“Dada, dada, dada!” I shout.

If you listen to the tape closely, you can almost hear the Chin Chin Man’s patience in the face of Nana’s growing frustration and my unreasonable interruptions. He’s trying to pay attention to us both, but, of course, neither of us gets what we really want: complete and utter attention, attention without compromise. I wasn’t speaking real words yet, but still, there is an urgency to my nonsense babbling. I have something important to say. A disaster is on the horizon, and if no one listens to me the disaster will come to pass and my father and Nana will have no one to blame but themselves. The urgency in my voice is quite real. It’s distressing to listen to, even all of these years later. I’m not pretending there is an impending disaster; I truly believe that there is one. At one point, I make a low, guttural, animal sound, a sound so clearly biological in its design to elicit attention and sympathy from my fellow animals, and yet my fellow animals—my father, my brother—do nothing but talk over me. They talk over me because we are safe, in a small, rented house in Alabama, not stranded in a dark and dangerous rain forest, not on a raft in the middle of the sea. So the sound is a nonsense sound, a misplaced sound, a lion’s roar in the tundra. When I listen to the tape now, it seems to me that this itself was the disaster I foresaw, a common enough disaster for most infants these days: that I was a baby, born cute, loud, needy, wild, but the conditions of the wilderness have changed.

    On the tape, Nana goes back to telling his story, but it’s of no use. I grow increasingly desperate, not letting him get a word in edgewise. Finally, you can hear a little smack, Nana shouting “Shut up shut up SHUT UP.”

“No hitting,” the Chin Chin Man says, and then he begins to speak to Nana in low tones, too low to hear on the tape, but you can still sense the anger underneath those hushed sounds. The anger has notes of understanding in it. He’s saying, Yes, she’s insufferable, but she’s ours and so we must suffer her.

* * *

—

My mother was eating again, though not in front of me. I came home from the lab a couple of times to find empty cans of Amy’s Chunky Tomato Bisque in the trash, and so I started buying loads of them at the Safeway near campus.

I wasn’t eating much myself in those days, the lean, unhealthy grad student days. My dinners all came in boxes or cans, announcing themselves by the microwave’s ding. At first, I was embarrassed about my diet. It didn’t help that the cashier I always seemed to get at my local Safeway was improbably beautiful. Dark olive skin with an undercut that I caught a glimpse of every time she tucked her hair behind her ear. Sabiha, her name tag, always crooked and fastened just above her left breast, announced. I couldn’t bear it. I started to imagine her internal responses to the contents of my shopping cart. That “Sesame Chicken Lean Cuisine for dinner again, huh?” look I was certain she’d once flashed me. I decided to spread my shopping around to different grocery stores in the area. Now that my mother was staying with me, I felt less embarrassed about the soup cans overflowing in my cart. If anyone asked, I was armed with an excuse. “My mother, she’s ill,” I imagined myself saying to that beautiful cashier.

“Would you mind if I eat dinner with you?” I asked my mother. I brought two bowls of soup into her room, my room, and sat in a dining chair I’d dragged in. The room was so sparsely decorated that even the word “decorated” was too strong to describe it. There was a bed, a nightstand, now the chair. There was also a smell, that funk of depression, sturdy, reliable like a piece of furniture.

    As was typically the case, my mother had her back to me, but I had decided to try to talk to her anyway. I set her bowl on the nightstand and waited for her to turn. I ate my soup loudly, slurping because I knew how much she hated eating noises and I wanted to get a rise out of her. Even anger would be better than this. She’d been living with me for a week and had spoken maybe five sentences.

I hadn’t spoken much either. I didn’t know what to talk about. What do you say to a woman’s back, your mother’s back? The curve of it, the sloping, sagging flesh of it, was more recognizable to me now than her face, which was once the one thing in this world that I sought out the most. Her face, which my face had come to look like, was the thing I’d studied on those evenings we’d spent in her bathroom, talking about our lives while she applied makeup, readying herself for work. In those just-the-two-of-us years after my return from Ghana, I had studied her face for any sign of collapse, trying to make myself an expert on the shades of sadness I recognized in her eyes. Was it lurking there again, the dark, deep sadness, or was it just the everyday kind, the kind we all have from time to time, the kind that comes and, more important, goes? It had been almost three days since I’d seen my mother’s face, but I had studied her enough to know which kind of sadness I would find there.

* * *

—

In Edward Tronick’s popular “Still Face Experiment” from the 1970s, babies and mothers sit facing each other. At first, they engage with each other readily and joyfully. The baby points and the mother’s eyes follow her finger. The baby smiles and the mother smiles back. They laugh; they touch. Then, after a few minutes of this, the mother’s face turns completely still. The baby tries all of the same moves that had elicited a response only moments before, but to no effect. The mother won’t acknowledge her.

    I first watched this experiment in my developmental psychology class in college, and it reminded me of the audiotapes from my childhood, except the videos of this experiment were far more distressing. Unlike in my tape, there is no attempt at soothing the child’s suffering, and the child is so clearly suffering. The look on her face is one of such pure betrayal, elementary, really, this betrayal. More treacherous still, perhaps, is the fact that it is the mother, of all people, who is ignoring the baby, not a sibling or a father. It is the one person who biologically, emotionally, unequivocally matters most at that stage of life. In class that day, watching the baby’s wariness play out on the projector while my classmates and I took notes, we heard a sudden whimper. It wasn’t the baby in the video. It was a fellow student, a girl whom I’d never really noticed, though she sat only a few chairs away from me. She left the room abruptly, knocking over my notebook as she did so, and I knew she knew what the baby knew. She’d been in the same wilderness.

My mother and I reenacted the Still Face Experiment, now repurposed as the Turned Back Experiment, except I was twenty-eight and she was only weeks away from sixty-nine. The harm done by her turned back would be minimal; I had already become the person I was going to become, a scientist who understood that what ailed my mother was in fact a disease, even if she refused to recognize it as such. Even if she refused doctors, medicine, her own daughter. She accepted prayer and only prayer.

“I still pray sometimes,” I told my mother’s back. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, though it certainly wasn’t the truth. The last time she’d spoken, she asked me about prayer, and so I was willing to forgo the whole truth if it meant she might speak again. Maybe religion was the only well that would draw water.

* * *

—

    Rejoice always, pray without ceasing. I used to worry over that scripture when I was a child. “Is it possible?” I asked my mother. “To pray without ceasing?”

“Why don’t you give it a try?”

So, I did. My first attempts involved getting down on my knees at the foot of the bed. I started by listing everything I was thankful for. My family, my friends, my blue bicycle, ice cream sandwiches, Buddy the dog. I looked up and not even a minute had passed. I kept listing, people I thought God should work on a little more, animals that I thought God had gotten right and a few that I thought he’d gotten wrong. Before long, I got distracted and my mind wandered so far off that I found that instead of praying, I was thinking about what had happened on my favorite television show the night before.

“I don’t think it’s possible,” I reported back to my mother.

She was in the kitchen, straining used oil into an empty bottle. She had a habit of sticking her tongue out when she poured things. Years later, in the bathroom pouring soap into a dispenser, I’d caught myself in the mirror making that same face and it had startled me. The thing I feared, becoming my mother, was happening, physically, in spite of myself.

“With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible,” she said.