He hesitated. Then he looked me up and down, from head to toe. “Is that what you’re wearing today?”
I took a quick look down at the navy sweat suit Vickie had bought me when she knew I needed something comfortable to wear after surgery. It had a couple of stains on it. I hadn’t felt like doing laundry, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d washed it.
I tried to brush the stains off with my hand. “I’ll wash it tonight,” I said.
“Lilly, how many days in a row have you worn that?”
His words gave me a zap, like the static shock I’d get from walking across the carpet in stocking feet and then touching the metal handle on the refrigerator door.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. He sat beside me.
“I’m worried about you, Lilly,” he said. “You’re not yourself lately.”
I looked down at my hands, rubbing the tips of my fingers where the skin was worn so smooth I no longer had fingerprints, something I’d discovered recently when updating my military pass. “It’s just going to take me a while to get back to my normal self.”
He shook his head. “No, I’m afraid it’s not that simple.”
I studied the cover of Charles’s new book, which he’d placed beside him on the bed. He’d told me a little bit about it, how the Rapture had occurred, and people had disappeared from the face of the earth as a result. I didn’t like the ominous cover, a picture of the planet surrounded by darkness. I didn’t like Charles’s own doomsday tone either when he forced me to recognize that I wasn’t acting like my usual self, but I knew he was right. I couldn’t continue to function like I was, and he could only do so much to help me. It was time to ask for real help. I’d tinkered with the idea; a lot of people I knew went to see one particular psychiatrist in Gadsden, known as “the Goodyear psychiatrist.” When Charles and I finished talking, he reached below the bedside table and handed me the yellow pages. I looked up her phone number and scheduled a meeting with her as soon as I could.
SINCE I’D found the note, I’d been overwhelmed by a kind of shame I’d never felt before. In the safety and calm of Dr. Judy Cook’s office, for the first time in my life, I was able to talk about my deepest thoughts and feelings. While my knee continued to heal slowly on my extended medical leave, I started to work on all the emotional damage I’d incurred.
At first, pieces of myself flaked away as easily as silver slices of mica, and I was afraid that in the end nothing would be left of me. Talking to a psychiatrist, another stranger, was unsettling, and for a couple of days after visiting her, I was convinced I felt worse, not better. But I’d bottled up my problems for so long, and once I’d said out loud to the EEOC officer the things I had experienced, I couldn’t return to sealing all those emotions away anymore. They’d overtaken me with a vengeance, and it was a relief to be heard. Bit by bit, I began to see how off-kilter my life had become, how cut off from myself I was. I faced the painful fact that I’d let Goodyear become the family I kept trying to please, neglecting my real family. I found that realization devastating, and I knew I needed to make amends to Charles and Vickie and Phillip.
ABLE TO drive again, I shuttled Edna back and forth to her radiation and chemotherapy at the hospital in Anniston. Edna, of course, was stubborn when it came to listening to the doctor. He’d warned her that getting out in the sun would harm her, but there she was, not long after he fussed at her for doing too much, standing outside in the middle of the yard in the blazing heat.
While Edna gave instructions about the grass, the yardman nodded, leaning against his silent lawn mower. The collar of Edna’s housecoat gaped open, her chest covered in burn blisters from the radiation. If I hadn’t been so disturbed by the sight of her once-beautiful olive skin charred as if from rubber poisoning, I would have laughed a little, remembering how aggravated she made Charles when he tried to cut her grass after we were first married. He finally quit.
On the way to her treatment, I tried to tell her that she was going to make herself sick. “You have to do what the doctor says, or you’ll make yourself worse,” I insisted.
“Hush talking now. You’re giving me a headache.”
No, the sun had given her the headache, but Edna was used to being the caregiver, not the patient. I didn’t expect her to listen, because she always did things her way.
In just a few months Edna’s cancer had spread quickly, her health deteriorating at a disconcerting pace. In May she was hospitalized for pneumonia, and once she settled in at home again, I started spending the night with her. After a week, needing a break from sleeping on a lumpy sofa (better than the hard mattress in the guest bedroom), I decided to spend the night at home. I wanted to get some rest and clear my head. I’d gotten another call from Goodyear. They didn’t understand why I was taking so long to return, and indicated that the longer I stayed out, the more problematic my absence became. I knew I needed to get back into the swing of things, but I was worried about the doctor’s concerns—he’d warned me that if I returned to what I was doing, I’d be crippled in two years and need an entire knee replacement—and about asking for a lighter work schedule. I didn’t want to jeopardize my position by staying out too long, but I also didn’t want to return before I could handle what I was expected to do.
Before I could put my bag down in my kitchen, the phone rang. Edna said her temperature was 103. I rushed back to her house, thinking we were headed to the hospital for another long visit. In her bedroom, I shook the glass thermometer and then took her temperature. The red mercury line read normal.
“Edna, you’re okay. Everything is fine. It’s kind of stuffy in here. Maybe if I open a window, you’ll feel better,” I said, pulling back the curtains she’d drawn.
She grimaced a little as the sunlight flooded her bed. “You know I don’t like it so bright in here.”
“I know, but this breeze will cool you off. I’m going to go now, but I’ll turn on the TV before I leave so you can watch the news.”
“Don’t forget to water my pear tree. You forgot again. If it doesn’t get watered, it will die.” She’d had the yardman plant a fruit tree that spring, and all she could talk about was how much she looked forward to making pear preserves. I, on the other hand, was so wary about what was around the next corner, I didn’t even subscribe to magazines. Who knew what could happen in a year? “The watering can is in the garage,” she said. “What time are you coming back?” she asked as I fiddled with the TV.
I’d begged her to let someone else help me with her care, but she refused to have a stranger in her house.
“This afternoon,” I said, satisfied that the volume was adjusted correctly. “I’ll be back this afternoon to check on you,” I repeated, leaving.
“Don’t forget the pear tree, now, you hear?”
“I won’t.”
Watering the spindly tree, I realized that as Edna’s demands increased, I could not be pulled automatically into every real or manufactured crisis anymore. I could not drop everything and go into high-functioning overdrive. I had to establish some real boundaries. I had an important obligation to fulfill, but to what degree was I going to disappear into this crisis?
MY DOCTOR continued to extend my medical leave, insistent that I find a more appropriate job or I’d ruin my knee for good. In the meantime, for the entire month of June Edna was in and out of the hospital. She’d developed a blood disorder that required close monitoring and frequent blood transfusions. I did my best to take care of myself, but I became entirely wrapped up in looking after her.
At the hospital one afternoon, I waited with Edna for her to receive a blood transfusion. Uncomfortable with any form of silence, she started in about how she had cared for her mother night and day.
“I didn’t leave her side. Not once,” she said, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. “I did everything for her.”
My heart ached for her when I thought about her losing her mother as a young girl only to become a mother when she was still a child herse
lf, but I couldn’t respond to her unspoken charge. The last time she was given blood, I’d left to run an errand and returned to find her alone in the room choking on her own vomit. I’d run down the hall to alert the nurses, who were gathered chitchatting, completely unaware of the situation. I wouldn’t let that happen again.
Listening to Edna complaining, I hoped she wasn’t planning to pull another stunt like she had a few days earlier. She’d protested because I didn’t stay with her one night. She quit drinking liquids, got dehydrated, and slipped her frail body underneath an electric blanket turned on high. We had to rush her to the hospital. Then she’d gone as far as telling her neighbors that no one was taking care of her. I couldn’t let that bother me because I knew everyone saw Charles and me coming and going.
Now I managed to maintain my composure until she brought up my having left her alone to stay with Vickie for the birth of her third son, Alex. Against my better judgment, I jumped in to defend myself.
“Mama, we’ve been over this. You know I wouldn’t have left for anything else. I came back as soon as I could. Anyway, I’m here now, so let’s just forget about that.”
The nurse finally came in to tell us that they were ready to give Edna the transfusion and wheeled her out of the room. I waited in the sterile, quiet room grappling with the fact that everything I did, no matter how important or insignificant, made her mad. My sleeping on the couch upset her, and she’d berate me for not using the guest bedroom. There’s no way I will ever please her, I told myself. Then I said something I’d never said to myself before. Edna hates me. My mother actually hates me. She’d tell me she wanted me to have her dining room set, and the next thing I knew she’d have given it to another relative. Looking for an outfit for her a few days earlier, I’d chosen a dress she liked when I felt a lump in one of the pockets. I stuck my hand in and discovered my sock, the one I’d been missing for months, the one I’d turned the house upside down looking for when I stayed with her so many nights. The entire time Edna had had it in her pocket.
I’d never understand this strange spitefulness. Recently I’d discovered box upon box of brand-new books in her attic, each one inscribed on the crisp front page in her neat script with “Edna McDaniel” and the date the book was purchased. I knew she’d joined a book-of-the-month club after my father died, but talking to her, I realized she didn’t understand that she could have chosen one or two books, not the entire monthly selection. What I couldn’t reconcile when I saw so many boxes filling her attic was the fact that my entire childhood she’d refused to allow my father or me to buy books.
As if the nurses and doctors could actually hear what I was thinking, I stood up and closed the door, then leaned back against it, closing my eyes. Why did I think her behavior would change at this point in her life? Trying to please her was just setting myself up for constant disappointment, and she would only become more unreasonable as the cancer wreaked havoc on her body. The only way she could deal with her own fear of death was to lash out at the world, and I’d always been the nearest punching bag. I was the one who had to change my expectations. I would continue to take care of her, but I would no longer take her criticisms personally. I wasn’t the bad person she insisted I was.
Letting this realization spread through my body, I stood there until Edna was wheeled back into the room, her arms bruised and bandaged from so many transfusions.
I RETURNED to work in late July, assigned to a lighter workload. I worried about what I was facing, considering that Rodney and the union man had been given a three-day suspension without pay for the tire hold the three of us had been blamed for in February. As I’d relayed to the EEOC officer, that last day I worked before taking a week off for Edna’s testing, we’d supposedly scrapped four hundred tires.
At the time that tire hold occurred, a lot of blame had been going around—there’d been more than one hundred holds the previous year, including large batches of tires with upside-down sidewalls or the wrong tread getting out the door. Most of the time, the problem is discovered after the tires have been released; other times, if the problem is caught early enough, a change in code during the processing can correct the situation, particularly if it’s something simple like the incorrect serial number. If not, a knife is stuck in the tire and it becomes scrap. Those tires are then displayed on a flat with a large sign indicating the problem and serving as a warning not to make the same mistake.
I was told the day I returned in February that the plant manager was deciding what course of disciplinary action to take. Every day after that, before I was actually suspended, one of my supervisors, a short, overweight man named David, told me in one form or fashion that I’d probably be suspended without pay. He’d play out different possible punishments until I’d say, “You really need a procedure in place when these things occur. That way you treat everybody the same.” I was unaware of anyone being suspended for a tire hold, and I’d ask him why others hadn’t been punished in this manner, citing the specific tire holds we all knew about at the plant. “I’m sorry, Lilly,” he said in a not-so-sorry tone. “You’re right. We don’t have a consistent disciplinary program for salaried people.”
Preparing for my first day back in July, I knew something was up when David instructed me to come in at 7:00 A.M. rather than at 6:00, when the regular managers’ meeting was held after the night shift. I attended that 6:00 meeting anyway. No one looked at me or talked to me. It seemed strange that one of the other technology engineers, who worked an opposite shift, was there. David directed me to his office afterward.
“I really apologize,” he said. “I know you’ve been through a lot, and I hate to do this, but I must suspend you for three days without pay.”
I couldn’t get away from the stigma of a mistake that I wasn’t convinced I was responsible for, and I now understood that he’d wanted to tell me about my suspension after the meeting and send me home then. He didn’t want me at the meeting because my replacement was already there. I imagine he’d also planned to announce my unpaid layoff as a warning to the others.
David slid a piece of paper across the desk at me.
“What’s this?”
“It indicates we’ve had this discussion. I need you to sign your name at the bottom.”
Nothing was written on it. I could tell he wasn’t going to let me go until I signed the paper, which I did.
After the meeting, I walked past a straggling group of managers getting ready for the day shift. I held my head high and didn’t answer the questions they threw my way: Where are you going? Aren’t you supposed to be working? Who’ve you pissed off now? When I passed the guards, one of them asked me, “Wait, didn’t you just go in? Why are you leaving now?” I was humiliated.
I took the unpaid three-day suspension and filed an incident report with the EEOC.
ONLY A short time later, in mid-August, while I was still on light work duty, one of my supervisors said, “If you don’t return to your regular job, I won’t have anything for you.” Not long after his warning, an e-mail popped up in my in-box saying that four technology engineer positions were being eliminated and encouraging all employees to take an early buyout effective November 1. Rereading the e-mail, I had to ask myself what was stopping me from retiring. Clicking it closed, I stretched out my stiff knee underneath the desk. Fear, of course. If I stayed for twenty years until my retirement date, February 1 of the following year, I’d receive a higher compensation and would be eligible for Social Security. That way I could knock down some of my debt faster. I had been with the company nineteen years and ten months. Couldn’t I just hang on three short months from the early buyout offer until February? I wished I hadn’t been moved; if I’d stayed where I was as an area manager in the tire-building room, I wouldn’t have to consider this possibility. Those jobs weren’t being cut.
And how was it that I was facing the loss of my mother better than letting go of Goodyear? Maybe because I couldn’t control her cancer, and I’d come to terms with th
e fact that I’d never fulfill her demands. Since I’d found the note, it was clear that I’d never been accepted at Goodyear either, so the only way I could really win was to take control of the rest of my life. If I didn’t let go, the ways things seemed to be going, I’d get laid off or fired and lose what little I had accumulated in retirement. The truth was, I couldn’t hold that tiger by the tail any longer.
For two years, everywhere I turned, I’d felt pressured to leave Goodyear. Determined to keep going, I ignored my doctor and Charles when they expressed their concerns about my physical health. Just as Edna refused to see that she was dying, I was not able to accept that my career was over. When I found the note showing that my salary was so much lower than that of my male counterparts, I finally understood that I had no choice but to leave. They’d finally gotten to me, but not in the way they’d intended.
The only thing they left me after they pushed me out was an anger as invasive as the cancer I watched destroy my mother’s life, 80 percent of my salary, and a crystal clock with an emerald winged foot set with my service time: nineteen years.
ONCE I put in my retirement notice, I was given the assignment of training the two men replacing me. I had worked twelve days straight and had taken a day off, planning to work another twelve days before my last day in October, when Edna became critically ill with more tumors and fluid in her lungs. She spent the rest of the month in the hospital, so I used my vacation to be with her. By the end of October, although Edna wanted to start new treatments, there was nothing else the doctors could do for her. All that was left was to make her as comfortable as possible, and I moved her into a nursing home.
On the first day of my retirement, I sat alone with Edna in her room, bare except for the two-foot card some union guys had sent her several months earlier, addressed to “the cakemaker,” standing open on the table. I sipped my cold coffee, the lipstick that had stained the edge of the Styrofoam cup now worn off my chapped lips. I didn’t care if the coffee was cold. I wasn’t leaving Edna’s bedside. I’d stayed with her around the clock, sleeping in the chair. She had barely opened her eyes for days, and if she spoke, it was only to call me “Mama.”
Grace and Grit Page 16