An Unnecessary Woman (27 page)

I sit by the window. And while I sit

my youth comes back. Sometimes I’d smile. Or spit.

“I can wake her,” my great-niece says. “It’s not difficult to make her stop sleeping.”

I tell them, my sister-in-law and great-niece, that I don’t want to disturb her, or them either. I can wait for a while. I’ll be out of their way. I drag over a nearby high-backed chair and sit facing my mother, the window behind me. The few leaves on the ficus tree next to me are wilted and scorched, whether from lack of light, or of blessed watering, or of loving attention, I can’t tell. There doesn’t seem to be another potted plant in the apartment.

The armchair’s back faces the rest of the living room. You can watch television without having to be disturbed by the sight of my mother. She can stare out the window toward the world, but not toward her family. Maybe she’s the one who made the choice. Maybe she’s the one who wanted to keep looking out, not in.

There must be a word in some language that describes the anguish you experience upon suddenly coming face-to-face with your terrifying future. I can’t think of one in any of the languages I know.

Maybe it exists in Swahili or Sanskrit.

Maybe I can make one up, like Hamsun’s
Kuboaa
.

Maybe the word is just
mother
.

There is a word I know:
litost
. In Czech, according to Milan Kundera, litost is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.

The more I observe my mother, the more I think she looks like a Chekhovian character resting before a long journey, possibly a train trip, though God knows we no longer have passenger trains in Lebanon. Like a constipated creek in dry summer months, the drool of sleep flows leisurely and intermittently from the left corner of her slack mouth as her head falls southeasterly forward. Her breathing comes at me in jagged intervals, a whispery snore.

I don’t wish to be here. She’s contagious. My breathing becomes as serrated as hers.

There’s a milky gash in the dark chestnut coffee table next to her, a table that hasn’t felt the smooth pampering of a coat of varnish in at least a decade. On it, alongside an inopportune desk lamp, sits an old, round, ticktocking alarm clock with a spherical skullcap for a bell. But what captures my attention is another object on the table: a mother-of-pearl-encrusted music box, hand-sized, that I remember well from my childhood. I recall the day she bought it as a gift to herself.

I control my breathing because I feel a flood of emotions rising. I haven’t seen that music box since I was married off.

“
I begged of you, O Memory, / to be my best assistant,
” wrote Cavafy.

I assess my surroundings. My sister-in-law isn’t in the room. She’s making blustery, demented chopping noises in the kitchen, but her granddaughter spuds on the couch in front of the flickering television while banging the keys of an older-model laptop, studying me out of the corner of her eye. I must restrain myself.

My mother bought the music box because of its oddness; it had two twirling ballerinas, not just one, a pseudo-Sapphic pas de deux. It was Russian, or appeared so, and we all assumed the music it played was Russian too. It isn’t. I may not recall what I had for breakfast this morning or whether I had breakfast at all, but I can whistle that tune note for note, even though I probably haven’t opened the box in sixty years.

The twisted red coils of the heater in the far corner emit a steady electric hum that feels ominous in this situation. I begin to perspire again.

The tinny piano-imitating tune interred within the box is Chopin’s Waltz no. 2 in C-sharp Minor. I had forgotten all about this box, forgotten it even existed. I’d dismembered it in my memories. I’d disremembered it.

No wonder I was so easily infected. The Chopin virus was already latent in my system.

I desperately wish to sneak the Russian box into my handbag, but I resist my shameful urge. There are things I just won’t do, as much as I want to, if I intend to live decently with myself afterward.

I’ll listen to Rubinstein the Pole play the waltzes when I get home.

I distract myself by gazing at the barely perceptible steam rising off a damp pink sweater that’s draped over the top of the heater. The girl must have come in not long before I did, wet from the rain. She chews her gum loudly.

My mother used to call me a praying mantis (the term in Arabic translates to “prophet’s mare,” which is beautiful, if you ask me) because I was tall and scrawny. I think she meant a stick insect, but whether as a child or as a woman, I rarely disabused her of her incorrect assertions. Yet as I sit before her, I realize she’s much thinner than I ever was. She’s gone from Rubens to Schiele.

Many suggest that we close the circle as we age by growing childlike. The way she sits, folded upon herself, I’d go as far as to say that she’s shrinking to fetus form. Her appearance has changed as well, and I don’t mean just the intense reticulation of lines and wrinkles, the true stigmata of life. She wears someone else’s skin, someone much larger, a hand-me-down skin. A bluff of short spiky hairs sprouts on her upper lip, sparse Hitlerian. Her face is both gaunt and puffy; its muscles are completely slack. It has no discernible angles. My mother’s countenance has turned androgynous.

This is what I have to look forward to.

In slumber, my mother is melancholia in human form. I wonder, though, whether I only see this in her because I expect it. For all I know she may be dreaming of flowers and wheat fields, butterflies and Swiss Alps, chocolate and Chanel. Maybe that mind of hers is happy in its insanity. Devoid of worries and responsibility, of mundane earthly concerns, she may have reached Nirvana, without guru or Sherpa.

But the mournful words of Thomas Jefferson loop through my head. In a letter to a friend in 1825 he wrote, “All are dead, and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know us not.”

Jefferson obviously had no Sherpa.

My mother wears a hearing aid that circles and penetrates her left ear, a recent addition but not a recent model. What seems at first to be the manufacturer’s logo behind her ear fails to sustain the illusion on closer inspection. It is formless Roman script in purple ink that reads, when I lean forward to see,
AU SECOURS!
I don’t have to wonder long who did this: as soon as I lean back in my chair, I notice the Kenzo potato blushing, avoiding eye contact by staring at a television commercial.

The slam of the front door distracts her. The density of the air changes faintly, allowing me to note how stale the room smells, a brew of ancient cigarette smoke, naphthalene, and armpit sweat. I worry that it’s my half brother the eldest, but a sloppy teenage boy walks in, a year or two older than the girl, who must be his sister. His eyes are covered by unattractive sunglasses that feature, incredibly, cheap-looking silver tassels behind each ear. He stops when he sees me. He stands with arms ceremoniously akimbo, directly in my line of sight.

“Who’re you?” he snaps, not maliciously, but with a certain air of privilege.

His sister shushes him, points toward my catatonic mother. I don’t reply. He shrugs with the honed nonchalance of ungracious adolescence, trudges with lazy steps into the kitchen. I’m sure his grandmother will explain who I am.

I, on the other hand, can’t explain who my mother is. Who is this woman before me? This thought drifts like smoke through my head:
Do I know you?

I’ve been so busy thinking about how my mother saw me that I’ve had little sight left to look upon the grande dame, her holiness herself. This is my mother. I rack my brain. What do I know of her? What do I remember?

I remember incidents, patches of a life—actually, minor patches in a long life, and only when they intersected with mine. I see scenes—images and scenes. I know my mother only in sepia.

Isn’t someone’s life more than a collection of scenes? Isn’t she more than the images I have compiled in my head? These questions may sound rhetorical, but I genuinely don’t know. I can’t tell whether my understanding of her is limited, if I can’t get to know her because of a basic deficiency of mine, or whether this is as far as any human can understand another. The question that really bothers me is whether I know anyone else better than I know my mother. It seems I’ve always asked, with Lear, “Does any here know me?” but never “Do I know any here?” Trying to know another human being seems to me as impossible, and as ridiculous, as trying to grasp a swallow’s shadow.

My mother lived, lives, in a hazy world, not my own.

Other people are hazy phenomena that become corporeal only in my memories.

Although I know the characters of a novel as a collection of scenes as well, as accumulated sentences in my head, I feel I know them better than I do my mother. I fill in the blanks with literary personas better than I do with real people, or maybe I make more of an effort. I know Lolita’s mother better than I do mine, and I must say, I feel her more than I feel my mother. I recognize Rembrandt’s painted face of his mother better than I recognize the real face of mine.

The girl pretends to watch television. It may be just background noise for her, but it isn’t for me. Even though the volume is low, whatever show is on is in a language I don’t understand, possibly Turkish, possibly Hebrew; the voice drifts as if from a distance, not the television, but a far-off land—a male voice, nasal, mingled with faint crackles and New Age string music. Most irritating.

“Turn that off,” I snap angrily, much too angrily.

Surprisingly, the girl does, doesn’t even hesitate.

What I would love right now is a massage, a gentle shoulder rub, anything to untangle my mess of muscles. Not that I’ve had many massages. I don’t submit easily to a stranger’s touch no matter how beneficial it might be, and I can’t afford to pay for self-indulgence in any case. My shoulder muscles have spun themselves into worsted yarn, their numbness and ache locked deep between the blades. I tense my shoulders, count to three, and relax them, an exercise Hannah taught me once. It doesn’t help. It never actually did.

A heavy vehicle causes the window to rattle and the spiderweb dangling from the chandelier to sway. The noise and clatter wake my mother. She opens her left eye first, then her right.

I brace myself. In my head I count the seconds—no, no, someone else counts the seconds in my head: one, two, three. I can’t seem to restrain my thoughts. I count each wrinkle around her eyes without mixing either tally. I shiver as my mind skates from one bleak oblique thought to another. Will she recognize me? Has she ever rocked me in her arms? Does she hate me? Why did she never brush my hair? Has anyone taken her to a doctor recently? The voice of Karita Mattila singing the opening notes of the third of Richard Strauss’s
Four Last Songs
echoes in my skull. My tongue and the insides of my cheeks feel dry. I note the little red lash marks on the palm of her hand, the earth-toned liver spots on the back of the other. Her eyes focus on me. They seem so very sane.

At the count of twelve, she calls my name quietly. “Aaliya,” she says.

I acknowledge the recognition by smiling and nodding. My hands, still slightly clammy, unclench. I place them on my thighs. My heart beats just a little faster, just a little sharper. Her breathing is calmer, without stertor, less of a struggle than while she slept.

“You’ve changed,” she says in a cotton wad of a voice.

“Yes,” I say. “We all have. I’ve grown older.”

“No,” she interrupts me. “No, your hair is blue.”

Has she ever rocked me in her arms? Hugged me? Whispered baby talk in my ears? I doubt it very much.

“Yes, that,” I say. “Yes, it is blue.”

She looks puzzled, and a little lost. She winces. Her face distorts a bit, as if she found my answer offensive, or maybe incomprehensible, or simply terrifying. I can’t tell. She tries to move farther back into the chair, but that proves physically impossible—she is as far back as the chair will allow.

“It’s all right, Mother,” I say in as comforting a tone as I can muster. “I used coloring shampoo by mistake, more than I should have. It’s not permanent. My hair will recover.”

She looks more confused, breaks eye contact. She regards the ceiling as if she’s watching some ghostly agitation up there. She pushes her hand under the shawl around her shoulders and scratches her arm. Her grimace becomes more pronounced, the corners of her mouth moving farther apart as if they loathe each other.

“Are you all right?” I ask, pointing at her.

I receive no response, verbal or non.

“She doesn’t always answer,” my great-niece says. No longer pretending to ignore my presence, she’s on her knees, leaning over the side of the couch, trying to engage me. “Sometimes I know she’s in pain but she won’t be able to tell me what’s hurting her. Other times she’ll tell me it’s her neck but she means that it used to hurt her years ago. You can’t tell. She’s not good at communicating.”

“Neither am I,” I say. “Mother, are you in pain?”

“She doesn’t talk much, just hums most of the time.” My great-niece underlines her words with an extravagant repertoire of hand gestures and facial expressions. “Old Arabic songs. Hum, hum, hum. Not Oum Kalthoum, not Fairuz. You’ll never guess.”