Temple’s hands shake, her tea spills over the splintered boards of the porch. Leaning forward makes her face go a deeper red. “Doctors, like lawyers you know, they don’t hurry.
“I thought it would be a while, weeks maybe, even months. But Lord, years! I never thought they’d take years, and then tell me nothing. Just the lupus, ’cause of the spots and the strangling. Lupus like with Claire or that cousin I don’t know that I really believe ever existed. But hell, they didn’t really know what killed him. Lupus kills slow, and Robert died fast.
“Sometimes, sometimes, I dream sometimes, oh God!” Temple rocks her head back and forth, casts a glance at her daughters and looks quickly away, speaking in a whisper that does not carry to where they sit. “I dream sometimes I lead the children out in front of a big old semi, a row of hearses following easy as you please, all their daddies nodding at me as they’re mowed down!”
She shakes her head, shakes her shoulders, her whole torso following, the pink in her cheeks going brighter than sunburn.
“But, sometimes, too, I dream I am alone, walking through Greenville as it burns, the sparks coming down on my neck but nothing burning me. No one sees me. They come out and throw water and yell. I just walk through and grin. Imagine the kind of woman I am to take pleasure in that kind of thing!”
Imagine the kind of woman she is, Temple on her porch with the paint flaking down. Temple with her hands still on her knees, ridged and knobby, the veins blue-purple and high. Her face a permanent red-tan flush. Her daughters going in and out, slowly, carefully, the deadly warts on the pale skin of their necks and calves burning her eyes.
Imagine what kind of a woman sits still, safe in her own mind, slow as myrtle leaves turning. Sugar thickening the blood in her veins, pressure pinking her skin. Wanting nothing more than new plumbing and her daughters’ slow movement forward, alive. Some man to come along now and then, never quite as real as the man who lives behind her eyes.
Temple writes me once a year, a letter that lists who’s died, who’s been born, a letter that ends with a reminder of who she is. She is my favorite cousin, after me the most remarkable, the one who lived with us the year I was seven, the year Mama almost died, the year she first had cancer and I fell in love with the very idea of redheaded women.
“Do you hear from Temple?” Mama always asks me. “She say anything about the girls? Heard from Dot that Maryat was planning on getting married and Claire wasn’t doing very well at all.”
Every year I do not go home, it hurts me. I think of Temple, the year I was seven and she was eighteen; the year I was eleven and she lost her lover; the year she lost her teeth and her baby girl; the years I realized she would never be mine.
“Do you hear from Temple?” my mama, my cousins, my aunts always ask. I am the one she writes to, and if I have not heard from her then no one has. Sometimes I do not answer, I fall into Temple’s white-eyed memories, the silence of her flushed cheeks, her thin face and hot eyes. The wolf in my neck bares his teeth, stretches, lays one paw on the other, dreaming of fire and sparks raining down, myrtle leaves blackening in the heat.
I fight the wolf, fight him with my love for Temple. I hug to myself the warmth and stillness of her porch, the certainty that she does not fear the wolf as I do, the wolf in her, the wolf who hides his teeth but watches, watches out of her eyes.
Notes: Lupus: Any of various skin diseases; especially a chronic tuberculosis disease of the skin or mucous membranes; a particularly dangerous disease of metabolic origin—incurable but sometimes controlled by steroid drugs—which exhausts the energies of its victims and necessitates an extremely careful restricted life.
Lupus: A wolf, from “eating into the substance of”; cancer.
Compassion
In the last days Mama’s mouth cracked and bled. Pearly blisters spread down her chin to her throat. The nurses moved her to a room with a sink by the bed and a stern command to wash up every time you touched her.
“Herpes,” Mavis, the floor nurse, told me. “Contagious at this stage.”
I held Mama’s free hand anyway, stepping away every time the doctor came in to wash with the soap the hospital provided. Mavis let me have a bottle of her own lotion when my fingers began to dry and the skin along my thumbs split.
“Aloe vera and olive oil,” she told me. “Use it on your mama, too.”
I took the bottle over to rub it into the paper-thin skin on the backs of Mama’s hands. She barely seemed to notice, though a couple of her veins had leaked enough to make swollen, blue-black blotches. Mama’s eyes tracked past me and even as I rubbed one hand, the fingers of the other reached for the morphine pump. That drip, that precious drip. Mama no longer hissed and gasped with every breath. Now she murmured and whispered, sang a little, even said recognizable names sometimes—my sisters, her sisters, and people long dead. Every once in a while, her voice would startle, the words suddenly clear and outraged. “Goddamn!” loud in the room. Then, “Get me a cigarette, get me a cigarette,” as she came awake. Angry and begging at the same time, she cursed, “Goddamn it, just one,” before the morphine swept in and took her down again.
That was not our mama. Our mama never begged, never backed up, never whined, moaned, and thrashed in her sheets. My sister Jo and I stared at her. This mama was eating us alive. Every time she started it again, that litany of curses and pleas, I hunkered down further in my seat. Jo rocked in her chair, arms hugging her shoulders and head down. Arlene, the youngest of us, had wrung her hands and wiped her eyes, and finally, deciding she was no use, headed on home. Jo and I had stayed, unspeaking, miserable, and desperate.
On the third night after they gave her the pump, Mama hit some limit the nurses seemed determined to ignore. Her thumb beat time, but the pump lagged behind and the curses returned. The pleas became so heartbroken I expected the paint to start peeling off the walls. The curses became mewling growls. Finally, Jo gave me a sharp look and we stood up as one. She went over to try to force the window open, pounding the window frame till it came loose. I dug around in Jo’s purse, found her Marlboros, lit one, and held it to Mama’s lips. Jo went and stood guard at the door.
Mama coughed, sucked, and smiled gratefully. “Baby,” she whispered. “Baby,” and fell asleep with ashes on her neck.
Jo walked over and took the cigarette I still held. “Stupid damn rules,” she said bitterly.
Mavis came in then, sniffed loudly, and shook her head at us. “You know you can’t do that.”
“Do what?” Jo had disappeared the smoke as if it had never been.
Mavis crossed her arms. Jo shrugged and leaned over to pull the thin blanket further up Mama’s bruised shoulders. In her sleep Mama said softly, “Please.” Then in a murmur so soft it could have been a blessing, “Goddamn, goddamn.”
I reached past Jo and took Mama’s free hand in mine. “It’s OK. It’s OK,” I said. Mama’s face smoothed. Her mouth went soft, but her fingers in mine clutched tightly.
“That window isn’t supposed to be open,” Mavis said suddenly. “You get it shut.”
Jo and I just looked at her.
Mama’s first diagnosis came when I was seventeen. Back then, I couldn’t even say the word, “cancer.” Mama said it and so did Jo, but I did not. “This thing,” I said. “This damn thing.” Twenty-five years later, I still called it that, though there was not much else I hesitated to say. That was my role. I did the talking and carried all the insurance records. Jack blinked. Jo argued. Arlene showed up late, got a sick headache, and left. In the early years it was Jack who argued and that just made things harder. Now he never said much at all. For that I was deeply grateful. It let us seem like all the other families in the hospital corridors—only occasionally louder and a little more careful of each other than anyone at MacArthur Hospital could understand.
“Who do they think we are?” Jo asked me once.
“They don’t care who we are.” What I did not say is that was right. Mama was the one the medical
folk were supposed to watch. The rest of us were incidental, annoying, and, whenever possible, meant to be ignored.
“I like your mama,” Mavis told me the first week Mama was on the ward. “But your daddy makes me nervous.”
“It’s a talent he has,” I said.
“Uh huh.” Mavis looked a little confused, but I didn’t want to explain.
The fact is he never hit her. In the thirty years since they married, Jack never once laid a hand on her. His trick was to threaten. He screamed and cursed and cried into his fists. He would come right up on Mama, close enough to spray spittle on her cheeks. Pounding his hands together, he would shout, “Motherfuckers, ass-holes, sonsabitches.” All the while, Mama’s face remained expressionless. Her eyes stared right back into his. Only her hands trembled, the yellow-stained fingertips vibrating incessantly.
Gently, I covered the bruises on Mama’s arm with my fingers. Jo scowled and turned away.
“They should be here.”
“Better they’re not.”
Jo shoved until the window was again closed. When she turned back to me, her face was the mask Mama wore most of our childhood. She gestured at Mama’s bruises. “Look at that. You see what he did.”
“He didn’t mean to,” I said.
“Didn’t mean to? Didn’t care. Didn’t notice. Man’s the same he always was.”
“He never hit her.”
“He never had to hit her. She beat herself up enough. And every time the son of a bitch hit us, he was hitting her. He beat us like we were dogs. He treated her like her ass was gold. And she always talked about leaving him, you know. She never did, did she?”
“What do you want?”
“I want somebody to do something.” Jo slammed her fist into the window frame. “I want somebody to finally goddamn do something.”
I shook my head, gently stroking Mama’s cool clammy skin. There was nothing I could say to Jo. We always wanted somebody to do something and no one ever did, but what had we ever asked anyone to do? I watched Jo rub her neck and thought about the pins that held her elbow and shoulder together. There was my shattered coccyx and broken collarbones, and Arlene’s insomnia. At thirty, Arlene had a little girl’s shadowed frightened face and the omnipresent stink of whiskey on her skin. I had been eight when Mama married Jack, Jo five, but Arlene had been still a baby, less than a year old and fragile as a sparrow in the air.
“What is it you want to do? Talk? Huh?” Jo rolled her shoulders back and rubbed her upper arms. “Want to talk about what a tower of strength Mama was? Or why she had to be?”
My shrug was automatic, inconsequential.
A flush spread up from Jo’s cleavage. It made the skin of her neck look rough and pebbly. Deep lines scored the corners of her eyes and curved back from her mouth. In the last few years, Jo had become scary thin. The skin that always pulled tight on her bones seemed to have grown loose. Now it wrinkled and hung. I looked away, surprised and angry. Neither of us had expected to live long enough to get old.
For all that we fight, Jo is the one I get along with, and I always try to stay with her when I visit. Arlene and I barely speak, though we talk to each other more easily than she and Jo. There have been years I don’t think the two of them have spoken half a dozen words. In the ten weeks since Mama’s collapse, their conversations have been hurt-filled bursts of whispered recrimination. At first, I stayed with Arlene and that seemed to help, but when Jo and I insisted that Mama had to check in to MacArthur, Arlene blew up and told me to go ahead and move over to Jo’s place.
“You and Jo—you think you know it all,” Arlene said when she was dropping me off at Jo’s. “But she’s my mama too, and I know something. I know she’s not ready to give up and die.”
“We’re not giving up. We’re putting Mama where she can get the best care.”
“Two miles from Jo’s place and forty from mine.” Arlene had shaken her head. “All the way across town from Jack and her stuff. I know what you are doing.”
“Arlene . . .”
“Don’t. Just don’t.” She popped the clutch on her VW bug and backed up before I could get the door closed. “Someday you’re gonna be sorry. That’s the one thing I am sure of, you’re gonna be sorry for all you’ve done.” She swung the car sharply to the side, making the door swing shut. If it would have helped, I would have told her I was sorry already.
Jo put me in the room where her daughter, Pammy, stashes all the gear she will not let Jo give away or destroy—shelves of books, racks of dusty music tapes, and mounted posters on the wall over the daybed. I fell asleep under posters of prepubescent boy bands and woke up dry-mouthed and headachy.
Jo laughed when I asked about the bands. “Don’t ask me,” she said. “Some maudlin shit no one could dance to—whey-faced girls and anorexic boys. All of it sounds alike, whiny voices all scratchy and droning. Girl has no ear, no ear at all.”
Pammy had been picking out chords on the old piano Jo took in trade for her wrecked Chevy. She spoke without looking up. “You know what Mama does?” she asked in her peculiar Florida twang. “Mama sits up late smoking dope and listening to Black Sabbath on the headphones. Acts like she’s seventeen and nothing’s changed in the world at all.”
Jo snorted, though I saw the quick grin she suppressed. She kicked her boot heels together, knocking dried mud on the Astroturf carpet. That carpet was her prize. She’d had her boyfriend Jaybird install it throughout the house. “She’s eleven now,” she said, nodding in Pammy’s direction. “What you think? Should I shoot her or just cut my own throat?”
I shook my head, looking back and forth from one of them to the other. They were so alike it startled me, thick brown hair, black eyes, and the exact same way of sneering so that the right side of the mouth drew up and back.
“Hang on,” I told Jo. “She gets to be thirty or so, you might like her.”
“Ha!” Jo slapped her hands together. “If I live that long.”
Pammy banged the piano closed and swept out of the room. My sister and I grinned at each other. Pammy we both believed would redeem us all. The child was fearless.
“We need to talk,” I told Arlene when she came to the hospital the day after I moved in with Jo. Arlene was standing just inside the smoking lounge off the side of the cafeteria, waiting for Jack to arrive.
“She’s looking better, don’t you think?” Arlene popped a Tic Tac in her mouth.
“No, she an’t.” I tried to catch Arlene’s hand, but she hugged her elbows in tight and just looked at me. “Arlene, she’s not going to get any better. She’s going to get worse. If the tumor on her lung doesn’t kill her, then the ones in her head will.”
Arlene’s pale face darkened. When she spoke her words all ran together. “They don’t know what that stuff was. That could have been dust in the machine. I read about this case where that was what happened—dust and fingerprints on X-rays.” She tore at a pack of Salems, ripping one cigarette in half before she could get another out intact.
“God, Arlene.”
“Don’t start.”
“Look, we have to make some decisions.” I was thinking if I could speak quietly enough, Arlene would hear what I was saying.
“We have to take care of Mama, not talk about stuff that’s going to get in the way of that.” Arlene’s voice was as loud as mine had been soft. “Mama needs our support, not you going on about death and doom.”
Sympathetic magic, Jaybird called it. Arlene believed in the power of positive thinking the way some people believed in saints’ medals or a Santeria’s sacrificed chicken. Stopping us talking about dying was the thing she believed she was supposed to do.
I dropped into one of the plastic chairs. Arlene’s head kept jerking restlessly, but she managed not to look into my face. This is how she always behaved. “Mama’s gonna beat this thing,” she’d announced when I had first come home, as if saying it firmly enough would make it so. She was the reason Mama had gone to MacArthur in the first place
. Jo and I had wanted the hospice that Mama’s oncologist had recommended. But Arlene had refused to discuss the hospice or to look at the results of the brain scan. Those little starbursts scattered over Mama’s cranium were not something Arlene could acknowledge.
“We could keep Mama at home,” she’d told the hospital chaplain. “We could all move back home and take care of her till she’s better.”
“Lord God!” I had imagined Jo’s response to that. “Move back home? Has she gone completely damn crazy?”
The chaplain told Arlene that some people did indeed take care of family at home, and if that was what she wanted, he would help her. I had watched Arlene’s face as he spoke, the struggle that moved across her flattened features. “It might not work,” she had said. She had looked at me once, then dropped her head. “She might need more care than we could give, all of us working you know.” She had dropped her face into her hands.
I signed off on the bills where the insurance didn’t apply. For the rental on a wheelchair and a television, I used a credit card. Jo laughed at me when she saw them.
“You are a pure fool,” she said. “Send back the wheelchair, but let’s keep the TV. It’ll give us something to watch when Arlene starts going on about how good Mama’s doing.”
Mama had had three years of pretty good health before this last illness. It was a remission that we almost convinced ourselves was a cure. The only thing she complained about was the ulcer that kept her from ever really putting back on any weight. Then, when she was in seeing the doctor about the ulcer, he had put his hand on her neck and palpated a lump the two of them could feel.