Bed
By means of a small inheritance from my deceased father, I had moved from Idaho to New York—where I could afford only the most modest of lodgings—for no reason other than the great purposefulness I associated with its inhabitants, which I hoped might prove contagious. Years passed in which this did not prove to be the case. Instead, my suffering, deriving in the main from the feeling that my life was of no value to anyone else, much less to myself, and from my having no idea by what means I might make this life worthwhile, had increased by contrast with my new neighbors, who brushed past me with an urgency that underscored my own lack of destination and carried themselves with a self-importance that accentuated my own insignificance.
That things were hard for me I think is fair to say, though certainly for others they were harder. Unfortunately, rather than lessening my burden, thoughts of those in less privileged circumstances and centuries added to its weight, for I envied those beset by greater struggles than my own. Not only was I doing nothing of consequence, I was enduring nothing of consequence through which I might prove myself or be exempted from proving myself. Neither did my youth—I was in my twenties—ease my suffering. Rather, my youth exacerbated it; I was so many years away from the end, from even the middle, of a race which—had I had a choice in the matter—I would never have chosen to run.
How insufferable I sound to myself, making so much of such minor complaints! I would not have wanted to be my own friend. But then, I had no friends.
Nor did I have any diversions. My simmering feelings of inconsequentiality were brought to a boil by anyone I saw of great power or talent or beauty, all qualities which I myself had in no measure; consequently, I did not go out much. What evening’s entertainment would not cause me to bemoan the instruments I was not playing, the dances I was not dancing, the arias I was not singing? It goes without saying, or would, were I not to say it, that I did not go to museums. Even such things as reading and watching movies pained me, especially if the book or the film had any merit, for I saw an implicit criticism of myself in it: the book I had not written, the movie I had not made. Nor could I enjoy a glass of wine! Even the sight of a bottle aggrieved me, for I thought I could have been happy as a vintner, spending my life under the Mediterranean sun, cupping smooth grapes, pregnant with juices, in my calloused hands! But here I was in Queens, knowing nothing of wine, having no vines.
I did attempt to take long walks, which I prized for their power to interrupt-- alas, not to obliterate—the train of my fruitless ruminations, in the neighborhood where I lived four blocks from the last stop of the subway line. But even these walks would often be cut short by, for example, the sight of a postal truck. What agony the sight of the postman caused me! The great directedness of his walk on his way to deliver parcels, that they might be happily received! Seeing him, I was sure that I had missed my calling. Or I might glimpse a hearse and fall into a depression, contrasting myself unfavorably with its driver, who’d found for himself a job of such dignified importance. The longings I felt were too various and conflicting to lead me toward any one course; how could I ever choose between being a postal worker or a hearse driver? One did not seem to me better than the other, or more possible than the other.
I lived in an apartment on the second story of an unremarkable house in Astoria which belonged to an old couple. It was thanks to the translatory efforts of their son that I had rented the place, as the woman spoke only Greek (at least I assumed it was Greek, based on the ancient-sounding names appended to the mailbox we shared—the extent of our camaraderie—and the neighborhood, which was replete with Greek restaurants and Greek churches), and the man, who was either pitiably ailing or else staggeringly impolite (how could I be sure? I, who was sure of so little?), communicated only by grunting. In my kitchen, where mice ran rings around the stovetop burners, I could hear the Greek couple argue, and coveted their relationship, by virtue of which they each had been able to commit their days to the necessity of conjuring a certain degree of misery in the other.
I spent most of my time in my bedroom, lying on my mattress on the floor, staring up at the popcorn ceiling, listening to mice squeaking as they died on glue traps in my closet. Sometimes, I looked out the window, as if waiting for something. For I felt that I was: waiting for something. An occasion to which I might be summoned and rise. A purpose to which to bind my considerable energies. A challenge by which the world might discover me, and I might discover myself. But upon looking out my window, I would see only the untended backyard garden, inaccessible to me, with a cracking, dry birdbath and a tree that looked perpetually to be dying. I could not contemplate that garden for long; I saw how out of that shabby patch one might eke out the beginning of a life that was worth living. Many times, I thought about getting a houseplant of some kind, and many times, I almost got one.
At one point, the point, the one at which things begin, insofar as anything can begin, my mother came to visit me from Pocatello. Perhaps it was my birthday, or hers, or some holiday or other. Or perhaps she had simply heard in my voice the waning of the hopefulness with which I had first arrived in the city a few years prior, naively sure that it would see something in me—notwithstanding my not knowing what that something was—and fling open its doors to me, which of course it had not done.
On the first morning of my mother’s visit, I was disinclined to rise. My mother made me a soup for lunch, and mashed potatoes and lime Jell-O for dinner, which I took in bed. Far from being disappointed with this arrangement, I think my mother, who hummed as she tended to me, her fleshy face dimpled with what seemed to be contentment, was relieved that I wasn’t making her walk all over New York, as I had on her previous visits, during which I’d been tireless, embracing the role of hostess which had been thrust upon me. I think the statues and waterfront views had been largely lost on my mother, and though she had been fond of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the perfume counter at Saks, visiting them—as we had on a summer’s day, or perhaps it had been an inexplicably hot winter’s day—had left her exhausted. She was not a small woman, my mother, and that she and her health were continuing to part ways was evident by the way her sizeable chest had heaved as she surmounted the steps to my apartment upon her arrival.
The second day of my mother’s visit I desired to get out of bed no more than I had the previous day. “You’ve been working so hard!” said my mother, and despite the obvious refutability of her assessment, I stayed in bed, as I did every day after that, and she stayed with me. This happened without discussion of any sort. My mother and I had, some years ago, divined that we got along best if we refrained from making comments on anything of consequence. I never said, “I will not be getting out of bed.” I don’t think I even thought that with any degree of clarity; but then, I thought nothing with any degree of clarity.
Taking to bed under my mother’s observant eye was like sinking into a warm bath. It seemed the most natural and necessary thing I had ever done, whereas everything I had done up to that point seemed unnatural and unnecessary. I did not have a plan as to how this new arrangement might work, as I did not have a plan for most things. And yet, very quickly, a pattern to our days developed. In the mornings, there were difficulties of hygiene to address, the bed being in one room, and the toilet and shower being in quite another. But my mother saw to me, as mothers will. She emptied the bedpan she had procured and washed it. And how she washed me! She kept me clean as the day I was born. She washed my hair more often than I’d ever bothered to myself; I leaned over the edge of the bed, my hair dripping into a red plastic bucket as my mother poured water over me from a kettle. In the afternoons, she cleaned and cooked. Weekly, she did laundry and changed the sheets, which required me to roll to one side of the bed and then to the other. It was no great onus for me to roll in this manner; in fact, I valued the opportunity: once, alarmingly early into our new mode of life, my mother found a bedsore on my right hip when she was giving me a sponge bath (how relieved I was to have identified the source of the pain, which I’d feared had a deeper root!). An enterprising woman, she clipped away the dead skin with a nail clipper, filled it with powdered sugar, and covered it with gauze. (The sore lasted for months and left me with a scar.) Henceforward, I made sure to roll forward and hence, and to do exercises of my own devising which did not require me to rise or even to sit. I was diligent about changing position every few waking hours, even if I did not feel like it.
Every so often, my mother ran errands. (If memory serves, and so often it doesn’t, an aunt by the unfortunate name of Mamie was living in my parents’ house. Mamie took care of certain financial matters, and forwarded checks to my mother. This was evidently enough to pay rent and for the sundries we needed.) I did not discourage my mother from leaving; her outings made her homecomings sweeter, and I was able to appreciate her beauty anew (for beautiful she was, despite her plumpness, or because of it, like a peony!) upon her return and, as she embraced me, the fragrance of the world upon her, mixed with her own warm and earthy scent. She often walked over to 31st, where there was, near the subway, a “department store” that sold things like toilet seats and trash cans, slippers and shower caps, everything covered with a fine layer of dust. (That was where she’d gotten the bedpan and red bucket, on one of her first days in town.) There was a grocery store and a fruit market—a stand, really, half inside, half out—where my mother bought apples and raspberries, the occasional peach. I remember the fruit girl, a young woman, about my age. I believe she had cerebral palsy: a jagged walk, a curved hand. She fretted over the careful arrangement of her fruit and was exacting about the change counted, and everyone was patient with her and tipped her generously. How sorry I am, and how much I loathe myself, for wanting her disability, one which struck me as being just severe enough to excuse her from any hefty aspirations and entitle her to widespread kindness. How I wanted her life: the shelter of her striped awning, the smell of fruit, the knowing, at the end of the day, that you were doing your part to prevent scurvy.
In the evenings, after simple, delicious dinners that tasted of my childhood, my mother would sit with me; or, more precisely, she would sit, and I would rest my head in her copious lap, to allow her to stroke my hair back from my temples. She did this with a gentle circling motion, while singing to me “You Are My Sunshine” or the lullaby about the diamond ring.
I thought the songs she sang me might plague me, the way most songs did, with regret for not having composed them. But, to my surprise, I found them, coupled with my mother’s tender hand on my brow, deeply soothing. Perhaps it was the fact that these songs were for me that relieved me, just as having a great opera dedicated to me might (or so I imagined) save me from feeling compunction for not having had some part in its composition.
From time to time, it occurred to me that it would be nice to be my mother; to have retired after many serviceable decades as a dental hygienist; to be widowed after the satisfactions of a long marriage; to have a daughter who wanted nothing more out of life than my presence; to have taken upon myself the mission of waiting on this daughter hand and foot, day after day. Yet, I was not envious. In fact, my familiar dissatisfaction with my lot had left me. I had stumbled into the great purpose of giving my mother a purpose, while securing for myself the fond attention that I had been too long without.
Amidst the sounds of my mother’s songs and the kettle whistling and the jangle of silverware in the kitchen drawer, I experienced a relaxation like none I had ever known, and spent my days drifting in and out of sleep. Because of my frequent naps, I was often awake later than my mother at night. I did not want to disturb her, so I did not move, not even if part of me was stuck to her by sweat, as it often was, despite our intervening nightgowns. I would hold very still and listen for the sounds of mice, which I found I no longer heard. Perhaps my mother’s housekeeping had banished them, or perhaps her presence kept them away, like a cat’s. Sometimes, the night was so still, or my sensitivity so acute, that I thought I could feel far beneath me the spinning of the world, though that could have been the subway.
Often, I simply watched my mother’s soft face on the pillow next to mine as she slept and listened to her breathe and fart her purring, dusky farts, and did not think there was a way in which my happiness could have been more complete. I had always imagined the soul to be like a white worm, curled up. Hold it in your hands, sing to it, breathe hot breath on it, jiggle it, wait, and it would open. Slowly, over these years—for years they were!— in which I was fed and held and warm and happy, I felt like my soul was unfurling. It hurt a little, like stretching out a cold, curled-up hand. I think that was my soul, but I suppose the effect could have been gastrointestinal.
Despite her near-continual presence, I never grew irritated with my mother. I loved her for accepting things as they were, the way an animal would. For accepting even the qualities in myself other mothers would have considered defects. My mother never told me I should get up or go make something of myself. She was a mother who had, since my childhood, praised the genius of my smallest efforts, something she still did. (How helpfully I rolled from side to side, when she changed the sheets! how inventive my exercises were! how neatly I ate!) She was a mother who had costumed me and pushed me onto the doorsteps of strangers—I believe this was for some holiday or other, though the stage lights on this scene from memory have gone dark—that I might receive candy from them, despite their frightening garb and their cackles and the long spears of their plastic fingernails. In all ways my mother led me to believe that I was enough just as I was, and that there was nothing in the world of which I ought to be afraid.
The paradisal life I describe began, after some years—how many it is impossible for me to say—to be shadowed by the occasional eclipses of my mother’s longer absences. Sometimes she took the subway all the way to Fifth Avenue, or to the church, where she enjoyed lighting a candle—I did not ask her for what—and to Saks, where she often bought perfume.
During her absences, I was determined to adhere to the unspoken rules that governed our days: I did not budge from bed; to do so would be a betrayal. So I would wet myself and sometimes defecate, which was unpleasant, after the initial relief, and caused me to see things in a different light. At these times, I would think myself cowardly and weak-willed for taking to bed, and see my discomfort as a kind of deserved punishment. Worse, in this black state of mind, I felt that I was not alone in my blameworthiness. It seemed to me that my mother deserved to clean me, for it was she who had prepared me so poorly for this life, she whose praise and assurances had been, on the whole, dishonest, she who had implied in infinite ways that the world would be different than it had turned out to be, that it would embrace me the way she had embraced me, that it would afford me a life of some meaning and import, with no particular effort on my part, just as she had always afforded me, without my having to win it, a place of great significance.
I was sure all mothers told pretty lies, and that most children recover from them. I don’t know why I didn’t. But she, being my mother, should have known I wouldn’t.
Thankfully, these dark thoughts would dissipate immediately upon my mother’s reappearance. How could I be unhappy when this woman who loved me was coming in with an apology for a face, hugging me and cooing and spraying her new perfume just above me, so that fragrances not unlike frankincense and ginger ale drifted down over me in a mist? When she was cleaning me up and changing the sheets again without complaint, and sleeping so soundly next to me in the bed I’d earlier befouled? Wiped and dried, with my mother once again next to me, I was sure only some minor imperfection in weight distribution prevented my levitation.
If that was the beginning, and it might as well have been, this is the middle: one winter, or one unseasonably cold summer, it was freezing in the apartment. My mother must’ve communicated this to the landlady on her way out to get groceries, probably acting “cold” out—rubbing her arms and shaking or somesuch, for the landlady came up while my mother was out. She put her hands over the radiator in my bedroom, catching sight of me belatedly and with a start. After her initial fright, which I did my best to assuage—I whimpered a bit, to give the impression, entirely accurate, of my harmlessness—she sat on my bed for a while, her hand companionably atop my left shin. She spoke to me in Greek (or so I supposed), an expression of concern on her face. She left, and it got warmer.
Over the week that followed, a few other women trundled in, chatting as they made their way upstairs. I assumed these women, who were very old, and dressed in black, and spoke Greek (again an assumption), were friends of my landlady’s, though whether or not this was true, I never discovered. They prayed around me, muttering with their eyes closed, beads dripping from their pressed palms. I imagined they knew each other from church: the way they prayed together made me think they were used to praying together.
Before long, our visitors multiplied: a dozen women began to come to our house every day. Perhaps they were the same women each day; perhaps different, but they all looked similar: stout, milky-eyed, missing teeth, riddled with wrinkles, dark sacks for dresses, black handkerchiefs around their heads. According to my mother, who could see them out the kitchen window, they gathered outside the door each morning, leaning on their canes, bearing baskets and folding chairs. Then, around eight or nine all of them would come in without knocking. We hadn’t invited them, but how could we turn them away? It was cold outside, and perhaps they had nowhere else to go. The women would squawk open their folding chairs, then sit in their row and look at me like crows on a line. My mother would make tea and cut the pastries that the women had brought (baklava, tsoureki, and almond paste cookies with cherries on top). She set them out on platters, off which the women would grab them with atrophied fingers crowned by splitting yellow nails. The women clicked their rosaries while eating and sipping their tea, crumbs on their lips. I admit that I did not like watching them chew, that the scuttling, beetle-ish sounds of their rosaries unnerved me. Often, I had the feeling that I was at my own wake.
My visitors left at night, trailing out one or two at a time with their chairs in tow. (After a couple weeks, they began to leave their chairs behind.) While I thought it would be nice to be them, to have each other, to believe that praying did something, to have found purpose in paying charitable visits to a bedridden girl, to be nearing the end of life, and so on, by in large, I realized with no small shock that I preferred being myself. None of them had a mother doting on them. Furthermore, I remembered sitting, which is how they spent most of their time, as being uncomfortable.
My mother left me in the hands of these women one day when she went to the church and the perfume counter. While she was gone, one of the women crawled toward me. Abruptly, she reached out a hand and touched my shoulder, then shrieked and jumped back, giggled. A few more made approaches, drawing back only when I threw my pillows at them, at which they laughed and clapped quick, sporadic claps—perhaps mocking my weak throwing arm. After that, I stubbornly refused the tray of food they offered me, and was affronted when one of them pocketed our salt and pepper shakers and another took the roll of toilet paper by my bed.
I described this behavior to my mother upon her return. My mother assured me that the women merely wanted a touch or a relic from me, and that we had plenty of toilet paper. I did not push the matter further, as she seemed quite tired.
My mother soon spent more time sitting among our visitors, on one of the stools from the kitchen. One day I had a terrible fright: I could not at once tell which of the women in my room was my mother! Though I soon figured it out—my mother was, after all, many times bigger than any of them, and spoke English, in an accent that was familiar to me—what I took from that vertiginous moment of unrecognition was that my mother was getting quite old. And then my mother coughed—a murky, swampish sound—and I realized she was not entirely well, and it seemed unlikely after all that she had been spending so much time at the perfume counter and the church, or that she’d been able to get the oxygen tank she now toted with her from either of those places. Whatever thing inside me had felt sprawling and safe knuckled back up into a tight little fist. The precariousness of my situation was now evident. Of course my mother had welcomed these women in, kept offering them tea: how else was I to survive her passing, if not by means of the goodwill of strangers such as these?
I made an effort from then on not to increase my mother’s difficulties. When my mother was gone—as she began to be more and more often—I let the women touch my hair and fondle the sleeves of my nightgown. I accepted their ministrations, though I did not like the way they shoved my bedpan at me, nor the way, when they took it from me, they chuckled at its contents.
Then came a day when my mother was gone for a long time. I must have nodded off. I woke up to the chomp of a scissors alongside my ear: the women were cutting my hair, shearing it close to my scalp. When I kicked them away, they fluttered back to their side of the room and tucked the locks of my hair into their black clasp purses.
When my mother returned, I told her everything—by then I’d realized they’d taken snippets of my nightgown as well—while I clutched at her sleeve desperately. “Shh, shh. You’re very brave. I know you’ll always be very brave,” she told me. This should have worried me, but the way my mother was stroking me, and her sea-loud breath—she’d put on her oxygen mask—put me right to sleep.
The next morning, she was gone. She did not come back that evening, nor did she the next day, nor the next. I was alone with the women. They washed me roughly, with a dry loofah; instead of serving my food on a tray, they took to tossing it at me (lumps of bread, nuts, apple slices), much the way one might feed a duck. Once, exhausted by my concern for my mother, I made the mistake of falling asleep. I woke to a scream (my own): the women were on me like spiders, plucking away at my eyelashes and eyebrows and trimming my nails. Then one day the women were not there, and I felt as desolate as a child at the bottom a well.
That was the middle, and this is the end, insofar as there is an end to anything. I began to think it likely that my mother had died, since I did not believe anything could keep her from me, save death. When the women, who had left me on my own for a period I guessed to be several days long, came back with ashes in a box, my suspicions were confirmed. Underneath my mother’s plated name, which I well knew, were two years bracketing a dash: one I took to be the year of her birth, though I could not have verified it, and one I took to be both the year of her death and the current year, though it surprised me, being greater an integer than I would have adjudged.
I opened the box, and brought my nose close to the ashes. They smelled nothing like my mother, more like a charred tree. There did not seem to be enough ashes; how could it be that my mother’s largeness had been reduced to such a small container? I was overcome with loss: what I held in my hands did not feel like nearly enough. It felt like preposterously little. In addition, I was saddened because of the year I now knew it was, and because I understood with uncharacteristic alacrity that my life had regained its valuelessness. My throat burned. I closed the box.
One woman offered me a handkerchief from her purse; I buried my nose in it and promptly inhaled the smell of onions, at which I began to cough. The women brought me water and food on a tray, even cut some meat into little bites for me, but despite this unusual civility, and my having survived these last days on the remnants of stale bread that I found in the folds of my quilt and sips from the glass of water on my nightstand, I could not eat.
I kept the box next to me in bed that night. I was up for many hours after the women left. I felt terribly bare, cold in a new way, even underneath my covers. I no longer had even my worry about my mother to protect me. Deprived of her insulating presence, the walls suddenly seemed thin; I heard sounds I hadn’t heard before, TVs and cars going by and faraway shrieks that might have been laughter. I could hear mice again. (Something was squeaking, at any rate; perhaps tiny birds or bats?) I was even aware of long, low growls that occasionally tumbled up from the core of the earth, rattling the house, though that might have been the subway.
And then it occurred to me that I should not keep my mother’s ashes in bed with me, but instead have them brought to a place she loved: to the perfume counter at Saks or the church on Fifth Avenue. (I imagined that the box could be nestled under a till, or tucked under an altar, but I was unconcerned with these exactitudes as I was with most exactitudes.) It relieved me so much to have thought of one more daughterly thing that I might do—or arrange to have done—that I fell right asleep. In the morning, I tried to express to the women (whose return, despite their peculiarities, came as a relief to me), where I wanted them to bring my mother’s ashes. Unfortunately, they seemed not to understand “St. Patrick’s” no matter how many times I said it, or how loudly, and, from my gestures in the direction of the drawer of my mother’s perfumes, incorrectly derived that they now had permission to spritz themselves and each other with such a quantity of fragrance that I quickly became light-headed, and would have had to lie down, were I not already lying down. Clearly, I would have to be the one to deliver my mother to her final resting place.
How my mother’s heart would have burst had she seen me struggle, once the worst of my dizziness passed, to get out of bed, and for no other reason than to carry her ashes to the city! To wander weakly through a haze of perfume to seize my best dress from the back of my closet! But the women, clucking and fighting over bottles, were the only audience for my tragic performance—involving a preponderance of knees and elbows—that culminated in a black dress hanging bag-like off my scrawny frame. Next, I labored to put on my boots. One foot secured, I wondered why I had chosen boots with laces, but it was too late to go back. I persisted until the other boot was, more or less, on. (“So strong!” I imagined my mother saying.)
Bebooted, I made my passage to the bathroom, where I saw my face in the mirror for the first time since I had taken to bed: my skin was preternaturally smooth and pale, like a nun’s, my eyes feverish, and I would have been the loveliest I had ever been, had it not been for the sooty half-moons under my eyes, and the way my hair had been shorn so that I was left with long strands dangling between patches of scalp. Some of my eyelashes and eyebrows were gone, too, contributing to the impression that I was molting. I did what could be done, or what I could do, which wasn’t much. I splashed my face with water that smelled scorched. I smoothed my remaining hair down.
I headed for the stairs, which entailed that I pass my bedroom. To my dismay, the women were stuffing their purses full of perfume bottles and rifling through my mother’s drawers. One whisked up my mother’s extraordinarily large white nightgown so the sunlight from the window shone through it, putting me in mind of a sheet on the line. I thought that when I came back, I should find a way to keep the women out. Perhaps there was a lock on the downstairs door: I couldn’t remember. If so, I would lock it.
I walked downstairs—more accurately, staggered, due to the wastedness of my legs—leaning on the rail. The women followed me. I waited at the door that led from my staircase to the foyer, thinking one of the women would open it for me, but they made no move, so I tucked my mother’s ashes in my elbow crook and thrust my right shoulder against the door—leaning my entire if insignificant weight into it—while spinning the handle with my left hand. Success! The front door was one I needed to pull, which I apprehended after some false starts, and achieved by hanging monkeyishly off the knob. Then, I hoisted myself up by the same knob until my feet were once again positioned underneath me. The women trailed behind me; I left it to them to close the doors, or not to close them, as they liked.
It could have been fall. Or it could have been a cool summer day, and the trees could have been suffering from some disease. When I looked down—the sun, brighter than I remembered, stung my eyes—I noticed there were holes in the dark dress I had put on; the women must have clipped the clothes in my closet, too.
I’d forgotten how very long my block was: I passed house after house, each low and square and white, like a row of molars with gaps between them. The women were muttering behind me, though when I looked back, they stopped. (In the merciless daylight, they looked newly ancient.) I could not look back for long, as my balance was precarious, so the muttering resumed and followed me as I took a left at the corner. Apparently, I still knew how to get to the subway, or perhaps I had made a deduction based on the sight of the aboveground tracks, now three blocks away, or the shrill braking of the train, which came to me among other assaulting sounds on this busy street: sirens and stereos and screams, or perhaps cheers.
Many people were outpouring from the subway station, and I hitched with the thought that one of this crowd might inquire as to the particulars of my current state. Not only did I doubt that I would be able to speak and stay upright at the same time, but I knew I would be no more able to fit my answers into conversation than I could curl my whole self up inside my mother’s box. I adjusted the collar of my dress—which kept slipping off my bony shoulder—so that I would look less conspicuously pathetic.
My worries were unfounded; I attracted no attention. I thought, how nice to be any of these people walking past me, with such easy and blind determination, from some place they’d had to be to some place they had to go. The weight of the resurrected longing to be someone, anyone, other than myself weakened me further.
Things were not going altogether well. By the painful way the boots rubbed against my feet it was evident that I had forgotten entirely to put on socks; more than that, I had forgotten that there were such things as socks that ought to be put on. My legs were unused to walking, and my arms unused to swinging—especially while holding a box of ashes—and I could not remember if it was the left arm that was to go forward with the right leg, or was it right arm, right leg? I tried both versions, as well as a variation that involved my hopping both legs forward, then swinging both arms forward. At some point in this effortful process, when I was near a jewelry shop (perhaps the glinting of the diamond rings in the window distracted me), I let go of the box of my mother’s ashes, flinging it upwards—my arm had been mid-swing—where it hit a lamppost that re-routed it in a downward trajectory, until it was stopped by a curb, against which it cracked before tipping into the gutter.
I ran—no, wobbled—to the curb, and peered over it with the same color of trepidation with which I might have looked over the edge of a ravine to see if my mother’s body had hit bottom. To my horror, the box was upended, its latch broken, its lid snapped, its contents expelled into the gutter. My mother’s ashes were already leeching up wetness, second by second indistinguishing themselves from the grime of the city street. I desperately wanted to restore them to the sanctuary of their box. I squatted down, on the curb’s edge, that I might lean into the gutter and recollect the ashes with the spoon of my hand. I was beginning to do this when it became obvious to me that the squat into which I’d maneuvered myself was one I was neither going to be able to hold nor to rise from, and it did not surprise me when I tumbled forward. Being unsurprised, I was able to list to the right on my way down (how I longed to hear my mother remark upon my foresight!), so that when I did hit the concrete, I was not face down but on my side, with my back to the curb.
I felt the shadows first: cold stripes of darkness across my body. I rolled onto my back and saw the women hovering over me. There were more of them then there had ever been, or so it seemed. From my vantage, their buckled shoes and the support hose binding their swollen ankles took prominence. They seemed to have grown taller, tall as buildings. Their faces, very far above me and backlit by the strong sunlight, did not look the least bit kind. In fact, their eyes looked like the waiting eyes of vultures, and it struck me that perhaps they did not have my best interests at heart, that perhaps they never had, that perhaps they had not been guiltless in my mother’s death. Not that it mattered now.
Far above them, a chevron of large birds flew; inelegant birds, with club-shaped bodies. Possibly geese. Possibly not. I longed (suddenly! painfully!) to be one of those geese, or not-geese! It did not seem to me that there could be anything better than being possessed by the drive to fly thousands upon thousands of miles on the great mission of survival.
As I watched the birds go wherever they were going without me, I realized I no longer had any hope of making it to the subway, which was still blocks away. Nor did I have the strength, or the will, to go back to my motherless apartment. The women reached down for me, their sharp nails biting into my forearms, determined to upright me, or perhaps do me in. It made no difference to me, since it was clear that I could have no place in this world, and that life from now on would be impossible.