The End of Eve (4 page)

In walks a sixty-something woman with long, stringy hair and not a stitch of makeup. She looked like the Catholic Worker types my stepdad used to hang out with. Beige plaid pants. Wrinkled white coat over a beige shirt. She sat down on a chair with little wheels on it, scooted in too close to us. I thought to tell her to please move back, that I didn't know where she was from, but here on the West Coast of the United States we allowed for a certain amount of personal space. I glanced at my mother, but she didn't seem uncomfortable, so I kept quiet. Doctor Benoit could sit close if she wanted to.

The last doctor, the pulmonologist, the one with the red shoes, paged through my mother's chart and showed us scans on computer screens. But this doctor had no paperwork, no images. She just sat in front of us, sat too close. It occurred to me that I might be dreaming all this. I thought,
I'll scream and if a sound comes out I'll know this is happening.
But I didn't open my mouth.

“The kind of cancer you have is called adenocarcinoma,” the oncologist said. She looked at my mom, then at me. “It's the most common type of lung cancer.”

She asked my mother questions.

Yes and no.

More questions.

“I smoked one cigarette a day for about a year when I was twenty,” my mother said.

“I never lived with anyone who smoked,” my mother said.

“I have a cough, but it's nothing,” my mother said.

“It's because I moved into a new apartment and I didn't have a comforter for the first few nights,” my mother said.

“I was cold, so I got a cough,” my mother said.

“I've lost a little weight,” my mother said, “but it's just because I started this vegan diet and I don't know what I can eat. I haven't found enough I can eat.”

“I'm not as active as I used to be,” my mother said, “but it's because of the new hip.”

“I feel fine,” my mother said.

The oncologist nodded. She didn't seem to have an agenda. “Do you have any questions for me?”

My mother held her hand out to inspect her manicure, didn't look up. “Yes,” she said. “How long will I live?”

I looked at the little sink next to me and the white cupboards above, the exam table in the corner behind the chair on wheels.

“Well,” the oncologist finally said. “That's the hardest question. This does seem to be a slow-growing cancer. I suspect you've had it for a couple of years.”

A COUPLE OF
years. I thought about that. It had been a couple of years since my stepdad died. Since my mother killed him or they were in on it together. I glanced at my wrist:
Behave in a way that you're going to be proud of.

Now would not be a good time to scream.

“It isn't smoking-related,” the oncologist was saying. “You're female. Both these things improve your prognosis. I don't know how long you'll live.” She looked up at the clock, like maybe my mother only had a matter of hours. “I would guess a year,” her tone stayed flat, like she was telling us a stranger's address. “A year would be my guess.” The oncologist looked at me now. “Do you have any questions, Ariel?”

Of course I had questions. A year, but what would the year look like? Would my mother be all right for a while – three or six months – and then collapse? Would she continue on this slow
energy decline we'd all been forced to endure with her – the decline that had her moving in and out of assisted living facilities where Sol and I took turns bringing organic breakfasts and Ayurvedic dinners until my mother had the inevitable late-night panic attack and decided the room was bugged and the nurses were Eastern-bloc spies and her neighbors were trying to poison her and we'd finally relent and find her someplace new? Would it be like
Terms of Endearment
? Would we have to buy a bigger house so she could come and live with us? Would it be like
Grey Gardens?
Would we all start drinking vodka for breakfast? Would it be like
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

My mother coughed. “No,” she answered for me. “Ariel doesn't have any questions.”

I didn't say anything, didn't want to make my mother cough with my questions, so I just stood up and my mother stood up and Dr. Benoit stood up and we all shook hands like we'd just made some terrible business deal.

IN THE ELEVATOR
, my mother coughed. “Ariel,” she said, “I just want you to know that if I do get sick, you won't have to take care of me.”

“I don't mind,” I told her. “I can take care of you. Or we can hire someone. Or both, you know – whatever you feel comfortable with.”

I remembered what my friend China wrote in her punk parenting zine when we were young moms. “I want to be the female Bukowski, the female Burroughs, but instead I'm just the female.” In that elevator right then, I felt like such the female – the caregiver.

My mother shook her head, looked down at her gray Ugg boots. “If I ever need a caretaker, I'll just blow my brains out.”

“Well,” I laughed. “On that cheery note.”

My mother laughed, too, but then she sucked in her cheeks. “I'm serious,” she said.

WE INCHED BACK
through the traffic to my mother's apartment. NPR was having a pledge drive. I stopped in the parking lot, but my mother didn't make a move to get out of the car. I wondered if she wanted me to come around and open the door for her – if she wanted me to walk her inside her building. Maybe I was supposed to treat her differently now that we knew she would die soon. I glanced at my wrist. “I have to go pickup Maxito,” I said.

“I know.” She nodded. “It's just. Announcement.”

I wasn't sure I could handle another announcement, but I took a good breath. “Yes?”

“I won't die on 82nd,” she said “I
refuse
to die on 82nd Avenue.”

82nd Avenue. Most of the prostitutes had been gentrified further east by now, but the street was still mostly fast food chains and bus stops. “All right,” I said. Fair enough. The apartment on 82nd was only meant to be temporary, anyway. Until she got better and packed up and headed home to southern Mexico, to her art studio and her friends there.

I couldn't picture her dying in that tiny apartment, either, but where could she die? She'd already been through half the hotels and adult foster care homes in Portland, through house-sits and retirement complexes where they played Bingo on Thursday nights and served the white bread roast beef sandwiches she was too good to eat.

“Where do you want to ... live?”

WHEN I WAS
a kid my mom always offered our guest room to our aging relatives – to my great-grandmother and then to Gammie. “Your room is ready,” she told them when their husbands died or when they hit 72 or 84.

They refused her offers, of course. “Oh, darling,” they said, “I don't want to be a burden.”

“How could they refuse?” my mother cried over our brown rice dinner. “This is the Mexican way – the generations living together.”

I thought it was a weird thing to say. I mean, we weren't Mexican. In all other circumstances my mother claimed Italian roots in southern Texas, but somehow when it came to elder-care she needed to be Mexican.

NOW SHE STARED
at me. “We can just get a big house –” she started.

I should have said no right then.

I didn't owe her anything.

“I can't die on 82nd,” she pleaded.

Her words made my heart feel small in my chest, but logic still said no.

“Think about it, Tiniest?”

She still called me by my childhood nickname, the one she coined I guess because I was the baby in the family. “Of course.” I started to put my hand on her shoulder, but she moved away from me. “We'll figure something out,” I promised.

“Okay,” she said softly.

And I watched as my mother walked away from my car in the rain, one of her legs dragging a little.

NPR still hadn't met their pledge goal for the break. I texted Sol:
My mom wants us all to get a big house together.

Sol texted right back:
No way.

But that night after we put Maxito to bed and I opened a second bottle of five-dollar red wine and Sol picked the dregs of her weed from her little wooden stash box and we listened to Lucinda Williams, she nodded to the music and said, “Okay.”

She filled her rolling paper with bits of weed. “We're going to have to take care of your mom wherever she lives, right?”

I shrugged. “Probably.” The Virgin of Guadalupe tattoo on Sol's forearm was already getting that weathered look. She'd gotten it when her own mom died a few years earlier. Her mother had been ill for at least a decade, but she was far away in the Dominican Republic so we never took care of her, never had to.

Sol rolled her little joint. “And there's pretty much no chance your mom's going to live even a year.”

“According to your Merck Manual, anyway.”

“Right? We can do anything for a year.” Sol licked her rolling paper. “So what if we get a place with her? Just not in Portland?”

I thought Portland had been good to Sol – she had good friends and a thriving veterinary practice even if she refused to charge more than fifteen dollars to set a dog's broken bone or to put a cat down – but Sol had always hated Portland. Too much rain, too many white people. We'd been here nine years, but it wasn't my home either. We were what lots of people were in Portland – displaced from where we'd come from because we were overly tattooed or queer or couldn't afford the rent where we were born. We'd come to Portland because it didn't matter. The real estate was cheap, and people read all kinds of books here.

Sol stood up and turned the stove on, lit her joint from the burner.

I knew where Sol wanted to go.

She'd lived outside Santa Fe in her 20s, always romanticized that high desert. “If I'm ever going to make a living,” she said, “it's going to be in New Mexico.”

I tried to imagine that, Sol finally making a living.

“If I'm ever really going to be a musician,” she said, “it's going to be in New Mexico.” She swayed to the music now. “I've done your thing here in Portland all these years. But you can be a writer anywhere.” She looked past me, like she could already see her new life. “Honestly, if you and I are ever going to have a sex life, it's going to be in New Mexico.” She exhaled a plume of smoke toward me. “That place is the salve to my soul.”

New Mexico.
It sounded crazy, but maybe it wasn't crazier than anything else. Maybe this was my chance to make everyone happy. My mother would get us, Sol would get New Mexico, and I'd get – well – maybe Sol was right that I could live anywhere. At least I'd get out of the rain.

Sol kissed me on the head. I always felt like a little kid when she did that, not like anybody's girlfriend. “Think about it,” she said.

But all I could think about right then was my mother placing some pawn-shop gun in her mouth and pulling the trigger.

4.

I
My Garden