The Unspeakable (3 page)

There was no more clothes sharing after I left for college. During that time my mother moved out of our house and into her own place and I came home as infrequently as possible, staying with my father when I did. Her career in full throttle, she was usually too busy for family time anyway. She was out late rehearsing summer stock productions of
Sweeney Todd
. She had close friends whose names I didn't know and would never learn. Still, my assignment from there on out was clear. For the rest of her life, what I was supposed to do was celebrate how little my mother resembled her own mother. I was supposed to accept that her old personality had been nothing more than a manifestation of various sources of oppression (her mother, her husband, the legacy of 1950s Southern Illinois) and that what we had on our hands now (the fan club of gay men, the dramatic hand gestures, the unsettling way she seemed to have taken on the preening, clucking qualities of a teenage girl, almost as if to make up for skipping over that phase the first time) was the real deal.

I could not, however, manage to do those things. Even more cruelly, I couldn't even fake it. She had a habit of picking up the phone in her office inside the high school theater and letting the receiver hang in the air for several seconds as she continued whatever in-person conversation she was already having. When she did this to me I usually just hung up. On the occasions when I visited the theater, I smiled silently when her students gushed about her superfabulousness. Several times I told her flat out that if I, as a kid (who had been instructed at the age of six to answer the phone, “Hello, this is Meghan Daum,” and then “professionally” field the call to the appropriate parent), had for even one second exhibited the traits of her new personality, her former personality would have sent me to my room for three months.

“I wish you'd been raised by the new me,” she said more than once.

*   *   *

The last time I saw my grandmother was almost ten years before she died. I visited her with my mother. Arriving at her apartment, which was in a sterile two-story complex near the main highway of the town she'd never left, my mother and I were immediately taken into her bedroom and shown her latest collection of teddy bears. They were dressed in clothing that said things like “God Bless America” and “I Hate Fridays.” My grandmother's speech had the thick, Ozarks-influenced twang endemic to Southern Illinois—a “hillbilly” accent, my mother always called it—and as she cooed over the bears and pronounced this one “real purdy” and another one “cute as can be,” I saw my mother's hands curling into tight, livid little fists. They were the same fists I made whenever I heard the outgoing message on my mother's answering machine, which for the nearly twenty years she lived alone had somehow rubbed me as the most overarticulated and high-handed version of “leave a message after the tone” in the history of human speech.

(My mother told me that when she was a girl she secretly unwrapped her Christmas presents ahead of time and then rewrapped them and placed them back under the tree. The reason for this was that she didn't trust herself to react appropriately to them. She had to plan in advance what she was going to say.)

My grandmother's infractions went deeper than stuffed animals, of course; and while I might be able to cite my mother's central grievance—that her mother didn't recognize her accomplishments, didn't appreciate the person she was, didn't, in fact, see her at all—I'd be a fool to think I had any real grasp of the terrain of their relationship. During that last visit, while my mother was describing in detail the complexities of her latest theater production, my grandmother interrupted her mid-sentence and asked, “Honey, do you ever wish you'd been a career gal?”

You'd think something like that maps out the terrain pretty well—“Jesus Christ, what do you think she's been talking about?” I snapped as my mother fumed silently—but no one can ever truly read that map, maybe especially not even those occupying its territories. A lot of people knew my grandmother to be as nice as pie, just as a lot of people knew my mother as an incredibly talented theater arts administrator and overall fun person to be around. Neither of those observations was objectively wrong, they just weren't the whole story. But there again, what can you say to that? In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told. At my grandmother's burial site, my mother broke away from the crowd and stood alone at the headstone looking mournful and pensive. I recognized my cue and walked over and put my arm around her, knowing this would create a picture she wanted people to see and would therefore console her. Not that anyone could see the real source of our grief, which was not my grandmother's absence but the limited time my mother now had to enjoy that absence. My mother would die nine months later, and what most people don't know is that of all the sad things about this fact, the saddest by far is that she did not have one day on this earth in which she was both healthy and free of her mother. All her life she'd waited to be relieved of the burden of being unseen, only to have that relief perfectly timed with her own death sentence.

*   *   *

My father understood this cruel twist, though at times he seemed to understand little else. He did not, at least to my knowledge, bother to look up
gallbladder cancer
on the Internet when it first entered our family lexicon and see that the average life expectancy after diagnosis is five months and that fewer than 2 percent of patients make it to the five-year mark. Since he lived a twenty-minute cab ride away and since their relationship, for all its animus, still extended to things like hospital visits and accompaniment to chemotherapy appointments, he did do his share of emptying buckets when she vomited and showing up at the emergency room when she had a crisis of pain or hydration. Our family was not one to shirk its duties, even if we did not always perform them warmly.

Curiously, though, my father did not seem particularly affected when, after eight months of aggressive chemotherapy at a major cancer center that prided itself on beating the odds, the news was delivered that the treatment was no longer working—“longer” referring to the three months beyond the average my mother had survived. She would likely die within half a year's time (it turned out to be two months). There were many ways my mother could have chosen to tell my father she was dying and there were many ways he could have chosen to respond. Their choices, as my mother lay in her hospital bed and I sat nearby in my usual visitor's chair, playing around on my laptop computer as usual, were these:

“The timeline has been moved up,” my mother said.

“I see,” said my father.

“So they're talking months at this point.”

“Hmm. Okay.”

“So what else is going on?” my mother finally asked when it was clear he wasn't going to say anything more.

“Well, actually, I have done something to my foot,” my father said. “I somehow stumbled when I got out of bed and stepped down on it the wrong way. And it's been killing me.”

My mother said maybe he should have it looked at.

“He's happy,” she hissed after my father left the hospital on his aching foot. I told her that wasn't true, that he was scared. I said this not because I believed it but because it seemed like the kind of thing you should say.

I could try to go into the reasons why my parents never got divorced but I suspect that would fall into the category of trying to explain fully how things were between my mother and my grandmother or even my mother and myself, and that would be overreaching, moot, a fool's errand. I could try to explain all the ways that my father is a good person who behaved the way he did partly because he lacked the “emotional vocabulary” to face the situation and partly because my mother, who'd hired a van and moved out of the house on a humid summer day in the early '90s, could never make up her mind about what she wanted from him. For years, she'd summoned him when she needed him—to mark holidays, to suggest to out-of-town guests that their marriage was not exactly over but simply had “a different style”—and shunned him pretty much the rest of the time. When she got sick, a few ferociously loyal friends from her old personality came in from New Jersey whenever they could, though no one would have held it against them if they hadn't. But the gay man posse, not to mention the friends my mother had claimed to have made since moving into the city (“a costume designer who has many inroads to theater producers,” “a
very
interesting museum curator,” “so many former students who live here now but still want my advice”), were largely absent and so it was that she was forced to call on my father for help and he obliged, though not as graciously as she would have liked. When I hopped on a red-eye flight at a moment's notice because it was clear she needed to go to the famous cancer center's urgent care unit but didn't want my father to take her, my presence was tacitly understood as a polarizing force. My mother felt grateful and vindicated. My father felt snubbed.

“You didn't have to come out here, you know,” he told me as we loitered around the vending machines. “I've taken her before. I'm capable of it.”

He wasn't capable of it. He didn't know the code. Or, if he did, he refused to abide by it. I can't blame him. The code had to do with not just showing up but actually being there, which was no longer really a part of their social contract. My mother didn't want my father to be her husband but she still wanted him to impersonate one when the occasion arose. All around us were family members of other patients, people who sobbed in the hallways or set up camp at bedsides or emerged from the elevators carrying piles of blankets and needlepoint pillows and framed photos from home. One afternoon, en route to the visitors' kitchenette to get coffee, I passed a man clutching the door handle of a utility closet and crying. He looked to be in his sixties. He looked weathered and hammered down, as if he'd spent his life doing manual labor. I assumed he was crying over his wife, though I had no idea. No one was crying like that for my mother. Occasionally I'd overhear family members of other patients using words like
gift
and
blessing
, words they seemed to be able to use without apologizing for sounding sentimental. Our family had a significantly different style. We weren't bringing anything up in the elevator except our own lunch. Occasionally I brought up flowers or a book I knew she'd never read, which is to say I understood the code enough to fake it.

*   *   *

The best line in this whole saga goes to my mother's oncologist, who broke the bad news like this:

“Our hope for this treatment was that it would give you more time. Some of that time has now passed.”

One day some months earlier I had entertained a passing fantasy that my mother would get hit by a bus. The oncologist had just delivered the news that the chemotherapy was working. This came as a surprise, since an earlier therapy had failed and this was plan B, which I'd assumed stood even less chance. My mother was elated and shifted at once into one of her more dramatic gears, calling friends and telling them she was on the road to recovery, that it appeared she was a special case, that the doctors “were so pleased.” She was so happy that day that she actually ventured outside the apartment on her own to buy a Frappuccino and I remember thinking to myself how great it would be if she were hit by, say, the M7 express on Columbus Avenue and killed instantly and painlessly. I knew from the Internet that chemotherapy for gallbladder cancer works (when it works at all) for about one cycle before the body develops immunity and the disease resumes the process of ravaging it. She would never have a better day than this day. She would never again walk down the street feeling as hopeful and relieved and exceptional as she had when she strode out of the doctor's office that morning, past the throngs of chemo patients and their families sprawled out in the lounge like stranded airline passengers, past the ever-friendly lobby personnel (trained, no doubt, to greet each visitor as if it were the last greeting they'd ever receive), and on to the street, where for the first time in weeks she actually hailed a cab herself and announced her desire for a Frappuccino.

That night she drank half a vodka gimlet to celebrate and regretted it for the next several days. She vomited from the chemo through the rest of the summer until she landed back in the hospital with severe intestinal and bowel trouble. It was September. Autumn, New York's most flattering season, was preparing to make its entrance. I had just gotten engaged to my longtime boyfriend, which had made my mother very happy.

“Our recommendation would be to transfer to another level of care,” the oncologist said.

Hearing this, I moved my chair closer and grabbed my mother's hand under the blanket. I did this because I felt that if we were in a play this would surely be part of the stage directions. I was also afraid the doctor would judge me if I didn't. If I just sat there with my arms crossed against my chest, as I was inclined to, the doctor would make a note in the file suggesting that I might not be capable of offering sufficient support to the patient.

I retrieved her hand from under the blanket and squeezed it in my own. She did not reciprocate. She didn't pull away, but there was enough awkwardness and ambivalence coming from both sides that it was not unlike being on a date at the movies and trying to hold hands with someone who'd rather not. I think we were both relieved when I let go. The doctor said she would most likely make it through Christmas, so we should feel free to go ahead with any holiday plans.

For three nights in a row, my mother made me stay in her hospital room. She was dealing with incontinence (if you learn nothing else from these pages, learn that gastrointestinal cancer is not the kind of cancer to get; get any other kind, even lung, even brain, but don't get carcinoma of the gut) and it had grown so severe that she was up every few minutes and sometimes didn't make it to the bathroom in time. The people who came to clean her up were terse and tired and spoke mostly in heavy Caribbean accents. A few times she lay there in her own shit before they could get there. I know this because I was in the sleeping chair on the other side of the room, listening to it all while pretending to be asleep.