“Okay,” the doctor says. “We’ve known the time was coming. It will be much better if she’s in an environment where her needs are met. I’m only talking about assisted living. If it will help, I’m happy to meet with her and explain that things have reached a point where she needs a more comprehensive support system.”
“She’ll say no.”
“Regardless,” he says. “You and I know that if there was a fire she wouldn’t be capable of processing the necessity of getting out. Does she eat dinner? We can’t say for sure that she eats, now, can we? She needs to maintain her caloric intake. We want to allow her to avail herself of resources structured so that she can best meet her own needs.”
“She’ll say no,” I say again.
“May I suggest that you let Tim operate as a support system?”
“Forget him. He’s already been denied tenure twice.”
“Be that as it may, if your brother knows she’s not eating—”
“Do you know she’s not eating?”
“Let’s say she’s not eating,” he says. “It’s a slippery slope.”
“Pretending that I have my brother as a ‘support system’ has no basis in reality. You want me to admit that she’s thin? Okay. She’s thin.”
“Please grant my point, without—”
“Why? Because you’re a doctor? Because you’re pissed off that she misbehaved at some cashier’s stand in a parking lot?”
“You told me she pulled the fire alarm,” he says. “She’s out of control! Face it.”
“I’m not sure,” I say, my voice quivering.
“I am. I’ve known you forever. I remember your mother making chocolate-chip cookies, my father always going to your house to see if she’d made the damned cookies. I know how difficult it is when a parent isn’t able to take care of himself. My father lived in my house, and Donna took care of him in a way I can never thank her enough for, until he . . . well, until he died.”
“Tim wants me to move her to a cheap nursing home in Ohio.”
“Out of the question.”
“Right. She hasn’t come to the point where she needs to go to Ohio. On the other hand, we should put her in the slammer here.”
“The slammer. We can’t have a serious discussion if you pretend we’re talking to each other in a comic strip.”
I bring my knees to my forehead, clasp my legs, and press the kneecaps hard into my eyes.
“I understand from Dr. Milrus that you’re having a difficult time,” the therapist says. Her office is windowless, the chairs cheerfully mismatched. “Why don’t you fill me in?”
“Well, my mother had a stroke a year ago. It did something. . . . Not that she didn’t have some confusions before, but after the stroke she thought my brother was ten years old. She still sometimes says things about him that I can’t make any sense of, unless I remember that she often, really quite often, thinks he’s still ten. She also believes that I’m sixty. I mean, she thinks I’m only fourteen years younger than she is! And, to her, that’s proof that my father had another family. Our family was an afterthought, my father had had another family, and I’m a child of the first marriage. I’m sixty years old, whereas she herself was only seventy-four when she had the stroke and fell over on the golf course.”
The therapist nods.
“In any case, my brother is forty-four—about to be forty-five—and lately it’s all she’ll talk about.”
“Your brother’s age?”
“No, the revelation. That they—you know, the other wife and children—existed. She thinks the shock made her fall down at the fourth tee.”
“Were your parents happily married?”
“I’ve shown her my baby album and said, ‘If I was some other family’s child, then what is this?’ And she says, ‘More of your father’s chicanery.’ That is the exact word she uses. The thing is, I am not sixty. I’ll be fifty-one next week.”
“It’s difficult, having someone dependent upon us, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes. But that’s because she causes herself so much pain by thinking that my father had a previous family.”
“How do you think you can best care for your mother?”
“She pities me! She really does! She says she’s met every one of them: a son and a daughter, and a woman, a wife, who looks very much like her, which seems to make her sad. Well, I guess it would make her sad. Of course it’s fiction, but I’ve given up trying to tell her that, because in a way I think it’s symbolically important. It’s necessary to her that she think what she thinks, but I’m just so tired of what she thinks. Do you know what I mean?”
“Tell me about yourself,” the therapist says. “You live alone?”
“Me? Well, at this point I’m divorced, after I made the mistake of not marrying my boyfriend, Vic, and married an old friend instead. Vic and I talked about getting married, but I was having a lot of trouble taking care of my mother, and I could never give him enough attention. When we broke up, Vic devoted all his time to his secretary’s dog, Banderas. If Vic was grieving, he did it while he was at the dog park.”
“And you work at Cosmos Computer, it says here?”
