The Making of a Nurse (2 page)

Yes, she was so Tosca, it made my head ache!

“Tosca brings me to the brink of madness.” Her eyes shone. “Just to the brink, mind you.”

Oh no, never further than that!

“And the secret to life, Tilda,” she leaned forward to impart her wisdom, “is perfect breath control and deep diaphragmatic breathing.”

Her life lessons were often interrupted by my three older brothers, especially when they trooped in together, always hungry, after school. “What’s for dinner?” they’d ask. Tall high-school basketball star David was from my father’s first marriage. Aloof, ambitious Stephen and angry, brooding Robbie were from my mother’s first marriage.

“
Vichyssoise
and
bouillabaisse,”
she sang, to the tune of
L’elisir d’amore
. On other nights it might be Chicken Cacciatore to
Le nozze di Figaro
or Bratwurst and Sauerkraut to
Der Rosenkavalier
. Her singing voice was like a signal to my brothers to vamoose. They scattered in different directions to their rooms, but I stayed close by her side.

She sang wherever and whenever the impulse struck her, even in the grocery store or at the bank. Big, cartoon blasts of Italian arias, French chansons, German Lieder ballooned out of her mouth. I flushed with shame. It was so annoying, so
unnecessary
. What would make her stop? Poison? A bullet? A dagger? I could do nothing but wait it out. She sang until she dropped down onto the couch in exhaustion. What a relief that was – like when the dentist stopped drilling. I wished she would stop altogether. Singing, I mean. She sang for friends at salon evenings in our home hosted by my father. It was at one such gathering that they each made an important announcement.

After her final encore, their friends called out, “Bravo, bravo!”

“Brava, brava,” my father shouted, loudest of all, to correct them. He stood beside my mother at the piano and faced the guests. “What a set of pipes on that gal!” he crowed. “Unfortunately, Elinor hasn’t been her best lately. The top medicos in the city are running a battery of tests, but I say all she needs is rest. She’s wearing herself out taking care of the kids. They’re a handful, especially Robbie. He’s been acting up lately, nothing serious mind you, just normal teenage hijinks. David, what an athlete, and Stephen, what an outstanding scholar, and of course, Tilda is our little nurse. She’s an angel. I don’t know how we would manage without her.” He put one arm around me and the other around my mother. “But Dr. Wilhemina DeGroot, the brilliant and renowned Chief of Neurology at Toronto General Hospital, is working on this most perplexing case. I feel certain she will come up with a magic pill.”

My mother tugged on my father’s sleeve, to indicate she wanted to say something. First, she thanked the guests, as she always did, but that night added something new. “This will be my last performance. If it were not for you, dear friends, I would not have the courage to go on.”

“Of course you would, Ellie,” my father interrupted. “You can beat this thing.” The guests’ voices rose up again and the tinkling of wineglasses merged with their conversation and laughter.

The next morning, I sat at the kitchen table with my brothers, each one barricaded behind their own cereal box, eating breakfast and planning for prizes they were going to send off for. My father had already left early to go to work. My mother appeared at the door, wanting to join us, but frozen in place. Her dark, wavy hair was tousled from sleep and she still had on her bright red lipstick and dark eyeliner from last night’s performance and her black silk “Madama Butterfly” robe with pink blossoms swirling all over it. I jumped up and went to her. She leaned on me to make her way to the table, and when we got there, I eased her down onto a chair.

“Today,” she announced, “I feel normal.” No one was listening. “Well,
nearly
normal.” From the pocket of her kimono she took out a small tin of blackcurrant lozenges and popped one into her
mouth. She kept those purple “pastilles” close at hand to keep her lubricated so she could break into song whenever necessary. She cleared her throat. “I may have to cancel performances. I must shepherd my vocal resources.” She glanced at the clock on the stove. “Aren’t you kids late for school?”

Why didn’t she know it was summer vacation?

Suddenly, she turned around in the chair as if someone was calling her. Was it a chorus of merry villagers? Don Giovanni asking for her hand in marriage? She stared at the chart on the stove and began to sing, “Beef,
boeuf
, 375 degrees; chicken,
poulet
, 375 degrees; ham,
jambon
, 375 degrees; veal,
veau
, 375 degrees; la, la la.”

Robbie turned on the radio and strummed his index fingers in an agitated drumbeat to accompany the Rolling Stones, making it perfectly clear that Mick Jagger was not the only one around who could get no satisfaction. “What do you think of his voice?” he asked our mother.

His question broke her reverie. “Voice? You call that a voice? He has no voice. Singers nowadays can’t make a sound without their moog synthesizers and microphones. They don’t know the first thing about proper breathing. Who can understand a word he’s wailing? His diphthongs are atrocious.”

We could barely hear her. Her batteries were running low. “Why are you whispering?” I asked.

“I have to protect my vocal cords. I am not a piano or a violin. You can’t press my keys or pluck my strings. My voice is my instrument and I have to keep it in good working order.”

I knew all about her voice, how it required hydration, lubrication, and nutrients and how smoke, cool drafts, and spicy foods were to be avoided. She clutched onto the kitchen table to pull herself up and out of the chair. “Now if you children will excuse me, I must prepare for my concert.”

“What concert?” Stephen asked with suspicion. We never knew what to believe.

“A benefit concert for the Institute for the Blind.”

“How ’bout for the deaf?” Stephen muttered, making Robbie and David chuckle.

My mother slowly made her way to the living room, gripping each piece of furniture as she went, and I followed closely behind. At the piano there was a bouquet of red roses given to her by her friends, but they were wilted because no one had thought to put them in water. “I’ll do some light numbers to cheer up those poor blind folk,” she told me. “Nothing too serious.” She rifled through stacks of sheet music. “Perhaps ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’? Or, what about ‘On a Clear Day You Can See Forever’?” She loved her joke so much that she started laughing hysterically and within moments, tears streamed down her face. She could go from zero to flat-out howling laughter in seconds! I loved it when she laughed. When she finally caught her breath, she looked around at the room, as if seeing it in a new way. “It’s a fairyland!” she exclaimed, suddenly seeing a world that was enchanted and hopeful. She wiped her eyes with the sash from her kimono. “Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone,” she said, putting a damper on all the fun. “I’ll do ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’ and Schubert, of course.”

Right then and there, I wanted to tell her that I loved her, but couldn’t make my mouth form the words and I said nothing. Then she said she was tired, so I helped her over to the couch to lie down for a rest.

MY PARENTS WERE BOTH
widows with young children when they met. My mother had been married to a New York lawyer, and one snowy evening while driving home, his De Soto turned over into a ditch. He died a few days later in the hospital.

“Overnight, I became a widow with two young songs – I mean
sons,”
she told me once and giggled helplessly at her slip of the tongue.

One year later, Harry Shalof, also a widower, but fifteen years older than she and with a son of his own, started coming backstage at the concerts she gave, such as a fundraiser for the synagogue or an evening of Christmas carols in the church. A few months later they married and settled down in a sleepy little town in rural Pennsylvania where they had me. My father worked in a dry
cleaning plant and my mother stayed at home, substituting lullabies for arias.

But in the early sixties, as the Vietnam War escalated, my father felt a growing horror and shame. He decided to pack up and seek haven in reasonable, peaceful Canada. He also wanted to protect his sons from being drafted into the army. He moved us all to Toronto, where he continued to watch the conflict every night on
TV
. “War has become the American way,” he lamented. “I could not stay.” My father found a job as a dry cleaning salesman and drove all around the city and outlying suburbs, his car loaded up with pressing irons, jugs of chemicals, and plastic bags. In the evenings, after work, he loved to cook rich, strange foods, take night courses at the university for the “mature” student, and in his spare time was writing a book about stain removal entitled
Out, Damn Spot!

MY MOTHER’S ILLNESS
crept over her slowly. For a long time I had had an inkling something was wrong with her mind, but now something was definitely wrong with her body. Which was worse? By the time I was eight years old, I knew for sure she was sick, both inside and out. I wondered if she would die and how I would feel if she did. I felt there might be some advantages to me if she did die, but of course, I told myself, I didn’t want her to.
Of course not
.

“Sometimes your mother needs a bit of help with her
ADL
,“ explained my father on days when he asked me to stay home from school to help her. By then I knew the medical jargon for the “Activities of Daily Living.”
ADL
meant, for example, going to the bathroom. To get her there, I walked backwards, facing her while she held on to my forearms for balance and momentum. I waited outside the door, listening for when she was done, and then went in to get her. She also needed a boost getting up from the couch or a prod to start moving from a standing position. Sometimes she would even break into a run of a few tiny steps and then stop abruptly, as if someone had yelled, “Freeze!” I was there to catch her when she fell, which happened often. For no apparent reason, she would stumble or trip over nothing at all and crumple to the floor.

“I can’t seem … to get my balance.” She clutched the air as I pulled her up from the kitchen floor one time. “I’m having an off day.”

Most of the time, she lay on the couch, spilling over the edges. When she stood up, it was strange to see her vertical. In every moment, with every movement, I was with her. I knew her feelings, her very thoughts. When she was sad, I was sad. When her spirits lifted, my heart soared. It felt cruel to be happy around her, as if I was mocking her, so I tried not to be too energetic or flaunt my robust health in front of her.

“There are days when I can hardly manage to create a sound and other days when I feel miraculously reborn,” she told me.

Some days she seemed to cast off her illness. “Let’s go window shopping,” she might say, her voice suddenly audible. “How about a drive in the country? I feel on top of the world.” She held her head high and let loose with a few blasts of song. “No one can even tell there’s anything wrong with me!”

By the next day she’d be sunk into the couch. “I’m not on today,” she’d say. “It’s an off day.”

She was a light switch!

“It’s the well-documented ‘on-off syndrome,’” my father said. He had begun subscribing to medical journals.

But there began to be more off days than on. Days when she couldn’t get out of bed and I stood beside her doling out her blue and yellow pills, holding a glass of water to her lips as she took them one by one, with long sighs in between each swallow.

When she spoke, you could hardly hear her. When she sang, she made the plates and cutlery jump on the table. Her hands trembled when she dialled the telephone, yet her handshake was powerful. She toppled over at the slightest disturbance like when the toast popped up or when the carpet gave off a crackle of static electricity. And at night, I knelt beside her and talked to her to calm her nerves and checked to make sure she was breathing. She fell asleep easily, but in the morning she always said how tired she was. It was as if sleeping exhausted her and being awake made her sick.

Let me switch with you. I’ll be the sick one and you can be the healthy one. I can handle it
.

My two older brothers David and Stephen kept their distance, but Robbie demanded answers. “Why do you lie down so much?” He stood looming over her where she lay, mired in the couch.

“I am tired but when I sing, I feel as light as a bird.”

“Why did you have to get sick?”

“Believe me,” she said behind closed eyes, “it wasn’t my intention.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Robbie, stop pestering your mother.” My father intervened. “She needs to rest.”

His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean by that? Why don’t you ever tell that to Tilda?”

“Tilda is your mother’s nurse. She takes care of her.”

Robbie had many questions, but if my father asked him, “Where are you going after school?” or “Will you be home for dinner?” he would answer with a scowl. Robbie cut classes, shoplifted, and got sent to the principal’s office for swearing or smoking cigarettes. Usually he told me to get lost, but sometimes he wanted me to be with him all day and all night. “Til, you’re the best sister anyone could ever have. I need you to stay close because I’m worried about my mind.” He sat on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands. “I am ill,” he said grimly. “Quite ill. Do not underestimate the quiteness of that ill.”

I placed my palm on his forehead as if to take his temperature. I had no idea how to help him other than to love him. My father was busy with my mother’s illness and couldn’t take on more worries. David and Stephen went away to university and as soon as Robbie finished high school, he ran away and no one knew where. He wrote to me from Chicago, San Francisco, and then London, England. A few years later, he landed up in Israel, which seemed like a strange place to find peace, but there he seemed to, for a time, until he moved on to other ports of call.