I wanted to ask, What’s it like to have a mother so strange and devoted? A mother whose mind goes away and doesn’t always come back? Who you worry about? “Really?” was what fell out of my dry mouth.
“Yeah, she was terrified. About me and my father.” You stood up, brushed off your pants. “She’s fine now, though.”
Early summer, we were at someone else’s house, moths buzzing at the window screen. Boys I didn’t know were tethered to the stereo with headphones the size of cabbages, two girls sat on the couch watching you. You were sketching whatever appeared in front of you, the orange cat, a black boot flopped over, your own hand holding the charcoal. The girls didn’t talk to me. I was there because of you.
“Clear light, Anney,” you said, holding out your hand. “Pure acid.” The two nearly invisible panes were so small they nearly got lost in your palm.
The acid hit my mind like a hurricane, beating words against the walls of my brain until it splintered. Voices began to pull at me like nervous dogs. Open the door. Here, no here. Hurry why can’t you? I went from room to room, searching for you. I ended up alone in a pink bathtub, sobbing. Everything about me was grotesque, even the fingers growing out of my hands. My mother’s voice surfaced. Why don’t you dry up and blow away? She hated how I wouldn’t stop asking her for things, things I knew she wouldn’t give. Money, a car, a party after graduation. I began to howl, my voice stretching beyond the bathroom walls.
You came in, made me drink grapefruit juice. “Anne, vitamin C. Ronnie. It’ll bring you down.” The ice seared from throat to breastbone.
Around dawn, green light flowed calmly through the window. My body moved, found you at the bottom of the stairs, staring at the cat, your hand in midair. “She wants to bite me. Sometimes I let her.” Scratches ran up your arm like bloody exclamation points. I started to cry again.
“Don’t,” you said. “Let’s talk.”
I looked down at you, light pooling around your round face.
“Why can’t we feel it when someone dies?” I said. “In Vietnam? Next door? Anywhere on earth?” People were dying. People we knew. Bill Maslow had been blown up by a land mine in May. Terrance Smith hanged himself the night before graduation.
“Wow, Anne. Keep going.”
“Why doesn’t one less person on the earth matter?” I wasn’t sure where other people stopped and I began. I felt my bones pushing against my skin. I hated it. Not just the feeling. Acid.
You tilted your head, smiled.
That summer, you were tripping most weekends. I worked, camp counseling days, waitressing at night. I decided money, not drugs, would set me free. I was headed for college in California that fall. You, New York City, art school. Or maybe Boulder. You weren’t sure yet. You painted seriously now, alone in your room, canvases stretched as big as doors. Lengths of silk. Gray circles, purple lines running off the edges. Paintings stacked up behind your door. Paintings you didn’t show me.
In August, you called. “Come. You’ve got to. Everyone will be there.”
“Who?”
“Jimi Hendrix, The Dead, Canned Heat. Bob is driving his van up. Tons of room.”
“I can’t get off. A big wedding party is coming in Saturday.”
“Drive up after your shift. We can pick out a spot to meet.”
“Okay. I’ll ask.”
“Anne, it’ll be so far out. Three days of peace and music.”
After I heard the news, I didn’t even get in the car. “Thousands, hundreds of thousands, of young people are descending on the Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York. The roads are so jammed, most have abandoned their cars and started walking.”
After serving chignon-heavy bridesmaids and men in three-piece suits who kept asking for more champagne, I went home and listened to records alone in my room. The Who, Janis Joplin, Ten Years After. I told myself it was better this way. I could hear everything.
Besides, I’d never find you.
When you got back, your mother called. “It’s Catherine,” she said, her voice concerned. “Would you talk to her? She’s not herself.” There wasn’t a flicker of doubt in my mind about what your mother said. She’d been out of the hospital for nearly two years.
When I walked into your room, you looked like you were floating, breathing in huge breaths of easy air. You were wearing clothes I’d never seen before, an oddly formal man’s black vest and ripped cut-offs, your hair was dark with grease. Your eyes looked out at me and the room as if we were shapes that could at any moment get washed away.
“I must have blacked out,” you said. “I’m not sure. There are whole parts of days and nights I can’t remember. The music was just out there. I couldn’t get anywhere near the stage. Too many people. Too much mud. I climbed up on the roof of Bob’s van. That’s when I saw it.”
“What?”
“At the top of stars. How it fits together. Everything.”
“Bob told me nobody knew where you’d gone. They spent hours looking. Everyone was scared.” Half of me was jealous. You’d left so easily. Nothing, nobody holding you back. The other half, annoyed that you couldn’t bother yourself with what other people thought or felt. Other people now included me. Your eyes took this in.
“It all worked out, didn’t it, Anney? Here I am. Talking to you.”
Instead of art school, you left for places I’d never heard of with people I’d never met. I saw you two, maybe three more times, when you were back from Esalen or Banff or Baja or wherever it was you’d been. Your mother padded around the kitchen. I remember staring at the back of her head, the fuzzy line of gray-black hair against pale skin. She brought us tea in china cups and disappeared into the dining room where the three of us had once sat. This time I kept quiet. I knew by then words could slice open the ugly underbelly of things, raise a stink in the room. You and I talked about how humid it was, Dylan’s new album. At some point you told me your father hadn’t lived there for a while.
Your mother was relieved, you said. Really. Your grandfather had money enough for the both of you. I told you I was a hostess at Denny’s. When you looked confused, I said, “It’s a restaurant. After classes, I don an orange uniform and cite four kinds of coupon specials.” We laughed, and for a moment, time stepped back. Then our conversation spun, never quite took hold.
My husband calls you my old hippie friend.
“What do you mean her name is Catherine?” he says, stretching his big arm up. “Didn’t she come back from Woodstock as Rainbow or Forest or something?”
I’ve never mentioned I called you Mike, and Cath. Never told him what happened to your mother that afternoon. What he likes to remember is how you spent hours lying on top of a VW camper staring at the stars, letting Shankar and the Who soak in. He even bought the album. My husband didn’t go to Woodstock either. He was working in Salinas that summer, loading lettuce on trucks.
Do you remember the last time we talked it was on the phone? A couple years later, maybe. I was home visiting my family that summer, my first vacation after landing the big consulting job in San Francisco. You were back in Chappaqua from Spain where you’d been studying with your guru. I’d heard you and your mother were living in an apartment near town. It was strange to think that our house was now bigger than yours. I stood in my parents’ living room, watching light catch in the maple leaves.
“You don’t know?” you said, your voice low. “Nobody told you?”
“No.”
“My mother died January twentieth, the day after her birthday. The car skidded off the road. An icy patch.”
I listened to the sound of running water, plates clinking. My mother was washing dishes in the kitchen next door.
“Nobody’s sure exactly what happened,” you went on. “Maybe she drove off on purpose.”
In the silence that swelled between us
, this information worked its way through my body. This time, I thought, no one found her. Alone in the car. Was it over in a flash? I hoped so. Or did a stranger come upon her overturned car, call for an ambulance, the lights spinning, the siren going full blast. Did you hold a service? Or was it a quick burial, just family, snow dusting the ground, ice coating the branches? Did you follow it with a few lines in The Patent Trader? So brief my mother missed it. Or else forgot. On the twentieth of January, I was working, surrounded by people I haven’t seen now in years. When your mother died, I didn’t feel a thing. She was just one less person in the world.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” I said. I wondered when you got the news. Were you standing in that very room or some foreign phone booth? Did the voice say Mom or mother, the word dead? All these things I wanted to know, questions in my head that I didn’t ask.
“It’s all right, Anne. No one was.” Your voice was calm.
“No, that wasn’t—I mean—” Every word that came into my head seemed to be cruel or pointless. Finally I managed, “You. I mean, with you.”
I don’t remember what else we talked about, who said good-bye first. I had no idea this would be the last time I’d hear your voice outside my head. All I remember is how heavy the phone felt as I laid it down, how the greasy spots from my fingers smeared.
Then you were gone. Completely. For years, I swear. I remember barely remembering you, Ronnie and Mike, the black booth, people’s outstretched palms. Mostly girls were interested, ones who truly believed we could tell the future, and who we couldn’t help later imitating: “Him? I will? Four kids? You’re sure?” We laughed, it felt good. A few boys came forward with questions, too. Not about that. Not about who would live, die, make it home from the war, though that question was there, too, waiting for us. The unknowing us. The night we sat in that booth was just a scratch in time compared to finding your mother the afternoon we’d built it.
When the dreams wouldn’t stop coming, I began to write to you. Two or three cheerful, vapid letters in the space of ten months. Letters I carefully sealed and sent to the last of many addresses I’d collected for you, an apartment in Calgary. The letters left my hand, left the house, never came back, but never got answered either. I began to worry there was no one to open them.
Finally, I write you this. This letter. No, not a letter. The truth—everything I never told you—hoping that will bring you back. For you have to come back. I have to know the voices that finally claimed your mother haven’t also claimed you.
It’s late now. Everyone’s in bed, and I should go up, too. Still, I want to imagine you sitting on the sofa downstairs, your fingers grazing its flowery arm. Maybe your hair’s a yellow-white now, but still as thick as summer leaves. When we meet, will we speak only of the easy memories, bring out photos of smiling children, of husbands as fine as spring? Or will something else press through the fog of years? Your mother’s eyes spinning with smoke, the comfort of her chained glasses, the upside-down station wagon? Our faces pointed at the moon? Maybe you’ll say she wasn’t crazy. Just sad. I feel sad, too. It was your palm we practiced on, remember? I propped your mother’s big book in front of us, showed you the fleshy line that gave you years. Many more than forty-nine.
Maybe you’ll call me Ronnie. Maybe you’ll say it all worked out, didn’t it? She’s okay now, my mother. Can’t you feel it? She’s where she needs to be. Not here, her eclipsing eyes, streaming flesh, her mouth moving, no words. She’s not between us. There’s only you and me here in my living room. Those voices, that’s the two of us talking.
Acknowledgements
My deep gratitude to Jaynie Royal, Editor of Regal House Publishing, who plucked this manuscript out of her immense slush pile and enthusiastically wanted to publish it. Jaynie—and the entire Regal House team—have been meticulous editors.
Heartfelt thanks to the Leporines writing group—especially Alia Volz and Jackie Doyle—who read draft after draft of this work, simultaneously encouraging and challenging me as the bunnies played around our feet. Many thanks to friends and fellow writers who read early incarnations of these stories: Dan Coshnear, Andy Couturier, Dorothy Hale, Linda Lancione, Lily Iona MacKenzie, Barbara Roether, Mike Shaler, Elizabeth Stark, Susan St. Aubin, and the two Tims: Crandle and Rien.
Immense appreciation to my professors at the University of San Francisco, in particular Aaron Shurin who so impressed me at a Saturday morning information session that I threw caution to the wind, left corporate life, and followed my dreams of becoming a writer; and to Deborah Lichtman whose generosity of spirit and administrative acumen helped me every step along the way.
Catherine Brady’s masterful stories and gifted teaching have endlessly inspired me. Thank you.
My wholehearted appreciation to Joshua Mohr—the amazing writer that he is—for saying, “Don’t just write a story, Laurie. Write a book!”
Nina Schuyler has been an invaluable reader and mentor. Her careful attention to everything from small details to big questions of meaning has meant the world to me.
Special thanks to Liz McDonough who hired me a decade ago to teach at the UC Berkeley Extension Writing Programs. The dedication and insight of my students over the years have not only made me a stronger teacher, but a better writer, too.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Tin House, and Lit Camp for support, fellowship, and parties that went way too late.
The San Francisco Writers Grotto offered encouragement, community, and wisdom when I needed them most. Thanks especially to Vanessa Hua, Lee Kravetz, Julie Lythcott-Haims, Ethel Rohan, and Louise Nayer for your expert advice and unfailing support.
I feel profoundly grateful to the following literary journals who published earlier versions of these stories: “Ask for Hateman” in The Los Angeles Review, “Bigger Than Life” in Jabberwock Review (Nancy D. Hargrove Fiction Prize finalist), “Breathe” in Timber Magazine, “Or Best Offer” in Arroyo Literary Review, “Restraint” in Midway Journal, and “Voices” in Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose (Fiction Prize finalist). KY Story Press anthologized “Or Best Offer,” and Stories on Stage Sacramento honored this piece with a delightful dramatic reading.
To my family and friends: your pride and faith have sustained me. I’m especially grateful to my father for teaching me honesty and perseverance, two qualities at the heart of my writing.
A huge hug to my son Marco, mijo, mi cielo, who in more ways than he knows gave me the courage to write these stories. Thank you, Marquito, for being just who you are.
No one deserves more thanks than my husband Sam. He selflessly supported every word I wrote in this book. My deepest appreciation to him for proofing drafts, shopping and doing the laundry when I was too exhausted, and driving Marco back and forth so I could finish just one more sentence, try out one more ending. Thank you one million times over.
World Gone Missing Page 17