Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 28-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
“Oh shit,” I say to my brother on the phone. Dad is being discharged too soon. He’s still hallucinating.
“Jeannie?” Mom calls from her chair in the living room.
“Yes?” I say, still on the phone.
“Bring me the round bottom pot on the lower shelf in the cupboard to the right of the sink.”
“You mean the top of the double boiler?”
“Yes,” she says. “I feel sick.”
Good to know her preferred piece of cookware to vomit into.
“Gotta go,” I tell my brother, who has jokingly forbidden me to stay more than one night with my mother for fear I’ll go insane.
She doesn’t throw up. I rub her back while she has some dry heaves.
“Oh, Jeannie, you’re so good with me.”
And I am, but I am also frustrated and frightened. I don’t exhibit fear with my Mom. This must be how it is for my brother, too, when he tells me he feels defeated. And of other amateur caregivers, family members chucked into the chaos of keeping their parents’ lives together while their own lives go down the drain. While I’m with her, I do what I am told. I listen. I hold her hand.
I got her to eat some yogurt when she said she felt sick. She didn’t like the yogurt because it had a “strange flavor” and it’s likely that I’m supposed to think the yogurt and the pasta sauce from the night before has made her sick. I don’t know.
She says she’ll have cheese on toast for lunch. I tell her I will make it for her, but right at that moment I am heating up leftovers of the “too strong” pasta for my lunch. I sit down to eat it in my Dad’s chair and she says, “I guess I’ll get my cheese on toast now.”
“I will get it,” I say. “But may I just finish my lunch first?”
“Of course, dearie,” she says.
Who has lunch five minutes after almost throwing up? Not to mention, she had breakfast an hour earlier. I rush through my lunch and get back to the kitchen to make hers. I slide a slice of 60{e5d2c082e45b5ce38ac2ea5f0bdedb3901cc97dfa4ea5e625fd79a7c2dc9f191} whole wheat into the toaster, grate a very small amount of cheddar, slather Becel margarine on the toast, spread the tiny layer of cheese on the toast and get it under the grill (not before having a corner of the fragile toast break off and cheese spill onto the warm stovetop to melt and make a big mess, me cursing silently, vehemently, nearing the end of tether, rope; hoops all jumped through).
I carefully get the toast out onto the right plate, cut it diagonally, check the clock, grab a few grapes and head in there.
One (me) is always doing something wrong, it seems. Back to the kitchen to put the plate on the tray. She sits there a long time looking at it and while I packed up my things she manages to eat half of one piece, so basically a quarter of one slice of bread, before saying, “This is more cheese than I normally have, Jeannie dear. Can you wrap this up for my lunch tomorrow and put it in the fridge?”
“Yes.”
“Use the wax paper.”
“Yes Mom.”
The doing of dishes—breakfast, lunch and dinner—never seems to stop. There is a bag of garbage tied up on the floor near the fridge, ready to go outside to the garbage can, about three times a day. Where is all this garbage coming from?
Yesterday, while we were looking for the stopper for the hot-water bottle, she wanted to go through the garbage. I used the scissors to cut open the bag and started moving the mounds of used Kleenex around, hoping to see the red plug in the sea of damp white tissues without having to get my hands in there. I started to feel a bit sick myself.
I ended up buying a new hot-water bottle, after which I found the stopper in the bottom of the laundry basket, when I went to fold more towels than any household should actually have.
“Do you use a towel once and then put it in the wash?”
“No,” she said.
I had the bus times figured out, but after lunch it was time for tea or was it time for the precisely poured glass of milk? On and on.
“I’m not going to worry about the dirty marks on the bathroom floor,” she says.
Which means go and clean the bathroom floor, Jeannie.
