“I comprehend it. The right side of my mother’s brain has died in part, which means the left side of her body will be affected.” I am as clinical as she, forthright.
“By affected you mean paralyzed.”
A beat goes by before I say, “You’re joking, right?”
“Do you have a sibling or another family member who can help you sort through this? There are going to be a lot of decisions to make. Around forty-eight hours from admission the hospital’s going to start asking you about long-term arrangements for your mother after discharge and I’m afraid that means a nursing home, unless you can afford around-the-clock nursing care. Which also raises the question of disability insurance. Do you know if your mother has any? The social worker will want to see a copy of her policy.”
Paralyzed.
It can’t be. They’re wrong.
Temporarily
paralyzed maybe, but not forever. Doesn’t the brain have the ability to rewire itself around bruised spots? I know it does. Otherwise, how to explain Bobby Newsome, who got hit on the head with a baseball and lay unconscious for three days when he was six and went on to become state representative?
Paralyzed.
My mother’s left hand lies weakly above the sheet, her platinum and diamond engagement band ridiculous on those old veiny fingers. I want to wake her up and tell her this awful story that I heard about a daughter whose beloved mother fell in the garden one day and woke up paralyzed. I want her to click her tongue and tell me that reminds her of something that happened to Teenie’s niece or Lois’s best friend.
“Do you have a brother or a sister, Julie?” Aronson is next to me, her arm around my shoulder comfortingly.
“I have a brother, Paul, in Manhattan. He’s a stockbroker and very busy. He can never get away. They work him to death.” My mother’s words. They come as easy to me as if she’d said them with my own mouth.
“If he were my brother, I’d call him right now and get him on a flight to Boston. If he has anything he needs to say to your mother, he should say it soon.”
Chapter Twenty-four
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
—HAMLET, ACT I, SCENE 5
It is around midnight, when I’m waiting for my brother’s delayed American Airlines shuttle from New York, that I realize I have completely forgotten about Michael and the Cape. Did we make love years ago or just this morning? It’s all a blur.
I am going through the motions, recording each minor action so I can process them later when I am alert and sane. That is—if I’m ever sane again.
Here is the moment I’ve dreaded, waiting at Logan for my brother because something horrible has happened to Mom. These are my companions as the airport shuts down for the night: a couple of college students, an Indian man in a short-sleeved plaid shirt, a woman holding a brightly wrapped gift looking worried. This is what I’m wearing: a white scooped-neck T-shirt, and jeans that, unbelievable as it is, I put on this morning in Truro. When I got out of the car in the Logan lot, sand fell from the cuffs.
I should have apologized wholly and fully to Mom. I should have taken back every bratty thing I said about Dad. Instead, I acted like an adolescent. (Em would have behaved better.) She needed me to take charge and instead I wrapped myself in my own petty personal problems—my idiotic obsession with landing on the national election team, my love/hate relationship with Michael, the brouhaha over bringing the cobbler to Rhonda’s house. Even the mammogram that turned out to be no big deal.
If I could take back those weeks and redo them, I would. But I can’t and now it’s too late.
A fresh stream of stragglers drags themselves through the exit gate. I’m annoyed with every single one of them because I’m tired and haggard and haven’t eaten since a bag of chips from the hospital vending machine.
When at last I see Paul in his gorgeous black double-breasted suit, his gray sideburns that are ridiculous with his boyish grin, I burst into tears. He is the only one who’s in my place, who can share my pain.
“I know I’m a hunk, but you don’t have to lose control,” he says, slapping an arm around my neck. He smells like stale airline air and New York City metal. “Where’s the nearest drink?”
“My apartment.”
“And why am I not there?”
I tell him everything on the drive back from the airport, an ideal arrangement since I can pretend to keep my eyes on the road while pretending not to notice him quickly wiping away tears. In the Callahan Tunnel I drop the bomb that Mom has suffered brain damage and, on Storrow Drive, I gently inform him that this is more than a garden-variety stroke, that her left side is paralyzed with little hope of recovery
After that we talk about Em and his on-again, off-again fiancée, Scooter (thirty-five and she still goes by Scooter, I ask you). We are filling space and time with words as Paul tries to comprehend what I don’t understand, either: that our mother might be dying.
At home, having changed into jeans and a loose Amherst T-shirt left over from when he went there (he’s never gained a pound, the fink), he pours me a vodka tonic and pushes me onto the couch.
“At a time like this, drinking is a small, good thing.” A spin on Raymond Carver’s “eating is a small, good thing.” “I forgot Boston could be so fucking sweltering in the summer. You’re telling me Michael installed these air conditioners?”
“He did,” I say, demurely giving my drink a stir.
“A man brings you flowers and chocolate, he’s trying to get laid. He brings you air conditioners, he’s trying to move in.”
“Let’s not talk about it.”
Paul cocks his head. “Trouble in paradise so soon?”
“Please. Do me a favor and for the rest of your visit don’t mention his name. If you see him, if you talk to him, which I’m sure you will, leave me out of it.” My mind is reeling from his heavy hand of the vodka he’d brought from New York. “What is this?”
“Grey Goose. Expensive, but it’s worth it. I can’t deal with the swill you’ve got. So, is Dad handling this stroke thing okay or is he . . .”
“Not around.”
“Not around? What do you mean, not around?” There’s an edge to his voice and I see his right hand flex. “Don’t tell me he’s pulling that same shit as when Mom had cancer.”
“We’ll talk about it in the morning.” Paul and Dad have a rocky relationship at best and there’s no point in getting him riled up when he needs to get his rest and focus on Mom. “I’ll make us a couple of sandwiches and then you can sleep in Em’s room. She’s in Maine with Donald.”
“Donald.” Paul snorts and flips through a copy of
Boston
magazine on my end table. “How is the pompous git? Has his buggering finally caught up with him?”
“He’s consoling Em, that’s how he is,” I snap, and then, feeling bad about that, I apologize and make him the most incredible ham and Swiss cheese sandwich ever, followed by brownies Mom left for me in my refrigerator.
Like magic, Paul and I are back on friendly terms.
The next morning I wake to the sound of Paul stealing my car.
It’s late, after nine, and my whole body aches either from the Grey Goose or stress or both. I suspect Paul’s gone to see Mom alone, which is fine by me. Not that I’m the Mom gatekeeper or anything. Just that I know what it’s like to want to have Mom all to yourself. He deserves that. She does, too.
I do the usual morning routine of checking my email while the coffee perks. When was the last time I checked email? Friday morning, before I went in for my test. A century in cyberspace time, I think, clicking through 123 messages‚ including a few from Arnie signing off on my emergency request for a leave of absence to take care of Mom and one from someone named “kittyluvr” about a “Dessert Class After Party.”
Dear Students of Chef Rene’s Recreational Dessert Class:
The Boston Cooking School wishes to invite you to a Dessert Class “After” Party at the Boston Cooking School this Friday at 7 p.m. to celebrate his latest creation:
D’Ours, D’Jour
to debut on The Food Channel later this fall.
As a twist, we’re asking guests to bring a dessert of their choice, either one made in class or a favorite family recipe. Also, please feel free to invite friends and/or family since we are very eager to spread the news about this exciting TV show to be hosted by one of our most deserved chefs.
Until then, bon appétit!
Angela
That
Angela? She of the severe bangs and midnight-blue hair—she’s the kitty lover?
The front door slams and Paul walks in carrying a bag of bagels. He’s wearing khakis and a yellow and white Ralph Lauren Polo shirt Mom bought him for his birthday last year. Nice touch.
“She’s awake and wants to talk to you,” he says, tossing the keys on the table. “You are such an alarmist. She’s going to be perfectly fine.”
“How did the biopsy go?”
This is my half-conscious mother’s first question after I tiptoe into her quiet, darkened room. Her brain is still bleeding, her doctors aren’t quite sure of her prognosis, and yet she remembers to inquire about the biopsy.
“I’m fine,” I say, pained that I’ve been on her mind, so grateful for a chance to tell her myself. Sitting by her side, I take her good right hand and gently stroke it. “How are
you
?”
“Been better,” she mumbles.
“You’re going to make a full recovery, I hear. You’re going to walk out.”
Half awake, she barely stirs. “So no cancer?”
“No cancer.”
She nods slightly and slurs, “I told you so,” before falling back to sleep. Then I spend the rest of the day sitting by her side.
Waiting and thinking, about Mom and Dad and Em. About work and Michael.
Michael calls me every night to ask how things are going and if it’s okay for him to visit. He’s already sent Mom flowers and offered to help in any way, even pulling strings to get her into the best local nursing home—an inevitability I dread. The truth is, I’m not sure I’m up to facing him right now, not after overhearing Carol’s sexy breathless message asking him to stop by on his way home from the Cape.
What’s the story with those two? I have no clue. I’d ask him if I didn’t think he’d spit back an obnoxious line about me being a green-eyed monster. So, for protection, I’ve shut myself down, tucking in my vulnerable heart like a turtle hides his body until danger has passed.
“I’m worried about you,” he said the other night. “Why don’t you let me come over or take you out? You can cry on my shoulder, or any other part of me you want.”
It was a tempting image and I would have said yes if I hadn’t been in turtle mode. “Are you going to the dessert class after party?” I asked, changing the subject.
“Are you?” The answer of a true noncommitter.
“I don’t know. It depends on how my mother is.”
“I can understand that” was all he said.
By the end of the week, Mom is sitting up and talking. It’s a miraculous recovery, even the nurses agree, though I still haven’t gotten used to how her body drops on one side like a puppet with broken strings.
“I’m hideous, aren’t I?” she asks when I breeze in with exaggerated cheeriness.
“Of course not. You’re gorgeous.”
“I bet you say that to all the stroke victims.”
That’s the weird thing, how she hasn’t lost her sense of humor. All week she’s been making cracks about being a “lamebrain” and having a “stroke of genius.”
“It was a stroke of genius,” she slurs when her friends visit. “I always was a lamebrain.”
Mom gets lots of visitors: Teenie, Lois, women from her Meals-On-Wheels program, even Liza, and once, when I was out picking up Em from Donald’s, Michael. The only one missing, really, is my father.
Dad’s line is that he has a new job supervising a construction site somewhere. What site? We have no idea. All we know is that he stops by to see Mom between seven and eight in the morning, before he “goes to work,” and returns at five at night filled with stories about what bonehead employee accidentally lit his truck on fire or who dropped what.
During these evening meetings, Mom nods and smiles as if she’s in the kitchen serving up dinner and Dad’s relaying his report of the day. As if everything is normal.
But nothing’s normal anymore.
“What happened with the biopsy?” she asks on Friday, four days after I told her the first time.
A lunch tray of inedible puréed food sits between us practically untouched. The nurses fret she’s not eating, but who would want to eat that? Baby food. Mushed-up carrots, applesauce, and puréed white gunk.
“The biopsy went fine. No cancer,” I say, dipping a spoon into the applesauce.
Mom says, “How many times have I asked you that?”
“I’ve lost count.”
“Oh, brother. That’s a doozy.”
This is her new post-stroke phrase. “That’s a doozy.” Also, “Oh, brother,” and, “Would ya get a load of that.” As in, “They say if my next MRI is okay, I can go home. Would ya get a load of that.”
I have no idea where these phrases come from. Liza says they sound like they’re from her childhood, 1940s lingo. Next she’ll be saying things like, “Hey, sister” and “Say, what’s the big idea, big boy?”
“You going to dessert class tonight?” she asks, picking at a yellow blouse I brought her from home. My father told her she looked pretty in it and now she refuses to wear anything else.
“No dessert class tonight. Though there is a party for D’Ours. He’s getting his own cooking show and the class is having a celebration.” I hold up a spoon of applesauce. “How about you eat a little something so the nurses will call off their dogs.”
She feebly opens her mouth and I spoon it in, feeling a strange sense of victory, like when I finally got Em to eat her first solid food of rice cereal. It’s all I can do to stop myself from saying, “Good girl.”