The After Party (9 page)

M
y mother began to lose her mind after my father's visit. There were moments of clarity—when she asked clearly for water, or another blanket, or called me by my name—and other times I felt certain she didn't recognize me. Idie had warned me about this: “The mind leaves the body first, Cecilia.”

A few days after my father's visit, Joan came over after school, as she did most days. Being in close proximity to death—my mother upstairs, us in the kitchen drinking Dr Peppers and eating cocktail sausages out of the tin, our favorite snack—didn't rattle her.

“Mama told me your father was here last week. You didn't tell me.” But her voice wasn't accusatory. She picked up the last sausage. Chewed, swallowed. She seemed so strong, so vibrant and
present. My mother could barely take a sip of water without coughing.

I shook my head. “Only for a little while. I think it's the last time he'll come.”

I wondered, briefly, how Mary had known, but Mary knew everything.

“My father doesn't want me to live with him,” I said, abruptly. Joan had stood, opened the refrigerator. She was always starving after school. “He said something about me staying on here, with Idie.”

She turned, a jar of pickles in one hand, a loaf of bread in the other. Joan was never confused. She took the world in stride. Nothing surprised her. But
I
had surprised her, just now. She couldn't fathom a world where a father would not want his own daughter.

Her expression infuriated me. I took a deep breath, tried to remind myself that Joan was silly, a little girl in certain matters.

“Why did you think otherwise?” I asked. I could not keep the anger from my voice. “You know how it is. You know how he is.”

“I'm sorry, Cece.” Her voice was low. “You'll come live with us, at Evergreen.”

I closed my eyes and heard the clink of the jar as she set it on the counter. She came to me and hugged me, from behind. And I wept.

•   •   •

T
hat night I woke to the sound of my mother moaning. I was sleeping on her chaise longue, with a thick cashmere blanket that
had been in her bedroom since I was a little girl. It was from Scotland, she used to tell me, and I wasn't to touch it.

Now the blanket, sturdy for all its softness, was my one real comfort at night. I associated it with sleep, when I could wrap myself in it and let myself go dead to the world for however long my mother did not need me.

Usually I slept in spurts: an hour here, half an hour there. But tonight I had closed my eyes at midnight, and my watch read 4:13 a.m. when I opened them and held my hand to the window to see the time by moonlight. The watch had been a gift from my mother and father last year, presented to me in a slim red box from Lechenger's for my fourteenth birthday. The piece was much too nice for a fourteen-year-old, a gold bracelet with diamonds framing the delicate watch face, and I had kept it in my sock drawer until recently. I'd never felt before the need for a watch; at home Idie kept me apprised of the time. At school, teachers. But now my mother needed medicine on a specific schedule; now I needed to always know the time.

“I want a bath,” my mother said, after I held up the glass of water I had just poured to her lips. She shook her head, pressed her lips together in a line.

“A bath,” she repeated.

And her voice was filled with such longing, such desire, that I did not know how to say no. I should have said no. Or I should have, at the very least, fetched Idie, to help me. But my mother would have screamed at the sight of her, so what would have been the point?

“All right,” I said, “a bath. Let me draw the water.” And I stood, Idie's words—let me draw the water—strange in my mouth. It was Idie who had drawn my bath for years and years, until I was old enough not to need her. I couldn't remember my mother ever doing it for me. I slipped my watch off and left it on her bedside table among the collection of pill bottles that stood sentry.

My mother's tub was porcelain, iron-footed. Pretty, as everything she owned was pretty. She had often retired to her room in the evenings, and I could hear the water running for a long time, and then silence, and then the drain, and so I had come to understand without ever being told that my mother liked long baths. I did not. I didn't have the patience.

I retrieved the glass bottles of pastel liquids from underneath the sink, along with the green dish of bath salts, a silver spoon nestled within. I had put them there when the nurse had asked me to clear the bathroom of anything unnecessary.

Now I had the feeling someone was watching me as I worked, putting a little bit of this and that into the water as it ran, trying to create the most perfect scent. I felt like a sorcerer. And then it was time to get my mother.

She is like my child, I caught myself thinking as I wrapped my arms around her back and lifted her to a sitting position, supporting her head with my hand. One day, I will carry my child like this. And then my mother's smell rose up, and the thought, which had been tender, turned grotesque.

I half carried, half dragged her to the bathroom, and then I stood in front of the mirror and used her reflection to help me undress her. We had long ago exchanged her silk nightgowns for
thick, flannel pajamas, which were so unlike my mother. I had called Battelstein's and had them send over the smallest size they carried in men's. My mother was always cold, always freezing, and now, as I drew the top over her head, slid the bottoms off her hips, she gasped.

My naked mother was pressed against me. Her spine was so pronounced her vertebrae looked like joints from a child's building set. The place where her chest would have been pressed into mine, her bone against my flesh. I felt nothing. No tenderness, no pity. Just a strong desire to deliver her safely into the tub.

And I did, somehow. She lay there for a long time, moaning, almost imperceptibly, with pleasure. I propped up her head with a folded towel, and every so often I opened the drain to let out a little water and refill the tub with more hot water. It was satisfying work, because my mother was satisfied.

I don't know how long she stayed in the bath. I wouldn't remember my watch until the next morning, when it was light out. In my memory, it is hours, but that is impossible. The hot water would have run out long before then. My mother wouldn't have been able to tolerate the same position for so long. Or maybe she would have, since she was buoyant in the bath as she wasn't in her bed, her hips floating to the surface like two small, perfect apples. Maybe my memory is correct, and we sat there for hours, my mother's eyes closed against the light, me testing the water, over and over, until my own hands were prunes.

“I'm ready,” she said, at the end of it. She sounded sleepy. She sounded nearly happy.

I crouched over the tub and began to lift her, but it was harder
to handle her wet than dry. I hadn't wanted to drain the bath first, knowing she would be cold.

I dropped her. It happened quickly, as those things do. One second she was half out of the tub, her torso wrapped in a towel; the next second she was splayed on the tile floor, an inhuman keening emerging from deep inside her throat.

I screamed for Idie. I screamed as loud as I could, so loud I could not hear my mother.

Idie was good in a crisis. As soon as I saw her I stopped screaming; then my mother started, furious at Idie's presence, and in pain. Idie examined her quickly, ran her hands down my mother's arms and legs while my mother lay there on the bath mat, the towel barely covering her.

“I'm sorry,” I murmured, over and over again, intercut by Idie's “Hush.”

“Her shoulder,” Idie said, when she was finished. My mother had gone mercifully silent, closed her eyes against the sight of us.

“I don't think it's broken,” she continued. “Wrenched.” I touched her shoulder as lightly as I could, but my mother still flinched. Already there was a bruise blossoming. It seemed impossible: my mother's body was so weak, so spent, how could it possibly have worked up the energy for a bruise?

She submitted to Idie's help: we carried her to the bed, dried her, dressed her, deposited her beneath the covers. We were lit only by the narrow glow of my mother's bedside lamp, for which I was grateful, because this way Idie couldn't see as clearly how ravaged my mother's body had become. But still she must have
seen what had become of my beautiful mother. I felt both protective and ashamed of her.

Yet it was easier, much easier, to handle her with another person. Every time we moved her, even slightly, she whimpered, and I cursed myself for not being more careful. I had never caused my mother's pain before. Before, I had only relieved it in some way—with medicine, a heating pad, a massage. Mostly medicine.

I was near tears, but I did not want Idie to see me cry.

“Do you want me to crush it?” I asked, holding up her pain pill, “or can you swallow it?”

I asked the question a dozen times a day. There were various pills, for various ailments. I kept a chart to keep track of it all, which I had drawn on graph paper from geometry class. I'd taped it by her bedside table, on the side closest to the window, where she would not see it. She would have hated it, something like that taped to the beautiful wall of her beautiful room. She would have thought of the residue the tape would have left when it was removed. Or perhaps she didn't have the energy to hate anymore, to consider things like tape residue. Perhaps it was a salve, to believe that she did.

When my mother answered she would say, “Swallow.” When she did not, I would crush the pill. My mother would not look at me. So I turned from the bed, placed the pill in the bowl of the mortar, and lifted the pestle. When she spoke her voice was clear, as it had not been in a long time.

“Crush me a thousand more. Deliver me from this.”

I glanced at Idie, who stood near my mother's feet, close
enough to help me, far enough away that my mother might not notice her. Her face revealed nothing.

“Stop,” I said. “Stop it.”

“Her.” My mother lifted her chin in Idie's direction. “Tell her to leave.”

I looked down at the applesauce I held in my hand, then up at Idie. I didn't want her to leave, but I needed her to. She nodded, and slipped out the door, closing it softly behind her. I felt a surge of love.

“There,” I said, “it's as if she was never here in the first place.” I spooned the applesauce into my mother's mouth. It felt like I was depositing food into the mouth of a corpse. There was no resistance when the spoon met her lips, no sign that she knew she was being fed except the faint contraction of her throat when she swallowed. I began to cry. I hadn't cried in front of her since I was an infant—maybe the errant tear here or there, but not like this. I felt my shoulders heave. I felt desperate. How long could we do this? I could hurt her again, easily, and it could be worse next time. I wasn't meant for this. I wasn't good at it.

My mother opened her eyes. “It's time,” she said, as if she'd read my mind. She moved her hurt arm, and winced. I knew she was searching for my hand, so I gave it to her. She held it with more strength than she had mustered for weeks. I don't think I'd ever felt as close to her. And perhaps that's why I did what I did: this closeness.

“A dozen,” she said, and nodded to the applesauce, which I held, half-eaten, in my hand. “And I'll go to sleep.”

•   •   •

I
couldn't do it. I took the pills and the mortar and pestle into the bathroom early that morning, while my mother drifted in and out of her endless half sleep. That was as far as I got.

Idie found me at the breakfast room table, a bowl of grits in front of me. I had no appetite. I'd lost ten pounds since my mother had become ill. My clothes slid around my frame, meant for a bigger version of myself. I wondered, as I sat there, the grits congealing into a solid mass, whether I'd gain the weight back after she died, or if I would continue to become smaller and smaller. It seemed possible, that I might disappear. I hardly cared. I didn't know any girls without parents. There were girls with stepparents, though that was rare in those days, even in Houston. But every girl I knew had a mother attached to her, a mother we all knew, and saw; a mother who made sure she did not disappear.

Idie took my grits from me, replaced them with a cup of hot coffee and a cinnamon bun.

“Eat,” Idie said, and I tried. She sat down next to me, with her own cup of coffee. She wanted to say something about last night, I knew. But I was too exhausted to help her say what she needed to say.

“The Lord will take her when it's time,” she said finally, and touched the small gold cross that rested in the hollow of her collarbones, the only jewelry I had ever known Idie to wear. Her voice changed when she spoke of God. Her entire bearing shifted,
into something more serious. I didn't like it. I especially didn't like it now, my mother upstairs, so close to death I had to wet her tongue every hour or it dried up like a sponge.

I nodded. It seemed like the path of least resistance.

But still I could feel Idie watching me. After a moment she spoke.

“Has she asked before?”

I was too exhausted to lie. “Yes,” I said. “She started asking a week ago. Maybe longer. I can't remember.”

I looked up at Idie then, and was surprised to see that she seemed pleased. Then I understood why. I hadn't done anything to help her so far. I was a good girl, in Idie's eyes. I knew right from wrong. She rested her hand on top of mine. It felt good to be touched by a person who wasn't sick.

“It's not for man to interfere with God's work,” she said, and I nodded again, feeling my throat constrict.

“I'm not,” I said. “Interfering,” I continued, in case she didn't know what I meant. “I can't.”