Kasey Peters's Deborah Forever

Ma, what do you think of composting? she asks me. She never called me that her whole life, Ma. Mommy for a few years, briefly Mother, then Deborah forever. But now we’re playing family. She’s down in the yard, working in the dirt. Soil, she says. She installed the garden when she moved back home, carving a mess out of my neat yard from her hatchback, the thing loaded down to shit with pots and shovels of dirt. Of soil. What do I think of composting?

Something to consider, I tell her, is cost. The woods is cheaper. The woods is free.

Something to consider is whether or not I can handle the jail time, she says.

To laugh, I blow into the trumpet. Oh, you’ll run the place.

Ah, she says, I’m too soft. She is owed a weak trumpet for that one, I’m sure.

My girl is not soft. At twenty-seven, Megan is broad-backed and bulky, round-limbed, strong as a bull. The gold loop in her nose contributes to this impression. She wears a black T-shirt every day, even though it shows the formula mess like infant spit-up: she looks, excruciatingly, like she’s raising a baby. She wears brown work pants with an abundance of pockets, cuffed at the bottom, and her hair is buzzed in a style I am trying not to see as grotesque, or trying not to see at all. The blue and black tentacle of an octopus curls down her thick upper arm from beneath the sleeve of her T-shirt. I have not looked at the rest of her tattoos, though I have seen them.

Megan says, Also, Ma, what woods? She has narrowed her eyes, playfully I think, and smeared a streak of dirt—of soil—across her forehead.

I don’t know, Megan, just the woods.

She blinks. That isn’t my name, Ma.

It takes great effort to keep her in focus. In the vacuum of receding sunlight, a misty swarm of tiny insects seems to swirl around in the garden, darting up on occasion into the light like sparks. I’m not sure if they are real. The life flows all around her, all through her.

I’m tired, I say.

Okay, she says, lowering her face to the darkening dirt where her form dissolves into shadow, and then dusk has crept over me and gone right by, and I find myself coming up for air in the fishtank, and it is sometime-in-the-night. Stationed in the living room in the glow of a muttering television and the hum of air purifiers and dehumidifiers, under water, I am unable to breathe.

*

When Megan first moved home, I wished it had been her brother Robbie, and I suppose that was cruel of me. Robbie, of course, couldn’t walk away from his life because, while he doesn’t have any kids, he does have a real job,

computer something, and he makes house payments. Megan has never had a real job, so she had nothing to leave behind. After college she wanted to build bicycles, which I endorsed even though I had paid for her degree in “media studies,” because she’d resisted everything I’d ever endorsed and because I was tired of shouting her down. I said, Fine. Go ahead. Throw away everything I’ve given you. It twisted my throat into a shape it has been ever since. She worked in a hippie-dippie bike shop anyway, attending “readings” and living on credit card debt and cultivating an expertise, like gardening, that means nothing in the world. A nice thing to do if you’re rich. She wants to live for charity, eating out of dumpsters, and all that. Like she doesn’t remember growing up. I worked myself to death.

In the morning now, she puts me out on the deck first thing, before Megan has even had a cup of coffee. This is our routine. Dosage, diaper, feed, and hours alone. I don’t blame her; how could I? It is a simple wooden deck with no railings, a platform that sits only a foot above the lawn, attached to a modest ranch-style house in a modest suburb. As she backs me through the threshold and onto the deck, my reflection rolls across the glass patio door: it seems impossible that the pale, dormant arms are mine, their flesh sapped and sagging on the bones. Are we all just skeletons dipped in wax? Meg slides me out of the frame, angles my chair so that I am overlooking the yard. This house was a foothold, and I hung on tight. I paid two men to come once a week to mow my lawn and apply the little neon granules, and I was so proud of that. Megan disparages the neighbors for their lawn care tactics, which she calls white supremacy, and fascism. I don’t follow, but I do understand that she is, by extension, implicating me.

From the garden, she harvests shirt-fulls of small tomatoes, hot peppers, beans, herbs. Her thick waist is revealed. Leaves spring from her chest. A beetle spills from between her fingers. This is okra, she tells me, like I’ve

never heard of okra. She brings the tropical, cream-white flower of okra to me, a small darkhearted universe of curvature and pollen, and sets it on my lap. I don’t need to admit I’ve never seen its flower, because she knows. The flower wilts.

Megan takes her haul inside and comes back out with her second cup of coffee, and lights a cigarette. I wish she wouldn’t. Both that she wouldn’t smoke—though I am, admittedly, relieved to let go of this argument, too—and that she wouldn’t arrive. This is how I know it’s almost over. I need to hear it. I need to hear all the life. The little sparrows, little I-don’t-know-whats, they have songs I can’t write down, songs I can’t even make with my throat, and never could. The full white-out rush of sunrise crescendo, the heat descending, the way the neighbor’s weed wacker rings in my jaw is a welcome relief. It blots out everything.

Ma? Did you hear me?

What?

Aquimation. That sounds alright, doesn’t it? Like a nice jacuzzi.

Or hot soup.

Yeah, hot soup for grubs. Legal hot soup.

Sure. Lovely.

A slight grimace folds her lips down into themselves and they disappear. Lovely, she hates that I said lovely. Lovely Megan and I have done our talking,

goodlord for eight months we have done our talking and I am dried up of talking.

I get tired. Eight months is no time at all.

I take in the sight of her as if I were not her mother: I can appreciate the gravity of her dark eye wells, the distinction of four earrings up one ear, and the strange glamour of her thick fingers maneuvering a cigarette. Cowboy. There it is: that same something about her. It could have been beauty, if only she’d grown in that direction. Instead she chose this. I shouldn’t have let you play softball, I said to her one night, one early night, and she was hurt for a moment before she rolled off the deck laughing.

Now, Megan’s second cup of coffee brings her out onto the porch and signals, for the length of its consumption, my timer running out. When she has swallowed the last swig, the heat will be soon on her heels, and I will have to go back into the fishtank for the long, timeless, underwater afternoon.

I wish I could have timed this better, I say to Megan, startling her with an expenditure of such effort at this hour. Possible interpretations of my statement scurry like mice across her face.

You mean, like, forty years from now?

I mean that I wish it were autumn. So I could spend all day outside.

Autumn is only a few months away, Ma.

In lieu of an answer, I look away. She places her hand over mine. I can feel it, but cannot respond.

*

The fishtank: Put on Don Henley, my man. Witchy woman. And a movie. I can’t follow the movies anyway. Wake up, falling in love, wake up, fighting, wake up, credits. There must have been the big kiss. Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.

Megan moves around me like I’m a piece of furniture; I can’t blame her. She checks the machines. She mixes the feed. She measures dosage. She wears navy sweatshorts, a pair of mine from the eighties, cotton with a blown out waistband and pockets, her calves like basketballs, goodlord, and those awful foam shoes. I wonder if she gives me too much of the muscle relaxant. I wonder if this is something she has learned to do from the support group.

The websites say that people who live with the disease—die, they mean—and those who take care of them may experience better quality of life by participating in support groups. I am not participating. Megan exchanges messages on Facebook. Especially when it’s the mother, Megan types all afternoon.

Don Henley takes me back and holds me in place, The Eagles, Great American rock band version of my nostalgia for the future I was about to arrive in. Soundtrack vision of the life I thought I was living. When she was little, six or seven years old—that would put me at twenty four and Robbie at three—I got the post office job. I started cleaning our apartment on Sundays. It was the first time since I was fourteen I didn’t have to work on Sundays. I got my paycheck all in one place. I got health insurance. I saved for retirement. I took my kids to the park on Wednesdays after work, it was our special date, I let them play in the dirt. There's my kids, a little boy and a little girl, digging in the spongy muck. It’s humid with the night’s rain and sunny, Robbie’s in his baseball cap with the sunscreen white on his ears and my Megan is in pink shorts and an orange tank top, pigtailed. She stands

over him, instructing him to cup his hands for the worms she’s digging. He writhes, but holds. Good boy, Robbie. His brow is furrowed with concentration. The worms, one by one, pile on. We’re going to feed these to the birds, Robbie. Her body was still made of my body back then, and on those days I felt it.

Sundays, so. They didn’t have to go to day-care, or gramma’s, and I made it cleaning day. We surrendered to industriousness. We surrendered to Don Henley, et al. We surrendered to the hits. Megan sang into a dishcloth microphone. She was always a hoot. She was going to be my best friend. Is that insane? I remember joy, Meg, I do.

*

When Megan first moved back home, we would stay out on the deck late into the night. We talked like we hadn’t talked since she was a child, when she was my captive, when it was her speech that took greater effort and I was the one drinking the wine. It was strangely celebratory, both of us weird with the shock of it. The joke she made: I never thought you’d let me move back in. Nothing to do but laugh. Sick of crying and praying angrily to god, if you can call it that, prayer, god.

God, the things she told me.

Do you remember that time I missed state track with the stomach flu? I was hungover—I think I was still drunk. Drunk on Fireball shooters I stole from the gas station with Stevie Connely.

That white trash girl?

Ma, her dad was an addict.

Exactly.

Do you remember junior year, that district softball game I got benched? And they let a little ninety-five pound freshman play catcher.

She really got pummeled.

Something with recruiting, wasn’t it? Rich dad? What was it?

No, it was: I ratted out Coach. I told the principal he was getting handsy with another player. He kept trying to drive her home, always offering, It’s on my way, It’s no problem, No big deal, as if she were asking him for a favor. The principal started coming to practices, and Coach found out it was me.

You got benched for that? That’s what it was about?

Yeah. He was a scumbag.

He believed in you! He got you scouts. He paid for your summer camp.

Megan said only, Yeah, and we sat in the silence of that. I felt the words I was about to say, You could have had a full ride, I felt them wash up like saltwater out of my throat and enter the room unspoken. I was relieved I

hadn’t said them, but it didn’t really matter. She knew. You can never win with your own children.

There is some relief in finality. I don’t know whether I believe that because it’s true, or because I don’t have a choice. It will all come out in the wash, my grandmother used to say. Surrender.

Do you remember that time you got home early from work and Robbie had a girl hiding in the closet?

Little prick. Strangled him.

Well, she wasn’t Robbie’s girl.

How so?

She was mine.

Megan about killed me, with that one. Had to put the oxygen mask over my face. That’s when the oxygen mask was still optional. She didn’t know whether to laugh or freak out. Little of both.

Do you really think Robbie coulda pulled a girl like that? Megan said, when we had both calmed down.

Oh, Jesus, I don’t even remember her.

Miranda Daniels. She was a ten. And a senior. She was a ten point five.

So it went. I was her mother, but also not her mother. I had become a person in whom she could confide. It was absolute vulnerability, with no risk, because I was, and am, her dependent. The agony of revelation was tempered by the effervescence of flirtation. We were falling in love. That’s when the burial revision began in earnest. Hospice paperwork, hours’ long phone conversations, accounts management, legal action in response to her dad’s attempts to reappear in the will: things she tried to protect me from, burdens that meant almostnothing to me. She used the phrase funeral industrial complex enough times that I, too, wanted the coffin wiped from the face of the earth. The woods sounded more fun.

*

Am I supposed to be grateful for July? For the wheelchair accessibility of my deck that Medicare will or will not cover sometime in the future when my retirement account has been exhausted, for the technological innovation of an eye-movement keyboard that robo-voices my thoughts when my own throat is unresponsive, for the cord extension that allows me access to air once a day, at five in the morning? Time is tidal and I am deep. There is no despair like that which I feel when I wake up in the fishtank, when I realize that I have fallen asleep outside and allowed the world to spin away from me. The world is a hotplate. I am an ant under a magnifying glass. I have missed my chance. Grandchildren, which I wasn’t getting anyway. Evening wine. Hot soak. Putting my face on for work in the morning—even that, those little routines, the first sip of coffee, the splash of cream. To twirl a spoon.

God bless Don Henley. God, let Don Henley be murdered right this second. Let his voice be struck by lightning in time while he records this song in 1972, while my boobs are coming in too soon before I’m knocked up before I know

better, let Don Henley and The Eagles die with me, let nothing have ever existed, ever.

*

It gets harder to write. Trumpet is no-go. Breath machine. Writing as before: eyes on letters typing. Get tired. Fishtankrage.

Megan fires the day nurse. Right in the middle. Drunk, says. Megan doesn’t cry. Solid Megan. Machines, dosage, diapers, feed. Only Megan.

I slip. I was a child all day. Crush on Gary Hupka like brand new. Am I pretty? Hope to grow out my hair. Practice cursive Deborah Deborah Deborah. Pressing flower petals for the future. Poison ivy rash.

My mother taught me to drive at ten years old. Country roads ’til highway. So she could sleep halfway to work. Already at the wheel.

Megan hires a new day nurse. Won’t learn her name. Megan is haggard. Megan is alone. Megan puts her fist through the bathroom door.

*

Robbie visits. This is how I know that she has been flooding me with morphine. I am awake again, now. Slow, sure, but awake. She brings me out of it, and I don’t blame her.

My Robbie. His voice in the kitchen, and hers. Her voice is orange, now. When they were kids in high school, I would listen at my bedroom door and her voice, back then, if I remember right it’s green as turf grass, sunshine buzzing.

Just don’t, Robbie says.

Megan says something low. They are in disagreement.

Robbie: Yeah, if Mom wasn’t about to die, then yes, you would talk to her. But just, he says, Just let her go without all the trouble.

Trouble, she says like a bear, It’s not trouble, it’s—

Alright. Whatever.

They murmur for a while, orange and blue-black until Robbie laughs, gently, Okay okay, it turns into a long sigh.

When Robbie comes into the fishtank, he sits on the couch, elbows on his knees, hands templed. My boy is balding early, I see. They say that runs in the mother.

Hi, Mom.

Robbie. Missed you.

Missed you, too, Mom.

And then he eats a sleeve of crackers, one after another, not looking at me. Love me, love me not. I wait for him to talk to me. If this were some other August, I would prod him with flattery to communicate my need. What trouble is the ladies’ man getting up to on the weekends that he’s too tired to talk to his own mother? And he might roll his eyes at me, slightly annoyed, slightly reassured, and he would acquiesce to answering my questions. But he is not a ladies’ man, especially not now: he looks like all he

ever does is slouch into his computer screen. And he never talks to his mother unless she begs him. He is a boy inside the bubble of manhood, my Robbie, and between us is the slab of my body, its sour excretions, and he is eating his discomfort, and I am so lonely. When he leaves, I am sick with a shame I thought couldn’t touch me anymore. I sink down.

The day nurse is lifting me again, and Megan: the cleaning procedures, the body oozing, the stink. Horrid thing, the body inert. The formula in, the formula out.

Some time, or days, later, Megan shows me a break in the weather on her phone screen. Unseasonable nights in the sixties coming up. I can go out. I imagine taking her hands in mine.

*

I’m really into mycelium right now, she says, smoking beside me on the porch, the day’s first cup of coffee perched on her knee. Megan talks but does not expect an answer. I was tired of her talking, before. I am grateful now. What I wouldn’t give for a cigarette.

I think it’s going to save the world. Or, maybe not save the world. I think it’s going to survive humans.

It’s so early that the day hasn’t even arrived: we sit in the pre-dawn, the gray-blue promise of something. It is as timeless as dusk and you can trick yourself into believing the beginning and the end are the same. When she

very little, before Robbie even, I used to get her up this early, sleeping, carefully, and put her into the car seat. I used to take her to my cousin’s daycare and work my box job at the factory, and she would wake up there without me, she would live her whole life at my cousin’s daycare learning words while I packed little boxes with sheets of syringes, ten hours on the floor. But until I dropped her off it was me and her in the gray-blue before. I was jealous but I never woke her up. I drove with the radio off and we were two bodies in proximity: her perfect little limbs at rest, my mechanical endurance, the sky with the first puddles of light seeping in. So quiet.

God, Meg, you could have been a beauty. Cheek bones, the big mouth. There isn’t much I get the urge to cry for anymore, but for the long glow of sunrise in the baby hairs on your chin, I feel it. Oh, baby hairs, my strange girl, my baby.

I know we’re resistant to coffins, she says, but they make mushroom coffins. Megan ashes into the yard, like I’ve asked her not to do a hundred times.

The mushrooms can get to me in the woods like they get to everything else, I don’t say.

All above board, though, she says, as if she has heard my thoughts. It’s still an industry, but there’s no escape from capitalism.

Megan laughs at her own statement then, turning to me. This is how I know you’re a hippie underneath all that, she says, This thing you have with the woods. She has said this before. It used to get a honk from the machine,

when I had the lungs to blow into it. Plus, she says, winking, You keep listening to me.

Do I have a choice? I would ask, if I could. Whether or not this is love, it is unconditional.

Ma, she said, and it must have been months ago, now, because I could still place one hand on top of the other and turn my head to look at her. I want to talk to you.

This was back when I could still do the talking, back when we still had that good night nurse with the headphones, back when Megan could have a few drinks and we could forget things for a moment, lounging on the deck, we could enter together into the no-time of daylight receding but not yet gone from the sky.

What is it, Meg.

It’s Mack.

What’s Mack?

You know, Ma. Stop pretending. Please.

It must have been at the very beginning, because I could still turn my head away from her, make a gesture toward throwing my hands in the air, and motor around. Mack, please. Gay was hard enough to handle; I wanted to leave it at that.

By the time I got the diagnosis, three months before my forty-fourth birthday, I could barely use my hands. They took too long to figure it out—some kind of hopeful denial enacted through endless referrals—but it was always fatal, at every second, diagnosis or no. It had its own clockwork trajectory, my body did, and I wasn’t even keeping watch. Here is my life, a woman in a magic show getting happily into the box, cut right in half. It was hard to believe, I guess, even for them. Megan thinks I knew all along. She thinks I could never have believed myself clumsy, falling down at work, tumbling from the truck into somebody’s yard, mail flying. She thinks me so immune to humiliation. She blames my pride. I admit it, maybe she really doesn’t know what it’s like to be a woman. It is not immunity at all. It is a simultaneity: dignity in how you carry humiliation. When her father got his girlfriend pregnant, I had to have some dignity. I couldn’t go on pretending I didn’t know.

I’m sorry, my girl says just now, as she finishes her cup of coffee and I am afraid it means my time in the air has run out. But instead of rising, she turns to me.

Ma, she says, I know this isn’t fair.

Oh, the trumpet I oughta give her!

But you wouldn’t listen before.

I close my eyes: her voice is burnt orange, copper going red. I close my eyes and I’m back in the park with my kids on a Wednesday, her pudgy little hands are plucking the worms from the dirt from the soil, the tension of them

snapping, overpowered by her strength. I open my eyes: I’m thinking sky burial. I try to tell her as much.

Ma?

Sky, I try to say.

Why? There is no why. Things just are sometimes.

Birds. Eat.

My little girl throws the worms into the sky, hoping to commune with robins, and they land on the ground, one after another, until one of them lands on Robbie’s head. The shock, the laughter, the shrieking worm fight that ensues, all of it plays out in the sun, my girl and my boy all along.

Look, I’m not asking anything of you. I’m just opening myself up.

I look at my first child, the baby that I grew that I birthed that I lifted onto my shoulders, gone and grown into some other person I never saw.

I really love you, she says, so I’m doing the hard thing.

My girl takes a long, final pull of the cigarette. She puts it out into the little ashtray piled up with a dozen other filters. She tells me. She tells me a story of the body, and I sit in my godforsaken stillness, and I hear it.