The End of the World as We Know It (3 page)

When my mother began really to die because the varices had come back, I was in a recording session in New York, making some fool commercial, some jingle. My sister called and told me about the anemia and the blood and I hung up the phone and said to everybody, “My mother's dying,” and I got up and
went home and called my friend Rocco, who was a doctor in Nashville. I described her symptoms, and asked him what was going to happen.

“Your mother will weaken because they won't be able to stop the blood. She won't get the best care because doctors don't try very hard with alcoholics because they know they'll just do it again. She'll start to lose her mind and dementia will set in, so if you want to have a rational conversation with her, you better go fast. And she'll be dead in ten days.” I went down the next afternoon.

It was hot late August, almost Labor Day, and my mother was moved to a hospital in Roanoke, fifty miles away. Every morning I'd get up and drive my father to see her, and every afternoon I'd drive back and see her again about five o'clock. I don't remember what we talked about. They were giving her blood transfusions and she had come to look forward to them. “I hope they give me another one soon, because they make me feel so good.” She was dying in a dream. Sometimes my sister would go with me and sometimes not.

I somehow thought there would be a moment of clarity, that she would open her eyes and say to me that all that had happened with her and me and my father was not my fault. I longed with all my heart for her to say that thing, but she never did.

I tried to prepare my family for what was going to happen, but my sister couldn't accept it out of her deep affection, and my father wouldn't accept it because it wouldn't cut through the haze and because I guess he really did love her; they were obsessed with each other, in a way. “No, no,” he would say. “She'll have this little cancer episode and then she'll be home and we'll have another year.”

The doctors had discovered that her breast cancer had returned, but they weren't going to give her chemo because it wasn't cancer that was killing her, but my family all pretended that was what was going on. My aunt, my mother's sister, whose heart was filled with grace and affection beyond reason, couldn't bear the thought of her sister in pain, or dying, especially dying of alcoholism. I called my brother every day and told him to come from Atlanta immediately, but he kept putting it off another day. Scenes of pain, and hospitals, made him anxious.

My mother's mind began to go. She became vague and unfocused; sometimes she didn't know who we were. Still, I drove an hour each way every morning and every night. On the morning of the ninth day, I drove my father down and let them sit for awhile and talk by themselves. She seemed fairly alert. She seemed better. She had gained some weight. As I took him out of the room, I promised her I would come back that afternoon to see her.

I lay by my sister's pool, and then it was time for me to go. “Don't go,” she said. “You're so tired. It's a long way and you're tired.” But I got up and got in the car and went home and changed my clothes to go to the hospital. I could hardly see for exhaustion.

I drove two miles out of town and pulled the car over to the side of the road. It was on a wooded incline near Buffalo Creek and you could feel the first cool breeze of the afternoon. I put my head on the steering wheel and decided to turn around, to go tomorrow when I took my father. But I knew there were some promises you don't break, so I picked my head up and drove on.

When I got to the hospital it was clear she was dying. She
had this delusion that she was rehearsing a play in London with Bruce Willis and she was late for rehearsal. She leaned forward, and her nightgown opened, and I could see the hollow where her breast had been, and a series of small nodules, a constellation, across her chest.

She had lost her mind, and her breathing came in shallow gasps, and I knew she was dying. I sat with her and held her hand and told her I would miss her; then I went to find the nurse and told her to call the doctor right away because my mother's condition was so grave. I used the word
grave
. And then I went back and kissed her and told her I loved her and I left. I don't know why I left her to die alone, but I did.

Yes. I went home to tell my father that my mother was going to die that night, and call my sister and call my brother, who finally said he would fly up the next day. My father went up to bed, and I slept on a foldout sofa in the dining room with the telephone by me on a little table, so I could answer it on the first ring and not wake my father. I lay awake all night and the phone rang at seven in the morning, a nurse calling to say that my mother had died. I told my father when he came downstairs and he went back up to bed and rarely left it for the next three days.

She was sixty-six years old.

My brother arrived and my sister and I picked him up as we were on the way to collect my mother's few things, a shabby, cheap overnight case, some pictures of her grandchildren. Her room so empty, the sheets already made up crisp and white. My brother was angry he had missed seeing her, although we all knew he would never have come, he would never have seen her in pain, never have visited her in a hospital to watch her die.

That afternoon, I took everybody's clothes to the dry cleaners so we would all look spruce, like we were the Kennedys or something. At least my father would look presentable.

We had to sit and talk with all the people who came. My father wouldn't come downstairs. The flowers and the roses and the bouquets were amazing. Many people wept as they sat with us, mostly her women friends. There was a blue slipper chair in the sitting room where my mother had always sat, and nobody would sit there.

It was in that chair that my mother said the most extraordinary thing. Years before. We were sitting with a couple, some friends of my parents, a doctor and his wife, when suddenly the wife, who was a wit, asked this question: If you were a character in literature, who would you be? Not who would you want to be, but who is it in literature you most closely resemble?

The doctor's wife said she was Elizabeth Bennet. And she really was. I don't remember what the doctor said. I said I was Rawdon Crawley, a lie in every way. My father said with remarkable self-awareness that he was Mr. Micawber. And then my mother spoke. “I'm the Lady Brett Ashley,” she said.

“Why?” the doctor's wife asked.

“Because I believe in living the way she lived. You wreck your own life and then, very gently, you wreck the lives of those around you.” Nobody knew what to say. She was sitting in the blue chair when she said this, and I never looked at it without remembering what she said. Now people wiped away tears when they imagined her sitting there again, so witty and pretty and chic, the way she had been before it all, or not before it all, but before it all got out of hand.

Her funeral was straightforward, after some trauma about the old prayer book versus the new prayer book, and my aunt and I went and took communion at three in the afternoon, before the service, just the two of us. It was lovely and comforting, in a small kind of way. At the funeral, we sang “For all the saints who from their labors rest” and “Come, labor on.” Ora Labora. I still cry when I hear it. I hope they sing the same hymns at my funeral, and the Allegri Miserere.

People loved my mother very much. They surrounded her with affection and regard and it was never enough. People were so gentle with her, and waited for her bons mots. And she was kind and thoughtful and wrote a beautiful thank-you note.

In private, she was both vicious and adoring. She told me that, when I was born, I was such a beautiful baby that she wouldn't pick me up for a year. I'm not sure into which category that falls.

And I rubbed Icy Hot on her open wound.

The night after her funeral, my mother unburied, after everybody had left, we went over to my sister's for a swim and I got so drunk I had to be driven home and I fell down on the sidewalk. The next day my aunt, who wasn't there, said to me sadly, “Don't ever do that again.”

But that night, after I went to bed, I woke up at two o'clock in the morning. I had not shed one tear for my mother the whole time she was sick or since her death. I went down to the kitchen and poured a glass of iced tea, and I started to cry. Not just cry, bawl. I cried so hard I was embarrassed, even alone, and I somehow thought that maybe it was the kitchen, so I took my iced tea into the next room and sat down exhausted in a chair
and I started crying again. I moved through every room downstairs, drinking iced tea and crying for my mother. I sat in her blue slipper chair and felt the velvet and smelled her and cried. It was almost light when I went to bed.

I spent every night for the next six months in New York getting fucked up in every conceivable way. I would come home at one or two in the morning, so drunk and high on cocaine and fresh from some anonymous sexual encounter with somebody I wouldn't recognize on the street the next morning that I hardly knew where I was. Sometimes I couldn't pronounce my address for the cab driver. I got mugged five times on my own block. I did weird things like decide to make potato chips in the middle of the night, slicing the potatoes razor thin and dropping them one by one in sizzling oil in my disgusting kitchen in my disgusting apartment.

And one night I picked up a pack of cards and sat down on the floor with a bottle of Heineken and started playing solitaire. I played for hours. I finally crawled to my bed and passed out, but the next night, when I came home drunk, the cards were still there, and I played again. I played every night for weeks and I couldn't figure out why. It was just what I did. Then I remembered lying awake in my room at home in Virginia, before things got so out of control for me that I would sweat through my shirt walking five blocks to work, lying awake and listening to my mother playing solitaire. The Lady Brett whose work was done.

I played for months, until one night, I played a perfect game. All the cards fell into place, one after another. I didn't cheat. I just turned over the cards one by one, and one by one they turned out to be the right card, like a pitcher throwing a perfect
game. And when it was done, when the cards were lying in four neat piles, every suit in order ace to king, I picked up the cards and put them in a drawer.

I never played solitaire again.

My aunt Dodo was severely retarded. She was not only retarded, she was deformed. Her left arm ended in a little nubby stump with a small red nipple on the end of it and she had a short, stumpy body and a large head and piercing eyes. People said she'd been retarded by scarlet fever at the age of two, but it looked to me like she had been retarded since day one. Apparently it never occurred to anybody that Dodo wasn't exactly an appropriate name for her. She was born Virginia, that was her real name, but she was called Dodo all her life. My grandfather, my father's father, was a drunk, the kind who wrecked cars and had to be sent away, and my father often had to go get him at the country club or wherever he was making a scene and help him home but, after Dodo's mind went blank, he never took a single drink again.

After his death, Dodo slept in my grandmother's bedroom until my grandmother died. They slept in twin beds. She would brush my grandmother's hair in the morning with a silver hairbrush that had soft, yellowed bristles.

Dodo's mental age was about four. She wore her hair in a little haircut kind of like Christopher Robin's, and she wore checked shirtwaist dresses with thin leather belts and saddle oxfords and
short cotton socks. She could dress herself and even tie her own shoelaces, a feat which always stupefied us as children.

She smoked like a madwoman, and every morning at eleven, she and my grandmother would sit down and have a glass of sauterne. They would drink sauterne pretty much throughout the rest of the day, so that besides being short and thick and dressed like a child, Dodo was drunk most of the time.

My grandmother had a cook named Martha who came at six in the morning and left at eight at night, and she had Warren, a gentleman boarder who did a lot in the way of keeping things running smoothly. She would sit down every morning at the telephone table and order her groceries from the Jones Brothers, Bobby and Ogle, I swear, so she didn't have much to do except drink sauterne and nap and buy crabs from Archie Newton when he came by in the truck—softshells when they were in season—and big tins of potato chips from the Charles Chips man, who also came by in a truck once a week. She always looked lovely. She was known to be a great cook, but really all she ever did was sit in the enormous kitchen and tell Martha what to do, how to make deviled crab or angel food cake, recipes which Martha must have known by heart, after all those years.

Dodo watched television. Dodo was in love with the flickering image, and she would sit on the floor and watch anything that was on. She loved the early soap operas. She loved
American Bandstand
. She was a romantic.

She was the greatest playmate a child could have. She was strong, so when we played horsey she could carry an eight-year-old boy on her back with ease, crawling around the sitting room
on all fours for hours, one eye on the TV. We would use her thin belts for reins. We would also arm wrestle and Dodo would always win. And, like all children, she could be mean, hurting you for no reason, pinching you until you bruised. But most of the time she was sweet and funny and amenable, and we adored her. My parents would pack us off to Fredericksburg in the summer so my grandmother could look after us, but she was old, and Warren was downtown working, and Dodo, except for nap time, was always available. Once my parents went to the Adirondacks, to Onteora, unimaginably far away, and we were at my grandmother Jinks's house for three weeks.

Jinks was extraordinarily mean to me. She was my father's mother, she doted on him, and she considered my brother and sister to be part of her family, since they were named after members of it, and I was considered to be part of my mother's family, since I was named after my mother's father. She would sit us all down, my brother and my sister and me, and she would say, “Look now, children. Everybody thinks Robbie's so smart, but we all know that he's just good at imitating the grownups. That's not really intelligence. A parrot can do that. You two are really the smart ones.”