by Marge Piercy
She dozed, the wine making her sleepy. She woke only as they landed. Stumbling through the small West Palm Beach airport, whose name always suggested visions of luxury that its reality belied, resembling as it did the seedy bus station of a medium-sized city, she felt disoriented by the heat and the humidity. The hour of sleep had simply made her groggy. Joe called to her as she was waiting for her bag to appear on the carousel. “Where’s Ross and the kids?”
“I came down alone because I was the only one who could get away immediately.”
“Everybody’s working weekends now? They must be in my business.” Joe loomed over her, the tallest of a family in which she and her mother were considered short at five six. If his nose had not been broken in high school and reset poorly, he might have been as handsome as Pops. As it was, his hair was receding fast. “They sent you down alone? When are they planning to arrive?”
“When I’ve checked out the situation, I’ll call them.”
“You get on the phone right away and tell them to move their butts down here.” Five minutes in her company and as usual he was issuing orders, trying to bully her.
“Tracy’s in college and Robin has a new job at John Hancock. Ross can’t just fly off whenever he pleases.” She tried to sound calm and confident. “So, how is Mama? If you wouldn’t mind letting me know.” She grabbed her suitcase as it rode past.
He took it from her and carried it out to his station wagon, double-parked outside with his oldest kid Junior at the wheel. “Did you eat?” he asked, bumping Junior over.
Daria climbed into the back. “Not really. But it doesn’t matter.”
“He said you wouldn’t eat the crap on the airplane. He’s waiting for you at the hospital.”
He said with emphasis in her family always meant Pops. “I’m not hungry. I want to see her.”
“Sure. Not that there’s much to see. She’s got a nice nurse. It’s a real modern hospital, first-rate. All the new gadgets. Every room a private room. Nice for Mama. A quality place.”
“So tell me. Mama, how is she?”
“She’s in a coma. They did an EEG on her this morning and it was flat. Two flat readings in a row, and they shut off the respirator.”
“Why?”
“Because that means she’s dead.”
“They could make a mistake. Everybody makes mistakes.”
“Daria, you’re being silly. They handle strokes every day. There’s six other stroke victims in there right now.”
“How far is it?”
“Another half hour, relax. You’ll see her, plenty of time. Then you and him eat at the Lobster. He must be starving, he hasn’t had a bite since lunch.”
Joe had moved his family to Florida a few years after their parents retired there. The restaurant he had owned in Revere had done poorly. After a fire, Joe had given up on Revere and moved his family south on the insurance money, where they opened a restaurant in a shopping plaza two towns away from where Nina and Pops were living.
When she entered the hospital room, she was astonished at the small heap Nina made under the hospital linens. Nina had been a plump woman most of her life, but now she was girlishly slender. Daria took Nina’s cool papery hand. The respirator made its horrid sound while glucose hung down in a bag into Nina’s limp arm. Pops rose from a chair by the window and came to embrace Daria. He looked well: tanned, unlike most old men she saw around the hospital, unlike Nina who was as pallid as if she had spent the year up north. He had his full bushy head of black hair streaked with snow. Now he had grown a pepper-and-salt moustache, with longer sideburns. He pinched her cheek, calling her Dolly, as he had pet names for every one of his children, drawing her into a massive hug against his paunch.
The nurse was adjusting the machine as Daria moved close to take her mother’s hand again. She pressed gently. Nothing.
“They took another EEG. Flat. Stone flat,” Joe was explaining. “You should say good-bye to her and then we should take Pops to supper.”
“I was waiting for you,” Pops said. “Sad thing. There was nothing they could do for her. But she didn’t suffer none. We can be glad for that. It hit her like a bolt of lightning, and that was it.”
“What’s going to happen?” She wriggled between her father and Joe to address the nurse. Daria was forty-three with her own family and a career: how could her family make her feel immediately eleven, awkward and a misfit?
“The EEGs measure whether her brain is still functioning, you understand? Whether it’s still on, if you follow me.” The nurse avoided her gaze. “We can start a heart again and we can put a patient on a kidney machine, but once the brain is turned off, that’s it. Legally that’s death in this state.”
“Suppose the machine isn’t working?”
“It’s functional. It’s working on the other patients. That’s why we do it twice to be sure, dear. She didn’t suffer. She never knew what hit her.”
During those two hours or more of lying on the floor, she didn’t know? “You were with her all day?”
“I come in for the evening shift. I kept talking to her last night because naturally I always do that just in case the poor dears can hear, even if the doctors say they can’t. Why take a chance? Nobody really knows.”
“I’m glad you talked to her. Thank you.”
“That’s what I’m here for. Go ahead. You can talk to her if you want to.”
She stepped close to the narrow bed. Nina looked asleep. It was hard to believe she could not be awakened. That was still Nina there, palpably. She bent over to kiss her mother’s forehead. “It’s me, Daria, your daughter,” she said. The presence of the others inhibited her. “Mama, it’s me, Daria, come down to be with you.” Gently she laid her cheek on Nina’s breast.
When she finally let go of Nina, the men were waiting in the corridor. The nurse said, “Your father is such a wonderful man. Such a lively gentleman. He doesn’t miss a thing.”
“What is going to be done now? Exactly what?”
“We turn off the respirator. That’s all that’s keeping her body going. Her own breathing had stopped.” The nurse drew her aside, lowering her voice. Why, Daria wondered, because only Nina was there to overhear. “Dear, it’s only a matter of time, a short time, even if your father hadn’t decided. She’s only on the respirator. Either her heart or her kidneys will malfunction over the next two days. It’d be uremia or heart failure. Her pressure’s critically low. You can let her lie there on the respirator till her kidneys fail, but she can’t come back.”
She had a fierce and irrational desire to force them to leave the machine going, but as she clutched again at Nina’s limp chilly hand, she knew she was wrong. Nina was no longer present. Daria also knew she had no power here. She was only a daughter. Decisions were being made by Pops as usual, and any he left unmade, Joe would clean up. Nonetheless the sleeper was Nina, still some kind of mother. She did not want to give her up. Surely her lashes were lightly quivering. She did not want to leave. “Come on, Daria, come on! Visiting hours are over.” Joe took her arm and dragged her away.
At first Nina and Pops had lived in a vast dusty trailer park. Then Ross and Cesaro had bought them out of the old house in East Boston, so they could purchase a garden apartment in cluster housing for old people. One more kindness Ross had shown her family over the years. She begged Joe to drop her at the garden apartment, where she would be staying, but Pops insisted she come along to the restuarant. In the kitchen a big table was set with room for twenty. The kitchen staff and the waiting staff ate there every night before the restaurant opened—many of them family. Pops sat in the head chair while everyone fussed around him. Pops worked in the restaurant as a sort of greeter-headwaiter, for his style was mellower than Joe’s, who annoyed many people, herself included. She tried to call Ross from the restaurant phone, but there was no answer.
She picked at her minestrone and her salad. She knew the food was probably good, but she could not eat it. She wondered if they had turned of
f Nina yet. The very way that Joe wanted the soup made was their mother’s recipe. After the third attempt to reach Ross, she tried Annette’s number.
“What? Where are you? No, I didn’t know. He must not have had a chance to tell me. No, I haven’t seen him over there. Oh, poor dear, is there any chance of recovery?”
Daria could not bring herself to tell the truth, to speak it, when somewhere she hoped still it was not real. “Not much.”
Joe and his wife Marie were taking turns calling the rest of the family, summoning them down. The restaurant, the Blue Lobster, was doing a brisk business as usual. She had always considered the Blue Lobster a stupid name. Joe did in fact serve some Maine lobsters, not blue, although frozen so long they tasted of iodine and only a fool would order one for $18.95. Daria was glad to leave, finally, for her parents’ garden apartment.
There she tried her call again and again, without success. Ross must be having a late supper with friends or a colleague. She would catch him in the morning. She kept imagining the hospital room with the small body under the sheet. Why could they not have let her stay? Nina had been even thinner than in April. Ever since Pops had begun working at the restaurant and taking his evening meals there, Nina had been losing weight. When he took his evening meals out, she would not cook for herself but simply would open a can or nibble a piece of fruit. Although it was less work for her, Nina had felt deserted, passed over, as she complained to Daria. Now Daria felt as if Nina’s loss of weight were some secret practice at vanishing. She could not accept that Nina was dead. It was more as if she had lost her, allowed the hospital to hide Nina from her, allowed alien rules to come between them. She could not accept that Nina was not someplace, hidden, hiding. She felt as if she had never in her life wanted anything so intensely as to talk to Nina again, even if all that happened was that Nina complained.
5
That night Daria crept into Nina’s bed to lie rigid and unsleeping while the quiet death was accomplished miles away at the hospital. The grief she felt was so pervasive it seemed a part of the thick air she was breathing. No one really cared, she kept thinking, all those years married and who really cared? What did Nina get out of it? I can’t live like that, she thought, I can’t. I can’t stand the emptiness.
After a while she switched on the light. Nina’s room was ugly, pastel green with old stains from a leak in the roof showing through, a dampness that never left the walls. The brightest spot was an afghan Grandma had knitted. Grandma had lived with them until she died. Daria could remember her making a square at a time. Daria had pointed out that the squares were all different, that they didn’t match exactly.
“But why should they be the same?” Grandma asked in her heavy singsong accent, grinning with bad teeth. “Why keep doing the same thing?” Grandma sent her out into the yard to look at the roses. Sure enough, none were the same when she looked at each carefully. That had impressed her. Grandma knew things that other people didn’t: that the pigeons puffed like ruffled balloons were the men pigeons courting the lady pigeons; that the sparrows who hopped around in the street used to eat seeds from horse dung; that the flowers of the summer phlox had sweet nectar at the base of each floweret that she could suck.
Nina’s dresser was a jumble of clippings, spilled powder, hairnets, safety and bobby pins, postcards and letters from her children and grandchildren. Several clippings concerned strokes. SEVEN WARNING SIGNS OF STROKE. Nina had suspected. That upset Daria so much she lay down again and switched off the light, as if to dim her discovery. She wanted to throw the article away and forget. Why hadn’t Nina told her she was afraid of stroke? Nina had taken up their last phone call with complaints about Pops flirting with a waitress at the Blue Lobster and how lonely she was when he didn’t come home till after midnight, and how at the restaurant he was gaining too much weight, which was bad for his heart.
They had wasted their phone calls; they had wasted their letters, and now there was no time at all. Nothing more could be said; nothing could be added; nothing could be given. She remembered that last call. Those strange notes had been on her mind as she wondered whether or not to tell Nina about them; then she had thought, What a lot of fuss over nothing at all. After all, Ross was a lawyer; people dealt with him every day about their private business and he was privy to many peculiar secrets. Fussing about those idiotic notes, she had missed the chance to draw Nina out about fears she must have had.
… her mother was sitting in Grandma’s rocker in the big back kitchen of the house on Havre Street. She wanted to ask Mama why she was sitting in Grandma’s chair. Mama was rocking back and forth and singing to herself about a paper moon. Her belly was beginning to stick out again Daria noticed, and wanted to strike her mother. Wanted to hit Mama right in the belly. Another one! She thought she had too many brothers already, who needed yet another? Her mother was mending one of Pops’ shirts, turning the cuff with those fine, fine stitches Daria could hardly endure to look at, they were so tiny and tight, and humming her silly song. Daria was two when Cesaro was born; six when Gussie was born; ten when Tony was born. Joe was three years older than Daria and Franklin had been six years older. At the same time she was figuring all that out, she was still a little girl standing there in the kitchen glaring and pouting at her mother for taking Grandma’s chair and for the belly showing she understood far too well. She smelled cinnamon and coffee and something simmering, tomato, basil, olive oil …
All Sunday and Monday she drove back and forth to the West Palm Beach airport in the Pinto that belonged to Joe’s wife Marie—an overworked, overweight, much put-upon woman who, like her sons, worked at the Blue Lobster. Tony arrived first with his wife and baby. Daria felt a little awkward with Monica, the new wife, as his previous wife Gloria had used Daria as a confidante and still called her up on occasion to run over the troubles of her new life. Daria found it difficult to switch her loyalty from the old wife to the new.
Later Gussie flew down alone. Her children still had sore throats and Don, her husband, was staying with them. Daria felt a familiar pinch of anxiety when she saw her younger, her only sister. Gussie had been by family agreement the pretty one, as Daria had been cast as mother’s helper. Daddy’s little girl and mother’s helper could not miss being rivals as Robin and Tracy were, but in a house with four brothers ready to cuff them, tease them, roar them down, they also drew together.
Gussie had liked boys, craving male attention, and married young. She was the only one of the siblings who had not crawled up out of the working class. Gussie still lived in East Boston and no longer looked younger than Daria, six years her senior.
“Daria, do you think Mama was in pain?”
“At first, when it happened, maybe. Then no, I’m convinced.”
“It’s hot here! I didn’t know it was going to be hot.” Gussie collapsed in the seat. “Nobody warned me.” She was wearing an old black winter coat. Under it when she wriggled out, she had on a turquoise pantsuit just a little tight.
“In the winter, you can never tell. Maybe something of Mama’s will fit you, something summery. Or something of Marie’s?”
“Marie? That cow? She’s twice my size. How would I know about Florida in the winter? The only time we ever get down here is summer when it’s cheaper, and besides, that’s when Don gets his vacation. You think maybe Joe will pay for my airplane ticket?”
“If he doesn’t, I can give you something toward it. Off the record.”
Daria ran errands all day. She was coming to hate pulling out of the parking lot by the garden apartments, so called, with their brown baked lawn with two squat scabby palms and a stand of crown of thorns, and heading over to Route One, the inevitable road to anyplace. The land was flat as a pool table, and at every intersection big enough for traffic lights sprawled not one but four shopping malls, one for each corner. Each seemed lined with the same assortment of shops. What differentiated them from Northern malls was the presence of a broker’s office, an E. F. Hutton or a Paine Webb
er. Fat men in short-sleeved polyester shirts and baseball caps, wizened men in golf shirts in flat plastic-looking colors wearing black sunglasses and digital watches that talked, came and went, looking self-infatuated.
Driving was hazardous. There seemed two types of people on the road. There were young blond surfers or Burt Reynolds look-alikes in pickup trucks, often with a shotgun mounted in back, weaving through traffic ten miles over the speed limit. Then there were nearly blind old people with their hood ornaments lined up with the median strip driving ten miles under the speed limit until they abruptly veered for a never-signalled turn.
She called Ross from the apartment, she called him from the airport, she called him from the restaurant. Finally Sunday evening he called her. He was very sympathetic but dealt firmly with her protests. He had an enormous amount of paperwork to complete for the HUD project, he said, that must be got out of the way before he could fly down.
Finally Monday evening Ross arrived with the girls on the same 8:05 flight as Cesaro and family. Obviously they had travelled together. Cesaro’s blond wife Vinnie stumbled off first with their little boy Jay. Their horsy daughter Trish came next with Robin and Tracy, all of them giggling. Then Cesaro and Ross got off, deep in conversation. Everyone shuffled out looking dazed, then put on somber expressions upon seeing her. She was startled to see a camera around Ross’s neck, but then he never travelled anywhere without one. It turned out Ross had reserved a car, so she turned the Pinto over to Cesaro and got in the rented Dodge Omni with Ross and her daughters. Ross drove and she sat back, filling her family in on events and arrangements.
They were far too many to fit into the garden apartment and Joe’s split-level, so Ross immediately volunteered to take a motel room for himself and Daria. Robin and Tracy objected to staying in Nina’s room, agreeing for once. Finally Ross took a room for them and for Trish, who insisted on being included. Were they afraid death would be contagious? she asked them. Their holiday mood was annoying her. Yet she did not want to sleep in Nina’s room herself. It was too sad.