She’s fifty-eight. She’s wearing her Thoroughly Modern Millie wig, pageboy style, with bangs. Shiny and dark, with an artificial gleam that suggests vitality. In the airport you can see the wig from way off because it’s the only part of her that looks alive. She’s rail thin and her gait has the stagger of someone who’s become incapacitated in a hurry. Age slows you down bit by bit: Arthritis eats away at a hip, maybe, and the rest of the body compensates or doesn’t, but it happens slowly. This is different. My mother has aged dramatically in the last month, like Sondra Bizet in Lost Horizon—the minute she leaves Shangri-La, a century hits her all at once. The ordinary can become treacherous so quickly. A stalled escalator, metal stairs frozen, seventeen steps down to baggage claim. It may as well be the Antipodes down there. What about the cramped women’s bathroom, rosettes of discarded tissue sticking to the bottom of her Lucite cane? How to balance the cane in one hand, the handbag, how to lean against the stall’s door, panting, he can’t come in here to help, you have to do this alone, this was your idea, you insisted on coming against everyone’s advice and orders, to see this baby.
