Smoking Circles
Thirsty Work — Chapter 7: that one night
Two young women from California travel to New Orleans in search of redemption after the death of their mother. Carolee thinks she will show her little sister the world, but what they find in the barrooms of the French Quarter at Mardi Gras is more than she knows how to handle, or could have imagined back home. This is the seventh chapter of the novel Thirsty Work.
One month after my mother’s funeral I loaded empty boxes in my blue Volkswagon squareback and made the five-hour drive from Stockton to UC Santa Barbara. When I’d left three months before for a weekend visit with my family, I didn’t know I wasn’t coming back. Marcy didn’t complain about the loss of rent on our one-bedroom apartment. How could she? She’d packed up my things and found another roommate. Now I was going to retrieve my belongings and officially end my claim on the single bed in the living room.
The drive down Highway 5 was hard. I distracted myself by listening to music, making plans for New Orleans, marking the miles to Andersen’s Split Pea Soup Kitchen as proclaimed in a long line of billboards, and trying to identify the endless acres of crops on both sides of the road, planted in neat rows that channeled the air to make a rhythmic fwap fwapping sound as I drove past. Here was cabbage. Maybe artichokes. Were those almond trees? Those were all pretty good distractions. But when I finally arrived in Isla Vista, the aggressive health and radiant innocence of the cloistered suburb of students seized my heart in a fist. Boys walked by carrying surfboards. Girls leaned off of balconies in bathing suit tops. Music blared from many windows.
I don’t belong here anymore, I thought as I pulled up to the curb in front of my old apartment. Raucous laughter seemed to answer my thought. I don’t even know this place. My mind suddenly emptied and the vision I’d been suppressing since the funeral rushed to fill the empty space.
My mother’s face staring at me in the corridor. Her cheekbones, eye sockets, exaggerated, enlarged.
I leaned out the car door and tried to vomit, but there was nothing in my stomach. I hadn’t wanted to stop at Anderson’s Split Pea Soup Kitchen after all, despite the billboards. I was in too much of a rush. But now that I’d finally arrived, I didn’t want to get out of the car. I felt safe here, alone, far from home and family, encased in metal and glass. I locked the doors and rolled up the windows, leaned my head back and let the memory come.
It was already dark the last night I went to the hospital. I was wearing a new party dress, hurrying to pay a duty call before leaving with a group of friends for a big night in San Francisco. We were going to see a new play at the Geary Theater: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Our tickets had been purchased weeks before. Johnny was waiting impatiently in my living room at home.
The hospital was quiet, almost empty. The click of my high heels echoed hollowly down the wide corridor — too fast. A fat man in a straw hat dozed in a waiting room. A nurse stood at her station with a clipboard, making notes, the harsh scratch of her pencil competing with the clatter of my high heels.
I controlled the familiar fear as I approached my mother’s doorway. One, two, three, four, counting the sick people’s rooms as I passed; hurrying away from a dangling arm, a protuberant foot, a siphoned nose; wondering what manifestation of my mother I would find this time. Pensive? Bravely cheerful? Obviously drugged? Asleep?
I drew up outside her room cautiously. When I poked my head around the doorway, I was stunned by what I saw. She was staring straight at me — as if she knew I was coming. Her eyes, all black pupils, were emanating fear.
“Mama?” I used the old appellation, the one she’d directed me, as a baby, to discard for the more civilized “Mommy.” Instant tears burned my eyelids, drowned the back of my throat.
“Mama, what’s the matter?” I asked hesitantly. But the question was meaningless, ludicrous, almost hilarious. No matter how long I stood acting stupid in the hallway, I couldn’t escape the certain knowledge. It was imprinted on every cell.
My mother was dying.
Death was here, in her room.
Death swelled behind her curtains, sifted under the door to the bathroom, gathered in the corners of the closet, oozed in every drawer. He wore black robes. His shape changed with every inhalation. Now a shadow, now the hairs rising on my forearm, now a yellow skeleton in long black robes — just like the movies — his bony mouth open wide in a hideous grin.
I enter the room haltingly. It is dark. My mother is alone here. Where are the nurses? Death is crawling between her blankets! My mother is afraid.
During all the long weeks of her illness, my mother had never shown me this face. She sat regally in the hospital bed and asked of my progress at school, the activities of my friends, the state of the weather. We weren’t to discuss it: her dying. She’d rather not. We were to look out the windows and remark the sky.
Sometimes, I wondered if it was really happening. Sometimes, I wondered at the absence of fear and rage. Sometimes, I thought that she was welcoming Him beneath her sheets: a long-awaited lover, a killer, an escaped convict; taking comfort in the silvery glint of his unconcealed blade.
She was tired; her five children almost grown; her alcoholic husband increasingly cruel. Her body was used up by pregnancies and age. Her legs, slightly bowed, were laced with thick blue veins. Her hips wide with menopause. Her mottled thighs.
Her breast, the breast that suckled me, sliced off at the root, stored in the hospital basement in a sealed bin of foreskins, diseased organs, amputated limbs and other human garbage, leaving nothing on her chest wall but an angry red scrape.
But tonight, she doesn’t remark the sky. She looks straight at me. Her face is filled with fear.
“Mama!”
I run to the bed and gather her body up my arms. She weighs nothing. She has no responsive muscles, no resilient fat, no warmth. Already, she is bones.
Her bones are hollow.
I press my wet face against her blue and white hospital gown, her shoulder, her neck, her chin. I don’t look at her. I smell her. I breathe her up — into me. I smell the hot chicken soup she brought me when I was in bed with the measles. I smell her bitter anger when Johnny brought me home late from a date. I smell the Jergen’s Lotion on her smooth, soothing hands as they stroke my chubby, tear-stained cheeks as a child, the day my girlfriends wouldn’t let me play two-square at recess.
I want to say all the right things — all the things I’ve heard on television. How we’ll always remember her. How she’ll live forever in our hearts. In every action we take, in every word we speak, in every thought we think or dream. “I’m sorry mother. I’m so sorry that you’re dying. I love you mother. Please don’t be afraid.”
I imagine that this is why she was waiting for me. That she only needed to hear these words to let go. I am the chosen child. I am the favorite. I am the ferryman. She has shown me her face! But when I open my mouth to help her cross the chasm of fear, my throat closes tight. Only my spit strings out. I can barely whisper, “Mama please! Mama please don’t die!”
Perhaps she knows.
Perhaps she knows everything I want to tell her. Perhaps she hears more than those six stingy words. Perhaps she reads my thoughts through her bony forehead, feels the tribute in my spit. Now she will be at peace. My love will help her make the crossing. But when I lower her body back down to the bed, her face is unchanged. She wears a frozen mask of fear. I have said nothing!
Now the curtains are shifting, the drawer is sliding open, the bathroom door is swinging ajar. He is coming! A trickle of pee wets my underpants.
I run.
I put her broken body back down on the bed and run.
Her eyes follow me out the doorway, past the nurse with her clipboard, the sleeping man, the indifferent sick. Her eyes follow me as I crash and clatter down the cavernous stairway, too scared to wait for the elevator. Her eyes follow me as I race across the asphalt parking lot, kicking up tiny pebbles in my tumultuous wake.
Her eyes burn two black, smoking circles in my yellow, rancid back.
I don’t look back for her, the woman who held my hand through every crisis. I don’t look back for her.
I run. I run. I run!
I leave my mother to die alone. I go to San Francisco with my friends as we had planned. Everyone admires my new dress.
When the vision passed, I opened my eyes slowly and looked around to see who might have been watching. No one was paying any attention to me. No one I could identify, anyway. Did that curtain flick in an upper window?
I wiped my forehead with a dusty napkin I found on the dashboard, could do nothing for the sour dampness under my arms. I got out of the car and climbed the steps to my old apartment. My nausea subsided when I reached the top. Carly Simon was singing beneath the numbered door.
I put my key in the lock and felt surprised when it let me in. My roommate stood at the stove, cooking bacon. “Carolee! You’re here!” She wiped her hands on a towel, crossed the living room to give me a hug. “How was the drive?” She stepped away to turn down the stereo.
“How’s your family? Have you recovered from the funeral? I’m sorry I couldn’t come, but you know I had that history exam. You wouldn’t believe what Mr. Fuchs did to us on the final. Thank God he’s grading on a curve.”
Then she stopped talking and looked at me closely. “Are you all right? What’s that on your forehead?” She took a clean napkin off the counter and wiped off my clammy skin. “Have you been playing with the garbage again Carolee?” I tried unsuccessfully to laugh. Her forehead creased. “Come here, Honey,” she said. She guided me over to the single bed where we sat down together. “I’m so sorry about your mom,” she whispered, taking me into a hug.
“Yeah. Me too.”
She let me have the one bedroom that night. She and her new boyfriend slept in the living room. I sighed and rolled, rolled and sighed, and begged the sun to hurry rising. I wanted nothing more than to be back on the road, driving out of this life I no longer recognized, the flat, dusty miles of Highway 5 falling behind me like a trail of limp, discarded clothes.
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