by Wade Rouse
I scanned the room.
And winced.
There were Loralynn Jenkins and Vesta Rutini, big girls with even bigger moles, wearing winter coats even though it was ninety-seven degrees outside and 150 degrees in the room. Their greasy hair was slicked back and separated into two stiff braids that made it look as if they had just undergone electroshock therapy. They were fingering xylophones, and, from a distance, it looked as if they might be holding shiny pretzel sticks, the instruments dwarfed by their size.
There was Tabitha Buchanan, who was lovingly called “Tubby Buchanan” at school, and she was standing, fittingly, beside a tuba while smiling gleefully. From a distance it looked as though two very happy, very fat, very pale sisters were posing for a picture.
Ray Davenport, whom a couple of the mean boys called Gay Davenport as though that was his given name, was playing the piccolo. Really playing.
Ray had practiced, and it showed, notes floating forth that sounded like real notes you’d hear on the radio. Ray, unfortunately, drooled from both sides of his mouth when he played, like my dog did when I held a piece of steak in front of his face, and, considering the way he blew and went to town on his instrument, I had to admit his nickname seemed to fit.
“This is a house of freaks,” said my brother, who had been forced by our parents to join us after he’d been caught chewing Skoal behind the high school bus barn. “Can’t I wait outside? I don’t want anyone to think I’m actually with these people.”
But my brother was right. After he left, I focused on my primary purpose: to select an instrument less on its musical intricacies—the way its sound touched my soul—and more on how it would minimize my big-boy size while maximizing my reputation at school, not realizing at the time that neither goal was attainable.
I walked around the room and surveyed the instruments that were on display:
A xylophone? I glanced over at Loralynn and Vesta. Definitely not.
A piccolo? I looked at Gay, still sucking away. No way.
Tuba? I checked out Tubby and her sister. Next.
Drums. They would accentuate my stomach.
Trumpet. Not big enough, and too many people were already clamoring for it.
And then I saw it, the one instrument that stood alone. I walked over to it and ran my hands over its golden body, quickly becoming enamored by its uniqueness. I picked it up and blew through the large silver mouthpiece. A deep, bold blare shot forth.
Manly, I thought.
“This is it!” I yelled at my parents. “This is it!”
“A trombone?” my dad said. “Now why in the hell would you pick a trombone?”
I couldn’t say the real reasons: that I thought its size and its big bell would make me look thin in comparison, that people would focus on the slide moving back and forth instead of on my girth, and that it sounded deep and commanding, unlike my real voice.
“It’s the foundation for every piece of music,” I said.
Our band director, a bouncy, thin man, rushed over and said, “He’s right! The trombone is the key instrument to all musical pieces. It’s rarely the lead, but it’s always the key. However, we already have three trombonists coming back next year, and we really don’t need another.”
I looked at my mother, ready to cry, and she sensed I would be crushed if I couldn’t play my instrument of destiny.
“How about the clarinet?” the band director asked.
“My great-great-uncle on my mother’s side played trombone for the Count Basie Orchestra,” my mother said. “That is correct!”
The band director looked at her, genuinely confused, wondering if she was really telling the truth, which, of course, she wasn’t.
“Fact or fiction?” I mouthed to my mother, whose eyes widened with excitement.
“I guess a band could always use another talented trombonist,” he said.
For the next six years, my mother and father would cheer me on from snow-covered streets as I marched by in epaulets, spats, and a two-foot-tall white fuzzy hat playing “Jingle Bell Rock.” They would snap pictures from the bleachers as I played “Apache Dance” with the band, releasing the spit from my trombone between songs. They would even watch as I played Inspector Trotter from Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap, poorly meshing an Ozarks accent with an English one. In fact, I would go on to do things my parents never anticipated, never expected. Their dreams of watching their son hit a home run, or make a game-saving tackle, or hit the game-winning free throw would be replaced by a son who would rather recite his own poetry.
And yet—always, always—my parents would be there to cheer me on, sitting in empty auditoriums or standing on deserted streets when other parents had long ago grown tired of the out-of-tune music and out-of-step marching of their dorky kids. I would look over and see my parents, clapping wildly, looks of absolute bewilderment frozen on their faces.
Years later over a Mother’s Day dinner, just after my first feature story had been published in a fairly prominent newspaper, my mother proudly turkey-walked away to retrieve a photo album, carefully lifting the plastic to add my clip to our family history to proclaim, “I always knew we came from a family of artists, isn’t that correct, Wade?”
Out of habit I wanted to yell, “Fact or fiction?” but instead I looked into her eyes, smiled, pulled her close, and hugged her, knowing that for once in her life she just might be telling the truth.
MOTHER’S DAY (ADULT)
The Privileged Few
My grandma Shipman used to install twenty-foot inflatable reindeer on her roof, wrap our gifts in velvet bows, and bake and hand decorate hundreds of Santa Claus cookies, whipping and dyeing the icing so that Santa’s coat looked red and velveteen, his beard white as snow, his eyes glistening from just that little extra coating of sugar.
Birthdays meant homemade cakes with mile-high frosting and colorful balloons filling the kitchen. Halloween meant carving pumpkins and laughing at witches that had flown directly into my grandma’s light pole outside her home.
But when my grandmother became ill and her health slowly and methodically began to decline, our holidays became more minimalist.
It was too difficult for me to see my grandmother as some sort of ghost of Christmas past, so I began to stay away more and more during the holidays while she lived in a nursing home. What I missed during this absence, I would later discover, was the fact that my mom had taken on my grandma’s role. In fact, my mother spent vast amounts of time in my grandma’s nursing-home room re-creating those cherished holidays for her: She lavishly decorated her tree, she helped my grandma carve a pumpkin, and she walked into her room—ignoring all codes and regulations—with sparklers ablaze on the Fourth of July.
One spring evening, after I had not visited home in a particularly long time, my mother called and said, simply but directly, “I think it’s time you visited your grandmother in the nursing home. I expect to see you here on Mother’s Day.”
“But …” I started.
“No buts,” my mom said.
“But she’s not my mother-mother.”
And then my mom hung up on me.
I cussed my entire five-hour drive home, lamenting a lost weekend.
As a young man, I had so many better things to do than visit my grandmother in a nursing home. I had more important things to think about, other things to occupy my time and mind than the very real fact that my grandmother was dying and that youth was fleeting and that, sooner or later, this would eventually be my fate.
When I returned home that Mother’s Day, I walked in to find my mother a changed woman.
She seemed harder, tougher, but more resilient. She didn’t gush over my return like usual. She said, very directly, “It’s about time.”
That Sunday, my mother and I went to visit my grandmother on Mother’s Day, bringing her a vase of hand-picked peonies from her garden, a heart-shaped box of chocolates, and a stack of elaborately wrapped gifts, ones that looked as if they might be photographe
d for a style magazine—hauling them into the very nice nursing home and past a few patients, some of whom sat motionless, wheelchair-bound, in the throes of dementia.
As we made our way past, a couple of the patients began to wail and flail, just like babies, unable to convey their emotions that visitors had come to call.
When I passed an ancient woman with a shock of white hair who was eating her lunch off the tray of her wheelchair, she suddenly stuck an arthritic hand into her compartment of corn and tossed a handful of kernels at me and said, in a disturbingly matter-of-fact way, “Well, look who the dog dragged in. If it ain’t Sonny, home from the war.”
And, just as quickly, she began screaming.
And crying.
Yelling, “Sonny, my baby!”
She was coughing up corn and ghosts from deep within her body.
I crumpled against my mother and we made our way to my grandma’s room, which was marked simply and sweetly—like a kindergarten teacher might designate her room on the opening day of school—with only her first name, Viola, drawn in purple crayon, just like her floral namesake.
“I’ll go in first,” my mom said, taking all the presents. “I want to prepare her. It’ll be easier this way, okay?”
There was something about the word prepare—prepare my grandma for what, I thought—that made me highly uncomfortable, made my teeth begin to chatter, which I tried to blame on the chill in the nursing home.
I waited outside the door a minute or two until my curiosity got the best of me, and then I peeked my head around the frame and saw not my grandma but a nearly unrecognizable version of her: bloated, pale, a mass of white, brushed-out permed hair, no makeup, no dentures.
My mother was hugging a ghost.
I retreated, standing flat against the blandly cheery wallpaper in the hallway. I tried to grip something to keep myself from falling and finally managed to grab the safety bar that served as the home’s functional chair rail before I slid all the way to the linoleum floor.
I shut my eyes to stop the spinning and tried to remember my grandmother as she had been.
My grandma’s sole dream in life had been to be a mother and a grandmother. Happiness pulsed from her body, joy radiated from her soul, when she engaged in the simplest of daily pleasures, the ones that made her family smile: frosting a towering, three-layer cherry-chip cake; making homemade pie crusts; pulling sugar cookies out of her oven; giving hugs; decorating for the holidays; simply listening to her family tell the tales of their lives.
My grandma was a simple woman, and—as I grew older and more bitter about my course in life, the fact I was gay, the belief I might never find happiness—I equated her simpleness with naïveté.
That was a mistake.
And when I longed to tell her the story of my life, to have her sit and listen to me around her Formica dining-room table like she did when I was young, it was too late.
“Wade?” I heard my mother say. “Wade, do you want to come in?”
I stood, rounded the corner, and my grandma looked at me, rather blankly, like a babysitter might look at a child they once cared for, with vague familiarity but no emotional ties.
“Mom? It’s Wade? It’s James Wade. Remember?”
I approached her bed gingerly, as if I were walking around land mines, and she looked at me, trying to fit the pieces together somewhere in her head, and when she did she began to bawl, to caress my face like it was a baby rabbit, as if I were the most tender and precious and beautiful thing she had ever seen.
And then she started screaming.
Always an emotional woman, my grandmother’s illness had made her even more emotionally vulnerable, and my mother told me she would now start crying without reason at any minute of the day, unable to put into words her feelings of loss or fear or happiness.
I took a seat in one of those nursing-home chairs that looks inviting but is not comfortable, that begs you to sit but not stay, and listened to the roar of the TV infomercial my grandma had going.
My grandmother never watched TV.
I stared out the window and watched it rain, watched the wrens collect at the little feeder my mother had hung just outside of her window. My grandma’s world was now this window.
My mom clicked off the TV, silencing the incessant noise and bringing blissful quiet to the room. A sense of calm seemed to envelop not only me but also my grandmother.
And then, out of the blue, my grandma began pointing at pictures on her wall and nightstand, at photos of her husband, her daughters, her grandchildren, of those who had died before her or those who rarely came to visit, and my mom would give one to her and she’d hold it closely, hugging the picture like it was the person, closing her eyes and remembering something from long ago.
My grandma would look at my mom, struggling to lift her hand to her mouth, and then point at the picture she was holding. She was asking my mom to speak for her. We sat for hours that Mother’s Day, my mom telling stories of our family for my grandmother, and then at the very end my grandma pointed at me and then at a picture of me she had beside her bed, one of me when I was very little, dressed in a tiny bowtie.
“My baby!” she moaned, managing to find words from somewhere deep inside—words I thought she had lost long ago. “My baby Wade!”
And then it was me who began to cry, to bawl, my false bravado shattering, my gasps causing the wrens at the window to stop eating and take notice of the commotion.
My grandma lifted her fists and dabbed at my face, wiping tears, and then put her hands to her mouth, asking me to talk.
I scooched my chair up to her bed and held her hands, and it was then I knew that she knew me, truly knew me, because she just stared at me, smiling, like a baby at its mom, watching my every move, listening intently to my every word, like she did when I was young and we sat at her little kitchen table.
So I sat for an hour and finally told my grandmother about my life.
When we left her that day, I asked my mom on the ride home, “How do you do it? How can you do it? Every day? It’s such an obligation.”
“The question is,” my mom answered, “how can I not do it?”
Her voice got a little shaky, and she said, “Do you know I visit nearly every person there? Their families and friends no longer come, because everyone is too busy to be bothered. Your grandmother spent her whole life sacrificing for me so I could be the first to go to college, the first to have a career, so I could have an easier life than she ever had.”
And then my mom slowed the car, her hands trembling on the wheel.
“And it’s not an obligation, Wade. It’s a privilege.”
There was an awkward moment of silence. I looked down at the speedometer and noticed my mom was driving twenty miles per hour. Joggers were passing us.
And then my mom, the lifelong nurse who retired and became a hospice nurse, said, “When parents and grandparents age and become infirm, families no longer want to deal with it. They visit in the beginning out of guilt, and then it becomes a hassle, something they have to do between soccer lessons and work. People see these as ‘the bad years,’ but this is simply our time to take care of our elders, just like my mother cared for me when I was a baby. Those weren’t such great years for her, I’m sure. She struggled to put food on the table. And I certainly couldn’t talk. I could only tell her what I was thinking or feeling through my emotions. This is the same thing. She is the baby now. And I am the mother. It is my time to care for her, to let her pass on to God with dignity and love, to let her know during every single moment I spend with her these final days that it has been my privilege to be her daughter.”
It would be the last Mother’s Day of my grandmother’s life.
And, as I learned that day, it was my privilege—not obligation—to spend it with her.
MEMORIAL DAY
Pretty Pink Peonies
Many Memorial Days when I was a kid, I would accompany my mom and grandma around to the little cemeteries that dotte
d the Ozark countryside, the trunk of our car filled with miniature American flags, boxes of Kleenex, and a slew of fresh flowers from my grandmother’s gardens.
While Memorial Day typically marked the end of school and beginning of summer vacation, our family would delay our departure to our log cabin on Sugar Creek until all of our “family visits” had been completed.
My grandma and mom would hit as many cemeteries as possible on Memorial Day with a great sense of purpose and a definitive agenda, like holiday shoppers the Friday after Thanksgiving.
My mom would slowly pull our car down the cemeteries’ long dirt or gravel driveways and bicker with my grandma about who was buried where, my mom pointing this way, my grandma pointing the other, until both would give up and my mom would put the car in park and we would each grab a handful of fresh flowers, tiny flags, and Kleenex.
Ozark cemeteries were not lush, lavish, or large. Graveyards, as we simply called them, were usually compact and often rested on a rolling foothill or quiet piece of country land next to a pastoral pasture. They were not filled with enormous marble headstones. There were no mausoleums. They did not sit on breathtaking cliffs overlooking the crashing waves of an ocean.
But Ozark cemeteries were plentiful—almost too plentiful, like churches—seemingly one for every large family. We even knew families who would purchase a depository of family plots for sisters and brothers, moms and dads, aunts and uncles, a life-insurance policy, as it were, so the family could remain together in death.
The weather always varied greatly on Memorial Days in the Ozarks. Some days were hot and stifling, portending a humid, windless summer where the unified cry of the crickets could almost make a man go nuts. And others were wet and cool, a gentle rain softening the earth, chilling our bones, turning the green grass on the graves even greener.
But the weather never deterred my mom or grandma. They made their way in sensible, respectful heels over mounds and molehills, in the rain or sweltering heat, wending their way among the graves, their arms interlocked, purses notched in their elbows, their heels often getting mired in mud, me following to wipe them clean with Kleenex that were originally meant for mascara-strewn eyes and cheeks.