by Tilda Shalof
Right then and there, I wanted to tell her that I loved her, but couldn’t make my mouth form the words and I said nothing. Then she said she was tired, so I helped her over to the couch to lie down for a rest.
MY PARENTS WERE BOTH widows with young children when they met. My mother had been married to a New York lawyer, and one snowy evening while driving home, his De Soto turned over into a ditch. He died a few days later in the hospital.
“Overnight, I became a widow with two young songs – I mean sons,” she told me once and giggled helplessly at her slip of the tongue.
One year later, Harry Shalof, also a widower, but fifteen years older than she and with a son of his own, started coming backstage at the concerts she gave, such as a fundraiser for the synagogue or an evening of Christmas carols in the church. A few months later they married and settled down in a sleepy little town in rural Pennsylvania where they had me. My father worked in a dry cleaning plant and my mother stayed at home, substituting lullabies for arias.
But in the early sixties, as the Vietnam War escalated, my father felt a growing horror and shame. He decided to pack up and seek haven in reasonable, peaceful Canada. He also wanted to protect his sons from being drafted into the army. He moved us all to Toronto, where he continued to watch the conflict every night on TV. “War has become the American way,” he lamented. “I could not stay.” My father found a job as a dry cleaning salesman and drove all around the city and outlying suburbs, his car loaded up with pressing irons, jugs of chemicals, and plastic bags. In the evenings, after work, he loved to cook rich, strange foods, take night courses at the university for the “mature” student, and in his spare time was writing a book about stain removal entitled Out, Damn Spot!
MY MOTHER’S ILLNESS crept over her slowly. For a long time I had had an inkling something was wrong with her mind, but now something was definitely wrong with her body. Which was worse? By the time I was eight years old, I knew for sure she was sick, both inside and out. I wondered if she would die and how I would feel if she did. I felt there might be some advantages to me if she did die, but of course, I told myself, I didn’t want her to. Of course not.
“Sometimes your mother needs a bit of help with her ADL,“ explained my father on days when he asked me to stay home from school to help her. By then I knew the medical jargon for the “Activities of Daily Living.” ADL meant, for example, going to the bathroom. To get her there, I walked backwards, facing her while she held on to my forearms for balance and momentum. I waited outside the door, listening for when she was done, and then went in to get her. She also needed a boost getting up from the couch or a prod to start moving from a standing position. Sometimes she would even break into a run of a few tiny steps and then stop abruptly, as if someone had yelled, “Freeze!” I was there to catch her when she fell, which happened often. For no apparent reason, she would stumble or trip over nothing at all and crumple to the floor.
“I can’t seem … to get my balance.” She clutched the air as I pulled her up from the kitchen floor one time. “I’m having an off day.”
Most of the time, she lay on the couch, spilling over the edges. When she stood up, it was strange to see her vertical. In every moment, with every movement, I was with her. I knew her feelings, her very thoughts. When she was sad, I was sad. When her spirits lifted, my heart soared. It felt cruel to be happy around her, as if I was mocking her, so I tried not to be too energetic or flaunt my robust health in front of her.
“There are days when I can hardly manage to create a sound and other days when I feel miraculously reborn,” she told me.
Some days she seemed to cast off her illness. “Let’s go window shopping,” she might say, her voice suddenly audible. “How about a drive in the country? I feel on top of the world.” She held her head high and let loose with a few blasts of song. “No one can even tell there’s anything wrong with me!”
By the next day she’d be sunk into the couch. “I’m not on today,” she’d say. “It’s an off day.”
She was a light switch!
“It’s the well-documented ‘on-off syndrome,’” my father said. He had begun subscribing to medical journals.
But there began to be more off days than on. Days when she couldn’t get out of bed and I stood beside her doling out her blue and yellow pills, holding a glass of water to her lips as she took them one by one, with long sighs in between each swallow.
When she spoke, you could hardly hear her. When she sang, she made the plates and cutlery jump on the table. Her hands trembled when she dialled the telephone, yet her handshake was powerful. She toppled over at the slightest disturbance like when the toast popped up or when the carpet gave off a crackle of static electricity. And at night, I knelt beside her and talked to her to calm her nerves and checked to make sure she was breathing. She fell asleep easily, but in the morning she always said how tired she was. It was as if sleeping exhausted her and being awake made her sick.
Let me switch with you. I’ll be the sick one and you can be the healthy one. I can handle it.
My two older brothers David and Stephen kept their distance, but Robbie demanded answers. “Why do you lie down so much?” He stood looming over her where she lay, mired in the couch.
“I am tired but when I sing, I feel as light as a bird.”
“Why did you have to get sick?”
“Believe me,” she said behind closed eyes, “it wasn’t my intention.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Robbie, stop pestering your mother.” My father intervened. “She needs to rest.”
His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean by that? Why don’t you ever tell that to Tilda?”
“Tilda is your mother’s nurse. She takes care of her.”
Robbie had many questions, but if my father asked him, “Where are you going after school?” or “Will you be home for dinner?” he would answer with a scowl. Robbie cut classes, shoplifted, and got sent to the principal’s office for swearing or smoking cigarettes. Usually he told me to get lost, but sometimes he wanted me to be with him all day and all night. “Til, you’re the best sister anyone could ever have. I need you to stay close because I’m worried about my mind.” He sat on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands. “I am ill,” he said grimly. “Quite ill. Do not underestimate the quiteness of that ill.”
I placed my palm on his forehead as if to take his temperature. I had no idea how to help him other than to love him. My father was busy with my mother’s illness and couldn’t take on more worries. David and Stephen went away to university and as soon as Robbie finished high school, he ran away and no one knew where. He wrote to me from Chicago, San Francisco, and then London, England. A few years later, he landed up in Israel, which seemed like a strange place to find peace, but there he seemed to, for a time, until he moved on to other ports of call.
“DON’T GO TO SCHOOL,” my mother said one day that fall. “Stay home with me. I need you.” She stretched out her arms to me. “I feel better when you are here.” I had been missing a lot of school, but my teachers didn’t seem to mind. I lay down beside my mother on my parents’ rumpled bed, and we watched TV and ate marsh-mallows. In the afternoon, I got up and walked around aimlessly, feeling homesick. The house was dark, messy, and had a sour, musty smell. Stacks of old newspapers were piled up and there were dusty books everywhere. I couldn’t wait to grow up and leave home like my brothers. I went into the bathroom and examined myself in the mirror. Looking back at me was just a sad, ordinary girl.
“Brown hair, green eyes. Average height and weight,” the school nurse had recorded on my chart that I snuck a peek at. “Well-nourished. Brushes her teeth correctly.”
“Shy. Introverted,” the school’s guidance counsellor had written in my file that I read upside down, from the other side of his desk. “Quiet and helpful.”
“What do I look like?” I went back to the bed and asked my mother.
“Du bist wie eine Blume,” she trilled,
clasping her hands to her heart.
But I didn’t want to be a blossom, or a ray of sunshine, nor a star from the heavens above. I did not want to be an angel or a nurse. I wanted to be a normal girl with a normal mother.
I got back on the bed beside her and resumed my ongoing project of plucking out tufts of chenille nap from their olive-coloured bedspread while watching Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, and my favourite, Dr. Ben Casey. He was a neurosurgeon, played by the gorgeous heartthrob Vince Edwards. The opening always gave me chills when a disembodied hand appeared on the screen and wrote the following symbols while a solemn voiceover intoned the words: “man , woman , birth *, death †, and infinity ∞.” I sat, my eyes riveted to the screen, fingering the bedspread threads and pretending they were the dark chest hairs sticking out of the collar of Dr. Casey’s white shirt, always open by one or two buttons. That open shirt showed his maverick spirit as he battled brain tumours and aneurysms and rebelled against the conservative medical establishment that tried to rein him in. He didn’t suffer fools gladly and was gruff and demanding, but he was a dreamboat and besides, he had to be cruel to be kind, didn’t he? He dared to perform complicated operations that no one else would touch, even risking his own life once when he accidentally contaminated himself with a patient’s needle. Gentle Nurse Wills was always at his side to soften the blow and to wipe the sweat from his brow during long operations. She was there, too, after hours, to help him take his mind off things, at least until the episode when he fell in love with a patient who had been in a coma for thirteen years, but awoke looking more beautiful than ever, every hair in place and her make-up on!
As soon as my mother fell asleep, I went out and walked to Shopper’s Drug Mart. Once, I had noticed there large plastic bottles of big pink capsules filled with white gelatine powder, guaranteed to strengthen brittle fingernails. I bought a bottle and returned home. In the bathroom I emptied each capsule into the sink. I wrote messages on tiny marijuana rolling-papers I found in one of my brothers’ rooms and inserted each one into an empty capsule. “Time for your medicine,” I said, handing her one along with a glass of the purple loganberry juice that she loved. “Just what the doctor ordered. Miracle pills.” I opened one and read it to her. “Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.” Others read, “You Can Do It!” or “Keep on Truckin’” or “Every Day, in Every Way, You Are Getting Better.” She was so excited she wanted to open them all, but I told her not to overdo it; she’d had enough for one day.
A few hours later, my father came home and got busy making dinner. I sat at the kitchen table and lost myself in the crazy whirling wallpaper that depicted jars of pickles, mustards and relishes, ham hocks and lamb chops, sheaves of wheat, and fruits and vegetables from every vine, tree, and bush, bursting forth out of straw cornucopias. My father heaved pots and frying pans onto the stove and soon his head became enveloped in a cloud of steam that fogged his glasses. Pots splattered and spluttered onto the enamel surface, and as he tasted from each one, he told me about his day. “If the customer doesn’t tell the dry cleaner about the stain, they can’t treat it. Home remedies are merely first aid, but dry cleaning saves the patient. Guess, what’s the most stubborn stain?”
“Ink?”
“It’s mustard!” he exclaimed. “It takes a lot of know-how to dry clean fabrics, and that’s where Regal Sales excels. We’ve got the best products on the market.” He went to get my mother and brought her to the kitchen, and we propped her up at the table. “Come on, Ellie, sit up straight!” he coached. He set bowls of steaming rice and chop suey in front of us. “Kung Hei Fat Choy,” he said to welcome the Chinese New Year. “First, let’s check your progress today.” He flipped through the notes I’d made about whether my mother had done her exercises, what her heart rate and blood pressure had been, and if she had cried. He was pleased with her day. “Now, let’s eat.”
There were very few rules in our family, but one of them was chopsticks.
“Here Ellie, let me get you started.” He positioned them in her hand.
“I’m sorry I’m so slow.” My mother tried to grip the chopsticks, but they slithered away.
“Hold the top one like a pencil. That’s it! Move it up and down. You’ll get it.”
But I could see that she couldn’t grasp a thing so I moved my chair closer to hers and made a napkin into a bib and tied it around her neck. The chopsticks slipped out of her fingers and clattered to the floor. “No, Tilda, she can’t give up,” I heard my father say as I bent down to pick them up. I decided to stay down there awhile. Crouched under the kitchen table, I began to dream up a plan. I decided that if I would be a devoted and gentle nurse, the kindest, most attentive nurse possible, in return my mother would get well. While I was at it, I would be the most loving, understanding sister so I could make Robbie happy, too. And if I could be a doting, obedient daughter, I could ensure nothing bad would happen to my father.
Unfortunately, in the years that followed, not one of us kept our side of the bargain.
2
WATERGATE DIAGNOSIS
By the time I was eleven years old, I had a new patient to worry about.
Something was wrong with my father. Every night, long after midnight, I heard bizarre sounds. I crept into my parents’ bedroom and found my father sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing his chest. He had a strained look and in his hand he held a row of white antacid tablets – lined up like the pennies and nickels he rolled and took to the bank. He pounded lightly on his chest. “Greppps …,” I heard him say.
“What’s wrong, Dad?”
“Not a thing, my dear. It’s nothing but mild heartburn. Greckkk …”
“It seems your father has become a musical instrument. A woodwind,” my mother said. She was lying beside him, waving an imaginary baton in the air. “He’s playing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.”
“It doesn’t sound good, Dad.” I stood there, staring and worrying.
“It’s nothing but garden-variety borborygmi. Intestinal rumblings caused by moving gas.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“Well, as a matter of fact I’ll take you with me to my appointment next week. It will be an educational experience for you. Maybe you’ll be a doctor one day?”
But he had taught me about rhetorical questions; you didn’t have to answer them.
AT THE DOCTOR’S OFFICE my father went to the men’s room and returned with a plastic container filled to the brim. He handed it to the nurse, saying jovially, “Urine the money!” She took it from him carefully. Then, she placed suction cups on his chest, and I stood watching as a needle on a machine rose and fell, sketching twelve different views of his heart on strips of pink graph paper. Next, the nurse drew blood from his arm, and my father beamed at the healthy-looking sample his body had produced. He held the test tube of blood in his hands and marvelled at its warmth. We moved to the examining room, where the doctor took his blood pressure, first one arm and then the other, first standing up and then lying down, and placed his stethoscope on my father’s hairy chest, closed his eyes, and listened.
“Hear a symphony in there, Doc?” my father asked.
The doctor asked him to please be quiet, please, so that he could auscultate properly. “Have you had chest pain, Mr. Shalof? Palpitations? Indigestion?”
“No problems whatsoever. I’ve never felt better. It’s my wife –”
“Frankly, there are some worrisome findings here. Nothing conclusive, but I would like to do some tests. In the meantime, I am putting you on a strict diet. You are overweight and that is putting a strain on your heart. Also, you have diabetes.” He paused to look over at me. “Your daughter will have to be alert for signs of a precipitous drop in your blood sugar and be prepared to take action.”
Yikes. What did that entail?
“A diet?” echoed my father as if he was unfamiliar with the word. “The great philosopher Montaigne said diets prepare one for death, that they undermine one’s enjoyment of
life.”
“Cut back on the calories. Reduce your salt intake. No sugar. Low-fat.”
“What’s left?” He looked quizzical.
“Mr. Shalof, you’re now in your sixties. Have you considered retirement?”
“Please, Doc, I’m a long way off from that.” My father reeled back in mock horror. “Say, about those tests, can I study for them? Ha, ha …”
“First of all, a chest X-ray and more blood work. A barium enema – I know it’s not the most pleasant thing – and I’d like you to see a colleague of mine, a cardiologist.”
“Barium? Isn’t that what you do with the patients who don’t make it?” The doctor busied himself with the chart, but my father pressed on. “Hey, Doc, what’s Italian for ‘enema’?”
The doctor looked up.
“An innuendo! Get it?” A faint smile flickered across the doctor’s lips, which only encouraged my father. “Say, if you jumble up the letters in ‘laxative,’ you get ‘exit lava’! Pretty good, eh?”
“You can book the tests with my nurse,” the doctor said, his back already to us as he opened the door to leave.
After the doctor’s appointment, my father suggested we take a stroll through Queen’s Park. “What a great city!” he exclaimed, gazing around as if at all of Toronto at once. “In New York’s Central Park, you could get mugged. In the Damrak in Amsterdam, you’d get high from the dope fumes. Tilda, take a deep breath of our city’s fresh air.” He helped himself to one. “Enjoy our clean, safe streets.”