Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [83]
I was in Los Angeles doing my play when I got the same phone call I had been getting for about seventeen years: “Your mother is about to die.” But she never did. But this time she did.
Katharine and Julia and I were here to deal with all of it, to throw it out, give to Goodwill, leave for the super, divide among ourselves, and with the things no one wanted to keep, sell, or leave, bring to my dad’s. Eleanor would come with Jim the following day to clean the place up the best they could.
There were mouse droppings in corners and on tables and worst of all on her bed. The walls were light brown and wet-looking, like caramel, from years of chain-smoking. There were inches of dust on tables. There was no door on her bathroom. I can’t remember how it came off and more important why it was never fixed. It had really been years since anything had gotten fixed, since we tried to maintain her. Which had seemed reasonable before, not “enabling” her any longer, sane even, but which now did not seem reasonable or sane. The first rule of alcoholism: You can’t get anyone else sober. The second rule: If your mother dies of alcoholism in a mice-infested shithole in the West Village all alone, you’re never going to feel good about it, you’re never going to feel you did enough and you will definitely feel like you should have out-fucked that first rule and saved your mother’s life.
There was an old-lady gismo on her toilet seat, something you see in a hospital, something you turn from, not wanting to know the names for such indignities that might await even you. There was a walker. She was sixty-four. Who knew it was going to be this awful? Did we? I mean . . . did we?
As Katharine and Julia and I stared at the squalor and in particular the mouse droppings everywhere, the buzzer sounded.
“Exterminator.”
We were semi-paralyzed around the intercom. The farcical entrance of an exterminator was like the bell ringing and it being Betty Ford. We don’t need you now, Betty. She’s dead. Where the fuck were you ten years ago? Eight years ago? Two years ago? Shit, Betty, are you on the sauce again?
“Umm, we don’t need you today. Thanks,” Katharine blurted.
We looked at one another and around the apartment for some way in, some indication of where to start. “This is not going to end well,” my mother would say about fifty times a day, mostly when the four of us girls were throwing one another down staircases or rigging things over doorways to fall on one another, and I can’t help remembering this saying of hers, because not only did her life not end well, it didn’t end badly. It ended horrifically, one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen to a life. And when this happens, when this happens to your mother, what do you remember? Which Mom? Which mornings? Which nights? What do you leave and what do you take with you? Clearly I’m not here looking for day-count coins from AA. But is there something here that will work for me, that will help me find I don’t fucking know what? She no longer has to be or not be anything to anyone. She didn’t get sober. She wasn’t the mom I wanted her to be. I wanted her to fight. Fight. Fight. Fight. But she didn’t, obviously. And it was over. So then why was I scanning the joint like it was my own brain: deducing the love, the anger, the confusion, looking for her, in death, to be something I could live with? We were here to clean out her apartment, to get rid of things. But it seemed I was actually here to acquire a mother.
There was a lamp that looked even too gloomy to be in a Tennessee Williams play. It was a standing lamp with a table around the middle like a child’s water float. It had a big ivory-colored lampshade, browned by wear, and it had a bad tear in the