For a split second I wonder if the hair dryer will blow a fuse, but it doesn’t. This bathroom looks like it could be original to the house, but it’s an addition that was meant to accommodate Jasper in his final years. It’s cleaner, nicer, and more functional than the other bathrooms. The “fancy toilet,” as Mom calls it, has handles on each side. The seat automatically lifts up and down, and all it’s missing is a cup holder. The door is mounted flush with the original wooden panels beneath the stairs and practically disappears when it’s closed. It swings inward with just a slight touch, and the floor looks like real wood but is actually heated tile.
The whole house seems to be a juxtaposition of maintenance and disrepair. Everything in the library, from the walnut bookshelves and ornate fireplace to the cream-colored walls and velvet conversation couch, is in remarkable shape. At the same time, the stair railing is loose like Simon mentioned, and the bedrooms need paint and attention. The crisp fleur-de-lis wallpaper in the front parlor perfectly coordinates with the mint-colored walls and emerald marble fireplace. The formal dining room has warped floors, cracks in the white plaster walls, and an old shoofly hanging from the ceiling on rusty hinges. It’s like time stood still in some parts of the house while other parts deteriorated with age.
At noon, the three of us sit at a table that can accommodate twenty-two and eat tuna sandwiches. We eat off blue-and-white china that’s so old the glaze is dulled, and
we drink our bottled water out of heavy crystal goblets. It seems silly to eat sandwiches from 150-year-old china that has to be carefully handwashed, but if it makes Mom happy, that’s what we’ll do.
“John had horrible stomach pains, but after a few nights of my snugglin’, his pains went away.” I’d close my eyes to block the visual, but I have to keep at least one eye on the shoofly. “I have a passionate nature that works miracles.”
Sometimes Mom’s memory reminds me of a jukebox with only a handful of selections. Earl. Tony. Miracle worker.
I’m trying to block out the pain of the “snugglin’?” stories, but Lindsey doesn’t seem to notice. She puts a palm beneath her chin and one on the top of her head and snaps her head to one side like she’s trying to pop her neck. She’s chosen the yellow bedroom at the top of the stairs, and I know she didn’t get much sleep either. The feather mattress on her sleigh bed is even harder and lumpier than mine. Mom’s mattress—Jasper’s old one—is just as bad, but she seems neither discomforted nor grossed out by it. If she did, she certainly would have let me know by now.
Mom pauses in the second recounting of her miraculous healings and her brows scrunch together with confusion. “John had horrible pains,” she begins all over again.
After lunch, Lindsey and I measure the beds in the house and get busy on the Google net—good Lord, listen to me—searching for the closest mattress store. I don’t know how long we’ll be in this house, but it doesn’t matter. We can’t sleep on bad mattresses while we are here. The nearest furniture store is a half hour away. Unfortunately, a mattress isn’t something I can just click and enter a credit card number for, nor can I hand off the task to someone else. Lindsey and I both have to go, and Mother needs to choose a mattress for herself. I know she’ll argue with me, but I just can’t let her sleep on a lumpy mattress that, as recently as six months ago, displayed Uncle Jasper’s corpse. Maybe she’s not disturbed by that, but I am enough for both of us.
Mom takes a nap, and Lindsey and I measure bed frames. Thank God they all fit a standard queen and I don’t have to order anything custom. We’ll need extra bedding, too, but that’s an easy problem to resolve, and I put it on my mental to-do list.
Setting up my office in the library should be just as easy. The desk looks like something out of the Oval Office, but the Empire chair is as lumpy as the mattresses. Easy, the desk stays, the chair goes, but I run into a big problem with the electric sockets that only fit two prongs. I know there are three-prong sockets in the kitchen, and I’ll need to run an extension cord all the way to the back of the house until I can figure something else out.
I have to write a blog by the end of the week, and that can’t happen without power. I try to imagine where I’ll find a long cord and head out to the garage. Of course, the door doesn’t open right away. I shove my sore shoulder into it, but unlike the front door of the house, it swings open and bangs into a wheel of the big horse-drawn carriage parked where I’d planned to park the Escalade. It’s a surrey with the fringe on top. I’ve seen carriages like this in museums and old movies, but this is longer, with three rows of seats. I imagine it was the family station wagon of its day. Mom would love this, but I don’t think I’ll tell her about it. No doubt she’d want to take it out for a spin, and I don’t trust the cracked wheels. Not to mention, I haven’t the slightest desire to rent carriage horses.
I flip on the light and move to the other side of the garage, where I find two cords: an orange hundred-foot extension and another fifty-footer. I grab both to be on the safe side, but the orange cord is more than I need. I spend the next few hours working and take a break from my writing long enough to sign up for weekly food delivery from Rouses and hire the Cajun Maids to come twice a month.
When the Cadillac is delivered, I find Lindsey in Mom’s room, insisting that she continue her daily exercise, which mostly consists of Mom doing arm and leg lifts with a big rubber band while seated.
“I already did this one!”
“We have to do three repetitions, Patricia.”
Exercise used to be part of Mom’s daily routine, but that was a while ago. These days she prefers watching TV and eating Pirate’s Booty. “No,” she says, and throws the big rubber band across the room. Both women have their arms folded across their chests in what appears to be a stalemate. Lindsey’s jaw is set, and my money’s on her. She’s bigger and more determined, and I’ve seen her battles with Mom about drinking enough water. She usually wins.
“We need to get going to the mattress store,” I say. I know I shouldn’t undermine Mother’s health care, but this could go on for hours. “It’s five already, and the store closes at six.”
Lindsey glances at me and relents. She wants a new mattress as much as I do. Mother, however, wants to continue the battle. “I’m not going.”
“You have to go and pick out a new mattress.”
“I don’t want a new mattress.”
“All the mattresses here are bad, Mom.”
She points to Jasper’s bed. “That one is good.”
I sat on that mattress and I know better. “Uncle Jasper died on that one.”
“I don’t care.”
She’s being stubborn, and I’m forced to think up a quick lie. “It won’t fit the bed frame you want.”
“Bring down the mattress with it.”
I said it was a “quick lie,” not a good one. “It was thrown out years ago,” I fib again, and don’t feel the least bit bad. I expect her to argue, but she rises, and I quickly usher her out the back door before she can change her mind.
“What a waste,” Mom says as I help her down the wooden steps. The overgrown shrubs make the same clicking sounds as they did the day before and I say a prayer for my Manolo heel, in there somewhere but as good as gone. No way am I crawling into those bug-infested bushes. “When Grandmere couldn’t have kids right off, she had a voodoo queen cast a fertility spell on that mattress. After a few years and a whole lotta practice, she birthed Jed and Jasper and Momma right on that mattress. I was born in New Orleans, where Momma and Daddy lived before he left.”
“Uh-huh.”