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(Another in the columnist’s series about his parents, Eleanor and Pete. At the time this episode takes place, Eleanor is living in a nursing home in Center City and Pete has already been dead some 20 years).
It was a dazzling spring afternoon in Philadelphia. No time to be cooped up in a room in a nursing home. When you are confined to a wheelchair as Eleanor was, you had to wait and hope that someone would come by and take you for a walk. Luckily for Eleanor, her son was off from work that day and decided to visit and take her for a walk, or a ride as it were, in her wheelchair.
Nursing homes, even the nice ones, don’t smell so nice. No detergent has yet been invented that can remove the odor of lives lived too long. The food isn’t great either. And there were definitely times when Eleanor needed a break from her roommate, whose lapses of memory sometimes annoyed her. With it all, Eleanor had adjusted quite nicely to her surroundings. She was quite social and liked to argue about current affairs. Her favorite target was President George W. Bush, a dim bulb if she ever saw one. Eleanor could be sharp tongued too. Her favorite expression when her son screwed up, which she felt was more often than not recently, was “God forgive me, Thomas, but you’re dumb.” Thomas smiled. And God always seemed to forgive Eleanor.
Her son asked the nurse to get his mother’s wheelchair because he was going to take her for a nice afternoon walk around Logan Square. In truth, Eleanor preferred the old days when she could get around herself and not depend on anyone. She loved to roam along South Broad Street, and stop to get herself a coffee and muffin from her favorite store. She liked to hang out at a friendly funeral home, which she found not at all odd. She had all kinds of friends and liked to invite them back to the apartment, even though her overprotective son warned her against doing so.
The nurse brought the wheelchair and left it in the room while Eleanor chatted with her son, telling him how she argued with her husband in her dream last night. Pete had died 20 years ago, but she was still angry with him because he died first, which Eleanor considered grounds for abandonment.
Her son helped her over to the wheelchair, but as she proceeded to sit, he noticed the chair move slightly and realized that the lock was not on. He leaned forward to catch her as the wheelchair slipped away, and they both fell to the floor amidst her cries for help. The nurse and an attendant rushed into the room to find Eleanor lying on the floor with her son alongside her. When the nurse realized Eleanor was not hurt, she leaned over to pick her up and in so doing whispered in her son’s ear, “If you’re hurt, hide it from your mother.”
Her son was indeed hurt. He had a searing pain from his left thigh all the way down to his ankle, but he got himself off the floor. The nurse helped Eleanor into the wheelchair and said to her son, “Don’t disappoint her. Take her for that walk.” With a great deal of pain (he later found out that he had injured his hamstring), he pushed the wheelchair out of the hospital into the bright sunshine.
The birds were chirping and traffic was heavy around the square. Limping as he pushed the wheelchair, he sought to assure himself that his mother was alright. She was, but he could tell she wasn’t thrilled with him at that moment. That was when he failed to clear the curb with the wheelchair. As the chair hit the curb, his mother almost rose up out of the chair and was nearly dumped on the sidewalk. In horror, he recovered just in time only to hear her say, “God forgive me, Thomas, but you’re trying to kill me!” Try as he might to convince her that he had no homicidal thoughts in mind and would make sure he was extra careful the rest of the way, she insisted on his taking her back to the nursing home. “Take me back before you kill me,” was what she said, with sarcasm rather than any trace of fear in her voice.
He limped back to the nursing home pushing the wheelchair. Eleanor seemed understandably content to be back. Her roommate questioned where she had been. The woman was always petrified that his mother would request a transfer to another room. Eleanor really did like her roommate, but this was one of her impatient moments. She reminded her roommate that she had been gone fewer than 20 minutes. Her roommate no longer had any sense of time, much like a pet who greets you the same way whether you’ve been gone six minutes or six months.
Once back, Eleanor was already conversing with her favorite nurse. She was offering the opinion that if they served her chicken one more night, she was going to start clucking. He limped off into the afternoon sun.
A week later he saw his mother’s doctor in the hallway of the nursing home. “I heard you tried to kill your mother,” he said.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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