Buffalo wings. And I knew she meant not the drumsticks but only the wings, bright orange, from the local restaurant where I’d once worked as a hostess, wearing panty hose under starched black pants. I left the hospital, buoyant. Calling in the order, I was as thrilled as someone in my position could be. I picked up the white Styrofoam in the brown sack. Though it was spring I blasted the heat in the car and held the sack to the vent to keep the wings warm. My mother hated cold food. She liked to burn her tongue.
I walked into her room, victorious. She’d recently been moved onto the oncology floor and the new room was beautiful, compared with the first sticky days in the maternity ward. When she’d been admitted, maternity was where the available bed was, my mother the only quiet ashen thing among the red-faced, sweating, and jubilant.
I have them, I said. Your favorite.
She looked up. Beside her I’d stacked her copies of People magazine and Gente, its Italian equivalent. I’d moved the television remote to a place where she could easily access it. But she hadn’t touched a thing. She’d just been lying there, staring at the yellow wall.
Oh, she said.
What do you mean, Oh?
I’m not too hungry.
Just try, I said. I’ll cut them for you.
No, she said, you know I like to eat them off the bone.
But she couldn’t. To eat something off the bone you need to have a genuine appetite. She picked a wing up and dropped it down.
I was angry. At her lack of want. I was angry because she was barely trying to want.
Do you have anything you want to tell me?
You know where all the things are, she said. She meant the deed to the house, the little other things she’d hidden from burglars and prying family members.
Yeah. I mean anything else.
I love you.
Great, I said. She understood my rage. She knew I thought it was her fault, not necessarily that she’d gotten sick, but that she didn’t care that she’d gotten sick.
You want to know something else, she said, all right. Her accent was less thick than it had ever been. The morphine had a way of slurring language, of making her sound like everybody else.
The kindest nurse came in, then, and said, Hmm, chicken wings! Lucky lady! And my mother got it up for her in a way she didn’t for me. I have a good kid, she said, and patted my arm.
After the nice nurse left my mother looked at me. Her face was so gray. Only at night when they pumped other people’s blood into her did she get pink, resemble the woman I used to know. Who cleaned her house tirelessly, who polished her copper pots weekly and ate sunflower seeds, noisily, unrepentantly, in movie theaters.
Are you ready? she asked me.
Yes, I said. I got close to her face. I touched her cheek. It was still warm and I knew it wouldn’t be for long.
Don’t let them see you happy, she whispered.
Who?
Everyone, she said wearily, as though I had already missed the point. She added, Other women, mostly.
I thought it was the other way around, I said. Don’t let the bastards get you down.
That’s wrong. They can see you down. They should see you down. If they see you are happy, they will try to destroy you.
But who? I asked again. And what do you mean? You sound crazy.
I was young still, I had been without a father for only a few years. I had not yet gone out into the world alone and been bitten. On top of this I was a split person; my father had told me I could have it all. That I was the only thing that mattered. My mother taught me we were flies. We were all in the waiting room of overstuffed hospitals. All of us consigned to whatever ward could take us.
Her eyes closed then. The eyelids fluttered, actually. It was more dramatic than it needed to be. Even in that moment, a smokestack of twigs, she wanted me to be aware of the weight of her life.
One hot night in July 2018, Arlene Wilken gets ready for bed. She puts on the nightly news and pulls the covers up to her waist. The other side of the bed is empty.
On the television the news anchor is talking about the latest teacher-student scandal in North Dakota. There are so many, it’s a hotbed, it keeps happening. Arlene