Authors: Ariel Gore
The End of Eve (13 page)
I peddled faster, imagining some helpless shadow chasing after me. I sailed across University Avenue, ditched down another alley and turned onto the bike path that lead down to San Francisquito creek.
Breathless and elated, I threw my bike down at the creek's edge and tossed stones across the shallow water as the first commuter train crossed that old train bridge,
chclack, chclack, chclack.
WHEN I GOT
home, the house would still be quiet.
Only my stepdad up.
I'd creep into the kitchen and say, “Good morning, John.”
He'd smile at me and say, “Well, good morning, chickadee.”
And I'd pretend I didn't notice the bandages on his head as he fried me a plateful of sliced bananas and leftover brown rice and we'd sit there at the butcher block table, the two of us, pouring honey over our bananas and rice and spooning all that soft sweet sticky mess into our mouths and we'd laugh and lick our lips because we shared this unspoken grateful feeling between us that, yes, we'd made it to breakfast just fine.
SUNRISE HELD THE FORMER DUPLEX IN SILENCE
.
Maybe things would chill out now that my mother's red ink death date had passed.
Maxito peered around the doorframe into the living room where I was curled up on the couch. “Watch
Bell, Book and Candle,
Mama?” He'd just turned three and this was his favorite film â the Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak neo-noir about a pretty witch who owns a magic shop and puts a love spell on her unsuspecting neighbor. Maxito played the
DVD
over and over, laughed at the same blue flame and Siamese cat spell scenes again and again.
“Sure.” There was time for a movie before shopkeeping and preschool.
On the camping stove in the cold blue-sky backyard, I made strong coffee and hot cocoa, scrambled eggs with green chile.
Seven a.m. and my mother hadn't yet emerged from her room at the far end of the house.
Eight a.m.
Eight-thirty.
Maybe she was dead in there.
I didn't want to check.
Sol steamed coconut milk for more coffee. “Have you seen your mom since yesterday?”
“No,” I lied. “I'm sure she's fine.”
I didn't know if the cure for my life was to lie to everyone about everything or to become brutally honest.
“How
ARE
you?” acquaintances would ask when I ran into them at the Tune-Up Café on Hickox. I'd order my Salvadoran plate, nod and say, “I'm fine and great to see you.”
“How
IS
your mother?” they'd ask when I ran into them at Healthy Wealthy. I'd place her probiotic cottage cheese and organic shiitake mushrooms in my cart and say, “she's doing all right.”
I didn't want to say too much to anyone about my mother in part because I'd been taught since childhood not to. My stepdad and my Gammie and the few friends who knew the quality of her violence said she couldn't help the way she was and anyway,
Come on, Ariel, she's tiny, who could she hurt?
And I didn't want to say too much because, inexplicably, I still wanted people to like her. I was afraid they wouldn't like her. And then my new acquaintances would be like every mop-haired hippie kid I went to elementary school with in the '70s in California, those kids who used to slap my head when I passed them in the hallways and say, “Hey, Airbrain Ariel, how's your bitchy mom?” Bitchy because she'd called them a corporate greedy sugar dealer when they just wanted to sell her a box of Girl Scout cookies. Or bitchy because she'd followed them home after they broke a bottle in the street and she'd grabbed them by their shirt collar and told them to “come back, you little brat, and clean it up. I work at San Quentin â that's where thugs like you end up.” Those kids friended me on Facebook now and wrote on my timeline, “I always admired your mother and I'm so sorry to hear she's ill,” and I kind of wanted to slap their heads.
NINE O
'
CLOCK IN
the morning and my mother finally emerged from her bedroom in her leopard-print robe and a Patagonia jacket.
“Nonna â” Maxito beamed when he saw her. “
Bell, Book and Candle!
Want to see the funny part?”
My mother smiled at him and sighed, “Good morning, Maxito.” But when she turned to me she wasn't smiling anymore. “Why haven't you put the grandmother clock together?”
“I haven't had a chance,” I said. And I hadn't â consumed as I'd been about whether or not she'd try to murder my child as I slept. “There's hot water in the backyard for your essiac tea. Do you want me to bring it inside?”
She nodded slowly. “If you were planning on staying here you would have put the clock together by now. You're going to leave me here alone to die, aren't you?”
I didn't want to leave her alone, but how much longer could we stay? “We'll have to figure something out that works for everyone. Okay?”
I checked my email. I'd applied for a sweet visiting professor gig at the University of New Mexico and here came the good news: Unanimous vote. I was hired. I'd start mid-January.
Who was I?
A mother, a daughter, a professor.
The snow would be coming soon.
I HAD FANTASIES
of running away like I was 16 years old again. Maxito and Sol and I would pack up our lives into three little backpacks and we'd climb out the window and run laughing into the cold night.
But we didn't run.
Instead I rigged baby gates in the hallway that led to our bedrooms and told my mother I'd done it because I worried about Maxito sleepwalking.
THANKSGIVING CAME AND
we could finally use the kitchen even though it still needed paint and countertops. We roasted the requisite turkey even though no one but Maxito and Ronaldo was eating meat that week.
CHRISTMAS AND MY
mother said the tree I'd brought inside was even more pitiful than last year's and, “I'm trying to be
tolerant, Ariel, because obviously you don't have any money, but get that fucking thing out of my house.”
I left it where it was.
Maia flew in for the week and tried to get us all drunk on mescal and shivered, “It's stressful here.”
I wrapped a couple of candles from the shop and put them under the tree for my mother.
She gave me a can of smoked sardines.
THE DAY AFTER
New Year's I lit a Virgin of Guadalupe candle, but I didn't know what to pray for. Maybe God had enough trouble without worrying what happened to us.
Sol took Maxito to a circus-themed party somewhere at sunset.
I paged through an unlabeled file on the kitchen counter. New Xeroxed figures with my mother's name on them. New tumors in the lungs. New tumors in the brain. A new tumor the hospice nurse had circled in red pencil: The one that pressed into the mitral valve, beginning to cut off the blood supply to her heart.
“How are you doing?” I asked her when she shuffled into the kitchen.
She put a pot of water on to boil. “I'm dying, I'm sure you're happy to know.” And then, “I don't know what your family is doing here in my house.”
I didn't know what to say.
Your family. My house.
I was tired of this shit, tired of making excuses for her, tired of blaming the tumors or anything else. And it wasn't true that she couldn't help the way she was. She didn't treat everyone this way. She was just an abusive bitch who happened to have cancer. I shook my head, looked right at her. “If anyone in your life has ever treated you like family, it's been me and my kids. If you can't see that, take it up with God.”
As I turned away, I heard her low whisper, “You just made a big mistake.”
I crawled into bed even though the sliver of a moon had barely risen. I thought I'd read or write, but I just took a few good sips of bourbon from the bottle on my nightstand and fell asleep. Didn't wake when Sol and Maxito came in.
IN THE MORNING,
I made coffee and hot cocoa. I scrambled an egg for Maxito. I didn't see my mother. Didn't hear her in her room. Didn't hear the laundry running. We took Maxito to preschool and went to work at the shop, but it was cold and snowy and no one came in so we closed early, picked Maxito up from preschool early and headed home.
As we turned onto the dirt road, Sol gasped, “What the mother?”
Twenty seven giant black garbage bags in the driveway, our red couch behind them. The grandmother clock. My old hobo bird painting propped against the turquoise trailer.
“Watch
Bell, Book and Candle
again!” Maxito cheered from his car seat.
“Hang on, Maxito.” Sol pulled over and I climbed out of the car, blast of cold air and the sound of my own boots on the gravel. I tried the front door, but the front door was locked. My key didn't work. That's when I noticed the living room windows were all boarded up. I walked around the side of the house. My mother's bedroom window was the only one not boarded. It was open and there she was in her green Patagonia jacket, just staring out the window, the screen between us.
“What's going on, Mom?”
She kept staring like I wasn't standing there on the other side.
“Mom, what are you going to do?”
She was quiet at first, didn't move except to smile at a question like that. “Don't worry about me,” she finally said. “The devil takes care of his own.”
SOL WAS LOADING
bags and cursing under her breath when I got back to the car. Maxito whimpered in his seat.
“Don't worry, baby.” I whispered. “It's just a game. House bounce.”
He didn't look soothed exactly, but he stopped crying. “House bounce?”
What was there to do? We couldn't kick the art student tenant out of our apartment on a moment's notice. We'd given him a nine-month lease. And so it was that the three of us, a veterinarian, a professor, and their three-year-old kid moved into the back room of a candle shop best known for the curse-reversals we did not perform.
A short trek through a frozen outdoor passageway lead to the toilet and sink we shared with the Buddhist temple that had moved into an adjacent live/work space. We'd worry about where to shower later.
WE DRAGGED GARBAGE
bags in from the car and Sol borrowed a truck from the pizza shop across the parking lot and went back for the couch and clock. I set up the DVD player.
“Mary Poppins
or
Bell, Book and Candle?”
“Bell, Book and Candle!”
Maxito squealed.
“We're going to live in our shop now,” I told him like it was as ordinary a place to live as anywhere. “Just like in
Bell, Book and Candle.
”
“Yes,” he smiled. “We live in our shop.”
It was dark by the time Sol had moved the couch and the rest of our stuff in. “We need wine,” she said.
We did. “I'll go.”
She held up a full pink petticoat tutu she'd found in one of the big garbage bags of our belongings. It was mine. The kind of thing people wore in Portland with a pair of motorcycle boots. The kind of thing no one ever wore in Santa Fe with anything for any reason.
“I dare you to wear this to Healthy Wealthy,” Sol laughed. “I'll pay for the wine if you wear it.”
SO, THAT
'
S HOW
I found myself in the wine aisle at Healthy Wealthy â a mother, a daughter, a new visiting professor, not exactly homeless, wearing my full pink petticoat tutu on a January night in Santa Fe, New Mexico, even though it was only seven degrees outside.
WINE-TIPSY IN THE DARK OF OUR SHOP WHILE MAXITO
and Sol slept, I clicked onto Facebook. My mother had updated her profile to show that she no longer had any children. I unfriended her, then felt like a worm.
Did I really just unfriend my dying mother?
I poured myself another glass and typed a rambling status update.
My old friend Teagan commented,
Geez, talk about our parents having no use for us the minute we're not who they trained us to be.
I LOOKED AT
my old hobo birds painting propped against the wall, looked out the window. The dark of the new moon. I didn't want to sleep with Sol on the red couch in the back room, so I curled up in the giant Mexican equipale chair in the corner of the shop and fell asleep in my pink tutu like some kindergartener who'd just projectile vomited at the talent show.
Morning was a ringing phone in the pocket of my hoodie.
Hospice.
I'd left a voicemail telling them my mother was alone and asking them to check on her more often, but I guess the fuzzy intake nurse was also the fuzzy exit nurse, because it was her voice on the phone now saying, “Well, hello there, dear Ariel. I'm calling to let you know that well â as luck would have it â your mother fired hospice yesterday.”