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that she wasn’t living with us, in our house, but she also was proud that, for a woman
her age, she was still spry and active. She took care of herself: made her grocery list and
lled her basket only with what was on it; kept her own checkbook, paid her bills, and
ordered clothes from catalogs over the phone, there being no place for an elderly
woman who didn’t want to look frumpy to shop along our stretch of the Maine coast. In
fact, she had briey tried assisted living but hated every minute of it—the phony cheer
of group activities, the dining room’s mushy, overcooked food and overheated
conversation, the periodic, obligatory inspections of her apartment (her apartment!) to
make sure she wasn’t creating, as even she had to admit some of the other ladies did,
some kind of re hazard. My mother wanted none of that, and she was especially
disdainful of the facility’s other services: transportation to the grocery store (“My son
does that”), to the doctor (ditto), the dentist (ditto again), and the hairdresser (and
again). She didn’t require a scooter and didn’t need to hang on to anyone’s arm or on to
the ugly ubiquitous railings bolted to the corridor walls. She certainly didn’t need to be
wheeled anywhere. Despite chronic lower-back problems, she still cleaned her own
bathtub and did her own ironing. Nor did she want me paying for it. We never showed
her the bills, but she somehow found out that it cost about the same as a year’s college
tuition, and that was that.
So when she said she lived independently, she also meant—and this was another point
of pride—that she received little nancial help from us. And she had good reason to be
proud. Having never in her life been well paid, her monthly Social Security check was
meager in the extreme; and having divorced my father, she could lay no claim to his
veteran’s pension. She had no inheritance beyond her mother’s Depression-era ability to
stretch a budget, which owed much to a stubborn willingness to do without a lot of what
other people considered necessities. She qualied for rent and heat assistance from the
state, as well as food stamps, though she was too vain to accept these. Okay, there was
a shortfall most months, just as there’d often been on Helwig Street, a shortfall that I,
like any decent son who had the wherewithal, was happy to make up. And of course
there was the occasional emergency. That said, the only times she and I ever argued
about money was when I tried to give her more than she asked for, hoping to make her
life a little easier. But she didn’t need any more than I was giving her, she insisted. She
took great pride, she explained, just as she had always done, in taking care of herself.
In the end, of course, after her health began to seriously fail and her needs grew
exponentially, month to month, she’d take my hand and say, “What would I do without
you?” I tried to reassure her by saying, “That’s what I’m here for,” and reminding her
that, unlike far too many writers, I made an excellent living. To which she’d reply that,
yes, of course she knew. She guessed it was still pretty much like the old days on Helwig
Street. As long as we had each other, things would be ne. But then, anxious, she’d look
around her apartment, at her increasingly constricting world, and say, “But if anything
ever happened to you, I’d have to say good-bye to my independence.”
AS A YOUNGER WOMAN my mother didn’t see her inability to drive as inconsistent with her
desire to be, and to be seen as, a bold and independent woman. Gloversville was a