Easy Exotic by Sonia Feigelson

Once she threw everything out, we thought there would be more room. I gave away a lot I wanted. Mom said, “We can get new stuff,” but you can guess what happened. Our old stuff is still gone.

Except for the puffed stuffing clumped in pockets on her pelvis, Mom is loose and sunk, humiliated by the tubes tucked up her nostrils and the respirator clacking over tile, rucking up the rug. Where she walks, dust and dirt sputter up in small clouds.

I have never been so aware of surface texture as our stripped home has made me. I know now how skin can look like an organ. Sweated holes, stretching taut on bone, lumping into tumor and thickening cyst. How could the body be forgotten?

In the end, we keep only what gets used.

I got rid of my kid clothes and my Legos and my scientific calculator and my books on How Stuff Works. I sold my CD player. I helped Mom put vases into boxes. I emptied out the colored pencil ends in the jar.

Mom is a lot. Last days she stood easy, she unplugged appliances. She wrapped electrical cords round one jutted elbow. She said: “How could we possibly have this much?”

Our home looks like a week-long rental we’ve lived years in, by which I mean, there is not a lot on the floor or on the walls.

Nights after her aide is gone, we watch TV together. Maybe it’s awful to spend so much time tuned out, but we do. Our favorite show shows real people competing against each other to come out on top. Each week contestants get stacked by ability in a hierarchy that shifts as soon as it is declared. The order is determined by a panel of four judges, one of whom changes week to week, as celebrity guests file in and out to shout about what they’re up to now. The host is an aging model with an accent.

“Who do you think has had more procedures?” Mom says. “Me or her?”

The contestants are professionals. They were chosen from countless applicants. “You are here,” the aging model tells them, “Because out of everyone, we have recognized something in you.”

As the season goes on, contestants are shaved off for not having enough in them of the same something the judges first saw. What I learned from our purge: when you put one thing next to another thing, one of the two will probably seem less useful.

There were three of us when the specialist said we’d soon be whittled down to two. The one we lost was not the one we thought we’d lose. Sometimes that happens, a surprise elimination.

Contestants are wild when rules like these are broken. They want to believe in a divine order to the competition. They want to believe in a system that can be worked.

A week after her husband left, Mom got rid of everything but its ghost.

He had an ugly name. We should have said no to him once we knew his name was ugly. We should have been attuned to the surface, how quickly hers would become more core than any virtue, idea, experience, emotion, or preference.

I watch her sleep. Her skin rises and falls in all the wrong places.

Listen. All I can offer I am offering. I am here with her. Hear how her breath deepens when her feet are in my lap?

He is not here with her. He is a joke I make so Mom will laugh.

How else to digest what trash her husband left us? He revved his wife’s steeply sloped health into a hill we could climb together. “Only a little longer,” he kept saying. “We’ll tough it out till the next treatment comes along.”

Imagine that but in khakis. I do the voice too.

“We,” I remind her. We are watching our reality TV show; an episode in which people who cut hair cut hair on camera. She has her eyes closed.

“We,” I say louder, watching for movement. “What was that about?”

She shakes her head, or makes a meek gesture at it. “We who?”

“Him We.”

Mom furrows herself at me. “We’ve just got to stay hopeful!” she says.

I say: “We won’t be able to make it this weekend! We have an appointment with Dr. Guerrero Friday night!”

“Here is a support group for us!” she says. “Here is a website with a page that publishes stories like ours!”

I ask her: “Are you sad?”

On TV, a woman is trying to describe how she’d like to look if she didn’t look how she looks. She holds up a photo of herself when she was twenty-five. This is what she wants in a haircut. Mom snorts, and then coughs something up. “Whaddya gonna do?”

I pass her a tissue. She holds out her hand to me. “Baby,” she says, flicked wrist. “Help me sit up.”

She keeps calling what she does on the couch sitting.

“Remember the suns?” I ask her.

She remembers, and smiles. “Ugliest earrings I ever saw.”

“Why did he think you’d want that?”

Mom looks long before smiling in a sorta dead way. “My naturally sunny disposition.”

Next week’s TV preview advertises yelling. Contestant versus contestant! Contestant versus judge! Dog eat dog eat God! Mom rolls her eyes.

“Hey,” I say, and it must seem sudden because she twitches like she meant to move larger. “Is a haircut something you’d be interested in?”

She looks at me like something has happened that I am too dumb and young to understand. “No,” she says. “A haircut is not something I would be interested in.”

We like this show. We’ve watched it for years, though some seasons have been better than others. On one, a guy almost died. That was before they got the whole thing down.

It was a while ago that the model published her cookbook, but they’re still promoting it, and hearing her push us to want to cook how she looks when she cooks gets me tired. Salade Nicoise a la ‘Easy, Exotic’, Coconut Almond Snap Pea Stir Fry a la ‘Easy, Exotic’, Soy Chicken a la King a la ‘Easy, Exotic’.

Mom says: “I can think of another thing ‘Easy, Exotic’ describes.”  

I tell her if I hear that title one more time I don’t know what I’ll do.

“Easy.” Mom says. She watches me bang the back of the remote against the couch arm. “Exotic.”

“It won’t mute.”

“Don’t mute.” She says. “Get me the kitchen chocolate.”

I get up.

“Don’t get me the kitchen chocolate.” She says. “Hold my hand.”

A cheerio takes another cheerio tubing in an endless ad for breakfast cereal. Mom puts her head on my shoulder. She is picking lint off the couch. “Why do we even own this piece of junk?” she asks.

Hours past, I hear her rattle in her sleep. Our doors stay open at night. Who was it that said God doles out dollops of hardship to those with the capacity to clear their plate? Appetite is all the god we’ve got here, and guess what? Here is not a lot.

Here is my Mom with Lymphangioleiomyomatosis. Here is her cough, shrill in a brittle night. Here is her doctor, happy to tell her the rapid progression makes her unusual. Here is the dream of all those deemed individuals: be unusual. Here is my unusual Mom. She will die on line for a lung.

For years the name we had for her health was declining. A too tired to go anywhere so often overdoing it take a cat nap or cut it out kinda diagnosis. A no answer, but that she asked too much of herself, onto which she added her own wry twist: “A no answer for she who asks too much.”

“You’ve never been shy about asking.” I remind her.

She says: “Would you turn that sound down?”

Once we knew what it was called, we stopped needing to call it. Enough is quickly enough when what you’ve got is unpronounceable. We call it LAM. Not really, that’s some support group mnemonic shit. We call it why do you still have this? Do you really need to hold onto all this old stuff?

Science says only women get sick in this way: over time and invisibly. Smooth muscle proliferates until it blocks oxygen. Her alveoli won’t make way, so swollen are they with extra cells. Poor prognosis for women looking to live ten years past diagnosis, poorer if caught post pregnancy, poorest if symptoms presented too long before a diagnosis did. “New developments every day!” Dr. Guerrero promises. He prints out a study showing survival rates gone longer than ten years, with treatment. Mom tries antiestrogen therapy, oxygen therapy, sirolimus therapy. Mom breathes with her lips tightly pursed. Lungs honeycombed in cyst—Dr. Guerrero talks transplant to treat a collapse. Worse comes to worst, he’ll adhere her, lung to chest, as many times as it takes to stay stuck. Mom jokes that she is literally running out of breath. I joke that she is so dense she’s dying. Treatments buy time as quickly as they use it up.  

The season dwindles while we track our favorites. Mom likes gay guys who yell. She is always in support of the loudest saddest man with a bleached streak, kept on to be cut out halfway for no reason we know of, but that his emotion tired everyone out. He’s called Roger this time around, and talks a lot about how he was bullied in backwater Alabama till he grew up and got out.

I Google photos of the host’s toddler, turning two in a televised special this month. Over takeout, we talk about who might be gone by the time the special airs. Mom wrinkles, remembering when the host’s baby was just a bump under an empire waist.

“I wish you could sell me,” she tells me. We watch commercials for dark cars speeding through the wilderness at night.

Her husband calls us and leaves another message on the answering machine. It sounds like he’s been crying. “I wish you would pick up.” He says. “I wish we could make this right.”

“We.” Mom says.

I delete the message. Mom says: “We who?”

It’s the season finale, and everything is swollen. We order Thai food, and Mom tries to make room for me on the couch.
“Sometimes I dream this theme song,” she says.

In the final episodes, when shit gets down to the wire, people usually have less to say to each other. Whereas the action of earlier episodes relied heavily on interpersonal friction, contestants hunker down into themselves as chances at championship slim. How far they’ve come has got a name now, and it’s Final. They talk to the camera as if it has borne witness to their most secret individualities, and come down on the correct side. “It’s one in three now,” contestants confide.

They smile wide, suddenly and temporarily assured of their worth. “It’s down to one of us two.”

Sonia Feigelson is a Brooklyn-based writer and actress. Her work can be seen in or is forthcoming from Split Lip Magazine, Two Serious Ladies, Burrow Press Review, Temenos, Extract(s), and Quaint, among others. She was a 2010 recipient of the Memoir award from Random House Creative Writing Competition. Most recently, she was awarded third prize in Glimmer Train‘s Short Story Award for New Writers. She has only ever kept one plant alive. www.twitter.com/FeigelsonSonia.