The End of Eve (11 page)

The pink hospice lady whispered, “She's beautiful.”

I'd brought three folding chairs out from the back room, but the hospice lady dragged the giant Mexican equipale chair from the corner of the shop, like maybe she thought it looked more comfortable than the folding chairs. She motioned for my mother to sit down in it, but when my mother did sit, the image was all wrong, my tiny mother in that giant pigskin chair. She was maybe 95 pounds now, but she looked even smaller in that ridiculous chair, feet not touching the floor. Lily Tomlin as aging cancer patient.

The hospice lady didn't seem to notice. She and I sat in our folding chairs and she shrugged and smiled, shrugged and smiled. “People are really into conscious dying right now.”

Who knew there were trends even in dying?

“I don't want to know anything about dying,” my mother said.

“You don't want to know?” The intake nurse smiled a wide white smile like she'd never heard such a thing, but she was going to be nice, like some preschool teacher pretending that sucking on one's own knees might be in the realm of the socially acceptable. “It's important to be conscious as you decline,” she tried.

“I'm not declining,” my mother said. She inspected her manicure.

“Are you in pain?” The hospice lady asked.

“No,” my mother said. She sucked in her cheeks and looked more gaunt.

“Because if you're in pain we can help you with that, Eve. We're here to help you. Whatever you need. As you know, you've been automatically admitted to hospice because of your diagnosis and your lack of insurance outside Medicare and here we are to help, help, help. You might not be in pain now, but as you decline you'll be in bone-crushing pain, Eve. I mean bone-crushing.
Conscious, conscious.
At this point we'll just come and visit you from time to time. You'll meet your nurses. You'll love those little gals. Now, are you sleeping well enough, Eve?”

“Yes,” my mother said.

“About how many hours each night?”

“Five. Maybe six hours. I worry.”

I didn't pipe up. Maia had mentioned that when they were staying in the casita my mother slept two, maybe three hours a night.

“We can give you something for that,” the pink hospice lady offered.

My little mother in her giant chair. She rolled her eyes. “I would never take your medication.”

The hospice intake nurse nodded, unfazed. “Are you into alternatives?”

“Yes,” my mother monotoned. “Alternatives.”

“Well,” the pink lady smiled. “Here's the alternative, Eve. Every evening – every single evening just before sunset – you go outside and you bathe your eyes in the sun. You bathe them, do you understand? It's called sun gazing. Have you heard of it, dear? It's ancient. You
gaze
at the sun. Every evening, Eve. Do you hear me? Every single evening. That will cure your insomnia and, well, you never know what else it might cure.” The pink
hospice lady with her fuzzy hair giggled. “Those ancient Egyptians knew a thing or two about immortality.”

When the hospice lady finally stood up and placed her hands on her pink hips and said, “We
are
here to ferry you to the other side, my beautiful little sun-gazing Eve,” and smiled wide and side-stepped out the door and let it close behind her, my mother looked at me with a mixture of terror and trying-not-to-laugh and she said, “Ariel, you are
not
allowed to parody this.”

12.

Curses

OUR CANDLE SHOP HAD BEEN OPEN A MONTH THE DAY
a white girl with dreadlocks ducked in. “Are you Ariel?”

“I am.”

She smiled, already pleased with herself. One of her front teeth was broken in half. “Well, well,” she said. “I just thought you should know. Your girlfriend, Sol, is leaving notes for Bipa at the mime school.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know the master mime? Bipa?”

“Sure,” I shrugged like I couldn't care. “I know who she is. I didn't realize she still lived in Santa Fe.”

“Yeah,” the dread girl said brightly. “Bipa moved back here last fall. She lives in that earthship at the edge of town.” She looked around at all the candles like she'd just noticed them. “Cute shop. Well, good luck.”

Santa Fe suddenly felt small like that, everyone hungry for some fresh morsel of gossip or betrayal.

“Thanks?”

But the dread girl was already gone.

Bipa.

Amy Winehouse sang from the iPod behind me.

I picked up the phone, called the café across the street and ordered a soymilk latte and a pile of enchiladas without cheese. Maybe I just needed some calories and some caffeine.

“Red or green chile?” the barista on the phone wanted to know.

“Christmas.”

“You got it, honey.”

I recognized her voice. The girl with the neck tattoos. But it was one of the waiters who stepped into the shop ten minutes later with my plate of enchiladas. “I could use your help,” he whispered as he set the plate on the counter. “My girlfriend. She may be cursed.” He had smooth skin and a boyish smile.

I hated to think his girlfriend was cursed. Hated to have him believing that. “Why do you think that, Amador?”

He looked over his shoulders, made sure we were alone. “I can't get her pregnant,” he confessed. “She really wants to get pregnant. Do you have a candle for that?”

I pointed him to the hummingbird candles. “Light that pink one. She could also try acupuncture.”

Days at the shop were like that. Just waiting to see who'd come in next and what they might want or need.

THE DOOR OPENED.
A woman with gray hair walked in carrying a cardboard box, set it on the counter in front of me. “Will you sell these candles I made?” She took a seven-day candle from her box. Onto the glass holder, she'd glued an interesting color Xerox collage of an old witch in front of her house on chicken feet. “Are you acquainted with Baba Yaga?” the woman asked. She had a little bit of a mustache.

“Sure,” I said. “The old hag who flies around in her mortar kidnapping children?”

The woman with the mustache frowned. “Dear goddess, Baba Yaga is much more than
that.
She helps people on their quests. She inhabits the worlds of both life and death. She offers guidance to lost young souls. Think of the old Russian story
Vasilisa the Wise.
Of course Baba Yaga requires that Vasilisa works for her, serves the irrational, sorts the poppy seeds from the dirt, prepare her feasts – but Vasilisa completed her tasks without
asking too many questions, without asking the wrong questions, and she was rewarded with light and wisdom. Vasilisa got a better life.

“All right,” I said. “I'll take a dozen.”

“You won't be disappointed,” the woman promised as I forked over twenty four bucks.

THE DOOR OPENED
again. My landlord. He wanted the rent.

No problem.

So I was sitting there eating my enchiladas with Christmas and writing the check to my landlord when my mother threw open the French doors.

When my landlord looked up at her in intricately embroidered Mexican cottons, his mouth kind of fell open.

“Ariel? As loath as I am to admit it,” my mother announced. “I may owe you an apology.”

I couldn't recall my mother ever apologizing to anyone for anything. But who knew? Maybe my mother was experiencing some late-life transformation. “How do you figure?” I asked.

My landlord stared at her. Here was my mother, the very last modernist turned frail old woman.

She looked into him.

His hair was white, too. He wore a bolo tie. “Is that you, Eve?”

She cocked her head to the side. “Are you?”

He nodded slowly. “Far, far out.”

I pushed the rent check toward him, closer to the edge of the counter, wanted him to take it.

One of my creative writing teachers used to say that when an object passes between two people in a story, you should slow the narrative down because it's more than an object passing between them, it's energy.

But before I could slow down the narrative, my landlord pocketed that check and scurried out of my shop like some so-busted teenager.

My mother bowed her head and whispered, “That man dropped a lot of acid with your father in the sixties.”

I nodded. “I've heard.”

My mother looked disoriented for a moment, then refocused. “I'm too tired to stand, Ariel. Don't you have a chair?”

I pointed her to the too-big Mexican equipale in the corner and she collapsed into it. “Nobody knows how sick I am,” she sighed. She shook her head, then started to cry. “Nobody knows how scared I am, Ariel. All I'm asking is that you do what you said you'd do.” She buried her face in her small manicured hands, then straightened her back, seemed to compose herself. She stood up, stepped to the glass counter and leaned across it toward me. “Tiniest, I'm only asking that you come and live with me and help me even the
slightest
bit. I don't ask very much, do I? I have stage four cancer. I'll be dead in a few months. I don't want to be any trouble, Ariel. I've spoken to a Jungian analyst about all of this and he tells me you're angry about your childhood and that's why you're abandoning me and, Ariel, I'm sorry about that. I would take that on if I had the strength. But your need for revenge is more than I can handle right now. Please just let that go and help me?”

My heart went out to her. It always did. But I didn't know what to say. Maybe it would be a good time to explain my point of view? Lyle Lovett was singing on the player behind me and my mother seemed authentic in her pleading rant. I stood up straight. It seemed important to have good posture when trying to confront my dying mother. “I sold my house,” I started. “I packed up my family. I came here. When I was en route, you emailed me not to come. But, see, I'd already sold my house. When we got here, the duplex we'd bought together wasn't a duplex anymore. And it wasn't inhabitable. I couldn't even park my trailer outside because you didn't get a building permit. I have to say – I'm having the hardest time seeing all of this as my abandonment of you.”

I swallowed hard.

“God.” My mother flung her head toward the counter like she was really going to bash her forehead into the glass, but she stopped just short, straightened back up, looked me in the eye. She had dark eyeliner tattooed on. “Ariel,” she said gravely. “I cannot
believe
you're 40 years old and you're going to make this about you. Fine. I'll give you the name of the analyst. I'll stop seeing him myself. Will that make you happy? Get some much-needed analysis? That's fine. Just move in. We'll have a functional kitchen at some point. In the meantime there's a perfectly good camping stove in the backyard. One of the bathrooms is now enterable. You know how loathe I am to ask you for anything, but pitifully, Tiniest, you're all I have.” She took a piece of paper out of her purse, unfolded it and placed it on the counter next to the evil eye beads. It was a Xeroxed picture of a generic female body and it had red dots of various sizes drawn on it; a doctor's name in the corner. She pushed it across the counter. The moment when I'm supposed to slow the narrative down. “These are the tumors,” my mother said. “These are the lung tumors we already knew about.” She pointed to the red dots around the Xeroxed figure's lungs. She pointed to the red dots in the figure's liver. “But it's metastasized to the liver, and,” she pointed to the figure's head. “The brain.” She looked at me now, placed her finger on her left eyebrow. “I have a brain tumor. I can feel it from the outside. Touch it?”

I didn't touch it.

“Ariel, as hard as this is for me to say, I would love to be allowed to share my last dying months with Maxito. If you insist on bringing that control freak, Sol, well, fine. It's just a couple of months. This is
all
I'm asking of you.”

She shook her head when I didn't answer. “Why don't the three of you just come over to the house tonight. We'll watch
Dark Passage
, the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall film.”

“All right,” I agreed. “Sure.”

But I already knew we were sunk for more than movie night.

13.

Lung Cancer Noir

TWO MONTHS SHY OF THE DEATH DATE MY MOTHER HAD
written on her calendar in red pen, Sol and I sublet our studio apartment to an art student for the school year. We'd keep the shop space downstairs.

“Your situation is interesting,” the art student said as he signed the lease agreement. “If there's a gay kid in the family, it's always the gay kid who has to take care of the sick parent. I always thought that was because the gay kid wouldn't have any children of their own. But that's obviously not true for you.”