Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [84]
After about fifteen years and ten rehabs and detoxes, my sisters and I had decided we couldn’t help her. Her dog walker took over for a while, until the day he found my mother under a desk with the D.T.’s when he returned from walking Emma. Assorted therapists kept her alive, and West Village boys helped her get by, like her drinky pal Marcel, until she accused him of stealing her Xanax. Then various people from the Perry Street group of AA helped, until it became clear she didn’t want a virgin mojito any more than she wanted to “go gray,” and at that point it was my father who became her final caretaker.
Anyone who came near her got caught in her lair of need. A new neighbor, a delivery boy, my brand-new boyfriend might find themselves receiving late-night phone calls about Rodney, the boy she should have married, God damn it, or running to the corner to get her a carton of True Blues, tending to her endless groany requests until they became a resentment factory who hated themselves for the way they were treating someone so obviously petite. Like Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun. He’s in love with Elizabeth Taylor, but he’s gotten Shelley Winters pregnant already, and her maddening neediness turns him into a murderer essentially. My mother was not just about who she became, she was about who she made you become.
She got around an awful lot by ambulance at this point in her life, but if she had to go anywhere other than the emergency room at St. Vincent’s, someone had to take her. Occasionally I took her to doctors’ appointments on the condition that we “stop by” an AA meeting on the way home. I tried to call her at least once a week but admittedly saw her as little as possible. I found her apartment very difficult—when I did go there I would be depressed for weeks afterward.
I wanted to be a better daughter than I was. If I couldn’t cure her I should have been her unflappable nurse. I would like nothing more than to recount tales of how I regularly went over, made her soup just to have in the fridge, brought her unauthorized biographies of Lady Di, watched Lifetime with her at three in the morning. I wish I could say I did all these things when my mother became the kind of drinker who wakes up and doesn’t know if it’s five in the morning or five in the afternoon, I wish I could tell myself that I did all I could. But I don’t think I can.
After about age forty-eight, she claimed to not be able to walk anywhere, not even down a flight of stairs to a cab, which was just incredibly hard to believe. The Thanksgiving before she died, Katharine was cooking dinner at her new house and my mother was making a big stink about making the trip.
“Windsor Terrace? Who ever heard of . . . Windsor Terrace? It all sounds awful. I just don’t know what to do.”
“Get in a cab, Mother,” I suggested.
“A cab? A cab will take me to Windsor Terrace?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“I’m not sure you’re right about that one, sweet pea.”
“I swear, Mom. Just tell them the address.”
“Cabs don’t like to go to Brooklyn, Jeanne. Did you know that?”
“Well, they have to, Mom. It’s the law.”
“What if he leaves me on the Brooklyn Bridge? Oh, this is insanity. Absolute insanity.”
“I’ll borrow Kate’s car and drive you home if you take a cab there.”
“It sounds like a royal pain in the ass. Brooklyn is a real pain in the ass in my opinion.”
Silence.
“Will you tell Kate and Henry that I’m so sorry Mom’s such a burden that they couldn’t come pick me up? Tell them I understand what a difficult meal Thanksgiving is to put together, what with the peas and mashed potatoes and