Don't Call Me Mother (34 page)

The following days are spent monitoring Daddy, who’s in Mexico receiving Laetrile treatments. I write him a letter, eager to share with him Gram’s transformation and that she wanted to be forgiven. My heart pounds as I try to link these two enemies, whose connection to each other has been through me, and through their own wrangling and fighting. I hope they can each forgive now, and enjoy a peaceful end to their lives. It feels unreal—both of them dying at once. Will Daddy be able to read my letter? What will he say to this miracle?

Two weeks later Aunt Helen calls to tell me Gram has taken a turn for the worse, though no one knows exactly what’s wrong with her. Mother is on her way by bus. Uh-oh, I think. There’ll be trouble now.

That day I spend the afternoon with Gram at the hospital. She half-sleeps and dreams, calling out the names of people she once knew, murmuring about the past. I wonder if she’s reviewing her life in preparation for death. I think about the spiritual teachings I’ve read about the dying—reviewing their lives, meeting departed loved ones. Is Blanche waiting for her?

All afternoon, Gram has slipped in and out of reality, but when Aunt Helen and Uncle Maj arrive she sits up, alert. While Aunt Helen is feeding her dinner, a nurse announces that a “Miss Myers” is downstairs. Aunt Helen and I respond with a moan. The nurse says, “I don’t want anyone disturbing our patient.”

We explain that Mother is “different,” that she and Gram don’t get along. I tell them I’ll calm Mother down and check out her mental state before bringing her up to see Gram.

When I lean down to Gram to tell her that Mother has arrived, she stops eating, and her eyes fill with tears. “Oh, my brown-eyed baby,” she says, invoking the phrase she always used when she felt tender toward Mother. I try not to cry as I walk down to fetch her. What were things like when Mother was a little girl? When exactly did Gram leave her? I don’t really know what happened back then, only that it has left a tragic history never to be fully revealed now that Gram seems to be dying. Will Gram and Mother say words of forgiveness the way Gram and I did? I do know this—they have not laid eyes on each other for eight years. Aunt Helen told me that Gram “paid her off” with several thousand dollars to leave her alone and never come back. It’s a shocking story—and it just might be true.

Mother paces impatiently in the lobby. She is well fitted-out with perfect make-up and hair, despite her two-day bus trip from Chicago. She peppers me with questions, obviously worried about Gram. I tell her that the nurse asked us to wait a few minutes before coming up. We chat about Mother’s trip and the weather, unusually hot for this time of year, until she seems calm.

When we go up, she marches boldly into Gram’s room and I follow. I’m surprised to find Gram lying down, the covers pulled up to her chin, her eyes tightly closed. The last time I saw her, she was eating dinner. How could she go to sleep so quickly during the few minutes I was downstairs? Gram doesn’t move for several hours. Finally I realize that something must be wrong, and get the doctors and nurses involved. They examine her and declare that she’s in a coma. It’s uncertain why, and they can’t say when, or if, she’ll come out of it. I wonder if Gram managed to disappear so she wouldn’t have to face her daughter.

Mother becomes more and more distraught, wild-eyed and wired as the hours pass. She paces and smokes all night while I try to get some sleep curled up on an orange plastic couch. She wakes me up to grill me about Gram’s money—how much is there, when will she get it—subjects that I know nothing about. Finally I shout at her to let me sleep, but she won’t. She even harasses the nurses and upsets everyone on the hospital floor. Constantly embarrassed, I keep apologizing to them for her insensitivity and rudeness.

I keep vigil at Gram’s bedside, trying to prevent Mother from screaming her questions at me, but I can’t stop her from ranting for hours about money and men, her usual subjects. After three exhausting days, I tell Mother that I have to leave. The plains weather has plunged from the seventies to the forties. Wearing the same flimsy spring skirt and blouse I arrived in three days ago, I’m freezing and just plain frazzled. I plan to go home, then come back with warmer clothes to take up the vigil again. Mother tries to stop me from leaving, threatening to slap me if I don’t “mind.” Despite all my years of independence, Mother scares me, but I stand my ground until she agrees that I should go.

I whisper my good-byes to Gram, telling her that I hope she will be all right wherever she is going. I tell her that I’m sorry for all the things that didn’t work between us, and thank her for forgiving my father and me.

Her death will free me, but I can’t imagine life without her.

Two days later, on my twenty-sixth birthday, the phone rings at three in the morning. The nurse on the other end of the line tells me that Gram is gone. The nurse says that Mother is sitting right there, but she doesn’t want to speak to me. After I hang up, I try to imagine where Gram might be. Is she hovering nearby? Can she see me lying here beside Dennis, thinking of her? There are no tears that night, but they will come. Later, grief will run like a river. I will find out that death does not end a relationship; it is a beginning.

The next day, there are many small tasks to distract me: I play with Andrew, wash the dishes, and vacuum the house. Everything passes in a fog—it doesn’t seem possible that it’s both my birthday and the day of Gram’s death. In the afternoon, the funeral home calls to ask me a startling question: “What are we supposed to do with the body?”

“You mean my grandmother?”

“Yes. We don’t have any instructions.”

“My mother said she would handle everything.”

“I’m sorry, miss, but she’s left.”

“Left what?”

“She left town.”

Typical. Mother had chased me up and down the halls of the convalescent home, screaming that we’d have a funeral in Enid, but I knew Gram wanted to be buried beside Blanche; she wanted a funeral with her Iowa family. None of that suited Mother. She would handle everything, she said in a huff, yelling at me to shut up and leave it all to her.

Now, it seems Mother has gotten on a bus and vanished.

The day after my birthday, I awaken in Aunt Helen’s bed. Lying between sweet-smelling sheets, I stroke the empty side of the bed, remembering how Gram slept next to me on those carefree weekends of my young childhood. We’d cuddle together spoon fashion, her breath on my neck, the warmth of her body against me.

Gram was always her best self at Aunt Helen’s. Perhaps she felt the most loved and accepted there. Nothing Gram ever did permanently tore them apart. The year after their blowup about the letters to Daddy, Aunt Helen came over every Sunday with a homemade dinner. Gram would rant and rave as always, and even call her names and abuse her, but Aunt Helen would just nod, saying, “Uh-huh, you don’t say.” She’d grin, nod, and burp. After Gram finished the meal, Aunt Helen would gather her dishes and head toward the door. “Now you quit those cigarettes and get some sleep, Frances.” The next week, Aunt Helen would return, bearing fried chicken and chocolate pudding, or whatever delicious item she might create in her kitchen, and it would happen all over again. I would watch this constant loyalty from Aunt Helen, thinking, “So this is loyalty. This is the kind of friend I want to be.”

Aunt Helen thought of it this way: Gram wasn’t well. It was a simple, natural thing for Aunt Helen to offer her friend the food from her table and her undivided attention for an hour a week. She wouldn’t let Gram break her spirit or destroy their bond. Those were the rules of Christian friendship that Aunt Helen believed in and lived.

Once I wake up fully, I remember that Gram is dead. Reluctantly, I throw off the quilt. I could spend the rest of my life in Aunt Helen’s cozy bed, safe from the troubles of the world. Only the smell of fresh coffee, the soft shuffle of Aunt Helen’s padding feet, and Uncle Maj’s morning harrumphs make it possible for me to leave the bed and face the hardest journey of my life.

Aunt Helen and Uncle Maj drive me to Perry where I will take the train with Gram’s casket in the baggage car to Iowa for the funeral. A pale sun flits between clouds as we follow the shiny black hearse down familiar roads threading between greening wheat fields. As I have done so often before, I wait at the Perry station for my future to unfold. Gram’s casket rests on one of the old wooden carts on the platform. The train whistles, everyone gathers close to the tracks, and the railroad men roll the casket to where the baggage car will pull up. After the train arrives, the three of us watch Gram’s casket being lifted into the train for her last ride.

The ironies of all this are with me as I board the train and wave at Aunt Helen and Uncle Maj until they grow small in the distance. As we cross Kansas, I sit alone, gazing at a perfect pink sunset. In the dining car, coffee is served in paper cups, and the sandwiches are served on plastic plates. I remember Gram and me in the compartment with our silver coffee service, the fancy white tablecloth and china, during one of our trips to Iowa. I lift my paper cup for a toast. “For you, Gram. For you.” Tears wash inside me, but I am too tired to cry.

The train splits the darkness of the plains, whistling its lonely call all through the long dark night.

The Iowa family and I gather together at the funeral home high on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. Gram rests in a casket I chose for her on my birthday, wearing the clothes I selected for her on my birthday. She lies with her hands folded, looking peaceful the way Blanche did at her funeral. Mother sits quietly in the front row and barely nods at me when I come in. She appeared in Muscatine just before the funeral, telling a strange tale of being disoriented, blown into a building in Kansas City. No one knew if her story was true. To the farm people of Iowa, with their down-home logic and common sense, she wasn’t entirely credible. Something must have happened to mother’s mind, but she was irritating just the same, full of her usual bossiness and hysteria.

The minister speaks of eternal life, telling the basic facts of my grandmother’s life: She was born in 1894 to Blanche and Lewis. Married to Jasper Blaine. Had a son named Harrison who died at birth, a daughter named Josephine, and a granddaughter named Linda. Traveled to Europe. Lived in Enid. Died. What a sketchy outline of a complex person, whom in some ways, I feel I never quite got to know.

After the funeral, there’s the usual party for the living. All the neighbors and Blanche’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren gather at Edith’s. Everyone contributes to the usual Midwestern assortment of food: fried chicken, gravy and mashed potatoes; potato salad, ambrosia, Jell-O with grated carrots; chocolate cake and fruit pies. This delicious down-home food was made by these ladies in cotton dresses, whose worn, spotted hands are smoothing white tablecloths in the dining room, ordinary women who love their children and grandchildren.

Their conversations weave memories of the Iowa world for me: ripe tomatoes in August, Blanche embroidering by the window, a rhubarb pie on a summer afternoon. This is the place where my roots are, but I realize now that it will all disappear one day. Gram is dead and Daddy is dying. Edith, Grace, and the others will go someday, and I’ll be alone with my mother, who seems to care about nothing but herself. Of course, one day she too will die, but the prospect doesn’t sadden me as it should.

Suddenly, Mother’s shrill voice punctuates the droning murmur. She’s chatting with the minister, waving her cocked cigarette holder as she tells a largely fictional story of Gram’s life, in which she, Josephine, is the star, she is the one who is put upon, wounded, and lost. I don’t argue with her, realizing in that moment that my mother, who in some way lost her mother long ago, is entitled to her own way of coping with all of this. Maybe being the star of the show—sashaying around the men with her curves, her big-city attitude, and her perfect face and hair—maybe that makes her feel better.