Women Drinking Benedictine (23 page)

“For God's sake, Denny.” I went over and grabbed the bike. “Be careful.” I dragged it back and held it out to him.

“I need your help.” Denny sat on the ice, not making a move to get up.

“No way,” I said. “It's too cold to be out here.”

“Please, Caroline,” Denny said. “Pedal the bike for me.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What good is it going to do if I take the bike to Grand Isle? Where are you going to be?”

“You can ride me,” Denny said. “I'll go here.” Denny stood up quickly and moved to the front of the bike. He stretched his arms out behind him and threw his leg over the front tire. He boosted himself up and sat on the handlebars. The bike shifted, and I had to lean forward to hold him up.

“Do it, Caroline. Please. I can't do it by myself.”

“You don't need me,” I said.

“I do,” Denny said. “I really need your help.”

“Do you mean it?” I put one foot on the other side of the bike. My feet could easily reach the pedals.

“Of course I do,” Denny said. “Remember this morning in the bar when I told you I was going to find those women? Well, that's what I'm trying to do now. That's all I want to do now. I just want to find my women.”

The wind picked up and started moving across the open bay, making it hard to hear what Denny was saying. He had worked up a sweat carrying the bike to the lake, and his hair was wet. He licked the sweat off his upper lip and stood there, just looking at me and waiting to see what I would say, and I decided I might as well help him.

“This is crazy,” I said.

Denny let out a yell and we started up slowly. He wasn't very heavy, but the ice underneath the thin layer of snow was slippery and it was hard to keep both of us steady. I couldn't keep the bike balanced when I was sitting, so I stood, keeping the dark line of pine trees and the red blur of the lighthouse in clear sight, and I pedaled Denny all the way to Grand Isle to find his women.

 

T
HE FAMILY BLAMED ME WHEN MY
mother tried to kayak over Tahquamenon Falls last spring. It was a stupid and dangerous stunt, and they thought that I had somehow encouraged her to attempt the fifty-foot drop. The waterfall, the second largest east of the Mississippi, is in Michigan's Upper Peninsula outside a town called Paradise. My mother knew the area from books she read about Michigan rivers and campgrounds and was well aware that, at maximum flow, fifty thousand gallons of the Tahquamenon River roar over the precipice every second. It was only the first day of April, but the temperature was close to fifty degrees when she unloaded her plaid-bottomed kayak and put off just above the tongue of the river. The root-beer-colored water, overflowing and cold, tumbled onto land as it made its way out to Whitefish Bay in Lake Superior, and my sisters, Nina and Megan, were convinced that I had helped plan my mother's so-called suicide run.

“You might just as well have given her a bottle of Elavil or locked her in the garage with the car running,” Megan said to me over the phone after the police had called to inform her of the “accident.”

I told her I was in a hospital and couldn't hear her.

“Tied the noose around her neck,” Megan yelled. “Put her head in the oven and held it there.”

“You don't know what you're talking about,” I said.

“Don't I?” Megan shouted. I held the phone away from my ear as if to solicit complaints, but the hospital was empty of people that afternoon.

“No. You really don't,” I said, then hesitated, since there was no sense denying that I had spent the last few days vacationing with my mother in the Upper Peninsula. We had left Detroit early Wednesday morning full of plans for a spring camping trip. My mother insisted on bringing her kayak even though a late March storm had recently dumped ten inches of snow over the entire state. This was nothing unusual—no reason to panic. My mother had been taking her kayak with her ever since those first lessons in the pool at Schoolcraft Community College two years ago. Since then she had conquered local rivers, even won a trophy for her Indian rollovers in rapid water. We had tied the awkwardly shaped kayak to the roof and had driven slowly in traffic around Detroit. The highway cleared as we got farther north, and we would have forgotten all about the kayak except for the bow, which hung over the windshield casting elongated, almost animal-like shadows on the road in front of us.

“You helped her plan this, and then you sat back and watched her do it.” Megan was starting to repeat herself. “We're talking about the woman who gave you life, the woman who brought you into the world.”

“Don't be so dramatic, Megan.” I could see my mother's room from where I stood. She was asleep. They had not sedated her. She was simply exhausted. The nurse had already assured me that her concussion was minor, and except for a few signs of frostbite near both big toes, she was fine.

“The police told me that no one has ever made it over the Falls.” Megan was at work. She's an environmental engineer for General Motors in suburban Detroit. She sometimes wears a hard hat and drives a golf cart when she goes out to new sites. The plant was loud, and Megan often comes home hoarse from shouting over the roar of machinery. Things were quiet on her end of the line that day, but she was furious with me, so she was yelling.

“They said no one tries it,” I said. “It's illegal,” I said. “There are signs everywhere warning you that you'll be arrested if you try it.”

“So what was wrong with Mom? Couldn't she see the signs?”

“That's why she did it,” I explained. “Because she knew it was illegal. She wanted to be the first.” A siren started up outside. I twisted the phone cord in my fingers and pulled the receiver to the window. A few seconds later the noise subsided. Perhaps a false alarm.

“They would have found her body out in Lake Superior,” Megan said. Her voice caught and I could tell she was crying. I told her I was sorry.

“There are just so many times when I can't believe that you're my sister,” Megan said.

“Yes,” I said. “I know.” Megan and I are only a year apart, but we have never been as close as we pretend to be.

A few minutes later we hung up. Megan and my younger sister, Nina, were leaving as soon as they could. I had lost my wallet months before and had never bothered to replace anything. Since I had no I.D., the police wouldn't believe I was related to my mother. They didn't think she was quite right in the head and wanted someone from the family to be with her.

My mother was still in shock when the DNR guys dragged her from the river. I think she rolled over on purpose just as their motorboat approached the kayak. She would never have allowed them to tow her in to shore with that odd-colored rope they threw her. She must have hit her head on a rock, maybe on the bottom of the kayak, but she quit fighting and they pulled her to the far shore. The thick-planked cedar footbridge was wet with the turbulent spring waters, and it took me some time to cross over. I knew they could see me. The Day-Glo colors of my wind-breaker were visible within at least a three-mile radius—probably more in the thin, gray branches of the new Michigan spring.

Instead of taking her to the local hospital, they transported her across the Mackinac Bridge to Petosky. I think they thought she was really crazy and wanted her to be as close to home as possible. Since I had no license, the police made me leave my car in the parking lot and ride downstate in the ambulance.

“Why not?” I asked when the driver refused to let me sit with my mother.

“You might do something stupid,” he told me. “I can't keep an eye on you both.” The guy held the steering wheel tightly, as if his grip was keeping us on the road.

“I'm not going to do anything,” I promised. “I just want to sit back there so she won't be alone.” I didn't want her to be frightened if she came out of shock while we were still in the ambulance.

“She doesn't seem to be the kind of person who scares easily,” he told me. “They caught her trying to kayak over the falls. Even the Indians got out and walked around when they heard the sound of rushing water.”

I stared out the window at the rainclouds the spring winds were moving in. The storm caught us as we were crossing the Mackinac Bridge. White lightning darted over Lake Michigan while the sky above Lake Huron stayed bright with the disappearing sun.

And though I wanted to believe that my mother would be scared if she woke up in the back of an ambulance, I knew the driver was right. My mother was not this kind of person. I don't know when or why she lost her fears. I don't think it happened all at once. Maybe she watched too much television. She spent so many nights alone in that four-bedroom house in suburban Detroit. After my sisters and I went off to college, my father continued to travel on business during the week and left her alone. The darkness and silence of those empty rooms made her turn to the television for company. She hated sitcoms, and made-for-television-movies bored her. The endings were too predictable, she said, the people too beautiful. One night, flipping through the channels on the remote control, she found the twenty-four-hour sports channel and started watching the Pistons. A hometown team: She got hooked. She loved the emotions of the players, their excitement on the court and in the locker room during the postgame interviews. She was impressed by the players' tears and gratitude as night after night they thanked their mothers, their coaches, their wives, their gods. At first I thought she felt maternal about these young guys, but gradually I came to understand that she didn't want to be their mothers—she wanted to be one of them.

“Your mother likes sports,” my father told me a few months before he died. He was in Beaumont Hospital, three days out of intensive care, and these were not the kinds of things I wanted him to concentrate on. The painkillers made him spacey, and he had to struggle to put together a complete sentence.

“I certainly hope they have a good season,” he said.

“Excuse me?” I asked. The hospital room was warm. I was wearing my winter coat, and my skin, underneath the thick wool, was prickly and uncomfortable. But there was no place to put it except on the bed, which seemed rude, so I kept it on.

“The Pistons,” my father said. “For your mother's sake, I hope the Pistons have a good year.”

“Really?” I asked and stared out the window at the skeleton structure of the new hospital wing. The construction workers had finished the top floor. The undecorated Christmas tree stood at the very edge of the building.

“Yes,” my father nodded. “I want her to be happy.” He did not say after he was dead and I'm not sure that that's what he meant, but I nodded to show him I understood and then he asked me to go to the gift shop and find something for him to read. He was bored, and it was obvious to the family—and probably to the doctors and nurses—that my father saw his days in the hospital not as a time of recuperation but as a time of vacation. He saw them as days when he could catch up on his reading and take long afternoon naps whenever he pleased. He was ignoring his illness just as he had always ignored his health.

This was my father's second heart attack. The doctor had already warned the family that he was not a cat—he could not have another heart attack and live. I wanted to talk to him about the family, to talk about my mother, about what he thought she should do if he died. There was the house, the two cars, the property up north, all those bills, but when I came back upstairs with a bagful of paperbacks—some thrillers, which he hated, some mysteries, which he had probably already read—he started in again about my mother and the Pistons.

“You should ask her about the team. Percentage shots, rebounding records, previous teams. She knows all those kinds of things.” He sat up and sorted through the stack of books, obviously unhappy with my choices.

“What if I don't care?” I asked. “What if I just don't care about basketball?”

“We're not talking about you,” he said and handed me back half the stack. “This is about your mother. Not about you.” His hair was almost all gray that afternoon. I remembered he once told me he wanted me to remember him as a younger man, but now even after I look at photographs of him, I can't remember him without the gray streaks in his hair. “Ask her about the postseason games last year. She watched every game.”

I was not living in Detroit at the time and had no idea how important the Pistons or their season would become for my mother. I did not know then that my father would come home from the hospital seemingly healthy, with plans for a new diet and exercise program, only to die in his sleep one night. My mother was right beside him and didn't realize he was dead until she reached across the bed to turn him over. She thought she heard him snoring, but it was morning and he was gone. That spring we were all glad that my mother was interested in basketball. The Pistons kept her occupied and gave us something else to talk about. We thought she'd gradually come to accept my father's death, and there seemed nothing wrong with her obsession with basketball. And that June when the Pistons lost to the Lakers in the seventh game overtime, Isaiah Thomas limping down the court with a swollen ankle, the buzzer sounding way too early, my sisters and I cried with her.

My mother and I hadn't slept much during our camping trip. The nights were cold, and our sleeping bags got soaked with the early dew long before we were ready to get up.

I went into her hospital room and stretched out in the chair beside her bed, anxious for a few hours' sleep. I wanted to be alert when Nina and Megan arrived.

A nurse shook me awake just as I was drifting off.

“That's my mother,” I said, hoping she would close the blinds and leave me alone. There was no sun, but the gray light made me cold. I was still wearing the clothes from that morning, and I was chilled. The nurse explained that it was nap time for the hospital—all visitors were to leave. I didn't think I would be disturbing this activity, but she refused my request to stay.