Wait Until Tomorrow (20 page)

In Charlotte my colleagues at school wheel toward me, their faces compositions of concern when I enter our wing of cubicles. They know that I am a bloodied soldier. I don't volunteer a lot but I am not prone to lying either. “Fine” is no longer part of my vocabulary. I keep the bulletins short. My coworkers nod sympathetically, realizing that sympathy is pointless. It does nothing, and “talking about it” provides no relief.

Lynda is my mentor/soul sister/friend and literary mother. Hal is her cranky but kind poet husband, who adores her. Lynda and I talk only about books. A salve on my blistered psyche. This is what sympathy would enviously love to be. I realize in a rare moment of self-satisfaction that I have chosen my friends well. This kind of friendship is not earned. It is a kind of grace. A friendship administered so gently it doesn't infect you. This friendship helps you become light, light as that vermilion flycatcher tossing about on the currents of air, barely clinging with its clawed toes to the topmost cedar branch. I want to be lighter still, like the quiet haze resting on the hills, pale and almost empty, absorbing smoke, filtering sunlight, nestling an insubstantial cheek on a warm white wall.

San Miguel de Allende is every gringa's dream: cobblestone streets, galleries, parks, crimson birds flitting about in branches of gargantuan trees. I eat well, I read voraciously, I watch the Oscars
with Lynda and Hal and their friends. We meet writers and artists. At a lovely outdoor garden restaurant, while an insipid musician croons Jimmy Buffet songs, a poet flirts with me, and I flirt back. We meet a sculptor and his painter wife, who invite us to come by for drinks and marijuana, of all things. We decline. Once as we are walking, Lynda and I stop to read a sign listing upcoming twelvestep meetings. One is for sex and love addicts.

“That used to be me but not anymore,” Lynda says. “Disgusting.”

And we laugh till the tears stream down our cheeks. Our sexfilled stories and voracious concupiscent characters bound us together when we first met. But things change, don't they? And we can't help but lapse into hilarity at the notion of our old voracious selves.

I could stay here, I'm thinking, and never go back. Then my cell phone rings insistently. It's Hank.

“I'm in the hospital in Atlanta,” he says.

I'm silent.

“I was in the airport waiting for my connection, and my blood pressure spiked again. I don't think I can handle this thing with my parents.”

Hank is supposed to be going to California to work with a TV company on the LA Marathon and then stay and take care of his dad while his mother goes into the hospital for a perforated colon.

“Call me when you get to California,” I tell him.

The next day he calls again.

“You need to come to California. My blood pressure is hitting the roof. My dad is probably dying and my mother has got to go to the hospital. Dad refuses to go to hospice.”

No, I'm thinking, I need to go home. I need to get back to my own mother. She can't be alone in that place after my brother
leaves. But really, there is no question, no debate here. Hank has not asked for a lot these past years. And now he needs me. My heart is resolute. My mother will have to cope without me. I am going to California. The company that hired Hank has offered to pay for my ticket.

The next day I am flying into Los Angeles with Arlo Guthrie's voice in my head: “Bringing in a couple of keys.” Yeah, I'm thinking, a key to my house and one to my mom's. That's all the keys I've got.

When Hank picks me up at LAX, we have a short reprieve. His mother is not going into the hospital for a couple of days and the company he works for has booked him a room at the Sheraton Universal. That night we wander over to Universal City in search of food. What a culture shock after the sweet naturalness of San Miguel. It's like a sensory rape, like entering a comic book world, like a funhouse on steroids. IMAX cinemas! Mechanical bull riding! Bungee dives! Fun dining!

We get out as quickly as possible to head to downtown Burbank, which has, of late, become the trendiest place on the planet. Throngs of teenagers and tourists spill over the streets. But it's downright mellow after Universal City. We wind up in a Thai restaurant where the plates are square and black and the food is, let's face it, superb.

It's comforting to be with him. We don't talk much. We don't need to. We know each other so well. Somehow my presence helps settle his blood pressure, and I feel calmer around him, too. Though we have our fights over money and politics, we also enjoy each other's company. Briefly we can forget about everything else and be the same two people we were twenty-five years ago when our biggest worry was where we would eat dinner that night and what kind of wine we would get.

The next day we head down behind the Orange Curtain to La Brea. We enter the maw of homogeneous corporate America and find a world of identical chain stores and restaurants, beckoning us to eat and buy. Hank's parents live in a ranch house in a manicured subdivision. His father retired in his forties and spent his days playing golf, watching television, and listening to talk radio. That life is over.

Hank Senior is back in the bedroom when we get there. When I see him, I am floored. His head is swollen with fluid and he cannot stand without a walker. The last time I saw him—six months earlier—he looked the same as he always had, same trim, compact body and head full of dark hair. He didn't look like he was approaching eighty. He looked like he'd just qualified for Social Security.

“It's the chemo,” Jean tells us.

The next day she has to check into the hospital and she's worried about the “prep” medicines she has to take—with good reason. They wipe her out. No way can she help Hank Senior to the bathroom. Suddenly my Hank is their caretaker, helping one parent and then the other. The look on his face is of a man in a war zone, and I'm reminded of the one time we went to Nicaragua. We were exploring Managua, which was not such a smart thing to do after dark, and we realized a car was slowly following us as we walked along the darkened streets. We knew we were in danger, but we didn't panic. We headed straight for the hotel like we were on a mission and somehow we made it back to our lonesome bottles of rum unscathed.

I try to help, but mostly I'm there for moral support.

The next day, Hank's duties have changed. Hank and his brother have finally convinced Hank Senior he needs to go to hospice. They take him to the same house where their sister died just
a few months earlier. Jean is now in the hospital, getting ready for surgery. And with the immediate caregiving crisis over, Hank and I find ourselves alone in the house.

And this time we panic. We are not supposed to be alone in this house. This house is supposed to be filled with people, with the smell of cooking foods, with the sounds of television and radio. We aren't even supposed to be in this house at this time of year. Where are the two children? Where is the dog we usually bring? Neither of us can swallow. Breathing becomes difficult.

I'm remembering one Christmas before Beth got sick. On Christmas Eve I sat down with Jean as she opened up the cupboards of the past and hauled out one family member after another, showing me pictures and mementos. She told me about the six children from Russia, the eight who were born here, the aunt who was a dwarf, and the uncle who died of rheumatic fever when he was seventeen.

The next day after the ritual gorging on gifts and before the ritual gorging on food, Hank and I left the house for a walk. We cut down an alley behind perfectly landscaped lawns and up a hill into a meadow.

“This is the old way to the high school,” Hank said. We wandered along a fence beside the football field and into the woody edge of a golf course. We cut over and wound up inside a cemetery where we lingered, reading rows of plaques bearing remote dates: 1844–1910 and 1851–1904. I found myself reading the first names as we walked down the long rows—Margaret, Stella, Effie, Walter, Grazella, Charles, and John. Above the names were the words father, mother, husband, or sister.

As I gazed over the grounds at the hundreds of simple plaques on the ground, I felt as if I were watching a parade that had been going on forever. All these people, I thought. All these laughing, loving, lying, hating, working, eating, and finally dying minds and
bodies. All those souls, all those now-silent voices. My mother has often said she wonders where the music goes when we can no longer hear it. Those vibrations are still traveling somewhere.

It's an old, old truth that seems to lie in wait for us like the tree we never notice until it falls down in our path. It seems that we must acknowledge every once in a while that we are only visiting here and briefly at that.

Now Beth's ashes are lodged in that same cemetery, and Hank Senior's time is short. Hank and I stare at each other in the empty house like two lost and abandoned children.

“We have to get out of here,” I tell him. Everything about this house, the couch where we're sitting, the coffee table where we played Clue, the two recliners where his parents always sat, the dry black hole of the fireplace, everything is a reminder of all we once had. And it wasn't long enough. There just wasn't enough time.

“Here, take this,” Hank says, handing me half a Xanax. So I do. The grief lifts briefly, and we get on about our business, visiting one parent and then the other, eating dinner with Steve, and then back to visit a parent.

The most poignant moment is when Jean is talking to her husband, her high school sweetheart, on the phone in the hospital while he is at hospice.

“You take care of yourself,” he tells her.

“I will,” she says. “I'll see you soon.”

At the hospice house, I sometimes pick an orange from the tree in the backyard. Hank Senior is not the only one dying here. A few very quiet people sit in the living room or stay in their beds. The women work hard, cleaning these broken bodies, feeding them, making them comfortable. Their activity keeps the place from feeling morose. Business as usual, people living, people dying.

Jean's surgery goes well, and she comes back home. It's time for
me to go home as well. While I was gone, Emmy was sick with the flu and I was not there to take care of her. My mother was alone in the nursing home and I wasn't there for her either. But they both survived without me.

I hug Hank goodbye at the airport. He is staying with his mother for a while as she recovers. The sky picks me up from the ground and tosses me over the continent.

Morning. I drive to the nursing home where my mom is in rehab. Her body is a crumbling house. Her mind is worse. It is nine thirty when I walk through the corridor to her room. I find her lying in bed, whimpering.

“What's wrong, Mom?” I ask. “What's wrong?”

She has no answer, and I realize I am once again asking the wrong question. Somehow I assumed there was something I could fix if only she'd tell me what. But it is obvious I have made a misstep. I should not ask questions. I need to bring answers.

“There's nothing wrong,” I tell her. “There's nothing wrong, Mom.”

I turn to lower the volume on the TV, which I brought from her apartment. She keeps whimpering as I fiddle with the controls. The whimpering is an insistent tug on my consciousness, making it impossible to focus.

“Stop it,” I say, glancing back at her, but my voice is gentle. She closes her mouth in compliance.

“Now, why aren't you dressed yet, I wonder? Do you want to get dressed, Mom?”

“I don't know. I don't know what I want to do,” she says, clutching her hospital robe. “I can't tell if it's day or night.”

I glance at her rolling table and see that her breakfast is mostly gone.

“Mom, look out the window. See, it's daylight, and you've just had breakfast, so it must be morning, right?” An azalea bush waves a meager bloom on the grounds outside.

“Yes, yes. You're right.” Her voice relaxes. She lets go of the gown.

Actually, she is far more coherent than she was before I left. And the infection she had earlier is gone. Her breathing is better. Once again, she has peeked into the abyss and beat a retreat.

“I wonder if I should dress you. Maybe they're going to clean you up first.”

I go out to find a nurse's assistant.

“Has my mother been cleaned up?”

“No, not yet,” she says. She's headed into someone else's room.

“Then I'll do it,” I answer. She directs me to the clean towels and washcloths, but the closet is empty so I get some clean ones out of the laundry room. It doesn't take long to know where everything is, to feel like one of the staff.

Back in my mother's room, I gently wash her back with the warm, soapy washcloth. I wipe down her arms and armpits and bring the washcloth under her soft shapeless breasts. Neither of us is self-conscious about it. I once nursed at those breasts. Can there be a more intimate bond?