The End of Eve Read online

  Praise for Ariel Gore

  The End of Eve

  Ariel Gore has blown my mind twice before with her previous books on motherhood and happiness – now she’s stunned me a third time with The End of Eve. This is the story of the world’s most insane, beautiful mother who was supposed to die in one year – but nearly killed her entire family and staff before she was through.

  SUSIE BRIGHT, Author of Mommy’s Little Girl: Susie Bright on Sex, Motherhood, Pornography, and Cherry Pie

  Dorothy Parker famously said “there are no happy endings,” but Ariel Gore’s sweet, tough, elegant account of her mother’s last days is absurdly happy – if happy means inhabiting life in all its mess, distress, beauty, and occasional hilarity. A near-perfect gem.

  KAREN KARBO, author of Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life

  The depth of insight of The End of Eve often took my breath away. Not to mention its drop-dead humor, the sadness, and the rage. Ariel Gore’s memoir is in its essence a how-to book. In the face of death, our grief, how to breathe, how to be brave, how to be funny, how to be authentic. How to make it through. But most of all: tenderness – how Ariel puts human tenderness on the page is an act of poetry damn close to sublime.

  TOM SPANBAUER, author of In The City of Shy Hunters

  Ariel Gore takes some of the heaviest life work – caring for a difficult, terminally ill parent – and somehow through her writing transforms it into a funny, interesting, moving experience. Her work is like origami in that way – capable of changing one solid thing into something entirely different, and beautiful, because of the way she looks at the world. Totally unique, and very inspiring.

  CORIN TUCKER, Sleater-Kinney

  How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead

  One of the snappiest, most useful books a writer for hire is likely to read.

  DAVID PITT, Booklist

  Hip Mama Magazine

  It’s the quality of the writing that sets Hip Mama apart.

  THE NEW YORKER

  Hip Mama is considered one of the best zines out there.

  SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  Fun and irreverent.

  USA TODAY

  Ariel Gore’s transformation from globetrotting teenager to the hippest of mamas reads like a movie script about a Gen-X slacker following her bliss to unlikely success.

  UTNE READER

  Atlas of the Human Heart

  Oregon Book Award finalist

  Gore’s adventures make absorbing reading.

  BETH LEISTENSNIDER, Booklist

  A terrific and important book. Ariel Gore rips through the cultural wasteland of the 1980s with fierce desire and female angst, taking us on a wild ride. Impossible to put down.

  CORIN TUCKER, Sleater-Kinney

  Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness

  Thoughtful, funny, and inspiring, Gore is a down-to-earth guide to the elusive human quest for happiness.

  JUNE SAWYERS, Booklist

  Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City

  As rough-hewn and gorgeous as the city that inspired it, this anthology breaks queer ground as it shows us that everywhere is Portland but Portland is its own special place, home to queers seeking and finding home, from the city itself to each others arms.

  DAPHNE GOTTLIEB, author of Kissing Dead Girls

  The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show

  Booksense pick

  This novel is a miracle – deliciously subversive and deeply spiritual.

  GAYLE BRANDEIS, author of Fruitflesh and The Book of Dead Birds

  An affecting tale about the search for home, connection, and authenticity.

  CHRISTOPHER CASTELLANI, author of The Saint of Lost Things

  Piercing and insightful, Gore’s first novel limns one woman’s complicated relationship with her religion and her personal faith.

  KRISTINE HUNTLEY, Booklist

  With a dash of mysticism mixed with the underground freak show scene, Ariel Gore creates a fascinating, inventive, and modern odyssey.

  BETH LISICK, author of Everybody in the Pool

  Punctuating the narrative with stories of the saints, Gore depicts Frankka’s religious reawakening with both irreverence and respect for tradition and faith.

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  A bold and imaginative story.

  MICHELLE TEA, author of Rose of No Man’s Land

  Breeder: Real Life Stories from the New Generation of Mothers

  Forget books that drone on about what is considered ‘normal.’ Scrap guides and articles that tell you how it’s done...

  SPIKE GILLESPIE, author of All the Wrong Men and One Perfect Boy: A Memoir

  The women who gathered in my mother’s kitchen when I was a child weren’t free. The women whose voices are gathered in this remarkable collection are – and that’s a difference worth celebrating and a development that must be documented.

  DAN SAVAGE, author of American Savage

  Copyright ©2014 Ariel Gore

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gore, Ariel, 1970–

  The End of Eve/Ariel Gore.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-9893604-1-8

  1. Parent and adult child.

  2. Mothers and daughters.

  3. Aging parents.

  4. Mothers – Death – Psychological aspects.

  I. Title.

  HQ755.86.G67 2014

  306.874–DC23

  2013017604

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts

  2201 Northeast 23rd Avenue

  3rd Floor

  Portland, Oregon 97212

  hawthornebooks.com

  Form:

  Adam McIsaac/Sibley House

  Set in Paperback

  CONTENTS

  Book One: Hobo Birds

  1. All About Eve

  2. Pele, Have Mercy

  3. Agendas

  4. I My Garden

  5. Mother as Metaphor

  6. San Quentin

  7. Clowns and Caregivers

  Book Two: Cities of the Interior

  8. Water in the Desert

  9. What If I Lived Here?

  10. Conquest

  11. Trends in Bleeding and Dying

  12. Curses

  13. Lung Cancer Noir

  14. The Water’s Edge

  15. Bell, Book and Candle

  16. The Smell of Death

  Book Three: Underground

  17. Blindfold

  18. A Place to Hide

  19. The Fires

  20. Mime Wave

  21. You Can’t Afford to Look Cheap

  22. The Winged House

  23. If My Lungs Were Wings

  24. The Mine Shaft Tavern

  Book Four: The Feasts of Baba Yaga

  25. Marked Women

  26. What We All Call Love

  27. Pirates are Beautiful

  28. Pot Stickers at Yummy Café

  29. Light and Other Scattered Words

  30. Poodles and All

  31. My Mother’s Memoir

  32. Seven Swords

  33. The Heart Sutra

  34. Moveable Feasts

  35. Kitchen World

  36. Ink and Story

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY ARIEL GORE

  Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness

  Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City
/>   How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead

  The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show

  Whatever, Mom: Hip Mama’s Guide to Raising a Teenager

  Atlas of the Human Heart

  Breeder: Real Life Stories from the New Generation of Mothers

  The Mother Trip: Hip Mama’s Guide to Staying Sane in the Chaos of Motherhood

  The Hip Mama Survival Guide

  Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

  RAINER MARIA RILKE

  THE END OF EVE

  SOMETIMES I STILL DREAM MY MOTHER ALIVE. SHE startles me awake. Have I left a dirty dish in the sink? Written some offensive story?

  In the dream, she steps out of a glass elevator into a crowded market. I’m not afraid of her, exactly. She’s already seen me, anyway. So I just hover still like a hummingbird.

  She points to her chest as she approaches me. Her skin is translucent like the thin skin of a water blister.

  I can see her heart and lungs through that skin. I can see everything.

  She squints at me. “Touch it, Ariel.”

  But I don’t want to touch it. I know better than to touch it. If I touch it, the skin will break and it’ll all come gushing out. If I touch it, I’ll die soon, too. “I can’t,” I tell her.

  She kind of scoffs at that. She says, “You were always a coward, Ariel.”

  But she’s lying about that part.

  I was a lot of things – loyal and drunk and optimistic; full of demons and stories – but I was never a coward.

  All of this scared me. But I didn’t run.

  I’ll tell you the story.

  Book One

  Hobo Birds

  1.

  All About Eve

  I MUST HAVE BEEN TEN YEARS OLD WHEN MY MOTHER took me to see Mommie Dearest and then bragged to her friends that I’d laughed through the wire hanger scene.

  She riffed on the joke at home, applying that thick white facial mask and bursting into the dark of my bedroom with the wire hanger as I slept. I’d wake terrified, her slim figure a silhouette above me, the hanger in her fist poised to come down on me. But even in interrupted half-sleep I knew my cue: I laughed. And then she wouldn’t hit me.

  Retelling it now it sounds so twisted, but at the time it seemed as natural as anything – fried bananas for breakfast or a flasher on the corner, all the unjudged sequences of childhood.

  Where to start?

  In the beginning that comes to mind, I’m grown. Thirty-nine years old. A homeowner and an unmarried wife. One kid in college and another in the crib.

  Start anywhere, Ariel.

  It was an ordinary day, after all. Maybe 2, p.m.

  MY MOTHER STOOD on my doorstep wearing a coral sweater and coral lipstick. Her hair was white now, but she was still striking in that Hollywood kind of away. Tiny and dark, she looked like a cross between Joan Baez and Susan Lucci from All My Children. Beautiful. That’s the first thing people noticed about her. “Your mother is beautiful,” they’d say. Like I didn’t know.

  I sat on my couch working on my laptop. I waved her inside. “That sweater looks good on you,” I said.

  “Thanks.” She stepped over the threshold into my living room. “It was Gammie’s. The sweater.” She sat down in the leopard-print armchair. “This chair looks good in here.”

  The chair was Gammie’s, too. Our dead matriarch. Our small inheritances.

  I clicked the keys on my computer. My important work. I wanted to appear distracted so my mother wouldn’t engage me in some conversation I didn’t have time for. I had to finish a blog for Psychology Today. I had to post a few story critiques in the online class I was teaching. I had to pick my son up from preschool in an hour. My mother was just stopping by to get the youthful skin serum made from sake and lamb placenta that she’d ordered on the internet, wasn’t she? What did she need to talk about?

  She cleared her throat. “I guess I should tell you. I didn’t get what I wanted.”

  I glanced up at her. I knew she wanted an exposed-brick condo downtown. I shrugged. “There’ll be another condo.” Portland was sprouting new condos like goat grass.

  My mother didn’t say anything.

  I felt something like a chill in my hand. I hadn’t had a cigarette in three years, but now I wanted one. I stopped typing, looked up at her.

  Sitting there in my Gammie’s old chair, my mother seemed so small. She didn’t smile or frown. “It’s cancer,” she said.

  “What?” It was like I’d heard the syllables, but didn’t know their meaning.

  “It’s lung cancer.” Her words floated into the air between us like dandelion seeds, just hung there.

  “What?”

  I’d seen the scans at the hospital two weeks earlier, the little Christmas lights that filled my mother’s rib cage. The pulmonologist wore red shoes. He pointed to those Christmas lights, said he was worried. But she’d never been a smoker. There were still so many different things it could be.

  “I have lung cancer,” my mother said again.

  I moved the computer from my lap, sat up straight. “Shit. All right. What do we do?”

  “Nothing.” She fiddled with the gold band on her ring finger. “It’s too late for chemo.”

  I remembered summer mornings when I was a kid, sneaking away from the violence of our home to make daisy chains in the park down the street; I remembered that just then for no reason.

  “What do you mean we do nothing?”

  “Stage four,” she said. “I’ll be dead in a year.” She reached into her purse, grabbed her coral lipstick, and re-applied. She licked her teeth. “I’ll go home now,” she said. Home to the studio apartment I’d just rented for her next to the pawn shop on 82nd Avenue.

  “Oh, stay for dinner,” I tried.

  “No.” My mother pushed herself up out of my grandmother’s chair. “I don’t want to drive back in the dark.”

  MY MOTHER HAD finally rented a car after all three major cab companies in Portland banned her. I couldn’t even get a taxi to the airport these days when I called from my landline. They associated my number with her. “Eve,” the operators would insist. “We know it’s you.”

  “They have ego problems” is all she’d say about the cab drivers and the dispatchers when I asked how she’d managed to offend them. “Unbelievable ego problems.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I have to go pick up Maxito. Sol should be home by six. We’ll bring dinner to your place?”

  My mother nodded. “All right. But it’s got to be organic.”

  “Of course.”

  She stood up, moved for the door, then turned back to me. “Don’t tell your sister about this,” she said. “She’s channeling Pele on the Big Island. We don’t want to ruin her retreat.”

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  And my mother was gone.

  PELE? MAYBE I should have been channeling Pele.

  Instead my girlfriend, Sol, and I had been taking care of my mother for three years. She’d come to Portland for a hip replacement, second hip replacement, minor stroke and too-long recovery. It all started after my stepdad died. The California newspapers called his death in Mexico a suicide: Local Excommunicated Catholic Priest Takes Own Life. It was almost as good as the headlines of my childhood: Local Priest Defrocked by Temptress Named Eve. But it wasn’t suicide. Not exactly. Either my mother killed him or they were in on it together. He wasn’t young. Eighty nine to my mother’s sixty four. Maybe he was sick. My mother had always talked about “mercy killing” when people had terminal illnesses. But in his last email, my stepdad said “God bless Dr. Kevorkian.”

  Precisely how it ended is one of the things we don’t get to know.

  “You can’t ever know what happens between people,” my first journalism teacher used to say. Her words stunned me even though I knew she was right.

  She was incredibly sexy, that professor, with her square-rimmed glasses. And I had a pro
blem with transference. I hung on her sultry morning words and here she was dashing all hope for certainty.

  Never mind that the idea that truth was discoverable had been one of the things that drew me to journalism – over, say, poetry or women’s studies.

  You can’t ever know what happens between people. That’s what she said. So, there I had it.

  Either my mom killed my stepdad or they were in on it together and who cares anyway because here now my mother was sick and she was going to need someone to take care of her. And here we were. Too late for chemo.

  I’D NEVER GIVEN much brain-space to the idea that my mother would die in her 60s or even her 70s. My Gammie had just died a month earlier at 91.

  Does death always arrive first as an ideal?

  My first big death was a childhood friend. She’d had cancer for a few years, done it all: amputation and remission, chemo and visualization, macrobiotics and metastasis. It hadn’t been too late for anything. Surely my friend would survive. She called me a few days before she died to warn me. “I’m trying to stay focused on a picture of me healthy at the beach in Hawaii, but sometimes I just get an image of myself cold and gray in my coffin.”

  An image is an idea.

  We were twelve years old.

  THAT EVENING IN Portland after I got the idea that my mother would die didn’t feel very different from any other evening in Portland. It was raining.

  I picked Maxito up from preschool and he recounted his day to me in his toddler-Spanglish and “no me gusta take a tubby.”

  When Sol came home and let the door slam behind her I jumped, just a little, not sure if she was angry about something at work or if I’d left the porch muddy.

  My mother called and said never mind dinner, she wanted to watch a Bette Davis movie alone.

  Sol and Maxito and I ate rice and black beans at our little round kitchen table and Maxito flung the beans at the wall and said “too spicy,” but he ate a few spoonsful of rice before he climbed out of his chair and toddled away from the table.

  Sol rolled a joint. Sol. She was strong and pretty with sparkling eyes that seemed almost magic until she’d confessed that those golden flecks were actually citric acid burns because someone back in the Dominican Republic when she was a kid told her that lime juice would turn her brown eyes blue. I still thought her eyes were magical, but now they reminded me of the meanness in people, too.