Frog (56 page)

“He takes his mother out to dinner, drinks too much at her apartment first and then at the bar while they're waiting, because she wants one, for a window table, and gets sentimental and sad to himself about how old she looks and fragile she is and weak her voice has become, though doesn't want to reveal what he's feeling. But for the first time, he believes, he sees her as—”

“I asked my mother to tell me a thing or two about her mother she remembers the most. She asked me what I meant. I said ‘A memory, some incident, something she did to you or around you or to anyone—anything, a trait, habit or ritual she went through, religious, dress, food, or otherwise. But just something that keeps coming back and back to you—a quirk, even, or some physical gesture or a pretension—and you do or you don't know why it does come back or why you can't forget it or even what it means to you or just in itself, but something that possibly, well, you know, exemplifies her, but it doesn't have to be as sweeping as all that.' She looked at me as if she still didn't understand. I shrugged as if saying ‘What's wrong?' ‘Really, sweetheart, you're not making yourself very clear, and I don't think it should be blamed entirely on my hearing.'” Enough, give up.

_______

She was a very pretty child. People thought she'd be the best-looking one in the family, possibly a beauty like his mother. Complexion, nose, eyes, hair, smile, face shape, long neck, fine features. It's difficult describing looks. There's a photo. There's always a photo. In a large plastic bag of photos he keeps in a file cabinet drawer in his office at school. Has no room for it in the house and his mother lives too far away to keep it there. But that's the one he thinks of when he thinks how pretty she was and beautiful she might have become. A posed photo, as much as a child can pose, by a professional photographer his parents had hired when she was around three. Since it was summer and he knows what year it was and when she was born, she was six to seven months past three. They had rented a bungalow for the summer in a bungalow colony near Peekskill, New York. So his father could drive up weekends. Morning Glory Park, it was called. No significance. Later photos: when she was very ill, dressed in black, couldn't get around except with a walker or on crutches and not for long on either of them. Thin, gaunt, twenty to thirty pounds lighter than what should have been the normal weight for a woman her age and size. But that's another thing. She was supposed to become the tallest member of the family: six feet or six-one. Based on the growth chart compiled by her pediatrician. In the top two percentile in height and something close in weight when she was born and then when she was a month old, half-year old, every annual checkup till she was five. That's when she showed the first sign—cross-eye—of the disease that would kill her twenty years later. First operation when she was six. Another when she was nine or ten. Several in her teens, one in her twenties, all crippling her more but done, doctors said, to stop the disease from spreading. If there was a family motto: “Doctors Like to Cut.” Years later his mother would say “Was any of it necessary? What we put her through so early. If I had it to do over I wouldn't let them cut into her so soon and maybe not at all. Those operations just replaced big ugly growths on her neck and back with long ugly scars, and I'm sure they metastasized the disease faster.” And a few years ago: “Today, of course, she would have been cured or at least not died from it.” He was with her that morning in the hospital. Where most of this will probably take place. It's been on his mind. They knew she was dying. Her medical man used an expression when she was brought in. “There aren't any nails left to bang into her coffin.” Or “nails left in her coffin to bang in.” He said that to them because of the more well-known line about nails and coffin he used the previous time she was brought in. Tubes all over her body and under her bed. But what? Last time she was measured—it was nearly impossible; for years she couldn't stand or lie down straight—she was four-eleven to five-two. And weight, couple of months before the last time she went into the hospital, was sixty-eight pounds. He was curious. She'd become so light. So he put a scale by her bed, weighed himself on it, picked her up while his mother was changing the bed under her or pulling away the potty, and stepped on the scale with her and told his mother to see what it read. Later his mother said they shouldn't have done it, what was to be gained by it? and he could have slipped on the scale “and that's all we need is for her to break her hip.” She's brought home several days after she was born. He's waiting at the door with his next oldest brother. A nurse he's never seen before is carrying her in a blanket. His parents are behind her, all bundled up, laughing, and waving at them. A big to-do in the building's hallway before they even get in. Someone, while she's being passed around, asks how he likes her. He says he just met her, so doesn't know but thinks he likes her fine. How do you know if you don't know her yet? He's supposed to have said, one of his remarks often quoted by his father, “For now she's too small to do anything wrong to me.” She's on her back kicking the floor and screaming. He doesn't like her. She looks so ugly. She makes so much noise. She cries and whines too much. She's no fun to play or be with. She never says anything smart or nice or thinks up new things to do. She's always cranky and complains. Her face is red and twisted and wet too much. She's allowed not to eat what he has to eat and doesn't like. Can't they see? She's only screaming for attention. Or she's trying to get him in trouble by making believe he hurt her or wanting people to think that. Someone get her to stop. Her screaming's busting his eardrums. Plug up her mouth or he's going to do it for them or start screaming at the top of his lungs too. His mother says his sister can't help it. She's frustrated, she says. He doesn't know what that means and every definition his mother gives doesn't help. It's not being able to deal with her sickness, that's all, his mother says. So what's she so sick with? She's just sick, but something worse than a headache or a cold. An earache? he says. If it's an earache, he can understand. Then she should be in bed with that heating pad under her bad ear, which for him doesn't do anything but give him an upset stomach, it's so sickening and warm, but for everybody else it seems to work. Something much worse than that, she says. He's too young to understand what. But he has to begin tolerating her tantrums—sympathizing with her, even—helping to calm her down, if he can. In other words, putting up with her the best way he knows how, or at least a lot better than he's been doing. She's just faking, he says. He'd grab her up and twist her wrist and start spanking her hard till she stopped crying. She tells him to go to his room and stay there till he can come out and say he understands. He says he can't understand, he'll never understand. She's just a brat and everybody should know it. He's slapped and pulled to his room by his hand. She's got a hole in her throat. He learns a new word, tracheotomy. He learns another new word, trachea, but this one he forgets fast. He learns other new words: windpipe and bronchial tubes and larynx, but the last two he quickly forgets what they mean too and how to say them. Bronchee, monkey, long key. It's an ugly hole in her neck, pink and full of wet flesh like a fingertip gash, with a little dribbling like spit coming out of it sometimes. He doesn't know when the hole's uglier, with the tube in or out. She has it in her when she comes home after each operation. It makes his mother sick when she has to clean it or use it to suction the gook out of her neck right past the hole. He can't wait for the tube to come out for good and the hole to close. It never does all the way but gets smaller and smaller till after a while it's about as big as a little asshole when it's closed and he can look at it for a short time without turning away. Sometimes, though, and he doesn't know why now and not then, he has to excuse himself quick and run to the bathroom because his stomach's getting sick. He begins feeling sorry for her. No more yelling at her, she wasn't a brat and he can see it was something else doing it to her. She's in a hospital bed at home and doesn't look like the same girl that left. Skin's yellow and black marks under her eyes, cheeks are deep and lips are chapped and cracked, and something about her hair and eyeballs. Came home on a stretcher carried by two men. Ambulance outside with its roof light turning and a few people on the sidewalk bending down to look past the building's vestibule all the way back to the apartment's foyer. “It's my sister. She had a bad operation at the hospital that almost killed her, but she'll be getting better at home.” “I'm glad,” someone says. “You be a good brother and take good care of her.” “That's what I'm doing. I'm trying to keep the street quiet for her, because she's right in that front room. Anyone beeps a horn too much, I'm running over to say something.” He tells his mother how he feels and she says it's about time. Then she says she's sorry for saying that and pats his head and says it's wonderful he feels that way and she hopes he means it deeply because it's much better for Vera that he does. “If she thought you didn't want to look at her or hated her the way she is or just didn't like her, you never know what could happen. She could just give up and die.” Later she says it could never come to what she said it could. It would just mean a lot to Vera and no doubt help her get well faster if he showed her the kind of nice attention they all know he's capable of. She's in bed in the hospital after her second operation. That would make him around eleven. Bar above her bed to hold on to or pull herself up with when she gets stronger. Flowers and cards all over the room. Toys, fruits, boxes and tins of candy. Lots of tubes and hanging bottles near her. A new radio she doesn't want played and dolls and stuffed animals she wants taken home or turned away from her. That same sick face again, arms black and blue, scrawny. She hardly says a word to anyone but his mother and usually so quietly his mother has to put her ear to Vera's lips. “What? What? Don't repeat if it's too hard to.” Her head never leaves the pillow and mostly faces up. Something's been drilled into the top of her skull. Someone calls it a sinker and he thinks of fish. Another new word, traction, which he almost never understood but could see what it was doing. Each time she moves her head even a little he thinks her scalp's going to be pulled off. The weight attached to the cable seems heavy enough to give him some trouble lifting. She doesn't seem to be in pain but he doesn't see how unless she's being drugged. He wonders how the sinker will come out without another operation. He asks and someone says don't worry, it's like a tooth. He thinks of his own teeth, which fell out while he was eating or came out with a little jiggling, and thinks that might not be it but he's satisfied with it. He hopes she doesn't come home with it in and the pulley and weight and his mother says she's going to be in the hospital that long just so she won't. A visiting nurse comes for two hours a day at home to relieve his mother and do the harder chores. Vera won't let anyone do the suctioning but his mother. She says it hurts too much when anyone else does it. His mother pleads with her that she doesn't do a good job sometimes and maybe just this once it should be done properly, but Vera squinches her eyes and pounds her thighs with her fists and shakes her head violently. He has trouble looking at her in the hospital bed from one side because of the urine bag hanging off it. Sometimes it's so full and the tube to it is still dripping that he thinks it's going to burst all over the floor or else go back inside her without bursting and kill her. He sees her body filling up with urine till it leaks out of the neck tube, and he has to shake the thought off. But he's also drawn to the bag, often checking how high the urine is, and occasionally tells people it's filled or that the bag's very dirty and she needs a new one, but they always say it has a little ways to go yet or that the bag can be used a couple of more days. There's a big party for her sixth birthday. Friends of his parents, cousins and uncles and aunts, kids from the block who don't even know her and a few who seem too old to be there. The room's decorated with streamers, flowers and balloons, all the kids have party hats and noisemakers, folding chairs and a special long table have been rented, lights have been set up around the table for a movie a man's been hired to make of the party. There's mixed drinks and catered canapés and things for the adults, hamburgers and hotdogs and potato salad and different sodas for the kids, a huge ice cream cake is brought in by two waitresses, three musicians play the kind of music he once heard at a wedding, a clown pulls rings and bracelets and money and a baby rabbit out of Vera's ears and mouth and gives her the jewelry. She's very shy through it all and won't look at the camera whenever she's asked to. She blows out the candles after several tries and with some help from his parents and everyone cheers and claps and sings “Stand up and show us your beautiful face,” and his father lifts her to his shoulder and walks around the apartment with her and lots of the older people kiss her fingers and knees and shoes. He asks his mother why such a large party for her and she says it was so much fun and everyone had such a good time and it was so wonderful seeing so many of her family and friends together for once that maybe she'll give them like this for all her children from now on. His mother wants him to read to Vera a half-hour a day. It'll take her mind off things, she says, and her eyesight's gone bad and she refuses to be examined for glasses. Whatever he chooses to read she doesn't like and she can't think of a book she wants him to read. She doesn't like any books, she says. There's nothing in them that ever means anything to her and someone reading one to her would make what's bad even longer. He says hell read fast, she'll see, so pick a subject she's interested in and he'll go to the library and get a bunch of books on it. If they don't have it, their mother's said he can buy any book she wants at a bookstore and as many as two a week. She says “Nothing,” then she says “Pottery.” He says all right, he'll get them, even if they won't be very interesting reading for him. What is pottery? she says. She's heard the word and liked the sound of it. He says at her age she doesn't know what pottery is? Maybe that's why she should be reading books more. But she must be kidding him, and she says she is but he can see she's not. He ends up reading her
Robinson Crusoe
because he has to read it for a book report at school. Most of the times she falls asleep about ten minutes after he starts reading. Or stares up at the ceiling and when he calls her name and asks if she's listening, she doesn't answer or look at him. It's the drugs, his mother says. Maybe in a few months she won't have to take them anymore. His reading is making it much easier for her to rest and fall asleep naturally though, which she also needs to do, so look at it that way. His brothers and he always know about her next operation a week or so beforehand. His mother usually announces it to them at the dinner table about an hour after she's told Vera. “I'm very sad to have to say this, though it is, what I'm about to say, going to take place for a very good purpose…” “I know what you're going to say,” Vera said once, “and I don't want to. The doctors hurt me. They come at me with sharp blades and big clubs and cut and beat me to ribbons and I feel most of it when it's going on but I'm too doped-up to keep them away or say anything. And then it hurts for such a long time after and none of the painkillers do anything to make it stop and I get uglier and smaller and worse each time. I know I'm going to die because of the operation this time, either when they're doing it or soon after.” “No you're not. It's a simple operation, the simplest of any of them. More for correcting a little thing from the last one than doing anything new this time. Probably not even an IV after it or any intensive care. You'll be up and around maybe an hour or two after you come out of the anesthesia, if they even have to put you out for it.” “That's what you said before the last one and it was the worst and most painful one I had. This one will be even worse. And the one after it, if I don't die this time, even worser.” “What are you saying? This one should be the last.” “That's what you said before the last one. I remember and you do too and everyone else here does also but you'll all pretend you don't. You think I'm dumb and have lost my memory because that's what my sickness is supposed to do to me too. And why does it always have to be me? Why doesn't someone else here get sick like me and have to go in for one and I can have a rest from them for once?” “I'm sure if one of us could—” “I won't go to the hospital for it. I'll run away first. I'll kill myself first, even. It's better than having a lot of doctors with half faces cut me up and hit me with hammers to help me die.” “Believe me, darling, this one should be the very last. I was mistaken the last time. I understood wrong what the doctor told me. This one you'll be on the operating table a short time and home in a day or two. And you'll have dinner at the table with us that night if your stomach can take it and you'll go to sleep in your own bed when you get home. If I'm wrong again—If there are sudden complications while they're operating, and they don't expect that to happen. Or something they just discovered because they have you opened up—then it won't be because I was mistaken or didn't understand what the doctor told me. These things sometimes happen. But I truly believe and hope and pray and everything like that, my sweet darling—we all do—that it won't happen this time around with you.” She's always dressed as if for a party and has her little valise packed with bedclothes and bathroom things and a few of her smaller bubbled-glass and alabaster animals when she goes to the hospital. She's always at the door with the valise and with her coat and hat on and once holding a child's umbrella, waiting for her mother to finish her coffee and maybe have another cup and brush her hair and put lipstick on and get her coat and handbag out of the foyer closet and make sure she has all the documents the hospital needs and enough cash in her wallet and her checkbook and a paperback to read and her keys. His father always goes to work about a half-hour before. Vera's already waiting at the door. Kisses her and says if he's not too tied up with last-minute patients he'll see her at the hospital tonight. His mother and she always go alone together. Vera won't let anyone carry her valise outside or put it in the cab. A couple of times he ran up the block with one of his brothers to get a cab for them, then had to run down the block while his brother rode in the cab to their building. He should have been in school by then but his mother wanted Vera's brothers there to say good-bye. He kisses her and his mother and waves to them and the cab drives off. His mother always looks through the rear window and then waves back at them till the cab slows down for a red light or is about to turn the corner. Maybe she was holding on to Vera when the cab came to a stop or turned, afraid she might fall forward or hard to the side. Vera never says a word these mornings. Head always faced down and she never looks straight at anyone or responds to any question or remark, even his mother's. When his father crouched down and hugged her and said something in her ear, she stared at the door. His own last words to her on the sidewalk are always “Good luck,” and then he wishes he hadn't said them. She might think the operation's going to be much worse than she's been told. That she might need luck after all. For why have her brothers stayed home for her, why's everyone being extra nice to her? Two of these mornings he tells himself, when Vera's about to get into the cab, not to say good luck as he's done the last times, but it always comes out. Say “See ya,” he tells himself one of those times, “See ya, Vera” or “I'll see ya,” which is what he almost always says when he leaves one of his friends or brothers, but something stops it—he forgets while he's telling himself to say it and instead says “Good luck.” His mother always later says Vera was the same way in the hospital: silent and resigned and acting like a phantom when she was checked in. “I had to do all the answering for her—how old, date of birth and so forth, any cold or sore throat the last few days?” And then when she went upstairs to her room, had lunch and dinner—“I had to check off what I thought she wanted to eat and drink; she wouldn't give me a clue.” And when she went for some tests or aides and doctors came in to prepare her for the operation if it was to be the next day. His father never gets to the hospital those nights but always leaves the house early the next day to be there in time for her breakfast. If the operation is for the next morning, he skips going there that early and comes after work much later that day. Once he went away for a couple of days when she was being operated on. A patient of his had invited him to a Catskill resort he had a big interest in or owned. His father said he took the man up on it only because the operation would be too much for him—it was to be the most serious she'd had—and he'd be more problem than help if he hung around the city during the operation and went to the hospital right after. But his mother used to say he just didn't want to pass up a free vacation. Years later Vera told him, when she got into an argument with him about something else, that she still held it against him, but other times she said she'd never given it much thought. “You did right. You wouldn't have been any help.