Rebecca puts down the shopping bag and kisses the top of her mother’s head. Someone has given Harriet a haircut, a surprisingly flattering one. Her head smells faintly of shampoo.
Harriet puts up a hand and feels for Rebecca’s face, briefly cupping her chin. “They think it was a Basque separatist group.”
Rebecca nods, and goes down the hall to the kitchen, to put the rice pudding and lamejuns in the fridge. The hallway is full of wheelchairs, a straggly becalmed flotilla of gray people just sitting there, some with their head lolling on their chest. On the way back to her mother’s room, she runs into the social worker assigned to Harriet’s case. Today is Halloween; the social worker is wearing a pirate hat and an eye patch. “How do you think your mom is doing?” she asks Rebecca.
“I think she’s still angry about being here,” Rebecca says. Harriet moved into the nursing home a month ago, after the rehab hospital said she had “plateaued” and the assisted-living place said they couldn’t take her back.
“I know,” the social worker says. “But they adjust.”
When she goes back into her mother’s room, Harriet is watching for her. The TV is off. “I’m so glad you came,” Harriet says.
“I just ran into the social worker in the hall. She says you’re adjusting.”
“Bullshit,” Harriet says. “Did you bring stuffed grape leaves?”
“I didn’t remember that you liked them.”
“I love them.”
“Next time,” Rebecca says. She pulls over a chair and sits facing her mother. Harriet is in a wheelchair, paralyzed again—it has happened before, she has some rare chronic spinal disease, but this time the neurologist says it is permanent. Rebecca had listened while he talked to Harriet about suffering and acceptance, about how what was happening to her was truly terrible, worse than what anyone should have to go through. Rebecca liked the doctor’s humanity and thought it might be somewhat comforting to Harriet; certainly Harriet has always found it gratifying to be admired for her bravery. But Harriet was furious. “He’s talking philosophy when what I really want to hear about is stem-cell research.”
Rebecca feels guilty about not making it down to see her mother more often. Harriet is always mentioning something she needs—lavender talcum powder, or socks, or an afghan to put over her legs when they wheel her outside, or, she sighs, “Just a really good turkey club sandwich.” Rebecca mails what she can, alternately touched by and annoyed by the many requests. (Are they wistful or reproachful? Both, she thinks.) (But they are also simply practical. These are the small things we live with, and Harriet now has no way to get hold of them.) She has talked to Harriet about moving to a nursing home in the Boston area. “It would be more convenient.”
“For you, you mean,” Harriet said. She is adamant about staying in this particular nursing home because the man she’s in love with is in the assisted-living place next door, and comes over to visit her nearly every day. Rebecca thinks it’s great that her mother has someone, though she could do without some of Harriet’s more candid reports. (“Ralph called me this morning and said, ‘I wish I could make love to you right now.’”)
“How is Ralph?” Rebecca asks now.
Harriet shrugs. “He thinks I’m mad at him because he didn’t give me a birthday present.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.” They laugh. They talk. Rebecca heats up some lamejuns in the kitchen microwave and makes Harriet a cup of tea. They hear the woman in the room next door say loudly, angrily, “Who washed my floor?” A low murmuring answer; then the angry woman again: “In the future I must ask that you not wash my floor without first giving me notice.”
Rebecca looks at Harriet. Harriet says, “That’s all she ever says, on and on, day and night, about the floor.”
Some lamejun has fallen onto the front of Harriet’s sweatshirt; when she finally notices and brushes it off, it leaves a spot. “Damn it.” She wipes furiously away at it, but in the midst of the fury is also grinning ruefully at Rebecca—Can you believe it? How does it happen every single time? She’s a very large woman, and she’s been dropping food on her shirt for as long as Rebecca can remember. The last time Rebecca visited, on the day Harriet moved to the nursing home, the aide swathed Harriet’s front in an enormous terrycloth bib before bringing in her dinner tray. Harriet allowed it, looking at Rebecca with a kind of stunned sadness; of all the enraging indignities of that day, this was the one that undid her. “She doesn’t need that,” Rebecca told the aide.
“We do it for everybody.”
“Right, but my mother doesn’t need it.”
So that was one small battle that Rebecca was there to win for Harriet. Without Rebecca, Harriet could have won it just fine for herself. Both of them knew this—and yet, between them, love has always had to be proved. It is there; and it gets proved, over and over. Some of their worst fights, confusingly, seem to both prove and disprove it: two people who didn’t love each other couldn’t fight like that—certainly not repeatedly. Still, Rebecca has often wished for something quieter with Harriet. Are there mothers and daughters who can be happy together without saying much?
“You know,” Harriet says now, frowning, clearly resuming an argument she’s been conducting in her own head, “you jump on me about watching the news all the time, but it’s not because I’m just some morbid tragedy hound, it’s—”
“I know why it is,” Rebecca says.
Rebecca’s younger sister, Cath, disapproves of the relationship between Rebecca and Harriet. She thinks it’s unhealthily close. She says she is tired of giving Harriet inches and having her take miles. (Rebecca, who has never seen Cath give Harriet an inch, finds this declaration both funny and infuriating.) Cath is a sculptor who lives in Denver. She thinks Harriet is a monster. She thinks—and here Rebecca agrees with her—that their father, a quiet, scholarly, self-deprecating man who drank, had ended up drinking more and walling himself up more and dying lonely because Harriet took up so much room. Harriet always had another man, single, recently divorced, or widowed. “She had affairs,” Cath said. “She broke Daddy’s heart.”
“You think those were affairs?” Rebecca asked, remembering all those wistful, mostly handsome, young men who had always seemed to her to be intruding—What were they doing at the Thanksgiving table? Why were they hanging around on Christmas Eve?—eagerly passing the cranberry sauce and trying brightly and unsuccessfully to engage her father in conversation.
“Not consummated affairs,” Cath said, with exasperated authority. “Mom was never brave enough, or radical enough, to actually sleep with anyone else. Those affairs were all about noble renunciation of actual sex. They were all about deprivation and suffering.”
She has said, more recently, to Rebecca over the phone: “She’s going to live to be a hundred, you know. People like that, who only care about themselves, live forever, because every ounce of energy they have goes into preserving the organism.”
Rebecca and her mother had begun to get close only when, nearly fifteen years ago, Harriet seemed to be dying.
She was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer just when the revelations broke about the rotten marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Rebecca was going through her own fierce divorce at the time (it had started amicably, with a mediator, and then escalated to the point where the lawyers’ bills had become so horrifying, so disproportionate to whatever it was that she and Steve had been fighting over, that the two of them had met for a drink one night and agreed to do everything the mediator had suggested in the first place).
But when Harriet got sick, Rebecca picked up the phone and called her soon-to-be-ex-father-in-law, who was on the board of a famous cancer hospital. She believed that Steve’s father, who had never liked her much and never done much to conceal it, was nonetheless fundamentally ethical and would do what he could to help. (Another belief, both bitter and accurate, was that he liked to remind himself of his own power by pulling strings and making things happen.) He got
Harriet admitted to the hospital, and the surgeon who was supposed to be brilliant lived up to his billing.
The doctor came and spoke to Rebecca after Harriet’s surgery, which took an entire day. “I got it all,” he said, and went on to list all the places where he’d found it: pretty much everywhere, as far as Rebecca could tell.
“So what’s her prognosis?” Rebecca made herself ask, though she felt she already knew.
The surgeon looked seriously at her. “I have no idea,” he said.
Rebecca wanted to hug him for that, and would have hugged Steve’s father, if he had been there. She did hug Steve, who had showed up unexpectedly at the hospital and sat in the waiting room with her all day. They had spent most of the time hunched over a book of Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles; they screwed up each one irreparably, in ink, and then they would make a big blue X on it before moving on to the next one.
During that day, and right afterward, Rebecca thought that maybe the divorce was a mistake, and that she and Steve would get back together. But it turned out to be like the illness of Anna Karenina: a kind of temporary exalted goodwill, a glimpse of how lovely things might have been if everybody hadn’t felt the way they actually did feel.
She went out and bought People magazine, and a copy of Diana: Her True Story. Every day she read to Harriet, who lay in bed with tubes coming out of her nose, and puffy boots automatically inflating and deflating around her legs at intervals, to prevent blood clots. “She tried to kill herself with a lemon slicer?” Harriet said. “What’s a lemon slicer? Do they mean a peeler? She tried to peel herself to death?” The two of them sat there in the dark hospital room, laughing. Whenever the surgeon came in, Rebecca hid the book and the magazine in the nightstand, because Harriet didn’t want him to think she was the kind of woman who read trash.
Harriet would later say of that time, “It was a nightmare.” Rebecca, who, partly in reaction to her mother’s hyperbolic way of putting things, tends toward understatement, would say, “It was tough.” But while it was going on, it was, in some bizarre way, also wonderful. They liked being together, for the first time in years. One afternoon, a couple of days after the surgery, Harriet needed a blood transfusion. The drip was still running when someone, mistakenly, brought in a dinner tray. Harriet was not allowed to have anything by mouth, and so Rebecca told the aide: “We don’t need that.”
“Oh, you’ve eaten already?” the aide said.
Harriet, lying on her back with the blood still dripping into her arm, raised her hands and curved them into little bat claws and said, in what Rebecca somehow understood was meant to be a Transylvanian accent, “I’m still eating.”
Rebecca laughed, and her eyes filled with tears at the valiancy of it, the surprise of that sudden little flash of wit.
It was before Rebecca started the bookstore; she was teaching high school English then, so she had the summer off. She went to the hospital every day and stayed there all day.
Then Harriet went through her year of chemotherapy. Rebecca was teaching again, but she went down to Connecticut on a lot of weekends. The pope got colon cancer. They watched the networks grappling with the delicate challenge of reporting on a pontiff’s gastrointestinal system: lots of disembodied scientific diagrams juxtaposed with footage of worried-looking nuns praying in St. Peter’s Square.
“What do you think the nurses are saying to him right now?” Harriet said, lying on the couch and looking at a shot of the outside of the hospital where the pope had been operated on earlier that week.
“Okay, Your Holiness, scoot your hiney over to the edge of the bed,” Rebecca said.
Harriet laughed and laughed. Then she threw up.
So here’s the glib psychological explanation: Harriet had always craved attention and now, made vulnerable by illness, needed more; Rebecca had failed at her marriage and needed to feel like a hero.
All of which was true. But it was more that they both discovered, almost shyly, that they liked each other. That they were having, in the middle of all this dire stuff, a good time together.
It was also, Rebecca knew, that her mother was dying. She sometimes lay in bed at night and cried, alone, or with Peter Bigelow, who taught architectural history at Harvard and whose two children—he was divorced—went to the school where Rebecca taught. He held her and listened while she talked about how hard it was to be finding her mother and losing her at the same time.
But, Peter said, it sounds like the knowledge that you’re losing her has been part of what allowed you to find her.
Oh, he was a nice man, Peter. Back then, her romance with him felt too new, too green and slight to bear the weight of everything Rebecca was feeling, about her divorce, about Harriet. Poor guy, she had thought, looking at Peter’s kind, earnest face, his sandy rumpled hair, his open trusting bare chest, his hand resting on the sleeve of her flannel nightgown.
Are you sure you don’t mind, if we don’t, tonight?
Of course not.
I’m sorry, I thought I wanted to, but—
Rebecca. Don’t worry. It’s fine.
She might have been suspicious of his tenderness, seen it as his own need for heroism, or as a ploy to hook her before revealing his true selfish self (remember, she was just wrapping up a divorce). But she’d seen him for years with his kids. He was nice, period. He took her out to dinner and to concerts, talked to her about his work enthusiastically and not at all pompously (he was writing a book on H. H. Richardson), listened while she talked about wanting to quit teaching to open a bookstore, and was frank and relaxed in bed.
He advised her to pace herself, with Harriet. Her friends were saying the same thing, especially the ones who’d had sick parents. Go easy, take time for yourself, don’t let this take over your whole life. But her mother was dying, and Rebecca wanted to cram in as much as she could. In some unexpected way she and Harriet had fallen in love.
Incredibly, Harriet didn’t die. Her cancer never came back. She kept having more surgeries: to insert a catheter for the chemo drugs under her chest wall, to remove it again because of recurrent infections, to remove scar tissue in her abdomen, to remove more scar tissue. Rebecca kept driving down and spending time with her mother.
The glow wore off.
What a disconcerting thing to feel, to acknowledge! It wasn’t that she was sorry Harriet was still alive. It was more that she couldn’t keep it up: the attention, the rapport, the camaraderie, the aimless joy of just hanging around with her mother, watching the news. She had burned herself out, just as Peter and her friends had warned she might; but looking back at the time when Harriet had seemed to be dying, she couldn’t imagine having managed it any other way.
Harriet started feeling that Rebecca wasn’t visiting often enough. It was true, she was coming down less often. But oh, that “enough.” That tricky guilt-laden word that doesn’t even need to be spoken between a mother and daughter because both of them can see it lying there between them, injured and whimpering, a big throbbing violent-colored bruise of a word.
“What about Easter?” Harriet asked—plaintively? coldly? in a resolutely plucky way that emphasized how admirably she was refraining from trying to make Rebecca feel guilty? It could have been any of those ways of asking, or any of a number of others, all of which did make Rebecca feel guilty, and angry, and confused. The burnout took the form of an almost frantic protectiveness of her own time whenever Harriet wasn’t sick. If her mother needed her, she dropped everything and went; but if her mother didn’t need her, she wanted to feel free to say no.
Harriet, on the other hand, seemed to feel that the time Rebecca spent caring for her didn’t count. Hurting, drugged, frightened, throwing up—that’s not what Harriet called spending time with her daughter. (The watching-the-news part was engrossing, and sometimes fun, but it was more like a jailhouse party, a desperate entertainment concocted by people who have very little to work with.) Harriet wanted to travel with Rebecca—to go on a cruise to Alaska or the P
anama Canal. Or see Moscow and St. Petersburg, for heaven’s sake—all those mythical places that you could now, suddenly, actually go to.
Rebecca had no desire to travel with Harriet, and she was getting ready to start her bookstore, looking for space, making a business plan, applying for loans. “A bookstore?” Harriet said. “With your education you want to start a store, and one that doesn’t even have a hope of making money?”
“It’s what I care about,” Rebecca said.
“I worry about you,” Harriet said. “What is your life adding up to?”
Rebecca was hurt, furious. What did a life, anyone’s life, add up to? Why did Harriet feel she had a right to say things like that? (In her head, Rebecca wrote the script for what a mother should say in this situation: “That’s wonderful.”) They had one of their old fights, made worse by the fact that Rebecca hadn’t realized these old fights were still possible. The recent long entente around Harriet’s illness had lulled Rebecca into a false sense of safety. She felt ambushed.
Then Harriet sent Rebecca a check, for quite a lot of money. To help with the bookstore, she wrote on the card.
“You can’t afford this,” Rebecca said.
“It’s what I want to do,” Harriet said.
Then she got sick again.
Pneumonia—not life-threatening, but it took a long time to get over. Rebecca drove down and made Harriet chicken soup and vanilla custard, and lay across the foot of Harriet’s bed, watching the vigil outside the Fifth Avenue apartment building where Jacqueline Onassis was dying. They watched while John Kennedy Jr. came out and told the reporters that his mother was dead.
“Poor Jackie,” Rebecca said.
She was remembering how much her mother had admired and pitied Jackie, in the years after JFK’s assassination, when Rebecca was growing up.
But “What’s poor about her?” Harriet said. “She’s been living with another woman’s husband.”