Maya held the collage for a few moments, frowning. “Hmm,” she said. “This would seem to suggest that a woman’s just a bunch of organs.”
Helena was surprised, hurt. She’d wanted to please Maya, to show her she could say something new and complicated about illness, as Maya had with her Wheelchair Nudes— women sitting in their chairs in groups of two or three, wearing their scars without shame. “I thought you’d like it,” she said.
Maya touched Helena’s knee. “This is your mother we’re talking about,” she said, her voice patient and slow, and Helena had wanted to cry.
By the time they’d toured the Carousel of Progress and ridden the Astro Orbiter and eaten lunch, Helena’s mother’s shoulders were sagging and the circles beneath her eyes had darkened to violet gray. She sat at the restaurant table picking at the bun of her chicken sandwich, her wig drooping in the humidity.
“Are you all right?” Helena asked her. “Can I get you more lemonade or something?”
Helena’s mother let out a sigh. “I’m fine, honey,” she said.
Beside her, the twins sprawled in their chairs, drumming their sneakers against the tiled floor. Nora sipped her lemonade and looked out at the white peaks and antennae of Tomorrowland. But Brian sat watching Helena’s mother, his own sandwich unfinished in its plastic basket.
“Maybe you and I should sit out awhile,” he said. “Nora can go on ahead with the kids.”
“That’s right,” Nora said. “You take a break, Nancy.”
Helena’s mother didn’t seem to have the strength to argue. Instead she sat back in her chair and said, “I think it’s the heat. I’m not used to it anymore.”
“Why don’t I take the kids to Space Mountain?” Nora said. “That’ll give you two time to catch up.” She stood and took Margot’s hand. Margot looked anxiously at her mother, then at Nora, as if she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to want to do. Helena wasn’t sure herself. She didn’t like the thought of leaving her mother alone with Brian.
“Go on,” Helena’s mother said. “We’ll be right here.”
“That’s right,” Brian said. “We’re going to sit here in the shade. I think I may have gotten a little too much sun myself.” He raked a few strands of hair across his bare scalp and then quickly pushed them aside, as if embarrassed by the act.
Space Mountain was housed in a complex structure of interconnected cones, white metal jutting like an iceberg into the Florida sky. Sunlight glinted from the high ridges, and shadows hung ghostly blue in the valleys. Nora steered Margot and the twins through a black arching doorway twenty feet high. Helena followed them into a long tunnel where they waited with other parents and children, watching projections of stars and planets and listening to synthesized space music.
“It’s just like I remembered it,” Helena said, to no one in particular.
“You should ride with me,” Louis said. He reached over and pinched her waist, and she swatted his hand away, moving toward Margot and Nora.
“How’re the allergies?” she asked Margot.
“Bad,” Margot said, lifting her glasses to rub her eyes. “I’m all itchy.”
“Don’t rub,” Helena said, holding Margot against her. “You’ll make it worse.”
Nora gave Helena and Margot her tight, gummy smile. “You must be a big help to your mom, Helena,” she said. “It must be terrible for Margot. But you’re so much older. You must be like a little mother to her yourself.”
Helena felt words coming to her, a polite response. Then she looked at Margot, who was still rubbing her eyes, and something contracted in her chest, a kind of visceral fear. “Margot has a mother,” she said, her voice hollow in the tunnel.
Nora stopped smiling. “I didn’t mean otherwise,” she said. She inspected her fingernails for a moment, then met Helena’s gaze. “You must be proud of your mom,” she said. “Both your parents. It’s lucky they’re doctors. They’ll get her the best treatment possible.”
Helena nodded, and said yes, that was lucky. But she wasn’t sure how lucky it was. She’d seen her mother turn pale as she palpated some growth beneath her own skin or examined the tracery of veins in her arm. Other husbands wouldn’t pass out when they saw their wives’ CAT scans. Other women wouldn’t understand how sick they were.
In a few minutes they reached the front of the line. The place was rigged up like a high-tech loading dock, with curved plastic tubes and machinery tangled across the far wall. Whooshing fluty music filled the boarding area, and a woman’s voice instructed them that their mission would commence in three minutes. An orange light flared from a tunnel as a set of three cars rolled forward onto the loading platform. The cars were made of sparkly black plastic, with foam-covered safety bars and working headlights. Two people could ride in each car.
“Margot has to ride with an adult,” Nora said. “That’s me, I suppose.”
Jeremy climbed into the car behind his mother’s, and Louis took the one behind Jeremy’s. Helena slid in next to Jeremy, who didn’t look at her. She was glad they were finally getting on the ride. The thought that Brian Sewald and her mother had been alone together all this time made her uneasy.
The ride workers moved forward to secure the safety bars and to wish everyone a good journey. As the cars rolled into the dark tunnel, Helena felt Jeremy’s hand brush against her leg. She shivered and moved closer to the edge of the car. Behind them she heard Louis whispering, “Do it, man, you have to do it.”
“I’m trying,” Jeremy said, under his breath.
Helena’s back stiffened as they began to ascend on a clicking track. They clicked higher and higher, and it was dark all around them except for the pinpricks of electric stars glowing high above. Screams and mechanical rumbles echoed far off, and Helena could see the headlights of other cars looping and shooting in the distance. Jeremy touched her thigh again. Margot giggled in the car ahead of them, and Nora laughed with her.
“Stop it,” Helena hissed. “Your mother’s right there.”
“So?” Jeremy said. His hand moved over her shorts, and she covered her lap with her own hands. He shoved his fingers beneath hers and squeezed her thigh. Helena wanted to scream. She pinched his hand, but he didn’t move it. There was the caramel pull of the last moment up, when she knew they were already hanging over the drop, and then the air slicked her hair back and she became weightless. The padded metal harness pressed hard against her shoulders and legs. Margot and Nora shrieked. Jeremy’s hand moved toward Helena’s crotch, and her body went rigid. They fell into the back-crunching pit of the drop, the car snaking right and left, and Helena flushed hot with anger and shame as Jeremy rubbed the denim between her legs. She curled her fingers and scratched his wrist as hard as she could. He yelped and pulled away, whispering “Fuck!” under his breath. Now they were clicking up another track. Their car slid over the top again, down into the crush of gravity, and then they looped upside down, suspended for one clacking moment over a sea of formless black. There was another loop and a series of sickening dips and rises. Helena let her hands relax for a moment, and just then Jeremy reached inside her shorts and ground his knuckles against her. An orange light loomed ahead, and they shot into a screaming tunnel of tangerine strobe light. At last the car slowed as they rolled up to a red-lit unloading dock. “Please step off to your left,” a disembodied female voice instructed. “Please step off to your left.”
Margot was crying as she climbed out of the car, holding a broken plastic ear from her Mickey Mouse hat. The other was still attached. “My glasses fell off,” she cried. “They’re gone, Helena!” She held the broken ear and stood there watching the cars move back into the tunnel.
“Shh, shh,” Nora said. “Your dad will buy you a new pair.”
“But I can’t see!” Margot wailed.
Nora took Margot’s hand and led her along the corridor. The twins walked just ahead of Helena, laughing. Jeremy whispered something, jabbing his hand forward rhythmically, and Louis clapped him on the s
houlder. Helena felt as if she were burning or bleeding, as if her body were marked; everyone would see what had happened as soon as she stepped into the light. She wanted to take Margot and crouch inside the blue-lit tunnel forever. She never wanted to see the twins’ faces on the refrigerator again, or be told to stand up straight for their sake. She wanted to scratch their blue eyes out. The only thing that kept her feet moving and her arms still at her sides was the thought that she had to get back to her mother.
When Helena broke into the light, she had to squint and shield her eyes. Margot ran ahead of Nora and the twins, weaving a little, toward the restaurant. As Helena got closer, she could see Brian and her mother still sitting at the table. She went inside just behind Nora, ready to tell her mother what had happened, to show her who these people really were. But her mother’s expression stopped her. She was pushing something toward Brian—the black velvet box—and saying something Helena couldn’t make out. Her face was red and puffy, and a twisted Kleenex lay before her on the table. Brian shook his head, eyeing the box as if it frightened him, as if it contained something he wasn’t supposed to touch. But when he looked up and saw his family coming, he took the box and put it in his pocket.
“Something terrible happened,” Margot said, pulling the hat from her head.
Helena’s mother dried her own eyes and then reached forward to dry Margot’s. Her arm froze in the air. “Where are your glasses?” she asked.
Margot’s voice rose in a wail, and she balled a fist against one eye.
Helena stepped forward and laid the plastic ear on the table. “They’re in Space Mountain,” she said.
“Oh, no,” her mother said quietly. She looked from the disheveled Margot to Helena, who blushed as she tried to straighten her shorts.
“You’re still a beautiful mouse in my book,” Brian said to Margot, and set the hat back on her head. “We’ll just look at you from the one side.”
That made Helena’s mother smile. She touched Margot’s cheek. “Don’t cry, now,” she said.
As they moved through Fantasyland, Helena stayed close to her mother, taking in the faint ripe odor of her sweat. She still wanted to tell her what had happened in Space Mountain. But her mother seemed to be in another place now, untouchable. She wasn’t adjusting her wig anymore or pulling at her shirt to disguise her small false breasts. Helena could see the pride she carried in her narrow shoulders as she watched Brian Sewald walk with his sons and wife. There was a silence in the way she moved, almost as if she were floating. Helena imagined that if she glanced behind her, she might see a trail of things her mother had let fall: bits of iridescent fabric and glass, white petals, locks of hair. She seemed truer to herself, finished with trying to make things appear different from the way they were.
Helena knew that was supposed to be better. She’d heard it a hundred times in school, seen it on banners in the halls: Be true to yourself! Celebrate yourself! But what if you were dying, losing yourself piece by piece? Were you supposed to be true to that? Helena had done everything she could think of to hold on to what her mother had lost. She’d imagined her mother’s organs going through a kind of re-forging, a kind of mystical cleansing, after which they’d start their lives again in Helena’s body—her mother’s sick breasts becoming Helena’s new healthy ones; her mother’s ovaries, reborn, shooting estrogen into Helena’s bloodstream. She’d seen herself as the woman on the right side of her collage, the outline into which her mother’s organs were being transplaced. She’d saved strands of her mother’s hair, fingernail parings, eyelashes, things she’d be able to touch six months or two years from now. She hadn’t been able to say what it was she was dreading—not her mother’s death, because that was beyond imagining. But as she watched her mother walk through the Magic Kingdom, eyes half focused, arms limp at her sides, past six-foot-tall mice and cotton-candy vendors and pink benches, in the shadow of Brian Sewald and his family, Helena knew that this was what she’d feared: her mother’s decision to let go, to shrug off the things she’d saved. She wanted to throw herself down in front of her mother, hold on to her feet and scream. But her mother walked on, and Helena followed her.
After a while, Margot paused at a bench to tie her shoe. “Can you help me, Mom?” she asked. “I can’t see the laces.”
“I think we should go back to the hotel soon,” her mother said, bending to tie Margot’s shoe. “I’m getting tired.” She finished the knot, then drew a hand across her forehead and closed her eyes.
“We can go back right now, if you want,” Helena said, touching her mother’s arm.
“No,” Margot said. “I want to ride the teacups.”
“Mom said she’s getting tired. We can ride them tomorrow.”
Brian and Nora turned around to see what was going on. But Jeremy and Louis were still headed for the teacup ride, and Margot pulled on her mother’s hand. “One more ride,” she said.
“Well,” her mother said, “maybe just one more.”
They went on toward the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, a huge pavilion beneath which pink and yellow teacups twirled on a rotating platform. It was late afternoon and the lines had thinned as people went to early dinners. By the time they reached the ride, the previous turn had ended and people were leaving through an exit on the other side of the pavilion. The ride supervisor opened the gate, and people ran to board the teacups. Jeremy and Louis scrambled into a yellow one with Nora, and Margot and her mother took a pink one.
“Look at us!” Margot yelled. “We’re in a cup!” She waved to Helena and Brian, who stood near the rail.
Helena’s mother took a kerchief from her yellow straw bag and tied it around her head, securing it under her chin so her wig wouldn’t blow away. As the music started and the platform began to rotate, she took the metal disk at the center of her teacup and turned it, tentatively at first, then faster. Margot shrieked with pleasure as they whirled away.
“Those things make me sick,” Brian said, leaning against the railing. “They make my head spin.” He twirled a finger to demonstrate.
“Me too,” Helena said.
The pink teacup came back toward them, close enough for Helena to see the thin muscles of her mother’s arms straining as she turned the silver disk. She was laughing, her eyes closed against the wind as she spun herself away. Then Nora and the twins passed, hair whipping, mouths open with laughter.
“We’re all tired,” Brian said. “It’s been a long day.” He smiled at Helena, a weary, kind smile that made her feel the heaviness in her own arms and legs. She wanted to go back to the hotel and lie down.
“I’m going to sit in the shade,” she said, motioning toward some benches.
He nodded. “Meet us when the ride’s done.”
She moved away from the railing and went toward the bank of benches, a little way behind Brian, next to a hot pretzel stand. The yeasty scent of the pretzels made her hungry, and as she squinted against the afternoon sun, a dull pain pressed at her temples. After a moment she saw Brian take the small velvet box out of his pocket, open it, and examine the contents. When his family whizzed by again, he closed the box and concealed it in his hand. Then, looking over his shoulder as if to make sure no one was watching, he knelt next to the railing and slid the box under a flattened paper cup.
The ride began to slow, and Brian looked up as Nora called his name. He went around to the far side of the pavilion to meet her. Helena moved forward to the railing, nudged the paper cup aside with her toe, and picked up the box. She felt its worn plush, the resistance of its hinges. Inside, on black velvet, lay three wrinkled and yellowed hulls, and Helena recognized them as the gardenias her mother had worn in her hair nineteen years before. There was an odd pain in her chest, a sharp constriction. She closed the box, feeling as if she’d seen something too personal, a kind of private leave-taking, and when she looked up she was almost surprised to see her mother coming toward her, blue eyes glazed with sun, laughing and tired and alive.
Stations of
the Cross
Three weeks into our stay in Mexico, my mother sent the article from the Times: a photograph of Dale Fortunot and a brief note about his life. He’d been killed by a suicide bomber in Nablus, where he’d been working on a story for a political magazine. Dear L, my mother wrote. Can this be the same Dale Fortunot? Don’t want to upset you, but this caught my eye. Much lv always, Mother. She’d written P.S. and then scratched it out, as if there were something more she’d meant to say but couldn’t. I read the letter on the patio of the house we were renting, my husband and I, during the second trimester of my pregnancy. The trip was a kind of farewell to travel and to being alone together. I loved being pregnant and speaking Spanish all the time and waking up in the morning with nothing to do. The rest of the world and its coil of problems had come to seem like a dull, distant ache. The only newspaper we’d been reading was the local daily, El Mensaje.
The Times photo showed a fine-featured man in his late thirties, with small round glasses and light brown skin, smiling gravely, as if he already suspected his fate. The article described how he’d been interviewing Jewish settlers and Palestinian leaders for a feature that was to coincide with the fifty-fourth anniversary of Israel’s independence. He’d been waiting at a checkpoint when a young Palestinian jumped out of a van and detonated a bomb strapped to his chest. Two Israeli soldiers had also been killed. According to the article, Dale had been writing about the Middle East for nearly a decade. He’d been married to an Israeli journalist, and they had a three-year-old son named Samuel.
Unmistakably, this was the same Dale Fortunot I’d known in south Louisiana. It must have been 1973 when we’d met, the year my mother and I had lived in Iberville Parish. Though my mother’s note had made no mention of that time or of the incident that linked Dale Fortunot and me, I sensed in her scratched-out P.S. a kind of silent reproach. There I was, a grown woman, a professor of American Studies at Cornell, almost a mother, but suddenly I felt an old, fierce shame. I’d never forgotten Dale Fortunot or what had happened the day of his cousin’s First Communion. My mother hadn’t forgotten either. I wished she’d never seen the photograph, but there it was in my hand.