THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 37
pital nurses, between my mother and
the nurses. But a phone screen could not
possibly accommodate all the subtleties
needed to allay my mother’s fears.
I was useful, really, for only one thing:
calling the nurses’ desk to explain conflicts
as they arose among multiple aggrieved
parties. But I didn’t actually know any
of the names of the relevant parties. Al
though my mom always remembers
which nurse has how many children or
who works deftly enough to press air
bubbles out of her gastric tube, neither
she nor Ying, who speaks no English,
can remember anyone’s name. Instead,
they use nicknames, usually based on the
nurses’ appearance. But, at the height of
the pandemic, new nurses arrived on the
ward, none of whom I’d ever seen. Once,
in the middle of the night, I received a
call from Ying debriefing me on the mis
conduct of an “old doughnut.”
“An old doughnut?” I asked, my voice
still enveloped in sleep.
“Yes, she gave your mom the wrong
medication.”
“An old doughnut gave my mom the
wrong medication?” I sat up.
“It’s definitely Old Doughnut, not
Mo’ Money,” she said. I rubbed my eyes.
“They are the only two on duty. Your
mother thinks one of them gave her the
wrong medication in her sleep.”
I called the nurses’ desk. No one an
swered. I called Ying back, got the name
of the medication in question, and as
sured my mother that a stool softener
was not likely to cause lasting damage.
By then, my mother had spelled out a
string of nicknames including Meng
Lu (the Chinese shorthand for Mari
lyn Monroe) and Princles (my moth
er’s attempt at “freckles”), and regaled
me with their every misdeed and blun
der. It was after 5 A.M. when I hung up.
Prepandemic, my visits could re
lieve tensions between Ying and my
mother. Now they were locked in a
room together, armed with nothing but
glares. On video chat, I emphasized our
enormous gratitude to Ying for stay
ing, and admonished my mother to be
mindful of her exhaustion. Privately, I
pleaded with Ying for forbearance. But,
not long afterward, Ying sent me a note,
in her tenuous, slanted hand, relaying
a message blinked out by my mother,
which included the line “she like three
yearold.” Because Ying doesn’t speak
English, she had no idea that she had
painstakingly transcribed a list of her
own flaws.
This was a step too far. On video
chat that evening, I warned my mother
that, for her own sake, she had to be
have. And then, in English, I said, “Re
member what it was like when you were
working?” I made sure I didn’t say the
word “housekeeper.” “Remember how
it came down to respect?” Alluding to
our past in front of a family “outsider”
made me go rigid, but it had to be said.In our Connecticut days, “respect” was
a word my mother fastened on, as if ut
tering this piece of English vocabulary
in private could solve our public predic
ament. After a day of scrubbing, clean
ing, washing, and folding, she was full
of recrimination toward everyone who
had demeaned her. At first, it was the
adults of a household she served, then
the children, who she insisted had cop
ied their parents’ haughty expressions
of contempt. Then, one day, my mother
rebuked me for being “just like them.”
“You think you are like them because
of your English and your fancy school,”
she said. “But you are nothing—noth
ing but a housekeeper’s daughter.”I
n the months after my mother re
ceived her A.L.S. diagnosis, I would
sometimes conduct an experiment. In
bed, after a deep breath, I would will
my body to be completely still. The sen
sation was like pausing in the middle
of a dark forest and hearing the ambi
ent noise of birds and leaves for the first
time. This is what it feels like to be my
mother, I would think, to be imprisoned
in your body. When the lockdown was
announced in New York, I thought about
this experiment occurring on the scale
of an entire city, as all infrastructure and
commerce ground to a halt. My mother
was now incarcerated in a body that was
confined in a sealed facility, which was
trapped inside a lockeddown city.
As the world outside her hospital
grew more cataclysmically unbearable,
it became very important to me to cu
rate her perception of it. On the day that
a hospital where she’d once been treated
lost thirteen patients to COVID19, I jab
bered on about the new zucchini reci
pes I’d discovered online. What good
would it do to tell her that if she were
to be infected she would almost certainly
die and that I would not be allowed at
her bedside? Most days, my mother said
only two things. One: “donot gainst
china.” And two: “u still have job?” The
pandemic did nothing to lessen her rev
erence for hierarchy. For her, deference
was a precondition of living, and never
more so than when precarity loomed.
One evening, reading on my phone
that more stringent lockdown orders
could soon be in place, I realized that I
was out of rice and late in mailing my
rent check. I grabbed the trash andI HAVE SLEPTINMANYPLACES,
FOR YEARSON MATTRESSES THATENTERED
I have slept in many places, for years on mattresses that entered
my life via nothing but luck, as a child on wet sheets, I could not
contain myself, as a teen on the bed where my father ate his last
pomegranate, among crickets and chicken bones in ditches, in the bare
grass on the lavish grounds of a crumbling castle, in a flapping German
circus tent, in a leanto, my head on the belly of a sick calf, in a terrible
darkness where a shrew tried to stay afloat in a bucket of well water,
in a blue belfry, on a pink couch being eaten from the inside by field mice,
on bare floorboards by TV light with Mikel on Locust Place, on an amber
throne of cockroach casings, on a carpet of needles from a cemetery pine,
in a clubhouse circled by crabapple trees with highschool boys who are
now members of a megachurch, in a hotel bathtub in St. Augustine after
a sip from the Fountain of Youth, cold on a cliff’s edge, passed out cold
on train tracks, in a hospital bed holding my lamb like an army of lilacs.
—Diane Seuss