ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leah McCormack is a Ph.D. candidate in fiction at the University of Cincinnati. She received her MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York.Her work has appeared in Fiction magazine, and she was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s 2006 Family Matters contest.

Who Were We, What Were We?

By Leah McCormack


We sit in our baggy underpants at the kitchen table while our husband pricks us in the thigh with the needle. 

I can’t trust you anymore, he tells us as we stand up and steady ourselves against the wooden chair with one hand and pull our pants back up with the other. You forget to pay the bills, he says, you forget to take your prescriptions, forget what your doctors tell you. I have to do everything now: make your appointments—

Bullshit! we say, frightening the dog out from under the table. I can damn well pay the bills. I can damn well make my own appointments. I’ve been doing it for forty years. I’ve been making your appointments—and cooking your meals and washing your dishes and doing your laundry and buying your pants and your shirts and your underwear. For forty years I’ve basically wiped your ass! Don’t tell me I don’t know how to run this house.

Our husband throws up his arms, then heads to the bedroom and slams the door. Now we are alone with the black dog. She comes over and puts her head in our lap. It’s okay, we say and stroke her soft fur. He won’t hurt you.

 

Before our husband leaves for work this morning, he stands in the doorway and tells us: It’s not safe for you to drive. With these dizzy spells you’ve been having, it’s not safe. His large belly bulges beneath a flannel shirt; his dark beard nearly hits the collar.

Yes, we say, our head still spinning. It’s not safe. We bend over in the kitchen chair and pat the dog.

Please, he says, please please don’t go to bingo today. Stay home. Don’t drive.

Yes, we say. No bingo. Then we watch the front door close behind him and we sip our coffee and listen for the car to turn over and the muffler-less exhaust to boom.

By noon we are bored. Nothing good is on TV. Our dizziness has disappeared. Bingo starts in half an hour. We get up, go to the bathroom; replace our slippers with orthopedic shoes. Outside, we slide our hand over the metal railing our husband built for us, and stagger along the muddy path to the dirt driveway where our car is parked. It is good to be outside. The sun is warm. Leaves rustle in the wind. It takes us several minutes to open the car door and sit down, then pick our bad leg up and drag it inside. We back out of the dirt parking lot and watch the house disappear in our rearview mirror.

 

Today we get up from the couch to pee and we trip on the edge of the carpet and fall. Our dog leaps off the couch and cowers under a table. Then our husband comes running, the floorboards sinking under the weight of his body.

What happened? he says. Are you okay? he says. Goddamn it, he says. Be careful.

We nod—our pants now soaked—and let him pick us up by the armpits. We are embarrassed. Before he can see the wet spot, we sit back down on the couch. Then turn on the TV. Oprah is on again. 

How can you stand to watch this shit? our husband says.

If you don’t like it, we say, leave.

Christ! he says and bangs open the bedroom door, frightening the dog out from under the table and back onto the couch.

 

The deck door is wide open and we are cold and waiting for our dog to limp back inside. She crouches on the deck, dropping a load onto the wood planks. From the couch we call out,

Good, girl.

Our husband walks into the living room. His large forehead wrinkles in confusion. Why is the door open? he says and moves to shut it. Then: Again? Are you fucking kidding me? No! He stomps out onto the deck, claps his big hands. No!

 

Bingo is held at a community center fifteen minutes away from home. Our husband has told us not to go there anymore, we forget why, but we go every Tuesday anyway. We get there early, park in the handicapped section, stumble up the walkway. At sixty-five, we are the youngest of the bingo players, but we are also the most disabled. No one ever seems to notice, though. They give us the first seat in the room, hand us a bingo marker, and take our three dollars. Whenever we yell Bingo! and the caller comes over and checks our sheet and then shakes her head and says, Sorry, I didn’t call that number, no one gets annoyed.

Today, once bingo has ended and we are heading back to our car, an eighty-year-old woman lets us lean on her elbow. We tell her: That was a big win you got. (What’s her name?) Thirty dollars—woohie!

She smiles. How’s your husband?

Oh, you know. Busy.

On the drive home, we get confused: Which turn do we take? We sit at the intersection until someone comes up behind us and beeps. Then we go left and keep driving. We pass a barn and some trees and a field, a few houses, a pond. Now we remember: this is the way home.

 

We are told that our memory has gotten worse over the past six months. That sometimes we forget conversations we’ve had an hour earlier. Our husband tells us to mention our memory problems to our doctor, but we forget. This pisses off our husband.

Our daughter comes home for the weekend, makes a joke of it. The next time you see your neurologist, she says, we’ll have to hang a sign around your neck. Please ask me about my memory, it’ll say. My family thinks it’s gotten worse.

Ha-ha, we think and smile.

But our husband shakes his head, leaves the kitchen.

Our daughter is pretty. Just like we used to be at her age—we can remember that.

 

And we can remember this:

We were in our early thirties, a little older than our daughter is now, when we started slurring our speech and our balance got bad. This was early in our marriage, shortly after our daughter was born—during the period when we had most wanted to leave our husband.

As the years passed and the disease grew more pronounced, our right arm and leg more stiff, we kept getting fired from every new job—because of incompetence, they said, or lack of tact, or because, in the end, we weren’t as physically capable as they’d at first believed, and so couldn’t do everything that was expected of us. But we suspected otherwise—we suspected that we did our job just fine, but that we made our boss and coworkers uncomfortable. Each time we lost our balance at our new job and tumbled to the floor, or couldn’t stop our ass from rumbling, took a moment too long to understand what someone was saying—we knew it would soon be over.

When our daughter was in middle school and we had been fired, yet again, from our job, we found work as a substitute teacher. One morning we got a call to sub for our daughter’s history class and, needing the money, we accepted the offer. Learning this, our daughter refused to go to school that day.

All the other kids say you have a wooden leg, she said. They call you retarded.

 

Our daughter has come home for the weekend. She makes a joke, something about hanging a sign around our neck. We laugh—it is a good joke. Our husband gets upset, though, leaves the kitchen. Now it is just our daughter and us sitting at the table. Her dark hair is pulled up in a bun, her round face slightly oily. It is around noon.

Can you get me a beer? we ask.

Our daughter stands up, goes to the box on the floor and digs around for a can. We don’t like our beer cold—it hurts our teeth—which is why it’s not in the fridge.

How have you been, Mom? she asks, cracking open the Schlitz and handing it to us.

Fine, we say. Great.

She sits down, looks carefully at us: You haven’t felt dizzy lately?

We stare back at her, unsure what she means, what she wants us to say. (Dizzy?—when were we dizzy?) And now too much time has passed, she is catching on. Soon she will say something and it will be too late; she’ll know that we don’t remember. We shrug and try to think what might be true.

It’s not so bad anymore, we say.  

But she knows we’re lying. She has that distant, fearful look in her eyes.

It’s not hereditary, we say.

What’s not?

Just because I have MS doesn’t mean you will.

I know that. Why are you telling me that?

We shrug. I don’t remember.

 

Here is what we think. It is psychosomatic. When it started we were depressed, unsure of our marriage. Our guard was down. The MS struck.

Years ago, we told our daughter this—that if we hadn’t married her father, maybe we wouldn’t have MS. And that maybe, if it was all just in our head, we would be fine; we could beat it. With the right attitude, we could beat it.

But if you hadn’t married Dad, our daughter interrupted us, I wouldn’t exist.

Yes, we said. You wouldn’t exist.

 

Our daughter is home for the weekend. It is so good to see her. She makes a joke about us not remembering to tell our neurologist something. We laugh, but our husband gets upset and leaves the kitchen. Then it is just us and our daughter, and before long she has that look in her eyes, that distant, fearful look we recognize from her childhood. Soon she will stand up and tell us that she has work to do. She will come over and hug us, and we will kiss her on the cheek and feel her recoil.

Love you, Mom, she’ll murmur and run off.

And then we will be alone again. We don’t want her to know how much we dread her leaving us, so we tell her: Well. I’m sure you brought work with you to do. And then we get up and stumble towards the couch and our dog and the TV.

 

Outside the kitchen window, in the distance, there is a field of wild grass. The yellow stalks break through the half-melted snow. One winter, a long time ago, we saw a black dog limping along the edge of that field. Something had lopped off part of her paw. She was skittish. When our husband approached her, she ran into the woods. It was obvious she’d been abused by somebody. After we hobbled out into the cold with a piece of bacon, she let us take her inside, clean and wrap her wound. She was loyal to us after that, never left our side.

 

Our husband drives us to the neurologist’s office. I don’t trust you anymore, he tells us. I want to speak with the doctor myself.

In the waiting room:

My wife has an appointment, he booms to the receptionist. She has MS.

Fifteen minutes later, he sits on a stool in the corner of the patient’s room watching the doctor tap below our knees with a small mallet. Then the doctor flashes a light in our eyes. He takes notes. When our husband asks: How is she?

I see no change, the doctor says, in her condition. Not since I saw her last.

What do you mean? our husband cries. Her memory is horrible—much worse than before. And she gets dizzy now—that’s new! Write that down in your notes.

Dizzy? the doctor says, crinkling his brows.

Yes, dizzy. All the time. He points his beard at us, his green eyes sharp and accusing. I’ve told her not to drive, not when she’s dizzy. Then back at the doctor: That’s right, isn’t it? She shouldn’t drive?

He nods.

Well, there you have it, our husband says. You heard the man. Don’t drive.

Yes, we say. No driving. But we think: You’re both crazy. We can drive. We get to bingo all right, don’t we?

The doctor turns to us: You’ve had MS for—what?—twenty-five years? At this stage, and with more cerebral cases like yours, it’s not unusual to see some memory loss and cognitive degeneration. Your ability to process information, to reason, to concentrate—

Thirty years, doc, our husband interrupts. She’s had MS at least that long. And it’s not just ‘some’ memory loss or ‘some’ confusion. It’s been bad for a long time. Now it’s worse.

I’m fine, we say. And try to smile. He’s exaggerating.

On the walk back to the car, as we lean on our husband’s elbow and drag our right leg behind us through the parking lot, he says: That doctor’s a quack! I don’t want you seeing him anymore. Let’s get you to an MS specialist. Why aren’t you seeing an MS specialist?

 

Lately our good ankle has been caving in. We call it this because that’s how it feels—like the ankle is about to collapse and bring us down with it. Already our right leg drags behind us when we walk. Our right arm has curled up into our chest, its muscles atrophied. Once our good ankle goes, we’ll be confined to a wheelchair. There’s no room in this cluttered, ancient house for a wheelchair. It won’t fit through the doorways or between our husband’s piles of junk. And once we’re stuck in a wheelchair, we won’t be able to drive our car. We’ll be trapped in this house, which is itself trapped by forest. As it is, our husband thinks we’re dangerous behind the wheel. He tells us all the time: One of these days you’ll kill somebody.

Even if we do wind up in a wheelchair and are stuck in the middle of nowhere and unable to get from room to room, we wouldn’t want to leave this house. We’ve lived here for over forty years. There are still footprints on the wall at the bottom of the stairs from when our daughter was trying out her new sled; there are scars on the living-room ceiling where the giant Christmas trees our husband cuts down every year from behind the house have been mashed into place; there are still spaghetti stains on the kitchen walls, and holes in the bathroom and bedroom doors where steel-toe boots busted through the cheap wood: reminders of the early part of our marriage, of our daughter’s childhood, of our healthier years. If we moved to a new home now, we’d lose ourselves entirely.

 

In the bathroom, we peer at ourselves in the streaked mirror above the rotting wooden shelf. We see gray. Some stray nose hairs. We push our bottom dentures loose with our tongue. A black gap appears and our bottom lip sags in on itself like an empty sack.  

That’s enough: we don’t want to see more.

 

It has been years probably since we’ve used a broom or a vacuum, a mop or a dust rag. Despite the dirt, and despite his allergies, our husband doesn’t seem to mind. In the past, whenever our daughter came home for the holidays, she would get out the mop and throw it aside, bitching about how nasty it was, and then splash soapy water onto the kitchen floor and crouch on her knees and scrub. She would beg us to buy a new carpet for the living room, to throw out our old couch; would ask us why we never remove the green slime from the tub.

Tonight our daughter says: Dad can’t breathe in this filthy house, Mom. All the dust—it’s unhealthy. He’s been complaining for years.

Why can’t he clean? we snap back at her. Is half his body paralyzed? Then: When has he complained?

You’ve never cleaned, Mom—not anything! Don’t blame it on the MS!

Shh, we say and point to the dog crouched at our feet. You’re frightening her.

 

It isn’t hereditary, we say into the phone. MS isn’t hereditary.

We are leaving a message on our daughter’s answering machine. She never picks up when we phone her.

I forget why I’m calling. We pause. Are you coming home for Christmas?

 

The last time our daughter visited us—we remember this clearly now—she asked us during dinner how we had met her father. He sat on the other end of the table, his green eyes shiny and expectant. We paused, tried to locate the memory. It was before the MS, we remembered that. We were still young, still had our health.

At a Love-in, our husband cut in. We met at a Love-in. We were protesting the war. He glared across the table at us, looking hurt that we had forgotten.

That’s right, we said, a Love-in. (We racked our brain for this: nothing.)

 

We sit on the couch in front of the small TV. The couch is old, its fabric torn and pillows coughing dust with every movement of our body. It is mid afternoon. A can of Schlitz balances on the greasy arm of the couch. Our slippered feet stretch out before us on the balding carpet. It is winter. Our dog curls up on the cushion beside us. Her leg is swollen. She hasn’t moved all day, hasn’t eaten. It is white outside. The TV is loud, its picture fuzzy. We put our hand on the dog’s head and she looks at us, sad. Her black eyes are pasty. The Hallmark channel advertises a made-for-TV movie. Oprah reminds us to remember our spirit. It is dark inside. The bulb above our head is dim. A faded blanket droops over our shoulders and onto the dog. It is cold. The furnace must have shut off. We cannot walk down the steep stairs into the basement to turn it back on; it is unsafe, our balance too poor. A cordless phone lies in our lap. We have just used it to call our husband at work. We ought to call him again. Tell him to come home soon. We are cold. The pipes will freeze. We cannot walk down the stairs into the basement to restart the furnace.

We look at the phone in our lap. We hit redial. Yes, we say, extension two eight, please. And wait for the operator to transfer us.

Hello, this is Mr— 

Hello?

…I’m not in my office right now. Please leave a message after the beep.

Beep.

Oh. That was the machine. It’s me. Pick up.

We wait.

Where are you? we say. There’s no heat in the house. I’m freezing. Call me back.

We hang up. We take a gulp of beer. The Montel Williams Show is on. Our dog still hasn’t moved. We look at the clock on the wall. We look at the phone. We look at the clock. We look at Montel Williams. We look at our dog. We pick up the phone, hit redial.

Extension two eight, please.

 

In the streaked mirror above the rotting wooden shelf, our lips look shriveled and pale. Strands of our gray brows stick out at weird angles. Our face is a wrinkled heart. If we lift our weight off the sink, though, and lean back from the mirror and squint in the dark bathroom, we can just make out the blurry shape of the woman we might have been.

 

Our dog cannot get up onto the couch anymore. She sits at our feet, keeping them warm.

That’s a good girl, we say. Keep Mamma nice and snug.

When our husband comes home from work, he says: Your dog looks like death. He says: We need to put her down. He says: Look at the tumor in her leg. It’s the size of my fist. 

Oh that, we say. That’s nothing.

We pat the tumescent leg. Don’t listen to him, girl. He’s crazy.

I’m crazy? He throws up his arms. I’m sick of this! Tomorrow she goes to the vet.

 

We phone our daughter, but she doesn’t pick up. 

I forget why I’m calling, we say after the beep. Oh yeah. Your father’s crazy. Don’t listen to him. The dog is fine. Call me back.

 

A long time ago, we told our daughter that the MS appeared inside us right after the worst part of our marriage. We told her that she was too young to remember it, but her father once dragged us across the floor by our hair. That maybe, if we’d never met him, we wouldn’t have MS.

After we told her this, our daughter said: But if you hadn’t met Dad, I wouldn’t exist.

 

Our dog has been put to sleep. Our daughter came home and said that we were cruel to keep the dog alive so long. Then she and our husband carried our skinny dog with the fat leg into the car with them and drove off. When they came home, the body was in a cardboard box. We watched from the kitchen window as our husband and daughter dug a hole in the ground at the edge of the field. When they came back inside, it was dark out.  

Now we have nothing. Our husband tells us that he hated walking the dog; he doesn’t want another one. Our daughter wags her finger at us, says: You don’t deserve one anyway. That dog was in pain and you let her suffer. How could you not see that she was suffering?

Now we are crying. We close our eyes and let the salt sting our cheeks.  

Our daughter shuts up. I’m sorry, Mom, she says. I’m sorry. 

 

If we are happy, and we take good care of ourselves, we can keep the ankle from caving. Keep the left leg from growing weak. We won’t have to wind up in a wheelchair, if we are happy. We tell our husband this, that it is all in our head, and that we need to stay positive.

He looks at us, his eyes pained. I made an appointment, he says, with a new doctor, an MS specialist. The appointment is on Monday. Don’t forget.

 

Today our daughter calls to tell us something important. You ought, she says, to thank Dad every once in awhile. He’s been doing a lot for you this past year. I don’t think you realize.

Yes, we say, I’ll thank him. When I see him tonight, I’ll thank him.

Beside us on the couch there is a saggy indent where our dog used to lie. We place our palm in the bowl and stroke the empty cushion.  



Published April 2010