Deserve

It was dark when Mom and I pulled up to our new house. The cottage, we called it, was a slumping single-floor cabin with a leaky roof located on my grandparents’ property. At six years old, it seemed a grand adventure to be nestled in the Maine countryside; a pastoral daydream pulled from a great American children’s novel where a walk down a dirt path or a tumble through shrubbery would land me on my grandparent’s doorstep. The lack of distance was the key. They were getting older, health problems amassing, and the 15-minute drive from our old house was 14 minutes too-long. My mother—the ever-dutiful daughter—had packed up our lives to be there.

“I just need a minute,” Mom said, clicking on one of the car’s overhead lights. Her voice was thick, and when I turned, her face was already red, tears tipping down flushed cheeks as her long brown hair hung lank. I could see my father through the lit living room window, unaware of his wife’s gulping sobs as he read the newspaper; Mom didn’t want to give him another reason to argue against the move. We were two moors of orange-smeared light in the darkness. My grandparent’s pink-carpeted living room we’d spent the evening in suddenly seemed far away as I started to tear up. I’d always been a sympathy crier.

“It’s like no matter what I do it’s never enough for them.” 

***

Mom was the eldest of three. All girls. My grandparents had given up trying for a boy after the third unsuccessful attempt. It must have been hard, Mom says, having to protect three daughters. She grew up poor, bouncing around New England with the rest of her family as my grandfather tried to find steady employment. Mom’s voice is almost fond as she recounts her mother’s efforts to keep them all fed when money was tight, and there was only the yawning maw of empty cupboards, dinners of buttered noodles, and desserts of frosted crackers.

I think Mom finds those memories soothing because they’re proof of affection—of care for her physical well-being—in a childhood punctuated by casual cruelty. Violent hands. Violent words. Violent actions.

Hanging above it all was the promise of my grandmother’s imminent death, despite the lack of a real medical reason. I might not be here next year, she said, voice airy and frail as she looked into Mom’s wide blue eyes. At six years old, my mother so terrified that she’d lie awake at night, huddled between her sisters in their shared bed as heat built behind her eyes. What would happen to her? To her sisters? Maybe she knew, even then, that the responsibility of care would always come down to her.

Mom was the oldest, but not the favorite. That title was reserved for the youngest, the baby, while Mom was adored in that particular way eldest children often are because they were first, and she was good at being first. Smart. Quiet. Well-behaved. She molded herself into the most pleasing shape, sparing her from some of the vitriol by being ignorable, and her sisters—the baby and the scapegoat—hated her for it. Sometimes I hate my mother too, in that fleeting way children do. She is too much, she is too little, she doesn’t say the right words, and she doesn’t understand me. But she tries. Pricking her fingers on the shards of her past to build something better for me. 

***

            On Sundays, almost every week, Mom makes her parents’ beds for them. It’s a chore she’s never liked, not because of the task itself but the knowledge that the final product will be found wanting or be dismissed in favor of a million other things her parents suddenly want done. But with one sister in the ground and the other in the wind, Mom is the only one left to help.

My grandmother is engulfed in the red recliner my parents bought her, watching as Mom disappears into the backroom. Her abandoned walker idles to chair’s left. Grandma used to use the walker when she was younger, often berating her now-deceased sister for refusing the help of her own, but now rejects its aid as she precariously shuffles along the length of the house. My grandmother has fallen. Multiple times.

Her body is pliant, dead weight, in my father and brother’s hands as they use the benches my parents bought to slowly return her to her chair; a practiced ritual only ended by my brother nearly throwing his back out while lifting her and Mom telling my grandmother she’ll have to call the ambulance next time. She hasn’t fallen since.

            “How are you feeling?” I ask from the love seat. A game show is playing on the new TV they got for Christmas. Grandma and I would play along with the contestants when I was a kid, but now my fumbling words, pushed out of my mouth too soon in my haughtiness to get the correct answer, are alone.

            “Pretty good,” she replies. The answer will change when Mom asks it, platitudes transformed into a long list of ailments recounted in a feeble tone reserved only for her.

            “That’s good,” I say. The silence that falls between us is familiar. Grandma has never been one to do the legwork in conversations. The game show host promises viewers they’ll be right back as the program cuts to commercial, and I try not to notice as Grandma leans forward with interest at the drug advertisement that plays.

***

Grandma’s belief in her own death is now a sixty-year-old premonition whose repeated telling has become a rite of passage between my mother, brother, and me. When mortality is cheapened by repetition it becomes easy to ignore its inevitability. We are the village, and my grandmother is the boy who cried wolf. Yet, the wolf’s howls get closer every year. One day I will wake up with his teeth pressed against my throat again, like when I was thirteen and Grandma was hospitalized with her first stroke, or two years ago when the cancer was found in her breast. I think she can feel him too. Her hugs have gotten tighter, possessing a strength I didn’t know she still had as she squeezes our bodies together, pulling me back down whenever I try to break away too soon. My arms fold around shoulders that never use to be so fragile. She’s given me family heirlooms and, most preciously, her safely guarded recipes written in wobbly letters on 3x5 cards.

We call these her moments of clarity when her normal moodiness gives way to something gentler. This is the same woman that appeared, a box of Scrabble in hand, at our doorstep when I refused to learn how to spell in kindergarten. But how do I reconcile this version with the one that left Mom sobbing in the driveway? Is it my responsibility—my mother’s ever-dutiful child—to take up the mantle of hate in my mother’s stead, or did she already pass the seven stages to acceptance when I wasn’t looking? Mom says she feels sorry for my grandmother. Sorry that she wasn’t a good mother. Sorry that she worked her whole life to still end up poor. Sorry that life couldn’t make her happy.

If time were compressed, I think I’d find Mom in its folds examining the shards embedded in her own mother’s palms. Lost amongst the shuffle of six children, my grandmother was married too young to a man too old; pant legs clutched in the fists of three demanding toddlers before she turned twenty. The illusion of the smiling 50s housewife was never a dream she’d gotten to indulge in before she’d had to sweep up its shattered fragments. I pity her. But she is a specter of a woman at the ends of my outreached fingertips, her reputation destined to proceed her while Mom stands solidly before me. It may not be my place to hate my grandmother, but neither is it to forgive.

***

Mom still calls her mother almost every night. Checking in. Over the course of the conversation, the years will slough off until she is that little girl being told her mother is going to die again. That same little girl who was half-convinced she could stop death if she only behaved well enough. 

“Could I be doing more?” Mom asks me after she hangs up. Hours of doctor’s appointments, running to grocery stores, writing checks, paying bills, and making calls reduced to nothingness. Mom’s always worn guilt too easily, like an unflattering but readily available coat. We both know she could pull the sickness from her mother’s body herself, and Grandma would still find fault in it.

“After what they put you through, they don’t deserve half of what you do for them,” I tell her.

            To deserve indicates worthiness. It’s a simple idea complicated by its inability to be truthfully quantified. Sometimes we do things for people who don’t deserve it because we feel indebted. Sometimes it’s because we love them too much to care. Well into her sixties, Mom says she’s lucky to have both of her parents still alive and, as a later-in-life baby, I cannot argue against a privilege I will never have. But I wish they loved her in the way she deserved.

***

With the excuse of home improvement on our tongues, we returned to my old house when I was in high school. It wasn’t a complete lie. By now, water had eaten away the cheap drywall of our living room ceiling. Our move was also enabled by my brother and his nurse girlfriend-turned-wife moving not far down the road; a go-between in case our 15-minute drive is 14 minutes too-long. Home visits still end with questions of when we plan to move back. Soon. Soon. Soon. The answer bounces around my grandparent’s living room, dulled pink carpeting squishing under our feet as Mom and I shuffle out the door.

“I loved being here, you know?” Mom confesses in a different car, in a different driveway. Her eyes roaming over the towering pines that surround my grandparent’s property. She’s always loved the quietness of the countryside, contented by the feeling of potting soil under her fingernails and the sight of overfed birds perching on feeders outside the cottage’s kitchen window. Dad and she have vague visions of building a log cabin there after an uncertain retirement date, but it’s a dream that must be stalled until my grandparents’ house stands empty, and the tears have long dried. For now, Mom deserves the distance.

Powered by Froala Editor

Powered by Froala Editor

Powered by Froala Editor