“Mom, you didn’t even look at the brochure we brought,” Bryan says. “It’s a nice—”
“I don’t need to look at a brochure to know you’re trying to put me away.”
Allison’s hands fly to her cheeks, presumably to hide a sudden flush of color. “No, Mom. We’re trying to help you,” she says. Her hands barely hide what now looks like streaks of fire consuming the wall of her face.
“By tearing me away from my home? That’s helping me?”
“Okay, let’s slow down and start this conversation over again,” Bryan says, his face softening into the curve of a half-smile. He seems to be running his own internal version of good cop, bad cop. I wonder if he does this when negotiations at his law firm need to be reset. I can only assume this is the look he uses to disarm anyone foolish enough to go against him.
He sighs and moderates his tone. “Look, Mom, you could have someone do everything for you. Housework, shopping, the laundry. They have fun bus trips. You could meet new people. You could have girlfriends again.” He waves the brochure like a fan. “It’s a beautiful facility and you can have your own apartment with your own things. It’s beautiful… really.”
“It is,” Allison says, her smile looking like a wedge of red apple. “We took a tour already and it’s gorgeous. We can decorate your room any way we want, and I know this wonderful designer who is totally gifted with small spaces. She uses really soothing blues, muted colors, soft textures. She could—”
“No! I’m not leaving. I don’t like soft, muted things. I don’t like small spaces. I don’t want someone else telling me where to put my things. I’m not leaving my home just to spend a fortune to go sit in some tiny, cramped little baby blue, softly textured hole waiting to die. I need my space. I need my garden.”
Bryan cups his head and slides the brochure back into his bag.
I’ve made my point.
“Well let’s just postpone the thought of moving until you’re ready. In the meantime, we’ll get you more help around the house, someone to help you keep up with daily things. The dishes and laundry. The heavy gardening. Kind of keep an eye on things around here until you’re ready to talk about this again.”
“I don’t need help.” I place my chin in a defiant pose. “But if it would make you feel better you can send someone over to lop back that yellow… thing… that vine-thing that’s hanging over my rose bed and blocking the sun. But I’m not moving and I won’t discuss this nonsense again.”
With that final, sputtering word, I stand from my chair and head toward the kitchen, leaving Bryan and Allison to clatter about in their seats. Bryan colonizes the couch, while Allison perches on the edge of her chair like a cat ready to spring after a sparrow. I expect they will maintain those positions for at least a few minutes.
I pluck a sponge from the bottom of the kitchen sink and wipe it across the counter.
Even though I’ve won this round, I begin to cry. Great drops of sadness fall onto the kitchen counter. I dab them up with my sponge and move over to the stove, continuing to wipe crumbs and tears and the misery of every woman whose children think it best to take her from her home.
Whether it’s for my own good or not, I can’t imagine never having a cleaning sponge again in my hands. I can’t think of having my garden shears and gathering basket, my dishes, my furniture sitting out on the driveway to be picked over and bargained down in a yard sale. I can’t conceive of never again lying in my bed, listening to the early morning creaks and groans and rustlings of this dear old house. I can’t possibly leave behind the pencil marks on the pantry doorjamb where each year’s growth of the children was carefully measured and tallied, or where their little handprints were pushed into wet cement as we poured the walkway along the side of the house. I can’t be asked to leave the spot where my beautiful Ivan fell to the ground, my arms holding him, my scream keening through the sky as his last breath sighed into the earth.
There is rigorous madness to my arm strokes, a blue sponge creating a ridiculous prop for a crazy woman. The difficulty of a failing memory makes me either obsessively clean, going over and over the same spot like stories that get repeated again and again, or forgetful to pick up a sponge in the first place. Right now, I fall into the former category, rubbing obsessive-compulsively over and over the same spot in a great spurt of muttonheaded behavior.
Soap creeps up my hands, my arms, like bubbles from an ocean surf. I’m reminded of something and I run back to the living room.
“I took you to the goddamn ocean and this is how you treat me? We stood together in the surf, laughing, with bubbles of saltwater climbing up our legs and this is what you want to do to me? Put me away?” I shake my wet sponge at the startled faces of my children, flipping water across the room like a blessing. “You can’t hide the ocean we stood in and you can’t hide me.”
I run back to the kitchen and start scrubbing the counter again. Again and again and again my arm makes wild circling arcs across the countertop. I feel John Milton winding his soft body around my legs, his tail curling like a plant tendril up a garden stake.
I run back to the living room. “And I’ll not leave John Milton,” I cry. “And you can’t take him away either. He’s my comfort… and… so there!”
I march back to the kitchen where I find John Milton looking as nonplussed as my children. I seem to dismay those I love these days. My children. My cat. Even myself.
Here is my predicament: I’ve now become that electric moment between a spark of lightning and its thunderous announcement when everyone counts the seconds between the flash and the boom. My children say something I find disagreeable and I can nearly watch them count in their heads, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, as they measure the time until I come crashing down around their ears.
Now here I am, standing in the middle of the kitchen, tears falling onto the floor, drop by drop, when Bryan and Allison come in. Without a word, they braid their arms around me.
“Shhh, Mom,” Bryan whispers. “It’s all okay.”
“We won’t make you move anywhere,” Allison says. “We’ll get someone to take care of you.”
“Forever,” Bryan says. “We’ll make sure you always stay right here. We promise.”
We begin to sway a slow, small dance. It’s the dance of a broken mother and her frightened children, the tender waltz of a woman who is well beyond anything but her own terrifying and myopic needs.
I dance within the arms of my children. My hand releases the wet sponge; it falls away to the floor and, for now, the notion of moving me from my home falls away with it.
Chapter Seventeen
My head is a box of dust. Somehow I’ve altogether lost my ability to reason with myself. I’m now an argument with every movement and every sound I make. I feel as if I’m in a paper boat, floating down a sidewalk stream during a torrential rain. Ahead is a sucking drain, waiting to swallow me up, paper boat and all, and I’m paddling to stay afloat in all this water and dust, but it’s useless.
I am lost, lost, lost.
Every room of my home is now littered with the evidence of my fractured thoughts. Laundry clutters the floor of my bedroom, trickling in lumpy little piles down the hallway. I stack mysterious envelopes on the kitchen table into towers of puzzlement; my name is on everything, often printed behind little glassine windows. I’m not curious enough to open any of the envelopes, but neither am I ambitious enough to clean them off the table. If, now and then, an envelope should get brushed away and fall to the floor, it is simply left where it lands. Newspapers lie on the front porch until the delivery boy finally stops leaving them. Some days I’m bright enough to bathe, but then halfway through I find myself adrift and splashing. My hair often goes unwashed, as do the dishes.
I no longer make a distinction between what is John Milton’s food and what is mine. We eat what we eat. It’s all the same and, every now and then, I’m horrified at what I’ve become.
Colors have turned to varying sha
des of gray. Differences and nuance between this and that are no longer available to either my senses or my abilities. Every day there are more and more small downward steps—tiny little backward movements that leave me stunned and ashamed. I shuffle, drift, float through time. Now and then I surprise myself by popping up to take a deep breath of clarity before once more diving under the surface of an ocean always stormy with forgetfulness. During the times when I notice how my disposition has turned to become mostly dreamy and unconcerned with ordinary tasks that are part of running a house, I also understand that in the next moment, I’ll likely forget what I’m supposed to be doing anyway.
New things don’t stick in my mind for long, in spite of the chewing gum and glue that continues to fill up all the little nooks and crannies of my brain. Making sense of little things is now the occupation of every day. Nights are always long hours of anguish.
This head of mine, filled with its dust and gum, is always an unreasonable question mark. A comma. A period. Punctuation that interrupts the flow of every day. At times, I find long moments of brilliance when thoughts are clear enough to provide encouragement to me that perhaps I’m not really so very ill at all.
It’s in these moments of sunny thought that I’m strengthened and able to continue hiding the odd nature of my illness. Somehow I’m always able to rise above the clattering fray, to gather my piles of clothes and place them in the hamper, or to scurry through the house with a dust cloth. To quickly sort through the mail. Snip away dried leaves from my potted violets lolling on the kitchen window sill. Take a leisurely soak in the tub, put on makeup. Find my perfume.
But then I always crash, each time slamming harder than before, tearing myself open with the broken shards of this awful disease.
I am lucid. Then I’m not. Still, I manage to hide it all from everyone, because it seems the only reasoned course—just in case I become better.
Just in case.
Allison sends a cleaning lady twice a week, every Monday and Friday. I’m always surprised when the doorbell rings and a woman I don’t know stands on my porch with a bucket of cleaning supplies and a mop, begging to be let in.
These women are lucky I’m a lady with a Southern upbringing. I’m convinced they leave with their pockets filled with my things, although I never catch anyone in the act in spite of my chattering vigilance over every sweep of the hand. I stand over them as they scrub away toilet rings and tidy the kitchen. I follow them around as they pick up my clothes and wash my dishes, as they guide a broom across the floor and vacuum the carpet. As they dust, polish, fold the finished laundry, and sweep the floor. I watch over every movement as they spread the scent of cleanliness across the rooms of my home.
They diligently create order from stem to stern, but each new and different woman fails to do the simple task of picking up my fallen-down mind. It’s no wonder—and certainly not my fault—that when they’re done and packing to go, I yell at them to never come back again.
On Saturdays, men come into my yard with noisy mowers and weed-eaters and blowers to whisk away the evidence of my inattentiveness to the garden. When they come, I move to the centermost spot in the house and stand as still as a statue until they finish and reload their equipment into their truck. I don’t like their noise and I don’t like what they do to my plants.
After the men with their lawnmowers and leaf blowers are gone, I tiptoe outside and lay soft apologies like tiny prayers over my poor flowers and bushes for the horrid assaults they must have endured at the hands of those noisy, grass-stained men.
The Monday and Friday women are difficult enough, but I especially don’t like the Saturday men.
On Sunday mornings, my children come to see the handiwork of the labor that has occurred over the week. They cluck and coo over sparkling floors and manicured lawns as if they had made the shine and orderliness with their own hands. Bryan whisks up my neatly stacked mail and places it in a plastic bag; he’ll take it with him when he leaves.
He used to spread papers across the table for me for me to sign. One day I signed something so I wouldn’t have to sign things any longer. Bryan told me he was putting my money in trust. We argued over that—a great heaving, sighing argument as heated and tear-filled as when he took away my car—but in the end, I gave Bryan control over all paper things and all car things. Now he just takes my mail without comment and I say nothing in return.
I’ve no idea where my car went (along with my keys from the lettuce drawer that started all this).
I guess today is Sunday because my children arrive, shaking a rainy Sacramento sky from their shoes and forming smiles upon their faces. They kiss my cheek and say Good morning, Mom, not particularly with words, but rather with their kissing mouths and patting hands.
“I’m going to stop your newspaper delivery,” Bryan announces, his voice as flat and dull as the low-hanging sun that seems desperate to make its way through this morning’s heavy clouds.
“Did I run out of money to buy my newspapers?” I ask. “Am I poor now?”
“Mom, you have enough money in trust to live until you’re a hundred and twenty. Dad left you just fine… you don’t need to worry about money.” Bryan smiles gently in my direction.
“Then why are you taking away my newspapers?” I ask. “Those are my newspapers and I want them. I need them… for… for newspaper things.” My voice is high and thin with sudden distress at the thought of losing yet one more thing.
“You don’t read them. You don’t even bring them in the house.”
“Well, I’d read them if they were placed here,” I say, patting the top of my coffee table. “They should deliver my newspapers… with coffee, don’t you think? They should ring the doorbell. Maybe I’d open the door if people had the common courtesy that God gave a duck to let me know they’re here. With coffee.”
My children look at me as if I’m a stranger. A stranger with dust and gum in her head.
“So it’s settled,” I say. “If I do have money then I should have my newspapers, with coffee… and maybe a nice blueberry scone.” I narrow my eyes. “Or maybe you’re not telling me the truth about my money and I am poor.”
“Mom, listen to me… this isn’t about money.” Bryan looks wounded as if I’ve just questioned his manhood. “All this is about is that you don’t pick your newspapers up off the porch.”
“Then I want you to call the newspaper people and tell them to bring coffee and scones with my newspaper. I’ll pick them up then.” I punctuate my declaration with one sharp nod of my head.
“Oh good grief,” Allison says. She shrugs her shoulders and wanders off to putter around my kitchen. I’ve apparently made an appropriate point because Bryan says nothing more. He opens the Sunday paper and hides his face behind its pages.
It’s often like this that my children avoid me. I don’t know why.
Sometime later, Allison comes out from the kitchen and asks me, “Mother, why is there cat food in your cereal bowl?”
YOU DON’T. You don’t know why you would have spooned cat food into your favorite cereal bowl, the red one, the one clearly imprinted with the word Cereal on its side. You want to explain how you know your different bowls, but what’s the point? To you, it doesn’t matter if you feed the cat from your cereal bowl, or if your cereal ends up in the cat’s bowl. A bowl is a bowl. Yet, children still question their befuddled mothers, giving well-meaning discourses about bowls and their proper use (according to the words written across their ceramic sides). You’re no longer compelled to be perfect; your best response is to shrug your shoulders and walk to the center of your living room. There, you shuffle your feet back and forth and hold your head in a posture of shame, even though you don’t know why you do the things you do.
“Mom?” Allison gently shakes my arm, speaking earnestly into my face.
She startles me. “I don’t know,” I say, my voice echoing her earnest tone. I say my words once more for good measure. “I don
’t know.”
I’m not certain exactly what it is that I don’t know, but I assert my innocence over it all anyway.
“Don’t feed the cat from your bowl… and don’t you eat from the cat’s bowl,” Allison says, her eyes wide and serious. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I say. I look up in time to notice Bryan’s eyebrows flip quizzically before resuming his place in the business section of the newspaper.
“That reminds me,” I say. “Do we know what time my coffee and scones are to be delivered? I want to be ready on time. A lady always needs to be dressed, with her make-up on… and certainly, a smile on her face.” My children disappear once again behind their newspapers and kitchen doors.
I return to shuffling back-and-forth in the center of the living room. When one’s head is a fractured stream of nonsense, the middle of a room is a safer place indeed.
After my children leave—Bryan taking with him a plastic bag with my mail tucked inside and Allison taking the last of my good senses—I go into my closet to comfort myself with another letter. This time I pull out something that appears to be a poem. I say appears because it’s nothing like the somersaulting poetry of Milton or Poe or Joyce or any of the classic writers.
Strangely, reading is something I still do well in spite of this creeping, gathering illness. Maybe it’s because I learned to read at a very young age. I could, perhaps, compare my continued reading ability to an athlete’s muscle memory that, once ingrained, requires little conscious effort or thought to throw a fast ball or kick a field goal—or in my case, to read a simple sentence. Maybe, in spite of my silly-willy mind, I’m simply making up for all the reading Ma couldn’t do because her eyes were so very broken. I’m not sure which of us received the better bargain, though. I wonder if we each in our own way came to a certain form of blindness. My brain is as blind now as Ma’s eyes had been.
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