Woman with a Trump Mask in the Medical Center Waiting Area
I stake out the loneliest corner, away from the TV,
though I can still hear strains of some chipper
reality show. Every other chair’s cordoned off
with black butcher paper. She stands in line, the dark
face-mask half-turned away, but I’m pretty sure
of the word stamped over her mouth.
She walks with a limp to the reception window.
Overhead, the light fixture twitches and dims. I slump
down into my phone. A moment later, with a sigh
she lowers herself onto the seat across from me,
those boldface letters, all caps, like a dare.
It’s not the first time I’ve wondered why a woman
would wear that name on any part of her anatomy,
which puts me in mind of my mother, the day
we intervened, removed her from her home
and took her to the care facility, the red MAGA
hat she wore I imagined a small rebellion
against us taking away her freedom.
I won’t learn why my mother wore that hat.
She died a few weeks ago. And I won’t
ask this stranger about the word on her face,
though I half-smile at her through my mask.
She doesn’t smile back. I understand.
We wouldn’t be here if not for some kind of pain.
I glance at the black brace on my hand
then out the storm-darkened window,
my face hot beneath a blue paper mask.
I never saw the room where my mother let out
her last breath, and now I wonder who bent over her
to check her vitals, felt the stillness of the air that morning.
The woman in front of me is probably somebody’s
mother, most likely a grandmother, too. My mom
had all but given up on grandkids, but then
my daughter sprung up, as if from a prayer.
There’s a gold chain hanging from the woman’s neck.
It plunges deep into the crevasse between buttons
on her red and black checkerboard shirt. I’d wager
it dangles a cross, perhaps the one with her hangdog
savior slumped over it, like the one they handed
my brother along with the ashes.
It’s hard to love yourself, I want to tell her.
But every day, I try to do better than the day before.
My mother did her best, I said at the funeral.
It was as true, I imagine, as that other cliché,
the one about her being in a better place now.
But I wasn’t going to think about my mother today,
I mean like this, I say to the lady, though only
in my mind, remembering how my tears startled me
the other day in the parent-teacher conference
on Zoom when I said that my daughter had just lost
her grandma, and how this thought took me back
to hearing my name over the intercom
in a department store, my mother frantic
because I’d wandered off in the JCPenney’s.
She’s about twenty years older than I,
the woman with a gold-plated Jesus
hanging in the dark valley between her large
breasts, much larger than my mother’s, the ones
that fed me. Though I don’t remember that,
of course. And my daughter doesn’t remember me
nursing her, but she knows it happened because
the other day the cat was kneading my belly,
and she said You won’t get any milk out of her, Lucy,
because I drank it all. I told my mother this story
the last time she called, two days before she died.
She was upbeat, like the time after she got kicked out
of the first home, put in a place my husband called
the funny farm. One thing I’ll say about the funny farm:
they got her meds right and she seemed happy.
She called us every day. She hated the home
she had to go to after that, the only one she could
afford. We were trying to get her into a better one.
Really, we were, I want to say, because the woman
in a Trump mask has eyes on me now.
Probably she’d think I left my mom to die in a shitty
place, that I should have done more. I look down.
A tear rainbows the cracked screen of my phone.
I swipe it away. She’s probably right, I’m a snowflake.
Though I want to tell her how grateful I am
for that last call, how we both said I love you
that day. But she’s pulling herself up, her gaze
still fixed on me, then a nod so slight I wonder
if I only imagine it as she turns toward a nurse
with a clipboard, the light from a half-open door.