Pay the Piper (38 page)

“Mother, just let me order. What do you want?”

“I don't want anything.” She told the waitress conversationally, “It's a waste of time eating out. I feel like I'm just throwing away money, they give you so much food.”

“I'll get more water.”

Laurel watched the waitress walk away. “Mother, decide before she comes back.” She dreaded drinking another full glass of water. Her mother, as if she heard command, read the menu.

Long trickles of water were poured into her glass. The waitress had freckle-spotted and brown-spotted hands. Like my own, Laurel thought. But she wouldn't hide them in her lap and put them on the table. She had tried to squelch the squirming in her stomach. “Have you decided?”

“What do you want?”

“I've ordered.”

“I'll give you ladies more time.” Again, the woman went away on her softly clad feet.

“Think of something, Mother.” Laurel drank water.

“Why? What's your hurry? You don't have anything to go home for. Nobody to cook for tonight.”

She didn't understand why this woman wanted to inflict pain; Laurel looked into her lap and knew there was nothing she was going to do about it this late in time. An old woman sat opposite her, and it was too late to tell her what she thought. Too late to express the rage she felt. She tried not to look at herself walking into her house with the sense of emptiness and betrayal she always felt, and she tried not to wonder what quality of emptiness her mother's death would leave. In the end, she might mourn only a mother she never had.

It was strange sitting across the table from death; it was written on her mother's face—something she longed for, she said. If she had cyanide, she would kill herself. There are ways if you wanted to do it, Laurel longed to say. Her mother worried all the time about her future. Who was going to take care of her business when she died; what was Laurel going to do with all the junk in her apartment? If only she could have died during her operation, Mrs. Wynn mourned. And Laurel had no comfort to give her. She would like to tell her mother to stop thinking about herself, but what was she to think about instead?—she had never prepared herself for anything except bridge. She could only wonder if she loved her mother, or if she even liked her. She did not feel obliged to do either thing because this woman was her mother. She did not feel that her reactions had anything to do with geriatrics; they had to do with her mother as herself, with the personality she had always had, with the person she had always been. Only now, with the sessions Laurel had been going to, she had learned not to blame herself for the past, not to accept guilt, not to be shoved around. Understanding reasons for past behavior, Laurel could forgive herself a passive role among other things. Not only did she feel herself well, she felt herself more well than a lot of people she knew who'd never thought anything was wrong with themselves.

“Decide, Mother,” Laurel said with an airy gesture of her hand. Then to her astonishment and amazement, she realized this was an exact copy of the way her mother often raised hers. She had even heard in her voice an inflection that sounded like her mother's. She would grow on and on to be more like her as she grew older. She heard her talking about her own mother as she walked about her apartment, Laurel's grandmother. “I'm getting to be just like Momma,” Mrs. Wynn kept saying, meaning her nervousness and a way she had of flicking the side of her skirt. It is inevitable, Laurel thought, that I shall keep getting like her. Therefore, I must fight harder against it; she swore to herelf.

The remaining water in her glass ran over her nose and tickled it. She let her nose remain buried. She thought of the things her mother's desperate loneliness had driven her to. She knew a change had to take place and that she was the one who would have to take charge of it. Her mother talked about cleaning her apartment and yet dust lay everywhere. Mrs. Wynn was “too nervous” to have help come in. She wore greasy or dirty clothes, saying she “didn't give a damn.” A way of thumbing her nose at life, Laurel supposed. She tried to pay her mother a compliment; maybe her crustiness was a way of making herself know she was alive. It was a pain in the neck to other people.

Her mother had fallen into the habit of dropping by her doctor's office and sitting in his waiting room. She managed to look chagrined, saying this was a way of being with other people. As pitiful as that was, Laurel thought. How could she solve her mother's life, her problems? The doctor told her to wash her clothes, to comb her hair, and that she was “crazy.” He had been supplying her with Valium for years. He sent her to a psychiatrist, and now the psychiatrist was supplying her mother with antidepressant pills. Drugs to a drug-dependent person, Laurel thought. What could she do about doctors who prescribed pills and walked off and left other people to cope with the patient they had created? Why didn't doctors think? She thought of being moved to pity by a homeless woman asleep in a subway station in New York in a puddle of her urine and how she'd tucked money into her hand. When she came home, one of her mother's friends called to ask, “What is wrong with your mother? I saw her at the grocery and she used to be always so well-groomed. She didn't have any makeup on, her hair wasn't combed. Her dress had spots.” She hadn't known how to transfer her pity for the woman in New York to her own mother.

“If you're not hungry, Mother, why don't you have a frozen fruit salad?”

“Ugh. That's nothing but ice. It gives me a headache to eat it.”

“How about cottage cheese and fruit platter? That's light.” She was not going to let her mother rile her, she had decided.

“Don't tell me how to order. I know how to order.” Mrs. Wynn plopped down her menu. “And stop squinting. Wear your dark glasses.”

“I don't want to wear them. They're prescription and I'll get dependent on them.”

“Then stop squinting. It's not going to do any good to get your eyes fixed if you keep squinting. If you want to have the operation, I'll give you the money.”

Laurel was afraid to take money from her mother, she was afraid of repercussions. All the time her mother worried about not having enough money for her old age; suppose she turned out to be nine hundred dollars short because of my operation? Laurel thought. When would I hear the last of that? Anyway, she went to a surgeon in a panic as soon as Hal left; while there, she said, “My husband thinks my breasts are too small,” and inquired about enlargement. Imagine that she would do that, she thought now. She had considered back then there was no sense telling the doctor her husband had already left her. “Your husband's crazy,” he had said. “You have beautiful breasts for a woman your age. Why don't you have your face lifted instead?” Well, thanks for nothing, she had thought, walking out, and decided she'd keep for now whatever God had given her. Why were women always being made conscious of their ages? She thought of rebuffs that had slapped her over and over since she had gone about trying to meet men. In Delton, an old friend had said, “You were so beautiful, you could have had anybody in Delton.” Then realizing his meaning, his words, he had looked embarrassed and had whipped out a folder and showed her pictures of his two young children by his second, young, wife. She had cooed over them.

The waitress said, “Ladies, have you decided?”

“Mother. Order.”

Mrs. Wynn sighed hugely. “Just bring me the clam chowder.”

“Large or small?”

Her mother rolled her eyes toward the waitress. “You decide.”

“Mother,” Laurel said.

“Well, bring me the large.” Mrs. Wynn leaned confidingly over the table behind the waitress's back. “It won't be anything but hot milk and potatoes. There's never any clams in it.”

Laurel curled her toes to the soles of her shoes and watched the blue smoke ring her mother blew toward the ceiling.

“Maybe I'm not hungry because I smoke so much. I think my ulcer is back. From worrying about you.”

“Don't worry.”

“I can't help it.” Her eyes swam about behind her cigarette smoke. “I feel like all I'm doing is waiting to die.”

“That
is
all you're doing,” Laurel said. But she softened the words. “That's all anybody is doing.”

“I guess I'm never going to live to see any great-grandchildren.”

“Probably not. And don't put any pressure on Rick about that.”

“Well, you just don't know what it's like living with depression.”

“I wish the psychiatrist hadn't given you that word. You've latched on to it too conveniently. And I don't think you should take those antidepressant pills. He should be treating your head, not your body. He says they're not addictive, but it seems to me they are. I can always tell when you've had one; you're different.”

Mrs. Wynn stubbed out her cigarette. “I think they are too,” she said. “I went to see him yesterday and told him I had to get off them. I told him I can't stay in that apartment by myself any longer either. I've got to go somewhere. He wants me to go to the hospital to the psychiatric ward for several weeks.”

“Mother, that's great. I wish I could go too.”

“You want to go? Why?”

“I'd like to have somebody take care of me.”

“Not many people are there my age, he said. Mostly, young people are there. They're the ones who can't take stress these days. A forty-year-old woman in town jumped out of her apartment window the other day.”

My eighty-year-old mother in the psycho ward, Laurel was thinking. How did everything come about? “If they keep you on medication there, nothing will be gained. Tell them you want to get off pills. What's the answer after that? You still have to come back to your same apartment, to your same life. Your friends who have died will still be dead. The ones who have gone to nursing homes will still be in them.” Laurel realized the loneliness of old age but thought she'd never live in an apartment. She'd always have a little house and a yard to putter in and a dog fenced in. Would she still be a pain to Rick? Probably so, she concluded. “What day are you going? I'll take you. I've got to get my hair done. I want to look my best taking my mother to the nut house.”

Mrs. Wynn smiled. “I'm going Thursday. I've got to wash my clothes.”

For that moment, Laurel thought about their long association. She thought about the past they shared that no other human being alive knew about. She did not want her mother to die, she thought. In looking back, she supposed she had moved to Delton searching a haven one more time. After so many months alone in Soundport, her teaching stint ended, nothing else available, after so many months of singles groups, Southport seemed a dead end. Her mother had told her not to go back, that she would not be happy there, but she had sold her house and moved. Her mother once again stayed put, adopting her wait-and-see attitude, and then Laurel came back.

I would have come back sooner, she told herself, if I could have found a sublease for that condominium. It had brown walls, and to live in it was like being buried; the walls closed in gigantic with shadows. People she had known thirty years ago were as remote as if she were in Connecticut; she was cut off from some people because of her past association with Hal and should have realized that would be the case. Anyway, it was all too late for her to have come back. She was not used to a city, and driving about a sprawling one with endless wide, flat streets was like being in a terrible maze. She longed for water of any kind, a pond, a brook, a stream. She had little in common with people she had long known and needed to find a whole different group of friends in the place she had come from, an arduous and long process and one that seemed too difficult. She went to the dog pound and got a puppy. While she paid for him, a black man came from the cages holding the dog gently in his arms. He spoke to it. “Now you don't have to be lonely anymore,” he said.

Her throat had filled with tears. It is I who am lonely, she had wanted to say. The dog was impossible to keep confined; it yapped all the time at night. She put it into her bed and could not keep it on the other side of a pillow barricade. The puppy had to sleep against her. She had to return it. But, too, this dog taught her about life. She liked its determination in climbing over anything she erected to get out of the kitchen and find her. The fact that it would not sleep except next to her taught her more than anything else that people were not meant to be alone. At Christmas, she returned to her mother's. It was not fair to ask Rick to come where he knew no one. Delton would never work out. And really, she had expected her old high school days, girls going about in groups to sorority meetings and going by carloads to drive-ins to see boys.

Her old friend Catherine gave her a party in Delton and invited all the single men she knew. Laurel had felt she was making her debut late in life or as if she were on an auction block. When none of these men asked her out ever, she felt she had failed Catherine. And Henry, Catherine's husband, had followed her about at the party, and said, “Who's been eating you lately?”

A waiter had been nearby moving glasses. “Hush,” she had cried out. “Are you drunk or crazy? The waiter can hear you.”

“Let him. The nigger probably does it too,” Henry said.

Laurel was appalled and tried to escape him. “Well, who has been?” Henry said, blocking her way and laughing. “You're blushing.”

“No one,” she hissed at him.

“Remember when I did?” Pushing past him at last, she said coldly, “No,” because the one time they met, they had not been that intimate. Had this memory really failed him, or did his male ego make it necessary to brag, now that he was in his sixties and sexual escapades could not quite match the past? Growing older herself, she was no longer so interested in adventures, just when, being alone, it was necessary for her to have them or go crazy staring at her walls in solitude every night.