and the older brother of a boy in my class had come back not right in the head), but didn’t ask.
Over the years I’ve tried to understand my mother’s emotion at that moment—regret about an unconsummated love affair? Her own Lucy Jordan moment? Simple sadness at my brother’s departure, and thoughts of all the things that now would be forever unsaid?—but all I know is that I’ll never know. I decided, for a long time, that it had to do with the ending of a maternal role, with the painful knowledge of all she’d sacrificed to raise him, when now she was handing off her son to the world. But more recently, I’ve thought that maybe it was about an unconsummated love affair after all, maybe about a flirtatious exchange with a stranger in a train station, or an unanswered letter from a college sweetheart, one of those secret moments when you think that now your life will have to change, only it doesn’t. Something small but big that she regretted and that tormented her each day. With my children, I’ve discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another—desire, by another name—is the source of almost every sorrow.
While I could have, I never asked her. She might not even have remembered crying in the Hunan Gourmet, as I’m sure she wouldn’t have remembered crying in the A&P. When she got her diagnosis—and with it the promise of infinite torment, of so many things she would never, never again do—she didn’t shed a tear. It was a sorrow without expression. For months she’d had a twitch in her left hand, and thought it was nerves. She’d shown it to me at the kitchen table when I was over for supper—the house so quiet by then, almost vast in its quiet, no Matthew, no me, no Ziggy or Sputnik, the hallways dark outside the kitchen’s pool of light, broken only by the distant glimmer of my father’s reading lamp in the gloom of the living room—how could a body spend so much time reading The New York Times?—and had said, with her sharp laugh, “Just look at that! It comes and goes. My hand with a mind of its own. It thinks it’s smarter than I am. Getting older stinks.”
“You should ask Dr. Selby about that,” I said, but in an offhand way, because although I saw the twitch, the ripple of the muscles of her fingers, it seemed that because it was part of her body, my mother’s body, and because we could see it, that it had to be some version of normal. Besides which, I was busy pouring myself a second preprandial glass of pinot grigio, because by that time I found that if I didn’t, the darkness of the house seeped into my bones like damp, and chilled me for days afterward. I was about thirty, then, and my mother was sixty-one, my father just past sixty-five, a few months into his retirement, and now that their ages don’t seem so very far away, I marvel at all they seemed already to have renounced. But it was the isolation, the crippling boredom of it, that got me. Pinot grigio helped, and pinot noir too. Even a beer, if that was all they offered. So I wasn’t paying the proper attention. She must have shown my father too, and presumably he looked up from his newspaper and said much the same thing as I did in the same distracted way, and because of this she did nothing about it, didn’t visit or speak to Dr. Selby for the better part of a year after that, by which time the fasciculation, as it’s properly known, had spread to her feet as well, though not, still, to her right—her writing—hand, because that would’ve sent her doctorward pronto. And by the time they started the tests—the electrodiagnostics and the spinal tap and the muscle biopsy and the whole nine yards—she was scared, not least because she could see that Dr. Selby was scared. For all her smiling hypocrisies, she was very honest, my mother, and she said to me, “I wanted him to reassure me, and when I saw he wasn’t going to, I thought, This is when the shit hits the fan.”
When they finally made the diagnosis—it took a while, a lot of eliminating of other possibilities—maybe she already knew. And the diagnosis—ALS, aka Lou Gehrig’s, aka