“You know what my favorite movie is?” Miriam said. I wasn’t paying much attention. Having no money was compounded by a new problem. The waitress knew Peter. She didn’t like him. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. I would have to wash dishes. I knew that wasn’t a real option, only something that happened in movies. I had no idea how to get out of this. “My favorite movie,” Miriam said, “is Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”
That brought me out of it. “Really?”
“Uh-huh. I love it.”
For a moment, the problems retreated. I started to tell her how the story in the movie was just like me and my mother. Leaving the old home together and starting a new one.
“I thought you lived with your dad.” Then, when I fumbled, she said, “You know why that’s my favorite movie? Because of the scene in the beginning, when she’s little, and when she sings off-key and then she says, ‘If anyone doesn’t like it, they can blow it out their ass.’ That’s great.”
I excused myself to use the bathroom. A moment later, I found our waitress at the register. “Excuse me?”
“Master Charming,” she said.
“I’m not—”
“That girl Sue isn’t your mother, is she?”
“Peter isn’t my dad. My mom is a friend of his. He told that girl I’m eating with that I’m his son. My real dad lives in Chicago.”
She said slowly, “The sad thing is I believe you.”
“I have a problem. Peter gave me ten dollars to take this girl to lunch.”
“Ahhh.”
“So I was wondering.”
She put her pencil behind her ear. “Here it comes.”
“Maybe you could get the chef to put about seven dollars’ worth of food on her plate. That way, I could have my café au lait and there would still be about a dollar fifty for a tip.”
A new look crossed her face, a reappraisal. “You aren’t Peter’s kid, are you?”
“No.”
“Yeah, you couldn’t be. I like the part about you still tipping me. I’ll talk to the chef.”
* * *
—
“And if anyone doesn’t like it, they can blow it out their ass,” Miriam was saying as we walked back up Union Street. I wanted the date to be over so it could be a story I told.
We went inside. Miriam turned the lights on. “You want a tour?”
“Okay.” I liked house tours.
She pointed. “This is the hallway. That’s the kitchen. That’s my mother’s bedroom, there. I sleep in the living room. Sometimes I wake up and I can hear her making connections.” She ground her knuckles together.
I didn’t have a response. It was quiet.
“Oh my God, Bewitched is on! Let’s watch Bewitched!” She fell on her bed. I sat next to her, at a distance, and I thought about my mother’s bedroom and mine. As Bewitched unfolded, I decided that in San Francisco, among the elite, where every man was a prince and every woman a princess, we didn’t let such things affect us.
When the show was over, Miriam kissed me on the mouth. I tried to push her away. She was stronger than I was. She held me down and tried to kiss me again.
“I need to kiss you, Glen. I’m in love with you. You’re going to be my boyfriend.”
“I don’t want to kiss you.”
“We have to kiss. Hold still.”
We were wrestling around when the key jangled in the lock. It seemed to take forever, as if someone were deliberately making noise. I threw Miriam off me, but she grabbed my arm and tugged me toward her bed. “Please don’t. Please start kissing me. You have to start kissing me. Please.”
I pried loose. I was sweaty and breathless, but standing alone in the hallway when her mother came in. Then I realized there was a smear of purple lipstick on my face. I was not a gentleman. I’d been caught mauling an eleven-year-old. Miriam stood behind me, eyes on the carpet.
Her mother called out to Peter, who was just coming up the stairs, “Oh, Peter. I wonder what they were doing. Peter? I said I wonder what they were doing?”
When she turned toward me again, she had a smile on her face that was the pride of ownership.
* * *
—
There was a dinner party that night. Peter had called friends and told them I would tell the story of my first date.
“I don’t understand women,” I said. “She ordered the most expensive thing on the menu and she didn’t eat it.”
“You understand women,” Peter said.
“You said she was a beautiful blonde. She wasn’t pretty, and she had black hair.”
Now Sue glided in. “Glen David Gold, you don’t have to be beautiful or blond to be a beautiful blonde.” She kissed my forehead like a punctuation point and then she left again while the adults laughed for what felt like the rest of the evening.
It was a good line. We create our own realities, make our own beauty, that was the landscape she meant. But saying Miriam was a beautiful blonde didn’t explain her bed in the living room. Or her dodging her mother’s boyfriends. Or the metal-against-metal feeling of her hopelessly trying to kiss me.
My story was deemed a great success, and the date an experience, a perennial the adults would want to hear about again and again. Except my mother.
I saw her seeing me standing next to Peter in front of the roaring fire, and the way he and I ceded parts of the story to each other. As when I used to do presentations about the coins, my mother was narrowing her eyes at how I soaked up the attention. She had worried about me becoming cold like my father, but now she was concluding I would become like Peter. In her eyes, had I known how to read them, there really was no good pathway for me, in that I was starting to become a man.
Someone finally asked Peter: During my date, what was he doing? You know, after he left with Miriam’s mother.
Ah, of course. The real reason for the date. He’d wanted to fuck her for ages, but she kept saying she couldn’t with her daughter around. I heard that and I took it in—Peter had used me—and when it was my turn to speak again, instead of hitting the laugh lines, I was thinking, “I can hear her making connections,” and I faltered.
My first date had meant I was in charge of an afternoon. How to behave with a girl. I knew some small ways now I could finish the phrase, “I am the type of man who…”
Who tells stories about the sad life of someone less fortunate than himself, apparently. I did not feel good. Some people were not beautiful or blondes and Peter’s world didn’t have room for that.
* * *
* * *
—
Something shifted a little bit after Miriam. I was unsure of Peter. My mother was unsure of me. Moreover this was when Peter was helping my mother invest her money, a situation I know little about to this day. But if you look at the date with Miriam as a template, you could reasonably assume there were always lateral and tangential plans unfolding without explanation of who was going to benefit.
I do know the investment results were not as straightforward as you’d think. To reel your mark in, you have to let her win a few hands first. So my mother was about to win a few. But then Peter would fatally overreach. It had to do with the part of her Peter could never control, the part she refused to cordon off, her ready and resourceful heart.
I am proud of my mother’s ability to love, particularly after two marriages. And I’m impressed by her simultaneous desire for autonomy. Only a strong person knows how to ride two horses going such different directions. Amazingly she was about to get all her contradictory dreams fulfilled. But it’s hard to write this next part because I know what’s coming.
My mother is made of traits and characteristics that don’t seem to add up. I have sometimes mistaken the way she lived for being inexplicable. But that’s not quite right. Her desires are like the raw pieces of brightly colored glass you’d
insert in a kaleidoscope. The horizon line viewed through a specific eyepiece, accounting for the interruption and tumble of strange and jagged emeralds and lapis, ends up being a worldview. It’s a metaphor I’ve often considered in opposition to my father’s worldview, the one seen through the telescope.
Imagine the hands of a clock at midnight, the beginning of the day. When I was born, my point of view was my mother’s. As I grew up, I separated and yet I was connected—like the hands of a clock—until all I believed was in complete opposition to her worldview. And then I began to see things from her perspective, which felt like being dragged backward into defending her, but which wasn’t. That’s not the way clocks work. I have empathy for her without having to defend her. I can account for my mother the way I do the passage of time. You can describe time. But you can’t be so arrogant to think you can explain it. It’s like that with my mom’s need to maneuver her way past some obstacles toward the bright and confusing future she wanted.
The immediate obstacle in her path? That would be me.
* * *
* * *
—
My mother was antsy. I wasn’t the public school sort. “Remember, there are boarding schools,” she said, again, which wasn’t what I’d been thinking. I felt nervousness in my chest, the same way I had when she presented me with a key to let myself into the apartment, or when Peter had given me ten dollars for the date with Miriam. Mom reminded me she had heard about places in Switzerland where the children of diplomats went. I could learn French. It would be an experience.
I wasn’t ready for that, but the truth was, she wasn’t looking for my permission. She had already entered a crafty letter exchange with Dad—first she mentioned how well I was doing, and then how mature I was. She said I seemed to judge her social life badly. She didn’t mention my crack about her missing underwear, but she used the phrase “Glen is always underfoot.” Further, she said, I seemed to get along very well with him and Ann, and in a return letter my father blocked that with a careful description of how small the apartment was, and in the following letter my mother suggested boarding school.
My father wrote back that he wasn’t going to pay for that. (My father wasn’t going to frighten Ann off with a monthly payroll in Swiss francs.)
Soon after, my mother enrolled me in a local day school, the Town School for Boys. It was walking distance from our flat. We went to Young Man’s Fancy, a store in Presidio Heights that the school had recommended I purchase seventh grade clothes from. Not that Town had an official uniform, but they had noticed that when a boy came to Town late—that is, after first grade—he might have trouble fitting in. They suggested that dressing like my peers would reduce the culture shock.
With an adult’s idea that it would make me blend in, my mother bought me corduroy trousers cut for my husky frame and a deep blue sweater with a spectrum of thin colorful lines that clung to my belly, under pectorals that were now unnervingly growing into breasts.
“You’re just going through a puffy phase,” my mother said. “You’ll grow out of it before the fall.”
I decided that I would exercise more and eat less, probably, and that maybe I would have a growth spurt so that when I met my new friends—I would have friends—I wouldn’t be fat, just smart. And funny.
* * *
—
When I visited Chicago that summer my father took me and Ann to visit my grandparents, where the living room couches were encased in plastic to preserve them. There was some cross section of family there, as if Grandma Frieda had dug her palm into a bin of mixed relatives, to encourage some cousins and great-aunts to come mourn the child of divorce. No one else in the family had divorced, not even Harry the Horse Thief, who had to be dragged out of the brothels on Friday before dusk. My father continued to concern them.
On the wall, directly in front of me, were three photographs. One was of my uncle Nortie marrying his lovely bride, who twenty years later sat with all of us now; one was of my uncle Jerry marrying Barbara, who was hilarious and smart and who was with him now in Westchester County, close enough to New York for Jerry to take the train every day to his job as a successful attorney. In between, there had once been a photo of my father and mother marrying, and there had, before that, been a photo of my father and his first wife marrying. Now there was a photograph of me, age five, in a sort of one-piece with shorts that my mother had sewn. I have a triumphant smile, as if I am acknowledging that I am just as marvelous as the audience expected.
It was strange to see that photo, given how indistinct and awful I felt now. Clearly no one wanted to talk about the photograph. Grandma Frieda had had no good options. Keep the photo of my mother up, even though Ann was coming? Impossible. Blank space on the wall? That would call attention to itself. Just a photo of Dad? That would be almost comically terrible. The photo of me was the best choice, or it was until a lull in conversation, when I asked why there was a photo of me on the wall.
I felt something acrid and hot. My father shrank, saying, “Glen David…” as he only does when exasperated with me. Simultaneously, all the old people in the room fought to come up with an explanation. They talked over each other.
I thought that at any given moment there had to be a comment that would make a whole room laugh. I had no idea what this was, but I was sure that if I considered it enough, it would come to me. When there was a new pause, I said, “Another awkward silence,” which turned out not to be the thing that would make everyone laugh.
Instead, Uncle Nortie and my father asked if I felt awkward, and as I was answering that, Aunt Rhoda asked me the same thing, while the more distant relatives said they weren’t feeling awkward, there was nothing to feel awkward about. They transparently ignored Ann, as if by not looking at her, she would be a part of the family. Of course that meant that she stood out as clearly as if my father had taken a photograph of her and put it on the wall over mine.
* * *
—
My dad asked me how things were with my mom. I knew Dad loved a good story, so I told him about the time Peter Charming met me at the airport with a custard pie. My father liked cars, so I told him how Peter once had a Jaguar that had broken down too many times, so he’d taken out a classified ad: a Jaguar will be parked in the Marin Headlands this Sunday. There will be a sledge hammer. Five dollars buys you one swing of the hammer. Ten dollars buys you three swings. He made thousands. (Not much of a response to this story, either.) A guy once welshed on a business debt and Peter forgave him but bought his soul. The guy couldn’t pay the money back fast enough—he paid Peter in the middle of the night.
We were driving somewhere, my father and Ann in front, me in the back. I announced, “Peter says the twenty-dollar bill is the most common bill in circulation, so counterfeiters—”
“What?” My father shouted. “That’s ridiculous.”
“No, it’s true. The twenty-dollar bill is the most common bill in circulation.”
“No, it’s not. How can you say that?”
Then Ann jumped in. “The one dollar bill is more common.”
“How often do you see one dollar bills, Glen? Often! Twenty-dollar bills, much less so,” my dad continued.
“Plus, there are more fives and tens than twenties,” Ann said.
That made sense. I tried to reason out where I’d gone wrong, but it was suddenly hard to think. “But the twenty—”
“I mean, if there were more twenties than ones, ones would be more valuable,” my dad interrupted. “If Peter Charming said the moon was made of green cheese, would you believe that? When you say things like that, I can’t believe anyone is ever paying attention to you,” my father said. “Your mother is a flake and she surrounds you with her flaky friends.”
I recalled, even though I couldn’t express it, that what I’d meant to say was that the twenty-dollar bill was the most commonly counterfeited bill in circula
tion, but it didn’t matter anymore. My father and Ann were verbally elbowing each other aside to yell at me. Once upon a time, back when we were still happy, coins and currency had been a friendly topic for me and my father. That was gone.
“It’s like the argument about the catalytic converter,” my dad continued. “Uninformed people like you make decisions and it hurts the rest of us.”
I didn’t know what a catalytic converter was. But I knew, suddenly, that I wasn’t smart. I cried.
Was it that night? On some night, I started crying and I couldn’t stop. After trying to hush me for a while, my father and Ann went quiet.
The apartment had a design flaw, a support pillar that belled out where the wall met the window, leaving a couple of feet for me to stand in the corner, unseen. I squeezed in there to press against the wall while the adults sat quietly somewhere else, reading, doing crossword puzzles. I watched the weather over Lake Michigan. I repeated to myself, moving my lips but not even whispering, “This isn’t so bad.”
* * *
—
I walked down Michigan Avenue with my father. It was cold enough that my ears hurt. He finally said, “If you have any questions…if there’s anything confusing you about sex, sexual issues…you can ask me.”
I fished for that response, the one that would make him laugh. I couldn’t figure it out. I knew that all I had to do was wait till I got back to San Francisco and tell Peter what my father had just said, and that would make Peter laugh. Because Peter had made the same offer just weeks beforehand.
* * *
—
When I flew back, the pilot told the passengers with a chuckle that we really shouldn’t worry about it, but there had been a little hitch with the landing gear and regulations required that there be “trucks with red lights” on the ground meeting us, but again, really, don’t worry.
I Will Be Complete Page 9