The End of Eve (26 page)

Leslie and Leo ambled in now, two nights before the memorial, Leo carrying a plastic bag of my mother's remains.

“We couldn't afford an urn,” Leslie said. “Do we have anything like an urn?”

I pulled a Mexican ceramic casserole dish from a low cupboard in the kitchen, offered it up.

Leo placed the bag inside. “Just right,” he said.

The chef handed him a giant bag of corn husks and he washed them in the bathtub, took the scorpions he found outside.

We made masa, then made it again because the chef said the first batch wasn't good enough for a final send-off. And we all sat around the dining room table folding the masa and pork and cheese and chile into the clean corn husks.

Ana, the woman who organized the annual Day of the Dead procession to the old cemetery south of town texted:
May I play the accordion for your mother?

I texted back:
Of course.

And on the morning of the memorial, the lilacs along the gravel driveway up and decided to bloom.

Maia dug through family pictures and wedding announcements, cobbled together a photographic display of my mother's life.

I tore cilantro, cut limes.

The chef mixed the cabbage salad, made the green rice and calabacitas, steamed tamales.

Leslie built a fire in the backyard and someone put the
Harold and Maude
soundtrack on the boom box as the guests began to arrive – the caregivers and the nurses, Ronald and Sol, the strange blonde friend from the hospital and Moe Hawk, the worker my mother had fired for crying in the bathroom and Abra's friends from the Native Arts College. All the queers turned out, too, and my Buddhist friend from Albuquerque. There were people we didn't know, old friends we remembered from my stepdad's church community back in California, people who lived in New Mexico now.

Leslie scanned the crowd. “Where did they all come from?”

Cat Stevens on the boom box. I shrugged. “They're her friends. My friends.”

Leslie shook her head. “Geez. If a cray cray dying lady can create community, maybe anybody can.”

We borrowed chairs from the church across the street.

ABRA READ FROM
The Bible. She read the Mary Oliver poem “Wild Geese.”

An old man with a French accent who I recognized from the disconnected images of my childhood told a rambling story about taking my mother to all the sex shows in San Francisco in the '70s–Carol Doda and the rest of them – and the way his heart beat fast and nervous when he had to bring my mother home to her husband, the priest, and the way the priest didn't blink, just wanted to hear all about Carol Doda and the rest of them.

The chef set out the food, the tamales and the mole, the salad and the tortillas. She poured the wine.

I REMEMBERED OCTAVIO
'
S
dictation notes. The piece of paper I'd stashed on the fireplace mantle. I unfolded it.

The final scene of my mother's memoir/screenplay had no dialogue.

Eve walks slowly through the brush behind the house, walks toward and into the foothills. As she walks, the snow gets deeper, the visibility less. A mountain lion walks with her. Suddenly, a shot is heard from the direction of the house and there's a splattering of bright red blood on the white snow. The wind begins to hum. The snow falls more thickly. In the growing darkness and snow light, the ghost of a mountain lion walks up the mountain, and beside him the ghost of a woman.

FADE TO BLACK
.

LESLIE LIT THE
fire in the backyard, handed out little slips of paper and instructed all the disparate guests to write down the thing they were ready to let go of. As Ana played the accordion, the people approached the fire and, one by one, they let something go.

36.

Ink and Story

MAXITO HELD MY HAND AS WE SHOPPED FOR BERRIES
and braising greens at the farmer's market. He'd taken to wearing his Spider-Man costume everywhere we went, reveling in the winks and whispered attention: “Look, there goes a superhero!”

“We should buy peaches for Maia,” he said, blinking into the early summer sun. “Maia likes beautiful things and peaches are beautiful.”

Maia. She was scheduled to fly into Albuquerque with her new boyfriend that afternoon. She'd totaled Gammie's big red Oldsmobile in a weird morning accident on her last day of school and I'd offered to help her buy another used car with my ghostwriting paycheck.

Maxito hummed as he selected the peaches, each for its particular beauty. He tapped his Spider-Man foot to the drum beat of the one-man band who always played the farmer's market. “Nonna died,” he announced to the poet he must have remembered from the candleshop when she appeared next to us at the peach table. She wore real rattlesnake rattlers as earrings.

“I heard about that,” the poet said. “It must have been very sad.” She looked at me. “Did you bury her here in the desert?”

“No,” I said, then hesitated. “She's still on the mantle. Her ashes.”

The poet picked up a peach. “Your mother wasn't from here. I don't think you should keep her here.”

I didn't know why, but I knew the poet was right.

Maxito stared at her. “I'm not really Spider-Man,” he said. “I'm just a kid. I'm Maxito.”

The poet smiled at that. “Good to know.”

AT HOME IN
the former duplex, my painting of the winged house hung above the mantle now, my hobo birds in the dining room. I rushed inside, Maxito heavy on my hip, grabbed the ceramic casserole dish/urn with my free arm. I buckled Maxito back into his booster seat, seat-belted the urn into the front passenger seat and we all headed for the “pack and ship” on the south side of town.

MAXITO PLAYED WITH
the toy
UPS
trucks and
DHL
planes as I pushed the casserole dish/urn across the counter.

The woman who worked there squinted. She had feathers for earrings. “Any declared value? What is it?”

“It's, um.” I lifted the lid, set it down on the counter. “It's my mother.” I'd jotted my godmother's address in Monterey on a note card, handed it to the woman.

She stood quiet for a moment, then back to business: “Well,” she said. “We'll have to send your mother
U.S.
Postal Service. Certified. It's the only legal way.” She hesitated. “May I?” And she motioned to lift the bag out of the urn.

It seemed an odd request, but I said, “Sure.”

So she picked up that plastic bag full of ashes and bone fragments, said “it's surprisingly heavy.”

I'd noticed that, too. The weight of it. “It's not nothing,” I offered. “This living and dying thing.”

The woman with feathers for earrings set the bag back in the urn, replaced the lid, and then she boxed up my mother for her freight-journey home to California.

“That's not Nonna,” Maxito clarified, not bothering to look up from his toy trucks and planes. “It's just the ashes left over.”

MY PHONE BUZZED
with a text from the chef:
Do you want some alone time with your kids or should we make a big Southern dinner?

I texted back:
Big Southern.

IN THE CUSTOM
kitchen, the chef mixed frying batter for the chicken and tofu cutlets, chopped bread for panzanella, said, “let's invite Carter Quark, too. He's family.”

I boiled collards, stirred the cheese sauce for macaroni, chopped peaches for pie.

Pretty soon Maia and the new boyfriend appeared wearing black T-shirts and faded jeans; carrying bags of fresh mint and bottles of Old Crow Reserve. “We thought what's a big Southern dinner,” the boyfriend said, “without juleps?”

Maia looked around, the art from her childhood on the walls, Maxito's robot drawings taped to the faux finishing in the kitchen, new red paper lanterns over my mother's old beige light fixtures. “It's cozy in here,” she said. “Feels like home.”

I grabbed her arm. “Let's see the new tattoo, Maia.” I'd glimpsed it on Facebook. A living crow for her Nonna – just up her arm from the image of Gammie as a 1940s pin-up. Maia's matrilineage inked into her skin.

“I don't have any tattoos,” Maxito chimed in. “But I do have a really cool shirt.” And he pointed to the dinosaur on his belly. “It glows in the dark.”

Maia showed off her arm piece, sighed. “It turned out pretty big.”

“No, it's perfect,” I said. “Beautiful.”

All this ink and story. I thought about cold bricks at my back, thought about the wind in the alley just then for no reason. About the way abuse invents us, sure, but as long as we're alive there's time for reinvention; time to imagine some way to integrate the enormity of it all.

MY PHONE BUZZED
with a text from Abra:
Landing in Barrow, Alaska.

She'd headed to the Arctic to find the father and grandfather she'd never met. If life was finite, she figured, she might as well spend some time with this family of strangers at the edge of the earth. “That's what Baba Yaga would have me do, isn't it?” She'd asked over black coffee after my mother died.

And I'd nodded, “yes, I think so.”

CARTER QUARK STEPPED
in, set a six-pack of Dos Equis on the counter. “How does it feel now that it's all over?” he asked.

The urge was there, of course – to put a on bow on things, to say
we did this spiritual work and now we're enlightened.

I didn't feel particularly enlightened.

I clicked my iPod into the music player – Mumford & Sons and Aloe Blacc and Nina Simone the rest of them.

Not enlightened, but it was true that something had lifted. Something had been burned through. The secrets and complicated violence we'd always called love – called home – were ashes now.

“Let's eat outside,” I said.

Carter Quark set the picnic table with red napkins and my Gammie's silver.

The chef carried platters of fried chicken, collard greens and coleslaw.

“It's like Christmas,” Maia's new boyfriend smiled.

But Carter shook his head. “This is just Tuesday here. They usually have a piñata.”

“Don't worry,” I promised. “We have a piñata.”

Maxito wiggled into his seat at table. “With sugar in it.”

MAIA HAD POSTED
pictures of the chef frying tofu and the boyfriend mixing juleps on Facebook, so now Sol appeared in the backyard, too, a bottle of sparkling water in hand. “Mind if I join you?”

Maxito smiled up at her. “Come on.”

Maia stood to give Sol a quick hug, but she pointed to me. “You have to ask Lady Yaga. She's the matriarch now.”

I shrugged.
Why not?

The chef leaned over my shoulder, whispered, “don't worry, she'll be nice.”

“This all looks amazing,” Maia said. She picked up a plate of biscuits, took one and passed it.

Maxito adjusted his Spider-Man mask. “I like biscuits,” he sighed. “But I like sugar better.”

I looked out over the backyard. A single crow on the fence.

I was once somebody's daughter.

And now I was free.

Notes and Acknowledgements

MANY PEOPLE
'
S NAMES AND A FEW PEOPLE
'
S IDENTIFY
ing characteristics have been changed to protect their privacy. Thanks to everyone else – not least of all Eve – for being good sports. My mother always wanted to be the star of something dark and grand. This probably isn't quite what she had in mind, but it's what I've got.

Thanks to all the wayward writers in the Literary Kitchen, where I teach and write – especially to my early draft editors Sailor Holladay, Krystee Sidwell, Deena Chafetz, Marti Reggio, Bonnie Ditlevsen, and the indomitable Inga Muscio.

And thanks to Rhonda Hughes and the no-nonsense team at Hawthorne Books for believing in it all. I'm thinking that right now some beautiful girl is sitting on the bank of a river with a copy of this book in her hands and right now she has a rose in her hair.