Until the Real Thing Comes Along

  “Nice robe,” he says. “Pretty.”

  “Ethan got it.”

  “That right?”

  “Yeah, he outfitted me and the baby like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Well, that’s nice.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you doing down here, sitting in the dark?”

  “Nothing. Can’t see to do anything.”

  I smile, then say, “Could you … talk to me a little bit about things now? Just a little.”

  “Yeah, sure, honey.” He leans back in his chair, rubs his hands together. “I’m glad you’re home.”

  “Me, too.”

  A long pause, and then, “Well, we think this first started happening maybe six, eight months ago.” He looks up at me and on his face is a terrible vulnerability, as though what he is about to reveal now is suddenly arbitrary, and it is up to me to make fact or fiction of it. For the first time in my life, I see the boy in him.

  “Uh-huh,” I say, gently. He has to finish. I need to know it all.

  “She … well, you know, she had those mood changes. And she does get a little confused. It’s just … starting to happen more often. Not all the time, though!”

  “No.”

  “And, uh … Well, she started … She …” He pushes back away from the table. “Could you …? I’ll be right back. Okay?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m fine. I’ll be right back.” He goes into the little downstairs bathroom, closes the door quietly.

  I sit for a minute, then go to stand outside the bathroom door. Inside, I hear him quietly retching. I remember that his mother did this when his father died—she vomited over and over. She was lying on the sofa in a darkened living room, her yellow scrub bucket by her side, the afghan over her, though it was a hot summer day. She lay quietly, like a dead person herself, except to rise up now and then and hang over the bucket. I remember thinking, Well, that’s good, that’s a way to get the grief out. Now I understand the absurdity of that hopeful notion. I hear my father flush the toilet, turn on the tap. I think he may be looking at the image of himself in the mirror and seeing Miss Marilyn White, his pink-cheeked bride, twenty years old and saying I do with her mouth, with her eyes, with the slight slanting of her body toward his, the oblique line of love. She is brushing her auburn, then graying hair; smiling at him in her vanity mirror. She is scraping out a striped mixing bowl, patting down pincurls, opening her own mouth when she feeds their baby applesauce. She is turning up the radio and singing along with her favorite song, clapping her hands over her mouth when she sees the kitchen he remodeled for her, shielding her eyes against the setting sun last summer, when she came out into the backyard wearing her new sleeveless yellow dress and no shoes—earthily beautiful and plainly his. I’m sure that’s what he’s seeing. And seeing. And seeing. I pull my robe tighter around me, go back to the kitchen table, and wait for him.

  In the morning, I go to the window and look out into the backyard. My mother is sitting in a lawn chair, her head thrown back, letting the sun fall on her face. It must be chilly; she has a sweater clutched around her. I look at my watch: 7:40.

  I go into my parents’ room. Empty, the bed neatly made, framed pictures on the dresser speckled by dust that nearly glitters in the strong morning light. I get a pair of my father’s warmest socks, put his robe and slippers on, join my mother in the backyard.

  “Say, there’s an attractive outfit,” she says.

  “It’s warm,” I say. And then, “It’s cold!”

  “Well, it’s early.”

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “He went to the bakery. You want some coffee?”

  “No thanks, Mom. I can’t—”

  “Oh! Yes, I remember. I remember that.”

  “Okay.”

  “You look wonderful, honey.”

  “I hate being pregnant.”

  She laughs.

  “I do! I thought it would be so wonderful but it’s just a pain in the ass.”

  “Don’t use that language in front of me.”

  “Sorry. But it is.”

  “Well,” she says. “Just wait.”

  I look at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Pain in the ass?” she says. “You want to know about pain in the ass?” She laughs again. Well. She’s certainly in a good mood.

  “It’s not pain in the ass you have when you deliver,” I say, looking down.

  “I hated being pregnant, too,” my mother says, suddenly.

  I look up. “You did?”

  “Yes. Does that surprise you?”

  “Well … yes. You never said anything.”

  “Wasn’t worth it. I said it to your father, he knew. But there was no reason to tell all of you. Anyway, I loved children, I just hated the pregnancies.”

  “God!” I say. “God!”

  “Are we praying, Patty?”

  “Ma. I just … I wish I’d known that. It would have made me feel so much less guilty.”

  “Oh, don’t feel guilty.” Her voice is bitter now. “It’s such a waste of time.” She looks around the yard, at the fading garden, at the trees just starting to turn. Together, we listen to the staccato message of a woodpecker, and together we smile at it.

  “What else?” I say.

  “What?”

  “What else can you tell me about pregnancy that might be useful? Not that I have much more time left. If there’s a God in heaven.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Relax.”

  Something occurs to me. I need her. I swallow, look away.

  “What?” she says.

  “Nothing. I’m just thinking.”

  “Thinking what? Patty?”

  “Just … I need you. You know?”

  “Well. I’m here.”

  “I know, but I need you to keep telling me things.”

  “Oh, I’ll always tell you things. I live in you.”

  A car door slams, then a house door. Then we hear my father yelling, “Marilyn? Marilyn?”

  “We’re out here!” she yells back. Then, to me, quietly, “For heaven’s sake. He’s never going to make it.”

  23

  Ethan and I are sitting in the parking lot of the Mary C. Conway Center for Alzheimer’s. It is a handsome building, a brick exterior, evergreen-colored trim, a well-kept lawn. We have an appointment to talk to the director in fifteen minutes.

  The afternoon after I came home, my mother napped while the rest of us sat in the living room and talked about whether we would ever have to—or be able to—institutionalize her. “She’s not that bad!” I said, and Johnny said, “She’s had a couple of good days in a row. But we have to face the fact that she’s getting worse. Last week she was trying to use a fork to drink milk. And she left her slippers on the stove. And—”

  “All right,” I said. “But she doesn’t have to be put somewhere! I’ll help take care of her. And Dad will. There are home health aides you can hire. And … day care. For adults.” At this, Phyllis and I both began crying, and my father didn’t look far from it. We all stopped talking when my mother suddenly appeared, saying, “Enough. I won’t have my family falling apart before I do.” She sat down in a chair beside my father, smoothed her skirt. “Now. What’s for dinner?” she asked.

  “You want to go in now?” Ethan asks.

  “No.”

  “You want to just wait here till it’s time?”

  “No.”

  “Patty.”

  “Oh, all right, let’s go in.”

  We go through a set of double glass doors and encounter an older man dressed in a three-piece suit, a hat on his head, a cane in hand. “I wonder if you could help me,” he says to Ethan.

  “Yes?”

  The man takes Ethan’s hand, leans in close to him. “Well, but I wonder if you could help me.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Where’s my room?”

  “Oh. Sorry, I don’t know.”
br />   “I just moved here,” the man says. “Used to be in the armed forces.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Damned if I know where my room is!”

  “Well, let’s ask,” I say. “There’s a nurse; let’s ask her.”

  Together we approach the nurse, who is standing in the hall before a medication cart. She looks up and smiles. “Hi, Henry. Are you giving these people a tour?”

  “Well, I’m a little lost,” Henry says. “I just moved here.”

  “No, hon, you’ve been here for two years. Okay?”

  “Oh yes,” Henry says, and takes her outstretched hand, shuffles along beside her.

  “Did you need some help?” the nurse asks us, over her shoulder.

  “Yes,” Ethan says, at the same time that I say, “No thank you.”

  I walk out quickly, Ethan close behind me. Outside, he says, “What, you don’t want to stay?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. But let me just go back in and cancel the appointment.”

  “I’ll be in the car.”

  I make my way on feet that have gone numb, then sit and stare out the windshield.

  When Ethan returns, he says, “She said if you change your mind, come back any time.”

  I nod, stare out at the trees. The colors must be breathtaking to anyone who can really see them.

  “It wasn’t so bad there, Patty.”

  I say nothing.

  “I mean, it was … clean. And—”

  “No, Ethan.”

  “All right.”

  He starts the car, drives slowly out of the lot. I sit quietly, remembering a time when my parents went out and I was babysitting for the younger ones, and we decided to snoop around. It had been a long time since we’d done it. We got very organized, divided up the house. I got my parents’ room, and I checked the closet, the bureau, under the bed. There was nothing. Then I looked in my mother’s night-table drawer, which never yielded anything but cough drops and Kleenex and paperback novels and her pink rosary, but we had vowed to be thorough. This time, in addition to the usual, I found a half-eaten Heath bar, wrapped up with a rubber band. I was a little angry about this; I loved Heath bars, and she had never offered one to me. I also found a list with menu ideas for a week—under Tuesday was “San Francisco pear salad??” I guess she decided against it, since I never remember having it. She’d also listed stuffed peppers for another night; and for Friday, she’d planned “Italian spaghetti.” I still remember that list as plainly as if I were holding it in my hand right now. Also in the drawer was a little pile of photos, pictures of hairdos cut out from magazines, models with hair approximately the length of my mother’s, in greatly varying styles. This surprised me. I had no idea my mother cared about her hair. I was fifteen and completely self-obsessed; the notion that my mother, too, worried about hairstyles irritated me. And yet I felt a kind of tenderness toward her that made me not share any of her drawer’s contents with anyone else. I said I’d not found anything interesting at all. I didn’t want to betray her.

  The next week, coincidentally, I’d found another surprise: a pair of ballet slippers in a cupboard in the laundry room. This room was not one that we ever looked in during our snoop sessions. But I’d needed bleach for a science experiment and when I pulled it out from the cupboard, I saw a brown paper bag pushed toward the back, and inside were pink toe shoes. They were beautiful, with wide pink ribbons wrapped neatly around them. The shoes were old, but hardly used; the soles were nearly perfect. I put them back. Not long afterward, I asked my mother about them, and she said, “Oh, you found those, huh? Yes, I bought them for myself a few years ago. I saw them in the window of a store that sold dancewear one time when your father and I went to New York. And I went in and just … bought them.”

  “But why?” I asked.

  “Why?” She smiled, consulted her hands for an answer I might understand. “To dance, I guess.”

  “When do you ever dance?”

  “Oh,” she said, “sometimes when you are all in school. I just put them on and … Well, I don’t really dance. I try, I guess, but mostly I just walk around a little, stand on my toes, do a little pirouette….”

  “How come?” I was mortified. I didn’t want her to do it anymore.

  She laughed. “I don’t know.” And then she went off to answer the phone and we never talked about it again.

  Now I see my mother pulling those ballet shoes out of the paper bag, sitting on the red vinyl step stool next to the dryer, raising her housedress up over her knees. I see her sliding off her loafers, winding beautiful pink ribbons around her forty-year-old ankles, then standing, just for one brief moment, sur la pointe, to the applause of clinking buttons and zippers in the dryer. I didn’t know if she ever came out of the laundry room to dance. And now I’m afraid to ask her, for fear she will say, “What ballet slippers?”

  I am so selfish. Never mind all that my mother faces. I am so afraid of what I will lose when she forgets.

  “You want to eat something?” Ethan asks now.

  “Yes,” I say. And then, I say, “Oh!”

  “What?” he says. “What’d you forget?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “I think … I’m in labor.” The word sounds so stupid. Forced, as in when you learn a new vocabulary word and then feel compelled to use it the next day.

  “Not yet,” Ethan says. “It’s not time yet.”

  I look over at him, and he looks back at me.

  “You want to tell the baby that?” I say. And then, “You want to take me to the hospital?”

  “Should we pull over?” he says. “Should we call an ambulance?”

  “No. It’s a first labor. This will take about six thousand hours. You remember what they said about first labors, right?”

  “I don’t remember anything.” He signals right, turns left. “How bad does it hurt?”

  I put my hand to my belly, as though this will help me tell better. And in a way, it does: I can feel a tightening when the pain comes. “It’s pretty much like not-so-bad menstrual cramps,” I say. “On … you know, the second day.”

  “Ah,” Ethan says. “Thank you. That clears it right up.”

  An hour later, I am back at home, sitting in my living room with Elaine. Ethan and Mark have gone out to pick up some Chinese food from the expensive new restaurant we’ve all been dying to try. Apparently we’re going to celebrate my idiocy.

  “Dr. Carlson was really nice,” I say. “But it was so embarrassing! They put me in a room right away, took me before all the broken arms and bleeding people, and then it was nothing!”

  “Well, how are you supposed to know?” Elaine asks.

  “I am supposed to know! Between Ethan and me, we’ve read about fifty-five books; we took that stupid class …”

  “But you haven’t been through it before.”

  “No.”

  “I’m so glad you’re back here. I want to see when it really happens.”

  “Great.”

  “No,” she says, “it’ll be fun.”

  I look at her. “Why don’t you just get pregnant? Then you can see for yourself?”

  “Actually—”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Elaine!”

  She shrugs. “Are you glad?”

  “Well … yeah! Aren’t you?”

  “Well … Did you ever get that black line down your belly?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Then I’m glad.”

  I hug her, then say, “We are very superficial people.”

  “I suppose.” She leans back, stretches, then says, “How’s your mom?”

  Ah. Yes. That. “I don’t know. Diagnosed, you know—I guess that’s the difference. Now that it has that name, it’s so much scarier. She’s actually handling it the best of all of us. My father is a wreck.”

  “Yeah. He would be. I never saw a man so much in love for such a long time. I always think of that story he told us about
jumping off the ship when he was in the navy—remember, to get the letter your mother had sent that blew out of his hands?”

  “Yeah. And you know what my mother told me the other day? When they were first married, she wanted lilacs in their backyard. They couldn’t afford to buy any bushes, so my father went into some rich people’s neighborhood and tried to steal some. He got arrested!”

  “Wow! Really? He has a record? Lilac thief?”

  “I guess. He might have gotten away with it if he’d only taken one, but he was trying to stuff five or six of them into the back of his car.”

  The door opens and the smell of Chinese food wafts in. “Ummmmm,” I say. And then, “Ohhhh!”

  Three pairs of eyes turn to look at me.

  “This is not like menstrual cramps,” I say.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Ethan says, and Elaine asks excitedly, “Is this real? Is this the real one?”

  I sit down. Someone has lassoed my uterus and is trying to drag it out of my body.

  “This is real,” Ethan says. And then, to Elaine, “Want to come this time?”

  “Call my mother,” I say. And walk out to Ethan’s car with my mouth wide open, which I think is not how I am supposed to be breathing.

  “Bring my bag!” I yell, over my shoulder.

  “I’ve got it!” Ethan says, running up quickly behind me.

  “Help,” I say quietly, as he fastens his seat belt.

  “What?” Ethan starts the engine. He is a little wild-eyed.

  “Oh, God,” I say. “Look what we did.”

  He takes my hands. “You’re going to do just fine. I’m going to be right with you, okay?”

  I nod, then say, “Ow!”

  “Here we go. We’re going now.” Ethan puts the car into gear, and we are off.

  Right behind us is Mark’s car. I see Elaine crying and waving at me. I wave back, smile weakly, face front again. “What time is it?” I ask Ethan. My watch says 7:22 but I want to be sure.

  “Seven twenty-two.”

  “All right then,” I say. And then, “Wait. Wait. It doesn’t hurt now.”

  “Okay, so let’s time them, starting with the next one. That’s what we’re supposed to do. Write it down—there’s pen and paper in the glove compartment.”

  “No, I’m telling you it went away. It doesn’t hurt! At all.”