Habit (2 page)

M
A IS EIGHTY-FIVE
. She's struggling with a stomachache. We've been on the phone a lot, especially tonight, which happens to be the night before my birthday.

Ring. Ring.

—Hello?

—Susan?

—Yes. Hello, Doctor Maxwell.

My mother and her GP have been playing phone tag all week. She calls his office and offers unintelligible descriptions of her digestive affliction to the staff:

—Tell the doctor that there has been considerable difficulty with elimination, resulting in great distress in the undercarriage, if you please.

This is passed on to Maxwell, who doesn't seem to be grasping the urgency of the situation. I sense we are destined for a colon specialist of some kind, but I dread the process of choosing one. My mother has strict specifications, which she won't articulate. I have to guess.

Last month, she wanted a gynecologist. When I checked her HMO's approved list:

—How about John Mathews at Stone Mills Hospital?

—I won't go to one in Stone Mills; it has to be Abington and it has to be a woman.

—Okay, how about Alice Greenberg in Abington?

—No.

—Why? What do you know about her?

—I just know I don't want to see her.

—Ruth Rothschild?

—I don't want to see her, either.

—Ma. What's going on here?

—Nothing, I just don't—

—I've got one for you: Martha Sullivan. Nice Catholic-sounding name. That okay with you? Oh, never mind—someone named Ali Mohammed shares the office with her, we can't have that—

—Oh stop it. I have to be comfortable. This is my body and I have to feel all right about who I see.

This afternoon, I poked my nose in and called Maxwell's office myself. Maybe they've spoken to each other by now.

—Susan. Your mother has explained her symptoms to me, and I am deeply concerned.

—Okay.

Maxwell is my GP, too, and my husband's. This outburst is a little abrupt for him, which is alarming. Like most doctors for whom medicine is a calling as well as a career, he does his best to keep things human with a little personal talk before getting into the technical. When my mother is the subject, we usually have to first get through
Susan Susan Susan. I want to make sure you're taking care of yourself. That woman is incredibly headstrong, so first I want to know about YOU.

Maxwell's as busy as any doctor, which makes it easy to excuse him for forgetting I've heard this lecture over and over. But tonight he cuts straight to the chase:

—Susan. She needs to go to the emergency room at Abington Hospital and be evaluated right away. Can you drive her there?

—Of course. (
It would have been nice if they had spoken earlier in the week, when this could have been handled in a normal office instead of the frigging ER. . . .
)

—Susan. Did you know she has blood in her stool?

—What?

—This is very serious, Susan. Your mother may have a bowel obstruction. It could be a matter of Life and Death.

Ma sits erect on a bed in Abington's ER, managing somehow to look elegant in her hospital gown. People often say we resemble each other, which makes me uneasy and pleased at the same time. I wouldn't mind aging as gracefully as she has, with her limber, trim figure and flashy, close-cropped white hair. She's mostly been blessed with good physical health—I've only had to take her to an emergency room once, eleven years ago, when she slipped on some ice and broke a kneecap. We did spend a lot of time together in an ICU in Florida when my father was dying. Those two events aside, it occurs to me now that the only other time we've been in a room in a hospital together would have to have been forty-eight years ago almost to the day. The night I was born.

We've brought an overnight bag, and Ma's friend Bess has typed up a list of her medications and supplements. But the intake nurse, Jeffrey, wants to hear it from Ma.

—Do you have any allergies?

—Lots, says Ma.

—Like what? How about medications? Antibiotics?

—I am allergic to all antibiotics.

—All?

—Yes.

—How do you know? Did you take them all?

—No, I didn't have to. I took one or two and now I just know.

—Which one or two?

—I don't know.

—What doctor prescribed them?

—I don't remember; it was in Sarasota.

—What happened when you took them?

—I just felt—ah.

Ma gives a discreet little gasp, tilts her head, and looks pained.

I love my mother's description of her near-fatal brush with antibiotics. For years, I have been dreading the moment when some doctor tells her antibiotics are the only way to keep her alive and she refuses them because one time years ago in Florida, some drug nobody made a note of caused her to gasp a little and look pained. What if she is unconscious and they want me, with the Medical Power of Attorney, to approve the use of them? Do I allow it because I don't think her explanation has been valid enough, and possibly cause her accidental death? Or do I withhold them per her wishes, which could kill her for sure?

Which reminds me of Maxwell: a matter of Life and Death. And here we are.

Jeffrey ponders.

—Where are you from? he asks.

—I'm from Philadelphia.

—No, I mean originally—your accent is British, right?

—This is the way I was brought up to speak, by my family and my school, Shipley.

Ma's people were Philadelphia WASPs. They all had nicknames like Gaga, Aunt Tiny, Cousins Buckety and Hebe Dick. Ma's mother was born where her family summered on the Isle of Wight: a few miles off the southern coast of England, conveniently and strategically within very close range of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's summer digs. That whole side of the family had faintly British accents going back many generations. My grandmother somehow managed to pass hers on to Ma and the rest of her children, despite the sketchy amount of time she actually lived with them. This mostly depended on how long my grandmother stayed married to their fathers and whether or not the courts deemed her fit to be left alone with her own children while she was carrying on with dwindled funds and whatever dashing but equally penniless new husband she had taken up with at the time.

Jeffrey releases Ma's blood pressure cuff.

—Shipley? We played against them in high school.

—Really? It's very different now. When I was there it was a girls' school. In the back of one of the alumni bulletins last year, there was a picture of three young women. . . .

(I have a feeling I know where this is going.)

—One of the women was an alumna. She was posing between her new wife and the female chaplain who had just performed their wedding. I wrote the headmistress that it simply
wouldn't do
.

I watch to see how Jeffrey will take this. Not a blink. Good for him.

They do an x-ray and there is no obstruction. They decide the cramping is due to the senna tea Ma took for constipation, and recommend she see a colorectal surgeon as soon as she can. We are free to leave.

On the ride home, we notice it is after midnight, and I point out it is now my birthday, which I had insisted I didn't want to spend with her this year.

Ma crows in delight:

—Right at the time of day you were born!

My birth was not an easy one. There were fifteen years and five miscarriages between Ma's first child (my brother, Felix) and her youngest (me). Two sisters between us survived, thanks to luck and whatever god-awful drugs they used back then to deal with our parents' unusual situation: Ma had that rare Rh-negative baby-killing blood, and Daddy's was Rh-positive. This incompatibility could have been seen as a sign of the greater obstacles they faced as a married couple, but it was particularly problematic when producing children. The babies in this situation tend to inherit their father's more common blood type, which is eventually lethal to the mother. So Ma's body had to automatically produce antibodies after Felix, her first Rh-positive child was born, in order to keep her blood cells intact. These antibodies would then kill off the rest of her Rh-positive babies one by one, her body deliberately rejecting its own offspring in order to save itself.

Ma's always told me she was sick as a dog during her pregnancy with me, and even wished at times that I'd get it over with and abandon ship like the other five miscarriages.

—
But you didn't. I couldn't understand why you were being so stubborn.

By my birthday in 1959, the doctors were attempting a few new tricks. Since my mother's blood and its lethal antibodies would enter my system during delivery and kill me, they swept me away within hours of my birth for two complete transfusions and stuck me in an incubator for almost a week. I can still make out little scars between my fingers and toes from their incisions. I'm a miracle of science.

—Actually, I had already guessed you were
Special
because of my veins.

Ma had been a smoker for years, through all the other pregnancies and births. I guess no doctor in the 1940s or 1950s knew enough to point out that everyone involved might be better off if she'd quit. Still, just after Ma knew she was pregnant with me, she says, when she took a drag of a cigarette the veins on the backs of her hands immediately hurt
like the dickens
. So she stopped cold turkey. Her theory is that Someone was looking out for us, because I was
Special
.

Philadelphia, 1960

According to my mother, it was important for me
in particular
to survive this antibody thing. I've never been entirely clear as to why she thinks I was chosen to make it in 1959, or if such a thing is even possible—this
someone's
supposed plan is taking time to reveal itself. There's one thing we know for sure: My other siblings aren't geographically, physically, or emotionally available right now to drive Ma to the ER for a matter of Life and Death.

I went along with Ma's
Special Susie
theory for a spell. My Montessori school was seen by her as her finest discovery to date as a parent, following years of disappointment in the early education options for my older siblings. My brother and sisters saw the delight she took in my resulting supposed
brilliance
as favoritism. There was a four-year gap between my next oldest sibling and me; I was the prized, irritating baby who sucked up all the attention, and none of them could hide their disgust at seeing me trundled out to recite Shakespeare or sing “The First Noel” for the dinner guests at age three.

It didn't occur to me not to accept the petting and praise until the treatment began to rankle as a teenager. That's when I figured out that distance was optimal. Till then, along with all the religious conversions there had been an awful lot of school switches for one reason or another—not all of them, in fairness, due to my mother's whim—nine moves in total. By a twist of luck, I was shipped out to a Rhode Island boarding school in eleventh grade, followed by college in the Berkshires.

I felt liberated once I was away from home, but not quite liberated enough. My parents separated temporarily after I left, due to intense disagreements, which could have otherwise led to mass casualties (he thought she spent too much, she thought he drank too much—they were both right). I discovered the theatre, and they would each take turns coming to see me perform. Daddy would drive up with one change of underwear and a couple of bottles of vodka stashed in the trunk of his VW beetle. He was pretty self-sufficient, but Ma had a knack for picking the most academically stressful weekend possible and making peculiar demands:

—My bus arrives at eleven tonight.

—I have a ninety-page paper due in the morning.

—That's all right. You can meet me at the bus and help me carry my suitcases to your dorm.

—But that's completely across campus! Why do you want to come to my dorm at eleven at night anyway? Can't you go to the hotel and meet me for breakfast?

—I can't afford a hotel because of your father. Find me a room in your dorm.

—Ma. There's only one empty room in my whole dorm. It's empty because the last person who slept there had a breakdown. They found him in the closet with a dry cleaner's bag over his head and now nobody wants to go near it.

—That will be fine. I'll need a pillow, though, and some sheets. And I see you have a French class the next day. I'll come with you to that.

—Oh my gosh. Please don't come to my class, nobody's parents ever do that. It's tiny and the professor is really boring.

—Nonsense. I'll be fascinated.

(This was a class with only four students. We would sit around a small table with the professor, and he really was very, very boring. Ma came as promised, sat right next to him, and was snoring within the first ten minutes.)