The Year My Mother Came Back

by Alice Eve Cohen

  It’s a day of pure happiness.

  So of course, I’m counting the days till Doomsday.

  Doomsday is scheduled for August 6.

  THE GOOD NEWS: Eliana is going to have surgery to lengthen her shorter leg.

  The bad news: Eliana is going to have surgery to lengthen her shorter leg.

  “She’ll need two surgeries: a first to lengthen her upper leg; a second one to lengthen her lower leg,” said Dr. Campbell in January, after reviewing Eliana’s X rays and growth curve, and describing the long, arduous limb-lengthening procedure to us in grueling detail.

  “Is it absolutely necessary?” I asked.

  (All surgery terrifies me. My idea of preventive surgery is to prevent surgery.)

  “The question is not whether she’ll have surgery; it’s when. Without surgery, she’ll have back pain her entire life. This is a good age for her to have her first leg-lengthening. She should complete the second one by high school.”

  “Does it hurt?” Eliana asked him.

  “Yes, but we’ll give you medicine to take care of the pain.”

  “When will I be a hundred percent better?”

  “It takes eight months.”

  “I just want to get it over with. As long as I can go to camp. That’s the most important thing to me.”

  “Okay, here’s what I propose,” he said, sitting beside Eliana on the examining table. “Go to camp this summer. We’ll do the surgery when you get back in August. That way, you’ll be fully recovered by April, and you can go to camp again next summer. Do we have a deal?”

  Dr. Campbell extended his hand.

  Eliana shrugged and shook his hand.

  I took Eliana to two more surgeons for second and third opinions, hoping they would tell me that she didn’t need surgery at all, that she was doing just fine with a shoe lift. Heck, she plays on the West Side Soccer League; she can run three miles. I was looking for a surgeon who shared my “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” credo. But all three surgeons had the same opinion—not the one I was looking for. I wish I could kiss Eliana’s boo-boo and make it better, the way my mom took care of my garden-variety scrapes and bruises. But Eliana’s growth disorder is an über boo-boo, requiring Herculean measures.

  Eliana’s surgery is scheduled for August 6 with Dr. Campbell. I dread it, but like Eliana, I just want to get it over with. I am determined to be the unwavering, un-ambivalent, dedicated mother Eliana will need me to be, for the duration of her eight-month medical ordeal.

  THREE

  I stare blankly at my computer on the kitchen table, where I’ve been writing all afternoon, and try unsuccessfully to see this as an Aha! moment instead of an Oh, shit! moment. My doctor called me three minutes ago, on this steamy July afternoon, with the news that I have breast cancer.

  I call Michael at work, but he doesn’t pick up. “Please call when you get this,” I say, with just enough urgency to motivate him to call me back.

  I put my face in my hands and cry for a few minutes, lonely and scared.

  I call my sisters at their offices, but Madeline and Jennifer aren’t picking up their phones. Julia is in Canada all month. Eliana is at camp in Maine till Thursday.

  This doesn’t fit into my plans to be a perfect mother, completely available to Eliana. I was so preoccupied with her surgery, scheduled eleven days from now, that I forgot to look over my shoulder, and the Evil Eye snuck up behind me.

  Michael wouldn’t believe me if I confessed to him that I literally feared the Evil Eye. He assumes I use it as a literary device, which is only partially true. I haven’t told Michael the part where I believe the Evil Eye is breathing down my neck, waiting for my next misstep. I’ve tried to overcome my fear of unguarded happiness (the green light for the Evil Eye), but my fear is tenacious.

  My slip-up might have been three months ago, in April, when I joyfully e-mailed my friends from college to share the good news that Julia got into Princeton, our alma mater. Joanne e-mailed back, “i’m so happy for julia, (and for you!) my advice is, if you haven’t yet, turn a glass over. if you don’t know about turning a glass over, my grandma used to swear by it. it kept the bad spirits away when something good happened.”

  I thought I already knew all the necessary precautions for keeping away bad spirits. I learned them from my mother, decades ago: “Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder.” Done. “Spit three times between the middle and index fingers to keep away the Evil Eye,” Tuh, tuh, tuh!—Done. (I ignored her more phobic precautions, which caused her to cower in the middle of a room during an electrical storm and prevented her from taking elevators—she climbed many flights of stairs, long before it was promoted for exercise.) “Don’t gloat over good news, and above all,” she taught me by example, “don’t admit that you’re truly happy.” Oops, forgot that one.

  Joanne’s grandma’s upside-down glass ritual was new to me, but there was logic to it; the upturned glass would keep the bad spirits out, like keeping a genie in a bottle, or the lid closed on Pandora’s box. I promptly turned over the empty glass on my desk and e-mailed Joanne with a pragmatic follow-up question: “How long did your grandma say you should keep the glass upside-down?”

  No response. Maybe Joanne thought I was kidding. Maybe she was kidding. Maybe she never read my e-mail. The next night, I put the upside-down glass in the dishwasher. The Evil Eye must have escaped before the rinse cycle.

  The cancer showed up on a routine mammogram. During the biopsy, a small metal marker was inserted, to make it easier to find the tumor at a later date. Unfortunately, the metal marker is now sitting on a nerve. For the past week, at random moments while walking down the street, a sudden shooting pain has caused me to involuntarily utter a loud yelp and grab my left breast with my right hand—“YELP!” Grab—which must look bizarre to passersby, who probably think I have a unique version of Tourette syndrome—“YELP!” Grab—Excruciating in the moment, but not a lingering pain. Embarrassing, but—“YELP!” Grab—out of my control. The silver lining of my doctor’s call this morning was her promise that the metal marker would be removed, along with the lump.

  I’m not surprised by the diagnosis. My mother had breast cancer when she was forty-seven. I was twelve, on the cusp of puberty, the summer after seventh grade. Mom survived cancer, but she died of a stroke ten years later, when she was fifty-seven, five years older than I am now.

  I close my eyes. I hear a familiar percussive sound. I open my eyes.

  My mother is at the kitchen table next to me, typing on her old-fashioned black manual typewriter, fingers flying over the keys.

  What is she doing here? My mother has been dead for thirty-one years.

  I think about her every June, but this is the middle of July. I don’t think about her in July. Yet here she is, typing furiously. Here, in my head, in my apartment, sitting beside me at the kitchen table. My brilliant, beautiful, complicated mother.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Typing,” she says, barely looking up from her work.

  “But you’re dead.” She stops now, looks up at me.

  “I know.”

  A salty breeze blows through my kitchen and wraps itself around me. It is my mother’s hug from fifty years ago, when I was a very little girl. It makes me cry.

  “Mommy, I’m sick.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  I see her more vividly than I have in the three decades since she died. Her fingers race over the clacking keys of the Smith Corona, the same typewriter she’s had since she was a Barnard student in the 1940s. She stares intently at the keyboard, warm brown eyes magnified by thick glasses; her face, once chiseled and gorgeous, now softly wrinkled, framed by cropped gray curls. She wears a yellow button-down shirt and blue wraparound skirt. Life-sized and adamantly unconventional—legs unshaven, hair undyed, chest flat and un-enhanced, warm-blooded, 3-D Technicolor. Mom is sitting right next to me, extracted from the cosmic periphery to which I’ve relegated her for thir
ty-one years.

  “I have breast cancer.”

  “I know. So did I. I know all about breast cancer.”

  YEAH, SHE KNEW about it. Mom had a double radical mastectomy, all her lymph nodes removed, and some of the flesh and muscle from both armpits. In 1967, lumpectomy was not an option. Breast surgery was an all or nothing deal. My mother had it all, and ended up with nothing.

  On the last day of seventh grade, Dad helped Mom into the car and drove her to the hospital, without telling us why. Days passed. I was scared she would die. Two weeks passed. I was sure she was dead. When she came back home from the hospital, she looked and acted like a different person. So sad and thin, flat-chested, suddenly gray-haired, weak and old.

  My mom didn’t actually die, but she was gone.

  Now she’s in my kitchen, typing.

  My mother was writing her PhD dissertation the summer she was diagnosed with cancer. She was always working on her dissertation, which she never finished. From the time I was able to grasp a crayon in my toddler fist, the backs of her discarded pages were my drawing paper. I sat beside her with my Crayola box, drawing and drawing and drawing.

  For the first time in decades, I’m remembering Mom, all of her—the wonderful and terrible things about her that I’ve cast out of my thoughts for so long. I’m still struggling to prevent these memories from erupting from their subterranean depths. Trying to hold back the flood. I can’t, not today. The levees break.

  My breast cancer has brought my mother back to me.

  But now is not the time. My daughters need me, Eliana most of all. I have to be unwavering in my maternal commitment. I’m trying to be a great mother, but my experience as a daughter is still haunting me. I don’t want my mother here. Not now. I don’t want to think about her, or how our once-close relationship devolved into barbed mistrust. She’s a liability. She’ll get in the way.

  But she’s back.

  She stops typing, pushes her reading glasses on top of her head, rests her elbows on the table with fingers laced together, and looks at me expectantly. What does she want?

  It seems perversely ordinary to have my mother sitting here with me in my kitchen. I should make us a pot of coffee, but she’s a ghost. I guess. Is that what she is? I don’t know what to call this version of her. I’m scared of ghosts, they remind me of death. What if my mother’s ghost has come for me, like the Grim Reaper? I’m nearly the same age she was when she died. Maybe she wants to take me with her. But I don’t believe in ghosts, so this is not possible, which means my mother sitting here at the kitchen table with me is really, really bad.

  I close my eyes.

  Send her away. Bury her. Forget her, like I have—very effectively, thank you very much—for the past thirty years. I don’t have time for my mother’s ghost, or for this uncompromising torrent of memories, or my holographic fantasy of her, or whoever and whatever she is. It’s not safe. It’s not practical. There’s so much to figure out. I don’t have time for her right now!

  Open my eyes.

  She’s still there. Shit.

  Close my eyes. Inhale.

  Yit-ga-dal ve-yit-ka-dash—I stumble through the few Hebrew syllables I remember from the Mourner’s Kaddish—she-mei ra-ba . . . I don’t know what it means, but I hope it encourages her to go back to wherever she came from.

  Go away! Go!

  Open my eyes.

  She’s gone. Thank God! Exhale.

  FOUR

  The summer suddenly has a different temporal landscape. Eliana comes home from camp in two days. She assumes that she’s having surgery on August 6, a week after she gets back. Her surgery will be the start of a grueling eight-month process of painful leg-lengthening.

  But now I’m scheduled for surgery at the end of August, followed by six weeks of radiation. I’m very lucky: my cancer is zero grade, noninvasive, garden-variety DCIS, ductal carcinoma in situ, the most common type of breast cancer. It’s completely curable. (Tuh, tuh, tuh!) Even so, Eliana’s surgeon and mine concur: leg-lengthening can wait; cancer cannot. Eliana’s surgery will be postponed until after my radiation treatment is finished.

  BEFORE CALLING ELIANA at camp, I rehearse what I’m going to say, so I won’t cry. But as soon as I hear her voice—light, airy, high-pitched, full of little girl excitement and wonder and love and trust—I am choking back tears. I love her so much. I tell her, using as few words as possible, so that I can get out a complete thought without falling apart, that her surgery will be postponed until November.

  “Why?”

  “Because . . .” I speak slowly and carefully, to maintain my composure. “I need to have surgery in August, and my doctor says we can’t both have surgery at the same time.”

  “Aw. I wanted to get it over with. Now I have to worry about surgery all the way to November.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Will I still be completely better by April?”

  “No.”

  “Aw. That’s not fair.”

  “I know.”

  “Will I be better in time for camp next year?”

  “Yes. And the good news is, you’re free for the rest of this summer. If you want to, you can stay at camp an extra two weeks. What do you think?”

  Brief pause.

  “I want to come home. I love camp, but I’m homesick, too, in a good way. I’ve already packed. I want to come home tomorrow.”

  And then I love her and miss her so much, I’m crying again. I can’t wait to see her. I’m so happy she wants to come home, so happy I’ll see her tomorrow, and that we’ll be together for the rest of the summer. So glad she didn’t take me up on my offer.

  The next day, Eliana’s bus from camp is delayed. I have an hour to kill, so I stroll to Lincoln Center and sit on the edge of the fountain. The plumes of water, the hot afternoon sun, the cool mist, and the roar of water are hypnotic. I remember being Eliana’s age, the thrall of summer vacation with my family.

  Dad taught me and my sisters to bodysurf. Sand was everywhere—in my bathing suit, in my butt crack, between my toes. He was the fun one. I mean, I loved Mom, too. I loved her so much, and she was the one who brought us on protests, and who took care of us every day when Dad was at work, and if we were ever sick. But he was more fun, he played more, he liked games.

  Our sunburns were tanned from long, sunny, salty days on the beach. The summer was almost over.

  As soon we got back home from vacation, Dad sat down at the piano. While he played Beethoven, Mom announced, “I’m going outside to read.” That was her way of saying she was going to take a nap, without admitting it. In five minutes, she was asleep in the hammock with a book on her chest. She snored softly, which Jennifer and I thought was hilarious. We watched her from the living room window and giggled. It was good to be home.

  A chickadee flew onto the hammock right next to sleeping Mom. Then a robin redbreast. Birds loved my Mom. They must have missed her while we were away on vacation. I took out binoculars and my field guide to birds. Two sparrows. A tufted titmouse. A bright red cardinal. Mom had a knack of getting along with nature. She just understood. I don’t know how she did it. Jennifer and I wondered why the birds wouldn’t land on us, despite our efforts. We had tried lying on the hammock, as motionless as we could, but the birds never came. We dared each other to stay absolutely still for ten minutes, but we couldn’t do it for even one minute. We were too jumpy. We giggled and the hammock wiggled. It was Jennifer’s fault. She tickled me when I was trying not to move a muscle.

  THE TALL BUTTERCUPS in our yard danced in the breeze, like they were having a party. That spring, when Dad mowed the lawn and cut down the buttercups, it broke Mom’s heart, and she campaigned for buttercups’ rights.

  “I don’t particularly like the idea,” said Dad.

  “Please, Ira, the wildflowers are so beautiful, and the girls love them. What if you just mow the front yard, and not the back?”

  “Well, all right, Louise,” he grumbled.

 
Since we went away for vacation three weeks before, the grass and flowers had grown higher than ever. Jennifer and I ran outside and chased each other around the backyard. It was a meadow now, filled with buttercups, dandelions, tiger lilies, Queen Anne’s lace, and goldenrod. Rose bushes in full bloom and peppermint plants with tiny purple flowers surrounded the big rock we liked to climb. Amanda, our gray cat, dove into the tall grass and proudly emerged with a mouse in her teeth.

  The blue jays circled high above, cackling from a safe distance. They never landed on the hammock—the jays hated our family. They were mad at us, because this spring a newborn blue jay fell out of their nest into our yard, and I picked it up to save it. I’d been planning to put it in a shoebox and feed it mashed-up bread and milk with an eyedropper, like Mom showed me how to do with that baby sparrow I saved the previous summer. But the blue jay parents thought I was kidnapping it. Or maybe they thought I was a predator who wanted to eat their baby, so they dive-bombed my head and I had to run inside. Then I looked out the window, and saw the most horrible thing: the mother and father blue jays killed their own baby. They pecked it to death. It made me cry so much that Mommy had to hold me in her lap and comfort me. “It’s okay, Alice, sweetheart. I know you were trying to save the chick, but the jays don’t know that. It’s in their nature to protect their domain.” After that, the blue jays dive-bombed our heads every time we went out of the house. Especially my head. They were holding a grudge.

  Until Mom came up with a plan.

  “Alice, round up all the kids on the block and bring them over.”

  I ran up and down the block and got twelve kids, and we ran into my house, past the dive-bombing blue jays. Mom had assembled all our pots and spoons on the kitchen table.

  “I want each of you to take a pot or a pan and a wooden spoon. Everyone have one? Okay. Are you ready to make a lot of noise?”

  “READY!” shouted twelve kids.

  We went in the front yard, carrying our pots and pans. As soon as the blue jays started flying down from their tree, Mommy gave the command. “MAKE AS MUCH NOISE AS YOU CAN!”