I was a brooder, caressing demons in my nine-year-old darkness, making pacts and spinning into sleep reciting my long lists of resentments. I could not forgive. I was sly, listening at locked doors and frowning at my mother pointing a camera, making certain she would remember and later, sifting drawers, discover a girl staring at her with twisted lips and mouth snarled. I was listless, always refusing, my mouth forming an iron no while I stored invisible scars from air torn by slammed doors. I wandered alone and practiced abandonment in parks of low drained hills. I was the one wearing childhood like a rare disease, already bored by fairy tales, already knowing better. I was the one with straight A’s and secrets, the one who moved slow and said no and meant it. I was cold, closed, never learning to charm or beg. I was the one who spun webs and made night a contagion.
“You look terrible,” Francine observed. It’s a standard greeting between us.
“What are the odds?” I asked.
I knew Francine would compute the possibilities into odds. My mother and father had spent their first three years together on the road. My father was a gambler. The thoroughbreds were his passion. My mother and father rode trains and slept in hotels while following the thoroughbred horses from New York to Florida and back again. Their map was not cities or states, but race tracks. Tropical, Hialeah and Gulfstream, Havre de Grace, Monmouth and Garden State, Aqueduct, Jamaica, Belmont and Saratoga. That was before I was born. That was before the first cancer.
“Even money says he’ll make it through the surgery. But there’s more involved.” Francine lowered her voice. “You know those bastards.” She meant the doctors. “There’s always more involved.”
I was staring across the living room at my mother. Francine and I are always studying one another across a savage gulf of space neither of us wants or understands. It is dark. Things stir, rustle and peck. The path sinks. There are thorns. A dull wind thick with debris settles over the surfaces, the edges blur.
“Are you going to have a nervous breakdown?” Francine asked.
She walked to the bar. She sat on a stool with narrow cane legs. A mirror, round and the size of a child’s globe, was perched near her elbow. The mirror was framed by small bright bulbs, pinkish and looking hot. Francine was rubbing a bluish cream into her eyelids. From time to time, she sucked in her cheeks and tilted her head, studying her reflection from various angles.
“Well? Are you going to break down?”
Francine made it sound like a race horse breaking a fragile leg. A horse that would have to be shot.
“I want to know what this is going to cost me. How many hospital tabs do I have to pick up? Just his? Or both of you?”
Francine held a small black brush in her hand. She was putting on mascara. Her cheekbones were high, rouged. They looked as if an electric current ran through them. Her neck was thin. Her mouth was full, expressive. I could see her thoughts float across her lips. Her hair had been arranged into a perfect auburn swirl. The telephone rang.
“No way,” Francine said, holding the receiver lightly and opening a tube of brownish lipstick. “My husband’s got cancer.” Francine always calls my father her husband, despite their divorce. “I don’t care if they’re giving it away free. I can’t get to New York now. Screw Barbara Walters.” Francine hung up the telephone.
Francine’s house is large and cool, elegant in an antiseptic way. Her house is a series of tans and beiges, caramels, browns, bones, oysters, bronzes, coppers and creams. Nothing of an earlier Francine remains. Here the past has been completely eradicated. There is not one single chair or table, not even a small lamp or vase, recognizable from childhood. The new tan sofas and light-brown rugs, the new suede chairs and camel-colored pillows came all at once. There was no birth. The house existed fully formed from the beginning, a house without mistakes, not even one tiny mismatched throw rug in a rarely used back room.
Over the years, Francine has been bleaching herself of the past and the invisible black scars it left embedded in her flesh. Francine has pronounced her past useless. Here, on the other side of the country, in the lap of the Pacific, in the land of always summer and peaches hanging big as melons on branches, Francine found her second chance. She was reborn. She ascended, white and pure, with the others, the elect, the white dazed, white bleached, white capped.
Despite her stiffness, and she is a stiff woman, Francine has a strange gaiety, a kind of unnerving optimism. I have observed her in lobbies and elevators, subtly alert, watching men out of the corner of her eye. She is waiting for the one who will take the sting out of darkness with a snap of his fingers. She is waiting for the one in particular to cross a crowded room and hold her close, hold her through everything — the childhood of orphanages, the lifetime of nightmares, hypochondria, chronic depression and the grinding tedium of endless budget meetings.
I have watched my mother straightening her shoulders when she feels a man glancing in her direction. Slowly, as if unconsciously (and perhaps it is unconscious), she rearranges the thin strands of gold necklaces at her throat. I feel her sucking in her breath, wondering, is this the one, is this him, has he finally come, at last?
In my mother’s house, in the layers of tans and bronzes, brown-golds, creams and pale salamanders, I realize that this woman is not the same person I knew in childhood. Francine is something newly created, both inventor and invention. For her, the future is white and amorphous, flat and etched in something hard like stucco. The past never happened. It was savage and painful and now it is gone, over, finished, less than dust, less than the memory of dust.
“It’s going to be a long haul. Months in the hospital, if he makes it. Months to recover, if he recovers. Are you going to collapse?” Francine asked me again.
“I’ll try to hang on,” I said finally. The ceiling looked dangerously low. The far side of the room had developed a slant.
“You’ll do better than try, kid,” Francine said. “We’re in this one, this shit heap, together. I was twenty-seven years old the first time, alone, in a strange city. They said he wouldn’t live through the winter. I had to beg the train ticket money. I didn’t know a single person in this town. I had a child, an invalid husband, no education. You don’t know. You couldn’t know. I breathed life into him. He wanted to give up. He wanted to die and I wouldn’t let him. It was August in Philadelphia, 102 degrees. He was lying under blankets, shivering. I bent down and breathed air into his mouth. Are you following me? I wiped him, washed him. I emptied bedpans. I changed bandages. I saw the blood, the scars, the horror. I went to work, paid the rent, put food on the table and clothes on everybody’s back.”
The phone rang. Francine held the receiver while blotting her lips with a Kleenex. “Sacramento?” She tilted her head. She lit a cigarette. “What kind of car?” Pause. “No, I’m not going to Sacramento for a goddamned Volkswagen.”
Francine hung up the phone. She looked disgusted.
The phone rang again. Los Angeles is a city dedicated to the telephone. In part, everyone is constantly on the phone because they are continually making, breaking and changing their deals. They’re constantly on the phone because here, in the City of the Angels, where the elect have ascended, they often find themselves perched on cliff tops, on canyon tops and hilltops, absolutely alone.
I sat down in my mother’s den on a caramel-colored sofa with coral and tan stuffed pillows. For no particular reason, I began thinking about my ex-husband, Gerald. We were living in Berkeley, in a one-room attic apartment with a hot plate in the closet and a Murphy bed on the wall. The one window was small and permanently jammed shut. By April, the stiff air was unbearable. Heat dulled us into a terrible mindless lethargy.