By the time I got there, the night air had sobered me up a bit. My mother wouldn’t be home for an hour; she’d told me she’d be back at nine-thirty. That way Mrs. Gruder would have enough time to get her ready for bed and not have to stay late. I’d be able to speak a few words to Mrs. Gruder and go to bed—she wouldn’t suspect a thing. She was dense that way.
My mother, however, was not dense that way. And she was home. As soon as I walked in the door I heard, “Diana?”
I drew in a breath and willed myself to be normal, then went into the dining room, where I leaned against the wall. “Hi,” I said. Well done. Just a normal hi.
“Where have you been?” she asked, and I saw that I had not fooled her at all.
Mrs. Gruder was straightening bottles of pills on the nightstand, and I saw my mother’s bare shoulders rising above the clean sheet laid over her—she slept nude to avoid the problems caused by wrinkled pajamas pressing into her skin. The large sheepskin she rested against at night had been placed behind her back; two pillows were under her knees; and a smaller pillow she used at her feet to keep them from flopping down was also in place. Obviously, my mother had been home for a while. When Mrs. Gruder heard the tone of my mother’s voice as she spoke to me, she started for the kitchen. “I’ll just finish up a few things out there,” she said.
“Why don’t you go home, Eleanor?” my mother said, but she wasn’t looking at Mrs. Gruder at all. Her eyes had not left me. “Go ahead and call Otto.”
“…All right, then.” Mrs. Gruder went to the phone and dialed. Her number had a lot of zeros; I thought she’d never finish. “Come and get me now; I’ll wait on the porch,” I heard her tell Otto. She hung up the phone, and I heard the rustling sounds of her gathering up her things. Then, “Good night,” she called out doubtfully, and my mother called back good night, again without taking her eyes from me.
After we heard the click of the front door, my mother said, “Come here, Diana.”
I hesitated. “What. I’m here.”
“I said, come here.”
I stepped a bit closer to her bedside. She was still sitting up high; Mrs. Gruder had not yet lowered her to the forty-five-degree angle at which she slept. “Here!” she said angrily, and I moved to sit beside her.
She looked closely into my face for a long while, saying nothing. Then, “Light me a cigarette,” she said, and I did, then held it up for her to puff on. All the while she smoked, she said nothing. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. “What?!” I said.
She drew in a last puff, exhaled over my head. “Finished.”
I ground out the butt in the ashtray for what was perhaps too long a time, then turned back to her. “Do you want me to lower you down now? Do you want to sleep?”
“No.” She worked at dislodging a piece of tobacco from her tongue. I picked it off and flicked it away.
“All gone,” I said cheerfully.
“Where were you? And what did you drink?”
“What do you mean?”
“Diana.”
I looked down. “I was at Suralee’s. And she…just…made some drinks. Just for fun.”
“What drinks?”
“Coke with a little rum, just a little.” I looked up at her. “But did you have fun? On your date?”
My mother readjusted her head on her pillow. “No. I did not have fun. I was ridiculed and stared at. And then I was thrown out.”
“Why?” I felt dangerously close to tears, but oddly, my sorrow was for me.
“It seems the proprietor had no idea about the extent of my disability. At first he didn’t say much, just looked at me, you know that look?”
I made a pulled-in kind of face and my mother nodded. “Exactly,” she said, with grim pleasure.
“And then sometimes they do like this,” I said, and made a frankly horrified face, which made my mother smile. Maybe we were done with my sins and could move on to her humiliations.
“I’ll tell you what happened next, Diana. Though I had my back to the rest of the room, as Brooks had promised, it seemed I was upsetting the other diners. They didn’t like the noise of my respirator. They didn’t like it that I had to be fed. One man came up to me on his way out. He said, ‘What can you have been thinking, to come out to a public restaurant this way?’”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“At first, nothing,” my mother said. “My mouth was full. I kept chewing and I just looked at him. ‘Well?’ he said, and then he said it again, louder, so I spit my food out at him. And then I said, ‘Sorry, my mouth was full. Now we can have a conversation.’”
I saw the scene, some scowling man standing before my mother while his indignant wife waited by the door, holding tightly on to her purse, her jaw dropping after my mother spit food at her husband.
“What did Brooks and Holt do?” I asked, giggling in a kind of loose way that let me know I was still not quite myself. I cleared my throat, overcorrected my posture.
“They escorted me out,” my mother said. “Because right after that I was told to leave. And never to come back. But I will go back.”
“Why?” I said. “Why would you ever want to go back there?”
Her respirator was on inspiration, but I could see the answer burning in her eyes. Then she said, “You know, it’s so funny. What keeps any of those people in that dining room from being like me is just a virus, a thing in my body over which I had no control. Why did I get it and not them? Fate. Circumstance. Luck. But I have a place on the earth, just as they do. I have rights.
“When I was in the lung, I had people tell me every day that I had to get used to the fact that I could never have a normal life. Every day, they told me that I would have to come to terms with all I could no longer do.” She shook her head, remembering. “But I decided to concentrate on what I could do. When the shrink talked about how the disease would affect my personality, I talked about how my personality would affect the disease. I didn’t understand why nobody…I kept thinking, ‘I am me! I am still me!’” Her voice began to shake, and she closed her eyes, then opened them. “Wipe my tears away and give me a chocolate,” she said.
I put a tissue to her eyes and then lifted the box up so she could see in. “Which one?” I asked.
She surveyed the candies carefully.
“The chocolate-covered cherry?” I asked.
“The Messenger Boy,” she said, and I gave it to her with regret. I put the box back down, hoping she would say, around her mouthful of chocolate, “You take one, too.” But she did not. She chewed slowly, swallowed, and then, in a more deliberate tone, she began speaking again.
“I promised myself that I would raise you, though everyone advised me against it. I promised myself I would pay attention to the world and keep on learning, maybe go back to school someday, though I knew how hard it would be. I thought I might even get married again. Everyone, everyone, said I shouldn’t get my hopes up for that kind of relationship. I’ve given up on that, but I learned tonight that I can at least go out. I can leave the house. It’s scary, but I can do it. And maybe someday I will go back to school. I know I’ll be looked at. I know it’ll bother people to see me. I know most people would say I should stay home, where it’s easier for me and my caretakers. But what most people think isn’t always the right thing.”
I sat still, hardly breathing. I had never heard my mother talk so much about this all at once. Everywhere around me, it seemed, people were saying odd, charged things.
“All your life, Diana, you’re going to run into situations where you have to decide whether or not to take a stand. Sometimes it just isn’t worth it. But other times it is. Not only is it worth it, it’s vital. It makes you the person that you are. You have to honor what you know is true, or bit by bit, you die inside.” She smiled. “So. Now let’s talk about your evening.”
Ah. “That’s pretty much all,” I said. “What I told you. It was just for fun, the rum. It was just a little. I didn’t even like it, really. It
made me feel sick. I won’t do it again, I didn’t even like it. So…” I leaned over to look at her clock and had to stop myself from falling on my face. “I think I’ll go to bed.”
“Oh, I think not,” my mother said.
“Why not? I’m tired.”
“Are you.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m not quite through talking to you. Let’s talk some more. Who else was at Suralee’s?”
How did she know these things? I considered lying, but she’d been all right about the rum. Maybe she just wanted to continue our mother-daughter talk—she was very talky tonight.
“Oh yeah, she had these two guys over.”
“And where was Noreen?”
I wanted to say, Well, you’re so smart about these things, why don’t you tell me? Instead I said, “She wasn’t there the whole time.”
“Oh?”
“No, she had a date, so she wasn’t there. The whole time.”
“Uh-huh. And who are these boys?”
I know this one. “Just friends of Suralee’s. She’s known them a long time. They’re brothers. They play baseball.”
My mother waited.
“They’re real nice.”
“So the nice boys and you and Suralee had some drinks.”
I stared into space, as if trying to remember.
“Diana.”
“Yes!”
“Anything else happen?”
I stared at my hands. The little prickly hairs of his blond crew cut, the way he smelled so good. How nice it was to be hugged. But the way he forced my mouth open when he kissed me and slung his tongue around, the way he stopped talking to me. The rocking motion of his hips against mine when we lay on the floor, so hard I thought he’d leave bruises. “What do you mean?” I said.
“I mean, did anything else happen.”
“Well, we talked. And…that’s about it.”
She said nothing, and I burst into tears.
“What happened?” she said, and in a rush, I told her. We kissed, he touched me, I threw up, Suralee got mad, I came home. That’s all. The end.
My mother nodded. Then she said, “Well. You’re growing up quickly, aren’t you?”
I shrugged.
“It’s wonderful to grow up—all these exciting adventures, all these new privileges.”
I said nothing.
“Of course, with any privilege comes responsibility, wouldn’t you say that’s true?”
“I’m really tired. Can I just go to bed now? Can we just talk about this tomorrow?”
It was as though she hadn’t heard me at all. “Now, in this case, we’re talking about sex. Huh. I would have thought you were a bit young for that. But you’ve decided otherwise. Now, you told me this young man touched you. Did you like it?”
I was deeply embarrassed. “No.”
“Is that all he did, was touch you?”
“Yes!”
“All right. Well, here’s what I can tell you, Diana. You say you didn’t like it. And maybe that’s true.”
“It is true!”
“But if you didn’t like it this time, it doesn’t mean you won’t like it next time.”
“What next time.” My foot started wiggling, and I stopped it. I was now past giddiness and into a kind of ragged irritation. I really was tired; I so much wanted to go to bed. I was still dizzy, and I could feel some nausea returning.
“Oh, there will be a next time,” she said. “And a time after that. And what you’re going to have to know is how to handle yourself when those situations arise. Now, this time maybe you just felt awkward.”
Not true. I had mostly liked it. I had felt on fire. At first, I had wanted him to never stop.
“But at some point,” my mother said, “it’s not going to feel awkward. And then you’re really going to need some willpower. Do you think you have willpower?”
“I guess so.”
“I don’t think that answer is quite good enough, Diana. Because if you get in situations like that again and you don’t have willpower, you’ll go too far. And you’ll end up in trouble. Believe me.”
I looked at her, outraged. “I’m not going to get pregnant! I would never do that.”
“Never say never,” my mother said in a singsong way. I wondered, suddenly, if my mother had been pregnant when she got married. But I didn’t want to ask, for all it would say about me.
“You’ve apparently decided that you can handle the pleasure of sex,” my mother said. “I want to make sure you can handle the responsibility. So here’s what I want you to do. I know you’re really tired. I know you want to go to bed. What I want you to do is stay up for a few hours.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you need to understand that sometimes your body is going to be asking you so hard for something and you’re going to have to know how to not give in to it. This will give you an idea.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll stay up for a few hours.”
“And I’ll stay up with you. You just stay there.” She nodded. “You stay right there. But first get me a fresh drink of water. You might want one yourself. This is going to take awhile, and it’s going to be hard.”
And it was. Many times I went to the kitchen to splash cold water on my face so that I could wake up a little. A few times I told her I got it, I understood, could I just go to bed now. Each time she said no. Once, I took aspirin for the aches in my body. Nothing felt comfortable—not the floor, not the chair beside her bed.
We talked sometimes. The lights were out; I could see only the dim outline of my mother, and this, combined with the spaciness of extreme fatigue, made for a kind of freedom of inquiry. Once I asked her why, when she was in the iron lung, everyone was so pessimistic about what her life would be when she was discharged.
“They didn’t want me to be disappointed,” she said. “They were trying to be realistic. There was one crazy nurse there who made us all feel better, though. She looked at people who had polio as a privileged group, like a secret society. She said we had superior nervous systems, much more organized than most and therefore more susceptible to disease. She said such highly developed systems indicated great abilities or talents.” She laughed. “Not that we could do anything with it. But for many, it was nice to believe.”
“Did you believe it?” I asked.
She hesitated, then said, “Yes. Sometimes I did.”
At another point, I asked her, “What’s the hardest thing?”
“About what?” she asked.
“About…being you. The way you are now, I mean.”
A long pause, and then she said, “When I went out tonight, we passed a rosebush, and there were petals on the ground beneath it. I wanted them. I used to sprinkle them places—in my bathwater, into little bowls around the house. I was thinking of how I’d like to have a bowl full of rose petals beside me at night, but I couldn’t ask Brooks to stop and get some for me.”
“Why? Was it too hard to talk?” She had a lot of difficulty talking when she was breathing on her own.
“No. Because it would have been too much to ask. You get a sense about what you can and cannot ask for. Brooks was already doing so much. He was nervous. He was gripping the wheel, and he had this little band of perspiration above his lip. He was just staring so hard at the road! I think Peacie scared the hell out of him.
“But anyway, it’s…You know, if someone turns the television on for you, you can’t ask them to flip through the channels during the commercials. If someone has just rearranged your limbs for you, you have to wait awhile before you ask them to do it again. That’s what’s hard. Those little aggravations. Peacie dusts and the lampshade is askew, but I can’t be after her to straighten it.”
“I don’t see why you couldn’t ask for that.”
“Oh, Diana. If you ask for everything you want, you’d be asking for things all day. Think, sometime, about the million little freewill things you do. And then think about having to ask someone to do e
very one of them for you. You’ll see what I mean.”
I sat still, imagining variations in my day brought about by my own whimsy. Sleeping late. Spreading a thick layer of peanut butter on my sandwich, because I was in the mood for more than usual. Stopping at the window at the bottom of the steps to watch the robin that landed on our lawn. Removing a barrette that was beginning to hurt my head. Going off somewhere to be alone.
“It’s awful, isn’t it,” I said, quietly.
“It’s what it is,” my mother said. “And believe it or not, it has its positive side. It teaches you to be content with less. Otherwise, you’d go crazy.”
I shuddered—a spasm of aggravation on her behalf. “What do you think you got it from? Do you really think it was from a water glass?”
“I do. I’ll never know, of course.” She looked at her bedside clock. One A.M. “All right; you can go to bed now.”
“I don’t want to yet.”
She smiled. “Go to bed.”
“I will, but…can we just talk some more?” There was something about this middle-of-the-night talking, an openness in and access to my mother I’d not enjoyed before.
“I just want to ask you something,” I said. “Did you ever think…Did you ever wonder if you caused it, somehow?”
As soon as I spoke the words, I regretted them. But it was something I’d always wondered about.
“There was a six-year-old boy in a lung,” she said. “I used to hear him talking to his mother. He used to say he was sorry, over and over, for playing with a dog he’d been told not to pet. It didn’t matter how many times his mother told him he didn’t catch polio that way; he believed he had.”
“What about you?”
“I knew it was a virus. I knew it was. But sometimes I’d think…I’d wonder if it was punishment for being so wild.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Being wild?”
“Oh, it was just crazy thinking. I did that sometimes, I guess everybody did. I wanted to have something to blame it on. But it was just a virus that attacked the motor-nerve cells of my spinal column. There was no reason. It was a long time ago. I need another drink of water, Diana.”