Read Online The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke - Free Book Online Page A

focus long enough to decide what she wanted. Then she would get frustrated and insist, “Don’t worry about me. . . .”
    She had the choosiness of a fussy toddler, complicated by the pride of an adult. Finally Diana just made her eggs, and my mother pushed them away and said, “No, you eat them, I’ll make some for myself.”
    â€œBut these are for you ,” Diana finally said, slight frustration entering her voice.
    My mother heard it, pulled herself up, and put on the jokey face she had developed for these moments, to make things she’d done in confusion seem like little pranks. It was her way of having a modicum of control. “Of course they are!” she said brightly, and began to eat.
    Later she turned to Diana and said, deliberately, as if she could find words that would burn through the fog in her mind, “You know, sometimes I have this feeling that I just want to . . . pop! Do you know that feeling? I just want to pop.”
    Diana had to turn away to hide her face.
    Â 
    Â 
    A week later my father, my mother, and I were sitting in the living room, discussing how my mother would get to a doctor’s appointment. She kept insisting she could drive herself. “I’ll be fine,” she declared.
    â€œYou can’t drive, Mom. I’ll drive you,” I said. My father and I began squabbling about the particulars. I was annoyed that he wasn’t doing it. He seemed to have trouble going to the hospital, and his resistance infuriated me. Why wouldn’t he just take the day off from work? He told me to stop being so bossy.
    â€œStop it, you two,” my mother said, using the look she gave her misbehaving students, a look Eamon called “the Skeleton Face.”
    My dad left the room. He came back a few minutes later with his fist closed. “Time to take your medicine,” he said to my mother. She tapped his fist and he opened it: there lay five pieces of candy corn, left over from Halloween.
    â€œWell, thank you!” she said, a smile flickering.
    Â 
    Â 
    â€œMom,” I said.
    â€œMmm?” she said. She was staring into space, as if seeing something that was not there.
    â€œAre you hungry?”
    She turned her eyes toward me. “Mmm,” she said. Silence. Minutes went by.
    â€œMom!” I said again.
    â€œMmm?”
    â€œAre you hungry?”
    She hunched herself up a bit. She was tangled in an afghan and in the nodes of the TENS machine I had bought her a few weeks earlier from a dismal medical supplies store in Norwalk; it provides electrostimulation to the nerves and helps diminish local pain (in this case, from the tumor in her iliac bone). “I guess I should be,” she said.
    â€œWhat do you want?”
    A blank stare. Her stomach was showing; her pants were too big. When I had come downstairs that morning, she was in the kitchen, putting cups away into odd places with one hand, and with the other she was holding a tape measure around her waist, as if it were a belt.
    â€œI don’t know,” she said blankly. “Maybe . . . some yogurt?
    â€œOK,” I said. “You need to drink something. Water? Juice? Limonata?”
    â€œLimonata,” she said.
    She looked at me puzzled where I stood in the doorway. “Shouldn’t you be standing over there?” she said, pointing to a chair in the corner. “I look at you and I think you should be standing there.”
    Â 
    Â 
    I realize now as I write that my memories are blurring. Which trip was which? How did I get there the second time? I had been sleeping poorly, and I was exhausted. Trying to teach two college writing seminars and work on the website and have a relationship and help with my mother: none of it was working. I was spending a lot of time in Connecticut, and I was moody and terrified, and inevitably matters had frayed in my romantic life. At one point the man I was dating said, You’re choosing your mother over