by James Brown
On the morning of my seventh day home, I awake to bright sunlight. If I’ve had any dreams, I don’t remember them, and I guess that’s the whole point. Still I miss them, the dead, knowing I may never be able to dream them alive again. I sit up in bed. My wife stands beside the bedroom window, pulling back the drapes. She’s considerably younger than me, and she looks unburdened, even hopeful. The sunlight is on her face. The sunlight is in her brown hair and she is staring out the window into the woods. I get up. I walk over to her and slip my arms around her.
She leans back into me, and for once in a very long while I’m there, really there, seeing what she sees. The tall pines and cedars, and beyond them a denser forest.
BLOOD AND DUPLICITY
She’s already fallen twice, first breaking the left hip when she misses a step at the beauty parlor, then her right in a tumble at her old house in Arizona. It’s in this precarious condition that my mother comes back into my life. When her second husband dies, it falls on me, as her only surviving child, to move her from Arizona to the Shandin Hills Retirement Community in San Bernardino where I can better attend to her needs. She is eighty-two. I am forty-seven. My mother and I have never been close. There are many reasons for this, but chief among them is my brother’s suicide, the accompanying guilt, and my need to blame, and in large part I blamed her. For nearly twenty years, we rarely spoke. Now, for the first time in my adult life, I am forging something of a relationship with my mother.
Both hips have been replaced, but it’s the left one that troubles her. In the short while that she’s been here, hardly a couple of months, I’ve taken her to the doctor three times, and I am taking her there again, today, for another cortisone shot. Hopefully it will relieve some of the pain and stiffness. When I come to pick her up, she is already waiting for me at the front door of her apartment. She has on one of her favorite dresses, a black and white ensemble, and her face is made up with lipstick and the heavy rouge that many older women like to wear. Surely she’s been preparing for hours, as she might for a date. It makes me think: this mundane experience of visiting a doctor is by no means mundane to someone whose health is faltering, who lives alone and seldom gets out. I should also mention that she is wearing heels; heels I believe may one day be the death of her.
“Mom,” I say, “I wish you’d wear flats.”
“I like my heels,” she says. “I’ve worn heels all my life.”
It’s about pride. I understand this. It’s about refusing to accept the rapidly narrowing boundaries of her life, and I respect this as well, but with two artificial hips she doesn’t so much walk as teeter. I trail closely behind her as we make our way along the path to the carports, ready to catch her if she stumbles, afraid that each step might be her last.
I recently traded in my old BMW for a truck, and because it rides higher than most cars, it is difficult for my mother to pull herself up and into the passenger seat. To make her life easier, I built a strong wooden box for her to use as a step. I get it from the bed of the truck, set it on the ground, and unlock the door. I turn around and she is gone. I look down the path we just walked. She’s not there. I look in the opposite direction. Nothing, no one. Then, out of sheer luck, I spot her just as she’s turning the corner at the end of the carports. I call out to her.
She doesn’t hear me.
“Mom,” I call out again, louder, as I begin to run.
She’s gone from sight now, heading where I have absolutely no idea, but I catch up with her a few seconds later. I’m out of breath. I touch her arm to get her attention. She turns and looks at me. She studies my face, and for a moment she doesn’t quite recognize me. Slowly, though, it dawns on her.
“Where’d you go?” she says.
“I didn’t go anywhere.”
“Don’t leave me like that,” she says.
The pain-relieving effects of cortisone are short-lived. The shots also don’t always work, and apparently that’s the case with my mother. The pain persists. The stiffness gets worse. Walking even a short distance winds her, and in the few weeks since her last doctor’s visit she’s developed a limp.
Certainly I want her to get better.
Certainly I don’t want her to live in pain, and it wouldn’t be so bad, having to shuttle her back and forth to the doctor, having to do her grocery shopping and banking, if I didn’t sometimes feel that by helping her I’m betraying the memory of my family.
For the longest time, as a child, I denounced her for forging my father’s name on the deed of trust to our house and selling it out from underneath us to cover her bad debts. For the longest time, as a child, I denounced her for constantly belittling my brother and sister, for telling them that nothing they did was good enough, for striking them too hard, too often. I denounced her for burning down an apartment building, an act that led to her incarceration; and when she was released two years later, I denounced her for taking us children from the father we loved and moving to L.A. But most of all, I came to blame her for the suicide of my alcoholic brother, a blame that lasted far beyond childhood, and one that may well have continued if I hadn’t eventually come to understand better my own alcoholism. The root causes of addiction share linkage with the past, but in the end no one but the alcoholic is responsible for their destruction. This I learn through experience. We are in my truck now, headed for my mother’s two o’clock doctor appointment, a follow-up for the ineffective cortisone shot. As we drive I glance over at her, and it strikes me, how as death nears, the aged diminish, the body drawing into itself, the limbs thinning to little more than skin and bone. Time has rendered her once quick, violent hands powerless.
“I just want to thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
“For taking me around all the time. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
I appreciate her words. It is this arrangement, with me caring for her, or else a convalescent home, and she’s not ready for that. I’m not ready to ask it of her, either, though I know the day may come when her life drains too much from my own, when she can no longer do even the smallest things for herself. Frail and weak, her beauty long faded, she is harmless now, this woman whom my brother, sister, and I feared, loved, and hated. As she stares straight ahead, her delicate fingers laced together and folded neatly in her lap, I glimpse the child in my mother, the tiny frame, the fragile skull of the very young, looking impossibly innocent, impossibly blameless.
This time the doctor recommends X-rays, speculating that maybe the steel rod in my mother’s left thigh has somehow come loose. If so, it could be the cause of her suffering, and in the meantime, until he has these X-rays, he writes her a prescription for Feldene, a mild analgesic similar to aspirin. A few days later I drive my mother to the Palm Imaging Institute on 21st Street, directly across from Saint Bernardine’s Medical Center where my ex-wife, Heidi, died soon after giving birth to another man’s child. Being near this place sets off a wave of hard memories, and I suddenly feel the thirst for a drink, a tightening in the back of my throat. I get out of the truck. I go around to my mother’s side and help her do the same. She’s heard me talk about this hospital.
“That’s where she died, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Your brother,” she says. “Your sister. Your dad, and now Heidi. You’ve lost too many.”
In the radiology room, my mother lies on a stainless steel table. It is dark in here, just a dim light in one corner, and the machinery is large and old, painted gunmetal gray. The X-ray device slides along two heavy iron rods bolted to the ceiling above her, and as she rests there, her left hip positioned toward the lens, I think about her words. I think about how I can’t go there, to the past and the places it takes me, because it takes me too far, and I need to remember the present. I need to remember I have three sons who need me here, who need me now. I need to remember that my second wife has come forward with her own love for my children, and that this love is strong and genuine, and that they are fortunat
e to have her, as I am. I need also to realize that I can’t fully love and appreciate this woman, the way she deserves to be loved and appreciated, if I’m obsessed with the past. I am wasting her life by residing in another. It’s about balance. It’s about loving the living and missing the dead, and I have never been able to clearly separate the two.
The radiologist motions for me to step behind the safety partition. Through a pane of thick glass I watch my mother, wondering why she and I are still here and the others are not, if it’s about fate or chance, if it’s purposeless or somehow by design. The radiologist presses a switch and a collision of atoms blast through my mother’s body, bone, flesh, and skin.
My mother is returning from an afternoon bingo game at the recreation center when she takes a spill into a flower bed. This happens between doctor visits, before we get the results of her recent X-rays, and I don’t know if the fall has anything to do with her wearing heels or not. Fortunately, though, the soil is moist and soft and serves to break her fall. A passerby helps her to her feet and escorts her back to the apartment where she phones me just as I’m sitting down to dinner with my wife and sons.
“Jimmy,” she says, “I need you to drive me to the hospital.”
“What happened?”
She tells me, and I shake my head.
“Did you break anything?”
“I hope not,” she says. “But you should see my arm, it’s completely black-and-blue.”
“Can you move it?”
“It hurts when I do.”
“But you can move it. That’s a good sign,” I say. “Hang on, I’m on my way.”
The closest hospital is Saint Bernardine’s, but I have no confidence in their doctors or staff. So I take my mother to a much better hospital in the neighboring city of Loma Linda, and on the way there she thanks me again. For driving her to the hospital. For, in general, looking after her. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she says, as she often does now, and that thought apparently triggers another, one about my brother and sister. “It’d be so much easier if Barry and Marilyn were alive. I’m sorry,” she says, “that you have to do all this alone.” I tell her it’s not a problem. I tell her I want to help, and for a while she’s quiet. For a while she just sits there holding her injured arm. “I don’t know why they did it,” she says. “Barry was doing so good as an actor. It’s what he always wanted and he went so far, so quickly. I don’t understand. And Marilyn, poor Marilyn, she was such a sweet girl. I don’t know what got into her.”
At one time, her words would’ve set me off. At one time, I would’ve told her that she was in many ways responsible for their suicides. I would’ve wanted her to admit guilt. I would’ve wanted her to acknowledge the lack of guidance she provided. I would’ve wanted to acknowledge my part in it all as well, if there was anything I could’ve done to save them and did not. But as the years have passed, and continue to pass, I have come to realize the worthlessness of guilt and blame and how hurt only begets more hurt.
“You holding up all right?” I ask.
“It aches bad.”
“We’re almost there,” I say. “I’m sure they’ll give you some pain medication.”
At the emergency room, we’re assigned a number and asked to wait. It proves a long wait, too, because the place is packed with the sick and injured, mostly the poor and undocumented. Finally, six hours later, we’re called in. By this time the bruise has spread from just above her wrist to just below her shoulder, and it’s darkened in color, a deep purple. I worry that she may have seriously hurt herself. I worry that her bones may have shattered. But when the results of her X-rays come back, the doctor tells us that it’s only a hairline fracture to the upper portion of her arm. It will heal on its own. The severe bruising, he says, is common, particularly to the elderly. Oddly this good news seems to disappoint my mother, hungry for attention, any attention, and as we’re leaving she whispers in my ear.
“He can’t be right. We need to get another opinion.”
But I don’t want to think about any more doctors or X-rays, at least not now, not for a while, because I’m tired. I’m worn out. I drop my mother off at her apartment. I help her inside, and on the drive home, along a narrow highway that winds up into the San Bernardino Mountains, an old memory resurfaces: We are in our bedroom, my brother Barry and I; he is twelve and I am six, and she is beating him about the back with a bamboo spear we bought at Disneyland. The tip is made of rubber but the bamboo is real enough, and she strikes him repeatedly until he’s cowering in the corner. All I do is watch. As the youngest I escape the beatings my sister and brother endure, but later when she leaves, when Barry takes off his shirt, I will remember the many welts and the crisscross patterns they make across his back, already darkening, a deep purple, like the colors of the bruise spreading along our mother’s arm.
The X-rays are in. These are the ones of her left hip, and once again I am driving my mother to the doctor’s office. I am hoping the X-rays will reveal nothing out of the ordinary. I am hoping this appointment is not the precursor to an operation and that the doctor has discovered another, less serious cause for her pain. Going under the knife at her age can easily lead to infection, and infection for the elderly is often a death sentence. Ideally what ails her is something that can be managed with a pill, or physical therapy, and luckily this appears to be the case.
“Your X-rays look fine,” the doctor says. “No breaks to the hip. The rod is aligned. I think you may have arthritis, which is not so bad. We can treat that. I’ll write you a prescription for the pain and stiffness and I’d like to see you back here in a couple of weeks. Now,” he says, “let’s take a look at that arm.”
Again, just as it happened in the ER, my mother seems oddly dissatisfied with the doctor’s diagnosis. I am guessing here, but I imagine that she’d anticipated the worst, and instead of being relieved by the better news, she somehow feels jilted. How can the cause not be more serious? She doesn’t see herself as a complainer, and neither do I, but I’m glad she won’t have to risk another operation. The visit ends with the doctor recommending yet another set of X-rays, these for the injured arm, just to be sure it’s healing correctly.
Back at her apartment, I fix us both a vodka tonic. After six months of abstinence, I am drinking again. I have been drinking off and on for the last several weeks, and trying, as I have often done in the past and failed, to limit myself to just a few, and only when the day is over, only when my work is done. I make mine strong, nearly straight vodka, and I make my mother’s weak, so she won’t get woozy when she stands up after I’ve left. She relaxes in the leather La-Z-Boy that I bought her, and I sit across from her on the couch.
Of course she knows about my problem, but she has no say over what I do, and besides, she likes a drink now and then herself. It loosens the tongue. It allows us to talk freely where we might ordinarily freeze up. Still, as I hand her her drink, she feels inclined to at least warn me.
“Be careful,” she says. “Remember what happened to your sister and brother. I couldn’t bear to lose my last child.”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m fine. I have it under control.”
This is my mantra when I’m drinking, or about to take a drink, and I believe my words. The alcoholic mind is stunningly deceptive, but still there remains something inside me, a second voice, telling me that I am lying to myself. I ignore it. On the coffee table, I notice a framed snapshot of my mother and her husband, not my father but her second husband, posing on the sands in Hawaii, his arm draped across her shoulders, both wearing leis and smiling into the camera. She sees me staring at it.
“He was a good man,” she says. “Not to slight your father, but Bud always did those little things. Flowers or perfume when I wasn’t expecting it. You know we went to Hawaii not once but three times. I can’t say your dad ever took me on a real vacation.”
She fails to mention that she bankrupted my father. She fails to mention that she bankrupted her
second husband not once but three times in the twenty-five years they were married and that these trips to Hawaii were made before and between those bankruptcies.
“That’s nice,” I say, and for the most part I mean it.
Because they look happy in the picture. And it would be wrong of me, I think, to begrudge anyone what little happiness they can take from this life, whether I believe they deserve it or not.
“He went so fast. He just kissed me goodnight and we fell asleep and when I woke up he was cold. His skin was blue.” She takes a sip of her drink and sets it back down. “It’s hard,” she says, “living alone after all those years. I appreciate your staying and visiting for a while. I know you’re busy. I know you have a family.” She pauses. “It’s strange, awful even, how quickly it goes. I hope there’s an afterlife, but I really don’t believe in it.”
I fix us another drink.
I stay for a while longer and then I tell her I need to leave, that my wife is teaching a night class and it’s my turn to make dinner for the boys.
At my house, I head upstairs to the bedroom to change into some sweatpants and a T-shirt, and as I’m doing this I look at another picture, one on my dresser, a framed black-and-white photograph of my mother and father taken shortly after they married. I pick it up. I hold it toward the light. In this picture my mother is thirty. My father, beginning to bald, is forty-four. They make a handsome pair with his sharp jawline, blue-gray eyes, and fair skin, and my mother’s olive complexion, her dark Sicilian eyes, and thick black hair. In her day she was a striking woman, and I wonder if this, her beauty, has anything to do with it; if it somehow predisposed her to expect more from life than life was willing to give.