Either way, much of my life I’ve unconsciously assumed there would be an explanation, and either way, my mother would get eventually better. Or that I would get better. What I mean is this: she has started promises with the phrase, “when my ship comes in,” and I have wanted to believe there is a ship. And on that ship, deep within an unaccounted-for crate, between flats of tea and exquisite silks made for royalty, there is a box, and in that box, written on a slip of paper in a firm and compassionate hand, is the explanation of how my mother has behaved the best she could, even if this might mean I am a terrible son not to love her.
I imagined myself weeping, and thinking, “If only I had known, all this would have made sense.” In other words, I have felt that when my mother’s ship came in, it would confirm the story she has told throughout her life.
Here, dawn, weed wearing off, I am realizing there is no ship. My mother will never change. She thinks she loves me, and I believe that if you could biopsy her soul and put the resulting slide under a microscope, you would find that every fiber of her being does in fact love me. Which makes me sad, because her love is terrible.
My mother didn’t keep bringing me to the swimming pool. Which meant she had the capacity to change. As I started to feel the truth of this, I felt that same sensation of water filling my nose. I sank into something, reluctantly. My mother is the sum of her choices. She is what she does.
I was out of a loop. I was no longer part of her. I could feel this before my brain kicked in and made words to describe it. It was strange, because I had imagined that there would be a word, like “anger” or “sorrow” or “happiness” written across some dark board that only I could read, but it wasn’t like that. There weren’t words, or interpretations, just the inarguable heaviness of a perspective having shifted. Once, 1974, age ten, in the back of a cab, I went into a tunnel of words, and here, now, I was out of the tunnel, a reveal of sky and air. I felt it, I felt everything, and I didn’t need to talk about it, and even though the sun had come up, I went to bed finally and I slept soundly for the first time I could remember.
DIAMOND
MY MOTHER AND DANIEL were living in a van. I arranged to meet her alone in Corona del Mar, at Fashion Island, an outdoor mall near where she, my father, and I had once lived, back when we were rich. It was a grand place for champagne brunches, stores where the salesladies still wore real pearls and sold monogrammed silver tea services. Neither she nor I had been back in years, as we had no real business being there. It was just a coincidental meeting point for us.
I hadn’t seen her in a year. She was having trouble walking in her shoes, which she’d found in a dumpster, and the ice cream cone I’d bought her dripped into her lap. She kept asking me when I was going to get married, when I was going to make her a grandmother, if I wanted to get in on her multilevel marketing scheme, if I wanted to learn to be a paralegal.
We walked slowly past the expensive stores. When I was a child, I had loved going into Russo’s Pets to see their two-headed snake. And it was still there, now stuffed and in a diorama kept in back. This was where we’d gotten Leo. She asked if I remembered that. I told her I did.
My mother mentioned, not for the first time, a story she’d heard when she first came to America. A woman was trapped in her car when trying to drive in a flood. The waters came up, and up, and she drowned. But when they found her the next day, her hands were sticking up out of the river, and in them was her baby, whom she had held up even after she drowned. My mother said that when she first heard that story, she felt bad about herself, because she knew she could never live up to that woman’s heroism. But that changed when she was pregnant. Once she had a baby, she knew that she could do that for me. Her love was that deep.
She looked at the toddlers on the playground. She reminisced about how patient I was with children who weren’t as smart as I was. “You’d be good at sales,” she said.
The kids were darting behind a wall of colored glass, primary color blocks that distorted their reflections. There was a koi pond with huge square river rocks below our feet, and I had a fleeting perception of the children and the fish in motion, the clarity of water and the filter of glass being somehow one and the same to me.
I knew that after Mom left she would go with Daniel, who might kill her. I was going to hug her goodbye. In the crowd, I saw children, dozens of children, startling in their simple needs. My mother saw deposed princes, unjustly accused doctors, inventors who need money to fight the patent office. When she looked my way, she saw through a kaleidoscope.
My mother, I thought at the time, was trapped in a fantasy, unable to tell the difference between the Mighty Oz and the Man Behind the Curtain. I think that before that day, if you had asked me, I would have said I loved my mother, and I hoped things were looking up for her, and they probably would, as soon as the lawsuit was over, as soon as the landlord got his blood money. After that day, I would tell you it was like seeing the koi below our feet. Clear as water. And later, much later, I would tell you I felt sad for her. My mother has lived with a fiercely intelligent enemy determined to almost destroy, but not quite, the life of her host, and anyone who gets close enough will sense the long shadows near the sweet woman who always looks so concerned. Mom, that thing you tried to escape? It’s you. I am so sorry.
It was getting late, I said. She agreed. We were at the base of the hill on top of which our old house on Setting Sun Drive stood. People who were still millionaires lived there. Neither of us looked that way. What would we have said?
Mom always has an eye for the next venture. What she spotted now was a jewelry store she used to shop in. There was a sign in the window: “Ask about our contest. Details inside.” She wanted to go in for a minute before we said goodbye.
The store had dropped from its former days into something starved and humiliated. There were bright orange SALE! signs over most of the merchandise. The owner, red-eyed, broken veins in his nose, asked if he could help us.
“My son and I came in about your contest.”
He walked us to the end of the counter. Ten diamonds, half a carat each, rested on a black velvet backing board. “Nine of these are cubic zirconium,” he said to my mother. “If you can guess which is a real diamond, you get fifty dollars off any purchase of two hundred dollars or more.”
I thanked him. I was tired. I thought we were ready to leave.
But my mother said, “Diamond,” pointing at one particular stone.
The owner smiled. “That’s right. That’s the diamond. You’re the winner.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
People rarely ask if historical fiction is autobiographical. This has allowed that genre to be a good tent for showcasing my impulse to rewrite events from my life in accordance with my worldview. I haven’t used that muscle in this book.
Nonetheless, if you appear here, you probably remember things differently than I do. After he read a draft, I asked my dad if he wanted this book to provide more nuance, and he said, “I don’t do nuance.”
Which is a shame. While I was interviewing him, I mentioned the Fabergé chess set and its place as a metaphor in this story for the riches that had passed from our lives, valuables that—
“It wasn’t a Fabergé,” he said.
I said, “Wait—what?”
He explained that at the time of the auction, he wasn’t that sophisticated about who Fabergé was. But he’d convinced himself that it was Fabergé’s because he wanted it to be true.
This abruptly made it an entirely different but equally good metaphor.
“It was contemporary. It was a collectible,” he said, pronouncing the word like it was a kind of luncheon meat.
“I thought it was incredibly valuable.”
“Expensive, but not valuable.”
So, regardless of what he claims, I’m saying there are nuances. There are things I didn’t know.
* * *
—
I’ve seen memoir writers account for the distortions in their narratives. My own issue is cause and effect. I have tried, by saying that one thing happened, and then another thing happened because of it, to make sense out of some chaos. My mother bailed out the man who stole her jewelry. Peter Charming showed up at our door with a rubber tree plant as an apology. But was it for the infraction I’ve outlined here or for something else? It’s possible I have organized some events so they’ll make sense. If I were to console myself for that (and I’m not sure I should), I’d add that this is a pathology which did not start with, and certainly doesn’t singularly apply to, the written part of my life.
* * *
—
I first wrote a small section of this during a memoir workshop taught by Geoffrey Wolff at UC Irvine in 1996. After class, Wolff patiently explained to me that my mother hadn’t really found the diamond. I will never forget the series of emotions that crossed his face when I said, “Wait, are you sure?” That’s when the door opened. Thank you, Geoffrey.
* * *
—
You are correct: “Nicolas et in Arcadia ego” isn’t the name of the painting. Saturn actually takes twenty-nine years and then some to get around the sun. Some of the addresses are approximations. Miriam actually was pretty. “Camelot gone” is Richard Brautigan’s phrase. Sherman Day Thacher wasn’t the first person to say “there’s something about the outside of a horse that’s good for the inside of a boy”—but he did say it eventually. In Fantastic Four 51, the Negative Zone was still called “Subspace.” I have tried to find reference for my father’s insistence that a character in the daily Los Angeles Times version of the Asterix strip was named “Ropus Dopus,” but I’ve come up empty. Xander Cameron made an observation about Thacher and Athens that I’ve adapted here. Amy Gerstler said, “Fear is a civilizing influence,” an observation so excellent I’ve put it in two books.
* * *
—
I gave up on this project as impossible several times, and several times unexpected grace gave it new life. Thank you to Alice Sebold for taking the pages out of the trash; Zyzzyva for publishing an early version of the “2709 Setting Sun Drive” chapter; the Squaw Valley Community of Writers for asking me to give a lecture about memoir; Rob Spillman for shoving me in front of Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story; Diana Miller for happening to telephone me while I was walking in circles around my manuscript in anticipation of throwing it away, again. Each of these resulted in the resurrection of what I’d thought was beyond comprehension.
* * *
—
People to whom I complained along the way: Ben Acker, Steve Adams, Lisa Alvarez, Aimee Bender, Amber Benson, James Bierman, Carolyn Birnbaum, Ben Blacker, Diane Bourdo, Gavin Bryars, John Butler, Ron Carlson, Tim Caron, Bill Charman, that asshat Howard Chaykin, Mark Childress, Laura Cogan, Tom Cole, Bernard Cooper (everyone should read Truth Serum), Jeffrey Cranor, Shawn Cuddy, Rob Delaney, Lynne Dixon, Amanda Eichstaedt (listen to Bakersfield and Beyond on KWMR), Maria Farrell, Joseph Fink, Matt Fraction (finally, a part of the book he’ll like), Dagmar Frinta, Judith Grossman, Michelle Henning, Eli Horowitz, Sean Howe, Jan Iverson, Brady Kahn, Evan Karp, Hope Larson, Michelle Latiolais, Felix Lu, Joen Madonna, Paul Madonna, Maggie Malone, Patrick McDonnell, Maria Mochnacz, Katie Moody, Judith Moore, David M’Rahi, Violaine M’Rahi, Kirsten Neilsen, Vix Nolan von Throuple, Karen O’Connell, Lexi Olian, John Parish, Alison Powell, John Raeside, SeanMichael Rau, Kit Reed, Adam Rogers, Diana Schutz, Julia Scott, Gail Seneca, Matt Shakman, Jon Shestack, Paul F. Tompkins, Andrew Tonkavich, Oscar Villalon, Barb Wagner, Matt Wagner, Karen Wessel (nice try!), Wally Wolodarsky, and Vanilla Ya-Ya. Some of these names might be desserts.
* * *
—
Supportive institutions: ALOUD, Babylon Salon, CSULB, East Bay Express, the Hammer Museum, Greenlight Books, The Grotto, KWMR, MacDowell Colony, Manx Museum, Marin Sun Farms, Quiet Lightning, Pints & Prose, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Why There Are Words, Writers with Drinks, the Corporation of Yaddo, and my family (you know who you are).
* * *
—
This book is now complete: Susan Golomb & Writers House; Diana Miller, Betsy Sallee, Jessica Purcell, Danielle Plafsky, Sonny Mehta, & Knopf; Carole Welch, Jenny Campbell, Fleur Clarke, & Hodder.
* * *
—
Animals I Have Known: Coco, George, Charlie, Max, Bogie. We are all brothers under the skin.
* * *
—
Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe: Guys, I’m so sorry.
* * *
—
David Leavitt: Also very sorry.
* * *
—
Unicorn: Sara Shay
* * *
—
I yam what I yam.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Glen David Gold is the author of the novels Sunnyside and Carter Beats the Devil, which have been translated into fourteen languages. His short stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, Playboy, and The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Los Angeles.
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I Will Be Complete Page 53