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There’s no way to make this disappear.
“Keep me company while I grade these?” she says. “Let’s put on a movie. We haven’t done that in a while, either.”
“B’seder.” Okay.
Ima doesn’t ask if we should invite Tovah down, and I don’t suggest it. I put on an old Audrey Hepburn movie and pull a textbook from my backpack, but the words swim in front of my eyes. I’m stitched into the fabric of the sofa, mesmerized by the sight of my mother. She has become someone always in motion, prone to wild jerks that used to be occasional twitches.
I watch, when she isn’t looking, with more scrutiny than I ever have before.
I can’t sleep. The sheets are twisted around my ankles and my skin is damp with sweat. My period made an appearance earlier tonight, and my abdomen is all knotted up like it usually is on day one. Absently, I wonder how many more periods I’ll have in my lifetime. If I’ll ever hit menopause.
I peel myself out of bed and turn on my laptop. Again I watch the videos. Again I listen to the way people with Huntington’s talk. My mother’s sentences used to sound like songs. In the coming years, she’ll stutter through both her Hebrew and English, and one day her rich voice will be gone.
I can’t clear my mind for long before it traps me back in this place. This place where it loops over the reality that my mother is going to die, not of old age but in five or ten, or if we’re lucky, fifteen years. It will be brutal and entirely unfair, watching her wither and waste away. And then it will happen to me.
Unless—unless I don’t live that long.
Unless I make certain I never become my mother.
I sit completely still for a few minutes. An unfamiliar charged thrill zips through me.
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that. A strange sound gets caught in my throat—a laugh? Apparently, some half-asleep part of me finds this idea half-funny, though it is absolutely not. God, I must be delirious.
What if I could?
I smash the laptop shut, as though the screen had some kind of macabre instruction manual on it. The room is plunged into darkness again, and I hug the sheets tights around me and try to fall asleep. The possibilities, realistic or not, haunt me into the morning.
Sixteen
Tovah
ZACK SITS ACROSS FROM ME in a cozy restaurant that serves individual potpies. After I say a bracha, he regards me with a small smile.
“You always do that,” he says. “It’s interesting.”
“For as long as I can remember,” I say with a shrug. “Before eating, after eating, in the morning, in the evening . . .”
“I caught a few words, but not all of them.”
“I could teach you.”
“I’d like that,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to learn more Hebrew.”
“Well, you know ‘tov’ already, which means ‘good.’?”
“Yes. You’re very tov.”
I flush. I run through a few other common Hebrew phrases with him before changing the subject. “Tell me more about art school?”
“Art school.” Zack leans back in his seat, flexing his arms above his head. “I’ll go to whichever one will have me.”
“And your moms, they’re cool with it?”
“I had to convince Tess, but Mikaela is a free spirit. She thinks it should be illegal to throw away something you can compost.” He half grins like he’s about to tell me a secret and continues: “She even smokes pot.”
I nearly choke on my water—I wasn’t expecting to hear that. It’s like learning your parents love a TV show you thought you discovered. “Do you smoke?”
“I did it with Mikaela once. She wanted me to do it in a ‘safe environment.’?” He air quotes this. “It was about as fun as you can imagine getting high with your mom would be. I got really hungry and we ordered way too many pizzas for the two of us to eat. Anyway, Mikaela’s a sculptor. She’s had a few pieces commissioned by the city, so she knows it’s possible to make money as an artist. . . . It’s just really fucking hard.”
