Joy Enough

by Sarah McColl

  Driving, she said, was the only thing that made her feel normal, but even quick trips were disrupted by nausea. She would feel a wave rise in her throat, keep one hand on the wheel, and extend the other toward me. That was my signal. I reached for the roll of paper towels she kept on the floorboards, ripped off a wad of rough sheets, and thrust them toward her. It was like a gym class relay race. Here! She held them to her mouth like an oxygen mask, then clenched the wheel, staying straight. She looked down the double lines of the road like a gangplank and took deep, deliberate breaths. I just, need, to relax. Once, after she returned home from a meeting, I found her in the driveway wiping streaks of yellow vomit from the inside of the driver’s-side door.

  It was like science fiction. First, she shrank. Wearing new black corduroys in a size formerly unknown to her, her concave thighs left dead air between legs thin as a fashion model’s. More jokes.

  Then she grew, expanding in all the wrong places. She unbuttoned the new pants to accommodate the swell, and my sister and I, stopped under a traffic light, wondered aloud what was growing inside. Her blood vessels began to leak into the tissue, so that her upper arms swelled like Popeye. Then her calves, ankles, and feet. Sometimes the pressure of the fluid was so great it would burst the skin. She sat at a luncheon, her feet in a pool of herself.

  Try not to lose any weight, the oncologist said. Not dying seemed like a matter of meals. To lose weight was to move into an unseen space, the way headlights round the walls of a room at night, illuminating it a final time before a car turns the corner.

  Here’s what I heard: If she eats, she’ll live. My older brother had gotten into the habit of depositing protein shakes on the bottom shelf of her refrigerator. They accumulated there, untouched. I could do better, I thought.

  I was thirty-one the June Saturday a friend drove me out to my mother’s farm. I left my husband and the china we had finally settled on—paper-thin and plain white—in our Brooklyn apartment for the summer. It did not occur to me that what I did looked like leaving; I would return for meetings at work and for date nights, I said, and my stepfather could use the break. I packed a suitcase of summer dresses, a sharp knife, and my good sea salt. When we turned into my mother’s driveway, the weeds in the garden were waist high, and the redbud in front of the house was split in half, pulled apart by the weight of its two heaviest branches. It did not occur to me I might fail at any of what I attempted to save. I arrived in my mother’s blue and white farmhouse kitchen. I thought if I could cook, I could cure.

  I WROTE A NEW grocery list. No peanut butter, she told me, unless it’s with saltines. Potato skins sounded good and those sticks of cheddar cheese wrapped in plastic she could stick in her purse. Hamburgers, devil’s food cake, creamy potato soup made with real cream. Crisp toast with salty butter, Greek yogurt, guacamole. She liked fish still, she said, and steak, and grease-stained sacks of fried chicken from the grocery store. Salads—big piles of ribby romaine, bright with vinegar. She had dressed one most nights for the past forty years. Now it was my turn.

  We shopped together when she felt well enough, but when her feet ached from neuropathy, and shoes seemed only to make it worse, she walked into the Amish market wearing thick wool socks. Waiting in line for a pretzel-wrapped sausage to share, another woman, about my age and tight with propriety, stared at my mother’s feet as if a barnyard animal had clod into her dining room. My mother didn’t notice; she was watching the bonneted women braid dough before dropping the pretzels into fryers of hot oil. The woman standing with us in line had a child with her, one who kicked his chubby legs from the top shelf of the shopping cart. She was ordering a platter for a party, sighing and shifting from one foot to another, impatient with the wait, and annoyed that a bald woman and her bitchy daughter were now standing in the way, foreshortening her view.

  My rage was stealth. Its arrival never surprised me since I could feel it there, quiet but ever present in my body, like the steady machinations of menstruation. Still, it was startling when it ruptured the surface of an ordinary day. Women riled me—generations of them who walked together arm in arm through the parking lot of the zoo, who posted photos from a bright hospital room where there were more eager arms than could hold a swaddled new baby. Or a woman like this one, one who I had deemed insufficiently pleased with her precious little life and the littler one she had made, one with so much ahead that she could blithely waste what was being wrenched from my fingers, one who I knew nothing about, and yet had seen enough of. She could feel my glare.

  “Am I in your way or something?” she asked.

  “Not at all,” I said, my mouth lifting into the kind of smile I had learned watching women in Texas. “But I believe we were next.”

  IN DALLAS, I had accompanied my mother on mornings of endless errands. JoAnn Fabrics, Weir’s Furniture, Snider Plaza. This was the only bearable time to be outside in high summer—before the heat of the day gathered thickness and the sun burned, relentless. East of the skyscrapers, where shotgun houses sat behind parched lawns and hanging laundry, five aluminum structures similar in dimensions to a football field rose from the colorless landscape. On their short sides, under the triangle of their pitched roofs, each was painted with a number. I remember 4 and 5. Inside, parked pickups, flatbeds facing in, filled with watermelons, with cantaloupes, with honeydew, trucked in from anonymous tracts of land in east Texas off I-35. This was the farmer’s market in the mid-1980s. No bluegrass band, no cooking demos, no heritage pork.

  The vendors were men. Tan and ropey thin, they tucked soft packs of cigarettes into the chest pockets of their worn cotton shirts. They were polite but terse, wore mesh-backed baseball caps and mirrored sunglasses. My mother strode the length of the buildings in blue jeans and square sunglasses with lenses that faded to the palest purple. Her hot-roller curls were brushed loose, her perfume deep as ripe melons. She pointed at quarts of peaches and red plums, and the men tumped green cardboard containers of fruit into plastic grocery sacks. She said something, and they laughed. She hooked the bags over her forearm, took her change, and we walked to the back of another man’s truck to buy tomatoes and corn. If there was a breeze that day, and my hair were gathered into a ponytail, I could feel the air move at the nape of my neck.

  We began to run errands together again. A few rolling miles from her home with my stepfather, at the Dvoor dairy farmer’s market on the Route 12 circle, my mother leaned on her walker, stooped like Nanny before she died. She was only sixty-three, but she moved like an old woman. I followed her around the circle of vendors. We bought sweet potatoes from a young farmer with short sleeves and a tan, easy smile. His looked great, she told him, what was his secret? His face brightened, and he explained the conditions were right this year, and how to keep them over the winter in a cool garage. He handed her change, and she pushed it in her pocket, raising her shoulder like a girl. She hooked the bags on the handles of her walker. We moved on, and she sighed. “I used to be cute,” she said.

  On our way to the car, a little boy ran up to my mother with a coffee can. “Would you like to give to the Hunterdon Land Trust?” he asked. She pulled a dollar from her pocket and slipped it in his can. The boy looked back at his own mother, who handed him a roll of stickers. “Say ‘thank you,’” she urged. “Thank you!” he chanted, then peeled off a sticker and placed it on my mother’s extended forefinger. She put it above her breast. “I give,” it said.

  She was tired, so I drove us home, stopping at the Texaco just as the gas light turned on. The attendant was young, and we smiled at each other. When he turned his back to lift the nozzle from the pump, my mother looked ahead through the windshield, delighted by something unseen.

  “What?” I said.

  “Only a beautiful young woman could buy ten dollars worth of gas at a full-service station,” she said. “Enjoy it.”

  MY HUSBAND CALLED to say he’d been staying up all night writing code for his iPhone app and eating cold pizza for dinner. “That sounds grim
,” I said. “Life without my wife is grim,” he said. On the weekends, he worked from bed with the curtains drawn. He thought he had Lyme disease, lupus, Celiac, a stomach parasite, cancer. The doctor told him to stop googling symptoms. I told him I could not hold all our joy.

  I BUILT FOUR raised beds inside the fence of my mother’s large garden. Some things, neglected, were still kicking: the apricot, apple, and plum trees; the raspberry bush. I ran the mower through the overgrown grass to cut a path, and then my mother rolled her walker out to talk me through the next steps before heading back to the porch to read the newspaper.

  Inside the four-foot square beds, I made layers according to her instructions: newspapers and collapsed cardboard first to block weeds; then rotted sheep manure, shoveled from the heap as big as a jungle gym behind the barn; a six-inch crown of dark and fragrant soil.

  We had ordered the seeds before the snow melted from catalogs with pen-and-ink illustrations, and my mother had drawn the beds to scale on graph paper. Now, I pushed the seeds into the soil with an unsure index finger. Basil, a mix of bitter Asian greens, Brandywine and Big Boy tomatoes, Cashflow summer squash and zebra-striped zucchini, bright French breakfast radishes, two kinds of kale. We had decided to devote an entire bed to flowers, for beauty and for the bees. The envelope of cosmos was called the Sensation Mix. The winter squash were space hogs, so my mother suggested piling the manure between the walls of two separate beds and planting them there, free-form.

  It was too late in the season for any of this, and in my panic, I treated it more as science than art. I cut back and forth across the lawn to the porch to ask follow-up questions. My mother sat on the chipped wicker furniture repainted white each year before this one. I stood in front of her, sweaty and concerned about seed spacing. She was nearly subsumed by the slipcovered cushions and the sections of the paper on her lap, but she was calm in the hot, insect buzz of the afternoon.

  “There’s no way to screw this up,” she said. “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

  Within days the green tops of the radishes sprang right out of the dirt, and I dug them in wide-eyed marvel, before slicing them into salads I handed to her at lunch. I was amazed at how simple it was to grow something from seed.

  I give.

  HER YOUNGER BROTHER, Quennie, hosted a picnic at his dairy farm in Westminster, Vermont, pitching a party tent beside the driveway so we could linger for the afternoon out of the sun eating hamburgers and potato salad. One of my younger cousins had returned home with her newborn. Together with my sister’s daughter, the babies rolled and toppled on a yellow blanket spread at my mother’s feet. The skin hung loosely from her bony jaw, slipping from her face like a landslide. She wore a black daisy-print bucket hat someone had given her.

  “I feel so happy, and so stimulated!” she said. She looked terrible.

  I paced the rows of my aunt’s gardens, then stepped out of sight into a shed. It smelled like hay and bicycle tires. I could hear my mother’s laugh as the babies played with the Hungry Caterpillar, an orange rubber ball, a toy Hess truck.

  I wanted to be pregnant, and I needed my husband’s help. But the baby I wanted was not with him, it was with her. For her. Birth was the logical continuation of a circle, the reassurance to both of us that as she died, something of us grew. It was the closest I could come to knowing my mother from inside the vessel of my own skin, to understand how she loved, and to pass it on. This was my inheritance. These were the only riches I had ever cared about. I give.

  But before I went to care for my mother, and again after I returned home, each month, timed perfectly to ovulation, my husband and I argued about something small, then walked into our bedroom stony and lay in the dark, silent and awake with our backs to each other, the way you do when there is a big thing no one is yet ready to say.

  I COOKED WHOLE sides of salmon with thick, fennel-flecked yogurt sauce. Outside, over charcoal’s gray ash, I grilled butterflied chicken and then pounded parsley and basil in a mortar before adding a stream of green olive oil. I carried glass jugs of full-fat chocolate milk home from a local dairy. I made a peach crumble and burned the top, then scooped ice cream to cover it. I assembled tomato sandwiches with thick layers of mayonnaise on gold-toasted sourdough, and criss-crossed slices of crisp, hot bacon on top. Every meat had a sauce, every meal a dessert.

  My mother insisted she didn’t care about food. In fact, she never had cared, would have happily sustained herself on buttered toast and tea were it not for the hungry mouths of a family and the required ritual of a meal.

  “Don’t get your ego involved with cooking for me,” she warned. But sometimes she requested seconds, and those nights sent me upstairs, fist-pumping in triumph. I would lie awake in bed under the glow-in-the-dark stars I had affixed to the ceiling in high school, brainstorming extra calories. Soft pats of butter into her bowls of rice, more olive oil poured onto the salad. I sent progress reports to my sister in Massachusetts. “I will be very, very surprised if she loses weight this week,” I wrote.

  ME, I ATE peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Popcorn. Or I did not eat at all, strangely comforted by my stomach’s savage growling. It was one of three times in my life I have lost my appetite, increasingly disinterested in my own meals as I focused on my cooking project for her.

  For my mother, I turned on the stove. For my mother, I set the table. For my mother, I took the wineglasses from the cabinet, struck a match, lit the candles, cut zinnias and cosmos and collected them in an empty marmalade jar. My stepfather would leave us at the table to our talk. Those nights, neither of us must have cared about eating. Our desires were less tangible. There is one way to slow a story as it speeds toward its inevitable end, and that is to linger in the scene. There was no other purpose for a meal than this: for my mother and me to unfold our napkins in our laps and sit side by side until the sun sank behind the barn and I rose to clear our plates, empty or not, and switch on the overhead light so we could stay and stay and stay.

  SOME DAYS, the medicine made her weird. She dozed sitting upright, out of it, and listened with her eyes closed. She was there—wearing a twin set, cup of milky tea in front of her on the coffee table—and also not there. She dipped in and out of conversation to smile at someone, and then, drugged and heavy-headed, rolled out again. She was like this one afternoon sitting next to me on the couch while I read a poem aloud, realizing too late what it was about. She blinked her eyes open. Our faces were very close, and we looked at each other—really looked, the way, I imagine, a portrait painter can see beyond the surface of a subject—the shape of an eye, the slope of a shoulder—to what is immaterial but plain. I was watching her body waste its way off the earth, a witness to the very simple process of disintegration. But the material world, the facts of its entropic systems, were complicated that day by what I saw. How could a thing be in the process of dying when I had never seen anything more alive? I know, from the way she looked back at me, she saw the same thing in me.

  IT WAS NOT a reversal of roles. She did not become the child and I the parent. My care was her own mothering returned. I didn’t fuss, wasn’t precious. I made soup, mopped the floors.

  “You are me,” she said one night when I returned from a meeting in the city. “Taking out the garbage in your high heels.”

  “I can’t make her comfortable the way you can,” my sister told me on the telephone, and I felt I had been chosen.

  IN THE EARLY evenings, I pushed the wheelbarrow and shoveled manure. One night in the bathroom, washing up before cooking, I saw sheep manure smeared on my cheekbone. I smiled hugely, proud. There was bright summer air in my chest, and my skin was salty with sweat.

  But I felt, too, the reel of summer’s speed and our slow progress in it. I didn’t know the names for country things and forgot family stories. What was the tiny quick-headed bird with yellow tail feathers? How do I rotate the vegetables next year so they don’t deplete the soil? Who was struck by lightning while driving a tractor
, left witless with the teeth of his zippers fused? There were days when I felt thoroughly consumed by the work at hand, when picking wet strawberries and fetching the mail at the end of the long driveway and thinning the overgrown thicket of basil was enough to occupy my mind and body. Yet there was a sort of light in the early evenings, a kind I failed repeatedly to capture in photographs, that would bring my eye to the wider landscape. Its quality was by nature ephemeral and also sort of skittish, weaving its view out of my hands perhaps for my own good, as if the attempt to reduce splendor to a single small frame was to misinterpret its inherent scale. The faded hay wagon stood empty in the field across the road, and the sun illuminated the tree line until it dipped behind the green horizon. Our home here on the Delaware River sat on one hundred acres. There were another hundred acres and eight generations of stories on the farm my mother grew up on at the foot of Mt. Greylock. What I didn’t learn would die with her.

  The world was in such full bloom, we were wavering on the quick edge of a ripeness about to rot.

  THE FARMHOUSE SLUMPED into the earth. I could manage the vegetable garden but not my mother’s flower beds, too, now overgrown with weeds as tall as high school basketball players. Digging them up was a sweaty, cursing war. The downstairs toilet sank into the soft, warped wood floor. The garbage bin overflowed. Open, abandoned yogurt sat on the fridge shelf, overgrown with black spots. The ants were everywhere. I sprayed bleach on the countertops and threw out old jars of olives. I could not keep pace with the decay.