An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

  My mother used to call me a praying mantis (the term in Arabic translates to “prophet’s mare,” which is beautiful, if you ask me) because I was tall and scrawny. I think she meant a stick insect, but whether as a child or as a woman, I rarely disabused her of her incorrect assertions. Yet as I sit before her, I realize she’s much thinner than I ever was. She’s gone from Rubens to Schiele.

  Many suggest that we close the circle as we age by growing childlike. The way she sits, folded upon herself, I’d go as far as to say that she’s shrinking to fetus form. Her appearance has changed as well, and I don’t mean just the intense reticulation of lines and wrinkles, the true stigmata of life. She wears someone else’s skin, someone much larger, a hand-me-down skin. A bluff of short spiky hairs sprouts on her upper lip, sparse Hitlerian. Her face is both gaunt and puffy; its muscles are completely slack. It has no discernible angles. My mother’s countenance has turned androgynous.

  This is what I have to look forward to.

  In slumber, my mother is melancholia in human form. I wonder, though, whether I only see this in her because I expect it. For all I know she may be dreaming of flowers and wheat fields, butterflies and Swiss Alps, chocolate and Chanel. Maybe that mind of hers is happy in its insanity. Devoid of worries and responsibility, of mundane earthly concerns, she may have reached Nirvana, without guru or Sherpa.

  But the mournful words of Thomas Jefferson loop through my head. In a letter to a friend in 1825 he wrote, “All are dead, and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know us not.”

  Jefferson obviously had no Sherpa.

  My mother wears a hearing aid that circles and penetrates her left ear, a recent addition but not a recent model. What seems at first to be the manufacturer’s logo behind her ear fails to sustain the illusion on closer inspection. It is formless Roman script in purple ink that reads, when I lean forward to see, AU SECOURS! I don’t have to wonder long who did this: as soon as I lean back in my chair, I notice the Kenzo potato blushing, avoiding eye contact by staring at a television commercial.

  The slam of the front door distracts her. The density of the air changes faintly, allowing me to note how stale the room smells, a brew of ancient cigarette smoke, naphthalene, and armpit sweat. I worry that it’s my half brother the eldest, but a sloppy teenage boy walks in, a year or two older than the girl, who must be his sister. His eyes are covered by unattractive sunglasses that feature, incredibly, cheap-looking silver tassels behind each ear. He stops when he sees me. He stands with arms ceremoniously akimbo, directly in my line of sight.

  “Who’re you?” he snaps, not maliciously, but with a certain air of privilege.

  His sister shushes him, points toward my catatonic mother. I don’t reply. He shrugs with the honed nonchalance of ungracious adolescence, trudges with lazy steps into the kitchen. I’m sure his grandmother will explain who I am.

  I, on the other hand, can’t explain who my mother is. Who is this woman before me? This thought drifts like smoke through my head: Do I know you?

  I’ve been so busy thinking about how my mother saw me that I’ve had little sight left to look upon the grande dame, her holiness herself. This is my mother. I rack my brain. What do I know of her? What do I remember?

  I remember incidents, patches of a life—actually, minor patches in a long life, and only when they intersected with mine. I see scenes—images and scenes. I know my mother only in sepia.

  Isn’t someone’s life more than a collection of scenes? Isn’t she more than the images I have compiled in my head? These questions may sound rhetorical, but I genuinely don’t know. I can’t tell whether my understanding of her is limited, if I can’t get to know her because of a basic deficiency of mine, or whether this is as far as any human can understand another. The question that really bothers me is whether I know anyone else better than I know my mother. It seems I’ve always asked, with Lear, “Does any here know me?” but never “Do I know any here?” Trying to know another human being seems to me as impossible, and as ridiculous, as trying to grasp a swallow’s shadow.

  My mother lived, lives, in a hazy world, not my own.

  Other people are hazy phenomena that become corporeal only in my memories.

  Although I know the characters of a novel as a collection of scenes as well, as accumulated sentences in my head, I feel I know them better than I do my mother. I fill in the blanks with literary personas better than I do with real people, or maybe I make more of an effort. I know Lolita’s mother better than I do mine, and I must say, I feel her more than I feel my mother. I recognize Rembrandt’s painted face of his mother better than I recognize the real face of mine.

  The girl pretends to watch television. It may be just background noise for her, but it isn’t for me. Even though the volume is low, whatever show is on is in a language I don’t understand, possibly Turkish, possibly Hebrew; the voice drifts as if from a distance, not the television, but a far-off land—a male voice, nasal, mingled with faint crackles and New Age string music. Most irritating.

  “Turn that off,” I snap angrily, much too angrily.

  Surprisingly, the girl does, doesn’t even hesitate.

  What I would love right now is a massage, a gentle shoulder rub, anything to untangle my mess of muscles. Not that I’ve had many massages. I don’t submit easily to a stranger’s touch no matter how beneficial it might be, and I can’t afford to pay for self-indulgence in any case. My shoulder muscles have spun themselves into worsted yarn, their numbness and ache locked deep between the blades. I tense my shoulders, count to three, and relax them, an exercise Hannah taught me once. It doesn’t help. It never actually did.

  A heavy vehicle causes the window to rattle and the spiderweb dangling from the chandelier to sway. The noise and clatter wake my mother. She opens her left eye first, then her right.

  I brace myself. In my head I count the seconds—no, no, someone else counts the seconds in my head: one, two, three. I can’t seem to restrain my thoughts. I count each wrinkle around her eyes without mixing either tally. I shiver as my mind skates from one bleak oblique thought to another. Will she recognize me? Has she ever rocked me in her arms? Does she hate me? Why did she never brush my hair? Has anyone taken her to a doctor recently? The voice of Karita Mattila singing the opening notes of the third of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs echoes in my skull. My tongue and the insides of my cheeks feel dry. I note the little red lash marks on the palm of her hand, the earth-toned liver spots on the back of the other. Her eyes focus on me. They seem so very sane.

  At the count of twelve, she calls my name quietly. “Aaliya,” she says.

  I acknowledge the recognition by smiling and nodding. My hands, still slightly clammy, unclench. I place them on my thighs. My heart beats just a little faster, just a little sharper. Her breathing is calmer, without stertor, less of a struggle than while she slept.

  “You’ve changed,” she says in a cotton wad of a voice.

  “Yes,” I say. “We all have. I’ve grown older.”

  “No,” she interrupts me. “No, your hair is blue.”

  Has she ever rocked me in her arms? Hugged me? Whispered baby talk in my ears? I doubt it very much.

  “Yes, that,” I say. “Yes, it is blue.”

  She looks puzzled, and a little lost. She winces. Her face distorts a bit, as if she found my answer offensive, or maybe incomprehensible, or simply terrifying. I can’t tell. She tries to move farther back into the chair, but that proves physically impossible—she is as far back as the chair will allow.

  “It’s all right, Mother,” I say in as comforting a tone as I can muster. “I used coloring shampoo by mistake, more than I should have. It’s not permanent. My hair will recover.”

  She looks more confused, breaks eye contact. She regards the ceiling as if she’s watching some ghostly agitation up there. She pushes her hand under the shawl around her shoulders and scratches her arm. Her grimace becomes more pronounced, the corners o
f her mouth moving farther apart as if they loathe each other.

  “Are you all right?” I ask, pointing at her.

  I receive no response, verbal or non.

  “She doesn’t always answer,” my great-niece says. No longer pretending to ignore my presence, she’s on her knees, leaning over the side of the couch, trying to engage me. “Sometimes I know she’s in pain but she won’t be able to tell me what’s hurting her. Other times she’ll tell me it’s her neck but she means that it used to hurt her years ago. You can’t tell. She’s not good at communicating.”

  “Neither am I,” I say. “Mother, are you in pain?”

  “She doesn’t talk much, just hums most of the time.” My great-niece underlines her words with an extravagant repertoire of hand gestures and facial expressions. “Old Arabic songs. Hum, hum, hum. Not Oum Kalthoum, not Fairuz. You’ll never guess.”

  “Asmahan,” I say.

  “You guessed!” She sounds ecstatic, unable to control her glee. “Of course you’d know. You’re her daughter. I try to ask her who Asmahan is but she keeps mumbling, ‘They killed her, they killed her.’ Then she starts humming again. Nonstop humming, always music in the house. It’s like we have our own canary.”

  At first I feel hurt and want to object. That’s an awful thing to say about someone. In a short story by the fabulous fabulist Sławomir Mroz˙ek, a narrator attends a party at which the entertainment is provided by the household pet, a caged liberal, a humanist who has been reduced to nothing more than a singer of quaint revolutionary songs. My mother doesn’t know any revolutionary songs, but she does Asmahan’s. So I also feel a tickle of happiness, a flicker of joy, unrelated to the fact that I guessed the singer; that my mother hums Asmahan’s songs makes me feel good. That my mother likes the singer who married and divorced three or four men, the scandalous actress who left her husband and family to pursue her career—an illustrious, titled family no less—allows my own heart to sing.

  “Do you know who she is?” asks my great-niece.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “The singer,” the girl says. “Do you know who the singer is?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well?” she says.

  She waits for me to say something. I am more experienced in waiting.

  “Who is she?” my great-niece asks.

  “You have that wonderful computer next to you. Look her up.”

  My mother whimpers, and a frisson of fear courses through me. Will she?

  “Are you all right, Mother?” I ask.

  She no longer seems to recognize me, but she quiets. I can’t read her, can’t tell whether she’s in agony or simply distracted. She seems alone and fearful, her mind the only place in which she can hide. Her mouth is never still, moves from grimace to lazy smile to irritation in a matter of seconds, back and forth, sideways, up and down.

  “You have to be more specific,” my great-niece says.

  She’s off the couch now, standing beside me. If I stay a bit longer, if I continue to linger in her presence, I wonder whether she’ll end up sitting on my lap.

  “She doesn’t answer if I ask a general question,” she says, “but if I ask whether her back hurts, she might. Sometimes I have to ask about every body part one by one.” She nods while speaking, as if she’s agreeing with what she’s saying. Her voice seems to have an element of delirium. “Before you came in, she answered yes to whether she was thirsty, but when I brought the glass of water, she was asleep, so I drank it.”

  My great-niece’s excitement is so high that I wonder if I should hold on to her so she doesn’t launch herself at the ceiling.

  “Mother,” I say, “does your back hurt?”

  My mother pays no attention, as if I don’t exist. I have to control the urge to lean forward and smack her.

  “How can I ask her anything if she doesn’t hear a word I’m saying?” I mutter.

  “Hold her hand,” my great-niece says. “She doesn’t always know you’re speaking to her. Sometimes you have to touch her, otherwise you might be sitting here for hours and she’ll be off in her own world.”

  She puts her hand on my shoulder, but withdraws it when I instinctively flinch. She folds her hands into the small of her back. What can I say? Judging from her enthusiastic agitation, I’m afraid she’ll go Ancient Mariner on me. “The guests are met, the feast is set.” Let me be.

  “Go on,” she says. “Hold her hand. She won’t hurt you. She doesn’t bite.”

  “Oh, but I might, so better be careful.”

  Can I get any sillier than this in my old age? Trying to be funny for a teenager, my jokes as bad as Fadia’s. Maybe I should pick up Fadia’s boisterous laugh as well. I’ll ride out on a lame horse toward a simulacrum sunset with a comedy drum roll and cymbal crash.

  “Haha,” she says with amused sarcasm. “That was almost as unfunny as Grandpa’s jokes.”

  In my hand, my mother’s feels breakable; it is skin and bones—desiccated skin that lacks any semblance of elasticity. My great-niece is right, though. My mother looks suddenly alert.

  “Does your back hurt?” I ask.

  She shakes her head no. She removes her hand from mine and points toward her shoes with a skinny finger that looks surprised that it can hold itself aloft. “My feet,” she says softly, gently.

  “Your feet?” I ask, pointing toward her shoes to make sure.

  “Her feet,” my great-niece says. “Yes, it must be. She’s never pointed to her feet before.”

  I now have a sidekick.

  “Can I see?” I ask my mother. “I’ll need to take your shoes off.”

  I don’t know why I’m making such an offer. She’s not wearing any socks or nylons under her low black heels. For all I know she may have callouses, and will I be able to help her with that? Contagious fungi, gigantic bunions, ingrown warts, lacerations, ulcerations? What if she’s accumulated blisters on the bottoms of her feet like barnacles on the bottom of a boat—a boatload of blisters?

  I bought my first pair of slippers after I left her house. She wouldn’t allow me to take my shoes off until it was time for bed. For all she cared, the boys could prance around the house shoeless, sockless, barefoot, or wearing their underpants as freedom fighters’ face masks—“boys will be boys,” that most insipid of phrases. Not her daughters. Ladies should never be without shoes.

  My sidekick is wearing light blue slippers with sheepskin lining and a Hello Kitty logo. She sees me looking at them and says, “She used to demand that I wear shoes, and we used to argue all the time, but then she stopped a few years ago—she stopped noticing.”

  No bunions, no blisters, at least not at first glance, though an effluvium of foot odor assaults my nostrils. The stench even penetrates my great-niece’s defenses of cheap perfume and bubblegum.

  “Ew!” she says, quite succinctly, if you ask me.

  I don’t have to touch my mother’s feet—I really don’t want to—to realize how dry they are. Her shoes have irritated the skin at the joints, making the toes look like they’ve had a lovers’ tiff. Her nails are clawlike, an eagle’s talons, which is what’s probably causing her pain. She needs to have her toenails trimmed.

  “Oh!” my great-niece exclaims.

  I like her monosyllabic.

  My mother should have a pedicure. I can’t take her to a salon, not in her condition. Some manicurists visit your home, but I don’t know how to find one. I can ask my sister-in-law; she might know.

  “We have to do something about her toenails, Tante,” my great-niece says.

  “I know, I’m trying to think, and please don’t call me Tante. My name is Aaliya.”

  She proudly tells me her name, Nancy, and waits for me to comment. I don’t.

  “Think quickly, Tante Aaliya,” she says, “or we might suffocate in here. Should I open the window? It’s cold outside, though. Should I get cologne?”

  I’m surprised that I find my great-niece bearable. She seems to be able to change gears from sh
y to loquacious in microseconds, needs to have every thought heard and acknowledged. I usually find that incredibly annoying, if not insufferable. Not here, though, not now. I wonder if she too is lonely—if she too is in possession of that vast, heavy isolation that’s so difficult to bear. If she would sometimes happily exchange it for any kind of interaction, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who came along, even the most unworthy. If so, then today I happen to be my great-niece’s first person, the most unworthy.

  I don’t want to give my mother a pedicure. Apart from the fact that I’ve never trimmed anybody else’s nails, I find it—how shall I put it?—demeaning. I am not Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. I don’t wish to be crucified tomorrow. I am not Mary of Bethany. If I dry my mother’s feet with my hair, will they turn blue?

  I am not the Magistrate. I am not the Magistrate. I am not the Magistrate.

  And now, what will become of us without barbarians?

  O Coetzee, O Cavafy, O beloved gods, what am I doing here?

  “Can you help me, please?” I ask my great-niece.

  Can she bring a tub of hot water, not boiling, but hot enough for a footbath? Green tea leaves if there are any in the house, black tea if not, even tea bags are acceptable. No, we’re not going to drink the tea, it’s a disinfectant, but if you want to make some, I’ll share a cup—separate from the footbath, mind you. Rubbing alcohol, clippers, nail file, and a sliced turnip, or if there isn’t one, a radish will do. Their juice is a natural deodorant. Can she get a pair of my mother’s socks, please, and Vaseline to moisturize, since I doubt we can get our hands on spikenard oil?

  Did Mary of Bethany use spikenard oil simply for its fragrance or does it actually moisturize? I should experiment with lavender oil, its sibling, to see.

  How did I learn about the bacteria-destroying properties of tea, the odor-ameliorating power of certain root vegetables? My usual response is snappy: books, I read books—read, read, one can learn everything from books. Not in this case, however. I learned from watching my mother wash her feet when I was a little girl, as she probably learned from hers.