Doorbells

            “Someone rang the doorbell again at 4:00 a.m. It’s just unbelievable. That’s the second time this week. How am I supposed to get any sleep around here?”

            The cell phone crackles on my end, buzzing with static. My mother sounds exasperated, resentful—maybe also afraid. Eighty years old, she’s never lived alone before. She must feel vulnerable, all by herself.

            “Can you hear me, Mom?”

            “Yes, I can hear you. Not very well, though.”

            “So what did you do? Did you open the door?”

            “I looked through the peephole, but by the time I got to the door, there was no one there. I wish your father was here. He’d know what to do.”

            I picture the corridor at her lavish North Carolina retirement complex, its discreet lighting, original artwork on the walls, miles of spotless, blue-patterned carpet, rows and rows of identical doors. Probably just a bewildered senior citizen on the wrong floor. A labyrinthine Versailles, it’s easy to get lost in her building. I’m always turned around for the first couple of days when I visit, confused and claustrophobic. All of that tasteful decorating, those replicas of antiques, tapestries and upholstered banquettes, indistinguishable doors and floors, alternate routes to the lobby, the dining room, the exercise room, the entertainment annex and library.

            Maybe it was someone sleepwalking—a side effect of one of those medications that cause people to do strange things in their sleep. Ambien, Lunesta, Restoril. I suppose it could be someone trying to break in, but I’m not too worried. The wealthy residents of Sylvan Glen are well protected. Mom even wears a buzzer on a chain around her neck that will instantly summon a nurse.

            “I’m sure it’s fine, Mom. Someone on the wrong floor. The front entrance is locked at night, so it can’t be an outsider.”

            I can hear the worry in her voice, though, and imagine what it’s like for her. Mom standing anxiously inside the door, straining to hear, the unknown presence on the other side of the door.

            The doorbell rings.

            She remembers Kenilworth Road, some seventy years ago. How when they were children they used to ring doorbells and then hide in the bushes, hysterical with suppressed laughter, waiting for someone to answer the door. “Who is it?” an annoyed grownup might say. “Who’s there?”

            It’s been several months, and Mom’s still complaining about the doorbell. Every week or two, at random intervals, always in the dead of night, the doorbell rings, waking her out of a sound sleep.

            “Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?” I’m rinsing dishes with one hand, loading the dishwasher, holding the cell phone to my ear with the other. I’m too restless to sit for these long phone calls.

            “Yes, I’m sure I wasn’t dreaming,” she answers, irate. I’ve become skeptical, hearing this story week after week, and wonder how she can be so sure.

            “It happened again last night. The doorbell rang at 4:15. For what I’m paying for this place you’d think there’d be better security.”

            I murmur something, hoping to head off another monologue about money, one of her favorite themes. “It’s highway robbery, what they charge here. Just unreal.” She adamantly refuses to use the grocery shopping service at Sylvan Glen because it costs ten dollars, or their taxi service because she has to pay for it. “Can you imagine?” She’s angry that they charge to deliver meals to the apartment. When she does takeout salad from the dining room, she piles the Styrofoam container so high that she can’t close the lid. She fills her purse with bananas and handfuls of after-dinner peppermints. She continues to spend hours every Sunday clipping coupons and arranging them in her wallet. She won’t spend ten cents more for a can of low sodium soup, or consider healthier foods. “It all adds up,” she says. “Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know.”

            If I raise any objections to her complaints or her unnecessary cost-saving measures, she’s off on a loop of distorted reminiscence. “Your father and I never had a lot of money.” Already not true. He was a well-established engineer when they married. Right now she has well over a million dollars stashed away in a living trust, which she refuses to spend a penny of. “We seniors are on fixed incomes,” she tells me. “Your father and I didn’t get where we are now by spending money. We had a budget, and we counted every penny we spent. How do you think we paid for your college?”

            I remember the penny budget. Every night when my father came home from work, he recited everything he’d spent, while my mother wrote down each expenditure in pencil on a small white pad, later to be copied out again in ink in a ledger book for future financial projections. They talked about money constantly when we were growing up. My brother and I were sure that we were one step away from penury. Two generations removed from Ireland, my parents still referred to the “poor house” as if it were a real possibility.

            “Of course you wouldn’t understand. You kids spend money like there’s no tomorrow.”

            I can feel the muscles in my neck and shoulders tensing. I will myself not to react. Take a deep breath. Let it out. Run the water in the sink and empty the strainer.

            My husband and I have never been extravagant. We don’t spend too much on our son, who deserves every minute of his Ivy League education. Of course he should fly home for vacations, including Thanksgiving, which she objects to every year. I’ve heard this rant a thousand times. It’s a monologue, not a dialogue, and there’s no point in defending myself, or suggesting that she spend some of her money to make herself more comfortable. If I react, she’ll go on for an hour. Longer. She’ll review years of grudges—her sister’s spendthrift ways, her sister-in-law’s ingratitude, go back thirty years to my brother’s financial irresponsibility in college and start from there.

            I can see her sitting on the stepstool by the kitchen phone, lips pursed, eyes narrowed, shaking her head in angry disapproval. Her gray hair is pulled back with bobby pins, and she’s wearing one of her K-mart housedresses, maybe the old blue and white striped one. She never throws anything away. Her closet shelves are piled high with brittle leather purses, boxes of hats from the forties, high heels from the fifties, mod costume jewelry from the sixties. Two walk-in closets are crammed with clothes she never wears. In recent years, she’s combined parsimony with startling excess, shopping only at clearance sales, but buying two, sometimes three or four of every item. She’s convinced she’s saved twice as much, earned money instead of spending it.

            She’s back to the doorbell, and the letters she’s written to the Sylvan Glen administrators about it. “This time I marched right downstairs the next morning and demanded they do something. I’m not paying a fortune to live like this.”

            I worry about my mother on the warpath, chin jutting forward, fuming, self-righteous. She’s gone straight to the top, storming past receptionists and secretaries and counselors to waylay the CEO in his inner office for answers more than once. She’s triumphant when they take charges off her bill, sure that they’re admitting to grave injustice. I expect it’s just easier than arguing about $34.23. I’m afraid they’ll tire of her eventually, maybe even ask her to leave. I don’t know what we’ll do then.

            “You can bet that got results. They had Bob from Maintenance up here Tuesday afternoon. He took the entire doorbell apart. ‘Mrs. Doyle, I can’t find anything wrong,’ he said. So he left it all unhooked. And wouldn’t you know, the doorbell rang again two nights later.”

            “Mom, how is that possible?”

            “I don’t know, but that’s what happened. The doorbell rang again in the middle of the night. There must be some kind of electrical connection even when the wires aren’t attached.”

            “I don’t think the doorbell can ring without the wires connected.” I keep my tone mild. I don’t want to start one of our arguments.

            “Well I’m telling you, it happened.”

             I’m starting to worry, not about an intruder or confused neighbor, but about her. She sounds lucid enough, her usual aggrieved self, but maybe this is the first sign of dementia or some age-related psychosis.

            I turn on the dishwasher, awkwardly drying my hands while holding onto the phone.

            “It just doesn’t sound possible, Mom.”

            Are those ripples of laughter in the hallway? She thinks she hears them. Voices so faint they’re almost inaudible. “You ring the doorbell.” “No you ring the doorbell.”

The doorbell rings.

            “Someone’s coming.” She hears rustling and excited whispering, the faint patter of tiny feet. Ghostly children, scampering down the corridor? But there are no children at Sylvan Glen.

            A glimmer, a spurt of fire, a slight perturbance of air, as someone or something disappears.

            My brother phones from Wisconsin to tell me that Cassandra, the social worker at Sylvan Glen, has called him. “She wants us to set up a conference call. Can you talk to her on Saturday?” It’s three hours later in North Carolina than it is in California, so I have to set my alarm for 6:00 a.m. My brother has already agreed that we’ll pay the current bill under dispute, so I’m wondering what Cassandra wants to talk about.

            It’s not good news, but it could be worse. Sylvan Glen apparently has not only dismantled Mom’s doorbell. They also mounted a security camera in her hall. They waited three weeks. They monitored the tapes. There’s been no one there outside the door, though my mother claimed that the doorbell rang several times.

            “We’re concerned about your mother.”

            “I understand,” I say, stalling. “We really appreciate all you’re doing for her.”

            Cassandra sounds nice enough, but somehow I don’t trust her. Perhaps I’m picking up my mother’s paranoia, but what is this about, anyway? Do they want to shift her into Assisted Living and free up her Independent Living apartment for someone else?

            “We know about the doorbell, of course, and we’re concerned too,” I say. “Maybe it’s a dream she’s having, or tinnitus from one of her medications.” Cassandra wants a psych workup, and dementia testing at the neurological center on their “campus,” and I say yes, we’ll think about that. But really, I’m thinking, my mother sounds normal to me, just outraged, which is not unusual, pretty much like she’s always been. Even if there is something wrong, I really doubt we’re going to be able to talk her into any testing. She thinks psychiatrists are overpaid witch doctors, and denies that my grandfather suffered from dementia before his death. “Thank God we’ve never had that in our family,” she’s always said.

            “We’ll talk to her, Cassandra. I think everything will be okay. She’s still adjusting to living alone. I’ll let you know about the testing.”

            I’ve read somewhere that there are often electrical disturbances in the wake of a death. A few days after my husband’s mother died, we were watching television, and our power blinked on and off. Once, twice, three times. Our lights flashed on and off every so often for a week. None of our neighbors had a power failure that night or problems with their electricity later. I don’t mention this to my mother. I don’t want to spook her, or myself. And I certainly don’t mention it to Cassandra.

            The doorbell rings in the still of night.

            Dragging footsteps, punctuated by the rhythmic clunks of a walker, a long pause. “Who is it? Who’s there? What do you want?”

            She’s been complaining about the TV. It flickers. “Your father wanted to buy a new one, one of those flat ones, but I said there’s nothing wrong with the one we’ve got. We don’t need to spend money on a new TV. Well I guess he was right and I was wrong.”

            The remote control doesn’t work anymore, and I try to explain about the batteries but she’s not really listening. “Your father always took it to Radio Shack and they took care of it,” she says.

            “Well they probably just put new batteries in it. Get Sue Anne to pick some up when she goes to Walgreen’s for your prescriptions.” She grudgingly pays her some-time health aide Sue Anne to run errands, including the grocery shopping she won’t pay Sylvan Glen to do.

            But Mom’s not having any of it. She’d have to go to Radio Shack, which would require a taxi, which would require getting dressed, and a day when she was feeling up to it. “Do you know what they charge for the taxi around here? It’s just not right. That’s all I can say.”

            I give up on the remote control. She’s not getting any exercise, so maybe getting up and down to change the channels is good for her.

            Next the toaster’s on the blink.

            “Do you have the dial turned up all the way for dark toast?”

            “I don’t know. When I told Sue Anne about it, it worked fine for her. I just can’t get it to work. I wish your father were here. He’d know how to fix it.”

            “Maybe you should get another one. They’re cheap. They sell them at Walgreen’s.”

            She sighs dramatically, as if I just don’t understand. After a long pause, she bursts out, incensed, “I just can’t go spending money hand over fist. It’s not the way I was brought up.”

            The doorbell rings. She stands by the door, heart pounding, listening to the silence.

            “It’s me. Can’t you hear me?” A whisper, a silvery sigh— faint, almost imperceptible, a ripple of air outside the closed door.

            She can’t get the checkbook to balance, and can’t get someone at the bank to go over the cancelled checks with her. Her old calculator stopped working. When Sue Anne bought her another, that one didn’t work either. She’s at sea in what she calls “paperwork,” all of the brochures and notices and accountings of Dad’s financial empire. Not only was he the one who dealt with it all, he also kept everything in triplicate, which she is struggling to do, though when I ask her why she has no answers. It’s frustrating when she won’t accept help or suggestions, doesn’t even seem to hear what I say. We’re lost in a wilderness of conversational corridors, repeatedly retracing routes we’ve already taken, no closer to reaching a destination.

            “I just can’t go on like this. You have no idea how much paperwork there is. It’s all over the apartment.”

            “You have to start throwing things out, Mom. I’ve been saying this all along. You don’t need all those financial records. It’s all online anyway. Let one of us take care of it if you need to look something up.”

            “Your father knew what he was doing. He kept those records for a reason. Besides the shredder doesn’t work anymore and I can’t just throw these out. You have to be careful. It’s on the news all the time, what do you call it, identity theft. You can’t imagine how much paperwork I have here. It’s unreal.”

            I don’t bother to suggest that she buy a new shredder.

            The apartment was already chaos, even before Dad’s death. They never fully moved in, his cancer diagnosis intervening in the unpacking. There are stacks of boxes everywhere, overflowing with framed photographs and knick-knacks, scrapbooks and photo albums, memorabilia there’s no room for anyway. Since his death she’s set up a ramshackle card table in the living room, covered with bills and little notes to herself, newsletters from the bridge club she no longer goes to, menus from Sylvan Glen, sympathy cards from six months ago that she still plans to answer. She won’t let anyone else touch anything. When I visited shortly after Dad’s death and offered to help, she let me throw out some dead plants but none of her papers, not even the advertising circulars. I bought her some colored folders to help organize her bills and financial statements, which she promptly lost. She was furious with my sister-in-law when she tried to tidy things up during their visit. “Can you believe that? I’d just gotten things organized over on the buffet and now I don’t know where anything is. What was she thinking?”

            The pile of medical bills for my father’s radiation therapy and hospital visits keeps mounting. Most of them are records of what’s already been paid by Medicare. She pores over every charge anyway, squinting through her bifocals, which hang from a cord around her neck when she’s not using them, along with her Sylvan Glen ID card and keys and safety alarm. “You just wouldn’t believe what they charge for an aspirin in the hospital. It’s out of this world.”

            The cancer had spread from a tumor in his mouth to his brain at the end. Up in the middle of the night, mysteriously printing out reams of material on sleep apnea on his computer, he fell. She found him lying on the kitchen floor in a small pool of blood from a head wound. “Don’t be mad at me, Peg.” When the paramedics arrived, he insisted that he wanted to stay at home, but they wouldn’t allow it. Three days later he died in the hospital, alone in the gray light of predawn. My mother was at home asleep. She’s still repeating the story of his last days to anyone who will listen, explaining that the doctor insisted she go home to get some rest. “He absolutely insisted. ‘There’s no reason for you to stay tonight. You go home and get some sleep.’”

            “He pointed his finger at me and said, ‘You go home now. You need your sleep.’”

            The doorbell rings again, insistently.

            “Who is it? Who’s there?”

             A whisper, or maybe a slight draft. “It’s me. Can’t you see it’s me? Open the door.”

            “Is the doorbell still ringing, Mom?”

            I’m sitting at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and leafing through the newspaper. The morning sun is warm on my back. The cat purrs on the windowsill beside me. I can hear the first stirrings of my husband, shaving in one bathroom, and our son, singing in the shower in the other. I call my mother more often than I used to. She’s become less truculent, but has instead lapsed into a sort of lassitude that worries me more. A year after my father’s death she seems no closer to accepting that he’s gone, that she needs to build some kind of life without him. I don’t know how to help her, beyond listening.

            “Yes, it still rings sometimes.” She falls silent for a minute. “I know there’s nobody out there, so it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to.”

            It’s hard to say whether this is tranquility or torpor.

            “Your new toaster okay?”

            “It’s okay. The manual says to keep it unplugged when you’re not using it, so I keep it unplugged. It’s hard for me to plug it in, so I have to wait for Sue Anne. Your father always used to do those things for me. He always opened the apple juice and the spaghetti sauce jars.”

            It’s 9:00 a.m. in California, lunchtime in North Carolina. At least she’s not in bed, as she often is. I can tell she’s in the kitchen on the stepstool, which creaks as she leans forward to sip her instant coffee. Even though I installed cordless handset phones in every room for her after Dad died, she still perches on the uncomfortable stepstool where she used to sit by the old wall phone, its long cord dangling and twisting. I suspect she’s in my father’s blue velour bathrobe and one of her washed-out nylon nightgowns. Even a housedress is too much effort these days. She complains of constant colds, and rarely leaves the apartment.

            “I’ve been looking through the boxes in the closet and I found a lot of old cards.”

            “What kind of cards?”

            “You know, birthday and anniversary cards from your father, valentines. I was going to read you the one he gave me when I was pregnant with you, but I don’t know where I put it. I’m so tired all the time now. I just can’t seem to catch up on my sleep.”

            “You can read it to me the next time we talk, Mom,” I say, gently.

            “I’ve been thinking about him a lot this week. He didn’t want to go into the hospital, you know. And the doctor told me, ‘You have to get some sleep. Go home now.’ That’s just what he said. ‘You go home.’”

            “I know, Mom. There wasn’t anything else you could do. Really. Get some sleep now. I’ll talk to you in a few days.”

            The sound of the doorbell pierces the quiet in the dark apartment. Outside the first light of dawn extends silver fingers. Tiny birds have begun their musical chatter.

            “Who is it? Who’s out there? What do you want?”

             The air shimmers, as if an imperceptible breeze has fluttered through the still corridor, bearing the merest trace of sound, a barely audible susurration. “It’s me. Can you hear me?”

            She stands inside the door, peering through the peephole, straining to see. “Is someone there?”

            Out of the corner of her eye, she catches a slight movement, a flicker of light and shadow, a soft exhalation of breath. “Hello?”

             “It’s me, Peg.” A faint, urgent whisper. “Can’t you hear me? Where were you? I called your name, but you weren’t there.”

            Back in her bed, shivering with the cold, she pulls at the covers and tosses restlessly. The gray light of morning seeps in under the blinds. She’s wondered over and over again if he woke before daybreak in the hospital, reaching for her. Whether he forgave her absence. Whether he felt as alone as she does now.

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