Lying with the Dead

by Michael Mewshaw

  As a young woman she reminded me of a ferocious lioness protecting her brood—whenever she wasn’t mauling us. Now she’s a bedraggled old house cat. In spite of myself, I hug her.

  I press her head to my breast. She’s frail, her skin’s cold, her hair’s synthetic-smelling. Her arms dangle at her sides, and her shoulders draw up so that I suspect I’m hurting her. I let go.

  Once the door’s closed, the living room is scarcely warmer than the air outside. Mom wears slippers, flannel pajamas, a woolen robe, and over it a sweater that she clutches shut beneath her chin. The house is as rank as a jungle, smelling of mold and cigarette smoke and food that has fallen to the floor and been stepped on and ground into the carpet. Mom appears oblivious to it, but the stink bothers me. The least a daughter owes her parent is to keep her and her house clean. But whenever I volunteer to break out the vacuum and spruce things up, Mom won’t hear of it. If I argue, she unleashes her venomous tongue, accusing me of hinting that she’s dirty. Which she is.

  “I didn’t sleep a wink last night,” she says. “No sense laying there in the dark, I figured. So I got up, said my prayers, and started looking at my pictures.”

  Mom sags onto the couch. Beside her is a big cardboard box that she brought home from Safeway when she worked there as a cashier. It holds hundreds of family photographs that have never been cataloged by year, subject matter, or any other way. I’ve urged her to paste them in albums, or let me do it. But apart from a few framed snapshots on an end table, she keeps them in the box, all tossed together like kittens in a basket.

  She lights up a Kent, and I sit in the rocking chair opposite the couch, aware of the Host in the purse on my lap. I’m also super-aware of the box of photographs and what it might signal. She’s not normally the nostalgic type. When a sentimental mood does take hold of her, it’s sometimes a short step to bad memories, then an explosion.

  I decide to wait until she’s between cigarettes before I bring out the pyx. I watch the Kent burn down toward her nicotine-stained knuckles and silently review the liturgy for the Communion of the Sick where Christ declares, “I myself am the living bread, come down from Heaven. If anyone eats this bread he shall live forever.”

  Like she’s reading my mind and is duty bound to contradict me, Mom says, “No one should live this long. They ought to put me to sleep like a stray dog.”

  “A lot of people your age still enjoy life.”

  “Name two.”

  “Lawrence and I see them out on the golf course.”

  “Great! Buy me a bag of clubs.”

  She dragon-snorts smoke from her nostrils. I don’t suppose there’s anything worse about an old woman smoking than a young person poisoning her system, not to mention my system, with cigarettes, but she’s about to receive Communion. Do I dare ask her to brush her teeth?

  Instead, I say, “I’m sorry you had a bad night.”

  “Wish I could describe what they’re like, these spells of mine. It starts with music,” she says. “Eerie music and a hot flash in my chest that turns to goose pimples on my spine. All of a sudden I’m trembling and seeing colors. Streaks of brown and green. Excuse me, Candy, I know you’re a prude about language, but it’s like I have shit in my eyes. There’s an awful smell and something I’m dying to see but scared to see at the same time. I don’t know. I can never dial it in clear. I just wish there was a pill to cure it.”

  Since Mom downs a dozen medications a day—thyroid pills, antidepressants, beta-blockers for an arrhythmic heartbeat, anti-anxiety tablets, blood pressure pills, sleeping pills, pick-me-up pills—I timidly allow as how her panic attacks might be a side effect.

  “No, it’s a punishment,” she insists. “It’s God or the Devil getting revenge.”

  “For what?”

  “For my sins.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’re in a state of grace.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that.” She lights a fresh Kent off the butt of the first. “I’m paying for the past.”

  “You shouldn’t dwell on the past,” I tell her. Yet it surprises me that she’s examining her conscience. Is that another tip-off, like the pictures? Sign of a mood swing? Last week she shocked me by asking whether she had ever hit me. I feared a trap and didn’t answer at first. The fact is, she’s belted me so often, it’s just the big occasions that stick in my mind—the black eye on my thirteenth birthday, the bloody lip for high school graduation, the boxed ears the day Quinn flew off to Europe. Finally, without dwelling on dates and details, I told her yes, she hit me.

  “And Maury?” she asked.

  “Well, hitting I’m not sure, but there was the time you pushed his face into a bowl of hot pea soup.”

  “I did?” she said, amazed. “What about Quinn?”

  “You’ll have to ask him.” It’s like her brain is a sieve that no longer retains anything so minor as a memory of walloping us.

  From the box she lifts a snapshot of Maury as a boy. Knees bunched under his chin, he’s crammed into a fruit crate that Dad nailed in the branches of an oak out back. Maury called it his tree house. He loved to hide there, alone and out of reach.

  He was always climbing things. Agile as a monkey, he shimmied down from his high chair even before he could walk. To keep him in his crib, Mom and Dad had to flip it upside down and lower it over him like a cage. I remember him staring through the wooden slats, a little prisoner.

  But when Mom asks what I recall about Maury, I don’t mention cages. I don’t mention her or Dad shouting at him. I say what a beautiful baby he was.

  “He’s still a handsome man,” she insists.

  I agree, although neither of us has laid eyes on him for years.

  “When did you first notice something was wrong with him?”

  There’s no predicting what Mom wants to hear, except, of course, that she didn’t cause his problems. Maybe she believes there’s nothing wrong with him at all; he’s just unlucky. When Lawrence showed me a newspaper article about Asperger’s syndrome, and I passed it along to Mom, thinking it matched Maury’s symptoms, she rejected any notion that her older son might be “an Ass Burger.”

  “I love Maury so much,” I tell her now, “I never noticed anything wrong with him.”

  “That’s crap, Candy.”

  “Well, only that business with the fan, the way he watched it and made a whirring sound.”

  “Yeah, then when we got air-conditioning,” she says, “you couldn’t drag him away from the window unit. He’d squat there staring through the vent. I hoped he’d grow up to be a repairman. But no such luck. Remember how he played wrong with his toys? Give him a truck and he’d flip it over and spin the tires until he was hypnotized. Then he got that Hopalong Cassidy gun set for Christmas,” Mom goes on, “and treated the pistols like cars and crashed them into each other. By the same token, you’d expect he’d pick up a toy truck and shoot it. But there was never any logic.” Mom shakes her head. “Still, it wasn’t until Maury started school and other kids teased him that I knew something was wrong.”

  How could she not have caught on before then? I’m fifteen months older than Maury. It’s not like Mom never saw a normal child. Didn’t she wonder when he fell to pieces every time she switched on the vacuum cleaner? He was scared of being sucked into the bag, just like he was of getting washed down the drain when Mom pulled the bathtub plug.

  When it was empty, though, he loved the bathtub. He’d climb in with his clothes on and snuggle up. He liked the feel of the porcelain. I never figured out how to square this with the fact that he couldn’t bear to be touched. He loved me the most. He told me that all the time. But whenever I tried to cuddle him, he squirmed away.

  Mom passes me another picture. I must be about four, Maury just shy of three. Both of us have curly blond ringlets and we’re wearing matching white shoes and flouncy pinafores. Mom claims it wasn’t unusual in those days to dress little boys in girl’s clothes. But cute as he and I look together—honestly, Maury was prettier tha
n me—I don’t think it was smart to twin us.

  “Isn’t this sweet?” Mom holds up a shot of me pushing Maury in his stroller. Then in what I don’t fancy is an aimless fall of her hand on a similar picture, she flashes one of Maury later on pushing me in my wheelchair. Like it might have slipped my mind, she asks, “Remember when you had polio?”

  The snapshot shows me smiling. Or fake-smiling. Sure, I was happy to be out of the hospital. On the other hand, I recognized even then that I was playing a role. Nobody loves a complaining drama queen. The script called for cheerfulness. That was the only part available to a kid who pulled through polio.

  Lately total strangers have started asking me about it. They’re not shy, and I don’t fault them for it. Who can blame anybody for being curious about a disease that doesn’t exist nowadays? A woman writing a book on polio even sent me a questionnaire. Everyone wants to know what it was like.

  How I caught it is a complete mystery to me. Mom kept Maury and me indoors during the hottest hours of the summer epidemic, and neither of us swam in a pool, public or otherwise. Yet polio singled me out and hunted me down like a dog after a rabbit.

  I had it a month before anybody realized I was sick. The chills and fever, the pins and needles in my leg, the fatigue and limping, they got lost in the family’s bigger problems. Things had gone belly up for Dad and he couldn’t pay his gambling debts. Scared of having his legs broken, he left town and laid low until he could make restitution. Meanwhile Mom found a job checking out groceries at Safeway. Surprisingly, she didn’t seem to have any problem dealing with the public. She kept the cutting remarks to herself until she got home. But she did claim that being around food all day sickened her so bad she couldn’t cook dinner. She gave Maury and me cold cuts.

  Sometimes she took Maury to Safeway with her and he spent hours jumping on and off the mat that opened the automatic doors. He wouldn’t or couldn’t stop until Mom gave him a good smack.

  She tried to cure me of polio in the same fashion, with a stinging slap to the face. “Straighten up and walk right,” she demanded. But when that didn’t scare me into good health, she drove me to a doctor who took one look and declared, “Your daughter has P-O-L-I-O.” He spelled it out like the disease had gone to my brain and I couldn’t understand the word.

  Mom wobbled and sobbed, then promised me, “You’re not going to die.”

  The doctor hadn’t mentioned dying. I had never thought I’d die. Now I couldn’t think of anything else. It didn’t help my spirits that Mom removed the Miraculous Medal from her neck and looped the chain around mine. “Pray to the Blessed Mother for a miracle,” she shouted, as an orderly with a mask over his nose and mouth wheeled me into the hospital.

  The children’s polio ward was strictly black and white. Nurses in white bustled around, their starched uniforms crackling. Nuns wore crow-black habits with rosary beads rattling from their belts. The white doctors and priests dressed in dark suits, and the black orderlies in white smocks. The patients—boys, girls, and babies—were white. Black kids with polio got sent to a different hospital.

  The ward was the first air-conditioned room I ever slept in. A summer blessing, believe me, for Washington, D.C. But the stink of disinfectant and medicine made me gag. Every breath of air tasted like another swallow of sickness. I wanted to hold my breath and squeeze my eyes shut so nothing of that place entered me. But you couldn’t block it out. It was too strong, and I was weak and I couldn’t quit looking.

  At night, I sneaked out of bed and spied on the other kids. The refrigerated air cooled my backside through the slit hospital gown. But I shivered less from that than from what I saw. Kids with heads lolling on pipe-stem necks. Babies as twisted and bent as one of Mom’s discarded bobby pins. My roommate was a bundle of sticks in an iron lung. She breathed through a machine that wheezed and groaned while she gazed up at a mirror that showed her hollow-cheeked face. That’s how we talked, the two of us speaking into the mirror, her face paralyzed in a smile, mine frozen in disbelief. The worst thing was—I mean the weirdest—she had toys with her in the iron lung, but couldn’t move her hands to play with them.

  The black orderlies didn’t mind that I roamed the ward. I guess they agreed that I wasn’t sick compared to other patients. But the nuns and nurses warned me never to get out of bed by myself even to go to the bathroom. They made me use a bedpan, which I wouldn’t do until they threatened me with an enema.

  Polio had no cure in those days. It had to run its course. Some died. More wound up crippled. While you waited to see how things worked out for you, all you could do was stay limber. Each morning an orderly lifted me under the arms, lowered me into a tub of hot swirling water and told me to kick my feet. Kids who had no control of their muscles got dunked up and down. Their scrawny legs quivered like spaghetti strands in a boiling saucepan.

  After the whirlpool, a physiotherapist told me to reach for my feet. That, she said, was how they’d know when I was healed—when my fingertips touched my toes. In the beginning I could barely grab my knees. But I kept at it—the physio kept me at it—and my hands eventually moved down to my calves, one plump, the other stick thin. When I made it to my ankles, I was just six inches from home.

  In the evening, orderlies dragged metal cauldrons onto the ward, and the kids right away started crying. It was like a siren on a timer. One minute total silence, the next nothing but bawling. The orderlies jabbed tongs into the cauldrons and yanked out hot compresses, then went from aisle to aisle, wrapping our arms and legs. They burned like fire, those compresses, and my pink skin didn’t stop stinging till bedtime.

  But I wasn’t in so much pain that I didn’t notice something strange. Kids on the ward started wailing even before the orderlies wheeled in the cauldrons. They knew, their skin knew, what was coming.

  When I told this to Lawrence, he explained about Pavlov’s dogs. Right off the bat I realized that that described polio. It was a disease that reduced you to a howling mongrel.

  After three months, they discharged me to what I dreamed would be happiness at home. But I had to stay in the house and rest most of the day in bed. With Mom at Safeway and Dad still hiding, Maury was all the company I had.

  Out the window, I watched people on the sidewalk across the street, staring at our house and whispering, just as they did years later after Maury was arrested. Neighbors and rubbernecking strangers from around town had read in the newspapers about me, the umpteenth polio victim of the season, and they were anxious to have a look. They kept their distance, though. Like with AIDS today, people didn’t know whether to feel sorry or disgusted.

  Parents wouldn’t even let their kids play on my side of the street. One daring little friend did dart over, and for a minute we hollered back and forth, me at the open window, she down on the lawn. But then her mother swooped in and toted her off to safety.

  I suppose that’s when it started, this sense I have that I’m excluded, that my feelings don’t matter and I might as well not have them. That’s been the hardest part for Lawrence to handle—the way I act like if I ever drop my guard the past will eat into every corner of my life.

  “Candy, you’re daydreaming,” Mom breaks in. “Shut your mouth before you catch flies.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Not to me, you’re not.”

  “I’m here as a Eucharistic minister,” I remind her. “I’m concentrating on the prayers. Are you ready?”

  “I told you, I prayed all night. I have so many special intentions,” she says between cigarette puffs, “there aren’t enough hours in the day. ‘Hear me, Lord,’ I beg. ‘Your will, not mine, be done.’”

  I know she prays for me to land a good man, which I regard as an insult to Lawrence. She prays for Maury to find a good woman and for Quinn to win an Oscar. Then on top of the missionaries and the souls in purgatory, she prays for God to have mercy on an A-list of dead celebrities—Audrey Hepburn, Elvis, Natalie Wood, Rock Hudson …

  “Oh Lord, life is
hard,” she groans. “The old griefs, the memories, so much pain.”

  “Why don’t you just tell God that He knows what you need and leave it in His hands?”

  “I’d rather itemize. It calms me down. At least it did. Now I’m so nervous you’ll ship me off to assisted living, I pray I’ll die soon.”

  “What do you have against living in a nice room with all your needs looked after?”

  “Roaches,” she says. “Those dumps are crawling with roaches.”

  “We’ll find you a clean place.”

  “And they’re expensive. A couple years of living like Lady Bountiful and there’d be nothing left for you and Maury.”

  “Don’t worry about me. And you can count on Quinn to look after Maury.”

  Mom flicks an ash from her cigarette. It misses the ashtray and floats to the floor. “Promise me one thing. Don’t commit me against my will.”

  I tell her the truth. I wouldn’t dare to do anything against her will. If I did, she’d attack tooth and nail. They’d have to strap her into a straitjacket and stuff a gag in her mouth. Mom’s like those guys Maury did time with, cons who can turn anything—a rolled magazine, a comb, a toothbrush—into a deadly weapon.

  As she gropes in the box for more photographs, she resembles a dealer plucking cards out of that gadget called a shoe. She deals me a shot of Dad, his hair brilliantined, his sport shirt splotched with Hawaiian flowers. Gamblers, I’ve heard it said, stay in the game secretly hoping to lose. But judging by his cocky grin, Dad wasn’t that kind. He always looked and dressed and acted like a guy with an ace up his sleeve and a joker to play. He had a wicked sense of humor.

  I remember once he returned from a fishing trip on the Anacostia River lugging a snapping turtle by its tail. He chased Maury and me around the backyard until the turtle crooked its long neck over its shell and bit at Dad’s hand. That did it. He slapped it down and chopped its head off with an ax. Blood splashed everyplace and the headless snapper stumbled blindly in the grass.