Motherland

by Elissa Altman

  That’s not my problem.

  So, no papers.

  “Are there any other children?” the nurse asks. “Grandchildren?”

  “No other children. No grandchildren. My wife and I have no children.”

  The words catch in my throat like a fish bone. My eyes burn from the ammonia in the air.

  “A husband? She’s wearing a wedding ring.”

  “It’s her mother’s,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  Susan and I have been awake for thirty hours, sixteen of which have been spent sitting in folding chairs alongside my mother’s stretcher, while they pump her full of Demerol. She fights them; they threaten restraints; she screams. My chest aches when I look at her. I want to run, to take Susan by the hand and flee down the hallway, out to York Avenue, back to our car, back to Connecticut. I want to run, to stay, to reach out and hold her hand, to comfort her. It feels alien, like tearing through a membrane.

  “They won’t touch her until she signs a directive,” the nurse says. “Her age. Hospital liability.”

  She has never discussed her plans with me. I have no idea what she does or doesn’t want. Whether she would sign a DNR or even where she wants to be buried. There is no cemetery plot. Cemeteries repel and repulse her; she has never visited her parents, since her mother died in 1982. When I begged her to draw up the most basic of healthcare proxies after my father died in a car accident, she found an entertainment lawyer in the Yellow Pages who charged her four hundred dollars for his time, printed the papers off the internet, and never had them notarized. But he promised to make her a star.

  “He’ll do things for me,” she warned “—so don’t you mix in and screw it up.”

  I call our lawyer in Connecticut on Sunday morning, the day after the accident. In three hours we have a directive in hand, along with a new healthcare proxy. My mother agrees to sign both of them in front of the hospital notary public.

  “You are not allowed to speak during this process,” he says to me.

  He turns to my mother.

  “In your own words, do you want to be resuscitated?”

  “Are you crazy? Of course I do! Over and over and over again. That’s a ridiculous question. Are you one of those people who think everyone over sixty should be allowed to die?”

  “Do you want a feeding tube if one is necessary, Ma’am?”

  “A what?”

  “A feeding tube,” he says.

  “Up my nose?”

  “Down your throat, to provide you with nutrients. With food—”

  “Absolutely not,” she says. “I’ll eat when I’m hungry. I don’t need anyone feeding me.”

  The notary looks at me. I can’t speak.

  “Do you understand that you’re saying you want to be resuscitated but that you don’t want the nourishment needed to keep you alive? You may be unconscious—”

  “I understand exactly what I’m saying,” she says. “No food unless I ask for it. I refuse to get fat.”

  * * *

  —

  We sit in a crowded, musty waiting room filled to capacity. An extended family—siblings and friends and neighbors, a young man in gang colors—gather around the mother of a stabbing victim, who is being interviewed by a police officer. A group of Orthodox Jewish men, black-hatted and ancient-eyed, pray quietly near an eastern-facing window for an elder undergoing heart surgery. A tired Hispanic woman, her eyes red and swollen from crying, sits by herself. An old friend, an infectious disease nurse who works at the hospital, comes by during a break from her shift and waits with us.

  The act of waiting is not a sentimental one; to see people, related by blood or not, sitting quietly in a badly furnished, airless room, its noise level artificially flattened by the din of wall-mounted televisions tuned to the banal and the ridiculous, is to come face-to-face with the tribal. We don’t sit with people and wait for the tumor to be excised or the heart to be repaired or the incision to be stitched. We sit and wait as evidence of life and circle, as a way to peer together over the edge of possibility and time. We sit and wait because the human condition is not to be alone; not to be abandoned.

  A ten-hour surgery to reconstruct my mother’s ankle with an articulated plate and seventy-five titanium screws secured to spongy osteoporotic bone.

  At hour four, I have a massive spontaneous nosebleed that leaves me woozy and my heart racing. Susan cleans me up, holds my hand, tilts my head back.

  * * *

  —

  I am called by the recovery room nurse.

  “She’s awake,” she says, “but she’s very groggy. You can stay for five minutes.”

  I imagine it this way:

  I will creep in and hold her hand. I will kiss her forehead. She will whisper I love you, Lissie. I will whisper back I love you too, Mom. I always have.

  Dark mascara streaks run down the sides of her face into her ears. Evidence of the lipstick they wiped off before they intubated her is smeared across one cheek.

  “I’m so sorry for everything,” she says in a hoarse voice, barely recognizable.

  “I’m sorry too, Mom,” I say, rubbing her hand. “I love you. I’m so sorry—”

  Tears that will not stop.

  I rest my head on the side of her bed. She rakes her fingers through my hair.

  “Lissie darling—get your highlights—”

  “I love you so much, Mom.”

  * * *

  —

  I am led down the hallway by the surgical waiting room manager. My mother is in the first bed with a dedicated post-op nurse named Svetlana, who is monitoring her vitals.

  There is giggling. I stand at the foot of my mother’s bed. She is flat on her back, her feet elevated in huge plastic cam boots. She and Svetlana are laughing.

  “I told her to Google me up, honey,” my mother slurs, lifting her head. She waves at me with a limp hand, her pupils wide as black marbles.

  Svetlana spins my mother’s monitor around so that I can see her blood pressure, blood oxygen level, pulse. She wants me to see how well my mother is doing, after such a hideous accident and the violent daylong surgery required to save her.

  There on the screen is my mother on a recent fashion website, dressed in an orange sheared mink shrug thrown over a silk blouse the color of bone, with her massive round signature glasses and bright red lipstick. She poses for the camera on her terrace, unsmiling and cool, nostrils flared, chin tipped up, hand on her hip. She floats twenty-one stories above the Upper West Side, the rest of Manhattan behind her in the distance, everyone walking and walking, all of them a blur.

  11

  HER RIGHT KNEE IS BENT inward toward her left, her left foot pointed away from its mate, its tender and narrow ankle sharply rolled under and on to the ball of her foot, to near disjoint. The intended effect: a slimming of the leg, a prim taunt, a come-hither beckoning.

  In 1980, with the ink not yet dry on her divorce papers, my mother takes up tennis. Ben, whom she will marry in a year, belongs to a Westchester country club on a narrow country road anchored from end to end with yellow clapboard farmhouses. She wants me to teach her how to play. I’m suspicious. My mother hates sports. She has no eye-hand coordination. She hates to sweat. She owns no sneakers, no shorts, no polo shirts, no sweat socks, no T-shirts. She’s never swung a tennis racquet before in her life.

  Teaching her how to play tennis feels like a ploy, a mercenary setup.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I say. “Why?”

  She has barged into my bedroom, dressed for the day in a jewel-toned jacquard Missoni sweater and loose raw linen trousers the color of wheat. She fingers my grandmother’s massive jade beads, which she has recently begun wearing like a talisman: green, she says, is the color of money.

  I am sixteen. A pair of stereo headphon
es hangs around my neck like a choker. I roll my eyes, I laugh at her. Her face turns red. I snicker. I’m wary and I’m cruel and I want nothing to do with her. The Eagles’ Greatest Hits is on my turntable. I found out a long time ago what a woman can do to your soul.

  “Because I asked you—that’s why,” she says through clenched teeth. “Because I am your mother. I. Am. Your. Mother. I demand that you teach me.”

  Fuck, I mumble under my breath. Fuck it.

  “Can’t you just ask the pro?”

  Nick is twenty, Bain de Soleil–tanned, with a mane of shaggy blond hair that makes him look like a cross between Bjorn Borg and a golden retriever. Every day at one, when the sun is at its highest point in the sky, he pulls his shirt off and plays in only his tennis shoes, socks, and tiny white shorts, a tuft of golden man fur sprouting deep from the cavern of his back. He loves the ladies and they love him. Mrs. Stone, whose husband is in drapery, has a seasonal room at the club, and Nick delivers her dinner himself every night while Mr. Stone stays back in the city. Why, I want to know, can’t my mother ask Nick.

  “Because I want you—” my mother says, pointing down at me like Uncle Sam.

  The tennis court is my territory, a planet in the universe I’ve constructed for myself where I keep the rest of the world at bay. While my high school friends are blowing their boyfriends in the back of bright orange Firebirds parked in abandoned lots all over Queens, I spend every afternoon in a nearby middle school playground pounding a fucking ball against a fucking wall for hours before dinner. Eventually, I play competitively—there will be camps and teams and closets stuffed with racquets and crates of balls—and our living room will be covered with plaques that hang from the wall and trophies that stand on the piano next to my mother’s loving cup. Tennis belongs to me. She wants what is mine.

  “So can I borrow your shorts?” she says. “I’d ask Ellen, but she’s too fat.”

  “Ellen’s a six, Mom—”

  Our next-door neighbor is tiny, an Auschwitz survivor who, tormented with grief and guilt, stopped eating once the war was over.

  “I want yours. The pleated ones.”

  “You hate pleats.”

  “GIVE ME YOUR SHORTS OR I WILL KILL MYSELF!”

  She balls up her fists and fake-beats them on the sides of her head. The dog, who has been asleep on my bed, runs into the living room, his tail between his legs.

  I grew up in a home where the threat of suicide was tossed over one’s shoulder like grains of salt. Put on more lipstick or I’ll kill myself, my mother shrieked every morning when I left our apartment for middle school, and every afternoon, I stopped on the street, halfway home, and reapplied my Bonne Bell Lipsmacker, terrified that I’d open our door and there she’d be, stretched out on the plastic-covered love seat like Jacques-Louis David’s painting of Marat dead in his bathtub.

  My diary for this day, written in runny blue Bic pen in a gray lab notebook plastered with Mirabai Bush rainbows and daisies:

  Mom. Suicide. Shorts.

  “Take them,” I say, pulling a pair out of my dresser drawer. She storms out and slams the door. Paint crackles off the frame and onto the floor.

  Five minutes later, she is back.

  “So what do you think?” she asks.

  She poses in front of my mirror, left foot out, ankle down, hands on her hips. A hair toss, and she grabs an inch of loose material from beneath her navel and grimaces. She turns to the side, looks over her shoulder, sucks in her cheeks.

  “I can safety-pin the waist. When did you get so big?”

  She leaves in a blur.

  I lock the door, strip my T-shirt and bra off, and stare into my full-length mirror, dressed from the waist down in worn Levi’s and navy blue Pro Keds.

  I put my hand on the tiny mark under my left breast, at the top of my rib cage. I close my eyes.

  * * *

  • • •

  ON A LATE SATURDAY MORNING between the end of summer and the start of my senior year in high school, I travel by subway from our apartment to Grand Central Station. I ride Metro-North up to the Mount Kisco stop in northern Westchester, where a local taxi picks me up and takes me, my tennis clothes, and a bag of racquets and balls up to the Valley Club, where my mother has arrived with Ben a day earlier. By noon, mother and daughter stand face-to-face on the dusty green Har-Tru tennis court. I am on one side of the net in my white Izod polo shirt and red nylon gym shorts. My mother stands on the other side in a tight white sequined Studio 54 T-shirt, full makeup, and jewelry: a few massive turquoise and silver pieces from Mexico, her broken mood ring, the little round monogrammed gold charm that I bought for her birthday, massive gold hoop earrings, my grandmother’s jade. My pleated white Fred Perry shorts hang away from her narrow legs like a potato sack. She wears white leather Capezio ballet flats with nude nylon peds. She does not intend to run.

  “Shake hands with the racquet, Ma,” I say. “Make friends with it.”

  She holds it loosely in an eastern grip, the racquet head at eye level.

  “Take it back the minute the ball crosses the net. Okay? And keep your eye on the ball.”

  She nods. She walks back to the T. She gives her Toni Tennille bowl haircut a toss and straightens her spine. She holds the racquet up the way I told her to.

  “Ready,” I call out through megaphone hands.

  My mother tucks an errant strand of mahogany hair behind her ear, rests the racquet on her shoulder the way they do in Town and Country, and poses as though she’s in the showroom: right knee in toward her left, left foot pointing away toward the next court, left ankle parallel to the ground, her instep almost brushing the court.

  A few of the club’s members—tidy Westchester ladies wearing gold add-a-bead necklaces and Lilly Pulitzer tennis dresses and carrying wooden-handled, monogrammed Bermuda bags—are gathered around by the chain-link fence.

  “Ready…hold your racquet the way I said—”

  She nods again, fiddles with her hair. She looks around her. She knows she’s being watched. She holds her head up, rests the racquet on her shoulder, and poses. The ball sails over the net and past her to the fence.

  “Let’s try again…Can you at least swing?”

  She nods. She fiddles with her hair. She looks around and sighs. She’s bored and distracted. She poses. I lob another ball across the net. It sails past her and jangles off the fence.

  “Can you leave your hair alone?”

  She drops the racquet and walks to the net.

  “There is no reason not to look good,” she says through clenched teeth.

  The club ladies think that mother and daughter are up at the net discussing grips and strokes and swings and whether a two-handed backhand is more effective than the traditional version. I squint up at her head, which is blocking the rays of the sun like an eclipse.

  “You’re not in the showroom, forgoddsake,” I say. “Why did you even bring me here?”

  “Don’t you dare talk to me that way,” she growls. “You’re just trying to make me look bad because you don’t like Ben. You want me to be alone. I know why you’re doing this—I’m sending you home.”

  “Don’t send me,” I say, starting to walk off the court. “I’m leaving.”

  “If you leave, I’ll change the locks. I’ll throw your things out.”

  “I’ll go to Gaga’s.”

  “She won’t let you in either.”

  Silence.

  We glare at each other, panting and snorting like hot, angry animals: me, the tomboy daughter she never expected to have, the one she had no idea what to do with, the one who was not her mirror image. She, the bombshell mother, full of beauty and longing and regret. A showdown on a tennis court in the middle of Westchester on a sunny Saturday afternoon. The O.K. Corral with Tab and grosgrain headbands.

  She threat
ens me with banishment: She will turn me away, set me loose in the desert to wander, the Torah’s sacrifice—the Azazel, the scapegoat. I will throw you out and my life will go on. I imagine stepping off the elevator, turning right down the hallway toward our apartment, and all of my things—my suitcases, guitars, mandolins, tennis racquets, albums, stereo, books—piled up outside the door, like the Joads right before Tom straps everything to the Ford. The piano, bought for me by Gaga and taken over as a piece of living room furniture, stays behind.

  I imagine going across the street to Gaga’s. I ring the doorbell.

  “Go away,” Gaga says through the tiny metal peephole above the doorbell. “We don’t want you anymore.”

  Because of tennis. Because my mother didn’t swing her racquet.

  * * *

  —

  On this day at Ben’s Westchester country club, tucked quietly down a leafy road off Route 22, I have been lured into the role of foil; I am ever, always hopeful that by giving her what she wants, what she needs—Who might the mark on my rib have become?—she will be happy and safe, the desperation will dissipate and slow, and we will be re-formed, and our relationship made fresh and new.

  This time will be different; we will be healed.

  My mother has as much interest in playing tennis as in performing brain surgery. This is a performance, a recital of sorts, meant not for us but for the other club women—the Bermuda bag ladies who have standing weekend games with their coltish teenage private school daughters with names like Bitsy and Muffy—to see us together on the court, Brenda Potemkin and her doting mother, wealthy, loving, inseparable. An affectionate daughter teaching her adoring mother how to play the game of the rich and well-heeled, the assimilated and American. A mother genuinely interested in her only child’s favorite activity. If I don’t play the role she has assigned me, I will fail her.

  * * *