__________________________________
Rachel Pabst
by Stephanie Kemp
Rachel Pabst
by Stephanie Kemp
It is 3pm on a Friday.
Suburban Detroit, as Elvis Mitchell once pointed out to me where I was from at the Cannes Film Festival.
I try not to look desperate as I desperately can’t wait to get on a plane in 4 hours and go home.
My mom is onto me.
And her desperation no longer seems to have a hiding place.
I think this is because she knows that we are trying to get her to move from the home she has lived in for 25 years in the town she has lived in for 75 and into a Home far away that might make her want to kill herself.
This is a shitty phase of life no matter how or where you cut the pie.
I hate it. And I’m not even there yet.
_______
Mom jumps around her kitchen like a Mexican jumping bean. I am sure this must be offensive, like calling a garbanzo a chi-chi bean, but it is the best way I can think to describe her jittery energy. (I look up Mexican jumping beans. They are actually not beans at all. And they are disgusting.)
She doesn’t understand why I don’t want her to drive me to the airport. It is because she shouldn’t drive anymore, period. Another shitty cut in the pie. And non-negotiable, now that she has been diagnosed with macular degeneration. I’ll have my sister tackle that one, when she gets off the next plane.
Usually my mom and I are both really sad when I fly back to California, but today is fucking us both up.
It might be because before we head to the airport we are going to visit my uncle in his rehab facility. He is there because he had a stroke. A stroke that evilly decimated his body then wickedly left his brain intact.
I absolutely do not want to go. See my uncle. Like this.
Neither does my mom. I know this because she just suggested that maybe we could swing by Olga’s instead, for an early Greek dinner.
It is still 3pm.
We are going to see my uncle. We both know this.
The rehab facility is a place I have never seen, although I have passed it literally thousands of times. It sits high on a hill off the main road of my hometown but I have only ever noticed its driveway entrance surrounded by a rush of trees. The driveway looks out of place on the busy street. When I was little I thought it looked scary. Like a secret orphanage. Or like Boo Radley might be living up there in the wrong house in the wrong city. When I got older I thought it looked like a driveway to a bank. A posh bank that got to be higher up than the ones in the flats (I had recently lived in London for a month and thought I knew everything, including what a flat meant to a Londoner). When I got even older (and more judgmental of my hometown), I laughed at my recollections of this familiar driveway:
“Ha! As if a book like To Kill a Mockingbird could ever have been written in a town like this!”
“Ha! Like there could even be any flats without a single mountain!”
“I want to live in London!”
At least I didn’t make fun of (even the idea of) an orphanage.
(What time is my plane?)
In the last few years this rehab facility has become a setting in the play that has become my mom’s life. For that reason and because it’s easier if I try to pretend this is a movie, I will refer to it moving forward as The House on the Hill.
Her life long friend went there after her stroke.
Her husband went there after his heart attack (Was it a heart attack? I was not close to my stepdad.)
Her golf partner, her bridge partner, her neighbor, her former classmates, her doctor, her everyone who’s ever been anyone seems to have gone to live in this…
House on the Hill.
And my mom is trying every single day to make sure she never has to join them.
__________
The car is loaded for the airport and we do not go to Olga’s.
We drive without talking to go see my uncle as I pretend that I can’t figure out why I am so nervous.
Strokes.
Pacemakers.
Machines.
Tanks.
Tubes.
Metal replacing bone.
Relearning to eat.
Talk.
Walk.
Stand.
Why would anyone be nervous?
_____________
But a funny thing happens on the way to the House on the Hill.
Like so many things, it becomes less scary upon arrival.
We pull into the mysterious driveway, drive up the still midsized hill (Mom’s residual driving skills on the black ice make me think we might all be ok forever), and pull up to what looks like a very nice Hamburger Hamlet with a massive parking lot and lots of lights on.
Oh! No problem! This is going to be great! I might even want to work here some day and write a book about the beauty of human perseverance!
I am relieved and suddenly excited, even feeling sad that my flight will be leaving so soon. Maybe I can catch a later flight or leave tomorrow!
_________________
4pm.
Scratch that.
As soon as I walk out of the sleet and through the front door, I know I need to leave immediately and that there will be no turning back.
All the safety of distance from this time in my own life (I am not yet 50) and the false belief that these are people that only Mom knows (Is that Mr. Kelly? Mrs. Corbett? Dr. K?) disappear and I know that I need to get in and get out. You can only freeze people in the time you want to remember if you don’t stay connected to them. I have been disconnected for 25 years and am now in a Jordan Peele movie without the good writing.
Just as my mission becomes crystal clear (Get Out), so does Mom’s (It’s Still a Wonderful Life), and we are on a collision course to disaster. I want to beeline and find Room 112 to hug my uncle goodbye (definitely for today and possible forever - these are real stakes), and Mom wants to talk to everyone she knows (and she knows everyone) about any and everything any of them ever did (together or apart), while also reminiscing about favorite memories (funny or sad), from any part of life (and the entire world), in as much detail as possible.
Once inside, she has no choice but to spread her sunshine.
And as always, I have no choice but to leave.
I walk around the Hamlet (this still feels right, given that this will NEVER be MY House on the Hill) and start to separate from myself. There is the me that is using my legs and looking at room numbers that don’t make tracking sense. The me that knows it is way too hot in here. The me that can hear tiny Christmas Carolers singing my childhood songs to old people that look like like my friends’ parents (because they are my friends’ parents, only now at their real age) sitting on wheelchairs in a florescent boiler cooker masquerading as a lobby. The me that hears hushed whispers about “ the ice cream running late.” The me that sees people through spotless interior windows working with machines I’ve never seen trying to get strong again. Or stronger now. A woman crying with her head in her hands is hugged by a woman in scrubs as a woman in civilian clothes stands over them both with fisted hands on even hips with original bones.
I can’t hear the carolers anymore.
As if my uncle knows that I am about to have a panic attack, he appears in his wheelchair 5 feet in front of me, in front of a room numbered 112 that I have already passed 4 times while trying to find it.
He has always been this person to me.
________________
We sit in his room. It is terrible. Not the room, which is fine and sort of homey, but seeing him like this. While I have forgotten that I brought him a present, he has not forgotten that he loves getting them. As we unsuccessfully negotiate spoken language as a form of reciprocal communication, he bossily tells me with his good arm to give it to him.
I do.
We get to be us for a second, because the present is a little pillow that says “Be Nice.”
His response using no words lets me know that he is still my uncle.
I can breathe and hear again.
But then Mom arrives and the play goes off the rails (Are you scared? Did you think it was already off the rails? Do you want to leave, too?). Mom is sort of nice to both of us for a minute before she realizes that we have to hurry!
“The ice cream has arrived and the concert is over! You have to meet Rachel before everyone heads back to their rooms for Jeopardy!”
Having no idea what the fuck she is talking about, I return to panic mode, worried that I won’t get to the airport because the Ice Cream is Coming and I am now desperate to leave again. I kiss my uncle goodbye, hoping it won’t be the last time, but only if he is hoping this, too.
Once Mom crosses the threshold of the door back into the throngs of the people, she turns into Julie McCoy Cruise Director. Has she forgotten her own dire warning? In a rare moment I snap at her. In an even rarer moment, she snaps back:
“We are not leaving here until you meet my friend, Rachel Pabst! I have told her all about you and I promised her we would say hello. She broke her hip and her kids live out of town and we have plenty of time so I don’t want to hear another word about it!”
Although I have (at least) heard of every single person my mom has ever met, I have never heard of a person named Rachel Pabst. But these words come out of a mom mouth that I haven’t seen in a very long time. A mouth that holds gritted teeth and lives under flaring nostrils below eyes sliced from their former pools of warm blue. Holy shit. Is that mom still in there? GO MOM!
Let’s meet this Rachel Pabst!
We are united on a mission, although it is almost 5pm and the ice cream rush is really fucking us up. We are trying to get to Rachel in Room 176 (right near the exit! we realize delightedly from our newly united front) but we lose each other in what feels like Beatles level pandemonium. As I try to figure out what the hell is going on, I hear a nurse yelling into phone saying “This timing should’ve been worked out before today!” and “None of this should ever have happened!”
Jesus.
(And Thank God!) There is Mom. But not the OG I last saw with the gritted teeth. This is the one that has massive COPD and lives about 30 pounds under a functional body weight. This one needs to get outside fast. To get some fresh air in those lungs. Or any air. Or have a smoke.
We meet in the middle of the madness and push our way toward the exit. At least that’s where I push. But no. There will be no exiting when room 176 is right there! and there is a Rachel waiting. My mom literally shoves me into the room with both hands.
But then she doesn’t come in behind me.
I find myself standing in Room 176, which is dark enough that my eyes have to adjust and quiet enough that I am surprised when the woman sitting on the bed (who I still can’t really see because she is also partially hidden behind a sliding hospital curtain) says, “Hello. Would you mind closing the door, please?”
I am now in a different play.
I introduce myself to Rachel Pabst (did I call her Mrs.? Why is it so dark in here? Where the fuck is Mom?) and try to explain who I am and how happy I am to finally meet her because I’ve heard so much about her and I’m sorry to intrude like this but Mom was just behind me and did you get some ice cream and where do your kids live and you’re lucky it’s not too hot in here and blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Just as I realize that I haven’t let Rachel Pabst say a single word, she turns on a little light near the bed and I see her properly for the first time. She is in a hospital gown. She has two black eyes and a massive 4 pronged neck brace attached to a metal halo floating around her head. She adjusts her top sheet and I try not to notice the fresh bandage on a leg that has been amputated at the knee.
Upon seeing my response (I can’t begin to imagine what she sees), she turns into the same person I recognize from my mom’s transformation into Julie McCoy Cruise Director.
These women are taking care of people that need to be taken care of.
She is happy to meet me.
Sorry to miss my mom.
Asks how my family is.
Where I am headed from the airport.
Knows it is probably pretty confusing being here.
Not what you were expecting.
Not what any of us were expecting.
I can’t stop looking at her face. She is so calm. I feel proud of my mom for knowing her. Grateful that she forced me to meet her. Maybe there could be a different way to do this.
Any of it.
All of it.
The end of it.
I am embarrassed when she breaks the spell (when was the last time I said something?) by saying that she should probably get some rest.
Say hi to your mom.
Have a safe trip home.
I am so glad we met.
I am embarrassed that I judged a hill because it wasn’t a mountain.
A flat that was just doing its best either to connect a world between hills or provide shelter to anyone lucky enough to call it home.
That I thought there could be such a thing as a town with no stories. Especially a hometown.
I turn to leave and see that there is another woman sitting in a chair against the wall behind me. She looks like she wants to kill me. She has clearly been crying.
“Stephanie, this is my friend, Jane. Sorry I didn’t introduce you. She’s having a hard day.”
_______
What.
The.
Fuck.
Is.
This.
Play?
_______
I say goodbye (did I?) and shut the door behind me. I am back in the bright, loud, hot, still a Hamlet hallway. There is my Original Mom. Not the OG and not the one that can’t breathe. The one that is still trying to take care of people while doing everything she can not to become a concert goer in a wheelchair. This mom is at the nurses’ station looking at pictures of her late husband’s former physical therapist’s grandkids asking questions and laughing her head off. “Oh, that’s a riot!” ….“He is ADORABLE!”
At this point I don’t give a shit about my flight but I do want to know what just happened in there and why she didn’t come with me to meet her friend who had much more than a hip replacement.
“Oh Honey. Sorry. That was the wrong room! I don’t know who that was. But this is Sally - look at her adorable grandson! Her daughter lives in California, I gave her your number!”
_______
I make my flight.
I drink wine on the plane.
I write much of this down and then don’t revisit it (or go near the rest of it) for over 5 years.
Because I am still trying to figure out one thing:
What the fuck is this story?
I still don’t know, but know I have to try to tell it somehow because it keeps knocking.
Oh, and the play? It’s not written either, but I bet it could be pretty good, if I could turn it into a movie and get someone else to write it.
Suburban Detroit, as Elvis Mitchell once pointed out to me where I was from at the Cannes Film Festival.
I try not to look desperate as I desperately can’t wait to get on a plane in 4 hours and go home.
My mom is onto me.
And her desperation no longer seems to have a hiding place.
I think this is because she knows that we are trying to get her to move from the home she has lived in for 25 years in the town she has lived in for 75 and into a Home far away that might make her want to kill herself.
This is a shitty phase of life no matter how or where you cut the pie.
I hate it. And I’m not even there yet.
_______
Mom jumps around her kitchen like a Mexican jumping bean. I am sure this must be offensive, like calling a garbanzo a chi-chi bean, but it is the best way I can think to describe her jittery energy. (I look up Mexican jumping beans. They are actually not beans at all. And they are disgusting.)
She doesn’t understand why I don’t want her to drive me to the airport. It is because she shouldn’t drive anymore, period. Another shitty cut in the pie. And non-negotiable, now that she has been diagnosed with macular degeneration. I’ll have my sister tackle that one, when she gets off the next plane.
Usually my mom and I are both really sad when I fly back to California, but today is fucking us both up.
It might be because before we head to the airport we are going to visit my uncle in his rehab facility. He is there because he had a stroke. A stroke that evilly decimated his body then wickedly left his brain intact.
I absolutely do not want to go. See my uncle. Like this.
Neither does my mom. I know this because she just suggested that maybe we could swing by Olga’s instead, for an early Greek dinner.
It is still 3pm.
We are going to see my uncle. We both know this.
The rehab facility is a place I have never seen, although I have passed it literally thousands of times. It sits high on a hill off the main road of my hometown but I have only ever noticed its driveway entrance surrounded by a rush of trees. The driveway looks out of place on the busy street. When I was little I thought it looked scary. Like a secret orphanage. Or like Boo Radley might be living up there in the wrong house in the wrong city. When I got older I thought it looked like a driveway to a bank. A posh bank that got to be higher up than the ones in the flats (I had recently lived in London for a month and thought I knew everything, including what a flat meant to a Londoner). When I got even older (and more judgmental of my hometown), I laughed at my recollections of this familiar driveway:
“Ha! As if a book like To Kill a Mockingbird could ever have been written in a town like this!”
“Ha! Like there could even be any flats without a single mountain!”
“I want to live in London!”
At least I didn’t make fun of (even the idea of) an orphanage.
(What time is my plane?)
In the last few years this rehab facility has become a setting in the play that has become my mom’s life. For that reason and because it’s easier if I try to pretend this is a movie, I will refer to it moving forward as The House on the Hill.
Her life long friend went there after her stroke.
Her husband went there after his heart attack (Was it a heart attack? I was not close to my stepdad.)
Her golf partner, her bridge partner, her neighbor, her former classmates, her doctor, her everyone who’s ever been anyone seems to have gone to live in this…
House on the Hill.
And my mom is trying every single day to make sure she never has to join them.
__________
The car is loaded for the airport and we do not go to Olga’s.
We drive without talking to go see my uncle as I pretend that I can’t figure out why I am so nervous.
Strokes.
Pacemakers.
Machines.
Tanks.
Tubes.
Metal replacing bone.
Relearning to eat.
Talk.
Walk.
Stand.
Why would anyone be nervous?
_____________
But a funny thing happens on the way to the House on the Hill.
Like so many things, it becomes less scary upon arrival.
We pull into the mysterious driveway, drive up the still midsized hill (Mom’s residual driving skills on the black ice make me think we might all be ok forever), and pull up to what looks like a very nice Hamburger Hamlet with a massive parking lot and lots of lights on.
Oh! No problem! This is going to be great! I might even want to work here some day and write a book about the beauty of human perseverance!
I am relieved and suddenly excited, even feeling sad that my flight will be leaving so soon. Maybe I can catch a later flight or leave tomorrow!
_________________
4pm.
Scratch that.
As soon as I walk out of the sleet and through the front door, I know I need to leave immediately and that there will be no turning back.
All the safety of distance from this time in my own life (I am not yet 50) and the false belief that these are people that only Mom knows (Is that Mr. Kelly? Mrs. Corbett? Dr. K?) disappear and I know that I need to get in and get out. You can only freeze people in the time you want to remember if you don’t stay connected to them. I have been disconnected for 25 years and am now in a Jordan Peele movie without the good writing.
Just as my mission becomes crystal clear (Get Out), so does Mom’s (It’s Still a Wonderful Life), and we are on a collision course to disaster. I want to beeline and find Room 112 to hug my uncle goodbye (definitely for today and possible forever - these are real stakes), and Mom wants to talk to everyone she knows (and she knows everyone) about any and everything any of them ever did (together or apart), while also reminiscing about favorite memories (funny or sad), from any part of life (and the entire world), in as much detail as possible.
Once inside, she has no choice but to spread her sunshine.
And as always, I have no choice but to leave.
I walk around the Hamlet (this still feels right, given that this will NEVER be MY House on the Hill) and start to separate from myself. There is the me that is using my legs and looking at room numbers that don’t make tracking sense. The me that knows it is way too hot in here. The me that can hear tiny Christmas Carolers singing my childhood songs to old people that look like like my friends’ parents (because they are my friends’ parents, only now at their real age) sitting on wheelchairs in a florescent boiler cooker masquerading as a lobby. The me that hears hushed whispers about “ the ice cream running late.” The me that sees people through spotless interior windows working with machines I’ve never seen trying to get strong again. Or stronger now. A woman crying with her head in her hands is hugged by a woman in scrubs as a woman in civilian clothes stands over them both with fisted hands on even hips with original bones.
I can’t hear the carolers anymore.
As if my uncle knows that I am about to have a panic attack, he appears in his wheelchair 5 feet in front of me, in front of a room numbered 112 that I have already passed 4 times while trying to find it.
He has always been this person to me.
________________
We sit in his room. It is terrible. Not the room, which is fine and sort of homey, but seeing him like this. While I have forgotten that I brought him a present, he has not forgotten that he loves getting them. As we unsuccessfully negotiate spoken language as a form of reciprocal communication, he bossily tells me with his good arm to give it to him.
I do.
We get to be us for a second, because the present is a little pillow that says “Be Nice.”
His response using no words lets me know that he is still my uncle.
I can breathe and hear again.
But then Mom arrives and the play goes off the rails (Are you scared? Did you think it was already off the rails? Do you want to leave, too?). Mom is sort of nice to both of us for a minute before she realizes that we have to hurry!
“The ice cream has arrived and the concert is over! You have to meet Rachel before everyone heads back to their rooms for Jeopardy!”
Having no idea what the fuck she is talking about, I return to panic mode, worried that I won’t get to the airport because the Ice Cream is Coming and I am now desperate to leave again. I kiss my uncle goodbye, hoping it won’t be the last time, but only if he is hoping this, too.
Once Mom crosses the threshold of the door back into the throngs of the people, she turns into Julie McCoy Cruise Director. Has she forgotten her own dire warning? In a rare moment I snap at her. In an even rarer moment, she snaps back:
“We are not leaving here until you meet my friend, Rachel Pabst! I have told her all about you and I promised her we would say hello. She broke her hip and her kids live out of town and we have plenty of time so I don’t want to hear another word about it!”
Although I have (at least) heard of every single person my mom has ever met, I have never heard of a person named Rachel Pabst. But these words come out of a mom mouth that I haven’t seen in a very long time. A mouth that holds gritted teeth and lives under flaring nostrils below eyes sliced from their former pools of warm blue. Holy shit. Is that mom still in there? GO MOM!
Let’s meet this Rachel Pabst!
We are united on a mission, although it is almost 5pm and the ice cream rush is really fucking us up. We are trying to get to Rachel in Room 176 (right near the exit! we realize delightedly from our newly united front) but we lose each other in what feels like Beatles level pandemonium. As I try to figure out what the hell is going on, I hear a nurse yelling into phone saying “This timing should’ve been worked out before today!” and “None of this should ever have happened!”
Jesus.
(And Thank God!) There is Mom. But not the OG I last saw with the gritted teeth. This is the one that has massive COPD and lives about 30 pounds under a functional body weight. This one needs to get outside fast. To get some fresh air in those lungs. Or any air. Or have a smoke.
We meet in the middle of the madness and push our way toward the exit. At least that’s where I push. But no. There will be no exiting when room 176 is right there! and there is a Rachel waiting. My mom literally shoves me into the room with both hands.
But then she doesn’t come in behind me.
I find myself standing in Room 176, which is dark enough that my eyes have to adjust and quiet enough that I am surprised when the woman sitting on the bed (who I still can’t really see because she is also partially hidden behind a sliding hospital curtain) says, “Hello. Would you mind closing the door, please?”
I am now in a different play.
I introduce myself to Rachel Pabst (did I call her Mrs.? Why is it so dark in here? Where the fuck is Mom?) and try to explain who I am and how happy I am to finally meet her because I’ve heard so much about her and I’m sorry to intrude like this but Mom was just behind me and did you get some ice cream and where do your kids live and you’re lucky it’s not too hot in here and blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Just as I realize that I haven’t let Rachel Pabst say a single word, she turns on a little light near the bed and I see her properly for the first time. She is in a hospital gown. She has two black eyes and a massive 4 pronged neck brace attached to a metal halo floating around her head. She adjusts her top sheet and I try not to notice the fresh bandage on a leg that has been amputated at the knee.
Upon seeing my response (I can’t begin to imagine what she sees), she turns into the same person I recognize from my mom’s transformation into Julie McCoy Cruise Director.
These women are taking care of people that need to be taken care of.
She is happy to meet me.
Sorry to miss my mom.
Asks how my family is.
Where I am headed from the airport.
Knows it is probably pretty confusing being here.
Not what you were expecting.
Not what any of us were expecting.
I can’t stop looking at her face. She is so calm. I feel proud of my mom for knowing her. Grateful that she forced me to meet her. Maybe there could be a different way to do this.
Any of it.
All of it.
The end of it.
I am embarrassed when she breaks the spell (when was the last time I said something?) by saying that she should probably get some rest.
Say hi to your mom.
Have a safe trip home.
I am so glad we met.
I am embarrassed that I judged a hill because it wasn’t a mountain.
A flat that was just doing its best either to connect a world between hills or provide shelter to anyone lucky enough to call it home.
That I thought there could be such a thing as a town with no stories. Especially a hometown.
I turn to leave and see that there is another woman sitting in a chair against the wall behind me. She looks like she wants to kill me. She has clearly been crying.
“Stephanie, this is my friend, Jane. Sorry I didn’t introduce you. She’s having a hard day.”
_______
What.
The.
Fuck.
Is.
This.
Play?
_______
I say goodbye (did I?) and shut the door behind me. I am back in the bright, loud, hot, still a Hamlet hallway. There is my Original Mom. Not the OG and not the one that can’t breathe. The one that is still trying to take care of people while doing everything she can not to become a concert goer in a wheelchair. This mom is at the nurses’ station looking at pictures of her late husband’s former physical therapist’s grandkids asking questions and laughing her head off. “Oh, that’s a riot!” ….“He is ADORABLE!”
At this point I don’t give a shit about my flight but I do want to know what just happened in there and why she didn’t come with me to meet her friend who had much more than a hip replacement.
“Oh Honey. Sorry. That was the wrong room! I don’t know who that was. But this is Sally - look at her adorable grandson! Her daughter lives in California, I gave her your number!”
_______
I make my flight.
I drink wine on the plane.
I write much of this down and then don’t revisit it (or go near the rest of it) for over 5 years.
Because I am still trying to figure out one thing:
What the fuck is this story?
I still don’t know, but know I have to try to tell it somehow because it keeps knocking.
Oh, and the play? It’s not written either, but I bet it could be pretty good, if I could turn it into a movie and get someone else to write it.