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Children of Aging Parents 19 2 Whosoever: The Language of Mothers and Sons  Rick Moody Whosoever knows the folds and complexities of his own mother’s body, he shall never die. Whosoever knows the latitudes of his mother’s body, who­ soever has taken her into his arms and immersed her baptismally in the first-floor tub, lifting one of her alabaster legs and then the other over its lip, whosoever has bathed her with Woolworth’s soaps in sample sizes, twisted the creaky taps and tested the water on the inside of his wrist, and­ shovelled a couple of tablespoons of rose bath salts under the billowing faucet, marveling at their vermillion color, who has bent by hand her sclerotic limbs, as if reassuring himself about the condition of a hinge, and has kissed her on the part that separates the lobes of her white hair, cooed her name while soaping underneath the breast where he was once fed, breathed the acrid and dispiriting stench of her body while scrubbing the greater part of this smell away, pushed her discarded bra and oversized panties (scattered on the tile floor behind him) to one side, away from the water sloshing occasionally over the edge of the tub and choking the runoff drain, who has wiped stalactites of drool from her mouth with a moistened violet washcloth, swept back the annoying violet shower curtain in order to lift up his stick-figure mother and bathe her ass, where a sweet and infantile shit sometimes collects, causing her both discomfort and shame, who has angrily manhandled the dial on the bathroom radio (balanced on the toilet tank) with one wet hand in an effort to find a college station that blasts only compact-disc recordings of train accidents and large-scale construction operations, selecting at last the drummers of Burundi on WUCN knowing full well that his mother can brook only the music of Tin Pan Alley and certain classics, and who has then reacted guiltily at his own selfishness and tuned to some “lite” AM station featuring the greatest hits of swing,­ whosoever has noticed in the course of his mission the ripe light of early Rick Moody, “Whosoever,” from The New Yorker (March 17, 1997). Shorter version published as Chapter 1 in Purple America. Copyright © 1997 by Rick Moody. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company and the Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC. All rights reserved. 20 Fiction and Poetry about Family Caregiving November as it is played out on the bathroom wall where one of those plug-in electric candles with plastic base is the only source of illumination, and has waited in this half-light while his mother takes her last bodily pleasure—her useless body floating in the warm, humid, even lapping of rose-scented bathwater, a water which in spite of its pleasures occasionally causes transient scotoma, ataxia, difficulty swallowing, deafness, and other temporary dysfunctions consistent with her ailment—who has looked nonetheless at his pacific mom’s face in that water and known, in a New Age kind of way, the face he had before he was born, and who has wept over his mother’s condition while bathing her, silently weeping, without words or expressions of pity or any nose-blowing or -honking, just weeping for a second like a ninny, and who has thereafter recovered quickly and forcefully from despair, formulating a simple gratitude from the fact that he still has a mother, but who has nonetheless wondered at the kind of astral justice that has immobilized her thus, whosoever has then wished that the bath was over already so that he could go and drink too much at a local bar, a bar where he will encounter the citizens of this his home town, a bar where he will see his cronies from high school, those who never left, those who have stayed to become civic boosters, those who have sent kids to the same day school they themselves attended thirty years before, who has looked at his watch and yawned, while wondering how long he has to let his mother soak, who soaped his mother a second time, to be sure that every cranny is disinfected, that every particle of dirt, every speck of grime, is eliminated, who stepped into a draining tub to hoist his mother from it, as if he were hoisting a drenched parachute from a streambed, who has balanced her on the closed toilet seat so that...

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