It’s not in the cards for me, she said.
What cards? I wondered. I wonder still.
* * *
They all had blue eyes and loved to drink. Adelaide, my great-grandmother and snake ring creator, was a genius and a lunatic, my grandfather told me. One of her favorite party tricks was to run out of the house after dinner, screaming, and hide. She would come back in the morning, dress covered in dirt, laughing. One time she found an ax in the shed in the yard and used it to break in the front door.
An ax?!
My grandfather holds his hands up like he’s not to blame. I remember her and her petite brown cigarettes from the nursing home. In her late eighties she still had a drawer full of lingerie.
Adelaide’s daughter, Peggy, my grandmother, was also a genius and lunatic. She had a photographic memory. Though she had no college degree, starting with only a few thousand dollars she played the stock market until my sister and I had enough money for college. She absorbed numbers and the roving Dow in her sleep. To bed she wore seafoam-green silk nightgowns and a headset she connected to a tiny television. The ticker tape rolled over her barely closed eyelids, rinsed in blue light. Each morning her eyes were as glassy and straight as a gambler’s.
She was a magnificent drinker: tumblers of scotch in daylight, bottles hidden in bookshelves, inside unused soup tureens. By sundown she talked to herself and to ghosts. She looked right through me, even if I was curled up against her. As the hours waned, she called out, “Mama, Mama.” I realize now she was calling for her own mother, not mine.
One night she stumbled up to adjust the chime on the grandfather clock. She was a theatrical stumbler, falling while soft-shoeing in a dim room, falling at parties, falling while trying to stand up from the roulette table on a cruise she took us on. My aunt is still wounded remembering her first wedding reception, where my grandmother got so plastered she fell in the middle of a conversation with Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles. But I watched as she fell that night. She pulled on the innards of the grandfather clock, the chains and pendulums, and it fell with her, tackled her, and pinned her to the floor. She broke a rib and took to her bed for a week.
Later it strikes me as heartbreaking that my grandmother was looking for her mother. When she was seventeen, her mother fell in love with a sea captain and headed to Vegas for a quick divorce. Adelaide left her daughter, Peggy, in the care of friends. It took me a long time to see that was abandonment. It helps explain her anger, her fast hands that could hit you before you had time to flinch. It helps explain why she encouraged my mother to send me to Colorado and forbade my aunt from taking me in.
The last time I saw her we took a borrowed boat for an early evening cruise on the Naples canals. My grandfather motored us into the bay, passing students rowing crew, children being packed up from waveless beaches. The boating was an activity she hated, and the subtext was that she was doing it for me. She was preparing for a hysterectomy as part of her treatment for colon cancer. I was leaving for Colorado in two days, and we barely spoke. She died a month later.
It doesn’t occur to me until I’m back walking those canals to visit my grandfather, that my grandmother and I have an adolescent abandonment in common. Did she plan it that way? I have told countless people that the move to Colorado was the best thing that ever happened to me. I am sure that my grandmother said the same thing about her own mother leaving her. I am sure we both said that it made us stronger. That it didn’t hurt because nothing my mother did could hurt me anymore.
I really believed that until I moved back here.
Long Beach, California
My grandfather’s house is right on the canals. The thick green water rises, recedes, breathes, outside his windows. He and my grandmother moved from Palos Verdes right before I started high school, and here, my aunt says, Grandma was so miserable she died. I wasn’t planning on seeing my grandfather, but I need to restore some harmony broken by my visit with my mother.
He’s napping on the couch and his nurse, Gilda, is in the middle of a puzzle. The house is stuffy and a television plays Fox News, muted. I wander up to my grandmother’s room while I wait. She died fifteen years ago, and her room remains untouched: the staggering armoire dusted, bed made, mirrors polished. The effect is more impersonal than haunting (there are no trinkets, no photographs), as if the cleaning lady had just come. My aunt and I call it the mausoleum, not least because it’s covered in royal-blue toile de Jouy wallpaper depicting pastoral idylls. Her room looks over water, but the shutters are always drawn. I crack them and sit in a large upholstered chair—it is also covered in toile but in linen. Remarkably, it smells like her.
The toile, this fusty, British room in this coastal landscape, is laughable. But it is a perfect emblem of the WASP world she tried to maintain. There were the stories: ties to the Daughters of the American Revolution (loose at best); our “cousin” Clara Barton, Union nurse during the Civil War (affiliation also loose at best); her childhood rivalry, auditioning against Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood (which, though my grandmother was beautiful, seems a stretch). There was her lifestyle, where her values shone. My aunt and mother were debutantes, went to private schools, rode horses, traveled to Europe. They sewed curtains and did needlepoint, took lessons in dance, voice, and French (my grandmother cringed when I started taking Spanish in middle school). But more than that, they were educated in a kind of domesticity that boggles my mind, groomed from the time they were little girls for marriage and motherhood.
My grandfather was the dirt-poor son of a newly arrived Italian immigrant, a towering, abusive man. My grandfather was one of six, and mostly raised by his sisters. As he explains it, every immigrant wanted to marry a native WASP. That was his American dream. He still says marrying my grandmother was the smartest thing he ever did. She had social skills, she was like taking the elevator to the top floor. She was the love of his life.
This is both true and untrue. My grandparents used to make the walls shake yelling at each other. In my lifetime they never slept in the same room, or even the same wing of the house. And for all my grandmother’s social skills, the rigorousness of her manners and decorum, the bridge-playing and piano lessons, her drinking is her defining characteristic.
Look who it is, Granddaddy says. He’s standing in the doorway. It’s nice to see you in this room.
He doesn’t age for me. He was an old man when I was born and is the same old man now. I tell myself that means he will never die. Have you ever considered new wallpaper?
He nods, as if he’s turned off his hearing aids. It’s impossible for me to see my grandfather unsentimentally, though I’m now an adult and can see that the stories don’t add up.
James Vercelli Ferrero III served in the United States Navy for three wars. He was one of the small team of men who developed, built, and journeyed on the USS Albacore submarine (at the time, 1953, the most advanced research submarine on earth), and he went on to be an engineer at Howard Hughes, where he shook hands with the great man himself exactly three times. He personifies the postwar aerospace boom that developed (some would argue, destroyed) Southern California. And he is correct that he rocketed straight through the expanding middle class to the ranks of the upper when he married my grandmother and installed his family in Palos Verdes Estates. But his politics are hard for me. He can be cold. He was once also a drunk, before he turned jaundiced from a weekend golf bender in Pismo Beach and his doctor made him cut back.
And yet, when I look at him, as I am now, watching him inspect the wallpaper lightly, the way he blinks away his emotions when he notices that I’m wearing my grandmother’s earrings, I see a hero. A man apart from time, not for what he did for his country (which I admire, but in all honesty cannot possibly understand), but for what he did for me and my sister. He was the only male figure in our life, and he and my grandmother partly raised us.
He’s the only thing that s
tood between you and a double-wide, my aunt says. She’s not wrong. And yet, this is only one aspect of a man whom my grandmother accused of having a secret second family, who was—by all accounts—a terrible father and husband. Who knew he was meant to be a grandfather? my mother and aunt would say, ruefully, watching him dote on us, sitting rapturously through our every Christmas concert and ballet recital.
I was visiting Nancy, I say to him, explaining my presence. He approves of me visiting my mother. Daughters visit their mothers, that’s the final, orderly word on that.
I’m a little disturbed, I say. By what I saw over there. When was the last time you saw her?
She doesn’t want me to visit.
Did she say that? I don’t think she knows what she wants.
Is her boyfriend still there?
I nod.
It’s a bad scene, he says.
He shakes his head, pained. I follow him downstairs where he inquires after his car (You don’t park it on the street, do you?), my financial situation (Still making a living basket-weaving?), and obliquely about my love life (You have anyone to take care of you?). He apologizes for not having money anymore, though I haven’t asked him for a cent after he had to finance my last year of college out of pocket. The money has dried up and he doesn’t know how to relate to me without it. The fact that I’ve been able to quit waiting tables can’t assuage the anxiety he feels about the precariousness of my path, or his embarrassment that I had—at thirty-one years old—been waiting tables at all. Every decision I’ve made troubles him. My apparent ability to survive fascinates and irks him. I’m proof he doesn’t know the world anymore.
Do you ever think about the future?
I’m just not sure what that looks like, I say.
He is desperate for tasks: maintaining his car that he doesn’t drive, filing my mother’s tax return, making my aunt run “death drills” where she comes over and he watches her open up his computer, find the documents, open the safe. Or being the permanent mailing address my driver’s license is attached to. Though I don’t care about the junk mail he’s collecting, or his inspection of his car that I’m borrowing, I like that he thinks it’s holding us all together.
I’m not sleeping, he tells me, while Gilda puts together a turkey sandwich for him. I wake up. I can’t go back to sleep. He’s genuinely perplexed by this disobedience. The Navy taught him to sleep anywhere. And to put ketchup on his scrambled eggs, causing my grandmother to sigh: Once a pleb, forever a pleb.
That’s pretty good, I say, regarding his sleep. All things considered.
All things considered. Since everyone else is dead, that’s pretty good?
He’s aghast that he’s old. Lonely since everyone has died. Planning obsessively for a future that he knows, rationally, is more and more limited by the day. Unfortunately, at ninety, there’s nothing wrong with him. Aches and pains, but he’s mobile. Jarringly alert. He just got an iPhone. He calls my sister and me to troubleshoot it. But today it seems somehow unjust, actually frightening, that five minutes away my mother seems to be in a semi-coherent state of decay, immobile in front of a television that plays and replays Casablanca, while her father just learned how to send photo messages of the sunsets.
Has my mother seen a doctor? I ask, directly. Does she go to AA meetings? Has she left the house? Can she shower herself? Can she walk? How does she eat? It looks like she’s had some sort of stroke—
He puts his hands up for me to stop.
—and she’s covered in bruises.
He shakes his head. In a voice that reminds me of my grandmother I say, Now, don’t cry. Just tell me what’s going on here.
Cut it out, Gilda says to me sharply, dropping off the sandwich. She’s only twenty years younger than my grandfather but she’s strong and ageless. She was Audrey Hepburn’s nurse in the last years of her life. She once won the lottery. She’s from the British West Indies and my grandfather is so enamored of her he tells me—weekly—that if I want to write a book, I should talk to Gilda, because that’s a real story. He’s right.
Sorry, Gilda, I say automatically.
My grandfather doesn’t touch his plate.
It’s too hard, honey, he says. I don’t have it in me. I’m old.
I put my hand on top of his hand. I feel betrayed. Why did I think he was in charge? Because he collects my mail? Again, that voice of my grandmother’s, cruel and uncompromising: Because it was easier those years in New York to believe someone else was taking care.
Joshua Tree, California
The Love Interest takes me camping in Joshua Tree, one of his treasured places. It’s a place of spiritual significance to so many, invoking the park borders on sentimental. He is a sentimental man. He’s bent on making me fall in love with California again, or perhaps he thinks I’ll fall in love with him.
All across the horizon I see the dark silhouettes of people climbing to the tops of the pockmarked, orbital boulders, the prickling shadow of its trees. We’ve scaled our boulder with blankets and jars of wine. Our campsite laid out like a playground below us. We’ve turned west for the sunset. I think I hate these parts of California away from the coast, the dust, the ache of dryness, but then I’ve never inhabited them like this.
Can I tell you, I never once thought the desert beautiful until today, I say to him.
Those are desert eyes. When I first get here, all I can see is the brown. Then after a day or two, I get my eyes and the nuances come. The faded colors, wildlife, all the flora.
Desert eyes, I say, pocketing the phrase. That’s good. I’m keeping it.
Even when you’re in a place like this?
What?
You’re always writing?
No, I say, lying. There’s nothing to write about Joshua Tree. It’s beautiful. No conflict.
You can’t write if there isn’t conflict? he asks. He thinks he’s teasing me, but it’s a real question.
Two people went camping and drank wine while the sun set? I ask in return. It was one of the most peaceful landscapes she had ever seen?
He is a man who calls his parents once a week to catch up. They have been married for thirty-six years, together since they were sixteen. He tells them real, true things about his life, asks them for advice. He believes in achieving a state of happiness and believes in sex as one way to get there. I remember when my couples therapist told my ex-husband and me that we were bonded by damage from our childhoods. The Monster and I were bonded by the same shared ache, this feeling of not enough, unworthiness that kept us in a constant suspension of trust. I can’t explain my past to the Love Interest without admitting that his wholeness feels juvenile to me. Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism, but I don’t think I can outgrow it. As I gaze with him at the gaudy lavenders and oranges of the sunset, I think of how proud I’ve been of my independence. When this man talks about his parents, I realize that I haven’t had another choice. On these evenings with the Love Interest, I feel ancient, and also stupid for not believing anything can bond people besides trauma.
He’s telling me about a study on soothing landscapes, about a tableau of fields, a river, yellow rolling hills, and a road going through it. There’s a tree in the foreground, which promises shelter, there’s water, the promise of life, the yellow hills imply wheat, promising sustenance, and the road, a journey. People from thirty-one different cultures pointed at this as the most beautiful image.
All those promises, I say. It sounds like something you’d see in a doctor’s office. I don’t know if I’ve ever been attracted to that kind of landscape.
No, I wouldn’t think so. A woman in love with conflict.
Seal Beach, California
My mother didn’t hit me often when I was a child. A slap here or there, something she learned from my grandmother, who used to smash my head into the wall if I misbehaved. But my mother couldn’t stomac
h spanking us. She took so many hits from my grandmother, she knew if she started lashing out like that, she would not be able to stop.
She stopped caring when her drinking got worse, which it did with her second marriage. I look back for a sign, a trigger, something to explain why she stopped caring what kind of parent she was to me. If there was something, it remains hidden to me. I used to ask Christina why our mom hated me, but she was too naïve to guess. She said, Maybe because you don’t put your stuff away? My grandmother said I was too much like my father. That’s impossible, I replied. I didn’t even know him.
My mother waited until we were physical equals—until I was as tall as her, weighed more than her, when we had already been at each other’s throats for years—to start trying to physically dominate me. It started with breaking plates to make her point. Then one night she threw a Pyrex glass at me. It bounced off the wall and didn’t shatter. Then the hitting, hair yanking. Christina ran up the stairs when it started, she’d hear a tone of voice and she’d be gone. She’d lock her bedroom door.
In our family we use Mason Pearson brushes, an extravagance that started with my great-grandmother Adelaide and has made its way to me—there’s one lying by the sink in Laurel Canyon. Occasionally when I pick it up, I remember the back of that smoothly sculpted plastic brush against my cheek when my mother smacked me with it. Hard enough that it would swell the next day. A rupture. She kept hitting me. I curled into myself, shielding my face, and the brush cracked against my skull, then my neck and back. She had never hit me with something before. I remember thinking, Where are the adults? Someone has to stop this.
Another rupture when I pushed my mother. I don’t remember understanding how close we were to the stairs, but I do remember suspecting—I was on fire with the suspicion—that I was stronger than her. The stairs, her stumble, the wine, the wine, the wine. Her tiny frame in that large nightgown, parachuting while she tumbled. I immediately heard my grandmother’s voice indicting me: She pushed her mother down the stairs.
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