There are cities trying to eradicate it, he says.
It’s still beautiful, I say, to see it bloom like this, the hills undulating in front of us, each curve revealing another, through Oxnard and Ventura covered in a mesh of gold.
It is, he says. But conflicted. Just like you prefer. They say the Franciscans planted mustard along the Camino Real to mark the path. It just happened to destroy the native plant population.
I’m haunted by the violence at the root of this place. Indigenous people wiped out, land overwritten for profit, this city like none other I could think of in the way it rapaciously took from its environment. It is so plainly unsustainable: we don’t even have our own water. One lake after another drained, droughts coming, the fires reignited, oceans rising, and we cling to our routines and arguments. We must believe deep down that we’re exempt from consequences. Yet from my limited life experience, I know that we aren’t.
Part of me enjoys the contradiction, the beauty, the yellow applause out the window. What kind of person does that make me? I recall another evening the Love Interest and I got into an argument after I realized he didn’t know who Tennessee Williams was. I railed against his college education, his fatal mistake of never living in New York City. He felt condescended to, and we found ourselves in our first fight. I did not concede my ground, which was only that I was disturbed I was spending my time with someone who had—literally—never read Shakespeare, but I did apologize for my tone. In the days since, I realized that my disproportionate anger had less to do with the integrity of a liberal arts education, and more to do with the pointless narrowness of my every intellectual pursuit. There seemed to be some slightly immoral trade-off I had made, wherein I’d decided it was worth more to be able to converse about the works of Henry James with, oh, maybe six other people, than to know anything about the physical world besides being able to categorize landscapes as “pretty” or “ugly.” When I think of what’s at stake in our environment, this trade feels catastrophic. How much of my life have I been studiously ignoring, essentially sleepwalking through? These plants that I thought were markers of spring were, in fact, dangerous.
I touch his neck while we drive. His contentment takes no prodding, does not need to be cajoled or captured. It’s evident in his profile, his tan, the Pacific behind him.
You know I just got out of something bad.
He nods. With that married guy.
Yeah. Sometimes I’m scared that he’s going to leave his wife. And come for me.
The Love Interest smiles at me, and the smile feels careless. I’m not scared.
You should be, I say.
Why, he asks, do you want to be with him?
No, I say. It’s not that.
What am I trying to tell the Love Interest? I wanted him to say that of course this man was going to leave his wife for me, he was probably on his way this moment. I wanted to give myself an out in case a month from now, six months from now, I had to break off this lovely burgeoning relationship. I could say, See I warned you, I’m honest, nobody can say I wasn’t honest. I want to say, I’m scared I won’t stop loving him, or stop feeling him watching me when we make love, or when I touch your neck and think you’re beautiful I have to forcibly push back his face, his neck, his smell, swallow some grossly intimate memory that pulses in my blood, and that by pushing the Monster away I am always, even in my sleep, fighting with him, and in that way, I’m his.
Why aren’t you scared of anything? I ask finally.
The Love Interest says, It just feels like a waste of time.
Practical.
One time after sex, the Love Interest asked me if I was happy. I was so surprised by that question, its baldness, I said, I don’t know how to answer that. I still don’t. Happiness is a filter I apply in hindsight. A wash of color over a span of recollected time. But he is teaching me to name things that move me. Coastal live oaks. Poppies and lupin. Arroyos. When I get in the car with the Love Interest to explore some fabled part of this state, I feel alert, aroused, and at peace. I think this feeling must be very, very close to happiness.
* * *
When was my mother happiest? When my sister and I were little, she would speak in French when she didn’t want us to understand. We grew up knowing we were Italian, that we had family outside of Turin. The towns my mother’s family and my father’s family are from are only twenty minutes away from each other (Baldissero Canavese and Bosconero). But France was hers, and she insisted on pronouncing croissant with an accent, even at Vons, until she lost that kind of humor.
She had been unhappy at college (Why? I ask her on one of my visits. Were you lonely? Depressed? Homesick? She shrugs. I just didn’t like it, and that’s it). Other people in the family remember that Nancy was struggling making friends, finding her place. First at Davis, then closer to home at UCLA. She decided to take a year off, become an au pair, and attend the Cordon Bleu culinary school where her hero, Julia Child, had gone. She was—for the first and only time—free of her family, and alone in the world.
Photos show her in groups of friends smoking cigarettes with a sweaty forehead and permed hair. Her recipe books from the Cordon Bleu are handwritten, the paper yellowed now, but one can sense her voice in them, earnest. The shallot should jump, not spit or retain the blood to thicken the sauce, flour never as smooth, and my favorite, More butter!! With two exclamation marks. During this time in Paris she fell in love with an Armenian man who courted her at her local café. Her letters to her mother show that within the year they were engaged, and Nancy would not be moving back to the United States.
The story goes that Grandmamma flew over there to talk some sense into her daughter, but in a twist that reminds me of Henry James’s The Ambassadors, she stayed too long. Perhaps my grandmother lost her sense of the mission. Granddaddy had to fly there himself to bring both of his women back. They took my mother out of Paris kicking and screaming, forbade her from contacting her fiancé. They put all of her copper E. Dehillerin pots and pans, the tarte tatin mold, in a suitcase so heavy it took two men to carry it. Regardless of how much of this is true, the essence of the story, that my mother was bullied by her parents into a life she hadn’t chosen for herself, rings true to me. The copper pans now hang here in my kitchen in Laurel Canyon, tarnished, but as heavy and functional as ever. My mother came home from France, enrolled in Loyola Marymount University, and met my father the next year. So yes, I think that Paris was the last time she was—if she had the ability to be, if any of us have the ability to be—truly happy.
Laurel Canyon, California
Christina flies out after my birthday and from the second she gets into her Uber, she’s complaining about the traffic, the smog (which, I tell her, has dramatically decreased since our childhood, yay!), and general sprawl and disorganization of Los Angeles.
Why? she asks, pulling her bag out of the car, dragging it in the dirt toward the house. Why, why, why?
Fleetwood Mac lived here, I offer.
Yeah right, she says.
My sister and I have always been surprisingly close given that we’re only twenty-one months apart. When we were young, I was ferociously protective of her in social situations. I bullied girls who bullied her. We played on the same soccer team (she was such a strong athlete she always played up a year) and I chased down girls who hurt her and took red cards for it. We fought the usual amount through childhood; I dominated her until she got bigger than me. I, famously, broke her nose with a golf club, which I maintain was an accident. My aunt says it greatly improved her nose.
But it wasn’t until I left California that we developed the bond we have today. We talked on the phone for hours, then would cry ourselves to sleep missing each other. We began to revisit our childhood, noticing we came from a veritable sea of alcoholism and narcissism. We came into a reverential awareness of the insular bubble we created, which was and continues to
be so complete that we’re still fluent in our secret language.
She’s not really here for the holidays. She’s here to check on our mother, and maybe to check on me. My sister is in the delusional haze of a fucked-up romantic situation. We talk about it quite a bit. We do not talk about the Monster. I’ve told her it’s over, but she’s avoiding it. Christina is a straight arrow, steadfastly honest in her relationships, and my infidelities in the past disturb her, something about her older sister she’d rather not see. The dynamic of our birth order means she’s not allowed to judge me. The Monster, the fact that I believe he’s my soul mate, scares her, probably not dissimilarly from the way my parents’ judgment scared me. She also blames the Monster for the fact that I’ve left New York.
Where’s the sun? she asks.
It’s three p.m., I respond. During the winter that means light is gone in the canyon. Night is already settling in, aqueous and indifferent.
The next day we talk to a lawyer about a conservatorship for our mother. Turns out, conservatorships are difficult to obtain. As long as Nancy can feed herself, bathe herself, write checks, it doesn’t matter that she can’t walk, hasn’t seen a doctor or left the house in years, or occasionally gets dropped off at a detox center to dry out. Conservatorships aren’t for the merely self-destructive. The person in question usually has to be endangering someone else, often a child. And my mother’s boyfriend, essentially acting as a caretaker, and at risk of losing his “livelihood,” would surely contest it, dragging the process out even more. They’re time-consuming, expensive, and very rarely granted.
It’s also a lot of work, if you were to be awarded one, the lawyer says. For you two. You’ll be making every financial and medical decision for her. It requires constant supervision. Most often the conservator would either move in or nearby.
Christina and I share a look that says, Nope.
I think, I say, clearing my throat, we’re anticipating more of an assisted-living situation. She can’t live on her own and we can’t afford full-time, in-home care, and neither of us is able to—
I can barely say the words—live with her. So.
The lawyer sighs a sigh that says she’s seen kids like us before, devoted for all of ten minutes before they realize the implications. The real question you need to ask yourselves is, would she be better off in a nursing home or in her current living conditions?
Christina and I meditate on that while we drive straight from the lawyer to the Korean spa, the only place in Los Angeles my sister enjoys. We go into the basement where dozens of naked women—squat, lean, breasts that drip toward the ground, pubic hair gone gray, girls who still look like boys—stroll in elegant steam, everyone’s skin buoyant.
Nancy’s still young. Relatively, I say. I had done a walk-through of a well-regarded and expensive nursing home on the Long Beach shore and been unsettled. Not by the facilities: they were clean, nondescript. It was the realities of senior care that I had a hard time shaking off. I walked in and, as if on cue, a staff member dragged out a mop to clean shit off the floor. A diaper had overflowed in the lobby. There were people being walked, playing cards, watching television, sitting in a courtyard with potted jade plants. Only a few still mobile.
A woman pushed a walker through the hallway with tears running down her face. She looked at me. I paused and smiled. She said, The world is so ugly. And then she pushed on.
What would happen to my mother in there? I’m wary of people who retire too young. What little is left of her brain would atrophy quickly in an environment where dementia is the de facto state. It was a place I couldn’t imagine my grandfather in.
That’s not the only nursing home, my sister says. She’s practical and exasperated by my hyperbole. (Once she boiled down all the mythmaking and drama of my adolescence to I think you just had abnormally high hormones.)
She continues regarding the nursing home: They have activities. And she could have therapy. And we wouldn’t have to worry if she’s eating. She couldn’t drink. She could improve.
She’s right. I agree. I mean, it’s not like she’s social now. She could be social, I don’t know. Make a friend?
My sister thinks about it. So it could be better.
Yeah maybe.
Neither one of us believes it. Our mother has always been a paranoid, private person. She’s found stability surrounded by her things. Even in her current state she won’t let me borrow her vintage St. John blazers or old Jimmy Choo heels, despite the fact that she can’t walk and hasn’t been out of baggy sweats in years. I don’t blame her. Her objects are her history.
Do you think she’s happy? my sister asks. She never calls me. She never asks to see me.
Me neither. She canceled on me last week. I had already driven to Long Beach and she called and said she was busy.
Doing what?
Exactly.
I don’t think my mother remembers how to use words like happy or sad. Both seem oddly existential and unnecessary to the state she’s in, where one day is indistinguishable from the next. Unable to change, she’s lost the ability to dream, desire, create. Perhaps she’s achieved the presence I crave. If that’s what it looks like, do I want it?
I am lying on my stomach, while a Korean woman scrubs me. My face inches away from the inner crease of my elbow, arms over my head, legs spread while she breaks down the skin of my inner thighs, my ankles, my butt cheeks. It hurts but it’s a fresh hurt. The skin in my elbow is creped. I’m staring at it, its slackness, a shriveled excess of skin. I’m thinking such insightful thoughts as, I’ll start wearing sunblock, does this woman see my vagina, and I hear a third thought underlying those on repeat, That’s not my arm. That’s my mother’s skin.
She’s hiding, I say when reunited with my sister, as we apply sheet masks. She thinks she’s hiding the drinking. Like the old days.
After you left, it was always our secret, what happened in our house, she tells me. There was so much pressure on me to keep her alcoholism a secret, to let her be a perfect mom.
A perfect mom? I’m startled.
Yeah, snacks on the soccer field, trips to the mall, manicures, you know.
I don’t. She did those things for you, I say. Our experiences of high school couldn’t be more unalike. I cried our family’s dysfunction at anyone who would listen. Teachers, therapists, restaurant coworkers, friends’ parents, my aunt, all were trying to help me. I realize that my mother got to rewrite it all with Christina, who had been trained since birth to avoid conflict. For what it’s worth, they never fought. And while I don’t begrudge Christina the easy passages of her adolescence, occasionally I want to shake her and ask if she knows how hard it was for me. Once I left, it was like I never happened.
Anyway, my sister says. Hiding the drinking isn’t good.
I’m trying to make her accountable, I say. But I’m not qualified to do this. I can barely look at her. I don’t know what we can do. Are we really supposed to take over? Stage a coup?
We can’t do it. We don’t have any support from the family. Not even Granddaddy. They all think Larry is better than a nurse.
What she doesn’t say is that we can’t do it because we are kids. That we were never supposed to be doing this. But that’s not something we say out loud. She fingers her pores in a mirror. Frankly, I can’t afford it. Can you?
Of course not. I can barely afford to take care of myself.
Here we are. Two adult women, both married and divorced before thirty years old, high-functioning self-medicators, eternally anxious, with no idea how to trust ourselves. Once, Nancy and her boyfriend got wasted on Christmas Eve and woke us up in the middle of the night to open presents. It shouldn’t have, but it felt like a breach of trust. My sister and I both started crying. It’s not the morning, I said, through tears, pushing the presents away, while they tore at the wrapping themselves. I remember the smell o
f wine on my mother and how mean her boyfriend was about our crying. I was ten. Who teaches you to trust if your parents don’t? When both our parents fell apart in 2005, people would come up to my sister and me at weddings or family functions to tell us how miraculous we were. They were comforted by our youth, by our escape to New York City, by our early marriages. It was only as we grew older, both divorced, that the praise turned hesitant. Blood is thick, their eyes say.
I’m getting wrinkles, Christina says, trying to smooth out her forehead. Her skin, at this moment, is wrinkleless but there’s no use telling her.
At least you don’t look like her, I say, inspecting my own face. Christina’s eyes cut quickly around my face. She seems surprised.
Yikes, she says.
* * *
A few days later, Christina is stoic on our hike through Runyon. I couldn’t have produced a more striking winter morning, the kind that makes New Yorkers decide once and for all to quit the city. She won’t speak, her hands clasping her phone in her sweatshirt pocket. I stop trying, letting her steep in anxiety over an arrogant Saturday Night Live director I deemed worthless a month ago. But she’s taking it hard. That he’s also in LA at the moment seems to have thrown her off-kilter.
My aunt says that after my sister was born she didn’t make a sound for nine months. She slept in a bassinet or watched noiselessly. Of the two of us, she was always considered the quiet one, shy, hiding at the edge of the frame in the videos my grandfather filmed of us. One finger in her mouth, she watches me belt out Marvin Gaye, self-absorbed and tone-deaf. But I know that she stifles her feelings and anxiety. By the end of the day I can feel the tension radiating off her and I ask her what I can do.
Stray Page 16