Riding Fury Home (34 page)

 

 

AS OUR THIRD ANNIVERSARY approached, Dana and I played with the idea of having some kind of commitment ceremony, but were uncertain we'd go through with it. In 1987, among our friends, we knew of only one other lesbian couple who'd done such a thing.

One day, we went up to Redwood Park to take a hike and happened on the brochure at a park kiosk: “Oakland Parks and Recreation Department Wedding Sites.”

“Let's just drive from site to site and look,” I suggested.

We stood in the small outdoor amphitheater staring at the rough halfcircle of wooden benches, looking out at our invisible audience, imagining standing before them and speaking our vows. It gave us the willies, a thrill down the spine that whispered,
Yes, it's scary. Do it.

When I told Gloria about our ceremony plans, she was unusually terse. “When is it?” she asked. “I'll write it on my calendar.” She didn't ask much about it, or jump for joy. I felt awkward to be too jubilant around her, so I didn't go on about it either. We both knew it was another marker of my shift of primacy. I felt sad that she had no lover of her own, that she had never found someone to settle in with.

In a cabin on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, Dana and I planned our ritual. The ocean arced vast and fluid outside our windows. We asked ourselves the question—what were we committing to? We discussed, meditated, each wrote vows, and reconvened.
Let us nourish each other, in our togetherness and in our separateness. Let us grow old together.

We decided we wanted a circle of intimates, only those who could wholeheartedly support us. That meant I didn't invite my father. For several years now, our relationship had thinned to once-a-year visits and occasional phone calls. He was still only nominally accepting of my being a lesbian, and hadn't grappled with his own history or opened his heart to Dana.

Dana invited her mother and father, telling them that they should come only if they could be truly supportive. Her mother came, her father didn't.

 

 

THIRTY FOLDING CHAIRS circled around an open space ringed by redwood trees, gigantic and solemn. Live flute music began a song of greeting. My mother was one of the four women who stood to cast the circle as sacred space, each in turn calling on the four directions and their associated elements of earth, air, fire, and water.

As my mother raised her arms to call the west, the element of water, I could see she had put whatever ambivalences she had aside and was giving it her all. Her voice rang out; her face was radiant. I'd never imagined my mother like this: a priestess showering us with her blessing.

Dana and I stood, turned to face each other, and read our vows. Then Dana's brother David and my friend Lorraine wrapped us in
a white-and-blue
tallit,
a Jewish prayer shawl, while they each said a blessing. We listened, joined by the shawl, as around the circle our friends voiced their wishes for us. We fed each other challah—braided Sabbath bread—and wine, and passed both around the circle. Then our whooping friends hoisted us in chairs to the blast of klezmer music from a battery-powered boom box, dancing us in the air. Lowered back down, we joined hands with everyone to dance the hora, kicking with joy.

Back home a few hours later, Dana and I were sprawled on our two living-room couches. The floor was littered with wrapping paper and open boxes holding our presents.

I staggered up. “Where're ya going?” Dana asked.

“To call my mother,” I replied.

Even my mother was surprised when I rang her on Clarke Street. “You're calling me on the night of your wedding?” she chortled. “I thought you'd be occupied with other things!”

The habit of narrating my life to and with my mother ran deep. I may have moved, I may have gotten married, but I couldn't stop myself from checking in. “Are you kidding?” I laughed. “We're beat. No action here but lying on the couch! But wasn't it amazing?”

“Yes, amazing,” she echoed.

After I hung up, I went back to Dana. “Let's go to bed,” I suggested. What I meant was that now that I'd talked to my mom, her voice my lullaby, I'd be able to sleep.

ONE MORNING, ABOUT a year after the commitment ceremony, I pulled up in front of Gloria's apartment on Clarke Street. We were getting together for a late breakfast.

Her car was parked on the street right in front of her place, so I was puzzled when I rang her bell and there was no answer.
Must be in the bathroom,
I thought. I rang a second time, and when she still didn't answer, I used my key.

I called out, and sure enough, I heard a muffled sound from the bathroom. The door was ajar, and I pushed it in. Gloria was sprawled on the floor, wearing a pale blue nightgown.

“Mom, what happened? Are you okay?”

“I'm fine, tripped on the bath mat, juz b'fore you came in.” Her eyes looked puffy and watery.

“Let me help you up,” I said, reaching my hand toward her.

“Nah, it's fine down here.” She giggled.

“What?” I frowned, looking down at her.

“I mean, I can do it.” She chortled, then tried to pull herself up, clutching on to the edge of the bathtub as she rocked forward, then
sank back down, landing with a
plop
on her bottom. “Oops! Give me a lift, would ya? My joints are shot.”

I grabbed her under the armpits. “Okay, one, two, three,” and heaved as she lurched up. I helped her back to bed.

“Listen, could we take a rain check? I want to go back to sleep.”

I stared at her. She did look exhausted and groggy. “Sure, no problem.”

At home, my thoughts pushed against something that my body knew, but I didn't want to know. I wanted my mother's simple explanation: “I tripped and fell.” But my bones ached with the familiarity of my mother's slurred speech, her watery eyes.

The next day, I called Gloria. “What happened yesterday when you fell? You seemed kinda out of it.”

“Oh,” she said. There was a long pause.

“Yeah, what happened?”

“I took an extra pill.”

“What kind of pill?” A sudden heaviness gripped my body, my chest tight and sinking.

There was no point in her denying it anymore; she told me that her doctor had prescribed sleeping pills. “Halcion,” she said. “My pain was so bad that night, I still couldn't sleep, so I took one extra.”

Silence crackled between us, my mother's secret exposed.

It had been almost twenty years since I'd left for college and she'd detoxed from prescription pills. At the hospital, they'd had to shoot her with muscle relaxants to keep convulsions from choking her. Ever since then, she'd had terrible insomnia, but now, with severe arthritic pain, she needed help to sleep. How could I blame her? Still, anger flared in me.

“Jesus, Glor! Promise me you won't take extra anymore. It's dangerous! Promise!”

“Okay, sweetheart, I won't.”

It was too glib, too easy, but for now, what could I do?

After I hung up, I leaned over the kitchen table, gripping my face in my hands.
My God, here we are again, full circle; I'm picking my mother up from the bathroom floor.

 

 

OVER THE NEXT YEAR and a half, Gloria had one knee replacement, then a second. With each surgery, there were my visits to the hospital, and then her recovery at home and my rounds of bringing her food and books and videos, and then my driving her to rehab and back. But it wasn't these chores that ached in me; it was what they meant: the horror of her body's deterioration, and the claim it placed on me—
take care of me, help me, I need you.

My mother bought an electric scooter and had a hydraulic lift for it welded onto her Honda hatchback. Her moments of greatest relief were when she was put on massive doses of steroids, creating temporary euphoria before the mood crash, while as a side effect her face grew round as the moon. But the dose was always gradually reduced because of the drug's dire side effects, and the pain returned.

One day she said to me, “If I get so bad I can't take care of myself, don't ever put me in a nursing home. That would kill me. Promise me you won't do that.”

I looked at her, dismayed. She was single, had never found a lover since she'd moved, and even though she had good friends, it was me she relied on. Would I have to take her in, care for her until the end of her life? I wasn't sure that I'd be willing to, but her ending up in an institution
was
an appalling idea.

“No, of course not; we'd work something out,” I said.

But as it turned out, it was not a problem we would have to worry about. There was no time.

IT'S ODD HOW THINGS happen: how that night I did something I almost never did—I turned on the ringer of my office phone after my last session with a therapy client. By now I'd completed my internship hours and was in private practice under a supervisor's license until I passed my orals. The ringing phone startled me at 9:00 PM, as I was sitting at my desk writing notes. Dana launched right in: “I'm at the hospital with your mother, in the emergency room. We've been here for hours. I didn't want to call until we knew something. It's her belly—filled with fluid.”

Dana's words wavered and pulsed, some assaulting my ear, others whispering away.

“The emergency room doc says it might be . . . blankety-blank . . . or . . . garble garble . . . or cancer.”

Cancer. The word hovered in the air.

My mother and I had gone lap swimming the day before at an outdoor city pool. It was a beautiful pool, set in the middle of a park, with live oak trees bordering its aqua waters. When we got out,
she told me she was short of breath. “You better go see the doctor tomorrow,” I said. She'd been complaining to me that despite all her efforts at dieting, her waist just kept expanding, and her pants were strained to bursting.

I put down the phone. The drive across the Bay Bridge was a blur of gray steel girders and red taillights.

In my mother's room, I found Dana standing next to Gloria's bed, holding her hand. They both looked up as I entered. Dana stepped back, and I went to my mother's side, leaned over, and kissed her. Her eyes skittered around, then met mine, piercing me with her fear.

“Sweetheart,” I said, taking her hand and squeezing it, “we'll get through this. Tell me what's happened so far.”

She took a ragged breath. “Well, first thing I went to see Dvora. She examined me, then sent me off for a chest X-ray.”

Dvora was our family doctor.

“I was home waiting for the results, and when Dvora called, she said, ‘Go to the emergency room, right now.' I was so scared. You were off in the city seeing clients, so I called Dana.”

Dana took up the thread: “The doctor said there's fluid in her belly. He said she'll have scans tomorrow.”

“I'll cancel my clients for tomorrow, and just be with you?” I realized it had come across more as a question than a statement.

“Whatever you think, darling,” she answered. She was lying very still, as if drawn into herself.

“You matter more than anything,” I said. “More than any clients.” I saw the relief on her face, but I hadn't quite heard the plea underneath her words. I vacillated: How many of my clients to cancel? In part, it was magical thinking:
If I don't have to cancel my clients, that means this is not serious. It'll be okay.
I clung to an illusion of control. Part of me wanted to flee and pretend it was just a regular
day, to be distracted by other people's problems. In the end, I kept a couple morning clients and canceled the rest.

When I returned the next day, Gloria was back from her scans. Dvora was staring intently at a chart in her hand. She was petite, with short brown hair, wearing corduroy pants and a jean jacket. Before I could speak, a thin man in a white coat entered the room, scowled at Dvora, and barked, “You have no hospital privileges here! I'm in charge of this case!”

I stood there, immobile. Didn't we already have enough stress? Dvora stood up abruptly, chart in hand. “Let's discuss this elsewhere,” she said. They both exited. We could hear their muffled voices through the door.

“Jesus, what a jerk! Who is that guy?” I asked.

“He examined me yesterday in the emergency room, so I guess he's assigned to my case,” Gloria answered. “He's a jerk, all right, but he's the jerk we got.”

We smiled at each other, the grins of trapped people.

After a short while, Dvora came back in and pulled a chair close to my mother, reached over, and took her hand. “Gloria, I'm going for now, but I'll be back tomorrow. The Alta Bates team is going over the scans and will talk to you about the results. You're in good hands.”

 

 

AN HOUR OR SO LATER, the thin man in white was back. Dana had left work early, and we were sitting in chairs next to Gloria, chatting. The doctor started speaking as soon as he entered the room. I was watching his mouth move, and I found my hearing had gone intermittent again, as if someone was fiddling with a radio dial. “A large mass . . . ascites, fluid in the peritoneal cavity . . . indicates ovarian carcinoma . . . until a biopsy of the tumor.”

Everything crashed around me. There was thunder in my ears, my mouth tasted sour, the room had dimmed

“A gynecologist will be visiting you in a while, to discuss your treatment,” the doctor mumbled.

He had barely left—perhaps we three were stunned into a stupor—before the door opened again and a woman in a white coat entered. A skirt with red and yellow flowers peeked out beneath her lab coat. She stood at the foot of my mother's bed and introduced herself; her eyes were warm and making direct contact with Gloria. She explained about the mass—that it was most likely cancer, but in any case, it had to come out. “You need the surgery, Gloria. The surgery will prolong your life,” she stated.