An Unnecessary Woman (28 page)

“Asmahan,” I say.

“You guessed!” She sounds ecstatic, unable to control her glee. “Of course you’d know. You’re her daughter. I try to ask her who Asmahan is but she keeps mumbling, ‘They killed her, they killed her.’ Then she starts humming again. Nonstop humming, always music in the house. It’s like we have our own canary.”

At first I feel hurt and want to object. That’s an awful thing to say about someone. In a short story by the fabulous fabulist Sławomir Mroz˙ek, a narrator attends a party at which the entertainment is provided by the household pet, a caged liberal, a humanist who has been reduced to nothing more than a singer of quaint revolutionary songs. My mother doesn’t know any revolutionary songs, but she does Asmahan’s. So I also feel a tickle of happiness, a flicker of joy, unrelated to the fact that I guessed the singer; that my mother hums Asmahan’s songs makes me feel good. That my mother likes the singer who married and divorced three or four men, the scandalous actress who left her husband and family to pursue her career—an illustrious, titled family no less—allows my own heart to sing.

“Do you know who she is?” asks my great-niece.

“Who?” I ask.

“The singer,” the girl says. “Do you know who the singer is?”

“Of course.”

“Well?” she says.

She waits for me to say something. I am more experienced in waiting.

“Who is she?” my great-niece asks.

“You have that wonderful computer next to you. Look her up.”

My mother whimpers, and a frisson of fear courses through me. Will she?

“Are you all right, Mother?” I ask.

She no longer seems to recognize me, but she quiets. I can’t read her, can’t tell whether she’s in agony or simply distracted. She seems alone and fearful, her mind the only place in which she can hide. Her mouth is never still, moves from grimace to lazy smile to irritation in a matter of seconds, back and forth, sideways, up and down.

“You have to be more specific,” my great-niece says.

She’s off the couch now, standing beside me. If I stay a bit longer, if I continue to linger in her presence, I wonder whether she’ll end up sitting on my lap.

“She doesn’t answer if I ask a general question,” she says, “but if I ask whether her back hurts, she might. Sometimes I have to ask about every body part one by one.” She nods while speaking, as if she’s agreeing with what she’s saying. Her voice seems to have an element of delirium. “Before you came in, she answered yes to whether she was thirsty, but when I brought the glass of water, she was asleep, so I drank it.”

My great-niece’s excitement is so high that I wonder if I should hold on to her so she doesn’t launch herself at the ceiling.

“Mother,” I say, “does your back hurt?”

My mother pays no attention, as if I don’t exist. I have to control the urge to lean forward and smack her.

“How can I ask her anything if she doesn’t hear a word I’m saying?” I mutter.

“Hold her hand,” my great-niece says. “She doesn’t always know you’re speaking to her. Sometimes you have to touch her, otherwise you might be sitting here for hours and she’ll be off in her own world.”

She puts her hand on my shoulder, but withdraws it when I instinctively flinch. She folds her hands into the small of her back. What can I say? Judging from her enthusiastic agitation, I’m afraid she’ll go Ancient Mariner on me. “
The guests are met, the feast is set
.” Let me be.

“Go on,” she says. “Hold her hand. She won’t hurt you. She doesn’t bite.”

“Oh, but I might, so better be careful.”

Can I get any sillier than this in my old age? Trying to be funny for a teenager, my jokes as bad as Fadia’s. Maybe I should pick up Fadia’s boisterous laugh as well. I’ll ride out on a lame horse toward a simulacrum sunset with a comedy drum roll and cymbal crash.

“Haha,” she says with amused sarcasm. “That was almost as unfunny as Grandpa’s jokes.”

In my hand, my mother’s feels breakable; it is skin and bones—desiccated skin that lacks any semblance of elasticity. My great-niece is right, though. My mother looks suddenly alert.

“Does your back hurt?” I ask.

She shakes her head no. She removes her hand from mine and points toward her shoes with a skinny finger that looks surprised that it can hold itself aloft. “My feet,” she says softly, gently.

“Your feet?” I ask, pointing toward her shoes to make sure.

“Her feet,” my great-niece says. “Yes, it must be. She’s never pointed to her feet before.”

I now have a sidekick.

“Can I see?” I ask my mother. “I’ll need to take your shoes off.”

I don’t know why I’m making such an offer. She’s not wearing any socks or nylons under her low black heels. For all I know she may have callouses, and will I be able to help her with that? Contagious fungi, gigantic bunions, ingrown warts, lacerations, ulcerations? What if she’s accumulated blisters on the bottoms of her feet like barnacles on the bottom of a boat—a boatload of blisters?

I bought my first pair of slippers after I left her house. She wouldn’t allow me to take my shoes off until it was time for bed. For all she cared, the boys could prance around the house shoeless, sockless, barefoot, or wearing their underpants as freedom fighters’ face masks—“boys will be boys,” that most insipid of phrases. Not her daughters. Ladies should never be without shoes.

My sidekick is wearing light blue slippers with sheepskin lining and a Hello Kitty logo. She sees me looking at them and says, “She used to demand that I wear shoes, and we used to argue all the time, but then she stopped a few years ago—she stopped noticing.”

No bunions, no blisters, at least not at first glance, though an effluvium of foot odor assaults my nostrils. The stench even penetrates my great-niece’s defenses of cheap perfume and bubblegum.

“Ew!” she says, quite succinctly, if you ask me.

I don’t have to touch my mother’s feet—I really don’t want to—to realize how dry they are. Her shoes have irritated the skin at the joints, making the toes look like they’ve had a lovers’ tiff. Her nails are clawlike, an eagle’s talons, which is what’s probably causing her pain. She needs to have her toenails trimmed.

“Oh!” my great-niece exclaims.

I like her monosyllabic.

My mother should have a pedicure. I can’t take her to a salon, not in her condition. Some manicurists visit your home, but I don’t know how to find one. I can ask my sister-in-law; she might know.

“We have to do something about her toenails, Tante,” my great-niece says.

“I know, I’m trying to think, and please don’t call me Tante. My name is Aaliya.”

She proudly tells me her name, Nancy, and waits for me to comment. I don’t.

“Think quickly, Tante Aaliya,” she says, “or we might suffocate in here. Should I open the window? It’s cold outside, though. Should I get cologne?”

I’m surprised that I find my great-niece bearable. She seems to be able to change gears from shy to loquacious in microseconds, needs to have every thought heard and acknowledged. I usually find that incredibly annoying, if not insufferable. Not here, though, not now. I wonder if she too is lonely—if she too is in possession of that vast, heavy isolation that’s so difficult to bear. If she would sometimes happily exchange it for any kind of interaction, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who came along, even the most unworthy. If so, then today I happen to be my great-niece’s first person, the most unworthy.

I don’t want to give my mother a pedicure. Apart from the fact that I’ve never trimmed anybody else’s nails, I find it—how shall I put it?—demeaning. I am not Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. I don’t wish to be crucified tomorrow. I am not Mary of Bethany. If I dry my mother’s feet with my hair, will they turn blue?

I am not the Magistrate. I am not the Magistrate. I am not the Magistrate.

And now, what will become of us without barbarians?

O Coetzee, O Cavafy, O beloved gods, what am I doing here?

“Can you help me, please?” I ask my great-niece.

Can she bring a tub of hot water, not boiling, but hot enough for a footbath? Green tea leaves if there are any in the house, black tea if not, even tea bags are acceptable. No, we’re not going to drink the tea, it’s a disinfectant, but if you want to make some, I’ll share a cup—separate from the footbath, mind you. Rubbing alcohol, clippers, nail file, and a sliced turnip, or if there isn’t one, a radish will do. Their juice is a natural deodorant. Can she get a pair of my mother’s socks, please, and Vaseline to moisturize, since I doubt we can get our hands on spikenard oil?

Did Mary of Bethany use spikenard oil simply for its fragrance or does it actually moisturize? I should experiment with lavender oil, its sibling, to see.

How did I learn about the bacteria-destroying properties of tea, the odor-ameliorating power of certain root vegetables? My usual response is snappy: books, I read books—read, read, one can learn everything from books. Not in this case, however. I learned from watching my mother wash her feet when I was a little girl, as she probably learned from hers.

My great-niece needs the help of her brother, sans sunglasses, to carry the plastic basin of hot water—a red circular tub the size of a car wheel, with four Lipton tea bags floating like water lilies, their yellow tags conspicuous. My sister-in-law’s chopping reaches mayhem proportions. I hope a juicy turnip is among the things she’s torturing. The siblings bicker as they lower the water wheel to the floor, my great-niece insisting her brother should listen to her because she knows what we’re doing.

What are we doing?

My mother’s feet barely reach the water. Her toes dive below the surface and curl, wishing to drown; the arch of her foot retracts, wanting no part of this forced baptism.

“This won’t work,” my great-niece says. “She’s too small. We have to move her forward.”

“No,” my mother says, quite succinctly, if you ask me. She is suddenly alert. “Go away.” If eyes are windows to the soul, then my mother has a pretty angry one right now. “Leave me be,” she tells my great-niece, her weak hand flicking in a dismissive, despotic gesture, “and tell your mother to find you a decent husband.”

“She’s busy,” my great-niece snaps. Her upper lip curls inward, almost disappears—not so attractive.

Her brother considers this the greatest of jokes. “I can find you a husband,” he says, “a big, fat, ugly one with no sense of humor.”

Without thinking, I glare over my shoulder. He looks suddenly a little guilt-ridden, less enamored of himself than when he walked in, a disheveled quail of a boy; his hands behind his back, he rocks hesitantly on his heels. His sister bores into him with a homicidal stare, but that doesn’t seem to be the cause of his concern. My mother holds him with her glittering eyes. Maybe she objects to the lack of humor in a husband.

“We can raise the basin,” the boy says, his singsongy voice alternating oddly between high and low notes. “That’ll solve the problem.”

We place the red tub of water on a stool, and I kneel on the floor, luckily carpeted by an old cheap Turcoman similar to its sisters on the walls.

My mother’s feet are broad, the toes stubby, the toenails corn yellow with kernels at the center, the ankles prominently veined but not swollen. Mottled discoloration runs the length of her legs, from the tips of her toes to the knees and probably higher. The pigments of her skin are no longer properly mixed.

She sighs as I guide her feet into the water.

The boy claims his sister’s old spot on the sofa and begins a dialogue with the laptop. He lights a cigarette and within seconds fades into an uneasy cumulus of smoke. My great-niece kneels beside me, asks if she can help. I admit that I don’t know what I’m doing. Wash her feet and trim her nails? She can take the right foot and I the left.

I lift my mother’s foot out of the water, all bones and no meat. With my hand I wash the foot slowly, build a milky lather before passing the bar of soap to my great-niece. Once tectonic plates, her calves are now emaciated, striated with boysenberry-purple veins. She used to have the strong legs of any of Javier Marías’s female characters. I knead the tendons and knots around her anklebone, massage her toes, run my fingers through the gorges between them. I feel the flow of her blood.

My great-niece mimics my every step. We arrive at a gentle rhythm, slow and anodyne, the rocking of an old porch swing on a summer afternoon.

My mother’s eyes are shut, her lips as well, and probably her ears. Calm spreads over every wrinkle of her face. She cares little that I’m the one who’s washing her feet. She cares even less about my bleating conscience. More than content, she seems happy. She’s no longer present in the room. I don’t know what to do with her, what to say. I continue with my menial task. She is lost to me once again.

“Maybe I’ll dye my hair blue,” my great-niece says.

Rain streaks the small window—lazy, untroubled rain, sure of itself, which tells me I should reconsider my plan to walk home.

The troubled sky reveals

The grief it feels.