My mother's hands and feet are falling off in layers. There is nothing she can do.
She asks me to help her push in a thumbtack. It will split her finger open if she does it herself.
She wont go see a doctor.
I yell at her. "You're a fucking leper and you don't care! It's disgusting, ma. Really."
She says she's too busy. She clips on a pair of earrings and throws a shawl over her shoulder. "Looking real good, ma. Just bring a pair of gloves. And forget about the sandals. They'll run away in disgust before you even show them the house."
My mother is kicking off her real estate career at 56. She got a lucky break on leads, and now gets bankruptcy referrals out of the ears. She's found her calling. Her own bankruptcy, when I was 13, has given her an empathetic understanding of her clients. It's all so far behind her now, but still she carries the sadness from those evil years deep within her, neglected. Just like her hands and her feet.
She rushes out of the door and gets into her $50,000 lemon, a black BMW that looks more like a vehicle for transporting gangsters, hitmen, mafia, or the dead. She paid for it in cash.
"Ma, I'm leaving for Washington state. I'm driving north tomorrow."
"Yeah, right. You're not going alone. Bye!"
I'm 27 years old, and have lived all over the US, and traveled across Europe solo. Before you go thinking I come from privilege, let me say this: I was more of a shoestring traveler than anything. I slept in libraries, streets and benches. I hunkered down under trees during lightning storms and begged the police to find a place for me to rest when they treated me like a bus depot bum.
"This isn't a bus depot" they said to me once, as I stood chattering, chatting to my long-distance love, a man 14 years my senior, (who had a cutting problem and serious anxiety disorder). That was at Swedish hospital in Ballard, a suburb of Seattle.
Obviously, I made it Washington state. My mother hasn't visited. But she says she will.
There's nothing I can do, though, to keep her ship on an even keel. It seems destitution never lingers far behind her. The bubbles keep an ebb in her cash flow: she never manages it well. Feast and famine. The story of our lives.