The Woman Upstairs

6





When Sirena failed to show up for Back to School Night, I wondered whether to call to remind her of our appointment at Burdick’s two days later. I decided to wait and see. I was aware that this was not only unteacherly but simply not very grown up of me. I was setting a friendship test.

She passed. She came, although she was almost fifteen minutes late, and seemed to be carrying half a dozen parcels and bags with which she breathlessly and clumsily bumped the other customers: she got one of them, an old lady drinking hot chocolate, in the back of the head.

Because I’d been waiting awhile, I’d managed to snag a table. The tables and stools there are small and close together, and they’re not comfortable, but we squeezed ourselves in and piled her packages underneath our feet. We kept our coats on, although it was warm, because we had nowhere to put them.

“Shopping?”

“Shopping, yes. It’s my husband’s birthday tomorrow.” She gave a pretty laugh. “We always give many presents. Nothing big, but lots of small things. It’s always a challenge to find the right ones. He is an—idiosyncrasy?”

“He’s idiosyncratic.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“And his work is the reason that you’re here?”

“Only for one year. He has a fellowship from the university, to write his book.”

“Interesting. What’s it about?”

“You’ll have to ask him to explain it, because I’ll do a poor job. Ethics. It’s about ethics and history. He’s interested in how we can’t tell a history truly—there’s no such thing after all—but so then we must try to tell a history ethically—and what does this mean?”

“Why can’t a history be true?”

“Because we always have only a part of a history. You can’t make a picture three hundred sixty degrees; we can’t, even in one second of a life, show everything that we experience. So how could we do such a thing for a person’s history, or a people’s history? A nation’s history? It isn’t possible.” She put her hands up in a cheerful show of despair.

“And what do you do, then? Are you a historian, or an ethics person, or whatever, also?”

“No! I could never do such things. Words are not for me.” She looked at me closely, her marbled dark eyes alight. “I’m an artist. I make things. Installations. Sometimes videos.” She said this as calmly as if she were confessing to making cakes or collecting stamps, and I knew she was for real.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Why?”

“I’m an artist, too.”

I’d lurched inside at her admission—this! Of course! we shared—but worried, from her smile, that her first impulse was patronizing. She was thinking that making art must be a hobby for me. She was thinking that I was an elementary school teacher. But she was too polite to let on. “Really,” she said. “You must tell me about your work.”

“No, no. I want to hear about yours. We can talk about me another time”—I felt bold because this presumed there might be another time—“I’m here to learn about Reza’s life; which means, about yours.”

“About ours, there’s not so much to say. But Reza: he’s very cherished because we couldn’t—I couldn’t—have any more children. Do you have brothers and sisters, Nora?”

“An older brother.”

“Then you know what it’s like, so important. I come from five children; Skandar from three, although one of his brothers has died. But we both wanted more children, for Reza too, you know.”

“As a teacher, I have to say that only children are often at an advantage academically—”

“Yes, because we, the parents, spoil them and spend so much time. Only children, they become like a third person in the couple, do you know? They don’t get so much to be children, but little grown-ups.”

“This is your concern for Reza?”

“This is our concern. In Paris, we’ve made for him a world of children. He has cousins—not real ones, they’re in Italy—but friends as close as cousins. In our apartment building alone he has three friends, including a girl three weeks older that he’s known always. They see each other almost every day.”

“So it’s a difficult transition for him, to come here.”

“For all of us, yes, of course.”

“It’s helpful to know. Thank you.” I’d hoped for some more intimate revelation. I don’t know quite what.

“But with the bullying, you see—”

“Yes, that was horrible, I know. I’ll keep a close eye. Those were bigger kids who didn’t know him, though. In our class, he’s extremely popular. Very well liked. Boys and girls both. He’s a very kind boy.”

“Yes, kind.”

“And he’s making good progress with his English.”

“Yes. We speak only English at the dinner table now, to practice. All three of us, making mistakes. ‘Please pass,’ we say, and then ‘that thing,’ if we don’t know the word. Sometimes, we’re too tired. But Reza teaches us words now.”

“Not rude ones, I hope?”

“Those also.” She smiled.

We’d finished our coffee. The moment of recognition, the sign—it had to have a meaning.

“But about your art,” I said. “You were going to tell me about your art.”

In that first conversation, she told me about her installations, which were—as I would eventually see with my own eyes—lush gardens and jungles made out of household items and refuse: elaborately carved soap primroses, splayed lilies and tulips fashioned out of dyed dishrags and starch, silvery vines of painted and varnished clothesline and foil, precisely and impeccably made. I couldn’t quite picture them when she talked about them, but the idea made sense to me: visions of paradise, the otherworldly, the beautiful, and then, when you’re in them, up close, you realize that the flowers are mottled by filth and the vines crumbling and that the gleaming beetles crawling on the waxy leaves are molded bottle tops or old leather buttons with limbs. Her installations had names from fairy tales and myth—The Forest of Arden; Avalon; Oz; Elsinore—but they were, in reality, the kitchen or the laundry room, and sooner or later the viewer would realize there was an ancient sink behind the waterfall or that the boulders between the trees were a washer and dryer, blow-torched black and furred with dark lint.

She told me too that latterly she’d made videos of the installations, that the story of the videos was precisely this revelation that the beautiful world was fake, was made of garbage; but that first she had to film it in such a way that it looked wholly beautiful and that sometimes this was hard. And also, she said, narrative was hard: when you made a video, there had to be a story, and a story unfolded over time, in a different way, and didn’t always unfold as you wanted it to.

She told me all this and I could tell that on the one hand she was proud to talk about it, passionate even, but on the other, she retained a slightly world-weary air. I was a tad piqued.

“Can I see what you’re working on?” I asked.

She shook her head, looked at me through the film of her hair. “I’m supposed to build Wonderland—that’s my next project. But I have none of that here with me. Maybe I can get a video for you of the earlier stuff, though it’s not the same, really.”

“But why?”

“It’s about the space, and my tools, and my whole world there.”

“But you can’t have a year without your work!”

“No. I’d turn into a monster that neither Reza nor Skandar wanted to know. It’s what keeps me from being crazy. Too much dark, otherwise.”

“I’m the same. I need to do it, or I go mad.”

She smiled, in a real way, as if she actually wanted to hear, now.

And I told her about how I used to paint big messy pictures, but how when my mother was sick, and for all the years she was dying, one small capacity at a time, I stopped being able to paint, stopped being able to make any big gestures at all, and turned instead to little things, to rooms the size of shoe boxes, Joseph Cornell–scaled dioramas, as if these, at least, could not be taken from me—these are the fragments I have shored against my ruin. And I didn’t explain, then, about how I stopped trying to show my work, let alone to sell it, and let go of the idea of it finding a home in the world—because somehow, in that long, slow extinguishing of life, it felt as though the one way I could try to keep my mother alive was to close in, and hold on, hold on to what I made as she had made me. I worried that this would make no sense, and this is why I didn’t speak of it then. But I explained about my illuminated boxes, about making scenes and worlds in miniature, and how always, hidden somewhere, where you could barely see her or could not see her at all, there was a small gold figure that was Joy.

“It’s hard for me to believe in,” I said, “but it’s also the most important thing to make myself believe. So I put her in there no matter what. Even in the death scenes, I put her in.”

“I really understand,” she said, and I could tell that she really did, and suddenly the afternoon was worth it, the sign had meant something, and we could get up and leave our awkward little table at Burdick’s, separate into the now-dark afternoon.

As she gathered her parcels, fumbling again, her clumsiness charming to me, she said without glancing up, “I’m thinking of renting a space, but the one I like is too big, too much for me. It’s better to share. Would you have any interest?”

“Yes,” I said, before I really understood what she was offering. It was a very fast “yes.”

Outside on the sidewalk, she put her hand on my arm, in the same way her son put his small hand on my arm. Now I would know where the gesture came from. “I’ll call you,” she said. “At the weekend, you can come with me to see the studio. Maybe Saturday afternoon? Skandar and Reza can do something together then.”

“Yes,” I said, without considering that I’d promised to visit my father that day, that I’d have to call and disappoint him, a spare, gray old man alone in an apartment in Brookline, counting the hours until I came. And when I realized this mistake, I didn’t waver, either; and I didn’t wait for Sirena to confirm, I called him up, picturing him there in his overheated lemon-yellow sitting room with its strange, plush, old rose broadloom that my mother had chosen when they moved in from Manchester, when the cards were already on the table but she was still up to such choices—the weirdness, to me, that my mother had deliberately made it an old person’s apartment, the colors and the furnishings saved from their house the ones most conducive to a powdery, grannyish atmosphere, as if, by doing so, she might will herself into old age (she wasn’t then old; she wasn’t old when she died), might keep herself going by simply setting the stage for keeping going—and always, when I spoke to him, I pictured him forlorn in this sea of pink and yellow, oblivious to it as he seemed to be. I told him something had come up; I intimated that it had to do with school. He tried to sound excited for me, thinking perhaps this might imply some professional advancement, while I tried to sound irritated about the obligation, as if I wanted nothing less than to go. We were both engaged in bonhomous deceit of such long standing that it was barely conscious; but surely he knew I wasn’t sorry enough, and I knew that he was disappointed, and I’m ashamed to admit I was so excited that I didn’t properly care.



There comes that time, that Lucy Jordan time, when your life looks small and all and always the same around you, and you don’t think anything will change, you think that hope is not for you—and if you’re me, then in that early period of awakening to your condition, you don’t even feel angry. Dismayed, maybe; shocked; but that’s just, it seems, what life is, a world in which the day’s great excitement is the arrival of the Garnet Hill catalog that you will peruse in the bathroom, and where a triumph is when you take a long walk through the glorious snowbound cemetery after the first storm and somehow don’t get lost among the dead, you find your mother’s stone and kiss it, kiss her: that is a triumph. The stone leaves an icy taste upon your lips and your nose; and the sky, with its ridged clouds, is tinged with mauve. It’s a far cry from the tony gatherings in the galleries of New York’s Meatpacking District for which you once believed yourself destined; and while it is beautiful—grief, too, can be beautiful—this small triumph doesn’t have about it any aspect of beginning. Let’s just say that the open doors in graveyards aren’t necessarily doors you want to enter.

But it looks—it is—as though that’s what there is, Death or the Garnet Hill catalog, that cheery, flimsy distraction from Death; or in a pinch Law & Order, because on some station or other, at any time of day or night, you can find it—Detective Benson! Detective Stabler! My long lost!—and no longer be alone.

And then, suddenly, there’s something else. When you least expect it. Suddenly there’s an opportunity, an opening, a person or people you couldn’t have imagined, and—elation!—it feels as though you’ve found the pot of gold, when you’d thought all the gilt was gone from this world forever. It’s enough, for a time—maybe even for a long time—to make you forget that you were ever angry, that you ever knew what anger was at all.





7





When I went to college—to Middlebury, a small liberal arts institution known for its language studies, up in Vermont—I didn’t major in Studio Art. There didn’t seem much point in having gone to Middlebury for that. It was a battle, or rather, a discussion, I’d had with my parents before I chose the school. I’d applied to RISD, the art school in Providence, and to Pratt, in New York, as well as to traditional liberal arts colleges, and my parents had sat me down and told me they thought it would be a wasted opportunity if I went to study art. I wasn’t surprised that this was my father’s opinion; but I trusted my mother, so I listened to her.

“You’ll do your art either way,” she said. “Your art doesn’t depend on a degree. To be honest, your art lives in a realm where degrees are meaningless.”

“Then why go to university at all? Why not just go and make art?”

“Look, Mouse”—my mother called me Mouse; nobody else did, not even my father, and when she lost her ability to talk I felt that she looked the word at me with her eyes—“you’re only sixteen years old. You’re not old enough to vote, or to drink, or to sign a lease on an apartment. You’re barely old enough to drive. You can go away to college or you can stay at home with us and make your art in the garage and scoop ice cream all day down the road. Your choice, but I know what I’d choose: get out of this stodgy little dump! See the world.”

“Why don’t you, then?”

“Why don’t I what?”

“Get out and see the world.”

“Oh, Mouse”—she stroked my hair, which was long then, so that stroking it meant caressing, too, the greater stretch of my back. Like a cat, rather than a mouse. I loved it. I loved being her child. I remember looking at her and thinking she was the most beautiful thing in the world. “I’ve had my moment, sweetie. Maybe another will come. But for now, I’m needed right here.”

“Why?”

“Didn’t you know, I make a house a home? That’s what mothers do.”

“But I’ll go and then—”

“I love your daddy. He needs a home, too.”

And then we were back to the college question, and it seemed that art school wasn’t really a choice, because there wasn’t any money—barely enough, even with loans, to get me to university at all—and it mattered to my mother that I be employable at the end.

“You’re such a baby, you can go to art school afterward and still come out even. Get a master’s in Painting on top of your B.A., and you’ll be ready for all of it. I want you to have it all. It’s not like when I was a girl, the MRS degree and all that. You won’t live off pin money, off any man, no matter how much you love him. You won’t depend on anyone but yourself. We agreed, right?” And there was that edge to her voice, which I thought of then as darkness, and recognize now as rage, the tone that came in her intermittent phases of despair. And so I went to Middlebury.

I always understood that the great dilemma of my mother’s life had been to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price. She was of the generation for which the rules changed halfway, born into a world of pressed linens and three-course dinners and hairsprayed updos, in which women were educated and then deployed for domestic purposes—rather like using an elaborately embroidered tablecloth on which to serve messy children their breakfast. Her University of Michigan degree was all but ornamental, and it always seemed significant that it stood in its frame under the eaves in the attic, festooned with dust bunnies, among a dozen disavowed minor artworks, behind boxes of discarded toys. The first woman in her family to go to college, she’d cared enough to frame her diploma, only then to be embarrassed about having cared, embarrassed because she felt she hadn’t done anything with it, had squandered her opportunity.

The transition from pride to shame took place sometime soon after my birth, I think: I appeared in ’67, and by 1970, her two closest friends in Manchester had divorced and moved away, reborn into the messy and not necessarily happier lives of the liberated. My brother was born in ’59, when Bella Eldridge was but a tender twenty-three-year-old: he was what she did with her precious education.

As far as I could tell, she didn’t burn over the consuming demands of motherhood the first time. In those days, all the young women around her were doing the same thing, discussing Jane Austen over coffee while their cloth-diapered brats wriggled around on the floor, the women themselves still almost students, glad to be absolved of worry about money and still blithe in their belief that life was long, would bring more to them than wall-to-wall carpet and a new Crock-Pot, with the occasional dinner at Locke-Ober or the Copley Plaza in Boston as an anniversary treat. She was young enough to be hopeful.

There are abundant home movies and antiquated slides of baby Matthew, with his slightly Frankensteinian square head and his bright blue eyes—he looks, somehow, like an infant of his time, has an all-American aspect that babies seem not to affect these days—and in the background, my mother grins, her face all angles, cigarette in hand. She grins at the swing set, she grins by the Christmas tree, she grins behind the picnic table, with its blue gingham cloth, on the Fourth of July.

In the later pictures, the few that remain of my own infancy, even the daylight looks darker. Maybe Kodak had changed their formula; or maybe the world had moved on. I was a smaller, more somber child, born three weeks early, weighing less than six pounds (“always impatient, that’s my girl,” my father used to say), and with thick black hair that subsequently fell out and left me near bald for months. I look like a befuddled frog gussied up in pretty dresses, a fat foot peeking from beneath the hem, and my brother, a strapping eight-year-old with buckteeth, eyes me askance from the corners of the picture frames. My mother is hardly in these pictures at all, anywhere. She must have been taking them. There’s one Christmas snapshot of the three of us, my father behind the camera: it was the year, she said, that Matthew and I both had the flu, and all of us have high color, cheeks like painted dolls’, including my mother, whose long hair is a ratty mess, and whose dotted pinafore is falling off her shoulder. Perhaps because of the fevers, our eyes are forlorn—even Matt’s eyes look black, and my mother’s mouth is open in a half sneer, as though she were about to tell my father to cut it out and put the damn thing away.

I don’t remember my early childhood as unhappy—to the contrary; the only thing I feared was my brother, who was pinching mean when he had the chance—but the record, such as it is, suggests that my mother was suffering. She was only thirty-one when I was born, but had done it all already once and knew what she’d have to give, and knew, too, that like Sleeping Beauty she’d waken from the baby dream to find that years had elapsed, and herself pushing forty. No wonder she later threw herself into her harebrained schemes—the cooking, the sewing, the writing of children’s books that nobody would publish, that she didn’t even really try to publish, all of them intended to catapult her to something greater, to a world beyond Manchester, to some early fantasy that lingered still at the corners of her eyes. But when she signed up for classes—Mastering the Potter’s Wheel or Conversational French—it was hard to believe even then that she took them seriously. The only paying job she ever held when I was young was at the local bookstore over the holidays, when they took on extra staff—a couple of college kids and my mom—for the Christmas rush. She did it several years running and grew adept at making pretty packages, with perfect edges and curlicues of gilded ribbon.

She wasn’t, in any practical way, ambitious. The friends she had who were ambitious made their moves strategically, went to law school at night, or studied for the realtor’s exam, and then they took steps away from the hearth, out into the world. She both admired and resented them, the way plump women both admire and resent their successfully dieting friends, trying, all smiles, to force upon them a slab of chocolate cake. She didn’t keep close to the ones who went back to work, or who divorced and moved into the city: she celebrated them with lunches and sent them on their way, as if they were off on a dangerous mission from which safe return was—as indeed it was—impossible.

Do you remember the ladies’ lunches of those days? The table set first thing in the morning. Cold poached salmon and Waldorf salad, pitchers of iced tea, sweating bottles of white wine, everything served on the best china, and the ladies all still there in a blue fog of cigarette smoke when I came home from school, as though there were nothing, nothing to call them away. And the knowledge, which I had even then, that once they left the charmed circle, they were gone forever.

When I was about seven, in the week before Christmas—before, it must be said, the bookstore years; and it only now occurs to me that they were a direct result of this incident—my mother broke down in tears at the A&P, her face a map of blotches in the sallow supermarket light. I’d asked for something extra—a jar of chocolate Koogle, maybe, which the more indulgent mothers of the day allowed their children to take as school sandwiches, on white bread with butter: your dessert as a main course! The world gone haywire!—and her features crumpled.

“I’m so sorry,” she blathered, all moist and shamefully public, as I tried to push the cart along and her with it, and kept my eyes to the floor, “but there’s nothing for you or your brother. Nothing at all. I have nothing for you for Christmas. There’s just no money left.” She let out a small wail; I cringed. “I had to have the dishwasher fixed, and then that stone hit the windshield on the highway, and to replace the glass—it’s all so expensive and you see, you see, there’s nothing. And I can’t ask your father. I can’t ask him for more. So there’s nothing for you at all. I am so sorry.” My mother, you understand, lived on an allowance from my father—or a salary, if you prefer: he had a bank account and she had a bank account, and each month he transferred a fixed sum from his account to hers, and with this sum she managed the household. She had spent the housekeeping money on housekeeping, and there was nothing left over for gifts. Even though I was still small, I understood the basics of this arrangement.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, trying to console without causing further embarrassment. “I don’t care about presents.” Although I did care, and was disappointed, not least because I was still supposed to believe in Santa Claus, and this outburst seemed like the Wizard of Oz emerging from behind his curtain, an unconscionable breach of propriety and of our necessary hypocrisies. “Really,” I said again, “it doesn’t matter.”

And suddenly, then—inexplicably to me as I was, but in a way so obvious to me now—she turned viperish, rageful, a temper as shameful in the A&P as her earlier tears. “Don’t ever get yourself stuck like this,” she hissed. “Promise me? Promise me now?”

“I promise.”

“You need to have your own life, earn your own money, so you’re not scrounging around like a beggar, trying to put ten dollars together for your kids’ Christmas presents. Leeching off your father’s—or your husband’s—pathetic paycheck. Never. Never. Promise me?”

“I already promised.”

“Because it’s important.”

“I know.”

And that was an end to it. She’d dried up and put on her sunny smile by the time we reached the checkout, the only sign of her distress a slight smearing of her mascara. We were served by Sadie, the daughter of my old first-grade teacher, a girl who spoke very loudly and slowly as if she, or we, were deaf. She wore her brown hair in a single pigtail on one side of her head and it looked like the handle of an old-fashioned water pump.

“Mrs. Eldridge,” she bawled. “So good to see you! As always!”

“You too, Sadie, dear.”

“Looking forward to the holidays?”

“You bet! Isn’t it the best time of year?”

“The best. I love it. Don’t you love it, Nora?”

I was too busy watching my mother to answer. As she stacked the groceries on the conveyor belt there was an expression of such impassioned nostalgia on her face that she looked like a Norman Rockwell portrait. I could see her genuinely believing what she’d told Sadie, believing that it was the best time of year. Someone else had wept and yelled at me minutes before, and Bella Eldridge would never have recognized her.



My mother wasn’t a weeper and I rarely saw her cry; but there was one other instance of impromptu tears that has stayed with me. It was just before Matt went off to college—in the summertime, because I remember we were freezing in the air-conditioning at the Hunan Gourmet. My brother was surly, wishing himself already gone. My father, typically mild, was oblivious to the tension at the table, to my mother’s tight brightness and her habit, throughout the meal, of reaching for Matt’s sleeve and then pulling back before she touched him, a ghostly sort of tic. It seemed as though I was the only one watching, the only one who could see the four of us in our leatherette armchairs, leaning over the soy-spattered synthetic tablecloth (it rucked with every human movement, then slid oilily back into place), father and son chatting in a desultory way about the upcoming football season and how my brother would have to throw his heart behind the Notre Dame team, now that he was going there, all the way to Indiana. My mother, who loathed sports, kept trying to change the subject, picking at possible threads (the campus? The journey? Matt’s friend Busby’s choice of Bowdoin?) like a glassy-eyed magpie: thwarted, persistent, quick. It was an evening in which I said nothing—it was like that with our family, because Matthew and I had so little relation to one another beyond his occasional insult or a quietly hostile tousling of my hair. Even when we were all four together, our parents were being either his parents or mine, in one mode or the other, able to deal adequately with only one of us, two children who merely happened to share the same accursèd progenitors. And that Hunan Gourmet outing was a Matthew Eldridge night.

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, f*cking 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.

My mother was only two years dead, that fall. It felt like an immense distance then, but now, in time’s accordion folds, the two events—my mother, unable even to move her head, wheezing in her elephantine breathing machine, sliding her eyes to the light, then closing them a final time; Reza at the supermarket, leaning over the bench to laugh at my spilled apples (who has upset the apple cart? I have, I have!)—seem almost contiguous. As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life’s passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar. My mother left here for an unknown there; and then Reza and Sirena and Skandar came to me.