Karen Rosenbaum
1985
“It’s not good,” Will said. He heard his sister catch her breath. Then her voice, determined and firm, came through the receiver.
“How bad?”
“It’s in his bones already. Dem bones. Dem bones not gonna walk much longer.” He sighed. “Not much the docs can do. Some radiation.”
“He knows?”
“He knows.”
“And Mom?”
“She knows.”
“How is she holding up?”
“She’s pretty fierce, our mom. Maybe you’ve noticed.” He snorted a little. Viv was pretty fierce too.
“Yeah, but this—“
“She’s holding up.”
“So what now?”
“Eight weeks? Eight months?” He slid from the bed down to the floor and stared at his stockinged feet. Hole in heel. “They think they can keep him comfortable. Do hospice at home. Great foresight moving into this condo ten years ago. Elevators. Rooms big, doorways and halls wide.”
“Have you called Craig?”
“Had to call you first. The oldest.”
“And bossiest.”
Will laughed. “That too.”
“What are they doing right now?”
“They’re in the kitchen. Dad was sharpening knives when I snuck off. I said I’d take them out to dinner, but Mom said there’s leftover spaghetti.”
“All day,” Viv said, “I get aid for people who have diabetes and congestive heart failure and emphysema and cancer.” Will pictured her in her cubicle, running her left hand through her thick hair. “But I’ve never had a case with prostate cancer.”
“By the time men get prostate cancer, they’re usually already retired, already on social security.” Will ran his hand through his hair, thick and black like his sister’s. “But most men who have prostate cancer don’t die from it. They die from something else first. Doctor says it’s only if it’s aggressive like Dad’s that it kills them.”
“He’s only 69.”
“Yeah. And some months.”
They both snickered. Family joke. Mom and Dad had been very secretive about their ages. “But how old are you?” the kids would ask when they were young.
“Twenty-nine and some months,” Mom would say.
“You’re both 29 and some months?” Even in grade school, Will could see this seemed highly suspicious.
“Both,” Dad would say.
Turned out Mom was a couple of years older than Dad. But the kids didn’t know this for sure till both Viv and Craig were 29 and some months. Will, then 24, had applied for a job as an engineer for a company that had state department connections, and he had to fill in the birth dates of both parents. He got the security clearance, but decided against the job.
Viv’s voice crackled through the phone. “Sixty-nine’s too young to die.” She paused. “And we’re too young.”
Will nodded, then remembered to say “Yeah.”
“And too much for you, for all you’re going through right now. When are you flying home?”
“I thought I’d stay an extra couple of days. Figure Mom will find things for me to do. First job is to get her spaghetti down.” Not likely, he thought. He’d felt queasy for weeks. When Annette told him the marriage was over, he couldn’t eat for two days. “I didn’t know you could even buy canned mushrooms anymore.”
“You aren’t telling them, are you?”
“About Annette? Don’t plan to. Think I can keep it from them for more than two months?”
“Try,” she said.
“Tax stuff is here.” Dad pulled out the top drawer of the wooden file cabinet. “You’re used to doing the long forms, so ours should be simple.”
Craig nodded. Tuition and tithing. Plus Jean sent checks to about 105 charities—protect the newts, whooping cranes, autistic terriers. She did keep records and receipts.
“Mom likes Irving at H & R Block.” Dad pushed the drawer back in. “She trusts him.”
“Trust’s important,” Craig said. “What about the condo stuff?”
“Third drawer,” Dad said. “But your mom’s on top of that. She writes the checks. Knows both maintenance men and their life stories. Pays them off with raspberry jam. And she understands the social security and the pension and the insurance. It’s mostly taxes that’ll scare her.”
Organized. Dad was so organized. Desk looked clean, one tidy stack of papers on the right edge, the plaster bust of Lincoln center back, a wooden box with pens and pencils on the left.
Wincing, Dad sank into his desk chair. “I get so tired,” he said.
Craig slid a stool over to sit close.
“I’m glad your mom has her church. They stand by each other, those church people.” Dad laughed. “But you know about that.”
“Do you hurt?” Craig took the bony hand. He felt himself slip into work mode. “Have you been having any headaches? Vision problems?” Why would he ask that? It was what he knew to ask. What he knew how to do. Help people see better.
“Mostly I’m tired,” Dad said. “Doc says there are things for pain, which I don’t need yet. Doesn’t seem to be anything for tired though. Not even caffeine.” He chuckled. “Tried Dr. Pepper. Put me right to sleep.”
“We can ask tomorrow. Can I go in with you and Mom? Even if I’m not a medical doctor…”
“Craig is a real doctor,” Mom had told her cousins when he got his degree. She always sounded defensive. “He’s a doctor of optometry. Like your dentist is a doctor of dentistry.” Somehow, Craig was aware, no one ever asked, “Are you a real dentist?”
“You’re as close to a medical doctor as we’ve got in this family,” Dad said. “Besides, you’re our son. We always want our kids with us.” He fiddled with a pen on the desk. “We appreciate you all coming so often.” He sighed. “Guess maybe we should have retired closer to one of you. Vivian made a case for California since both she and Will are there. Or we could have moved to Arizona to be closer to you and the grandkids. But this has been home for so long. When Mom’s alone though, maybe she’ll agree to move.”
“Ha!” they both said at once. “About as likely as her taking up meditation or tai chi,” Dad said.
Craig smirked, then pursed his lips. Dad looked thin in his brown sweater. He never used to wear a sweater inside. And it was hot in here. Mom had switched to whole milk and was always offering Dad chocolate ice cream. “If you’d like,” Craig said, “I could get someone to help me give you a blessing.” Something else he knew how to do.
“Does it work if you don’t believe in it?”
“Sometimes.”
“Would it make you feel better?”
Craig thought. “Yeah, it would.”
“Go ahead then.” Dad spun the wedding ring on his finger. “Didn’t used to be able to do that,” he said.
The toilet was stopped up in the second bathroom. Vivian sighed. When she opened the door, she could see Dad tucked into a fleece blanket in his recliner. He watched Jeopardy now. And golf matches. When she visited, she sat next to him and watched them too.
The toilet. Used to be he could fix it. Used to be Mom didn’t have to bribe the maintenance men with jam. Today Mom’s cousin Eunice had taken her out to lunch. “No, go!” Vivian had protested when Mom had started to decline the invitation. Vivian looked again at Dad. He was napping, his glasses slid down to the end of his nose. She slipped into the kitchen and looked at the list next to the wall phone. Mike. That was one of the maintenance men, she remembered. She called and left a message about the toilet.
The good thing about watching golf was all the green. And sometimes there were azaleas. She hated watching football, but she would have done that too, had it been the season. Dad stirred when she settled onto one of Mom’s needlepointed chairs. “Who’s ahead?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” Dad said. The cancer had got into the brain, the doctors had told Mom, who conceded Dad “sure isn’t very sharp anymore.” On the plus side though, the pain receptors are in the brain, and they wouldn’t be working very well. Probably wouldn’t need big-time pain meds.
Treasure this time, Vivian said to herself. It’s all the time there is. Dad had begun snoring quietly. She looked at her watch. An hour earlier at home. Karl would be at the courthouse. She couldn’t remember what the case was. She didn’t pay much attention to his work. He didn’t pay much attention to hers. Her clients—mostly middle-aged folks, disabled folks needing government assistance—were a lot easier to identify with than his. He had businesses. Corporations. She had Ramona, a diabetic amputee who knitted socks and sweaters and told stories about her former life as a Las Vegas showgirl. Millie, who had emphysema and a portable oxygen tank and whose apartment still smelled of cigarettes. Burt, who was blind but played very serious bridge. Everyone at his table had to use those braille cards.
Her marriage wasn’t anything like her folks’. The first ten years, she and Karl were passionate about everything they did. They backpacked in Alaska. They wandered around India. Biggest difference, of course, was they didn’t have kids, which they had planned never to have. Some childless couples grew even more dependent on each other. She and Karl had never been that dependent on each other. They got on each other’s nerves more now. One night last week, she took refuge on the couch while he rattled the bedroom with his snoring. The couch was lumpy and piled with New Yorker magazines he was going to read some day. She’d been too angry to sleep.
Last year she and her brothers had talked about a 50th anniversary party for Mom and Dad. Wasn’t going to happen, she knew now. And her own marriage. More solid than Will and Annette’s, but—would they be together in another five, ten, twenty years? Well—there were their Monday nights, when she wasn’t here in Utah. Poetry before sex. They took turns choosing the poem.
2006
January 2, the day before they were due to return home. They’d come for the holidays, so Vivian and Karl were asleep in the guest room when Mom fell. They’d talked her into wearing one of those alert buttons on a cord around her neck, which she claimed she didn’t need, and this morning when she fell, she proved to be right—instead of pushing the button, she had just yelled Vivian’s name. They found her on the plush bathroom carpet, one leg under her, one askew. It hurt a little, she told them, but not too bad. “It’s all a ruse,” she said, “so you’ll stay longer.” She’d insisted on their getting her yellow robe from the closet. They followed the ambulance to the hospital.
It was a broken femur, the event Mom had most feared, the one that had ended life as they knew it for so many cousins and friends. But she was telling the nurse a funny story about laughing gas when they wheeled her into the operating room.
She came out a different person.
The doctor told Vivian that most 90-plus-year-olds don’t survive the surgery—or the long rehab.
The doctor didn’t tell her that Mom might lose those social skills that had made her feistiness lovable, even admirable. Now it was simply exasperating. Mom despised the physical therapists. She spit out curses that she once paddled them for saying.
Karl flew back to work, but Vivian requested a month off and stayed to manage things. She found two Tongan women, Kalasia and Melino, to provide round-the-clock care. She bought a baby monitor to put in the guest room, which became Kalasia and Melino’s room, so they would hear Mom when she called in the night. Vivian slept on an air mattress on the living room floor.
Her heart broke when Mom called out for her own parents. “Who’s going to take care of me?” she wailed. “Get Sis. Sis’ll take care of me.” Vivian had got down on her knees in front of Mom. “We’re taking care of you,” she said, but Mom looked vacantly at her. Sis had died twenty years before, just after Dad. Two enormous losses for Mom that year, but she had soldiered on.
Sometimes Mom returned to the present. Sometimes she knew she’d outlived her parents, her husband, her sister, so many friends. The past wasn’t always more secure than the present, even her childhood past. Sis waving snakes at her. Sis pushing her up a tree and leaving her there. But her folks had taken care of her. They hadn’t hired Tongan women to prepare her meals, take her to the bathroom, bathe her. No wonder Mom had reverted to her pre-school self.
At home, on her nightstand, Vivian had a book of poems by a woman who had lost her mother. You are no longer a child, the woman had said, when your last parent dies.
You become an adult, Vivian thought, when your only parent becomes a child.
Will went through the closets and drawers while Craig watched television with Mom in the den. Will acknowledged that Craig had the harder job—hours of The Sound of Music and South Pacific and Fred Astaire movies—all those musicals that mesmerized Mom, that were both familiar to her and unfamiliar since she couldn’t remember she’d seen them the day before.
Will hauled boxes of decades-old greeting cards and recipes and newspaper clippings to the condo dumpster. He packed a suitcase with the clothes Viv thought would be most useful in the California nursing home—knit pants and tops, three nightgowns, sensible shoes, though Mom hardly walked now, only a few of the pretty dresses she had loved. He checked off the items on Viv’s list. He would pack more things when they returned to empty the condo, get it ready to sell. This was to be a visit to California, they had told Mom, a rather long visit to avoid the cold Utah winter. Not that Mom went outside anymore. Except for doctor’s appointments, which they scheduled when one of them was there. The doctor at the last appointment said it was time for skilled nursing. Kalasia had cried a little when he had told her that they were moving Mom, but Melino, who had teenage children, seemed relieved. Mom had been harder on Melino.
There was so much stuff in Mom’s condo. On her dresser, music boxes she had collected from their travels, small trays of coins from foreign countries, a three-storied jewelry box, a pin cushion in a yellow ceramic shoe one of them had made as a child, and a dozen or more framed pictures of the three of them and grandchildren—all courtesy of Craig and Jean. Neither he nor Viv had produced any progeny. Viv and Karl at least had managed to keep their marriage going though he suspected it hadn’t always been easy. He and Bianca had lasted so far longer than he and Annette. But Bianca’s drinking was out of control. He never knew what he’d find when he got home.
Annette had been good about damage control. They’d pretended to be together till after Dad’s funeral. It was going to be harder to hide Bianca and her booze. Maybe not from Mom, who recognized her three kids most of the time, Jean and Karl some of the time, but no one who’d arrived as late on the scene as Bianca. But how to hide his collapsing marriage from teetotaler Craig, who would certainly be visiting California now that Mom would be there. Viv and Karl had witnessed Bianca’s behavior—her absences at their family get-togethers, her frantic and unfocused attempts to “help” in the kitchen, her erratic driving, but they’d agreed to say nothing. Will sighed. No one they knew would get into a car with Bianca behind the wheel even when she seemed sober.
Will emptied the big storage closet. Boxes of quart canning jars though Mom hadn’t put up peaches or apricots in three decades. Boxes of small jars crammed in the corner—the ones she used for raspberry jam. She especially liked baby food bottles because she could fill so many of them and have a lot for gifts. But the raspberry jam days were over now too. The nursing home Viv had found had a lot of activities for the residents. Will hoped there were more than Bingo and sing-alongs. Mom seemed happiest when Kalasia had her folding the washcloths and dishtowels.
“Hi guy.” Craig tipped his baseball hat and squeezed into the storage closet past the boxes labeled National Geographics. He looked around. “You think our folks were hoarders?”
“I always thought it was Mom,” Will said. “But look at these boxes. Dad never threw away a map.”
Craig lowered himself onto the box marked “Xmas tree & dec.” “We’ve been lucky,” he said. “We’ve had our squabbles, but we would never have described our family as dysfunctional, would we?” He pulled a fur stole out of a plastic bin. “Better not let the SPCA see this.”
“Mom probably bought that before they were married,” said Will. “But the SPCA might like it. They use things like that for abandoned puppies. Makes them feel their mother is there.”
Craig rubbed the fur across his cheek. “Yeah,” he said. “I get that.”
Vivian couldn’t talk at the graveside service. It wasn’t an unhappy affair, Craig’s grandkids running from grave to grave and squealing like baby pigs. Sun was out, air warm. Jean waved her arm around like a conductor, and they sang a couple of peppy hymns—everyone but Bianca, who was wearing sunglasses and stiletto heels, but she seemed to be steady on her feet. Craig said some things about Mom being with Dad again. Vivian watched Will roll his eyes, but she closed hers. She would like to think of their being together.
She was the only one who was crying. Even when she laughed at the funny stories Craig told, she cried. Mom dropping the Christmas goose on the dining room floor. Mom sewing pockets in everything but dishtowels. Mom and the procession of maidenhair ferns she couldn’t keep alive. Mom embroidering dishtowels and pillowcases so her sons as well as her daughter would have trousseaus. Mom snapping the cards down when she played bridge or rummy.
It had been time. When Dad died, Mom had the stone cutter engrave her name on the grave marker too—above the blank space for her dates. But even if it was time, it was so hard to walk away from the casket resting on boards over the empty vault. When they left, the cemetery workers would lower the casket. She couldn’t stand seeing that. She turned away, and Karl steered her towards the car. She remembered then Karl’s dad’s burial, almost ten years before, in the part of the cemetery where the grave stones had to be flat. When they had started to lower his coffin into the earth, a thin woman with wild gray hair threw herself onto the varnished top and wailed. Karl’s mom, who had been tearless, started to wail too. A couple of men got the wild woman off and practically carried her away. For five minutes, Karl’s mom sobbed. Then she swallowed and nodded, and the casket was let down into the grave. The next month, Karl’s mom moved to Wyoming to live with his sister.
“Did you know?” she had asked Karl.
“I suspected.”
“Did your mom know?”
“I think so.”
“There better not be anybody throwing herself on your coffin, buddy.”
“On my urn.”
“On your urn.”
Remembering, Vivian smiled. She smiled at Karl. Maybe they would make it to their 50th. She slid into the rental car, and they followed her brothers to the restaurant where they would tell more stories and toast the two that had made them all possible.
2017
Vivian arranged the finished quilt blocks on the table, then swiveled back to the Bernina, her retirement gift to herself. “I can’t believe you can pay that kind of money for another sewing machine,” Karl had said before he bought himself a year-old Mustang, silver gray, which pushed her ancient Corolla out of the garage onto the curb. “It’s for both of us,” he said, and he had at least agreed to an automatic transmission so she could drive it if he ever had a stroke on one of their road trips. They did about five road trips a year now. She was always happy to return home to the Bernina, which she took to calling Bernie.
She matched the sides of two of the blocks and swiftly sewed them together. This quilt was to be a 60th birthday present for Will.
Will.
It was the same kind of cancer their father had, only Will was younger. Still, he said when he told Vivian, they do things differently now. He might not live to be as old as Dad, but he could live better than Dad did. Female hormones. One big bad side-effect—hot flashes.
“If I survived hot flashes,” Vivian said, “you can.”
But she worried. She and Karl saw a lot of Will now—he had moved into a studio apartment and left Bianca to her bottles. He swam, played tennis, taught inner-city kids how to sail on weekends, joined a restorative yoga group where he’d met a cheerful children’s librarian named Molly. Will didn’t have her bad knees or Karl’s bad back. His hair had grayed, like hers. He still traveled a lot for work, but he always texted her on the way home, and he’d usually join them for dinner the first night back. He had decided he would be happy.
To decide to be happy. When she was young, before she’d met Karl at their multi-class reunion—her fifth, his tenth—she’d followed her college boyfriend Adam to Boston and found a clerical job at the Widener Library. She catalogued newly arrived volumes by day and watched her relationship with Adam disintegrate by night. She never talked about her personal life at work, but everyone seemed to know, and one day her supervisor stood in front of her desk and looked at her long and solemnly and then, turning away, said, “One day you’re going to make some man a very unhappy wife.”
In the eye of memory, Vivian could still see that supervisor’s little mustache and little sneer.
Had she married Adam—who knows? How could anyone know what if? She’d married Karl, and she hadn’t been an unhappy wife. But maybe she hadn’t been a happy wife either. Was it possible to just make yourself be happy?
She fingered the ceramic pump pin cushion that she’d made in a summer crafts class and given to Mom one Christmas. She’d probably been eight or so, before she had any desire to wear high heels. Now, how many years had it been since she’d worn anything but sandals and sturdy walking shoes?
She matched two more quilt squares. Lovely green and brown patterns. Just right for her brother. She took a deep breath and slid them under the presser foot.
That hollow feeling she had when Dad had been diagnosed, when Mom had finally given up, that was the feeling she had when she worried about Will.
Craig put down the phone. Talking with Viv sometimes depressed him. He took off his glasses, wiped them with a lens cleaning tissue, then perched them on the plaster bust of Lincoln which presided over the heap of papers to the left of his computer. Jean had always complained about his office clutter.
The tricky thing about prayer, Craig acknowledged, was that there were no promises. When they were children, they counted on prayers to make everyone and everything safe—Mama, Daddy, Grandma and Grandpa and Granny Lou, soldiers, lost cats, broken arms, Sugar Corn Pops, pot roast. And Grandpa said very long prayers, especially at Thanksgiving when he and Vivian and Will just wanted to start gnawing at their drumsticks and wings. The other grandpa, Grampy Sam, was a shadowy figure with a cane; he had died before he was a real person to them. Like him, Dad didn’t believe in prayer. It was Mom who rang up God and the angels and the prophets, whoever would listen. It was Mom who taught them to pray.
If prayers got you what you wanted, Viv and Will would still be believers. Everyone would be a believer. Why not, after all? You want that girl to love you? You want a promotion? You want your wife not to have early dementia and your grandson not to have diabetes? Granted, granted, granted, granted.
You want your brother not to have stage-four prostate cancer.
It was a gift, he knew now. To be able to believe. He had it. Jean had it before the dementia and after. Two of their four kids had it. He couldn’t explain it. It didn’t give you what you asked for. It didn’t make life easy. But it did give you comfort. If only it gave you comfort you could share.
“Which image is clearer?” he asked his patients all day. “One or Two”? He would flip the phoropter lenses. “Two or Three”?
“I can’t tell,” some of them would sometimes say. “They look the same.”
“That’s all right,” he would tell them. “It’s not that one’s right and the other’s wrong. How about these? One or Two?”
Just once he wondered if someone would complain about the whole process. “They’re all awful. Give me a Five!”
From the trail Will could see the ocean, gray in the dusk. The sky was mottled, darkening. When he’d set out, it was mild so he’d left his jacket in the trunk, but he had kept on walking, walking though he knew he ought to turn back. When he was getting used to his diagnosis, he’d told Viv that he wouldn’t let himself slowly deteriorate, that while he was still strong, he’d swim out into the ocean and keep going until he couldn’t go any farther. He already knew what it would be like to drown. On a family outing to Great Salt Lake, when he was seven, he had felt the rocks beneath his feet fall away, and he was under the water, struggling to get his head into the air. You were supposed to float in the Great Salt Lake, he knew, but he didn’t float; he flailed his arms and tried to shout, his mouth filling with water. He gave up then, and it was beautiful, peaceful, sinking into oblivion. And then, abruptly, Dad had him and was shaking the water out of him, and Will was alive and angry and spitting up salt water on the sand.
When he casually as possible outlined his ocean plan, he had seen the horror, the terror in Viv’s eyes. She had looked down, said nothing. Now he knew he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t do it that way. He’d read up on the pills and three doctors signing off. But you couldn’t wait too long. You had to be able to swallow and do it all by yourself.
Dr. Bench would sign off after they ran out of oncology tricks. Will had some time yet. He still felt strong. Had made new friends, mostly new women friends who were affectionate and undemanding. He’d told them the truth. Mostly. What he understood was the truth.
Looking at the sun sinking into the sea, he slipped on a wet place in the trail, caught himself and staggered a few steps till he was upright. The earth wasn’t firm, solid here. That was the trouble with the earth. You couldn’t count on it. He could hang on for now, while his balance was good, while his muscles were strong. While there was still joy. Sunsets like this one, Warriors games, the excitement of the East Oakland kids on his sailboat, casserole dinners with Viv and Karl, evenings with Molly and her dog Zelda.
As long as he could still use dem bones. Dem bones, dem bones. As long as dem bones could walk. And dance. Why not? He turned around and headed back to his car. At the rec center where he took the yoga class, they had salsa lessons. Dem bones, he hummed, dem bones gonna dance. Dem bones gonna dance around.
Karen Rosenbaum has been writing and publishing short fiction and personal essays for over half a century. Her collection Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Wives (Zarahemla Press) won the Association of Mormon Letter’s 2016 Best Short Story Collection Award. A retired community college English teacher, she lives with her husband in Kensington, California.