Sweet Talk Page 5

  My Mother Breathing Light

  My mother cannot say the word cancer. A year ago, after an operation to remove a tumor at the juncture of her small and large intestines, she used the word blockage to explain what the problem had been. “The doctors have found a blockage in my intestines,” she told relatives who came to visit as she convalesced on the porch. “Now that it’s gone, I can finally eat again, thank God.”

  My Aunt Ruda took me aside and said, “I want you to tell me the truth about your mother. Is she talking about an ulcer, or what?” Aunt Ruda is my mother’s sister-in-law. When I visit every summer, at the end of my teaching year, she has a new inventory of details about other people’s medical problems—grotesque incisions, ruined arteries, fatal blood clots, irradiated wombs. Aunt Ruda is overweight, plump with the stories of other people’s grief.

  “Gemma, you mustn’t tell anyone what the operation was really for,” my mother said to me, and I saw the fear skate across her eyes, cold in the blue light of the kitchen’s fluorescent bulb. “If any of your aunts and uncles find out that it was something really serious, they’ll keep asking how I am.” I understood then how a question about one’s health can be like a sheath on a sword, hiding the real question: “When will you die?”

  Now my mother and I visit as we always have the first night I am home in Ohio. We sit in front of the television in separate chintz-covered chairs, our feet propped on a shared footstool, a box of chocolate buttercreams on the table between us. This year, however, I have come home early to deal with what my mother says is a “new wrinkle.” For one year, she has led a healthy, normal life. She has gained weight, she has bought new clothes. She has visited me in California. But two weeks ago, during a quarterly checkup, something unexpected appeared in the X rays.

  “You look healthy,” I tell her. “You look wonderful.”

  “I feel fine,” she says. “I can eat anything.”

  We invent a dessert menu for the next week. Chocolate mousse, peach Melba, apple spice cake, banana cream pie, cherries in cognac. In the muted light of the television screen, in the old hollows of familiar furniture, we feel protected.

  • • •

  Usually in June there is a milky haze lying among the wooded hills and the steaming crops—young corn, ripe wheat, silvery middle-aged oats. Today, the landscape surprises us with its sparkle and clarity, as if we have driven into the center of a crystal prism. I can see the way a slender leaf of corn ripples along its center vein. I can see the fanning seed head on a stalk of yellow wheat.

  “Ironwort, tiger lily.” My mother gives me back names from my youth, identifying the wildflowers that lean frailly away from the edge of the road.

  When I was a child, I suffered from frequent kidney infections, which my mother called “attacks.” It was not until years later, when I casually used the term during a college physical examination, that I recognized its benign absurdity. “An attack?” said the doctor. “A kidney attack?” At once, I saw the image it must have called up, of a scowling cartoon kidney, with thin arms and mitten-shaped hands carrying its muggers’ weapons. Now we drive back through the Ohio countryside. We are on our way home from the university hospital, where a second opinion has been offered on the spot that showed up on the X rays of my mother’s liver. She calls the spot a “development,” as if it is something promising, like a housing project. Her hands move quickly as she talks. The backs of them are tanned from her work in the garden. The palms, flashing white as she speaks, remind me of the undersides of maple leaves exposed in a wind. With her hands my mother can make small houses, a street intersection, a car going out of control.

  “Well, it just went poof,” she said once, explaining to my father and grandmother where the grocery money had gone and why we were having hot dogs once again for our Sunday dinner. “Like that,” she said, and her hands described baroque scrolls of smoke above her dinner plate. It seemed to me that with her hands she might produce, out of the imaginary smoke, an emerald bird, inside of which would be a golden egg, inside of which would be a lifetime supply of grocery money.

  My father, ever mindful of my education, cast a meaningful eye my way and said, “Although a hot dog on a bun is not the feast we had all hoped for this afternoon, let us remember that it contains more protein than the average Chinese person eats in a week.”

  “I am not a Chinese,” my grandmother said, looking sideways at my mother. “I am a Protestant.”

  “I’ll need time to think about this new development,” my mother says now. “I’ll need time to plan.” My father has been dead for five years, and my grandmother three. Not long before he died, my father moved the family, without consulting anyone, from a large house on the edge of town to a smaller one near the center. He was thinking ahead to their old age, he told me. The smaller house was near drugstores and supermarkets, and closer to the hardware store he ran. It was near the hospital in case of emergency. The Christmas after he bought the house, he drove me into the countryside to discuss the future.

  “These are the insurance policies, this is the will.” He handed me thick brown envelopes. “This is the key to the safe-deposit box. Do not let your mother sell that house when I am gone. It is in a good location for old people.” I had been home from college only two days, but already I felt like a child again, inarticulate and fearful. I felt the old speech rhythms return, the truncated syntax, the vague euphemistic vocabulary, and a sense that there were always secrets to be kept from someone else in the family.

  “You’re still alive,” I said. We walked down a slope to a pond, sliding on the crusted snow.

  “I’ve arranged it so that your mother will not be able to get her hands on all of the money at once,” he said.

  I thought of her back at the house, wrapping presents with my grandmother. I thought of how pleased she had looked as my father and I left the house, suspecting, perhaps, that we were going to collect a surprise Christmas present. Instead, we stood at the edge of the pond as the sun went down, and defined the limits of her future—where she could live, how much she could spend, who would die first—as if her life were a geometric pattern, something that could be drawn with ruled sides and with perfect arcs spun off the tip of a compass.

  The sun slid behind a row of fir trees, and the pond glowed lavender near the shadows of the opposite bank. “The ice is too thick this winter,” my father said. “There’s no light at the bottom of this pond. The water plants will die and then the fish will die, too.” He spoke matter-of-factly. It was not his pond. “If we don’t have a thaw, the farmer will have to come out here and drill holes to save the fish.” He paused and looked at me. He seemed about to suggest a lesson in life. “It’s a good thing we do not live in the country,” he said. “Your mother and grandmother think they would like to live in the country, but it is better for them to live in town.”

  The following summer, he died. Two winters later, my grandmother died, not long after falling on the ice in front of our house. There was a step she had forgotten about, at the juncture of our walk and the city sidewalk. It was not a badly designed step—just one that, in her old age, she had overlooked.

  Aunt Ruda knows that something is up. Every day for the last two weeks, my mother has been going through closets and trunks and throwing away things that once belonged to my father and grandmother. Old shoes, shirts, dresses, sweaters, cheap jewelry, soured cologne still in its Christmas box, gun magazines, clippings of inspirational pieces from Christian newsletters. Ruda stands on the porch and frowns at the seven garbage bags sitting by the curb.

  “She’s selling the house, isn’t she?” Ruda says. My father was Ruda’s brother, and now she takes a proprietary interest in the house on his behalf. “If she moves into the country, she’ll never be able to get out of her drive in winter.”

  “I don’t know what she’s doing,” I say truthfully.

  In a spiral notebook, I have made an orderly list of the decisions that must soon be made about my mother’s
chemotherapy treatments. Where will she have them—in California with me, or in Ohio, near Ruda and the other relatives? Should a registered nurse be engaged? Should a housekeeper be brought in? My mother ignores the notebook and moves through the house in a distracted way, bumping into furniture. “This house is too small,” she tells me. “It was designed for short people.” She has decided to remodel the kitchen, and she presses me for advice. “Do you like harvest yellow or that green color?”

  “I don’t know.” I am impatient with her, anxious to deal with the crisis at hand. She pretends that this is like any other summer, that once, a year ago, she was sick and gaunt but now she is well again. It is early July and the serious heat is here, moist and languid, settling upon the town like sleep. In the evenings we drive into the cooler countryside in search of air-conditioned rural restaurants. My mother eats hearty meals—mashed potatoes and gravy, fried chicken, buttered corn. I think about her liver struggling to sort out the proteins, the fats, the poisons. Something must be done. She lingers over the menu, wondering whether to order liver and bacon, liver and onions, or chicken livers in wine and sour cream. Watching her, I wonder whether this is an unwitting irony or part of a secret plan to attack the diseased cells with surrogates. Suddenly I can imagine them, the bad cells, as cartoon cousins to my evil kidney, planning their defense with small knives and guns and miniature cannons.

  Under her bed I find a stack of new books, optimistic in their clean dust jackets. Mind Over Matter. Long Life and Nutrition. In the mornings, when she thinks I am reading the newspaper on the porch, she goes into the kitchen and blends a viscous concoction of raw eggs, goat’s milk, brewer’s yeast, honey, kelp, bananas, wheat germ, cooked rice—everything she has ever heard was good for one’s health. I am a spy in the house. In her desk I find a brochure describing a health spa in Mexico where inoperable patients are given a vegetable diet and coffee enemas. In her purse I find a newspaper clipping about a Catholic shrine in Indiana, where blind people are able to see again and arthritics stand up straight. Her disease is becoming a secret that each of us keeps from the other. At night, after she has gone to bed, I read about the side effects of chemotherapy. I discover that one of the chemicals used in what is called “chemotherapy” is similar to the fuels used in jet airplanes.

  “Rachel has a secret,” my grandmother said to my father at the dinner table that Sunday as they sat before their hot dogs and wondered why the grocery budget, so carefully calculated by my father, was so badly mismanaged by my mother. It was true. My mother did have a secret. Since her marriage, she had never had a job, and now she had decided to go to work. She had decided to become an American Fragrance Lady, selling cosmetics and perfumes door to door. For weeks she had been taking a few dollars from the various household budgets in order to raise the capital for the initial investment. She invited me along the day she went to collect the merchandise from the regional representative. I was fourteen years old and already beginning to talk in the superior way my grandmother and father had, but still she took me into her confidence. On my lap I held the huge envelope of fugitive dollar bills.

  “Maybe I’ll let you take a few of the products around to some of the high-school girls,” she said, already imagining the empire we would build, a magical place where money flew out of every house and followed us through the streets.

  “She always had secrets when she was a kid,” my grandmother continued. “She used to steal money from my purse.”

  “That was me,” I said. “I stole quarters.” It was a joke, a diversionary tactic. My mother smiled faintly.

  “You stole from your grandmother?” my father said.

  “So did Rachel,” my grandmother said. “This is a wonderful family.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said my mother. She left the room and returned carrying the American Fragrance display case, which she placed on the table and snapped open to reveal the rows of glittering bottles. They were made of heavy glass in red, blue, and opaque white, and were cast in the shapes of the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and other national monuments. I think there was a moment, as she lifted a red bottle in the shape of the Lincoln Memorial and held it to the light of the window so that it sparkled like a gemstone, when she actually thought my father might be pleased by the prospect of his wife going from door to door, to his friends and his neighbors and his customers at the hardware store.

  Without looking at her, he picked up the mustard knife and said, “If you have a private matter to discuss with me, we will discuss it after dinner.”

  I didn’t hear the conversation. I imagine it was brief and sensible. My father would have been organized and logical, using the legal tablet to calculate the triviality of her projected profits. He would have reminded her that she did not have, after all, the aggressive personality of a saleslady. Perhaps he made fun of the products, their ludicrous shapes, their dubious smells. Perhaps he simply said no. I never saw the display case again. My mother never set out into the neighborhood dressed in a suit and the heavily applied makeup prescribed by the American Fragrance regional representative.

  • • •

  “I don’t have fifteen hundred dollars a week,” my mother is saying. She says it so sharply that it sounds like an accusation. “Do you have fifteen hundred dollars a week?” I am young and healthy. I grew up in a family of three adults. Tap lessons, ballet, clarinet, piano, western-saddle riding lessons, English-saddle, a college education, graduate school, a job in California. I am the one who escaped this house.

  All morning she has sat on this porch and torn photographs out of old albums, ripped them into halves, and thrown them in a garbage bag by her feet. I awoke earlier than I usually do, and when I came downstairs I saw her there, through the gauze of the living-room curtains, seated near the trellis of honeysuckle vines. I watched as she held the pictures before she tore them up. They trembled in her hands like caught animals. It seemed to me that she was destroying my own past, pictures of herself with me, my father, my grandmother, my brother. Something must be done. I decided to force the issue. I went out to the porch and asked where—exactly where and how—she would like to begin treatment for the spot on her liver, which was not a development but cancer. She put the albums aside and closed the garbage bag with a twist tie. She gave me a long, stern look, as if I were an adversary, and said, “Switzerland.”

  Switzerland? What was in Switzerland?

  “A place where they give you mineral baths and chemicals that don’t make you sicker than you already are.”

  “All right,” I said. A place in Switzerland was better than no place at all. “Let’s look into it.”

  She already had. The place in Switzerland would cost fifteen hundred dollars a week, plus air fare. Our medical insurance would cover most of the treatment if the clinic were in America, but it was not. I thought of the American Fragrance venture and wondered whether she was thinking of it, too—of how the sale of a thousand little Plymouth Rocks and Empire State Buildings might have bought her, if not health, then at least the rarefied air and the beguiling sunlight on the side of an Alpine mountain.

  “Do you have fifteen hundred dollars a week?” she says again.

  “Fifteen hundred dollars for a mineral bath?” I say it too quickly, too callously, my own hysteria turning to flippancy. “Can’t you find a mineral bath in America?”

  She stands up. Her hands are fists. “I don’t want to lose my hair,” she says. She walks past me to the other end of the porch and says it again. “I don’t want to lose my hair. Do you want your own mother to lose her hair?” And now suddenly the stiffness leaves her body, the accusation melts in the summer heat. She returns to the far end of the porch and studies the honeysuckle vines that she planted six years ago, when my father bought the house. She reaches up and begins to unwind a runner that spirals toward the ceiling of the porch. “If you let them grow straight up, they’ll just droop from the roof and look sloppy,” she says. She begins to rewind it along a horizo
ntal piece of lath. Her fingers are so long and supple in the green light that she seems to be winding her own hands into the latticework. “I’m going to phone your Aunt Ruda for some advice,” she says at last. “She knows all about doctors and diseases.”

  While she is on the phone, I hurry through the photo albums and the garbage bag to see what can be salvaged. Here is a picture of my mother and father, looking younger than I am now, at the seashore. Here is one of the five of us in our best clothes in front of my father’s hardware store. I want to weep. I see that my mother’s target has not been the family, as I had imagined. It has been merely the pictures of herself that are blurry or unflattering. All morning she has labored on the family photo albums like an editor, expurgating the ugly likenesses of herself in order to leave an attractive vision for me when she is gone.

  My mother went to bed early this evening. She sleeps ten hours a day now, taking care of herself. I watched television until two in the morning. On a talk show there was a woman who researches death. She has made a living by talking to people who are dying or who have nearly died. She has asked them what the approach of death is like. She told the talk-show host that what she learned should make everyone hopeful and happy. “We never die alone,” she said. In all the case histories she studied, the dying people reported that they were with a loved one who had preceded them in death. The heartattack victims in surgery, the drowning victims called back from death by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the badly mutilated victims of automobile accidents, the weak and frail and palsied in their hospital beds—all of them, she said, reported that they were in the presence of loved ones who came through the dark to be at their sides. The woman was a doctor, middle-aged and passionate. She spoke with a German accent, surely the voice of science. I moved closer to the television and listened carefully, wanting to believe her.