9 1/2 Narrow (25 page)

The next evening, Lee, my mother, and I were watching TV in the den, which used to be Bumpa's bedroom. One of the channels was showing a special on 1960s pop music, and my mother started singing along with vintage footage of Herman's Hermits.
“I'm 'Enry the Eighth, I am, 'Enry the Eighth, I am, I am.”
Lee looked over at me, as if to say,
How in the world does she know that?

“I wish they'd show the Beatles,” my mother said. “Paul was my favorite.”

“I remember.”

We were both sitting on the couch, her legs stretched over my lap. “I have bad arthritis in my feet,” she said. “They hurt a lot, and they're stiff as boards. They're practically useless.” She wiggled her toes.

“Do you remember Bumpa's foot rubs?” she asked. “He had healing hands.”

“Would you like a little foot rub?” I asked.

We listened to the Dave Clark Five and Petula Clark and the Byrds while I massaged her tired, worn-out feet. “It's just like the old days, isn't it?” she said. “I miss them.”

My mother needed new sneakers, so the following day, Lee and I took her to the New Balance factory outlet, which is in Lawrence, across from the former textile mills. The “Big Ben” tower clock that had stopped running in the 1950s was restored in the 1990s and now keeps accurate time. New Balance claims to be one of the few companies committed to the domestic shoe business, but more and more of its products are being manufactured in Asia. My mother didn't care where they were made; she only cared that New Balance would restore her old balance.

“If I can only find the right pair, I know I'll be fine,” she told me. I didn't have the heart to tell her that sneakers wouldn't correct her balance or reset the clock. The parking lot was on a steep incline, so Lee dropped us off while he parked the car. After we helped her into the store, we found the 8½ medium section. Since it was a factory outlet, we had to fend for ourselves. My mother sat down on a bench, while I pulled out various models, which she rejected for multiple reasons. “I am not a teenager, Patricia,” she said. “Can you imagine me in orange? Or lime? No, I want something subdued.”

“Like gray?” I asked.

“Gray? Ugh! Too depressing. I'm not in the grave yet.”

“I have the same pair, and I like them.”

“You have your father's feet. Very narrow.”

“But these come in medium.”

She turned up her nose. “I don't like gray.”

I found another pair, gray and pale blue. “What do you think?” I asked. At this point, Lee had disappeared into the men's department. He is the most patient man I have ever met, but even he has his limits.

My mother made a face. I convinced her to try them on. They were too big. She tried on a smaller pair. They were too small. We tried on at least six different pairs in various sizes, colors, and styles. Finally, she found a pair she liked. I suggested that she walk in them to make sure they fit properly. “I am not using my cane,” she said defiantly. “Remember, I used to go to Silver Sneakers.” She was referring to an exercise program for older adults that she'd attended fifteen years earlier. I helped her walk up and down the aisle. She was pretty sure they fit. I was worried about the “pretty sure” part, but we'd already gone through all the sneakers in her size.

“I'm delighted with them,” she announced back in the car. “I'm so glad you came with me. I would never be able to do this myself. The incline in the parking lot is treacherous. I'd probably kill myself. But these are perfect. Thank you, Patricia and Lee. Now I won't have to use my cane.”

Back in New York, I called my mother. “So, how are the sneakers?”

“I brought them back. They didn't fit, and I didn't like the colors.”

“You walked from the parking lot to the store? You said it was treacherous! You said it could kill you!”

“Those sneakers would have killed me. Anyway, you'll be happy to know I bought the gray ones.”

I gently suggested that maybe my mother should stop driving and hire someone to help her do the food shopping and errands.

“If I can't drive, that's it for me,” she said. “You expect me to be stuck in the house all day long? I'll go crazy. I love getting outside and walking places. Take that away from me, and it's over.”

Her favorite destination was Whole Foods, where she worked the system like a pro. First, she parked in the handicapped spot and then got her cane from the backseat and walked to the shopping carts, which were usually in front. Once she steadied herself with a cart, she was all set. There were always “kind” people ready to help, probably because they couldn't believe someone that old and frail was walking around a warehouse-size supermarket on her own. Every day I expected to receive a call from someone at Whole Foods telling me she'd collapsed near the kale chips.

The following September, my mother did indeed fall—not at Whole Foods but nearer to home, more specifically, at the bird feeder. She claimed she was trying to fill it with birdseed, though I suspected she was attempting to grease the pole to keep the white squirrels away. Since my father couldn't hear her cries for help, she crawled the whole length of the backyard to attract his attention. She had to move quickly to avoid the sprinkler system, which was timed to go on. When my father saw her on the ground, he immediately called 911 and an ambulance took her to the local hospital. The doctors couldn't find anything wrong, but given her age—she was about to turn ninety-three—they wanted to keep her overnight for more tests the next morning. Nancy drove from Boston to stay with my father. Around three
A.M
., my mother decided she'd had enough of the hospital and demanded to be let out. Remarkably, given the liability issues, they actually released her in the middle of the night and an ambulance brought her home. When she got there, she discovered that she didn't have her house keys. My father had removed his hearing aids and Nancy is a heavy sleeper, so nobody heard the doorbell. My quick-thinking mother convinced the EMS workers to get a ladder from the garage and then climb up to the roof, where they had to remove an air-conditioner to gain entrance through a second-story window. Nancy woke up to find two strange men in the hallway and screamed.

When my mother told me the story, I said, “That's the craziest thing I ever heard. You should have stayed in the hospital.”

“I didn't want to be in the hospital. I wanted to be home. The only way they're going to take me out is feetfirst.”

We hired a home-care attendant against my parents' strenuous objections. My mother hated having someone else in the house, but it was clear she needed help with errands. She continued to complain that she was tired, but with her insomnia, it was hard to know if she wasn't getting enough sleep or if it was more serious. Though I'd begged her not to do it, she'd renewed her driver's license, but she didn't feel well enough to drive or even accompany the attendant to Whole Foods or to her hairdresser's. The only thing she cared about was Thanksgiving. Emily and her family had promised to come home, and my mother was looking forward to finally seeing everyone together at the table.

Two days before the holiday, she was taken to the emergency ward again, this time with an excruciating headache. Or was it eye pain? It was hard to keep up with the ever-shifting complaints. The doctors at the hospital diagnosed congestive heart disease, and she was sent to a nearby nursing home for rehabilitation. Coincidentally, it was the same place where Priscilla Lane, the movie star and mother of the girl with the white Mary Janes, had spent her final years.

On Thanksgiving, everyone was at the dining room table, except my mother. I sat in her chair, propping up her driver's license against a candlestick so she'd be present in spirit.

The following morning, Lee and I brought my father over to visit her. Since he rarely left his reading chair, it was difficult for him to move, and we were nervous that he'd slip and fall. We helped him to the door of the nursing home, where we'd arranged for a wheelchair. When he saw my mother being wheeled out of her room, his green eyes lit up with such love I had to hold back tears. I'd never seen that expression before, or maybe I'd just never looked hard enough for it. We took them both into a private room, where they sat side by side and held hands. My father kept moving his wheelchair back and forth, as if on a first date and he didn't know what to say.

Back home, my father showed me the blue-and-white Victorian figurine of a little boy that sat on a side table next to the couch. It had been there forever, but I'd never really noticed it. My father explained that before he was sent away to boarding school, the landlady at the rooming house where he lived with his father told him he could select one thing to keep him company. He picked the little boy and somehow managed to hold on to it for the next eighty-five years. “Look over there,” he said, pointing to a blue-and-white little girl figurine. Again, it was one of those objects that had always been next to the couch but that I'd never paid any attention to. He told me that when he first met my mother, it was the first thing he noticed in her apartment. The little girl was the perfect match to the little boy.

My mother spent the next several weeks in the nursing home, trying to regain her strength. She pushed as hard as she could in physical therapy, but she hated the place, complaining that the aides were rough and the food terrible. Once, after an aide yelled at her for pressing the call button too many times, both Nancy and I were on the phone with the social worker and nursing station. Another time an aide upbraided her for not making it to the bathroom on time. It was humiliating for my proud mother, and once again, we spoke to the staff, but it didn't seem to matter. Though we explained that my mother didn't like eggs, they persisted in serving them to her. Deciding that she was dehydrated, they put her on an IV drip and in the process managed to blow a vein, causing blood to leak out. I was the one who noticed that her arm, with its paper-thin skin, was all swollen.

There were a few bright spots. One day she received a bunch of tulips from my friend Robin. Steffi had introduced us right before she'd died, making a point of telling me, “You two should become friends.” It was if she'd willed her to me, and we did indeed become close. My mother had always loved flowers, and as the tulips opened up and changed shape, she found them mesmerizing. “These are simply the most beautiful flowers I've ever seen,” she told me. “I could watch them for hours.”

She spent much of the day sleeping, however, and after she told me she'd had a dream of walking through her childhood home, I began to get nervous. I knew that such dreams are common at the end of life. “Mom, you don't think you're dying, do you?” I asked hesitantly. She immediately turned into her old self. “Patricia, how could you ask such a question? Of course I'm not dying. Really! You always have to make such a big deal out of things.”

A few days before Christmas, Lee and I drove to Andover to bring my mother back home. The nurses and social worker gave out very little information on her progress, and the doctor didn't return calls. When we went to see her, one of the attendants called me aside. “I shouldn't be saying this,” she whispered. “But you really should get her out of here. She's not improving at all. All she does is sleep.”

“We're bringing her home,” I explained. “That's why we're here.”

It took several days for the paperwork to be processed before my mother could be released, so Lee and I bought a tree and decorated it with all her favorite ornaments.

We hung the mantelpiece decoration Bumpa had made fifty years earlier; he'd cut out little angels, choirboys, and snowmen from pieces of colored felt, gluing sequins for eyes. We put a Christmas wreath on the front door, white poinsettias around the fireplace, and arranged to have the tree in front of the house outlined in white lights. It had snowed recently and, to use one of my mother's favorite expressions, it looked just like “a winter wonderland.” My parents were about to celebrate their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary on December 27. It had snowed on that day too, as it had on my wedding, and at Bumpa's funeral, and on the days Nancy and I were born.