My mother convinces me that we must celebrate my upcoming wedding. We must talk about womanhood with strangers or women, in bars, on this island, amid the late-night island heat. It’s better than being alone with her; it’s better than talking about being a woman with just my mother under fluorescent kitchen lights.
It’s Creedence Night at The Wharf. The vacationers love it. There’s a live band doing all the CCR covers, and the lead singer—he’s from the mainland—actually looks a little like John Fogerty, but taller and more handsome. There are a lot of rough-skinned women here, all the old fake boobies, too, and we are all wearing our best. My mother has convinced me to wear her lipstick, and it’s blending into a mess.
She pulls a chintzy white veil from her purse, and it’s attached to a headband—the kind of thing you buy at Party City, and she combs it right into my hair. She tells me I look beautiful. She tells me I should have worn a shorter dress to Creedence Night. We’re crowding in front of the mirrors in the bathroom, and she’s reapplying lipstick. She reapplies mine. Says she wishes she had lips like mine.
Other women pile in. Though it’s still early, people have been drinking all day. Some came from LA just to see this fake John Fogerty. Some, just to get away. There’s a woman in a mirror next to us, and she’s wasted, the toppling-over kind of drunk, and she asks when I’m getting married. My mother tells her everything, and I slip out and find my way to the bar.
My mother finds me, and her new friends parade me around the room, and my mother buys shots for me. An entire group of women who are out to celebrate a recent divorce shriek with joy. We suck the small cups dry, and my whole body burns. My mother, she’s on fire.
The divorced women offer us barstools at their high-top table, and my mother sits at the head. She tells stories about her divorces. She says, Sometimes love doesn’t last. She tells them that she’s happy without anyone. A woman chimes in with something like, You have your beautiful daughter, and this is when she does the thing where she pretends we are close. That I am loved. The more shots, the more doting she becomes, the more I think I am loved. It’s so easy to fall for it because I want it to be real so bad.
The women follow her to the dance floor and spread out, and begin to bounce and shake. They are careful to hold their dick-strawed drinks in one hand. Careful to laugh together. To sing along with the chorus. Over the dense weight of the booming sound, they comment on her body, her swaying, in the foggy bar light; they tell her she is beautiful. A woman whispers to me that I’m lucky to have a mother like mine.
My mother holds her drink to the ceiling, and she’s made eye contact with Fake John Fogerty, and he raises a beer, too, and she gets everyone to chant Fuck divorce!
I’m bobbing alongside my mother and these strange women and we are dancing. I’m drinking beer as fast as I can. We keep moving, and my mother wiggles her way to the front of the small crowd and sways beneath Fake John Fogerty’s feet. He dedicates a song to her, and she screams to correct him, that, no, it’s her beautiful daughter who is getting married, and we must toast to her. She forces my hand into the air, and there are more strangers who cheer and tug on my veil. Fake John Fogerty wishes me a lifetime of happiness from the microphone and takes a giant swig of beer.
We keep drinking. This is what I know to do. My mother ends up at another table, some divorcées follow, and one woman fans her like a real dead queen. She convinces the women to buy us more shots. We fulfill our duty and drink.
“Oh, divorces can be nasty, but they can also be the best thing that will ever happen to you,” she says to one stranger.
Next there are blow-job shots. They’re too sweet, and I fear the worst: I’m going to be falling-down hammered with my mother if we continue at this pace. It feels like she wants this, and with all the Creedence and the drums, I might want it, too. She’s holding my hand. She’s fixing my veil. She’s shouting to strangers, My daughter is getting married! My beautiful daughter! My only daughter! And people—at least plenty of men—think we are sisters. My mother says we must keep dancing.
The Creedence Clearwater Revival cover band is getting louder. They are generous with smiles. The bar is vast, and the standing-only pit below the stage is littered with bodies, hard and soft. Like a wave, we are all moving together. My mother is eyeing this Fake John Fogerty guy, and I can’t admit that I’m smitten with the drummer. He’s drilling another heartbeat into my chest. We dance.
My mother is throwing her hands in the air, kicking her feet, and she’s a wondrous creature. She’s telling the divorced women that she once gave herself whiplash at a Van Halen show—and still managed to get backstage—and still managed to meet David Lee Roth. She claims that Sammy Hagar was much, much better.
I don’t feel lonely when I’m with my mother. But when she’s gone, I don’t feel lonely, either. I can’t explain it to her—that whether she’s there or not, she’s accidentally always with me. Even when I hate her. Even when I love her. She’s just here. And now, I feel her next to me, like I do when she’s gone. It’s a terrifying feeling to love a woman like my mother, and all those years my father spent saying nothing about it must have been miserable. I keep drinking. I keep getting sentimental. I keep letting her hold my hand.
She’s locked on to Fake John Fogerty. I slip away to the patio and smoke borrowed cigarettes with people I don’t know. There are so many people stumbling in the streets, in full-vacation mode, their faces oily and burned. They are without sweaters, something they always forget, and the women are shivering, huddled together, hands cupped around the ends of cigarettes with lighters. Even heavy with the dreadful summer crowds, the island feels like home, like I am the keeper of magic here. Even on this patio, where I smoke with three practically teenage boys and they tell me they like my lipstick and my veil. They tell me they are college boys from LA. They ask me about weed.
“We’re looking for Winter Wonderland,” they say.
I’m drunk enough to say it: “That’s my weed.”
And it’s all gone. I sold the name for cash to bail my father out of jail. We had to pay his debts and clean up the pieces of our lives that he ruined so long ago. I don’t do weed anymore. I don’t deal drugs. Now there’s a company in Japan who makes a weekly cartoon called Winter Wonderland, with a gnome who grows magic mushrooms on a dark and stormy island near California. I hear it’s a hit there. We got enough cash to pay everyone off. To keep us from being killed. I don’t know where to get it, raw and wild and organic, because it doesn’t grow here anymore, I want to say. And: I don’t have my father anymore, or a heart. I’m getting married. To a man who shouldn’t love me. But he does. And what if he leaves me someday? And: I’m wasted.
“You’d have better luck on the mainland,” I say.
“It grows wild here, and mushrooms, too,” they say.
Certainly everything is wild here, and I tell them about the abandoned north, about the once-overgrown forest, about the weather, about it all, until nothing makes sense.
“There were gnomes, they say, until the storms came,” I say.
They laugh. I’m old to them. They think I’m just a vacationer like them. They think I must have kids, a job, a family, a life. I am all of those things and none of them at once—looking for magic, just like them, and still looking for my mother, who’s evaporating under the bar lights. She’s talking to Fake John Fogerty on his break, and her hand is practically on the crotch of his leather pants.
The divorced women are going to another bar, and they beg us to come. My mother is suddenly missing somewhere in the back, and I know what she’s doing and I don’t want to know what she’s doing, and I say we will meet them later. I rush through the swinging kitchen doors and run up the stairway to the roof.
I’ve been on this roof many times, before this place was The Wharf, when my father and I ate free food from the kitchen and lay on beach towels and did homework just for the view. In spring, this was the place to see the great whale migrations.
I stand on top of a rusted chair on the roof, and I stare at the sea. I look for the lighthouse. For Liam. For a boat. For a whale. For something to come into the harbor. For an answer.
“Congratulations,” a man says.
The drummer. He’s smoking a cigarette. He asks if I want one. I’m about to puke, and I can’t decide what’s right, so I take one and gag. He helps me off the chair, saying he’s worried I’m a little too drunk to be on a roof, or a chair on top of a roof.
“What are you looking for?” he asks.
“I’m not sure,” I say.
I’m fiddling with my veil, and it smells like smoke now.
“When’s the wedding?” he asks.
“A few days,” I say.
“Lucky guy,” he says.
The drummer tells me about how he became a guy in a CCR cover band. He’s a composer, or at least he wants to be, and he tells me about the life he wishes he had. There is sorrow in his eyes, and for a moment, he says he loves a girl who doesn’t love him back, and I tell him that the man I love might be lost at sea, that my father is buried out there, too, and that my mother is probably fucking Fake John Fogerty in the bus outside.
“What a disaster,” he says.
He leans in to kiss me, and for a second, I let it happen. Not because I love him, or could love him, but because of biology. See, there is biology to sex and companionship and kissing, but there is no biology to missing and loving. While his mouth meets mine, I keep my eyes open, and I look back to the sea. I talk through his attempts to kiss me, and I tell him that we must get back. That I must rescue my mother. That I must rescue myself.
My mother is not as disheveled as I’d imagined. As I’d hoped, so I could yell and scream at her and tell her she’s terrible and unfair. She pulls me from the kitchen doors, and there are more shots. Someone is crying. My veil is ripped. She dances with just me in front of the band again and is twirling me around with my fingertips locked with hers. She whispers in my ear: Don’t worry, baby. Your Liam will be home.
My mother thinks she can smell the dead whale on the ride back. We drape our arms and lean our heads outside the cab windows, and the whale is indeed still here. I puke in the kitchen sink; my mother, in the bathroom. We sleep on the couches that face each other, our arms curled under our chins in the same exact way.