Mother-Daughter-Sister

was looking for a face that matched the low, husky, voice of a female college professor-- an articulate voice prone to prolonged silences between sentences. I sat at a small table, looking out through the windows of the Black Sheep Cafe, reading and rereading a single page in my book, waiting. A likely candidate walked in: a middle aged woman with a tote bag on one shoulder and a paper bag from an organic grocery store in her hand. She paced in front of the windows, turning her head to look for a free table or-- as she hinted by glancing towards me-- for a college student she’d talked to but never met. I raised my eyebrows and gave her a quick smile; she matched it with a tilted chin and a slight nod. We both hesitated; she down sat at a diagonal from me, scanning the room. Every now and then, we exchanged another set of subtle smiles and half-nods. Eventually, I stood up and walked over to her table.

"Excuse me," I said, "but--- are you Bailey Clark?"

"Yes. You’re Gwyneth?"

"Yes. Good to meet you." We shook hands and moved to a new table.

"I’m not really sure where to start." I said, turning my coffee cup on its base.

"Well, let me start by telling you about the type of illness my mother has and how it’s similar but also fairly distinct from Alzheimer’s." Bailey’s voice sounded very different than it had on the phone: it was warm, lighter, and rounder, as if no air escaped from her nose while she spoke.

"You see, often times, any symptoms of memory loss or disorientation are just lumped together into the category of Alzheimer’s. But the fact of the matter is, there are a variety of age-related illnesses," she paused, her mouth open, frozen in the consonant shape of her next word. "Take my mother, for example: She has Multi-Infarct Dementia--- which is completely different from Alzheimer’s."

"What happens with your mother’s condition?" I asked.

"It also goes by Vascular Dementia, by the way, which essentially means my mother has a kind of brain damage caused by multiple strokes." Bailey smiled and fiddled with her glasses on the table next to her coffee. "So tell me, have you been to any of the nursing homes in the Valley?"

"Not yet. I went to an adult day care center yesterday in Hadley, though. I volunteered during bingo hour. The weirdest part was that I expected the place to be pretty solemn, but most of the adults there acted a little bit like children."

"That’s very interesting because…" Bailey assumed an academic tone, and patted her glasses. "… take a look at the visual cues we use to define aging… For example, Shakespeare, in As You Like It, describes the Seven Ages of man. The First Age being a toothless baby, and the last being this degeneration into this sort of infantile, toothless old man." I nodded as she picked off a piece of sticky bun and put it into her mouth. "You know, the one thing that nobody is really prepared for is when they find themselves switching roles with their parents. Like, changing a baby’s diaper is one thing. But an adult, especially with a parent, it’s a whole different story." She looked up and her eyes ticked back and forth as if she were reading a page mounted on the ceiling.

"When did you have to start caring for your mother like a parent?"

"Well, my mother started showing signs of Dementia after my father was diagnosed with cancer. At first we thought it was stress related, you know from staying up all night, taking care of my dad through hospice. After he died, she had live-in assistance, but-- when somebody starts needing help going to the bathroom, it changes the sort of person you can have living there. You need at least two people, 24 hours per day." Bailey paused; her dark brown hair was pulled back from her high forehead and looped into a lose knot. Beneath the sharp peaks of her thin eyebrows, she had widely spaced, deep-set, ice blue eyes

"When my mother started to have to wear diapers she was really resentful of me. With my dad, he knew I was helping him. I would try to preserve his dignity, by, sort of, meticulously changing each diaper, and putting a towel over his groin. Eventually we just gave up and threw away all notions of shame and modesty. I remember saying to him: ‘You know, dad, things are much easier without the fig leaf.’ And we both laughed." Bailey smiled. "So--- it’s eleven right now." She showed a line of crooked bottom teeth. "Would you like to go meet my mom?"

I nodded; we stood up and scooted our chairs under the table.

*****************************

We idled at a stoplight on Route Nine. A pushpin held up the lining of the car’s ceiling like a circus tent. Bailey started talking…

"There's a word that birders use?" she said. " You know, people who study birds? There’s a word that they use for talking about how you can recognize a bird when you see it sitting, like that one up there." She pointed at a large tree nestled between strips of a mall’s parking lot. "See that black thing? It’s sitting on a branch; that’s a crow. I know it’s a crow because it’s black and about the right size. But-- I know it’s definitely not a hawk, because it couldn’t be sitting like this," she pantomimed the bird’s shape, palm down and fingers horizontal, "and not like this." She held her hand vertical, as if she were shyly raising it in a class. "It’s called its ‘ Jiz’."

"Its what?"

"It’s Jiz. J-i-z. The posture a bird holds on a branch is called its Jiz, or when it’s flying." Her voice became high and girlish. "Well-- my mom has a Jiz!" We both laughed. I scanned the tree for the crow.

"She has a way of being in the world that is totally self-consistent. You know…. "She paused. Her quiet, slow sigh sounded like a tire deflating, "Her posture towards people is utterly conditioned... It’s utterly shaped by, you know, sort of, who she’s been for all these years, and that who, you know has this certain kind of continuum to it."

The light turned green and we pulled into the parking lot of the nursing home: a two story, brick building on one side, connected to a Seventies, church-pavilion style building on the other. The pavilion part had a weather vane on it instead of a cross.

Bailey’s mother sat, by herself, in a large room; three white walls and a hospital bed; the wall behind her bed had been painted fuschia. Postcards and snapshots were pinned to a bulletin next to her TV--- pictures of grandchildren, a scene of Venice, a photograph of a birthday cake with "Happy 88th" written in icing.

Bailey’s mother was sleeping in a mint green wheelchair in the middle of the room; her palsied right hand was curled and tucked against her chest like a bird’s claw. She wore a low hanging, maroon shirt; the skin beneath her neck was tanned, taut, and healthy. A small, white clip, pinned to her shirt, attached to pull chord that alerted staff if she fell or got out of her chair. Bailey smoothed her mother’s white and gray streaked hair, then pulled back from her forehead in a tight ponytail.

"Hi, Momma. Are you awake?" Bailey’s voice shifted from New England professor to a babying, Southern drawl.

"Yee-ehss..." Bailey’s mother slurred, keeping her eyes closed. She spoke in a monotone. "I’m still shakin’ the sleep off. There were hands, and the arms were grabbing me. Tellin’ me, ‘ Do this, do that.’ They, and they were workin’ on things. Working on this and that." Her accent was so thick it made my ears itch. She opened her eyes.

"Gwyneth--- this is my mother, Louise Clark. Let me turn you a little, here, Mom." The wheel chair squeaked but wouldn’t turn. I knelt down and removed a hairball lodged in the wheel.

"This is my friend, Gwyneth. This young woman, her name’s Gwyneth. Mom? Now that you’re a little more awake, have you got me located? Do you remember who I am?"

"You’re Bailey," she said. She sounded unsure; her watery, blue eyes narrowed uncertainly.

"That’s right."

"I’ve known that ever since you walked past." A look of recognition lapped across her face, a face that mirrored Bailey’s. Louise’s cheekbones were wider, though, and her nose was longer and sharper .

"I’ve known that ever since I was born, because you named me." Bailey picked up a large Styrofoam cup off of the bureau. "How ‘bout some water, would you like some water?"

"If it’s good water, I like it."

I looked from Louise to the wall nearest the window where there was a framed photo of her and her husband, twenty years earlier, hanging askew.

"This is good fresh water." Bailey placed the straw of the cup up to her mother’s lips. "Mom? Have you got me located that I’m your kid?" There was a certain sharpness or stab to that last word. "That I’m your daughter?"

"Yes."

"O.K. ‘Cause every now and again I’m your sister. You think I’m one of your little sisters."

"Well I guess I’ve got you located, but if you told me you weren’t I’d probably believe you." Louise’s chuckles sent a shudder through her body.

"Well I was talking on the phone, yesterday, with Margaret? Bill’s wife. Your brother, Bill? I was talking with Margaret, and Margaret said to tell you hello."

"Oh. She’s coming here?"

"No, I talked to her on the telephone, because she’s in Kentucky. Do you remember Kentucky?"

"Oh yeah. I remember pretty well. A lot of the little things that have been past, I never did learn them. Sometimes it’s a matter of never having known them."

"You never know to forget, huh?

"That’s right. O.K., that’s enough. I don’t wanna be jumpin’ up and down all day." With a shaking hand she pushed away the cup.

"Mom is your foot comfortable? It’s hangin’ all the way off your footrest. If I could just bend it..." Bailey crouched in front of her mother and started to lift her leg as if it were made of bone china.

"Don’t bend it too far, ‘cause it hurts when you did it. Hurts right in the middle of it." Louise gritted her teeth and winced. "It screams."

"I’m sorry." Bailey said, still lifting her mother’s leg.

"People like to see it scream, I think. They come along and grab it and make it go up. Then they say: ‘Look what we’ve done for you!’ Louise mocked them in a piping voice.

"Did I make it scream?"

"I don’t know, you usually don’t." Louise blinked and noticed me sitting in the lounge chair. "And this little girl over here is a big girl. She remembers things very well."

"I don’t know about that. I try to." I said.

"Mom, I did your laundry and I’m going to put it away." Bailey saw me staring at the Teacher Recognition awards, hanging on the wall next to the bathroom. The phrase: "Professor: One who provides knowledge and insight." was cross-stitched in light green thread on an olive green background.

"My mom started teaching when she was 17. She had one semester of college; it was the Depression, and she got her emergency certificate, and started teaching."

"I don’t recall that," said Louise.

"You taught little kids for a long time, and later, high school, and later after that, you taught college."

"When I first started the weather was bad, but I was younger and back then I could take it better than I can now. And some of the girls were very good, but we’ll let Margaret tell it, because she remembers it more specifically than I do." Louise stared at me and waited for me to talk.

"Have you got Gwyneth mixed up with Margaret? Are you thinking this person is Margaret?" Bailey said, waving at me.

"Yes," Louise said, her voice strained.

"Well this is Gwyneth. Margaret is your brother Bill’s wife. And Gwyneth is about the same size as Margaret, except Margaret has black curly hair. But I think I can see why you think Gwyneth is Margaret because she’s just about the same size and build."

I met Louise’s confused stare and nodded at a diagonal, not wanting to contradict the idea that my straight, red hair could get mixed up with someone else’s curly, black hair. Louise puffed out with a cheerful laugh.

"She shook her head in two ways."

"I do that a lot." I furrowed my brow and tried not to look embarrassed.

"I’m gonna hang your clothes up", Bailey said. She dragged two white trash bags over to the closet and started sorting the clothing-- some to hang, some to go into drawers.

"I don’t know what I’ve forgotten. It happens so fast and they’re yellin’ at you to get on the program." Louise said to me, over the rattle of the plastic bags. "Get on the line so you don’t get lost. And when you get there and know what you’re doin.’ With all the little sisters I had, I had about a dozen or so..." Louise trailed off. I sat transfixed; listening to Louise’s speech was like watching someone narrate a dream with their eyes open.

"How many sisters do you have?" I asked.

"For a time I was the oldest girl. And you had Ethel, and Rachel, and Emily, and Lillian, and Billy, and… Here I go, and I just didn’t keep up with what all of them were thinkin’ about the same thing I had to be thinkin’ about... at the time."

"Hello, are you ready for lunch now?" A nurse interrupted, knocking on the doorframe.

"Yes, I’ll bring her down. Mom? Are you ready to go down to lunch?"

"I’m always ready to go to lunch."

Bailey ran a hand along the top her mother’s head and then wheeled her out of the room trying, not without some difficulty, to avoid bumping Louise’s toes against the lift chair or the bags of laundry. In the hallway we passed a room: a woman with an oxygen mask around her blank face rang a small, silver bell.

**********************************

"Are you O.K.?" Bailey asked me. " Going to these places sometimes can be pretty awful." We were back in the car with the circus tent ceiling.

"No, no. That wasn’t so bad. You’re mother is an amazing person… The strange part, for me, was when she looked at me and said: "That’s Margaret." And I nodded in two directions because, how can I argue with someone’s perception?"

"You’re Margaret! I’m perfectly willing to be Margaret. I’m Margaret!" Bailey laughed through her words, and fluttered a hand through the air.

"Who do you become when somebody has a completely different conception of you? I mean, how can you organize your own memories when you don’t have a self-reference in her?" I asked.

"Well------ your identity is somewhat created by this other person’s perception of you, so------ when that stops being stable, that part is really dislocating. I think the thing that was the most dramatic piece of that for me was that... My mom she said a couple times that she was the oldest girl. There was a brother, James Bailey, who was two years older than she is. Well--- he died when she was 15. After my mother got old enough to feel vulnerable, she told a piece of the story of James’ death that she’d never told before--- told it, after she, in some sense, had become more fragile. After James Bailey had died, she said, she’d seen her father cry for the first time in her life. And--- that shook her--- because her father said: "Who am I going to depend on? I’ve got all these little children, and who can I depend on?" And she thought: "Well, why can’t he depend on me? Just that I’m a girl, why can’t he depend on me?"

Bailey shook her head slowly--- as if she was trying to gently shake the words out of her mouth. " James Bailey was a kind of figure in my mother’s whole sense of who she was. I definitely grew up having his name, but I never felt that I was supposed to be him. But there was some sense--- that I had been given this torch to bear, or something…." Bailey spoke this, said this, like it was a fact, but there was a puzzled lift at the end of her sentence.

We pulled into a parking lot near my dormitory; Bailey turned off the car. We unbuckled our seatbelts and sat with the doors cracked open.

"So I think, going back to your original question," Bailey said, "the moment that was the most strange for me was when--- maybe two years ago--- all of a sudden she couldn’t remember James Bailey. From one week to the next--- he wasn’t in her constellation anymore. I got this really odd feeling of ‘Well, am I supposed to remind you?’ Right? Well, here’s this person who’s been a kind of ontological center for her, but also kind of given to me in a way that I felt ambivalent about, as being my name. It’s very, very peculiar to be the repository of not just somebody’s memories but also their meanings? In terms of sort of sorting out what’s meaningful to me versus what’s meaningful to her?" Bailey spoke her sentences as if they were questions. Incomplete questions. "It’s a funny kind of triangle: there’s her in the present, there’s the her that I remember, and then there’s everything --that I remember--- that used to be important to her." As Bailey spoke, she plucked at her steering wheel, each pluck a meaning: her mother in the present; Bailey’s memories of her Momma as she once was. And--- Bailey’s memories of he mother’s memories. Memories that had vanished.

***************************************

Outside her room, her eyes and mouth just barely open. She wore a blue fleece nightgown, splotched with pink flowers, and a long, sparkling loop of a rhinestone necklace.

"Louise? Are you awake?" Nursing home classical music twittered and trilled out of a speaker system. Louise murmured; her left hand convulsed and tapped Morse code into the armrest of her wheelchair.

I went back to the lobby to wait. The magazine rack was stocked with old romance novels and outdated copies of National Geographic. A woman with feathered, close cropped, black hair was locked in a lingering embrace with a young redhead in front of the reception desk.

"Are you O.K.?" the black haired woman asked.

"Ronnie died. Just now." Still holding the other woman, the redhead lifted a crumpled tissue to dab the corner of her eye. The black haired woman dropped her forehead into the curve of the redhead’s neck. Both women patted each other on the back and then returned, red eyed, to finish their paper work and answer the phones.