The End of Eve Page 4

  But no one I knew was at the Sapphire Hotel that night.

  “Can I get you anything else, ma’am?” The bar waitress had tattoos of bacon and cupcakes on her chest.

  I’d been in Portland for ten years and it occurred to me that I’d suddenly become older than almost everyone else and now I had this toddler at the bar and who was I to think I belonged anywhere?

  When I first bought my house by the railyard, I held onto the doorframes sometimes and looked at the sills under the leaded windows and thought, I own this, even though the bank mostly owned it. Now as Maxito played with his cheese and laughed, I felt my ribs through my hoodie, uneven, and I thought, this is what I own, bones and flesh – this is my structure.

  AT HOME THAT night I took a random book from the shelf.

  The Upanishads.

  I ran my hand across the gold cover, asked: Should I or should I not agree to live with my mother ... move my family and my life ... change everything?

  I opened to a random page and read this: “Live with me for a year. Then you may ask questions.”

  So there it was.

  You make your choice and let the rest fall away.

  I DIDN’T WANT to answer the phone, but Vivian’s name flashed and Vivian was half a Buddhist and she loved me beyond reason. Surely Vivian could understand when I explained my plan and that maybe this was my dharma – my spiritual work right now. But Vivian just clucked her tongue when I said that. “It’s not your dharma, honey,” she snapped. “It’s your Co – DA.”

  As I hung up, I wondered at the difference.

  Seemed like maybe dharma work was the compassionate service you offered because you were on a spiritual path, here to let everything happen to you, to expose yourself to annihilation in hopes of burning through to some indestructible core of tenderness and confidence.

  And then Co-DA was the compassionate service you offered because you were a total and complete sucker.

  5.

  Mother as Metaphor

  I WAS IN A CAFÉ ON HAWTHORNE GRABBING A CUP OF coffee after my morning teaching gig when my phone rang.

  Maia. “Hey, Mama, I’m driving home for winter break.”

  I stared at a painting on the wall. A black bird on a wire, a hazy red sky behind it. A Portland painting. “Don’t drive, Honey. Just fly. You have a free ticket on Southwest.” It was fifteen hours on the I-5 from Los Angeles to Portland. All those snowy passes.

  “I want to drive, Mama. I want to have my car when I’m home.”

  Her plan was ridiculous, of course, but what difference would it make at this point? I was trying not to ask too many questions. That’s what the oracle advised, right? No questions for a year, anyway. I’d take my hands off the controls of this life thing and see what happened.

  IT HAD BEEN six weeks since my mother’s diagnosis. She’d lost weight, but she still drove around town in her bright blue rental car in the rain and somehow found the energy to yell at service workers.

  She’d jumped at the idea of moving to Santa Fe. “Perfect. All the artists live there, don’t they?”

  So I was getting my little house ready to put on the market. “Beiging it up,” my friend at the paint store said when I came in for ever more cans of light brown and pale yellow to cover the oranges and blues.

  “You never can be too beige in this market.”

  Between my mom’s inheritance and the expected money from the sale of my place, we’d come up with enough to make an offer on a for-sale-by-owner stucco duplex on an acre of land on a dirt road in Santa Fe. We’d given up visiting oncologists and settled on a fairly simple treatment plan for my mother: weekly intravenous vitamin C at a local clinic and the Bill Henderson protocol – basically a gluten-free vegan diet plus a cottage cheese and flax seed oil concoction intended to feed her body’s healthy cells and starve the cancer.

  I poured soy milk into my coffee because they didn’t have coconut milk, held the phone between my ear and shoulder. “At least let me fly to Sacramento and meet you,” I said. “I’ll drive the icy part home with you.”

  OUTSIDE BAGGAGE CLAIM in Sacramento, I shivered in my sweatshirt while the smokers on the bench behind me complained of global warming.

  When Maia pulled up in the big red Oldsmobile that used to belong to Gammie, I felt a sudden nostalgia, like maybe everything was normal again and I was a daughter and a granddaughter and Gammie was picking me up at the airport in Big Red because I’d run out of money in some foreign country and my I-Ching had advised me to go home for the deep of Winter and maybe Gammie had agreed to put the ticket on her credit card if I’d pay her back someday. But when I climbed into the passenger’s seat, the Oldsmobile didn’t smell like new upholstery and Coco Chanel. It smelled like cigarettes. I pretended not to notice. And then there was the more alarming reality: The entire back seat was packed with clothes and shoes, books and knick knacks, lamps and framed art – even a chair. This wasn’t a car packed to come home for a week at Christmas. This was a car packed to move home.

  “What’s up with all your earthly belongings, Maia?”

  She pushed a Duke Ellington CD into the player as she pulled out of the airport. I liked that Gammie’s old car still traveled with Gammie’s old CDs. “I want to be with Nonna,” Maia said, matter-of-fact. “I took a leave of absence from school.”

  I closed my eyes. Surely this was not happening. Who quits college in the middle of their junior year?

  “You can’t drop out–” I tried to muster some maternal authority, like she hadn’t already done it, like we weren’t already driving north into a blizzard with everything she owned.

  “I’m not dropping out, Mom.” She said it slowly, like maybe I was getting dim-witted in my late 30s. “I took a one-semester leave of absence.”

  “What about the boyfriend?” I whined. They’d been dating for a couple of years and had just moved in together in a cute apartment in Brentwood.

  “He’s fine with it,” she tried, but now tears streaked her makeup. Her hair was long like always, but she’d dyed it black.

  “What’s going on, Mai Mai?”

  “I can’t tell you.” She kept her eyes on the highway. And then, “Okay. He’s been on a coke bender for two weeks. He hasn’t slept. I had to leave.”

  I thought, Please, God, no. Really? The boyfriend? But he was so cute. I thought Can’t he just go to rehab? I thought, Good for you, Maia, it took me months to leave my first coke-head boyfriend, but why does he get to keep the apartment? I said, “Are you serious? What an asshole.”

  My phone buzzed. The boyfriend. I showed Maia the caller ID, but she just shrugged.

  “Yes, this is Ariel.”

  “Yeah? Ariel?” The boyfriend’s voice was heavy with exhaustion. “Would you like to know what your daughter did now?”

  I’d always liked the boyfriend, but my disenchantment was immediate.

  “She’s gone,” he said. “That’s what. She left. She’s probably cavorting around Hollywood with some guy or one of her slut friends. How do you like that, Mama?”

  “Excuse me?” I had to interrupt the boyfriend. “Are you calling me because you’re concerned about my daughter’s safety or because you want to tattle?”

  The boyfriend was silent for a moment. Then, “I just think,” he slurred. “I just think you should know where your daughter is.”

  “Thanks. I actually have a pretty good idea where my daughter is.” I clicked the phone off.

  Maia rolled her eyes. “Sorry, Mama.”

  I sighed. “Don’t worry about it. Just pull over at the next exit and let me drive.”

  WE ROLLED BACK onto the highway, Duke Ellington playing “Take the A Train” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” and as we wended north out of the Sacramento Valley and up into the snowbound Cascade range, Maia curled against the passenger side door and fell asleep.

  I glanced in the rearview to see how far we’d come, but the piles of all her stuff blocked the window.

  IN TIMES OF
crisis, I learned as a child, gather bandages and prepare food.

  On a bad day when my stepdad had gone to work early, I woke to the shrill screams coming from my sister’s room – my mother and Leslie trying to gouge each other’s eyes out with the broken shards of a piggy bank, echoes of I hate you I hate you I hate you.

  It’s a way to feign control, I guess, to stay calm and practical, to get up and get dressed in your purple corduroys and your Joan Jett and the Blackhearts T-shirt, to creep barefoot down the hallway and into the kitchen.

  My mother and sister would emerge soon enough, bloodied and hungry, Leslie stone-faced angry and my mother laughing. I’d have the herbal antiseptic spray and gauze and Band-Aids ready for them on the kitchen counter, cinnamon toast crisping in the oven. “Good morning,” I’d chirp, like I’d been up for hours and hadn’t heard a thing.

  NOW I JUST wanted to sit by myself in my own little kitchen, barefoot and writing feminist books and psychology blogs, but somehow I was still wearing my purple corduroys – tending wounds and feeding people.

  So it was that on Maia’s first full day back home, the house smelled like laundry detergent, garlic, and the fresh bend of a Christmas tree. Four o’clock in the afternoon and it was already dusk. I stood there ironing, making a mental list of the ingredients I had to buy to make the mushroom-leek risotto recipe from the cancer-free newsletter.

  Sol would be home in a couple of hours and she’d let the door slam behind her and I’d jump, just a little, afraid of what she might be mad about tonight.

  My mother would join us for dinner.

  “I’ll pick Maxito up from preschool and get a movie,” Maia offered. “I’m thinking it’s a Sunset Boulevard kind of a night.”

  No matter what happened in our dwindling family, we could always bond over a good Hollywood noir. It was definitely a Sunset Boulevard kind of a night.

  I COOKED.

  We waited.

  As Maxito and Maia hooked the last lights onto the tree, my mother floated in an hour late for dinner. “Mai Mai Person, you came home –”

  Maia wrapped her arms around her. “Nonna, I’ve missed you.”

  Maxito crawled up onto the red couch to be nearer to my mother.

  Tonight she wore a black dress and red lipstick, heavy Mexican silver bracelets and necklaces.

  My kids wanted to bask in her glow.

  She’d always been this way – alluring, like hot metal.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard your grandmother has cancer,” she said, her voice suddenly low with the glamour of it.

  I should like to die of consumption, Lord Byron once mused. The ladies would all say, “Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying.”

  I didn’t think my mother wanted to die, but she’d always been drawn to the romance of illness. If she had to die, I knew she’d want to look interesting.

  She glanced over her shoulder as if she’d just noticed the tree. “That is the driest, most pitiful excuse for a Christmas tree I have ever seen in my life.”

  I’d bought it off a Delancey Street Foundation lot and couldn’t see what was wrong with it.

  “Maybe we like Charlie Brown trees,” Maia tried.

  Maxito beamed. “I like Linus and Snoopy.”

  NONE OF US had the nerve – or whatever it might take – to ask my mother about her diagnosis or her thoughts about the coming year, so we waited for her to pipe up.

  “Cancer,” she informed us at the dinner table, “is a disease of emotional repression.” She lifted a glass of wine and half-smiled. “So obviously either I’m the exception – I’m cancer’s mistake – I’ve been unjustly colonized – I’m the Bahamas when Columbus was aiming for India. Or I don’t have it. I don’t have cancer at all.”

  Maybe she wasn’t going to skip the “denial” stage after all.

  “That’s interesting,” Sol said. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking what I said,” my mother snapped, slamming her glass on the table. “Either the doctors have made a cruel mistake or the cancer itself has made a mistake. Everyone knows that people cause their own cancer with negative thinking and I didn’t cause this. I’ve been unjustly invaded.”

  Sol nodded. “Of course you didn’t cause it.”

  “This isn’t my fault,” my mother said.

  “Of course not,” Maia whispered.

  I’D TRACED MY mother’s illness back to my stepdad’s death, to the day she killed him or they were in on it together, but what did I know? I was just doing what we do, telling myself a story in hopes a story would make things better. If my mother had caused her own cancer I wouldn’t have to feel vulnerable. That meant it wasn’t genetic or environmental. But she was on the other side of new age logic now. She always believed other people caused their cancers, so what was she supposed to believe about her own cancer?

  In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag warns us off this kind of thinking, saying “scarcely a week passes without a new article announcing to some general public or other the scientific link between cancer and painful feelings. Investigations are cited – most articles refer to the same ones – in which out of, say, several hundred cancer patients, two-thirds or three-fifths report being depressed or unsatisfied with their lives, and having suffered the loss (through death or rejection or separation) of a parent, lover, spouse, or close friend. But it seems likely that of several hundred people who do not have cancer, most would also report depressing emotions and past traumas: this is called the human condition.”

  So maybe this was just the human condition. Or the human condition with cancer. It was something caused or random, a technological problem to be solved or romanticized.

  I did the dishes.

  IT FELT A little crazy, this consciously trying to take my hands off the controls, this willingness to follow my dying mother. But it made sense in ways that mattered to me.

  It made sense in a Buddhist kind of a way, for one thing, and I was half a Buddhist – philosophically, anyway.

  “Anything you’re attached to, let it go.” That’s the advice the 11th-century Tibetan yogi Machig Labdrön got from her teacher. “Go to the places that scare you.”

  My mother scared me sometimes.

  It made sense to me in a Catholic kind of way, too, and I was half a Catholic. My stepdad had been a Catholic priest before he married my mom. I was never baptized, but I grew up praying favors from Saint Martin de Porres, Saint Christopher, and Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I thought of all those images of the pierced heart of Mary – the seven swords that represent the seven sorrows. But they say those swords aren’t the things that cause our wounds. The swords are markers of strength earned through struggle. And the first sword was the Sword of Surrender.

  I wanted to surrender.

  It all made sense in a spiritualist kind of a way, too. And I was probably part that. I lit a seven-day candle with an image of Marie Laveau on it. The voodoo queen of New Orleans, she was the problem solver. Maybe she could solve all this.

  It made sense to me in another way, too, maybe a more important way – a way that didn’t have anything to do with spirit or dharma or faith or surrender. And maybe this is the part I shouldn’t tell you, because I don’t want you to misunderstand. But it made sense to me in a journalistic way. Because more than a Buddhist or a Catholic or a spiritualist or an adult daughter, I’m a journalist. I’ve been making media about parenting and psychology and women’s work all my adult life. I’ve never been a daily newspaper reporter, but I’m a journalist. And when the wildfire changes direction, threatening a town or when those first shots explode and people with any sense grab their children and their poodles and hurry to evacuate – that’s when the journalists come in – rushing toward the storm or the crime scene, not because we’re adrenaline junkies, but because we know that something important and human is about to happen. Something true and real even if it’s tragic. Something that might require a witness.

  Maybe I wasn’t the kin
d of journalist who flew into hurricanes or civil war zones. (I wanted to be that once, but I always had little kids at home who needed their dinners made). Still, I was a journalist. That’s how I understood myself. And the only way I knew how to make sense of my world was to do what journalists do, to rush in and try and dispatch some usable truth from the human places that scare us.

  MAIA PUSHED THE Sunset Boulevard DVD into the player. That Hollywood gutter at dawn. Dead leaves and scraps, burnt matches, and cigarette butts. The credits, then sirens. That classic shot of the body floating in the pool. The voice-over: “Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. It’s about five o’clock in the morning. That’s the Homicide Squad, complete with detectives and newspapermen. A murder has been reported from one of those great big houses in the 10,000 block. You’ll read about it in the late editions, I’m sure. You’ll get it over your radio and see it on television ... But before you hear it all distorted and blown out of proportion. Before those Hollywood columnists get their hands on it, maybe you would like to hear the facts, the whole truth.”

  My mother leaned back into the red couch. “You’ve come to the right party,” she mouthed along with the voice over. “You can’t beat old Hollywood,” she sighed. “Nothing the least bit interesting has happened since film noir.”

  6.

  San Quentin

  “IT’S IMPERATIVE THAT YOU UNDERSTAND THE NATURE of evil,” my mother said. We were driving north through the fog across the Golden Gate Bridge, on our way to visit my mother’s boyfriend on death row at San Quentin, Pink Floyd on the cassette player.

  I was a teenager. I’d run away and come home a couple of times already.

  The last time I ran away my mother was the prison art teacher. Now she was in love with one of the inmates and she cried, “I was fired for love! Blacklisted for love!”

  So she wasn’t a prison employee anymore. Just a forty-something married woman dragging her teenage daughter to visit her boyfriend on death row at San Quentin and talking about all the things I needed to understand. Evil, for one.