Wait Until Tomorrow (22 page)

Thursday morning I must go with Hank to the cardiologist. He's been to a sleep clinic and found out he has sleep apnea; he's also been to an endocrinologist. We're still playing with the blood pressure medication trying to get him on an even keel.

“Stop drinking diet soda. Take more walks,” I tell him, but I'm not the kind of doctor he listens to.

 

Then the weekend comes. Hank and I drive halfway across town to find the movie
Double Indemnity
. Then we drive up to Winston-Salem to pick up Emmy. Everything is good. This time there are no boys kissing each other in front of the building—a sight which burned the corneas of my homophobic husband. There is only our girl with her long thick hair and her wide smile as she bounds out of the building and into our arms. Suddenly it's as if I've never been sad or lonely in my life.

Back home, Hank cooks refried beans and tortillas. Emmy grates the cheese and sets the table. I cut up the onions, lettuce, and tomatoes and chop cilantro. Emmy makes the guacamole the
way her dad taught her to with cilantro, cumin, salt, and tomatoes. After we eat, we all clean the kitchen and then sit down to watch the movie. My mother is left to her own devices. I am with my family, and I'm thinking of the rainbow Hank and I saw in California when I was a couple months pregnant—one of those arching textbook rainbows. Our kid was the pot of gold.

“Your mother's wheelchair has got to go,” the head nurse at the Sanctuary tells me. My heart sinks and my spirit turns a sickly yellow color.

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“Yes, the other residents are complaining. They're afraid of her,” she says. “Not only that, she knocked the glass door at the front of the building off its rail. We've ordered a manual wheelchair for her.”

I'm trying not to imagine a glass door shattering over my mother's head.

The next day I head up to her room on the third floor. She's got that frantic confused look on her face that is so common to her now. She's in a small black manual wheelchair, and I'm shoving the motorized wheelchair into her closet.

“I don't know why you have to take it away from me. I've been very careful, very careful,” Mom says.

“Because you knocked the glass doors at the front of the building off the track and cracked one of them. Because you dragged a chair out of the activities room all the way to your bedroom, clearing everything in your path. Because the other residents are terrified of getting run over by you. Which you may recall happened to me not that long ago when you pinned me against a car,” I tell her.

“But I've gotten better. I really have.” My mother is frustrated to the brink of tears. “This one is so hard. It's so hard to push it with my arms. Can't we move somewhere else?”

“No.”

“No?”

Now I am frustrated to the brink of tears. I want my mother. My real mother.

“Where did they take it? Will I get it back? When do you think I'll get it back?” she queries.

“Mom, it's here in your closet. I don't know when you can use it again.”

Right then, in my imagination, my real mother, handsome and vibrant, enters the room.

“Hello. Who are you?” my fifty-year-old mother asks.

I feel such relief. I want to fall into her arms, but she doesn't know who I am.

“It's me, Pat. Your daughter.”

“Pat? What are you doing here?”

“Taking care of you.”

“Taking care of me? Are you still taking heroin?”

“No, Mom. I cleaned up more than twenty-five years ago. I'm a mother. I'm a college teacher. But I had to take a leave of absence when you went in the hospital. When you got out of the hospital, I had to bring you here.”

“Well, that's wonderful. I thought you'd be dead by now. You made it. I won!”

“Yes, you did. And now you are exacting your revenge. You're whacked out on pain medication most of the time. You whine and complain constantly. You call me three, four, five times a day. No, Mother, I'm not dead, and you aren't either.”

“God, how awful. How old am I?”

“Ninety.”

“Ninety? Impossible.”

Reality breaks in on my imagined conversation with my mother. My real mother.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” my impostor mother says, “but I don't know what I'm supposed to do. It's in there, isn't it?”

I miss my fifty-year-old mother right now. I miss her so much. She never complained about anything. She was the life of the party. We talked almost every day. We laughed even when things were awful. She always said she felt so lucky that she didn't just love her children, she liked us, too.

I allow myself a moment of bitterness, thinking of my two brothers, far away with their new girlfriends.

“I really need help. I can't figure out how to move my feet. I need to go to the bathroom. Pat, what are you doing?”

“Talking to you,” I tell her.

She was always afraid that I would die. Now I understand why it was so important to keep me alive. She must have known.

I get the walker and help my mother transition from the wheelchair to the walker. Then I pull up her dress and pull down the disposable underpants while she balances precariously before falling backwards onto the toilet. I go into the bedroom and wait for her to call me when she's done. My phantom mother waits for me by the window, looking out into the parking lot below.

“I'm sorry about all this,” she says. “Terribly sorry. But I do love you.”

“I know. I love you, too,” I tell her. “I always love you even when I think I don't.”

Then she's gone, and I hear my mother calling from the bathroom.

“Pat? Pat? I'm ready.”

SUMMER 2008

The biggest favor the universe has done me is putting my mother at the Sanctuary, where there are people to help her, listen to her play the piano, talk to her, and eat meals with her. My life is about to crack wide open.

Emmy has decided she won't go to college right after high school. She wants to work with an experimental theater company for a few months and defer college for a semester. I like this plan. I was never in favor of going straight to college. As a university professor, I've watched many eighteen-year-olds flounder in their first year, taking pointless classes, flunking out, getting depressed, getting drunk, spinning around completely clueless. At the theater company she'll be working with adults on a professional level, and when she isn't doing theater, she'll be doing farmwork.

But when Hank hears about this scheme, he explodes. Hank is not a halfway kind of guy. He's the sort to pull out the cannons when a water pistol might do.

I start throwing things in a suitcase. My MO is always to disappear. When I was about three years old and my drunken father came home, I took off for the woods behind my house. My brothers had to go out and find me. I may have been just three years old, but I knew danger when I saw it.

But Hank knows this about me, and he reins in his anger enough that we don't bolt. It's only a temporary truce, however. This is a fight to the death. It isn't about whether or not Emmy goes to college in the fall or sometime later. There's something deeper, more fundamental going on. Twenty years worth of resentments and disagreements boil to the surface.

Hank and I battle like Titans.

“Why can't you be on my side?” he asks.

“Because I think your side is wrong,” I tell him.

No matter how many times we get in the ring to duke it out, neither of us wins. We just get bloodier.

Emmy has become a zombie. Neither of us can eat. We live on smoothies. I decide she's got to get out of this toxic atmosphere while I figure out what to do, so I send her to New York to visit a friend.

That night I lie in my bed in the dark and push into the pliant flesh below the curve of my belly, an inch or so above the ridge of my right hip bone. My body reports back to me in a language I don't understand. What is it telling me? Hank is in his room, asleep. Now that he has a machine for his sleep apnea and a prescription for Ambien, he sleeps at night like the rest of the world.

I contemplate the demise of my marriage as I lie in bed. Most marriages break up because of infidelity, substance abuse, someone going wild with the credit cards, or just plain boredom. But in our case none of the above applies. Are we really breaking up because of an eighteen-year-old's possible career choice? I can't help but wish he'd had me for a kid. Then he'd have something to be pissed off about.

“I'd rather see her be a prostitute than an actress,” Hank says bitterly.

When Hank thinks “actress,” he thinks bankruptcy, drugs, suicide. But Emmy is not even sure she wants to act. She has no cotton-candy movie-star dreams. She's interested in theater as a means of communication. And she's interested in a lot of other things, too—politics, art, music, history. But Hank won't hear of it. In his narrative, I have corrupted his child, infusing her with illusions of glory to make up for my own rotten childhood.

History is filled with such stories. St. Francis's father rejected him when he became a monk. Gay friends tell me of being turned out of their parents' homes. My own father preferred a mediocre piano student to his own children.

As I lie there poking around my belly at the source of this mysterious pain, I wonder if there's more at work here than this eruption over Emmy and her desire to live her own life. I realize I've been living in a comfortable cage for a long while, and now suddenly it looks like the door is open. And maybe that's what Hank is thinking too, deep in the far reaches of his subconscious. We are both so dependent in this relationship. We have become each other's drug. And we are stagnating. I wonder, is Emmy the sacrificial lamb that allows us to break free of each other? The one point on which neither of us will budge?

 

The next day the “gone child grief” overwhelms me.

“Let's go to the beach,” I tell Hank. I've got to get out of this house with all its memories cascading over me. Maybe at the beach, Hank and I can talk. Maybe we can find a way out of this hole we've dug for ourselves.

We pack up some things and throw them in the car.

Just as I'm pulling out of the garage, I notice that odd little phrase coming from inside my body. What the hell is it?

I turn to Hank and ask, “Where is the appendix located?”

“In your lower right abdomen,” he says. “Why?”

“I have a pain there. In fact, I've had a pain there for a few days.”

“It could be appendicitis,” he says.

“It could be gas,” I reply, remembering once when I was a child, my aunt taking me to the doctor because I had stomach pains which were nothing more than gas. Besides, I don't get things like appendicitis. I'm the healthy one here, the nonsmoking vegetarian yogi who doesn't consume alcohol or caffeine.

But we decide not to take a chance. So instead of going to the beach, we wind up in the emergency room for eight hours. At one point I have to drink a few gallons of some orange crap and go into a little room where they inject me with stuff that makes me feel like I have to pee and then we wait some more. Fortunately, I have brought along a copy of
War and Peace
, which I read aloud to him while we await the results of my CAT scan. We don't mention Emmy or the ongoing battle. Instead we're friends again. But I get tired of reading and tired of waiting.

“Fuck this,” I say. I get off the gurney and demand a nurse come unhook me from the diabolical machines. I hate hospitals. I am determined never to be like my mother, never to obey these people who act like demigods. They barely manage to placate me until a friendly doctor with a gray beard comes into the curtained room where we wait.