Chapter One
"The doctors here say they think I have some kind of cancer," my mother said on the phone, from Las Vegas.
It was on July 25, 1992, my ninth wedding anniversary.
I don't remember hearing anything else. When your mother calls and says that she has cancer, all of the air flies out of the room, out of your lungs, out of your gut, out of your heart. You can't breathe and you can't hear.
If she had said that the doctors thought she had just a touch of cancer, like a touch of the flu, I might have been able to catch my breath. All I wanted to hear were the words that would make it all better. Throughout my whole life, she'd been the one person who could fix anything no matter how messy or hopeless. If she had said that her cancer was less than stage one (which is the best stage to have, if you have to have cancer), I'd have heard that. She could have told me that there would be no need for surgery, or chemotherapy. I know I would have heard her loud and clear if she had told me that it was just a small thing and that the doctors in Las Vegas were sure she would have a complete and quick recovery.
I needed her to patch this up, add one more piece of information that would take the hurt off the words "The doctors here say they think I have some kind of cancer." Then I could hear. Then I could breathe again.
But she didn't say any of that. She just sighed, long and slow and deep, and that said everything about what she was feeling. There was so much fear and pain in her sigh that it made me sigh too. There was no weeping or wailing for us, but we each cried silently. Across the phone lines I could see her large, round brown eyes brimming with tears, and I knew that somehow she could see my face too.
In an odd way, I felt a little relieved. Two weeks before, she had visited my family for a week, and we'd been shocked by how thin and sick she looked. I now had an explanation.
When my mother had announced that she was coming for a visit, just after I'd lost a job offer, I figured I was destined to be out of work to get ready for her arrival. I went through the house like an obsessive-compulsive maniac. I dusted things that normally never got dusted. I rearranged pictures along the fireplace mantel, replacing one of my father, stepmother, half brother, and me with a black-and-white portrait of me as a baby, dressed in a fluffy little dress and lacy socks, perched on my mother's lap. You could tell by the pose that she was telling me to look at the camera and smile pretty for Mommy.
I spit-shined our kids, Christopher and Nicole, and begged them to stay clean, at least until I could pick up Granny from the airport, although I knew it would be hard for a two-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl to do. She'd kiss and hug all the stuffing out of them, but would also inspect them from head to toe, making sure that we were not starving them, depriving them, or dressing them like ragamuffins.
My mothering skills were on the line, but I knew she would judge me more by how the children looked and smelled than whether or not they threw food or said please and thank you.
When I was growing up, she was a strict disciplinarian. But she had clearly outgrown it. Now, a grandchild having a full-court, screaming fit about a plaything in Toys "R" Us, turned out to be much more acceptable to my mother than chocolate ice cream on his T-shirt (which would end up being my fault anyway).
Her only expectation now was that I keep them clean and cute. All other little-thug behavior was acceptable. Go figure.
After feeling confident that I had isolated the children from any mess, and felt semi sure that they would be clean when I got back, I moved on to the kitchen, giving it a light going over, again, and again, and again. Then I vacuumed the dining room rug for the fourth time.
I second-guessed everything, trying to hide all my housekeeping warts. I needed to be a big girl who met with her approval. I had to show her I could run a house and manage a family.
"God, when will this visit be over?" I said, thinking I was alone.
"You're already acting crazy as hell, and she hasn't even gotten off the plane yet," my husband, Darnay, reminded me. "Relax." Easy for him to say.
He had no idea. When your mother comes to visit, your meat loaf recipe is never right. Your cakes always fall. You're self-conscious about using mayo instead of Miracle Whip, which, she will remind you, "has been used by women in our family for years."
Before you know it, you spin so far out of control that you don't quite fit comfortably in the skin you wore like a champ just a day ago. In my case, I had gone from being a strong woman who made giant decisions about business and clients and dinner and children every day, a woman whom other people called for advice, to a little girl who needed to please her mommy.
I was late getting to the airport but the plane was too. I paced, using the time to rehearse good answers to all the questions I knew she would ask. Yes, I have more things to wear than baggy sweatpants and baseball caps. No, I don't think my haircut is too short. No, I'm not worried that if I dress that way out in public, people will think I'm gay. No, we don't have a couch yet. No, thank you, we want to buy it ourselves.
When her plane finally came in, I walked right past her. I was looking for the mother I had seen six months before. She wore a size twelve, sometimes a fourteen. She normally would have had on one of those swishy jogging suits in pastel colors. She loved them. "They make you look neat when you travel," she'd say. She'd be carefully made up, following the ironclad rule of women in my clan, which was to never leave the house without your lipstick on.
She'd have on a brown, reddish brown, or sandy brown short, but fluffy, wig -- whatever was catching her fancy. And she'd have a big, wide smile. "Baby," she'd say.
I watched and waited while people filed off the plane and hugged their loved ones, but I didn't see her anywhere. I was about to call Vegas to see if she had missed the plane when I spotted the one unclaimed passenger. It was Mother. I recognized the suit, but she was about a size six and it flapped on her like a sheet in the breeze.
Everything about her seemed washed out and gray. Her skin was ashen and her hair was a frizzy mat of tight curls, eight shades of gray that fit on her head like a steel-wool scrubbing pad. As she walked toward me, she moved on tippy toes, tenderly, like her bones hurt, but she smiled with pride, as if her new appearance was perfectly normal.
"See how good I've been doing watching my diet," she said, extending her arms so I could get a good look before she hugged me. I didn't know what to say. I wondered if she had developed some eating disorder since her move from Indiana to Las Vegas.
"That's some diet, all right," was the best, most politic answer I could muster.
So we both pretended that everything was okay. Throughout her visit we all acted as if she looked just as she had the last time we had seen her. We never mentioned the fact that she spent most of her time lying around, watching talk shows and soaps.
I couldn't even enjoy the fact that for the whole two weeks she was there she didn't complain about my clothes or tell me to put on some mascara. She got smaller and smaller by the day, always pushing her food from one side of her plate to the other. Anorexia? When I asked her why she wasn't eating, she never answered.
Nicole showed me that Mother threw the food away, or hid it under discarded newspapers and coffee filters.
"Doesn't Granny like your cooking?" she asked. "She waits until you leave the room, then she scrapes her plate. See?"
At night, when everyone was in bed, Darnay and I weighed whether we should say anything.
"Ask her if she's feeling okay," I told him.
"No way. She's your mother, you ask her," he said. "I don't want her pissed off at me."
Neither of us knew how to ask. What do you say? "You look awful. Las Vegas doesn't agree with you at all. You look like you could use a good pork chop."
There have been times in my life when I would have loved to take a potshot at her (all of middle and high school). But it was clear that something wasn't right. "Maybe she's just tired," I said.
Three days before she flew back home, she rented a little blue car to drive the three hours to our hometown of Gary, Indiana, to see her father, sister, brother, and some old friends. She'd never lived anywhere but Gary until she was fifty-nine years old. Everybody knew everybody there. Her best friends were the people she had played with even before kindergarten. My childhood friends were the children of her childhood friends. And they were the children of my grandparents' childhood friends. The hardest part of her move to Las Vegas six months before with my stepfather, John, had been leaving the people she had known all her life.
She was so excited about seeing everyone, eating at her favorite place, and shopping at her favorite spots. I was hoping that she'd come back looking a lot better. Maybe going home would give her new energy. Las Vegas had probably been a bad move and she was too proud to admit that she wanted to come home. I wanted to believe that she was simply depressed. We could fix that.
I was also hopeful that at least one of her longtime friends would get Mother to confide in her. There was always the hope that my eighty-six-year-old grandfather and his girlfriend, Ruby, would take one good look at her and tell her that she was looking a little peaked.
Months later, Gussie, the friend she'd stayed with during her visit, told me how concerned she had been. Like me, she hadn't known what to say. "I started to call you but..."
She told me that after my mother had gotten there, she'd pretty much stayed in her pajamas. She called people, but told them that she was in Lansing, apparently having decided that she didn't want anyone to know she was in town. The only person she saw was Grandpa, and that was because he was legally blind from glaucoma and cataracts, and could only make out shadows. She timed her visit for when she knew Ruby wouldn't be there. No witnesses.
"I just don't feel like being bothered," she told her friend. But when she got back, she told us that she had flitted around seeing everyone, and they were all so surprised by how well her new life was agreeing with her. "They said I looked better and happier than I have in years," she said.
It would have been my moment to say something, but again I choked. I look back on it now and wonder what would have changed if I had said, "You don't look well." Instead we all acted out "The Emperor's New Clothes."
I almost spoke up on the day she left. The kids had gotten used to having her around, plying them with sweets, buying them whatever they wanted, and giving them all of her attention. They were upset to see her packing.
"Make Granny stay," my daughter said. This made my mother cry, which made me cry too. Seeing me cry made both the kids wail. "You don't have to go, you know," I said. "You could stay. You could stay with us and not go back."
I told her that nobody cared if the move was a mistake. She wasn't the first person to sell her house to move to something better, only to realize that it wasn't better after all. "Las Vegas is not making you happy."
"But John loves Vegas." She looked away, pulling herself together to finish packing. We didn't talk about it again.
At the airport, she insisted that we say good-bye at the curb. "I'll be okay. I'll check my bags here." She nodded to the airport attendant.
Christopher was asleep in his car seat, but Nicole was determined to make sure that Granny got to the gate.
"Nicole," Mother said, "Granny will be so upset to have to say good-bye at the gate. So you would be helping me a lot if you let me kiss you and hug you here. I'll send you and Chris some toys from Circus Circus when I get home."
I unloaded her bags at the curbside check-in and we all hugged good-bye. When she turned to walk through the automatic doors, I had this quiver of a feeling that it could be the last time I would see her.
It felt like the end, but I couldn't figure out why. I just knew I had made a terrible mistake in letting her go. I should have kept her here. I could have insisted.
After she left, I called John. "What the hell happened to her?" I said. I don't even think I said hello first.
"She doesn't look so good," he said. "I told her she ought to go to the doctor."
But I wanted to know what had happened. A person doesn't wake up one morning and age twenty years without someone asking why. You don't lose three dress sizes in a week and not have your husband notice. "Do you look at her at all? She looks like hell," I said, my voice getting higher and louder with each syllable.
The truth was, he probably hadn't paid her much attention, or her to him, in several years. She must have mentioned him only twice during her whole visit. I wasn't completely convinced that her melancholy wasn't tied to the fact that she'd finally figured out, after all these years, that he was boring. This may not have been an issue before, when she lived in Gary and had her old friends and family to distract her from the fact that the two of them had nothing in common. In Las Vegas, their only diversion was the excitement of the Strip.
I waited to hear more from him about when he'd first figured out that she was sick. But he had no more answers. He hadn't really thought about it. He just knew what he knew: "She doesn't look so good."
Copyright © 2003 by Andrea King Collier
