Fiction Ruined My Family

by Jeanne Darst

  I WAS NOW THREE MONTHS behind on rent. Was this a good time to write a play or a bad time to write a play? My friend in Vermont who runs a theater company in an old barn offered me an August spot to do a show. I took it. It wasn’t the first time I had accepted an offer to perform a play that had yet to be written. I sublet my place and headed to Warren, Vermont, to live in a trailer in the woods and finish this play.

  I stayed in a 1954 Prairie Schooner trailer that the owner, an architect at a university in Seattle, had made into a crazy compound with an Airstream down the hill and a wood deck and French windows. A stonemason had built a beautiful stone wall around the trailer. There was an outdoor shower off the back of the trailer. The main attraction, though, was the glass outhouse in the woods. It was a compost toilet and his girlfriend, a Seattle artist, had put broken plates all over the front of it. It had amazing views of the mountains. I called it the Julian Schnabel outhouse. People were always coming by from local colleges and environmental building classes to check out the famous glass compost outhouse. And they never called first, so I’d be out there using it and crowds of design/build geeks would come over the hill and find me there in my bathroom.

  In the trailer in Vermont, I managed to finish the play about a prostitute named Sally who was raised on a commune in Northern California, started by her father, where they grow endive and wear old fencing clothes discarded from the California College of Arts and Crafts. She moves to New York City as a teenager after all the kids are kicked off the commune by the father. She becomes a sex worker in the meatpacking district but decides, amid all the art world craziness of the ’80s in New York, that what she does is actually art, that her fucking is so rich, so expressive, that she’s a “fucking artist.” She adapts Orwell’s Animal Farm into a blow job and collaborates with a man who calls himself Ken Burn on a seventeen-part PBS series called The American Anus. She stops charging people and becomes a full-time fucking artist and sets up a nonprofit. She eventually winds up experiencing a Thoreau-style look back at her life, minus eating woodchucks. She thumbs through the Bible one day, specifically the Sermon on the Mount, which she decides is Jesus’ one-man show, and she thinks, Well, if John Leguizamo and Eric Bogosian and now Jesus can do one-person shows, why can’t I? So Sally writes her one-woman show and calls it Sally on the Mount. I performed it in the barn at the end of the summer. As Sally, I change clothes onstage, climb on pianos in high-heeled hiking boots, sing badly. It’s fun.

  Sally started as a way to avoid getting evicted from my apartment on Amity Street. But when I got back from Vermont, I still owed rent and was evicted anyway. I had to have two friends come over and pack all my things in the middle of the night and help me get them to my new apartment in Park Slope, before the sheriff arrived in the morning to put a lock on my door.

  Shortly after I moved into this new place with a roommate, the economy started to pick up and I got a bunch of little jobs. I freelanced for a branding company: two hundred bucks and a catered breakfast for a three-hour workshop to come up with ideas for new products and snappy language for old products—a great gig. There were not enough workshops to survive on, though, so I also worked at a vintage clothing store in Brooklyn, for nine dollars an hour. I picked up my niece, Louisa, a couple days a week from school and babysat at night. I read books and wrote reading guides for HarperCollins. I was always scrambling for more work, always late on rent and often just plain out of money. Once, after concluding a workshop at the branding company, I was too broke to take the subway home and too chicken to jump the turnstile. I was so tired of being the loser, the mooch, always borrowing from my sister Katharine. I could have called and said, “Can you loan me ten bucks,” but there is something—I know this from my father’s borrowing—something even sadder about borrowing a small amount of money than a large one. Ten bucks is a sad sum. A thousand bucks is understandable somehow. A million bucks is downright dignified. So I walked from Thirtieth and Seventh, just down from Madison Square Garden, to Berkeley Place in Park Slope, about six miles. Most people in New York do this only when radical Islamists fly planes into the World Trade Center. I walked everywhere. I have always liked to walk, but I also had to walk everywhere I went. I needed every dollar.

  One month when I couldn’t pay rent at my new, cheaper Park Slope pad I devised a financial plan of a rent reading. I decided to read Sally on the Mount, which had been staged only once at the barn in Vermont, in my apartment living room. Katharine made brownies. We gave away beer and charged people ten bucks. In three nights I made over eight hundred bucks, which was my rent. The reaction to the play was really good, good enough to make me decide the play should be produced. I brought it back to the barn in Vermont that summer as a more finished work. Then it went to the Lower East Side, then Hawaii, then Puerto Rico over Christmas. Never went near a theater. Halfway through the run at Tonic, a jazz place on the Lower East Side, I got a grant for seven thousand bucks. My work for the first time felt real. I was a playwright. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t pretty but it wasn’t a fantasy, either.

  IT TAKES A WEST VILLAGE

  MY MOTHER OFFICIALLY DIED of a stroke. It’s difficult to detect when alcoholics are having the small strokes that precede a larger, deadly stroke because often people assume they’re just drunk. My father had spoken to her a few times that week and nothing seemed terribly wrong. When he went to her apartment to do the little things he did for her he found her on the floor unconscious. By the time the ambulance got her to St. Vincent’s she was in a coma and was almost immediately pronounced brain dead. I had called her a few days earlier, on Valentine’s Day, but got a busy signal. For some reason that was our day. On Valentine’s Day she felt like my mom, which was not always the case with my birthday or Christmas. On Valentine’s Day she felt like the woman who cried with me watching Little House on the Prairie after school (“God damn that Half Pint!” she’d say, reaching for a cigarette), the woman who’d pretended to tie me up to the radiator after we watched Sybil together one Sunday afternoon, the woman who loved to smoke and watch the US Open and ogle Vitas Gerulaitis.

  I was in Los Angeles doing my play when I got the same phone call I had been getting for about seventeen years: “Your mother is about to die.” But she never did. But this time she did.

  Katharine and Julia and I were here to deal with all of it, to throw it out, give to Goodwill, leave for the super, divide among ourselves, and with the things no one wanted to keep, sell, or leave, bring to my dad’s. Eleanor would come with Jim the following day to clean the place up the best they could.

  There were mouse droppings in corners and on tables and worst of all on her bed. The walls were light brown and wet-looking, like caramel, from years of chain-smoking. There were inches of dust on tables. There was no door on her bathroom. I can’t remember how it came off and more important why it was never fixed. It had really been years since anything had gotten fixed, since we tried to maintain her. Which had seemed reasonable before, not “enabling” her any longer, sane even, but which now did not seem reasonable or sane. The first rule of alcoholism: You can’t get anyone else sober. The second rule: If your mother dies of alcoholism in a mice-infested shithole in the West Village all alone, you’re never going to feel good about it, you’re never going to feel you did enough and you will definitely feel like you should have out-fucked that first rule and saved your mother’s life.

  There was an old-lady gismo on her toilet seat, something you see in a hospital, something you turn from, not wanting to know the names for such indignities that might await even you. There was a walker. She was sixty-four. Who knew it was going to be this awful? Did we? I mean . . . did we?

  As Katharine and Julia and I stared at the squalor and in particular the mouse droppings everywhere, the buzzer sounded.

  “Exterminator.”

  We were semi-paralyzed around the intercom. The farcical entrance of an exterminator was like the bell ringing and it being Betty Ford. We don’t need you now,
Betty. She’s dead. Where the fuck were you ten years ago? Eight years ago? Two years ago? Shit, Betty, are you on the sauce again?

  “Umm, we don’t need you today. Thanks,” Katharine blurted.

  We looked at one another and around the apartment for some way in, some indication of where to start. “This is not going to end well,” my mother would say about fifty times a day, mostly when the four of us girls were throwing one another down staircases or rigging things over doorways to fall on one another, and I can’t help remembering this saying of hers, because not only did her life not end well, it didn’t end badly. It ended horrifically, one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen to a life. And when this happens, when this happens to your mother, what do you remember? Which Mom? Which mornings? Which nights? What do you leave and what do you take with you? Clearly I’m not here looking for day-count coins from AA. But is there something here that will work for me, that will help me find I don’t fucking know what? She no longer has to be or not be anything to anyone. She didn’t get sober. She wasn’t the mom I wanted her to be. I wanted her to fight. Fight. Fight. Fight. But she didn’t, obviously. And it was over. So then why was I scanning the joint like it was my own brain: deducing the love, the anger, the confusion, looking for her, in death, to be something I could live with? We were here to clean out her apartment, to get rid of things. But it seemed I was actually here to acquire a mother.

  There was a lamp that looked even too gloomy to be in a Tennessee Williams play. It was a standing lamp with a table around the middle like a child’s water float. It had a big ivory-colored lampshade, browned by wear, and it had a bad tear in the middle of the shade. The top half of the lamp was stooped over to one side in misery. It could go no further. Katharine and Julia and I stared at it. I felt awful for this lamp. Going through various papers and legal documents around her apartment, we found insurance photos of my mother’s father, Grampe’s house on Litzsinger Road in Ladue, St. Louis. I spotted the lamp in one. You could see it in its heyday—polished regularly, upright, shining with dignity. This lamp didn’t deserve this.

  After about fifteen years and ten rehabs and detoxes, my sisters and I had decided we couldn’t help her. Her dog walker took over for a while, until the day he found my mother under a desk with the D.T.’s when he returned from walking Emma. Assorted therapists kept her alive, and West Village boys helped her get by, like her drinky pal Marcel, until she accused him of stealing her Xanax. Then various people from the Perry Street group of AA helped, until it became clear she didn’t want a virgin mojito any more than she wanted to “go gray,” and at that point it was my father who became her final caretaker.

  Anyone who came near her got caught in her lair of need. A new neighbor, a delivery boy, my brand-new boyfriend might find themselves receiving late-night phone calls about Rodney, the boy she should have married, God damn it, or running to the corner to get her a carton of True Blues, tending to her endless groany requests until they became a resentment factory who hated themselves for the way they were treating someone so obviously petite. Like Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun. He’s in love with Elizabeth Taylor, but he’s gotten Shelley Winters pregnant already, and her maddening neediness turns him into a murderer essentially. My mother was not just about who she became, she was about who she made you become.

  She got around an awful lot by ambulance at this point in her life, but if she had to go anywhere other than the emergency room at St. Vincent’s, someone had to take her. Occasionally I took her to doctors’ appointments on the condition that we “stop by” an AA meeting on the way home. I tried to call her at least once a week but admittedly saw her as little as possible. I found her apartment very difficult—when I did go there I would be depressed for weeks afterward.

  I wanted to be a better daughter than I was. If I couldn’t cure her I should have been her unflappable nurse. I would like nothing more than to recount tales of how I regularly went over, made her soup just to have in the fridge, brought her unauthorized biographies of Lady Di, watched Lifetime with her at three in the morning. I wish I could say I did all these things when my mother became the kind of drinker who wakes up and doesn’t know if it’s five in the morning or five in the afternoon, I wish I could tell myself that I did all I could. But I don’t think I can.

  After about age forty-eight, she claimed to not be able to walk anywhere, not even down a flight of stairs to a cab, which was just incredibly hard to believe. The Thanksgiving before she died, Katharine was cooking dinner at her new house and my mother was making a big stink about making the trip.

  “Windsor Terrace? Who ever heard of . . . Windsor Terrace? It all sounds awful. I just don’t know what to do.”

  “Get in a cab, Mother,” I suggested.

  “A cab? A cab will take me to Windsor Terrace?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “I’m not sure you’re right about that one, sweet pea.”

  “I swear, Mom. Just tell them the address.”

  “Cabs don’t like to go to Brooklyn, Jeanne. Did you know that?”

  “Well, they have to, Mom. It’s the law.”

  “What if he leaves me on the Brooklyn Bridge? Oh, this is insanity. Absolute insanity.”

  “I’ll borrow Kate’s car and drive you home if you take a cab there.”

  “It sounds like a royal pain in the ass. Brooklyn is a real pain in the ass in my opinion.”

  Silence.

  “Will you tell Kate and Henry that I’m so sorry Mom’s such a burden that they couldn’t come pick me up? Tell them I understand what a difficult meal Thanksgiving is to put together, what with the peas and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. It’s not like they’re making pot-au-feu for twenty-five, which is what I did with you girls. I had huge dinner parties and four babies, not one, and an enormous house to take care of.”

  “Can you just get in a cab? Geez. Why do you have to be so difficult?”

  “Oh, now I’m the difficult one?”

  “You’ve always been the difficult one!”

  “I have had just about enough. I don’t have to listen to one more minute of this—”

  She hung up. My phone rang a minute later.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Mother. I wanted to let you know I just put in a call to Bill Shames, my lawyer in St. Louis, because I am going to SUE YOU for everything you’ve got, which I realize, hah, isn’t much.”

  “You’re suing me?”

  “That’s right, baby.”

  “For what?”

  “For acting like an insensitive maniac.”

  “You’re suing me for acting like an insensitive maniac?”

  “That’s right. You’ll be hearing from my attorney, dearie.”

  I should have picked her up.

  There was blood on her couch from the day she had the stroke. My father called me the day before we were to go clean my mother’s apartment.

  “Now, Jean-Joe, should I go over to Mama’s and take the bloody couch out of view so that you girls don’t have to be traumatized by seeing that? Is seeing that awful blood on Mama’s couch going to be . . . uh, traumatizing, do you think? Although where in the hell am I going to drag a bloody couch to . . . I’ll probably get arrested . . . I suppose I could just throw a blanket over the bloodstains on the couch so you wouldn’t have to see all that blood. I could always do that.” It would simply never occur to my father that perhaps repeating the words “bloody,” “Mama,” “stains,” and “couch” in various combinations might have taken care of whatever traumatizing remained to be done.

  We divvied up the jobs at the beginning of each day there, and today I was on clothes. I wondered whether I would find any Lenox Hill Hospital robes. Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side used to have these really chic robes—blue-and-white seersucker, shortish. My mother was a regular there when she lived on East Eighty-seventh Street, and my sisters and I couldn’t get enough of them. The problem was that our friends also took a shine to these
bad boys, and before you knew it we were fielding requests from all over town.

  “Jean, hey, it’s Sophia. I don’t want to be insensitive, but if your mom goes to detox again in the near future, could you nab me a medium?”

  I didn’t find any of the robes. I put things in bags that would go in the garbage. I didn’t want to give any of it to Goodwill, because I am a serious thrifter and I was horrified at the idea of coming across any of my mother’s things in a secondhand store. Though from the apartment I was the only one of us who took anything wearable, anything that required putting a piece of my mother’s smell anywhere near me. Nothing could compete with the way my mother smelled at the end. The cigarettes, the old vodka smell mixed with the new vodka smell, the greasy hair, the hundred-dollar-an-ounce Parisian stench called Joy. I think Kate sent my mother’s jewelry to the dry cleaners. Figuring I could wash things a few hundred times, I took one totally queer yellow-and-navy-blue-striped boat-neck shirt from L.L.Bean, one fantastic Indian-print muumuu from the ’60s, a cream-colored cashmere sweater from L.L.Bean, one navy-blue wool jacket that my dad gave her from Brooks Brothers. She had never even been on the Internet, so L.L.Bean catalogs became her only option for clothes, her one-stop shut-in shop. I don’t know why I took these clothes, because they were not clothes that represented her particularly.

  Later that day while Julia worked on the kitchen, I transferred myself from closets to the bookshelves, which were loaded with crap. My mother didn’t have affairs, she read commercial fiction to make my father insane. There was also the matter of her tendency when she went to rehab to stash money in books, so each book had to be gone through before being sent to Goodwill. It was genetic; her mother, not a drinker, was also a cash stasher, although my grandmother stashed cash in her refrigerator crisper drawer.