by Sarah Reith
We lose ourselves the way jewelry gets lost at the border; how crops are lost in a drought; and even how a train of thought goes missing in an argument that’s lost. We get lost trying to find answers, the way I did when I traveled to the land of the original Reinhardts and found nothing at all but a grave.
IF YOU SAY you are lost in German, without specifying whether you got that way while walking, driving, or riding an elephant, the default assumption is that you are lost on your spiritual path. Try this: walk up to a complete stranger in Frankfurt and announce that you are lost. He will look right through you, like someone who knows better than to get caught up in bad performance art or low-brow social experiments. Besides, they have laws against that kind of thing in Germany. You can’t be ontological in public—not in a country with a medieval crimes museum, several perfectly preserved Stasi prisons, and a booming tourist trade in death camps.
Incidentally, the German word for “lost” is “verloren,” which sounds a lot like “forlorn.”
I found the grave of a man named Walter Reinhardt, the year I was lost in Germany. He was a soldier’s homecoming gift, born in 1918, and he died three years before I was born. His gravestone was a little crooked, which made it seem like Walter Reinhardt was leaning back to distance himself from all those other dead people, noisy and boisterous in their large family plots. His grave was laced with extravagant ivy, which provoked a couple of distinctly American associations for me: the Ivy League and kudzu. Was this dead lonely Reinhardt a rarefied scholar, or helplessly lost in non-native plant life?
The year I was in Germany, a non-native plant in spite of my name, was the year of broken shoes. Every pair I had when I arrived broke its back on the cold round cobblestones of the ancient city. Every pair I bought when I was there lolled apart by the end of a week, like my shoes were making fun of how I talked—not at all like a proper German Reinhardt. And for a long time afterward, my shoes simply vanished from around my feet, like they were made of tissue paper and my feet were made of snow.
I was not particularly good at being in Germany. I was also not good at being a wife or a college student or, come to think of it, anything—not since I was a scrappy sunburned kid who was really good at climbing trees.
And then, when I was ready to get lost, I came home.
Maternal Ancestors
WHEN I WAS ten years old, I was very good at keeping secrets. My mother (who had no way of knowing anything about our family history) claimed we were descended from Kaiser Wilhelm’s bodyguards, who took elaborate oaths of secrecy. We knew how to protect our own. We could withstand interrogations, pleading, threats, and trickery.
It was important to know about this atavistic ferocity, at the progressive alternative public school she sent me to. We celebrated Kwanzaa at the elementary school named for a pioneer in children’s education. We called our teachers by their first names. We shared a campus with a Japanese bilingual school where the boys kept their backpacks on as they played in the yard, and we only ever heard them speaking Japanese.
But I remember a joke that didn’t match the innovative use of art in math class, or the rousing workers’ ballads or the woven scarves the teachers wore. It was all in the setup, as any good comedian or trained interrogator will tell you. It went like this: a swarm of avid little boys would descend on a victim, their eyes alight with maniac glee.
“Does your mother work?” the leader would sneer. His name was Chad Brenner, and he was the fastest runner in school.
“Well, duh,” I’d begin, impersonating my idea of a kid whose mother had a legitimate job. Children are the worst criminal accessories ever. All that stuff about quarterly expenses and the clauses of the Mann Act was fine for Mother’s legal and financial teams. But that “duh” was barely out of my mouth before Chad Brenner’s chorus was howling, “Which corner?” and whooping like they’d pulled off a coup. No ten-year-old has ever been as conscious of letting down the Kaiser’s bodyguards as I was, every time they played that joke on me.
Little boys have always lacked historical perspective. In California in 1987, everybody’s mother was on her way to work. Mothers were bursting out of commuter trains. They were doing lunch, rather than dishes. They were power-dressed in pencil skirts and puffy sleeves that made the most aerobicized young matron look like a cross-dressing linebacker.
My mother, who knew a thing or two about the importance of costume and power play, informed me that my classmates were training to be shame-filled johns. “They’re only ten,” she explained. “The girls they’ll pay for sympathy haven’t even been born yet.”
My mother understood the ratio of sympathy to semen with a machinist’s precision. If Caitlin Swift ever worked in an office, it would be a corner office, with windows and a view. You understand now that my mother was, in fact a whore; that I failed to protect her secret, though I wasn’t even the tiniest bit tortured.
Caitlin did not regard this as a shameful secret: just a dangerous one. After all, she was a damned good whore. She also claimed to be a feminist. In San Francisco, all throughout the 80s and into the 90s, she belonged to one of the nation’s first sex workers’ collectives. She could quote case law, chapter and verse, pertaining to whoredom and whores. “Did you know that sex workers are forbidden to gather,” she cited. The only part of that sentence indicating that it might have been a question was the placement of the verb.
To round out her education, my mother went to lots of workshops on intimacy and communication, which are (not always, but often) expensive euphemisms for sex work. From a series of ferocious, kittenish women, she learned that a statement can be softened by phrasing it as a question. Enthralled by this new idea, she clamped on her figurative hard hat, drew on her metaphorical gloves, and fell to work, making herself less intimidating by bringing a breathy curiosity into her speech.
It didn’t work. My mother was so quick in her certainty that she could barely sketch the outline of a query before she moved to fill in the facts. “It’s considered a form of treason,” she announced, less than a full moment after asking rhetorically what I knew about why sex workers are forbidden to gather.
It was not my job to answer questions, anyway. It was my job to listen attentively when my mother needed what she called “a sounding board.” I learned a lot about how to make an accusation with a question, and how to wonder about things silently; but very little about asking for answers.
Meanwhile, my mother was busy attending workshops on the intricacies of running a sex workers’ collective in the Internet age, and generating intimacy with kinky strangers. It was hugely entertaining and time consuming. It threatened the stability of the free world, which, she pointed out, was not free at all, but based on the unpaid labor of women. She fell just short of accusing the world’s wives and daughters of being industry scabs, choosing to focus instead on how tirelessly she and her cohort worked to disrupt the unnatural order of things. As a traitor, she wasn’t just some high-end whore. She was Mata Hari of the culture wars, with her eye on the masculine hegemony.
I was not at all qualified to absorb the things she was prepared to teach me. I was repressed and unattractive and knew already that I would never inspire the kind of fascination that is worthy of betrayal. But there is a strong tradition of ignoring precedent in my family. My mother’s mother was a beekeeper, and her father owned oil wells in Saudi Arabia. Caitlin joined him one summer in high school, and never forgot it. She wore a veil, this woman of the night, this Constitution-toting member of the ACLU.
For as long as I can remember, my mother has carried a large leather wallet with images of Indian elephants and gesturing monkeys on it. She says she needs something big enough to carry her passport and her copy of the US Constitution. “That way,” she explains, “if I get stopped by some cop who wants to search my car . . .” Here, she waves the document, as if she has only just this moment been moved to do so. She is a consummate performer, and her gestures are exactly the same, every single time.
I think every day that passes without a chance to outwit her adversaries is a disappointment for my mother, who travels with toolboxes full of sex toys and unusual prosthetics. Her luggage contains costumes that are almost architectural, designed for the dual purposes of intimate athletic performance and easy cleaning. She can stow all of it into her silver CR-V at a moment’s notice. She resembles a soccer mom, until she starts talking.
For Caitlin Swift, conversation is an exercise in throwing hand grenades. “You would be amazed at how many men love to be fucked in the ass!” she exclaims, as if she is charmed to note some subtle and endearing tendency. “Straight men!” It is a motto she says so often it’s taken on the quality of homily. I half-expect to see it stitched onto a sampler and hung up by the door someday. Once, when we passed a vintage clothing store called Up Your Alley, she murmured gravely, “They really don’t know what they’re talking about, do they, sweetheart?”
It’s important to remember that she didn’t become a prostitute until she was well into her thirties. It’s not her first language, but she speaks it fluently, with an outsider’s thrill of discovery. To me, it was all too obvious that she was fascinated with the lingo, rattling off the names of things she would and would not do. I thought she sounded overly thematic, like an aging secretary who has overcome her inhibitions about looking ridiculous and wears a silly hat to work on Saint Patrick’s Day. She was entirely too enthusiastic, too eager to show what she knew. It’s the perfect combination of traits for a customer service professional, and Caitlin thrived in the industry.
She was always very good at becoming an integral part of any situation, while simultaneously distinguishing herself within it. She was the only mother at the New Feminist Childcare Co-Op with a glossy red pedicure peeking out of her Birkenstocks. She wore mascara with her granny glasses. She was smart and fun and serious, and men had a way of sitting at her feet in adoration as she lectured them on Joseph Campbell and the Great Goddess Har, Patron Saint of Sacred Harlots. “I love your mother’s mind,” they told me, with every appearance of sincerity. She was a smart girl with Abbie Hoffman hair, and every man who fell in love with her believed he was the only one who noticed how goddamned sexy she was.
For my mother, prostitution was an ongoing graduate seminar in pre-Judaic religious studies, with the goddess Ishtar and her Wondrous Vulva stationed at the temple door. She was impossibly sincere. And she walked it like she talked it, with six-inch platform shoes and ritual paint on her face. “You have to have a certain—how do you say,” she said playfully, “je ne sais quoi.” Her fake French accent was a sexy purr. “To call yourself Lilith. In this field.” Her working name was Lilith. She was victor of the field.
While her story has elements of tragedy, she did not become a practitioner of the world’s oldest profession for any of the usual tragic reasons. She was never abused or addicted to drugs. She didn’t even have an eating disorder. Caitlin Swift went to a private school where she learned dressage. She played drums in an all-girl punk band. She sat in the front row of her college physics class when she was sixteen years old, wearing tie-dye and a miniskirt, and answered every question right without ever raising her hand. Then, abruptly, she fell in love with a man who rode a unicycle on a slack wire while juggling fiery clubs. Gustave Reinhardt was a smart girl’s bad boy, spouting esoteric theory and treating oppressive conventions as if they didn’t even exist. Every time he launched himself across that wire, he told a story about danger and adventure and the bravery to wonder which was which, on any given day.
And then he fell. He landed in a wheelchair, which the surgeon at SF General Hospital told him he’d better get used to. He would be there, the doctor said, for the rest of his life. He was twenty-eight years old.
Actually, my father jumped. At the end of every act, he jumped from the wire for dramatic effect, glittering and leaping in the costume my mother made him. This defiant submission to gravity was the perfect finale for an act of such exquisite control; but one day, he landed wrong. That’s all. He landed wrong, and my parents headed up to Mendocino County, where my mother grew pot and my father learned to walk again. A cherry tree bloomed in a richness of light as thick as loam. Caitlin labored like a pioneer, chopping wood and hauling water and tending the chickens and the garden that fed her little family. She was powerful and all-giving and inexhaustible.
As soon as he could, my father was out of that bed and in between the sheets and legs of another woman. Alizarin was younger than he was, younger than my mother, with a fine full figure and long curly hair. One night, at a children’s slumber party, Alizarin stood naked at the top of the stairs and ordered all the little girls to stop giggling immediately. She was backlit by the lamp from her bedroom so she looked like a nude Madonna, all full of semen and secrets and wrath. Her daughter’s name was Jezebel, and Jezzie was a crybaby.
“I wanted to find out what was going on with your father,” my mother explained, when she’d cleaned up her face and straightened her hair. There was nothing rarefied about her good looks now. She had a product and a mission in mind. This is how my mother the scholar, the would-be priestess of a long-dead cult, became a prostitute in the spirit of research. She was sure that she would solve the mystery of men’s desires by approaching them where they grazed in the wild. She’d compile data on their secret fetishes, their weaknesses and appetites. She collected endless unrelated anecdotes, never came up with a unifying principle, and eventually became a phlebotomist. “Still sucking!” she remarked triumphantly, as if we had all agreed that it is a triumph to render one’s life in a punchline. Because there are years of my childhood that we did not spend together, these stories are difficult to verify. What I am almost sure of is this:
My mother was not a streetwalker. She never worked for a pimp. She was not “full service,” which means she performed various non-coital services for men who paid her upwards of six hundred dollars an hour to babysit their fetishes. Out of this, she sent generous remittances to my grandmother, who took care of me in the wary, fatalistic way that people do when they’re not sure why they keep feeding a stray cat.
My mother’s mother, Francine Swift, tended to her bees. That is literally the only thing I ever saw her do. I am not entirely sure the bees served any financial purpose. I think Francine regarded money as unladylike; so much so that speaking of it would be crude, like addressing the matter that appears by some obscene miracle in the commode. Of course, I have no idea how she felt about anything, because speech, to my grandmother, was just one more noxious sound produced by the body, and therefore best avoided or politely ignored.
Francine Swift woke up every morning at four a.m., crept around on long-toed stockinged feet, and retired at six-fifteen p.m. Between these hours, she tended to her bees. She murmured to them in a gentle buzz that might have been a particularly noisy form of telepathy. She drove them around to various farms on the outskirts of central California, bumping along back roads with a sense of direction as sure as that of a worker bee coming home to her hive. I assumed for a long time that she was sneaking the bees into these orchards, tucking them away at the edges of forests and fields. I thought of the bees as tiny victims of persecution and my grandmother as their champion, poaching nectar on behal
f of all these miniature, tragically toiling fugitives.
Caitlin, who never took the time to stare at bees, had plenty of stories about them, too. On a good day, the queen bee was a successful dominatrix, ruling the hive with her sexual prowess. More often, all the bees were tragic drudges, even the queen, who gathered all the genetic material she needed in a single maiden flight and spent the rest of her life churning out eggs in the dark. To Caitlin, the hive was an irresistible symbol of the totalitarian state. She was obscurely offended by how unthinkingly the sexless workers spent their lives creating a concoction of unbearable sweetness, simultaneously doting upon and enslaving a single corpulent female, engorged with more eggs than she could ever lay. The brutality of it horrified and fascinated her.
But I have seen her moved to the extreme of putting on her sunglasses by the poignance of a queen’s one flight into the sunshine, where the males all take their turns at fertilizing her. To my mother, this was a wild festival of love, never to be repeated. She saw a dreadful sacrifice in singular events that cannot be improved upon; where fates are sealed in an hour and no one ever strikes out their own; never doubles back to re-examine possibilities; is burdened forever by choices they made and things that happened to them.
Francine was a little less staggered by the metaphorical possibilities of insects. She made her living by their expertise; because of course the farmers paid her to pollinate their crops. Of course she had a barn full of shining equipment; and of course she haggled fiercely with the merchants who carried her products, her soaps and her candles and her slabs of waxy honeycomb, dripping with the life’s work of half a well-fed hive.