Then she stopped cooking, and we knew. We couldn’t any longer avoid knowing. Anyone who had ever shared a meal with Mumma knew what it was to enjoy food. Her pride in her cooking was equaled by her enjoyment of eating, and it was simply fun to watch her savor her proud twin pleasures. She cut a ravioli in half and held a chunk on her fork, anticipating. She brought it under her nose, inhaling slowly. Then she dipped it into whatever she’d sauced it with, put it into her mouth and, as soon as she closed her teeth into it, closed her eyes too, so as not to let anything distract her from experiencing that first taste. It didn’t matter what she was eating—a slice of warm pecan pie à la mode, a glazed carrot, an unadorned steak, a bouillabaisse—each offered her its particular delights. Mumma maintained that she didn’t care what she ate, but anyone who shared meals with her knew better.
So when there were foil trays from frozen dinners in her kitchen wastebasket, we had to recognize it for what it was. Stouffer’s lasagna in her freezer, Captain Bob’s fish sticks, Sara Lee cheesecakes, Swanson fried chicken pieces—they all gave it away: Mumma was no longer herself. We could no longer pretend. We had spent too many years, too many meals, wishing that we had her ability to enjoy eating, and cooking too, too much time envying her relationship to food, to be blind to the mute evidence in her freezer and her trash. Obviously, Mumma was failing. Most obviously, it was time for Mumma to stop driving.
But as long as any of us could remember, the world had featured Mumma behind the wheel of her fire-engine-red Coupe de Ville.
Mumma always drove a bright red car and it was always a Cadillac, the make Pops originally selected because of her long drives into Boston for business. It was the safest car he could find, and he was looking for the safest because he had taught her to drive, for one thing, and for another, this was Massachusetts. “The only thing worse than the standard Massachusetts driver,” Pops told us, “is your mother. I wish I could buy her a Sherman tank.”
On the winding roads of the Cape, Mumma habitually drove ten or fifteen miles per hour above the speed limit, and she exceeded it by more on highways. Also, she responded to traffic controls like the natural outlaw she was. Stoplights she was willing to respect, but a stop sign had to prove its worth. “I can see everything I need to,” she would say, slowing down to perhaps ten miles per hour below the speed limit to enter or cross a roadway. “I saw him coming, I had lots of time, don’t be such nervous Nellies.” Or, if our fears were well grounded, “Where did he come from? He was going like a bat out of hell, he’s lucky he didn’t cause a wreck.”
Mumma was proud of her driving, just the way it was, proud of her reflexes and her fearlessness, her ability to charm policemen and be unmoved by irate drivers. She was also proud of her car, proud of the care she always took of it, keeping it washed and waxed, lubricated, taking it in for the checkups, having the tires rotated, the wheels balanced. It follows as the night the day that Mumma refused to share the pleasure of driving, especially on short trips when it was such a bother repositioning the seat, and also especially on long trips, when an open road required long periods of good concentration. When she drove, Mumma put her foot down hard on the accelerator and kept it there, her ability to maintain a steady speed the mark, she assured us, of a good driver. She parked wherever convenience decreed, and in Wampanoag she could do that with impunity. Characteristically, however, when reserved places for handicapped drivers began to appear, despite any personal inconvenience she honored those restrictions. “Life is hard enough without being handicapped,” she told us, and was vigilant about checking the license plate of anyone parked in the restricted spots. If she spotted an undeserving vehicle, she would park her car directly behind it. “He won’t be making that mistake again,” she reported with satisfaction. “Not in this town.”
So to take Mumma’s car away from her…
For me, for all of us, that was the worst moment of her Alzheimer’s, worse than the time of ever-increasing anxiety, worse than the diagnosis itself, even worse than those last miserable months before Mumma had entirely detached herself from herself, when her waking hours were filled with a nervous and fearful fussiness. The time we understood that it was really, inevitably, happening was when we admitted to ourselves that we would have to get Mumma off the road. In the event, however, Mumma seemed to forget immediately that she had ever had a license, and a Cadillac. I say “seemed” not because she gave me any reason to doubt but because I couldn’t believe it had been so easy. Without her car, Mumma took to walking around town, a little bright-haired lady in a bright flowered dress and sneakers, with either a shopkeeper or a daughter (me, usually) to help out if she had too many packages to carry home. “You should walk more,” she told me. “You always were lazy, always with your nose in a book. A woman needs exercise, more than a man,” she declared, forgetting that she had always maintained that being a mother and keeping a house kept her trim enough. Forgetting it or ignoring it, that is. With Mumma, you could never be sure what was Alzheimer’s and what character. “I’ve been wanting to get rid of that gas guzzler for years,” she eventually told us, “but you girls wouldn’t let me. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you didn’t want me to get the benefits of walking. At my age, especially, it’s important to keep fit.”
• • •
We put off the crisis of Mumma’s driving until the third time the police called me. “I’m sorry to bother you,” the officer always began. “The old lady’s fine,” he always assured me. “We’ve got her safe here with us.” Mumma had been a great supporter of any Police League activity and lobbied for increases in benefits too, for all public servants; she was an advocate and so they cut her slack, her credit good for years of indulgence. But she had become a menace. “Three strikes and she’s out,” we had decided after the first call. “Three strikes and we get rid of the car,” we said after the second, hoping it wouldn’t come to that.
My sisters were as reluctant as I was, but they knew as well as I did how dangerous she had become, to other drivers, to herself, and even, when we couldn’t stop it from happening, to the grandchildren, who gleefully rebelled along with her, by not strapping themselves in when they rode with her, by riding in the front seat. “Gran’s not afraid,” they told their mothers. “She’s not afraid of anything. Gran’s fun.”
“You’ll have to get her car away from her, Beth,” my sisters told me. We met regularly after Pops died, as well as talking frequently on the phone. That day we were in Wayland. We had had one of Meg’s lunches, lasagne verdi, pear and walnut salad on a bed of mixed young greens, and with our coffee a selection of lovely little pastries, miniature tarts, cream puffs the size of gumballs, tiny perfect napoleons.
We remained at Meg’s dining room table after lunch, the green lawn and the asphalt tennis court visible through the open windows, the vista framed by two stately horse chestnut trees and a clapboard corner of the four-car garage. We drank our coffee out of Limoges cups, with saucers, and made our selection from the silver platter of pastries, moving the tiny delicacies onto dessert plates of clear Finnish glass.
“Why me?” I asked.
“You’re the one who sees her every day,” they reminded me. “You’re her primary caregiver.”
“All the more reason it shouldn’t be me,” I said. “I’ll hear about it forever.”
“What forever?” asked Amy, but Jo had a less fatal view. “We all know that at this point, she’s forgotten what she knew about driving.”
I couldn’t argue. After all, there had been the third call from the police, and the last few times I’d been on the road with Mumma I had seen Death with sickle raised over me, more than once.
“She absolutely should not have a car,” Meg maintained.
I agreed. “I know, I’m the one they call, but why don’t you take it away from her, Meg? It would take some of the heat off of me.”
“I can’t imagine Mumma without her Caddy,” Meg mused sadly.
“Imagine her with her Caddy
,” Amy advised. “Imagine her going nose to nose with an eighteen-wheeler. Or nose to nose with a car full of children. Imagine that. That Caddy could take out a Chevy, easy. Imagine the publicity.”
Meg continued, “Just thinking about Mumma without her—” and blew her nose.
“Imagine the lawsuits,” Amy advised.
“Mumma trusts Beth,” Jo announced, then turned to me. “She’s used to you. The rest of us…She’s not used to having us around. When I go home, it takes her about five minutes now to figure out who I am. She’s fine then, well, mostly, I agree, but—”
“Imagine the guilt,” Amy advised.
“What am I supposed to do?” I demanded, hoping for an idea. “Just get into her car and drive away with it?”
“You could bring it to my house,” Amy said. “Wilfred would love a red Caddy.”
I was pleased to be diverted. “And then how would I get back home? And who says I don’t want it, anyway, or any of the rest of us, what gives Wilfred first refusal? Or one of my children, or one of any of yours?” Of course I knew it would have to be me and I dreaded doing that to my mother, taking her car away from her, taking away her driving privileges, her independence. But my sisters were right. I gave up the quarrel.
I made a date for lunch with Mumma, writing it on her calendar, calling her in the morning to be sure she had looked at the calendar. I agreed to let her drive me to the restaurant. I agreed to let her pay the bill. I agreed to “look nice.” By then Mumma had grown suspicious. “You’re up to something,” she told me. When I didn’t deny it, she said, “Save it for after the meal. Life is too short not to enjoy lunch.”
So I did. I enjoyed my lunch with Mumma and it was over coffee and warm pecan pie topped with a scoop of fresh-churned vanilla ice cream that I told her, “You shouldn’t be driving anymore. It’s not safe. We don’t want you to drive.”
She fixed me with a mahogany gaze, and chewed. She swallowed and stared at me. Ice cream melted in my mouth as I waited, unable to swallow.
At last she said, “All four of you? You all agree?”
I nodded.
“That’s it, then.”
I swallowed gratefully. Mumma reached into the purse she had hung off the back of her chair and rummaged around in it for the car keys, which she set beside my coffee mug in a gesture of surrender, Lee at Appomattox. We finished our desserts in silence. Then, “So who gets the Caddy?” Mumma asked me. “Not you.”
“Not me,” I agreed.
“That fine husband of yours,” Mumma suggested, and I knew that she had temporarily lost George’s name.
“I’ll ask him,” I assured her, although I was pretty sure what his answer would be. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Yes. Well. It may be a good thing for me not to drive anymore, because sometimes I’m not sure of the way home. With all of the building that’s been going on around here, all the new streets springing up.” She fixed me again with her gaze. “About getting old, I can tell you, the only good thing about it is that half the time I can’t remember how old I am because I don’t know what year it is. Getting old is like trying to see through a fog. Or maybe it’s like walking through a spider web, in a thick woods, when you’re trying to peel sticky stuff off of your face, pull it out of your hair…” She pulled fretfully at her bright, unnaturally auburn hair, miming this. “And at the same time as you pull you’re walking into more of it. Or it’s like wearing snowshoes, you can’t just walk normally, you can’t trust your balance or your instincts. But really, it’s like trying to see through a thick fog. I think. Or did I already say that? I already said that, didn’t I? I think I did.”
“Don’t worry, it’s worth saying twice, to make sure I get it.”
Mumma opened her purse. “I’m not worrying, I’m paying and that’s all there is to it. Now what have I done with the car keys?”
By the time we got back into her car, and I’d reminded her that she would have to ride in the passenger seat, and she’d told me in no uncertain terms that she was not about to strap herself in, Mumma was in a fury. She didn’t say anything to me, but she muttered to herself all the way back to her house. I didn’t understand a word of what she was muttering, although I did get the gist, which was, “Can’t do this to me.” But by the time I walked into the kitchen with her, to retrieve the second set of car keys, the insurance information and the title to the car, her mood had changed. “When is my new car coming?” she asked, and then, without waiting for my response, said, “You didn’t get black, did you? You wouldn’t do that to me.” She fixed me with another mahogany look and then a broad and happy smile that was, more than anything else, certain that she was about to get her own way. “You wouldn’t dare.”
9.
Burying Mumma
The nursing home called me, I telephoned my sisters, and by evening we had gathered at my house, which used to be Mumma’s house, the house we had grown up in. None of them had wanted to come with me to view the body and make a final farewell. “The day she no longer knew my name is the day I said goodbye to her,” Jo said.
Amy said, “I have to admit, I expected her to last much longer. I was actually sort of hoping she’d make it into the next millennium.”
“She’d have liked that,” Meg agreed, and pointed out, “She almost did.”
Jo said, “It would have been just like her to keep living on, sticking to it no matter what. Like you, Beth, the way you went to see her every day even though she never had any idea she’d ever seen you before. Stubborn.”
I thought I should apologize. “I live so close, I couldn’t not go. It didn’t feel right not to.”
“It didn’t feel right to me when I went,” Meg admitted. “That’s why I stopped. I used to think, when she was so irritating and know-it-all and wouldn’t let me grow up? I used to think I’d like the chance to boss her around and be the one who knew more, but I really…When push came to shove? I hated it.”
“Having her be so anxious and unsure.”
“Helpless,” I added.
“Needy,” Amy defined it.
Ceremoniously, Jo lit a cigarette. She moved over to the open window before I could protest, and from there gave voice to what we were all thinking: “We’re a fine set of daughters, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Amy said, “but I did the best I could.”
“She thought we were good daughters,” Meg said. “Especially compared to other people’s children.”
“Just not much good compared to her,” I pointed out.
“Well, Beth,” Meg said, as if I didn’t already know this, “Mumma didn’t think anybody could compare to her.”
We all thought about that until—“Maybe she was right,” Jo said.
“Of course she was right,” I answered. “That’s what made her so annoying. And I don’t know why you think that’s so funny.”
George had taken Sarah out to dinner and a movie, even if it was a school night, leaving the four of us to accomplish unhindered what had to be done. We had ordered out for pizza. Jo was drinking beer, Amy mineral water, Meg and I had glasses of wine. Amy had insisted on making a salad and Meg insisted that we eat on plates, and I had surrendered, setting the table with place mats, silver, and cloth napkins, just as Mumma would have, except I put candles on the table, and lit them. Mumma for some reason made a stand against candles on a dinner table.
“It was quick,” Amy observed. “Not just in terms of how long we thought she’d hang on, but she had a quick death.”
“I bet she’d claim she died of a broken heart,” I said. “If she could come back and give us her personal diagnosis.”
“Doctor Rida,” Jo laughed.
Meg temporized. “But she did, didn’t she? Isn’t that what a heart attack is? A heart that’s literally broken?”
Amy got to the point. “She can’t come back and tell us.” She helped herself to pizza and piled salad on her plate. “But—”
Jo interr
upted to echo, “I guess she’s really finished with us now.”
I took two pieces of pizza and had no room on my plate for salad and decided that I might just treat myself to a meal without any green leafy vegetables in it.
“Not quite,” Amy said.
“Good pizza,” Meg said to me as if I’d made it myself, and I accepted the praise, “Thank you.”
“What do you mean not quite?” Jo asked Amy. “In that I-know-something-you-don’t voice, the way Mumma used to.”
Amy merely looked gravely around at all of us, which gave Jo time to say, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be…” before she told us.
“There’s a letter. Mumma left a letter. And before you all get bent entirely out of shape, it was George she gave it to. Years ago. This was just before Pops died, when Pops was in the nursing home in the coma. George asked me to keep it. ”
A letter was Mumma reaching back from the great beyond, defying death, or trying to, thinking she could, which was so like her that we were stunned into silence. Finally I asked Amy, “What does it say?”
“I haven’t opened it. What do you think of me?” Amy protested, and before anyone thought of it she added, “Neither has George. I asked him.”
Before any of them could wonder about me, I told them, “He never said a word to me,” which was the truth. “So where is it?”
Amy leaned over to her attaché case and extracted a long creamy envelope. She set it on the table in front of us. It was Mumma’s handwriting all right, a little shaky with age and encroaching Alzheimer’s, but those were her large black letters, ramrod straight although some the o’s and g’s were left unfinished, as if the writer’s mind had moved much faster than her hand. She had addressed it: To My Daughters.
“I should open it,” Meg announced. “I’m the oldest,” she reminded us.
She took the envelope and turned it over to unseal it. When she did that, we saw written across the back: Meg should open this, she’s the oldest. So we were smiling when Meg took out the sheets of Mumma’s heavy business stationery and read. Typically, Mumma had wasted no time on a salutation.
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