I have never set fashions. Most of my life I could barely figure out what to wear. She insists I take off my scarf and I do because she is so ill. I want to make her happy. And she says, “I love it. I love your hair.” I want to scream. “Are you looking at me, me, me? I am bald. Feel it, feel my head. There is nothing there. There is no hair. I have cancer, Mom. I just had half my organs removed. I have bloody poison in every pore and I could die and I am not eighty-five, I am fifty-seven, and I got on an airplane and risked infection because my white blood count is very low, I risked my fucking life to fly here for you, you, you.” But I don’t say that. No, I never do. I laugh and pull my nonexistent hair. Then she talks about my niece Katherine’s long blond hair and stunning face, identical to her own.
She can’t stop talking about my pretty niece, how pretty she is. I am bald and my niece is pretty. So pretty, just like her. Then she catches herself and says, “Oh, you are pretty too. You are all pretty,” she says to the room, like “Drinks on the house,” and I say, “I do not look like you. I never have. I am therefore not pretty.” And this conversation feels so familiar, I crave the chemo antinausea medication.
Her long red fingernails look strangely out of place with her hospital gown. They are the only part of the invented her that remains. She is bone and moles and catheter tubes and bruises and itchy IVs. Her long white hair is so fine, it gets caught in everything. I think she is dozing when she says out of nowhere, “Guilt.” My sister and I say, “What?” And she says, “Guilt. I am guilty that I did not love you all more.” I lie. My sister doesn’t lie. I say, “You have been a loving mother. There is nothing to be guilty about,” and I think, What will this guilt do for any of us? Will it give me back the years I hurt myself and almost drank myself to death? Will it reverse the bruises on my legs and ass and neck from being choked and whipped and punched? Will it undo your taping me to chairs, putting underpants on my head for an entire day to teach me a lesson? Will it make me understand why you woke my drunken, raging father from his stupor to report things to him, things you knew would incite him to violence—“Come quick Arthur, she’s at it again, she’s smoking. I’ll show you. Come quick. She snuck out with a boy. She’s missing from her bed. Come quick, Arthur. You must handle this.” And he did. Usually with his fists and curses, a half-awake, drunken, raging monster that you steered in my direction. Guilt. I lie.
I ask her if she wants to see my scar. She doesn’t. She never has. I decide to show her anyway. The nurse who takes care of her pretends to be interested. I show her my scar—the entire length of my torso. She hardly looks and says, “Mine is so much longer. Mine wraps around my whole body.” My mother does not have such a scar. It was just the same when she heard I had to have chemotherapy. She told me, “I had it. It wasn’t that bad.” She made it sound pretty easy. Then I discovered she had never had chemotherapy. I got cancer. Then my mother’s cancer came back. Then I went to chemo. Then my mother decided to die. She will win this round.
She is so frail. She looks breakable, but she isn’t. She has outlived everyone who believed she was breakable and treated her like china. She has survived three types of cancer. She said all the time, “I have no desire to live long. Let me out of here before I am that old.” She is eighty-five and she is still fighting with one lung.
I rub her very bony chest and get her to breathe in and breathe out. I calm her down. I am surprised that I am able to do this. She is a child. I am her mother. I get her to close her eyes and then she leans her head against mine. I decide to talk to her through our heads. I decide to tell her everything. I decide this moment will be my freedom. I press my brain right up against hers. I tell her how angry I have been and I say it is over. I say, “I waited my whole life and you are not coming.” I say, “I wanted to believe your wall would come down and you would remember me, and feel for me, and worry about me.” I say, “This didn’t happen.” I say, “I hated you for this and I have carried this hate my whole life. I hated you because you did not protect me or teach me that through protecting me I had a right to protect myself.” I say, “I got sick. I am done blaming you. It happened. It didn’t happen. It was. It isn’t. I want to be able to move on and not search the world for my mother and not crave adoration. I want this to be the moment where I get free, so I free you.” We sit there head to head and I know that somewhere in there she can hear what I am saying, and I feel my body relax and my aversion and hunger leave me and she relaxes and we fall asleep like this.
I wake at 4:00 a.m. on a cot in her room and she is moaning. She is freezing. The air-conditioning is so cold and lonely. I take my blankets and climb into her bed. I wrap myself around her the way I always dreamed she would wrap herself around me. I enfold the blankets around her shivering bones and I pull her to me and I hold her so tight, her moaning stops. Then in her sleep she says, “I was having a terrible nightmare. I dreamed they came to take our hearts. They didn’t want mine. They wanted yours the most. They are coming to take our hearts.” I want to ask, “Who is they?” But somewhere I know. I hold her even tighter and I hear my voice deepen. I say, “Don’t be afraid. They will not get our hearts. I will not let them. I promise.”
The next morning they move my mother to the cardiac unit because her heart has now become the problem. It is where we do not live that the dying comes.
SCAN
IT WAS A BEACH, I THINK
The sun was setting. Lu wanted to sit outside. It was a beach, I think, but it might have been a parking lot. The wind was sea and salty. It was holding us and tearing things apart. There was nothing to say—we were past recrimination and longing, past who got loved more or who didn’t get loved at all. Florida, the burnt place of fossils and remains.
I took off my hat. The wind blew through my sticky baldness. The humidity was an embrace. Lu and I were stunned at how fast it was all happening. My mother’s dying made us strangely hungry. We ate things that children eat. Everything was fried. We shared. Lu had wine. There was a time when the silence would have pushed me to ask my sister to revisit the family horrors, but they didn’t seem interesting now. The horrors. I thought of Lake Kivu, how once when I was crossing it from Goma to Bukavu, it turned into a raging ocean, and the waves were higher than the boat loaded with too many bags and people. I wasn’t like the others—worried about drowning. I knew I could swim. I was terrified of what was under the water—all the dead bodies and body parts—the people who had been killed or raped or macheted in the forests, who died with their families and whole villages so they were never missed: the lonely floating bodies reaching out in the dark water, bobbing like capsized possibilities, still waiting their turn. I always thought I would die walking into water. But I am not sure there was any there, that night after we left my mother’s room. It was more the idea of water, the idea of something that comes in really close and then pulls away just as you are coming to understand it. It was my mother. The wind holding Lu and me; the wind tearing everything apart.
SCAN
SHIT
I remember my mother once proudly telling me that she toilet trained me in a week. I wouldn’t learn, so she just kept me in my soiled diapers without changing them for six or seven days and she laughed, a strangely wicked laugh, and said, “Believe me, you got it. You begged to have those diapers taken off you.”
Have I told you my mother was obsessed with giving me enemas as a child?
I don’t remember being constipated. I don’t think that is why she gave them to me. I think it was about cleaning me out, getting this thing out of me, this badness. I was born dark and Jewish and she was a Wasp. Well, kind of. She was part Wasp and part other things. Poor white kinds of things. Whereabouts and origins unknown. No one ever thought she was my mother, including me. I was convinced for a long time that I was adopted. When they discovered the hundreds of thousands of orphans in Romania after Nicolae Ceausecu’s twenty-five-year reign of terror, I was sure I had come from there. Enemas were my mother’s way of making me somethin
g else. Perfect, French twist wrapped up tight—elegant, no mess. Enemas were about making me something that wouldn’t embarrass her.
For years I was terrified of shit. I was plagued with dreams of shit, oceans of shit, swallowing and consuming me. Now I really was swimming in a sea of shit, shit I could no longer control. Now I was wearing a bag of shit, a swampy pouch of my unexpressed feelings pouring out at their discretion. This made leaving the house treacherous. Sometimes the bag just exploded. When I was anxious, my stomach swelled. The stoma glue couldn’t hold and it was a mess. The bag could not be trusted if I ran into a person on the street speaking to me in the way that people speak to a person with cancer. You know? That sanctimonious pity that makes it horrifyingly evident that they have written you off. I smile that bald-headed smile and take care of them, tell them not to worry, I’m fine. Cancer free. Not going to die. But my bag is pissed off. By the time I’ve finished my bullshit sentence, the stoma is already beginning to swell, the bag filling up. Or, at a reading of a new play a producer I am having serious doubts about comes up to me, and as I go to shake his hand, I look down and realize my hand is covered in shit.
It was shit. Unpredictable shit. My shit and it was out there. There was no more hiding it or keeping it in.
SCAN
RADA
I call my friend Rada with the red hair and the Yugoslavian accent. Rada speaks fifteen languages and knows the history of every country, and if you point to a bridge or a monument anywhere in the world, she can tell you when it was built and why. She is a linguist and a feminist and an activist and makes the best vegetable soup I have ever tasted. She wrote the Finnish/Croatian dictionary. I need Rada. I ask her to come. It isn’t just her soup, or her hands, or her skin, or her imagination, or the way she talks, or the things she knows. It isn’t just that she is at once the brainiest and earthiest, or that she will be the one person who is not afraid of my bag or poop. It isn’t just that. It’s what we’ve been through traveling to war zones together.
I met her in 1994. I had seen a photograph on the cover of Newsday, six or seven young girls in a state of shock and terror having just escaped a rape camp in Bosnia. There was something about the picture, about the idea of a rape camp, that compelled me to find a way to get there and meet these girls. There was a place in Zagreb, the Center for Women War Victims. I faxed them a letter. They didn’t respond. I faxed them again. It was clear they were not impressed. It was clear they had become cynical about journalists and writers coming from outside the country. I must have faxed four more letters and finally they agreed I could come and sleep on their office couch. I felt like I had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Rada was one of the women running the center. She was to be my translator, and it was clear she was not thrilled with the assignment. I was just another writer coming to steal their stories and leave them in pain. She was not enthusiastic, but she wasn’t unkind, and she devoted hours to translating for me. We spent days in refugee camps and centers, backyards, and crumbling Communist compounds. It was summer and hot. We traveled in tight buses, sweat, trauma, and terror rising from the soaked clothes of the displaced and forgotten. That August we were engulfed in clouds of cigarette smoke and misery, drinking thick Turkish coffee and eating burek and baklava. It was in Bosnia that the women’s stories began to enter me. Hundreds of stories of women dragged into public squares and raped in front of their husbands, families, and friends. Stories of young girls held for days like slaves, their bodies used over and over by psychotic soldiers, sometimes six or seven at a time. Stories where it was clear that rape was being used as an organized and systematic tactic to destroy Bosnians, Muslims, Croats, and, in some cases, Serbs. Stories of women being forced to leave their cows, goats, and fields, being forced to watch as soldiers led their husbands and sons away, never to return. Stories entering me like emotional shrapnel lodging in my cells and gut. Stories that would eventually own and direct me. Stories that would never let go. And of course these stories would lead to other women, other countries, other stories, all of which would eventually lead to the ultimate story that was the Congo. It all began here in Bosnia with my friend Rada and the stories I needed to hear, although I am not sure what I was seeking. I needed to know what violence looked like. I needed to know how others survived. I needed to listen. But what I really needed was to know the world, the truth of the world. I needed to find the invisible underlying story that connected everything. I returned to the Balkans again and again over the next years. Each time Rada was my host and companion.
This was how our friendship was forged—two women trying to understand war. Two women trying to love the women who suffered. We slept in tiny beds together, we shared fresh figs, we compared our runs and constipation, we got colds, and we cherished the places with good coffee. We smashed peaches, strawberries, cucumbers, and lemons in a bowl one day and made facial masks for refugees and survivors on an island. We did benefits and performances and workshops. We read books about trauma and took holidays on empty, abandoned Croatian beaches. We shared small summer cottages where we could hear each other fucking with our partners.
Now it was almost fifteen years later and we were both divorced after long marriages. There were new wars. Now I had cancer.
We went to Montauk, which is where I go when I need to disappear. We walked on the beach and Rada made her miraculous soup and we read poems out loud and showed each other photographs. We watched a video of the women building City of Joy. She dreamed wistfully of falling in love. I dreamed of surviving. We talked about war crimes tribunals and the Bosnian women still seeking justice. We talked about the conflict ending in the Congo. If my cancer disturbed her, I never knew it. It was another battle, another thing we would get through. There was work to be done. She fed my rage by feeding me news, she helped me make plans for the future, she rubbed my shoulders and my neck almost every day—pushing me, loving me, needing me, back, back into the ring.
SCAN
DEATH AND TAMI TAYLOR
James stays with me for a month during chemo. He is the closest I have ever had to a real brother. We come from the same pod. He makes flower arrangements and paints beautiful pictures, organizes my closets, helps me get rid of old books. He builds me a Cat in the Hat bookcase and helps find the perfect glass door for my shower. Because he is an actor and an artist, he is very porous, and I feel somehow that we are doing the chemo together. Each night James and I move to Dillon, Texas. This is a surprise. I have never really been drawn to Texas or football or small towns. The nausea comes. The body aches. We smoke a joint, eat a picnic, and travel. I am not sure why or why now. I know Tami Taylor has a lot to do with it. She is tall with long red hair, supersmart, sexy, Southern, and kind without being stupid. I alternate between wanting her as a mother, a lover, and a friend. I live for Tami Taylor. James lives for the totally unavailable bad boy, Tim Riggins. It’s a TV show called Friday Night Lights that revolves around a high school football team. I have never really watched television before. It always depressed me.
What I love is that we now really live in Dillon, Texas. Our days are just marking time before we can be with our friends: Coach Taylor, Tami, Tim, Matt, Julie, Vince, Jess, and Lyla Garrity. I want to say it’s not that their lives are more interesting, but in fact they are. I hardly leave the house, so this is the closest I get to traveling. I have become a person obsessed with a TV show. There are so many things I never thought would happen. Each day, some way in which I thought myself special or different comes undone. For example, I was convinced that I was not a “cancer person,” whatever that meant. I thought cancer didn’t happen to emotional people or manic people. I was sure I would die of a heart attack or stroke. What I failed to figure in was (a) emotional does not mean “enlightened,” (b) the toxic world, (c) it was in my family, and (d) trauma. We make up stories to protect ourselves. I am not a cancer person. I am not someone who would die in a car crash. I had a rough childhood, so the rest of my life will be easy. I paid my dues. These little
myths and fairy tales keep us from the existential brink. Now I had crossed over and had discovered that there are no rules or reliable stories. There is suffering. It is ordinary. It happens every day. More of it seems to happen the older you get, or maybe your vision for it just expands. It is as unavoidable as is your ordinariness, your baldness, and your bag.
TV always makes me think about death. There is something about the emptiness. I have thought about death since I was ten. Maybe even before.
I was ten and watching The Invisible Man, which seems like an extremely sophisticated movie for a child, and Claude Rains—who was my stand-in father, always so witty and clipped and handsome in that impenetrable kind of way—had thick, white, scary bandages around his face and head. In one key scene he unwraps them and I waited for the revelation of something hideous and grotesque. He unwraps the bandages and there, in place of some deformity, was something far worse. There was nothing, absolutely nothing where his face and head once were. Even now my blood chills and the nausea returns. Claude Rains was invisible, gone. I vomited for three days and right after became wickedly afraid of the dark.