This post is not about Doomsday. I figure if you’re here to read it on Sunday, you’re probably safe.
I was in Seattle last week, and then the day before yesterday I was in the city at my mother’s, bringing her my old laptop because she wants to “learn how to work the computer and get email.” It hasn’t occurred to her yet that she’ll likely need to send email in order to get email, but I’m sure she’ll figure that out eventually. So I brought her the computer and spent the better part of the afternoon showing her how to turn it on. I set her up with a gmail account and wrote her pages of remedial instructions so long and drawn out that my writing hand went numb.
My mother has never been particularly good at mechanical or conceptual things, and that’s okay; not everyone is, or has to be. It’s taken her years to learn — despite my explaining it to her over and over again — that her flip phone won’t automatically shut off when she closes it. She’s not entirely sure about the light in the fridge. When she and my stepfather were members of a golf club back in the 80s, she learned how to drive a golf cart, but not down hills, and not in reverse (which I suppose is okay because she doesn’t know how to drive, although she did once move my grandfather’s Plymouth from one end of Havemeyer Street to the other by releasing the brake, back when she was 3). Using a butter knife, she once tried to pry the plastic top off the carafe on the expensive Krups drip coffee maker we once bought her, because she couldn’t get it to unscrew; I could just see her forcing the dull blade between the plastic and the metal, trying to jimmy the thing out so she could make her coffee. Then she told me that the carafe was dented because I’d bought her a second.
More recently, and despite lengthy explanations and all sorts of flow charts and labels, I couldn’t teach her how to use the cd player I bought her for her birthday.
“The third button from the left is the open button,” I said.
She started counting from the fourth button from the left. Why? Who knows.
So this computer fixation was, I was sure, going to be the kiss of death (mine) and my days, while I sit here on a tight book deadline, were going to start with her calling me at seven in the morning with questions like “I keep pressing the space bar but nothing is happening.” (That’s because you’re actually clicking the mouse, I said.)
This afternoon, I came home to a message from her — sullen, slurring with the Brooklyn accent she only developed when she hit seventy, sounding like a child.
“It’s broke,” she said. “Broke. Elissa, help me—-the machine is BROKE.” And her voice trailed off, and then she hung up.
By the time I called her back, she was poking at the computer, she said, pressing all sorts of buttons, and nothing was working, including pressing the DELETE key to shut it off (which, I guess, is actually sort of ingenuous. She just wanted to delete the whole broke machine, and make it go away like the spontaneously combusting drummer in Spinal Tap).
“What am I gonna do?” she said, when I got her on the phone. “You leave me with this broke machine to fend for myself, and it’s broke. Broke! This was your plan all along—”
And there it was: the accusation. I’d dragged my exhausted self into the city with the thing, brought a router, set it up, spent six hours with her, and it was my plan all along to make her feel like an idiot. Instead of engaging, I hung up. And I finally realized — it finally occurred to me — that we’re in a very different place now, the two of us.
Things happen slowly; they blur together like scenes in a dream. Your parents are getting older. You’re getting older. You have dinner with friends and the conversation migrates to discussions about illness and older age and the aggression that was always there but that seems to be getting markedly worse by the minute. You order a bourbon, and describe the meals where you took your mother out with a friend from the midwest who has never met her, and she, dateless for years but still quite the looker, grows coy and flirtatious with him, even with the bits of food stuck to her lip that you try and motion for her to wipe off with her fuschia lipstick-stained napkin. And then, looking at you out of the corner of her eye as you take a bite of your bagel, she asks your friend-the-chef if he has a weight problem, and whether his wife, who works as his general manager, is thin. And you want to crawl under the table and die, very quietly.
When did this happen? When did the slope become quite so slippery? You wonder if this will happen to you because someday, you’ll be her age too. And you’ll get angry at the laptop for not behaving itself and you’ll slam it closed and you’ll crack the screen and you’ll place furious blame on whoever it was who gave you the damned thing to begin with and the fact that she was doing it just to make you feel like a moron.
Is this really what it comes down to in this life?
My father used to say that mothers and daughters didn’t have relationships like this, or at least weren’t supposed to. Conversations weren’t supposed to be filled with enmity and old sadness, and mothers’ arrows — pulled from the sheaths slung over the the side opposite their hearts — weren’t supposed to have such perfect aim. And as they got older, that aim was supposed to get worse; not better. People and things are meant to soften over time.
I came home from Seattle bone-tired; I returned home from my mother’s computer lesson and our lunch with a friend, weary — so weary that I was almost dizzy — and I wanted to slip off and take to my bed, like Judy Traherne in Dark Victory. I blamed my exhaustion on jetlag, but in retrospect, I’m not sure that was quite it.
