Dorothea,
Would you mind making one teensy weensy concession to modernity? _Get_ a cell phone. Or, failing that, get that ancient rotary wall phone in your house fixed, because this business of leaving messages with that nutty Russian woman who lives up the road has just gotten ridiculous. Today she was telling me about her toenail fungus and the herbal remedies she's been trying, and the success or failure of each. The other day she was asking me for Mother's recipe for scalloped oysters, and advice on what brand of canned cranberry sauce was the best. I was like: sorry, honey, but my mother is in the hospital, or has just gotten out of the hospital, and I really don't have time to exchange Thanksgiving cookery tips on the phone with you or serve as a dial-up herbal apothecary.
Anyway, Dorothea, I don't honestly think that your Swiss Family Robinson lifestyle will be compromised in the least if you have a phone. You're 59, remember, and what with your bum knee and propensity to fall off ladders and chop off pinky fingers while digging up potatoes I don't think having a phone handy is an imprudent idea, now, is it? Think of how pleasant having a phone would be! We could dial each other up for a spur-of-the-moment chat and gossip session (ha!), and I could keep you up to date on Mother's condition without having to deal with addled, irritatingly chatty Russian go-betweens or write _letters_, of all things, which is terrible for my repetitive stress problem. My wrist is already aching, and all of Mother's pens seem to be out of ink. I don't think I even know how to _write_ with a pen anymore. This letter will be brief.
Mother's much better--that's the long and the short of what I wanted to say. She spent the first day home from the hospital in bed with her ratty fox stole draped about her shoulders, like some old dowager Marie Dressler would play in a 1930s film, and all of her horrible cats draped over all the other parts of her. These animals are a real nuisance, I have to say--they climb on everything, including the dining room table and the piano, and run around her feet so much that it's a wonder she hasn't fallen and broken her hip. Then too they have an pathological aversion to me, probably because I keep shooing them out the back sliding door whenever I get the chance! They're supposed to stay indoors at night, but (don't tell Mother) I've been locking that mangy orange one--Hiram--out to keep it from scratching on my door at three a.m. I do have to get a little sleep, and it's hard around here with Mother rattling around in the bathroom three and four times a night, and listening to talk radio at 3:00 a.m. at a crazily loud volume.
Since the day before yesterday, Mother's been creeping around a bit on her cane, eating a little (mainly Ritz crackers and pimento cheese), and--surprise, surprise--appearing punctually at cocktail hour for the first of several bourbon highballs and her nutritious evening meal of canned herring in sour cream. I'm trying to limit her to one (highball) but she's so sneaky that it's difficult; every time I look around the golden liquid has mysteriously crept up another inch in her glass. The doctor doesn't like it at all, but what am I going to do? The woman's eighty six; if she wants to drink, I say let her. (But God how she scares me, teetering around on that cane.) Anyhow it's not her drinking that's her problem, it's her lungs. Wouldn't it have been nice if she had quit smoking when the Surgeon General's report came out instead of waiting until she was 77 or 78 and mildly emphysemic? But you can't tell her anything. Three times a day she has to withdraw into her bedroom for her breathing therapy, which involves hooking an oxygen tube around her head and inhaling this medicine for thirty minutes. She was trying to do it in front of the fire in the living room until I put a stop to that; the last thing we need is some catastrophic explosion on top of anything else!
But oh my God, Dorothea, you can't imagine how truly dismal this town is. Downtown is boarded up except for a few discount furniture places and a dollar store that sells cheap gimcracks; there's nowhere to eat except "Appleby's" and "Hardees" and some godawful buffet place called the "Pinetop Inn" that Mother used to go to with Evie on Sundays. The old Charles House has been sold and will be torn down next spring, Mother tells me, without a trace of melancholy. She's never been one to be sentimental about the past. Aren't we lucky that she didn't follow through on her threat to move us back here after she and Father split? Where would we be today, I wonder, if she had? You'd likely be some doctor's wife, vast and wide-hipped in bright floral prints, active in the church and with Women Aglow or something, and I'd be--what? Maybe some paunchy antiques dealer with some hunky "kept boy" assistant, making monthly trips to Greensboro or someplace to see traveling productions of "Cats" and "Fiddler on the Roof" at the Civic Center. Well, maybe we'd have found a way to escape! Anyway, everyone looks sad and beaten-down and of course terribly _big_ here: fat not in a jocund, laughing, merry-peasant like way, but just miserably, sadly, woefully heavy, as if it were a disease they had caught quite by accident.
Some of the young people, such as these thick-necked, swaggering boys with little feathery moustaches I was looking at when I was in the ABC package store the day before yesterday (replenishing our booze supply for Thanksgiving Day), are rather fetching, I must confess. I was afraid I was a little too obvious in my ogling, but then I remembered that I'm protected from any "bashing" episodes by the invisibility syndrome that afflicts everyone after 45 or so: one simply ceases to have any sort of noticeable physical presence for the young; one becomes one of the gray, anonymous shades shuffling around decrepitly in the background, a ashen frieze of the wrinkled and superannuated. Such a fate wouldn't be quite so painful, I don't think, if one's appetites, shall we say, would fade and shrivel away in the same way, and at the same time, that our faces and bodies do. But these importunate wishes persist, I see now, long after the ability to act on them or inspire them in others dies away--they go on, it seems, to the very grave.
Our Thanksgiving wasn't very festive, but neither of us was in an especially festive mood. With some ham that a neighbor lady kindly brought, and some leftover potato salad from KFC, and some canned yams that I dressed up with chopped pecans and sugar, we had a semblance of a meal, washed down with some cheap Zinfandel Mother had stashed away in her liquor cabinet. Not very appetizing. Afterwards we retired to the sitting room to watch some BBC miniseries thing with bug-eyed, faintly hysterical-looking ladies in nineteenth century dress creeping fearfully around some dark English manor house with candles, pursued by sinister men in frock coats. Can't remember what it was--these BBC/Masterpiece Theater things, of which we've been watching quite a few, begin to run together after a while. Mary Renfroe called while it was on to see how Mother is doing. She can't come visit just now because of her new baby, who has a cold, but promises to pop up for a weekend after the New Year, which will cheer Mother, I think. She has always thought highly of her, as you know.
I'll be back home next week, provided that my plane isn't hijacked by an Islamic terrorist and crashed into the Empire State Building. After being away for a week, I find I'm dying to get back to NYC, though for the past few months I've been absolutely dying to get out. It seems now that there's no place I'd rather be, perversely enough.
When I get back we must sit down and have a talk, Dorothea, about what we're going to do about Mother next. She has that woman Prellie coming in each morning to dust and surreptitiously pocket little packs of sugar and sheets of fabric softener and toilet paper rolls, but my feeling is that she needs much more that now--a permanent home-health-care person, or (God forbid) some nursing home/assisted living type place. Naturally Mother says she'd rather die, and in fact in her more melodramatic moments claims that she'll see to it that she _does_ die if it comes to that. Despite all of these morbid avowals, however, I somehow think that if she were going to voluntarily kick the bucket, as she's been darkly threatening to for ten years or so now, she'd have done it by now. Something keeps her here with us, I'm not sure what. It's not religious belief, because she claims to have none, and it's not friends, because all of hers are either dead or senile, like poor Evie.
Maybe it's us, Dorothea--did you ever think of that? She keeps on living for us. Jesus, what a sad thought. It's enough to make you cry.
Get a phone, Dorothea! Get a phone!
Love,
Maury
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