"The Red and Purple Bulbs" by Terese Svoboda
Even prone she looks angry: the jut of her hip against the bed, her eyes slipping around their sockets in fury, her fingers claws. She flinches when she is offered a forkful of her favorite, volcano cake, as if it were an affront. You think you're going to buy me off? Cordial, she isn't. Is she in pain? No, never, she says through clenched teeth and hands.
She has a mane, still black and thick, that spreads over her pillows, but all the hair has fallen off her legs, limbs in the past stubbled with black-razored stumps. Overhead, the TV is always on, tipped to match the angle of her bed, and turned up so she doesn't have to wear hearing aids, or because that way she can't hear anyone else over the Fox confirmations of her anger. The head of her state's anti-abortionists, she knows which way to lean. Women should die if they try to kill their children.
I say some people are irresponsible at that time of their lives, and someone has to take care of all those unwanted children. She says now as she has said before: she wouldn't have had us at all, but for our father.
He stands around. He isn't what he calls a sucker for punishment, but he doesn't divorce her. He might have missed all that sex. Besides, she believes in the forever of marriage. It is another edict of the Catholic church she chooses to swallow.
She opens her mouth like a bird in my direction but I am captivated by a tell-all interview spewing from her screen. She mutters, assuming I cannot hear her over the noise. She says I will write a tell-all about her.
I shovel the cake into her. I think no, I won't.
Now, of course, I have grey hair, I can reconsider.
Over the five years of her bedridden glory, the doctor diagnoses nothing. Can you die of hate? My siblings and I want to know if it is catching, if there are genes to suppress. The flowers of our youth play video games at home, the noise of which we know to be even louder than this TV, the hospice nurse calling for morphine, my father dealing another hand of solitaire while the chatty assistant rubs his back. A little lower. We vow these children should not have to endure the same excruciating pageant. We think pills for ourselves or gas ovens, given the family predilection for long lives, but nobody asks for prescriptions, everyone buys electric.
She wants to push us into the oven of her anger, I tell my sister. She wants to eat us to stay alive. The chocolate cake is just an appetizer.
Our very presence annoys her, says my sister.
Behind those sugar-paned windows of childhood, we never argued with each other, we linked arms when we could. Now we buy stinky cheese that we know she won't spit out, swathed on a cracker whose shards might just kill her, we thaw more chocolate cake out of a freezer full of it. We speak on the phone to those at home, failing to convey the horror of her dying, conveying only that spring is coming, and the bulbs we planted in the fall will soon force themselves past the ice and into red and purple blooms. Such beautiful bouquets, we will bring her by the armful.
Will she have a change of heart and love us? In the hour before she dies, she reiterates why she will leave us nothing. Each of us have only a few children, which means surely we have had abortions. It is obvious, never mind our protests. What she loves instead of us are the clothes in her closet. Her many dresses do not need hangers they are so crushed against each other. Ostrich bags, mink hats. Soon after she expires we take turns picking from the loot, packing each item carefully, but as soon as we arrive home we throw them out or hustle them off to Goodwill, although one sister hangs a few choice suits on the wall, as if mounting Mother.
The bulbs we had anticipated, their red and purple blooms like bruises, have not appeared by the time we pack up. Perhaps they will not. Perhaps they have been planted too deep, and the ground we thought would protect them will turn out to be too dark and too heavy.
Terese Svoboda is the author of the forthcoming Dog on Fire and Roxy and Coco, her seventh and eighth novels, as well as a biography of the proletarian modernist, Lola Ridge, eight books of poetry, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, a memoir that won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, and a book of translations from the Nuer. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Bomb, Paris Review, Atlantic, NY Times and its review, Granta and many other magazines. She's finishing a second memoir, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law.
