Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things Read online

  It was March. There were four inches of snow on the ground, topped by a crusty shield of ice. The spring rains had started; it had been raining sideways most of the day. Michaela was at the kitchen table, working on her calculus homework. I assumed she sensed the reason behind my presence in the kitchen (“Hey, have you taken Calvin out yet?”) and therefore she deliberately didn’t make eye contact—not that I blamed her. I put on my coat and boots but couldn’t find Calvin’s leash or sling, or Calvin. I pressed my face to the window and looked outside toward the darkened driveway. And there was Angela, seven months pregnant, wearing the coat she could no longer button and the strappy sandals she had worn to school that day in the snow. In her right hand she held up the sling around Calvin’s body; in her left, she balanced an umbrella, which she inched over the dog’s head while he pooped.

  My heart cracked open in that moment, and I softened to the tenderness and kindness of this teenager, who after all was flailing about and really just trying to figure out how to grow into her own life—just as I was also trying to do.

  Angela remained in high school and continued taking good care of herself. We hosted a huge baby shower at the house in April. Three weeks later, Angela went into labor while at the movies with two girlfriends. She calmly asked for her money back at the ticket counter, left the theater, walked down through the shopping mall, bought herself some pajamas for her confinement, and drove herself and her friends to the hospital after the movie let out. Angela’s baby daughter, whom she named after her beloved Dominican grandmother, entered the world surrounded by excited teenagers. We laid her in a little Moses basket (the same one Emily had slept in as a baby) in Angela’s bedroom, and the young mother and new baby got to know one another. I nicknamed the baby “Sparkle Pony,” because she was sweet and sparkling and because seeing her beautiful face each morning chased away my anxiety and made me smile.

  Five weeks later, Bruno, Avila, and I passed the sleeping baby back and forth in the gym when Angela and Michaela received their high school diplomas. We celebrated our first wedding anniversary with our baby granddaughter, now three months old.

  Sparkle grew. She was healthy, bright, and cuddly. Our domestic life became exponentially more chaotic. We got through months of interrupted nights, ear infection scares, and the occasional rash. We always seemed to be putting a car seat into or out of a car. We pulled a high chair up to the dining room table and took turns holding the baby while we cooked. Bruno’s sister Ceci brought her kids’ crib to us from her home in Philadelphia. I explained the difference between Ferberizing and cosleeping and made Angela stay downstairs during bedtime for a few nights while I sat on a chair outside the bedroom door, training Sparkle to soothe herself so Angela could sleep through the night.

  Angela took the baby to our neighbor Lisa (who had also taken care of all of the sisters as young children) and started working a few hours a week at a local nursing home. After picking her up from the babysitter, Angela would hold Sparkle in the air in the kitchen while one of us pulled off the baby’s puffy snowsuit. It was like unwrapping a beautiful present. We gave Sparkle a doll for Christmas, which Calvin quickly chewed the face off of. He dragged the faceless doll around with him and eventually pulled all of the baby’s toys into his kennel, where he slept curled around them.

  Michaela had sifted among her college acceptances and decided to go to St. Andrews University in Scotland. Although I was now sensing how very much I would miss her, I told her to fly, fly away. During a break from her own college, Emily went with Clare and Michaela to Scotland to look at the school. They stayed with my mother’s antic friend Faye in Edinburgh, who I assumed taught them to smoke cigarettes and drink whiskey. They returned from the trip quite whiskey conversant, having inched closer toward a relationship that for Emily was starting to seem sister-like. Emily was an only child, who (because she was raised by me) didn’t like to share. And yet, now she was sharing me.

  I settled into the role of cruise director. I planned trips to New York City to go to the theater, Christmastime weekend jaunts to see the Rockettes and window-shop, weeklong summertime trips to Block Island, and trips to Cooperstown for Bruno and me to attend the opera in the summer. Avila started saying things like, “Remember when we were on Block Island and Kirk [my best friend from childhood] cooked all those lobsters for us?” Avila also had a way of wordlessly taking jelly jars out of my hands to open them (I have weak hands) that made my eyes water with gratitude. We were starting to have memories together. I even turned up as a supporting player in one of Angela’s vivid dreams, and I was flattered when she told me about it—even if I was a little unsure of the context.

  I never knew how much I valued and needed my privacy until I didn’t have it. The gregarious side of me powers through groups of people with competing agendas and their infernal complications. The other side of me wants to spend the afternoon in a darkened movie theater, alone. This impulse is impossible to carry out in a small town, where even if I could hide out from my families of birth or marriage, I would still inevitably have to make small talk with at least three sets of people along the way.

  I coped with this by stealing away when I could, sometimes driving to a nearby town where nobody knew me, walking an unfamiliar Main Street and spending the afternoon in the town’s library. Sometimes I told Bruno I had an afternoon conference call but went to the movies instead. When the weather and my work schedule permitted, I’d go to our nearby ski hill and spend the afternoon riding the chairlift with teenage snowboarders. Flying down a hill on my rented skis, I felt free in a way I needed to feel, before returning to a household where I was starting to feel almost too necessary.

  After several months of delicate negotiations (more on this later), Jane moved to a nearby nursing home. Bruno’s mother (still on the farm where he grew up) transitioned to a wheelchair. When my plane touched down after one business trip, I drove straight to the hospital from the airport. Bruno’s mother was in the acute care ICU. After visiting her, I took the elevator three floors up to the other ICU to see my own mother. There were nasty diagnoses for various family members, crises for others, middle school lacrosse games for Avila (two concussions), blizzards on top of snowstorms, sideways spring rains. A baby learning to crawl. Calvin, limping now on his bad leg, broke his other hind leg. Again with the meds and the sling and the head cone. Emily and Clare each graduated from their colleges the same June weekend. Bruno and I split duties and each attended one ceremony. Emily, with her degree in English and a minor in music, moved into her old summer room in my Main Street house. While she figured out how to somehow turn her passion for reading and writing into a profession, she took a job at the Gap at the mall.

  When Sparkle was a toddler, Angela took her to the Dominican Republic to see her extended family. We played “bye-bye” at the airport gate. Three weeks later, they returned home. Angela was glowing. She had gotten engaged to her boyfriend, Junior. At the time, we didn’t know that Angela had a boyfriend, but we had become accustomed to Angela’s preference for living her life outside of our sometimes bossy influence. Angela had figured out how to bring Junior to this country and pursue citizenship for him. I was warily happy for her—she was making a family of her own and excitedly planning her future.

  Three months later, I was in Chicago, patting myself on the back after another taping of Wait Wait (“I so smart…”). Bruno called. Was I sitting down? Yes, I was. He told me that we were going to have another grandchild.

  I would like to say that I handled this news entirely differently than I had two years earlier, that I had picked up so much wisdom and motherly (and grandmotherly) seasoning along the way that I now reacted with grace. And yet—no. Not so much. I was the same amount of anxious, the same amount of panicked, and felt the exact same amount of everything that I had two years before. Angela powered through this tough pregnancy, taking care of herself and Sparkle and spending her evenings filling out a foot-high stack of paperwork to bring her guy to America. />
  Unfortunately, because of a backlog at the INS, Junior didn’t make it in time for the baby’s birth. This time, it was just Angela and me in the hospital room on a chilly day just after Thanksgiving. “I can’t do it,” she said, wincing through her painful back labor. I gripped her hand. I can’t do it either, I thought. And yet, she did and I did, too. We welcomed another daughter, “Sprout,” to the family.

  I spent my days working on my advice column in my house in Freeville while Emily was working at the mall. She was looking for a journalism job in Chicago, and I knew it was just a matter of time before I said good-bye to her again. In the afternoons I visited Jane in her nursing home and ate an early dinner with her. Then I drove back to Pemberley in the gloom of a winter dusk and sat in the driveway looking in through the lighted windows while I watched my beloved husband and house full of daughters glide, turn, and bump in the kitchen. Dog barking, cat on the counter, babies in their bouncy seats.

  Oftentimes, navigating all of these varied relationships, with everyone’s life so crowded with needs, incidents, and drama, overwhelmed me to overflowing. The health scares, the homework assignments, the frequently hospitalized elderly mothers, the middle school musicals, birthday parties, college departures, business worries, cell phone bills, the annual conversations over whether to get some chickens—sometimes I simply longed to know what would happen next. Even if it was a bad thing, I just wanted to know. After all, Calvin still had two healthy legs left to break.

  Angela’s fiancé, Junior, finally qualified for a visa, caught a plane north, and moved in with us. My first glimpse of my soon-to-be son-in-law was on a frosty and freezing January morning. Sparkle was a toddler, and Sprout was two months old. I had sent a wool cap and down jacket along with Bruno and Angela when they went to the airport to retrieve Junior on his first trip outside of the Dominican Republic. He was sitting at our kitchen table in the silvery dawn light, still wearing his cap and cooing over my cat, Chester, who was sitting on his lap. I realized in that moment that, although they claimed to like Chester, not one member of the household had ever voluntarily held my cuddly cat. Junior was starting off well.

  Junior didn’t speak English, and the only Spanish I could recall from my high school class was, “Esto es mi amigo, Ramon. Juego al tennis?”

  I said, “Ummmmm… Que bonito. Bonita? Bonito. Shit.”

  I recovered. “Esto es Chester,” I said, pointing to the cat.

  “Allo, Chester,” Junior said.

  We pulled another chair up to the table. One month later on Valentine’s Day, Angela and Junior were married in the living room at Maryhill Farm. I held Sprout while Sparkle shyly hugged my leg. Within a couple of months, Angela, Junior, and their children moved into one of Bruno’s candy-colored rental houses a few minutes away.

  With Angela and her family in another house and Michaela away at college, our house was suddenly emptied out, and Bruno and I were left with only Avila, now a high school junior. “Oh my God, you guys, stop staring at me,” she said regularly at the dinner table. Alone among our girls, Avila truly seemed to see her father and me as a parental unit. I had first met Avila when she was a little girl, wincing her way through a hug. Now she was a confident young woman studying for the SATs. She flopped onto our bed on Saturday mornings and described her dreams of the night before. Avila was also the only one of our daughters to whom I had confided my secret ambition—to be a school bus driver. She held this knowledge close. One day when she got particularly good news at school, she called and left me a breathless, screechy, and hilarious message that I still have on my phone. I listen to it when I’m having a bad day.

  Michaela graduated from college in the spring. I had missed her during her time away. In addition to enjoying her company, I suspected that she was the only family member who truly thought I was funny. I loved to sit with her in the kitchen during her visits home. Bruno and I took Clare and Avila to Scotland for her graduation, and along with Michaela we explored the Highlands in the rain and hiked the hills of Edinburgh. As Bruno drove through the Scottish countryside, the girls and I took turns yelling at him to drive on the left. One blustery day during this visit, Bruno and I climbed to the top of Arthur’s Seat, the ancient volcanic cone in the middle of Edinburgh overlooking the North Sea. Bruno stood at the very top of the small mountain and bent down and extended his hand to me. I let him pull me up. We had come a very long way, and we traveled well together.

  Michaela introduced us to her college friends at St. Andrews. “These are my parents, Bruno and Amy.” Depending on the context, most of our daughters at some point had decided to shortcut through the verbal logjam of introducing us as “This is my father and stepmother.” Whenever it happened, it always made me smile. I was not the mother of these young women, but I had become their parent.

  Chapter Seventeen

  We Abide

  A couple of months ago, I had a lunch meeting with three Tribune executives to talk about my professional future.

  At that meeting, we never actually got around to discussing me, because we ended up talking about our parents. Around the table we went, trading stories about where our folks were living, what ailments they suffered from, and what we were doing about it. Every single one of us was involved in the care of an elderly parent, a job made all the more challenging by the fact that we—a salesperson, an editor, a writer, and a financial analyst—were doing the caretaking. Woefully unprepared, each of us was up to our elbows in the heartrending task of taking care of someone who would never get better.

  Two of us got teary during the lunch. One of us was stammering with frustration. And one seemed to have checked out.

  “God,” I said. “Look at us. Remember when all we used to do was talk about our kids?”

  Those days of bragging about toilet training and Little League coaching and slipping our kids’ awesome SAT scores into the conversation seemed like a lifetime ago, even though all of us still had children at home. But our kids didn’t command the attention or grab the personal headlines anymore. We’d stopped worrying about their learner’s permits and driving tests. Now it was all about how to get our folks to turn in their car keys. We were at the tail end of the baby boom generation, the middle-aged daughters and sons who waited to have kids because we were so concerned about getting everything just right. We built our careers in industries that no longer seem to exist, and now we tried to avoid downsizing as we struggled to pay our mortgages and our kids’ tuition bills.

  Those of us whose youngest child has just left for college enjoy exactly 3.5 weeks of freedom before our parents start to depend on us. Someone falls and breaks a hip, and then the other joints start to go.

  Caretaking seems an inadequate word to describe the whole-life transformation of dealing with an aging and ill parent. For me, the transformation started slowly but gained momentum over time, until caring for my mother and worrying about her seemed to take over my life. Jane had rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic and painful illness that did its damage gradually but inexorably. She had always managed her health, and her life, very much on her own.

  When I first moved back to Freeville, my caretaking mainly involved watching. Watching and waiting and wondering what to do. It was a short walk down Main Street to Jane’s old house. I would work on my advice column during the early day and visit my mother in the afternoons. She was using a cane, but she was still driving her black Jetta on what seemed like twelve very short errands a day. I’d look out my front window and see her rolling through town, the top of her head barely visible through the windshield.

  My sisters and I started worrying about her. We’d call each other and gossip about her dangerously glacial driving and talk about how her hands were getting worse. After I noticed that my mother had tried to open a can of plum tomatoes in her kitchen by attacking it with a ball-peen hammer, she confessed to me that her preferred method of opening jars and cans was to drive them to the gas station on the corner (a hundred yards away) and hand th
em out the car window to Jimmy Whyte or one of the mechanics. They’d loosen the lid and hand it back. “It takes a village!” she offered gamely, repeating for the umpteenth time a phrase that I had come to loathe. And yet, it really did take a village. Freeville has a population of 520 people, and at one time or another every single one of them seemed to have a hand in my mother’s welfare. We all wondered how long she could hang on in her house on Mill Street.

  The last five years of Jane’s life were a gradual slide into entropy, punctuated by occasional terrifying emergencies. The Year of the Cane morphed into the Walker Year, which turned into the Era of the Wheelchair. Jane’s beloved Jetta eventually sat idle in the driveway, collecting leaves and snow and coatings of pollen as the seasons changed. At one point when Jane expressed a (terrifying) determination to drive her car again, Rachel dealt with it by saying to her, “I’ll tell you what. If you can open the car door, get in, and close the door by yourself, then go for it.” Needless to say, she didn’t.

  Getting Jane to move out of the house where she had lived by herself for thirty years took months of strategizing, subterfuge, and frustrated coercion on the part of my two sisters and me. She was the human equivalent of Chinese handcuffs: The harder we tried to persuade her to move, the tighter she held on. Somehow, the physically weaker our mother became, the more she was able to exert her ancient powers of passive aggression to control everyone around her. Her primary weapons were a raised eyebrow and a pursed lip. She told me once that she had spent the entire summer of her eighth year practicing raising one eyebrow like Hedy Lamarr. Seventy years later, she ruthlessly employed this technique to send her daughters scurrying away from the topic of moving somewhere safer. We visited nursing facilities, secretly put her name on waiting lists, and kept in touch with nursing home directors. When I would get a call that there was an “opening,” I knew what that meant. Someone had died, and we had twenty-four hours to grab the slot.