My mother calls me at my home in San Francisco as I work on my computer in my kitchen. In San Francisco, I live alone in a spacious one-bedroom. People visit and crane their necks, looking for my roommates. My monthly rent is more than I’ve ever paid, but only $300 more than what I formerly paid to live with three twentysomethings—a bartender/performance artist, a banker/drag queen, and a student. I decided to move out when I found our fridge filled with sickly, shriveled houseflies. They moved slowly in the cold, among the leftovers. I realized they must have been born there, and that baby flies are maggots. I was thirty-nine years old and feared that if I celebrated my fortieth birthday there I would have a crisis. So I moved.
My mom calls me from the lanai of her own home in Florida. She lives there with her husband. Because my mother is a graveyard-shift nurse and her husband suffers from a disease that makes sleeping difficult, their bedroom goes mostly unused. They take turns sleeping on the puffy, fake-leather couches in the living room. They sleep before the blaring television, always tuned to Fox News though neither is Republican. The television doesn’t seem to bother them, nor do the cups of coffee they drink like water throughout the day. Their circadian rhythms are so busted from overnight work shifts and around-the-clock naps that neither coffee nor hysterical blather has any effect.
My mother tells me that they’ve moved the futon from the spare room into the living room and are trying to sleep together again, there on the floor, between the couches and before the TV. Her husband’s disease—a spinal cord pocked with holes and stuffed with cysts—makes it hard for him to get out of a normal bed, but a futon on the floor is manageable. They haven’t slept together in a very long time and seem to be excited, though he has already rolled off of the bedding, bruising himself.
I leave my computer when my mother calls and lie down in bed to talk to her. My own bed is a very firm mattress sunk into an antique French headboard carved with an argyle pattern and also flowers and ribbons and birds. My room is filled with light. My mother tells me her husband is probably experiencing the beginning stages of congestive heart failure. They’re not sure. He doesn’t have health care, and so attempts to understand what is making his feet swell up and his stomach bloat into a hard ball, what is making him short of breath, have not gone well.
“It’s just an awful situation with the health care,” my mother says. Her voice betrays forty or so years on the North Shore of Boston, where the accents run thick. No r’s to speak of, and then certain words, say, half, have such a refined pronunciation that the dialect’s British roots are revealed. My mother is from New England, specifically the city of Chelsea, a place that made national news when it went into state receivership in the early nineties. The amount of people living below the poverty line is about double the state average.
My mother has health insurance and her husband doesn’t; because of his preexisting condition, she can’t add him to her plan. He was turned away from their local free clinic because my mother’s income is too high. I don’t ask my mother how much money she makes; it seems rude. On occasion my sister and I will send them checks, most recently when my mother broke her knee at work and needed groceries. Through a series of bureaucratic bamboozlements my mother was not given any paid leave for her accident. Her time away uncompensated, she returned to work too soon after the accident, on painkillers and in a wheelchair, to care for a ward full of seniors, some younger than she. She’d hurt herself slipping in a puddle of urine.
My mother’s friends suggest she lie and say that she and her husband are separated. He can get a post office box and redirect his mail there. My mother can say that she allows him to stay in the house at night while she is at work, but she kicks him out in the daytime when she returns. This could help him get better health care.
“I can’t do all that lying,” my mother says. “You shouldn’t have to go there.”
In San Francisco, where I have lived for almost twenty years, I have had health insurance three times: for one year while working at a housing clinic, facilitating the removal of lead from low-income apartments in the Tenderloin; for one year while working at Mills College, teaching fiction; and for the past five months since my partner put me on the insurance she gets through her employer. The majority of my care has been through the city’s free clinic system. I could walk into any clinic and wait all day but eventually be seen and with a little paper card my medicine was five dollars. The staff worked to find ways to cover your costs. Though I am a lesbian, for years my annual gynecological checkups were covered through a federal family-planning fund. The free clinic closest to my mother and her husband is only open one day a week, on a first-come, first-served basis.
My mother’s husband was just rejected for social security benefits for the third time in a row. She says that having more than a high school education worked against him, as well as how much money he’d made the year before he got sick.
Both my mother and her husband attended the School of Practical Nursing offered by the Soldiers’ Home in Chelsea, a vets’ hospital. The program is free and you work at the home after graduation. My mother graduated when I was nine, then promptly divorced my father; I often think of the program as a way of giving the city’s many uneducated women in bad marriages the tools and the income to get out.
It was while working at the home that my mother met her husband. He was an orderly with homemade tattoos on his fingers and an earring. She was scared of him. They married a year after her divorce, and within another year he too attended the Soldiers’ Home School of Practical Nursing and got his LPN.
My mother has continued to work in geriatric nursing, even though she dreamed of being a pediatric nurse. The extra year or two of schooling needed to get her RN, with its attendant pay scale and increased opportunities, has been disregarded; my mother said she doesn’t want to be like “those people.”
“What people?” I cried. “People who make more money? People who live more comfortably?”
“They think they’re better than everyone,” my mother said. “And plus, I’m too old to go back to school.”
My mother tried and failed to get a part-time job at the Big Lots! near her home. The management feared she would be bored with such work. She dreams of working at a bookshop or as a Walmart greeter.
Before he became sick, my mother’s husband was promoted to manager at the assisted-living facility he worked at. He had to report to work in a tie, which disturbed him. He was asked to overcharge the patients from wealthier families to make up for the economic drag of the poorer residents. He also was expected to discipline the staff, his fellow nurses and aides. He quit. My family is not cut out for positions of authority; having spent too much of their lives resenting those in charge, the transition into such a role is psychologically impossible. For years I’d thought that my own raging against the upper classes, my resistance to bettering my standing, was a punk-Marxist stance born of my own moral spirit. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I realized I was parroting everything I’d heard in my home my whole life.
After leaving the management position, my mother’s husband found work as a home care nurse. He would drive to different housebound patients, administering medicines and routine care. Apparently, he was a favorite. Both he and my mother are proud of what good nurses they are. My mother has told me the very first thing she does when she gets to work is wash her patients’ eyeglasses with warm water and soap, an image I can dwell too heavily upon when feeling especially sorry for her. The tenderness and the duty of it strikes my heart.
Both my mother and her husband talk to their charges like normal people, like equals. They treat them with compassion and respect. They possess a certain snobbery about having received their training in New England, in “Boston,” my mother will stress. Not in Florida or any of the other podunk regions where her coworkers were certified. My mother did internships at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, at Beth Israel. A New England health-care education is world-class.
My mother’s husband began to chafe against his job. He did love the freedom, no one breathing down his neck, alone in his truck listening to Aerosmith on his way to his next patient, goofing and palling around while administering care, but management wasn’t reimbursing his mileage, and gas is expensive. Plus, the wear and tear on his truck. Though they sometimes wouldn’t have work for him, he was forbidden to sign up with other agencies. Then he became sick, and employment was no longer an option.
A combination of shames keeps my mother from sharing her and her husband’s problems. She doesn’t want to be a burden on her children. Parents are supposed to give their children money, support, help, not the reverse. She doesn’t want me to worry. I’ve had a strained relationship with her husband, and perhaps she doesn’t want to give me more reason to wish they weren’t together. Her husband, too, can be secretive. Sometimes I think they’re both shady. It can seem like they’re hiding things, not telling the full story. Maybe they’re not.
At the beginning of the end of the mortgage bubble, when my sister and I sent them checks in hopes they could hang onto their home, I was confused. My mother put her husband on the phone to thank me for the money. He sounded ashamed. I spoke despite the fist of guilt and pity in my stomach. “Why aren’t you working? Why aren’t you helping Ma?” It would be a little while till I got the whole story. By then, their house was gone.
The last time my mother’s husband left Florida was Christmas 2007, when they came to San Francisco for the holiday. My sister came as well, and her husband and his family. My sister and I put my mother and her husband up at a hotel in Union Square, in the middle of the hustle-bustle, where the cable cars clang all day. We hadn’t expected him to be so sickly. The three blocks down Powell to grab a hamburger in the mall food court killed him. He seemed to be in tremendous pain as he walked, the kind of pain that evicts you from your body. He seemed to be both intensely focused on moving forward and also totally checked out, ignoring his body’s command to stop. He was present and not present.
“What’s wrong with him?” my sister asked in the hotel lobby. “He’s going to need a wheelchair.”
“Oh, he’ll shoot himself before he ends up in a wheelchair,” my mother said, fearful and defensive. “Or winds up in a home, god forbid. He’ll kill himself.”
Suicide as a sane response to a more draggy ending is something my family has always championed. “A bottle of Seconal and a six-pack,” my grandmother would say about her time, should it come preceded by cancer or dementia. And it did, by lung cancer at the age of fifty-four, and there were no barbiturates or alcohol, just a painful, drawn-out death at Massachusetts General, where she lay in a bed convulsing, bald from chemotherapy, her body shrunk and whittled into something resembling a Chinatown chicken.
My mother shared her depressive death wishes with me until I ordered her to stop, and still she lives. My grandfather requested not a burial but to be “thrown in a Hefty bag and tossed into the Bay,” but a burial he got, replete with handsome young Navy officers sounding taps in his honor. No one dies well, but it is true that the poor die worse, with less care, more terrible care, no care at all, and then burial costs their families can’t afford. It took my mother a year to come up with the money for my grandfather’s memorial—the stone, the cremation. A burial was not an option. It makes sense they’d try to control the eventuality with gallows humor and a DIY attitude.
In San Francisco my mother took her husband to a traveler’s doctor downtown. He saw them after-hours, late in the night, and prescribed painkillers that could only be filled at the twenty-four-hour pharmacy in the Castro. She took a cab there and back to fill it. I learned this the next morning, when it was all done and her husband was floating on a cloud of pills. Actually, he wasn’t floating, not in the way narcotics lift you when you don’t actually need them. He was just normal. The medicine had absorbed his body’s struggle and he could be among us on Christmas Day, smiling, excited to see San Francisco, hanging off the side of the cable car that took us into Nob Hill, to the French bistro where we’d be eating our holiday dinner. He had beef Wellington for the first time and found it pleasing, as did I. We both enjoyed the lobster risotto. We’d agreed on a Secret Santa plan to stop everyone from spending money on everyone else, but my mother cheated and gave me a light-blue sweater from Old Navy. My sister’s mother-in-law picked up the bill; on the cable car back downtown she shoved a pocketful of bills into the operator’s gloved fist and expressed sympathy for his having to work on Christmas. He dinged the bell at her.
In the hotel lobby I said, “Ma, you should have called me, I could have gone to the Castro for you, I could have come to the doctor’s.” But my mother didn’t want to worry me, she was too busy worrying about me: my recent breakup, my new AA sponsee. My mother was happy I wasn’t drinking anymore, but she didn’t like me hanging out with so many alcoholics. Her husband is an alcoholic as well, though he hasn’t taken a drink since the early nineties. He went to AA for a moment, to get his footing, but all the talk about God and the members’ dependence on the meetings bugged him.
On the telephone my mother tells me that their car broke down again. She laughs when she tells me, though it isn’t funny. My mother has a peculiar tic wherein she laughs broadly while delivering bad news. It used to drive me crazy. “Why are you laughing,” I’d asked. “Do you think it’s funny that the car broke down/your husband fell while mowing the lawn/was run over, somehow, by his own truck/lost his truck/was declined for Social Security?” The hurt in her response made me feel like a monster. Of course she was laughing because it wasn’t funny. I’d grown up in this family. If I didn’t understand their ways by now, age forty-one, I was hopeless.
I ask her what happened to the car, and she tells me it was the oil pump. The good news is the oil pump is new, less than a year old, and therefore under warranty. The bad news is she has to fix whatever broke the oil pump. The badder news is that the car has been in the shop going on four days and she’s having to take a cab to and from work, a city or so away. “Do you trust your mechanic?” I ask her. Because her car is always breaking down.
My sister has a theory about their car always breaking down. The theory is that my mother’s husband is a secret drug addict. No longer with an income of his own, he has rigged up a situation with their car mechanic, who would have to also be a drug dealer in order for this to operate. The theory is nothing is ever really wrong with the car, it’s just a cover for my mother’s husband to pay the drug dealer for his pills. Before my mother’s husband stopped working, when he was a home health-care nurse, always on the road, my sister speculated that he was actually seeing prostitutes. My sister’s theories sound far-fetched, but similarly outrageous ideas in the past have proven to be true.
“We’re going to a new mechanic,” my mother tells me. “That last one, he’s a nice guy but he makes too many mistakes.” My mother pauses, feeling a bit guilty for judging the mechanic. “But then, you know, the car is twenty years old. It took all the money I’d saved to visit your sister, so she’s going to have to feed me while I’m there.”
All we want to do is feed our mother when she visits, and buy her things, as if we could somehow save her with tuna sandwiches and hamburgers and tchotchkes from the Disney Store. But she is our mother, and all she wants to do is take care of us, to pay for our lunches and dinners and buy me cast-iron pans and glittered silicone spatulas from the fancy kitchen shop by the water. It is hard to accept things from my mother, but to refuse them robs her of her dignity, her desire to be a mom taking care of her kids. It would take from her the feeling that all is right with us, that our family demonstrates the natural order of things: parents take care of kids. Kids don’t take care of the parents—not until they’re very old, anyway—and even then, you inherit something, don’t you?
My mother and her husband make ridiculous decisions with money. The way that she came into any at all was from throwing her back out at work in the nineties. Her settlement was enough to buy a house where they lived in Massachusetts. Soon after, my sister and I confronted my stepfather about his creepy behavior while we were younger. The family fell apart for a while, which my mother dealt with by maxing out her credit cards on trips to Disney World. Her husband became a certified diver and took trips off the Keys, swimming with whale sharks. Eventually, they decided to live inside their vacation and moved to Florida. She sold her home to her husband’s brother at a deep discount, not bothering to try to make any money on the sale, let alone get what they paid for it. Her brother-in-law struggled, with a lazy wife who wouldn’t work and two teenage boys. Plus, the houses in Florida were cheaper.
About a year after they moved, the brother-in-law sold the house at a profit and joined them in Florida. The house he bought was bigger and had a cage pool.
When a hurricane ripped apart their town, my mother’s house was spared, though she was traumatized by the experience. The windows on her floor of the managed-care facility had imploded, spraying glass across her patients. The tornado in the parking lot created an otherworldly atmosphere that popped her ears and sucked the elderly toward the hole in the wall. She found her staff, a group of certified nursing assistants from Trinidad, holed up in a nurses’ lounge holding hands and crying out to Jesus, and ordered them back into the ward. When she returned home, her house was so obscured by fallen trees she thought it was gone. She cried with relief to see it wasn’t, and she continued to cry for the next month, erratically bursting into tears at the Home Depot, buying a case of bottled water, or talking to me on the phone from her home, a dark and oily place, powered on generators, the windows boarded, fans replacing air-conditioning, weakly trying to push the Florida swamp out of their home.
When a man came around offering to haul downed trees out of their yard, she paid him up front for three days’ work. He was a stranger, but he had a little girl with him and seemed like he needed money, and she felt bad. She gave the little girl lemonade. The man worked for half a day and never returned.
When my sister got married my mother’s anxiety about the cost of the wedding consumed her. She decided to sell the lot that came with her house. It didn’t matter that the wedding was paid for or that her plane tickets and housing would be taken care of, she wanted to help. She wanted to buy a dress and pay for a lunch the day after the wedding. The possibility of a sale rose and fell, rose and fell.
“Do you know about Joseph in the Ground?” my mother asked me. European Catholic nuns once buried statues of St. Joseph in the ground outside of property they wanted for their convents. Now people buried the statues on their own property when they hoped to sell their homes. She’d purchased a Joseph-in-the-Ground kit from a Catholic Supply Center and dug him into the wild lot beside her home. She signed off on a fast sale, less money than she could have gotten had she waited, but the wedding was coming.
My sister tried to block my mother from spending any of the lot money on the wedding. She wanted her to put it in the bank. “Do you have any savings at all?” my sister demanded. “How are you going to take care of yourself when you retire? We’re going to have to take care of you.”
My mother bristled. “Retire? I’ll work till I die,” she snapped. “You’re not going to take care of me.”
I told my sister that she needed to let our mother pay for the lunch. “It’s important to her,” I said. “She needs the dignity to make her own decisions with her money.” My sister’s therapist said this was true, and so my mother paid for the lunch.
My mother’s husband’s medicine runs her $400 a month. It is harder and harder for him to get his prescriptions filled, as their region of Florida is plagued by “pill mills,” illegitimate pain clinics staffed by doctors who will prescribe morphine and Oxycontin to addicts. Morphine and Oxycontin are his medications. The pain clinics have become tiny police states, with all patients presumed guilty—addicted—by the cops who patrol and raid the places. Squad cars idle in the parking lot; my mother is not allowed to wait there for her husband, waiting in the car is prohibited. Because he is not insured, her husband can get his prescription at the pain clinic, but he can’t get it filled there, as they don’t take cash. He goes to the pharmacy at Walmart, but they are clean out of narcotics. He finds a private pharmacist that is scared to take on a pain-pill client. My mother’s husband talks him into it.
I think about writing about what my mother’s husband is going through in order to get his medicine, and ask if I can talk to his pharmacist about it. His response is terrified. “Oh no, no,” he says on the phone. “He won’t talk to you, and he’d stop filling my prescriptions.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “Nothing illegal is happening, why is he so scared, why is it so hard to get your meds?”
Why do some people have really, really hard lives while other people’s lives are easy? Why don’t I have a degenerative spine disease? My mother learned from a friend from Chelsea that three other men of her husband’s generation have strange spinal disorders. They all grew up in the same neighborhood, a series of streets that dead-ended into a large waste dump.
“What are you gonna do,” my mother says, and it’s not a question. “It’s just what’s going on.” She’s talking about her husband’s body, the swollen feet and belly, his trouble catching a breath. “It is what it is.”
But we don’t know what it is. Could it be the meds? “I wonder if they’re not bothering his liver?” my mother wonders. “Your liver, your heart, your lungs, they all coincide.”
My mother and her husband are the least healthy health-care professionals on earth. They have done nothing to supplement the education they received in the 1980s. They chain-smoke, and have resigned themselves to the deaths they’ll be rewarded with. My mother reacts with fury against the anti-smoking legislation popping up around the country. When she arrives in California, she’s not allowed to smoke outside the airport. In San Francisco, she cannot smoke in parks. “Before you know it, they won’t let you smoke in your own house,” she rails.
“Mom, you’re paranoid.” I said. “People just don’t want to breathe in cigarette smoke, it’s gross.”
“I know,” she says, slightly ashamed. “It’s terrible.” Her addiction butting up against her desire to make everyone happy, or not make anyone mad.
Her husband has a high white blood cell count. “What does that mean?” I ask. “How did you find that out?”
“When we went to the free clinic and they told me I made too much money,” she scoffs. “They handed him an inhaler and sent him home.”
“How is he doing today?”
“He’s down in the dumps.” Her husband has been depressed about his condition, about his inability to contribute to their life. To compensate he’ll mow the lawn or take on a chore beyond his ability, resulting in falls and increased pain. He has burst into tears, afraid that she will leave him. For years my sister and I have wanted her to leave him. Now, if she leaves him, he’ll die.
“If his feet swell up bad again, we’ll go to the emergency room,” she tells me. “He’s not in dire straits, like I need to call 911 or anything.” Dire straits is something my mother will say a lot. They’re waiting for him to reach this level to bring him in. But I wonder if they are able to accurately recognize what dire straits looks like. To me, they have been in dire straits for quite some time. What does the bottom look like to them?
“His feet came down some once he put them up on pillows,” she explains. “They were so red and shiny.”
It is hard for my mother to explain a situation in a straightforward manner. I think she is in a state of perpetual overwhelm. “Why are there fluids in his feet?” I ask her.
“It’s a congestive heart failure thing,” she says. “The heart’s not pumping, and the fluids pool in the feet. I noticed Thursday or Friday, he took a shower and came to sit down. I said, ‘You don’t look good.’ He was huffing and puffing.” My mother got one of her nurse tools, an oximeter. “It’s a little gizmo you put on your finger and it tells you how much oxygen is in your blood. I said, ‘Put it on and go walk into the kitchen.’”
He shuffled into the kitchen, where their untrained Maltese, Kira, pees on newspapers on the floor. He shuffled back.
“Ninety-one,” she said. “Not good. We put people on oxygen at ninety-two. But then it went back up again. He’s not in dire straits.”
Dire straits. Only my mother talks like my mother. Who says dire straits? They’re a band. There are all sorts of old, regional phrases that my mother carries on. Not for nothing. As in, “Not for nothing, but I should have looked into the situation for nurses before I moved to Florida. There’s no union. It’s a right-to-work state, meaning you have the ‘right’ to work, and they have the ‘right’ to fire you.” Or, Light dawns on Marblehead. Marblehead is a fancy town by the sea in Massachusetts, but it is also your own thick-headed noggin, slow to understand.
“He’s going to talk to his doctor,” my mother continues. “He wants to get off some of his medication.”
“Wait, I thought he doesn’t have a doctor.”
“His pain-management doctor, at the pain clinic. She does labs but she’s not his primary care. He doesn’t have that. I could have him go to Mapatan”—that’s her doctor—“but he won’t do shit. He’ll say, ‘Put your feet up and watch your salt.’”
“You don’t know that,” I said. Is it because my life is so comparatively easy that I’m quick to access hope? Because my life has turned out well, do I presume everyone else’s will too? “Why don’t you just try Mapatan?”
“Because he doesn’t have insurance. No one wants to see you. They literally tell you they don’t take uninsured patients.”
I begin a rant about the Hippocratic oath. Don’t all doctors take a pledge to not let people die? I am ruined from a life in San Francisco, where people like to do good things. I do not understand how the real world works.
“We’ll see,” my mother says. “Like I said, he’s okay right now. I’m a realist, Michelle. I’m just a realist. He’s got a disease process in his back. He’s a heavy smoker, though he’s cut his smoking way down, and people get sick.”
I am relieved that my mother is so detached, because I fear her being in emotional pain over her husband dying before her eyes. And I am chilled at her detachment. When they found a cancer in my grandfather’s nose, my mother was also a realist. “He’s an old man,” she repeated. She didn’t think surgery was a good idea. But they took care of the cancer and he lived another decade.
“I don’t think I’m exaggerating,” she says. “I just know what I see. And his belly’s gotten huge.”
I would never think that my mother exaggerated. My mother and our whole family downplay everything, they do not exaggerate. They are a meek people. For years my mother would play the lottery, elaborating humbly on how she would spend the money. “I’d keep some,” she’d say, “but I’d give it to you kids, I’d give it to Papa and Willie”—Papa’s girlfriend—“I’d give it to Darlene and the kids, I’d give some to Carlie.” It was a prayer of sorts. My mother is truly Catholic, and believes that selfless altruism is rewarded with the granting of more selfish desires. The pagan roots of her Irish Catholicism exist within her without her knowledge, her prayers often resembling spells. Joseph in the ground. Playing our birth dates on the lotto. In her cold acceptance of death she is a Scorpio, in her work she is Hecate, ushering the dying out of life.
Her husband also believes in the value of aiming low. Wanting to transition out of nursing and into his passion, diving, he dreamed of washing the windows for a dive shop. “Wouldn’t you want to lead dives?” I asked. “Or work on the boat?”
“Nah, I don’t care, I’d be happy just washing the windows.” These goals filled me with a heartbreaking rage. I saw in them the history of my own low standards and lost potential. It made me want to kill them both. That was before he got sick, when I spent the visit researching universities that had programs in marine anthropology, registering him for information. He wanted to study shipwrecks. Why would I think someone satisfied with washing windows at a dive shop would have the wherewithal to enroll in college? I hadn’t even had such wherewithal, and had not attended a university. This was once their fault, but at this point it’s my own.
My mother is explaining her husband’s body to me. “It’s just that your heart doesn’t pump right, so the fluids in your body, instead of moving they stagnate. You got valves in your legs that pump the blood back into your heart.”
“What is the fluid?”
“Blood, plasma, lymph fluid. Your blood isn’t just blood.”
“What does he want to do about his meds?”
“I think he wants to get off all of them and start all over again and see how he does without them. They don’t know enough about syringomyelia.” That is her husband’s disease. When he was diagnosed, my mother called and asked me to look it up on the internet, something she didn’t have. I printed out pages of information and sent them off to Florida in an envelope. “Duke, UCLA, and Mass General are just starting to do tests.” There is a new medicine available, called Neurontin. “It’s for neuropathy pain, from nerves. It’s not a narcotic.”
“The whole thing is no health insurance,” my mother says. “You can’t even go in and get it straightened out. We’ll see what we can do. It seems to be a chronic thing—it’s not like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to call 911, he can’t breathe.’ But the shortness of breath is new.”
Her husband doesn’t want to go to the hospital, anyway. “‘Oh yeah, and there’s another bill for you,’” she mimics him. “‘And I can’t contribute.’ But I don’t care about that. You think I care if I get a $2,000 bill from the ER? Seriously, I’m sixty-two, what are you gonna do about it? I’ll give you ten dollars a month. As long as you give them something, what are they gonna do?”
There’s no debtor’s prison, my mother is fond of saying, and good thing. She went bankrupt traveling to Disney, moving to Florida, installing a hot tub on the lanai of the house they eventually lost.
“I’m reading a lot about that generation,” she says, referring to her husband, a decade or so younger than she. “The sixties and seventies. People did a lot of shit and it took a toll on them, their livers and hearts, and it’s showing up now.”
I wonder if he could have hepatitis C, like a lot of people who once shot drugs.
“They were wild childs,” my mother says, and shifts from vaguely cavalier yet agitated, to somber and guilty. “Part of me feels bad for talking to you about it. I haven’t even talked to you in a week and now I just dump all this on you.”
The doorbell rings and Kira the Maltese begins to bark wildly. “Hold on, it’s my pizza,” she says. I wait on the phone while she pays the delivery guy. My mother doesn’t have many people to talk with. Maybe some casual friends at work. A couple of old flames from childhood she’s reconnected with on Facebook, both with sickly wives. They commiserate. Her parents are dead and her only brother is a mentally ill drug addict so far gone that, at this point, it is impossible to tell when he is high and when he is having an episode. She comes back on the line.
“I think you need to talk about it,” I say to her, and she says, “I guess I do.”
We have confusing boundaries, my mother and I. I have forbidden her from sharing so much of her pain with me, because I didn’t want to hear how she wanted to die. When I wouldn’t speak to her husband, I didn’t want to hear about how hard it was for her.
“Maybe it’s hard for me to not have a family?” I’d lash out. “To have had a Peeping Tom stepfather?” Now, she shares this new trauma in a stop-and-go fashion, bursting with it, then sheepishly backtracking. But I think it’s okay for her to talk me.
My mother’s pizza is getting cold. She has to go and eat it.
“I love you,” I tell her, and she counters with, “I love you more.” It’s what she always says. “Kisses and hugs,” she singsongs and makes a bunch of squishy kissing noises into the phone, and hangs up.
First published in n+1 in 2014.