Elvis Has Left the Building

Ch. 10 of An Evening With God

As the high priestess of social anxiety and the queen of catastrophic expectations, Mom was of course scared to death as Steve found a parking space and Lisa chirped, “Well, here we are.” But Mom didn’t want to get out of the car. She’d worn the wrong blouse — not wrong in the sense of having reached blindfolded into her closet and picked something terribly unbecoming, but of deciding the other one she’d been considering would have made a better impression her first day at Forest Floor Residence for Seniors. She wanted to go home and change.

“But you are home, Mom,” Lisa said brightly, “your new home. Me and Steve will go over. to the house and pack all your clothes tomorrow for you. They’re expecting you at two-thirty.”

Mom looked at her wristwatch, no doubt hoping against hope that there was time to go home and change. If there was one thing even less imaginable than looking less than her best to this woman who 61 years ago had been voted Best Dressed Gal by her high school graduating class back in Racine, it was being late. There was only one person on earth Lorraine Noonan hadn’t deferred to reflexively, and thus would never dream of keeping waiting, and that was her late husband, who wasn’t on the earth anymore, but in it.

She wasn’t budging from the front passenger seat, though, and Lisa was giving her elder brother her you-deal-with-Mom look. Steve came around to the passenger side and extended his hand, but Mom just shook her head frantically and tried to close her door. Failing that, she put her hands on her lap and looked straight forward.

“Come on, Mom,” Noonan said in a tone that suggested it might be last thing he said in his kind, patient tone. “You can do this. You really can.”

She tried going into little-girl mode. “Please don’t make me go in there, Stevie. I don’t know anyone in there. They’ll all have favorite people to sit with at meals. I beg of you, please don’t make do this!”

Noonan looked at Lisa, who shrugged. It was three minutes before the hour. As the son of parents who throughout his childhood had invariably been parked in front of somewhere they needed to be 20 minutes before they needed to be there, condemning him and Lisa to the boredom of a stationary American sedan’s back seat, Noonan wanted no part of tardiness. Lisa, no doubt itching to get home to her online used fashions business, had exhausted her own fake cheerfulness. Her expression told Steve, “You’re the man of the family. This is yours to fix.”

He reached into the car and grasped his mother’s upper arm. “Cut it the fuck out now, Mom,” he said. “We’re already late.”

Mom knew her part in the little play was to appear shocked by her son’s foul language, and to pretend that his use of it had made her fear for her safety if she didn’t do whatever someone capable of such vulgarity and disrespect demanded of her. The fact, though, was that Noonan had been saying fuck around her a couple of years. It was a manifestation of the ever-greater anger he’d begun to feel for her after the stroke that had left Dad unable to walk.

The guy who’d taught his court-ordered anger management class had referred Noonan to psychotherapist Kirsten Holmes, who’d helped him understand the violence that had gotten him expelled from high school at 16, and jailed twice as an adult, one of those times for 60 days.

Holmes had wondered, leadingly, if Noonan’s apparently insatiable need to prove his manliness with his fists might have something to do with Lorraine Noonan’s seeming not to have wanted her son ever to get close to his dad. “I wonder,” Holmes said, “If her own psychopathology made her feel that the closer you got to him, the farther you were from her.”

Mom had never made a secret of her contempt for the man she’d married at 31 because in those very different, very impatient times a young woman who wasn’t married and pregnant by 24 was seen as an old maid. The circle was vicious. The more Freddy, a gentle soul who adored her, let her disdain him right in front of the kids, the greater her contempt.

“There are two ways a boy growing up in that setting could have gone,” Holmes had said. “He could imitate the primary male role model in his life, and become docile and submissive himself. Or he could go in the opposite direction.”

“Like I did,” Noonan said. “But why?”

“Couldn’t tell you, Steve. Something to do with the way God, or Mother Nature, or whatever other force you might wish to invoke, made you. If you’d had a brother, he might very well have chosen the submissive road, no more consciously than you became someone who’s felt compelled at many times to express himself with his fists.”

Not two weeks after that session, Steve drove Mom over to the convalescent hospital in which Dad had come to live because the queen of catastrophic expectations was sure that if she “let” Freddy come home, there’d be a fire, and she’d be unable to drag him to safety).

Steve and Lisa discussed rescuing Dad from the convalescent hospital. Dad couldn’t come to live with Steve, who commonly worked 12 hours a day — construction for eight hours and intimidating his boss’s creditors for four more — and Lisa had no room in the one-bedroom apartment she shared with her boyfriend and their baby daughter. At least they could find somewhere that didn’t reek of disinfectant, and had better food, though, right? Wrong. Dad rejected the idea out of hand. He was sure Mom had her reasons for having chosen TLC. In all the years of their marriage, he’d never defied her, and he certainly wasn’t about to now that he couldn’t even walk.

As a treat, his wife and kids were going to drive him down to the beach, and get him out of the disinfectant stench of TLC for Elders for the afternoon.

When they finally reached their destination, Steve popped the trunk open and reached for Dad’s wheelchair. Mom wasn’t hearing of it. “It’s too heavy,” she gasped. “Let’s find someone to give you a hand with it. Or at least let me help you.”

It wasn’t a big deal at the time. Noonan laughed and said, “Who do you suppose folded it up and put it in the trunk if not me?” During the long drive home, it had occurred to him — finally, at 41 — that Mom had done what she’d done in a million small ways over the course of his life. She’d told him he wasn’t a man, but a dependent boy.

Mother and son had been close Noonan’s whole life. She’d always made clear that she loved him very much more than she loved Lisa. Ordinarily mild-mannered, Dad had been incandescent with anger over Steve’s expulsion from San Rodrigo High School and subsequent arrests, but Mom even then had stood by him without hesitation. The same woman whose devotion to propriety was such that she probably wouldn’t have lived through being inappropriately attired at one of the half-dozen neighborhood get-togethers she agreed to attend with Freddy during Steve’s early ears was fine with her handsome son’s having broken his PE teacher’s jaw. “I’m sure it’s exactly what he deserved,” she said.

How she’d loathed the neighborhood get-togethers. Being invited over to someone’s home was excruciating for her. What she would wear, when she had absolutely nothing to wear that wouldn’t make the other women tacitly scorn her? And of course she couldn’t count on the avidly gregarious Freddy not embarrassing her horribly, flirting brazenly with those other (much better-dressed) women, wanting desperately to be liked, or just noticed.

What a team Mom and Dad had been, she reclusive and almost paralyzingly shy, he the would-be life of every party, the implacable slapper of backs and teller of loud jokes. As a kid, Steve had fervently dreaded the mornings after, when he’d wake to the sound of Mom shrieking, “How could you humiliate me like that?” and Dad meekly promising that he’d never again be so insensitive (as to chat for more than a moment with another woman), so oblivious to how he was making his wife feel.

“Do you not think,” Dr. Holmes had asked, “that this might have been your dad’s way of getting back at your mom for treating him as she did?” It was one of a great many things Holmes saw that Noonan had not, even though they’d been right in front of his face.

Close as they’d been through his late 30s, he and his mom would never be very close again after she condemned Dad to TLC Convalescent Care, and told Steve he’d need help to get Dad’s wheelchair out of the trunk. He’d always love his mother, but he’s started hating her a little bit too.

The difficult thing was that Holmes hadn’t let Steve think Mom the sole culprit in the upbringing that had made him a human powder keg. “Do you not see that your dad was complicit in your mom’s treatment of him, Steve? Why, if not because he’d handed over control, were all the decisions hers alone? What was stopping your dad from demanding that, if she couldn’t be affectionate and generous with him, she could at least treat him with respect in front of you and your sister?”

Steve had hated Holmes asking that, and come to realize it was exactly what he should have asked himself all those years.

Two months later, after Dad died, Steve felt as though he’d lost both his parents. His unconditional adoration of Mom was no less dead than Dad was.

It was a wonder Steve could hang drywall. Throughout his early life, he’d regarded himself as hopeless at working with his hands. When he admitted this offhandedly to Holmes at one session, she pointed out that most young men learned to be handy from their dads, and asked if Steve’s had been a carpenter. Steve related that, as a boy, he’d never be allowed to work on anything for 45 seconds without Dad swooping down on him, shaking his head, tsk-tsking, and marveling at Steve’s knack for going about things ass-backward.

Holmes had wondered if Dad might have had a comparable experience as a boy. “No matter how hard we try,” she said, “very few, if any, of us manages not to replicate many of their parents’ mistakes. Very often, you don’t realize you’ve done it until year later.”

Steve said he’d never met his paternal grandfather, so had no idea of how good a teacher of the manly art of home maintenance he’d been, but when he thought about it, it occurred to him that Mom had been to Dad what Dad had been to Steve. She’d been contemptuous of him in every other way, so why not in this one too? Any time something would go wrong in the house. Dad, looking as though about to be executed, would come to puzzle over it. Mom would grant him maybe 45 seconds’ deliberation before disgustedly demanding, for instance, “Why don’t you admit you have no idea what to do?” Then she would intone words that neither Dad nor she herself, frugal as they were, ever wanted to hear. “I suppose we’re going to have to call someone to come out.” Had a non-English speaker watched video of such a moment, he or she might have guessed that what Mom was really saying was, “What a rotten excuse for a man you are, not being able to repair a leaking faucet!”

Men don’t cry, and Steve had taught himself not to. He made others cry. But sitting there in Holmes’ little office, thinking about Dad, he remembered an episode that made him explode in tears so profuse that they startled Holmes. Steve, in his own second-hand Corolla, and Mom and Dad, in their Prius, had driven over to Lisa’s. At visit’s end, Steve’s car hadn’t started. The kind of man that Dad wanted to be would have opened the Corolla’s hood, rolled up his sleeves, and known exactly what to look for. Dad didn’t even go through the motions with the hood. He folded a one-sided flyer he found in the Prius’s trash basket, wrote on it, “Please don’t tow — Will not start,” and placed it under Steve’s driver’s-side windshield wiper.

It appeared, in Holmes’ little office, as though Steve, who hadn’t wept in maybe four years at that point, had been saving the tears not cried for just such an occasion.

His first couple of weeks working for Timmons Builders were as dramatic an affirmation of the combined power of his anger management course and Dr. Holmes’ psychotherapy as anyone could have asked, as his fellow workers mocked his ineptitude relentlessly, and he didn’t break even one of their jaws.

Mom shocked her two kids by adjusting in no time to life at Forest Floor, whose residents had their own apartments, but convened at mealtimes in the big communal dining room, with white tablecloths, table service, and food that was more attractively presented than at TLC, but almost certainly just as flavorless, given the vast array of things their physicians had forbidden the diners to eat. What Mom had been most worried about was not having anyone to eat with, but her fellow residents had been very welcoming, and within 72 hours of being coaxed out of the car and into the place, she had a male resident interested in her.

The problem was that, as one who’d lived in the area since before the orchards were turned into what at the time was the almost inconceivably farflung suburb of San Rodrigo, Harry had friends in the area. One of them, Gloria, was the widow of the guy he’d started his heating and air conditioning business with in 1963.

Every other Friday, Gloria would come over to Forest Floor to have dinner with Harry. Mom couldn’t bear the idea any more than she’d been comfortable with Dad paying undue (to be fair, any) attention to other women at neighborhood get-togethers during Steve’s childhood. She took to effectively demanding that either Steve or Lisa have dinner with her on Gloria nights, Mom’s treat.

When both said they couldn’t make it, she’d tell them, in her best drama-queen sigh, “Well, I guess I’ll just have to eat a big lunch and skip dinner then.” Surely, though, she’d made other friends she could eat with! And it wasn’t as though Harry hadn’t invited her to join him and Gloria. “No, it’s fine,” she’d say. “I could probably stand to lose a few pounds anyway.”

Steve invariably capitulated, but being his mother’s son, made her pay dearly for his company, making a big display of how put-upon he felt. He was snide. He remembered text messages he’d forgotten to send, and composed them right there at the table. By being the Asshole of the Century, wasn’t he avenging his dad?

He was so busy being the AOC that it took him a couple of dinners to realize that Mom seemed to be degenerating mentally. When he arrived to take her out (or her dime) to their third Gloria-Nite dinner, he saw something that made him literally gasp in horror.

A stain on her pants.

She wasn’t the high priestess of social anxiety, but also the most fastidious woman on earth. She hadn’t been voted Best Dressed Gal solely on the basis of her excellent taste and financial ability to implement it. There’d also been the fact that she was always perfectly put together — always pressed and pristine. And spotless.

As she seemed when she first opened the door to Steve. The crease on her pants was, as ever, a marvel of modern science. She’d chosen her accessories with her customary care and discretion. But as they walked down to Stev’s car, he was it — heartbreaking quarter-sized blotch on the left inside leg of her pants.

He made an appointment, with a geriatrician wonderfully named Dr. Apostle, for her to be assessed, though he was well aware there wasn’t much anyone could do about dementia. Dr. Apostle was a supercilious jerk, and treated Mom with mildly disgusted impatience, but here, of all places, Steve became very much his mother’s son.

To Steve’s considerable embarrassment, Mom addressed the waiters in the restaurants he allowed her to take him to on Glora Nites as sir, as in fact she’d addressed every male, even those decades her junior, throughout her life. She was as reflexively deferential as she was fastidious, and if she could defer to a waiter, surely her boy, whom she’d raised right, could defer comparably to one as learned as Dr. Apostle clearly imagined himself to be.

He asked Mom a series of questions to test her mental acuity. What day of the week was it? What year was it? What was the name of the senior retirement community where she lived? She got probably nine questions in a row right without hesitation, and Steve, breathing ever easier, concluded he’d over-reacted to the stain.

But then Dr. Apostle asked her age, and without hesitating, in the same bright, eager tone in which she’d correctly remembered Forest Floor as where she lived, Mom said, “35.”

And Steve had thought the sight of the stain had made his blood run cold!

Guiding her out into the reception area at examination’s end so he could hear Dr. Apostle’s diagnosis in private, Steve managed not to cry, and was more tender with her than he’d been at any moment since Dad’s death. Dr. Apostle clearly didn’t want to spend a lot of time with Steve, and said there was nothing much anyone could do about dementia, though donepezil, rivastigmine, and galantamine had all been shown to impede memory loss in some cases. Oh, the pleasure uttering those intimidating polysyllables seemed to give him!

There was no saying for sure how quickly Mom was likely to deteriorate. The good doctor gave Steve a look that said, “I don’t know what more you want from me, you tiresome blue collar riff-raff, but I’ve got Warriors tickets, and need to get out of here.” Steve didn’t empty the contents of the planter containing his areca palm over Dr. Apostle’s head, and, as Dr. Holmes had advised, gave himself a little mental pat on the back for having controlled his temper.

Driving Mom back to Forest Floor, he told her the doctor had pronounced her just fine. Worrying her would serve no one.

Her resentment of Gloria only grew. Steve, whose anger at her had dissipated a little bit in the wake of the Apostle experience, tried to talk to her about Gloria as they’d talked in the days of Steve’s blissful obliviousness to how Mom had subverted his and Dad’s relationship. He pointed out that Harry had repeatedly assured Mom that she was welcome at his and Gloria’s table, but she’d actually been offended rather than reassured. “Their table. Well, that leaves me out in the cold, doesn’t it? she said, her eyes brimming with tears. “Three’s company, after all. I’ve always been the odd man out, all my life.”

There might have been a time when Steve would have teased her about not being the odd woman out, but the days of affectionate teasing were long past. “Mom,” he accused, “for Christ’s sake. For 46 years you had everything your way with Dad. Almost half a fucking century! You’d say jump and he’d ask how high. Do you not understand how high a price I’ve paid in my life for that arrangement? Can you not appreciate that your utterly fucked up relationship with him horribly distorted my view of what being a man meant?”

She didn’t even notice the four-letter words. “You’re 10 times the man your father ever was, angel. A hundred times!”

Now it was he who was holding back tears. She’d addressed him as angel when he was a little boy, and hadn’t so addressed him since.

“And didn’t he have some say in the matter?” she continued, trembling with anger and frustration. “Was it somehow my fault that he was a fucking weakling?”

Fucking felt like a faceful of ice water.

“It was both of your faults! But we’re getting off track here, Mom. You can’t re-do the past. Nobody can. What you can do is show me that, if you had it to do over, you might do better. And you can do that by not making demands of Harry that he obviously isn’t going to kowtow to. He isn’t Dad, Mom.”

He’d probably seen her cry three times ever. This was the fourth. “You just don’t understand, Stephen,” she said. “You’re not even trying to!”

Four days later, three days before the next Gloria Nite, the whole thing was moot. Watching a Warriors game in the gentlemen’s TV room, Harry had a fatal heart attack.

Mom’s condition began to deteriorate ever faster. As dutiful as he was resentful, Steve would phone her twice a week, rain or shine. She would sound fine, and sometimes even chipper, but would then address him as “dear”, as he’d never heard her address anyone. The Forest Floor called to tell him they didn’t think it was in her best interests to try to continue living alone. She seemed unable to remember to come down to meals, and the day before they phoned, she’d come down to dinner barefoot, incoherent, and furious. When her waiter had asked what she wanted for lunch, she’d told him to go fuck himself, loudly.

Steve moved her into The Cedars at Perdidas, one of the nicest eldercare facilities in the area. It occurred to him that putting her in the one in which Dad had died, TLC, would be poetic justice. Lisa wouldn’t hear of it, though.

She might not have noticed how nice it was. On a couple of occasions, she asked Steve if he’d heard from his brother, who never found the time to phone, and he realized she thought she was talking to Lisa. Then it quickly got much worse. She didn’t remember having a relative named Steve. And worse. She didn’t seem to remember how to speak on the phone.

It was heartbreaking.

It was a relief.

His hating himself for feeling relieved improved his job performance, at least the creditor-intimidating part. Bud Timmons, who’d originally hired Steve as a drywall hanger, was also one of northeast County’s major wholesalers of substances Steve preferred not to know about. Steve was commonly told to let one of the other guys worry about the drywall, and to go encourage one of the retailers Bud supplied to make his (and in one case her) account current. This encouragement commonly involved fretting pointedly about the debtor’s ongoing physical wellbeing.

Bud had heard that Steve seemed to be delivering the messages with ever-greater conviction. Since Steve had taken over for Carl, the Latino day laborers Bud and his foremen commonly hired for cash from in front of the big Home Depot seemed to be thinking twice about getting on Bud’s case for money owed. In a perfect world, it occurred to Steve, it would have been an asshole like Bud he was intimidating, rather than some poor bastard from God knows where who was trying to keep his family clothed and fed while living in terror of being deported.

Nearly two months since he’d last seen Mom, Steve got a call from Lisa, who thought they should visit her. Steve said he didn’t see the point.“Elvis has left the building,” he said, simultaneously amusing and disgusting himself with his callousness. “The lights are on but there’s nobody home anymore.”

“Do it for me,” Lisa said. “I hate that place as much as you do. We’ll stay for half an hour.”

He said he’d go.

Lisa had never said she hated the Cedars, as Steve did too. How could a place so implacably tasteful, so beige and mauve and pleasant, with the sounds of songbirds and burbling brook piped in at an almost subliminally low volume all day, inspire such strong feelings? The staff was implacably pleasant, and had been trained not to skimp on the use of air freshener. The place smelled faintly of vanilla. And its artificiality made Steve’s flesh crawl.

At his most recent visit, Mom had looked at him, or, more accurately through him, without a trace of recognition. He’d held her hand and said, “It’s me, Mom,” but he might as well have said it to the wall. But now she was even worse off. She was sitting upright in a wheelchair in the resident lounge, surrounded by fellow residents chatting (in one case with themselves), playing cards, staring into space, or snoring with their mouths wide open. It occurred to Steve he’d never seen Mom so at ease around other people. She seemed asleep but wasn’t. Lisa took one look at her, yelped softly in horror, and told Steve, “I can’t do this. She’s even worse than last time. I just can’t.”

“It was your fucking idea to come,” he said.

“I know it was. Let me just collect myself for a few minutes.” She left mother and son alone.

Steve held his mother’s soft, warm hand. “Nice weather we’ve been having, huh, Mom?” he said. Another old lady’s beaming at him from the other side of the coffee table annoyed him until he remembered her from an earlier visit, when she’d looked slightly different. She was never not beaming.

An alarm went off. There was enough of Mom left for her to tense reflexively. A couple of the snorers woke. A young woman member of the staff Steve didn’t recognize hurried purposefully through the lounge. “She’ll turn it off in just a second,” Steve told Mom.

No she wouldn’t, or couldn’t. The new staff member hurried back the way she’d come, smiling tensely, and saying, “There’s no fire. I’ll have it turned off in two shakes.”

It stayed on. You’d think a place that worked so hard at being tranquil could turn off the fucking alarm! Steve looked around for someone to make feel as he made Timmons’ creditors feel. Here, through the lounge, came the new staff member again, even more hurriedly than before, this time with another member of staff, one Steve recognized. Surely the older woman would know how to replace the shrieking of the alarm with the brook burbling and the songbirds singing.

Or maybe not. The shrieking didn’t stop.

Steve wheeled Mom down the long corridor to her bedroom. The same two photographs as at Forest Floor were atop the dresser. In the one that had made Steve have to excuse himself and go into the bathroom to keep from being seen crying, Mom and Dad were sitting side by side smiling on the tasteful gray loveseat in their living room, Dad as though trying to win the award at summer camp for Biggest Smile, Mom because she understood she was supposed to. Dad, in that way he had, had imagined Mom was going to let him put his arms around her shoulders. Fat chance. She was leaning forward to avoid contact with him.

Steve’s parents’ relationship in a nutshell.

The other photo was of Steve and Lisa with Mom when Steve was nine and Lisa six. Someone, presumably a member of the staff, had felt called upon to affix stickers of adorable puppies to both photos. The alarm shrieked on defiantly.

The Alzheimer’s seemed to have left Mom’s lizard brain intact. She was unmistakably tense. There were two pillows on her bed, which an implacably pleasant staff member, or maybe the paid-under-the-table wife or girlfriend of one of the day workers in front of the Home Depot, made every morning, not bothering to smile because no one saw her. Steve could help Mom out of her wheelchair. He was more than strong enough for that — and onto the bed. He could hold one of the pillows over her face until what little life remained in her was extinguished.

The siren would not be appeased. What was the point of Mom’s suffering this terror when there was so little left of her?

Steve glanced at the photo of her leaning forward out of Dad’s reach, and didn’t help her onto the bed or reach for a pillow. Maybe she deserved her terror.

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