Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (31 page)

“I’d like to hear the Lesson again,” she says to Dad, giving the rest of us our cue to leave.

Grandma and
Aunt Kay arrived today. I am on my way to the Hyatt to pick up them up, because earlier Olivia met them at the airport, drove them to the hospital to see Mom, then dropped them at the hotel to check in and rest before dinner. Sherman is in Hopewell cooking, which is a first. During the twenty-minute drive to the hotel, I grip the wheel tightly with my left hand and with my right hand stab at the station settings of the radio until I find a song I like.

I am on edge, girding myself for a battle with Aunt Kay, who earlier in the day said to Olivia—in response to my last conversation with Uncle Jack—“Well, you know, Liv, Lucia has a way of listening selectively.”

How dare she? I’d like to give her a piece of my mind. I know what I will say too, the moment I get her out of Grandma’s earshot: You have no idea, Aunt Kay. And now you’re accusing me of lying? Uncle Jack said what he said. I wrote it all down.

I punch the radio buttons again and find Joe Cocker singing “You Are So Beautiful.” All of my pent-up, pissed-off, fuck-the-whole-lot-of-you anger dissipates. I am left instead with an unbearable longing. I should pull over to the side of the road until the feeling goes away, or until a different song comes on, but I drive on through, my vision clouded and my head and arms like lead.

I see Grandma and Aunt Kay sitting together on a sofa on the far side of the hotel’s atrium. They are an elegant, well-heeled mother-daughter pair, who could easily be meeting for afternoon tea.
Aunt Kay is knitting, and, even from where I stand, I can see her jaw aggressively moving back and forth, chewing gum. My heart races at the sight of her; I realize I am not ready to face her, but she looks up from her knitting, peers over her reading glasses, and sees me. She and Grandma stand and head toward me; we meet halfway.

“Hi, dear,” Grandma says, kissing my cheek and pinching my forearm tenderly. She looks terrible: so frail, slightly stooped; the tremor in her hand is very pronounced. My eyes tear again, and I hug her.

I then look up at Aunt Kay, and in my head I hear,
Lucia has a way of listening selectively
. My pulse quickens.

Aunt Kay puts her arm over my shoulder and presses her head to my ear as if she wants to tell me something. Maybe she regrets what she said to Olivia earlier today. I wait.

“Lucia, I’ve given this a lot of thought,” she says, pulling me in close to her. I soften. I turn to face her and offer a partial smile, and she withdraws slightly so our eyes can meet. She has the same ice blue irises as Uncle Jack.

“This has all happened,” she says, pausing briefly, searching for the right words, “because your mom is suicidal. It’s really a slow death wish.”

Oh, my, God
. I break away from my aunt before she finishes speaking and pick up my grandmother’s bag. I am enraged. I am also worried for Grandma. I hope she didn’t hear this. Everyone knows Aunt Kay has the capacity to spew forth her sometimes outrageous thoughts without filtering them first, but nothing has prepared me for this one.

“C’mon, let’s go,” I say and lead the two of them to the car. I keep a distance between us and open the back door, motioning them both in. We don’t speak the whole ride home. I drive recklessly fast, and blast the radio.

I look at my aunt and Grandma in the rearview mirror. They buckle their seat belts and say nothing. I feel omnipotent and vengeful with them in the backseat. I thrill-seek with every hill and bend
in the road. For a moment, I worry how Dad might react if I total his car, but then I realize I don’t give a shit. I think of the times I drove alone to and from Tenacre, how more than once I contemplated a hasty, impulsive turn of the wheel to veer off into a ditch or hit a tree. At the time, I thought of it only as a way to bring an end to the secret. Even if I didn’t kill myself, I’d end up in a hospital bed and draw the Minnesota relatives to Princeton. Then they’d find out about Mom. It wouldn’t have taken much courage for a split-second impulse.

Before dinner
, Aunt Kay, Grandma, and Aunt Mary are sitting out on the patio. The foot of Aunt Kay’s crossed leg taps the air nervously. Both hands cling to the arms of her chair, and I imagine she is holding court, sharing her theories with Grandma and Aunt Mary. Dad appears to be hiding in his study, no doubt doing his protective work. Olivia and Terry sit in the den with the doors closed. When Sherman calls everyone to the table, Grandma, Aunt Kay, and Aunt Mary come in from outside. Slowly, Dad descends the stairs. In the living room, he comes face-to-face with Aunt Kay and Grandma for the first time since their arrival.

Aunt Kay extends a stiff handshake. “Are you off to the hospital?” she asks him bluntly.

“I’m staying for dinner first.”

My father bursts through the swinging door to the kitchen, where Sherman and I are putting food on the plates. I look up. His face is the color of beets and he mumbles through gritted teeth, “That Kay, what nerve!” He looks like he may explode at any moment.

I consider telling him what Aunt Kay said about me listening selectively, and Mom being suicidal, but hold my tongue.

It is amazing that we all take seats in the dining room, but we do: Dad at one end of the table, Sherman at the other, in Mom’s chair; Aunt Mary, Olivia, and I along one side; and Aunt Kay, Grandma, and Terry along the other. It is customary for our family to join hands before a meal and say grace, but both the grace and Mom are missing.

Sherman, whose culinary ability up until now has been limited to microwave popcorn, has remarkably re-created Mom’s standard Sunday fare: roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, bread stuffing, a tossed salad. For dessert, he has made Mom’s peach crisp.

At first, the only sounds are the scraping and clinking of silverware against china and water glasses being cautiously replaced on the table after pensive sips. We focus outwardly on our plates, inwardly on the ever-widening, layered, and multiplying rifts: between Dad and Mom’s family; Olivia and Uncle Jack; Uncle Jack and me; Aunt Kay and me; between Mom and Dad; between Dad and us kids. The only words spoken are barely audible requests for salt or butter or gravy. Eventually, Dad compliments Sherman’s cooking, and everyone enthusiastically voices agreement. Then silence again. Oh, how I—we—could use a glass of wine or two. I consider, for a moment, how odd it must have been—back when we still lived in Minnesota—for my aunts and uncles to come to our house for Christmas Eve dinners every four years, when it was our turn to host. I wonder now if they used to pop a few cocktails
before
heading over, knowing they’d spend the rest of the holiday evening completely, confoundedly sober?

“Did anyone feed the dogs today?” Olivia asks.

“I did,” I say. Another lull. The chicken is a little dry. I add more gravy. I think about the wishbones Mom used to save from our chicken dinners, how she hung them to dry on the wrought-iron chandelier in our kitchen in Minnesota, and on the windowsill here in Hopewell. There was always a wishbone to break for any occasion requiring luck: a spelling bee, a hockey game, a pass on cleanup.

“Sherman,” Terry offers, barely above a mumble, “want to shoot some hoops in town after dinner?”

Sherman nods. Another pause.

“What’s the name of your band again?” Aunt Kay asks.

“The Bureaucrats,” Sherman replies, hardly looking up.

The one concern we all share is the one topic we avoid: I wish
she
were here, eating this chicken. I wonder how much longer Mom will be restricted to the intravenous hyperalimentation. I wonder
if she will ever sit here with us again. And I wonder when she’ll be strong enough to undergo the biopsy.

“So,” Sherman asks, “do we know when they’re doing the autopsy?”

For an interminable moment of stunned disbelief, everything stops. My forkful of food hovers in midair. Doubting that I’ve heard right, I look to my sister as I gently set my fork onto my plate. She looks back at me and cracks a smile, pursing her lips quickly to prevent any further response. A puff of laughter escapes my mouth before I can catch it. Then Olivia chokes back a laugh and holds a napkin to her face.

“What?” Sherman asks, confused.

He must be aware of his slip, and too horrified to admit it. It was such an innocent mistake, anyone might have made it. Olivia and I can’t help ourselves; the laughter threatens to become the kind you can’t stop even if you know you should. I bite my lip and look away and try to think of something else. Aunt Mary is laughing too now, through her nose with her head bowed, chin to chest, her Mary Poppins posture as erect as ever. Terry turns to face Aunt Kay; they smile at each other, then at Sherman sympathetically. Dad wipes the corners of his eyes. Fortunately Grandma, hard of hearing, misses the whole thing.

“What?” Sherman demands again.

“You … mean … biopsy,” I whisper. “You said autop——”

“I fucking said biopsy!”
Sherman yells. His eyes fill with tears. He stands up and bolts out of the room. We hear the door to the patio slam.

“What … happened?” Grandma says.

Dinner is over. As quickly as the laughter has come, it goes, replaced by the deadly silence of collective worry. Terry excuses himself and heads out after Sherman. The rest of us clear the table, even Grandma, despite our urging her to just sit.

I drive Aunt Kay
and Grandma back to the hotel. (Aunt Mary is staying with us.) This time, I remain on my side of the yellow
line, within the speed limit. In the parking lot, I turn off the engine. Grandma, in the front passenger seat, grabs my hand as I am pulling the key from the ignition.

“You go ahead, Kay, we’ll catch up. I want a minute with Lucia,” Grandma says.

I stare straight ahead. Aunt Kay gets out of the car.

“Lucia, your mom isn’t suicidal,” Grandma says tenderly. Her hand trembles, so she grasps mine more firmly to steady it. “She wouldn’t do that to you. She loves you very much.”

I drape my arms over the steering wheel and rest my head on them. Grandma’s hand slips under the back of my shirt. She gently runs her long fingernails along my spine. I am suddenly transported to an easier time, when my grandmother’s gentle touch could heal anything.

“This is such a mess,” I say, when she stops.

“We all have to try to be good Christians,” she says.

She is the only person in the world who can say this to me without provoking a groan. I know the sincerity of her faith, how hard she is trying. The despair in her voice after Uncle Jack put her on the phone still haunts me: “… and tell your father I will
never
forgive him.”

Grandma and
Aunt Kay’s first visit lasts just two days. On their final trip to the hospital before leaving for the airport, Aunt Kay and I are sitting in the SCU waiting room. Grandma wants some time alone with Mom, and Aunt Mary is downstairs on the pay phone talking to her husband, Uncle Brad. Aunt Kay and I have
tried to avoid each other as much as possible. But now, we are face-to-face.

To keep from smoking, we both chew gum, Wrigley’s Spearmint for me, Nicorette for her. She, like Aunt Nan, has brought her knitting with her. Her needles click away rhythmically. Her blue eyes dart back and forth between a spot in the middle of the room and me.

“I guess I have to believe that, if I were Mom, and I really wanted to use Christian Science, I wouldn’t want my kids to interfere,” I say. I am reminded, uncomfortably, of the meeting back in April with Mom’s practitioner. But I realize too that I am trying to defend my own inaction as much as I am Mom’s right to her beliefs.

Aunt Kay’s knitting needles stop. She fixes on me over her half-frame glasses. “Don’t you believe in rescue?” she asks.

The tone of her voice is not accusing—it is unexpectedly tender and searching—but still, I feel like I’ve been charged with a crime. Of the three Johnson sisters, Aunt Kay has the most severe features, with a square jaw, a hard mouth, those unforgiving, ice blue eyes. I say nothing, but her question frames the dilemma in a completely new way, and I am thrown off balance.

Of course I believe in rescue.

For the next
several days, Dad, Olivia, Sherman, Aunt Mary, and I wait for Mom’s condition to improve. Terry, who has returned to Tucson to register for his first semester of law school, is ready to catch the next flight back if necessary. We shuttle between the hospital and Hopewell and divide our time between Mom’s bedside, the SCU waiting room, the hospital cafeteria, and the house. Dr. Sierocki informs us that, assuming a continued return of her strength, “Mother” can expect to undergo surgery within the next ten days. (I wish he wouldn’t call her that. She’s not his mother.) He also tells us that, from now on, to avoid further communication problems, he and the rest of the hospital staff will give updates
on Mother’s condition only to us: Dad, Olivia, Sherman, and me. Someone (Dad?) must have told him about Uncle Jack.

Olivia and I
are quietly sitting in Mom’s room. She drifts in and out of sleep. At one point, she asks Olivia to try on the eye mask she had offered me the week before, dangling it like a child might offer her favorite toy in a moment of generosity. Olivia takes it hesitantly, says thank you, and sets it in her lap.