Crazy Enough (29 page)

She was in the front entrance of the Elms when we pulled up. She sat in her little wheelchair smoking. As we walked up, the woman she was chatting with outside shouted, “Oh! Well, of course, you're Stormy, you look exactly like your mother!”

“Hi, Mom.” I leaned over and hugged her in her chair. She smelled exactly the same, lily of the valley and Kool Mild cigarettes.

There were no tears, no where have you beens, no obvious, needy heartbreak, or how could yous . . . no drama. It was nice.

She took us to the common area and the cafeteria, where we met several of Mom's new favorite people in the world. They were all geriatric, brain injured, or doddery in some way, but they were
all in love with her. Haggard old faces would light up, shiny gums, or impossibly perfect-looking dentures would gleam wide at her approach.

“These are my children!” she sang to whomever we encountered. There were only friendly hellos, and nicetameetchas. Not one single surly word nor judgmental look our way. It was
nice.

Then we went up to her room, opting to eat inside. She showed me her jewelry-making table and all her beads. She told me about selling some of her pieces on eBay and how excited she was about her new skill, her new friends, and life in general. She asked me about my life, where was I living, was I married, how old was I now, was I happy.

I nearly laughed at how odd these questions were for a mother to ask a daughter, but after six years, I suppose, things can change a lot. So I shared my stories about music and Portland and what my life was like and she shared hers.

It started to look like John was right, that she really was better. I decided to go back to see Mom, again, the very next day. By myself, even.

Now we'll see what the trap will be. It's been awhile, but I'm hip to this game. What'll the
gotcha
be?

I was at orange alert. With Mom, there would be a bait and switch almost as certainly as there would be a pack of cigarettes and an ice cube tray of pills. She would be warm, loving, and a mom, then within twenty-four hours, without fail, some terrible drama would bloom and it would either be my fault or my responsibility to fix it. Either way, I was ready for anything.

I bet it'll be some octogenarian friend of hers, ready to corner me like a lion tamer with a walker, clack their dentures at me for
being such an ungrateful daughter, breaking Mom's heart like that, staying away all those years, how could you do that to your poor mother?

I went back, tightly wired, middle fingers at the ready.

“Hello, darling!” she sang. We ended up back in her little room, chatting. Friends came by. Tea was made. More chatting about jewelry, what was my favorite color and would I like some earrings? We had lunch in the cafeteria. More people genuflected before my mother, praised her mightily as she smiled over her macaroni salad and said, “This is my daughter, Stormy!” Then the inevitable “You look just like your mother” comments and further praise on Mom's good works on behalf of the residents at The Elms. They did everything but lay fruit at her feet. It was sweet to see her so adored and accepted at last.

Afterward, as I drove back to my father's house, I noted with some shame that seeing her, being with her, was nice. No drama. Not even a whiff of histrionic, make believe,
everyone hates me'
s. It was casual, mature, and uneventful.

Sparkly beaded, mother-made earrings dangled on either side of my head as I shook it slowly. “That was actually nice,” I said to the inside of the car a few times. “Crazy.”

It was so nice that we stayed in touch. I gave her my number and address and we kept up a correspondence. We didn't talk on the phone much; we mostly wrote cards. Little notes back and forth. Updates and ideas, talk of friends, pets, life, and the weather, only occasionally did we refer to the past, and it was always to emphasize how much better the present was. I sent her a Christmas card that said, “I'm so thankful you are in my life again.”

She died the day before it arrived.

There was a yellow sticker on the returned Christmas card that read:

MOVED LEFT NO ADDRESS

UNABLE TO FORWARD

Gotcha.

I
hate moving. I'm pretty sure everyone does. They say it is second only to losing a loved one in terms of stress. We've all been suckered or guilted into helping some person move. In my opinion, it is one of the hugest favors to ask of someone. A favor that should be repaid in kind with meals, six-packs, and endless thanks for being such a good friend. Now, I like to think of myself as a good friend (I am also a sucker), so I have often found myself, my car, and my aching back, in the service of someone else's relocation. Some moves were executed under serious duress, too—a rancorous breakup, or a bad roommate situation—but regardless of circumstance, it's always a pain in the ass. However, with many hands and a plan, it gets done eventually, and after all is said and done, you're popping beers, getting thanked and fed while you watch your friend unpack.

Mom had already moved out, but we still had to deal with her stuff. Her apartment was small, more a large hospital room, with very few belongings of her own, but, for some reason, it seemed to take ages. We moved through the process as if we were bugs suspended in sap, struggling as it hardens into amber.

Maybe it took so long because we weren't really moving Mom anywhere. We were only dismantling the place she had lived for five years or so, deconstructing and relocating items. Taking a thing that existed as a whole and spreading its parts out among many others. Mom was setting up someplace else. She didn't need any of this stuff. She was in a duplex, or rather, two side-by-side Ziploc freezer bags.

We had to figure out where her stuff would go, who would take what, where to donate anything else, and how to do it all without completely falling apart.

Henry was late.

John and I stood around the little apartment and tried to make a plan. There wasn't a lot of stuff to move, but it was taking forever. Every time we picked up a box there was something in it that would stop us, and rip open a memory. Some crazy old familiar thing that made images snap in and out of focus in my mind, like remembering scenes from a movie I saw a million years ago. Did I ever
see
that movie or did I only watch the trailer,
hear
about the movie, and make up the rest? There was jewelry, figurines, a wind-up ceramic ballet dancer that twirled around to an unknown yet totally familiar tune. Did I play with it when I was little, spacing out at its little painted features, winding it over and over again? Was Mom there? Adding to the slow-motion effect was the heavy scent of Mom's perfume. It soaked everything in the place. If it were a cartoon you would see the wavy lines rising off everything depicting the stink of Muguet, a cheap, overly sweet lily-of-the-valley perfume that I'm convinced
destroyed her olfactory senses. I have vivid memories of choking in the car with her as she doused herself in the stuff before we went anywhere. It could have also been the menthol cigarettes she paved her respiratory system with that kept her from being able to smell how strongly she reeked like a urinal puck.

She had been dead and gone almost a week, but it was as intense as if she were only gone “ . . .
half a tick, back in a sec
.”

None of these memories were clear, but they were all rushing into my head in blurry twists of moments and feelings. There were pictures of us everywhere. Us with missing baby teeth, in corny school pictures in front of American flags, us holding dogs and cats now long dead and buried. Pictures of Mom with Dad or with the Banks. Everyone looked happy in the pictures. Were we happy? Where were we all when it was good, and was it good ever?

We dealt with the big stuff first. Her wheelchair and hospital bed were a no-brainer, they went back to the facility. The nurses and other admin personnel in the place came and took those, but they said no to her cool craft station. Her little bead-making table, with drawers and Tupperware cups filled with pounds of glittering beads of every color, her little pliers and spools of beading wire, they didn't want it? To me, this was the essence of my mom's newly found happiness. Well, that and maybe the metric ton of fancy antidepressants and other pharmaceutical fixer-uppers that filled her bedside table and cupboards. But she had really gotten into her creativity at last and found a useful expression of it. She had made so many pairs of earrings, bracelets, and necklaces that adorned the old ladies in her ward, I felt sure someone there would want to carry on the creativity in honor of her memory. I didn't want it, but couldn't imagine throwing it away. So, I snuck it down into the craft room just by the cafeteria.

Okay, it wasn't technically a craft room but it was a room with
chairs and a television and no authority types to say, “Um, what are you doing? You can't leave that there!”

“It's a craft room
now
. You're welcome,” I said to no one, as I headed back up the elevator to resume the move.

Mom's clothes would go to St. Vincent de Paul, but, for some reason, Mom's bedding could not be donated. I heard a nurse say it was a biohazard, but that sounded like bullshit to me, it was probably just superstition. More than likely considered bad juju to make your bed with sheets of someone recently deceased. I threw them into my rental car with the clothes and kitchen things bound for St. Vincent's.

All of Mom's pills got flushed. It seemed a terrible waste; some, specifically the name-brand antidepressants, were probably expensive and could have been used by someone in the facility. But again the folks in charge there said no. As I dumped and flushed, I imagined there must be some happy-ass junkie rats floating around on hospital turds, without a care in the world.

John and I cleaned, separated, and packed. Henry showed up at last and looked stricken, but in no time hup-twoed into captain mode and started directing the tasks. John and I would normally be irritated at our ex-cop brother assuming authority, especially since he was late, but we hadn't gotten anywhere. So we followed his lead. Henry liked order, and was good at it.

While we were packing, one by one, many of the elderly residents came by. Some hunched over walkers with tennis balls on the feet, wheelchairs, and electric scooters, some walked on their own, with difficulty, but Mom's door was the only place they would get to pay their respects, and they all came. The old-timers, who could talk, would say hello to us, then stare sadly in at where Mom used to be with her girly laugh and easy hug. They would sigh, lean their
brittle bones on the door frame, and talk to us about Mom. They all had sweet stories of friendship, how kind and helpful Mom was to them with this or that. All day, a nonstop parade of ancient bodies, determined to impress upon us how important and special she was, and how she was going to be so terribly missed.

We offered each one of them something of hers: jewelry, books, silly little ceramic creatures, and no one took a single thing. “Oh, she already gave me plenty!” I remember one saying. Many just swore their lives were made better just for having known her.

Mom's best friend was also named Suzi. Suzi2 lived across the street from us in the 1980s, and was a tough-as-nails broad who had been through the ringer a time or two. She had been served and had eaten many a turd sandwich life tossed her way. Not the least of which was her husband. A man I named “Twinkie.”

Twinkie had a strange habit of raging through their house when he was home alone. He would shout obscenities at the tops of his lungs and throw stuff around. And he would do this completely naked. Being right across the street, these events were in full earshot, and sometimes view, through the windows.

It was all very amusing until the day Suzi2 sat in our living room crying and shaking uncontrollably. Mom kept filling her glass with Harvey's Bristol Cream, trying to comfort her. I later heard that Twinkie had woken Suzi2 up from a dead sleep, but not because of his naked raging. She woke up to the metallic click of an unloaded gun. While she was sleeping, apparently, Twinkie stood over her, pointing a pistol into her hair over her left ear. She woke up when he pulled the trigger, but kept her eyes closed. He stayed standing over her for a minute or so, not saying a word.

That was what I heard anyway.

Suffice to say, when she and my Mom first became friends,
it didn't faze Suzi2 in the slightest when she came over for a girls' outing, and found Mom speaking solemnly into a mirror.

“Who you talking to, Suz'?”

“Oh . . . the judges,” Mom said simply. “I'm crazy and the judges live inside me. They tell me to do things sometimes.”

“Okay. Are they gonna let you go to Shopper's World with me today?”

Mom looked into the mirror then back at her, “Yup! Let's go, Lovey!”

Suzi2 had seen Mom two days before she died and had thought she didn't look right, but Mom told her that she was just really tired. They made plans for after Christmas.