For Olin, in memory
The driveway to the Asheville, North Carolina, home of my mother and stepfather is a steep decline to the driver’s left that requires crossing Crestwood Road just before a curve to the right. Every visit to see them, one of us mentions the leap of faith we take as we cross and plunge. Luckily, we have seen more bears in that driveway than cars coming around the curve, for by the time we would see an oncoming vehicle, it would likely be upon us and slam right into the passenger side of the vehicle. Why my typically cautious stepfather never put up at the top of his driveway one of those large mirrors that allow a driver to see around the curve perplexes me. It is surprising that the man I know to be obsessed with his health would fail to do something so simple to make sure his demise was not the result of an accident easily avoided.
And he does not just worry about himself. “When was the last time you changed the oil in your car?” he would ask me before I drove back to Knoxville from a visit to their New Orleans home when I was in graduate school. If I expressed any uncertainty in my response, I would get into my car to leave for my nine-hour drive back and find a new dated sticker on the windshield telling me when to get the next oil change and a receipt on the front passenger seat, indicating that my stepdad had taken the car in to have the oil changed while Mom and I were out and about. My mother’s husband is an enigma, albeit a lovable enigma—worried that I would end up stuck alone on the side of the highway and yet, every visit to their home in Asheville not so many years later required that leap of faith into their driveway.
This man whose health concerns inspired my mother to change her cooking style completely in the early years of their marriage darts across the road, then down into his driveway several times a day as he spends his retirement years driving down and up Town Mountain running errands, keeping himself busy, never tiring of the winding roads leading to their mountain home. He does not think before heading out for the first time on any given day about all the things he might get while in town to avoid multiple trips. He does not wait, let the day play out, so that he might make a single drive into town. Rather, as his day proceeds, if he finds he needs something—or if Mom does—off he goes, even if he has just returned minutes before. The tedium of the same roundtrip several times a day does not bother him.
When Mom realizes there are no olives for her special martini, which she only makes when I visit (and I only drink with her), he happily leaves for the store, pulling his car out onto that winding road again, then the treacherous blind dart across the lane into the driveway on his return. He doesn’t drink with us, allowing himself only a glass of red wine with his health-conscious dinner, though we long ago made a deal that I will bring him cheeseburgers when he moves into the old folks’ home. By the time he’s there, he figures he will not have to watch what he eats.
My stepfather has been “dying” for almost as long as he’s been married to my mother—almost forty years. His medical history includes the probability that the men in his family who came before him didn’t live past fifty or, at the outside, sixty, though he does not have much information about them, raised as he was by his stepfather. Now over eighty, my stepfather still plays singles tennis regularly. “And if some ‘young’ guy gets cocky on the court,” my mother tells me (and by “young” she still means over fifty), “he plays to win even though it means he will be sore the next day.” He was once the longstanding top player at our small-town country club in south Louisiana, where we all lived at the time, and he still has a competitive streak.
In the early 1980s, the first few years of their marriage, my stepfather had an episode during a routine physical exam that seemed to suggest a heart attack was imminent. Apparently, a mistake was made in interpreting the results, but that made no difference in his long-term reaction to a doctor rushing into the examination room with the results in his hand and telling him, “Sit down. Right now. It’s lucky you’re in a hospital already.” According to what the doctor thought he was seeing on the medical chart before him, he was puzzled that his patient had not dropped dead on the treadmill during the stress test and half expected him to keel over right there. Even after the mistake was recognized and shared to reassure my stepfather that his condition was not so dire after all, he remained convinced he was going to follow his forefathers to an early grave, and he changed his eating habits overnight.
To help her new husband do that, Mom adjusted how she cooked, also overnight. This changed what she ate, too, even though, she weighed at most a hundred twenty pounds back then. With her high metabolism, she is able to eat anything she wants, “and I gain the weight just watching her,” her husband would joke. An unforeseen consequence of her new cooking style was that she could be of no help when I asked her decades later to teach me to fry the fresh fish I caught in my new home on the eastern end of North Carolina the way that I remember her cooking it when we were children catching fish in south Louisiana. She simply doesn’t remember how to fry food.
After years of assuming her husband would precede her in death—by decades, he figured—it was Mom who gave us the first real mortal scare. She suffered chronic, debilitating pain in her joints, caused by an autoimmune deficiency aggravated by an extreme case of shingles that left her unable to wear anything but a loose nightgown and thus unable to get out and exercise, which is crucial to her managing her joint pain. Her appetite sapped by pain and the steroids prescribed, she shrunk down to under a hundred pounds and seemed inclined to keep shrinking until she disappeared. Realizing she was the age her father was when he died, early seventies, it occurred to her that her metabolism and size were inherited from him, so she should not assume that she would be like her plump mother, who lived, mainly healthy and cogent, twenty years following the sudden death of my thin, able-to-eat-anything-and-not-gain-weight grandfather. Unlike my grandmother, who enjoyed herself until the very end of life at ninety-three, Mom found herself feeling worn out and miserable, and she seemed ready to give in and give up.
It was a harsh winter that year in western North Carolina. How was my stepfather going to drive up and out of that driveway, then down the slick winding road to take Mom to a warm hotel the next time they lost power? Or how was an ambulance going to get up the mountain road and down their steep driveway if she took a turn for the worst? So between snows, my stepfather took her all the way down the mountain, back to Louisiana, where neither of them had been as happy as they were in their mountain home, but where she could exercise even in the winter months. As they prepared to make the quick move, he told me what he didn’t tell her—that he didn’t think they would return to Asheville, the town that had embraced her art, just a six-hour drive away from me. But her health improved in the warm Louisiana winter that allowed her to take a daily walk, and then, when North Carolina warmed up in the spring, they moved back for another few years into the mountain home they loved.
“Let me just be clear,” I told my stepfather, after we were past those several scary months, “I am going to be pissed at you if she dies first.” He understands, I think. After all, thanks to her devotion to him, I’m never again going to learn to fry catfish filets or whole croaker like my mom used to do it. But the sacrifice has been worth it to have him in our family. I was glad to see how fulfilling my mom found her second marriage to a man who supported her desire to pursue an art career. He took her out of our tiny hometown, where she was expected to be satisfied as a housewife. First, they settled in New Orleans, where she could go to art school, and then, in Asheville, where she launched her career in her late fifties.
I think that I finally understand my stepfather’s growing rather than lessening obsession with his health during their years in Asheville. They had found a paradise there, and he wanted to extend it for as long as he could. During this period, when they were in their sixties, then seventies, my siblings and step-siblings would occasionally call them from Louisiana to report the deaths of various old friends. Bewildered by the shorter and shorter spans of time between such phone calls, my stepfather made a request: “First just tell me So and So is sick, and then call a week or so later to tell me he died. I need time to prepare.”
I am now reaching the age when I am experiencing the same frequency of loss. On my end of North Carolina, I’ve discovered paradise on the Pamlico River and now find myself sharing the mortality concerns of my stepfather, worrying occasionally about a swollen mosquito bite (or is it a tick bite that will give me Lyme’s disease?) or a new age spot (or is it skin cancer?). It takes some of us longer in the pursuit of happiness, and when we do find the right mate in the right place, we might be inclined to panic over how much (or how little) time is left to enjoy it all, while we perceive that time going by faster and faster. Youth was like the slow-moving current of the Pamlico River flowing behind my dream house, while middle-age’s passing is more comparable to the rushing rapids of whitewater rivers outside of Asheville.
In spite of his long-held expectations to the contrary, my stepfather has actually reached old age after all, and he is finally slowing down a bit, hunching over with back pain, and becoming forgetful, a little less cognizant—not substantially so to the rest of us, including him, but the woman who has spent almost four decades living with him has noticed. As she glances out of the window, she notes that her over-eighty-year-old husband continues to piddle around in the steep yard around their mountain home, doing much of the planting and replanting himself in the spring, rather than instructing and watching the yard service men she insists he hire to do the work. She determines it is her turn to take him home to Louisiana, where his daughters can help to take care of him when the need arises, especially if she is not there with him by then. In the meantime, perhaps those daughters can help her convince him he shouldn’t play singles tennis or work out in the hot sun all morning, stopping only to drive into town to get more flowers or potting soil.
“You don’t have to go back,” I tell my mother, worried about how unhappy she might be living in Louisiana again. When my stepfather first retired twenty years before and suggested they escape the hot Louisiana climate where he had to wait an hour or so after the sun set to jog in the evenings, Mom agreed to be uprooted, as long as they moved to an artist-friendly community, which she found in Asheville. Her art flourished as she joined a co-op to show her work regularly and submitted to juried competitions in galleries in the surrounding area, the owners of which then asked for more of her work. And she loved painting the mountains. Where they had lived before, in New Orleans, the art scene had been much more difficult to break into, beyond the opportunity to take lessons with artists who had already done so. And yet, she and her husband were now talking about moving back to Louisiana, to Lafayette, which has a much smaller art community and which is much more conservative than either New Orleans or Asheville. Since leaving our hometown (much smaller than even Lafayette) over thirty-five years before, Mom has enjoyed not being the only woman in her circle to question the conservative ideology of the majority of the South. I worry about how she will fit in upon returning to the area. She didn’t fit in well when she lived there before.
But Lafayette is where several of their children and grandchildren live. “It is time for me to get to know my grandchildren,” she points out to me.
True, when Mom left Louisiana, my sister Irene was just starting her family, and she was not happy about Mom moving so far away. “Mom has already done her time with small children,” I told her when she shared her dismay that Mom was leaving right when she was going to need her advice as a new mother—as if Irene has ever listened to anyone’s advice. “It’s her turn to pursue her own dreams,” I responded. “We need to support that,” adding, “Dad loves playing with your boys. You have an enthusiastic babysitter just about any time you want him, and it’s his turn.”
I was so right at that time, but Dad is gone now. None of us would have guessed he would go before our always-near-death stepfather. In stark contrast, in fact, Dad never let himself worry about his death, and clearly did not “hear” what the doctors were telling him during several health crises of his last years. When death came suddenly, it was likely as much a surprise to him as to those he left behind.
And now Mom is also talking about the possibility of predeceasing her husband, and I am the one feeling deserted. It occurs to me to ask myself, is my issue that once again my stepfather is taking my mother away from me, as he did when they moved to New Orleans while I was still in high school? Not wanting to leave my friends our senior year, I stayed with Dad, as did my younger sister and brother. Moving was too much of a change after the already life-altering divorce of our parents, along with moving out of the home we’d grown up in. Since I was going to college in a year, and was a very active senior, I was too busy to notice if I felt abandoned by my mother’s departure. And since she and I became closer after she divorced my dad and embarked on a more fulfilling life for herself, I have never resented my stepfather. Quite the contrary. I liked the woman she was with him. And I’ve always appreciated how he supported her pursuit of an art career.
But years later, I experienced a breakthrough in therapy upon realizing how traumatized I’d apparently been by my hometown’s reaction to my mother leaving my father, and how I feared that kind of ostracism being directed at me some day. This fear of social rejection is the source of so much of my anxiety, it turns out. I didn’t fit in with my Deep South community much better than my mother did, no matter how hard I tried to suppress the ambition that distinguished me. After college, I stepped onto the traditional path, marrying the man I’d dated on and off through college, just because it was time to get married, and I didn’t leave my Louisiana husband until I could leave town, the whole state in fact, so as not to deal with the possibility that friends might choose him over me.
I repeated that pattern for a decade, staying too long in more than one bad relationship, breaking it off only when it was time to make another career move that took me out of town—until, that is, I couldn’t so easily move away to escape the fallout. My career was the one constant in my life. And with tenure within reach, I’d just bought a house. I had to learn to deal with the anger of a scorned lover and the hurt I felt when some friends chose to believe his version of events. It was traumatic, but I survived, of course. And learned about my abandonment issues from the mental healthcare I sought to help me through the crisiss
The smartest thing I ever did was follow Mom out of our Louisiana community and away from the provincial life that my small-town, Deep South childhood prepared me for. And the longer I’ve been gone, the more my ideological distance has grown to match my physical distance from that home, creating a political breach between me and my dad in his last years that continues between me and my younger siblings. But at least I had Mom. And now she’s going back to them. They won’t change her, I know. She has always been who she is, the woman unafraid to call herself a feminist (“Of course, I am. I have three daughters,” she would say) in a place that considered feminism an f-word. But she will have to speak quietly again when she returns to Louisiana and share her true ideology with just me and my older sister, to maintain comfortable relationships with my siblings as well as her husband’s children there. I worry that such suppression of her voice will feel like going backwards to her, that such suppression will aggravate her pain issues.
“You don’t want to sell your beautiful home,” I suggest to her as we stand on her balcony looking upon the vista that inspires her art. Maybe I am being selfish. Of her many homes since she moved away from us, this is my favorite, with its wall of windows in the living room, looking out over the city and beyond—Cold Mountain, Mount Mitchell. On a clear day you can almost see Tennessee, the state I lived in after escaping my own stifling marriage. Also, I really love having her across the state from my own home, even if it is a very long state. “It takes me as long to drive to Asheville, as it does to fly to Louisiana,” I have had to point out to my family still in Louisiana, who seem to think I visit her all the time. And yet it is easier and less expensive than visiting Louisiana—and much more relaxing, as conversation flows freely, and no subject is taboo. In the early years of their Asheville residence, we would go exploring in the mountains, though this is not so easy for her anymore, and I now enjoy sitting on her balcony looking at the mountains and just talking. Sometimes we venture into town, to visit her gallery, to peruse the shelves at Malaprop’s Bookstore, to shop, and to eat at one of many good restaurants they have discovered in and around Asheville.
I try to convince Mom and her husband not to abandon their home here but instead to buy a second home near me in eastern North Carolina, which they can move to in winter, to get off of their mountain, not have to slide up and down that precarious driveway in icy weather. They loved fishing and sailing when they were still living in Louisiana, and even if they think they are too old for boats, the man who still plays singles tennis is not too old to fish from a dock.
Plus, it’s my turn to have a parent living near me, isn’t it? “Let me take care of you when you are old,” I tell Mom.
“You can. I’ll move there near you if he goes first,” she tells me.
But in the meantime, they sell their house, pack up, and take another leap of faith.
