Winter Vacation

Do you know what I was thinking about last night?  I was thinking about those times when you’re a kid when your parents take you to Florida or the Outer Banks or a trip to Canada to go fishing.  They wake you up in the middle of the night to get ready.  Did that ever happen to you? 

I would have a difficult time falling asleep initially because of all the anticipation, but the next thing you know its five in the morning and mom is harshly whispering in the darkness of my room,  “Get up, it’s time to get going.”  She would even flip the light on.  She had no mercy.  I had one of those hard, domineering mothers you hear about when discussing the parents of gays.

She was probably hung over.  My mom was an evening drinker. After a day of concentrated housework in which things were cleaned with discipline and regiment, she would settle into a five o’clock cocktail while monitoring something simmering on the stove.

By dinnertime, she was primed to be more lighthearted, but she could turn quickly if something set her off.  Usually it was something on the news:

“How about that!  Raped that little girl?  What do you boys think they should do with a guy like that?  I’ll tell you what I would do.  I would take that guy out into the middle of the woods and I would make him take that thing of his out and I would cut it off and put it in his mouth.  That’s what I would do.”

It was something to think about while chewing your pot roast.

My father died when my brother and I were young, a car accident, and my mother took over his business, a roadside bar and grill.  It was called the Duncanvilla and under my mother’s hard watch, it became very successful.  Men from all around used to come in for her famous meatball sandwiches and enjoyed the bullying, no-nonsense lip she gave them.  She could be coy when needed and at other times, cold and tough.  There were very few she couldn’t handle and when one came along that she couldn’t she coaxed the other regulars to pressure him to leave.  Her business partner was in the mob; she looked down the barrel of a revolver during one robbery; and one of her barmaids, as she called her staff of all-women bartenders, was rumored to have murdered her first husband.

My twin brother and I each had a different relationship with her.  My brother was a hot shot when we were in school, a lady’s man, cocky and smart.  He was Born To Be Wild as they say and that kind of behavior in my mother’s eyes was like a gauntlet thrown down.  She came at him with both barrels blazing and Jesus did they fight.  Mine was a more smoldering relationship.  Conflicted about my sexuality, I was moody and distant which could also set my mother off, especially on days when she was a little rough around the edges after a night of drinking.

Years and years later, long after I had come out to her and my family, long after my brother married (to an alcoholic btw), my mother got sick with cancer and I left my job in NYC to return to Pa and take care of her.  It was an incredibly fulfilling experience.   We rarely fought.  Actually, we became oddball friends.  Good friends.  We talked, ate together, drove around in the car.  We didn’t spend that much time together, but the time we had was truly enjoyable.  It wasn’t till the last two months of her life, 60 long cruel days, that the experience became almost unbearable.  She was so sick she couldn’t eat, couldn’t talk.  She just lied in her bed and wasted away but she would not die.  She seemed to face death with the same angry stare, the same icy poker face that she must have given that man with the revolver.  My mother didn’t greet oncoming death with contrition; she looked it in the face and without blinking seemed to say, “Yeah?  What about it?”

The night before she died, I gave her more morphine than I should have.  It wasn’t my idea; it was the hospice nurse’s.  Before the last injection, I told my mother that I thought she was beautiful and called her my beautiful angel.  She sighed…a kind of huff that was riddled with fatigue and perhaps contempt.  I left the room with her staring angrily at the space above her.  Silent and armed to the end.

I went to bed unsure if she would make it.  About 3am I was awakened by a telephone call.  I answered and a seductive, male voice asked me if Angel was there.  Confused a bit, I stuttered so the voice repeated, “Is Angel there?”  We live in a very white, blue-collar town; there are no women or men called Angel where I live.  Toughening up, I queried, “Who is this?”  And in the same seductive tones, the voice repeated, “Is Angel there?”  Then the caller hung up.

The next morning, I woke to find my mother dead.  I recalled our conversation during which time I called her my Angel and I remembered the eerie late night phone call.  I *69ed the number and it came up blocked.  The man never called again and I never found out who it was.

It was the height of February cold and snow when she died, but I had been preparing for it for weeks by buying forced, spring-bulbs to decorate her room and bringing in vases of forsythia and ornamental quince to bloom.  It had all timed out perfectly and that day, when I waked her in her room, mourners sat with her in a space filled with spring scent and blossoms.   By 10pm the funeral director came.  It was heart wrenching to let go of this woman after guarding her for so long.  In her room, I made brief preparations.  I tore out all of the hateful tubing, catheters and bandages, changed her clothes and brushed her hair.  In the inside pocket of her nightgown I placed a picture of my brother, her, the dog and me. It was a shot of us crouching before a rhododendron bush, years earlier when that bush was much shorter and so little experience had passed.  Those were the days when the trip to Florida was just around the corner.  A night of anticipation and then a harsh whisper in the middle of the night.  “You boys get up.  It’s time to go.”