What We Have

by Amy Boesky

  “Well,” Christina said slowly. “You look at a watch.”

  There was some dissent. You looked at a clock, too, a boy named Jason pointed out, but we went back to the OED and the ways in which watch was associated with the visual, and I told them a little bit about timepieces in the seventeenth century and how they were becoming increasingly part of visual culture: things seen, instead of things heard.

  Then we talked about Jacobean conceptions of dying.

  A memento mori, I explained, was a small material object intended to remind people of the brevity of life. Literal translation, from the Latin: “remember you will die.” In Stuart England, there was a whole cult of memento mori—people wore watches shaped like skulls, or had their portraits painted with candles half snuffed out, or with death’s-heads in them. Pretty much everything that was animal or vegetable or mineral could be construed as a memento mori. I had a few slides to show them for examples: Dutch still-life paintings of half-eaten fruit; a vanitas diptych of a portly woman overshadowed by a leering skeleton.

  Maybe this was too much for the first day.

  They were quiet again. Michaela unwrapped a piece of gum and put it in her mouth. Jason started doodling in the margin of his notebook. Everyone else was faithfully writing down what I told them: “The fear of death was sometimes sanitized or managed by the production of material objects. Consumerism was a way of staving off the sense that life is transient, fleeting.”

  Inside my notebook I found last week’s receipt from Northwest Airlines and half a shopping list: Pampers, size 5; fat-free peach yogurt; Equal; sesame bagels. My own attempts at staving things off.

  The conversation slowed a little. I was almost ready to let them go a few minutes early—it was Day One, right?—when a boy who hadn’t said anything yet raised his hand. His name was David. “I don’t understand why he’s like this,” he said. He seemed to mean Hamlet, not Shakespeare. “I read this play in high school and I still don’t get it. Did they really believe in ghosts?”

  I stopped short. They were all looking at me expectantly. I was the professor; I was supposed to know the answers.

  There were lots of ways to answer him. I’d been reading an interesting book that suggested that when the Protestants suppressed the idea of purgatory in England, the belief in ghosts emerged as a way to preserve the sense of the in-between. Ghosts showed up everywhere in the Renaissance. Donne’s poems are filled with men coming back from the dead to haunt their lovers. Ghosts paced the stage, crept behind chairs in Dutch paintings.

  But did people actually believe in them?

  “Some people did,” I told David.

  Some people, of course, still do, but I didn’t say that.

  I couldn’t pretend to understand Hamlet completely. I’d read it many times, and it was always a different play for me—even though it was always December, always midnight, always Denmark, the air frosty, a cock crowing, a bloated, melancholy prince traversing the same lonely landscape, a world of corpulent and corrupt uncles, of madness and sorrow. It was even harder to make sense of it now, sitting in this sunlit room with these wholesome students, each so seemingly sane, so securely anchored to the late-twentieth-century world of antibiotics and vitamins and exercise, a million light-years away from the dim Jacobean world of poison and death’s-heads.

  “Ghosts,” I said slowly, “are in-between things.”

  I didn’t believe in them, of course. Not me, the consummate nonbeliever. Give me something out of the ordinary, and I was all set to doubt it.

  On the other hand, this past year there had been these ghosts. Emily, who was there, and then wasn’t. And what about Sacha? Every month she changed—stronger, bigger, doing new things—and some older version of her disappeared.

  Then there was Jacques and I. We were so different a year ago. It wasn’t that I wanted it back, the way we used to be. Lately, especially at night, before sleep, Jacques held me and we talked about my mother and sometimes I cried. But somewhere, who knows where, the ghosts of the people we used to be were trolling some dim horizon.

  My mother . . .

  My mother was becoming a ghost.

  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

  I had tears in my eyes.

  I blinked them away. Luckily they weren’t looking at me anyway, they were riffling through pages in their Norton Critical Hamlets, sneaking furtive glances at the clock hanging over my head, thinking about their next classes, maybe, or about getting something to eat out of the vending machines, and I told them that I thought in this case, the ghost was a sign of all the things the culture wanted to understand, but couldn’t. I tried not to think about my mother, tried instead to focus on these eleven students. It was time to get going, we were saying good-bye, I was assigning another act for them to read for next class, and before I knew it, they were floating away like so many bubbles.

  The Moon Ring

  BY MY NEXT VISIT HOME, I could see things had gone downhill fast.

  It was a hard weekend. I’d left Sacha back in Boston with Jacques, after endless deliberation, and as soon as the plane took off, I was sorry. She cried when I left, and I felt worn out: sick of crying, of worrying, of Terminal D, of back-and-forth. Sick of being in-between. I wasn’t feeling great. The plane ride was bumpy, and by the time we reached Detroit I was tired and queasy.

  It was hard to believe my mother had made it to Charlevoix just a month ago. In just a matter of weeks she had become a full-scale invalid, moving only very slowly and with intense deliberation from one to another of three “stations” set up for her in the house that just a few months back had been filled with real estate agents. Perfect for a Growing Family.

  Now, either she was in bed upstairs in the Hilton, pillows propped behind her, New Yorkers fanned out on the bedside table along with an increasing battalion of sick-person’s things—paper cups, drinking water, vials of pills, tissues, ChapStick (her lips were always dry, my father thought it was the morphine)—or she was downstairs in the family room in the big chair with the ottoman, a similar coterie of objects on the table beside her, with (maybe) the addition of the cordless telephone or the biography of Churchill I’d gotten her for her birthday. Or else she was at the kitchen table, sitting in front of the greenhouse window, a yellow melamine plate in front of her, holding (depending on the meal) a sliver of banana bread, untouched; or a few slices of Granny Smith and some whisper-thin slices of Jarlsberg cheese. Dinner was often skipped completely, erased by naps. She had no appetite, which might have been from the morphine, or from the pain, or maybe just from the cancer itself. Who knew?

  Once in a while, she wanted a cup of tea. Or a sip of ginger ale, especially if the bubbles had gone flat. But most of the time, she didn’t want anything.

  When I got to the house late Friday morning, Ray, the day nurse, met me at the door. She was a small woman, mouse-brown hair, a strong aroma of peppermint and Dial soap. “She’s upstairs,” she told me in a crisp, offhand way. My mother may have told her who I was—“the middle one.” Maybe my mother talked about us now, to the nurses. Hard to know.

  I’d never opened our front door and had a stranger answer. It was unnerving.

  Even more unnerving was the sound of pounding upstairs. The contractors were working on the laundry room. Actually, they were still in demolition phase, smashing apart the walls in the linen closet that was going to become a laundry room one day. The noise got louder as I climbed the stairs. Outside the Hilton, it was deafening. How was my mother able to sleep through this?

  I wasn’t sure how my father had managed to get the contractors to come with so little notice. Maybe he’d prodded them into action, or maybe it was a windfall for them, a job small enough to fit in between bigger-scale remodels. So far they mostly seemed to be making noise and dust, clattering through the closet in the upstairs hallway with sledgehammers. When I got upstairs I saw they’d taped sheets of plastic to the place where the clo
set door had been, like one of those dividers you drive through at a car wash, and miraculously, most of the plaster dust seemed to be staying inside. I could see them in the closet, masks on their faces to keep the dust out. They looked, through the cloudy partition of the plastic, like the shadowy figures in Plato’s cave—dreamlike, handing each other tools, reaching for things.

  The laundry room was the first thing my mother wanted to talk about when I came in.

  “Hey, Mellie,” she said, patting the side of the bed next to her. “Did you see what they’re doing?”

  Her voice sounded different. It was the morphine: It made her slur her words, and along with that, the effort not to slur them made her overly careful. It was like she had something in her mouth she was trying to conceal.

  Tactful, I tried to pretend everything was normal. Like I was used to being shown in by a nurse, traipsing into the Hilton past carpenters, finding her sitting up in bed, emaciated, a glass of ice chips next to her with a sad straw poking out.

  I sat down to look at what she wanted to show me. The laundry room plans.

  She had plotted out every detail. She showed me magazine clippings and grid paper drawings. The space was tiny, there was only room for a stacked washer and dryer—in the past, healthy, she had derided these—but I was too careful with her now for anything but affirmation. I praised it all, trying not to notice that in the sketch she’d drawn, morphine-inflected, the lines were ragged. Across from the stacked washer-dryer, there would be a wall-mounted ironing board.

  “Very nice,” I mumbled. Something in the Hilton smelled funny to me—was it the medicine? The airlessness?—and I felt my stomach lurch.

  “They’re getting a lot done,” she told me, though it was hard to know how anyone could tell that yet. Maybe they gave her progress reports at the end of each day.

  The whole conversation felt surreal. Did she really care as much as she seemed to about the choice of cabinets, the color of the laminate on the counters?

  How could this be what a life came down to in the end? How, after everything she’d planned—courses, histories, phenomenal excursions, babies, careers, lives—could she be plotting and replotting a room (four feet by six) to hold a supplemental washer and dryer?

  While my mother showed me the plans, I sneaked surreptitious looks at her. She looked even thinner and frailer, if that was possible. She was wearing an unfamiliar robe over her pajamas that looked like the kind of thing someone must have sent her as a get-well present—expensive, not her taste. I could tell she’d gone to trouble getting ready for me. She had her wig on, and she’d taken pains with her makeup. Ray must have helped her. She’d drawn eyebrows on with a brown pencil—like scratches of graffiti on a white wall—and she’d put mascara on the two or three pale stalks of eyelash that somehow, miraculously, had survived two rounds of Fuck You. Her cheekbones, always prominent, now stuck out unfathomably far, and her face was all bone and angle, more like a pelvis than a face, really, with only her big owl glasses to provide a familiar sense—oh yes, it was her—like a jut of well-known jaw under a Halloween mask.

  Her face looked bigger than usual, because the rest of her was so wasted. It gave a stronger than ever impression that she was all head.

  Like poor Yorick.

  She wanted, she told me, to hear everything. She patted the bed again, signaling that I should inch closer, it was the last vestige of hospitality she could offer, like this was some kind of bizarre pajama party, and I moved forward, uncertain. My stomach felt terrible. She wanted to know about Sacha, what she was doing, did she like Annabel? Was she crawling?

  I started. How had my mother, who always remembered every detail, forgotten? Sacha had been crawling since July. My mother knew that. She’d seen for herself, in Charlevoix!

  “Yes, she’s crawling,” I said, unnerved. Between earth and heaven, I thought, remembering the lines from Hamlet I’d been reading on the plane.

  If she caught her mistake, she didn’t show it: She was moving on.

  How were my students? What about my department, what were the other professors like? Who—this was so my mother—was I having lunch with?

  “Oh—different people,” I told her. I mentioned a few names.

  Actually, I liked my colleagues—the ones I’d met so far. I just hadn’t been eating lunch with them. Instead, I ate at my desk, facing a gray plaster wall with lighter gray squares on it where somebody else’s posters used to be. I underlined passages in Hamlet. Some days I called home and asked Annabel if I could talk to Sacha. Annabel was always willing to try and make this happen, but Sacha would thwack unhappily at the phone with her hand and whimper to get away. My voice when I wasn’t in the room with her confused her and made her cry. Sometimes I called Jacques and we talked in code. “How is she today? Any better? Did they change the morphine dose?”

  One day I called Julie, and she said my father was thinking about canceling out patients for a while so he could spend more time with her during the day. We knew that was a bad sign. He’d wanted to save that until absolutely necessary.

  I didn’t tell my mother that I went to campus on Tuesdays and Thursdays and prayed (except being me, I didn’t pray, it was more like intense wishing) that I could get through my classes and make it home before I fell apart.

  None of my colleagues knew what was happening with my mother, except my chair. I couldn’t exactly ask for time off—I’d just started. I’d just had eight months off! I’d already had to ask my chair to see if we could slow down my tenure clock. When I’d taken the job back in February, I’d asked for credit for my two and a half years at Georgetown. Now, I wanted to give the credit back.

  I didn’t tell my mother any of this.

  I’d been rehearsing anecdotes to tell her, bringing stories for her the same way I’d brought photographs, dozens of them sticking together in my book bag, almost all of them identical shots of Sacha, pulling up on things, stepping on the feet of her terrycloth onesies so they stretched out behind her, but before I could show her, she was beckoning again for me to come closer, struggling to get something out of the drawer of the bedside table. Her eyelids lowered, she was suddenly fighting off exhaustion, it seemed to have dropped over her like a parachute, she couldn’t fight it, but there was something she wanted to do before she fell asleep for what must have been, even just that day, the dozenth time.

  THIS VISIT, SMALL THINGS BOTHERED me. The fact that Ray, who my parents were paying seventy-five dollars an hour, couldn’t even make my mother a new cup of tea when she asked for it. I found her microwaving the same wretched cup of brown water when I came downstairs, and I wanted to strangle her.

  “How about some fresh tea,” I said. Who knew how much time my mother had left? She almost never wanted to eat or drink anything, and when she did, why couldn’t she have a cup of tea that was drinkable?

  Ray put her lips together, looking past me.

  It was easy to get mad at Ray, to take things out on her. But in fact, Ray wasn’t a bad person. In fact, she was pretty compassionate, in her own way. Later, when I found her down in the kitchen while my mother was napping, she explained that my mother’s biggest enemy now was pain. If she took enough morphine to be “comfortable”—Dr. Brenner’s new goal—she felt like she was completely out of it. Couldn’t read or write. Couldn’t stay on the phone for more than a few minutes. The morphine made her unbearably sleepy—she dropped off, just like that—and it turned her mouth to paper and didn’t so much get rid of the pain as—this was Ray’s version of my mother’s description—“put it next to her, somehow.” So she tried to tough it out, struggled with Ray over every ounce—no, no, she didn’t want that much—it was liquid, a funny shade of gold—but then she hurt so badly she cried and begged for more, only to get hysterical again (Ray’s description) when Ray brought it, begging her to pour half the dose down the drain.

  It wasn’t fair blaming Ray, trying to make things all one way or another. Good and bad, my mother used to say, joki
ng about the ways in which people divide life up so neatly—the good nurse, the bad nurse. All one thing or another. But of course it wasn’t that simple. When we weren’t here, my sisters and I, Ray helped my mother in ways we couldn’t fathom. Already, impossible as it was for me to understand, my mother—who could always do everything (except knit)—couldn’t do most things for herself. She needed help going to the bathroom. She couldn’t get in or out of the bath by herself. It was Ray and Dora who were there now, lifting her, helping her, listening to her stories, and maybe that was why I was so irritated with Ray, not because she kept reheating the same cup of tea my mother sipped but wouldn’t drink, but because Ray stayed, permanent, paid, and all I did over and over again was come back here just to leave.

  MY MOTHER SLEPT ON AND off all that afternoon. When she woke, sometime after five, the workers were gone, the hallway was quiet. Dora, who I hadn’t met yet, was parking her Toyota in the driveway, and Ray was packing up to leave. One watch giving way to another. The changing of the guard.

  My mother was calling me. She wanted to talk to me before Dora came. In this tiny space between nurses, this space left for us to be just us, alone.

  Mother, daughter.

  Nobody else here. No sisters, no baby, no husbands. Not even my father. Just my mother and I: the two of us. Early evening light coming through the shutters. Her wig had tipped to one side while she slept, and if I had been another kind of person, I would’ve scooped her up in my arms and held her tightly against me and sobbed. Instead, I stood uneasily in the doorway, still feeling sick to my stomach, my eyes swimming, wishing there was something I could do to make any of this better.

  “Ame,” she said, her voice hoarse. Her voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere else.