by Mira Bartók
I felt worse, finally knowing where she lived, knowing exactly what the place looked like. How could I turn my back on her now when her sad life was staring me in the face? And if I didn’t do something soon, what was to stop her from moving on yet again, to another shelter, another town?
I had been communicating with my mother’s social worker for the past year about reuniting us, with a third party present for support. I wouldn’t do it without a third party, without my mother living somewhere under close watch, in a halfway house or a nursing home. Even though she was now elderly, in my mind she was still the madwoman on the street, brandishing a knife; the woman who shouts obscenities at you in the park, who follows you down alleyways, lighting matches in your hair.
I had no idea if my sister Natalia would want to see her at all, but planned to ask her when the time came. The organization that was helping my mother, MHS (Mental Health Services for Homeless Persons, Inc.), had been trying to arrange a legal guardianship for her so she could be placed in a nursing home where she could get adequate care. She would finally have an advocate—someone to make decisions for her about finances, housing, and health. But when MHS presented my mother’s case before the court, they lost. It didn’t matter that she slept outside on the wet ground some nights, or that she was incontinent, nearly blind, and seriously ill, or that she had a long history of suicide attempts and hospitalizations. The judge declared my mother sane for three simple reasons: she could balance a checkbook, buy her own cigarettes, and use correct change. It was just like when my sister and I had tried to get a guardianship for her in the past.
I picked up a rental car at the airport and met my childhood friend Cathy at my hotel. We had seen each other for the first time after thirty years when I came to town two months before. Except for a few extra pounds and some faint lines etched around her blue eyes, Cathy hadn’t changed. I could still picture her laughing, leaning against her locker at Newton D. Baker Junior High—a sweet, sympathetic girl in a miniskirt, straight blond hair flowing down to her waist.
As we were going up the elevator at University Hospital, I told Cathy about what the doctor had said to me earlier that day on the phone. He had said that my mother’s abdomen was riddled with tumors, and that he had removed most of her stomach and colon. He explained what stomas were, how her waste was being removed through them and how they had to be kept clean. I said, “He claims she’ll never go back to the shelter. They’ll get her into a good nursing home and make her as comfortable as possible before she dies.”
“That’s a relief,” she said, taking my hand.
“I don’t know, Cathy. I still think she’ll just get up, walk out the door, and disappear.”
The door was slightly ajar when we arrived at my mother’s room. I asked Cathy to wait in the hall until I called her in. The lights were off when I entered. I watched my mother sleep for a few minutes; the sun filtered through the slats in the shades, illuminating her pallid face. She looked like my grandfather when he was dying—hollow cheeks, ashen skin, breath labored and slow. Would she believe it was really me? She thought that aliens could assume the shape of her loved ones.
“Mom,” I said. “It’s me. Your daughter, Myra.” I used my old name, the one she gave me. She opened her eyes.
“Myra? Is it really you?” Her voice was barely audible and her cadence strange.
“I brought you a little gift,” I said, and placed the soft orange scarf I had knitted for her around her neck.
I sat down and took her hand. How well could she see? She had always written about her blindness, caused by glaucoma, cataracts, and “poisonous gas from enemy combatants.” I wondered if she could see how I had aged. My dark brown hair was cut in a bob, like the last time I had seen her, but I had a few wrinkles now, a few more gray hairs. I still dressed like a tomboy, though, and was wearing black sweatpants and a sweater. “That’s a good look for you, honey,” she said. “You look sporty. Where’s your sister?”
“She’ll be here in a couple days,” I said. “She sends her love.”
I was relieved that I could say that. What if my sister couldn’t bear to come? What would I have said?
When the nurse came in I asked her how much my mother weighed.
“Eighty-three pounds. Are you her daughter?”
“Yes,” I said, then hesitated. “I haven’t seen her in seventeen years.”
I expected the nurse to reproach me, but instead she was kind. “How nice that you can be together now. I hope you two have a great reunion.”
My mother brought her hand up to shield her eyes. “Turn that damn light off.”
“It’s off,” I said.
“Shut the curtains. It’s too bright in here. Where’s my music? When am I going home?”
“Where do you want to go?” I asked.
“Back to my women.”
Did she mean the women’s shelter? Or did she want to be with my sister and me in her old house on West 148th Street?
“Where’s my little radio? Did someone steal it again?”
The last time I visited my mother in a hospital, it was over twenty years ago. She was in a lockdown ward at Cleveland Psychiatric Institute (CPI) and had asked me to bring her a radio. She had always needed a radio and a certain level of darkness. In her youth, my mother had been a musical prodigy. When I was growing up, she listened to the classical radio station night and day. I always wondered if her need for a radio meant more than just a love of music. Did it help block out the voices in her head?
I pulled the curtains shut over the shades. “Is that better?”
“Yes, honey. You’re a good girl.”
I could smell lunch arriving down the hall—coffee, soup, and bread. Comforting smells in a world of beeping machines and gurneys—the clanking, squeaking sounds of the ICU.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
“Not that hungry these days,” she said. “You want something to eat? You’re too thin. Go ask them to make you a sandwich. I’ll pay. Bring me my purse.”
My mother was missing all but her four front teeth. I remember her writing me several years before to say that she had had them all removed because disability wouldn’t pay for dental care. According to the Government, teeth and eyes are just accessories, she wrote. Like buying a belt or a brooch.
“Where are your false teeth?” I asked. “They’ll be serving lunch soon.”
“Someone stole them,” she whispered. “They always steal my teeth.”
We sat for a while, holding hands. She drifted in and out of sleep. I put my mother’s palm up to my lips. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t smell cigarettes on her skin. She smelled like baby lotion. She opened her eyes.
“You should be proud of me. I quit smoking,” she said.
“When did you quit?”
“A week ago. When they brought me here.”
“Good for you,” I said. “You know, I always loved you, Mommy.”
It was the first time I had used that word since I was a child. My sister and I always called her Mother, Norma, or Normie, or, on rare occasions, Mom. It was hard to call her anything maternal, even though she tried so hard to be just that. But in the hospital, as she lay dying, Mommy seemed the only right word to use.
“I love you too,” she said. “But you ran away from me. Far away.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“A lot happened,” she said.
“A lot happened to me too. But I’m here now.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m glad you came. Now let me sleep. I’m so very tired.”
On Tuesday, my second day at the hospital, a nurse came in and asked me how old my mother was. “She just turned eighty in November,” I said.
My mother threw me a nasty look. “It’s a lie!”
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Not that old,” she said.
“I was just kidding,” I said. “Are you in your forties now?” I winked at the nurse.
“A l
ittle older but not much. A woman should never reveal her age.”
“She’s fifty-two,” I said to the nurse but mouthed the word eighty when my mother turned away.
Later, the surgeon talked to me outside the room. He said that the pathology report had finally come in. What he originally thought was colon cancer was late-stage stomach cancer, which is more deadly and was moving fast. I bombarded him with questions: “Where else has the cancer spread? Is she too far gone for chemo? How long does she have?”
“Well, the good news is that your mother is doing remarkably well!” How can a dying person do remarkably well? I wondered. He added, “She’s recovering great from the surgery but there’s nothing we can really do for her anymore, just keep her comfortable.”
“Can you explain what you did?” I asked.
The doctor borrowed my notepad and drew a picture. His pen flew over the paper; it was a map of what my mother looked like inside. “Here’s what I did,” he said. “I redirected what’s left of her colon and moved this over here, so that her waste can exit through this stoma, see?”
He spoke too fast for my brain, using words like fistula, ileostomy, and carcinomatosis. I had no idea what he was talking about. It looked like he was drawing the map of a city as seen from above. Was this what is inside us, these roads and byways, these rotaries and hairpin turns?
“Thanks,” I said. “That explains a lot.”
“Super,” said the doctor, perpetually upbeat. “We can talk more later. I want to speak with your mother now.”
The doctor and I went back inside her room. “Good morning, Norma! How are you doing today?”
She smiled weakly. “All right.”
He turned to me. “Her abdomen is completely diseased. We couldn’t take everything out.”
I glared at him and put my finger to my lips. The day before I had said on the phone that discussing this with my mother would just upset her and that she wouldn’t really understand. The doctor continued anyway.
“It’s much worse than we thought, Norma. People always want to know how long, but I can’t tell them. I could say a few weeks, months, either way I’d be wrong.” He sat down beside her, took her hand in his, and said loudly, “You have cancer, Norma. It’s very bad. Do you understand?”
She looked baffled. The night before she had told me it wasn’t anything serious, she just had food poisoning from bad Mexican food. “Don’t eat at Taco Bell,” she had warned me. “They poison the beans there.”
The doctor said again, “Norma. Do you understand that you have cancer?”
“Get me a Danish,” she whispered in my ear as if it were a secret. She thought for a second. “One with sweet cheese.”
Later that day, my mother suddenly became concerned about her things at the shelter. “Where’s my black backpack? Where’s my purse? Who took them?”
I asked Tim, her shy young social worker from MHS, to retrieve her two large garbage bags from the shelter on Payne Avenue. I assumed these were the only things she owned in the world. In the years that we were apart, she often mentioned in her letters that she still had some of our family things in storage. Was it true or did she just imagine they were locked up somewhere for safekeeping? Sometimes she wrote me urgent letters, begging me to come to Cleveland and help her move her things from one place to another, but I suspected that it was just a ploy to get me to come back home.
In the hospital parking lot Tim and I rummaged through her bags to see if there was anything she might want. We found her backpack in one of them, filthy and ripped, filled with laundry detergent, toothpaste, damp cigarettes, receipts, a diary, a sketchbook, a medical dictionary, incontinence pads, and a dirty white sock filled with keys. I took the keys and counted them, seventeen in all. Most looked like they went to lockers and storage units. One was a house key. Did it unlock our old red brick house?
Back in her room I showed her the sock. “Where do these go to?” I asked.
“I’m tired. I don’t know. Let me sleep.” Then she motioned me to come closer. “I have Grandma’s diamond rings for you girls. They’re locked up in a safety-deposit box.”
“Where?” I asked. “What box? What are all these keys for?”
“Tell you later. Too tired now. Shut lights. Don’t let them steal my pack.”
That evening, in the hotel room, I picked up the diary I had found in her backpack. It was a pocket-sized purple notebook with red hearts on the cover, like the diary of a ten-year-old girl. I wondered if she had more of them hidden somewhere. I flipped through the coffee-stained pages. The book had the same faint odor of stale smoke and mildew that her letters had. I turned to her last few entries. Two weeks before the paramedics picked her up from the Community Women’s Shelter, my mother wrote: Magma: Hot liquid rock can be three shapes: spherical, spiral or a rod. It flows out like lava or cools underground.
They had told me at the shelter that when they called 911 that day, she couldn’t stop vomiting and her stomach was distended as if she were about to give birth. “That Norma, she didn’t want to go to the hospital,” one woman had said to me on the phone. “She is one stubborn lady.” She had been sick for months, but wouldn’t see a doctor. Finally, the day the ambulance came to take her to the hospital, the women at the shelter convinced her to go.
In her diary, my mother wrote: If lava reaches Earth’s surface it turns into igneous rock. Basalt: dark gray rock forms when magma cools into a solid. My mother had been studying geology. I turned back the pages. Before geology, she had reread all of Edgar Allan Poe. Before that she had turned to the stars: Recently, I had a dream of a cataclysm. Was not prepared for study of the planets, which has fevered my imagination once again.
Before I left for Cleveland I had been studying geology too. I was in the middle of a book about Nicolaus Steno, the seventeenth century Danish anatomist, whom some call the grandfather of geology. Steno was fascinated by what the oceans hid and left behind. I had read about how one day, in 1666, young Steno was in an anatomical theater in Florence, Italy, dissecting the head of a shark. It wasn’t just any shark but a great white. The shark was a wonder, and Steno’s patron, the Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici, wanted to know what was inside. This was the time when wonder and scientific inquiry were intricately entwined—when collectors collected the rare and the mysterious, the miraculous and mundane, from the bounty that explorers brought back to Europe from the New World.
When Steno peered into the monster’s mouth he noticed that the shark’s teeth resembled the little stones people called “tongue stones,” or glossopetrae, the mysterious stones Pliny the Elder said fell from the heavens on dark and moonless nights, what the church said were miracle stones left from Noah’s Great Flood. Steno’s mind leapt from shark to sea to a question that plagued him for the rest of his life: why are seashells found on mountaintops? Even his scientific colleagues thought the fossils were signs from God. Nicolaus Steno laid the foundation for reading the archival history of the earth: How crystals are formed, how land erodes and sediment is made over time. How over centuries, seashells become fossils embedded deep inside the bedrock of mountains.
My mother would have liked Nicolaus Steno. She’d marvel at the way his mind flew from one thought to another, uncovering the truth about ancient seas, how he learned to read the memory of a landscape, one layer at a time. The earth is also a palimpsest—its history scraped away time and time again. If my mother were well enough, I would tell her this. She’d light up a cigarette, pour herself a cup of black coffee, and get out her colored pens. Then she’d draw a giant chart with a detailed geological timeline, revealing the stratification of the earth.
That Tuesday night I met my sister, Natalia, at the airport. I spotted her cherry-red coat in the thick throng of hurried holiday travelers. She lugged a huge suitcase behind her, walking a fast clip in high black boots. Like me, it had been close to seventeen years since she had last seen our mother, but my sister had made the painful decision never to write to
her. When I had called her about our mother dying, I didn’t know whether or not she would come. Her last vision of our mother was a nightmare, indelible in her mind. I was relieved when, without even deliberating, she said she’d join me in Cleveland.
“Nattie, I’m so happy you’re here.” I ran up to hug her. I had almost called her Rachel, her birth name before she changed it more than a decade before. Being back in Cleveland made her newer name feel strange on my tongue for the first time in years. Just as well. Around our mother, we’d have to be Myra and Rachel one last time.
“How is she?” asked Natalia.
“Don’t be shocked. She looks like a survivor from the camps.”
“I really want to see her. Let’s go first thing in the morning.”
“Before I forget, I wanted to tell you—I found some keys. And receipts from U-Haul. She must have a storage room somewhere.”
“What do you think is in there?”
“I don’t know. But we can go this week and see. I imagine there’s a lot of junk.”
The next morning Natalia woke up early to work out in the gym. She has always kept a strict regimen—a daily exercise routine, a rigorous schedule for writing, teaching, grading her students’ papers before bed. While Natalia was out of the room, I skimmed through my mother’s dairy. She wrote about staying up all night in the rain on a stranger’s porch and trying to sleep at the bus station without getting mugged. Should I read any of this to my sister?
When we walked into our mother’s room at the hospital, she looked up at Natalia and said, “Who are you?” She turned to me. “Who’s this lady?”
How could my mother not recognize her? Did she look that different seventeen years ago? The last time our mother saw her, Natalia was running away from the house on West 148th Street. Maybe that was how our mother remembered her—a terrified young girl in flight, long hair flying in the cold January wind.