The Original 1982 (15 page)
M
om,” you say. “Listen to this one.” You're in a silly mood, feeling giddy. You tell me a joke, and when I don't get it, you try to explain why it's funny through hysterical giggles. You're holding Z in your arms, the first of the guinea pigs. Turns out guinea pigs are social animals, so shortly after we brought Z home, we got Cinnamon to keep her company. A year has passed since we adopted the two of them.
“I'm sorry. I still don't get it,” I say about the joke, and you give me a look that seems to say:
That's because you're old.
But I don't mind. You've been having a hard time lately and I'm happy to see you laugh and smile.
We go to Ray's, the pizza place on the corner, and I tell you about the time I came here when I was pregnant and had just seen the first-ever picture of you. You interrupt me to say, “I
know,
Mom. You've told me this a million times already.”
“No, I haven't, not a million,” I say.
“Mom, it's boring.” You've become a teenager at twelve.
When we get home I notice that Kiki is not doing well. You're already dealing with a lot by then. You've just started the eighth grade at a private school Gabriel insisted was the best. You miss your friends and are having a hard time adjusting.
All the way to the animal hospital, you beg the taxi driver to go faster. Kiki is weak and thin. She hasn't been eating, not even the tasty bits of tuna we held beneath her nose. An hour after we bring her in, she's gone. We stroke her side and say her name as the veterinarian administers an injection to end her life.
After, you sob, your arms wrapped around my neck. “
Why,
Mom?” you ask.
“She was very sick,” I tell you gently. “But she had a good life and she's not suffering anymore.” It's all I can do not to break down myself.
We hold hands on the way home. For a few hours, you become my baby again.
B
efore we've even had a chance to mourn Kiki's passing, Hector calls with the news that Maria has suffered a stroke. Tragedies seem to come in bunches, Minnow. I don't know why it's true.
We go to visit Maria on the Upper East Side, at the hospital where you were born. She's already been there a week, and Hector says she's doing better.
You hand him the flowers we've brought and he thanks us for coming. “Where's Maria?” you ask.
“She's with a physical therapist,” Hector says. “He's got her up and walking.”
This sounds encouraging, so we're shocked to see her when she's brought back to the room and helped into bed.
Maria seems to be paralyzed on her left side. Her mouth drags down and her eye doesn't blink. Her arm hangs at her side. Hector lifts it at the elbow and arranges it in her lap. He adjusts her pillows to make her more comfortable.
Thankfully, though her voice is weak, she can still speak, and she says, “Minnow, it's so nice of you to come visit me.
Ven acá.
Sit. Hector, get a chair for Lisa.”
Hector goes out into the hallway to find a chair for me. Maria directs you to her good side. You sit beside her, on the edge of the bed.
“Mi amor,”
she says, “you look wonderful. How is school?”
Her illness makes you shy at first, but soon you're telling her about your teacher and your friends, just the way you always have, leaning in close. She reaches up to touch your face with the palm of her good hand.
In the next bed, behind a curtain, another woman clears her throat. She has no visitors. When a nurse comes in and pulls the curtain back, we see she is a tiny old woman, gray and frail. “Hello, there,” I say to her brightly. “Can we get you anything?” She slowly shakes her head no.
“You're a good person, Lisa,” Maria says to me softly, and it almost makes me cry because she is so kind and so sick.
We treat Maria's bedside like it's the living room in her house. We play cards and talk. Even the dust particles hover around her in the sunlight. We learn that she will be released soon; she'll go to a rehab center in order to regain the use of her left side. Her doctor says that if she works hard, there's no reason why she can't make a full recovery.
When Maria's son and grandsons come to visit, we've already been there for more than an hour. So we leave to make room for them. You tell Maria you hope she feels better soon. We kiss her cheek and say good-bye.
On the way home, you ask me to explain what has happened to her.
“Maria had a blood clot,” I say. “It caused the part of her brain that controls her left side to be damaged, but the brain is an incredible organ, and it can learn new ways to do the things it used to do.”
You're fascinated by this and want to learn more about the brain. We go to the library and check out books about neuroscience. I've got Oliver Sacks's
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
You choose a medical journal called
Clinical Neuropsychology: Brain and Behaviors.
“Mom,” you say as we're getting ready for bed that night. “I'm glad Maria's stroke was in the right hemisphere and not the left. She could have lost her ability to speak and understand language. That would have been terrible.”
I lean in to kiss you, and you allow a brief brush of my lips on your cheek, the last of good-night kisses. You're separating from me. I understand it, because I've been doing research about that, too. Though it hurts to have you recoil from my touch and dismiss my opinions, I've learned that individuation is the process by which a person becomes her true self.
Y
ou know the face you see in the mirror when you first wake up,” Jules says. “The face with its creases and droopy eyes? Well, one day it just stays that way. It's your new face!” We laugh hard over that one. Tears of mirth roll down. It seems exactly true, terrifying, inevitable, and hilarious. We're still young but don't know it.
Jules has called to tell me about her reunion. The cast and crew of
L.A. Emergency,
the show that kept her employed for six seasons, has had a party to mark another six since being canceled. She tells me how good it was to see everyone, talks about them all by first nameâher fellow cast members, the writers, producers, assistant director, second assistant director, caterers, grips, makeup artists, and so on. “We were like a family,” she says, and sighs.
I ask about her current work prospects. She says she's had a couple of good auditions, but hasn't heard back yet. “How are things at your job?” she asks.
“Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to be canceled,” I say.
“Oh? I thought it was going well,” she says.
“It's fine.” How to explain the tedium of it to her? She's under the impression that it might be fun, like a TV show about a real estate office. “It keeps Minnow in jeans and T-shirts,” I say.
“Is Minnow still having her dinner dates with Gabriel?”
“Yes,” I say, and lower my voice so you won't hear. You're in your room doing homework. “He's been taking her to all his old haunts when he's in town. I'm sure it's the Gabriel show, but she doesn't seem to mind.”
“Oh, she must be mad for him,” Jules says. “Getting to know him after all these years?”
“You never liked him much,” I remind her.
“I didn't? No, I guess not. I never liked the way he treated you.”
When she says this I suddenly remember a time that the three of us went to the movies together and, in the dark, I saw him put his hand on her knee.
A
t thirteen, Minnow, you excel intellectually. Socially, you're warm and outgoing but easily bruised. You come home crying after school because the girls have arranged themselves into cliques and excluded you. The mean girls know how to find your weakest point and prey upon it.
One day, they make fun of your favorite shoes, and you refuse to wear them. You say you have to have new shoes, just like all the other girls, so we go shopping for them on Eighth Street. “They have to be exactly the same, Mom. Not a bargain brand,” you warn me. When we get home, you take the new shoes from their box to dirty them up. You step on them, bend them, and otherwise abuse them, trying to make it look as if you've had them for years. Then you put them on and look at them from all angles in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. “What do you think?” you ask me.
I could laugh or cry. “They look nice,” I say, and you frown because my response is not the enthusiastic one you want.
Most of your schoolmates have parents who are wealthy and divorced. Chic mothers and absent fathers. In this, you are the same. Gabriel calls to speak to you on Fridays. His check comes at the beginning of the month. He wants to see report cards and hear progress reports. He doesn't take his investment lightly.
In the years since your first meeting, I've watched your relationship with him grow, though he continues to be himself, busy and self-centered. You bend toward him like a lily hoping for a little more sun.
When he calls to invite us to spend the month of August at his house in Malibu, how can I refuse? We go to see him in Los Angeles, just the way I've always told you we would.
While you have surfing lessons and get dragged along to business lunches in Hollywood, I make the drive to Santa Monica to see Jules.
It's hard to be an aging beauty, and harder still to be an aging beauty in Hollywood. Since her TV show was canceled, Jules is playing the occasional mommy now and is glad to have the work. She's no longer an A-lister and says she couldn't care less. She sees the entertainment business for its superficialities and says she doesn't take the rejection personally. She's happy for the time her frequent unemployment gives her to paint and work in the garden. But being without money is another story. She's not good at it. She's not the kind to stretch a penny or forgo a purchase. She's no longer living in the Spanish hacienda, but coming up with the rent, even for her more modest house, is a challenge. When I go to see her in Santa Monica, I've just left Gabriel's place, where the phone is still ringing with opportunity.
I pull up to her charming cottage surrounded by pink rosebushes and palm trees in Gabriel's silver Mercedes convertible. She comes running out, letting the screen door slam. “Hi! Fancy wheels!” she says. She's laughing, and her five Chihuahua rescues are on her heels, barking. The sun is shining through her gold hair. She seems illuminated. I jump out of the car and throw my arms around her. It's the first time we've been face-to-face in more than ten years.
Her house smells of laundry soap and coffee. One of the dogs isn't quite housebroken yet, and Jules's bedding is in a constant state of being washed or dried. There are piles of sheets and blankets on a tabletop waiting to be folded.
All of her beautiful furnishings and collected objects are crowded into the rooms of this smaller house, arranged in artful groupings, displayed as if in a gallery or shop. Still, there's no place to sit down, really. She leads me through the hallway, the living room, and dining room. The dogs follow, causing commotion and chaos. She scolds them affectionately.
In her yellow kitchen, the sun shines through a window above a white cast-iron sink. On the counter two large enamelware canisters catch my eye:
SUGAR
and
FLOUR
. Jules pours freshly made coffee into heavy mugs, and we sit at the table. We could be back on Tenth Street, at her old place in the Village. “What's going on with you and Gabriel?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “It's all for Minnow.” Although it is nice to spend time with him again.
“How is our darling girl?” Jules asks, and I explain that since Maria's stroke you've become fascinated with the brain and now want to be a neurologist. I describe the way you took to your surfboard with a fearlessness that astounds me. I tell her that, a few months ago, you got your first period.
“Oh, it starts,” she says.
“The only concern I have, really, is the way she worships Gabriel. I hope he doesn't let her down.”
She looks at me knowingly, and I know what she's thinking: Like mother, like daughter. But you're not like me, Minnow. You're able to love more than one thing at the same time.
I ask Jules about the movie-business mogul, the one she will later refer to as the love of her life. She says she still hears from him occasionally. “He couldn't deal with the dogs,” she says as she gets up to let them out into the yard. “We grew apart.” She lights up a cigarette, that most familiar of her gestures, cupping the match, although there is no breeze.
I wonder if there were other things about her he couldn't deal with. She is bigger and brighter than she was. Like a child's colorful drawing, she's made no effort to stay inside the lines. It occurs to me that this behavior may only be socially acceptable in the young. With age, it seems more like eccentricity or madness.
After we finish our coffee, she takes me out back to her studio, a converted garage with white walls, a large skylight, and a concrete floor. The room is full of her artwork and supplies. One large canvas has a vintage ball gown affixed to it. It stands six feet tall. Another is a self-portrait that captures her features but lacks her essence. Her real face is so animated, eyes squinting or opened wide, brow furrowed, mouth moving in explanation. “What do you think?” she asks, striking a match to another Marlboro Light.
“I love this,” I say, approaching a piece in the corner. She's constructed what looks like a beehive in the shape of a woman's torso. Patches of chicken wire show through plaster or molded paper. It reminds me of your unicorn with wings, Minnow, the one we made when you were five.
“This one is a work in progress,” she says of the six-foot dress.
“It's beautiful, as is,” I say sincerely, but there's something sad about it. It reminds me of an abandoned bride. So I ask her, “Do you ever get lonely? Do you miss him?”
“I think about him,” she says, “but I'm too busy to get lonely. All the time I used to waste thinking about him, I spend on my work now, and it's not just time. The
quality
of my entire focus is different. I don't have the distraction of wondering what he's thinking or doing, or when I'm going to see him next.” The room fills with a cloud of her cigarette smoke, and I move toward the door for air.
The five little dogs bark and follow us back to the house. They burst through the kitchen door when she opens it.
They
must distract her, I think. Life is full of distractions. Still, nothing throws you off course like the obsessiveness of love.
But would life be worth living without it?
