Wait Until Tomorrow (28 page)

I also spend time with my mother, and I begin to catalog what happens when your parent grows old. I sit with her in the courtyard and search her face as she explains to me, once again, that the beauty of her recent circumstances is that she doesn't have to worry about food—no preparing, no cleaning. It's just there. This is a marvelous thing. She says this often. Very often. As I listen to her, I'm trying to remember the woman I once knew and I'm angry with myself that I didn't know her better. I look back and see how we ignored her aging. She was always the same, and then she wasn't.

At home I look at my own face. I barely recognize it. Those
lines on my forehead can't belong to me. And what is that? A shadow? Some kind of strange lumpy formation on my forehead? I rub extra virgin olive oil into my skin, trying to lubricate it. Who the hell are you, I ask my reflection. I've heard that our cells replace themselves every seven years. Like my mother I am not the person I used to be. My cells are different. I don't know my own face. When I look at it, I usually see what I've always seen—not what is really there.

One evening I find my mother in the courtyard with four other residents. One of the women is my age. She has early onset Alzheimer's. She's very sweet and often visits with my mother, but my mother says, “She's not very bright.” The poor woman can't remember anything. The women in the courtyard are all listening to a woman with a heavy French accent. Her name is Jacqueline. She has thinning red hair and an interesting ruddy face full of character.

“It was June,” she is saying, “June of 1944. And the Germans had taken all of the grand hotels and turned them into hospitals. We were students at the time and the Red Cross advertised for help. Well, school was out so we thought it would be a good idea.”

She tells us about the German nurse yelling at her—“Oust! Oust!”—and finding an amputated leg covered in maggots in the bathroom. She tells us about the handsome American GI she met after the war. How he managed to find her house although all the street signs and landmarks were gone. How she married him.

“I was very thin because we had no food most of the time,” she says. “Oh, I was lovely.” She laughs.

Like Lam says, you can learn a lot from these people.

SUMMER 2009

Emmy gets a phone call from her landlord Tuesday morning, saying that they've found a renter for her apartment. If we can clean out the apartment that day, we won't have to pay rent for July. Hallelujah, I think. She won't be returning, since she's transferred to another university about forty miles away.

I borrow a truck from a guy I know and offer him Emmy's vehicle while we're gone. Then we head up the highway for the two-hour drive to her apartment. When we walk in, my spirits drop. She's done nothing as far as packing and I had forgotten just how much stuff she has accumulated in the few months.

“There's no way we're gonna do this in one trip,” I say. “No way.”

“Yes, we will,” Emmy says. Right-brainers like Emmy are better at spatial visualization than linear thinkers like me.

While she goes to the courthouse to try to keep herself off death row for the heinous crime of making an illegal left turn, I start packing. Emmy is supposed to bring a sheet of paper proving she had undergone some driver's education, but of course that piece of paper is in the glove compartment of her car, which is sitting in Shawn's driveway.

“Are they gonna send me to jail?” Emmy asks.

“Maybe,” I answer. “But probably not. Just ask for a new court date.”

I am halfway through Emmy's closet when the cell phone in my pocket begins to vibrate, causing me to jump.

“They gave me a new date,” Emmy whines, “but it's when I'm going to be in New York.”

“Why didn't you tell them that date wouldn't work?”

“Because that woman is mean and scary!”

“Oh, sweetheart, this is all the power that woman has. Just find someone to give you a new court date.”

Thirty minutes later, I have most of the kitchen done. My phone vibrates again.

“Mom, they told me to get a lawyer!”

Jesus, this is going to be the most expensive left turn in history.

“Did you talk to the scary woman?”

“No.”

“Go back and talk to the scary woman, babe.”

An hour later Emmy is back with a new court date, and I'm trying to figure out how to open the back of Shawn's truck.

“That woman looked at me like I was a child murderer,” Emmy says.

It takes Emmy's genius to get that truck filled to the brim, but we manage to do it. All the while, her piano-playing nextdoor neighbor Julian smokes cigarettes on the porch and watches mournfully.

“Julian, help yourself to anything in the refrigerator,” I tell him. He does. Then we sweep and mop and throw away bags and bags of stuff. Sweating, aching, and exhausted, we start the drive home. Emmy topples over and sleeps while I enjoy the tunes on Shawn's satellite radio, looking down on the little cars from my rumbling throne.

Shawn calls me about halfway through the trip home and says he needs the truck early the next morning. He tells me he'll help us unload it tonight.

“Great, Shawn. Thank you so much,” I tell him, even though I've been planning to go to bed and unload tomorrow. “I'll pick you up in about an hour.”

“Noooo,” Emmy moans.

We pull into my driveway about eleven thirty, and the three of us unload that truck into the garage in about twenty minutes flat. The back of the truck is empty except for a few containers of transmission fluid, some movers' blankets and a couple of car parts catalogs.

I stare at that great empty space that just a few minutes earlier housed a love seat, daybed, two bookcases, five or so suitcases, two boxes of kitchen items, a record player, two big bags of nonperishables, comforters, sheets, towels, everything except the garbage can and the shower curtain. We left those things behind. I think of the empty truck as a metaphor for my life, which was so recently overflowing and now is not. Now more than ever, I understand my mother's deep well of loneliness. It's my loneliness, too. I'm all she has, really. And in a sense, she is all I have, too.

 

An idea has been tunneling through my head. As Emmy and I prepare for our annual trip to Florida, the idea begins scratching at the door.

Thursday morning we do our last-minute errands. Emmy makes CD mixes for the car ride. This is crucial. Our road trip music must be perfectly calibrated in order for the trip to be a success. I'm trying to complete a few loose ends on a freelance project. Also I decide to dye my hair at the last minute, pay some bills, and write down instructions for the neighborhood girls about taking care of the cat, who now requires fish oil and some kind of
paste for cat viruses added to her food to stop the damn sneezing. The fish oil seems to be the magic ingredient.

After this we have to return a movie, go to the bank, get gas, and stop by the Sanctuary to pay Mother's rent and hairdresser bill. And I have to reassure her that I'm not going to be gone forever. The night before we stopped by to see her. We were on our way to see the touring version of
Phantom of the Opera
because one of Emmy's friends was a dancer in the show. And I was feeling a little guilty because I hadn't been a frequent visitor this week.

So that night when we went to see Mom she was still eating dinner. Her hearing had gone almost completely from her left ear. She took a few bites of her dessert and then we paraded into the lobby. She seemed more distressed than usual, probably because we were going away for a few days. When we explained we had moved Emmy out of her apartment the day before, she wanted to know where we would be staying tonight.

“Um, at my house,” I said.

 

On Thursday when we come by, she is much more lucid.

“You're going to Jacksonville?” she says. “I really would like to hear the organ again.” She means the organ at Good Shepherd. Her organ. Though not hers anymore. The idea grows a little bigger.

Finally we are on the road, heading south, where the air will be thick and soft, the trees juicy, the sun harsh, and the sleeping arrangements questionable.

As soon as we cross the Florida border, Emmy slams the R.E.M. CD into the CD player and we stick our hands outside to feel the silk sheets of air running through our fingers.

Thursday night we pull into the driveway behind Jim and Dale's house. The back door opens and my lean, handsome, seventy-four-year-old godfather comes out to greet us. If my own
father represents everything dark and heedless in the masculine, my godfather represents all that is bright and good. He is the quintessential white knight—gentle, strong, funny, and wise. Like my father, he once succumbed to his generation's penchant for three-martini lunches and after-work cocktails. My father continued to drink and bluster in his egomaniacal manner until that fine mind of which he was so proud was drained and all that was left was a jumble of fears and odd compulsions. Jim, however, turned in humility to the Twelve Steps long before he destroyed the lives of the ones he loved. A die-hard liberal, a baritone in the church choir, a banker who helped small businesses get loans, he became my godfather when I was six years old and realized that I had not been baptized as a baby. After all, the church was our second home, and if I wasn't baptized, I couldn't get confirmed with everyone else and go to communion and have the priest deliver the bitter-tasting wine onto my young tongue to wash down the papery wafer that was poor Jesus's desiccated body.

So my mother said I could choose my own godparents. I chose wisely at the age of six. My two godparents took their roles quite seriously. While my godmother Elise loved me and fawned over me while I was young, my godfather Jim was the stalwart figure in the background of my life who emerged in my later years as the salve to heal my father issues once and for all. Every time he said that he loved me or spoke admiringly of some accomplishment of mine, an old hurt disappeared. Though he is not technically my father and there are four people who can lay legitimate claim to him, in my head and heart he has replaced that bitter old man who ignored my existence, who belittled my mother, and who picked fistfights with my brothers.

So Thursday night we are in the Florida room of Jim and Dale's house, Jim sitting in a chair by the stereo system, Dale at the other end of the small room, and Emmy and I on the couch in
the middle, scarfing down potato chips and clam dip. I mention to Jim that my mother has said several times that she wants to hear the church organ again.

“Do you think it would be possible,” I ask, hesitantly, “for someone to do her requiem again?”

I can see the thought registering. His clear blue eyes light up. Soon we are figuring out whom to contact. Jim digs through his old cassettes. He finds the original recording of the requiem when it was performed back in 1982. After some fast-forwarding and rewinding, he manages to get it to play. I am stunned. First of all, I recognize it. But what I didn't realize until now is just how wonderful a piece of music it really is. Powerful and strange and haunting.

“The times have caught up with it,” Jim says with a gentle smile playing on his lips.

“You're right,” I say.

An American Requiem
's time has come.

 

In late July, my brothers Jo and David arrive like a couple of Viking warriors. Jo shows up Tuesday around midnight with his drum and his flutes. We spend the next day with Mom, and then on Thursday we all pile into my car to go to the airport to retrieve David. But Thursday is not a good day for me. These days happen. I wake up tired and cranky, off-kilter. I don't know what it is. It's like having bipolar energy levels, though not so extreme. How do I explain myself on these days? Usually I don't. Usually, I hunker down and wait it out. It only takes a day and then I'm okay again, but for that day I can't think, can't pretend to be friendly, outgoing, or happy.

When we get to Mom's place, David tells me he hasn't brought the movie.

“What?” I wheel around, my cranky shrew level ratcheted up ten knots. Mostly I'm annoyed with myself for not reminding him
to bring it. There is much buzz at the Sanctuary about the movie event: David is going to be showing
Knights of the South Bronx
, an A&E movie starring Ted Danson that is actually about David's work teaching chess to children at a school in the poorest congressional district in the country. The activities director has been asking for a copy for months and I've provided something better—David in person. But now we don't have a movie.

“Where are we going to get it?” I ask in full-tilt whine.

“Netflix?” David asks.

I decide to calm down. Getting upset is taking way too much energy, and it turns out they have the movie at Blockbuster.

The three of us eat dinner with Mother at the Sanctuary. The food isn't bad. In fact, she never complains about it. Then we go upstairs to the media room. Not for David's movie. That's not until Friday night. But Jo has brought a copy of a video recording from the 1980s of a performance of
An American Requiem
by the
Lost Colony
choir. I've told him about my plan to resurrect the requiem, and he's all for it. In fact, somewhere he's got the orchestration for it, and he promises to find it.

The four of us commandeer the media room and Charlene helps us figure out how to get the video started. She stays to watch with us for a while. I close the curtains to shut out the light and on the large screen comes a picture of a choir as they begin to sing “Requiem.” Rest. My mother's requiem uses the Latin words and mixes them with English. It begins, “
Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine
.” Meaning “Grant them eternal rest, O Lord.” Is that what death is? Eternal rest?