One True Thing (10 page)

“Let Ellen sleep,” my mother said querulously, as though she had been repeating it all night long.

I brought a heating pad down from my room and together my father and I pulled my mother upright, one on each arm. With the
quilt rolled back and her nightgown slipping off her shoulders and twisted up around her thighs I could see how much she had hidden from me until now. The skin on her upper arms hung down in wrinkled sacs; her collarbone stood out like the beams that hold the house up. Her legs were narrow stalks, bruised. I was reminded of a girl in our house at Harvard whose diet consisted only of bananas and Evian and who left at midsemester, still insisting as her size three leather skirt slipped down her bony hips that what she really needed was to run another mile each morning.

Six weeks we’d lived so close together and yet she had insulated me from much of the disintegration she saw whenever she removed her nightgown each morning. Insulated me when she kept me out of Dr. Cohn’s office, when she talked to me in gentle code of works of fiction and past lives, when she shut the door of the bedroom and bathroom and mustered her gay smile on our excursions. “Let Ellen sleep,” she had insisted, and I knew why. She was not yet ready to let her child be the grown-up in the house. She had had one great calling, as a mother, and she would not be forced from the field.

When we laid her back down on the heating pad, my father and I, she was breathing as though she’d run up the stairs herself.

“You have a nine o’clock,” she said to him, without opening her eyes.

As I was calling the doctor I heard the door open and close, and knew that he was gone. I wondered what he thought when he looked at the wreck of her body, whether he was sad or repulsed. I wondered what she thought as she watched him look. I wondered what life was like on the night shift, whether she was able to say and feel the things in the dark of their bedroom that she kept from me in the light of day, whether he was a better man than I now thought him.

I called Dr. Cohn at the hospital. “I know you guys don’t make house calls anymore,” I said, and before I could go further she said, businesslike, “I’ll be there in half an hour.” And in half an hour the blue Volvo with its MD plates and baby seat in the back was in the driveway, and I made a pot of coffee.

“Oh, Doctor, I’ve done something to my back, a disc or something,” my mother said plaintively. “The pain is awful.”

I watched Dr. Cohn fill a syringe, feel softly around the lump in my mother’s upper chest, then inject something into the catheter lodged beneath the skin. Almost immediately my mother relaxed, and her lids began to droop.

“Better,” she said, lying back with her arms at her sides.

The doctor rolled her over and lifted the blue flannel nightgown with its pattern of tiny flowers. I held my hand to my mouth and turned away, my head against the cool white jamb of the door.

“Ellen?” my mother said faintly, half asleep, and I tried to reply but my throat had closed around the knot of my fear and grief and no matter how I worked I could not make it open and let my words out. Although what I could possibly say, except “Mama,” like a baby, a good child, I did not know.

“She went downstairs to fix me another cup of coffee, Kate,” said Dr. Cohn.

“Oh, wonderful,” my mother replied, and in a minute I heard her breathing slow and deepen. The doctor had pulled down her gown, rearranged the quilt, and was taking her pulse.

Downstairs we sat together at the table, that old oak table, with its golden surface. Dr. Cohn drank her coffee without speaking. After it was finished, she took a pad out of her bag and began to write. She had nice even script, and when I said so she laughed dryly. “People have been thrown out of med school for less.”

She handed me the prescription. “She didn’t throw her back out,” she said.

“I’m not stupid, Doctor.”

“I know that, but as you may have realized by now, intelligence is not what’s needed here. Empathy is. Your mother seems to be in a great deal of pain. It’s hard to tell how much because, as you well know, she is an uncomplaining patient. Perhaps to a fault. Her cancer is progressing far more quickly than I think any of us would have suspected. I wouldn’t be telling you that if I hadn’t
already told her during our last visit. One of the most important things at this point will be the management of her pain. I’ve given you morphine pills. Depending on how she does, we may go to a pump that will dispense morphine directly through her catheter. Have you and your father discussed hospice care?”

“Doctor, I can’t predict the future, but I can tell you this. No hospice, no hospital. I had a good job in the city and a nice apartment and friends and places to go and people to see and I junked it to take care of my mother. And I am going to take care of my mother. I will do what is required.”

She began to write on her pad again. “Are you seeing someone?” she asked as she wrote.

“A shrink?”

“Actually, we in the trade prefer to call them psychiatrists. But yes. I think you need someone to talk to.”

“I talk to my mother.”

“You need someone to talk to
about
your mother. And about how your mother is making you feel about yourself. And your mother could use someone to talk to about how it feels to be dying.”

“My mother is fine. My mother can talk to me.”

“Can she? Has she said she’s terrified to go to sleep because she’s afraid she’ll never wake up? Has she told you she imagines sometimes how the rest of you will go on with your lives and forget her? Has she told you that she wants to have sex with her husband but she’s afraid he doesn’t want her? Look at the stenciling around the ceiling of this room, at the quilt on her bed. Look at the trees outside this house and the wreath on your front door, which I assume she made. Has she told you how it feels to lose it all?”

Doctor Cohn pulled the second sheet from her prescription pad. Side by side they lay on the oak table. “Morphine sulfate,” said one. “Jessica Feld,” said the other, with a phone number under it.

“You need to talk to someone, Ellen,” she said, standing up.
“You need to talk to someone and you need to give her the pills every eight hours to help her get through this next part. Don’t let her chew them and don’t crush them. I’ll send over a wheelchair. She may experience difficulty walking soon. I’d like to see her tomorrow if she’s up to it. I’ll let myself out.”

Before she’d even pulled out of the drive I took the two prescriptions upstairs and stuck one under the edge of my desk blotter, beneath the note from Mrs. Forburg I hadn’t answered yet. When I went to the pharmacy with the other, Mr. Sellinger filled it without pleasantries, except to say as I left, “Give our love to your mother.” And I did, and the pills. For a while, they helped.

M
y brothers came home the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Brian burst into tears when he saw her. But she only pulled him down next to her. He knelt by her chair and put his head on her chest, next to her heart. “No, no, Baba,” she said as she had so many years ago.

Jeff stood looking down at them, a crooked smile on his freckled face. “Ma, you look like hell,” he said.

“It’s Ellen’s fault,” she replied.

“Nah, it’s not. You haven’t been eating your vegetables. You’ve been out dancing all night long. There’s an empty six-pack behind the shoe rack in your closet. I know your kind.”

“Oh, Lord, Jeffie,” she said, and he ruffled her hair.

But I think our mother’s appearance was not as big a surprise for either of them as mine was for Jonathan, when he arrived at the house unexpectedly on Wednesday. I heard steps behind me and there he was, handsome in a blue sweater and gray flannel pants, his eyes hidden by his mirror sunglasses. It was when he took them off that I saw the surprise in them, saw him look me
up and down in a way that, under different circumstances, would have been flattering. I was wearing a red-and-white checked apron that said
KISS THE COOK
on its bib, and I had pushed my hair up into a haphazard bun on the top of my head. I was making biscuits, and my hands and the front of my apron were covered with flour. I hugged Jon and kissed him hard, and when I finally pulled away I had left him blotched with white, his sweater, his pants, even the part of his hair that hung heavy like a butterscotch parenthesis over his forehead.

“Oh, hell,” he said, looking down at himself.

“Love you, too,” I said, and playfully—or spitefully, I’m not certain which—I put a floury thumbprint in the center of his chest.

“Ellen!” he yelled. After I’d washed my hands and taken off the apron he wrapped his arms around me and kissed me for a long time in the quiet house. “You smell like butter,” he said, but he didn’t sound that happy about it.

Both of us pulled apart as we heard slow footsteps on the stairs. My mother came into the kitchen. “Jonathan,” she said brightly, and he bent to kiss her cheek, pale yellow skin stretched over sharp bone. I left them talking about law school. But after I had taken a shower, when the two of us were out in the car, he leaned back against the seat and let his breath out, long and hard:
Whhhhooooo
.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“As little as possible.”

“I see what you mean,” he said.

He didn’t, of course, because instead of putting off feeling, Jonathan never really felt things at all. I liked to think he loved me in those days, but loving a woman was not truly part of his constitution. No Jessica Feld, no “what we in the trade call psychiatrist,” was necessary to explain this to the laywoman. Jonathan’s mother had left when he was just two and she just twenty, had decided her spur-of-the-moment teenage marriage was a mistake and left behind its most tangible asset, the little boy who, once grown,
would never be able to say “I love you” without believing that the sentence was a prelude to a farewell, an abandonment, a kick in the teeth.

She lived in California now, had another family, a house with a pool. Once, when he was twelve, he had managed to get his mother’s phone number out of his grandmother and had called her and heard a little boy answer the phone. “How could somebody just leave their kid?” he told me he asked her when she came on the line, and she replied, still with a broad streak of Brooklyn in her voice, “I just did.”

“You could almost hear the shrug,” Jonathan said.

Not long ago I saw Jonathan on Madison Avenue with a really lovely-looking woman, with blond feathers of hair around her face and sharp intelligent eyes. I knew that she was smart and interesting, someone you could take anywhere. Jonathan appreciated her, I’m sure, just as he appreciated me, appreciated my quick mind, the determination and ambition, the ardor and the lack of inhibitions. But love? I don’t think so.

His father had been a police officer in New York City, taken retirement after the requisite twenty years and what the cops called a tit job as chief of security at Langhorne College. He and his son moved into an ugly modern house just outside town which was, Jon once said, four times the size of the Brooklyn apartment they’d shared with his grandparents.

He had stared openly at me in English class, and afterward I heard him ask Jackie Belknap who I was. “Gulden?” said Jackie. “Study, study, study, bitch, bitch, bitch.”

“Just what the doctor ordered,” said Jonathan.

He was good-looking in an odd kind of way, with eyes a little too close together and dirty blond hair, a strong jaw and surprisingly full and feminine lips, very red. These last gave him a powerful aura of sexuality which was not in the least misleading. But we were a match as well, both of us quick and anxious, driven and oblivious to the effect we had on other people. Hungry puppies, as Jeff would have said. Jeff would have said that someday we
would wind up eating one another up. But I wouldn’t have listened.

Jonathan’s father had remarried when we were in college, to a secretary at Langhorne. That Thanksgiving, he and his wife—“call her my stepmother and die,” Jon said to me early on—were three hundred miles away at her daughter’s. We walked in the door of the house and began to remove our clothes before it was even closed.

In movies there is always something sexy about such a thing, about the sight of gray flannels, red turtleneck, flowered panties, gray socks, in a Hansel-and-Gretel trail leading to the bedroom. But as I was struggling with hooks and eyes as though it was the most important thing in the world that I be naked, there was something so driven and desperate about it that by the time I was on my back on the bed all pleasure had vanished. I almost said aloud, “All I really want to do is sleep.” But not to Jonathan. Not ever to Jonathan.

It had been a long week leading up to the holidays. Sometimes my mother would twist in the chair and I would know that something was gnawing at her belly and her lower back. Certain lines about her mouth, once only smile lines, began to deepen with her grimaces. Her hair was wispy, the thin and awry fuzz of an infant, and each morning she wrapped her head in a scarf and pulled a few strands from beneath it to soften the sharp bones that showed so clearly now in her face.

And the rages began. The worst was the day when I brought the wheelchair out. Once the pain came in earnest she was like that, turning from time to time into a person I had never seen before. She raged against several members of the Minnies who wanted to make her honorary chairman of the tree ceremony and spare her the work of decorating. She raged at the way Mrs. Duane had rubbed her back in the bookstore, “petting me as though I were a dog.” The outbursts seemed so different from her usual self that I sometimes felt as though the cancer itself had a voice, and I was hearing it. Or it was the voice of the morphine.

“I am not an invalid,” she cried when she came down from a nap and first saw the wheelchair folded in a corner. “First you dope me up and then you want to turn me into an invalid.” She sat down heavily on the living-room couch, holding a pillow to her belly like a shield, and raged at the wheelchair and at me. “Put it away right now, Ellen. Put it away or I will roll it down the street.” She picked up a Styrofoam ball and with shaking hands tried to push a gold sequin into it with a drawing pin. “It’s humiliating,” she said, and the sequin dropped to the floor.