Wait Until Tomorrow (6 page)

Rosalind MacEnulty
An American Requiem

AUTUMN 2003

In 2003, I worry constantly about money. I make my living from a series of freelance writing jobs and teaching the odd composition course as an adjunct at a nearby university. I've had one novel published by an independent publisher in Britain, but Hollywood, for some unfathomable reason, has not yet come calling. I don't have health insurance. Hank pays the mortgage on the house and some of the household bills, but when it comes to my car payments, Emmy's private school and clothes, and any material goods I desire, I need to come up with the bucks.

One Tuesday in mid-September, I'm working on a newsletter for a volunteer organization in Florida when Hank walks into my office and says, “There's a Category Five hurricane heading straight for your mother.”

I wheel around in my chair and stare at him. His eyes widen as if to say, you better do something.

“Shit,” I say.

I call up my mother and tell her I'm coming over to Edenton to get her. She does not protest. Within an hour I am on the highway, hoping I don't get stuck in the storm.

When Hurricane Dora gathered up her skirts and flounced toward Jacksonville back in September 1964, my mother could barely contain her excitement. She bought cans of food, Sterno, and an oil lamp. She taped up windows the way Skipper, the old salt, had taught her. We lived two blocks from the river so we were bound to see some action. That first afternoon when Dora was merely flirting with the city on the river, we went outside with an umbrella to walk Tojo, my old red chow. I laughed hysterically as the wind blew our umbrella inside out. My mother pretended she was Mary Poppins.

My mother loved storms, especially big, terrifying storms. And she taught me to love them. That night when Dora was no longer just toying with us, the wind moaned long and loud outside our windows. The whole world shivered. The rain bucketed our town while I slept happily in my bed. In the morning we went outside to meet the river, which had gotten friendly overnight and decided to visit houses a block away from its banks. We waded down to the new shoreline and saw people in canoes or rowboats where once there had only been cars. Tree limbs had been amputated and cast all about the place.

There was no school and no work, just summer camp in the dining room, cooking pork and beans over a Sterno can and reading stories by candlelight until our power was restored and the subdued river returned to its home.

But my mother is old now, and I have heard too many tales from survivors of Hurricane Andrew to take the storm heading toward Edenton lightly. I must make the five-hour trek to get my mother out of its path.

The rain is falling lightly when I arrive. Sandy, my mother's
landlord and upstairs neighbor, gushes in relief when she sees me. I quickly pack a suitcase for my mother and grab the package of Poise pads from her small bathroom. My mother has never mentioned her incontinence.

Because of the walker, Mother can no longer get out of her apartment through the back door. The back steps are too rickety. She still has a car, an old blue Buick, that she no longer drives. She keeps thinking she'll get hand controls, but that seems like a bad idea. Instead Diane, her part-time caretaker, uses it to go to the store for her a couple of times a week or to take her to doctor's appointments.

I load my mother's things into my station wagon and pull to the front of the driveway. Mother clomps out onto the porch with her walker. She turns the walker sideways when she gets to the steps. With one hand she holds onto the walker and with the other she grasps the rails, and slowly, very slowly, she lowers one foot at a time and that way manages to get down the steps. I help her get into the car, fold up the walker, and shove it in the back. Then we're off with Hurricane Isabel fast on our heels.

 

Prior to my mother's impromptu stay with us, I had established a nice little routine for my life: carpool Emmy and three other girls to school every other morning, take Merlyn for a walk in the park, come home and work on my computer all day, then go get Emmy and the other girls, drive to choir, piano lessons, or dance lessons, come home, make some pasta and cheese and broccoli or spinach for Emmy (every night!), and then help her with her practicing or homework, or carpool to choir practice and back, and then it's (thank you, Jesus!) time for bed.

While I'm on my timetable, Hank usually works in his corner office upstairs with his television on. He found he couldn't hack ironing clothes every morning and so he quit his corporate television
job and now works at home, designing video equipment for a company based in California. Sometimes he sleeps all day and works all night.

Hank's a great cook, and fairly regularly we'll make family taco dinner. He fries up the shells for us—soft for me, medium for Emmy, and hard for him—while I chop vegetables and Emmy grates cheese. He heats refried beans for us, and cooks meat for himself. His guacamole tastes like California with cumin, cilantro, salt, onion, and a bit of chopped tomato. Sometimes Emmy and I will wake up in the morning and find him in the kitchen, eggshells and flour covering the counters.

“Cakes and eggs, babe?” he'll ask Emmy, knowing that nothing would make her happier. I heat up the maple syrup.

On Tuesday nights we all watch the military/courtroom-drama television show,
JAG
, and on weekends we get a movie.
JAG
happens to be one of those right-wing propaganda shows that once actually featured (I kid you not) Iran-Contra henchman Ollie North as a good guy, but I love the female character, Mac, because she's a recovering alcoholic and because she always chooses the wrong guy. Sometimes as I'm pulling out of the driveway on another mission to drive Emmy to some rehearsal or another, I paraphrase the opening of the show: “With the same daring and tenacity her own mother used getting her to ballet class, she fights evil and overcomes all traffic jams to get her daughter to choir practice on time.” Emmy laughs every time.

This is our weird, humdrum little life. It works for us. In fact, we like it.

And now Mother is here like a rhino in the living room.

 

Hank has to go to California for work, which is a relief for me as I can focus more on my mother and less on balancing the interests competing for my attention. She can't get upstairs so I've made a
bed for her in the living room—a box spring and mattress half on the couch and half on the large plastic boxes that Hank uses to ship video cameras back and forth to California. I also place an old speaker by the toilet in the bathroom as a prop so she can push herself off the toilet seat, which is too low for her.

Her presence irritates me like an annoying buzz that only I can hear. We have a local supermarket that emits a high-range squeal audible only to teenagers to keep them from loitering. When my mother is around, I feel like a thirteen-year-old standing outside that store.

It's morning. I've taken Emmy to school and now I'm back home, unloading the dishwasher. I've got a deadline to meet, and Mom sits at the table, wanting to be friendly, to talk. I haven't slept well because my mother has to have the television on all night and she is hard of hearing.

“What kind of tree is that?” my mother asks, looking out the window.

“I don't know,” I reply irritably.

“There are so many different kinds of trees,” she says pointlessly.

This is something I really don't feel like conversing about. In fact, I don't want to converse at all. I want to keep the bubble of my own thoughts around me. This is one of the beauties of my life as it is—mornings when Hank is usually sleeping, Emmy is off at school, and I am virtually alone in the delicious silence of my house.

“I have work to do,” I tell my mother. “Is there anything you need before I go upstairs?”

“No,” she says. “Is something wrong?”

She must wonder why the daughter who has always loved her and enjoyed her company is suddenly taciturn and sullen. I can't give her a proper answer. The truth is that I don't want her here.
My life is full with work, husband, and child. I realize I am being thoughtless, ungrateful, and selfish. What I don't realize quite yet is that I am going to need to make room in my life for her—and it's coming sooner than I think.

So later, after I've gotten some work done, I make an effort to be a better daughter. I play Scrabble with her, and I take her out to lunch (though it's not easy to take her anywhere). I bring her with me to Emmy's choir rehearsals. And that old bond between mother and child starts to knit itself back together.

Then, two weeks after the daring rescue of my mother, Sandy says it's safe for Mom to come back to Edenton. Hank, who has returned from his trip, and Emmy are both happy to see her go. As a child, Emmy was protective of my mother, but she's a teenager now, and this old, needy woman who constantly calls out my name isn't looking like a sweet deal. Emmy has owned me lock, stock, and barrel for all of her thirteen years. The idea of having to share me with someone else is intolerable.

When I drive my mom back to Edenton, we find a war zone with blue tarps over damaged roofs and work crews still trying to get trees out of the roads. My mother's house is undamaged, and the old brick church where she works is fine. Mom is glad to be back, but I have the feeling it's time for me to start anticipating the next stage of her life. I know that she is almost unbearably lonely here. And yet it is her life. Her music. Her job. Her friends. Still, it's not enough.

After my mother leaves, Hank tells me that his sister Beth's cancer has returned after a brief remission.

“It's looking grim,” he says.

“God, your poor parents,” I answer.

“The next few years are going to be bad,” he says. He crosses his arms over his chest and gazes at me as if we are the tsar and tsarina facing the red hordes. We're in for a hard ride.

SPRING 2004

As I begin to realize just how hard things have become for my mother, I try to visit her as often as I can—usually with Emmy but sometimes by myself or with the dog. Ever since her own grandmother (Skipper's mother, Gammie) made her look at a piece of dog fur under a microscope, my mother has never been an animal person. But she has always tolerated my need to have at least one animal in my life. So she never complains when I show up with a big, ungainly beast—a beast that tends to sweep valuable objects off the coffee table with a swipe of his happy tail.

And even though she doesn't love him, Merlyn adores her as he does all women. Fortunately, he doesn't try to mount her. But he does like to put his cold nose on any bare body part he can find, and her shriek of surprise is always good for a laugh.

When I visit, we get her friend Marion to come with us on an outing. Mother admires Marion a great deal for having lived in Europe and been married five times, and for being a flagrant atheist in a southern town of churchgoing Christians who love to pray for people. One of my mother's favorite Edenton moments is when one of the Christians said she was going to pray for someone in poor health and then looked at Marion and said, “And you can just hope.” The town understands and loves Marion.

That spring after the hurricane I go to visit my mother. Sleeping
at her place is traumatic for me. She has to get up several times in the night to go to the bathroom, and the sound of the walker thunking around on the wooden-plank floor jars me awake without fail. Sometimes my mother has nightmares and starts moaning loudly in her sleep. This has happened off and on since I was a child and I always attribute it to the Terrible Night. But still it scares the hell out of me.

This particular night I am sleeping soundly for once on the uncomfortable little rollaway bed, when suddenly a loud incessant singing jolts me awake. What the hell? And it doesn't stop. Loud. Louder. Louder still. Finally, I get up and stagger into her room. There she is, sound asleep, the TV blaring loud enough for people three blocks away to hear it. She has rolled over on the remote control.