Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim

by Lisa Scottoline

  So we did, and she must have, because she was gone.

  But I miss Fawn Hall Scottoline.

  And if she comes back, I’ll have her cradle ready.

  Starry Starry Night

  By Lisa

  I should have mentioned that Mother Mary is living with me for the summer. We’re in Day 16, which is now a countdown, like the Iran hostage crisis.

  I’m waiting for the cable company to rescue me.

  Until they get cable to the cottage, Mother Mary watches TV at my house, with the volume on eighty-six. That’s the highest number of the volume on my TV, and it’s not a number you should know. It’s like having a car that goes 130 miles an hour. You don’t need to drive that fast.

  Mother Mary does.

  UNDERSTAND?

  ALSO, ARE YOU GETTING UP?

  So, here’s what I’ve learned:

  Matlock starred Andy Griffith, not Dick Van Dyke. I had previously thought they were the same person, but they’re not.

  There are still shows with laugh tracks, and Mother Mary loves every one.

  The fake laughter on the laugh track of Everybody Loves Raymond erupts in bogus hilarity every thirty seconds, like manufactured waves at a water park. If you’re trying to work while the show is on, let’s say if you’re a writer, you’ll find yourself waiting for the next wave, like a dripping faucet.

  And the joke will be on you.

  Ha-ha.

  If House is on, Mother Mary has already seen it. This is also true of Seinfeld, Two and a Half Men, and Law & Order, regardless of whether the victims were special.

  Oddly, that’s a good thing.

  Mother Mary will watch only shows she’s already seen. If you ask her why, she’ll say, “DON’T QUESTION ME.”

  But you will, anyway.

  Because YOU HAVE A HARD HEAD.

  Last night, so she could see something new, I suggested that we rent a movie on TV. She likes comedies, and The Hangover was on, so we sat down to watch it together. If you think that a movie with profanity and nudity might not be appropriate for my mother, it’s time you knew the truth.

  As soon as the movie begins, she asks, “IS THAT A REAL TIGER?”

  I answer, “YES.”

  Next question, “IS THAT A REAL BABY?”

  “YES.”

  Third question, “IS THAT BABY REALLY CRYING?”

  “NO. HOLLYWOOD WOULD NEVER MAKE A BABY CRY FOR MONEY.”

  “BUT IT LOOKS LIKE IT’S REALLY CRYING.”

  “THEY DO IT WITH SPECIAL EFFECTS,” I tell her, because it’s okay to lie to your mother if it will prevent a cardiac event.

  She looks at me sideways. She’s hard of hearing, but she’s not stupid.

  Ten minutes into the movie, it strikes me that The Hangover is not a great choice for her plot-wise, because she asks, “WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT GUY’S TOOTH? WHERE DID THE CHICKEN COME FROM? WHY IS THAT GUY IN THE TRUNK NAKED?”

  I want to say, “DON’T QUESTION ME.”

  But I answer, and we spend the remainder of the movie screaming questions and answers at each other, after which we’re both exhausted, so we call my brother to have him FedEx her hearing aids.

  Then it’s time for bed, and it turns out that Mother Mary likes a beer before she goes to sleep. I have no problem with this. She survived throat cancer and The Depression, and if she wants a brewski before bedtime, it’s fine with me. She drinks Bud Lime, the choice of frat boys everywhere, and that’s okay too.

  So we sit in blissful silence, petting the dogs while she drinks her beer, and I feel torn. I could let her sleep upstairs in my house, but then she wouldn’t get used to sleeping in the cottage, which is right in my backyard. The time it takes her to drink the beer gives me a chance to think, and I decide I have to stick with the plan. So I get her into her lab coat, which you might remember from previous books is her favorite outfit, and walk her down to the cottage, holding her bony little hand so the dogs don’t trip her. And she makes her way through the grass, which is wet and soaks her sandals, and there’s a chill in the air, under a night full of stars.

  I point them out, and she looks up and smiles agreeably, though she can’t see a single one.

  And I get her inside her cottage, turn on all the lights, and make sure she can lock the door from the inside, which she does. Through the window, she gives me a brave thumbs-up, like an octogenarian astronaut.

  “LOVE YOU, MOM,” I tell her.

  She can’t hear, but she knows what I said.

  The Many Homes of Mother Mary

  By Lisa

  Mother Mary makes everything an adventure, even a trip to the food store. And by adventure, I mean fistfight.

  We begin in the produce aisle, where she’s looking for bean salad. There’s a counter that contains all sorts of prepared salads, including a five-bean salad, but Mother Mary eyes it with disdain.

  “No,” she says simply.

  “What’s the matter with it? It has five beans. That’s two more than anybody needs.”

  “It doesn’t have pinto.”

  “What difference does that make?” I have no idea what a pinto bean even looks like. I thought a pinto was a car.

  “I like pinto. I want pinto.”

  “Then add some,” I say.

  Mother Mary throws up her hands. “If I wanted to cook, I wouldn’t come to the food store.”

  Fine. I always thought that people who go to food stores then go home to cook, but what do I know?

  We move on to the tubs of chicken salad, and there’s another problem. “No,” she says again.

  “Why?”

  “Too busy.”

  I don’t understand. Chicken salad isn’t busy unless it’s wearing plaid pants with a polka-dotted shirt. “It has celery and mayonnaise. What’s busy?”

  “Forget it.” She looks around, her white head swiveling neatly as a snowy owl. “We need broccoli and cauliflower.”

  “I’m on it. You stay here.” I leave her with the cart, run to the broccoli and bag it, then run to the cauliflower and bag it, and come back.

  “No good.”

  “What?”

  “I want broccoli and cauliflower together.”

  “I got it together.” I hold up both bags, one in each hand. “See?”

  “No, they have to be together. In Florida, they have broccoli and cauliflower in the same bag.”

  “No problem.” I take the bag of cauliflower and stuff it in the bag of broccoli. “Welcome to Pennsylvania.”

  Mother Mary shakes her head. “At home, they have it in the same bag, cut up, and you cook it that way.”

  “Well, this is your home, too, and we can take it, cut it up, and cook it together.”

  She blinks. “This isn’t my home.”

  “Yes, it is. You have your house here, and your house in Florida.”

  “Only one is home.”

  “We’ll see about that.” I sense we’re not fighting about vegetables anymore, as I’m astute that way, and in the Scottoline household, almost anything can turn into a power struggle, including vegetables.

  Even the cruciferous become crucibles, if you follow.

  So we move on to a fight in the next aisle, where they don’t carry Ensure, and to a fight in the aisle after that, where they don’t carry Dial soap.

  I don’t see her problem. “Ma, what’s the big deal with Dial?”

  “It’s laid, spelled backwards.”

  Oh.

  I hurry her through the checkout counter, where I try to stuff her in a recyclable bag, but they stop me.

  Just kidding.

  We go home and have dinner together, and I put the broccoli and cauliflower in the same pot, overcooking them so that the cauliflower turns a cadaverous white and the broccoli takes on a gangrenous hue.

  “Delicious,” Mother Mary says with a smile.

  “Pennsylvania’s not so bad, eh?”

  “Shut up,” is all she says.

  Mother Mary learns to love the outdoo
rs … for a few minutes.

  Mother Mary takes Peach and Little Tony for a spin.

  Later, we clean up the dishes and she tells me that she misses our old cat Smoochie, who passed way.

  “I have his ashes upstairs,” I say, and she lifts a sparse gray eyebrow.

  “Really?”

  “Sure.” I keep the ashes from all of my pets, for the past thirty years, in my office. The dogs Bear, Rosie, Bertie, Lucy, and Angie. Smoochie is the only cat, and I even have a chest of ashes from Francesca’s horse, Joy. In case you were wondering, a chest of horse ashes is roughly the size of a footlocker, and now you know why I work in the kitchen.

  So I tell her all of this, then add, “I want to be cremated, too. Put me in a little cedar chest and stick me on the shelf in my office.”

  “I don’t want to be cremated.”

  “No?” I ask her, which is when I see her expression darken and realize that the conversation just took a serious turn. So I twist off the faucet and ask gently, “What do you want?”

  “I want a mausoleum.” She starts to smile, and so do I.

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. At the food store, you said I have a house in Florida and a house in Pennsylvania. Well, I want another house. In Holy Cross.”

  I laugh. “You’re not going out cheap, are you, Ma?”

  “Hell, no,” she answers, with a wink.

  Happy Birthday

  By Lisa

  It’s my birthday, and I’m spending it with Mother Mary, which I know is a gift.

  But unfortunately, you can’t return it.

  Just kidding.

  I’ve said that aging isn’t for the fainthearted, but I was talking about turning fifty-five. Now that I’m fifty-six, I realize how right I was.

  Older and wiser, that’s me.

  And living with Mother Mary, who’s eighty-seven, I’m beginning to see what strength is all about.

  No kidding.

  Strength is trying to walk forward when you can barely see.

  Strength is trying to change a channel when you can’t find a button on the remote.

  Strength is trying to open a jar when you can’t grasp it properly.

  Strength is trying to speak when you’ve been robbed of your abilities.

  Strength is remembering how things used to be, but knowing they aren’t that way anymore. And going ahead anyway.

  She is strongest, though her body is weakest.

  I’m not trying to be a downer. I know that many older people lead full, active lives, and I hope to be one of them. But I’m living with one older person in particular, who has survived two strokes, throat cancer, and the cancellation of Law & Order.

  Being with Mother Mary has opened my eyes to the fact that life isn’t easy if you’re a senior, especially a senior senior.

  Microwave buttons are hard to read. The stairs in a movie theater are tough in dim light. Large print books are hard to find. Menus, cans, and bottles are unreadable.

  Why can’t there be an earphone on a TV, so we don’t have to TURN UP THE VOLUME?

  And there are salespeople in the world who are patient with older people, but some who aren’t. If anybody’s going to be nasty to my mother, it better be me.

  Can we accommodate seniors better? I’m not the only baby boomer to be asking this question, and I bet we all become very interested in the issue, the older we get. Or as more of us take in our relatives and see how very strong they have to be, in their own special way.

  Living with her makes me realize that we worry about all the wrong things. I see women every day on TV, and in the market, whose lips look suspiciously plump, and I wish them luck. But when I see what Mother Mary is worrying about, it isn’t her looks. I know this because I just replaced her thirty-year-old bra and had to wrestle her into a new one. Two women and four breasts, flailing about in a dressing room. It gives a new meaning to girl-on-girl action.

  It’s not about her wrinkles, it’s about the very senses that enrich our lives and keep us in contact with the world around us. We discuss this over lunch, which she agrees to have outside, even though she hates bugs, because it’s my birthday.

  Francesca, Lisa, Mother Mary, Laura, and Franca celebrate Lisa’s birthday with a girls’ night out.

  “Happy birthday, honey!” she says, with a smile. Then, “Wanna see the scar?”

  I laugh, though I’ve heard it before. I was delivered by Caesarean section, and for a joke, she would flash me her scar. That’s the walking lesson that is Mother Mary.

  She gave birth, and it left a mark.

  She bears the marks of all of her days, good and bad, and so do we all, ultimately. We go forward with our failing eyes and ears, our steps slowed and speech sometimes a little funky. But if we’re lucky, we go on, knowing that life isn’t what it was, but it’s something new, and after all, it’s life.

  That alone is precious, and enough.

  In the end, she’s the Birthday Girl.

  Aftershocked

  By Francesca

  Italian women are stereotypically over reactors. My mother, for example, makes nuclear reactors seem reasonable. But I pride myself on being the cool-headed one. I can win any argument, or at least whip my mom into a frenzy, simply by remaining calm. So I always imagined I’d perform well in an emergency. I finally got my test case in an East Coast earthquake

  I was writing on my laptop, when all of a sudden I felt as if the floor was swinging. I thought it was in my head, maybe a migraine or caffeine overdose. But then I saw the ripples in my water glass, and if Jurassic Park taught me anything, it’s that when that happens, it’s time to get out of the jeep.

  In the next moment, my TV started wobbling and my picture frames fell off the shelves. I had no idea what was happening, but I wasn’t sticking around to find out. I leashed Pip, grabbed the keys, phone, snatched a pair of flip-flops, and flew down six flights of stairs barefoot, like a monkey down a tree.

  I skidded outside on the sidewalk, bewildered and out of breath, only to find everyone else going on his or her merry way, oblivious. Excess adrenaline coursed through me, but there were no opportunities to be heroic—no child trapped beneath a car, no unconscious adult in need of a fireman’s carry, not even a kitten in a tree. In fact, no one seemed concerned at all.

  Fear made room for embarrassment, as I became aware that a) I was apparently the only person who had almost wet herself in the last minute, and b) I was not wearing a bra.

  I’d like to say I was raised better than this, but the last time my mom went to the ER, she wasn’t wearing a bra either. It’s practically family tradition.

  Pip, also unconcerned, pulled at the leash, so I crossed my arms and walked him around the block. The dog looked for spots in need of pee while I looked for anyone whose look of panic matched mine; Pip found several lucky lampposts before I found a single comrade-in-alarm.

  There’s a new restaurant under construction on the ground floor of the building next door. The head contractor always tries to chat me up when I walk by, so normally I avoid the corner, but when he greeted me today, I didn’t let him get a word in.

  “Hey, hey, hey. Guillermo, hey, it’s Francesca, hi, c’mere.” I tried to slow my speech, but after being struck dumb with fear, my tongue decided it was its turn to freak out. “Did you just feel anything, like, shaking?” I realized my hands were shaking, which I hoped he took as active storytelling. “Did you guys just bust out a wall, or drop anything heavy, or something?”

  He shook his head.

  “Oh, okay, because, well, this is gonna sound crazy—” I tried to toss off a laugh, but it missed casual by an octave and came out at loony-bin pitch. “But I swear the walls of my apartment just shook.”

  He frowned, looking a bit skeptical, so I threw in my trump card:

  “A picture fell off the shelf!” The gravity of the statement diminished when I said it aloud.

  “Well thanks for letting me know, I’ll ask my guys,” Guillermo said.
“In case I find out anything, how about you give me your phone number?”

  “Good thing one of us keeps calm in emergencies.”

  “Okay, good idea.”

  Yes, if you catch me in an emergency, I am this naive.

  I had just handed the pen back to him, when my cellular service returned and a text message from my mom chimed in:

  “U heard about earthquake in VA/DC? Aftershocks on E coast. Turn on TV. Love you!”

  Finally, an explanation! But my next thought was for the victims in Virginia and D.C. Surely any earthquake whose aftershocks scared me so must have unleashed utter devastation at its center. Is the White House a pile of rubble?

  Oh no? It’s totally still there, really? Everybody pretty much a-okay, huh? Well, thank God! Glad to hear it.

  So maybe I overreacted a little. But it’s not my fault.

  I am the granddaughter of Mother Mary, once dubbed “Earthquake Mary” by The Miami Herald, because she was the only person in Miami to feel an earthquake that occurred four hundred miles away in Tampa.

  You can’t fight genetics.

  Stroke, Stroke, Bail, Bail

  By Lisa

  I don’t know how to swim but that doesn’t stop me from trying.

  Let me explain.

  I never learned how to swim, because it involves putting your head underwater, which is a problem for me, as I require oxygen to live.

  Also I’m terribly nearsighted, so if I take my glasses off, which is the kind of thing people expect when you swim, I can’t see the Atlantic.

  When I was little, I would go stand at the water’s edge and jump waves with my brother. I have recurrent nightmares of being drowned, which is either a residual memory of those days or a flashback to my second marriage.

  You won’t be surprised to know that Mother Mary can’t swim, either. She always says that she has a deal with the sharks. She won’t go in the water if they won’t go on the land.

  When we were little, she would go to the water’s edge to watch us and make sure we were safe. That she couldn’t swim didn’t seem to matter.

  We lived, so it must have worked.

  I’m lucky enough to have a pool and I’ve been known to float around on an inflatable raft and fall asleep. I also do a lot of clinging to the side, like a girl barnacle. I hang on tight and walk myself around the pool, hand over hand, which is kind of like swimming on land.