I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  You must remember that this was real. Real hooves, real sparks.

  Mom and Ron got married in the garden of the Lola house on Super Bowl Sunday. They served sub sandwiches from the Blimpie inside Terrible’s Town. The men watched the game during the reception. Lise and I jumped on the trampoline with our cousin Darren, sailing high over the garden, our sunflowers, ice plant, water lilies, roses, much of it viewed at night, though some of Mom’s acquisitions had occurred in broad daylight. I leapt into the air, spying on my mother in her garden. Her shoulders were wrapped in creamy lace—a curtain she’d transformed for the day into a gauzy shawl—and her hair shone in the sun like some new metal. She was surrounded by women she loved and who loved her. She was holding her baby. When the vows came she had assented to every word save one.

  Obey.

  * * *

  —

  My mother never got to make everything she wanted to make, to build even a fraction of what she wanted to build. Still, she built a lot. When she learned that a fantastically preserved skeleton of a woolly mammoth had been dug up from the bed of the Amargosa near Tecopa and taken north, she convinced Sonoma State to give it back. She built—well, Ron and some of his AA buddies built but Mom fundraised, lobbied, agitated into existence—a one-room wing on the back of the Shoshone Museum to house the mammoth. Then she took us to Sonoma to get him.

  He was on display in the sunny atrium of some sciences building, presented as he’d been found, lying on his side with his ribs arched skyward, his spectacular tusks unfurled in the mud. Mom and Ron dismantled the display, wrapping the mammoth bones in moving blankets and sleeping bags we’d brought from home. It was not unlike viewing things at night, except for the graduate students helping under the direction of Kathy, a geology professor my mother had gotten to know during the repatriation negotiations. Kathy was boyish, not married. She and Mom had something between them, something I wanted the way I’d wanted Winston’s silver ingot teeth. But my job was to look after baby Lyn, just learning to walk. I spent mammoth moving day with baby fingers in mine, watching Lyn bumble back and forth across the lawns of Sonoma State in bare feet, the grass’s giving softness a magic to me, as well the wide fronds offering shade in a courtyard, the ancient trees and the birdsong everywhere—all of it became on that day the smooth cool lush shelter I would ever after attach to the word campus.

  * * *

  —

  Mom wanted a real house. She said so on our early morning runs down Lola Lane. Past the cottonwood where the gravel road went dirt, then right on the ranch road, irrigation ditch and alfalfa fields on one side, wild desert on the other. I held a knob of silvery cottonwood as a marker and dropped it when we slowed to a walk, so that each morning we ran a little farther, deeper into the alfalfa fields, toward the dairy.

  She was done living in trailers, she huffed, even a trailer called a manufactured home, even a double-wide on acreage with an apron of cinder blocks obscuring its wheels, even a trailer with a pond.

  We moved into a house on Navajo Road, in the Indian streets on the southernmost end of the valley. Navajo, Paiute, Savoy, Comanche, Pawnee, Cheyenne branching off Homestead Road with two brothels down on the end of Homestead, the Chicken Ranch and Sheri’s. I learned to parallel park at Sheri’s, which boasted one of the few curbs in town. The other option was the Mormon church, but my mom refused to set foot there. My school bus had passed the brothels every morning and afternoon, turning around in the Sheri’s parking lot. It was a moment I waited for, that slow view of the Chicken Ranch—stick-built, painted hot pink and baby blue, gingerbread embellishments and dormer windows, a white picket fence. I wanted to live there.

  But I lived with Mom and Ron and Lise and Lyn in Pahrump in the Navajo house, stick-built, two stories in the style Mom called Cape Cod. Cape Cod was not a place any of us knew or wanted to know. Whatever the Navajo house was supposed to be it was clearly not. Something was badly off in the proportions. Everything seemed to change for the worse the day we moved in. In fact I came to consider the Navajo house cursed. It had no insulation, it had a pigeon infestation. Pigeons fucking day and night, Mom’s words. Evenings she sat outside in a lawn chair with a pellet gun, smoking cigarettes and picking them off. Spike got the carcasses and did his thing with them.

  Spike died of old age in the Navajo house with his head in my lap on the floor in front of the bookcase, an institutional metal rig my mother had coated in FlexStone, a mainstay of her decor repertoire. The bookcase was crammed with what seemed like every kind of book, one whole glorious wall arranged in no order and by no rule except to keep the encyclopedia sets together. Encyclopedia of Rocks and Minerals, Encyclopedia of the Supernatural, Encyclopedia of Greek Myth. I ransacked this shelf one summer when all I did was work and read and tan. Out on the blazing trampoline I read Zane Grey, field guides to rocks, addiction memoirs, second-wave feminist manifestos, N. Scott Momaday and Tony Hillerman. Orwell’s essays plus 1984 and Animal Farm, which I thought was about an animal farm. I reread my old Goosebumps and Boxcar Children and Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. I read Cadillac Desert and Silent Spring and several anthologies of local color and Manifest Destiny propaganda. I read the Pahrump Valley Times every day starting with Sports, looking for pictures of hot boys playing anything. I read the clippings from the Amargosa News and Views in my mother’s dusty portfolio, her short-lived column of plainspoken Caruthers-style pieces about zany desert folk, half of them dogs. I read her letters to the editor about chemtrails and Yucca Mountain and domestic violence.

  We buried Spike in the backyard.

  We watched a lot of VH1.

  G-ma Mary Lou bought Lise a porcelain doll and Lise was too gracious about it so G-ma kept buying them, collector’s items she said of what even we knew was daytime TV junk, Kewpies and Precious Moments and a themed doll for every holiday. Lise’s room filled with smooth glass heads with curls painted on, drowsy eyelashes and deathless plastic eyeballs. She stopped sleeping, got into feng shui, broke the bad news. Our front and back doors were perfectly aligned, inviting the worst kind of energy. The stairs were positioned in such a way that they shot all our blessings right out the front door.

  Too hot upstairs, too cold down. Old pink-gray carpet downstairs with a threadbare trench leading to the bathroom. One morning Mom woke me before dawn. She was watering the downstairs carpet, that smoker’s-lung color against the green garden hose. “Get dressed,” she said, “I’m scamming the insurance company and I need your help.”

  The scam worked! We got new carpet. But the trench came back. Nicotine stained the walls, stamps of white when you took a picture down. Off acoustics. High ceilings paneled in pine so sound couldn’t find a clear path. No one could hear anyone, ever, nor the phone ringing, so by the time you got someone’s attention you were already screaming.

  Bad vibes indeed and these confirmed for me that we’d always be two families, two houses. The Tecopa house and the Navajo house. One family of four, one family of five. We—my mother, Lise and I—missed the Tecopa house as we missed my dad. Grief was a river running under the three of us, all but invisible to Ron and Lyn. We couldn’t help it. We longed for Tecopa, each in our own way, my mother’s mostly private. I only ever saw it out the corner of my eye. Between Pahrump, Tecopa and Malibu I tried to triangulate who my father had been. I developed various small, secret fantasies about him meeting boys I liked or walking me down the aisle. At night he might speak to me through my stomach gurgles. If I prayed, I prayed to him.

  I said, Dad, I wish you were here. I need you.

  Or, later, Dad, I wish you were here. Mom needs you.

  * * *

  —

  Darkness descended on the Navajo house. One by one, we each became deeply unhappy there. Mom had lost Spike and a bunch of other people. Cancer, mostly, and suicide. She was sick all the time. I became an angry, overachieving teenager completely obsessed with one cruel boy after th
e other—the worse he treated me, the better. Lise and her born-again boyfriend lost their virginity to each other and then the boyfriend asked Jesus to give his back. Lyn had lava dreams, wrote a report on Martin Luther King Jr. winning the Nobel Peas Prize. Ron left the house at four each morning to drive to jobsites in Vegas. For breakfast Lise made him horchata rice cooked mushy with butter, sugar and cinnamon. He got home a few minutes before dinner, sat speckled with concrete at the table and nodded off while we ate Mom’s Marie Callender’s or Hamburger Help Me. After dinner Ron showered then collapsed in his recliner upstairs in the den and we all watched TV. Some nights he stayed downstairs on the computer. He got deep into Age of Empires. We all got deep into X-Files and Coast to Coast AM. Art Bell lived and broadcast from a few dirt lots away. Our desktop computer helped NASA look for UFOs. Mom monitored the Test Site and Yucca Mountain and Area 51. Aliens, lunatics with guns, cancer clusters. What was crazy about any of it? Lise and I were taught to identify chemtrails by the distinct pattern and pacing of their dispersing tail. Sometimes we were not allowed to play outside because, Mom whispered, They’re spraying. Her belief was blinding, too bright to behold. We started looking at her only through the big picture window. There, she stalked across the front yard in her nightgown, camera raised to the midday sky.

  * * *

  —

  The Navajo house had a few rules. We could not say shut up. We could not call someone stupid. We could not say I can’t. We could not answer the phone during dinner and never if the caller ID said UNKNOWN. All mail went unopened into a drawer by the back door and that drawer was never otherwise opened. If someone came to the door we were to sic the dogs on them.

  Her hands began to shake there. One Christmas I waited downstairs at the picture window for a boyfriend to pick me up. While I waited, Mom’s reflection said nonsense things to me, silly things she seemed to know were funny though not why. She amused and frightened me.

  I suppose she must have been in a great deal of pain—even now I struggle to simply say: she was hurting. Struggle to say: she was sick.

  Many evenings of my childhood were spent in the common areas of twelve-step clubs; many weekends passed at AA picnics or roundups. I have sat in open meetings and eavesdropped on closed ones. Miles and miles of lonesome desert road has folded beneath my mother, my sister and me as we listened to rock bottom stories on tape. I have read the literature. I have attended my fair share of Al-Anon meetings. Addiction is one of those concepts I cannot recall ever learning. A notion I seem to have been born knowing. Words my mother had been taught to say too late. She’d had to learn for herself, and told us when and where and how she’d learned, was learning. She told vague stories about the years she drank, gestured to things she’d done to us when we were little, described Lise protecting me, me protecting Lise, shameful incidents neither of us girls remembered but which our mother confessed to anyway. AA was as close to a church as our family would ever get. My mom was careful to never say she was an alcoholic or used to be. I ached for her to say it—the present tense frightened me. For years she had cigarettes, coffee, work, gardening, building, making jewelry, making dinner. She was never still. She never played. I asked her often how come if people replaced one addiction with another, like she said, she couldn’t just get addicted to playing. That’s not how it works, she said. You can’t get addicted to anything that’s good for you.

  She kept a rainbow of chips in her jewelry box, sobriety medallions in every gleaming color commemorating days then months then years. I was allowed to touch them but never to remove them. I often opened the jewelry box to stroke them. I liked how they stacked up, how they slid. They called to me, budding kleptomaniac, but I never took them. All I knew for sure as a girl was that if my mother wasn’t sober, my sisters and I would be the kids in those rock bottom stories: lost, taken or dead.

  Today I know even less. I don’t understand her at all. I can’t. She is a void. She goes suddenly very still. Hurting all over, she said, and no one could say why. No one believed her, she said, and she was right. Too late, they diagnosed her Lyme disease. A tick had bitten her in Sonoma, she thought she remembered, while she was getting the mammoth. She was given OxyContin for her chronic pain.

  Soon, with help from the internet, she became her own doctor.

  She quit the museum or was fired, we didn’t know which. I read the accusations in the paper. She took the money but only as a loan, she said, and what she took was nothing compared to what she was owed.

  The Navajo house filled with rocks and bore down on us, that stick-built house with a brick-and-mortar mortgage. Cigarette burns opened like eyes on the blankets and cushions and on the couch where she watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, The X-Files, Law & Order.

  We watched her fall asleep with cigarettes smoldering between her fingers. I remember my dad almost burned alive in the van. We developed a technique of intervening at the fabric’s first singe but not before, for if she woke she’d accuse us of overreacting, and without a burn hole we’d have no evidence to the contrary.

  On her arms were morphine patches and on her nightstand a mortar and pestle so she could grind her Oxy and snort it. Many mornings she did not wake up and some she could not wake up. Once she took so many pills that she passed out before she could swallow them all. She still had them on her tongue when we found her, in various stages of dissolve.

  Lise and I took turns on those mornings. One sister walked Lyn down the road to a friend’s house, asked Lyn’s friend’s mother to make sure Lyn got on her bus, then this sister boarded her own bus for high school.

  The other sister waited at home for the ambulance. She greeted the EMTs. One of the EMTs was a few years older than me. Sometimes I ran into him at parties, sitting around a fire on old tires or tailgates, he and I usually the only ones not chugging Robitussin. He never acknowledged that he’d carried my mother naked on a stretcher down our bad energy stairs on more than one occasion.

  (How many occasions?)

  So many I lost count. So many the emergency wore off. Waiting for the ambulance was the worst job, and Lise and I bickered bitterly about who would do it, who had a test in first period, who had too many absences, whose teacher was more lenient and whose was a hard-ass. I often won. My first period was Drama 2 and I got a scholarship to Shakespeare camp. Lise’s was Algebra and she failed it. I took Drama, Anatomy & Physiology, Civics, AP English. I was on the yearbook committee and put so many pictures of myself in it that the class of 2002 called it the Claire Bitch Project. Lise got held back, needed glasses but no one noticed. She skipped class for the darkroom. I skipped class for Dance Dance Revolution at Mountain View Casino and Bowl. My seasons were volleyball, basketball, plays, work. I answered phones at Domino’s Pizza, lifeguarded and taught swim lessons at the public pool. I read at work and through various boyfriends’ band practice. When I turned sixteen I was given my mom’s 1970 orange Volkswagen Beetle.

  Lise stayed home and basically raised Lyn. She read the Golden Compass trilogy and the Encarta encyclopedia and watched Pop-Up Video. She mastered first the SNES, then PrimeStar and finally dial-up. She barely graduated from high school.

  I graduated easily but could not afford college. Ron had been slipping large portions of his paychecks into slot machines, I deduced after he finally agreed to fill out his portion of the FAFSA. The spring my classmates spent saving up to move out or dropping out to have their babies, I spent having risky sex with dullards and overexercising, baffled on the treadmill at how my stepfather’s tax returns could tally up to over a hundred thousand dollars per year and yet every day at lunch one of my girlfriends loaned me two of her five dollars so I could buy Pizza Hut breadsticks or a seven-layer burrito. The mail drawer overflowed with envelopes that went white yellow pink. The phone rang and rang and we did not answer for the caller ID always said UNKNOWN.

  * * *

  —

  Mom called her ove
rdoses accidents. I let myself believe her. Lise didn’t, couldn’t. But Lise wasn’t unkind with her wisdom, allowed me my denial. So many years before, when our father was dying, Lise had been the one to tell me what dying meant. It’s my first memory. She explained impermanence gently but exhaustively when I came up for air in the busted hot tub, so perhaps she thought she needn’t explain it again. Still, it’s a concept I struggle with.

  I moved to LA, into an apartment with my cousins. Lise stayed behind in Pahrump with Lyn. That’s when, Lise says, the wheels came off.

  Mom made more trips into Las Vegas to get pills from her sister. On one of these trips she totaled her car by driving it off an on-ramp. Lyn was in the car. Years later, we found out it was Lyn driving. Lyn would have been ten.

  After the accident, Mom took Lyn. They disappeared for six days. When she came back, out of money, Mom said they’d been in Utah taking a friend to a doctor’s appointment, that she had wanted to show Lyn Utah, that it was none of our beeswax where she was she was a free woman.

  She took out a restraining order against Ron and he took one out on her. He was at work the day the deputies served it, forcing Mom out of the Navajo house. She took Lyn with her. Lise was seventeen and could do what she wanted, Mom said. But Lise, who knew her capable of any insane thing, went with her, to protect Lyn.

  Somehow Mom convinced someone to rent her a house, though she had no job, no money, bad credit. I doubt she even had a bank account at this point. But she was smart, knew how to manipulate the dirt farmers, as she called the men in our town. She told a landlord that she was being beaten by our stepfather. I don’t know that she wasn’t, but I never saw him hit her or be violent with any person. What I did see was my mother hurt herself, often and not always by accident. She would pass out on the toilet and fall face-first into the sink or throw herself down the stairs. In this manner she had broken her nose many times and the blood vessels there seemed permanently open, her nose squished and pink and blooming. It would not have been difficult for her to convince a landlord that she needed a place immediately, a battered woman and her girls. If you knew my mother you’d know it would not have been difficult for her to convince a man to let her live for weeks and weeks without paying him anything. This would have been a kind of sport for her, she who enjoyed a well-crafted scam, swiped letterhead and stationery wherever she went, who always said you could never have too many death certificates on hand. (At the time I was paying part of my rent in Mar Vista with fraudulently extended Social Security checks, survivor’s benefits from my father that would have expired on my eighteenth birthday if my mother had not used my letters of recommendation to forge documentation to extend them for another year—my graduation present.) So while it isn’t at all difficult for me to see how she got into the rental, I still find myself fixating on this figure: the landlord. Maybe he represents a sort of valve that might have closed, preventing everything that happened, after.