term for the last section of a composition—and I have made the time bearable for her, sometimes even enjoyable. I wonder if she isn't hanging on for my sake, to give me the chance to ease my conscience for all the years she propped me up with love and money. I wonder, too, if my youthful “troubles,” as she calls them, weren't my gift to her: a chance to save someone from selfruin, as she hadn't been able to do for her father or her husband.

I decide not to go to the hospital right away. Instead I take Merlyn for a walk before the rain comes. The weather is typical of Southern winters, blustery and pregnant with possibility. I feel as if I am seeing the material world in all its splendor after having huddled for weeks in a cave. Standing in the field at the top of my neighborhood, I gaze at the pine trees silhouetted against the cloudy sky. Merlyn scouts the brittle weeds for new scents. I take a breath.

The reprieve is sweet but short-lived. An insistent tug, like the ocean's undertow my mother always feared would sweep her child out to sea, pulls at me with an irresistible force. Soon I am heading back to my house where I will grab the keys to my car and speed to the hospital to be at her side.

Instead of sending her home right away, the social worker arranges for Mom to go to a “skilled nursing facility” just down the street
from the hospital. It is nighttime, and I have to enter through the back door. That thick odor of antiseptic and age immediately subsumes me. One seemingly abandoned and shriveled woman, ancient as Egypt, watches from her wheelchair as I look for someone who might be in charge.

The attendant, busy eating her dinner, has no idea where I might find a wheelchair. “Just borrow one from that room over there,” she says and points vaguely. I find one, but it doesn't have footrests, so my mother has to hold up her weak legs. As soon as I wheel her in, I whisper in her ear: “One night. That's it.” I leave her on a cot-sized bed in a small, closed-in room with two other invalids, go home and lie in my big comfortable queen bed unable to shut my eyes.

The next day, as soon as my classes are over, I head to the nursing home, pack up my mother's belongings and abscond with her back to the apartment—AMA, against medical advice. Using the walker, she is able to get from room to room. The nursing home experience has been enormously restorative. She'll do anything to avoid going back there.

When I finally get home late that night, Hank and Emmy ask when they might get a chance to spend some time with me again. I shrug. I've developed a rash right over those deep worry lines between my eyebrows. The rash looks like the letter
A
on my forehead. I'm reminded of Hawthorne's
Scarlet Letter
. Am I an adulteress or does the
A
merely stand for “Anxiety”?

I sleep deeply that night, hoping that in the dark place I can suckle at the life source and replenish my depleted soul. The next morning when I call my mother, she tells me she is all right.

“I'll be there in a little while,” I say. I have some bills to pay, laundry to do: the little things without which our lives spin out of control.

I move slowly, but finally I am ready to leave. Then the phone rings. I pick it up and hear her desperate cry: “Where are you? I'm very sick!”

I cannot help myself. I put the phone down, and a scream escapes from my lungs. And another scream and another.

“Call your brothers, or I will,” Hank demands. I call Jo, and twenty-four hours later I meet him at the Greyhound station and fall crying into his arms.

ONE MONTH LATER

Jo stays for a couple of weeks, and during that time I spend all my time with Hank and Emmy. I'm like a starving person at a banquet. I can't get enough of them. But then he goes back to St. Louis, and I start my juggling act all over again.

“If only you could clone yourself,” my mother says sympathetically. Though she sometimes seems oblivious, in actuality she is often aware of being burdensome.

About a month after my mother's ordeal at the hospital, I get a phone call.

“Ma'am,” a paramedic tells me. “Your mother has fallen, and we're taking her to the hospital. We think she might have broken or twisted her ankle.”

It's night, and I'm already in one of Hank's old T-shirts getting ready to crawl into my bed.

“Should I come to the hospital?”

“Ma'am, she's probably going to be in the emergency room for a while. You can wait till the morning when they check her in.” My body is only too ready to comply.

I should have known better. I should have gone over to my mother's apartment and stopped them from taking her to the hospital.

Instead I tumble into the comforting embrace of my bed.

After a fitful night, I get up around six, dress, and head to the hospital. Mother has only just then been put in a room. She is dopey from morphine, but there are no broken bones. At least nothing that the X-ray showed. And this is another point at which I could have said, fine, I'll take her home now. But we are conditioned to do what people in scrubs tell us to do.

“We want to do an MRI just to make sure there are no fractures that the X-ray missed,” a nurse tells me. “Is your mother claustrophobic?”

“Yes, she is.”

“We'll give her something to calm her down.”

A half hour later, I'm reaching into the MRI machine clutching my mother's hands as the damn MRI bangs like a berserk bongo drum round our ears. The nurse has asked me to try to keep her from thrashing around in the narrow cylinder or else the pictures won't come right and we'll never get her out of there.

“Help me!” my mother screams over the clattering noise.

“Damn it, you're not being tortured, Mom,” I hiss in the brief moment of silence between pictures.

“Please, can we go?” she whimpers.

“No, Mom. It's only a few more minutes.”

Back in the room, after the MRI, my mother tries to pull out her catheter and her IV. She tries to get up and walk without a walker. She tells me I need to call Suzy. Who the hell is Suzy?

I stay vigilant, telling her firmly, “You can't get out of bed, don't touch your damn tubes, and no, you can't call Suzy.”

Halfway through the hellish afternoon my mother assumes her choir director's voice. She informs the room, empty except for me, that we will perform some wonderful songs and the first one will be “I'll Be Seeing You.”

“Ready, everybody. One, two, three, four . . .” Silence. She grimaces. “Come on, everybody, now. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four . . .”

So I pipe up in my wobbly soprano, “I'll be seeing you in all the old, familiar places. Dadadadadadadada.” My voice fades. My mother smiles indulgently and says, “That won't do.”

 

Finally the nurses put an alarm on Mom's bed and promise to watch so I can go home and get some sleep. She calls me at five thirty the next morning. “They're so cruel here. They won't feed me,” she wails. The hard edge of my voice cuts through the dim morning as I observe that it isn't time for breakfast yet.

“You are cruel, too,” she says and hangs up.

An hour later when I arrive at the hospital, she is happily eating breakfast.

The doctors find nothing wrong with my mother—no breaks or fractures, but these couple of days in the hospital have completely debilitated her and now they want her to go back into a “skilled nursing facility.” This time I spend the day investigating my options. I find a place that is decent, but there's no getting around the horror of these places—the abandoned people consigned to their wheelchairs, drool dripping down their chins as they wait for death.

 

Mom is situated in the rehab wing on a plastic-mattressed bed near a window. I hook up her Bose radio for some entertainment, put her name on all her clothes, and slip her a couple of pain pills before I leave. I hate to leave her there, but I am tired as hell. On the way home, as I pass the dark fields, I cry. I am missing my boon companion, my bosom buddy, my best friend, my kid.

When I get home, Emmy isn't there. I call her cell phone and
find out she is having dinner with a friend. I suggest that I pick her up from the restaurant and we go to Target to get a bathing suit for her trip to the beach the next day.

“Sure,” she says.

I find her by the fountain in front of the restaurant with her friend.

“Are you telling her about the time you fell in?” I ask, remembering the dripping wet child who came to find me in the restaurant one day aeons ago.

“Yes,” she says with a laugh. She hugs her friend goodbye.

We head over to Target where the collection of suits is especially NOT cute this year, but we don't have time to go anywhere else. My daughter holds up a bathing suit top covered with ruffles and says, “I
so
want ruffles.” This causes us to laugh so hard that she collapses to the floor and I am doubled over, wiping tears from my eyes.

And as we laugh, something inside me that is stiff and black begins to soften and glow again. This is my life, I realize. I have no choice but to let it sweep me out to its dark waters. Acceptance equals mercy. Even if it's only temporary.

In her bleak little room in the nursing home, my mother draws an
o
from the bag. I get a
u
, so she goes first. The word she puts down is
codas
. We are seated across a rolling bed table. My mother has often told me that this part of her life is her coda. I have discovered that she is not having one coda but several.

I have just put down the word
news
on a triple word score, tacking the
s
on to the word
tough
when I hear a faint, plaintive cry: “Help me. Please someone, help me!” In the nursing facility,
you will find odd lumps of bruised flesh with dull eyes parked in wheelchairs in the hallways. Occasionally, one of them will ask you, “Will you please tell me where we are?”

I am afraid to answer that call, afraid I will be confronted with my own helplessness. But I can't stop myself. I have to find the source of that plea. I get up and look down the hallway as Mom searches for a word among her seven letters. The hallway is empty. So I peek into the bathroom my mother shares with the two women in the room next door and find a white-haired lady in a wheelchair facing the toilet, desperate to get her rear end across the chasm and onto the toilet. My fear dissipates.

“Let me help you,” I tell her. Perhaps I shouldn't help. After all, I'm not a professional here. What if the woman gets hurt? But although the staff here is generally competent, they have many patients and little time. It seems more expedient and frankly kinder just to help her myself. Besides, I have learned in recent years how to get an old woman onto and off of a toilet.

So I help the woman, lifting her under the arm the way I lift my own mother, helping her maneuver around.

“It hurts,” she says.

“I know it does,” I tell her.