At some point therein, after having visited every continent that isn’t primarily inhabited by penguins, I realized that this was my favorite place in the world. It didn’t hit me the first time I saw Ashland. Or the second. It happened slowly, until one day I found myself staring at the last traces of sunlight on the surrounding hills and realized there was literally no place else I’d rather be.
Funny how people and places can creep up on you like that, until suddenly you can’t live without them.
This is not to say that Ashland is perfect. If love comes from knowing something really, really well, then it comes from knowing all its shortcomings, too.
Here is a brief list of Ashland’s:
• It has only one doughnut shop, which is only open until 2:30 p.m. on most days and is closed all day Sunday, which I’m sure you’ll agree is total bullshit.
• I once saw a guy let his dog drink directly from a public water fountain.
• The place is overrun with deer and septuagenarians. It’s like Cocoon meets Bambi, which sounds innocuous but in reality is rather terrifying. Also, a lot of them get really angry when you update Shakespeare even the teeniest bit. (The old people, I mean. I have no idea how the deer feel about it.)
• Based on a random sampling, at least half of the hotel proprietors in town are assholes.
But here’s the thing: none of that really matters to me. After enough visits, I’ve come to know Ashland’s faults and virtues as well as I know my own husband’s, and I know I can live with almost all of them. I see them both for what they really are—imperfect, beautiful, and mine.
It didn’t happen overnight. It happened slowly, after numerous visits and the creation of countless memories, mostly good and sometimes bad. Some people understand my affinity for it; others don’t. I figure that’s okay—if Rand is the only person on the planet who understands why I feel the way I feel, that’s enough. You love what you love, and you take the good with the bad.
It is simply my favorite place in the world. And as with him, when I finally realized it, I didn’t have a single doubt.
3
THE CONTENTS OF MY MOTHER’S CARRY-ON LOOK LIKE EVIDENCE FROM A PRISON RIOT
I’VE HEARD IT SAID THAT we do not simply marry our spouses—we marry their families, too. I often bring this up to Rand, just so it is abundantly clear that he willfully walked into all this. But with the exception of the pickax, now part of family lore, he never seems to mind all that much. He is often kinder and more patient and simply better to my family than I am. I maintain that it’s because none of them have ever given him a mullet.
He puts up with my older brothers, my curmudgeonly father, my doting aunts, and my unfiltered uncles. He puts up with a cadre of swarthy cousins and their adorable, sticky progeny (the latter’s collective favorite pastime—jamming their fingers into the mucus membranes of Rand’s face). He puts up with that drunk guy who keeps showing up at family events uninvited. He puts up with me.
But most significantly, he puts up with my mother. This is no small feat. She is a destroyer of worlds and logic and the occasional plate.
I have a distinct memory of her chaperoning a field trip when I was five or six. I really needed to pee and virulently refused to follow her into a bathroom because I thought it was a broom closet. Because my mother suggesting I pee in a closet was not outside the realm of possibility. I was shocked when there was actually a toilet for me to use. When I was ten, she led a protest at Universal Studios because too many of the rides were broken, and secured a refund on admission for us and two dozen other people (after which we were immediately escorted out of the park). She yelled at the first boy who ever broke my heart and at my driver’s ed instructor when he made me cry. She broke up fights. She started wars. She inadvertently taught me way too many Italian cuss words, an accusation she vehemently denies.
She breaks every rule and she bucks every damn trend, except those that include leopard print. I can’t even do a decent imitation of her accent, despite having heard it nearly every day, either in person, on the phone, or in my echoic memory for the last three decades or so—reminding me to triple-check that my front door is locked so I won’t be kidnapped.
Her pattern of speech is an archaeological blueprint—decipher it, and you can loosely trace the path of her life. A hybrid of an Italian accent (where she was born) mixed with an English one (where she spent many formative years), softened by several decades in the United States (which has given it—and this is truly baffling—a sort of Valley Girl lilt). The best approximation I can come up with is Alicia Silverstone from Clueless, if the film had been set in a Turkish prison.
She sounds rather elegant and charming provided you don’t pay too much attention to what she’s actually saying, which usually has to do with aliens or governmental cover-ups about the existence of said aliens, punctuated every now and then with a toss of her hair and a flippant “Well, you know, what-ever.”
She raised me and my brother Edward bilingually—we grew up speaking Italian at home and with my grandparents. It became the language of curses and secrets and scolding—anything we didn’t want someone to overhear was discussed in Italian.
And yet, despite being able to communicate with my mother in two languages, I rarely know what she’s talking about and consistently have trouble understanding the logic—such as it is—behind her actions. It is easier to predict the flight path of a moth than to know what my mom is going to do next. She is Loki; she is Eris; she is the avatar for the god of lost socks and the personification of that feeling you get when you are about to pay for groceries and realize you don’t have your wallet.
I rebelled in the only way I saw fit: I was, despite a predisposition to swearing like a (bilingual!) sailor in my preschool years, a good, reliable kid. It wasn’t that my mother’s way wasn’t appealing—fun and carefree and excitingly dramatic, it was sometimes too much so. Like having a beautiful wild mare majestically destroy your bathroom.
I soon recognized my own capacity for chaos, and one of the few things that kept it in check was that the role had already been taken.
The position of Beautiful Chaotic Disaster Vixen has been filled. May we recommend something else? Like Responsible Fed-Up Daughter?
I did my homework and occasionally the homework of my friends. I obeyed rules to a fault. I never questioned authority. Even to this day, I plan and organize and make elaborate emergency protocols. Living in the Pacific Northwest, my earthquake survival kit is incredibly well-appointed, except for when I get stoned and eat all the rations. But I almost always immediately replace them.
I spent long hours scrutinizing her behaviors like a biologist studying another species. I know that this isn’t unique to us. Most people I know are bewildered by their parents, and I suspect that’s the whole point. They raise us, they feed us, and they do illogical and strange things that confuse us, so that when we go out into the world and encounter illogical and strange things, we aren’t scared. If anything, we feel right at home.
This is how I’ve come to explain her behavior—as simply preparing me for whatever life threw at me. Absent of this justification, most of her actions become just inscrutable. Or felonious. Or both. I’d like to say that I patently disagree with everything she’s ever done, but then she goes and yells at Rick Steves in person for what she perceives as an unfair bias against southern Italy, and I find myself snickering with delight. I’ve spent years trying to anticipate her actions so I could somehow be ready for them. So I’d be ready for anything.
It was fruitless, but know that I tried. I really did.
I tried to warn Rand. During the first year of our relationship, we took our first cross-country trip together. In the weeks before, I had attempted to explain what traveling with my mom was like—that her mere presence on a trip made the Punic Wars seem like not that big a deal. We were headed down to Florida with my mother to visit family for Christmas. My motivations were simple: I was going to arguably the worst
state in the union during the holiday season because of love and also guilt. Rand, I can only assume, was going out some sort of Victorian self-flagellation.
Rand booked the tickets for us; we got Mom an aisle seat, which she prefers. I casually suggested that we also book her on a different departing flight. I may have added a little laugh at the end of it, which he mistook for me joking, and not a failed suppression of my own hysteria.
Don’t get me wrong: my mother is a lovely person, and in many ways, she’s remarkably unfussy and easy to please, especially when it comes to travel. She’s willing to sleep on the floor and she’ll eat anything, be it decorative soaps (“I thought they were chocolate”) or canned meat. But she is not predictable. She is as subtle and unobtrusive and law-abiding as her homeland, which is to say, not at all.
She once packed for my cousin’s wedding by doing an entire load of laundry and dumping all of it into her bag. It consisted mostly of lingerie. Whereas I once had a meltdown of unreasonable proportions when I left for a trip and realized I’d forgotten my usual dental floss and had to rely on the backup floss I keep in my purse.
Mom tries to leave the house in a negligee, so I carry backup floss. (Rally the psych majors! I am the case study they dream of.)
Her influence on my life has been that of an exquisite tornado: she tears through a room noisily, a whirlwind of anxious affection, leaving a path of destruction and lipstick marks in her wake. She creates chaos out of order, but she can also do the opposite: place her in the middle of a disaster and she will calmly set things right. She can’t come over to dinner without bringing two pounds of food with her and insisting on doing all the dishes afterward, breaking only one or two glasses in the process.
She’s fun. And interesting. She’d make a great travel partner were it not for the fact that you’d never reach your destination, because she’s gotten you locked up in some prison where you get a body cavity search in lieu of due process.
I tried to express this to Rand, and he gently dismissed my worries.
He found my mother entertaining and mostly harmless. He’d met Melba, the mannequin she kept in her home. The first time Rand was over at my mom’s house, she insisted on introducing him to the life-size plaster figure, a relic from some 1950s department store, missing two hands. My mother proceeded to have an animated, one-sided conversation with Melba while my future husband nodded mutely. This was three short weeks into our relationship; he could have run. He had his chance.
In hindsight, we should have paid attention to the fact that the person who had known my mother for more than two decades and had emerged from her womb was in a panic, and the guy who had known her for less than a year was not.
“It will be fine,” he said. “You just need to relax.”
I did precisely the opposite, but more quietly than I had been, which I felt was a good compromise. By the time we reached the airport on the day of our departure, I was by all outward appearances fine, save for a twitch underneath my left eye that began firing then and has continued ever since.
If you have managed to avoid the airport during the holidays, congratulations. I would love to meet in order to learn your secrets and also to slap you, Joan Collins–style, out of jealousy. The rest of us know well that had Dante ever flown cross-country in late December, The Inferno would have had a tenth circle of hell.
It was a week or so before Christmas and fifteen months after 9/11. The United Airlines check-in desk had been taken over by feral children. At the other kiosks, agents were working tirelessly to send checked baggage to destinations they picked at random. Everyone in line at JetBlue was openly weeping.
And we were about to go through a heightened security screening with my mother.
“Mom,” I said, as we approached the checkpoint, “no jokes.”
“Hmm?…”
“No jokes, okay? Don’t say anything inappropriate.”
“Of course not.”
“I’m serious. No cracks about”—here I lowered my voice—“terrorism or plane crashes or anything like that.”
My mom nodded, but I pressed on for the next few minutes, outlining in a hushed whisper all the potentially disastrous things I didn’t want her to say.
“You know,” she finally said, turning to look at me, “this is really offensive. I’m not stupid.”
This is a skill of my mother’s—to act reasonable for just long enough to make you second-guess yourself. Despite having more than twenty years of experience on my side, I quickly backpedaled and apologized.
This was, after all, a woman who had immigrated to America while I was in utero and my brother was three. Just a few years earlier, she’d married my father and moved to Germany without speaking the language, traveling alone to Italy and back by train, with my brother, then a baby, asleep in her arms. By the time I knew her, she spoke three languages and had lived in four radically different countries.
She was even visible in my first passport photo: she’s holding a six-month-old me high over her head, her hands visible on either side of me. I am slumping in them like a lump of uncooked dough, squishy and hairless. I can’t imagine how this was an acceptable image for an official federal document, but I suspect that was just how things went in the hedonistic world of the 1980s. People were doing lots of cocaine and wearing shoulder pads, and even the Ghostbusters were smoking. In light of this, having someone else’s hands in your passport photo seems perfectly reasonable.
Despite her quirks and erratic behavior, she clearly knew how to travel and through it had acquired a unique kind of badassery found almost exclusively in immigrants. The sort of toughness that comes from jumping headfirst into a foreign country and a foreign culture and a foreign language and saying, “I got this.”
I had to start giving her more credit, I resolved. Especially when it came to travel.
I was about thirty seconds into my resolution, waiting in line for the metal detector, when I heard her yelling behind me.
“HELP ME.”
I turned around. My mother was crouched on the ground, frantically clawing at her neck.
“What are you doing?”
“I HAVE TO TAKE OFF MY JEWELRY.”
“Why didn’t you do that before?”
“JUST HELP ME.”
Here is a fascinating fact about my mother: for security purposes, she feels that leaving her valuables at home is unsafe. And so on any given trip she’ll wear roughly three dozen individual pieces of jewelry. This one was no different. She looked like a walking homage to Liberace and cubic zirconia.
“Christ, mom, why are you wearing so many necklaces?”
“JUST HELP ME.”
She flipped her mass of hair forward, and I looked at the back of her neck. It was a tangle of a half dozen chains of varying sizes, woven through with long strands of her hair. I began fumbling at the many clasps (all impossibly tiny, and some were attached to the ends of other necklaces, just to make things interesting).
The task was made slightly more difficult by the fact that my mother was frantically squirming as she pried her rings off, while a massive rush of holiday travelers tried to get past us. I had most definitely lost sight of my carry-on, which I was fairly certain had been carted away and detonated in the name of national security.
As I took inventory of the contents of my lost bag, I slowly unraveled my mother from her cocoon of jewelry. When she was finally free from her chains, she bounded off for parts unknown like a bunny released from a trap.
I took a deep breath, removed my necklace and watch, and placed my bag on the conveyor belt. The TSA agent opposite me, in his forties and gray-templed, was looking intently over my shoulder.
“Is… is that your momma?” he asked in a faint drawl, still staring past me.
I turned around. Mom had set off a metal detector and was now giggling through a pat-down.
“Yes,” I said, with a heavy sign of resignation. “That would be she.”
“You… you tell your momm
a she’s got it going on.”
Now, I realize how improbable all this sounds, because I’ve neglected to provide you with one key piece of information: my mother is, was, and (if trends continue) will likely always be a bit of a knockout.
I can say this without any risk of vanity: we look nothing alike. I got my father’s Eastern European features: a nose large enough to require that I have sense of humor, a perpetually pissed-off expression, and a slight but proud mustache.
I am shaped like a sturdy, asymmetrical potato. Built to endure a harsh winter, appealing to anyone who has survived famine.
But Mom looks remarkably like Monica Vitti, an Italian actress who, based on my limited research, spent the better part of the 1960s looking sultry and sad across Italy while eating gelato. Big eyes, full lips, killer cheekbones. Naturally thin with those weird, long muscles that I have spent countless fruitless hours in Pilates class trying to get. And pretty much all of it is fucking recessive.
I remember a dozen or so moments in my childhood when some poor, hapless admirer would try the cringe-worthy tactic of asking me what my mother’s name was as I stood there, holding her hand.
“Mom,” I usually replied, exasperated the way only children can be—when you’ve been on the planet for only a few years and someone is wasting a serious percentage of your life. “Her name is Mom.”
The point is: this agent’s reaction wasn’t all that new or surprising.
Rand and I passed through the metal detector, and I stood, waiting for my mother.
Another agent, blond, handsome, thirtyish, pointed to my mother’s purse.
“Ma’am, is this yours?”
All Over the Place Page 4