If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother

by Julia Sweeney

  In April, I was in Spokane and Bill was in the hospital. He had hepatitis C, kidney disease, and cirrhosis, and MRSA on top of all that. He’d also broken his wrist (which he did several times over) from falling. I stood next to his hospital bed and held his hand. He was orange from the cirrhosis—even his eyes—his stomach enlarged, and he was strapped down. Dying of alcoholism is a grisly way to go. He looked at me and said, “Hey, Jules, let’s go on a hike while you’re here.” I held his gaze. I blinked away the tears. “Sure,” I replied.

  I never thought he’d leave the hospital, but he did. He seemed slightly recovered. He was walking around with a cane then, like he was a much older man.

  My mother was at the end of her rope. By the time I was visiting in Spokane just last month, Bill wasn’t drinking anymore, but he seemed to be declining anyway. My mother wanted him to go back in the hospital, but Bill didn’t want to go. I took Bill to a doctor’s appointment because of a boil he had on his neck. We sat in the waiting room for almost two hours together, reading magazines. We drove around and looked at a house we grew up in, on Twenty-sixth Street, and we gazed at the tree in front we both knew so well. We drove by our grandmother Henrietta’s house on Bernard Street and noted that the shutters had been painted. This was where my aunt Barbara lived, too; she also died from alcoholism, and also turned yellow at the end.

  If that seems like we knew it was good-bye to those locations, we didn’t. This is what we always did when we were together in Spokane. It was our ritual.

  I tried to hang out with Bill for as much of the rest of the weekend as I could. He lived in a rooming house downtown, and he had his friends. They were mostly drug addicts, recovering addicts, some very elderly, and very poor people. They had one bathroom at the end of the hallway for all of them to share. Bill introduced me to a woman, in her eighties, for whom he’d buy groceries when he could. He told me she had repaid him and accidentally written him a check for two hundred dollars, when what she owed him was only twenty dollars. He returned the check and she said she’d mixed up that check with her rent check and thanked him profusely. It was hard for me to understand how this woman came to live in a place like that rooming house, without even a bathroom of her own. On the other hand, I found her inspiring. And frankly, this was true for the whole place. Yes, it was grimy and sad, but if you stayed there a little while, you could feel the embers of connectedness and community.

  I met other friends of Bill’s, people down on their luck. I was reacquainted with his friend Pete, who’s a member of the Spokane Tribe of Native Americans. Pete told me he had a steel plate in his head and all his brothers were in jail. There was another friend in a wheelchair down the hall, who was a struggling addict. There was a couple in one room with a TV set, and other tenents crowded in watching like it was a dorm room.

  The floor of Bill’s room was lined with books, stacked neatly on their sides. They looked like caterpillars, crawling out of the baseboards, twisting their way up. I teased out one book from the middle of a stack and asked Bill where he found it, an early paperback edition of Will Cuppy’s The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. “The mission has a bin of books outside,” he replied. I resisted making a joke regarding the title of the book and the place he found it. Our eyes met across the room. We laughed, not having to articulate why. We discussed Blue Latitudes by Tony Horowitz, a book I gave Bill a year or so ago. Next to that was A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Bill asked me to get that book out for him. “I haven’t read that one yet,” he said. It seemed like an odd choice. I handed him the book and then I left for my mother’s condo.

  The next day Mulan flew to Spokane from O’Hare Airport, on her own. It was her first flight by herself, ever. I’d paid the “unaccompanied minor” fee and Bill and I drove out to the airport together to get her. Bill felt too weak to walk all the way to the gate, and I left him near the check-in counter and went to fetch Mulan. When we emerged from the security gates, Bill was standing there, leaning on his cane. I appreciated that Mulan gave him a big hug without me nudging her.

  The next day I called Bill as soon as I woke up to see how he was feeling. He said he thought he probably should go back to Emergency. But in our family, going to Emergency often defies the word. I asked him if he wanted to go to Emergency at eleven? At noon?

  Writing this now it seems so surreal, but taking Bill to Emergency was so commonplace by then, it was like another errand. Bill came to my mother’s condo. He didn’t eat. He said he wasn’t feeling well but didn’t elaborate. The boil on his neck was bigger. We all ate scrambled eggs and he sat in the living room quietly. My mother’s eyes were simultaneously dilated and glazed. Another battle to save a son was about to be lost, but it wasn’t a foregone conclusion yet, and Bill always seemed able to rally himself back to life.

  Around noon, Mulan and I took him to the Emergency room. They admitted him right away; they knew everything about Bill. They asked us to come back with him to the area where they prepared people to enter other areas of the hospital. Mulan and I sat together on folding chairs while Bill got himself disrobed, in an area cordoned off with beige curtains for a little privacy. I have a flickering image of Bill through the partially pulled curtains, sliding off his pants and shirt to get into the gown. Now, I think about how that was the last time. His last time to pull off his pants. When I think of him sliding himself onto the hospital bed, I think about how that was his last time to slide himself onto a bed. He had an impish way about him, light on his feet, youthful even. But is that true? Maybe that’s just me transforming his movements, because I knew him as a boy.

  While we sat there we watched the hubbub of the emergency room. A man arrived with a bullet in his leg. He was accompanied by two policemen who may have participated in putting it there. There was a man who seemed to be having a heart attack; paddles were pulled out. A little girl arrived who’d had a terrible accident. An industrial-sized sewing needle from a large machine had been shot into her knee. She was screaming and holding a stuffed bear. Mulan’s eyes were so big, just watching. “This is the real world,” I said to her. Then I hated myself for saying something so trite. “Well, everything is the real world,” I added. Mulan, irritated, frowned at me, like I was interrupting an absorbing TV show.

  We went in and talked to Bill. The nurses had him hooked up to some fluids and were going to take him off to some other area of the hospital. We said good-bye, like it was nothing, like see you later.

  I really only have feelings of sympathy for my brother Bill. He couldn’t conquer this demon. Who knows what kind of fate was written for him in his genes and in his experiences? Frankly I don’t think he had a choice. I don’t know why some people are able to change their destructive behaviors and why some people aren’t. And truthfully, I don’t think anyone does.

  Now, this third week I am home alone, I’ve been on the phone all day and night with my sister, Meg, who lives in Japan, and my brother Jim, who is with my mother in Spokane. I am on the line with my aunts, with friends who knew Bill. We’re planning the funeral for August, in Spokane, when everyone is home from their summer vacations. Then my mother is going to come here and stay with me for a week or more.

  My emotions roll over me like waves. I feel strong one minute, but then I am a puddle of tears the next. I am relieved—I am relieved for Bill, and relieved for his kids. No more worrying that Bill is going to show up high or drunk.

  When I’m not on the phone, my mind scrambles. When I’m in yoga class, my mind hops. I’m agitated. I have very low energy.

  My mother called and said that when she got Bill’s backpack at the hospital after he died, she found the book The Year of Magical Thinking. She said she was going to read it. She said she thought Bill had left that book in there for her.

  I wasn’t sure she was wrong.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Starter Gods

  One reason that Santa is so jolly is that he knows where all the bad girls live.

 
—George Carlin

  I think we need a breather. I think we should talk about the death of fairy tales. But wait, I love fairy tales! Not, however, when they’re presented as the truth, to a little child who doesn’t have the critical thinking skills to be appropriately skeptical. On the other hand, I love to pretend, I love fantasy, I love imagining. This has been the bread and butter of my career. But here’s the thing: I know I am fantasizing when I’m fantasizing.

  You see, I went through a rather rigorous philosophical upheaval shortly before I became a mother and this caused me to feel very deeply that I should absolutely never lie to Mulan. I felt I had been deliberately lied to as a child, and I resented it. And even though my struggle had to do with religion, it bled out from there. To Santa Claus, for example.

  When I thought about Santa Claus in the abstract—the myth’s connection to my own childhood, and the joy of the festive images and the presents and the tree and all the folklore—it was great. It was a part of the seasonal fun of being a parent and being a kid.

  But when it came to the reality of it, to what you had to do to create that magical mystery, I balked. I felt incapable of peering into Mulan’s sweet, open, naïve, trusting eyes and lying to her. I was her protector and overseer, and this rankled me deeply. I just couldn’t do it.

  Since Mulan was only two for her first Christmas with me, it was easy to just skip it all. When she was three, Santa Claus was around but he was just art. His cheerful image was on things, but I didn’t feel compelled to explain him. And she wasn’t in school yet, so I didn’t have to deal with other kids’ expectations and assumptions, either.

  By the time Mulan turned four, however, I had changed my mind. I felt I was cheating her out of a great holiday tradition and this wonderful feeling of magic and the remarkable characters and stories of her culture. I mean, c’mon, it was fun. Why was I such a stick in the mud?

  I didn’t realize that it was actually kind of late to introduce a kid to the concept of Santa Claus. At this age, she was already a person with some critical thinking skills and when I began to tell her about Santa, I just ended up scaring the hell out of her.

  Because I had dithered in my mind about how to say it, I delayed, and didn’t end up telling her about Santa until Christmas Eve. That year we were alone, just the two of us, in Los Angeles. We had a tree, and a few presents. But I had kept most of her gifts hidden in a closet so that “Santa Claus” could bring them out.

  So, just before she went to bed, I said, “I need to tell you something. There is this guy . . . his name is Santa Claus and he, well, frankly he’s been watching you.”

  She looked terrified.

  Maybe that wasn’t the best way to begin.

  She asked, “When?”

  I said, “He . . . he can see you all the time. He is sort of like, invisible and he can watch you and he knows if you’ve been a good girl or not.”

  Her face showed deep concern. She said, “Yeah. . . .”

  I said, “And well . . . he—based on your behavior over the last year, which in my opinion has been pretty good—well, based on that, he is going to come in our house tonight, while we’re asleep, and bring you some presents and put them under our tree.”

  “What?” Mulan cried.

  “I know,” I said.

  “How is he going to get in our house?” she asked.

  “Well, he actually . . . he comes down the chimney—y’know, through the fireplace.”

  “What? Why? Why doesn’t he just come through the door?”

  “Because . . . because he’s magic?” I smiled and shrugged.

  “So,” Mulan stated flatly.

  “Well, it’s his traditional way, because he’s magic, and. . . .”

  “But if he’s magic, he could just make the presents appear there, under the tree.”

  “I know, that’s a good point, it’s, it’s . . . just his way,” I scrambled.

  Mulan’s face filled with terror thinking about this. She actually began to shake. “I’m not sleeping alone tonight!” she cried.

  I ended up letting her sleep with me. She had a hard time falling asleep and every sound made her wake and grab for me in fear. There was nothing about it that was fun or good or, least of all, magical. It was all just horrible.

  In the morning, while she was still asleep, I put the presents under the tree. I came into the bedroom and gently woke her. I said, “Let’s go in the living room and see if Santa Claus came!”

  She sucked in a loud and fearful gulp of air. “No!” she yelled. “Mommy, no!” I had to lift her out of the bed, kicking and screaming. I had never seen her so afraid and deeply disturbed.

  The point is: I didn’t do a very good job with Santa Claus.

  Maybe because I felt like such a failure in this department, I began to resent the whole idea of Santa Claus even more. It became so obvious to me that Santa was just a starter god. It was a way to ease a kid into an idea that was to be taken even more seriously later. Think about it: “He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake?” “He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake?” He even looks like the traditional Western image of God, the white hair, the white beard.

  On the other hand, I didn’t want to turn into a curmudgeon (although it might be too late for that).

  Even so, I kept things up for the next two years. At six, Mulan lost a tooth and I realized I was going to have to go through all of this again with the Tooth Fairy. This, too, traumatized Mulan. I explained calmly, “There’s this woman, and if you leave your tooth under your pillow during the night, while you’re sleeping, she will come and take it and leave you money.”

  “What?” Mulan’s eyes bugged out.

  “Yes.”

  Mulan looked at the tooth in her hand, her prized possession. “What does she want the teeth for?” Mulan asked.

  “Well . . . she . . . she . . . I don’t know exactly; she just wants them and she’s willing to pay for them.”

  “She takes the tooth from under my pillow? While I’m asleep?”

  I could see where we were headed.

  “She’s very small, she’s a fairy—a teeny fairy, and she’s going to fly in, by magic—”

  “Like a wasp?”

  I resisted the impulse to say, “No, she’s actually a Catholic.”

  “Well, how much . . . how much does she give you for your tooth?” Mulan looked at her tooth like she didn’t know if she was willing to part with it.

  “I don’t know, fifty cents maybe.”

  “Fifty cents,” Mulan said skeptically. She scrunched up her nose suggesting the question, What can you get for fifty cents?

  “Or a dollar even.” I was upping the price, I hadn’t accounted for inflation. I couldn’t remember what I had gotten. The Tooth Fairy idea was not going over well.

  “I don’t want anyone flying into my room and going under my pillow,” Mulan stated with reason. “If a fairy is coming into my room tonight and going under my pillow, well, that’s scary. So, I’ll do it, but I want to sleep with you.”

  Ah . . . Mulan was always very good at leveraging new information into a bargain for what she really wanted.

  It occurred to me that if Santa Claus was a starter god in general, the Tooth Fairy was the starter god of capitalism. You have something, and someone else wants it. It may be something that you find completely useless, although it has value to someone else.

  So, she did put the tooth under her pillow, but she slept with me and we both went into her room together in the morning to see what had transpired overnight.

  A year or so later, I was sitting in a chair reading the paper and Mulan walked up to me with her hands deliberately behind her back. She said, “What is this?” When she said the word “this” she dramatically revealed a Baggie she’d been hiding behind her back, and waved it in front of my nose.

  I had saved her teeth. I felt odd throwing them away. I figured maybe we’d make earrings out of them, or
buttons for a doll’s dress. I don’t know, something. But at this moment I felt I was on a witness stand. “It appears to be a plastic bag with some small teeth in it.” I stammered.

  “Mom, are you the Tooth Fairy?”

  “Yes,” I said. I wondered for a moment if she thought I was everyone’s Tooth Fairy, the world’s Tooth Fairy, but she didn’t.

  Mulan went on: “You’re the one who took my teeth and gave me the money.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Are you Santa Claus?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  She seemed very proud of herself and I was relieved. I was glad all this nonsense was over.

  But it wasn’t.

  When the next Christmas arrived, Mulan asked, “What if I believe in Santa? If I believe in him, then isn’t he real?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But if you want to believe in Santa, go right ahead.”

  It was a little awkward. She started saying things like, “Oh, I hope Santa knows how good I am!” She wrote a letter to Santa and wanted to actually mail it. I went along with all of it. I felt a little creepy, like we were an old, bored married couple who had to dress up in outfits to spice things up. I pretended with her, but I was gulping back reluctance and grimacing. I kept trying to get myself going, thinking, This is up my alley, I’m an actress, let’s just go for it. But I don’t think I was all that convincing.