DON"T DO IT.
That was my father-in-law"s advice in a nutsh.e.l.l. He was not an unkind man, but he"d met my mother at the wedding and, like everyone else, he"d witnessed her fragile condition and sensed how near she was to unraveling. It would also have been clear how dependent she was on me, that if I ever left the room she"d nervously watch the spot I"d disappeared from until I returned. So when his daughter told him that my mother wanted to move in with us until she could find a job and start a new life in Tucson, he warned her that it would be a terrible mistake. "If you let that woman in," he said, "you"ll never be rid of her."
She"d telephoned that morning in the throes of a full-blown panic attack. There was a three-hour time difference between New York and Arizona, and she"d waited as long as she could, but it was still early and also a Sat.u.r.day, so Barbara and I were asleep. I"d been expecting the call for days, actually. My mother and I talked pretty regularly, so I knew where she was in the never-ending cycle of her anxieties. Sometimes venting to me did the trick, releasing some stuck emotional valve, allowing some of the pressure a means of escape, after which she"d pull herself together, give herself a good talking-to, and thereby avert coming completely unglued. "Can"t you understand?" she"d sobbed. "Doesn"t it matter that I"m a person? Don"t I have a right to a life, like anybody else? How long am I expected to live in a cage?"
The cage was once again 36 Helwig Street, where she"d been living for a couple years. Phoenix had gone well for a time, but ultimately badly. She"d fallen in love with a man who looked like Sam Shepard and was about as laconic. He wore jeans and cowboy boots and drove a pickup truck. Then suddenly he was gone, and she was devastated. The story she told me was that they"d gotten too serious, too quickly. He had no desire to get married, so he"d left the state in hopes of forgetting her. That last part didn"t sound like the man in question, and a friend of hers later confided that he hadn"t left Arizona, or even Phoenix, or, for that matter, the neighborhood. He"d bolted once he discovered how intense my mother was about him, moving to another apartment house a few blocks away, where he was now seeing someone else. When my mother spotted his truck in the lot, it sent her into a tailspin. Had she mentioned, her friend wondered, that she"d lost her job at U-Haul? Well, no, she hadn"t, but she did the next time we spoke, saying that it was okay, that she"d hated the job from the start. The company wasn"t well run, nothing like the old GE in Schenectady, which for her always represented the gold standard of employment. What had she been thinking to leave it? she wondered out loud. Just imagine if she"d stayed. How many promotions would she have fielded by now? Just imagine her salary.
It didn"t take her long to find another job, though it was no better, and she had no safety net if something went wrong, which was making her nervous. Her doctor had agreed to up the dosage on her Valium, but she didn"t like the way it made her feel. While she wanted to stop taking the pills entirely, she needed them to stay functional. Something was amiss at the apartment house, too. It had been so fun-loving and gay at the beginning, but the parties had turned dark, and there were drugs now. (By then it was the mid-Seventies, so maybe.) Worst of all was the driving-the traffic, the heat, the lack of air-conditioning. Something was going to have to change, or she"d suffer a nervous breakdown.
Then, to my surprise, on the heels of the fleeing cowboy, there was suddenly another man in her life. Several years younger and recently divorced, he was clearly crazy about her. I"d met the man and liked him, though something didn"t seem right. She was always a sucker for style, and the men she was usually drawn to-like my father and the most recent fugitive-were invariably handsome and had a certain swagger, a boyish, self-destructive charm, a hint of danger. Russ had exactly none of that going for him, but he was good-natured and solid, the kind of man who might actually be good for my mother if she could learn to see past his unromantic virtues.
"Well, I think he loves you," I said when she asked my opinion about what she should do. "Do you love him?"
She didn"t answer, so I said, "It sounds like you have a decision to make," and she agreed that she did. Neither of us needed to articulate the exact nature of the dilemma: she could marry a man she didn"t love or return to Gloversville.
The marriage lasted a couple years, one in Phoenix and another in San Francisco, then crashed and burned. After the split she moved to nearby Pacifica, which sat under a permanent bank of dense, wet fog. Her apartment was situated on a cliff, and from it you could hear the waves pounding on the beach below, and there she went about the business of once again putting herself back together. She had no job, though, and no means of getting one. I"d inherited the Gray Death when she and Russ went to San Francisco and was willing to give it back, but she said no, she was through with driving.
So, when the money from the small divorce settlement ran out, there was nothing to do but return to upstate New York. It was midsemester, and I was now in grad school, but I stole a few days and flew to San Francisco, where I rented a truck, packed her books and other possessions, put them in storage, and promised to drive them to Gloversville that summer. My grandparents found money for a one-way plane ticket to Albany. My aunt and uncle picked her up and drove her to Helwig Street, where my grandparents had evicted their upstairs tenant to make room for her. She arrived in Gloversville with two suitcases and an official narrative. She had not failed to make a new life for herself out west. Moving to Arizona had not been a mistake. She was not returning home in defeat, but rather because her father was failing fast, on oxygen all the time and for the most part confined to his armchair. The burden of his declining health on her mother was too much, so she was returning to help out. As with so many of my mother"s narratives, this one was designed for people who knew better-her parents, her sister and brother-in-law, me. She never cared whether people believed her, simply that her version of events was never publicly questioned.
Being back in Gloversville worked for a while. She found a job and bought some furniture on credit. My grandfather"s condition was truly grave, and for a while her own problems paled by comparison. My mother had always adored him, and the rift caused by our departure for Arizona got mended. Further disputes were now out of the question; he had all he could do just to draw his next breath. For over a year she and my grandmother lived to the rhythm of his gasps until finally they stopped. Then they were alone in the Helwig Street house, two women who"d never seen eye to eye about anything. While my grandfather lived, they"d managed to coexist; neither had wanted to upset him, but with him gone the conflict resumed. To the old resentments-my grandmother questioning my mother"s decisions and offering unsolicited advice-was added another, far more toxic dispute. They simply could not agree on who my grandfather had been. To my grandmother, he was a loving husband, a model of responsibility and duty, the kind of man who quietly endured what could not be cured; to my mother he"d been a rebel, trapped just as she was in a town he hated, in roles as husband and father he"d never wanted but from which he could never escape. On top of all this, a recession hit, and my mother was laid off, and there wasn"t much to do with the day"s long hours except to take stock: once again stuck in Gloversville with no friends, no money, no future, no life. All of which had led to that Sat.u.r.day morning when she"d called to ask me how long any human being was expected to live in a cage. There was only one person in the whole world who really cared about her, who understood and could help her, and that was me. She needed to make a new beginning, but she could hardly do it by herself, with no one to call her own.
At the time my wife and I were living in a fourteen-foot-wide mobile home that we"d parked in a remote trailer park on the outskirts of Tucson, where rental s.p.a.ces were cheapest. It had two bedrooms, one on each end, the architectural wisdom of which we didn"t fully appreciate until my mother came to live with us. It cost twelve grand, probably more than my grandfather had paid for the house on Helwig Street, and to me a terrifying sum to owe. How could we ever pay back that kind of money? My grad school stipend paid less than two grand for teaching two sections of freshman composition per semester. Barbara was a secretary at a tiny, fast-failing electronics firm that her father had started up with another engineer from Hughes Aircraft. They"d called the company Iota, which by the time we got married seemed to summarize its chances of surviving another year. For those reasons I"d hoped, right up until we closed, that the finance company would take a good look at us, come to its senses, and refuse us the loan.
"She"d only be with us until she finds a job and can afford her own apartment," I a.s.sured my wife. "She doesn"t want to live with us."
"There"s a recession here, too," Barbara pointed out. "What will she do in this trailer all day when we"re gone? How will she get to job interviews? If she gets a job, how will she get back and forth to work? Who"s going to hire someone who can"t hold her hands still?"
All good questions. With no answers anybody would want to offer.
I didn"t even recognize her getting off the plane. Too poor to travel, we hadn"t actually seen each other in the year and a half since the wedding, by far the longest we"d ever been apart. She had to say my name, and I had to connect the sound of her voice to the frail, elderly woman coming toward me. Her hair had gone mostly gray, but it wasn"t that. She seemed about half the size of the woman who a few short years before had climbed behind the wheel of a car she only half knew how to drive and pointed it toward Phoenix and the new life she was betting everything on. Had she been like this at the wedding? Caught up in the event and my own happiness, had I failed to notice? When had she become so tiny? Or was it me, simply that I was looking at her with new eyes? After all, I was now married. At least symbolically my mother"s place in my life had been diminished. But, no, it was more than that. The way she came toward me had less to do with how I saw her than how she saw herself. In her own eyes she was about half her former size. When I held out my arms, she stumbled, nearly falling into my embrace. "Ricko-Mio," she said. "Always there. Always my rock."
SHE WAS IN terrible shape, shattered and barely functional. Determined to get back on her feet as soon as possible, my mother immediately scoured the help-wanted ads but on most days didn"t make a single call, unable to control her voice, barely able to hold on to the phone because her hands shook so badly. On better days she"d set up interviews around my teaching responsibilities, then cancel them as the time approached and she became too nervous. I"d seen her in bad shape before, but this was new. It was as if her world had gotten smaller, or the part of it she felt safe in had. For Barbara and me the trailer was suddenly too small, its common areas, especially the kitchen, too cramped. We were constantly in one another"s way. That was what my mother seemed to like best about it. Back in Gloversville, after my grandfather"s death, she"d been living by herself in our old flat with the few pieces of furniture she"d bought and could no longer make the payments on. Whole days had gone by, she told me, when she never heard the sound of another human voice. The fact that we were so crowded in our trailer was having a healing effect. She was no longer alone.
It also seemed to help that I was never gone for more than a few hours. Barbara had a nine-to-five job and left for work early, but my mother and I began each day over coffee, mapping out what she"d try to get done in our absence, and in the evening we all ate dinner together. I gave her my teaching schedule, so she knew when my cla.s.ses got out and roughly when to expect me back. I knew to call if something unexpected came up at the university, because each afternoon she positioned herself at the window and waited for the Gray Death (yes, still alive) to pull up beside the trailer. Normally I"d have graded my papers and prepared for cla.s.ses on campus, but things ran more smoothly if I didn"t leave her alone too long. Gradually, her condition did improve. She was able to cut back on the number of pills she was taking, and the tremor in her hands became less p.r.o.nounced. She set up more interviews and actually made it to a couple of them.
The problem was that though my mother was doing better, my wife and I were doing worse. She was finding reasons to stay later at work, and I couldn"t blame her. Each night there were three of us at the dinner table, but mostly my mother talked to me as if Barbara weren"t there. It was almost as if she"d forgotten I was married, that this extra, unnecessary person was my wife and not some girlfriend I"d soon tire of, or vice versa. She certainly didn"t dislike or resent Barbara and often remembered to thank her for opening up her home. It was my wife"s existence she couldn"t quite account for, as if she were a hologram, and when I asked Barbara a direct question, my mother often answered it. At the end of the evening, after we"d done the dishes, Barbara and I retreated to our bedroom as early as we decently could, and after turning out the lights we crawled into bed and whispered all the things we normally would"ve talked about over dinner. I think we both imagined my mother on the other side of the door, desperate to give us her input. We could no longer have friends over and felt guilty (or at least I did) if we went out someplace and didn"t include her.
Not that we"d have gone out much. Iota Engineering was then in its death throes, sometimes unable to make its payroll. One month Barbara was paid in office furniture, and she had little choice but to start looking for another job. It was against this stark financial backdrop that we began to make weekend trips to places like FedMart to start furnishing the kitchen of the apartment my mother didn"t yet have. It seemed like a smart idea to do it little by little. A new frying pan or a set of cheap cutlery cheered my mother by bringing into imaginative focus the day when she"d be officially back on her feet and living, as she liked to put it, independently. It wasn"t just for her that we did this, of course. Buying the pan also allowed Barbara and me to believe that day was coming. One Sat.u.r.day, though, I went too far and put too many things into the shopping cart, as if to hasten its arrival, and when I looked up Barbara was gone. I found her in the car, in tears. I"d spent money we simply didn"t have. Nor could we borrow it. Her father hadn"t drawn a salary in months, so her parents" situation, with most of her nine brothers and sisters still living at home, was as dire as ours. There was simply no one in either of our families who had two nickels to rub together. And of course I made the mistake of saying we"d been fools to ever buy the trailer, and the look on my wife"s face conveyed clearly what she was too kind to say. We"d been fools, all right, but not about the trailer. Even if we a.s.sumed the day would finally come when my mother had recovered sufficiently to live on her own, what would be left of us?
But eventually, that day did come, along with a great many others, and somehow there was still an "us" for my wife and me to protect and cherish. Indeed, over time our trials would appear to ill.u.s.trate the old saw that what doesn"t kill you makes you stronger. The threads we were dangling by in Tucson, both financial and emotional, proved more sinewy than we"d imagined. They would need to be.
THE FURNISHED APARTMENT my mother finally rented in Tucson reminded her of the one she"d loved in Phoenix, and she found a job she could get to by bus. Weekends I took her to the grocery store and wherever else she needed to go. Otherwise, Barbara and I returned as best we could to the routines of our young married life and told ourselves that maybe it would all work out. But then summer was upon us with its pulverizing heat. My mother"s apartment was several blocks from the bus stop, and the buses weren"t necessarily air-conditioned, so she often arrived at work already wilted, with eight hours still to go. She ate lunch at her desk, there being no restaurants within walking distance, at least in the midday heat, and there were no sidewalks anyway. In July came the monsoon rains, the skies darkening ominously every afternoon right as she got off work, and the downpours, though brief, were apocalyptic. She must"ve felt like the physical world was mocking her, because by the time she got home, drenched to her skin, the skies would be blue again and steam rising from the asphalt, the air not just hot but humid. "What an awful, awful place," she lamented, exactly what she"d said that morning in Phoenix after learning she wouldn"t be working for GE anymore.
Ironically, what ended up doing her in was neither Tucson, with its heat and monsoons, nor the job she hated (her new company poorly run, nothing like GE), nor the fact that she"d made no friends, but rather the return of her emotional equilibrium. One of the ironies of my mother"s condition was that her periodic tranquillity was usually a mixed blessing. Panic might cause her to spin out of control, but once she got her bearings again, she could see beyond her own torment. Back in Gloversville, her desperation to make one last grab at a fulfilling life hadn"t allowed her to imagine what that would be like in Tucson. It had to be better because it couldn"t be any worse. In her mind"s eye everything she saw was on a Gloversville scale, only better. She pictured me living nearby, down the street, maybe, or right around the corner. But Tucson was like Phoenix, a sprawling city of identically ugly intersections, where you were always half an hour away from anywhere else. It was a sea of cars, and she didn"t have or want one. Being "close" in Tucson wasn"t ten minutes by foot; it was twenty minutes by car-and much longer if you were living, say, in a remote trailer park.
Worse, her failure to accurately predict her own life in Tucson was compounded by her inability to understand ours. She had no idea how hard we were working, me on my Ph.D., Barbara on supporting us while I did. Even before my mother"s arrival, we"d been stretched thin in virtually every respect. As short as we were on money, we had even less time. I needed my Sundays for grading papers, and on Friday and Sat.u.r.day nights, for extra cash, I was a singer in a popular restaurant. Barbara"s large family all lived in Tucson, which provided plenty of other obligations. But whenever something unexpectedly came up in my mother"s life, I always did my best to accommodate her, and she could tell it wasn"t easy. "You"re always there when I need you," she"d said one day, gratefully patting my hand in the dentist"s office after she"d chipped a tooth. The plan we"d developed back at the trailer was intended to restore her independence, and its major components were now in place. She had an apartment and a job. What was dawning on her, though, was that none of this was sustainable. The truth was that she needed me, at least emotionally, all the time. The only thing that could work in the long run would be a version of the old Helwig Street model in which each of us was central to the other"s daily existence. But eventually, Barbara and I would have children, and as a father I"d have even less time to devote to her. And when I finished the Ph.D., my university career would begin, and who knew where that would take me? Back in Gloversville it might have seemed that we were separated only by geography, by all those miles, but now she understood that our separation was not only more profound than she"d imagined but was in fact only going to get worse.
By the time the holidays rolled around, she"d given herself a good talking-to. Coming to Tucson had been a mistake. It was time to admit that. And also, starting over in her midfifties was, well, too late. She hated Gloversville, G.o.d knew, but maybe it was the right place for her, maybe the only place. Her mother had welcomed her back before and would again. They would simply have to find a way to get along. Toward that end, she had a new, better idea. Instead of living upstairs in our old flat, she"d move into the spare bedroom downstairs, and they would share expenses. The upstairs flat could be rented, further bolstering their bottom line, taking financial stress completely out of the equation. And, to put my worries to rest, she pointed out that it wasn"t like we"d never see each other again. There were far more colleges and universities east of the Mississippi than west of it, so I"d more likely end up teaching somewhere back east, and we could spend our holidays together. She"d worked it all out, just as she had that long-ago plan to come west with me in the first place, letting me in on the details only after her own mind was made up. I wasn"t asked what I thought of the decision, simply informed of it, which was just as well.
Maybe coming to Tucson had been a bad decision, as she said, but returning to Gloversville would be another. What I couldn"t give voice to was my growing certainty that my mother was lost in some labyrinth of her own thoughts and impulses, and that if she was ever going to escape the maze, she"d have done so already. Since leaving Gloversville myself, I"d come to understand that this had also been my grandfather"s fear. I remembered that last day on Helwig Street when he"d watched from the front window, gulping air from his oxygen tank, as my friends and I loaded the U-Haul. Over the long months of bitter conflict, his anxiety had morphed into resignation in the face of his daughter"s tidal determination, but when my eyes met his I didn"t yet understand the true nature of his concern. He was worried about what would become of my mother, of course, but also what would become of me. Even if he"d had the desire, he lacked the breath to say all this, and anyway it would have been a terrible betrayal of the daughter he couldn"t stop loving, regardless. Probably less harmful, he must have reasoned, to maintain the long-established family narrative. My mother suffered from nerves. So did lots of people.
Ironically, the one person who ever openly questioned that narrative was my father. He wasn"t one to indulge regret or apologize, but the summer I turned twenty-one we were working road construction together in Albany, and he must"ve decided the time was right to explain his absence during my childhood. We"d stopped at half-a-dozen roadhouses on the way home, as was our dangerous habit, and were very drunk. "I should"ve thought about you more," he admitted, "but you were easy to forget. There was always something going on, a horse at the track that couldn"t lose or some poker game. You seemed to be doing fine without me." When he paused, I figured he"d said his piece, but then he added one last thing. "And anyway, I couldn"t be your father without being married to that crazy woman." The expression on my face then must have been strange, because he leaned back on his bar stool so he could really take me in. "You do know your mother"s nuts, right?"
I don"t know what I looked like, of course, but I recall being for a time unable to speak. I probably just sat there with my mouth open, a series of unwelcome emotions washing over me in waves. First anger at the seeming ease with which my father, who had no right to do so, had offered his judgment. After all, if my mother was crazy, at the very least he was a contributing factor. But even more powerful than anger was a totally unexpected surge of relief, because his verdict was no sooner rendered than I realized it was true, that I"d known this myself at least since the morning in Phoenix when she"d finally come clean about not really having a job at GE awaiting her there; and probably, truth be told, some part of me had known it for much longer. How many meltdowns, followed by good talking-tos, had I witnessed as a boy, too frightened to draw the necessary inference? Later on, as an adolescent, how many times had I suppressed the terrible possibility that something in my mother was off-kilter? Hadn"t I also suspected all along that other family members-my grandparents and aunt at a minimum-also knew this but refused to say anything? Now, for the first time, I understood how lonely I"d been in my fears and suspicions, how alone I"d felt in the possession of adult knowledge to which I was hardly ent.i.tled.
And, finally, I felt guilty. That I"d come to the same heartless conclusion as my father was a terrible betrayal, surely. I don"t recall whether that came right away or later. I only know there"s been enough to last a lifetime. How else to explain my willingness to jeopardize my young marriage a decade later and, as the next three decades unspooled and my mother"s condition worsened, the many times I"d repeat that same mistake, refusing to acknowledge the primacy of other loyalties subsequent to those forged on Helwig Street. Suffice to say that my mother wasn"t the only one caught in a dangerous loop of repet.i.tive behavior.
NOT LONG AFTER she returned to Gloversville from Tucson, I began a decade-long academic nomadship during which I jumped from job to job, trying to teach and be a writer at the same time. For a while, after our daughters came along, we were even poorer than we"d been as graduate students. And I was a bad boy. Caring not a whit about tenure and promotion, I thumbed my nose at the advice of department chairs about what I needed to do to succeed in the university. I left jobs for other jobs that paid less but offered more time out of the cla.s.sroom. In the summer, when many of my colleagues taught extra cla.s.ses, I wrote stories and spent money we didn"t have on postage to submit them to magazines. I wrote manically, obsessively, but also, for a time, not very well. I wrote about crime and cities and women and other things I knew very little about in a language very different from my own natural voice, which explained why the editors weren"t much interested.
My first full-time job was as an a.s.sistant professor at a branch campus of Penn State University. Altoona was a good day"s drive from Gloversville, close enough for holiday visits but too far for my mother to expect much more. We continued to talk on the phone at least once a week, and these calls were for her a lifeline. I knew things weren"t going well. She"d moved into the spare bedroom downstairs as planned, but she and my grandmother, who was by then in her eighties and crippled by arthritis, still weren"t getting along. They liked different TV shows and different food, and rather than come to an accommodation my mother insisted on cordoning off their existences. Since the dining and living rooms were roughly the same size, they set up their own camps. They had no choice but to share the kitchen, though my mother refused to cook or to allow my grandmother to, arguing she was the one who"d have to clean up. So at lunchtime each made her own sandwich using her own personal ingredients, and for dinner each warmed her own frozen dinner in the oven. Afterward, they watched their favorite shows on their competing televisions, bickering endlessly about whose volume was turned up too high. My grandmother seemed to understand that this was lunatic behavior, but confronting her daughter would only have made matters worse. With her husband gone, the balance of power had shifted. Short of threatening to toss her out, something my grandmother never would"ve done, she had little leverage, so gradually my mother"s will became law. When we visited, usually during the holidays, they strove for a truce, but you could tell they were unused to speaking to each other beyond demanding that the rival television be turned down. One day my father stopped by to say h.e.l.lo, took in the arrangement at a glance-my grandmother"s furniture crammed into one room, my mother"s into the other, the two TVs a few feet apart blaring different shows-and regarded my mother for a long moment, then said, "Jean. What the h.e.l.l"s wrong with you?"
Not long afterward he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and this more or less coincided with my taking a new job in New Haven, which meant I"d be only four hours from Gloversville instead of eight; given the deteriorating situation there, closer seemed to me, if not better, at least more advantageous. My father did his chemotherapy and radiation, and his cancer went into remission before it ultimately returned even more aggressively. Finally, too sick to care for himself, he was admitted into the VA hospital in Albany, where I visited him every other weekend. He seemed less concerned about his own mortality than not having anybody to bet his daily doubles at the OTB. "You going over to Helwig Street when you leave here?" he"d ask, incredulous, like a man who"d dodged a bullet even more dangerous than death. "That"s some crazy s.h.i.t going on over there."
In the spring of our second year in New Haven I sold my first novel, as a result of which I was offered my first real job as a writer. Until then I"d been a teacher with a writing habit that was tolerated but not necessarily encouraged. The new job, in Carbondale, Illinois, offered everything I"d wanted for the last decade-a real writing program, good colleagues, time to do my own work. But it was too far away, I knew. Instead of being four hours from Gloversville, I"d now be three days. My mother needed me closer, not farther away. I explained why I had to take the job, and she agreed I"d be a fool not to, but not long after we were settled in Carbondale, I got what would be the last of those frantic Helwig Street phone calls from my mother demanding to know why she didn"t deserve a life the same as anybody else and how long she was expected to remain locked in a cage. I called my aunt to see if things were as bad as they seemed and learned they were actually worse, much worse. There was a lot going on, most of it old: conflicts not only unresolved but also unresolvable. But one new thing my aunt mentioned scared me. My grandmother had been prescribed a new medication in capsule form, to be taken with food, and my mother had somehow gotten it into her head that this meant the capsules needed to be ground up in her food, which she then proceeded to do over my grandmother"s tearful objections. When my aunt discovered what was going on and confronted her sister, explaining that the medication simply should be taken with meals, she became unhinged, screaming that if anything happened to their mother, it would be my aunt"s fault. She had shouldered the entire burden of my grandmother"s deteriorating health for years, she claimed, expected to make every single decision, but if her judgment was going to be questioned, now or ever, then she wanted nothing more to do with it. My aunt could take over all those duties and see how well she liked them. Apparently this fracas had precipitated the call to Carbondale. My aunt knew and was very fond of my wife, and knew we had our hands full with new jobs and two small daughters, but I could tell she was also worried sick for my grandmother, and when I asked if I should come get my mother, she reluctantly agreed it might be for the best.
By the time I got to Gloversville, she"d calmed down some. The knowledge that I was coming, that I"d be there by week"s end, allowed her to step back from the precipice, but she was clearly in terrible shape, far worse than when she"d come to live with us in Tucson. At the time I owned a pickup truck into which we loaded her things, mostly books. What didn"t fit was left behind. I"d borrowed a camper sh.e.l.l so we could lock everything up at night when we checked into motels. Together, we drove back across the country on the same route we"d taken twenty years before. The truck had air-conditioning, but my mother suffered one panic attack after another, and she swore she couldn"t breathe, so we had to drive with the windows open to the August heat. Between these fits she regaled me with stories about how awful the last few years had been, detailing every single responsibility that was hers and hers alone, how abusive her sister and mother had been. "You have no idea how cruel they were," she said, over and over. "I kept it all a secret."
As we made our slow journey west, my wife was busy trying to find a place for her to live. Before I headed to Gloversville, we"d negotiated as best we could the terms for how all this would go. a.s.suming she wasn"t a danger, my mother would stay with us until September. She was retired now, on Social Security, so she didn"t need to work, and she qualified for elderly housing, if we could find it. Halfway to Illinois I called Barbara, who said there was an opening at the senior-citizen tower, exactly the sort of place I knew my mother would veto. The next day I explained patiently that the apartment would only be temporary until we could find something better, that it was five minutes from our house, and she"d have the rest of August with us to get back on her feet and orient herself to her new environment before moving in. Since her only other option was returning to Gloversville, she had to go along with this, though she had a stipulation. The tower had to be only for the elderly, with no Section 8 residents. She refused to live with crazy people.
She also wanted to know if my driver"s-side window was rolled down all the way, because she couldn"t breathe. I knew how she felt. I couldn"t either.
FIVE YEARS LATER, in 1991, I was offered a teaching position at Colby College in Maine. What made the position especially attractive was that it was part-time, a relative rarity in academia. At long last I was earning some money from my writing, almost enough-maybe, if nothing went wrong-to live on. At Colby I"d have more time to write and health insurance despite my part-time status, as well as a tuition subsidy for our daughters. If things went well, I could imagine writing full-time in a few years. We were also anxious to put southern Illinois"s buggy, humid, tornado-ripe summers behind us, not to mention its pa.s.sive-aggressive religious fundamentalists. I was tired of answering the door on Sunday morning to find strangers wanting to talk about Jesus. When we politely (for the most part) declined, they"d peer inside and see all the books, then shake their heads and advise us to put away our pride. "All them books don"t amount to nothin"," they"d tell me, "not if you don"t know the Good Book."
There were, however, compelling reasons to stay put. Barbara liked her job, and our daughters had their friends, and I was pretty sure the university would match whatever Colby offered. And of course there was my mother. She"d changed apartments twice since I brought her to Carbondale, and while she hated it there, she at least was settled. Like she always did after leaving Gloversville, she now remembered it fondly as the home from which she"d been exiled. She called every week to talk to her sister and mother and ended all these conversations by saying how much she loved and missed them, how lucky they were not to live in the Midwest. During the long spring and summer months, when the tornado watches beeped and inched incessantly along the bottom of television screens, she phoned with a familiar lament: "What an awful, awful place."
She was anxious to go to Maine, of course, because she"d be closer to home, but could she make the trip? It would be, no matter how we handled it, a logistical nightmare. Say we went to Maine, found a place, moved in, and then returned for my mother. Well, she couldn"t be left alone for longer than it took milk to spoil because it would, literally, spoil. Even more important, her emotional well-being was tied to our proximity. On any occasion when we"d be gone for just a week-taking the girls to Disney World, for example-it was necessary to let her know well in advance so she could accustom herself to the idea, and then she required telephone numbers not only for every place we"d be staying but also for various friends in case she needed backup. Still her anxiety level always rose to fever pitch in the days before we left, and afterward we were pretty sure she upped the dosage of her meds on her own authority. Since it might take us a month to get settled in Maine, leaving her behind was simply out of the question. The opposite scenario-setting her up in an apartment in a strange new place, then returning to Illinois to go through our own move-would be, if anything, worse. Therefore, we"d have to make the move together, putting everything in storage until we found accommodations.
Actually, after I accepted Colby"s offer, we discovered all this was going to be even more difficult. What few decent apartments were available in the Waterville area got snapped up seasonally by faculty and staff, so finding a place for my mother was going to be a challenge. On top of that, the housing market there was tight and expensive. Barbara made two exploratory trips that spring, saw numerous listings, and came back dejected both times. There was nothing even remotely as nice as the house we were selling in Carbondale. Worse, it wasn"t selling. After two months, no one had even insulted us with a lowball offer, whereas in Waterville, where we wanted to live because of the schools, anything good got snapped up before we could see it. Since we"d be moving over the summer, we were advised to rent a camp on one of the nearby lakes and look at our leisure. If we saw something we liked we could make an offer within twenty-four hours.
As our departure date approached, my mother again showed signs of coming unglued. There was just so much to be done, she kept saying, and she had to do it all herself. Actually, I kept reminding her, there was nothing for her to do. I"d hired a mover, scheduling her things to be loaded onto the truck the day before the same mover added our own. I would pack up her books and anything that wasn"t going on the truck myself. The night before the move, she"d stay with us. Yes, she said, but that still left hundreds of other tasks she"d have to do, though when I asked what they were, she"d collapse into the nearest armchair and claim she was too exhausted to think. Nor could we agree on how to handle the simplest details. It was June, and the temperatures already in triple digits, but she was adamant that we drive to the phone company to terminate her service, then to the cable company, and so forth. We could do that by phone, I pointed out. No, she said, she"d never had much luck with the phone. She was afraid the utility companies wouldn"t refund her deposits, and that was money she couldn"t afford to lose. I promised to make good on any losses, but she didn"t want my money; she wanted her money. The day her stuff was to be loaded on the truck, it was more than a hundred degrees by nine in the morning, and when the truck pulled up and two skinny black kids got out, I knew we were in trouble. The driver couldn"t have been more than eighteen, and the other looked about fifteen and weighed a hundred and ten pounds tops. "Stay here," I told her, then went outside to talk to the driver and sign the paperwork. "My mother"s in a bit of a state," I warned him. "I"ll try to keep her out of your way." I"d hoped to convey this vital information to the other kid, too, but he"d gone directly inside. He was in there for about ten seconds when I heard my mother wail, "Oooh! Oooh! Oooh!" as if he were jabbing her with a hat pin. Arriving on the scene, I saw that he"d picked up my mother"s credenza by one end and was intent on taking it outside. It wasn"t a heavy piece of furniture. He"d taken one look at it, sussed out that it was made of pressed sawdust, not wood, and hoisted it into the air. "You"ll break it!" my mother was screaming at him, her hands over her mouth. "You"ll break it!"
In the car, she sat there, her face in her hands, still picturing the kid with the credenza. "You need to calm down," I told her. "If it gets broken, I"ll replace it."
"But I love it," she said.
"Mom," I said. "It"s from Kmart."
It took a good minute for her to respond to this unwelcome fact. "Don"t you have things that you love?" I didn"t answer, and she was quiet until we pulled into the driveway of the house we"d be leaving the next morning. "Do you really think I"m not trying?" she said, her hands shaking and bottom lip quivering. "Because I am. I hope you never know how hard."
There wasn"t much to say to that. She was trying. As hard as she could. As was often the case with my mother, it was her utter lack of success that strained credulity.
AND SO WHATEVER didn"t fit into our two small cars went into storage, to be delivered we knew not when to we knew not where. For my mother, who always preferred to settle things wrongly than to leave them unsettled, a nightmare. For all concerned, the next five days turned out to be another. Barbara drove one car, with Emily and Kate listening to music on their headphones in the backseat, my mother riding with me in the other. Officially unraveled now, she suffered one anxiety attack after another, unable to breathe unless all the windows were down, muttering all the while, "Dear G.o.d, how much longer?" Our progress was slow, torturous. In the morning it took her a good hour and a half to get ready, and by late afternoon she"d had all she could endure, and we"d have to pull off. She needed a hotel room to herself, which was fine, because by then so did we. She needed another hour or more to shower and dress for dinner, and then we had to scout out the possibilities. "I"m sorry, but really I can"t bear it," she"d say if the place was too loud or she could smell grease when we walked in. When we finally found a restaurant she could bear, the first thing she did was ask our waiter to turn down the air-conditioning because it was freezing, and often there was something wrong with the table we"d been seated at. What she was hoping for, of course, was never on the menu. "If only they just had a grilled cheese sandwich," she"d lament. "Could you ask if they"d make me one?" My mother never ordered for herself in restaurants. She explained what she wanted and expected me, as the man at the table, to communicate her desires. If a waiter addressed her directly, she"d say, "My son will order for me." Sometimes, depending on just how disappointed she was with the overall proceedings, she"d add, audibly, "If they were professionals, they"d know it"s the man who orders." Emily, ever the peacemaker where her grandmother was concerned, would try to appease her. "I don"t think that"s the way things work anymore, Grandma," she"d say. "Certainly not in T.G.I. Friday"s," her sister would add. Most days, I"d about had it by that time. "There are two hundred people in here, Mom. You have to order from the menu." Sometimes Barbara would note that there actually was a grilled cheese sandwich on the kiddie menu, which it would then fall to me to order. "That was perfect," my mother would say when she was finished, now in a better mood. "It was all I wanted." By then I"d usually had a couple bottles of beer or a margarita. Would you please, for the love of G.o.d, just shut the f.u.c.k up and eat your Jell-O? That was what I"d have liked to say. Items on the children"s menu always came with Jell-O.
Our second day on the road, around dawn, we were awakened by a call from the motel"s front desk. During the night somebody had broken into my car, smashing in the windshield with a tire iron. Nothing was stolen, but we couldn"t get back on the road until we spent the morning getting the windshield replaced. The front seat and floor were vacuumed, but tiny gla.s.s shards had worked their way into the fabric of the seat cushions, and by the time I drove back to the motel where my family anxiously awaited, my undershorts were pink. My mother would now have to ride in the other vehicle. "Which car do you want to drive?" I asked Barbara. That is, would you rather have my mother in your car for the next seven hours or bleed from the a.s.s in mine? After twenty-five years, she was used to such choices. Still, she seemed to debate this one for a long time.
We took a bath towel from the motel and put it down on the seat, and then I slid in gingerly behind the wheel. "Try not to squirm," my wife advised.