Hungry Hill: A Memoir

Chapter 34 - Planning for the Future

A Memoir 177 34. Planning for the Future My mother w as never sick in bed even one day until her cancer, and then she died; but Mary runs to doctors so often that she drops their names in conversations as if they are family members—Uncle Bill, Dr. Baltrucki. Only doctors understand her; I could not. With the back of her wrist to her forehead, Mary announces over a dinner of pork chops and Mott’s apple sauce that she needs an operation. My eyes glaze over when she lists her weekly ailments, involving body parts and conditions I had overlooked in tenth-grade biology. When Mary mentions her pain, I blank out. I cannot fix pain. A willing, obedient patient, she seeks out doctors she can charm or manipulate until she finds one who listens to her ailments and agrees to do whatever it is she wants. Doctors who dismiss her concerns she condemns as unfeeling, unprofessional, and a long litany of failures that she links in a vague way to the Hippocratic Oath. What the doctors she favors do best is cut. She is now scheduled for a hysterectomy. Last year, right after the wedding, she had a hiatal hernia. Michael, Danny, and I joke she is only on the letter “H” in her medical symptom book. Like her white mohair coat, Mary wore her hypochondria proudly. As we wait for the elevator in the lobby of Saint Francis Hospital, my father turns and asks me not to say anything that might upset Mary. After all, this is their one-year anniversary and here she is in the hospital. What better place? I think. If there were a list of unacceptable topics that could get Mary going I would avoid them, steer away from them, but the way I figure it, I just never know what topic will get Mary going until we are smack in the middle of it. I have a better chance of ordering an eightydegree day in a Springfield winter than I do of controlling Mary’s reactions to me, to what I say or do. Tonight I promise myself to adopt a respectful silence. What harm could there be in silence? I reason; yet I know Mary could attack my quiet, could say that I really do not want to be there visiting her, that I want to be hanging out with my high school friends. Mary 178 H u n g ry H i l l could spit out the words friends so that Jean, Pat, Maria, Margaret, Mary Anne, and the twins might just as well be vagrants I’d picked up at the Peter Pan bus station on Main Street. Her green striped cosmetic bag is zippered shut on the bed stand. In spite of pain medication, Where is that nurse when she needs her pain medication ? Mary’s lips are painted that perpetual pink, the eyebrows that same perfect umbrella-shaped black. “Joe, the roses are beautiful. They were here in the room when they wheeled me in from recovery,” she says weakly, wiping away a tear and reaching for my father’s hand. I sit quietly, reviewing in my head how many lines of Virgil I have to prepare tonight, grateful for the translation book I had bought at Johnson’s Bookstore.According to the Baltimore Catechism, since visiting the sick is one of the corporal works of mercy, my divine tally sheet should jump up a notch or two with this visit. Out in the parking lot where I can unclench my fists, I realize that this night anyway, there were no skirmishes, no battles, as Mary lay sedated in the hospital bed. As the car crosses the Enfield line and I spy the “Welcome to Massachusetts ” sign, I start breathing normally again. The green and white road sign seems friendly, hopeful even. But when my dad pulls our station wagon into the driveway, he grips his hands around the steering wheel and sighs. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you.” He sounds serious, almost sad. “You’re dating that boy Kevin now. And, and I don’t want anything to happen to you.” His tone is scaring me. “What do you mean? Nothing is going to happen to me.” “I don’t want you getting pregnant.” Has he lost his mind? I’m not sure what’s involved in pregnancy, but I’m not even close. “Dad, Kevin hasn’t even kissed me good...