Later in the day, after Kathryn has showered, she bends to apply a pain patch to her lower back. Samantha is about to ask if she needs help, but her mother’s movements are practiced in the application of the pain patch. Samantha takes the opportunity to stare, unobserved, at her mother’s body, not unlike the Picasso etchings going up for Final Auction at 1:30. If Picasso were to draw Kathryn he could make use of the wobbled etching line, what her mother’s silhouetted flesh has become, a series of ripples and blurred edges.
At the photo gallery wall Kathryn and Samantha find portraits of themselves—at embarkation, in the Tropical Café (with plushly costumed seagull), in the Summer Palace (with plushly costumed dolphin). In every shot, they look happy and relaxed, well lit, eyes open, smiles broad. Even she is tempted to pay the $19.99 for the 5-by-7 embossed leatherette folio. But it is Kathryn who splurges on it, won’t let Samantha buy it for her as a gift. She picks a lovely one of the two of them—no plush characters involved—their heads tilted toward each other. For an extra dollar they get a copy, one for Samantha to take home to Boston. The leatherette folio will sit open for display on Kathryn’s bookcase in Tacoma, displacing the carved plaster Buddha that Samantha made in art class in seventh grade.
Samantha and Kathryn have not sampled the Thai, Chinese, French, or Italian cuisine in the surcharge restaurants. They had no interest in the Cultured Pearl Seminar, nor did they bother to obtain raffle tickets for Parisian diamond jewelry. They attended no dance parties.
Samantha sampled one open-air Jacuzzi (not hot enough to suit her), but did not venture down a water slide. She read carefully about, but did not book an appointment for, the many spa offerings.
They finally visited the bridge, but the officers had the shades of the observation window lowered. They stumbled upon the Friends of Bill W. meeting in the chapel right off the bar, forward on the fifteenth deck.
Karaoke. Samantha needs to cross this item off her life list. She searches the master book for the Stevie Nicks song she has forgotten the title to, hums a few bars to people nearby, until one woman reminds her of its name, “Landslide.” Samantha gets dry mouth waiting; wine makes it worse. Kathryn situates herself for multiple snaps. Samantha stands through the opening instrumental notes, which are strangely unrecognizable to her. What key to come in on? Wrong guess. She straightens out the key, but has the feeling she’s inaudible (Kathryn will later confirm this, though her hearing is not to be trusted). She does have some stretches where her voice seems to fill up the song. She dares not look at individuals in the audience, but couldn’t really see them anyway, so bright is the glare from the spotlight. She waits through another instrumental passage with no patter or interesting moves. She decides karaoke is harder than it looks, and vows to give full credit to all comers from now on.
The song ends and Samantha feels undeservedly triumphant; people are clapping. Kathryn took two pictures of a brass rail, none of Samantha. She is heartbroken, wants Samantha to sing more. But Samantha has crossed this item off her life list, doesn’t need to sing more, at least until her sons are by her side. The woman who knew the “Landslide” title performs “Play That Funky Music” with her mother. Brilliant choice. Her mother stands comically blank like Letterman’s mother, and that daughter is bright in a sexy flowered dress and pouffy hair and does move during the instrumental section. But she has a sidekick, the pleasantly blank mother, so Samantha gives herself credit for going it alone.
THE BIG GOOMBAH
Tacoma, 2007
The big goombah is gone from where it had been sitting on her chest, and what is there instead is nothing. You can spare half a lung, the surgeon told her, after he described a mass the size of tennis ball. Benign. He’d been so sure it would be otherwise that he had tossed it in formalin, ruining it for purposes of culture, so that they are unable to determine what spore or bacterium latched on to Kathryn’s lung, blooming there like cauliflower. I was wrong, he said, grinning in his lavishly colorful scrub cap, inviting her into the joke: His being wrong was rare. But you wanted that big goombah out of there anyway, he assures her. Did she? She probably did.
When she came back to life, the boys’ choir was singing away. No one else heard it. It’s coming from above me, she said. Next floor up. It’s faint, but they never stop rehearsing. What do you think they’re rehearsing for? That one song, over and over.
You’ve had a lot of anesthesia, Samantha pointed out. And don’t forget the morphine. There’s no boys’ choir.
Kathryn just closed her eyes, discussion over.
In every other respect, she’s herself again and the fog has cleared. She follows the presidential debates—Obama versus that other guy—from her rehab bed. Reads mysteries. Rehab itself consists of reaching for things in a pretend pantry, going bowling with a pretend ball, dressing and washing. Rehab, in other words, consists of practicing life, in the cocoon of the facility where falls are caught and accidents prevented. With her therapist chirping prompts, Kathryn makes rehab chocolate chip cookies and serves them to her son, visiting that night. He isn’t a rehab pretend son. He’s her real son, Steve.
I wish they’d call off the singing, she says.
There’s no singing, Mom. None whatsoever. These cookies are good.
Take them home to the girls, she says. I certainly don’t need any. She isn’t a grandma who bakes much; she’s done with that, after a lifetime of baking. First, everything from scratch, the way her mother taught her, then mixes—everyone used them. But her rehab cookies are from scratch and she might as well get the credit.
Great, her son says, wrapping them in napkins.
Just leave me a few, she says, so he unwraps one of the bundles.
She starts going places with her walker, and the singing follows. When she rolls as far as the rec room without needing a chaperone, it’s sometimes difficult to hear it over the babble of the television and the mumbling of patients overlaid with the bright tones of therapists. But the singing never completely goes away—filaments of human longing braided to celestial hopes so lovely, she sometimes has to pause in the hall, head cocked, waiting for a particular swell. She is—was—a soprano herself; she tries to figure out the song: Handel? Schubert? It’s both familiar and unknown, but as fine as you’d hear in a big cathedral, not like the hearty congregational singing of her youth.
The week after surgery, when her surgeon comes to the rehab wing on rounds, he tells her she’s ready to go home. Pain flares from the empty hole in her chest. The choir reaches its highest note and holds it.
I’m still practicing, she tells him.
He laughs, this time wearing a scrub cap with giraffe print. Has he just come from removing parts of children? Or does he think giraffes are generally consoling to all age groups?
What are you practicing? he asks.
Life.
This is it. You’re alive. Go home and get back to mischief.
Samantha is on hand to help, but the physical therapist recommends that Kathryn pack up her own things. When the therapist leaves the room, her daughter helps anyway, folding Kathryn’s robe, stacking the library books. Kathryn’s given up asking Samantha if she hears the choir, and she has, as well, learned to turn it up or down, depending on whether she needs to hear someone talk or whether she no longer wants to. But when she’s alone she doesn’t seem to have any control over the volume knob: The music simply fills her up, and while at first the single choice of song annoyed her, now it’s a sequence of notes that feels deeply tuned to her cells, and somehow a known set of words, which she’s decided are in German, a language she doesn’t speak, though it was her mother’s mother’s mother tongue. Her own parents spoke snippets of Pennsylvania Dutch to each other when they didn’t want the children to understand, and Kathryn knows only Ach, du lieber Gott im Himmel. Dear God in heaven.
When the choir follows her home, she has to admit that they are not musicians in residence at the rehab center. Though no less real for that fa
ct. She has the presence of mind not to mention the singing when she goes to see her favorite doctor, the pulmonologist. She tells him other news instead: that she practiced putting five pounds of flour up on a shelf in a pretend pantry, and is now home putting real groceries away in her own pantry. Nothing she buys in real life approaches the practice five-pound weight, so the flour bag was overtraining. Her retirement complex, which her children have dubbed the Home, provides the evening meal, and all she needs otherwise is a little coffee, a little oatmeal, a few cans of soup, and some Egg Beaters. Her doctor compliments her on her recovery and especially on the results of her lung function test, blowing into the tube. She thanks him.
You’re not going to miss the lobe, he says.
That’s what that smart-aleck surgeon said.
Dr. Singh laughs. He has an easy laugh and she likes to say starchy things to provoke it. He wears a different color turban every time she visits him, always in deep, jewel tones, and she always compliments him on the way they match his shirt or tie. He tells her his wife does that, the matching. His dark beard is very neat and she wonders if his wife does that, too. When he first found out she’d been born in India to missionary parents he took a great interest in the fact, not only because of their shared nativity, but because it made her medical case very interesting. The first thing he thought of was a latent tuberculosis biding its time in the childish pink tissue of her lung and coming to life as her immune system weakened with age. But because her know-it-all surgeon tossed her goombah into the formalin fixative, they will never know exactly what it was.
What about the rest of your life? he asks.
She has a moment of confusion; does he mean until she dies? Then he elaborates: Are you getting out, doing things?
She drives to her son’s when his busy family has time, looks forward to her daughter’s visits when her busy family can spare her for a plane trip. She supposes, to an outside view, she does not look very occupied. Her only regular engagements are with her physicians and her tablemates at dinner. Impossible to explain to Dr. Singh, kind as he is, about the many steps of her day, the time it takes to do the simplest thing—make a bed, for instance. To her great disgrace, she doesn’t always do that anymore. Or dusting: She has many magazines stacked up in the particular order in which she intends to read them. They must all be dusted individually and dusted around. When she does her laundry in the machines downstairs, she loads up her wheeled cart with the wet clothes to bring back upstairs and drape on her wooden drying frame. The fact that the wooden drying frame is getting old and rickety and that she can’t find a replacement at Target or Fred Myers worries her. Will she outlast it? She absolutely doesn’t trust the cleanliness of the dryers at the Home after once she saw another resident put unwashed wet tarps in one. When Samantha pointed out that the hot air has a sterilizing effect, Kathryn holds her peace, knowing her daughter can supply endless counterarguments to many things Kathryn holds as true. When Samantha further suggested that a high school girl might come in and do these chores for twenty dollars, Kathryn had two thoughts: Twenty dollars was a lot of money, and the high school girl wouldn’t know how to do things the way Kathryn needs them to be done.
I’m busy all the time, she tells Dr. Singh.
Because volunteer work can be a wonderful way to stay healthy and active, he says.
She blinks at him. She’s worked all her life and feels like she is working still. Before children, she was a bookkeeper at Mixer-Mobile, then when they were in school, she got a part-time job as receptionist at the County Mental Health Department. By the time they were old enough, she moved into a full-time secretarial job at Portland General Electric, taking the bus downtown. Even before the kids were grown, she did temp work whenever Carl was on strike or laid off. Then she retired, and had housework and yard work to do. Now she only looks after a small apartment a young person could clean in an hour, but it takes her days, attacking it in small shifts. And then there are her checkbook and bills.
I’m plenty busy, she tells him. She is so hurt he might think her lazy that she can’t even inject the feisty note to make him laugh. She thinks, with shame, of all the hours she spends reading, how she lets herself finish a book before she does the week’s laundry.
That’s good, he says. That’s why you’re so young.
She forgives him, because he has the best intentions, and because she has a soft spot for him. When she first moved to the retirement complex in Tacoma she thought of it as full of old people, and of herself as something else. But the thing about living there is that you lose folks, at least one a month, and sometimes even at a once-a-week clip. The oldest ones from when she moved in are gone now, some to assisted living or nursing homes, and some just gone. Found dead in their apartments. Ambulances come and go. She sees them through her window that looks out to the back parking lot, and then she hears what happened at dinner. Every evening she puts out her Good Night door tag, and every morning she removes it before ten, or her neighbor Vivian will worry and start making calls. If she’s running water and doesn’t hear the phone or the knock, Glen will unlock the door with his master key, Vivian at his heels. It is both startling and reassuring to see them bursting in. She feels the same worry and zeal if Vivian forgets her door tag and she’s the one who needs to make a call. Everyone, she knows, will die someday. But she inhabits a world where someday could be this day, this very one, and an empty chair at the dining table doesn’t automatically mean that someone is out to dinner.
One day, a week or so after she got home and returned to her routines of scrambled egg, morning hygiene, book, nap, book, dusting, dinner, television, and door tag, the boys’ choir leaves her flat. Her head fills with an unaccountable silence, the way ear pressure can change suddenly during a cold or on a flight. Alarmed, she takes her walker and ranges up and down the halls, trying to pick up the frequency. All she hears are televisions barking behind doors, the distant rumble of elevator machinery, and the greetings of residents shouting at each other as they congregate near the dining hall or community room. The return to unsung, unaccompanied life is almost unbearable. No, she protests—to herself or to someone else, she no longer knows which. Her religion, or lack of it, is confused these days: long since transformed from her Mennonite roots, and having passed through many stages in between, including, oddly, a seventies-infused return to the idea of reincarnation that her missionary parents had traveled halfway around the world to set straight. But, anyway, to whomever: No, no, no. And then—Why has thou forsaken me?
When she makes the mistake of mourning the vanished choir to Samantha during a phone call, her daughter irritatingly insists that it was never there in the first place, an auditory hallucination, hangover from the anesthesia, but as Kathryn points out to her tartly, Samantha wasn’t the one to hear it, was she? So she has only ordinary reality to consider, whereas Kathryn had the unearthly beauty of the choir itself.
How could she make up music like that? It was utterly complete, with words she knew were words but that somehow never reached her as distinct and comprehensible. She was going to have to come closer, the singing seemed to say, if she wanted to hear all of it. And now she’s ready to, the hole in the middle of her widening like an aperture—bigger, brighter, everything she can let in. Maybe she’ll hear it again just beyond the walls of the Home. Maybe it will come back to her in the garden at the side of the building, where there’s a little plastic bench she can sit on, amid the tulips with their splitting sides. She dresses in spring yellow and green for the excursion, and because there’s still a nip in the air, loads her fleece into the walker basket.
Got a date? a resident asks her in the elevator, a lady whose name slips her mind. People come and go, and the whole process lately seems speeded up, the changeovers happening too often. But it doesn’t matter which lady it is, because all residents, whoever they are, use the same script if someone looks about to leave the premises. Sometimes the saucy Running away? or Going out to caus
e trouble? But most often a wink, a smirk, a knowing tone: Got a date?
And the correct answer, the only answer you are allowed to give, is yes.
CENTENNIAL
Boston, 2013
Kathryn stands still, not changing face. She watches the adults fix their gaze on the ground beneath them, picking their way among the stones and roots.
She watches her mother in the dandie, or rather, glimpses her as the dandie pivots and dips between the Indian bearers on the trail. She can see the backs of the other missionaries, bobbing in the dimness, going down, seeming to sink into something—she knows it is the trail descending to the lower part of the mountain where the cars are parked that will take them to the train, but it looks simply like the mothers and fathers are sinking into the earth. Kathryn fixes her eyes on the bearers’ white shirts, the pair of parentheses around the darkness that is becoming her mother. If her mother turns back to look, there is time for one more wave, one more flare of her face. But then the white shirts of the dandie bearers round the bend and she is gone.
She could catch her. She could break away from the line of children and run quicker than the teachers, be gone before they know it. She could weave through the other mothers and fathers until she is even with the dandie. She would slow to a walk and slip her hand up to her mother’s, and they would remain clasped like that down to the car, and she would climb in and lean against her mother’s warm side during the winding curves and have to be woken up when it was time to walk to the station. Every year before has been like that; Kathryn turning back and waving and waving to her brother Paul as he stood in the Woodstock line just as she is standing now.
Ultraviolet Page 23