Bad Bad Girl, page 30
I will never get used to it.
In the Scarsdale house of my childhood, my parents’ twin beds had stood like the flanking guardian beasts of an Assyrian palace gate, ensconcing, like a throne, their night table. In lieu of a monarch, though, the table boasted a fake Tiffany lamp with blue-green plastic panes and, below that, in its drawer, a hidden treasure: my mother’s notebook record of her temperature. (Despite the slip that gave rise to Sean, she continued practicing the rhythm method of contraception all her fertile years.) To approach the complex, you crossed a sound-deadening expanse of thick blue carpet with two white-brocade swivel chairs; there was a marble-topped fruitwood table on your right, and a dresser and chest of drawers on your left. The hush was palpable, and it was dim in there, thanks to the iridescent peacock-colored drapes. A semi-sheer panel hung between the drapes near the chairs, but behind the throne setup, drapes completely obscured the windows. Indeed, it was only when my parents moved out that I realized there were windows back there at all.
There is more light in this Chappaqua bedroom. But it is as if someone took my mother’s old bedroom, gathered it up into a hobo’s cloth, and then spilled it out here—willy-nilly and yet somehow, strangely, with its hush intact. Just one thing moves—my mother’s body, her chest rising and falling, rising and falling as she inhales and exhales, struggling to breathe. She is otherwise the picture of somnolence in her faded posy-sprigged ivory flannel pajamas; only her white hair is lively and wild, as if dreaming its own dream.
What is it about hair, that when it loses its color, it loses its shine, too? And why does it become hay-like and wayward? One section splays out in a flat whorl; it looks like a storm system on a weather chart. My mother is lucky in still boasting a full head of hair. She’s been spared the beach-dune-studded-with-plugs-of-erosion-control-grass look. But even she has lost her eyelashes. I am saddened by the puffiness of her eyes—part goldfish, part James Baldwin, I want to say, although I am too sad to quip. I am saddened by the mottled purpling of her hands, too (the result of bullous pemphigoid, Lisa has said, a rare condition in which your immune system attacks the tissue below your skin). And I am saddened by her sheer age—by the spectacle of time having gone stealthily after her cells, one by one by one.
But I am shocked at her dishevelment. It’s one thing for the room to be a mess. It’s another for the disorder, like a rising tide, to have reached her very bed. Her bedding is a jumble; her pajama top is twisted under her; and the fitted sheet, having for some reason never been properly pulled over the corner of the mattress, shrinks back like a receding gum. It exposes both the incongruously shiny gold brocade mattress on which she lies as well as another truth: though she has her aides and sons to take care of her, my mother does not have herself. Packer of neat suitcases and arranger of neat drawers that she was—upholder of the proper ways of doing things—she straightened my father’s bedding right until the end. People often think of me as having started to become a writer when I took the name Gish, but it was perhaps a greater act of defiance when I began to simply throw my underwear and socks into a drawer—when I stopped folding and stacking them as if for some impending inspection. How my mother would have hated to see her bed in this state.
I pull the corner of the sheet over the mattress corner. Part of me wants to blame the caregivers; I can’t help but wonder how well she’s really being cared for. But later, when I hear how the aides sit far from the other passengers on the train and how they change and wash their clothes as soon as they enter the house, I am glad I kept my doubts to myself. How much more they seem to know about the mystery disease than David and I. Is there a community of caregivers in the city, where they live? Do they talk and confer? So it seems. We are grateful.
At the same time—how my mother loved control, and how little she now has.
I shake her warm shoulder. She resists waking up—crying, half asleep, in a baby voice, “I don’t feel good, I don’t feel good.” But when I ask, “What’s the matter? What doesn’t feel good?” she just answers, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” and falls back asleep.
I try again to wake her.
“I want to sleep,” she cries. “I want to sleep.”
She sounds half awake—awake enough that finally, leaning over, I say, “Mom! Mom! Guess who’s here?”
Her lashless eyelids flutter.
“It’s not Reuben, and it’s not Lisa, and it’s not Sean, and it’s not Shane,” I say.
“Lil!” she says then, opening her eyes. And looking genuinely surprised and happy, she says, “You little stinker!” and caresses my cheek.
It’s a touch that should be so familiar, a gesture she should have made a million times. But in fact I only remember it from what seems a hundred years ago. I want to cry. Why did she wait decades to show that affection again?
“Little stinker.” Yes, she called me that, years and years ago. I had forgotten.
I wish she would call me that again.
* * *
—
The moment is lost in the process of getting her washed and dressed. Melanie handles this right through the smoothing on of my mother’s knee-high stockings. I help only with the working of her feet into the sneakers David and I bought on our last trip to see her. The sneakers are several sizes too big (size 8 when she’s always worn a 5½ or a 6) but even so have to be worn unlaced; her feet are as swollen as if she’d sprained them. She’s unclear sometimes about which foot is which, Melanie says, though it’s hard to know how confused she actually is, as she hears better out of her right ear than her left but not well in general, and of course will not wear a hearing aid.
I sigh. For years, the family struggled to convince my father to wear a hearing aid, too; when my day comes, I vow to be less self-defeatingly obstinate. In the meanwhile, all my mother’s colors seem off. It isn’t only that her feet are blue and her hands blue-splotched. In certain lights, her brown eyes, too, are almost blue—a milky blue, like the blue of a fine piece of porcelain held up to the light. And her mauve-painted nails belong to a strange register. Evocative of a ladies’ luncheon or a dance hall, they seem to reflect a generic notion of what elderly women like; it’s not hard to guess that there are half-moons of natural nail near the cuticle where the polish has grown out because the aides asked my mother if she’d like her nails touched up and she said no. Which, of course, my father always said she loved to do—say no, no, no, no—but how little power that “no” now holds. Though her white hair flares out, as per usual, like a broom, there is an improbable patch of black hair at the top of her forehead, like a photo negative of a witch’s forelock—all that remains, it seems, of her oppositional self.
The swelling under her eyes seems worse now that she’s up, and her eyelashlessness more disturbing. Though I had learned from the Johns Hopkins website that it is the weakening of the muscles and tissue around the eye that “allows the fat surrounding the eye to bulge out, creating that bubble-like appearance,” and that “a drop in certain hormones may slow or even halt the production of eyelashes,” explanation only helps so much.
Here we just are.
She gets into her wheelchair—her “Cadillac,” she calls it—on her own.
“By myself,” she chortles. “I think I’m pretty good.” And I readily agree—“You are!”—applauding and encouraging her, even though in truth I thought that she had stopped trying to use her walker well before she really had to. Back when she was in rehab, my siblings and I had had to push her to do her exercises, crying, “You have to try, Mom! You have to try!” Wrote Reuben in an email:
Her lack of faster progress is, I believe, partially psychological. She lacks confidence, and there’s also a laziness factor: if you’re flying business class and waited on all day long, there’s little incentive to do much for yourself.
* * *
—
But we were up against a master of stasis. It wasn’t just that she was “a bit stationary in the flesh,” as writer Grace Paley would have put it; she reveled in the power of inertia. The Daoists have a phrase—wú wéi—that extols a profound embrace of inaction, an embrace I thought of when I saw the great Kurosawa movie Kagemusha. In this, over and over, you hear the phrase “The mountain does not move,” and when, at last, the “mountain”—that is, the army—does move, the result is disaster, as my mother might have predicted had she been given to prognostication (which she was not). How steadfastly she had refused to apply herself to so many things over the years—to learning how to use an iPhone or iPad or computer, for example. How many times had I explained how to use a keyboard—didn’t she know how to type, after all? How many times had I held her finger to a touchscreen so she could see how gently she should tap it? And when that didn’t work, how many times had I tried to teach her to use a rubber-tipped stylus? It is in fact hard to learn to tap rather than press. But her brothers and sisters in Shanghai had all learned. I did not believe she could not do it.
“Wouldn’t it be fun to see what all the grandchildren are doing on Facebook?” I’d ask her, only to hear, “I’m too old to learn.” Instead, she watches TV. Now that my father has died, she can watch as much as she likes.
Once I tried to arrange for a water service for her.
“We can get you a dispenser,” I told her. “The jugs for it will be delivered. You won’t have to do anything. They’re big and last a long time, and can dispense not just cold water but hot—water hot enough for tea. It’s really convenient.”
But she resisted and resisted, until finally it dawned on her stupid American daughter that what she wanted was not convenience but company. She wanted my brothers to have to bring her water to her, jug by jug.
And so it is that for all the reasons people fudge in these moments, including a kind of largesse of spirit crossed with a frank desire not to hear the same sentence yet again, when she once more says, “I think I’m pretty good,” I answer, “Yes, you are, you’re very good.” Call-and-response.
David folds up her wheelchair, packing it into the trunk of the Mercedes of which he and I had disapproved many moons ago. We were in my father’s camp on this. “Just have to show you are rich,” he used to tell my mother, preferring old cars himself—cars you didn’t have to worry about. He did eventually come to enjoy a new car. After decades of dismissing such frills as soft, he finally bought a station wagon that wasn’t a strip model and drove it home from the dealer with the air-conditioning on high and all its windows open.
But how trivial those struggles seem today. Today we are just glad my mother has enjoyed her car. What an enormous repertoire of pleasures David and I have, after all—from walking with friends to reading in the bathtub to napping in the middle of a lake on paddleboards—whereas there are so few things you could even say my mother wants besides to see the Yankees win, and go out to lunch, and be told she’s pretty good for her age. With the wheelchair goes an old, flat gray-green pillow with a white stain of some sort on it. Her tummy is as beachball-round as ever, but the way her chin pours straight down to her breastless chest, she seems to be turning into that Japanese anime character Totoro—Hayao Miyazaki’s neckless chinchilla with the pencil-mark breast feathers.
My poor mother.
Most days my brothers take her to the bagel shop in Mount Kisco, where she has a croissant with scrambled eggs and decaf coffee. She picks up her New York Times there as well. Happily, the staff all know her, as she will often mention—“They know us there” being an important phrase for her, suggesting as it does that she feels not like the outsider she has been for so much of her life but an insider. Usually she eats half the croissant sandwich and takes the other half home in a doggy bag. If, however, we leave the uneaten half behind, as we did the day we took her to the Katonah Museum (afraid that, with the temperature in the nineties, the sandwich would go bad), the owner will run out after us, bag in hand.
“Your mom has trained me,” he will say.
My mother will be delighted.
But today we are headed to a new place in Mount Kisco called Village Social. It is my mother’s choice. She wants a change, and anyway, by this time (well past two o’clock) the bagel shop is closed. We arrange her pillow and wheel her up the ramp from the parking lot to the sidewalk. Then it’s past the pet grooming store where the groomer, it seems, gets bitten all the time. (I don’t remember how I got to talking to him one day, but I do remember how he shrugged off this particular occupational hazard. “You get used to it,” he said. Xíguàn le, in other words—my father would have approved.) We pass a deli, navigate some concrete pillars, and shoulder open the glass door, propping it ajar. By the time we are situated at a wheelchair-accessible table, my mother is no longer a person who seeks approval but one who grants or withholds it.
“Okay, Mom?” I say.
“Okay,” she says diffidently.
Nothing else.
Eldercare, American style. David and I start to wipe the table down with the hand wipes we’ve brought. A waitress appears and wipes the table down again with an old cloth—meaning well, but hasn’t she just spread germs all over the table? When she turns her back, we surreptitiously wipe the table once more.
“Okay, Mom?” I say again.
She says nothing. If she is curious about what we’re doing, she doesn’t ask.
Dave and I wipe her hands with a clean wipe, then split a wipe for us to share. On the drive down, we had learned from our phones that whatever is going on, there are already shortages of hand wipes. We don’t want to use two when one is enough.
It’s so early in the Covid crisis that the subject of masks has yet to come up. No one knows how the mystery virus spreads; neither are we sure how concerned to be. On the one hand, a lawyer in nearby New Rochelle has infected the better part of his synagogue. On the other, the total number of cases in the state is under one hundred. To reassure people that it’s safe, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has been filmed riding the subway. So is it paranoid to watch with trepidation as a curly-haired child plays around the legs of his mother’s chair, then circles through the dining room, giggling and playing peekaboo and touching everything? We’re not sure.
My mother pores over the menu, holding it so close to her face she could eat it. With the most animation she has shown so far, she chooses the dandan noodles. Though America has come a long way since the days when few outside our family seemed to eat things like dandan noodles or tofu (dôu vu, as we called it in Shanghainese), it’s still exciting to see a quasi-Chinese dish in a mainstream restaurant. Yes, it will be Americanized, but still. My mother orders the noodles, as do I, although as soon as they arrive, I realize that they have too much salt for her. How can I not have anticipated this? I am kicking myself, although luckily, they seem to be ramen from a package—not too appealing. And the pork is tough as jerky—far too tough for someone with false teeth to “bite,” as she puts it. She samples the dish more than she eats it per se.
I’m relieved.
The last time I made her dandan noodles myself, she was delighted, maybe because I used lots of what we call là yu in Shanghainese—chili oil—to make up for the lack of salt; she has always loved spicy food. “I like that,” she told me. “That’s taste real good.” And, “It’s good you can make Chinese food, so anytime I want Chinese food I can have it.” That phrase “anytime I want Chinese food” is, like “They know us there,” important to her; years after she has had to deal with scarcity in any form, the availability of food still registers. I promise her I will bring her some more noodles the next time we come down. In the meanwhile, what a treat to be out and about and eating with chopsticks.
“Chopsticks! In an American restaurant! Isn’t that amazing?” I say.
She nods.
“We never could have imagined such a thing when I was growing up.”
“At that time, very few Chinese people,” she says.
“We had to go to Chinatown for Chinese food.”
She doesn’t disagree.
“Or Hartsdale. Remember when that Japanese grocery opened?”
She bows her head a little, a quick down and up, remembering.
“Yes, they were always bowing.”
“Japanese people.”
She will never forgive the Japanese for their occupation of Shanghai. But her voice is neutral, as if she’s forgotten why she hated them.
“Yes, they were Japanese people. But the store had all kinds of things,” I say.
“Japanese food.”
“They had some Chinese stuff, too. Remember? Red bean paste. Ginger. Big bags of rice.”
She doesn’t respond. Maybe it’s too much to have to concede that the hated Japanese were rice-eaters like us.
“Of course, this isn’t really Chinese food,” I say.
“Chop suey,” she agrees—meaning that it is American food, really.
“Still,” I say. “Hái kěyǐ.” Meaning, It’ll do.
“Okay,” she says.
The food is good enough for her to ask for a doggy bag. But the salt—we shake our heads. No. Sorry. No doggy bag.
She’s disappointed. All the same, she got out of the house; she liked the food; she had fun. Everyone is happy. But if I had the idea that she would ask how we were, or what the children were up to, or even pretend to be interested should I volunteer something about, say, how things were going with Paloma’s debating or Luke’s research—it is like hoping a rock will blow out to sea.
