by Kari Lizer
After a few moments of this, Brad comes back out and discovers her, wailing like a wounded animal on the ground.
BRAD (CONT’D)
Honey?
He quickly crosses to her.
BRAD (CONT’D)
Honey? Amy? What happened? Did you fall down?
AMY
(SCREAMING) I did everything for that fucking ingrate, and now he’s leaving me! He’ll die without me! (SOBBING HARDER) I’ll die without him.
Brad crouches down to her, wildly embarrassed by the scene.
BRAD
(WEAKLY) He’s coming home for Thanksgiving. (THEN) Let’s get you up.
Amy makes no move to get up or stop crying. Brad desperately tries to get her to her feet. He grabs Amy under her arms and tries to lift. She’s limp and uncooperative. He tries to go at it from another angle, attempting to scoop her up, but he can’t get a handle on her limbs. It’s a mess.
INT. RENTAL CAR—A SHORT TIME LATER
Brad and Amy have made it to their rental car in the dorm parking lot. Brad sits in the driver’s seat, Amy next to him, staring blindly ahead, drinking beer out of a can. The crying has subsided, but every once in a while, a little hiccup/sob escapes.
BRAD
That was nice of that kid to give you a beer.
AMY
I’m done, Brad. Nobody needs me anymore. I wish I belonged to that tribe that takes their old women and leaves them on rocks to die.
BRAD
What?
AMY
Yeah. I read it in a book.
BRAD
By book you mean Huffington Post?
AMY
When the women can’t have babies anymore and their bones get too brittle to carry firewood, they set them out on rocks and leave them to die.
BRAD
Where?
AMY
On rocks.
BRAD
Where are the rocks?
AMY
I don’t remember.
BRAD
But not in America?
AMY
I don’t know.
BRAD
You’re saying this is happening currently or a long time ago?
AMY
I don’t know.
BRAD
Why can’t you ever finish an article? They’re like two paragraphs long.
AMY
(HOPELESS) I don’t know.
Brad reaches out and carefully touches Amy’s shoulder.
BRAD
We’re going to get through this.
Amy looks at him for a beat as if she doesn’t know how to break it to him.
AMY
You know, Brad, no offense, but we’re not going through it. It’s different for me.
BRAD
How, Amy? How is it different for you?
AMY
You have a job. Zach was my job.
BRAD
Yeah, I have a job. I’m a publishing rep, trying to sell books to bookstores. Guess what doesn’t exist anymore. Books. And bookstores. It’s like trying to sell record players to dinosaurs.
AMY
(COMPLETELY IGNORING HIM) I did every goddamn thing for that kid. He’s average. At best. And I pushed his below-average ass like a boulder up a hill for eighteen years. I was room parent and team mom and orthodontist appointment maker and barf cleaner-upper, and what do I get?
BRAD
You get a great kid who’s healthy and happy and going to college.
AMY
Big deal.
BRAD
What do you want?
AMY
A little goddamn acknowledgment that I sacrificed the best years of my life so that he can repay me by leaving me in the dust.
BRAD
He appreciates you.
AMY
No. He doesn’t. He barely tolerates me. He couldn’t wait to get away from me. In fact, if you and I were trapped in a burning building and he could only save one of us, guess who it would be.
BRAD
(HAPPY) Me?
AMY
That’s right. Mr. “See you when I see you” fun parent, “drink responsibly” dad. He’s an ungrateful, spoiled brat.
BRAD
Then why are you going to miss him?
AMY
Because he’s my soul mate!
That hangs in the air between them. Amy offers Brad a sip of her beer. He takes it.
END OF ACT ONE
The thirty-year-old HBO executive didn’t get it. He said, “Why is the mom so upset? The kid’s eighteen. Of course he’s leaving home. Can she really be surprised?”
To which I replied, “Ask your mother.”
The answer, Campbell Hall parents of the class of 2017, is yes. It’s a surprise. Even though everything you have done up until this point is in preparation for their eventual departure—the tutors, the college tours, the nagging, the tears, the speech therapists, the educational therapists, the marriage counselors, the extracurricular activities that will look good on an application, the community service, the threats, the bribes, the struggle—all leading to this moment. And still, I thought they were bluffing. So the only wisdom I can offer is this: try so hard to be happy that they’re happy, even when it makes you sad. We’ll call that love.
Empty Nest
In the past two weeks, several people have asked if I’m okay.
“Why?” I ask.
“Well, you’re talking about your chickens a lot. You’re kind of obsessed with them. Doing all right with the twins off at school?”
“What? Yes. Of course. I’m fine. Just a little trouble at the house.”
My twins had left for college. And, yes, when two of your three children leave at once, it’s a bit of a shock, but I was dealing with an actual crisis at home, a chicken crisis. The safety of my backyard flock had been threatened. Even so, I wouldn’t say I was obsessed. I just had to handle it. A hawk had suddenly discovered my free-ranging ladies and came swooping down one day, sinking his talons into poor Hen Solo’s feathered backside. Fortunately, Hen Solo is a hefty girl, and the hawk couldn’t lift her more than a few inches before she dropped back to the ground with only flesh wounds, but the girls were freaked. Especially Princess Layer and Chew Bak Bak, who immediately stopped laying eggs and took to hiding under the bushes during daylight hours, clucking in worry. The chickens count on me to protect them. I’ve looked out for them every day of their lives from the first day they hatched, and I wasn’t going to stop now when they really needed me. Something had to be done.
I did a little internet research and learned that once hawks have discovered your flock, it is nearly impossible to dissuade them from attacking again, and there are very few ways of handling the problem other than locking away your hens in a predator-proof enclosure.
My chickens had lived carefree in my backyard their whole lives, and it pained me to think of caging them up, but birds of prey are federally protected, so even throwing a rock at that nasty hawk was a $12,000 fine. Not that I would harm even an evil bully bird anyway… but this is where I started getting a little consumed, maybe. I was determined that my hens would remain free. So first I built a scarecrow. Unfortunately, there was nothing scary about her. She was wearing my overalls from high school, a nice linen tunic shirt from the Sundance catalog, gardening gloves, and a sunbonnet. I spent more time putting her outfit together than I did dressing myself in the morning. She looked like Diane Lane in Under the Tuscan Sun. The hawk planted himself in my pine tree to watch my nonsense. My scarecrow did nothing to shake his confidence. Next I bought a fake owl and falcon. I read that in order to make this deterrent effective, you had to move them around the yard so the hawk is fooled into thinking they’re real competitors because hawks don’t like competition. Who does? I went out a dozen times a day and moved the fake birds to different locations, making what I thought were very convincing owl and falcon noises in the process. I put them on trees and in fences. I even climbed up a ladder a
nd put the fake falcon on the roof. When I climbed down the ladder, I looked out at the yard and saw the hawk, in the pine tree, still watching me. He flew out of the tree and did a low flyover over the pool—a total dick move, as if to say, “This is what a real bird looks like, asshole.”
After a week, the hawk got even more brazen. He would be waiting in the walnut tree next to the coop when I went out in the morning to turn the girls out into the yard.
He wasn’t giving up, and I didn’t see any way out of it: for their own safety, I was going to have to lock up the chickens. So I called Paco.
Paco had done a few small carpentry jobs for me around the house and had always impressed me with his skill and neatness. I asked if he thought he could handle a chicken enclosure. He said he could. I hated that my girls were going in a cage. I hated that my beautiful backyard was going to have a big chicken jail plopped right in the middle of it. The hawk had ruined everything. I didn’t entirely trust Paco’s aesthetic sensibilities, so I spent a long time overexplaining how much my backyard meant to me and how depressed I would be if the chicken enclosure was some big, ugly thing ruining my bucolic retreat I so carefully cultivated, that it was really the only thing that made city living tolerable for me. I showed Paco pictures of charming and attractive coops culled from Pinterest to drive the point home that I really needed this coop to be cute. About halfway through my explanation of how seriously awful this would be for me if we couldn’t get this right, I realized how shallow I must sound to Paco: the obnoxious white lady bumming that her organically fed poultry wouldn’t be able to lounge by the pool anymore while he probably has to worry about ICE breaking down his door to take Uncle Francisco back to Mexico for a traffic ticket he got in 1994. Shit. I wanted Paco to understand that I’m not the obnoxious white lady. I hate white people too! But I’m having a hard time. My kids have gone away, the hawk has ruined the tranquility in my backyard, and I just need a cute coop. Now Paco thinks I’m an asshole. I hate the hawk.
When Paco presented me with his design for the chicken enclosure, I was stunned. His drawing was detailed and professional, perfectly to scale.
He had incorporated everything I’d babbled to him into the design and presented me with a perfectly drawn chicken dream house—as good as any I’d seen from an architect. Paco was going to make everything okay. Did I mention that Paco was handsome?
Once he started building, it only got better. He revealed himself to be a true artisan. The angles of the pergola that would be the outdoor living space echoed the angles of the persimmon tree it perfectly lined up next to. The coop itself was situated on the property in such a way that it looked as if it had been part of the original concept. Not a chicken man himself, Paco nonetheless considered the chickens’ needs when he designed the ramp that led to their coop, understanding that when the girls are heavy with eggs, a long uphill climb can be uncomfortable, so having the nesting boxes just inside the door with the easiest access possible is best. When thinking about the seasons, he gave the ladies several eaves under which to find shelter from rain or intense sun. He thought it would be more aesthetically pleasing if the coop mirrored the architectural design of the main house, like a guesthouse, so he trimmed the windows and framed the doors in the same style and matching paint. Paco was building me a masterpiece. A chicken mansion that not only kept my girls safe but made me want to spend even more time in my backyard than before. You know why? Because Paco cared about me. He listened to me. He understood my needs. I was in love with Paco. But Paco could never love me because I wasn’t good enough for him. How could Paco ever respect me? I get paid money to write jokes. I can’t actually do anything. I can’t draw anything. I can’t build anything. I can’t even work outside because my hormone replacement cream makes me overly sensitive to the sun. Paco must think I’m worthless.
The impossibility of our love became even more apparent when the gardeners and my dog walker, Elizabeth, gathered around to admire the chicken mansion and say in all seriousness, “That is much nicer than my apartment.” I said it too. Just because I wanted to fit in, but for me it wasn’t true. My house is still nicer than the chicken coop.
Paco worked fast, faster than I wanted him to, and by the end of the week, he was nearly done. On Saturday afternoon, I had to go to a fancy friend’s house for a play reading. I promised I would come, but I really didn’t want to leave my backyard and Paco because I could tell our time was growing short. I loved my friend, and she loved me, but I was so much more comfortable talking chickens and tacos with Paco than standing in Santa Monica in my friend’s perfect house, trying to figure out how I was supposed to attack this buffet with its mini kale salads in mini glass cups with mini silver spoons, and hold on to my wineglass so the overzealous busperson wouldn’t sweep it away while at the same time balancing a compostable bamboo cheese plate—I would have to have five hands. Whenever someone asked what was going on with me, I would, of course, tell them about the chicken mansion. They’d laugh, realize I wasn’t kidding, then drift away, leaving me to balance my kale cup, wine, and cheese alone. I didn’t belong in this world. I belonged with Paco. If I spoke better Spanish, I would have told him, “I’m not what I seem, Paco. I am much more like you than I am like me.”
But I knew that if it sounded that bad in English, it probably really wouldn’t come off well in my broken Spanish. When I got back home, Paco was gone, but he’d left me a note—well, not a note, a bill.
The chicken mansion was done, and so was my time with Paco.
All of the chickens were really happy except for Teri Hatcher, which was not surprising. She’d been disgruntled since the day she was laid. The first couple of days, I kept a list in the kitchen of things I was going to call Paco to come back and fix. Teensy little complaints, excuses to bring him back to me: he left the latch off one of the gates, the stickers on the windows, a couple of his paint buckets in the garage… all things I could easily handle myself, but I didn’t want to. I wanted Paco to do them because Paco would do them perfectly.
The last time I saw Paco, he came back to get paid. He wasn’t wearing his work clothes. He had on khakis and a button-down shirt. He looked beautiful. I told him I loved the chicken mansion so much I couldn’t even stand it. I was going to take pictures of it and make him a photo album. I told him he could definitely get a lot of work in places like the Palisades making coops for obnoxious rich white ladies who fancied themselves urban chicken farmers—not real ones like me. We laughed; it was bittersweet. I told him I’d hook him up. I’d be his agent.
He told me, “You work too hard.”
I said, “Me? I don’t do anything. You’re the one.”
Then he said, “You’re a good mom.”
I said, “How do you know? My kids are all gone.”
He said he could tell by the way I took care of my chickens. I, of course, burst into tears. That would have been the perfect time for Paco to kiss me. He didn’t. He looked super embarrassed. I think he was going to church with his wife. I gave him his check, then went into the house, where my dog walker, Elizabeth, hugged me because she’s used to me. And there was no one else to do it.
When it was getting dark, I was closing up the chickens for the night and wondering if I was actually losing my mind. Paco. The chickens. My empty nest.
Of course, it all makes a certain amount of sense that I feel this intense attachment to my chicks right now. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to protect them. And the other ones are so far away, and I can’t keep them safe from the hawks.
Denial
My parents have lost two of their four children, and I like to say, “One more to go, and I’ll be the favorite.” Saying things like that is the reason I’m so unpopular in my own family. Truth is not appreciated. My parents live in a state of denial, in the neighborhood of unfelt feelings, on a dead-end street of cheap scotch and jug Chablis. They don’t want to stop tanning, so skin cancer is a myth. They have a “system” in Vegas. And a drinking hiatus is not an
option, so they just refuse to read the drug interaction warnings on their ever-increasing bottles of medications, and why do I have to be such a downer?
My brother died of heart failure due to chronic methamphetamine abuse. My mother and father prefer that he died of a tragic and rare genetic heart irregularity even though it sent my freaked-out niece running to her doctor to be tested for a heart condition made up by my mom and dad. When my sister was dying of a brain tumor and was in hospice, my mother wouldn’t admit that she was unresponsive. She said they talked all the time, and if Lisa wasn’t speaking to me when I sat with her, it was probably because of something I did, and I better search my conscience to figure out what it was. And the Thanksgiving immediately following my divorce, when my ex-husband had my kids for the holiday; my only remaining sibling was at his in-laws’ family; and the three of us, my mother, my father, and I, sat around the Thanksgiving table, the lone survivors of our decimated family, forks clinking noisily, my mother loudly declared: “Well, I think this is the best Thanksgiving ever!”
My dad agreed. “More leftovers for us!”
Their belief in their delusions is so unflinching that when they insist a couch is a car, you think you must be the crazy one.
The truth is, they don’t want the truth. They like the lie. I have spent much of my life trying to get them to face reality, get their feet on the ground, heads in the game, their minds on planet Earth. And it’s nearly driven me crazy, until recently when I’ve finally begun to understand them because a light bulb went out in my kitchen.
There are three recessed lights above the island where the ceiling is twelve feet high. In order to reach a bulb and change it, a six-foot ladder must be placed on top of the four-foot counter. I first have to climb onto the counter, then climb to the very top step on the ladder, and then stretch to my full height to reach the bulb and unscrew it, balancing myself on the swinging pot rack that holds hundreds of pounds of cookware. It’s like Cirque du Soleil, but not sexy, just dangerous. If anyone saw me do it, they would definitely tell me not to, but there is no other way to accomplish this task, so I’m doing it anyway. And somehow, against all odds, I get the dead bulb out of the socket and descend the ladder without killing myself.