People Who Knew Me Read online

  “What happened?” I asked. I pulled it to my face to smell and I knew the answer before Drew had to say anything. His mom wet her pants on an almost daily basis. We had started putting trash bags over the couch cushions.

  “She had an accident,” he said. “She didn’t realize she was sitting on it.”

  She looked at me with regret. “Sorry,” she whispered.

  Drew must have seen my eyes enlarge with rage, because he said, “Don’t worry, I’m taking it to the Laundromat tomorrow.”

  That didn’t help, though. I didn’t want the blanket washed. It was delicate. It had never been washed—not in the two decades I’d had it. I liked that it smelled like the passage of years.

  “Why don’t you go for a walk?” he said, standing and guiding me to the front door like a bouncer attempting to divert a threat in a crowded club. He opened the door for me, practically pushed me out, told me with his eyes to come back when I was calmer, less likely to kill someone.

  I walked down the steps to the sidewalk and when I rounded the corner of our block, I quickened my pace until I was running, until I was sprinting, until I was so exhausted that I was physically incapable of screaming even if I wanted to.

  I was wearing my work shoes—loafers.

  * * *

  That escape Marni said I’d need? I found it. I started running nightly, until I was so exhausted that I could return to the apartment without anger. I got so good at it, started running so many miles, that I returned to the apartment with complete apathy. I didn’t listen to music; I just listened to the rhythm of my feet and the cycle of my inhales and exhales.

  Within a week, I was running before work and in the evening. I ran three times a day on weekends. I ran with the gusto of Forrest Gump. Over a midweek lunch with Marni—we didn’t meet for after-work happy hours that often anymore because I didn’t want to miss my evening runs—she said she was worried about me.

  “Whenever women run, they’re running away from something,” she said. “Every time I see a woman jogging, I pity her. I want to stop her and have a heart-to-heart and ask, What the hell are you running from?”

  “But it’s okay for men to run?” I asked, flexing a feminist muscle that I knew Marni would appreciate.

  “Men have, like, a primordial need to run. It goes back to their days as hunters sprinting across the Great Plains to kill mammals.”

  She stabbed a tomato in her salad as if it were one of those just-mentioned mammals.

  “Marni, that’s bullshit and you know it,” I said.

  She used her finger to wipe up the dressing left in her bowl, then licked her finger shamelessly. “I just think you’re running from something,” she said. “Which is fine. I would run, too, if I was in your situation—metaphorically, I mean. I’d never actually run unless some rapist was chasing me.”

  “I guess I won’t ask you to come along sometime,” I said, though I wouldn’t have asked anyway. I didn’t want a companion.

  “Look, just don’t get hit by a car or pass out from exhaustion or lose every ounce of body fat.”

  She reached across the table and pinched my upper arm.

  “Apparently I’m too late with the body fat thing.”

  * * *

  One day, at work, I was looking up information about Parkinson’s online and saw a list of support groups. There was one for caretakers—in Brooklyn Heights. So, that Thursday night, I ran four miles, in the dark, to a church on Jay Street. I didn’t tell Drew I was going.

  There were seven of us total, including the group leader—a sixty-something woman named Pam whose credentials were twofold: she was a retired social worker and her brother had Parkinson’s. The newcomers had to introduce themselves to the group, AA-style.

  “Hi, I’m Emily. My husband’s mother has stage five Parkinson’s and she’s been living with us since May.”

  That was all I said. I didn’t tell them that I made Drew get out of bed first in the morning because I didn’t want to greet his mom. I didn’t tell them that every time she started to topple over, like a diseased tree falling in a forest, I thought about whether to steady her or let her fall. I didn’t tell them that I considered calling Social Services on myself, claiming to be a neighbor witnessing elder abuse, so that they would take her away. I didn’t tell them these things because I thought they would tell me the same thing Drew did—to have a little compassion.

  Everyone welcomed me, then moved along to the two other newcomers. I was the youngest there by about twenty years, which made me feel sorrier for myself. This wasn’t supposed to be happening to me—to us—now. When his mother first moved in, I said to Drew, like a toddler throwing a tantrum about a time-out, “It isn’t fair.” He told me it would be helpful if I’d complain only about things that had a solution. I didn’t talk to him for two days.

  The woman sitting across from me was also there for her first meeting. She had wild gray hair, long and wavy. She tapped one foot on the floor impatiently, like she couldn’t wait for her turn to talk. When it came, she said:

  “I’m Nancy. My seventy-two-year-old mother just moved in with me. Stage five. I’m about to lose my fucking mind.”

  Everyone just stared at her. I tried not to laugh. She must have felt the need to explain, because she went on:

  “I have siblings—three of them. None of them want to take in my mother. She was crazy before Parkinson’s and she’s even crazier now.”

  She spoke fast, like she was on uppers, hands flailing all over the place. I liked her immediately. When she saw my amused smile, she winked at me.

  Most of the meeting involved trading tips. It was like a Parkinson’s advice swap meet. The group spent twenty minutes discussing adult diapers. “There’s this new one that isn’t as poufy as most of them. My mom doesn’t fight me as much about wearing it at night,” this lady named Alice said. The others looked at her like she was the messiah and jotted down the name. They all had notepads readily accessible.

  Then Pam spent a half hour explaining “circle theory.” I wasn’t sure it was a real thing or something she made up. She instructed us to draw a circle on a paper and put the name of the Parkinson’s patient in that circle. Then we drew a circle around that and put the name of the primary caregiver in that ring, then another circle with the name of the next-closest person, and so on. Pam said, “Comfort in, complaints out,” meaning we were supposed to offer comfort to people in circles more inward than our own, and complain only to people in circles farther out than our own. In my life, this meant Drew’s mom could bitch and moan as much as she wanted, to anyone at any time. And Drew could bitch and moan to me as much as he wanted. I had to offer the two of them comfort. I was in the third ring. I could only bitch and moan to people farther out from the situation than me—Marni, mostly. Unloading my frustrations on Drew was a no-no.

  After the meeting, Nancy tapped me on the shoulder at the snack table, which featured a sad-looking bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies.

  “Is it just me, or is that circle theory a crock of shit?” she whispered. I scanned my immediate surroundings to see if anyone else was listening in on us. They all seemed preoccupied with others. There was lots of slow nodding and hugging going on.

  “Yes,” I said. It felt like I’d just confessed a sin.

  She asked if I wanted to go somewhere for a real snack and a real talk. I said, “Sure,” and we walked to a coffee shop down the street that displayed carrot cake muffins in the window.

  Even though we’d left the meeting, we still whispered our confessions across the little round bistro table, clutching steaming mugs in our hands. I told her how overwhelming it was that Parkinson’s wasn’t terminal. I asked her if it made me an awful person that I wished it was, that I wanted nothing more than an end point.

  She scoffed. “Honey, sometimes I hope my mom will catch a flu that turns into pneumonia.”

  We both knew that was how most people with advanced Parkinson’s end up dying—that or infected bedsores or a
bad fall that leads to necessary surgery that the body just can’t handle. I wasn’t at all shocked by her revelation. I’d had the same thought drift into my mind when all the defenses of propriety were down. I was relieved, and she was relieved that I was relieved. We were fast friends—by necessity, really. We had no one else.

  “You know what bugs me more than anything?” Nancy asked.

  “Hmm?” I said, taking an exploratory nibble of my muffin, confirming it was edible. The girl at the counter had given it to me for free because she thought it might be stale. She couldn’t remember when they were made. She looked high.

  “When people say that God only gives us what we can handle.”

  “Or when they say we learn from things like this.”

  “All I’ve learned is that God must not know me at all,” she said.

  I realized why I liked Nancy. She threw one hell of a pity party and I was happy to attend. After all, Drew wouldn’t let me throw my own.

  “Thing is, you’re way too young for all this shit,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “Though I don’t think anyone is ever at an age to deal with this.”

  “True. But you’re supposed to be planning your own life, not helping someone else survive the end of theirs.”

  It felt good to hear the thoughts in my head verbalized, validated.

  “Drew always says, ‘These are just the cards we were dealt,’” I said. “If he uses that line one more time…”

  She took a long sip of her coffee. I asked how she could sleep after drinking a mug of coffee late at night. She said, “I don’t sleep anyway. May as well have the energy to make the sleepless hours productive.”

  “Sometimes I think about what we’d be doing if we didn’t have to deal with his mom,” I said.

  “And what would that be?”

  I stared at the muffin, picked out the raisins, and put them on my plate. It wasn’t that I disliked raisins; I just wanted some kind of project to distract from my current thought process.

  “We’d probably have a baby by now,” I said.

  A baby—the ultimate project to distract myself. I’d contemplated this hypothetical child a lot, mourned it as if I’d miscarried. This baby was a girl, in my head. Her name was Lila. Or Claire—sweet and simple Claire. Or maybe Winnie. I’d always loved Winnie in The Wonder Years.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-eight in a few weeks,” I said.

  She said, simply, “Guess it’s about that time.”

  It was that time. I’d always thought I wanted two kids, at least. I was an only child and wouldn’t wish that loneliness on anyone. I’d done the math—even if I got pregnant that night, I’d have my first baby just a couple months before turning twenty-nine. After a year of adjustment—physically and emotionally—we would try for a second. I’d have that baby when I was thirty. That seemed old to me. I’d envisioned myself as a younger mom. When my own mother was thirty, I was already eight.

  “It doesn’t even seem in the realm of possibility now—having a child,” I said. “I mean, Drew’s mom could go on like this for years.”

  Nancy nodded. She understood. Like me, she’d read the online message boards with frustrated posts from people who had been doing their caretaking for a decade or more.

  “She’s your child,” she said, making no attempts to spare me the harshness of this reality. “You make her food, wipe her ass, put her to bed.”

  “For the record, I don’t wipe her ass,” I said. “Drew does. He knows better than to ask me to do that.”

  “At least he’ll be good at changing diapers when that time comes.”

  “If,” I said, “if that time comes.”

  I ate my discarded raisins, one at a time. It was just before ten o’clock. The high girl was starting to wipe down the counters.

  “Do you have kids?” I asked Nancy.

  I felt like I knew her so well already, and yet not at all.

  “Nope,” she said. “I have a slew of nieces and nephews, though.”

  “Drew and I don’t have any sisters or brothers, so I won’t even have those.”

  I was crashing her pity party, making it my own.

  “I was married once,” she said. She leaned back in her chair, so far that the front legs came off the floor. I remember when kids used to do that in school and the teachers would scold them, say, “One day you’ll fall on your head, then you’ll see.”

  “I think I was too selfish for the whole institution,” she said. She pulled at a huge turquoise ring on her left middle finger. She wore rings on all her fingers, as if compensating for what society deemed the all-important ring.

  “Selfish?” I asked, interested.

  “I wasn’t good at it—caring for someone else, being a team with someone. I just wanted to do my own thing, live life my way,” she said. “I wanted to take trips when and where I wanted. I wanted to have a bowl of cereal for dinner some nights. I wanted to sleep without someone kicking me or snoring. I know, it’s crazy.”

  “It’s not crazy,” I said.

  “I guess the universe is teaching me a lesson by giving me my completely debilitated mother to care for round-the-clock. So much for selfishness.”

  “How old were you? When you got divorced?”

  “Just about your age. Got married when I was twenty-four because it was what I was supposed to do. Gave it a try—probably not my best try, but a try.”

  “Any regrets?”

  She put a chunk of muffin in her mouth and, while chewing, said, “Nope.”

  With that, she looked at her watch and said she had to get home. She had a neighbor watching over her mother and was already going to be late. We left the coffee shop and she asked where I’d parked. I told her that I didn’t come in a car, that I had run, and she looked at me like I was stark-raving mad.

  “I’m giving you a ride home,” she said. There didn’t seem to be a way to object to this.

  She pulled up in front of my apartment building, reached over across the center console, and gave my hand a squeeze.

  “Will I see you next week?” I asked, as nervous as a girl being dropped off after a first date.

  “Unless I kill my mother first and go to prison,” she said.

  “You mean go to a different kind of prison,” I said.

  She pointed a you-got-it index finger at me and winked.

  “Know what? How about you and me do our own meeting?” she said. “At the coffee shop? Same time?”

  “I’d love that,” I said.

  She reached down by her feet for a balled-up piece of paper, a windshield flyer advertising dry cleaning. She smoothed it out, wrote down her number, and gave it to me.

  “Hang in there, kiddo,” she said, then drove away.

  * * *

  Drew’s mom was still awake when I walked into the apartment. She was sitting up straight against the back of the couch, two pillows stacked on each side of her so she wouldn’t tip over. The TV was on, its glow highlighting her catatonic stare.

  “Hi,” I said. It hadn’t become any less awkward to communicate—or attempt to communicate—with her in the months we’d shared a home. She couldn’t manage to reciprocate my greetings and I couldn’t manage not to take it personally.

  Drew walked in from the bedroom, a glass of water in his hand.

  “You’re home late,” he said, taking the water to his mom, tipping it into her mouth slowly. It had become more difficult for her to clutch a glass. We switched to plastic cups, but then decided it was time to just spare her the embarrassment of spilling.

  “Yeah,” I said. It hadn’t become any less awkward to communicate with Drew, either. He set the glass on the end table and came to me, put his arms around my waist, kissed my neck. I never knew how to feel when he did this, when he tried to act as if everything were normal, as if his mom weren’t right there watching his desperate attempts to win my affections.

  I pushed him away gently. “I’m pretty tired,” I s
aid.

  I gave his mom my good-night wave and escaped to the bedroom. I heard Drew wish his mom sweet dreams. He used a booming voice with her, as if he assumed she couldn’t hear, just because she couldn’t speak.

  “You okay?” he asked, closing the bedroom door behind him.

  “Long day,” I said. There was no point in sharing my unhappiness with him. He would just say there was nothing he could do about it and we would be left standing there, at an impasse neither of us knew how to circumvent.

  “She seemed stronger today,” he said. “She was lying down on the couch and I saw her push herself up to a seated position.”

  Nancy was right—Drew’s mom was our baby. We cheered for even the smallest physical achievements.

  “That’s good,” I said, less than halfheartedly. Quarter-heartedly.

  “Her voice seemed to have a little more oomph today, too.”

  I didn’t know if Drew was in enough denial to really think she was going to get better, or if he just wanted me to think that.

  I went to our bathroom across the hall. He followed me, stood behind me as I washed my face, brushed my teeth.

  “I can give you a massage,” he said.

  I didn’t want a massage, though. I didn’t want any of these attempts to make it better, to make it something it wasn’t.

  I spit into the sink. “Maybe tomorrow. I just want to go to sleep.”

  “You sure you’re okay?” he asked, following me to the bed.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. He didn’t probe more. He knew that was dangerous.

  I gave him a kiss on the cheek, the kind grandmothers give their grown children. Then he got into bed on his side, and stayed there. Neither of us would sleep well, anticipating his mom calling out to him around two o’clock in the morning, needing to use the bathroom. If I wasn’t awakened by Drew getting out of bed, I was awakened by the light flashing on and the bathroom fan whirring away.