One True Thing (21 page)

I leaned over the rail of the bed, its metal cold and hard against my chest, and took her hand in mine, her grip strong, painful almost, and then lax. I slid the railing down and I put my head on the sheets, atop the cage of her pelvis, no fat or flesh to protect it. I cried until the sheets were wet, and she stroked my hair, over
and over, the dry flesh making a faint sibilant sound, like the smallest whisper. Then in a softer voice, she began to speak again.

“It’s hard. And it’s hard to understand unless you’re in it. And it’s hard for you to understand now because of where you are and what you’re feeling. But I wanted to say it, I didn’t say it very well, I’m no writer, but I wanted to say it because I won’t be able to say it when I need to, when it’s one of those nights and you’re locking the front door because of foolishness about romance, about how things are supposed to be. You can be hard, and you can be judgmental, and with those two things alone you can make a mess of your life the likes of which you won’t believe. I think of a thousand things I could teach you in the next ten years, and I think of how everything important you learned the first twenty-four you learned from your father and not me, and it hurts my heart, to know how little I’ve gotten done.”

“No, Mama,” I whispered.

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, somebody let me speak the truth, somebody let me,” she cried. “Your father says I’ll only upset myself, and you say, please, no, Mama, and only Teresa lets me speak. Saying it is the only thing that makes me feel better, even the drugs aren’t as good as that. All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble. I want to talk before I die. I want to be the one who gets to say things, who gets to think the deep thoughts. You’ll all talk when I’m gone. Let me talk now without
shusshing
me because it hurts you to hear what I want to say. I’m tired of being
shusshed.”

“What do you want to say?” I said, lifting my head and pushing my damp hair aside. “Go ahead and say it.”

“I just said everything I wanted to say, except that I feel sad. I feel sad that I won’t be able to plan your wedding. Don’t have a flower girl or a ring bearer—they always misbehave and distract from the bride. And don’t have too many people.”

“Mama, I don’t know that I’ll ever get married.”

“Don’t say things like that, Ellen. Think about what I just told you.”

“All right. What else?”

“I feel afraid that when I fall asleep I will never wake up. I miss sleeping with your father.”

“Should I tell him that?”

“I already have.”

“What else?”

“If I knew you would be happy I could close my eyes now and rest.” Her voice was beginning to sink and die, as though it was going down the drain, rush of words to trickle of whisper. “It’s so much easier.”

“I know it is. I wish you could.”

“No, not that. The being happy. It’s so much easier, to learn to love what you have instead of yearning always for what you’re missing, or what you imagine you’re missing. It’s so much more peaceful.”

“I’ll try,” I said.

“It doesn’t work that way.” And suddenly she was asleep. Her mouth hung open and her hair was scraped back from her forehead, lank because we had not washed it for several days, not since the last time Teresa had come. The lines across her forehead were cut deep, as though someone had done them with a ruler and a pencil. The sheet over her midsection was dark with my tears.

Everything you know, I know, she’d said, and it was true. I was the ignorant one. I’d taken a laundry list of all the things she’d done and, more important to me, all the things she’d never done, and turned them into my mother, when they were no more my mother than his lectures on the women of Dickens were my father.

Our parents are never people to us, never, they’re always character traits, Achilles’ heels, dim nightmares, vocal tics, bad noses, hot tears, all handed down and us stuck with them. Our dilemma is utter: turn and look at this woman, understand and pity her, like and talk with her, recognize that she has taken the cold cleanliness of the spartan rooms in which she grew up and turned them, within her considerable and perhaps wounded heart, into a life-long
burst of cooking and cosseting and making her own little corner of the world pretty and welcoming, and the separation is complete—but when that happens you will have to be an adult. There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.

Just before midnight she woke. She licked her lips slowly, twisting and turning her arms on the sheets, then turned her head.

“Is it morning yet?” she said.

“No.”

“I need pills,” she said.

It was a new vial, nearly full. She gulped one down, her throat working; coughed and then sipped again, her whole body moving with the effort. She sighed and it rattled deep in her throat, half groan.

“Help me, Ellen,” she whispered. “I don’t want to live like this anymore.”

We stared at each other in the half-light of the lamps.

“Please,” she said. “You must know what to do. Please. Help me. No more.”

“It’ll be better in the morning.”

“No,” she said, and groaned again. “It will not. It will not.” She sounded like a tired and irritable child. She wrapped her fingers around my wrist, the wrist of the hand that held the pills. Her grip was surprisingly strong, and for some reason I thought of those people who lift Volkswagens off babies pinned beneath, of people trapped in caves and found alive, saved by a diet of snow, long past the time when they should have died.

“Please,” she said. “Help me. I don’t want this.” But I could tell that the pill was already beginning to take effect, or perhaps that the effort of the words, the request, the hand on my arm, had put her under. She looked at me sadly from beneath lids that began to drop like those of some wise old bird. “Help me,” she whispered. “You’re so smart. You’ll know what to do.” Then her eyes closed completely. “Please,” she whispered once more.

I slept that night in a chair in the den, fell asleep as the snow continued to fall. It covered everything without any sound except the scratch of the pine branches against the side of the house. I woke to the ugly fluorescent brightness of a world deep in fallen snow, covered with pitiless whiteness. It was a world changed forever, a world in which I found it difficult to meet my mother’s eyes.

I
t must be terrible to bury someone you love in early May, when the ground is beginning to thaw and stretch and turn bright green and the smell of lilacs tumbles down from the bushes like a little benediction. Or in September, when the noon sun is still warm on your face but the evenings are cool enough for flannel and an extra blanket dragged up from the footboard in the middle of the night.

Or at Christmas. It must be terrible at Christmas.

February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long. At the beginning of the month I had bought my mother anemones at the florist on Main Street, paid fifteen dollars for a tiny bunch because they seemed, with their fragile lavender and bright red, to represent something that seemed as distant as the moon. I put them on the table next to the window, so that when she looked out she saw, not just the gray piles of old plowed snow at the edge of the driveway, like slag from some quarry, not just the
side of the neighboring house and the big oak groaning in the winter winds, but those frail and beautiful things, bending their heavy heads toward her. But after only two days they fell, drooping almost to the dusty tabletop, their stems defeated, perhaps by a draft from beneath the sill. And I threw them away.

“Lovely, Ellie,” she whispered sometimes, even when they were gone. “Lovely flowers.”

Teresa came one morning and attached the little machine, like a tiny tape recorder with its red digital numbers, that would pump morphine into my mother’s catheter whenever she pushed a button on its side. Teresa programmed it and taught me how to do it, too. “We will have to say how much is enough, and for how long,” said Teresa.

“Could she overdose with this?” I said.

Teresa looked at me, one brow raised slightly. “Not likely,” she said.

My mother winced when Teresa lodged the needle in the catheter, but when it was taped in place and the little box placed at her side she said she felt nothing except the pull of the tape on her tender skin. “I can retape it, Mrs. Gulden,” said Teresa, smoothing her hair, held back from her face with a black band. “Perhaps it is too tight.”

“No, Teresa,” my mother said. “It’s fine. Thank you.”

We sat by her side for almost an hour without speaking, Teresa and I, she making notations in the small log she always carried, me finishing the background on the sunflower pillow. As she slept, my mother pulled fretfully at the diapers she now wore. Three times in the past week she had soiled the bed, and I had called Teresa, who was not supposed to do such things—they had a health aide to change beds, someone not as skilled or as salaried as a nurse—but had insisted that this was no time to have someone new and foreign in our home. After Teresa cleaned my mother and helped her onto the sofa, I gathered up the sheets with a great deal of bustle and carried them to the basement, holding my breath so that I would not gag.

“I’m so sorry,” my mother said each time.

Finally Teresa had taken her hand and sat on the side of her bed. “Mrs. Gulden, I would like to catheterize you,” she said.

My mother’s hand came up slowly to touch the small mound on her chest, above her heart.

“A urinary catheter,” said Teresa. “So you need not use the bedpan or depend so much on Ellen.”

“Oh no, Teresa,” she said. “I don’t need that.”

“I think perhaps you do.”

“No, no.”

“Then I think perhaps you should wear protective pants.”

“Oh no,” she said, and lay back on the pillows. Tears began to slide from beneath her eyelids down the furrows from eyes to nose and nose to chin. “This is too much.”

“I know it is upsetting,” said Teresa softly, stroking the back of my mother’s hand. “But I believe it will be easier for you. And for Ellen, too.”

But whenever my mother dropped off to sleep she pulled at the diapers as she did now, as though when she was unconscious they became the tangible reminder of the pain, the disintegration, the life that had become a half life.

She ate nursery food when she ate, which was not often. She ate oatmeal, applesauce, puddings, yogurt. Her lips were cracked and dry, and several times a day I smoothed petroleum jelly over them so that they would not peel or bleed. It had become difficult to tell whether she was awake or asleep under the thin blanket of consciousness, or simply lying with her eyes closed, thinking the unimaginable thoughts that anyone must feel when they are standing on the bluff overlooking the abyss.

“How are the boys getting on?” she said slowly after Teresa had gone.

“Fine, I guess. Jeff is his usual wisecracking self. Brian has a new roommate and seems to like him better than the old one.”

“Good. I worry about Brian.”

“Do you want me to bring them home, Mama?” I asked.

“No, Ellen,” she said clearly.

That last afternoon I gave her cream of tomato soup for lunch, but after three spoonfuls she shook her head, perhaps because the act of moving the spoon from mug to mouth was so slow, so torturous, so messy that I had to put on a new top sheet afterward. She wore her velour housecoat, its nap flattened by the days in bed, and from beneath it her legs were sticks.

“I look like those people in the films about the camps,” she whispered, looking down.

I tucked the clean sheet, with its nice fresh smell, in around her, and pushed back her hair. On the metal cart in the corner that held her pills, her water, a box of tissues, now her soup mug, was a tiny picture in a heart-shaped frame of a newborn, its face the color of your skin after a hot shower. Her tiny fists were balled up and thrown over her head as though she was surrendering, and her face looked like an uncooked biscuit with raisins for eyes. The dome of her head, atop which there was only fuzz, was off-center and misshapen. Halley had had her baby and had brought over the hospital picture to give to my mother. At the door I said that my mother could not have visitors, but then a voice had called faintly, “It’s all right, Ellie,” and I had brought Halley in for a few minutes at my mother’s bedside. She was nursing, she said, and could not stay long because her milk was coming in. But at the door she hugged me and said, “I’m so sorry, so sorry,” as she wept. There were dark circles under her eyes and her hair looked nearly as unkempt as my mother’s. Ground down by maternity, the two of them, I thought.

“This must be so hard on you,” she had sobbed, trying to muffle the sound with a tissue she pulled from her pocket.

“It’s almost over,” I said.

When I came back into the room my mother had been staring at the photograph. “That baby is no beauty,” I said.

“Babies are never beauties, especially first babies. They’re a long time coming out, and they get knocked up in the process.”

“The little mother doesn’t look so good, either.”

“She’ll be fine,” said my mother. “It’s hard work, but she’ll
manage. When I think of the people I’ve known who’ve had children who had no business even owning a cat—well, they all get raised somehow.”

“You were a good mother,” I said.

“I worked hard,” she had said.

It was around four when she woke up and started to turn toward me. Then, remembering, she reached up and pushed the button that released the liquid morphine into her catheter and from there to a vein. She closed her eyes and her breathing became hoarse and very loud, like the noise a stick makes when you run it down the length of a fence and it hits the pickets, one by one, with that surprising carrying sound. I paced my breathing with her own, the two of us raising and lowering our chests in unison to keep ourselves alive. “That works better,” she said after a few minutes. Her hand found the medication machine again and pressed, but I knew nothing would come out. Perhaps it had a placebo effect, for she slept again for another hour. I turned on the lamps around the room after I saw her eyes glittering in the half darkness.