One True Thing (20 page)

I sat down at the table with one of my mother’s magazines, looking at spring perennials, although where I was going to plant perennials and why, when gardening bored me so, I could not have told you. I read the recipes and the instructions for making a bedskirt for a crib. Perhaps my mother was saving it for Halley, whose daughter must be overdue. From above me I heard a sound that I thought at first must be the pipes again, or a child calling from down the street, or perhaps a sudden bad-tempered fit of winter wind whipping around the dormers. It came again and I lifted my head. Again, and I went to the foot of the stairs.

“Ellen,” came the cry.

I ran up those stairs as I had not run up since I was in high school, running to see if my father was in early, to tell him news and make it real—“I got into Princeton!” “I won the essay contest!” “I’m valedictorian!” How many times had I run in, banging doors, breathless, to tell him something and had to settle for her instead? How plain had it been on my face?

“Ellen,” came the cry again.

Her bedroom was empty, the covers thrown back. Before my mother was sick I think the only time I had seen my parent’s bed
unmade was when they were in it, when I came in frightened after a bad dream, when I stuck my head in to tell them I had gotten home safely at one in the morning. A pair of knit pants and a tunic were on the chair, which had been moved closer to the bathroom door so that my mother could walk, stopping for a handhold as she went, from bed to table to chair to bath. The bathroom door was closed, and I knocked softly.

“You have to come in,” my mother said with a catch in her voice.

The room was warm and smelled rank, the smell of perspiration and something sweeter, deeper. My mother lay in the tub, her arm across her eyes, perhaps practicing the child’s fiction of believing that if she could not see me I could not see her.

“I can’t get out,” she said.

Silently I picked up the towel that was on the bench just next to the tub—she had made the bench from a kit, I remember, then painted it and sanded some of the paint down so it would look old—and hung it over my arm. I took her by the hands and tried to pull, but her legs scrabbled helplessly in the water, slick with bath oil, finding no purchase on the smooth porcelain of the tub. Then I reached around her chest and, with one great tug, pulled her over the edge and onto the bench. I was panting and the front of my denim shirt was wet with bathwater and, perhaps, perspiration. She weighed nothing, but felt so heavy.

I had never before and have never since set about a task which required me so completely to act without thinking. My mother leaned her elbow on the edge of the tub and her head on her hand and wept as I toweled off her poor ravaged body. I took it piece by piece, bit by bit, because I knew that if I allowed myself to really look at her, at what she had become, I would be done for.

But she knew, and while I couldn’t speak, she couldn’t keep silent. Suddenly she wiped her face with her hand and said, “I never wanted you to see me like this. I should have just stayed there until your father got home. I couldn’t figure out what was worse, having you see me like this, or him.”

“I would have come up eventually,” I said, drying her shoulders.

“I would have died before I would have let you see me like this. Just … rotten. That’s what I look like now, like a peach when it’s all rotten. Like bad fruit. Why can’t I just die and be done with it? It’s a crime for a human being to have to live like this. Rotten like this.” And she let her head drop down again.

It was an apt description. Her skin was slack on her body in places, like soft fruit when it’s past its prime, on the insides of her thighs, her upper arms. But most of her flesh was stretched tight over her bones, a faint shroud for the skeleton: the two long bones running parallel beneath the skin of her arms and legs, the cage of pelvis and ribs. In her face every bit of skull was visible where the flesh had gone, leaving only the clear outlines of the understructure, the yawning
Os
of the eye sockets, the sharp peaks of the cheekbones, the hinge of the jaw, from which all the padding had disappeared. Her breasts were flat and sagging, like those of old women I’d seen in pictures of primitive tribes, and her pubic hair was nearly gone.

I went behind her, and, hooking my hands under her armpits, pulled her into a standing position. She held my arm tightly and shuffled into the bedroom. I helped her on with her underpants and her pants, her tunic, as she held on to the edge of the dresser. But I never touched her, not really, never patted her, much less held her close. And if I told you today that I’ve wondered about that a hundred times since then, whether I should have wrapped my arms around her instead of the towel, whether I should have rocked her as she had done so many times for me, I would be lying about the number, because it has been many many more.

I never try to remember how she looked that morning. I remember that I never touched her, and I never looked her in the eye. When I was done she moved slowly to the bed, like a blind person in an unfamiliar room, and she lay down on her back, staring at the ceiling. For the first time I noticed that the scarf Jeffrey had given her for Christmas had been slung over the mirror atop her dresser, so that a spill of glossy purple grapes and green grape
leaves and the sinuous twist of vines hung in place of any reflection.

“I’m going back to sleep,” she said.

That January, when they delivered the hospital bed, leaving the den in disarray and the living room crowded with furniture, leaving a long scratch in the oak floor of the hallway because they were careless with a metal side rail, she didn’t say anything. She just got in and turned on her side so that she was looking out the window, out the window that looked out on our driveway and the side of the house next door. It was as though something was broken, but I think it broke in the bathroom, on that bench.

A
t the end she was both child and mother, both teacher and student, both strength and supplicant. At the end she lay in the den, in the bed with the high bars on the side, so that she would not roll out at night. Sometimes I would stand in the doorway in the dark, quiet and observant as a Peeping Tom, and watch her thrash and cry and talk, bits of disconnected things, about my father, about her babies, always babies. About people whose names meant nothing to me, who might be ghosts, figments, or regrets and missed opportunities. When she talked to her brother Steven one night, her eyes open even though their glaze made their blindness as clear as a white cane, that was when I stayed until the sky outside began to lighten. Somehow I thought if she talked to her brother, dead so many years ago, it meant she was seeing another country in her mind’s eye and that her heart was hammering toward its inevitable full stop.

Often I watched with tears dripping down my face onto the front of my nightgown, but it was as though they were an inert function of my body, like a runny nose. There were no sobs, none
of the heaves that you associate with a crying jag. There was no sound but my mother’s thick and arduous breathing as I stood across the room, bleeding tears.

Once, when I came downstairs, the side of her bed had been lowered, and my father was wedged uncomfortably next to her. He and I looked at one another in the darkness, but I turned and went upstairs and if he followed afterward I did not hear him.

That room had white pine paneling on the walls and flowered curtains at the windows, a rose-and-green print I can still evoke in memory. The green couch had been carted into the living room, the hospital bed positioned in front of the wall of bookshelves so it faced the television. But all of the light and prettiness evoked by the decor was negated that month by the light, which was dim and gray, the dour grudging clouded sunshine of January and February. Now, today, I feel my heart begin to sink on New Year’s Day and lift only—inevitably, ironically—when Easter is on the horizon. My miserable anniversaries.

One night the branches of the Douglas fir at the corner of the house lashed my windows and hers all night long, and by morning the snow was falling thick and fast, so that there was no light in the room at all and I had to turn on the lamps in the middle of the day. The snow began to drift until finally it reached almost to the windows. My mother kept her head turned to the side all day, except when she drank her soup, lifting the spoon to her mouth in a long slow arc, dropping her mouth open when the spoon was only halfway there, as though she could no longer trust herself to coordinate her motions more precisely. “The snow is so beautiful,” she said, handing me back the mug, and then she fell asleep.

Beneath the rich yellow light of the lamp I read and, when my eyes became tired, went into the kitchen to judge the progress of the storm by the thickness of the blanket in the back, ripples and hillocks where it covered small bushes, a rise in the yard that marked an azalea I had protected with an upturned peach basket and a burlap bag. The phone in the kitchen rang like a scream in
the quiet house, and when I went to answer it I saw that the day had slipped away and it was nearly seven. Only the light told me the time, and the light had been disguised all afternoon.

“Ellen,” my father said, “I cannot possibly get home in this. The security people have closed off both the footbridges and no one has been able to get out to plow. I will sleep somewhere here.”

“In your office?”

“I don’t know. Several of the other people in the department have pullout couches. If I can find someone who’s already gone home, I’ll use theirs. If you try me here and there’s no answer, that’s what I’ve done.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“How is your mother?”

“The same.”

“Tell her that I’ll see her tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

I think I remember that when I put down the phone there was a flicker of the thought that if my mother died during the night, with the snow falling thick outside, while my father was marooned on a sofa bed with some erudite honors graduate of a Seven Sisters college with strong opinions on Henry James and a soft spot for narrow handsome married men, that he would suffer with the memory the rest of his life. Or perhaps that was how I remembered it afterward, when memory plays so many tricks.

In the den my mother’s eyes were open, looking at nothing. “Who was that?” she said softly.

“Your husband,” I said in what I thought was a voice without expression. “He cannot seem to find a way to get home, so he is staying at the college. He says he will see you tomorrow.”

“It’s a bad storm,” my mother said, looking out the window again.

“It’s not that bad,” I said.

“Ellen,” she said, and her voice was stronger than it had been in days, “put down the book.” In fact her voice was stronger, sterner, than I had ever remembered it, except the day that I mocked the little girl with Down’s syndrome who once lived at the foot of our hill and my mother turned cold and pitiless in a way I had always thought only my father could. She was like a sprinter now, at rest until those brief necessary moments when she would become herself for just a few minutes.

“What has happened between you and your father?”

“What do you mean?”

“You have been very angry with him since you came home. If you’re going to be angry at anyone about all this, you should be angry at me. I’m why you’re here, not him.”

“Mama, this is not about you. And it’s not something we should discuss. I have my own differences with Papa that have nothing to do with you.”

“They do have to do with me, especially now. He’s all you’ll have.”

“Stop. Just stop.” I raised my hands, palm out, as though to push the words away.

“No, you stop. You and your father will need each other. And you and your brothers. And I hope he can have more of a relationship with the boys, too, if I’m not there to get in the way. But you and he already have such a bond. You’re so much alike.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“Why? Because he’s not perfect? Because he’s not the man you once thought he was?”

“Mama, I can’t talk to you about this.”

“Ellen,” she said, struggling to turn toward me, her hands like pale claws on the railing of the bed, her legs scissoring away the white sheets, “listen to me because I will only say this once and I shouldn’t say it at all. There is nothing you know about your father that I don’t know, too.”

The two of us stared silently into one another’s eyes, and I think that after a moment she gave a little nod and then lay back.

“And understand better,” she added.

“All right,” I said.

“You make concessions when you’re married a long time that you don’t believe you’ll ever make when you’re beginning,” she said. “You say to yourself when you’re young, oh, I wouldn’t tolerate this or that or the other thing, you say love is the most important thing in the world and there’s only one kind of love and it makes you feel different than you feel the rest of the time, like you’re all lit up. But time goes by and you’ve slept together a thousand nights and smelled like spit-up when babies are sick and seen your body droop and get soft. And some nights you say to yourself, it’s not enough, I won’t put up with another minute. And then the next morning you wake up and the kitchen smells like coffee and the children have their hair all brushed and the birds are eating out of the feeder and you look at your husband and he’s not the person you used to think he was but he’s your life. The house and the children and so much of what you do is built around him and your life, too, your history. If you take him out it’s like cutting his face out of all the pictures, there’s a big hole and it’s ugly. It would ruin everything. It’s more than love, it’s more important than love. Think of Anna.”

“Anna?”

“In the book.” She gestured toward the end table where my paperback copy of
Anna Karenina
lay.

“But you didn’t finish reading it.”

“I’d read it before.” She looked at the snow falling, tiny floating ghosts tapping against the window, spinning in and out of the blue-black beyond. “I’d read them all before. I just wanted a chance to read them again. I wanted a chance to read them with you.”