I lived and relived my mother’s death until I was so desperate I’d resort to prayer. I’d get on my knees and bargain with the God I had just recently met in church: If you bring her home, Heavenly Father, I will never scream again.
Since there was no way that was going to work, I would begin making new housing plans. I’d remember it was just my brother, mother, and me, and since she’s dead now, would I live at my father’s house? We did not know him well enough for that. I loved him, but saw him so infrequently I still behaved around him. Nobody can endure such conditions long term.
Would I stay with my sleeping brother? Probably not, since he was only two and a half years older than me and obviously had no idea how to handle danger. Perhaps I will be sent to live with that woman who helps my mother at her magazine—the one whose daughter had a kid at fifteen and who attempted to superglue her teeth back in? She babysat for us a few times. Her pit bull tried to eat us and we smelled like cigarettes for nine days. I’d rather be homeless.
Eventually, as I sat immobile on the couch, too afraid to move, waiting for my mother or the police, my terror shape-shifted into a formless mass that usurped the body of my mother. I forgot about her specific dying, or it was overtaken by a crushing terror of something to come, or something to be removed, which I could not identify. It felt like waiting and powerlessness.
But in one glorious moment, I’d hear the garage door go up, or a rustle on the porch, and it would be her. I could not believe my good fortune. I’d hug her and she’d let me curl against her in “the big bed.” She always let me in, and the warmth was always as perfect as I knew it could be. As long as she was with me, I was alright.
• • •
It turned out Keith had more than office space to offer my mother, and when I was eight, my brother, mother, and I joined Keith and his two teenaged sons on a cruise to Mexico. Keith and my mother married on the mainland in a ceremony none of us children witnessed. When we returned, we moved into his house, and I suddenly had two stepbrothers. The older one was a warm and handsome young man with a gorgeous girlfriend. The younger was a short, reserved, rat-faced human who scurried about looking like he was about to gnaw your face off. As far as I could tell, he was not to be trusted, but as luck would have it, he was the one who would babysit my brother and me in the red-shag-carpet house.
One night in that house, some older neighborhood boys came over and convinced me to spread the lips of my vagina while I sat on a couch, so they could all see. I did it, which was the horror that never left me.
I had shaken my head in protest. I had mumbled no. But something about them all gathered around the couch, something about them urging me on, something about them demanding—I found myself pulling down my own underwear.
Later, I wondered why I didn’t simply walk away, lock myself in my room, staunchly refuse with a big, strong voice. I wondered why I participated in my own degradation, my own humiliation, without a soul touching me. I didn’t know why I did it, not understanding at that young age how children are manipulated. I wrote about it in my diary, a blue one with pink pages and a white unicorn and red stars on the cover. I referred to my vagina as my “private parts,” because I was young and mostly Mormon and that’s what we called it.
When I told my mother about that and other unfortunate, related occurrences, she sent me to a therapist who explained, after my mother left the room, that what had happened wasn’t abuse because “it wasn’t done violently.” That was it. No problem here. I never saw her again, and I never told my mother what she said.
After that, I filed away in my gut the notion that I was illegitimately tainted and evil and dirty. I thought something was wrong with me not only because it happened, but because I was upset it happened. And then everybody moved on from it but me, and each week we went to church, where they talked about the sanctity of marriage and the woman’s body and how it’s a temple.
Do not fuck with the temple. Mine had already been fucked with, but we couldn’t mention it, so I held a dark weird secret in my temple like a forgotten rotting room.
I resolved I was simply garbage.
My new room in Keith’s house was a loft overlooking a big living room. Between the loft bars, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I spied on my stepbrothers watching porn on fuzzy, stolen channels. I hated being in the loft, where there was no door or wall on one side. I felt exposed in the open air, like I did that night on the couch. I’d remember the way the boys laughed and gazed.
But I couldn’t crawl into my mother’s bed, because she had a husband now.
So instead I closed the curtain to my loft room, stood in front of a little mirror next to boxes of Keith’s old taxes, looked myself in the eyes, and said, out loud, “Janelle, you don’t need anyone and nothing will ever break you.”
I stood there in pajamas, next to a purple unicorn comforter, staring into a mirror with little ballet shoe stickers all over it, turning myself into a fortress.
• • •
I spent three months in the loft until we moved out again. During this particular separation, Keith was suddenly baptized Mormon, which I explained was a clever ruse to win my mother’s affection. He kept smoking cigarettes and drinking while not actually attending church, which I gathered as evidence of the ruse theory, but my mother only agreed when she was feeling scorned.
Keith’s most infuriating feature was that he was categorically delightful to me, and I fell into an immense and uncomplicated love for the man. He was my dear friend, and I suspected there had never been a stepfather who loved a stepdaughter as much as he loved me. We had a hundred traditions just between us, songs that were ours and ours alone—so many that I was never afraid of my mother and him separating. We had nothing to do with her.
She was too good for him anyway. My mother was gorgeous, with soft waves of brown and blonde hair and green-blue eyes with yellow in the centers. It’s impossible to tell the color of her eyes. Ava and I have the same ones. Green? Hazel? Blue? They change according to what we’re wearing, or the sky, or something inside of us perhaps.
When she put her lipstick on, she stuck her bottom lip out too far, and I laughed and teased her, because it looked like she was sweeping pink paint on the inside of her mouth. I never understood how it didn’t smear across her teeth. She explained she had to turn her lip like that because her lips were “so flat.” To make me laugh harder, she exaggerated sticking her lip out, and I did it, too, as soon as I’d see the lipstick come out of her purse. The whole lipstick process seemed ridiculous to me, but her mother had taught her never to go outside without lipstick on. Grandma Joan never left the house without her “face” on, and she was strikingly beautiful even into her seventies and eighties. She had a square jaw and huge, bright green eyes. When we would go out in public, people would mistake her for my mother’s sister. The family always said it was because she was half Filipino.
My mother had beauty, but she didn’t have her mother’s marriage, her incredible lineage of love. It must have hung over my mother’s marriages like a vast and impossible utopia. With an example that solid, perhaps the only option is to blow up your own life.
We moved into Keith’s house three times over the seven years we lived in Atascadero. Once we moved all the way to Round Rock, Texas, then back again seven months later, back to the same damn junior high I had tearfully abandoned mere months before, with the same horrific children, only in more solidified cliques.
I could pack my room in twenty minutes flat.
• • •
At the end of my eighth-grade year, when my mother decided she was unquestionably finished with Keith, we moved back to Northern California, right next to where we began, in the city where my father, stepmother, and brother lived. My brother had gone to live with our father a few months before. I believe he was tired of moving.
My mother behaved exactly as she had every other time we left: unequivocally committed to the impossibility of ever returning. By this time, at fou
rteen, I was not even distantly convinced, because if a Californian can move all the way to Texas and still not find escape, there is nowhere far enough.
That first year of high school, I ran for class president and somehow won, which I always figured was because the kids didn’t know me well enough to hate me yet, but nobody cared about class president. What they cared about was the father-daughter dinner dance, the fanciest event of the year, particularly for us freshmen, who certainly weren’t going to prom and probably not homecoming either.
My actual father lived five minutes from my mother and me, and Keith lived six hours away, but I invited Keith because I missed him, and I knew him better than my father. I knew he would come. He did, and we danced, and by the end of the night I was reassured that no distance or divorce could fracture us.
Three months later, I sat in a witness box in front of a courtroom describing through teary eyes in my most passionate and earnest voice the history of Keith in my family. I understood Keith was denying the legitimacy of his marriage to my mother, claiming it was done in Mexico in a fraud ceremony. My job, according to my mother’s attorney, was to prove that Keith and my mother “acted married.” Or, more specifically, that he acted “like my father.” The situation struck me as odd, and I didn’t understand why the debate was occurring, but I wanted to help my mother, so I listened carefully to the attorney’s direction and sat ready to convince a judge.
Keith was sitting in a tweed suit coat at a table with his attorney, right across from me. I hadn’t seen him since the dance. He looked weary.
I told the courtroom how we went to Magic Mountain in Valencia and to Harris Ranch on Highway 5, to Yosemite and the beach and out for hamburgers in San Luis Obispo. I told how he took me along on work trips around the county and how we listened to Rod Stewart as we wove through the fog and down Highway 1 along the coast. That was our song: “Forever Young.” I told how he went to my Campfire Girl events when I was in second grade, and how he heard me read my winning D.A.R.E. essay in sixth grade, and took me to ice cream at Thrifty (where I would order mint chip and chocolate malted crunch). When I finished, I knew there could be no doubt of our love anywhere in that courtroom.
Keith’s lawyer took a few steps toward me at the stand and asked, “Where is your actual father?”
I started, wiped tears from my eyes, and said, “Oh, he lives here in Santa Rosa.”
The attorney raised his voice, grinned a little, filled his mouth with trash, and sneered: “So your real dad is not DEAD?” He chuckled after he said it. He laughed at me.
I flinched, and broke the attorney’s gaze to look into the eyes of the man I thought was my closest adult friend, who loved me and watched me now and many years before, and I thought I saw tears in his eyes.
Did I? I don’t think I did. Maybe I did.
It didn’t matter if there were tears or not, because no matter what, I was the one sitting up there like a fool, trying to convince a court he loved me. I shuddered at the humiliation as he sat silently looking at me with the same eyes I had watched for years, eyes I thought looked right back at me and adored what they saw. I had been sold a lie, and I knew it right then, on stage, in front of battling parents and stepparents and strangers, at fifteen years old. I flinched for the first time at the pain of rejection that’s unbearable in its finality.
We had nothing. Not a single thing.
Case closed.
Illegitimate. A fraud marriage. A scam love.
He won, and I never saw him again.
I went home and looked at a Norfolk pine Keith had given me when I was nine or ten, a plant he brought home to me from Yosemite, and that I tried to keep alive, water just right, position perfectly next to the sunlight. It never thrived, but I moved it all over with me, through every move, to Texas and back, and then to our apartment in Northern California. That day after court, I moved the plant onto the patio, though I kept watering it occasionally for reasons I’ll never fully understand.
A year later, when I tried smoking weed for the first time, the pine wilted on the porch. By the time I had moved on to acid, it was nearly dead in the rain. On drunken evenings in that room when my mother was out of town, it was a few sticks and some dirt, a tiny sprig of green here and there out of dumb luck.
By the time I showed up on my father’s doorstep at seventeen years old, announcing myself with the words, “I only have two years left and I want to get to know you. Will you turn me away?” I swear that pine was dead. It appeared completely dead. I even thought it was dead but moved it anyway, because by that point I simply brought the damn Norfolk pine with me when I moved.
My father and stepmother did not turn me away, so I took over my brother’s old room—he had left for his mission for the Mormon church—and set out to get to know my father. If he didn’t want me, fine, but I wanted to know. I wanted lived experience. Case closed.
I’m not sure what my father did when I was seventeen and eighteen while I drove around and went to work as a lifeguard and waitress and sometimes went to school. I’m not sure what he did while I left the house to drink and do cocaine or mushrooms and hang with my new boyfriend who I was sure would become my husband. I’m not sure what he did with that pine while I got angry and raged at my mother and past, at the broken-down minivan and the church, or while I planted my roots as an alcoholic, wrote furiously in my journal, and had sex for the first time.
I don’t know what he did, but suddenly I looked at that fucking pine tree and it was brilliant green and giant and bursting. There was no brown left.
It had grown so huge I couldn’t recognize it.
Dad and I named it “Norfy,” because it was so alive and part of the family it needed a name. It lived in the living room by the back door, where I guess the lighting was just right.
Keith died when I was nineteen. I didn’t attend the funeral because I wasn’t invited. I heard he died in a chair at his desk, slumped over, below the loft where I used to sleep. Sometimes I wonder where he’s buried. If I went, I don’t know what I’d say, but it would probably be something like, “You are such a fucking piece of shit. Burn in hell. Also though, how the hell are you, man?”
By then Norfy had grown so big we had to take it to my father’s office where he and Grandma Bonny and my aunts ran their newspaper, where the ceiling was higher and the walls didn’t confine the sprawling green branches. It seemed like something out of a book, some magical creature that refused to stop growing.
We didn’t trim it. We just moved it where it could grow without reason, for as long as it wanted, and eventually it was so huge we couldn’t move it at all. For years when I visited, I’d look at that plant and remember when it was a few dead sticks, and how my real father brought it back to life.
• • •
“I married another asshole.” My mother said it with hopelessness, an almost furious fear. “I married another asshole.” I looked at her shape-shifting eyes.
I was a freshman in college when she said it. She was speaking of her third husband, Albert, a man she had met at the little art gallery she owned in Bodega Bay when I was in high school—her second or third, or perhaps tenth, promising entrepreneurial endeavor.
He was an eccentric man who smoked more weed than I’d ever seen anybody smoke in my life, but my mother seemed happy and stable living in his enormous home in the Berkeley Hills. He had money through inheritance, hadn’t worked in years, and owned a mind-boggling collection of rock-and-roll concert posters from the 1960s—Stanley Mouse and Rick Griffin, all the gurus—piles of them from when he worked for Bill Graham at the Fillmore. Albert was a fascinating, generous creature, but unfathomably weird. During conversations, he would flip his mouth around and randomly quote poets while gesticulating wildly, then he’d be on the ground straightening the fringe on his Turkish rugs while smoking a joint. This concerned me, but it wasn’t my business. I was in college, and my mother was not alone.
I had hated thinking of her alone in her house i
n Bodega Bay before she met Albert. Past Bodega Bay, actually, miles outside of town. It was just her in a little two-bedroom house on a coastal hillside.
Perhaps we’re supposed to outgrow such things, but during my entire first year of college, I would lie in my dorm room nearly every night wondering if my mother had locked the window over her bed. She was always hot and repeatedly failed to shut and lock that damn window. I would imagine a man crawling in and hurting her. I would hear her cries and convince myself she was trying to tell me through my thoughts that she was in danger, because we were that deeply connected, mother and daughter, and I would look at the clock—one a.m., two a.m., three a.m.—and wonder if she’d answer my call. I’d pray again. Within a short time, I would be sure she was dead. By the morning, I would have forgotten, and the next time I heard her voice I would laugh at my ridiculousness and remind myself never to do that weird shit again.
I was visiting her and Albert at their vacation rental in Mendocino. My mother and I had just come inside after soaking in a hot tub beneath Mendocino’s magnificent fog. I sat down on a bed and feared asking her how married life was going, but I asked anyway because I feared not knowing more.
She was standing in front of a closet, drying her hair with a towel. She wrapped it around her head and turned toward me. “I married another asshole, Janelle.” That was how she answered.
It was the way she said my name. It was the way she said my name as if she were pleading, as if she were reaching out, as if she were looking to me to help her or fix it or even just be the ear to listen and care. I felt my stomach turn in a feeling that was like air in its familiarity.
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