NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS

"How's your mother doing?" asks everyone, whomever I run into or speak to. Or perhaps "How are things the other side of the pond?"

"Same." 

My favourite answer. I could go into Peg's latest medical report from her GP (fine), latest health obsession (watery eyes and jelly legs), latest opinion on sleeping alone in the house (wants the Staff to bugger off one day, grateful for them the next), latest worry about what I've "done with her stuff" (a not very interesting print of a circular bridge somewhere in Minnesota that used to be in my grandmother's bedroom and which Peg said I could have about 20 years ago and which is now framed and hanging in my upstairs hallway, not sure why because I don't much care for it, but don't hate it enough to schlep it back across the Atlantic so Peg can say "That's nice, what is it?" 

I could talk about the latest collie news. That Spurn Me Not alias Piper Angel Honeybear who cost Peg $2000 and was returned to the breeders last May because she was peeing all over the house not to mention was a waste of space as a canine companion since you couldn't get near her--is pregnant. The original Dog Deal, which Peg says she was "forced" to sign and that Dawn, who used to work for Peg, "put her hand over" the part that said Spurn was to be returned to the breeder if and when she came into heat and that Peg would get the proceeds from one of the puppies, and that this was to happen twice, after which Peg would have  the dog for keeps--still stands. Meaning, if the pups are alive and well, Peg get about $1000 from the sale of one. Peg, you can be sure, is already thinking she gets a puppy, not the money from the sale of one. I can see this turning into, shall we say, an issue.

I could also tell people about how I try and put Everything Becket out of my mind while I'm here dealing with Everything England. Or that I would go crazy. And that I sometimes do anyway. When suddenly my List seems so endless that I am going to run out of pages on the steno pad, when I can't get a simple piece of information through Peg's head, when DK suddenly says I never asked HIM what HE thought about bringing Peg over here to live, that I just went ahead and made plans, when Alex keeps doing fuck all about his future and I try to come to terms with him being a bartender his entire life, when the dog won't stop barking at pigeons in the big pine tree she doesn't have a hope of reaching but tries to climb up to nevertheless, gradually reducing my carefully-tended lace-cap hydrangea to a bunch of broken sticks. The hydrangea I planted because Daddy put one on the tree outside the front door in Becket and I love it and I wanted one so I can look at it and think of him. And that is when, roughly,  I lose it. And rant and rave and let off steam and DK retreats to this office and Alex thinks I'm crying over "some dumb plant" and Mabel--keeps barking at the pigeons. This lasts about ten minutes, after which I am fine again. Until it hits me how scared I am, how out of my depth I feel, having to build a house and sell a house and move a 98 year old and fill out 3 million forms to hopefully get her on the National Health and find a companion here for her and how my heart starts beating faster and faster and--I feel sick most of the time. Seriously nauseous and not hungry. 

I could furthermore mention how pissed off I am that for all this stress on my plate, I don't appear to be losing any weight. And this pisses me off almost as much as Peg, out of the blue, telling me not to have a face lift done in England because that you "can't trust them" here, and that there's a very good "eye man" in Springfield. 

"Mother, no one has mentioned face lifts. I don't want a face lift. Honest!"

"Oh go on! I'll pay for it." 

Fuck me, I think--on top of everything else I need a face lift!

So really, you see, when someone asks me how Peg is, it's really just easier to say "Same."