Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review reader Julie Cadman-Kim introduces Janice Furlong’s “Just One Day” from our Winter 2022 issue. You can purchase it here.
I wrote and rewrote this introduction of Janice Furlong’s magnificent debut story, “Just One Day,” about fifteen times. One version was funny, one was solemn, one fairly gross. I wrote about themes and plotlines and character, and then I started again. I say this not to point to my own struggles as a writer (though I certainly have many), but to explain how complex this story is, how it defies attempts at pigeonholing or categorization. It is a story that doesn’t spare you or allow you to forget a single part of it. It’s one of the truest stories I’ve ever read.
The story centers around Wesley, recently divorced and living with his mother. This isn’t the typical millennial story, though, where the “failed” adult has to move back in with his parents to get his life in order. Wesley’s mother, Margaret, is the one who has moved in with him, and she’s the one whose life is falling apart. As Margaret deteriorates from early-onset Alzheimer’s, Wesley must put his life on hold while he builds his daily routine around Margaret’s needs: feeding her, bathing her, cleaning up her accidents. Still, it takes a visit from his sister, a blue-haired, quintessential “Bennington Girl,” for Wesley to realize how drained he is.
In this, her first published fiction, Furlong writes with such a deep understanding of the human condition that it is impossible not to find yourself in some aspect of this story. “Just One Day” asks how far we’re willing to go for the people we love, asks us to consider what it means to truly devote your life to someone no longer capable of reciprocating. It points towards the hazy line where such devotion blurs with an underlying need for control, and then interrogates whether that need has really just been a desire for love all along.
Though mostly taking place over just one day, the story’s power stems from its charting of transformations. Wesley has transformed from an anxious little boy into a well-intentioned husband, a divorced bachelor, and finally his mother’s caretaker. Margaret has transformed from a gregarious Mary Kay saleswoman to a person so confused she can no longer be trusted to reliably use the toilet. The setting—Wesley’s home—has transformed as well: the condo meant to house his wife and child now houses himself and his mother. Even everyday reality has undergone change. Fresh fruit becomes a choking hazard. A daughter becomes a stranger. As we read, the scenes and sentences transform until the end result is something as beautiful as it is ugly, as heartbreaking as it is hilarious, and as finite as it is expansive.
JUST ONE DAY
The morning his sister Krissy was due to arrive, Wesley consumed twelve ounces of dark roast, two slices of Mestemacher Fitness Bread, one small nectarine, and The Wall Street Journal in its entirety before allowing himself to check, again, on the status of her flight. Hoping she would be delayed, if not completely waylaid, by the snow beginning to blanket Boston, he refreshed the JetBlue flight status page. On time. He retyped her flight number. On time. Mustering the steely resolve for which he was famous at the lab, he washed his coffee mug, sponged up crumbs from the teak tabletop, and folded his newspaper into the blue recycling bin. Faint rustling sounds began to issue from the monitor on his kitchen table. Head bowed, he waited. Sometimes his mother went back to sleep on Saturdays, gifting him another hour of silence. The rustling ramped up to a series of thumps. His precious morning solitude was over. His sister was on her way, and Margaret was definitely awake.
Easing her door open, Wesley found his mother propped up on pillows, knocking her feet against the white lacquer bedframe. Her nightgown, speckled with orange stains from last night’s spaghetti dinner fiasco, was riding up above her knees.
“Can you let up on the kicking?” he asked, giving the hem of her nightgown a quick downward tug.
She lay still.
“Thank you.”
“What’s that thing?” said Margaret, pointing at the wallpaper, voice quavering.
The thing was an elephant. For weeks now, she’d needed a daily reintroduction to the concept of an elephant, along with reassurance that the image on the wallpaper would not harm her. Wesley hated the elephants too. When he’d purchased his Beacon Street condo as a newlywed, his wife immediately converted the smaller bedroom into a nursery featuring yellow wallpaper festooned with ridiculous dancing elephants and red hearts. Four years, sixty-eight thousand dollars, five donor inseminations, and a divorce later, the elephants taunted him, their spritely dance steps and obscene trunks reminding of his failures as a man, as a husband.
“That thing won’t hurt you,” he said. “Are you ready to get dressed?”
“Black pants.”
Margaret asked for black pants every morning, a nod, he realized, to the fashionable black pantsuits she used to wear to work. Rummaging through her bureau, he chose a pair of grey sweatpants and placed them on her pillow. He found himself staring at her fingernails. Once perfect pink ovals, her nails were now uneven, chipped. Averting his gaze, he sat on the edge of her bed. “Remember what I told you yesterday, about Krissy coming to visit?”
“Who?”
“Your daughter. Your wild child. My sister.”
Margaret tilted her head, like a hunting dog straining to hear a distant sound.
Wesley lifted a framed photograph from her nightstand. A group of laughing women held an International School of Lima Theater Arts Department banner. “Here she is,” he said, pointing to the cobalt-haired woman, positioned front and center, sporting a tiara and pink fairy wings.
“Why is her hair blue?”
“An excellent question.”
His mother began picking balls of lint off her bedspread.
Wesley scanned the sky. The snow had stopped. Too dispirited to propose an alternative activity, Wesley joined his mother’s lint removal initiative. Soon her bedspread was smooth.
*
Although Krissy’s visit was just a twenty-hour stopover in Boston, a midpoint between her home in Peru and her destination of Reykjavik, the prospect of spending even one day with his sister generated a noxious blend of dread and resentment. Outside of their mother, they had no common ground, at least none he’d ever taken the time to discover. Their infrequent phone conversations were stilted. If he hadn’t added that one sentence about Margaret’s deteriorating condition to his last email, Krissy might not have bothered to add this stopover to her itinerary. Thus far, she had not made even a token offer to help with their mother’s care. She did live four thousand miles away and travelled extensively for work, but in Wesley’s view, the real barrier was Krissy’s extravagant distaste for caretaking of any kind. She had never wanted children. Even pets were too much responsibility. Krissy herself told the story, repeatedly and unapologetically, of adopting a tiny black kitten when she first moved to Peru. Absorbed in her theater escapades, keeping odd hours, she kept forgetting to put out cat food. After a week, the kitten found itself another home.
In fact, Wesley didn’t want his sister’s help. He relished being the hero, the loyal son, the competent care manager, the man who got the job done. Wesley did have to hire a rotating trio of home health aides to dress, feed, bathe, supervise, comfort, and entertain Margaret while he worked, but the aides were bit players; he was the director of the operation. Wesley wanted nothing from Krissy. Nothing except a definitive display, a sincere display, a sustained display of appreciation for the responsibilities he’d taken on when he moved their mother into his home.
*
Just after nine, the doorbell rang: three short bleeps, followed by an interminably long buzz. This was Krissy’s signature ring, her version of the first measure of Beethoven’s Fifth. One day, Wesley reminded himself. Just one day.
Before Wesley could extend his hand, Krissy swooped him into a tight embrace. She smelled of patchouli and sweat. “You look exactly the same,” she exclaimed.
“And you have blue hair.”
“I’m thinking of going magenta next. Something new, you know?” Squinting, she scanned the room. “Where is she?”
“In bed.”
“Lucky her! I got zero sleep on that plane.” Krissy brushed snowflakes off her alpaca coat and shook her head like a dog shaking its fur dry. “Why do mothers with screaming babies always sit next to me?” Depositing her suitcase in the middle of his foyer, Krissy discarded her muddy Doc Martens an inch from the border of his hand-loomed rug and tossed her fur coat and coffee-stained suede gloves on the arm of his white leather couch. Maintaining a discreet butler-like distance behind her, Wesley hung her coat in the closet, tucked the gloves into her coat pockets, and placed her boots on a sheet of newspaper.
Flopping in his armchair, she perched her stocking feet on his cherry coffee table. Wesley brought her a glass of water. “So. Reykjavik.” He cleared his throat. “What’s this conference about?”
Krissy wriggled her toes. “I’m teaching a master class, on the Stanislavski System. Eighty people registered. It’s going to be epic.”
He tried to muster interest; she did have a substantive career. Fluent in four languages, she’d performed all over Europe, South America, and parts of Asia. But that word epic hit a nerve. Everything Krissy did was epic. She spent her college years at Bennington smoking weed and roaming Vermont villages with an improv troupe called Stranger Things Have Happened. After a stint in the Peace Corps, she took the job teaching drama in Peru. Her emails always included emphatic subject lines: Hiked the Inca Trail! Went surfing! Made ceviche! During summers she traveled to places like Kathmandu and Ho Chi Minh City to run drama workshops and give lectures about her craft. That’s what she called it, her craft. Meanwhile, Wesley, four years her senior, finished a PhD in biochemical engineering, joined a research lab, and married Maureen, all according to plan. Except for the infertility. And the divorce.
Before Krissy could elaborate on her epic master class, Margaret materialized, half hidden behind the living room door. Relieved to see she had managed to dress herself in the gray sweatpants and floral print pullover with no food stains, Wesley motioned their mother to come forward.
“Lunch bunch,” said Margaret. “Time for brunch.”
“Mom!” Jumping up, Krissy whacked her knee on the edge of the coffee table, sending her water glass crashing to the wood floor.
Margaret stiffened, like a child playing freeze tag.
Wesley summoned his best take-charge voice. “Nothing’s broken, Mom. Just a spill.”
A dark spot appeared in the crotch of Margaret’s sweatpants. As the stain seeped through the gray cotton and his mother looked increasingly bewildered, Wesley felt his face flush as deeply as if he’d had an accident himself. The home health aide had mentioned occasional episodes of incontinence, but he’d never had to deal with such a travesty himself.
“Oh. My. God.” Voice low, Krissy turned to her brother. “She’s a mess.”
Wesley felt a surge of anger. His sister, the mess expert, the blue-haired, patchouli-scented tornado with a penchant for sweeping all things orderly into the air and dumping them down in unruly heaps, was scolding him about a mess? What a bad decision he’d made, giving Margaret’s aides time off for the duration of Krissy’s visit, imagining their absence would allow him to showcase his caretaking competence. He couldn’t allow Krissy to see him fumble. “I’ll deal with this,” he said. “Go. Sit in the kitchen. There’s coffee.”
With his sister safely out of view, Wesley armed himself with a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of bleach. After swabbing up the puddle, he attempted to wipe his mother’s hands. She batted him away. Unable to coax her to stand, he lifted her ninety-eight pounds of brittle bone and sour skin, carried her to her room, and placed her on the bed. Margaret threw her pillow onto the floor. Wesley retrieved it. In her closet, he found a half-empty box of Depends.
He held up a diaper. “Do you know how to put this on?”
“Black pants,” she said. “I want black pants.”
He considered phoning Margaret’s daytime aide, who, if offered a generous cash bonus, would have dashed over in a flash. But no. He should get the job done. “Lift your hips, Mom, just a little.”
She jerked away.
He pulled off her soaked sweatpants and wrestled her out of her underpants, trying hard not to look at her almost hairless pubic area, her flaccid belly. After wiping her with a wet washcloth, Wesley eased a diaper under her hips, fastened the tabs, and eased her into clean sweatpants. These moments of intimate communion with his mother’s body left him feeling like a pervert, a voyeur, desperate to look away but unable to avert his eyes. Her whole body seemed oddly unfamiliar. Even her hair, a skunk-like mane of black and white, seemed like the hair of a stranger. Only this year, as the glint of silver at her hairline sprouted into four inches of white roots, did he realize his mother’s sleek black bob had been a dye job. Before she started losing her mind, she never would have allowed her roots to show; taking immaculate care of her appearance brought her pleasure. For three decades she’d been a Mary Kay lady, selling cosmetics to the women of their Albany neighborhood, charming customers with her perfectly painted lips, her slightly manic energy, her bawdy sense of humor. More than a few of Wesley’s high school friends had crushes on her. His mother used to smell good, too, favoring a perfume called L’Air du Temps. God, he loved that scent. That mother was gone now, gone for good.
Margaret wiped her nose on her forearm, leaving a trail of clear snot from bony wrist to elbow. “I’m tired,” she said. A whisper of ammonia and sweat wafted up from her inert body.
Wanting to comfort her but not knowing how, he watched her drift off to sleep, envious of the effortlessness with which she switched from on to off. Wesley’s off switch had never worked properly. Back in elementary school he used to lie awake at night, ruminating about his poor performance at recess. Recess had no rules. Boys ran in chaotic zigzags across the blacktop, shoving each other’s shoulders, making fart sounds on their forearms, calling each other doodoo head, and Wesley could not figure out how to enter the fray. Even if he could have discerned the rules of engagement, he wasn’t sure he wanted to engage. Sleepless, he’d long for his mother. Like magic, she would appear beside his bed, read to him from his favorite dinosaur book, rub his bony back, tickle his ribs, make him laugh in spite of himself. You’ll figure out the friend thing, she’d say. Just give yourself time. Some nights she lay down next to him until he drifted off. Wesley still struggled with bouts of insomnia, the worst of which had been triggered by the baby issue. Back when she was well, his mother used to pine openly for grandchildren. Knowing Krissy was a lost cause, Margaret focused her campaign on Wesley. Babies will soften you, she used to tell him; they will expand your heart. Swayed by his mother’s exhortations, and afraid to challenge his wife’s fierce determination to conceive, he’d gone along with the pregnancy quest. He wanted to get the job done. He wanted to please his wife and his mother. But when he tried to envision life with a child, he stiffened. He did not enjoy children. Children were chaos machines. They required flexibility he didn’t possess, patience he couldn’t muster. The louder his private doubts about having a child had become, the more aggressively he had silenced himself. Maybe his heart was not capable of expanding.
To read the rest of “Just One Day,” you can purchase the Winter 2022 Issue here.
