Bastards: A Memoir (15 page)

Early one evening during my senior year of high school, I happened to be near the phone when it rang. The voice on the other end of the line asked for Becca, and instinctually I said that they had the wrong number; no one named Becca lived here. As soon as the phone clicked into the receiver, my sister bounded around the corner and I remembered. I knew how important a name could be to a person; my name was certainly important to me. My sister had asked me hundreds of times to call her Becca, especially around her friends. My failure to do so reeked of contempt. I braced myself for one of her usual stomping and screaming fits, but it didn’t come.

“I tell you things and it’s like you’re not even here,” she said.

She was right. I wasn’t there. I was far, far away: from her; from Forty-fourth Street; from Mimi and Granddad; from Oklahoma.

I’d been gone for a long time.

Wake Up

A
fter I graduated from high school, I had a summer job at a nationwide call center where I booked rental cars for people in exotic locales like Danbury, Connecticut, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I still refused to spend any money on a car myself, but Granddad had retired by then and didn’t seem to mind giving me a ride when I needed one.

One afternoon two weeks after my high school graduation we were in the Chrysler, a new gold one that he’d bought himself as a retirement present. He kept his eyes on the traffic on the Lake Hefner Parkway, his hands locked at ten-and-two, when he told me, “Mimi’s sick.”

“Is it cancer?” I asked. She’d had a bout with breast cancer during my junior year of high school. They found it early and performed a mastectomy—she had been fine since then. But I knew that cancer could come back. It always did in the movies.

“It’s not cancer,” Granddad said. “They think it’s kidney failure.” A membrane of water clung to his blue eyes. He didn’t look at me and he didn’t blink.

Whenever we had reason to discuss Mimi’s health over the years, Granddad always said, “Don’t you worry, Mimi-Mouse is going to outlive me. By a
long
shot,” and he’d point out that Mimi’s parents had lived into their nineties. Granddad talked that way through every one of Mimi’s migraines, asthma attacks, and the increasing number of pills she took with her breakfast. He said it through the breast cancer and the mastectomy. But he did not say it today.

Mimi would need to start dialysis treatments as soon as possible. She was going into surgery the next day to insert a tube in her stomach. Then, once a week doctors would connect her body to a machine to clean her blood. The only other option was a kidney transplant. But new kidneys went to twenty-year-old diabetics or kids with rare congenital diseases, not seventy-four-year-old women who had recently had cancer.

“It’ll be a simple procedure,” Granddad said. “She’ll be home before you are tomorrow.”

But when I finished work the next day, Becca was waiting for me in the parking lot. She sat on the back bumper of the old gray Chrysler chewing her cuticles. This was strange: Granddad hadn’t sold the old car yet, but he never let Becca or me drive it. Not unless it was an emergency.

“Mimi’s not waking up,” my sister said.

Becca and I drove to the hospital. Granddad had asked us to bring a pair of pajamas for Mimi so she wouldn’t be cold. Mimi was on the eighth floor, in the intensive care unit. The tile floors, fluorescent lights, and the strange lady behind a desk sent a tremor through my psychic landscape.

“We’re here to see Mrs. King,” Becca said.

“There are no visitors in ICU, I’m sorry, girls,” The woman behind the desk said.

“We’re not visitors,” I said. “We’re her daughters.” I tilted my head to indicate the bundle of clothes in my hands. Who but daughters would bring pajamas, slippers, and a toothbrush?

The woman squinted her eyes at us; she must have been thinking about seventy-four-year-old Mimi, frail and curled and unconscious in a hospital bed on this floor, wondering how it was possible that woman had daughters our age. She was suspicious.

“We’re adopted,” I said, and she waved us through.

The hallway breathed with machine sounds, whirrs and clicks surrounded us as we passed dark rooms.

The blue-white spotlight above her bed was the only light source in Mimi’s room. Her eyes were open but unfocused, and her hands wandered slowly across the nubby white blanket that was tucked snugly around her chest and under her arms.

“She’s awake,” Granddad announced as we walked through the door. Becca stood at the edge of the light pool, her arms hugging her waist as if she needed them to hold her organs inside. A doctor entered the room carrying X-ray films. They rumbled like thunder as they curled in his hands.

He was a pulmonologist, one of a team of specialists—also including a cardiologist, gerontologist, and pathologist—whom Mimi’s original doctor had consulted when she didn’t wake up after her surgery. The pulmonologist showed us two X-rays of Mimi’s lungs: one that he had taken that morning, and one that Mimi’s oncologist had taken two years ago, after she’d had her mastectomy.

“See this scar tissue here?” he said, pointing to the two X-rays. The recent one looked decidedly more cobwebbed.

It had never been her kidneys. It was there in black-and-white. Mimi’s kidneys were fine—well, not exactly
fine
, but they weren’t what was killing her. The general anesthesia for the surgery this morning had caused her oxygen level to plum met, and because her lung capacity was so decreased with all that scarring—“fibrous tissue,” the doctor kept correcting himself—she couldn’t get enough oxygen with each breath. That effect had snowballed to the rest of her body.

“It is called pulmonary fibrosis
,
” he said. He told us that they weren’t sure what had caused it. Possibly the chemicals Mimi had inhaled over the twenty years she ran her beauty shop, or maybe she aspirated a bit of porcelain dust in her doll-making workshop.

“The only cure is a lung transplant,” the doctor continued.

If Mimi had been least likely to get a new kidney, she would never get a set of lungs. “She probably has about five years left on the lungs she’s got,” the doctor continued.

Right now the hospital would focus on getting Mimi’s body re-oxygenated. Her muscles, organs, and brain were operating on a trickle of the oxygen that they required. She would need physical therapy, breathing treatments, steroids. Mimi would be here for a while.

Granddad spent every day at the hospital, arriving there in the morning after he dropped me off at work. When he picked me up in the afternoon, we bought an extra-large milkshake for Mimi—the serious kind made with two scoops of ice cream—because Mimi didn’t like the hospital foods. She was losing weight, but she needed calories if she was going to get better.

I was shocked by how quickly Mimi’s body deteriorated. After a couple of weeks her calf muscles and forearm flesh dangled off her bones like flags. She rarely made sense when she spoke, but the nurses assured me that she was “making progress.”

I rarely saw my sister in those days. Becca slept late every morning, and when I got home at night she was jamming with her band or passed out in her bed with her jeans still on. The most time I spent with her was on Sunday mornings when Becca, Granddad, and I attended Sunday Mass, our weekly performance of family unity.

My sister failed to understand something that I thought was self-evident: in the face of illness, the family was meant to suffer, too. Their suffering was part of the cure. If sunny days were left to ripen and rot on the vine, if rosary beads were clicked together in urgent calypso-like rhythm, if fewer hours were slept, more coffee consumed—consumed, not enjoyed, in trough-sized amounts that gave me stomach cramps when I stood up—that would somehow protect Mimi.

Mimi’s daughter Jolene understood this. Every day that I spent in the hospital with Mimi, I saw Jolene’s handiwork. She curled and styled Mimi’s hair, perched hypoallergenic plants on the windowsill, and rolled new socks with skid-resistant grippers on Mimi’s feet. I wondered if Jolene saw my offerings when she was there. Did she notice the expanding collection of unscented lotions on the nightstand? Could she tell that I had rubbed those emollients into Mimi’s papery skin on her arms and legs, massaged her floppy muscles to increase blood flow? Had Jolene noted that Mimi’s fingernails were filed in ovals and her toenails clipped? Had she seen the thick novel whose bookmark was moving steadily through its pages as I read aloud to Mimi each day?

I introduced myself over and over. I’m her daughter, I said, so the day nurses would tell me Mimi’s current oxygen level. I told physical therapists, “She’s my mother,” when they chirped about how glad Mimi must be to have such a devoted granddaughter. I used the word
daughter
more in the hospital that summer than I had in the seven years prior.

As the weeks became months, Mimi grew more cognizant, though still physically weak. Walking to the bathroom required assistance and even with someone to lean on she got winded after more than five steps. She needed to exercise to revive her muscles, but exercise exhausted her. Then she needed to nap. Sometimes in a half-awake state she’d turn to me with empty cupped hands and say, “Take this kitten away, would you, it’s too hot.” And I would be unsure if she was awake or asleep; if I should humor her or point out that there was no cat. Maybe forcing her to stare at that fact would lead her out of her confusion. Maybe that was precisely what she needed, my refusal to wander into her dreamworld with her. I would look over my shoulders for a health care professional to offer guidance. When I didn’t see one I would scoop the phantom cat from Mimi’s hands and pretend to tuck it underneath my chair.

I was supposed to leave in three weeks to attend college in central New York. It was arranged before Mimi got sick, but I was no longer sure that leaving was the right choice. It occurred to me that there was a silver lining here if I was willing to take advantage of it. In Mimi’s illness was a way that I could finally repay Mimi and Granddad for the years of their lives that they spent raising me; I would reimburse their time with my time. I could stay. If I enrolled in the University of Oklahoma I could remain in the house on Forty-fourth Street and do whatever was needed.

I could have enrolled in OU without telling them. I could have simply done it. But some part of me still needed another person to approve my plan so I would know it was good.

My opportunity came on a mid-July afternoon after Mimi’s daily dose of
Murder, She Wrote
reruns. By late July she was having more good days. She could carry on conversations without losing her train of thought midsentence. She could make and hold eye contact. Her doctor had predicted that she had five more years, but forecasts could be wrong. I couldn’t be sure that I’d have another opportunity to say what I needed to say.

The way I felt about her was the echo of something I remembered feeling a very long time ago with my first mother, when I was a different person. My love for my first mother was sometimes, I thought, too intense. It warped me, that much closeness. It scooped a divot deep in my soul that would never be properly filled. Mimi and I would never have that sort of connection. The two-foot gap between my chair and her hospital bed that afternoon was physically the closest we had ever been.

“I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused you,” I said, giving Mimi the opportunity to say that I was no trouble, that she was glad to have someone to teach all the things she knew, an empty vessel for her to pour her knowledge into, such an eager pupil.

She said, “I know. I already know.”

“It’s not too late for me to stay,” I continued with my second line, looking at her knees shifting under the nubby blanket.

I mentioned that the state university accepted applications until the end of July. I could stay in the house on Forty-fourth Street, keep it in order until she was better. I could take care of her because she had taken care of me.

“No, no. You can’t stay . . .” she said, shaking her head, closing her eyes with the effort. “You have to go.” She reached for my hand. Her fingers were the lightest I had ever felt them. “You can come back and tell me all about it.”

She started to cough then, and the respiratory therapists arrived to administer her breathing treatment. I walked laps around the hallway to warm myself until they were done, thinking about what had just happened.

On the day of my adoption, I had looked for a grand gesture to show that someone cared about having me or losing me. But when I performed such a gesture for Mimi, for the woman I had been telling people was my mother all summer, she refused it. I wanted to be relieved—I should have been relieved—she had let me off the hook. I wouldn’t have to be a seventeen-year-old nurse. I could to go college, and parties, and be whoever I wanted to be. But this crossroads was ominously familiar. I couldn’t consider this present situation without thinking about the choice I’d made when I left Peggy. Here I was, years later, abandoning another mother at the lowest point in her life in pursuit of something better, something for myself. I regretted leaving Peggy every day, and I knew that this departure would trouble me the same way. A truth pulsed in my mind like a neon sign: Daughters stayed. In every story about family and illness I had encountered—from
Little Women
to
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape
—family stayed close. But maybe I had overlooked something. Maybe in those stories the characters stayed close because they were held close. And I wasn’t.

Mimi was released from the hospital a week before I left for New York. She had more accessories now, an oxygen machine that sat in the living room with hundreds of feet of hollow tubing that tethered her to it, a wheelchair, a walker, a traveling oxygen tank, and enough bottles of pills to fill half a kitchen cupboard. Granddad portioned the pills into a container with twenty-eight compartments and wrote detailed notes for Becca to administer them over the next four days, when Granddad would be driving me to New York.

Granddad and I packed the new Chrysler early on an August morning. The sky was still dark when I slid the last plastic bin in the backseat. Becca shuffled to the front door and leaned out, barefoot and pajama’d, to watch me. Her hair hung in her face like a beagle’s ears.