Sharon Wahl

1.

Paper Napkins

My mother does not have dementia. But she wishes she did. She yearns for the blank, the absence: of responsibility, of action, of effort. Of decisions. What to keep. What to let go of, forever.

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My mother is a packrat. A relative of a hoarder, but keeping up appearances: to strangers, her house simply looks overdecorated. You have to open the closets, the drawers, to see what is going on. The hundreds of empty glass jars stored high up on her kitchen shelves. The walk-in closet in her bedroom stuffed with clothes, hangers crammed so close together it's difficult to select a blouse to wear. Most of the clothes still have tags, recording the bargain price she paid at Ross, T.J. Max, Marshalls. Shopping is the only activity she truly enjoys. Every store presents her with a challenge: finding the items she will purchase, discovering them on her slow transits of women's wear and home goods as though these objects were hidden for her intentionally, like Easter eggs.

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My mother is 94 and is selling her house. Everything must go. I was excited to hear that her neighbors -- who for years have carried up the mail from her mailbox and mowed her lawn and looked after everything while she was away visiting one of us -- were having a clothes drive. Their minister was heading to Jamaica and needed shirts, tee shirts and short-sleeved button-downs. My mother had dozens, new with tags. But my mother never gives anything away.

Why won't she donate these shirts she will never wear to the neighbors, to their minister, for the Jamaicans who have suffered a hurricane? She has no answers. The more persuasively the question is framed, the more furious she becomes.

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My mother has asked me to help her put her house on the market for each of the past three years. Each time, I've set aside two weeks to help her. But she hasn't let me get rid of a single thing. Last year I spent three days emptying the storage barn in her back yard. I took out all the boxes she'd brought from her old house, the house in New York where I grew up, the boxes she moved to Alabama and never opened. We opened every box and wrote a list of what it contained. I threw out the actual garbage -- broken glasses, moth-eaten drapes and towels, wadded-up twenty-year-old newspapers -- then put everything back inside the barn.

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My mother has accumulated hundreds of packages of decorative paper napkins, napkins she once set out at dinner parties or when hosting bridge, most stored in an old cherry-wood secretary. All its drawers are stuffed with napkins. Some packs are open and have been partly used, but most are intact. Some are quite beautiful: woven of paper that feels like cloth, printed with butterflies lifted from a Japanese screen.

My aunt would like some of her napkins. My mother won't give her any. "I'm giving Nanette the dining room rug," she says.

"But why not give her some napkins?"

"The man is going to sell everything." This is a man from church that Nanette found to hold an estate sale after my mother's house has sold.

"You'll get maybe ten cents for them!"

"Sharon!" She gave me a name she could hiss. "I am not giving them away."

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My mother's house would look better, would be more likely to sell, if she removed half her things. I try to convince her of this, echoing the real estate agent. There is so much in it -- large abstract paintings, candlesticks, empty vases and vases full of artificial flowers (good ones, roses that look real, and fanciful blooms that don't look real at all but are lovely extrapolations of what flowers could be), table lamps, sofas loaded with dozens of pillows (leaving little room to sit), end tables holding candles or small pretty fragile objects, china or cut glass.

Over the mantel in the living room, lit by a spotlight, is a decorative plate a foot and a half in diameter. It's a picture of zebras mating; the one in back has thrown his foreleg over the other as he mounts her.

"Why do you have a picture of fucking zebras?" I ask.

"Because I like it."

I realize that my mother thinks I mean, fucking zebras as in, Why do you have a picture of zebras, of all things? "But they're mating. You have a picture of zebras mating on your wall."

"Really? I don't think so." The plate has hung there for years, but she has no idea what the zebras in the spotlight are doing.

2.

Happy Hour

My mother would burst into my room without knocking. "It's 5 o'clock." She was sixty years old, or seventy-eight, or ninety-four, though at ninety-four her entrance was slower. She had to balance on her walker and lean over carefully to reach the doorknob. She no longer had the strength to shove the door open wide. Now she turned the knob and gave a frail push, opening just enough of a crack to make her pronouncement. "It's five o-clock." Her voice never lost its command. Whatever I was doing at that moment, I stopped. I poured her bourbon and my wine and carried our glasses onto the patio, to her chair that nervously rocked, mine that held still. We toasted to the only thing we had in common: we liked our drinks. "Cheers," she said. "Skol," I said. Skol, because my father, who died so long ago I never had the chance to get drunk with him, was Norwegian.

Sometimes she put on red lipstick for our happy hour, or accented her nightgown with a matching bright scarf. Sometimes she changed her clothes, just as she used to change out of her nightgown for my father shortly before he was expected to appear at five or six or seven o'clock. He always called and asked if she needed anything from the grocery store on his way home. That's how she knew to get dressed. She applied her make-up. She carefully placed her wig, a wig that shaped her head into a large firm hair-sprayed bubble. Then she clipped on earrings encrusted with fake jewels, clip-ons so heavy she'd have felt them wagging her ears with every movement of her head, and in high heels, she walked to the overstuffed white chairs where they would have their cocktails, waiting to be waited upon. My father mixed the drinks. It wasn't anything like those old commercials where the wife cheerfully greets her husband at the door with an ice-cold martini.

From the way she screamed at God the night my father died -- she really did believe God would save him, even after my father wasted away to look like a beautiful child, especially his eyes, his eyes became transparent, I want to say transcendent, as though they would open his soul to us, after a lifetime of Norwegian reticence, which he now regretted --

From the way she screamed at God the night my father died, I thought my mother would spend the rest of her days drinking. What else was there for her to do? Soap operas. Bridge, then as her friends died, solitaire. Fox News, when it came along, played 24/7 on her tv. Fox and Friends. They really were her friends: when she woke in the middle of the night, they were there to talk her back to sleep. She lived thirty-eight more years. But every day she waited until five, watching the clock the way she'd waited for my father's phone call, then measuring two ounces into the gold-plated jigger. She'd fill her plastic tumbler with cubes of ice, and when the bourbon was gone, she ate the melted bits, crunching them between her dentures like cold nuts.