I always really, really hated that part. What did it mean that Ged had “spent” his power? Was I just supposed to accept that?
I thought I had nothing left to give Jeff, a cheerful young guy who was into mass spaceflight and doll collecting. (He was smart, too, and the most conscientious intern I have had. He had a graduate degree in archaeology!) I felt I was trading him a stink bomb for his eggs and flowers.
With the other interns it was even worse. There was über-masculine Frank, an angry goy who taught young boys at a yeshiva and brought in essays about how much he hated their pale, weak, Jewish visages. I critiqued the essays for him, noting in my best neutral writing-teacher manner that “it was hard for me to feel very much empathy for the narrator.”
I don’t know if he got that. He did not last long in any case. Muscular Frank seemed resentful about hauling my groceries, despite my cripple’s free writing advice.
Will was a former student of mine who applied for the internship when the Internet startup for which he worked folded. I came to dislike him more and more the more he worked for me. Yet he was always helpful, and occasionally kind—letting me know at a certain point that I did not have to pay him the $6 an hour, he wanted to help me anyway. So why did I dislike him so intensely? Was I afraid he saw me as a charity case? Will had a certain coldness to him. In his writing for our class, he had often put down people who didn’t have much money to spend. He also mocked those men and women whose clothes and apartments weren’t up to speed.
When I saw tall, gay, funny, slightly pudgy Will I felt ashamed to be poor and, I thought, on a downward slide in my life.
Strangely, as it seemed to me, Will was also applying to become an Episcopal priest. Reader, you may have guessed that my theological views were not at all in line with those of the Episcopal Church, but nonetheless it offended me somehow that Will, who wanted to be a priest, liked stylish clothes and enjoyed making fun of people who didn’t buy them. Perhaps he was too human for my notion of a priest.
For our exchange, I helped him with his application to join the priesthood. Though, as I say, I understood that my own Gnostic views would necessarily be utterly different from Will’s Episcopalian ones, I was deeply offended by the theology he evinced in his essays. Will, and, he claimed, the Episcopal Church, were of the opinion that priests were needed to intercede between God and the congregation. The idea was that regular people could not talk to God on their own. I hated that stupid idea! But reader, why should I have supposed that Will needed to have the same views about God as me, when I have never been an affiliant of organized religion, not even in my yeshiva days?
I detested him, I think, reader, because I detested myself. I think I could not bear that someone as human and fault-laden as Will wanted to help me.
With Edwidge the problem was simpler. She was a hard-working teacher with two jobs and three kids and the amazing residual energy to write a 500-page novel about public-school teachers who moonlighted as vigilante superheroes who hunted child molesters and put them through a set of retaliatory tortures.
I read her novel and critiqued it, which I considered a fair trade for her schlepping my bagels and taking out my trash.
Then one day Edwidge mentioned that she was in touch with what she called “some nice thugs” who occasionally supplied her with muscle when she had need of it. They had intervened—for free, just because they liked her and they were nice guys—when a corrupt principal needed to be shown the light. She had also utilized their services when she’d been having problems with her landlord.
I was fascinated with the unusual resources Edwidge had developed.
But, possessed of a most un-golem-like desire to preserve my own safety, I decided I did not want them around me. As soon as I believed unhazardously possible I told her I didn’t really need an intern anymore, my situation had considerably improved.
She was very understanding.
Next there was Marla, a young lesbian who edited the weekly calendar for one of the city’s gay papers.
For Marla, gentles, I feel a mix of guilt and rage—yes, I still feel them, seven years later. The interns I had who benefited the most from me were the ones who had a concrete piece of writing and wanted feedback on it. Marla was not one of these. Instead, she said, “The only thing I’d want from you is your ideas. But you’d probably wanna keep those to yourself, wouldn’t you!”
My ideas?
Her requestchilled me. There has always been a part of me with an old dwarf’s suspicions about giving anything to younger people. They’ll supplant me! They’ll take everything I have! But somehow the way she put it particularly aroused my suspicions.
She seemed to believe, as I did, that her ideas would have to come from me or nowhere; as though we were in a zero-sum game where either Marla would steal all my apples and I would have none, or I would hold onto them and she would never get any. Somehow, neither of us imagined that there were other possible solutions. Teaching, for example—that I could help her develop her own ideas—or mutual development.
My suspicions weren’t the only thing her request aroused. Marla was one of the most negative, caustic people I had met in a very long time, and it was horribly attractive, reader. Her saying “the only thing” she could possibly want from me were my ideas stirred my desire, reader, in a way I did not understand.
Because she did not want me, I wanted her. Specifically, I wanted her contempt—something I was getting anyway! In addition to no writing ideas, Marla had a scornful, lips-pursed manner that drew me like a set of iron filings to an enormous caustic magnet.
It sure was an odd dynamic between her and me. Marla, surly, physically strong, squat, making annoying jokes about sex and romance all the time (Her, in a Don Juan voice: “Want a date?” Me: “Uh, no, thanks!” Her, handing me a Medjool date from behind her back, triumphant: “I meant one of these!” She repeated this joke every time we shopped in the food coop.)
I could tell that Marla was not interested in me and for some reason this obsessed me, even though I found her very ugly and stumpy.
I was going to write that we were not at all on the same wavelength. Except, unfortunately, actually I think we were. Marla was the sort of butch who, when you asked her why she wanted to date a certain woman, said, “Because she’s got a great rack!”
Even in my butch days, I would never have said that. Still, I was known for saying provocative, inappropriate things that transgressed generally-agreed upon boundaries, all over the town. I was known, probably, as well for being lame and hard-to-take when I tried to date.
There was also the coincident fact that we were both resentful people. Once she knew I was not going to give her my ideas, Marla hated the fact that she was working for me, putting my milk away and filing my receipts. She would show up as agreed, but grimacing every time. Perhaps the last time I had her come to work for me was the day my mother died.
I did not know my mother was going to die that day, of course. It was a Sunday and I had arranged for surly, grumbly Marla to come over and help me with my taxes, which are hard to work out on your own with a hand injury. Even when I knew, in early morning, that my mother was dead I did not cancel Marla. Dully, I was thinking that I still had to finish my taxes, and I was worried that even on the day of my mother’s death, if I put off tax-computing while I had an intern available, it surely would result in even more terrible disaster, like the IRS flying in through my closed window like a big black bestial bird of prey.
Or maybe I wanted to pretend that nothing had happened. This did not work very well, reader. After only ten minutes of looking at receipts with sour Marla, I sent her back home to Astoria.
The jig was up.
— Reader, I didn’t plan to go into this now. Have I gotten ahead of myself? My mother’s sickness was supposed to come in a discrete, well-ordered section that had nothing to do with my bad intern relations.
Chapter 11
My mother started to fade as soon as I did. Were w
e each other’s simulacrum? Howsoever it happened, the day I had my first RSI doctor’s evaluation was the last day my mother was ever capable of driving herself to the Long Island Rail Road station to pick me up for a visit.
I was supposed to come right after my appointment. I never did make it out that day to see her. My Mount Sinai exam wound up taking two hours longer than expected, and when I called to say how late I was, she told me to come back in a few days. She and her boyfriend, John, were already exhausted from just driving to the train.
Her lungs, propped up by magic all those years, failed gradually. She was only sixty-four when she started taking oxygen with her everywhere. Perhaps the year before she had started using a wheelchair sometimes—not because anything was wrong with her legs, but because her breathing was so poor it was hard for her to walk under her own power.
My mother had been complaining of ill health, you might say, ever since I had met her, but the reality seemed to have finally caught up to its promotion. Both she and I were supposed to have died during my birth, she said. “You almost died, and I almost died,” she told me when I was four. “The hole was too small.”
Our apocalyptic double murder-suicide was somehow averted by the hospital staff. Or perhaps by our own abilities as shamans. My mother and I have always known that we are incredibly gifted magicians, even at a time when one of us going through labor and the other was but a newborn.
Our bodies’ link did not, of course, end there. My mother acquired her disability, the hole in her neck and the cutting-out of her voice box, at the age of thirty-six, and so did I acquire my own at thirty-six, a breaking of the hands that seemed almost ritual in its implication. (In Diary of a Mad Housewife, a novel I read as a child, Sue Kaufman writes about “thirty-sixitis,” an alleged condition women get when they turn thirty-six—“a significant and dangerous age for a woman—like fifty for a man,” one of her characters claims. It’s the age at which Marilyn took her pills.)
Whenever my mother was angry because other people were not doing exactly what she wanted, she would shout in her hoarse caw-cry, “I’m a handicapped woman!” Of course, I did something like this, too, when it was my time to turn thirty-six.
What surprised me was how much it bothered me that I could not help her physically because my arms had broken. I was flabbergasted that I wanted to. I think I had never wanted to help her before.
Her physical state was shocking to me. For a while, she could still speak—my mother was one of the best practitioners in the world of esophageal speech, a method laryngectomees employed to talk—but she could no longer make me lunch, which she had liked to do when I’d come over. My mother loved to make me tuna fish sandwiches with tomato, and I had loved to eat them, reader, so we’d had moments and moments of her feeding me, of her nurturing me, when I’d come over to North Shore Towers, the famous old person’s luxury co-op she lived in near Lake Success.
She didn’t have enough steam to make a sandwich anymore, but she would get the nice young home health aide to buy me tropical fruit from the best market on the “arcade” level, mangoes, starfruit and papayas so that she would know I was enjoying something special.
When she could no longer talk—when was this? The fall of 2000, after the spring in which my arms had broken?—she wrote notes for awhile when she had something especially important to communicate, like “Is she [the home health aide] the authority on the Q69 bus, or am?!”
When she could no longer write notes, she would just stare with her head raised grimly, looking like an American Indian warrior chief whose skin had inexplicably turned gray.
Years ago—twenty-one years ago to be absolutely precise—my mother had begun telling Josie, Aphra, and me that she was a devoted member of the Hemlock Society, the pro- assisted suicide group, and that she expected us to grind up twenty pills and slide them down her throat if necessary to help her die when her time came. (She didn’t mention the pillow to smother her as a failsafe, but I later learned most Hemlock Society members requested that, too.)
But was I really supposed to do that? It was very hard to know. Certainly, she was experiencing horrendous pain. I eventually realized it was literally hurting her to breathe,and the doctors had given her a morphine patch as well as three different oral kinds of pain medication. There was an ad libitum morphine drip as well, for which my mother could press a button whenever she wanted a little extra.
She described her pain rather jauntily, though. “I feel what people feel like when they have cystic fibrosis,” she would say triumphantly, “as though they’re drowning!” And she would grin. “I am really drowning, little by little!”
While she was still speaking gleefully about her pain did not seem like a good time to kill her.
When she couldn’t speak, though—and even the last couple of months she could—my mother sometimes looked really mortified and frustrated to be so helpless. I don’t think I’ve told you what an industrious person my mother was, how she was always hatching book proposals, political campaigns against capitalism and homophobia, new ways of arranging the living room furniture, poems. Indeed, the year before she stopped being able to talk, my mother had written and published a kind of Cliff Notes guide to Billy Budd, put out two poetry chapbooks, and schemed each day to get gold and diamonds cheaply on eBay.
Now every two weeks it seemed she could do less and less. The nice young home health aide once a week, cleaning and buying fruit, had morphed into three distinct women who had the exhausting labor of taking care of her: the day woman, the night woman, and the woman who lived the entire weekend with her, my mother’s home-health-aide version of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, the threefold goddess who waxed and waned, washing my mother’s buttocks and buying her Diet Coke, with the week.
My mother stopped being able to: make herself coffee, read books, read the newspaper, read her mail, do email, scramble an egg, take the cottage cheese out of the refrigerator so she could eat it, choose the presents she bought people for Christmas, even eventually—astounding!—watch TV.
My mother loved TV, and after she’d begun to get sick , she had actually descended as far as Judge Judy. Now she descended even further—no TV at all.
“You have to promise me,” she’d demanded when I was fourteen, sixteen, twenty-three, thirty-two, “that you’ll help me die.” And, reader, I surely did promise, many times. It was hard not to promise my mother anything she wanted when I was a child. As I hurtled into my 20s, I promised again.
Was there ever a time when I refused to promise? I seem to remember one faintly, in my 30s. But is it a real memory? (Am I trying to find a light, bright period in which I either did not want to kill my mother or had the strength to resist saying I would be part of her death?)
Somehow, I thought the whole thing would be easy. As a child I even saw it as a matter of some moral urgency, reader. As someone who’d gotten hit regularly, I felt an affinity for anyone who wanted to escape their pain, even my mother.
Eventually, I had a sneaking suspicion that this might be a somewhat demanding request to make of one’s child. But early on my promise was, at least in some respects, willing.
What in god’s name were my responsibilities to her? It had always been hard to tell.
Whenever she made the request, my mother gave us to understand that she would always have the pills carefully stocked in the medicine cabinet to accomplish the task—“I’ve been putting them away,” she would say slyly. “I always get some extra pills to put away.” My mother had been threatening suicide off and on for years, so I absolutely believed that she had all the pills she needed, and that she maintained them constantly in a state of perfect readiness.
It was part of my belief in her all-comprehensive powers.
It was a shock when she turned out not to have the right kind of pills squirreled away. I know this is not the usual thing you read in the case of daughters caring for their ailing mothers. But, if she had ever had the pills, they had expired, lost their
strength, been thrown away, or been taken for pleasure, in the moment. Also, it was now so long after the last time she had asked me that I could no longer be sure if my mother wanted to die.
She had asked me only when she wasn’t sick and wasn’t dying.
Now my mother had developed a hump of flesh in her back, and a stomach full of air like a malnourished child. Other parts of her body—her face, her back—looked skeletal. All my life, my mother had wanted me to feel sorry for her, but I never, ever had, until this stupid moment.
I tried to ask her once or twice, very, very quietly so the home health aide in the next room wouldn’t hear. My mother was semi-silent by then, and when I whispered “Mom, do you want me to help you die? You have to tell me or I won’t know,” she said nothing.
I did do research at one point into getting the pills. I had a chemist girlfriend, bitter Betty Pill, who wrote me up a list of the combinations that I needed.
Was I going to be a murderer? It would have felt like a better role, I know, than being her victim, but from some mysterious place I found the strength to resist her request from long ago.
I felt so guilty. But I didn’t want to do it if I wasn’t sure she wanted me to. I also wanted to protect my own mind, from the torment of having killed my mother.
Lastly, I didn’t want to go to jail. It wasn’t worth it, perhaps even if she would have wanted me to do it. But I felt so selfish for putting my own shabby needs above hers.
It was horrible to me that for physical reasons, I couldn't give her even much more basic help than that. I was embarrassed and sad that I often could not reach to touch her, could not get her a glass of water or her sweater.
Here matters came to a head with one of the home health aides, Reyna, a motherly, middle-aged woman from Guyana who was my mother’s favorite. Reyna was infuriated when I’d ask her to help me pour a drink for myself after my long, hot walk from the train, or to move a chair for me into the bedroom so I could sit with my mother and not have to sit on her bed.
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