7.
NO ONE THOUGHT I’D GET THE PRICE I WAS ASKING FOR my little house next to the railyard in Portland.
“This neighborhood is all foreclosures,” the real estate agent warned me. She had platinum hair and impossibly white teeth. “You’ve got to be realistic.”
Our neighbor across the street shook his head at my flyer. “Dream on,” he sighed.
My mother sniffed around the newly beige corners of the place, too. “You’ll never sell it. These shades are hideous.” She pulled her green Patagonia jacket tight around her like maybe the colors were chilling, too. “I’ll pay for you to have this professionally repainted. Even a person who knows nothing about color is going to have an unconscious reaction to this. It’s like a cross between a hospital and a bottomless bog. Anyone with a soul who walks in here is going to feel at once ill and trapped.”
“Project a little, Mom?”
“Very funny, Tiniest. I’m just trying to help you. I don’t know why I bother.”
I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to slash the price or redo the walls. So maybe my house wouldn’t sell. Then maybe I wouldn’t have to move and maybe my mother wouldn’t get sick and I wouldn’t have to take care of her and then maybe she wouldn’t die.
Just because I put a “For Sale” sign in my front yard didn’t mean anything had to change, did it?
I buried a Saint Joseph statue next to the sign and the house sold in a week.
Crap.
I rented it back from the new owners.
THE PALE ORANGE to-do list on the fridge:
Pack
Ship
Medicaid paperwork
Write Psychology Today blog
Wrap up teaching gig
San Francisco reading March 25
Reno reading April 13
What to do with the cats?
MY MOTHER COMPLAINED that nothing was moving fast enough. “Doesn’t anyone understand that I’m dying?” she cried when I stopped by her apartment to drop off a prescription from her naturopath. “I have a death sentence. I’ll be dead in October.” She held a paintbrush in each hand, but had no canvas. Her fingers were just wrapped around those brushes. Her dark red nails dug into her palms.
Everyone had a different idea about when my mother might die, but she marked the date red in her calendar. October 18, 2010. Exactly a year from her diagnosis. “I’m running out of time,” she said. “I’ll be dead on ten-eighteen-ten.”
I didn’t know about 10/18/10, but I knew had to get her moved while she still had the energy. So that night at my kitchen table the five of us ate spicy yam stew from the cancer-free newsletter and hatched a plan. Maia and my mother would go ahead to New Mexico and get settled into the stucco duplex on the dirt road. I’d fly in and out of San Francisco for my reading, then Maxito and Sol and I would drive down from Portland to Santa Fe via Reno come first blossom of spring.
Maxito played with his noodles on his wooden high chair tray and sang “Wo, Wo, Wo your boat ...”
Maia texted someone under the table.
Sol excused herself, saying she had to water the plants in the backyard. She grabbed a lighter off the counter before she stepped outside. Of course we had no plants in the backyard. And it was raining.
I sipped from a glass of sparkling water I’d already spiked with a little gin.
Yes. We were going to do this.
I CHARGED TWO one-way tickets on my emergency credit card and off Maia and my mother flew, their carry-ons stuffed with chalky naturopathic cancer remedies.
SOL AND I bought a 1968 Shasta compact trailer to drag behind our car. We painted it turquoise and stitched red curtains. If things didn’t work out with my mother in Santa Fe, well, we could always live in the trailer. A six-foot by ten foot trailer. What more could three people need?
AT A CURBSIDE table next to the vegan burrito food cart on Division Street, Maxito picked at his cheese-less quesadilla while Sol and I discussed our situation – the date we had to surrender the house and my interior decorating plans for our little trailer. A twenty-something girl with Little Orphan Annie hair and a red clown nose smiled at us from the next table. People often dressed like clowns in Portland. I didn’t know why, but I’d gotten used to it. Finally the clown got up, leaned over Maxito’s shoulder to pass us a note. My Dear Fellow Humans, it started. Please excuse the written communication, but I have taken a vow of silence. I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation and I know an organization that assists homeless families like your own. She’d jotted down a phone number and website.
I thought to explain to the clown girl that we weren’t homeless exactly, that we were moving and maybe it was complicated, but I just thanked her and she bobbed her head up and down like, “You’re welcome,” and I loved her even though she was kind of a cliché.
BACK IN JOURNALISM school they taught me that every story needs a “nut graf” – a paragraph that contains those nutshell statistics that will give a universal context to a personal story. Maybe it’s a little late in the narrative now, but here’s the nut-graf: In any given year, almost 30% of the U. S. population will be caring for an ill, disabled, or aging friend or family member. The caregiver will offer an average of 20 hours a week in unpaid labor and over $5,000 a year in out-of-pocket expenditures. According to some researchers, all these numbers are higher in queer communities. The typical caregiver, it turns out, is me: An adult female with children of her own caring for her widowed mother.
At Powell’s City of Books downtown, I picked up a hardcover about “the transformative journey of the caregiver.” I scanned a few early passages and learned that the stress of this whole project could take ten years off my life and yet, for some reason, the advice offered at this juncture was to “buy zany gifts” for my mother.
I bought no zany gifts.
Instead I Googled “take ten years off your life” and learned that there are actually lots of ways to do it: smoking, drinking, raiding the fridge, not exercising, eating too many eggs, general pessimism, and motherhood, to name a few. At least I’d be in good company.
IT WAS DEEP winter and the sky dumped frozen rain. Sol and I packed up my mother’s apartment on 82nd Avenue, packed up our own house by the railyard and sent everything off with a cut-rate moving service.
I pawned my two cats off onto an aging metrosexual Ken doll look-alike who said he could communicate with them telepathically and would transition them from the lousy generic food I’d been feeding them to an organic raw diet. We’d called them Ricky and Lula since they were kittens, but the Ken doll would call them Atlantis and Lhasa.
“All right,” I shrugged.
“They’ll be very happy,” he promised.
NEWLY CAT-FREE, I sat in my car outside the Ken doll’s house. My phone buzzed: Maia. It had been a few days since I’d talked to her. “Hello?”
“Mama? The movers are here.” Maia’s voice was steady on the phone.
The movers. In Santa Fe already. I fiddled with the radio dial. KBOO was broadcasting an indie music festival.
“Um,” Maia said. “Nonna is throwing away your furniture.”
I clicked the radio off. “What?”
I could hear my mother screaming in the background: “Don’t tell her I’m throwing this crap away, tell her I’m burning it.”
Maia cleared her throat. “Actually, Mom? She says she’s going to burn it. She’s piling it all in the backyard. She’s making a bonfire.”
It occurred to me that my daughter would make a good crisis counselor. Still, I felt something hot in my chest, just under my heart and I thought I might really lose it right then. Break my windshield with my fist at least, let my hand bleed into the drizzle. But I’d been reading my Pema Chödrön books like a good half-Buddhist, so I took a breath instead, focused on the crack in my dashboard. “Why is Nonna burning my furniture?”
“I don’t know,” Maia sighed. “She says it’s all crap. The blue bookshelf, the pink bookshelf, the nightstands. All your stuff, really.”
There was a quick rustling sound and now my mother was on the phone, screaming and shaky. “I told you only to bring good things,” she coughed. “Just cut me some slack,” she said, softly now, like she might be crying. “I have cancer. I have stage four lung cancer.”
“Don’t worry,” I said in the best soothing mama-voice I could manage. “Can you put Maia back on the phone?”
“Hey,” Maia whispered.
“Listen. If there’s nothing you can do about the furniture, that’s fine, but call me back if Nonna starts opening my boxes.”
“Okay,” Maia promised. “I can make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Live with me for a year. Then you may ask questions.
I was going to have a lot of questions.