Motherland

by Elissa Altman

  I took her out to lunch the following week. We gaped at each other coldly over bowls of salad and long, narrow bread sticks. She stared at my hair. She ordered a glass of wine. I drank water.

  “Mom—” I said. “I have to tell you something.”

  I wept; she knew.

  “Are you telling me you’re gay?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry, Mom—”

  “It’s not possible,” she said. “I didn’t raise you that way.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Do you have to look like Fran Lebowitz?”

  “What—?”

  “I know you like suits. This is your father’s fault—”

  “I can’t even—”

  “Does he know?”

  “Yes—”

  Her face turned purple.

  “So you told him before you told me?”

  * * *

  —

  No one—not family or friends or colleagues—had known about the brief, intense relationship I had with my roommate, Julie, years earlier. That we had been gifted the keys to a friend’s cabin in New Hampshire and, driving north into a blinding snowstorm, arrived, built a fire in the wood-burning stove, got into bed, and never left. No one knew that she could not tolerate the thought of being involved with a woman and brought man after man home to our apartment while I lay in the guest room on the other side of the wall, listening to them fuck like bunnies.

  I was madly in love with her. I was gay. Julie, however, was not; she was experimenting. One day I came home from work to find her sitting on our couch sipping a cup of herbal tea, her dog-eared copy of Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization by her side. A rose quartz geode the size of a cantaloupe glimmered on the maple Conran end table next to her; Windham Hill’s December played on our tape deck; clouds of patchouli incense filled the air. Her blue eyes were wet. Before I had a chance to take my coat off, she said she’d had enough; she was ready to get on with her life. Hers was the primary name on our lease; when it was up, she would be moving to San Francisco to do an AIDS research fellowship. I needed to be out within the month. I had no money, no apartment, and nowhere to go. She gave me a small black velvet sack of rainbow tourmaline to purify my heart chakra. She gave me the cats.

  The night that Julie asked me to leave, I took a taxi to my mother’s apartment. We ordered Chinese takeout. We stood in the kitchen drinking white wine, and I lied that the woman she knew only as my roommate was going back to Nebraska to be closer to her family. She knitted her brow; she was poised for a fight. She didn’t need to know anything else about us; she didn’t need to know that I loved someone who wasn’t her.

  “So you can come here,” my mother said. “You can live here again with me and Ben, darling. You don’t need that whore anyway.”

  She pronounced it who-a: a Brooklyn, old-country way.

  “She’s not a whore, Mom—why would you even call her that?” I said.

  My mother categorized people in the binary: friend, enemy. If she was no longer my friend, then she was my enemy. A lowlife. Trash.

  A whore.

  “You should never have moved out of this apartment,” she said. “That was your first mistake.”

  “It was for my own health, Mom—” I said.

  “That’s bullshit. You just hate me—” Her face began to flush. “The doctor turned you against me. And that Haffner shrink of yours. I know the truth.”

  “I can’t move back in with you and Ben—”

  “Of course you can—you just don’t want to.”

  “I’m twenty-eight years old, Mom. I can’t live with you—”

  “I lived with Gaga until I met your father. I was twenty-six—”

  “I’m not talking about you, Mom,” I said. “I’m talking about me.”

  “You’re never talking about me,” she said. “It’s always about you—”

  “I’m sorry, Mom—” I said.

  “I’ll buy you a fur coat—”

  “I don’t want a fur coat, Mom. I hate fur.”

  “I have given you everything—You don’t know what I gave up for you. Your goddamned father took everything from me and now, who are you? Miss PETA? So where are you going to go? Who else could you possibly have in your life?”

  14

  BEEP: SO THE PLANE IS missing. Call me.

  Beep: A search party. This is terrible. Good thing that Jackie’s dead. Where the hell are you?

  Beep: Her sister also. Cape Cod. Can’t believe it. I asked you to call me.

  Beep: The wedding, it’s off. That Carolyn is such a ferbisinah. He had to marry someone with his sister’s name? I am your mother. I am not dead. Call me.

  Beep: So do you want to go to P.J. Clarke’s? I’m going to Bloomie’s. I’ll meet you in the lobby in an hour.

  Beep: Stop playing these games with me. I’m calling the police already.

  * * *

  —

  I apply the mascara first. I go over my eyelashes with the wand again and again, slowly, carefully, until my eyes are glued nearly shut as they might be with sickness, obscured by a waxy black debris that flakes off onto my cheekbones; I can barely see. My lips are engorged; they are dry and hot. I swipe on a bright red lipstick, again and again, around and around, covering my mouth, philtrum, chin, until the entire tube is gone, the stick worn flat to a scarlet button. I powder my face with a cobwebbed lamb’s wool ball of the sort that might be stuffed into a ballerina’s toe shoe. It is stapled into a yellow Bakelite handle crazed with time; the wool smells like corn silk. The puff is the size of a round bed pillow. I powder and powder until clouds of grayish pink dust fill the air around me. I cough. I brush my hair back with Gaga’s long-handled dressing table brush, encrusted with rhinestones and strands of long white hair matted into its bristles. I turn to look in the lovely mirror that hangs over my dresser—it is white and pink, with dainty antique roses hand-painted between each of the drawer’s round wooden handles; it is part of a set that includes a canopy bed, which my mother’s father gave to me the year that he died—and what looks back is not human. Yellow and gray and pink, its eyes glued shut with hardening black paste, its lips polished until the blood-red scarlet wax coats the underside of the nose, which hangs like a boneless chicken breast, ugly and flaccid, over the mouth.

  The moment in sleep when it is impossible to move, as though one has been pumped with curare: sleep paralysis. It presages in mythology what sleep scientists call the Night Hag Attack and its related hallucinations, voices, terrors, which occur, according to sleep specialists, during the hypnagogic, parasomniac stage. On this day in 1999, this makeup monster, half-living, half-dead, stares back at me from my childhood mirror. It is an overlay, a maternal triptych, a golem: my mother and Gaga and me, young and old, then and now, past and future.

  I wake to find Viola, my tuxedo cat, sitting on my chest, cleaning my eyes, my lips, my cheeks, my hair, as if I were a kitten. Cleo, my Siamese, is nestled against the small of my back, asleep. I’m not sure of the time. The track lights above my sleigh bed are on. The answering machine is beeping; I hear my mother’s voice. Something about John-John. A truck outside on Fifty-Eighth Street is going in reverse.

  * * *

  —

  Days earlier.

  I have taken the crosstown bus to the Upper West Side in order to feed a friend’s new poodle puppy; my friend has gotten stuck at her job downtown and can’t get back to her apartment in time to change the newspaper she’s put down in her kitchen, to play with the pup, to feed and water her. I pick up my friend’s keys from the man she’s been sleeping with—he’s married; he can’t be seen going into her apartment himself; the neighbors are gossiping—and I let myself in. I climb over the plastic baby gate that keeps Laverne in the kitchen and peeing on the paper that has been set down on the kitchen
floor. I clean everything up. I put down fresh paper. I feed her. I throw a small stuffed moose across the room for her again and again; she doesn’t tire of the game and retrieves it for an hour until it’s a damp, sucked-upon mess and she is exhausted. I get up to leave and feel dizzy. I drink a glass of cold water. I sit down on the floor with Laverne, who is pleased that I’ve decided to stay. I wake up two hours later, the gray speckled linoleum cool against my back, pinned down by a small, furry weight. Laverne is stretched out on top of me, her little black nose resting on my chest.

  I take a taxi home, across Central Park and down to Fifty-Seventh Street. I put dishes of food down for my cats, wet and dry, and fill their water bowl. I kick off my sandals, pull the covers back on my bed, and pass out in my clothes.

  For the coming days, I will sleep and wake at six-hour intervals. When my temperature hits one hundred and four, I take two Tylenol, which will bring the fever down fast enough for me to get up and change my soaked sheets, pull a fresh T-shirt out of my drawer and put it on, and climb back into bed. I sleep and sleep; when the Tylenol wears off, a violent rattling wakes me, my skin burning and sore to the touch as if I have been baked on a hot dry stone.

  The illness—sudden, untraceable; this is the middle of summer and not flu season—is a purge, an emetic. I am releasing something. I have carried it with me like a bucket, heavy with mud, and with every step my health has dimmed. I am sick. I am alone. The phone is ringing; the Kennedys.

  I am your mother. I am not dead. Call me.

  I will not call. I let it go.

  A shift; I will leave New York, or I will die.

  * * *

  • • •

  WEEKS EARLIER:

  We had been sitting on my friend’s couch in North Carolina, not far from Chapel Hill. I had traveled south from New York to attend a small literary festival. Laura, whom I had known during the summers of my sleepaway camp childhood in Pennsylvania—she had been my counselor for seven years—lived close by and worked at the university. I found her email address through a random search after hearing that she was living there and working in academia. We were in touch for the first time in decades.

  I wrote; she wrote back. We spoke as though no time had passed. We talked about jobs lost and found. About moving with Jennifer, her partner of two decades, from Texas to Georgia to North Carolina. Rounding the corner in her life where she had spent more time living with her partner than not, she spoke in befores and afters. The challenges of living as gay women in a region that is still, in some pockets, small-minded and relentless in its bigotry. She asked if I was single; I said I was. She asked for my mother.

  Is she still so beautiful? she wrote. I remember her on visiting day. None of the other mothers looked like her. She seemed completely out of place, disoriented. I remember you crying when she arrived with your father. Nobody else cried when their mothers arrived.

  She’s still beautiful, I wrote back.

  We talked about camp, and that it seemed to be another lifetime ago. That every day after dinner, when the other girls were playing tennis or meeting boys behind the camp laundry, she would watch me hike into the vast fields behind girls’ campus that abutted a local dairy farm overgrown at its edges with lamb’s quarters and chickweed. I would sit on the ground, up to my shoulders in tall grass, obscured, watching the cows graze just beyond the fence. I was drawn to the silence and the quiet, a place where my head could be clear. My mother had warned her that at home I had become moody and glum and asked her to keep an eye on me; I seemed to have retreated into myself.

  * * *

  —

  I flew down to Raleigh-Durham and Laura picked me up at the airport on a hot June day.

  We hugged and took a step back so that we could get a better look at each other. I was in my early thirties; she was in her early forties. She hadn’t changed, apart from a few strands of graying dark hair.

  As a teenager, Laura had always been kind and warm, but not willing to take any bullshit from her young, hormonal, often obnoxious charges; she exuded competence and self-possession even at sixteen. I knew, in the wordless way that one does, a particular unknown known: that she was somehow different, and so was I. When we reconnected as adults, I came out to her on a long hike with Jennifer and their dogs in the hills outside of Chapel Hill.

  Well, of course, she said.

  I knew about you forever, we both said.

  When? we asked simultaneously.

  Always, we answered.

  We stopped at a brook to let the animals swim.

  “So is there anyone?” she asked.

  There isn’t, I told her.

  “Anyone you’re interested in?”

  I’m not.

  “Dating?”

  Not really.

  “Sex?”

  Sometimes.

  “Why?”

  I threw a stick for one of the dogs.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s so beautiful down here,” I said to her that night. We were sitting on her couch drinking glasses of wine while Jennifer made dinner. It was quiet, apart from an army of peepers loud enough to be heard in the next state.

  “There’s a lot of work down here,” she said. “It’s cheaper than New York—”

  “Everything is cheaper than New York—”

  “Why don’t you think about moving? We’ll help—”

  “I can’t—” I said, quickly.

  It was instant; a reflexive no, like stepping on a tack.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t abandon her—”

  The words hung in the air between us. Laura shook her head.

  “Liss,” she said, “you are never going to meet anyone until your heart is ready to leave.”

  I know, I said.

  “It’s time for you to have your own life.”

  I know.

  “It’s time for you to go—”

  15

  MY MOTHER IS SHARING A hospital room with a long-haired Mongolian woman in her forties who is dying from stomach cancer. An assortment of people have flown in from the other side of the world to translate, to hold the woman’s hand, to sit vigil night and day with her while decisions are made: If she can survive the flight, can she return to Ulaanbaatar to die at home, or will she return to the small apartment in Flushing that she shares with six other women, for hospice care? There is no money for continued treatment; there is no insurance.

  “The other women will help,” someone says.

  “Are there any children?” a hospital administrator asks.

  Doctors, residents, interns, clipboards in hand, all want to know who is the responsible party.

  No, the people around her keep answering: No children. Alone.

  “It’s like Grand Central Station in here,” my mother whispers to me, lowering the volume on her television. “The poor thing—it’s so depressing that they can’t do anything for her—she’s up all night. They should put her in a private room. It scares me that she is alone.”

  My mother reaches up for my hand and elevates her bed so she can see a bit better.

  She is neither alive nor dead, this young woman in the bardo who floats in and out of consciousness, between two worlds. My mother is terrorized by her proximity to the unknown; she can’t control it, can’t manipulate it, can’t pretty it up. After I leave, she throws a full bedpan; she asks for Xanax; she asks to be moved; she files a complaint against an aide who doesn’t instantly respond to her; she squeezes the call buzzer for hours until the nurse’s station, monitoring her remotely, disconnects it; she self-soothes and calls the Clinique counter at Saks to order hundreds of dollars’ worth of a pale lavender face milk, to be delivered to her bed in the hospital. I have her wallet but the salesgirl has her credit card on file. The fact of the situation in her mi
dst, of the seeming hopelessness of it all—a young woman, alone, dying just a few feet away from her in a strange hospital in a strange place, an anonymous body in this sterile universe of gauze and suture—renders my mother hysterical. She can’t get up and walk away, walk anywhere, walk to Saks, walk home.

  “But she is not alone, Ma,” I say. “She has people with her at all times.”

  A tribe standing watch over the woman has assembled to talk to her in the words she knows—untaakh, they say like a mother to her baby; sleep, sleep—to make sure that when she opens her eyes, someone is always there. What could possibly have more meaning as one draws one’s last breath than this: They have come to help ease her way.

  “But no children,” my mother says, her eyes wide with panic. “No children.”

  She grabs my hands in hers and strokes them while she stares wide-eyed and unblinking at Perry Mason on the television attached to the place where the ceiling meets the wall. He looks down at her from the heavens, like a god.

  “Don’t leave,” she begs. “Promise me you won’t leave.”

  My mother’s hands are ice-cold, white as marble, bruised in flowers of green and brown from the emergency room intravenous lines, shaking.

  “I won’t, Ma,” I say. “I promise.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “DO YOU THINK YOUR MOTHER might want to talk to someone?” Brittney, the hospital social worker asks. “From the pastoral office?”

  “She’s not religious,” I say. I am leaving for the day, standing at the nurse’s station.

  “But sometimes it helps?”

  “If you send her a priest, she’ll drop dead on the spot,” I say, rolling my eyes.

  “I don’t get it,” she says, smiling uncomfortably. “Is that a joke?”

  “Never mind,” I say. “It’s fine.”