She crushes her cigarette into the ashtray he’s fetched for her and raises her jaw. “I’m not a hippie,” she says, “but I would ball a hippie.”
They don’t ball, not that night. The camera girl does not even get his name.
Her mother is a change girl at Caesars Palace. When Martha was a child, some feminists printed the names of the casinos that didn’t promote women in the newspaper. Caesars Palace, the ads said, was the worst of the worst. NOW and the unions marched on the Strip, shut it down for a day. At last Caesars capitulated, promoted a few of the white change girls from the floor into the cage, including Martha’s mother, Mary Lou. With this raise and what she managed to steal, Mary Lou bought a ranch house walled with breeze-block on Fairway Drive, the sewer side of the public golf course. Martha’s older sister, Monica, lived in San Francisco with her husband. Her older brother, Jack, was a valet at The Sands. Her stepdad, Joe, sat at the bar at Caesars through Mary Lou’s whole shift, watching. They fought, then Jack and Joe fought. Someone in that house was always beating the living hell out of someone else, and the moment the hell started spilling out, Martha rode her ten-speed to a ditch that would one day be the Meadows Mall, to her friends’ houses, to school or work, to Harry’s, good enough reason to marry him.
Harry is in New York, working. He doesn’t write and he doesn’t call and he doesn’t send money like he said he would, and Martha does not mind a bit, drunk-driving her VW Bug back to Vegas beneath a smear of stars pointing west. The hot springs have melted the work from her muscles. On Harry’s mattress like a raft on a sea of dirty clothes she sleeps the deepest sleep of her life. She dreams a black orb and wakes knowing its message. She packs her shit, loads it into the Bug and drives to her mom’s house, to the bedroom she and Monica once shared, where all her favorite things are still, things she has never brought to Harry’s. Her perfect reading chair made out of raw wood and hide, the garage sale mirror, the full bookshelf and two big, thirsty ferns. Her acoustic guitar from Sears on a carved wood stand, a rug almost half the size of the room, an aloe plant in a macramé sling, a maroon and gold tapestry.
Behind the tapestry is a hole punched in the wall some time ago by some man. Inside the hole, waiting down in the darkness in a Crown Royal pouch hung on a nail, are all of her earthly treasures: ticket stubs to Jesus Christ Superstar, Bob Dylan, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Joni Mitchell, and Elton John, a fat ounce, and some whites. She adds her tips, rehangs the velvet pouch on the nail, replaces the tapestry and waits.
She lives again in this room in her mother’s house on Fairway Drive for two weeks. Mary Lou doesn’t come home, or if she does, she comes while Martha is at work. Martha listens to the radio and tends her plants and practices guitar with the chords she’d long ago drawn on the wall of the bedroom near a yellow submarine and Kilroy and Charlie Brown and Snoopy. She goes to the laundromat and into her mother’s bathroom (silver Marilyn Monroe print wallpaper) to smell Mary Lou’s cold cream. She rides her old ten-speed to her ditch, reads there and writes in her diary. She types a letter to Harry and another to her cousin Denise, buzzing with clarity. Obeying an arbitrary but nonetheless rigid timetable she’s assigned herself, on the second Saturday Martha loads the Bug with her now-clean clothes, her toiletries, her best books, her guitar, Denise’s typewriter, her cameras and equipment, her portfolio, her plants and her sack of treasures. After work, aloe and ferns buckled into the passenger seat, Martha drives back to the Crowbar.
There he is, her nameless love, polishing a glass at the bar.
He looks up. “What took you so long?”
Things are complicated, then they aren’t.
She moves to Tecopa.
* * *
—
They raise a parachute on a telephone pole for shade, grow grapevines, dates, figs, palms, bamboo. Martha grows mint from cuttings taken from Quon Sing’s patch. She feeds the soil coffee grounds, eggshells, bonemeal and menstrual blood. Ice plant and carrots, onions, corn, tomatoes, hollyhocks and honeysuckle. Her darkroom had been Paul’s workshop, and her chemicals and equipment share space with blades and bits and cracked five-gallon buckets of rocks until they open a rock shop in town, next door to the post office. Visitor’s Center—Rocks Maps Gemstones, the sign says. They sell postcards, maps, Paul’s rocks and jewelry, Martha’s photographs—landscapes, Paul in the mine, the dogs—and copies of The Amargosa News and Views, the newspaper they make with their friends.
Lise and I are born less than a year apart, Irish twins. Me in 1984 at the hospital in Bishop near the lake LA drank, Lise in 1985 in the back of Mary Lou’s Datsun 280Z on the side of the road in Death Valley. Around this time we whiz unknowingly through various deadly thresholds.
Well, Exxon knew.
* * *
—
Mom would open our front and back doors so randy tarantulas could migrate through. Don’t bother them, she said, they were here first. Lise practiced shaving with our dad’s razor. I remember them holding her down in the kitchen, lots of red-black blood on the green linoleum. She remembers me walking on a cinder-block wall in front of the post office. Calif. had just become CA but lif. was still sunstamped on the block wall. I slip and catch my chin on the cinder block, my blood lit red-orange in the late-day sun. Lise watches them sew me up, nine black stitches ants along my jaw. The scar still pulls a little, making my smile look sarcastic.
One planter box in the garden is surrendered to any tortoises we catch. We feed them iceberg lettuce until they tunnel out. Horny toads we tag with nail polish, cataloging them in a locking diary, until Mom says they breathe through their skin. “You’re killing them,” she clarifies.
A lump on my father’s neck. He goes for rides in airplanes. Lise and I sleep together beneath Raggedy Ann and Andy bedding bought on layaway. We lie before the swamp cooler, splayed naked in the sun with Dad cross-legged beside us, coated in mud.
We become the leaders of a small pack of dogs—Barry, Spike and Garfield. A pack of coyotes on the far ridge yipping, cackling, waiting. They get Garfield, then Barry, but not Spike and not us, not yet. Rattlesnakes at dawn and dusk. We never see but at times can feel the bobcat up at the spring, watching.
* * *
—
I’ve seen the footage and the reenactments. I’ve seen a video of my father on Larry King Live wearing a tan button-up shirt and a bolo tie. I’ve watched him fiddle with his malfunctioning earpiece and talk about his friends in the Family. They were sick. They thought they were righteous angels on a wave of revolution that was cleaning up the world.
In another video he is in Malibu, propped up with pillows in the bed where he will die of leukemia. He looks into the camera. He says, Here I am, my girls. I want you to know how much I loved you. I want you to know who I was.
Did he know then that he was asking too much? I was six years old when he died. Lise was five. We have none of the memories he so hoped we would have. We have CNN, Helter Skelter. My Life with Charles Manson. I look for him there. I play his interviews over and over, listening to his voice rasp and tremble in all the familiar places. I listen, listen like I listen to nothing and no one else, especially myself. But he never says what I need him to say.
Malibu had flowers that looked like birds and had the names of birds. Slugs and snails and dew, everything glistening. One neighbor’s house was a giant barrel, another’s a geodesic dome. The drained swimming pool behind the guesthouse we rented throbbed with frogs. Paper dolls on Lise’s birthday. The zoo, the tar pits, the beach, Disneyland.
Malibu. The place our father came to die and did, while I was doing somersaults in a busted hot tub and my sister was beside me, counting.
* * *
—
After, Mom ran the rock shop and sent us both to kindergarten at the trailer school—a dozen students in a single-wide trailer, grades K through six in one room, seven through twelve in the other, two bathr
ooms in between. It was early for Lise and she clung to me until we twinned. Our classmates, white boys and a husky Indian named Winston, liked to catalog our likenesses: same hair, same eyes, same laugh, same voice. Only our sizes were different. Was Lise a little little or was it me a little fat?
Winston was not good at reading. Something had happened to him as a baby and it made him slow, his voice hoarse. Sometimes our teacher would hit him across the face with his reading textbook. This was 1990. I had a bad singing voice too. For this reason Winston and I were put together in a closet at music time, the door cracked so we could hear the others sing. The crack let a little light in. It caught Winston’s top teeth, four silver ingots gleaming. I wanted them.
* * *
—
Sisters in the back of the rock shop after school, coloring with highlighters, making happy birthday banners from dot matrix printer paper, bird’s nest crowns with the shred bin. Mom is nicer to kids in the shop than she is to us, gives them TV rock or pyrite she never calls fool’s gold. Outside we pick pomegranates and split them open on mining equipment or glaciers of talc with holes bored in from a long-ago drilling race. We build forts in the salt cedars, venture deeper into the mesquite groves and then, bravely and at the urging of an older girl, into the grasses, the alkali soil crunch underfoot. We watch out for rattlesnakes—for that river that is sometimes there and sometimes not.
Little twin, fat twin. Mom says we’re sturdy stock, black Irish on our dad’s side, crazy fairy folk, jockeys and alcoholics. From Mom’s side came our freckles, bad vision, more alcoholism, more crazy.
It seemed we three were alone a long time, but it also felt immediate that we girls were no longer allowed to sleep in Mom’s bed, not allowed the Mountain Dew or the Kraft singles not ours in the fridge, a hard hat and an Igloo lunch box on top. Her boyfriend Ron was sober, recently released from prison, an apprentice in the carpenters’ union. They met at an AA meeting. He built parking garages for casinos in Vegas and needed to be closer to his jobsites. We moved to Trout Canyon, a wrinkle on the west-facing slopes of the Spring Mountains (“Las Vegas’s sleeping porch,” Caruthers called them), where my father’s parents owned a one-bedroom cabin.
Trout Canyon was a spooky, sensual place, the plot steep, rocky and alive with wild juniper, cherry and apricot trees, blackberry brambles climbing the chain-link. At the bottom of the property, near the dirt road that came up the mountain, sat a slimy pond ringed by weeping willows. Ponderosa pines sticky with sap, a patch of lamb’s ear I liked to walk on with bare feet. Inside the cabin, between two stones in the fireplace, was a secret door. When we opened it a tiny animal skull peered out at us, something with teeth. In Trout Canyon I told my mother that all I wanted was for us to be normal, a normal family.
She said, Oh honey, there’s no such thing.
I would have liked to stay in Trout Canyon forever, but it didn’t belong to us. We moved again, down the mountains to the valley floor to Pahrump, an unincorporated smattering of innumerable Libertarian retirees who refused the census, its northern boundary Yucca Mountain, its southernmost point a dry lake bed rimmed with two legal brothels and a commercial military-grade artillery range where you could shoot bazookas. On a clear night, from the front door of our wood-paneled double-wide on the north end of the valley, we could see the lights of Vegas over the range, our neon aurora borealis.
At the bus stop on the first day of second grade, Lise and I met our first best friends, Ty and Kevin Chen, real twins who looked nothing alike. If they were twins, we were twins, we all agreed. The Chens’ dad was dead too. The four of us made an elaborate fort near the bus stop, a tumbleweed midden surrounded by a labyrinth of trails through the sagebrush. Me and Lise and Ty and Kevin were in the fort early mornings well before the school bus came and after school until dark. We were in the fort all weekend, unless we were breaking into houses with Mom.
She’d read the real estate listings in the newspaper, copy down the addresses of the listings that interested her, and we’d head out. These were boom times in southern Nevada, so many houses being built, stucco and drywall on bare desert lots off unpaved roads, no trees or sidewalks or city water. And best of all: no neighbors. Mom liked her space. There was no worse slur she could sling at a house than “too close to the road.” She was not quite a hermit but easily a misanthrope. She liked to see people coming a mile away, alerted by a dust plume billowing across the valley.
If a house was not too close to the road, we entered in various ways. The front door was sometimes unlocked, or the garage door. We rolled it open and ducked under. More often Lise, runty and cunning, slid through the doggie door and let us in. Mom could pop a screen in seconds, so sometimes Lise went in through a window. Or we came through the front door: one of the local realtors used the same code for the digital locks on all her listings and never changed it, so that was worth a try. We walked around the house, picking out our rooms, enjoying the way our voices bounced.
Mom went to the kitchen sink and held her fingers under the water, sensing the pressure, timing how long it took to warm up, feeling how hard it was, looking through the window for the mountains.
She discussed with us the carpet decisions, the tile decisions, the drywall job, the foundation. We shut ourselves in the walk-in closets, opened and closed all cabinets, fridges, sliding glass doors and blinds. Lise and I fantasized aloud about what colors we’d paint our rooms. Mom fantasized about central air and skylights. Once, we all three lay in a dry Jacuzzi tub and sang. Then we left everything more or less as we had found it and drove home across the desert, briefly invigorated by the lives we might live.
It was around this time that Mom took Lise and me to Outback Steakhouse and announced she was going to have another baby. We ate a Bloomin’ Onion and watched her cry.
My mother lived by her own code, something like: you won’t see it all if you don’t trespass a little. She had little regard for the concept of private property, but after her third baby was born—and with help from G-ma Mary Lou, who tapped her pension from Caesars—Mom and Ron bought land in Pahrump: three and a half acres shaped like Nevada, mostly mesquite with a beautiful big cottonwood shuddering at the tip. Mom customized a double-wide for the property and we were there the day its two halves were trucked in.
* * *
—
My mother’s career was a bit of a con. She didn’t graduate from high school and had no formal education in museum studies, yet she expanded the rock shop into the Shoshone Museum. She was a self-taught historian—meaning she read a lot—and learned photography in the basement darkrooms of the Strip. My father had taught her a little about mining and lapidary work, and she taught herself a lot more. She began to make her own jewelry and sell it at the museum and at gem shows. She was an artist, a naturalist, a writer, though she never used those words.
At some point she stopped taking pictures. I know she did not always love being a mother. She loved her garden and smoking and work. When she got home we were not to ask her any questions for an hour. She wanted, more than anything, to be left alone in her garden on unpaved Lola Lane, bordered by open desert and alfalfa fields. She cultivated the property with a technique known by the family euphemism “view it at night,” a specific subset of theft, typically the stealing of landscaping elements from a corporation by cover of darkness. She might say, “They just put century plants in in Summerlin. Perhaps we should view them at night,” and in no time we’d uproot a few ornamental agaves from the freshly landscaped median and take them home. She might back up her Bronco over a new curb and load it with baby date trees waiting to be plugged into the sod lawns of an unfinished subdivision. She might, with Ron’s help, roll expensive decorative boulders from the outer banks of the parking lot of a union-busting casino and into my dad’s old truck. She might persuade Ron to spend his weekend digging her a pond then stock it with lily pads and koi skimmed from a golf course water feature. In
this manner the Lola property bloomed. Frogs moved into the pond with an elusive turtle we got from the fair and never saw again, only heard plopping himself into the water when we opened the front door first thing in the morning.
Other wonders appeared. A bench swing in a grove of screwbean mesquite, their curly-fry seedpods falling silently into a bed of mint. A fence, a deck, a patio off the master bedroom shaded by climbing roses. Dogs from the pound to keep Spike company: a Rottweiler we named Vash after Captain Picard’s girlfriend and a lunkhead golden retriever I got to name Oberon because I was just back from Shakespeare camp and Mom had missed me.
One day, driving on the ribbon of highway between Tecopa and Shoshone, we passed a house that Mom knew to be vacant. We stopped to take a look. Behind the house we saw a pen, and in it two donkeys, one iconic brown with a black cross of Bethlehem on its back and a bristly Mohawk mane, the other entirely white, an albino.
I didn’t even notice the animals’ ribs or the empty trough turned over in their pen, but as we drove away, Lise began to howl. She didn’t stop until Mom borrowed her sponsor’s horse trailer and we took the donkeys home. Around this time and in a similar manner our household came into a gigantic potbellied pig. Lise named him Wilbur and almost as quickly came home from school to find him killed and partly eaten by Vash. It was not Vash’s fault, Mom said. She was made that way.
The donkeys fared better than Wilbur. Ron built them a corral and we fed them sheafs of alfalfa from the farm at the end of the road. Not long after their arrival Lise and I took the brown one—mine, Buckwheat—out into the desert for a ride, playing Mormons. Her donkey, the albino, was skittish and mistrustful and would not tolerate mounting. As we circled back, a strange sound echoed into Deseret, a keening. The white donkey, braying for her brother. The moment she caught sight of him, she tried to jump the corral. But she was tired, malnourished, afraid. We could see all this in her eyes as she writhed on the corral, stuck, her hooves screeching on the iron bars and sending up sparks. That’s how Spark got her name.
I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness Page 4