Chapter 1. All About Eve
I must have been ten years old when my mother took me to see Mommie Dearest and then bragged to her friends that Id laughed through the wire hanger scene.
She riffed on the joke at home, applying that thick white facial mask and bursting into the dark of my bedroom with the wire hanger as I slept. Id wake terrified, her slim figure a silhouette above me, the hanger in her fist poised to come down on me. But even in interrupted half-sleep I knew my cue: I laughed. And then she wouldnt hit me.
Retelling it now it sounds so twisted, but at the time it seemed as natural as anythingfried bananas for breakfast or a flasher on the corner, all the unjudged sequences of childhood.
Where to start?
In the beginning that comes to mind, Im grown. Thirty nine years old. A homeowner and an unmarried wife. One kid in college and another in the crib.
Start anywhere, Ariel.
It was an ordinary day, after all. Maybe 2 p.m.
My mother stood on my doorstep wearing a coral sweater and coral lipstick. Her hair was white now, but she was still striking in that Hollywood kind of a way. Tiny and dark, she looked like a cross between Joan Baez and Susan Lucci from All My Children. Beautiful. Thats the first thing people noticed about her. Your mother is beautiful,” theyd say. Like I didnt know.
I sat on my couch working on my laptop. I waved her inside. That sweater looks good on you,” I said.
Thanks.” She stepped over the threshold into my living room. It was Gammies. The sweater.” She sat down in the leopard-print armchair. This chair looks good in here.”
The chair was Gammies, too. Our dead matriarch. Our small inheritances.
I clicked the keys on my computer. My important work. I wanted to appear distracted so my mother wouldnt engage me in some conversation I didnt have time for. I had to finish a blog for Psychology Today. I had to post a few story critiques in the online class I was teaching. I had to pick my son up from preschool in an hour. My mother was just stopping by to get the youthful skin serum made from sake and lamb placenta that shed ordered on the internet, wasnt she? What did she need to talk about?
She cleared her throat. I guess I should tell you. I didnt get what I wanted.”
I glanced up at her. I knew she wanted an exposed-brick condo downtown. I shrugged. Therell be another condo.” Portland was sprouting new condos like goat grass.
My mother didnt say anything.
I felt something like a chill in my hand. I hadnt had a cigarette in three years, but now I wanted one. I stopped typing, looked up at her.
Sitting there in my Gammies old chair, my mother seemed so small. She didnt smile or frown. Its cancer,” she said.
What?” It was like Id heard the syllables, but didnt know their meaning.
Its lung cancer.” Her words floated into the air between us like dandelion seeds, just hung there.
What?”
Id seen the scans at the hospital two weeks earlier, the little Christmas lights that filled my mothers rib cage. The pulmonologist wore red shoes. He pointed to those Christmas lights, said he was worried. But shed never been a smoker. There were still so many different things it could be.
I have lung cancer,” my mother said again.
I moved the computer from my lap, sat up straight. Shit. All right. What do we do?”
Nothing.” She fiddled with the gold band on her ring finger. Its too late for chemo.”
I remembered summer mornings when I was a kid, sneaking away from the violence of our home to make daisy chains in the park down the street; I remembered that just then for no reason.
What do you mean we do nothing?”
Stage four,” she said. Ill be dead in a year.” She reached into her purse, grabbed her coral lipstick, and re-applied. She licked her teeth. Ill go home now,” she said. Home to the studio apartment Id just rented for her next to the pawn shop on 82nd Avenue.
Oh, stay for dinner,” I tried.
No.” My mother pushed herself up out of my grandmothers chair. I dont want to drive back in the dark.”