Habit (20 page)

I spend January 7 tying up yesterday's paperwork mess and taking down our tree, thinking about how excited Ma must be, and wondering if she managed to get into that nun habit on time this morning.

Sometime late in the afternoon, the phone rings.

—Susie.

—Father Basil?

—It's—yes. How's your mother?

—What? I thought she was with you.

—No, I had to stay at the church. I'll try to get over to the hospital tonight.

—The
hospital
?

—Didn't Seraphima talk to you?

—
Who?

It takes a while to piece this together from different eyewitness accounts, which include Father Basil, Ma, and a soft-spoken young church member named Seraphima. Seraphima's been leaving me a series of updates on the cell, which I won't pick up till the next day because my phone is turned off in my purse:

Ten-fifteen a.m.:
Susie? This is Seraphima. Mother's had an accident but she's all right. My number is 267-555 . . .

Twelve noon:
Susie? Mother Brigid's hip seems to be broken, but her arm may not need surgery and the doctor is talking to her now. Can you call me? God bless you. . . .

Two p.m.:
Susie? I'm with Mother at the hospital, can you please call us? Christ is born, it's Seraphima, and my number is . . .

It seems Mother Brigid (in full costume) was delivered safely and efficiently by Babbie's driver, a retired gentleman named Hopper who was missing a leg (really:
Hopper,
with one leg, on crutches).

Saint Mark of Ephesus has a big open worship space with no pews. You're supposed to stand. How they put up with this for hours at a time, I'm not really sure, but apparently it's not unusual for worshipers to come and go and generally mill around. They do have seats on the perimeter for the elderly, and that's where Father Basil immediately put Mother Brigid when Hopper went crutching back to his car. Ma was a lot earlier than expected, and Father Basil didn't want her to get into any trouble, so he instructed her to sit still and not go anywhere.

—But you know your mother, Susie. She does what she wants no matter what you tell her.

The fall occurred ten minutes into the Nativity service when Mother Brigid of Carlisle defied orders, got up, and started bumbling around fixing and lighting some candles near the front of the church (
of course, the Baumards' rapprochement!
). Apparently, she tripped on the hem of her voluminous nun habit, and splat.

Ma is now in the emergency room at Carlisle Hospital, two hours from home. She is in no shape to be brought back here for the surgery. A hip
and
a shoulder are broken. Some doctor I've never laid eyes on, Winkleman, wants my permission to operate first thing tomorrow morning. So Ma is looking at an extended stay.

On the phone, Ma is giddy from painkillers:

—I did
not
trip on my habit. I just wasn't steady on my feet. Somebody's candle had fallen on the floor; it was still lit and nobody noticed it. I could have told someone, but instead I got up to fix it myself.

—Oh, Ma . . .

—And then I decided to light my own candle, and when I turned I stumbled and landed on the anbvon—

—What's an
anbvon
?

—It's the platform in front, where the priest stands during the service. I was right by Father Nectarios when it happened because that's where the candles are as well. I was so thrilled to be there, I must not have been thinking straight. It was very stupid of me. Impulsive. You can't be impulsive like that. And Susie, Hopper may be missing one leg, but it's only the
left
leg, so his driving is perfect.

—So what did Father Nectarios do?

—Well, the service had already started, and he was
so marvelous,
he didn't miss a beat of liturgy at all. Susie, it was amazing, he was saying all the prayers and I lay there on the floor next to him and said
OUCH!
and
DON'T MOVE ME!

—They tried to get you
up
?!!

—No. They called the ambulance. We waited till the paramedics came to put me on the stretcher and
that hurt.
I'm afraid I made a lot of noise then, saying
OUCH, OUCH, OUCH
, but that Father Nectarios, he is
amazing
. He just chanted louder and
then
before they wheeled me out, he asked me if I wanted communion because it was time for communion.

—That was thoughtful of him.

—Yes, it was. He gave me communion right there on the stretcher by the altar and the candles. And Seraphima put a little prayer rope in my hand, and off I went. It was a lovely service from what I could tell; I wish you could have seen it. But Seraphima's here and Matushka and I'll be all right, don't feel you have to come right away.

—Of course, I'm coming. I don't know how long I'll be able to stay, but I'll get on the road the minute the boys go to school tomorrow.

I look up Doctor Winkleman on the Internet while he's with me on the phone. I have never heard of the schools he attended. His group is called the Susquehanna Clinic, which doesn't exactly have a reassuring urban ring to it, more of an ominous
Deliverance/Dueling Banjos
twang that makes me think of creepy mutant people in the wilderness with Burt Reynolds's broken leg bone poking out of his skin. Winkleman does appear to have two eyes, two ears, a nose, and a mouth in his picture, though, which are all essential for any good surgeon, and he explains the situation very clearly and patiently.

I call Felix, who quickly gets an old buddy from Yale in orthopedics to bestow his blessing on the proposed procedure. So I give surgery the go-ahead, cancel the aides, update David, arrange a ride home from school and dinner for the boys tomorrow, email the siblings, post the bills, drag the tree out to the curb, and pray. For another Orthodox miracle.

T
HERE'S THIS
G
ERMAN MOVIE
David and I love:
Run Lola Run
.

Franka Potente (in a wife-beater undershirt and light green pants, sporting a big tattoo around her belly button and an awesome chin-length neon-red hair mop) is a young woman named Lola. In the opening scene, Lola gets a phone call from her boyfriend, Manni. He's frantic because he has lost a satchel containing 100,000 Deutschmarks that belongs to his crime-lord boss. She has twenty minutes to get the money and save his life.

Ready, set, go!
Lola races to borrow the money from her banker father, dodging obstacles in the streets of Berlin along the way (an ambulance, a barking dog, workers carrying a huge pane of glass across the street). When her father refuses to help, she rushes back to Manni just in time to help him rob a store. They flee the police, and Lola is fatally shot in the chase. Just as she is about to lose consciousness, Lola says,
Stop!
Then the film starts all over again at the beginning with the same desperate phone call from Manni.

This time, Lola runs in the same direction but handles each obstacle a little differently, thereby altering the outcome of a series of background stories. Things go even worse with her father, and this time Manni gets fatally injured, run over by the same ambulance Lola passed before. When Manni dies, they're back at the beginning. It's like a video game, with Lola and Manni using up their lives: Super Mario or Lara Croft trying to beat the level.

I'm thinking Lola's neon-red hair is doable for me. Something to add fun and flair to the rat race I've found myself in.

After the hospital released her, my mother ended up in a rehab center not far from the church. I've made the mad dash to Carlisle four times in the last three weeks. I drop the boys at school and then I drive home, do the dishes, check my lists, and load up with assorted provisions (things Ma needs from her apartment, and especially food: the menu at the rehab place, Cloverfield, is limiting for a nonmeat eater). I gas up the car, drive two hours on the highway, get off the highway, bolt a quick bowl of soup at Panera, order some hot and fattening takeout for Ma, and drive through the farmlands to Cloverfield:
Run Susan run
.

I allow three hours at Cloverfield tops. I unload the stuff into my arms, stagger with it down the hall to the skilled nursing wing, and dump it in Ma's room. I then scurry back and forth between Ma and whoever I have to meet with there: therapists, nurses, social workers, business office people, whatever it takes to make sure Ma has what she needs to get better. Then it's time to rush home: through the farms, onto the highway
, run Susan run,
to pick up the boys in time for dinner and homework.

This extended stay in Carlisle has pluses and minuses. The distance is rough on me. But Ma is happy to be close to the church and all her friends, and it's mutual. They've been very gracious to me, too. Father Nectarios is a nurse in real life, so he really knows the ropes. He steered Ma to the right surgeon at the hospital, and helped me narrow down the list of options for rehab facilities. Father Basil and his Matushka even offered to put me up if I was sleeping over, and everyone seems to hope that Mother Brigid will stay permanently. I'm not sure how I feel about that and neither is Ma, but we're keeping our minds open. It's the bright side of a tough situation: She doesn't get to see these people much as a rule, and she's seeing plenty of them now. I get the impression the church members have been thronging in for audiences, which is a great comfort. Photini says they treasure Mother Brigid here, because she's literally the only monastic in Pennsylvania. Their convents and monasteries are in other states, and if Ma had been younger and more active, she would have gone to live in one. Apparently, the people here in Carlisle feel blessed to have unlimited quality time with my little old mother. It's sort of interesting to find I'm connected to a celebrity besides my husband.

Today there's a Care Management meeting at Cloverfield, and I'm invited. Ma's not totally happy with the therapy, and I've got questions about health insurance. So
ready, set, go!

I get there by twelve and do the stagger thing past the front desk with my mountain of stuff. There's a tiny woman by the nurse's station peering into a huge birdcage with several parakeets. Her eyes are sort of rolling around in her head, and she and the birds are all screeching rapturously at one another. Ma's nearby, in her wheelchair, determinedly reading the paper. There is an untouched bowl of pasta on a tray at her side.

The physical differences between that Ma the night before Christmas, in bed with her pink shawl, and this Ma at Cloverfield are becoming a bit of a worry for me. She's starting to look more and more like a molting, disheveled
Whistler's Mother
. Her hair is growing; it's at that awkward in-between stage. Along with getting used to Ma's weight loss (more pronounced each time we see each other), I track the progress of this wispy pure white nun hair that will grow and grow till I don't know what—it's trailing off behind her. Soon we'll have to figure out a way to put it up.

On the way to therapy, we meet a favored aide I've been hearing about, whose name tag reads
Fran
.

—This is
Frohn
ces, says Ma. (Ma has an aversion to certain nicknames.)

—Oh, lah-dee-dah, I'm
Frrrohn-
ces! says Fran, flattered. I can tell she likes Ma (she calls her Mother Brigid, of course).

We discuss the laundry situation, which seems to baffle not just us but everyone in the facility—nurses, aides, residents, and even a furtive guy in the hall who eventually, when cornered, did admit to Felix last week that he was the laundryman.

Washing clothes is tricky. Mother Brigid must wear soft, black, non-itchy cashmere, which means Dry Clean Only. This makes
Frohn
ces snort, but we settle on her using the delicate cycle in the laundry machine and hanging dry instead of sending the woolens out to be destroyed by the furtive laundry guy. This is a huge favor she'll be doing for Ma and not one of the included services.

(Felix, it should be noted, came up trumps. He threw a small fit, at first, about the disruption to his annual post-New Year's diet and exercise regimen. He likes to cut out his wine and spend up to three hours a day on the rowing machine, working his way through all the art house movies on his Netflix queue. To his credit, he got over himself pretty quick and voluntarily drove down through the snow right after Ma settled in. He spent three days in the Sleep Inn down the road from Cloverfield, figuring out ways to make Ma comfortable and giving me updates on his cell phone.

—
Suse, this place is decent but it's fuckin' weird. They have a mangy old long-haired dirty white cat that sits on the couch in this room called the Activity Room, and it never moves. I thought it was stuffed! I tiptoed in to check out the computer, and there was a guy up at the front giving a lecture to about ten or fifteen old farts just sitting there in a semicircle in their wheelchairs, all snoring their heads off.
)

Ma's therapist is a strapping woman who appears to be trying to telegraph some level of frustration to me. I sense a comradely history of dysfunctional, unresolved conflict. This can't be good. Ma's been here less than two weeks and already the staff are rolling their eyes at her the way I do. . . .

There is a sort of floppy woman slumped on a low padded table in the corner of the room. She's being gently manipulated by two very solicitous therapists, who are trying to get her to sit up straight. She has amazing inner poise, but keeps listing back and to the side like she has no concept of up or down. This makes the therapists laugh, and they pull up a full-length mirror so she can see what she's doing wrong.

—Do you see yourself?

—Unfortunately, yes, she says, with a beautiful German accent.

There's also a tiny woman over in another corner, facing a wall. Her back is so crumpled that it might as well be only about three inches long. She's using a machine where her arms have to pedal like a bicycle. She continues to pedal away extremely slowly the whole afternoon. None of the therapists seem to realize she is there.