Wait Until Tomorrow (25 page)

“It's over,” I whisper.

Hank does not return.

SONG BEFORE SUNRISE

O Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world,
Have mercy upon us.
Give them peace, O Lord,
And grant to us also that grace which comes from thee,
That peace which only you can give,
The peace of accepting,
The peace of forgiving,
The peace of knowing the oneness of God, the greatness
of God.

Rosalind MacEnulty
An American Requiem

WINTER 2009

Emmy and I stare at the dorm room, with its blood-dripping horror movie posters covering bleak cinder-block walls, tiny metalframed bed crammed into the corner, and junky furniture piled in the middle of the small room. The first inhabitant, who is nowhere to be seen, has already commandeered the window.

At this moment, Emmy could pass as a model for an Edvard Munch painting.

“I'm thinking you would need a shitload of antidepressants to stay here, honey,” I tell her. “And I'm not sure we can afford the therapy.”

A few hours later, we're looking at a studio apartment a couple of blocks from campus. A few days later, we've finished emptying the storage unit where the last of my mother's things has been kept since she entered the assisted-living place last April. The boxes of music, the distressed copies of the requiem, and a stack of her books are now in my office. The daybed, love seat, and bookcase have been moved to Emmy's new apartment. She's decided she'd like to take the wicker chest, too. So we're sitting on the living-room floor, the wicker chest beside us with the lid gaping open, and I'm slowly extracting the contents—envelopes filled with pictures and newspaper clippings, a scrapbook, old literary magazines
where poems and stories of mine were published, a photo album and framed publicity shots of my two brothers from their days as a conductor and an actor.

The arrangement of the photos in the album is a haphazard affair: a few pictures of me as a child, of my brothers and their kids, of my godmother, and even a couple of my father and one of my stepfather. Emmy and I look through the photos, remarking on each one in turn. Emmy is entranced with one large studio portrait of my mother, her sister, and her two brothers as children. My mother is the eldest. She has a pixie haircut and is smiling at the camera. The youngest has a large picture book on his lap. When they were very young, the Field kids all had blond hair, and my mother's father, Lewis, remarked that they looked like a bunch of Swedish immigrants.

“It was the worst thing to be called an immigrant,” my mother once explained. “He didn't like children very much.” Conversely, my mother never cared for him either. He was a powerful judge, involved in dirty politics, and a drunk, who left his family to fend for themselves during the Great Depression.

Now my mother is the last of the Field kids. Her two younger brothers and younger sister are all dead. Her dearest friends are dead. Her ex-husbands are dead. Even her piano has been carted away and put in storage.

In the scrapbook a tiny newspaper clipping catches my eye: it says that twelve-year-old Rosalind Field has been chosen to be the accompanist for the Girl Scout Chorale.

“Her first job,” I say, shaking my head in wonder.

Then there is increasing evidence of the jobs and accolades to come: an article about “the musical family”—my mother and my two brothers—putting on a performance for the Friday Musicale; programs from concerts where she was the composer, the conductor, the pianist, or all three; a brochure from
The Lost Colony
, an
outdoor drama, for which she was musical director for a quarter of a century. There is also a program for
An American Requiem
.

I put it aside to show her. I'm remembering that request she made that we not let the requiem die when she dies. I hope my brothers and I can find a way.

I stuff these relics from my mother's long and productive life into another box and notice that old dog Grief sniffing around my heart. Sometimes it feels as if the last four years have been a series of small deaths.

 

With Emmy gone to school, Hank missing in action, and the dog dead, I spend more and more time at the Sanctuary with my mom. Her memory plays tricks on both of us.

One time when I come over, her hair has just been cut and styled. It's a gorgeous thick silver halo.

“Your hair looks lovely this color,” I tell her.

“Well, I never did dye it,” she says.

I laugh and say, “Yes, you did, Mom. In fact, sometimes I dyed it for you. You've never been fully gray before you lived here.”

She looks at me in surprise.

“Really? Well, I suppose if I were to write my memoirs, it would be mostly fiction.”

 

One night I go over to the Sanctuary at about 6:45 p.m. to spend some time with Mom. She hates that the evenings are so dull—almost everyone else goes right to bed after they eat dinner—so I try to get there after dinner and play a game of Scrabble with her. Tonight I help her go to the bathroom first, then get her back in her wheelchair and put her feet on the metal footrests. I push her into the hallway and wait for the elevator.

Without fail, my mother says, “It's so convenient having this elevator right here.”

“Yes, it is,” I answer and rub her shoulders as we wait.

Downstairs we head inside the parlor to play our game. A woman named Jane asks to join us, and so I put out a third rack. Mother and I stopped keeping score several months ago. It had gotten to the point that I couldn't play with her anymore because she made such seemingly stupid moves. It was annoying to beat her by hundreds of points, and it would infuriate me when she would make a play for four points that with one simple adjustment could be fourteen points. Finally I realized that if we played without keeping score, we could both still enjoy the game.

Jane, however, wants to keep score. I can tell she's a bit competitive. I am, too. So I make sure I get a fifty-point lead and then I relax for the rest of the game. Jane's husband is in the hospital. He has Alzheimer's and when he returns from the hospital, he'll be moved from their apartment to the memory care unit.

“I'll still be able to eat with him,” she says with a smile. Then she tells me that she's taken care of him for sixty-four years, the last six with Alzheimer's.

“That must have been hard,” I say.

“Not when you do it out of love, it isn't hard,” she says.

We finish the game at ten minutes till eight. I like to get out of the place by eight. Otherwise, the door will be locked and I'll have to hunt around to find someone to let me out. So I hurriedly wheel my mother upstairs. This is where I make my mistake. She has to go to the bathroom, and instead of pushing her call button, I decide to help her myself, but quickly so I can get downstairs before they lock the door. Only you can't do anything quickly with an elderly person.

Once she's done, I try to get her into her reclining chair, but panic hits her. I don't know why, it just does. And I'm just trying to get out of there. But she's suddenly incoherent. She needs or wants something but she can't say what it is. She stammers and waves her
hand and looks terrified. And the saintly person I was just a few minutes earlier is replaced by the demon daughter from hell.

“God damn it,” I growl through clenched teeth, my face within inches of hers. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Then she cries, and I get angrier. And I'm angry about everything. Angry about my guilt for treating her badly, angry about the fact that she's gotten old, angry that she's always in pain and no longer the tough cookie who used to be my mother, angry that I'm no longer young either, angry that I'm not out with some cute guy in a fast car with a cold bottle of beer in my hand, angry that I'm not rich and successful or poor and holy or some damn thing, angry that my daughter has grown up and left me, that my dog is dead and my husband has gone AWOL, leaving me in a half-finished house where the squirrels and raccoons can nest unmolested. And don't get me started on the Republicans or the Taliban.

One of the caretakers enters. She can see that she's walked into a bad situation. She can see that I'm not being a good, loving daughter. She can see that I'm a snarling demon bitch.

I leave immediately.

The next day I go over to see my mother. I bring chocolates. She is happy to see me. I wheel her outside to get some fresh air. You'd never know the night before even happened.

 

My mother complains that she never got to travel enough. There had been a trip to Bermuda with her mother when she was just a child. The trip had been to help Skipper recover from the nervous breakdown she'd had as a result of her husband's drunken escapades. Then there was a trip to Europe in her early twenties, funded by Skipper, to help my own mother cope with the strain of being married to her drunk husband.

Other than that, she devoted her life to working. She was at the church on Sundays and Wednesdays and in the theater on Tuesdays,
Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. When she had finally planned a trip to Heidelberg in her eighties, a vertebra in her back needed attention. She went in for surgery. Not only did she not go to Heidelberg, she did not walk unassisted ever again.

The lessons of 2008 and my mother's regrets have not been lost on me. I have decided to go to India and take a program at Sadhguru's ashram. Because of the economic “downturn,” airline tickets are cheaper than ever, staying at the ashram is ridiculously inexpensive, and I've got a break between terms. The only reason for me not to go is that Hank doesn't want me to. And Hank is on the other side of the country and shows no inclination to return, so his opinion is of little weight.

“You should go,” my mother says. “You will never regret it.”

“Will you be okay?” I ask.

“I'm terrified of you leaving for that long. But you must do it.”

She's right. I do not want to be sitting around spilling my regrets to Emmy some day.

FEBRUARY 2009, SOUTH INDIA

The thick woolly heat of the late February afternoon has finally released its tentacles from around our necks as Margit from Germany and I pick our way through the crowd of Indians in front of the temple. Dust rises around our sandaled feet but does not settle on our pristine Indian outfits. I am in borrowed silk (from my Indian neighbor back in Charlotte)—cobalt blue with gold flowers on the tunic and the pants. Margit wears linen, a little more comfortable for the daylight hours, but by the middle of the night, I'll be glad I'm in something heavier.

We wind our way through throngs of the devoted outside the temple and pass a giant statue of a kneeling black bull to meet up with a striking blond woman named Anya, whose job it is to help us find the bus. Anya is wearing a turquoise tunic and pants with linen trim. A few other Westerners gather around her with us. We're all dressed so beautifully. Have I ever been to a rock concert in anything but jeans and a T-shirt, I wonder? Have any of us?

We leave the temple grounds, which are located on the edge of the sprawling Isha yoga ashram, and walk past long rows of towering coconut trees to the bus. We crowd in and soon bang down the dirt road to the concert grounds where we will celebrate Mahashivrathri with live music, dancing, and chanting with more than one hundred thousand other happy, dancing people. The bus
chugs through swarms of motorcycles and deposits us in a veritable ocean of people: old folks, children, parents, teenagers. At the edge of the grounds a giant Ferris wheel spins, lights twinkling. We wander into an enormous white tent. Our section is close to the front along the side of the tent. We have a great view of the stage where the bands will play.

About five hundred of us non-Indians are staying at the ashram, preparing for the meditation program. Tonight, however, we are going to kick out the jams Indian-style from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Why are we doing this and without the benefit of wakefulness-inducing drugs? (Most of us haven't had caffeine for the past forty days.) We are here because Sadhguru has invited us to be here, and generally when Sadhguru wants you to do something there is a certain amount of fun involved, not to mention the spiritual sparks. And always music.

Mahashivarathri means “The Great Night of Shiva.” It is celebrated all over India on the fourteenth night of the new moon that occurs in February or March. Shiva is the destroyer—the original yogi.

The program starts with music, but my new friend Ginny and I decide to wander around the grounds. When we get back to our spots in the bleachers, Sadhguru is sitting on the stage in his robe. He explains to the throngs that there are several legends attached to Mahashivarathri, which make it an ideal night to honor Shiva since you get to decide the reason.

“For one, it is the day that Shiva attained his ultimate stillness. For another, a day of absolute inclusiveness. For another, it's a wedding. For another, it is conquest, and for another it is the day of the weird.” Then Sadhguru gives that characteristic hearty laugh of his.

Weird it is, but in a somehow familiar way. Woodstock without the mud. Bonnaroo without the hangover. Bliss without blowback.
I thought I might have a hard time staying awake, and there are a couple of moments early on when my head lolls forward, but pretty soon the energy in the place starts crackling. It's like a fire. There is that first lick of flame, a few inquiring tentacles, and then the sudden bursting forth of yellow pitchforks and searing heat. The enormous crowd is chanting, calling “Shambo, Shambo,” which is another name for Shiva. The sound beating from a hundred thousand throats mesmerizes me.

As the night rolls forward, serious dance music ratchets up. A band called Indian Ocean roars into the wee hours, and the night turns wilder and wilder. Finally, the house band, Sounds of Isha, comes on. A supernatural ecstasy permeates the tent. By this time we are on the chairs, gyrating madly, hands in the air. It goes on and on. Tribal. Primal. The Destroyer has demolished all inhibition. We are marionettes and the musicians pull the strings.