Ordinary Life: Stories

by Elizabeth Berg

  He sat at his desk and spun his globe around. “But all I meant is that she’s changed,” he said. “That’s true, isn’t it?”

  They are going out for the evening to someplace very special. My father wears a suit and looks proper but boring. My mother, though, wears her white formal that lives in a zippered plastic bag in her closet. It has what I believe are diamonds all across the bodice. I have spent much time standing in my mothers closet so that I may be close to such a wondrous thing. Once, I unzipped the bag to rub my hand against the diamonds.

  My mother comes down our long staircase with the dress floating around her as though it is alive, and with her hair in a French twist. She is wearing rouge tonight. I stare at her, my mouth dry with admiration. I want to tell her how wonderful she looks. “Here comes the bride,” I say. She touches my cheek, and I smell her perfume. “Thank you,” she says. Her voice is so gay, so full of life. At parties she is always in some large group of people, making them laugh, making them like her. When I am introduced to my mother’s friends, they tell me they hope I’ll be just like her. I stare up at them while I shake their big adult hands, muted by my fervent longing—can’t they see?—to do just that.

  Joey took three bags and my mother told him how strong he was. He shrugged. “They’re light.”

  Inside, while I unpacked the bags, my mother and Joey sat at the kitchen table together. “You look pretty good, Gram,” Joey said. “How’ve you been?”

  “Well, I’ve been just fine,” she told him. “Of course, I can’t do what I used to do.”

  He looked down at the table. “No.”

  “But I get along. I’m here for dinner,” she added.

  “Oh yeah? That’s nice.”

  My mother opened her purse and took out a tube of lipstick. She pursed her lips and applied it slowly It was wildly off the mark. Then, staring straight ahead, she began to sing and to keep time by slapping the table gently with the palm of her hand. I saw Joey shift his weight uncomfortably on his chair. “Well,” he said, “I’ve got a lot of homework.” He was begging me, in his way.

  “Go ahead up to your room,” I told him. “We’ll see you at dinner.”

  Joey is three, and having a tantrum. He doesn’t want to leave my mother’s house. “No!” he screams. “I want to stay here! I love Grandma!” I pull him outside with me, while he protests with wails that escalate in direct proportion to his distance from her side. “You can come back, Joey,” I hear my mother say “I’m not going anywhere!”

  My husband came through the door into the kitchen and saw my mother. “Oh—Peg!” He put down his briefcase to hug her. “How are you?”

  “I came for dinner.”

  “Uh-huh. Good. I haven’t seen you for a while.”

  My mother chewed her lip. “Oh?”

  Jim paused. “Well, I mean, what’s it been? Couple weeks or so?”

  She looked bewildered. “Well, I just don’t know.”

  Jim put his hand on her shoulder. “It doesn’t matter—I’m just happy to see you.” He turned to me. “Want me to start the grill?”

  I nodded yes. I thought she was worse. Every time I saw her, I thought she was worse.

  We ate in silence, for the most part. Joey showed my mother his report card at my request, and seemed happy when she said, “Why, Joey! This is excellent! I believe you’re even smarter than your mother was!” But then during the course of the meal she asked three times what the salad was. I can’t stand this, I thought, as I cut my steak into unnecessarily small pieces. I thought of Jim’s suggestion to put her into a home of some kind. “There are some good ones,” he’d said. “I think we can afford it. But I just don’t think it would work if she lived here. I mean, do you?”

  I am nine, swinging from the clothesline pole, kicking my legs to make myself higher and higher. Suddenly, I slip off and land flat on my back on the concrete below. I stand up and realize that I cannot breathe. I am terrified, and run into the house. My mother is on the telephone, but she says, quickly, “I’ll call you back,” and hangs up. I run into her arms, thinking myself a baby but thinking also that I am dying. And then my breathing comes back. I take in huge gulps of air and sob, “I thought I was dying! I couldn’t breathe!”

  My mother pulls me down onto her lap. “I am too old to do this,” I say into her shoulder, humiliated but comforted.

  She hugs me tightly. “You will never be too old for this,” she tells me. “Don’t you know that I will always take care of you?”

  After dinner, I took my mother into the guest room. “I forgot a nightgown,” she said. I told her she could use one of mine. I gave her towels, some she had given me. “Aren’t these nice—wherever did you find such pretty towels?” she asked, and I thought she could be teasing me. And she was. “Don’t I have good taste?” she asked, and smiled.

  We talked in the living room after we’d both changed. “Mom,” I began, in what I hoped was a very reasonable tone of voice. “It’s hard to live alone, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be nice for you not to have to worry about making your own meals or doing your own cleaning? There are residential communities, you know, that aren’t really nursing homes.”

  She looked down. “I would like to stay in my own house.”

  I sighed, angry. “Look, I know you would. But it’s just not safe anymore, Mom. You had a slipper on top of your stove, right next to a burner!”

  She frowned at me. “I did not.”

  It wasn’t going to work to try to talk her into anything. When she was diagnosed, I was given power of attorney. Now was the time for me to be her caretaker. I changed the subject. “What have you been reading?” I asked her, and she stared at me, silent. “Mom?”

  “Oh, I don’t read,” she said. “Never have.”

  I am fresh out of the bathtub, dressed in clean cotton pajamas and a red chenille robe with big silver buttons that I believe to be quite sophisticated. My mother has combed out my hair, a gruesome ordeal for both of us, and my reward for not complaining is my clown book. My mother puts on her reading voice and though we have heard the book one hundred times, we enjoy it again, both of us. At the end, a clown pops up. I admire most about him his extraordinary red hair. I fold him carefully back inside, and then put the book back in its special place, the far right-hand side of the lowest shelf on the bookcase. I whisper good night to it arid gently caress its deteriorating spine. I love my books passionately, as does my mother. She reads in her bed every night following a certain protocol: She props herself up on two pillows. Then, while she reads at an astonishingly rapid rate, she slowly eats one piece of fruit and one candy bar, believing that one makes up for the other. She usually picks apples as the fruit, and a Mars or Heath bar for the candy. I believe that these candy bars are for adults only, and I aspire to someday being able to lie in my own adult bed with my own adult books and eat them. My mother never reads just one book at a time—my father complains about books all over the nightstands. They have fallen on him in the middle of the night. Sometimes they have replaced him. Often, my mother stays up much too late reading, and then she is tired in the morning when she makes my breakfast. “I just couldn’t stop,” she tells me.

  “I’m going to bed, Mom,” I told her. “I’ll see you in the morning.” When Jim climbed into bed beside me he said, “It’s so sad. I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe she should live here.”

  I stared out the window. “I don’t know. I don’t know! I mean, think of how it would be. She’s getting worse all the time. Last week her car was parked in the middle of the street with the keys still in it. And remember how I told you about how her pot holders were scorched? Today she had a slipper on top of her stove! What if she starts a fire?” Jim reached for my hand. I sighed. “Sometimes I think about all these floating spirits in heaven, like new recruits. They’re deciding whether to come to earth and be human. As the last part of their orientation, they get to look down and see life in progress, see how it’ll go. And they really see it—the dis
eases, the accidents, the utter arbitrariness of it all, and then the inevitability of death. Oh, it’s awful, when you think about it, isn’t it? Still, I think that seeing that, all those spirits would want to come anyway.” I paused for a moment, and then added, “And I would, too.”

  Jim said, “I would say, ‘What? You mean, that’s how it is? You just go slogging through life only to die?’ ”

  “So you’d pass, huh?” I asked him.

  “Hell, no,” he said. “I’d probably push to be first in line.” Then he reached for me in tender hopelessness and I stared over his shoulder and said, “I don’t understand anything.”

  “Nobody does.” He held me tighter.

  I had been asleep for a while when I heard a loud noise coming from downstairs. It took a while for it to register that it was the front door slamming. I ran to the window and saw my mother outside in her slip, walking purposefully down the sidewalk. I put on my robe and went after her. She startled when she heard me call her. “Oh, you scared me!” She laughed.

  “Mom,” I began, out of breath. “Mom.” I couldn’t think of anything to say. I began to cry.

  “Why, darling, what’s the matter?” she asked, and suddenly I wanted only for her to be my mother again. I wanted to tell her what the matter was, and I wanted her to fix it. Instead, I said, “Let’s go in the backyard.”

  We sat in two lawn chairs, facing each other. The night was warm, beautiful. I showed my mother the full moon, and she smiled appreciatively and lifted her face up to it. Then I said, “I love you, Mom, and I want to keep you safe. You can’t live by yourself anymore, so we’ll find you a place where you won’t be alone. I’ll do everything I can to help make you happy there.”

  She was still, listening to me. “I know this is difficult,” she said. And then, softly, “I know I’m ill.”

  “Do you, Mom?”

  “Oh yes, I know. Sometimes I forget—do you know?”

  “I know, Mom. It’s part of the disease.”

  “It’s Alzheimer’s disease.”

  “Right.”

  “And where is Joey? And Jim?”

  “They’re asleep, Mom.”

  “Oh, are they?”

  “Yes, it’s—well, it’s late.”

  “Oh. I wondered.” She turned to me then, and her eyes were not clouded or confused, and she looked glorious in her slip. “Well, you know I love you too, of course,” she said. I nodded, two parallel lines along my throat aching. “And I trust you. I’ll go where you say.” She looked around the yard. “Such lovely flowers,” she said. “I wish they would last forever.”

  Her voice seemed so small in the pale darkness of the night, against the infinite number and complicated history of the stars in the sky above us. I moved closer and put my arm around her, as though I could protect her. As though I could save us both.

  Sweet Refuge

  When I was a visiting nurse, I got a reputation for liking the hard patients. So when a case came up involving a man with cancer of the pancreas who was “difficult to manage,” he was assigned to me. He was being sent home from the hospital to die, and he needed someone to do dressing changes on his chest catheter, to help him with his morphine pump, and to provide emotional support. He was extremely angry, they said. Mean. Did I want him? And I said yes, because an immediate alliance had been struck between that patient and me as soon as they told me he was angry: he was thirty-one years old.

  I went to the hospital to meet Richard the next day. One of the floor nurses led me to his room, talking in a low voice about how I could expect very little in the way of cooperation. “Sometimes he simply refuses to speak,” she said. “Don’t be surprised.”

  We entered his room as he was emerging from the bathroom. A haze of marijuana smoke hung suspended in the air behind him. “Oh yes,” the nurse told me quietly. “He also smokes a lot of dope.” She spoke up then, told Richard, “This is Abby. She’ll be seeing you at home.”

  I smiled, held out my hand. “Abby Epstein,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

  He didn’t take my hand. He walked over to his bed, sat on it, and stared out the window. He was heartbreakingly thin, but still quite handsome, a light-skinned black man with wire-rimmed glasses.

  “I’ll just leave the two of you alone to get acquainted,” the nurse said. She rolled her eyes at me, then left the room.

  I moved over to stand in front of Richard, cleared my throat. “I just wanted to say hello, and to tell you that I’ll be coming to see you every day.”

  Nothing.

  “I wondered if eleven o’clock would be a good time.” He looked up at me, then away. “It could also be ten,” I said. “Or twelve.”

  Nothing.

  I waited. I heard the dripping of the bathroom faucet. The dope smell was still thick in the air. I wondered who sold it to him, what their conversation had been. I’ll give you a discount, man. I mean, you’re checking out, right? I shifted my weight, bent down a little to try to look into his face, but he turned away. “Well, I won’t take any more of your time now,” I said.

  He laughed. “Yeah. I’m pretty busy.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow at eleven.”

  I was almost out the door when I heard him speak again, but I couldn’t quite make it out. “Pardon?”

  He looked me slowly up and down. “Fuck. You.”

  I took in a breath, breathed back out. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Richard.”

  When I was a freshman in college, I worked weekends at a hospital cafeteria. My job was to push a heavy steam cart up to a little kitchen where I’d dish out meals for the patients on that particular unit. The nurses lined up to carry the trays to the patients. At that time, they still wore little white caps, each different from the other, and stud earrings. They wore their hair up off their collars. Their uniforms were white, their stockings were white, their shoes were white, even their watchbands were white. They were always busy, but they were remarkably cheerful. I admired them: their understated makeup, their calmness in the face of ever-impending disaster, their absolute willingness to help. I had gone to school intending to become a teacher, but after watching the nurses for a few weeks, I decided to change my major. “I’m going to go to nursing school,” I told one of the nurses, and she said, “Good. We need you.”

  After I graduated, I got my own white cap with a navy blue stripe. I thought it looked great. I used white bobby pins to anchor it and I wore white pearl studs. I was cheerful, like my mentors. And I worked happily in hospitals until the time my husband picked me up after work one night and complained, again, that I hadn’t come out on time. “I was pushing on someone’s chest,” I said. “I was making his heart pump so he wouldn’t die. It didn’t particularly matter that my shift had ended.”

  My husband stared straight ahead, shifted the car too precisely.

  By the time we could afford two cars, I’d had children and needed to be home more often. So I started working part-time, visiting patients in their homes. As it happened, I liked doing that even more than working in hospitals. Because I saw all of those patients. They weren’t stripped of themselves, sitting alone in a hospital bed with a wrinkled patient gown tied on them. Now they wore their own clothes and sat in their own chairs, surrounded by the things that made them themselves: their newspapers and coffee mugs, their exuberant dogs and various family members, their pictures on the walls. I liked that I could check their temperature while I smelled their dinner cooking, that I heard their phones ringing, saw their gardens blooming. I liked being closer to them. That’s what is best about nursing: you get close to patients, because when people are sick, they don’t bullshit. They are real, and you can be real back. What I understood about myself the day I decided to become a nurse is that there’s nothing I prize more than looking into someone’s eyes and seeing them true. I thought if I were a nurse, I could do that over and over again.

  Richard lived in a brick building with six apartments. It was an old place in fairly good shape, wi
th high, interesting windows and gigantic screened-in porches. I stood outside looking at the place, wondering what he’d thought when he first saw it. Probably he didn’t think, So this is where I’ll die. Probably he thought, This will do for now.

  I rang number five and was surprised to be immediately buzzed in. I was afraid I’d have to get the super, that Richard might refuse to admit me, but when I reached his door, I saw why I’d been let in so promptly—someone else had done it. A red-haired woman, pale and beautiful and wary looking, held out her hand. “I’m Richard’s girlfriend,” she said. “Laura.”

  I shook her hand, told her my name. “Is he up?” I asked.

  She motioned me inside the living room. “Yes, he’s in the bedroom. He’s lying down. You’re going to do his dressing, right?” I nodded. She sat down on the sofa, lit a cigarette. “I was taught how, you know, but he doesn’t like for me to do it.” She exhaled in a straight line, up into the air over her head. There was some anger in it. Then she looked levelly at me. “I thought I’d watch, though, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” I said. “You can help me if you want.”

  “No,” she said. “Richard wouldn’t like it.”

  “I need to do an interview first,” I said. “First-visit stuff—just some routine questions.”

  “He won’t tell you anything.”

  I hesitated, then said, “Well, maybe I’ll just try.”

  She shrugged. “Call me when you’re ready for me.”

  She was wearing a pair of tight blue jeans and a white blouse, knotted at the waist. Her feet were bare, her toenails painted a deep red. She wore large gold hoop earrings and her hair was in a falling-down bun that was lovely. There were violet-colored smudges under her eyes, and I wondered when she’d last slept through the night. When was the last time she’d worried over something at work, over the cost of groceries? What luxury most of us enjoy, complaining about the things we do: long lines, uncomfortable weather, the numbers on the bathroom scale. I couldn’t imagine being Laura, waking up at night to someone you loved and knew was dying. Surely she watched, sometimes, in the moonlight, for the rise and fall of his chest. Surely she rose up on one elbow, full of fear, to look, then fell, relieved and aching, back onto her own pillow. Usually people die at night, late. Three A.M., four-fifteen. They are being polite, I suppose. They mean not to grieve everyone so much.