Motherland

by Elissa Altman

  I like Brittney: She brings my mother cookies, which my mother loves and eats like a child under the covers when no one is watching—an orderly frets about the crumbs—and sneaks her a mesclun salad with nuts and raisins from a nearby bistro. My mother lights up in Brittney’s presence; they share magazines and Hollywood gossip. George Clooney’s wife is too smart for him. Melania’s outfits are getting too conservative. Coats like Pat Nixon.

  I agree; don’t you? they say to each other.

  Brittney comes to see her when she’s off her shift and it’s time to leave. A young woman with kind brown eyes and straight dark hair, she is possessed of a taut body that has responded to hours of the Pilates she has regularly fed it at one of the nearby studios on the Upper East Side. I can see her stretched out long and lean on a reformer, dressed in black Lululemon tights and a bright white tank, her new pink-gold Apple watch reflecting the glint of sun streaming into the room through ceiling-height windows facing Madison Avenue. She is fresh-faced and energetic, a platinum wedding band encrusted with baguette diamonds gracing her slender left hand. A dozen red roses are delivered to her desk near the nurse’s station twice a week.

  “Tell me about your fella,” my mother says to her. “I wanna hear about your fella.”

  Brittney’s life will unfold. A prediction: She has married an associate in a downtown entertainment law firm. In six months, they will move from their one-bedroom rental on the Upper East Side, Ninetieth Street, to Brooklyn Heights, a prewar co-op a few blocks from the Promenade, where they will walk their teacup French bulldog every morning and evening. A baby will arrive, and two years later they will decamp for northern Westchester, Katonah, for its lovely small-town feel and train accessibility. Brittney will open a private therapy practice once the second baby is three and the two children go off to day school. They will add a yellow Labrador retriever and a calico cat to the family. Christmases and Easters will be crowded affairs and include both sets of grandparents, siblings and their families, stray friends from college with nowhere to go. There will be family vacations every year, a cancer scare that will prove to be, thank God, nothing. By the time Brittney is sixty-five, she will be a grandmother twice over, married for what seems like forever, summering every year in a rambling shingled cottage on the midcoast of Maine. Big enough to have everyone there all at once, it will be outfitted with wheelchair ramps for Brittney’s ninety-two-year-old mother, who comes up from Vero Beach to stay every summer with her caregiver.

  Is Brittney twenty-eight? Thirty?

  Every morning, Brittney strolls the halls in staggeringly high heels, clipboard in hand, starched and ironed, perfectly but not overly made up, not a strand of hair out of place. I imagine that she has just finished breakfast: a kale, cucumber, parsley juice with a double shot of ginger and turmeric to bolster her immune system. She weighs nothing. She is lovely and earnest and will be with my mother only for another week: She is going on maternity leave. I never notice the small baby bump obscured by her white coat until she mentions it.

  When I arrive on this particular morning, the Mongolian woman is asleep, morphine dripping into her arm. An older man and woman sit in chairs near the door, reading; they nod to me; I nod back. Brittney is perched on the end of my mother’s bed near the window, reviewing the contents of my mother’s makeup bag the way young boys review baseball cards. I watch them for a moment from the doorway, the sunlight behind them; they are forehead to forehead looking down at the bedcover and its pile of treasure. My mother unscrews a bright red lipstick and holds it up, as if to say, This one, this color changed everything. Brittney nods and smiles; they throw their heads back and laugh together. She swipes it across the back of her hand and cocks her head to the side.

  They don’t see me. I am a witness to what might have been, what could have been, like in a scene from Dickens: The ghost of Christmas yet to come.

  Brittney is the daughter my mother should have had. She is the twin. Dread and jealousy boil up in me like a pot on high. Why couldn’t I have been this woman for my mother?

  I cough and my mother looks up and waves energetically, her IV lines dancing around the side of her bed. She beams; I bring her mail, the newspapers, a latte from the Starbucks kiosk in the lobby. I kiss her hello on the top of her head, the way I did to my kids when I was a counselor in sleepaway camp.

  “Good morning, darling—” she says. She stops, pulls back for a moment, screws up her eyes. “Let me see your shoes—”

  * * *

  —

  “She’s totally fabulous,” Brittney whispers as we walk out to the nurse’s station together.

  “She is,” I say.

  “She said the hospital got it wrong and she’s sixty,” she says. “Really—I said to her, then why do you have Medicare—and she told me to be a pal and lie for her. Can you imagine?”

  “That sounds about right,” I sigh.

  “It must be so amazing for you,” she says. “She loves you so much.”

  “It is,” I say, smiling. “Totally. I love her too.”

  “But it must be hard—she says she’s a walker. That it’s her thing. We have to make sure that she can still do it when she gets out of rehab. I’m worried that she’s getting depressed. She’s not eating.”

  “She doesn’t eat,” I say, “as a rule.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Rarely,” I say.

  Her face grows serious. We talk about what’s next: Where she will go to rehab. What her insurance will pay for and what they won’t. Where the financial burden will lie. How she will fare with the exercises. Will her bones be strong enough to support her body, which is fueled on plain white diet bread and an egg white and a few ounces of chicken, probably fewer than a thousand calories a day.

  “If walking the city is the motivator,” I tell Brittney, “she will do the exercises. She has to be able to walk again; if she doesn’t, it will kill her.”

  Her face grows solemn; she nods. She understands. Solvitur ambulando.

  Brittney wants to know: My mother said she was Jewish when she arrived in the emergency room. Perhaps she would like to see a rabbi? Perhaps, she says, a visit might provide her with some existential comfort?

  * * *

  • • •

  IN 1974, THE YEAR OF my new womanhood, my parents sent me to camp in Pennsylvania, where I would spend eight weeks. The day after I left, they flew to Britain and Europe for two weeks: London, Paris, Vienna, Florence, Rome, home. At every stop, my mother bought souvenirs: Mary Quant makeup on Carnaby Street. Victorian cherry amber at the Place Clignancourt in Paris. Viennese wooden carvings to hang in the living room. A cameo that she swears looks exactly like me, hand-painted by an artist who sold them outside the Duomo. Two sets of rosary beads at the Vatican: one for my mother’s friend Olga, an Italian woman who lived in our building, and one for her. She bought them and held them up in front of the window when the pope appeared. She wanted them to be blessed, to be sanctified by the man with an inside track.

  “I had a big fight with your father about it,” she told me when I got home from camp. She held the rosaries up: tiny black and silver beads ending in small silver crucifixes. “Your father said, So what are you becoming now? A Catholic?”

  She deposited them in my tiny hands and I rolled them around and felt the cool black stone of each bead. I ran my finger along the narrow, tortured body of Jesus from his feet to his crown of thorns. I gave them back to her.

  “Do you wear them?” I asked. “Like a necklace?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t think so. We’re Jews—”

  “So why did you buy them?”

  “For luck,” she shrugged. “Because everyone needs a little luck. I need a little luck.”

  She smiled and tucked them back into her jewelry box; I never saw them again.

  Years later, a huge laughing Buddha—Hotei th
e eccentric—showed up on the piano, situated between her silver loving cup and my tennis awards; every morning before she and Ben left for work, she rubbed the deity’s bright red belly—the color red wards off the evil eye in Jewish tradition—and made a wish for health and prosperity. When her neighbor came back from a trip to Israel, she brought my mother a massive mezuzah to affix to her front door; the size of a box of Tiparillos and the color of bone, it was decorated in a relief depicting the anguished, twisted bodies of the Holocaust—mothers and children, older people and babies—memorialized at Yad Vashem, where the mezuzah was purchased. I gasped when I saw it.

  “It’s just modern,” my mother said when I asked if she knew anything about it and understood what it represented: destruction and survival, parents and children.

  She kisses her mezuzah both going and coming: on her way out of her apartment and always on her way in. Susan and I were mezuzahless for a year, when we had our siding replaced and the workmen accidentally broke it—a Murano glass mezuzah brought back for us by my father from the Jewish ghetto in Venice. I kept it, broken in two, in my jewelry box—so when my mother came to visit, she simply pretended that it was still there. She kissed her hand, reached up, and touched the unadorned door frame. Invisible to everyone but her, it contained the klaf, the scroll on which appear verses from Deuteronomy, commanding that His word be inscribed on the doorposts of thy house and upon thy gates. My mother harangued me until I bought a replacement and attached it in time for her next visit.

  It’s unlucky not to have one, she said.

  “Do you even know what it means,” I said.

  For a while in the eighties and nineties, she lit my grandmother’s Sabbath wedding candlesticks on Friday nights because Ben had asked her to, the way his own mother, who had been observant, did; my mother blew them out after he went to bed. Once Ben died, she split the set up and stuck a leopard print candle in the one that she stood on the piano next to her loving cup, like a beacon.

  * * *

  —

  What is luck: a flimsy manifestation of a religion for the secularly ambivalent and the superstitious? Is it hope? The result of a favorable or unfavorable view of a particular deity?

  “What did I do to deserve this?” my mother cried the night of her accident. “I am so good to people. I have such terrible luck. God hates me.”

  “You were so lucky,” I told her, “that the one doctor in America who is an expert at repairing your kind of injury, at what is the best orthopedic hospital in the world, which happens to be located in the city in which you live, was on call that night.”

  “If I was lucky,” she said, “this wouldn’t have happened at all.”

  In my childhood home, she fends off bad spirits at every turn: the evil eye, poo poo poo, kenorahorah, knock on wood, toss a penny in a fountain, salt over a shoulder, step on a crack, the warding off of the devil. Over the years, she wears an Egyptian ankh, a Brazilian figa, an Italian horn of plenty, a Chinese articulated fish painted with green enamel, Gaga’s green jade beads, a brooch in the shape of a lucky frog brought back from Puerto Rico, a red string on her wrist, and in her purse a trio of highly polished stones carved on one side in English and the other in Hebrew with the words HEALTH PROSPERITY HAPPINESS that Lucille brought her from the Kabbalah Center back when Madonna was a member. All of them are meant to bring her good fortune, to assure her safety, long life, money. To give her the things she wants.

  None of them promises love.

  16

  “I ASSUME SHE WILL BE going home with you?”

  My mother’s rehab case manager smiles at me across the ersatz walnut conference room table where I sit, sandwiched between Susan and the attorney we have hired. Betty’s hands are clasped tightly in front of her, her nails filed short and square and decorated with small purple and white unicorn appliqués; each of the creature’s ten eyes is fashioned from a single drop of lavender glitter that sparkles under the fluorescent ceiling lights. She is wearing gold half glasses on the end of her nose and a large gold cross around her neck; the corners of her yellow cardigan are clipped together with a short pearloid chain. A manila folder with my mother’s name written in red Magic Marker sits in front of her on top of a blank legal pad. We are meeting to discuss my mother’s insurance situation, which is, Betty says, terrible.

  Most rehab patients who are in their seventies and beyond have traditional Medicare plus supplemental insurance for which they pay a monthly fee. Together, the combination results in medical bills being, in most cases, nominal. But when my mother turned sixty-five in 2000, she decided against carrying the traditional Medicare card because it would instantly reveal her age. And a supplement, she reasoned, would tap her monthly expendable cash, which she was using for other things. Planning for the future, for the probability and likelihood of illness, simply never figured in.

  We fought; she railed. You don’t understand my needs.

  “But what will you do if you have an accident?” I asked.

  “I’ll sell something,” she said. “Just like I did when your father went bankrupt.”

  Seventeen years later, we sit here, in an airless conference room at a for-profit rehab center, face-to-face with Betty.

  “We need to look at our options,” she says, smiling at us across the table. “I understand that you two girls live in a ranch house.”

  * * *

  • • •

  MY MOTHER IS UPSTAIRS IN her room, where she has been for five days, since her release from the hospital. It is Christmas. Her left foot is encased in a black plastic knee-high cam boot, her right foot in a shorter one. She has not stood or walked for more than two weeks, and her legs are beginning to atrophy, her flesh turning to putty. On this day, she sits up in her bed, fully made up like Norma Desmond, wrapped up in an Italian wool paisley shawl like a grand pasha, wearing the PolarFleece leopard print pants we bought for her when she arrived without any pajamas. Her black long-sleeved T-shirt says Queen for a day in rhinestone script.

  Every afternoon, Juan, the gay facility janitor, makes the rounds dressed as Santa Claus. If my mother is in a good mood, she looks forward to his arrival.

  “Have you been a very good girl this year?” Juan asks as I walk into her room—a single near the nurse’s station, where the facility administrator thought she would be most comfortable.

  “Get the fuck out of my room, Santa,” my mother says. “My sugar’s dropping. Get me a cookie.”

  “Merry Christmas,” Santa grumbles. He heads to the nurse’s station to find my mother a cookie.

  “You can’t say fuck to Santa, Ma—” I say, putting down a bag of magazines on her swing-away table: Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair, Elle, Elle Décor, New York, and her favorite coffee table book about the Kennedys.

  “I want a fucking cookie,” she says, reaching up for me with both arms. “You look tired—” She squints and checks me out, up and down.

  “I am tired, Ma—”

  “So you should sleep more. It’s not like you should come here every day or anything. I’ll be fine without you.”

  I bend down to kiss her. She grabs my hand. I pull it away.

  “You need your highlights,” she says, fingering my hair. “You’ll look less tired.”

  The television is on. It’s a Wonderful Life. Donna Reed is hanging wallpaper.

  “When I can get to it,” I say.

  “Get to it,” she says. “Make the time.”

  * * *

  —

  We have moved her from the hospital in Manhattan to a rehabilitation center in Connecticut ten minutes from our house so that I can be her advocate—She’ll need an advocate, Brittney said, and that should be you—and the facility knows that there is always someone there, always watching when the mistakes, which are plentiful and dangerous, are made: The attempts at giving her p
ills for a condition she doesn’t have. The lack of an identification bracelet for more than twenty-four hours after her arrival. My mother’s hysterical allergy to pink serves her well: On a middle-of-the-night visit by an inept nurse’s aid, she refuses blood pressure medication meant for another patient simply based on its color, and saves her own life.

  I visit her every day, twice a day, at the beginning. I bring her what she wants, making lists of the things that will make her most comfortable. She spends her days in bed watching television, a bulging flowered Clinique makeup bag tucked up under each armpit. Each morning an orderly brings her a plastic basin of water so that she can wash her face and apply fresh makeup; every afternoon she removes it and reapplies it. On this day, she decides she needs a new supply from her stash in her apartment. She sends me back to the city for a few things.

  “Go into the hallway bathroom,” she instructs as I sit on the end of her bed, a pen and pad on my lap. “There’s Clinique powder on the bottom shelf of the vanity. You could bring me that.”

  “Anything else?” I ask.

  “In my bedroom bathroom, there are a few tubes of lipstick in Red Red Red. I could use those. I’m running low.”

  “How could you be running low? You’re in a rehab.”

  She throws her head back and screams, a sudden, ear-piercing shriek like an infant’s; her face changes color.

  “Because I need them because I wear my makeup every damn day I want to die kill me just kill me my life is over—”

  She weeps and shrieks and her cell phone rings and she answers it and it’s Dick and she cries to him, cries that everything is over, everything that she has worked so hard for has been taken away from her and she has nothing else to live for and she just wants to die.

  “Is she okay?” an orderly asks, poking her head in.

  “Fine,” I say.