Vamoose
Kathy AndersonThe sisters took a walk every morning to relieve the extreme boredom of watching their mother die. Dying was the slowest process in the world. It seemed every stinking cell had its own turnoff switch and every rattling breath was designed to trigger yet another.
There was grief too, and a surreal state of denial, but the overriding feeling they had was an intense stultification that reminded them of being in elementary school, trapped in a class that would not end, where a teacher mouthed unintelligible, meaningless facts at them and all the sisters wanted was for the bell to ring and release them to a recess yard full of fresh air and sunshine.
They walked at different times so that Mother was never left alone. Those glorious walks. A sister by herself is a happy sister. Neither of them could believe they had survived an entire childhood crammed into that tiny row house bedroom, in bunk beds stacked over each other like prisoners in a jail cell. They had both left home as soon as they could and had never gone back. Wednesday was returning home from what she thought of as her morning sanity walk when a purple van pulled up, its sides festooned with a huge logo reading Mice-Be-Gone and a horrifying graphic of a stampede of mice swarming a kitchen. She gagged and doubled over the sidewalk, trying to keep her chocolate croissant inside.
“I told you not to call them,” she cried to Tuesday, her older sister, who was holding the front door wide open for the
exterminator. “How can we have him spraying while Mother is dying in there? It’s obscene.”
“We don’t, uh, spray,” the exterminator corrected her. “We, uh, inject these packets into the walls, they can’t resist licking them, then they go outside and explode. It has, uh, to do with creating tremendous thirst in them.”
He held out a small plastic packet to show them. His bare hands were shaking, making the lethal pellets inside the packet rattle. He was new to exterminating, that was clear.
“We can’t live with mice,” Tuesday said. “I’m going berserk. I haven’t slept in a week. I swear to god I’m going to go to a hotel if he can’t get rid of them.”
“Please stop.” Wednesday was a vegetarian, a wannabe Buddhist. She did not care to think about animals dying, did not want to be the cause of more suffering in the world.
The exterminator explained that mice were only trying to get away from so many predators. Outside there were feral cats, foxes living in the nearby cemetery, skunks in sheds and under porches, and hawks and owls overhead ready to swoop down. He had studied a terrifying graphic of this very fact, showing a tiny mouse surrounded by danger.
“Did you know mice are mammals? The mothers nurse their babies, like with mouse breasts,” he said.
The sisters blinked at him, trying to understand what on earth he was telling them.
“You could leave them alone, they won’t come inside the rooms,” he said. “They need to be in the walls to survive.”
“But they run around in there all night long, we can hear them gnawing. Every time I’m finally almost sleep, they start up,” Tuesday said. “It’s disgusting. It’s like they’re inside my head. I wake up screaming my ass off. Do you think that’s good for Mother?”
“They might even go away by themselves and find another home, if you can wait it out,” he offered.
“What kind of an exterminator are you? You want us to leave them alone?” Tuesday’s nerves were shot. She had no time for this fool.
“He knows more than we do,” Wednesday said. She hoped, for once, that Tuesday wouldn’t have the last word. What a relentless know-it-all she was. No wonder all four of her marriages had broken up. Who could live with that? Wednesday wanted to strangle her at least ten times a day, but she’d never get away with it. She never got away with anything.
“The packets might work but they might not. They might stay away for six years or six hours. Hard to say. Extermination is, uh, more like a process, not a one-time thing,” the exterminator said. His father owned the company and had schooled him in lowering customer expectations.
They went into Mother’s room. Tuesday pointed at the wall where the mice ran, right up against the cot the sisters used during their vigils.
“Right there,” Tuesday said, slapping the wall. “The minute I lie down and close my eyes, they start up. It’s torture.”
The exterminator turned his head at an unnatural angle to avoid looking at the dying woman in the bed. “All we can do is try. Or you can leave them alone and see if they find their own way out. Hey, they don’t like peppermint oil. You can spray that around. Or cayenne pepper, they hate that.”
Mother groaned. It was a terrible sound. The sound of a soul struggling to rip its way out of the body, kicking and shoving organs out of the way.
The sisters rushed over to her. They had been through this a million times. It always seemed like it might be finally over and it never was. But still they had to stay hopeful, stay vigilant.
“It’s okay to go, Mother. You can go now. We’ll be all right. You can let go anytime you are ready, Mother.” The sisters started their chorus, now so familiar. Was this another dress rehearsal or was it the final performance?
They were supposed to be encouraging in tone, according to the books they’d read about helping loved ones die. But inside, Tuesday was screaming, Go to the other side already, for the love of all that is holy. Mother, now is the time to let go of whatever is holding you here. Vamoose.
Mother wouldn’t recover; she was 94 and every organ was failing. She was in tremendous pain. She knew what was going on, though. She saw these old women hanging over her, heard their strange urgings to let go as if she were dangling on a rope over an abyss, and she recognized them. How did my daughters get so stinking old all of a sudden? Tuesday had those uncanny eyes from the moment she’d opened them, sharp eyes that judged everyone around her all the time. Wednesday had been so chubby and cute, with one wandering eye and fat curls on her head. Now the skin of their bodies hung off them in wrinkly waves, both of them too thin, their eyes now barely visible as their eyelids collapsed over the sockets.
Mother felt her body convulse; she was a snake rippling out of her skin. She rolled off the bed, a surprising toboggan chute, landing face down on the floor.
The sisters screamed.
“Should I call the ambulance?” the exterminator asked.
“DNR DNR DNR,” the sisters shouted back at him.
They sounded to him like sports fans chanting a star player’s initials or a secret slogan. He didn’t know what DNR meant. Finally one of them spelled it out for him. “Do Not Resuscitate. No ambulance.”
On the floor, Mother listened.
“Help us,” the sisters cried.
The exterminator and the sisters lifted Mother back into bed. She was still breathing.
“You can go,” Wednesday said to the exterminator. Why was he still hanging around? Couldn’t he see their mother was on the very lip of death?
At the door, he stopped and turned around. “Who was she?”
The sisters looked at each other. They had never answered this question before, so it took a few minutes for words to rise up to the surface and come out of their mouths.
“She was a do-gooder,” Tuesday said finally.
“Activist,” Wednesday corrected her.
“Whatever. She stood up for poor people, for children who needed families, for workers’ rights. She fed hungry people. She worked for women’s rights. Stuff like that.”
“She saved a little girl’s life once,” Wednesday said. “She went to visit the girl in a bad foster home and found her being beaten with a baseball bat. If she hadn’t gotten there right then and carried her to the emergency room, she would have been killed that day, only four years old. Our mother was brave. They could have turned that bat on her.”
“It wasn’t all big drama though,” Tuesday said. “She went to every boring city council meeting, every organizing meeting, every union meeting. She went to eviction court hearings to stop crooked landlords from throwing families on the street. She showed up for people every single day. That’s who she was.”
Mother heard her lifework being painted with words. She pictured a mural with vivid colors, huge and beautiful on the side of a building. Philadelphia was full of murals, each one depicting a notable person from the section of the city they were in and there she was high over the sidewalk, waving a protest sign, holding one daughter on her hip, with her other daughter wrapped around her leg as tightly as a sock.
This is the moment, she recognized, and she slipped away then. Dying felt like turning the corner on that building with her very own mural on it. She left her life with her daughters’ words streaming around her. They used to delight in screaming BYE BYE BYE BYE out the window at her as she left for her meetings. She used to delight in walking out of range of their voices. So this leaving business, this saying goodbye, was nothing new.
What was new and thrilling was floating so high above it all— her wrinkly old daughters, the mice in the walls, that lost sock behind the radiator, dirty boots, limp carrot in the refrigerator, half-squeezed toothpaste, crumpled pamphlets, faded underwear, rusty paint cans in the basement, yellowed books all over the house, photographs of people she didn’t know anymore, hidden letters full of pain, stained tablecloths, broken answering machine, and best of all, so many causes still festering, all those people still suffering—she was detached from all that now, untethered from the woes of the world. She was released, she was buoyant, she was ascending.
