By Danna Walker
“Mom, everything in here is broken.”
“It is not. Why would you say something like that?”
We’re yelling slightly to accommodate for Mom’s bad hearing and my foul mood.
I’m struggling to get outside to shake out the bathroom rugs, which I tried to wash but whose rubber backing crumbled against the years like my mother’s memory.
The sliding glass door latch is gone and the metal bar keeping the door secure keeps falling down. The piece of a weathered business card holding the screen latch in place slips out and I can’t find it.
“There’s nothing wrong with this house. Stop messing up the door.”
“The latch is broken.”
“It is not. It was fine yesterday.”
Yesterday, when all things were new and functioning, is my mother’s safe space—where reality is as malleable as buttercream in summer, though in her case the butter would be oleo, on sale, half off.
“Can I get you some new bathroom rugs? I can probably find some in black, just like these. These are falling apart.”
“No,” she says forcefully, leaning hard against her walker as she tries to loom over me, forgetting she’s no longer taller or stronger.
“That’s why I don’t wash them.”
I finish scooping the atrophied bits from the bottom of the washer.
“Would you like some coffee?” I ask, changing the subject.
I reach for the jar of instant, the top stuck from the Louisiana humidity and the crystals hard and clumped.
“There’s Splenda in here, right?” I ask as I lift the top of the porcelain sugar bowl, the stem being a small binder clip that stays attached despite the laws of physics.
“Meals on Wheels brought you a Little Debbie rice crisp thing,” I add, stabbing my hand with the jagged end of the scissors’ partially missing finger ring. “I’m trying to get it open.”
“I’ll have it later,” she says. She doesn’t usually turn down sweets. “I already had coffee.”
I look at the long-abandoned coffee maker and the ancient jar of Folgers, neither of which had likely been touched since I was last in Shreveport four months ago. I yearn for the aroma of the Nicaragua Rio Coco beans at Java Nation near my neighborhood in the DC suburbs.
Giving up on coffee as well as trying to please her, I shove my glass into the lever on the freezer door with one hand and the crispy treat in my mouth with the other. But I remember the ice maker is dead and I need to go to Albertsons for about a dozen items, including a bag of ice.
“The plumber is coming tomorrow to see if the water is getting to the ice maker,” I say, in between bites.
“Why?”
“It’s not working.”
“That’s strange. It was working yesterday.”
***
I’ve been going through the process with my two younger siblings of trying to relocate my mother nearer to my brother in an assisted living facility in Springfield, Missouri, 420 miles away. My mother, who isn’t recuperating well from a broken hip, is hostile to the idea.She is oblivious to the invisible hands keeping her alive—the meals and medication from the part-time caregiver she thinks is simply a friendly neighbor; Meals on Wheels; parish-sponsored well checks; autopay for bills and the yard guy; groceries on order; a security camera; and a legal trust to protect her only asset, the house.
I visit to see how the rickety care infrastructure my sister, brother, and I have set up is working. She held off my brother and an entire staff of an eldercare facility for seven hours after changing her mind several months ago. This is the best we can do.
Because of her relentless pain, she spends her days sleeping, which gives me time to write in between forays to Walmart for heating pads, arthritis ointment, foam pillows, back braces and ice packs—none of which she will use. She demands we remove the risers under the couch as well as the shower seat, somehow pulling the latter out into the hallway on her own “to get it out of my sight.”
I lost it that time, calling her “nasty” and wanting to add “old woman” but stopping myself. If only she would see that we could make things better, if she would just try a little harder. If only she could see the chips and cracks were starting to take over.
Blue Bell Moo-llennium Crunch is her only balm. When she’s awake late in the day, she balances the carton on top of her walker and wobbles barefoot to her well-worn spot in front of the TV, hair comical and peach house dress faded to beige. She hasn’t gotten fully dressed in months, or is it years?
***
Until she’s up, I try to write in the formal dining area by the natural light of a wall of windows, sometimes looking out into the exactly medium-sized yard, sometimes just staring at the living room, grateful to be in a room where, other than my laptop, the Magnavox stereo hi-fi console is the latest technology.
The living room is so dramatic a cleaning lady I surreptitiously hired while Mom was in rehab said, “Your mother lives like she was in Hollywood. Did she like Marilyn Monroe? She’s got a lot of style.”
I think, Wow, these bright, loud walls of yellow, orange, and green—painted by my mother, herself—this black, oriental-style furniture, the brass, the old hi-fi, the sequined pillows and orange Buddha, the tall willows in the marble vase, they say something to a stranger—almost a true thing.
The era of Sean Connery as James Bond, the Rat Pack, Marilyn, Sinatra, the big bands with their horns and saxophones like my dad used to play—it’s all here.
It’s kind of the perfect place to write about my past, an unusual opportunity to bear witness to the compost heap of my childhood. A poem pours out of me as part of an essay about my late father, his meager upbringing, magnetic presence, angry outbursts, and love of bourbon. It centers on my scattering of his ashes alone in Goliad, Texas, the home of his rabble-rousing ancestors.
My mother once told me she had never met another man as smart or attractive as him, putting words to what we all believed. I’ll never forgive you for expecting he would always be yours, I remember thinking at the time. It was never going to work out.
I move on to making a list of things I would like to forgive my mother for if I could, now that time is running out for her and the house:
· For never following a recipe and believing a cheap cut of meat should cook for four hours, I forgive you.
· For arguing with me over whether it’s better to park with the front end in or backing in, I forgive you.Well, maybe not.
· For not fighting for me when Dad gave me a black eye, I forgive you. Thank you for the ice afterward.
· For constructing a reality based on your own self-preservation, I forgive you.
I make another list for which I imagine she might forgive me:
· For taking your father’s attention when there was so little to go around, I forgive you.
· For not being my girlfriend, I forgive you.
· For holding my limitations against me, I forgive you.
· For seeing my house as the problem, I forgive you. Almost.
***
The limited choices of women of her generation seemed to most affect my mother as an absence of having anything specifically her own. This manifested in her fierce claim later in life to the $22,500, 2,400-square-foot house we were now asking her to give up. When a caregiver questioned her recently about what she was most grateful for, she responded quickly, “My home,” before the woman prompted her to add, “My three kids.”
As a young mother, pregnant with me when she married my father, their first house was her reluctant domain. This house, bought almost new in 1965, later became her haven after she and my father divorced, she got her bachelor’s degree in her late forties and started working full-time.
After receiving an allowance from my father during the twenty-five years of their marriage, she had her own disposable income for the first time and she filled the closets with the oranges, pinks, and turquoises she favored, with lots of shoes to match. With the help of her kids, friends, and travel shopping, her collection of costume jewelry grew to fill an entire chest of drawers.
She glammed up her bedroom out of a catalogue and re-did her kitchen, where she hung framed sayings like, “I only work to support my shoe addiction,” “Men should be like coffee. Sweet, strong and rich,” and “Love isn’t love, ‘til you give it away.” Her name, Shirley, is on no fewer than six signs or mugs.
The hi-fi, black teak coffee table and dining set, orange suede bucket chairs, and mid-century bedroom suite stayed in place from when my father and us kids also lived in the house—as did the
gold-painted plastic hairspray cover on her vanity. The top has been re-glued and finally left broken for more than four decades.
When my dad got remarried for the second time to a woman younger than me, Mom once again focused on her house, putting in new carpet, named “Green Grape,” she pronounced proudly. It was a pretty, bright color like, well, green grapes. After her children and the grandson she helped raise in her sixties were gone, she took a final step of rebellion, replacing “Green Grape” with long-nap, snow-white carpeting throughout, either an ode to Marilyn or a dare to us to boomerang. I didn’t know which, but none of us ever moved back.
***
I experienced my first period in this house, my first kiss, drink, and encounter with violence. I lay on every color of its carpeting to look up at the Christmas tree and listen to my father’s Stan Getz albums and the Beatles, made even more perfect through the deep and mellow tones of the hi-fi.
I later made fun of the house’s confining loudness, putting my mother so prominently in your face. Finally, after so long and so much decline, I chafe at its needy defiance, the fact that it’s still around, its budget glamour now tired and worn.
The back door, the ice maker, the sugar bowl, the clogged sinks, the graying carpet, the dated colors on the walls, and my mother’s ill body and mind defy repair.
But facing these final days, the house might say it no longer matters, and it, too, is ready to forgive. After fifty-five years of taking care of my family but sheltering my mother the longest, I imagine it to have quite a list. It might say that for painting one of my rooms black and another bright turquoise, I forgive you. Or I forgive you for neglecting me because where houses are concerned, the chips and cracks are part of the character of a place.
It might say that there’s no need to forgive bad taste, especially if your inspiration is Marilyn Monroe. It might add, I forgive you for thinking I’m the problem.