When you ask her your name, she does not remember what it is. Ask your father. He’ll know. She does not remember the name of the president. She does not remember the name of the president’s dog. She does not remember the season. She does not remember the day or the year. She remembers the little house on San Luis Avenue that she first lived in with your father. She remembers her mother leaning over the bed she once shared with her brother and kissing the two of them goodnight. She remembers that as soon as the first girl was born she knew that something was wrong. She didn’t cry. She remembers holding the baby in her arms and watching her go to sleep for the first and last time in her life. She remembers that they never buried her. She remembers that they did not give her a name. She remembers that the baby had perfect fingernails and a very unusual heart. She remembers that she had your father’s long nose. She remembers knowing at once that she was his. She remembers beginning to bleed two days later when she came home from the hospital. She remembers your father catching her in the bathroom as she began to fall. She remembers a desert sky at sunset. It was the most beautiful shade of orange. She remembers scorpions and red ants. She remembers the taste of dust. She remembers once loving someone more than anyone else. She remembers giving birth to the same girl twice. She remembers that today is Sunday, and it is time to go for her ride, and so she picks up her purse and puts on her lipstick and goes out to wait for your father in the car.
DEMENTED
LAUREN FRANCIS-SHARMA
“Your hands feel like chalk, child,” she said. “It’s no wonder you couldn’t keep that boy’s father. You think anybody wants you touching them with those hard hands?” My mother slid her arms beneath the pink blanket, gripping the cushion of the loveseat with its canvas slipcover before closing her eyes.
I sometimes convinced myself that what my mother said was not what she would have said before the diagnosis. I sometimes convinced myself that that woman with the pursed mouth spraying words like old vomit was not my mother. But some things felt too familiar for me to be fully convinced.
“Ma, my hands are hard because I have to wash them all the time.” My mother wasn’t listening. We’d found her old cassettes and a boom box with a tape deck. Al Green always quieted her. “I wash them before I make your food. Before I lift you from the bed. After I change your diaper. After I get poop on my fingers.” I wanted her to hear me, but instead she rubbed her face, the mustache she’d once tweezed on Sunday nights thick and curly.
Ma had been a school principal, a church organist, a woman who thumped me with her red-leather Bible if I didn’t wake for school. She wore cockatoo brooches at the neck of her blouses and double-girdled her behind because she didn’t want to “tempt the masses.” My mother was a sanctified, respectable woman, who had put herself through college by the time I was seven, who had earned her master’s degree by the time I was fifteen. And when Ma was accepted into a doctoral program and Daddy did what was expected of a man like him, Ma spared him the shame of divorce and instead sent his mistress a handwritten note about what to do at nights when he choked in his sleep: Just knock him on the forehead as hard as you can, she wrote.
Demented. Dementia. “De-” used to convey something is lacking or without. “Mens,” meaning sense or mind. Demens. Which to me sounded very much like “demons,” for my mother seemed often a woman possessed. Possessed by an uncertainty that had never been hers before. My Ma, who was once so certain of herself that she rewired our house for stereo sound with only a Radio Shack manual; my Ma, who could make it from Baltimore to Brooklyn in three hours driving a Toyota Tercel. This mother of mine didn’t remember her own name.
I had been an only child and was raising a boy alone when Ma came to live with us. I didn’t want to take care of her. This was not something one said. And yet, I didn’t want anyone to say that I had not.
Ma had always been honest about the burdens of motherhood. It was an accepted truth in our home that her only child was hard work. Too much work. I had big hair that needed to be tamed and a big mouth that needed to be heard. Ma was always dutiful. It was her job “to raise me right,” and my job “to behave right.” When I told her about my pregnancy and my intention to quit law school, she told me I’d been her greatest cross and would also be her greatest failure.
Who knew she would be mine too?
“Children eat brains, you know. What’s that show you used to watch? Little aliens implanting themselves in people’s stomachs and killing their hosts,” she’d said. “You’re gonna wake up and your mind won’t be your own. You’ll feel hungry when that baby’s hungry. You won’t remember what you want or what you used to enjoy, somebody will ask you what makes you happy and you won’t know. You’ll see.”
“Raising my child will be an honor. I am not you,” I told her.
“You believe that?”
“Which part?”
She laughed and told me to call the clinic.
My mother’s laughter used to embarrass me. She didn’t laugh often, but when she did, it was hearty and throaty. My childhood friend, Simone, once said that my mother’s laugh was “uncouth.” When I asked Ma what that meant, she said it meant “ghetto.”
“That debauched mother of hers must’ve told her that,” Ma said. “I’mma bake them a cake and put a big Black laughing face on it.” My mother giggled herself to sleep when she returned from leaving it on Simone’s doorstep.
“Get it away!” Ma waved her hands about her face. “I ate already!” Often Ma did not remember to eat, did not remember having eaten. Every morning before I took Charles to school, Ma protested when I set her blue plastic breakfast plate down before her. “You’re trying to make me fat like you!”
I pushed the plate toward her chest. “Yes, Ma, I gained weight.” I had put on thirty-six pounds since she took over the first floor of my house. I couldn’t afford new clothes, so zippers remained unzipped, buttons remained unbuttoned. “Nine pounds for each year you’ve been here.” I’d eaten Charles’s lunch snacks every night after Ma lost the battle against sleep, and then another handful of Utz crackers and a hunk of cheddar cheese, each time she’d wake during the night. “I am very happy to have something in my mouth to stop me from screaming.”
Ma glared as if disappointed in my choice of words.
A year after she moved in, Ma began to shout each evening at sundown. They told me this would happen, and yet this was when I began to dislike my own mother’s face. A monstrous sunken mask, it seemed to me, cheeks sagging like deflated balloons, jowls plunging like her memory, a quicksand in which lost things would never be found. And in the whites behind her black pupils, there seemed no life remaining, only the reflection of my own soured and exhausted expression.
My childhood friend Simone had a mother with a face from a Spiegel’s catalogue. Her name was also Simone. This name recycling was something my mother said one did when one thought too much of oneself. Ma said Ms. Simone thought too much of herself. Ms. Simone was the sort of woman the boys on corner posts whispered about, the kind of woman who wore lipstick the same red as the Porsche 911 pictured on my bedroom posters. Ms. Simone had sharp Nordic features but her skin shone the color of Werther’s butterscotch. “A fine woman,” my father said once while Ma plated his food. My mother didn’t disagree, but she made sure to give Daddy only one dumpling with his chicken that night.
Simone’s father worked as an engineer in Trinidad. He assisted the United States government with building a winding road along his country’s northwest coast. When he arrived in the States, he couldn’t secure a better job than hauling parts at Union Carbide on the night shift. He spoke three languages, and Ms. Simone expected she would have a Good Housekeeping kind of life. After she realized her husband would come to nothing much, Ms. Simone took to having an affair with a bearded Frenchman who taught physics at Hopkins. This ended when Simone’s father left a buffed machete on the passenger seat of the professor’s restored BMW with a note that read: “Made in Trinidad and Tobago
.”
Outside of receiving Ma’s initial diagnosis, I found myself most surprised when Ms. Simone began her weekly visits. She drove on Sundays from her retirement townhome in Pennsylvania to the suburbs of Washington, DC. Together, my mother and Ms. Simone watched Lifetime Television. Ms. Simone clapped for the women who ran their husbands off roads, talking to the television or to my mother, I couldn’t quite tell. My little house smelled of Chanel No. 5 long after she left. I found those visits strange but also comforting and chalked them up to Ma’s smiling cake having been delicious.
“You should call Little Simone,” Ms. Simone said each week before she left. Ms. Simone was older than Ma by ten years, but time had been more agreeable with her. Her hands trembled a bit, the webbing around her eyes contracted when she grinned, and when she spoke her tongue took a bit more time hearing the words in her head, but there was no denying her now quiet beauty. “I’m sure she’d like to tell you some things.”
I hadn’t spoken to “Little Simone” in over twenty years. I didn’t tell Ms. Simone that I followed her daughter’s posts on Instagram. That I thought that except for the unfortunate loss of her natural eyebrows, Little Simone was just as cute as when we were girls. I told myself that speaking to Simone would remind me of my mother’s better days and make the pain of losing her worse, but I knew it was more than that.
“I can’t come over no more,” Little Simone told me one early summer’s day in the alley behind my house. Someone had left their hose running, and I recalled the sound of trickling water, like a brook babbling. “My dad said you can’t never come over again either.”
We were thirteen, and we’d been spending every Saturday night at each other’s homes since we were four years old. We had shared soggy fried chicken television dinners, took baths in my mother’s rusted tub, French-kissed the same big-headed boys, hated the same stuck-up girls.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s a boy or a girl or a dog. The heart makes no distinctions like that,” my mother had said.
That summer my mother was the kindest she’d ever been to me. She told me I was better off without Simone, and Ma left me alone to cry in the peace of my bedroom with only the blue glowing light of Space Invaders to feed my crushed spirit. It was the hottest summer on record, and the fan in the window pulled and pushed warm air. When I emerged, two inches taller in the fall of my freshmen year, I was a girl hell-bent on proving Simone Sanders and her roti-eating father wrong about me. I studied my way out of the city’s best public high school and then went on to the Ivy League. I was near the top of my class, when in my second year of law school, I met a boy who was more likely to have married a Simone than a me. A boy whose stepfather had a house on the Vineyard, a boy who never knew I had his son. Ma said she would not help take care of my baby. I told myself she deserved to live her life as she wished. But I was angry. As I pumped breastmilk into bottles and shuttled Charles between daycares, Ma learned to swim, took karate, studied French.
“You only study French if you plan on going to France.”
“Maybe I’ll go to France,” she’d said.
“You’re never going to France.”
I was sometimes an awful child to my mother.
As a grandmother, Ma offered only what was needed and nothing more. Charles was seven years old the first time I had to call Ma for assistance. I was home sick with the flu. Charles couldn’t find his violin in the music room at school and missed his ride home. I had enrolled Charles in one of those fancy private schools like Simone once attended, with rolling hills and white people who traveled to Utah for skiing on long weekends. The gap between the tuition and the aid they offered was so wide I thought every month I’d drown in it, but I had pieced together a life for Charles and me that, at a far enough distance, looked much like the life I would have had if I had done it all the right way.
I regretted needing to call Ma. I knew she’d sashay herself onto that campus and shatter the suburban mom image I’d carefully cultivated with her Baltimore City church-lady air. I told Ma to wait until aftercare was almost ended, to park in the lot and hike up the hill to sign out Charles. It would be easier, I had said. Ma told me her knee was swollen and that she’d be picking up Charles the way everyone else picked up their grandchildren. So I had to tell her how to manage the carpool circle, how she mustn’t be on her phone, or let her car idle, how she must make sure to use her emergency brake when she stopped on the steep hill.
“I’m not a goddamn child!” she screamed.
In all the years I’d taken my mother’s words on the chin, she had never once cursed at me. As a principal, she told her kids if they had to resort to cursing, then they either didn’t know the Lord or didn’t know enough words. And she’d set them on the magic quilt in a quiet corner and make them choose between the Bible and the Oxford.
I should have known something was wrong, but I didn’t think much of it until after she called me from the school.
“I hit somebody. And now he’s calling the police.”
“The police? Who did you hit?”
“Some man in a fucking Mercedes Benz who’s cursing at me like I crucified Jesus!”
“Did you get his name? Did you hit him from the rear?”
“No. Head on. And the boy in his front seat didn’t have a seatbelt on. That’s not my goddamn fault.”
They took away her license. She’d had more accidents than I’d known. One in New York City, another in Virginia Beach, two in Pennsylvania. Baltimore Gas & Electric had turned off her lights. Her taxes had gone unpaid. She’d been sending money to a sweet-talking Nigerian prince in Trenton. I’d hoped it was a benign tumor, that she could be fixed up, made right again, but after the diagnosis, three times checked, I knew there was nothing that could be made right ever again.
“You got no business looking at me like that!” I’d cracked open the bathroom window for fresh air while sponge-bathing her. A neighbor, walking her Cavachon, looked up, as if to ensure that Ma was being treated well. I wanted to scream out to that nosy woman that Ma wasn’t the one who needed to be saved.
I turned to Ma. “Who’s gonna look at you if I don’t?” I said.
Daddy came to visit Ma once. She seemed to remember him and repeated the story, over and again, of Daddy not knowing the difference between a cucumber and a zucchini. Before he moved out, she’d embarrassed him at a cocktail party thrown by the Baltimore City school superintendent. It seemed the story embarrassed him still. Ma told him he was a man-baby, and when he stopped speaking and his big body sunk into my loveseat, Ma didn’t care about his quiet, didn’t notice when he left.
But Ma always noticed when Ms. Simone arrived. My mother smiled and reached for words that sounded feathery on her lips. I made sure on those days that her still-thick hair was curled, framing her face like a doily, and that I creamed her hands so they glistened when Ms. Simone reached for them.
One Sunday as Ms. Simone readied to leave, I thanked her again for not forgetting about Ma, for it seemed everyone else had.
“Your mother was everything I wanted,” and then Ms. Simone’s voice trailed off at “to be.”
After Ms. Simone left, Charles fed Ma chopped chicken breast from his plate. I hadn’t told him I had become too frightened to feed her, that my stomach soured when drool fell from the left side of her face, that I disliked watching the way she chewed. The chicken was over-cooked and I made a big fuss about it, moving about the kitchen so as to avoid the feeding. The nighttime aide hadn’t yet arrived, so Charles kept Ma busy with a story about a boy at school who had tied a shirt around Charles’s neck like a noose. Charles didn’t tell Ma how he’d cried, how I’d held him in the back of my car, incensed that those white boys might’ve smelled that barely-keeping-it-together scent I’d passed on to him. Charles told Ma that I’d scolded the boy’s mother, telling her that nooses weren’t playthings for Black boys. “Grandma, she sounded just like you,” he said.
My mother smiled, removed the chicken fro
m her mouth, setting it on tablecloth. “That Simone’s got big beautiful nipples. The color of baked peach cobbler,” she said.
Charles stared at his grandmother, not certain he’d heard her correctly.
“This is the disease, Charles. This is not Grandma talking.” I’d told him this, many times before. The disease, always it was the disease. Charles blushed then went to his room to finish his studies.
That night I found Little Simone on Facebook Messenger and asked if I could call her the next day.
I shared an office with another paralegal, a Russian woman who spoke in whispers to her imprisoned daughter each day at noon. Most days I left for lunch before her call, but when Simone answered the phone with a woman’s voice I did not know, I found myself thinking only of how much I regretted that we hadn’t seen each other grow into women. Simone told me all the things about her life that her mother had often mentioned. That she taught nursing, that her husband was an accountant, that her children both had black belts. I listened until I found enough quiet between us to ask why she stopped being my friend. I was crying ancient tears by then, feeling an old heartbreak like new. The Russian called me something that sounded like “sooka” and stared at me, with the phone to her head, her daughter on the other end crying too. I firmed my voice, as I explained to Little Simone, that the strain of taking care of Ma had left me overly emotional. That it was just a phase.
Simone said she understood, said she was sorry again.
Everyone was always sorry.
“My dad said that on the nights your mother played organ at the church she would drive down our street, park her car in front of our house, and stare into the window. You remember that my room was at the front, right?” Simone’s bedroom carpet had been a cream- colored shag that never showed dirt. Each time I returned from her house, I’d try and convince Ma to take off her shoes in our bedrooms too. “My dad said your mother was a pervert.”
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