Things I Wish I Told My Mother

“LAURIE MARGOLIS, YOU CRUSHED it! After you left, they said—”

“Hold on a sec, Drew. I’m in an Uber.”

I tap on the glass partition. The driver is humming along to sitar music more suited to a yoga class than a drive to New Jersey.

“Could you turn that down a little?” I ask. He does.

“Okay, Drew. Now tell me everything.” Drew Merrill is executive creative director of Vanessa. Fair, honest, a stubbled Brooklyn hipster with the required tattoos, and fiercely loyal to the people who work for him.

“They loved you. They loved your ideas. They had a couple of questions about timing and product placement. But they thought you had a really first-rate understanding of the hair-care category. Great opening line, by the way.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank Edith Wharton.”

Good old Edith. Always there with a wise comment when you need one. As I stood up to speak, I looked around the table and quoted one of her mantras: “Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.”

They’d smiled. A few of them nodded.

And I knew right then that we were golden.

“They did everything but jump across the table and hug us,” Drew said. “Turns out the Dumbo group didn’t deliver. So—congratulations. The account is ours. Well, actually, yours. They insisted you be their key contact person.”

Drew is a classy guy. He’d never discuss money or compensation on a cell phone. But I know I’ll be getting a significant bonus for this. Maybe even a promotion from group head to creative director.

As my Uber pulls up to Ridgefield Hospital, I am still feeling good about myself. So good, even the thought of dealing with my mother doesn’t bring me down.

(Esther would be so proud.)

The thick glass doors open automatically and I make my usual left toward the Walker Pavilion. Over the years, I have been here many times—as a patient (when I busted a finger playing touch football with a boy I had a crush on) and as a visitor. My father spent many weeks here, wasting away from pancreatic cancer, before we moved him to hospice care. So I know exactly which elevators will whisk me up to Room 723.

But when I get off the elevator and find my mother’s room, I am in for a surprise.

No. Not a surprise. A shock.

I expect to see my mother sitting up, fully dressed in her usual designer clothing, tapping her fingers impatiently, angry about how long it’s taken me to get here when there’s no traffic in the middle of the day.

But no. My mother, the famous Dr. Elizabeth Ormson, is lying in a hospital bed in one of those white and blue hospital gowns, looking small and frail, and older than her sixty-eight years. Instead of frowning because I am late, I see a small smile begin to form on her face. And I am equally unnerved by her breathy, almost whispery words: “You’re here.”

My mother is connected to a bunch of machines. Red LED lights appear and disappear in sync, popping up and down. An IV bottle is dangling from a metal hook, dripping into a vein in her arm. Her blond hair, which she spends a fortune to re-frost every week, is splayed out on her pillow like a fan. Yesterday’s makeup has caked on her face, and she has dark-blue mascara rings under her dark-blue Scandinavian eyes. A soft, insistent beep fills the room, as if counting out the moments of my mother’s life.

This is not the mother I know.

Somewhere there’s got to be a giant pod that contains the real, tough, feisty Dr. Liz Ormson. And in her place is this small, sad-looking woman with a pasty complexion and a bit of drool running down her chin.

But then she speaks. Yup—it’s my mother after all.

“What took you so long?” she asks, sitting up. I am somewhat relieved. I think.

“And where are my clothes?”

I assume they’re in the closet near the door. But I’m a little hesitant about getting them.

“Who told you that you were being released today?” I ask.

“Nobody told me. I’m releasing myself.”

I should have known. I open the closet and hand her the bag of clothes the staff has “carelessly” (her word) crumpled up into a hospital plastic bag.

Yes, my mother’s trying like crazy to get back to her usual take-no-prisoners self. But she can’t quite pull it off. The hospital gown separates as she tries to remove it over her IV, and I get a quick view of her legs—thin, covered with varicose veins. For a split second, as she raises her hand to reach the call button, I see a small but unmistakable shakiness. But her trigger finger is working just fine.

She rings for the nurse. And rings. And rings.

“Mother, I can help,” I say.

“No, Laurie, you can’t. They need to unhook me. I’d do it myself, but the IV is in my dominant arm.”

A short while later, a sweet chubby nurse named Remi enters.

“Well, my, my,” she says, clearly surprised to see my mother tangled up, halfway out of her hospital gown and halfway into her beige Cardin sweater. “Where are we going in such a hurry, my dear?”

“We are not going anywhere. I’m going home,” my mother says, like a finicky guest checking out of a luxury hotel because the room-service hamburger was too rare. “And I’ll thank you to get me off this IV.”

There is a touch—okay, more than a touch—of anger and hostility in my mother’s voice. Nurse Remi doesn’t seem to notice. She’s still smiling. But her smile disappears as she checks the chart at the foot of my mother’s bed.

“Has Dr. Akers said you could leave?”

“If I know Malcolm Akers,” my mother says, “he’s probably teeing off at the fourth hole at Somerset Hills. Now please disconnect me.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Ormson. You know the policy. I’m not authorized to do that.”

“Then I’d like to speak to someone who is.”

It’s clear to Remi that my mother is used to having her own way about things.

“Yes, ma’am,” Remi says, and disappears as quietly as she arrived.

Soon, the nursing supervisor—bigger, heavier, not quite as friendly, with several thick dreadlocks wrapped around her head—enters.

“What seems to be the problem, Doctor?” she asks.

“The problem is, I’m ready to leave.”

Once again, my mother is told the rules. Once again, she rebels.

“Enough. We both know full well I can discharge myself,” she says. “This is a hospital, not a prison. By law I am free to go as I wish. So now please unhook me from this IV, or I shall be forced to pull it out.”

It is clear from the way the dials on the machine are jumping that my mother is aggravating her own body as much as she is aggravating us. But just as she’s about to lose it entirely and start screaming, a wonderful thing happens.

The door opens. And in walks her cardiologist.

DR. MALCOLM AKERS IS in his midforties, tall and stately as a tree, with dark curly hair. Like most cardiologists, he looks like he’s in great physical shape.

“Hello,” he says to me, extending his hand. “I’m Malcolm Akers.” It’s clear he overheard some of the conversation as he was walking toward the room. “It seems I may have walked in on a little…kerfuffle.”

I smile. I love that word. If only that was all my mother was: a chronic kerfuffler.

“Malcolm, this nurse,” my mother says, pointing to Remi, “is refusing to unhook me. I need to be released this afternoon. I have my own patients to attend to, you know.”

But Dr. Akers isn’t listening. He’s wheeled a PC into the room and is looking at her records. And then he frowns. “Not a good idea,” he says, quietly. “Elizabeth, I’m going to level with you. There were some irregularities on the EKG we did this morning.”

My mother looks up. Surprised, annoyed, and—wait a minute. Do I detect a hint of fear? From the great Dr. Elizabeth Ormson? No. Can’t be. I must have imagined it.

“Irregularities? Such as?”

He swings the PC around so she can read the screen.

“It appears you may have had a myocardial infarction at some point.”

“Impossible. When?”

“Can’t say for sure.”

“I order these EKGs for my patients all the time, you know,” she says. “And I know the statistics for false positives.”

I have to smile. Who else but my mother would try to argue her way out of a heart attack?

“I’m sure you do. But you did present here last night with angina.”

“Yes, but…”

“Listen, Elizabeth, you know as well as I do that—”

“Don’t tell me what I know and what I don’t!” my mother says. Wow. This is like watching a tennis match pitting Nadal against Federer. I take a step back to get a better view.

“Fine,” he says. Defeated? Hardly. He bounces back like a Joe Palooka boxing doll. “We can’t keep you here against your will. I know that. But the numbers show…”

And with that, they go into a quick medical shorthand discussion. I hear words like arrhythmia…hypertrophy…ventricular tachycardia.

“So I recommend that you allow us to do a few more tests before we release you.”

She says nothing.

“Strongly recommend,” he adds for emphasis.

I have to confess: there’s something refreshing about seeing The Great Elizabeth Ormson taken down a few pegs. But then the tone of the room begins to change. As he goes on and on about Baseline Numbers, Just To Be Sure, Rule Things Out, he seems to be getting through to her. Slowly, she sinks back into her pillow, her spirits as crushed as the highlights on her blond hair. She looks the way she did when I first walked into the room.

And it breaks my heart.

“Tell ya what,” I say after the doctor and nurse leave the room. “Stay here a bit, do what they tell you, and as soon as you get the all-clear and you’re released we’ll do something fun.”

“Like what?” she asks.

“Maybe…oh, I don’t know. Maybe go somewhere? Just the two of us. Would you like that? To take a trip with your one and only daughter?”

Too late. The words were out. And I see a sparkle in her eyes.

Oh. My. God.

What was I thinking?