by Ron Koertge
“I called a few people I know, and in that warmhearted way of drug addicts everywhere, they told me to get lost. So I go out to my car, where I think I’ve got some more phone numbers, and there’s Marcie, working in the yard. She asks me how I’m doing, one thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, I’ve got the Virginia Woolf suite. So I’m set for a little while.” She reaches over and rubs my face. “Now we’ll find your mom and tie up a few loose ends, okay?”
We blow by the Baldwin off-ramp, the one A.J. and I took just a few hours ago when we left the racetrack. I think about her life, all planned out, starting with Paris or New York. How she said we made a good team. That lukewarm kiss in the parking lot.
Colleen and I ride for a while. People check us out, guys, mostly. Alone in their cars with fifty-two payments to go. They’re wearing their nice shirts and ties. They’re on their way to shake somebody’s limp hand. I’ll bet they’re thinking, I wish I was in high school again. I wish I was that guy.
I tell her, “My alleged mother probably isn’t going to be home. You know that, don’t you?”
“So we’ll come back.”
“She could be food shopping or working or out with friends.”
“Did she have friends before? Did she have a job?”
“I don’t remember. Grandma says she had a real-estate license but never sold anything.”
“Relax. We’ll do some recon: find her house, check out her car. If she’s got four or five Mexicans in the trunk, she’s a smuggler.”
“Even if she is home, I can’t just go to the door and say, ‘Hello, I’m your son,’ then throw my one good arm around her and weep.”
“Why not?”
“Colleen, she doesn’t want to see me, not really. If she wanted to see me, she would. We live twenty miles away from each other, okay? Maybe that’s all I want to do today — see her. Just look at her.”
“Fine. So we’ll take a look at her. But don’t forget: you live twenty miles away from each other now. What’s that note say again?”
I open the envelope and read out loud:
Dear Mrs. Bancroft,
Thank you for the money. It cost more to move and get situated than I planned. My new address is on the envelope.
Yours,
Delia Bancroft
Colleen says, “See? She’s getting situated. She might’ve moved to be closer to you.”
“And today’s prize for unbridled optimism goes to the lady in the blue Vans, Colleen Minou.”
Colleen careens across three lanes, exits way too fast, slides around the corner, and finally comes to a stop at a big intersection with a barbecue joint on one corner and a Chevron station across the street.
“You’re the worst driver I’ve ever seen.”
“Ed and I used to have to run from the Mexican mafia.”
“You should be making movies, not me.”
Colleen looks both ways a couple of times. Then lights a cigarette.
I suggest, “Want to ask at the gas station?”
“Look at the Thomas Guide. It’s down there under all those In-N-Out Burger wrappers.”
I find it and pry the sticky pages apart. Colleen’s arm is across the back of my seat, rubbing my shoulder. A.J. could drive me out here. Or Grandma or even Rane, but they couldn’t keep me from just jumping out of the car and running right back the way we came. Colleen knows me. She really knows me.
I tell her, “Looks like left here a couple of blocks and then right on Magnolia.”
“Good work, Magellan. Now let’s go and find your mommy.”
Two blocks and one turn later, we come to Magnolia and then to 111. My mother — how weird are those two words? — lives in a court. Not a trailer court, thank God. Little units, six on a side, fill up a deep lot. Not like the three-story building next door with a hundred apartments that hogs the sun.
One eleven is a little seedy, like in Day of the Locust, the ultimate movie about Hollywood the way it used to be. The light that falls on it looks like weak tea. The kind you might make for a sick person, and then add a piece of toast cut into a triangle.
Colleen peers from across the street. “So if she’s in D, and I can see A from here, she’s in the fourth one up on the left.”
There’s one uncomfortable-looking chair on the tiny porch.
We just sit. Colleen smokes. I take deep breaths and let them out with a whoosh. Finally I say, “If this was a movie and we were staking this place out, she’d open the door and walk straight to her car. They never show the twelve hours the cops sat there drinking coffee.”
Colleen points. “Bingo!”
Somebody comes out of unit D. Somebody in a blouse and skirt. Carrying a purse and one of those little insulated lunch bags.
My heart rate shoots up.
Colleen slaps me on the arm. “Am I gonna have to call the paramedics?”
I shake my head. “Oh, my God. Is that her?”
We watch her walk toward the street, eyes down. Her hair is stringy, still damp from a shower, probably.
I gasp. “She’s kind of fat. She didn’t used to be fat.”
“Yeah, she hasn’t been going to the gym much, that’s for sure. And she’s not smuggling illegal aliens, either. Coyotes make a lot of money.”
She gets into an old Sentra. The blinker comes on, she looks over her shoulder, then pulls away from the curb.
“Driver,” Colleen says to herself, “follow that car.”
We make our way down Azusa Avenue, tailing my mother’s dusty Nissan.
I tell myself over and over: That’s your mother in that car. Your actual mother.
I point. “Wait. Look. She’s slowing down.”
“How can you tell? If she drives any slower, we’ll be parked.”
But she doesn’t stop. She’s just super-cautious. A quarter of a block away, there’s a mom with a four-year-old, standing on the curb and talking into her cell. My mom acts like the kid might dart into the street.
We speed up a whole five miles per hour. Colleen lights another cigarette.
“Why do you smoke so much?” I ask her.
“Oral fixation.” She waggles her eyebrows at me.
“That’d be a lot sexier if you didn’t look like Groucho Marx.”
I glance around. Azusa looks like the kind of place that’s semiclose to places that are actually close to Disneyland or L.A. or the beach. There’s a row of motels like Super 8 and Best Western. In the parking lots, people who travel slightly off season to save money pack up the minivans and yell at their kids.
We pass signs for a country club, a river trail, and the Burro Canyon Shooting Park.
Colleen points. “I think I was out here with Ed once. He wanted me to know how to use a handgun in case things got dicey in the marijuana business.”
“Remember ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire’?”
She glances down. “These are new pants, too.”
“Why do you think my mom picked this place to live?”
“Why does anybody do anything? It’s cheap. That little shack of hers would be called a charming cottage in South Pasadena, and it’d go for thirteen hundred a month. I’ll bet it’s not eight out here in the middle of nowhere.”
I adjust the bucket hat Grandma wants me to wear so I won’t get skin cancer. “So she moves down here from God knows where, finds a cheap place to live, drives twenty-two miles an hour and signals four blocks before she wants to turn. What’s up with her?”
“We’ll trap her in a corner. You cry and yell at her for leaving you on Grandma’s doorstep, and every now and then I’ll ask, ‘And by the way, why do you drive so slow?’”
I look over at Colleen. I put my sick hand on the wheel, right beside hers. “I’m glad you’re here. I couldn’t do this without you.”
“Ah, bullshit. You totally could. It just wouldn’t be as much fun.” Colleen slows to a crawl. “Heads up,” she says. “I think we’ve reached our destination.”
The Sentra turns
into a big parking lot beside a Target store. Shoppers with red carts cross in front of us.
“There’s some smart gals,” Colleen says. “You never know when you’re going to need a hundred rolls of toilet paper.”
When the Sentra oozes all the way to the farthest corner of the lot, we slide in between two SUVs.
“I’ll bet she works here,” Colleen says. “They always want their minimum-wage lackeys to leave the primo spaces for the customers.”
I tell her, “I don’t get it. Mom and Dad were married. She should have gotten half of everything.”
Colleen opens her door. “C’mon, Hopalong. This crafty varmint’s on the move.”
My mother walks as slowly as she drives. She clutches her purse with both hands and stays as close to the wall as she can.
We follow her through the big electric doors, past a bored-looking guard wearing what looks like his big brother’s uniform. Then she disappears through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
“What now?” I ask.
“We wait. In the meantime, we pretend to shop. Try and fit in, okay? Walk behind me like all the other guys and look like your balls are in a vise.”
Nobody looks very happy. Most of the women have three or four kids grabbing at anything, and Dad’s a human calculator wondering what this excursion is going to cost. Spacey-looking tweens text each other as fast as they can.
Colleen links her arm through mine and leads me to a wall of socks, where she pretends to be enthralled with some Hello Kitty knee-highs.
Then she stops abruptly. “Whoa. Look who’s here.”
It’s my mother, in a one-size-fits-none vest. Her brown pants are loose. Black, soft-looking shoes, run down a little like she’s heavier on one side. Pale.
“Was she always like that?” Colleen asks.
“Like what?”
“Invisible.”
I tell Colleen, “Not to me. We’d go places together. Grandma, too.”
“Old laugh-a-minute Granny.” She pulls me behind a rack of dresses with flowers all over them. “What’d your dad do, anyway?”
“Remember when we went to Caltech to see Marcie’s movie? I showed you the library where Dad worked.”
“I thought you guys were rich.”
“Grandma is.”
“And as far as the C.P. goes, you were pretty much screwed from day one, right?”
“If you want to use abstruse medical terminology, yes.”
She leans in and kisses me. “I fuckin’ love you, Ben. You just crack me up.”
My mother disappears through the wide doors marked CHANGING ROOMS. But only for a few seconds. Then she’s back, pushing a cart loaded with all kinds of clothes. Loaded to overflowing. She has to lean to push it, like the coal miners in How Green Was My Valley. Or the seven dwarfs in their diamond mine.
We watch her trudge, take a blue dress off the top of the pile, look at the label, then put it back on a rack with a dozen others just like it. She moves like she’s underwater.
Colleen says, “It looks like Count Dracula’s been stopping by her cottage for snacks. Either that or she’s loaded.”
I don’t mean to, but I take a step back. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Talk to her. The shock might start her heart.”
“What do I say?”
“How about, ‘Remember when you dropped me off at Grandma’s? Well, I’m still waiting for you to pick me up, and, boy, am I thirsty’?”
“I’m serious, Colleen.”
“Okay, okay. Just walk over there and say, ‘I think you’re my mom. Do you remember me? I’m Ben.’”
I retreat some more. “I can’t.”
“Then I’ll do it.”
“NO!”
I’ve got my hand around her wrist and she uncurls my fingers one by one. “Relax. You just try on one of these whimsical prints with a cinch waist and side pockets.”
I watch her walk away. I step in between the long dresses, the ones with the flowers. But they smell like chemicals. Like I’m in a chemical jungle.
Colleen waits until my mother figures out that the white blouse in the cart belongs with the other white blouses. Then Colleen says something. Delia’s hands (I can’t totally think of her as my mother, so I default to what Grandma calls her) reach for each other. Then they disappear into the sleeves of her blouse. But I can see them moving in there. Turning and twisting. Writhing.
Colleen waves me over. Another deep breath, another big whoosh, and I totter toward them.
She doesn’t look up, but one hand comes out tentatively. “Benjamin,” she whispers. “What a coincidence.”
“Yeah,” I croak. “Isn’t it?”
She looks at Colleen. “What brings you to Azusa?”
“Oh, we were just driving around.”
She takes her hand back. Her limp, damp hand. “It’s a lovely place to live.”
Colleen nods. “It looks nice.”
Her face closes down a little. “I need to get back to work. They’re always watching. And there’s always something to do. I have to keep my area shoppable. I have to zone the junior knits.” She points. “And this isn’t the only cart I have to attend to.”
Colleen smiles reassuringly. “Listen. Do you get a break anytime soon? I could use some caffeine. Any chance of sitting down somewhere?”
My mother checks her watch, a Timex with a cracked leather band. “Just let me get someone to keep an eye on my section.”
While she’s gone, Colleen says, “So far, so good, right?”
“Here are my choices: I can either faint or throw up.”
“Door number one. That way I can give you mouth-to-mouth. No way is that going to happen if you hurl.”
We follow Delia toward the cash registers. Past those, I can see a yellow-and-blue room with tables. Grandma would need more than one digestive enzyme to eat here.
My mother’s pants are a little off-kilter. Her vest slants the other way. Her too-big brown socks sag a little.
“What would you kids like?” she asks, sounding like she’s memorized the line.
Colleen helps me out. “We’ll have what you’re having.”
Delia turns and looks at us slyly. “It’s probably not good for us, but it’s delicious.”
I reach for one of the twenty-dollar bills Grandma gives me. “Let me pay, okay?”
She waves it away, “Oh, that’s not necessary, Benjamin.”
“I know, but I’d like to.”
She lets me lay it across her open hand. “Well, all right. I do get the employee discount.”
The girl behind the counter — stud in her nose, blue hair — looks at Colleen and gives up the slightest nod.
My mother says, “You kids should sit down. I can manage.”
Colleen and I find a table without too much mustard on it. I tell her, “I just can’t believe that’s actually my mother.”
“We’re reading this play in Alternative School where this Oedipus guy sleeps with his mom. So what you are going through here is nothin’.”
“Have I told you lately what a great consolation you are in these stressful times?”
She leans into me, flicks her tongue in my ear. “Keep talkin’ like that, big boy, and you might get lucky tonight.” Then she nudges me. “Uh-oh. Despite what she said, I don’t think Mom’s coping all that well.”
I hurry over. Three corn dogs and three cups of 7-Up are too much for one tray.
I get another one and manage to off-load all the drinks. “Now we’ve each got one, okay?”
Relief just makes her face light up. I follow her to the table. Colleen, God bless her, stands up and helps with the flimsy red plates, the ketchup and mustard, the plastic knives and forks.
Delia settles in, worries her napkin till it opens and floats onto her lap. And immediately slips off. She reaches for it, but it’s too far away. I try, but it’s on my left, and that arm is, well, that arm. Colleen simply hands her another one.
My mother looks at
me. Actually, at my partly shriveled arm. “Has that been difficult for you, Benjamin?”
“I manage.”
“You seem quite capable.”
“He’s more than capable,” Colleen says, with a leer.
Delia acts like she’s only heard the content, not the tone. “Well, that’s such good news,” she says. “I’m glad.”
Then she gives all her attention to her corn dog — holding it down with a fork, slowly withdrawing the stick, cutting it into six bite-size pieces.
“These are kosher dogs,” she says, “so we don’t have to worry about a pig’s anus in our lunch.”
Colleen pushes her plate away and reaches for the 7-Up.
I take a deep breath. “So, where were you before you moved to Azusa?”
She chews a long time before she answers, and while she’s chewing, I wonder if she’ll ask how I know she lived somewhere else. If she asks how I know, what do I say? But not much registers with my mother except the basics.
“Seattle,” she says. “I was in Seattle.”
“No way,” Colleen blurts. “Seattle is the fucking suicide capital of the world.”
“It could get gloomy,” Delia says. “Perhaps that’s why my doctor says I needed sunshine. Now I have a comfortable chair on my front porch, and I sit out there all the time.”
My corn dog bulges in the middle like a python who’s just had his supper.
I manage to ask, “What did you do up in Washington?”
“Oh, I worked.”
I really want to know if she left California because I was so much trouble. But I can’t ask. Not today, anyway. Not with her hunched over that awful corn dog.
“Do you like the movies?” Colleen asks. “Ben loves the movies.”
She pauses and looks up. Her eyes are just like mine — light blue and deepset. God, she’s my mother for sure. “I used to,” she says, “but I haven’t been in years.”
I ask, “What kind did you like?”
She moves her fork like a tiny baton. “Where people sang and danced in the streets or around a fountain.”
Colleen puts one arm around my waist and pulls me toward her. It’s such a cool thing for her to do. I can feel her through our clothes: we’re in this together. “This looks like a pretty nice place to work,” she says. “Do you like it?”