by Helen Garner
Then, wandering round the dark apartment one New Year’s Eve, she fell. Dad woke and found her on the floor near the front door. Her collar-bone was broken. She needed surgery. The morning after the operation, the Orthopedic ward called: ‘Come at once – we can’t handle her.’ Our mother, the most law-abiding person in the world, making trouble?
Dad and I rushed to her bedside, expecting to see a little old lady sitting up neatly in a nightie and a sling. Instead we found a raging virago, fully dressed, who took one look at us, muttered an insult, and stamped out the door. We ran after her. I corralled her in a visitors’ lounge. There she stood, oblivious of her broken bone, blazing, exhilarated, in florid hallucination. She pointed in wonder at the swarms of insects that filled the room. She raved about a terrible flood which had washed people off their feet in the city and carried them away down the gutters. She cried out that she had seen a hundred Spanish galleons under full sail go sweeping down St Kilda Road.
Dad panicked. ‘What the hell are you talking about? There are no insects! There’s been no flood!’
Her face went blank and her body jerked back, as if she’d been slapped. Some old hippie instinct whispered to me: Don’t fight it. Go with it. Hiding my alarm, I said, ‘A flood! Tell us more about the flood!’
She relaxed, and let us lead her back to bed, discoursing all the while on strange nautical themes. She was on a ship. The captain had a moustache and smoked a pipe. ‘When did you come on board?’ she asked Dad. ‘What’s your cabin number?’
Shocked and moved, I sat with her that day and the next, while the anaesthetic left her system. As she dozed and raved, I realised that for the first time in my adult life I was thrilled by my mother’s company. I could not get enough of her poetic flights of fancy. I held her hand, I stroked her hair, and she let me, this woman who had always been so reserved about touching or expressing affection. I opened my ironic intellectual’s mouth and out of it came the incredible words ‘I love you, Mum.’ Sometimes I laughed at things she said, and so did she, gently, looking me right in the eye. Sometimes I would find tears running down my face. They were tears of joy, at the release of tenderness.
Once the violence of the anaesthetic had worn off, she went home to a sort of normality, but the break had damaged nerves in her right arm, and she could no longer knit, write or cook.
Over the next year, in fits and starts, the illness crept over her. She and our father had always travelled a lot – to Europe, to Western Australia, to the Mallee to look at the crops, or just to the RACV Country Club at Healesville for a weekend. But now her fragile equilibrium could not tolerate even a short trip away from home. In a hotel she would sink into sullen lethargy, or wander the passageways after midnight, or grow obsessed with looming disasters. She would come home disoriented. She lost her physical confidence. Instead of walking she shuffled.
Some of us floated the dreaded word Alzheimer’s. Others, furious, rejected it outright. We began to squabble among ourselves. We didn’t know where to go for help. Her female GP struck some of us as passive and uninterested, but our parents liked her and resisted pressure to change. We took Mum to a psycho-gerontologist who tested her short-term memory and found it almost obliterated. She was angry with him for confusing her with his silly questions.
She tried busily to invent little stories and excuses to cover her growing inability to cope with ordinary life. ‘My husband usually does that!’ she’d say brightly, when asked to fill out a form or write down her address, and someone would do it for her, at her dictation. We began to suspect that she could no longer read.
She fell again, broke a hip, needed to have it pinned. This time the Orthopedic ward could not handle her mania at all. It was plain that she would not be coming home: that her care was too much for our father. Desperately the family searched for a nursing home. Our father inclined, in his distress, towards a hollowly luxurious up-market establishment in a remote suburb. We urged something further down the scale, more accessible, where even if there were smells she would have warm attention. Again we quarrelled.
At last we found a nursing home. Mum went straight there from the Orthopedic ward. We called the Alzheimer’s Association. They sent out a kind man who sat with us in Dad’s living room, listened patiently and spoke carefully, managing to ignore the fact that the air in the room was zinging with tension.
When he’d gone we started to draw up a roster. ‘She must have a daily visitor!’ trumpeted one of us.
Another, dull with misery, suggested that she wouldn’t know whether we had come in or not: ‘You’re only doing this roster out of guilt. It’s got nothing to do with what she needs.’
‘I go in there evvvvvv’ry single day,’ said our father, over and over, till someone exploded: ‘You’re her husband! It’s your duty! We’ve got children! We’ve got jobs!’ People wept and raged. Each of us suffered a different version of the general horror, guilt and grief.
The whole dynamic of the family changed. With Mum no longer a presence, we split into shifting factions. Our relations with Dad, always complex, became strained and broke – then, as we organised ourselves round our adversity, they grew richer and more affectionate than they’d ever been.
The ability to visit Mum flickered unpredictably through our ranks. People checked up on each other. Resentments boiled over. Sometimes I’d go every other day; then for a fortnight, a month, I’d think of her hardly at all, and only distantly, as if she were already dead.
I still can’t bear to picture her in her single room, with her hands clasped and her swollen feet placed side by side on the carpet, doing nothing, just sitting there staring dully into space. I’m afraid that this vision of her will drive me crazy. It paralyses me, until the guilt gets strong enough to force me back to her.
She has got used to being in the home, though she has no idea where she is, or why. Many of the carers are heroic in their gentleness and patience – with her, and with us. Others are offhand, even hostile. Possessions vanish. The ludicrous staffing levels leave her, at times, neglected in the physical squalor of her condition.
Her moods are wildly erratic. Sometimes she knows me at once, smiles, and calls me by my childhood nickname. If Dad walks in, she’ll switch gear, sob with relief, and pour out rambling paranoid tales about cleaners who leave bombs rolled up in the fresh towels, or men with guns who have already shot and killed her. Next time she’s one of two spoilt little princesses, or a station-owner’s wife who has to cook for the shearers. For a whole week it was a matter of brooding urgency to get a train ticket to Geelong.
There are days when she grumbles so relentlessly that the drone of her voice gets into my bones and drains the joy out of everything. Then it’s all I can do not to smother her with a pillow, or tip her out of the wheelchair into the lake and hold her head under with my boot. She is as unaware of my mutinous fury as if she were an empress on a throne. Her children confess these murder fantasies to each other, and double up in silent spasms of relief: without laughter it would all be completely unbearable.
With Dad she is often sulky and beetle-browed, taking out on him the suppressed anger of a long marriage. Faithfully he bears it. But then one day he’ll bring her a salmon sandwich he’s made at home, and she’ll eat it with gusto and proclaim it ‘the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted’. We enter the nursing home with trepidation, never knowing what we’re in for, whether we’ve got the emotional stamina to handle it one more time. Like her, we crash up and down, elated, disgusted, despairing, but somehow struggling on.
And there’s something miraculous about the stories she comes out with – their emotional colour, their dreamlike ingenuity. They are a game we can play. Imagination is the only hope we’ve got for communication with her.
She used to weep and rail at us when we’d get up to leave. Then a nurse said, ‘Don’t say goodbye. It only upsets her. By the time you get to the lift she’s forgotten you’ve even been here. Sneak out. Believe me, it’s kinder.’
We wer
e appalled by this suggestion. But one day, in the tense moment before parting, it occurred to me to say, ‘I’m just going out the back, Mum, to hang out the washing.’
Her agitation melted. She said pleasantly, ‘Got enough pegs?’
Since that day, I imagine I’m building a house around her, where she and Dad can live together, in harmony, with all their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It’s a phantom house, of course. Cold facts have killed our longing for a material one. But it’s wide and many-roomed, with a garden of leaves and blossoms, a swing, old sheds, a clothesline, a garage. When I walk out the door of her room, that’s where I tell her I’m going: just out the back, or down to the shops to buy something to cook for our dinner. It works every time. But often I howl all the way back up Punt Road.
Mum no longer cares for her once-beloved CDs, but she likes it when we sing. One day, wheeling her along the promenade beside the bay, my sister and I sang ‘The Carnival Is Over’. Mum looked round at us, and listened right to the end with unusual attention. Then she drew a deep sigh, and said, ‘I love that song. Where do you store all the tears?’
Moon-Gazing
My son-in-law told me that down at the casino on Sunday evening, footballers would be getting naked. My sister had already invited me to watch the lunar eclipse with her, but it had been quite a while since I saw a bare man, so I put her off and plumped for a different sort of moon-gazing – the Western Bulldogs’ famous fund-raising ‘Male Revue’.
It was my first visit to the casino. Like a fool I had imagined that it might be civilised – that the audience might even sit at tables. But by the time I arrived, there was standing room only in the All Star Café, a hot, dark cavern whose walls were lined with tremendous tilted screens where rock videos swarmed and twitched in all their punitive bravado.
Women young and old came streaming in. They moved in packs and pairs, clicketing along on their hurtful-looking heels, chins high, eyes bright, lashing about with their long bleached hair. The smart ones, knowing that the stage wasn’t raised above floor level, had already packed the front of the room in dense throngs. Behind them the latecomers lost impetus and milled around deflated, knowing that they would be able to see the footballers only from the waist up, or in blurry video on the looming screens.
I was chugging a Lemon Ruski when the first of the half-dozen ‘acts’ burst out from behind the dark curtain, on a distorted tide of music.
I strained on tiptoe and glimpsed, beyond the heaving mass of women, the heads and shoulders of four grinning, embarrassed young creatures – princelings, godlets – labouring to perform a simple dance routine and vaguely mouthing the words of the song. To get their boxers off at the end they had to bend over: the women around me screamed like whistles but the action had dropped below my line of vision.
By the third act I had lost all shame. I fought my way to a table, shoved aside three ecstatic girls, and scrambled on to it.
The dancing footballers’ perfect teeth and brilliant eye-whites flashed in the light. The women cried out with joy at the sight of them – but how timid their movements were, how awkwardly they jostled each other, missed cues, flung out their arms in feebly dramatic gestures!
Some were gawky, unsmiling, like fourth-formers called to the front of the class. Obediently they worked their way through the hackneyed routines: their movements were narrow and constrained. Others were in their element, grinning with all their teeth, and yet their hip-grinding and lip-pouting was ironic, defended, like a helpless parody of something gay. And when they stripped to their famous jocks, I felt like howling.
Because they were so shockingly beautiful. The triangular torsos. The wing-stubs of their shoulder blades. The delicate waists under the massive chests. The long muscles of the limbs. The finely arched feet. The skin smooth as wax. The firm globes of their perfect arses. All this glory, amid the brutish battering of the music and the women’s high screams.
I longed for the racket to be stilled. I wanted these young gods to be raised, one by one, on pedestals before us. The self-mockery, the coarse cries of laughter and desire would die away. Someone would play an acoustic guitar, very very softly. We would stand in silence, absorbed, awe-struck. In the dim room full of people breathing, each man would strike, in grand succession, the simple sculptural poses of antiquity, designed to show the splendour of his body – the beauty of his youth, which is so fleeting and precious, which cannot last.
Some hero’s boxer shorts were auctioned. They brought $500. When he scrambled out of them and thrust them at the winning bidder, with the brusque, innocent gesture of a boy handing his undies to his mother to be washed, I finished my drink and slipped away.
Outside, on the south bank of the Yarra, the sky was crystal, the air cold as metal. People were craning up at the eclipse. A veil the colour of a brown paper bag was being drawn across the bright coin of the moon.
Two drunk girls in skimpy clothes sat cross-legged on a concrete wall, smoking and calling people on their mobiles.
‘Mum? It’s Leah! Are you watching it? Go outside! Look at the moon! High up in the sky! It’s a total eclipse! And it’s not going to happen again till the year 3000 or something! Go outside! It’s awesome! Bye!’
She hung up, turned to her friend and burst out joyfully, ‘I love you! You’re the funniest person ever! That’s why I hang out with you!’
Along the bank a row of tall stone pillars, sheathed in water, began to shoot out vertical jets of flame. No one paid them any attention. Nobody was looking at the river, either; but it kept on steadily flowing.
My Blue Glasses
He was old. Older than I am, with a quantity of thick, soft-looking, well-cut white hair: something had blessed him.
He strolled out of his optometrist’s shop, greeted me in an old-fashioned style and invited me in. I didn’t need new glasses. I was just drifting around the city, in a dream. But with many a gracious gesture, he manoeuvred me into an upholstered chair near a mirror, and offered to cull from his stock a choice of frames of a type that would suit me.
Now, it is a scientific fact, established by at least two of my husbands, that no glasses suit me. Apparently there is something funny about the shape of my head. But it was nice in the shop, being served. I vagued out and went passive.
He fanned out before me a rainbow of frames.
‘I’m saving one particular one till last,’ he murmured. ‘We only brought in six. From Italy. It’s not cheap. But I’ve got a feeling that you might appreciate it.’
Then he dropped into a matching chair at a slight angle to mine, and launched his campaign.
There was something almost indecent about the intimacy of it. He would lean forward and put his face close to mine while he slid the side-pieces over my ears and settled the frame gently into position. Like Maoris rubbing noses, we ‘breathed the same air’. And like two sea-going travellers on a deck, we kept turning from each other to contemplate a view – not of the ocean, but of my suspicious, anxious face in the mirror.
For I did not want to buy. Nup, I said. Nope. Too narrow. Nuh. Too tiny. Too heavy. Too youthful. Too pale. Too manly. Too sissy. Too high. Too low. Too frumpy. Too groovy.
He could really absorb a knockback. He worked more slowly, more deliberately. With an expression of ardent concentration, his lips softly closed, he slid each frame on to my head, and sat back to contemplate the effect. He flirted with me, raised his eyebrows, tilted his head.
How tiring rejection is – how graceless and unappealing. I couldn’t help smiling. Once or twice I even laughed. My face softened. Grimness left it. I lost three years, five.
‘That’s better!’ he said. ‘I was frightened of you when you first came in!’
The pause between his move and my riposte grew longer. I was losing ground. He pressed forward. I had to admit – yes – that one was a pretty frame. I even liked myself, in this one. Yes, this one was definitely a possibility. Put those three aside for me to try again.
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Then we got to the special frame he was keeping till last. He whipped it out from behind his back. It was blue. A kind of carefree, opaque, sky blue. It was Armani. It cost an arm and a leg. I leaned forward so he could slide it on to me. I looked at my reflection with trembling incredulity. I looked . . . gorgeous.
I handed him my multi-focal prescription, paid a deposit and skipped out of the shop. He waved goodbye with a smile of tender solicitude.
I lived a breathless week. I was going to become beautiful. On the day, I washed my hair. I wore a dress and stockings. I arrived early. I walked into the shop. The white-haired man was there. I waved eagerly.
He looked right through me.
I moved closer, smiling. ‘Good morning, Mr X!’
He gave me a curt nod, and returned his gaze to the window. His middle-aged son brought out my glasses and brusquely hooked them on to my head. I turned to the mirror.
They were awful. I looked like the plain friend of the heroine in a screwball comedy: clever, faithful and dry-witted, but in the final analysis unsexy, and irredeemably unloved.
A posh lady swept into the shop on a wave of perfume. The white-haired man hurried to greet her. He enveloped her in the glow of his attention. I stood there at the counter in my misbegotten blue spectacles, holding my credit card in my hand. I thought, Yes, I know this feeling, though I haven’t had it since about 1965. It’s the conviction of worthlessness, of deep error and abandonment and self-contempt, that attends the morning after a mistaken one-night stand.
I went home in the glasses. I tried to brazen it out. But in the end I tossed them behind the TV, and there to this day they lie, wasting their blueness on the desert air.
Into Thin Air
Our mother had been living in the nursing home for several months before we noticed that stuff was going missing.
First, the lavender mohair rug we gave her when she turned eighty. In the birthday photo the family clusters round the blank-faced ghost in the wheelchair, with the pretty rug displayed across her knees. Before long we were saying to each other, ‘Anyone seen the mohair rug?’ One carer thought she might have seen it in the laundry, but a search yielded nothing. The rug had dematerialised. Mum’s dementia, our panic and guilt and sorrow, crowded it out of our thoughts.