Frozen Stiff

ran to be able to make that claim. But because my mother would probably go screaming in terror at the site of mud-caked paws, I grab an old towel from the house and clean off Hoover’s feet the best I can.

There’s no need to call ahead to see if Mother will be home because the woman rarely ventures out of the house. According to her, the outside world is full of horrible threats: germs, radiation, cancer-inducing sun rays, skin-wrinkling poisons, secondhand smoke, airborne pesticides . . . and that’s before she starts thinking up the more bizarre dangers, like getting your head split open by “turdites”—her word for those frozen, blue meteorites that are created when crap gets jettisoned from airliner toilets. I’ve always thought Mother could score big in Hollywood— the makers of disaster movies could learn a thing or two from her when it comes to thinking up ways for people to be annihilated.

Mother’s long-term paranoia and hypochondria have definitely shaped my psyche and may have been why I chose to be a nurse. As a young child I kept expecting her to turn up dead any time, either from one her many supposed ailments, or some uncanny and unfortunate accident. As a result, I was always choosing alternative caregivers from among my friends’ parents and imagining what a more normal life might be like. Over the years Mom dragged me along with her to hundreds of doctor appointments, an experience that always proved terrifying. But my fright didn’t stem from a fear of Mom’s illnesses or possible death—by the age of ten I began to suspect that her only real sickness was a mental one. Instead I was scared to death of being mortified by her behavior.

Because of her fear of germs and her belief that doctors’ offices are giant petri dishes, incubating all the horrific diseases of every patient ever seen there—a fear that unfortunately has some foundation in truth—she would always refuse to sit in the waiting room. Instead she would insist on being taken back to an exam room immediately upon her arrival. If she wasn’t, she would raise a fuss until she got her way, something that typically happened pretty quickly since the front desk people were always anxious to shut her up and get her in the back so she would quit scaring the other patients.

Unfortunately, getting past the waiting room was only half the battle. Once Mom got to an exam room, she would make the nurses go through a rigorous cleaning procedure that she had to personally supervise, an exhausting process that often took fifteen minutes or more and plucked the last nerve on the most patient of nurses.

As a result of all these idiosyncrasies, Mom knows every generalist and specialist in town because she has seen and made herself persona non grata with most of them. Nowadays she travels nearly an hour to see her doctor and she has toned down her behavior quite a bit. I think she finally realized she was running out of options and would soon be forced to weigh her fear of flying against her fear of death because the only doctors left who would be willing to see her would be too far away to drive to.

My marrying a doctor certainly helped things, and in my mother’s eyes it’s the one thing in life I did right. When I started dating David, she was ecstatic; when we became engaged, she nearly had an orgasm. She can’t understand why I now want to divorce him over something as mundane as infidelity. I have to admit that David, despite his many faults, has always been a veritable font of patience when it comes to my mother. And she definitely pushes the limits, calling him often and at all hours of the day and night. If I had a dollar for every house call David ever made to my mother, I’d be pulling into her driveway right now in something a whole lot nicer than a hearse.

Today there is another car in Mom’s drive and it’s one I recognize. It belongs to William-not-Bill Hanover, a nerdy, germaphobic accountant with a bad case of OCD and an even worse comb-over. William was my blind date for a Halloween party a few weeks ago and the results were nothing short of catastrophic. However, he proved to be a perfect, albeit younger match for my mother. Apparently the sharing of a common mental illness is a powerful aphrodisiac.

I leash Hoover and head for the front door, trying to sidestep the slush piles to keep his paws as clean as possible. Apparently Mother either saw or heard me pull up because the door whips open before I reach the porch. She looks at Hoover with a horrified expression and claps a hand to her chest. Her normally pale skin is whiter than usual; she looks like one of those pale, see-through creatures you might see on a National Geographic special about the denizens of the Mariana Trench.

“What is that?” she says, pointing at Hoover and curling her lip in repugnance.

“It’s a dog, Mom. I’m pretty sure you’ve seen one before.”

She gives me a disgusted look. “I know it’s a dog. I meant why do you have it? And what is it doing here?”

“It is a he,” I say. “And he’s mine. I found him a few weeks ago starving and abandoned, so I took him in.”

“Dogs are filthy creatures,” she says, wrinkling her face. “They harbor fleas and worms and that mange stuff where their skin sloughs off like someone with Hansen’s disease.”

Hansen’s disease is better known to the non-medical public as leprosy, but my mother’s hypochondria has given her a better than average knowledge of medical information and terminology. She has four bookshelves filled with nothing but medical resources and texts, and I’d bet every bookmark on her computer is a Web MD knockoff.

“Hoover doesn’t have fleas, mange, or worms,” I assure her. Actually, I’m not sure of the latter since I haven’t taken him to a vet yet, but the fact that I gave him a store-bought deworming agent and he hasn’t been walking around scooting his butt on the ground makes me think he’s okay. I wisely decide to withhold the fact that Hoover has a fascination with the crotches on my worn underwear and the deposits my cat, Rubbish, leaves in his litter box.

“Why are you here?” Mom asks. She is staring at Hoover like she wishes she had a crucifix and a garlic necklace to ward him off.

“What?” I say all innocence. “I can’t drop in for a visit with my loving mother?”

Mom narrows her glacial-blue eyes and gives me The Look. It’s an expression she mastered years ago, one that can cut through the thickest bullshit like a laser scalpel through soft fat. The first time I remember her using it on me was some thirty years ago when I tried to convince her I wasn’t the one who had scraped off and rearranged the frosting on the German chocolate cake she had baked for the company coming that night. At first I tried to deny that the cake had been tampered with at all, despite the fact that, by then, the frosting consisted of a thin, sugary glaze dotted with a few scattered strands of coconut and a handful of nut pieces. When that didn’t fly, I tried to blame the tampering on my sister, Desi, ignoring the fact that she was still in diapers and confined to a playpen. Then I offered up the theory that the frosting had simply melted and been absorbed into the cake. It was an insane defense but I was naive enough at the time not to let the laws of physics get in my way. It was at that point that Mother gave me The Look. It left me shaking and trembling with fear. I not only confessed immediately, I cried for hours afterward, begging the whole time for forgiveness.

I haven’t touched another German chocolate cake since then, though I have been known to buy cans of the frosting and eat it with a spoon.

Mom’s Look now has nearly the same effect on me it had during the cake debacle, minus the blubbering part. I confess. “I admit I have an ulterior motive. I want to spend the day in Chicago tomorrow and I need someone to dogsit for me.”

“Chicago? What are you going to do in Chicago?”

“Shop. I want to get my holiday stuff done early this year.”

I look away, knowing Mom will likely smell a rat. She knows I love shopping about as much as I love getting what Desi calls the annual spread-’em-and-let-’em exam. Hoping to distract Mom from sniffing out the truth, I stomp my feet and blow into my hands. “It’s cold out here,” I say.

Mom chews on one side of her cheek, eyeing Hoover warily. Worried that she’s about to say no, I play my trump card.

“By the way,” I say, “Hoover here is part Lab. Did you know that Labs have such an exquisite sense of smell they can actually sniff out cancer in its earliest stages? Or predict when someone is going to have a seizure?”

Mom’s eyebrows arch at this. “Really?” she says with newfound curiosity. Hoover thumps his tail and grins at her, as if he understands she’s softening toward him. A shadow materializes behind Mom and Hoover’s tail thumps even faster as the shadow morphs into William-not-Bill.

“Hi, William,” I say with genuine warmth. Even though my date with him was an unmitigated disaster, deep down he seems to be a nice, decent guy. I like him and, more important, Mom seems to like him, though given her track record with men, I’m not sure this is a point in his favor.