Habit (19 page)

A woman in an SUV comes down the driveway, waves at the lawn crew and heads off to the main road.

—Darn, we could have asked her. Let's go up.

—Susie, this is trespassing!

—Ma, we're having an adventure. We've come all this way, why don't we drive up there and see? Just act like you know what you're doing.

So up we go past the gardeners, who don't look like they're going to report us. At the top of the hill, we round a corner.

—Oh my, says Ma.

—Is this it?

—Yes, this is it!

I've had a huge estate house in my mind, with tennis courts and outbuildings, a ballroom, but Kyneton is actually sort of normal looking. It clearly has a lot of bedrooms, but it's not really anything to jump up and down about. Still it's fun—somewhere below here among the newer houses was the tennis court and the actual touch football field. This is where Auntie Gaga lived and died, drove one of the first Model Ts, and much much later, age eighty-two, woke herself up at four in the morning to see the first Soviet
Sputnik
overhead.

—That oak tree has always been there.
Always,
says Ma.

I remember a grand old oak mentioned in
Muzzy
. Auntie Gaga and her husband, George, bought their twenty-five acres of land around the time they married in 1902. The only tree on the hill where they built the house was a single massive oak. It was supposedly still standing when
Muzzy
was written in 1966, so this must be the one. The gardeners are working their way up the driveway, too, but I get Ma out because who knows when we'll ever come back here? I give her my arm, and we teeter across the driveway to take a picture by the ancient tree.

It's gnarled and lumpy and a lot of its older branches have had to be lopped off. It must be really ancient now, but it's here.

Ma leans on me as we go up over the grass to stand at its base. I have to back myself up to get as much of the huge tree in the frame as I can. Ma looks so small, but she's standing on her own, and behind her the trunk of the old oak spirals majestically up, up, up, with sunlight coming through the leaves near the top.

The remaining good branches are sturdy and long. If you look at the picture closely, you might be able to see Auntie Gaga up there on one of the limbs—she still climbed trees in her seventies. And maybe you'll see beautiful Gaga, and Cousin Buckety, Granny with her poodles arranged along a branch beside her, and the countess, and Aunt Tiny who wasn't really tiny. This tree is so old, maybe even older than truly tiny Little Granny with her Quaker bonnets, and older than all the other grannies we know about, and Grandsir and Bobs, and Grandma Drayton in her summer whites. But still, the old oak is here.

And so am I. And so is Ma.

Ma, Villanova, 2007

P
APERWORK MAKES ME GRUMPY
, and it's worse than ever this year. Bills all over the place. Elaborate forms to fill out for Ma's Long-Term Care claims. Phone calls to places like Eliza's new college, trying to make sense of their supposedly efficient, indecipherable online paperless tuition payment system. They won't let Eliza look at her grades till I sort it all out, and it's a labyrinth of passwords and login numbers and user IDs with unexplained charges popping out of nowhere.

Ring. Ring.

—Hello?

—Susie, did you hear about the Baumards' rapprochement?

—Yes. . . .

—Isn't it amazing? It's just astounding. . . .

(
I can sense it coming, here it comes I just know it's religious and I'm going to get cranky. I should get off the phone quick before I say something mean
—)

—Don't
you
think it's astonishing, Susie? Their father wants to see them after all these years!

Ma's deceased sister, Bobs, married a Frenchman named Baumard, and they had a lot of children, my cousins, who are now scattered all over Europe. Following the divorce many years ago, the children's relations with their father have been strained. Ma feels very maternal about Bobs's children.

—Well, I don't really know them as well as you so . . .

—It's the Holy Spirit! The Bishop
said
this kind of thing might start happening in the family when I became a nun and—

(
Too late.
)

—So, Ma. You think this reconciliation between the French cousins and their father is our family's first legitimate miracle? What about
your
rapprochement with Daddy thirty years ago when you two were separated and he joined AA and started going to church with you at Saint Mark's? An Episcopalian miracle!

—What does that have to do with anything?

—You're saying anything good that happens in our family from now on will be because you became an Orthodox nun. All those other good things that happened before were hoaxes because they were the wrong religions.

—But it
is
the Holy Spirit. I'm going to light a candle for the Baumards when I get to Carlisle.

—You do that. Look, I'm being a pill. I should go; it's the bills; they're making me nuts. Sorry.

Mother Brigid is going on a trip. She's making her first official church appearance to celebrate Orthodox Christmas at her home church in Carlisle tomorrow. It's a very big deal. She has been spending much of her time this month figuring out how to assemble the nun habit.

Her friend down the hall, Bess, is good with computers and things, so Ma finally enlisted her when she couldn't make sense of the elaborate handwritten diagrams sent from one of the convents. There are all these pieces of black cloth you have to wrap around yourself and layer over one another and tie together in hard-to-reach places. It takes forever and is exhausting. At the end of their first try, Bess needed a glass of wine and Ma looked like she had joined the Taliban. I have a grim record of the result of their ordeal: a snapshot of Ma, haggard, glaring out from under masses and masses of black fabric, like an exceedingly irritated, swaddled old bird. I've posted it on our bulletin board, next to a reproduction of Picasso's
Jester on Horseback
and my favorite George W. Bushism:

I know how hard it is to put food on your family.

But she's really in the groove—cancer-free as far as anyone can tell, and her Wizard surgeon is very pleased. In fact, Ma's had a pretty smooth recuperation in her apartment throughout most of the autumn, attended by cheerful home health aides thanks to the Long-Term Care policy. She's now ready to risk ruining everything by going on a Christmas adventure.

The siblings were full of helpful advice for how to handle this:

Colette: That's not safe; it's a terrible idea. Tell her she can't afford it.

Felix: Tie her up and lock her in a closet.

Home care had taken some figuring out at first. When the acute care rehab clinic released Ma about a month after surgery, their social worker (a rather limp, portly man named Fred who seemed to have pressing business elsewhere) told us she needed twenty-four-hour supervision for the first few weeks.

Me: Who pays for that?

Fred: Well, the family usually provides it.

Me: I can't provide it. I have kids and my husband's away and there's nobody else in the family who can do it.

Fred (offering me a printout): Here is a list of home health care agencies. . . .

Me: Long-Term Care Insurance only pays for about eleven hours a day of that. Who pays for the other thirteen hours a day?

Fred seemed at a loss. He gave me a number to call for city services to the elderly: our tax dollars at work. This was really just an experiment. I knew we could finance aides on twenty-four-hour care for a short time, but I was curious about the not-so-distant-future when needs like this might be more permanent, so I decided to get the ball rolling and see where it went.

First we got a visit from another social worker: Vicky, a short, roundish bustling Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle sort of person who started with some questions about general fitness. I like to be there to translate for these interviews because Ma pretty much speaks a language unknown to the average person.

Vicky: Do you use a commode at night?

Ma: Yes.

Me: No, you don't; you go into the bathroom with the walker.

Ma: Yes, I use the walker, but then the commode.

Me: Not exactly. She goes into the bathroom.

Ma: Yes, I go into the bathroom and then I use the commode.

Me: Ma. A commode is a portable toilet by the bed.

Ma: I know that.

Vicky: So you go into the bathroom and then you go back out and use the commode?

Me: Oh, I know what you mean, Ma. The toilet is down too low, so we took the commode apart and put the seat bit on the—

Ma: Yes. The commode is on the po-po.

Next was the mini-mental. This is basically an oral memory test, very quick and easy to pass for someone as together as Ma, but somewhat nerve-wracking due to strong convictions and her need to share them when opportunities arise.

Vicky: What country are we in?

Ma (pityingly): The United States.

Vicky: Who is our president?

Ma (smiling smugly at me): Well, we're very lucky it isn't Hillary.

Me: Ma, just answer the questions.

Ma: It's George W. Bush, thank God.

Vicky: What holiday is coming up next week?

Ma: Halloween, but that's not a real Christian holiday. It's a made-up excuse to sell candy and confuse the children.

Vicky put in a request for home aides and told us not to expect the HMO to agree to more than two hours a week of help. This seemed pretty useless, but you never know. A week later, Ma called me:

—Susie, who was that person?

—What person?

—She was crazy. She didn't introduce herself when she called, she just said, “Would you like me to come over and give you a bath?” I said, “No, I wouldn't. I don't even know you.”

—What was her name?

—I never found out. An hour later, she called again and asked for directions. I thought you must have sent her so I told her where I was. But all morning, she kept calling over and over, lost. She'd say things like “I'm at Talbot's. How far are you from Talbot's?” and I'd say, “Who ARE you?”

—Who on earth was she, Ma?

—Susie, you don't know, either? Finally, she called from the street outside and said, “Where should I park?” Then she called from the fifth floor and said, “Where are you, I can't find you,” and I said, “I'm right here on the tenth floor, where are you?” Then, Susie, when she finally got here she was DETERMINED to give me a bath.

—This is really crazy. Maybe it was
—

—Yes, it was crazy. I didn't want a bath at all. I'd already had one, but she wouldn't listen.

—Well, I didn't schedule anyone other than the usual people you've already got, so it must have been from Vicky—

—Who's Vicky?

—You know, Ma; the one who came to talk about George Bush and Hillary and the po-po.

—Oh yes.

—So what did you do?

—Well, I told her I wasn't interested. Then she took out an apron and started filling the bath, and I told her to GO AWAY.

And this is our tax dollars at work.

So we're using Michael's ladies, paid by Long-Term Care Insurance, and as predicted, Ma is slowly becoming more self-sufficient. Now the walker's in my basement, and she is down to a few hours of help in the mornings and evenings. We have her two favorite aides on a schedule, and things are pretty smooth.

We also managed to get Ma over to our house for Christmas, which was
not a real holiday, just another made-up excuse to sell things and confuse children.
The Orthodox Nativity of Christ is on January 7, and the main thing to do is church, for like six hours or something. Ma is psyched. The rest of us are braced.

Ma's church, Saint Mark of Ephesus in Carlisle, is a two-hour drive along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the farmlands. Nothing was going to stop her—she found a cheap but well-referenced driver to take her there, recommended by her friend Babbie. The idea was that he would drop her at the church and leave right away. Ma's friends there had a place for her to stay, and someone to drive her home the next day.

The night before the trip, I stop in to say good-bye and drop off a paycheck for the aide who'll be coming early next morning to get Ma ready. The lights in Ma's apartment are dim and the candles lit. She's in the bedroom, all settled under the covers with a cozy pink cashmere shawl around her shoulders. When I lean down to kiss her good-bye, I'm more aware than usual of this role reversal we live with: I've been the mother of my mother ever since that turning point in Ireland with the gardener. In therapy, I've identified this seemingly unavoidable habit of mine as something I should watch closely. I have to remember to protect myself because of the intense frustration it causes. Tonight Ma seems so happy, like my children when they were small, wriggling with anticipation and delight, Santa's cookies and milk set out at the foot of the bed. I'm surprised by a flood of real maternal passion, an urge to capture this precious moment and take a picture. Like Ma's real mother could have felt, but most likely did not.