by See, Carolyn
She looked so bad that I ended up asking her if she wanted us to stay home, but she said no. She’d wait until we came home to have her operation. The week that we came back, she did have it—a routine gallbladder procedure. Lisa and Clara and I went up to be with her; Clara was fifteen, Lisa, twenty-five. We played cards in the hospital room the night before the surgery. Clara won, as usual. Mother accused her of cheating. The next morning I saw Mother as they brought her back from the recovery room. She was trying to sit up in her moving bed. She was in terror and great pain. I wish I hadn’t seen her face that day.
We stayed for three more days and then went home. Three nights later the doctor called me late at night. Mother had gone into a coma and wasn’t expected to live. I got back to Victorville around five in the morning, and went in to see my mother. She was on a respirator.
Nobody could figure it out. Her Filipina internist was furious at her surgeon brother-in-law, who wore gold chains and played tennis. “It was a clean incision,” he told me, and shrugged. I had my mother taken off the respirator, since that had been her wish. By the middle of the day Lisa and Clara were back in town. We took turns being with Mother, talking to her. Fastidious Lisa even climbed into bed with her to whisper in her ear that she’d be all right.
She only had three days to live. We went out funeral shopping for my mom. We tried to explain to the undertaker that my mother was a hell-raiser, that if she had ever been afraid of anything, she’d shoot first and ask questions later. That all she’d ever wanted was to drink and play cards. So instead of praying hands on that little memorial folder, could we have a poker hand instead? He got excited. “I’ve got a cannon around here some place,” he said. “Do you think she might like it if we shot off a cannon?”
We said we knew she’d like it.
That evening, late, Lisa and Clara went out for a snack. There was nobody around in intensive care except me and one tired nurse. She came to turn Mother over and give her a shot in the behind. She let her hand stay on Mother and pushed. Pushed again.
“Does your mom drink?” she asked.
“You bet.”
“I think she’ll come around tomorrow. She’s sort of pushing back, you know?”
“I’m sorry?”
“This is probably alcohol poisoning. It’s pretty common after an operation. You can’t have a drink, so you suffer alcohol withdrawal. We get them all the time up here. People drink hard in the desert.”
By the time the kids came back for me, I was in that state that only my mother can put me: Suckered Once Again! We were irate. All our grief, worry, for a case of alcohol poisoning!
But this is how we celebrated—having received a diagnosis that actually meant something, rather than the confused ditherings of a pair of immigrants (who might have been just trying to be tactful): we drove to the county fair, which was going full blast just outside of town. We found a steakhouse and chewed our way through great big steaks. Then we went back to The Green Tree Inn, where the air-conditioning had conked out. We put a fan on a chair, opened the door, turned on the TV, and drank canned margaritas. It was, I guess, the first time Clara had ever drunk in front of her family. Her face turned red as a tomato and she laughed so hard her knees buckled. We were giddy with relief. It was Grandma Kate, you know? We didn’t want her to die.
The next morning, after three days in a coma, Mother woke up in a roaring temper. Someone had stolen her purse, she was sure of it. She’d been at a stadium, and gone down a long hall toward a bright light. There’d been a doctor down at the end and she’d asked him, “Is this where they bring the banged-up athletes?”
“You had a real death experience, Ma!” I said, “Going down a long corridor like that. Seeing that bright light. That’s amazing.”
“Somebody stole my purse, goddamnit! I want it found right away!”
My mother would literally hover between life and death for the next thirty days. Her bowels wouldn’t move. The internist and the surgeon held heated arguments right in front of me. They were both so small that I, only five feet four myself, looked straight down on to the tops of their heads as they bickered.
“You wan’ her to die onna table?”
“Fine! You wan’ her to die inna bed?”
My mother compounded all this by telling everyone to hold a pillow over her face and kill her because life wasn’t worth living. She wanted me to do it, which I said would be perfect for her, since she’d get to die, and I’d have to spend the rest of my life in jail. She’d give me the fish-eye and ask me who stole her purse.
Still, an atmosphere of mild festivity prevailed. Clara’s and Lisa’s boyfriends and girlfriends kept making the 100-mile drive up to the High Desert. Lisa and Clara spent hours in the emergency room, playing cards and keeping track of the appalling carnage that kept coming down in Victorville, Apple Valley, Hesperia, Adelanto. Motorcycle accidents, battered wives, stomach cancer, knife wounds. Violence and chaos!
Clara and Lisa were there, playing gin rummy, when Aunt Helen turned up. She blew into the waiting room looking truly scary. Instead of dusting her face with powder, she’d used rouge. She still knew a lot of these people. Hadn’t she carried for half a century the sobriquet “Mrs. Victorville,” or, alternately, “Mrs. Liquorville”?
When Helen found that her sister was in ICU, still between life and death, she demanded a wheelchair. No way was she going to be upstaged by Kate. I saw her in the hall. “Hi, Hi! Penny!” she wheezed, but didn’t linger, knowing I wasn’t a fan. She wheeled past me into ICU. I followed, and got to see my mother recognize her, and groan, and turn her face away. If Helen’s feelings were hurt, she didn’t show it. She wheeled back out to the waiting room, engaged Lisa and Clara in perfunctory conversation, then turned to her elderly buddy Wilma, with the old enthusiasm. “Well, Wilma! Time for a short snort!”
Mother, in a temper in Yucatán.
Aunt Helen wouldn’t come back. She said it was too “upsetting” to see her sister like this.
During these thirty days, my mother gradually came to herself. She displayed tremendous bravery. When they threaded a wire straight to her heart she held my hand, but not very hard, and looked patiently at the ceiling. Once she asked me, “Am I going to die?” and I answered as truthfully as I could, “I don’t think so.” She took it in, and thought about it.
Somebody got the idea to have her swallow a ball of mercury on a string. The idea was that the volatile mercury, rolling its way down through her digestive system, would hit her intestines, and by nudging, falling, leaning, might wake up her lower digestive tract. The danger of death by toxic infection was present every second, the way things were. The down side of using the mercury was that if the ball broke, she was a dead person. Every day the tennis-playing surgeon shouted at the internist that he had to operate. “You wan’ her to die inna bed?” Every day Mother swallowed about another foot of string. The mercury wasn’t working.
Lisa and Clara went home. John and I moved into a cheap motel with a Western motif—a neon horse out front. Every night I took a couple of canned margaritas to the room and John opened a book. (There was no TV here.) We were in the desert, waiting. Finally, even the internist had to admit that her brother-in-law had to do something. She couldn’t let Kate die. That night my mother’s friends came and went, and John and I stayed with her until around midnight. She asked us not to come in early the next day. She didn’t want any demonstration, she hated that stuff. But she was sad, looking death in the face.
The next morning, I went to the hospital to hear the bad news. The surgeon sidled up to me with an uneasy grin on his face: “We decided not to do the operation after all …” I raised my arm to hit him, and he cringed.
At dawn that morning as they’d wheeled Mother into X-ray, she’d surprised them all by defecating over everything. And again. And again. So many times that it came to them they didn’t need an operation.
So she was better. Her internist told her no more drinking, and she never
did take another drink. Her friend Edna told me that Kate, before her operation, had put away half a gallon of vodka a day, and still kept up her bridge schedule.
Just after this crisis, my father sickened and died in a way almost diametrically opposed to how my mother had faced death. He was terrified. When I visited him on the cancer floor at Scripps, he sat, petrified, in a wheelchair, convinced that a Chinese gang headed up by a man named Ching Chang Phouie was after him. (What a cruel reward for a lifetime of making up silly stories.) I told him there definitely wasn’t any Ching Chang Phouie after him, and wheeled him out for a lap around the eighth floor of this gruesome monument to Western science, so different from the slapdash coziness of the little hospital in Victorville. As we wheeled past his bathroom, he couldn’t resist a sidelong glance, looking for Ching Chang Phouie.
Every test they could do on my dying dad, they did. They put him through a CAT scan to see if he had a brain tumor. He did. What a surprise! They loaded him with chemicals and radiation, they maximized the bottom line. As soon as his insurance stopped, they pitched him out of the hospital. Lynda, with a young child to take care of, had to put him in a nursing home. He lasted there three weeks, calling home every day, begging to come back. He took dying very badly.
But Mother was getting better. And getting her old disposition back. She came down for Christmas and wouldn’t speak to us during Christmas dinner. (Clara passed me a note on which she’d scribbled No More! No More!)
As a gesture to end all gestures, at a Christmas during the late eighties everyone pitched in to give Mother a magic gift—she and I would spend a week in Cuernavaca the week before her birthday. The family thought I’d gone completely nuts, taken my martyr role far far beyond any reasonable limits. Because it would be just my mother and me, and I wasn’t drinking at the time.
I did take a bottle of Valium though, and every time I got even a twinge of the old panic, I took another Valium. I took so many Valium that, in a filial echo of my mother’s old ailment, my bowels didn’t move for a week. We saw the Diego Rivera murals, we saw Malinché’s residence, we spent a wonderful afternoon in the town square watching a Red Cross drive. One night, Mother accused me of thinking I was too good for her, but I just took two more Valium.
On our last day in Cuernavaca we went to a fancy gringo restaurant with rolling lawns and squealing peacocks. We had a swell lunch, and, after dessert, they brought us complimentary Kahlúas. Mother drained it off. “It isn’t alcohol,” she said. “It’s just flavoring. Go ahead! Drink up.”
I did. I was dying for a drink, to put it mildly. Mother looked at me and smiled the Devil’s smile. “I knew you couldn’t stay with it,” she said.
With my mind, I still saw my mother as admirably strong. Or as a “victim of society,” trained to be beautiful and nothing else. I remembered that she squeezed fresh orange juice for every last one of us. With my heart, I remembered the terrible three weeks when she gave in to grief after my father left. And I remembered her incredibly brave days in the hospital forty years later.
You can’t get on with your life unless you forgive and forget. But what if you can’t forgive and forget? I applied a double standard to my mother. It was easy to forgive Richard, or hot-tempered Tom—and ask them to forgive me—or even, when I thought about it, to forgive my sewn-up stepdad. God knows I made their lives as hard as they made mine. I made it a point to apologize as often as I could to my own daughters, and I hoped they forgave me. But I came up against a blank wall with my mother.
In the spring of 1989, John and I drove out to a community college in San Bernardino—at the far eastern end of what they call the Inland Empire. Fifty miles more over the Cajon Pass, and you’d be up in the High Desert, in Victorville. We harangued four hundred hardworking high school teachers at eight in the morning. They wanted to hear the words we told them. We told them they could write if they wanted to; that they were so lucky to be teaching young minds; that we were all having a lot of fun here; that, relatively speaking, we were living in heaven on earth.
Afterward, as I was signing books, I looked up to see my mother, who had come uninvited. She was mightily pissed. She came up to me and said, “You’re bullshit, you’re bullshit. Everything you do or say is bullshit.” Later, as I stood shaking hands with teachers, she engaged them in conversation. “When she got lippy when she was little, I beat her up pretty good. I guess they could put me in jail for that now.”
The next day, I composed ten separate postcards, each with the topic sentence: “Funny how people’s ideas of bullshit can differ. Here is one of mine.” I mailed three before I came to my senses. I told Mother I’d never see her again except in a public place or in the company of a therapist. She chose a Christian therapist up in the High Desert, whom we saw twice for a two-hour session, and nearly drove one more person to madness.
Two years after that, in 1991, as we were packing to go to the Miami Book Fair, the Filipina internist called to say that if we wanted to see my mother alive we’d better come right away. Swearing bitterly, I put away the resort dresses I’d bought and pulled out my Victorville clothes.
It was after midnight when we hit that same old hospital. Everyone was, as always, exceedingly kind. I worried that when Mother saw us she’d die of rage. She had congestive heart failure and a clot on her lung. She looked so small when we saw her! Up in her eighties now, and weighing about eighty-five pounds. I shook her shoulder very lightly. She turned over, recognized us, and gave us a friendly smile. “Oh, hi!” she said. “How about that Magic Johnson! Doesn’t he make you want to throw up?”
We saw Mother in 1992, for what I personally hope is our last Christmas together. We drove up to Victorville to give her some presents. The deal was, we’d meet only in a restaurant, since in a public place she’d go easy on saying awful things. We met in the evening, and she had her friends with her. Such nice people! It seemed we’d stay in The Green Tree Inn and give her those presents at breakfast.
At seven in the morning, Mother called and said she was too sick to go out. We’d have to drop the stuff off where she lived. Suckered once again! She wasn’t sick at all, just in another rage. Two hours later, I watched a gingerbread loaf skitter end over end along the length of her trailer, as she gave it one last desperate, underhanded pitch, trying once again to express hatred that stayed pristine, unchanged, and inexpressibly strong.
That could be my last memory of her, or the memory of her hanging up on Rose when she called during that second terrible illness to see how her mother was. But the most entrancing one I have is of both of us, nervous as cats, sitting in the parlor of the Christian therapist (the kind of woman who has ceramics all over her tables, and macramé hangings on the wall).
The therapist is looking over two questionnaires she’s had us fill out. “Carolyn, I see you’ve been married twice, have two children, and consider that it’s possible you might have a drinking problem, is that right?”
I nod solemnly, on my best behavior.
“And, Kate, you’re widowed, have one daughter, and don’t drink at all?”
“That’s right,” my mother says sweetly, “I have one daughter, and I don’t drink at all.”
The thing is, you have to admire my mother. Mom stands pat.
14. PEACE BREAKS OUT
Clara Sturak marries Chris Chandler. A very happy day
Early in 1992, Clara decided it was about time to get married to her boyfriend, Chris Chandler. They’d been together for over five years, and living together for one of those years. Chris was still an undergraduate at UCLA, working at Dutton’s Bookstore in Brentwood. Clara worked full time in Santa Monica at a shelter for women who were homeless and mentally ill. It was Clara’s job to save young women—fifteen at a time—who had been living on the streets, messed up from drugs, often alcoholic, repeatedly raped and beaten, abandoned with stony unconcern by their own families. She and her staff would clean them up, feed them great meals, find them some clothes, get them on a set of
drugs that might make them sane again, find them a job, an apartment, then start in with another batch. Hard work, and dangerous. Clara’s most endearing client had beaned her husband with a dresser drawer to keep him from beating her anymore, and done time for murder.
In spite of her spartan, almost saintly lifestyle, Clara decided she wanted a magnificent wedding.
It was going to be a challenge. You could see it shaping up to be a challenge from the very first day. Because of divorce, guess who said that fancy weddings were a bourgeois sellout? Her dad might not have said it. He might have been joking. She might not have heard him correctly. But it was more or less inevitable that they would disagree. Besides, he might not be able to come.
Clara approached the latter problem with breezy cheer. She showed her father an open calendar: “You pick the date,” she told him. “I won’t get married without you!” She also said that she wanted both of us to walk her down the aisle. She wanted the wedding to be in her dear friend Gretchen’s garden, a lush and perfect forest out of a fairy tale. Clara wanted John to write a poem and read it.
While Lisa’s husband’s family was an exemplum of “stability,” Chris’s family was a mirror image of our own. Meanwhile, Chris wanted a friend and all his brothers to be groomsmen. Since each of his brothers had a different mother, this looked like it might be a problem. Chris didn’t care. He wanted everybody. He wanted his mother and father to walk him down the aisle and was mightily bummed when he realized he didn’t even get to go down the aisle.
An afternoon wedding, with white dinner jackets. But Clara began to get depressed. Her father said he had never worn a tuxedo; never had, never would, and wasn’t going to start now. Her young half brother, Michael Sturak, a spookily beautiful photocopy of his dad, and slated to be one of the groomsmen, said if his dad wasn’t wearing one, he wasn’t wearing one. Even Clara’s stepmother, Tom’s third wife, usually a cool peacemaker, opined that tuxedos might seem a little extreme. Clara gnashed her teeth.