Hank notices a pretty nurse and whispers to Steve, “You should ask that nurse out. She could take care of the whole family. I think she’s hot for you.”
But Hank doesn’t know how to whisper, and I’m sure the nurse has heard him, so I look at him wide-eyed and Emmy joins me, and soon we’re all cracking up there in the hospital room at Hank’s faux pas.
The next day Beth comes home. She needs help getting her long white compression hose on, and since this is something I’m fairly experienced at, I go in to help her. In order to have something to say other than how awful her situation is, I bitch about Hank.
“He didn’t even want Emmy to go to that arts school,” I complain.
She sucks her teeth in disgust. We’re the same age, and ragging on Hank has been one thing we can agree on, as if we’re both the younger siblings. She doesn’t sleep well. Neither do I, and in the early morning the two of us are alone in the quiet light of the living room enjoying the hush before everyone else wakes up. She eats a donut and drinks her coffee. Since the return of her cancer, she loves sweets. She’s not exactly watching her weight. In some ways she reminds me of my mother. A lot of things don’t matter when you’re on the precipice. She can’t remember much. She’s not interested in much. She’s become an aficionado of silence.
When we leave there’s still a miniscule thread of hope, but in December Beth dies. Hank Senior has lung cancer and a brain tumor. We stay home that Christmas.
FOUR
ANTHEM
What need have you of further demons?
Figures from your own hells are enough.
(Save us from our minds!)
Dry papers flutter about your feet,
Lifted by poisonous dust.
(Save us from our words!)
Your monsters devour the hills,
The forests are laid low.
The oceans are slowly dying.
(Save us from our works!)
Traced deep in each man’s being
Are the tracks of his transgressions.
For as soon as the wind goeth over it,
It is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more.
Rosalind MacEnulty
An American Requiem
ONE
WINTER 2008
The year 2008 came down on my little family like the Four Horsemen on a rampage. It started all right. I was in my second year of a full-time teaching job. My third novel had just been published, and it was getting good reviews, though, of course, not raking in the big bucks. All my life my dream had been to publish a novel. Now I had three of them and a short story collection. This was the time of my life I needed to be doing whatever it was that writers do to promote their work. I needed to “get out there” and do readings and workshops—something I hadn’t really done for my previous books. So I had two trips scheduled for the spring—one to a conference in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico and another to New England.
In the back of my head I knew that it was risky—planning these trips—but I’d received a local grant to fund both, and I was determined to go. I let my brothers know that I had made my plans and that nothing would stop me from going. Nothing, I insisted. Even if Mom wound up on her deathbed (which I was sure was exactly what was going to happen) I would not alter my plans. I had sacrificed enough. So I bought my airline tickets and waited for the inevitable disaster to strike.
It did, of course. In February.
Mother’s belly had blown up to the size of a basketball, and she constantly complained of constipation. Over the years, I had given her enemas and plied her with laxatives recommended by the doctor, but her large intestine simply didn’t have the power to do its job. This time she was backed up so badly that Roto-Rooter couldn’t have helped us out. And the doctor wasn’t sure what was going on with that enormous pregnant-looking belly. So it was time to go back to the hospital.
At first she charms everyone there. One of the doctors, an elderly Jamaican man, is smitten and tells me what an intelligent woman she is, how much he enjoys chatting with her. But this little honeymoon ends soon.
They are going to flush my mother out. They need me to stay there and make sure she drinks several gallons of Drano. Already my mother’s fabled intelligence is getting murky. Hospitals have that effect on old people, I am told. I sit at her side and say, “Drink up, Mom.” Mother balks, of course. Who wouldn’t? But she has to drink it all, and I keep after her for several hours till it’s all gone. Then we wait for the inevitable eruption.
I won’t go into the details. Suffice to say the toilet is never as close as it needs to be, and not only do I become a medical professional, but I also serve as janitor.
That should be the end, right? But it isn’t. My mother makes the mistake of letting the nurses know that she is in pain. Well, she’s always in pain. Because the doctor nicked a nerve in her back during her spinal operation, now her brain has gotten locked onto the idea of pain. This is a trick that brains do though I won’t fully understand this till later when a friend explains that the same thing happened to her sister. So my mother is in constant pain. In hospitals they don’t like pain. I understand this. Why should anyone be in pain if it’s unnecessary? We have the technology to get rid of it. A little visit from Sister Morphine and all your cares slide under the table to sing about dead roses. And they always think they’re doing you a favor by giving you just a little extra bump. Oh, wouldn’t the junkie I once was have loved these folks?
So they start to give her morphine, which does not put her to sleep. Instead my mother goes from being an outspoken witty old woman to a deranged madwoman. I must be loony myself because I actually go home one night to try to get some sleep.
The phone rings at two thirty in the morning.
“Will you come do something about your mother? We can’t handle her,” the nurse says.
“Yeah, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” I roll out of bed, put on my jeans and shirt and head out the door.
In my mother’s hospital room, I settle on a little plastic-covered reclining chair and try to drift back to sleep, but she won’t be quiet. She’s babbling about how guilty she feels and how sorry she is and not really meaning it because she’s out of her head, and finally I growl at her, “Would you shut up! Just shut up!”
A nurse walks in at this very instant and stares at me in horror. I am rather notorious among those few who have heard this particular verbalization come from deep in the back of my throat. Emmy says, with a touch of admiration, that it is the scariest sound she’s ever heard. I used it once to quiet some unruly girls on a choir trip, and she has never forgotten it. Just as it worked on the choir girls, it works on my mother, but I’m sure the nurse thinks I am an awful daughter. Yes, damn it, sometimes I am. But Mother will never remember this transgression.
At least I get a little bit of peace. Finally it’s 6:30 a.m. and I can head to the cafeteria for something to eat. My mother is finally out of it. The food offerings in a hospital cafeteria are not particularly appetizing; I get some scrambled eggs and a biscuit and sink down in a booth in the deserted room. I’m mechanically ingesting the food when my cell phone buzzes. It’s Hank.
“Hello?” I say.
“Yeah, I’ve called the paramedics and need to know which hospital to go to,” he says.
“Come again?”
“My blood pressure has skyrocketed, and I feel bad. I’m all shaky. The paramedics are on their way and I’m probably going to have to go to the hospital. Which one do I go to?”
“Good Lord. Go to the one in Pineville,” I tell him. It’s not the same hospital where my mother is, but she has a different insurance policy than we do. “I’ll come by on my way to school.” I spend the day bouncing from one hospital to the other and somehow manage to teach my classes as well.
Hank comes home that night with a list of different doctors to see. My mother, on the other hand, spends ten days in the hospital and is much worse at the end of those ten days than when she
went in. She’s had a colonoscopy and every kind of test known to humankind, but they can find nothing seriously wrong with her. She is simply old and the plumbing doesn’t work anymore. But now she’s caught infections and something has gone really wrong with her brain. She seems to be in such misery that I actually wish for her death. She can’t understand why she is still alive. And I am helpless to do anything for her.
“This is so awful,” she says over and over.
One of the nurses insists that he has to give her the full dose of morphine that the doctor has prescribed, which is nuts. The morphine has sent her into another dimension. She doesn’t need that much, I try to tell him. You can give less than the doctor orders, just not more. This isn’t penicillin, for God’s sake. It’s morphine. I manage to win this battle but something bad has happened to my mother’s brain.
She is somehow still alive at the end of this ordeal. The hospital, however, is through with her. They’ve done their worst, and now it is time for her to leave. She is heading back to the nursing home where she was last year. But now the insurance rules have changed and I’m looking at the possibility of a bill that will make me a pauper. Still, there is no choice. And no matter what, I’m going to Mexico in another week.
I visit her every day at the nursing home and stay for hours. She has infections. She can no longer form complete sentences. She spends a half hour trying to tell me about her problem with the telephone. There is no phone. In spite of her condition, I am determined not to cancel my trip to Mexico. My brother Jo and his girlfriend come to Charlotte to relieve me of my duties. I get on a plane and I am gone.
In Mexico I sleep a lot. Hal and Lynda live in a beautiful five-story apartment. Each story consists of a single room. I am ensconced on the bottom floor on a futon mattress. It’s comfortable. I am surrounded by books, and I lose myself for hours in someone else’s words, someone else’s woes.
In San Miguel Vitamin D is plentiful, church bells ring often and randomly, dogs bay, pigeons worry about the sheen of their feathers, and bread smells slide over the balcony ledge to place a calming hand on my shoulder.
In Charlotte my life is a litany of despair. Hank and I lie next to each other trading our tales of woe, calculating the calories of grief in our daily diet. My mother can no longer defecate, I tell him. Hank counters that his father’s brain is riddled with cancer like Swiss cheese. And then we list the others gone or going—his sister, my friends, his coworker, my professor. We are paralyzed, and only our tongues can move obsessively, tolling the bad news.
In San Miguel de Allende I don’t tell Lynda the details of my life. This is not a conscious decision, but simply a response to the unwritten code of Paradise. Leave those shit-filled diapers back in the nursing home. Do not defile the sanctity of this crystalline dream with the tales of your endless tears.
In Charlotte my colleagues at school wheel toward me, their faces compositions of concern when I enter our wing of cubicles. They know that I am a bloodied soldier. I don’t volunteer a lot but I am not prone to lying either. “Fine” is no longer part of my vocabulary. I keep the bulletins short. My coworkers nod sympathetically, realizing that sympathy is pointless. It does nothing, and “talking about it” provides no relief.
Lynda is my mentor/soul sister/friend and literary mother. Hal is her cranky but kind poet husband, who adores her. Lynda and I talk only about books. A salve on my blistered psyche. This is what sympathy would enviously love to be. I realize in a rare moment of self-satisfaction that I have chosen my friends well. This kind of friendship is not earned. It is a kind of grace. A friendship administered so gently it doesn’t infect you. This friendship helps you become light, light as that vermilion flycatcher tossing about on the currents of air, barely clinging with its clawed toes to the topmost cedar branch. I want to be lighter still, like the quiet haze resting on the hills, pale and almost empty, absorbing smoke, filtering sunlight, nestling an insubstantial cheek on a warm white wall.
San Miguel de Allende is every gringa’s dream: cobblestone streets, galleries, parks, crimson birds flitting about in branches of gargantuan trees. I eat well, I read voraciously, I watch the Oscars with Lynda and Hal and their friends. We meet writers and artists. At a lovely outdoor garden restaurant, while an insipid musician croons Jimmy Buffet songs, a poet flirts with me, and I flirt back. We meet a sculptor and his painter wife, who invite us to come by for drinks and marijuana, of all things. We decline. Once as we are walking, Lynda and I stop to read a sign listing upcoming twelvestep meetings. One is for sex and love addicts.
“That used to be me but not anymore,” Lynda says. “Disgusting.”
And we laugh till the tears stream down our cheeks. Our sexfilled stories and voracious concupiscent characters bound us together when we first met. But things change, don’t they? And we can’t help but lapse into hilarity at the notion of our old voracious selves.
I could stay here, I’m thinking, and never go back. Then my cell phone rings insistently. It’s Hank.
“I’m in the hospital in Atlanta,” he says.
I’m silent.
“I was in the airport waiting for my connection, and my blood pressure spiked again. I don’t think I can handle this thing with my parents.”
Hank is supposed to be going to California to work with a TV company on the LA Marathon and then stay and take care of his dad while his mother goes into the hospital for a perforated colon.
“Call me when you get to California,” I tell him.
The next day he calls again.
“You need to come to California. My blood pressure is hitting the roof. My dad is probably dying and my mother has got to go to the hospital. Dad refuses to go to hospice.”
No, I’m thinking, I need to go home. I need to get back to my own mother. She can’t be alone in that place after my brother leaves. But really, there is no question, no debate here. Hank has not asked for a lot these past years. And now he needs me. My heart is resolute. My mother will have to cope without me. I am going to California. The company that hired Hank has offered to pay for my ticket.
The next day I am flying into Los Angeles with Arlo Guthrie’s voice in my head: “Bringing in a couple of keys.” Yeah, I’m thinking, a key to my house and one to my mom’s. That’s all the keys I’ve got.
When Hank picks me up at LAX, we have a short reprieve. His mother is not going into the hospital for a couple of days and the company he works for has booked him a room at the Sheraton Universal. That night we wander over to Universal City in search of food. What a culture shock after the sweet naturalness of San Miguel. It’s like a sensory rape, like entering a comic book world, like a funhouse on steroids. IMAX cinemas! Mechanical bull riding! Bungee dives! Fun dining!
We get out as quickly as possible to head to downtown Burbank, which has, of late, become the trendiest place on the planet. Throngs of teenagers and tourists spill over the streets. But it’s downright mellow after Universal City. We wind up in a Thai restaurant where the plates are square and black and the food is, let’s face it, superb.
It’s comforting to be with him. We don’t talk much. We don’t need to. We know each other so well. Somehow my presence helps settle his blood pressure, and I feel calmer around him, too. Though we have our fights over money and politics, we also enjoy each other’s company. Briefly we can forget about everything else and be the same two people we were twenty-five years ago when our biggest worry was where we would eat dinner that night and what kind of wine we would get.
The next day we head down behind the Orange Curtain to La Brea. We enter the maw of homogeneous corporate America and find a world of identical chain stores and restaurants, beckoning us to eat and buy. Hank’s parents live in a ranch house in a manicured subdivision. His father retired in his forties and spent his days playing golf, watching television, and listening to talk radio. That life is over.
Hank Senior is back in the bedroom when we get there. When I see him, I am floored. His head is swollen wi
th fluid and he cannot stand without a walker. The last time I saw him—six months earlier—he looked the same as he always had, same trim, compact body and head full of dark hair. He didn’t look like he was approaching eighty. He looked like he’d just qualified for Social Security.
“It’s the chemo,” Jean tells us.
The next day she has to check into the hospital and she’s worried about the “prep” medicines she has to take—with good reason. They wipe her out. No way can she help Hank Senior to the bathroom. Suddenly my Hank is their caretaker, helping one parent and then the other. The look on his face is of a man in a war zone, and I’m reminded of the one time we went to Nicaragua. We were exploring Managua, which was not such a smart thing to do after dark, and we realized a car was slowly following us as we walked along the darkened streets. We knew we were in danger, but we didn’t panic. We headed straight for the hotel like we were on a mission and somehow we made it back to our lonesome bottles of rum unscathed.
I try to help, but mostly I’m there for moral support.
The next day, Hank’s duties have changed. Hank and his brother have finally convinced Hank Senior he needs to go to hospice. They take him to the same house where their sister died just a few months earlier. Jean is now in the hospital, getting ready for surgery. And with the immediate caregiving crisis over, Hank and I find ourselves alone in the house.
And this time we panic. We are not supposed to be alone in this house. This house is supposed to be filled with people, with the smell of cooking foods, with the sounds of television and radio. We aren’t even supposed to be in this house at this time of year. Where are the two children? Where is the dog we usually bring? Neither of us can swallow. Breathing becomes difficult.
I’m remembering one Christmas before Beth got sick. On Christmas Eve I sat down with Jean as she opened up the cupboards of the past and hauled out one family member after another, showing me pictures and mementos. She told me about the six children from Russia, the eight who were born here, the aunt who was a dwarf, and the uncle who died of rheumatic fever when he was seventeen.
Wait Until Tomorrow Page 14