An American Requiem.

ONE.

AUTUMN 2003.

In 2003, I worry constantly about money. I make my living from a series of freelance writing jobs and teaching the odd composition course as an adjunct at a nearby university. I've had one novel published by an independent publisher in Britain, but Hollywood, for some unfathomable reason, has not yet come calling. I don't have health insurance. Hank pays the mortgage on the house and some of the household bills, but when it comes to my car payments, Emmy's private school and clothes, and any material goods I desire, I need to come up with the bucks.

One Tuesday in mid-September, I'm working on a newsletter for a volunteer organization in Florida when Hank walks into my office and says, "There's a Category Five hurricane heading straight for your mother."

I wheel around in my chair and stare at him. His eyes widen as if to say, you better do something.

"s.h.i.t," I say.

I call up my mother and tell her I'm coming over to Edenton to get her. She does not protest. Within an hour I am on the highway, hoping I don't get stuck in the storm.

When Hurricane Dora gathered up her skirts and flounced toward Jacksonville back in September 1964, my mother could barely contain her excitement. She bought cans of food, Sterno, and an oil lamp. She taped up windows the way Skipper, the old salt, had taught her. We lived two blocks from the river so we were bound to see some action. That first afternoon when Dora was merely flirting with the city on the river, we went outside with an umbrella to walk Tojo, my old red chow. I laughed hysterically as the wind blew our umbrella inside out. My mother pretended she was Mary Poppins.

My mother loved storms, especially big, terrifying storms. And she taught me to love them. That night when Dora was no longer just toying with us, the wind moaned long and loud outside our windows. The whole world shivered. The rain bucketed our town while I slept happily in my bed. In the morning we went outside to meet the river, which had gotten friendly overnight and decided to visit houses a block away from its banks. We waded down to the new sh.o.r.eline and saw people in canoes or rowboats where once there had only been cars. Tree limbs had been amputated and cast all about the place.

There was no school and no work, just summer camp in the dining room, cooking pork and beans over a Sterno can and reading stories by candlelight until our power was restored and the subdued river returned to its home.

But my mother is old now, and I have heard too many tales from survivors of Hurricane Andrew to take the storm heading toward Edenton lightly. I must make the five-hour trek to get my mother out of its path.

The rain is falling lightly when I arrive. Sandy, my mother's landlord and upstairs neighbor, gushes in relief when she sees me. I quickly pack a suitcase for my mother and grab the package of Poise pads from her small bathroom. My mother has never mentioned her incontinence.

Because of the walker, Mother can no longer get out of her apartment through the back door. The back steps are too rickety. She still has a car, an old blue Buick, that she no longer drives. She keeps thinking she'll get hand controls, but that seems like a bad idea. Instead Diane, her part-time caretaker, uses it to go to the store for her a couple of times a week or to take her to doctor's appointments.

I load my mother's things into my station wagon and pull to the front of the driveway. Mother clomps out onto the porch with her walker. She turns the walker sideways when she gets to the steps. With one hand she holds onto the walker and with the other she grasps the rails, and slowly, very slowly, she lowers one foot at a time and that way manages to get down the steps. I help her get into the car, fold up the walker, and shove it in the back. Then we're off with Hurricane Isabel fast on our heels.

Prior to my mother's impromptu stay with us, I had established a nice little routine for my life: carpool Emmy and three other girls to school every other morning, take Merlyn for a walk in the park, come home and work on my computer all day, then go get Emmy and the other girls, drive to choir, piano lessons, or dance lessons, come home, make some pasta and cheese and broccoli or spinach for Emmy (every night!), and then help her with her practicing or homework, or carpool to choir practice and back, and then it's (thank you, Jesus!) time for bed.

While I'm on my timetable, Hank usually works in his corner office upstairs with his television on. He found he couldn't hack ironing clothes every morning and so he quit his corporate television job and now works at home, designing video equipment for a company based in California. Sometimes he sleeps all day and works all night.

Hank's a great cook, and fairly regularly we'll make family taco dinner. He fries up the sh.e.l.ls for us-soft for me, medium for Emmy, and hard for him-while I chop vegetables and Emmy grates cheese. He heats refried beans for us, and cooks meat for himself. His guacamole tastes like California with c.u.min, cilantro, salt, onion, and a bit of chopped tomato. Sometimes Emmy and I will wake up in the morning and find him in the kitchen, eggsh.e.l.ls and flour covering the counters.

"Cakes and eggs, babe?" he'll ask Emmy, knowing that nothing would make her happier. I heat up the maple syrup.

On Tuesday nights we all watch the military/courtroom-drama television show, JAG, and on weekends we get a movie. JAG happens to be one of those right-wing propaganda shows that once actually featured (I kid you not) Iran-Contra henchman Ollie North as a good guy, but I love the female character, Mac, because she's a recovering alcoholic and because she always chooses the wrong guy. Sometimes as I'm pulling out of the driveway on another mission to drive Emmy to some rehearsal or another, I paraphrase the opening of the show: "With the same daring and tenacity her own mother used getting her to ballet cla.s.s, she fights evil and overcomes all traffic jams to get her daughter to choir practice on time." Emmy laughs every time.

This is our weird, humdrum little life. It works for us. In fact, we like it.

And now Mother is here like a rhino in the living room.

Hank has to go to California for work, which is a relief for me as I can focus more on my mother and less on balancing the interests competing for my attention. She can't get upstairs so I've made a bed for her in the living room-a box spring and mattress half on the couch and half on the large plastic boxes that Hank uses to ship video cameras back and forth to California. I also place an old speaker by the toilet in the bathroom as a prop so she can push herself off the toilet seat, which is too low for her.

Her presence irritates me like an annoying buzz that only I can hear. We have a local supermarket that emits a high-range squeal audible only to teenagers to keep them from loitering. When my mother is around, I feel like a thirteen-year-old standing outside that store.

It's morning. I've taken Emmy to school and now I'm back home, unloading the dishwasher. I've got a deadline to meet, and Mom sits at the table, wanting to be friendly, to talk. I haven't slept well because my mother has to have the television on all night and she is hard of hearing.

"What kind of tree is that?" my mother asks, looking out the window.

"I don't know," I reply irritably.

"There are so many different kinds of trees," she says pointlessly.

This is something I really don't feel like conversing about. In fact, I don't want to converse at all. I want to keep the bubble of my own thoughts around me. This is one of the beauties of my life as it is-mornings when Hank is usually sleeping, Emmy is off at school, and I am virtually alone in the delicious silence of my house.

"I have work to do," I tell my mother. "Is there anything you need before I go upstairs?"

"No," she says. "Is something wrong?"

She must wonder why the daughter who has always loved her and enjoyed her company is suddenly taciturn and sullen. I can't give her a proper answer. The truth is that I don't want her here. My life is full with work, husband, and child. I realize I am being thoughtless, ungrateful, and selfish. What I don't realize quite yet is that I am going to need to make room in my life for her-and it's coming sooner than I think.

So later, after I've gotten some work done, I make an effort to be a better daughter. I play Scrabble with her, and I take her out to lunch (though it's not easy to take her anywhere). I bring her with me to Emmy's choir rehearsals. And that old bond between mother and child starts to knit itself back together.

Then, two weeks after the daring rescue of my mother, Sandy says it's safe for Mom to come back to Edenton. Hank, who has returned from his trip, and Emmy are both happy to see her go. As a child, Emmy was protective of my mother, but she's a teenager now, and this old, needy woman who constantly calls out my name isn't looking like a sweet deal. Emmy has owned me lock, stock, and barrel for all of her thirteen years. The idea of having to share me with someone else is intolerable.

When I drive my mom back to Edenton, we find a war zone with blue tarps over damaged roofs and work crews still trying to get trees out of the roads. My mother's house is undamaged, and the old brick church where she works is fine. Mom is glad to be back, but I have the feeling it's time for me to start antic.i.p.ating the next stage of her life. I know that she is almost unbearably lonely here. And yet it is her life. Her music. Her job. Her friends. Still, it's not enough.

After my mother leaves, Hank tells me that his sister Beth's cancer has returned after a brief remission.

"It's looking grim," he says.

"G.o.d, your poor parents," I answer.

"The next few years are going to be bad," he says. He crosses his arms over his chest and gazes at me as if we are the tsar and tsarina facing the red hordes. We're in for a hard ride.

TWO.

SPRING 2004.

As I begin to realize just how hard things have become for my mother, I try to visit her as often as I can-usually with Emmy but sometimes by myself or with the dog. Ever since her own grandmother (Skipper's mother, Gammie) made her look at a piece of dog fur under a microscope, my mother has never been an animal person. But she has always tolerated my need to have at least one animal in my life. So she never complains when I show up with a big, ungainly beast-a beast that tends to sweep valuable objects off the coffee table with a swipe of his happy tail.

And even though she doesn't love him, Merlyn adores her as he does all women. Fortunately, he doesn't try to mount her. But he does like to put his cold nose on any bare body part he can find, and her shriek of surprise is always good for a laugh.

When I visit, we get her friend Marion to come with us on an outing. Mother admires Marion a great deal for having lived in Europe and been married five times, and for being a flagrant atheist in a southern town of churchgoing Christians who love to pray for people. One of my mother's favorite Edenton moments is when one of the Christians said she was going to pray for someone in poor health and then looked at Marion and said, "And you can just hope." The town understands and loves Marion.

That spring after the hurricane I go to visit my mother. Sleeping at her place is traumatic for me. She has to get up several times in the night to go to the bathroom, and the sound of the walker thunking around on the wooden-plank floor jars me awake without fail. Sometimes my mother has nightmares and starts moaning loudly in her sleep. This has happened off and on since I was a child and I always attribute it to the Terrible Night. But still it scares the h.e.l.l out of me.

This particular night I am sleeping soundly for once on the uncomfortable little rollaway bed, when suddenly a loud incessant singing jolts me awake. What the h.e.l.l? And it doesn't stop. Loud. Louder. Louder still. Finally, I get up and stagger into her room. There she is, sound asleep, the TV blaring loud enough for people three blocks away to hear it. She has rolled over on the remote control.

"Mom," I yell. No answer. "Mom!"

I wrest the remote control from under her slumbering body. She wakes and immediately feels guilty for stealing sleep from me.

I grumble back to bed, also feeling guilty. Fortunately, we are good at forgiveness. We need to be or else neither of us would survive the other. Sometimes my mother wonders whether she somehow caused me to become a drug addict in my youth. I honestly can't say. I was allowed to do just about anything I wanted to do my whole life. Perhaps she could have kept a tighter rein. Perhaps she could have provided more guidance. But I decided long ago to take responsibility for my own actions. I made bad choices then; I can make better choices now.

When my mother was young and planning to marry my father, her sister Hazel predicted the marriage would never work. "Who will find the keys?" she asked. Hazel was right. They were not a good match. Not only could neither of them find the keys, they both needed to be the center of attention. This was easy for my mother. All she needed was a piano. She was famous for her improvisational style. You want to hear "Happy Birthday"? She can play it in at least five different styles from boogie woogie to horror movie. One of her friends told me that once he was listening to her play the organ during a church service. Which Bach cantata is that, he wondered. Then he realized it wasn't Bach at all. She had taken a Broadway tune and turned it into faux-Bach, and n.o.body was the wiser. Another time she composed some music that fooled knowledgeable people into thinking they were listening to some newly discovered piece by Mozart.

Brilliant as she is, my mother has always had a bit of the absentminded professor in her. There is the story, famous in our family, of the time she left the baby outside while she was practicing. She had completely forgotten about him until a friend showed up and wanted to see the baby.

"The baby?" my mother asked. She then realized with horror that she'd left him outside in his little swing, and now it was raining.

Like all mothers, my mother had a set of maxims that she thought were important to impart to me: if you can't say anything nice, then don't say anything at all (unless it's irresistibly funny); it's as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it is with a poor man (a nice idea in theory); if you want to commit suicide, wait until tomorrow (advice which has, it turns out, saved my life).

My mother was fascinated by the idea of suicide when she was young. Then when she was a teenager, the woman next door hung herself, leaving behind her daughter, who was a close friend of my mother, and a grief-stricken husband.

"You not only kill yourself, you kill everyone who ever loved you," my mother said. Suicide was no longer romantic. Not to say that she didn't later consider it. Once she told me she had merely been waiting for me to turn eighteen before taking her life. Then when I turned eighteen, I was in more trouble than ever and the timing for a self-imposed departure on her part wasn't good.

Still, the threat of suicide was a great controlling device. When I was sixteen and wanted to rent a beach house with a friend for the weekend, she threatened to kill herself to get me to back down. I did, of course, but it was a dreadful mistake on her part. That was one of the few friends I had who wasn't heading to prison or death by overdose.

THREE.

SPRING 2004.

As my mother transitions from elderly to "frail elderly," my daughter is getting ready to make the transition from middle school to high school. They are both graduating, in a way. And I've got to figure out what the best next step for both of them is-and how to afford it.

Emmy is in the eighth grade and attends a small private school about thirty minutes from our house. There are only sixteen kids in her entire grade, and even though they have their cliques, they also like to do things in a pack-go to movies, amus.e.m.e.nt parks, parties, and dances. For the three years she has been there, I have written the school play. Emmy was the lead the first year but only because I was out of town and someone else gave her the lead role. After that I made sure that the plays were heavy on "ensembles" and light on leads. But there's no doubt that every time she gets on a stage, Emmy is riveting.

For the eighth grade play, I create a pastiche of Shakespeare's plays, and we ask the kids to audition by reading a short monologue from Romeo and Juliet. We've gone through all the kids when it's Emmy's turn. She comes in, all legs and elbows and big brown eyes. She doesn't have the sophistication of some of those other world-traveled girls, but when she's done reading the part, my friend Kerry, who is directing the play, and I just look at each other. She's in another league entirely.

High school will be different. She will have to leave this warm coc.o.o.n. I'm thinking that now might be a good time to switch to the public school where her neighborhood friends go. It's been rough coming up with eight grand a year for this school even though they let me pay by the month and they're pretty lenient when those payments are late.

Emmy, on the other hand, decides she doesn't want to go to public school. She tried it once and said it was like jail. I know that the standard liberal approach is to send your child to public school for the diversity and all that, but maybe those other liberal parents did not have the same experiences I had with the public school system.

I went to elementary school in Jacksonville, Florida, where every day felt like an interminable sentence. I was bored beyond redemption. When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher warned us as we were preparing to take a field trip to the zoo not to sit on the public toilets because some "fat colored lady" might have sat on the seat before we did. I was shocked. My mother had taught me that bigotry was unacceptable. Of course, schools weren't even integrated at the time-a fact that hadn't quite registered in my consciousness. By fifth and sixth grades I started getting into trouble-shoplifting, scrawling bad words on my desk. Maybe it's the only way I could stand the tedium. Maybe those childhood traumas were beginning to make themselves evident.

After sixth grade I went to the newly built Episcopal private school for the next three years. By then I was already on the path to ruin, but at least I learned a lot. In the seventh grade I memorized a huge section of Hiawatha just to impress our lovely young English teacher. In eighth grade, a teacher named Mr. M., who only liked a few of the handsome older boys, taught us "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot and changed my life forever. I had never known that such music or despair could be conveyed by mere words. He also made us read Great Expectations, and I've been a slave to stories ever since.

My mother was fairly hands off when it came to my schooling as were most of the parents of the time. I think she found school superfluous to education. When she was in high school, she often refused to go to school on Wednesdays. Instead she took the bus to town and educated herself in museums and libraries or by going to the courthouse to watch trials.

"Five days of school a week seemed a bit excessive to me," my mother often told me.

My mother did come to my elementary school once when I had refused to eat the cafeteria food. To this day I shudder to think of those grits that you could stick a fork into and raise up above your head like a dead jellyfish, or those cold foul-smelling little orange fish sticks. It was lunchtime when my mother came to speak to the princ.i.p.al.

"I notice you aren't eating the cafeteria food," my mother said to the princ.i.p.al who had a deli sandwich on her desk. "Why would you expect a child to eat that garbage?"

Now Emmy's in the eighth grade, and we have to figure out where she'll go to school next year. This is almost like getting ready for college. Everyone signs up for open houses at the "big three"-the three powerhouse private schools where Charlotte's elite send their children. I'm still holding out hope for public school, but some strange instinct draws her to the one school I would never have imagined for her. It's a large private school where the "old money" families send their children.

We take a tour of the campus. The "athletic center" is better than those at most colleges. The cla.s.ses are small. The teachers, top of the line. The fine arts building is state of the art. I try to keep my inner roughneck in check as we smile at the admissions counselors and the other moms whose every movement reeks of money and privilege and impeccable three-story homes.

Not only does Emmy like the place. They like her. I realize that even though we are white, we are the diversity that the school seeks. Most of the other students have gone there since kindergarten. Emmy is fresh blood. She might as well be from another planet compared to those kids with their perfect hair and their trust funds. A few weeks after we apply she gets an acceptance letter and something even more startling-a scholarship. Not for the whole thing, but enough so that if I watch my pennies I'll be able to make the payments.

When we lived in Tallaha.s.see, she went to a very small "handson" learning school, like Montessori only with a little more structure. It wasn't a particularly expensive place, but I was even poorer then so I split janitorial duties with another mother to get half off the monthly tuition. Mopping those wooden floors where my daughter and her friends had been playing, pouring Lysol into toilets, scrubbing sinks and wiping down tables in the evenings in the empty school house-those were the most meaningful jobs I ever did.

As eighth grade comes to a close, Emmy and I are prowling through the mall, searching for the ear-piercing place. I know it's un-American, but I'm not much of a shopper-especially these days when checks always seem to be in the mail but not in the mailbox. I may buy new clothes for Emmy, but for myself, it's usually Goodwill-or some discount place if I'm feeling extravagant. We find the boutique (hair bows, cheap jewelry, and lots of stuff that is pink and plastic) beside the food court: "Ear Piercing-Free."

Inside a young woman whips out a cardboard tray with tiny birthstone earrings, and my daughter locks on the fake emeralds. The piercing is free. The earrings cost thirty-five bucks.

Emmy sits on a stool and the young woman uses a ballpoint pen to mark the spot where the hole will go. The girl offers my daughter a mirror, but Emmy just wants to get it over with. She's petrified.

"Do you want me to let you know when it's coming, or just do it?" the girl asks.

"Just do it," Emmy says with a tight smile. A few seconds later, a green stone sticks out of her earlobe on a gold stem.

We had intended to do this a week earlier on her fourteenth birthday, but those plans were ambushed by a well-meaning science teacher who told her that in spite of her "remarkable" gift for engineering (her rockets went higher than anyone else's) and how much she had impressed him with the self-propelled car she had built, she would not be getting the science award at the end of the year. Her right-brained tendencies (terrible organizational skills and an inability to get homework turned in on time) had exacted a heavy price. She would not be eligible.

When I picked up my child from school that day, I had not been expecting this storm of grief. It was her birthday, after all, and I'd just been there a few hours earlier with pizza and cupcakes. But now she was inconsolable.

"Everyone thinks I'm an idiot," she sobbed. "It's always the same ones who always get the awards. No one knows that I'm smart."

It was not a minor issue. The birthday plans I had mapped out went down the drain, and I spent the rest of the day comforting my brokenhearted girl.

So a week later, the day before her eighth grade graduation, the day before the dreaded awards ceremony, we are finally strolling out of the mall with a couple of pretzels and a pair of newly adorned earlobes.

As we drive to the ceremony the next day, Hank can speak of nothing but piercing. My daughter sits in the backseat in her new black dress with spaghetti straps, her strappy black shoes with wedged high heels, a slight sheen of gloss on her lips, her thick golden-brown hair gleaming as it falls past her shoulder blades-and he can see nothing but the tiny green dots on her ears.

"What's it going to be next, babe? A tongue stud? How about a nose ring? I know a girl who wore a bone from her dead poodle in her nose. It was quite the conversation piece." Hank's teasing has a sharp edge to it.

Emmy has never been a prissy girl. She scorned some of her cla.s.smates whose lives revolved around shopping and makeup counters. She called them "nail polish girls." She had never shown any interest in earrings. In fact, I was the one who had insisted that at fourteen, it was time. She had shrugged noncommittally and said, okay. It was only when it looked like it might not happen in time for graduation that she had finally pleaded, "Can we please go get my ears pierced today?"

We pull up to the country club for the graduation ceremony. Emmy looks as if she is going to a hanging.

"Will you please tell her that she looks nice?" I hiss to Hank right before we go into the reception room.

"What?" He's clueless. "Oh. You look nice, babe."

That helps a little, but the day is doomed from the start. She is leaving a school she loves and sixteen close friends. And worst of all, she will not be getting an award.