French Kiss

Frédéric’s chemo and radiation were going well. I told him in August I was almost certain I’d have to postpone my September trip until we could stabilize my mom again, perhaps a month until I knew she was okay.

“Don’t worry about me,” Frédéric said. “This will give me another month to be in good condition for your visit. Tell your mom I think of her and am waiting fondly for the day I finally meet her. Do you think you will be with me for Christmas?”

“Oh, yes. I am shooting for October. My mom loved the place she stayed when she broke her hip and she told us she might like to go there to live instead of all of us caring for her at home. I think their Shrimp Scampi won her over, but we’ve been fighting, and I think she knows that, too. My brother is being a dick; I think the stress is getting to him. So, my plan is to come to you in October and stay for our Christmas.”

“Darling, in the old American movies I’ve watched, a dick is a private detective. So, I don’t quite understand.”

“Mon frère est un con,” I replied.

Frédéric laughed. “Oh, a dickhead! Now it’s clear.

Guilt choked me. The man I was pretty sure I loved was battling cancer without me and my mom was fading fast. I had to hope Frédéric would be fine, and another month wouldn’t be the end of the world. My mom would be stable and cared for and I could concentrate on Frédéric through the end of the year. I tried not to think about losing either of them.

My mom’s kidneys had failed, felled by medicine with side effects she had taken for years; the congestive heart failure slowed, the diabetes controlled, but the kidneys on their death bed. That summer, I drove her to dialysis late mornings, three days a week, and sat with her in the cold room, pulling her favorite blue blanket from her canvas bag and tucking it around her neck when she began to shiver. We read and chatted quietly as the other patients dozed or snacked, all resigned to the snaking tubes that washed the toxins from their blood. She made the best of fate, savoring forbidden food --- tomato slices, cantaloupe wedges, and chocolate with almonds --- the day before dialysis.

She was frailer and couldn’t walk at all now, exhausted dead weight after dialysis when I had to lift her back into the car and then from the car to her wheelchair when we got home. I really needed to work on my arm strength I thought, my lower back protesting, too, which it never did when I was young. My mom’s neighbor, whose husband was a retired New York City cop, often crossed the street to help us.

“I learned technique from my husband when he had to tangle with crooks, and I learned more from having kids. It’s all in the thighs, not the back,” she told me.

“Thanks so much for your kindness, for helping us,” I said, nodding toward my mom and then pointing to the recycling bin the neighbor had moved back by the garage. “I’m always afraid I’ll drop her.”

“It’s nothing. Happy to assist. Getting old happens to the best of us and we all need a little help,” she said, waving as she headed back across the street.

After dialysis, my mom always fell into a dreamless nap, stirring when it was time for dinner. I prepped the food my brother bought, but he preferred to cook it when he got home from work. “Anybody who eats basically rabbit food is not cooking for me,” he told me.

Our days stretched on like that, with me emailing Frédéric, trying to balance talk of his cancer, which he hated, and dreams for our future, which he loved. We spoke often, and I managed to draft and revise numerous contracts for Manny, tasks woven around caring for my mom, the reason, after all, why I had moved back to Saint Petersburg.

That summer, my mom busied herself redecorating her bedroom, pointing from her wheelchair, and explaining what she wanted, which was some change, since all things must, but not enough to erase the years in this intimate place she had shared with my dad. I shook my head at the beginning of her project, it seemed so immense for an 84-year-old woman. The room had an 80s vibe: gold-flocked wallpaper, a chenille bedspread, the furniture dreary mahogany left over from their early married days in the 1950s.

She ordered a white wood and ratan bed and table with a chair that might suit a guest for tea which she would drink from her wheelchair. She chose a plump chair and installed it under a high window with strong light for reading. I practiced maneuvering her into it, hefting her weight with my thighs, which worked, thanks to her neighbor’s instructions. My brothers and I painted the walls peach and tossed peach and sky-blue pillows on her bed and plump chair. She kept the mahogany highboy with its curved front and engine turned pulls, where she had stored keepsakes like my dad’s war mementoes from the day they were married; his Purple Heart and discharge papers, a faded khaki Army cap, and more red, white, and blue ribbons attached to gold-colored medals sitting on top of his death certificate.

Her 1940s alligator pumps and handbag, the ones I had delighted in wearing when I was four, were still tucked in the bottom drawer, the one that could hold the most. I found faded pictures from her childhood, which filled an album covered in swirling lavender moire. Pictures of her at six, her bobbed hair and straight bangs framing a gap-toothed grin while she sat on a sturdy pony, at ten, mouth agape on a roller coaster, at high school graduation, at college graduation, at her wedding to my dad in a white lace gown studded with crystals that glimmered like stars, she the angel among them.

Her health declined that summer, and by late September, she was hospitalized again. The dialysis was not working like it should and toxins were building in her blood, making her groggy and distant with fewer and fewer lucid moments. The professionals at St. Anthony’s managed her dialysis and tried to keep her from further decline, but she was fed from a tube and only allowed to chew on ice cubes or suck the hard candies Frédéric had been sending her. I visited every day, and for a while she seemed to be stable.

“Ma, your room smells like candy canes,” I said to her in early October. She stuck out her bright red tongue and handed me a crinkly cellophane bag filled with peppermint candies. “Have one, they’re good,” she said. Three bags of hard candy were piled by her plastic water pitcher the nurse kept filled with ice.

The accompanying note was under her pillow, and I knew these were from Frédéric, who hadn’t wavered sending them, despite his cancer battle. “This boy seems very nice,” she said, acknowledging the candy and note were from Frédéric.

“You’ll meet him, Ma. As soon as he’s finished with his cancer treatment, he wants to come meet you.

She smiled. “We’ll see if I last that long. Do you love him?”

“Yes, Ma, and you have to last that long. I can’t just be an orphan looking for a man to marry and take care of me. Mothers are supposed to take care of their kids.”

She rolled her eyes. “Marry? Is it that serious?”

“Maybe.”

“Your dad would have wanted you to settle down. I guess I know you can take care of yourself, but the right husband is important, and you haven’t done so well in that department.”

“I see where you’re going with this, Ma, but I’m okay. You just have to accept what I’m telling you. I’m pretty sure I love Frédéric, and I hope to build a future with him, and I expect you to be part of it. Don’t you want to visit Paris again?” She had been several times, although not in fifteen years with her college roommate.

“No, it’s dirty and the pigeons crap everywhere. I am asking because I won’t be here much longer. I’m trying to make sure you will be okay without me.”

“No, I will never be okay without you. You have to hold onto hope. The doctors are trying to figure out how to fix your dialysis. You have to help fight.”

“I have been. But there comes a time when you just get tired. When it’s too hard to fight and you just want to lie back and go to sleep. You just get tired of it all.”

I knew in that moment she was warning me. That she could feel the end coming like a freight train that couldn’t screech to a stop in time, and she was not going to fight the inevitable crash. My dad had died suddenly, leaving us numb and confused, but watching her long decline had been a daily razor cut to the heart.

We like to believe the elderly just fade away peacefully and float to a better place. We try not to think of their shuffling steps and sagging skin because they remind us of our own aging selves, barreling to the end, too, weaker and spent, weary and ready. I just didn’t believe anybody was ever ready.

“Well, Ma, we should have a pact, because now you’re talking about dying, and you’re scaring me and making me sad,” I said. “Just keep fighting. And maybe, when it’s your time, you could come back and tell me where you are and what’s going on.” I wasn’t being flip. I was floundering at the enormity of death.

She laughed, a throaty sound signaling she was amused, and her mouth was dry. “All right, I’ll come back. Maybe for a talk or maybe to haunt you if you don’t straighten out and find a good husband. My prerogative as you mother. I’ll think about fighting a little longer.”

“So, don’t think about anything serious now. C’mon, what would you like, more than anything in the world, right now; something I can get you?”

“Well, you can’t get me your dad, so ice cream! I would love some Ben and Jerry’s vanilla ice cream.”

“Done! I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

***

I handed my mom the plastic spoon I had snatched in the Publix deli, hoping her Ben and Jerry’s was soft enough to scoop. I helped her dig into the carton and spoon the silky ice cream flecked with vanilla bean into her quivering mouth. She lay back and closed her eyes, her tongue licking it from her upper palate, roomy without her dentures.

“That’s heaven. Heaven,” she said.

She asked for one more spoonful, then raised her hand to signal she was finished. She lay back again, closing her eyes and rolling on her side, silent while I polished off my pint of Cherry Garcia.

A nurse in bright blue scrubs came in to check the blinking monitors and bags of fluid hung from poles that dribbled into my mom’s arm. She picked up the abandoned vanilla ice cream. “I’ll put this in the floor refrigerator for later,” she said.

The late afternoon sun melted through the blinds, falling across my mom’s hospital bed like bars across a jail cell. I leaned in to say goodbye; my brother was due soon for his appointed vigil. My sister and baby brother had visited the day before. I took my mom’s hand and squeezed it. I thought she squeezed mine back, but the sensation was so weak, I could have been imagining it. I kissed her on the cheek, her paper-thin skin cool and desert dry.

“Would you like me to rub cream on your face?” I asked the woman who had insisted since I was ten that good face and body creams were essential to every woman’s beauty regimen.

“No,” she sighed, eyes still closed, lying perfectly still.

“I’ll come again tomorrow, Ma. I love you,”

“Today. Today was good. I love you, too.” She drifted peacefully into sleep, a faint smile on her face, a touch of ice cream dried in the corners of her mouth.

I stood to go, thinking as I looked at the wisp of a woman who was my mom how fast life flies. I imagined her from her photos as a young girl careening on the roller coaster at Cedar Point, her wavy black hair flying straight behind her like the tail of her Shetland pony. I saw her as a college girl in tap shorts and a halter top, flying in her college beau’s ‘41 Chrysler Thunderbolt, the hairpins holding her Betty Grable hairdo loosening one by one and blowing down the gravel road; saw her at a playground surrounded by her kids while my dad launched her to the heavens on a swing, her head back, laughing, looking a little like Liz Taylor; saw her flying over the Sunshine Skyway, the teacher-mom we called Leadfoot, late for her classes the day the bridge collapsed killing everyone moving slower than she; saw her kicking a football and flying down Clearwater Beach for the arbitrary end zone, chased by her married kids and grandkids; saw her flying down the driveway in her wheelchair, the hot breeze ruffling her thin, gray hair, shrunken in old age but still moving, still moving. And that’s how fast life flies, I thought.

She died in her sleep that night. We buried her in a grassy, shaded spot at Bay Pines Veterans’ Cemetery, close enough to hold my dad’s hand, if the universe allows such things.