Daughterhood
Wendy BooydeGraaff
I take my daughter to see my mother at the hospital for what I suppose could be the last time. My mother’s colorectal cancer is no longer treatable, only manageable. The palliative care wing swallows her last days in its antiseptic perspicuity. In health, I rarely saw my mother. But she’s dying. I can’t live with regrets. In doing this, I want Suni to see compassion, to see warmth in the face of illness, to see persistence. I want Suni to experience the deathbed wisdom. I think surely my mother will be granted the compassion and wisdom all those nearing the end invoke.
But my mother, her lips dry and her heart drier, says, You look more and more like your father every day, don’t you? Suni nods, and says in her earnest way how her father is showing her the trick with the ears, how to focus on the temporalis muscle, isolate it, move it exclusively. Only ten percent of people can do this. Really, you are moving the muscles around your ears, not actually wiggling your ears, Suni says. My mother interrupts Suni to say it’s much more than the ears, hon, and I interrupt my mother to tell Suni to get something from the vending machine. Tell her to take my wallet, buy two or three things. Take her time. Enjoy the decision. Because this is the way it goes, my mother is ready to comment on her own grandchild’s race as if it were the only thing she can see. Dab says why not let Suni see how the world is, how Arlene is, in order to build up her resilience, but what girl needs a grandmother to imply her heritage is substandard. Dab’s parents dote, the way grandparents ought, and it is what Suni expects, her face open and ready to absorb what my mother will pierce her with.
Suni’s steps echo in the hollow hallway. I lean toward my mother. I call her Arlene. I have never used endearments, and won’t start now. I hear the hollow sound of her inhale. I smell the fetid presence of death. I say, Suni is going to compete in the regional spelling bee. Well, my mother says, good luck to her. It’s a long road to the big time. But, little successes, eh? I suppose that’s what we celebrate now.
I cannot wiggle my ears, I say. I can’t either, says my mother. She sniffs.
I have my mother’s immobile ears.
I tell her how I earned tenure this year, how I wrote a paper that was well received by my peers and was placed in a respected journal, and she tells me how she won an essay contest in high school, and how it was used as an example in a textbook. Something she has told me many times. Did you know, my mother says, that Rose next door fell off a ladder while hanging Christmas lights and gashed her forehead? She looks like Frankenstein. She came with those stitches across the forehead. Ha! No way to cover those up. Walking all stiff like, too. Brought me those. My mother motions to the carnations. She used to work at a flower shop. She could have at least brought alstroemerias.
Rose and my mother have lived beside each other for at least fifteen years, long enough for my mother to report on Rose’s frequent flirtations with the UPS driver, her cherry red lipstick even while mowing the lawn, her stomach bulge while practicing yoga in stretch pants—stretch pants! at her age—on the back lawn. My mother would have had to be on a ladder or looking from an upper level window to witness the backyard yoga.
I feel disgust, with my mother, for wanting this to be our conversation, one of our last conversations. I want a reckoning for what I’ve endured, I want a facsimile of closeness, an attempt at closure. I want apologies for the hate speech she made at Thanksgiving when Dab’s parents were seated on the other side of Suni, as if she didn’t know or didn’t care that they’d immigrated. There is so much I want from this woman. Wanted. Small and deflated in the blue-tinged sheets, she twists in pain and I hold the straw for her to swallow the medication from the crimped paper cup. Death writhes and pulses inside of her, rearing up and pushing against the bodily restraints of life. Suni returns with a small bag of chips, a peanut butter cup, and sour worms. I tell her about the water fountain at the other end of the hall and she goes out again, to fill the Styrofoam cup I’ve given her.
Remember when you taught me to make peach upside-down cake? I say when the medication takes hold, or the idea of the medication takes hold.
My mother laughs. She cackles, really, her hand in front of her mouth. You forgot the peaches, she said. And they are always the first things to go in the pan. The first. Her voice sings strong still. Crackled and fractured but strong. Not near death, that voice, that laugh. It echoes in the sparseness of the room.
Yes, I did. I hold my mother’s hand. She squeezes it, the bony phalanges pressing into my palm. I say, I had to put the slices on the top instead and then it was Peach Right-Side Up. I adjust my fingers inside my mother’s squeezing. I think my mother will cackle again, or smile.
Peach Nothing, my mother says. Peach Nothing. She sighs and motions for another sip.
And how about on senior skip day, when I got my leg caught in the revolving door at the Amway Grand, I say.
I had to come and get you from Butterworth, my mother says. Ah, yes. You just wait. That daughter of yours will make you run all over tarnation, just the way I ran everywhere for you. It hasn’t even started yet.
That daughter. Her name is Suni, I say. Sunita, if you want.
I know, my mother spits out. Of course, I know. Don’t you think I’ve got the right to call her what I want?
By virtue of being old, I think. By virtue of no virtue, I think. By some antiquated idea that just because you have aged, you have become wise, that you have earned the years to do or say anything at all.
Suni comes back and I give her my phone, allow her to download the game I had previously denied. Allow her to sit nearby and shoot daggers at something, while I collect my mother’s daggers and alter their projection.
How about the time I had the solo in chamber choir? I say.
Laryngitis, my mother says. Angels We have Croaked On High. She laughs, her own noises croaked and broken.
Suni looks up, My mom? she says. I laugh, a forced laugh, and say, I’ll tell you all about it.
My mother says, Now listen. Your mother, she was so proud of that solo, had been practicing for weeks, she was insufferable, singing around the house.
I hadn’t remembered it like that.
She kept repeating the same line over and over, getting the high notes just squeaky enough to make me cringe.
It’s called practicing, Arlene, I say, my voice getting that warning edge, which I try to stifle because she is dying and Suni is watching.
It’s called breaking my eardrums, is what it is. And also wearing your voice out, so no wonder you got laryngitis.
I didn’t try to get sick, I say.
No, but you did.
I did, I say. I don’t say what I remembered, which was devastation. Carl and Priscilla and Kelly had comforted me back then, put me back together.
My mother shivers and reaches for my hand again, and I let her have it. I want to slap her, yet I let her have my other hand as well, to draw the warmth out of it, to suck the heat from my marrow and store it in her cold, dying bones. I give her more than I thought I knew how. I lean in close, and speak sotto voce about how a colleague spilled a drink on me at the holiday party because I didn’t put his name first on the list of collaborators on the acclaimed paper. My mother squeezes my hand, pressing her chill into me. Huh, she says.
I lean in closer and tell my mother about my department chair, how at that same holiday party he’d commented on my dress, and then he said I’d sat on one of the cupcakes, and then he put his hand on my derrière for a full thirty seconds before I realized what he was doing and I walked away, leaving his hand in limbo, cupping the air.
I hope you got a raise, my mother says.
What? I say.
Well, if your boss likes your ass, maybe you can get a raise. She sings that Abba song, Money, money, money, the one from Mama Mia, and there is no irony in her tone. These days you can use that sort of thing to your advantage, she says.
I pull away, check on Suni in the corner chair, phone closer to her face than I like to see. I brush her hair out of her eyes, and she looks up from her game, and she thanks me with her flickering eyes. This child, who hourly, I want to press to my heart. I tap her shoulder, pretending to pick off a fluff, then turn back to my mother.
I’ve been taking a pottery class. At night, I say.
You always had that artsy, fartsy streak, she says. Or wanted to be part of that crowd, anyways.
I lean in. I say, Every pot I make is out of whack, crooked, or cracked. One time I made a perfectly round pot only to find that after it was fired, there was a worn out circle in the bottom.
I tried slam poetry and got booed off the stage.
I developed an allergy to shrimp linguine, my favorite dish. Had to run out of the restaurant.
There is a student who comes in five minutes before office hours end, and stays so long, with so much burden to unload, that I miss Suni’s dance rehearsal every time.
My mother eats my offerings until she is temporarily sated. She lays back on her hospital pillow with her thin lips puckered and says, Enough. I’m not dying today. Go home.
I take Suni home, with a soft serve ice cream from the hospital cafeteria, and a chasm dissecting my core. I ask Suni to tell me everything about her day, about the good and the bad, and I swallow it all with air so it cushions inside of me, pillows up and fills the empty. Rest gently within, these words of my daughter, this essence of her.
I will visit my mother again, alone. I will collect my moments of misery, I will seek out what hurts me most and I will offer it to her on a platter of tongue and bile. I will consider lying, consider collecting stories that happened in my imagination or to others, stories that I discover on flickering Internet posts late at night. But I know my mother will taste the difference, and it will leave her hungry.
I will visit my mother five, six more times, and she will clasp my hands, and clutch my thinning hands to her heart. She will stroke the hard edges of my wrists, looking for hollows to let more blood. She will almost forgive me for pursuing academia, for marrying someone I love and still love, for gleaning a smidge of light.
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Wendy BooydeGraaff is from Ontario, Canada and now lives in Michigan, USA. Her work has been published in Jellyfish Review, Across the Margin, and SmokeLong Quarterly, and is forthcoming in Whistling Shade, So It Goes, and NOON.
