My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman (17 page)

One of the oddest experiences you may ever have is visiting your adult child for the first time. And while we’re on the subject, “adult child” is one of the oddest phrases ever.

I’m not sure it even makes sense.

I guess that, at age 24, Daughter Francesca is considered an adult child, and God knows I’ve met a child adult in my time.

But to stay on point, Francesca has lived in New York for a year now, and I still feel weird when I visit her. It’s different from when I saw her at college, because though she was living on her own there, she was in a dorm and therefore hadn’t become an official adult child. But now that she has an apartment and a lease, there’s no question.

So when do I stop calling her an adult child and start calling her an adult?

If you’re a mother, the answer is easy:

Never.

I think it’s hard to let go of your child, whether she’s going to college or kindergarten, whether she’s walking down the aisle or backpacking in France. And if having your kid move out is bad enough in theory, visiting her makes it real.

Can I just say that I’m not completely on board with this whole moving-away part?

I think it’s something we don’t talk about, for fear of being labeled insanely overprotective.

Like that’s a bad thing?

Honestly, I keep it to myself, but every time I visit her, I see for myself how treacherous her life can be. A woman from her building was mugged and her jaw was broken. Another woman she knows was hit by a van as she crossed the street, her nose broken.

A face is in jeopardy in the big city.

Francesca lives in a nice neighborhood, and when I walk around, I see lots of nice people, but I also see drunks and drug addicts. True, I don’t have proof of their occupation, but they wear black-leather jackets and have lots of tattoos and piercings.

So they could be lawyers.

But in my defense, there was a time once when a drunk/drug addict staggered into a pet store where we were, tried to kiss Francesca, then fell crying on the floor. She felt sorry for him, and I wanted him dead.

Keep your lips off my baby.

And my thoughts ran wild. What if he had a knife? A gun?

When I walk down her street, I worry, is this where she walks every day? And where can I buy a large plastic bubble?

It only gets weirder when I cross the threshold into her apartment, where she asks me to sit down and offers me coffee and a sandwich.

Who raised this child?

It’s sweet of her to offer, but it’s for me to sit her down and make her a sandwich. I can’t shake a habit of twenty years so easily. My job is to feed and water. So we bump into each other as we both go for the sandwich plate.

She wins.

And as proud of her as I am, and I am so proud, I do wish I could help her just a little. I wasn’t aware of this until my last visit, when I found myself cleaning up her apartment while we talked, even though it was already neat and clean. I started picking up a stray newspaper here and there, and she finally waved me onto the couch.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said, softly. “Please, stop.”

“But I can help.”

“Let’s just talk instead.”

Still I wanted a vacuum cleaner. I could hardly wrap my mind around the role reversal. My world was going topsy-turvy, but I sat down and we started talking and the chores were forgotten among the chatter.

We’re making a new way to be together, visit by visit.

The hardest part comes when I have to leave, and again, on the last visit, I was supposed to go on Sunday night after dinner, but I found myself making excuses to stay over. When it started raining, I decided it was dangerous to drive home.

(In truth, I drive in blizzards.)

Also I noted that
Big Love
was on TV, and I love
Big Love.

(But I had set the DVR before I left home.)

Plus Monday was a holiday, so the traffic would be less if I stayed over and drove home the next day.

(There’s no traffic at ten o’clock at night anyway.)

So of course I weaseled my way into staying over, but I couldn’t stop there. I insisted that she let me drive her to the dry cleaner with her dirty clothes, then I offered to run errands with her in the car, then we could have lunch.

She looked over at me, in the front seat.

She said I was being nice.

But I wasn’t.

I was being a mother.

And she’s an adult.

You know I have way too many dogs, which constitute the sum total of my social life. But the pet who takes up most of my time is a cat.

Vivi.

You may remember that I live with two cats, Mimi and Vivi. Mimi is nice, and Vivi is mean. Mimi is affectionate, and Vivi is nasty. Mimi is good, and Vivi is evil. In other words, Mimi is Gallant, and Vivi is John Wayne Gacy.

And she’s up to some new tricks.

She’s accelerated her occasional mouse murder to a killing spree. I know that many people don’t let their cats out at all, but I have plenty of room and live near a wooded area, so both cats go out in the day and come in at night. Which means that every morning, my first chore is cleaning up mouse remains.

Wake up and smell the tails.

I won’t get too graphic, but it’s not pretty. Vivi doesn’t merely kill mice, she dismembers them. If I wanted to, I could reassemble the body parts and put together a grotesque mouse puzzle. It’s not like she eats them, either, because she’s always ravenous when she comes in. I stuff her with high-rent cat food so she’ll stop the killing. Her latest culinary temptation is Tender Tongol Tuna, which Fancy Feast calls “Appetizers for Cats.”

Maybe that’s the problem, it’s just an appetizer?

But that’s not the problem. Vivi gets dry food, too, and table scraps.

Bottom line, she kills for fun.

I’m no forensics expert, but I’ve figured out her MO. She kills the poor thing, takes it apart, and arrays its tail, legs, and ears around the back patio, so they spell POINT OF NO RETURN.

Or YE SHALL NOT PASS.

And IF DOGS ARE SO GREAT, WHY CAN’T THEY DO THIS?

Every morning, I spend half an hour picking up all this disgusting debris, then fetch some hot water and wash blood off my patio.

It ain’t
House & Garden
around here.

And it gets worse. Now what’s happening is that when I call her to come in at night, I catch her in the act of chasing, stalking, or trying to demolish some terrified fieldmouse, and I have to save the mouse.

I saved three mice last month.

Yay?

I know. It’s counter-intuitive, which is a euphemism for dumb. I don’t really want mice around my house, where they could get inside, so when I catch Vivi in the act, I should just go back to the family room, turn on the TV, and crank up the volume, so I can’t hear the cries for help.

I should mind my own business and pretend I didn’t see anything, like a witness at a Gotti trial.

As we used to say, I don’t want to get involved.

But I have to.

I’ll be a coroner, but I won’t be an accomplice.

So last night, I spent an hour in frigid weather, with a coat over my bathrobe, trying to save a mouse that I want dead.

Vivi had it cornered against the house, so I tried to rescue it by calling her frantically, but she ignored me. I picked up a stick and waved it around to distract her, with the dogs in the house, barking frantically. She ignored them the way she ignores me.

Vivi doesn’t do frantic.

Then I ran into the house and got the Tongol Tuna, but I didn’t have time to wrestle with the plastic top because she was closing in on the mouse, so I charged her, acting like I was going to hurt her, which I never would, and the mouse saw its opening, darted across the patio, and scooted out of reach onto the porch furniture, and stopped to catch its breath on the back of a wrought-iron chair.

Homicidal Vivi.

Victory?

Then I chased Vivi around the yard, while I ripped off the top off the tuna, and finally used it to lure her inside.

The mouse remained panting on the patio chair, then ran off into the night, undoubtedly to return to my house, bringing ticks and bubonic plague.

But before it left, I took its picture.

It’s giving the thumbs up.

I just got off the phone with Mother Mary and I don’t understand anything we said. It seems impossible that we communicate so badly, and I can’t blame it on the cell phone, bad reception, or a faulty connection.

The faulty connection comes with the family.

We talked for about fifteen minutes, both of us speaking English, which is our first language. But it was as if we were having two different conversations. And I can’t figure out when we took a wrong turn to Conversational Crazytown.

It started innocently enough, with me calling her to say hello, to which she replied, angrily:

“This cat is so spoiled!”

“Really, why?” I asked, surprised.

To interject some background, I’ve never heard Mother Mary get angry at the cat. At the dogs, yes. At my brother, yes. At the cable company, yes, and the humidity, yes, and the double-parking on their street, yes. Also at the City of Miami, yes, and all politicians, whom she regards as crooks and drunks, yes yes yes. She wakes up angry, then spends the day accumulating reasons therefor.

Retirement, Scottoline-style.

Andy Rooney is a piker compared with Mother Mary. He’s merely cranky, which is kid stuff. In our dotage, we don’t do curmudgeonly. The Flying Scottolines aim higher, for generalized hostility.

Many people take up a hobby in their golden years. Our hobby is aggravation.

Can’t wait.

But Mother Mary never gets angry about the cat. She and my brother, whom you may recall live together in South Beach, love their cat, a skinny Siamese who’s sixteen years old, named Putty Tat. In their defense, they didn’t pick the cat’s name. We’re crazy, not stupid.

“She peed on your brother’s bed!” my mother was saying.

“Uh-oh. When did she do this?”

“All the time!”

“Really? When did it start?”

“A year ago.”

“
What?
Why didn’t you do anything about it?”

“She does it on purpose.”

So I’m thinking, what difference does that make, and why are you so mad about it now, but I didn’t say anything for fear that her head would explode. And I was already figuring that the cat is sixteen, which is probably 3,000 in cat years, and nobody can vouch for their bladder after their 200th birthday. I got my own problems and I’m only 54, if you follow.

So I said, “Mom, maybe you should take her to the vet.”

“She’s so spoiled. I make her shrimp and I have to boil it. She won’t eat the canned. And now your brother came home with a bedspread! I can’t sleep a wink!”

I tried to follow. It was like a string of non sequiturs, connected by changing tenses. “Ma, slow down. What does the shrimp have to do with the bedspread?”

“There’s bats everywhere!”

“In the
house
?”

“Don’t be fresh!” she snaps, even more exasperated, but I’m not being fresh, I’m being confused.

“Ma, where are the bats?”

“On the bed! There’s like a thousand. They keep me awake!”

“Bats? Real bats?”

“He makes bat noises! It’s not funny!”

On the phone, I hear my brother call out, “Batman and Robin!”

To interject again, my brother shouts in the background on most of our phone calls, and for that I’m grateful. I love him, and he’s like my personal translator, fluent in Mary Scottoline. But I’m still confused. Also please note that nobody in my family ever explains anything. You have to cross-examine them, then piece the story together yourself. I’m trained as a lawyer, and this is difficult even for me.

“Ma, what about Batman and Robin?”

“How am I supposed to sleep with bats?”

My brother calls out, “I got her a Batman and Robin bedspread! It came with a coloring book!”

I can’t believe I’m hearing this right. She’s eighty-six. “Ma, why did he get you that?”

“It has bats on one side, all bats! For him, he got one with trucks and cars!”

My brother calls out, “They were on sale at Ross!”

My mother calls back, “I can’t sleep with bats!”

He shouts to her, “So turn it to the Batman side!”

She shouts back, “And have Batman lying on top of me?”

Okay, so this is about where I check out of the conversation. The picture of Mother Mary in bed with Batman burns itself into my imagination, and my mother and brother are off and running anyway. At some point, I suggest they take the cat to the vet and the bedspread back to Ross.

I don’t know what they did with the coloring book.