by Ilie Ruby
Inside room 21, Dolly and I slipped under the covers with my mother and agreed to wait out the storm. As I watched my mother sleeping, I felt no anger; rather, I felt its absence. I told myself that there were gnomes outside, guarding our door, protecting us from the huge ocean waves and whatever else it was that had been out there, and now, I was sure, was trying to get in.
WHEN I WOKE up a few hours later, all was still. I noticed the framed painting of two large palms on the wall above our soft queen-size bed. Two lamps with tissue-thin shades stood atop worn wooden night tables. The bathroom was clean, and tiled pink, with a white claw-foot tub and a fresh stack of white washcloths on the vanity. I imagined sinking into that tub, picturing bubbles on my kneecaps like two islands, just like the Calgon lady in the commercials.
Our bodies were warm against my mother’s naked body, with Dolly and me on either side of her, pretending to be asleep, recalling how the wind had shaken the windows behind thick green drapes. Appreciative of such a large bed, I pulled the palm tree–patterned comforter over my head. I rarely felt this close to my mother. All I wanted was the sound of her breathing to disguise the waves. I tried to make friends with the ocean. I closed my eyes and imagined the waves leaping up into a burning hillside, covering it with water and putting out the fire. I felt intoxicated by the smells: the musty traps of the drapes mixed with Chanel No. 5 perfume from a former guest; the dampness of the gray carpet beneath our feet mixed with the scent of laundry soap; and fresh-pressed linens.
I told Dolly I was happy to be here. “You’re adopted,” she said in a loud whisper, propping herself up on her elbows. “This place is a dump.”
“I like it here,” I whispered over my mother’s back.
“It’s so obvious we have different fathers,” she said. “I look like Mom, you look Irish, like the milkman.” She had been named Dalia, after our mother’s grandfather Daniel. My great-grandmother Ruth was my namesake.
“Sisters don’t have to look exactly alike,” I argued. Dolly was dark, with small angular features and crimson hair, an odd shade. I was big-boned, taller than Dolly even though I was younger, with pale blue eyes. Dolly affectionately called me Moose. Some called me fat. I had been born with a head of curly red hair like my great-grandmother’s, something that proved my lineage. I wore glasses with thick pink frames and frequently donned polyester bell-bottoms that I knew were ugly when I picked them.
Our mother said that according to Jewish tradition, you had to name your baby after a dead relative. You also had to stay away from bacon, unless you wanted worms.
It never bothered me, though Dolly and I looked and behaved nothing alike, that we had different fathers. No one on General Hospital had the father they thought was theirs, either. I would never know mine. I never wanted to. My mother and sister were all I needed. I didn’t want to open what my mother called a Pandora’s box, to know about anyone causing my mother pain, which I was certain our two fathers had done if they took after any of the men on television. There were no real men in our lives.
THE NEXT MORNING, the motel room at the Twin Palms was dimly lit, with a thin curve of light spilling from between the curtains. My mother reached across the bed and picked up the black telephone receiver. She dialed and pushed her hair from her eyes. I imagined the man on the other end of the conversation was wildly in love with her. I could hear his laughter. As she carried the phone into the bathroom, where she sat on the edge of the tub to shave her legs, nestling the receiver under her chin, I pictured her words creeping into the sky, burning with the stars, and becoming dust. Magic swirled around her, as though hot flames. I was certain her magic made everyone fall in love with her—men, women, and children. Someone was always waiting for her, and she was always excited at the outset, before she grew bored. I could tell by the way she drew on her eyebrow pencil that afternoon, creating extra-thick, dark brows, and the fact that she plucked her eyebrows, bewitching Dolly and me, in the flicker of the television. The Brady Bunch was on, and I was certain Mr. Brady, an architect, would be the perfect partner for my mother.
“I may not be back for a while. You have everything you need. Play games, okay? Use your imaginations. Be creative.”
“What time will you be home?”
“Go to sleep after Johnny Carson,” she said.
Who was my mother going to see? Why couldn’t he come to the motel to bring us food? We were hungry. My mother ran down to the snack machine and bought us Pop-Tarts and pretzels. Our car was still underwater. The phone rang an hour later, and my mother hung up and took off her bra. He couldn’t get through the storm, whoever he was. We finished the peanuts in the minibar. To distract us, my mother told us her favorite story, “The Most Beautiful Lady in the World.” She had been telling us this story since we were small, and we never tired of it. It was about a young boy who gets lost while shopping with his mother in a market. He asks everyone where his mother is, but he is a stranger to this place. When people ask him to describe her, he says, “My mother is the most beautiful lady in the world.” The police search the area, questioning all of the most beautiful women—girls with large black eyes and lustrous long dark hair, girls with thin waists and full red lips. Still, none is the right one. “Is this your mother?” ask the police. Each time, the boy says no. They continue looking for days.
One day, the boy sees a woman in a crowded market. He runs to her and she throws her arms around him. “My son! Where have you been?” The old woman with bloodshot eyes smooths the pleats from her wide yellow dress. Her hair is thin and short, and when she smiles, her mouth is empty of teeth. “My son. Thank you for finding him.” The most beautiful lady in the world walks away with her son.
That, my mother said, is how a child should view a mother, whether anyone else thinks her beautiful or not.
WRAPPED IN BLANKETS, we took in an episode of General Hospital and then The Partridge Family. My mother had quit talking and started drinking, emptying the minibar of tiny bottles, keeping her back to us in the bed. I imagined my sister felt the same way about her, wanting to bridge our mother’s silence with our bodies as her moods turned dark. There was too much we didn’t know, and yet her whiskey love carried her away from us even further. She wanted something. What was it? She was hungry for it, but she didn’t eat. She smoked three Winston Lights and then locked herself in the bathroom to take a hot shower.
She was trying to burn.
Our two fathers had somehow remained a part of the hidden tapestry of our lives. They informed my mother’s actions, her drinking, those things I did not understand. It was easier to imagine that they, and not us, were the cause of the tiny bottles of whiskey in her purse, beneath the car seat, in the glove compartment. It was better just to love her. I wanted to protect my mother from the pain I was sure men had caused her, from the fact that her life as a single mother—caused by us—had not been easy on her. This made me hang on the rare sound of my mother’s laughter as though it were a life-rope, just as my mother hung on the stories she told us about the full moons, thinking that if she could make us believe, then perhaps they would come true.
WHEN THE POWER went out in the motel, I closed my eyes, wishing the storm would last forever. I had made peace with the ocean by this point, or had become infatuated with it, at least. Not it as much as the closeness it created, its suffocating presence that somehow forced my mother to see me. Who in their right mind would want to be holed up in a weather-beaten motel for this long? I did. I tried to absorb everything, pretending we were never leaving. There was no worrying about the future or the past in this place. No one would be left. Here she was, snuggled into bed, all ours. I could sense someone else near, even back then when I was just a child of six, keeping me company in my mother’s shadows.
My mother said this could happen with familial empathy—that a very sensitive person could feel the enormity of emotions of those who had not yet been born into a family or those who had already passed on. Perhaps that is why I had feared the o
cean: because my ancestors had come by steamship to America, a difficult trip.
And because I would have a daughter who would fall in love with the sea.
By the time the lights went back on that evening, we had finished up the snacks, along with some oranges and apples, left outside our door by Dr. Brownstein.
Dolly complained that she was hungry again, now that the storm had died down. When she opened the curtained windows, my mother tensed up.
I HADN’T SEEN much of Long Beach during our escape through the rain. I had hardly seen the parking lot. But when I heard the loud barking, I ran to the window. I speculated to Dolly that it might be a dog. My mother was sleeping off a hangover. A few hours later, the barking had stopped, but it was all I could think about. Perhaps an animal had been trapped, I told myself.
“My hair is on fire!” I yelled, but no one heard me. Dolly was in the bathtub. I snuck out of the room and sloshed through the parking lot in my bare feet.
I adjusted my glasses. I could hear splashing. Beside the yellow Volvo, I saw a shiny wet boulder.
It moved, its eyes focused on me. They were deep brown pools above a pointed doglike snout. Its ears perked up aside its crested head, and I could see the light catching on its whiskers. Its dark skin had begun to dry, despite the slick patches. It was vocalizing, barking. Was it grieving? Hurt? Somehow, I was not afraid, which worried me. I knew I should stay away, but something drew me nearer. I kept walking, my hands open, showing I was not a threat. I had seen this done on television. Whenever somebody approached a stray dog, they opened their hands.
Suddenly, the barking turned into deep, loud utterances of dominance. He moved toward me, as big as a car.
I didn’t mean to scream.
Sea lions are similar to their seal cousins in many ways, but for the fact that they have protruding ears, and for the position of their hips. While both are pinnipeds, “fin-footed” mammals, sea lions’ hips are not fused, so they can rotate their hind flippers under their bodies, and shuffle or “walk.” California sea lions can move quite fast, rather than heave their bodies along, as seals do. Though fairly private, they could be fed. They liked the plethora of fish in Long Beach harbor. There were many reasons they might be territorial.
I knew the word “help” but could not say it.
“Child, what in the damn-ass are you doing?” Dolly cried, yanking me back.
Suddenly, we heard a pop. Two shots rang out. Blood splattered across our bare legs.
We looked up.
Dr. Brownstein stood on the balcony. She had spotted the sea lion and would later tell us that she had been trying to protect us, not knowing whether the creature was a threat. At over eight hundred pounds, he had most likely become disoriented in the changing current. Though most of the sea lions usually stayed on the white buoy cans that marked the fishing lanes, or floated on the platforms of oil rigs, this one had come in with the storm. In distress, he had climbed onto the beach, seeking refuge or food.
Now, blood spilled across the wet floor of oyster shells, near the yellow Volvo.
Dolly and I began to cry. Dr. Brownstein ran down the stairs toward us.
“Girls, are you okay?” she said. She held a blanket from one of the rooms and threw it over the animal. “Go, hurry on, now. Get going,” she said.
My mother stood open-mouthed in the doorway, her hair blown back, her eyes rimmed in dark coal. She stared at her crying daughters and the wet heap beside the car. She ordered us inside.
I stood there for a moment. I imagined how we looked from all angles, from a stranger’s eyes. Dolly and I, the sea lion lying in a blanketed hump, and Dr. Brownstein. My mother in the doorway, holding her head.
Within minutes, she was frantically packing our things, stealing motel sheets and towels, shoving them into our station wagon, and sweeping branches off our windshield with her hands. Dr. Brownstein watched from the lobby, holding the telephone to her ear. My mother screamed at us to get ready, for ruining her life, for costing her a new job as the motel housekeeper, which she hadn’t even applied for yet. “You could have been killed, Ruthie!” she cried, as we peeled out of the parking lot, leaving Dr. Brownstein alone with the sea lion. “No job. No cash. You girls will not be satisfied until you have ruined my life,” my mother cried.
Dolly slammed into me, her hot breath on my neck. “She’s going to crash this car. Get ready to jump out, open your door. I’ll say when.”
I held my breath and shut my eyes. We had grown used to this, careening back and forth in busted seat belts. I knew to have my hand planted on the door handle, ready to jump.
“Damn fool, just like your father. Do you want them to take you from me? You’d never survive without me. This is why I try to protect you. You could have been hurt. Is that what you wanted? For them to try to take you from me?”
“I thought it was a dog,” I whispered. She would leave me again.
Now I had to wait for it.
I knew who them was, the people we avoided. Dolly and I had to talk to them after I fell out of a two-story window into a pool. Dolly and I had been chasing each other around, and I had tumbled right through the screen. Someone had called Social Services, and my mother had to go to court. All I remember is that she bought a navy suit from a thrift store and put her hair up in a bun with black bobby pins. That’s when the story about homeschooling originated, and after, our instructions to carry book bags whenever we left the car, which she filled with old tattered schoolbooks from garage sales.
“Who walks toward a wild animal?” Dolly hissed. I slumped into the backseat as we watched the people on busy Second Street. Life had continued here, just a few blocks from where we’d been holed up in the motel, pretending life had stopped, an excuse not to keep moving. People were sweeping water and debris off the sidewalks. Some were riding bicycles. Others were shopping. The ice cream shop was open, and two young boys sat on a bench, staring at Dolly and me as we slowed at a light. “It’s so sad,” Dolly said. “That animal probably had a family to support.” I knew she was just angry, thinking that perhaps my mother would have gotten us ice cream, had it not been for my mistake.
“What will happen to it?” I pressed my face to the window. “Will somebody bury it?”
“They’ll probably want to make a coat out of him,” worried Dolly.
I nodded, winding my hair around my wrist, gazing at the nape of my mother’s neck, at her large Jewish-star charm that slipped back and forth along the chain, beneath tendrils that spilled from her hair, pulled up now in a bun.
When she reached for a bottle from the glove compartment, one hand on the wheel, I looked up. As our car swerved across Second Street, nearly clipping two bicyclists, she said that few people were mensches and that it would be best to find some family. Close friends could become mishpachah, family. When she turned on her cassette player, blasting the melodious voices of Fiddler on the Roof through the windows, I looked over at Dolly. “What are you staring at?”
WE DROVE ALL day, until nightfall. When my mother finally stopped, we were in the desert. We got out and examined the car, each of us taking a turn to shine the flashlight while the other ran her hands over the nail in the tire. The tiny orange flowers that dotted the cacti were just closing. We followed my mother across the sandy earth for an hour as she clutched her bottle of whiskey, her gait wavering. We were nowhere. Lost again, with nothing and no one around.
“Would you girls like to pick some flowers?” my mother asked, but by this point I was exhausted. I fell in a heap on the hard cold sand, barely able to keep my eyes open. The stars blurred in the sky, as did the sounds, but I could hear her voice lilting in the cold dark waves of the desert. I knew she was drunk. It had been some time since she’d been this bad. I knew the only thing to do was to be quiet and wait.
The air would be warm soon. The desert never stayed cold for very long.
“A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac; find out moonshine, find out moonshine,” my moth
er said, tripping over her feet in the moonlight, reciting a line from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She waved her almanac in the air.
I looked up at the waning moon, now a less than perfect circle in the night sky. I felt guilty for my own thoughts, which I was sure I would be punished for. No matter how anyone wanted to sugarcoat it, the fact was that some people were never meant to be mothers.
I buried my head under the orange sleeping bag, imagining the sea lion cutting through a circle of bubbles, its large brown body floating out into the cold dark desert, then taking me with it as it dove beneath the black water.
Chapter Three
1975
IF THE HEART were a book, its lovers would be the chapters. A girl’s book begins with her mother, who is her real first love. What happens between them will likely determine the direction of words on all of the subsequent pages. Next, she will fall in love with her first best friend, and her first lover will follow, essentially as the third act. Depending on how the heart is tended during these beginning chapters, its capacity will be reached, or never at all. That is the only goal. No one can say for certain whether the heart will wither like petals near seawater, or whether it will be strong, resilient, able to stave off the elements that will likely befall it. We had to go all the way back to my great-grandmother to find a love story that we could all reference. One that we knew we could go back to again and again, as one does the right book. No woman in our family had gotten it right since 1895.
My mother liked to tell this love story sitting on the hood of the car, filling us with hope. Our ancestors were from Grodno. My great-grandmother Ruth and my great-grandfather Daniel grew up together and fell in love when she was just fifteen. They spoke Yiddish at home. Daniel came to America first, fleeing anti-Semitic rule. Once he saved up enough money, he sent for Ruth, who had flaming red hair and worked in a large tobacco factory, as well as his sister, Rivka. The two young women boarded a steamship in Hamburg at the turn of the century. My mother kept a black-and-white photograph of them, two refugees waiting on the crowded dock in Germany, collecting a final memento of their former lives. Ruth and Rivka are wearing long white dresses with high Edwardian collars; their flowing bodices are pouched, and below, cinched with sashes at the waist. Their wavy hair is swept up to the top of the head, twisted into a knot. They look hopeful and expectant, as though they are leaving for a grand dance.