One True Thing Read online

  I went behind her, and, hooking my hands under her armpits, pulled her into a standing position. She held my arm tightly and shuffled into the bedroom. I helped her on with her underpants and her pants, her tunic, as she held on to the edge of the dresser. But I never touched her, not really, never patted her, much less held her close. And if I told you today that I’ve wondered about that a hundred times since then, whether I should have wrapped my arms around her instead of the towel, whether I should have rocked her as she had done so many times for me, I would be lying about the number, because it has been many many more.

  I never try to remember how she looked that morning. I remember that I never touched her, and I never looked her in the eye. When I was done she moved slowly to the bed, like a blind person in an unfamiliar room, and she lay down on her back, staring at the ceiling. For the first time I noticed that the scarf Jeffrey had given her for Christmas had been slung over the mirror atop her dresser, so that a spill of glossy purple grapes and green grape leaves and the sinuous twist of vines hung in place of any reflection.

  “I’m going back to sleep,” she said.

  That January, when they delivered the hospital bed, leaving the den in disarray and the living room crowded with furniture, leaving a long scratch in the oak floor of the hallway because they were careless with a metal side rail, she didn’t say anything. She just got in and turned on her side so that she was looking out the window, out the window that looked out on our driveway and the side of the house next door. It was as though something was broken, but I think it broke in the bathroom, on that bench.

  At the end she was both child and mother, both teacher and student, both strength and supplicant. At the end she lay in the den, in the bed with the high bars on the side, so that she would not roll out at night. Sometimes I would stand in the doorway in the dark, quiet and observant as a Peeping Tom, and watch her thrash and cry and talk, bits of disconnected things, about my father, about her babies, always babies. About people whose names meant nothing to me, who might be ghosts, figments, or regrets and missed opportunities. When she talked to her brother Steven one night, her eyes open even though their glaze made their blindness as clear as a white cane, that was when I stayed until the sky outside began to lighten. Somehow I thought if she talked to her brother, dead so many years ago, it meant she was seeing another country in her mind’s eye and that her heart was hammering toward its inevitable full stop.

  Often I watched with tears dripping down my face onto the front of my nightgown, but it was as though they were an inert function of my body, like a runny nose. There were no sobs, none of the heaves that you associate with a crying jag. There was no sound but my mother’s thick and arduous breathing as I stood across the room, bleeding tears.

  Once, when I came downstairs, the side of her bed had been lowered, and my father was wedged uncomfortably next to her. He and I looked at one another in the darkness, but I turned and went upstairs and if he followed afterward I did not hear him.

  That room had white pine paneling on the walls and flowered curtains at the windows, a rose-and-green print I can still evoke in memory. The green couch had been carted into the living room, the hospital bed positioned in front of the wall of bookshelves so it faced the television. But all of the light and prettiness evoked by the decor was negated that month by the light, which was dim and gray, the dour grudging clouded sunshine of January and February. Now, today, I feel my heart begin to sink on New Year’s Day and lift only—inevitably, ironically—when Easter is on the horizon. My miserable anniversaries.

  One night the branches of the Douglas fir at the corner of the house lashed my windows and hers all night long, and by morning the snow was falling thick and fast, so that there was no light in the room at all and I had to turn on the lamps in the middle of the day. The snow began to drift until finally it reached almost to the windows. My mother kept her head turned to the side all day, except when she drank her soup, lifting the spoon to her mouth in a long slow arc, dropping her mouth open when the spoon was only halfway there, as though she could no longer trust herself to coordinate her motions more precisely. “The snow is so beautiful,” she said, handing me back the mug, and then she fell asleep.

  Beneath the rich yellow light of the lamp I read and, when my eyes became tired, went into the kitchen to judge the progress of the storm by the thickness of the blanket in the back, ripples and hillocks where it covered small bushes, a rise in the yard that marked an azalea I had protected with an upturned peach basket and a burlap bag. The phone in the kitchen rang like a scream in the quiet house, and when I went to answer it I saw that the day had slipped away and it was nearly seven. Only the light told me the time, and the light had been disguised all afternoon.

  “Ellen,” my father said, “I cannot possibly get home in this. The security people have closed off both the footbridges and no one has been able to get out to plow. I will sleep somewhere here.”

  “In your office?”

  “I don’t know. Several of the other people in the department have pullout couches. If I can find someone who’s already gone home, I’ll use theirs. If you try me here and there’s no answer, that’s what I’ve done.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “How is your mother?”

  “The same.”

  “Tell her that I’ll see her tomorrow.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fine.”

  I think I remember that when I put down the phone there was a flicker of the thought that if my mother died during the night, with the snow falling thick outside, while my father was marooned on a sofa bed with some erudite honors graduate of a Seven Sisters college with strong opinions on Henry James and a soft spot for narrow handsome married men, that he would suffer with the memory the rest of his life. Or perhaps that was how I remembered it afterward, when memory plays so many tricks.

  In the den my mother’s eyes were open, looking at nothing. “Who was that?” she said softly.

  “Your husband,” I said in what I thought was a voice without expression. “He cannot seem to find a way to get home, so he is staying at the college. He says he will see you tomorrow.”

  “It’s a bad storm,” my mother said, looking out the window again.

  “It’s not that bad,” I said.

  “Ellen,” she said, and her voice was stronger than it had been in days, “put down the book.” In fact her voice was stronger, sterner, than I had ever remembered it, except the day that I mocked the little girl with Down’s syndrome who once lived at the foot of our hill and my mother turned cold and pitiless in a way I had always thought only my father could. She was like a sprinter now, at rest until those brief necessary moments when she would become herself for just a few minutes.

  “What has happened between you and your father?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have been very angry with him since you came home. If you’re going to be angry at anyone about all this, you should be angry at me. I’m why you’re here, not him.”

  “Mama, this is not about you. And it’s not something we should discuss. I have my own differences with Papa that have nothing to do with you.”

  “They do have to do with me, especially now. He’s all you’ll have.”

  “Stop. Just stop.” I raised my hands, palm out, as though to push the words away.

  “No, you stop. You and your father will need each other. And you and your brothers. And I hope he can have more of a relationship with the boys, too, if I’m not there to get in the way. But you and he already have such a bond. You’re so much alike.”

  “Please don’t say that.”

  “Why? Because he’s not perfect? Because he’s not the man you once thought he was?”

  “Mama, I can’t talk to you about this.”

  “Ellen,” she said, struggling to turn toward me, her hands like pale claws on the railing of the bed, her legs scissoring away the white sheets, “
listen to me because I will only say this once and I shouldn’t say it at all. There is nothing you know about your father that I don’t know, too.”

  The two of us stared silently into one another’s eyes, and I think that after a moment she gave a little nod and then lay back.

  “And understand better,” she added.

  “All right,” I said.

  “You make concessions when you’re married a long time that you don’t believe you’ll ever make when you’re beginning,” she said. “You say to yourself when you’re young, oh, I wouldn’t tolerate this or that or the other thing, you say love is the most important thing in the world and there’s only one kind of love and it makes you feel different than you feel the rest of the time, like you’re all lit up. But time goes by and you’ve slept together a thousand nights and smelled like spit-up when babies are sick and seen your body droop and get soft. And some nights you say to yourself, it’s not enough, I won’t put up with another minute. And then the next morning you wake up and the kitchen smells like coffee and the children have their hair all brushed and the birds are eating out of the feeder and you look at your husband and he’s not the person you used to think he was but he’s your life. The house and the children and so much of what you do is built around him and your life, too, your history. If you take him out it’s like cutting his face out of all the pictures, there’s a big hole and it’s ugly. It would ruin everything. It’s more than love, it’s more important than love. Think of Anna.”

  “Anna?”

  “In the book.” She gestured toward the end table where my paperback copy of Anna Karenina lay.

  “But you didn’t finish reading it.”

  “I’d read it before.” She looked at the snow falling, tiny floating ghosts tapping against the window, spinning in and out of the blue-black beyond. “I’d read them all before. I just wanted a chance to read them again. I wanted a chance to read them with you.”

  I leaned over the rail of the bed, its metal cold and hard against my chest, and took her hand in mine, her grip strong, painful almost, and then lax. I slid the railing down and I put my head on the sheets, atop the cage of her pelvis, no fat or flesh to protect it. I cried until the sheets were wet, and she stroked my hair, over and over, the dry flesh making a faint sibilant sound, like the smallest whisper. Then in a softer voice, she began to speak again.

  “It’s hard. And it’s hard to understand unless you’re in it. And it’s hard for you to understand now because of where you are and what you’re feeling. But I wanted to say it, I didn’t say it very well, I’m no writer, but I wanted to say it because I won’t be able to say it when I need to, when it’s one of those nights and you’re locking the front door because of foolishness about romance, about how things are supposed to be. You can be hard, and you can be judgmental, and with those two things alone you can make a mess of your life the likes of which you won’t believe. I think of a thousand things I could teach you in the next ten years, and I think of how everything important you learned the first twenty-four you learned from your father and not me, and it hurts my heart, to know how little I’ve gotten done.”

  “No, Mama,” I whispered.

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes, somebody let me speak the truth, somebody let me,” she cried. “Your father says I’ll only upset myself, and you say, please, no, Mama, and only Teresa lets me speak. Saying it is the only thing that makes me feel better, even the drugs aren’t as good as that. All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble. I want to talk before I die. I want to be the one who gets to say things, who gets to think the deep thoughts. You’ll all talk when I’m gone. Let me talk now without shusshing me because it hurts you to hear what I want to say. I’m tired of being shusshed.”

  “What do you want to say?” I said, lifting my head and pushing my damp hair aside. “Go ahead and say it.”

  “I just said everything I wanted to say, except that I feel sad. I feel sad that I won’t be able to plan your wedding. Don’t have a flower girl or a ring bearer—they always misbehave and distract from the bride. And don’t have too many people.”

  “Mama, I don’t know that I’ll ever get married.”

  “Don’t say things like that, Ellen. Think about what I just told you.”

  “All right. What else?”

  “I feel afraid that when I fall asleep I will never wake up. I miss sleeping with your father.”

  “Should I tell him that?”

  “I already have.”

  “What else?”

  “If I knew you would be happy I could close my eyes now and rest.” Her voice was beginning to sink and die, as though it was going down the drain, rush of words to trickle of whisper. “It’s so much easier.”

  “I know it is. I wish you could.”

  “No, not that. The being happy. It’s so much easier, to learn to love what you have instead of yearning always for what you’re missing, or what you imagine you’re missing. It’s so much more peaceful.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  “It doesn’t work that way.” And suddenly she was asleep. Her mouth hung open and her hair was scraped back from her forehead, lank because we had not washed it for several days, not since the last time Teresa had come. The lines across her forehead were cut deep, as though someone had done them with a ruler and a pencil. The sheet over her midsection was dark with my tears.

  Everything you know, I know, she’d said, and it was true. I was the ignorant one. I’d taken a laundry list of all the things she’d done and, more important to me, all the things she’d never done, and turned them into my mother, when they were no more my mother than his lectures on the women of Dickens were my father.

  Our parents are never people to us, never, they’re always character traits, Achilles’ heels, dim nightmares, vocal tics, bad noses, hot tears, all handed down and us stuck with them. Our dilemma is utter: turn and look at this woman, understand and pity her, like and talk with her, recognize that she has taken the cold cleanliness of the spartan rooms in which she grew up and turned them, within her considerable and perhaps wounded heart, into a life-long burst of cooking and cosseting and making her own little corner of the world pretty and welcoming, and the separation is complete—but when that happens you will have to be an adult. There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.

  Just before midnight she woke. She licked her lips slowly, twisting and turning her arms on the sheets, then turned her head.

  “Is it morning yet?” she said.

  “No.”

  “I need pills,” she said.

  It was a new vial, nearly full. She gulped one down, her throat working; coughed and then sipped again, her whole body moving with the effort. She sighed and it rattled deep in her throat, half groan.

  “Help me, Ellen,” she whispered. “I don’t want to live like this anymore.”

  We stared at each other in the half-light of the lamps.

  “Please,” she said. “You must know what to do. Please. Help me. No more.”

  “It’ll be better in the morning.”

  “No,” she said, and groaned again. “It will not. It will not.” She sounded like a tired and irritable child. She wrapped her fingers around my wrist, the wrist of the hand that held the pills. Her grip was surprisingly strong, and for some reason I thought of those people who lift Volkswagens off babies pinned beneath, of people trapped in caves and found alive, saved by a diet of snow, long past the time when they should have died.

  “Please,” she said. “Help me. I don’t want this.” But I could tell that the pill was already beginning to take effect, or perhaps that the effort of the words, the request, the hand on my arm, had put her under. She looked at me sadly from beneath lids that began to drop like those of some wise old bird. “Help me,” she whispered. “You’re so smart. You’ll know what to do.” Then her eyes closed compl
etely. “Please,” she whispered once more.

  I slept that night in a chair in the den, fell asleep as the snow continued to fall. It covered everything without any sound except the scratch of the pine branches against the side of the house. I woke to the ugly fluorescent brightness of a world deep in fallen snow, covered with pitiless whiteness. It was a world changed forever, a world in which I found it difficult to meet my mother’s eyes.

  It must be terrible to bury someone you love in early May, when the ground is beginning to thaw and stretch and turn bright green and the smell of lilacs tumbles down from the bushes like a little benediction. Or in September, when the noon sun is still warm on your face but the evenings are cool enough for flannel and an extra blanket dragged up from the footboard in the middle of the night.

  Or at Christmas. It must be terrible at Christmas.

  February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long. At the beginning of the month I had bought my mother anemones at the florist on Main Street, paid fifteen dollars for a tiny bunch because they seemed, with their fragile lavender and bright red, to represent something that seemed as distant as the moon. I put them on the table next to the window, so that when she looked out she saw, not just the gray piles of old plowed snow at the edge of the driveway, like slag from some quarry, not just the side of the neighboring house and the big oak groaning in the winter winds, but those frail and beautiful things, bending their heavy heads toward her. But after only two days they fell, drooping almost to the dusty tabletop, their stems defeated, perhaps by a draft from beneath the sill. And I threw them away.