The End of Eve (2 page)

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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 problem 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.

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.