Wait Until Tomorrow

The third time my mother goes into the hospital that summer is, I decide, the last time. No more consulting with brothers. No more trying to patch together a system of care for her. She is eighty-six years old. She is crippled. Her mind is faltering. Her independent life is over.

I feel as if my chest has caved in. I walk around carrying a tray of pain as if it were hors d’oeuvres. No one wants any. A friend asks me why I don’t just give myself permission to own the pain. “Go ahead and grieve,” she says. I put that on my “to do” list. But first I have to go and take her away from her old life for good. On top of it all, another hurricane is heading for the North Carolina coast where she lives.

On Monday August 1, 2004, I’m back at the rental car place because, once again, the Blue Monster is in the shop. I’m now on a first-name basis with the manager. He gives me a compact, and I drive to Edenton with a purpose. I am getting her and taking her and as many of her things as I can fit in this little car. I am commandeering her life. In Edenton, they will have parties for her. They will celebrate her. They will make a cake in the shape of a piano. They will print a huge story in the local paper about this gifted woman who came to a small historic village and played the organ for their church services, created a community chorus, wrote music for them, and taught them to sing like angels. For her it will be like getting to attend her own funeral. It will be sad, but it will not be depressing. She will be the belle of the ball.

While a light steady rain falls, I pack and load, pack and load. She does what I tell her to do like an obedient little girl. When I’ve finished cramming everything I can get inside the car, she lowers herself into the front seat. I fold up her walker and jam it in the backseat on top of the boxes of books and kitchen items and music manuscripts. I lean over and help her buckle her seat belt. Then I shut the door and run around to the driver’s side. Clouds hunker over the Sound. Hurricane Alex is brewing off the coast, and we are leaving it and Edenton behind. The roads are slick. I back into the busy street, put the car in drive, and go. My mother’s Edenton life disappears in the mist.

Later that day my mother is sitting on the bed of her new “home”—a second-floor room in an assisted-living place called the Oaks. We both suddenly feel sick. I am positive that this is the wrong thing. This has been an awful mistake. My mother smiles stiffly, trying to be brave.

“The carpet is pretty,” she says. But we both hate the place and everything about it. And mostly I hate myself. Should I have moved her in with me, I wonder? But how would I ever get any work done? Would Hank and Emmy leave me if I did? And where would we put the piano? The management here has promised that we can keep the piano in the parlor. Of course it’s not the best idea, leaving a Steinway grand out where any senile person could spill Ensure all over the keys, but at least Mom can entertain people, which is what she lives for.

The main reason my mother cannot live in our house with us is that we are not always there. And this is the one thing I know she needs: the company of others, not just her moody daughter and her daughter’s equally moody family. She needs friends, admirers, and co-conspirators. In a little cabinet in my heart where I keep the things that hurt me most is the memory of her telling me that, in her apartment in Edenton, she screamed sometimes at the top of her lungs just to see if anyone would hear her, to see if anyone would come. My mother has friends in Edenton, but her best friend Marion has just been moved to an assisted-living place in Long Island to be near her daughter. And her other friends have lives of their own. And a few (to my continued wonder) seem to have abandoned her altogether.

All three of us want the Kierkegaard. I’m sure David already has a copy. He takes the Bertrand Russell instead since it was his to begin with. I don’t know why I think I’m going to have some profound metamorphosis and wake up one morning as an intellectual. Jo gets the Kierkegaard.

I always thought it was a bad idea for Mom not to assign things to each of us, but the division turns out to be fairly easy. We each wind up with the things that mean the most to us or that we need. Jo lays claim to the old table from the days of Lincoln, but he has no room for it so I’ll keep it at my house. I have already sequestered the bird-of-paradise plates and that makes up for anything else that I might desire but which they might desire more. In fact, I don’t want much when it comes to Mom’s things. Stuff feels rather burdensome to me. David takes the beautiful old crystal wine glasses. Jo and I don’t drink so that only seems fair. He takes lamps for his New York apartment. Fortunately, the pictures will go to her new place—otherwise there would surely be strong disagreement over who should get the wheelbarrow painting that Andy Griffith gave her. They met when she was the music director at The Lost Colony, and his wife even sang in a performance of her requiem. When she admired the picture hanging on his wall, he sent it over to her house the next day.

I take George and Martha, the porcelain figurines that once belonged to Gammie, Skipper’s mother, and that my mother somehow played with as a child. It’s possible that George and Martha are worth some money, but we’ll never know. I would have to be starving before I’d sell them.

We’re too engrossed in the dismantling of our mother’s Edenton existence to absorb the finality of it. The moment one of us begins to feel it, we close our mouths, lips tight together. Almost everyone at some point, I suppose, realizes they must face a time like this. We know that our parents cannot go on doing whatever it is they do forever. Change must come. We see it happening to the parents of our friends. The inevitable. But when that particular experience comes your way, it is more wrenching than you felt possible. My mother will never again live on her own, I realize, as I empty the kitchen drawers of her old silverware. She will not play the organ every Sunday as she has for most of the past seventy years. She will not put together shows. She will no longer shelter a choir in her living room on Wednesday nights.

“Her first organ-playing job was at the age of fourteen or maybe thirteen,” I say out loud as I stack piles of music into boxes. But my brothers know this. As I’m packing away her music, I find about ten or so copies of An American Requiem in old tattered black folders. Something tells me to keep these scores. Someday maybe we’ll get enough money to hire someone to put the requiem in computer format and submit it to a publisher. I’m pretty sure this is the one thing I need to hang onto.

In spite of what we are doing, the fact that my brothers and I are together is a rare and happy enough event that it keeps us from becoming morose. Besides, we are packing and cleaning machines now. The ants abandoning the ant farm after the queen is gone.

We’ve advertised a yard sale for the next day, and Sandy has offered to help. We’re hoping that the furniture will sell. It’s going cheap. A few of Mother’s acquaintances drop by on Friday while we’re in the midst of packing and deciding what to sell, what to keep, what to give away. I mistakenly think they’re visiting with us, but really they’re nosing around our mother’s belongings early, trying to stake their claims. David is irritated with them, but we go ahead and get rid of a few things. One woman wants to buy the little books of Shakespeare plays that are probably a century old. I’ve lived my whole life knowing those little books were always available if I needed them (although I’d long ago absconded with her tattered copy of The Collected Works). Once, I actually performed a reading of the entirety of Romeo and Juliet for my mother, using one of those little books. And she, saintly woman, sat on the living-room couch (this same couch now in need of a new home) and served as my audience. I have no idea if the books are worth anything, but I’m so tired of packing and the truck I’ve rented hasn’t even an inch of space left. So I sadly, regretfully, let them go for a few dollars, knowing I’ll never feel good about doing that.

I have a feeling their anger has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with why we are here, or maybe it’s just an eruption from some long-ago childhood battle that happened before I was born. The argument subsides, and we move back into that place where we know and understand each other better than anyone else ever can. I idolized my big brothers when I was a child, and I still hold them in high regard though now I can acknowledge their imperfections, too. And they seem to love me as if I were still the long-haired, laughing little girl they tossed back and forth between them as brawny teenage boys.

We have been with each other through a lifetime of mistakes, miracles, and accolades. We are each other’s biggest fans. When I was in prison, I would call David almost every week for my allotted phone call. He told me later that someone, who was supposedly an expert on fucked-up people such as myself, had told him to cut me off. “Once a junkie, always . . .” this genius told him. And what did my brother know? He had never been a drug addict. But he was always there when I called, willing to talk to me, willing to laugh or be horrified by my observations of prison life, whichever was appropriate.

“You wouldn’t believe how many thieves there are in this place,” I once told him without a trace of irony, and he burst out laughing. He also made sure I got the Sunday New York Times every week, which was one of the things that probably saved me. It gave me a connection to a world that I could aspire to, a world of educated banter and beautiful clothes, far away from the raucous, simple-minded bullying and poorly made prison uniforms that constituted my life at the time.

For some reason I was not in regular communication with my other brother, Jo, during those years. He was dealing with issues of his own—a divorce, illness, and too much time spent on a barstool before he found AA. But years later when I’d gotten into an unfortunate relationship, he was the one to drive twelve hours to where I lived and handle the hostilities. Whenever he visited, which became fairly frequent in recent years, we would meditate together, I would listen to his poems, and he would read my stories.

The next morning, the vultures arrive. We have one absolutely beautiful vase for which I am asking fifteen dollars. It’s probably worth seventy-five. Some white-haired crone tries to bargain me down on the price. But I am tired of haggling, and I refuse. I’ll keep the damn thing first. Behind my back she convinces Sandy to let her have it for five dollars. When I realize what has happened, I want to snatch it out of her hands and smash it to little porcelain bits on the sidewalk. That’s how I feel at the end of the day of bargaining away my mother’s life.

When the apartment is emptied, we scrub and mop every inch of the place, and then we drive away. Jo takes off in his loaded van with Ralph Nader stickers on the bumper. David takes off in Mother’s old Buick, loaded with boxes and lamps. And I drive away in the filled-to-the-brim rental truck. Even the cab is filled with her belongings. How I am going to unload that truck by myself I have no idea. When I get back to Charlotte, I dragoon Emmy into helping me. Hank will have no part of it.

I spend the next day unloading. Emmy and I somehow get Mother’s small but very heavy Clavinova onto a hand truck, through the delivery entrance, and into Mother’s new room. I hang up the pictures and try to make it look like “home,” but my mother is not home and she knows it. Then we swallow back our tears and play a game of Scrabble.