My mother made her first visit to Montana soon after I moved, while I was still living in the converted attic. I baked an apple cake as I waited through the drizzly afternoon until it was time to go to the airport. Her imminent presence was always a thrill, how she would pretty the drab world. I wanted to impress her that I’d baked for her, and I’d planned a party for the following night so she could meet my friends. She quizzed me as we sliced a baguette. “Tell me who’s coming, in order of importance.” A friend of mine had a gallery show, and we went. My mother flooded the room with mention of big-deal auctions, the so-and-so collection. She bought two pieces. “I can’t afford this,” she whispered, “but I want her to like me.” My friend was running the credit card, happiness on her face. She always had a soft spot for my mother after that.
Over the next four years, a scattering of visits.
One visit: She followed me into our cabin, saw Christopher was home and called me aside. She pulled an envelope from the muddle in her bag and lifted its flap. “It’s two thousand dollars. Cash, Sue. Don’t tell me you don’t need it.” She whispered, “You don’t have to tell Christopher about it. It can be just your money.” Christopher was of little use to my mother. He didn’t lie, and he didn’t flirt. He found her chattery and abrasive but tedious. Loudly, she said she had a present for him, too, and came at him, hand extended, something wrapped in a scarf. He drew out an antique silver napkin ring that had a C forged in it. The object was stupefying when you considered our life, and he didn’t recognize its purpose. “It’s a cock ring!” my mother said. She taunted us both for his frozen expression.
Once, my mother greeted me at the gate with an announcement. “I’m on Depakote. It stabilizes me.” For a couple of days we had this easy time. The drug made her calm down and hold a conversation without twitching or eruption. Pieces of her soft self emerged, as she let go of that fretful need to make an impression on everyone. “If Depakote needs a spokesman,” I joked, “I’ll go on tour.” But she “forgot” the pill for a few days. “Fuck Depakote,” she said, as if she meant to be rude to it. She told us she’d taken a job, a position in Barbados, the church had begged her to take it. “I’m counseling teen drug users,” she said, serious, suddenly in possession of church formality. “The kids know I’ve been through it. They know I’ll call them on their bullshit, and they listen to me. I happen to be very good at it.” When we were alone Christopher and I laughed and laughed.
One visit: I drove us down the Bitterroot Valley, heading for Kootenai Creek. I stuck to the business of driving as she spewed information about people I’d never met, talking-tos she’d given friends of Penelope’s I’d never heard of. Her hands dipped in and out of her bag, window down, window up, radio loud, soft, loud, finger pointing at things across my line of vision.
“Please!” I said. “I’m trying to see the road.”
She pushed my hair behind my ear. “You only have one good profile,” she told me. “It’s good it’s the one visible to the passenger side, you clever thing.”
How could a person respond to that? We had fifteen miles more to drive, but I veered off the narrow highway and parked at a trailhead. “Here we are,” I lied. I had to get the door open, get out, and knew she wouldn’t notice the forest service sign as we started to ascend the trail. We hiked in about ten minutes, which was all she had patience for.
One visit goes like this: She stole Tylenol and sunglasses at Target, producing them from her bag and pocket simultaneously with adolescent glee before we’d reached the car. She was waiting for remonstrance. I just got us in and started the engine. She told me to get over myself.
She had promised us an extravagant dinner. “Come on, you two, loosen up, stop being such puritans,” as if we were playing at minimum wage. Money had always danced from her hands, an enchantment that at any moment could vanish, so why wait? The careless squander through my childhood, novelty notepads, cocaine, of course, tons of flowers—birds-of-paradise or three dozen irises. She knew our grandmother would buy our clothes, send emergency checks for the rent or the phone bill.
My mother pointed out the lamb chops, the crab cakes and salmon, the bottles running down the wine list. “Should we get a bottle?” Christopher and I were grim, not saying much. She didn’t listen, or ask about the clinic. Conversation went nowhere. She was annoyed that I hadn’t taken time off for her whole visit and annoyed I wouldn’t choose the salmon. The menu looked like this: electricity bill, grocery bill, new jeans. I didn’t mean to be irritating about money, and she was paying anyway, but Christopher and I had three jobs between us, a patchwork of schedules. We budgeted and thought things through. This was my first taste of ordinary, the repetition of freeway commutes and changing over to snow tires and the dish towel drying out over the faucet neck after dinner. She’d never taught me how to be part of everybody else.
Approaching, the waitress would have seen a lighthearted woman happy to be at dinner and two unpleasant companions. She flirted with the waitress—“And when did you move here, love? Which courses are you taking? What does Daddy do?”—then chose for all of us. “Rack of lamb for my ravishing daughter—very pink, right, Sue?” She wanted to please the waitress, have her return to the kitchen and point back at us, over there, table eight, the event of her week. She would tip hugely. When the girl left with the order, my mother leaned in and bitched, “Does she have to tell us everything? Like we care!” I felt Christopher prickling. I didn’t want him to think I was anything like this, but I was forcing myself not to join her frenzy, and she knew it. She wanted a certain daughter of me, and I wanted a certain mother, our standoff.
After dessert, she asked for the bathroom and came back to the table saying she’d called a taxi. Always leaving by a different way than she arrived. Three hours ago we’d been collecting her. “I know you don’t want to drive me home. Susy’s mad at me for shoplifting.”
Christopher and I relished the silence in our dark car, and Daphne went back to her hotel and picked herself up another daughter.
Maybe my mother stopped her for directions with a hand on an arm, then asked why she looked sad. Had she bought something from her, turning the transaction into the girl’s boyfriend trouble, car payments, acne woes? I don’t know. The next afternoon she brought the girl to the clinic and introduced her with urgent warmth to everyone. From my office I heard her voice in the waiting room, the sharp glassy thrill of it running down my spine. I found her surrounded, just like at camp or backstage after school plays. She had her arm around the girl’s shoulders, and the girl—my height, curly brown hair, you’d confuse us from the back—looked perplexed but dazzled. She looked the way I used to look, wondering what was about to happen to her. My mother pointed out the clothes she’d bought for her. “She’s a junior at the college, she just moved here last month, from Great Falls, she got her cat from the pound, same day she broke up with her boyfriend.
“We’re going out to dinner,” my mother said. “She’s a vegetarian, but she will eat fish, won’t you? And maybe I can get you to eat organic lamb? I know this place that has the most divine lamb.” Her body was entirely turned toward the new girl, who hadn’t existed in anyone’s consciousness until my mother spun her into place.
“See you later,” she said, not quite to me.
She left me, as she meant to, rejected and stung. One of the nurses said it was nice of her to help people. A friend asked me wasn’t I supposed to go too? No, I said, I wasn’t. I went home confounded and tried to figure out the behavior with Christopher, who didn’t know where to begin.
In a shop a few weeks later, the clerk recognized me from the splurge of money Daphne had dropped buying me cashmere socks. I had come to return them, their baffling taint too much to surmount. They’d never be just serviceable things, warm feet.
“Your mother was so nice!” the clerk said, more than friendly, as if we could count on a common happiness. “She came back in the next day with your sister and got her this adorable robe.” I experienced that buzz of being thrust out of my own life, the saw blade of my mother’s invention getting close.
Many months later, I saw that girl downtown, that false sister, and we regarded each other with mute shame, as if we’d both been part of a porn movie. My mother’s porn, what turned her on.