You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

  WHEN I SHUFFLED OUT of my room an hour later, I went to the kitchen door and found my mother lifting the bottles from the paper bag where I’d packed them: a cognac Kate had recommended, whipping cream, a jar of peppercorns. I’d bought baby green beans instead of the woody, finger-thick ones at the market. I had planned to make steak au poivre, which my mother had never tried. I’d thought it would be festive. I’d been looking forward to cooking for her, and maybe that was part of the reason I chose the steak au poivre—I had planned to flame the cognac when they weren’t expecting it.

  She hadn’t heard me come out of my room, and a glance out the front window revealed my father shoveling the front walk of its most recent dusting of snow. I watched my mother uncork the cognac and sniff it. “My,” she muttered, examined the label, then sniffed again. She rattled the peppercorns. The whipping cream she put into the refrigerator.

  I went into the kitchen and she turned, startled, a hand at her throat.

  “Just me,” I said. I took out the beans and a bowl and began snapping off the tops and tails.

  “You didn’t have to bring all this,” my mother said. “There’s no need to be so fancy. Really, just steaks are fine.”

  “I know they are,” I said to the beans. The soft prickle of their fuzz on my fingertips, removing the tough floss of the strings, made me feel better. The steaks, which were sitting on a plate on the counter, were beautiful too, pomegranate reddish-purple threaded delicately with snow-white fat. I’d cook anyway; they didn’t have to appreciate it. “I just thought it might be fun to show off a little.”

  fifteen

  JILL HELPED ME MOVE in exchange for—her words—“the best meal of my life thus far.”

  “You can make me something,” Jill informed me. She hefted a box full of hair gel, brushes, my single zippered bag of makeup, and shoes. “Or you can just buy me dinner. Someplace I cannot afford.”

  “You’re enjoying the idea of me with a little more money, aren’t you?”

  Jill hefted a box full of sweaters. A purple sleeve dangled over the front. “You’re not?”

  We filled the trunks of each of our cars and that was about all it took. I didn’t have a lot of stuff, and my room at Kate’s was already furnished—we’d bought furniture for it back when she was renovating. Had I known I would live there I might have taken a more active role in planning it. But it was a lovely, quiet room that drew the sunlight in the morning and faced the garden in the backyard. I would have liked to push for my saffron paint, though. Maybe I still could.

  A girl from Jill’s program was moving into my room. I had sold my bed and bureau to her for fifty dollars. The bed was still in the center of the emptied room, stripped to its limp pancake of a mattress.

  We shut the trunks of our cars. Jill brushed off her hands and looked at me. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll meet you at Kate’s.”

  “I’m going to run back for one more spot check.”

  The saffron paint looked a little odd without framed posters on the walls and the copper pan reflecting the glow. Too bright, too full of effort. With everything else it had seemed cozy. My bed sagged in the middle. I counted myself lucky and maybe slightly immoral for having gotten fifty dollars for it. Maybe I should have felt nostalgic to see it go—memories and all. But I thought about Kate taking item after item from her old house, remembering this and rediscovering that, and for once I was glad I had nothing. I had some new clothes and makeup, a cookbook, a vibrator, and a copper omelet pan.

  MY MOVE NECESSITATED A switch in caregiver schedules. Simone took on four mornings a week. Hillary took the afternoons, and I filled in the gaps and the nights. Against the doctor’s wishes, we left Kate alone for a few hours a day, which she maintained was essential for everyone’s sanity.

  The emergency button was backup now. We bought intercom monitors to string between our rooms instead. The first night I slept there I turned on some music as I lay in bed, reading, then wondered if it was keeping Kate awake. I couldn’t recall if the noise went both ways or not, so I turned the radio off and tried not to rattle the pages. I could hear her slightly through the monitor, the staticky, liquid tremble of her breathing. After the flu, then a cold, something just lingered in her chest, bubbling and viscous. The antibiotics hadn’t quite kicked in. No one really came right out and said why it mattered so much, though we all knew. If she couldn’t control her coughing or if her lungs didn’t clear from a routine cold, she’d be hospitalized.

  I had been hovering in the background a lot with my head poised on a level with her shoulder blades as I pretended to root around for the cake pan or the Cuisinart, listening.

  “I think it’s a little better,” I said to Simone one evening. The three of us had taken to conferring as we arrived and left our shifts—pausing outside the front door after dinner, murmuring about how she’d sounded that day. Now we stood on the front porch, Simone holding a dish towel and shivering while I searched for my keys. Kate had gone to her room to read after dinner. We’d had a homey chicken and rice dish with a side of okra, which I’d found in an old issue of Gourmet. Unexpected preferences had surfaced in the months I’d been cooking: Hillary adored Mexican food, corn tortillas, chicken with lime, and salsa loaded with more serrano peppers than the rest of us could handle. I gave extras to her in a little side dish. Simone had a thing for oxtail stew and all mahogany-colored, winey meat dishes. All three of us turned out to adore okra, though this was the only food I’d ever heard Kate say she disliked.

  Instead of cooking our meal at the end of my afternoon shift, I made it the first duty of my evening shift. The food was better this way; I had more time to shop, felt fresher, and cooked more complicated things. It could backfire if I got overly ambitious: I made lasagna the old-fashioned way and discovered it had been simplified for good reason. By then I was too far in to quit, so over a period of two hours I prepared the tomato sauce and béchamel sauce from scratch, sautéed the sausage, cut up the wide fresh sheets of pasta, while Hillary peered in occasionally and Kate periodically glided by with a bemused expression. When we finally sat down, I was supposed to be starting my shift and I was already filmed with sweat and exhausted.

  “I think you should approach the dinners with a little more healthy fear,” Kate had told me.

  Now I dug around my bag while Simone, who was on duty that night, glanced back inside the house to be sure Kate hadn’t come out from the bedroom.

  “Is that rumbly thing gone?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. It was more a rattle. But I think it’s softer.”

  She nodded, chewing her gum loudly. “Hill said she was definitely better Tuesday night,” she informed me. “So I’ll keep an ear out but I think we’re okay for now.”

  At first I hadn’t taken her lung problems as seriously as I knew I ought to. It just seemed hard to believe a mere cold might do that much harm. I was almost always there, or someone was, and I think deep down I believed I had some power of persuasion, as though I could lay hands on her and stop it. But soon after I returned from my parents’ house she had had a coughing fit.

  These were not as minor as they sound—a real fit could last for ten minutes, in which she gave her body over to it completely because she had no other option. I was no help. For one thing, it took me far too long to realize she couldn’t stop. What was worse, and what I later castigated myself for, was that I was in my bedroom, reading, tuning out the sound of her cough until I realized how long it had been going on. By the time I came in she was half-hunched over in her chair. Her head had fallen forward from the force of the fit and the short wings of hair hid the sides of her face. From beneath her hair her eyes rolled in my direction, shining with moisture, showing the white. One of her hands had fallen from the armrest and dangled near the wheel.

  I knelt by her, trying to remember what to do. Finally I bent her forward, holding on to her carefully, in the hope it would help her lungs expel fluid. I had the urge to give her the Heimlich though I knew
it was unlikely she needed it. I could hear from the cough that she wasn’t choking on something, and she hadn’t eaten by mouth in days. But what had I been told to do? I just stood there, holding her in a bent position with her shoulders near her knees. I was casting about for the cordless phone as I held her, wondering where the fuck I had put it because I never just put it back and she hated that and now I knew why. If it didn’t clear I’d leave her and call an ambulance, I told myself. I felt her lurch and shake. She sucked in a breath that sounded as tight and ragged as a tunnel in a cave. Then the coughs began to space further apart, and when it was over I wiped her mouth with a tissue and sat on the ground next to her chair, exhausted.

  When she’d gained her breath back fully she said, “We have to discuss something.”

  I sat down on a chair opposite her. “Okay.” I knew what was coming. I had done a terrible job with the coughing fit. I should have called 911 before I did anything.

  “Do you remember that you must ask me before you call an ambulance?” she asked. Must. I watched her lips curve in over her teeth as she said that, thinking it was a useful word for her, so unmistakable, forceful. Then I considered what she had said. I had forgotten until then that I was supposed to check with her.

  “Right. Of course.”

  “I need to count on you to force yourself to pause, no matter how it feels.” She swallowed, grimacing slightly as she did. She caught my eye and held it. “You have to realize what happens once I’m in there,” she told me.

  “You make it sound as though no one would listen—”

  She cut me off. “You think anyone will follow my orders? They can barely understand me.” She paused to make sure I got that. I repeated it and nodded. “If I’m on a respirator I can’t talk anyway. And it might take lawyers and court to disconnect it even if I told them to. I can live at home, with a lot of help, for now. After that . . .”

  “There are nurses and therapists,” I pointed out.

  “They’re busy. I’m privileged here. I have someone who takes care of only me.”

  “Several.”

  She nodded. “Several,” she agreed. She swallowed again, her head dropping forward. I waited a moment to see if she could right herself and then, when she didn’t, lifted her head again. “Thank you,” she said. “You might ask me and I might say yes,” she went on. “I won’t know till then. But you cannot send me somewhere where I lose control of what happens to me. Do you understand how important this is?”

  I nodded. “Okay,” I said. I was thinking about how I’d panicked a minute before. I was promising her I’d do it right as though it were an incantation. If I said I would, I’d have to. I’d remember somehow. Kate was still watching me, her eyes bleary from the coughing spell. I got another tissue and pressed it to her lower lashes, watched the damp stain the tissue.

  “And if I tell you not to call, and . . .” She paused, shook her head. Our eyes locked, and she raised an eyebrow, knowing I understood. “You would have to wait awhile too, afterward. If I’ve made that choice, I don’t want some ER doctor to bring me back.”

  “What about Simone and Hillary?”

  She left her eyes closed as I blotted the other eye. Then I sat back. “They know,” she said.

  THROUGHOUT MARCH I HAD been hoping uselessly for spring, but the night I took Jill to Le Champignon for her thank-you dinner, the wind was blowing wet and chilly. It whipped our hair into our eyes and mouths as we ran from the car to the door. As we ascended the stairs into the restaurant the warmth and chatter settled over us, the clink of silverware, the faint strings of violins. We glanced at each other as the maitre d’ took our limp cloth coats and hung them along a row of buttery leather and fur.

  I used to walk by this restaurant when I skipped class and went to the Wednesday market instead, looking over the menu they posted in a glass window and making a note to look up some of the words. One of my old notebooks had various culinary terms scratched on it over the marketing theories.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t split this?” Jill whispered.

  “Positive,” I said.

  In fact, Kate had given me her credit card. This had come after a long, troublesome week. For the first time I had said to her, “You don’t need to,” and meant it. Since I had moved in I often found myself wandering pointlessly around the house while Hillary or Simone helped Kate with the insurance or fund-raising phone calls.

  My first morning there, Hillary was on the early shift and Kate was already reading in the front room near the window when I got up. She glanced over at me, smiling good morning, not moving her head too much so the page-turner didn’t move before she was ready.

  As I threw yogurt and frozen blueberries into the blender, I listened to Hillary on the phone: “. . . on behalf of Kate Norris of the ALS Society.” Who would give her money when she sounded so flat? You had to sound serious but bright. I pulsed the blender, the motor shrieking, and Hillary covered the phone and glanced up at me, the light flashing off her glasses.

  “Oops,” I’d whispered.

  She shook her head and went back to her phone call. “Also called Lou Gehrig’s disease. Right.”

  I poured the smoothie into a glass and set the blender noiselessly in the sink. I started to walk away but then returned and washed up instead. Kate was a neat freak. I didn’t want to be a slob my first week. I was still in my pajamas. I had lain in bed and listened to Hillary come in that morning and get Kate up and into the shower. I could hear the drawers opening, the toilet flush, the water running. It was like spying. So this was how Hillary did this and that, and this was how they talked when they were together. I’d lain there, thinking Hillary wasn’t quite as deadening as I usually made her out to be. In the morning, I thought, and I’d bet at night too, her low steady voice seemed soothing. I’d bet her movements were all slow and careful and trustworthy.

  The switch in hours, now that nights and not days were my main responsibility, meant that a lot of my old duties were taken care of. In order to keep a few nights off I had retained some mornings, and I found those a bit of a relief. I set my alarm early, got into the shower by six thirty, and was tending to Kate, my hair wet and brushed back in a headband, by seven. At those moments it felt like my old job, and I felt less like a freeloader, drinking tea I hadn’t paid for and eating one orange when I wanted two. Frankly, by the time Kate and I had stocked up the kitchen to feed an additional, non-shake-drinking person in addition to our dinners, I was both pampered and pointless. (There had been some leftover condiments, baking supplies, and spices from the previous house, but a lot were items Evan enjoyed—a certain type of grainy mustard, star anise, which Kate never liked—I quietly threw them out.) I believed I was costing her far more money than my presence in the house was worth. She didn’t need me most nights, except for the occasional bathroom trip, and I found it difficult to get over the idea that I should be working madly all night if she didn’t call for me. So when I wasn’t sleeping, I cleaned or cooked, straightened up compulsively. Finally, the morning of my dinner with Jill, Kate told me I didn’t need to dust the windowsills when she paid someone else to do that. Then she added, “You’re going to dinner with Jill tonight, right?”

  “Yup,” I’d said. “We’re going to gorge ourselves. In a demure way.”

  She’d laughed, and said, “Get my purse, would you please?”

  I stalled as I walked over to the table with her bag in my hand. “Take the American Express,” she said. “Treat yourselves.”

  “I haven’t done anything for you,” I’d said. I tried to speak softly because Lisa was in the next room. I held on to Kate’s purse but didn’t take out her wallet. I had the money for once, and I had planned to write a check for dinner. To be honest, I was looking forward to it, to signing with a little flourish and overtipping.

  “You moved,” she retorted. “Jill helped you. People always give things when friends help move.”

  “A twelve-pack and a pizza, not a six-course Frenc
h meal. It’s too much. You’re paying me to sleep,” I told her.

  Kate had given a big, rattling sigh. “Please let me give this to you,” she said. “Do you realize how lucky I am that I even have the money to employ you? I’m grateful. This is me being grateful.”

  “But I feel like your—your kid,” I said. I had almost said “mistress” but caught myself. I was thinking of kept women in old movies, all marabou and nail polish, but I knew I had teetered on the edge of invoking Cynthia instead. We tried not to talk about her. We blocked all the chinks in our conversation to prevent her slipping in.

  “If you were my kid I would never send you to Le Champignon,” she said. “I probably wouldn’t even buy you tacos.” She gave the purse another pointed look. “And I know what caviar costs,” she added. “So I’d better see some on there.”

  THE MAITRE D’ SEATED US near a window, pausing, holding the wine list up against her chest as we settled ourselves. She handed it to me and then said, “How’s Ms. Norris?” I blanked for a moment, then realized she meant Kate, who at one time had been a regular.

  “Oh, she’s great,” I said, recovering. “How did you know?”

  The maitre d’ gave me a mysterious smile. “She had her friend phone and ask us to take special care of you tonight,” she said. “Please give her our regards.”

  When the maitre d’ had strode away, her long skirt swishing around her legs, Jill and I looked at each other.

  Jill raised her eyebrows at me.