The Woman Upstairs (8 page)

It was the fortune cookie that felled my mother. Mine said simply “Hallelujah!,” and Matt’s promised, “A short vacation is in order for you.” My father’s told us, “It isn’t our position, but our disposition, that makes us happy”—and if my mother had gotten that one, things probably would have been fine. But my mother’s fortune read: “It is what you haven’t done that will torment you”—which I knew only because I picked it up off the floor on the way out. When she read it, she gave a little cry, as if wounded, and crumpled and chucked it, and then became very silent, and for the last ten minutes of the meal I watched the tears trickle unacknowledged out of the corners of her eyes
and down her cheeks, and I watched the tremor of her lower lip, and I watched my brother and my father throw themselves the more valiantly into the football conversation (Matt even dropped his surliness, animated in his effort) so as to pretend, altogether, that everything was fine. Nobody said anything to my mother; nobody even asked what her fortune had been. Only on the way out of the restaurant my father put his hand on Matt’s shoulder and murmured, in the bluff, confidential tone of manhood at that time, “Be good to your mother these last few days. It’s hard for her that you’re going.” And I, all of eight, wondered briefly whether Notre Dame involved danger, like going to Vietnam (my friend Sheila’s cousin had been killed there a couple of years before, and the older brother of a boy in my class had come back not right in the head), but didn’t ask.

Over the years I’ve tried to understand my mother’s emotion at that moment—regret about an unconsummated love affair? Her own Lucy Jordan moment? Simple sadness at my brother’s departure, and thoughts of all the things that now would be forever unsaid?—but all I know is that I’ll never know. I decided, for a long time, that it had to do with the ending of a maternal role, with the painful knowledge of all she’d sacrificed to raise him, when now she was handing off her son to the world. But more recently, I’ve thought that maybe it was about an unconsummated love affair after all, maybe about a flirtatious exchange with a stranger in a train station, or an unanswered letter from a college sweetheart, one of those secret moments when you think that now your life will have to change, only it doesn’t. Something small but big that she regretted and that tormented her each day. With my children, I’ve discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that
hunger of one kind or another—desire, by another name—is the source of almost every sorrow.

While I could have, I never asked her. She might not even have remembered crying in the Hunan Gourmet, as I’m sure she wouldn’t have remembered crying in the A&P. When she got her diagnosis—and with it the promise of infinite torment, of so many things she would never, never again do—she didn’t shed a tear. It was a sorrow without expression. For months she’d had a twitch in her left hand, and thought it was nerves. She’d shown it to me at the kitchen table when
I was over for supper—the house so quiet by then, almost vast in its quiet, no Matthew, no me, no Ziggy or Sputnik, the hallways dark outside the kitchen’s pool of light, broken only by the distant glimmer of my father’s reading lamp in the gloom of the living room—how could a body spend so much time reading
The New York Times
?—and had said, with her sharp laugh, “Just look at that! It comes and goes. My hand with a mind of its own. It thinks it’s smarter than I am. Getting older stinks.”

“You should ask Dr. Selby about that,” I said, but in an offhand way, because although I saw the twitch, the ripple of the muscles of her fingers, it seemed that because it was part of her body, my mother’s body, and because we could see it, that it had to be some version of normal. Besides which, I was busy pouring myself a second preprandial glass of pinot grigio, because by that time I found that if I didn’t, the darkness of the house seeped into my bones like damp, and chilled me for days afterward. I was about thirty, then, and my mother was sixty-one, my father just past sixty-five, a few months into his retirement, and now that their ages don’t seem so very far away, I marvel at all they seemed already to have renounced. But it was the isolation, the crippling boredom of it, that got me. Pinot grigio helped, and pinot noir too. Even a beer, if that was all they offered. So I wasn’t paying the proper attention. She must have shown my father too, and presumably he looked up from his newspaper and said much the same thing as I did in the same distracted way, and because of this she did nothing about it, didn’t visit or speak to Dr. Selby for the better part of a year after that, by which time the fasciculation, as it’s properly known, had spread to her feet as well, though not, still, to her right—her writing—hand, because that would’ve sent her doctorward pronto. And by the time they started the tests—the electrodiagnostics and the spinal tap and the muscle biopsy and the whole nine yards—she was scared, not least because she could see that Dr. Selby was scared. For all her smiling hypocrisies, she was very honest, my mother, and she said to me, “I wanted him to reassure me, and when I saw he wasn’t going to, I thought, This is when the shit hits the fan.”

When they finally made the diagnosis—it took a while, a lot of eliminating of other possibilities—maybe she already knew. And the
diagnosis—ALS, aka Lou Gehrig’s, aka Stephen Hawking’s disease—was really simply the confirmation that she was dying, which of course we all are, only that henceforth she’d be dying more swiftly and efficiently, more horribly than most, although mercifully without pain, her body no longer a temple but a prison, one closing door after another, until she was confined inside her mind—a room, it is true, with no walls, but ultimately with no doors, either.

What was fascinating to me, and instructive, because I was still learning, as I am still learning, how to live, was that she did not, upon her diagnosis, jump up and cry, “Let’s visit Burma! The Taj Mahal! The pyramids! The pampas!”—all the places she’d always longed to go. Nor did she proceed upon a sayonara tour to bid good-bye to the lakes in Maine, the winter beach at Wellfleet where my parents liked to mark their anniversary by walking in the white and fog, the room at the Pierre in New York where they’d spent the weekend of her fiftieth birthday and had—sin of luxury!—breakfast in bed. Nor did she turn her back on all of it, leave the dishes unwashed in the sink, the clothes piling up in the basket, the lawn unmowed. No, she kept living as though nothing had changed. No: she simply kept living. She knew everything had changed: she oversaw the cleaning and the packing and the sale of the Manchester house, a task for which my father (he could never have been any good at business, could he?) proved useless; and she pushed him until they found the place in Brookline, and she decorated it, as I’ve said, as though she would see her ninety-sixth birthday there. She kept reading mystery stories, and she kept buying the same Danish pastries from the Swiss bakery, for as long as she was able, and she took each blow—the cane, the wheelchair, the obscene rounds of medication, the Darth Vader breathing machine—as though they were so many gnats to be swatted at, and then ignored.

By all of this, I could only surmise that she loved her life. She loved it as it was. Like a Zen master, she reduced to the essences: I do not need to walk around the Museum of Fine Arts; I do not need to be pushed around the MFA in a chair; I do not need the MFA at all, because its treasures, as I love them, are imprinted in my memory; and if they are wrongly memorized—a lily where there are tulips, the boy’s torn hat rakish at the wrong angle—then this only makes the pictures
the more mine. They may offer the ancient Egyptian portrait of a young woman, her black almondine eyes a marvel, on extended loan, but to me she hangs always in the gallery behind the mummies, surrounded by shards of pottery and antique jewels, a secret for my own heart.

But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead, that I only half believed in her? I wanted—I needed—her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy, like volcanic eruptions, I know. And the sick must husband their resources (even as they are resourceful for their husbands). But I couldn’t help wanting for her, couldn’t help the feeling that she’d given in, that she had measured out (with coffee spoons?) what it was that she might ask of life, and having found it lacking—tragically, gapingly lacking—had decided nevertheless to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life. And I never loved her more than the day I came to see her, bedridden, sallow, grandiose only in her wheezes, I with the whiff of autumn on me and the glow—I could feel it—of having run the miles from my apartment to theirs on a crisp late October afternoon—and she glared at me and set her jaw and said, “Get out. I can’t. Get out. But never for a second think I don’t remember what it’s like. Don’t think, either, that I can help hating you for it. Just right now.”

And I did get out—the overheating on top of the run had the sweat almost coursing down my back—and I ran all the way home again in the dusk, too cold, too tired, my feet aching on the pavement, my eyes and nose streaming from the wind and her meanness—how could she be so mean to me, of all people?—but by the time I got home I was, even in my self-pity, rejoicing: because for once she threatened not to go gently. For once, she threatened.

She called to apologize the same evening. My father must have dialed; she couldn’t anymore, then. I was going to punish her, and let the machine take it, but her voice was so small that I picked up halfway through.

“Never let the sun go down on an argument,” she said.

“Because one of us might die in the night,” I said, as I’d replied since I was small. But this time, she laughed, a dry, sad laugh. “One of us just might, Mouse.”

8

It took my mother years to die. It’s a hard art to master. During the time that she was dying, I was trying to figure out how to live. How to live my own life, that is. I knew it wasn’t right that when asked how I was, I invariably spoke about my mother. Or my father. I had to try, and I did try, to overcome this, to get a life, or two, or three. I’d already come back to Boston from New York for the course at the Museum School; I’d already tried and almost given up the notion of being a self-supporting artist. There was something about turning thirty that made the apartment-share in Jamaica Plain, the sweaty bike messenger housemate, friend of a friend’s ex-boyfriend, with his equipment always blocking the hallway, the intermittent babysitting gigs, slightly too close to unbearable. I’d started the Education degree before my mother got her diagnosis. I was already—mercifully to my parents, I could tell—on my way back to gainful employment.

Even as I was taking care of my parents, I got very good at practical things over those few years, like the most competent secretaries. I lived multiple lives: in the first, I had every appearance of a modestly accomplished young woman in her early thirties, capable if not interesting, easy to get on with, prompt, efficient, with unnoticeable clothes and a serviceable hairstyle, and a voice a bit higher, perhaps a bit breathier, I was told, than one was led to expect by my frame. A woman without notable surprises.

But my first life was a masquerade, my Clark Kent life, though in my second I was not a heroine at all. I sometimes hoped that someone out there imagined for me a second life of glamour and drama, as a rock star’s mistress, or an FBI agent. But I wasn’t the sort of person for whom anyone would bother imagining a secret life; and in that second life I was no lover or huntress or martyr, but a daughter, just a dutiful daughter.

Then there was my third life, small and secret: the life of my dioramas, the vestiges of my artist self.

You could say that my mother and father, grateful as they manifestly were, didn’t ask me to give up my life. And if I chose to, though I can’t see the logic of my own choice, I’d like to believe it was a purposeful choice and not simply a show of poor time management. A good number of my children are bad at time management. You see it a lot. But you can’t succeed in life unless you get good at it: there’s no point writing the world’s best answer to the first question on the test, if you don’t then leave yourself enough time to write any answers at all to the other questions. You still fail the test. And I worry, in my bleaker hours, that this is what I’ve done. I answered the dutiful daughter question really well; I was aware of doing only a so-so job on the grown-up career front, but I didn’t really care, because there were two big exam questions I wanted to be sure I answered fully: the question of art, and the question of love.

This was the miracle of my first Shahid year. Never, in all my life, had I thought, as I did then,
This is the answer
. Not once, but over and over in different configurations, the answer to not one but to every question seemed to come in the course of that year, like music. “On me your voice falls, as they say love should—like an enormous ‘yes.’ ” Philip Larkin on Sidney Bechet: a love poem that is not a love poem. And my love life that was not a love life, but something as consuming, as formidable, as whole.