“What am I supposed to do?” I asked her. “I don’t understand how they can do such a thing. How can they eat together?”
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” she said. “You’re my son, and I love you. But those women are much more ambitious than you are. You’ve always been happy with your unhappiness. But those women want their lives to be better. Frankly, I wish they’d fall in love with each other.”
My mother, my wife, and my former girlfriend have always searched for something better. Good for them, good for them! Estelle left her reservation because she wanted to live near a great library; Mary left Montana because she wanted to work for Ralph Nader; Cynthia left me because she wanted a tacit life. A defense attorney for the city, she met and married a carpenter who doesn’t believe in metaphors. They moved to “the country,” whatever that is, and they send us Christmas cards. So maybe all is forgiven, or maybe Cynthia wants to teach me something; she was always teaching me something.
“All those books in your house, and all those books in your head,” Cynthia had said to me when she left me for good. “And you don’t know a damn thing about a damn thing!”
Oh, she was right then, and she’s right now. Smart women surround me and lovingly tolerate my stupidity. My wife and daughters believe me to be a Holy Fool, a builder of nothing and a fixer of less. But damn, I make them laugh, and I do my share of the household chores!
“Son,” my mother said to me on the night of my high school graduation, “if you want your future wife to lust after you for the rest of your days, then all you have to do is complete this to-do list:
“Wash the dishes on a regular basis.”
“If you’re feeling lonely and you want her to suck on your toes or any of your other projectiles, do the laundry.”
“Do you want to keep love alive? All you have to do is vacuum. Oh, my son, vacuum in the middle of the night, and your future wife will rise naked from her bed and make love with you at three in the morning!”
“Reverse the stereotypical gender roles, my dear, dear boy, and you shall be redeemed!”
But it was my mother who first gave up on love, who, since my childhood, has lived what I assume to be a chaste life. She could not love a man who did not respect her; she could not sleep with a man who made her feel dirty. So as far as I can tell, and I believe she would tell me otherwise, she has simply gone without. She is a secular nun! My crazy aunt Bettina thinks all that whole-woman talk turned my mother into a lesbian (and what better way for a woman to show her love for women than by romantically loving women?), but I think my mother has decided that she’d rather spend more time with open books than with closed men. My mother refuses to lower her standards! She’ll read any book once but will toss it aside if it doesn’t hold up to a second reading. As for me, as crazy as it sounds, I want to become the kind of man my mother would sleep with. Ha, ha, ha, ha! I don’t want to sleep with my mother, but I want to sleep with women my mother loves. Ha, ha, ha, ha! I don’t want to be cherished by my mother (and I am beloved) as much as I want to be respected by her.
Estelle and I both grew up to be white-collar community-college teachers. At North Seattle Community College, I teach three classes of American history (imagine that: An Indian teaches white kids about Benjamin Franklin and Susan B. Anthony, isn’t that joyous!), while Estelle teaches two art-appreciation classes and one in women’s studies at Seattle Central Community College. My mother has become a respected and well-loved academic bureaucrat (Teacher of the Year for seven years running!), but that’s hardly the stuff of New Age fantasies. This is what my mother teaches now:
A thousand years from now, the Egyptian pyramids and middle-class white American all-you-can-buffet restaurants will be viewed with equivalent awe at their majesty and disgust at their excess.
President William Jefferson Clinton is the epitome, perhaps the evolutionary apex, of white male behavior, and that’s why most white people, liberal and conservative, hate him so vehemently.
Twenty-seven-year-old white men look exactly the same as three-month-old white babies of either gender.
White men are endlessly creative because they’re so damn bored. Shakespeare and golf were invented for the same reason. Hitler and Pee-wee Herman were motivated by the same existential dread and masculine insecurity. Hugh Hefner and Napoleon should be flavors of ice cream. World domination and the complete line of Sears power tools are equally important goals.
White men are terrified of being better and kinder and more intelligent men than their fathers; therefore, they invented nostalgia and have canonized slave owners like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
The average white male working the graveyard shift at a 7-Eleven in the year 2003 is a more educated and advanced and decent human being than the average white male attending an opera in New York City in 1876.
If you want to make a white man cry, despite the amount of time it’s been since he last wept aloud, then all you have to do is employ “baseball” and “father” in three consecutive sentences.
My mother is no longer on a wholehearted journey to claim her female wholeness. I don’t ask her about it, but I’m sure she loves her life and considers it complete, as filled as it is with her students, colleagues, books, grandchildren, and the mountains that surround Seattle on all sides. Call her answering machine (she rarely picks up the phone even when she’s home), and you’ll hear: “Hi, this is Estelle, and I’m not here, so I’m probably climbing a dormant volcano. Leave me a message, and I’ll give you a call when I come back down.”
I don’t know if my mother keeps in contact with those needy white women from the summer of 1976. I read about them in the newspapers; I see them on television. Some of them have become locally famous, and one is famous everywhere. A former lawyer, she recently won an Emmy for her role as a lawyer in a TV movie.
My mother invited me over to watch the movie with her. It was bad.
“I remember when she couldn’t orgasm,” my mother said of the woman. “I wonder if she can orgasm now.”
I learned about female orgasms at a very young age. I never once in my life believed in the vaginal orgasm. I learned I’d find Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhart before I found a vaginal orgasm.
My mother made me read the feminist bible titled Our Bodies, Ourselves. I read it once and gave it back to my mother and never said another word about it. But I came home early from school one afternoon and found my mother and twelve white women studying their vaginas with handheld mirrors.
“Ma!” I shouted after the women had pulled up their pants and fled into the kitchen. “I’m not supposed to see things like that! Well, maybe I’m supposed to see things like that, but only one at a time!”
“The vagina is a beautiful flower,” said my mother.
“I know it’s a beautiful flower,” I said. “I’m drowning in the garden!”