When we get to the old neighborhood, my dad starts naming all the people who used to live on this block: he remembers the name of virtually every family on both sides of the street. There used to be barns in some backyards, he tells us. His father, a teamster, kept horses in the backyard; chickens, too. There is a FOR SALE sign on the house, a lockbox on the door, and Vicki and I decide to call the realtor to see if there’s any way we can get in. Vicki will explain it’s my dad’s ninetieth, that this is the house he and his brother were born in; maybe she’ll let us in. The realtor tells us she has no time to meet us, but she gives us the code to the lockbox—the house is empty; I suppose she figures there will be minimum risk. Also, she has a heart.
After some arduous manipulation that finally requires lifting Frank’s wheelchair—with him in it—into the house, there the brothers are, in the little kitchen of the house where they were born, my father ninety years ago, my uncle over ninety-five. My father says, “Bill [the oldest brother, long deceased] used to make us dance with the broom in this kitchen. You know, to clean it up.” He wanders into another room off the kitchen and stands there. “Bedroom,” he says, and I can only imagine the memories that must be washing over him: he and his brothers and sister as children, both of his parents alive.
He walks over to stand at the top of the stairs that lead down to the basement. “I fell down these steps once,” he says, peering down as if expecting to see the ghost of his boy self lying there, more chagrined than injured. I move beside him and put one hand on his arm. I say, “Yeah, well, don’t be falling down them again.” He smiles and moves away, wanders in and out of the rooms a few times over. The house has been done over and it’s quite nice now. The kitchen and bathroom have been tastefully modernized; there’s a charming pantry that probably was there when my father lived there, freshly painted in a soft white. The wood floors are exposed and polished, the lighting fixtures are well chosen. There is a cozy Pottery Barn feeling to the place.
“It hasn’t really changed much,” my father says. “No,” Frank says. My sister and I look at each other and smile.
Our next stop is White Castle, per Frank’s request. We seat the brothers at a table and go up to the counter to order. When I turn around, I see that my father’s hand is on his brother’s back. I ask someone to take a picture: to capture the view from behind of those two old men, but by the time a camera is produced, my father has taken his hand away. Still, that image will live on in my brain, the way that even from behind you can see the love between them, the comfort each other’s existence offers.
When we deliver the burgers, my father eats with gusto. Not so Frank, to whom I offer a burger a few times over. Each time, he waves it away with hands malformed by arthritis. But then I try breaking the burger up into pieces, and he eats it immediately. Ditto the onion chips. “Want another burger?” I ask Frank. They’re awfully small—famously small—not for nothing is the advertising slogan “Eat ’em by the bagful!” But, “Oh, no,” Frank says, holding his hand up, as though he’s just polished off a gigantic platter heaped high with food.
As we drive Frank back to the nursing home, I listen as my sister talks to the driver. She thanks him for coming in on a Saturday, his day off, in order to drive the van, and she thanks him, too, for going above and beyond in getting Frank into the house in his wheelchair.
“No problem,” he says. “They’re interesting, those two. I hope when I get old, someone will come and take me out on my birthday.”
Vicki gives him a nice tip, and says she’ll send the realtor a picture she took of Frank and my dad, in the kitchen, smiling.
After we get my dad home, he falls asleep in his chair almost immediately. But we must awaken him soon afterward to go over to Vicki’s, where her husband, Derk, is making smoked ribs and pork chops; where there will be all kinds of side dishes, including my sister’s famous potato salad and my niece’s famous Greek salad, and where we intend to put ninety candles on the carrot cake I baked my dad. “I’m going to need help with that,” I tell Bill. “Everyone will get a quadrant to light, and then we’ll have my dad quick blow the candles out before the fire alarm goes off.”
During the party, my mother sits behind a TV tray and does not say much of anything to anyone. I ask her if she’d like this or that to eat, and she refuses most of it.
When it’s time for cake, four of us light the candles, and even before we are finished, the frosting starts melting. The candles are quickly melting down, too; there is wax all over the cake; you can feel the heat on your face. Never mind: we carry the blazing confection in and my father does a pretty good job blowing out the candles. We all applaud, and I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say that at least a few of us are asking ourselves, Do I want to live to be ninety? I give my father a huge piece of cake, and he eats every bite.
In the car on the way home, my mother is chatting with me when my phone rings. It’s my sister, saying, “Is she talking to you?”
I press my phone tighter to my ear. “Yeah. Uh-huh.”
“Okay, so it’s just me she’s mad at,” Vicki says.
“Why?”
“I have no idea. But she didn’t say a word to me. Usually at these things she comes out in the kitchen to help, she talks to the little kids. But no. She wouldn’t eat. She sat there scowling. She’s probably pissed that he’s getting all the attention.”
But it’s more than that, I think we both feel. It’s that, lately, every day, she finds a way to be negative. And here’s something else I think we both feel: Can’t it just be my dad’s day? It’s his ninetieth birthday. Can’t it just be his day?
* * *
The next morning, I get a call from Vicki. She won’t say so, but I think she’s been crying. She says, “I called Mom to see if you were there, and she was just…I said, ‘What is your problem?’ and she started in again with ‘You people just leave me alone!’ ”
“We should leave her alone,” I say bitterly.
“I’m afraid she’ll take it out on Dad,” Vicki says, and I fear that, too.
“I’ll go over there and talk to her,” I say.
“I’ll come, too.”
“Don’t bother,” I say. “Have a day for yourself.”
“No,” she says, “I’m coming, too.”
On the way to the car, I pick some peonies from my parents’ yard, to give to my mother: Here. Does THIS help?
On the ride over with Bill, I feel myself getting angrier and angrier. My sister has done so much for my mother, for both my parents. Why must my mother make her life harder? Why must she take so much for granted and be so unappreciative?
When we arrive, I find my parents in the kitchen. My father has a plate of waffles before him, and he’s just begun to eat. My mother looks startled, then her face becomes closed, sour-looking. I give her the peonies and she says not much. This is in direct opposition to the woman on the elevator who so admired them; I gave her a couple to put in a bud vase, and you’d think I’d given her the world.
“I think Vicki’s coming over,” I say, and my mother says, “I hope not.” We exchange a few testy words, and my father sits there. Finally he says, “Well, excuse me, but I’m going to eat,” and takes a bite of his waffle.
My mother disappears and then comes back with a list that she shoves into my face. “Here! Here’s my list of what you people think of me!”
I read a list that says we (even my dad!) find her selfish, uncaring, wallowing in self-pity, etc. I read through it, muttering, “Yup, sounds about right.” And then I come to the bottom, where she has written, “I may just end it all if I can find a way.”
I wish I could say that at that point my heart opens and I remind myself of all that she is having to endure. But all that happens is that I become infuriated. I feel as though everything we’ve tried to do for our mother is being ignored. Vicki calls just then, saying she
is there, and I go downstairs to meet her in the lobby, my mother’s list in hand.
“I brought her some chairs she wanted,” Vicki says. “Is she in an awful mood? Because if she is, I’m not going up there.”
“She’s being horrible,” I say. “But I want to show you something.”
We sit in the chairs Vicki brought, and I show her the list. “Well,” Vicki says. And then, again, “Well.” And I can tell that she, too, is angry.
We take the elevator up, and then walk down the hall, fuming. We find Bill sitting with my father in the kitchen, and I give him a look that says, Keep him there. Vicki and I go into the television room, where we find our mother in her own furious state. “I don’t want to talk to you,” she says. And I say, “Well, you’re going to.”
And then I fling her list on a table and tell her that it is totally manipulative. That her behavior yesterday made Vicki feel terrible when Vicki had nothing to feel terrible about. My mother puts her fingers in her ears and, enraged, I pull her arm down and say, “No! You don’t get to do that! You listen!”
Next comes a tirade from me and my sister that I am sure neither of us is proud of, but which, at the moment, anyway, we feel is overdue. We focus on our mother’s constant complaining and criticizing, on her being unwilling to try the smallest things, of her being cruel to my dad. Which she emphatically denies. Which makes us even angrier.
“You purposely don’t talk loud enough for him to hear,” my sister says. “You walk ahead of him all the time. You know he has trouble walking and you won’t slow down. It’s like, La-di-da, look how fast I can walk. You say he shuffles like an old man. He can’t help it!”
“You ignore him when he speaks to you,” I say. “You pretend you don’t hear him, when it’s clear that you do. When he kisses you, you scowl. You think he doesn’t see that? He knows you’re angry at him all the time, and he doesn’t know why!”
My mother says, “Shhhhhh!” and angrily points to the wall: The neighbors!
“I don’t care!” I say, louder.
My mother lowers her voice and, in an attempt at reason, says, “As I have said before, I just wish you two could live here for a week and see what it’s like.”
Here my sister explodes. “I wish you could live my life for a week! I wish you could get up at six every morning to go to work, work overtime almost every night and then every weekend come here! And suicide? You think you’re the only one who thinks of suicide? Everyone thinks of suicide at some point or another! But you know why people don’t do it? Because it’s selfish!”
“I know that!” my mother says. “That’s why I haven’t done it!”
I think about taking my mother up on her offer and living here for a week with my dad. I think, I’d take him to bingo, and to breakfast and to dinner. I’d take him to watch Wii golf and to the men’s group and to meet with the people who get together and talk every evening after dinner. I’d go for a walk with him and he could ride his scooter beside me.
But I know there’s more to it than that. I know there’s a dark and dispiriting side of my father that she has to deal with all the time. She’s eighty-eight years old and not even five feet tall. She just lost her sister and best friend and her house and she’s losing her husband, bit by bit. She’s under terrific strain, and it’s manifesting in this anger: all that frustration and fear and sorrow has to go somewhere. But. She has also always been self-centered and pampered by my father, and now that some of my sister’s and my fury has been unleashed, we can’t seem to stop. It goes on and on, our accusations and recriminations.
Vicki says, “You say about Dad that he ‘was so intelligent.’ He is still intelligent and this”—here her voice breaks—“this is horrible to watch. You just want him out of the way! You want him put into a nursing home so you don’t have to take care of him!”
At this, my mother looks genuinely shocked. “No I don’t!” she says. “I feel sorry for him! I suppose it’s terrible to say this, but I just wish he’d go to sleep and not wake up!” Here she begins to weep loudly, and bows her head nearly to her lap.
It grows quiet. Finally, I say, “That’s not horrible. That’s how I wish he’d die, too. But in the meantime, we have to deal with what’s going on.”
My sister and I tell her what we are trying to do, what we hope to achieve, what we wish my mother would do to help on her end. And finally my mother raises her chin and speaks quietly. “Fine,” she says. “I will try. I will try to do what you say.”
There is no victory here. I think all three of us feel washed up on the shore, saved from drowning but, oh, scraped.
We go back into the kitchen. We’ve been ensconced in the TV room for a good half hour, forty minutes, and Bill now makes a much-needed trip to the bathroom—he was afraid to leave, lest my dad wander into our catfight. On our way back to Chicago, he tells me that my dad and he had a very nice conversation, and my dad was entirely lucid the whole time: no repetitions, no inappropriate remarks. Just a nice conversation.
I tell him about the not-so-nice conversation my sister, mother, and I had, and then I stare out the window, full of guilt. It’s a long drive home.
What is your idea of God? When I was a child, I saw Him, as many do, as a benevolent grandfather: white beard, belted white robe, eyes that see everything, hands that can gentle any wild, cruel thing. Would that God were that way, I thought, driving down the freeway past the rest stops and gas stations, past the mile markers counting down the distance home. Would that God would lay His hand on me and say, “I forgive you.” Because I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive myself. I see myself over and over knocking my mother’s hand down from her plugging her ears, I see that familiar pattern of freckles on her white skin, her watch now loose about her wrist, I see the way that it was two against one, the way I wouldn’t stop yelling, the way I’d lost my ability to be at all objective or empathetic. I thought about how, when the fight was over, she’d have no one to tell about it, because the people she enjoyed that kind of closeness with, had that kind of trust with, are all dead.
Yet sometimes such an awful fight is what it takes to clear the air. To defuse the situation. Or to blow it up so that you can put things back together again in a different way. Sometimes things get dire, and there are no easy solutions. I’ve heard about Hopi Indians who pray for rain by having priests run from a high mesa to the plains while grasping a handful of snakes. Sometimes, it seems, it works.
* * *
I call my mother from home the next day, and she is subdued. “I’m sending him downstairs to mail a letter now,” she says. I hear her tell my dad, “The slot over by the letter boxes. If you don’t see it, ask somebody, they’ll help you.” And then, “Maybe you’ll run into someone to talk to!”
We both laugh a little, my mother and I, and the sound loosens the belt a notch.
She tells me that she’s making some changes. She says she waited on my father all her life and that it would be good for him to do some things for himself.
“Right!” I say. It’s true that she waited on him. She did the grocery shopping and made him all his meals, and for years delivered them to him either at the table or, later, to the TV tray as he sat watching television. If his beverage ran low, she refilled it. She performed all the tasks of the housewives of that era, like laundry, which meant washing and then hanging clothes and linens out on the line, even if they were frozen when you brought them in. She did the ironing (including sheets and my father’s boxers and T-shirts). There was not much wash-and-wear then, nor were there steam irons, so you used a soda bottle with a sprinkler top for dampening the clothes, and if you weren’t going to get to the huge pile of ironing in one day, you stored damp clothes in a plastic bag in the refrigerator. Women in those days vacuumed and dusted and scoured the sink and toilet daily. They cleaned the windows and washed and waxed the floors. Regarding the woman who comes in every oth
er week to clean her apartment now, my mother says disdainfully, “Well, she uses a mop on the floors.” Meaning she doesn’t get on her hands and knees, as my mother did. The cleaning woman also doesn’t burn her lungs using ammonia to clean out the oven, as my mother used to do—also on her hands and knees. Doesn’t defrost the refrigerator or pull it out from the wall to dust its coils.
In her day, my mother performed an extra service, too. Growing up in my house, I often heard my father yelling, “Jeanne! Where’d I put my cigarette?!” He was a heavy smoker for many years, one of those guys who lit up immediately upon awakening: he’d sit at the side of the bed to have the first one of the day. Then he’d wander around getting ready for work, smoking the whole time, and oftentimes he’d forget where he’d put his cigarette down, so he’d yell for my mother. His tone was angry, accusatory: it was like it was her fault that he left his Camel on the edge of the dresser, or sink, or in some other completely nonsensical place. And when he yelled “Jeanne!” like that, she would scurry about trying to find his cigarette for him. Most times, she did. I wonder if he ever said, “Thanks, honey,” or, “Sorry I yelled at you that way; I just got scared I’d set something on fire.” I don’t think so. I think he thought her finding his misplaced cigarettes was his due. So, yes, it might be nice for my father, even at this late date, to learn to help himself more.
My mother says, “Last night, he wanted one of those little ice-cream sundaes, you know those little turtle ice-cream sundaes I got at the grocery store? Well, he said he wanted one and I said, ‘Go and get one.’ ”
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