Native Country of the Heart

by Cherríe Moraga

  Although we had made every effort to surround my mother with objects of meaning from her San Gabriel home—family photos and statues of saints and altar keepsakes—she seldom responded to them in her new environment. Instead, she inserted old meanings into new people and things. The wide carpeted corridor, with its walls decorated in 1940s memorabilia—AngloAmerican images of big-band dancehalls and World War II soldiers’ homecomings—became her home hallway lined with family photographs. She occupied her day entering and exiting other people’s rooms, fixing, folding, cleaning, emptying trash cans, doing activities not unlike those tasks she had performed in her own home all day long.

  One day my sister, unable to find our mother in the common spaces nor in her room, found her in a male resident’s room, helping him put on a sock. JoAnn was convinced that she had simply exchanged this man in her mind for our father, on whom she had waited hand and, in this case literally, foot for over fifty years. It seemed that the physical activity was what mattered to our mother’s shrinking brain; and that her body be allowed to reenact behavior it had performed for her entire life. The actual context for the activities was no longer of any consequence.

  * * *

  My father had been in a nursing facility recuperating from his hip surgery, and more than a month had transpired since my parents had last seen each other. On the morning of his move into Prestige, I escort my father over to the memory-impaired wing for the reunion. I punch in the entry code, hear the latch release, and push open the heavy wooden door into the canned heat of Expressions. The motionless quiet is what hits you first. As if the air itself holds its breath, waiting not for death exactly, but for the predestined unfolding of events. Ambulances are a regular occurrence, as they are on the other side of the coded door. But here, on this side of the dented coin that is dementia, the ambulance seems to be greeted with a dreaded hopefulness by the residents. They lift their faces up to watch the action. Perhaps this time it is my time to die.

  That day when I search for my mother, we find her in the dormitory-style room she shares with another female inmate. The roommate is tucked inside her covers, unable to find the strength to rise during the day. My mother pretty much ignores her or refers to her with a kind of uninterested condescension. I am grateful for the privacy that the roommate’s illness provides my parents, who are being unceremoniously reunited behind the closed door of this sleeping quarter.

  My father is reserved, nervous. “Honey…?” he ventures. She looks up from whatever task she has busied herself with. “Vera…?” He goes to her, wraps his arms awkwardly around her, bringing the small bones of her shoulders into the wall of his chest. She responds, and I notice my father visibly sigh in relief. They embrace for a few brief moments. Then suddenly she pulls away from him, her face full of intention and indifference at once.

  “I did the best I could,” she says, and walks away.

  In this reunion after more than a month of separation, my mother pronounced the end of their relationship. Sure, she would continue to see her husband, who would daily come to fetch her from Expressions. Balanced by a new combination of psychotropic drug therapies, there would be whole months before them in which my parents did not fight. But no fight also meant no Vera to reconcile either the last years of torment or the decades of embitterment that preceded them. In that statement, “I did the best I could”—the last wholly relational sentence she would address directly to my father—my mother absolved herself of their embattled past.

  She was, in effect, done.

  The next night, upon my return to Oakland, I sleep against Celia’s back and openly let the tears fall. At 4 a.m., I am up again, sadder than ever. “My mother is dying” is all I can think to say. “Brace yourself,” Celia tells me. But there is nothing to support the broken limb of promised death. We learn to walk, at times crippled by its truth, as our own faces grow aged from the worry over who, when, how, how much longer…?

  “She’s had a long life, eighty-nine years,” I say with feigned confidence to anyone who asks, as if I were ready to let her go. And I was, surely, every time I saw her walk about the corridor of the dementia unit disoriented and anxious, carrying a lonely confusion about which room in this place of no locks and no exit was really hers; whose clothes, which bathroom, and where was the toilet? Is the toilet the sofa you ask me to sit in? She drops her pants, confused.

  I am Elvira’s daughter who awakens in the middle of the night and prays that it is her mother’s death to which she has awakened.

  Who prays to have this not-dying over with, once and for all.

  POR COSTUMBRE

  January 1, 2004. Oakland.

  I write on this first morning of the year that isn’t a beginning at all, but a deep place of returning inward to the work of winter thought. The rain reminds me of this, a deep drenching of sorrow, running in rivulets into the leaf-clogged gutters of this gray-cloaked city.

  Still, I am happy just to be here. Because there is rain and the gray bay beneath it. There is the Rose Parade on TV, and my heart lightens when I see the National Band of Mexico from Puebla, playing an unrecognizable brassy number, march across the screen.

  Celia laughs when I tell her, “I love marching bands.” I reminisce about my own trumpet-playing football-field-marching youth.

  “There’s so much I don’t know about you, querida,” she says. We both like the idea of this fifty-one-year-old revelation of my “MexicanAmerican girlhood,” as we refer to it.

  * * *

  On New Year’s Eve, we had refused cliché in our marking of the year’s end. The cold kept us indoors; there was no movie, no dinner out as planned. The kids had been sent off to other familia for the night. We lit the candles on the dining room table and sat down to a meal that seemed just enough: winter vegetables, a piece of meat, salad. I found the remaining bottle of red wine, given to us at Christmas. I poured myself a glass.

  And true to custom, we look at each other. And I can tell behind Celia’s eyes, which mirror mine, we are almost embarrassed by how contentas, in fact, we are just at the moment.

  Custom requires a fire and we light one. I toss in a bit of prayer tobacco and realize I’m grateful for the heartache of the closing year. Somehow. Somehow, there is a kindness in it.

  After dinner and another glass of wine, my mind conjures the scenario of my making love to Celia, how her eyelids drop when my touch excites, how she moves inside herself for me to find her, waiting.

  We kiss and the mutuality stuns for a second. But to have sex is to push at something the moment resists; to consider friction and rising energy and orgasm is to interrupt the delicate balance of desirous quiet we have achieved this evening.

  So we do not make love, but bring pillows and blankets onto the floor before the fire and talk and do not talk and hold each other until I find I have drifted off to sleep on her shouldered breast. We pull out the sofa bed, the fire dying down, turn off the lights from the Christmas tree, and fall asleep.

  The quiet is not interrupted until the sudden rumble of firecrackers explodes into the fog outside our sala window. We stir.

  “I think it’s midnight,” I say. And return to sleep.

  EXPRESSIONS

  “Prime-time Elvira” is how I thought of it. In February, my mother is administered memantine, believed to retard some of the gravest symptoms of Alzheimer’s for a short period of time. In the months ahead, she comes to repossess aspects of her old self. This was, in a way, a last hurrah for my parents. My father could show my mother off to the residents and the Latina staff, whom she charmed with her effortless bilingualism, petite figure, enduring good looks, and doting affection.

  During those months of drug-induced reprieve, my mother walked around like she owned the joint. In Elvira’s mind, Latina staff became her nieces; and the meals served in the common dining area, a restaurant. Once a week she went to the residence beauty salon, where the stylist arranged her thinning scalp of returned-to-Indian straight hair into pseudo-jazz-a
ge bobs she would never have tolerated were she in her right mind.

  By springtime my mother had recovered her pre-hallucinatory state, with one unexpected difference: her outbursts subsided to periodic ruptures of high irritation, but never rage. She now recognized my father as her husband of fifty-plus years, but could not fully grasp why, at the end of each day, he went off to his room in the assisted-living side of the residence and she to hers, behind a door with a code she had not deciphered. She spoke complete and expressive, if not always coherent, sentences. She was in good humor much of the time. She even gained weight, from seventy-two pounds when she was first hospitalized to eighty, which looked good on her.

  On one visit, I find my tío Eddie, sitting with my mother out in the Prestige courtyard. He holds his elder sister’s hand with the confidence of a lover. She is fragile but quite “present.” The next day, Rafa takes his grandma out to this same square, surrounded by manicured hedges and blooming plantitas. He gently tosses the plastic ball back and forth to her, she making a circle with her arms the way small children do. She catches it and smiles, and Rafa throws the ball back to her with the patient tenderness of a grandparent.

  In the months ahead, there were occasional lapses, her mental health sometimes compromised by the relentless pain of osteoarthritis and the regular reappearance of blood clots in her legs. Since my mother’s first foray into dementia care, my sister and I had been struggling to determine what degree of intervention we wanted from the medical establishment regarding our mother’s physical condition. There were good days and bad. And each time any of her family members punched in that entry code to Expressions, we could not deny the visceral anxiety we felt, not knowing which woman would be there to greet us (or not) on the other side of that wooden door.

  One day, anticipating my mother to be completely dispirited after a long bout of listlessness and exhaustion, I find her utterly present. Another slight change in her medications had returned her capacity for small pleasures. That day it was a bowl of soup, with a ring of crackers around it. She slurps the teaspoon of carrots, chicken chunks, and floating noodles into her mouth. Her hand does not shake as she finds the cup of coffee pleasantly bitter and warm.

  James has come for a visit. And she sits among her three chattering children and quiet husband for a few good hours, fully awake and listening. At one point, my brother leans toward our mother to say something. She pulls away and looks at JoAnn and me. “Who’s this?” she asks.

  James’s face flushes. We all just chalk it up to Alzheimer’s, swallow the moment, and move on, for our mother had returned to us for just a bit longer. Somehow those few hours of conscious awareness in this vibrant being sitting next to us, enjoying the simplest of pleasures, eclipsed all the struggle that preceded it. This remained the ongoing mystery of Alzheimer’s: what combination of a good night’s rest, good breakfast, and good drug balance would bring our mother back to us, if only for a few hours.

  Outside of those fleeting moments of reconnection, I would often have to press myself to recall my mother’s laughter—the personality of Elvira—in her pre-dementia life. At best, I caught faint glimpses of her, like sudden Polaroid snapshots: my mother in a scalloped bib apron and red lipstick, flyswatter in hand, flailing at the swarm of flies hovering at the back screen door just before the guests arrived; my mother with outstretched arms in a thin summer housecoat, chanting, “Ay, mi angelito, mi hediondo apestoso,” to my baby boy as he races up her driveway on sturdy toddler legs.

  One spring day, after months of being cloistered, Elvira was so animated when she greeted her that JoAnn decided to take our mother out to a nearby Mexican restaurant. Midway through the meal, JoAnn put her on the cell phone to me. This was one of the things I missed most in relation to my mom, the ability to simply pick up the phone and talk to her.

  “Cherríe? This is your mother. Cherríe?”

  She had reached my answering machine. I hear the telltale hoarseness of her vocal cords through the gravelly recording, but her voice also possesses a youthful lightheartedness, her manner casual, relaxed, even as she searches for the words. She waits for my response, doesn’t realize it’s a recording.

  “Mi’ja…?”

  Since she gets no reply, she hands the phone back to JoAnn.

  I overhear my mother dismiss the project: “It’s not that much of a thing.”

  My sister prods her: “Tell her you love her, Mom.”

  My mom complies. “I love you, mi’jita. Cherríe?” She pauses, hoping to hear my voice. “I love you, mi’jita. Please call me. I like to talk … about you. Come over,” she insists, as if she has a whole house of her own in which to host me. “Come over at least for a little while, okay? I’ve been waiting for you to come.”

  And then the next line breaks me:

  “Everything that I eat, I think, I say, my little girl…” and then I can’t make out the rest, but I know the rest because I cannot remember one meal that I ever shared with my mother where she did not refer to which of her children or grandchildren were missing at the table—my brother, my sister, my nieces and nephews.

  For my mother, meals were the site of familia. Her capacity to feed us was her capacity to mother us. So even when we were not present, she ate with the awareness of a place reserved for us at her table. La madre dadivosa had returned, if only for the length of a cell phone connection in which she used more words than I had heard from her in the past year.

  I was not an orphan after all. Not yet.

  SOME PLACE NOT HOME

  During the stolen hours of my visits alone with my mother, I often worried how we would pass the time. In the ensuing months, she would lose most of her verbal language. On the best of days, she was reduced to a few rehearsed phrases of two or three words:

  “It’s a shame…”

  “Mira, mi’ja…”

  “You never know…”

  “Cuidado con…”

  “Tengo ha…” And she would gesture bringing food to her mouth.

  I didn’t doubt that my mother’s stories still resided within her. I could often see the impulse rise up from inside her. It was so organic to my mother, the urge to contar, chismear, comentar, avisar, but the words no longer followed. She would struggle to draw her faithful listener in, pressing my forearm lightly, pointing with her eyes identical to the way I remembered my abuelita doing in the last years before her death at ninety-six. Theirs was a wry humor, an uncanny sense of irony, expressed in the raising of an eyebrow, the fallen corner of a mouth, a shrug of the shoulders. Celia often commented on how much my mother could say without words.

  * * *

  It is spring break and I have brought our family of four down from Oakland for a visit. We are in the activities room of Prestige. Celia and my mother watch our children, Camerina and Rafael, play pool, knocking the balls around the table. Rafa has the advantage over Camie, having spent long hours at the table during our regular visits to Yorba Linda. He’s feeling at the top of his game.

  I see my mom tug at Celia’s wrist to get her attention. She points to Camie with her eyebrows, as Camie’s newly acquired length and rounding adolescent hips, which mirror Celia’s, lean across the table for a pocket shot. Elvira’s milky graying eyes scan that body approvingly. She nods, with a kind of licentious arch to her eyebrows, and casts her eyes back to Celia. “Tiene un cuerpo bonito,” I hear my mother say without words. The gesture claims a kind of a personal ownership, by all our abuelitas, of that emergent tribe of Mexican young women that follow. Celia nods in agreement, smiling.

  Later, my mother and I will sit together in the quiet living room of the dementia unit. A gas flame creates the illusion of a real fire in the fake fireplace, logs stacked in a perfect zigzag arrangement. The day before, I had shared with JoAnn my worry over how to pass the time with our wordless mother. She had suggested magazines. “She likes to look at the pictures,” she said, “especially of beautiful things … flowers, gardens, bridesmaids.”

  I
grab one lying on the coffee table. It was a home-and-garden type, which I’m sure my sister had already shown my mother, and I am suddenly thankful for that small amnesia. The magazine yields anew dozens of pictures to which my mother can nod approvingly or frown at in displeasure. I turn the page and we land on the picture of a house whose rustic kitchen opens to a garden in full bloom. She points at the picture with enthusiasm; and then suddenly frowning, she indicates with her head the room in which we sit and the nearby kitchen area. There, elders are planted, some playing cards with attendants, others slumped in their wheelchairs in a nodding half sleep.

  “No.” She shakes her head. “Estoy cansada,” her eyes plead to me. And then I get it. The picture is of home, a home she longs for. “This is not it.” That many words she could say of this place of half-dead americanos and a stove that sits cold during the day. She wanted me to take her home.

  “Sí, Mamá,” I say, “real soon,” wanting to believe that I would one day steal her away and bring her home to me. Where the stove will stay warm all day long, I promise to myself. Moments later, she would cognitively forget this conversation; of that I could be sure, but the spirit does not forget.

  In the eighteen months my mother would spend at Expressions, her need for home was evident in all that she did. Her daily rituals mirrored what she had been accustomed to doing most of her life, from providing small tendernesses for other residents (patting the hand de una pobrecita) to cleaning crumbs from a tablecloth or rearranging shoes at the foot of a closet. Home had always provided my mother with a sense of purpose and sure-footedness in a slippery world. Bereft of her home, my mother improvised. Through pure invention, she created as much home as she could in her daily life.