The Good Life (16 page)

I'd heard about her faith all my life and hadn't seen it move so much as a note card. I said, “We can fry some potatoes with the salmon—that's always nice. If you have any apples on hand, I'll make a pie.”

“Now you're talking,” Dad said.

We stopped at the big Thriftimart on the way home and bought seven bags of groceries; whenever I stopped to look at an item, he put it in the basket. “I don't know what we have,” he shrugged, collecting both light and dark miso. By the time we got home it was nearly four, the sun low, and I pulled my snug jacket tighter against the sharp ocean wind. Dad unlocked the door, then gestured me in with a courtly sweep of his arm, and so I was the first one to see my mother crumpled at the bottom of the stairs.

“I was sure you'd been in an accident,” she said. When she turned I could see how she had tucked the leg without the cast underneath her to keep warm. I could also see the urine puddled on the back of her robe.

“Mom, I'm sorry,” I said, dropping the bag of groceries and squatting, letting her shoulder rest against me.

“I know you are,” she said.

Dad trudged up from the garage with the suitcases, muttering as he always did about how I must have packed bricks. When he saw my mother on the floor, he said, “For Pete's sake,” then set down the suitcases and bent to lift her up.

“I was trying to get to the bathroom,” she said. “You were gone so long.”

“Why do you think the doctor gave you crutches?” Dad said.

“They hurt. You think it's easy, but it's not.”

“You're working hard to keep it complicated, I'll give you that,” he said, letting her lean on him as she steadied herself on her good foot. “This is quite a homecoming for our daughter.”

“Don't worry about me,” I said, with idiotic brightness. “I'm tough.”

My mother glanced at me and twisted her mouth. “I'm not weak. But I could never have believed the pain.”

“Now that we've shared that, Mother, let's get you cleaned up,” Dad said, steadying her hips while she awkwardly hopped ahead of him. “Then you can come down and talk to Tracy. She's going to make dinner for us.”

“A blessing,” my mother said, breathing hard. Dad turned and winked at me, and I rolled my eyes despite my best intentions.

 

When I finally got Jon on the phone, I told him, “It's like trying to skirt quicksand.” I'd been home four days. “One foot is always being sucked in.”

“This is your opportunity to work on detachment,” Jon said.

“I'm detached, dammit. She talks about God's will, Dad tells her he's sick of her whining, and I yell over the fray for time-outs.”

“You can only take responsibility for yourself.” His voice was hushed and choppy, and I could picture him nodding, waving his hands to hurry me along. His wife was probably in the next room.

“It's such a relief to talk to you,” I told him, my voice sticky and wheedling. “When I hear you, I feel like I'm standing on something solid.”

“The holidays are a difficult period for everyone,” he said. “We're set up to relive the traumas of our youth.”

“We've got the mother lode here,” I muttered, but he was still talking, reminding me not to let others define my reality for me. I didn't have a chance to tell him about watching Bob Hope on TV the night before. When I had stood up to get some cookies, my mother's face was covered in tears. “It's like something gnawing with sharp teeth,” she said when I touched her shoulder.

“For God's sake, Mother, why didn't you say something?”

“I didn't want to bother you,” she said.

Now Jon was talking about openness to life's richness. “I'm open, all right,” I told him. “I'm taking in every morsel that my rich new life provides me.”

 

Dad came down to the kitchen every night after the news, when I liked to have a snack. “At least you can get some sleep,” he would say, breaking off a piece of whatever I was fixing. “She lies there and moans. In case I forget for one second the torment she's in.”

It was so hard to resist. Already I had found myself telling him about washing her hair, when she started crying because I'd let shampoo seep into the corner of her eye. She pushed me out of the way and hobbled back to bed, soapy water streaming down her neck. “Fastest I've seen her move since I got home,” I told Dad.

“Good to know something can make her jump,” he said. “She lies in that bed like she wants to make a career of it.”

Now that I was home, my mother was making more of an effort to get up, but her lurching progress exhausted her. She collapsed into chairs and sat, pinched and silent, for fifteen minutes before she could gather herself to speak, and her suffering face was a mask of accusation. I came downstairs later every morning and lost whole afternoons to elaborate recipes that called for stacks of phyllo and jasmine rice.

“I really would prefer plain chicken,” she kept saying from the armchair we rolled into the kitchen for her. “Rich food doesn't agree with me.”

“We're trying some new things,” I said. I was enjoying myself; every time I suggested a menu, Dad headed to the grocery store. I had never cooked better and with his encouragement tried a chicken stuffed with chestnuts, chocolate-mint torte. “Good for the holidays,” I said when I served the cashew-rolled tenderloin that, left over, made such good sandwiches. “I never eat this way at home.” Mom picked at whatever I put on her plate. Sometimes her eyes were damp, though my own—frustrated, impatient—remained dry.

In the mornings I stared helplessly at my computer screen. The chapter about coping strategies was only sketched out, so every morning I reviewed my thick stack of notes and case histories. I couldn't manage to boil them down to the punchy, practical style my publisher liked. After a half-hour of twisting on the chair, I would go to call Jon.

I knew the relationship with him was not ideal, but it was a far cry from the terrible entanglements of my twenties. “More affairs than I could count. As long as men were unavailable—emotionally, maritally, fiscally, or physically—I was game,” I wrote in the first book. That confession had been central to my recovery; it took all the courage I had to publish it. After the book was included in an article about recovery literature in
Newsweek
, my brother Patrick, who used to drive me wild by calling me Saint Tracy when I was a pious ten-year-old, sent a furious letter addressed to Slut Tracy. I brought it to the next session of Standing Tall as an example of how families can get in the way of our growth.

My parents didn't mention the book. I waited until two weeks after the
Newsweek
article, then finally asked whether they had seen it. Jon held my hand while I made the call.

“I'm not going to read it. It doesn't seem like something I'd like,” said my mother. “But we're both very proud of you.”

Now I typed:
Health isn't a goal like a high-jump record. Life throws us curves
. I sighed and wiped it out.

There was a tap at the door, and then Dad opened it a crack to look in at me. “Just making sure you were off the phone,” he said.

“Never was on it. Couldn't get through.”

“You've been trying.”

“You monitoring my calls?”

“Now, now. Your mother frets. She thinks your publisher should be the one paying for long distance.”

“I'm not calling my publisher,” I said. “I'm calling my collaborator.”

“Collaborator. Sounds like World War II.” He raised his eyebrows at me playfully, but I swiveled back to the keyboard.

“I'll shave my head and you can parade me through the streets,” I said.

“I'll leave that to your mother. Who wants you to wash her hair this afternoon. Apparently she's recovered from your last assault.”

I quickly typed:
We who seek and strive are heroes, and only when the battle is finished do we see the faces of our foes
. I saved it, turned off the computer, and said, “Tell her majesty I'm on my way,” pushing back from the computer so hard, my chair screeched and stuttered on the wood floor.

 

After I'd been home a week, I had floated well out to sea. I sat at my computer from nine to twelve and buried myself in cooking all afternoon. My mother joined me when I came downstairs, so my sauteing and mincing stopped whenever she needed more pillows or a sip of cranberry juice or—the most frequent request—help in hobbling to the bathroom. Sometimes she sat at the table and phoned one of my brothers, then handed off the phone to me. “Well,” said James, my closest brother in age, “finding stories to tell for another book?”

“I'm working on it,” I said evenly.

“Most of us are still recovering from the first one.”

“That was about opening the door. This one is about starting the journey.”

“Mary's fine, and the twins are great,” he said. “They've got almost all their teeth.”

“You should bring them out to visit. Mom tells me all the time how she wishes you'd let her dote on them.” It was the kind of meanness I wouldn't have stooped to a month before, but I was tired. Jon hadn't answered the phone since the first call. When I took time out to read my affirmations, they felt absurdly childish, chipper as Norman Vincent Peale, and it took an act of faith to bother opening the book at all.

“It's good to see you and your brothers talking,” Mom would say after I hung up. “A close family is one of the graces I pray for.”

This was an opening volley, but there was no way I could have known that. She launched the full campaign on Christmas Day, after we came home from mass, which had left us undone. She had winced and gasped the whole short ride, then inside the church redirected Dad three times until he situated her wheelchair out of the way but still in full view of the priest.

After the service she held court outside in the thin December sunshine, and it took a half-hour to wheel her away from the people who pressed their cheeks to hers and told her how she never left their prayers for a minute. “And see,” my mother kept saying, clutching my hand, “my daughter is home.” I smiled while they nodded coolly at me. Clearly they had heard about the book. I
have nothing to apologize for
, I wanted to say. But no one quite gave me the opportunity, and by the time we came back home I felt as if I'd been flayed.

“I can't tell you the good it does me to go to mass,” my mother uttered faintly, her head resting against the chair back. “I miss it so.”

“Until that ankle heals, God's just going to have to understand,” Dad said.

“The mass is a comfort,” she said.

“You certainly are popular,” I said. “It looked like you knew everybody there.”

“We have a community.”

“Now that people know what's happened to you, I'm sure they'll call,” I said. “You won't feel so cut off.”

“It's not the same,” she said, twisting fretfully and waving her hand as if she would reach over the length of her cast and rub it herself. Dad and I watched her for a second, then I went over and rested her foot on my lap and got to work. “The new priest, Father Jim, he gives such good sermons—even on weekdays. You wouldn't believe.”

“What are you angling for, Mother?” Dad asked.

“Nothing. I'm not
angling for
anything.”

“That's good,” he said. “Because Trace and I have got our hands full here.”

“I just think,” she said, “it would be nice if you two went to mass together during the week. It would be a fine sharing time for you. And you could tell me what Father Jim said.”

I kept rubbing and shot a look at my mother's face, which was serene. “Mary Grace,” Dad said, “you're out of your mind.”

“I don't know why you say that. I think it's a good idea.”

“Tracy and I are not going to start getting up at five-thirty to go off to mass for you. I can't believe the wild hairs you get.”

“I don't see any reason that you should speak for our daughter,” my mother said, trying to hike herself up in the chair. “She's perfectly capable of speaking her own mind.”

I was bent over her foot, still rubbing away. “I write in the mornings,” I said.

“You could manage a half-hour for mass. It would probably help your writing.”

“I don't think so,” I said.

She yanked her foot away from me, swinging out her leg so hard, it jerked off my lap and crashed under the weight of the cast to the floor. “So you won't even consider it. Both of you just too busy to do this simple thing for me.” She sniffed hard and tried to clamp her mouth. “It's a small enough favor, God knows.”

“Not everyone shares your sense of priorities, Mother,” Dad said.

“You've made that perfectly clear,” she said. I reached down to hoist her leg back up, but she snapped, “Just leave it alone. I wouldn't dream of putting you out.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake, Mary Grace, lighten up.”

“I wish you wouldn't swear in front of Tracy.”

“She's heard worse,” he said.

“I'll go,” I said. I was clenching and unclenching my hands, trying to control my breathing. I didn't look at either one of them.

“No,” my mother said, jerking her chin. “I don't want you to go now.”

“I'll go. Maybe I'll find something I can use in my book.”

“Tracy, sweetheart, you can't just give in,” Dad said.

I stood up. “I can't stand listening to you two. When did you start going for blood? You never used to fight like this.”

Dad shook his head and sighed. “Always. But you didn't notice what you didn't want to see.”

“You had your head in the clouds.” My mother nodded.

“Things are different now,” I said, and went into the kitchen. I had made brownies and icebox bars the day before, from recipes in my mother's oldest cookbook. I put a handful on a plate and then headed for the stairs and my room, but Mother called me back.