Wait Until Tomorrow (8 page)

As we drive to the ceremony the next day, Hank can speak of nothing but piercing. My daughter sits in the backseat in her new black dress with spaghetti straps, her strappy black shoes with wedged high heels, a slight sheen of gloss on her lips, her thick golden-brown hair gleaming as it falls past her shoulder blades—and he can see nothing but the tiny green dots on her ears.

“What's it going to be next, babe? A tongue stud? How about a nose ring? I know a girl who wore a bone from her dead poodle in her nose. It was quite the conversation piece.” Hank's teasing has a sharp edge to it.

Emmy has never been a prissy girl. She scorned some of her classmates whose lives revolved around shopping and makeup counters. She called them “nail polish girls.” She had never shown any interest in earrings. In fact, I was the one who had insisted that at fourteen, it was time. She had shrugged noncommittally and said, okay. It was only when it looked like it might not happen in time for graduation that she had finally pleaded, “Can we please go get my ears pierced today?”

We pull up to the country club for the graduation ceremony. Emmy looks as if she is going to a hanging.

“Will you please tell her that she looks nice?” I hiss to Hank right before we go into the reception room.

“What?” He's clueless. “Oh. You look nice, babe.”

That helps a little, but the day is doomed from the start. She is leaving a school she loves and sixteen close friends. And worst of all, she will not be getting an award.

She smiles through everything—the family portrait, the tedious speeches, the snapshots with happy friends, the hugs and goodbyes. She smiles and smiles and smiles until finally we are in the car on the way home and then she weeps. She weeps like a little girl.

SUMMER 2004

Shortly after Emmy's graduation, I am driving down a busy street in Charlotte when my station wagon, my quintessential “mom” car, makes an awful grinding sound and then shudders to a halt. It only takes a couple of hours for the tow truck to arrive and take me and the Blue Monster, so named by one of Emmy's friends, to the transmission shop, where the experts are baffled.

This is not a happy time for me. My collection of short stories came out recently, and while the reviews were generally favorable, several said the stories were “depressing.” But mostly I am worried about my mother.

Then comes the call. Sandy, my mother's landlord, tells me that my mother is in the hospital for something unspecified. I call the hospital and speak to Mom.

“Do you need me to come get you?” I ask.

“No, it's too much of a bother,” she says. Then she begins to cry.

My car is in the shop, so I find a ride to a car rental place, rent a little white economy car, and drive the five hours to Edenton. When I walk into the hospital room, I find my mother lying in the bed looking like a bewildered child. For a moment it is as if we are strangers.

A nurse comes in, smiles, and busies herself taking my mother's stats. I stare out the window at the flat silver lake on the other side of the parking lot and wonder what's coming next.

The doctors can't find anything seriously wrong with my mother. She's dehydrated, they say, so they pump her full of fluids and the next day she's ready to go home. Before she's released I go over to the church and meet with several of her choir members, hoping to find some way that she can stay in Edenton. They knit their brows. They're concerned, but they aren't her family. I can't expect anyone to take her in and care for her.

“Mom, I think you should come home with me. I've found an assisted-living place near my house,” I tell her.

“No, no. We can't afford it,” she says.

So I leave her with a makeshift care arrangement and drive home feeling as if I have abandoned her on an ice floe.

When I get home, my car is supposedly fixed. I have my summer arts camp job, and for two weeks I forget about my problems as I revel in poetry and playwriting with my brilliant teenage prodigies.

But the car is not fixed, and neither is my mother. Mom is back in the hospital. This time I decide I will not leave without her.

Hank and Emmy are not thrilled. My mother's plaintive cry “Pat!” rings through our house. She needs help getting to the bathroom. She can't get out of the chair. She forgets which door is the closet and which is the bathroom. She throws our busy lives into slow motion. They don't understand. They can't see who she really is. They can't see past the illusion of the body, sheathed in papery
skin. I know that in reality, in my reality, she is an exciting, funloving person with a terrific sense of humor. They, however, see someone who cries and is no fun at all. To them she's like the worrywart fish in
The Cat and the Hat.

One night we decide to watch one of Hank's favorite movies,
Shrek
. I think Hank secretly identifies with the large green ogre, a softhearted grouch. It is not an unreasonable comparison.

We love watching movies together, and we mistakenly assume that my mother will enjoy this family ritual of ours: the popcorn, the pillows piled in front of the TV, the dog nosing his way into the circle. We place Mom in her portable recliner and turn the television up loud enough for her to hear it, and we proceed to enjoy the movie, Hank chuckling at the witty banter between Shrek and Donkey. But we are not even halfway through when my mother grows frantic. She frets and moans and says, “Oh, this is terrible. This is terrible.”

Hank and I look at each other. My lips tighten over my teeth. Emmy is silent.

“What is it, Mom?” I ask. “What's wrong?”

But she can't tell me what's wrong. She can only moan and flail about. Hank and Emmy disperse. I turn off the movie. The night is ruined. (In fact, we never watch that movie again.) My mother doesn't seem to notice. All she knows is that now my attention has turned to her, and there are no distractions.

 

With my helpless mother in the house, I sigh constantly. I have never before understood the emotional significance of the sigh. But now I get it. A sigh is your very spirit crying its quiet distress. A sigh is your futile prayer to whatever gods might overhear it. You understand you are beyond help. There is no answer. So you sigh.

Then my brother David shows up. David is the hero in any narrative. He's the one who goes into a poverty-ridden school where the children are looking forward to a life of gang violence and prison and teaches them to play chess and takes them to the White House and shows them the world and the children grow up and get scholarships to Ivy League schools, and if perchance they still get in trouble, he goes to court and convinces the judge to give them another chance. He's the one who came to find me when I was holed up with another junkie in the Battery and took me back to the drug program in the 1970s. He's the one who will chase down a purse snatcher for twenty blocks until finally the perpetrator throws the purse down in frustration and keeps going.

I wrap my arms around him in relief.

David and I take a tour of an assisted-living place near my house. He agrees that it's a decent enough place. The price is somewhat daunting, but right now Mother has enough savings that we can get her in there and pay for a few months. And at this point we're not able to look much further than that. Perhaps it's a failure of imagination, or that annoying habit I have (as Hank loves to point out) of believing that everything will just work out. “God will take care of it,” Hank says in a mincing voice even though I've never said that (out loud).

Even as he's nearing sixty, David still bears a strong resemblance to the muscular weight lifter he was in high school. He has a newscaster's deep voice and he brings a Spockian logic to problems. After we look at the assisted-living place, we take Mother to an outdoor café near my house. David and I discuss her options: Should Mom go into the assisted-living facility? Should we try a little harder to find someone to stay with her in Edenton?

Mom then puts her hand out and says, “But where will I be sleeping tonight?”

“You'll be at my house, Mom, with us. Just like you have been all week,” I tell her. I don't cry. I don't bang my head on the metal table. I don't rip open my blouse and beat my chest. But I want to.

Later these lapses won't bother me so much. Occasionally, I'll snap at my mother when she says something absurd. Other times I'll just answer the question and move on. Everyone who has had a parent lose his or her mind knows the shock of the first time. Every single one of us thought it would never happen to our parents. Sure, old people in the movies or on TV are ditzy as hell, but not our parents. Then it happens right in front of us. And if it happened to those gods of our childhood, we can no longer deny it will happen to us.
Lord, let me die first
becomes our unspoken prayer.

Emmy is not happy. To her, my mother is a rival. And sometimes I think my mother feels the same way about her. My mother never took to grandmotherhood the way some people do. Don't get me wrong—my mother thinks Emmy is lovely. But she doesn't feel the same way that Hank's parents seem to feel about grandchildren—something to dote on and brag about.

 

My mother is not convinced by our arguments that assisted living is the way to go. She does not want to leave her job, and who can blame her? She wants to go back to her piano, her choir, her pipe organ at the church. She will struggle up the narrow steps every Sunday to the balcony of the church where she will lift her hands and make music happen.

My brother shrugs his shoulders. This is what she wants.

“But it won't work,” I tell him.

“We have to let her try,” he says.

So I pack mother's toilet seat into the trunk and her walker into the backseat of the rental car that David is using to take her home. Hank and Emmy come out onto the porch. They are both
way more cheerful than I am. I hug David goodbye and then hold my mother. Nothing about this feels right. I am helpless to do anything about it. She's as happy to be going home as Hank and Emmy are to see her go.

 

So my mother leaves and I turn my attention to getting Emmy ready for her new school. She is going into the lion's den alone. She will need fashionable clothing, not just the hand-me-downs from the neighborhood teenager who happens to be her size and a couple of years older. It's been a lean summer for me, and Hank with his usual largesse spots her the customary C-note to go shopping for school clothes. Well, I decide, she'll have to figure out a way to impress the kids with something other than her sartorial savoir faire.

“I'm not worried,” she says with a weak smile. The kid is scared shitless. Me, too. And this year I have no one to carpool with. No one else at the school lives in the hinterlands where we live. That means that for the next two and a half years I'll be driving a half hour there and back every single morning during rush hour and twenty minutes there and back every afternoon. That's almost two hours a day in a car. And of course I'll be calling on my fiction writing skills fairly regularly as I make up excuses for why we're late almost every day.

AUGUST 2004

The third time my mother goes into the hospital that summer is, I decide, the last time. No more consulting with brothers. No more trying to patch together a system of care for her. She is eighty-six years old. She is crippled. Her mind is faltering. Her independent life is over.

I feel as if my chest has caved in. I walk around carrying a tray of pain as if it were hors d'oeuvres. No one wants any. A friend asks me why I don't just give myself permission to own the pain. “Go ahead and grieve,” she says. I put that on my “to do” list. But first I have to go and take her away from her old life for good. On top of it all, another hurricane is heading for the North Carolina coast where she lives.

On Monday August 1, 2004, I'm back at the rental car place because, once again, the Blue Monster is in the shop. I'm now on a first-name basis with the manager. He gives me a compact, and I drive to Edenton with a purpose. I am getting her and taking her and as many of her things as I can fit in this little car. I am commandeering her life. In Edenton, they will have parties for her. They will celebrate her. They will make a cake in the shape of a piano. They will print a huge story in the local paper about this gifted woman who came to a small historic village and played the organ for their church services, created a community chorus,
wrote music for them, and taught them to sing like angels. For her it will be like getting to attend her own funeral. It will be sad, but it will not be depressing. She will be the belle of the ball.

While a light steady rain falls, I pack and load, pack and load. She does what I tell her to do like an obedient little girl. When I've finished cramming everything I can get inside the car, she lowers herself into the front seat. I fold up her walker and jam it in the backseat on top of the boxes of books and kitchen items and music manuscripts. I lean over and help her buckle her seat belt. Then I shut the door and run around to the driver's side. Clouds hunker over the Sound. Hurricane Alex is brewing off the coast, and we are leaving it and Edenton behind. The roads are slick. I back into the busy street, put the car in drive, and go. My mother's Edenton life disappears in the mist.