ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME
c Jo Dereske 2014Chapter 7
Time
Just after dawn, I entered Louise’s house to make coffee and set out breakfast before she and Mike rose from bed. But Louise was already sitting at the table in the gloomy light, staring down at her hands. I turned on a light and guardedly sat down.
“How are you feeling this morning?” I asked.
“John and June are so thoughtless.” Crumpled tissues covered her placemat. Her eyes were wet as if she’d been crying.
She was talking about my father and mother. My father, her baby brother, had been dead for eleven years. My mother, had moved to California to assist her ill parents, and across the country my mother and Louise maintained a gentler, closer relationship than they’d managed when they lived three miles apart. “I’ll fix the coffee,” I said, hoping to distract her. “Would you like a piece of toast?”
“I thought they’d take us out for breakfast,” she continued in a querulous voice. “Anyone else would have, but I ended up making them breakfast.”
She was so outraged my curiosity got the best of me. “What happened?”
She was only too eager to share. It might have taken place yesterday. “Mike and I asked them to stand up for us. We were married right here in this house. I hoped they’d take us out for a celebratory breakfast. But no, they never offered. I was a new bride and I had to work, cooking everyone a big breakfast while they all sat around and celebrated. No one even offered to help. Thoughtless.” And her hands rose to her rigid mouth.
I knew this story and even though I was only four years old at the time, the memory was vivid. It was summer. My mother had taken me berry picking and we’d walked into a patch of Poison Ivy. I escaped with a few itchy spots on my legs but my mother had a violent reaction. Her legs were covered with a suppurating running rash. Poison Ivy spread inside her mouth, under her arms, invading her entire body. The doctor told her she was in serious danger; he ordered her to be hospitalized immediately.
Louise and Mike’s wedding was already scheduled for the next day and my parents were to be their witnesses, so my mother refused to check into the hospital until after she’d witnessed, sick and barely able to stand.
From the wedding, my father rushed her to the hospital, where she remained a week. What I recall is my father firmly telling a nurse he didn’t care about hospital rules. “I’m taking her to see her mother.”
He held me too tightly in his arms beside my mother’s bed. Black ice packs anchored her legs to hold them still; a high fever racked her body; her chestnut hair was tied back from her flushed and drawn face, not in the pageboy I was accustomed to. I stared at her, terrified she was dying.
“So thoughtless,” Louise repeated, turning away from me.
Over forty years ago.
1929 At 9:30 in the morning Billy and I got married at City Hall. Then we quarreled all day. What about? I don’t know – it just happened that way. We went to the south side in the evening and got rid of all. Saw Sylvia and Al and we all got pretty happy.
Later that morning when Mike began his routine trips to the mailbox, he couldn’t find his boots. “Where did you put your boots, Mikey?” Louise asked.
“Here or there,” he answered, his face going blank as it often did under direct questioning.
We scoured the house, in closets, behind furniture, in the basement. Kipling searched the garage, the patio, in the snow around the bird feeders, but we couldn’t find his boots anywhere. Louise fussed and obsessed over the missing boots so Kipling and I headed for town to buy Mike a new pair. They refused to accompany us. The first pair we bought, which was similar to his missing pair, wasn’t quite right although neither of them could explain why. We brought home another pair, nearly identical, which were acceptable but too small, so we ordered the correct size.
“It’ll take a good week for them to get here.” The clerk in the small store told me. It was the same store where my father and brothers had bought boots, except now the shelves were sparsely populated, several pairs dust-specked.
Several times a day Louise questioned me whether Mike’s boots had arrived. Her memory was selective and obsessive. A week later when I stopped by the store to pick up the boots, the clerk greeted me in surprise. “I said they’d be here in a ‘good’ week. It’s only been a week. Come back on Monday.”
When the boots arrived – on Monday as the clerk had said – they fit Uncle Mike perfectly. He pulled them on and off without zipping them and admired each foot, saying in pleasure, “Well, well. New boots.”
But the next time he traveled down the driveway to the mailbox he wore only his slippers. “Where are your new boots?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands. Again we rummaged through all the usual places but the boots had completely disappeared and would never be seen again.
1929 We moved to 6421 Maryland and bought a davenport and chair for $134.50. It looks swell. I told Mother and she sent pillows and a quilt. Sometimes I’m shocked by how DUMB I am.
Back along the west coast of Washington state, where winter meant cold rain, and spring arrived early, my son was living in our house while he attended university. Riding his bicycle on his way to class his tires slipped on wet pavement and he slid into the rear of a truck. Fortunately his injuries weren’t serious: painful abrasions and a badly sprained knee.
But I felt that desperate mother-longing, that gut-wrenching black panic that I was too far away.
“Mom, I’m fine,” he assured me with a touch of embarrassed impatience. “I’ll take the bus until it heals.”
I asked my daughter, who was attending University of Washington in Seattle to drive ninety miles home and confirm he was actually all right.
“He’ll be okay,” she reported back, “but you wouldn’t like the way he’s keeping the house.”
I took that to mean he wasn’t.
But the sense that by being in Michigan I was in the wrong place, haunted me. Leaving Washington was unpardonable. My priorities were skewed. My heart was split by thousands of miles.
1929 Had a HORRIBLE letter from Tofelia in the hospital in Muskegon. Gordon took his fists to her. She has broken ribs, arm and a concussion. She was stupid to run off with him. I’m taking the bus up there in the morning. If Billy ever laid a finger on me I’d kill him. I have no doubt. And he knows it.
Tofelia in rough shape. I brought her flowers and fed her soup. She has to stay in the hospital longer. Gordon is lying low. Neighbors called the police who didn’t do anything but call an ambulance. She says she won’t take him back. I guess not!!
I went up to Ludington afterward but no one knew I was coming so nobody was there to pick me up. I started out in a taxi and then walked. Mr. O picked me up and gave me a ride home. He said I was prettier every time he saw me. Hah! The good Lord forgot to make me beautiful.
Bill borrowed Tony’s car and drove to Michigan. I had to tell Mother about Tofelia. So Billy drove us to Muskegon to see her. She wants to come home to recover. Mother was upset. She gave us $50 for a wedding gift.
We're going back to Chicago tomorrow.
In the Woods
The “bad days” mounted up. Nothing I did was right. Innocent words were taken to mean something more sinister, or just plain rude. I was certain Aunt Louise felt old age carried the privilege of rudeness without recrimination. She thought I was bossy and commandeering her life when she was perfectly capable of running it herself.
On a Saturday, I gave up trying to offer lunch or clean up the dishes or even sweep up crumbs from the floor, and marched back to the little house, stomping across the driveway. Kipling was in a bad mood; his work wasn’t going well and his attention slipped away from my complaints about life “over there.”
“When will I ever get to do my work?” I cried, waving toward my darkened computer screen, suddenly aggrieved and feeling the brainless unimaginative drudge. “I have deadlines.”
He looked at me silently. He didn’t say it but certainly he was thinking: “This whole thing was your idea.”
I grabbed my jacket and rushed out of the house, slamming the door behind me. The sky was dull gray, like dirty cotton. Spring was at hand but the world was dull and colorless. The only green I’d seen were winter feathers the goldfinches had shed beneath the thistle feeder.
I trudged behind the silvery barn, past the raspberry cane skeletons, past a collapsed cold frame, trampling across an area where the strawberries used to be, and into the woods.
I hadn’t been in these woods since I was a child and unlike most childhood memories, the trees were taller than I recalled, the woods deeper, more enclosing, even in their bare-limbed winter nakedness. Snow still persisted in the shadiest spots. The remains of burdock gripped my pant legs, dried briars grabbed at my sleeves. I pushed ahead, wincing at the ripping sounds as they released their grasp.
Fifty feet into the woods and the sounds of road traffic faded. There was an illusion of being inside, as if a roof existed above the forest, muffling and sheltering. This was Somewhere Else, and I experienced the same sense of inaccessibility as when I rode a Washington State Ferry to one of the San Juan Islands: too distant to be reached. Cares unable to cross water.
Suddenly, the ground dropped sheerly away. Forty feet below, the amber and black of Weldon Creek twisted through a wide cut in the woods. The creek doubled back on itself like rivers seen from airplane windows as it continued to the Pere Marquette River and into Lake Michigan. Black rocks glistened as the creek’s amber current divided the water.
I sat on a stump with my face to the creek and my back to the farm, tucking my bare hands under my arms and scuffing at the ground with my heels until I’d made two slick depressions.
I wanted out. It was impossible to do this. I wanted to go home and live in my own house. Just to be in the same time zone as my children. To see my friends and the mountains. To attend plays and movies and parties. I wanted my days to myself again, to form into my own work schedule. To be able to leave for more than two or three hours at a time. I didn’t want to prepare meals at the same time every day whether I was hungry or not.
But mostly, I wanted the Aunt Louise back who doted on her nieces and nephews and who was sharp and funny and fiercely independent. I wanted the gentle Uncle Mike with his dry sense of humor who didn’t pee himself and wander in a blank fog or forget who I was. I wanted them to recognize me instead of being thrown into confusion when I appeared in different-colored clothes.
“I hate it here,” I said aloud. The woods were silent, muffling my words and emphasizing their ugliness. I didn’t dare repeat them.
So what if we left? Would Louise and Mike even notice our absence? Louise frequently insisted she should be in a nursing home. Maybe she was right. It was time. We were only creating misery for all of us while we prolonged the inevitable.
High above me, a tree groaned as its branches rubbed in the breeze.
A nursing home. Picturing Louise and Mike living in a nursing home produced deep, biting sorrow.
But how to carry on?
My body racked with shivering. My cheeks were stiff. There was no point in staying out any longer so I traipsed back to the little house, no wiser, nothing resolved, positive there was no satisfactory answer on earth.
Kipling was in the kitchen and when I entered he poured out two cups of hot chocolate.
“Cold out?” he asked.
“Slightly,” I answered, wrapping my red hands around the warm cup.
“Do you want to leave?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know what I want.”
1929 We went to the White City to watch fireworks. Billy and I fought over nothing. Went for a walk alone. How the fellows do flirt.
Mother came to visit for a week. She loves the city. She wore me out wanting to do EVERYTHING.
It’s the end of 1929. I’m a married woman and I love my Billy. Goodbye old year. Happy 1930!!
When Ray stopped by, I poured out my latest struggles with Louise and Mike. Like Kipling, he was a calm and thoughtful man, totally not what I wanted at the moment – where was their sympathetic outrage and commiseration? The magic bullet to fix all this?
“She’s frustrated, not mad at you,” he said by way of comfort. Well, yes.
After Ray left, Kipling said to me, “You sounded like a woman under stress.”
“I am,” I shot back.
Less than an hour later, Barbara called. She and her friend Debbie were going to hold a “poetry night” that evening at Ray and Barbara’s house. “We’ll all read poetry,” she said cheerily. I suspected a lifeline was being thrown my way.
Ray’s log house shone golden as we drove into his tree-lined driveway. Lukas, 3, Jonukas, 6, and Nicki, 10, watched out the window for us. I was bringing the cookies.
Debbie and John, with their new baby, already sat at the dining room table. Debbie was a serene woman with an uncanny way of deflecting questions and attention from herself to others.
Ray and Barbara’s house was rarely anything but chaos, rampant with children, dogs, cats, and ongoing projects. It was also a magnet and anyone who stopped by – and someone always was – willingly stepped into the warmth of that chaos. It was a large house with five bedrooms and every convenience, operated by solar and wind power, all of which Ray had built himself.
“Luke, you go first,” Barbara said when we’d settled. I’d had doubts the children would be interested but Luke solemnly recited “Humpty Dumpty,” bowing and giggling to our applause, Jonukas sang a song about trouble, and Nicki, unknowingly already a beauty, read a poem about the power of beauty. Russell, who at 16, no one expected to even emerge from his room, descended and read an appropriately gory poem about war.
After the children left us to play in the living room, we adults took turns reading by low light and drinking, until the poetry naturally gave way to conversation. I nearly squirmed in happiness: conversation that lasted longer than a few minutes, ideas, books, politics. No talk of infirmities or medication.
For a while I basked in being a member of an impossibly good scene, one I felt fortunate to find in cherished books: of warm light, log walls, and good company
1930 Bill has lost his job and now, like a knife has fallen on our necks, we have to be careful with money. A lot of people are out of work. Bill went to the south side to borrow some money.
After asserting again that she belonged in a nursing home and Mike should go out hunting for a younger woman who could “still shake it for him,” Louise said, watching me closely, “I dreamed I climbed to the top of the windmill and jumped off and killed myself.”
Her dream frightened me; reminding me of her plan to drive herself and Uncle Mike into oncoming traffic. I dragged out some old pop psychology and answered, “That means you don’t really want to die because you know you can’t climb the windmill anymore.”
Her eyes widened and she laughed heartily before asking me to refill her coffee cup.
But I’d become desperate. My heart pounded when I considered facing Louise’s uncertain temper and Mike’s vagueness. The house frequently smelled of urine – or worse. At times they stared at me blankly until I reminded them who I was. Nothing I did seemed to make any real difference. I was frustrated by my own ineffectuality.
Aunt Louise baited me and resisted my efforts to help her, and every logical fiber in me said don’t fight back. Don’t quarrel with old people, especially old demented people. She was angry and grieving because her life had been stolen, she was living her worst nightmare: dependency. That’s why she raged so often; she was trapped inside herself, failing.
She had to express it, I consoled myself. But on the other hand, I was too much her niece, from the same quick-tempered, over-sensitive stock. Words flew out of my mouth before I thought and when I didn’t voice my feelings, I stewed in red hot resentment.
All of us: my brothers and sister and me, we’d been idealistic and arrogant to think we could make a difference, when in fact, we might be making their situation worse, turning their last days into strife and discontent. We had acted out of love, love and ignorance.
Something had to happen.
1930 I went to look for work but my God, it’s so hard to find ANYTHING. We’re flat broke. Billy got a job shoveling snow for the railroad – pray for more snow! – but there’s nothing decent in sight for either of us.
Next Tuesday, Chaapter 8: Help arrives from Tennessee