Fresh Water from the Sea
The woman was weeks away. Maybe even days away.
The phone calls at first were difficult to understand. “You shouldn’t worry about this, but I’m getting thinner,” she said to her daughter, but instead of the note of excitement the girl expected, the woman sounded lost. “There’s less of me.” The girl imagined an old woman, her spine collapsing in on itself, giving in to gravity.
“Shrinking?” she asked.
“I’m losing myself,” the mother tried. The girl thought of her mother sitting on the floor of her apartment, the expensive rug covered in the puzzle pieces of her body. “It’s not like that,” the woman explained. “It’s like I’m vanishing. Like I am a thick fog, burning off.”
The girl flew across the world, LAX, JFK, then east, across the Atlantic, across the Mediterranean. The mother answered the door. She was slightly wispy. Where she had once been a precise oil painting, now she was a watercolor. “It’s good of you to come.” She looked the girl up and down, and the girl knew her mother was disappointed to see that the girl still looked the way she always had. “Any boyfriends?”
“No boyfriends.” The girl tried to smile, tried to keep the old joke alive.
Reluctantly, the woman hugged her, and the girl thought, My goodness, has she always had all of those bones?
The mother sat down on the couch in front of the huge windows, looking out at the city and the sea beyond. She patted the spot next to her. “You see it too, right?” she put her palm up. The girl nodded. It was just the very edges of her mother that were foggy. The girl reached out and held her mother’s hand, which felt as if it was coated in sea foam. “Good. I’m not going crazy,” the woman said.
They sat there quietly. For two days, since her mother had first called, the girl had tried to imagine what she would look like. She had tried to prepare herself for the worst. The words my mother is vanishing had been like a loose piece of metal rattling around the cage of her brain. She had felt a little bit of electricity shoot through her system, a jig of hopefulness. Maybe we will actually say something real to each other, she thought. Now she was wordless. “It’s good to see you,” the girl said. She stood at the edge, just where she always had.
From her suitcase she removed a jar of peanut butter, a box of cereal bars, oatmeal, pinto beans, and a loaf of whole wheat bread? “A little bit of America.”
The girl thought she could see a wisp of her mother disappear right then. “I’m sure it’s just…something,” she said, trying to stop it. The mother, misty, smiled at her daughter.
Out the window, they could see the tops of buildings, the air-conditioning units and heating tubes and collections of wires. The minaret from the mosque craned its neck. Below, café people were sitting with their legs crossed at the ankle and their faces up to the sun. This part of the city had been crumbled in the last war and was built back all at once, the center of the city turned into an overly cheerful mall. Plaza and clock tower, cobbled streets radiating out with shops.
“It looks just like California,” the girl said. She had taken a class on The American Dream in which the students wrote papers about the exporting of culture.
“At least it’s intact,” her mother said. She gestured to the other window, through which a big hotel stood, its walls yawning with holes, the railings on the balconies mangled. It was so quiet, that bombed-out hotel. How strange, the girl thought, that only the visual evidence of a war is recorded.
Beyond the city, the sea was endless.
The rest of the afternoon, the girl and her mother did what people do: went on in spite of what had changed. They chatted a circle around the outskirts of their lives, they ate something when they got hungry. By the time they went to bed, the woman’s blurry edges had become just another fact of the world, a stray cat that, once let in, had made itself at home.
In the morning, the girl and her mother packed up for the doctor’s appointment, put on decent-looking clothes. The girl did not say that her mother was a little hazier than she had been the day before. She did not say that when she came close to her mother, the temperature changed, as if the woman were her own weather system.
The doctor refused to look the mother in the eye or smile, as if doing so would break his calm. He asked a lot of questions that seemed like a way of avoiding what else he had to say. He wanted to know whether she’d been sleeping; and how about the chills, had she had any? And whether her snot, which she reported having a little of, was green or yellow.
“Clear,” she told him.
He said, “That’s great,” with conviction that surprised even him. “I mean,” he fumbled, “that’s good.”
The girl raised her eyebrows and nodded. “Her eyes are fine too,” she said, “and everything’s shipshape with her toenails.”
“We’ll run some blood tests,” he said, and they all knew that he meant This is a new way to get there, but the end will be the same.
The girl stood up and left the room. She went into the sterile-smelling bathroom and sat down on the toilet and kicked the wall once, hard. It clanked. There was a rubber mark on the wall from the black sole of her sneaker. She opened the little window where the pee samples were supposed to go. It was empty at the moment. She could see, through plastic curtains, technicians adjusting dials on the machines. They appeared as if underwater, breathing miraculously, collecting and testing out the life around them. Determining the lengths of time everyone had left on this alien land. She wanted to ask for forgiveness or clemency. Her mother hardly knew her at all, and she suspected the reverse was also true. She had always expected some midlife understanding, a trip to India in which they wore a lot of loose white clothing, finally revealed their true selves, said all those unsayables. On one of the little paper pee cups, in the marker that was meant to be used to write your name on the sample, the girl scrawled: Give us more time, please. As much as you can spare.
On the second day, the girl left her mother asleep on the couch in the sun and went walking. Ahead of her, the sea was pane-smooth, and in a square looking out at it, a statue of an angel shot full of holes. A taxi driver swerved and honked at an old woman crossing the road and then stopped short to buy a newspaper from a child. The girl remembered the city, but not well. She had visited her grandparents when they were alive, had eaten sugar-syrup pastries in the sun, driven into the mountains, and looked out at the sea. “The cliffs will eventually erode,” her grandfather had said, gesturing. “See how the water keeps tugging at them?” There was an underground river of desperation in his voice. This country was not big enough to lose any more ground.
The girl watched boys jump from the sea wall into the deep blue. Families had chairs set up along the boardwalk, lunches, hookahs, children with candy-stuck faces. They were alive and together, and God, whichever god was theirs, had shaken this day out like a crisp sheet for them to lie down on.
The girl sat on a bench and called her sister who was planning, always planning, to worry about someone beside herself. “It really is as if she’s fading away,” the girl said over the thousands and thousands of miles. It felt strange to say it, and she looked around to see if anyone had overheard her. The girl waited to be carted off, a crazy daughter.
“I just wish I was there,” the sister told her.
“You can be. There are airplanes.”
“God,” she kept sighing, “give Mom a big kiss for me.”
“Is this really happening?” the girl asked, but her sister had already hung up.
The story, the way it had always been told, was this: When the woman was eighteen years old, the war had woken back up. Her parents sent her away with a suitcase full of gifts for the relatives in California who had agreed to take her in. “But I don’t know who I am anywhere else.”
The parents said, “You’ll be whoever you become.”
In the airplane, the woman had cried until her cheeks were sore, her eyelids swollen, her lips raw. She promised herself to her country, swore she would never love anything or anyone else.
She planned to go home in a year, but her parents matched her up with the boy who lived down the street from the girl. The woman did not fall in love with him, but she married him because it was easier than not marrying him. She pinned photographs of that faraway coastline to the ceiling above her bed, stared up at the relentless blue sea while her husband breathed into her neck. Then the woman was pregnant with twin girls, a pair of anchors that would sink into the sand of their adopted city.
When the girls were young, everything in the house had come from the woman’s faraway home. Olives, sweets, citrus, honey. The first thing the daughters learned to draw was the cedar tree, famous and endangered. Inside the house, the family lived in a tiny island of the woman’s long lost home. The girl and her sister were taught to be suspicious of everything else, California looming like a high-wire circus that wanted to recruit them. All their lullabies were from home, all their prayers. The mother surrounded herself with the seaside country like it was atmosphere, the only thing keeping her alive on a noxious, foreign planet.
The girl remembered sitting outside her parents’ door before her father left, listening to them fight.
“I’m from the same place as you,” the father had said.
“But you are not the place itself. You are not my home.”
In the afternoon of the third day, the woman and the girl sat on the bed playing two games of solitaire because neither one could remember the rules to anything else. The cloud that was the mother had grown thinner. The air around her was dewy.
Outside, the people, the poor war-battered and future-looking people, were just trying to enjoy a day in the sunshine. They were being good, trying hard. The girl, watching them through the window, thought about rewarding them, throwing chocolate coins or confetti down.
“Would you do something for me?” the mother asked her daughter. “I haven’t shaved in days. I can’t stand to touch my skin.”
The girl filled up a pot with warm water and put on a pair of shorts. She took one of her mother’s legs in her hands. Even without shaving cream, the mother’s legs were puffs. For a moment, after each stroke, her skin looked like skin, as if all the girl needed to do was sweep the clouds away to find her. But soon the mist gathered, and the woman was ghostly again.
“Why is this happening?” the girl asked.
“I’m sure it’s my fault. Maybe I didn’t eat enough leafy greens. Maybe I did something awful in a past life. I’m sure I should have loved you better.”
“There are worse mothers, and they don’t disappear.”
“Everybody goes, somehow.”
The mother watched while her daughter worked. She looked back and forth between their legs. “Your bone structure, sweetie,” she told the girl, “it’s very good. Even your ankles; look at how nicely they taper.” She reached out and smoothed her finger over the girl’s calf.
The mother was gently marking the girl. When, in some future, the girl let a man near her skin again, she knew already that the fingers she’d feel would be her mother’s.
The moment the girl and her sister were settled in college, the mother began to shop for an apartment back home. She was a brightened, colored-in version of herself. She sold off the furniture, gave away half her clothes, made her daughters reduce the relics of their childhood to two cardboard boxes, stored in their aunt’s garage. Meanwhile, the girl set up pictures on her dorm room desks, organized her sweaters in the drawer. She, too, felt as if she were living in a new country—college was America and nowhere else. She felt as if she had just stepped off a ship for the first time in her life, her body still listing.
The mother called occasionally at the beginning of fall to report the progress settling in, news from friends, restaurants discovered. The girl would return her mother’s calls when she got back to the dorm from a series of parties, just drunk enough to feel like talking. “How is your sister?” the woman asked. “Is she still with that What’s-His-Name?”
“I have no idea. I don’t keep track.”
“It’s late. You should study.”
The girl put a foot on the floor to anchor herself. Dear Mom, she thought, I’m really happy to be alone in the world. Thank you for being far away. All her life, the mother’s unhappiness had been like a magnet for the girl, pulling, pulling. There were so many new things for the girl to love, now that her mother was in the distance.
The girl could hear her new friends in the common room, microwaving something wonderfully horrible to eat. Her life was an unplanted field, and everywhere she looked, something waited to be sown.
On the fourth day, the girl called her sister, knowing it wasn’t a good time for her. She would be eating in a new restaurant with a new boyfriend who was probably on the verge of proposing just at the moment the sister would have spotted someone cuter in the yellow streetlight outside. She made the girl tired, the dance of her life. “How is she?” the sister said, her voice full of the over-concern of guilt.
“She’s less and less,” the girl said. The sister sighed. The girl knew she did not believe what was happening—none of them did. It seemed made up, a story they were all pretending. The sister did not comfort the girl and the girl did not comfort her sister. “Are you sure you don’t want to come? Consider ten years from now, won’t you wish you’d seen her?” On the far end, the voices of many people, awake late at night, clinking their glasses.
“What? It’s so loud here.”
The girl whispered, “I can hardly hear you either, in all this quiet.”
By the fifth day, the mother’s skin was practically radiating light. She looked more and more like weather, like a brewing storm. Her face was hairless and glowing. Disappearing was what the mother was now doing, as if disappearing were a job. She was working hard at it, overachieving as usual.
The girl sat down close to her mother on the couch. She wanted to touch her mother. It was the same temptation she had had on every airplane flight of her life, looking out at those mounded clouds. There was a coolness to her mother, the chill of wet air. The girl felt something hard around her mother’s waist. “What is this?” she asked, startled.
“A girdle,” the mother said.
The girl paused and ran her hand up the perfect smoothness of the device, which did not give way. “Have you always worn this?”
“I was trying to find something to contain me. To hold me together.”
“Let me do it,” the girl said. “The last thing we need is a device that’s meant to shrink you.” The girl moved her hand up the long line of clasps, releasing. She put her arms around her mother’s waist, and she held hard. The woman was too weak to wriggle away. For this they both gave silent thanks.
The woman studied the street scene. “I never got around to sorting all my paperwork,” she told her daughter. “I still have all my old gas bills in storage. It hardly seems fair that I should disappear yet they remain.”
“Are there things I should keep?
“I have no idea. Ask my accountant. Or maybe there’s some kind of packet available. ‘What to do with your files when you vanish.’” They both laughed, and then they both stopped laughing. “You should take the fashion magazine subscriptions for yourself. Give the political stuff to your sister.”
“Yeah, she’ll really love that.” The girl imagined her sister with her nose curled up, as if doing so could make her any less stupid, trying to understand even one line of an article about the wars, the elections.
Down below on the street there were clumps of people eating at tables. They had hummus and lamb-flatbread and a bottle of wine. A man wore a t-shirt that said, Talk to My Agent. There was a rack of postcards standing on the sidewalk, and a man and woman were taking out one at time and laughing at it. They pointed and then they laughed. The girl imagined the cards: puppies dressed as policemen, old women, naked but for cat-eye sunglasses and martinis. The people found this funny. They could be anywhere on earth, any nationality, and the joke would still be the same.
“Tell me something about your life,” the mother said.
“A professor asked me out. We had one boring date and a sloppy kiss. I got a B in the class and I was so furious.”
The mother put her hand on the girl’s. It was too soft.
“I love you,” the girl said.
“Let’s not do that.”
The girl searched the room for something safe to look at. On the counter was a bowl with a fissure straight through, waiting to be glued. It was an old bowl, probably a gift from some beloved. Would she throw it in the garbage? Dead and over? The apartment was full of the souvenirs of a lived life, each one the nail holding a memory in place. The girl wondered, when they passed through her hands and did not jog a memory because neither the objects nor the places they came from belonged to her, if she would want to wrap them carefully in paper and ship them to herself in boxes. Or if she would send them to the poor because they were inanimate and mute and could not revive the woman who used to love them. Would some part of the girl suddenly bloom that knew what to do?
“Throw them away,” the mother said, as if she was reading her daughter’s mind. “We’ll go through the apartment tomorrow and tag the good things—worth money, or very special. You don’t want to treasure some piece of art for the next fifty years only to meet me in heaven and discover that I always hated it.”
Late at night the girl took the girdle into the guest bedroom where she was sleeping. She wrapped the girdle around herself and hook-and-eyed the long strand. She examined herself in the mirror. She wondered who would hold her in when she began to disperse.
The girl found her phone and scrolled through the contacts, wanting to hear a warm voice. She hit send on her ex, and he answered with a question in his voice. In the background was the din of twenty-something fun. The girl said, “Hey,” and the lonesomeness in her voice surprised her. The ex talked for a second, but she was listening to the party behind him. He had no idea how lucky he was to be in a room with a hundred other young bodies, complete bodies, everyone yelling to be heard. The girl hung up without saying goodbye and didn’t answer when the boy called back. The room was sick with quiet. The girl took the girdle off and held it to her cheek, her mother’s sweat and skin part of the fibers now, pressed together like praying hands.
A week after the girl had arrived, the woman was vapor. She was pure humidity, and the whole apartment was muggy with her. The marble in the bathroom sweated all day. Droplets of condensation fell from the ceiling. The air was heavy. The mother, what was left of her, hovered on the couch. Even her bones were faint. The girl called her sister to say that she didn’t think the woman had long.
Someone knocked on the door a few minutes later. It was a pimpled adolescent boy with a huge bouquet. The girl closed the door to a crack. Her first thought was that God had sent these flowers—who else could have gotten them here so quickly? She pictured the all-powerful, trying to negotiate a bouquet without too many carnations. The card said, “Dear Mom: Wishing you the best in this hard time in your life,” in the sister’s looping script.
And what about your life? the girl thought. I suppose this is not a hard time for you. Do you have a secret mother waiting to replace this one?
The girl looked at the almost-nothing that was her mother now. “Look what your daughter sent,” she said. The mother looked back. The girl was completely visible, but that was not the same thing as being whole. Inside the girl, there were fractures, fault lines.
The girl stood by the open window, pulled a rose out and threw it. It whirled in slow motion for a few seconds, like the hand on a clock, counting down. A man picked it up, then turned upward, shading his eyes and trying to figure out the source of the bloom. “What are you doing?” the mother asked.
“I guess I’m throwing roses,” the girl said, unable to make sense of herself. The mother, barely a mist now, joined her by the window. A little whorl of her trailed behind, and the girl swept her hand through it.
“Can I have one?” The woman tossed it and it felt good. “You can love as many and as much as you want. I thought I had to save my love up, that I would run out. It turns out it’s the exact opposite.” She paused. “When I was living in California, the only thing I could smell was this city. I would remember the plainest things, some random intersection, and feel an ache to see it. Missing home was sweeter even than being here.”
The girl thought of all the leavings a person does over the course of her life. Leaving the womb, growing up and leaving home, letting go of friends, breakups with lovers, divorce, houses packed up and moved out of. She pictured abandoned, grown-out-of skins everywhere.
The girl could already feel the empty space forming around her mother, and its gravity. She knew she would circle it for the rest of her life, orbiting that absence.
“When I walked out of the airport, when I finally came home, I thought I never have to leave this. All those years, all I had wanted was to be surrounded by this city, engulfed.”
The mother told her daughter about the first weeks, which were all reunions with old friends, picnics by the sea, meals in which every single thing was right—the dreamed-of bread dipped in olive oil, the woman’s fingers glistening. She woke in the seaside country, she slept in it. She breathed and it filled her up.
“Soon, I had seen each of my old friends once, and when I called for another date, their voices cooled. ‘We’re going away soon, and I have a million and one things to do,’ one said. ‘I’d really love to, but it’s a busy time at work.’ I used to be a once-every-three-years friend.”
The girl thought of the architecture of those lives in which there was a small room for her mother, quiet, off in the corner.” The sitting rooms were filled with nearers and dearers, the gardens were at capacity, the bedrooms, certainly, were full.
As the months passed, the mother said she had continued to buy the dreamed-of bread and dip it in olive oil, but she did not close her eyes with pleasure each time anymore. This was not bread from the faraway seaside country anymore—it was just bread, commonplace and unremarkable. The coffee was just coffee, the oranges just oranges. Every bakery had the treats she had eaten as a child; every café the tomato salad. The concentrate that she had spent her whole life brewing, the thick syrup of this place that she had lived on, had been watered down. Every single thing was the war-torn seaside-country.
“How could I love every single thing?” she asked. “It used to be that I was my love for this place. With so much of the place, it was like I, too, was being diluted.”
The girl thought of her mother, her mostly water body dropped into a deep blue pool, dispersing.
“I wandered, street by street, buying things just so that I could say hello to the shopkeepers. I still felt unseen.”
And the next week, she said, she was also unseeable. Just a little bit, at first. The woman kept taking her sunglasses off to clean them, to try and wipe away the fogginess. But the rest of the world was crisp. Her body alone was blurring. “Is this what dying feels like? I wondered. Does everyone have this experience at the end of their lives?”
“I’m sorry you were sent away,” the girl said. The girl remembered hearing as a child her mother crying in the other room. Her mother had been lost, the girl knew that much. She was drifting on an unknown sea. Many times, the girl had tried to turn herself into an island on which her mother could land.
The girl threw another rose. A man picked it up, squinted up into the sky, and the woman and the girl could tell that he did not see them this high. The mother and her daughter were nothing more than strange weather.
The girl asked her mother to tell her that they were both going to be all right. That they were both going to be at home wherever they were. She wanted it to be true, something the mother could know from her perch at the edge of life.
Out over the sea, the sun grew hotter. The girl remembered the water cycle: evaporation, condensation, precipitation. The mother closed her eyes. She was almost invisible now. She was just the faintest color, like the rainbows thrown by a crystal in the window. The air hung against the girl’s skin, heavy. The woman was the air; the girl breathed her in. She looked around the room and could not see her mother anymore.
A storm broke over the girl, thunderheads, lightning, rain and rain and rain and rain.
