The End of Eve Read online

“Well,” I laughed. “On that cheery note.”

  My mother laughed, too, but then she sucked in her cheeks. “I’m serious,” she said.

  WE INCHED BACK through the traffic to my mother’s apartment. NPR was having a pledge drive. I stopped in the parking lot, but my mother didn’t make a move to get out of the car. I wondered if she wanted me to come around and open the door for her – if she wanted me to walk her inside her building. Maybe I was supposed to treat her differently now that we knew she would die soon. I glanced at my wrist. “I have to go pickup Maxito,” I said.

  “I know.” She nodded. “It’s just. Announcement.”

  I wasn’t sure I could handle another announcement, but I took a good breath. “Yes?”

  “I won’t die on 82nd,” she said “I refuse to die on 82nd Avenue.”

  82nd Avenue. Most of the prostitutes had been gentrified further east by now, but the street was still mostly fast food chains and bus stops. “All right,” I said. Fair enough. The apartment on 82nd was only meant to be temporary, anyway. Until she got better and packed up and headed home to southern Mexico, to her art studio and her friends there.

  I couldn’t picture her dying in that tiny apartment, either, but where could she die? She’d already been through half the hotels and adult foster care homes in Portland, through house-sits and retirement complexes where they played Bingo on Thursday nights and served the white bread roast beef sandwiches she was too good to eat.

  “Where do you want to ... live?”

  WHEN I WAS a kid my mom always offered our guest room to our aging relatives – to my great-grandmother and then to Gammie. “Your room is ready,” she told them when their husbands died or when they hit 72 or 84.

  They refused her offers, of course. “Oh, darling,” they said, “I don’t want to be a burden.”

  “How could they refuse?” my mother cried over our brown rice dinner. “This is the Mexican way – the generations living together.”

  I thought it was a weird thing to say. I mean, we weren’t Mexican. In all other circumstances my mother claimed Italian roots in southern Texas, but somehow when it came to elder-care she needed to be Mexican.

  NOW SHE STARED at me. “We can just get a big house –” she started.

  I should have said no right then.

  I didn’t owe her anything.

  “I can’t die on 82nd,” she pleaded.

  Her words made my heart feel small in my chest, but logic still said no.

  “Think about it, Tiniest?”

  She still called me by my childhood nickname, the one she coined I guess because I was the baby in the family. “Of course.” I started to put my hand on her shoulder, but she moved away from me. “We’ll figure something out,” I promised.

  “Okay,” she said softly.

  And I watched as my mother walked away from my car in the rain, one of her legs dragging a little.

  NPR still hadn’t met their pledge goal for the break. I texted Sol: My mom wants us all to get a big house together.

  Sol texted right back: No way.

  But that night after we put Maxito to bed and I opened a second bottle of five-dollar red wine and Sol picked the dregs of her weed from her little wooden stash box and we listened to Lucinda Williams, she nodded to the music and said, “Okay.”

  She filled her rolling paper with bits of weed. “We’re going to have to take care of your mom wherever she lives, right?”

  I shrugged. “Probably.” The Virgin of Guadalupe tattoo on Sol’s forearm was already getting that weathered look. She’d gotten it when her own mom died a few years earlier. Her mother had been ill for at least a decade, but she was far away in the Dominican Republic so we never took care of her, never had to.

  Sol rolled her little joint. “And there’s pretty much no chance your mom’s going to live even a year.”

  “According to your Merck Manual, anyway.”

  “Right? We can do anything for a year.” Sol licked her rolling paper. “So what if we get a place with her? Just not in Portland?”

  I thought Portland had been good to Sol – she had good friends and a thriving veterinary practice even if she refused to charge more than fifteen dollars to set a dog’s broken bone or to put a cat down – but Sol had always hated Portland. Too much rain, too many white people. We’d been here nine years, but it wasn’t my home either. We were what lots of people were in Portland – displaced from where we’d come from because we were overly tattooed or queer or couldn’t afford the rent where we were born. We’d come to Portland because it didn’t matter. The real estate was cheap, and people read all kinds of books here.

  Sol stood up and turned the stove on, lit her joint from the burner.

  I knew where Sol wanted to go.

  She’d lived outside Santa Fe in her 20s, always romanticized that high desert. “If I’m ever going to make a living,” she said, “it’s going to be in New Mexico.”

  I tried to imagine that, Sol finally making a living.

  “If I’m ever really going to be a musician,” she said, “it’s going to be in New Mexico.” She swayed to the music now. “I’ve done your thing here in Portland all these years. But you can be a writer anywhere.” She looked past me, like she could already see her new life. “Honestly, if you and I are ever going to have a sex life, it’s going to be in New Mexico.” She exhaled a plume of smoke toward me. “That place is the salve to my soul.”

  New Mexico. It sounded crazy, but maybe it wasn’t crazier than anything else. Maybe this was my chance to make everyone happy. My mother would get us, Sol would get New Mexico, and I’d get – well – maybe Sol was right that I could live anywhere. At least I’d get out of the rain.

  Sol kissed me on the head. I always felt like a little kid when she did that, not like anybody’s girlfriend. “Think about it,” she said.

  But all I could think about right then was my mother placing some pawn-shop gun in her mouth and pulling the trigger.

  4.

  I My Garden

  I’D ALMOST ALWAYS SLEPT THROUGH THE PREDAWN train that shook my little house as it rumbled through the railyard, but now I opened my eyes in the dark morning and my mind started typing 400 words a minute: Where am I going to get a hospital bed? Will it fit in Maxito’s room? Then maybe Maxito can sleep in here with Sol and me? Should I call my aunt Laurie? She’s a medical reporter. She might know things. Should I stop eating dairy products? Did I imagine that having a baby would save my relationship with Sol? How cliché is that? Why hasn’t my mother’s biopsy wound healed? Would it be wrong to find a lover on Craigslist? Would it be safe? What if I answered an anonymous ad and it was someone I already knew? One of my students or one of Sol’s clients? What if I recognized their pet goat? What’s the difference between a heavy drinker and an alcoholic? I need to do a money magnetism spell to manifest the mortgage. Do most words start with M? My mother has lost weight, hasn’t she? What if we don’t have as long as the doctors say? I need to lose weight. I can’t get a lover on Craigslist until I lose weight. Is the fact that I can’t fathom a miracle cancer cure a form of negative thinking? Does negative thinking kill people? Why does my brain still seem to use a typewriter? Will my kids think in Facebook updates long after the death of Facebook?

  I didn’t hear rain, but couldn’t believe there wasn’t any. Maybe I’d become desensitized to that irritating sound. Either way, I needed out of my house, out of my brain. I put on a hoodie and boots over my sleeping sweats, ducked out the backdoor and ambled through the rainless mist toward the all-night gas station where there was always a giant cup of weak coffee with chalky creamer waiting for me.

  “You so sexy even in the morning,” the guy at the register said as he ran my card. He was clean-shaven and unappealing.

  I rolled my eyes. “Thanks, I guess?”

  “Just a simple compliment,” he yelled as the glass door shut behind me. I sipped the hot coffee. There was always something satisfying about a terrible cup of coffee
too early in Portland.

  I crossed the street, climbed through a hole in the chain-link fence that held the train tracks, and I crouched there in the weeds and the garbage.

  I remembered an afternoon a few years before my Gammie died. We were poolside under a California sky. She placed her hand over her heart the way she did when she was thinking life-thoughts. “I may look old,” she said. She was in her late 80s. “But your core never changes. Inside, I could be eighteen years old.”

  I felt like a teenager now, bent against the morning.

  The graffiti that covered the wall on the far side of the train tracks was so impossibly bright, I thought of Van Gogh. Maybe I was slipping into some artistic depression that caused me to envision the world more vivid than it actually was.

  I don’t want to lose an ear over all this.

  Another train.

  My brain.

  When my mother was pregnant with me, she knew I’d be a boy. She was so excited. Imagine that. A boy. In our family? She’d name me Claiborne after our great-great-grand-uncle, the first governor of Louisiana. “Napoleon sold, Jefferson bought, Claiborne signed,” my great grandma Addie used to brag. Governor Claiborne. He once danced with Marie Laveau herself. “People called those voodooiennes evil,” Addie said. “But those women just knew how to make things happen. They were the problem solvers.”

  When I showed up all shiny-wet and obviously female, my mother just looked at me. It wasn’t even 6 p.m. according to my birth certificate – midsummer in a California hospital – but my mother claims the sky outside was indigo night.

  A nurse took me away and my mother fell asleep, woke alone in darkness and didn’t bother to name me. Another girl.

  I sipped my gas station coffee as a freight train barreled past.

  Your core stays the same.

  ONCE I WAS four and my mother told me a story. She was actually a witch who flew around at night in a mortar and she’d kidnapped me from my real parents. At first I laughed at her story, but she was serious. “Don’t you see this mole on my nose, Tiniest?” she pointed with her red-manicured nail. “It proves I’m a witch. Do any of the other mommies at Lad and Lass Preschool have moles on their noses?” She kind of cackled.

  The next day and the next day I watched as the other women brought their uncombed children to Lad and Lass Preschool. My mother was right. No moles. I was some kind of an orphan. Stolen. I wondered if my real parents were looking for me.

  ONCE I WAS nine, morning paper route finished and the street lights still on. A Southern Pacific hurdled past. I loved those trains. I pedaled as fast as I could, just trying to keep up. In my good childhood memories I’m always in motion. And there are never any parents.

  ONCE I WAS sixteen, running rushing flying away from home. Ten thousand miles was never far enough. I scrawled Escape Artist on the soles of my feet with a Sharpie pen, got my first tattoo – a bird on my back.

  Everything was freedom and everything was loneliness.

  Another train.

  My gas station coffee getting cold.

  And I wasn’t a kid anymore.

  IN THE GRAY light of dawn, I crept back into my little house. Sol and Maxito were still asleep, but my cellphone on the kitchen counter already buzzed with messages from my mother’s friends and mine.

  Everyone who called in those early days after my mother’s diagnosis had big ideas. They knew someone who knew someone who’d cured themselves of late-stage cancer with herbal tea or mass quantities of blueberries. They had a naturopath who specialized in figuring out which shampoos a person was allergic to. They knew someone who had a lead on a maligned American doctor who now practiced exclusively in Mexico. They had the address of a shaman in Cleveland, a meditation teacher in Manhattan. They remembered a woman they’d met at a party who’d mentioned a book – they’d find out the title. They knew a website where we could order a little-known healing mushroom from a curandera in the forest in Idaho.

  I distracted myself with academic articles on death. In “Dying in a Technological Society,” the brainy doctor Eric Cassell claimed that our attitudes about death boiled down to cultural mythologies. Americans had moved from a moral mythology to a technological mythology, so we’d come to see death as something that could be overcome. Death was like a broken appliance – just a mechanical problem to be investigated, solved, and fixed.

  My mother intended to solve this death problem. Instead of sleep, she sat at her computer researching the latest alternative therapies and buying tinctures, vitamins, size-six Mephisto boots, and antique French dishes.

  Every afternoon, the UPS guy piled my front porch with boxes of things that had no resale value.

  My mother had just inherited $100,000 from my Gammie. It was her prerogative, I kept telling myself, if she wanted to spend it all online in three weeks. But I was worried, too. What if we needed more than my mother’s monthly social security check to take care of her?

  The phone kept ringing.

  I DIDN’T KNOW why we were going to see oncologist #2.

  My mother didn’t want any Western treatments, but she still seemed to want something from these doctors. Maybe just some acknowledgment that she was right.

  I read On Death and Dying. According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the first emotional stage after a terminal diagnosis is denial. But my mother had moved straight into anger.

  “Oh, just go with her to the second oncologist,” Maia said on the phone when I finally talked to her.

  And I would. Of course I would.

  “I want to come home,” Maia said. “I want to spend some time with Nonna.”

  My daughter was maybe the only one in the family who loved my mother without reservation – and it wasn’t because she hadn’t seen the brutal part. Maia just didn’t expect people to come without shadows any more than she expected the sky to come without clouds. She’d seen too much death for a 19-year-old, and she understood that life didn’t come without cancer.

  “There’s time,” I promised her. “Do your schoolwork, come home at break.” The semester would be over in five or six weeks. “Give my love to the boyfriend,” I said.

  “Okay,” Maia sighed. “Promise to call me if anything gets worse?”

  “I promise.”

  She hadn’t had time to get to the hospital in London when we got word that her father was dying.

  “I seriously promise.”

  IN THE ONCOLOGY waiting room without any windows, the receptionist was having a hot flash. I held Maxito on my hip, rocked him back and forth as the receptionist fanned herself with a hospice brochure. Her acrylic nails were airbrushed with palm trees. “This is a nightmare,” she said. “How do I make them stop?”

  “Chinese herbs,” my mother told her, and she dug around in her purse for her herbalist’s business card. “You just have to drink a tea from hell every morning.”

  The receptionist kept fanning herself. “I can do that.” She typed something into the computer as she talked, her nails click-clacking on the keys. She squinted at my mother’s medical card. “This is a living nightmare,” she sighed.

  “I’ll trade places with you,” my mother offered.

  The receptionist didn’t say anything. She nodded at the computer screen. “I’ll think about that.”

  “Yeah,” my mother said. “Think about it real hard. And get yourself some herbs.”

  MY MOTHER TOOK off her Uggs to weigh in. One hundred eleven pounds. “Pretty good,” she said to the nurse. “Right? A cancer patient only losing a couple of pounds?”

  The nurse shrugged. “You’ll lose weight when you start chemo.”

  Maxito wiggled in my arms. He didn’t like the fluorescent lights as the nurse escorted us all into the same little white room where we’d met oncologist #1.

  I set up Maxito’s DVD player on the exam table, pressed play.

  “Snoopy doops?” Maxito smiled. “I like Linus.”

  My mother smiled in his direction, but she was busy shuffling pa
pers, gearing up for a fight. “Chemo,” she hummed. “As if I would take their Chemo. Is it totally foreign to all these Western medical practitioners that I might not want to poison myself?”

  And here comes oncologist #2, a guy with a slouch and an I ♥ My Garden T-shirt.

  He sat down on the chair with wheels and smiled at us. “I understand you want to learn about Tarceva.”

  “I’ve actually read quite a bit online,” my mother started. Her hands, in particular, seemed very small. “I hear they call it the chemo pill.”

  Oncologist #2 sort of nodded.

  “I understand it has quite a few side effects, including terrible rashes and will only prolong my life by a matter of a couple of months?”

  Oncologist #2 nodded again, didn’t say anything.

  Maxito bounced and bobbed to the Snoopy song.

  “Do you garden?” My mother smiled at oncologist #2, but her voice had that tone.

  I wanted to disappear.

  “Yes I do,” the oncologist perked up. “I garden.”

  “Organic?” My mother scooted her reading glasses down her nose to get a better look at the guy.

  “Yes. Organic.” He smiled, like now we were talking about something interesting.

  “Well,” my mother seethed. “Would you put Tarceva on your precious fucking organic garden?”

  Oncologist #2 just kind of stared at my mother, then glanced at me, at Maxito riveted to his Peanuts video.

  My mom narrowed her gaze, wanting to argue with the doctor.

  But oncologist #2 was aloof. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t put Tarceva in my garden. Your research is accurate.”

  As we left, my mother leaned into me and whispered, “That guy had NO ego. Drop me off at the Anthropologie downtown, will you?”

  I DIDN’T WANT to go straight home either, so after we dropped her at the store, I headed for the Sapphire Hotel on Hawthorne Boulevard where everything was red and haunted by the ghosts of dead sailors and whores. Maxito could entertain himself with a cheese platter in that place long enough for me to nurse a happy hour “Seven Sins” and run into somebody who’d remind me why I loved this rainy city.