The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon

by Moira Greyland

  Lisa never objected to anything Marion did no matter how irrational or weird, and treated her as though she was a goddess. One day, when Marion wore a particular skirt suit, Lisa told her that she looked like Kim Novak, inspiring her to parade about in the outfit.

  But Marion looked no more like Kim Novak than she looked like the family dog. I am not trying to insult either my mother or the dog. My mother was perfectly plain. Her pictures are easy to find on the Internet. She was hugely overweight, she had a flat, round face and nearly invisible blonde eyebrows, no eyelashes, stringy, dirty blond hair, and no physical grace or self-awareness in terms of how to move.

  I was astonished. In direct contradiction to everything I had ever been taught, here was my mother preening like a sixteen-year-old girl in a prom dress. Lisa was feeding Marion’s vanity with obvious out-and-out lies. It was incredible.

  Why on Earth was Lisa flattering Mother, pretending she was sexy and pretty instead of focusing on her actual positive attributes? Why not be entranced with her intelligence, her quick wit, her occasional kindness, or her sense of fun? Why not talk to her about books and music, like my father did? Why would she lie to Mother if she really gave a hoot about her? Did they have anything resembling a genuine relationship, or was Lisa merely hoping to get both hands on the checkbook?

  If Lisa loved Mother, why did she lie? At that point, I began to fear that the entire relationship was a theatrical sham.

  Why is there an issue about someone looking the way they have always planned to look? Mother never paid any attention to her appearance and did nothing to improve it. She had always taught me that appearance did not and must not matter, and the only reason I was ever allowed to pay attention to my appearance was that I was onstage and my work depended on it.

  Telling such a disingenuous, obvious lie was a huge warning sign to me that Lisa was not what she seemed. No friend would have told such a tall tale: how could a lover do so? After all, it was not as if Mother’s looks were something she had ever set great store by, and she did nothing at all to try to improve them. If she brushed her hair, let alone washed it, it was a miracle.

  To my astonishment, Marion didn’t catch on to Lisa’s deception. She was lapping it up like a kitten with a saucer of milk, making a ridiculous spectacle of herself. Mother even told me that if I ever wanted her to choose between me and Lisa, I wouldn’t like her choice.

  Although Mother and Father technically separated in 1979, it was not the sort of separation one might assume. The only thing that really changed about their relationship was the sleeping arrangements. After Lisa arrived, my father continued to live in the same house with Mother and Lisa, keeping the downstairs bedroom he had shared with Mother. Since he was no longer sexually interested in Mother, he was initially grateful that she had another target so she would not be harassing him for sex and threatening suicide over his abandonment.

  My mother and father remained best friends. They still saw each other every single day, and had tea together every morning. He still read her morning’s work, and Mother and Lisa handled all the bills and other things for my father, managing his money and giving him an allowance from his paycheck. When he lost his job they put him on the payroll, even though he didn’t do much of anything for them. Mother felt that since he had shared everything with her, she should share with him.

  However, things turned sour between my father and Lisa very quickly. Lisa was as sweetly Machiavellian to my father as she was to the rest of us. With Mother’s blessing, she ended up managing all his money and she gave him a tiny allowance out of what was left over.

  Where Mother had let my father do as he liked, Lisa was a much fiercer taskmistress than Mother had ever been. Now she not only owned Marion and the two of us kids, but my father as well. He had been disenfranchised by someone who did not care about him the way Mother did. Lisa knew perfectly well that every bit of money she did not give my father she had access to herself; she was not about to let him have any more of his money than she absolutely had to. My father ended up having to beg for every cent, and he was never one to confront anyone to begin with. He was humiliated and afraid of Lisa, and with good reason.

  Where I could comfort myself with the knowledge that I was going to be able to do things that Lisa could never do, my father had no such comfort. In his mind and heart, he knew that he was a prisoner, and that there would never be any escape for him.

  I had seen Mother having love affairs before, and they did not involve one person acting the part of a perfect love-slave. Mother’s relationship with Randall Garrett had been very different: No hero-worship, no stupid submission, and certainly no lies. Randall was not trying to get anything from her, and he had always seemed trustworthy to me. He was obviously attracted to my mother. Their relationship was egalitarian and based on love. And yes, this went on with my father’s knowledge and consent.

  Randall was nice enough, if a bit creepy. I got very upset once because he made an admiring sexual comment at me and when I protested, Mother simply claimed he was paying me a compliment. He admired my mother’s wit and her large bustline, which annoyed her. Mother eventually declined to marry him because he was a drinker, and he married another writer named Vicki Ann Heydron. Mother and Randall remained friends until his death from encephalitis.

  Randall figured in one of Mother’s favorite jokes. Since they were both science fiction writers, they had briefly been friends with L. Ron Hubbard. They had been discussing with him how to create religions in their science fiction worlds, and were both appalled when Hubbard announced he was going to use this knowledge to create his own religion and get rich. Every time Hubbard’s name was mentioned after that, Mother would say “I knew him when he was a small-time crook!”

  Because I had seen Mother in love before, and the way she acted and the way that Randall acted, I did not believe that Lisa was there for love, and I concluded sadly that she was not there because she cared about us. She was there because she saw a gold mine in my newly-successful Mother. Nothing Lisa has ever done has counteracted this initial impression, although I have hoped and wished again and again that I was wrong.

  Early on, Lisa slept with Mother in the upstairs room that used to be her office now done up as her bedroom. Lisa kept Mother in an erotic haze for the first several months while she consolidated her position. I walked in on them more than once while they were having sex. Where it was giggle-worthy when my friend Jean and I walked in on them, it was also extremely uncomfortable.

  Lisa thought she had to explain to us exactly what kind of sexual conduct we had witnessed. It was appalling to hear Lisa mispronouncing various sexual terms which I will not repeat here. We knew what they had been doing, given what we had been exposed to over the years. The issue was not her explaining their sex life, but the embarrassment of witnessing it at all. For me, to know a woman who called my mother “Mommy” was providing her with orgasms made me sick.

  Is this, in the final analysis, what a daughter does? Is this what my mother wants a daughter to do? Had I simply been replaced because of my failure to sexually comply?

  Mother had long complained about having to be “the heavy” because my father refused to discipline us in any way. She saw a golden opportunity to be “the good guy” when Lisa arrived by making Lisa be “the heavy.” Mother put Lisa in charge of all discipline, sidestepping my father. My mother changed, overnight, from being an unholy terror—a random, frightening disciplinarian—to being an insipid, irresponsible marshmallow who followed Lisa around like a puppy. In terms of our day-to-day lives, this made things a lot worse for both Patrick and me. To begin with, Lisa had no history with us and we had no reason to trust her. Both my brother and I had seen the same things about her relationship with Mother, and we both suspected her of being there only for Mother’s money. From the way she fawned over Mother and how insincere she was, we didn’t think Lisa actually believed a word she said.

  Worse, Lisa warmed to the task of disciplining us and enjoy
ed it entirely too much. Mother thought, naively, that Lisa would love us in the same way that she did and that she would make all the right decisions to benefit us all. However, Lisa seemed to see us as competition for resources, and knew that the more ground she gained with Mother the more resources she would control. That meant that to gain status with Mother meant marginalizing my brother and me.

  Neither Lisa’s methods nor her attitudes were anything like what we had been exposed to; her values were completely at odds with everything we had ever been taught. She was sweetly caustic, like an ounce of lye mixed into a cup of nice, warm hot chocolate. To her, we had no manners and were dirty, ill-taught, and didn’t write thank-you notes whereas she was the pinnacle of perfection, having been raised in a “good family” in Connecticut.

  We never heard the end of her “good family,” which failed to explain her anxiety and dread over every communication with her mother. Why would a “good family” not make her feel loved and welcomed? I had seen good families, such as Serpent and Cathy, and I knew perfectly well that a good family was a happy, harmonious one, not one that folded napkins just so and wrote thank-you notes. On that basis alone, I knew she was a social climber. Only money could trump the social status she believed her “good family” gave her. I thought it was pathetic and repulsive. I had never met anyone in my life who made such claims, or who tried to act superior based on the alleged social status of the family she apparently feared so much. Her parents worked straight jobs and had written no books. Really, the whole thing mystified me. How could her family be superior to anything if they hadn’t created anything of lasting value?

  Lisa was a big fan of Miss Manners, and trotted her books out at every occasion. It was not only that our conduct and our manners were substandard, but the two of us as people did not meet her standard. Her fundamental dislike and contempt for us were as obvious as they were painful. Eventually, Patrick and I both went to Mother, suspecting Lisa’s motives and complaining about her treatment of us. Mother could not believe that Lisa was so very different behind her back. She could not believe that her sweet, submissive “baby” would cut us to the bone.

  Not long after Lisa arrived, they decided they wanted more privacy and they moved into an apartment on Telegraph Avenue together, about three blocks from Greenwalls. I always thought of the apartment as “The Love Nest.” Although I was relieved to not walk in on them in flagrante delicto anymore, their absence made its own set of problems. Both actual adults were now gone, and my father was allegedly going to care for my brother and me.

  My father, though loving and kind, was no more fit to run a household than he was fit to run a marathon. Would he drive us anywhere? No, of course not. Help with homework? No. The idea of him paying bills? Preposterous. Going to the bank? Impossible. Putting out the trash once a week? Absurd. Cooking? Never. We cooked for ourselves, and for him.

  Mother and Lisa came over once a day and took care of some things, but it did not prevent the house from becoming completely unmanageable. It was a riot of cockroaches and filth. I was used to the chaos, though. I was also used to finding my own food in the pantry and getting myself to wherever I needed to go. My father was helpless when faced with even the simplest real-world matters. Left to his own devices, he would work as close to 24 hours a day as he could manage, sleeping when he could not avoid it.

  Here is an example of my father’s coping skills: One day, my father’s oven set the house on fire when he was alone. He called Lisa, and said “The house is on fire. I am not kidding.” Naturally, she told him to call 911, which had never occurred to him.

  The cuckoo had landed, and it was time for the baby birds to hit the concrete. To Lisa, we were not welcome, we were not good people, we were not worthy of the food it took to feed us. We did not take this lying down, though. We staged a full-blown intervention with probably a dozen of us present downstairs in the carriage house before it had been rebuilt. The whole family tried to tell Mother that Lisa was corrupt and only out for her money, but Mother did not believe it, and told us that even if every word was true she would remain with Lisa.

  By far the worst part of Lisa’s attempted reformation of us began when Mother was still in her Lisa-induced sexual haze. She was trying to reform my awareness of my position in our family. I was supposed to accept her not only as my owner and superior, but as my “older sister” which was ludicrous.

  If one accepted Lisa’s definitions, Lisa was right. I was not submissive but rebellious. I was not interested in what Mother wanted me to do, but intent on leaving the house. I was not even interested in Mother’s books, and dealing with her fans was difficult for me because they adored her and I couldn’t join them in hero-worship. If sycophancy is the measure of a daughter, I failed on every level.

  Mother spoke often of how Lisa was a “better daughter” than I was. I was puzzled by this: biology is not earned, nor can it be altered through merit. But apparently, Mother thought that there were a set of things that a “good daughter” would do that I considered to be completely unreasonable.

  To be fair, Lisa did some wonderful things. Rather than claiming a stopped clock is right twice a day, I must think Lisa did not want to be hated. She was complimentary about both my singing and my costumes, and she also did not always join in when Mother was verbally bashing my brains out on the things I did. Moreover, she once did something even more important, and tutored me in math after I had a head injury.

  When I was attending ninth grade at West Campus Junior High in 1979, I had two episodes of trouble. Since I was a bookworm with a big mouth, I was often beaten up in the Berkeley public schools I attended. One day, a girl chased me for a long way from school, insisting that she was going to beat me up. I ducked into a bank and explained the situation to the teller, who kindly let me call home. Mother came and got me from the bank, so the girl never got to beat me up. In this case, the story grew as she retold it until she claimed to have “rescued [me] from a pack of children in full cry!”

  My mother loved to defend me at times, provided there was an audience and she could look properly heroic. My brother David used to say that to Mother, “truth is a lousy first draft.”

  The other time I got into trouble was on the way into class one day. A young man was standing outside of my classroom as I was walking in, and I saw him kick the rear ends of the two girls ahead of me, which made me very angry. I told him clearly that he was not going to do that to me. He grabbed me by the throat and slammed my head against the door jamb until he knocked me out. I was not unconscious for long: I remember waking up flat on the floor in the school hallway.

  I was taken downstairs to the infirmary and learned I had hit him back, although I do not remember doing so. He walked by my bed with a huge frown and a bloody split lip. I had sustained a more damage, though. The school nurse called my mother, and she took me to the hospital. Although they feared a skull fracture, I only had a serious concussion. I was out of school for some weeks after that.

  The school had interpreted the event which resulted in my head injury and his split lip as a “fight,” even though it did not seem that way to me at all. We both were required to serve detention. I was not able to remain in school for long after returning. My head still hurt a lot and I was dizzy and sick to my stomach for some time.

  Lisa tutored me in math, which I had completely forgotten, from arithmetic to trigonometry and algebra within the space of about two weeks. That was a kindness on her part, and an important one. She did not make a show of rescuing me, she just helped me with the actual problem which resulted from my being out of school.

  I do not think either my father or my mother had ever helped me with homework.

  Since I was not going to be able to finish out the year at West Campus, my mother decided to homeschool me, and called the school she created for me “Hollingworth School.” She had Lisa teach me math and French, pretty much testing me on what I did on my own. Adrienne Martine-Barnes taught me sewing, which amounted t
o her looking at the things I did on my own, and Mother herself assigned me various papers to write on English topics, which amounted to her reading what I wrote. I wrote easily and she never said much, although when she said something it tended to feel like a switchblade. I knew enough to be very careful in what I wrote. She was vicious about free verse and anything with words that was less than meticulous.

  Doing schoolwork had never been a problem for me: Dealing with the other kids was the problem. Mother always called me a “self-starter,” and knew I would easily complete any assignment they gave me. Mother only homeschooled me for half a year, and then put me into Berkeley High School.

  Like so many people with normal skill sets, Lisa wanted very much to sing, to write, to dance, to ice skate. Sadly, she had about as much artistic talent as a spare tire. As a dancer, despite many years of ballet lessons, she might as well have been a panda. As a skater, despite endless lessons, a starfish would have been more fun to watch. As a singer, no amount of voice lessons corrected the odd sounds she made. Eventually, she volunteered as a supernumerary for the San Francisco Opera, where she would stand in for a singer while they dealt with lighting and costuming issues, or simply stand there in a costume and not sing.

  It is possible that Lisa might have gotten involved with Mother so that she could become an author herself. It is a fact that she sold everything she wrote to Mother, and then posthumously to Mother’s estate. In effect, she sold everything she wrote to herself. Her two books were reviewed by her friends, which goes to show that they have more patience than I do. I read the first one, Changing Fate, and my overall impression was that her characters sat around making “To Do” lists, and during one particularly torrid love scene, the lovers held hands. The reviews themselves are online on Amazon. I thought they were worth noting, the way her friends all found something nice to say to the effect that either book was worth the electronic paper it wasn’t printed on.