The flight from New York had been exhausting. As the hours across the ocean wore on, five-foot-one Dorothy sank farther and farther into her seat, until she resembled a child whose feet waggled impatiently above the broken-crayon-and-mini-pretzel-strewn floor. Helen had noticed the flight attendants casting worried glances at her mother whenever they passed, and she knew that they were quietly wondering if they were going to have a corpse on their hands before they reached Munich. She imagined that there was a protocol for this kind of emergency: surely they would remove the dead body from the sight of the other passengers—perhaps lay her mother on the floor of the galley at the back of the plane, cover her with some of those too thin blankets, or roll her into one of the ingenious storage places airplanes specialized in.
In the low light of the train compartment, Dorothy’s face shone. She had grown so thin lately; her skin stretched tautly over her nose and her cheekbones like a sheet on a well-made bed. In the last few months, Helen had become intimate with her mother in a way that made them both uncomfortable. During her increasingly frequent visits to New York, she had bathed Dorothy, helped her to sit on the toilet, pared her thick, yellowing toenails, then stroked them with the bright- red discount-store polish that Dorothy had been faithful to all these years. This breaking down of the customary distance that had existed between mother and daughter for decades made it more difficult for Helen to view her mother as a living thing rather than as a collection of body parts and functions. But perhaps that was a necessary by-product of giving care; Helen knew that if she allowed herself to look at the larger picture of her mother’s demise she would be overwhelmed by thoughts of needs, both met and not, and that she risked succumbing to a childlike terror of being left alone.
When called on to be a page-turner at the Philharmonic, Helen found that if she concentrated on one note, and then the next, instead of letting her mind take in the whole sweep of the piece, she never failed to turn the page at the right time. It was only when she lost sight of the particulars, when she let her mind range backward and forward across the music like a low-flying bird, that she made a mistake. She’d begin by thinking about the specific piece—what choices she might make in the speed of a diminuendo or the attack on a coda. Then she’d get trapped in an eddy of memory about her decision to leave the conservatory, to walk away from the possibility, no matter how far-fetched, of being the person who was now seated at the piano so close to her that she could hear his or her breaths and grunts and soft guttural moans, as if she were standing at an open doorway to a bedroom while the pianist was making love. And then, with her mind hijacked by so many thoughts, she would be a beat too late or too early with the turn, and suffer the annoyed glance of the pianist. She would carry the mistake with her for days.
A week earlier, Helen had told her nominal boyfriend, Nathan, about her mother’s decision to go to Germany for the treatment. He had almost rolled his eyes. Helen had been grateful for his blunt skepticism, because it allowed her to take the opposite position with a kind of self-righteousness that she would not otherwise have been able to muster. She proclaimed, if not a belief in, at least a tolerance for this latest of her mother’s nonmedical solutions to “the cancer problem.” This was how Dorothy referred to her illness, as if it were a tangled political issue that might be written about on the editorial page of her beloved New York Times, and then hotly discussed with the butcher or the man at the shoe-repair place when she went out each day on her brisk round of errands.
“She’s done her research,” Helen told Nathan, who sat at the kitchen table of the hilltop apartment they now shared. “They’ve had good results.”
Nathan did not respond because he was not a foolish man. Six months had passed since Helen had discovered that he was having an affair, and their current détente was built on the understanding that he would never again be able to speak freely. A year before, Nathan would have thrown back statistics of his own; he was in immunology research at Children’s Hospital, and had a dedicated disrespect for the alternative medical arts. Over the years, he had listened with slack-jawed disbelief when Helen had explained that her friends Wendy and Terry were forgoing vaccinations for little Mandy and Timmo. “Do you know how many kids die each year from whooping cough?” he had exclaimed in frustration. When Wendy had proudly told him that she’d cured Timmo’s conjunctivitis by squeezing her own breast milk into his eye, Nathan had not been able to restrain himself. “Right from your tit?” he’d responded, as if Wendy had exposed Timmo to porn. Helen felt a momentary pleasure as she watched Nathan swallow his criticism of her mother’s new gambit; he was no longer sure of himself in their relationship.
She had taken him back because he had apologized, begged, cried, and apologized again. But in the current atmosphere of their relationship he had no idea what concessions to his character she would continue to make, and what could cause her to send him back down that ancient elevator tower while she tossed his clothing from her balcony to the street below. Could he still organize the papers she left scattered across the table into neat piles set at right angles to one another? Could he still indulge his need to keep the refrigerator clear of any food that was even approaching its use-by date? She had gained the upper hand in the relationship, but her sense of victory was overshadowed by the knowledge that she no longer really had a boyfriend, only a set of misgivings and recriminations decorated as a handsome enough, smart enough, bearded, bespectacled man with delicate hands, shiny from too much washing. The loneliness that had descended on her in the aftermath of the crisis was so palpable that Helen often thought of it as a person. It stood by her side as she washed the dishes, or helped Marina Delgado, her best student, struggle through the Well-Tempered Clavier while she half listened, half watched the dust motes hanging in the air, lit by the afternoon light coming through the louvered windows of her apartment. The loneliness followed her, judged her, pointed out which of her irritating habits had finally driven Nathan to do what he had done. She was not sure why she hadn’t kicked him out in the end, except that she had begun to look forward to the outsized emotions of his entreaties, the late-night talks, the tears. She knew that the high drama was silly, but it reminded her of the kind of person she had once been—a girl who would weep when her rendition of a Beethoven adagio did not live up to the version that played in her imagination, a girl who would mourn that perfection was too difficult a goal to aim for and too crushing to fall short of.
What Helen had really felt after hearing Dorothy’s description of the blood-heating regimen was not skepticism but pity. But she would never have said this aloud, not only because she didn’t want to give Nathan the satisfaction but because she knew that it was horrible to have such feelings toward her mother, whom she loved—if that was the right word for the mixture of frustration and gratitude and hatred and tolerance and surprising, intractable, illogical attachment she felt for Dorothy, who was as deeply and inescapably rooted inside Helen as her own fractured heart.
Dr. Halverson, Dorothy’s purported oncologist and an old suitor from her City College days, had recently pronounced the disease so far gone that the risks of conventional treatment, if Dorothy were to change her mind, would be more deleterious than the risks of doing nothing.
“You mean my risk of dying is now no better than my risk of dying?” Dorothy replied.
“Dodi.” Dr. Halverson sighed, shaking his head at her lack of sentiment, an atavistic admiration dancing around his lips.
Helen had been in the examination room when he broke the news. She could not figure out why Dorothy continued to consult Dr. Halverson, or why he agreed to see her, despite her long-term resistance to his advice. What was the point of all those unfilled prescriptions for lab tests? Why did he continue to let her waste his time? Maybe he, like Helen, was so mystified by Dorothy’s aberrant choice of the esoteric over science that he didn’t quite believe it, and was waiting for Dorothy to finally break down, reclaim her lifelong set-jawed, unforgiving gaze on life, and
start the do-si-do of chemo and radiation. Dorothy, this short, mouthy woman from Bayonne who had marched for women’s rights and against Vietnam, her small frame hidden in the crowds while her homemade posters floated in the air above her as though held aloft by a ghost, had never once, in fifty-seven years, shown an interest in anything “alternative,” or even philosophical. Helen had been six when her father died. She asked how long it took a person to climb to Heaven. Dorothy took Helen’s face in her hands and said, “Not Heaven, honey. That’s just a fairy tale.” How frustrating it must have been for Dr. Halverson to watch Dorothy placing her faith in Dr. Hsia and his stinking herbs in Chinatown, or in Paul Romero and his needles in Park Slope, or in the water-therapy clinic in D.C. Helen admired the doctor’s delicacy. He never belittled Dorothy’s choices, and in these past months, when Dorothy had experienced her first truly frightening bouts of pain, he had visited the apartment as often as he could.
His patience stood in sharp contrast to Nathan’s disparagement. “It’s her body,” Helen had said to Nathan, in defense of the Germany plan. The word body sank to the ground the minute she said it, weighted, as it was, with the idea of his body and his desires, which had managed so casually to reject hers. She felt suddenly conscious of her thighs wrapped tightly (too tightly?) in denim, her small breasts bolstered ineffectually by some newfangled underwire bra she’d bought online. She had never had smooth skin—had picked and squeezed it too much as a teenager despite her mother’s warnings. Was that it? Did Nathan’s other woman have small pores? Nathan shrugged, smiled, then scrolled through five other expressions, trying to find the one that would cause him the least harm. Helen was humiliated all over again. That was the problem with his transgression, she thought: he had taken so many words away from her. Besides body, there was hope (the woman’s ridiculous name), there was desert (one of the places they’d trysted). Whole sentences like “What’s on your mind?” became as dangerous as stepping in front of a speeding car.
The train made a stop at a local station. It was dark, and shadowy figures wearing heavy overcoats against the midwinter cold moved on and off the platform. Dorothy’s eyes opened. She stared across the compartment, but Helen could tell that Dorothy was not seeing, that she was suspended somewhere between her pill-induced sleep and a fuzzy semi-alertness. It made Helen feel weak to see her mother hovering helplessly in this state. As much as she hated to admit it, Helen counted on her mother’s decisiveness, her unwillingness to wander around in the gray areas of emotion. When Helen finished with middling results in too many competitions and took a hard look at where she stood among her musical peers, she made the choice to give up her dream of becoming a concert pianist. Dorothy had said, “That’s sensible,” as though she’d been waiting patiently for years for Helen to get the answer right. Helen suddenly felt the lie behind all those performances and recitals; she had thought her mother her ally, when in fact Dorothy had been tapping her foot the whole time, waiting for Helen to wise up.
Helen regarded her mother a moment longer. The blue of her eyes was rheumy, indistinct. Her mouth hung open in a way that Helen knew she would hate. A few strands of hair were stuck to her dry lips. Dorothy had imparted several important pieces of advice to Helen in her youth, one of which was “Don’t hold your mouth open—it makes you look stupid.” Helen was also to wear a bra even in bed, in a war against future droop, and suck her stomach in at all times. Dorothy’s advice was a warning about how to avoid a dark, ugly inevitability. So, in reality, it wasn’t advice at all, only an admission of Helen’s ultimate inefficacy in the face of the Cards You’ve Been Dealt.
Dorothy’s teeth seemed yellower than Helen remembered. But everything about her seemed yellow now, like the pages of an old library book.
“God,” Dorothy said, breathlessly, and, for a moment, Helen wondered if she was having a conversation with that Man she professed not to believe in. But Dorothy’s eyes were focused now. She had come to. “Where are we?”
“Nowhere,” Helen said, looking out the window. “We just passed a town. You should sleep some more, Mom. We have a ways to go.” She regretted this suggestion. Her mother was cunning enough to know when she was not wanted.
“Whenever I sleep, I feel like I’m rehearsing for something,” Dorothy said, attempting to sit up. Helen helped Dorothy settle against the train seat. Her mother smelled of the tuberose perfume she’d used her whole life, that and the turning odor of the body in decline. Helen wondered when this happened—at what point the body’s smells could no longer be masked by deodorants or flowery soaps, at what point they would stop taking no for an answer.
“How do you feel?” Helen asked. She herself had barely recovered from the eight hours on the plane from New York. She felt clammy and bloated from having eaten too many meals in too short a time. She wanted to strip, have a bath, evacuate, start over again.
“I feel like shit, darling,” Dorothy said.
“Are you hungry?” Helen asked.
“No.”
“You should eat.” Helen looked into her purse. “I have a granola bar. And that turkey sandwich from the plane.”
“That will kill me. What is it, ten hours old?”
“You’ll need your strength.”
“Let’s put away the platitude playbook, sweetheart,” Dorothy said. “If there’s one thing I know about lately, it’s my dear, disastrous body. And if it eats right now it will upchuck all over this lovely compartment you’ve wasted your money on.”
Helen studied the pattern of veins webbed across her mother’s cheeks. She thought about La Brea Woman. A model of the dwarfish prehistoric woman was posed in a glass case at a museum on Wilshire. She appeared clad in an animal pelt, her long black hair modestly covering her naked plaster breasts. But, then, through a trick of light and mirrors, her outfit, as well as her skin, fell away, so that you could see her knobby skeleton.
“You make it awfully hard, Mom,” Helen said, finally.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Dorothy sighed, her expression genuinely penitent. “But for some reason having cancer gives everyone else the feeling they can order you around. Like you don’t know what’s good for you now that you’ve been stupid enough to contract this disease.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t—”
But Helen was smiling, and Dorothy’s eyes lit up at the memory. Dorothy had despised Helen’s childhood habit of apologizing for everything and everyone around her—which was, in itself, a reaction to her mother’s uncomfortable insistence on truthfulness. Once, after months of Helen’s complaints about a certain irrational science teacher, Dorothy had walked right up to the woman at an open house—a woman who was half a foot taller than she—and asked her if she was experiencing menopause. Helen had spent much of her youth trying to position herself at a physical and psychological ten-foot remove from her mother.
They were good together this way, teasing each other. When Helen had discovered the affair, she flew to New York. It was a strange impulse to seek out her mother for emotional succor, and Helen was almost frightened when she arrived at the apartment, certain that her mother, never a baker of chocolate chip cookies or a soother of feverish foreheads, would only make her feel worse. She had spent the weekend in an old Lanz nightgown that her mother had saved, standing at the open door of the refrigerator with a hand on her hip, pouting. Dorothy had been a wonder of humor, insisting that they google “Nathan’s girl,” as she referred to her, and, together, mother and daughter had stared at a picture of the absurdly named doctor with the dumbfounded awe one feels in the presence of a masterpiece. Hope was pretty enough, with a lustrous mane of brown hair and the kind of Jewish looks that had been smoothed out by cross-fertilization or plastic surgery. She was obviously younger than Helen. But before Helen could fall into despondency, Dorothy found fault with the set of the woman’s eyes, her thin lips, her ironed hair. She could tell that the woman had a
“big tush,” despite the fact that the image on the computer screen showed her only from the neck up. Her dissection made Helen laugh and feel defended and full of gratitude.
The dim shapes of small villages appeared against the night sky like phantoms, only to disappear into unarticulated darkness. An occasional bright constellation spread across the land, signaling a town of more significance. If she squinted, Helen could make out church steeples, the dark spill of homes on a hillside, and large, low factory buildings. She could have been anywhere in the world. She had never been to Germany before, and now she was seeing the country only as geographic semaphore.
“I need to pee,” Dorothy said.
Helen stood up immediately, relieved to be necessary. She helped her mother out of their compartment, and they awkwardly negotiated the narrow corridor. Helen held on to her mother as she opened the bathroom door, careful to steady her as the train lurched from side to side. Dorothy was as light and fragile as papier-mâché. Helen closed the bathroom door behind them, reached past her mother, and flipped up the metal toilet lid, then loosened her mother’s slacks and eased them down her hips. Dorothy had always been private about her body; Helen could not remember ever having seen her naked before the disease had turned her into a reluctant exhibitionist.
“I think I can take it from here,” Dorothy said.
Helen stepped back into the corridor and shut the door. She leaned against the cold window, trying to get the image of her mother’s thighs out of her mind, the way the folds of skin sloped gently toward her pubic area like small waves rippling onto a barren shore. Five minutes later, Dorothy came out of the bathroom, exhausted by the effort. The door swung shut behind her and she leaned against it as she zipped and buttoned her slacks. Embarrassed, Helen tried to shield Dorothy from the view of the few strangers who lingered farther down the corridor. Her discomfort soon gave way to sadness, as she realized the degree to which the disease had stripped her mother of the identity that had gotten her through so much in her life, and with such grace.
Alone With You Page 10