Lit_ A Memoir Part 31

G.o.d has a dream for me? I say. I love that idea. It sounds like a Disney movie.

I know, Margaret says. Her pale round face opens up. Everybody uses the phrase G.o.d's will G.o.d's will or or plan plan. That has a neo-n.a.z.i ring to it.

I like the Disney version.

I feel you, she says, and I sit for a minute silently disbelieving she's a nun. She adjusts her heavy gla.s.ses, and her eyes once again magnify.

Let's eat a cookie and pray for each other's disordered attachments, she says. Mine involves pride and cookies.

Mine, I say, involves pride and good-looking men.

Together we bow our heads.

44.

The Bog Queen Where did they bury the dog after she hung herself,and into the roots of what tree are those bones entangled?I come blessed like a river of black rock, like a long secret,and the kind of kindness that is like a door closedbut not locked. Yesterday I was nothing but a roadheading in four directions. When I threatened to run awaymy mother said she'd take me wherever I wanted to go.-Terrance Hayes, "The Blue Terrance"

The house I grew up in sat in a bog, and in the middle of the house sat my mother, well into her dotage. All my life, she'd blamed the place-a.n.u.s of the universe, in her parlance-for robbing her of every artistic inclination. Daily, she willed it to slide back into the Gulf it sat on the edge of.

In my thirties, it actually started to sink: plots of land once three feet below sea level got to four. Houses sagged and listed on their brick stilts, and one end of a church parking lot disappeared into a sinkhole. The refineries that pumped toxins into the sky were showing around their rivets starbursts of rust, and fewer and fewer pickups lined up for parking slots every year. Young people started to move away after high school.

Among those left behind in tract houses and trailer parks, the occasional meth lab set off a spectacular explosion. Due to the acid-green poisons poured into bayous and backwaters, the cancer rate shot through the roof. Every family had its fair share of tumor scars and chemo stories. For others, the guns their fathers once pointed at squirrels and possums were increasingly turned on each other or taken between the teeth.

You'd think the destruction of the town would've left Mother, who'd cursed it for decades, doing some celebratory chicken dance on Main Street. But in a wry twist, Mother has come to love the house in the bog. She's had it painted egg-yolk yellow. With the red roof and green lawn, it looks like a child's crayon piece, with my mother inside it dwindling into a line drawing.

But the swamp is eating Mother's house, too. Wet rot gobbles at the window fittings, and purple wisteria vines edge in, followed by various species of lizard and beetle. She finds, sleeping in the clothes hamper, a chicken snake big around as her wrist. A neighbor has to come with a hoe and a garbage bag to haul it off while Mother stands aside with a small snub-nosed revolver. All the house's screens are imploding, their frames no longer square, and the back doorjamb is edged with encroaching honeysuckle.

Mother sits in the house reading the Bible along with histories of lost civilizations and books of gnostic mystery ordered from far away. Plus The New Yorker The New Yorker and and Artforum Artforum. Her hair's grown out from spiky to thick c.u.mulus cloud, and the curves of her body have started to burn off. Though she's shrinking down toward the underlying bone, her mind is unquenchable fire.

She's grown saner with age, but she still has the lackadaisical whims of a kid. Even after a quadruple bypa.s.s has reamed the four chambers of her heart, she smokes nonstop and exists on a diet-I once heard her announce to her careworn cardiologist-of provolone cheese and summer sausage, fruit, and the occasional Ho Ho. Two suitors come to see her at regular intervals, but their romantic beseechings have become as matter-of-fact as her refusals. Afternoons, she plays dominoes with them at the kitchen table, speculating at length on which of them will die first.

And she says, I don't know why I'm still here.

She lights one long cigarette after another and despite all this, fails to seem-exactly-unhappy.

She still has some arrows in her quiver. For instance, when she feels hungry for Mexican food or merely wants company, she'll call my sister more than two hours away with killer traffic.

Lecia's family of six (her son and four stepkids plus executive husband) keep her busy. She runs an insurance business that's paid for a house, inside which are a waterfall and a pond with plump orange koi trained by regular feedings to recognize my sister's shadow and swim to her with their mouths blowing her kisses from the pond's surface. On the edge of that, a golf course where tall Husband Tom-nickname: Big, both for his height and after the romantic lead in a TV show-putts with an accuracy almost surgical. There's even a metal-lined room to hide in if the revolution comes and bandits or insurgents show up. The Scarface House, I dub it.

But to run all this, my sister gets up at four or five most mornings, following a regimen fit for a five-star general executing a military coup. At night Big entertains executives by cooking vast carca.s.ses on that grill the size of a station wagon. They take a lot of trips-some involving golf, which Lecia hates-and the rest of which she mostly doesn't think up. In short, she's as much slave as empress to her realm.

Yet when Mother calls to report a heart attack coming on, my sister grabs her bag and dashes out of the house, floorboarding her Batmobile down to the sagging corner of earth sliding toward the Gulf, only to find Mother affably awaiting her, palpitations miraculously improved. No, they needn't visit the doctor, but that place on the corner has the best enchiladas and virgin margaritas.

Even after I urge my sister to ask Mother point-blank if she's lying about her ailments to yank Lecia's chain, and even after my Mother baldly confesses that she makes up about 95 percent of her maladies, my sister can't stop herself from galloping toward the town of our birth, since forty years of training can't be shaken off, and codependence is a terrible thing.

While we sisters agree it's time to sell the sagging house and move Mother closer to one of us, each time we sound serious about this, Mother gets weepy and suffers shortness of breath and unprecedented rises in blood pressure that twist my sister's innards.

A few times I fly Mother to New York City, the mecca of her youth, and roll her through museums in a wheelchair until she says, I feel like a fool; why don't I push you awhile? We horrify many citizens of that great city as she limps behind me and I recline, swigging water. At night, though she swears to stay out of the minibar, she forces me nearly to bankruptcy by devouring as many fifteen-dollar c.o.kes and twenty-dollar PayDay bars as she can in her brief stay. At one breakfast, I find her hands smeared with chocolate.

But I'm the prodigal, the long-gone daughter, and I can't send home enough checks to pay down that guilt. And when one night she tells me her mother hasn't come back with the car, and I have to remind her that her mother is forty years dead, I can hear the hoofbeats of the apocalypse galloping unwilled toward her.

So I fly home, crossing the patio whose bricks are being split by gra.s.s. I walk in, drop my bulging bag, holler, Honey, I'm home Honey, I'm home, and I find the dining room ceiling caved half in, the central air conditioner dangling down through plaster on a slanted slab of plywood, hanging in midair as if by magician's wires.

Mother, I say, rushing into the room and feeling under my sandals the squish of water in the green s.h.a.g carpet, which exudes moldy odors of a color I don't want to picture. I say, Mother, what happened here?

I stare up into the hole while standing off to the side, fearing the rest of the ceiling is on the verge of collapse. Finally, I ask, Why didn't you call somebody?

I didn't know who to call, she says. She's distractedly studying a crossword in one hand, her bra.s.s gla.s.ses on the tip of her narrow nose till she says, What's an eleven-letter word for coinage of Alexander the Great?

I squish my feet, saying, The rug's ruined. Can't you smell that?

No worse than outside, she says.

This didn't happen just today?

She looks up saying, Of course not. This week. Maybe last week.

I still don't understand why you didn't call somebody before the whole floor soaked through.

She perches on the side of an easy chair and studies her puzzle. She says, I'm bad on coinage. Can you call your sister?

I flip open my cell phone and punch redial. Lecia answers as she does when busy, like one of those cartoon tyc.o.o.ns-or the mother of five children, which she is. She says, Do you need something?

Coin of Alexander the Great.

How many letters?

Eleven.

Tetradrachm, she says, then spells it. Is that it? she adds, I'm covered up with work here.

We trade love before I snap the phone shut.

Got it, Mother says, and moves to the next clue while saying, I figured you or your sister would come along and fix it.

The eleven-letter word?

The ceiling, she says.

I track down and cajole into action air-conditioner repairmen and electricians and plaster workers to glue back together Mother's crayoned house.

That's it, I say when the bills are presented. We're selling this cracker box.

We chip in to buy Mother a condo in the same small town as Lecia's office. We know Mother will rail about the change, but to prop up the rotting house would cost twice what it's worth. I can envision driving up someday to find the walls caved in, Mother sitting amid mossy ruins with book in hand and birds nesting in her hair.

You tell her it's a fait accompli, Lecia says. She'll raise holy h.e.l.l. You make her take the hit. Tom and I'll move her.

If y'all do that, I'll clean out the house.

Once again Mother promises to be packed and ready, and once again Lecia finds her staring, coffee cup in midair, at three empty supermarket boxes, not a single plate newspapered.

I need y'all to start me up, Mother says.

Over a period of two days, Lecia and her husband pack and manhandle Mother's possessions into a truck with the energy of newlyweds. They ferry it all two hours away, near Houston, into the corner unit we bought, staying till every picture is hung.

Making up Mother's new bed with plush linens, Lecia finds a Polaroid of the egg-yolk crayon house under Mother's pillow.

The old house is cleared of big pieces when I fly in to clean it out, which involves sorting through letters and paintings and stuff we may want to tenderly tuck away in tissue, though in truth, we partly long to bulldoze the place.

I'm not without help. My high school friend Doonie, now the fence king of San Diego County, flies home to help. So does John Cleary-boy next door, first kiss. They show up on the steps as if dismounted from white chargers to shovel out the pigsty of a house.

By dusk, it's down to the baseboards, and I'm alone. John and Doonie head off to drive a final truckload to the dump. My legs are streaked with dirt, and it's as if some key on my back has unwound, for I've dropped in my tracks in Mother's once magical closet. I've folded up where I'd so often played hide-and-seek inside the silks of her bespangled wardrobe, inhaling like so much hash smoke her minty Salem smoke and Shalimar.

Other people kept marriage and divorce decrees, birth announcements, sc.r.a.pbooks. Mother kept clothes-but she'd trashed all the good stuff. Gone the Dior couture and pearl-snap rodeo shirts, the shirred beaver coat the color of clotted cream whose ecru lining had chocolate lace at the hem.

Today I pulled off hangers the oddball c.r.a.p she wore when she got old-a red sweatshirt with Santa Claus on it, a pink one whose cat applique had jeweled eyes. (What do you like about that, Mother? And she said, Sparkly.) I strip from the hangers big-shoulder jackets from the eighties and splashy tropical shirtwaists. The slanted high heels my once small feet had disappeared into got upended into the charity box. When the last white polyester blouse slipped free, the coat hangers rang against each other with a high-pitched keening.

Seeing that closet so bare brought back when Daddy first hammered it together, for he'd built their whole bedroom out of our garage. We had made this house and grown into and-finally-out of it.

When Doonie and John come back from the dump, they find me in that musty closet under a bare bulb and a rod holding dozens of crow-black hangers. I'm thumbing ancient Playboys Playboys. I don't know who these belong to, I say.

Get out of there, Mary Marlene, John says.

Right before we leave, one of Mother's old friends shows up with her station wagon. We load in the ma.s.sive easels on which Mother will never again tilt a gessoed canvas. She'd quit painting, quit buying pretty clothes. Petal by petal, she's been shedding herself. We box up the rusted coffee cans from which brushes of fine Russian sable protrude like so many furred blossoms.

Then John and Doonie drive me in a chilly rental car to a seafood joint with sawdust on the floor. There we all drink sweet iced tea, and from giant ovals of crockery we draw the hard sh.e.l.ls of barbecued crabs and break them open with our greasy hands. Napkins tied around our necks, mouths shining with oil, we tear at and suck from the intricate chambers and corridors of those stone sh.e.l.ls before they're dropped on the sawdust floor.

45.

My Sinfulness in All Its Ugliness Which way I flie is h.e.l.l; my self am h.e.l.l.-John Milton, Paradise Lost Paradise Lost That night I'm driving back to Mother's condo not having prayed, which seems no accident from this juncture. Cleaning out the childhood home that day had been heavy duty. Plus, it's a dark time in terms of the Exercises-the season of Lent, atonement-when you daily pray to be shown your own sinfulness in all its ugliness. Over bayous my rental car goes low-flying like a steel-coated bat. Since I didn't quite believe that spiritual forces for good and evil tug us to and fro, I fancied that failing to pray was understandable, an accident, for I'd risen at four to catch a plane down to Houston.

In the rental car, I fly over foggy blacktop alone, with the sciatic kink in my lower back keeping me edged toward the phosph.o.r.escent dash. But swelling in my chest is-what unknown sense-pride? I've been able to help Mother for once with more than a check in the mail. My sister hasn't borne the burden alone. And the company of my Leechfield brothers has left me feeling all shiny inside.

Sister Margaret had warned me that praying to know your own sins may prompt an arid season, with no consolations. Which makes you-in her scary parlance-a juicy morsel for the Adversary. Okay, I said, if a guy in a red suit with horns and a long scaly tail appears, I'll shake a crucifix at him. Margaret told me, He might appear as future pleasure, or he'll appeal to your intellectual vanity. Asked what I should do to prevent these dark a.s.saults, she said, During Lent, don't miss a single minute of prayer, no matter what comes up. Err on the side of overkill, even if you feel yourself only going through the motions.

That night driving from the homestead, the black sky sliding off my windows, I don't consider sending up any hosanna of thanks, nor do Margaret's warnings echo through me. I feel exhausted, sure, but contrarily swell about myself, like the best daughter. Sin? What sin? The hours spent cleaning out the house have left me in weary ease-proud of the good works I've done. The fog holds me in the car's hull, and I drive suspended in time.

Reaching Mother's condo about eleven, I climb the stairs swinging a light garment bag, expecting to find her asleep. But she's ensconced in her mushroom-colored recliner, a giant magnifying lamp burning like a halo alongside her. An old movie with the sound muted unrolls across the screen. I ready myself for the praise and approbation she'll heap on me for squiring her into this luxury.

She says, Did you have fun?

I see from the set of her jaw she's fired up and ask her what's wrong.

Nothing's wrong. How could anything be wrong? I'm here in the little white hole you and your sister have buried me in. You've stripped me of all my possessions, robbed me of anything I held dear.

Mother, what are you talking about?

I've been sitting here wondering whether it would make you happy to come in and find me with my brains blown out. That's what would really make your day.

It's an ambush I never saw coming, and where I'd been sizzling with tired satisfaction before, I've suddenly got a kink between my shoulder blades. I say, I'm exhausted, Mother. Don't start this s.h.i.t now.

(Maybe normal people don't have to beseech G.o.d at such junctures to stay level, but I do. But it's as if I've never prayed. No s.p.a.ce exists in me for any perspective.) In a flash, the fishy crab taste sours my breath, and I bend to rummage my bag for a toothbrush. Instead, I get a glowing vision of my toiletries bag, forgotten in the old house. I ask Mother if she has a fresh toothbrush or some mouthwash.

I have nothing, she says. She's sobbing. I have nothing.

To escape the image of her pitched forward, her back heaving, I shut the bathroom door. I wash the grit off my face and neck. Spying a frayed toothbrush upside down in a gla.s.s, I squeeze paste on it and start to scrub my mouth out when I taste bleach-and do I detect the odor of s.h.i.t on its bristles? It's been used to scrub the toilet. I spit and rinse my mouth and spit, holding back the urge to vomit.

And, in that instant, my mouth scalded with bleach and s.h.i.t, I feel the entire fabric of the world began to undergo a profound shift. I cease to be myself, or rather, my adult self. Time arcs back, carrying me in it.

On the ends of my arms, I feel the length of my fingers dwindle. Though standing upright, I sense the floor escalating closer as my legs get shorter. My arms shrink in their sockets. My eyes no longer sit flush to the front of my face; they've retreated far back into my head, as if my true self is crouched in terror in the back of my skull, staring out at Mother from far off.

And, into each strand of my mother's white hair, fiery color floods back. Her shoulders square, and she's tall and slim again, facing me with the enraged pout of her former drunker self. In an eyeblink, our old forms devour us.

When you've been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it's like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place.

Standing before Mother that night, I hear her spewing the kind of bile I listened to for most of the worst evenings of my life, and G.o.d no longer exists, nor any road for me other than to let land whatever barbs Mother might pitch. She's G.o.d then, or my fear is G.o.d. Her face warps into the old mask as she shrieks, You raped me, you and your sister raped me.

I inhale her fury as I might fumes from glue tubes squeezed into a paper bag. The adrenaline that flushes through me inflates me again into a fire-breathing rage. What I shout is more messy and furious than these lines, but the general gist goes: You could talk to me like that when I was little and I didn't have any way out.

But I spent all day throwing out all the canvases you never had the b.a.l.l.s to paint on. Every s.h.i.t-sucking day of my whole life, you blamed me and Daddy and Lecia for you not painting. The truth is: You never had the b.a.l.l.s to paint, Mother. You were too f.u.c.king scared to reveal your ugly self to the world. So you stayed home, and you vomited all that pent-up poison on all of us. And having made not a single plan for your old age, you sit in the house we paid for, trying to screech me back into submission.

I don't f.u.c.king think so, Mother. You don't like it here? Get in your f.u.c.king car and go. And Lecia and I will sell this place and enjoy the first vacation either of us has had in years, you selfish f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h.

I think is what I said.

When I stop speaking, I see my terrified eighty-year-old Mother, small and white-haired. She's collapsed on a recliner, using a magnifying gla.s.s to read the labels of pill bottles, sobbing. She's looking for her nitroglycerin tablets.

Which I retrieve for her.

And that's how I find my sinfulness in all its ugliness-not in prayer but in its absence. Without G.o.d, any discomfort makes me capable of attacking with piety the defenseless-including a frail, confused old lady who's lost her home of fifty years. And it's for this type of realization that G.o.d-in His infinite wisdom-created mirrors. I put Mother to bed and catch a glimpse of us as I pull the covers up to her chin. I'm saying I'm so sorry, and she's claiming to understand.

In the next room at the side of the unfamiliar bed, I get on my knees and try to pray, but my pinballing consciousness slams side to side against my curved rib cage, blasts up to the top of my skull and down against my pelvic cavity, and keeps slamming around that way in vectors I can't follow. I kneel there for fifteen minutes or so, then climb into bed and implode into sleep as if smashed up inside with a ballpeen hammer.

Fitful, this rest is. At one point I dream I'm picking up a child's stuffed animal-a Beanie Baby of the type Dev collected as a kid. In my dream hand, I look down, and the stuffed toy has morphed into a pit viper. With its triangular head, it lunges at my face. I scream myself awake and sit up and see-with eyes wide, a night terror-snakes lunging from the bed's tufted headboard.

Sweaty, heart rattling against my ribs, I look at the digital clock-just after three in the morning I'd gone to bed about two. I pull on running shorts, then tie on a pair of sneakers, thinking that a few miles of road will bang the ugly out of me.