Mother Daughter Me (27 page)

After my mother returns, the conversation turns to Smokey, then, not surprisingly, to her own dogs, including Tavi, the aggressive one she put down. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she says.

This, of course, would ordinarily make me go berserk. She has just told me that she found the death of a dog more tragic than the custodial surrender of her children. But today I’m indifferent. And with this comes a glimmer of understanding: I can pick and choose what I absorb and what I deflect. This is how the color spectrum works: Some colors absorb light, while others deflect it, depending on where they are on the spectrum. Earlier in my life, when it came to hurtful words from my
mother, I was more like an off-shade of brown, absorbing most of them. Now, with experience, wisdom, and a little more self-confidence, my spectrum is shifting. I’m making a choice to be less absorptive. And her comment about the dog she put down is one for which I choose to become pure white.

———

W
HILE ZOË IS OFF ON A SCHOOL SKI TRIP OVER PRESIDENTS
’
DAY
weekend, I spend two nights at Bob’s little bachelor apartment. His father’s surprise party is less than a month away, and I’ve told him I’ll be happy to accompany him. Over breakfast the first morning he asks me if I’d like to bring Zoë along. I say that it’s very nice of him to think of it and that she’d probably love to come.

On his small dining table I notice a single plastic place mat. I point it out to him. “That’s me in two years after Zoë leaves for college.” As I’m saying these words, I find I’m not afraid of a solitary place mat. Bob’s response takes me aback. Ever so gingerly, he says, “Well, you never know what might happen to us. If we’re a Thing, we might put our single place mats together.”

Of course, he knows we’re already a Thing, that taking both Zoë and me to Florida for a family event implies big-time Thing status. Now he means a bigger Thing. “Nice,” I say, sticking with the image, not quite
ready to deal with its implications. “Two pathetic single-place-mat people coming together.”

Later that day, I’m back home and in the dining room, where I’m working on a large editing project, papers spread across the long table. My mother comes in and I tell her about Bob’s comment about uniting our single place mats. Then I catch myself. I no longer want to say anything about Bob that might invite a judgmental comment, and I wish I hadn’t. Yet habits born of excess psychological baggage die slow, complicated deaths. We can’t just tell ourselves we’ve killed them off one day and start fresh the next. Luckily, as I’m trying to figure out a nimble way to take the conversation in another direction, she does it for me, by turning it to herself.

“I’ve definitely reached the single-place-mat stage of life,” she says. She tells me she had a dream that she was living in a tiny apartment in an independent-living facility like the ones we visited. Nothing happened. It was a still life of a dream, yet it felt like a nightmare.

“I just wanted to get out,” she says.

“Maybe you’re having some anxiety because of our day with Anne,” I suggest. “Or maybe it’s your knee. It’s really limiting your mobility.”

She ponders this. “Maybe, yes, looking at those places was pretty depressing. And you’re right. I’m not exactly swift on my feet.”

Geriatricians often say that one mistake doctors tend to make when caring for the elderly is to blame everything on age. They’ll say, “What do you expect? You’re seventy-eight; do you expect to feel marvelous all the time?” A favorite joke among more-enlightened geriatricians is about the ninety-year-old man who went to the doctor complaining of knee pain. When his physician handed him the standard line, “What do you expect, you’re ninety years old,” the man replied, “Oh, yeah? My other knee is ninety years old, too, and it feels fine.”

But here and now, in my mother’s mind, her knee problems cannot be untangled from the steady creep toward advanced old age. I don’t say this to her, but the tiny apartment in that dream may represent many of her fears about the growing limitations of her body, which, in spite of two knee surgeries—to say nothing of years of abuse from cigarettes and alcohol—has held up remarkably well. I sense that she’s worried her luck is running out.

—–

MY MOTHER HAS BEEN
apartment hunting with a vengeance. Her criteria for the perfect dwelling: two bedrooms, one and a half baths, decent heating, in a building that’s piano-friendly, and in a neighborhood that’s not too hilly, with good bus access. She has her mind set on a place with two bathrooms, or at least two toilets—in case one clogs. She is in touch with a few different rental agents, and my seventy-eight-year-old computer maven of a mom is on Craigslist constantly. But she’s growing unhappy with the online listings, where the same crummy places keep coming up.

I suggest we drive around her preferred neighborhood looking for F
OR
R
ENT
signs. We find one almost immediately; my mother calls the number and the manager tells us it’s a two-bedroom apartment in an elevator building. With two bathrooms! The ten-story Gothic Revival-style building, constructed in the 1920s, is a beauty, in what seems to me a perfect setting. Within a couple of hours, we’re meeting the building’s manager. Not only is the apartment large and sunny, with freshly refinished hardwood floors and a bay window, but it’s a corner unit on the fifth floor, with a view up and down Pacific Avenue, which is lined with handsome old buildings. Best of all, the rent is reasonable. She decides to take it on the spot.

On the way home, she turns philosophical. “Katie, I think we conducted a noble experiment. I couldn’t have done this move to San Francisco without having this transition step. I don’t think I would ever have left San Diego. I needed the fantasy about our year in Provence in a beautiful house to get me out of my old life.”

Neither of us points out the obvious—that, stunning as the house is, what we ended up with was an expensive walk-in freezer that was nearly impossible to keep warm, a space for her so dark it was like a dungeon and down a set of stairs so steep that trying to climb them did her other knee in. Not to mention the essential problem, which was that it was a house filled with the tension of three generations who never should have tried to live together.

But now she’s a happy woman. As we’re driving along the crest of a hill overlooking the bay, she tells me once again how much she loves San Francisco and how she can’t believe her good fortune in having landed
in such a wonderful city. She also tells me about a friendship that’s blossoming, with a woman who is a New York transplant. I sense that the two women are growing close, and I couldn’t be more pleased. “Maybe I’ll be the Grandma Moses of life. I’ll really start to get it when I’m eighty,” she says. Since my mother’s abrupt departure from San Diego, she has become her own version of intrepid. She’s now parallel parking all the time, sometimes just for fun, and she’s a public-transit champion. In less than a year, she’s gone from frightened shut-in to urban thrill-seeker. What’s next? Will she be leading tours of Alcatraz?

Geriatricians speak of a life-space “diary,” which defines the geographic distance an elderly person will travel. Early on, retirees go on adventures, taking cruises and traveling to places they haven’t seen. The world is their oyster. Later, travel is domestic—first the country, then the region. Eventually, trips out of the city become rare, and sequentially the neighborhood, house, bedroom, and bed become their life space. My mother, a born anomaly, appears to be doing this in reverse order.

Her vitality is certainly inspiring. Once she was away from Norm, my mother was ready to have her life back. Apparently this often happens after a woman is widowed, especially for a woman my mother’s age, a relative spring chicken. “You’ve done something pretty incredible, making a new life for yourself,” I tell her. And I mean it. I’m genuinely impressed with what she has done and wonder if I would be capable of starting over at her age.

Once we get home, she crunches a few numbers, incorporating the amount she’ll be paying for rent in the new apartment. She figures that at the rate she’s spending her money, she’ll have just enough to get her to eighty-eight. “I’m spending it down,” she says. She seems to think not only that eighty-eight is far into the future but that she might not make it that far. I, on the other hand, am thinking, if this is the Grandma Moses of life, she’s only getting started, and in ten years she’ll have burned through all her savings, every last cent. Then what?

A WEEK LATER, MY
mother finds me downstairs in the laundry room, and within seconds she’s hovering. “That’s probably dry already,” she says, pointing to a shirt I’ve left out to line-dry.

She’s doing her swaying. Is she regretting her intrusiveness? Having second thoughts about the move? No, as I’m about to discover, she’s thinking how to break her big news to me. Then she comes out with it.

“The mover inspected the new place and decided the Steinway would be too difficult to carry up five flights of stairs,” she says. “So I’ve decided to sell it.”

She sees the surprise on my face. “Katie, you don’t want that piano,” she says, having decided for me what it is I want. Then she launches into a list of grievances against the instrument. It’s too big. It’s too loud. Even the tuner recently referred to it as “a beast.”

“But I
like
that piano.”

I know I haven’t been playing and that on the rare occasions when I do play I don’t play at all well, but that’s not the point. I want the piano because it is her piano and because I am her child and thus, I presume, one of her heirs. I want the piano so that it can someday go to Zoë, who has genuine musical talent.

“I’m selling it,” she says, obviously having made up her mind. It’s the value of the piano—some $40,000—that she’s focused on. From a financial perspective it makes perfect sense for her to liquidate the asset and put the proceeds toward her final years. But because the Steinway is the one valuable tangible object that I asked her for and that she promised to leave to me, I’ve grown invested in having her fulfill this singular request. A codicil to a will is an unambiguous promise. And I want the piano because this is a promise my mother can still make good on.

She has nothing more to say, and at this awkward and painful moment, neither do I. I take my shirt off the line, fold it over my arm, and go upstairs. The issue might be resolved in my mother’s mind but not in mine. For the next few weeks, it follows me around. I’ll be in the middle of doing something, and the conflict over the piano will bubble into my consciousness and enter its recursive loop. To my mother, the piano is merely a thing. But to me, it has ceased being a musical instrument and become something far more—a pure distillate, a centrifuged pellet comprising all our struggles.

———

A
S VIVID AS THE MEMORIES OF MY MOTHER’S NEGLIGENCE ARE, I CAN
also recall with some clarity times during my childhood when she was sober and she did take care of me. So completely was she mine during a flu that I occasionally feigned illness, wrapping my hand around the glass thermometer in hopes of making the mercury rise and eliciting more of the tender devotion I longed for. When I broke my leg, part of me was happy, because my mother spent hours near my bed and bought me comic books by the dozen. This is the kind of mother she always had the capacity to be but rarely was.

Now my stomach is roiling. It could be that I ate too much Mongolian beef at the neighborhood Chinese place where Zoë and I went for dinner earlier tonight. As I lie in bed reading, I feel the first shudder of nausea. I shrug it off but notice I’ve just read the same sentence five or six times and I’m still not sure what it said. Within a few minutes, the
internal convulsions are impossible to ignore and I dash for the bathroom.

My retching is so violent that Zoë hears it from behind her closed door down the hall. “Mommy, are you all right?” I look up to see her standing in the open doorway of the bathroom.

She surveys the scene. I’m lying on the cool tile, trembling from the sheer force of the purge.

She looks worried. “Do you need to go to the hospital?” I pull myself together enough to say, “I must just have a stomach flu.”

Zoë is visibly relieved to hear that I’m in no immediate danger of dying, her first thought whenever I complain about something as minor as a headache. Then her concern turns to disappointment. Moms aren’t supposed to get sick. At all times, they should be up and doing for their children. Even sleeping late signals a shirking of one’s duty, which is why kids like to get up in the morning and find their parents already up and cooking pancakes, ever at their service. I sense all of these emotions churning in Zoë as she looks at me.