Pretty in Ink (24 page)

I take deliberate steps down the path and into the house. I will myself into the dayroom, where my father has set up the hospital bed so Mom doesn’t have to climb stairs.

“Darling, it’s you!” My mother hugs me, her arms like wire hangers, and I blink away the moisture welling up in my eyes. As is always the case when I’m back in my childhood home, I feel the age drain from me, years and years slipping away; suddenly I’m a ten-year-old girl who’s just skinned her knee, and I need my mother. But not this strange-smelling version of her who’s still clinging to me.

I realize too late, as I do on every one of these visits, that I should have made plans. I should’ve packed more than ratty sweatpants and T-shirts; I should’ve brought my skinny jeans and rompers and cute tops so I could escape the fog of sickness and go out with my friends who are home for the summer. These visits are like my father’s phone calls: I so much look forward to them, eager to pack in the moments with my mother, but the minute I step over the threshold of our beautiful old Tudor now overrun with medieval looking medical equipment, I want to flee back to my cramped sublet in lower Manhattan.

“How’s it going, Mom?” I say, detaching myself from her hug. She smiles, but says nothing. I remind myself how happy she is to see me. My dad hands me a list of tasks. He needs me to go grocery shopping and cook dinner and clean the kitchen. These things I can handle. “Look, I bought an immersion blender,” he says proudly, holding up the contraption like it’s show-and-tell. I’ve never known my dad to prepare anything more elaborate than a turkey sandwich. “She’s keeping down soups these days,” he adds in a whisper.

My mom goes to bed early, and my dad and I stay up late watching terrible talk shows on TV. At some point I conjure the energy to stumble up to my childhood bedroom and pass out.

In the middle of the night I’m awoken by strange, guttural sounds, and before my mind can tune out or deny them, I understand it’s my mother dry heaving. I half sleepwalk to the bathroom, where she’s crouched over the toilet, a mop of someone else’s hair askew on her head. I hate that she feels the need to wear that thing even to bed. Saying not a word, I trace the length of her back with the pads of my fingers, avoiding the jutting nubs of her spine. I soak a towel in cool water and lay it onto the back of her neck. I open a bottle of seltzer and feed her sips, pushing grim thoughts from my mind. I see in the mirror that, even now, my mother and I share the same profile, the same way of smiling with the edges of our lips curled up unevenly. Eventually my mother kisses my head and tells me to go back to bed. She has no energy for a speech. So I leave her. I feel guilty turning on my noise machine, but do it, anyway. I sleep deeply until eleven o’clock, which also makes me feel guilty.

Saturday morning, I’m grateful to flee to Pathmark. I weave the aisles of the store—so vast compared to the D’Agostinos and Associated Markets in the city. I pretend I’m a suburban mom, shopping for her husband and three little rugrats: I’ll need juice boxes and macaroni and ground beef. That kind of life feels so distant from my own that I nearly laugh out loud. On my grocery list are Saltines and applesauce and ginger ale. Huh, funny that shopping for a cancer patient is pretty much the same as shopping for someone with a hangover.

So far I’ve managed just half of a Wikipedia article about my mother’s condition. I’m a researcher by nature, usually driven by intense curiosities that lead me down long paths to yet more curiosities. But in the case of my mom’s disease, the shallowest forays into Google have left me close to full-on panic attack. I don’t know her prognosis or the functions of the army of pill bottles on her bedside table or what it feels like to endure a round of chemotherapy. I don’t know how or where the tumor has spread, or where it might spread further still. My father issues palliative statements like, “I think she’s really fighting this” and “She seems like she’s getting stronger every day,” and I take his words at face value. As much as possible, I think of my mother as a fun-house mirror reflection of her real self, like one day soon we’ll all step out of the carnival and return to regular life.

I add to the cart one of those fancy grass-fed chickens, a bunch of specialty vegetables, and a box of Godiva chocolate–dipped strawberries (they’re sold in the supermarket, too, apparently). At home my dad unloads the groceries. “What’s all this?”

“I figured I’d make a nice meal for us tonight, a treat.”

“Oh, all right, honey.” I catch him checking the receipt. I bought everything organic, and I’m remembering now that he’d asked me to stick to the generic brands. But Mom has cancer, for God’s sake; surely we can spare her pesticides or whatever.

Then I remember what my dad said about Mom and soups, and I cringe imagining her pretend to enjoy a big meal. So that evening I wait to start cooking until after she’s nodded off. The chicken and vegetables are roasted just so—delicious. Still, with each bite, I can’t help feeling I’m eating up funds that could have gone to doctors’ bills or medication copays or whatever. Dad and I converse in stilted sentences, and I’m equal parts relieved and disappointed when he flicks on the TV. I forget about the box of chocolate strawberries. Several weeks later, when I’m up at night ravenous (apparently we’ve all started skipping meals along with Mom), I’ll come across the strawberries rotting in the pantry.

I leave earlier than I should on Sunday. I mow and water the lawn, wash a load of laundry, and help my dad cook up a big batch of minestrone, then I invent a lie about having to get back for an acoustic concert in Central Park. It’s the type of thing I’d planned to do when I decided to spend the summer in Manhattan, back before my mother got so sick. I board the train and immediately begin missing my parents.

I spend the rest of the day sprawled out on the bed in my rented apartment, watching episode after episode of a terrible show about the country’s worst mothers. I picture the show’s children growing up and their terrible mothers, aged by twenty years, getting diagnosed with cancer; I wonder, even though long ago the moms insisted the kids get ankle tattoos at age eight and howled at them when they chose to do homework instead of massaging their moms’ bunioned feet, would the grown-up kids still feel sad?

 

Monday morning, Zoe dumps the stack of entries to the Mother’s Day essay contest on my desk. “I was supposed to go through these back in May, when they came in, but they got lost in the shuffle when Mimi started, and I really can’t stand this sentimental crap,” she says. “Mimi’s asked for my winner picks this afternoon so we can get them up on the website. In other words, it’s über-urgent. Hopefully you’re a speed reader.”

“I can’t,” I blurt out. “Photo needs me.”

“Oh.” I see that Zoe suspects I’m lying, but calling me out on it would risk my calling her out on passing off all of her work to me.

Drew doesn’t mind my hanging around in the photo department. She’s in the retouching studio, and invites me in to watch. They’ve picked out several images of Helena Hope as options for the November cover—none from the ferry, unsurprisingly. A fountain shot is up on the projector screen: Helena is laughing and kicking up a spray of water, looking carefree and joyful—pretty much the opposite of how she actually seemed that day on set. I’m impressed the photographer was able to create this happy fantasy.

“We haven’t retouched it yet,” Drew explains.

Lynn, the creative director, is taking an inventory of Helena’s body parts with a red-tipped laser pointer, dictating notes: “Erase crow’s-feet and under-eye circles. Even out skin tone. Gloss up hair, particularly around the temples. Let’s see. Brighten teeth, re-contour bump on top front tooth, plump up lower lip. Fix folds along shirt collar, darken dress color to contrast better against sky and water. Airbrush underarm, define waist. I think that should about do it.” Drew has been nodding and scribbling down notes as if Lynn were reading out a grocery list. I wonder how she can possibly make all those changes and still have the photo resemble the Helena pictured before us.

“Mind if I stay and watch?” I ask.

“No problem-o,” she says. “Prepare to get supercynical.” Drew begins tweaking, and it’s amazing craftsmanship—how she can adjust the line of a cheekbone just the slightest bit so you can barely notice a difference, but also think, Oh, right, that’s what we call beautiful.

“Newsstand sales spike in inverse proportion to a cover girl’s wrinkles and weight,” she explains. “But only up to a point. Watch this.” She smoothes out the tissue-papery lines around Helena’s eyes, but leaves the faint indents in her forehead. “She’s got to look aspirational, but not totally out of reach. Women want to buy the issue and think, How does she do it, so I can do it too? The reality is,
I
do it in the retouching studio.”

As Drew tweaks the colors—deepening the hue of Helena’s dress, lightening a shadow here and darkening another there—I remember the set of paper dolls I had when I was little. I would sit on the living room floor for hours at a time with all the separate hairdos and dresses and accessories splayed out around me, and I’d work on assembling the perfect dressed-up doll. My mother would crouch beside me, pick up my construction, and very seriously consider whether to supplement it with a pillbox hat or heart locket necklace. I thought her final touches were genius.

Drew is gradually shrinking Helena’s upper arm, and I flash on my mother’s own arm. My family used to have arm wrestling contests, and she would triumph even against my father. “It must be from mixing all that cookie batter,” she’d say sarcastically, flexing an impressive bicep. I picture a photo of my mother up on Drew’s screen, her clicks of the mouse melting the muscles and fat, adjusting the rosy reds and ivories to greens and grays until my mother has become the new, surreal shell of her former self. I feel nauseated.

“I need to use the ladies’ room,” I say, and bolt from the room. It’s a shock to move from the studio’s dark to the office’s florescent lights, and my unadjusted eyes distort the view. Everything looks like it’s been retouched, overly bright and garish.

I’m sitting on the toilet, doing a deep breathing visualization exercise I read about in an old issue of
Hers
—an article about the surprisingly high prevalence of anxiety disorder in American women.

Someone enters the stall next to me. “She’s supposed to be smart—in the interview she bragged about her perfect GPA—but she’s a sloppy worker.” It’s Jane.

“I know, and she acts like it’s all beneath her.” Zoe’s voice. “She totally bailed on a project I gave her this morning, like she couldn’t be bothered to do something so lowly.” Despite the deep breathing, my heartbeat lurches to a sprint.

“And this is awful, but—”

“I know what you’re going to say. That dress, right?”

“What was she
thinking?
” Their cackling mixed with the angry grunts of a toilet’s flush is one of the crueler sounds to have rattled my eardrums. I stare at the crack in the door in front of me as the editors gather by the sinks and then exit. Then it’s just me and the whirring white noise.

I look down at my dress. I pulled it from my mother’s closet this past weekend, a retro-print shift, pink and green polka dots, fringed on the bottom. There’s a photo of my mom at around my age; she’s wearing the dress along with big green sunglasses and steep wedged sandals—totally glamorous. It’s true that I’m wider in the hips and a bit stouter than her, but when I looked in the mirror this morning and twirled around, I felt like I’d stepped right out of the photo. I guess I must’ve done my own spontaneous retouching.

It feels like half an hour before I can peel myself up from the toilet. I skulk back to the retouching studio, and Drew gives me a warning look. The entertainment director, Johanna, is perched over her chair, the veins popping from her forehead. “Never in a million years will Helena go for this,” she shouts. “Her arse is the size of Texas! She looks like a bloody cow!”

“I shaved off a good inch and a half from her waist and practically performed a virtual tummy tuck,” says Drew.

“Rubbish! Look at her arms, her thighs, her double chin, for Christ’s sake! You’ve got to cut her down by at least another size or two.”

“What did Lynn say?”

“Never mind Lynn. She’ll understand that we have to appease Helena. We can’t send her photos where she looks like bloody crap or she’ll go off her trolley and call the whole thing off.”

“But if we do more editing she won’t even look like herself.”

“She’ll look like all the photos the whole jolly world sees of her, a slightly lovelier version of herself.”

“Slightly?” Drew whispers under her breath.

“And oh, Christ, fix her giant earlobe—it looks like an alien’s ear.”

“If you say so,” Drew says. “Let the games begin.” As Johanna looms over her, I watch Drew perform what amounts to severe plastic surgery on the photo, until it looks like Helena’s “after picture” if she were featured in one of those gastric bypass ads. It’s amazing and disgusting both.

“Perfect,” says Johanna, then exits.

“
Puuuh
-fect,” mocks Drew. “For the record, Mark would never have OK-ed this kind of a hack-up.” I remember Mark, the old creative director, vaguely from the first few days of my internship. He was knee-deep in boxes.

 

Zoe catches up with me in the afternoon and asks me again about the Mother’s Day essays. I’m out of excuses, and I can’t stop thinking about her words in the bathroom, so I let her unload the stack on me. I set it aside on my desk, ignoring it in favor of Facebook and celebrity gossip blogs. I scroll through people’s dumb photos of their kids and pets and the stupid things they ate for lunch, and then celebrities “looking just like us,” feeding the parking meter, hailing cabs, and cavorting in the ocean. It all feels so fake, like this can’t possibly be what we all covet and crave and care about. I try to be a good citizen and click over to
The Economist,
but my eyes immediately glaze over. I resign myself to the drivel, and head to MAGnifier.net, the snarky blog about the publishing industry.