Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (20 page)

It would be awkward. She and I had never had a private conversation, and in public we exchanged only meaningless pleasantries.

I was in the middle seat between the boys.
What do you think of Claudia . . . No, no, of course, she’s nice enough, but what do you really think? . . . Yes, Dad seems happy, and he’s dressing better, but what do you really think? . . . Remember that night she wouldn’t borrow shoes to play flashlight tag, what did you think of that?

Fortunately they were both asleep, and I couldn’t badger them into telling me what I wanted to hear.

In New York Guy had arranged for a car service to bring us from the airport. We got stuck in traffic, so we arrived later than planned, but as soon as I got myself settled in the room over the garage, I went to find Claudia, knowing that she and Mike had arrived earlier in the day.

She was in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher. She seemed to have staked this out as her particular job. I didn’t like that. She was invading my territory. Surely everyone would agree that the kitchen was mine.

Her nubby gray slacks were, I supposed, the color of driftwood, and the soft yellow of her shirt had to be a color in her conch shell. If I hadn’t known about her brand, I would have thought it was a perfectly normal outfit. But knowing that she had been thinking about the brand when she chose that shade of gray made it all seem a little creepy. She had just returned from a week in the Virgin Islands, but there was no sign of sun on her face or hands.

Who was she? I had no idea where she had grown up, who her family was, where she had gone to school. I wasn’t a snob; one of our best nurses had come from a trailer park, another had worked her way off the welfare rolls. I didn’t care what her background was; it just seemed strange not to know. She must have wanted it that way. She wanted people to see what she had become. She had invented herself; she had created a brand.

What else did she want? Mike, my boys, Cami’s family, and this big house in the Hamptons. She was playing musical chairs with me, and she was going to make sure that I ended up standing along the wall.

Suddenly I felt that behind the cool, elegant wardrobe, the real Claudia was a garishly colored Bobo doll, one of those inflatable vinyl clowns whose bottoms were weighted so that when you punched them, they always popped back up, their eyes bulging and their stupid painted-on grins leering. It wouldn’t matter what I did to keep this woman from trying to take a place—my place— in my family; she would bounce right back. The harder I hit, the faster she would recoil.

But that did not change the fact that I owed her an apology.

So I got to it. “Claudia, I think that something I said ended up with Mike suggesting you take his mother to St. Thomas. I didn’t mean it to. I don’t think Marge does very well away from home.”

Claudia looked down at the ironstone cream pitcher she was rinsing. “She smokes.”

“Don’t you hate that?” Marge’s smoking had always made our visits to her difficult. When the boys were little, she would go outside to smoke, claiming that she never smoked in the house. But clearly she did—the smell of her curtains attested to that—and the change in routine made her jittery.

“We had to change planes.” Claudia’s voice was tight. “Flying on December twenty-third is difficult enough, but when you have to find someplace to smoke between flights . . . we almost missed our connection.” She fitted the cream pitcher over one of the prongs in the dishwasher and then glanced at her watch. “And that is not the way I travel.”

“When you fly with her, you have to change in Charlotte.” I was surprised that Mike hadn’t remembered that. “North Carolina lets people smoke in airports.”

Claudia picked up a mug, emptied the old coffee out of it, and rinsed it. Before putting it into the dishwasher, she ran a soapy sponge around the rim, then rinsed it again. So much for Managed Perfectionism. This was Perfectionism Run Amok. “Has Marge ever talked about what she wants to do when she has to leave her house?”

I shook my head. “No, but Mike and I split up more than three years ago. She might not have been thinking about that then.”

“Oh.”

That was all Claudia said, but I got it. Was Marge Van Aiken hinting, in that snarky way of hers, that she and her Parliament Lights were looking for somewhere to live? If so, Claudia’s spacious, immaculate house would be appealing.

No one on earth, not even Claudia, deserved that.

But in about thirty seconds my sympathy for Claudia faded. She needed to wake up. A man Mike’s age was a package deal. On one hand, he came with two handsome sons, one of whom was
about to marry into a family with a house in the Hamptons. On the other hand, he had a difficult, demanding mother whose long-term care he would eventually have to figure out. Family life was full of the kind of compromises that Claudia Postlewaite probably was not used to making.

First thing the next morning, I volunteered to do a grocery-store run. I didn’t have a car, so Rose went to get the keys to her Mercedes even though I wasn’t wild about driving someone else’s very big, very expensive car on unfamilar roads.

“Would you like me to give you a lift?”

It was Mike. He must have guessed how I felt.

“That would be great.”

I got my coat and purse and went outside. Mike was moving toward the driver’s side of his car, and Claudia toward the passenger side. I hadn’t known that she was coming.

Mike’s car is a little, two-door model. The backseat was a narrow, uncomfortable bench. I’d never seen anyone ride in it. Claudia opened the passenger door, pressed the lever below the seat, and pulled forward on the leather headrest, folding the seat down. She flattened herself against the open car door, her hand still on the headrest, waiting very politely for me to crawl into that narrow backseat.

I’m older than you,
I wanted to shriek.
I’m the mother of this man’s children. I should be in front, not you.

But the harder you hit a Bobo doll, the faster it slaps back into place. I might care who sat in front, but she cared more. That would always give her the advantage.

My nice mom-type therapist had asked me why I felt patronized when anyone tried to help me. Was I confusing help and pity?

After wasting a session protesting that I wasn’t, I reluctantly admitted that I probably was. I couldn’t stand the idea of people feeling sorry for me. People had felt sorry for my mother . . . because of me.

Grand Rapids, Michigan, is not a small town, but East Grand Rapids, where we’d lived, is. It’s a suburb, small enough, affluent enough, homogeneous enough that when “Dr. Bowersett’s little
girl” spent the day outside the principal’s office for mouthing off to a guidance counselor, people heard about it.

And my mother got such sympathy from the other ladies, such polite, triumphant sympathy.

Through all my adolescent garbage, my mother had been loyal and optimistic. She’d gotten exasperated, impatient, even angry with me—she was not a saint—but she’d never given up on me. She’d never thought that I was naughty by nature or that my misdeeds were her fault because she hadn’t quit work. It was as if she’d intuited, long before the medical establishment would have supported an ADD diagnosis for me, that my unease with myself and the world was something biochemical, something that I truly could not help.

I’d always pretended that I didn’t feel guilty about what I was doing. So what if I didn’t want to take the AP classes? So what if my friends’ families couldn’t afford to live in East Grand Rapids? I did feel bad about how hard I was making things for my mother, but I couldn’t figure out how to change.

Years and years later she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It progressed rapidly, and during the final months of her life, in the spring before Mike had left, the person she’d wanted with her was me. Both Dad and Chuck were doctors, but I was her daughter.

Being valuable to her, being necessary to her, eased much of my guilt. I was finally paying her back for how she had stood beside me when I had been determined to push her away. She was the one who’d directed me into nursing, who’d never for one moment let me believe that nurses were just people not smart enough to be doctors.

Frightened by the fact that she was going to die, Dad and Chuck wanted her to have whatever she wanted, and what she wanted was me. Dad was torn about pressuring me to spend more time with her. Chuck was not. He would call me, grim and insistent: “You need to get back out here.”

But Mother was in Michigan, and I had obligations at home. Jeremy was a senior in high school; Zack was floundering during his last year of middle school. Even though Mike was still home, the last four months of her life were a nightmare for me. When I was in Michigan, I felt that I should be at home. I missed the Sports Banquet at which Jeremy received the crew team’s Coach’s Award. I was so disappointed by that; I would have loved to be there. Zack needed me even more than Jeremy did. His reports from school seemed to be getting worse by the day, and Mike was too angry with him to help.

But when I was home, I ached to be with Mother.

Even though I was able to take unpaid leave from work, I was exhausted. Before I left Michigan, I would cook maniacally, filling my dad’s freezer with meals he could reheat. I would come back to D.C., stop at the grocery store on the way home from the airport, and cook the exact same meals for Mike and the boys to reheat when I left again. I bought lightbulbs in Michigan and toilet paper in Washington even though it was Dad’s bathrooms that needed tissue and the lights in my home that were missing bulbs.

I went home for Jeremy’s graduation and then flew right back to Michigan. Mother died a week later. Three months after that, Mike moved out.

Our therapist noted the timing, and in the bland, nonjudgmental tone that therapists must have to practice, he asked Mike, “How did you feel about the choices Darcy made during her mother’s illness?”

Mike looked puzzled for a moment as if he couldn’t imagine how that question was relevant. But he was plenty smart, and in a second, he got it. “Are you saying that that had anything to do with my leaving?”

The therapist made a little gesture.

“That’s ridiculous,” Mike said, then turned to me. “Darcy, it had nothing to do with it. I understood why you needed to be in Michigan, but she died in May. It was more than three months.”

“So, Mike, you felt that three months was a long time?” the therapist asked.

“I guess.” Mike didn’t sound like his usual confident self. “My leaving had nothing to do with her mother’s death.”

“And you, Darcy . . . did three months feel like a long time to you?”

Hardly. “I still think about picking up the phone to call and ask her something.”

“So the two of you had very different perceptions about where Darcy was in the grieving process.”

“I wasn’t thinking about that,” Mike insisted.

When we were walking to our cars after the session, he could not leave the subject alone. He was caught between an apology and a need to justify himself.

During the session I had been inclined to let him off the hook. Of course he hadn’t consciously been trying to punish me for how much time I’d spent with my mother. But standing there in the therapist’s parking lot, I realized that if there was a hook in his gut, it was right where it belonged.

So he hadn’t been thinking about my mother’s death. I believed that. But he should have been. Why hadn’t he noticed that I was stumbling around in a fog of grief so murky that I felt completely lost?

“It’s been a lot to handle,” I said. “Mother dying, Jeremy going to college, your leaving. They all feel connected.”

He didn’t like that. “Come on, Darcy. I’m not the kind of guy who kicks people when they’re down.”

“Before you flounce around saying that about yourself, you need to be sure you can tell when a person
is
down.”

His lips tightened. He couldn’t stand to have his judgment or his insight questioned. “Of course I can tell.”

“Believe what you want,” I said. “You always do.”

And that was the last of the therapy sessions we attended together. From then on, Mike started discovering his last-minute scheduling conflicts.

One thing people say about ICU nurses is that we don’t process our feelings, that we never discuss the deaths or the catastrophic disabilities, that we just move from one crisis to the next. That’s probably true, but I can’t imagine why people think that’s a negative. If your husband or child were in the hospital with multisystem organ failure, would you want your nurse dragging in, grieving for the last person who had been in that bed, or would you want her alert, optimistic, and rational, focused on your loved one and only your loved one?