Good Family

by Terry Gamble

  “Wake up, honey,” she says to my mother. “You won’t believe who’s come.”

  My mother’s eye wanders briefly to the left. There is no movement in her fingers or her mouth. Only her chest rises and falls.

  “I can’t stay long,” I say for my mother’s benefit as much as Miriam’s. “I’m here to help Dana get ready. Besides,” I go on, trying to sound upbeat, “it looks as if she has everything she needs.”

  “Oh, she has everything she needs,” says Miriam, pressing her lips together.

  I push open the window so I can listen to the waves. In the distance, the drone of a motorboat. I wonder if my mother hears these things, if she hears the cawing of gulls or the sizzle of heat bugs after the rain.

  “Miriam,” I say, “do you think she can hear me?”

  “She hears you all right.”

  I lean against a bureau and look down on her. Her head has dropped to the side in an almost coy fashion is if she is flirting, but I’m convinced she can’t see me. Wouldn’t she say something? Wouldn’t she mouth my name?

  “How do you know when to feed her?” I ask Miriam.

  Miriam’s eyebrows are drawn together with vicious precision. “I feed her,” she says, matching my intonation exactly, “when she’s hungry.”

  Yes, of course, when she’s hungry. But how would Miriam know? I fix my eyes on my mother. “I don’t know what to say to her.”

  Miriam sticks a straw into my mother’s mouth. My mother’s cheeks work vigorously as her eyes roll toward me like a curious child’s. I wonder if Miriam has spiked the drink, and if that’s why my mother is sucking so earnestly. “Why don’t you tell her about your life?” Miriam suggests.

  I laugh quickly and turn away. My mother stopped asking me about my life ten years ago, so why should I inflict it upon her now? Would she really like to hear about being single and thirty-nine in New York? Or would she like to hear about the documentaries Ian and I make—obscure narratives about obscure people who have spent their lives pursuing arcane interests? Or how I met Ian in grad school; how he got me into treatment and AA when I was starting, it seemed, from scratch? We had held each other’s hands at the close of my first meeting, both of us averse to touching, each of us refusing to say the Lord’s Prayer, our hands clutching afterward like survivors on a raft, both of us knowing we had found a kindred soul.

  “She doesn’t want to hear about my life.”

  “How would you know what she likes to hear about?”

  “I wouldn’t even know how to ask.”

  Miriam dabs at my mother’s lips. “She likes music. You like music, don’t you, Evelyn?” My mother’s eyes are intensely locked on Miriam. She doesn’t nod. Instead she makes a clicking sound, apparently with her tongue.

  “What’s she doing?” I ask.

  “She’s telling me she’s had enough.”

  Oh, dear God.

  “You can sing to her,” Miriam says to me. “You know how to sing, don’t you?”

  “If you consider a two-note range singing.”

  Miriam looks at me as though I’m beyond the pale. Her look reminds me of Louisa, and I think of how, when we were growing up on Sand Isle, the black help and the white help had different nights off. The memory of it embarrasses me now, like that picture of that little girl on the steps of an Arkansas school. I suddenly want to let Miriam know that I’m not of this place—that I’ve moved light-years away from here. I mention that I have a friend who sings scat in Harlem.

  Miriam purses her lips. “I don’t think Evelyn would appreciatescat.”

  “How can you stand it here, Miriam?”

  Miriam smoothes my mother’s hair and begins tucking in her bedclothes. “Keep your apologies,” she says.

  I cross to the bed and join her, making hospital corners by my mother’s feet, folding them like handkerchiefs. My mother’s right hand grasps the sheet; her left lies limp. The nails on both hands are clipped down to the tips, pitifully naked and colorless.

  “Miriam,” I say, jerking my head toward the window, where there’s a clear view of the lake, “can’t we move her over there?”

  Miriam briskly adjusts a pillow, then squirts some lotion into her hand and starts massaging Mother’s arms.

  I persist. “It’s so stuffy in here. She might like the breeze.”

  Miriam pulls her brows together, but she seems resigned. “You hear that, Evelyn? You’re going for a ride.” She rubs the rest of the lotion into her own arms and gives me a nod. Together, we heave the hospital bed across the room so that the breeze coming through the window can touch my mother’s face. She’s had so little touching in her life. My theory is that she went to the hairdresser every week because someone would run his fingers across her scalp, massage her temples. Breathing from the exertion, I drag my hand across her forehead. Her open eye closes with the touch. At this moment, I wish I could sing to my mother, sing her something low and soulful to ease her way, but I have only a two-note range and can’t find the words.

  I an?” I almost whisper into the phone.

  “Oh, my God! The prodigal Maddie! Have they locked you up yet?”

  I make a sound like oy, something vaguely Jewish just to make me feel like I’m back in New York. “It’s not just my family,” I tell him. “It’s me. It’s like having your childhood smack you across the face and say, ‘See! This is who you are!’”

  “Yes, but have the cousins arrived?” The thought of my cousins makes Ian almost rapturous—poor only-child Ian from Minnesota who grew up a voluptuary in the midst of Lutheran pragmatism. No thespian, coke-sniffing cousins for Ian like my cousin Sedgie; no paint-encrusted heartthrobs like Derek; nor any who, like Adele, believe they are the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. “A-dele,” says Ian, his voice lascivious, evoking Sedgie’s glamorous sister. “Is she there yet?”

  “Ian,” I say, “I’ve got to book an earlier flight. I want to get back to work.”

  Ian, my partner in film production, ignores me. “You’ve got to tell me what she’s wearing.”

  I sigh. “No one’s here, Ian,” wanting to add, For which I am grateful. “It’s quiet, for once.”

  Ian starts incanting, “MaddieAddieAddison. It’s only a place.”

  But what does Ian really know about Sand Isle? I have tried to paint for him a picture of exclusivity that doesn’t allow for much variation in race or religion. The dour descendants of Anglo-Scottish ancestors purged their souls with bracing morning swims, retired to prim, sober sleep each evening after vespers. Only at the turn of the century were non-Presbyterians allowed. By then, the climate was distinctly less sober, especially during Prohibition when the denizens had their own bootlegger who came by rowboat after dusk. My great-grandmother, famous for having lost her mind and regaining it, ascribed this to pernicious Episcopalian influences, but before she succumbed to cancer in 1935, the Catholics had appeared, about which Grannie Addie was aggrieved. Since then, interfaith marriages (Presbyterians to Episcopalians, Episcopalians to Catholics) became de rigueur, and, for the first time ever, a divorcée was allowed to take title of the cottage she had inherited from her parents.

  Sexual orientation? Ian had inquired after hearing all this. Do they care if you’re queer?

  Now I hear someone coming out of the kitchen. I tell Ian I will call him back. Hanging up, I stare at the wall. Bead-board is a hallmark of these cottages. Some owners have painted theirs in an attempt to “brighten,” some have Sheetrocked over the studs. Our house is mostly intact, the dark wood in front of me a gallery of framed pictures. Some are tens of decades old—nameless and yellowed. There is my grandfather as a boy in bloomers sitting in a rowboat, his long, blond curls falling past his shoulders. There is my grandmother, droopy-bosomed even before she was middle-aged, three children—four, if you count the one who died—two boys and one girl who would each go on to have two children of their own. Postwar babies who arrived after my uncle and father returned from Europe, toddling on the knees of aunts whose
saving graces were their sisters-in-law and the army of maids in my grandmother’s staff. We are the cousins, and there is ample documentation of our ever-expanding family. Nineteen forty-nine—the first one, Adele, followed by the identical twins Edward and Derek, who had to endure the scrutiny of four grandparents and two sets of aunts and uncles.

  The rest of us were born in the fifties—almost the sixties, in my case. Ike was president, Elvis was singing “Love Me Tender,” and the low rumblings of sex, drugs, and rock and roll were beyond the curve of the earth. That world, consisting of two kinds of people—relatives and friends—was my Eden, pristine and blank, unfettered by truth before knowledge first touched my lips.

  Nineteen-sixty is the first family photo where we’re all together. Edward stands off to the side almost in premonition of his absence. The other cousins are crew-cutted or pixied, three of us fair with Scots-Irish blood, three of us dark—the mysterious gypsy genes—our expressions ranging from confident to surly, our beaming, Coke-fed faces betraying nothing of what came later. There is no hint of multiple incarnations in Adele then. Or of Derek’s artistic bent. And the smaller of us—Sedgie, Dana, and me—we are scooped into our mothers’ laps or leaning against our fathers’ legs, our grandmother, now widowed, anchoring the center. It is here at the Aerie that we all come together, our yearly pilgrimage that defines and gives us meaning. No one looking at this picture would see anyone alcoholic or oversexed or neurotic or delusional. Dana, on my father’s lap, looks slightly worried, her eyebrows furrowed even then. And me? I am the youngest, hardly yet formed, a lump on my mother’s knee, as raw and unprotected as a just-hatched chick.

  When Dana comes into the dining room, I am looking at the place I marked twelve years ago behind the door. Eighteen inches above the floor, the initials S.A.F. Sadie Addison Farley. She was fifteen weeks old. We held her up to the wall as if we were taking a mug shot. Sadie’s wrinkled face was red with baby acne, and she looked like a cranky old man in need of a bowel movement.

  Penciled into the same soft bead-board, initialed and dated, is the mark of Aunt Pat at age five, already tall for her age. Below and above it are those of my father, barely two feet in ’23, shooting all the way up to six feet two inches in ’55. The whole wall looks like a Rosetta stone of growing children. Some of the initials are difficult to read. Some have changed with marriage and divorce. Next to an aunt in 1920 is a great-nephew in 1984. Same height, two generations later.

  “Did you check on Mom?”

  “Hmm,” I say.

  “So what do you think?”

  How, exactly, to phrase my response? Do I say that it’s an abomination that our mother is lying bedridden in a diaper, drooling out of the left side of her mouth? That she can no longer walk or talk coherently or smile or give any indication of what she’s thinking, or if she thinks at all?

  I touch the mark on the wall and stand up.

  “The guard brought your suitcase, and Dr. Mead is coming over,” Dana says. “This afternoon.” She pushes her glasses up on her nose, looks from me to the wall, but doesn’t ask. I was hoping to go swimming this afternoon, but the rain I predicted last night is waiting to drop, and the lake is a forlorn gray.

  “Did hospice call?” I say.

  “Still waiting.” Dana looks exasperated as she says this. “The phone’s been tied up,” she adds in a tone as if she’s been stewing over something for the longest time, and that this particular transgression, which should have been obvious, is left to her to rectify.

  “It was Ian,” I reply evenly. “We’re in the middle of a project.” I know she won’t ask, What project? That would acknowledge a world outside of this one, one that involves productivity and colleagues. It is a threatening, tainted world, and the borders of Sand Isle are sealed.

  “Does Mother want to see her?” I ask, referring to Dr. Mead.

  Dana crosses her arms. “I thought you might want to.”

  I know where she’s going with this. Already, I am feeling sucked in, asphyxiated. I want to say, It has nothing to do with me. Mother and I have made our truce if not our peace. Rain has started to beat against the dining-room windows. I wonder if Philip will cut his sail short. “Okay, okay,” I say, backing against the wall of initialed heights. “I’ll see the doctor.”

  My sister reaches forward, lays her hand on my head. It is as if she is giving me a blessing, but I’m sure she’s only measuring me.

  A half a day, and I’ve avoided the nursery. There’s no reason to go back there other than my therapist’s suggestion that it may be (A) edifying and/or (B) cathartic. Dr. Anke, dispeller of bogeymen and tainted memories. She asks relentless questions about my parents. She makes me go into rooms I would dearly prefer to avoid.

  In the Lantern Room, I turn on the faucet. Most of the bedrooms have their own sinks from the days when water closets were sequestered, and bathtubs had their own cells. In houses like these, plumbing was an afterthought. The faucet sputters and burps, coughs out a liquid that is insidiously brown. I let it run for a while, waiting for the cold, rich stream of hard water to erupt from its artesian source.

  When it runs clear, I splash some on my face. I’ve learned to control my panic attacks. Breathe, Dr. Anke told me. In and out. I can walk through the bathroom to get to the nursery, or go down the hall and enter it from the west. Two doors—one in, one out. Like breaths.

  There is a buzzing in my ears. If only I’d adjusted that baby monitor. I envision the crib. I breathe.

  Dr. Mead has been tending my mother since the year before she had her stroke. Dr. Mead is the only one other than Miriam who, as far as I can tell, talks straight to her. Two years ago, Mother had gone over to the hospital in Chibawassee for some complaint—plaque in the eyes, a slight blurring of vision—and lucked into Dr. Mead moonlighting in the ER. Dr. Mead had checked my mother’s vitals, moved a pin light around her eyes, examined her skin for bruising.

  How much do you drink, Evelyn? Dr. Mead had inquired, yanking her stethoscope out of her ears.

  Oh, my mother had said airily, a couple of cocktails around dinner.

  Your liver’s enlarged. You don’t get that kind of liver without knocking back a lot of booze. And you have emphysema. You’re going to stroke, Evelyn, if you don’t cut this out.

  Dana, who had accompanied our mother to the doctor, braced herself for one of Mother’s withering responses that she gave to taxi drivers or hairdressers when they were too familiar. But my mother’s nose crinkled conspiratorially as if she and Dr. Mead were sharing some delicious joke, and after that, she and Dr. Mead were friends.

  It wasn’t Dr. Mead, however, who was scoping my mother’s carotid at Cedar-Sinai last fall when she threw the clot to her brain. They knew instantly my mother was stroking. First she vomited; then her hand went rigid. The operating room filled with people trying to revive her, to keep her heart beating, her blood flowing. When she finally came to, her mouth drooped and she could not speak.

  The doctors went on to fill her with anticoagulants and antispasmodics and antidepressants and antibiotics whenever she ran a fever. She won’t have a year, they told Dana, so when June came, Philip and my sister brought her back to Sand Isle via private jet loaned by a friend.

  Now we are sitting at the kitchen table with Dr. Mead. I have risen twice to refill our coffees, offered butter cookies from a flowered tin.

  “She refuses to move,” Dana explains to Dr. Mead. I notice that Dr. Mead is about my age, but she seems older. She certainly has a more attractive hairdo, her hair swept up from her face like that. “And,” Dana adds, her voice pinched with disgust, “Miriam is giving her vodka in the Ensure.”

  “Very practical,” I say.

  My sister shoots me a look. At the very least, given my own history, Dana feels I should exhibit at least a modicum of outrage concerning our mother’s alcohol intake. But what can I tell her? That I might do exactly the same, given the circumstances?

  “Under the circumstances,” says Dr.
Mead, “I don’t see that as a problem.”

  I try not to smile, although I feel vindicated and even further allied with Dr. Mead. Dana, who has never so much as taken a hit off a joint, done a line of coke, or had a major hangover, doesn’t quite understand the exquisite pleasure of leaving one’s body. But I know. I know it as my mother knows it.

  “These doctors in California,” says Dr. Mead, leaning in toward the two of us. “What’s with all these meds?” I had noticed Dr. Mead picking up all the little orange containers on my mother’s bedside table, reading their contents. “Antidepressants?” she says.

  “Well,” says Dana, “she’s depressed.”

  “Of course she’s depressed,” snaps Dr. Mead.

  “Agoraphobic, too,” I say, avoiding Dana’s eyes. What would you know about Mother? she could say. You’ve been AWOL yourself.

  “Well then, maybe these drugs would have done her some good ten years ago.” Dr. Mead shakes her head. “Now they’re just dragging out a process that can’t be pleasant for anyone. Least of all, your mother. Your mother”—she beats us down with eyes that have seen it all—“just wants to die.”

  I have decided Dr. Mead is the sanest person I have ever met. Her candor is like a drink of springwater. I want to ask where she buys her clothes. She looks neither resort-y nor JCPenney-ish, which are about the only choices in this area. She resembles a sister of mercy. But just as I am about to ask her what we ought to do, Philip pushes through the kitchen door.

  “Hey,” Dana says to her husband in an unnaturally cheerful voice. “We’re talking about Mom’s meds.”