Wait Until Tomorrow (27 page)

Lately, I've been wondering if I'll ever be attractive to anyone again. A sociologist named Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot describes the years between fifty and seventy-five as the third chapter. She says these years are transformative and regenerative, a time for passion, risk, and adventure. But to me, it's looking scary and sad. It's looking like years of going to bed at nine thirty with a book and my cat. It's looking like maybe being alone and sometimes screaming out loud just to see if anyone hears.

Everyone but me is drinking wine, but I might as well be drunk as I show off the scar from my surgery. I've become rather proud of my brief fling with cancer, and my friends are dutifully impressed. Then we're winding down. Gary, Amy, and Mark are talking music. Pam falls asleep on the couch. I am sitting on the other end of the couch bundled up in a paisley blanket. When I look up, Theo is smiling at me, and it occurs to me that the third chapter of my life might not be so bleak after all.

MAY 2009

I am sitting at the Caribou coffee shop with my friends for our biweekly writers get-together. As we're waiting for everyone to arrive and eat a quick lunch, I notice Tamara's big, boxy emerald ring with two diamonds on either side.

“Wow, that's beautiful,” I remark.

“Thank you,” she says. “It's my engagement ring. I love emeralds.” Tamara's husband is a doctor and makes a pretty decent salary—a lot of which gets donated to various causes that Tamara believes in, but I guess he gets to spoil her a little when she lets him.

“I gave Emmy an emerald ring for Christmas a couple years ago,” I tell her. I bought it at the jewelry store in this same shopping center.

“That's right,” she says. “I remember that.”

“She lost it,” I say. We both laugh. Emmy is notorious for being unable to hold onto things—her cell phone which she left at a bus stop in the Bronx, her little lilac winter coat (brand-new) that she left in a Taco Bell when she was eleven, her backpack and keys in high school. The list is long.

“Someday,” Tamara says, “you should give her a map with a red pinpoint of everywhere she's lost something.”

After I leave the coffee shop, I head over to the Sanctuary to see Mom. The manager takes me aside as soon as I walk in. I'm worried he's going to tell me that they've decided to raise her rent. But instead he asks if I've heard that Mom has lost her ring. My heart sinks. It's a beautiful amethyst ring in a big gold setting that my brother David gave her. How could she have been so careless, I wonder. She knows that there are always people around who will lift what you leave behind. She never locks her apartment, of course, and has even complained that people come in and take her cookies, which I'm pretty sure doesn't happen. Still, it would seem that if she thinks there are cookie thieves out there, she would surely guard the one thing she has of any value.

When I find my mother in her room, she's distraught. I do an exhaustive search, but no ring. Overall, I'm pretty sure the employees here are an honest bunch, but the economy is bad right now and one of them might have been unable to resist the temptation. Or maybe my mother managed to drop it in such an obscure place that it will never again be found. Regardless, she's going to have to suck it up.

“Let it go, Mom,” I tell her. “There are worse things than losing a ring.”

“I just feel so guilty,” she says.

“Please don't. It happens,” I say. I want to chastise her the way I chastise the forever-losing-something Emmy, but it serves no more purpose than her purposeless guilt.

I push her wheelchair outside and we sit on the little patio area in the sun, facing the parking lot. I relish the spring sunshine and this moment free from grief and worry. I am filled with gratitude and not a little relief that I can be here with her today, and because today the worst thing that has happened to us is the loss of a ring.

Emmy comes home from college for a short visit. I was thinking we'd spread out the comforters in front of the TV and get reacquainted with Woody Allen. But she can't stay for a second night. She has four papers to write and decides to go back to school to finish them. It has begun to happen. This house is more storage, more of a way station for her. In a different course of events, Hank and I would be rekindling our love life about now. I would not be living in this big empty house alone without even a dog. But Hank is gone, Merlyn is dead, and my next ship hasn't come sailing over the horizon.

So instead of watching Woody Allen, I'm visiting my mom. When I walk into her room, she's got a helpless look on her face. She's just rung her pendant for someone to come help her get to the bathroom.

“I'll help you, Mom,” I say. As often happens, she has a big wet spot on the back of her dress. So I help her change into something else.

Mom is in good spirits today. She doesn't complain of pain. I wheel her into the courtyard where we slowly circumnavigate, stopping to admire the flowers. She's always liked flowers, but now she seems to derive a special delight in them.

After we've toured the small courtyard, I park her wheelchair catty-corner to one of the mesh chairs and sit down. I tell her about a movie I've recently seen. She likes to hear about what's going on out there, but it doesn't hold her interest for long. Soon her conversation veers to the past.

Somehow we get on the topic of “The War.” Both of her brothers served. Bob went out and shot a rabbit before enlisting and realized he simply couldn't kill a person, so he joined the Merchant Marines. Dave was in the Navy and served in the Pacific. He made one cryptic and pained comment that Mother never forgot:
“All the terrible things that they say the Japanese did to us are true. But we were no better to them.”

“Daddy never served in the military,” I say.

“No, he got out of it because of his eyes,” she replies.

“So after Yale, the two of you went to Vermont?”

“Yes,” she says and smiles. Her teeth are stained yellow, but she still has a great smile. “Vermont was wonderful.” She has told me many stories of the boys' school where my father taught right after college. They had no electricity and the winters were brutal. But she loved the adventure of it.

“Driving up there, I saw a house with smoke pouring out of it, and I thought it was on fire. I told him we had to stop and help whoever was inside, but he just drove on and said, ‘Oh, those people know what they are doing.' I was so frustrated, but he was right. It was some sort of cooking house for the maple syrup.”

She has often told me that my father was the only man she ever loved. I hope this is not a genetic disorder. I hope that Hank will not be the one great love of my life.

“It must have been a culture shock when you wound up in Jacksonville.”

“That's right,” she says. “At the time there were still separate water fountains, marked white and colored.” She pauses and then remembers. “We had some friends who were black. Musicians.”

“Mitch and Ruff?” I ask. I have a book about them and remember hearing that my parents knew them—jazz musicians from the South.

“It's possible. Anyway, they were on tour, and we had them over for dinner. I distinctly remember having to pull down the shades so we wouldn't wake up with a cross burning in our yard. It was a scary time.” She pauses again, remembering. “I'm sure I've told you about the trip we took up north with our colored maid.”

She has, but I don't stop her from telling it again.

“We had to bring food out to her in the car when we were in the South because they wouldn't let her eat inside the restaurants where we stopped. I felt awful. I couldn't let her go hungry, or put her through that humiliation.”

The lines were clear cut in the South during the 50s and 60s. My mother was berated by her neighbors in Spartanburg for paying her maid too much. One time she tried to sit down and eat lunch with “the help,” and the woman immediately got up and said that wasn't the way things were done. We weren't the sort of people to always have a maid. But she was a working woman with two young boys and it wasn't abnormal to hire help. They didn't have day care back then.

“It's quite different now. We've seen such a big change in our lifetime,” she says. It's true but I can't help but notice that most of the CNAs (certified nursing assistants) here and at the nursing homes we've been to are women of color, and most (though not all) of the residents and the supervisors are white. My favorite caregivers at the Sanctuary are Charlene and Lam. They've both shown me that the work they do, which I thought was hard and demeaning, is as rewarding as anything I do.

“You learn so much from the residents,” Lam once told me.

“Not everybody can do this kind of work,” Charlene informed me on another occasion. “It takes a lot of love. You have to love these people.”

The conversation with my mother changes course.

“I've always wanted to write something, and I think I should write my autobiography. Not for publication but because the grandchildren might be interested someday,” she says. This is a familiar path. Just do it, I always tell her, and a few scraps get written here or there. Then she begins again, “The worst piece of advice I ever got . . .”

I know exactly where this is leading. This is one of her dominant themes. Her mother told her not to bother to learn how to type because “you'll always have someone to type for you.” Eventually my mother did type on a computer but never with any confidence. It's no wonder that the summer after my eighth-grade year, my mother signed me up for typing lessons at Jones Business College. I was the youngest in the class and not very good at it, but I learned how to type passably well. Later when I took typing in high school, I still wasn't very fast and I could never do it without errors. The “quick brown fox” was often a “wuck brown foz.” But my mother's insistence that I learn to type was prescient, I suppose. We had no way of knowing that one day these magic machines would be invented and it wouldn't matter how many errors I made.

At around five forty-five Mom starts to get anxious. Dinnertime is at six, and she is never, ever late for dinner. At five minutes to six, I wheel her in. While Mom is eating, I get into a long conversation with Charlene. Charlene tells me she started working with the elderly when she was sixteen years old. She's my age now. Her eyes are so bright they dazzle.

“Why do you do it?” I ask her.

“I love being able to take care of somebody who can't do for themselves,” she says.

It's true that when Charlene is on my mom's floor, Mom's care is impeccable. Lam joins us and the three of us hang out for a bit in the library, chatting.

One thing I've been curious about is how much the CNAs make. I remember a technician at the hospital telling me she couldn't survive on her paycheck. And it rankles me that these people who work so incredibly hard don't get paid what they should.

“How much would someone make as a CNA just starting out?” I ask.

“Starting out, maybe $8.50 an hour. People with more experience can make about twelve dollars an hour,” Lam says.

“Do you get benefits?”

“Benefits are offered, but they're too expensive,” Lam says.

“So you don't have health insurance?”

Lam shakes her head.

“It's a lot better up north,” Lam says. “The health insurance is good up there. Here it just costs too much.”

At this point, my mother wheels herself into the library.

“Still, I love this job,” Lam says.

“Me, too,” Charlene agrees. “These people are so interesting. Your mother told me all about working with Andy Griffith. And she said Aunt Bee isn't really as nice as she seems on TV. Ain't that right, Roz?”

“Oh, stay away from Aunt Bee,” my mother says. Charlene bursts out laughing.

 

In early June the management at the Sanctuary sends me a letter saying they are going to raise her rent by a thousand dollars a month. In truth, that would be about in line with what any other place would charge, but we cannot afford it. I panic. I can move her in with me for the summer and cancel any plans of travel—or sleep. Then I can move her to my brother's house in St. Louis, and he and his girlfriend can try to take care of her. But I don't want to move her. She's found some semblance of stability here, if not necessarily happiness. There are always people around. She plays the piano, Scrabble and bingo. A couple of days after the letter, the director calls me and makes a deal. He'll raise the rent by $200. I figure I'll just have to work more. I'll have to come up with it.

But I have other money troubles. Over the years I used my mother's credit card to pay for some of the bigger things she needed that I couldn't quite manage—the lift chair, some hospital
bills, medicine whenever the Medicare gap hit and the drug costs skyrocketed. I dutifully paid the minimum each month, but you know how credit cards work. You can pay and pay and never pay it off. At some point the low-interest period was over and boom, the minimum was beyond my reach. So I stopped paying it. Now, they've tracked me down. The truth is, I don't have to pay this. The credit card is not in my name, and they can't squeeze any money out of my mom. But I have this bad feeling about letting her die in debt. So when they offer me a fairly reasonable payoff deal, I accept. It makes things tight as hell and there are plenty of other things I'd like to do with that money, like start my own retirement account, but I agree to pony up.

 

I don't have any teaching work during the summer, and Emmy is taking summer classes to make up for missing the fall term. I spend huge chunks of my time alone. I believe this is good for me. Time for a slow settling of all the upheavals of the past. I do my yoga every morning outside on the deck with a flock of leafy trees for company. I listen to Vivaldi and Bach. It feels as if my spirit is reconnecting the wires that got loose or ripped off in the storms. I am getting reacquainted with myself.