Abruptly, my father gets up. “Veronica!” he screams. Veronica runs in and takes him to the toilet again.
My mother looks at me. “I don’t think he really has to go,” she says. “I just think he wants to be alone in the bathroom with that woman.”
“She’s the nurse’s aide,” I say.
“Don’t believe that malarkey,” says my mother. “She’s only pretending to be a nurse’s aide so she can undress him. I’m wise to all her tricks. I wasn’t born yesterday. But I pretend I don’t know. One of these days, I’m going to throw her out of the house.”
It wouldn’t be the first time. When my mother was a little stronger last year, she fired people constantly. “Get out of my house, you big fat thing!” Sometimes: “You big fat black thing,” she would scream—my mother, who had never been a racist in her prime. I told myself she was more rational now, but she was only weaker. She was biding her time. One of these days, she’d get up screaming like her old self and throw all the strangers out.
“If I should go with the High Class Angels, who’ll take care of her?” my father used to rant in the old days when he was strong. The “High Class Angels” fascinated me. Whom did he mean? The Angel of Death? Or was he wrestling with angels as he slept, like Jacob?
And hearing about these mysterious angels, my mother would shriek: “Nobody has to take care of me! I’ll bury you all.”
Sometimes I think she may know more than she lets on.
“I’ve seen a lot of people die,” Veronica says later, “but your father is one tough old bird. He’s going to fight like hell before he leaves this earth. Your mother too. She never stops watching me. You know that time she fell out of bed and had to go to the hospital? She was worried I was doing something with your father. Don’t believe she’s out of it. She’s more together than she looks.”
“How can you stand this work?”
“Who’s gonna do it if I don’t? You girls? You gonna clean up the shit when it runs down their legs?”
I go in to my mother again.
“When did you get here?” she asks as if we had not seen each other before, as if we had not just been talking.
I sit on her side of the bed. My father is there but not there, asleep, awake, and drifting in between.
“You know, when you get old, you see that everything is a joke. All the things you were so passionate about don’t mean a thing. You only did them to keep busy. I used to think it was important that I could dance better than other people, but now I see I was only fooling myself. I only did it to keep busy.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“It is. Even if you’re well known, what difference does that make? It doesn’t keep you from getting old and dying. People see you come into a restaurant and they say, ‘Isn’t that so-and-so?’ Well, what good does that do you? Or them, for that matter. It’s all a joke.”
“But you still want to live, don’t you?”
“To tell you the truth, I’m bored. I’m bored with every-thing. Even the things I used to love—like flowers—bore me. Everything except my children. In the end, that’s all that matters, leaving children behind on the earth to replace you when you go. Why do you look so sad? What’s the matter?”
“You know what’s the matter. I don’t like you to say you’re bored with life.”
“Do you want me to lie to you?”
Actually, yes, I think. Please tell me that life is worth living. Please tell me that all the hassle of getting up, getting dressed, is worth the trouble. I don’t want to believe that life is only a joke. I don’t think parents ought to tell that to their children. Odd that I am still expecting them to be parents.
“You still look very young,” my mother says.
“There’s a reason for that,” I say.
“Good genes,” my mother says.
“Good genes and a face-lift.”
“I don’t believe you’ve had a face-lift,” my mother says.
“Have it your way,” I say.
Before I started to watch my parents fade away, the scariest thing I ever did was plastic surgery. A female ritual like childbirth. It stacks up there with all the other female rituals—genital mutilation, foot binding, whalebone corsets, Spanx. I know men do plastic surgery too now—voluntarily—but it’s different for men. Women feel they have no choice. Age still equals abandonment for women. A man can look like he’s a hundred, be impotent and night blind, and still find a younger woman who never got over her daddy. But a woman is lucky to be able to go to the movies or bingo with another old bag. I considered plastic surgery as mandatory as leg waxing.
First I sent the doctor a check so large I would not be able to back out. Then I spent five months in utter terror. (The last month was the worst.) Then I got on a plane and flew to Los Angeles.
Arrived in the midst of mudslides and heavy weather. (This was two winters before the century turned.) Took a room surrounded by fog in a skyscraper hotel. The floaty fiftieth floor. (Maybe an earthquake would intervene and I wouldn’t have to go through with it.) The next morning, early, after disinfectant ablutions, sans breakfast, I limo’ed to the clinic. My darling friend Isadora Wing came with me to give moral support. She waited for me.
The doctor’s office was decorated in ice-cream colors and all the nurses had perfect Mona Lisa faces done by him. They smiled their half-moon smiles. They reassured me.
I was taken into a rose-colored room with soft lights and told to undress. I was given elastic stockings, paper slippers, a grasshopper-green gown, green cap. I had already prepared by scrubbing myself, my hair, even my shadow, with doctor-proffered potions. I garbed myself in these ceremonial clothes and lay back on a reclining chair, a sort of airplane seat for traveling through time. The anesthesiologist and surgeon arrived, also in grasshopper green.
I remember looking into the anesthesiologist’s soft brown eyes and thinking, I wonder if he’s a drug addict. . . . We talked about the methods by which unconsciousness would be achieved. He seemed to know plenty about them. Almost imperceptibly, a needle was inserted into one of the veins that branched over my hand. The colorless liquid carried me away like a euthanized dog.
I had picked my doctor because I had seen his work—or rather because I saw that his work was invisible. Most New York plastic surgeons specialize in the windswept look—Gone With the Wind face-lifts, I call them. You see them on the frozen tundra of the Upper East Side. Bone-thin women whose cheeks adhere to their cheekbones as if they were extremely well-preserved mummies. My doctor, born a Brazilian with a noble German name (my husband joked that his father must have been the dentist at Auschwitz before hurriedly leaving for the Southern Hemisphere with bags of melted gold fillings), was famed for his tiny, invisible stitches. He was an artist, not a carpenter. He could look at the sagging skin around your eyes and see how to excise just enough, not too much. He could make tiny, imperceptible cheek-tucks that erased the lines of worry and age. He could raise your forehead back into your twenties. He smiled sweetly as anyone would smile anticipating gargantuan fees. This was a hundred-thousand-dollar three-procedure day for him. I drifted off to the Land of Nod.
Time collapsed on itself and died. I didn’t. (But if I had, I would never have known, would I?) I woke up in a back room of the clinic with a nurse asking me how I felt. Parched. Trussed as a Christmas turkey. With a pounding headache. All over my head.
“Do you want to use the bathroom?”
“May I?”
“I don’t see