“I know you love Diet Coke with Lime, right? Right?”
“Yeah, I do. You know me,” I say, taking the cold can from the clutch of her plump fingers and thumb.
When I bend the tab, the drink hisses, and a million bubbles come to life.
I sip.
“Good?” Mom says, nodding and looking up at me from under her thick gray eyebrows.
The truth is that this is a bribe. My mind flashes back to the last time I tried to clean out the house and get her help. I had my old Olive Garden waitressing friend drive Mom and the insanely long shopping list I gave her to Kmart. Armed with more than one hundred extra-strength trash bags, I started stuffing like a madwoman. I had the living room completely done when Carissa and Mom returned, much too early. Kmart had run out of pink sweat suits on the sale rack, which had triggered one of Mom’s panic attacks. When she found me cleaning, Mom started screaming, “No! No! No! No! No!” for minutes, then began punching herself in the side of her head hard enough to leave a bruise. Carissa and I restrained her on the cleared-from-shit-for-the-first-time-in-years couch. Since Carissa and I were planning a move to Florida at the end of the summer, we acquiesced and calmed Mom by helping her rearrange her piles of trash. She kept mumbling over and over, “Your room is yours, Portia. The rest is mine. Your room is yours, Portia. The rest is mine,” which muted Carissa and drained all the color from her skin.
Back in the present moment, Mom says, “Like you remember from the last time you were here? Diet Coke with Lime? Good?”
“Very good. But they have Diet Coke with Lime in Florida too, Mom. You can get these pretty much anywhere in the world, so you don’t have to keep so much of it—”
“Your room is just as you left it. I haven’t touched a thing!”
“A little Portia Kane museum. Just like the dining room, I bet.”
I walk into the next room, which doesn’t have a dining room table in it like you might think, but instead boasts a five-foot-square tower of my grandfather’s lifetime magazine collection, National Geographics stacked with yellow spines out, the rest with spines facing in—who knows why, maybe they’re old girlie magazines—and the whole thing towering so high the cheap dusty gold chandelier rests atop, its chain piled limp next to it. These were moved up from the basement when we started getting water leaks. The dining room table is now down there, each leg up on a cinderblock, mostly because that makes no sense whatsoever and this is a mad, mad home. You could kill someone by pushing the magazine tower onto them. The walls of this room are wallpapered floor to ceiling with taped-up pictures of me. There is a two-foot-wide walkway separating the four sides of the magazine tower from the million or so versions of my always-aging face.
If I could bear to look, I could trace the history of my entire life.
Baby pictures. First day of kindergarten and every other year, all the way through college. Every Halloween costume. Every Easter and Christmas outfit. My fat phases. My acne. Every date in an ill-fitting suit or out-of-fashion tuxedo who ever slid cheap flower arrangements around my wrist while pretending not to look at my hoarder mother’s many piles of dusty junk before taking me to a dance—me wearing poofy Disney-princess sleeves and shiny cheap fabric that made me into the shape of an uppercase A.
My mother’s life work is on these four walls.
I am her single contribution to the world, the poor woman.
It’s amazing that she’s never had an existential crisis.
Of course, the fourth wall is mostly pictures of Ken’s and my wedding, all removed from the very expensive leather-bound album I sent her and in which she doesn’t appear, because—even though Ken purchased her first-class airline tickets and an ocean-view suite at the hotel—she refused to travel to Barbados to attend the ceremony, claiming it was “too dangerous for an unmarried white woman.”
And then beyond the wedding photos on the fourth wall are all of the shots I’ve sent her over the years from trips Ken and I’ve taken around the world—scenes I do not wish to revisit. And yet I know them all by heart already and can’t help imagining me smiling stupidly in front of the Eiffel Tower holding a flaky baguette like a sword in two fists, the Great Pyramid of Giza resting like a tray of food in the palm of my hand, me in a black bikini sipping rum and sugary milk from a coconut with a ring of flowers around my neck in Hawaii, me pretending to talk on the phone in one of those red booths they have in London, me standing next to a koala bear in a tree at an animal refuge in Australia, the underwater shots of me and Ken in flippers and the silly snorkel gear floating over the Great Barrier Reef, me with my arms spread Christlike with the great white iconic statue looming over my shoulder in Rio de Janeiro—so many stupid pictures we took all over the world ended up here in this hellish place, with my mother circling endlessly around her National Geographics tower to fuel the merry-go-round narrative of my life, wearing out the dusty carpet even, an endless zero of obsession and insanity keeping her from having any adventures herself, from ever experiencing anything but the piles of trash with which she surrounds herself.
For some reason, I envision ancient ape people finger-painting on cave walls, the glow of a torch illuminating their Neanderthal faces as they squat and make stick figures and hide in sunless godforsaken dankness from the saber-toothed tigers that roam freely with huge top-of-the-food-chain teeth and ferocious appetites.
What is my mother’s real-life saber-toothed tiger? I’ll probably never know.
Now we have reality TV shows, memoirs, and all sorts of information and resources about hoarders, but when I was a child I didn’t even know the word for what my mother was. There was never a diagnosis, so how could there have been a solution? No one found my mother grotesquely fascinating enough back then to put her on television and make her disease part of popular culture. I can’t decide if that was a blessing or a curse. And regardless, I’ve come to believe that there is no cure for Mom now. Her mind’s been rotting for far too long. Some people you just can’t resurrect, no matter how much you love them.