“I’m not sure,” I say, my voice quivering.
“I am. I’ve known you forever. I remember your mother making chocolate-chip cookies, my father always going to your house to see if she’d made the damned cookies. I know how difficult it is when a parent isn’t able to take care of himself. My father lived in my house, and Donna took care of him in a way I can never thank her enough for, until he . . . well, until he died.”
“Tim wants me to move her to a cheap nursing home in Ohio.”
“Out of the question.”
“Right. She hasn’t come to the point where she needs to go to Ohio. On the other hand, we should put her in the slammer here.”
“The slammer. We can’t have a serious discussion if you pretend we’re talking to each other in a comic strip.”
I bring my knees to my forehead, clasp my legs, and press the kneecaps hard into my eyes.
“I understand from Dr. Milrus that you’re having a difficult time,” the therapist says. Her office is windowless, the chairs cheerfully mismatched. “Why don’t you fill me in?”
“Well, my mother had a stroke a year ago. It did something. . . . Not that she didn’t have some confusions before, but after the stroke she thought my brother was ten years old. She still sometimes says things about him that I can’t make any sense of, unless I remember that she often, really quite often, thinks he’s still ten. She also believes that I’m sixty. I mean, she thinks I’m only fourteen years younger than she is! And, to her, that’s proof that my father had another family. Our family was an afterthought, my father had had another family, and I’m a child of the first marriage. I’m sixty years old, whereas she herself was only seventy-four when she had the stroke and fell over on the golf course.”
The therapist nods.
“In any case, my brother is forty-four—about to be forty-five—and lately it’s all she’ll talk about.”
“Your brother’s age?”
“No, the revelation. That they—you know, the other wife and children—existed. She thinks the shock made her fall down at the fourth tee.”
“Were your parents happily married?”
“I’ve shown her my baby album and said, ‘If I was some other family’s child, then what is this?’ And she says, ‘More of your father’s chicanery.’ That is the exact word she uses. The thing is, I am not sixty. I’ll be fifty-one next week.”
“It’s difficult, having someone dependent upon us, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes. But that’s because she causes herself so much pain by thinking that my father had a previous family.”
“How do you think you can best care for your mother?”
“She pities me! She really does! She says she’s met every one of them: a son and a daughter, and a woman, a wife, who looks very much like her, which seems to make her sad. Well, I guess it would make her sad. Of course it’s fiction, but I’ve given up trying to tell her that, because in a way I think it’s symbolically important. It’s necessary to her that she think what she thinks, but I’m just so tired of what she thinks. Do you know what I mean?”
“Tell me about yourself,” the therapist says. “You live alone?”
“Me? Well, at this point I’m divorced, after I made the mistake of not marrying my boyfriend, Vic, and married an old friend instead. Vic and I talked about getting married, but I was having a lot of trouble taking care of my mother, and I could never give him enough attention. When we broke up, Vic devoted all his time to his secretary’s dog, Banderas. If Vic was grieving, he did it while he was at the dog park.”
“And you work at Cosmos Computer, it says here?”
“I do. They’re really very family-oriented. They understand absolutely that I have to take time off to do things for my mother. I used to work at an interior-design store, and I still sew. I’ve just finished some starfish costumes for a friend’s third-grade class.”
“Jack Milrus thinks your mother might benefit from being in assisted living.”
“I know, but he doesn’t know—he really doesn’t know—what it’s like to approach my mother about anything.”
“What is the worst thing that might happen if you did approach your mother?”
“The worst thing? My mother turns any subject to the other family, and whatever I want is just caught up in the whirlwind of complexity of this thing I won’t acknowledge, which is my father’s previous life, and, you know, she omits my brother from any discussion because she thinks he’s a ten-year-old child.”
“You feel frustrated.”
“Is there any other way to feel?”
“You could say to yourself, ‘My mother has had a stroke and has certain confusions that I can’t do anything about.’ ”
“You don’t understand. It is absolutely necessary that I acknowledge this other family. If I don’t, I’ve lost all credibility.”
The therapist shifts in her seat. “May I make a suggestion?” she says. “This is your mother’s problem, not yours. You understand something that your mother, whose brain has been affected by a stroke, cannot understand. Just as you would guide a child, who does not know how to function in the world, you are now in a position where—whatever your mother believes—you must nevertheless do what is best for her.”
“You need a vacation,” Jack Milrus says. “If I weren’t on call this weekend, I’d suggest that you and Donna and I go up to Washington and see that show at the Corcoran where all the figures walk out of the paintings.”
