Tempo Change

by Barbara Hall

  My mother hung tight for a while and then she dropped me off at Joss and Mimi’s and went to find my father. I was certain she’d be able to bring him home. She was going to pick him up, the way she picked me up from school. My mother back then was feisty and determined. She had tattoos. Small ones, where you mostly couldn’t see, but this was way before anyone was doing it, let alone girls or mothers. She had short hair and it always changed colors and her eyes were green and had laughter and mischief in them. Back then. Not so much as time went on.

  She didn’t bring him home.

  In fact, he wasn’t even in Bali when she got there. He had moved on. She hadn’t found him. For a long time after that, she didn’t even hear from him.

  It’s hard to talk about the next few years. Her not leaving her bedroom. Us getting kicked out of the house. We went to live with Joss and Mimi, which felt entirely different from me just staying there during the daytime.

  There was so much going on I couldn’t understand. I didn’t even know my mother was drinking in her bedroom and that was why she couldn’t leave it.

  I didn’t know what had happened, either, when she suddenly got sober. Joss and Mimi, turned out, were able to help make things improve. They dragged her to AA meetings and then she started eating again and then she started talking in rhymes and slogans but she was able to leave the house and get a job.

  Finally, when she moved us to Santa Monica, I felt we’d left Los Angeles altogether. Gone was the edgy feel of being in a city, the crazy loud landscape and the odd collection of people. Santa Monica was like a small town, like the one she had come from somewhere back East, and later she said she moved us there because it felt like someplace she could manage. We rented a tiny house a few blocks from Main Street and the ocean. Main Street was exactly what it sounded like, a quaint little stretch of stores and restaurants. Mom worked in a clothes store and then she became a manager. She had pulled it together (not expecting any help from my father). Eventually she opened her own place. It was called Biscuit. This clothing store took all of her time, and she said it was our future.

  She decided to look into sending me to private school because she was worried about me not getting into a good college. She wanted me to have a life with choices. I took tests and scored high enough to become a scholarship kid at LaHa, and that was how my life was shaking out. LaHa wasn’t a great school, Mom had a career but not really, Santa Monica was in Los Angeles but so far from it you could barely get a glimpse of the fancy life. We were on the periphery of everything.

  Now that I think about it, it was probably part of the AA program that made my mother forgive my father and not say anything bad about him. She never said anything about him at all.

  The last really negative thing I heard her say was on Christmas Eve when I was twelve. They had been talking on the phone and he must have made some vague commitment to come back for the holidays and then he’d backed out. She said to me, “That’s just typical of your father. He never wants to have the hard conversation. He just drifts away and depends on everyone else to call it fate.”

  I remember lying in my bed that Christmas Eve, thinking about when I believed in Santa Claus. I mainly believed in him because my father used to put on a big show, making footprints on the carpet and creating reindeer tracks in our front yard and writing little notes from Santa on my presents. I knew he was doing it but part of me still wanted to believe. So I decided that because he, Santa, was famous, he knew my dad, who was also famous. They traveled in the same circles; they understood each other.

  As I was crying in my bed that night, thinking about Santa Fraud (my new name for him), I thought also about the other big headliner of Christmas, which was God. It was all a big act. My parents didn’t believe in God, really, but because they occasionally made references to Him in the early days, I bought it all. Big fat guy who brings presents, big loving Dad in the sky, why not?

  Santa leaves, my father leaves, why wouldn’t God leave?

  My life was an evacuation site.

  Wisdom from Gigi

  I CAN’T TAKE YOU RIGHT INTO MADRIGALS CLASS. WE’RE going to need to stop by the lunchroom first, where I spent an hour complaining to my best friend, Gigi.

  If you think this is going to be a story about how I came to love Madrigals, then keep reading. You haven’t found the toy surprise.

  Gigi was sitting at one of the two long Victorian tables at LaHa, studying for AP biology, even though we were three days into the semester.

  Gigi was feeling a lot of pressure from her parents to become president. I’m not talking about president of the class, either. Though they were hoping for that, too. They were making her run for class office in the spring because they said any career in politics starts early. Bill Clinton, they said, was president of his class all the way through his various schools. Hillary didn’t make it, but she left eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling. Gigi was supposed to make it.

  Gigi didn’t talk back to her parents. They weren’t that kind of parents.

  She was going to be the first female minority president. She was some beautiful exotic mix of Latina, African American, and Native American. No one could be entirely sure, since Gigi was left in the parking lot of a hospital, in a basket with a note attached to her. It said: “I can’t handle it.”

  One of the doctors at the hospital had a friend who had a friend who was Rodney Stone, a well-known real estate magnate. His face was on benches all over the city. His slogan was “Your Dream House Is Just a Stone’s Throw Away.” Rodney had grown sons but he had recently married his third wife, an exercise guru, who was shocked to find she couldn’t have children after all those years of eating broccoli on the elliptical machine. The doctor called Rodney and Mrs. Third Wife, and that’s how Gigi ended up in a mansion in Beverly Hills being groomed for president.

  Gigi’s full name was Georgia Erika Patterson Stone. Her mother, whose name was Erica Patterson, gave her a “k” because it seemed more ethnic. Her mother was as white as the space on my application where clubs and sports should go.

  Gigi had a good attitude. She thought it was awfully big of them to rescue her in the first place and she loved them. She didn’t mind being treated as if she was a project. They did it in a nice way. She knew she saved them as much as they saved her. Besides, it wasn’t as if Gigi didn’t have a heap of her own ambition. Her GPA was higher than mine, and that wasn’t easy to pull off. She wanted it, too. She felt lucky they’d taken her in. Life was good.

  Someone like Gigi belonged in one of the better private schools in L.A., like Marlborough or Harvard Westlake. The reason she wasn’t was that her parents decided she would have a better chance of getting into her first-choice college if she was top of the class in a lesser-known school. I always gave them credit for thinking out of the box. She wasn’t a scholarship kid, like me. She sometimes forgot that I was one and made fun of the others, who stood out a bit more. Most of the guys were on scholarship. We called them all Josh because almost of them were actually named Josh. The Joshes were science geniuses and misfits. There were four cute guys in school, the Non-Joshes, and they were kids who were on their way to military school or detention. LaHa was the last-chance Texaco for them.

  LaHa was formed by some parents whose kids couldn’t get into the better schools, mainly because they’d been sent to all these experimental hippie schools all their lives, and while their self-esteem was through the roof, they had neglected to learn how to read. So LaHa was a lively mix of spoiled model types, surfers, stoners, geeks, discipline cases and brainiacs from diverse backgrounds such as myself. Gigi was a category all her own. I was an oddity because I was the daughter of someone famous, but no one really knew that. My mom totally let that go.

  “Madrigals,” I said. “Do you know who is in Madrigals?”

  “Yes, it’s all the Chelseas, Kelseys, Mercedeses, Cocos and Madisons.”

  This might sound hypocritical coming from a Gigi, but to be fair, I was the only
one who called her that and she pretended to loathe it.

  “The actresses,” I said. “The ones whose parents are going to get them into Juilliard and Carnegie Mellon and Yale.”

  “My parents are going to get me into Yale.”

  “You’re going to get yourself into Yale. They just added fifteen percent more freshmen to the school. And this isn’t about you.”

  “Sorry. Keep going.”

  “There won’t be any guys in Madrigals.”

  “Who cares about guys at LaHa? Besides, isn’t Josh Franklin in there?”

  “No, he started wearing that surgical mask, remember, because he got so afraid of germs? You can’t sing with a surgical mask.”

  “Oh, right. What about Josh Hammer? He’s into music.”

  “Josh Hammer is the editor of the Manifesto and he knows nothing about music. Nobody here is into music, including the Madrigals. It’s just an easy class.”

  “Maybe you’ll like the singing part,” Gigi said.

  “I can’t belong to something called Madrigals. I can’t even sing.”

  To be honest, I had no idea whether I could really sing because I didn’t try. I didn’t know much about my father’s singing. I couldn’t listen to his music because it was upsetting to hear his voice without having a person attached to it. Sometimes I read his lyrics and I liked them. One of my favorite songs went like this:

  There ’s a crack in the door where a little light

  comes in.

  I can feel the hope whispering against the wall.

  But darkness is a cool and undemanding friend

  And sometimes a little light is worse than none

  at all.

  Imagine what that guy was going through when he wrote down those words. He was an artist, no doubt about it. And it was the thing I never wanted to let myself be. That was why I was so academically inclined. And a critic. Anything was safer than art. Who wanted to feel all that pain and then write it down and spread it around?

  My father always said that art was a calling, a thing that found you whether or not you wanted to be found.

  But maybe he had never located a good enough place to hide.

  Or maybe he had finally located it, wherever he was.

  But Madrigals wasn’t like being found. It was more like being forced. I chewed on a nail, thinking about it. Gigi looked up and swatted my hand away from my mouth.

  “Relax. Anybody can sing in a group,” she said. “Just don’t sing loud.”

  Talking to Mom

  THAT EVENING MY MOM KNOCKED ON MY DOOR SO WE COULD have a talk.

  Imagine how excited I was about that.

  I was sitting in my room listening to Fleetwood Mac on my iPod. I liked new music but I studied old music. I was obligated to understand the roots because of my job on the paper. I started going back in time that way because of my favorite contemporary bands. For example, I liked this guy named Jamie Lidell, and he said he grew up listening to Prince and Al Green, so suddenly I was listening to Prince and Al Green, and that led me all the way back to Robert Johnson, and suddenly I realized, it’s all been done before. I mean, no one is going to sing “Love in Vain” better than Robert Johnson, though you have to admire the Rolling Stones for trying.

  I felt it was my job to make my peers think back farther than fifth grade. “Perspective, People” was the name of my column. Some people loved it, some people hated it, and I kept the letters editor in business.

  So I was listening to Fleetwood Mac because I had been hearing Lindsey Buckingham-style guitar in lots of modern songs and I wanted to talk about that. Basically, there wouldn’t be any sensitive guys with acoustic guitars playing today if it weren’t for Lindsey Buckingham. I was thinking of starting my column that way.

  I was trying to wipe off the disaster of being assigned to Madrigals.

  But first my mother with the knock and the talk.

  She stood in the doorway with a fake smile acting like she just wanted to make sure I was studying. The grades concern was always her way in. I think my mom wasn’t all that sure of how to be a mother since day one. I had limited information about her childhood and less about my grandmother. Mom kept all that to herself. She’d been in survival mode since Dad left. When she got sober, it was like she had another kid named Sobriety and Sobriety was a lot more high-maintenance than I was and needed a lot more attention. I was the kid who never got in trouble. I never did get in trouble but I always looked like I might.

  For example, I dyed my hair red. Which wasn’t all that strange except that my hair was red. Now it was growing out and it was two different shades of red. I frosted the tips blond. I had the hair of a troubled kid.

  Mom was all excited when Laurel Hall Academy formed and actively started recruiting smart kids from public schools. Even though I didn’t mind the gigantic Oceanside High School I attended, it was a little too close to the bad part of Venice and there had been some incidents of violence, and drugs were everywhere. Mom trusted me to resist all that, but at the end of the day, I think she lost her nerve because she remembered what she was like at my age. She wasn’t like me. She didn’t just have the hair of a troubled kid. She was one.

  I had memories of my mom being kind of artsy and loose and funny when I was young. Later she told me the word for that was “drunk.” Now that she was in the program, she was more solid, but it was like that solidness had taken over everything and she didn’t have a past that she owned. She didn’t admit, even to herself, that there had been some good times when Dad was around.

  Now what she was, was reliable. She worked all the time. Her idea of socializing was meeting some of her AA friends at the Fig Tree on the beach for endless pots of tea. They talked about other AA members and people they might have to intervene on and all that. She was constantly helping. When she wasn’t helping she was talking about the clothes at Biscuit, the inventory, the sales figures, the money, the money, the money. She worried about it all the time. Not to me but on the phone with her sponsor.

  Talking about the Money was a way of talking about Dad. He had left us without any to speak of. It’s not that we were ever rich, she explained to me. Even when Dad was making money he didn’t know how to handle it and somehow it just disappeared. So Mom knew a thing or two about how to live paycheck to paycheck. She had bought our tiny house with some savings he had freely given over to her when he walked out. He sent us money sporadically—big and small checks coming at random times, like Christmas out of nowhere.

  Not having money was not a thing I worried much about, even at LaHa. In fact, at LaHa I kind of wore it like a badge. My father was always a little proud of his financial difficulties. In fact, sometimes he admitted that the money was what drove him away from his calling. He remembered a time when making music had nothing to do with making money. And when the checks rolled in, he felt it was a kind of betrayal.

  In my research for the column, I once read that the money was what did in Kurt Cobain (of Nirvana fame). He couldn’t reconcile the popularity with the purity of the art. And so the shotgun to the head. Reinforcing my belief that being an artist made it nearly impossible to be anything else, including, sometimes, alive.

  But back to my mother in the doorway.

  “Did you eat anything?” she asked.

  It was always what she asked when she came into my room. It was as if someone had given her a manual that told her what questions to ask her teenager.

  “No.”

  “Blanche, you have to eat.”

  “I ate at school. I had yogurt on the bus. I don’t have anorexia. My grades are fine.”

  “I know that.”

  “I don’t smoke, drink or do drugs or have sex.”

  “Is that funny to you?”

  “No, Mom. Nothing much is funny to me.”

  “Well, I don’t want you to be that way.”

  “What way do you want me to be?”

  “Happy, Blanche.”

  “I’m fine.”

 
; “I know, I know, everything is fine with you.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  The question was a mistake. It gave her an opening to come all the way into the room and sit on my bed. She was wearing a tie-dyed tank and a denim skirt and flip-flops and lots of jewelry from head to toe. She was tanned. Her hair was a shade darker than mine naturally was, and French New Wave short while mine was retro-hippie long, and she didn’t wear makeup. She knew exactly who she was all the time, even if she didn’t know what she was doing. When she didn’t know what she was doing, that was who she was—a person who didn’t know what she was doing. Which is to say my mother had forgotten how to be fake, if she’d ever known. Being honest was a very big part of the program. She was committed to this.

  This is what I knew. She started out in L.A. as a girl fresh off the bus from a New England town she didn’t like to talk about. She came to L.A. to be famous even though she didn’t know what she’d do to become famous. She painted some and modeled some and acted some. But mostly she went to parties. At a concert at the Troubadour she met my dad, who was on his way to being famous. They got married. Mainly because of me. While Dad was on his way to being famous, she worked in a lot of crazy jobs, from yoga and meditation teacher to massage therapist to exotic dancer—something she still didn’t like to discuss, like the small town in New England. Since my mother had gotten sober and serious about living, she didn’t want to think about all the time she’d spent wandering.

  I knew not to ask about her family. I knew even less about my father’s early life. Their parents were either dead or not talking to them. They only had each other, she told me. That was a thing they had in common. Being all alone in the world. Until they found each other.