Musings of the Night Nurse [4]: Nudes! Nudes! Nudes!
A series on caretaking my mom as she nears the end while fighting off the entities who prey on the old
“Do you want to come with me to a nudist camp?” your mom asks. “You can write an article about it!”
You are in your early 30s, writing for various magazines and newspapers. That any one of which might relish a piece about going to a nudist camp with your mother tempts you not at all.
“No, Mom,” you say. “I really don’t.”
But they’re fun, she insists; everybody does everything in the nude, eats in the nude, plays tennis in the nude…
You tell her that envisioning 60-year-old men with their junk splatted on dining benches and swinging around the court is not making the invitation more appealing.
“You’re such a prude!” she says, and laughs, this libertine mother of yours who, since your teen years and, if you think about it, even before, has been showing by example how the rules of decorum, of marriage, of nudity do not apply to her. She does not use the term “free spirit” and does not need to, she simply does what she wants.
“I’m going to the Bahamas for the weekend,” she tells 13-year-old you; that there are cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli in the pantry to make for yourself and your younger brother. While she is away, you one night spend 45 minutes on your knees in front of the big living room window, out of which you can make out the lights atop the Brooklyn Bridge, and try, maybe, to connect yourself to one of those lights, or further, to a satellite or unknown star.
When you mention to your mother decades later that such parental decamping is not really done these days, she looks confused, then irritated.
“Your father lived three blocks away,” she says. Which, fair enough, and also, par for the course for your mother, who is not one to reflect. Not that you want or need her to, she is - as everyone who has ever met her is forced to reconcile - something of a shooting star herself, always in motion, always getting her way, talking talking talking until you cried uncle (“I call it the, ‘Shut her up ‘yes’,” your dad said), or saw or pretended to see things her way.
“I just bought a big sushi platter at CostCo and carried it up on the train,” she tells you on the phone. “I am going to serve it on Christmas Eve.”
You think to mention that carrying unrefrigerated raw fish for four hours is a rather bad idea, but go instead with reminding your mother that it is December 4; that there is no way she is serving three-week old sushi…
“Oh you’re so picky,” she says, at which you ask her to go check the sell-by or maybe the must-be-eaten-by-to-avoid-death date on the sushi platter. You can hear her deliberately stomping to the kitchen and, a few minutes later, a softer padding back to the phone.
“December 8,” she says, sounding sheepish for maybe the first time in her life, a burden shucked off by the next breath. “But what am I going to do with all this sushi?”
You cannot say whether your mother would have insouciantly given her family food poisoning before she walked through a door you did not see her walk through, a door you had not anticipated. You knew, logically, that people experience dementia, but your mother had always done things her way and so, when she starts calling you 10, 20, 30 times a day; when she gets testy when you say, “Mom! You’re driving on the wrong side of the road!” you do not immediately chock it up to memory loss, you and your brother and your daughter say to one another that your mother has never listened, that she has always tried to be the center of attention, that she always will do things her way.
But it is now 2020 and what you see happening to your mother cannot be explained by self-interest, to your being picky or a prude or any of one hundred other exasperations and endearments. Your mother is on a road that goes only in one direction, away from everything she knew and knew how to do. Embedded in that road are nevertheless talismans she can pick up, things she was once committed to and loved, jazz music, her children and grandchild, being naked, which you learn anew when someone in your mom’s orbit feels the need to plant a penis privacy hedge…
