The End of Eve Read online

  Who would tell that to a child?

  She lit her joint, offered it to me like she always did and I refused it like I always did. The olive skin of her arm was half-covered in tattoos of spiders and saints.

  I knocked back a beer. A couple of beers.

  AS I NURSED Maxito in the moonlit dark of our bedroom that night, I whispered to Sol, “What are we going to do?”

  She sighed the way you sigh when bad things feel inevitable. “I read the Merck manual online at work today,” she said. She ran a sliding-scale community veterinary clinic between our house and the bar I frequented. “Your mom isn’t going to live a year. She has maybe two months if she doesn’t treat it. Six months maximum. Stage four lung cancer is no joke.”

  I stared at the giant painting on our bedroom wall. Three hobo birds gathered around a pot of stew over a campfire.

  Maxito had fallen asleep nursing. He released my nipple from his mouth-grip as his breath changed. I waited a few moments to be sure he wouldn’t wake, then carried him to the crib in the little room that used to be my office.

  “Ariel?” Sol whispered when I crawled back under the flowered quilt.

  “Uh huh?”

  “I don’t think I have the mortgage money this month.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Sol turned over, curled her back to me as she fell asleep.

  My hobo birds in the moonlight.

  WHEN SOL STARTED to snore, I tiptoed out into the kitchen, poured myself a little mason jar of whiskey, lit a seven-day candle on my altar. I settled onto the red couch in the living room, pretended the glow from my laptop screen had a warmth to it – like some woodstove in some little cabin.

  I knew I had to call my daughter, Maia, in Los Angeles. I knew I had to call my sister, Leslie, even if my mother didn’t want me to. But they could both wait until morning. I clicked to Facebook, saw my old friend Teagan online. Maybe Teagan could find the pony in all this.

  ME:

  What am I going to do? Sol isn’t like a partner, she’s the roommate from hell who doesn’t even pay the rent. And now my mom is dying.

  TEAGAN:

  Are we allowed to joke about lesbian bed death?

  ME:

  No. And don’t try to tell me it doesn’t happen to straight people. When they stop having sex they just call it “marriage.”

  TEAGAN:

  LOL. First you get U-Hauled and now this. What’s up with your mom?

  ME:

  Stage IV lung cancer. They told her she has a year.

  TEAGAN:

  I’m sorry to hear that. But, you now, if it’s any comfort, your mom won’t be dead in a year.

  ME:

  How do you figure?

  TEAGAN:

  I’ve met your mom. She’s a narcissist. Narcissists take a long time to die.

  ME:

  You’re funny.

  TEAGAN:

  I’m serious.

  ME:

  What do I do?

  TEAGAN:

  Do you remember when we were in our early 20s and I got pregnant and you already had Maia? Do you remember your advice?

  ME:

  No.

  TEAGAN:

  You told me not to think on it too hard. You said everything is freedom and everything is loneliness. You said there’s no regret and there’s no sacrifice. You said make your choice and let the rest fall away.

  ME:

  That’s your advice to me now?

  TEAGAN:

  Yep. Everything is freedom and everything is loneliness. Make your choice and let the rest fall away.

  ME:

  Maybe I should get that tattooed on my wrist.

  TEAGAN:

  You should. You haven’t posted a new tattoo on Facebook in months. Anyway, look, I’m tired and overmedicated. Talk to you soon?

  SHE FLICKERED OFFLINE before I could answer. I poured myself another jar of whiskey, took a too-big sip and held it in my throat to savor the sting and heat of it. Even with my glasses on, the walls of my living room started to recede into that familiar blur. I must have fallen asleep, but I didn’t dream.

  AT DAWN I crawled back into bed next to Sol, drifted in and out as I listened to her breath. Visions of my mother getting sicker floated across my dreamspace. Visions of my mother in a hospital bed in the little room that used to be my office. Visions of my mother getting thinner.

  How am I going to take care of her?

  For three years of doctors’ appointments and physical therapists and assisted care facilities, the light at the end of the tunnel had always been that she was going to get better and go home to her house in southern Mexico and get old like a normal person.

  Now maybe the only light was death.

  My house felt too small for all of us.

  The sound of morning rain.

  Anywhere else in the world I loved that sound – cleansing and life-giving – but in Portland that incessant noise was just irritating. Like needles hitting tin.

  How am I going to take care of her?

  Sol woke mumbling “Oh, Bipa...”

  Bipa. The master mime from the circus Sol had performed with when she was in her 20s. It still bothered me when Sol woke with that name on her lips. I’d found a half-dozen love notes to that woman over the years. They’d flutter out from between Neruda pages: Dearest Bipa, Beautiful and Silent Bipa, My Soul Mate Bipa ... You’d think I’d have gotten used to it by now, gotten used to Bipa, but Sol’s whispered longings still made me feel nauseous and jaded. Still inspired me to put my boots on and walk the two blocks to the Twilight Room, to slip into a vinyl booth and order a double shot of Big Bottom with a beer back. But it was too early for whiskey now.

  I crept into Maxito’s room, watched him in his crib as he slept, watched the rise and fall of his chest.

  I missed Maia living at home. Some mornings even when she was a teenager I’d poke my head into her basement room, listen for the sound of her breath to tell me she was still alive.

  Watching Maxito now, I felt that sudden sadness when you know you can only promise your children suffering. I tried to shake it off. Maia was doing fine in college in Los Angeles. Maxito seemed happy enough. Who was I to project my existential depression onto them? Every day we were still breathing somehow, even when breath seemed like such a fragile thing.

  Pull yourself together, Ariel.

  In the kitchen, I set the yellow kettle on the flame to boil. “Oh, Bipa.” I said it under my breath and all overdramatic like I could make it sound too stupid to matter. “I love you, Bipa.” I mean, seriously? A mime?

  Maybe all I needed was some strong black coffee.

  2.

  Pele, Have Mercy

  “DUDE, IT’S THE CRACK OF DAWN HERE.” MY SISTER’S sleepy voice on the phone gave me a sudden unexpected hope. Like rose petals in the rain. Like maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all. It was just cancer. Families handled this kind of thing all the time. The two of us would think of something. Maybe we’d even bond over it.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I forgot the time difference.” I sat on the front steps of my house, watching the overcast autumn morning. Two months earlier I would have called my Gammie for advice. Two years earlier I would have called my stepdad. Death was relentless, but I still had my sister.

  If we’re mostly water, DNA, and memory, then a sister is something. We shared the same blood – the same biological parents, anyway. We’d grown up in the same old house with the same mother and the same stepdad and the same brown rice and apple juice potluck dinners. We’d stood side by side against the same wall when we were in trouble for a B on a report card or a stain on a flowered rug; we’d waited there for our mother to bash our heads together or into the plaster wall.

  Yes, if anyone could understand the exact nature of my ambivalence, it would be my sister.

  “How’s the retreat going?”

  “It’s all right,” Leslie sighed. “I’m in this little hotel near the volcano. Palm trees.
What’s up?”

  I felt like a jerk calling my sister before my mother wanted me to, but it seemed weird to keep the secret. “It’s bad,” I started. I took a breath and counted to three, but when I finally blurted it all, about the lung cancer and the year to live, Leslie didn’t seem surprised.

  “That explains the dead birds in my dreams,” she said.

  I heard the flick of her lighter and all at once remembered my loneliness. My sister’s ambivalence had always been a different color than mine.

  “I totally dreamed this,” she said. I could hear her sucking on her cigarette. “Anyway, don’t worry about it.”

  An androgynous Portland hipster biked past my house, balanced a huge cup of coffee between a free hand and the handlebars.

  “I am worried,” I squeaked. “I’m the one who has to take care of her.”

  Leslie cigarette-exhaled into the phone. “You don’t have to do anything. Anyway Mom won’t get sick. She’ll take herself out.”

  A few cars passed. Fat raindrops started to fall. One of my cats purred against my leg.

  “Listen,” my sister said. “I’ve been doing this spiritual work here on the Big Island and I’ve been in contact with one of our unknown ancestors. It’s a Cherokee woman who was raped and murdered and beheaded. I’m just now realizing that this woman is the reason we don’t trust men. She’s the reason there are hardly any men in our family.”

  I nodded like my sister could see me. I didn’t think of myself as someone who didn’t trust men, but I wasn’t going to argue. “That sounds about right,” I mumbled.

  Maxito tapped on the window behind me, giggled as he pressed his nose against the glass and made it fog with his breath.

  The sight of him made my tits swell with milk.

  “Well anyway, listen,” I said. “Maxito’s up. I gotta go. Talk to you soon?”

  I heard my sister’s lighter flick again. “I’m flying home in a couple of days,” she said. “Talk then?”

  I clicked the phone off, tapped the windowpane in front of Maxito’s face. “Morning, baby.”

  I craved salted chocolate, craved so many things right then, but settled for nursing my toddler on our soft red couch. I could hear Sol in the kitchen steaming coconut milk for my second cup of coffee and I felt like such a brat. I wondered if this was a pattern for me – this always craving something I didn’t have. People’s mothers got cancer all the time. People without sisters or money or health insurance or sex lives or salted chocolate. They didn’t whine about it. Women all over the world were caregivers even if they were breadwinners, too. They dealt with it.

  I balanced Maxito on my knee as I nursed him, reached for the Sharpie pen on the coffee table in front of me, wrote on the inside of my wrist: Behave in a way you’re going to be proud of. I didn’t know what I meant by that, exactly, didn’t know what I’d be proud of, if anything. But the words seemed important.

  Sol set my coffee in front of me.

  “Thanks, honey,” I said. And I meant it – wanted to mean it – wanted to appreciate Sol even if all she could do was make me a cup of coffee with steamed coconut milk. “Can you take Maxito to preschool? I have to pick my mom up for an oncology appointment.”

  “Sure,” Sol smiled sad. “Whatever you need.”

  3.

  Agendas

  MY MOTHER FIGURED THE ONCOLOGIST WOULD BE French. “With a name like that he’s got to be French,” she said as she climbed into the passenger seat of my little Honda.

  Maybe she was thinking he’d be handsome, too – elegant and refined. Maybe they’d have an affair. He’d be open to treating the cancer with an organic diet or with magnesium-rich Epsom salts. He was European, after all. “Europeans are always much more open to alternative therapies,” my mother said.

  I turned north on 82nd, stopped at the light. “What should we ask him? What’s our agenda?”

  My mother stared ahead into the rain. I knew her well enough to know that she always had an agenda, but sometimes part of her agenda was pretending she didn’t have an agenda. “We just let him talk,” she said. “He’ll have an agenda.”

  “Should we ask, you know, I mean, if you do get sick, should we ask him if your insurance covers long-term care or, you know, home care?”

  My mother coughed. “That’s depressing. That makes me cough.”

  THERE WERE NO windows in the oncology waiting room.

  “I’m here to see Doctor Benwaaa.” My mother dragged out the end of the name and silenced the t.

  The receptionist tapped her keyboard. “Ya mean Doctor Bin-oyt?”

  My mother frowned. “Isn’t he French?”

  The receptionist shrugged. “Doubt it.”

  Fill out these forms.

  Weigh in behind door number one.

  Blood pressure behind door number two.

  Wait behind door number three.

  OF COURSE DOCTOR Benoit wasn’t French. Doctor Benoit wasn’t a he, either.

  In walks a sixty-something woman with long, stringy hair and not a stitch of makeup. She looked like the Catholic Worker types my stepdad used to hang out with. Beige plaid pants. Wrinkled white coat over a beige shirt. She sat down on a chair with little wheels on it, scooted in too close to us. I thought to tell her to please move back, that I didn’t know where she was from, but here on the West Coast of the United States we allowed for a certain amount of personal space. I glanced at my mother, but she didn’t seem uncomfortable, so I kept quiet. Doctor Benoit could sit close if she wanted to.

  The last doctor, the pulmonologist, the one with the red shoes, paged through my mother’s chart and showed us scans on computer screens. But this doctor had no paperwork, no images. She just sat in front of us, sat too close. It occurred to me that I might be dreaming all this. I thought, I’ll scream and if a sound comes out I’ll know this is happening. But I didn’t open my mouth.

  “The kind of cancer you have is called adenocarcinoma,” the oncologist said. She looked at my mom, then at me. “It’s the most common type of lung cancer.”

  She asked my mother questions.

  Yes and no.

  More questions.

  “I smoked one cigarette a day for about a year when I was twenty,” my mother said.

  “I never lived with anyone who smoked,” my mother said.

  “I have a cough, but it’s nothing,” my mother said.

  “It’s because I moved into a new apartment and I didn’t have a comforter for the first few nights,” my mother said.

  “I was cold, so I got a cough,” my mother said.

  “I’ve lost a little weight,” my mother said, “but it’s just because I started this vegan diet and I don’t know what I can eat. I haven’t found enough I can eat.”

  “I’m not as active as I used to be,” my mother said, “but it’s because of the new hip.”

  “I feel fine,” my mother said.

  The oncologist nodded. She didn’t seem to have an agenda. “Do you have any questions for me?”

  My mother held her hand out to inspect her manicure, didn’t look up. “Yes,” she said. “How long will I live?”

  I looked at the little sink next to me and the white cupboards above, the exam table in the corner behind the chair on wheels.

  “Well,” the oncologist finally said. “That’s the hardest question. This does seem to be a slow-growing cancer. I suspect you’ve had it for a couple of years.”

  A COUPLE OF years. I thought about that. It had been a couple of years since my stepdad died. Since my mother killed him or they were in on it together. I glanced at my wrist: Behave in a way that you’re going to be proud of.

  Now would not be a good time to scream.

  “It isn’t smoking-related,” the oncologist was saying. “You’re female. Both these things improve your prognosis. I don’t know how long you’ll live.” She looked up at the clock, like maybe my mother only had a matter of hours. “I would guess a year,” her tone stayed flat, like she was telli
ng us a stranger’s address. “A year would be my guess.” The oncologist looked at me now. “Do you have any questions, Ariel?”

  Of course I had questions. A year, but what would the year look like? Would my mother be all right for a while – three or six months – and then collapse? Would she continue on this slow energy decline we’d all been forced to endure with her – the decline that had her moving in and out of assisted living facilities where Sol and I took turns bringing organic breakfasts and Ayurvedic dinners until my mother had the inevitable late-night panic attack and decided the room was bugged and the nurses were Eastern-bloc spies and her neighbors were trying to poison her and we’d finally relent and find her someplace new? Would it be like Terms of Endearment? Would we have to buy a bigger house so she could come and live with us? Would it be like Grey Gardens? Would we all start drinking vodka for breakfast? Would it be like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

  My mother coughed. “No,” she answered for me. “Ariel doesn’t have any questions.”

  I didn’t say anything, didn’t want to make my mother cough with my questions, so I just stood up and my mother stood up and Dr. Benoit stood up and we all shook hands like we’d just made some terrible business deal.

  IN THE ELEVATOR, my mother coughed. “Ariel,” she said, “I just want you to know that if I do get sick, you won’t have to take care of me.”

  “I don’t mind,” I told her. “I can take care of you. Or we can hire someone. Or both, you know – whatever you feel comfortable with.”

  I remembered what my friend China wrote in her punk parenting zine when we were young moms. “I want to be the female Bukowski, the female Burroughs, but instead I’m just the female.” In that elevator right then, I felt like such the female – the caregiver.

  My mother shook her head, looked down at her gray Ugg boots. “If I ever need a caretaker, I’ll just blow my brains out.”