Elsewhere: A Memoir Part 8

"Know what?"

"The time. Later, I'll want to know."

"But it won't be eight forty-five anymore."

When she stared at me blankly, I decided to try a different tack. "Mom, did you forget about the doctor?" We were due at his office in half an hour.

Abject terror now. "Did we miss the appointment?"

"No, there's plenty of time. But you need to get dressed."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"I haven't showered. I didn't know what time it was."

"You can shower when you get home."

She blinked at me in incomprehension, then gazed aimlessly around her new apartment. Was this home?

"Do you think you can get dressed?" She followed me into the bedroom, where the clothes she'd planned to wear were hanging on the inside doork.n.o.b. I pointed out her dresser, where the day before she and Barbara had arranged her undergarments in the top drawers.

She sat down on the bed. "I need to think." She picked up her alarm clock and peered at it. For some reason it said 3:17.

"You need to get dressed, Mom. So we can go to the doctor."

Terror again. "Did we miss the appointment?"

"Just get dressed, okay?"

In the living room I called home, catching Barbara just as she was about to leave the house to run an errand. "I need you," I told her. "Right away, actually."

"What's wrong?"

"I wish I knew. Maybe another TIA." Somehow I didn't think so, though. Her ministrokes always left my mother exhausted, one side of her face tingling, her speech for a time impaired. But she always knew what they were and what had just happened to her. This was something new. Except for the fact that she wasn't making any sense, her speech seemed fine. "She's disoriented. Confused."

It would take Barbara twenty minutes to get here. I called the doctor's office to say we'd be a few minutes late. Setting the receiver back in its cradle, I noticed that the clock on the lamp table said 11:22. The one on top of the TV said 7:03; the one on the stove, 1:54. All these clocks had been set correctly the day before. "How you coming, Mom?" I called.

No answer.

The bedroom door was open. "Mom?" I said.

She was sitting on the bed, still in her nightgown, her back to me. Morning light was filtering in through the curtain, but the room was dark. In her hands was her favorite clock, the gold-plated one I'd bought her for Christmas years ago. At first I thought she was winding it, and started to tell her that while time was of the essence, the clock, ironically, wasn't. She wasn't winding it, though, just making the hands go around, minutes and then whole hours, pa.s.sing in a few seconds.

I sat down next to her. "Mom," I said. "What's wrong? Can you tell me?"

"Why do the hands go this way?" she said.

When it was clear I didn't understand, she made the universal motion indicating clockwise. What she wanted me to explain was why the hands wouldn't go in the opposite direction. Still anxious that I understand, she demonstrated by twisting the stem counterclockwise, grunting with the effort.

"You're going to break it," I told her. "See, you've already bent the stem."

This didn't interest her. The mystery she was trying to fathom ran much deeper than that.

AMAZINGLY, EVERYTHING HAD gone off without a hitch. The movers had arrived in Winslow when they were supposed to and immediately went to work. I fully expected my mother to renege on our agreement and demand to stay behind and ramrod the whole job, but instead she got in the car with Barbara and off they went to Camden, leaving me to inventory her possessions as they were carried out the door. "This lady moves a lot," one of the men remarked. He had her dinette upside down on the floor (which, had my mother been there, would have elicited cries of Oooh! Oooh! You're scratching it!) and was uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g its legs. The table's underside sported several stickers in different colors applied from previous moves.

At one point Dot stopped by, and I learned they hadn't gone out to dinner after all, that my mother had phoned to say she was too tired. "I've never seen anybody so worked up," Dot said.

"It's like this with every move," I told her.

"I don't know if it's the move or the idea of a new doctor," Dot said.

Which was true, of course. Changing doctors always weighed heavily on my mother, because she had a good dozen prescriptions that would need to be filled; high on her list of anxieties was whether the new drugstore and the new doctor communicated effectively, otherwise giving her the wrong meds or leaving her totally without. A new doctor also meant unwelcome questions, about her unhealthy eating habits and lack of exercise and all manner of things she considered n.o.body else's business. It had taken her a long time, but she'd managed to train her Waterville doctor to accept what she told him as true and to write the scripts she believed she needed, including, for the past few years, Paxil, about which I was beginning to hear disturbing stories. The new doctor might express misgivings about the efficacy of all this.

"She says she's exhausted from having so much to do," Dot continued, "but when I ask her what I can help with, there doesn't seem to be anything."

"You can't help her worry."

"I also said I hoped we'd be able to keep in touch. Camden's not so far, but I got the impression she's not interested."

"Maybe after she's settled," I said hopefully, though I was pretty sure their friends.h.i.+p was over. My mother hated all maybes, ifs, and whens, preferring to resolve things badly than leave them up in the air with a good outcome a mere possibility. "Thanks for being such a good friend."

"I'll miss her," Dot said. Then she added, almost apologetically, "I really like your mom, it's just a shame she's so ..." She struggled to find the right word but finally gave up. Either that or the word impossible suggested itself, and she was too kind to use it. "Maybe that's why I like her. Being your own worst enemy is something I understand."

Later, back on the coast and armed with my diagram of the new apartment, I told the movers where to put the furniture and stack the boxes of books. "Wow," said the guy who'd mentioned how often my mother moved, taking the place in. "I wouldn't mind living here myself."

I stifled the urge to tell him to check back in a few months when this very apartment would probably be available. Because my mother was clearly going to hate it here. We'd looked everywhere, coming up against the exact same obstacles that had plagued us inland. She preferred not to live among old people, because all they ever talked about was their illnesses and their new meds and which of their daughters was ignoring them this week and which would be visiting next. She wanted someplace lively, like where she'd first lived in Phoenix. She wanted to feel alive, and for that you needed young people. With young people, however, came music and noise and children, and she wanted none of that. She couldn't have anyone living overhead. Underfoot would be okay, except that she couldn't manage stairs, which pretty much ruled that out. She preferred apartment complexes but hated subsidized places, because the law didn't allow them to discriminate, and you might end up living next door to some Section 8 nutjob. Unsubsidized places she couldn't afford, and she didn't want us making up the difference, especially if it was considerable. And we knew from experience that whatever she settled on had to be within half an hour from Camden. Nothing we'd seen was suitable and, to complete the Woody Allen joke, they all had long waiting lists.

The place I thought would be best for her, Megunticook House, was actually in Camden. The rents were subsidized, and she clearly qualified. The residents were all elderly, and the complex provided no services, so by and large they weren't terribly infirm. The apartments themselves were nice, the grounds clean and neat, but when we pulled in she took one look and said, "Oh, Rick ... really, I don't think so, do you?"

"Could we look, at least?"

She grudgingly agreed, but it was clearly a no-go. "Shabby," she explained later, when we were back in the car. "Did you see how run-down the whole place was? And did you see all the walkers there in the foyer? People who need those should keep them in their rooms. Didn't you notice how the paint was peeling outside?"

I explained that we were now on the coast and the complex was a quarter mile from the ocean, with harsh winters and salt air, well, paint peeled.

"I couldn't live there," she said. "The other place was better."

By this she meant Woodland Hills, an a.s.sisted-living facility in Rockland, twenty minutes away. Its long drive and carefully manicured grounds made it resemble a country club, but this, too, had put her off. "I don't need anything this posh," she said. Inside, the corridors were wide enough that two wheelchairs could pa.s.s each other going in opposite directions, and handrails were affixed to all the walls. There were endless activities-from wheelchair aerobics to computer cla.s.ses-and she wasn't interested in any of them. "I'm used to living independently," she explained to the lady who showed us around. She naturally didn't care about the van that took residents to the supermarket and doctors' offices: "My son does all that." The meals were served in a large dining room, though the schedule instantly offended her. "Who eats their main meal at noon?" she said once we were back in the car.

"Well ...," I began.

"a.s.sisted living, my foot," she said. "That's a nursing home. There wasn't anyone there who walked without a cane."

"The apartment itself was nice," I pointed out for the sake of argument. "Light and airy." Better yet, she'd run her index finger over the surface of the stove, and I could tell it had come away clean. "Plus there's no waiting list."

"Let's keep looking," she said.