Adventures with a 100-Year-Old Mother: Inventing a Life | Emily Rubin

Part 1: Raggedy Ann: Death and the Doll 

She was sitting slumped over in the rocking chair, staring. The soundtrack is a profundo heartbeat tapping into my fear of the threat lurking in the shadows. I am an audience of one in the theater of my mother’s home. The truth is hidden from the innocent in the scene until the denouement if death doesn’t come first. The innocent, usually a young woman, is now me, a just past middle-aged daughter wondering what it will be like to find Mom slumped over. This time, it’s a doll.

My mother’s end is closer than ever, although she is not sick and has only minor pains and failing eyesight. Raggedy Ann is much worse. The doll and I are the same age, and it shows. Her tightly woven cottony skin has gone spidery parchment with a tear  down the right cheek revealing padding underneath. I touch my cheek in the same spot to check.

Unlike Raggedy, I moisturize as if it were a religion. There’s still a film of the aloe almond oil combo I apply each morning. Raggedy Ann doesn’t care. She is still smiling, falsely holding on to her youth, and still dressing like a happy-go-lucky farm girl. I pick at the skin around my thumbnails, revealing the padding underneath. Nerves and forehead lines appear—the house of tired carpet and triple upholstered chairs. Scatter rugs curl at the corners, tripping threats for even the spryest. Double-stick tape would minimize the danger. I stumble over them, but my mother never does.

If I did secure them, would that send her flying into the ultimate fall that brings the end to the old? Would I accuse myself of murder by double-stick tape? The house is a mildly insidious death trap. Front stoop stairs of brick with a rickety railing, wood stairs to the basement with walls lined with New Yorker covers from back in the 60s. It’s her choice to stay here, and maybe that’s a good thing, but when I gaze at wide-eyed, smiling Raggedy Ann, she seems to say, ‘This is ridiculous. We should go live someplace where everything is taken care of until we take that last rag doll flop off this earthly coil.’

Not too long ago, my aging dog, Sebastian, made his final exit. I am still sad—as it is with a furry companion who was dearly loved and loved us. In his last months, I knew I would be sad for a long time when It was time to say our final goodbyes. He held on valiantly, and maybe we waited too long for the visit to the vet. Yesterday, I placed his ashes on a shelf shrine alongside a Mexican sculpture of two dogs hugging and a velvety bobble-headed dog that looks nothing like Sebastian’s terrier mix but rather a square-faced boxer.

With my mother’s impending but unknowable death, I am at a loss for how I will feel [I know the feeling will hang on for a long time; I am anticipating its dimensions, but I can’t begin to imagine them]. Even with Sebastian, I still have no idea how long the sadness will linger.

My mother is not a burden, as she has often said she does not want to be. But the thought of her – and of her impending absence – is overwhelming. I think about her all the time and talk to her every day—every sentence could be our last. Some days, I struggle with feeling reluctant to speak because we don’t have much to say to each other.

But I know that she relishes stories of tragedy and illness—which there is no lack of those in the world. Recently, a dear friend was diagnosed with a highly complex, because of its location, tumor that turned out to be cancer, so that’s the story I brought up, and she wants to hear the daily updates. It is a love for the tragic mixed with a modicum of empathy. The empathy question is one I have considered for a long time because when I share something troubling, Mom responds with a platitude. When I had a tooth pulled a couple of weeks ago,  she said, ‘Well, nothing lasts forever.” Or when I told her I was going in for surgery for breast cancer, she said, “I never had cancer.”

While I write this, she is 101—in November, she will be 102. She speaks on repeat about her friend Helen, who recently died at 99. Her son in California could not get her on the phone, so he flew to New York and found her in bed, having died in her sleep. Not knowing the final moment but thinking it was a peaceful transition, I think, ‘I hope that’s how she goes too.’ Being the one to find the expired loved one is something I think about, but only with an abstract understanding of what that would be. Upsetting or relief if death came quickly and regret or sorrow, empathy if it did not.

So, I play the scenario out with the Raggedy Ann Doll that still sits in the child-sized rocking chair in my mother’s living room.

Raggedy Ann looks as if she agrees with me and lets me off the hook.

Put me down, cover me over. It’s okay, I have done what I need to do.

When I enter the house, having spoken with Mom by phone, I know she is probably still alive. But first I encounter Raggedy Ann. Maybe I should practice on her, shaking her rag doll body, listening for a heartbeat, calling 911. Calling the family! Raggedy Ann is dead! Today, she and my mother are still tensely smiling. My mother is not someone who smiles a lot. When she relays details of a delicious meal or a beautiful article of clothing she has found at the thrift shop, she speaks with pain, agonizing over the pleasure. Don’t let on that something is exquisite or pleasing because it will be too easily taken away. A Jewish thing. Lowered voices when talking about someone’s success, as opposed to when something bad happens, sung high volume.

So Raggedy Ann, once again during this liminal time is my bridge to understanding life in the abstract. Earlier on she was my cloth conduit for becoming aware that everything is figurative, like those paintings on the cave walls, and referred to by other things.

I am not sure if she was a gift or a hand-me-down. I have no sisters, and my two brothers did not have dolls, and anything they did share, they shared reluctantly with their little sister. Right from the start, Raggedy Ann was used, so perhaps her floppy girlhood was a passing baton of childhood handed off in a moment of boredom or decluttering. Some days we were sisters. On others, mother and daughter, aunt and niece, grandmother and granddaughter. Companionship with my mother was at a distance, while Raggedy Ann was a confidant. She would never use my secrets as filial ammunition. We stared at each other endlessly.  She was not like the needy, Tiny Tears or the life-size Patty Play Pal startling my mother when I hid in the closet laughing when I put her in my stead in the bed.

Raggedy was my stitched girlie icon of cotton and orange wool with red oval lips and a triangle for a nose. We were both bad on alternate days—throwing ourselves downstairs, taking gardening shears and stabbing blow-up kiddie pools, telling the cat to shut up, and turning on the television in the brothers’ room before they woke on Saturday morning. We pretended not to understand the note on the TV: Do Not Turn On Without Our Ultimate Permission. The older one, full of himself, liked to use big words, thinking it would befuddle and intimidate little sister and her silly doll. It did not stop us. There were cartoons to watch. I knew what the note said, but it wasn’t fair that the only TV was in their room. Raggedy and I did what we wanted and endured the consequences. The brothers yelled and threw pillows, and when they got up reluctantly to pee, we shrugged our shoulders.

They blew a collective lament through spittle-filled mouths.

Little sister, little brain.

Still, I worshipped them, their height and smarts, and bristled with jealousy to be part of the noises coming from their upstairs lair: stomping, farting, belching, endless flushing of the toilet, and strident brushing of hair with green glop to slick it into matching Dick Tracy dos. On the other hand, Raggedy Ann smelled of Lucky Charms and Coco Puffs. She ate ravenously and only threw up once, that I can remember.

She has a sensitive stomach like Tiny Tears. Let’s give her a bath, my mother insisted.

Giving a doll a bath, a staggering leap into the fractured lens of the conceptual. I had fingered the silhouette of a cow on a milk carton and realized it was the same as the one that came up to the fence at the farm we visited on a family outing. Driving there, I sat on the hump in the back of the ’52 Chevy. The car was seven years old, born before me, as I was only three.

 No one heard me think, looking back on it now, what I meant to exclaim was, “Holy shit, it’s a fucking cow on that carton, like the one at the farm. They’re both fucking cows.”

 Why didn’t anyone tell me? Luckily, Raggedy told me what was up, You got this, girl, take it and run with it.”

She was so practical, wearing a white apron over a blue flowered dress. Under the dress was a petticoat and bloomy pantaloons with elastic secured below the knee and around the waist. Red striped knickers, and no matter how many times I lifted that dress to inspect her underneath, it never was enough. Between the pale flesh of her puffy legs and her sunken stomach, I always looked for the other parts. Her face was flat and round, and her beady, slick, tar-colored eyes, framed by the smile, forced from ear to ear—but there were no ears! Was this another hint of the real and not real? As much as I tried, I could not make my lips form a perfect oval. They told me I had a button nose, and Raggedy only a wretched triangle. Mine did lengthen and sharpen as I grew—had it become a triangle?

Lifting Raggedy’s dress, pulling it past the ties of the apron, revealed a heart that was not fully drawn. There was a section of the outline missing. Inside the incomplete heart were the words ‘I love you’ in stick letters, slightly askew. Once again, I considered this abstract version of the thing that the doctor listened to under my blue dress while saying, “Take a deep breath.”

All this intellection disappeared when Raggedy Ann was sleeping with me or when we were holding hands: hers floppy, mine chubby—dragging her along the floor through the kitchen to my tiny room, to the bathroom, and outside—propping her up wherever we went. On the bed, next to the toaster, in a rocking chair, fingering the toilet tissue, or up a tree. Unlike me, she never stopped her oval smiling.

 I administered a lifesaving technique for that incomplete heart from the first aid kit of Crayolas.  But there was no blood red crayon among the forest and kelly green, and robin’s egg blue. Then I saw a magical word, vermillion. Ver-million. I held it, peeled back the paper around the waxy shaft, and drew the missing part of Raggedy’s heart. Now, she could full-on love with me. The crayons stood at attention, waxy Rockettes lined up to dance onto the dreamscape field of construction paper. With a few geometrics, I made a quilt for Raggedy out of ripped pieces of colored paper. Red (her favorite color), orange, blue (my favorite), yellow, and green. Designs of mushrooms and birdies tickled her feet.

The construction paper quilt did not survive, and Raggedy suffered a near-death experience when Jenny, a real live dog, took her on like a troublesome rat in a corner. Jenny was a best friend, and like anyone that close, we had a different opinion when it came to toys. The jaw shaking of Raggedy’s head left a scar, much like the one I have at to the left above my third eye from a run-in with a door frame. My hair grew back, but hers remains a lousy patch job, resulting from my harried mother’s haphazard sewing. There are hospitals for dolls, but the ambulance never came. I nursed Raggedy, forgave Jenny, and we took it easy for a few days. A rest and relax vacation like what the grownups talked about endlessly never being able to achieve.

Raggedy still sits in the mini rocking chair in the house where we siblings scuffled and cried, then left. She is wide-eyed, always awake in a state of semi-retirement. She is more worn, we match that way. I asked her if she was content. She would not say but asked as I looked under her dress,

“Why is there no crayon for the color of time?” 

“What would that be?” I asked.

She was unequivocal.

“It would shimmer with gold and blood-red memories, and when you draw a line or curve, it smells of burnt wax and goes click, click, tap, tap, tap, and moves your hand along with each mark you make.”

All this she announced, still floppy, waiting for someone else to be curious, pick her up, inspect under her dress, and confirm the heart was complete. I let her stay, feeling her stare as I retreated into the floppy, tangible colors of the present.

Hi Mom, how are you today?

---

Part 2: The Caregiver #1—Cheez Please

Hi, Mom. How are you?

No answer.  Then a mother’s foghorn blast.

I’m not a doddering old woman!

Two days a week having a caregiver/companion has been an adjustment for my mother. And there she goes again, riled up and telling the story of the manicure/pedicure finance debacle and the unexpected trip to an IHOP for a hamburger. These stories have been on a loop for weeks.

She’s got to realize I’m not a doddering old woman!

If anyone is allowed to dodder, it’s my mother at 102.  The ambiguities of aging. She perceives herself as a flickering, lithe, dancing in a blizzard of youth.

I must have been in a fog, she said.

Now the repetition.

What’s her name is getting too familiar with my finances—I pay my tab and she pays hers. That’s it. Next time she’s here I am going to let her know the deal.

Yes, Mom. You’ve got it all figured out.

Separate checks—I don’t know what I was thinking.

I listen till I can’t take it anymore, and then I change the subject. 

Hey, Mom, what’s your favorite snack?

Oooo. Snacks. Fattening, not supposed to eat in between meals. But there is one I can’t resist.

Really, what’s that?

The name escapes me. That happens these days. The word, or the thing is playing hide and seek, snickering, like the kids at school did. I had a glandular problem and was overweight. But I’m no fool! I’ve been around the block. I want to be remembered as a nice person. The name, the name, escapes me.

The aging brain wanders in a tighter and tighter spiral. A vault of unedited, loopy treasures, or maybe it’s a bubbly hot bath, like the one she takes each night, seeping into gelatinous mindset, a swamp with squeaking frogs and beedy-eyed snakes staring into the middle distance of her tired decolletage?  It’s more like her brain is a campus on shutdown. My mind starts to wander, and the narrative of what she feels pulses into a moment of clarity that has nothing to do with reality but is true. I circle back.

Try to describe the snack, I say. I can tell you my favorite snack.

No. No hints. Don’t tell me yours, mine is mine, and yours is yours.

Like the separate checks?

Yes, exactly—separate checks from now on. I gave her the money for my pedicure, how much did I get back? I must have been in a fog. Then we went all the way to the south shore to an iHop. Why would we go there when we were so close to Ben’s Delicatessen? I had a hamburger.

How was the hamburger?

Very good.  The waitress was very nice, a little plump. Oh, never mind, it’s all a bunch of bunk. Let me think. I can picture it. A salty orange pillow. A drawing on a refrigerator.  That’s where they are, on top of the refrigerator.

I remember Mom’s taste for after dinner midnight snack and her indigestible dreams, followed by a household directive.

Bring me the bottle of Tums.

Always on the night table.

She continues.

Ha, I’m being silly, it’s just a snack, but don’t write anything about me having an addiction. I don’t remember the name, but there is something I do remember. 

Her hard-edged voice coasted on a lyric of memory.

My father, your grandfather, described something, he called it hard tack. In World War I, he told me the square jaw-breaking crackers were given out as rations. It’s just a bunch of flour and salt, baked like the desert, he said, but when you’re hungry and tired, and the ship is rocking, it was everything, better than sleep. I don’t think he slept much. He didn’t tell many stories of the war. He liked to drink rye whiskey. He went so his brothers didn’t have to go. Carried the wounded back on ships. Staving off hunger and watching the fall of imperialism with that hard tack. Imagine if eating hard tack meant justice would be done.  He hated plutocrats.

I can give you a hint.

No, no, I am going to remember. If it’s the last thing I do.

That’s very funny, Mom.

I am not a doddering old lady. I went to Albany last year and waved a placard with the retired teachers to fight to keep our healthcare. They were planning to take it away. If I can challenge them, I should be able to remember the name of the damn snack I love so much. Ha! We were a bunch of old geezers with fists in the air. Talk about justice. Those side-mouthed politicos must have imagined we were their mothers pointing our swollen knuckles in their faces. I’d give them all a crack or a cracker across their insolent faces, and a whack on their flabby sunken behinds. We didn’t get everything we wanted, but we did keep our eye and dental coverage. Don’t mess with us.

You are amazing, would you like a hint?

No, I got it, there’s a box on top of the refrigerator. Give me a minute.

She puts down the phone and walks across the living room. I can hear her feet scuffing along the carpet, and then tap tap tap on the kitchen linoleum. Her shoulders crack as she raises her arms over her four-foot-eleven frame, stretching onto tiptoes to reach the top of the fridge. Her hands tighten around the box, she shakes it and holds it against her chest. The rattle of home life. She pushes the kitchen chair out of the way to get back to the living room. The impassioned voices of NPR filter in from the crackling kitchen radio.

I’ve got the box, but I need my glasses.

Cheez-it, the cracker, like my mother was born in 1921. They were first invented by Austin W. Riddle, a food scientist from Ohio. He developed the cracker as a way to use excess cheese produced on his family farm. The manufacturer Green and Green took over production. They were hardcore cracker enthusiasts and had manufactured hard tack for the army and navy in WWI. They perfected the recipe of the tasty morsel with the punched-in center hole and puffy pillow shape that crunches when you bite into them. The taste of cheddar (real cheese), paprika, and annando seasoning releases your yearning taste buds. The paprika gives the cracker the orange color and for my mother and her Jewish roots, it may be why she is addicted to them. Every pot roast, kugel, and devilled egg from her mother’s kitchen was presented on the table with a dusting of burnt orange paprika. 

 ***

When I visit my mother, I make a quick tour around the house to see if anything is amiss. Sometimes food is moldering in the fridge, furniture askew, and rugs are rolled into dangerous tripping curls. Various memories slide off the walls of my brain as I cross the thresholds of each room. In her bedroom, it’s the first day of kindergarten and I’m standing by her bedside tapping her arm to wake her, as it is surely time to go--- then in the evening, I’m a pre-teen, after the dishes are done, she sits up in bed reading, half glasses down to the tip of her nose and a box of Cheez-its in her lap. Her hand goes in and out of the box, grabbing the orange crackers one by one, chewing slowly. The conveyor belt of satiety never ceases. I recently found a 3-D collage I made in fifth grade for a science project titled The Digestive System. Were those Cheez-its in the stomach of the drawing? The ever-present bottle of Tums. An after snack, snack, and a source of calcium. Tums were invented in 1928 by a pharmacist wanting to cure his wife’s indigestion. No records indicate what was causing the poor pharmacist’s wife’s gastritis. A nurse won the naming contest with the entry, TUMS for the TUMMY.

This year, we installed chairlifts, one to the second floor, where she has an office, and the other to the basement.

I don’t need them, she claimed after the salesperson left brochures on the dining table.

After a few weeks, she became friendly and appreciative of the lifts, calling them her quiet partners who don’t argue, and they deliver laundry to either floor. I wish she would trust the caregiver the same way. For now, she takes no prisoners.

She must think I’m a doddering old woman. I’m no dummy. Where are my glasses?

Usually on her head.

I found them, ha! On my head. I got it! Cheez-its. That’s it. They sell them at the Dollar Store. I need another box. Next time what’s her name is here I’m going to tell her a thing or two.

Anne is her name, Mom.

That’s about it. How’s your new puppy?

She’s fine. Thanks for asking. Lucinda is her name.

Lucinda, that’s a nice name. Bye-bye.

Bye, Mom.

---

Emily Rubin lives and writes in the Hudson Valley, NY. Her debut novel (Stalina, Lake Union) was a selection in the Amazon Debut Novel Award. She co-founded the reading series Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose, presenting writers in laundromats across the US. She runs the Write Treatment Workshops for NYC and Upstate cancer centers. Her work has been published on HOWblog.org, IceFloe Press, Poets & Writers, Good Works Review, Oldster Magazine, and All the Restaurants in New York by John Donohue, as well as other journals. She was a recipient of the Sarah Verdone Writing Award and grants from NYSCA, Poets & Writers, CREATE, Berkshire Taconic Fund, and NYFA in support of her writing projects. She was an urban homesteader for 40 years, the inspiration for the novel, Solo Girl. She is now writing a memoir in stories, Adventures with a 100-year-old Mother.