Report from Pillville: Ghosts, the Grim Reaper, and Other Thrills

my mother and her twin Millie

If you're a regular visitor here, you've probably heard that my mother frequently yells in her sleep. Or maybe you've just plain heard her. She's loud.

One morning just past dawn I heard her proclaim, "I really don't know all that much about baseball," and then proceed to sing "Take Me Out To the Ballgame." Mostly though she yells things like: WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? WHO ARE YOU? AAAARRRGG. NOOOOO!  GET OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW! I'm usually awakened from a sound sleep sometime between 3 and 4 a.m., heart pounding, adrenaline rocketing through my body. Fight or flight, the horrified brain and body ask each other. Don't know. Pantpantpantpant. Don't know. 

Last night it was 4:45 a.m when she screamed all of the above. I leap out of bed and run to my door to lock it, considering that there might be an intruder downstairs. I dash back to my nightstand, grab my phone, go to the keypad and dial 9 to get a head start on 911. I listen. More screaming. Do I grab the martial arts stick of Dan's and go downstairs? Hahahaha. (Anyone who's seen me actually panic is laughing right now.) But, hey, I do grab the stick--I just continue to cower behind my locked door, a third of the way to an emergency phone call.

Holy shit, right?

Well, I determined that it was just my mom yelling, and I got back to sleep and then had a ridiculously stressful dream wherein I drove to Phoenix to help my friend P with her mother, knowing full well I had less than 24 hours to do so while M was here with my mom. I got lost. But finally found P's apartment which was massive and shaped like a Mayan temple with narrow curving driveways to each of the levels. It was so confusing I parked my car down below and then realized there was no way I could walk to the top. Plus, I had my cat from decades ago, Little Guy, with me, and he was squirming in my arms and I was afraid he'd run away, and then trying to get back to my car, I forgot where I parked it and then, in a panic, called M who was completely unsympathetic, but I found the car, and drove it up the terrifying driveway and found my friend P. Maybe I helped her, I don't remember, but when I went to leave I accidentally let her chihuahua, Max, escape, and he went running down the street with a pack of dogs who were chasing a car. But when a car came toward me, they turned around to chase that car, and I somehow grabbed him before P noticed and put him back on her patio, but I got lost again, this time in the network of courtyards and nearly bumped into an old tattooed woman who called me stupid. When I finally got to my car, driving down was more terrifying than going up, and I kept thinking that I must be on a pedestrian path instead of a street, so I kept turning onto an intersecting route every time I had a chance, but the roads kept getting smaller and smaller until eventually my car was squeezed and tipped onto its side, wherein a grumpy old guy with a narrow trailer just wide enough to hold a Prius on its side, said he'd take my car down the hill for me. But when I turned my back, he'd pulled it into his garage and covered it up with an old carpet and said he didn't know anything about my car. I realized he was a thief and then I woke up, horrified that I'd lost track of my cat.

Today I asked my mom what she'd been dreaming about, thinking maybe she'd seen a ghost or the grim reaper. "Oh, Millie and I were lost in the woods again," she said. "I thought we'd never find our way home."

In Which We Step Through the Looking Glass

twins

"Come here," my mother said. She wanted to show me her twin sister's obituary in their hometown paper--which we read daily on my iPad.

 A few days before, according to my mom's wishes, we'd selected a photo of my aunt from 1988 to run in the obituary with a more recent photo. It was a Christmas photo of the two of them standing in front of the fireplace at my cousin's house, and they were bedecked with dangling earrings and shiny necklaces. My mother wanted a photo of her sister that people would recognize from the days when they lived in Iowa together. She liked the photo I showed her, and so, I cropped her out and made a headshot of my aunt. My mom gave her approval, and I emailed the picture to my mother's only remaining sibling who had taken on the job of writing the obituary.

"That picture of Millie in the red dress--that younger picture--it's me, not her," she said. I reviewed the chain of events relating to the choosing of the photo while I opened iPhoto. "See?" I said, showing her the original photo. "You're taller and bigger. Millie was a slightly smaller person."

"I don't know," she said. "I think it's me." I must have looked stricken because she assured me then that it didn't really matter.

Sometime later she retold a story from her childhood I've heard before. How in the afternoon when chores were being parceled out, it was one twin's job to walk towards the factory where their father worked and meet him on his way home with a sandwich and some water. "Hello, twin," he would say. "Which one were you?" There's a story or two from their Baltimore days too where they filled in for one another at their nightclub jobs with no one the wiser. There was a cop on the beat there, though, who would swing his nightstick at the pretty brunette with the identical sister. He knew that my aunt was the one who would flinch.

Or was it the other way around?

Last evening, my mom shrieked when she saw what she thought was a spider in the bowl of grapes on the kitchen island. "I'd rather see a rat than a spider,"she said. But I remember a decade or two ago when my aunt and my mom would come to visit regularly. "Ethel, spider!" my aunt would call. "Help, Ethel!" My mom wouldn't smash the spider. She'd capture it and suffocate it, then pin it to a piece of cardboard, legs artfully extended. She'd spray it with hairspray and later, with a hint of sisterly torment, show the spider to my aunt.

Sometime in their 70s when my mom and my aunt were beset by a variety of health problems, I was visiting my mom when my aunt was in the hospital. My mother called her sister to tell her goodnight. "Where are you?" my aunt asked.
"I'm at home," my mother said.
"I thought you were in the hospital," my aunt said.
"You're the one in the hospital," my mother told her. I suppose that bit of weirdness could have been a miscommunication. Like maybe, my aunt thought my mom was there somewhere on the hospital grounds. I don't know. But I know what my mom thought about the conversation because we talked about it. She thought her sister was mixed up from the drugs. However, the whole thing gave me goosebumps.

As you might imagine, I've been fascinated by twins my entire life. A mother who's an identical twin, a fraternal set of twins for a great aunt and uncle, twin cousins--who have a sibling who has twins. Did you know that there's such a thing as vanishing twin syndrome? While I'm not entirely sure how much I trust the source--or the ABC News stories for accurate science, it's pretty captivating stuff--though a bit off the subject here. But nevertheless, I sense that, in my mom's grief, there's something odd happening here.

Mourning in Margaritaville

My Aunt Millie, my mother's twin sister, died this past Friday evening. She and my mom recently celebrated their 89th birthdays together on the east coast. The trip was wonderful for my mom, and although her sister's health was more frail than her own, my mother began enthusiastically talking about next year's trip immediately after our return home. "I just can't believe it," she says over and over again when she considers the fact that Millie is gone.

I loved my aunt. I met her for the first time when I was a teenager. She lived on the east coast while my mom was raising her family in Iowa, and in those days, distance and lack money for travel kept the twins apart. It was eerie waking up on the sofa in her Baltimore apartment--like I'd been transported to a parellel universe where a woman who looked just like my mother was making my breakfast in a city I'd never been to.

In the 80s after my mom and my aunt were both widows, they moved back in together and were housemates for decades. Every year they came to visit me and my family in California. My daughters sometimes referred to my Aunt Millie as a "bonus" grandma. The twins were a package deal--no doubt much like they'd been as children

My mother's loss is profound, and I try to imagine what it's like to experience her particular grief. My own grief at the death of my aunt feels as though it's waiting in the wings while center stage a weeping old woman looks in a mirror and there's no one looking back.

Maybe 4 years old?

Age 7 /First Holy Communion--
my grandmother cut her wedding veil in two to
make their veils

wow

1970-something

Last month

Turning Californian

"I am who I say I am, goddamnit." My mother made her proclamation when we were back in the car, thankfully. The clerk at the DMV had rejected her application for a California I.D. Turns out you can't just hand over your driver's license from another state and expect to be turned into a Californian--even if you have no intention of operating a motor vehicle. "I have a Medicare Card," she said. "If I can get one of those, I ought to be able to get a plastic I.D.  card."
Nope.

A California I.D. Card requires a birth certificate----and if you've changed your name since the day you made your grand entrance in your birthday suit, a second document is required to reflect your new legal name.

We had my cousin mail us some of her important papers that still reside in the basement apartment in his house, where my mom once lived with his mom. That stack yielded her decree of divorce from her second husband which restored her previous married name. I wasn't sure that would do the trick, and she still needed her birth certificate anyway, so I ordered her marriage certificate, too-- which reflects her current legal name-- from her first marriage--her marriage to my father. Two state bureaucracies later, we were ready to do battle with California.

Today, exactly a month since our first attempt, the clerk at the window poured over my mother's birth certificate and her marriage certificate and then took them to a supervisor sitting at a big wooden desk at the back of the room. They conferred, and then the two of them walked to yet another person at a desk where the threesome hovered over these ancient midwestern records. I have to admit I was praying a little because my mom's sore toe was killing her, and I didn't want the the DMV to be the place where her last nerve gave out. But two thumb prints and a photograph later, my mom is now a pending Californian. And it was free. That's right. If you're over 62 and you want a California state I.D., you pay nothing.
California: the gold rush, stardom, a plastic surgeon on every corner, and free--I tell you--freeeeee I.D.s here in the Golden State.

And the bonus? Her birth certificate says that she was the first of the twins to be born. The birth order question has been unanswered for years. Now we know. But if I'd had to place a bet on it, I would have gone with my mom, for sure. Looking at the photo at the top of the post, which twin would you bet made it out first? (see answer below)


ʇsɹıɟ uɹoq sɐʍ (ʞɔɐlq uı ǝuo ǝɥʇ) ʇɥƃıɹ ǝɥʇ uo uıʍʇ ǝɥʇ

And, incidentally, the picture is from 1988--some months before that Medicare card kicked in.

August is Sandcastle Month

That's what the bulletin board at my aunt's nursing home says. There's a lopsided construction paper cutout that looks like it's been faded by the sun--but the sun has no way to  make an appearance in the windowless room where the"old folks" eat their meals and visit with the people who come to see them. The other section of the bulletin board reports the day and the date as well as the season--"Summer!" and the weather--"Hot!" For some reason the section captioned, "The Next Holiday" is left blank. Maybe thinking ahead to the turn of the calendar page is too much when you're living in a place like this.
We took my mom to visit her twin Millie.  We sat on the patio with them while they smoked.  My mom stopped making the sounds that have recently become part of her repertoire.

"What's with the moaning?" I'd asked my brother the first night of my visit.
"It's not really moaning," he said. "It sounds to me like she's contemplating." I had to agree. Our mother is not moaning in pain. But if she's not actively engaged in a conversation when she sits sipping her coffee or her martini or just sits doing nothing, she vocalizes in a way that seems to be a non-verbal comment on something she's thinking about. Usually these "comments" don't sound all that positive.
My mother talks in her sleep, too.
"What do you dream about when you talk in your sleep?" I asked her the first day of our visit.
"I'm always talking to Millie," she said. "She's trying to help me. I'm in trouble, and she says, 'Hang on. Don't let go of the rope. Grab on to the branch. Don't jump.' "
I wonder if the waking "contemplations" are between her and Millie too. And that when they were together, that's why my mother could stop.

The weird thing was, as my aunt and my mother sat together on the patio, it was my aunt who began making the sounds.

When Their World Was Made of Water

When their world was made of water, my mother and my aunt floated together in my grandmother's body. Identical twin girls, that not even their father could tell apart. When they were youngsters and took turns meeting him with a snack on his long walk back from his factory job, he'd greet them by calling out, "Hello, Twin. Which one are you?" My mother concedes that maybe he was just teasing.

After they graduated from the 8th grade, the culmination of their education, they had a chance for a brighter economic future when a relative invited them to leave rural Iowa for Baltimore. When they pooled enough dough to get one ticket, my aunt headed east and once in the big city earned money faster than my mother could in Iowa and sent it back home to contribute to her sister's ticket.

They worked as "photo girls," with Polaroids slung around their necks, and hat check girls at night clubs with names like the Chanitclere and the Band Box. They saw Guy Lombardo, Jimmy Dorsey, and all the big names. Sometimes one twin would take a few days off and the other would cover her shifts. There was a cop on the beat who could tell them apart. If he pretended to swing his night stick at them, my aunt would flinch.

My mother and my aunt have lived together for almost thirty years.

I doubt they will leave this world together.

I wish I could change that.