Habit (4 page)

The deal I offered Ma for the impounded Camry was wily but appropriate. To her credit, Ma saw the sense in it. Operation Ma would bail the car out of jail as long as she would take a senior citizen's driving test to see if she was safe on the road. This seemed more than fair to her, mostly because Doctor Maxwell warned me on the phone that unfortunately most of his elderly patients managed to take this test and keep their credentials even though their families were sure they would not.

As far as I was concerned, Ma's driving was no worse than it had been when I was a child. This had nothing to do with her advanced age, but I figured at least if someone else judged her to be good to go, any resulting disaster would not be on my head.

The testing man, incoherent on the phone after Ma's exam:

—I have never in my life—the other cars honking, I'm having these flashbacks, I tried to save us, but she kept calling me an ass.
Don't be an ASS
, she said. What is WRONG with her?? And I wanted to get my door open and JUMP for it, but she didn't STOP, she just—oh. I'm sorry, I'm going to tell her doctor the truth, I can't be unethical, I'm—oh, oh, I have to hang up, I'm not well . . .

Doctor Maxwell, later that afternoon:

—Susan Susan Susan.

—I know.

—Get rid of the car. And it might be a good idea to have your mother checked out for mental impairment.

All this was going on in between trips to the Center for Infectious Diseases to get the kids' typhoid vaccines and malaria pills, and tense spats with our college-bound senior, Eliza, who wouldn't even look at schools in Ohio for some reason (what's wrong with Ohio?), let alone anywhere in an earthquake or hurricane zone. I was close to the breaking point.

For me, Ma's car trouble was simply an illustration of values she seemed to share with all those people cheering for George W. Bush. Pre-emptive war was necessary. Taxes, bank regulations, and parking tickets were not. And as soon as they turned eighteen, Ma's grandsons would need to lay down their lives defending her right to ignore them. Or something like that. It was a last straw type of thing, and I found I just couldn't deal.

It was the eve of the midterm elections in 2006. The Republicans were out of favor with most of the country, but there was that stubborn 30 percent still hanging on, and one of them was my newly indoctrinated neocon bible-thumping mother. What happened to Ma and me was classic. We saw it all around us: Our relationship, tenuous enough already, fractured along the red state/blue state divide. I told Ma that I would figure out what to do with the battered car, pay the bills, run the errands, and keep her safe, because I may be a bit of a brat but I was a Democrat brat and that's what good little Democrats do.

But I couldn't sit across the dinner table from Ma and smile just yet. Birthdays and all that pseudo-harmonious chitchat and folderol were not going to be happening this year.

Ring. Ring. Doctor Maxwell.

R
ING.
R
ING.

—Hello?

—Hi, Ma.

—Oh, how are you?

—Okay, how are you?

—All right. There was a fire alarm in the middle of the night.

—Oh my gosh, did you have to go down the stairs?

—No. I called them, and they said
don't you worry about it, dear.

Ma lives on the tenth floor of a nice, haphazardly managed building with a temperamental fire alarm system. It's what's known as a Nork, or Naturally Occurring Retirement Community because, with its twenty-four-hour doorman and easy handicapped access, it attracts a lot of senior citizens.

When the fire alarm goes off, sometimes the elevator shuts down. This unnerves older people on the top floors. Their general tactic is to ignore any alarms and cross their fingers. It's been hard since New Year's Eve several years back, when an especially ancient and addled resident left an electric heater unattended and burned her apartment to cinders. Ma was celebrating at our house so she missed all the excitement. Her friends down the hall, Dorothy (Lou Gehrig's disease) and Bess (mysteriously accident-prone) described a harrowing trip down ten flights of stairs to join a milling throng of disoriented residents waiting for buses to drive them to temporary housing. You can't assume the alarms will always be false, and they happen a little too often for it to be fun.

—You didn't check the emergency channel on the TV?

—No I couldn't remember how to do that.

When they wired the building for cable, they gave everyone a special converter to connect with the camera in the front entrance. It doesn't make any emergency announcements; you just see what the front lobby looks like in real time. It's really to check out visitors before allowing them to come up. During fire alarms, you can try to read the attendant's body language: If he is running back and forth and his clothes are on fire, or if there are men trotting past with hoses and axes, it would be good to evacuate. Better than nothing, but the technique for getting the front desk on the screen is not senior-friendly. I find this counterproductive: How do they expect someone to start twiddling obscure buttons on their TV when a siren is blasting and they are rattled enough already?

—Oh, Ma.

—I know I know—Josie's on the other line let me tell her to get off
—

Click.

I wish the phone company had never offered Ma call-waiting. She just can't let it go. If someone's trying to call she absolutely HAS to beep through; she can't bear letting her answer service pick up the call. Ma's friend Josie is actually my age; she has been beside herself about Ma's health all week—she lost her own mother when she was in high school and she and Ma have a special artist's bond.

Josie is one of a significant collection of people from my generation who, unlike my siblings and me, seem to truly appreciate my mother. Ma's more restrained, more able to resist the strong urge to correct and manage when she's dealing with friends as opposed to family. People like Josie seem to feel safe turning to her for advice. She must bother them, too, from time to time, but she doesn't hit their sore spots the way she can with her own offspring, still scarred from when we were tiny and vulnerable. Josie can laugh with Ma, make dates for tea, and confide. This has always confused me, but I do feel for her now and her urgent need to make sure Ma's getting the right medical help. If I were Josie, I'd be a little hurt to have Ma click in only to say she's got someone more important on the other line. . . .

Click.

—Well, I've been reading the book your sister sent me about how the intestine is the other brain and you know Tina had a bag and Whatsisname killed himself and I'm sure there's some emotional source for this.

—Yes, Ma, I've heard cancer can have an emotional source.

It's cancer.

We really didn't see that coming. We followed the ER's instructions and went to a colorectal specialist Josie recommended. He took me aside in the waiting room while Ma was still dressing after her exam, and told me he'd found a plum-size tumor on her rectum. There will be a colostomy bag in her future. For some reason, the doctor decided it's up to me to figure out when to tell Ma more specific details: They may have to remove an awful lot of her apparatus, and the bag may not be just for the recovery period. It may be permanent. This insider information weighs heavy on me.

We've been getting all the tests done. My favorite was the colonoscopy, scheduled as a priority rush on a morning that turned out to be icy. There's nothing like the challenge of driving on black ice somewhere you've never been before, dodging skidding cars and accident scenes, when your passenger is an elderly person in pain, on a massive laxative prep solution designed to empty her colon that hasn't quite finished its job yet. We're still collecting opinions, but it looks like it's going to be a long, hard slog, this cancer. Ma seems to be handling it with determination.

—Well, yes, and I think we all need this book now—it's so terribly important—you and David and Felix must all read it right now
—

—Ma, stop it, this is what you always do, trying to force some new idea you've got that can help
you
onto everyone else—remember YOU are the patient at the moment.

There is a pattern. Ma's voracious intellectual curiosity and zest for living has taken her down many interesting paths. When she finds something along the way, something she wants to pursue, her first impulse (before she even knows what the details are) is to call up the family and try to bully us all into it with her. This can be tricky, because quite often the thing she's latched onto is actually something we all might benefit from. But it's just too irritating to admit that.

My sister Colette lives in England. She has discovered she's good at finding books Ma might be interested in. Now they have this handy two-person book club on the phone, which fills the intervals between shouting matches. I see where we're headed with this new one: If you have rectal cancer, you need Colette's book. If you have trouble sleeping, you need Colette's book. If your teenager is moody, he needs Colette's book. If your friend is going through divorce, she needs the book. If you can't find your car keys, if you have a hangnail, the book, the book, the book. It will get so incessant that I won't want to tell her anything at all because she won't be satisfied until I have read the book from cover to cover and applied it to every aspect of my life and gotten Oprah to do a show about the frigging book.

I wonder if Josie's been given a copy of Colette's book yet?

And then, exhausted from dutifully adopting the complicated diets and exercises and meditations the book recommends, having outfitted my house with all the equipment that goes with it (the herbal remedies, the special pillows) not necessarily because I want to but just to keep her off my back, I'll find out Ma never read past the first chapter. She's realized that actually Colette's book was written by a Freemason; it may be subtly Satanic in nature and not a good idea at all.

When I was three, Daddy's drinking was hard to ignore. My parents had married young, on the eve of World War II. It's difficult to say exactly why
they
thought they should be together, but I think their parents approved of the match because each had something the other's family found desirable: Ma was a genuine Old Philadelphia aristocrat, a gifted artist, and beautiful. Daddy had an exotic name, a promising career in the law, and family money.

They never really connected, though. When Felix was little, Ma decided having more children might fill in the vacuum between them, which was hard work because of all the miscarriages. By the time she finally had fleshed out their collection of offspring to four, she realized her plan had backfired, and they were stuck. She was understandably miserable, but too well disciplined in discretion to dare talk to anyone about personal problems. So she went and unburdened herself to the Carmelite nuns, because she found out they take a vow of silence and therefore can't divulge anyone's secrets. This led to a full-scale conversion, and we all had to leave the Episcopal Church and become Roman Catholics because the Catholics had The Answer To Everything.

In the late 1960s, when I was nine, The Answer To Everything became health food and vitamins. Ma doled out chewable vitamin C instead of candy on Halloween and filled our cupboards with things like soya rice cakes and those nasty little lozenges with the sesame seeds in them that bond permanently to your teeth. I eventually stopped inviting anyone for dinner, because it was painful to watch friends like Margaret, skinny as a twig and a seriously picky eater, not allowed to get up from the table until she had gagged down a plate of marinated salmon (that's raw marinated salmon, way before anyone knew about sushi), and okra sprinkled with brewer's yeast, with buckwheat groats on the side. Forget dessert. Colette's birthday cake one year was an uncooked squash with a candle stuck in it.

When I was ten, The Answer To Everything was the Power of Positive Thinking. There was a book. She'd recite affirmations like
whatever I eat, I get thinner and thinner; I get thinner and thinner whatever I eat
. And whenever we said anything negative, she would make us say
cancel-cancel!
which was like tossing verbal pinches of spilled salt over our shoulders.

Then there was Astrology and the Montessori Method, Transcendental Meditation and Silva Mind Control—that was a six-week course we all had to take, something about going to your subconscious level to make things all better. Occasionally, she'd fall in with people whose motives were a little suspect—she went through a period where if we knew what was good for us, we all had to sell our homes and move into Buckminster Fuller-style geodesic domes. She got so into those domes that she rented a conference center and had some guy come in and pitch the concept to all her friends. Whatever her new thing was, it was usually something that might have been useful in moderation, but Ma was so pushy and obsessive, and it had been crammed so far down our throats that we would come to loathe the subject and not want to have anything to do with it even if our lives depended on it. When you think you have The Answer To Everything, you should just keep it to yourself for God's sake.

Ma laughs.

—That's right. I'm the patient, so what about me?

—Did you call to get your thyroid medicine renewed at the pharmacy?

—Not yet because I just woke up because I was up all night with the fire alarm.

Today we'll get our second opinion from Scott Weissman. A friend in the colorectal field says Weissman is supposed to be the very very best, someone you would allow to operate on your own mother.

It should be noted that Ma's level of tolerance for doctors with suspiciously non-Christian names seems to have improved. She is staying calm and focused (focused for her), listening carefully to what everyone has to say, and letting me steer the ship. This is not the attitude I would have expected. When close friends or family have cancer, Ma scolds from the sidelines if they pick traditional treatment over holistic alternatives. When Daddy had an aneurysm and opted for emergency surgery toward the end of his life, she was against it, but didn't get there in time to stop them. She felt she was proven right when, to all our distress, he proceeded to spend his final three weeks in the ICU instead of bouncing back to life the way the surgeon had predicted.