“It’s a good story,” your mother said, sighing. One of those times, when you couldn’t contain yourself any longer, you asked her, “Did Missionary Lady accomplish her mission?” But sometimes, as the light grew dim in the evening, you saw her thumbing through the picture book. Did your mother confide in her new friend the difficulties of her life? You don’t know. In the course of several months, Missionary Lady visited weekly. Her marriage was on the verge of dissolution, her visa was about to expire, and she had scarcely two hundred dollars to her name and an eight-year-old daughter in tow. Your mother could have used a savior then. While your mother presented her with slices of watermelon, the visitor even chimed in with a few halting words of Chinese that she’d picked up in the immigrant-dense neighborhood, only one of which you understood: “Saviour.”
#KEEP IT A SECRET FROM YOUR MOTHER RAW FREE#
That first day, Missionary Lady came bearing a free Chinese-language picture book in which a white-haired man with benevolent eyes presided serenely over Popsicle-colored sunsets. “Jehovah’s Witness” meant nothing to your mother, so she took to calling the woman Missionary Lady. Plump, dignified, with a loose, expressive face, she was the first American, and the first Black person, you had ever seen up close. Not long after you and your mother arrived in the U.S., before your father left for good, a stranger came to the door of your dank studio apartment in New Haven to convince your mother of the existence of God. One day, your mother wants to know what you are writing about. Blinking is what she has-that raw, moist thwacking. At her bedside, you trail your finger around a clear-plastic alphabet chart, as if you were teaching her a new language. To speak her mind, your mother is dependent on your body. It is a disease that Descartes would have loved for its brutal division of the mind, “a thinking, non-extended thing,” from the body, an “extended, non-thinking thing.” It is a mysterious massacre of motor neurons, the messengers that deliver data from brain to organ and limb. is an insurrection of the body against the mind. Your mother, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, speaks with her eyelids, using the last muscles over which she exercises twitchy control.Ī.L.S. At which time she disintegrates into smaller and smaller pieces until you are whispering to a sliver on the tip of your finger. She is smooth and pure, a sheet of glass that becomes visible only when it breaks. It does not store any personal data.In your dreams, your mother has no legs, no arms, no spine-no body. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies.
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