Читать книгу Incontinent on the Continent - Jane Christmas - Страница 8
ОглавлениеNOW, WHAT are you going to do about that hair?”
This was my mother’s immediate reaction when I broached the idea of our going to Italy. Just her and me. For six weeks.
“Nothing,” I replied. I picked up a magazine from the coffee table and began to leaf through it, pretending not to be bothered by her comment. “I’m not doing anything about my hair.”
Even with my eyes averted I knew Mom’s jaw was tightening and her head was shaking with disapproval. She is convinced that if she could just fix my hair she could fix my life. As if it were that easy.
Mom is five feet two inches short with a soft, plump body and a round face that exudes a charming, effervescent sweetness. Beneath that sugary exterior, however, is a tough cookie. Imagine, if you will, a cross between Queen Victoria and Hyacinth Bucket (“It’s pronounced ‘bouquet,’ dear,” the fussy, social-climbing character on the Britcom Keeping Up Appearances constantly reminds people).
She has a thoroughly determined personality, my mom. Her opinions and beliefs are so entrenched that a tidal wave of evidence to the contrary cannot dissuade her. Her faith in God is as unwavering as her certainty that she will win the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. She pooh-poohs the notion that man ever set foot on the moon: according to my mother, the lunar landing was staged in a movie studio.
Mom’s hair is blond—ash blond, according to the product description—and she has maintained the same hairstyle for as long as I can remember: short, frothy, and layered. She likes it shorter at the back of her neck because she complains that that area gets hot. The front is swept off her face to reveal a smooth forehead; the sides are slightly curled.
To my mom, a tidy hairstyle signifies order, control, maturity (the very qualities, coincidentally, she feels I lack), and she trots out her theory like religious dogma at every opportunity.
Whether watching tv, stopped at a traffic light, sitting in a church pew, reading the newspaper, or getting groceries, my mother monitors the world’s hairstyles. No one escapes her appraisal: the Queen (“A bit too severe”), Adolph Hitler (“I hope he shot his barber”), the Woman in the Street (“That style does nothing for her”), Robert Redford (“Perfect”). Wander into my mother’s range of vision and you’ll get an immediate, no-charge assessment.
Men I have dated and introduced to my mother have been accepted or rejected—mostly rejected—on the basis of their hair: “I didn’t know whether to let him in or sweep him off the doorstep. That hair!” Or, “You tell him that he’s not sitting at my dining room table unless he gets a haircut.” Or, “He’d look much better if he parted his hair on the side.” Or, “His hair is his best feature, and that’s not saying much.” On rare occasions, she has confided: “Oh, I do like his hair.” The guy could be a serial killer but that would only register as a minor concern.
To my mom, hair is the yardstick by which civilized people are measured—and that includes me. She scolds me if my hair drifts into my eyes (“Get it off your face”), for not getting it cut short enough (“I hope the hairdresser paid you for that cut”), or for not having age-appropriate hair (“A woman your age should have a neat, smart hairstyle”).
When she spots an agreeable style in a magazine or in a shopping mall she shoots me a baleful look and says: “There’s a nice style for you.” A tight smile or a nod indicating total agreement from me is usually sufficient to end the conversation— until she hones in on another passing hairstyle. Lately, she’s been pushing a short streaky blond bob as the elixir to happiness. The fact that such a hairstyle would not work with my face shape, my personality, or my impossibly fine, unpredictable dark hair is inconsequential.
If I have learned anything in life, it is that my one-day-limp, next-day-curly hair is best left alone. Over the years, I have made peace with my hair, but I have not done so with my mother. I wanted us to go to Italy to see if I could finally fall in love with her. This trip was my olive branch.
I wasn’t going to allow her question about my hair to bug me. Not one bit.
I looked up nonchalantly from the magazine I was perusing and flashed a calm smile to mask the emotional maelstrom that was swirling and slopping inside me like the contents of the boiling cauldron being stirred by the Three Witches.
“Dishevelled is my look,” I said playfully, tousling my hair as I prepared to shift the conversation to our travel itinerary.
“Your hair looks like your life,” she said.
WHAT WOULD possess anyone to go to Italy, the Land of Love, with a sparring partner?
The answer: it was part détente, part deathbed request.
It has been a source of sadness and perplexity that my mother and I have not been able to get along. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not always a battle. The wary coolness between us has evaporated during moments of laughter or when we have weathered loss together. She never turned down a request to look after my children when I was struggling to adapt to single parenthood; she has always been a kind and generous grandparent. I, too, have been there for her: when she falls ill or when she needs my help around her home. She has even been known to seek my opinion.
Still, the tectonic plates of our relationship have never stopped shifting, and the fault lines—there’s an interesting metaphor—have, according to my mom, been entirely my creations. She also thinks I am too sensitive—and there is no question that I am—but she doesn’t think she needs to modify her tact when dealing with me.
“You take my words too seriously,” she scolds impatiently.
“Really?” I reply. “So when you say that my hair looks like a rat’s nest I should just laugh it off?”
“No,” she answers thoughtfully. “You should go to a hairdresser and do something about it.”
It’s that sort of no-win bickering.
Then there is the matter of the deathbed request:
“Make friends with your mother,” my father had instructed as I sat on the edge of his hospital bed a few weeks before he died.
I had wanted to scream, “CAN’T YOU JUST ASK ME TO WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE IN MEDICINE? THAT WOULD BE EASIER!”
When my father died in 1999, Mom and I lost our mediator and our buffer. We were left to soldier on through the minefield of our relationship as best we could. We maintained an awkward truce while marching to the beat of old drums.
Now, with life ebbing away and my mother’s health issues mounting, I decided to be proactive and use what time we had left to set things right—if that were at all possible. So I came up with this ingenious idea of a trip to Italy. I wanted to see whether my mother and I could spend six weeks together without biting off each other’s head, six weeks so distracted by art and antiquity that we could see each other as the individual works of art—flaws and all—that we are. I wanted to get to know this woman I call Mom, a woman I’m pretty certain, deep down, I love—but have had trouble liking. I hoped that in Italy the conversations I’ve always wanted to have with my mother would bubble up and help ease, if not resolve, decades of discontent.
I believe we take two trips when we embark on a journey of almost any duration: there’s the physical trip, with its attendant need for schedules, accommodations, maps, and fretting about what to pack, how much money to bring, where to go and what to see, all the while anticipating possible calamities. Then there’s the parallel journey, the internal journey. We talk about “leaving it all behind,” but in reality a lot of emotional and primal baggage accompanies us on our travels. Trips are as much about testing ourselves or seeing how we adapt to a new place or to unfamiliar circumstances as they are about exploring new territory. Removing ourselves from our daily routines, from day-to-day relationships, from regimentation, allows us to see ourselves and others more clearly in new surroundings. Sometimes it allows us to resolve a gnawing problem or to find clarity about a situation or event from our present or our past. In this, I was no different: I wanted to resolve the mother-daughter dilemma.
Most daughters have an uneasy or tempestuous relationship with their moms. Just ask them, and stand by for a torrent of venting. It’s usually a one-sided complaint—most mothers will rarely admit to difficulties with their daughters (and being the mother of a daughter I know of what I speak). Show me a mother who claims to have a great relationship with her daughter, and I’ll show you a daughter in therapy.
Privately, many mothers fret about their relationships with their daughters. Maybe that’s because mothers see themselves most clearly in their daughters. When they are successful we feel a shared sense of accomplishment; when an argument flares between mother and daughter it is like arguing with ourselves. I gleaned this handy bit of insight from Don the electrician. An electrician. How apropos.
One morning, while Don was fishing wires through a wall in my home, my daughter’s fuse blew. I can’t remember what the issue was, but I do clearly recall trying to keep the argument quiet because, well, I really dislike public displays of aggression. Zoë had no such reservations, and our quarrel regrettably escalated to the point where the electrician felt it prudent to intervene.
“You know why you two are arguing, don’t you?” Don interrupted, straining to be heard above our raised voices.
Zoë and I froze, a bit shocked by the intrusion but nonetheless curious about what he had to say.
“Because you’re both exactly the same!” he said with exasperation.
Zoë stormed off, horrified by the verdict. My reaction was quite different: The Little Voice Inside let out a victory cry of “Yes!” Deep down, mothers yearn for their daughters to be mirror images of themselves. For daughters, it’s different.
There’s nothing worse for a woman than to be told, “You’re just like your mother.” Not even when it is said in a nice way.
I’ll admit: I sometimes live vicariously through my daughter. Zoë is the type of young woman I wanted to be at her age: smart, confident, unafraid to push back against authority. (She also does amazing, twisty things with her hair, a knack I can’t even begin to learn). I was very much a late bloomer when it came to finding my groove. Seriously late: like, in my forties. Some of that emotional growth spurt occurred while Zoë was flexing her teenage spirit, and her newfound feistiness occasionally clashed with mine. It was a marked contrast to my teenage rebellion and my own mother’s midlife awakening. Whereas I let the reins on my daughter slacken slightly, my mother gripped them tighter and yanked on them. She was often strict and sharp with me and never short on advice about how to improve my life or my appearance. Handwritten notes accompanied by pertinent newspaper clippings or religious homilies frequently appeared in my mailbox.
I just knew that another side of my mother existed, a fun-loving character with an intrepid nature. I wanted to spend time with that person.
Like me, my mother found her voice late in life. Her boundless creativity and can-do spirit was out of step with the times. The 1960s, for all the psychedelic talk of freedom and “doing your own thing,” were still a time of repression, not least for women. Proper women stayed home to raise their children and do volunteer work; they didn’t make waves, and those who defied convention would have their husbands’ masculinity called into question. My mother managed to maintain the status quo on the home and volunteer fronts, but she also wrote a newspaper column and cultivated hobbies that weren’t typical of a suburban mother in those days. She was different from any other mother I knew.
Along with my father, she developed a passion for preserving old homes. When no one could be found to assume old ruins slated for demolition, our family would move in. No house was deemed too run-down to save—not even if the place lacked running water. It bears reminding that in the early 1960s, the term “home renovation” was not in the lexicon.
Mom also had an insatiable appetite for antiques and was adept at scouring the back rooms and basements of dusty antique shops in parts of downtown Toronto where no other mother dared to tread. She cared not that the rest of civilized North America was swooning over the Swedish Modern look or that the color palate of the ’60s favored hot-pink and fluorescent green: Our family lived in a 19th-century time warp of ball-and-claw-footed chairs, brocade and damask upholstery, inlaid walnut tables, and mahogany dining room suites that could seat twelve people. Our home resembled the set of The Addams Family. I was the only eight-year-old who knew that crewel work was not a reference to torture. Frequently my mom would drag me into shop after shop on her endless but unspecified quest for “a piece.” When something caught her eye—a china platter or a carved medallion, for instance—she would lovingly examine it, running a delicate finger slowly and reverently around its detailed scalloped edges while marvelling at its beauty. It made me flush with jealousy; I craved for her to touch, admire, and notice me in the same way.
We operate differently as parents, my mother and I, and yet—and it pains me to admit this—there are undeniable similarities, just like Don the electrician said about Zoë and me. In an effort to be our own people we will deny any similarities and even try to make them look like differences.
Later in life, when I had children of my own, some of my mother’s criticism waned, but the wounds never healed. All it took was one comment about my hair, my housekeeping standards, or my parenting skills to reopen the scars. I adopted unconsciously her insistence on perfection in everything and everyone around me, including her.
I also inherited my mother’s penchant for busyness. Single parenting for much of my adult life was a frightening juggling act of keeping my head above water financially while maintaining the facade that the lack of a husband/father was but a minor inconvenience. I tossed more balls in the air just to prove my point. I enlisted my children to help out so we could all appear productive, respectable, and on our toes. I subscribe to the belief that chores and responsibilities are important to a child’s development, but the memory of my own chore-filled childhood was a reminder to go easy on them and to cultivate within them, and within me, gentleness, helpfulness, and forgiveness. I didn’t always succeed but I tried.
Somehow, I could not bring myself to be gentle with my mother.
Not that it was all miserable between my mom and me. We’re white Anglo-Saxons after all; we are able to hide vast amounts of emotional damage behind stiff upper lips, fake smiles, and forced laughter. Still, an awkward detachment exists.
The question that has always bedevilled me—besides, Was I adopted?—is, How did my mother and I fall off the rails so early in our relationship and why was there no attempt to mend our rift? Instead, we let things drift and accepted dysfunction as the status quo. Whenever we locked eyes it was like the bell had been struck to begin another round. Still, no matter how bitter things got we never left the ring. We kept swinging and bouncing off the ropes till we all but exhausted ourselves.
A trip to Italy was the reward for two old prizefighters.
What better place to hash out mother-daughter matters than in Italy? The country positively invented motherhood— worships it, in fact. It is the backbone of Italy’s dominant religion; it is woven into the social fabric; it is an iconic feature of the culture. You cannot picture Italy without visualizing a robust mother smiling at the head of the family dinner table or smacking the head of a misbehaving adult son or pinching his cheeks with her chubby fingers out of love and pride.
Italy seemed like the best place to view our relationship from a safe, therapeutic distance; a place where we could assess the past as if it had been some kind of psychosocial experiment whose results had been submitted for peer review, and where we could regard the hurt, the rage, the what-ifs, the sharp words, the crushing disappointments with breezy dispassion.
Who was I kidding?
Still, nothing can silence my mother like the sight of a faded tapestry or an ancient ruin, and that was another reason I thought Italy would be perfect for us: When we ooh and ahh over stone follies, pastoral views, oil paintings, and antiques, we give voice to a common denominator that confirms our familial tie, a tie frayed by too many years of tugging.
Our shared interest in antiquity was the reason we gave when well-meaning friends, aware of our contentious history, carefully inquired as to why we were going on holiday together. But the unspoken reason—one that my mom and I could barely admit to one another—was that we were going to use the background of the Italian Renaissance to spark a renaissance of our own.
I WAS stretched out on my tummy on the living room carpet like a teenager, legs bent at ninety-degree angles and crossed at the ankles, elbows propping me up as I pressed the phone’s receiver to my ear. My favorite book, the National Geographic Atlas of the World, was open in front of me. My index finger was languorously following the contours of Italy’s curvaceous coastline while my mind dallied with fantasies involving stiletto heels and a swarthy hunk named Giancarlo. Then Mom’s voice spoke sharply across the phone line.
“And make sure you tell them I need a wheelchair. Those airports are too big, and I can’t make it from the check-in counter to the plane without one.”
Poof! Giancarlo and the stilettos vanished.
The words “wheelchair” and “Italy” seemed incompatible, almost as incompatible as my mother and I. The mere mention of a wheelchair caused my chest to tighten and brought my vocal chords to the brink of a scream. I had only considered pushing my mother around Italy in a purely metaphorical sense.
“And I’m bringing my walker. The red one.”
I hate the walker. It makes me feel seriously old, even though I’m not the one using it. I do not like to think of myself as being old enough to have a mother who uses a walker. And of course when you walk with someone who is pushing a walker, you unconsciously adopt the walker shuffle: a slow, deliberate one-step, the type of gait you use when you’re recovering from a C-section or hysterectomy.
The wheelchair was but one consideration in planning this trip.
My mother is at an age where myriad health issues are gradually clipping her wings. (She has threatened to cut me out of her will if I divulge her exact age, so let’s just say that she is younger than one hundred and older than sixty-five.)
Seating on the plane had to be near a washroom: my mom is incontinent.
The hotel rooms had to have ensuites for the same reason.
The hotel could not have too many stairs: my mom has osteoarthritis in her knees.
The distance from the lobby to the hotel room could not be too far: my mom has asthma and heart problems.
Food to nibble on needed to be packed: my mom has diabetes.
No-fish meals had to be requested: my mom is allergic to seafood.
Rental cars had to have enough storage space to stow the walker.
Mom also has two canes: a fold-up cane for travelling and a non-folding cane in case she loses the fold-up one. (She only brought one to Italy.)
Did I mention that she’s hard of hearing? (At times I think this affliction is selective.)
“Other than that I’m perfectly healthy,” Mom cheerfully told me.
“Are you sure?” I asked as we discussed our trip.
“Absolutely,” she said.
Most women my age planning a six-week holiday to Italy would be conducting forensic online research into the precise location of every Ferragamo or Prada outlet in the country. My research consisted of figuring out how much room a package of incontinence diapers would take up in a suitcase and whether a smorgasbord of medication and asthma puffers would be an issue at customs.
Travelling with a senior is not much different from travelling with a small child. Same preparation time, same cargo-ship’s worth of paraphernalia in anticipation of every manner of disaster, same dashing-back-into-the-house routine to retrieve a forgotten item. The gear is essentially the same; a pale blue or pink carrying bag is replaced by one in a more dignified sage or black. Walkers or wheelchairs replace strollers, books and magazines replace toys, peppermint candies replace cookies, sweaters and shawls replace blankies, eyeglasses and hearing aids replace pacifiers—and diapers are replaced by, well, bigger diapers.
Then there is the medication.
I dropped in one day to help Mom with her packing. Her bed was heaped with bottles and jars and crinkly packages. It looked as if she and her neighbors had taken the contents of their medicine cabinets and dumped them.
“What’s all this?” I said with mild horror.
“My medication,” she replied matter-of-factly.
I’ll admit, not proudly either, that whenever Mom launched into a description of her health problems and prescriptions the information waltzed in one ear and out the other. As soon as she uttered the words “I was at the doctor’s the other day,” I would politely say, “Keep talking,” and leave the room to pour myself a large glass of wine.
That behavior ended when I became the person who would be carrying her luggage to, through, and back from Italy.
I looked down at the array of pills on her bed and shook my head. There was a prescription for everything short of leprosy.
“Don’t worry,” said Mom. “The pharmacist is making up dose-ettes for me.”
“What?”
“Like this.” She held out a cardboard platform with small plastic bubblelike compartments arranged in a grid, containing all the pills to be consumed that day. Across the top row was marked, in large type, the days of the week; down the left side was the time of day—morning, noon, evening—the medication was to be taken.
“Why do you need a prescription for vitamins?” I asked, peering at the label of one medicine bottle I had picked up at random.
“Because the doctor gave it to me,” she said in a tone of voice reserved for addressing morons.
“You should check whether your doctor isn’t getting a kickback from the pharmacist,” I said. “You can buy this stuff over the counter and save yourself the dispensing fee.”
“Don’t interfere,” she said petulantly. “I know what I’m doing. Besides, it’s hard to get a doctor these days.”
My packing required less attention to health concerns; I am, touch wood, in good health. I don’t believe in taking medication of any sort—not even vitamins—except when something like sudden depression or a freak infection hits me, and then I am all for prescription drugs.
Without the worry of drugs and walking aids, I loaded my suitcase with clothes and makeup. And shoes. I seem to require a lot of shoes whenever I travel. I also cannot leave home without a small arsenal of face creams, cleansers, shower gels, hair conditioners, and body lotions to fend off dry weather. Whenever I pack and review my heaving case of toiletries, I realize with a heavy heart that I was born in the wrong part of the world. My skin and hair are at their best in tropical climates.
All the guidebooks and Web sites I had perused before heading to Italy mentioned that during the winter months the weather was moderate and mostly warm, especially in the south. I happily packed light skirts, sandals, T-shirts, and—because there would be a pool at one place we had booked—bathing suits and silky pareos.
Mom left all the arrangements and decisions about the trip in my hands (“Wherever you want to go is fine with me”) and then insisted on seeing a printed itinerary of the sort found in travel brochures or issued by tour operators.
Rarely do I travel with a plan. I’m like Robert Louis Stevenson, who once said, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.” But since Mom was expecting something more than “Get on plane; fly to London, then to Bari. Rent car,” I cobbled together a basic plan to keep her happy.
This was it: We would f ly from Toronto to London, transfer to a flight to Bari, rent a car; and drive from Bari to Alberobello, where we would stay for two weeks. From there we would drive to Sorrento and stay for four days, then drive from Sorrento to Viterbo, our base for three weeks. Our flight home would begin in Rome, with a connecting flight in London.
I was especially proud of the accommodations I had booked.
In Alberobello we would be staying in a renovated trullo. Trulli are the traditional small shelters built about eight hundred years ago by field workers in Italy’s Apulia region. They look like little white stucco beehives with conical slate roofs. As a field worker’s family grew, so did the trullo, and more beehive-shaped units were added. Eventually some trulli consisted of three or four buildings, each cone serving as a room. Trulli are the latest real-estate craze, especially among the Brits, who are flocking to the area and snapping them up as income properties. One of those Brits happens to be the brother of my beau, Colin. Mom and I would be his first clients.
In Sorrento we had booked a family-run hotel that had been recommended by an acquaintance.
Our Viterbo digs consisted of a medieval town house I came across on the Internet. It was located in the center of the old quarter, and its Web site promised antique stores and cafés right outside the front door. It would be perfect for my antique-loving mom, and for me since I love soaking up the historical atmosphere in out-of-the-way places.
“And of course we’re going to Tuscany and Venice,” said Mom as she scrupulously reviewed my itinerary.
Neither of those places was part of my plan. I was so sick of clichés about Tuscany and its amber-colored, manufactured romanticism that I had lost interest in the place long before preparing for this trip to Italy. As for Venice, a friend who had recently returned from a visit had told me it was dirty and dismal. I nixed Venice, too.
“We’re not going to Tuscany or Venice?” Mom asked loudly. “What’s Italy without Tuscany or Venice?”
“Exactly,” I replied firmly. “We are not going near the tourist traps.”
“Look,” she said, fixing me with a dark, penetrating stare. “I’ve never been to Italy, and this is the one and only time I’ll be there. This is my last trip to Europe. Make no mistake: We are going to Tuscany and Venice!”
“Well, we might go into Tuscany a bit,” I allowed.
“And Florence,” she said emphatically, not quite grabbing me with both hands by the lapels, but you get the picture. “We have to go to Florence.”
“Yes, of course,” I sputtered.
I felt myself shrinking into a ten-year-old version of myself, so I squared my shoulders, straightened what remained of my backbone, and said, “Listen here. This isn’t going to be one of those holidays where we’re rushing from one end of the country to the other. I am not going to be forced to drive like a lunatic all over the place. Do you understand?”
“I know,” she said, her eyes refusing to meet my gaze. “That won’t happen.”
