I had never seen my mother's house before when no one was in it. There were always people banging around the kitchen. The television set was always blaring. The table was usually set.
Today, it had an austere recovery room quality to it. It had to be the cleanest house in North America. Pillows were peaked like meringue made with fresh eggs. The countertops in the kitchen were as barren as those in a model home. And the peach carpet looked like it had just been raked. I had often accused her of laundering her dust. Maybe I was right.Actually, I had never paid so much attention before to the way it looked. I had never lived in this house. The one I grew up in had unsightly holes in my bedroom walls and adhesive tape permanently embedded from my posters, and a bed buried beneath clothes. No, this was the dream house she and my late father earned from years of working in an Ohio factory. This was where they were going to kick back and make withdrawals from lifetime deposits of savings and sacrifices.
I pushed open the bathroom door. There was the toilet seat I had kidded her about because it played "Lara's Theme" from "Dr. Zhivago" when you sat on it. She disconnected it because she said she wanted a new tune. In the kitchen was a pencil and pad by her Bart Simpson portable phone she received from her grandson last Christmas. I smiled whenever I heard her mumble in the receiver, "Wait a minute. It's not easy talking into someone's fanny."
I straightened a picture on her brag wall in the hallway - pictures of her grandchildren at various stages of their lives and framed covers of my books. (When someone just happened to ask her if she was my mother, she answered dryly, "Someone had to do it!")
In the driveway as I leaned over to pick up her paper, my eyes caught sight of a humongous fake owl perched on her TV anntenna. She said she heard they discouraged birds from dropping tons of do-do on her roof, which would eventually cave in the roof.
Before closing the door on these walls of silence to visit her at the hospital, I remember thinking how often we look, but never see . . . we listen, but never hear; we exist, but never feel. We take our relationships for granted. A house is only a place that has no life of its own. It needs human voices, activity and laughter to come alive. It needed my mother shoving a picture of an appetizer before a guest's face who arrived late saying, "These are the hors d'oeuvres you missed." It needed her talking a mile a minute into Bart Simpson's fanny.
It needed a doctor to whisper in her ear the most beautiful word in the English language - benign.