The Frailty Syndrome

Dorothy’s presence is unendurable. My bitterness has turned septic, an untreated ulcer. It is cruel to think unkindly about a disabled elder, but I cannot curtail the insidious progress of acrimony. She moved in with us after she could no longer fend for herself. She broke her leg from a fall, and my husband decided without seeking my opinion. I suggested in-home care.

‘She’ll be coming here. I don’t want a stranger taking care of my mother.’

He phrased the two sentences with a specific tone to ensure silence and emphatically seal my fate. To my mind, an inadequate solution to the problem. He’d said nothing more, leaving me alone at the dining table.

Dorothy’s presence has made me into a merciless person, one that I no longer recognise. My compliance now seems mysterious to me. It’s as though I’d inadvertently misplaced my identity. I have all manner of excuses for myself. I’ve concluded my own inadequate upbringing had left me open to extortion. With Ted, it was essential to have a script in advance, whether you employed it or not. As usual, I hadn’t thought to compose one.

I cleared the table and washed the dishes, impotence biting like a toothless dog at my ankles. Within a month, I wheeled Dorothy into the bathroom, transferred her to the commode, bathed, and dealt with an uncooperative body topped by a barely functioning brain. Then there were the pills arrayed in their daily doses. I’d be sure to mess them up if the pharmacist hadn’t carefully arranged them in a Webster pack.

I can add self-pity to my flaws, but one needs an audience. It occurs to me that Dorothy is fit for purpose in this regard.

I amuse myself inventing a dialogue with Dorothy. One that is more congenial than I have ever had with this woman. Her utterances were invariably barbed with criticism when in full command of her faculties. Now though, I fancy her memories resemble our ancient mulberry tree. In autumn, the leaves fall to pattern the damp ground, decaying at the foot of the gnarled husk of its trunk.

I view the baffling question mark of Dorothy’s unseeing gaze with a vague hope of some explanation, some form of regret, but in truth, those eyes only reflect what I assume to be the occasional blink of pain. Placing her wheelchair close to the window, I look past her crown of silver hair towards the mountains.

Columns of smoke spiral above the foothills, signalling yet another bushfire. Grim images haunt the TV news. Massive losses and several deaths have been reported. I learn that our valley lies in the path of the blaze, evacuation imminent. Turned toward the dark plume of smoke, we two women are handicapped by sight – one sees too much, while the other nothing at all.

I have developed an oddly attuned sense of Dorothy. Her presence has been added to the resonance permeating the bones of the house, a nebulous vapour pressing down on me, condensing me into a passive substance, inert and withdrawn. She remains stolid against the violently changing world outside the house and my grouchy discontent within. Her past disapproval of me had found fertile ground in her dependency.

A doctor helpfully entitled this stage of Dorothy’s existence the frailty syndrome, a condition readily adapted by the carer.

I’ve noticed an infinitesimal tremble originating at Dorothy’s bitter mouth undulating silently through her frail body. Something has changed; I sense her time is near. Ted refuses to discuss it.

By midday, the smoke fills the sky, the sun obscured by the inferno’s grim descent, colouring everything with a strange yet beautiful orange glow. If I’d believed in a god, I might have fancied him paying us a final visit to wave us on before casting us all into hell. I warned you, he might say.

My first encounter with my mother-in-law consisted of a sour appraisal that later appeared regularly, often directed at my children when in her presence. Offers of help in the kitchen were met with a surly dismissal, causing me to melt away in disgrace, as though some cardinal sin had been committed. Dorothy, ever judgemental, saw my tendering of domestic help as an insult. She had been the family guardian forever. The bastion standing tall against intrusion, her slightest redundancy unthinkable.

I met her son at a university party I ordinarily would not have attended. I had wearily acquiesced at the insistence of a friend. She had her eye on a med student and prevailed upon my participation as an ally. Ted, one of the first people I saw when I walked through the door, sat gloomily by himself, trying to look inconspicuous. An odd, out-of-place person, not entirely unlike myself. Thus my sympathies were engaged.

Ted intrigued me. He appeared to be indifferent to the concerns of his cohort. Like me, he had no patience for the clatter of football talk and rivalry demonstrated by the men, nor the self-consciously smoking women, clucking like hens in sight of a rooster – behaviour meant to impress each other rather than the opposite sex.

After a few drinks, the dancing started. My friend and the med student grabbed Ted out of his seat and paired him with me. He was awkward but not impolite, something I liked. He had an edge to him, which I mistook for maturity.

Initially, I took issue with the demands Ted made of me, considering them unjust or unwise. He wasn’t a bad man. Like so many trapped by his need to live in a world reflecting an unreasonable idea of manhood. A sleight of hand, as unaware of the truth as a bird is unaware of the sky. I had become enmeshed with him and his corrosive delusion of masculinity.

I believed I could save this earnest, conflicted man from himself and his dysfunctional family. His two siblings were fractious and impossible to please. Their failed attempts at marriage left Ted and me the holdouts. I understood how a specific variety of family dynamics could poison the waters of childhood; my own was not untainted. Ted never knew his father, but the tight knot of obligation he felt towards his disagreeable mother was a challenge for all of us. My earlier resolve faded as I understood he could not break from its bonds.

At some point, I must have thought I might be of use other than that of a housewife. I’d planned to become a teacher of English. Instead, within months of earning my degree, I became pregnant. Rose was born, then thirteen months later, Jayden. Poor at choosing a husband, I tried to be a good mother.

My wintry, frightened husband didn’t break me. I broke myself. To my mind, an important distinction. I saw my youth’s naive expectations and incoherent desires as luxuries I could no longer afford. With this denial, I could divert all my love and attention to my children; anger and regret hovering out of sight. I believe Ted knew that failure resided with us like a malignant lump at the centre of our small world. He had not the tools to rescue us from the regime of his unhappiness.

There were many times with Rose and Jayden when I felt the tide washing away all the other parts of me that didn’t categorise me as ‘wife and mother’. I remember sitting between their beds, reading Alice in Wonderland to them. They departed into sleep, but I’d become mesmerised by Carroll’s extraordinary sentences.

“I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”

I closed the book and gazed at the sleeping faces of my children. Wasn’t it a child’s right to wake every morning and feel a little different, to become the person he or she was meant to be? Had I once been an  Alice, and if so, when did I stop inventing myself?

 Long before Dorothy came to stay, the children went off to university. They could never bear to be very far apart. Perhaps the disaffection clinging to the family home made them determined not to sever their love for each other. They never seemed interested in individual favouring, dividing parental loyalties, complete in their little coven of two.

Ever the shrewd investor, Ted purchased an apartment for them in Melbourne. Had he not worried about them plotting something, a way to get back at us for all our failings? I fancied they received their cunning from me and now await their moment. I expect them to be merciless.

One day my son zoomed to say he had found the one, looking overwhelmed with love, somehow plumper and beaming, or perhaps it was the distortions of software. I could only fret over this revelation—had Jayden found his soulmate, not a cleverly masked succubus? I recognised the savagery of this thought as the curse of a virulent form of motherhood. Of course, once I met the young woman, I was forced to modify my dark presentiment.

Rosie had grown glorious and buxom, even within the bleached environment of face-time, her pale blue eyes radiating a life force I could only admire. She was not about to be drawn into any kind of permanency, scattering heartbroken girlfriends like feathers in the wind.

One summer, when they were little, I took them to a rockpool deep in the valley. It was accessed via a culvert, a head-high concrete cylinder with just enough light bending in to form the shadows announcing our approach. The tunnel opened to a shady close, ferns and bottlebrush surrounding the cold and brackish pool. Broken branches and heaped stones lay on the bottom. Looking through the watery lens, we watched freshwater crayfish foraging amongst the debris. Water striders scattered when the children swam like nymphs in the shallows, reinventing in their private whispers, the world below the surface.

Lifting my skirt, I waded in, feeling the prickling cold of the water lapping against my thighs, aroused by the gurgling movement of the stream; my toes curled over the moss-furred rocks beneath. I ventured further and parted my legs to allow the creek to buffet me.

Some mornings the valley’s trees are drenched by a silky white mist as though floating in a lake of milk. One could almost ignore the signs of human habitation. I have witnessed the living valley’s consonant history: the silent fall of long-leafed twigs from the majestic eucalyptus, the rustle of skinks in the roadside grasses, the sway of the stick insects.

The warble of currawongs begins early. Goshawks dance on the thermals before their swift dive for prey. With their frightful screech, black cockatoos swarm like paratroopers to pick the nuts from the casuarina trees and vanish with a flash of their red tail feathers. Their stay is peremptory, whereas their sulphur-crested cousins, our local hooligans, will stay for the entire season, driving everyone mad with their constant bickering.

The hot westerly pick up leaf litter, swirling it into the driveway. The weather is persistently dramatic on the vast escarpment hovering above the Pacific. Last August, fierce winds sweep up from the south trailing the last of winter’s cold, thrashing the tall trees into a frenzy. One such night, the rubbish bins had been blown over, the wind causing the lids to slap loudly against the boundary wall. I put on a raincoat and stepped out to retrieve them.

Lightning illuminated the house as I secured the bins at the back of the driveway. A sharp crack, and I watched the top half of a gum tree shear off. During its grinding descent to the ground, it brought down the power lines taking out our roof gutter before slamming into the driveway. While the tip of its highest branch scraped the nylon netting off a fly screen of the house, its thick girth crushing the roof of my car. I stood transfixed by the violence, incapable of flight. A miracle I was left unharmed.

Live wires snaked on the ground, and trees thrashed furiously as hail crashed from the black sky. I lifted my eyes from the frantically dancing shadows to see Ted shove his mother’s chair close to the window. I imagined her skinny legs crushed against the internal wall. He gestured to the devastation outside as though she was to blame.

This strange act alarmed me more than the storm. Ted, pale and withdrawn in his dressing gown, watching for omens from the mute, pinched old woman in the candlelight.

This last summer, the scorching sunlight settled about our village. I felt the weight of it, a dense shroud clamping me to the house and its attendant miseries. Late home due to the city’s ever-increasing traffic congestion, Ted, flustered with anger, often slumped into bed without bothering with the evening meal.

The television bled with images of the fire germinating in the hot winds flying in from the western plains. The spark from a discarded cigarette or the work of a pyromaniac. There had been holocaustic blazes in the past, a source of fascination and usually from a safe distance. This blaze roared across the vast forests and tree-change holdings, reaching the outskirts of our village by mid-afternoon.

Like a rocket departing for the stars, a fireball rises above the valley’s ridge. Flames lick the branches of eucalypts in leering, caressing motions before burrowing into their bowels. The blaze conspires with the tree’s oily juices to set off the leaves like firecrackers in a fit of glorious blue, white and red. The fury of hot wind crashes among the branches when a startling crack like cannon fire sounds, and the crown of a tree burst, blowing out incinerated branches, leaves, seeds and black flowers.

The fire, now so close, emergency workers rush from house to house, pounding on the doors and yelling at the occupants to escape while they can. Sirens clash with the crackling rush of the fire. Cars move up the hill from the streets low in the valley, those inside terrified, the awed faces of children pressed to the windows. The emergency workers, black with soot, direct traffic, shouting into walkie-talkies. Fire hoses point at the burnished rooftops of nearby houses and, ineffectually, towards the incinerating gums. The birds have fled, while others expire from exhaustion, torched on the wing.

Ted will stay in the city; all traffic deviates from the emergency. The violent hearth of the valley and the afternoon light will be capturing the silhouettes of Dorothy and me in our high window. I fail to answer the loud knocking on the door or be dismayed by the voices of neighbours strained with terror, throwing keepsakes into their cars, forced to abandon everything? I felt inert, unable to gather the strength to leave.

Standing beside Dorothy, I watch the firmament whipping cinders into the boiling creek, riding the magnificent dying trees to exhaustion. Turning her wheelchair away from the window, I kneel before her. I am uncertain as to what to look for. Is it some form of clarification, a small semblance of contrition? Who is this frail ghost with whom I’ve shared the last five years, with her bird-like body, curled hands and small, stockinged feet placed side by side, a pose already mirroring death? I have not one thing in common with her, yet we remain intimately linked. She has become the remaining evidence of denial, the natural consequence of my dormancy.

The children will try to get through; the mobile towers are affected. They are resilient. I had taught them to be ever-aware, even suspicious, inuring them to sentimentality, a legacy of watchful buoyancy I hope will be a grace note beneath the fabric of their lives.

A snake-like hiss and the house is without power. I enter the kitchen, thinking of checking for cans and cereals to last us a few days. Instead, I gaze out to the garden from the window. Evening is almost upon us, the last vestiges of sunlight haemorrhaging a deep orange, the air thickening. Black and white cinders, rain on the grass like confetti. The mint and coriander bow in the heat and the tiny daisy-like plant I propagated around the garden die as I watch. The fire would relish the sticky spikes of my gnarly old rosemary bush, the only plant yet unperturbed.

The bay tree, swamp mahogany and lilly-pilly shadowing the garden shed begin to rupture and convulse in the heat. All the elements of the inferno have become alluring to me, disabling the instinct for flight. Confused, I turn to Dorothy in the living room for guidance. Her small, mean mouth has dropped open, and her eyes appear surprised to see my dying garden for the first time. This stranger, our pale interloper, sits rigid in her chair. No need to check her pulse. Death has taken her.

As a fireball engulfs the car-port and greedy flames lick the bubbling paint on the weatherboards, I wonder what those old bones and indeed these here in the kitchen, will reveal about a life lived in our particular form of desperation.