Twilight Children (33 page)

I said my piece. Gerda’s eyes were on me as I spoke, and if there exists telepathy in this world, it was happening then. I could hear her silent pleading. I could feel her desperation not to go down the road she was headed on. Her desolate sorrow echoed in my head. Nonetheless, I had to say what I had to say.

When the meeting ended, the decision was made. Gerda would move on to full nursing home care.

Afterward, when Gerda had been wheeled back to her room and most of the staff had returned to their duties, her son, Edward, came around the table to where I was sitting with a cup of coffee.

“I want to thank you for your efforts,” he said. “I’ve been told you’ve been coming specially to see my mother.”

I nodded. “You’re welcome. I’ve enjoyed it.”

“I wish we could have come up with something else for her,” he said. “I know she won’t like it.”

“No,” I replied.

Edward gave a faint shrug of his shoulders. “But she’s always been difficult.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“Mother is very passive-aggressive.”

This seemed an extraordinary thing to say, so I asked, “How so?”

“She’s always been one of those people who never does anything with her own life, but she also resents anyone else trying to do anything with theirs.”

“Did you find this?” I asked.

“Yes, definitely. We all did. You should have met my father. He was extraordinary. Quite a go-getter.” Edward smiled and sat down in the chair next to mine. “Funny how families are. How, if you look at them. You know. When you get older. When maturity gives you a more distant perspective. You do wonder at the workings of them. At how things ever turned out as they did.”

I nodded.

“My father was, in his own way, very sophisticated. At least for those times. He was from Philadelphia, which was a long ways from here. In more ways than one. His family wasn’t rich, but they’d still managed to help him get a good education. He was cultured, was my dad. Well versed in things like Greek mythology and botany. Music and art. Loved his art, did my father. And opera. He
knew
opera, can you believe that? Out
here
? My mother, on the other hand, never went past eighth grade. They met—it was during the Depression, so nobody had jobs—my father was unemployed and working piecemeal at whatever he could find and he got a temporary job at the sawmill and that’s how he met her, because her father worked at the sawmill as well. He rented a room at their house and that’s how they started courting. And know what? My dad married her, and then he spent the whole rest of his life as a manual laborer. I mean, here was a guy with two years of college. He could tell you about all the great artists living in Florence during the Renaissance and explain how all that creativity came about because of the Medici family’s money, and then he’d tell you what all those pictures they painted meant. Yet he just stayed out on that ratty little farm they had, raising pigs and chickens to supplement the pittance he got paid at the mill. He had a strong personality, my father did. Influenced both Anna and me. Gave us such a love of culture.” He grinned in a rather admiring way.

“Whereas my mother never bothered to learn anything. If she told us things, it was stuff like how they had to scrape grease from the frying pan to put across their bread when she was little because they didn’t have enough money for butter, or how she raised a bum lamb once; it followed her everywhere, just like in the nursery rhyme. That was all she knew about, that very inward-looking down-home stuff. Yet she controlled my father. He refused to move off the farm. He refused to go anywhere, even into town. Kept saying it would kill her. Kill her to live somewhere else than here, just because she was born and raised here. But in the end, it killed him. Had a heart attack two days before he was supposed to retire. Just too much hard work.”

“He must have loved her very much to do that,” I said.

Edward gave a half shrug and twitched up the corner of his mouth. “I suppose they did love each other. In a way. But it was love without respect. One of those marriages of the kind they had in those days, when people had to stay together for economic reasons. I mean, how could my father respect someone who didn’t want to do anything with herself but live out in the sticks with a bunch of animals? My mother is just plain stubborn. She acts so meek and mild, but she controlled us all that way. Not by doing things, but by not doing things.”

“Yes, families can be challenging, can’t they?” I said.

“It’s not that I don’t care about her,” Edward replied. “I do. But she
is
just plain stubborn. She wants things all her own way. The number of times I’ve said to her, ‘Mother, you need to move into town. Why don’t we sell this place and you can get one of those nice apartments in a retirement community.’ We have a couple of them near us, where we live in Detroit, and that would have been ideal. I
could
take care of her then. So I
have
offered to help. But what does my mother say? She says, ‘What about my cats?’ I told her, ‘Well, they’re not going to take dozens of cats, are they? But then nobody
needs
dozens of cats.’ I said, ‘Get it down to one. Maybe we can find a place that would take one.’ But, of course, she’d rather have cats than people. Which goes to show what her mind is like. And it always was like that. She always preferred cats. I used to shoot them when we got too many. I learned to use a .22 that way, shooting those blamed cats, because half of them were wild anyway. But Mother is just like her sister, my aunt Louisa. Both of them loved to be miserable and gloomy.”

As he talked, I just sat, staring into my empty Styrofoam cup. There was nothing I could say.

I didn’t want to go in to see Gerda afterward. I didn’t want to look into her eyes after this meeting. On some level it felt as if I had betrayed her. I hadn’t, of course. Things had been no more in my control than hers. Being there as a professional, however, being there among the decision makers, I nonetheless felt guilt by association.

But then, what choice was there? How could the decision have gone any other way? Unable to walk, to talk, to stand, to bathe herself, to use the toilet alone, she couldn’t live alone. As she was, she wouldn’t yet even be able to cope with assisted living. So it had been a fair, reasonable, and inevitable decision. Sadly, just not the way life should have to be.

After another cup of coffee to fortify myself, I did go in to see her, walking the long, narrow corridor of the rehabilitation center to her door, second to last on the right. Sitting up in the chair beside the bed, she was alone in the room.

I pulled up the orange plastic visitor’s chair. “I’m sorry about the way things have gone. Sorry you aren’t getting to go home.”

She gazed at me. Something in the damage the stroke had done seemed to make it difficult for her to communicate straightforwardly, even with gestures, so she seldom even nodded or shook her head in response to conversation.

“Perhaps further down the line,” I said. “Perhaps if you keep working hard. Because you have improved a lot since the stroke.”

She continued to gaze at me a moment or two longer, her blue, blue eyes on my face. I gazed back, studying their blueness, seeing the cloudiness of age and wondering vaguely if blue eyes went bluer in old people, because it seemed that way to me.

“Sitting in the twilight,” Gerda said.

I smiled at her.

Her eyes drifted away from me to some unseen point beyond.

“Fire in the haystack that autumn,” she said softly. “We didn’t have no hay for the winter. Mama says sell the horse, can’t feed the horse and us, too. Papa says, ‘No money in that horse, except for the glue factory. Won’t no one buy that horse for anything else.’”

Gerda paused.

“Sitting outside in the twilight,” she continued quietly. “A cold night. Frost is coming. Moon’s coming up. Autumn moon, laying on the hill. Tim’s in the corral. Munching. I say, ‘Don’t eat so much, boy. Please, don’t eat so much.’ I say, ‘I’ll take care of you.’ I’m going to work. I tell Papa this. Papa says ‘You’re useless, girl.’”

“How old were you?” I asked. Gerda didn’t seem to be able to answer direct questions when she was expressing one of these memories. Any time I asked, she went on as if I had said nothing. But I kept trying.

She just sat.

When she didn’t answer, I said, “That must have been hard for you, your parents threatening to sell Tim.”

“Mama had too many mouths to feed. Sitting outside on the step, no one notices. Twilight’s come. No one notices.”

“It’s awful when you’re little and you can’t make anyone hear you. Especially when you’ve got feelings about something and no one realizes,” I said. “I remember when I was small, we had this mother cat who kept having kittens and my family were always getting rid of them. I always tried to stop them, but lots of times I couldn’t. It upset me so much.”

“Sitting on the porch steps in the twilight,” Gerda said. “Not day nor night. Nothing. No one can see what’s in the twilight. Might as well be nothing. Papa can’t see I was there. Says we’ll sell Tim. Didn’t matter what I wanted. Can’t see I was there.”

T
or once, when I arrived for my session with Cassandra, she wasn’t in the seclusion room. Indeed, she wasn’t even in the dayroom, where she usually waited for me. She was in the unit classroom with the other children, who were all sitting around a big table, doing work in the individual folders sent in from their various schools.

This unexpectedly ordinary scene startled me, making me aware of how seldom I had seen Cassandra in any context that might be deemed “normal.” It pleased me as well. Chaotic and traumatic as the last week had been, clearly we were making progress.

Cheerfully Cassandra came with me. She was dressed in her dancer’s clothes again—black leggings and long-sleeved T-shirt with a brightly colored short-sleeved T-shirt over top—and for some reason had only socks on and not shoes. She sprinted ahead of me and turned not one but three cartwheels in a row down in the corridor.

“You’re very lively today!” I said.

“Yeah, I know.” She turned a fourth cartwheel.

My first inclination was to correct her, to point out that the corridor was not really a place for turning cartwheels, that the floor was hard and that wearing only socks meant she might slip and hurt herself, that there were doors all along the corridor and someone might come out and bump into her; however, I held my tongue. Cartwheels weren’t an ideal thing to do there, but they were a whole lot more acceptable for an energetic child than being a pterodactyl or throwing oneself against the walls of a padded cell. So I smiled instead and put my arm out when we arrived at the therapy room.

“Come here. Here’s our room.”

Cassandra bounded in past me.

“We’re going to do something different today,” I said. I turned out the lights and closed the door. As it was overcast outside and the room faced north, we fell into murky daytime darkness.

Cassandra had meanwhile leaped up onto the table. She ran from one end to the other and jumped down.

Going over to a small cassette recorder on the shelf, I turned it on. Soft, slow classical music started playing.

“Hey, cool!” Cassandra cried and leaped back up on the table. She shot to the other end again and leaped off.

“I can see you have lots of energy today. In fact, I’m a little concerned you might hurt yourself doing that. Come over here. We’re going to do something different. See these pillows on the floor over here? We’re going to sit on them. We’re going to lie back and get
really
relaxed.”

“How come?”

“Because we’re going to talk today. And I want us to feel lazy and relaxed.”

“Why are we going to talk? What are we going to talk about?” Cassandra asked. She started to climb on the table again. “I don’t want to talk. I want to draw.”

“Yes, I’m sure you do. But today we’re going to do this.” Coming to the table, I grabbed hold of her as she prepared to charge off. I didn’t want it to appear I was restraining her, so I made a big playful show of wrapping her in a bear hug, which, of course, was around her thighs, as she was on the table. Grabbing her tightly, I lifted her right off the table.

“Wow! You’re strong!” she cried as I started to carry her over to the pillows. “Wow! Do that again! Catch me again off the table!”

“No. We’re going to sit down here and do this.” I was still holding her tightly around the thighs. I didn’t set her down. “All right?”

Cassandra drummed playfully on the top of my head.

“All right?” I asked again, keeping my tight grasp.

“All right,” she said in a somewhat deflated voice.

I let her down. After a moment’s hesitation, she did sit with me on the pillows.

“So what’s so important to talk about?” she asked.

“We’re going to relax first. Get really comfy. Listen to how soft the music is. Take deep breaths so we feel really good. Then I want you to tell about what happened to you when you were with your dad.”

“Why do you keep making me talk about that?”

“Because the way we get rid of your Troubled Place is by opening it up and cleaning it out, so there is nothing in it anymore.”

“Dr. Brown never made me talk about it.”