The Worst Years of Your Life (28 page)

“Motive is obvious,” I said. “Who gains the most from Kennedy dying? LBJ gets to be president. Who's responsible for the investigation and subsequent cover-up? LBJ gets to appoint the Warren Commission. There's proof that LBJ actually knew Jack Ruby. All LBJ ever wanted was to be president. Not vice president. He was an old man. Time was running out.” I told my mother that there had been talk of Kennedy dropping LBJ from the ticket in '64.

“How do you know so much?” she asked.

“It's Dad's fault,” I said.

“You know, your father always wanted to be a high school history teacher.”

“What stopped him?” I asked.

“Well, sweetie,” Mom said, wiping ice cream off my nose, “convicted felons aren't allowed to teach children.”

Mom balanced her own ice cream cone against the steering wheel and turned on the ignition. She headed out toward Johnson City. We drove past brown, sandy hills crowned by patches of cacti with round, thorned leaves.

“Take it back,” I told her. “What you said. Take it back.”

“You shouldn't idealize your father. You didn't know him as well as you'd like to think.”

“From the looks of it,” I pointed to Mom's belly, “Dad didn't know you at all.” I was deciding between calling my mother a “bitch” and calling her a “fucking bitch” when she chucked the rest of her ice cream cone at the side of my face. The ice cream splattered against my hair and cheek. The wafer cone landed on the side of my leg. I picked it up and threw it back at her. I pulled the top of my own ice cream off of its cone and aimed for Mom's chest. She shrieked, swerving the car and throwing back at me whatever clumps of ice cream she could pull from her cleavage. We each lost sense of our target, hurling any ice cream slop we could get hold of. The rental car's green cloth upholstery and side windows clouded over in a sticky, cherry-flavored film. Chocolate ice cream melted in streams down Mom's chest. The black velvet letters on my Victim T-shirt soaked up my dessert. Mom drove and swore. She called me ungrateful and threatened to leave me right there on the spine of the Devil's Backbone. Mom didn't notice the bend in the road. She screamed in confusion as our rental car lurched through a very real white picket fence, careening down a hill and into an orchard. She pumped and locked the brakes just in time for us to hit a patch of peach trees.

The air bags did not work. No explosion of white pillow. In that brief instant, as I watched the seat belt jerk Mom back and hold her safely in place, I thought of how the pressure and force of the air bag would have crushed Mom's belly, crippling Lyndon, killing the start of him. Mom saved me from the windshield by holding her right arm out straight against my chest. “Holy fuck,” she said.

Mom surveyed me. “Are you all right?” she asked. We got out of the car together, the two of us still dripping with ice cream. We marveled at the damage. A peach tree appeared to be growing out of the hood of our rental car. Mom picked up a pink-and-yellow fruit, brushing the fuzz against her lips before taking a bite. “You and your presidents,” she said. “That's it. I'm through. And you can be damned sure I'm not taking you to Yorba Linda. There's no fucking way I'm visiting Nixon.”

I
INSISTED ON HIKING
the remaining mile and a half to the LBJ Ranch. The car was not my problem. I was a kid and this was my summer vacation. I stayed a hundred yards in front of my mother. She played with her cell phone the entire time, dialing and redialing numbers. From her loud cursing, I could tell that there was no service, no way to call a tow truck or taxi. No way to complain to her mystery lover about me. I imagined my mother had many young lovers. For all I knew, she didn't know who Lyndon's father was. I didn't want to think about The Lion having sex. I wanted to remember the Saturday mornings when I'd wake up early, sneak into my parents' room, and burrow a narrow tunnel between their sleeping bodies. I'd trace the beauty marks on Mom's back, naming the largest ones. With the tips of my fingers, I'd smooth out the worry lines on my father's forehead. Their bed was an enormous life raft. I would imagine that the three of us were the last family left in the world. I loved my parents best when they were asleep and I was standing guard.

O
N THE
LBJ
TOUR BUS,
the man sitting closest to the door stood up to give my mother his seat. She smiled and said, “Not necessary.” We'd taken turns washing up by ourselves in the ladies' room of the park's Visitor Center. While Mom pulled knots of peanut Twinkle-Kote from her hair, I watched a short film about the ranch, the birthplace, and the family cemetery. The birthplace wasn't really the birthplace. The original birthplace had been torn down. LBJ actually had a facsimile of the house rebuilt during his presidency. He decorated the house in period pieces, but none of the furnishings were original except for a rawhide cushioned chair. The film showed Lyndon in a cowboy hat and sports coat posing on the front porch of his make-believe home. Dad would have loved the film. He would have leaned over and repeated the story about LBJ and the goat fucker.

“Do you know about LBJ and the goat fucker?” I said to Mom. “When Johnson first ran for office, he told his campaign manager to spread a rumor that his opponent had sex with farm animals. When the manager pointed out that this wasn't true, Johnson said, ‘So what. Force the bastard to admit, “I never fucked a goat.” He'll be ruined—'”

“You curse like your father.” Mom sighed.

The Reconstructed birthplace was the first stop on the tour. The park ranger/bus driver was a chatty, older woman named Cynthia. She bounced around the bus taking our tickets, sporty and spry in her light green ranger's uniform. A row of bench seats ran along each side of the bus facing a wide center aisle. Another row of seats ran along the back. There were nine other people on the bus: the polite man closest to the door, a pair of elderly, identical twin sisters who wore matching red windbreakers, a middle-aged German couple toting two large canvas backpacks, and a family of four. The mother and father of the family laughed as their young daughter hugged her baby brother and scooped him up onto her lap. The little blond boy had a crazy cowlick I wanted to flatten and fix. Mom and I sat in the very back row, several seats apart from each other.

As we drove past the banks of the Pedernales River, Cynthia described the lawn chair staff meetings Lyndon held at his ranch during Vietnam. She told us that Lady Bird had kindly donated all of the land and the ranch to the National Park Service, but chose to live part-time in the main ranch house. I could feel my shingles sore rubbing against my T-shirt, the pain ratcheting up inside of me. I was still angry at Mom. I held my breath to calm myself and ran through dates: “Andrew Johnson 1865–69, Benjamin Harrison 1889–93, Warren Gamaliel Harding 1921–23.” Mom leaned over and said, “Lady Bird is shrewd. Putting the ranch into a trust is an excellent way of avoiding taxes.”

We drove past lazy orange-and-white Hereford cattle grazing by the river. An ibex shot out from behind a sycamore tree, and then another ibex followed, and another. The cows ignored the elegant brown-and-white horned antelopes. Cynthia said, “Lady Bird also runs an exotic animal safari on the ranch. As exotic animals are legal in Texas, hunters can pay the Johnson family to come and stalk rare creatures from the Dark Continent.” My mother whispered, “Lady Bird's a genius.”

I'
D ALWAYS THOUGHT
that Dad liked Mom because her mother's maiden name was Van Buren. One afternoon, my father told me how he and Mom began dating. “You have to be careful with this information,” he said. “Your mother doesn't know the whole story.” My parents met their freshman year in college. The same day Dad met Mom, he also met another woman, a sculpture major named Lisel. She had wavy black hair, a German accent, and an apartment off-campus. Dad liked both women and was stuck deciding whether to pursue Mom or Lisel. He decided to go after Lisel. He was dressed up and on his way to meet the German sculptress for their first serious date when he bumped into Mom. “She'd been playing rugby and she was totally covered in mud and sweat. She asked me if I wanted to take a shower with her. I went back to her dorm.” Dad smiled. “And that's the moment when my life began.” He said something else about Mom being a sexy lady, but I clutched my hands to my ears and blocked him out.

T
HE RECONSTRUCTED
birthplace was white with green shutters. It was small. Just two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a breezeway. Cynthia showed us the bedroom where Johnson was birthed. A queen-size bed dominated the room. I noticed long, shiny black beetles crawling over the chenille bedspread. One of the beetles flew up and circled past me. Cynthia said, “His mother claimed that he had it wrong. She kept insisting that Lyndon was actually born in the smaller bedroom, but LBJ was adamant.”

In the kitchen I saw the rawhide chair, the one authentic piece. I wanted to run my hand over the cow fur. Right by the kitchen table stood a baby's wooden high chair with L
ADY
B
IRD
etched across the backrest. Cynthia said that the First Lady had been kind enough to donate her own Roycrafter high chair for the replica. Mom mouthed “Lady Bird” to herself and rested her hands on her belly. I pictured a plump, kicking baby fidgeting in the chair. “Mom, if you want,” I said. “I could steal the high chair for you.”

“What's a lady bird?” Mom asked Cynthia.

“A lady bird is what we in the South call ladybugs.”

Mom looked at me. She shook her head. “Those little killers.”

S
OMETIMES WHEN
I hung out with my Dad while he smoked Buchanan, I'd get paranoid. Even though I understood how girls got pregnant, I'd imagine one of my father's sperm magically escaping from his boxer shorts, swimming through his pants, landing on my leg and inching up my Holy Angels uniform. I imagined being pregnant with Dad's baby, but I couldn't imagine anything after that. In her grief Mom had fucked someone. Maybe The Lion had some Meat after all. She probably couldn't explain her own pain over losing Dad. At least not to me. I knew harboring a baby while I looked on could only make her feel alone. While he was alive, Mom was certain I loved Dad more than her. “The two of you have your own secret society,” she'd say. Now that he was dead, Mom was convinced I'd love the memory of him more than I'd ever love her. I wanted to tell her she was dead wrong, but I wasn't sure that she was.

T
HE
J
OHNSON FAMILY
graveyard, nothing more than a small plot of land squared off by a stone wall, stood straight across from the birthplace. Mom and I walked hand in hand in the August heat to the cemetery. Cynthia and our bus mates were still loitering beside the house. Mom told me that Dad had been arrested before I was born. He'd been pulled over for speeding in his pie truck. The cop noticed a baggie of pot in the ashtray. A very big baggie of pot. Dad was arrested, tried, and found guilty of possession with intent to distribute. “Your grandfather could have made the whole thing go away, but instead, he let your father do six months in prison. Minimum security, a life lesson. I was pregnant with you the whole time he was locked up.”

Mom tucked a wisp of loose hair behind my left ear. “I figured you should know about your father's past, you know, for your political career.”

I wanted to tell her that I was sorry. As much as I loved my father, I was mystified as to why Mom, who worked ninety hours a week, would stay married to a man who was happiest when lying down on a couch, a man who couldn't keep his balance on the roof of his own house. A man who could never find his wallet or remember to tie his shoes. A man who panicked every time the phone rang. I would never understand how she had come to love him.

“I'm sorry about the rental car,” I said.

“Insurance will cover it.”

Mom and I looked out at the family gravestones. The tallest one was Lyndon's.

“Honey, your Dad was a wonderful, frustrating, lovely, ridiculous man.”

W
HEN WE
reboarded the bus, our tour guide Cynthia smiled and informed us, “You're all very lucky. Lady Bird is in Bermuda this week. The Secret Service has okayed us for a drive-by of the ranch house.”

Mom shouted down the length of the bus to Cynthia, “Can't we leave the bus and visit the inside of the house?”

“I'm afraid not, ma'am.”

“But that's why we came here,” the elderly twins said in unison.

“Sorry, ladies. Those are the rules.” Cynthia turned the bus onto a red dirt road.

Without even the slightest look in my direction, Mom shouted, “My daughter has visited every presidential home in the country. We came all the way from New Jersey.”

“Security risk.” Cynthia said. “Plus, the ranch house is Lady Bird's primary residence. None of us would want a bunch of strangers trudging through our homes while we were out of town.”

“It's fine, Mom.” I said.

“Besides, you've seen the birthplace,” Cynthia said.

“The reconstructed birthplace,” Mom retorted. “Elise, you came here to see the house, and I'm going to make sure you see it.” My pregnant mother pushed herself up from her seat on the moving bus, clutched her leather purse and waddled to the front. Cynthia continued to drive. Mom held onto a railing and leaned into the back of Cynthia's chair. Cynthia shook her head. And then she shook her head so violently that her mirrored sunglasses flung off her face and skittered to the floor of the bus. Mom kept right on talking. She reached into her purse and pulled out her wallet. Everyone on the bus heard Cynthia say, “Ma'am, I am a ranger for the National Park Service. I cannot be intimidated.”