Habit (10 page)

The kids are smart enough and they work hard, but David's been away so much and I've barely been able to focus on them. According to Sam, his latest research paper stumped him; it just froze him right up. He says he sat staring at the computer in a trance for three nights in a row, and it was like dominoes. All the other work got neglected, and now he's in a real jam. I get the feeling if I, his actual mother, had been there checking in now and then, he might have snapped himself out of it.

It's ninth grade and the GPA counts. Sam's in the generation of kids where college acceptance is at its most cutthroat. I simply won't let this crisis mess up his chances. So Sam is moved to the top of my list for now.

I've got to check in with his teachers, which is difficult because they're busy, too, and during the day, I really need to work on Operation Ma, picking up what she needs at her apartment and organizing rides to radiation when I can't do it and stuff. I have this new compulsive relationship with my cell phone. It rings all the time now, and I can't resist answering it even when I'm driving, which is unsafe. There's no time to shop for a Bluetooth gadget, but we have an old headset that connects with a wire, and I wear it all day, clipped to my waistband. That way, when I'm in the sporting goods store looking for the spandex bicycle shorts Ma's physical therapist thinks will help support her back, I don't have to stop what I'm doing when Sam's advisor finally calls.

This is why I don't have a job. This
is
my job. I know there are people who manage it, single working mothers with aging parents. I just don't know how. How do they take care of the kids, the parents, and
then
go to an office or wherever and accomplish anything anyone would actually pay them to do? Honestly, it's beyond me to even understand, much less be capable of it.

And this place, this place, this place, it's not working out very well. I don't understand why everyone else here looks okay, because Ma's just not. Maybe we're not assisted-living material. When we arrived this morning, they didn't have sheets on the bed and people kept coming in with paperwork, saying
where are the sheets?
And we'd say
yes, where are they?
and they'd say
it's not my job
. So fine, Ma sat on her padded seat in the middle of the room until finally somebody whose job it
wasn't
took pity on us and found some sheets.

This got me thinking. Ma's using her first walker ever, and it's hard to get out of bed quickly. She just came off massive laxatives. Bed linens are hard to come by in this place for some reason. Put that all together, and it seems like I'd better make sure they know it would be a good idea, for the first night or two, to have some extra sheets handy for heaven's sake and maybe a person available whose job it is to get them if something were to happen in the middle of the night. So I ask the head nurse if she is prepared. She says
of course, not a problem
and puts it in the notes for the night nurse to see when she comes on tonight.

It's hard to figure out who to talk to about things. There are lots of women walking around in scrubs, laughing in the hallway, but when I ask them things like
who do I talk to about my mother having breakfast in her room on a tray,
they say
I'm private duty,
and that seems to mean they don't really work here. What's that all about?

I'm determined to get all this settled in time to be home for dinner and homework.

We have a geriatric psychologist who said
make sure your mother has familiar comfort things like family pictures,
so I've brought some of those and a couple of her icons. And because I can't just keep it simple, I grabbed our little portable DVD player and a handful of movies like
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
, which I hear is a huge hit with the little old ladies, especially future Orthodox nuns.

I've made several thousand trips back and forth from the car. It's funny because everywhere I go, I see Mrs. Martinelli.

I get in the elevator to go downstairs from Ma's room and it stops at the second floor and Mrs. Martinelli gets in. I say
hello
,
it's Susie von Moschzisker,
which seems to ring more of a bell for her, so that's who I'll have to be.
Oh, hello, Susie, how are you?
(We already established how I am this morning, but anyway.)

We travel down to the lobby together. I go out to the car to collect the next load of stuff: a quilt and the DVD player. Everything is getting a little tangled up with the wire from the phone headset, which gets somehow shut in the car door. And when I try to walk away, my earpiece is ripped off my head and the phone yanks off my waistband and lands on the pavement and the battery clatters out, but it still seems to work, thank God, and I hook everything back up again and I go back in and push the elevator button and after a while the door opens and out pops Mrs. Martinelli.

—Hello again, Mrs. Martinelli, it's Susie von Moschzisker.

—Oh, hi, Susie, how are you?

I wonder which of Mrs. Martinelli's kids has my job. Maybe we can have coffee sometime and talk each other out of killing ourselves.

When I get back to the third floor, Ma announces that Father Nectarios will be here any second to give her communion, and isn't that nice because I will get to meet him finally.

—
So
nice, I say.

Nice for her but
help
. I don't have time to wait around for that to get done, it's almost time for dinner and I'm going to have to pick up some takeout as it is. The kids really need a calm meal before homework. I show Ma the DVDs. She's being uncharacteristically decent about everything, which sort of makes it hard for me to feel inclined to take any of my monkey-in-a-cageness out on her, which is a good thing.

I'm trying to figure out how to get the DVD player to work. This gadget belongs to the boys, and they know how to work it, but I have not got a clue. I've got the directions, but half of it is in Spanish and the other half is an obvious translation from some other language altogether, using one of those word-for-word programs on the Internet:

Making to Play: Please be setting the proper input button on your DVD device. Wires installed correctly will to avoid hazard instead.

So I've laid all the different wires and batteries and things on the floor, and I'm slowly making some sense of them all when Father Nectarios and his wife, Matushka, arrive. This business about Matushka took some concentration. Father Basil and Father Nectarios are at the same church. They both have wives named Matushka, because apparently that is what your name is when you are married to an Orthodox priest. (You get your own special Orthodox name when you're baptized. Photini used to be something much simpler. They call Ma Anna now instead of Marjorie, which could be hard for Mrs. Martinelli to get the hang of if it ever comes up.)

Anyway, Father Nectarios and Matushka are here, and I'm still figuring out how
to be setting the correct AV cable to acquire proper according to the output frequency of this component
or something, but I drop everything and shake everyone's hands and ask if they would rather I come back tomorrow.

But Ma wants to see
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
in bed tonight. So we decide I'll just keep on sorting the DVD player out while Father Nectarios and Matushka do whatever it is they do. This turns out to involve a lot of walking around with candles and decanters of wine and special cloths on Ma's head and some very long and drawn-out chanting. I have to discreetly climb around them with all my wires while they do all this stuff.

I get the thing working, and I sort of hover till they come to some kind of break in all the chanting and walking around, and it feels rude, but I ask:

—I'm sorry, is it okay if I just go over this with Ma I mean Anna for a second before I go home?

Not a problem, so I show her how to turn on the power and put in the disc and what to push for play and pause, and I kiss Ma and I shake everyone's hands and thank them, and thank God I got that taken care of so Mrs. Martinelli and I can grab a minute to catch up on things in the elevator on the way down to the lobby.

What's amazing is that there is so much going on, I don't even pause for a second to register the fact:

That walk down the hall I was dreading?

I just did it.

I kissed Ma good-bye and walked out the door. And surprise surprise, she wasn't alone like I had always imagined. She had Father Nectarios and Matushka, and Holy Communion, and she was kind of happy.

And yes, I
did
that walk down the hall by myself, but in my recurring horror fantasy I never pictured Mrs. Martinelli waiting for me in the elevator, a reminder that this kind of thing happens to lots of people whose children are not selfish jerks any more than I am. Maybe we're all going to manage.

So we have an excellent stew from the take-out place, and Sam and I get to talk about his situation. I sort of pace around all evening trying to think about what else could go wrong and how to stop it. David calls and gets an earful and he wants to speak to Sam, and then he starts to wonder if he should pass on this Broadway play he was thinking of doing, which is really a bummer but maybe that's the thing to do.

—Maybe not, I say. Don't pass yet. I think it may be under control.

I call Ma first thing in the morning to see how the night went, and yikes.

—I have to go home now.

—What happened?

—There is something very very wrong with this place.

—What? What happened?

—Well, a person came into my room in the middle of the night and woke me up and started yammering.

—Oh my
gosh
, was it Mrs. Martinelli?

—Who?

—Never mind, who was it?

—I have
no idea
. A nurse.

—What did she want?

—She was shrieking
what's all this about having to change the sheets all the time. I'm not set up for this!

—What?! Wait, you needed the sheets changed?

—No, I didn't need the sheets changed, I was asleep. I didn't need anything.

—Are you sure you hadn't been bothering them?

—No, I hadn't been bothering anyone. I didn't have anything to bother anyone about. It's completely unnecessary for me to be here.

—Well, what
did
she want?

—She had a chart and she was waving it at me and howling. I was quite frightened, but I didn't want to wake you.

—So what did you do?

—Well, she finally went away and I couldn't sleep. So I watched your
Big Fat
movie over and over for the rest of the night, and it was awfully good. Susie, they were all Orthodox in it and how did you find that movie, it was perfect.

—Well, that's good.

—Yes, but Susie, this really won't do.

The thing is she's going to radiation at ten today, and I don't know how we'll manage if she moves back to her apartment, and we know what we can't do with the Elephant, and it feels like a trap is closing in on me. I'm so worried for her and Sam and David's job and all of us, so I say
please, I'll talk to them and try to sort this out.
I get the kids fed and drive them to school and then I go home to call the admissions person at the facility, who sounds very apologetic and says they'll work things out with the night nurse, who must have felt unnecessarily overwhelmed about the note in the chart about the sheets.

Ma's friend Diana is going to drive her to radiation today. Just when it's time for her to be picked up, Ma calls:

—Why didn't I get any breakfast?

I
told
them about her breakfast, so what the heck's
that
about? I drive over there to talk to someone, and I end up in this little office with the head of something or other and the admissions person and they're all very sorry about this. I ask them:

—What is going on here? I thought Assisted Living meant you got Assisted with your Living. You don't have anyone to put the sheets on the bed, nothing is anybody's job it seems like, and now what? Do they need me to buy Nurse Ratched an extra supply of sheets? Should I drive over here every morning and make sure my mother gets some breakfast?

They are really very very sorry and it's just a series of miscommunications. The aide didn't file the right instructions about breakfast in the room;
your mother hasn't had a chance to fill out her menu choices yet. Here, you can talk to the Director of Nutrition and fill out her meal choices, and it won't ever happen again.

So the Director of Nutrition is wheeled in: a surprisingly corporate man in a pressed polo shirt. He gives me a stack of forms with choices for things like prunes or fruit cocktail, eggs boiled or scrambled and what kind of toast. I'm looking at it and I am trying hard to think, I'm really trying to focus:
What would Ma want?

And now I know exactly how Sam must have felt, staring and staring at the computer, frozen stiff, blocked. I put the menus on the desk.

—I'm sorry, I think maybe I need medication
. I can't do this.

And they look at me with great compassion but no idea what to say. They must have seen this a million times.

So I get up and I walk like a zombie out past Mrs. Martinelli, who stops as I go by, trying to figure out where she's seen me before.

I go home and lie down for a while and call Colette for the millionth time, and we decide the thing to do is to call that Michael guy with the hopefully not light-fingered people who help you at home because that's what Ma wants: to make a polite departure from this lovely facility, and be in her own home while she's going through all this. And David says, of course, you don't need medication, this is just like when the twins were born, you will be all right, you're figuring out how to make this work, it's just that this all matters so much and you care so much.
I know you can do this;
I'm coming home soon.