I asked Deborah what I should title this post. She said, “Deborah’s shitty summer.” So here we go:
Deborah’s Shitty Summer
or
The Lost Art of The Long Post
With barely any work over the previous three months, even just one night at the Standard Hotel in Manhattan was quite an extravagance, but Deborah had just returned from an emotional trip to western Pennsylvania to visit her ailing mother, Barbara, and was already making plans for another one. She hadn’t slept in days and I wanted to splurge on a special distraction for her birthday.
Deborah did her best to enjoy the night, which included dinner at the Standard Grill, and a brief bout of exhibitionism in front of the floor to ceiling windows overlooking the High Line Park – despite, or perhaps because of, the letter on the designer coffee table which read, in part:
Dear Guest,
As a reminder, please be aware of the transparency of our guest room windows and that activity in your room, when the curtains are open may be visible from the outside. We appreciate your consideration of the patrons of the High Line public park and surrounding neighborhood below.
I barely had time to finish reciting the note before Deborah stripped and stood at the window, several stories above the oblivious park goers strolling along the boardwalk.
We had a good laugh and then shared a long, hot soak in the oversized bathtub, but Deborah’s concern over her mother’s health kept her a tightly tangled slinky of stress which prevented either of us from enjoying it much.
“I hope I can sleep,” she said.
She didn’t.
Although Deborah’s childhood wasn’t exactly a happy one and, after leaving home, she often went years without speaking to her parents, she had come to accept, if not forgive, events of the past, and had reconciled with them to the point where she was calling them every at Sunday at 5 o’clock and signing off with kisses. A strict weekly phone schedule was necessary because when their phone rang unexpectedly, her mom and dad rarely answered it. In the days before Deborah came up with the idea of calling at a specific time every week, she used to have to call her cousin, who lives next door to her parents, and ask if someone could walk over to tell Deborah’s mom and dad that she was trying to reach them.
A couple of weeks before her birthday, Deborah’s father, Elmer, said that her mother was too sick to come to the phone. Deborah was concerned. Elmer was concerned too, but her mother –– who was borderline agoraphobic and rarely left the house –– refused to go to the doctor, choosing instead to continue treating her self-diagnosed intestinal problems with a regimen of vitamins and herbal supplements bought over the phone from a radio program she listened to religiously.
As soon as Deborah got off the phone, she left a message with her cousin asking that someone check in on her mom. The report came back: “She looks like a skeleton.”
Deborah booked a flight immediately. She doesn’t have a driver’s license — as teenager, she was never allowed to drive, and the license she got while living in LA expired shortly after she moved back to New York— and she didn’t want her father to drive to the Pittsburgh airport to get her (not that he would’ve agreed to, anyway) so there was a lot of juggling before she was able to arrange a ride from a childhood friend who still lived in the area.
When Deborah finally arrived at her parent’s house and saw her mom, she was stunned at how much weight she had lost. Her mother mustered the energy to put on a semi-convincing show that led Deborah to believe — or rather hope — that the worst was over and she was on the mend. Deborah wasn’t convinced enough not to insist her mother still get checked out by a doctor.
“No, no, no,” her mother said, she knew what was wrong and it was only a matter of time before she was back to her old self. In fact, she was already feeling much better. The cabinets and counters were littered with pills and powdered concoctions that were doing all that needed to be done. “No doctors!”
Deborah was exasperated, but her screaming was no match for her mother’s stubbornness. “You never did what I wanted you to do,” her mother said. (Deborah had never become a schoolteacher or married the preacher’s son, for instance.) “Why should I do what you want me to do?”
Deborah left after a few days, exasperated but already planning to return with me — and our car. “We’ll drag her ass if we have to.” In the meantime, she made hit-or-miss attempts to call her parents more often. During one such call, Deborah learned that her mother’s condition had deteriorated to the point where she finally needed to go to the Emergency Room.
But there was a problem.
Barbara and Elmer own two schitzu dogs they keep on a short leash — literally. They are loud, smelly and annoying dogs with a lot of nervous energy. Everyone in the family — Deborah’s brother, her cousins, her aunts and uncles — would love to see them driven far away and left at the side of the road, or better yet, driven off a cliff, but Deborah sees her own childhood reflected in the repressed lives of the dogs, and she often finds herself defending them. “The dogs would be just fine if my parents weren’t crazy.”
The problem was that neither Barbara nor Elmer wanted to leave the dogs alone, even for a few hours.
“Would you forget about the fucking dogs for a minute and get mom to the hospital,” said Deborah. “The dogs will be fine.”
“No, no, they’ll get into everything. The go into my room and chew on my socks. They’ll get germs.”
“Put them in the basement.”
“They’ll get into the sump and get eli coli.”
“Put them in a kennel.”
“No no, it’s too expensive and those places don’t do what we tell them to do.”
James, Deborah’s cousin-in-law, who lives next door and does a lot of work fixing things for Barbara and Elmer, offered to check in on the dogs while they went to the hospital, but just “checking in” wasn’t good enough. They needed someone they could trust to stay with the dogs at all times. The problem with that, of course, was that there was no such thing as “someone they trust.”
It was finally determined that Deborah’s uncle, Alex, a former D.C. cop and Marine, who lives in a neighboring town, would be recruited for the task. Although he has Parkinson’s and is the first to admit his limitations, Barbara still thinks of him as the big, strong guy she grew up with and is one of the few people she thinks can “handle the dogs.” Alex agreed to sit in the basement with the dogs, watching TV and eating Double Quarter Pounders that he’d pick up on his way to the house. By the time it was settled, however, Barbara decided she needed one more day to mentally prepare.
As Barbara spent the night mentally preparing to go to the hospital, Deborah spent a sleepless night watching lightening illuminate the skies over lower Manhattan through the window of the Standard Hotel.
In a cab on our way home, we learned Barbara was scheduled for emergency surgery. Apparently it took no time at all for a doctor to diagnose a cancerous tumor.
“You must’ve been bleeding for a long time,” the doctor said to Barbara as he examined her.
“I thought I had hemorrhoids.”
“Well, you misdiagnosed yourself.”
So much for catching it early.
Deborah and I walked in the door of our apartment, stuffed a weeks worth of clothes into a couple of suitcases, caught a few hours sleep and sped nearly 400 miles to Monongahela Valley Hospital. By the time we arrived, Barbara was recovering in the ICU.
Deborah’s brother, a Sergeant Major in the Army, had flown in from Colorado ahead of us, and was standing outside the hospital. “Is that my brother?” Deborah said as we approached. They hadn’t seen each other in years, but she recognized the uniform.
“You might want to take a minute to prepare yourselves before you go up there,” he warned us.
The diagnosis wasn’t good. Although the doctor’s plan was to open Barbara up and remove a tumor, the cancer turned out to be so far advanced that all he could do was give her a colostomy and sew her back up again. Even with chemo or radiation he gave her six months at best.
“Honestly, I came prepared for a funeral,” said Mark, as he and I took a break in the visitor’s lounge.
I admitted that I had packed a black suit just in case.
His eyes reflected the same conflicted emotions that Deborah’s did.
“Sometimes I remember my childhood and think, Did that really happen? Was that really my life?”
Barbara wanted privacy while the nurse burped her colostomy bag and so Deborah left her mom’s bedside to join us in the lounge.
“What are you guys talking about?”
“Our childhood,” said Mark.
“Ugh.”
Deborah doesn’t like to talk about her childhood much, and they reminisced about things I’d never heard about before.
Some of the punishments their mom came up with were truly bizarre. “What did she do that for?”
“Who knows? Some sin or another,” said Deborah.
“Whatever,” Mark shrugged, “I don’t think any of it had much effect on me in the long run.”
“It had an effect on me,” said Deborah. “That’s for fucking sure.”
Mark left the following day, while Deborah and I booked a room and stayed through the week. Despite the cost, Deborah insisted we stay at a nearby motel. “I can’t sleep at my parent’s house.”
Deborah’s parents built their house in 1965 and it hadn’t changed much in all the years since, other than to fill up with knick-knacks purchased from the Home Shopping Network. Who knows the last time anything had been painted. The formerly white walls are a papery gray, and the doors are mostly bare wood with a few chips of paint. That’s not to say things aren’t clean. Barbara was a germophobe and kept the house disinfected by obsessively scrubbing everything down with bleach and boiled water, but all the cleaning hasn’t prevented things from slowly disintegrating with age. The off-white curtains used to be a bright yellow — though at least they were in one piece, unlike those of Deborah’s granddad who, as the story goes, used to cut small squares out of his curtains — the part that hung behind the couch so his wife wouldn’t notice — and use them to wad up his chewing tobacco. The only thing remotely new is the sliding glass door leading to the sprawling field behind the house and that’s because no one is allowed to use it. Barbara used to open and close the door for Elmer when he walked the dogs, but somewhere along the way she decided she wouldn’t even allow herself to touch it.
A beautiful Baldwin organ in pristine condition maintains a prominent place in the living room. “First we got Mark, then we got the organ, and then we got Deborah,” says Elmer when he recites the chronology of his life, seeming to give the organ as much significance as Mark and Deborah’s adoptions. The organ hasn’t worked in at least thirty years and its only use now is as a place to display Holiday greeting cards.
It’s not that Barbara and Elmer aren’t aware of their home’s inertia. Elmer told us that as they walked out the door on their way to the Emergency Room, Barbara took a look around and said, “I never did get new curtains.”
We went to the hospital everyday, stopping first to get Elmer. I’m not a psychologist, so my diagnosis means nothing, but at times I’ve thought that Elmer suffers from ADD. Other times I think he’s OCD. Occasionally I think he’s bi-polar, or maybe even suffers from schizoaffective disorder. He himself claims to have Alzheimer’s. Whatever the case may be, one thing’s for certain, he’s a flibbertigibbet. Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t be surprising for Elmer to be completely out of his gourd, but since Mark had somehow managed to get him a prescription for anxiety meds, he was simply his usual distressed and frantic self. “I wanted Barbara to be around for the Rapture,” he kept telling us. “But I don’t think that’s going to happen. I mean, it could still happen. No one knows when it will happen. It could happen and moment. No one knows. Only God knows. It’s going to happen soon, I know that, but maybe not before Barbara gets called home. I always planned to be with Barbara for the Rapture and we would go up together. When the world was going to end in 2000, I never left your mother’s side. I wanted to grab onto her hand as she rode up to Heaven.”
During our stay, I took Elmer on a few errands by myself — each one and adventure all its own — giving Deborah time to sit alone with her mother who, despite regular shots of morphine, was actually quite lucid. She told Deborah that, Rapture or no Rapture, she feared she wouldn’t make it to heaven at all.
“I was a toughie,” she said.
Although she didn’t go so far as to apologize to Deborah for any of the cruel and rather creative punishments she concocted, hearing her mother admit she’d been “a toughie” was a breakthrough.
We went food shopping so Elmer would be well stocked before we left. He and Barbara helped us work up a list. I have to admit I was more than a little annoyed when I discovered that half the stuff we bought was for the dogs – tuna fish, peanut butter, cheese. We bought more than they asked for and as we unpacked the bags, we showed Elmer the canned food we bought. “I can’t bother with that,” he said. “You’re mother doesn’t like me to mess with the stove.”
“Well, look, we got you some canned ravioli,” said Deborah. “You can eat it cold if you want to.”
He picked up the can and looked at the label. “Oh, we got this once,” he said. “But it gives the dogs diarrhea.”
At the end of the week, we drove back to New York, exhausted. Deborah was on the phone every day — with her mother to say I love you, with her father to reassure him as best she could, with her brother and his wife to discuss all the possible scenarios for the future, with nurses to get updates on her mother’s condition, and with a variety of social workers who were supposed to help navigate the tangled mess of what to do next.
Her mother would have to leave the hospital soon, but no one could figure out where she would go. Their insurance plan was very limited. When they first hit the age of eligibility, instead of choosing a Medicare plan that would have covered everything, they insisted on a PPO plan that offered less coverage in exchange for allowing them to choose their own doctor — never mind that they didn’t have two pennies to rub together or that they never went to see any doctors, anyway. Barbara wanted to be home with the dogs, but doubted Elmer could take care of her. Elmer wanted Barbara home, too, but also knew it was way beyond the scope of his abilities. He was a nearly unintelligible ball of stress as it was.
Mark phoned to say that one of the social workers refused to continue working with Deborah. Apparently Deborah had offended him with her swearing.
“She’s far too emotional for me to deal with her,” the social worker said.
Mark told Deborah that he and his wife would take over the task of finding a place for their mother to go, and sure enough, for the bargain price of $1600.00 a month, they did. But the nursing home required payment up front and no one was there to write a check. After some negotiating, they made a rare exception to take Barbara in on Mark’s word that a check was in the mail.
The relief was short-lived. Barbara wasn’t happy with her new digs. There was no air conditioning, and no TV. When a TV was located and rolled into her room, it came without a remote control. Barbara was ready to call it quits. “I just want to go home.”
I picked up a couple of days work, finally, while Deborah made plans to return to Pennsylvania. Hurricane Irene was lumbering up the coast, however, and getting anywhere wasn’t going to be easy. “Just hunker down here with me in New York until the hurricane passes,” I said. “The last thing you want to do is get stuck at the airport, or worse, a bus station.”
She felt helpless, but with the hurricane looming, there was little to do but wait. Airports were closing, busses and subways were shutting down. We stocked up on water and peanut butter and spent the day before the storm moving anything of value away from our loft’s big windows. The storm came and went like a giant scrubber, as if we passed through a giant automatic car wash. The sun came out to dry us off. “I hope it’s not expecting a tip.”
Back at work on Monday morning, as if nothing happened, I got a call from a woman at the nursing home. “Mrs. Rice has passed away,” they said. I wondered why they were calling me, or where they got my number. They didn’t even know who I was.
“Her husband is taking it really hard. He collapsed. We literally had to pick him up off the floor,” she said, “He’s hysterical and we can’t have him here, is there someone who can come get him?”
“Have you spoken to Deborah or Mark?” I said.
“We spoke to Mark,” she said. (I imagine Deborah’s name probably still had a big red mark next to it.) “Who are you?”
“I’m Deborah’s husband.”
“Oh, okay, well perhaps you can get a hold of Deborah. Someone really needs to take care of Elmer.”
Deborah called me a moment later, crying.
“My mom died.”
She heard it from Mark. The check for the room arrived at the nursing home the same morning Barbara died, but apparently, a refund was out of the question.
“Are you okay?” I asked Deborah. “Should I leave work?”
“No, I’m alright,” she said. I’m going to take a pill and go to bed. I’ll see you when you get home.”
We packed and left the next day for another marathon road trip. The highways were pulsing with impatient trucks catching up on lost time from the hurricane and overstuffed family vans getting a head start on the holiday weekend. The rest areas were bloated; the bathrooms were a sticky mess. A million Coke-a-colas sipped through fat straws from over-sized paper cups, converted into a murky piss inside the guts of day-trippers and truck drivers and splattered onto the tiles. We kept our stops to a minimum.
We passed several accidents on the interstate, fender-benders mostly, though one particularly acrobatic car tilled a wide swath of soil from the highway’s shoulder to the middle of a grassy median where it lay upside down and defeated like an embarrassed figure skater. Traffic inched past so that everyone had time to gawk and say, “Wow.”
____________________
We drove straight to Elmer’s house to pick him up for an appointment at the Funeral Home. Regardless of whatever time we arrived to pick him up for anything, he always took at least an hour to run through his routines and today of course, was particularly rough. He took the dogs out, wiped their asses with a paper towel, and then continued to fuss around, repeating things to himself, and to us, over and over.
“I’m taking my own car,” he said.
“No, dad, we came over here so that we could drive you.”
“I need to take my own car.”
“Why?”
“It’s what I have to do. You can follow me if you want to, or you can ride with me, but I’m taking my car.”
“No, dad.”
“I can’t just stop driving!” he snapped. “What do you think? How do you think I was getting around before?”
“You’re upset and I don’t want you driving like that.”
He agreed, then disagreed, and then agreed again. It was the same with every decision, big or small. Finally we got him into our car and headed to the appointment.
Alex’s wife, Sheila (the mother of Deborah’s cousin next door) was on her way from Virginia. Although she and Alex were still married, they hadn’t lived in the same town for decades. Before she left, she spoke to Elmer on the phone and said, “Don’t take out any loans to pay for anything. I’ll give you what you need.”
Elmer repeated it over and over as we spoke to the funeral director about the arrangements. “That’s what she told me, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll pay for it.’ That’s what she said.”
Regardless of who was paying for it, we kept the choices modest, but a funeral is expensive and once everything was arranged and Sheila heard the grand total, she was a little stunned. “I can give you two thousand dollars, that’s it,” she said. Although it was a generous offer, it was, unfortunately a few thousand dollars short of what was needed. My own mother and father wired me an emergency loan, but with the first of the month looming, Deborah and I would soon be tapped out. We felt pretty queasy about putting another several grand on our credit card.
Elmer used to talk to Barbara about life insurance, but whenever he brought it up, she’d say, “No, no, no. You might decide you need the money some day and try to kill me. I don’t want you profiting off my death.”
So there we were.
“We’ll figure something out,” I said.
The funeral home could wait to get paid, but the gravediggers needed money up front before they’d touch a backhoe. Seven hundred and fifty bucks in cash or check to “open and close the grave.”
Elmer had a small stash in an envelope hidden in the house somewhere that just about covered it. Deborah asked him how much he had, and where it was, but he was very secretive. Most of it was money that Deborah and I had given him last Christmas to buy a set of new chairs to replace the tattered pair they used for watching the Home Shopping Network, or Lawrence Welk, or any number of Christian programs.
Of course, when it came time for us to make a trip to the cemetery to pay the gravediggers, we had to wait a couple of hours while Elmer tried to find the envelope.
Since Deborah refused to drive with her father, and somebody had to stay with the dogs, I drove Elmer to the cemetery while Deborah stayed at the house.
Despite the record-breaking heat, Elmer led me around the cemetery showing me various graves. Deborah’s grandmother, who was perhaps the sole reason Deborah managed to survive her childhood and become as reasonably well-adjusted as she did, and her grandfather who, despite being beaten into a coma for refusing to take a stand against blacks joining the coal miner’s union, (“They are just trying to feed their kids, same as me.”) lived to the ripe old age of 92, rested in peace a few yards away from Barbara’s plot. Barbara’s sister and husband were a few yards in the other direction. Elmer had four plots of his own — one for him and his wife, and one for Mark and Deborah. “But I don’t know,” he said, “Now that Deborah’s married, you’re the boss of her. You might not want her to be buried here. You might want to be next to her, I don’t know, that’s up to you. But I might not need mine, either, if the Rapture comes. It could happen at any time, no one knows. We’ll see, we’ll see.”
We spent another half hour looking for various other distant relatives, none of which we found. “We should pay the man, and be on our way,” I said.
We walked into the office, and Elmer proceeded to over-share the way he always does. He told the man how his wife didn’t have a bowel movement in ten days before going to the hospital. How the doctor examined her and said, “Cancer! She has cancer!” He described her suffering and ultimate death in lurid detail, and then proceeded to describe his own health issues. “I have to wear diapers,” he said. “And I can’t hold my urine, either.” He mentioned wearing a clamp, something that makes me cringe every time he does. He goes into inappropriate detail with everyone he meets, so I’ve heard about the clamp a hundred times, but I still don’t know how it works. It sounds Medieval.
“Do you have the money?” I said.
When he opened the folder he was carrying, it was gone.
“Oh no!”
A frantic Easter egg hunt ensued, retracing our steps, searching high and low for the envelope full of cash that somehow, someway, slipped from his grasp. Elmer raised his hands and prayed for God to give him his money back.
It worked.
Elmer dropped to his knees and praised God, “Thank you, thank you thank you.”
We walked back to the office. Elmer was trembling, but still managed to count out the money. “One, two, three, four, five, that’s one hundred. One, two, three, four, five. That’s two hundred. One two three…wait how much did I put down already?”
“What took you guys?” said Deborah when we returned.
“Long story. How were the dogs?”
“Fine. I took them outside for a walk. They were no trouble at all.”
“Wait, you took them out?” said Elmer.
“Yeah, dad.”
“Did they do a dirty? Did they do a dirty? I have to wipe them if they did a dirty,” he threw his hands in the air. “ I need to wipe them if they did a dirty or they’ll get sick. Was it hard or was it runny?”
He wrung his hands and fretted. He wiped the dog’s asses and then took a shovel and made Deborah show him where she had taken the dogs. It was all wrong.
“I never take them on this side of the house. Never. You took them on the other side of that ditch? Oh no, they aren’t allowed over there.”
He shoveled up the dog shit and moved it from under one tree to under another.
The funeral was scheduled for Friday, proceeded on Thursday by a viewing.
At the viewing, Elmer didn’t leave Barbara’s open casket for more than a minute. At one point, he needed a cup of coffee and Deborah asked if I’d take him downstairs to the coffee room. It wasn’t much, just a paneled room with some historic photos on the wall and a small counter where a couple of coffee pots sat on warmers. I poured some into a Styrofoam cup and handed it to Elmer. It was scalding hot, but Elmer gulped down a series of frantic sips.
“Slow down Elmer, there’s no rush.”
“Someone might come and they won’t know where I am.”
“Someone will tell them.”
“One of my old school friends might show up. They won’t see me and they’ll leave.”
“”Who are you expecting?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“Well Deborah knows where you are. Whoever comes won’t leave without seeing you. Take a minute and drink your coffee.”
It was useless. He lived in a world of compressed time. My 30 seconds was his twenty minutes.
He took three more short, sharp sips, then rushed upstairs. I followed him, but then Deborah needed to escape, too, so went headed down to the coffee room together. An old family friend followed us.
“How ya doin’ Debbie?” said the old man with a broad, engaging smile and sparkling eyes.
“I’m okay.”
“I’d love to talk to you a minute about something. Will you let me do that?”
Deborah knew what was coming.
“No,” she said.
“I just want to talk to you about Jesus for a minute,” he said, getting bug-eyed and too close for comfort. “Will you let me do that? Please?”
“Drop it,” she said.
“Awww, man, really?”
“Really.”
“I just love Jesus, man. I want to share the word.”
“Seriously, I’m not interested. This is my mothers funeral and if you start with me, I’m going to get really angry.”
“Okay, I can respect that.”
He changed the subject, somewhat, to various mission trips he’s taken to Mexico, and then to a recent three-week vacation he took to Hungary.
“Was that a mission trip, too?” I asked.
“It’s always a mission trip,” said Deborah. “Just walking downstairs was a mission trip. When he walks back upstairs, it’ll be a mission trip.”
He laughed, but said it was true.
“I love you guys. God bless you.”
“We should go back up now.”
Back in the viewing room, a well dressed old man — the best dressed in the room, anyway — strolled up to Deborah and put his arms around her waist. “Debbie, beautiful Debbie,” he said, squeezing her tightly. “How long has it been?”
Who’s this slick old coot? I wondered. It was the preacher of course. He was there with his wife, a well-preserved seventy-something woman in a tight sweater and a torpedo bra. The two of them host a radio show, “Nine hours a week,” he told me.
A small boy, about two years old, was running around barefoot — in and out of the room, back and forth in front of the casket, weaving around the people.
“Is that your boy?” the preacher asked.
“No, I don’t know who that is.”
It turned out to be the great-grandson of Deborah’s aunt. Elmer had eight brothers and sisters, but only a few were still alive. She was one of them. Deborah sat on a chair next to her and said hello.
“How much is all of this costing?” she asked. Not because she wanted to help out, just because she was nosy.
Deborah changed the subject and struck up a conversation with the woman’s daughter, who then introduced Deborah to her son. I didn’t catch the guy’s name. In fact I didn’t catch anything he managed to say other than. “New York…Brooklyn…prison…fighting…” I tried to read the tattoos all over his neck, but I couldn’t make out any of that, either.
It was mostly the same cast of characters at the funeral the next day. The preacher apologized for being too old to sing anymore and played a couple of songs from a CD, instead. He spoke about believers and non-believers and it was hard not to feel like he was talking directly to Deborah. He asked if anyone wanted to give testimony.
A guy with a pencil thin mustache got up to say a few words. He was thankful for growing up with Barbara and her family. “We never knew any sinners,” he said. “We only ever knew Christians. And for that, I’m forever grateful.”
Deborah’s aunt Sheila said a few nice words, but of course it was Elmer who — despite his ever-rambling style —gave the most touching tribute.
“Barbara was the greatest…” he started.
He spoke about when they met, when Barbara would only let him kiss her once a week. They got married three days after Barbara’s eighteenth birthday and then she let him kiss her once a day. Things never progressed much beyond that. That is to say, they weren’t particularly affectionate for the rest of their marriage but, in the end, fifty three years later as Barbara lay in the hospital bed too weak now to push him away, he kissed her a million times.
