HIGHLAND, INDIANA, 1991
âMom?â
âWhat is it, Emily?â
The last part of my name became thinned, crackled netting as her voice lost its shape and sent her coughing again. I waited until I heard her spit.
âMom?â
She didnât answer but opened her door and walked past me into the kitchen. I followed and stood by the table, waiting as she poured a glass of water and put a cup of that morningâs coffee into the microwave.
Her collarbone created a crease in her gauzy leopard-print button-down shirt. Her short black skirt, usually classy-slutty and risquĂ©, was limp at her waist with no âcornbread bootyââas her boyfriends used to call itâto speak of. The seams that were once bursting now hung, slightly bent and confused.
I wasnât confused, though. I was increasingly sure my worst fear had manifested. It was just like the research papers Iâd written in my English classes and the speeches Iâd given in Mrs Petrinâs public speaking course. First came an unexplainable weight loss, and then a weird flu that didnât go away. What happened next depended on the person. It could be purple splotchy lesions all over the body, Kaposiâs sarcoma, but that seemed to happen more with men. Women often got pneumonia. They had a shorter incubation period and almost always died faster. Aside from that, in 1991 there wasnât much information about women who contracted HIV.
Abstinence educationâthe governmentâs and, in turn, the mediaâs answer to HIV infectionâseemed more dangerous and destructive than all STDS combined. More shame. More secrecy. More puritanical bullshit, and so, more stigma. If youâd secretly polled most of the teenagers I knew about whether the threat of hell, or âgay cancer,â was keeping them pious on a Saturday night, their answer would be no.
Where we lived in Northwest Indiana, no one talked about safe sex. At Highland High, the nurseâs office refused to offer condoms, so I got free condoms at Planned Parenthood and strategically left them in bathrooms around school and around town. Sometimes Iâd leave them in our bathroom at home, tucked inside a Star or a Mademoiselle, along with pamphlets about safe sex, HIV, and hepatitis. I figured that if she wanted to be loved so much that sheâd date men who hurt her kids and stole her car, she probably wasnât enforcing a âNo glove, no loveâ rule. My mother never mentioned finding the condoms, and I didnât mention leaving them. I never saw any pamphlets at Planned Parenthood about using clean needles, or I would have left those too.
I watched my mom drink her coffee over the sink. Steam floated from the mug; it looked like it was coming out of the top of her head. She made a loud slurpy sound, and for the billionth time I wondered why she didnât just wait for her coffee to cool. I started to say that, to make her laugh, but shut my mouth, held my breath, and chewed on the inside of my lip.
Staring at her diminished figure, I tried again. âMom?â
Silence.
âMom ⊠um ⊠Have, have âŠâ
She was facing me and leaning against the sink. She looked irritated and suspicious and ready to fight with me. She also looked tired and sad. I decided now was as good a time as any.
Deep breath. âHave you ever had an AIDS test?â
âWhat?â
I stumbled backwards, feeling indignant. And then angry. And then genuinely surprised.
Had she really not considered HIV? Or that her string of horrible boyfriends and her ongoing drug addiction might scare or upset her kids? Though maybe she hadnât. I was almost certain that Jessica hadnât ever called her out on anything. Jess was a drug-addled motherâs wet dream who instinctively followed the rule that children should be seen and not heard, an expectation seeping from our maternal, old-world mix of Catholic/Sicilian DNA. And, most likely, David had also never said anything, which was probably more of an adherence to rule number one of the Sicilian first-born-male bylaws: loyalty no matter what.
My loyalty was to the truth, and the truth seemed as obvious as the ever-growing lines of exhaustion on her face, and the windy echoes of a skirt searching for fifty lost pounds.
âEmily! What are you talking about?â she snapped.
âWell, itâs ⊠itâs just that, well, youâve lost so much weight. And you keep saying you have the flu, and you keep coughing. I ⊠I was just wondering.â
I forced myself to look her in the eye, but she didnât meet my gaze. Instead, she looked out the window, at the remains of a quickly fading sunset.
âMom.â
Silence.
âYou know what, Emily? Fuck you!â
She stormed into her room and slammed the door.
Fifteen minutes later, my mom emerged from her bedroom and stood behind the couch where I was sitting, punishing myself by watching the TV show Small Wonder. I didnât look up.
âYes, I have,â she said. âIt was negative.â
I turned around, and we really looked at each other. I was surprised sheâd come out of her room, and I was also surprised the test had come back negativeâif sheâd really gotten one. I just didnât think I could be wrong, not that I wanted to be right about her having HIV.
âYou went back for the results?â I asked her.
âNo, Emily. They called me.â
I thought that was strange. One time Iâd asked Planned Parenthood how it worked to get tested, and theyâd made a big deal about how Iâd have to come in to get the results no matter what.
âWhere did you go? They donât usually give those results over the phone, Mom.â
âI went to the Board of Health. In the city, okay?â
She waved both hands in front of her like a Sicilian member of the Supremes and said, âNow, stop! Enough! Iâm going to lie down.â
She disappeared into her room and I thought it over. I knew from my studies that there was a three-to-six-month window between being exposed to the virus and the antibodies actually showing up on a test. My intuition was that she hadnât lied to me about taking the test, or even testing negative, but, based on her symptoms, I thought she was actually now HIV-positive.
Iâd asked my mom about the AIDS test in February 1991. In May, I was still worried. Her health was deteriorating or staying the same, depending on the day. Now she also had night sweats and chills. She seemed even more exhausted than before, but it was hard to tell whether it was from working. She had a new job with Baroni, a new company at Bloomingdaleâs, where she made various shades of lipstick and eye shadow on-site, right at the makeup counter. I was so happy when she got that job.
Her best friend Barbara had once told me that mom had wanted to go to the Art Institute of Chicago before I was born, and that sheâd been a painterâmostly oils. Only two of her paintings were in our house, and they were both buried in the basement somewhere. One was a still life of roses; the other was a Dracula-looking clown with a blank expression. I wanted my mother to experience colors and creativity and success, and her new job gave her that. The customers loved her, and she was brilliant at it.
Iâd still been studying AIDS every chance I could. Iâd just finished my final research paper for my AP Biology class, and it was on the opportunistic infection cytomegalovirus.
Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a member of the herpes virus family. Around 80 percent of people have it, but it doesnât show up as more than occasional swollen lymph nodes or a fever, unless you have a compromised immune system. If you have an autoimmune condition, CMV can escalate quickly, leaving the patient blind and in pain, and his or her nervous system crippled.
I canât remember why Iâd picked that particular disease, but Iâd written ten pages about it, and I got a grade of ninety-eight percent. Well, no, actually, I didnât get the ninety-eight percent. The friend I gave my paper to got the ninety-eight percent, but had I been able to turn it in, that would have been my grade.
I didnât get to graduate from high school. Three weeks before graduation, I was kicked out. I wasnât failing any classes; I just didnât go as often as I should have. It was extra awful because Iâd been awarded a scholarship to go to college for musical theater. My beloved guidance counselor, Mr Hedges, said, âEm, just go anyway. Itâll take them at least six months to figure it out, and by then they probably wonât care!â
I replied, âUm ⊠yeah. No, thanks. Iâm not into that kind of humiliation.â
By late spring, my fears permeated my thoughts every day, including a random Friday afternoon hanging out with my best friend Jason at my motherâs house. I stared into the insipid yellow-with-stock-clip-art-pictures-of-flowers wallpaper, thinking about how ridiculous it was that someone whoâd gotten a ninety-eight percent on a paper had just been kicked out of high school, which then made me think about HIV ⊠and then my mom.
I turned my brain off, lit a cigarette, and realized Iâd been waiting for what seemed like forever for Jason to finish fixing his makeup and Boy George hairdo. Finally, he sashayed his gloriousness out of the bathroom, fanning himself with a stack of pamphlets (my campaign of infiltrating my motherâs magazines had continued), and sat down next to me at the kitchen table.
âWhatâs up with these?â he asked as he spread the pamphlets for services offered by Planned Parenthoodâincluding the proper way to put a condom on a banana and how to do an at-home breast examination. He pulled out the pale blue oneâfree HIV screenings every Wednesday between three and six p.m.âand held it up.
I ignored the brochure and gave him my most defeated, forlorn face.
âI canât believe it, Jason. Iâm a goddamn statistic. I canât believe Iâm not going to graduate from high school!â
âUm ⊠really? No offense, but you werenât exactly winning any awards for attendance.â He crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue.
I laughed. âFuck. You.â
âHa! Whatever. Fuck you, too. Anyway ⊠So, whatâs up with these?â He waved the HIV information in front of my face.
âIâm just worried about her,â I said.
Led by his shoulders, Jasonâs torso began to involuntarily move back and forth, while his neck became an unwavering frozen steak; he nodded and looked down at the papers again, silent. He was tough in a lot of ways, but anything involving sex, nudity, or blood easily pushed him over the edge.
âYeah. Me too. Iâm worried, too. Do you really think she might have AIDS? Really?â
âYeah. I do. God ⊠Sheâs so annoying. Why couldnât she just marry for money and get addicted to Valium like other moms?â
We laughed, and he said, âYeah, not Toni Stern. She doesnât want any of that fancy stuff, like stability or joint bank accounts or trips to the grocery store. The dank weed and a nice eight ball, however âŠâ
When I was eight years old, my mother called me a fucking whore. I ran to my busted, cracked paperback dictionary, the same one my best friend Selena and I had used when weâd played the game âpick a random word and guess what it meansâ in first grade, and looked it up.
Whore:
noun
a woman who engages in promiscuous sexual intercourse, usually for money; prostitute; harlot; strumpet
verb (used without object) to act as a whore
verb (used with object) to consort with whores
obsolete: to make a whore of; corrupt; debauch
In January 1992, six months after my motherâs HIV-positive diagnosis, I talked to her on the phone after a doctorâs appointment. I asked her how it had gone.
âI told him my eyes have been acting weird and my leg hurts, and he said I might have something called cyta or cyto virus.â
âCytomegalovirus?â
âYes! Thatâs it. Is that bad?â
Yes, Mom. Thatâs bad. Thatâs awful. Itâs one of the most horrible, fucked-up, irreversible things you can get.
I wished I hadnât known about that virus at all.
âNo, Mom. Itâs not so bad. They have a lot of drugs that can slow the progression. Youâll be okay.â
I met Aurora on an ordinary night. It was stuffy and unbearable, but the same as every other July in Indiana. It may have felt even more suffocating because I was in my old room at my motherâs house. The TV was on in the living room, and I heard The Arsenio Hall Show playing. I couldnât be there. Couldnât stand it all. I was restless.
I walked into the living room, and my mom looked up, her eyes slightly confused but welcoming. âGood night, honey,â she said.
I kissed her puffed-out, steroid-infested cheek and wondered who she saw in the mirror. I recognized her, like someone youâve met somewhere but whose name you canât remember.
I pretended to go back to my room. Instead, I quietly opened the back door, the same way Iâd done in high school, and left.
With nowhere in particular to go, I climbed into my 1978 Pontiac Catalina, the bumper still held in place by duct tape and two coat han...