Wait Until Tomorrow (32 page)

Emmy glares at me at the same time that my mother lands halfassed on the wheelchair. But by then I am laughing so hard I've peed on myself, which brings on the idea that maybe my mother isn't the only one who needs “extra protection.” Fortunately, Darryl and his very strong friend Eric arrive at that moment. They lift up my mother, wheelchair and all, and cart her up the steps onto the front porch. Eric, who took care of an elderly couple for several years when he first moved to the United States from Poland, pulls the wheelchair over the last step and across the threshold while I run upstairs to clean up and change clothes. All's well that ends well, right?

Maybe it's because she's sick with the cough, but my mother's listless and confused from our pre-dinner gathering in the living room for appetizers through dinner. Like all of us, she does make special mention of the splendid soup. While the rest of us talk about various topics (Eric from Poland fills the Americans in on Abe Lincoln's connection to Thanksgiving and how he established the holiday for morale), my mother's eyes droop. I worry about whether she needs to go to the bathroom and if that is possible in the tiny first-floor “powder room.” A couple of times she tries to keep up with the conversation but her hearing has gone and not everyone knows to speak loudly to her. She does, however, notice the lace tablecloth and the place settings—remnants of her mostly vanished life.

After dessert, we waddle like hippos back into the living room, where Emmy lights a fire in the fireplace and entertains us with stories of riding back to school recently on a train packed with
drunken football fans. Darryl, Eric, and Steve wax philosophical. Lisa informs us of the real skinny on 2012. Lorri laughs at the jokes. I watch my mother.

Her head slowly lowers, eyes shut, and she peacefully dozes until suddenly—as if she were falling—she screams, “Ooooh!” and her body jerks upright. The conversation skids to a halt every time it happens. I find myself wishing the festivities would just end so I can get her back to the assisted-living place where she has an accessible bathroom and her adjustable bed. Finally at about seven thirty I tell my guests I have to take her back home. Steve and Eric carry the wheelchair to the sidewalk, and I wheel her back to my car.

Unlike my friend Mike, my mother's life has ended in degrees. Tonight, I realize, we've lost a few more of them. This will be the last time I'll bring her over to my house. I don't have the income to build a ramp and retrofit my bathroom. Besides, if it isn't enjoyable to her, what is the point? I decide I will not force her out again. The thing that worries me is the requiem performance. The date is set for February 21. Everything is a go. But how will I ever get her there? I'm thinking we might have to do it without her. I shut this awful thought out of my mind.

Mom surprises me on the way home.

“What a lovely evening,” she says.

“It was nice, but I'm so tired,” I admit.

“Well, don't fall asleep before you get me home,” she says. And I laugh. Though my mother's long slow decline saddens me more than I can say, I feel grateful that she still has that spark of humor, that I've been able to have one more Thanksgiving with her in my house with the old lace tablecloth that belonged to her grandmother and the beautiful hand-painted plates that belonged to my grandmother, and that back at my house, a large pot of leftover Thanksgiving soup will keep me warm for the coming days.

Here is Greg's recipe, with his permission:

 

Cover with water two inches above solids and simmer for at least an hour

 

Sauté vegetables until tender, adding each vegetable one at a time: onions, celery, carrots, garlic, ginger. Deglaze with vegetable stock or dry white wine. Add vegetable stock and simmer for half hour. Add mushrooms, curry, cooked lentils, and squash and cook for another half hour. Finish with fresh herbs and nutmeg. Salt and pepper to taste. Add garnish when serving. Can drizzle truffle oil or olive oil to taste.

WINTER 2010

I am traveling across North Carolina in an Amtrak train—warehouses of brick and corrugated steel, tanks, leafless trees and evergreens, brown or pale yellow lawns, small clapboard houses with metal carports attached to the sides, factories, anonymous brick buildings, trucks. We pass over highways and see people heading to work, cell phone towers, roofing businesses. I love the train, the easy forward momentum. These trains don't seem to rock the way trains used to. They glide like steel serpents.

A blue-suited steward comes through collecting tickets. We pass small towns; I notice a faded painted sign “Central Grocery” on old brick. We pass enormous steel water towers like spaceships gleaming in the blighted rural area. An old man in a Stetson hat creakily gets out of a truck. Some houses still have their Christmas decorations up. The houses are tiny. I wonder who lives in them. A brown-and-white dilapidated trailer, more manufacturing plants where something happens but I can't imagine what. An electrical forest of towers and wires. Backyards and apartment complexes. A college campus—brick buildings with white porticoes—where I once tried to get a job. I'm glad I didn't. The train blowing its one chord, sometimes long, sometimes short—an indecipherable Morse code.

I'm on my way home to Charlotte after visiting Emmy at college. As we walked across the campus, she told me about the phone call she recently had with Hank, how the conversation was unstrained and happy, how they laughed together. The two of them seem to be finding their way back to each other.

The train continues west and the sun slides by in window-sized patches as we round bends. Outside I watch the scenery: farmland, wetlands, a tiny log cabin, a blue tractor in a shed, a strip shopping center, a brick Baptist church, a hawk scouring the land for breakfast, a landfill with a dump truck spilling black dirt, and a backhoe with its head on the ground as if it is sleeping.

I'm worried about the requiem performance. Everyone is expecting Mom to be there. They have a different idea of who she is. They think she will be happy and honored. I think so too, but I think that it will be her ghost who is happy and honored. I believe that her former self still lingers near her body. I believe that even though she may fall asleep during the performance, some part of her consciousness will register this homage to her work.

I haven't been able to do much to make sure the performance goes the way it should. My brother Jo has taken the reins, and I'm glad for it. But he is trying to make all the arrangements long distance. There's a committee of Mother's old friends working to make it happen, and apparently there have been unspecified problems. Have we imposed too much, I wonder. We don't have money to pay for anything. The most important thing to me is getting a good recording of it, but so far I haven't had much luck finding someone who can do it. I have to trust that Jo will make it happen. He seems pretty confident.

We're pulling into Greensboro—a small, pretty city with a few midsized buildings. A lone cargo trailer sits by the side of the tracks. I wonder how long it has been there, if it's been forgotten.

At least Mom has been better mentally, more alert, more like
her old self since she got over her cold. And I know I have no choice now. She has to go to Jacksonville where the requiem will be performed. The only hitch in the plans is that Emmy can't come with us, so I'll have to get my other brother and his son to help me transport my mother. She's so afraid of travel now and of leaving the confines of the Sanctuary. I will have to find some way to convince her.

“Mom, you know how much you love me?” I will ask. “I need you to do this for me. I need you to not be afraid, to be strong and to be happy. Please do this for me.” If I can just frame it that way and tap into that old drive of hers, then she'll do it. She'll go to the ends of the earth. All my life I have known this, that if I really needed my mother to do something for me, she would battle dragons. I once used this power to persuade her to get drugs for me from her friend the dentist. I still feel bad about that.

The truth is that it's not for me. It's a chance for others who have loved her and learned from her to get a chance to express their feelings. It's a chance for people who have never heard the requiem to hear it. And it's one more chance for her to realize the impact she has had. And no, it won't just be her ghost that will get it. She'll thrive in all that attention. I only have to get her there.

The mystics say that old age is a time of return to the essential self. What looks like the worst thing imaginable to us is actually a spiritual process at once beautiful and liberating. I have judged my mother's aging time and again, but I also know that there is something holy and ineffable about the slow erasure of her worldly persona. And the requiem feels like a way to honor not just her, but the transformation that is taking place.

The train is moving again. Small white houses, a giant piece of concrete pipe in a section of scrub—of no discernible purpose. A lot full of hundreds of cars. A sign on the fence that says “If you can read this, you are on camera.”

We are slowly moving through a tangle of wood, some trash on the ground, big muddy puddles, bare trees with brown desiccated leaves. The ground is covered with leaves and sticks. A few pines lift their green branches like chalices; they toast their imperviousness to the weather.

Soon I will be back in Charlotte. I will drive to work. I will teach my classes as always, collecting papers, listening to presentations. Though at first I won't even want to be there, my students will suck me into their world as they always do. And suddenly I'll start caring.
Yes, you can turn that paper in next week. Sure, I'll look at what you've written. Now, what are you really trying to say right here in this opening paragraph?

And then I'll drive to my mother's.

 

After days of feeling like a petri dish swirling with cold germs, I wake up Saturday—departure day—feeling like the universe is on my side no matter what. The cold germs have vacated the premises.

My brother David and his son Edward are still sleeping in Emmy's room when I pop out of bed (something I haven't done in weeks) and take a shower. I've been dreading this day in a way. Feeling like it was more of a chore than an exciting event. I joked that getting mother into my car would be like getting Merlyn in the dog cage before an airplane trip, requiring a combination of earnest cajoling and brute force. But this morning feels like a rose in full petal. I make oatmeal with blueberries, walnuts, and raw honey and manage to impress my brother—which is something that, after all these years, I'm still trying to do.

While David showers and Edward goes off with Lorri to take our broken TV to the dump, I decide to squeeze in a short walk. The cold morning air nips at my cheeks, but the sun shines like a Happy New Year hat. It's February 20, the day before the day.

I shiver in my fleece jacket and puff up the hill. At the top of the hill, I emerge from under the trees, and the sunlight massages my blue-jeaned legs. I cross the street into the next neighborhood. As I walk along the sidewalk past the brick houses, I notice two trees with branches bare of leaves but filled with birds. Redbreasted robins. Spring is sneaking up on us. The sun hovers over the horizon, and its beams slide across the planet to illuminate the breasts of the robins so it looks like the trees are full of gold coins. I am paralyzed with delight and wonder. Suddenly the birds all take wing. I stand on the sidewalk, head tilted up, watching them whirl around like a tornado of feathers above my head. Then I see the cause of the disturbance coasting slowly over the houses at the end of the street. Two hawks with nowhere to go and nothing in particular to do. The robins are spinning en masse—little missiles. As the hawks pass them by, they settle back down.

I decide the marvelous little show is a good omen for the weekend.

 

We go to pick up my mother at the Sanctuary. Edward is twentytwo now, a college graduate getting ready to enter the Navy. My mother looks up at him in wonder. Of all the grandchildren Edward is the one who makes a point of being her grandchild. He's always had this inborn loyalty to the concept of family. He's the only grandchild who came to our father's memorial service. He tried to understand why our father didn't relish the company of his three children, but our bitter answers left him only more baffled.

“So you're my grandson?” Mom asks. She has not seen him in several years, though he has sent cards and letters, including the speech he gave at his college graduation.

“This is David's son,” I tell her.

“David, my brother?”

“No, David your son. He's here too, in the café, washing some fruit for the trip.”