“You Can’t Go Home Again Without Me, I Will Be Desolate”
WE SELL/WE BUY
(May–August ’98)
1 Ralph sold Mom’s art.
• Via ceramics, he knew the rudiments of the trade, and got real money even for less favored artists.
• Soon the house began to fill with blank walls.
2 I sold antiques.
• I made a tent of blankets and went in there with the phone and a glass of straight vodka. Then I had to crawl out again for the phone book.
• The guys at Half Moon Bay Antiques knew Mom of old. “Oh, how is Lannie?” they cried, happily reminded, and I told them she was doing super.
• I sold furniture and jewelry. I sold an old computer and a dusty guitar. I sold my mother’s Mustang to her cocaine dealer, Spiz, who had known me since I was a tot and called me “Crispy-lips.” I found Eddie’s watch beside the swimming pool and sold that.
• I sold the doors Mom bought to replace the old antique doors she sold when her mother and father died.
3 It was Ralph’s idea that we three should move to the guest wing. Since the kitchen was there, the practical advantages were plain. Also, we would then be sequestered from future residents.
He made a sketch of his plan and all I cared about was that Eddie was downstairs in the guest bedroom, while Ralph and I would have what was now a single huge upstairs room, once my father’s weights room. He sketched in the partition and then drew a door in it, though without saying it was a door. I held my breath over, was it a door? But he didn’t say. I was feverishly imagining.
3.1 In the fullness of time, a partition wall with a door was built.
3.2 The door locked on Ralph’s side, not on my side: that was another long day in my head.
4 Eddie came to throw a fit.
We’d been raising cash on his assets, which was stealing. He stalked around Mom’s office going, “This is all mine! Mine! Eddie’s stuff! Do we have hearing people here? Hands up, the hearing people!”
This produced whimpering in me while Ralph stared out the window. Social dynamics in groups of three are of course notoriously awkward. Eddie wore down to a low, steady hum of martyrdom, and sat:
“Twist my fucking arm . . . right, twist my fucking arm. Pen!”
Ralph tossed him a pen. Eddie pulled a checkbook out of his jacket pocket, picked the pen up off the floor and wrote a check for 20,000 dollars in favor of the Tibetan School of Miracles. Tearing the check off, he held it out to Ralph, saying, “You realize if this kills me, that makes you guys murderers?”
“What are we supposed to do with that?” I said.
“Look under rocket scientist in the Yellow Pages,” Eddie said, “Maybe someone there can tell you how to open a bank account. And this is out of the buckaroo’s salary,” he said, making a face at Ralph.
“No,” said Ralph. “And we’ll need more.”
“More?” Eddie posed with both hands on his throat. Then he let his throat go, and stood up with a villain’s sneer: “Whatever. See you later, I gotta go pick up this stewardess.”
5 I woke in the dark to decisive banging.
5.1 “Chrysalis, I’ve just turned the hot tap on, so you’ve got about five minutes before the bath overflows. See you downstairs.”
5.2 I couldn’t get out of bed. When I got out of bed, I couldn’t face leaving the room. When I’d left the room, I couldn’t concentrate on whether I wanted a bath or a shower. When I got in the shower, I just wanted to stand there forever, with my eyes shut, and I was going to tell Ralph all this at breakfast, to wear away his resolve.
5.3 You can only not care about your appearance if you have jeans, but all I had clean were dresses, so I had to care. I couldn’t do that, either, and lay on the bed looking at the ceiling for a long time, like a jammed mechanism.
5.4 “That’s how everyone feels in the morning, Chrysa. I feel that way right now.”
5.5 Every morning just like this, for the rest of my life.
6 Ralph reproved me for forgoing popcorn when I really wanted popcorn.
6.1 “You look smart today,” he said if I did not.
6.2 Meeting my remaining friends, he dubbed them “pain-loving ghouls” and told me everything they’d ever told me, was shit.
6.3 “It’s good, clearing out this Unhappy Childhood Museum.”
6.4 Once, when I had failed to greet the builders, Ralph introduced me to them as the maid.
7 We spent money and we placed orders and chose. We signed for deliveries and instructed workmen. We opened an account.
Because I gave them money, people treated me with respect. I felt magically better. I combed my hair and cut my fingernails so they were all the same length. My voice was louder and when the waitress snubbed me, I considered the possibility that it was not a very good restaurant.
The house smelled of paint and all day you heard men shouting.
Then all the walls were white and some walls were gone and some were new; it seemed like overnight.
There were ten toilets, there were male and female shower rooms. There was an elongated dinner table, like a bowling alley on legs. We ordered 50 chairs because it was a round number. The upstairs bedrooms were packed with shoddy beds.
Ralph bought a Spartan mat to sleep on, thinner than even futons. It smelled like grass and was the only furniture in his room.
I put off moving into my new room for total eons. Then one day I came home to find my bedroom stripped. I crossed the courtyard to the guest wing with beating heart, irrationally certain they were giving me my walking papers.
But in the window of my new room I spied the Pollock, all blue and black and wallpaperlike at that distance. I went up the stairs and sat on my bed, which had been set against some random wall that felt lopsided. Through the partition I was not sure I heard Ralph. I thought I would never be able to sleep again.
8 Ralph spent 5,000 dollars on white clothes. They were near-Amish in their austere cut, and some just ‘said’ white, though they were beige or charcoal. Eddie took one look at the brand name on the shopping bag and put his hand to his pocket as if wounded.
8.1 In them, Ralph looked iconic, like the right actor cast as Christ. When you saw him with a bag of Doritos, it jarred.
8.2 We made cracks –
(Eddie: “So what is it? A tennis cult?”
Me: “Now you can’t roll on the grass anymore.”)
– at which no one laughed and we sounded jealous.
9 We decided to hold lectures in “The Land of the Lost,” once a conservatory Mom built in a brief fad for horticulture and orchid-rearing.
9.1 Brief history thereof:
1974 |
Extension ordered and blueprinted, estimated cost 40,000 dollars. |
1975 |
Conservatory complete, 100,000 dollars and three contractors later. Novelty glass stars in roof, guests ooh, ahh. |
1976 |
Plants in place. Excitement of heiress. Her domain: Remember-II-the-mutt / young children barred. José the gardener under strict orders, keep out. In main building, glossy gardening manuals proliferate. |
1977 |
Dusty gardening manuals move to shelf. Plants return to natural state. Psychiatrically troubled daughter tries to save world in person of tropical conservatory species, feeds, waters in untutored way. Resulting jungle. “Land of the Lost” monicker inspired by children’s TV series about young family stranded by time machine prang in Jurassic rainforest hell. |
1978 |
Dad dies. |
1979 |
Plants die. |
1980 |
Stench from unfrequented glasshouse. José the gardener requests, gains admittance. Room cleared, ammonia smell. Solitary folding chair forgotten, left on bare expanse of tile. Chain w/padlock on door suggests folding chair as hostage in exquisite glass prison. |
– present |
“Land of the Lost” nickname sticks. |
9.2 On his last ever evening at home, my dad was standing with me in the dining room, looking through the glass sliding doors that led to the Land of the Lost. The dining room was intact then, a genteel room in the belabored style of the French eighteenth century. It even had ornate brass torchères, twice my height. There was a smell of beef cooking, it was a summer evening. Dad had one hand on my head as we peered into the dense jungle. Dimly through the plants and the leaded glass we could see a spidery magenta sunset, and in that light the various pots and trowels were invisible. Dad had just been told about my campaign to save the abandoned plants.
And he said, almost whispering, a just-between-us Dad ploy that made me squirm, irked, under his cajoling mitt –
“Tell me. You and Mom get along okay?”
I muttered, “Yes.” But then, shrugging in that shirt-too-tight kid way, I said, “Sometimes I go and hide in there, when she’s drinking.”
He took his hand away from my head. “Is that so?”
I said, “Yes, she calls me names, so I go in the Land of the Lost till she . . . falls asleep.”
“What kind of names?”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t like me.” I didn’t feel like crying for some reason. He would tell me I was silly. Of course your mother likes you, your mother loves you. Sometimes Mommies say things they don’t mean. So I blurted, risking all – “She keeps calling me the fat bat. Only, really cruelly. ‘You fat bat.’” I looked at him and then quickly back at the jungle. I could maybe run in there now.
He crouched down to face me, eye to eye. Gripping my shoulders so I had to look at him, he said, “Listen up, bugaloo, how’s about me and you go off together some time? That sound like fun?”
“We couldn’t really go anywhere,” I groaned, miserably yearning.
“Couldn’t we? No? Couldn’t we?”
Then we both turned, again drawn to stare into the hothouse, whose brutish foliage seemed to lean out over us, gloating –
and Dad said, muted, “Well, we couldn’t go there.”
|
So he saw them too, the phantom |
O |
ocelots, orangutans, opulent Orinoco |
P |
parrots, smorgasbord of panthers, my |
Q |
queen |
R |
for wrong children and remorse; |
S |
shed |
and when Dad died I hid there till nightfall, unsought, with each neglected hour more certain Mom would send me back to starve, vulture-torn, on my birthright’s soiled rope
When I came out, there was Eddie in the kitchen.
He was pouring milk into a bowl of Count Chocula cereal, and when he saw me
he threw the milk carton on the floor
he knocked over the cereal bowl all over me
and said
he wouldn’t be my friend anymore if I was going to be that selfish, disappearing,
and I said,
FINE.