Wait Until Tomorrow (3 page)

I realize I come from a long line of strong women at least as far back as the Puritans in the sixteen hundreds, who left everything they had known and boarded ships to come to America. They and their daughters would lose husbands and children to wars and diseases. Some of their granddaughters would go to college.
One of them would become a famous poet. They worked. They persevered.

I don't want to be like them, I'm thinking, as the warm water rises around me. I don't want to have to be strong. But I might as well wish for brown eyes instead of blue. The earth may be breaking apart under my feet, but the resolve of generations before me and of the new one inside me is leading me to solid ground.

MAY 1992

Hank calls. He's changed his mind. He sends money and presents for the child he hasn't met. His mother writes me a letter. He sends a check to help with my expenses. I agree to meet with him.

Two years earlier I had moved with my three-month-old daughter to Tallahassee and reenlisted in graduate school to get a PhD. I figured if I was going to be a single mom, being a college professor was better than working twelve-hour days as a freelance journalist. I qualified for food stamps and Medicaid, I taught classes for very little pay, and my mother sent money.

On Derby Day, Hank, who has gotten a pilot's license, flies a small rented Cessna to the airport in Ocala, Florida, halfway between Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. I drive down with my two-year-old child in the backseat and meet him at the airport. I'm not sure how to respond to him. I'm not even sure how I feel about him anymore, but he's here, and he has a legal right to be a part of his child's life. I'm willing to give him a chance.

Hank gets in the front seat, spins around, and takes one look at the child.

“Who are you?” he says.

She stares at him with brown saucer eyes that match his own; at that moment they fall in love with each other, and our fates are sealed. Hank sells his house and moves up to Tallahassee with us.

One day when we pull up to the babysitter's apartment, Emmy gets out of the car, looks at Hank, and says, “Hank, love you.” Then she slams the door and runs inside to play. He's the first person she says that to.

A year after our reunion, we get married at a little wedding chapel in Lake Tahoe and come home with a couple of coffee mugs that say, “The Party's at Harvey's.” These are our wedding mementos.

 

My mom had retired from her myriad of jobs in Jacksonville and moved to Edenton, NC, and we'd make occasional forays up there to visit. The drive from Tallahassee to Edenton took an eternity. My mother also came to visit us in Tallahassee at least once that I can remember. I know this because I have a picture from when we went to the opera.

In the picture I have of her from that visit, she is standing by the fountain in front of the auditorium at Florida State University, wearing a dark green velvet dress and holding the hand of fouryear-old Emmy, who has one leg out in an arabesque and is balancing on the wall of the fountain. My mother is heavier in this picture than she had ever been before—solid, seemingly immovable.

My mother became old in fits and starts. Every time I saw her, I noticed some surprising new mile marker. On this visit I discovered she could no longer keep up with me when we walked anywhere. I found I needed to walk very, very slowly. Her heart, she explained . . .she had congestive heart failure. I was nonplussed. She had never had anything wrong with her heart before—except a murmur she'd had since birth. The past twenty or so years she'd been an inveterate walker. That was her exercise, a way for us to spend time together, to talk and laugh. And now, all of a sudden (or so it seemed to me), we were cr-aw-ling. We had become characters in a movie, moving in slow motion, each step exaggerated
and excruciating as the world seemed to stop spinning in space. Of course, I hadn't planned for this when I got her and Emmy in the car to go to the opera. I had carved out just enough time for us to speed over to campus, find a parking space, and sprint to the opera hall. We barely made it.

During this visit, I kept thinking there was some way to “fix” my mother. At the time I had come across a set of five exercises called the Tibetan rites. A man who had supposedly discovered them in Tibet said that these exercises would have old bodies dancing like teenagers.

“Here, Mom, just do this,” I said. So with my agile thirtyseven-year-old body, I demonstrated the rites in the living room of our little ranch house. Spinning was the first one. I got my mom to slowly spin three times. (You're supposed to build up to twenty-one.)

After the third spin, she was out of breath, and a bright red blood spot suddenly bloomed in her left eye. Shit, I thought, I've killed her. She's had an embolism or something. But my mother survived whatever it was. Of course, she was a big disappointment to me, having gone and grown old like that. Where was my playful friend?

This is the last picture I have of my mother without a walker. The Buddhists teach impermanence—an idea that still confounds me. In my mind my mother is permanently laughing and vigorous, physically strong and intellectually at the top of the mountain. But today (many years later) as I sit on my front porch on a chilly autumn morning, yellow poplar leaves carpeting the ground, I am aware of my own mortality slowly ticking away. My doctor has informed me that my bones have already begun the process of deconstructing themselves. One day my daughter will look at me in shock and dismay as I can no longer keep up with her. And I—this I of this moment—will be just a ghost in her mind.

APRIL 1999

Hank doesn't want to leave Tallahassee. We've been fairly happy here in the land of the canopy road. I have my friends, Hank has his work, and Emmy goes to a small private school where the children never have homework or tests and yet still learn as much as kids in the state-sponsored gulags.

Now Hank is being offered a job in Charlotte, North Carolina. Oh, please, I silently intone, please, accept the job. I've lived in Florida all my life, and the opportunities for me to make a living in this college town with its cup running over with PhDs are just about nil. The one full-time teaching job I had thought I might get went to one of my friends instead.

So when Hank says he has the possibility of a real job with benefits and a salary and not as much travel, I'm ready to start packing. For one thing, Charlotte is only five hours away from my eighty-one-year-old mother, and I want to see her more than just the couple of times a year we now manage. He's leaning in that direction but first we have to take an exploratory trip to North Carolina.

 

Hank, Emmy, and I are in Hank's truck with Jaxson, our black labrador retriever. Jaxson is a sweet, dumb moose of a dog with one invaluable ability. He knows how to become invisible. This is
an essential skill for a dog to have if you are going to be sneaking him into hotel rooms and other places where large beasts aren't welcome. That first night we check into a cheap motel room on Independence Boulevard, which we will later learn is the ugliest street in Charlotte. A security guard stands at the top of the parking lot, watching as Hank and I lurk around, putting our things in the motel room, waiting for an opportunity to sneak the dog in while Emmy stays in the Blazer with the beast. With his full beard and bulging belly, Hank has an uncanny resemblance to Fidel Castro. We must surely look like we are grifters with a dead body to dispose of.

The suspicious security guard wanders down past Hank's old Blazer while Hank and I watch from the motel room doorway. He peers into the window of the truck and sees an adorable eightyear-old girl who smiles angelically at him and waves while the ninety-pound dog lies at her feet on the floorboards as silent as stone. We laugh about this for months to come. Our little con artist. We couldn't be prouder.

Although Hank isn't happy about the move or the idea of getting up and ironing clothes to wear to work every day, he takes the job. I get a full-time teaching gig at a nearby college. The move is a tough one, but necessary. For one thing, I've got a souvenir from my days as an addict—a sometimes debilitating case of hepatitis C. Eventually I need to do something about it, and that something will surely require health insurance. So we find a pretty two-story house with a porch and a creek in the backyard, and we settle into our new lives in suburbia as if we're normal people.

Neither Hank nor I really have the hang of this marriage business. I don't know what his excuse is. He comes from a nuclear family unit, headed by two upstanding Orange County California Republicans. But I have only had the example of my mother and my two older brothers, all of whom did time living with my railing,
egotistic, alcoholic father, who (luckily for me) left when I was three. I should perhaps mention the stepfather experiment that didn't work out so well either. Shortly after my mother married this man, he developed a taste for vodka, lots and lots of vodka, and for my teenage babysitter. My mother didn't repeat the experiment after he skulked out of our lives.

When Hank berates me for not making enough money, I shrug my shoulders and go on doing what I love to do: writing and being involved in various unprofitable artistic ventures. He doesn't like to socialize, and I could hang out with people all day. He's a staunch Republican (though not the church kind), and I am definitely not (though I am fond of certain offbeat churches). But we're affectionate with each other and faithful. He's not a big drinker, and I gave up the last of my legion of bad habits soon after he came into my life. He keeps me sane. When the demons start to close in, he makes me laugh and they disappear.

Our favorite holiday is Halloween. Our first Halloween in Charlotte, Hank and Emmy carve a pumpkin. Hank draws the face and then shows Emmy how to cut it.

“That's good, babe,” he says even when she lops off the jacko'-lantern's tooth.

Hank uses his electronic ingenuity to create two glowing eyes that peer from the bushes of our house. He and Emmy make ghosts out of old sheets to hang from the trees, and I allow spiderwebs to accumulate on the porch. We know how to do this much.

 

My mother and I talk on the phone nearly every night. We have always been close, even when I was at my most awful. When I was a teenager, I started doing drugs like a lot of kids in my generation. The difference between me and most other kids was that I was an overachiever. I had to do more and harder drugs than anyone else—cocaine, heroin, Dilaudid, morphine. I fell in love with
drugs and built a fortress around myself with them. Throughout those years my mother somehow never gave up on me. She bailed me out of jail. She sent me to drug programs. She told me over and over again, “This is not you. I know who you are.” Finally, after my stint in prison, the love affair lost its luster. Then I met Hank on a video shoot in Miami (I was the production assistant, he was the “genius” engineer), and he swept away any vestiges of the old druggie that lingered inside me.

Now that we live in North Carolina, I am able to see my mother more often.

My mother was always smarter than anyone else I knew. The damage to that blade of intellect occurred offstage. The years are blurry. In 1997 she had to have an operation on her back. Something went wrong. She had to have another surgery, and the second surgeon said that the first one had not completed his work. Her spine was actually wobbling. The end result for my mother: two surgeries and a life sentence of painkillers and a walker.

During this time my brother Jo went to Edenton and lived with her. He took care of her as she had done for him when he had lymphoma back in 1991. When he flatlined she happened to be at his side; she ran out and summoned the doctors and nurses who brought him back from his peaceful interlude on the other side. It wasn't the first time she'd saved the life of one of her children.

People have asked why we didn't sue the surgeon who, in addition to leaving her spine wobbling, nicked a nerve, causing her to be in pain for the rest of her life and confined in a cage-like walker. But apparently, in North Carolina, a doctor has to intentionally screw you up before you can actually sue for damages.

“If there's a fire, you don't have to prove arson to make an insurance claim,” my mother said after yet another attorney turned down her case. “Why can't there just be insurance for medical accidents?”

At this point I don't understand how drastically things have changed since the operation. I only know that she doesn't travel well anymore. Ever since the surgery Mom has lived on little pink pills. Ever since the surgery, her life has been difficult and often lonely. Her pain eats away at me. But at least I am closer now.

THE 1960S, JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA

When my mother lifted her hands, music happened. Those hands summoned the voices of singers, waved on orchestras with a thin white baton, and elicited the dulcet tones of a Bach fugue from a harpsichord, the Wagnerian state trumpets from her fourkeyboard pipe organ, and the intricate harmonic gymnastics of Rachmaninoff from her Steinway grand piano. When I picture her from those days, she is always pitching forward with an armful of music, plowing through life relentlessly from one rehearsal or performance to another.

Wednesday night was always choir rehearsal night. Always. Although over the years she sometimes had bouts of asthma or migraines, she was never sick on Wednesday nights or Sunday mornings, when she sat at the helm of the enormous pipe organ and directed the choir with one hand, her other hand and her feet steadily pouring out music. She generally dozed off during Sunday sermons. Music was her religion.

When she practiced her piano at home, her eyes would close as she swayed with the music; I would watch mystified as she drifted away from me. She told me that sometimes when she played, she would feel as though she were floating outside her body. It scared her a little.