Motherland

by Elissa Altman

  “You’re all here to see me!” my mother says. She gazes wide-eyed from one person to the next. She laughs and claps her hands like a small child at a birthday party. One person takes her pulse and another her temperature and another asks how far she can go using the walker with the tennis balls.

  “Dick says I don’t really need to use it,” she explains to the visiting nurse, “and I agree with him. He’s a very smart man.”

  “Who’s Dick?” the Medicaid consultant whispers to me. “We have her listed as widowed.”

  “Her man friend,” I say. “He thinks she doesn’t need a live-in caregiver either. Or the personal alert button that she refuses to wear around her neck.”

  We step into the hallway and I begin to explain my mother’s belief that men, simply by the presence of a particular appendage, always know best. The consultant stops me.

  “We see this all the time. The mother’s boyfriend, the angry kids. It’s hard on everyone.”

  We step back into the den, where my mother is being given the once-over by Michael, a tall black physical therapist who is almost outrageous in his handsomeness.

  “I can get around just fine without the walker,” she says to Michael. Her voice has gone up an octave. She’s sweet-talking and chirpy, like a schoolgirl.

  “…but I’d do so much better with you on my arm,” she adds, batting her eyelashes at him. “Do you know you look just like Sidney Poitier in Porgy and Bess?”

  Bile bubbles up into the back of my throat. He doesn’t look a thing like Sidney Poitier in Porgy and Bess, or Sidney Poitier in anything. The only thing that Michael and Sidney have in common is that they’re both handsome men of color.

  “Sometimes latent racism comes out with age and trauma,” the very white rehab social worker told me, “so don’t be concerned if she says something unusual to the staff. These people are used to it.”

  “These people? Maybe you all tell yourselves that to rationalize it,” I said.

  “They hear it all the time, dear,” she shrugged, “so don’t be alarmed.”

  “How could I not be alarmed?”

  “Don’t worry so much, really,” the rehab social worker said.

  Today, all my mother sees when she looks at Michael is Sidney Poitier, and he is taking complete advantage of her frothing at the mouth over him.

  “Can you show us how you walk?” he says. “We’d all love to see—”

  Everyone—the pulse taker, the note taker, the temperature taker, the Medicaid consultant, Tenzin—stops what they’re doing and watches.

  “Mom,” I say, “you can’t even stand up alone. Now is not the time—”

  “It’ll be fine,” Michael says, smiling at her. “Let’s see what your beautiful mother can do.”

  He moves the folding black lacquered television table away from her. He stands by with the tennis ball walker, just in case.

  She beams; she tosses her hair. She loves Michael.

  My mother scoots to the end of her sofa and tries to push herself up. She chews on her bottom lip and straightens her spine. She focuses on the television.

  “Perry Mason is so handsome—if he just wasn’t so fat—”

  “He doesn’t actually exist, Mom—”

  “They said he was gay,” she says, wistfully.

  “Perry Mason wasn’t gay. Raymond Burr was gay—”

  “I coulda changed him—”

  Michael throws his head back and laughs. She tries to push herself up again. Nothing. Her face begins to flush; I recognize the moment before the explosion.

  Fuck shit fucking shit! Help me up, Elissa—

  I step in to give her my hand. Michael waves me away and turns to Dora, who is standing in the doorway of the den.

  “Does she actually get around without the walker, Dora?” he asks.

  “Never—not once,” Dora says, laughing. She shakes her head and sighs.

  “Thanks a lot,” my mother growls. “Just remember who is paying you.”

  “I’m paying her, Mom. She’s not working for you. She’s working for me.”

  Dora has arrived as if by magic, as though she has fallen from the heavens; my mother has never asked who she was or where she came from or who was paying her. I scrape together her weekly fee to try to preserve what little my mother has left.

  “So what? I did for you,” she shouts, “and now you do for me. You don’t know what I gave up for you! Go put on some lipstick. I want to speak to these people. I must speak. I must be heard.”

  Everyone leans in; Michael shuts the television off.

  “I am a walker. It is what I live for. My daughter—” she nods over to me—“she don’t want me to walk again.”

  “Why do you think that?” Michael asks. “If she didn’t want you to walk again, none of us would be here.”

  “She hates me—”

  I stare at her. I don’t correct her.

  My mother smirks. The corners of her mouth betray her; they begin to curl.

  “She don’t want me to walk again. And—”

  She gasps. She closes her eyes tightly and puts her hand on her chest.

  What, Michael says.

  “She hit me.”

  Everyone looks up at me.

  My knees go soft. I lean against the den wall; I can’t breathe. The wind has been knocked out of me. On this day, in my mother’s den on the Upper West Side, surrounded by a team of people whose goal it is to help my mother—broken, older, frightened—I want to vanish, to disappear, to vaporize. I want to take my mother’s coffee cup, the one that’s covered with tiny, lovely delicate little hearts, the one she’s been sipping tepid water from all morning and that is now crusted around its rim with Red Red Red lipstick, and smash it against the dust-covered Tunturi stationary bicycle standing in the corner, covered with a bedsheet. I storm into the hallway, where Dora is standing, watching her new charge have a meltdown.

  “You fall for her games every time,” Dora whispers. She links arms with me and walks me into the living room. She sits me down in Gaga’s favorite armchair, the place where she spent every night in the seventies when my mother was newly divorced and out dancing at Studio 54 and Plato’s until dawn. I feel woozy. My neck is sweaty. Dora dampens a dish towel and hands it to me; I tuck it inside my collar.

  “What do you want to do?” Dora whispers.

  “I want to go home.”

  I want to leave, to go home to my wife and my dog and my house in Connecticut, to the life I have made away from her, separate from her; I want to never, ever come back.

  The kingdom of my heart.

  “You have to learn to laugh,” Dora says, rubbing my back. “She’s bored and she’s scared. She knows exactly how you’ll react. It’s all fun for her. She likes to make trouble. I bet she gets those happy hormones from treating you like this.”

  I drink my water. I stand up. We go back into the den. My mother reaches for my hand. I give it to her. She strokes it and kisses it; she holds it to her cheeks, first one, then the other.

  “I don’t think that’s true—that she struck you,” Michael says. “Is it? Because it’s a very serious charge.”

  “Of course it’s not true,” my mother laughs. “I love her. I just wanted to see if you were all listening. It was just a little game.”

  * * *

  —

  One by one, the consultants leave; Dora shows them out. I fall back into the one comfortable chair in the den. My mother and I glare at each other. Tenzin sits down next to her and listens to her heart. She takes her blood pressure. I notice a thin red cord on her right wrist.

  “Very good,” she says, typing numbers into her laptop.

  “It’s always low,” I say.

  “And how is yours?” Tenzin asks me.

  “She’s fine,” my mother
says. “She just needs to lose some weight.”

  Tenzin looks at us, back and forth; she shakes her head.

  “What kind of name is Tenzin anyway,” my mother asks. “I love your boots—” she adds, pointing down. “Liss, you should get some boots like that.”

  They’re bright and colorful, wool-legged, laced a long way up to her knees; Tenzin is very tall and very thin.

  “I’m Tibetan,” Tenzin says, packing up her laptop. “I come from Lhasa.”

  My mother screws up her face.

  “Isn’t that where what’s his name—I saw him on the street once, coming out of the Mark Hotel—that bald Chinese guy in the red dress who is always giggling—isn’t he from Tibet?”

  I pray for the Rapture. I pray for a hole in my mother’s ancient white broadloom to open and swallow me up. Please God take me.

  “The Dalai Lama, Mom,” I say. “His name is also Tenzin.”

  I smile weakly at Tenzin, this Tenzin, to let her know that I know. It’s a sycophantic gesture, an obsequious peace offering. By showing that I know the name of the leader of the world’s Tibetans is Tenzin, the Tenzin standing in front of me won’t go home cursing these two privileged Jewish white women, one of them leaning up against a velvet pillow embroidered with a saying about luxury, who will never know the kind of immigrant, exile hell the woman standing in front of her has likely gone through.

  “I was walking down Madison Avenue and all these men were milling around outside the Mark with walkie-talkies and this man in the red dress came out. He winked at me.”

  “The Dalai Lama did not wink at you, Mom,” I say.

  “You hate it when men pay attention to me—you just want me to be alone. She wants me to be alone,” she shrugs to Tenzin. “She does—”

  “I should be going,” Tenzin says. “Be well—”

  “I’ll walk you out,” I say.

  “I am not finished with you,” my mother shouts.

  Tenzin and I stand together in silence. I unlock the front door. The mirrored vertical blinds are drawn; slashes of light betray the dust that veneers the frames standing on the piano. The tennis awards. Her silver loving cup. My mother and I in matching lace outfits on the steps of Caesars Palace in 1970. My mother on the television soundstage in the late fifties, a sweater casually thrown over her shoulder, her eyes gazing ahead, fixed on something in the future, something lovely.

  “I am so sorry—please forgive us. We’ve had a hard morning.”

  “Do you have children of your own?” Tenzin asks, slipping her arms through her backpack straps. She looks down at me, unsmiling.

  “No.”

  “Your mother is a very beautiful woman,” Tenzin says, stepping into the hallway. “And if you’re not careful, she will outlive you.”

  II

  She sits beside Laura on the sofa. She simply does what her daughter tells her to, and finds a surprising relief in it. Maybe, she thinks, one could begin dying into this: the ministrations of a grown daughter, the comforts of a room. Here, then, is age. Here are the little consolations, the lamp and the book. Here is the world, increasingly managed by people who are not you; who will do either well or badly; who do not look at you when they pass you in the street.

  —MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM, The Hours

  19

  “IT LOOKS SO GOOD ON you, baby,” my father says.

  A family party. I am holding an infant, a girl, seven months old. Tousled white-blond curls and gray-green eyes. A squirmer in pink acid-washed Carter jeans with diaper snaps and a tiny cotton T-shirt flecked with orange spots from the strained carrots I’ve been spooning into her mouth. A wriggling mass of rubbery baby weight and breath that smells like milk. So much energy, everyone jokes, because her mother did high-impact aerobics late into her pregnancy. It takes two people to keep her still for a change.

  On this evening in the late nineteen-eighties, I stand the child up in my lap, directly facing me, holding her under her delicate armpits with their soft folds of tender flesh, devoid of muscle or control. Babies are skin draped over form; who knows how they will grow or what they will become. We gaze at each other, unblinking. I smile. She smiles. I laugh. She laughs. Our stare is direct, mutual, intense. She stops moving, stops pulling, frozen, as if all of her energy has been harnessed and funneled into the scrutiny of this person with the masses of oversprayed hair and gigantic shoulders, who is holding her up.

  “Hello, you,” I whisper.

  Maa, she says.

  “What,” I say. “Tell me—”

  Maa—

  “Tell me—”

  The baby’s face changes, like putty pulled in opposite directions. A smile, a frown, a laugh, a furrow, a smile, a shriek. She pulls back from me and grabs my necklace in a dimpled hand: She shoves it into her mouth, this simple gold chain at the end of which hangs Gaga’s monogrammed gold locket, the only thing of my grandmother’s that my mother passed on to me when Gaga died. I wear it every day. The baby drops it gently and watches it fall into the depths of my sweater. Gaga loved babies; adored them; crossed streets to say hello to them. I inherited this from her.

  The baby’s eyes are closing. I stand with her and try to lay her down in her Pack ’n Play. The vise grip she has on me—one hand hooked around my neck like a metal hanger on a rod, the other playing with my hair—tightens. She sighs and puts her head on my shoulder. I put her pacifier in her mouth and she takes it and suckles hard and fast, and suddenly she is asleep. It drops to the floor.

  “It looks good on you, Liss,” my father says. He is sitting at the dining room table with the baby’s mother, watching me and drinking a glass of white wine.

  He speaks in Talmudic riddles and Zen koans.

  It’s time, he is saying. You need to start thinking about this.

  I turn my back so he can’t see me cry. His second wife’s first grandchild is asleep in my arms.

  My grandchild by proxy, he calls her.

  * * *

  • • •

  I AM IN MY MIDTWENTIES. I have left my mother and Ben’s apartment on the insistence of my doctor, who says that I will die if I stay. I am living in a small one-bedroom walk-up apartment in Chelsea with Julie, a resident at St. Vincent’s Hospital. She needed a roommate, like the thousands of New Yorkers of a certain age who will search the classifieds in The Village Voice for someone to simply split the rent, share the space, and hope they’re not suddenly living with an ax murderer or someone into some unspeakable fetish, the latter of which, this being New York in the eighties, is a strong possibility. Introduced to me by a mutual friend, Julie took the tiny, narrow bedroom with the door, and I the living room. She will come home late every day after a long shift at the hospital, skulk into the bedroom, close the door, and weep.

  Julie is built like a cherub, small and muscular and dark, a tangle of contradictions, a devoutly German Catholic, crystal-wearing, Shakti Gawain–spouting, syringe-wielding caregiver to sick men and women abandoned by their families and lovers to die alone. Most of Julie’s patients are dying of AIDS; when no one will touch them—this is early on in the plague, and common humanity has been replaced with fear—it is Julie who rubs their backs and their feet and holds them when they cry like panicked babies, from the innermost depths of their broken bodies. She leaves the hospital exhausted, stinking of disinfectant, orange betadine caked around her nailbeds. She meditates and chants and lights incense; she cleanses with high colonics and wears a watermelon tourmaline pendant to ward off evil spirits along with her tiny gold confirmation cross. She loves sex and fucks anything that moves, anything but me, whether I am home or not: in cars parked on Chelsea side streets, in the restroom at her favorite yoga studio on Thirteenth Street, in the bedroom we will share in the coming months. She returns home from the hospital every night, death on her hands and clothes; she stands in the kitchen, pours cheap Chardonnay into a he
avy Mexican blue-lipped goblet and tells me a joke that has been traveling the hallways of the hospital, started by an asshole in the ortho department: What’s the best diet for someone with AIDS? Flapjacks and flounders. Flapjacks and flounders? Anything that will slide under the door.

  She laughs. Her knees go out from under her. She is tired. I hug her. She sobs in my arms.

  I am in love with Julie in a way that I have never been in love with anyone, and we will, in a year, find our way into bed together. But for now I am sleeping with a man, following the rulebook as though it will propel me into a life of the predictable and the safe: the husband and the child. The mundane and the expected. The chance to make things right, to build my own life, to be a different kind of mother. To break what Julie calls the Crazy Chain.

  We had been ill with a stomach flu. High fevers. We couldn’t make it down the stairs of our apartment building. My mother brought over tubs of chicken soup and rye bread and containers of boiled white rice from a deli. Ben double-parked outside. My mother rang the buzzer.

  I’m leaving it on the third-floor landing, she yelled into the intercom microphone. I don’t want to see her. And you’re sick. Now buzz me in.

  Julie was competition; the other woman. She was an enemy, charming and beautiful and compassionate, someone entrusted with the care of others who would steal my mother’s spotlight, an attention thief whom I was now completely and utterly focused on like a heat-seeking missile. The Crazy Chain, Julie said, had to be broken. Distance would need to be imposed. My life would depend upon it. But self-imposed detachment from my mother made me feel queasy and hungover and guilty, like a drunk with DTs. When I stopped calling her, my hands shook, and she began showing up at my job. When I hid, she called Julie’s pager. When she pronounced me ungrateful and a loser—You don’t know what I gave up for you; how dare you ignore me—I listened closely, in silence, to her litany of words, their choice and pitch and timbre. I stayed on the phone and wept and believed that she was right.