Lisa storms by. Slams her bedroom door. No “hello,” no “how was your day.” If my daughter doesn’t feel like picking a fight, she doesn’t notice me at all.
I said to my coworker, Jeannine, the other day, “I turned 50 and became invisible.”
Jeannine laughed and said, “You? You’re such a personality. You could sell sugar to a diabetic.”
Yeah, a real personality. But sometimes, I’d rather be a person.
I stare at the tin of cookies on the table. They’re from the couple who just closed on a 4-bed, 2-bath gut reno in King’s Park. I don’t need these cookies, and Lisa doesn’t want anything I have to give her. So, I carry them downstairs to the blue room, where Sunita is squatting beside my mother, helping her sip from a can of Ensure.
“Hello, baby,” Sunita says.
I’ve never been one for endearments, but I don’t mind Sunita calling me baby. It’s the accent. Very musical. I was enchanted from the first “Hello.”
And I was picky, believe me. I interviewed a dozen home health aides, at least. Half of them could barely speak English, and one had the nerve to ask if her son could come to my house after school. I was like, lady, I don’t know even know you, let alone your son.
But Sunita was polite. Professional. I didn’t have to listen to any sob story about her starving family. I still don’t know much about her personal life; I don’t even know which island she comes from. Which is how it should be. Boundaries.
I tried talking Sunita up to Lisa, to warm her up to the idea of having help around the house. “You’ll love how she talks, Li. Of course, you can’t understand half of what she says,” I’d joked.
My daughter lifted her big gray eyes from her phone. “You’re such a fucking racist, Ma.”
“I give someone a job and I’m a racist?” I understand my daughter wanting to pierce her nose and steal my vodka. But this racist nonsense? I don’t get it. “And watch your fuckin’ mouth, with the F-bombs.”
I thought she’d laugh, but Lisa stood up, shaking like a leaf. “You can’t even see what’s wrong with the crazy shit you say!” she’d shouted.
Crazy or not, I’m the one paying Sunita’s salary.
I extend the shiny blue tin toward Sunita. “These are for you.”
She smiles but doesn’t take it. She dabs some goop dribbling out the side of my mother’s mouth with a tissue.
“I’ll leave them here.” I set the box on my mother’s bureau. “Cookies,” I explain and hurry out.
There’s only so long I can tolerate being in that room. It’s not a bad room. It’s got a bay window that gets good afternoon light. And the carpet has an underlayer of foam so it’s like walking on clouds. Of course, my mother can’t walk.
We tried keeping her in the downstairs den, but then no one else could use it, and it’s my favorite room in the house. I’m not one to get sentimental, but that room is full of memories. It’s where me and Lisa used to spread out all the gifts at Christmas time and stay up late wrapping presents. And every time I see the rust-colored stain that lives on the wall, just over the love seat, I remember the time Lisa threw a mug of Earl Grey at her father. I never even tried to get it white again. That kind of stuff is what makes a house a home. What makes a sequence of events a life.
I step onto the back patio and tap a Marlboro out of my pack. I gave up smoking 20 years ago. Then I realized that giving up what you love because you think you might do better usually doesn’t work out.
Lisa’s been smoking, too. She thinks I don’t know, but every time I open my pack, there’re a few cigarettes missing. But what can I say? Technically, I don’t smoke either.
My phone rings and I stub out my butt in the cracked ceramic flowerpot I use as an ashtray.
“Can you do me a favor, love?” My husband thinks his British-isms can get him anything he wants; he’s generally right.
“There’s an envelope on my desk, yeah? Can you grab it and drop it in the post? I’ve got back-to-back surgeries tonight. Torn ACL and shattered knee cap. It’s going to be a long one.”
“I won’t wait up.”
“And the letter?”
“Yep.”
He says, “Tell Lisa I love her.”
“You might want to tell her yourself.” But he’s already powered down his phone.
To be honest, part of me delights in the fact that he isn’t going to call Lisa. Her father is the one topic upon which our hearts and minds converge.
The rest of the time, I’m the bad guy. When Lisa sees me setting the table for two, she gets combative. “Why isn’t dad coming home for dinner?” Like I have anything to do with where her father eats.
“Work.” I sound flat as day-old soda.
Lisa picks up a butter knife. “Mom.” She runs it across her palm, and it takes every ounce of self-control not to holler stop. “Can I ask you something?”
I can tell this ask is going to be tremendous. “Shoot.”
“Can I go to Colombia this summer?” Then she adds, “The country, not the school.” Like it’s not obvious.
I raise my eyebrows at my 16-year-old child. “With whom?”
She mutters the names of friends I’ve never met, beaches I’ve never heard of.
“Who’s paying for it?” I venture.
Lisa hurls the butter knife to the gray tiled floor. “I knew you’d say no.”
I lift my hands. “All I said . . . “
“You want me to be miserable, just like you!”
“Lisa!” I’m not miserable. Not really.
“I’m not hungry,” she announces then boom-boom-bang. She’s back in her room.
The kitchen smells of tomato sauce and ground meat.
I am hungry. I’m too old to let a little upset ruin my appetite.
***
It was the one thing my mother asked of me. “When I get senile, don’t you lock me away. I’d rather you kill me. Pull the plug.”
My mother never had much of a sense of humor, but she loved to joke about dying.
I never found it funny, especially not after my father passed, and she told me she was nervous about living alone. We were sitting at the dining room table in her old house when she asked if she could spend a few weeks in the downstairs guest room. “No one will notice me,” she promised.
She was right. We didn’t notice her. A few weeks turned into a few months. One day she’s standing at the stove making gravy, the next she can’t hold a fork. I can’t even remember when she lost her speech. Was she talking last Christmas?
It makes me feel like a real shit. So when Sunita calls me into the room to see this or that—“AnnMarie, baby,”—I go.
“I’ve got a closing in forty-five minutes,” I warn when she calls me in on Wednesday.
“Look.” Sunita points at my mother’s bubble-gum pink fingernails.
“My mother doesn’t like pink,” I tell her.
“Doesn’t she look pretty?” Sunita persists.
My mother looks like a goddamn clown with the polish and the lipstick and her hair blown out like big white dust ball. But I nod because maybe that’s as good as it’ll ever get.
Sunita strokes my mother’s hand. “She’s all ready to see Doctor Max.”
Right. The doctor. “Let me know what he says.” I move to leave, then remember how Sunita called me three times in a row last week to say my mother had no appetite and can I bring home ice cream because she always takes ice cream. “Text, don’t call.”
My mother turns at the sound of my voice.
Sunita smiles. “She’s happy you’re here. She’s happy with her mani.”
I check my phone. “I’m late.”
I get caught at every light. My knuckles blanch on the steering wheel. What does my mother know about being happy? She doesn’t even know her name. She doesn’t even remember that she doesn’t like pink.
***
Lisa didn’t want us to hire a nurse. That fight was a real doozy. We were in Lisa’s room, which she’d spent an entire weekend painting brown. Like a pig sty. I sat on her bed while she swiveled on her desk chair.
“You’re hiring a servant?” Lisa swiveled left then right.
“A nurse,” I corrected.
“Whatever.” Lisa crossed her arms. “You think Grandma will like a stranger wiping her ass?”
Of course she won’t. No one likes another person wiping their ass. “It’s better than a nursing home, isn’t it?”
Lisa looked down.
“Lisa, honey, someone needs to care for your grandmother.”
There was a long silence and then Lisa exploded. “You think you can just buy everything. Like life is just one endless transaction.”
“So what do you suggest, Li? I quit my job and we go without? I’m not trained in this…field.”
When I think about the way Lisa looked at me, I still feel hot all over. “Grandma would hate you if she knew what you were doing.”
I felt like I was in one of these dreams, when you’re at the grocery store, or walking into the office, then you look down and realize you’re naked. I didn’t know what to say, so I stood there until Lisa plugged in her headphones. Then I left.
That night, I stood in my mother’s doorframe and watched her sleep. Her body was so still, I had to fight the urge to stick my finger under her nose to check if she was breathing, like I used to do when Lisa was first born. “I’m sorry,” I said into the dark.
And I was sorry, without even knowing what for.
***
Sunita’s laugh makes me feel like there’s some inside joke I don’t get. Now that she’s taken to teaching Lisa how to cook, there probably is.
No one tells me about the cooking lessons. I find out when I come home and my mother is propped in her chair, staring at the television, reeking of shit. It kills me. My mother used to smell like Chanel no. 5.
I find Sunita in the kitchen, holding Lisa’s wrist and helping her turn onions. She lets go, and Lisa sends a wad of hot onions flying over her shoulder. They land on my shoe.
“My mother needs a diaper change,” I snap.
Sunita giggles.
“This is funny?”
Lisa glares at me. “You’re home early.”
Sunita is still chuckling as she kneels at my feet and removes the onions with a damp paper towel. They leave a circle of oil on the Italian leather. “Let me take them. I’ll get this off no problem, baby.”
When I step out of my pumps and say, “Thank you,” Lisa drops her wooden spoon onto the floor and marches off, a cloud of dark curls and patchouli.
Sunita smiles. “We made your mother pudding, it’s cooling in the fridge, and now we’re making curry lentil soup.” She rinses the spoon and continues to flip onions as she rattles on. “Lisa really knows how to balance flavor. Garlic, cumin…”
“I can take care of the kitchen. If you just clean up my mother, you can go.”
Sunita looks at me. “I’ll clean her up, then finish dinner.”
“You’ve already done so much. Too much.” I try to sound like I’m doing Sunita a favor instead of telling her to get the hell out of my house.
Sunita shrugs. “Okay, baby.”
I turn off the stove. And after she’s gone, I toss whatever slop they were making and take the garbage right out before the whole goddamn house smells like curry.
***
My cousin Stella calls while I’m in the den, binge-watching Ozark. Stella grew up five blocks away, but she moved to LA so her children could have “a better quality of life.” What they have is three SUVs and year-round tans. They call themselves Angelenos.
When Stella’s mother was dying, she wrote a few big checks and forced her sun-kissed children onto FaceTime twice a week. We were the ones who went to the nursing home every first Sunday, with flowers and chicken parmigiana. But she’s family, so when she calls, I answer.
“There’s no good solution to old age, AnnMarie. Trust me. I know.”
I move onto the balcony, look out over solar panels and pools that look like mirrors, cracking every time the sun strikes. I light a Marlboro.
“Are you smoking?”
“I’m hitting Lisa’s Juul.”
“What?”
“Never mind. I interrupted.” Every time I speak—to my daughter, my husband, my 35-year-old boss—it feels like I’m interrupting.
“My point is: your mother could go on like this for years. You can’t care of her. You have a career.”
Lisa likes to say that real estate is a vanity career. “Hard day schmoozing?” she asked the other night at dinner, as she picked all the chicken out of her General Tsao’s chicken.
“I don’t schmooze, Lisa. I sell homes.”
“Right. You help rich people spend their money.”
I didn’t bother responding. Lisa was more interested in methodically picking anything that might be animal product off her broccoli than anything I had to say.
I wondered if she still wanted to be a veterinarian.
After a few bites, Lisa shoved her plate to the middle of the table and muttered, “I bet you’re not even going to recycle the takeout containers.”
Well, I did. I cleaned out all the gunk and put them in the blue bag even though I know the garbage men just mix it all up. I wanted to show her that I understand the kind of world she wants to live in. Sometimes, I even think she’s right.
“I don’t know, Stel, sometimes, I wonder if I should do more.”
“You’re doing the right thing,” Stella assures me before we hang up.
But at the end of the day, what do I know about what’s right?
***
“AnnMarie, baby,” Sunita calls from the bathroom. “Can you bring me a towel?”
Sunita is lifting my mother onto a rubber-footed shower chair. My mother’s skin looks sizes too big for her body.
I hand her a soft blue towel, one my mother used to like.
Sunita curls my mother’s fingers over the chair’s silver handles. “Hold tight.”
“You think she understands what you’re saying?” I ask.
“Oh yes, baby. She hears everything. Don’t you?” Sunita perches on the edge of the tub, holds a squishy yellow sponge under the faucet, then lifts it, letting warm water and suds run down my mother’s back. I half expect my mother to smile, but she wears the same vacant expression as always.
Sunita keeps talking. “I’ve taken care of a lot of old ladies. And believe me, they hear everything. They know.”
“I hope not everything,” I joke.
Sunita hums as she wets and squeezes the sponge. “It’s a good career.”
Career. She must have had other aspirations, but it’s not my place to ask. That’s the thing about life. When you’re young, you think you can keep starting over, just like that, but when you go down one path, it’s not so easy to change direction. You land where you land.
“I’d better go start dinner,” I say.
Sunita gently tilts my mother’s head in my direction. “Say bye to AnnMarie.”
I can’t bring myself to say, “Bye, Mom.” I can’t even wave. There’s no point pretending my mother understands what we’re saying. If she could, she would’ve let go a long time ago.
***
When my husband slides into bed, he smells like the hospital, cleaning fluid mixed with human.
I inch away from him. “Do you ever worry your patients think you’re a prick?”
“All heroes are pricks.” I hear the smile in his voice and wonder how I ever found it enchanting. “Hard day?” He grabs a bottle of coconut-scented lotion from his nightstand and begins massaging it into his feet.
“Sunita said that my mother is aware. That she understands everything we say.”
“Is Sunita a doctor?” He works on his big toe.
“Well, she spends 12 hours a day with my mother. She must know a lot that we don’t.”
“That’s why you hired help, right?” The bottle farts out a big yellow glob. “So you don’t have to know.”
I tug the blanket away from my husband, close to my chest. “I just did the wash.”
“Well.” He uses the heel of his hand to press on his joints and crack all five toes on his right foot. It’s a freaking miracle I don’t vomit. “If Sunita says so, it must be true.”
I watch him pat his feet with great satisfaction. “Do you ever wonder if Sunita thinks you’re a prick?”
“I’m sure she does.” He falls back onto his pillow. “I’m sure she thinks we’re both rich, imperialist pricks.”
Then he’s snoring, his belly like a whale bobbing under the sheets. I lie awake half the night, recounting all the horrible things I’ve said that my mother might’ve heard, all the times I could’ve touched her, or said hello, but didn’t.
I’m not sure regret is the right word for the feeling that sits with me as I stand at the window and watch the sky lighten. If I took it all back, well, I can’t think of anything I would replace it with.
***
My mother loves the butter cookies from my clients. Sunita tells me every time she sees me. “You’ve got to see how she eats the cookies, AnnMarie.”
To tell the truth, I have a hard time watching people eat, period. So I avoid going downstairs for a few days. But on Saturday morning, I have to use the downstairs shower because I have a closing at eleven, and at ten, my husband decided he was in the mood for a bath. I almost make it past when I hear, “AnnMarie, come see!”
I go in, because what choice do I have, and watch Sunita help my mother dip a cookie into a cup of tea. “Here we go, dunky-dunky,” she sings, like my mother is two years old.
I want to take that mug of tea and hurl it at the wall just like Lisa did that long-ago afternoon.
Instead, I walk away without saying a word and lock myself in the bathroom. I run the shower but don’t get in. I don’t even take off my clothes. I stare at my face the mirror. It’s all lines and rough skin. Pale eyelashes. I suppose I used to be pretty, the way all young girls are briefly pretty, but I was never soft. My mother taught me that being soft will break you.
I figure I better use the toilet before I get in the shower, and when I lift the lid, I see it. A floating Marlboro butt. It must be fresh because a long, rust-colored ribbon of tar is spiraling out. When I crouch down, I see ashes all over the white porcelain roots of the toilet.
“Lisa!” I march upstairs and bang on her bedroom door before shoving it open. My daughter is lying on her bed with headphones on, knees bent and iPad balanced against her thighs.
“What?” She doesn’t even look up from the screen.
I knock the iPad to the floor.
“What the hell?”
“You think you’re smart, smoking in grandma’s bathroom?” I shout. “Second-hand smoke can kill her.”
“Still don’t know what you’re talking about.” Lisa has a real gift for being dismissive.
“You think I don’t know you steal my cigarettes? I’m not an idiot! Go ahead, smoke! What do I care? But do it in your own space, not around your grandmother. She’s old, Lisa. She’s dying. Do you hear me? Your grandmother is dying!” I feel lightheaded. Almost drunk. “Are you stupid?”
“No,” Lisa answers quietly. “Are you?” She looks so lovely when she’s angry, I wouldn’t be surprised if she practices in the mirror. “I don’t smoke, Mom. You smoke.”
“Yes, I do. And someone steals my cigarettes. So if it’s not you, then tell me, Lisa, who is it? Grandma? Sunita?”
Silence.
Then my daughter shrugs. “Why don’t you ask her before barging in here like a raging lunatic?” She slides off the bed and picks pieces of clothing up off the floor. Small stretchy tops. Dresses that look like slips. One by one she tosses them at me. “I know you don’t believe me so go ahead. Smell my clothes. Find me one article of clothing that smells like smoke.” She doesn’t stop. Jeans. Bras. Socks.
I stand there like a clothes horse. Everything she throws at me smells like sweat and bergamot. She thinks I’m angry, but the truth is, I want to stand here forever, enveloped in my daughter.
***
I don’t sleep on it or talk it over with Stella. I go downstairs and say, “Sunita, can I see you in the bathroom?”
She trills something into my mother’s ear and follows me. I point to the ashes. To the bobbing butt. “What’s this?”
Sunita doesn’t answer.
I stare at the discolored water. “Have you been taking my cigarettes?” No answer. “Smoking around my mother?”
Sunita’s silence tells me she is guilty. Then it tells me she is honorable, and my daughter is not, and she’ll take the fall for Lisa. No. I shake that thought right out of my head. Her silence tells me she is guilty. She has to be guilty.
“If you can’t answer, you can go.” She can’t even look at me. She just tilts her chin up.
Well. She has no right to get pissy. I’m giving her a choice. She has every opportunity to defend herself.
Sunita chooses to leave the bathroom. She’s so quiet, packing her bag and whispering what I guess is good-bye to my mother.
I wonder if my mother will miss Sunita. But that’s ridiculous. She doesn’t even know Sunita. There will be another nurse with her own kind touch and my mother won’t know the difference.
Sunita isn’t even a nurse. She’s a home health aide. A woman who’s made a career of wiping asses.
I catch her in the doorway, try to place my hand on her arm, but she jerks it away. She looks small standing beside the heavy door in her worn sneakers. “Wait,” I tell her, and offer, “I want to give you two weeks’ pay.”
She waits while I run upstairs for the checkbook. I can’t remember her last name, but when I go back downstairs, I’m too ashamed to ask. My hands tremble a bit as I write out the one name I have for her. Something about the way she watches makes me nervous. Like she can see down to the very core of me.
Sunita folds the check in half and tucks it into a faded coin purse.
“I’m sorry.” I want her to know how bad I feel. “I’m sick over this, you know.”
Nothing.
“I’m sorry,” I repeat. I want her to forgive me. To yell at me. Something.
Sunita just smiles and her teeth are so white it’s startling. She shakes her head. “No, baby,” she says. “You’re not sorry.”
I wait for the door to slam, but Sunita leaves so quietly, it’s like she was never even here.
*****
Jackie Stowers is a writer, ELL teacher, and mother raising two big-hearted girls in New York City. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, most recently Cimarron Review. From 2018 – 2020, she was a feature writer for Bustle Media’s parenting outlet, Romper.
