One True Thing (15 page)

She moved the silver disc of the stethoscope from place to place, stopped to run her fingers gently over the catheter beneath my mother’s skin.

“Is it still beating?” my mother asked.

“Loud and clear,” said Teresa, who took a clipboard from her bag and began filling in a form.

“Do you have children?” I said.

“No,” said Teresa. “I have not yet married.”

“So where’d you hear the knock-knock joke? Not from Dr. Cohn?”

“No, not from Dr. Cohn. From the daughter of a woman I also visit. She is five and thinks that joke is very funny. I have heard it from her perhaps twenty times.”

“What’s wrong with her mother?” my mother said, buttoning her shirt.

“Mama, I’m sure they’re not allowed to go from house to house talking about their patients.”

“Her mother has breast cancer, Mrs. Gulden,” said Teresa. “I have been seeing her for three months. Her own mother cares for her some of the time but she is not able to do certain things for her.”

“And she has a five-year-old?”

“And a seven-year-old.”

“Oh, Lord, that poor girl,” my mother said, her mouth trembling.

“If the two of you were together in this room you would have a great deal to talk about,” said Teresa.

“Yes?” said my mother.

“We can talk more about that. In the meantime what can I do for you? Is your pain under control? Can I help with your diet? Would you like help with bathing or dressing?”

“Oh, I’m having a terrible time getting in and out of the bathtub. But I can’t have you coming to bathe me.”

“Mama, you didn’t tell me that,” I said.

“Oh, there are so many things to worry about, Ellen.”

“I can help you.”

“No. Not with that.”

“Oh, Mama, I’ve been in a million locker rooms.”

“It’s different,” my mother said.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Teresa said. “I can show you some of the ways that coming in and out of the tub can be made more comfortable. And I would like to irrigate your catheter and you should be lying comfortably for that.”

“Will it hurt?” said my mother.

“Compared to what I imagine you are used to, not very much.” My mother’s lips quivered again as she replied, “What I’m used to is awful.”

“Yes,” said Teresa, and she took my mother’s hand. “It is important that you not hurt.” My mother’s head dropped, an orange daisy in a drought. Tears fell,
plop, plop
, on their joined hands. I felt like a voyeur, a stranger. They stood together, Teresa helping my mother to her feet.

“Excuse me,” said my mother, pulling a tissue from her sleeve and dabbing at her face. “I’m usually better than this.”

“Better and stoic are two different things, Mrs. Gulden. You have a right, even an obligation, to express your feelings.” She reached into her bag and brought out a folder. “You may want to read these,” she said to me. “Not all of them are suitable for all patients but Dr. Cohn seemed to think you should have them, particularly the more technical information.” Then she offered my mother her arm. Through the white bones of the banisters I watched them disappear, head, torso, knees, feet, as though they were ascending to heaven.

In the folder was “The Dying Person’s Bill of Rights” and some pharmaceutical pamphlets about morphine. There were sixteen tenets to the Bill of Rights, and I got through “I have the right to be treated as a living human being until I die” and “I have the right not to die alone.” I did not break until the last one: “I have the right to be cared for by caring, sensitive, knowledgeable people who will attempt to understand my needs and will be able to gain some satisfaction in helping me face my death.”

“What satisfaction?” I sobbed, and the tears ran hot down my
face and I cried into a pillow until my face was as swollen as I imagined my mother’s stomach must be beneath my father’s shirts.

I don’t know how long Teresa was there, but she never touched me or made any noise. When I finally looked up, she was standing with her stethoscope around her neck. She began to rummage in her bag, to pull out instruments and swabs in sealed silver packages.

“This is why I told Dr. Cohn we did not need a nurse,” I said to her, still shaking. “Having a stranger in the house is too upsetting. I cannot afford to fall apart.”

“Falling apart is curling up into a fetal position and staying in bed for a week,” she said. “What you were doing is having the emotional response an individual has to the loss of someone they love. We cry to give voice to our pain.”

“That’s very poetic, Ms. Guerrero, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“You are not going to feel any better for a long, long time, Ms. Gulden, and you know that far better than I do. But I refuse to believe that keeping your grief bottled up makes you feel better than crying.”

“Like a five-year-old,” I said, blowing my nose.

“The five-year-old who provides me with jokes never cries, Ms. Gulden. She does not understand what is happening. But you do.”

I shook my head. “I can help her,” Teresa said, and went upstairs again. In a few minutes I heard a cry, a short sharp one, from the second floor, and then the long murmur of voices, and I got up and went to make two cups of tea. I sat at the table in the kitchen and drank one while the other grew cold on the counter, a tan skim of milk congealing on its surface. From above came another sound. I went to the living room and looked upward, and then I heard it again, the sound of a belly laugh. Teresa came downstairs swinging her stethoscope.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

“She’ll tell you,” she said, as she began to pack up her things. “I’ve taught her ways to sit on the edge of the tub and then slide in in stages, but it’s going to make it easier if you buy one of those rubber mats with suction cups and fasten it to the side so she feels more secure. Then she will not slip.”

“Should I help her bathe?”

“She is embarrassed by the condition of her body, but it may become necessary. Does she have an odor?”

“God, no.”

“That may come and when it does you will have to talk with her again.” She zipped her bag shut and for the first time since she arrived she smiled. She was very beautiful.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Twenty-three,” she said.

“Jesus. I’m twenty-four. Why do you do this kind of work? You could be working in the hospital nursery, bathing babies.”

“Anyone can bathe a baby,” Teresa said. “Not everyone can do this.”

“You’re good,” I said.

“That’s what Dr. Cohn said about you, Ms. Gulden.”

“Ellen,” I said.

“Ellen,” she said. “I will be back next Monday, unless you need me sooner.” She handed me a card.

I put the kettle on and brought my mother a fresh cup of tea. She was on the floor in her bedroom looking through a long brown box, the kind lawyers keep documents in.

“Do you remember the Halloween the boys went as a set of dice and Brian fell over downtown and Jeff wouldn’t help him up because he got such a kick out of seeing him waving his arms and legs around. Jeff said he looked like a turtle on his back. Oh, I could have killed him, but the idea was very funny.”

“Don’t tell me—you’ve got the costumes in there.”

She held up a picture of the two boys standing side by side on the front lawn, the light dying behind them so that there was a bright disfiguring star of last sunlight in the upper right corner.

Jeff was showing number two, Bri a five. Lucky seven. “I lent the costumes to someone and they never gave them back. It was a good one.”

“Is that what you were laughing about?”

“When?”

“I heard you laughing upstairs when Teresa was here.”

“Oh,” my mother said, laughing again. “No. It’s another joke: a little boy comes into the classroom and his teacher says, ‘You’re late. Where were you?’ And he says, ‘On top of Blueberry Hill.’ And a second little boy comes in and the teacher says, ‘You’re late. Where were you?’ And the boy says, ‘On top of Blueberry Hill.’ And a third little boy comes in and the teacher says, ‘You’re late. Where were you?’ And he says, ‘On top of Blueberry Hill.’ And a little girl comes in and the teacher says, ‘I suppose you were on top of Blueberry Hill too.’ And she says, ‘I
am
Blueberry Hill.’”

My mother giggled. “The five-year-old told her that?” I asked.

“The seven-year-old,” my mother said.

“If I had told you that joke when I was seven I would have spent the afternoon in my room.”

“Autres temps, autres moeurs,”
my mother said, her fingers moving in a stroking movement to the bump of the catheter beneath her skin.

“Voltaire, I think,” I said.

“Really?” my mother said. “I thought your father made that up.” And she laughed again and looked back at the box. “Remember the Halloween when you were Bo-Peep?” she said.

“And I had to carry those sheep you made and kept spilling my candy?” I said. “How could I forget?”

“I remember it all,” said my mother, “every bit of it.”

O
n the morning when she went to decorate her tree we threaded red ribbon through the spokes of my mother’s wheels, the way my mother had threaded red, white, and blue ribbons through the wheels of our bikes on the Fourth of July when we were children, ribbons and playing cards—but only the red ones, for the color—attached to the spokes with clothespins so that we made a noise when we rode like old engines, Model Ts in movies.

But none of the Minnies, even Mrs. Duane, who talked to us for a long time about a little girl who’d been kidnapped in Texas—tragedies! Oh, we loved our secondhand tragedies!—mentioned the ribbons. I suppose if they had acknowledged them it would have meant acknowledging the wheelchair, and if they acknowledged the wheelchair it would have meant acknowledging my mother’s fragile sloping shoulders and the way her hands shook when she lifted them from the armrests.

And that would have meant acknowledging the disease, and the fears, and the dangers, and the death. Better than anyone I understood
why they didn’t want that to happen. Better than anyone except maybe my mother.

Imagine having to dictate your prose to someone else when you are writing a novel, or telling someone where to place the cerulean and how to mix it with white for the edges of a cloud in your landscape, and you can understand what it was for my mother to have to sit in her chair in front of the blue spruce, grown now to twenty feet all these years after its planting as a seedling, and direct my clumsy efforts to place her ornaments exactly where she wanted them. There were hundreds of them; both of us had sore calluses and little pin dots of dried blood on our fingers from pushing in the sequins and aligning the hanging wires. All red. All gold. Gold and red striped, gold and red spotted, random patterns of red and gold. And big red ribbons shot through with gold and stiff with wire, to be cosseted into bows.

“No no no, Ellen,” she called from below as I attached a bow to a branch. “It’s supposed to ripple.” With her hand she sketched a shallow wave in the air, and the winter sunlight seemed to illuminate the blue veins on its back like miniature rivers, tributaries from her heart.

“That ball right near your hand … no … no … there! It’s hanging too low. It needs to be tucked under there more tightly … higher … that’s it … and then there should be one just below it … no, lower and over a little.” It was like trying to scratch someone’s back, finding the right spot, except that it was bigger than any back and the effort seemed to go on forever.

Mrs. Best had the tree next to us; her ribbons were gold, her ornaments red and gold wooden soldiers. “Where does your mother get that ribbon that holds its shape?” she asked me with her lips pursed.

“She just seems to have things like that,” I said. “She’s the kind of person who can go upstairs to the linen closet and dig up some silver stars if you need them.”

“Oh, Linda, don’t worry,” my mother called to the two of us on our abutting ladders. “Yours looks beautiful already.”

The truth was that even with my shortcomings at spacing, grouping, and tying, I thought the Gulden tree was the handsomest, although Mrs. Duane was swathing hers in some gold stuff that looked like fourteen-karat insulation, which was magical if strange. “Some of them never learn that with a tree this size in a public park, gaudy is key,” my mother had said when I remarked that our ornaments looked like plump chorus girls in a second-rate summer-stock production of
42nd Street
.

As I stepped back to look at her tree, I could see she’d been right. The more tasteful decorations, including Mrs. Best’s, seemed to disappear amid the ice-blue branches of the big trees. And when the switch was thrown on the red lights the public works people had threaded through the day before, the quieter efforts would completely disappear. “These will reflect!” my mother had declared triumphantly, turning her sequins in her shaking hands.

“Ellie, there’s a bow on the other side that’s much too close to the end of a branch,” she called, fingering the ornaments in a box on her lap.

It took us nearly three hours to decorate that tree. By the time we were done, though the temperature was in the low thirties, I’d laid my jacket on the grass and discarded my gloves, my fingers alternately numb and aching from the pine needles and the wire hangers. “My back is killing me,” one of the Minnies said loudly, clinging to a ladder with one hand and rubbing the small of her back with the other.

Mrs. Duane went down the street to the deli and brought back coffee and sandwiches for us all, and I sat at my mother’s feet, my shoulders sagging, and ate roast beef and drank my coffee black. She ate nothing at all, only sipped at a cup of milky tea.

“How are you holding up?” I said very quietly.

“There’s a problem. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I can feel it.”

“What?”

“It’s something about the bows. Maybe they need to face down a little more.”

And back up I went, as Mrs. Best stood with her arms crossed on her chest and looked from her tree to ours and then back again. She sighed. “Kate, you do have an eye. You simply have an eye. And with an eye, you either have it or you don’t,” she said.