Ann sits at the table in her mother’s breakfast room and looks out at the oaks and silver maples. Dry thorns scratch the brick under the window, witchy and mournful, breaking the winter silence.
She sighs, goes back to sifting through her mother’s old recipes. A mug of Constant comment tea marks a pile of chicken recipes. Ann fiddles with the tag dangling from the mug. Ironic. She and her mother favor Constant Comment, but it’s difficult for them to share a single civil comment. Always, there are the interruptions, the frictions. The competition.
Ann doesn’t want to think about that now. Her marriage has fairly sprinted to an end since Christmas. She needs comfort, and so she finds it in routine. Reading recipes feels good. Nothing else is orderly. She grabs a handful of clippings and taps them into a neat stack.
A recipe for blueberry pie falls out of the binder. Her mother is good at pies, her sure fingers folding a thin sheet of pastry and dropping it neatly into the tin. When Ann was only as tall as the kitchen counter, she watched her mother make pies. Flour puffed in the light under the cabinets like lovely clouds. The wallpaper was red plaid, and her mother was beautiful, wearing a frilly apron she tied with her floury hands. Her pies are the reason Ann has candles in her birthday pie instead of cake. Ann smoothes out the thin clipping.
She hears the stairs creak. A straightening of the spine. Sit up straight. Don’t hunch over.
Her mother appears, framed in the doorway. She’s just awake, but she hardly looks rested. She looks sick. The light falls on her silver-blond hair, clinging damply to her forehead. She’d once been a beauty queen with a dark page boy and arched brows, but the years have not been good to her.
She brushes past Ann on her way to the pantry bar.
“I feel awful," she says. “But it’s the funniest thing. I’ll have a vodka and feel just fine."
Ann closes the binder with a soft thump. Her mother drops ice into a crystal glass and pours Absolut. She sits down at the table littered with recipes, the old-fashion glass clutched in ringed fingers.
“That’s not funny, Mom. Vodka isn’t medicine." She paces each word carefully, casually.
“Well, vodka is my medicine," she snaps. “It makes me feel better." She takes a sip and looks in the direction of the garden. An errant cardinal, lost in the gloom, flits from branch to branch. But, that’s it. Nothing has changed. It is a desolate Indiana afternoon.
Her mother leaves a message on voicemail. She sounds wistful, but she isn’t the wistful type--except when she sings “I Left My Heart in San Francisco." Ann was born there, her mother a young bride waiting for the ship. Gardenias bloomed on flower carts and the fog wrapped its arms around them. Ann thinks of her mother bending over her crib with a teaspoon of cooled, boiled water--to cure Ann’s hiccups.
She calls her mother back.
“What are you doing?" Her mother rarely engages in small talk. “Is this a bad time?"
“No, it’s actually a good time," Ann says.
Silence.
“What is it, Mom? You called."
“I had a scan," she says. “He put this gel on my stomach, and then he yelled, 'OH’. I knew he shouldn’t be saying that. But he saw it. He knew right away something’s in there."
“What’s in there?"
She clears her throat. Ann has spent a lifetime reading her tics and this throat clearing is one of them. “The Big C,"she says.
“They think it’s cancer."
“What the hell?"
“Yes. Hell."
She chuckles, which is her way of circling an unpleasant topic. “Cancer of the gall bladder.
Whoever heard of such a thing? The gall bladder," she says. “It sounds so unfashionable."
Ann can’t believe what she is hearing. Why would a gall bladder be life threatening? Who even needs a gall bladder?
“Are you there?" her mother says.
Ann hears the nails, polished in apricot crème, probably tapping the date book filled with lunches and parties, and now, doctors’ appointments.
“Yes, and no. I’m lost."
“Me, too."
“There must be something they can do. What about Mayo’s? Or that place in Texas? But that’s hearts, isn’t it?"
“There’s nothing wrong with my heart." Ann hears her riffling through pages. She imagines those little white squares and her mother looking for places to write in cancer.
“Mom, what are you doing? We’re talking about your gall bladder."
“No, we aren’t. You were talking about my heart. It’s perfectly fine, which is too bad because it will keep ticking away while this thing has a fling." The tapping stops.
“Get another opinion. They put baboon hearts in babies. So why can’t they do something about your gall bladder?"
“They tell me there’s nothing they can do. I could go to the moon."
Her mother’s skin is so translucent Ann can see to her bones. She is starving at night but can hardly eat a cracker. Ann finds small treats to tempt her--a thumbnail of cheddar, a sliver of ham. It becomes a game. She tells Ann, “The fairies came. That potato chip got me all the way to morning."
Ann helps her mother to a chair in the bedroom. She puts a cold, wet washcloth to her mother’s forehead. She is having a “poor spell." Ann waits until she is feeling well enough to coax her into a clean gown. Ann looks at the carpet. It is stained, and suddenly she wants to gouge it and scream. Ann tells herself to be calm. None of this is a bother; it is a blessing. It is all that is left to do, and finally there is so little anyone can do.
Their days unwind in the sunroom with glass walls where it’s warm even on cold days, with Oriental rugs, an old armoire and brass lamps. Two loveseats in black chintz with peach lilies and ivy bring the garden inside. Ann wouldn’t have thought of that. But her mother did.
Ann thinks about that sunroom. It’s where they come apart and they pull together.
One night the clouds touch the earth with the humid promise of spring, but Ann feels the unmistakable approach of death. Her mother hardly moves, the valium calming her anxiety and the morphine sedating her. Ann walks around like a robot.
Her mother sits on one of the loveseats with a throw over her legs, a blue gingham bed jacket pulled up around her pale cheeks. Ann hates that bed jacket. She’d given her mother one years ago, and she had lent it to a friend with cancer. “I never got it back," she told Ann, who went out and bought another. She is sorry she did. It is just another reminder.
Suddenly her mother wakes up. “Oh, shit," she says.
“Mom."
“They said maybe six months. It’s been more than a year." Something cold whirls around Ann.
Her mother struggles to sit up. The oxygen claps faintly. “I was afraid. I don’t know exactly why, but isn’t that just fear for you. The not knowing." Her eyes are startling blue. “But I’m not afraid anymore. I’ve had so much here, with you."
Her voice is strong. Ann thinks of a candle, burning, pooling out in a final luminescent white glow. Her mother waves her over, and she comes and sits on a hassock. She takes her mother’s hands, silky and loose, and this is different. Ann has rarely been comfortable around her mother. Even in the decline: There was no small talk along the way, no bantering down the stairs to hell. All of a sudden they are here.
Her mother says: “How can I ever thank you? I want to tell you something. I know being the eldest makes you feel responsibility very seriously. You’re different because you’re you, and you’re the first born. You know how I go on. There are so many good things about that; you’re strong, independent, smart and a great achiever. That’s a lot of good stuff. Besides, God made you beautiful. Isn’t that nice? And you’re blessed with good health…."
Ann doesn’t move. Her mother says: “Seems like you’re going through a giant rough spot now.
Please. Try not to look back. And try to forgive. I know that’s hard but it’s the only way you’ll have peace. Peace is what we need. You don’t have to say or act out forgiveness. Just know that you do…"
Ann leans over her mother, careful not to disturb the pillow under her and the air around them.
She kisses her cheek. They sit like that, together, with cold rain dinging the patio stones.
Ann goes over her mother’s words that fill the room to bursting. She locks them in. That is all she has. She thinks of this last time she talked with her mother and her mother talked with her.
...
(“Once I Had a Bunch of Thyme," the title from an old Irish ballad, won honorable mention in the Harriett Rose Legacies writing contest at the Carnegie Center, Lexington, KY, in April, 2015.)