Nightwork: Stories

DAYWORK

We enter the attic at the same time, which makes it all the more some awful heaven here, cottony hot and burnished and oddly bare except for her appliances, the parts our mother used to raise herself from bed. Here they are tilted against the attic walls: the legs, the arms, the clamshell she wore instead of a spine. Here is some of Mother leaned up in the attic.

“We shouldn’t be in this room,” my sister says. “She isn’t dead.”

I agree; we might be too much in a hurry taking Mother’s house apart. “Mother could get well again,” I say, unhooking hangers, finding some of what our mother wore for hair.

“I wouldn’t touch it,” my sister says. “Don’t look.” But we look and look at how the blistered skins of covered bins and clothes bags have gone yellow.

My sister says, “It feels as if someone is watching.” And she opens a long box — but whose, we don’t know.

“I’m glad it’s you doing that,” I say as she sniffs what looks like gauze, rusty in places, violently stained.

“Little worms,” she says. “I’m not kidding.”

“Throw it out,” I say, waving away what things my sister brings me. The netting and the tape and the wired sheets — what good are these to us or anyone? I sling a fat sack down the attic stairs to pile with the others. Dark bags full of Mother’s house — so much we don’t know what to do with we throw out: old clothes cut to fit over the parts that Mother buckled on.

“This stuff, too?” my sister asks. She is looking at the hinged machinery hooked on the attic walls: a cane with teeth, a bedside pull, a toilet seat with armrests.

“Pile it,” I say, wondering who would ever choose to use and save such things? Who would sit behind a flimsy screen attended to and cleaned while visitors made shadows on the other side? The low-pitched Oh embrace of it, the pain we have heard, and how our mother talked to it, talked about it, showing off her bruises, saying, “They don’t know where to stick me anymore. They can’t find a vein,” or saying, “Look at what they’ve done to me,” or saying, “Remember, will you, visit.”

One of the visitors, I have heard our mother easing into sleep and whispering to nurses, “Lover.”

“Why did she let them do it?” I ask my sister, but my sister says she doesn’t know.

My sister asks, “Did you see these?” And she holds out spongy socks meant to pass as shoes. “What about these?”

“Oh, Mother never liked to walk,” I say.

Lately, she gives up in the middle of a sentence. Mother fades away and chews her gum against the mouthpiece of the phone. There is all this fuzz between us; “I don’t belong here,” Mother says, to which I don’t know what to say.

You will never get any better, Mother?

You should wish yourself dead?

We make such terrible confessions, my sister and I, which is why we are uneasy in the attic in the presence of these parts of Mother that seem a part of her still, quite alive and listening in on what we talk about. The way our mother lets herself be seen getting in and out of beds — the stained lips, the patched-on nipples from when her breasts had seams and looked shut as drawstring purses.

Purses, there are none here in the attic, only overnight bags fitted with zippers to expand and expand for Mother’s longer visits, months spent in hospitals, listening to the pling, pling of some necessity — nurse, elevator, doctor, dear! What does Mother want? we wonder. For what cruel attentions does she still lie down? Our husbands, how they tremble at the very sound of their hearts, not to mention Mother’s stuttered welcome: “Come in, come in. This isn’t the Ritz, but it’s my home.”

My sister is sorry Mother couldn’t keep this house. “But Mother needs looking after. That much is clear,” my sister says.

I agree — the smell of Mother’s house! Everywhere, but in the attic, the insistent odor of cat from all those cats Mother kept alive long enough for them to fray the chairs and spray the curtains before meeting bloody deaths. Mother never should have had cats!

Here in the attic, at least, it is fragrant and dry, flamy grains of wood and moted air — still. We are guessing a long time ago Mother did rough cleaning here, and then, as with so many rooms, she shut the door, forgot. Think of what we have found in these closed-off rooms: old chocolates in drawers and sample perfumes and pulverized tablets, a mint-flavored dust fouling the drawers. Tin cabinets, their rusted shelves threatening as old razors and full of medicines — we have cleaned the cabinets of aspirins and strips of pills for allergies or sinus or whatever it was that day. “If one is good, two is better!” Mother was always saying, ready, unready, impatient, slapdash, our Mother, repairing furniture with florist clay, leaving spoons to pit in salt, and books! We find books somehow gone moldy, with only scrub outside: buckskin landscape, thin clouds. Coyotes, wolves, bigger cats — whatever it was that got Mother’s kitties is out there in the desert. “You can see from the attic,” I tell my sister. Eroded, arid country this is, agave stalks and cholla thickets, creosote in the wash.

“Look!” I say. “The distances — how chalky!”

But my sister says she doesn’t want to look. She wants to be home now and not here clearing out, calculating, wondering how long Mother means to live. “It seems purely in her power,” my sister says, and she talks about the glasses we have found, lipsticked rims and salty residues from whatever it was Mother went on drinking. “I warned her,” my sister says.

“I didn’t,” I say. “I sometimes bought it for her.”

“No!” my sister says, and her face is open, all surprise. Does she wonder what else I have done for Mother? Does she suspect how many times I have let our Mother smoke, then watched her wave her hands at me for help to breathe?

Bad daughter that I am, I have bought her favorite kind.

I have gone along in the top-down car with Mother driving fast on empty stretches. The trees chink past, chink past a watery green, and the fields that I remember are smooth and yellow. We want to lie down in them, and, ah, until we get to trees again, when Mother presses forward, reckless to get there: home or away from home. “May this never happen to you,” Mother is saying, when everything has happened to Mother. Stillborns missing necessary parts, men who turn out to be dangerous. Sickness, excess, indulged goutish heart — her kind of dying. I shut my eyes and listen to us coming into houses — such quiet on these streets and the sound of Mother’s scarf in its furious beating. Out in the desert, too, there is the sound of Mother’s scarf, its harsh snaps, its language: I want, I want, I want.

“Don’t tell me what,” my sister says, then tells me what it is she wanted: to see Mother grow the old of old ladies in their skeletal nineties — so papery and thin, their deaths seem just a blowing out and not this messy, limb by limb-seeming, slow dying Mother practices. My sister says, “She won’t be around to see my children.”

“You don’t know that,” I say. “She could always come back.”

This man-size woman, my mother, I have seen her home from hospitals, pulling herself up by the window of the car, growing taller and taller until she stands full height, taller than all the mothers I have ever seen and wearing her body as she might a loose coat — tissues off the tongue of her turned-out pocket — leaving hair and mouthprints wherever she has been.

My sister says, “I was too young. I missed the early miracles.”

I look at Mother’s legs, how they stand up by themselves in the attic. Whom will Mother find to kiss her now is what I wonder, thinking of Mother in the cranked-up bed, wearing someone else’s old mouth.

“You,” I say to my sister. “You’re the one who nurses her. You look for the bruises. Helping Mother in and out of tubs — you, you dress her, when I won’t even touch her clothes, when most of what I see of Mother puts me to sleep.”

Her old-lady feet! The monastic growth, the narrow, curling yellow nail of her big toe, the little thorns of all the others — such feet should be covered, I think, but my sister talks of pedicures. The ticktock of Mother’s feet under the sheets, the vacant rooms, the hospitals, do not scare her.

I am not my sister. I will not put salve on Mother’s sores or comb the smoky hair that flares off her high forehead. Mother’s damp heats repel me.

“You are good to her,” I say. “But she is worse when you are around. Then she plays the baby, and you feed her. It makes me sick to watch her pulling on the spoon — and you! The way you scoop food off her chin!”

“What else can I do?” my sister says, smiling at the faces I am making, the querulous mouth and shaky hand, the what, what, what that is me playing Mother, fumbling her way to ask, “What did you girls do last night?” And the night before that, and the day, the day before, the winter, the spring, the rebuking summer — all gone by while the nurses have been turning Mother, keeping Mother clean in a clean bed.

The nurses, I half-expect to see them in the attic, in the fumy cedar closet of the attic, nurses, heavy and alike as the clothes bags my sister carries, another and another. Nurses, the ones whose upper arms strain even the sleeves of their coats, I have seen them hoist Mother. From under her arms, they lift her long body. They say, “If you’re going to live on your own, we want to see you out of bed. We want to see if you can vacuum.” The nurses say, “So,” giving her a dust cloth and a can of cleanser, leaving Mother with her walker in a space that could be hers. “Are you up to it,” the nurses ask, “this independent living?”

“I have no patience,” I say, and watch the collapse of clothing bags, tilted as for a fire, ready to kindle — if we had the courage.

But nothing much here would burn entire, I think, only slowly in a noxious stink of plastic, canes smoking into lips, braces stumped as closed-off joints on amputees. A fire such as this would be all smoke.

So what are we going to do with these appliances, these sheets? Such things, so evidently used, are they ever used again?

“Would you sleep on these sheets?” I ask my sister — and these are good heavy sheets we have here, warm, heavy sheets. They smell of bandages and soap.

No, she shakes her head, which means, I guess. we’ll throw them out like so much else toward the making of the new house, the house Mother always said she wanted: “Hose down, no care.” And she has almost achieved it there in the hospital with the nurses she calls out to by name. “Nancy, Laurie, Gail, come in and meet my daughters.” These smiling nurses with stories of us in their eyes, we have met them before. “Yes, yes,” the nurses say, pinching off the dead heads of donated flowers, standard arrangement — no smell. But there is baby’s breath and a foil balloon that someone has tied to the rail of Mother’s bed. This could be a party, a birthday party, but this is every day where Mother lives: dessert as something special, as having come from someplace special, sheet-cake occasions down the hall or weddings bonged across the street. “What a treat!” the nurses coax. “Sit up, dear. Eat,” they say, and I see, or imagine I see, the soldier that is Mother, the yellow opalescent skin on her thin arms, her thin arms trembling to raise herself from bed. Oh, why should it be strange how, loving death the way she has, our mother wants to live?

Outside the attic window, there are no streets, only scrub and scratchy plants, wind or quiet, dust — dust enough for me to write Please Wash Me on the window.

My sister holds a broom and sweeps.