MY MOTHER ALMOST GOT MARRIED WHEN SHE was nineteen. As she told it, she was a townie that Gil (she liked saying his name) was fooling around with in New Brunswick. He went to Rutgers, and they’d met because she was working as a receptionist for a local New Jersey doctor he went to for a torn rotator cuff. She flirted with a lot of the patients; nobody cared in those days. It was midway into the sixties.
What he liked about her was her lack of timidity (a trait she kept). Their best date was a trip to Asbury Park—he’d never met a girl who wanted to go on the roller coaster two times in a row. All the crazy lurching, the swoops and the turns and the insane dips they could see ahead but couldn’t stop from happening were to her an orchestrated metaphor for the great physical excitement they were privately carrying on whenever they could. She’d been to the park many times as a kid, but on these visits she really understood it. It was a gaudy version of an enormous truth. She explained this to me with more specifics than I wanted.
So she and Gil were out on a warm May evening, right before the end of the semester, and they were strolling the boardwalk with their french fries and red cream sodas after the rides. “You know what?” he said. “You could marry me.”
My mother was wildly flattered—no one had proposed to her before—and she didn’t even really mind the conceited way he phrased it. But the finality of marriage (marriage!) didn’t seem accurate to her for what they had, though she was willing to be open-minded. “Maybe we should live together first?” she said. Since dropping out of college she’d been living at home and was eager not to.
“Forget it then,” he said.
She hadn’t known how insulted he would be. He stopped right there on the boardwalk and turned around and walked them back to the parking lot, a long and winding walk (it took her a minute to stop thinking: No frozen custard?). “We don’t have to leave,” she said. “Are we leaving? Don’t leave!”
He hated anything she said then, no matter how tearful she got. “I should’ve known,” he kept saying. “You’re such an infant, you have no clue at all.” She hadn’t expected him to turn on her like that. They had more dates before they actually broke up, but that was the end of whatever good times they had.
Years later, after my mother had lived all over the world, she was shopping in New York for a jacket, and she saw Gil’s name on a label. She knew it was really Gil, she knew he’d gone into the clothing business, but still it was a shock to see the threaded letters in satin. “I knew I couldn’t buy the jacket,” she said. “Nothing against Gil, but nobody wants the past muttering to her every time she gets dressed. Does she?”
The next boyfriend she had, after Gil, saw how well situated she was for swiping a few boxes of pharmaceuticals from the doctor’s office. She didn’t think anyone would catch her and they didn’t. She packed the goods neatly in her tote bag, under a flowered silk scarf. “Good girl,” Quinn, the boyfriend, said. She’d expected heartier praise, and he didn’t kiss her until after he’d counted the bottles. She was excited anyway. She wanted to be a different sort of person and he was offering lessons.
He’d wanted the drugs to sell, not use, though they did try them and get stoned and drowsy and physical (as they called it then) in slow ways. They were in his apartment at the time, in another part of her town. She fell asleep and didn’t go home to her parents’ house till morning, and the ruckus when she walked in, all the shouting and insults, caused her to see that she really could not live there anymore.
So Quinn was her ticket out (somewhat to his surprise). They had to move her belongings from the family home during her lunch hour, when no parent was in sight; he came in his car to get her and her duffle full of clothes. She was so young some of them still had nametapes from camp. And then he was picky where she put them in his closet.
She got along with everyone at the doctor’s office, she had a good personality, so no one worried if she spent a few minutes in the back closet, getting her hands on a few more drugs Quinn knew the names of. She went slow on the thefts, small amounts each time; she saw the risks. Quinn would have had her trucking out every bit of stock in uppers or downers they had. Let him call her chicken-shit if he wanted; limits were needed. She brought a bunch of daffodils to the office by way of apology the day she explained to the good doctor (he wasn’t that good) that she had to leave very soon to go back to school. “Pre-law,” she said. “It’ll be a grind.” Who goes to school in April? No one said a word. Her new zest for falsity did nothing but pay off.
Quinn was furious that she’d quit without even consulting him. “What am I supposed to do now?” he said.
“I have to tell you,” she said. “I might have a job in London.”
One advantage of working for a doctor who treated sports injuries was that a lot of men came through the door. She’d been having a thing with someone named Matthew, who had hurt his knee hiking the Kittatinny Ridge. He wanted to start off in England and go on the overland route across Europe to Asia—take buses or trains or hitch rides on trucks—through Turkey and Iran and Afghanistan, as far as the Himalayas. It would take them months but it wouldn’t cost much. My mother wanted something but she didn’t know what, and this was the best theory she’d heard, the most ambitious. She had a little money from her share of the drug profits, to get them started, and he was selling a car he had.
“What kind of job?” Quinn said.
“In a hotel,” she said. “My cousin knows someone in this London hotel.”
She must have been slightly afraid of Quinn to announce her leaving in this way. And leave she did. He called her names but he didn’t stop her, and she went back to her parents just for a few days (her family was still mad she hadn’t stayed with Gil) and then she slipped off for good with dear Matthew. A man with a generally nice character, though my mother had no idea then really. He’d found a cheap charter flight to London, and she even liked the crummy airline food, she was so excited. She fell asleep on his shoulder with the tray still in front of her. And that was how I came to spend the first nine years of my life in Nepal.
My mother’s name was Frances but everyone called her Frankie. They named me Tara, after a figure of great powers in Tibetan Buddhism—lucky for me it sounded like a regular name, though I had a phase of trying to be called Terry. My sister got stuck with Apsara, which was harder to tell people.
I had a cheerful childhood really. In Kathmandu my parents’ friends thought kids were intriguing creatures and they could easily be induced to play with us; they believed in freedom, in the rights of kids to run around like little maniacs. Apsara and I had each other to run with, we had buddies who came and went, and sometimes we got to play with the Nepali kids on our street. We had enough language for simple games and they didn’t mind us.
There were a few episodes of neglect. Once we got lost for hours taking a shortcut through the alleys of the city and were really scared, and once my sister had a cut that got infected and left some nerve damage in her foot. But mostly the joy and wonder that the grownups were in the business of hunting down was quite compatible with our preferences. My father taught us to read, when he was home from his hikes, and when he had bits of cash from setting up other travelers with mountain routes and trekking guides, we were sent to a little school run by an Englishwoman. It was almost like a real school.
Of course, they couldn’t stay in Nepal forever. California was a big shock when we landed there. We were staying in Berkeley, as good a spot as they could’ve picked, camping out in the living room of a friend of my father’s from college. People were perfectly nice to us, but they had different customs. School was much worse than we expected. My sister and I were not used to being apart and had no experience sitting still at desks for two and a half hours in the morning and two and a half hours in the afternoon. My sister was the one more outraged at first—she screamed and tried to leave by herself—but she adapted sooner. She was only seven; people put up with her.
I was better at doing what they told me, but I stayed horrified. This was really going to keep happening for the next eight years? My father said, “You’ll get used to it, chicken. I’m sorry.” Eventually I did learn how to give answers in certain subjects (not arithmetic) and then one girl asked me about the food I brought for lunch. I swapped my lentil stew for her cheese sandwich, the way kids do, and after that I could sort of talk to her and some of the others.
I’d seen a few videos on TV screens in Nepal but I’d never seen a movie in a movie theater, the vast glowing spectacle in the monumental dark, sealed and pure. My father’s friends took us to see E.T. and I couldn’t get over it. I came out amazed to be outside again, with all those wild events tucked back into themselves, known from a distance. I loved that distance; I loved being the monarch of my feelings.
My mother had to say, “I still can’t get over the way the electricity stays on all the time here.” She was having her own identity issues adjusting to the U.S. and tended to mock the ease and convenience of things. My sister kept repeating her favorite lines (phone home) from the scenes she liked and I shushed her savagely; I didn’t want anyone else’s version of what I’d just been through. I should’ve paid more attention to Apsara.
They were not into money, my parents, but they knew they needed it, now that they’d left their beloved Kathmandu, where prices were set by residents barely used to a cash economy. My father, who always wanted to be outside, was applying to be a park ranger. My mother thought she might start a store where she could sell pashmina shawls. These ideas did not match, but they weren’t used to holding jobs and may not have quite noticed. In the meantime, my mother got us food stamps. She said we had to get them fast before Reagan took them away.
It was May when my father finally got his placement in Devils Postpile National Monument. A name that scared us, but he couldn’t believe his luck. My mother would’ve kept all of us in Berkeley, waiting for his visits, but it turned out we did not have lodging forever with his friends. My parents had loud, sharp fights about what real life was, and then my father went off to what she called his hut in the wilderness. And when school was out in June, my mother took Apsara and me on a four-day bus trip (which we mostly liked) to New York. She had a friend from high school who put us up at first, and we settled on the Lower East Side. Someone let her work as a hostess in a restaurant—she liked the sociability and she could bring food home. And that was where we did the rest of our growing up.
Our mother always had to leave for work at four thirty in the afternoon, so our dinners were like after-school snacks. Apsara was the less civilized one, so cute she got away with murder. She ate with her hands, she put Log Cabin syrup on her hamburger; my mother didn’t care. When we got older I was in charge of feeding us. We never had sitters (I was already ten) but we had a neighbor we could call. The neighbor kids loved our food.
Nobody we knew had any money. Admittedly, our clothes were more makeshift—the bottom of the Goodwill barrel—but Apsara could spruce hers up with a belt or a zebra-print scarf she cherished. We had protectors when someone decided to mock or threaten us; we had the other kids in our building. In high school I was sometimes scared, but not too often.
I was good at schoolwork. When our father came to visit, maybe twice a year, he always said I was going to be president. He took me to movies; he’d do two in a row if I wanted. (Age suitability was nothing to him; we both liked Blue Velvet.) He took Apsara skating, ice in winter and roller in summer. He figured out the forms for my financial aid for college. Even our mother still loved him, though they both had other people, on and off.
The college he helped me pick (in upstate New York, three and a half hours away) was a school full of other movie nuts, a great place, and my theories were no weirder than anyone’s. My friend Tracey, a girl from the Bronx who could bat around terms like master shot and eyeline matching, thought my freshman film about garbage trucks was “much better than most other crap.” I was never more thrilled with myself.
A boyfriend I had for a while in my twenties used to say, “I hate to break the news to you, but nobody lives on nothing anymore.” I wasn’t flaky about money—I was the anti-flaky one in my family—but small amounts always seemed like enough to me. I was a barista at Starbucks when he said this, and I didn’t hate the job either. I’d been out of college a few years, trying to get some kind of work on other people’s films. Of course, I wanted to make my own, but when would that be? A student film of mine got shown at a festival, I helped with the editing of my friend Tracey’s short doc, and I made excellent lattes, with designs in the foam.
At least I was doing better than my sister, who liked to come in for free scones. She was doing too many drugs—I didn’t know which drugs, substances with nicknames way beyond me. She didn’t look that bad, a skinny pretty girl in a black T-shirt, not unusual. If I took my break at a back table with her, she’d tell me how her boyfriend had disappeared but was probably coming back, and she was getting a job soon really. I could never get her to come stay with me.
I made my first documentary with a grant from the state of New York and with lots of friends helping. It was about the innocent lives of urban rats; I had good close-ups of their squirrel-like activities and recorded talk from experts who didn’t hate them. Unsensational and fascinating, that was my pitch. The hard part was getting it shown anywhere. Tracey helped me get it into an evening of films by women, and the audience applauded after it was over. We got a few other showings too.
The rats worked for free, but the next project needed more cash. I wanted to do something about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 garment workers in 1911. Most of the victims had lived on my old streets on the Lower East Side and in what was now the East Village. I had this plan of also filming the cotton fields in the South where the cloth came from, maybe with old stills of the pickers. And I wanted footage of boll weevils. My cameraperson had to be good.
Filmmakers—the ones I knew, the doc people—were always talking about the burden of raising money. How super-hard it was now, at the end of the nineties. I knew I had to sound relevant but original to foundations public and private and be eloquent with rich people, convincing them that leftist documentaries were wonderfully in keeping with who they were. If they didn’t fund me this year, they’d do it the next.
I didn’t give up; I kept trying. I was not rewarded for this.
My mother said, “You need a rich boyfriend.”
“Mom,” I said, “you really think I could nab a sugar daddy? And I don’t see you dating any fat cats yourself.”
“I had my boyfriend, Gil,” she said, “when I was young. Now he’s a big deal. You know how many coats he sells?”
“I don’t,” I said, “and you don’t either.”
“He wanted to marry me. You could find him. There’s the internet.”
“Mom.”
“I don’t mean as a lover. I mean as an investor. It’s so easy nowadays, with email. People’s companies have websites. You go through a few offices, you can get through. I’ve already had a little back-and-forth with him, and I don’t have your computer skills. He was very glad to hear from me.”
“You found him? The guy Gil?”
“Just a little hi-how-are-you. He travels a lot in Malaysia. All the factories are overseas now, you know. I was never in Malaysia. People say it’s great.”
“Maybe he’ll let me film his factories.”
“Wouldn’t that be funny?” my mother said.
My mother thought Gil would be interested because he was Jewish and the Triangle fire had a great number of Jewish victims. (Also plenty of Italians.) “Does he give money for these things as a habit?” I said.
She was sure he did, but when I looked this up as well as I could, it seemed to be one of her illusions.
“He’s dying to meet you. And Apsara too,” my mother said.
I understand my mother (Frankie) has been in touch with you, I said in my email. I explained my history as an innovative filmmaker—I sent a link to a trailer he could look at—and I suggested (was this creepy?) that a contemporary manufacturer of clothing would have insights that might be of help to me on this project. Also, I looked a lot like my mom, if he wanted to see on my website.
He wrote back, I am glad to know she has creative children. I have a son and a daughter just a little younger than you. My boy is in law school. Doing well.
I said he was lucky to have work that took him overseas. He wrote, I enjoy Asia. Malaysia and Indonesia are very nice. Thailand was even nicer. But I miss my wife and family.
I wrote, I am interested in textile manufacture as a result of my research (which, by the way, could always use funding). Can you tell me anything that might be of use about current practices in garment factories where you are? It was a rash question, but I didn’t say anything about forced overtime or poor ventilation or underage workers.
As you are surely aware, he wrote a few days later, we do require basic standards, better than basic, but once you’re dealing with the Third World much is out of your hands. I’m sure you understand that having grown up in Nepal.
“What do you want from me?” was what he was saying. The answer was “money” but I wasn’t going to say that. I already knew better. A person doesn’t have to humiliate herself every single second. I could spare us both.
I loved Nepal, I wrote. Apsara did too. People think we’ve forgotten but we haven’t.
I was thinking of the two of us running around those streets—they were so bare of cars. Even the bicycle rickshaws were always waiting for fares, hoping. But the marketplace was crowded—people bargaining and pushing their way through to the stalls. Apsara almost got stepped on, more than once. How eternal markets were, the buzz of commerce. Best price for you, special today: heard throughout history. Was I unfair to Gil?
How prosperous Gil was, compared to Nepal—how hard it was for him to enter the kingdom of heaven, easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Out of his hands, my ass.
I thanked him for corresponding with me. I would let him know the next time a film of mine was showing in New York.
My mother thought Apsara could be a great pre-K teacher, if she ever went back to school to get a degree. She liked little kids; she’d be a natural. This was my mom’s idea, not Apsara’s. In the meantime she was living with another deadbeat boyfriend and taking people’s coats in a club. She was glad to be working nights, sleeping late. We were all late sleepers.
I had a shooting script for the first part of my Triangle fire movie. Even Apsara had to listen to me talk about it. The original building now belonged to NYU, with a plaque citing its history. At the time of the fire, doors on the ninth floor were kept locked so workers going home could be searched for stolen goods. I made her hear how trapped factory girls (younger than us, mostly) jumped out the windows from nine stories up, clothes and hair on fire, some of them holding hands.
She said, “I once had a suicide pact. With Jinx, remember her?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Fuck. What were you going to do?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Bullshit. You remember.”
“Oh, well,” she said. “We were just going to put rocks in our socks and go jump off the pier at Coney Island. At night. We didn’t mean it.”
Jinx was her high school friend. What else had I missed?
“Now, Terry,” she said, “you always get so carried away about everything. No big deal. Really.”
In Nepal, when she was little, my sister had been such a bubbly, active creature. Her name (she liked it then) meant something like “celestial dancer,” so she was always twirling around and skipping and hopping, a soft-shoeing angel. When she cut her foot she made up a hoppity lift-the-left dance step. I had been moodier, harder to please. Who knew where happiness came from? Well, actually, there were theories. In the Buddhism my father sometimes followed you heard arguments on the vanity of grasping for happiness. Whatever you ran after and clung to was destined to slip out of your hands, melt like snow, dissolve into thin air. What could be more obvious? The truth of impermanence was somehow a cheering idea to my father. He scoffed at the penny-ante ambitions most people knocked themselves out for. He believed in freedom, my father.
The next week I tried asking Apsara, “So do you know how Jinx is now?”
“Jinx has a kid, she lives in Philadelphia.”
“She’s okay?”
“Why wouldn’t she be?”
My sister had to get off the phone, she was on her way to the club, big big night, huge crowds, because the so-and-so’s were coming, a group I’d never heard of. “I’m ignorant,” I said.
“The last time they came Wilton danced for three and a half hours straight.” Wilton was her boyfriend.
“I’m so out of it.”
“You’d love them,” she said, and she laughed. Maybe she had a better life than I did.
My mother almost died having me. The hospital in Kathmandu had hygiene problems and she got a terrible infection. My father was very worried when she was pregnant the second time and he borrowed the money to fly us to Bangkok ten weeks in advance. I didn’t remember any of it, of course, since I was only two, but apparently I was a total pain in Thailand. “I didn’t want to leave Nepal either,” my mother said. “Big fuss for nothing.” She was really quite brave, my mother.
In Thailand I almost drowned in the Chao Phraya River. I was playing on the shore and slipped; it took them a minute to notice me spluttering. “Imagine that,” I told my friend Tracey. “I had a near-death experience before I was even talking in full sentences.”
“It doesn’t really count if you don’t remember,” she said.
But I thought it did. I had it as a story, passed down. I knew it so well, had always known it.
It turned out boll weevils were not a factor in the Triangle Factory’s cotton supply. The big invasion of ravenous bugs from Mexico didn’t get into full swing until the twenties, at least a decade later. I really wanted to keep the weevils in the action. Audition the best chewers, show off their talents.
Not my best idea. Where else could I go with this? The owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company had actually been brought to trial for manslaughter. They hired a great lawyer and were acquitted. A few years later they were accused of locking the door in another factory.
The fire had likely been started by one of the cutters—the best paid of the workers, all men—tossing a cigarette butt near a bin of cotton scraps and paper patterns; cutters smoked, which was against the rules but tolerated. Male privilege.
You have to think about who’s to blame and you’ll see more than you even want to, if you’re making a movie.
My mother said, “People hate being stolen from. They get outraged in a totally out-of-proportion way. How much could any girl ever have taken from that factory? I mean, bits of lace? Maybe a blouse rolled up? Very small potatoes.” My mother had had a few challenges about the amount of food she took home from one restaurant. Apsara was very fond of a cheesecake they were not, apparently, throwing out that night. My mother lost that job. She found another, but it took some doing.
My mom was phoning me now to talk about Apsara. When had I last spoken to her? What did I think about her saying she thought summer was the most depressing season? Summer? What kind of thing was that to say?
“She’s fine,” I said. “She told me she and what’s-his-name, Wilton, go to the beach all the time. Jones Beach, which is not bad, you know.”
My mother was going off to Maine for two weeks with a new boyfriend. She was young, our mom, just past fifty, with a full head of very curly dark hair (I had the hair), and she kept herself looking good, a requirement (she thought) of her job. That was where she had met her new guy, who was a prep cook in the kitchen. Quite a bit younger than she was too. “Just watch out for Apsara while I’m gone,” she said. As if anyone could really watch her.
“Property is theft,” I said to Tracey. We had written this in Sharpie on a wall when we were in college, quoting a nineteenth-century French anarchist (Proudhon, whose name I never heard after). No one could scrub it off. A great sentence, with much behind it.
Tracey said, “What did your mother swipe besides the cheesecake?” I always hated anyone speaking against my mother. Did she think pilfering was something out of Goodfellas? Tracey was a friend but we were old rivals too.
“I don’t know. All our glasses and cutlery. A nice steel pitcher.”
Tracey had a whole set of frying pans from her family’s hoard. My parents hadn’t carried back any household goods on the plane from Kathmandu; whatever we had here was scavenged and scrounged by my mother.
“Do you ever think of going back to Nepal?” Tracey said. “I mean if you had the money. I’d go with you if you ever went.”
Our beloved Nepal was having a nasty civil war—Maoists against other factions, including the royal family. Did we still know anyone there? I remembered my mother writing to friends. People still wrote letters then.
My sister, who didn’t remember the place as well as I did, had the best keepsake. She had a little temple bell made of brass, which I’d always coveted. The Hindu temples around us always had bells ringing and clattering at certain hours. I didn’t want to go to Nepal with anyone from here. I didn’t think they’d get it.
Tracey had three different sources funding a film she was about to start shooting, about a murder committed by two women who then went trout-fishing in the Catskills. She’d be gone for six weeks, hanging around cool creeks while we sweated in the city. I was way behind her as a filmmaker—well, everyone can’t be at the same level, right? I had talent but so did any number of humans. I might never get to do what I wanted. That was a simple fact. I might be one of those people whose projects were always half-thought-through, whose ideas never got off the ground. No one wanted them; the plans vanished. “You can think of something else to do,” my mother said. It was one of the worst things she ever said to me.
Apsara came in to see me at Starbucks one hot July afternoon. She told me, while I was using the noisy milk steamer, that she wanted to borrow money. “Just three hundred, just for a little while,” she said. “I had some extra expenses, I got caught short.”
Extra expenses—that’s how you talk to your sister who knows you? Apsara was gritting her teeth too, a sign of bad habits. “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Come after work, we’ll go to the bank.”
“Don’t you have a break before, just a short one? Couldn’t we go right away? Like now?” How childish she sounded, how pesty. I told her to come back in an hour.
“You could just give me the bank card,” she said.
“An hour,” I said. “Come back then.”
She didn’t come back. Where the fuck was she? No place good. When I phoned, I just got her voicemail, with a tune behind it. I tried more than once. I called the club but the woman who answered the phone said, “Not here Tuesdays. Sorry,” and hung up. I didn’t know the boyfriend’s last name or the address where she lived with him, if that was where she lived. I hadn’t wanted to know. What was the matter with me? I thought of calling hospitals—how many were there in the city? Could I really find anything out? I wasn’t calling my mother. Not yet.
Apsara called me around noon the next day to say, “I’m fine. Forget about the loan. Everything’s fine. You okay?”
My mother had a story about why they left Kathmandu. They had weathered a number of things by then. They’d loved their first months in that beautiful, flamboyant, dirty city, with legal hashish sold in shops all over. They liked hanging out and they liked the simplicity of being high, as if they were an airier and more advanced species. But my father wanted to go on his treks and my mother was so young she thought she could be a fashion designer. She bought beautiful fabrics very cheaply; she cut a pattern out of brown paper and tried sewing by hand, which took forever. My father found her one day, wrapped in a cocoon of brocade, weeping in sodden defeat. “I can’t do it,” she said, which was true. In the end he rented the top floor of a building with a long balcony, and my mother occupied herself furnishing it with small purchases from the market and having friends over for chai. She loved this part, which went on for a while. Then she got pregnant with me and gave up drugs and bidi cigarettes. She ate a lot of sweets instead, burfi and all the sugary, dense, ghee-laden things we later loved.
My mother came so close to dying after I was born that neither she nor my father ever got over it. She said she remembered lying in the dark in the hospital and seeing a shape in the hallway she was sure was a crocodile, waiting to open its jaws, and she couldn’t cry out. My father said he was thinking of all he’d done wrong to get them to this spot and he wanted to crawl to each of the nurses to beg forgiveness, though the nurses were part of the cause.
“What a pit that hospital was,” my mother said. It didn’t, however, embitter them against Nepal. When I was three years old, the Nepali government decided to outlaw cannabis and to drive hordes of hippies down to the border in vans, deporting them to India. My parents weren’t living in one of the hotels and nobody ordered them anywhere, and they stayed, happily.
But why did they leave when they did? It was my fault but I didn’t know it. I yelled at a little Nepali boy in our yard who dropped a book of mine into the mud. English kids’ books were hard to get, and I said vicious, sneering words to him in Newari, a local language I later lost the sounds of. Whatever I said made my mother think we were doing a bad job of living there and I was becoming hideous. They probably wanted to leave anyway; they were probably ready.
I got a phone call from Apsara while I was at my local Laundromat, waiting with a basket of wet clothes for a free dryer. “Hey,” she said, “sorry to bother you but I kind of need to borrow money again.”
“Why am I the one?” I said.
“You never lent the last time,” she said.
“I’m the rich sibling?”
“I just need five hundred. It’s not that much. I’ll get it back to you soon. You won’t even miss it.”
Said like a true druggie. I didn’t even know what she liked—Ecstasy, Special K, new forms of meth, late-nineties favorites—you’d think I could tell, she was Apsara, but I couldn’t. She always swore all she did was drink white wine. Anyone can swear anything.
“How much cash do you think I have floating around?” I said. “I work for Starbucks, not Apple.”
“If your friend Tracey needed it for one of her movies, you’d find a way to get it for her,” my sister said. Where had that come from? “You’re just as cold and fucked-up as every other film person I’ve ever met. In Nepal you weren’t like that.”
“You don’t even remember. We were little. What is this?”
“Stop yelling at me,” she said.
“Someone has to yell at you,” I said, “because you’re going downhill fast. A complete and total train wreck.”
I thought the conversation was over, but then I heard myself offer her two hundred, that was the best I could do.
She was cloyingly grateful when she came to my apartment an hour later to pick it up. “Thank you so much, you don’t know how much this is appreciated,” she said. “Really, really.”
“Oh, please,” I said. “Don’t be creepy.”
She was giving me a fake smile. Me, her sister.
A week later, when my mother came back from her excellent Maine vacation—good chowder, great boyfriend, ice-cold ocean—she couldn’t find Apsara. My sister’s cell phone said that it was not receiving incoming calls. The club said that no one with that name was working there at present. My mother knew Wilton’s whole name, but no address was listed anywhere for him. Apsara’s old friend Jenny said she hadn’t talked to her for months.
“You were supposed to take care of her,” my mother said to me.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s my job? She’s too old for that anyway.”
“I have to find her. We have no idea where she is. What if she’s lying in the street somewhere?”
“She’s fine.” I meant it when I said it—I was mad at her for talking me into a loan—but I knew too well the reasons she might not be so fine. Bit by bit they leaked out. My mother moaned.
“I am so disappointed in you,” she said.
“Me?” I said. “The world’s most casual mother is taking it out on me. Did you ever pay attention to either of us?”
My mother should not have been as shocked by this as she was. Her face flinched as if I had whacked her; her eyes were small and wounded.
“This is the worst side of you,” she said.
“You should never have had us,” I said. “Why did you bother?”
I asked if she had taken the trouble to call my father, who should’ve raised us instead of her; maybe he’d heard from Apsara. She dialed him then and there—it was early morning in California—and she handed me the phone while it was ringing. “Hey,” my father said, glad to hear my voice. I sputtered out our panic about Apsara, our defeats and frustrations and growing dread. “She went to Baltimore,” he said. “She didn’t tell you?”
Wilton the boyfriend had family in Baltimore. They were going to stay there for a while till the dust cleared—my father didn’t know what the dust was either. There was a landline phone at the boyfriend’s family’s house; she had given him the number. Just so he wouldn’t worry if he tried to reach her.
My mother called the number and left a message and called again enough times so that she got hold of Apsara by the next day. “The thing is,” my mother told me later, “I don’t like the way she sounds. She sounds foggy and stupid and out of it. What does that mean?”
“What do I know?”
I thought Wilton had probably done well to take her home. My mother called so often she finally got a different version of events. The story was that Apsara had gotten overheated and dehydrated and what-all from her usual dancing around in a club she liked in Brooklyn. She’d fainted but then they brought her around with ice cubes down her bra and got her home. She thought she was fine at home and she took a few OTC sleeping pills to help her rest. Maybe more than a few. It wasn’t till early morning that the boyfriend had big problems waking her and had the sense to bring her to an emergency room.
“They let her go after a day,” my mother said. “Do you think that’s right? I don’t think that’s right.”
Wilton claimed that Baltimore was now doing Apsara a world of good. His family was feeding her banana pudding, which she loved. My mother said Wilton was different than she’d thought. They’d had a good conversation. But nobody wanted us to visit, especially not Apsara herself.
“I left because I wanted to leave,” my sister said. “I don’t need to bring New York with me.”
“We’re not her dealers,” I said to my mother. “What is she talking about?”
“We need to get her somewhere,” my mother said. “You know what I mean. A treatment center.”
Did my sister even have insurance? She was no longer employed, for one thing.
“She needs to go someplace good,” my mother said. “They have places she’d like. We can find out.”
“You know they charge a ton, those places.”
“I don’t care. What does it matter? We know people,” my mother said. “We know Gil. I can write to Gil. You know how many coats he sells?”
Maybe my mother was aware of something I wasn’t. Maybe the times she and Gil had together—the times in bed with their new bodily talents, the nights of his telling her what he thought the world should do, the blue evenings of their walking on the boardwalk—were unforgettable and unforgotten. Maybe he would be delighted and honored to help his once-loved Frankie in her later troubles in her interesting life. He had a family; he knew what kids meant. And he was from a generation that liked drugs; he wouldn’t think my sister was just a self-destructive idiot. Though I thought that at the moment. My mother would know how to talk to him. She would tell him Apsara had had a hard time because of her restless sprite-like nature and she needed physical activity but she was so sharp at understanding people she would be fine once she focused. Once she got help.
My mother actually bragged the next morning about what a good message she’d written to Gil. “I just have a feeling,” she said.
Did I believe her? Who knew what to believe? He didn’t answer her email right away (why would he?), and then my mother looked up the phone number for his company’s office in New York. In case he was there and not in Malaysia.
She got him on the phone the next day. Leave it to Frankie. He’d let the call through. “Your voice sounds like your voice,” she told me he said.
“I think about us when I look at my girls,” she said. “About being young, I mean.”
“It’s different for them now.”
“I bet you don’t look old,” she said.
He chuckled. “I wish.”
“I have good memories,” she said. “You know what I mean.”
“I do,” he said.
Then she explained again about my sister. She hoped neither of his kids were ever in that kind of danger. It wasn’t a thing she could describe. But there were places to help Apsara, she knew there were places. Gil said he was confused about what this had to do with him. “Just a loan,” my mother said.
“Oh,” he said.
He said he had enough dependents to worry about as it was. What was it with people remembering him only when they wanted money? He was surprised at Frankie—Frankie of all people, Frankie who had never been like that—but maybe he shouldn’t have been, since the other daughter had also wanted a handout.
My mother understood that she had insulted him. He’d been glad that she was calling him, after all these years—the lost girlfriend come back again, trailing new longings, even if he had a wife—and then this nice prospect had turned into a bid for cash. A trick against him. She would have been glad to run over to his office for a quickie if that could’ve helped Apsara. Too late.
“I remember,” she said to him, “when Apsara was born. We went to Bangkok—I don’t know if you’ve ever been there—and the nurses didn’t have much English. When they showed her to me, I said, Kop kun ka, which was ‘thank you,’ the only thing I knew in Thai. Everybody laughed. But that was the right thing to say.”
“I love Bangkok,” he said. “We had factories in Thailand, but not for as long as I would’ve liked. It’s a wonderful country, my favorite. I miss it. I haven’t been back for eleven years.”
She was thinking what a fortune he must’ve made—the man was not hurting for money—just as he was reminding her how sorry he was that he was pretty busy at the moment and had to end their conversation.
She was very upset at home that night. She joked about robbing banks, but with my mother you never knew. Could a hacker get into his account, she asked me. A really good hacker, could that person do it?
My sister had some sort of tiff with Wilton and she decided to get out of Baltimore and all that stupid bed rest. She stuffed a backpack with her outfits and talked Wilton’s father into driving her to the bus station. Wilton was pissed off when he told us, and he didn’t know where she’d gone. Maybe Miami.
“Never thanked any of us,” Wilton said.
My mother tried to be calm. “She has to do things her own way, doesn’t she? Sometimes that’s just how it is.” I thought my mother was uttering bullshit.
But maybe not. What did I know? Apsara camped out illegally somewhere in Florida—she sent us one email with a sentence about the surf at night. On the beach she met people—who knew what people—and she got work outside Miami dancing in a club. If she was in a tailspin, we didn’t get details; she wrote when she wanted to. We had to get used to her being away. “She’s not coming back,” I told my mother, just guessing. Apsara did send emails to both of us to check that we were really okay when the World Trade Center came down—we were so glad to hear from her, proud for months. She made friends with someone who was a nanny, and she developed some sort of exercise program for little kids. Kids loved it—they saw her on the beach—and after a while she got paid to run it in municipal parks. My father visited her and had a great time—he said she looked like a punk grasshopper ballerina, in her green leotard, with her hair.
My mother and Ron, the prep cook who took her to Maine, had a longer run than anyone expected. He used to take her to salsa clubs—she loved this—and they went to Maine every summer. I liked him. She never had anybody after that. I met a really good guy in a class I took in digital editing. He helped me write grant proposals (I’d been doing them wrong), and I actually got funding to shoot a doc on the origins of the New York subway and all its barely connected lines. It got more showings and more attention than anyone ever thought, and I had better results getting bits of backing after that. I loved using history, as long as everyone saw the danger of thinking that bad news was over.
For years my mother spoke with remorse about the way she had treated Gil. She had badly wounded him twice—first in showing no eagerness to marry him and second in asking for a loan when he thought she had romance in mind. “I never wanted to hurt his feelings. He never did me any harm,” she said. She was always going to call him to try to set the record straight, but she could never figure out the right way to do this.
The one time she tried, it was too late. Ten years had passed since she’d made her plea to him to help Apsara. The phone number she had for his office didn’t work anymore, and it turned out there was no longer a company by that name. When she looked online, she saw it had been absorbed by a bigger company. No one at its main desk had ever heard of Gil.
She could call him at home, she decided. She wasn’t doing anything his wife couldn’t hear about. A grown woman could have a chat with an old friend, nothing incriminating in that.
I tried to explain this to the man I was seeing at the time. “I think she just wants him to think well of her. Everyone’s like that, right? She won’t ask for money again.”
“I hope not,” he said. “I mean, really.”
I never took well to slurs against my family. He’d already been too confused that I had a sister I was close to but hadn’t seen in over a decade. And I mentioned I had a father who was a ranger in the California desert. “What next?” he said.
“Too much for you, is it?” I said. “Where’ve you been in the world?” And I said some other things too.
He might’ve just been irritable because I was out of town more than he cared for, now that my work was having a boomlet, a little wave of attention. More people liked it. A film I did about women in nineteenth-century mill towns got very good write-ups. My big plan was to follow the topic overseas, shoot in Manchester and Leeds.
“I hope Gil knows how well you’re doing,” my mother said.
“Mom,” I said, “nobody cares about documentaries.”
“He’ll be sorry he didn’t invest when he could have.”
“He’s pining terribly.”
Apsara had been going through a spell of not talking to us at all. For a while technology had allowed us to see her impish, mobile face on Skype or FaceTime, and she sent a video of her lovely, jumpy routines with the kids. She gave classes at a Y and at a preschool. But something had happened in the past two years. She’d grown harder to talk to, barely answered questions, was peevish and distracted. And then she disappeared again. We couldn’t find her. We couldn’t tell if the cause was a no-good boyfriend or pharmaceuticals or worse. She wasn’t so young anymore. Then my mother got a postcard from her saying Just leave me alone for now. My mother called to read it to me with tears in her voice. I was away; I was always away—this time in L.A., working on a film with Tracey. “She’s too old for this crap,” I said. “She can’t be a baby forever. The woman is thirty-five fucking years old. You okay, Mom?”
It was a stupid question but the kind she always said yes to. That was how she was.
“It’s too hard,” my mother said. “I never knew it was going to be like this. Not when I was young and not later. Maybe nobody ever knows or they wouldn’t get out of bed. It’s too hard.”
My mother found a phone number that might be Gil’s, in an ancient Bell phone directory she’d never thrown out. On the Upper West Side, right? Worth a try. She left a brief message, and a woman called her back. The woman, Gil’s wife, said she and Gil had been divorced for some time and she was sorry to have to tell Frankie this, but Gil had recently passed away. Just a few months before. “Stroke,” she said.
“Oh!” my mother said.
My mother was sort of overwhelmed that the woman had bothered to call her back. “Well, it didn’t seem right not to,” the woman said. “You were an old friend?”
“I knew him before you did,” my mother said. “Did he ever mention me?”
“I’m not sure,” Gil’s wife said. “I don’t always remember names.”
My mother spelled hers.
“Very nice to talk to you,” the woman said.
“I should have called him long ago,” my mother said to me. “Some things you shouldn’t delay. You can’t beg for forgiveness from someone who’s dead.”
“You can beg,” I said. “But you can’t get it. Maybe the begging is the point anyway.”
I started to think that it was. Wasn’t this my mother at her best, trying to make up for old heartlessness with a man she hardly knew anymore?
“We should all beg each other every minute,” I said.
My mother laughed. We weren’t going to go around doing that, not us. Not the types to walk around bowing our heads or kissing hems. But I was thinking of all the people I had wounded. A high count, and I was better than a lot of humans.
“I’m sorry,” I said to my mother.
“Yes,” my mother said. “Me too.”
I wanted to beg Apsara. Where was she? And my father and more than a few old boyfriends. I had done all sorts of things to everyone.
Apsara surprised us, which she was always so good at doing. She was getting married! To Wilton, whom we knew from long ago. The news came in the form of a long phone call to my mom. No, she wasn’t in Baltimore, what an idea, she was in Queens. That was where Wilton lived now. He’d become a lawyer; he worked in immigration law. Lot of work, not a lot of money.
My mother said, “This is so good!”
“Well, he’s willing to join my crazy family,” Apsara said.
We never asked how long they had been in Queens before deciding to get in touch.
How would we look to her now? My mother was arranging a gathering, a celebration, in her apartment on Ludlow Street, for all of us to meet again. Apsara would notice I was older around the middle and dyed my hair auburn and had a different style, a little snappier. Should I wear the big silver squiggle earrings? I’d just been through a long breakup and wouldn’t be bringing anyone.
My mother squealed when they walked in, and I had to say, “Elvis has entered the building,” while she hugged my sister to smithereens. My heart leaped up too. My sister was still a sprite-like person with spiky hair, but her face had grown bonier around it. She had stayed skinny and wiry from all that exercise with kids, which she still did at three different Y’s. Wilton was balder but still cool in his black sport jacket. “The exiles return,” I said.
Apsara giggled a lot, which we liked. We all talked about how the neighborhood had changed, nobody shooting drugs in doorways, how much better the city was doing, Miami too, how thrilled we were that Obama was president.
“I love Michelle,” Apsara said.
Wilton said, “Nepal’s still a mess, but we might go there for our honeymoon.”
“Oh! I’m jealous,” I said.
“Come along,” Apsara said. A joke, but I loved it.
“Do you really remember it?” my mother said. “You were little.”
“Well, I won’t know where anything is,” Apsara said.
I was thinking she must remember it fondly, if she was choosing to go now. I didn’t think happiness could be a false memory, even if the particulars were all out of place.
Wilton said, “They have maps.”
My mother was totally over the moon about the wedding. “I could design the dresses,” she said. “For you, Apsara—you’d look so pretty—and for me and Tara. I could sew them too, you know.”
“What?” I said. Apsara and I were exchanging looks. We had to nip this one in the bud.
“I don’t think so,” Apsara said.
My mother saw our eye-rolling but chose not to complain. She was too thrilled to hold anything against my sister, who was home and alive and definitely in one piece (as we all turned out to be) and living close by, a mere subway ride away, and had given us a story that ended with a wedding.