Ever Too Much

Bea reminded herself that the pact was binding. Granny couldn’t say no. They signed their names at the bottom of a contract handwritten on parchment paper. Sixteen-year-old Bea insisted on burning the edges for authenticity. Sixty-three-year-old Granny indulged her, happy she wasn’t growing up too fast.They chose poetic words, but they did not pretend like they were saying anything other than what they were saying. The last line read, in Granny’s curling script “if ever, and only if, it is ever too much.”

Thirty-two-year-old Bea blessed her teenage self’s obsession with equality and justice, for making sure to ask Granny, “You would do the same for me, right? If it came to that?” To which Granny, almost certainly believing it never would come to that, added a line in the pact, “these words bind us both.”

In spoken words, she said she’d do whatever was best for Bea and reminded her that the only person who would ever know what was best for her was herself.

“Granny trusts you,” she said. It was a refrain often repeated throughout their deeply intertwined lives. When Granny was at her most ill and most desperate, when she couldn’t even pick up a cup of water, when ten-year-old and then sixteen-year-old and then twenty-six year old Bea was responsible for keeping her alive, provided it was never too much, she’d remind her, “Granny trusts you.”

At thirty-two, Bea didn’t feel that most people trusted her. She couldn’t send a work email without her boss’s approval. Anyone she’d ever dated required the equivalent of a five paragraph essay detailing specific reasons for any feelings she had. And it took two years of complaints before any doctor even thought to run a diagnostic test. Even with the family history.

She didn’t call Granny right away. She knew the day she was diagnosed that she would, eventually, but she didn’t know how long she would want to bide her time. She didn’t have a list of experiences she wanted to have, exactly. The past three years had been more focused on the milestones and goals she hadn’t reached. She played around with ideas of what she might want to do with her limited time. The only thing she could picture was taking herself on a swan boat in Central Park. She walked there, one day, shortly after the diagnosis, but the pit in her stomach wouldn’t let her approach the rental window. She turned around and headed home, the last long walk she would take.

The last time Granny was sick, Bea moved back to Ohio from New York City to take care of her. She never asked if Granny wanted her to enact the pact. Granny never mentioned it. The agreement, once spoken, and written out and folded up and placed in an empty tissue box dressed in a pale pink knit sweater, hidden in Granny’s closet on the shelf next to the laundry chute, became a silent one. Bea took it seriously and she knew that Granny did, too. They never needed to speak of it until it was time. And only if it ever was time.

Granny’s third time being ill only lasted a year. Bea stayed in Ohio for an extra two before she trusted herself to head back to the city. Granny told her to go whenever she was ready. They parted ways with an understanding that Bea had a life to lead, finally, and Granny wouldn’t call unless she needed her. Bea missed her every day, but she didn’t want the phone to ring. It could only be bad news.

She occasionally called Granny during the time between the ending of her illness and the start of Bea’s own. She always wanted to hear her voice, but when they got on the phone, she never knew what to say. Without the necessary words and actions of caregiving passing between them, they sat in silence, a buzz filtering through both sides of the phone. Bea tried to pass love through that space and hoped that Granny was doing the same. She felt nothing but discomfort. She stopped calling.

She picked up the phone no less than ten times the week she finally made the call. She dialed half of Granny’s phone number on the old rotary phone she’d taken from the house when she left for the city, relishing in the satisfying whir of the dial before chickening out. The slam of plastic against plastic as she smashed the handset back in place made her nauseous. She knew it had to happen that week. She decided the day she looked in the mirror and saw the gaunt pits below her eyes, her face an exact imitation of Granny’s. And of her mother’s. Her eyes shared the embarrassed, searching look that both matriarchs’ had in their worst moments. Her memory flashed to wiping her mother after the bathroom. Who was there to do that for her? Granny was old and frail now. She couldn’t ask the guy she’d been casually seeing for a few months. Her friends were more the type to grab coffee or drinks and catch up with. She didn’t have no one, but she didn’t have anyone, either. There was no point in waiting, in prolonging the misery, if it could even be prolonged.

On Friday, immediately following phone call attempt ten, she woke up on the floor, handset still in hand. She floated above the image of herself laying on the dusty carpet of her apartment, simultaneously witnessing the scene from outside, catapulted back into her nine-year-old self, and from inside, as her mother, one month away from the end, slipping further from life every day. She sat up and pulled the phone from the linoleum counter to balance in the loose gusset of her sweatpants. She hung up, then dialed again, finally finishing the number. It rang, shrill and grating, for just a few seconds before Granny answered.

“Hello? This is Beatrice Cardale.”

She didn’t know what to say. She thought she might cry.

“Hello? Did you mean to call Beatrice Cardale? Is this one of those scams?” Granny’s breath echoed through the phone.

“Granny,” Bea said.

“Bea? Are you sick?”

Bea didn’t know if Granny could hear it in her voice or sense it telepathically. The tears began, a torrent of weeping only subdued by her exhaustion.

“You’re sick.” Granny said in a half-second of space between Bea’s wails. Bea didn’t have to answer. Granny asked, “Do you need me?”

“Yes,” she sniffed, “I’m gonna come back to Ohio. Tomorrow.” She hadn’t decided that it would be that sudden until that moment.

“I’ll take care of you,” Granny said.

“I want…” Bea paused. She wanted Granny to fill in the blanks.

“What is it?”

Bea’s tears stopped flowing. She worried that Granny didn’t even remember the pact, after half a lifetime. She said, “Remember when I was sixteen? And you said that you wished it was up to you when you’d stop being miserable? That you didn’t want to be like mom –”

Granny cut her off, her tone serious and level, “I remember the pact.”

“Do you still have the…?” Bea trailed off.

“Still in the medicine cabinet.”

“Ok.” They sat in silence. Bea worried that Granny hung up on her, that she was mad that she’d been sick for so long, so many times, and it was never too much, and that Bea was so weak that she would give up so easily. She braced herself for a rejection, a lecture.

“Granny trusts you.”