“Good!” I say. “And while he’s at it, he can get one for you.”
Silence, while my mother mulls that over. What a notion! And then she says, “He’s back.” I hear her ask my father if ran into anyone to talk to. No.
JUNE 21, 2011
My father has an appointment tomorrow at the adult daycare center to see if they will accept him—and he them. I want to be there, it’s an important day, and so once again I go to Minnesota, only this time I fly. My sister picks me up at the airport and we go out to dinner, where the talk focuses, as usual, on my parents. It reminds me of how my husband and I used to go out to get a break from our little children and then spend the entire time talking about our little children.
Vicki brings me to the assisted living place to spend the night on my parents’ sofa. On the way in, we find a group of people sitting on the benches that flank the wide sidewalk leading into the building. They’re enjoying the mild air, chatting, seemingly enjoying one another’s company. It seems like such a pleasant thing, sitting out on a summer’s eve, chatting with your neighbors. I wish my parents would join them once in a while. But they are ensconced in their apartment, as they are every night. Sitting there with the television blaring, oblivious to anything outside: neighbors talking, the sunset coloring the sky, the birds offering their final songs for the day.
“There are a lot of people sitting outside, talking!” Vicki says. Would you like to join them? I imagine she’s thinking, and that’s what I’m thinking, too. But my mother only mutters, “Well, good for them.”
Oh, boy, here we go, I think. But then I recall a conversation I had with my daughter. She had spoken with my mother and then called me to say, “May I offer just one word of criticism? You have to stop pushing her! She’ll do things when she’s ready!” And when I heard Julie say that, I realized how often I have pushed my mother: calling her to remind her what’s on the schedule that day, urging her to participate in activities in which she has no interest, to make friends with people I pick out for her. So now, when Vicki speaks so enthusiastically of the people sitting outside, I hear it as my mother might: another directive, offered by someone who doesn’t have a clue. I make a vow not to suggest anything for her to do while I’m here.
Before I go to bed, I have a long talk with my mother and try very hard to just listen. She loosens up gradually, and whereas she begins by complaining, she ends by telling me some of the good things she’s been doing, and about the two women she talks to almost daily. Peace.
JUNE 22, 2011
“It’s very nice to meet you, Art,” the social worker at the adult daycare center says, shaking my father’s hand. We’re in her office, after having been greeted at the door of the daycare center by the man called “the official greeter.” He’s a bit overly enthusiastic and wild-eyed, but hey.
It was a little sad at first, walking in: there were men there who were gorked out, there were men who were physically quite incapacitated. I had not wanted my father to be the worst one there, to be fumbling with his memory among a group of men who had no such difficulty. Now I worry that he’ll be the best one there. It’s an uncharitable feeling, I suppose. Mostly, what I’m hoping is that my father will find a friend. I feel like my daughter, who has worries about her children integrating into nursery school.
In the office, we talk about what my father might expect, coming here, and see the schedule, which has some activities daily: current events, exercise, lunch. Other things change daily: musicians come, there are Wii sports. We talk about what the center expects from my dad in return, which isn’t much, really: just show up as often as you can and try to participate. We talk about transportation and fill out forms and decide that we will go over to the Metro Mobility offices to turn in the form today, to see if we can expedite the service. Then, for six dollars a day, a bus will pick my father up and bring him home, too.
My father is friendly and agreeable; he says he’ll try it. I think three of us—my mom, my sister, and I—all heave a sigh of relief. Maybe four, counting the social worker.
After dropping off the Metro Mobility forms, we have lunch at a Mexican restaurant. My mother points to a table over by the wall and says, “That’s where we sat.” I know what she means. Before. Back when they could go out by themselves whenever they felt like it, back when they weren’t so dependent on everyone else, back when they could both read the menus and confusion of any sort was not an issue.
After lunch, we head over to my parents’ house. There are some things my mother wants to salvage from the imminent estate sale, and we figure we’ll set those things aside in an empty bedroom and keep the door closed when the masses come to fight over what my parents will have to part with.
The realtor has given my mother the name of an auctioneer, and I call and ask if he can meet with us. It turns out he’s free at five p.m., so we decide to do some work sorting things for a couple of hours. After that I’ll take my parents home to their apartment, and then come back to the house so Vicki and I can meet with the guy.
On the way up the steps to the backyard, I am behind my father and it’s a good thing I am—he starts to tip backward, and were I not there, he would have fallen. Hard. I think, We got them out in the nick of time. As my father slowly climbs the second set of steps into the house, he pauses on the middle step and looks around at the yard, then into the little sun porch off the kitchen. “It’s a nice house,” he says. “If I were looking, I’d probably buy it again.”
There is a way that someone looks at a thing he has owned and loved, something that he took care of and cherished, that is no longer his. That’s how my father looks at the yard where he fed so many birds and finally surrendered to the squirrels, feeding them, too. That’s how he regards the sun porch, where he sat listening to baseball games on the radio, and eating summer dinners: barbeque chicken and corn on the cob, fat slices of tomatoes that he grew himself. Pesto made from the basil he also grew. That look he gives the house is sweeping and slow, full of gratitude and sorrow. I don’t think I ever really saw that look before, the way I see it now. See it and feel it myself, in my own small way.
My dad steps into the kitchen and, arms trembling, lowers himself into the booth. He knows he’s not capable of helping us up in the attic, so he sits and stares patiently ahead, and waits. I think memory movies must be running in his head, and I leave him to his private ruminations.
I check on him a couple of times, and one time when I come down, he’s gone. I find him in the front yard, his hands on his hips, inspecting a face he made years ago on a tall tree: plastic eyes, a nose and a mouth. I think he might have put it there for the entertainment of the neighborhood kids, or maybe as a gently ironic lawn decoration. Now he stands looking at it as though he’s expecting he might have a conversation with Mr. Tree.
“Dad,” I say, gently.
He turns around and looks at me.
“Want to come back in?”
He climbs the stairs slowly. I don’t trust that he won’t fall again (I’m so grateful he didn’t fall before), and I hold on to his elbow. At first, he resists my doing this. Then he pretends not to notice it, and so do I.
“Could you help a little with the sorting?” I ask.
“Sure,” he says.
“Mom needs to know what hats you’d like to keep, if any,” I say, and hand him a pile of hats. He tries one on, a straw hat with a colorful fabric band.
“That looks good,” I say.
He nods. “Panama.” Then he tries on the next hat, and the one after that. He puts every one of them in the keep pile. Every single one.
I need to find a computer so that I can do a little work, and I take my dad with me to the library. “Ever been here before?” I ask him, as we pull up to the building. “Nope,” he says, looking it over.
“Nice, isn’t it?” I say, and he says, “Um-hum.”
I find him
a nice-looking chair by the window where I can see him from the computer. “Want a book to look at?” I ask, and he says no, he’ll just wait. I find him a book anyway, one on fantastical tree houses that people have built, and he sits looking at the pictures with real interest. He’s so engaged, in fact, that I hate to make him stop looking when it’s time to go. “Want to check that book out?” I ask him, and he says, “No. No.” For a moment, I consider doing it anyway, but don’t.
We go back to the house to collect my mother, and then I drive them both back to their apartment. My mother has descended into crabbiness again. Must have been hard to be in the house and know she’s not going back. Maybe she’ll just be this way now, I think. I give up.
When I get back to the house after having dropped my parents off, the auctioneer arrives promptly. There are some people who are doing their show from the moment you meet them, and this man is one of them. He’s smarmy and glib and he says my sister’s and my names like he now has ownership of a good percentage of our personas. He goes through the house quickly; it’s clear he’s not impressed with the little pilgrims my mother used to put on the table at Thanksgiving. He flips through my dad’s remaining stamp albums, and says, “American. Where are the European?” Or maybe it’s the other way around. But whichever way, it’s clear that my dad has sold all the good ones; these are just not worth much. “Sorry to say,” the guy says, “but you can get just about anything online now. It decreases the value. You know?”
“Oh, uh-huh,” I say.
He looks at my dad’s watchmaker’s bench and this interests him quite a bit, until we tell him my brother wants that. Then he opens and shuts the drawers at great speed, saying, “Where are the watches?” He looks down his nose at the watch parts, saying, “These might have some value.”
“How about the clocks?” we ask, referring to my dad’s beloved collection of them. “Maybe the grandfather one,” the auctioneer says.
He digs around in another room of the basement, and my heart is just aching at the speed at which he reviews my parents’ lifelong possessions, at the way he dismisses my mother’s Lovelace crystal glasses, which she got for her hope chest at eighteen. “I wouldn’t bother,” he says. “The whole collection is worth maybe seventy-five dollars.” He holds one glass up and sees a small chip and frowns. “That’ll take your lip off,” he says. Unless you have the vast intelligence to drink from another one of the glasses, I want to say. Unless you can forgive a slight imperfection for the glory of the history of the thing. I think about my friend Marianne, who was asked by an old lady if she would like to take the woman’s fabric—she couldn’t see to sew anymore. Marianne said, “So I allowed four hours and I—”
“Four hours!” I said. “Why would it take you four hours to pick it up?”
Marianne shrugged. “I knew she’d want to tell me about each piece of fabric. You know: ‘This is what I made my daughter’s prom dress out of. This is what I used for curtains in the sun parlor.’ ”
Whatever Marianne is, this man is the polar opposite. I don’t expect him to linger, rhapsodizing over each item. I don’t even mind his speed. But if he could just acknowledge that there is more here than fabric and glass, metal and wood. There’s a personal history, memories of a time that will never return, a time that meant so much to so many. These things he’s rifling through make up my parents’ little empire, and the flag is still flying. But I guess my sister is okay with the guy: she has been quietly following him around, voicing no objection, so I figure we’ll have to work with him—I feel it’s my sister’s right to call the shots, as she’s the one who lives here and deals most often with my parents. But then he bends over to sneer at something else, and Vicki, who is standing behind him where he can’t see her, looks impassively over at me while she flips the guy off.
After his whirlwind tour, after he has finished deriding my mother’s collector plates and garden fountain and my father’s piles of National Geographics and his massive collection of golf balls and hats, he says, “Tell you what. I’ll take the stamp collection, the spinning wheel, the clocks, the watch parts, the snow blower, the German beer mugs, the crockery, the lawn furniture, the wooden folk art figures, and the wicker porch set. Five hundred dollars.”
“Yeah. We’ll call you if we’re interested,” I say, escorting him as quickly as I can to the door.
After he walks out, I look over at my sister. “Asshole,” I say.
“Agreed,” she says.
* * *
That night, I am on the couch and my parents think I’m asleep in preparation for a very early flight, but I’m not. I hear my father say, “Aren’t I supposed to take some pills?” He’s referring to the meds he’s meant to take at bedtime.
My mother is in her recliner, watching baseball. “It’s too late now,” she says. A pause, and then my father says, “Well, I’m going to take my pills.”
I go in and confront my mother. “You weren’t going to give him his pills?”
She is surprised, caught. She mumbles some excuse, and I say, “I’ll help him,” and I do. Then I lie on the couch and worry about how many other times this has happened, or will.
I go to sleep but then wake up at three-thirty and can’t fall back asleep. At five, I tiptoe out of the apartment and head downstairs to meet the cab I ordered last night. I feel happy, optimistic, and this surprises me. Usually, when I’m short on sleep, my mood is not good. The cabdriver and I have an interesting conversation; he tells me he’s from Uganda and that he starts work at three a.m. and sometimes waits two or three hours for his first fare. Despite the difficulties of the job he’s doing, he couldn’t be more pleasant; he seems to be one of those people who are just happy to be alive on the spinning planet. The sky pinkens, then turns pale blue, and as I get out of the cab and head into the terminal, I turn my thoughts from Minnesota and my parents to my life in Chicago. Bill. My dogs. My work. My house and my garden and my friends.
On the plane, I don’t sleep, which also surprises me. I never have trouble sleeping on planes. I look out the window at the cloud art and ponder why I am so curiously well rested. I decide it’s because I slept under the same roof as my parents. Compromised as they may be now, I nevertheless slid into that child’s privileged way of thinking that my mother and my father were there in the nighttime, watching over me.
JULY 18, 2011
Last week when I called my mother, she told me about how she had prepared a lunch platter for her former next-door neighbors, who came over to show her their new baby. She was still in low-gear party mode, listlessly describing the kind of lunchmeat she had offered, but describing it nonetheless. When I asked her about the little baby, my mother said, “Well, he’s not a pretty baby, but he’s a smiley baby.” She reminded me in that instant of my grandmother, her mother, who, upon seeing my firstborn, said, “That’s the ugliest baby I ever saw.”
The neighbors who visited said an interesting thing to my mother. Apparently in reaction to her saying she didn’t much like it there, they said, “Oh, we would have taken care of you.” As innocently as they may have offered that remark, as good-heartedly, it did a great deal of damage.
First of all, it made my mother start thinking again that living in that house was possible. It made her believe it would be simple, now that someone had signed up for duty. It put my mother right back on the hamster wheel of being unable to commit to being where she was, of thinking and thinking about how she might move back.
“Mom,” I said. “Do you really think they could take care of you?”
“Yes!” she said.
And for once, I didn’t get into it. I didn’t say one thing about a woman with a new baby hardly having time to go to the bathroom. I didn’t mention the fact that they have other children to attend to, that they go on vacations, that they would not be thrilled to be called in the middle of the night, that they are not home all the time, an
d that you can’t schedule emergencies. Nor did I point out that my mother hadn’t even known her neighbor was pregnant, so how close could they be? “Okay,” I said.
It was a beautiful day there, I happened to know, and I asked my mother if she had been outside at all. “Nothing to see but cars,” she said.
“Out back?” I said. “In the garden?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said bitterly.
I mentioned that things might get easier when my dad starts going to the adult daycare center twice a week.
“Well, I’m just waiting for the state government to shut down. Then there’ll be no transportation, so that will be that,” she said. It was true that there had been talk of that.
Silence. I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. Then my mother told me she’d been to a residents’ meeting.
“Really,” I said. “How was it?”
“They talked about how they didn’t like that the people who served them in the dining room had tattoos,” my mother said. “So they’re going to make them wear long sleeves. And they complained that there wasn’t enough egg in the potato salad. I wanted to say, ‘Hey, people, get a life!’ ”
I had to agree with her there, although potato salad without enough egg is a serious offense in my book, too.
That evening, I sat on a bench that I keep in the back part of my yard, next to a bank of hydrangeas, many of which finally came in blue this year. Others are lavender, or dusty pink, or hot pink, or a near red. They are so beautiful, it almost hurts to look at them. I kept moving my eyes over the hydrangeas: here, there, everywhere, as one does when looking at an art quilt.
I was waiting for the fireflies to come out and the very back of the garden seemed like a good place to sit—from there, I had a full view of where they like to go, in and out of the blossoms. It was still light enough that the first firefly had yet to appear, and when I could finally tear my eyes away from the hydrangeas, I stared at the back of my house, which was awash in a kind of pinkish light. I thought about each room inside the house, and then I admired the construction of the outside. It’s an American foursquare, my house, which I think of as architecture’s declarative sentence. I thought about how I would feel if I were told I could no longer manage living in my house and would have to move. Some part of me leaped up to say, “I would move! I’m sick of all these possessions, all these stairs! I want to simplify my life!” Another part of me knew the sorrow it would bring, and I think part of the sorrow is that when you are told you have to leave your house, you are being told you have to leave a part of yourself. Mostly, though, I thought about how the idea of having to leave my house feels about as real to me as getting old does to a fourteen-year-old.
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