The End of Eve

by Ariel Gore

  “All right,” I promised on the phone, clicked it off. The low desert shrubs. I texted all the caregivers: Don’t anyone admit to putting the Post-it Note on the faux finishing.

  33.

  The Heart Sutra

  MY CELLPHONE RANG TOO EARLY IN THE MORNING. A number I only vaguely recognized. I let it go to voicemail, crawled out from under the quilts of my bedroll, crept into the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee.

  Outside the kitchen window, a dusting of snow. The snow still coming down.

  Abra had fallen asleep on the couch.

  My kitchen lights flickered off. On again.

  The sound of the kettle whistle.

  Abra sat up, tired. “How will we look back on these days, Lady Yaga?”

  I glanced up at the painting of the winged house. “With relief that they’re over and some odd wish we could go back and do it all better.”

  I liked the way that Abra was still young enough to think of me as an oracle.

  I grabbed a blanket, took my coffee out onto the front porch, dialed voicemail for the message.

  A shaky voice. Lara. One of the newer caregivers from Milagro. “Ariel, you need to come up to the house right now.” A silence. “Your mother is passing today. All the signs are here.”

  I didn’t call Lara back, just finished my coffee, ducked back inside, threw on a pair of jeans and a sweater, pulled on my boots, didn’t tell Abra the why of my sudden hurry.

  I made an egg sandwich for Maxito, stuffed his clothes into my purse, lifted him out of his bed in his pajamas, whispered, “we have to go to daycare a little bit early today, sweetie.”

  As I buckled him into his car seat, he smiled sleepy.

  I handed over the egg sandwich, drove toward town, drove into the building blizzard, tried not to drive too fast, probably drove too fast.

  Your mother is passing today. Most of me knew I didn’t have to be there when she passed, but the world seemed to want me there. You need to come up to the house right now.

  I dropped Maxito off at his new daycare, helped him brush his teeth in the school bathroom before circle time, made my way to the house. Lara hugged me when I stepped into the entry-way, hugged me for so long I wondered if my mother had already died.

  But Lara led me into my mother’s room. She lay there on her back, mouth open. I watched her chest. Her breath. Life or death. She was a skeleton in her purple T-shirt and silk leopard-print robe. The hiss of oxygen. The rise and fall. She was alive.

  I sat down next to her. Sat there for a long time.

  Lara sat next to me, said, “I’ve been doing this work for years. This is your mother’s day.”

  I didn’t want to argue with a professional, but I said, “my mother will surprise you.” Then I doubted myself. Maybe I was just jaded to death dates. “Should we put on some music?”

  Lara put on a CD. Buddhist chanting. The heart sutra. She turned the volume down to a whisper. And the two of us just sat there, kept sitting:

  All things are empty:

  Nothing is born, nothing dies,

  nothing is pure, nothing is stained,

  nothing increases and nothing decreases.

  So, in emptiness, there is no body ...

  I THOUGHT ABOUT Gammie. No one sat with her as she died. She lived alone. Ninety-one years old. She just got up in the middle of the night to pour herself a glass of milk and bourbon and she fell down. I missed her, my Gammie. Wanted to call her now. Ask her what I should do:

  There is no ignorance,

  and no end to ignorance.

  There is no old age and death,

  and no end to old age and death.

  There is no suffering, no cause of suffering...

  MY MOTHER OPENED her eyes and jerked up, stared at the two of us siting there. The whisper of the heart sutra, the hiss of oxygen. “What? Did you think I was dead? I want an omelet.” She shook her head and cackled. “Someone make me a fucking omelet.”

  I CRACKED EGGS in my mother’s kitchen, whispered to Lara, “What were the signs? That made you think she would die today?”

  Lara chopped herbs. “The lights flickered,” she said softly.

  I thought about that. Was she kidding? “The lights flickered at my little place south of town, too,” I said. “There’s actually a blizzard.” I flipped the omelet.

  34.

  Moveable Feasts

  “TINIEST,” MY MOTHER STARTED WHEN I STEPPED INTO her room. “Matea tells me it’s Passover. We have to prepare a Seder. The leg of lamb. All the dishes. The bitter herb. Maxito can ask the questions.”

  I shook my head, set a cup of herbal tea on her bedside table. “First of all, Mom, we’re not Jewish. And anyway it’s too late to do a Seder.” We sometimes celebrated Passover when I was a kid, but it was already past 6 p.m. and we didn’t have any matzo. “Listen,” I said. “Easter’s in a couple of days. Let’s do Easter. The chef wants to cook for you again. Anything you crave. Traditional or not.”

  “Okay,” my mother smiled. “Sit down with me. We’ll make the menu.”

  MY MOTHER WANTED leg of lamb with mint jelly and gravy. She wanted red wine, some good pairing. Did the chef know about wine pairings? Of course. My mother wanted fancy ginger ale. Had I tried Q Ginger Ale? No, but I’d get it. She wanted salad, rosemary potatoes, roasted asparagus, carrot cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.

  “What else should we have, Tiniest?”

  “I think it sounds perfect,” I said. “We can get a plane ticket for Leslie to come too.”

  My mother brightened. “And Maia?”

  Maia had already missed too many Monday classes with her weekend visits. “She has midterms,” I said. “She’ll come again soon.”

  “And Maxito?”

  “Yes. Maxito.”

  “We’ll make him an Easter basket,” she smiled, tears in her eyes. “With real flowers.” She pressed her morphine button.

  “Yes. Let’s.”

  THE CHEF AND I made the grocery list and pushed through the aisles of Healthy Wealthy. Early afternoon on Easter and we stood in the chef’s little kitchen organizing ingredients. I recognized the nurse Matea’s number on my cellphone. She worked for both hospice and Milagro Home Care now. “Hello?”

  “Are you in town, Ariel?”

  “Yes?”

  “You should come up to the house,” Matea said. “You should come now.”

  I swallowed hard. “What’s up?”

  But Matea just said, “Your mother isn’t doing that well.”

  4/8/12

  8:00 a.m. Eve woke happy, washed up in bathroom, ate toast & fruit & yogurt with tea. Had her meds.

  10:00 a.m. Matea arrived to change the dressing on the bedsore, new sores starting where adhesive is. Matea went for more bandages. Eve sat for an hour at breakfast. New red patches began to appear. Will encourage her to sit only for short periods.

  11:25 a.m. Eve is happy, animated, wants to get up and check the guest room to make sure it’s ready and clean for Leslie.

  THE CHEF FOLLOWED me into my mother’s kitchen, set down the bags from Healthy Wealthy.

  Matea stood with a woman I’d never seen before, started crying. “Ariel,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  The new woman started crying, too. She was thin, with desert-colored hair. “I tried to resuscitate her. I know she was DNR, but it’s Easter. She was so looking forward to her feast.”

  I glanced out the window. All those living crows had taken flight. I wondered how deep we’d have to dig to reach well water, wondered that just then for no reason.

  What does it mean for life to bear witness to death?

  I stepped into my mother’s room alone.

  She wore her silk leopard-print robe. Lay there as if asleep, mouth slightly open, some peaceful portrait of herself. And even I couldn’t help but notice then that she was beautiful.

  I sat in the chair next to her hospice bed, sat there with her for just a few minutes, thought to take her hand and
then didn’t. “Well,” I finally said to her, “I think we did all right in the end, don’t you? Behaved in a way we can be sorta proud of? I mean. You built a beautiful kitchen. And I didn’t kill you.”

  MY MOTHER’S CROW watched silent from the wall as Matea and the new woman washed her body.

  I stood for a long time in her closet, forgetting and remembering my task: to pick out the clean white Mexican cottons she would wear to the incinerator.

  The women dressed her, placed a red glass heart on her chest and flowers by her arms. They wrapped her head and jaw in a white scarf to keep her mouth closed, turned the heat down in the room to ward off the smell of death.

  The undertaker would come for her body in the morning.

  THE CHEF UNWRAPPED the leg of lamb, peeled russet potatoes, cut asparagus.

  I crept in and out of my mother’s room, bringing white candles, half-expecting to notice the subtle rise and fall of her chest, half-expecting her to sit up suddenly and demand an omelet. But the sunlight waned into evening as it does, and my mother’s skin looked only paler, her body ever still.

  IN THE CUSTOM kitchen, the chef sprinkled rosemary on the potatoes, tossed radicchio in lemon-mustard dressing, melted butter, opened the wine.

  Leslie landed at the Albuquerque airport, would catch a shuttle.

  Abra crossed the Colorado border on her way home from Spring break.

  Maia cried on the phone, made plane reservations for the following weekend.

  I left a message for Sol not to bring Maxito after all.

  AND I SET the table with my Gammie’s silver, set a place for my mother, too, poured her a glass of red Zinfandel, let the chair sit empty the way we used to at our un-Jewish Seders – a place for the prophet Elijah, should he happen to stop by.

  35.

  Kitchen World

  THE CHEF STUDIED THE NOTES IN MY MOTHER’S OAXACAN cookbooks, ad-libbed the menu for the memorial spread: Mole chichilo with chicken and chayote squash, pork and guajillo chile tamales, black bean and cotija cheese tamales, fresh tortillas, cabbage and serrano salad, arroz verde, calabacitas.

  We’d only given ourselves a week to pull together a service. We had to get to work.

  The chef roasted and seeded and soaked the ancho chiles, the mulato, the casacabel, the pasilla negro, the chile de arbol, the guajillo, the costeño, and the New Mexico red.

  We taught Maxito to peel garlic and he stood on his little stepping stool, concentrating hard as he slipped the skin off each clove.

  The chef helped him press cooked tomatoes and tomatillos though a strainer, separating the skins and seeds from the juice and pulp.

  Maxito said, “I see. We like this part. We don’t like that part.”

  We posted pictures on Facebook and my friend China commented: Life is so hard sometimes. But you all really know how to live. You get together. You cook.

  I wasn’t sure we knew how to live, but maybe we were learning; withstanding this time of learning. We were getting together, cooking, taking respite from the big world of death and meanness in this smaller kitchen-world where things made sense, where if we gathered the right ingredients and had the patience, things turned out the way we thought they would.

  LILIES ARRIVED FROM relatives and friends and I lined them up along the walls of the house, vase after vase.

  The chef soaked beans, cooked the chile base, the pork.

  Leo had been camping with some friends outside of Truth or Consequences, so Leslie borrowed a car and headed south to retrieve him. They’d stop at the cut-rate cremation service in Albuquerque on their way back, pick up my mother’s ashes.

  Abra ordained herself online and paged through The Bible and The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and Mary Oliver poetry collections looking for the passages she would read aloud at the service.

  My mother had left no instructions, so we made it all up as we went along. Improvising this death.

  I STOOD IN line at Healthy Wealthy, a dozen bottles of wine and compostable wine glasses made of corn on the conveyor belt.

  “I know what you’re doing!” a henna redhead squealed when she saw my haul. “You’re having an art opening!”

  “Guess again,” I mumbled.

  “A reception?” she chirped.

  “Try again.”

  ON MY WAY to the copy shop to make memorial programs I noticed a homemade poster glued to a utility box. “St. Henry Miller of Words,” it read. A black-ink portrait of the old guy and the quote, “The one thing we can never give enough of is love ... and the only thing we never give enough of is love.”

  Henry Miller. Maybe Eve was with him by now.

  THE MILAGRO CAREGIVER Octavio appeared in the open doorway. “I came by to pickup my check,” he said, then scanned all those white bouquets. “I guess I missed something.”

  “Yes,” I told him. “She died on Easter.”

  Octavio nodded, quiet. His skin was pockmarked. “Who killed her?”

  I shrugged. “I think she just died. I think her heart gave out.”

  Octavio scratched his chin. “She was asking everyone to kill her. Someone must have killed her.”

  I wrote a check, held it out to him.

  “Who killed her?” He asked again.

  But I shook my head. “Octavio, not every question cries out to be answered.”

  YOU KNOW, IN that old Russian story Vasilisa the Wise, Baba Yaga doesn’t kidnap the girl. Vasilisa goes to the witch’s house voluntarily – no idea what she’s getting into, but she does go voluntarily. She goes seeking light.

  Vasilisa knows enough to know that not every question needs to be asked, that not every question has a good answer. And Vasilisa walks out of Baba Yaga’s place completely unscathed. She walks out carrying the light that will burn through all the complicated violence she’s been taught to call love.

  OCTAVIO TOOK THE check from me, handed me a folded piece of paper in exchange. “Eve was asking for ‘Tiniest’ a couple of days ago but I couldn’t reach you on your cell. Your mom said she had to dictate the last scene of her memoir to you. So, you know, I wrote down what she said. If you want it.”

  I took the piece of paper from him, stashed it behind a lily vase on the fireplace mantle as he walked away.

  “MAMA?” MAXITO PRESSED a straw into his blue juice box.

  “Where did all the crows go?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They flew away.”

  Leslie and Leo ambled in now, two nights before the memorial, Leo carrying a plastic bag of my mother’s remains.

  “We couldn’t afford an urn,” Leslie said. “Do we have anything like an urn?”

  I pulled a Mexican ceramic casserole dish from a low cupboard in the kitchen, offered it up.

  Leo placed the bag inside. “Just right,” he said.

  The chef handed him a giant bag of corn husks and he washed them in the bathtub, took the scorpions he found outside.

  We made masa, then made it again because the chef said the first batch wasn’t good enough for a final send-off. And we all sat around the dining room table folding the masa and pork and cheese and chile into the clean corn husks.

  Ana, the woman who organized the annual Day of the Dead procession to the old cemetery south of town texted: May I play the accordion for your mother?

  I texted back: Of course.

  And on the morning of the memorial, the lilacs along the gravel driveway up and decided to bloom.

  Maia dug through family pictures and wedding announcements, cobbled together a photographic display of my mother’s life.

  I tore cilantro, cut limes.

  The chef mixed the cabbage salad, made the green rice and calabacitas, steamed tamales.

  Leslie built a fire in the backyard and someone put the Harold and Maude soundtrack on the boom box as the guests began to arrive – the caregivers and the nurses, Ronald and Sol, the strange blonde friend from the hospital and Moe Hawk, the worker my mother had fired for crying in the bathroom and Abra’s f
riends from the Native Arts College. All the queers turned out, too, and my Buddhist friend from Albuquerque. There were people we didn’t know, old friends we remembered from my stepdad’s church community back in California, people who lived in New Mexico now.

  Leslie scanned the crowd. “Where did they all come from?”

  Cat Stevens on the boom box. I shrugged. “They’re her friends. My friends.”

  Leslie shook her head. “Geez. If a cray cray dying lady can create community, maybe anybody can.”

  We borrowed chairs from the church across the street.

  ABRA READ FROM The Bible. She read the Mary Oliver poem “Wild Geese.”

  An old man with a French accent who I recognized from the disconnected images of my childhood told a rambling story about taking my mother to all the sex shows in San Francisco in the ’70s–Carol Doda and the rest of them – and the way his heart beat fast and nervous when he had to bring my mother home to her husband, the priest, and the way the priest didn’t blink, just wanted to hear all about Carol Doda and the rest of them.

  The chef set out the food, the tamales and the mole, the salad and the tortillas. She poured the wine.

  I REMEMBERED OCTAVIO’S dictation notes. The piece of paper I’d stashed on the fireplace mantle. I unfolded it.

  The final scene of my mother’s memoir/screenplay had no dialogue.

  Eve walks slowly through the brush behind the house, walks toward and into the foothills. As she walks, the snow gets deeper, the visibility less. A mountain lion walks with her. Suddenly, a shot is heard from the direction of the house and there’s a splattering of bright red blood on the white snow. The wind begins to hum. The snow falls more thickly. In the growing darkness and snow light, the ghost of a mountain lion walks up the mountain, and beside him the ghost of a woman.

  FADE TO BLACK.

  LESLIE LIT THE fire in the backyard, handed out little slips of paper and instructed all the disparate guests to write down the thing they were ready to let go of. As Ana played the accordion, the people approached the fire and, one by one, they let something go.