Our dance

Sometime in 1997, I wait on the other side of a heavy dung-colored door. Someone has to come and let me in. To only let me in and not let the crazies out. My son is at home with his father. I know that my mother wants to see him, but I wonder what it does to him sometimes, coming to this place where men with beards alternately shout obscenities and weep for their mothers. The nurse leads me down the hall and puts me at a table to wait for my mother. Around me in the dayroom, the patients twirl and glare.

She wears cotton pants and two cotton gowns – one facing the back and one the front. The last time I saw her, she was in my apartment with a homeless man who was wearing a pair of her shoes. She wore a cowboy hat. And a feather boa. It is difficult now to find anything strange. She smiles when she sees me, stepping out of her room and into the bright, clean light of the hallway, but by the time she sits at the table with me, she is in tears.

“Hi, baby girl,” she says. Her hands lie cupped in her lap and her shoulders hunch forward. This is barely the woman I grew up with.I swallow hard.

“Hi, Mom.” I want to reach over and squeeze her hand, but I don’t. She already seems so frail, I am afraid that this gesture will be her undoing. Instead I hand her one of the tissues I brought with me. While she wipes her eyes and nose, I try to find something to say.

“Brought you some movies,” I finally tell her. “Sleepless in Seattle. Moonstruck.” Her favorites. She watches them over and over. Her doctor tells me it is comfort for her, something familiar to grasp in a world that seems to be spinning away from her.

“I have a vcr in my room.” She sniffles. I think of my son, catching his breath as he tries to calm himself after a good cry.

“The nurses told me when I called.”

“You called?” I can tell by the way her voice goes up at the end that I’ve made a mistake.

“You were sleeping.”

“Oh. Okay.”

But I know it is not okay that I called and did not speak to her. I know that she sees this somehow as an indication that I do not love her. It doesn’t matter that I called to check on her. It does not matter that I am here now.

"I’m thirsty,” I tell her as I stand up.

“Do you want anything? A soda?”

She shakes her head. “I have tea in my room.”

“I’ll be right back.”

I walk across the dayroom to a vending machine and dig for change in my pocket. I feel the eyes of the patients on me. Coins clank as they fall into the hopper, and I glance around the room, smiling uncomfortably and nodding as I make eye contact with the others in their cotton pants and hospital gowns. One woman bursts into tears and a man wants to know what the hell I’m looking at. I press my selection and try to concentrate on the banging sound of the can as it falls through the machine.

I keep my eyes to the floor on my way back to the table.

She has stopped crying completely, this stranger who inhabits my mother’s body, and I hesitate for a moment as I try to choose whether I should move to the chair on the other side of her, where my back would be to the room, or if I should sit down where I was. I decide on my first seat. It is better to make eye contact, no matter how uncomfortable, than it is to turn my back on them. On anyone.

“Was the boy sleeping?” she asks about my son.

I lie and tell her yes.

“Does he ask where I am?”

“He knows you're at the hospital. He wanted to buy you a teddy bear.”

My mother smiles. But her eyes don't show it.

“Maybe I will bring him next time.”

“Next time,” she says and the smile leaves her face. “How long am I going to be here?”

I close my eyes and bite my lip. Sometimes I think I will never get the hang of it - this dance we do so often. My mother listens too intently to what I have to say, hovering around every word, attempting to uncover what is yet unsaid. I shuffle my feet, try to stick to the choreographed steps, and hope to keep her from whirling too far away.