Worn Masks (4 page)

Daddy

Chapter 7

“GO BACK TO sleep,” Mom called.

“I’m thirsty.”

“Go back to sleep.”

“What’s the matter?” Dad mumbled.

“Nothing,” Mary Grace whispered.

“Now you woke up your father. Just go back to sleep,” Mom said.

“What’s wrong with the
bambina
?”

“Daddy, I had a bad dream.  I’m thirsty.”

“Spoilin’ her, you’re always spoilin’ her.”

Dad brought her water and as Mary Grace sat up, he placed her
hands around the cup. She felt the coolness of the ceramic mug, and then his
large warm hand on top of hers, guiding the water to her mouth. With his other
hand he pushed her hair back away from her eyes.

“You better take her to the bathroom before she has an accident.”

“What?”

“The bathroom,” Mom said.

Mary Grace tugged on his arm.

He put on her slippers. “
An-di-amo
. Let’s go.” Her father
stretched the word out slowly.

He unlocked the kitchen door and led her down the hall to the
bathroom, put on the light, and pulled the door partially closed. “I’ll wait.”

He went back down the hall, took the cigarettes out from behind
the plant, lit up, and stood at the top of the stairs.

The toilet flushed. “Wash your hands.”

The water turned off. “Shut the light.”

Mary Grace walked toward him, as he put the
cigarette out in the dirt around the plant, and he smiled at her sleepy face.
He guided her past the open stairway back into the kitchen and relocked the
door. He brought her into the living room, tucked her in on the couch turned
bed. Again, his hand swept across her forehead pushing the hair back, patting
the top of her head. “Go to sleep now,
bella.
”

She heard him get back into his bed.

“You’re spoilin’ her.”

Mary Grace blinked awake.
Daddy?
She was so thirsty. Where
was she?

She was in their bed. She was being a daughter. Her
dad had died over ten years ago. She had kept a
per
functory calling ritual to her mom, as promised to him, every, or
almost every month, since then. And, now she was here in their bed.

She couldn’t think. Maybe it had been a mistake to come. How many
days had she been here repeating to herself her friend’s advice:
Think of
her as a stranger who has no one. You would be kind to a stranger.
 

Locked
In

Chapter
8

MARY GRACE RELUCTANTLY maneuvered her mother’s wheelchair into the
makeshift hairdressers, next to a woman who was sitting stiffly in a straight
back chair, as if her body was mimicking the chair. The woman was quiet, her
clothes hung draped on what seemed like a once much fuller body, but now they
dwarfed her frail frame. Mary Grace nodded at her and then looked away. There were
other women at different stations, two of them with their heads under the
dryers, heads full of curlers. One was in a quiet sleep and the other kept
calling out, “Lady, will you help me.”

Another woman at the sink, her hair stringy and white, startling
next to her warm brown skin, was crying and begging for someone to come to her.
Mary Grace could hardly make out the unfamiliar words resonating in another
tongue: “
Ven aqui, por favor, ven aqui
,” over
the noise of the spraying water, and humming hair dry
ers, the
woman across from her repeating “3-4-5-5-5, 3-4-5-5-5,” as her pale and shaky
hands tied and untied shoe laces wound on a soft board, and opened and closed
little felt pockets. The board sat across her lap, locking her into her wheel
chair. She rocked and called out the numbers.

The hairdresser came over and ran her fingers through her mom’s
hair, asking, “So what shall we do for you today?” Mary Grace was taken by how
warmly
she touched her mother, this stranger.
She was torn be
tween two thoughts—
What’s wrong with you, can’t you
see she’s not responsive?
And,
why would you treat her so nicely, when
she’s been such a bitch all her life?

There were two other women, who wore no expressions, for whatever
tautness their facial muscles once practiced were gone, and they seemed to look
through
everyone. Mary Grace wondered if
their gazes were re
ally inward, looking upon some place where they were
locked in their minds.

Why had she brought her mom down here? The nurse had thought it
would be a good idea for Mary Grace to see more of the facility since she
hadn’t had time on her previous visits. Well, not visits to her mom really, but
to fill out paperwork, to bring her clothes so they could sew nametags in them.

“How long has she been here?”

Mary Grace realized then that the hairdresser was speaking to her,
asking about her mother.

“Two weeks, yeah, about two weeks now.”

“They must have given her a shower. They must have washed her
hair.”

“Um, I don’t know.” Mary Grace felt her body
tens
ing.
Was she supposed to know?

She could not stop searching around the room, glancing from one
woman to the next, for some sign of connection. Was there any reaction as the
hairdresser washed, combed, and cut their hair? Suddenly the woman trapped in
the wheel chair was screaming, “NO, no, no.”

“It will be okay,” Mary Grace managed. Although she did not know
what would be okay. What could ever change what was logged in this woman’s
brain, tattooed deep into the layers of her life? At first the woman went on
screaming, then large blue eyes locked onto Mary Grace, who repeated, “It will
be okay.”

And the woman became quiet. Then slowly she
be
gan
to mumble and speak again “3-4-5-5-5, 3-4-5-5-5.”

The hairdresser was moving from one woman to the next. “I will
start your mom as soon as I put the color in these gray curls.” The hairdresser
said tousling the full head of hair of the lady who sat like a slipcover placed
over the chair.

Mary Grace nodded, but she was thinking back to the week of her
grammar school graduation. “
Why can’t I have my hair cut at a beauty parlor?
I want a style. It is my graduation.” 

“Maria Graziella, clip, clip and I’ll have it done.” Her mom had
given her no further explanation, no space for conversation.

Couldn’t she just leave her mother here? They would
take her back upstairs if she said she had to go. She could bolt. Nothing but
flight instinct pounded in her head.

How long had she spent blocking out the years with her mother?
What did she have of hers alone that could be imbedded as the memory of her
life?

Yet, she didn’t want to go home. She was
worried about Aunt Maggie. She seemed sluggish, not herself. Mary Grace
squirmed in the chair. She quickly glanced over at her mother, who in the past
wouldn’t have allowed this fidgeting. “Ants in your pants,
Maria Graziella
,
sit still.”

Although she promised Dad she’d take care of her mother, right
then, running away from everything she’d ever known, finding some adventure,
some wild and wonderful experience to put into her head, creating the memory of
her life was all she wanted to do.

Seeing Black

Chapter 9

IN HER MOTHER’S room, Mary Grace pushed the wheelchair near the
window. She sat next to her mother and told her, “It is sunny out and very hot.
You’d like this place, you can’t open the windows.” 

After a while, Mary Grace said, “Well, here we are, and you’re
still looking right through me.” Then she got up, walked closer to the window,
and looked out over the parking lot three floors down. She could see her car.

“You know, I’ve been cleaning out the house. I’ve been to talking
to Aunt Maggie, too. You hate that, don’t you? I started with your clothes,
your closet, where you hung your dresses.” She looked back toward the window,
not down but at her mother’s reflection in the glass.

Her mother was blotting her red lipstick with a folded tissue. In
the vanity mirror Mary Grace watched her finish dressing: straightening the
cinched belt on the blue-Swiss-dot dress and slipping on the two-tone pumps.

“Mommy, what color is your hair?”

“My hair—a—sale e pepe. Salt and pepper
.”

It was unusual to see her mother out of her housedress and not in
one the three black dresses that dominated the closet. There was the old one,
for going food shopping, some
times worn
without the black nylons, the good one for Sun
day Mass, and the other
one for visiting neighbors. They were called mourning clothes and she wore them
from two to six months depending on the death—for an entire year when her
father died, although they hadn’t spoken in over twenty years. How wonderful it
was for Mary Grace to see her in the shiny dress and matching shoes, so
beautiful.

Her mom instructed her: “Are you paying attention? Stop leaning on
the bed—you’re wrinkling the bedspread. You mind your manners with Aunt Maggie.
Now go downstairs, Maria Graziella. We’ll only be gone a short while.” Then she
bent forward and turned her cheek for a kiss from Mary Grace.

Mary Grace always liked being downstairs. She liked when Aunt
Maggie would call up the stairwell, especially after her dad had wandered in
late for supper, and the food was cold, and her mom and dad’s voices grew
louder.

“
Come down, watch the Lennon
Sisters on the
Law
rence Welk Show
with me.” Mary Grace would
scramble past them down the stairs, the sound
fading be
hind her. In Aunt Maggie’s living room their voices from above
were muffled. Together they would listen to the music as Aunt Maggie hummed
along to the songs.

Later her mom’s raspy voice called down,
“Maria Gra
ziella, come up and get ready for bed.”

Mary Grace turned from the window to face her mother. “I can’t do
this. I just can’t do this.” She left the room. Like a mantra on the way to the
elevator, down, out, and into her car:
I have to remember that I am Gracie.
I got away, and I made my life. I won’t let her interrupt my life.

Broken Bones

Chapter 10

BLINKING, MARY GRACE reached for the re
ceiver, and
tried to adjust her eyes in the semi-dark to the iridescent digital number. She
fell back against the pillow. “Shit, the nursing home. What pill can’t they
give her today?”

“Is this
Maria Graziella
? Your mom . . .”
Had she
heard correctly, had her mother called Mary Grace? To be woken by that name,
the
one
only she used?
Mary Grace
shook
her head and tried to focus on the voice, quiet with
a distinct Indian
accent. “Sorry, she has been brought to hospital . . .”

They were deliberating about surgery for her smashed hip. She
had slipped out of their arms when they moved her from the shower harness back
into her wheelchair. She had jerked, she had twisted away from them . . . she
had tried to get away?

There were concerns about doing surgery, concerns about not
doing surgery.

Mary Grace was saying to herself,
sticks and stones can break
my bones, but words will never hurt me.
And the next line should be:
unless they come from my mother!

How many times had Mary Grace stood in her mother’s shadow, in a
store, at school, people trying to ask her a question and she wanted to answer,
but her mother would take a half-step forward and into her, the perfect block,
and then decide. “She’ll take this blouse” or “No, no, she no want to play
sport.”

Mary Grace tried to breathe.
I was a child then
. But,
what of when Dad was dying and the doctor asked her if he had a living will or
a health proxy and Mary Grace knew exactly what these were and began to say she
would try to talk with him. Her mother pushed her, literally pushed her aside,
saying, “Ahh, no paper, I am telling, I am the wife.” Mary Grace knew her
mother had no idea what they were talking about, and she tried to say it was
about her father’s choices. Her mother’s look alone pierced her and she
crumbled as if she were twelve again.

Now Mary Grace couldn’t get clear in her head that she had to
make this decision for her mother, who had never allowed her to decide
anything. Who could she
call? Aunt Maggie?
Yet, somehow she knew it was
important
for her to make this decision, not Aunt Mag
gie, not anyone else. Her
mother was a master of sayings, which came out at the worst times, when Mary
Grace wasn’t helped by a cliché answer whose purpose was to suppress her
reaction to something. Words that had hurt her many more times than the pain of
broken bones, that slipped under her skin and irritated like a rash gone wild.
Words that scarred.

She continued to replay the phrase,
sticks and stones can
break my bones, but words will never hurt me,
to think about its irony. She
realized she had suppressed words all her life. How many times had she just
wanted to say she hated her mother? How often had she resisted asking questions
about their miserable marriage? What about her mother’s family, known by
letters written in a foreign tongue, addressed in fancy script to
Signora
Teresa Giordano Maschere
? Letters Mary Grace didn’t know if her mother
answered.

Broken bones happen to the body, the
skeleton of our existence, but where do the words reside—in our hearts, our
minds, and our reach to the rest of humankind?

After the broken hip there was a stroke, after the stroke,
congestive heart failure, not once but three times. Each time her mom receded
deeper into the shell of her body until it completely shut down.