A few hours later, my sister and I took my parents to the facility to look at a two-bedroom unit that had opened up: a man I’ll call Ted had a wife who had moved to the Alzheimer’s unit and he was downsizing to a one-bedroom that had just become available. On the door leading out to the hall was a note Ted had written to his wife asking her please not to leave the apartment, to come and wake him up if he was sleeping or to knock on the door if he was in the bathroom and he would come and help her. At the end of the note was written, I love you.
There was a wonderful view of woods and a stream from all the windows of the place, and Ted told us, “You can watch the salmon spawning.” Ha, ha, we said, but it lifted everyone’s spirits, it seemed, to be in a place where there were a lot of people my parents might be able to make friends with, or at least talk to. In the exercise room, my sister tried one of the machines, and then my dad did, too, and I thought, Hallelujah. In the lobby, I spoke with three women who were hanging around and asked them how the food was there. One offered the hand gesture that means “so-so.” I asked if they liked living there and was met with a much more enthusiastic response. Oh yes, they all said, they really did. I asked one of the women how long she’d been there, and she consulted the ceiling and then allowed as how she wasn’t exactly sure. Nor was another of the three sure how long she’d been there. The third answered exactly how long she’d been there with some measure of pride. Then they all laughed. I thought, Good. My dad will be fine here.
On Sunday, my parents’ house was given over to repair and redecorating. There was a major plumbing problem that my sister’s husband and son labored all day to fix. I gave my dad’s birds’ cage a cleaning like they’d never seen, something that only someone far from home and absent the list of normal obligations would do. Then Vicki and I tore into my parents’ TV room, pulling out furniture and vacuuming up birdseed and feathers, and reversing the placement of the television and the reading machine so that they could hear and see the TV better. We made them come in and try it out and were pleased when they both said, “Oh, sure, this is much better.”
That evening was the Super Bowl. My cousin Chris, who is Lala’s youngest son and who lives with her in her modest house to serve as her caretaker, invited us to watch the game and to have dinner there. So I brought my parents over and we enjoyed Chris’s hospitality: he met us outside and helped walk my parents across the street, then moved the car so that they wouldn’t have to cross the street again on the way out. When we settled ourselves on the sofa and chairs, he offered appetizers of SunChips and slices of cheese neatly laid out on a platter. Beer anyone? Wine? After a little while, we moved to the little dining room for a dinner of beef Stroganoff (“It’s from a box,” Chris said, “but it’s good, isn’t it?”) and corn and salad. For dessert: cheesecake with strawberry sauce. Coffee, anyone? Cream?
At dinner, I was sitting next to Bill, Chris’s brother, who is closest to my age and is the other one of Lala’s children with whom I played when I stayed with them, and I looked at his profile and superimposed upon it was his profile from when he was just a kid. I thought back then that he was the funniest person on the face of the earth. He used to crack me up with his made-up stories about Mrs. Peabody and Mrs. McGillicuddy, and I stood in awe, watching, whenever he lay on his belly to dash off one of his drawings of fighter planes, bullets flying all around it.
When our parents got together at the house where French and Lala used to live, all of us cousins used to pile up on a sofa on the big screened-in front porch and happily punch and tickle each other for what seemed like hours. Inside, on the tiny black-and-white television set, the fights were on, and Hamm’s beer commercials played between rounds: Indian drumming was the background to the song, which went From the land of sky blue waters…There was always a huge bakery box of donuts in the kitchen, and we would take turns doing runs for more, more, more treats.
I sat at the dining room table remembering all this as I looked over at my cousin, and finally I said, “Hey, Bill, isn’t this just like old times?”
“Yeah,” he said, and laughed, and in it was affection but irony, too, for the way that Oh my goodness, things have changed, for the way that so many things have happened to us cousins. Marriages and divorces. Births of children and deaths of children. A suicide. Success in jobs and failure at jobs. A kind of wild optimism that was in all of us that has eroded as it must with the tired realities of life, with the anvil of aging that has fallen on our parents and will fall on us, too, should we live that long.
After dinner, we adjourned to the living room again to watch the game in earnest. My dad had a chair pulled up close to the TV to see the little he could, Lala chatted with her guests because she couldn’t see much of anything, and I watched for a while, but then, failing as usual to understand one single thing about the game, I sat at the dining room table looking at photo albums I’d asked if I might see. A lot of the old photos had been given away, but I found a few of them at the back of one of the albums, and I sat looking at my aunts and uncles as people far younger than I was now. Bill wandered over and looked at the photos with me for a while, then told me to come with him. He led me into his mother’s bedroom to show me a photo hung on the wall, one of Lala that French had carried during the war. “Didn’t she look like Rita Hayworth, though?” Bill said, and I nodded, my heart in my throat, as we stood side by side before that image, staring at it. And then I just looked at Bill and I saw that he knew everything I was feeling because he was feeling it, too. We went back out to the living room and watched the end of the game, and I paid off my debt to my parents: five dollars I’d bet on the team that lost.
* * *
On Monday, we went to the hospital to visit Tish in the ICU. I let my mother go in alone first, and I saw how she bent forward and stroked her sister’s hand and spoke softly, musically, to her. I saw Tish’s legs move; it was as though she was excited to see her sister. I stood out in the hall with Tish’s daughter, Patty, who said, “My mom’s probably going to be mad as hell that we let them put that tube down, but it seemed like the best decision.” It was thought that Tish would come off the vent in a day or so and then start a rehab process that was going to be a bit lengthy but would lead to a complete recovery. Which I reinforced, as instructed, when it was my turn to see Tish. “Hey,” I said, “you know what? You’re only going to have that dang thing in your throat another day or so and then you’ll be on your way to being a chauffeur again.” She looked up at me and it seemed to me she was trying to speak; there was a little movement in her throat, but mostly she just looked up at me with her storm-blue eyes, and I thought about an extremely hot summer day I was staying with her, how it was really too hot to eat and so she made fruit salad for dinner, and when Bob came home and asked what was for dinner and she told him fruit salad, he said, “Fruit salad?!” and put on his hat and left the house. Tish said he was probably going to go out to get a steak at O’Gara’s, so the rest of us sat down and enjoyed her fruit salad with whipped cream quite a bit; everything that woman made in the kitchen was good. I was going to share that memory with Tish, but I figured I’d do it later, when she could laugh and say something irreverent about Bob. So I just said, “Everybody loves you so much.” Then I said I’d see her later and I came back out in the hall and hugged Patty goodbye.
In the car, my mom said she’d told Tish that there was no way they were going to open that new dollar store without her; the sisters’ old dollar store had closed but a new one was opening even closer to my mom’s house, right near the Rainbow grocery store, where Tish took my mom shopping regularly. Every time they went, Tish forbade my mother from buying pinwheel cookies because they were too expensive, but she didn’t mind at all sharing in the winnings of the scratch-away betting card she always convinced my mother to buy.
After the visit to Tish, my mom and I picked up my father and we all went out to see his brother Frank at the nursing home. Sometime
s it’s hard to come up with conversation; Frank’s short-term memory is completely shot, as is his hearing. At one point, I wrote on his communication board, What’s an escape wheel?
In a book I’d read recently, I’d come upon the phrase “the escape wheel of the going train” and knew it referred to parts of a clock but no more than that. Frank used to be a watchmaker, as was my dad, after he retired from the Army; for many years, he and Frank co-owned a jewelry and watch repair shop. When I asked Frank what that term meant, his face lit up and he painstakingly described the gear and its function, and then drew it, to boot. “Ah,” I said, “I understand,” though I did not, not completely. It was not because the explanation was not fine; it was because I have trouble understanding such things, though clearly Frank does not.
Here is what the whole phrase means: the escape wheel is a toothed wheel for regulating a going train to which it is geared, engaging intermittently with the pallets of a pendulum or balance mechanism in such a way as to cause the mechanism to oscillate rhythmically and, in so doing, free the going train for part of each oscillation. The going train is the gear train for moving the hands of the timepiece or giving some other visual indication of the time. Even as I write this, I still don’t understand much beyond the lyricism, the buried poetry of those words. And for the way they seem to somehow serve as metaphor for the situation at hand.
We had brought some Valentine cookies for Frank that my sister had gotten for him—shortbread with pink sugar crystals—and he dove into them with relish. It seemed like he was in a good mood. We left the home feeling pretty happy, and my sister came in to meet us for dinner, which was pizza that Vicki and I volunteered to pick up. She and I relish the time away from our parents, so we can gossip about them, and I always imagine that at such times our parents gossip about Vicki and me. I know my dad thinks we’re interfering too much in his life. Once he waved his hand impatiently at me and said, “Your mother and I have been together for a long time, we love each other, we’ll work this out.” I switched to passive assertive to answer: “Yes. It will be worked out.”
On the Tuesday morning before I left, I sat in the kitchen booth and had breakfast with my parents. About ten minutes after my dad finished his cereal, he said, “What’s to eat around here?” My mother and I looked at each other. She told my father, “You just ate.” “What?” he said, and leaned in closer to hear. “You just ate!” she said, and he shrugged in a way that seemed to say, If you say so. “You had cereal,” she told him, and he said, “Okay.” My mother’s face softened, and she said, “If you’re hungry, I’ll feed you,” and I died one of those little deaths. “No,” he said. “Never mind,” and then I died another one.
I got out the newspaper and the three of us tried to complete that morning’s crossword puzzle. My mom got a few words, I got a few, and my dad got a couple. All together, though, we did poorly. If I were to give us a grade, it would be a D. After about fifteen minutes, I pushed the newspaper away, saying, “This is too hard,” and my parents kind of looked at each other and I imagined they were thinking, You want to know about “too hard”? and I loved that they had that moment of sharing something together. I loved that I was excluded from it, that it was theirs alone, that they were aligned on that side of the table, together.
When I got to the airport, I sat in a chair and checked my phone for emails. There weren’t any. But I kept checking and checking, wanting to be back at home before I got there.
* * *
On Wednesday, my mother left another message on my phone, and she sounded very pleased: Well, good news. She’s off the vent, and the first thing Tish said when Patty visited was “They took it out.” They moved her out of ICU and down to the medical floor. Oh, and there was a Valentine’s Day party at Frank’s nursing home, and they elected a king and a queen. Frank is king. When I checked my email later, I saw that Vicki had sent me a photo of Frank in his regalia. There he was, sitting in his wheelchair, a blue blanket pulled up high over him, wearing his royal crown and his royal robe. Vicki told me he didn’t really seem to know what was going on, but then neither did the queen. In the picture, Frank was smiling; he seemed happy. The crown was actually a very nice one, and it sat high and straight upon his head. The red robe with the white fur collar lay smoothly on his shoulders, and in his hand was a kind of scepter: a red velvet rose. Long-stemmed. Beautiful, in spite of itself.
* * *
On Thursday evening, I was making Thai lettuce wraps for dinner. There’s a lot of vegetables in them, and I like chopping to music, so I had the stereo turned up loud: Duffy’s new CD. I was in a bit of a hurry because Bill was due home in about twenty minutes and I was far from finished. So when the phone rang, I answered it impatiently. I heard my mother’s voice saying my name and it was very soft and tremulous.
“Mom?” I said.
“Sad news,” she said, weeping. “Tish is dying.”
“What?” I said. “What?”
“She’s back up in ICU on the ventilator again. They’re just keeping her on it until we can get there to say goodbye.”
“But what happened?” I asked, and my mother told me as much as she knew, which was that Tish started having some sort of breathing problem, and…and…She said she couldn’t talk more; she had to go. “Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry,” I said, and she said she’d call me later.
I stood frozen in the kitchen, the knife in my hand. Then I started crying, and then I went back to chopping. When Bill came in the door, he called my name and I said, “Yes?” and he said, “Are you okay?” and I said no and I told him what happened and I kept on crying and chopping, crying and chopping. He asked, gently, if I wanted to not make dinner and I said no, we would eat. And then, I said, in the morning I was going back to Minnesota. I would drive and I would take my new puppy, Gabby, because I didn’t know when the funeral would be and I thought it was most important that I be there now before the funeral. I kept wondering how my dad would react, if he could give my mother room for what was going to be a profound grief, if he could comfort her. I felt someone needed to be there. “Yes, okay, I’ll take care of things here,” Bill said. I ate dinner. I packed. I called my mother and told her I was coming. She had been at the hospital to say goodbye. She said she had sung her sister a song. “What did you sing?” I asked. “Well,” she said, “I sang, Hush, little baby, don’t you cry. That’s what I sang to Becky when she died.” Becky was my mother’s youngest sister, the first of five sisters who died, a number of years ago. When Becky knew she wasn’t going to make it, she said, “Well, I didn’t think I’d be the last to die, necessarily, but I sure didn’t think I’d be the first.”
Tish had no opportunity to make any such pronouncements, of course, because her death was such a surprise. A puzzlement. A black event that had all of us saying the word that is a reflex in such situations: “What?” After my mother told me about how she sang goodbye to Tish, she said, “Ah, me. Another chapter closed.”
I told my mother again how very sorry I was, and that I’d see her tomorrow. She expressed some worry about my driving alone and I said it would be no problem, there was no weather to worry about between here and there. In truth, I had no idea about this. But I thought if I ran into anything, I’d figure out what to do then. Sit in a Motel 6 and watch out the window for things to change. Whatever.
I went to bed and I lay in the darkness, thinking about how grief is the most private of negotiations between longing and reconciliation. It’s awful what you have to give up for the sake of equilibrium, i.e., the hope that the person who has left you will somehow return. In the morning, I hit the P icon on my car’s GPS that stands for Parents and I started driving. It’s a seven-hour trip. Most of the way, I kept the radio off. I let my soul attend to its repair while I watched the land go by. I saw things that were so beautiful: long stretches of cirrus clouds; rolling hills; tall pines rising up out of many feet of snow, evergreen.
&n
bsp; * * *
When I pulled into my parents’ driveway, I saw that my sister and brother-in-law and parents were squeezed into the booth next to the kitchen window. Such a familiar sight, the top of my parents’ heads as they sat there. I looked at what I could see of my mother’s face: from where I was, she looked okay. When I came in, the smell of garlic was thick in the air: my sister had made shrimp scampi, which my mother loves. “Do you want some?” my sister asked. And I said no. I ate pasta, plain, with butter, and it was not so good because the pasta had grown cold. I used a different salad dressing than the one my sister had put out. I ate my dinner, thinking, Why am I doing this? Why am I refusing offerings of food that I like? And I realized it was because I was mad that Tish had died, and by God, I was going to take it out on something.
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