Wait Until Tomorrow (33 page)

“What trip?”

“We're going to Jacksonville today,” I tell her.

“Really? Today?” she asks.

“Yes, I told you about this.” I begin pushing her wheelchair down the hall.

“I thought you meant next week.”

“Remember you agreed to do this. For your daughter who has done so much for you.” I nuzzle my cheek next to hers.

“I don't think you've proven yourself yet,” she says.

But she comes along easier than I dared to hope. She knows that resistance is futile. I've made that much clear.

 

The drive down is easy as well. We stop periodically at rest areas. We have a drill. Edward gets the wheelchair out of the back. David maneuvers Mom in the wheelchair and I bring her into the bathroom, take the leg rests off and get her onto the toilet. I've developed my own little patter: “Okay, plant your feet, Mom. Plant them under your knees. Are your feet planted? Now I want you to grab the bar here and stand. Stand all the way up. One two three. Good. Okay. Now pivot, move your foot, pivot, pivot, and go ahead and sit down, Mom. Good.”

I schedule eight hours for the trip but it takes less than seven. And then we are in the hotel. My brother Jo and his girlfriend Laurie are there with Sharen, my niece, who is going to sing the soprano solo in the performance on Sunday.

We're all parked in the little sitting area of David's hotel room when Jo pulls out the newspaper. The front page of the
Florida Times-Union
on Saturday, February 21, shows a contrite Tiger Woods and the words “I am so sorry” emblazoned above his face. But we are not interested in section A. We are interested in the
next section—the state and local news. And on the front page of section B—above the fold even—is this headline: “City's Music Master Returns.” The story takes up a solid column at the bottom of which is a picture of my mother from 1967. She looks like a movie star, like Joan Crawford or Jane Russell. She wears an old movie-star-style blouse with a collar that points out like the petals of a flower. Everyone comments on the blouse. The story continues inside, includes quotations from yours truly, and mistakenly refers to my brother David as “Mark MacEnulty.” We get a laugh out of this, but none of us is too worried about the name mix-up because the writer has the essence of the story—the grande dame is back for a special appearance at her old home, the Church of the Good Shepherd.

Jo and I congratulate ourselves later.

“We did it!” Jo says.

“You're the wide receiver, man,” I tell him. “All I did was throw the ball. You're the one who caught it and made a touchdown.”

It's true. He spent countless hours making scores for the chorus and orchestra and organist. He raised money. All his talents and skills from his former stint as conductor and managing director for a community orchestra in Illinois have paid off. I had planned to pay for any expenses myself. But it turns out all I'm paying for is gas, some food, and a hotel room.

Our family friend Karen managed to find the chorus and conductor for us, generate publicity, and get us a deal on the hotel rooms. And now she's invited our family over for dinner at her house. But when Jo and David are together, conversation and reminiscence take precedence. I actually do have a duty—herding this family of cats outside and into our respective vehicles.

The dinner is wonderful. Even though not everyone is here, there are more of our family members in one spot than have been together since Sharen's wedding ten years earlier. They start telling
Roz stories at the table. Karen tells us about a man who, for some reason, stopped Mother on one of her walks and began to tell her his woes. He had lost his wife and now his dog. He told my mother he couldn't see any reason to keep living. And apparently she agreed with him. I'm thinking that's not the sweetest story in the world. I'm thinking she was a more sympathetic person than that. But perhaps her methodology in this case was to shed light on his self-pitying.

Even though earlier, in the car, she asked if the four of us were all somehow related, Mom holds her own during the conversation at the table. If she's not fully cognizant, she's got a hell of a good act.

This day has gone so well that it's inevitable that I screw up. I do this by taking a bite of the incredibly delicious chocolate cake that Karen made. Oh hell. You might as well tell a crackhead “just one hit.” I scarf down my piece and half of my mom's. While this may not seem a terrible sin, you have to know that chocolate has caffeine and my body is akin to a finely tuned scientific instrument geared to detect the most minute portions of caffeine in any substance. I am not going to go to sleep for hours.

 

We come back to the hotel. The bed is too high for Mom, so I put her in the fold-out bed in the “suite” area. There's a wall between us but it only goes halfway into the room. The time we spent together today was fun, and we're both feeling rather sisterly. I lift her from the wheelchair and she drops onto the bed. Then I stand on the bed and pull her into a prone position. I place pillows under her head and feet and cover her with a blanket, leaving her feet uncovered per her instructions. At ten thirty I actually lie down in the king-size bed as if I'm heading directly to that adored world, that realm of happiness: sleep. But it is not to be. The chocolate cake, which by the way was the tastiest piece of
cake ever created by human hands, has sent its caffeine brigands to hijack my brain. They are celebrating Carnivale with lights, music, and dancing.

Eventually, however, the relaxation herb I take kicks in and I can just begin to taste the elixir of sleep. Around midnight, as I'm finally thinking I might go down the tunnel, the horror show begins. The whimpering, the groaning, the moaning, the tiny grunts.

“What is it, Mom?”

“I hurt.”

I get up and give her some pain pills and crawl back into bed. Now what is this? Oh, rapturous sleep. The thoughts in my head are deliciously nonsensical, a sure sign that I'm entering the sacred realm.

Then my mother whines and I am yanked out of paradise. I know just how the cavewoman must have felt when the boorish caveman grabbed her by a shank of hair and dragged her out of her warm cave.

“Stop it!” I growl.

For maybe five minutes there is silence. Then it comes back.

I beg, I plead, I cajole, I threaten, but Mother cannot be quiet. For hours, every time I start to drift off, she cuts off my oxygen supply. The CIA should employ my mother to torture terrorists. At about five in the morning, out of helpless desperation, I take the comforter and a pillow from the bed into the bathroom where I shut the door and lie on the floor. I quickly drop down into oblivion and for maybe forty-five minutes it works. I cannot hear my mother.

So she ups the ante. She no longer whimpers. Now she yells out: “Help! Help!”

I stagger out of the bathroom.

“What is it, Mom? What's wrong?”

She looks up at me helplessly and says, “I need some water.” She's already had a glass of water.

In a dry voice, I tell her, “If I had a gun right now, you'd be dead.”

“Why? What have I done?” she asks. Then she turns her face from me and says, “No one has ever treated me with such hatred, and it saddens me.”

“I'm just trying to sleep. Can you please please please just give me that?”

But she can't. And I can't help myself either. We're playing our roles—the victim and the martyr. Later I will realize she does not know what she's doing, but right now I'm cranky as hell and desperate for sleep. Later when I'm complaining to all and sundry about my sleep deprivation Sharen will mention that her other grandmother was the same way. The call it “sundowners.” The sun goes down and some old people lose their minds. Her other grandmother thought people were trying to kill her at night.

“I'll just leave,” my mother says. “I'll go back where we came from.”

“You can't do that,” I say.

At 6:30 a.m. I call Jo.

“She's killing me,” I tell him. He shows up at my door a few minutes later. We get her out of bed. I take her into the bathroom and clean her up and get a pretty dress on her. Jo takes her downstairs for breakfast. I try to get some sleep. But it's hopeless. I cannot sleep now. I get up in frustration and head downstairs, too.

 

That day I am a zombie. The performance is at 6 p.m., and I can't begin to imagine going there and smiling at people and trying to traverse the pathways of common conversation. People I haven't
seen in forty years will be there. And I'm going to look like someone who just escaped from a mental institution. I look in the mirror and am frightened.

While Jo and Laurie go to my father's old Unitarian church where Jo is giving a flute concert, the rest of us wind up having lunch at some bizarre place on the river decorated with stuffed wild animals.

We order gator tail for an appetizer. I don't eat mammals and have even stopped eating fowl, but a gator is a different story. I will eat a piece of gator in the hopes that someday I'll stop having nightmares about the scary bastards. I order for Mother, just like I used to do for Emmy. We gorge on fried shrimp and fabulous creamy key lime pie—de rigueur Florida fare. Then we zoom over to the church so Sharen can vocalize before the rehearsal. David wants to take pictures. Mom wants to stay in the car. I wander around with Edward, showing him where the choir kids all scrawled their names on the wall.

“There's my name,” I say and point it out, remembering the hours I spent in this room turning pages for my mother as she played the piano.

 

As we leave the church parking lot and head back to the hotel, my mother asks where we just were.

“At the church,” I tell her.

“What church?”

“The Good Shepherd. The church where you worked for thirty-something years.”

“Oh, that church,” she says.

The day is bright with a yellow sun in a merciful sky. But I'm totally off my game. My brain is filled with awful buzzing. Pam, Gary, and Theo arrive from Tallahassee and call me on my cell
phone, but I can't go hang with them. I send them off to eat. The big night is finally here and I'm in misery.

 

When we get back to the hotel, I leave Mom with David and Edward. For an hour I sleep! Sleep, glorious sleep. When I wake the world has been magically restored. Everything that was fractured is now whole. The night is almost here, so I slip into pantyhose, a shimmery dress, and high heels. I brush my hair and put on makeup and damn—I can actually pass for a member of the human species.

Theo, Pam, and Gary come over to the hotel. My God, my friends, I think. They come upstairs with me and my mom and wait in the sitting area while I get Mom ready for the performance. They can overhear me in the bathroom.

“I'm going to get you your pain pills,” I tell my mother in a loud voice because her hearing is “not what it used to be” as she says.

“What?”

“Pain pills.”

“What? Petticoats?”

“Pain pills, Mom. Pain pills,” I shout.

I go back to the sitting area for Mom's bag of medicine and pull out the sheet of Tramadols.

“Do you have enough for all of us?” Gary asks. Within seconds Pam and I are staggering with laughter.

I return to the bathroom with my mother's pills. Although the night before was one of my worst nights ever with my mother, today is filled with tenderness and connection. I stand behind her in the bathroom, facing the mirror, gently massaging her face with oil and then lightly rubbing in foundation.

“You do know I love you,” I say, and she knows I am asking for forgiveness.

“Yes,” she says. “I know.”

We have been as close on this trip as we have ever been. My disappointment that Emmy's schoolwork prevents her from being with us sits like a stone in my gut, but I realize that this time is for me and my mom. If Emmy were here, it would not be the same. I would be focused on my daughter and not on my mother.

A few minutes later Mom is dressed in her purple velvet dress with tiny pearl beads sewn into the collar. Her silver mane is brushed and I've put makeup on her. She converses with my friends while I finish getting ready.

“Your mother is so eloquent,” Pam tells me as we head outside. “Her language is sophisticated and playful for someone her age and in her situation. It's such a contrast—there she is in a wheelchair, with her memory going, but her mind is still journeying all over the place.”

She's right. My mother's wit refuses to die.

 

We arrive at the church; nothing is as I imagined it would be. It is so much better. The church is not too cold as we feared it might be. A half hour before the concert and already the place is getting filled. Edward takes charge of pushing Mother's wheelchair. And the homage begins. Friends from thirty, forty, fifty years ago file in. They all want to see her. I watch her face as it lights up in recognition over and over again. She yelps in delight when her old friend Henson shows up. Another woman introduces herself to me, and my mother wheels around. “Did I hear you say Kaye? Kaye Bullock?!?” She knows everyone. She laughs joyfully. And they are so pleased to see her, to hold her hand, to tell her she hasn't changed.

“Oh yes, I have,” she says with a laugh.

We are surrounded. Not just with her friends but with some of mine, too. Walking in the door is Katie and Nella. Katie was
my best friend from the age of five to about ten. And her mother Nella was my second mother.

“I always said, we moved in and you moved over,” Nella tells me. Nella is the one who opened the door for me on that terrible night. And I still feel a bond with her all these years later.