FOURTEEN
April 27, 1995
The Oregon Coast
I am trussed up like a chicken for roasting. I know these modern seat belts are a good thing, but they make me feel claustrophobic. I belong to a generation that didn’t expect to be protected from every danger.
I remember what it used to be like, back in the days when one was required to make smart choices. We knew the risks and took them anyway. I remember driving too fast in my old Chevrolet, my foot pressed hard on the gas, smoking a cigarette and listening to Price sing “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy” through small black speakers while children rolled around in the backseat like bowling pins.
My son is afraid that I will make a break for it, I suppose, and it is a reasonable fear. In the past month, my entire life has been turned upside down. There is a SOLD sign in my front yard and I am leaving home.
“It’s a pretty driveway, don’t you think?” my son says. It’s what he does; he fills space with words, and he chooses them carefully. It is what makes him a good surgeon. Precision.
“Yes.”
He turns into the parking lot. Like the driveway, it is lined in flowering trees. Tiny white blossoms drop to the ground like bits of lace on a dressmaker’s floor, stark against the black asphalt.
I fumble with my seat belt as we park. My hands do not obey my will these days. It frustrates me so much that I curse out loud.
“I’ll do that,” my son says, reaching sideways to unhook my seat belt.
He is out of the automobile and at my door before I have even retrieved my handbag.
The door opens. He takes me by the hand and helps me out of the car. In the short distance between the parking lot and the entrance, I have to stop twice to catch my breath.
“The trees are so pretty this time of year,” he says as we walk together across the parking lot.
“Yes.” They are flowering plum trees, gorgeous and pink, but I think suddenly of chestnut trees in bloom along the Champs élysées.
My son tightens his hold on my hand. It is a reminder that he understands the pain of leaving a home that has been my sanctuary for nearly fifty years. But now it is time to look ahead, not behind.
To the Ocean Crest Retirement Community and Nursing Home.
To be fair, it doesn’t look like a bad place, a little industrial maybe, with its rigidly upright windows and perfectly maintained patch of grass out front and the American flag flying above the door. It is a long, low building. Built in the seventies, I’d guess, back when just about everything was ugly. There are two wings that reach out from a central courtyard, where I imagine old people sit in wheelchairs with their faces turned to the sun, waiting. Thank God, I am not housed in the east side of the building—the nursing home wing. Not yet anyway. I can still manage my own life, thank you very much, and my own apartment.
Julien opens the door for me, and I go inside. The first thing I see is a large reception area decorated to look like the hospitality desk of a seaside hotel, complete with a fishing net full of shells hung on the wall. I imagine that at Christmas they hang ornaments from the netting and stockings from the edge of the desk. There are probably sparkly HO-HO-HO signs tacked up to the wall on the day after Thanksgiving.
“Come on, Mom.”
Oh, right. Mustn’t dawdle.
The place smells of what? Tapioca pudding and chicken noodle soup.
Soft foods.
Somehow I keep going. If there’s one thing I never do, it’s stop.
“Here we are,” my son says, opening the door to room 317A.
It’s nice, honestly. A small, one-bedroom apartment. The kitchen is tucked into the corner by the door and from it one can look out over a Formica counter and see a dining table with four chairs and the living room, where a coffee table and sofa and two chairs are gathered around a gas fireplace.
The TV in the corner is brand new, with a built-in VCR player. Someone—my son, probably, has stacked a bunch of my favorite movies in the bookcase. Jean de Florette, Breathless, Gone with the Wind.
I see my things: an afghan I knitted thrown over the sofa’s back; my books in the bookcase. In the bedroom, which is of a fine size, the nightstand on my side of the bed is lined with prescription pill containers, a little jungle of plastic orange cylinders. My side of the bed. It’s funny, but some things don’t change after the death of a spouse, and that’s one of them. The left side of the bed is mine even though I am alone in it. At the foot of the bed is my trunk, just as I have requested.
“You could still change your mind,” he says quietly. “Come home with me.”
“We’ve talked about this, Julien. Your life is too busy. You needn’t worry about me 24/7.”
“Do you think I will worry less when you are here?”
I look at him, loving this child of mine and knowing my death will devastate him. I don’t want him to watch me die by degrees. I don’t want that for his daughters, either. I know what it is like; some images, once seen, can never be forgotten. I want them to remember me as I am, not as I will be when the cancer has had its way.
He leads me into the small living room and gets me settled on the couch. While I wait, he pours us some wine and then sits beside me.
I am thinking of how it will feel when he leaves, and I am sure the same thought occupies his mind. With a sigh, he reaches into his briefcase and pulls out a stack of envelopes. The sigh is in place of words, a breath of transition. In it, I hear that moment where I go from one life to another. In this new, pared-down version of my life, I am to be cared for by my son instead of vice versa. It’s not really comfortable for either of us. “I’ve paid this month’s bills. These are things I don’t know what to do with. Junk, mostly, I think.”
I take the stack of letters from him and shuffle through them. A “personalized” letter from the Special Olympics committee … a free estimate awning offer … a notice from my dentist that it has been six months since my last appointment.
A letter from Paris.
There are red markings on it, as if the post office has shuffled it around from place to place, or delivered it incorrectly.
“Mom?” Julien says. He is so observant. He misses nothing. “What is that?”
When he reaches for the envelope, I mean to hold on to it, keep it from him, but my fingers don’t obey my will. My heartbeat is going all which-a-way.
Julien opens the envelope, extracts an ecru card. An invitation. “It’s in French,” he says. “Something about the Croix de Guerre. So it’s about World War Two? Is this for Dad?”
Of course. Men always think war is about them.
“And there’s something handwritten in the corner. What is it?”
Guerre. The word expands around me, unfolds its black crow wings, becoming so big I cannot look away. Against my will, I take up the invitation. It is to a passeurs’ reunion in Paris.
They want me to attend.
How can I possibly go without remembering all of it—the terrible things I have done, the secret I kept, the man I killed … and the one I should have?
“Mom? What’s a passeur?”
I can hardly find enough voice to say, “It’s someone who helped people in the war.”