by Jeanne Darst
There were the expected hits on my mother’s shelves: the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, How to Quit Drinking Without AA, Sober for Good, Seven Weeks to Sobriety, The Neutral Spirit: A Portrait of Alcohol by friend Berton Roueché. The recovery section also contained the Social Register— we were kicked out in the late ’80s because we never bought the black-and-orange books put out every year. Going through her books reminded me of the book my mother had given her new granddaughter, Louisa, several years before.
After seeing Louisa for the first time my mother had headed out to Kate’s deck to have a cig. Katharine went and put Louisa down for a nap. Coming back inside, Mom announced that she had a present for the baby. Katharine and Mom sat on the couch with Mom rummaging through her bag madly, finally finding the item and pulling it out of her bag and holding it out to Katharine. It was unwrapped. A book traveled from Mom’s to Kate’s hands and Katharine read the title.
“Hannibal by Thomas Harris.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“Hannibal. Like Hannibal the cannibal? Silence of the Lambs? Anthony Hopkins’s character who eats people with fava beans?” Kate asked.
“Right. Did you read the first one?” Mom asked.
“Um, well, no. This is—”
“It’s for the baby,” Mom said.
“Right. For the baby. She’s two months old.”
“I know, sweetie, you’re going to have to read it to her.”
“Right. Thanks, Mom.”
“You’re welcome. It’s really terrific.”
“Yeah. Well, she definitely doesn’t have it.”
Henry came in the door from work.
“Hi, Doris.”
“Hello, Henry. The baby’s beautiful, just beautiful.”
“Aw, thanks, Doris.”
“I have to go. I just came to bring the baby a present.” Mom got up.
Henry put his bag down on the couch. Kate held up the book.
“Hannibal,” Henry read, looking like someone had struck him between the eyes with a park bench. “Like Hannibal the cannibal?”
“Yeah.” Kate glared at him. Henry got up and went to the phone.
“Thanks so much, Doris. Here, let me call the car. I know the fastest one.”
On the shelf below all the how-to-quit-drinking books was a photo album of my mother’s debutante party, the Fleur de Lis Ball. It was like a wedding album, a professional book of about fifty or so photographs of the party at her house. Everything was so displayed back then. People. Soup. Gifts. Cigarettes. I stared at a picture of a long table where presents were displayed with my mother posed in front of it, while behind me Julia took a piss in the bathroom with no door.
Kate and Julia began boxing up the endless parade of silver: silver brushes, rulers, letter openers, trophies from horse shows, platters, picture frames, bowls, trivets, trays, cigarette boxes, cigarette cases, flasks, decanters. All of it engraved. Engravers must have been busier than McCarthy in the ’50s. Ditto for monogrammers. The number of monogrammed linens that my mother had was preposterous. I agreed to take three gigantic boxes of fancy schnoz-blowers, and it is not lost on me that I have inherited a lifetime supply of hankies from the world’s weepiest mother.
“Eek!” Kate screamed and then started huffing immediately. Julia and I rushed over to where she was going through a pile of family photo albums and giant framed portraits.
“What? Mouse?” Julia asked.
“Stay back!” Kate yelped. We froze in our places. “There was this grungy old piece of pink tissue paper stuck in this crappy old photo album from Amagansett and when I barely touched it diamonds came tumbling out and now they’re everywhere!”
“Fuck,” I said, not being a diamond lover so much as just someone who can relate to spilling shit.
“They’re really small, they’re not big like a ring or Mom’s diamond earrings. They’re teeny little diamonds.”
“Like diamond flakes?” Julia asked, putting on her glasses.
“No.” Kate tried desperately to remain calm. “What are diamond flakes? No, they’re diamonds. I’m just saying, there’s a lot of them and they’re very small and this place is a disaster so be really careful moving stuff around.”
We began searching. Kate started with her cleavage, which was a smart move, as stuff does tend to land there: contacts, food, earrings. I bent down to examine the area around Kate’s feet. Julia started with the perimeter behind Kate, presumably looking for any diamonds that had jumped out of the coke bindle they were wrapped in and powered themselves off Kate’s pregnant belly up and backward, behind her right shoulder.
“Here’s some!” I said triumphantly and picked up three little diamonds. “Where are we putting these?” I asked, looking up at Kate.
“Um, I say we put them in this little jewelry pouch over here.”
I handed her the diamonds and kept looking. “Move your feet,” I told Kate, and she lifted one foot and held it up for me to look under and then lifted the other and held it as long as she could.
Julia must have thought we were working on commission because she came around to where I had found my diamonds and started searching there, sort of pushing me out of my sales territory. I stood up and began looking on the edge of a destroyed armchair. It had tattered arms from my mother dropping lit cigarettes on it, and big stains on its seat. I gently moved my hand back and forth over the ratty, burnt arms looking for a girl’s best friend.
Julia found six more diamonds in the carpeting and Kate found one single diamond still in the coke bindle tissue paper. At that point we decided to have lunch.
After lunch I resumed my work at the bookshelves. The diamonds somehow reinforced what I had been thinking when I had assigned myself to the bookshelves, that Mom put things in strange places, places she was in no condition to ever find again, and I wanted to make sure that the three of us found everything. The thing is, the three of us weren’t looking for the same things. I was still looking for something very specific, though I didn’t know where or what it was. I wasn’t going to leave this dump without my mother, whatever she was.
I had wanted her to die. In that way, the final phone call was what I had been hoping for. It’s over. She’s dead. She’s finally dead. It was of course shocking that my mother was dead, but the second thought was, My God, what took so long? The woman survived two decades of what Nicolas Cage could endure only a single long weekend of in Vegas. My mother was Leaving Ladue, Leaving East Hampton, Leaving Bronxville, Leaving Naples, Leaving the Upper East Side, and finally Leaving the West Village. Wishing Mom was dead had been a desire for sense. Here was a person who should be dead. She had eluded the most serious of conditions, overdoses, falls, accidents, small fires. Death was the thing that would make sense. Wishing she would go was also a desire to feel loved by her. If she died, then I would have had a mother who loved me but just happened to be dead. If she continued living, then I had a mother who was killing herself slowly while I did nothing. This must have been a very different experience for Katharine and Eleanor and Julia, because they’re not alcoholic. They probably felt bewildered at how this could happen to someone. As an alcoholic myself, I know exactly how this can happen, and furthermore I know this could happen to me.
As I flipped through a Julia Child cookbook, I spotted a recipe in Mom’s handwriting for frozen rum raisin ice cream. It was written in pencil on the back of a card from the Oak Hill School. There was an oak leaf on it and it said OAK HILL SCHOOL at the top and then read: “This is to certify that . . . Jeanne Darst . . . has been recognized for . . . outstanding work and cooperation in French class. Date . . . October 1973.” I think I’ve turned out fairly decently, considering I was learning French at four years old in St. Louis. On the back is the recipe for frozen rum raisin ice cream:Finely chop ½ cup raisins and soak in ½ cup dark rum for an hour. Whip 1 cup heavy cream and fold in rum raisin mixture, ½ cup macaroon crumbs and ½ cup chopped walnuts. Gradually stir mixture into vanilla ice cream and spoon into
6 dessert dishes and freeze. Garnish and top with chopped walnuts.
I felt so lucky I wanted to scream out like Kate had done, but it was not that kind of score. For me, it was her. She was disorganized, a school report card would do just as well as anything for a recipe, she wasn’t a precious homemaker, she liked to eat in the kitchen at the big butcher-block table unless she made something complicated and wanted a dining room to honor the dish. Her handwriting looked like the handwriting of every other Catholic girl turned housewife from that period, very neat, slightly rounded cursive. Was she saving a great recipe for rum raisin ice cream or my report card from preschool? Knowing her, probably both.
I wanted things that would help me remember her ordinariness, not her debutante ball or her fancy upbringing or her physical beauty or her equestrian achievements or her sultry movie star voice. Somewhere between her swanky childhood in St. Louis and her tragic death, my mother was ordinary. Cooking, sitting around the kitchen, figuring out what to have for dinner and smoking was her favorite kind of day. It was her best time. I felt this when I read the handwritten rum raisin ice cream recipe. This was what mattered. This was what I decided to take with me. It felt like I couldn’t get any closer to her than this thing that she had written, a piece of her handwriting.
She was a mother, and in being that, she loved me, and I loved her. I stuffed it into my bag and went back to the bookshelves.
MANIFEST PREGNANCY
I LEANED OUT the third-floor window of a five-story town house on East Seventy-third Street off Madison. I had come to wrangle the hydrangeas. The week before, I had planted these hydrangeas in the window boxes, and then my boss got a call from the lady of the house saying her hydrangeas were sagging; this wasn’t metaphor but actual saggy hydrangeas, the tops leaning over onto Seventy-third Street as if they were about to take their own lives.
Dirk, the owner of City Gardens, picked up all his workers at the Bergen Street 2/3 subway station in Brooklyn around seven a.m. and gave us all rides to our various locations for the day. Most of his workers were sober and most were men, but Dirk hired me for the same reason he hired the guys who worked for him: I was clearly someone who couldn’t get or keep her shit together and no one else would hire me. I rode in the back of the van, sitting on bags of mulch with all the guys I knew from the sobriety circuit. There was always a day where someone didn’t have money for lunch, and today it was me. This guy Mike gave me five bucks. I found a banana someone had left on a flat of liriope, and it was unharmed, so I thought I’d just have that and a bag of almonds I brought from home for lunch and save the five bucks Mike gave me for an emergency.
“Okay, Jeanne, you’re working alone at the Fenners’,” Dirk said, pulling over.
I hated working alone, and I didn’t love this particular house. The house manager always yelled at me for tracking dirt on the carpets, and the young hot Polish nanny made me sad—her life looked so lonely.
I was using little sticks and string to prop up the suicidal hydrangeas. There were five floors, three windows per floor, and about four hydrangeas in each box. I had been doing this shit for hours. Marianne, the tall, fit black woman who ran the house, appeared in the doorway, startling me.
“You left your muddy boots next to the door. Carol saw them first thing when she walked in.”
“Sorry. Who’s Carol?”
“The woman who owns this place and is about to come in here and get all Medea on you,” Marianne snapped. Marianne could be made to be fun; it was just a lot of work. We often watched All My Children when no one was around.
“Well, Medea killed her own children, not the gardeners, so perhaps you should alert the kids upstairs.” I looked at my watch. “Shit. I gotta go. I gotta catch a plane.” I jumped up and collected my trowels and sticks and the clear plastic sheeting that had to be put over everything.
“You better get one of those other drug addicts to finish this window.”
“Recovering. Recovering drug addicts,” I said, folding the sheeting and putting it in my big bag.
“Oh, right! Recovering. Well, it seems more like resting if you ask me. Taking a break. Resting drug addicts. They always go back.”
“Not always. Three percent of us never use again!”
“Oh, excuse me!” Marianne said.
Heading toward the subway, I decided I needed a slice. Landscaping was the most physically exhausting work I had ever done, which was not entirely a point of woman-pride. It felt pretty stupid most days. What was I trying to prove? Why didn’t I just get a regular job? How long could I do this?
I got in line at the pizza place, getting out the five Mike had given me, waiting for the owner of the place to get to me.
There is definitely a difference between working shit jobs when you’re in your twenties and all your friends are working shit jobs, too, and working shit jobs when everyone except you has decided to fuck being an actress and has gone to law school and/or gotten married, is having kids and wearing comfortable clothing while you’re still “doing your thing.” I was headed to Palm Beach to do Sally on the Mount at my friend’s boyfriend’s house. I was going from being the gardener at a fancy New York town house to being the talent at a house show in Palm Beach. It was an upgrade, definitely, but I wasn’t sure why I was doing it other than for the money, which was reason enough. I thought it made sense. I couldn’t tell anymore.
The pizza guy repeated something he’d said while I was spacing out.
“What can I get you, sir?”
Sir? Sir? I was now a sir? I now looked so hideous, so dirtcovered and disheveled and ugly that people thought I was a man? I was paralyzed. He must have needed glasses, or would realize his mistake momentarily. He continued looking right at me. “Sir?”
Fuck it. What was I going to do? “One plain.” Shit. I took my slice and left, eating while I walked to the number 6 train at Seventy-seventh Street.
AT HOME I TOOK OFF my Carhartts and my City Gardens sweatshirt and jumped in the shower. My boyfriend of five months, Nick, called to see how I was doing. Nick used to have a junk shop on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. Katharine and I would go and check him out occasionally on the weekends. He got married and moved to L.A., but he’d come back to Brooklyn occasionally. One day I ran into him on the street, and he told me he was getting divorced.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, having no idea whether my face was matching my words.
And then a couple months later we were dating. I’ve always felt that the ideal way to live is to go to bed with someone and wake up alone. Heaven. But Nick had a quality that I hadn’t found in guys for about a decade: he didn’t drive me insane. I was doing my show in L.A., staying at his house, when my mom died. Nick’s dad had died only about a year earlier. His father, unlike my mother, died suddenly. He was struck by lightning while out for a run in the rain in Tampa, Florida, which, according to Nick, is the lightning-strikingand-killing-you capital of the United States.
“Are you okay?” Nick asked.
“I feel okay, but some guy just called me ‘sir,’ so maybe I don’t look so great. I was a little nauseous earlier, but I think it was this banana I found in Dirk’s truck. Maybe it was bad.”
“A bad banana? Not likely. Stop eating food you find in Dirk’s truck, baby. You’re probably pregnant.”
“Ha! Yeah.”
“You are, I bet.”
“Stop it, Jesus.”
“It’d be great. I love you. I love our baby—”
“STOP!” I laughed.
“Go run to the corner and get an EPT.”
“I don’t need to do one of those.”
After getting off the phone, I realized I did need to take an EPT. If only because he had now made me anxious. And maybe excited. I threw on some sweatpants and went to buy a test. I got home and did it immediately. It said I was pregnant. I took another one and it said “ditto.” I called Nick.
“I’m pregnant.”
“I told you!” he yelled. He was happy. I w
as happy. We were happily pregnant. He was meeting me in Florida the following day.
When I got off the plane in Palm Beach, my old friend Cassie was standing outside the terminal smoking a cigarette, talking on her BlackBerry.
She hung up and screamed, “AHHHH! What’s up, nigga?”
A black man got out of a car in front of her.
We headed to some swanky spot in town for lunch. The whole weekend was their treat, and I was also getting paid nicely. The menu was filled with dishes—aged carpaccio, pork loin salad, whole roasted Chilean sea bass on a bed of fennel—I hadn’t eaten since before the War on Terror. Cassie told me about some recent trips she and Harry, her boyfriend, had taken.
“You would have loved Croatia, Jeanne. We had to refuel there after Russia, so we hopped out for a few days. The Croatian people are incredible.”
I couldn’t imagine whom they could possibly have been hanging out with. Did they rent a Croatian couple for the long weekend? Lately, before seeing her, I had started prepping myself with an ancient Buddhist mantra: She can’t help it. She can’t help it. She can’t help it.
I looked at her diamond studs, Cartier watch and Mafiawife handbag. I could live for six months on her dry-cleaning bill alone. Raskolnikov would have clubbed her over the head with his whole roasted Chilean sea bass already.
“This is so cool! I’m so glad you decided to come,” she said.
I looked around the restaurant at the Palm Beach women: lots of plastic surgery, Lilly Pulitzer–covered wheelchairs, blond toddlers in navy blazers.