by Rex Pickett
We checked into our handicapped-equipped room. On the tenth floor, it enjoyed a panoramic view of the verdant valley and snow-capped peaks.
After helping my mother go I lay down on the adjoining queen. My ears were ringing. I was exhausted, wanted desperately to sleep, but it was still light outside and I knew my mother was excited about hitting the penthouse restaurant and her requisite two glasses of wine. Me? I told myself those two beers were the last and that was it. It did not promise to be a fun night.
My mother held me to my promise to bathe her. Which I did, not without difficulty. Stripping off her clothes and transferring her from the wheelchair to the tub proved a complicated, taxing ordeal. For her as well, I conceded. Seeing my mother naked was going to take some getting used to, but when she asked me to help her wash her hair, I obliged.
After her bath, and in fresh change of clothes, she looked, even sounded–and smelled!–magically transformed, a different person. In her demure words, “a human being.”
In my servicing her every need without protest, at least without vocal protest, as I still was annoyed by every rest stop pull-off, the tension abated considerably. Knowing I was there for her, she became concomitantly less demanding, as if a peace had suffused her back there on that godforsaken stretch of Interstate and banished a few of her irrational fears. I wondered, too, if the amelioration of tension made her less nervous because after my meltdown the intervals between pit-stops lengthened.
The Crowne Plaza’s top-floor restaurant lives up to its name: Montana Sky. We were seated at a window–there is an advantage to being with a handicapped person when requesting the primo tables. The commanding views of the city–the most populous in Montana–and the neighboring mountains were spectacular. My mother, with her glass of over-oaked Chardonnay, was in heaven. With my own death-grip on a glass of tonic water I wasn’t soaring where she was. But one glass would have become four, maybe more, and I couldn’t risk it. Over mostly confabulatory conversation, I white-knuckled it through a pretty damn decent meal.
My mother haggled for a third glass of Chardonnay, but I enjoined the waiter–to the accompaniment of her vehement protestations–from complying with her request. She wasn’t happy. Her harangue continued in the elevator, but lost its force as we turned our attention to the routine of administering her meds, removing her brace and transferring her into bed. Her bedtime routine finished, I climbed into my queen, dissolved a Xanax and an Ambien I filched from my mother under my tongue, and switched off the lights.
Soon, I was sweating heavily. I got up frequently to hydrate. The sheet turned sticky from my perspiration and I spread a towel between my body and the bed. As panic gripped me, I felt myself ever so slightly shaking. Maybe convulsing. Sleep eluded me as my mind, wired, ran wild to all things dark and bleak in my life. Again, I feared I was going to go insane, sure to wind up without knowing how I got there in a white-padded room screaming for Mother Mary, Jesus and Joseph. In my head everything was painted black with catastrophe. At one point I debated dialing 911 and having them whisk me off to the ER. As my mother snored away and I continued to suck the marrow of my own brain, pustulating macabre images and eschatological scenarios of every conceivable variety, I descended to the point of doubting I could handle life anymore.
My mother, awakened by my frequent trips to get water, asked meekly, “Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m detoxing, Mom.”
“Oh,” was all she said.
I wanted to talk but my mother wasn’t the right person to bare my soul to. We had never had that kind of close relationship and it was going to feel awkward to open up, desperately as I wanted to. Because in this wretched moment, she was all I had.
“I crossed the neurochemical Rubicon, Mom,” was all I said.
She didn’t say anything. Maybe she was trying to unscramble Rubicon. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about my drinking because it hit too close to home.
“The Rubicon is…”
“I know what the damn Rubicon is,” she snapped, arresting me.
I fell silent.
“It’s a river in Italy that Caesar crossed that meant an automatic declaration of war on the Senate. It was the point of no return.”
I still wanted to explain what the neurochemical Rubicon is, but didn’t dare. I lay there stunned. I never had gotten to know my mother.
“I’m not as dumb as you think.”
There followed a silence, but in the silence my mind continued wreaking havoc. Sensing that my mother was still lying awake, I ventured, “Did you drink when you were pregnant with me, Mom?”
That must have taken her by surprise. She didn’t answer. The question was decidedly too personal. And accusatory. And while we’d been accusatory for years, we had never been personal, and, as a result, my memories of growing up with her were scant.
“When I get you settled in Sheboygan it might be the last time I see you, Mom,” I said, in the grip of fear, wanting to talk, wanting anything but the night and its implacable silence.
My repressed mother didn’t like talking about herself, and my questions, I could tell, were upsetting her. She hoped silence would, well, silence me.
“It doesn’t matter now, Mom, I just want to know.” She remained stoically silent. I tacked. “What was your beverage of choice back then?” Again, my question was met with silence. “Wine? Beer? Scotch?”
After a long moment, she finally said in a low, croaking voice, “Beer. Pabst Blue Ribbon. Oh, your dad loved his Pabst’s.”
“So, you did drink when you were pregnant with me?” I asked, still quaking like a leaf in a stiff wind, my brow beaded with sweat, my body perspiring heavily through the towel.
The time lag was even longer. For a moment I thought she had dozed off. Then, out of seeming nowhere, her disembodied voice spoke, “I might have had a few beers,” she admitted, her tone clearly indicating that she was not appreciating where I was headed.
“Every night?” I prodded.
“I don’t know, Miles. I was depressed.” She broke into tears, and then the floodgates opened, “I didn’t want to have children. I had Hank, and then Rusty said he didn’t want an only child because he was an only child and it had been hard on him. So, then we had you, and you two were such a handful. And then two years later we tried for a daughter and ended up with Doug. It was such a struggle when Rusty left the Air Force and started up his new businesses and I had the three of you all alone. And you’d run around and run around and you wouldn’t obey,” she said, crying her way through the recounting of the memory. “I wanted to travel, I wanted to see the world when I got out of the military. I wanted to go back to school and study journalism, or use my nursing degree and help the poor in Mexico. But with the three of you? It was impossible. I felt like my life was over.” She broke down sobbing.
Suddenly I felt sorry for her. As if I had compelled her to dredge these laments at an age when all she wanted to do was blissfully forget. “You regret having kids?” I prodded gently.
“No, you’ve all been so good to me since my accident.” My eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, and when I glanced over she was nodding her head to herself. “That’s what kids are good for.” Through more tears: “They’ll take care of you.”
There was a pregnant pause, then I dropped the bombshell. “So, why’d you leave the family, Mom?”
My mother fell silent, but this time it was a different kind of silent, the kind that told me I’d made her deeply uncomfortable. Which was not really my intent. The fragility engendered by my detoxing was not really her problem. But there was something I wanted from her. Something I had never gotten. “Huh, Mom? Where were you that year you were gone?” I waited. “With another man?”
Another long moment, this one unsettlingly interminable. “Yes,” she said in a voice that sounded like it came from a completely other woman, one I had never heard before.
“Who was he?”
“His name was Paul. He didn’t have children.�
�
“What’d he do?”
“He was an internist. I worked for him as his nurse.”
“You took a year off from the family and traveled the world?”
“Yes.”
“Were you in love with him? with this Paul?”
The AC came on. Footsteps went by the door, rose and fell and then another door opened and shut. “I don’t know, Miles. It was a long time ago. I just know that you three were more than I could handle.” Tears blurred her eyes. “At one point I wanted to give you all up for adoption, I was so miserable. I was having a nervous breakdown. And back then they didn’t have the medicines they have today. They threw you in the loony bin. I was a nurse, I know.”
I had been eight at the time, but remembered feeling a chasmic void I couldn’t put voice or reason to. My brothers and I, gullible innocents, accepted our father’s spurious explanation for our mother’s abrupt absence, but every night we sensed, though we didn’t articulate, the moroseness in his demeanor, the strain in his bearing. I remembered how, when she returned, an awkwardness had fallen over the household, a discomfiture that was hard to quantify. Something in our psyches had been permanently altered. Her hiatus was never talked about again. Swept under the rug, it was one of those lacunae in life that get plowed deep into the unconscious. And the whole Raymond family turned to the bottle.
“Why did you come back, Mom?” I wanted to know.
She sniffled. “For you kids.”
“You felt guilty leaving us with Dad?”
“I hoped he would find someone else. I didn’t want children. He did.”
As the AC hummed, I tried to assimilate all this. “Do you regret your decision to come back?”
“I don’t know,” she said, growing miserable.
“Whatever happened to this Paul character?”
“He died recently.”
I nodded in the dark, thinking.
“Is there anything else you want to know?” she whimpered.
“No.”
“Do you blame me for your drinking?”
Now it was my turn to clam up. Her question left me nonplused. I didn’t know how or when or why I had fallen prey to over-imbibition. But at that moment, I saw clearly why I had become a writer. “No, I don’t blame you for anything, Mom.” Given the debilitating effects of her stroke and helplessness she must have been experiencing recounting these painful memories, it wasn’t fair of me to press her for more answers as to why I had become who I had become. In a lighter tone I said, “I absolve you of all guilt.”
“Oh, that’s such good news.”
“No, I know who to blame. I’d love to blame you. Or the people who want to give me oceans of free wine. But I know better.” I waited. “I appreciate your candor, Mom.” I waited again. “We can’t blame the past for who we are today.”
She wanted desperately no doubt to switch the subject. So, out of the blue, she asked, “Why was Jack holding his, you know, thingamajig. I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
I laughed at her euphemism for cock. “Well, he, uh, had an accident.”
“What kind of accident?” my mother asked.
“Uh, well…” At Jack’s expense, I spilled the whole story.
She laughed so hard, especially at my description of him in the OR. “I thought that’s what Jack always wanted!” she said, riding the wave of humor with me.
“Yeah, but I think he wanted to be able to switch it on and off at will.”
“Is that why he got divorced?” she asked. “Couldn’t keep it in his pants?”
“Mom! Jesus.”
“Well, you’re grown up now. And I know you’re no angel yourself.”
I almost said, takes one to know one, but my poor mother deserved a bit of a break. “Yes, Mom, Jack cheated on his wife. More than once. Finally she couldn’t take it anymore and threw him out, straight to the curbside.”
“Is that what happened with Victoria?”
“Yes, I cheated on her. Near the end. I tried to make amends, but it didn’t end up working. Now, she’s with a new man and has a beautiful daughter and I’m a successful author, so it all worked out.”
The room went quiet again. A few minutes later I heard my mother’s light snoring. I felt a little better, but I couldn’t stop trembling.
chapter 17
It was a long and insomniacal night. In my broken sleep I perspired through two towels and managed at best four or five pretty rough hours. Dark dreams assailed me like marauding armies. They were the same dreams I used to have before the success of Shameless: destitution, loneliness, the whole litany of my once-desperate existence. Had I come full circle? I wondered, as my mother, her Ambien evidently producing its desired effect, slumbered away.
In the morning, ragged and dreading the miles that lay ahead with no one left to share the duty at the wheel, I bathed my mother without voiced complaint. As I sponged her back, it dawned on me–our roles had reversed. Once she took care of me–made sure I was fed and washed and got to the doctor if I wasn’t feeling well–and now I ministered to her, bearing sole responsibility for her needs. As I rinsed her off, a frightening realization struck me like a golf shot: Who would take care of me in my dotage? Jack? I laughed out loud at the thought.
In the grand lobby of the Crowne Plaza I parked my mother in front of a majestic stone fireplace, while I bought a coffee, two wedges of treacly coffee cake, and an orange juice at the in-hotel Starbucks.
It was still early when we got out to the Rampvan. I was so tired from the previous day, so drained by my first night of detox, I almost wanted to turn around and check back into the hotel and stay another night in Billings–until I could rest up. But we had to move on, our mini-version of the Bataan Death March.
As I deployed the ramp, my mother said: “Could I sit up front with you, Miles?”
“Mom, that’s going to be a difficult transfer. It’s not like with the Prius.”
“Oh, please,” she pleaded. “You can do it. I want to see the countryside.” She locked her eyes on mine, nodded a few times and wheedled, playing on my sympathies. “This might be my last trip.”
Her words startled me for some inexplicable reason. “Okay, I’ll try, Mom.”
The Rampvan had a little step just below the bottom of the door. I would have to get her up on that step, then somehow lift her up into the seat. I considered summoning the valet for help, but it occurred to me that if I couldn’t perform the transfer by myself, what would happen when we got out on the open road, and I had to get her out for a bathroom stop?
I wheeled the chair up next to the passenger side door and set the brakes. “Okay, Mom, we’re going to have to do this in two stages. First, the little step-up, then into the seat. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Bravely, determined to sit up front, she held out her right hand. I hoisted her out of the chair, as if I were some kind of human dockside crane. I managed to get her paralyzed left leg onto the step-up. Mustering all my strength, I grasped her torso beneath her armpits and practically heaved her up, into the van, and onto the passenger seat. Finally I swiveled her lower limbs until her feet rested on the floorboard. Pancaking the wheelchair, I disposed of it in the back, all the while worrying about the numerous transfers I would be required to negotiate between Billings and our next overnight stop, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
In the driver’s seat, I turned and looked at my mother, riding shotgun, Gilligan’s Island hat and oversized sunglasses in place, looking ready for adventure. “Feel good to be up front, Mom?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. She crooked her index finger and pointed it at nothing. “I feel like a human being.”
I laughed and started the engine.
“It wasn’t so hard to transfer me, was it?” she said.
“Well, I hope you can hold that obstreperous bladder of yours, Mom.”
“I will. I’m not so nervous now.”
I jerked my thumb toward the rear. “Otherwise? Back there for the du
ration.”
“Okay.”
“I stopped the diuretics. I don’t think a couple days without them can hurt.”
“That’s good news.” It was almost disorienting to hear my mother going out of her way to be agreeable. Maybe the simplest of things like making the effort to seat her up front were all it took to radically alter her mood. I was learning.
The GPS guided us back to I-90. It was a spectacular lazuline-sky Montana morning and the interstate was wide open. The kind of wide open where you can do 80 mph and think you aren’t moving.
“Oh, it’s beautiful,” my mother exclaimed. There was something ineffable, but relaxed, in her mien. In her helplessness and absolute dependence on someone else for all her needs, Joy’s untimely departure must have paralyzed her with even more anxiety. Now that I had demonstrated I could toilet her and bathe her and administer her meds, a measure of calm had descended. Not only was I capable of providing at least the essential care, I was no longer out all night, drinking and whoring and carousing. That, too, I now realized, had caused her no end of sleepless apprehension. I had finally morphed–evolved?–from the profligate son to the responsible one. She might have believed in my transformation more wholeheartedly than I did.
“How’re you feeling this morning?” she inquired.
“A little shaky,” I admitted.
“We’ll be okay,” she said confidently. “If you get tired, I can drive.”
I turned and looked at her. She wore a closemouthed smile. “Pretty funny, Mom.”
“We have to laugh. Otherwise, there’s no reason to live.”
“When did you become so sententious all of a sudden?”
“Oh, stop using your fancy words on me.”
I laughed. “You knew Rubicon.”
“Yes. I studied the classics. I read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. All three volumes,” she added proudly.