Mother Daughter Me (26 page)

My mother’s actual emotions are impossible to read, but it’s clear that she wants to be polite and she’s Googling her brain for something upbeat to say. “It has a bathroom!” is all that she’s able to come up with. She says this in the high-pitched, little-girl voice she sometimes assumes when she’s feeling uncomfortable.

“Well, I’d hope so,” Anne says, earnestly. Perhaps my mother is trying her best to be positive; perhaps she’s being ironic—hard to tell. In any case, a woman who’s just found it necessary to elevate to celestial glory the presence of a bathroom is clearly not liking what she’s seeing.

The rent for this sliver of a living space is $4,900 a month. But presumably much of it goes to upkeep, which includes three meals a day in the dining room, as well as all housekeeping, utilities, laundry, a parking spot, and van transportation to doctors’ appointments. Unlike the average $500,000 “buy-in” at other places in the area, at Vintage there’s a one-time “community” fee of just $1,000.

San Francisco rents are ridiculously high, so $4,900 a month may be a relative bargain. By the time we get to the “tea room,” I’m beginning to sense that my mother’s playacting is an attempt to mask her dread. We enter the recreation room, where we come upon a very elderly woman in a wheelchair, completely alone in the room. She’s just finished their tai chi class but, unable to operate the wheelchair on her own, has been left stranded and is clearly unhappy about it. Elma greets her with a spirited “Hi, Jean!” but Jean wants nothing to do with us. She is waiting for an attendant to arrive and take her back to her apartment,
and she complains that she has been waiting too long. She looks exhausted and put out.

“Did you press your pendant?” Elma asks her, referring to a large button attached to a lanyard hanging from Jean’s neck. Jean says nothing but looks at Elma as if to say, “Do you think I’m an idiot? Of course I pressed my pendant.”

Elma turns her attention away from the despondent Jean and points to the room’s original murals, which depict children at play. “What a great place to celebrate life,” Anne says. Jean is clearly not in a celebratory mood.

Now Anne is directing our attention to the spotless outdoor courtyard, where the plants are real.

“It looks like a lot of fun,” my mother says, her voice now moving up the scale as if she’s Beverly Sills. Whatever “it” is, it also looks deserted. As we sweep past the indoor and distinctly unreal palms and ferns, I ask Elma where everyone is. She tells us that family and friends come to visit residents every day. But where are they? And where, for that matter, are the residents? Is everyone napping? Or stuck somewhere pressing their pendants, trying to get someone’s attention? Here in this hallway, I half-expect to see a tumbleweed roll by.

Next we get a tour of an already occupied apartment. Barbara, who lives there, is a twig of a woman with osteoporosis so advanced she has taken on the shape of a question mark. Unlike Jean, Barbara is only too pleased to see us, and she invites us to look around. She has moved here from London to be with one of her children, and the apartment is scattered with vestiges from her life overseas—a tasteful rug here, a small antique there. When my mother asks Barbara how long she has lived at Vintage, Barbara defers to Elma, who tells her it has been nearly three months now. Eventually, it’s clear that Barbara isn’t sure what day it is, much less when she arrived.

Our visit is over, and Elma encourages us to return someday soon for another visit and to stay for lunch. We say we’d love to and set off with Anne and Susan for the next place on Anne’s list, Coventry Park, which is closer to downtown. I’m hoping Coventry Park will be better. The lobby is spare but cheerful, with a large arrangement of fresh flowers to the right of the entrance. This time our host is Hannah, a young
woman who explains that the building used to house Red Cross offices but since 1998 has been an independent-living facility.

“It looks just like the Cloisters,” my mother says, referring to the place where Paula had installed Norm eight months earlier. This is not a compliment, I know.

At this facility, Hannah tells us, the average age is “in the eighties.” She doesn’t get more specific than that, and we don’t ask.

These apartments have a full-sized refrigerator in each kitchenette, as well as a two-burner stovetop. Perhaps people in their eighties have better safety records than the youngsters at Vintage.

As the tour of Coventry Park progresses, I see that my mother is now truly miserable. She’s even starting to look aged, transformed into an enfeebled old woman, her back bent, her complexion pale, and her skin so thin it’s almost translucent, fine veins visible everywhere just beneath the surface. Earlier that morning she could have passed for seventy, and she now seems at least a decade older.

Unaware of any of this, Hannah is busy telling us about the glee club, the Scrabble club, the bridge club, and the scenic drives on Sundays. We stop to admire the deserted exercise room, which consists of bare walls and two pieces of equipment whose function I can’t discern.

“This is a nice room,” my mother says in her high-pitched, Pollyanna voice. But it most assuredly is not. When we reach the barber/beauty shop, its emptiness has a particular poignancy. Do people not want their hair styled, their nails done? Where is everyone? If not now, when do these rooms fill with people? The beauty shop is the final straw for my mother, and she delivers a speech she’s apparently been rehearsing in her head for the entire morning, storing up for just the right moment.

“Rather than depressed, I’m heartened,” she says. “I can’t tell you how I’ve shifted from being negative to positive. The experience today will make me want to do this sooner rather than later. But what I think is that I don’t want to move in to a place like this right now. I’m still not psychologically ready. At the moment, I’m—” She pauses, thinking about how to follow this. “I’m very busy.”

The other women are nodding. They may not have heard this particular speech before, but they’ve doubtless heard dozens of versions
of the “I’m not ready” plea, some of them uttered by people like my mother, who aren’t yet in need of this kind of living environment, and others who are but think they’re not. Making as rapid an escape as we can, we thank Anne and Susan for their time and extricate ourselves from the plan they’d made for us to see the remaining two places on their list.

Once we return home, my mother fixes us both some tea. “I just can’t do that yet,” she says. “I need a few years to really live.” Of course, she’s right. Even if the time should come when she’s in need of more support, I can’t imagine my mother at a Vintage or Coventry Park. I can’t see her doing jigsaw puzzles, playing bridge or mah-jongg. And I definitely can’t imagine my musical hermit of a mother singing in the glee club.

I’m still growing accustomed to the idea that my mother is now unambiguously uncoupled. By unambiguously I mean not just between relationships but truly on her own. Until the day Norm went to the Cloisters, my mother was never without a man. When she was younger, she often had a spare or two waiting in the wings. Oddly enough—odd given that we are at such different stages of life—something in both my mother and me has changed, and changed at about the same time, so that we are both breaking our relationship addictions. I’m happy to see Bob, but I’m also just as content to spend many evenings in a row without him. There’s no neurotic need for his attention, no hole to fill that I can’t seem to fill myself. It’s not that I don’t want to see him. It’s that I don’t
need
to see him.

After Scott moved out, Zoë and I kept getting socked: the layoff from the
Times
, the onset of Zoë’s anxiety attacks, her appendicitis, followed by another scary episode, the summer before my mother came to San Francisco, when Zoë had a fever so high that she landed in the hospital again. The hospital staff was sufficiently nervous about what disease she might have that we were both put in isolation, which struck me then as an apt metaphor for our life. Dire as the situation was in the moment, however, something about the fact that I was ultimately able to deal with it—and with all those other crises—without a man in my life seemed to free me from a lifetime of neediness, from a longing for protection within the structure of a relationship. I’m not sure where this
new strength came from. It definitely wasn’t from years of therapy on and off, which failed to help in any fundamental way. And it couldn’t have been meditation, yoga, or solo backpacking trips to the Sierra, because I never did any of that. It was simply years and years of trying it the other way and having it blow up in my face.

My mother has arrived at a similar place. In her inimitable style, she says Norm has “queered” her on men completely.

“But this is a time of life I have to face,” my mother goes on, while filling the teapot. “Old age is very, very depressing; there’s nothing to look ahead to.” She’s waiting for the tea to steep, and now she’s really thinking—swaying from side to side with particular vigor. “But old age is also a kind of liberation, because no one expects much of you anymore.

“I sure don’t want sex,” she says. I snap to attention. “I don’t have a hormone left in my body. But if I came across a nice strapping forty-year-old, I might invite him to dinner and get him to move some heavy stuff and fix a few things,” she says. I chuckle, and she continues.

“You know, I got an email out of the blue a few weeks ago from a man who was in love with me when I was at Radcliffe.”

“Really? Who?” I ask.

“Harvey Braddock. We were in the same physics class at Harvard. He looked me up on the Internet, and he’s been writing to me.”

“Wow, after all these years?” I’m intrigued.

“Yes, he seemed really infatuated. I kept telling him I’m an old lady now, but he refused to believe it. This went on until just the other day. I finally sent him a picture of me to prove it.”

“And?”

“Haven’t heard a thing.”

Now she brings up my father. I’ve noticed this happening more. I’ve also noticed that instead of inveighing against him, her old habit, she grows nostalgic, retells his jokes, recounts adventures they shared, reminisces about the year they spent in England when newly married. Today she wants to describe an elaborate word game they used to play on road trips, as well as a music game that consisted of beating out a rhythm to a song, then guessing the tune. “Did I play that too?” I ask.

“No, you were too little,” she says. “But you heard a lot of music.”
And now she can’t resist a jab at Bob. “And none of it was Barry Manilow.” I let this remark go unaddressed, preferring to focus on the new closeness we’re enjoying.

FOR DINNER THAT NIGHT
, I pick up enough Chinese food for the three of us, though there are no guarantees that we’ll eat together. Zoë does decide to join us, but from the first words out of her mouth it’s clear that she’s not happy about it. I notice that she’s wearing a new sweatshirt I can’t recall having purchased for her, and I ask, “Where did you get that sweatshirt, sweetie?” The response—“Does it matter?”—tells me everything I need to know about her mood.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, whose granddaughter is in Zoë’s high school class, came to speak at Zoë’s school that morning. The senator’s visit made a big impact on Zoë, who is bursting with her impressions, but she refuses to direct any of her conversation to my mother. During the question-and-answer period with the students, Zoë says, she was surprised by Feinstein’s lack of candor and her reflexive support for her party’s policies. “I’ve never seen anyone so guarded and evasive.” I explain to her that politicians, especially those as prominent as Feinstein, are always on guard when they speak in public. And as a Democrat, of course she’s going to defend Obama and his administration.

“That’s a tough sitch, man,” Zoë says, lapsing into teen-speak. My mother has said nothing. I wish I could pass my mother some cue cards under the table, prompting her on how to ask questions of her granddaughter that might elicit a friendly response. But I’ve resigned myself to my mother’s inability to do that.

My mother finishes her dinner in silence, then gets up from the table and, without a word, goes downstairs.

“Is she mad?” Zoë asks.

I roll my eyes.

“What?” she asks, feigning innocence.

“You speak only to me then wonder why she feels excluded enough to leave the room?”

Zoë doesn’t say anything. But on her face I see a struggle. She’s still wrestling with the contrast between the expectations she’d had about
the day-to-day life with her grandmother and the reality of it. Her face wears the same expression I saw so often when the high hopes she had for a relationship with Scott were dashed. I brought Scott into her life, and he shut her out with devastating totality. Then I took my child by the hand and led her, squinting into the sun, into this latest living arrangement, only to see the pattern repeat itself. Zoë bought flowers, made a card, and scrubbed the apartment with similar buoyancy, but, still stinging from the harsh judgment she felt from Scott, she began erecting emotional walls soon after my mother’s first criticism of her music. Her lips don’t move as she takes in what I’ve just said, but her eyes convey all I need to know.

I WAKE UP THE
next morning to the sound of the garbage truck grinding its way down our street and realize I’ve forgotten to put the trash bins out. Still in my pajamas, I tear down the stairs and out the door, hoping to beat the trash guys to our curb. I make it just in time. But as I turn to go back into the house, I see that my car, parked just beyond the driveway, has a broken window. The contents of the car have been rifled but nothing stolen. Still, it’s a mess. There’s glass all over the backseat.

My mother is already in the kitchen, mixing up her signature drink. She’s alarmed by the incident, and she immediately decides to sweep up the fragments. I tell her not to bother, that the glass is tempered and most of it is inside the car. But she hasn’t heard me, and she’s heading out the door, broom and dustpan in hand. “Just for the sake of the shoeless,” she says. By this, of course, she means dogs.