Shanti Ariker – ‘Late in the Fourth Quarter’

My mother, Tina, was barely more than a chassis now, pillows propped around her to serve as inferior replacements for the evaporated body fat she used to fret made her look plump.

“How are you doing?” I asked, though she didn’t acknowledge me. “It’s me,” I said. I was desperate to connect with her in a meaningful way, but morphine drip-drip-dripped into her system, muting not just her pain and dulling all her senses.

 She responded, “I know.” But did she? She seemed to be floating above me out of reach. This unnerved me.

She smacked her lips together, eyes squinching, her perky red-head dissolved to a puff of cloud gray. Her entire body rebelled against her like her beloved striking farm workers against the greedy farmers whose crops they picked. She shook as she moved her thin-as-spaghetti arms, skin translucent as rice paper, veins poking through like flowing tattooed blue rivers. It took all her strength to move the thin hospital blanket away and prop up her legs on the mattress.

There was finally an us – me and her together – late in the fourth quarter of her life though it was. Tina and I had wasted more than fifteen years before finally re-establishing our relationship. At age five, I flew westward to visit my father and begged to stay. Custody battles ensued between my parents. They started out run-of-the-mill hippies, but somewhere along the way, they diverged. Dad became religious and Tina delved into communist politics, always picketing for the people, whether some low-wage laborer united by Cesar Chavez or a protest where they were burning the American flag to protest capitalism. Meanwhile, I adjusted to life with Dad and my stereotypically wicked stepmother.

During my acne-riddled, angst-packed teenage years, I wanted a mother who would teach me about myself, love me for who I was, and show me my potential. On my way to a high school dance, checking myself out in the mirror as I smoothed out my dress, I felt certain I’d have heaps more self-confidence if only I had a loving mom there to help me zip up the dress, apply a coat of lipstick, and tell me to stand up straight. But I wasn’t sure such a mom existed for me.

Instead, I stretched wide the chasm between me and Tina, a gaping valley that couldn’t be bridged by the letters she sent, full of her communist philosophy and railing against the U.S. government, or her calls that I refused to answer. I fed my peckish anger, reminiscent of her behavior back when I was a mischievous young child still living in her house. Her temper had been like a solar flare, burning hot and furious, a burst of radiation that I feared could incinerate me.

Tina remained an enemy combatant I fought against in our family custody battle. How could I stay a loyal foot-soldier to Dad and have a relationship with our adversary? And did she really care about me more than her causes? I wasn’t sure. Instead, I cut ties, like severing an imperfect but functioning arm and replacing it with a wooden one, hollow and subpar.

*****

I went on with my life for years until one day, I realized I needed my mother, no matter how imperfect she might be for me. I wished for the Hallmark movie perfect reunion pairing. We’d meet, shy at first, then realize how much we needed each other, a montage of fun adventures hitting the screen. The past would be blotted out like the tide washing away wayward footprints, crumbling sand castles, and leftover trash.

But life was no movie. After our reconciliation, we road-tripped from Tina’s rental, starting on the outskirts of downtown Chicago into Indiana, down winding country roads, past sprawling farms on either side of us. Recalling that her driving verged on reckless – she had nearly driven us off a bridge when I was a child – I offered to take the wheel, despite not knowing my way. I listened to her directions and tuned the radio continuously as we lost one station after the next, arguing as we wound our way down the backroad areas.

Tina started it.

She said, “Capitalism is like a drug that keeps some people down and out and others getting unfairly rich.” I had heard her make this argument multiple times.

“Communism seems good on paper but it never works out better from what I can tell,” I replied.

We went back and forth like that before I reminded her of our agreement to stay out of politics. We had promised to recreate a relationship built on shared experiences and not based on what we each thought about the world. It was hard, because her world revolved around her protests.

“I’ll be done with law school soon,” I said. “And then I will be headed to New York City, to work at a big law firm.”

“Just like my father. You’re following in his footsteps.”

I hadn’t thought about that. It felt good that I was carrying on a tradition that connected me to her despite all the rough patches that still existed between us.

And we learned how alike we were – as two similar cowrie beach shells, smooth and shiny. We began going on more outings together. One memorable visit, we went disco dancing until the early morning hours, singing and swaying to the music. After we stumbled out of the club towards a late night eatery to nibble on spicy Middle Eastern or Chinese food. The next day, drinking vats of coffee to wake ourselves up, we headed to Taste of Chicago in Grant Park. We strolled along the hundreds of food stalls, sampling food at the small booths until we were full. As we walked, we dribbled out stories from the past we had missed from living separate lives.

“I loved my English class in high school,” I told her. “That’s why I decided to go to law school.” I skipped over the many lawyers that had also influenced me during the custody battles, not wanting to open up old wounds.

“I love to read too. Did you read a lot of interesting books in that class?” she said. We discussed books like The Great Gatsby, Catch -22 and Jane Eyre and more modern novels like The Poisonwood Bible and Bridget Jones’s Diary.

But it was hard to erase the scabbed-over wounds that had left tough spots where there was once smooth skin. Memories of the years when we were enemies replayed in my mind. Her constant railing against the government, talk of Mao and communism, while I wanted to talk about my future, her past, how to move forward together.

Somehow we managed to cobble together a shared present. Tina was in the hospital to help me when the twins were born. She spoke to the nurse as I sat there trying to imagine myself as a mother now, ensuring that I would always be there for my kids, not letting the past repeat itself.

She helped me interpret the babies’ cries, rock them to sleep and change their diapers. She sang to them in her awful mewling voice, like a feral, junkyard cat. Despite the racket, it made me smile as I watched her beaming face looking down at her grandchild, the circle of life complete. I sat there, content in the wisdom I had shown to resurrect our relationship from the nearly expired.

*****

Though our bond thickened, Tina got sick. I was working all the time, busy most of the time at a corporate mega-company. I was in Las Vegas attending my company’s yearly kick-off event when I got a call.

“How are you?” she said.

“Oh, it’s so busy, I am running to the CEO’s keynote and then to a customer dinner,” I responded.

“I have some news,” she said.

I figured it was about a new trip she would be taking, as she had started traveling more since she retired. I was half paying attention as I walked along the corridors of the large casino complex where the conference took place. I planned to get off the call soon to get a good seat.

“I have cancer again,” she said. I stopped walking and listened more intently. “The doctor said it’s not curable this time. It must have moved from my colon to other parts of my body and they don’t think that they can stop it with radiation.”

“But you’re going to try, won’t you?”

“Yes, but I don’t want to suffer.”

“I don’t want you to suffer either.” I started to cry, wiping my tears on my sleeve, the keynote erased from my mind. I sat down in the long hallway, continuing to talk to her about her options. None of them were good.

As Tina grew sicker, I visited her more often. Even in those final, fatal months, she would rail against a pipeline, fascism or Trump when cognizant. Politics animated her. She took an interest once again in my life and her grandkids’ lives but her causes still reigned supreme, driving a continual wedge between us.

The nurse arrived with some applesauce, but Tina couldn’t lift the spoon. The room had that crisp antiseptic hospital smell, the odor that reminds you death lurks around the corner. The monitor behind her beeped on and off, monitoring her vitals, her frail state caused by cancer, an unwelcome house guest, thrown out once years ago, before returning to squat inside her body, now a permanent resident no matter the procedure, chemo, immunotherapy, or various quackery she attempted to evict it following every ‘How to Beat Cancer’ book that lined her apartment bookshelves. Cancer had unpacked, dragged in its own furniture, kicked back on the couch like a frat boy reveling in his independence, popping open a beer. It created additions throughout her body in the form of metastasis and fresh tumors.

On my previous visit the month before, when she was bedridden at home, she had refused all food except for whipped-cream-topped ice cream. Gone were her attempts to eat healthful food to try to ward away the cancer. She had given up.

Try as I might, I couldn’t get her to eat anything else. She’d spoon the ice cream slowly into her mouth, propped up in her bed with a wooden tray balanced on her skinny legs and eat it until there was nothing left in the bowl. She scratched her skin, constantly itchy from the radiation treatments that weren’t working.

Then she’d announce, “I want more ice cream.”

Now, sitting beside her bed on the floor, I ripped the foil off the top of the plastic container and began feeding her the apple sauce. She opened her mouth dutifully as I spooned it in, sliding the spoon along the roof of her mouth so the sauce wouldn’t fall out. She swallowed each bite until the container was empty. Then she sat there, staring at the T.V., or staring at nothing, sometimes in a stupor, sometimes her head falling back onto the pillow. She’d snap awake again, glassy eyed from the morphine they kept her on to keep back the pain from the cancer eating away at her body, staring straight ahead.

I sat there for a few more minutes, the T.V. playing in the background.

She blurted out, “Goodbye.”

I looked over at her and asked if she wanted me to leave now. Tina nodded. I was upset at the abruptness. I had the realization that I wouldn’t see her again, that our relationship ended here.

I asked if I could give her a kiss goodbye. She nodded again, and I gave her a kiss on the forehead. She acknowledged nothing, staring straight ahead. I reminded myself that the morphine dulled everything for her, that she was in pain – she wanted to end her own suffering after such a long, deteriorating illness. I knew that her dismissal of me meant nothing. She was decluttering her life in a kind of Swedish death cleaning, so that nothing remained to attach her to life. I knew I shouldn’t take it personally, but of course I did.

She wanted me to move on, but it hurt me as much as the hard tumor I could feel poking out under her arm. It meant that I couldn’t do anything more to ease her pain. And it meant she didn’t want me there. It was an unsatisfying ending, and I had no peace. I had gained my mother back, imperfect and so like me, but for only a whisper in time. This was not the way the Hallmark movie would have gone. I went downstairs, holding back tears.

 

__________

 

Shanti Ariker is a writer by night and a lawyer by day. The start of her memoir appears in How We Change, the 2024 San Francisco Writer’s Foundation Writing Contest Anthology. Her work has been published in The Thieving Magpie, On Being Jewish Now substack and Simpsonistas Vol. 3. You can find out more about her at shantiariker.com.