“I’m on a coconut water fast,” my mother says over the phone from LA.
A hot prickle of worry. “You are?” I ask.
“I’m five days in, but I feel good. I’ve even been able to continue practicing.”
She is tackling George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue for next Thanksgiving. She has a year, in which she plans to memorize all twenty-six pages. Last Thanksgiving she played Scott Joplin and handed out flyers she had made about the history of ragtime and jazz.
“I’m lucky my hands are so big,” she says. “Gershwin was working with octaves in this piece. It’s really meant for a man’s hands.”
This will be her third concert. Since she moved to Los Angeles from New York two years ago, she has been playing the piano and bassoon for her children and grandchildren at Jay’s house when we gather for Thanksgiving.
“Are you sure you should be fasting for a week?” I say.
Her words are clipped when she answers, “I feel fine, Christine.” I can hear the scold. She knows better than I do about these things. “I have energy. I slept all night last night, and my toe didn’t bother me at all.”
Her pinky toe has been keeping her up most nights. She is fasting, she tells me, because she believes the pain is due to the fact that the meridian attached to her gallbladder is blocked. The fast will clear the blockage. As proof that she needs to cleanse, she reports that the KinoTox pads she applies to her feet at night, which look like small Kotex pads and start off white and pink, are black and oily in the mornings as they work to draw out toxins, their purpose.
I make a note to myself to check in with her more frequently. I call her again at the end of the week.
“I break my fast tomorrow. I asked Lolo to buy egg yolks. I will eat kitchari and raw egg yolks for two days then introduce salads and cooked egg yolks. It’s remarkable how much energy I feel from the coconut water.”
Except she looks too skinny the next time I visit. I’m in LA to meet Francesca, whom I have only seen once since I moved to California. We had met by the campus at Berkeley, two years after I graduated from college. We were twenty-four, though at the time it had seemed like a lifetime had passed since our summers together.
I pick Francesca up from her hotel downtown and call my mom. She wants us to come to the apartment for lunch. “I’ve made kitchari,” she tells me over the phone. I had given her a heads-up that we could come for lunch and she’s ready. Francesca can’t wait. As we drive through Los Angeles, she tells me, “I always loved the way your kitchen smelled in Point Lookout. Did I ever tell you that? Like vegetables, like tomatoes and cucumbers and lemon.”
My mother lets us in to the small apartment. I have warned Francesca that there won’t be a surface that isn’t crowded with spices, dried roots, her preparations for three meals a day, hundreds of jars and tiny bowls filled with herbs, her fridge filled with juices she makes on Sunday now to last the week. Ron Portante, a psychic my mother started seeing when we moved to Beverly Hills, reported a vision of my mother in an earlier lifetime, standing off a crowded bazaar, witch-like, beckoning with a crooked finger, opening a cloak filled with fifty pockets, each with a different herbal remedy.
As expected, when Francesca and I enter, my mother’s small kitchen and living room feel claustrophobic. Boxes are piled high in every corner, all the counter space is filled, the small coffee table and bookshelves are stacked high. It took my mother a year to go through all the boxes and files and belongings in Illinois’s house, to send things to institutes, to foundations, to libraries. She has pared down her belongings, but I am reminded of why I like to travel so light in my life. I get the instant feeling of being weighed down, no escape, something I must have grown up feeling. She shows me how to use her new Coco Jack, a five-part system to open a coconut. It looks like a giant vice and requires several attempts and only partially works on the coconut she demonstrates with on her linoleum. She carries our bowls of yellow soupy kitchari and cut-up salad drenched in smeared avocado and lemon juice to a fabric ottoman that she has cleared off for our meal. She has steamed asparagus and dribbled it with olive oil. It seems like a feast, no longer weird because everyone has olive oil on vegetables and salad now. Even the kitchari seems like real food.
“This is delicious, Carol,” Francesca says. I wolf it down, appreciating it, as I notice I do when her food is only a treat and no longer a three-meals-a-day, every-meal-the-same regimen. “I’m so happy I came.”
The metallic hum of the juicer, my mother clinking jars together, shuffling around in her kitchen. Francesca here. I’m feeling flashbacks. I try to soak it in. Will the three of us ever be together again?
“I hope to see you again,” Francesca says to my mother, reading my thoughts, when it’s time to take her back to the hotel. “Let’s not make it another thirty years.”
I hug my mother, notice the sharp angles of her bony shoulders. Before I go, she wants me to make some ionized water; she has a brand-new ionization system installed under her small bathroom sink to remove tap water’s impurities.
“Press the red button; when the light turns green, hold the glass under the spigot. Keep it there until the third beep, the light will turn yellow, flip the lever off.”
I am suddenly twelve again. This is a lot of information to take in, but I want to prove I can manage her new system. I take the glass jar—my mother has no plastic in her kitchen—head down the narrow, stained carpeted hallway, crouch under the tiny sink. The ionization system is intimidating, it turns out. It looks like a science fair experiment: there are thin white spider-leg hoses going every which way, all attached to a large gleaming metal box. There is nothing remotely familiar about any of it. I push the red button, but it doesn’t turn green. I push it again. No water comes out. Or maybe the water is dispensing from some other opening I haven’t noticed yet.
“Mom, is the water supposed to come out after I push the button?”
It takes her a moment to get down the hall.
“No, no, no, Christine.” Real annoyance as she comes up behind me. “Red, green, yellow. Let me do it.”
I watch as water comes out of the first spigot. I would have liked to get it right, but there was no way to know.
“Some things never change.” I’m back in the kitchen with Francesca. “She didn’t think I could figure it out on my own. Maybe that’s why it’s taken me so long to believe I can.”
“Mothers…” Francesca says.
I’m glad Francesca’s there as witness. Glad I can name this now, even if it took several decades.
* * *
A month goes by, and I hear from Jay that my mother is doing another coconut water fast. Once she is done with the week, she implements, as a follow-up, a water fast every Sunday.
“Do you really need to fast once a week, Mom?” I ask her over the phone. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“My toe is so much better,” she says. “Can I put the phone down and play Rhapsody in Blue?” She has memorized twelve pages. She says she can feel George Gershwin in the room with her while she practices. She sees her neighbors when she goes down to the laundry room and they stop her and tell her how much they look forward to hearing her play.
Her playing sounds strong, her fingers on the keys forceful, the music beautiful, even through the phone. I trust her that she knows what’s she’s doing, that she’s feeling better. That she doesn’t want to bear the pain in her toe anymore and the fasts are the very thing that will solve the problem. So I expect and don’t expect the call from Jay a few weeks later.
“I got a call from Marta,” Jay tells me. Marta is my mother’s new Ayurvedic practitioner in Los Angeles. “She said Mom called her and her words were garbled. When I got to the apartment, she was fine in every way, except that when she tried to speak, nothing came out.”
I’m with the rugby team not far from Los Angeles.
“I’m getting on a plane.”
“Wait and let’s see what happens tonight,” Jay says firmly. “She doesn’t want to make a big deal out of this. She got mad at me when I suggested the hospital.”
“Can you get her to go?”
“She’s refusing.”
“Can you force her? Pick her up and carry her into the car.” To our mother, a hospital is a place where you go in healthy and don’t come out.
“Forcing her in this condition might do more damage than good,” Jay says.
The next day she agrees to go to Jay’s acupuncturist, who tells her he can’t work on her unless she has a medical okay. So, to my brothers’ and my utter shock, Jay sends a photo to all of us of my smiling mother sitting on a hospital bed, hooked up to electrodes as they test her responses. She is cleared for acupuncture and begins a whirlwind schedule of holistic practitioners. Ayurvedic, acupuncture, body work. Later we will find out there’s a drug that, if administered within a few hours of a stroke, reverses some of the brain damage. Her words return. Even so, she won’t let me visit: “Wait until I have the piece perfected. I want to play it for you; I’m not ready yet.” She is insistent. She doesn’t want me to see her when she can’t find her words, I realize. She doesn’t want me to see her damaged. Impure.
“There’s nothing for you to do, Christine. Come later, not now.”
Her emails slowly evolve from missing a word or two out of every sentence to back to her old sophisticated, erudite expressions. She has returned to her old self, even fasting on Sundays again, visiting her acupuncturist on Mondays, Marta on Tuesdays, her kinesiologist on Thursdays, going for electrolysis on Fridays. When I speak to her on the phone a week and a half after the stroke, she is slightly halting, but if I hadn’t known, I wouldn’t notice anything amiss. A few weeks more and she tells me she has all of Rhapsody in Blue memorized, including the challenging second six pages she had been avoiding. Now she feels the piece is ready and she wants me to come for a visit so she can play it for me. We make plans for me to travel in two weeks, as soon as the semester is over.
On Mother’s Day she confides that after Jay dropped her back at the apartment, after her visit at the house, she felt a deep longing for him. “I missed him. I don’t know why. How long can you stay?” There’s a hunger in her voice that is unfamiliar—usually she is so self-sufficient—but I sever the tendon in my leg a week before I’m supposed to go to LA, and need emergency surgery. On the other end of the phone, when I tell her, my mother is silent. Surgery is her very last wish for herself or for me.
I talk to her for the last time on Friday, three days before the scheduled operation. She says she is looking forward to seeing me when I’m able to come. Two days later, on Sunday night, I get another call from Jay,
“I just want to let you know: Lolo just called. Mom isn’t responding when Lolo shakes her. Apparently, Mom went into her room to meditate and didn’t come out all day. When Lolo went in to check on her, she was lying on the bed. I’m heading over there now. I’ll let you know.”
Jay calls half an hour later. “Chris, Mom died.”
She was sitting on the side of her bed and had then lain back, her arm across her forehead like she needed to rest for a moment, but she never got up. Her heart gave out or she had another stroke. We will never know, because my brothers and I agree that she wouldn’t want to be carved up by doctors to find out. That seems like too much of a betrayal.