Reckoning (n): a count, computation, calculation
The next time I fly to my mother’s house, I will:
We have made that shift, my mother and I, in which the child becomes the parent, and the parent becomes the child. As hard as I try, I’m not very good at either: I am an uncooperative child. I am a resentful parent. I calculate all the wrong things, don’t count the right ones. Nothing computes.
Reckon (v): to depend or rely on, as in expectation
I am expected to take care of this. It’s only fair. My sister has been the primary, keeping tabs on our mother, helping with house and chores and shopping. My sister also has a paralyzing fear of hospitals, and our mother needs major surgery: installing hardware to keep her fragile spine from collapsing. So I pack up my New England life and move it south, to Atlanta. With a cell phone and laptop (hospitals have wireless!) I can teach my classes online, keep up with email, and even schedule the occasional phone session with Debbie the Magnificent, my shrink.
After the surgery, the post-op staff recalibrates my mother’s morphine drip, and she becomes more comfortable. But as the drug settles in, any filter on her thoughts and tongue disappears. She begins with a rambling account about when she lived in Florida, 50 years ago; she conflates her mother’s family with my father’s. I am accustomed to her doing most, if not all, of the talking, and so I settle in to wait it out. I can tell the nurse is trying to listen politely, but then she tries to interrupt the monologue, asking my mother if her position is comfortable and the level of her pain. My mother responds by describing the restaurant her parents ran in Charleston, South Carolina, and how she was a cheerleader at a Charleston high school. I know from hearing the story before (sans morphine) that she is confusing South Carolina with north Florida, the beginning and end of her high school days merging into one.
The nurse takes a deep breath, says, “You need to stop talking so I can assess your pain.”
My mother says, “I don’t know what my pain is that scale is so confusing, and all, I don’t really know what the worse pain is the past few months I’ve been in so much pain, and all, but I would go to bed thinking I had felt the worst pain but when I got up the next day, and all, and it was better so maybe the worst wasn’t the worst…” She is forced to breathe. “Now what did you want to know? I don’t know what you want you asked me a question, but I don’t know what you want me to say.”
I notice that the morphine does not prevent her from using her favorite conversational strategy: “and all.” It lets her regroup while denying anyone else entry. Although I was taught never to talk over anyone, especially my mother, I have learned that the only solution is to interrupt.
“Mom, the nurse needs a number. Three is not-bad pain. Six is kinda bad. Eight is really bad. She needs a number to make sure your medication is right.”
My mother has to work hard to focus enough to glare at me. But she does. “You interrupted me.” Even so, she nods in the nurse’s direction, huffs that her pain is “around four.” I think to myself, ha, she really does understand the scale because she said a different number than I provided. She wants me to know that she won’t repeat any old number I make up.
Later, after the shift change, it’s time to break in a new set of nurses and techs. My mother is lecturing the new nurse on cooking: “I use that Spanish seasoning in my green beans, and all, but not in the collards my daddy always got fresh neck bones for collards now people use those smoked turkey wings, but I don’t like how they look, they…” When my mother takes a breath, I try to be helpful, tell the nurse, “I think she’s been less comfortable for the past half-hour or so.”
The nurse snaps: “The patient, not the family member, should report the pain.”
I think, well, fuck—you listen to her. But I say, “As you wish,” then lean back and derive no small satisfaction from watching two nurses and three techs spend the next forty minutes trying to extricate an answer from my mother. They don’t get much information about pain, but they do learn about the Bonifay rodeo, fig preserves, cosmetology, and my mother’s strong opinions on the shapeliness of an Atlanta Braves player’s butt-cheeks. The first nurse gives up; the second nurse asks me what I think my mother’s pain level might be. I encourage her to try the “is it this or that?” approach and, even though it never gets a direct answer (my mother does not fall for the same trick twice), it does reduce the meandering considerably.
Most of the time, if I need to get a word in, I try a more tolerable approach, though the “tolerable” part says as much about me as it does about her. What I have learned to say: “Will the senator from Georgia kindly yield the floor?” Even though I am (technically) interrupting, she laughs, mimics a sonorous good-ole-boy accent—part Herman Talmadge and part Colonel Sanders in drag—and says, “Well, what?” This technique does not work, however, when the senator from Georgia is on morphine.
Later that night, she is restless, distressed. She tells me (in case I hadn’t noticed) that pain medications always make her “tongue loose at both ends.” She tells me that she was awake, talking, for almost 24 hours straight after I was born, when she’d been given a large dose of medication due to the difficulty of the delivery. “I was black and blue for months after you were born black and blue from my chest to my knees I have never endured such pain.” I have no doubt that she was bruised, but I also know that she was also out cold for my delivery, which was the standard at that time, not to mention that my delivery required forceps and thus for her not to be conscious. I also know this is her way of letting me know what she expects. She will never say it directly, but here’s the message: “You owe me.”
And she’s right, to a point. I owe her at least a thank-you for giving me life and care, despite the challenges of pregnancy, followed by her significantly mixed feelings about motherhood. But there’s more. Like it or not, a part of me is drawn into her swirling monologues. When she describes her world, she also describes parts of mine, the landscape of family and memories that we uneasily share. Against my will, her voice—the one I have heard all my life—lulls me, the cadences so familiar, so like my own. It is sleepy-soft, the voice I heard from the back seat of the big, blue Pontiac, as she and my father talked quietly in the front seat, laughed the secret laugh they shared then, in the good days of their marriage.
Her voice carries the echoes of a time gone by, not one that I want to return to but one that resonates even when I wish it would not. Her words are pillowy but precise. If I read aloud in my head it is her voice I hear as much as my own. She gave me my first book, in which Farmer Brown politely greets every animal in the barnyard, and she read it to me until we both memorized it. She ordered the librarian in our small town’s library to give me my own library card when I was four, and she let me check out as many books as my small, sunburned arms could carry. I remember us standing at the librarian’s desk, and the librarian asking for my mother’s card. My mother replied, “She can read. Make her up a card.”
She helped create my utter fascination with, my absolute adoration of, words. And now she strangles me with them, relentless syllabic string after string.
A week after her surgery, my mother has a bizarre reaction to a muscle relaxant and hallucinates. The night nurse calls me at 1:00 am from my mother’s bedside. I hear my mother in the background, a horrified whisper: “The sugar! The sugar!” Because I’m half-awake and haven’t had time to get my guard up, I hear a terrified little girl, and for a vertiginous moment I do not know if it is my mother, or me. The nurse puts my mother on the phone, and I speak to her as if she were four, promise yes, I will be right there, yes, everything will be all right, yes, of course, I will send the sugar away. When I arrive at the hospital my mother is still terrified, her eyes wide above the blanket she has tugged over her nose and mouth. I pantomime sweeping away the sugar that she is convinced still threatens to bury her. Then I hold her hand and stroke her hair until she falls asleep.
When my mother wakes, she refuses all medication, until the discomfort—and the nurse’s reminder that she is going to physical therapy in a half-hour, medicated or not—wear her down.
“What if the sugar comes back?” She is in tears again.
“It won’t. Your chart says not to give you that med again.” I am so tired that I sway, wonder if I’ll start seeing mounds of sugar myself. The nurse orders me to go home and, relieved, I obey. As I head out the door, my mother repeats, “If the sugar comes back?” I’m not sure if she’s reassuring herself or testing me.
“If the sugar comes back, tell the nurse. She’ll call me, and I’ll come.”
“Right away?”
“Right away.”
Yes, she knows she can depend on me.
Reckoning (n): a statement of an amount due; bill
If my mother could issue an invoice, a bill for parental services rendered, the debit side of the account would read “You owe me for”:
I could point out more than a few imbalances on her side of the ledger, but that’s not a battle I can win. This is parental reckoning, using a formula that only my mother understands, the amount past due from the deep ambivalence of her childhood, of her own mother’s inability to love her or see her as more than another unwelcome chore to complete. My mother’s deep well of need fills a spreadsheet with a linked expanse of formulated cells that calculate an indecipherable bottom line. The sheet reflects the insufficiency of funds paid in, the cost of bringing someone to life who refuses to pay—in acceptable currency—the amount well past due. It’s always past due.
Reckoning (n): an appraisal or judgment
But wait. In all of this accounting, I have not posted some important entries. For example, my mother’s assets. She is on the small side, around five feet two before osteoporosis set in. Good looking. Knows it. She resembles her father’s family—rosy complexion, light-brown hair—the gray limited to strands that frame her face like a set of soft, fluid parentheses. Her nose curves daintily but isn’t perky. Her skin has softened over time, but her face has almost no wrinkles, the payoff for decades of exacting care. She will not use a tissue to wipe her face, says that the paper’s rugged cellulose tears her tender skin to shreds. Instead she gently removes the (organic, hypoallergenic, wildly expensive) cleansing cream with cloth diapers that she bought, cut into small, perfect squares, hand-stitched, then washed until butter soft. Unscented detergent, never bleach.
Her clothes are expensive, classic cut, perfectly accessorized and coordinated. Even in a simple pair of slacks and blouse, she is always perfectly put together, nothing out of place. She does not wear clothes that are revealing or tight; for her feminine appeal she relies on that elusive element she calls “class.” My mother does not like women who do not have class. She also does not like women who:
Men are not acceptable if they are fat, expose too much chest hair, do not tuck in their shirts, or fail to open doors for ladies. Based on the men my mother has dated over the years, acceptable male qualities include:
In her defense, I will say that my father was not faultless (former drinkers who find Jesus are not easy to live with). Part of me understands why she would want to play with infidelity, to shake his strictly ordered world, to make one hell of a point. His sudden death, just a few weeks after they’d agreed to try to make a new start must have felt like the long, cruel arm of divine judgment.
She married her second husband ten months later. After she divorced him (three years), she waited eleven months, married the third. She called me after the courthouse ceremony, said, “I got married. It’s your fault,” and hung up. That marriage, to a debonair manic-depressive, lasted five months.
After number three, she swore off marriage for a while. In the interim, she dated a massive, balding, retired professional wrestler and a slender, sleazy journalist who moonlighted as a wedding photographer. There was the semi-retired Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent with whom she co-owned a used car lot, and a man, about fifteen years her junior, who drove his beer delivery truck to her condo and parked it (“discreetly,” my mother insisted) next to the swimming pool. The relationship with the lieutenant colonel lasted a couple of years, and I recall that time as one when my mother seemed genuinely content. He would arrive on Friday night. They went out to dinner, then dancing, and then to his hotel (always top notch, his being a bigwig at the Pentagon, and all). On Saturday, he made huge pans of tomato “gravy” and then lasagna, which she ate until he came for the next rendezvous. He broke it off when she asked him to leave his wife.
The engagement to the furniture sales rep who made book on the side lasted another year or so, until he earned an all-expenses-paid staycation at Club Fed for racketeering.
My mother: “He is a very good furniture salesman.”
Her daughter: “He drives a Lincoln, wears custom-tailored suits and Gucci loafers. There’s not that much lawn furniture to sell in the entire state of Georgia.”
My mother: “You just don’t want me to be happy.”
Since husband number three, the lieutenant colonel, and the bookie were all signori, and I was studying the Renaissance at the time, I referred to this, mostly jokingly, as my mother’s “Italian Period.”
When my mother was in her mid-fifties, she settled down with husband number four, an electrical engineer who had been raised in the Salvation Army. He was, as she said, “Not very exciting.” But by that time she understood the downside of romantic derring-do, even as she sometimes chafed against her newfound stability. Number four was a gentle, rather bemused man who often looked at my mother as if she were a small, fluffy prize he’d accidentally won at the state fair. They maintained separate houses for the first nine years they were married; he was allowed to keep a pair of pajamas, slippers, and a toothbrush at my mother’s place. In their tenth year of marriage they moved into a spacious, well-lighted house, where they lived until he died seven years later.
If you’re wondering whether or not I like my mother, the answer is: sometimes. I admire her gifts. She is charming, always socially at ease. She can engage in the type of dinner party chit-chat that makes her a gracious host and that makes me cranky and snappy. She knows exactly which forks go where, and which spoons to use when. She can arrange flowers and find valuable antiques under geological deposits of old paint and shellac; she can make a room look like it just fell off the pages of a home decorating magazine.
Even though I don’t always like her, I love her. She gave me life. She “attempted” (her word) to raise me well and lead me in the paths of lady-like righteousness. Over time we have negotiated an agreed-upon judgment: I have squandered most of her efforts, and this is not her fault. Even so, I believe she genuinely loves me, despite my deficits. I’ve learned that she talks to friends and relatives about me, tells them I have a “good job,” that I am independent. She says that “we” earned a college degree and that she “always knew” I would be a good teacher, despite my resistance to becoming one. She conveniently forgets giving the college fund my father had set aside to her second husband, so he could buy a Harley. She doesn’t recall her relentless insistence while I was studying literature that I train for a real job. She denies any memory of one Christmas, when her gifts to me were a too-small, bright-green sweater and a brochure: “Your Career in Computer Programming.” I had just completed my first year of a master’s degree in English. On scholarship.
She does tell people, with some pride, that I have never asked her for anything. She is correct, but she carefully avoids this truth: I have never asked for anything, because what she has is not what I want. I once craved her approval. I have, however, made a careful—a lifelong—appraisal. It would cost too much.
Reckon (v): to think or suppose
My late partner used one word to describe my mother: “Spoiled.” I reckon that’s possible, that she suffers from only-child syndrome. Over time, though, I have begun to suppose: What if I have calculated incorrectly about this frustrating, fascinating woman?
My mother’s parents were the children of impoverished immigrants. There was no work they were not willing to do that would let them take their place in the dream of America. And work they did. When my mother was young, her parents had demanding jobs in a Phenix City, Alabama, cotton mill. My mother’s mother, the fourth of thirteen children, loved the work and the money, and the autonomy both brought. She did not like staying home with a baby—a reminder of years of caring for eight younger siblings in a hardscrabble farmhouse with neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. When my mother speaks of her mother, she always concludes with: “My mother never touched me with affection or kindness. She fed and clothed me. She did not hug me until after you and your sister were born.”
I can imagine how my mother perceived my own, very different relationship with her mother. As soon as I was able to roam, I walked the fifty yards east to my grandparents’ house or the quarter-mile west to their country store. At the house, I could help myself to any leftovers in the refrigerator, put my face close to the small oscillating fan pulsing the air. No matter what she was doing, my grandmother always met me at the door, folded me into her arms, and kissed the top of my head. At the store, I could pluck a chocolate Nehi from the drink cooler and, if I got sleepy, my grandmother placed a sheet of doubled-up muslin across the top of the large, square chest freezer so I could take a nap. Customers who wanted ice cream just had to wait.
Whatever my mother or grandmother thought about all this—the giving and receiving of affection, the costs of love dispensed and withheld—they never talked about it. My grandmother carved out a comfortable space, a sphere inhabited by two granddaughters who lavished affection on her and who received her reserved but bone-deep attention in return. At those moments, of course, I paid no attention to my mother, enveloped as I was in my grandmother’s warmth. I was aware of tension between them, of critical comments that each used to remind the other: “You don’t measure up.” I look back in time, into my grandmother’s compact kitchen, see two girls snuggled next to a plump woman, giggling and teasing her, tugging on her arm dangle and loose apron strings. Near the door is my mother, caught between these two generations, the few feet between her and her mother more vast and less navigable than the acres of dense Panhandle scrub she can see from the kitchen window. Her arms fold tightly against her chest. Her mouth is set in a firm line as she stares at some faraway point that only she can see.
Most families improve across generations, and mine is no different. My mother has a capacity for relationships, not to mention variety, that her mother did not possess. From our mother, my sister and I received a mix of affection and aggression, of smothering close and pushing away. I chose not to have children, not because of the lesbian thing (she’s right—there are options) but because I had no faith that I would achieve a better balance. My sister had more courage than I did, if not more sense. As she struggled to be a good parent to her son, my mother morphed into a world-class grandmother. Watching my mother interact with my nephew—calmly navigating his noise and messes and occasional full-body defiance—I became acutely aware of the kinship he has with her that I never did, never will. That discovery was no gentle tap on the psyche. No. The recognition cut sharp and hot. I’ve absorbed it now, but for a long time I staggered between relishing my nephew’s ability to bring out the best in my mother and raging that I’d never been able to do the same. I began to understand my mother’s tense, faraway stare in that long-ago kitchen.
I take a deep breath, unfold my arms, which have somehow become locked against my chest. He is not my son. I can unhook from at least some of the resentment. I am not his parent, so maybe I can avoid repeating the endless cycle. But there are times when I think, yeah, I reckon my mother’s life would have been a lot different if her mother had known how to love her. I reckon my life would have been a lot different if my mother had known how to love me.
Dead reckoning (n): the calculation of one’s position on the basis of distance
run on various headings since the last precisely observed position
“Precisely observed position.” That assumes a lot, doesn’t it? That I can really ever precisely observe or perceive my mother. Or that I can see past what abides in my cells, which, at some level, exerts an influence on everything. I try to see her as others do, try to calculate what other people count as her gifts. It gets me farther than it used to, but even if I live to proverbial ripe old age, I won’t achieve such precision, such a position.
“The calculation of one’s position.” Well, I can do that, can’t I? I am a teacher, a scholar on occasion, a friend who trends toward loyalty, a partner and sister and cousin who tries hard not to be distant in spite of my preferences for remaining untouched, free from expectations and overdrawn emotional accounts. I have worked hard to be considerate and kind. I try to listen as much as, if not more than, I speak. I try to be my own person.
To a certain extent, I have succeeded. Despite our similar eyes and voices, my mother and I display plenty of differences. I am athletic and active; my mother is mostly sedentary. She wears well-tailored clothes; I wear baggy pants and shirts in colors we’ll charitably call “earth toned.” Although I resemble my maternal grandmother (body) and my father and paternal grandmother (temperament) there are times, when my mother and I are together, that something of mine, of me—a gesture, an intonation—is repeated exactly by my mother, and I do not know whether I am imitating her, or she is imitating me. My greatest fear is that nothing matters except I have half of my mother’s DNA, and that it will one day overtake me—no matter how much effort and expense I put into crafting differences, I will wake up one day and be her, and I will be lost. The fear becomes more complicated as my mother becomes more frail. I want to be a good daughter, to be able to draw on the strengths I have developed. I want to be able to rise above the past, to forgive if not forget. I want to care for her in her aging—and her dying, which will come—as if all our accounts were even, as if there were no owing, no yearning for things that neither of us can provide.
That summer of the surgery, my mother was in the hospital for nearly five weeks, then I carefully drove her home. The first night, I dozed in the wing chair next to her bed. She woke every two hours, like an infant; she needed help turning, needed help going to the bathroom. I reminded her of the safe technique the physical therapists taught her for getting out of bed and steadying herself on the walker. I ducked just in time to avoid a roundhouse left. When I said, “Why did you try to hit me?” she replied, with utter righteousness, “You annoyed me.”
After two nights in the chair, I gave up. I crawled to the other side of her queen-size bed, stretched my aching back and legs. That night, she slept three hours before needing to move. I helped her turn, plumped the pillows, retrieved the blanket that had slipped to the side. She drifted back to sleep, and I lay down again, breathing deeply, trying to sink into and past a weariness that was cell deep and drawn tight. I was awash in resentment, for being asked to give more than I ever would receive in return.
The next night, I tried sleeping in the guest room. Try is the operative word. My mother was having separation anxiety. Even though we had set up a monitor in her room and placed its mate about three inches from my ear, she was afraid I wouldn’t hear her call. Between 11 and 1, she “tested” the monitor three times, needed turning twice, and had to go to the bathroom once. I gave up, turned off the monitor, crawled back into her big bed—on the edge, as far away from her as possible, to make sure (I told myself) that I didn’t bother her if I moved in my sleep. Assuming I could sleep.
What seemed like only moments later, I woke to a persistent tapping on my arm. No, not tapping, stroking.
“Need to turn?”
“No.”
“Bathroom?”
“No.”
“Medicine?”
“No.”
“Water?”
“No.”
There was a silence so prolonged I thought one or the other of us had gone back to sleep. She patted the top of my arm once more. Her voice was utterly naked. “I needed to make sure that you are there.”
“I’m here.”
Another long pause.
“Thank you.”
I stayed awake a long time after that, listened as her breathing became soft and deep. Then I matched my breathing to hers.
The “dead” in dead reckoning actually comes from “deduced,” not from any reference to being deceased. We deduce. We decide, based on something that precedes, whether the thing is known or—as is more often the case—assumed. There are disadvantages to dead reckoning, my uncle the retired sailor tells me, because you derive your current bearings from the previous values. You calculate and, right or wrong, you keep using that bearing as truth for the rest of your journey.
Sometimes, I think, you have to look up, find a cluster of stars, and start plotting your course anew. You survey the wreckage of your life, self-imposed as well as inflicted. You expected less, yet somehow you have received a strange abundance. You put aside the endless lists of costs, write a zero, tell the shrill voice inside yourself that zero marks a full, precise place, that it means more than merely nothing. You reappraise your life, understand that it is, all at once, immeasurably rich and staggeringly deficient. You begin reckoning: comparing costs, anticipating dependencies and expectations.
You know how to account. But you stop keeping score.
Beth Richards’s work has appeared in Fourth Genre (Editor’s Prize), Talking Writing, The Sun (Readers Write), and the Cincinnati Review (Schiff Prize); in three anthologies: Coming Out in the South, Into Sanity, and The Masters Review; andin Michael Steinberg’s blog (#84, “Stories and Stars”). She earned an MFA from the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program at Lasell University.
