“I am lucky Alice’s father didn’t drink. That’s all I’ll say.
“No, don’t even bother to ask.
“All I’ll say is Alice’s father didn’t spend my money and he left me with some. With a lot. He provided, but I was frugal. People used to money don’t tend to spend it. I didn’t, and yet my undergarments have always been silk, and most of what I wear comes from Paris. I like pretty clothes, so there’s a reason Alice likes clothes although her choices are garish, fantastic, often in very bad taste. The drugs and the drinking have never helped. At least that’s what I think. I don’t know for sure. I have never much indulged. I like punch cocktails and after-dinner drinks, the kinds made with sugar and cream. Alice puts out that I like pills myself, but Alice doesn’t know what she is saying. She exaggerates. She likes to tell stories. She tells coarse stories. She says what my husband liked about me were my breasts. She could write about the daisies but she chooses to write about shit. That’s what I always say is why write about … when you could write about the daisies. Alice thinks I’m in bad health, but I am not. I am healthy. I live alone in a large house with a housekeeper and a caretaker, extra gardening help and cleaning and sometimes with my granddaughter — with you, dear heart.
“I have never had to worry about money. I did not fight with my husband. When I was angry at him, I bought myself some jewelry. No, I am not leaving your mother my diamond. I am leaving your mother snarled in trusts she will never unknot. She expects to get my pearls, but she is in for a surprise, and maybe I’ll just give the ring to you. I might just leave you the sparkler.
“Here’s the key to where I keep it. Open that drawer and see.”
FATHER
I FOUND HIM, I think, my own. Late summer in a far-afield family site, I stood at his grave and tried to communicate. A radio played from somewhere loudly, and I couldn’t think what I was to him or would have wanted to be with this racket going on. Tunes from the 1960s, for Christ’s sake, and coy impatiens growing so easily around his stone, I couldn’t think who he was to me — but some kind of father, surely.
MOTHER
MOTHER, OR THE WOMAN who said she was my mother, settled in California, finally. That was where she finally went alone and where I found her. She bought a home, which she insisted was a first home because, unlike all of the others, she had picked it: a modern twist done in taupes and railings, built-ins, islands, skylights unexpected. More sun and more sun! On the days when she was well, she cut gardenias and floated them in silver ashtrays; she opened the terrace doors. The ocean brought a breeze; although she was halfway up the canyon, some few blocks from the beach, the sheer curtains caught the wind and looked like surf. I saw such days as these with her in the summers I went to visit — high-pressure high-colored days — Mother’s cats flopped dog-wise on the driveway in the sun. “Don’t drive over them!” this new and cautionary mother was calling from her bed.
I was driving now; Nonna was dead, and I was doing the leaving.
“But you only just got here! Don’t leave. Who is there to watch TV with me? Can’t you stay another week?” Mother said, “I don’t understand how you can leave in this weather.” She asked, “How can you?”
I told her it was hard, but it wasn’t really hard to leave her, not at all. I had fingered the dust of split capsules and licked the insides of drawers. Waxes, razors, jellies, whatever I had found that could be used on the body, I had used it, powdering the mound between my legs and walking through the modern house fearlessly undressed and shaved. The air against the newly shaved part was a pinprick thrill.
I was interested in meeting new men, but Mother’s friends were mostly women. The men who fixed her car, the gardener, these men she knew only in passing. California was women and cats and time spent on the flat, flesh-colored beach beneath the rusty cliffs near La Jolla.
Poor Mother in her mother’s body. I thought about it and about my own body. I shaved obsessively. Summer to summer, my goal was to be hairless and smooth and all one color — tawny.
We often went to the beach.
We went to Sea World a million times.
“Vons,” Mother said. “We need something for dinner.” I criticized her for the way she lived.
Mother said, “I’m sorry I don’t know any men for you,” and she offered me her sticky wand, swearing, “It works, believe me. Try.”
“No.”
I knew the sound the wand made. I had heard my mother’s voice swoop, and the consequences! Animals snarled in their clothesline-tethers or retching what was spiked for them to feed on, I had heard the calamitous tread of pets; I had heard the sounds of women singing off-key. Fires in the fireplace crackling in August, stalled cars, spills, glass, glass stepped on, accidents, emergencies, the wail once of an ambulance — for Mother? I think it was for Mother, but all of this happened when I was half asleep. Maybe I was dreaming; I didn’t ask about it,
I said, “We’re doing all right without men.”
She said, “But we could use more money!”
“We were laughing then, Mother and I; we were loud with what bodily pleasure there was to be had in it, in making noise, in breaking one object over another, in saying, fuck, fuck, fuck, why did we let them do it?