The Exact Same Moon Read online

Ready, aim, hop, stomp!

  This is why I’m angry. I’m angry at my dad for yanking my mom out of her dream too soon. But then, I can’t blame my dad for having his wants. You can’t blame a man for being in a different life stage than a woman. Or vice versa.

  I think of Alex and me, fifteen years apart. How long are we going to be in the same life stage? Are we even in it now? How long are any two people in the same life stage? What if one is speeding up, while one is slowing down? How do you possibly reconcile something as law-abiding as velocity?

  When we were farm shopping a few years ago, Alex used to joke that I was a train. He would say “I see the train has left the station” as a way of surrendering to whatever scheme had taken hold of me. In that case, buying a farm. “Because,” he would say, “when the train leaves the station, I know I have only three choices: I can get on board, I can get run over, or I can be left behind. But there is no stopping the train.”

  It was an interesting analogy, somewhat apt. And I hated that. I didn’t want to be a train. I don’t want to be a train! I don’t want to yank Alex along on my dream. I want us to both be driving the train.

  How do you do that? How do you do that without leaving one of you frozen in time, unable to so much as speak?

  Here’s an idea. Come to think of it, maybe the answer is pretty simple. It’s all up to the train. If you are the train, well, then it’s up to you to hold back. At a minimum, you have to make sure that your partner has a chance to build up steam for an idea. And if the steam doesn’t come, well, drop it. You just have to drop your dream.

  That’s what I’ll have to do. That is just the way I’ll have to live.

  I must control the train.

  Ready, aim, hop, stomp!

  I’ll bet my mom lived a lifetime of controlling the train. I mean, talk about a train. I do come by this honestly. And now look. She’s paralyzed.

  Ready, aim, hop, stomp!

  Okay, this might be a stupid example. But take, for example, my Chihuahua situation. Yeah, I have a Chihuahua situation.

  The Chihuahua lives in a cage in a pet shop I pass on the way to and from the hospital. In the past week or so I’ve been stopping by to visit it, once, sometimes twice each day. There are no pets at my parents’ house. Not one. And I guess I just kind of needed a fix. That’s how it started. I was at the drugstore and saw the pet shop and stopped in.

  I was drawn immediately to the Chihuahua in the middle cage, just next to a sweet little Border collie. He was a white Chihuahua, a puppy. He was the size of a healthy kitten. Could a dog this small really be considered … dog? His paws looked to be smaller than my fingertips. I asked the clerk if I could hold him. She said sure. And she opened the cage. And the so-called dog scampered right into my arms as if those arms were exactly what he had been waiting for. He was the most helpless little thing. I loved him more or less immediately. I told the clerk I would be back. I came back. I kept coming back. The shop owner said she didn’t mind. When I went in yesterday, she just pointed to the cage, said, “Go ahead,” and let me take the Chihuahua out. I nestled that dog into the cradle inside my elbow and took him over to visit the fish and the birds and the gerbils.

  This is what we do, me and the Chihuahua. The Chihuahua makes me happy, and I’d like to think the dog gets some relief from its boring caged-in days.

  But that’s as far as our relationship goes. That’s it. The point is, our relationship is contained. I have no intention of taking the Chihuahua home. Even the shop owner knows this. I’m just a visitor. A visitor who already has three dogs, thank you very much. A visitor who lives in a place that wouldn’t be able to provide a good home for a Chihuahua anyway. The horses might trip over it or crush it. And then there is Betty, who would have a heart attack if I showed up with a dog that could out-princess her ten thousand times over.

  But mostly—there is Alex. He loves animals, but he has a point when he says, “This is getting ridiculous.” He started saying that way back at Maggie, horse number two. Nearly all of our pets have come into our lives aboard the train known as me. And I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m just not.

  Ready, aim, hop, stomp!

  Oh, that was a good one. Good Lord, this plant is approaching the size of a watermelon. When did my mom put these in here that they’ve had time to grow so large?

  Ready, aim, hop, stomp!

  I’m thinking about a promise I made. I’m thinking about my promise to control the train. Not a promise to Alex. In fact, he’s always said that the good thing about my locomotion is it gets us places he never would otherwise get. So really, I made the promise to me. I made it when we got Skippy, mule number two, which was kind of my grand finale. I had no intention whatsoever of getting another mule when I got Skippy. I really did not. We already had Sassy, our wedding mule. How many mules does a woman need?

  But what happened with Skippy, well, what happened was I saw an ad for a mule farm. Thirty mules at one farm! I couldn’t imagine it. I just wanted to see it with my own eyes. I had grown to love mules. I had grown to love the mule concept. A mule is half horse and half donkey. The combination makes for a smart, strong-willed, sure-footed, and loving creature. But the main thing about mules is each mule is its own mule. Mules are sterile. There will never be progeny. This goes exactly against the more typical tradition of horse ownership, where bloodlines are everything. You get your papers from, say, the American Saddlebred Association, like those we have for Cricket, and you can trace your horse’s ancestry back to the Middle Ages. Well, not really. But you get the point. Bloodlines dictate how much your horse costs, and bloodlines dictate how tall you walk when you talk about your horse, and bloodlines dictate how important you are when you show your horse—oh, your horse comes from a long line of famous horses!

  In walks the mule. No bloodlines. Well, you’ll have some people trying. You know, there is always Mister I Have a Quarterhorse Mix From Fancy Schmancy Mule Farm in Montana. But for the most part it’s just: mule. A one-hundred-percent-in-charge-of-its-own-reputation mule. A mule unlike any mule before it and any mule after it. A creature that is here on this Earth on its own good time and for its own good reasons.

  Well, after hearing about that mule farm, one day Alex and I took a drive just to see. Just to absorb the wonder. And while we were at the mule farm, standing there watching this sea of giant-eared animals, one of them seemed to stand out from the crowd. He was a light-colored Appaloosa mix, a bit smaller than the others, and my eyes went right to his. I swear that mule was looking right at me. That mule was staring at me! That mule was picking me! I asked the farmer about the mule. He said his name was Skippy. And I don’t know what made me do it. How can you know? Suddenly I found myself calling out. “Skippy!” I called. “Skiiiippy! Mama’s here!”

  And the strangest thing—and Alex saw it, too—that mule shuffled this way and that until he had worked his way through the mule crowd and came toward me. It was like a movie! Like a peasant in a throng of peasants coming forth with some very important message. That mule walked right up to me, put his head on my shoulder, and snorted a huge snort of relief. Or so I interpreted the snort.

  Skippy.

  Yes, Skippy. Within a month Skippy was safe and sound in our barn.

  I felt good about bringing Skippy home, but bad for Alex, who was looking a little bedraggled. One more animal to feed and clean up after. “Isn’t this getting ridiculous?”

  Yes, maybe it was. And so I got control of myself. This is why I am not even thinking of taking the Chihuahua home. I am not even allowing myself to imagine taking it home.

  No, I am not.

  No! Now, stop it. Stop it right now.

  All right. One last daylily for today’s haul.

  Ready, aim, hop, stomp!

  Ready, aim, hop, stomp!

  Boy, is this therapeutic. Ready, aim, hop, stomp!

  All right, then. I’ve got this wheelbarrow pretty much full. That didn’t take long. See, if I just do one wheelbarrow
a day for the next five days, I’ll really have done something.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Brushing your mother’s teeth isn’t so bad. You just have to pretend you’re scrubbing a floor, or maybe a tile in your bathroom. Don’t make eye contact, that’s the main thing. If you look in her eyes, you will see her helplessness. If she looks in your eyes, she will see your heartache. It’s best to avoid all of this, since your main objective here is the removal of tartar and the application of fluoride.

  Tonight we’re using Aquafresh Triple Protection. And a red toothbrush. It’s a luminous, translucent red. The color of Jell-O, the color of cough drops. Back and forth, up, down.

  It’s May. Already it’s May. The move is over. Alex has come and gone and come and gone a few times now. And I’m still here. I’m brushing my mother’s teeth back and forth and up and down. I’m here, now. This is my here-and-now. I would do just about anything to return to my there-and-then. My new refrigerator. The ticking of my kitchen clock. All of it.

  Kristin is coming to relieve me next week. We’ve changed the way our shifts work so as to open up the chance to return to some semblance of normal life. Now it’s two weeks on and two weeks off. I’ve heard that the Red Cross does it this way when they send their disaster teams to hurricanes and floods. They must have figured out that two weeks is a good amount of time.

  Back and forth, up and down. Red. This is such a pretty red, this cough-drop red. But now I’m wondering why they call cough drops “cough drops.” As if they’re prepackaged little coughs you put in your mouth and then they go off, like little cough bombs, which of course they aren’t, their job is to quiet the cough. Hmm. Cough Mufflers? Cough Terminators. Cough Quellers.

  Hmm.

  These are the sorts of thoughts you have when you are standing in a hospital room brushing your mother’s teeth, doing your very best to avoid anything whatsoever to do with living in the moment. One thing about misery is, it has a way of making you give up doing what you think is good and right.

  “You ready to spit?” I say to my mom, holding up a cup of water.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” she garbles. She’s able to talk now. And she’s able to swish and rinse and spit. So we are making progress. The disease works in its own good time. You just wait for the lining of the nerves to grow back. Nothing to do but wait.

  I hold the yellow half-moon bowl up to her neck, then tilt her head with my hand. The hair on the back of her head is flat and brittle. The perm is long gone. Tomorrow I should wash her hair. Washing your mother’s hair isn’t so bad. It just requires a lot of propping and towels and hoses. Kristin found some clever portable shower gizmo at one of those patient-care stores, so we can do the washing right here in her bed. Everything is easier if she doesn’t have to be moved.

  She spits. She takes another sip of water, swishes with determination. She’s gotten so skinny. Waiflike. She doesn’t even look like my mother anymore. She has virtually no muscle tone, anywhere. She’s my mother with all the air sucked out. She’s the flat-tire version of my mother.

  But all of this is fine. I mean, this is just tooth-brushing time. I’m telling you this is nothing compared with some of the things we do. Like in the daytime, when the physical therapists come in. Nice enough people. In fact, some of the cheeriest of the bunch around here. My mom seems genuinely pleased to see them each time. Then: the crane. You can see the panic wash over her face.

  The crane is a nylon sling hanging from a big hook attached to a steel arm. They use it to get my mom out of bed and into a chair, where she is to sit for just a few minutes each day. This is how the muscles are invited back to life. “Come on, gang, get working!” The ones they’re trying to awaken first are the muscles of the torso that enable her to sit upright. Muscles anyone has long since forgotten about. Muscles you first got to know way back when you were an infant in a crib wanting with every fiber of your being to … just … roll … over.

  So this is what they do. They roll my mother to one side, tuck the nylon sling underneath her. They roll her on top of the sling. They hook the sling to the crane, push a button, and very slowly the crane lifts my mother out of the bed. For a few moments she hangs there in the air, hangs there like the tiny, helpless bird she has become. Hangs there chirping “Stop it! Stop this! Please don’t do this to me!”

  My mother.

  It’s all I can do to not run to her, throw my body underneath her to catch her in case she falls. Rock-a-bye, baby. When the bough breaks, the cradle must fall. Rock-a-bye, baby, my poor little baby.

  My mother.

  There really is nothing quite like seeing your own mother as helpless as an infant. There is nothing like it in the world or the universe or the galaxies beyond, I’m quite certain. There is nothing like suddenly being a thirty-nine-year-old woman with your first baby, and that baby is your mother.

  She spits again. “Wonderful. Thank you. That does it,” she says. She smacks her lips. “That was the highlight of my day.”

  “And we haven’t even done Mister Washcloth yet,” I say.

  She rolls her eyes. She’s grown sick of my Mister Washcloth routine. But she enjoys being sick of it. Hey, you do what you can.

  I head into the bathroom, rinse off the toothbrush, find Mister Washcloth hanging on his rack. “Let’s go, dude,” I say. I turn on the warm water, immerse, wring, fold in half.

  “Here comes Mister Washcloth,” I say, returning.

  “Oh, brother.”

  But I don’t sing my Mister Washcloth song. Hoobie Doobie Doo, Mister Washcloth Is Gonna Get You. Enough is enough. I place the warm cloth on her forehead. “Ahh,” she says, closing her eyes. “That feels nice.”

  I rub the cloth over her forehead and then, gently, over her eyelids. Then her cheeks. Now her chin. And behind her neck. “The highlight of your day,” I say.

  “Most definitely,” she says, opening her eyes.

  I see them.

  Damn it.

  I look away but it’s too late.

  Damn it.

  Her eyes are small, deep set. In that way, they are far away. But that doesn’t mean you can’t see the helplessness. That doesn’t mean you don’t feel it in your heart like a punch.

  My mother.

  My heartache.

  It’s half her. It’s half me. It’s the two of us, stuck together in this room. It’s everything I’m thinking when I think about her. It’s wanting to save her. It’s wanting her to save me. It’s everything generous, and it’s everything selfish. It’s me, at seventy-five. It’s coming down with some strange disease nobody ever heard of. It’s being paralyzed and all alone. It’s no one to come visit me. It’s no kids to come in shifts. It’s no one to wash my face, to brush my teeth.

  What am I going to do? Why don’t I have kids? Everyone needs kids.

  Is this how moms are born? Is this why moms are born? Is it some howling of the heart, the fear of having nothing, no one, when disaster strikes?

  I don’t think so. See, I really don’t think so. I don’t think the reason people go have babies is just so they might have some company when they get old. No, there’s a lot more to it than that.

  I wonder why my thoughts keep leading me here, to thoughts of babies. I keep trying to convince myself that I have no interest in going here. And yet I keep getting pulled here.

  Then again, I was the one craving family noise. I was the one getting pecked on the head by a bird in the form of a noisy kitchen clock. Not that the feeling of a bird pecking you on the head is the easiest sign to interpret.

  But still.

  I keep hearing that conversation I had with Alex after my peanut M&M dream.

  “You have some deep-seated need to have a baby?”

  “Um.”

  “Do you?”

  My goodness! I had no idea. Shouldn’t I have had an answer?

  Hell, I do have an answer. An answer that flattens me with fear. Why should that be such a scary answer?

  And now. The mor
e I stand here caring for my mother, the more of her helplessness I see, the more mother I seem to become. And the more mother I become, the more I notice that I have no child. No child except this one, my mother.

  It isn’t right. I’m telling you, it’s completely inside out and backward. But heartache isn’t a puzzle to figure out. Nor is heartache a monster you have absolutely no control over.

  Well, some heartache is. Grief is. When someone dies, you have grief. You have a void you can’t fill. But when someone isn’t born yet, what you have isn’t exactly grief. What you have is a void to fill.

  A void I’ve only recently met. A void that seems far too complicated to even think about.

  A void.

  Avoid! Oh, Alex would love that one. That’s just his sort of wordplay.

  Now, I wonder what he would do with this baby idea. I think he wouldn’t do. That’s what I think.

  “You want to watch The King and I?” I say to my mother.

  “Oh, I don’t think—”

  “Come on, it’s a happy movie,” I say. I put Mister Washcloth back in the bathroom for the night and get my canvas bag.

  “Here,” I say. “Let’s just watch it together.”

  “I really don’t think—”

  I put the movie in.

  I sit in the gray vinyl chair, prop my feet on the jazzy red hazardous waste can. Pretty flimsy for a hazardous waste can, if you ask me. I watch as Deborah Kerr goes swaying and singing and twirling in that giant hoopskirt. My mother says nothing. Nothing until Yul Brynner claps his hands and the children go running obediently away and he folds his arms and Deborah Kerr looks at him like he’s the biggest grouch on earth.

  “He’s so mean!” my mother says.

  “Well, not mean exactly—”

  “He’s so mean!” she says. “Why is he so mean! Oh, turn it off! Turn it off!”

  “Mom, it’s Yul Brynner. It’s The King and I. He’s going to get nice later, you know that.”

  “Please, turn this off! I’m begging you, turn it off!”

  Okay, but jeez. “Mom, it’s a movie. It’s a story with a happy ending. You can’t have happily-ever-after unless it’s set against a little tension.”