Transcendent Kingdom(22)

Katherine finally arrived. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, slipping into the seat across from me. “The Caltrain just decided to stop running for some reason.”

Even in that haggard, breathless state, she looked beautiful. Long black hair piled messily on the top of her head, those braces-straight teeth—a telltale sign of someone who’d grown up with money and attention. They gleamed brilliant every time she smiled. I glanced at her stomach. Nothing. “That’s okay,” I said, and then I clammed up. I had invited Katherine on the pretense that I wanted to talk about our work. There were so few women in our field, and though it was important to have role models and mentors, I had done very little to connect with the other women in my department. I was the typical graduate student, clambering for the attentions of the hotshot male scientists, the ones who had discovered this thing, won that award. I wanted my name spoken in the same breath as theirs, my work written about in the same journals. Katherine, brilliant though she was, liked to wear a sweatshirt with the word STEMINIST splashed across the front. Every year, she manned a booth at the undergraduate career fair for women considering a career in science. When she’d asked me, my first week at Stanford, if I wanted to join the Women in STEM group she led, I’d said no without a second thought. I’d had a professor in college laugh when I asked if he’d be my advisor the year I declared my major. True, I had never taken a class with him, and true, he was the preeminent microbiologist on campus, but still, in that split second of laughter before he caught himself and said, “Why sure, dear,” I’d wanted nothing more than to turn into dust, to sink into the ground and disappear forever. I didn’t want to be thought of as a woman in science, a black woman in science. I wanted to be thought of as a scientist, full stop, and it mystified me that Katherine, whose work was published in the best journals, was content to draw attention to the fact of her womanhood. Even this question of a baby, of the little ovulation “o’s” her husband had snuck into his calendar just at the moment when Katherine’s career was set to take off, was itself a reminder of the millstone of womanhood we wore around our necks.

    I didn’t want to wear mine, and I wasn’t really interested in talking to Katherine about the research that she was doing. What I wanted to talk about was my mother, her sleepy breath hum and weight loss, her vacant eyes, her sloping back. My dinnertime visits had done nothing to draw her out. After three days, I’d given up that tack and tried a different one. I called Pastor John and held the phone to my mother’s ear while he prayed.

“Father God, we ask that you rouse this woman from her slumber,” he said. “Jesus, we pray that you lift her spirits. Remind her that all of her crosses belong to you.”

    He kept going like this for some time, and my hand started to shake as I held the phone. I might as well have been casting spells over her for all the good this was doing. After he had finished, I hung up and slumped down onto the edge of the bed, sunk my head into my hands. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. Behind me, my mother’s breath continued its hum. The sound reminded me of the video of the black mamba I’d watched when I was a child, even though that snake hadn’t made a sound. The hum was the only lively thing about my mother, and so I’d come to be grateful for it, whatever it was.

What was the ethical thing to do? Was it right of me to let her stay in that bed courting death, practicing for it, even? I turned this question over in my head every day, playing out the possible scenarios, the things I could do, should do. I knew the statutes for involuntary commitment in California, and my mother didn’t meet those burdens. She wasn’t threatening to hurt herself or anyone else. She wasn’t hearing voices or having visions. She was eating, though only sporadically and only when she knew I wouldn’t be home to see her do it. It had only been a week, but the days dragged on, weighed on me. She told me she was “tired” and that she needed “rest.” I’d heard that before, but every time I thought of getting someone to intervene I thought of the last time and my courage failed me. The last time, when she’d gotten out of the hospital after her commitment, she’d looked at me and said, “Never again,” and I knew what she meant.

I should have said all of this to Katherine. She was a great doctor, an empathetic person, but when I tried to broach the topic of my mother, my words turned to ashes in my mouth.

“Are you all right, Gifty?” Katherine asked.

She was giving me what must have been her psychiatrist’s stare, intense and questioning. I couldn’t hold her gaze.

    “Yeah, I’m just a little stressed. I want to get this paper submitted before the end of the quarter, but I can’t seem to make myself work on it these days,” I said. I stared out at the palm trees as a quick wind blew through their branches, causing the fronds to sway.

Katherine nodded at me, but her gaze didn’t change. “Okay,” she said softly. “I hope you’re taking good care of yourself.”

I nodded, but I didn’t even know what it would mean to take good care of myself, what that would look like. The only thing I was managing to take care of was my mice, and even they had had their bloody scuffle just weeks before. Me, my mother, my mice—we were all a little scuffed up, but trying in whatever ways we knew how. I thought about the winter day my freshman year at Harvard when I’d finally walked into counseling and mental health services to ask for a SAD lamp.