By giving up my life to her on a global basis, I bought small moments away. I could read the books I liked. I could grow the flowers I wished. I could drive to Westmore and stand nude on a platform. Only by thinking I had freedom had I come to understand how imprisoned I was.
“Change!” Haku barked. I could hear in his tone an admonition to work harder on my pose.
A godsend, this one, after the awkwardness of the last. I sat down sideways on the chair, knowing that the students would have to imagine the edge of the tub beneath me. How my ass would be rounder instead of squared off by the seat of the chair. Again, I reached for the hospital gown and used it as a towel. After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Neck always allowed for a quick massaging squeeze or two to my shoulders before I grew still.
I heard a few students grumble about a lack of time. How they wanted the poses to be longer. There was one boy I particularly disliked, even if I knew myself to be uncharitable. When I was introducing myself in the first week and telling them about myself, describing my daughters-where they lived and what they did-the boy had said, “So you’re, like, as old as my mother.” I had answered, because my pride knew no danger, that I was forty-nine. His two-word response, I told my mother, laughing, was “Vomit city.”
“I tried to seduce Alistair Castle once,” she had said to me. I stopped and stared. Early in her eighties, she’d begun to tell me things I’d never known. How she was touched inappropriately by a friend of her father’s. How she had stopped having what she called “relations” with my father after his accident. How she didn’t care much for Emily, though she enjoyed Sarah’s failed audition stories. “Imagine having to audition to be a waitress,” she’d said, loving that in New York a restaurant job could be so competitive it involved callbacks.
With each of these unexpected revelations, I grew numb, an art I had perfected over time in order to extract the truth behind the flashes.
“And how did your seduction go?” I had asked my mother, my head spinning with the pain this must have caused my father if he’d known.
“Vomit city!” my mother responded, looking into the empty fireplace, whose bricks were painted black. “Marlene Dietrich had it right,” she said. “For about ten years, you can glue rubber bands to your head and pull your skin tight, but after that, it’s about hiding out. At least then you have mystique.”
I wanted to tell her that in terms of mystique, she’d won the lottery. From Billy Murdoch to her blanketed escapades, her mystique was bulletproof, even if it was more about being creepy and strange than unattainable.
She looked from the fireplace to me. She assessed. “You should get plastic surgery. I would if I were your age.”
“No, thanks.”
“Faye Dunaway,” she said.
“Tits, Mom,” I said. “If I get anything done, I’m going to get huge monster tits. I’ll serve dinner on them, and you can eat off the right tit and I’ll eat off the left.”
“Helen,” she said, “that’s disgusting.” But I had made her laugh.
I stood to draw the blinds before turning on her PBS shows for the evening. As I lowered the blinds all the way and then went to the television in the opposite corner, my mother landed her spear: “Besides, Manny and I were talking, and we both think it’s your face that needs work. Your body is still fine.”
What I wanted to say was “I’m glad to know Manny wants to fuck my headless body.” Instead I said, “It looks like Wall $treet Week has been preempted by Live at the Boston Pops.”
Days later, the rest of her story came out.
“Hilda Castle was in the hospital, having a hysterectomy,” my mother said. “I offered myself.”
The phrase repelled me.
“You what?”
“I tried to seduce him.”
I was holding the large bath towels I used to mask her way to the car, and she was delaying us as she always did when we had to go to the doctor.
I stood just inside the front door and unfolded the first towel, draping it across her shoulders like a shawl. This was the backup. If, for some reason, the towel that was protecting her head and face should fall, she could quickly grab the shawl towel and replace it.
She peered into my eyes, the algae green of the towel darkening her papery skin.
“Does Sarah fuck?”
I knew enough to ignore her.
“We are late for your date with the machine,” I said. My mother was scheduled for an MRI and was deathly afraid. For weeks beforehand, I had arrived to find her lying on the floor of the living room with a ticking alarm clock by her head. “What are you doing?” I’d ask her. “Practicing,” she’d say.
Going to the doctor was one thing I could not do by proxy for my mother. It was her body they needed to poke and prod, not mine. Twice the man my mother still called “the new doctor,” though he had taken over the office of my parents’ original physician in the 1980s, had encouraged her to try a sedative. It was an attempt to make leaving the house not so excruciating for her. She had nodded her head as if she found this sage advice. I watched her as she creased the dutifully written prescription once down the middle and then continued folding it over and over again. By the time we reached the car to head home again, the prescription would be the size of her thumbnail, even smaller than the notes I remembered finding in Sarah’s room when she was a teenager. “Mindy screwed Owen under the bleachers,” Sarah’s notes said. “Xanax 10 mgs. As needed,” my mother’s said.
As her daughter, I could fill her prescriptions, and though she would not medicate herself, I often popped a pill before I had to wrestle her into the car. I was sanguine about it-if, by taking a sedative, I crashed the car and killed one or both of us, life would be easier as a result.
“Emily must fuck because she’s married,” my mother said, but by the end of the sentence I’d put the towel over her head and muffled the sound. It was actually better if she got onto a topic like this. Her aggression was strength and therefore preferable to the alternative, which was her moaning in fear as I guided her down the front steps and toward the car.
I had done this too many times to worry about what the neighbors thought. I learned from Manny that many of the newer neighbors assumed my mother was a burn victim and that the blankets and towels were meant to hide her scars.
“But she’s a really nice old lady,” he’d said. “I was surprised.”
“Right,” I’d said, and then Manny went down to the basement for some unidentified chore for which I’d have to figure out what to pay him.
“Alistair Castle just stared at me,” my mother said as she sat next to me, under her towels. “He stopped coming around.”
“And Hilda started,” I said.
“He rejected her after the operation. We had that in common.”
“A hysterectomy?”
“No, sexual rejection,” my mother said. She had lifted the towel up just enough to make sure she was heard.
“Got it,” I said.
“Change!” Tanner barked.
I heard the students growing restless. Three poses was usually the max of their attention spans. The adjustment for Woman Washing in Her Bath was minimal. I had to lean farther over and replace the hospital-gown towel with the sea sponge, which I would hold at the back of my neck. My shoulders ached now but in ways I was long familiar with. Quickly, I glanced up to find Dorothy at her easel. She stared intently back at me.
Jake had come from a family that prayed. Emily had taken up the call by covering all bases: New Age spiritualism, Christian revivalism, and an ecumenical inclusiveness that bordered on the sublime.
I thought of my father tending the sheep in a graveyard for a church he had never been in. Churches spooked him, he said. “I prefer it out here, with the dead.”
In the weeks following his suicide, I had freighted that sentence with more meaning than it had most likely deserved. I did this with everything. I remembered the particularly sweet kisses he had laid on the heads of Emily and Sarah in the days before. I was struck by how all his suits were hung perfectly in the closet, with one Jake had complimented freshly dry-cleaned and ready to wear. And I went searching in his workshop for a photo I had found there as a girl.