The Museum of Modern Love(52)
They returned her mother to her in towels. Alice had dried the skin between her mother’s toes. She clipped her mother’s toenails and blow-dried her hair. Later, when her mother was again in her chair by the window, wearing a fresh kimono in patterned green silk over white cotton pyjamas, Alice took out nail polish and with careful strokes painted her mother’s fingernails and toenails a sparkling turquoise blue.
She shifted and the artist on the wall gently released Alice from her gaze.
Alice walked into a larger room. It was a performance called The Room with the Ocean View. Her mother had an ocean view now. Her room took in the dunes and the sea and the sea took in Lydia. Lydia liked to sit by the window. She had made noises, appeared in microscopic ways to be agitated if she was moved elsewhere. If Alice sat on the floor and placed her mother’s hand on her head, Lydia made tiny motions with her fingers as if she was attempting to stroke Alice’s hair. This she could only do with her right hand. She could not grip a cup or hold a pencil.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to go home?’ she had asked her mother, but there was no reply. The apartment on Columbus that had been their home for twenty years was gone. Alice had seen the new apartment only before her parents had purchased it. She had not been there since her father had moved in. He had never invited her.
Her mother was the sort of person who was greeted by the greengrocer. Who remembered the names of everyone in their building, including most of the maids and nannies that came and went from various apartments. When they ate at Cafe con Leche, the staff gathered around them and made a fuss, knowing Lydia would order the black bean soup, Levin the roast pork and she, Alice, would order the chicharrón de pollo, which as a child she had loved to say almost as much as to eat.
Home was a different notion now. Home was her clothes and books, the little window by her desk looking down onto a rooftop garden where no one ever sat. There were rituals of Cointreau late on Saturday nights after their weekly gig and huevos rancheros on Sundays. Home was her cello and her bass guitar. Home was being able to rehearse with her fellow band members in the tiny studio below street level on Seventh. Home was the squealing plumbing when the shower ran, and the creak in the floorboards by the fridge.
In The House with the Ocean View, Marina Abramovi? had created a home comprising three white rooms attached to the walls of the gallery, accessible only by three ladders with knives for steps. From the speakers Abramovi?’s voice narrated every step and action she had taken over the twelve days she lived up there. ‘I take a deep breath and my chest rises. Then it falls. I remain sitting still. My feet are flat on the floor and spaced hip-width apart. My back is straight against the chair. My head does not move. Only my eyes blink. The rest of my body is motionless.’
Alice could have made a similar account of her mother’s days. She suspected her mother was on a long journey away from the grace of ordinary. She might suffer another stroke. She might die somewhere while her mind was far away. Alice did not know how she would live without her.
Lydia was on the dialysis machine each week. They had completed another round of plasma exchange. To look at her, she appeared as fragile as mist. There was a calm about her that may have been life leaving, or life returning, Alice could not tell.
Yesterday, Alice had laid a brand new Moleskine notebook beside her mother’s chair and a 4B pencil that she knew her mother favoured. Her mother had shown no sign of recognition or acknowledgement when Alice arrived. Only her hand on the top of Alice’s head moving ever so gently seemed to indicate that, somewhere inside, she remembered.
When she was a child, Alice’s scrapbooks had been full of clippings from brochures of taps and door handles, wall and floor claddings, architectural magazines, houses lit for the evening, foodless kitchens, bathrooms without toys, beds without evidence of sleep. Every birthday her mother constructed from cardboard and foam core a new doll’s house according to Alice’s latest ideas—a tree house, a stable, a house five storeys tall, a lighthouse. She had spent a great deal of time watching her mother go from one hundred miles an hour to a complete stop. There was fast Lydia and slow Lydia. Slow Lydia slept a great deal of the time. Slow Lydia lay in bed and watched movies and played cards with Alice. Slow Lydia spent days in hospital. Slow Lydia was there in bed when Alice arrived home from school. When Alice had realised it was only medical knowledge that could save her mother, she had set her sights on becoming a doctor of haematology.
In the quiet room behind the dunes of Long Island, Alice had unlocked the clips on her cello case. She moved through the Suites for Solo Cello 1?6 and her mother remained entirely silent, fixed by the sea.
DANICA A BRAMOVI? WANDERED THROUGH THE retrospective, seeing photos of her daughter’s life that she knew nothing of. Marina had made her life everywhere but Yugoslavia. Even during Milosevic, she never came home. She let herself be slapped by that German, let herself be naked with him, traipsed after him across Europe showing her naked body to the whole world. But it hadn’t brought her happiness. Love was a wasteland. That’s the way it went, Danica knew. ‘You want to be a strong woman?’ she asked the visitors who wandered by, oblivious to her. ‘Then you will never find a man who treats you as an equal. You have to play the little games. Oh, giggling, cooking, making them think they have such a huge cock every time they put it near you. The truth is that men are the empty ones. And women are meant to fill them up. I could count on a few fingers the men I ever truly admired. Give them long enough and men are always disappointing.’