• • •
“WHICH WAY IS my room?” she says, at the intersection of two hallways. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” I think. It didn’t ultimately matter which one you took; that was the real point of Frost’s poem. The roads were pretty much the same. That stuff about the one less traveled making all the difference was bullshit.
At last we are safely back in the company of the TV, the tacky art, the tiny silent pianos. My mother used to have a white baby grand in her condo. When I was young she would sit at her old upright banging out some popular song from the forties, like “Some Enchanted Evening” or “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” I don’t feel like I ever really knew her, knew what she felt about her life before us kids, and after us. Mostly, growing up, I saw her on the other side of a tennis net, the regulation court marking off the distance between us.
But probably, again, that is a lie—the kind memory tells when trying to make sense of the story. If I allow for a messier story, I also remember us as close. I remember her singing Irish lullabies to me at bedtime, reading me fairy tales, hitting tennis balls to me and saying “Good, good,” no matter what I did. “Good” when I hit the ball into the fence, when I missed the ball entirely. I remember sitting on the lid of the toilet to keep her company while she took her evening bath, her breasts floating in the water, her legs tanned, her ankles and feet white from her tennis shoes and socks. Our fights would inevitably end with one of us making an ironic, deadpan remark, and then we would be laughing together. When I was in high school, we collaborated on stories for the school paper, and for years afterward one of us would mention Johnny Necro—the dead boy we invented to illustrate the problem of being sick (or dead) and not being able to go to the school nurse without a pass—and we would crack up. I remember how proud of me she was, even when she didn’t quite understand what I was up to. “It’s nice you have your poetry, the way I have bridge,” she used to say. For years, when I told her I was traveling somewhere to give a reading, she would say, skeptically, “They pay you for that?” Yes, Mom, they pay me. Usually.
While we were at the shopping center, someone has come in and pulled back the covers on the bed. There’s a large pad in the middle of the bed in case my mother’s adult diaper leaks. I sit her down and again try to get the damned fucking zipper unzipped. The metal teeth line up. I take off the coat and help her lie down and cover her with a sheet. She looks like she’s been through a trauma, and I suppose she has.
I stroke her hair. My heart feels wrung out. I lay my palm against her cheek and tell her I love her. I can’t wait to get back to Gary’s house and pour a big glass of wine. I say good-bye, but she looks as though she has already fallen asleep.
As my mother declines further, over the next months and years, I begin to pay particular attention to the old. There aren’t many to be seen where I live in Oakland. They aren’t in the bars or restaurants or music venues. Occasionally, not far from the senior housing complex, I see them shuffling glacially through a crosswalk, pushing their walkers to the grocery store. Their hands shake as they pull items from their cart. They take forever to count out their wrinkled dollar bills and hand them over to the cashier. I used to be impatient, caught in line behind them. Now I try to catch their eye, to let them know I know: it’s true, God is a senseless maniac. And they are champions.
All Manner of Obscene Things
I GO INTO the kitchen to take a couple of hits off a joint by the open window, blowing the smoke into the salt-scented air. It’s where my boyfriend often stands because it’s the only place in the house I’ll let him smoke his Camel Lights. It’s also the place where you can see the Pacific Ocean, down the hill less than a mile away. I wave the smoke toward the ocean and hurry back to our bedroom before my teenage daughter can come out of hers and catch me.
I’ve been watching TV for five minutes when Aya walks into my bedroom and says, “Mom, are you stoned?”
“No,” I say, but she can tell. “So?” I say.
She shrugs and walks out. I’m always doing something wrong. The latest wrong thing is cheating on my boyfriend with my second ex-husband, whom Aya justifiably hates. When they first met, she didn’t like him much. She already had a father, my first ex-husband, and didn’t see the need of a second one hanging around us. Then he won her over. I have a picture to prove it, from a day we visited my father’s grave. My second husband leans against the car door, his arm around Aya as she leans into him, a tiny eight-year-old with a blaze of blonde hair. I have another photo from that day, too, that he took without my knowing it. I’m on my knees beside the grave and a jar of wildflowers. Aya is hugging me, her face against my shoulder.
Then he left us, and I did a lot of crying and drinking. Aya loves my current boyfriend, and so do I, but I’m leaving him. I’ve been looking for an apartment. I can’t afford anything as nice as this house we’ve been renting, with its high ceilings and cheerful orange walls. When Aya was in junior high, she and I shared a one-bedroom apartment; she had the bedroom, and I had a futon in the living room. Now that she’s in high school we’re going to need something bigger, but all the places in my price range are small and ugly.
We meet on Mondays, the ex-husband and I. We hold each other’s hand in restaurants and can’t let go. We kiss in his car at Stop signs until another car comes up and the driver leans hard on his horn. We make love in his van, and in his flat, on the couch that smells faintly of the mice that live in it. I am too much in love to fully register the mice. By the time I do, we will be moving together to a small house in Oakland. Eventually he will borrow a large sum of money from me without my knowing it, and when I find out, that will be that. But for now, we are soul mates. We believe in our love as fervently as crazed zealots believe that by standing on an overturned crate and screaming at a busy intersection, they are bringing the word of God to the infidels.
I am deliriously happy, and I am hurting everyone.
• • •
EVERY CHILD IS born with a tiny part of its imagination missing, the part that can visualize Mommy and Daddy, or Mommy and Mommy, or Daddy and Daddy, naked and sweating together as all manner of obscene things occur. When I first learned about the man putting his penis in the woman, it never occurred to me that this abstract knowledge could be applied to my parents. Even once accidentally seeing my father’s penis, when he emerged naked from my parents’ bathroom, didn’t convince me he was capable of having an erection, let alone placing that thing in my mother’s vagina. Even writing these words, I feel faintly horrified.
I have seen my mother’s vagina. I washed it a few times, toward the end of her life. Still, I could not imagine my father making love with her. And it’s only now, after her death, that I can even think of her as a woman who was once a sexual creature, who must have slept with some of those early boyfriends she reminisced about in the years after my father died. Once, I asked her about her affair with Spencer Tracy. When she was a tennis star, my mother knew all sorts of famous people.
“Did you sleep with him?” I asked. She was visiting me in San Francisco. We were sitting on the beach at the Marina, our shoes off, our bare feet in the cool sand.
“Oh, Spence was a lot of fun,” she said, with a sly little smile, and I didn’t press her for details.
So I figure Aya could have done without knowing that her mother was off having sex with Fuckface, as we’d once nicknamed the ex-husband, messing up our life with a good boyfriend and a nice house with walls painted a color called Mango Tango and a view of the ocean, as well as her basement bedroom, where she could sneak her own boyfriend in and out without anyone knowing. And this was only the latest wrong thing. Before this, there had been that piece of pornography I published in Penthouse. Aya wasn’t supposed to see it, but my boyfriend pulled it off its hiding place on top of the fridge and said, “Look! Your mom’s in Penthouse.” At least I wasn’t in there spread over a hay bale with my airbrushed anus shining, but s
till. No teenager wants to hear, “Your mom is in Penthouse.” I wasn’t on the cover of Time, like my own mom had been; I was in a dirty magazine read under the covers and out in the woods by preadolescents. Somewhere, grown men were masturbating thanks to my words. I had written the story with a list of guidelines like “no bestiality” and “no excessive cum on the face.”
This is the kind of mother I was.
• • •
I’M SORRY I broke your Easy-Bake Oven the first time we used it, the little tray melted and mangled, the giant cookie burned beyond recognition. I’m sorry I accidentally sewed the cutout pieces of your purple tuxedo for the preschool concert to the bed covers and threw that metronome at your father’s head during an argument in the kitchen while you cowered in the hall, three years old and crying. Sorry I brought those guys home from the bar while you were sleeping, so you had to come out to the living room when we woke you playing music and worry I’d be raped. I’m sorry I got so drunk at the restaurant that I ate the napkin with the playwright’s phone number on it and kissed another woman in front of all your friends. I know there’s a lot more. I love you more than you will ever understand, unless you have a child of your own, and even then it will take years, as it did with my own mother. Two years after her death, our relationship continues, and I am still trying to understand.
• • •
MY BOYFRIEND IN the house with the view of the ocean was sweet and terribly good-looking, and every woman we met flirted madly with him. He cheated on me only once, with a bar girl in Bangkok, on a business trip. He was out with a bunch of his business associates. They were all drinking heavily, and I guess you can imagine the rest. He came home and told me right away. I wrote an angry short story about it, and then I forgave him.
Of the boyfriends and husbands, he was my mother’s favorite. Somewhere I have a movie of the two of them dancing in Las Vegas. My mother and aunt were there to play a bridge tournament, and one night the bridge players had a party. The room was full of old people in hideous outfits, talking obsessively about the hands they’d been dealt that afternoon. My mother wore a sweater appliquéd with shiny playing cards; my aunt had on a sequined sweatshirt. When the DJ put on Frank Sinatra—“Strangers in the night, exchanging glances”—my boyfriend asked my mother to dance, and all the old women, I imagine, sighed at the sight of a young, handsome man with longish hair and one earring spinning my mother around the floor. My mother loved to dance. For years afterward, when I visited her in her condo and then in assisted living, she would say, “How’s my favorite beau?” I would tell her he was fine, though I didn’t know. A friend got a note from him after we broke up, saying he’d gotten married—it was really my friend who received the note, not his, so I’m pretty sure he just wanted me to know. “I met my soul mate!” was what he wrote, but I understood the secret message: “Fuck off and die, Kim, I’m over you.”
I took the movie of my mother and boyfriend dancing with a new video camera I’d bought thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The other movies I have are of a different sort. They are marked PRIVATE and XXX. In the one we shot in our Vegas hotel room with the aid of a tripod, I’m a casino waitress in a short skirt, bringing him drinks, and he tips me a twenty each time. I also play the dealer, sitting down topless to flip cards faceup on the hotel desk in front of him. He’s a pipe salesman from Des Moines who’s losing, but he’s a gambling addict, so he just keeps placing more bad bets until all the poker chips are on my side of the desk. Guess how he gets more chips? For a while we made movies with all the passion of the Mitchell Brothers, the famous San Francisco porn kings who opened the O’Farrell Theatre in the Tenderloin district. Then we got used to our new toy, and each other, and settled down into a more normal sex life, with only occasional blindfolds and cross-dressing and visits to Good Vibrations for toys we sometimes had to get phone help to figure out.
I will probably never watch those movies again, but I can’t bring myself to throw them away. In them I am younger and mostly naked, except for a sexy costume or two. My boyfriend looks like a cross between a young Paul Newman and a Roman god. Loud music is pulsing, and we are doing obscene things that aren’t obscene because we are in love, laughing at how cheesy we are being, then forgetting all about the camera watching us. After this we will leave the hotel room, or the bedroom. We’ll eat Chinese buffet with my mother and aunt, or make dinner together in our kitchen, or barbecue on the deck downstairs with a few friends. We’ll part three years later, with tears and anger, and I’ll never see him again.
Aya can never see those movies. Even writing this, imagining her reading these words, I am faintly horrified.
• • •
PARENTS COME TO know this about raising children to adulthood: you do the best you can for them, make unimaginable sacrifices, and then they leave you. They separate, as therapists say. What this means is that your heart now has a permanent hole in it. The child who once clung to your legs when you tried to leave the room, who sang made-up songs while arranging apples in intricate patterns on the living room rug, who begged to sleep in your bed and had to be sent sternly back to her own—that child is gone forever. In her place is a sensitive, talented, lovely young woman you have to keep from staring at when you are with her, she is so beautiful.
• • •
AYA AND I are having breakfast together under some tall skinny palm trees, the kind I remember from spending winters in Florida as a child. These are Southern California palms, with browning fronds that rattle in the occasional breeze. I’m visiting Aya to see the play she’s in. Her character is a young woman who’s cheating on her husband. We’re miles and years away from my own drama, from the house and the boyfriend and ex-husband; they’re tiny figures in the lens of memory, getting lost the way so much in life gets lost. One day they’ll be nearly invisible, unless I write about them, but even so, it’s hard to keep them in focus. I’m eating the most delicious almond croissant, and the air smells like jasmine. Purple jacaranda blossoms are swirling down from the trees. My daughter is with me. Tonight I’m staying at her rented studio, and we’ll go to sleep in the same bed. I’ll stay awake a little longer to watch her.
She’s been married for a year. She wants to have a baby, but she’s not ready yet; she’s focused on her acting career. For a while she was getting a string of small, similar roles in film and TV: junkie girlfriend, New York prostitute, Russian prostitute. Then she got the lead in a play titled Whore.
“You know what,” I tell her over breakfast, feeling it’s time to broach the subject, “when we lived with that boyfriend there were some, ah, um, movies he and I made together of, you know, a sexual nature. I’m writing an essay . . .” My voice trails off. What was I thinking? I can never publish the essay. I want to take my words out of the flower-scented air, weight them with chains, and throw them in the ocean. Some things are better left unsaid.
“You mean those porn videos?” she says cheerfully. “I knew about those.”
Now I am truly horrified. “You did?”
“You had that locked closet, remember? Come on. Teenager? Locked room? We picked the lock.”
“You—”
“My friends and I started to watch one, but, eww, we turned it off when we realized. Wow, I’d totally forgotten about that until you brought it up. That boyfriend was nice, but some of the things in that room—”
“Okay, never mind,” I tell her. The breeze blows a few blossoms onto our picnic table. The fronds rattle overhead. Oh God oh God, I’m thinking.
“I had secrets, too, you know,” Aya says.
“Let’s talk about something else,” I say. My own mother was a master of deflection. If I tried to talk to her about some Deep Important Feeling I was having, she’d ask if I had any good writing students. She’d ask about her favorite beau. Her eyes would go to the TV, where people on some talk show were baring their souls to a studio audience.
Bef
ore this play, Aya had a handful of minutes of screen time in a Scorsese movie. In one scene, her line is something like “Make an appointment if you want to see him.” In two other brief scenes, she utters these lines, respectively: “Lick my twat” and “Go fuck your cousin.”
Over breakfast, she tells me she improvised those last two.
“Oh, honey, I’m so proud of you,” I say, and we laugh, mother and daughter sharing a moment.
Not Dancing
IN THE MIDDLE of the day I was eating huge handfuls of baked four-cheese crisps and drinking diet root beer, wondering if I should just open some wine. Why not? I was alone and feeling slightly crazy; a glass of wine would be good company. But I have always felt that drinking alcohol before 5:00 p.m. is like watching TV during the day: loser behavior. And I was a winner, lying on a couch in a sunroom while it poured rain outside, rain on the skylight, rain on the big thirsty trees, on the blue table umbrella, the table and chairs and the brick patio being slowly devoured by weeds. I had several entire days to do whatever I wanted. What I wanted was to write; I’d organized my schedule around creating this time, a week of space and privacy in this farmhouse. But just like someone on unemployment who has given up looking for work as the benefits are running out, I had given up trying to write as the precious days, gray and sodden, trickled away. Summer, upstate New York: continual rain, cheese crisps, and writer’s block.
Freewriting is the most common prescription for writer’s block. Liberate yourself! Write anything at all, and cast out that judgy little hobgoblin on your shoulder. What matters is that you get something down. Poet William Stafford offered the advice that writers who feel stuck should simply lower their standards. But this, for me, is like saying, If you’re tired of being alone, just go ahead and invite the homeless guy who admired your cowboy boots back to your apartment. He’d be happy to solve your loneliness problem. But we all know how that works. I’m not convinced that freewriting is actually writing, just as walking across a room is not dancing. And for the record, sex is not making love, though I have often been confused, myself, on this point. Poetry is not one of your latest freewrites broken up into lines and scattered over the page. What you’ve got there, honey, is some crap you wrote, nothing more or less. Sometimes we’re just chimpanzees typing “banana banana banana,” and it will never become “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer . . .” Go ahead, keep a journal and put down everything that happens to you; it’s probably not going to turn into real writing, unless your name is Anaïs Nin or Sylvia Plath.
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