One True Thing Read online

  In the folder was “The Dying Person’s Bill of Rights” and some pharmaceutical pamphlets about morphine. There were sixteen tenets to the Bill of Rights, and I got through “I have the right to be treated as a living human being until I die” and “I have the right not to die alone.” I did not break until the last one: “I have the right to be cared for by caring, sensitive, knowledgeable people who will attempt to understand my needs and will be able to gain some satisfaction in helping me face my death.”

  “What satisfaction?” I sobbed, and the tears ran hot down my face and I cried into a pillow until my face was as swollen as I imagined my mother’s stomach must be beneath my father’s shirts.

  I don’t know how long Teresa was there, but she never touched me or made any noise. When I finally looked up, she was standing with her stethoscope around her neck. She began to rummage in her bag, to pull out instruments and swabs in sealed silver packages.

  “This is why I told Dr. Cohn we did not need a nurse,” I said to her, still shaking. “Having a stranger in the house is too upsetting. I cannot afford to fall apart.”

  “Falling apart is curling up into a fetal position and staying in bed for a week,” she said. “What you were doing is having the emotional response an individual has to the loss of someone they love. We cry to give voice to our pain.”

  “That’s very poetic, Ms. Guerrero, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  “You are not going to feel any better for a long, long time, Ms. Gulden, and you know that far better than I do. But I refuse to believe that keeping your grief bottled up makes you feel better than crying.”

  “Like a five-year-old,” I said, blowing my nose.

  “The five-year-old who provides me with jokes never cries, Ms. Gulden. She does not understand what is happening. But you do.”

  I shook my head. “I can help her,” Teresa said, and went upstairs again. In a few minutes I heard a cry, a short sharp one, from the second floor, and then the long murmur of voices, and I got up and went to make two cups of tea. I sat at the table in the kitchen and drank one while the other grew cold on the counter, a tan skim of milk congealing on its surface. From above came another sound. I went to the living room and looked upward, and then I heard it again, the sound of a belly laugh. Teresa came downstairs swinging her stethoscope.

  “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “She’ll tell you,” she said, as she began to pack up her things. “I’ve taught her ways to sit on the edge of the tub and then slide in in stages, but it’s going to make it easier if you buy one of those rubber mats with suction cups and fasten it to the side so she feels more secure. Then she will not slip.”

  “Should I help her bathe?”

  “She is embarrassed by the condition of her body, but it may become necessary. Does she have an odor?”

  “God, no.”

  “That may come and when it does you will have to talk with her again.” She zipped her bag shut and for the first time since she arrived she smiled. She was very beautiful.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Twenty-three,” she said.

  “Jesus. I’m twenty-four. Why do you do this kind of work? You could be working in the hospital nursery, bathing babies.”

  “Anyone can bathe a baby,” Teresa said. “Not everyone can do this.”

  “You’re good,” I said.

  “That’s what Dr. Cohn said about you, Ms. Gulden.”

  “Ellen,” I said.

  “Ellen,” she said. “I will be back next Monday, unless you need me sooner.” She handed me a card.

  I put the kettle on and brought my mother a fresh cup of tea. She was on the floor in her bedroom looking through a long brown box, the kind lawyers keep documents in.

  “Do you remember the Halloween the boys went as a set of dice and Brian fell over downtown and Jeff wouldn’t help him up because he got such a kick out of seeing him waving his arms and legs around. Jeff said he looked like a turtle on his back. Oh, I could have killed him, but the idea was very funny.”

  “Don’t tell me—you’ve got the costumes in there.”

  She held up a picture of the two boys standing side by side on the front lawn, the light dying behind them so that there was a bright disfiguring star of last sunlight in the upper right corner.

  Jeff was showing number two, Bri a five. Lucky seven. “I lent the costumes to someone and they never gave them back. It was a good one.”

  “Is that what you were laughing about?”

  “When?”

  “I heard you laughing upstairs when Teresa was here.”

  “Oh,” my mother said, laughing again. “No. It’s another joke: a little boy comes into the classroom and his teacher says, ‘You’re late. Where were you?’ And he says, ‘On top of Blueberry Hill.’ And a second little boy comes in and the teacher says, ‘You’re late. Where were you?’ And the boy says, ‘On top of Blueberry Hill.’ And a third little boy comes in and the teacher says, ‘You’re late. Where were you?’ And he says, ‘On top of Blueberry Hill.’ And a little girl comes in and the teacher says, ‘I suppose you were on top of Blueberry Hill too.’ And she says, ‘I am Blueberry Hill.’”

  My mother giggled. “The five-year-old told her that?” I asked.

  “The seven-year-old,” my mother said.

  “If I had told you that joke when I was seven I would have spent the afternoon in my room.”

  “Autres temps, autres moeurs,” my mother said, her fingers moving in a stroking movement to the bump of the catheter beneath her skin.

  “Voltaire, I think,” I said.

  “Really?” my mother said. “I thought your father made that up.” And she laughed again and looked back at the box. “Remember the Halloween when you were Bo-Peep?” she said.

  “And I had to carry those sheep you made and kept spilling my candy?” I said. “How could I forget?”

  “I remember it all,” said my mother, “every bit of it.”

  On the morning when she went to decorate her tree we threaded red ribbon through the spokes of my mother’s wheels, the way my mother had threaded red, white, and blue ribbons through the wheels of our bikes on the Fourth of July when we were children, ribbons and playing cards—but only the red ones, for the color—attached to the spokes with clothespins so that we made a noise when we rode like old engines, Model Ts in movies.

  But none of the Minnies, even Mrs. Duane, who talked to us for a long time about a little girl who’d been kidnapped in Texas—tragedies! Oh, we loved our secondhand tragedies!—mentioned the ribbons. I suppose if they had acknowledged them it would have meant acknowledging the wheelchair, and if they acknowledged the wheelchair it would have meant acknowledging my mother’s fragile sloping shoulders and the way her hands shook when she lifted them from the armrests.

  And that would have meant acknowledging the disease, and the fears, and the dangers, and the death. Better than anyone I understood why they didn’t want that to happen. Better than anyone except maybe my mother.

  Imagine having to dictate your prose to someone else when you are writing a novel, or telling someone where to place the cerulean and how to mix it with white for the edges of a cloud in your landscape, and you can understand what it was for my mother to have to sit in her chair in front of the blue spruce, grown now to twenty feet all these years after its planting as a seedling, and direct my clumsy efforts to place her ornaments exactly where she wanted them. There were hundreds of them; both of us had sore calluses and little pin dots of dried blood on our fingers from pushing in the sequins and aligning the hanging wires. All red. All gold. Gold and red striped, gold and red spotted, random patterns of red and gold. And big red ribbons shot through with gold and stiff with wire, to be cosseted into bows.

  “No no no, Ellen,” she called from below as I attached a bow to a branch. “It’s supposed to ripple.” With her hand she sketched a shallow wave in the air, and the winter sunlight seemed to illuminate the b
lue veins on its back like miniature rivers, tributaries from her heart.

  “That ball right near your hand … no … no … there! It’s hanging too low. It needs to be tucked under there more tightly … higher … that’s it … and then there should be one just below it … no, lower and over a little.” It was like trying to scratch someone’s back, finding the right spot, except that it was bigger than any back and the effort seemed to go on forever.

  Mrs. Best had the tree next to us; her ribbons were gold, her ornaments red and gold wooden soldiers. “Where does your mother get that ribbon that holds its shape?” she asked me with her lips pursed.

  “She just seems to have things like that,” I said. “She’s the kind of person who can go upstairs to the linen closet and dig up some silver stars if you need them.”

  “Oh, Linda, don’t worry,” my mother called to the two of us on our abutting ladders. “Yours looks beautiful already.”

  The truth was that even with my shortcomings at spacing, grouping, and tying, I thought the Gulden tree was the handsomest, although Mrs. Duane was swathing hers in some gold stuff that looked like fourteen-karat insulation, which was magical if strange. “Some of them never learn that with a tree this size in a public park, gaudy is key,” my mother had said when I remarked that our ornaments looked like plump chorus girls in a second-rate summer-stock production of 42nd Street.

  As I stepped back to look at her tree, I could see she’d been right. The more tasteful decorations, including Mrs. Best’s, seemed to disappear amid the ice-blue branches of the big trees. And when the switch was thrown on the red lights the public works people had threaded through the day before, the quieter efforts would completely disappear. “These will reflect!” my mother had declared triumphantly, turning her sequins in her shaking hands.

  “Ellie, there’s a bow on the other side that’s much too close to the end of a branch,” she called, fingering the ornaments in a box on her lap.

  It took us nearly three hours to decorate that tree. By the time we were done, though the temperature was in the low thirties, I’d laid my jacket on the grass and discarded my gloves, my fingers alternately numb and aching from the pine needles and the wire hangers. “My back is killing me,” one of the Minnies said loudly, clinging to a ladder with one hand and rubbing the small of her back with the other.

  Mrs. Duane went down the street to the deli and brought back coffee and sandwiches for us all, and I sat at my mother’s feet, my shoulders sagging, and ate roast beef and drank my coffee black. She ate nothing at all, only sipped at a cup of milky tea.

  “How are you holding up?” I said very quietly.

  “There’s a problem. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I can feel it.”

  “What?”

  “It’s something about the bows. Maybe they need to face down a little more.”

  And back up I went, as Mrs. Best stood with her arms crossed on her chest and looked from her tree to ours and then back again. She sighed. “Kate, you do have an eye. You simply have an eye. And with an eye, you either have it or you don’t,” she said.

  What a dope, I thought to myself as I tilted bows downward.

  “Linda, you’re being silly,” my mother said, but from the gay tone of her voice I could tell that she agreed completely, with Linda Best and with me, too. “It looks beautiful, and the children will love the soldiers. Do you have any more?”

  “Tons,” said Mrs. Best.

  “Load ’em on,” my mother said, as I cut my finger on one of the wires. “More is more.”

  I wasn’t sure why she seemed so indefatigable that day, whether it was the brilliant weather, the pleasure she took in making things pretty, the return to something she’d done for so many years, or the competition—“the Super Bowl of home decor aficionados” my father had called it that morning at breakfast. Certainly my mother seemed a good deal happier at Mrs. Best’s chagrin than was charitable, and at the improvement in the Best tree as Mrs. Best hung soldiers from every bare inch of branch.

  Or perhaps it had been that she had gone out with my father the night before, dressed in her cranberry shift, the gold brooch of a bow with pavé diamonds at its knot pulling down one shoulder of the dress, which had already grown far too big for her. She’d made herself up painstakingly, but because her hands were unsteady her lipstick was, too, and her eyeliner looked a little like the stuttery lines on some hospital monitor.

  She timed her morphine carefully so that the hours when she got most relief and least sleepiness would come during dinner and the chamber music concert they planned for later. She wore her fur coat and bent her head to rub her cheek against its soft collar.

  When she and my father had driven away I sat on the living-room couch with my hands in my lap and tried to make a plan for my own evening. I had been so busy arranging for her dress, her medication, where her wheelchair would go in the car, that I had forgotten that for the first time in many months I would be alone. I called Jonathan, but he was not home and I left a breezy message on his machine: “Just called to check in. Call me if you have a chance.” When I heard the recording of Jules saying, “Can’t come to the phone right now …” I hung up.

  But after I found All About Eve on a cable channel, ate some ice cream from the container, and had a light beer, I felt more like my old self, the Ellen Gulden who had walked around her little downtown apartment touching things her first night—sink, stove, bathroom taps—thinking “Mine, mine, mine.”

  Jonathan was not coming home for Christmas. He’d be doing three fulltime weeks of data processing; it would pay for his summer sublet. He had plenty of schoolwork to do, too, he’d said. And perhaps he had a first-year law student who loved the way he ran his tongue over his upper lip and made impudent eye contact as they talked about torts.

  The pressure and pain behind my eyes and in my jaw was intense, maybe from the beer, and I wondered how morphine would go down with alcohol. On the TV Eve Harrington became a big star but sold her soul to that dandy of a devil, Addison deWitt. I’d never thought it seemed like such a bad bargain, although I’d have known better than to cross Bette Davis, with those mean sleepy eyes and that hard fish mouth.

  The next movie was High Noon. I hated Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly—“so white bread,” Jules and I would always say in unison—and I turned the television off just as a car door slammed outside.

  Even before they got in the house I could tell that my parents’ evening had not gone well. I could hear my mother arguing outside in the drive, and when my father opened the door with her clinging awkwardly to his arm, his face was white, his eyes dark.

  “…they were all looking,” I heard her say as he helped her over to the couch, where she lay down slowly, in careful stages, her pumps left on the floor like a memento.

  “I’ll get the chair,” I said.

  When I came back in, my father had turned on the lamps and was in the kitchen. I could tell from the sounds of cabinet doors and canisters that he was making tea. My mother’s eyes were closed, but she was biting her lower lip. When she opened her mouth there was lipstick on her teeth. Mascara was gathered at the corners of her eyes, smudgy shadows.

  “Disaster,” she whispered.

  My father came in with a mug and handed it to her. She raised her head and shoulders to sip, then put it on the coffee table and fell back.

  “I am never going out again,” she said.

  “Oh, nonsense, Kate,” my father said. “A thousand people have dozed off during chamber music in the chapel. The president has done it nearly every time in my memory. Why shouldn’t you?”

  “Because I never would have before and they all knew why I did it tonight. I remember the Vivaldi and a little of the Mozart and then the next thing I know I’m waking up with spit all over my chin and everyone staring—”

  “No one was staring,” my father said. “They were getting ready to leave and gathering up their things.”

  “They were staring. At the restaurant
people stared, too. And then you made the fuss about the chair—”

  “The doors should be wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs. It’s the law. The restaurant was negligent.”

  “—and you used that word,” my mother continued, the pitch of her voice climbing. “You used that word!”

  “I’m sorry,” my father said.

  “I am not handicapped, and don’t you forget it. Either of you. I am not handicapped. I’m just weak. And woozy. I get woozy. That’s why I need this thing.”

  “I said there were laws about accommodating the handicapped. I did not suggest that you were handicapped.”

  “Don’t say that word,” she said. “Don’t say it.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  I went into the kitchen and made myself a cup of tea. But when I went back to the living room, my father was kneeling beside the sofa with his head in my mother’s lap and she was smoothing his hair. They were talking to one another, but I could not hear the words, only the plaintive tones of one and the murmurings of the other. I went back into the kitchen and poured the tea into the sink, threw away the empty ice-cream container, took two aspirin for the pain behind my eyes, and decided to go to bed. The house was quiet except for the faint hum of the furnace from the basement, just discernible through the floorboards.

  I went through the hallway to the stairs, past the watercolor portraits of Brian at six, Jeffrey at eight, Ellie at eleven with serious eyes and mouth and a pink ribbon holding back her dark hair. But my parents were there ahead of me, my father three steps up, carrying my mother, who had her head on his shoulder.