Motherland

by Elissa Altman

  Avoiding the three of us, Susan and I invite a close friend— single father, recently divorced, a practicing Quaker—and his two little girls to join us for the holiday. They are vegetarians, and we have gone to lengths to cook extra dishes for them that they will enjoy. We have warned my mother far in advance of the day.

  We have a friend coming with small children, we said a month earlier.

  My mother’s face grew sour when we told her; her lips curled down in despair. My stomach dropped.

  Why, she asked.

  Because it’s their first holiday alone, and we wanted them with us, I said.

  But why, she asked.

  Because they’re our friends, I said.

  But I’m your mother, she said.

  On Thanksgiving, my mother steps out of the house as they pull in to the driveway in their red Prius, a bit dinged, covered in bumper stickers about Tibet and visualizing world peace. The car doors swing open and the little girls jump out excitedly, as little girls do. They throw their arms around me. I pick the little one up and she wraps her legs around my waist while my mother paces around the yard behind me.

  “Don’t they have a mother they can go to?”

  “Ma,” I say, spinning around.

  “I don’t understand why you feel the need to take everyone in, like stray dogs. What are you trying to prove? What have they done for you that I haven’t done?”

  She had been thinking about this for a month, ruminating on it, and lying in wait for the holiday to arrive.

  I put the smaller girl down. At five and seven, they stand stock-still and unblinking, clutching threadbare stuffed animals to their chests. My mother sticks her tongue out at them. They simultaneously burst into tears. Their father takes them for a walk to visit the miniature horses at a farm down the street. Inside the house, our local heritage breed turkey, stuffed with long-fermented sourdough cubes and heirloom apples, its skin massaged with sweet butter churned from the creamy milk of nearby pastured Hereford cows, roasts to a burnished bronze.

  “Get me a cab,” my mother demands. “I must go home.”

  “I can’t get you a cab. This is the country—and it’s Thanksgiving—please, Mom.”

  “Find one,” she growls. Her dark eyes go black and crazed; her mouth, twisted with fury, is set against her face growing paler with her anger and painted with a fierce red lipstick. She looks like Edobee, the eighteenth-century Kabuki warrior, menacing and malicious.

  “Just calm down,” I say. “Come inside. We’ll have a nice dinner.”

  I’m still in my apron, splattered with turkey stock. I follow her around the front yard, pleading; she’s strutting like a peacock, her back to me, struggling to release her black leather Miu Miu kitten heels, which get stuck in the lawn with every step.

  “I want to go home,” she says. “Or they have to leave. Don’t you know how much I love you, honey? I did not raise you to act like this—”

  Susan flies out of the house; the storm door slams behind her. She leaps off the top step of the porch and into the yard and grabs my mother by the lapels of her fur coat; bits of ancient sable float on the cool autumn air.

  “Behave yourself, Rita,” Susan says in a quiet, measured voice, “or you’re going home.”

  “How dare you,” my mother says, spitting with fury. “How dare you—Who the hell do you think you are to talk to me this way? I thought you were a Buddhist.”

  “Call her a car,” Susan says to me. “We’ll pay anything. Just get her out of here.”

  My stomach falls; my neck is wet. Sweat drips in a thin line down the small of my back. I can’t move my feet or feel my hands. Come home with me, my mother’s wide, hysterical eyes say. Come home to the city. You belong to me. We belong together.

  Two hundred dollars in cash transports my mother back to Manhattan on Thanksgiving Day.

  “I didn’t think you’d really do it—” she bellows when the Lincoln Town Car pulls in to our driveway. “So thank you very much. I am your mother.”

  The driver opens the door and helps her in. He offers her a bottle of water. Her mouth is still moving, she is still waving a finger at me so furiously that her charm bracelet rattles—I’ll fix you, she shouts; I’ll fix you—as he closes the door and she disappears behind the darkened window. They drive away.

  Susan links arms with me and we go into our house. The children return from the walk with their father.

  We sit down at the table with our friends. We give thanks. We eat.

  * * *

  —

  A month later, on this December Saturday night after my book tour, the radio is tuned to The Moth; Susan and I sit on the couch together, the dog at our feet, listening to quiet stories that are mundane and funny and tragic. The theme is survival and rescue. The voices are calming, intimate. We’ve made love—tender, generous, late-afternoon winter love between two middle-aged people decades familiar with each other’s bodies and their quirks: the aching left knee, the cramping foot, the torn rotator cuff, the inhibiting serotonin reuptake inhibitor. This is what we do, our routine, our home.

  The leftover turkey soup is bubbling on the stove when the phone rings. I hesitate to answer; I look at Susan, whose eyes are half closed as she listens intently to the voices on the radio. I think about letting the call go to voicemail.

  It had been the subject of a recent therapy session—my need to answer the phone, the inability to protect myself with a filter. The belief that whatever she was dishing out, I somehow deserved.

  “Why do you always feel the need to answer?” my therapist asked. “Love doesn’t mean you’re available twenty-four hours a day. Where does that compulsion come from—to answer every call, to be responsible for her fury?”

  “She might die—” I whispered.

  “You might die,” the therapist said. “An addiction. The belief that you have the power to ease her yearning—does it ever occur to you that she has you trained like a chimp?”

  “You have me trained like a chimp,” I cry when my mother calls again that night, the third time that day.

  “I sung with a chimp once on television,” she says. “His name was Zippy. He wore a blue snowsuit and shoved his hand down my dress while we were live. My God, even he wanted me. He bit Arlene Francis the next week. Are you still on that diet?”

  I stop answering all her calls, fourteen in one day when she was lonely and then sad and then happy and then enraged and she wanted to tell me everything, absolutely every single thing that happened to her, hour by hour, minute by minute. The bastard delivery boy from the deli brought her the wrong yogurt. The actors’ club where she sings every Friday night wants her to open the show but she hates the accompanist and needs rehearsals, if only she had some extra money.

  * * *

  —

  I get up from the couch and answer the call on the third ring. I drop the pitch of my voice as though it’s armor protecting my vital organs. I never know who will be on the other end: Happy Rita, who has just been stopped on the street by someone wanting to take her picture because they saw her on a television show, they think, and she’s not saying that she’s not Iris Apfel—my mother’s been wearing the glasses longer than Iris has—whom she hates because Iris is ninety and my mother is certainly not ninety. She might be pleasantly slurring Rita, asking after the dog. She might be furious Rita, hoping to fight, gloves off, demanding engagement and its addictive rush of endorphins.

  “Lissie—Lissie—”

  “Whut—”

  She wheezes and pants and gasps.

  Heart attack: the stopping of the engine, the breakdown of the motor that has propelled her through an unforgiving world that’s done her wrong at every turn. With her cholesterol in the four hundreds and a bleak family history, I am sure that this is what will take her, the way it took Gaga.

 
“Darling—” she says. “Darling—my ankle is broke—broke—”

  “What?”

  “Broke—please—”

  “Impossible,” I say. “That can’t be—”

  My mother is immune to damage; she bounces like a rubber ball, she is unbreakable, unstoppable. She will live forever, and my job is to keep her whole, to keep her from exploding into pieces like a crystal globe dropped from a window.

  There is no break, I decide.

  “Please—” she cries. “Please—”

  She is squealing like a baby; she is frightened, alone. It is a voice I’ve never heard.

  * * *

  • • •

  “SHE WILL PROBABLY FALL,” HER doctor told me months earlier, while my mother got dressed in the examination room down the hall.

  We were no longer cautious about our conversations; the rules and limits about what a physician can say to an adult daughter whose older mother is not taking care of herself can be bent when that mother is in danger.

  For years, my mother went to her appointments on her own, picking and choosing what to share with both me and her physicians, editing out unnecessary details: her unhealthfully low weight, severe depression, the Parkinson’s that blazes through our family like wildfire. There were crashing blood sugar problems for which she ate cheap bars of chocolate hidden half unwrapped in her purse, a wheat allergy ameliorated by twice-daily slices of white sandwich bread, hip pains for which she took a tiny orange antihistamine tablet strong enough to sedate an elephant, a troubling family cardiac history that she’d conveniently forgotten.

  “So what did the doctor say?” I’d ask, calling her after her appointments.

  “Oh, nothing—I stopped at Bergdorf on the way home for a lipstick.”

  “They couldn’t have said nothing, Mom—”

  “Everything is just perfect,” she’d say, lightly. “Would you rather I be sick? I’m sure you would.”

  Magical thinking: I began to believe her, to believe that nothing would ever go wrong, simply because she was so beautiful. Apart from having a small cyst removed from her delicate collarbone, my mother was never once sick when I was a child: There were no flus, no colds, no infections, no stomach viruses or food poisonings, no cuts, no scrapes, no tumbles. Maladies large and small leaped a generation as though I had taken on the mantle of illness for both of us, carrying in my cells the imperfect, unattractive weight of affliction. I was unwell all the time, spiking dangerously high fevers with every sniffle. As a child, I terrorized her with my routine viruses to the degree that she simply could not bring herself to care for me. It was too upsetting; she loved me too much. She entrusted my nursing to my father and to an older woman who lived in our building, a medical technologist with a boutique practice in Manhattan. When I got sick as a teenager, my mother’s remedy was to take me shopping, propping me up against the inside of dressing rooms all over the city, holding outfits up against me, imploring me to smile because it was impossible to be sick and beautiful at the same time. My mother’s health—the fact of her aging, her living or dying—is bound up in her beauty, as if her looks themselves will protect her from the absolute inevitability of death.

  If she stays beautiful, she will live forever.

  * * *

  —

  “It will be a hip or a femur,” her doctor told me while my mother got dressed in the room down the hall. A pleasant woman in her early fifties, she seemed weary in her white coat, stethoscope around her neck, a hint of crusting mascara on her glasses. Caring for older patients who would not—could not—come to terms with their own limitations weighed on her.

  “She doesn’t eat,” she went on. “She’s afraid of gaining weight. She’s built like a bird. She says she’s taking the osteo medication I gave her, but I don’t think that’s true. There’s no change to her test results.”

  “What osteo medication?” I asked. “I didn’t fill anything—”

  Older people—even outlandishly stunning and impetuous ones who get stopped on the street by Vogue to have their photos taken, and who their children believe will simply never age—are regressive. Young children feed their vitamins to the family dog, slipping them under the table when they think no one is looking. Teenagers hide their indiscretions from their parents: A joint is flushed, school is cut, the family car borrowed for a joyride out of state, pills are filched from a medicine cabinet. Older people are no different: Lies are told, stories spun, promises broken. A neighbor’s ninety-year-old father, restricted by his children and the state from driving, mows down a neighborhood mailbox and, in the process, an orange cat. A once-wealthy woman spends her money on cheap street jewelry and Vuitton knockoffs sold by Liberian refugees; penniless, she tells her daughter, who is supporting her, that they were gifts from her neighbor. A friend’s mother, at eighty-five and suffering from vertigo, props her rusting metal extension ladder against the side of her two-story colonial and cleans her gutters; she tells her daughter that the boy next door did it, even though he’s in Afghanistan on his second tour of duty. “He was on leave,” she shrugs to her daughter, certain that her daughter will believe her.

  These are not manifestations of dementia; these are mystical truths. Our lives are bound up in the vast human capacity for illusion, and older people believe that they are still the decision makers, the choosers, the planners, the ones in control. They are the same at ninety and eighty as they were at fifty.

  “Osteo medication is for old people,” my mother told the doctor. “I refuse to take it. And Dick says it will kill me.”

  “He’s wrong,” her doctor said. “Not taking it will kill you.”

  “He’s not wrong,” my mother said. “He’s a man.”

  Her doctor wrote the prescription anyway and stuffed it into my mother’s hand. She visited the bathroom, reapplied her lipstick, tore the prescription up, and threw it into the trash on her way out of the office, on her last visit without me.

  “Did she give you anything new?” I asked when she got home.

  “No,” my mother lied. “Nothing at all. I stopped at Bergdorf.”

  * * *

  —

  Sitting on the floor of her den on the Upper West Side, propped against the new beige linen pullout sofa where we sleep when we visit, my mother drops the phone and passes out. She comes back for a minute and passes out again. At some point, she crawls into the bathroom, sheds her soiled robe and pajama bottoms like snakeskin, and slithers back to the bedroom. She passes out again.

  It takes two hours to get from our house in northern Connecticut to her apartment, which is locked. No one else—not the doorman, the super, a neighbor, a friend, a cousin in Riverdale—has a key; it’s a trust thing that dates back to the seventies, when New York City apartment break-ins were common. Unless we can get there quickly, an ambulance will have to remove the door, which is secured with three Israeli-made high-security locks installed by a man who used to work for the Mossad. The papers she will need for the hospital are buried amid old sheet music, press clippings, and bank statements, in half a dozen massive white plastic shopping bags left over from when she and Ben were furriers to the stars, thirty years earlier. Each bag is large enough to hold a king-sized down comforter; they are strewn all over the apartment as though they were picked up and flung around in a cyclone.

  “Someday, my darling,” she likes to say, “I will show you where all the important things are. The good jewelry. Grandpa’s watch. The papers.”

  A rare acknowledgment of mortality, of the fact that life is finite and fixed, with a beginning and an end. There is no one else but me—I have no siblings, she has no siblings or spouse; there are no aunts or uncles or even friends anymore—and that at some point, I will be charged with her care and the settlement of her affairs. Someday, she will be gone.

  “You’re all I’ve got, my darling,” she will say. “You
’re all there is.”

  On this December night, with her left ankle a pale blue explosion of softened bone and sinew and atrophied muscle, and her right fifth metatarsal splintered like a dry Popsicle stick, she waits for us, dazed and in shock. When we arrive, I discover I have left behind one of her keys on my entryway table; I can’t get in. She drags herself half naked to the front door, reaches up from the floor as high as her thin, mottled arms will stretch, turns the doorknob, and collapses in a heap.

  6

  WHEN WE MET, SUSAN LIVED in a tiny gray half-Cape twenty-five miles west of Hartford, set back from a narrow, winding country road behind an unfinished picket fence. The right size for one person and a dog, which at that time comprised Susan’s immediate family—it was just she and McGillicuddy, a black curly-coated retriever with leaves in her fur and unsure of her own canine status—the house stood at the top of a hill overlooking a perfectly flat, sun-splashed acre of land push-mowed twice weekly in the heat of the summer by Susan’s mother, Helen, who lived nearby and was, at the time, eighty-two.

  Susan’s little house was filled with broad washes of light and air. Heavy iron shoemaking forms once belonging to Susan’s farmer grandmother, who handmade oxfords for the twenty-two feet of her eleven children, propped open doors and the wide slider that led from the kitchen to the deck and down to the backyard. A square skylight was set into the roof directly above the bed we shared; a pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks sat on its edge one late afternoon and watched us sleep. A window behind the stove was perpetually in need of being cleaned of grease from the dinners that Susan cooked for herself in the house’s perfectly square kitchen; it faced a massive 1930s three-bowl farmhouse sink above which hung a wide bookshelf housing old cookbooks from the sixties and seventies, including Susan’s childhood copy of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, from which she produced for her mother and father Sole Mornay one night when she was twelve. At the right time of day, sun blazed through the house like a laser: the bed, the sink, the books were illuminated.