Uncle Bob’s fork came down on the edge of his plate with a click.
“It comes of being tested so often when she was little.” My mother spoke directly to Bob. “She’s a good test-taker. She learned how to take a test, is all.” And then, turning to me, as if I wouldn’t have heard the other, “We’re so proud of you, honey.”
“We expected great things,” my father said.
“Expect!” My mother’s smile never faltered; her tone was desperately gay. “We expect great things!” Her eyes went from me to Peter to Janice. “From all of you!”
Aunt Vivi’s mouth was hidden behind her napkin. Uncle Bob stared over the table at a still life on the wall—piles of shiny fruit and one limp pheasant. Breast unmodified, just as God intended. Dead, but then that’s also part of God’s plan.
“Do you remember,” my father said, “how her class spent a rainy recess playing hangman and when it was her turn the word she chose was refulgent? Seven years old. She came home crying because the teacher said she’d cheated by inventing a word.”
(My father had misremembered this; no teacher at my grammar school would have ever said that. What my teacher had said was that she was sure I hadn’t meant to cheat. Her tone generous, her face beatific.)
“I remember Rose’s scores.” Peter whistled appreciatively. “I didn’t know how impressed I should have been. That’s a hard test, or at least I thought so.” Such a sweetheart. But don’t get attached to him; he’s not really part of this story.
• • •
MOM CAME INTO my room on Friday, my last night at home. I was outlining a chapter in my text on medieval economies. This was pure Kabuki—look how hard I’m working! Everyone on holiday but me—until I’d gotten distracted by a cardinal outside the window. He was squabbling with a twig, hankering after something I hadn’t yet figured out. There are no red birds in California, and the state is the poorer for it.
The sound of my mother at the door made my pencil hop to. Mercantilism. Guild monopolies. Thomas More’s Utopia. “Did you know,” I asked her, “that there’s still war in Utopia? And slaves?”
She did not.
She floated about for a bit, straightening the bedding, picking up some of the stones on the dresser, geodes mostly, split open to their crystal innards like Fabergé eggs.
Those rocks are mine. I found them on childhood trips to the quarries or the woods, and I broke them open with hammers or by dropping them onto the driveway from a second-story window, but this isn’t the house I grew up in and this room isn’t my room. We’ve moved three times since I was born, and my parents landed here only after I took off for college. The empty rooms in our old house, my mother said, made her sad. No looking back. Our houses, like our family, grow smaller; each successive one would fit inside the last.
Our first house was outside of town—a large farmhouse with twenty acres of dogwood, sumac, goldenrod, and poison ivy; with frogs and fireflies and a feral cat with moon-colored eyes. I don’t remember the house so well as the barn, and remember the barn less than the creek, and the creek less than an apple tree my brother and sister would climb to get into or out of their bedrooms. I couldn’t climb up, because I couldn’t reach the first branch from the bottom, so about the time I turned four, I went upstairs and climbed down the tree instead. I broke my collarbone and you could have killed yourself, my mother said, which would have been true if I’d fallen from the upstairs. But I made it almost the whole way down, which no one seemed to notice. What have you learned? my father asked, and I didn’t have the words then, but, in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.
About this same time, I made up a friend for myself. I gave her the half of my name I wasn’t using, the Mary part, and various bits of my personality I also didn’t immediately need. We spent a lot of time together, Mary and I, until the day I went off to school and Mother told me Mary couldn’t go. This was alarming. I felt I was being told I mustn’t be myself at school, not my whole self.
Fair warning, as it turned out—kindergarten is all about learning which parts of you are welcome at school and which are not. In kindergarten, to give you one example out of many, you are expected to spend much, much more of the day being quiet than talking, even if what you have to say is more interesting to everyone than anything your teacher is saying.
“Mary can stay here with me,” my mother offered.
Even more alarming and unexpectedly cunning of Mary. My mother didn’t like Mary much and that not-liking was a critical component of Mary’s appeal. Suddenly I saw that Mom’s opinion of Mary could improve, that it could all end with Mom liking Mary better than me. So Mary spent the time when I was at school sleeping in a culvert by our house, charming no one, until one day she simply didn’t come home and, in the family tradition, was never spoken of again.
We left that farmhouse the summer after I turned five. Eventually the town swept over it, carried it away in a tide of development so it’s all culs-de-sac now, with new houses and no fields or barns or orchards. Long before that, we were living in a saltbox by the university, ostensibly so that my father could walk to work. That’s the house I think of when I think of home, though for my brother it’s the earlier one; he pitched a fit when we moved.
The saltbox had a steep roof I was not allowed up on, a small backyard, and a shortage of extra rooms. My bedroom was a girly pink with gingham curtains that came from Sears until one day Grandpa Joe, my father’s father, painted it blue while I was at school, without even asking. When your room’s pink, you don’t sleep a wink. When your room’s blue, you sleep the night through, he told me when I protested, apparently under the misapprehension that I could be silenced with rhyme.
And now we were in this third house, all stone floors, high windows, recessed lights, and glass cabinets—an airy, geometric minimalism, with no bright colors, only oatmeal, sand, and ivory. And still, three years after the move, oddly bare, as if no one planned to be here long.
I recognized my rocks, but not the dresser beneath them, nor the bedspread, which was a quilted velvet-gray, nor the painting on the wall—something murky in blues and black—lilies and swans, or maybe seaweed and fish, or maybe planets and comets. The geodes did not look as if they belonged here and I wondered if they’d been brought out for my visit and would be boxed up as soon as I left. I had a momentary suspicion that the whole thing was an intricate charade. When I left, my parents would go back to their real house, the one with no room for me in it.
Mom sat on the bed and I put down my pencil. Surely there was preliminary, throat-clearing conversation, but I don’t remember. Probably, “It hurts your father when you don’t talk to him. You think he doesn’t notice, but he does.” This is a holiday classic—like It’s a Wonderful Life, we rarely get through the season without it.
Eventually she got to her point. “Dad and I have been talking about my old journals,” she said, “and what I ought to do with them. I still feel they’re sort of private, but your father thinks they should go to a library. Maybe one of those collections that can’t be opened until fifty years after your death, though I hear that libraries don’t really like that. Maybe we could make an exception for family.”
I’d been taken by surprise. My mother was almost, but not quite, talking about things we absolutely, resolutely did not talk about. The past. Heart clicking loudly, I answered by rote. “You should do whatever you want, Mom,” I said. “What Dad wants isn’t relevant.”
She gave me a quick, unhappy look. “I’m not asking for your advice, dear. I’ve decided to give them to you. Your dad is probably right that some library would take them, though I think he remembers them as more scientific than they are.
“Anyway. The choice is yours. Maybe you don’t want them. Maybe you’re still not ready. Toss them if you like, make paper hats. I promise never to ask.”
I struggled to say something to her, something that would acknowledge the gesture witho
ut opening the subject. Even now, even with years of forewarning, I can’t think just how I might have done that. I hope I said something graceful, something generous, but it doesn’t seem likely.
What I remember next is my father joining us in the guest room with a present, a fortune he’d gotten in a cookie months ago and saved in his wallet, because he said it was obviously for me. Don’t forget, you are always on our minds.
There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened. The mist lifts and suddenly there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. I see how, in a family like mine, love doesn’t have to be earned and it can’t be lost. Just for a moment, I see us that way; I see us all. Restored and repaired. Reunited. Refulgent.
Four
TOUCHED AS I WAS, there was nothing I wanted less than my mother’s journals. What’s the point of never talking about the past if you wrote it all down and you know where those pages are?
Mom’s journals were large, the size of sketch pads but thicker, and there were two of them, tied together with old green Christmas ribbon. I had to empty my suitcase and repack, sit on it to zip it closed again.
At some point, perhaps when I changed planes in Chicago, the suitcase waltzed off on its own adventures. I arrived in Sacramento, waited an hour at the luggage carousel, talked for another hour to a bunch of people with clear consciences and bad attitudes. I caught the last bus to Davis, empty-handed.
I felt guilty because I’d owned the journals less than a day and already lost them. I felt happy because just this once, the airlines had used their incompetence for good instead of evil and maybe, through no fault of my own beyond an excessive trust in everyone’s ability to do their job, I’d never see those notebooks again. I felt lucky not to have checked my textbooks.
Mostly I felt tired. The minute I stepped out of the elevator onto my floor, I could hear Joan Osborne’s “One of Us” and the music grew louder the closer I got to my own apartment. This surprised me, because I’d thought Todd (my roommate) wasn’t getting back until Sunday and I thought Todd was standing alone against the world in not liking “One of Us.”
I hoped he wouldn’t want to talk. Last time he’d gone to visit his father, they’d had a long conversation about everything they believed and wanted and were. It had all been so glorious that Todd had gone back downstairs after the good-nights to say how close to his father he now felt. From the doorway, he’d overheard Dad talking to the new wife. “Jeebus,” his dad was saying. “What an eejit. I’ve always wondered if he’s really mine.” If Todd had come home early, it was not for anything small.
I opened the door and Harlow was on my couch. She was wrapped in the crocheted shawl Grandma Fredericka had made for me when I had the measles, and she was drinking one of my diet sodas. She sprang up to turn the music down. Her dark hair was twisted onto her head and had a pencil stuck through it. I could see I gave her quite a start.
• • •
ONCE, at a parent-teacher conference, my kindergarten teacher had said that I had boundary issues. I must learn to keep my hands to myself, she’d said. I remember the mortification of being told this. I’d truly had no idea that other people weren’t to be touched; in fact, I’d thought quite the opposite. But I was always making mistakes like that.
So you’ll have to tell me what the normal reaction to coming home and finding someone you hardly know in your house would be. I was already tired and wired. My response was to gape silently, like a goldfish.
“You scared me!” Harlow said.
More dim-witted gaping.
She waited a moment. “God, I hope you don’t mind?” As if it had only just occurred to her I might. Notes of sincerity, contrition. She began talking faster. “Reg kicked me out because he thinks I have no money and nowhere to go. He thought I’d walk around for a couple of hours and then have to crawl home and beg him to let me back in. He pisses the hell out of me.” Sisterhood! “So I came here. I thought you wouldn’t be back until tomorrow.” Reason. Composure. “Look, I can see you’re tired.” Compassion. “I’ll get right out of your hair.” Commitment.
She was trying so hard to get a read on me, but there was nothing to read. All I felt was exhausted, to the marrow of my heavy bones, to the roots of my stolid hair.
Well, and maybe curious. Just the tiniest bit. “How did you know where I live?” I asked.
“I got it off your police report.”
“How did you get in?”
She pulled the pencil, and her hair dropped silkily to her shoulders. “I gave your apartment manager a pretty face and a sad story. I’m afraid he can’t really be trusted.” Her tone now was one of great concern.
• • •
I MUST HAVE gotten angry while I slept, because that’s how I woke up. The phone was ringing and it was the airline, saying they had my bag and would deliver it in the afternoon. They hoped I’d think of them the next time I flew.
I went to use the toilet and it overflowed. After several futile attempts to flush, I called the apartment manager, embarrassed to have him in my bathroom dealing so openly with my piss, but grateful it was nothing more.
Though he was eager. He came at a run, in a clean shirt rolled to show his upper arms, his plunger brandished like a rapier. He looked about for Harlow, but it was a tiny place, no way to miss her unless she was gone. “Where’s your friend?” he asked. His name was Ezra Metzger, a name of considerable poetry. Obviously, his parents had had hopes.
“Home with her boyfriend.” I was in no mood to soften this news. Besides, I’d been good to Ezra on other occasions. One time, two nondescript men had come to my door and asked questions about him. They said he’d applied for a job in the CIA, which struck me as a terrible idea no matter how you looked at it, and I still gave him the best recommendation I could make up on the spot. “I never see the guy,” I said, “unless he wants to be seen.”
“The boyfriend. She told me about him.” Ezra looked at me. He had a habit of sucking on his teeth so his mustache furled and unfurled. I expect he did that for a while. Then he said, “Bad news there. You shouldn’t have let her go back.”
“You shouldn’t have let her in. Without anyone here? Is that even legal?”
Ezra had told me once that he didn’t think of himself as the manager of the apartment house so much as its beating heart. Life was a jungle, Ezra said, and there were those who’d like to bring him down. A cabal on the third floor. He knew them, but they didn’t know him, didn’t know who the fuck they were dealing with. They’d find out. Ezra saw conspiracies. He lived his life camped out on the grassy knoll.
He also talked a lot about honor. Now I saw his mustache in full anguished quiver; if he could have committed seppuku with the plunger on the spot, he’d have done it. Mere moments later, he saw how he’d done nothing wrong. Anguish became outrage. “You know how many women are killed every year by their boyfriends?” he asked. “Pardon the shit out of me for trying to save your friend’s life.”
We settled on a wintry silence. Fifteen minutes passed before he reeled in a tampon. It wasn’t mine.
I tried to go back to bed, but there were long, dark hairs on my pillowcase and the smell of vanilla cologne on my sheets. I found Pixy Stix straws in the trash and fresh scratches in the gold-specked Formica where she’d cut something without a cutting board. Harlow was not a person who lived lightly on the land. The blueberry yogurt I’d planned for lunch was gone. Todd came slamming in, bad mood walking, made worse by the news that we’d been squatted on.
Todd had a third-generation Irish-American father and a second-generation Japanese-American mother, who hated each other. As a kid, he’d spent summers with his dad, coming home with itemized lists of unexpected expenses his mother was expected to cover. Replacement of ripped Star Wars T-shirt—$17.60. New sh
oelaces—$1.95. It must be so great, Todd used to tell me, having a normal family like you.
Once, he’d dreamed of experimental fusions, that he would be the one to merge folk harps with anime. Now he saw the incommensurability. In his own words: matter and antimatter. The end of the world.
Ever since the Great Eejit Incident, Todd had reached into his Japanese heritage when he needed an insult. Baka (idiot). O-baka-san (honorable idiot). Kisama (jackass). “What kind of kisama does something like that?” he asked now. “Do we have to change the locks? Do you know how fucking much that’s going to cost?” He went to his bedroom to count his CDs and then went out again. I would have left myself, gotten a coffee downtown, but I needed to be home for the suitcase.
No sign of it. At five of five, I called the airline number—800-FUCK-YOU—and was told I had to speak directly to lost luggage at the Sacramento Airport. No one answered in Sacramento, though my call was important to them.
About seven p.m., the phone rang, but it was my mother checking to see I’d gotten home all right. “I know I said I’d never mention it,” she told me. “But I feel so good about giving you those journals. Like a weight’s been lifted. There. That’s the last thing I’ll say about them.”
Todd came back around nine, with a pizza of apology from the Symposium Restaurant. His girlfriend, Kimmy Uchida, joined us and we all ate in front of Married . . . with Children and then the couch got a little busy, since it had been four whole days since Kimmy and Todd last saw each other. I went to my room and read for a while. I think I was reading The Mosquito Coast then. There seemed to be no end to the insane things fathers did to their families.
Five
NEXT MORNING THE PHONE woke me up. It was the airline saying they had my suitcase and would deliver it in the afternoon. Since I had a class, they promised to leave it with my apartment manager.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Page 3