MUSCLE MEMORY: Essay by Claudia Hinz

My mother hobbles into the kitchen. Her gait is a wide, see-sawing lurch, reminiscent of my children as toddlers who barreled headlong into everything. I watch helplessly, certain this is the moment she crashes into a table or snags the edge of a rug and hits the ground. 

This morning, her flannel nightgown is crusted with blood. Her lips are bloody. Blood foams at the base of her remaining teeth, but she is smiling. Two days after her second oral surgical procedure to remove decayed teeth and she is happy. Happy because I am home. She wants to know if I slept well and have a clean mug for coffee. I drag a space heater over to her spot at the kitchen table. I know that if she could figure out how to adjust the heater, she would turn it around to aim it at my feet. 

The kitchen table is a disaster. There are mountains of papers, letters and envelopes spilling everywhere. Stickers. Greeting cards from last week. Wedding invitations and graduation announcements from a decade ago. Old flowerpots filled with pens. Books hacked apart that she turns into cards for friends, family, and former teaching colleagues. Later, I will look up a chapter heading of a shredded book to discover it is a short story collection by William Somerset Maugham. I clear a small spot on the table for my coffee and wonder what my pre-stroke mother would have thought about this mess.

My mother was always wildly energetic. Sometimes this energy was a hurricane force that threatened to whisk her away from me. When we walked down the sidewalk, she outpaced the rest of the family by no less than half a city block. If she ever took a sick day from teaching or lay down for a moment to rest, I was unaware. She was an Energizer bunny from 5 am until after putting away dinner dishes and sitting down to grade homework. I can picture her at the dining room table over her students’ essays. She wrote copious notes about her students’ observations and where they could press harder on the connections between reading assignments and their own experiences. I think she was always communicating that their opinions and ideas mattered. Again and again, she was telling them that they mattered.

As a young mother, I used to wonder if I would ever have as much energy as my mother. These days, I tend to go hard out and burn out fast. Resting feels like failure. But today, it is my mother who marvels at my energy. “You already ran four miles this morning and wrote?” she asks, looking at the clock. She is content to spend the day at her spot at the kitchen table. The rituals of her day include a bowl of cereal with blueberries, accompanied by a sterling silver bowl, a British porringer, she tells me, of medications (ten pills set out each morning by my father). She uses the same utensils and mug every day. The same child-sized spatula to make her mid-morning French toast, cracking an egg into her water glass. I used to worry a lot about E. coli and salmonella. I still do but I have less energy for worrying. 

My mother would love an orange with her breakfast, but oranges have too much sugar. When told she can’t have something because of her diabetes, she always responds, “oh, okay.” I ask her what she misses eating, and she says, “oh, I guess, ice cream.” She is matter of fact. I don’t ask what flavor.

This morning, sliding down the piles on the table is a bag of blueberry muffins. She is not supposed to be eating muffins and I wonder if she snuck it into the shopping cart when the health care aide who takes her shopping wasn’t looking. There is a note in my mom’s hand taped to the muffins. They are for Malachi, the lifeguard at the local swimming pool. When I take her to the pool, she remembers to put the bag of muffins on top of her swimsuit in her tote bag. Her pockets are filled with rubber bands to squeeze her hair into her swim cap; she’s looped extra face masks on her wrist in case one breaks. She clutches a stack of letters she wants to put in the mailbox. Hat, mittens, parka, broken sunglasses teetering at the tip of her nose. A cozy bathrobe to put on when she gets out of the pool to walk to the lifeguard station to shake Malachi’s hand, give him the muffins, and thank him for watching her swim. So much to keep track of, to keep a grip on and remember to retrieve from the locker room after her swim. As we’re leaving the pool, the woman at the front desk stands up to wave goodbye. “We love your mother,” she tells me. When I put my mother’s bag in the backseat of the car, I see the smushed bag of muffins next to her wet suit.  

After her swim, I take her on errands. Shopping is also something new for my mother. True to her midwestern roots, she has always been frugal and deeply resistant to spending money. When I asked to buy the designer brands my friends were wearing–Benetton and Lacoste– my mother would make a face and say, How much for a simple cotton shirt?! and I knew that was a no. But now, spending is her jam. Two days in a row, we go shopping and she picks out lipsticks in nearly identical colors. The lipsticks go in a drawer in the kitchen. I peel off the invisible plastic sheaf before she stows them away, but I know she won’t remember they’re there.

She loves, loves T.J. Maxx. She fills the shopping cart with fuzzy socks, a discounted Ann Sacks watch with a face so small not even I can read the time (on past visits, I have counted twelve watches in drawers throughout the house). I dissuade her from a stylish pair of boots because the heel is too tall. Not safe for her morning walks up the driveway to the mailbox. “Oh, okay,” she says, slow to replace the boot on the shelf. I make a different speech about the cardigan with a dozen buttons. “Kind of a lot to fasten,” I say. “What do you think?” She has been robbed of so much agency that I hate to be one more voice telling her no. “Yes, I think you’re right,” she says, her hand straying on the silky sleeve. She picks out Christmas ornaments to send to her close friends. A week later, one of these ornaments will arrive in the mail and with it, a note: you are my closest friend. 

Our next stop is the grocery store. As we are heading inside, my mother’s toe catches the curb, and she lurches forward. I’ve got her elbow and stop her from sprawling onto the sidewalk. An old woman with a walker stops to watch me right my mother. “You need a walker,” the woman mutters. 

Quietly, my mother says, “Oh, I don’t think so.”

My heart is still racing when I pull out a shopping cart for my mother. She clutches the bar with both hands, leaning into it. I’d like to steer the cart into the nasty old woman. But she was right: if I hadn’t been holding onto my mother, she would have fallen. Would her slow instincts have prevented her from putting out a hand to catch herself? Would she have landed on her face? I worry all the time about the game-changing fall: a broken hip that marks a quick decline. My mother’s walker is stationed at the side of her bed. It’s missing a rubber stopper, and it stutters over the steep thresholds in my parents’ home. I know the walker is a reminder of the worst days of rehab after the cardiac care unit where she nearly died. Using the walker is one more stamp of her loss of independence and mobility.

At the cash register, my mother holds up the line. She has paid and is struggling to paper clip her credit card to an index card on which she has written, my credit card. The woman behind us stomps her feet impatiently and lets out a loud sigh. I try to nudge my mother along but she’s fumbling with her credit card and the paper clip, her eyes fixed on the cashier’s nametag. Seconds pass. Heads peer around to see what’s taking so long. The impatient woman has loaded all her groceries onto the conveyer belt and stands ready with her credit card.

“Daniel,” my mother says to the cashier. “Thank you so much for your help, Daniel. I hope you have a lovely evening.”

Daniel had started scanning the impatient woman’s groceries, but now he stops the conveyor belt and turns back to my mother. “You, too. See you next time.”

My mother wedges the credit card into her shallow pocket. Her mittens fall to the floor. More sighs from the woman behind us. I retrieve my mother’s mittens, slip them onto her hands, and guide them back to the shopping cart to steer her out of the store. 

“Mama,” I begin as I settle her into the car with our groceries. “What do you think about using the walker on your outings?” My mother is silent. I know she doesn’t want to disappoint me. Everything she expresses about my visit home is replete with gratitude and joy. “What if using the walker gave you greater mobility?” I try to frame the choice as the opposite of limiting. That the walker may, in fact, be freeing. 

“Okay,” she says, and I can tell she is trying to be agreeable. “Maybe I could practice using it on a walk to the top of the driveway and you could help.”

But the next day is too cold for her to be outside, and I have to fly home to the other side of the country. On the way to the airport, she sits in the backseat of the car, her eyes closed. When my father asks if she is sleeping, she says she is just enjoying the warmth of the car and the pleasure of hearing my voice before I leave. 

Double parked at the airport, I hug my parents goodbye and tell each of them that I love them. My mother promises to practice using the walker. I want to tell her I am sorry for proposing yet another change that makes her feel feeble. I turn back to watch my father help my mother into the front seat before they drive off. Every time I say goodbye to them, I wonder, is this the last time? Was that my goodbye? Have I said what I need to say? 

What I don’t say to my mother:

Mama, you may be frail, but you have the heart of an endurance athlete. An Olympian. You make people feel seen and special. That is your super-sized muscle, and it only grows stronger. 

I wonder: if we all flexed this muscle every day, how different our daily interactions would be. How different our world would be.

On the airplane, I look at the photo I took of the shredded Sommerset Maugham book from my parents’ kitchen table. If my mother had a cell phone, I would text her the picture of the page. I could print it out and send it to her, but in rereading it, I realize she doesn’t need these words as I do. She knows well the hazards and humiliations of the path, what Somerset Maugham describes as the “difficult crossing”:

“He watched his feet carefully… and he tottered a little. It was with a gasp of relief that he reached the last tree and finally set his feet on the firm ground of the other side. He had been so intent on the difficult crossing that he never noticed anyone was watching him, and it was with surprise that he heard himself spoken to.

It takes a bit of nerve to cross these bridges when you’re not used to them.

He looked up and saw a man standing in front of him. He had evidently come out of the house which he had seen.

‘I saw you hesitate, the man continued with a smile on his lips, ‘and I was watching to see you fall in.’

‘Not on your life,’ said the captain.”

-William Somerset Maugham, The Trembling of a Leaf

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Claudia Hinz lives in Bend, Oregon. Her work has been published in The Christian Science Monitor, Women Writers, Women’s Books, Story Magazine, Other People’s Flowers, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, The Manifest-Station, Brevity, The Boston Globe, Flash Fiction Magazine and Bend Lifestyle Magazine. Her novel is out on submission.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing