Mouse Problem

            Alone in the house, I still choose to sit at my accustomed place at the kitchen table.  I cannot concentrate on Othello.  Looking up from the book, I stare over piles of bills and a crowded lazy-susan, notice how healthy the peace lilies on the window sill look, and catch my ghostly reflection in the bay window.  It’s black outside.  I’d flown into Albany airport just a few hours ago, rented a car, dropped my few belongings in the eerie house that smells like mildew and cigarettes, and headed down to the hospital where I found my mother on the fourth floor.  “Who’s that?” she asks, looking bright-eyed, as I enter the room.  “It’s Mary Jo,” I say gently, and we talk for over an hour.  She had surgery for a fractured hip just the day before, and I don’t want to tire her, but I am very happy to see her, to be near her, hopeful that this time, maybe, my presence might matter.  I saw her through surgery once before and afterward she couldn’t say enough about how wonderful my brother had been.  “Oh, were you there, too, Mary Jo?”  She had forgotten I was there, but here I am—again.  “Oh, Mary Jo, I’ve made a mess of our lives,” she worries, sick with regret at the way a fluke fall—catching her foot in a purse hanging from the back of one of the kitchen chairs—may change everything.  “We have to hope you will heal, Mom.”  Even though I have read the statistics—one in four women die within the first year from complications—I know my mother will walk again.  The doors are locked, and I am free.  I could go anywhere in the house, get into anything, but I sit still as if something is holding me hostage.  The faintest rustle startles me, and I look up to see a black streak run behind the plants.  I’m glad when the phone rings and it’s Mom’s sister.  We gossip for a while and say goodbye.  I hear the noise again, and this time the tiny black mouse looks directly at me, regarding me amicably. 

I remember that before I left Flint, my husband had remarked unkindly, “So the little mouse is going home.”  He was alluding to his oft-told observation that every time I go home, I lose my personality.  “Even your voice changes,” he says and is right.  She asks nothing about my life.  When I bring up subjects, my sentences are choked off, suffocated by the smoke of her Kools and her utter lack of interest.  I can’t clean (she won’t allow anything to be thrown out), I can’t cook (the oven is full of take-out containers, pots and pans), I can’t wash (the machines are inaccessible and she goes to the laundromat).  I find a chair and a few inches of clear space on the table, and that’s it.  Listen.  Don’t speak.  Listen.  Scurry.  Try to get by on crumbs.  The cat’s away, but more mouse than the mice, I do not play.

For companionship, I open the Bible randomly to the last chapter of John’s gospel.  John was known as the disciple that Jesus “loved.”  It’s weird to think of Jesus having favorites, but he was, after all, human, and John was his.  But when Jesus “showed himself again to his disciples at the sea of Tiberias”—standing on the shore—they did not recognize him, until he recommends they cast their nets on the right side of the ship and the multitude of fishes caught make the net almost impossible to draw into the boat.  “It is the Lord,” said the disciple that Jesus loved.  I guess the moral is that love sees deeper than the eye, love listens, and love remembers.  But that night, alone in my mother’s kitchen, what I drew from the story was that I should be content with invisibility.

The next morning after a light sleep in which my mind scurried over anxieties and burrowed into memories in the same room where my grandmother slept next to a man she often forgot was her husband, I go to church.  I choose a pew in the general area where I used to sit next to my mother and study her nervous hands which have become my nervous hands.  When it’s time to say the “Our Father,” I reach out my hand to the old man next to me, but he refuses to take it.  Somehow, I am not surprised.  After Mass, I speak to Mom’s friends, who don’t recognize me because they haven’t seen me in thirty years.  I wait to ask the priest for a communion wafer to take to the hospital.  He doesn’t seem to know or care about my mother, but he gives me a special box, called a pix, marked with the cross.  Before going downtown to the hospital, I stop at Gambel’s bakery where the post-church crowd of seniors lingers over coffee and eggs.  I stand at the counter, aware that my mother and her friend should be here—“Cathy are you okay?  Are we still meeting for breakfast?” I heard the concerned voice when I played Mom’s phone messages.  When the girl behind the counter smiles, I point to some a crescent pastry with drizzled icing.  Somehow I remember that these are my mother’s favorites:  almond horns.  

It’s smooth sailing all day long.  I do nothing and say nothing to rock the boat.  I even sit through a tedious visit with my brother and sister-in-law.  I know that they are ready to be done with an old woman and her impossibly messy house, and they don’t even bother to ask me about my family or my life.  I question them about their vacations and their kids.  I joke about the state of things around the house—the woodpile, the mice, the plans for selling antiques.  Finally, I’m so bored I give up on trying to strike up a conversation and stare at the sunset.  There’s brilliant color between the bars of gray.  “Are those trees?” my mother asks idly.  She’s asking about a nondescript hospital print.  “Yes.  Yes, they are trees, Mom.”  There is some kind of tension in the room, in me, and I need to get out.  I wait out my brother, say goodbye to Mom (“I’ll be back”), and head home.  I make my usual walk along the cold pine woods down Potter Road to the West Mountain.  In the yard of the tiny gothic farmhouse, the carcass of a dead deer hangs from a tree, and under it stands a family group chatting.  A mother holds a child up, and I wonder how the child feels looking at a body with all the life taken out.  It reminded me of being in the hospital, and suddenly I remember the Thanksgiving a couple years back when my brother decided to show off his new guns.  He stood in his immaculately clean kitchen, looking down the sight of his new rifle.  I wish I had not remembered the gun.

In between hospital visits and errands to antique shops and doctors offices, I sit at home and try to concentrate, but it is as if there are tiny mice running around inside me.  They get quiet when I talk things over with Mom’s sister or Peggy Tulley, who lives across the street.  But this mouse problem has me thinking about a passage in Willa Cather’s novel, My Antonia, that I am reading to teach.  The narrator, Jim Burden, enters adolescence living in a prairie town with his elderly grandparents, and he is uneasy living within the guarded mode of existence that he describes as a tyranny.  “People’s speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed.  Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution.  The people asleep in those houses, I thought tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens, to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things.”  I know that I was raised to live this kind of guarded existence.  The times when my sisters and I were having something like a real conversation around this table, my mother would drift away, made noticeably uncomfortable by our passionate talk about ideas.  Families are social units, and like any society there is something like normative behavior.  I wonder if individuals in most families struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be one’s self at all.  In my family, I sense that each of the children have endured this struggle, and it has created an element of strain which has kept everybody almost at the breaking point.

Because I could leave my daughter and my students for only a couple of days, my second full day in Glens Falls was also my last.  I woke up, drove to Stewart’s where I got a large black coffee, and back at the house was a dervish of activity.  I had to clear out all the food—pre-packaged peanut butter crackers, bags of bread growing mold, old girl scout cookies, and ziplock bags of tootsie pops and peppermint patties—Halloween candy from years past.  It was immensely satisfying to pitch the perishables.  Then I began to clear the kitchen counters and sponge away the layers of dirt.  I thought how pleased my father would be since every time Mom went away, he would get the kids to help throw things out.  I made phone calls, collected information about local rehabilitation facilities, I bought mousetraps at ACE hardware, I dropped off one of Mom’s dental bridges for repair at an old house on a back street in Glens Falls.  I didn’t get to the hospital until noon, and when I did, my sister-in-law was holding court and “pampering” my mother.  I began to report my accomplishments, including what I’d learned about rehabs—Sunnyview is, hands-down, the best, Mom but it’s in Schenectady which is forty minutes away.  “Mary Jo,” says Kim imperiously, “her caseworker has been here and the rehab plan is already made.  She’s going to The Pines.”  But I’d heard that The Pines is just a half step up from a nursing home.  This felt like a major decision, and it had been made without my input.  Me, Mary Jo, Catherine’s oldest daughter.  “Kim, we are going to have to talk.”  The neighbors scatter, sensing discord:  “I can see where this is going,” said Coach Dennett, “and I’m leaving because I have plenty of my own drama at home.” 

My objection was, evidently, too aggressive, and it set the tone for the day.  I had to concede to The Pines because, when I talked to the social worker, it turned out that Mom was not a candidate for Sunnyview because of her age and condition.  Still there was the fact that they didn’t give me a chance to say anything, and this was about my mother’s future.  “Kim, can I have some time alone with my mother?”  I tried to contain my feelings by staring at the rain or the black water running in the river, but as soon as I saw neighbors come into the room from what felt like a past life, and throw my arms around them and cry, relieved to be expressing feelings that had no place in the spaces between me and my mother or between me and my siblings.  At the end of the day, it was Mom, my brother, and I alone, discussing the house and the likelihood of Mom’s return.  He started to lecture, to say that home would not be the safest place for her, that it needed major work, and he said it all in the familiar patronizing tone, as if we were too stupid to grasp basic facts.  “You do not have to talk to me that way,” I exploded, “Please just stop it.”  My mother began to try to take his side, and I snapped, “and you do not have to defer to him.  You’ve been doing it for years, and all he does is treat you like a child.”  My mother doesn’t quite grasp that he wants her put away in a home, in a bed, in a grave.  She doesn’t know that I defend her because I love her.  Somehow the tension is contained, helped by a cheerful Eucharistic minister, who knocks on the door and asks if anyone wants communion.  The timing is providential.  Before we receive the body of Christ, all of us pray “Our Father” together.  I hug my brother as before he heads out, and I wonder if he loves me.

Back at the house, I sit down at the table and try to concentrate.  Mom used to block us all out and spend hours grading papers, sitting right here.  Othello is open in front of me, but I feel more unnerved than ever.  In my peripheral vision, mice race across the kitchen floor.  They’re getting bolder.  But the fantasy I cannot shake is that my brother has a key to the house and he has a gun.  How can I rest when I fear for my life?  I have to go.  I hurriedly pack my things, fold up the bed, and go out into the rainy black night to a bleak hotel that really isn’t much better than the house.  On the plane back to Flint I felt proud of fleeing a mouse problem that wasn’t mine, but now I suspect that my panicked scurrying to one more safe hole was merely an indicator of how deep the infestation really is.  Two days later, the mechanical voice of my caller identification announces, “James Kietzman.”  I say hello.  He tells me Mom is failing.  He also reports that the traps I bought were merely bait boxes.  The creatures injest a poison which makes them so thirsty that they jump in the toilet and drown.  The image still troubles me as did his matter-of-fact follow-up, “I just flush them.”