ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME
©Jo Dereske 2014Chapter 9
Susan
Susan Oyler was a petite, pale-eyed blonde with fragile skin. She looked twenty. “So what have we got here?” were the first words out of her mouth when I opened the door onto the front steps of the little house. She’d left her jacket in her car and instead of lugging a briefcase, only carried a baby blue purse.
Within moments I was pouring out our problems: Louise’s depression, her unreasonable anger, Mike’s incontinence, their mutual befuddlement and the way they escalated each other’s confusion, our own frustration and inability to ease their lives as effectively as we’d hoped and wanted to.
I didn’t need to explain the fine details; she comprehended exactly what we were talking about. Her answers were clear and pointed – and practical, the brand of practical that made me shake my head and ask, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Maybe your aunt doesn’t want you to fix her problems; maybe she just wants you to hear them.”
“What does it hurt if your uncle sleeps in his clothes once in a while?”
“Let her win in an argument, even if she’s wrong. She’s only trying to hold onto some semblance of herself. She needs to be right."
“They’ll mirror you. If you’re upset, they’ll become upset.”
“Don’t ask him if he wants a bath. That’s too complicated a procedure for him to understand anymore. Draw it and tell him it’s ready. Talk him through the steps.”
Susan recommended a book titled, The 36-hour Day, which I would mail order from Grand Rapids and which was destined to become well-thumbed and dog-eared, always close at hand.
“What about the legal guardianship issue?” I asked.
“That’s immaterial as far as my helping you,” she said tersely and I recalled my phone exchange with her receptionist, “but your brother should consider it for your uncle’s protection.”
While Louise had assigned Ray durable power of attorney, nothing legal had ever been done for Mike. Susan explained that in Mike’s current state, no one was responsible for his health care. If he were struck by an emergency illness, his treatment would be taken out of our hands. Legally, he shouldn’t even see the doctor without a legal guardianship, and since we were nieces and nephews, not children, it was important to have the legal right to continue providing care for Mike.
“I’ll go meet them now,” Susan said, and when I rose to accompany her, she held up her hand. “I’ll go alone.” She didn’t take her purse, not even pencil and paper.
I watched her jump across a puddle in the driveway as easily as a child and unhesitatingly open their door without knocking. I dreaded the reception she was about to receive. I couldn’t fathom Louise’s response to this direct, erudite young woman. Susan was unlike any other person they’d met in the social services system.
Five minutes later Susan returned. “She threw me out,” she said cheerfully, smiling and looking satisfied, “but I think she and I will get along fine.”
At dinner than night, Louise remembered Susan and asked, “Who was that nosy nurse who was here today? She’s too young to be a nurse.”
“Too young,” Mike agreed.
As Alzheimer’s had advanced, he’d developed a trick of communication and could converse with an unobservant person by simply repeating the most stressed or last two words of whatever he heard.
“Hello, Mike. That was a pretty good snow last night.”
“Pretty good snow.”
“The plows still haven’t got to our road. The whole north end is drifted shut.”
“Drifted shut.”
“That’s right. I’ve seen it worse though. I just came back from town.”
“From town.”
“Yeah, not much going on there. Not until the plows get out.”
And so on. To a casual listener, the conversation made perfect sense, and I was reminded of Peter Sellers as Chauncey Gardener in the film, "Being There."
“Too many nurses,” Louise went on, leaning back from her half-eaten lasagna. “Too many pills. Just too many. I never dreamed my life would come to this.” Tears were building in her eyes.
Instead of rushing in with my usual cheery platitudes of why her life was still worthwhile, how much she was loved and what she could still accomplish – which she invariably saw as condescension – I tried a Susan Oyler tactic. “It must be discouraging.”
“It is. You just don’t know how discouraging.”
“I don’t,” I agreed. “You did a lot of exciting things in your life.”
“That was when I was full of piss and vinegar,” she answered with a distant smile.
I could barely refrain from smiling myself. Her threatened descent had been stopped in its tracks.
1930 Bill still feeling punk. Emma went with me to look at rooms on the south side. Al and Sylvia came for dinner. I made cream pie and French fried potatoes. Al is driving for somebody on the south side. He said Bill should apply. Easy money.
A puzzle started today in the Herald with a prize of $$. I’m going to try my hand at it.
Change was neither miraculous nor instantaneous. Life on Weldon Creek didn’t suddenly become the idyll I’d once naively expected it would be. We made erratic progress, sometimes by inches, occasionally by millimeters, and too often slipping backwards and losing precious ground.
Susan Oyler had other clients; she was occupied creating her new program, finding her local bearings, but whenever I called, she gave the impression she’d been sitting beside the phone waiting for it to ring just so she could discuss Louise and Mike. She dispensed confidence and praise and assured us that yes, we were definitely moving forward; life for Louise and Mike was improving, and that by helping them remain at home, we truly were giving them a gift; it didn’t matter whether they recognized it or not. On some level they knew.
It would be months before I consciously understood that what Susan suggested I give to Louise and Mike was exactly what she was giving me: assurance that we were valuable, encouragement when we made mistakes, recognition that yes, this was damn hard. Not sympathy, but this acknowledgement of our struggle strengthened us and gave me glimmers of the grace I longed for.
The arrival of spring helped. That anticipated lengthening of the days, the shift of winds from north to southwest. So what if the melting snow created fields of mud and slush that clung to the soles of our shoes? Floors couldn’t be kept clean. If we neglected slipping out of our shoes we trailed muck from room to room. The little runoff creek raced through the ravine in brown torrents we could hear from inside the house. Trucks passing on the highway threw up great fanned sprays of silvery water which hung in the air for a few seconds like mist. A steamy fog hung over the fields. We felt ourselves opening to the light and the slowly rising temperatures. Optimism seeped into the air and I fantasized baring my arms to the sun.
As the snow had melted, Louise’s patio emerged. The year my grandfather died, Louise went into a depression, a black withdrawal. Back then, her depressions were simply a fact of life. "Louise has the blues again," we'd hear Dad say – and we were filled with anticipation and conjecture as to just how she'd pull herself out of it this time. Would she spend weeks immersing herself in decoupaging every box and can she could find? Make exquisite braided rugs? She might take a paintbrush loaded with fanciful colors to the outbuildings, or start some ornate garden.
Once she reroofed the garage. Another year she dug a new section of basement beneath the house: breaking through the stone wall like an escaping convict and carrying out one pail of dirt at a time until she’d excavated an eight by ten basement room that undermined the house’s foundation. Whatever her project, it was a guarantee she’d fight her blues through physical action.
So after my grandfather's death, to drag herself from a depression so deep she could barely speak, she built the patio. She and Mike scoured the countryside for rocks, not any rocks, but the "right" rocks, rocks that looked like faces or animals or were especially smooth, that were the proper size and color, that had "potential."
A farmer, seeing them foraging for rocks beside the road, offered them a head-high pile of stones he'd culled from his fields over decades. Louise declined. "That would have made it too easy," she explained.
She built the patio herself, refusing anyone's help, including Mike's. It was a solitary effort, bordering on the heroic – or pathological. The patio, still in beautiful shape after twenty years, was curved, approximately fifty feet by twenty feet. Rocks lay perfectly flat, mortared with concrete, and inlaid between the rocks, a child's delight: silver dollars, antique door knobs, glass insulators, antique coins, marbles, seashells, crystals, even a credit card under glass, a silver spoon, jewelry, the porcelain arm of a doll.
She added stone walkways through the garden, a foot high collar around the thickest pine, another circled the well pit and windmill. Mike strung a wire of lights through the trees and attached to the roof so she could work after dark, sometimes until dawn. And when she’d finished the patio and the tree rings and paths, as if she couldn’t stop, she built a beautiful stone fireplace chimney on the west side of their house– although that side of the house didn’t have a fireplace.
She banished her depression by wearing it down, toiling on her patio single-mindedly from dawn until she was too exhausted to go on. The patio was more the center of her life than the house, and now she watched its emergence from winter with keen anticipation.
1930 A beautiful day. We went to Chicago Music Festival at Soldier Field with 150,000 other people. It was wonderful and made me forget our worries for a while. Bill is doing odd jobs. I worry but there’s nothing available. I pick up what I can but it’s not enough. Mother sent a package.
Yesterday Sylvia and I went to a spiritualist reading. She said I’d soon have a sister in the spirit world. Huh?
Hearing me screech out a curse when I scalded my hand draining a pot of pasta, Kipling asked, “Would it be easier if we shared the work?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” he said. “How about if we trade off? If I cook and take over dinner every other evening, and we trade lunches, too.”
“You can’t cook,” I said unthinkingly. He made chili and liked to barbecue, and I recalled a grayish tuna, cheese, and rice dish he’d concocted during his bachelor days and christened, “Tuna surprise.”
He shrugged. “I may not be a chef, but I can read a recipe.”
I was taken aback. Spring and summer were coming when he’d be doing yard work and maintenance, and our responsibilities would be more equitable. It was true, though, that my chosen tasks had begun to feel like martyrdom: cooking, cleaning, dealing with unreasonableness while Kipling never interrupted their lives with meals, baths or a vacuum cleaner. When they saw me, it was with suspicion that I was plotting some devious interference. Kipling was always welcome as the man who fixed things or who arrived to spread good cheer.
In an instant, I glimpsed liberation, time to myself, not having to begin another meal as soon as one was finished. I was touched by his generosity even while I worried about him struggling with cooking, or whether Louise and Mike would accept him.
But freedom!
“All right,” I agreed in a mix of eagerness and trepidation. “Let’s try it.”
Kipling attacked cooking in his usual meticulous and determined manner. He dug through Louise’s boxes of cookbooks, studying nutritional values of various foods, frowning over herb charts. I found him examining measuring cups and spoons, testing the heft of wooden spoons and spatulas, mulling over the pros and cons of ironware, and tasting contents of spice jars.
“Allspice isn’t a mix of all the spices,” I heard him say to himself.
The first time he took a bite of an omelet I’d made and commented, “I wonder how dill weed would taste in this,” I was startled.
“Whole cranberries in this sauce would taste better, I bet,” he said, reading a recipe. “Chicken is easier for them to digest than beef.” “I think we’d better plant fresh herbs.” “Have you ever worked with phyllo leaves?” “Let’s not buy any more pre-grated Parmesan cheese.”
We experimented and revised our schedules until we had a working plan that suited us both. When he cooked and took over their meals, I washed dishes. And when I cooked, he washed dishes. Whoever served the evening meal also served Meals on Wheels or fixed lunch the next day. I continued to prepare coffee in the morning because I liked to tidy up their house and leave the notes and have a general idea of how Louise and Mike had spent the night.
Kipling’s first meal was one of his own favorites: Beef Stroganoff. He’d ignored my suggestion that he start with something simpler, say meat loaf. He was both astounded and pleased when his beef stroganoff actually looked like the cookbook illustration. “It’s delicious,” I assured him, and it was.
At first he admitted to Louise that he’d cooked the Beef Stroganoff.
“You cooked this?” Aunt Louise asked him. “All of it?” She raised her hands to the heavens. “What a man.”
She cleaned her plate and asked for seconds. In the thrill of his first success, Kipling said, “I think I could like this.”
But her refrain soon became, “I tried to teach Mike to cook. He always said he’d learn when the time came. Well, the time has come and gone.”
And it grew worse. “Did you hear that, Mikey? Kipling cooked this meal. Why can’t you learn to cook? You don’t do anything anymore,” which caused Uncle Mike to grow petulant and stomp out of the kitchen to sulk in his chair by the living room window.
“You know,” Louise said when Mike was gone, “The most hurtful things I’ve ever said in my life I’ve said to Mike and he’s the one I’ve always wanted to hurt the least.”
“Why do you think that’s happened?” I asked.
She shrugged. “There’s just something cruel in me, and I hate it.”
After a few days, Kipling began telling them I’d cooked and he’d simply brought the meal over. That they could accept. “It keeps the peace,” he told me. I didn’t feel it was fair but he was right.
I followed his Serbian pork with hand-stuffed tortellini and he countered with dilled pork chops in a sour cream sauce. I baked my chicken and he deboned his and sautéed it in olive oil and garlic, with fresh herbs.
Mike’s pants grew tighter; Louise’s cheeks were rosier. They rarely left any food on their plates. “You’re a gourmet cook,” she praised me.
“Not every night,” I told her.
Louise had been fond of Kipling but now that she saw him more often, she’d come to delight in his measured, cynical humor and to anticipate his arrival. “Kipling’s a nice fellow,” she told me.
“I know it,” I agreed. “I’m glad he’s my husband.”
For some reason that set her on edge and she bristled. “He’s very nice,” she repeated. “In fact, I think he’s nicer than you are.”
1930 Tofelia went back to G. She’s crazy. They moved to South Haven.
How had I missed it? Louise saw them before I did. As if overnight, crocuses erupted in clumps and drifts across the sunnier sides of Louise’s lawns. Purple, yellow, white. Popping up in the dead grass of lawn and in gardens, even while snow still clung in the shade of trees and beneath shrubbery.
A corresponding optimism arose in us at this first promise of warmer weather and regrowth. “Pick the stamens for flavoring,” Louise told me. “They’re nice in rice.”
“Nice in rice,” Mike echoed, relishing the words. His mind often played with phrases and nonsense words, rhyming them or repeating sounds that pleased him. In the car, if he recognized a word in a sign he often turned it into a ditty: “fish. Fish, wish, swish.” “Store More.” “Tire Fire.” Susan said that was common, “a desire to create logic of sorts, even though it made no sense to the listener.”
I thought Louse’s mind was wandering about adding crocus stamens to rice until I read about saffron.
Her delight in the crocuses lasted for days. Each time she saw me she’d ask with new excitement, “Have you seen the crocuses?” Every fresh sighting of the tiny bursts of color gave her something to marvel over and for her, as for all of us, signaled the long awaited change of seasons.
1930 Bill thinks I’m a damn dumbbell and won’t know any better, but I do. He went to a meeting. I don’t want him hanging around those people.
We play cards almost every night with Al and Sylvia. Al owes me so much money he gave me a painting - I love it but it won’t pay our bills.
Next Tuesday, Chapter 10: Trailing into Spring