The End of Eve (6 page)

AT HOME THAT
night I took a random book from the shelf.

The Upanishads.

I ran my hand across the gold cover, asked:
Should I or should I not agree to live with my mother ... move my family and my life ... change everything
?

I opened to a random page and read this: “Live with me for a year. Then you may ask questions.”

So there it was.

You make your choice and let the rest fall away.

I DIDN'T WANT
to answer the phone, but Vivian's name flashed and Vivian was half a Buddhist and she loved me beyond reason. Surely Vivian could understand when I explained my plan and that maybe this was my dharma – my spiritual work right now. But Vivian just clucked her tongue when I said that. “It's not your dharma, honey,” she snapped. “It's your Co –
DA
.”

As I hung up, I wondered at the difference.

Seemed like maybe dharma work was the compassionate service you offered because you were on a spiritual path, here to let everything happen to you, to expose yourself to annihilation in hopes of burning through to some indestructible core of tenderness and confidence.

And then Co-DA was the compassionate service you offered because you were a total and complete sucker.

5.

Mother as Metaphor

I WAS IN A CAFÉ ON HAWTHORNE GRABBING A CUP OF
coffee after my morning teaching gig when my phone rang.

Maia. “Hey, Mama, I'm driving home for winter break.”

I stared at a painting on the wall. A black bird on a wire, a hazy red sky behind it. A Portland painting. “Don't drive, Honey. Just fly. You have a free ticket on Southwest.” It was fifteen hours on the I-5 from Los Angeles to Portland. All those snowy passes.

“I want to drive, Mama. I want to have my car when I'm home.”

Her plan was ridiculous, of course, but what difference would it make at this point? I was trying not to ask too many questions.
That's what the oracle advised, right
? No questions for a year, anyway. I'd take my hands off the controls of this life thing and see what happened.

IT HAD BEEN
six weeks since my mother's diagnosis. She'd lost weight, but she still drove around town in her bright blue rental car in the rain and somehow found the energy to yell at service workers.

She'd jumped at the idea of moving to Santa Fe. “Perfect. All the artists live there, don't they?”

So I was getting my little house ready to put on the market. “Beiging it up,” my friend at the paint store said when I came in
for ever more cans of light brown and pale yellow to cover the oranges and blues.

“You never can be too beige in this market.”

Between my mom's inheritance and the expected money from the sale of my place, we'd come up with enough to make an offer on a for-sale-by-owner stucco duplex on an acre of land on a dirt road in Santa Fe. We'd given up visiting oncologists and settled on a fairly simple treatment plan for my mother: weekly intravenous vitamin C at a local clinic and the Bill Henderson protocol – basically a gluten-free vegan diet plus a cottage cheese and flax seed oil concoction intended to feed her body's healthy cells and starve the cancer.

I poured soy milk into my coffee because they didn't have coconut milk, held the phone between my ear and shoulder. “At least let me fly to Sacramento and meet you,” I said. “I'll drive the icy part home with you.”

OUTSIDE BAGGAGE CLAIM
in Sacramento, I shivered in my sweatshirt while the smokers on the bench behind me complained of global warming.

When Maia pulled up in the big red Oldsmobile that used to belong to Gammie, I felt a sudden nostalgia, like maybe everything was normal again and I was a daughter and a granddaughter and Gammie was picking me up at the airport in Big Red because I'd run out of money in some foreign country and my
I-Ching
had advised me to go home for the deep of Winter and maybe Gammie had agreed to put the ticket on her credit card if I'd pay her back someday. But when I climbed into the passenger's seat, the Oldsmobile didn't smell like new upholstery and Coco Chanel. It smelled like cigarettes. I pretended not to notice. And then there was the more alarming reality: The entire back seat was packed with clothes and shoes, books and knick knacks, lamps and framed art – even a chair. This wasn't a car packed to come home for a week at Christmas. This was a car packed to move home.

“What's up with all your earthly belongings, Maia?”

She pushed a Duke Ellington
CD
into the player as she pulled out of the airport. I liked that Gammie's old car still traveled with Gammie's old
CD
s. “I want to be with Nonna,” Maia said, matter-of-fact. “I took a leave of absence from school.”

I closed my eyes. Surely this was not happening.
Who quits college in the middle of their junior year
?

“You can't drop out–” I tried to muster some maternal authority, like she hadn't already done it, like we weren't already driving north into a blizzard with everything she owned.

“I'm not dropping out, Mom.” She said it slowly, like maybe I was getting dim-witted in my late 30s. “I took a
one
-semester leave of absence.”

“What about the boyfriend?” I whined. They'd been dating for a couple of years and had just moved in together in a cute apartment in Brentwood.

“He's fine with it,” she tried, but now tears streaked her makeup. Her hair was long like always, but she'd dyed it black.

“What's going on, Mai Mai?”

“I can't tell you.” She kept her eyes on the highway. And then, “Okay. He's been on a coke bender for two weeks. He hasn't slept. I had to leave.”

I thought,
Please, God, no. Really? The boyfriend? But he was so cute.
I thought
Can't he just go to rehab?
I thought,
Good for you, Maia, it took me months to leave my first coke-head boyfriend, but why does he get to keep the apartment
? I said, “Are you serious? What an asshole.”

My phone buzzed.
The boyfriend.
I showed Maia the caller
ID
, but she just shrugged.

“Yes, this is Ariel.”

“Yeah? Ariel?” The boyfriend's voice was heavy with exhaustion. “Would you like to know what your
daughter
did now?”

I'd always liked the boyfriend, but my disenchantment was immediate.

“She's gone,” he said. “
That's
what. She left. She's probably
cavorting around Hollywood with some
guy
or one of her slut friends. How do you like that,
Mama
?”

“Excuse me?” I had to interrupt the boyfriend. “Are you calling me because you're concerned about my daughter's safety or because you want to tattle?”

The boyfriend was silent for a moment. Then, “I just think,” he slurred. “I just think you should know where your daughter is.”

“Thanks. I actually have a pretty good idea where my daughter is.” I clicked the phone off.

Maia rolled her eyes. “Sorry, Mama.”

I sighed. “Don't worry about it. Just pull over at the next exit and let me drive.”

WE ROLLED BACK
onto the highway, Duke Ellington playing “Take the A Train” and “It Don't Mean a Thing,” and as we wended north out of the Sacramento Valley and up into the snowbound Cascade range, Maia curled against the passenger side door and fell asleep.

I glanced in the rearview to see how far we'd come, but the piles of all her stuff blocked the window.

IN TIMES OF
crisis, I learned as a child, gather bandages and prepare food.

On a bad day when my stepdad had gone to work early, I woke to the shrill screams coming from my sister's room – my mother and Leslie trying to gouge each other's eyes out with the broken shards of a piggy bank, echoes of
I hate you I hate you I hate you.

It's a way to feign control, I guess, to stay calm and practical, to get up and get dressed in your purple corduroys and your Joan Jett and the Blackhearts T-shirt, to creep barefoot down the hallway and into the kitchen.

My mother and sister would emerge soon enough, bloodied and hungry, Leslie stone-faced angry and my mother laughing. I'd have the herbal antiseptic spray and gauze and
Band-Aids ready for them on the kitchen counter, cinnamon toast crisping in the oven. “Good morning,” I'd chirp, like I'd been up for hours and hadn't heard a thing.

NOW I JUST
wanted to sit by myself in my own little kitchen, barefoot and writing feminist books and psychology blogs, but somehow I was still wearing my purple corduroys – tending wounds and feeding people.

So it was that on Maia's first full day back home, the house smelled like laundry detergent, garlic, and the fresh bend of a Christmas tree. Four o'clock in the afternoon and it was already dusk. I stood there ironing, making a mental list of the ingredients I had to buy to make the mushroom-leek risotto recipe from the cancer-free newsletter.

Sol would be home in a couple of hours and she'd let the door slam behind her and I'd jump, just a little, afraid of what she might be mad about tonight.

My mother would join us for dinner.

“I'll pick Maxito up from preschool and get a movie,” Maia offered. “I'm thinking it's a
Sunset Boulevard
kind of a night.”

No matter what happened in our dwindling family, we could always bond over a good Hollywood noir. It was definitely a
Sunset Boulevard
kind of a night.

I COOKED
.

We waited.

As Maxito and Maia hooked the last lights onto the tree, my mother floated in an hour late for dinner. “Mai Mai Person, you came home –”

Maia wrapped her arms around her. “Nonna, I've missed you.”

Maxito crawled up onto the red couch to be nearer to my mother.

Tonight she wore a black dress and red lipstick, heavy Mexican silver bracelets and necklaces.

My kids wanted to bask in her glow.

She'd always been this way – alluring, like hot metal.

“I'm sure you've heard your grandmother has cancer,” she said, her voice suddenly low with the glamour of it.

I should like to die of consumption,
Lord Byron once mused.
The ladies would all say, “Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying.”

I didn't think my mother wanted to die, but she'd always been drawn to the romance of illness. If she had to die, I knew she'd want to look interesting.

She glanced over her shoulder as if she'd just noticed the tree. “That is the driest, most pitiful excuse for a Christmas tree I have ever seen in my life.”

I'd bought it off a Delancey Street Foundation lot and couldn't see what was wrong with it.

“Maybe we like Charlie Brown trees,” Maia tried.

Maxito beamed. “I like Linus and Snoopy.”

NONE OF US
had the nerve – or whatever it might take – to ask my mother about her diagnosis or her thoughts about the coming year, so we waited for her to pipe up.

“Cancer,” she informed us at the dinner table, “is a disease of emotional repression.” She lifted a glass of wine and half-smiled. “So obviously either I'm the exception – I'm cancer's mistake – I've been unjustly colonized – I'm the Bahamas when Columbus was aiming for India. Or I don't have it. I don't have cancer at all.”

Maybe she wasn't going to skip the “denial” stage after all.

“That's interesting,” Sol said. “What are you thinking?”

“I'm thinking what I said,” my mother snapped, slamming her glass on the table. “Either the doctors have made a cruel mistake or the cancer itself has made a mistake. Everyone knows that people cause their own cancer with negative thinking and I didn't cause this. I've been unjustly invaded.”

Sol nodded. “Of course you didn't cause it.”

“This isn't my fault,” my mother said.

“Of course not,” Maia whispered.

I
'
D TRACED MY
mother's illness back to my stepdad's death, to the day she killed him or they were in on it together, but what did I know? I was just doing what we do, telling myself a story in hopes a story would make things better. If my mother had caused her own cancer I wouldn't have to feel vulnerable. That meant it wasn't genetic or environmental. But she was on the other side of new age logic now. She always believed other people caused their cancers, so what was she supposed to believe about her own cancer?

In
Illness as Metaphor,
Susan Sontag warns us off this kind of thinking, saying “scarcely a week passes without a new article announcing to some general public or other the scientific link between cancer and painful feelings. Investigations are cited – most articles refer to the same ones – in which out of, say, several hundred cancer patients, two-thirds or three-fifths report being depressed or unsatisfied with their lives, and having suffered the loss (through death or rejection or separation) of a parent, lover, spouse, or close friend. But it seems likely that of several hundred people who do not have cancer, most would also report depressing emotions and past traumas: this is called the human condition.”