Letter from Los Angeles
Written by Linda Sandoval
In which Linda tells a story about a trip to the Midwest, her mother, a ghost, the Hanta Virus and The Usefulness of Other People
I read somewhere that the most stubborn stage in the grieving process is "longing" and that longing is very different from depression. We can wake up from depression, and for our own sanity we struggle to do so. Longing, on the other hand, though it may lessen in time, tends to stay with us. It contains our stories and pathways, this longing, and it can serve us by being called up and called upon.
My small town Missouri destination has no bus or train or van to take me back and forth from the Kansas City Airport and I must always rely on Lonnie the Driver as my ferryman to the center of the center of the country. When I arrive at my mother's house, I will try to start her car, praying for the engine to turn over after months of stillness. But until I can salvage my own transportation, it's a two-hour plus ride with Lonnie Briggs, a large, talkative man with watery, glancing eyes.
Right now Lonnie is waving to me from the baggage carousel. He needs no sign stating my name. After all the years of meeting Lonnie at the airport, he greets me like a daughter or a spouse. I am tolerant of his over-friendliness because of what I know to be his accompanying loneliness. He probably thinks the same of me, as I am arriving unaccompanied from the clutches of big, bad, impersonal Los Angeles.
While we wait for my luggage, Lonnie attempts conversation with the skycaps. Little niceties about this and that. He must count them as good buddies because he makes trips to the airport nearly every day. They ignore him and roll their eyes in bored annoyance. When the baggage finally starts bumping down the conveyor, he rushes to turn each and every suitcase over until it is standing upright with the handles perched for easy reach of the passengers. Not a single person thanks him for this service, but that doesn't seem to bother Lonnie. He smiles at everyone just the same. He then cheerfully grabs my bags, swings them around and heads for the big glass doors.
We step out of the concourse and into a blast of late summer Missouri heat. It can knock a person over, this heat. It feels like we are standing near some hellish oven where any moment the witch will come up behind us and shove us in. Lonnie's old Pontiac with its functioning air conditioner beckons. In late August, people in Missouri scurry as fast as possible from one area of climate control to the next.
Lonnie has a mess of papers and shirts piled up on the back passenger seat so I am obliged to sit next to him in the front seat where there is still barely room for me as it seems to serve as an ad hoc kitchen with leftover bags of take-out and giant coffee mugs. It occurs to me that he may sleep in the car if he has both a late night drop-off and an early morning pick-up. On the road Lonnie waves to many of the oncoming cars and trucks. Occasionally someone waves back which prompts him to merrily pump his arms up and down in the air. If it's a truck, he might get a sustained honk in return, causing him to yelp with joy. The brotherhood of the road. No doubt Lonnie's car is both his life and his livelihood.
He asks me how my mother is doing and I say not well and he is silent for a while. In rural Missouri silence is often a sign of compassion and understanding. It's only polite to let any hard news have its own space, its own weight. Then, continuing with the local etiquette, Lonnie changes the subject. He goes on to talk about his car. I can tell this is going to be a long Missouri style speech and I have learned from experience just to resign myself and let it roll on out. Any interjections on my part will just lengthen the whole thing.
So. Lonnie's car. A blue Pontiac with 300, 000 miles on it and he is in some kind of contest with other drivers around the Midwest. It seems if one of them can push their car to 400, 000 miles they might be invited to sell their story to the Pontiac people as a commercial or actually be in a commercial telling about their cars to millions of Americans all across the country! The tricky part is that so far no car has made it past 390,000. Lonnie goes on to explain his strategy of servicing the car every two weeks. It's expensive but it just might make the difference. And here comes the list. The check points that he puts his car through.
I'm leaning into the window and absorbing the landscape. Even with the August dryness, the gently rolling pastures are lovely. Stretches of woodland create mysterious, dense, fairy tale regions of dark green. Cattle stand cooling, belly-deep, in ponds. And there are noble white farmhouses with broad porches and spectacular barns. The farmer presence is sadly thinning, though. These miles of planted green are now marred with cellular towers, strip malls and massive concrete bunkers where fire crackers are offered for sale and young women dance nude while people drink juice, of all things. Who buys all of these acres of fire-works, I wonder. Who are these people who find drinking alcohol unacceptable yet expect young girls to dance without their clothes on? Do these same people finish the evening by lobbing cherry bombs?
The land speeds by. Highways go from six lanes to four and then two. The car talk continues. Tire pressure, wheel balancing, designer gasoline… On the two-lane country highway we are forced to a crawl behind an ancient tractor. The old farmer motions us on by and Lonnie gives a neighborly honk and wave.
I remember going on long, tiresome car trips as a child. Those squirm- making-are-we there-yet journeys that many American children suffer through. Each time I returned to my little town after one of those trips I was full of joyful relief. I feel it now too, a giddy anticipation of finally coming home. Landmarks start to pop up. There is place recognition, yes, but also recognition of myself as belonging to a place. The familiar welcoming streets, the evidence all around of peoples' lives still being here, ongoing during my absence. This feeling stops short, though as the landmarks fade and a different reality emerges.
We drive through the center of town where my heart is instantly broken by the sight of a huge cellular tower dwarfing the beloved Victorian courthouse. An old brick church has been torn down and replaced with a correctional facility. The tall stone buildings with their fancy mansard roofs are in terrible repair. Worse even than just a few months ago. More of them are empty. Some are falling in. There are more bars, tanning salons, pawnshops. A single Kotex box is placed in the window of a store that once sold foundation garments and the latest clothing to the proper ladies of the town. The jolly street scene of my childhood under bright striped awnings, with notions stores and friendly soda counters, gone forever. Absolutely not a trace left. I am seeing my town again and though it is still my town, belonging to me and reflecting me back to myself, it has decayed beyond repair.
Of course this goes on everywhere. The slow replacement of the individual with the mass-produced. The sad abandonment of once shared communities that now lie derelict. In Los Angeles we hardly pay a bit of attention to it. Whole worlds are packed up and replaced before we even realize something is missing. In Los Angeles life is in such constant flux we don't really comprehend how fast everything is being cycled out, including ourselves. Here, in this little town, there is no mistaking it. It must be felt.
And the sad truth is, I really have no right to complain, as I did nothing to stop it. I did not protest the destruction of the town or the accompanying sprawl of faceless big-box stores. I did not protest the dismantling of the old tree lined streets or the building of parking lots and gas stations right next to the grand old homes. And, as all the grand old people who lived in those homes are either dead or dying they could not protest either. I did not protect my town, I just moved away. And now my town has lost its distinction and could be anywhere, and therefore I can be anywhere, be anyone.
Lonnie asks,
So has the town changed much since last time?
Oh yes, and not for the better.
He is silent for a few blocks and then says, quite kindly,
It must have been pretty here when you were growing up.
My mother's house is fading too, disappearing before me as I look at it. The shutters need painting, moles have pushed up tiny mountain ranges of dirt, killing what is left of the large, un-mown lawn and the gutters are stuffed with decaying maple leaves. The house is dark. No lights greet me. None that I can see. My mother's decline spreads from her doorway to the cracked sidewalk to the dead redbud on the parkway and even beyond where other elderly neighbors are making similar heroic stands to maintain independence. Independence from people like me who arrive to 'Do Something About Your Mother' as they say here in the Midwest. I know my mother is right to fear this 'doing something'. All she wants is to hold on in her own home. No living with me in Los Angeles. No Assisted Living facilities. And we have both visited those other places where old friends sit waiting for someone to feed them, strapped in chairs and too drugged to hold their heads up. She will never submit to any of it. I don't know the answer. I have to look for one, if there is one. I have to do something, even if it's wrong.
Lonnie stacks my suitcases on the steps, handles facing up and collects his money. For a moment I am sad to see him leave. I fight back an impulse to invite him into the dark rooms. He could perhaps entertain my mother with his car tales? I know that silence in there. I know the isolation and the mistrust.
Give my respects to your mother, he says.
I walk through the dark house until I come to the back bedroom/sitting room where there is a single light. My mother is waiting for me there. Waiting patiently in her corduroy recliner.
For a moment I actually see my mother again. Her face lights up at the sight of me. She stands carefully and reaches out with her thin arms. There are bruises. Her hands are cold and arthritic. But she has on makeup and the robe I sent for her birthday. She has on earrings. She is my mother. And then she is not. Exhausted by the greeting she sits again and closes her eyes. A little bird-like woman as the saying goes. Except to visit the doctor she has not been out of the house this past year. It is not worth the effort, in her mind. It is not worth the danger of falling so she just stays put. I sit on the couch and watch her for a moment as she floats back into the safety of that corduroy nest. Like Lonnie in his car, Mom has surrounded herself with the means of her survival. Her cigarettes, her newspapers, cans of nuts and bags of popcorn, bottles of medication, birthday cards, pictures of her family. All within easy reach. Her eyes open again and regard me sharply.
Why do you let your hair go gray like that? It makes you look a hundred years old.
I don't like to bother with dye, Mom.
Such a Nickledy-dun color. You're a pretty girl. I don't know why you want to go around looking like that. It's completely unnecessary.
Oh she's back again with me, all right. She lights up a Benson and Hedges and switches on the TV. These comments on my personal appearance are long-standing with my mom and serve very well for defining who is still the boss. Meaning, she can say things like that to me but I cannot say things like that to her, so don't get it into my head that I have the right to demand any changes at all in where she lives or how she does things. Are we clear? This is the line drawn in the sand. She clicks the remote and brings up a dusty old Murder She Wrote and warily settles in.
Are you hungry, Mom?
I don't do anything all day so why should I be hungry?
Well, maybe I'll just look in the refrigerator and see if there's anything to fix for dinner.
This is just me giving her some space for a bit. I know there will be no food in the house. My mother lives on Meals On Wheels. She eats part of the Meals On Wheels for lunch and saves scraps for dinner. She then puts some of those scraps aside to choose from on Sunday when the Meals On Wheels folk take a break, for worship I suppose. The refrigerator is full of bitten into pieces of this and that in white Styrofoam packages. There is a four months old, stubbornly untouched carton of milk from my last trip, some mildewing Bread 'N Butter pickles and that's about it.
I make a list of supplies but I will not go to that town consuming Wal-Mart for food or anything else. The little Bi-Lo store is locally owned and delivers. They will gladly supply any amount of groceries as long as it is before 5:30 in the afternoon. Just try asking the same of Wal-Mart.
I'm going to bring in supplies, then, okay?
Makes not a whit of difference to me, she says. I hope the car still runs.
It puzzles me, in this land of almost decadent plenty, where fields are bursting with the late summer harvest, where beefsteak tomatoes are piled up on the side of the road with signs that say, 'free take some' how there can be so little real food in the stores that are supposed to being selling real food. The outer isles of the Bi-Lo, where the fresh produce should be found, are full of shrink-wrapped, wrinkled vegetables and troughs of macaroni and cheese and Jell-O with marshmallows and slimy carrot droppings floating about. I think about what my mother would have prepared for my homecoming when she was feeling like herself. Fried okra? A five- layer salad? Definitely a meat-loaf. I pick up ground meat, potatoes, and a big bottle of catsup. She likes ice cream. Mint. When I was a child she would make it herself. Whirling the salt, throwing in mint leaves from the garden.
My mother used to be a wonderful cook when she wanted to be, when she was putting it all together for family celebrations. In those days there was an insistence on refinement— good linens, polished silver, Mozart sonatas plunked out on the baby grand piano. Women who had survived farm life during the Depression felt proud of their later "in town" lives and struggled to find a sense of propriety and safety. They went to college, married bankers, joined book clubs. And, as liberated farm folk, they were delighted to limit the time spent harvesting a garden by relying first on canned, then frozen, then micro-waved and now, it seems, Meals On Wheels. This is progress to the Midwestern housewife and the Bi-lo store is completely in step.
I've got mint ice cream, Mom!
Good deal. I could eat a whole gallon all by myself, she says.
I knew that would put her in a better mood. And, I'm enjoying organizing the kitchen. It makes me feel useful for once, this empowering of the hearth. Bread here, cheese there, canned goods neatly stacked. A full refrigerator. China instead of Styrofoam. Some flowers. I stir up the meat-loaf, her recipe, with lots of catsup. Then mashed potatoes. But the first offering is scotch and water and I have purposely made it with much more water than scotch.
Pretty stingy with the scotch, she says.
Mom is not at all an alcoholic, but she is certainly a bonafide member of the cocktail generation. There would always be two stiff drinks for both my parents at the end of the day. A time to discuss problems and joys and just take the edge off and get sociable. For my mother this is the way civilized people behave in the evening. Now, however, she is in a lot of pain from a crumbling spine and she weighs less than a hundred pounds and she is alone and in danger of falling and two strong drinks is way too much. The resulting unsteadiness has caused her to fall in the past. To break bones. To be cared for in a pathetically inadequate-distant-child-who-lives-in-Los Angeles sort of way that only makes her decline more painful for us both. Everyday I think if only my mother would skip the cocktail hour, her body might finally heal from the breaks. She would get better. She would be restored as my mother, living in her tidy house, attending bridge parties with her lavender gloves and cigarettes and pretty hats and Shalimar Perfume and beating the pants off the family accountant who never had a chance with her at bridge. I indulge in maddened rescue fantasies where my mother returns in full vigor to dote on me and care for me instead of the other way around. How selfish of me. How frivolous. Mom refuses to even cut back on the drinking, because she does not want to cut back on the blessed numbness. The momentary and illusive freedom from pain.
Put more ice in while you're at it, she says, wagging the glass insistently. Hop to it!
We settle down with the scotch and meat-loaf and Perry Mason and Mom recounts a story about a friend of hers who has just died of bone cancer. In my mother's mind those foolish money grubbing doctors took out the cancerous bones and put in new ones but the new ones got cancer too.
How could she be crazy enough to let them do all that to her?
I think it was the marrow, Mom. A bone marrow transplant, probably.
Well whatever it was, who wants to live without your own bones? I don't.
No, me either.
All that suffering and what was the point, can you tell me that?
Nope.
When it's my time I don't want you letting anyone mess with me like that. Understood?
You got it.
She's on to her nighttime ritual of denture care, face creams, sponge bath, demonstrating it all for my benefit. She wants me to know that she's no slouch and she can take care of herself. She pointedly puts pills in the dispenser, turns on night-lights for trips to the bathroom and adjusts the thermostat.
Recently, my mother had all of the windows in the house sealed shut. They are now packed tightly closed with insulating pellets. Ever the practical Midwesterner, she wants to cut down on heating and cooling bills. Insulation is highly valued by oldsters for shutting out as much of the now traitorous nature stuff as possible. So, most of the upstairs bedrooms are stifling as they are picturesquely and suffocatingly crammed under the eaves and the windows won't open. The slight push of the central air really does not make much of a difference on the second floor because my mother keeps it turned down. Even in this heat she tends to be cold.
I decide to sleep in my parents' old bedroom. It has a window that was spared the pellets and can be pried open a few inches. The roof above is canopied with overhanging trees giving it another few degrees of relief.
I don't really like sleeping in this room. It is such a sad repository of loss. My father's handkerchiefs are still in his dresser, pressed and ready, next to his gold cuff-links. My mother's blue frosted eye shadow sits, waiting, on the vanity along with boxes of rhinestone jewelry and the beautiful copper hair ornaments that blended into her once beautiful copper-colored hair. I remember them both all dressed up and laughing in such happy anticipation of their evenings together. The contrast now is nearly unbearable.
Also, a few months ago, waking in the night, I saw a ghost at the foot of the bed. He was sitting at a tall desk and writing in a ledger. He had on knee britches and a rather sloppy gray wig and he never looked my way but just kept writing and as I became more fully awake he began to disappear. I don't even believe in ghosts, but there was one anyway, and I hoped he wasn't writing something about me.
No matter the ghosts and memories, I have to breathe real air, so I jam up the window and put a stack of my mother's old murder mysteries under it to keep it from sliding down.
Outside, the air is sweet and moist, but also very noisy with howling tree frogs and cicadas and then the train comes by and blows a long wail every few hours and then about two in the morning I hear a crash and I think, my mother has fallen.
I rush downstairs imagining stroke, heart attack, broken hip and there she is, standing in the kitchen swinging pots and pans around. The scotch has dulled the pain to the point that mom can move around almost like her old self. What is she doing changing around all of the configurations of foodstuffs and dishes? My arrangements! Fury sets in. She hasn't the strength to talk to me or take a shower or get out of the house but can sure as hell drink herself into one giant criticism of my way of doing things.
What a mess, she says, glaring at me and flinging the meat-loaf pan into a different cabinet.
And I say, quite loudly,
STOP WORRYING ABOUT IT AND GO TO BED AND DON'T DRINK SO MUCH!
I turn around and stomp back upstairs. I am really so angry. Then ashamed. Who am I to speak to my mother this way? It's her kitchen. At least she cares about how she wants it to be. And who dutifully mixed that second drink, anyway? Forget about sleeping the rest of the night. I have to worry through a marching band of self-pitying thoughts of how my mother has never approved of me or understood me and no wonder since I am such an ungrateful and immature daughter and probably if I do fall asleep that man with the ledger will show up and write it all down!
In the morning I fix mom her favorite breakfast of apple sauce, toast and crisp bacon. She is unusually praising of my efforts. This is how we apologize and move on.
It gets around that I'm back in town and visitations start piling up. Mom's next-door neighbor checks in everyday. She is a delight as well as a lifesaver on more occasion than one. But now others come as well and even though they are welcome they tend to wear out that welcome. There are old friends of mine from high school, mom's old bridge playing pals, the library volunteer, church workers.
Glad to see'em come, glad to see'em go, my mother says.
Nearly everyone in Missouri, with the exception of my mother, is a big talker. The visiting nurse stops by for mom's B Vitamin injection and wedges me between the car door and a full bag of groceries for upwards of ten minutes. Something about siding. About how all the old houses are being sided and the siding springs off with the condensation and it's just a scam run by con men from Kansas City and my mother was smart to send the siding men packing when she did even though she ordered the insulation which is probably a blessing in this heat what with the cost of electricity and so many people getting heat stroke, and as a nurse she finds people expiring in a heap every day, so that was a good idea all in all.
No doubt people mean well, but there comes a moment when neither one of us can take another word. I look at mom and I can tell she's really fading, but the visiting preacher is so into his own monologue that even though he's the preacher come to comfort the elderly, he doesn't notice my mother's fatigue at all.
I make up an excuse.
Do you need me to help you to the shower, Mother?
And she plays along.
Yes, I suspect it's time.
And then I say, more emphatically,
Well it's time for that shower!
And finally the preacher brings forth a long-winded prayer and takes his leave and my mother says,
I just can't stand it when they pray over me. It makes me feel dead already!
She then switches on an old I Love Lucy because, of course, she would rather crawl on tacks than take a shower. There is absolutely no way she will allow any kind of nasty drenching.
Which is better for her, isolation or people? The isolation is depressing and the people are exhausting.
I'm lying in bed not able to sleep again. I have moved into another bedroom because even though it is unbelievably hot, there are no ghosts and the closed windows blot out the night swells of tree frogs and the whoops of men watching the Chiefs' game. It's that 2:00 AM disaster hour again and I hear a crash like a tree being downed. BAM. No question about it, this time, my mother has fallen.
She lies by the side of her bed flat out and unconscious. Her arm has a long gash, from the bed railing, I think, and she is bleeding all over her nightgown. I try to wake her but she won't rouse. Her hands are like Ice and I'm not sure she's breathing. I'm in a total cold sweat panic but I mange to turn her over.
Mom. Mom please, please wake up!
Don't worry, she whispers. Now don't you worry.
I am so relieved. She is not dead. She is not tipsy either. This fall is due to a loss of balance. A simple misstep and look what can happen.
My legs just gave out, she says.
What hurts?
I can't tell just yet. My arm.
At first she is too weak to help me pull her to the bed. But she understands that if I can't get her up she will become too stiff to walk and that means an ambulance and the hospital. Mom dreads the hospital more than dying. She tries again and little by little she is sitting. I get warm water and bandages for her arm.
Oh, that feels better, she says.
Finally I can pull her to her knees. From there I am able to lift her torso and then her legs. I roll her gently toward the middle of the bed and cover her. I sit by her for the rest of the night, just watching.
In the morning I guide her to the recliner and switch on the Today Show. She views her bandaged arm and gives me a glance so direct and loving it is like reaching through a mirror back to a time when she could be trusted utterly.
What would I do without you to help me, she asks.
Tonight it is yet another bedroom, known for all time as the Sewing Room, and it is sealed and broiling and I am not alone. I hear mice. I hear them in the wall, perhaps under the bed in the boxes of old Butterick Patterns. I walk around in the dark listening. The house seems alive with the scratching. I go downstairs where my mother is sleeping in her chair and I see a guilty little lump scamper under a chewed-on stack of newspapers. The top of mom's mixed nut can is gnawed as well. I listen at the basement door. I notice droppings now, in the corners, in the tea-towel drawer and in the knife drawer and in the plastic bag drawer. I am afraid to touch any of it after all those Hanta Virus deaths in the Four Corners area. I put on latex gloves and pour Clorox on the silverware and put the towels in the washer and throw out plastic. I lie down on the couch across from mom and worry until morning. What happens when I go back to LA and my mother falls and before anyone can find her she is dead and left for the mice?
My mother is amused, I can tell, by my tales of terror regarding the mice. She's a farm girl, after all, and no one she ever knew was killed by a mouse. Still, she goes along with me when I insist on calling an exterminator.
The exterminator man is in agreement. We do have a terrible mouse problem. He launches into a long story about a woman in Bolivar, Missouri who was sweeping her attic and who died a highly graphic death three days later from the Hanta Virus. He shows me the very costly, yet flimsy, boxes full of gluey bait and he puts them around where he sees the droppings.
But those are just to start, he says. The mice usually won't pay a bit of attention to any traps.
And he nervously remarks that he will be back tomorrow to put out the deadliest, most horrible of poisons and when the mice eat it they will be so thirsty that they will rush outside and die a long, terrible death not unlike that of the Bolivar woman.
And I hope you never have to see the bodies, he says.
I am astounded, and so is my mother, because then the exterminator man starts to cry. Great big red- faced sobs. He strides back and forth in all directions eyeing all of the unused rooms around the house and then sizes up my mother's back-bedroom-make-do nest and her bandaged arm and shouts out loud enough for the gods to hear:
AT LEAST WITH AN EXTERMINATOR THERE WILL BE SOMEONE TO CHECK ON YOUR MOTHER ONCE A WEEK!
And he rushes out the door.
I call after him, when are you coming back with the poison?
But he's running full out towards his truck and doesn't answer.
My mother instructs me to get a rag and plug up a tiny hole in the baseboard next to her recliner.
It's been there awhile, she says, but I didn't think twice about it.
That afternoon the exterminating people call to say that our man, Mr. Heineke, came into the office and made a big stink, crying and carrying on about some Bolivar woman and then he just up and left town and no one knows where to and do I want them to send out someone else?
Now there is a new exterminator man. We don't like him.
He's a wiseacre, my mother says.
He sprays some spider poison in the basement and, eyeing my mom, makes an insulting joke about killing recluses. The Brown Recluse is a highly poisonous spider common to Missouri basements. We don't appreciate the remark. He also promises to return with the so- called really deadly mouse poison at some later date. My mother predicts he will never come back and no doubt the hole by the chair was the problem anyway, so she calls up the office and cancels the order.
And don't expect me to pay you a penny, she says. You didn't do a thing to get rid of those mice.
The extermination people threaten to sue and she says,
I'd just like to see you try it. How do think a court of law would regard your company taking advantage of a poor housebound widow?
They'll never tangle with her, I know, and so does she. My mother is a wily judge regarding the usefulness of other people.
Now the pain hits. Much worse than usual. The fall left her with a badly bruised or even broken rib and it took some time for her to really feel it. I might have broken a rib myself trying to pull her onto to the bed. Pain or no, she refuses to go to the doctor because according to her they're all quacks. Her own doctor is actually nice man who, in the past, has been quite responsive to mom. However, he is no match for her stubbornness. When she breaks something he provides pain pills, suggests X-rays, which she refuses, and that is about all he can do.
Why should I go down there when I'm too weak to walk and sit for hours waiting for him to come in off the golf course just to give me some pills? I have some from the last time right here on the table!
No point in arguing. I give her the recommended dosage. They don't work all that well. Maybe they're too old. So later she takes some more and that night she starts hallucinating.
She tells me a family has moved in with us. A woman with a little girl, or a woman who changes into a little girl and a white dog. There is a man too but he's a no good shifty type and pees on her sycamore tree. My dead father, who seems to be sitting next to me on the couch, is conferred with. He advises her not to send the woman and child away, since they don't have anywhere to go. But, my mother complains about the woman staining the kitchen sink with her red hair dye.
I hate to have my kitchen messed with, she says.
Mom?
What is it now?
Can you make it without the pain pills?
What do I need pills for? I don't hurt anywhere.
The next morning I call the doctor and he suggests getting a dishtowel to wrap her ribs. A practical remedy that costs nothing and this pleases her.
That will do just fine, she says. In a month or so I won't even know it happened.
I ask her if she remembers the hallucinations.
Oh yes, those people were just as real to me as you sitting there.
I am sensing the big opportunity. These past episodes have been a shock to my mom and I can see that even she is worried. It's now or never so it had better be now.
Mom. We have to get someone in here with you. Someone every day to make sure you don't fall or take too many pills. Someone to see that you're eating properly.
The Meals On Wheels people come everyday, she says. Except Sunday. Their food is fine.
But Mom, they aren't allowed to pick you up. If something happens to you they are required by law to call County Services and County Services will put you in a nursing home or a hospital.
There's the nurse.
She's not allowed to pick you up either.
The cleaning lady can look in on me.
She hardly ever shows up, Mom.
There's my next-door neighbor, she's here most every day and happy to help.
Not fair to her, Mom. And you know it.
Well, she says, good luck trying to find someone.
And that is as close to a "yes" as my mother is ever likely to give.
The secretary at the First Christian Church recommends Darla Miller who is a single mother living with her father and who is a second cousin to my mother's neighbor two doors down and has worked at the Memory Garden Nursing Home and seems all right to everyone I can think to ask.
Darla shows up promptly to the appointment but boy is she a talker. She sits right across from mom and confesses to a string of wife beating husbands including one who broke her arm, then drugged her and locked her the bedroom. This husband lived in a nearby town that is apparently known as one giant meth lab these days. Darla claims he put drugs in her coffee and she couldn't even get out of bed and she saw a locomotive come right through the front yard and it ran over her kids, killing them all, and then turned into a rooster. The rooster perched on the fence in front of her window and laughed at her. She was kept like this for days, seeing one crazy thing after another until finally she and her children escaped and came to live with her father.
It got so I didn't know what was real or not, Darla says.
The truth about reality, Mom says, is you can't get away from it. It's always there.
Darla considers this.
What happened to your husband, I ask.
Oh he's dead. Somebody shot him. I guess I was just looking for someone to love me and they were all nice at first.
And my mother says, Well, I think you have some growing up to do. I'll pay you six dollars an hour but I won't pay you to sit on the couch and talk.
Fine. Yes. That is fine. And that's that for now and for some brief respite to come. While Darla is there my mother can find a use for her and no doubt be of use to her. A year or so down the line, after other helpers, some not so kind or honest as Darla, it will be the friends from Meals On Wheels who find my mother, after all.
For now, I just want to take a walk. A late summer walk in the Missouri darkness. Dusky stars, velvet grasses. Cicadas and tree frogs sound soothing and friendly when I am out among them and not trying to sleep. A cat comes up to me. He rubs his chewed up head on my legs. He purrs and rolls on the ground and nips a bit as flirting cats like to do. Black lace trees. Fast rolling clouds. No fear. It's just the country. Just a little town. Faded, but here. There is something important that is still soundly present.
People wave back to me from their porches and I know that I can stop by any porch on this street and someone will be more than happy to talk with me. I can tell them everything. Talk on and on and on if I need too. They will know about mothers and what to do, since that is the question. They will listen and then talk quite a bit about their own mothers. There is nothing wrong with taking the time to talk it out. It's a comfort. It's how people learn to trust each other. The connections are still here, right now, to be exchanged even as they dim. My mother has a right to her home, her memories, her insulating pellets, her Meals On Wheels. That is the answer. She has earned the right to live and die in her own way.
The cat follows me for a while then darts into a stand of Queen Anne's Lace. I have come to a small stream. Blackwater, it's aptly named. Dark and still. No reflection on the surface. Black and thick as licorice. Yet, in the spring it is fast and full. Fast enough to carry me away.
We kiss and we try not to look at each other. When I leave I don't look back at the chair. I will die if I see her sitting alone in that final way.
Goodbye, Mom. I love you. I'll call you tonight when I get home.
All right, sugar. I'll be all right. I'll be just fine.
Lonnie is out front with his blue Pontiac. He is wearing a tight nylon shirt with swarming paisley maidens. He rushes forward for the baggage then turns toward the open trunk, giving me a shy, watery glance.
Are those mermaids on your shirt, Lonnie?
Oh, I guess, he says.
Again the car is ruffled up with clothes and food and I must sit in front wedged next to the door. I keep the window down. The air has gotten sharply cooler. These past weeks it has changed from summer to autumn. The breeze lifting off the fields is so fragrant. Nothing like it in Los Angeles, or anywhere else, I think. The two-lane blacktop rolls under us, then four lanes of concrete, then six. Lonnie is surprisingly quiet for a long time.
If you want them to be, he says finally. Mermaids. I wore it 'cause my Mom likes this shirt and I thought it might cheer you up.