Anton stuttered, asking the boys what they’d learned from this experience. Nicholas and James tried to apologize to Mom, but she wasn’t listening. I thought she didn’t love them anymore.
“We lost sight,” Nicholas said. I could tell both he and James were sorry from the expression on their faces.
“I feel fantastically stupid,” James said. He slicked his hair back with his hand and tried to talk to Mom. “It’s hard to understand where to stop sometimes, where the limits are.”
“I just can’t handle it anymore,” Mom said. “It’s just too much.” But Anton couldn’t ask Dwayne to leave and he wouldn’t give extra work to Nicholas and James. “I have to think about this,” Mom said. She scraped her chair back across the concrete patio and stood up. In her face there was that strength that hadn’t been there for a very long time, but even so I thought she might cry. She walked away, furious, giving Anton the silent treatment. I was sorry for Anton. In that moment he seemed so powerless, watching Mom walk away.
Then I thought about Dad. It occurred to me that he knew where we were because Camille had asked the operator. I imagined if Camille told him, he would come. He would want to come. I pictured him showing up, and the five of us, Mom, Julia, Jane, Kate and Dad, getting into his white VW and leaving and nothing about the silent treatment or the night before would matter; it would pass. Would be like the end. Of a movie, a TV show, or a dream, when you leave one world to go back into your own again.
∨ Bright Angel Time ∧
Eve
Mom knew who she was.
She’d been educated. Four years of college. They taught you how to be a wife. A diamond before you graduated. Her mother taught her how to be a wife. “An extra river water from Tiffany’s,” my grandmother would say – whatever that meant. “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Mom could throw a brilliant tea or cocktail. Her china served twelve. Her father laughed at her idea for secretarial school. Ha ha ha. “Secretarial school?” Big brown eyes beaming. Stern voice. “A blue blue Bostonian. Eleven generations Lynn,” as my grandmother liked to say. The Battle of Bunker Hill was fought on Breed’s Pasture, my grandfather’s forebears’ pasture. The Buster Brown boy all grown up. A doctor now, who had invented the safer football helmet. He loved his Evie. Her golden curls the color of sand. Her delicate hands. The silent type, he just looked at her, smoking his pipe, telling her with that look she’d have no need for secretarial school. Babies. That kind of thing.
Mom knew who she was. She knew French. Spoke it to anyone who’d listen, waiters in French restaurants. Dad took her to France in 1961 and they collected menus from all the three-star restaurants they ate in. At home she framed them and hung them on the walls around the house. Above a small table in the kitchen, a nook to look like a bistro. Little checks on the menus marked off what they’d eaten for dinner at the Hotel de la Poste Chevillot. Escargot de Bourgogne, la douzaine; Filet de Boeuf aux Truffes; Souffle aux Fraises, 2 personnes, Specialite; Vosne-Romanee-Les Malconsorts 1957. Mom would chant the words to us later, like a song. At the time she and Dad would leave Jane and Julia, babies then, in the back of their rented car while they feasted and drank. “They’ll be all right,” Dad said and nudged Mom, encouraging her, and together they laughed and feasted. Dad loved her. Her golden curls and the gap between her teeth. He loved her enthusiasm and endless optimism, her sense and passion for adventure.
Mom loved black Chiclets and burnt toast. She loved to suck on ice. She loved poetry and had had ambitions to be a writer. She loved Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. She loved to collect names from tombstones in an abandoned graveyard hidden in the woods behind our house – Jay Bo Lackey and Jojo Lipp. She loved to talk to strangers and strangers loved to talk to her. She got things from them, little secrets about their lives that somehow taught her about her own. She loved raw meat, and she loved to drink coffee with heated milk before getting out of bed in the morning. She loved to sink her arms into her garden to find the roots of weeds and she loved to tug and tug until she tugged them all out. Her home was immaculately clean. The brass chandelier shone and even our underwear was always ironed. In the basement she kept a sewing machine and bolts of Florence Eiseman and Liberty print fabrics, out of which she made us matching dresses.
She knew how to have babies, even though her mother had told her she wouldn’t be able to because of the split vertebra. As a child her mother kept her out of gym, away from all physical exercise because of this split vertebra. “Eve will never be able to have babies,” my grandmother told my father when he picked my sixteen-year-old mother up for their first date. But Mom knew how to have babies and would have had five if the last two hadn’t miscarried.
Every other year a baby – Jane, Julia, Kate. Kennedy was her hero. She was in the grocery store checkout line when he was shot. Mom believed that her insides were pure and white like the insides of a potato, that they didn’t slosh around. She knew she’d been born a blue baby and she knew my grandmother had whacked her to life. A registered RN, she sat up, having just delivered, and grabbed her daughter from the doctor by the leg, held her upside down and whacked until she coughed and cried and then she named her Eve. Eve because Eve had fallen. Eve because Eve was, literally, life and living. Eve because eve preceded something big and she’d been very late. Eve because Eve was evil and my grandmother had wanted a boy.
When Dad left, Mom left. She went to bed and didn’t get up until she met Anton, who offered her the world. At thirty-two, she’d been fired – from our father, from herself. She sank her diamond in a blue glass bottle filled with water and left it there. Several months later she sold it for a thousand dollars. Severance.
∨ Bright Angel Time ∧
Love and Sexual Equality
The back of his hand came down like a paddle and smashed into her face. His fingertips in her hair. His enormous turquoise ring in her eye. I could see the ring. The silver setting and the black hairs of his knuckles and the tightly pulled skin. His fist in her cheekbone. The back of his palm in her jaw.
♦
Anton knew who Mom was. Anton knew who Mom could be. It was she who had the potential to fill in his other half, to make them, as one being, whole. To pour her self into him, his self into her. The thought scared me. I saw Mom becoming Anton. I saw Anton becoming Mom. Fused together and both lost. Gone.
No one had ever known her before, the way Anton knew her, that’s what Mom said. He believed in her endless optimism and her relentless sense of adventure. “Residual omnipotence,” were the words he used to describe Mom’s driving forces. Her ability to believe that she could make anything happen – sleep in gas stations all across America to get to Anton, with three kids and forty dollars in her pocket – that she could stop time, change the course of the stars. Make a new family out of old and damaged families, a new family that would be bigger and better than the ones that came before. Anton loved her, cherished her. He thought her mind was wonderful, magical. He loved to hear her talk about Virginia Woolf, to recite Emily Dickinson. He believed there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do. She could be a writer, if that’s what she wanted. She could be a gardener, a painter, a comedian. Anything. A clown. A secretary. It was she who was by his side, helping him discover his discoveries: the tobacco-spitting contest, fiddling jam-borinas and racing armadillos. The craters left by volcanoes in which ran creeks of gold. “The thing about Anton,” Mom would say, “is that we really have fun together.”
Anton believed that the ideal love could only happen when man and woman achieved perfect equality. When their passion, desire, energy, spirituality, minds were driven with the same intensity. When the shackles, the teachings, of society were cut free from man and woman and the million variations on slave/master, beauty/beast were left to history.
Anton knew who Mom was. Mom could be this equal for him, if she’d only let herself go – forget what society had taught her to be. Doris Day. Grace Kelly. Whichever the case may be. “I am you. You are me.” He beli
eved that there wasn’t anything they couldn’t do together. Together they’d get lost just to get lost together. They saw the world in the same way: as theirs. They found things that others would never find: red, white and blue flowering Joshua trees in September; strangers by the roadside who’d become their children; a traveling Utopia with ten kids; a way of life, to live life that was all their own. It was 1970. You could do that.
He could fill her in. She could fill him in.
♦
There had been that time once, at home, when Anton had gotten mad at Mom because he’d been terribly jealous. ‘Terribly’ was the word Mom had used. My sisters and I weren’t there. We’d been at school. It was late May, not too long before we ran away to California. We’d never seen him mad so it was hard to imagine him swollen, face puffing the way we later saw it could. The veins like worms rising beneath the skin.
Mom was in the driveway in front of the house, alone and crying, when we returned from school. Her body folded over a smoldering heap of slides. The slides were of our trip, as a family, to Scotland the summer before Dad left. The slides burned and the negatives melted together into one gooey mass.
“He was just jealous,” Mom said to us, the three of us looming over her. “It was nothing. He was just terribly jealous. Terribly.”
♦
People. So many people. They waltzed. Cynthia hosted a party in the Dunes Room for the convention of doctors and some artists, several of whom were her good friends. Anton swirled me around. He sucked on my ear and then he set me down. I was afraid he would think I didn’t love him because of the fight with Mom. It had been two days since she’d spoken to him.
“Money’s never a problem as long as there’s plenty to go around,” shouted Cynthia Banks, pouring champagne into the top glass of a champagne fountain. She had six going at once. She wore a long red dress of chiffon that was tight and showed off her fat, and her thin hair was twirled into a skimpy bun crowned with a rhinestone tiara. Her head nodded to one side from having had too much to drink.
“She looks like she’s going to the junior prom,” a voice said.
“What an adorable girl you are,” said another voice, looking down on me, the face close to mine, big in my eyes. Mascara clogged her tear ducts and she smiled wide. Very white and crooked teeth. Anton took Cynthia in his arms and they danced. Lots of couples danced. Everyone in elegant clothes. I’d had my nightgown starched so it was stiffer than usual, and prettier. I wore my clip-ons and pink lipstick. I moved in and out of the couples. Mom wore a black dress with straps that sliced across her shoulder blades, showing off her tanned back. Sofia talked with the English doctor, who commented on our beautiful family. She told him about her four sisters, five brothers, two mothers and her father. I loved the way that sounded. He was so handsome I was afraid of him. Sofia wore patent leather shoeboots that rose to her thighs and a pink mohair minidress that must have been hot. I loved hearing Sofia include me as a sister. Jane danced with James. Me now with Finny and now with Timothy and then back to Anton. All the tables were pushed aside, napkins were strewn over the floor along with cigarette butts, and waiters in white suits made efforts to clear the plates off the tables. Mom waltzed with the English doctor, which soon bothered both Sofia and then Anton. Anton’s eyes were red sockets and his lids kept closing. He had smoked and drunk a lot. He tried to cut in on Mom and the doctor’s dance to offer the doctor a smoke. But Mom wouldn’t have it and she swirled the doctor away, feeling strong, like she didn’t need Anton.
The evening was cool, and through the doors I could see a net of stars and the silver moon. Water from all the fountains pricked in my ears. I’d had too much champagne. I was tired. “Kate,” Mom said. She came up to me from behind and wrapped her arms around me. In her arms I felt like a little child and wanted to collapse and have her carry me to bed. When she had cocktail parties with Dad the three of us would sing songs for the guests and weave between them offering up hors d’oeuvres and when we got too tired Mom wrapped around us like now and carried us off to the cool, tight sheets of our bed. “You’ve had enough to drink, Kitty.” She took the glass from my hand and set it on the floor. Sometimes she seemed very young and far away, but now she didn’t. She felt close and like my mother, like all the mothers of my old friends. Mrs. Campbell, Mrs. Conquest, Mrs. Tiller, Mrs. Fritz and Mrs. Fitzpatrick, Mrs. Love. “You should run on up to bed, little Toad,” Mom said. “But if you stay a bit longer do dance with Anton so he doesn’t feel left out. I’ll tell Jane too.” I didn’t want to dance. I slumped against the door and watched her dance back to the Englishman. People began to leave. Nicholas was drunk. He had thrown up in a cholla garden and come back with a vomit-stained shirt. Mom told him to stop drinking and to go and change his shirt. Nicholas ignored her so she told him again. Her voice rising, angry.
Anton tried to cut in again on Mom, but again she wouldn’t let him. I felt bad for him. Even Jane felt bad, and danced with him.
His eyes were big and sad, bulging – almost, it seemed, with fear. We knew what it was like to be punished by Mom. She could make it feel as if things would never change again. The world would end and you’d still be standing there, waiting for her to forgive you.
Once more Mom told Nicholas to clean himself up, told him he shouldn’t drink so much. He told her to fuck off and they started fighting until Nicholas stormed out.
Smoke stung my eyes and clogged my nose. I was tired. Some more guests shambled outside carrying candles and glasses of champagne and the party spilled out to the pools. Their voices clinking. I could hear splashing. The room emptied out. Jane took my hand in hers to lead me to bed.
“Don’t you ever tell my kids what to do.” We heard Anton’s voice, sharp and sudden. That muffled anger, coming to us as if underwater. Jane’s hand clutched mine more tightly and we stopped. We looked at each other. The walkways were lit with Japanese lanterns and the night was velvety dark. “I’m pissy mad,” he hissed. “I won’t have you bullying my kids.”
“Fine,” Jane said. “He tells us what to do, but she’s not allowed to tell them what do. Nice combination, for all his talk about equality.”
“Nicholas is drunk,” Mom shouted. “He should take care of himself and if he can’t, you should, damn it.” Jane turned back toward the Dunes Room. I didn’t want to go. Afraid. The underwater lights made the pools electric. I chewed on my tongue.
“Stop doing that,” Jane said and linked her arm in mine. “It makes me nervous.” I stopped. She held me close, in front of her like a shield. Mom and Anton were on either side of a table, alone in the room. He was big and swollen. I thought about him raising his hand to strike Jane. I wanted to go away. I turned around, but Jane held me hard.
“This isn’t what I wanted,” Mom said. “I didn’t chose this life. I never would have chosen this life.” Her eyes penetrated Anton. He just stared with those big eyes and his swollen head. Silence for a moment and then they were fighting again. About Nicholas and the drinking. About the Englishman and about Dwayne. About how she didn’t know how to love him. About how incomplete their union was. About the beauty of his wife’s mind. Screaming quietly, then, “Fuck off,” Mom said. Silence. Bad silence.
“What did you say?” He articulated each word slowly. He was enormous, standing over her. She thought for a moment.
“I said fuck you,” Mom said and she threw a champagne glass at him and his hand came down and smashed into her face. His eyes closed with the blow. His lids quivered, struggling to stay shut as if he couldn’t bear to see.
♦
On the road, heading east in the Eldorado. Everything inside raced. The four of us crowded together up front. No one wanted to be alone in the back. Julia, wrapped in a blanket stolen from the hotel, shivered between Jane and me. Mom drove calmly, holding a washcloth against her eye. The interior light was on so that Jane could read the maps. My maps. It was bright inside and almost cheery, just us. It had been a long time since it was just us. Outside was
black, no one else on the road. I wished someone else would be on the road. I could hear the wind rushing against the windows. I thought I should cry, but couldn’t. Jane talked evenly, though quickly, making plans about how to get home. Her palm pressed into her cheek. Mom’s thumbnail rubbed her lip. I thought about Anton pointing out our tics so long ago and I felt sad. Jane’s skin was blotched a nervous red-white. The maps crinkled and she couldn’t find the one for Arizona, but she didn’t get frustrated. “It’s fine,” she said. “Everything’s fine. We’re going to be all right.”
“We should find a hospital,” Julia said. Her eyes were big and blue and smart. Her body thin and frail. She’d lost a lot of weight. Mom’s eye bled and the washcloth was almost drenched red. “I bet you need stitches. You’re really bleeding. If you need them and don’t get them you’ll get a scar, Mom.” Julia sat forward and leaned over Jane and took the cloth to refold it, but Mom wouldn’t let her. I was glad. I didn’t want to see the eye.
Mom laughed lightly. “It’s nothing. Really. It’s…” She said it didn’t hurt. We could tell she didn’t want to talk about it so we didn’t. I thought about Finny for a second and wondered who’d speak for him, with me gone. The high beam pierced the blackness. Even the moon was small and dim. The spine of a mountain chain appeared and then vanished. We were quiet for a while. I imagined Dad at home, standing at the front door, waiting for us and then he vanished. I felt scared.
“I’m doing the right thing?” Mom asked.
“It’ll be okay,” Jane said, becoming Mom’s sister again. She patted Mom’s shoulder and again there was silence. We drove for awhile in the silence. Air leaked in from the hood. The convertible top hadn’t been put up right. I imagined that was Dwayne’s fault. I thought about renting Dwayne the Eldorado for his mission in the desert with the girl. Jane turned on the radio and we listened to some old songs.
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