What did you love about him? I asked my mother when I was a teenager, wondering if I had missed some central story that would make their animosity toward each other logical. Beyond a transaction related to one of his visitations, I never saw them spend more than five minutes in a room together.
He was handsome, she said, edged. He didn’t age well.
That’s it? Really?
My mother sighed. He gave me you girls. Isn’t that enough?
What did you love about her? I asked my father. That was when we were living together, and I had gotten to know him somewhat, how intolerant he could be of women. I couldn’t imagine him being able to stand her.
I was young, he said, and cleared his throat. I remember there was a lot of pressure.
That’s not an answer about her.
She was a good mother.
Was she?
When you were little, he says.
My parents locked me out of whatever feeling provoked them to choose each other. Their passion and pillow talk and how they imagined their future. Things I hope exist or else the entire enterprise is too sad.
I used to scour photographs of them for clues, wanting them to make sense beyond the well-mannered expectations of marriage. They traveled together. My mother studied in Rome, my father at Oxford (where—he once told me when he was fucked up—he had gotten a girl pregnant and he had to skedaddle when she wouldn’t get an abortion). Here are my parents in Paris, Milan, London, rural Italy, visiting our relatives, sipping cups of grappa. Here is my mother on her honeymoon in Santa Barbara, her blond hair dyed dark, looking Italianate finally, standing next to the plaque with her new last name hung on their cabin. She’s tan and smug.
I did that for your father, she said when I showed her the photograph. He loved my hair dark. The minute I kicked him out I went back to blond.
This was when Christina and I were teenagers and she took us to Rome. Her voice was softer, more voluptuous, because we were traveling. We were about to tour the Pantheon when my mother paused and pointed up to a hotel. It was a pensione on a noisy street. The front had potted flowers gone brown and twisted in winter.
When I lived here, I was in a dorm, but when your father came to visit me we stayed in this hotel. It was very adult, and fifteen lira a night. One time I wanted to surprise him, make my hair dark. I bought a box of dye at the drugstore, but apparently didn’t let it set completely. We got into the bath and it started to run, turned the water brown. I was so embarrassed. Then it came out all over the sheets.
That’s all I know. They stayed in cheap European hotels. She loved him enough to dye her blond hair brown. They took baths together and her hair leaked. They stained sheets.
Long Beach, California
It’s always ten degrees cooler down here, my aunt is fond of saying when I arrive in her corner of Los Angeles, stunned by the weather. That’s why the taxes are so outrageous. She lives in Naples, a cluster of three tiny islands surrounded by Venetian canals in Alamitos Bay. It was designed in the early twentieth century, marketed as a “Dreamland of Southern California.” The water in the canals is disgusting. But gondolas and crooning gondoliers make their way through the waterways, and people stroll with glasses of wine in the evening, tend to roses with gardening gloves. You should come over and take the kayak out.
But I’m not visiting my aunt today. I haven’t been in a kayaking mood lately. Instead I’m sitting in the car my grandfather loaned me—he’s ninety and could still drive it if he wanted to, he just doesn’t want to—parked on my mother’s street in Belmont Shore, a bit away from the canals and their grace.
I’m looking at my eyes (her eyes) in the rearview mirror. I wonder how I fell back into this so quickly. I’ve let my defenses down, no potential advantage to be won by this vulnerability. Being on her street in the middle of the day is unmistakably a mistake.
In the rearview mirror, I’ve accidentally aged from girl to woman, my looks overleveraged by the amount I’ve depended on them to protect me. Every line in my face, every sunspot is a reminder of what I have to pay back. I am the age she was when she picked us up from day care. Every mirror or window brings me back to her, to the way she used to look. Here we are.
People tell me stories about their own narcissistic or kooky mothers and then sigh, But you only have one mother. I’ve thought about that a lot in the years I’ve been gone. That she is my one mother, mine to call monthly, or mine to ignore. During those years I sometimes thought there might be space for more. That hurting each other cannot be the sum total of what we mean to each other. Maybe I can start something with her now that I’m back. Be the kind of daughter who visits her mother once a week. I can take her to movies or to the nail salon. It will be like a friendship. Or something.
Or I could leave. Of course, I could leave.
I am thirty-one years old.
Ten years since my mother had a brain aneurysm that left her mentally and physically handicapped.
Four years since she started living with a (technically homeless) man she met at Alcoholics Anonymous, and less than a year since her last sojourn in rehab.
Sixteen years since I stopped living under her roof, after our relationship became abusive and unsustainable. Sixteen years since she sent me to live with my father, who was for all intents and purposes a stranger. Sixteen years since I told her that if she sent me away, I would never come back. That turned out not to be true, as I moved home in 2005, after her aneurysm, to be her nurse for a summer.
I hope you didn’t move home to make peace with your mother. You don’t owe her anything, my aunt says often, after what she did to you. While I appreciate the sentiment, I always find the statement oddly and willfully blind. My aunt is forgetting, or ignoring, my bid to live with her when my mother and I fell apart. How I begged not to be sent to my father in Colorado. How I tried to be good when they had me over. I babysat my cousin, who was then a little girl, in a bid to prove my virtuous influence. Does my aunt really not remember when she said No?
Occasionally, if we’ve spent enough time together and she’s softened, I think she remembers it. She’ll put the words into her husband’s mouth: Gary says his greatest regret is turning you away. That approximates her own regret, without her having to own it. Your mother wouldn’t allow it. And your grandmother forbade it. It was your grandmother. Again, this all strikes me as curious—my aunt has never really taken orders from anyone. I think that my aunt was afraid of me. I know now that a family is a delicate equilibrium. I wasn’t so delicate at sixteen. And in the contest between believing her sister, and believing her adolescent niece, she chose her sister. That seems fair to me.
But still she feels the need to absolve me from the imagined guilt I must carry from being away for so long. My aunt is skilled at making the world into black-and-white. She has an old-world flair for absolutes, which made her a great lawyer. Right and wrong. Debt and credit. My mother deserves punishment, I do not owe her forgiveness, etc.
I tell myself that what I owe my mother and what she owes me stopped mattering a long time ago. In order to want something from her, I would have to believe she was still my mother.
* * *
When anyone asks, my sister and I say our mother’s short-term memory is gone, but it’s not exactly true. If I arrive and ask her what she ate for breakfast, she can tell me (coffee, she would say, suspicious, always a defensive woman, even before, as she says, I got a hole in my head). If I asked her the last time we spoke, or how long ago her aneurysm was, I’d get a sloppy guess (Last week? A few months ago? Four years ago?). Her long-term memory is selectively intact, depending on the day, but one gets the feeling that she uses it for whatever slim advantage she can garner. She remembers the name of the street she lived on in Rome when she studied abroad in college (Via Lattanzio near the Vatican) but doesn’t remember, she claims, the turbulence of my adolescence.
It takes her a long time to assimilate new information, especially if presented from afar and inconsistently. Our few phone conversations haven’t been full of questions, but statements that my mother tests out. In person now it’s the same. She adds a hesitation at the end and waits to see how her audience responds. I do a lot of nodding, but I do more correcting.
You’re married, she begins.
I’m not.
You’re not married to Brad.
I am not married to Brad anymore.
You live in New York.
I do not. Anymore.
Your sister lives in New York.
She does.
You live in…she stares at me, straining,…Brooklyn.
I did live in Brooklyn. I live here now, kind of.
Kind of.
I’m trying it out.
You live in Long Beach.
I live in LA. In Laurel Canyon.
You live with…
I live alone.
This loop will repeat itself at least once before I leave. To be fair to her, I didn’t tell her about my divorce for a while. There is never any rush to give her information, because I spend years confirming and revising her statements. The same thing happened when I got married in the first place, a year of repetition over the phone—but at least in that instance the news was good. She could clap her hands together and walk away from the phone feeling proud of herself. This news was distasteful. Her brows knit in frustration trying to remember what happened to me, though it is beyond her to simply ask.
You work at the wine store.
No, I wrote a book. It’ll come out next year.
Oh, that’s right, that’s right. You’re a writer.
A pause.
And now you’re…
Writing. Another book.
Oh. I see.
She does not, in fact, “see.” There is no recognition that my writing a book is an extraordinary occurrence. No memory of graduate school, the accomplishments, scholarships, sacrifice it took to afford said school. No surprise I’m being published, nor recognition that I’ve essentially won the motherfucking lottery. It’s the same to her as if I still worked at the wine store I started at when I was twenty-three.
I’m quite numb in this house in which I have no memories, this tiny house we moved her to when we realized that there was no money or hope of money. To visit with her, I make myself microscopic. I’m hidden away in a recess of my body (my shoulder, my rib) and I don’t think things that will hurt me. I’m a charming blank, and if I can stay that way, I’ll drive away from her in one piece. I do this because I imagine that I bring some variation to her colorless days. Or that she feels my absence as a punishment, and I don’t want to punish her. I guess I imagine, sometimes, that she loves me. And that being around a beloved is universally agreed upon as beneficial. Right? I don’t know.
I can’t look directly at her. Her physical devolution in the years I’ve been gone makes me heartsick. I end up looking at her things: the porcelain spaniel figurines on the mantel, her cookbooks, the sun-faded spines of my childhood, British histories and art histories and Shakespeare, everything tattered as if water and wind had wrecked the house, a tangible storm mirroring the psychic storms made of white wine and rage. Her teakettle dented and caked in dust. There’s a small bedside dresser in the living room with a locked top drawer, the key of which was always hidden in different spots around the house. Inside was her jewelry. She doesn’t wear it anymore, but I’m reminded that all the women in my family are absurdly attached to our rings.
I don’t look at how frail she is. Her clothes—picked up at Ross or Loehmann’s, ill-fitting and off-colored to begin with—won’t stay on her shoulders or hips. The skin on her arms hangs translucently off her. I don’t look at the bruises from where she’s fallen, or the way her dyed hair has grown out, half of it black and gray and then a strong line where the bottom turns brittle and blond (if I encountered her on the street, I would cross the street, my aunt says). I don’t look at her browning teeth, the gums receded from years of smoking, the front tooth knocked sideways from falling while drinking, or at the right side of her face which has sloped so that one corner of her mouth is frowning, the implications of that slope something I cannot handle, and I don’t look at her eyes (my eyes) which have sunk into the crepe-crinkled, sunspotted skin of an ancient woman (I see other sixty-year-old women, parents of friends, and my mother looks like she could be their mother), and I definitely, definitely do not inhale, because between her breath, her unwashed, weepy-eyed, obese dog, the cloying, cleaning-product-laced ammonia scent of alcoholics and shut-ins, all I can smell, if I were to allow myself to, is death.
But what hurts the most—if I had feelings anymore, which I assure you, I do not—is not remembering her from my childhood, or even before the aneurysm, when she had a flattering amount of Botox and worked out enough to comfortably wear a bikini at forty-six (my legs are long). It’s that after the aneurysm, it appeared that she would get better. That summer of 2005 when I moved in with her to nurse her. I would hold her hand and repeat what the doctors had said: You’re a miracle. And that is always what I’m hoping for, isn’t it, something akin to a miracle? Instead of a dulled impasse, wherein I want things to be different, and am distraught because they can’t be.
She’s staring out the window, silent. I look back at the books. There’s nothing awkward between us now. No pressure to say anything, to entertain each other, to arrive at any intimacy. It’s a conversation with no structure beyond our script and no momentum beyond manners. She’s huddled into a corner on the couch and hasn’t moved since I arrived. She can’t get up, I realize. I had let myself in. I had leaned down to hug her. Her boyfriend—who takes care of the house, lives off her small savings, and keeps her up to her eyeballs in booze—placed her there before he left. He will return when he sees that my car is no longer parked on the street.
I realize that I wanted to go on a walk with her. Maybe that was the reason I drove down here in the middle of the week. That writing about my father, thinking about the two of them, is hurting me, and a walk with my mother would prove that time can mend hurts. I’ll ask her to get up, ask her to sit in the backyard. I’ll get her walker. She’ll make an excuse for why she wants to remain on the couch. I won’t accept that excuse. She’ll refuse me. I’ll have caught her and then what? If I push, she’ll do what my sister and I call play brain-dead. She’s doing it now, disappearing at will, suddenly deaf, blind, mute. I know in my bones that she hasn’t left this house for a long, long time. I don’t owe her anything, I remind myself. She breaks the silence.
You have a boyfriend.
Kind of.
Well that’s good. It’s good to have a boyfriend.
I want to laugh, but I nod.
Los Angeles, California
I’m ashamed to tell Carly.
Our lives have diverged so drastically that we’re nearly the clichéd opposite of each other. I know this is a facet of adult friendship. The fact that my choices appear more and more regressive is harder to swallow. For a moment in our mid-twenties, it seemed like we were headed in the same direction: she was opening a cold-pressed juice store, I was helping to open restaurants, she had her first child at twenty-six, I was married the same year. We would text from bed on opposite coasts and marvel at people who were still living like…well…like they were in their twenties. As if our choices had aged us a decade beyond our peers. We traded recipes, sent each other vacation rentals in Big Sur or the Cape. We would jump on the phone to talk about how long to soak the salt cod for brandade.
I shattered all that self-assured placidity three years ago when I told her I was leaving my husband. That I was in love with an artist (I stand by that, but he was also a bartender). I didn’t care about anything: our obvious incompatibility, his lack of money, my own lack of mo
ney, or the annihilation of what was a very nice life. It took her the length of a phone conversation to compute it. She asked if I could see myself with the artist long-term. Not really, I said. She asked if my husband had done something to earn this decision—was he mean, did he cheat, did he drink too much? He does drink too much, but he’s not mean. He just loves me.
What do you want? she asked. When you imagine your life in five years, what do you want it to look like?
When I called her that time, I was sitting on the floor of my apartment in Williamsburg, alone, taking in all of my belongings but feeling no relation or possession. I had already disappeared from that life.
I have no idea, I said. I just want more.
She sighed. That’s a hard way to live.
Once Carly figured out that I was self-destructing with no plan, nerves frayed by lust, she was concerned. You guys need therapy. Or better yet, have a baby. You won’t have time to get into trouble like this.
I’m not in trouble, I said hotly. I’m in love.
She was quiet on the phone.
Now, I’ve been traveling alone for most of the year (my affair with the artist long ago flamed out as it was always certain to), and Carly is postpartum with her second child. She lives in a house in Santa Monica, with furniture and framed art, a backyard with a play structure, her husband. Her mother-in-law in the guesthouse. Her juice company is thriving, they add locations monthly. She goes to the Santa Monica farmers market every Wednesday.
Stray Page 3