The caregiver - Short Story

African American Review, Spring, 2002 by Eugenia Collier

O God, O God, if she doesn't stop that damn racket I'm going to beat her unconscious! No, no, no, no! My mother ... Mother ... old, sick. Something wrong with me, thinking like that. SHUT UP, LOU, HUSH HOLLERING! I'll come in there and make you hush, dammit-

In the background I could hear Aunt Lou shrieking at Donald. "I don't know what I'm going to do with her," Donald was saying above the confusion. "She won't even let me talk on the phone anymore. If I leave her room she starts hollering like that and keeps on until I hang up and come back in there with her."

"She sounds pretty strong to me," I said. How could anyone so sick make all that noise?

"What? I can't hear you."

"Look, Donald, I don't know what to tell you," I yelled into the phone. "You can't go on living like this. She's going to ..."

"Sister Little, I can't talk now," he said, reverting to the name they used to call me when we were children. Even though I wasn't anybody's sister but Manny's, and slightly taller, though he was older, the family used to call me Sister Little. "I'll get back to you after she goes to sleep."

I went back to the lecture I was preparing for my next day's American Lit class, and when, sometime later, I looked at the clock, it was well past eleven. He hadn't called. Figuring that he had probably fallen asleep when Aunt Lou did, I didn't call him. What could I say to him anyway? He wasn't going to put his mother into a nursing home, and they couldn't afford full-time care--or even much part-time care--in their house. Donald had taken early retirement from his job in New York, and his pension and Aunt Lou's together didn't go far. So Donald was nurse, housekeeper, cook, and companion. He fed her, bathed her, changed her diapers, and listened to her wild ramblings.

What could I say to him? There was only one possible solution, and we both knew it. My problem and that of my brother Manny was solved that way five years ago: Our mother had died.

Sleep--finally. Looks so little lying there. Lemme tuck the cover around her shoulders. So thin. There. Lord, I'm tired! Got to wash the dishes before I go to bed. What am I gonna do, what, what? Hope I can sleep tonight. What am I gonna do? Thought just goes round and round in my brain like one of those crazy rides in a carnival. God!

Two or three weeks passed before I called Donald again. Knowing that his tight budget wouldn't permit many long-distance calls, even between Washington and Baltimore, I usually called him. Aunt Lou was quiet this time.

"She had a good day," Donald reported. "Ate a good dinner. But she always eats pretty good." He sighed.

"And how are you doing?" I asked. He had been ailing lately. I suspected, though, that Donald had more than a touch of hypochondria, a malady from which a number of our relatives suffered.

"Not the best. My stomach stays upset, and I keep having pains in my back."

"Maybe it's your nerves."

"Maybe. I'm going to the doctor Friday if I can find somebody to sit with Lou."

We talked for awhile about how, with so much family nearby, there was never anybody to come and spend a few hours with Lou so that he could attend to other matters. Whenever he could get away, our Aunt Etta, who lived alone, would prevail upon him to do her supermarket shopping. Etta had a grown son, but she hadn't brought him up, having lost custody in a particularly bitter divorce when he was a little boy, and he lived somewhere in California. Etta had grown old alone. She shared with her brothers and sisters the conviction that family members were obliged to meet each other's needs, totally and without question. For her the obligation went one way: She demanded much and gave nothing. Like her brother Horace, she was frequently hospitalized for depression. After one such confinement, not wanting to be alone, she went to spend a few days with Horace and his wife Gladys. She stayed for ten years, until Gladys issued the ultimatum, "Either she goes or I do."

"Ask Etta to stay with Aunt Lou," I suggested wickedly.

"Yeah--when pigs fly and jaybirds swim." It was an old expression that we had used years ago when we were kids at Grandma's. Suddenly I saw him as he had been then--hazel eyes and crinkly sandy hair, skin golden in the sunshine, face lit up with mischief. The flash of memory both cheered and depressed me.

We talked for a few more minutes, then he asked, "How's Manny getting along?" as he always did, and I replied, "Fine," as I always did, and we hung up. But the image of the child Donald hovered in my mind like the phantom ache of an amputated limb.

From a TV camera long shot, our childhood would have appeared idyllic-three country kids playing merrily in a large fenced-in yard ringed by berry bushes and dotted with fruit trees. As the camera panned closer, however, it would have revealed small stresses not associated with childhood joy: the spastic gait of the smallest child, the hunched shoulders and spindly limbs of the girl. An extreme closeup would perhaps focus on our faces, and the viewer might read there the silent, separate tragedies that would mark our lives.