Three Women (10 page)

Suzanne

Suzanne and Elena were eating an early supper of Chinese takeout, before Suzanne took the shuttle to see Beverly in the hospital. “Why don’t you come to New York with me? You’ve always been your grandmother’s favorite. All you’d have to do is throw underwear in a backpack and we’ll fly down together.”

“She wouldn’t want me to see her like that.”

“I think she’s glad for any company. She’s bored to tears.”

Elena threw down her chopsticks. “I can’t do it!” she shrieked. “You know I can’t stand to see death and dying!”

Suzanne cringed. “I’m sorry. I thought maybe you’d gotten over it—”

“I’ll never get over it.” Elena rose and stalked from the table.

Suzanne found the routine of taking the shuttle to La Guardia every weekend and back again Sunday night grueling and depressing, but her presence helped ensure a decent level of medical attention for Beverly. She hoped it cheered Beverly up, although it was difficult to tell. This weekend Beverly was furious. Suzanne could feel the waves of anger coming off her mother, making her feel like an inadequate ten-year-old.

“Mrs. Blume can use her vocal cords,” said the speech therapist. “They are not paralyzed. Her stroke has affected her speech center. But she can relearn to speak, if she would only try.”

“I’ll have a conversation with her about trying,” Suzanne promised. Beverly used to get angry when anyone called her “Mrs.” Blume, for she was proud that she had never married, but here she could not protest.

At least the room was a little less grim. Beverly was installed with two other stroke patients. One was much older than Beverly, a white-
haired woman whose skull had been partly shaven for some procedure. The other was a woman in her forties, who wept constantly. She talked and talked. Suzanne heard the nurse call her Tammy. Tammy rattled off an occasional coherent sentence in the middle of babble and obscenities. She could not seem to stop talking, but she also could not seem to understand a word anyone spoke. The tears seemed to have no connection with what came out of her mouth. “Lazy fucking son of a bitch eat shit!” she would say. “Rover wants a cracker. Done the dirty laundry. Wrong dishes.”

Suzanne sat on an uncomfortable chair beside the bed and talked earnestly at Beverly. She tried to decide the best approach. Sympathy? I know how you’re suffering, Mother…. Beverly hated pity. At least her mother’s face had straightened out. The nurses combed her hair occasionally. Suzanne had brushed it for her an hour ago, but it was standing straight up as if indignant. She decided to be blunt and straightforward. Attack and insist. “Mother, you have to try. You must do what the therapists ask you to.”

Beverly printed in that awkward crooked left hand, BAD DOG.

She stared at Beverly, clutched with fear. Was Beverly going crazy like the woman in the next bed. No. Her eyes were lucid. “You mean, they’re trying to train you like a dog. Obedience training.”

Beverly nodded wildly.

“But, Mother, if they don’t get you to cooperate, you’ll never speak again.”

WANT DIE

“Mother, you aren’t going to die. That isn’t an option. You’ll live for years and years, so you have to learn how to communicate again. You have to get better. You must take seriously what they’re trying to teach you.”

POTTY TRAINING

“Well, do you want to dirty yourself? You’re practically an infant in what your body will let you do. Don’t you want to take back control?”

Now Beverly was weeping, only from the left eye. The other just stared.

It felt so odd. Instead of feeling ten now, she was her mother’s mother giving her childhood instructions: learn to dress yourself, learn to speak so that others can understand you, learn to feed yourself, learn to tie
your shoes and wipe your behind. No wonder Beverly was humiliated and furious. It was unjust that a mature and intelligent woman should have to go through this forced childhood; it was not right that Suzanne should have to play this hectoring role. Sometimes when Beverly glared at her, she wanted to tell her mother, all right, don’t learn a thing. Rot in your bed!

She pulled herself closer. “Look, you’re in great shape compared to What’s her name, Tammy over there. At least you aren’t blathering.”

Beverly actually made a noise that could have been a laugh. She printed, GET ME OUT

“I can’t.” Suzanne felt desperate. “You have to do what all the therapists show you. You have to cooperate, Mother. Or you’ll end up in a nursing home. The occupational therapist, the physical therapist, the speech therapist…”

WANT GO HOME. The conversation was extremely slow because Beverly had to laboriously print the words with her left hand.

“You’d starve to death. You wouldn’t be able to feed yourself, to dress yourself, to get food in. Mother, you have to learn to do these things. You have to. If you really mean to get out of here, you have to work at all the stupid things they try to make you do. You can’t get into college until you finish grade school.”

NEVER WENT COLLEGE

“Actually you went for two years, remember?” She was a little frightened that Beverly didn’t seem to remember that.

NO COUNT NO DEGREE

Suddenly Beverly sat up in the bed and began to sing, “We Shall Overcome.”

Suzanne ran for the nurse. “She can talk now! She can talk!”

The nurse stuck her head into the room and shook her head. “That’s just singing. A lot of them can sing when they can’t talk.”

“But if she can form the words to the song—Listen to her!”

“Don’t ask me why, but often the ones who can’t talk can sing songs they used to know. It’s just that way.” The nurse turned and swished off.

Whenever she tried to question anyone on the staff, from the chief doctor down to the therapists and nurses, she always came upon a blank wall closing off her march into answers. She began to realize it was not
because they were withholding knowledge, but because they didn’t possess it. The brain held secrets in its wrinkled gray convolutions, a mysterious organ as stroke was still a mysterious disease.

“Mother, I understand all this is humiliating, but there’s no going back. You have to obey these therapists and nurses, no matter how condescending they are. You have to try to walk. You have to try to speak. You have to try to hold the spoon. Things will only improve if you stubbornly try to do things, instead of stubbornly refusing.”

NEVER THIS MEAN TO YOU

“Oh, yes, you were.” Suzanne snorted. “But, Mother, the only one who can get you out of this damned place is yourself. Don’t fight me. Don’t fight them. Fight your illness!”

Sunday afternoon, Rachel was there, praying at Beverly’s bedside. Beverly must love that, but it sounded pretty, anyhow. At least it was company for Beverly, and soothing to herself. She could be quiet and bask in a moment of peacefulness. Rachel was blooming. She said she had been hiking with Michael. She tanned better than Suzanne, who freckled. Rachel freckled too, but not as extensively. How glad Suzanne had been when the fashion for a mahogany tan had faded in the epidemic of skin cancer and the destruction of the ozone layer. All through adolescence and early adulthood, she had spent a small fortune on tanning oils trying to look the way Elena looked naturally. All she got was blotchy. Her freckles got freckles.

Suzanne watched Michael, trying to collect a sense of him. He could pray just fine, loud and sure of himself with the Hebrew. His Hebrew was more fluent than Rachel’s. He wasn’t bad-looking, thin, fine-boned, a little awkward in his movements as if his body had grown too fast for him to be used to yet. Beverly was eyeing him too. At one point she caught her mother winking with her good left eye at him. He seemed startled and then forced a smile at Beverly. He was a good boy, to come here from Philadelphia every Sunday with Rachel. She noticed that they seemed to communicate by telepathy like a flock of birds, wheeling at once, turning in the same direction, a unit. She began to suspect this was serious. That kind of communication meant they were sleeping together, perhaps even living together. She never got anything but the answering machine or the roommates at Rachel’s apartment. She was disturbed that Rachel had not confided in her, as she always had.

In the hall outside Beverly’s room, Suzanne proceeded to try to find out. “I assume you’re coming home for Pesach, sweetheart. You can sleep in my room. Would you like Michael to come with you?”

“We thought we’d do first-night seder with you and then second-night with his parents.”

“Ah. The in-laws,” Suzanne said, watching Rachel’s face carefully.

Rachel blushed. She didn’t speak. Whoops! As if by remote control, Michael appeared immediately. “I think Rachel and I better get going, Mrs. Blume.” That Mrs. Blume was her, not Beverly. “We have a meeting of our Torah study group tonight. We’re starting Exodus.”

Suzanne was about to make her own exodus to La Guardia, when one of the hospital social workers buttonholed her. “It’s time to think of what sort of preparations you need to make for your mother.”

“Preparations?” It sounded like a euphemism for burial.

“You have to understand, even if she improves at a significantly faster rate than she has been able to do so far, she will never be able to live alone. Have you considered a nursing home?”

“No! But she has an apartment….”

“She can’t return to it. Mrs. Blume, so far your mother cannot feed or dress or toilet herself. She needs a safe environment, she needs continuing therapy long after she leaves us, and she needs care.”

Suzanne sat on the shuttle, wanting so passionately to be home already she had the feeling she could rise and rocket home at a greater velocity on her own, without the help of the plane. What was she going to do? She could not put Beverly in a nursing home. Would she have to take her back to Brookline? Even when Beverly was healthy, her mother and she had not willingly cohabited since she was seventeen. How could they possibly manage to live together now?

Suzanne had left home to go to college and returned only for an occasional holiday. Every summer, she had gone to summer school. She had zipped through in three years and then gone to law school. Never had she wanted to live with Beverly after she had gotten away from her. The happier parts of her childhood had been when Beverly was off organizing and she was living with her Aunt Karla. Aunt Karla loved having her there. Aunt Karla thought she was wonderful. Aunt Karla cooked succulent meals, cholents, pot roasts, chickens roasted with vegetables, goulashes—for her husband had been a Hungarian Jew who had
died slowly at forty-two after being hit by a fuel truck while unloading boxes on Flatbush Avenue. He had lain in a coma for three months, exhausting Karla’s savings. Her soups filled the house with steam that could make Suzanne drunk. Suzanne felt cherished with her aunt, as if her presence were a gift. She was the daughter Karla dreamed of. When she had gone off to law school, Karla had set about finding a little girl to adopt.

Her mother was apt to open a can of chili or chicken soup and call that supper. Her mother did not think Suzanne was wonderful. Her mother was always telling her how to act with boys, how to dress, how to carry herself. Then Suzanne would purposely slump and pick up a book and pretend to drown out her mother’s voice with the words on the page until in fact she became so involved that she could not hear Beverly telling her what was wrong with her and how to make it right. Beverly was always trying to fix her, to improve her, to organize her. The way Beverly did things was right, and the way that Suzanne wanted them was wrong—morally, aesthetically, politically wrong!

Her mother scoffed at lawyers and said the first thing to do after a revolution was to shoot them all. Her mother considered she had long ago sold out. Her mother thought teaching jurisprudence was a con, something highfalutin and silly. Her mother thought feminist theory was bad politics. Beverly had tried to make her feel guilty first for marrying Sam and then for divorcing him. How could she bring her mother back to Brookline, to a neighborhood Beverly hated to visit because she called it bourgeois?

There was a message from Jake: he would be in town Tuesday. Could she see him? She taught until three. Her sexual harassment case had gone to the jury, who had only taken two days to give her—or rather her client Sherry—a victory. She was still awaiting a decision on the appeal of the murder conviction of Phoebe, who had tried to protect her daughter. She had preparations to make for Pesach, for her classes. She could steal the time from around four-thirty to bedtime, a block of time she communicated about at once.

She was not nervous this time. She longed to fall into him and be replenished. She was exhausted, she was overcommitted, and he was her vacation. She would never say that to him—she doubted there was a man living who would like to feel he was essentially a kind of recreation
program for a woman—but she just wanted to snuff herself out in him for a few hours. She had consulted her gynecologist and put herself on the pill. She was entering menopause, but it seemed a gradual entry, and she could, her gynecologist warned her, still get a nasty surprise and find herself pregnant. She endured occasional hot flashes, but as far as she could tell, she had been too damned busy to actually experience her own menopause. It was creeping past her. When she had a hot flash, she was still astonished and often did not realize till a couple of months had passed that a period had been missed. Her body seemed off on its own adventure, without her mind accompanying it. She felt as if she were being cheated of something other women had begun to study: a colleague in women’s studies was writing a book about the change. With her weekends gone, she was behind in everything she did. Her article languished in her computer. Fortunately, she had overprepared her lectures on constitutional law during the last summer, so she managed to stay afloat.

She had not enjoyed a full night’s sleep in weeks. Her fatigue reminded her of just after Elena was born. After Rachel’s birth, it had been less totally draining, because she had known what to expect, because she had Marta and some help from Sam. With Elena, she had had only herself and a couple of weeks of Aunt Karla’s presence, a miracle in the middle of chaos. But Karla had to go back to teaching school and she was waiting for her own little girl to become available. That was Suwanda, tall, lean, now an acupuncturist in San Diego. Karla had adopted Rosella two years later, as a newborn. For a woman who had never given birth, Karla knew a lot about raising kids.