In the kitchen I find my parents have become Sid and Nancy. It even smells like a shooting gallery, the decay of human spirit, or is the garbage disposal broken again? My sixty year-old father with silver barely tracing his dark hair, stands before a window, an eye cocked on the contents of a syringe he holds nimbly between his fingers. Mom, hairless and crumbled, sits on a chair gazing up at him; a patient girl friend waiting for her fix. I watch as my dad flicks the plastic with the tips of his nails, removing all the air bubbles and carefully pushes the plunger up until just a drop slips out of the needle and glides smoothly down the sleek shiny prick.
It’s some drug to thin my mother’s blood, to make certain it won’t clot. Something cancer makes happen along with too many other things we don’t know yet. Like grief. He hands the needle to her and I wait in horror, half expecting that she will roll up a sleeve, make a fist until a fat green snake of a vein slithers up her arm. Instead, she lifts the cotton thin nightgown to her thigh and jabs the needle in. The fast beating of my heart makes the baby skittle fast inside me.
My father announces, finally noticing me propped against the counter top I am gripping for balance, “just fixing Mom up.”
"I noticed, hi Mom.” I manage to smile down at my mother, who is carefully aiming her needle through a hole in an empty plastic seven-up bottle for safety.
"Hi, Honey.” Her voice has rapidly aged and sounds elderly, deliberate and slurred. As she attempts a grin, her thin lips stretch and pull against her teeth.
“What time is the appointment?”
“Ten o’clock,” my father answers. We only have an hour.
“Mom, you should get ready." I tell her squinting as sunlight falls bright through the dusty windows above. A lone streak lands on her head, highlighting the scar made when they removed the brain tumor. Although it has healed well and little stubbles of fuzz have begun to hide it, there is still a resemblance to a large question mark.
“Oh? Well, let me take the rest of my pills and I’ll get dressed,” my mother sighs and goes about picking at her brown plastic vials. There are eight different prescriptions.
“I’ve got pills to make me eat, to go to the bathroom, not to go, to feel no pain, but nothing that’s going to keep me alive for long.” My father blinks and appears startled by this, as if he’s finally getting it: That this illness is killing her.
“Well,” he clears his throat, “guess I’ll be going to work then.” He leans over my mother and quickly brushes her inflated cheek.
With his briefcase in one hand, he holds up a wrinkled brown paper bag in the other. “My lunch,” he explains, “been making it myself." And then stays that way waiting, it seems, for some kind of applause.
After he has left for the office I follow my mother toward the stairs to dress. She has begun to shuffle more than walk and our journey from the kitchen seems to take hours. I waddle behind her, down the cluttered hall, littered with things like shoes and last season’s catalogs from places like Eddie Bauer and Spiegel. Something is still rancid and I figure it’s probably a permeating permanence about the house because no one has energy to keep it up. With cancer, we’ve come to realize, there is no time for silly things like order or cleanliness. Cancer is a dirty disease and to clean just takes energy no one seems to have.
As I get closer to my mother, I am horrified. The pungent odor is emanating from her skin, reeking like food left in teeth overnight. Radiation has ruined her sense of smell and I cannot imagine how to tell her she stinks.
“Maybe you should take a nice warm bath before we leave,” I suggest.
“We have time. It might help you relax.”
“I am relaxed,” Mom manages huffing and climbing the steps like a toddler, grasping the wooden rail, one foot, two feet.
“Really, you’ll feel better,” I squeeze quickly past her, my belly hitting the top of my thighs, up the soft carpet and then quickly down to the bathroom. “Besides, you kind of smell.”
“I do?” She stands wheezing in the bathroom doorway, her hands clinging to the frame, trying to sniff.
“Come on,” I smile stiffly and jiggle my stomach into the tiny space between the tub and sink. As I do this the baby whacks me in the gut.
“Here, Mom! Feel the baby,” I grab her hand and hold it against the taut skin of my belly, stroking the dry claws her fingers have become. When the baby reaches out again the might in his fist is so powerful both of our hands jump off my shirt.
“There! Did you feel that?” I ask excited, there is no doubt this time.
“No,” my mother removes her hand. “I never do.”
“Well, you will.” I pretend not to be disappointed, but I know she won’t.
She doesn’t want to. I shrug my shoulders and rub my side, still feeling the fist like a hard growth. My mother has never grown a baby inside of her and sometimes I wonder if this distance she keeps is envy.
“It must be strange to feel something alive in you like that,” she looks for a split second directly into my eyes. “I think I would cry.”
“It feels like I’m a drum being played from the inside.” I am eager to share with her my side of motherhood, but the wall goes up before I can continue.
“Okay, I’ll take it.” She slips her fingers around the tiny buttons on her nightgown, not wanting to listen to me about pregnancy and babies.
“What?” I nearly snap.
“I’ll take the bath,” she smiles. “Besides, it might feel nice to soak in some bubbles. Add some of those, will you?”
As she pulls off her nightgown, I turn away toward the mirrors above the sink. Caught in the glass I have nowhere to hide my expression. The last time I saw my mother naked, fat shifted easily around her middle. Now, her skin drops thick and loose, her breasts sag, deflated. In less time than it has taken to grow this baby, my mother has disappeared. She is nowhere any longer.
“Look at me! Thirty years of dieting and now it only takes a couple of months to lose fifty pounds. Should have thought of this earlier,” she laughs. “You know, I’m as thin as I was on my wedding day!”
“Real funny Mom,” I also laugh because there is nothing else to do.
I shake a cloud of purple bath powder into the water and ease her into the tub where she escapes into a cloud of lavender mist like a magic trick
I shake a cloud of purple bath powder into the water and ease her into the tub where she escapes into a cloud of lavender mist like a magic trick
“Honey, rub my back will you?” My mother huddles forward into the mound of glistening bubbles, waiting for my touch.
One hour later, when Dr. Shaw opens the door to the exam room, I catch a glint of surprise in him that my mother is still among us. He is a short wiry man, with clean delicate wrists I notice today as he ponders her chart. My mom is still slouched on the table, staring down at the space between her legs. It has passed the point where changing into gowns is necessary. Instead, she keeps on her outfit, the only clothes she has that fit her now – yellow denim bellbottoms and a polyester shirt stored in the attic since Nixon’s resignation.
“You’ve lost ten more pounds. How are you eating Helen?” Dr. Shaw studies her.
“Oh, fine.” My mother smiles like a lying Cheshire.
“What are you eating and how much?” He doesn’t buy it and leans back, crossing his thin arms, looking at her.
“Oh, I eat lots of things: carrots and salads and hamburgers from McDonalds and…”
“She’s not eating,” I interrupt.
“I am too! You don’t live with me, how would you know,” my mother snaps, making her wig scramble all over. Because she has shrunk it has become too big it looks like a drunk puppy clinging to her scalp.
“Dad told me.” Is this what having a child will be like, I wonder, you didn’t eat your carrots….Did too…Did not…?
“You have to eat Helen, that’s the only way to fight the cancer,” Dr. Shaw sighs.
“Nothing tastes good though, and I’m never hungry anymore,” she pulls at thewrinkles in the knees of the yellow jeans, making ridges and valleys in the material. She glances down to me sitting against the wall. “Besides, the chemotherapy makes me sick to my stomach. I just throw it back up.”
I nod, meeting the tired, nearly unfamiliar gray eyes of my mother. I cannot bear this much longer and I wonder if she suspects.
“I know it’s difficult,” the doctor says compassionately and encouragingly as a friend would. “But Helen, you have a grandchild to be here for.”
For seconds she is in her own world and we wait for her, the hum of the ghostly lights above is almost deafening. I hold my breath. I want to hear it finally – that she is trying to hold on. That by my having her grandchild is helping her live.
When she finally answers him it is not what I’ve expected to hear. “I just want to feel like myself again.”
I lean back entirely humbled. Only then does it occur to me how cruel we have all been. How dangling this baby in front of her is akin to some sort of Pavlovian experiment to keep her alive. As if her grandbaby growing in me will somehow substitute her own pain and fear. That while I’m creating life, my mother has been agonizingly and single-handedly reliving each moment of her own. How utterly unbearable this has to be for her. What has she be thinking; that inside myself I am sculpting her replacement?
“I realize that, Helen.” Dr. Shaw is saying kindly to my mother. “But it’s your first grandchild, you must be excited?”
But she doesn’t answer him. Instead, my mother merely shrugs her pointy shoulders ever- so-slightly while her fingers still pull at her knees. Her wig slips slowly forward, drifting over her eyes.
