The Madwoman and the Roomba

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  “Watch the movie CATFISH,” Tiger Aunt Kaitlin broods. “CATFISH. ‘JJ’ is likely to be a sixty-two-year-old man or scary obese woman in a trailer. A pedophile.”

  I TURN, as usual, to my therapist friend Yolanda.

  “First question,” she says. “You have to ask yourself. Seriously. Is your ego getting massaged by communicating with JJ and being such a ‘cool’ mom?”

  “Honestly,” I say, “maybe it felt like that for a moment, like that time we drew cats. But mostly his situation is too vast and complicated and unsolvable, and I fail as much as I succeed. I feel powerless and like I’m failing as a mother because I can’t protect my daughter from sadness. So no, it doesn’t feel very flattering.”

  “Fair enough. It’s interesting. Sally is what, eleven, right?”

  “Just turned twelve.”

  “Uh-huh. In my practice, there are a number of teen girls with suicidal gay male teen friends. It’s a common trope.”

  “What’s that about?” I’m grateful that at least Yolanda is considering that JJ might be a real person, rather than a sixty-two-year-old CATFISH.

  “These girls are experiencing huge emotions within themselves, which can be overwhelming. Dealing with the drama of their gay male teen friends is a way to play out those feelings, but on another canvas.”

  “So, Sally—?”

  “She may be feeling unstable inside, but instead of telling her parents, she helps JJ with JJ’s drama. It may give her a sense a control, worth, agency.”

  The conclusion: we have a mess on our hands. Sally should get therapy.

  I should get therapy.

  Sally and JJ can communicate, but I am to let go entirely. I am to cut off all communication with JJ. I am violating boundaries, muddying waters.

  I need to be the mother, the parent, and keep my distance.

  I INFORM SALLY of the prognosis.

  “Are you depressed, honey?” I ask. “Do you feel unstable?” But asking that of a teen is like asking a top if it feels unstable.

  Sally denies being depressed, says she doesn’t want to go to therapy, and insists all she wants is to go to Tampa to meet JJ.

  “Are you sure JJ wants us to come?” I ask.

  “Of course!”

  “Didn’t you say he can’t even predict where he’ll be in summer?”

  “He’ll be there,” she says with a calm I myself do not have, “he’ll be there.”

  SO OF COURSE, IN VIOLATION OF EVERYTHING THERAPIST YOLANDA SAID!!! I book a trip to Tampa. Because Sally is asking me over and over and over. She does not vary here. Her requests are constant. And I don’t have sense. But I do have air miles.

  We triangulate a week in early August. The story I tell myself is that we are going to Tampa to Have Fun! Never mind that, even after I’ve booked flights and a hotel, JJ can’t say where he’ll be. At his aunts’. Uncle’s. Grandparents’. I cling to the fact that we at least have a home address for Aunt Jill (and presumably Aunt Debra), in an apartment complex that snail mail has at least successfully come from and has been delivered to. I have google-imaged this address—the blurry photo reveals a small unit whose cheerful front porch features two blue folding chairs and several potted plants. We can at least drive by there, as you would by the home of Elvis in Graceland. Hopefully, Sally will get to meet JJ, somehow (for lunch, dinner? Marie Callender’s?) . . . but if not, she and I will drive seventy-seven miles to Orlando to Walt Disney World!

  Two weeks out, Sally asks, quietly, “If we go to Tampa and JJ is dead, can we at least visit his gravesite?”

  “Yes,” I say, completely saddened, though I decide to lunge for the next parental ring. “But JJ will be alive! I guarantee you!”

  One week before our trip, the mood lightens. JJ and Sally are making happy plans, of watching movies together and making pillow forts and meeting his cats. But come Saturday, Aunt Debra suddenly takes mysteriously ill. JJ is moved to his uncle’s house, where he is a house prisoner. His uncle is a jailer.

  Even I am starting to lose my patience now. (As Kaitlin would say: “Is that the telltale smell of . . . CATFISH?”) I say to Sally, “Look. Doesn’t it seem like a coincidence that JJ is ‘moved to his uncle’s house’ the exact week we’re coming? If JJ doesn’t want to meet us, really, there’s nothing we can do.”

  “I’m meeting JJ,” Sally repeats, with an eerie belief. “I can’t wait to meet JJ.”

  I am the worst mother ever.

  I HATE FLYING, and Florida’s Gulf Coast winds are superbumpy. I grip my armrests, nauseated.

  The prognosis for a horrible outcome is 90 percent certain.

  It’s as if I myself am a suicide bomber who has pointed the nose of the plane toward disaster.

  Worst of all is the excitement Sally is clearly feeling, that she is going to meet JJ! Looking out the window at the storm clouds, her face is radiant with joy.

  I pat her dry hand with my sweaty one and repeat the mantra that’s less for her than for me: “At the very least, we can drive by his aunts’ house tomorrow. At the very least, there will be evidence she exists, or her car exists, or something.”

  We touch down in Tampa. We see ads for Disney World, the happiest place on earth. It’s pouring rain.

  We drift down the escalator, past multiple WELCOME TO TAMPA! signs. “At the very least, we can drive to Disney World!” I say. “We’re going to have fun!”

  “Yes, we are!” Sally agrees, all smiles.

  We wait in the rental car line. The passengers and tourists around us, with Bermuda shirts and beach gear, look so hopeful. Otherwise known as lost and out of place. We are all fools. Total fools. In a tropical downpour.

  I try not to look over at Sally. My expectation is, now that we have landed, the texts will mysteriously stop. And in fact, Sally is sitting on a couch with her backpack, looking peaceful, but her phone is also not buzzing.

  “Disney World!” I exclaim heartily. “This will be fun.”

  It is in the car, driving through a tropical storm, past less-than-reassuring Florida tourism billboards—ZIPLINE OVER GATORS!—when suddenly Sally pipes up. “Oh good. Aunt Debra is better. So Aunt Jill is coming to pick him up from his uncle’s.”

  So we’re “on” again. Theoretically.

  All of a sudden, JJ wants to know if he can come over—okay!—and what time will we be at our place. We throw out 5 p.m. as a number.

  Now that this is supposedly moving forward, my stomach is starting to churn. There is, all at once, the hope that he will show up, the dread that he won’t, and the worry that he will show up and it will be not who we expect and I will have to call the Florida police (but what sort of person would pull a ruse like this on a twelve-year-old girl and her fifty-six-year-old mother?).

  We check into our lake cottage. It is a slightly mildewy vacation home with kayaks waiting, a vegetable garden, and a small hot tub. We have no idea where we are in relation to town. We’re starving.

  “We have time,” I say. “Let’s go to that Mexican place on the corner.”

  WE DO, and order a couple of burritos . . . but the service at this sleepy restaurant is weirdly slow.

  The clocks ticks to 4:45.

  “We have to get it to go. No time.”

  “Okay,” Sally says.

  I’m suddenly in a panic, throwing money at them as we grab searing hot Styrofoam containers. I feel like nothing can be left to chance. JJ is a mirage that will blow away at any second. Everything about this has a fatalistic Anna Karenina feeling about it. JJ and Aunt Jill come to the house, we miss them by five minutes, then his grandparents fly him to Cuba with the wrong medication—

  One thing is clear: If I am ever to see this vibrating fictional creature, I will slam an iron ankle bracelet on him.

  Now we speed bumpily back home. In the rain. Sally gazes out the window at Florida, quietly ecstatic. I just continue to see rain.

  We scream in at 4:57. We lay our Styrofoam boxes around the high glass table. Five o’clock come
s.

  Nothing.

  5:15. Nothing.

  It has stopped raining, anyway.

  A cloudy, murky, silvery mist persists.

  Sally eats her burrito contentedly. Her excitement is pure and continuous. Her phone buzzes. JJ and Aunt Jill are setting off a little later than they thought, and, what with traffic, will be another thirty minutes.

  6 p.m. comes.

  The phone buzzes. JJ reports—ten minutes away.

  6:15 comes.

  6:20.

  At 6:28 I think I hear a sound from the street. I peer out the curtains. A small blue sedan appears to be pulling up to the curb.

  In one motion, Sally rises from the table, flings open the front door and starts running, the wind at her back, the way you would run toward a whaling ship that has just come home after a seven-year journey.

  And through a pane of mildewy glass, I do in fact see two figures. A heavyset fortysomething woman with a blonde pageboy haircut and a small boy with dyed green hair and indeed large owl-like—though not un-cute—black glasses. He is in a purple cape, and orange and yellow troll horns.

  “Oh my God!” I exclaim. “JJ! He’s in cosplay!”

  Sally and JJ run toward each other and hug. In truth, she is so tall for her age, she lifts him up into the air.

  Like a cat.

  Because you know what? Apparently: “Cats understand.”

  For a blissful, surreal week in Tampa, there is no fighting, sulking, nor any rip in the cosmic fabric. It is like two atomic particles that, when separated, created these electric sparks and darkness via buzzing phones. But upon falling gravitationally together, they are in a steady state. They live together, finally, undisturbed, watch cartoons, draw pictures, eat tomato soup, in a magical pillow fort of their own making.

  Okay, so, let me say this. In the long run, transitioning out of tweenhood, this will not last forever. Life is, as we say, complicated.

  You have questions—as I did. What was going on with JJ’s Aunt Debra? Something about “better medication,” he said, that she was “better.” (Perhaps JJ’s antidepressant medication, which his doctors kept changing on him, was better?) His Aunt Jill was cordial during the week, if busy with work and her sister’s doctor’s appointments, so happy to have some child care. Why all those crazy texts, about all those dire situations? “Sometimes I panic,” JJ says. “I’m sorry.” We see no cuts on him. Does he make things up? How much of any of this was true? Some answers came, some didn’t.

  But let us leave that aside in today’s storytelling. In that one moment . . .

  As they ran toward each other in the mist . . .

  It was like experiencing something totally pure. It made no sense.

  It was very beautiful.

  The fact is that he did exist—and in the moment it was enough. Because very occasionally, when you least expect it, Love Wins.

  “Fall” into “September”/“October”/“November”/“December

  Marriage in the Middle Ages

  I Do or I Don’t?

  OF COURSE, AS PURE—if unlikely—as teen love is, in middle age, cohabiting? It’s hard for pure love to be pure, or love, or, sometimes, anything but intense, deep irritation.

  Which is to say, since the Hindu monks left, things have been rocky with Charlie and me, to say the least.

  He has been unemployed for two months. The VW needs a new headlight.

  He is reading food blogs for—what?—how many hours a day?

  I am working like a dog on a colleague’s manuscript edit—tedious and not inspiring, but it will pay.

  The house is a wreck.

  Maybe Charlie can bring in a little income so Luz can come more often?

  I say, “Even a thousand dollars a month?”

  “What do you expect me to do?” he scoffs. “Bag groceries at Trader Joe’s?”

  I shrug and say, “Well . . .” It seems like that’s a thing artisanally employed creative people our age are doing. With the proper perspective, working at Trader Joe’s could be viewed as a kind of party: the festive Hawaiian shirts, the deep discounts on products that are soy and gluten-free, in Pasadena perhaps one could even bike there, get some of that good cardio!

  But astonishingly, the capper is that Charlie and I had the most royal fight.

  It was so stupid.

  Which is to say, recently, we’ve been having all these tiring fights in the kitchen, about:

  Socialism

  Single-payer health care

  How everything is better in Denmark. So many of his sentences start “But in Denmark . . . ”

  “Where the income tax rate is 70 percent!” I yell.

  The other night, he raged: “If you can point out to me how the current Supreme Court actually reflects the will of the people? I’m moving to Mexico.”

  Meaning that if building the wall and straight wedding cakes actually reflect the popular vote—“the popular one!”—he can no longer tolerate living in the United States.

  “You’re moving to Mexico?” I erupted. “Because you don’t like the composition of our Supreme Court? Hashtag Second World Problems!”

  “I am,” he blazed. “I’m moving to Mexico.”

  “The Mexicans are really going to welcome you with open arms. You’re the freelance theater producer they’ve been looking for. That’s why they keep crossing the border north, trying to find you. You don’t even speak Spanish, for God’s sake!”

  I screamed: “WHY AM I THE ONE IN THIS HOUSE WHO HAS TO USE LOGIC???”

  “I JUST DON’T THINK I can do it anymore,” I say to Marilyn and her husband Barry. We always have a nice barter system going. I’ve driven to their lovely canyon home to lend them some movie screeners, in exchange for the loan of an extra printer for use by my daughters. And also a huge bag of lemons from their tree.

  “What do you mean ‘it’?” Marilyn asks.

  “I think Charlie may just be too eccentric!” I exclaim. “With the Hinduism and the beads and the cannabis and the poverty and his breaking-down VW, which he calls ‘Button.’ ” I shudder in horror. “He has a name for his car.”

  “I’m eccentric!” Barry parries, putting down a platter of tuna fish and chips and cut-up apples and cheese.

  “His astronomy thing!” Marilyn exclaims. It’s true: Barry’s passion for amateur astronomy can stretch to fifteen hours a week. Sometimes short desert trips are involved.

  “I know, Barry,” I say. “But you do things around the house and you have health insurance and you’re officially retired from that . . . legal stuff you used to do. . . .”

  “Patents,” he says.

  “I mean, you guys are like us, but the better, fifteen-years-older version. It’s like you guys caught the growth of the baby boom, and we caught the tail. It’s like I’m not quite old enough, with my still school-aged girls, and nor am I quite wealthy enough, to be pulling off the ‘fun Second Husband’ thing. Marilyn, you began as an actress, right?”

  “Yes!” she exclaims, shaking out her grayish but still-full ringlets. “I traveled to England, went to Oxford, did all the Shakespeare. . . .”

  “But then you went into business consulting and you invented all those team-building workshops and made a zillion dollars!” I say.

  “I was lucky,” she demurs. “There was some good timing.”

  “So you have the underground continent of money—that subterranean foundation—so that you can be this seemingly quirky boomer couple, with all your wacky hobbies, and all your—what—Tibetan drum circles, and your sugar cleanses, but it’s not like the bone is rubbing against bone or joint against joint.” I bring my hands together in a crushing motion. “I mean, look at your house, it’s gigantic!”

  “Your house is big, too,” Marilyn declares.

  “It is, but it’s wooden, and the sound! It’s like living inside an acoustic guitar! Every noise resonates!”

  “It is true that this home is a blessing,” Marilyn admits.

  “Separate
bedrooms!” Barry adds, eyebrows raised.

  “He snores,” Marilyn says.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” he says.

  “How would you know?” she asks.

  “Ah well,” he says, pouring prosecco.

  “Oh sweetie,” she says, sitting next to him and putting her arm around him. “It’s not that we can’t visit each other when we feel like it.”

  “ ’Tis true,” he says, “and I can watch my World War II documentaries. And sports!”

  “It’s so wonderful not to watch sports!” she exclaims. “But the point is, we still love each other. Other couples our age—late sixties? You can see the deadness in their eyes, but as my friend Gemma told me, about herself and her husband, ‘We’re ‘beyond divorce.’ ”

  “Meaning?”

  “There was a moment when they could have gotten divorced, when both kids left for college, but they didn’t get it together in time. Now that door has closed, they’re just both too lazy. . . . Why divorce when you’re turning seventy? But Gemma has put an earth-positive spin on it—‘like beyond meat,’ she says, ‘it’s ‘beyond divorce.’”

  “My aunt divorced my uncle when she was eighty!” Barry exclaims. “She said, ‘I have ten years left! Why should I spend it with this lump?’ She started painting and went to Europe—she has been having a grand old time!”

  “But you love Charlie,” Marilyn says. “I remember when you both first got together. What a romance! He’s your soul mate!”

  “Well, he may be my soul mate—you know, the person who is like a mirror? But I’ve looked in the mirror and I haven’t always liked what I’ve seen. Screaming ‘fuck you!’ at those poor Hindu monks. Though that was justified.”

  “But at heart, you do love him.”

  “Could you see ever getting married to him?” Barry asks.

  “Weddings are fun!” Marilyn exclaims, as they snuggle around cheese.

  “At this point, if we did get married,” I say, “it would solely be for health insurance purposes. I’m not even convinced I wish marriage on my own daughters!” I suddenly realize. “The thought of Hannah walking down the aisle with some twentysomething guy. . . . Are we ‘giving her away’? Into what? Never mind romantic love, what they’re actually doing is signing a legal contract to meld their finances. What if he’s charming on the surface, but bad with money? What are the chances this young yokel is going to have more sound financial habits than the entire clan of Loh, which, by the way, is headed by the dragon lady, my incredibly responsible sister, who could run a small country? And provide everyone excellent and affordable health insurance, btw?”