November 12 - This is what can happen when you grow old

It is after midnight and I am tired and I am eating reheated, prepackaged mashed potatoes because that is all I can find quickly in the fridge that does not require preparation or lifting or effort on my part, and effort is something I have little of these days. I am reading while I eat, which is my habit, and a whole splotch of the mashed potatoes, a big white jism of it, lands on the page when I swing the fork across too abruptly, and I think to myself: this is what it feels like to be a man and to come. To watch your product artistically spurt outwards. For a moment I am satisfied with my creation, but then I remember that it is just mashed potato splattered across my page and I lick it up without pausing to think that this makes me look ridiculous because the only other being in the room at the moment is the dog and the dog is sleeping with her head in her paws.

John is asleep in the bedroom and I am afraid to go in. Not because I might have to change the bedpan, or because he will be having one of his night sweats again and I will have to cradle him against my breast like I did with our two children, who are now grown, when they were young, but because I suddenly feel tired. It is eight years now since John’s accident left him with two stumps that end just above where knee caps used to be, and left the once-powerful thing between his legs limp and useless. “I’m useless,” John wailed in the first few years, staring at his flaccid penis in the bathroom mirror, and I would rush to him from across the room and throw my arms about his shoulders and whisper fiercely into his ear, “You’re not, you’re not, you’re not,” over and over like a mantra. After a while, John stopped saying it. I wondered if he still thought it, had just grown tired of voicing it.

But I was used to John, now, used to being his caretaker instead of his wife, had ceased staring at my red-rimmed eyes after another sleepless night and reminding my reflection, “I did not sign up for this!”; that it was something altogether different I pictured when I waltzed down a flower strewn aisle in my parents’ backyard twenty-two years ago. John had stood tall and proud in a rented tux by the altar made out of an old, carved tree; he could still stand then – this was years before the accident. He would father two daughters and take me ballroom dancing and play pick-up soccer with his friends on weekends in the park for many more years before the motorcycle spit him out and landed on top of him and I heard the phone ring while I was playing with Greta and Mabel in the backyard and I knew before I even picked up the phone that someone was calling to tell me that something was very wrong. But I was used to the way things were now, the role to which I had been relegated, so why was I tired?

The phone. Yes, I was tired because of the phone.

Brring brring it had insisted earlier today. Somehow it was one of those phone calls where I knew before I even picked up, like a horror film with the slasher on the other end of the line. I had been cutting up an orange for John the way he liked – neat slices arranged on a plate – and sucked off the juice as I picked up.

“Hello?” sounded ominous.

And it is not every day that a mother calls a daughter and needs daughter to play mother. It is not every day Mom chokes out the words about the surgery she is having for the lump they found in her breast. “Stage three,” she laughs as though the number three is a great joke like the Three Stooges or the Three Blind Mice. Three wishes, the genie gives.

“Stage three!” she cackles.

“Oh, Mom.”

“You can be there?” she asks, and she sounds young, young like when I was the daughter and she was the mother and I was scared to go to my first day of Kindergarten and tried to glue my hand to hers with Elmer’s, and I want this strange role reversal to go back to the way it used to be.

“Yes, I can be there.” Because Brenda obviously won’t be. Brenda is the older sister so shouldn’t she be relegated to parent, I think with a pout in my brain roughly the size of my frontal cortex, but Mom has called me because she knows Brenda won’t be there. Brenda is in the throes of a divorce – that’s how she describes it in her weekly phone call, the throes of a divorce as though it is a passionate, orgasmic thing, her with her ankles over her head or her back arched, and she just grins and bears it while her husband (almost ex-husband) plows away at the details. And of course Brenda is infinitely too concerned with playing soccer mom to the terror that is her three young boys or too concerned with milking her (soon to be) ex-husband for every penny he is worth, to be bothered with our mother. Our mother, I want to scream at her, imbuing the word with everything it means about spurting vaginal fluids and nine months of back pain, but I know Brenda won’t come, so I just say to Mom:

“Yes, I can be there.”

That’s how it always was, when I was a kid. Janie can do it, my friends would say for the task on the playground that no one wanted to perform. Janie can do it, my family would say when delegating responsibility. Janie can do it, John would tell our daughters as they grew from pink bundles of flesh that fit into my arms to strangely gawky adolescents with his knobby knees and my thin blond hair.

“Yes, I can be there.”

“Good, good.” Mom sounds relieved. “Because, the one other thing, sweetie. If there are any decisions to be made… You know… You’d have to be the one to make them.” Decisions. She makes it sound like picking fabric swatches for the living room, or which entrée to serve at a wedding. The chicken or the fish? The cake or the pie? Cut the cord on your mother? Yes ma’am, coming right up.

So this is why I feel tired tonight, I admit. I sigh and give in and tiptoe to the bedroom door, but luckily John is still just sleeping and the bedpan is empty, so I’m off the hook for another little while. I tiptoe into the bathroom and stare at myself. I am going gray. “This is what can happen when you grow old,” I decide.