My Body(31)

At Barbara’s urging, we went down to see my mother. “If it will bring you some kind of peace, why not?” she said. I drove fast. When we got there, my mother did not get off the white couch. The grandfather clock chimed on the wall, and the various greens from the front lawn shape-shifted outside. Her skin felt soft and delicate when I brushed my cheek against hers. I could tell she wasn’t happy that I hadn’t come on my own. She told us that she wanted to stay inside, out of the sun, so we kept the doors closed. I sat on my mother’s chair in the living room and let my feet turn cold against the white tile.

Barbara led the conversation. She asked about my mother’s treatment before talking about her own life and family. My mother wore out quickly. “The chemo,” she said. “Girls, I’m just so tired.” Her eyes grew heavy, her jaw slack. We left as she fell asleep. I called S on the ride home, but I had no words.

That night, Barbara announced that we would watch a show, one I would really like, she promised. She wrapped a blanket around me, made hot tea, and put my feet in her lap. My face was salty and puffy and red. Barbara picked an episode. Five men appeared on the TV screen: fixers come to repair another man’s house and his life, too. My chest was hot from the tea. The man’s wife had just died, he told the camera. We both felt it immediately: a heavy and determined sadness, the kind that was floating over my parents’ house like a giant bubble. It was all over this man’s house, too. Barbara looked at me: Shit.

I laughed and I couldn’t stop.



* * *



While in the hospital for sixteen days, my mother only craves baked potatoes with “the works,” she tells me. I find myself with S at a fancy restaurant, ordering a single baked potato. He laughs at me. “Good order,” he says, kissing my cheek. I’m devouring this potato when my phone lights up, a message from my father: a drawing. My mother is bald in this portrait, the top of her head drawn with a single confident mark. It is perfect, this crescent.

His sketches are brutally rendered. Without warning, they arrive on my phone at all hours of the day for over a month. In one my mother is sleeping, her head resting against a pillow, her cheeks bloated and her eyes two dark holes. She looks dead. I want to tell him to stop sending me these painful portraits, that I can’t handle them, but I don’t. Where will they go if I’m not there to receive them?

My father doesn’t communicate much with me beyond his drawings and short staccato texts. They are cryptic, and punctuated in a way that makes them feel like knife jabs. I am his diary. He counts the days of what he calls “house arrest.” “Day 17,” he texts me. “Day 20.”

One morning, I try to fall back to sleep after one of these texts arrives, but bright sunlight is streaming through my bedroom window. I think of the house I grew up in, the Georgian windows and the exposed golden-brown beams. The tiny treasures in every corner.

Framed pictures. Wood ceilings. White walls. Bookshelves. No space. Cool shadows. An image arises: I am in the living room, on the white couch, looking out at the neon-green lawn. A thick tube descends through a pane of the window, attaching itself to the side of my neck like an artery. This is my mother’s love for me, I realize.

When my mother checks out of the hospital, I text her a link to a poem by Marge Piercy, “My Mother’s Body.” “Most important,” I write, knowing that she might not feel able to read the whole poem, “is this.”

I carry you in me like an embryo

As once you carried me.



I copy lines from a different stanza into the notes on my phone, though—one I cannot stop thinking about but will never share with her:

What is it we turn from, what is it we fear?

Did I truly think you could put me back inside?

Did I think I would fall into you as into a molten

furnace and be recast, that I would become you?



The day after Barbara leaves, I wake up surrounded by white light and march purposefully up the stairs to the bathroom with the inherited tile. I pull back the shower curtain. Barbara has left eucalyptus leaves hanging from the shower head. I inhale deeply and run the water.

I am determined to take care of myself. I am determined to make this new house my own.

The tub isn’t deep enough for fully submerging myself, but my body fits, cocooned in warm water, if I lie in just the right position: on my back, with knees bent to one side. My skin is slick and hot. I look up to where light creeps through a strip of window at the very top of the shower. This isn’t the tile of my choosing, I think. But that’s okay for now.





Transactions





IN 2014 MY manager at the time, Evan, informed me that the billionaire financier behind Wolf of Wall Street was offering to pay me $25,000 to go to the Super Bowl with him. To be paid $25,000 to show up to an event that people saved money to afford was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. I’d only just started to see numbers like that get thrown around, and only for jobs that required actual time and effort on my part: days of twelve-hour shoots with few breaks. I hadn’t done more than a few paid appearances, and those all had talking points and a product to sell. This was different. He explained that this person, Jho Low, “just liked to have famous men and women around” and there would be other celebrities going, too. “Everybody who is anybody is doing these kinds of deals with him,” he assured me. “He’s just one of those insanely rich guys from Asia.” Jho Low’s fortune came from family money, Evan said. Easy money was a new concept, and it felt almost badass to be taking money from someone who had so much of it in return for so little.