Hunger
3.
That long-ago cook, whose face I can no longer remember, came closest to speaking the truth. I don’t care for cooking, and derive no enjoyment for food. I am sated with my coffee and cigarettes, genuine pleasures that would have shocked my mother had she known about them.
There are many things I kept from her, and keep from her still. For instance, the fact that my marriage was only happy for a year at most, before the discovery that behind my husband’s mild, agreeable face hid not the stranger I would’ve better endured, but someone too painfully familiar.
I had married a man I was certain did not have the proclivities for womanizing, gambling, and all those other tiring things. We were very happy for a while, and he did turn out a faithful, staid sort, but as I realized too late, his greatest devotion was to his personal injuries, which he brandished as sort of weapon against all reproach. My faults grieved him like a deliberate attack, my choices and misgivings pierced his heart as surely as if I had driven a stake through it myself. Most of all, he hated what to him seemed a stubborn passivity. You’re an empty shell of a person, he would tell me.
As dusk came, I sat beside her bed, as the age-old game triumphantly plucked the age-old answer from a long-dry river in the last light of day.
When we met, he had been sensitive and tolerant. Near the end, he paced the ruins of our marriage, blinded by certain carefully chosen truths—that I had never loved him, and this was the reason I didn’t want to have children—when the sad fact was that like my mother and I, we were too different, and love alone was not enough to keep us from fatally wounding each other.
But I refused to admit defeat as long as I could, until appearances crumbled and exposed me. My mother took the news of my travails with as much satisfaction as she had all my mistakes in life. Didn’t I tell you that you would be unhappy, she said, having summoned me to her house as soon as she had heard.
Stop being so depressed, she said. You’ve no one to blame but yourself. You’re giving up. God knows what horrors your father has submitted me to, but all these years I kept the family intact.
That was the prelude to one of her inspired speeches, that mother’s privilege that, to me, held as much gentleness as broken glass. In my younger days, I could sidestep its sinister points, but now it caught and shred whatever had survived the separation, reaching deeper, tearing finer than anything else could. I looked at her and shuddered with the force of what I wanted to say.
But she was merely an old woman with nervous eyes and a cruel mouth. I spun on my heels and left. At home I took pen and paper and bled my rage out into a letter. I was thirty-five years old, but I felt inconsolably old.
I wrote down many pains that surfaced from the depths where they had lain all those years. I confessed to the belief she had always tried to pry from me. She was a stupid, bitter woman, who was to blame for all my missed chances, my wasted potential. All my life she had spurred nothing in me but a desperate urge to escape. She had driven me to a miserable marriage.
I hate you, I wrote, and the hatred assumed a startling simplicity, like a perfect echo across a vast room, clear, resonant, and beautiful.
4.
The day I finally moved out of the house I had shared for ten years with my husband, she called to say she was dying. I was almost to the door, with the last of my things, when the phone rang. Her voice was almost inaudible. I have cancer; the doctor has given me only six months to live. My last request, my mother had said, is for you to come back home.
There is no command greater than a request from a dying parent. Immediately, I was pulled back to a past farther and older than my failed marriage. I held the phone in my hand and stared out the window, feeling the strings of my new life slip away.
I took a day packing my belongings in the small apartment I had begun renting, and appeared at my mother’s doorstep two days after she called. One of my brothers opened the door and fell into my arms, sobbing. I half-carried him into the living room where my father had been petrified for years on his rocking chair, watching TV. He looked up and said, Where have you been? Your mother is going to die.
Danny, stop crying. Wipe your face, boy, he told my brother. He shook his head and aimed the remote at the screen. Cara, he said, without looking up. Get me a beer.
The boys had lost no time in running back to our parents’ house with their families in tow, and I had not, as my mother saw it. Dying, she was at the peak of her powers, holding the emotional reins to each of her children like a master charioteer. She lay in her dark bedroom, with a rosary wound around her wrist. I kissed her on the forehead and could feel the muscles of her face tighten in displeasure. I’m sorry, Ma. I had to settle with my new landlord.
Did you bring all your things with you, she asked. I explained that, save for the large suitcase I had brought with me, all my other belongings had been left behind, albeit packed and ready to be delivered in the next few days. She took a deep breath and coughed.
You aren’t leaving anything behind there?
Yes. I’m moving back.
She slid down into the pillows and sighed. I wish I wasn’t dying, so you wouldn’t be bothered with attending to me, and you can live your life the way you want.
The room was warm with the familiar scent of my mother and the exhalations of the old house I had grown up in. As dusk came, I sat beside her bed, as the age-old game triumphantly plucked the age-old answer from a long-dry river in the last light of day.
It’s no bother, I said. I want to be here and take care of you.
5.
I carried the letter with me throughout the brief time she had left, fingering it in my pocket like a charm, its words like a mantra I repeated in my mind. I stayed with her until she became as weak and dependent on care as a newborn. Somehow, I thought, the admission had set me free—free of all yearning for her approval, and the pain that came with the infinite debt of blood. I felt towards her a surprising tenderness, and I held her, fed her, and bathed her with genuine charity, such as I would have done for anyone in need of it. It was the purest, most sincere gesture I had ever made for her.
At the end of six months, one of my old school friends died. Mother was at this time permanently in the hospital, hooked up to myriad tanks, tubes, and machines. She could no longer speak, being too weak, but it mattered little, because as I imagined, she had nothing more to say.
After a few months, one of my schoolfriends died overseas, after a fall from a high cliff. Anna’s body journeyed home to her parents and teenage son, who had been a toddler when he last saw his mother. No one at the funeral could reconcile the stranger in the coffin, her face marred by the accident and the estrangement of many years, with the lively girl we once knew. As I stepped forward for a last glimpse, my phone rang in my pocket.
My brother Danny’s sobs pounded my ears. My mother was gone. I snapped the phone shut and approached the coffin. As the lid was being lowered, I took the letter out of my pocket and slipped it into the coffin’s satin mouth. I imagined it there, nestled forever underground. As we the bereaved said our goodbyes, Anna’s son—this boy who had lived well and happy without his mother—let out a wail, a raw wave of longing that swept the emptiness of the park and the fragile, famished landscape of the heart.
