Wait Until Tomorrow (9 page)

 

Later that day my mother is sitting on the bed of her new “home”—a second-floor room in an assisted-living place called the Oaks. We both suddenly feel sick. I am positive that this is the wrong thing. This has been an awful mistake. My mother smiles stiffly, trying to be brave.

“The carpet is pretty,” she says. But we both hate the place and everything about it. And mostly I hate myself. Should I have moved her in with me, I wonder? But how would I ever get any work done? Would Hank and Emmy leave me if I did? And where would we put the piano? The management here has promised that we can keep the piano in the parlor. Of course it's not the best idea, leaving a Steinway grand out where any senile person could spill Ensure all over the keys, but at least Mom can entertain people, which is what she lives for.

The main reason my mother cannot live in our house with us is that we are not always there. And this is the one thing I know she needs: the company of others, not just her moody daughter and
her daughter's equally moody family. She needs friends, admirers, and co-conspirators. In a little cabinet in my heart where I keep the things that hurt me most is the memory of her telling me that, in her apartment in Edenton, she screamed sometimes at the top of her lungs just to see if anyone would hear her, to see if anyone would come. My mother has friends in Edenton, but her best friend Marion has just been moved to an assisted-living place in Long Island to be near her daughter. And her other friends have lives of their own. And a few (to my continued wonder) seem to have abandoned her altogether.

So I stifle the anguish roiling in my chest.

“I'll come play Scrabble with you every day,” I promise. “I'll take you out places. I won't leave you here all the time.”

She clutches me. I am her lifeline as she was once mine. We will do this together.

“The
Alice in Wonderland
was mine as a child,” I explain to my brothers. “It was a gift from someone.”

They concede the book. We are sitting on the floor of the living room of our mother's apartment in Edenton, divvying up her stuff. We don't have many conflicts except a few minor skirmishes over the books.

“Oh, here's the
Boston School of Cooking
,” Jo says, gently opening the old relic as if it were the original Dead Sea Scrolls. I wouldn't mind having that, but Jo is the cook.

All three of us want the Kierkegaard. I'm sure David already has a copy. He takes the Bertrand Russell instead since it was his to begin with. I don't know why I think I'm going to have some
profound metamorphosis and wake up one morning as an intellectual. Jo gets the Kierkegaard.

I always thought it was a bad idea for Mom not to assign things to each of us, but the division turns out to be fairly easy. We each wind up with the things that mean the most to us or that we need. Jo lays claim to the old table from the days of Lincoln, but he has no room for it so I'll keep it at my house. I have already sequestered the bird-of-paradise plates and that makes up for anything else that I might desire but which they might desire more. In fact, I don't want much when it comes to Mom's things. Stuff feels rather burdensome to me. David takes the beautiful old crystal wine glasses. Jo and I don't drink so that only seems fair. He takes lamps for his New York apartment. Fortunately, the pictures will go to her new place—otherwise there would surely be strong disagreement over who should get the wheelbarrow painting that Andy Griffith gave her. They met when she was the music director at
The Lost Colony
, and his wife even sang in a performance of her requiem. When she admired the picture hanging on his wall, he sent it over to her house the next day.

I take George and Martha, the porcelain figurines that once belonged to Gammie, Skipper's mother, and that my mother somehow played with as a child. It's possible that George and Martha are worth some money, but we'll never know. I would have to be starving before I'd sell them.

We're too engrossed in the dismantling of our mother's Edenton existence to absorb the finality of it. The moment one of us begins to feel it, we close our mouths, lips tight together. Almost everyone at some point, I suppose, realizes they must face a time like this. We know that our parents cannot go on doing whatever it is they do forever. Change must come. We see it happening to the parents of our friends. The inevitable. But when that particular
experience comes your way, it is more wrenching than you felt possible. My mother will never again live on her own, I realize, as I empty the kitchen drawers of her old silverware. She will not play the organ every Sunday as she has for most of the past seventy years. She will not put together shows. She will no longer shelter a choir in her living room on Wednesday nights.

“Her first organ-playing job was at the age of fourteen or maybe thirteen,” I say out loud as I stack piles of music into boxes. But my brothers know this. As I'm packing away her music, I find about ten or so copies of
An American Requiem
in old tattered black folders. Something tells me to keep these scores. Someday maybe we'll get enough money to hire someone to put the requiem in computer format and submit it to a publisher. I'm pretty sure this is the one thing I need to hang onto.

In spite of what we are doing, the fact that my brothers and I are together is a rare and happy enough event that it keeps us from becoming morose. Besides, we are packing and cleaning machines now. The ants abandoning the ant farm after the queen is gone.

We've advertised a yard sale for the next day, and Sandy has offered to help. We're hoping that the furniture will sell. It's going cheap. A few of Mother's acquaintances drop by on Friday while we're in the midst of packing and deciding what to sell, what to keep, what to give away. I mistakenly think they're visiting with us, but really they're nosing around our mother's belongings early, trying to stake their claims. David is irritated with them, but we go ahead and get rid of a few things. One woman wants to buy the little books of Shakespeare plays that are probably a century old. I've lived my whole life knowing those little books were always available if I needed them (although I'd long ago absconded with her tattered copy of
The Collected Works
). Once, I actually performed a reading of the entirety of
Romeo and Juliet
for my mother, using
one of those little books. And she, saintly woman, sat on the living-room couch (this same couch now in need of a new home) and served as my audience. I have no idea if the books are worth anything, but I'm so tired of packing and the truck I've rented hasn't even an inch of space left. So I sadly, regretfully, let them go for a few dollars, knowing I'll never feel good about doing that.

Friday night, we go to the only Italian joint in town. We talk politics and though we are all on the same side, for a moment it gets heated between my two brothers.

“Bush is an idiot,” David says.

“Bush is not an idiot,” Jo says angrily. I don't get it. Jo is definitely no Republican.

“He is, too!” David says and his generally deep voice cracks in righteous indignation.

I have a feeling their anger has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with why we are here, or maybe it's just an eruption from some long-ago childhood battle that happened before I was born. The argument subsides, and we move back into that place where we know and understand each other better than anyone else ever can. I idolized my big brothers when I was a child, and I still hold them in high regard though now I can acknowledge their imperfections, too. And they seem to love me as if I were still the long-haired, laughing little girl they tossed back and forth between them as brawny teenage boys.

We have been with each other through a lifetime of mistakes, miracles, and accolades. We are each other's biggest fans. When I was in prison, I would call David almost every week for my allotted phone call. He told me later that someone, who was supposedly an expert on fucked-up people such as myself, had told him to cut me off. “Once a junkie, always . . .” this genius told him. And what did my brother know? He had never been a drug addict. But
he was always there when I called, willing to talk to me, willing to laugh or be horrified by my observations of prison life, whichever was appropriate.

“You wouldn't believe how many thieves there are in this place,” I once told him without a trace of irony, and he burst out laughing. He also made sure I got the Sunday
New York Times
every week, which was one of the things that probably saved me. It gave me a connection to a world that I could aspire to, a world of educated banter and beautiful clothes, far away from the raucous, simple-minded bullying and poorly made prison uniforms that constituted my life at the time.

For some reason I was not in regular communication with my other brother, Jo, during those years. He was dealing with issues of his own—a divorce, illness, and too much time spent on a barstool before he found AA. But years later when I'd gotten into an unfortunate relationship, he was the one to drive twelve hours to where I lived and handle the hostilities. Whenever he visited, which became fairly frequent in recent years, we would meditate together, I would listen to his poems, and he would read my stories.

My brothers and I have always been united by love and admiration for our mother and bitterness toward our father. Our father is living in Jacksonville Beach, beset by dementia. We rarely see him.

 

The next morning, the vultures arrive. We have one absolutely beautiful vase for which I am asking fifteen dollars. It's probably worth seventy-five. Some white-haired crone tries to bargain me down on the price. But I am tired of haggling, and I refuse. I'll keep the damn thing first. Behind my back she convinces Sandy to let her have it for five dollars. When I realize what has happened,
I want to snatch it out of her hands and smash it to little porcelain bits on the sidewalk. That's how I feel at the end of the day of bargaining away my mother's life.

When the apartment is emptied, we scrub and mop every inch of the place, and then we drive away. Jo takes off in his loaded van with Ralph Nader stickers on the bumper. David takes off in Mother's old Buick, loaded with boxes and lamps. And I drive away in the filled-to-the-brim rental truck. Even the cab is filled with her belongings. How I am going to unload that truck by myself I have no idea. When I get back to Charlotte, I dragoon Emmy into helping me. Hank will have no part of it.

I spend the next day unloading. Emmy and I somehow get Mother's small but very heavy Clavinova onto a hand truck, through the delivery entrance, and into Mother's new room. I hang up the pictures and try to make it look like “home,” but my mother is not home and she knows it. Then we swallow back our tears and play a game of Scrabble.

I'm not placing bets on her lasting much longer. How can she survive without that busy admiring world of hers? The change is cataclysmic.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

Remember thy servant, O Lord.
He was not ready to leave us,
Nor were we ready to see him go.
The dark scissors of death have separated us.
He accepted danger. Its strong and shining thread
Led him from this tangled maze.
Help us, Lord, in thy great wisdom
To accept his acceptance.

Rosalind MacEnulty
An American Requiem

SUMMER 2009

Emmy and I are in Carolina Beach to stay for a night at a rented condo with my niece, Sharen, her husband, son, and mother, Camille, and Camille's husband. Camille is Jo's first wife. I had not spent any significant amount of time with Camille since I'd lived for a year with her and Jo when I was fifteen. Yet I still feel great affection for her.

“Mom's not much of a cook,” Emmy explains to the group as we sit around the glass table noshing on snacks.

“Except for pancakes,” I tell them.

“That's right. She makes great pancakes.”

“And you know who I learned how to make pancakes from?” I ask. Then I nod over at Camille. Camille and I share a glance. She seems pleased that her brief stint as my stand-in mother has left a mark.

Camille knows that I've been taking care of my mom for a while. Her mother lived with them up until about a year ago when they finally moved her to a nursing home; she died there last May.

Later, as we stand on the balcony and watch the Atlantic knit itself upon the shore, Camille says, “It wasn't until my mother died that I realized I had finally relinquished that role—the
daughter role. For years I was constantly tethered, afraid to go anywhere without my cell phone, constantly on the alert for the next emergency.”

She could easily be describing my life.

 

FALL 2004

I go to see my mother every day at the Oaks. I take her out often. My social life, which wasn't too active to begin with, dries up completely. If I'm not taking Emmy to choir or some school function then I am with my mother, playing Scrabble or just driving her somewhere so she can be out.