Homeland Elegies(67)
In the family room, she was lying propped up on the couch. Father sat beside her; he was feeding her from a bowl. “My hooonnneeeyy,” she slurred sweetly. Her smile was weak, but the brightness in her eyes—above the mass of mostly unmoving gray flesh on her face—matched the delight in her voice.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Yoguuu, yoguuu,” she cooed over Father’s extended spoon.
“You having some yogurt? Is it good?”
“Gooo…Gooo…”
“Can you put her music on?” Father asked, gesturing at the portable CD player on the fireplace mantel. He inserted another spoonful of yogurt into her mouth and watched sternly as I pulled the mitten from my hand to press Play on the console with my index-finger knuckle. The buoyant notes of a polka waltz began, the cheery, syncopated beat filling the room with anodyne joy. Mother discovered the music in the ’80s on local radio stations that played it late in the afternoons and early on the weekends. As she got older, polka became a bona fide obsession. While she was still well enough, packages from Amazon filled with CDs of her latest obscure discoveries would arrive weekly. She abhorred what passed for mainstream in the form, the slick, soulless schlock of Jimmy Sturr, say, and her command of the various schools was truly remarkable. She could untangle the advent of trumpets into the Cleveland-based Slovenian style from the Wisconsin-based strains that leaned Czech in their embrace of a smaller brass sound. Particularly enamored of Bavarian polka, she would call the local DJs to champion tiny bands from backwater towns like Kiel and New Holstein, where German was still a language spoken in the streets. Father never got her love of this music, but I thought I did. It was fun, simple, orderly; it pointed back to an Old World, not her own but old and native all the same, a homespun Wisconsin reminder she was not the only one who’d come here from somewhere else, not the only one still working to keep alive the memory of another place.
Father patted at her lips with a washcloth and stood up. “I luuu youuu, I luuu youuuu,” she burbled.
“I love you, too, Ammi. I love you so much.”
She tilted her face and closed her eyes, offering her barely puckered lips. I hesitated. Of course I wanted to kiss her, and yes, she was dying already, and no doubt it was unlikelier than unlikely she might get sick from the simple peck she wanted, but all the same, even the remotest possibility of giving your dying mother syphilis is an occasion for legitimate pause. I leaned in and felt the tip of her mouth—still wet from feeding—against my cheek. I turned and kissed hers, too. Contact made, she relaxed back into the cushions and closed her eyes.
I looked up and saw Father glaring at me from the kitchen.
“Outside,” he said curtly. Back in the garage, I told him the attending suspected syphilis; she’d given me the intramuscular dose of antibiotics; test results would take three days; until then, I should lay low. “And don’t kiss your mother,” he added with a grunt as he marched back into the house.
It was then that a discomfort I’d been feeling between my legs for some time finally drew my notice. I had a hard-on, and not of the usual wayward form: mostly firm, somewhat not, amenable to digital adjustment, a cupful of blood lost en route back to the heart. No. This was as fully distended an erection as I could recall, but with not a whit of pleasure or sexual sensation to it. No throbbing need, no promise willed or sought—just a rigid ache.
I went back into the family room and slipped quietly into the armchair by my dozing mother’s side. I watched and listened, her quiet snore belying the evident strain of her breath, the light crease on her forehead, a signal, I thought, of her reabsorption into the narrow black sack of her pain. The image was Tolstoy’s from the late tale about the unremarkable death of a vain government bureaucrat. The Death of Ivan Ilyich was among my mother’s favorite books. She’d given it to me when I was in high school, and I’d read it many times since. As she died, I’d taken it up again, a way to feel closer to her, no doubt, but also to populate her mute suffering with speakable meanings. Reading by her side, I would look up from the pages and wonder if the glorious end of Tolstoy’s tale—when death envelops Ilyich with its simple light—was in sight for her yet. I wondered if her pity had yet turned from her own predicament and to us, still caught up in all the self-deception of the living. On his deathbed, Ilyich came to regret all the time he’d wasted on appearances, on needing to seem worthwhile in the eyes of others. I knew she had other regrets of her own. I knew she felt her life had passed her by. I’d always suspected that she regretted her marriage to my father, though I didn’t yet know about her feelings for Latif. She would sometimes say her cancer kept coming back because it was trying to tell her something. It wasn’t until she died and I read her diaries that I had any idea what she thought the message might have been.
When the tumor was initially discovered, it was already fully interlaced with her spine; no surgery could be performed to remove it. She’d been through chemotherapy three times in thirty years and was resolved not to put herself through that again—which meant she was reconciled to dying of the illness this time around. Sure enough, without the aggressive chemical treatment, her tumor slowly spread into every part of her. By now, as she neared the very end, if the timing of her successive doses of Vicodin or Demerol or oxycodone or morphine—or whatever combination my father chose to give her—were not lined up exactly right, the resulting pain would rage through her entire body. The veins in her neck bulged, her fingers and toes crimped, her face pushed steadily farther and farther into the couch’s cushions, the usual, steady moans now replaced by something that looked like it required so much more from her than she could possibly have to give. Mostly, though, she slept, her pain bearable through a pill-induced haze.