Choke

Chapter 6

THE NEXT TIME I GO VISIT MY MOM I'm still Fred Hastings, her old public defender, and she keeps me yakking all afternoon. Until I tell her I'm still not married, and she says that's a shame. Then she turns on the television, some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.

The next visit, I'm still Fred but married and with three children. That's better, but three children ... Three is too many. People should stop at two, she says.

The next visit, I have two.

Every visit there's less and less of her under the blanket.

In another way, there's less and less of Victor Mancini sitting in the chair next to her bed.

The next day, I'm myself again, and it's only a few minutes before my mom rings for the nurse to escort me back to the lobby. We sit not talking until I pick up my coat, then she says, "Victor?"

She says, "I need to tell you something."

She's rolling a ball of lint between her fingers, rolling it smaller and tighter, and when she finally looks up at me, she says, "Fred Hastings was here. You remember Fred, don't you?"

Yeah, I remember.

These days, he has a wife and two perfect children. It was such a pleasure, my mom says, to see life work out for such a good person.

"I told him to buy land," my mom says, "they're not making it anymore."

I ask her who she means by "they," and she presses the nurse button again.

On my way out, I find Dr. Marshall waiting in the hallway. She's standing just outside my mom's door, leafing through notes on her clipboard, and she looks up at me, her eyes beady behind her thick glasses. Her one hand is clicking and unclicking a ball- point pen, fast.

"Mr. Mancini?" she says. She folds her glasses and puts them in the chest pocket of her lab coat and says, "It's important that we discuss your mother's case."

The stomach tube.

"You asked about other options," she says.

From the nurse's station down the hallway, three staffers watch us, their heads tilted together. One named Dina calls, "Do we need to chaperon the two of you?"

And Dr. Marshall says, "Mind your own business, please."

To me, she whispers, "These small operations, the staff acts as if they're still in high school."

Dina, I've had.

See also: Clare, RN.

See also: Pearl, CNA.

The magic of sex is it's acquisition without the burden of possessions. No matter how many women you take home, there's never a storage problem.

To Dr. Marshall, her ears and nervous hands, I say, "I don't want her force-fed."

The nurses still watching, Dr. Marshall cups a hand behind my arm and walks me farther away from them, saying, "I've been talking to your mother. She's quite a woman. Her political actions. All her demonstrations. You must love her very much."

And I say, "Well, I wouldn't go as far as that."

We stop, and Dr. Marshall whispers something so I have to step closer to hear. Too close. The nurses still watching. And breathing against my chest, she says, "What if we could completely restore your mother's mind?" Clicking and unclicking her pen, she says,

"What if we could make her the intelligent, strong, vibrant woman she used to be?"

My mother, the way she used to be.

"It may be possible," says Dr. Marshall.

And not thinking how it sounds, I say, "God forbid."

Then real fast, I say that's probably not such a great idea.

And down the hall, the nurses are laughing, their hands cupped over their mouths. And from even that far away, you can hear Dina say, "It would serve him right."

On my next visit, I'm still Fred Hastings and my kids both get straight As in school. That week, Mrs. Hastings is painting our dining room green.

"Blue is better," my mom says, "for a room you're going to put any sort of food in."

After that, the dining room is blue. We live on East Pine Street. We're Catholics. We save our money at City First Federal. We drive a Chrysler.

All at my mom's suggestion.

The next week, I start writing things down, the details, so I won't forget who I'm supposed to be from one week to the next. The Hastings always drive to Robson Lake for our vacation, I write. We fish for steelhead. We want the Packers to win. We never eat oysters. We were buying land. Each Saturday, I first sit in the dayroom and study my notes while the nurse goes to see if my mom is awake.

Whenever I step into her room and introduce myself as Fred Hastings, she points the remote control to turn the television off.

Boxwoods around a house are fine, she tells me, but privets would be better.

And I write it down.

The best kind of people drink scotch, she says. Clean your gutters in October, then again in November, she says. Wrap your car's air filter in toilet paper for longer service life. Prune evergreens only after the first frost. And ash makes the best firewood.

I write it all down. I inventory what's left of her, the spots and wrinkles and her swollen or empty skin and flakes and rashes, and I write reminders to myself.

Every day: Wear sunblock.

Cover your gray.

Don't go insane.

Eat less fats and sugars.

Do more sit-ups.

Don't start forgetting stuff.

Trim the hair in your ears.

Take calcium.

Moisturize. Every day.

Freeze time to stay in one place forever.

Do not get frigging old.

She says, "Do you hear anything from my son, Victor? Do you remember him?"

I stop. I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means.

Victor, my mom says, never comes to visit, and if he does, he never listens. Victor's busy and distracted and doesn't care. He's dropped out of medical school and is making a big mess out of his life.

She picks at the lint on her blanket. "He's got some minimum-wage kind of job as a tour guide or something," she says. She sighs, and her terrible yellow hands find the remote control.

I ask, wasn't Victor looking after her? Didn't he have a right to live his own life? I say, maybe Victor is so busy because he's out every night, literally killing himself to pay her bills for constant care. That's three grand each month just to break even. Maybe that's why Victor left school. I say, just for the sake of argument, that maybe Victor's doing his frigging best.

I say, it could be that Victor does more than anybody gives him credit for.

And my mom smiles and says, "Oh Fred, you're still the defender of the hopelessly guilty."

My mom turns on the television, and a beautiful woman in a glittering evening dress hits another beautiful young woman over the head with a bottle. The bottle doesn't even mess her hair, but it gives her amnesia.

Maybe Victor's struggling with problems of his own, I say.

The one beautiful woman reprograms the amnesia woman into thinking she's a killer robot that must do the beautiful woman's bidding. The killer robot accepts her new identity so easy you have to wonder if she's just faking the amnesia and was always looking for a good reason to go on a killing spree.

Me talking to my mom, my anger and resentment just sort of piddles out as we sit and watch.

My mother used to serve eggs scrambled with dark flakes of the nonstick coating from the frying pan. She cooked with aluminum pots, and we drank lemonade out of spun aluminum cups while we chewed on their soft cold lips. We used underarm deodorants made with aluminum salts. For sure, there's about a million ways we could've got to this point.

During a commercial, my mom asks for just one good thing about Victor's personal life. What did he do for fun? Where did he see himself in another year? Another month? Another week?

By now, I have no idea.

"And just what the hell do you mean," she says, "about Victor killing himself every night?"