by Lynne Hugo
But Mother did. She always said that when you do God’s will, He gives you the strength. But how do you know? How do you know what’s right when choices glisten with separate certainties? I was a long way from getting it: in the end, you really don’t know, and tough luck, you have to decide anyway.
She climbed into our car and backed up onto the pavement. From behind the windshield, her face looked eerie and distant, the glare of a low sun bouncing off the glass. I saw her motion me out of the way, and I took Gayla’s hand and pulled her to the side of the road with me. It was Gayla’s face I was watching as Mother gathered speed and aimed the driver’s side tires straight for the muskrat. “No,” Gayla screamed, and again, just as the car hit the animal. “No.”
Years later, while I sat in a sidewalk café in Paris drinking café au lait, a man stepped off the curb ten feet in front of me and was struck by a speeding taxi. I recognized the sound of the impact from my memory of Mother running over the muskrat. A crunch overlaid with something like a muffled thud: sickened, I heard it over and over in my mind and to this day, I can call it up. I tried to get Gayla to turn her back, but she wouldn’t.
Mother backed up, over the body again, and parked back where we’d first pulled over. Gayla’s face was a frozen, horrified mask leaking tears.
“Get the newspaper I bought this morning out of the backseat,” she ordered me.
I saw her bend over Gayla, who shrunk from her wordlessly. Then Mother squatted by the muskrat (no longer breathing, but still open-eyed) and waited until I brought her the paper from the rubble of the backseat. By pulling the animal’s tail, she eased its body onto the paper, then pulled the paper to the side of the road. A small pool of blood soaked into the paper and left a trail partway to the side of the road. Still Gayla said nothing. I wanted to take the little girl in my arms, caress her hair and tell her that it really was okay, that Mother was right: sometimes what seems unspeakably cruel is a kindness. But the truth is, I didn’t know it for sure myself. I just didn’t know.
In spite of that, when we drove away a few minutes later I put my hand on Mother’s arm and said, “I know that was hard, but you did the right thing.” I confess I said it to align myself with her, in spite of my doubts. What did I know of all that was to come, and how I would help her the next time? I flinch when it plays in my memory, and wonder if deaths are connected like paper dolls in a line, joined hand to hand.
She turned her head to look at me, tears hovering over the edge of her bottom lids, and said, “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” and hardly spoke for the remainder of that night. Certainly there was no more singing. Much later, in the spotty noise and darkness of the motel room we finally found, I lay next to Mother on the sprung mattress of a cheap double bed and thought about the mistrust on Gayla’s face, and how we’d left her there crouched over the muskrat’s body in the scrubby roadside weeds. I wanted to say something to the little girl, something that if she could just believe it, true or not, would help her live. I had no idea what those words would be.
NEITHER MOTHER NOR I spoke of Gayla and the muskrat again. The next day was consumed with cutting a hypotenuse across the northeastern tip of Wyoming and climbing Montana, west by northwest, always clinging to I-90 like a divining rod. We stopped for the night in the upraised finger of northern Idaho. Another rest stop, this one dim and deserted, with stale crackers in the vending machines, dirty toilets and an empty paper towel dispenser. I was afraid to sleep, but, of course, fatigue claimed me. The enormous dome of sky that had opened up in South Dakota and expanded as we progressed was thick with a clarity of stars, but the air felt thin and piercingly cold. In the front, with my body split again by the ridges of the bucket seats, I huddled under my jacket and fashioned a haphazard pillow out of my hands—as much to keep them warm as to cushion my head.
The next day, Mother seemed unrested. I drove more and more of the time. Once into Washington, she drew into herself, while I imagined versions and versions of where we were going, of the sick woman who was my grandmother, of what I was to do.
“Maybe…I’d, um, like to hear more about the…family,” I said. The topic was, as I’ve said, a minefield Roger and I had learned to tiptoe around. Maybe sheer tiredness made me daring, or maybe it was the sensation of power it gave me to be the driver.
Mother said more than she usually did, but it wasn’t terribly enlightening. “She made us lose Daddy,” she said. “What he did was wrong, but she could’ve kept him.” She shook her head, off in some other world. “I did what I could, but by then, that witch…it was too late.”
Yes, of course I wanted to know what witch she was talking about, and of course I wondered if she’d noticed that Roger and I didn’t have daddies, and whose fault was that exactly? But surely by now it’s clear how dangerous it would have been to verbalize criticism, direct or indirect. Besides, I wanted information, not to set her off.
“I can imagine how much you missed him,” I said, not a smidge of irony in my voice. “So…um…when did he leave?”
In my peripheral vision I saw pastel blue shoulders shrug and her arm, sleeved in the same color, reach for the knob to turn the radio concerto louder, though she’d told me to turn it down not ten minutes earlier. It was her I don’t want to talk about it shrug, not one that said, I don’t remember.
I knew she did remember, and a lot. By midafternoon, when we reached the outskirts of Seattle, Mother took back the wheel. She seemed to know how to get around, although she would occasionally mutter that something had been changed, and then she’d pull to the curb. Finally, irritated, she bought a street map at a gas station. She began reacting to places we passed with fragmented words of anger. She detoured a couple of miles to glimpse her high school, chanting, “God, God,” like a mantra as it came into view. She told a few stories: a boy had tried to put his hand down the waist of her skirt, a teacher had not believed something she’d said and other similar miseries, the beginnings of the vast misunderstanding between Elizabeth Ruth Kenley and the world.
IT WAS TO FIND THIS PLACE THAT she’d needed the map, I realized. The nursing home was less than homey. A stench of stale urine competed with antiseptic and won, while the furniture in the reception area looked exhausted, with darkened spots on the backs of vinyl easy chairs where heavy heads had pressed for hours. Mother asked for Sarah McNeil and it was the first I knew that Grandmother’s name was different from ours. Uneasy, I held back as Mother followed the directions, leading with her chin and bosom: down the hall, through the swinging doors, then turn left and room 423 is second to last on the left. She turned and motioned me to catch up to her. Ubiquitous television sets, tuned to game shows in patient rooms and nursing stations alike, all spewed garish laughter intermittently. Here and there in the hallway, walkers waited as though someone had abandoned them midstep. I glanced into one room and momentarily stood still in shock and fear: a white-clad worker was changing a man’s diapers in the bed nearest the door, and I saw his penis, a small dead thing sideways against a bony thigh, the first time I’d seen a man. He looked still young, and terribly, terribly sick, with a shock of black hair against the white pillowcase.
As we turned the last corner, Mother’s low-heeled shoes clicked a faltering beat on the linoleum tile. She slowed, but breathed heavily, as though she’d been running. I felt sorry for her then, even frightened and unnerved as I was. She stood a moment outside room 423, then squared her shoulders. She reached for my hand and I gave it to her. The pressure of her grip cut my ring into the fingers on either side of it. She stepped through the open door ahead of me. “Mother?” she said. “I’ve come.”
6
WE’D FALLEN INTO A CERTAIN rhythm by the third day, eating a carry-out dinner in front of the television before going to bed in my grandmother’s efficiency apartment, then sleeping late and picking up a Dunkin’ Donuts and coffee breakfast just before ten on the way to the nursing home. The pattern of the days was the only trace of predictability. You
couldn’t have told anything else by me.
On the walls around the bed were framed place mats of the state capitol building, state bird and state flower. While we were in her room, I studied them, trying to keep from staring at the tiny woman cocooned in sheets on the bed. Her jaundiced face was deeply wrinkled, almost pitted, like a dry peach stone, that small and shriveled. She didn’t look like someone to be hated, let alone feared, but I could feel the tension in Mother, the way she perceptibly drew into herself. It was as though she were bracing herself with a corset of distrust, so rigidly did she carry herself across the threshold of Grandmother’s room each day. To me, it made little sense; it didn’t seem that being in each other’s presence brought either of them comfort, but Mother was determined to see something out. Whatever it was.
To make matters worse, Grandmother took to me, and I to her. The only thing that made it a little easier was the frequency with which she fell asleep midsentence. After a while, I noticed that it often happened when Mother would enter the room, or seem to take note of what Grandmother was saying to me. She would nod off then, and I was grateful. Although I craved the praise and admiration Grandmother gave me, I felt a quick guilt, as well as disloyalty, when I thought Mother might overhear. (It might have occurred to someone else that Grandmother had figured how to put a splinter or two in my confidence in Mother’s side of the story, or worse, that she knew how to plain get to her daughter. All I can say is that at the time, it seemed sincere to me and given what was to come, I’d rather remember it that way.)
Mother had begun complaining after the first night that she couldn’t sleep, and had waylaid Grandmother’s doctor to ask for some sleeping pills. He pulled a prescription pad from his lab coat pocket.
“Don’t drink any alcohol with these, and don’t overuse them,” he cautioned as he scrawled.
“I don’t drink.” Mother was huffy, but what she said was true.
The protocol for Grandmother included morphine at certain intervals. Her pain generally began to increase in intensity a good hour and a half before she was due for a dose, and I found it almost unbearable to watch her writhe and twist the sheets. I held her hand when Mother wouldn’t because, she said, a flute teacher’s living is in her hands. I guessed I could see her point. When the pain started to come back, but before it was at its worse, Grandmother would talk. (The mercy of morphine would knock her out for a while. Anyway, by the time it came, she was exhausted from the wait.)
“Jacob was here two weeks ago, you know,” Grandmother said one morning. “Such a good son. He stayed quite a while. Said he’d be back the end of this month.” I hoped he’d come while we were there. I was getting quite an education, even if I still didn’t know what part of it to believe.
“Really…” Mother said, not with a question mark, but a period at the end of the second syllable.
“I don’t understand why you blame him,” Grandmother said.
“Really,” Mother said and glanced at me. “Would you like me to read another Reader’s Digest article to you?”
THAT AFTERNOON, I WAS ALONE with Grandmother while Mother went in search of new magazines. “What’s wrong between you and my mother?” It was a daring attempt for me.
“Not forgiven for her father,” Grandmother answered. Her sentences were often diminished to a phrase or clause, sometimes only a verb or a noun, depending where she was on the morphine continuum.
When Mother came back, as though picking up where she and I had left off, Grandmother said to Mother, “I forgave you, you know.” This was Grandmother at her most lucid.
“What do you mean, you forgave me? None of it would have been necessary if you’d done your job.” Mother picked up the thread effortlessly, as if this were the only conversation possible.
Grandmother did not respond, only shifted her arms uncomfortably and muttered, “Tired. Too tired.”
“Don’t give me that. You just don’t like what I’m saying. He wouldn’t have run with her if you’d kept him home. You nagged and you cried and you locked your bedroom.”
“Did my best.”
“You did not. At least I tried. You wouldn’t do anything, Jake wouldn’t do anything. Someone had to try.”
“Not right. Worst sin.”
“I just wanted him to stay with us. How were we going to live?”
“We lived.”
“And look at what we got, and what she got. And once she had the baby, he forgot Jake and I even existed.”
Grandmother’s pain was increasing, then. She was gasping between words. “Just want peace. You, me, peace. Let me go. Tired.”
“Well, I’m tired, too, Mother.” With that, my mother shook her head and stood so abruptly that I lurched to catch her chair as it began to topple backward on two spindly legs. “I don’t need your help,” she shot at me, and left the room.
I had no idea what to do. My head was awash with trying to decipher the conversation. I wanted to take Grandmother’s hand, but knew that if Mother returned and caught me like that, I’d be one of the Betrayers, again. Sooner or later, she always said, everyone betrayed her.
I had to, though. Take her hand, and ask again, keeping my voice down and an ear tuned to any approaching footfalls. “Please. Please tell me what happened. What are you and Mother talking about?” I hesitated and then added, “I won’t…tell her you told me.”
She didn’t open her eyes, but I knew she could hear me. There was tension in her hand, and her lips moved—as if she were starting to say something then hesitating.
“She…got…in bed—” a groan, then, with a slight shake of her head “—with her father…”
That was all she said. Even though I said, “What? What does that mean?” my grandmother seemed to fall asleep then. What could I do? You can hardly shake a dying woman and demand she explain what she’s told you. Did she mean literally? Why would my mother have done that? I had no idea. None.
Even more confused, I slipped as quietly as I could to the other side of the room, where there was an empty, unmade bed and sat in one of the chairs intended for a second patient’s visitors. I sat and listened to my grandmother making little moans as she exhaled into a sleep without rest.
“LET ME GO,” BECAME Grandmother’s theme. We tried every way we could to make her comfortable, but nothing helped.
“What do you want me to do,” Mother came close to snapping at her several times.
“Sorry. Peace.”
“What are you talking about? What do you want me to do?” Mother would say, but wouldn’t touch Grandmother other than to lift her head to press a glass against her lips. I’d take her hand when I could, and say, “It’s okay, Grandmother, it’s okay,” but I dared not say, “I love you,” or anything close to what I thought I should say. What I wanted to say.
We stayed later than usual that day, because we’d come in later. The night before, Mother had again shifted and tossed for a long time before she’d dozed off. She’d slept until nearly eleven in the morning; I’d not dared wake her. The second shift nurses and aides came on duty at four o’clock. Nora, who took care of Grandmother regularly, came in and said to Mother, “I’m surprised she’s still with us. Try to let her know it’s all right to go…sometimes they hang on and on, waiting for…permission. You know?”
But Mother was not about to give permission for anything as best I could tell. “Love you,” Grandmother breathed rather than spoke the words to her daughter. I heard her myself, twice, that evening alone. The first time, my mother didn’t answer at all. The second time, she said, “Don’t try to talk. Save your strength.”
“I can’t take this,” Mother said to me that night in the car. She began crying and used both fists to pound the steering wheel at the first red light. “It’s not fair. I can’t take it. We’re going to have to go.”
“Now?” I was incredulous.
“I don’t know,” she answered, something I’d almost never heard my mother say.
But we didn’t go. The ne
xt day, Mother went into Grandmother’s room with a grim look and a set to her shoulders that I recognized. “Love you. Let me go,” Grandmother started right away.
“How about some applesauce?” Mother answered.
“No, no, no. Please.”
“Okay. I’ll read to you then,” said Mother, deliberately misunderstanding, I thought. “Here. How about ‘My Most Unforgettable Character’?” Grandmother moaned. Not long after that, even sleep did not seem a respite. She moved her head from side to side and gasped. When she woke, it was as though it were a waking sleep and she was still dreaming. “Filth,” she said once. Later she looked straight at Mother and said, “Whore.” Mother flinched.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about. You never did,” Mother retorted angrily, but it was obvious nothing was registering in Grandmother. Mother’s face was a deadly pale, with gray smears beneath her eyes and her cheeks hollowing moment by moment. A brilliant sunlight was being sliced like an onion by the venetian blinds and my eyes stung with fatigue and worry as if the air were filled with the acrid odor. The bed next to Grandmother’s was still empty, a small mercy.
Mother picked up her purse, a huge, needlepoint affair that reminded me of a carpetbag. “Shut the door,” she said. I knew better than to hesitate. Mother took her purse over to the small dresser and set it on the top. An oval mirror was mounted over the bureau, in which Grandmother’s underwear and a sparse collection of toiletries were stored. Light green walls made the striped light in the room illuminate us in an eerie way as though we were suspended underwater, lingering briefly just below the surface before our descent to the bottom.
She stared a moment into the mirror. Her mouth was set in an absolutely straight line; I remember noticing that the way you notice odd details in a dream. Is it possible to communicate the aura of unreality that overtook the room? I was caught upside down in an undertow, disoriented, unbelieving and terrified until I relinquished myself and drew a full measure of water into my lungs. That is all I can say for myself: I have no other excuse.