Down on the subway platform a man in shapeless, filthy clothes was weaving along dipping his hand into the garbage bins, fishing out empty fast-food packages, and then tossing them back in a rage before lurching onward to the next bin. I could hear him angrily muttering to himself. Instinctively I took a step back from the edge and leaned against one of the thick vertical beams that lined the platform, making it impossible for someone to push me into an oncoming train. I’d been doing this pillar shuffle for as long as I could remember. It was one of a handful of little rituals that promised to forever separate me from the poor folk who ended up on the front pages of the tabloids, victims of the city’s randomness. I also didn’t step on manhole covers in the summer for fear of being electrocuted, and I avoided walking over the groaning sidewalk cellar doors for fear they would collapse (of all my city-induced neuroses, this was by far the most realistic). I had a healthy respect for New York’s heartless peculiarities.
When I’d first arrived in New York in the late nineties, just as Giuliani was campaigning for a second term as mayor, the front pages of the city tabloids were the equivalent of a great Greek chorus, weighing in with operatic judgment on the activities of its citizens. Often they told the sensational tale of a girl (pretty, young, white) who’d had one too many shots, or done one too many lines, and then: stumbled into the wrong cab, gone home with the wrong bartender, said yes to drinks with the wrong man, and was now dead. Or DEAD! MURDERED! MANGLED! Depending on her appearance, and how much drink or drugs or sex had been involved, she was either asking for it, or an innocent victim of the evil metropolis. Either way, a tragedy of lost potential. At twenty-three, largely on my own in New York, or at least bereft of any oversight, those headlines filled a space normally taken up by concerned parents or partners. Before long, my cautionary inner voice began resorting to tabloid speak. I’d gauge just how stupidly I was behaving by anticipating what sort of cover story it might make. If my night went badly, would I be regarded as the good girl for taking the subway at 4:00 a.m. after a long shift in order to save money, or the reckless girl for doing lines in the VIP bathroom at a club with two men I didn’t know, or the stupid girl for walking everywhere, alone, at every hour? Even though it had never gone badly, or badly enough to warrant front-page treatment, the habit had stuck with me. Now as I stood there, braced behind the pole against the uncertain movements of the man digging through the trash and anyone else who might come along, I couldn’t help but imagine the worst-case headline:
FOREVER YOUNG: On the eve of her 40th birthday, woman pushed into oncoming train by madman.
I envisioned packed cars of people folding back the paper, shaking their heads, horrified and grateful in equal measure to read of every New York City subway rider’s worst nightmare. Afterward they’d look up and say to themselves, or their neighbor, or later their coworker: At least she didn’t have any children. It was clear to me, even in the imaginary stories I was telling to myself, that after today I would be a person who would forever be measured by what I didn’t have.
A long rumbling from the dark tunnel and the A train pulled in. I boarded, squeezing into a corner seat by the door, as the rush-hour crowds behind me made their well-practiced move farther into the train car. I leaned back as we pulled out of the station and looked around at all the faces, something I rarely did anymore—people on subway cars were something to be navigated around, not contemplated—and thought about all the lives and complications that must lie behind them. All the fears and insecurities. I was just another face here. I thought about how I had been so many faces already in my life. So many different women. How I’d hurled myself into different versions of life to try them on, sometimes keeping them, sometimes leaving them behind like apartment addresses in neighborhoods I rarely returned to. Up until now the transformation had always thrilled me.
Before coming down to the subway platform I’d texted both Rachel and Maddy, and also my friend Mauri, to tell them what I was doing. Then I’d taken my phone and shoved it as far down into my backpack as I could, below the silk pajamas I’d rushed home to grab, and the lumpy freezer Ziploc I used as a vanity bag. It had largely been a gesture—there was no Wi-Fi on the train and it would be an hour before we’d come aboveground and I’d be able to get a signal—but I wanted my phone as far away from me as possible. I’d considered leaving it behind entirely; the idea of being unreachable had felt like the most luxurious present I could give myself. But then what if there was an emergency?
Based on the last few months, this was a not unlikely possibility. One of the reasons it felt like my birthday panic had arrived in such late fashion, rushing, it seemed, to catch me like a commuter making the last train, was that my life had recently been overrun with actual emergencies that had left little time for concern about much else. Before I’d done my weird, frustrating morph into a woman, a single, childless woman (the words continued to pound in my head like a sentencing gavel), on the eve of her fortieth birthday, I’d been spending much of the year being the good daughter, the good sister, the good friend.
At some point in the last few years my mother had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. At some point. That I, with my head for dates, couldn’t remember when this diagnosis had happened was a measure of how nonchalantly I’d greeted the news. It barely made a dent. My mother was a constant, gentle white noise in our lives. It had been my father’s health that had been the bell that tolled in our family since childhood. For as long as I could remember, he’d been plagued by back problems that laid him out on the living room floor for hours at a time. “Your father’s back is bothering him” was practically a slogan in our house, and my mother relied on it to explain all his last-minute absences. When I was a teenager, my father had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. This was long before the term had entered the public consciousness, or carried with it any understanding or empathy. It’s possible his condition contributed to his losing his job as an executive at a large bank when I was fourteen; I had no idea. I was a teenager and my awareness didn’t reach far beyond my immediate sphere. I did know that he never found his footing again, and when I was in eleventh grade, not long before my parents filed for bankruptcy, he went to work behind the counter at the local pizza joint, alongside my best friend who lived next door. A year later I was out of the house for good, but returned home for a stretch sometime after my thirtieth birthday to help my mother after he’d had a heart attack while driving home and required multiple bypass surgery and weeks of care.
So, when my mother floated into the kitchen one afternoon while I was home for a visit and gently announced, as though remarking on casual news she’d picked up during a trip to the mall, that the doctor had determined she had Parkinson’s, I don’t recall that I even stopped eating. I don’t remember why I was home, or what season it was. Or even if my sister, Alexis, had children yet. The news made no impression; it was so outside the narrative of our family, it refused to plant itself in a timeline. I do recall a brief sense of confusion. Wasn’t Parkinson’s the disease that made you shake? My mother had no discernible tremble—she had no discernible anything—how could they know? Apparently, they knew.
Years passed, or maybe just a year, and then quite suddenly, we also knew. Since Christmas—nine months by the calendar, but an eternity in my head—the disease had whipped through her like a match on dry tinder, at times leaving only shadowy hints of her former self. The violent tremors never appeared as forecast. Instead the thing that was consuming her had arrived like an alien invasion, skipping over her body and going straight for her mind. I remembered every detail of that holiday, right down to the classical music that was playing on the stereo, and the exact shade of blue afternoon light that the snow outside was reflecting into the living room when this new version of my mother appeared. I had been sitting on the couch reading when she suddenly came dancing through, waving her arms and pirouetting like a small child performing a made-up dance routine.
“I feel wonderful!” she said,
clapping her hands together. “Let’s go on a trip!”
I frowned. My parents didn’t travel. “We can go for a walk,” I said absentmindedly, assuming this would likely put an end to things, and we’d shortly end up in the downstairs family room watching a movie and ordering pizza, which is how she and I had spent most of our evenings together. My mother also didn’t exercise. My sister and I had been athletic our whole lives. Before having kids, Alexis had run marathons. My mother drove two blocks to the corner store.
“Yes! You are brilliant, my sweet, let’s do that.” She did another pirouette.
Maybe this was a New Year’s resolution I didn’t know about; every year she talked about making them, but they rarely lasted a full twenty-four hours. I loved walking; if she wanted to go, I was game. I got up to retrieve our coats, but when I returned to the living room a few moments later it was as though the air had gone wavy with an electric charge. I looked around before I realized it was coming from my mother. It was like she’d been plugged into a socket and currents were shooting through her body. Later I would learn to recognize those afternoon dances for what they were: evidence of dangerous storm clouds forming on the horizon of her mind, but at that moment I was aware only that she had slipped from strangely happy to something else.
She sat down, then she stood up, she walked in a circle around the room, and sat down again. Our black Labrador, Medley, the first family dog my mother could claim as hers, followed her movements with perked ears. The rest of the house was silent. Even though it was only late afternoon, my father was already in his bedroom and down for the night.
“Do you want to go outside?” I held up her coat encouragingly, not knowing what else to do.
“I’d like to go home,” she said, staring at me accusingly, standing up again and peering around as if looking for something. “I want to make sure I’m ready.”
“Ready for what, Mom?” I thought she might be looking for her purse; she had spent much of my childhood looking for her purse. I wondered whether she meant my sister’s home (Alexis and her husband and two children lived twenty minutes away).
“For when we leave,” she said. Then she gazed at me in alarm. “Is everyone else dressing up?”
“Dressing up for what?” I asked.
“For the event. I think I’ve decided after all, I don’t want to stay.”
I put her coat down and swallowed, making an effort to keep the growing alarm out of my voice. “What event?”
She turned and looked directly at me, her pupils swallowing up her eyes.
“Do you work here?” A metallic twang I’d never heard before had slipped into her voice. “I’m ready to go home,” she said, as though someone had locked her in.
I’ve always been told I was good in emergencies. In that moment, some instinct to remain absolutely calm rose up and gripped me. “You are home, Mom.”
I watched a wave of horrific amazement sweep over her, and for a minute I was reminded of the exaggerated acting in the old Twilight Zone episodes we used to watch on Saturday afternoons when I was a kid. Suddenly her face contorted with unmistakable rage.
I had no understanding of how to deal with rage from my mother. To my knowledge, she had never been rageful at anything in her life, let alone me. On the rare occasions she got angry it was a toothless anger that left me feeling guilty rather than fearful. Only once, when the girls on my swim team had singled me out to be bullied, the way preteen girls do sometimes, turning on me inexplicably like a flock of birds shifting flight, had I seen anything resembling this. On that occasion, my mother, having glimpsed the scratches they’d left on my legs during the previous practice, stood on deck and glared fiercely at them for an hour straight. Even underwater I could feel the fury radiating off her. I remember being overwhelmed with gratitude by this gesture—so out of character for her—and so comforted. After that night, the girls left me alone, and things soon returned to normal. Now that fierce gaze was being directed at me, and I was so shocked by it I couldn’t even be upset, let alone speak. All those years I’d complained she was too nice, too content to let things be, that she’d never just say what she was feeling. Here finally was the creature I had thought I wanted her to be—as though summoned by my teenage self, two decades too late—and I had no idea what to do.
She looked wild. Her eyes darted back and forth. The Parkinson’s tremors, normally so subtle as to be invisible, jerked her body this way and that. It was as if my mother had disappeared and been replaced with . . . I had no idea. I fought back the sensation that I’d also been dropped into another world. Maybe if I stayed calm I could help her return to safer ground. I squared my shoulders and lowered my voice as if I were talking to a small child, the way I talked to my niece or nephew.
“You are home,” I said. “This is your house. You live here with Dad. I’m your daughter.” There was a pause.
“I don’t have a daughter.”
She laughed cynically, another emotion that was wildly out of character, as if catching me in a lie. And then she looked around the room as though she had never seen it before. “I do not live here.”
The rage disappeared like a wave retreating out of her face as quickly as it had washed in, and was immediately replaced by terror. The blue of her iris had disappeared completely, and her eyes were completely black now.
“Why won’t you let me go home?” She spat the words at me. “Who are you?”
It took me an hour to get her to bed that night, and many more to calm her down. I’d spent the remainder of that holiday furiously Googling her symptoms, which was how I learned there was something called Parkinson’s disease dementia, except every piece of information I read assured me it was nearly unheard of in a patient who’d so recently been diagnosed. I sent long, descriptive emails to the wife of my close friend Kimberly, who was an expert in the Parkinson’s field. She sent equally long, incredibly kind replies back, concluding that what I was describing was “unusual” and “troubling.” The doctor’s offices had been closed for the holiday, and I wasn’t able to get my mother in to see someone till after the new year, at which point things had calmed down. Temporarily it turned out. In the months that followed, my frequent trips home had largely revolved around getting both my father and the doctors to recognize the severity of her condition.
•
That so much of the responsibility for my mother’s well-being had fallen on me was as much the result of circumstance as anything. My sister was eighteen months younger than me. When we were in our early twenties I’d once overheard her remark hotly to a friend that she’d be the one tasked with caring for our parents in their old age. The remark had stuck with me, lodging itself in my mind like a disturbing crystal ball reading. I’d been out of the house on my own for nearly five years at that point. I’d never considered what would happen to my parents when they aged. Never considered my role in it, or hers for that matter. But others likely would have agreed with my sister. By any of the usual metrics, Alexis was the responsible one. I’d joked during my speech at her wedding that it had often felt as if she were the older sister. She’d let me crawl into bed with her when I had nightmares. She had the nine-to-five job in the marketing department of a large company. She married at thirty-two a man she’d been with for a number of years, and a year later gave birth to my nephew. My niece arrived a year and a half after that. Except for two years at university, Alexis had never lived more than a forty-minute drive from my parents. But the certainty those sorts of descriptors provide on paper is so rarely mirrored by the experience of real life. Not long after my mother’s catastrophic Christmas, Alexis and her husband separated; shortly after that she discovered she was carrying their third child, due in late October. My trips home had increasingly been split between racing against my mother’s illness and helping my sister manage two small children and prepare for the arrival of the new baby.
And then everything got worse.
Since July, I’d been in three different emergency
rooms. Once to bring my sister the clothes she needed to stay overnight with my niece who was there for observation after banging her head in a swing-set mishap. Once to retrieve my mother who’d woken up alone and confused in the house and called 911. Since there had been no one else home, the fire department was required by law to take her to the hospital. And then, finally, gut-wrenchingly, for a friend who’d had a stillbirth.
At thirty-nine, I’d been through more than a few of my friends’ pregnancies, and nearly as many miscarriages. In my twenties, it had been about getting people through their abortions: lending money, being the drop-off or pick-up person. In my thirties I held hands through miscarriages, gave condolences and then gentle, encouraging talks about how common miscarriage was and that there was no doubt a healthy pregnancy was on the way. But there was no way for anyone to prepare for this. My friend had arrived at her doctor’s the morning after her due date only to discover there was no heartbeat. That’s what the text had said: Glyn, my baby has no heartbeat. I still had it on my phone. The text before it said thanks for the baby gifts! In between there was an extra wide white space to mark the passage of time, twenty-four hours, a small gap that held in it the upending of one person’s entire life. I’m on my way, I’d written back, and biked the hundred blocks up Third Ave., through the thick summer heat and empty August New York streets, and held her hand while she delivered, the loud cries of live babies echoing in the hallways around our terribly silent room.
Two days later I was back in another hospital in Canada, except this time in a specialist’s office for my mother. Two weeks after that, just days before my birthday, I had watched as my best friend, Mauri, was dreamily married at City Hall in New York. Somewhere in there Rachel, age forty-one and single, discovered she was pregnant, which meant our newly stable business now needed to start thinking about how to support a single mother and baby.
Far from spending the summer panicking about my age, I had instead occasionally wondered whether the world was conspiring to do me a very cruel favor. It sometimes felt as though all the things a single, childless woman on the eve of her forties is supposed to be most fearful of never having attained—the right guy, the happy marriage, the babies, the not-dying-alone—had been lined up for my inspection and then, one by one, unveiled to reveal the worst-case scenario. It wasn’t that I was missing out on happy endings; there were no happy endings! It was much harder to be devastated over not being the dreamy bride, the new mother, the settled wife, when so much of my life was currently requiring me to be the fill-in for husbands missing in action. But it was also too easy to be cynical, to slip into the belief that nothing ever worked out. I knew, too, that to let myself do so would be worse for me in the long run. Still, maybe it wasn’t so shocking I wanted to be alone, or that I’d been thrown for a loop by this late-stage panic: I hadn’t been a going concern in my own life for a while now.
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