Losing It (21 page)

“Hello!” Her mother’s left hand was making futile rolling motions, over and over, where the window roller would have been on an older-model car. The man looked up, started to walk over. “Oh, here he is!” her mother said. “I
can’t
get this window. Blast it! Here he is!”

Julia leaned across, waved to the man dismissingly. “It’s okay. It’s all right!” He turned his ear in question, motioned to her mother to put down the window.

“I can’t get it. Oh, this is so annoying!”

“Fine,” Julia said angrily and she lowered the window from the driver’s side.

“Hi, there,” the man said. He had a day’s black stubble on his cheeks.

“Yes, hello,” her mother said, very politely. “And how are you?”

“Fine,” he said, and smiled. “Do you need help?”

“No thanks,” Julia said.

“Well, it’s very kind of you to offer,” her mother said.

“Where are you going?”

“We don’t really know.”

“It’s all right,” Julia said.

“We’ve been driving for hours and hours, and we thought
you
might know.”

There was a horn blast from behind them. The light had turned green.

“Thank you. Thanks!” Julia said and drove off, pushing the button to raise her mother’s window. “We’re almost there,” she said hotly.
“Just relax.”

“How can I relax? Honestly! I don’t know where we’re going, you won’t ask directions, you won’t tell me anything!”

She’s not in her right mind, Julia thought. She always thrived on crisis anyway, there’s no need to take the bait. Julia focused on the road ahead.

“Why can’t we ask somebody?” her mother pleaded. Then, “There’s someone! Stop! Stop!” And she started to pull on Julia’s arm.

“You’re going to cause an accident! Just stay in your seat, please!” Julia didn’t think it would work but her mother took her hand away suddenly, sat back, and made a little miffing noise with her nose. Now they were stopped at another light.

“I don’t understand any of this,” her mother said bitterly.

“I know. I know. But if you could just trust …”

“We’re driving around aimlessly for hours and hours –”

“We have been driving precisely fifteen minutes.” Don’t respond! Julia thought even as she was blurting it out. How could she not, she wondered? Confused as this woman was, altered almost beyond recognition, those blue eyes still reached deep into Julia’s childhood, those thin shoulders had carried her long before memory, that frightened, uncertain gaze still belonged to her mother.

“And we don’t know where we’re going. Everything is strange and unrecognizable. I have never been able to get you to ask for
directions. Never! This is so typical!” Her hand was making the circling motion again, turning in the air fruitlessly. “And you are such an ass sometimes. Drinking in front of the children!”

“What?”

“I asked you not to, but you wouldn’t listen!”

Julia stopped herself from responding. The light turned green. It was slow traffic, late Saturday afternoon in the Glebe, an old residential neighbourhood near downtown. The sidewalks were crammed with shoppers, young mothers pushing strollers, elderly couples looking in the shop windows, traffic stopped at every block. Julia edged the van forward into the intersection, but she wasn’t certain she could clear in time for the next light because of a bottleneck up ahead.

“You never took me seriously,” her mother said. “As long as I had your martini ready, that was all that mattered!”

Inching forward. The light turned red and they weren’t quite through the intersection. But there was nowhere else to go. Nothing was moving up ahead. A pick-up truck turned left and crowded in behind them.

“I think I can ask this man!” her mother said suddenly, and then the door was open.

“Hello! Hello!” her mother said. She waved, then wrestled with the seatbelt, which would not let go, then waved again. “Excuse me, sir, could you help us?”

“Close the door!” Julia snapped. She leaned over her mother’s lap but the door was too far to reach.

“We’ve been driving for hours and hours!” her mother announced.

Julia threw open her own door and ran around the front of the van to her mother’s side.

“What’s the problem?” the man asked. He was an older, fairly short gentleman in a black felt coat.

“Hours! Just hours! And we can’t find our way!”

“It’s all right. It’s fine!” Julia said and pushed her mother’s arm and leg back in the van, locked and shut the door.

“Where do you want to go?” the man asked.

“She has Alzheimer’s. I
know
where I want to go,” Julia said and sprinted around to her side again. Cars were honking behind them; the traffic had cleared ahead and the light had turned green. She drove another block with her mother fighting for release from her seatbelt. Finally Julia parked the van on the side of the road and turned off the engine.

“We are almost home,” she said through tense lips.

“I don’t believe you!”

“Look at me.” And she held her mother’s shoulders. “Look at me!” But her mother’s eyes wouldn’t be still, they roamed constantly from one thing to the next. Julia took a deep breath, tried to calm down. “Look at me. Relax. Look at me.”

“You must think I’m crazy!”

“No, you’re sick, that’s all. But you have to trust me. I know what I’m doing. I trusted you when I was little. When you were taking care of me, I trusted you. Now you have to do the same with me.”

“It’s all gone strange!”

“Please, stop moving your head for just a moment. You have to look at me.” Julia tried to steady her but her mother fought it, grew even more panicky. “It’s all right. Shhhhh. Be still.”

“
Why won’t you let me out
?”

“Shhhh.”

“I need to get out! I can’t just sit here for the rest of my life!”

“Fine. It’s all right. We’ll get out.” Julia unbuckled her mother, unlocked the doors. Now her mother couldn’t figure out how to open the latch so Julia went around to her side and let her out. “We’ll just walk for a bit.”

“Let’s not waste any more time!” Her mother put her head down and started to walk along the sidewalk. Julia closed the door and had to hurry to catch up with her, take her arm. They covered a block, then came to a red light, which her mother didn’t seem to recognize.

“We have to wait a minute,” Julia said.

“Well! What in God’s name for?”

So they crossed at right angles with the green and continued along a back street. The houses were formidable age-darkened brown brick structures that pushed the boundaries of the small lots, with tiny huddling front lawns and gardens sombrely waiting for winter. Her mother didn’t look at any of it, was simply intent on walking with her head down in any direction. Julia steered them around a full block and back onto the main street. It was a grey, chilly afternoon and the coat she’d brought for her mother wasn’t going to keep her warm long.

“Here’s the van,” Julia said. “Why don’t we get in?”

“Oh! I thought we’d never get there!”

Julia opened the door, helped her mother into her seat, buckled her securely and shut the door. Then she went around to the driver’s side and climbed in, hit the autolock, put her key in the ignition.

“Where are we going now?” her mother asked.

“Home to my house. We’re very close – five minutes. Can you last that long?”

“But we’ve been driving for hours and hours! Endlessly! I think we should ask directions!” Her hand had started the rolling motion again, and she was looking out the window for someone to bother.

Julia pulled into traffic again, was halted immediately at another red light.

“Just hours and hours! Nobody listens to me! You never listened to me! You and your stupid poker nights! I told you not to go, but you lost hundreds, hundreds of dollars! And the stains on the rug! That was Mother’s rug, she got it in Belgium before the war. But you didn’t care. Anything to get out of the house. You said you weren’t going to bet. And you came back with holes in your pockets, the windows all broken. What was I supposed to think? In front of the children and everything. The drink is ruining us! And you know it!”

The light turned green, but now there was the sound of a siren behind them. Julia looked in the mirror – fire trucks. She pulled over into a metered parking space. Her mother was rattling away, head down, talking just for the sake of it, it seemed, the same way she’d walked around the block.

“You told me there’d be plenty of money for a vacation this year, but there wasn’t, was there? You gambled it away! Admit it! You gambled and you drank and now there’s nothing left but holes in the furniture. I asked you to fix the sewing table. You said that you knew someone. That was last month! Now I find holes and more holes, and what have you done? You went down the sewer just like your pals at the club. You’re all the same.”

Julia turned off the engine. The fire trucks roared past.

“I went down to the cleaners to pick it up and they said, ‘I’m sorry, madam.’ I looked and there were holes all through it. It was awful. I didn’t know what to say.”

“Mom,” Julia said gently, but her mother didn’t seem to hear.

“And then there was that other thing, you know what it is, that thing -”

“Mother
!” Julia barked, suddenly aware that it was her own mother’s voice she was using, the clarion call to lunch, to stop
fighting with her brother, to pay attention this instant. Her mother looked up suddenly, her eyes wide, amazed.

“Shhhh,” Julia said, and put her hand over her mother’s mouth, very gently, as if she were stilling a trembling limb. Her mother pulled back slightly but didn’t say anything. Julia started to tickle her down the side of her face. It was one of the things she always loved, light tickles. “I had a dream the other night,” Julia said softly, near tears, this was so difficult. But the tickling helped. Her mother stopped squirming somewhat, made pleasant, almost cooing noises in her throat. “Close your eyes, Mom.”

“But there were holes everywhere -”

“Lenore!” Julia said. “Close your eyes.”

“Everywhere …,” her mother said again. But almost dreamily. She closed her eyes.

“Do you remember the gentle place?” Julia asked. “I was a little girl in the gentle place, you were the mommy. Do you remember?”

“This is lovely,” her mother said.

“Whenever I had nightmares you’d come sit by me in bed. You’d tickle up and down my arms and hands, my neck and scalp and back. Just like this. Do you remember the gentle place?”

“Mmmm.”

“It’s a meadow on the edge of the woods. In a clearing. You used to tell me all about it. We’d walk through the woods and then emerge in the sunshine. The grass was so soft, we’d have to take off our shoes and walk barefoot down to the willow tree. Do you remember the weeping willow? So big. The leaves rustling in the wind, the sunlight dappling through. It had magnets, that tree, you just
had
to walk to it, lie down underneath it, the grass was so soft. There’d be the heat of the sun
and the cool of the shadows, and the sounds, do you remember the sounds?”

“Mmmm,” she said, rocking slightly, her head drooping. Just like Matthew. So suddenly running out of energy.

Gentle fingertip tickles along her mother’s papery cheek and neck, along the edges of her ears, gone soft with age like vegetables slowly wilting in the fridge. In a few minutes she was asleep, her head slumped forward, jaw still absently working up and down as if worrying something out of constant habit and need.

Julia stopped talking, continued to tickle so gently her mother’s face and neck. Just barely brushing.

“Thank you,” Julia whispered. “Thank you for the gentle place. All those years ago. It’s wonderful to still have it.”

Julia restarted the engine, turned slowly, eased back into traffic. “Huh!” Her mother said suddenly, startled awake.
“Where are we?”

“Oh no!”

“I don’t recognize anything! For heaven’s sake! Where are we going?” And she started to fiddle with her seatbelt clasp again.

“Home!
My
home! Oh, Mother,” Julia said.

16

B
ob shoved the padded lace bra and panties, the corset, slip, pantyhose, and the latex vagina into a small black plastic Central Heights Hotel garbage bag, and stuffed the package in the wastebasket once and for all. Then he emptied his broken briefcase, put all his papers and books in his main luggage, and leaned the briefcase carcass against the wastebasket, since it wouldn’t fit in. He did a quick last tour of the room to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything: checked around the bed, behind the drapes, in the closet, in the bathroom. Then he returned to the bed, zipped up his bulging suitcase, and put on his coat. He glanced at his watch: 6:10. It was growing dark outside already. It would be good to get going, to put this horrible trip behind him. Julia would be surprised, elated to see him home a day early. Saturday night! He’d pull up by taxi, it would be like that time he came back from Vancouver, after his flight had been delayed by a freak snowstorm. He’d had a cold for two weeks before that, she wouldn’t let him near her, but when he’d walked through the door that time she burst like a dam, they stood in the hallway and kissed and kissed, starving for one another.