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Last Words
August 7, 2004
Words have power. Especially last words. The last thing I said to my mother before
she disappeared was, “Quit being crazy, Mom. The church ladies won’t hurt you.”
Her last words to me: “You can’t make me go with them. I hate you!” Taking back words
is like trying to pull out a deep thorn without bleeding.
Looking back, I should’ve known better. In our family, calling somebody “crazy”
was a definite betrayal. At least once a day, for as long as I can remember, my father
called my mother crazy. Among other things: insane, nuts, mental, screwed-loose. It was
his belief that someday she would drive him crazy, just as her mother had supposedly
driven her father crazy. Dad had been pretty bonkers the year before he died. But that
was his own doing. Nobody had pointed a gun to his head and said, “Here, drink this
gallon of vodka” or “Here, cut up these pills and snort them.” We may have helped him
along a little in that last year, but he always did what he wanted. That was his motto: “I
do what I want. And fuck the world.”
As I watched my mother that day, I wondered if crazy would be our family legacy,
like the teardrop Christmas ornaments inherited from my grandmother. I’d never seen
Mom act like that—hunkered down in the middle of her living room, fists pounding
the floor, face crumpled in on itself like my old Tiny Tears doll. All this burned into my
mind like tracks on a CD, to be replayed a thousand times in the coming days. My instant
built-in guilt-a-meter.
At five o’clock, I drove over to Mom’s, brought her dinner. Dr. Rencher said she
shouldn’t use the stove anymore, in case she forgot to turn it off and blew herself up.
She’d been diagnosed a few weeks earlier with vascular dementia, possibly Alzheimer’s.
Pictures of her brain showed some mini-strokes deep within and masses of dead brain
cells throughout, what the doctor called “dead zones.”
I climbed her front porch, balancing a plate of crock-pot chicken, steamed
broccoli, and roasted garlic potatoes – her favorite and my specialty - in one hand, and
a plastic three-pound bag of apples in the other. Mom’s double-wide mobile home
sat in the middle of a two-acre lot, a few miles east of where I lived on Liberty Bay.
As I opened the screen door, a rat scurried across the dust-bowl of her side yard and
disappeared into the bushes. After Striker died, most of the rats had moved on. His dog
food had attracted them in the first place. Striker was my parents’ part Chow dog; he had
the breed’s long black tongue, and spent his life tied to a fifty-foot cedar tree. His rope
was just long enough so he could chase cars up and down the gravel driveway - his only
exercise, except for those few times he escaped and raced like hell, zigzagging through
the fields, sprinting down our backwoods roads. Sometimes my parents couldn’t catch
him for days. He’d tire himself out and finally drag back to his doghouse and food bowl.
When he got older, the rats would sneak up when he was sleeping and bite at his face.
“Hey, Mom, I brought a movie to watch while we eat.” The double-wide featured
late 70’s rust-colored carpet, dark wormwood paneling, and a canary-yellow island in the
middle of the kitchen where she usually ate. Tonight I dragged the TV tray in front of
her glider rocker and plugged the movie in the VCR. The green rocker was my Christmas
gift to her after Dad died. Our little celebration.
I turned on the lopsided ceiling fan. The whir of its motor vibrated through the
mobile home, washing the thick August heat over us.
“A movie? Goodie! What is it?” She clapped her hands. This was a new
development - her high-pitched little girl voice and child-like delight. It reminded me
of those grown women who look and sound like Barbie dolls, projecting the illusion of
perfect femininity I always thought was terrifying.
“Oh, Carol. I love movies!” Her face was framed by mousy-brown hair, frizzed
from too many perms. She plopped down in the rocker, grabbed a piece of broccoli with
her fingers and shoved it into her mouth. Dr. Rencher had warned me about possible
behavior changes, but it felt like Mom was sliding backward in time. I pictured the
disease shutting down her brain in a kind of reverse order. Would it eventually lead her
back to the beginning? Back to the womb?
“I brought The Pizard of Oz,” I said. Our inside joke. The first time we watched
the movie together I peed my pants when the Wicked Witch of the West’s ugly green
face popped up on our 40-inch big-screen TV. We were the first family in town to
own one, and Dad let everybody know it. Now, thirty years later, that 40-inch TV still
dominated her living room, though my parents had moved from my childhood home
years ago.
Halfway through the movie, just as Dorothy wakes in the poppy field and
discovers Oz for the first time, we heard a car horn beep-beep, then blare from Mom’s
driveway.
“Who’s that?” She jumped up, knocking over her plate of chicken bones. Mom
had always been a jumper. As far back as I can remember, each time Dad yelled for her,
she jumped up and hit the floor running like in the Roadrunner cartoons. Dad had been
dead ten years. I still couldn’t get her to stop jumping.
“Just a minute. I’ll check.” I opened the front door and peered through the
screen. “Looks like some ladies from your church. Are you going to church tonight?”
After Dad died, Mom joined the country Baptist church that met in an old barn in the
woods. On a good Sunday maybe thirty people made up the congregation. I could never
keep track of what nights were church nights. There was always some event—Bible
study, potlucks, birthday parties, bridal showers, secret sister meetings.
“Oh, yes. Tonight’s Bible study.” She chewed on her bottom lip, eyes darting
around the room. “No, no. Tell them to go away.” She screwed up her face, balled her
hands into fists.
Dr. Rencher said that Mom’s strange behavior was part of the disease process -
stampeding like an angry bull, cursing at total strangers, belching in public like a drunken
sailor. All this, he said, was to be expected. I wanted to ask him, “Expected by whom?”
I couldn’t understand how, almost overnight, my mild-mannered, obsequious mother
began to act as if she were auditioning for the lead role in The Exorcist.
“Okay. I’ll tell them not tonight.” I let out a long breath, and pushed open the
screen door.
“No. Don’t go out there!” she yelled.
“Well, you have to decide, Mom. Do you want to go to church? Or do you want
to stay home?” I drew the words out, trying to calm us both. As if calm was an ocean I
had access to.
“No! I don’t wanna go! You can’t make me.” She made a whimpering sound,
eyes fixed on the door.
I let the screen fall back into place and slowly walked to her. “It’s okay, Marilyn.
You don’t have to go anywhere.” Sometimes using her first name calmed her down,
snapped her back to reality.
“No! Stay away! Don’t touch me!” She threw her fists up and pummeled the air.
Tears rolled down her cheeks leaving little trails, as if water had, for the first time, come
to a desert.
Suddenly, I felt a hot flash. Pressure in my ears. Sounds of a rushing river. That
feeling of being squeezed from the inside.
My first panic attack in five years. And the first time in thirty, I’d seen my mother
cry.
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