The daughter dresses up to visit her mother just as the mother would expect her to do. The daughter applies an extra brush of blush, selects quiet gold jewelry, and smoothes down her unruly hair just as if she were sitting for a photo session. But the daughter is not the subject here. The mother is. The daughter is the mother’s camera, the lens, to capture her for the moment, and in so doing, the daughter finds a room full of ghosts.
The mother is fading. Like an old photograph pinned up on a sunny wall too long or the development process itself in reverse. Everything in the room is stark white – the walls, the rugs, the sofa. Even the mother is white. Her hair that used to be shiny black is now flat white. Her skin that was satiny olive is now crepey white: disappearing.
The daughter slips the orange tulips she has brought in the one remaining empty vase in the assisted living apartment, fills it with water, and turns to the mother. The daughter stares at the shadow of what used to be such a vivid woman.
The mother holds out her arms, “What a beautiful woman! Come, sit here beside me,” patting the cushion on her old sofa, and leaning close to the daughter, she begins, “Now, tell me about your parents.”
The air stills. Holding the mother’s hand, the daughter slides into her automatic ready-care voice in response to the mother’s acute memory lapse cover-up, a dance between ferocious pride and dimming dementia. The daughter recites the mother’s story back to her, hoping to tug a memory nerve. The key to the mother has always been her own mother, the grandmother, who died when her favorite daughter was twenty-one. That mother was her great love whom she has quoted everyday for three-quarters of a century. That woman lives, that revenant, inside this aging woman.
The story the daughter retells the mother is the familiar immigrant story. The grandmother, educated in Romania, with a certificate in costume design, followed her husband one year after he had come to New York City having saved enough money for his wife and four young children to make their way, somehow, to the boat that would take them to Ellis Island. The grandmother’s name is listed on the website with departure and arrival dates, the one detail to prove their passage. She gave birth to her fifth child, her favorite, only five months later. Did they count the months with so many mouths to feed? Did she reveal what had happened to her and who the real father was? Unasked questions? This fifth child, however, was quite different from her all of her brothers and sisters, older and younger. And, when the mother, in turn, gave birth to a daughter, a year after the parents died, the mother named her for her own mother to honor her and to keep the mother’s name in her mouth everyday.
The mother listens, her lips parted, without any indication that she remembers any part of this story as her own. But she lifts a finger, beckoning the daughter to continue.
Does she remember cooking with her mother, cleaning the houses they lived in, keeping their clothes in crates ready to move when they couldn’t pay the rent?
Does she remember being the one to be sent, at thirteen, to prospect for another “business,” assessing the store and the space above for them to live, dodging pinches from the men selling off their second-hand inventory? The mother’s eyes, once with sight like eagles, now half-blind, follows along with the story, not agreeing, or even remembering, perhaps considering.
The daughter continues, singing “How Dry I Am,” hoping the mother will remember the cue from the mother’s organ teacher on Friday nights at the silent movies to take over for him at the piano so he could get a drink from the bar-- an exchange for music lessons when there wasn’t any money.
“Do you remember working for the school board and investing half your salary so that you could support your family? Do you remember joining a charity and becoming its president, practicing your speeches in the bathroom mirror? And those suits, anthracite gray with peplums and matching hats?” No? No? You don’t remember?”
The mother has stopped listening. She picks up a letter lying on the coffee table. It’s one of the letters the daughter has sent just so that she can receive mail, as if she had a real correspondent. The mother holds the letter an inch from her eyes, and reads aloud, “Dear Other. Oh, there seems to be a letter here in front of other. Is
it an N or a M? No, it’s an M. That would make it Mother. What could Mother mean?”
The daughter sinks back into the white sofa cushion and gazes at the mother, white as a ghost. What can she say? She can’t tell her that she is the end of the line, no daughter of her own to care for or be cared for, in turn. Yet, she is looped back into the lineage.
The mother suddenly takes the daughter’s hands and kisses them. They sit silently side by side: the daughter, the mother, and the memory of the grandmother-- as they were and as they are now.