PUTNEY — Two figures move as one across the steaming asphalt of a medical building parking lot under a hot January sun. This is the kind of day that brings hordes of winter refugees west to follow the televised New Year's Day Rose Parade in Pasadena, Calif.
One of the figures is a frail old woman collapsed in a transporter wheelchair - a conveyance with four small wheels, made for transferring from place to place those whose self-propelling days are history.
The other is a middle-aged stick figure; her veiny hands grasp the heavy rubber handles of the transporter, pushing her load gently in the unseasonably warm mid-morning air.
When the conjoined pair reaches an unwashed silver Volvo, the ambulatory woman expertly backs the transporter into the space alongside the passenger side of the car and stops.
The middle-aged woman - who, if you haven't guessed by now, is me - rummages for her keys in a worn black backpack hanging by the handles of the conveyance.
A click of the medallion, and a few moments later, my mother, for she is the skeletal old woman in the transporter, is expertly pivoted and strapped into the front seat.
Because of the heat, I leave the door open wide while, in an oft-rehearsed routine, I roll the transporter to the rear of the car, open the trunk gate, kneel to swivel and unhook the removable foot pads, unlock the frame, and collapse the chair into a manageable, 12-pound package of chrome, steel, rubber, and vinyl, ready to be loaded into the trunk.
* * *
While I'm hoisting the chair, a shiny new maroon Cadillac Seville with tinted windows pulls alongside us.
The passenger window silently descends, and a tawny-faced woman of about 60 years of age leans across the gleaming leather front seat. Her hair, a shade of orange unknown to nature, sticks up in unraveling, dehydrated, curling clumps, and her red nails rap nervously on the steering wheel.
“Is that your mother?” she asks demandingly.
I nod, wiping a trickle of sweat from under the nose bridge of my sunglasses.
“How long have you been doing this?” She jerks her head in the direction of the chair, now on its side in my trunk.
We both know what she means.
* * *
I pause, counting not the years, but instead seeing multiple images unfold, all etched in needle-sharp pricks against the backdrop of my forties.
And with each piercing, I feel again the juice of vitality bleed from my veins, leaving me a pale shadow of the apple-cheeked woman I had been at 40.
Although I know that each moment of maternal care and gentle handling scoops from my life a nourishing drink I would rather bestow on my children, my husband, and myself, I cannot stop myself from giving.
Each smiling moment and lingering touch - whether a softly delivered sponge bath or an outing to the pet store to hold small animals - crafts moments when I am neither wife nor mother, but caregiver to a departed woman who lovingly, distractedly and, at times, somewhat misguidedly, raised me, and whose ghostly, guilty presence is more of a draw and more of a drain than anyone who has not been here can understand.
“Five years,” I reply in a mechanical voice.
I suppress whatever feeling might come with the confession that I have let pass five crucial years of my children's lives, while the unforgiving and ungrateful chasm of my mother's needs has grown wider and wider still.
The rear window of the Cadillac now descends, revealing an equally orange-colored, shriveled crone, her mouth agape, strapped into the back seat. Her sunken cheeks are crisscrossed with lines, and her eyes have a frantic wildness I see in my mother's.
As we near death, I wonder, do we try to see it coming with these widened eyes? Or are those bulging eyeballs simply more evidence of the gruesome, drip-by-drip drain that empties our corporeal vessel, rendering improbable - to those who meet us in these last stages of our lives - the very idea that we were once full-bodied, beguiling maidens whose organs, hard parts, and soft orbs were suspended in a fertile sea?
* * *
The driver jerks her head toward the withered woman in the back seat.
“Ten years!” She gasps, looking at me in horror. “Ten years!”
I stare into the car's interior, not sure if a shadow of pain doesn't flit across the parchmentlike forehead and yellowed sclera of the elder figure in the back seat. As silently as they descended, the windows rise together, and the two orange women are gone with a screech of wheels on the hot pavement.
I close the trunk, open the driver's-side door, lean inside, and start the engine and air conditioner. My mother looks at me, silent as usual, but her eyes hold a question I dare not answer.
I squeeze her bony elbow. “Somebody just asking a question, Mom,” I say.
I trot around the front of the vehicle so that, if she wishes to, my mother can see me and not fear again that I've abandoned her. I lean inside, making some inconsequential last adjustments of her seat belt.
I smile into the face of the person I first loved and whose life was devoted to me, my two sisters, and her husband.
“Hi, Momma,” I coo, trying to make up to her for a world of wrongs and hurts that have long been relegated to her own forgotten history. A pair of bloodshot light-blue eyes follow me, and a faint smile plays across lips thinned by age.
Just as they couldn't send us, when we were incorrigible teenagers, to Moscow with a note pinned on our sweaters (much as they might have wished to), we cannot now abandon those who gave us life but who, in their decrepitude, puncture our very beings with unquenchable need.
I cannot but give, even though the very act robs me and my family of breath.
“All is forgiven, Mama,” I whisper to myself, as I fasten my own seat belt.”
And I wonder, as we head home: When the hourglass turns, will those who render my care forgive me as well?