Wait Until Tomorrow

by Pat MacEnulty

  The attendant, busy eating her dinner, has no idea where I might find a wheelchair. “Just borrow one from that room over there,” she says and points vaguely. I find one, but it doesn’t have footrests, so my mother has to hold up her weak legs. As soon as I wheel her in, I whisper in her ear: “One night. That’s it.” I leave her on a cot-sized bed in a small, closed-in room with two other invalids, go home and lie in my big comfortable queen bed unable to shut my eyes.

  The next day, as soon as my classes are over, I head to the nursing home, pack up my mother’s belongings and abscond with her back to the apartment—AMA, against medical advice. Using the walker, she is able to get from room to room. The nursing home experience has been enormously restorative. She’ll do anything to avoid going back there.

  When I finally get home late that night, Hank and Emmy ask when they might get a chance to spend some time with me again. I shrug. I’ve developed a rash right over those deep worry lines between my eyebrows. The rash looks like the letter A on my forehead. I’m reminded of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Am I an adulteress or does the A merely stand for “Anxiety”?

  I sleep deeply that night, hoping that in the dark place I can suckle at the life source and replenish my depleted soul. The next morning when I call my mother, she tells me she is all right.

  “I’ll be there in a little while,” I say. I have some bills to pay, laundry to do: the little things without which our lives spin out of control.

  I move slowly, but finally I am ready to leave. Then the phone rings. I pick it up and hear her desperate cry: “Where are you? I’m very sick!”

  I cannot help myself. I put the phone down, and a scream escapes from my lungs. And another scream and another.

  “Call your brothers, or I will,” Hank demands. I call Jo, and twenty-four hours later I meet him at the Greyhound station and fall crying into his arms.

  EIGHT

  ONE MONTH LATER

  Jo stays for a couple of weeks, and during that time I spend all my time with Hank and Emmy. I’m like a starving person at a banquet. I can’t get enough of them. But then he goes back to St. Louis, and I start my juggling act all over again.

  “If only you could clone yourself,” my mother says sympathetically. Though she sometimes seems oblivious, in actuality she is often aware of being burdensome.

  About a month after my mother’s ordeal at the hospital, I get a phone call.

  “Ma’am,” a paramedic tells me. “Your mother has fallen, and we’re taking her to the hospital. We think she might have broken or twisted her ankle.”

  It’s night, and I’m already in one of Hank’s old T-shirts getting ready to crawl into my bed.

  “Should I come to the hospital?”

  “Ma’am, she’s probably going to be in the emergency room for a while. You can wait till the morning when they check her in.” My body is only too ready to comply.

  I should have known better. I should have gone over to my mother’s apartment and stopped them from taking her to the hospital.

  Instead I tumble into the comforting embrace of my bed.

  After a fitful night, I get up around six, dress, and head to the hospital. Mother has only just then been put in a room. She is dopey from morphine, but there are no broken bones. At least nothing that the X-ray showed. And this is another point at which I could have said, fine, I’ll take her home now. But we are conditioned to do what people in scrubs tell us to do.

  “We want to do an MRI just to make sure there are no fractures that the X-ray missed,” a nurse tells me. “Is your mother claustrophobic?”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “We’ll give her something to calm her down.”

  A half hour later, I’m reaching into the MRI machine clutching my mother’s hands as the damn MRI bangs like a berserk bongo drum round our ears. The nurse has asked me to try to keep her from thrashing around in the narrow cylinder or else the pictures won’t come right and we’ll never get her out of there.

  “Help me!” my mother screams over the clattering noise.

  “Damn it, you’re not being tortured, Mom,” I hiss in the brief moment of silence between pictures.

  “Please, can we go?” she whimpers.

  “No, Mom. It’s only a few more minutes.”

  Back in the room, after the MRI, my mother tries to pull out her catheter and her IV. She tries to get up and walk without a walker. She tells me I need to call Suzy. Who the hell is Suzy?

  I stay vigilant, telling her firmly, “You can’t get out of bed, don’t touch your damn tubes, and no, you can’t call Suzy.”

  Halfway through the hellish afternoon my mother assumes her choir director’s voice. She informs the room, empty except for me, that we will perform some wonderful songs and the first one will be “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

  “Ready, everybody. One, two, three, four . . .” Silence. She grimaces. “Come on, everybody, now. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four . . .”

  So I pipe up in my wobbly soprano, “I’ll be seeing you in all the old, familiar places. Dadadadadadadada.” My voice fades. My mother smiles indulgently and says, “That won’t do.”

  Finally the nurses put an alarm on Mom’s bed and promise to watch so I can go home and get some sleep. She calls me at five thirty the next morning. “They’re so cruel here. They won’t feed me,” she wails. The hard edge of my voice cuts through the dim morning as I observe that it isn’t time for breakfast yet.

  “You are cruel, too,” she says and hangs up.

  An hour later when I arrive at the hospital, she is happily eating breakfast.

  The doctors find nothing wrong with my mother—no breaks or fractures, but these couple of days in the hospital have completely debilitated her and now they want her to go back into a “skilled nursing facility.” This time I spend the day investigating my options. I find a place that is decent, but there’s no getting around the horror of these places—the abandoned people consigned to their wheelchairs, drool dripping down their chins as they wait for death.

  Mom is situated in the rehab wing on a plastic-mattressed bed near a window. I hook up her Bose radio for some entertainment, put her name on all her clothes, and slip her a couple of pain pills before I leave. I hate to leave her there, but I am tired as hell. On the way home, as I pass the dark fields, I cry. I am missing my boon companion, my bosom buddy, my best friend, my kid.

  When I get home, Emmy isn’t there. I call her cell phone and find out she is having dinner with a friend. I suggest that I pick her up from the restaurant and we go to Target to get a bathing suit for her trip to the beach the next day.

  “Sure,” she says.

  I find her by the fountain in front of the restaurant with her friend.

  “Are you telling her about the time you fell in?” I ask, remembering the dripping wet child who came to find me in the restaurant one day aeons ago.

  “Yes,” she says with a laugh. She hugs her friend goodbye.

  We head over to Target where the collection of suits is especially NOT cute this year, but we don’t have time to go anywhere else. My daughter holds up a bathing suit top covered with ruffles and says, “I so want ruffles.” This causes us to laugh so hard that she collapses to the floor and I am doubled over, wiping tears from my eyes.

  And as we laugh, something inside me that is stiff and black begins to soften and glow again. This is my life, I realize. I have no choice but to let it sweep me out to its dark waters. Acceptance equals mercy. Even if it’s only temporary.

  In her bleak little room in the nursing home, my mother draws an o from the bag. I get a u, so she goes first. The word she puts down is codas. We are seated across a rolling bed table. My mother has often told me that this part of her life is her coda. I have discovered that she is not having one coda but several.

  I have just put down the word news on a triple word score, tacking the s on to the word tough when I hear a faint, plaintive cry: “Help me. Please someone, help me!” In th
e nursing facility, you will find odd lumps of bruised flesh with dull eyes parked in wheelchairs in the hallways. Occasionally, one of them will ask you, “Will you please tell me where we are?”

  I am afraid to answer that call, afraid I will be confronted with my own helplessness. But I can’t stop myself. I have to find the source of that plea. I get up and look down the hallway as Mom searches for a word among her seven letters. The hallway is empty. So I peek into the bathroom my mother shares with the two women in the room next door and find a white-haired lady in a wheelchair facing the toilet, desperate to get her rear end across the chasm and onto the toilet. My fear dissipates.

  “Let me help you,” I tell her. Perhaps I shouldn’t help. After all, I’m not a professional here. What if the woman gets hurt? But although the staff here is generally competent, they have many patients and little time. It seems more expedient and frankly kinder just to help her myself. Besides, I have learned in recent years how to get an old woman onto and off of a toilet.

  So I help the woman, lifting her under the arm the way I lift my own mother, helping her maneuver around.

  “It hurts,” she says.

  “I know it does,” I tell her.

  A strong, vile odor lets me know that the woman has already messed her diaper. (They all wear diapers in the nursing home.) But I am unprepared for the stench as she lowers her diaper to her knees and drops clumsily onto the toilet seat. I am unprepared for the black tarry mess filling the cup of the diaper. I help her remove the soiled garment, deposit it in the trash can and quickly leave the room to get another diaper. I also have to stop my stomach from hurling up the vegetable lo mein I have just shared with my mom because the nursing home food is so bad she won’t eat it. I suck in some air from my mother’s room as she looks at me, wonderingly.

  “Be right back,” I tell her and grab a diaper from her own bag. In the bathroom, the toilet is filled with black goo. I wonder how anyone can have that in their body and still be alive. But with my queasiness under control, I use wet paper towels to wipe between the soft jiggling buttocks of the old woman, trying to get the sticky black shit off her pale skin.

  “You are such a kind person,” she says to me over and over. I don’t know about that, but I do find that these small acts of kindness I get to perform add a certain dimension to my life that had not been there before.

  On Sunday, Emmy and I go to see Mom. We take her outside to sit in the courtyard sun. Mom wants to go home. She is scheduled to stay until Thursday, which is as long as the insurance will pay for.

  “How about Tuesday?” I ask her.

  “That’s fine.”

  “I’ll make the arrangements.”

  On Tuesday, March 20, my mother’s eighty-ninth birthday, I go to Harris Teeter to buy a cake and ice cream. A drunk woman in front of me is trying to buy a six-pack of Smirnoff Ice. Martha, the cashier, leans over and asks in her kindest voice, “Are you sure you want to get this now?”

  The woman, a blond with disheveled hair, an expensive purse, and cute shoes, mumbles that she knows she has the money for it. Martha exhales in relief when it turns out the woman doesn’t have a wallet. She pats her on the hand and says, “You can come back later, honey.”

  The woman leaves, confused and disappointed. As I watch her wander away with her eyes cast downward, I feel a sense of my own remembered shame—the years when I took pills, drank tequila, injected myself with almost anything I could cram into the barrel of a needle.

  Martha turns her attention to me and says, “The Good Lord is watching out for that lady today. I sure didn’t want to sell her any liquor.”

  I nod, pay for my things, and tell Martha that today is my mother’s birthday—that makes Martha smile.

  When I go to pick up my mother, she’s sitting up in her wheelchair, hair combed, lips sticked, and eyes bright. When my mother is happy, she radiates it. She’s all packed and ready to go like a kid coming home from a dreadful summer camp. She’s made friends, of course, and they hate to see her go.

  “Your mama is one smart lady,” the woman from the room next door tells me. To my mother, “You be good, okay. Don’t get in any trouble.”

  When I get her home, Sylvia (who I finally realize was the “Suzy” she needed to call at the hospital) comes by. I had called her the night before and said we’d be having some cake and ice cream. She promised to spread the word. By seven o’clock the small living room is filled with my mother’s friends, all eating Harris Teeter’s finest red velvet cake with vanilla ice cream. Mom plays “Happy Birthday” on the black Steinway in a variety of styles from classical to boogie-woogie to a solemn “church” style, making everyone laugh. Then they tell church jokes. Mom tells one about the little girl who was making noise at church until her older sister told her to be quiet: “Can’t you see people are trying to sleep?”

  Then she tells a story. “During high school I was playing the organ—for money!—and conducting a choir, and was the accompanist for the New Haven Light Opera Guild. It could have been one of their rehearsal nights, and they served orange blossoms after the rehearsals. I just thought it was the best orange juice I ever had and took two glasses, and promptly went to sleep. They had forgotten that I was just a child, really, and there were multiple abject apologies when my mother came to get me. However, it did not lead to a life of drinking,” she says.

  Her friends laugh and tell stories of their own.

  There aren’t many night owls at her place, so by about the time the vernal equinox has passed at 8:37 p.m., most everyone has gone home. After Bill, Nancy, Art, and Mark straggle out, my mother looks at me and says, “I don’t know when I’ve been so happy.”

  I lean down and wrap my arms around her tiny frame.

  “Goodnight, Mom,” I tell her. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  NINE

  SPRING AND SUMMER 2007

  In spite of its painful beginning, a few small miracles occur in 2007. The first is that the marital intimacy I thought was dead and buried rolls the stone from the tomb and shows up in my doorway wearing her Easter Sunday frock. I’m not sure how it happens. For several years now, Hank’s pals—you know them: Bill, Sean, and Rush—have been warning Hank from their cable news thrones about the commie in the house. Every couple of years I go to the polls and single-handedly corrupt America’s youth, undermine the principles of liberty, and seek to force millionaires to give up their hard-earned money and hand it over to shiftless welfare mothers. And like all other traitorous Democrats, I am secretly hoping that every pregnant woman will run out and have an abortion even if she’s eight and a half months along. But at some point, Hank turns off his television and decides that I may be a commie, but I’m his commie. Throughout the years of conflict we still maintained an affectionate relationship, but now we’re spending time together again, and for the first time in years, I think that we might make it. We’re laughing again. Dare I say, we’re happy.

  The other thing that happens is that my spiritual life takes a new direction. Early in the year a woman named Cheryl comes to me with a book she wants edited; it’s about her experiences with a spiritual teacher called Sadhguru. The story is fascinating. All my life I’ve wanted to meet an enlightened being and it looks like I might soon have my chance. But what really piques my interest is the story Cheryl tells me of Sadhguru’s wife who simply chose to leave life behind. She wanted transcendence all the time and she made it happen. That’s what I want—a key to unlock the door that keeps us here. I do not want to live as long as my mother has lived. The Etruscans believed that the perfect life lasts eighty-four years. That’s long enough for me, I’m thinking. I mean, maybe with technology they’ll be able to have us feeling like we’re thirty when we’re ninety, but I’m not counting on that. What I don’t want is to wind up in one of those nursing homes in a fetal position unable to walk or read a book or laugh. So after I edit the book, I decide I’ll take one of this man’s workshops. I’ll see if there’s anything to this y
oga practice he teaches.

  But first we have a pressing issue. Emmy is a junior in high school, and college is looming ahead of us. The college search freaks me out. When do we start looking? Where? The college advisors warn that Emmy’s top picks might not be achievable because of her inconsistent grades. She never could get the hang of that getthe-homework-in-on-time thing. Teachers couldn’t get a handle on her: Was she ADD? Did she harbor a buried genius that made periodic eruptions? Was she lazy? Her photography teacher, however, knew. He said she was talented and smart and would eventually be fine.

  One weekend, Emmy and I drive west to check out the colleges that are within a three-hour radius. The trip is fun. We sneak away from one college tour because it’s so boring it makes us want to weep. After ruling out a couple of possibilities and keeping one option open, we are traveling back home under a bruised sky when my cell phone rings.

  It’s my mother.

  “Where are you?” she wants to know.

  “I’m on the road, Mom, with Emmy. We’ve just been to look at some colleges.”

  “Then you won’t be coming over tonight?”

  “No, I’m almost two hours away, and I’ve been driving all day.”

  Then she starts to cry.

  After I hang up, Emmy is practically apoplectic.

  “I’m the kid! You’re my mother! Can’t she even let us go look at colleges?”

  I reach over and run a hand along her arm.

  “I know, baby. I know. It’s just that she’s lonely.”

  Emmy crosses her arms and stares out the window as Simon and Garfunkel sing us back home.

  Like all the good middle-class folk, we go to the college fairs and that’s where Emmy and I make a fabulous discovery. The University of North Carolina has a school of the arts with a drama program for high school seniors, and it’s free for North Carolina residents.