by See, Carolyn
Aunt Helen drove him over to the hospital where, in a couple of weeks, he died. He’d had cancer for over two years, and hadn’t told her. She wasn’t exactly grief-stricken. She’d collected some boyfriends in town over the long years, but she found a new one named Mr. Pratt and married him. I took the bus up from LA to visit my mother. (This is something I did three or four times a year for decades; I can’t justify it.) I’d bought a new white blouse and my friend Judy made me a tweed jumper. My hair was blond then, with bangs. Aunt Helen and her new husband, Mr. Pratt, and my mother and two human logs who worked for the postal service were there in the living room. They made enormous fun of my hair because my ears stuck out, they made fun of my absent husband, and also of my jumper, because it didn’t have a waist. They drove me to tears and I went out on the front porch, asking myself, for the zillionth, zillionth time, why I’d come up here. Mr. Pratt came out on the porch to pat my shoulder. “They don’t mean half of what they say,” he said. “They don’t really mean it.”
You poor insane boob, I thought. What planet did you come in from? He died a few months later. So there were Kate and Helen, alone now in their respective houses, perversely loyal to each other, always making fun of each other, and between the two of them, keeping Hill and Hill in business.
You could always tell what was going on with my mother when she’d make up some barefaced lie, and lay it on you out of the blue. Thus, when she said about her marriage (in the church) to Jim Daly, “Anyone who asks, did he pay some money to get his first marriage annulled so he could marry me in the church? I say it’s none of their goddamn business. People say you have to pay money for that? We’re married in the church and it’s nobody’s goddamn business!” By this I deduced that Jim Daly had paid somebody some money to get his first marriage annulled. Like I cared.
During one visit, my mother said, “If anybody says Helen was drinking a little more than she should when she was driving? And somebody might have gotten hurt? I tell them it’s none of their goddamn business!” I deduced that Helen must have plastered somebody pretty good on a desert highway. She left Victorville soon after, in a flurry of costume jewelry and rouge, and went to live “down below” in a beach town.
So Helen was finally out of the way. Rose was out of the way. Except for maybe four visits a year, I was out of the way. Mother could begin to put together the kind of life she wanted, and, little by little, she did. She was secretary to the principal at the local junior high. That man and his wife were kind, and they loved Kate. There were two other teachers at that school, one of them named Carolyn, one, Rose. They became Mother’s friends, the daughters she should have had.
Above all, she was able to begin to act out what she had defined years ago as the perfect life. More than anything on earth she wanted to “drink and play cards.” She joined bridge club after bridge club. She played poker on the weekends. She put together a circle of friends, including Edna, with whom she shared a house for a few years, and they had a pretty good time. Edna, a counselor at school, drank more white wine than I did, but she loved to hike and play the violin. She and Mother had some nice days up in the mountains; Edna took a violin, Mother took a book, and the afternoons passed quietly, filled with the smell of pine. Her only companions were women, the kind of women who had been so long without men that they looked like men.
Through the years, my mother’s friends cohered. A wild bunch at the school got together every weekend to drink and party and compare notes about the general rowdiness of the kids. I never saw one of these parties, but I heard about them. They started out with jokes but ended up with one or two people crying inconsolably in somebody’s bathtub, sobbing, asking, “What’s the use? Is this all life holds out? Is this all there is? The Green Tree Inn, the Hilton across the street, the Happy Hours that are never, never happy, the sand, the boredom?” The friends console him or her. It isn’t that bad. We’re having some fun, aren’t we?
Victorville, Barstow, Baker, Adelanto, aren’t like other towns. Sure, there are plenty of churchgoing folks, and now plenty of ethnic minorities making a new life out in the desert, but since the towns are on the Vegas Road, there are roadhouses and prostitutes and cowboys and people who haven’t paid their taxes and don’t plan to, and people whose personal lives leave a little something to be desired. There are plenty of secrets about killings and rapes and beatings. If you really want to devote your life to drinking and playing cards, this is the place to do it.
—
One night in a Western dance bar in Victorville, old cowboys and waitresses whose faces look like road maps are doing the two-step, and some of these desert rats have neon lights on their behinds that flash on and off, start me, start me. We’re sitting up against the wall, seven or eight of us, and my mother is down at the other end of the party. One of her kindest friends, a sweet woman, is getting more and more shit-faced.
“Penny,” she yells, “there’s something I have to tell you.”
“Yeah?” I scream, “what is it?”
She puts her mouth close to my ear. “I’m a lesbian,” she yells. She’s very drunk, but who isn’t in this place?
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I could lose my job.”
“I don’t think so!”
“I’ve tried to tell your mother. She hates that stuff.”
I could say a lot of things. Be careful what you say to my mother.
“You really knew?” she asks, screaming again. “I didn’t think anybody knew. I did try to tell your mom. But she just won’t hear of it.”
Sure enough, six months later, I’m driving my mother home from a trying excursion to Santa Barbara, where she’s driven me to near matricide by insisting over a game of Trivial Pursuit that the Sea of Cortés and the Gulf of California are not the same body of water.
Mother speaks up: “You know what makes me sick? You know what I find repulsive? So disgusting I can’t even find words for it? Lesbians! They’re foul! They’re disgusting. They’re worse than anything I can think of. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand to think of it.”
“Then don’t think of it,” I snap.
“No, really. I can’t think of anything worse. There is nothing worse.”
“What about ax murderers?” I inquire. “What about Hiroshima? What about Vietnam?”
Mother won’t be moved. “There’s nothing worse on the face of the earth than a stinking, disgusting lesbian,” she insists, and manages, in the next few months, to lose perhaps the sweetest friend she ever had.
—
As the seventies rolled away and the eighties came into view, I began to get another take on my mother. She was always hopping on a bus and zipping off to Laughlin, to gamble. She called it “Going to the River”: “I went over to the river last week and won twenty-eight dollars. When I was over at the river I was on a Exercycle and woke up—boom!—on the floor. I passed out. They took me to the hospital and said I was all right.”
Sometimes, when I went up there, we zipped through the desert; I was the passenger. Mother drove like a fiend, and her car was filled with stuff. It looked like a Mexican car, with beverage holders and sheepskin and chenille and God knows what all. We’d be driving along and she’d say, “See that power station?” Well, of course I’d see the power station! Standing fenced and menacing by the road, poking up out of an endless stretch of sand, covered with signs that say HIGH VOLTAGE, DANGER, PELIGRO, KEEP OUT!!
“We were out driving and drinking one night and we stopped and went in and played tag. It was a hell of a lot of fun.”
Or, “See that stretch of sand right there?”
Of course I saw that stretch of sand right there.
“We were out driving one night and Eileen was drunk and somebody said something she didn’t like, and she threw herself out of the car and went stumping into the sand. She’s got a wooden leg, you remember. She must have gone a half a mile before we caught up with her. Old Eileen.”
Another tim
e, Mother got mad at her violin-playing friend, Edna: “We all went out to the ranch in the afternoon and, the deal was, we were all going to ride horses, but I’m not going to ride any goddamn horse! But you know Edna, she thinks she can do anything. She’d had about two gallons of white wine before we even got to the ranch, and I told her it was a dumb thing to do, but of course she got up on the goddamn horse, and then the horse starts to move and Edna falls right off and breaks a couple of ribs and has to have surgery. She’s damn lucky to be alive and I told her that, but she had to spend two weeks in the hospital, and she had to have a transfusion, and she got jaundice and hepatitis, her liver wasn’t in the best shape to begin with. So I guess she won’t do any more drinking for a couple of months …” I can see it. The ramshackle ranch, the leathery old drunks, the lethargic horses, poor old Edna, a decent person, lying on her back with broken bones, while someone trots back to the house to phone for an ambulance.
I remember back to a pretty iffy chapter in my own life as a divorcée, when once again I thought I might ride out from under the constraints of my own life and drive across the country with my daughters in our Volkswagen to live with a handsome black man in a loft on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I would have flown to Mars with a Martian (if I could have taken the kids) to get away from my own life in those days. Our first stop on our trip across the country was Victorville. Mother was fully repelled by me. She usually began to drink at six but today, at four o’clock, she was so drunk she could barely form her words. “You’re ruining your life,” she said. It came out, “Ya rooonin ya laf.”
We decided to go out to the park in Victorville. We poked around on different rides, taking the fresh afternoon air, giving Clara a chance to play, giving depressed Lisa some space, giving Mother a chance to sober up. But it wasn’t going to happen. We all got on a little manually operated merry-go-round, where you sat on metal animals and faced each other and propelled the contraption with your feet. We did that for about four minutes until Mother passed out. She was only about eighteen inches from the green grass of the park, and in a millionth of a second she’d hit that grass, all of her, flat against it. She fell so fast! It was an astonishing sight. Because we all came from the same murky gene pool, we began to snicker.
Drinking was the dead center of my mother’s life at that time, the whole reason she lived. The highest compliment she could pay to anyone was: he/she likes to drink. “You’ll like old Edna. She likes to drink.” The most encompassing apology was its opposite: “Maureen and Louis have been really good to me. They don’t like to drink, but they’re always ready to help out when you need something.”
Every Easter for years and years we’d go with Mother to Las Vegas, spending the night in Victorville, then hopping in the car and making the four-hour desert drive, always stopping halfway at the little town of Baker, where they have two motels, about a dozen trailers, and a restaurant that has the best Bloody Marys on earth. The drive to Vegas would not be too bad. Sometimes it would be just Lisa, Clara, Mother, and me, but after John Espey came into our lives, he was often the driver.
So it is that when my children go to their therapists, they not only have multiple divorce, a history of suicide on all sides of the family, nagging worries about alcoholic or drug-prone genes (although each of them appears to be a one-woman temperance union), but they also have to come to terms with the fact that for eight or nine crucial years during their childhood and adolescence, instead of being taken to church or at the very least an Easter-egg hunt, the children celebrated the appearance of the risen Christ by sitting through a mandatory performance of Spice on Ice, in which topless dancers skated around sadly on a nine-by-twelve rink, because that was the continuous and ongoing show at the Hacienda, on the Vegas strip, where we stayed.
Mother enjoyed the first days of these visits tremendously. As soon as we unpacked and the kids went out to the pool, Mother would grin and pull out her Bible, which didn’t have any pages but held instead a pint of whiskey and two shot glasses. Then we’d prowl out, find the nearest liquor store, stock up on vodka, whiskey, white wine, soft drinks, salted nuts, get on the phone, make some reservations for the bigger shows, go on out to the pool, and get blasted while the girls swam.
Mother played the slots. I think she was too shy to try anything else. Clara hit the second story of Circus Circus just for kids, where you could put fifty cents in a slot and watch a real chicken play the piano. We saw Leslie Uggams in Guys and Dolls, and Liberace, and Juliet Prowse, and a lot of shows I don’t remember. I remember sitting through Bob Newhart wowing the audience while I watched an exit sign with double vision, and tried through the show—without success—to make the two exit signs into one.
The days were like a furnace. As we trooped glumly from one casino to another we got to see all the rest of the Americans who had thought it might be cool to celebrate Easter by coming to Vegas: whole sad enormously fat families lining up at the Hacienda buffet eating withered sausage and watery eggs and sickening sweet waffles with butter and muskmelon that had seen better days. Most of the adults nursed colossal hangovers. Their hands trembled, their faces were puffed and white.
After the first day, Mother would point out our flaws to us: Lisa thought she was God on a rock, Clara might be mentally ill. Why didn’t I get a real job? (Writing didn’t count.) And did John look like he was going to die soon?
The drive home was always a nightmare. We played Geography—Geography, the game where I say Argentina, and you say Aegean, and the next person says Nantucket and the next person says Texas and I say Stockholm and so on. One taxing day, my mother got one A too many from Clara and said, with all her regular malice, “You disgusting little girl,” but Clara rapped right back: “You disgusting old lady!”
And those were our Easters, for years.
There were other vacations: a summer in Catalina, where I went with my divorced friend Joan and her three kids and I and my kids. John flew in, and the weather was beautiful and the beach was only a block away, but Mother came over with some of her friends and drank so much that she pulled up a chair one night when we’d just gotten dinner on the table and plunk! there went her head, facedown in her plate of baked ham. Do you laugh? Do you react with scorn, as a visiting teenager with his own problems did, muttering “She’s drunk,” and turning his head away, in a gesture I’ll remember until I die?
Mother, giving John a Christmas dirty look.
I had verbally, or not verbally, made it clear I wouldn’t bail out on her. That must have meant, in her eyes, that she had a permanent license to behave as badly as she could. And she was a master at this pastime! In Denver, where I was to speak at a writers’ lunch, I asked Mother along. I always did this! I always thought there would be a day when she’d say, “Gosh, I’m proud of you!” In the hotel elevator, we descended to the literary lunch, but two others crowded in, a young man in a tuxedo and a girl in a bouffant bridal dress. Riding down to their wedding.
Mother looked her up and down and asked, “What are you, going to a Halloween party?”
The bride looked as if she’d been shot.
Mother grinned.
So was it the meanness, or was it the drinking, or was it both?
I only knew that every fall I tended to get anxious and ill because it meant that Christmas was coming in two months. And as I tended to get more happy in my own life, Mother upped the ante. Lisa married. Kate asked if she’d ever get invited to “the house of the princess.” Clara took up with a nice guy still working his way through college. Mother asked what was in it for him. She repeatedly said John was going to die soon.
On one of our last holiday outings we decided to fly down to Yucatán for Christmas and come back on New Year’s Day. It was not a pleasant week. For our expensive, festive, New Year’s dinner, six women and the long-suffering John Espey watched dimly as my mother, that ever-feisty Kate, staged four separate walkouts, pushing herself away from the table and storming out onto the street because she was
so displeased with our behavior. By the third or fourth walkout, none of us even looked up from our plates, or our tired talk.
After dinner we wandered the streets of Mérida, looking for a party. Finally we found a decorated bar and headed in. My mother went back to the hotel in a rage. The rest of us stayed and danced, and drank. I talked to Edna and the dear woman who’d told me she was a lesbian. I felt that, without breaking any confidence, since God knew it was obvious, that I could say what I said. I was so drunk I felt as though I spoke from another dimension: “My mother and I can’t stand each other, you know? But we’re both too stubborn to stop trying.”
Against the Christmas lights, backlit, Edna nodded pensively. “You’re right about that,” she said.
And the young woman who would become the object of so much of my mother’s hate tilted her head back. “God, I’m shitfaced,” she said. “Happy New Year.”
—
In 1980, John Espey and I traveled to China for a month, and then to Bali. We went with some trepidation, because both my parents were ill. My father was recovering from a lung-cancer operation. He begged us not to go, but we figured he’d be OK for the time we were gone.
My mother had been very sick for about a year. Whatever she ate, she couldn’t keep down. We’d watch her order “a seafood salad without the shrimp” and a Manhattan with dry vermouth. As always, she picked through the salad until she found what she thought was a shrimp, and then gagged, gagged so much she had to throw up the Manhattan she’d just chugalugged. She’d order another, ignore her salad, and throw up her second Manhattan. “It’s terrible to be so sick,” she’d say. “It’s terrible.”