The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D

by Nichole Bernier

  December 3, 1984

  When I got in from the airport yesterday Mom was asleep on the couch. I just saw her in August but the difference was awful. Everything about her is thin and gray. The worst of it is her nose. I didn’t know a bony nose could change someone’s face so much. She was sitting up asleep with the white afghan that Aunt Lucy made her as a wedding gift when she was sick with it. My whole life it’s never come out of the antique trunk because Mom always said it was too special, and so was the trunk for that matter, one of the few nice things of Grandma’s. And here was the afghan with a plate spilled sideways, crumbs all over it.

  This place is the picture of neglect. The refrigerator is pretty much empty, and what little could get moldy already has. I scooped five dead fish out of the aquarium, but it looked like a few live ones were cowering behind the castle so I pinched a little food in. I can’t believe she still has Anna’s tank.

  She asked how long I’m staying, but the tone told me what she’s really asking is, When are you leaving? As if in this arrangement, I’m the one who cramps her style.

  I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about hopping the next flight to Florence, but there is literally no one else here for her. And honestly, there’s no one there for me, either.

  Kate wondered if Elizabeth had ever looked back, thought about the way her life might have gone if she’d remained in Italy. Though knowing Elizabeth, it wasn’t something she would have admitted aloud.

  All through the second week on the island, Kate read about the year Elizabeth spent caring for Amelia. There was a constant rotation of three tasks: making sure her mother took her medicine, getting her to the doctor’s appointments, trying to make her eat. On better days they went driving; Elizabeth would fill a travel mug with peppermint tea and they’d pass through the historic district in town, winding among the elegantly restored Victorians. They’d always end at the beach, watching the gulls over the water, parking in the same place where Elizabeth used to park with Michael.

  As the months passed, their relationship seemed to become more comfortable, though never intimate. There are none of those emotional epiphanies that are supposed to come from so much caretaking. We are cordial to each other and sometimes there’s warmth, but that’s as far as it goes. I give her credit for becoming more normal these past few years, and there are some of the trappings of closeness. But I still don’t feel like I know a damn thing about her.

  Yes, Kate thought. I know exactly what you mean.

  In March, Amelia and Elizabeth received a call about the mortgage. Their finances were not in good shape. Around the same time, the advertising agency where Amelia had worked part-time called to see whether she intended to return soon, or if they should look into a permanent replacement. On impulse, Elizabeth asked if she could take her place temporarily, and offered referrals from the gallery where she’d worked in SoHo sophomore year. She began working at the agency three days a week, driving to Stamford in her mother’s car, and within a few months transferred to administrative assistant for the design department. Elizabeth put in extra hours on the side helping with graphics, bluffing her way until she’d learned the computer programs. By the time there was an opening for an entry-level designer, no one asked about her credentials or degree.

  Amelia qualified for a clinical trial at the Yale–New Haven Hospital in May, which meant she’d need a ride back and forth several days a week. At first, Elizabeth’s boss, Malcolm, balked at having to accommodate her schedule, and urged her to find some other transportation for her mother. What would I do, pay a car service? Hire some random nurse? That’s not what I came home for. I might understand some strangers better than I understand her. But I didn’t come home so I could pay someone else to take care of my mother. In the end, Malcolm let Elizabeth work part-time from home for reduced pay.

  For a while, Amelia was in a holding pattern. That’s what her team calls it, like she’s a 747 circling LaGuardia. But in the summer, her condition worsened.

  August 12, 1985

  It’s spreading. She’s much worse and eats almost nothing. I make shakes bulked up with organic baby food flakes and buy her silly straws from the toy store because they make her smile. But none of it makes much difference. She’s irritable almost all the time, but every so often if I catch her medication just right, I get a nugget of something I’ve never seen before. Or maybe she always has been that way, just not out loud. Or just not with me.

  This afternoon I got her to talk about her book, the ratty old thing she’s carried around like a Bible for years. It was probably more her willingness and state of mind than anything I said or did, because she’s never responded to my questions before. I’ve thumbed through it a few times while she was sleeping. There’s a lot of blather about fire and soul, rechanneling anger and bad habits, truths and divinity, with some long-haired guy on the book jacket. I think he has something to do with wherever she went when I was in Florida with Dad junior year, just my gut feeling.

  That’s a pretty cover, I said, pointing to it. It would look great as a painting. I meant it; it has some kind of Asian strokes against a leafy pattern that must have been nice before it got so dirty and bent up. I knew I risked trivializing it, but you look for an opening where you can.

  Pretty cover, she mimicked. It always comes down to aesthetics for you. I wish you had something you really believe in, Lizzie.

  I took a second to swallow the irritation that comes up when she uses art as an excuse for anything she thinks I’m lacking, then tried to think of a response that sounded open, not defensive. I tried to imagine what it must be like to feel that you don’t have much time left, and know you won’t be able to pass along the one thing that matters to you in your life. To be a mother whose child is nothing like you are and is probably a disappointment, and a constant reminder of the one you weren’t able to keep.

  I do believe in lots of things, I told her.

  She shook her head. You’re closed, Lizzie, not receptive, not inviting to people.

  I couldn’t help myself then. Closed? I wonder where I learned that from, Mom. You’re the queen of secretive. I looked at the book and wanted to add, Though maybe you weren’t with these people. But I didn’t.

  She looked at me hard with shiny morphine eyes and said, Part of growing up is accepting what your failings are and instead of blaming other people, just fixing them. Sometimes people can do that themselves, and sometimes they need help. I’m not just talking about religion, she said. Faith is also about believing in yourself, and faith in what people can harness with their minds, groups of people together. With the right mind-set and the right kind of support, it’s amazing what you can accomplish.

  It usually makes me uncomfortable when people get all power-of-positive-thinking culty on me. Nasty little words come to mind. Like Crutch. Desperate. And, Freak. But my mother is not an unintelligent person, and whatever self-helpism took hold in her, who am I to say it hasn’t helped? After she went away she stopped drinking, she seemed less angry, she started being able to talk about Anna, she got a good job, and she just plain seemed happier. I’m no authority on the way the world works. It may be round and logical and we all descended from apes and such, but there might be intelligent life on Mars, and just maybe there’s intelligent life in positive-thinking long-haired-guru cults.…

  Kate felt a click of identification. This passage reminded her of her own credo: You never know. There might be value in things you don’t understand, might be an explanation for things that seem inexplicable. She and Elizabeth had had that in common. When someone else didn’t have an open mind, Elizabeth used to say, She’s afraid her brain will catch cold.

  … She was irritable but she wasn’t shutting down, so I kept going. Mom, why did you go to that place? My junior year, when I was in Florida with Dad?

  I figured if she’d tell me that, maybe I could sort out the other half myself—why someone would go somewhere else to open up to people for strength and togetherness wh
en her own flesh and blood was right next to her looking for the same thing.

  She clicked her thumb on the morphine pump and looked out the window at the hydrangea bushes by the curb, blooming three or four puffy shades of cotton candy. She knows next to nothing about gardening beyond the fact that they are perennials, but every year she seems surprised to see them return, as if Mother Nature could change her mind. Like the swallows of San Juan Capistrano might one year just say, Screw it, let’s go to Long Beach. I guess if something so arbitrary can happen as an eight-year-old girl getting blown off her bike on a quiet street, why shouldn’t the flowers stop blooming?

  She closed her eyes but I knew she wasn’t falling asleep, not yet. She might be a mystery to me, but I can tell the difference between when she’s not paying attention and when she’s very much paying attention but pretending not to. She has hardly ever answered my questions directly, and I guess she’s not about to begin now.

  Then from nowhere: There are times in your life when it’s helpful to find people who have strength in ways you do not, with the power of community in places that are especially conducive to that.

  I waited to see if she’d say more, but she sank lower on her pillow and sighed. Be sweet and close the shades, could you? And that was that for confidences.

  In late August, Elizabeth took a leave of absence from the agency. Malcolm tried to talk her into working from home—nights, odd hours—but Amelia’s condition had deteriorated too much. Clearly he hasn’t had any experience with cancer if he thinks it differentiates between night and day.

  One afternoon after Elizabeth had been at the market buying pumpkins to decorate the porch, she came home to find a message from her old boyfriend Michael on the answering machine. He was in town for their high school’s homecoming game and had heard about Mrs. Drogan’s illness. Elizabeth didn’t call him back at first, but gave in to curiosity. A few days later they met for a drink.

  He was balding prematurely, a detail that gave Kate a start. The sun radiates from his smooth head.… Glasses gave him a studious, thoughtful look. He was inquisitive about her painting and listened well, both of which surprised Elizabeth. She resisted the temptation to tell him about the pregnancy—I don’t see a single good thing that could come of that—and turned her cheek when he leaned in to kiss her good-bye.

  Kate closed the cover and sat back in the shadowy loft. It was the last page of the notebook. She looked out the window at the ocean, watched a boat moored in the dark harbor strung with small lights along its mast and sails.

  Elizabeth had not debated coming home from Florence when she found out her mother was sick. She’d just done it. Packed her artwork in shipping crates, paid her landlady, and left the life she loved to care for a woman who had barely cared for her during their difficult years. Whatever else Kate had read that did not sound like the friend she’d known, this did.

  Shortly after Piper was born Kate had developed mastitis. In the course of an afternoon, her breasts went from sore to rock-hard simmering hot, and she struggled to care for James and the baby while her fever soared. Chris was traveling, so Elizabeth came over with her children and cared for all four kids while Kate lay sweating in bed, ice packs pressed to her chest. Elizabeth convinced Kate’s obstetrician to give a prescription over the phone, then called another playgroup friend to collect it from the pharmacy. Dave was away too, and Elizabeth stayed at Kate’s house with her kids into the night, until her fever broke and she was able to care for her own children herself. Elizabeth’s competence and compassion were unlike anything Kate had experienced before, a mix of a maternity ward nurse and the best possible relative, one who understands that caretaking is more care than outsmarting the illness.

  There was a small sliver of moon over the bay, dappled wide as a field of sand. Downstairs the water went on and off in their bathroom, Chris brushing his teeth for bed.

  Kate could easily imagine Elizabeth caring for her mother, but could not imagine what it was like to do so without hope. Kate had never been close to someone who was seriously ill. She’d never had to watch the deterioration, knowing that all your caretaking—all your doling out of medications, spooning of broth—never led to a return to health, only to preparation and comfort, and sometimes not even that. Kate’s closest experience with death had been Elizabeth, and there had been no preparation or comfort.

  It was a shame, Kate thought, that Elizabeth’s mother became sick before Elizabeth was married and had her husband’s support. Or, it seemed, much of anyone’s. In the writings after her return from Florence, Elizabeth had never written explicitly about loneliness, but it was there on every page.

  Dave was the kind of person who would probably do illness well. He was more sweet talk than substance for Kate’s taste, southern vowels opening and stretching like happy boll weevils in the sun. Yet it was possible that charm like his could have a palliative effect, could make uncomfortable moments bearable. Perhaps there was a place for platitudes when nothing that was true could be of comfort.

  Kate removed the next notebook from the stack, a book striped in pastel chalk. The one beneath it was covered in an enlarged and laminated photograph of Elizabeth with young Jonah and Anna, the one she’d seen that night in the motel parking lot. The kids were laughing as if tickled, Anna’s toddler grin tucked deeply into her chest, Jonah’s head thrown back in contortions of glee. Elizabeth was smiling into her son’s dark curls, her blond hair across their faces catching the light like tinsel. The photo was overexposed to neutron white and there was no hint of background. Only hair, eyes, and laughter, as Elizabeth half disappeared in the searing light. It looked like the kind of place she’d have ascended that day in August, if you believed in such things.

  Kate went to replace it in the trunk but found she could not let it go. So she took this journal out as well, and propped it atop the bookshelf under the window facing her chair. She sat looking at it for several moments, an image she wanted to keep close. Then she closed and locked the trunk for the night.

  Just one more entry, she told herself, and chalk from the striped cover frosted her hand.

  September 25, 1985

  She’s much worse. Can’t read anymore. Her eyes are going and she falls asleep midpage, so I read aloud to her. She’s always enjoyed travel magazines, so I picked one up at the store with a cover story about Sedona.

  When I was done she said, The desert’s a very spiritual place, Anna. She calls me Anna now. It makes her happy, so I don’t correct her. Did you know, she said, some people believe that if you’re quiet enough you can hear the cactus humming? She touched the photo of a tall saguaro with hands like straw. I picked up the moisturizer from the cart and squeezed a dollop in my palm, massaged the cream across the top of her bony knuckles and down each finger to the tip. She looked at me with her eyebrows raised, what’s left of them, then back down at the page of the magazine. I’ve always wondered if that could be true, she said. The humming.

  I looked at the cactus, spines growing in vertical pleats. The photo showed a tiny bird sitting in the crook of an arm, either unaffected by the needles or finding protection there from something else. Who knows, maybe the humming was some kind of resonating effect in the open space, or some metaphysical echo of sand and sun and lizard life. Or maybe a cactus can just hum, like a seashell.

  I looked up from her hands and she was still watching me, waiting. I nodded, and smiled. Who knows.

  “You coming to bed?” Chris called up the stairs.

  Kate looked down at the book, skimmed the next entry. Sold the house today. Signed the papers, left my mother’s keys on the counter, and pulled the door shut behind me.

  “In a minute.”

  She heard him stand at the foot of the ladder a moment more, as if there were something else he wanted to say. Then after a bit, the creak of bedsprings. Kate waited, reconsidered joining him. Then she turned the page.

  Elizabeth moved into her own place in Stamford, a one-bedroom apartment in a su
bdivided Victorian house. It was not well cared for but it had a certain charm, and offered an independence she’d never had before. For the first time, her life felt centralized. There are no pieces of me scattered anywhere else anymore. I’ve herded in all the sheep. Anything that had been at my father’s he gave back before he moved to L.A. I brought the rest of my paintings from my mother’s basement and they’re squeezed here behind the television. Took her antique trunk, and am going to use it for my journals. It’s probably the nicest thing I own.

  At night Elizabeth would go running, mile after mile through the streets of Stamford, and afterward, eat take-out dinners in front of the television. Her work colleagues were the only friends she mentioned, but she didn’t seem to see them much outside the office. She reflected on her mother’s accusation that she was neither receptive nor inviting, and suspected she was right. Even as a child she’d been told to smile, but didn’t know how to begin without it appearing forced. She knew she had to make a change. I don’t join groups, I don’t form bonds beyond a few people here and there, haven’t belonged to anything resembling a community since the art collective. I could rot here and no one would notice.

  Kate paused at this. Elizabeth had been the heart of the playgroup, had quickly become integral to everything they planned. In all the time Kate had known her, a smile had appeared to be her resting expression. If being part of a group had not come naturally she must have had a lot of practice somewhere along the line, or had hidden it very well. Then Kate checked herself. A person did not pretend among friends.