There's no greater equalizer than a hospital waiting room. From my vantage point in this lime-green chair, I can see a prostitute whose lesbian lover was pummeled outside a bar, a young Hispanic mother whose baby decided three in the morning would be a good time to stop breathing altogether, and several young kids who look more like they should be cramming for midterms than worrying if that pill their friend took from a guy at the club was going to put her in a coma for the rest of her life.
I also see my mother, sitting by herself. She doesn't want me around, probably because she doesn't want me seeing her the way she is right now. George and I got here right after the ambulance did, so many hours ago. She rode with Daddy, not letting go of him even for the short distance from the apartment to the hospital. I'd expected her to pull some Terms of Endearment maneuver, cutting through the emergency room staff like Shirley MacLaine on speed, giving orders, making threats. I expected her to demand and push and intimidate, like she always has.
But she's not Shirley MacLaine tonight. She's sitting alone in the flickering glow of the waiting room television, images of The Honeymooners reflecting off her skin as she stares, unseeing, into the distance. Like she's in shock. Like she's deflated. Like some callous deity has plucked away all the thread from her seams, leaving her stacked haphazardly in some posture of strength, as though any slight breeze could send her shattering in all different directions.
My mother. The most intimidating woman in New York.
George and I tried to get her to let us bring Dad to Mount Sinai or one of the other hospitals in Manhattan, but they both argued with us. Nobody argues like my parents, not even with Dad having what turned out to be a massive coronary. "We live where we live," they said, like they've said all my life. So we stayed in Brighton Beach, brought him to a local hospital near the old apartment in the neighborhood where we worked, where we played, where five generations of my family grew up.
We live where we live. It's been her prayer, the same prayer that kept her here all her life, even when more lucrative offers came up in other parts of the city. We live where we live, and that means her judicial district consists of an aging blue collar population, most needing more help than we can give. We live where we live, we give what we give, and everybody knows everybody.
Everybody in my family knows our history, how our great-grandfather came penniless from Scotland, how he built the house my aunt still lives in and created a family line that produced two lawyers, a university professor, an MBA, a nurse-practitioner, and a professional music arranger. And that's not including the spouses, the nieces and the nephews. We live where we live, and my father is in that operating room right now. My mother and I, on the other hand, are a thousand miles away in a room not more than a few hundred feet in diameter.
I try to imagine what she's thinking. I try to imagine what it would be like to watch your husband of forty years collapse on the kitchen floor, to watch him reach out to you, helpless. I wonder what it must be like to be so strong that a man like my dad turns to you for help.
Mama doesn't look strong right now. I think I'm supposed to be the strong one. I'm the one with all the power now, the rich husband who can afford the best medical care they'll let us give them. So why do I feel so afraid? Why do I feel like I'm five years old and Mama is crying because Grandma has died and for the first time in forever, I feel at five, Mama can't fix it.
"I talked to George," I say to her, trying to brush away the image of my mom, so young back then, although ageless and all-knowing in the eyes of the five-year-old who still lives inside of me. "He says that Dr. Eric Folse of the South Louisiana Cardiac Care Center is available and can fly out tonight. He's one of the best cardiac specialists in the country. If you give the go ahead, he can be with Daddy first thing in the morning."
She doesn't respond, and I can't tell whether she is even listening to me. Maybe she's angry because I let George make these arrangements. She hates that I married money. She feels that I've sold out my integrity, that I've forgotten my roots.
I hate that she pushed him so hard. She watched everything he ate, nagged him about exercise, pushed him for as long as I remember. I think back in horror on the times I took him out for lunch and let him eat whatever he wanted, from street-corner hot dogs to pizza and garlic bread.
Did I really poison my dad to spite my mom?
I push the thought away. Hypertension, high cholesterol, it's mostly hereditary. Both Mama and Daddy lost their fathers too young, both to heart attacks. I'll probably lose both of them that way too. One hot dog a month is not going to send me straight to hell for patricide.
"When we were protesting the war…" Her voice was low and gruff, like she couldn't quite force the sound completely from her lungs. She wasn't looking at me. She was staring off at the wall of the waiting room, her dark eyes barely focused. I get the momentary memory of pictures I've seen, Mama and Aunt Maggie, little girls in the early fifties, hair braided and hands joined at their hips as they pose for the camera, identical except for the eyes. Mama was never a child, not with eyes like that. "When we were protesting the war, our teachers would talk to us about the movement. It wasn't like today, with professional protestors coming in to discuss media coverage, you know. It was just us, just the students and some of the braver teachers. I remember this one professor, Dr. Janoweth. He told us that what would break the movement wasn't cops or guns or tear gas. He said that what would inevitably destroy the movement was price."
"Price?" I'd heard Mama and Daddy talk about the Sixties all my life, like some holy medieval legend where all men and women were brighter, nobler, more focused than today's generation.
"Everyone has a price, he told us. One thing, or many things, that just cost too much. To protect that one thing, a person of conviction will sell out every principal, every belief, every good intention." She turned to face me, and I saw how hollow those eyes were, red-rimmed and sunken into her face. I saw the war being raged behind them, more fierce and deadly than anything Ho Chi Minh had to offer. "He's my price."
In all my life, I'd never heard a voice like that come out of my mother's lips. A voice so fragile, so wounded, so terrified that it made me want to crawl back into the womb, back to safety and warmth and ignorance. "Mama," I started.
"Have George send for the doctor. Have him use the company jet; hell, I don't care if he drags the Concorde out of moth balls if it helps your father." And she stared at me with those dark death-eyes, those fierce windows to that inner place where she was destroying everything she held dear in order to save her husband. "I'll dance naked in Time Square, singing the praises of Exxon and Mickey Mouse if it gives me another ten years with him." And then she began to cry, quietly, into her hands.
And my mother, who struck the fear of god into hardened criminals on a daily basis, let me rock her, let me comfort her. And I remembered the pictures, the only pictures I ever saw where Mama looked like a child, or at least a young person.
Pictures of Mama and Daddy on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, huddled together against an autumn chill. They couldn't have been more than their early twenties. He was so handsome and full of life, and she looked soft and in love. Staring at him, her hair long and loose around her shoulder. She never quite lost that angular intensity, but in those snapshots, she seemed to relax a bit. She was laughing in one of them, a real laugh, like she rarely did now.
Daddy is very funny; not even Mama can stay mad at him forever. He told me once that he fell in love with her because she was the only woman ever to turn him down for a date. She was the first woman he ever had to work for, and the only person who never settled for less than his best. I was mad at her at the time, defensive of his apparent abuse at her hand.
I knew Daddy loved Mama, even though I never understood why. I guess I figured it was because of the kind of man Daddy was…is. He sees the best in everyone. He always finds a reason to laugh.
But until today, I never really comprehended that Mama loved Daddy. Her hair is graying now, short cropped in that old lady in polyester fashion the Brighton Beach matrons seem to prefer. I brush my fingers through it slowly; it's damp and warm. She's been here for hours, and she's flushed with exhaustion. I realize that I'm still rocking her, cooing to her.
It's a rare moment in our family. I know I should call George, tell him to call Dr. Folse, but I'm not ready to give up this moment. I'm not ready to let Mama and me go back into those shells we've built around ourselves.
"He's going to be alright, Mama," I whisper into her hair. "He's stronger than both of us put together." A day ago, an hour ago, this might have been a lie. Nobody, I thought, was tougher than my mom. But I'm thinking differently now. I'm seeing through new eyes, and wondering how much of my perspective is based on the fact that I never really liked her.
Was he always the strength in our family? Was his enduring humor, his relentless optimism, what kept us going? "He's going to be alright," I repeated, and she nodded against me.
"He's strong," she said, lifting her face to look at me. For the first time in my life, her eyes were not intimidating. They were pleading, wanting to believe what I've told her. "He'll pull through."
"Yeah." I don't know where it comes from, but I kiss Mama's cheek, hot and tear-stained as it is. She kisses me back, on the forehead, her hands cupping my face gently.
"You look so much like him, baby," she says with a small smile.
I smile back. He's going to be okay, I tell myself, and hug my mom briefly. "I'll go call George," I say as I extricate myself from her embrace. I don't want to go, and she doesn't seem to want to let me go. But I'll be back soon, I tell her without saying a word.
"I'll be here." And she sits back in the chair, her back straight, eyes straight forward as she waits for news on Daddy, the perfect vision of the mother I grew up with.
The most intimidating woman in New York.
The End