The End of Eve Page 5

  I knew she wasn’t talking about the death row inmates when she talked about evil.

  We parked in the visitor’s lot, ducked into a white building and signed in. We stepped through a metal detector, headed up an asphalt walkway, in through another door.

  Wait for that door to close behind you before you open the next door.

  The visiting room smelled of stale coffee and cigarette smoke.

  And here was my mother’s boyfriend, hands folded in his lap and waiting for us.

  Next to him was The Midnight Strangler, convicted of raping and murdering maybe a dozen women and children in Los Angeles.

  And here was The Midnight Strangler’s new fiancée, Doreen. She wore a Gunne Sax dress and too much mascara.

  And here was another one of my mother’s former students, The Suburban Psycho. He looked like Mr. Clean except he was black. He said he was framed by a prostitute for knifing some white land developer in the cul-de-sacs.

  And here was a big white guy with gang tattoos on his neck and my mother pinched his cheeks and cooed at him and he snarled before he smiled.

  San Quentin. It all seemed perfectly normal at the time, that we should sit down together at a big plastic table.

  I lit a Camel no-filter.

  The Suburban Psycho lit a Marlboro.

  “Cigarettes are bad for you,” someone called from across the room.

  “So is cyanide gas,” my mother’s boyfriend called back from our table.

  And everyone laughed like that was the funniest thing.

  I wanted to be back in the car with Pink Floyd. I didn’t think capital punishment helped anyone, but I wasn’t sure death was the worst fate.

  My mother nudged me and whispered, “See that man?” She gestured with her chin toward a thirty-something guy with a handlebar mustache. “Do you see that man, Tiniest?”

  He wore prison blues and cursed as he pushed vending machine buttons, trying to get a Snickers bar out of the thing.

  “That’s Bobbie Harris,” my mother whispered. “He was literally beaten out of the womb.”

  I nodded, kept my eye on the man.

  “He murdered two teenage boys just to see what it felt like and then he finished their half-eaten hamburgers,” my mother whispered. “That’s cold-blooded murder. But you have to understand. Bobbie was beaten out of the womb. There’s no name for that like cold-blooded murder, is there? That’s how people get to be like that. Beaten out.”

  I kept nodding like I understood, like I could understand.

  My mother stared at me, wouldn’t stop staring.

  I felt nervous, didn’t want to hold her gaze, so I turned away.

  But now The Midnight Strangler was staring at my tits, wouldn’t stop staring. He had the darkest brown eyes.

  I wasn’t sure what to do, so I offered the Midnight Strangler a Camel no-filter.

  As he took the cigarette from me, he let his clean fingernails graze the back of my hand.

  My throat felt tight.

  The Midnight Strangler’s new fiancée, Doreen, gave me the stink eye – like I was some teenager moving in on her man.

  7.

  Clowns and Caregivers

  NO ONE THOUGHT I’D GET THE PRICE I WAS ASKING FOR my little house next to the railyard in Portland.

  “This neighborhood is all foreclosures,” the real estate agent warned me. She had platinum hair and impossibly white teeth. “You’ve got to be realistic.”

  Our neighbor across the street shook his head at my flyer. “Dream on,” he sighed.

  My mother sniffed around the newly beige corners of the place, too. “You’ll never sell it. These shades are hideous.” She pulled her green Patagonia jacket tight around her like maybe the colors were chilling, too. “I’ll pay for you to have this professionally repainted. Even a person who knows nothing about color is going to have an unconscious reaction to this. It’s like a cross between a hospital and a bottomless bog. Anyone with a soul who walks in here is going to feel at once ill and trapped.”

  “Project a little, Mom?”

  “Very funny, Tiniest. I’m just trying to help you. I don’t know why I bother.”

  I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to slash the price or redo the walls. So maybe my house wouldn’t sell. Then maybe I wouldn’t have to move and maybe my mother wouldn’t get sick and I wouldn’t have to take care of her and then maybe she wouldn’t die.

  Just because I put a “For Sale” sign in my front yard didn’t mean anything had to change, did it?

  I buried a Saint Joseph statue next to the sign and the house sold in a week.

  Crap.

  I rented it back from the new owners.

  THE PALE ORANGE to-do list on the fridge:

  Pack

  Ship

  Medicaid paperwork

  Write Psychology Today blog

  Wrap up teaching gig

  San Francisco reading March 25

  Reno reading April 13

  What to do with the cats?

  MY MOTHER COMPLAINED that nothing was moving fast enough. “Doesn’t anyone understand that I’m dying?” she cried when I stopped by her apartment to drop off a prescription from her naturopath. “I have a death sentence. I’ll be dead in October.” She held a paintbrush in each hand, but had no canvas. Her fingers were just wrapped around those brushes. Her dark red nails dug into her palms.

  Everyone had a different idea about when my mother might die, but she marked the date red in her calendar. October 18, 2010. Exactly a year from her diagnosis. “I’m running out of time,” she said. “I’ll be dead on ten-eighteen-ten.”

  I didn’t know about 10/18/10, but I knew had to get her moved while she still had the energy. So that night at my kitchen table the five of us ate spicy yam stew from the cancer-free newsletter and hatched a plan. Maia and my mother would go ahead to New Mexico and get settled into the stucco duplex on the dirt road. I’d fly in and out of San Francisco for my reading, then Maxito and Sol and I would drive down from Portland to Santa Fe via Reno come first blossom of spring.

  Maxito played with his noodles on his wooden high chair tray and sang “Wo, Wo, Wo your boat ...”

  Maia texted someone under the table.

  Sol excused herself, saying she had to water the plants in the backyard. She grabbed a lighter off the counter before she stepped outside. Of course we had no plants in the backyard. And it was raining.

  I sipped from a glass of sparkling water I’d already spiked with a little gin.

  Yes. We were going to do this.

  I CHARGED TWO one-way tickets on my emergency credit card and off Maia and my mother flew, their carry-ons stuffed with chalky naturopathic cancer remedies.

  SOL AND I bought a 1968 Shasta compact trailer to drag behind our car. We painted it turquoise and stitched red curtains. If things didn’t work out with my mother in Santa Fe, well, we could always live in the trailer. A six-foot by ten foot trailer. What more could three people need?

  AT A CURBSIDE table next to the vegan burrito food cart on Division Street, Maxito picked at his cheese-less quesadilla while Sol and I discussed our situation – the date we had to surrender the house and my interior decorating plans for our little trailer. A twenty-something girl with Little Orphan Annie hair and a red clown nose smiled at us from the next table. People often dressed like clowns in Portland. I didn’t know why, but I’d gotten used to it. Finally the clown got up, leaned over Maxito’s shoulder to pass us a note. My Dear Fellow Humans, it started. Please excuse the written communication, but I have taken a vow of silence. I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation and I know an organization that assists homeless families like your own. She’d jotted down a phone number and website.

  I thought to explain to the clown girl that we weren’t homeless exactly, that we were moving and maybe it was complicated, but I just thanked her and she bobbed her head up and down like, “You’re welcome,” and I loved her even though she was kind of a cliché.

&nb
sp; BACK IN JOURNALISM school they taught me that every story needs a “nut graf” – a paragraph that contains those nutshell statistics that will give a universal context to a personal story. Maybe it’s a little late in the narrative now, but here’s the nut-graf: In any given year, almost 30% of the U. S. population will be caring for an ill, disabled, or aging friend or family member. The caregiver will offer an average of 20 hours a week in unpaid labor and over $5,000 a year in out-of-pocket expenditures. According to some researchers, all these numbers are higher in queer communities. The typical caregiver, it turns out, is me: An adult female with children of her own caring for her widowed mother.

  At Powell’s City of Books downtown, I picked up a hardcover about “the transformative journey of the caregiver.” I scanned a few early passages and learned that the stress of this whole project could take ten years off my life and yet, for some reason, the advice offered at this juncture was to “buy zany gifts” for my mother.

  I bought no zany gifts.

  Instead I Googled “take ten years off your life” and learned that there are actually lots of ways to do it: smoking, drinking, raiding the fridge, not exercising, eating too many eggs, general pessimism, and motherhood, to name a few. At least I’d be in good company.

  IT WAS DEEP winter and the sky dumped frozen rain. Sol and I packed up my mother’s apartment on 82nd Avenue, packed up our own house by the railyard and sent everything off with a cut-rate moving service.

  I pawned my two cats off onto an aging metrosexual Ken doll look-alike who said he could communicate with them telepathically and would transition them from the lousy generic food I’d been feeding them to an organic raw diet. We’d called them Ricky and Lula since they were kittens, but the Ken doll would call them Atlantis and Lhasa.

  “All right,” I shrugged.

  “They’ll be very happy,” he promised.

  NEWLY CAT-FREE, I sat in my car outside the Ken doll’s house. My phone buzzed: Maia. It had been a few days since I’d talked to her. “Hello?”

  “Mama? The movers are here.” Maia’s voice was steady on the phone.

  The movers. In Santa Fe already. I fiddled with the radio dial. KBOO was broadcasting an indie music festival.

  “Um,” Maia said. “Nonna is throwing away your furniture.”

  I clicked the radio off. “What?”

  I could hear my mother screaming in the background: “Don’t tell her I’m throwing this crap away, tell her I’m burning it.”

  Maia cleared her throat. “Actually, Mom? She says she’s going to burn it. She’s piling it all in the backyard. She’s making a bonfire.”

  It occurred to me that my daughter would make a good crisis counselor. Still, I felt something hot in my chest, just under my heart and I thought I might really lose it right then. Break my windshield with my fist at least, let my hand bleed into the drizzle. But I’d been reading my Pema Chödrön books like a good half-Buddhist, so I took a breath instead, focused on the crack in my dashboard. “Why is Nonna burning my furniture?”

  “I don’t know,” Maia sighed. “She says it’s all crap. The blue bookshelf, the pink bookshelf, the nightstands. All your stuff, really.”

  There was a quick rustling sound and now my mother was on the phone, screaming and shaky. “I told you only to bring good things,” she coughed. “Just cut me some slack,” she said, softly now, like she might be crying. “I have cancer. I have stage four lung cancer.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said in the best soothing mama-voice I could manage. “Can you put Maia back on the phone?”

  “Hey,” Maia whispered.

  “Listen. If there’s nothing you can do about the furniture, that’s fine, but call me back if Nonna starts opening my boxes.”

  “Okay,” Maia promised. “I can make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  Live with me for a year. Then you may ask questions.

  I was going to have a lot of questions.

  Book Two

  Cities of the Interior

  8.

  Water in the Desert

  ON THE MAP IT WAS JUST A PALE BLUE EGG BETWEEN two Nevada towns we’d never heard of, but when we veered off the access road and onto the graveled shoreline, the silvery water glowed like some giant gasoline rainbow, poisonous and beautiful.

  How long had we driven in that hazy heat?

  A black and red sign at the water’s edge warned of unexploded munitions. DANGER: COULD CAUSE SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH.

  Maxito cried, “I want swimming –” He’d been promised swimming.

  How do you explain to a two-year-old that some people thought it was a good idea to spend decades testing weapons on a rare desert lake?

  Looking out over that poisoned water, it seemed like such a scam of anti-earth abuser culture to teach people that they cause their own cancer with negative thinking. Maybe this desert lake had been guilty of negative thinking? I sighed at the meanness of it all. Like lime juice in your eyes to better resemble your colonizer.

  WE’D LEFT PORTLAND on a rainy morning. All that lush green and damp gray. Maxito cried from his carseat when the turquoise trailer came off its hitch two blocks from home – the ruthless sound of metal scraping asphalt. But Portland magic appeared in the form of a sleepy hipster who tumbled out of a corner café, calling, “Hey, my grandparents used to have a trailer like that,” and “I know just how to hitch it.”

  We rolled out of town then like every cliché, Sol waxing romantic about the life we’d finally have. Some perfect queer family under the sun.

  Driving with Sol, we only listened to her music – to Bowie or Dylan or Freakwater or Steely Dan. The first year we were together she simply pushed eject whenever I chose the CD, so I’d given up. I liked Sol’s music well enough, but I wondered what kind of music I might listen to these days if I hadn’t spent eight years deferring. It made me sad to think I didn’t know what I liked anymore, didn’t know what I’d choose.

  We drove a couple hundred miles, then spent a snowy night camped at the edge of a little town full of scruffy mullets, Wrangler jeans, and old hippies waiting for the UFOs.

  Morning and a couple hundred miles of dotted yellow lines and green highway signs. Portobello mushroom burgers with friends in a Sierra mountain town that smelled of pine. We swam in a river and Sol cried on the rocky bank. Sol always cried at clean water. Her father was on trial for his oil company’s genocidal pollution in Latin America. She’d gone to college and veterinary school on the profits of destruction. It was part of the reason she felt morally obliged not to charge people much for her services. Like she was repaying some of her father’s karmic debt by tending parakeet wounds.

  A couple hundred miles then of cowboy bars and neon-lit brothels and here we were now at this glowing lake and clean water had become a precious thing.

  We had to keep going.

  IN A CREEPY motel office in a town of old miners’ graveyards, there was a napkin-lined basket full of muffins and a Post-It note that read “Martha made these. FREE.”

  Free muffins, Maxito decided, could almost make up for a long and waterless day driving. “Muffins,” he hummed, swaying in his fuzzy blue pajamas. “I love agua and muffins.”

  Our room smelled like cigarettes.

  Sol read to Maxito from a book about unpolluted rivers and lonely rabbits and the two of them fell asleep on the queen-sized bed. I sat on the toilet because that’s where the wi-fi worked. “Dear Nevada,” I status-updated on Facebook. “I’m lost.” I checked my email.

  From: evedebona@yahoo.com

  To: arielgore@earthlink.net

  Subject: Santa Fe

  Tiniest,

  I’ve been trying to call you all day. You’re either out of range or you’re avoiding me. It is urgent that you contact me. DO NOT COME TO SANTA FE. If you do come, DO NOT PARK YOUR TRAILER ON THE PROPERTY.

  Love,

  Mom

  I READ THE email a couple of times. Surely she was kidding. Do not come to Santa Fe? She had t
o be kidding. She used to call me on April Fools’ Day mornings to tell me she’d adopted a giant frog she had to walk on a leash or that she was unexpectedly pregnant with Anderson Cooper’s baby. But it was too late for April Fools.

  I crept out of the motel room. The warm night smelled like truck exhaust. I stepped back into the free muffin office and asked the man behind the desk to point me to the nearest bar, but he shook his head.

  “Nothing like that in this town.” He looked like an aging Anthony Perkins from Psycho with those dark little eyes and cleft chin.

  Do not come to Santa Fe. Sure. Who needed Santa Fe? Why would we come to Santa Fe? Maybe we could just settle here in this weird little barless town on the edge of a nuclear test site.

  I turned to leave the office, but Anthony Perkins called after me. “I’ll give you a night cap, little lady.” He poured a couple of shots of tequila into two Styrofoam cups, pushed mine across the desk.

  I wasn’t going to refuse. “Thanks.” The drink was warm and rough, but it soothed my throat.

  Anthony Perkins winked at me, lit a menthol cigarette. “You know there’s a whole army base under that lake, don’t you? Yes, Ma’am. You came from the lake didn’t you?” He knocked back his tequila, poured us each another Styrofoam shot. “It’s a submarine naval training station under there. Good one, huh? The Russians or the Chinese or nobody never gonna suspect a submarine base in the middle of the desert, are they? Submarine training in the desert.” Anthony Perkins kind of squinted and laughed at the same time. “Is that your sister you’re traveling with?” He gestured toward our room with that chin.

  “Yeah. My sister.” I nodded. “I better get back to my sister.”

  Anthony Perkins lifted his Styrofoam cup and smiled at me. “To family,” he said.

  I tapped the edge of my cup against his. “To family.”

  A couple hundred miles then down the 95 in the already-hot morning, the odd ghost town rising up from the brown-green sand and shrub. Nevada.