Don't Disappoint (Ch. 13)
by Martin van Cooper
Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next five weeks, we’ll be serializing Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest, back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
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The idea that every fully formed person needs to have a role to play in society. They don’t. Some people are just here and working through it and will leave nothing substantial and there’s nothing you can do to change it.
When his mother wandered first to the library, where she alarmed the employees and patrons by saying she was looking for her sister and then proceeding to disrobe in the DVD rental section and then second to the supermarket a mile from her house, where she was found eating donuts sitting in the produce section, both times necessitating involvement of local law enforcement who had grown up with her son and daughter and knew her from when she worked at the local insurance office, in the same week, his sister told him, through a Pinot Grigio fog one afternoon that spring that it was time for him to come home so they could have a serious discussion with their mother about new living arrangements.
You don’t understand Jay, I can’t be here all day every day. And she doesn’t want to…she won’t listen to me. Like yesterday I told her Mom listen we are going to pick up around here and then I will take you to the store for grocery shopping and then I’m going to the gym. That’s when she wandered off the second time. I was at the gym, and she, I told her, I’ll take care of your laundry and then while it’s in the dryer I‘ll go to the gym and when I get back we’ll go to Finast. She kept coming into the kitchen while I was doing the dishes and she would stand there and look at me and I would say Mom go watch Wheel and walk her back in there and then I’m in the front room trying to get caught up on emails and I hear the toilet flushing and she’s in there again flushing her socks down the toilet. Don’t fucking laugh. It’s not fucking funny, you fucking try and…and they went down just fine, her socks did, but then she’s with the nightgown trying to flush it down the toilet so by the time I get back there the thing is overflowing all over the floor and so I yelled at her Mom go back and put another dress on and go finish Wheel while I clean this up and she did and so I cleaned it all up and threw a load of laundry in and went back in there and she had dozed off. And so I figured fine, I can sneak out now so I locked all the doors from the outside too, but don’t ask me how she found a way to take the window screen off and climbed out the front window and went down to the library on her own. I was just getting onto the bike, Jay, when they called me. That’s how fast she Houdinied out and beat feet across town to the library. That’s like a mile or half mile at least. You remember Tony Aguilera, used to live next to the high school, a year behind you I think? He called me and said my mother was running stark naked through the library and maybe I better come pick her up. That was my Tuesday, Jason.
They had progressed to this point through a non-linear trajectory—things would plateau for a while before veering inevitably downward again—over a time frame that tended to be accelerated, the physicians told them, with cases of early onset. It progressed faster and he, Jason, needed to keep an eye on his sister for burnout, the doctor admonished. Not picking up the mail for two days. Calling twice in as many days to report that the tree in the backyard needed trimming and that she wanted to have the oil changed in her car before the snow arrived. Finding the shampoo in the fridge and the television remote, after a two-hour search, in the dogfood container (their dog had died years ago) in the garage. Hearing the same story three times over dinner, coffee. Having a dessert of vanilla ice cream served with unused coffee grounds in it. When she took her uniform out of storage and showed up at work two years after she had retired. Explaining how to log into email one thousand times before buying her an iPad and disabling all login requirements and security and printing out large font instructions about how to open the app and how to charge the device. Having the conversation about taking over paying her bills and managing her personal finances. Cleaning out the garage to install parking aids. Convincing her to just park in the driveway after she tore off the side mirror pulling in, twice. Hearing again about how much she loved the Cosmos series on Nat Geo and how it reminded her of their father and his love of the unknown. Hearing again about Wheel and how happy she was that Drew Carey, a local boy from Cleveland, took over for Bob Barker on The Price is Right, lost all that weight and kept it off, a former Marine, Jason’s sister used to serve him four eggs over easy, dry white toast, bacon and black coffee at Bob Evans in Seven Hills. Cancelling the newspaper subscription. Running into a high school acquaintance who said she just ran into your Mom at the store the other day and who starts the conversation with a pregnant Hey how’s your Mom doing? Finding spoiled milk under the bathroom sink. The first time she slipped and sprained her wrist going out to get the mail. And then the second, a week later, at the grocery store, slicing open her knee in the process on the shopping cart. Arguing with the clerk at the grocery store when he won’t accept overripe peaches on return two weeks after she purchased them. Getting a call from the Finast store manager expressing Concern About Your Mother. Catching her spooning baking soda into her coffee after dinner. Jason relocating to the garage the DVD player, CD player, desktop PC, food processor and treadmill (they argued about the microwave but it stayed for the time being—their mother being a stickler for finishing up leftovers) one afternoon while her sister took their Mom shopping. Her not noticing their absence but accusing them of stealing her hair dryer, which was found hidden under the bed. Convincing her to let them relocate the washer and dryer to the first floor and padlocking the basement door to keep her from monkeying around with the hot water heater. The third time she fell, again getting the mail and again scraping up her knees, the arm requiring a cast and the knees taking stubbornly long to heal because of her constantly removing the dressings and treating the wound with toothpaste. Initial episodes of incontinence, discovered in bedding days after the fact. The first time she wandered off in the middle of the day without her phone to sit in the back of the church only to be discovered by one of the priests after evening mass and driven home, dehydrated and having not eaten all day. The first time she took off too many clothes in public, again in the church, where she was found sitting in a confession booth in brassiere and undershorts, having deemed it too hot for confession. When she sat through dinner and said nothing, just smiling and moving the food around mindlessly on her plate. The conversations about the car and not driving anymore, after she coasted through a red light and side swiped a UPS truck. When she snuck out in her car again, used a valet key no one knew about in an unpoliced junk drawer somewhere and parked in the grass outside the bingo hall. A one month span where she fell a fourth time and was picked up by paramedics and taken to hospital for a broken rib which progressed into an infection and pneumonia, which kept her in hospital for two weeks, during which the neuro consult told Jason and his sister that they were on a months not years timeline for getting things in order and whereupon coming home she at first didn’t eat because of the pain and then after a week’s more rest wandered off while his sister was a work, stopping first at a Denny’s and ordering food and leaving without paying and then walking down to the cemetery to sit next to their father’s grave, where she fell asleep, caught pneumonia again and was back in hospital where she again refused to eat, deployed startlingly brutal racial slurs at the black nurses to the horror of her children (for their part the nurses were unphased, the unreconstructed grotesqueries lurking in the minds of Midwestern white women born before the 1960s being well known to them), striking the Vietnamese pulmonologist and calling him Charlie during chest auscultation and in the process reinjuring the wrist, after which she had to be thorazined down to prevent her from removing IVs, striking a nurse trying to administer the injection, transitioning to full incontinence, and prompting a return visit from the neurology consult along with a social worker who met separately with Jason and his sister to discuss concerns about advertent and inadvertent self-harm by their Mother and care taker burnout in the case of his sister. When her mother, Jason’s grandmother, came to visit it was by surprise and without invitation, Jason arrived to find her standing next to his mother’s bed talking to the attending, hustling around the bed, tucking, untucking adjusting and discarding, his grandmother said, in response to Jason’s inquiry of what the hell she was doing here, that she always knew that all those years of anti-depression medications would come home to roost someday. And here we are. His sister visiting the house once a day turned to her staying over twice and then 4-5 times a week turned into essentially moving into the spare bedroom and living with her full time. She was pretty much at her wits end, Alice said, and thought it was time for him to come home and call the game. She will be one of the younger ones on the floor, by almost a decade, the manager told him and his sister during one of the first visits to the facility before they took his mother in in what struck him as a somewhat tactless statement, however factual, from someone who should have more experience and grace in discussing such particulars. But then, very quickly, one realizes that nothing in a place like this has much to do with tact or grace. I mean after all, how graceful can one be with someone whose mother can’t remember their name, can’t control her faculties and has gone, in the span of less than a year, from a reasonably pleasant, if sometimes brash middle aged-retired woman to a vulgar, confused invalid. That word: invalid. His mother hated that word. He remembered her speaking of how her own mother cared for her father after he injured his back: she treats him like an invalid. The word spat out with scorn and indignation, like the person was somehow no longer enough. As though he were invalidated. He wept that when the term finally became objectively appropriate for his mother, it was his grandmother who uttered it and his mother was too confused—even had she heard it, which she didn’t—to understand.
The worst part of The Billionaire’s divorce-plus-infidelity scandal that year was the truly awful text messages that were released, in which he talked about just wanting to smell her, used the phrase alive girl…inexcusably cackhanded unromantic high school bullshit. Maybe the redacted text that went along with the pictures of his junk was redeemably raunchy? But what was released was unforgivably insipid and about as romantic as ordering your beloved flannel pajamas from Amazon. I love you. I am in love with you. I want to hold you tight. I want to kiss your lips. I love you alive girl. I want to smell you. I want to breath you in. I will show you with my body and my lips and my eyes, very soon. Basically I WANT TO BE WITH YOU!!! Then I want to fall asleep with you and wake up tomorrow and read the paper with you and have coffee with you. It wasn’t the loss of the hundred billion dollars or whatever it was. It was the godawful prose. Go deeper, she said. I’m out of adjectives, the poet replied.
