The Faraway Nearby Read Online Free Page A

not visiting, though I had dropped it off late at night and knew that I would have been unwelcome at that hour. Had I visited at an earlier hour she would have found fault with something I’d done when I was with her. And had I not given her a copy, another failure could be charted. There was no winning, just some decisions about how to lose and how not to play. I have seen people with charismatic or charming parents forever hovering in hope of validation and recognition, and I wasn’t waiting for those. I just wanted the war to end.
    Long afterward I got asked over and over the most common and annoying question about Alzheimer’s, whether she still recognized me. Recognition can mean so many things, and in some sense she had never known who I was. Much later, when she couldn’t come up with my name or explain our relationship, I didn’t care, since being recognized hadn’t exactly been a boon. In that era, I think my voice and other things registered as familiar and set her at ease, and perhaps she knew me more truly. And perhaps I her, as so much that was superfluous was pared away and the central fact of her humanity and her vulnerability was laid bare.
    Who was I all those years before? I was not. Mirrors show everything but themselves, and to be a mirror is like being Echo in the myth of Echo and Narcissus: nothing of your own will be heard. The fact usually proffered about Narcissus is that he was in love with his own image in the mountain pool, but the more important one is that in his absorption in his reflection he lost contact with others and starved to death.
    Glace,
the French word for ice, can also mean mirror. Ice, mirror, glass: the glass coffin in which Snow White lies dormant, poisoned, might as well be made of ice, as though she were frozen like those bodies in cryogenic storage, waiting to be thawed when their disease becomes curable, or those mountaineers frozen into the ice at altitude. You freeze up in childhood, you go numb, because you cannot change your circumstances and to recognize, name, and feel the emotions and their cruel causes would be unbearable, and so you wait.
    Ice, glass, mirrors. I was frozen, or rather thawing. I was a mirror, but my mother didn’t like what she saw in it. I think of human psyches as landscapes, and to the question of whether she was happy or unhappy, I think that others encountered her in a flower-spangled meadow that was highly cultivated, if not artificial, and I charted the authentic swamp of her unhappiness far away in another part of the landscape she herself did not care to know.
    If my mother had chosen a fairy tale about herself, it would have been “Cinderella,” the story of an overlooked, undervalued girl, a delicate child made into a workhorse. My mother’s older sister was a lively girl off on her own pursuits; her younger sister was, in her account, the cosseted baby who grew up to look like her twin but was thought of—at least by my mother—as the pretty one. It was mostly confidence that made the younger girl take up eyebrow pencils and pretty dresses, while her older sister hung back; they were nevertheless close and fond.
    From the time I was a small child, my mother would absentmindedly call me by her little sister’s name, so that I was cloaked in a jealousy and attachment that had been born more than a quarter century before me. My mother in her own stories was the freckled, skinny one on whom her mother leaned, the mother who sometimes kept her home from school because she was sickly, or for company, or to take care of her little sister. When my mother was ten, her father died in a construction accident and her mother had to go to work, another abandonment for both of them.
    If she was Cinderella, she was forever stuck in childhood, waiting for help, for transformation, stuck in situations that had ended half a century earlier, a Cinderella for whom no prince came, except her sons, the princes