Later, toward evening, after walking and feeding Jake, I retreat to the sunroom to read, relax, perhaps even to nap. I have just shut my eyes when my cell phone rings. It’s still light out, and very quickly, I remember that Anna Karenina and my reading glasses are beside me. It’s very hot here, I think, as I find my book, my glasses, put them safely on the coffee table, and reach for the phone—mom appearing on the screen.
“Hi,” I say—the greeting seems too informal, even gruff. Then there’s a pause and a sigh on the other end. “Are you all right?” I ask, now sitting up and quickly deciding to go inside for the air conditioning.
“No,” my mother says. “I’m not. Do you have a few minutes?”
I’m in the living room now. Jake is sleeping on a small area rug by the front window, where the blinds have been pulled up so that he can enjoy the comings and goings on the street. I’m walking around, somewhat aimlessly. “Sure. What’s up?” I ask.
“Lydia’s car isn’t working. The engine seized, and it’s too expensive to fix. We’re down to Julia’s car, and she’s staying mostly at Terrell’s house.” Terrell, I quickly recall, is Julia’s boyfriend. He’s Jamaican, and the family lives in a large house. Terrell has a younger brother who’s still in high school, but Terrell just graduated from community college and is becoming a licensed plumber. Julia works as a pharmacy technician and is planning to go back to college to study nursing when she gets enough money put aside for tuition. They’re thinking of getting married.
“Can’t Lydia buy another car, Mom?”
“No, she can’t afford it. She’s still making payments on the car that died.” My mother sighs deeply, pauses again.
I also pause. I know what’s coming.
“I hate to ask you again.” My mother’s voice is hard, resolute. “But I need to borrow a few hundred until we get on our feet again. We managed to buy groceries, pay the light bill, but now’s there’s this stupid car, and our rent is due. Overdue. Lydia sunk some money into a new timing belt because the mechanic thought that was the problem. But he took her money, and the car’s not fixed. She’s a fool. You know that. She was supposed to pay the rent with that money.”
“How’s Dennis doing?” I ask. I’ve walked upstairs, turned on my laptop, and now I’m thinking I’ll write a bit before making dinner. Then I remember that I need to go to the grocery store to pick up bread, coffee, and half-and-half. I turn off the computer, open my bedroom closet and slip on my black Birkenstocks.
“Not well. He’s tired all the time and in pain.” Then another pause. “Rae, I have no one else to ask.”
I know this, of course. She’s borrowed money from all our relatives to pay Dennis’s gambling debts, and, for the most part, she’s never paid them back either. “Mom, I can’t…” I begin.
“Just three hundred? I’ll pay you back when I get my Social Security check. I promise. I don’t know what we’re going to do.” I hear my mom’s desperation.
“Mom, I can’t. I don’t have the money.” Don’t have is so much easier than won’t give.
“Can’t you borrow against a credit card? Get a cash advance?”
“No,” I say. I’m sitting on the bed, my heart pumping so hard that I can feel it in my chest. There’s something there resisting, resistant. “Nick and I don’t do that. I can’t use my credit card. Mom, don’t ask me to do that.” It’s the same conversation we’ve had before.
“Okay, okay.” My mom says, fed up with me. “I just don’t know what we’re going to do. We can’t be homeless. Dennis is too sick.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say. I’ve walked down the stairs and now sit on the bottom step. Jake has followed me, his companionship steady and welcome.
“All right. I’ve got to go, Rae. Love you.”
“Love you, too, Mom. Sorry.”
I sit there for a few minutes, my heart calm again, trying to feel something—guilt, sadness, anger, exhaustion. I can’t tell. I certainly don’t feel good. But then again, if I gave her the money, I wouldn’t feel good either. I just gave her money, I tell myself. I can’t keep giving her more. There’s a point at which I feel taken advantage of, abused.
Abused. I sit with the word for a moment. Too harsh? Then I think, abused by whom? Not my mom, really. Though I feel bad for her. And angry.
It’s Dennis. Lurking ghost-like behind the scenes. A memory stirs, a shadow of a memory that fades before I can grasp it.
Regardless of what Mom says, the mess they’re in is Dennis’s fault. He’s stolen all their money, and even now he’s probably gambling somehow—phoning in bets—even sick as he is. But then I wonder, Where’s my compassion? For Dennis? My mom? For my sister-in-law and nieces? If I can alleviate some of their suffering—whatever the cause—shouldn’t I?
“No,” I say to Jake, and decide to go back into the sunroom, lie down, calm down. Jake follows me.
Groceries can wait. I slip off my Birks and collapse on the sunroom couch. The heat here is intense. Closing my eyes, I reflect on the Buddhist term “idiot compassion”—used to describe, among many things, those unskillful gifts that enable the addict or offer misguided generosity.
I think about money and what it represents—love, approval, attention, support. I remember back to times when Nick and I needed financial help—when we were first married during a major recession and were desperately broke, unable to find jobs. And again, when we were pregnant with Cal, then poor graduate students—and my parents told us that they couldn’t afford financially to help us. Yet they’d managed to help Dennis, always the more needy “child.” But wasn’t I as deserving? Aimed toward a professional career? Working hard in graduate school? Struggling to keep old cars running, to be good parents, to get ahead? But Dennis was struggling, too, with his compulsive gambling and lying. He, too, was worthy of help, though of another kind. Giving him money and allowing him to steal were never good ideas.
Nonetheless, I feel guilty. In the sunroom now, I lie on the couch and breathe, concentrating on the heat and the breath through the mid-channel of my body, my chakras. I think of the word aligned—aligning the breath, the body, our energy, ourselves. Giving money to my mother is giving money to my brother, enabling him as my mom did. And my dad, reluctantly, when he was alive. He couldn’t talk to my mother about Dennis’s gambling or thieving. She wouldn’t hear it, and he knew that she wouldn’t or couldn’t refuse my brother anything. After my dad died, my mother continued on her own to enable Dennis—even more so, without my dad’s silent disapproval to hold her back.
I’ve lost track of time, and that, I tell myself, is okay, what summer is about. The evening sun is low, and I can’t stop feeling bad about saying no to my mom. How can I, a daughter, refuse my desperate mother? How can I live with myself, knowing that she’s suffering?
I close my eyes, reflecting on my middle-class childhood. We always had money. Every season, I was allowed to purchase new clothes; there were my summer camps, guitar lessons, trips to the city. I enjoyed a childhood of plenty. Don’t I owe her something for that? I blink open my eyes, stare out into the backyard, where a squirrel runs gracefully across the top of our privacy fence. What balance, I think.
When my parents first moved to Florida to retire, they had a million dollars in savings. Some of it was the profit they made from selling the South Shelburne house; some of it was my paternal grandfather’s legacy. My grandfather, a notorious tightwad, had amassed a small fortune by investing in blue-chip stocks during the Depression, and he’d left most, though not all, to his only child, my dad. Back then, a million dollars was a lot of money. Much of it was well-invested and earning steady interest, which generated a decent, albeit modest, income, but one that along with income from my mom’s therapy practice and my dad’s Social Security check, offered more than enough money for my parents to live on comfortably. Where did it all go? Bad business decisions. Bad decisions that repeatedly linked their lives with Dennis’s gambling problems. Denial masked as optimism.
And, of course, there was the time that Dennis had forged my father’s signature to take $50,000 in cash from an IRA. And the time that Dennis had been accepted into a Physician’s Assistant program at Nova University but ended up dropping out. By lying that he was still enrolled, however, he’d been able to steal the student loan money that should have paid for his tuition. He gambled away all that money, to the tune of over $100,000, then proceeded to forge checks from our mother’s checking account. My mother and father must have known. My mother, in charge of family finances, must have noticed that large amounts of money went missing from her accounts.
That said, Nick and I had often lent my parents money over the years. Small amounts—$500 to $1,500—and we were sometimes paid back, sometimes not. At times, we’d insist that the money was a gift; at other times, we’d tell them it was a loan when we really needed the money returned. Of course, there was the $10,00 loan that wasn’t all paid back. But even smaller loans were never repaid on time nor repaid freely; I’d always have to ask or plead.
Often, I’d catch my mother in a lie. She’d say anything to get the money she needed. Although she would never tell me that Dennis’s gambling was the real cause of her desperation, Nick and I knew. Once she told me that she had been the victim of a scam—she knew better and was deeply embarrassed, she admitted. But the upshot was that she needed $1,500 to pay the mortgage. Another time she told me—and this happened later when my dad was in decline—that she needed money to pay for an uninsured medical procedure for him. When I offered to make payment directly to the hospital, she said, no, that she wanted the money so that she could pay the bill herself.
“Don’t you trust me? she asked
“No, Mom. I don’t,” I’d said, and she’d hung up. We didn’t speak for months.
k
Having fallen asleep, I awake suddenly to Jake’s pawing at the sunroom door, wanting to return to the living room. It’s steaming out here; I’m sweating intensely—a hot flash, I think. I feel drugged, sluggish, stupid from heat, sleep, worry. But I struggle awake, ready to get out, to walk Jake yet another time before going to the grocery store, then relaxing for the evening. I’m in no mood to write now. Only to forget.