How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? by Anna Montague

Author:Anna Montague
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

32.

November 1997

Dear M,

Mary Magdalene! I think is what I said, upon meeting you. You looked puzzled, and so I tried to explain: The Sea of Galilee? You started to back away. Magdala, I tried again, and you shook your head. Magda, you repeated, emphasizing it—mag-DAA!—surely thinking I was drunk, and I said no, it was an old fishing town. The Bible? I said as a question, and then you nodded. Oh, you said, okay.

For a while, you know, she was considered a prostitute, and then the currents turned. I don’t remember why, honestly, Sunday school so far behind me, but that’s all that matters: that people changed their minds. A savior, they decided—a saint!

There’s a point to this rambling, I promise.

I write this because the apostles and Mary Magdalene were what my mother spoke of in her last days. Even before that, the nurse says she was fixed on religion, insisted on going to Mass, though she hadn’t been for some time, not since she had gotten sick. She kept trying to go back to the old church, the one in New Orleans, but couldn’t quite remember how to drive.

The house is utter chaos. Dishes brimming the sink. A closet full of clothing, tags still on, one pair of underwear and a few plastic bags in the hamper. She always wore the same outfit, the neighbor said, and I find myself wondering if she changed out of those overalls, or if she simply fell asleep in them each night. Did she make herself tea? Did she remember to brush her teeth?

It feels disloyal, maybe, to share these details, but I can’t stop thinking about them. I can’t. Because I should have been here sooner. A form of penance, maybe. The nurse said she kept talking about the apostles, focusing on Paul, who was originally a Jew named Saul. He called himself the apostle of the Gentiles. My mother, who took some issue with anything progressive—Jewish tradition, homosexuality, liberal politics. This one, this was the person my mother was fixed on—but why? And why is it only now that I feel the need to know why?

I found one of the Mary Magdalene statues in the bathtub, her nose poking out from a few murky inches of water. It is worse, I am finding, the knowledge of how my mother lived. Another one of the statues was sidelong in the oven, coated in ketchup. The spoons are in the underwear drawer; the freezer is full of socks. That clean pair of underwear, folded, at the bottom of the hamper. A stack of programs from the church, weekly up until last month. Blood clotted in the carpet from when she fell climbing into or out of bed.

Sometimes it’s abrupt, is what the nurse said. The change from coping to not. Fred said he will fly down at the weekend, and I feel that he can’t see me like this. Me, the house, none of it. But of course I worry, in my self-involved

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