Habit (17 page)

I think it should be out in the open that I am aware of this tendency. It's possible that I have acquired it from someone close to me.

That's all I feel comfortable saying for now.

Finally, Lawson comes in looking as ready for a squabble as we are. He looks at me, then Ma. He stops to take in her thing around her neck with all the red Greek embroidery.

Ma (
imperiously
): That's my schema. I am Mother Brigid of Carlisle.

Pause pause pause.

(I just keep my head down. It's all good! It couldn't be more clear to him that she might not be making a rational, informed decision about her surgery than if Ma had smiled up at him and said
by the way, before we start, you should know that I am Nuts.
)

When we get into things a little, it becomes clear that Lawson has read my emails, and he won't give an inch about how poorly we have been communicated with. He seems to think this meeting, which I have fought like a tiger to get, was all his idea. He claims he has explained clearly the pros and cons of TATA. (He
has
explained them but not clearly enough for Ma—he doesn't know her like I do. She will forget whatever she doesn't want to know and besides that she is deaf deaf deaf deaf—it's very handy to have her kind of memory and hearing issues. You have to hit her over the head with the facts she needs for her own good, hit her with them over and over again at the top of your lungs till she is
whimpering.
)

So I say to him
my mother doesn't tell you this, but she has trouble getting to the bathroom on time. She tries to downplay it, and she is so weak right now with her bad back that we needed a wheelchair to get up here. So tell me, Doctor: For someone in her age and condition, is TATA, with its potential resulting incontinence, really the optimal choice for my mother?

Pause pause pause.

Lawson: No it isn't.

Me (
in Ma's good ear
): DID YOU HEAR THAT, MA?????????

Pause pause.

Me (
loudly
): What would you say IS the most optimal surgery for her?

Lawson: A permanent colostomy.

Me (
in Ma's ear
): A PERMANENT colostomy?

(Thank you.)

Lawson: But!

(Oh my gosh.)

Lawson: But! You can always wait to make up your mind about the second procedure after you have the first. If you want to stop after that, keep the temporary bag indefinitely and even skip the reconstruction surgery altogether, you can.

Ma: You CAN????????

Me: You CAN???????? Do you like that idea, Ma?

Ma: Yes, I do.

Me: Okay, so that's settled, you'll have the colostomy and decide later if you want it to be temporary or permanent, right?

Ma: Yes.

Pause. We look at Lawson, who takes this in.

Lawson (
pulls out a handy printout of the colon and makes illustrative marks on it
): Or, I can remove the tumor and leave the muscle intact, not rebuild the rectum, put the colostomy here instead of here. Then later, if you want me to, we have two more surgeries—

Me: Did you hear that Ma? Two more—

Ma: TWO more? Why—

Me: TWO MORE?????

Lawson: Okay, wait a minute.

Pause pause pause. I can see his gears turning. He crumples up his colon printout.

The Wizard, remember, is a Humbug. There's a little man behind the curtain pulling levers. He has no spare body parts stowed away anywhere, and he ultimately fails miserably at getting Dorothy back to Kansas. That turns out to be Glinda's job. (I believe I mentioned who played Glinda in high school.)

There's no way to be sure how much investment Doctor Lawson has in that sign he's got so prominently displayed behind his shoulder. But he is, after all, the only doctor out of five who has been able to get Mother Brigid of Carlisle this close to an operating room. It's beginning to dawn on me that a significant portion of a surgeon's skill has to be the ability to simply convince certain patients to agree to be helped in the first place.

Pause pause pause.

Lawson: What if I just decide what to do when I get in there?

And he
winks
at me.

Ma: That would be fine.

Me (
totally irritated by the wink, but if it means that at the very least my two cents' worth can no longer be overlooked, then
): Okay!

Ma: Can we
please
go home now?

Yes, Ma: There's No Place Like Home.

—W
HAT'S THE DIFFERENCE
between Gaga and
Auntie
Gaga?

(Every so often, I gather my wits and attempt to get this straight. It's extremely confusing. Just try to breathe through it.)

—Gaga was my mother's mother. Auntie Gaga was Gaga's sister.

—Which one of them was Muzzy?

—Auntie Gaga was Muzzy, but that's only what her children called her. Her real name was Gertrude.
We
called her Auntie Gaga because of Gaga being her sister.

—Wait, Ma.
Two
sisters?

—No,
five
sisters. My great-grandmother had three boys and five girls. Actually, she had six girls, but the first one, named Susan, died right after she was born.

—Wait. Wait. Okay. No. Okay, so, Ma: Let's just stick with this Gaga thing for a second. Your grandmother, your
mother's mother
, was Gaga. Oh. That's funny!

—Why's it funny?

—Because Gaga, you know,
gaga.
Your grandmother was
gaga.

—No, she wasn't; she was very rational.

—Whatever. Then why did they start calling her Gaga?

—It was instead of Granny, because we already had a lot of grannies. The name
Gaga
helped keep track of who's who.

—Well, that doesn't explain why her sister was called Auntie Gaga. How is
that
keeping track?

—It is, Susie, because Gaga was our grandmother and so her
sister,
who was our great aunt, was called
Auntie
Gaga.

—And one of Auntie Gaga's,
your great aunt's,
one of her children was Cousin Buckety, right?

—Yes, because Buckety's sister couldn't pronounce Buttercup.

—Her real name was Buttercup?

—No, it was Gertrude.

—Ma. Wait a minute. Auntie Gaga was Gertrude
and
Cousin Buckety was Gertrude, too?

—Yes.

—
And
she was Buttercup.

—Right.

(I have a life-size white plaster bust Ma did of Buckety's son Johnnie in our downstairs loo. It was probably a practice casting for the final bronze, which is now with Buckety's family. My copy has no base, so it looks like Johnnie's body is stuffed in the bathroom cupboard with his head sort of popping out of a hole in the countertop next to the sink. When you sit on the pot, Johnnie's looking at you, right at eye level.

This kind of intimacy bothers the men in our house. Sometimes I'll go in there and discover that Johnnie has been turned around to face the corner. I think somebody was too rough with him recently because he has a newish chip on his temple, and now he has to wear hats. I like to dress him up on Halloween—he looks best in an electric blue Cleopatra wig. He gets a Santa hat at Christmas.)

—So, Ma, who was it that married Max von Pappenheim?

—That was Nee. Gaga's and Auntie Gaga's sister.

—And what was his deal?

—He was a German count they met while they were wintering in Rome. He impressed Granny Wheeler, till they found out he had gambled away all his money. So before Nee married him, there was almost a duel with her brother. But instead, they tied up Nee's money so Max couldn't get it. That made him go away after he married her and found out. It was because of Max von Pappenheim we ended up related to the baron in Ireland. Granny Wheeler liked all that—

—Granny Wheeler, was she the one with the bonnets?

—No, that was
Little
Granny, Granny Wheeler's mother. Little Granny was a nineteenth-century Quaker. She always wore bonnets. Granny
Wheeler
was Episcopalian. Her name was Susan, too—you were named after her, and she was your great-great-grandmother. She had the five daughters. Four of them looked sort of the same, very blonde because of the Swedish ancestry . . .

(The Wheelers were Swedes who came to the new world to trade with the natives for beaver pelts in 1638, which was just before William Penn was born. That makes for a
whole
lot of grannies before this bunch even.)

— . . . But Gaga was different, darker, and particularly beautiful. That's why they called the five sisters Four Wheelers and a Hansom.

—And she married a count because she was so beautiful.

—No, her sister Nee married the count, but it didn't really last.

—Okay, Ma, let me see if I've got this: Little Granny was your great-great-grandmother, the Quaker with the bonnets.

—Right.

—And Granny Wheeler, who you named me after, Susan, was her daughter and therefore your great-grandmother.

—Yes. And Gaga was—

—
Hold on with the Gagas
, Ma—I'm not there yet. Little Granny wore bonnets and gave birth to Granny Wheeler and some other unidentified people. THEN, Granny Wheeler gave birth to the five girls (not counting the first one who died and the three brothers). One of them was Gaga, your grandmother, who was both beautiful and a Hansom, and one was Countess Nee Pappenheim, and one was Auntie Gaga, whose children called her Muzzy.

—Exactly.

—And Gaga, your grandmother, had your mother and some other children I'm not able to process right now. And your mother, Gaga's daughter, is the one I called Granny.

—Right.

—Ma.

—Yes.

—My grandchildren are going to call me Hot Mama.

—
What?

—It's decided, Ma. David and I agreed the first year we were married. I'll be Hot Mama and he'll be Gramps and there's nothing you can do about it.

Ma humphs.

—So, Ma. Did you call Gaga Gaga, too?

—Yes. And then Auntie Gaga was her sister so it was logical.

—Right. Logical. Except that she was also Muzzy.

There were a lot more women than men in my mother's family, and it's the women who fascinate me. Most of them had multiple daughters and only one or two sons. Sons tended to either die in the wars or just take generally background-ish positions in the family. Same for all the women's husbands, who often expired or fell out of focus somehow. Throughout the generations, it seems like strong women were often at the center of things, calling all the shots. And the one who intrigues me most right now is Muzzy, my great-great-aunt, known to me as Auntie Gaga.

There's a family photograph in Ma's gallery of Auntie Gaga with her parents and seven siblings. It's one of those pictures where everyone had to not move for a long time, so they're all sort of glassy-eyed. The youngest ones look like they may have had to be tranquilized to keep them still for the camera. I'm guessing it was taken in around 1888, because Auntie Gaga looks about thirteen. She wasn't the youngest, or the oldest, or even the most beautiful (the prettiest was definitely her sister, the Hansom: my great-grandmother Gaga), but she has superb posture, pale blue eyes, and this wonderful unmanageable lion's mane of wavy flaxen hair tumbling down to her graceful waist.

I've just finished reading a biography her son Charlie Thayer wrote, called
Muzzy.
Charlie was in the Foreign Service in places like Russia, and he wrote a lot of books, including this fun one about his mother. Auntie Gaga was the center of the matrilineal line for a lot of years. She lived on the Main Line (they all started out there), and her house, Kyneton, was where everyone gathered for tea every day and also on Christmas Eve, which was a real tradition.

She died when I was five, but I vaguely remember going in my velvet party dress for what may have been her last Christmas Eve, down a long driveway to a hill in the dark. The tradition was that everyone came and it seemed a little like visiting the queen. I remember she was really really old, and she sat in a big chair by the fire in the drawing room. You had to go up and kiss her, which was scary. Someone came out dressed as Santa with a big sack of presents, and every single person who came got something. In
Muzzy,
it says Auntie Gaga even gave presents to all the servants and the servants' children, too. I think mine was some chocolates.

Ma's portrait of Auntie Gaga, 1960

Today is Ma's follow-up visit with Doctor Lawson. Surgery was successful; she's coping relatively well with the bag. Her appointment finished sooner than we expected, and Ma's happy to be out in the world for a while. I thought she'd like to have lunch somewhere, but she says she's not hungry. So I ask, since we're sort of in the neighborhood, if she'd like to see if we can find Auntie Gaga's old house, Kyneton.

Auntie Gaga had six children of her own, including Buckety, George, and Charlie. When they all reached school age, she built a schoolhouse on her land and hired a teacher for them and some of the neighbors' children. The Kyneton School had a hundred students at its peak. She also had something to do with introducing field hockey to the United States, and her husband was football captain at Penn.