I was young. Along with the crepey neck, the sagging arms, the bunioned feet has come a sweetness interspersed with a fierce truth telling. Sometimes she thinks I am her sister or her mother. The dead and the living are all alive in her head. But she looks at me with an endless love I wish I could have taken for granted when I was young. My whole life would have been different. Or so I think. The truth is she often terrified me when I was young.
People shouldn’t get this old. Sometimes I think my mother’s senescence is taking years off my life. I have to force myself to look at her. Her cheeks are sallow and crosshatched with a million wrinkles. Her eyes are rheumy and clotted with buttery blobs. Her feet are gnarled and twisted, and her thick, ridged toenails are a jagged mustard color. Her nightgown keeps opening to reveal her flattened breasts.
I think of all the times I’ve sat in hospital rooms with my mother in the last few years. I am praying fiercely for her not to die. But aren’t I really praying for myself? Aren’t I really praying not to be the last one standing on the precipice? Aren’t I really praying not to have to dig her grave and fall in?
As you get older, the losses around you are staggering. The people in the obits come closer and closer to your own age. Older friends and relatives die, leaving you stunned. Competitors die, leaving you triumphant. Lovers and teachers die, leaving you lost. It gets harder and harder to deny your own death. Do we hold on to our parents, or are we holding on to our status as children who are immune from death? I think we are clinging with ever-increasing desperation to our status as children. In the hospital you see other children—children of fifty, of sixty, of seventy—clinging to their parents of eighty, ninety, one hundred. Is all this clinging love? Or is it just the need to be reassured of your own immunity from the contagion of the Maloch ha-moves—the dread Angel of Death? Because we all secretly believe in our own immortality. Since we cannot imagine the loss of individual consciousness, we cannot possibly imagine death. I thought I was searching for love—but it was reincarnation I really sought. I wanted to reverse time and become young again—knowing everything I know now.
“What are you thinking about?” my mother asks.
“Nothing,” I say.
“You’re thinking you never want to get as old as I am,” she says. “I know you.”
My father is sleeping through all this. His wasted body takes up remarkably little space under the blankets. With his hearing aid turned off, he cannot follow our conversation and he doesn’t want to. He prefers to spend the day sleeping. Just six months ago, before his cancer surgery, he was a different man. My sisters and I used to start the day with threatening missives from him, often in verse.
What do you do when your days open with this messily penned screed from your ninety-three-year-old father?
I feel like King Lear.I have three daughtersbeautiful and dear,clever and cute,already in dispute.Who gets more?Who gets less?What a terrible messFor an aging LearIn geriatric stress.
So much for poetry. At the bottom of the page he has scrawled in a shaky hand: “Read it again and again—no disputes!”
How did our father go from Brownsville to Shakespearean tragedy?
Here’s his version: “All my father ever said to me was ‘Get a job.’ I wanted to go to Juilliard. My father said: ‘You’re already making money playing the drums—why do you need it?’ He threw away my admission letter. That was why I was determined that the three of you should get degrees.”
My father said this in my mother’s studio overlooking the Hudson. She was lying in bed like Queen Lear, nodding. (Was there a Queen Lear?)
The sisters Lear were sitting around their mother’s bed. Their mother had just had stomach surgery and she was making the most of it. Occasionally she moaned.
“Your mother has Crohn’s disease, coronary artery disease, a fractured vertebra at the base of the spine, two hip replacements, two knee replacements. I cannot continue my job as ‘U.S. male nurse’”—my father’s pathetic phrase for his status in the family. “If you three don’t come here every day, there will be some changes made in my will.”
“Don’t you dare threaten me,” my older sister, Antonia, said. “When we were living in Belfast at the height of the Troubles”—of course Antonia had to marry a poetic Irishman—“pulling the piano in front of the door to keep the paramilitaries out, shopping for bread during the early-morning hours before the shooting started, covering the windows with furniture so that your grandchildren wouldn’t get hit by shrapnel—where were you? We were going through a genuine holocaust and nobody came to rescue us. I’ll never forgive any of you for that!”
Queen Lear suddenly revived: “What do you mean? We sent you money!”
“You sent us a measly twenty-five thousand dollars! What was I going to do with twenty-five thousand dollars with four children and a war going on?”
“Nobody ever sent me twenty-five thousand dollars,” my younger sister, Emilia, said.
“No, your husband got the whole business. That’s why you didn’t need twenty-five thousand dollars!” Toni shrieked.
“Your husband didn’t want the business! Nobody wanted it! We got stuck with it! You were both away gallivanting around the world and we were here, taking care of everybody! And Bibliomania—the shop itself. When Grandmama died, I was alone with her! The parents took off for Europe. Where were you two? I never got to go anywhere.”
“That’s not quite true,” I said.
“Girls, girls, girls,” my mother said.
“Nobody has any sympathy for me!” Emmy howled. “I felt I had to be the good daughter and stay home. I sacrificed my poor schnook of a husband on the altar of the family bookstore!”
“That poor schnook got everything! And so did you! We got nothing!” Toni wailed. “Some sacrifice!”
“I would have made that sacrifice.”
“No way! You never would have done it. Your husband never would have done it!” This is Emmy, who shouted just as loud.
“Can’t you try to see each other’s point of view?” I asked.
“Not as long as she’s a dishonest liar!” Toni yelled.
“My blood pressure’s going up—I have to get out of here!” Emmy ran to the door. I dashed to her and coaxed her not to leave.
“Why shouldn’t I leave? This is going to kill me! My heart’s pounding!”
By then my father, the old King Lear, had gone to the piano and was playing “Begin the Beguine” by Cole Porter and singing along to drown out the roar in the other room.
I was where I always was—the meat in the sandwich, the designated peacemaker, the diplomat, the clown, the middle sister.
My sisters went into the kitchen to continue their altercation without a mediator. I went into my mother’s room, where I found her leaning back on her pillows and moaning: “Why are they fighting?”
“You know perfectly well why,” I said. “Daddy set it up that way.”
“Your father would never do a thing
