My mother’s train had already arrived, and she was struggling under the floodlights alongside a porter to get her luggage out from below the carriage. Alongside her suitcases and bags she had an enormous, well-taped cardboard box that I couldn’t quite fit into the trunk of the car.
She explained as I was rearranging the bags that the delay was because of a train derailment, that they’d spent hours stuck on the rails without anything to eat, but people were nice about it. It was a story of refugees’ kindness and deprivation, and I was nodding as the trunk of the car accidentally swung down and smacked the back of my skull.
I dropped to my knees, hands on my head, which was ringing as my vision went stippled. I’d never been hit so hard in my life, my sinuses overloaded with an oceanlike smell. I thought, when I could think again, Catch the Wave. How ironic.
My mother had stopped talking. She wore an expression so strange it shimmered into my permanent memory. It wasn’t the look of a parent rushing to rescue her child. Instead, it was a look of recognition. You’re part of my world again, it said.
* * *
—
Later, with all the bags and the giant box unloaded in the study, Mom dug through her purse until she found a bottle of a Chinese analgesic she wanted to tell me about. There were many things to describe—her train trip, the things in her boxes, people she had left behind, how exhausted and happy she was to be here, the future, she was bubbling over with it. But first, here, the medicine. “I am your mother, after all,” she said, with a mock emphasis on “mother” like I might have forgotten that. She put some on the bump on my head and it did spread that menthol feeling of numbness. “It keeps mosquitoes away,” my mother said. “Also, it’s good for foreplay, but be careful where your fingers end up.”
Later, with my mother in the study, that door closed, I asked Lindsay if that last part had been a weird comment. She had to think about it. She wasn’t sure. Maybe? When she was a teenager, she’d bought something called Kama Sutra powder, something you were supposed to lick off your boyfriend. It had gone missing. Her mother had used it all. So Lindsay shrugged. Who knew what mothers were supposed to be like.
Then she asked part of a question, “How long do you think…”
“A month,” I said. We whispered even though we didn’t need to. My mother was mostly deaf. We’d agreed to a month, and if Lindsay was questioning my resolve, I was happy to answer: a month, still.
We were holding each other in the loft bed. Mosquito netting around us. Lindsay whispered, “What if, in a month, she hasn’t…”
“Yeah, I don’t know.”
* * *
—
My mother was on a clock, and she knew this. She was smart. The first afternoon she and I walked through the shops on Piedmont Avenue. It was Lindsay’s birthday and my mother wanted to buy her something. At the flower stand, she shopped prices, and then bought the prettiest combination she could for three dollars.
“What does Lindsay like? Does she like toys?” We went into a toy store and my mother stared at everything until her eyes fell on a wind-up plastic mouse holding a wedge of cheese. When you let it go, it did a backflip. It was a dollar. We had it wrapped up.
When we got back to the house she worked on her résumé, and wrote a cover letter on my computer. She asked me to print it out. It was still on my screen, amber letters, gray background, and I felt my stomach drop, and then forcefully be made okay, as I noticed there were typographical errors. Should I point them out? My mother had typed résumés for a living.
She was already planning her next step, answering an ad in the paper for phone sales, when I handed her the cover letter. I’d fixed the mistakes quietly, as I thought telling her about them would make her feel judged. There were still phrases I couldn’t understand, and non sequiturs. “I’m in the Bay Area currently to visit my son,” it began, and there was a whole paragraph about her salary requirements, something I knew you didn’t put in cover letters.
I’d found an organization in Berkeley that helped women returning to the workforce find jobs. She met with them willingly, but she was discouraged. They had asked about her typing speed and if she was up on the latest word processing software, which she wasn’t. She’d been living in a bus, she’d explained, but they didn’t seem to understand what that meant about being current with technology. They were grooming her for secretarial work, which wasn’t what she wanted. She felt talked down to, which was a terrible thing, and women in positions like that were often so condescending. They weren’t helpful about sales jobs.
That night, my mother gave Lindsay her gifts. Lindsay reacted the way I had when my grandmother, who was sweet and strange and crafty, gave me chocolate when I was four years old as a bribe to sit on her lap while she patted my shoulders and talked to me about the fairies. Sometimes gifts are barter. Lindsay’s tranquil eyes communicated with the slightest narrowing. She understood my mother had done the best she could with the mouse and the flowers. She understood something further because of the story my mother then told.
It was a story about when my mother knew her first marriage was doomed. She’d married an American GI named Bob, who took her to California. This was in the 1950s. Her in-laws owned a furniture store, and they took her through it to furnish the apartment she and Bob would move into.
“It was hideous furniture,” my mother said, “the most awful stuff that people would call ‘classy,’ because they didn’t know any better. But I appreciated the gesture, and so I dutifully picked out some things. And on our wedding day, they presented me with a bill for all of it.” She paused here for me and Lindsay to be horrified, which we were. But there was more. “I was working as a secretary, supporting Bob in school, and I arranged for ten dollars a week to come out of my salary. Week in, week out, and then on Hanukkah, his parents presented me with a scroll, with ornate calligraphy, celebrating everything I’d paid, and canceling the rest of the debt.” She paused again. “Not returning any of the money I’d paid so far, just to be clear—they were telling me I was welcome to the family by canceling the remaining debt they’d forced me to incur.”
It was a complicated moment, the terrible story and my mother choosing to tell it now, not so much to me as to Lindsay. My mother would say she was telling the story because she wanted to, without ulterior motive. But she was in her sweet way suggesting that it was a cold world out there, so many people were just counting their ledgers, weren’t they, Lindsay? Here’s a mouse and some flowers, as I am being gracious and I know you’ll be gracious in return, Lindsay. Stinginess can destroy marriages that haven’t quite yet gotten aloft on their own. Good night, see you in the morning.
* * *
—
My mother sat in our living room the first week to make phone calls. She had a script to follow, and a list of contacts. She was selling space at a medical supplies convention. She would get three hundred dollars for every booth she sold. If she made only one sale every two days, she could have enough saved up for her own apartment.
I’m not sure you’d call this a job. It was a task. It wasn’t a task she’d found recently. She’d had the phone contacts in a Rolodex she’d brought with her from her last situation. She’d tried to make it work before she was evicted, but she was sure she could do better here, without a sword hanging over her head.
I worked on depositions in the guest room and Lindsay worked at her desk just on the other side of the living room, so we heard my mother between us, talking on the phone stiffly. When she addressed potential sales, she had jarring moments of excess élan, when her accent became more grand, as if she were the top of a sales pyramid and she had many minions under her. There were pauses when she was listening, or trying to, and I would anticipate from the next room the awful moments when she had to react to whatever the potential exhibitor was saying, when my mother sounded terrified and unsure of herself. Thank you so much for
your time and if you reconsider, my callback number is…with careful enunciation of each syllable, as if she were translating for foreigners.
In between calls, the phone rang once, and she picked up. Her voice melted. She was glad to get this call. I could tell it was Daniel calling.
After she got off the phone, she came into the study, where I was working, and looked a bit wistful. She saw an opportunity to tell me something about Daniel. “He really is trying, you know.”
I asked why he was calling, and my mother told me he’d been trying to fill out job applications, but he was overwhelmed. He had sold a pint of blood to make the phone call. He was asking if Mom could help him with his résumé. She explained something I hadn’t known. Daniel didn’t know how to read or write. “But he really wants to learn,” she said. “Really. Look at this.”
She shuffled through her pile of bags. She pulled out a laminated sheet of yellow paper.
“He asked me to teach him to write something, so I asked him what he wanted to write. He wrote this. I showed him how do to it.” She read it to me. It was a marriage proposal. She had laminated it with one of her office machines. The words looked scratchy, hewn from bark, and they floated off the page for me. I remember the phrase, “Love is the Answer.” I felt embarrassed, like my mother had lifted up a sheet to show me how gentle a monster looked while sleeping in the nude. She was so proud of him.
I had too many reactions trying to force themselves out at once, and so I was instead churning with nameless, dark feelings about this. My mother wanted to be a writer and I got this part of my identity, writer, directly from her. I once thought she would write a wonderful book. And now she was showing me how Daniel could actually, finally sign his name. I nodded, because, yes, him loving her so much that he learned to write was impressive. But I felt a stab of jealousy along the lines of “I’ve written so much more than that, Mom” that was so deeply buried I wouldn’t have admitted it. Also, a thought was taking up much of the available room in my brain. My mother was never going to be a writer. That dream was gone.
Finally, a horror. I didn’t know if she’d married him.
She put the laminated paper away. I still couldn’t ask. Her reading and writing lessons hadn’t really held long enough for Daniel to begin reading—he didn’t see the use of books except the Bible, and he didn’t need to read that because he knew in his heart what it said. Love is the Answer. No, she hadn’t married him, but she thought he was so sweet for asking.
* * *
—
In one day the first week, my mother made two sales for her medical convention. I hadn’t expected that. She wanted to take me and Lindsay to dinner, but it turned out she wouldn’t get paid until the exhibitors in question sent in their contracts and their checks had cleared. That might take a week, she thought. But we had dinner and it was a little celebration.
I was quietly adding up how many more sales she would need to make to get an apartment, but a small hitch occurred. Her boss had asked her to send out 500 flyers but had only sent 250 of them, and stamps for 100. It was a major decision, she explained, whether to send out postal packages that cost 45 or 65 cents. She was unclear whether she was supposed to buy her own stamps for the rest, and she couldn’t get answers for a couple of days. How ironic, she said, for this to happen now when she was on the verge of success.
Nonetheless Mom kept calling to follow up with leads, even though she couldn’t send out brochures and didn’t seem to be making any more sales. Finally, one of the exhibitors told my mother that he might be interested in the show, but it was the same weekend as a much larger, more established medical convention that everyone he knew was attending.
It turned out that most of her call list had already signed up for this other show. When her boss phoned back, Mom learned her two sales had canceled. The net effect was that none of her leads panned out. She was out of money, and was in fact in worse shape than when she started when you added in the cost of stamps.
* * *
—
Lindsay decided to go to San Diego for a few days, which I thought was a good idea. We needed my mother to find some new place to go, but until then, why not stay out of her way?
* * *
—
Lindsay was gone. My mother was saying, “You spoke at graduation?”
We were in our living room. “It wasn’t anything big,” I said. I have no idea how it had come out. Maybe I thought that someone would tell her eventually. Maybe I was still angry about Daniel’s laminated note.
“It sounds like a big deal.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Oh. Did you invite your father?”
Touché. “He sort of demanded that he come up. I didn’t really have a choice…”
She looked willing to be convinced, but she also asked to see the speech, which she read quietly on her single bed. She noted the place where I called out to my dad from the audience.
“Well, I knew he was going to be there,” I said.
“I see.”
She must have congratulated me. She must have weighed whatever else she wanted to say against what she should say. I didn’t blame it on Daniel, because at that moment, it wasn’t just about Daniel anymore, but the two of them together. I was beginning to understand that them as a unit meant something different than what I’d thought before.
Finally my mother broke the silence, which had been terrible. “You really were class valedictorian,” she said. She looked at me like she was letting me know she’d been clever enough to write my life for me.
* * *
—
With Lindsay gone, dinners with my mother led to details about her life that she was too ashamed to tell in front of my girlfriend. They were almost stories, but they didn’t quite have beginnings or endings. Instead there was that word avalanche which picked up velocity as she connected memories of terrible things that had happened around her. She told me, again, how she and Daniel had met, but she used the word “mattress” for the first time. And said how she hadn’t left for so long because she was afraid of him killing me. This linked somehow to my father having been so cold to her, to her own father dressing her down in French, when he knew perfectly well she didn’t speak French. Really, it had started right when she was born. Her parents hadn’t been married, and she felt such shame at being a bastard, and it was far worse in British society than I could ever know. She didn’t even know when her real birthday was—her birth certificate had been destroyed, and her own mother couldn’t remember. Had she ever told me she had a twin? Other relatives had confirmed it, and she wondered what had happened. It was probably a stillbirth. But when she found her parents’ letters, she saw her mother repeatedly trying to blackmail her father into marrying her. “Our little one needs a last name,” Elsie wrote, and when my mother read that she felt devastated and guilty at having been the bait that forced this great man into a marriage he clearly didn’t want. Maybe Elsie had kept her and given the other twin away so as not to entirely frighten George. Maybe there was another woman walking the earth now who had entirely different circumstances.
She looked at me, face deep with hidden meanings I was supposed to understand. When I listened, it made sense to me intuitively, the way a lullaby did. If I actually unpacked the lyrics, it turned out I was supplying an internal logic that meant only that I was her son.
She said, “I know you must hate me.” I said I didn’t. But I asked her why she made such “odd choices.” I called them “odd” because “odd” was a neutral word.
She answered slowly, precisely, as if she’d been waiting until I was old enough to understand. And though I wrote it down, I can’t explain what she said. It’s long and serpentine, with reference to her low self-esteem, to her father again, to shame again, to needing to find disreputable men ever since because she felt they were the only ones she deserved. She had cheated o
n my father at the end of their marriage and had gotten herpes. But he had cheated on her, and had gotten herpes himself. And after the marriage ended, when we were in San Francisco, she had gone on a date that had ended violently. The man had forced himself on her in something she had only recently started calling date rape. She had lain there quietly because I was in the house. Before I could react to that, she described her family’s lack of support; never really having had a chance to be rich; events conspiring against her; how she’d be able to set up her own business if only she had one more chance. She made it all sound like she was in a small boat in the middle of the ocean, smacked around, no compass, broken mast, torn sails, spun by currents and winds she couldn’t control.
Then she said that when she’d packed to finally leave Daniel, he’d picked Misty up in his hands and told my mother he would strangle her if she did.
My mother didn’t deliver the next line of this story. She just looked at the floor.
“I made mistakes,” she finally said. I thought I knew what she meant, but it turned out she’d moved on from that last topic. “When I was with your father, I wasn’t ready for the responsibilities of money, but now I can visualize it and I’m ready for great wealth to find me.”
* * *
—
When Lindsay came back, we lay in the loft, holding each other, and I told her that my mother had cheated on my father, my mother had gotten herpes because of it, she had been raped, I’d been there when she was raped, she’d met Daniel when she’d had sex with him and a friend on a filthy mattress. Daniel had threatened to kill me. He’d strangled their kitten, maybe. My mother had no opportunities on the horizon. She was out of money and options and I wasn’t sure what to do next.
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