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By Root 907 0

my sister and I. That March when my sister called, I thought for a moment it was my mama’s voice. The accent was right, and the language—the slow drag of matter-of-fact words and thoughts, but the beaten-down quality wasn’t Mama, couldn’t have been. For a moment I felt as if my hands were gripping old and tender flesh, the skin gone thin from age and wear, my granny’s hands, perhaps, on the day she had stared out at her grandsons and laughed lightly, insisting I take a good look at them. “See, see how the blood thins out.” She spit to the side and clamped a hand down on my shoulder. I turned and looked at her hand, that hand as strong as heavy cord rolled back on itself, my bare shoulder under her hand and the muscles there rising like bubbles in cold milk. I had felt thick and strong beside her, thick and strong and sure of myself in a way I have not felt since. That March when my sister called I felt old; my hands felt wiry and worn, and my blood seemed hot and thin as it rushed through my veins.

My sister’s voice sounded hollow; her words vibrated over the phone as if they had iron edges. My tongue locked to my teeth, and I tasted the fear I thought I had put far behind me.

“They’re doing everything they can—surgery again this morning and chemotherapy and radiation. He’s a doctor, so he knows, but Jesus ...”

“Jesus shit.”

“Yeah.”

Mama woke up alone with her rage, her grief. “Just what I’d always expected,” she told me later. “You think you know what’s going on, what to expect. You relax a minute and that’s when it happens. Life turns around and kicks you in the butt.”

Lying there, she knew they had finally gotten her, the they that had been dogging her all her life, waiting for the chance to rob her of all her tomorrows. Now they had her, her body pinned down under bandages and tubes and sheets that felt like molten lead. She had not really believed it possible. She tried to pull her hands up to her neck, but she couldn’t move her arms. “I was so mad I wanted to kick holes in the sheets, but there wasn’t no use in that.” When my stepfather came in to sit and whistle his sobs beside the bed, she took long breaths and held her face tight and still. She became all eyes, watching everything from a place far off inside herself.

“Never want what you cannot have,” she’d always told me. It was her rule for survival, and she grabbed hold of it again. She turned her head away from what she could not change and started adjusting herself to her new status. She was going to have to figure out how to sew herself up one of those breast forms so she could wear a bra. “Damn things probably cost a fortune,” she told me when I came to sit beside her. I nodded slowly. I didn’t let her see how afraid I was, or how uncertain, or even how angry. I showed her my pride in her courage and my faith in her strength. But underneath I wanted her to be angry, too. “I’ll make do,” she whispered, showing me nothing, and I just nodded.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” I told her.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” she told me. The pretense was sometimes the only thing we had to give each other.

When it’s your mama and it’s an accomplished fact, you can’t talk politics into her bleeding. You can’t quote from last month’s article about how a partial mastectomy is just as effective. You can’t talk about patriarchy or class or confrontation strategies. I made jokes on the telephone, wrote letters full of healthy recipes and vitamin therapies. I pretended for her sake and my own that nothing was going to happen, that cancer is an everyday occurrence (and it is) and death is not part of the scenario.

Push it down. Don’t show it. Don’t tell anybody what is really going on. My mama makes do when the whole world cries out for things to stop, to fall apart, just once for all of us to let our anger show. My mama clamps her teeth, laughs her bitter laugh, and does whatever she thinks she has to do with no help, thank you, from people who only want to see her wanting something she can’t have anyway.

Five, ten, twenty years—my mama has had