STORIES: A Seasonal Life, (Continuation,Part IV)

From upstairs I hear the start of a normal sibling quarrel. Christopher’s voice a placating baritone to Sarah’s shrill soprano complaint. She needs more time to dress, she says. And Christopher already knows his lines to this feminine demand. They’re much too old for me to run upstairs to stop it and it dwindles down to pouting last words all by itself. Clomping footsteps down the stairs tell me Christopher is dressed and ready, and I turn to catch him coming up behind me.
“Morning, Mom,” as he kisses the top of my head; something he started doing since he grew tall enough to tower over me just three years ago.
“Good Morning, Chris,” I say, and wait for him to tell me about Sarah.
“Sarah will be down in a couple minutes, I hope,” he starts. I wait for more. “She takes so long in the bathroom every morning. Why don’t you get her up a half hour before the rest of us?”
I’m startled at this sensible suggestion, and rise to her defense against his father’s logic. “You know she’s always first one in the shower while you boys take another fifteen minutes to get yourselves out of bed. She’s always ready when it’s time to leave and she’s never held you up. It’s just her way sometimes to take a little longer. She’s a girl,” I hear myself say and immediately want to take that back because it sounds so condescending. Chris just shrugs, “I know,” he says, unaware he has stirred up my emotion, forgetting that and with what he was upset at all.
Sarah bounces in, cheerful and uninjured; she too has taken it in stride. Relaxed again, I watch them balance books, gulp down their juice, teeth gripping toast to free their hands to manage keys and jackets. I watch with pride and wonder at this ballet in our kitchen, which my children gracefully perform each morning circling around counters, chairs, and each other just stopping long enough to kiss me quickly as they twirl themselves out the door.
Act III finally makes his appearance, and I reach to rake my fingers through his hair as he attempts to dodge me. “Sleepyhead, I thought I’d have to go back up and get you,” I tease, because Joshua is still grinning. Was he, even on the day that he was born?
“I’m late, I know,” he says and waves a notebook as explanation—he hadn’t finished all his homework before he went to bed. He’s out the kitchen back door just as quickly as he entered, in a hurry to wait at the curb in anticipation, oblivious to the teenage stigma of a school bus-ride to school.
In just about an hour and a half I have the dishes done, house picked up, laundry folded, showered, dressed, and set my mood to quiet strength and tolerance. I pack the car and drive along the highway in a Volvo wagon that is yet another not-me part of me. I was happy with my Honda, but William says the Volvo is a better car. Reluctantly I try to fit the stereotype of Swedish ingenuity and design, but passable is the best that I can do. I find a spot to park in front, right near the “Greenwood Acres Nursing Home” sign and glide in as Volvos are supposed to do. Guiltily, I stand outside and light a cigarette to draw in the needed and imagined calm, unwilling to have cast the smoky scent upon the laundry I have loaded in the back seat of the car. I’ll hesitate, but steel myself not for the burden I’ll carry in, but for the woman I have come to see, William’s mother.
“Hi,” I beam; “You’re late,” she says, but nonetheless efficiently I put away her clothes in drawers and closets, empty the laundry basket in her room into the basket I have brought, before I try at conversation.
Does hatred have a stronger hold than love on heart and memory—for I’m the only one she still remembers as being me. While she does not acknowledge William, she still pleasantly will greet him every Sunday when he visits, yet my daily time spent fixing her hair and spoon-feeding her lunch is one that’s taut with tension and suspicion on her part. I chatter endlessly to entertain her despite receiving no response, aware it’s but an escalation of my twenty-year attempt to please her. Eventually I wither under the cool blue stare of the vacant eyes that follow me around the room she doesn’t know is hers. Distrust remains in the last vestige of her personality that Alzheimer’s has slowly eaten away. She doesn’t remember how or why, and has lost her sense of gracious solicitude, but she still sees me as her enemy, though Christopher she had always loved and accepted—is overseen as being only half mine. At last, a word: “Slut,” she says, and lifts her head to look directly at me. It’s part of the disease I know, for even twenty years ago, propriety would not have let her call me worse than “tart.”
Drained, I kiss her papery cheek and cheerfully tell her I’ll be back tomorrow, ignore the scowl and hurry out the door.
I sit here at our library, a story reader to the first graders and volunteer monitor almost every afternoon, and read the final chapters of The Trilogy—a book I haven’t read since college and enjoy now even more. I plan, as then, to follow this with Watership Down; I seem to need some rabbits in my life. My teeth have diminished in their clenching, but my jaw is sore from effort, and it takes longer than usual today to escape into Gandalf’s world. Marian has asked me why I don’t use library privilege to check out what I choose to read, but I am reluctant to remove especially this jewel from its vault. For that, and that I find myself unable to focus on more than one reading at a time; and the living story that goes on around me daily needs my attention more. I stay until almost five today, secure in knowing I will still make it home before the children who have blessedly planned activities all on this same afternoon.