Wait Until Tomorrow Part 16

"She lost it," I say. We both laugh. Emmy is notorious for being unable to hold onto things-her cell phone which she left at a bus stop in the Bronx, her little lilac winter coat (brand-new) that she left in a Taco Bell when she was eleven, her backpack and keys in high school. The list is long.

"Someday," Tamara says, "you should give her a map with a red pinpoint of everywhere she's lost something."

After I leave the coffee shop, I head over to the Sanctuary to see Mom. The manager takes me aside as soon as I walk in. I'm worried he's going to tell me that they've decided to raise her rent. But instead he asks if I've heard that Mom has lost her ring. My heart sinks. It's a beautiful amethyst ring in a big gold setting that my brother David gave her. How could she have been so careless, I wonder. She knows that there are always people around who will lift what you leave behind. She never locks her apartment, of course, and has even complained that people come in and take her cookies, which I'm pretty sure doesn't happen. Still, it would seem that if she thinks there are cookie thieves out there, she would surely guard the one thing she has of any value.

When I find my mother in her room, she's distraught. I do an exhaustive search, but no ring. Overall, I'm pretty sure the employees here are an honest bunch, but the economy is bad right now and one of them might have been unable to resist the temptation. Or maybe my mother managed to drop it in such an obscure place that it will never again be found. Regardless, she's going to have to suck it up.

"Let it go, Mom," I tell her. "There are worse things than losing a ring."

"I just feel so guilty," she says.

"Please don't. It happens," I say. I want to chastise her the way I chastise the forever-losing-something Emmy, but it serves no more purpose than her purposeless guilt.

I push her wheelchair outside and we sit on the little patio area in the sun, facing the parking lot. I relish the spring sunshine and this moment free from grief and worry. I am filled with grat.i.tude and not a little relief that I can be here with her today, and because today the worst thing that has happened to us is the loss of a ring.

Emmy comes home from college for a short visit. I was thinking we'd spread out the comforters in front of the TV and get reacquainted with Woody Allen. But she can't stay for a second night. She has four papers to write and decides to go back to school to finish them. It has begun to happen. This house is more storage, more of a way station for her. In a different course of events, Hank and I would be rekindling our love life about now. I would not be living in this big empty house alone without even a dog. But Hank is gone, Merlyn is dead, and my next ship hasn't come sailing over the horizon.

So instead of watching Woody Allen, I'm visiting my mom. When I walk into her room, she's got a helpless look on her face. She's just rung her pendant for someone to come help her get to the bathroom.

"I'll help you, Mom," I say. As often happens, she has a big wet spot on the back of her dress. So I help her change into something else.

Mom is in good spirits today. She doesn't complain of pain. I wheel her into the courtyard where we slowly circ.u.mnavigate, stopping to admire the flowers. She's always liked flowers, but now she seems to derive a special delight in them.

After we've toured the small courtyard, I park her wheelchair catty-corner to one of the mesh chairs and sit down. I tell her about a movie I've recently seen. She likes to hear about what's going on out there, but it doesn't hold her interest for long. Soon her conversation veers to the past.

Somehow we get on the topic of "The War." Both of her brothers served. Bob went out and shot a rabbit before enlisting and realized he simply couldn't kill a person, so he joined the Merchant Marines. Dave was in the Navy and served in the Pacific. He made one cryptic and pained comment that Mother never forgot: "All the terrible things that they say the j.a.panese did to us are true. But we were no better to them."

"Daddy never served in the military," I say.

"No, he got out of it because of his eyes," she replies.

"So after Yale, the two of you went to Vermont?"

"Yes," she says and smiles. Her teeth are stained yellow, but she still has a great smile. "Vermont was wonderful." She has told me many stories of the boys' school where my father taught right after college. They had no electricity and the winters were brutal. But she loved the adventure of it.

"Driving up there, I saw a house with smoke pouring out of it, and I thought it was on fire. I told him we had to stop and help whoever was inside, but he just drove on and said, 'Oh, those people know what they are doing.' I was so frustrated, but he was right. It was some sort of cooking house for the maple syrup."

She has often told me that my father was the only man she ever loved. I hope this is not a genetic disorder. I hope that Hank will not be the one great love of my life.

"It must have been a culture shock when you wound up in Jacksonville."

"That's right," she says. "At the time there were still separate water fountains, marked white and colored." She pauses and then remembers. "We had some friends who were black. Musicians."

"Mitch and Ruff?" I ask. I have a book about them and remember hearing that my parents knew them-jazz musicians from the South.

"It's possible. Anyway, they were on tour, and we had them over for dinner. I distinctly remember having to pull down the shades so we wouldn't wake up with a cross burning in our yard. It was a scary time." She pauses again, remembering. "I'm sure I've told you about the trip we took up north with our colored maid."

She has, but I don't stop her from telling it again.

"We had to bring food out to her in the car when we were in the South because they wouldn't let her eat inside the restaurants where we stopped. I felt awful. I couldn't let her go hungry, or put her through that humiliation."

The lines were clear cut in the South during the 50s and 60s. My mother was berated by her neighbors in Spartanburg for paying her maid too much. One time she tried to sit down and eat lunch with "the help," and the woman immediately got up and said that wasn't the way things were done. We weren't the sort of people to always have a maid. But she was a working woman with two young boys and it wasn't abnormal to hire help. They didn't have day care back then.

"It's quite different now. We've seen such a big change in our lifetime," she says. It's true but I can't help but notice that most of the CNAs (certified nursing a.s.sistants) here and at the nursing homes we've been to are women of color, and most (though not all) of the residents and the supervisors are white. My favorite caregivers at the Sanctuary are Charlene and Lam. They've both shown me that the work they do, which I thought was hard and demeaning, is as rewarding as anything I do.

"You learn so much from the residents," Lam once told me.

"Not everybody can do this kind of work," Charlene informed me on another occasion. "It takes a lot of love. You have to love these people."

The conversation with my mother changes course.

"I've always wanted to write something, and I think I should write my autobiography. Not for publication but because the grandchildren might be interested someday," she says. This is a familiar path. Just do it, I always tell her, and a few sc.r.a.ps get written here or there. Then she begins again, "The worst piece of advice I ever got . . ."

I know exactly where this is leading. This is one of her dominant themes. Her mother told her not to bother to learn how to type because "you'll always have someone to type for you." Eventually my mother did type on a computer but never with any confidence. It's no wonder that the summer after my eighth-grade year, my mother signed me up for typing lessons at Jones Business College. I was the youngest in the cla.s.s and not very good at it, but I learned how to type pa.s.sably well. Later when I took typing in high school, I still wasn't very fast and I could never do it without errors. The "quick brown fox" was often a "wuck brown foz." But my mother's insistence that I learn to type was prescient, I suppose. We had no way of knowing that one day these magic machines would be invented and it wouldn't matter how many errors I made.

At around five forty-five Mom starts to get anxious. Dinnertime is at six, and she is never, ever late for dinner. At five minutes to six, I wheel her in. While Mom is eating, I get into a long conversation with Charlene. Charlene tells me she started working with the elderly when she was sixteen years old. She's my age now. Her eyes are so bright they dazzle.

"Why do you do it?" I ask her.

"I love being able to take care of somebody who can't do for themselves," she says.

It's true that when Charlene is on my mom's floor, Mom's care is impeccable. Lam joins us and the three of us hang out for a bit in the library, chatting.

One thing I've been curious about is how much the CNAs make. I remember a technician at the hospital telling me she couldn't survive on her paycheck. And it rankles me that these people who work so incredibly hard don't get paid what they should.

"How much would someone make as a CNA just starting out?" I ask.

"Starting out, maybe $8.50 an hour. People with more experience can make about twelve dollars an hour," Lam says.

"Do you get benefits?"

"Benefits are offered, but they're too expensive," Lam says.

"So you don't have health insurance?"

Lam shakes her head.

"It's a lot better up north," Lam says. "The health insurance is good up there. Here it just costs too much."

At this point, my mother wheels herself into the library.

"Still, I love this job," Lam says.

"Me, too," Charlene agrees. "These people are so interesting. Your mother told me all about working with Andy Griffith. And she said Aunt Bee isn't really as nice as she seems on TV. Ain't that right, Roz?"

"Oh, stay away from Aunt Bee," my mother says. Charlene bursts out laughing.

In early June the management at the Sanctuary sends me a letter saying they are going to raise her rent by a thousand dollars a month. In truth, that would be about in line with what any other place would charge, but we cannot afford it. I panic. I can move her in with me for the summer and cancel any plans of travel-or sleep. Then I can move her to my brother's house in St. Louis, and he and his girlfriend can try to take care of her. But I don't want to move her. She's found some semblance of stability here, if not necessarily happiness. There are always people around. She plays the piano, Scrabble and bingo. A couple of days after the letter, the director calls me and makes a deal. He'll raise the rent by $200. I figure I'll just have to work more. I'll have to come up with it.

But I have other money troubles. Over the years I used my mother's credit card to pay for some of the bigger things she needed that I couldn't quite manage-the lift chair, some hospital bills, medicine whenever the Medicare gap hit and the drug costs skyrocketed. I dutifully paid the minimum each month, but you know how credit cards work. You can pay and pay and never pay it off. At some point the low-interest period was over and boom, the minimum was beyond my reach. So I stopped paying it. Now, they've tracked me down. The truth is, I don't have to pay this. The credit card is not in my name, and they can't squeeze any money out of my mom. But I have this bad feeling about letting her die in debt. So when they offer me a fairly reasonable payoff deal, I accept. It makes things tight as h.e.l.l and there are plenty of other things I'd like to do with that money, like start my own retirement account, but I agree to pony up.

I don't have any teaching work during the summer, and Emmy is taking summer cla.s.ses to make up for missing the fall term. I spend huge chunks of my time alone. I believe this is good for me. Time for a slow settling of all the upheavals of the past. I do my yoga every morning outside on the deck with a flock of leafy trees for company. I listen to Vivaldi and Bach. It feels as if my spirit is reconnecting the wires that got loose or ripped off in the storms. I am getting reacquainted with myself.

I also spend time with my mother, and I begin to catalog what happens when your parent grows old. I sit with her in the courtyard and search her face as she explains to me, once again, that the beauty of her recent circ.u.mstances is that she doesn't have to worry about food-no preparing, no cleaning. It's just there. This is a marvelous thing. She says this often. Very often. As I listen to her, I'm trying to remember the woman I once knew and I'm angry with myself that I didn't know her better. I look back and see how we ignored her aging. She was always the same, and then she wasn't.

At home I look at my own face. I barely recognize it. Those lines on my forehead can't belong to me. And what is that? A shadow? Some kind of strange lumpy formation on my forehead? I rub extra virgin olive oil into my skin, trying to lubricate it. Who the h.e.l.l are you, I ask my reflection. I've heard that our cells replace themselves every seven years. Like my mother I am not the person I used to be. My cells are different. I don't know my own face. When I look at it, I usually see what I've always seen-not what is really there.

One evening I find my mother in the courtyard with four other residents. One of the women is my age. She has early onset Alzheimer's. She's very sweet and often visits with my mother, but my mother says, "She's not very bright." The poor woman can't remember anything. The women in the courtyard are all listening to a woman with a heavy French accent. Her name is Jacqueline. She has thinning red hair and an interesting ruddy face full of character.

"It was June," she is saying, "June of 1944. And the Germans had taken all of the grand hotels and turned them into hospitals. We were students at the time and the Red Cross advertised for help. Well, school was out so we thought it would be a good idea."

She tells us about the German nurse yelling at her-"Oust! Oust!"-and finding an amputated leg covered in maggots in the bathroom. She tells us about the handsome American GI she met after the war. How he managed to find her house although all the street signs and landmarks were gone. How she married him.

"I was very thin because we had no food most of the time," she says. "Oh, I was lovely." She laughs.

Like Lam says, you can learn a lot from these people.

FIVE.

SUMMER 2009.

Emmy gets a phone call from her landlord Tuesday morning, saying that they've found a renter for her apartment. If we can clean out the apartment that day, we won't have to pay rent for July. Hallelujah, I think. She won't be returning, since she's transferred to another university about forty miles away.

I borrow a truck from a guy I know and offer him Emmy's vehicle while we're gone. Then we head up the highway for the two-hour drive to her apartment. When we walk in, my spirits drop. She's done nothing as far as packing and I had forgotten just how much stuff she has acc.u.mulated in the few months.

"There's no way we're gonna do this in one trip," I say. "No way."

"Yes, we will," Emmy says. Right-brainers like Emmy are better at spatial visualization than linear thinkers like me.

While she goes to the courthouse to try to keep herself off death row for the heinous crime of making an illegal left turn, I start packing. Emmy is supposed to bring a sheet of paper proving she had undergone some driver's education, but of course that piece of paper is in the glove compartment of her car, which is sitting in Shawn's driveway.

"Are they gonna send me to jail?" Emmy asks.

"Maybe," I answer. "But probably not. Just ask for a new court date."

I am halfway through Emmy's closet when the cell phone in my pocket begins to vibrate, causing me to jump.

"They gave me a new date," Emmy whines, "but it's when I'm going to be in New York."

"Why didn't you tell them that date wouldn't work?"

"Because that woman is mean and scary!"

"Oh, sweetheart, this is all the power that woman has. Just find someone to give you a new court date."

Thirty minutes later, I have most of the kitchen done. My phone vibrates again.

"Mom, they told me to get a lawyer!"

Jesus, this is going to be the most expensive left turn in history.

"Did you talk to the scary woman?"

"No."

"Go back and talk to the scary woman, babe."

An hour later Emmy is back with a new court date, and I'm trying to figure out how to open the back of Shawn's truck.

"That woman looked at me like I was a child murderer," Emmy says.

It takes Emmy's genius to get that truck filled to the brim, but we manage to do it. All the while, her piano-playing nextdoor neighbor Julian smokes cigarettes on the porch and watches mournfully.

"Julian, help yourself to anything in the refrigerator," I tell him. He does. Then we sweep and mop and throw away bags and bags of stuff. Sweating, aching, and exhausted, we start the drive home. Emmy topples over and sleeps while I enjoy the tunes on Shawn's satellite radio, looking down on the little cars from my rumbling throne.

Shawn calls me about halfway through the trip home and says he needs the truck early the next morning. He tells me he'll help us unload it tonight.

"Great, Shawn. Thank you so much," I tell him, even though I've been planning to go to bed and unload tomorrow. "I'll pick you up in about an hour."

"Noooo," Emmy moans.

We pull into my driveway about eleven thirty, and the three of us unload that truck into the garage in about twenty minutes flat. The back of the truck is empty except for a few containers of transmission fluid, some movers' blankets and a couple of car parts catalogs.

I stare at that great empty s.p.a.ce that just a few minutes earlier housed a love seat, daybed, two bookcases, five or so suitcases, two boxes of kitchen items, a record player, two big bags of nonperishables, comforters, sheets, towels, everything except the garbage can and the shower curtain. We left those things behind. I think of the empty truck as a metaphor for my life, which was so recently overflowing and now is not. Now more than ever, I understand my mother's deep well of loneliness. It's my loneliness, too. I'm all she has, really. And in a sense, she is all I have, too.

An idea has been tunneling through my head. As Emmy and I prepare for our annual trip to Florida, the idea begins scratching at the door.

Thursday morning we do our last-minute errands. Emmy makes CD mixes for the car ride. This is crucial. Our road trip music must be perfectly calibrated in order for the trip to be a success. I'm trying to complete a few loose ends on a freelance project. Also I decide to dye my hair at the last minute, pay some bills, and write down instructions for the neighborhood girls about taking care of the cat, who now requires fish oil and some kind of paste for cat viruses added to her food to stop the d.a.m.n sneezing. The fish oil seems to be the magic ingredient.

After this we have to return a movie, go to the bank, get gas, and stop by the Sanctuary to pay Mother's rent and hairdresser bill. And I have to rea.s.sure her that I'm not going to be gone forever. The night before we stopped by to see her. We were on our way to see the touring version of Phantom of the Opera because one of Emmy's friends was a dancer in the show. And I was feeling a little guilty because I hadn't been a frequent visitor this week.

So that night when we went to see Mom she was still eating dinner. Her hearing had gone almost completely from her left ear. She took a few bites of her dessert and then we paraded into the lobby. She seemed more distressed than usual, probably because we were going away for a few days. When we explained we had moved Emmy out of her apartment the day before, she wanted to know where we would be staying tonight.

"Um, at my house," I said.

On Thursday when we come by, she is much more lucid.

"You're going to Jacksonville?" she says. "I really would like to hear the organ again." She means the organ at Good Shepherd. Her organ. Though not hers anymore. The idea grows a little bigger.

Finally we are on the road, heading south, where the air will be thick and soft, the trees juicy, the sun harsh, and the sleeping arrangements questionable.