I lived with Marilyn for a year after my grandfather’s death, working as a ticket agent at Northwest Airlines and using my employee standby tickets to visit Ben in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he was in graduate school. I stayed because I thought she might need help finding her own life without my grandfather. I tried to convince her to join AA and to sell the Laundromat—a business my grandfather and she had bought while I was in college and which caused her endless stress. I tried to convince her to sell the porn store and to file amended tax returns. I tried to convince her to sell the boat and move on to land, something I knew she wanted to do. Sometimes she’d say yes, then not do anything about it, not even let me do anything about it. Most of the time she’d shake her head or say, “I’ll think about it, honey,” then go back to work or talk radio or Fox News, a cup of fruity cocktail close at hand.
I was right; Marilyn did need help. But what I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t the person who could help her. We were too close, and at the same time, had grown too far apart. I’d changed a lot in college.
Now so different from each other in outlook, Marilyn and I couldn’t talk about much of anything. I couldn’t talk to her about art or music or literature, pursuits which were to her a frivolous waste of time, the domain of the idle rich or the liberal indolent, but which had become my life’s pursuits, pursued with all the fervor of the young. I couldn’t talk about faith with her, because although I was still a Christian, I wasn’t a conservative Christian anymore. All she seemed to be able to talk about were politics, turning conversations with me or her friends into one-sided, angry fusillades of talking points lifted straight from the radio. My politics had changed too—not drastically yet, but enough so that talking with her about anything became a minefield. We couldn’t even stand to go to the same church—although, to our credit, we both tried.
After a year, Marilyn told me I should leave LA to start my own life. She said it out of love, concern for me, but we both knew she wanted to live her own life as much as I wanted to live mine. What we didn’t know then was that we’d reached the end of the closeness we’d always had, of the intimacy we’d shared since she became my mother. And we didn’t know that the gulf between us was only going to widen or that we would both help it grow.
In the years that followed, Marilyn would remarry without inviting me to the wedding—most likely because I didn’t especially like her new husband. She’d fire Pete after his fifteen years of work for us, when he was too old to get another job. She’d dump all of the cats at the pound, only to adopt different ones a few years later. She’d get into arguments with most of her friends over politics and stop talking to them, even Josette. She’d sell the Laundromat and borrow thousands from her mother and brother to fund her new husband’s business plans. She’d stop filing taxes. She’d be close to homelessness but refuse to let me send money. She’d go months without calling me or her mother; she wouldn’t return our calls. I’d be sick with worry; I couldn’t get my work done. When she did call, she’d often be drunk, telling me how horrible my grandfather was, as if somehow I didn’t know. She’d scream at me about politics, long after I stopped replying, until she was debating the static between us, talking over the sound of my tears.
When we talk about that time now, Marilyn tells me how desperate she was then—to get off the boat, to get out of porn and the Laundromat, to get out of the life Richard had trapped her in. She just didn’t know how, and this was the best way she came up with. Hearing her say that now makes her actions more understandable, although at the time, they seemed erratic, irrational, selfish. I didn’t know how to help her, and so I spent sleepless nights worrying instead.
Somewhere along the way, I realized if I kept worrying about her the same way I had as a child, I’d ruin my life too. And when I gave up on saving her, it was as if our biggest bond had been severed. We’d still talk on the phone every few months, visit every few years, but I’d built a wall around my heart. I let her go.
• • •
Marilyn would move off the boat eventually. The Intrepid would fall into disrepair, her hull covered in algae, her brightwork faded and peeling. She and her new husband wouldn’t be able to afford the liability insurance required to keep the boat in the new marina, but instead of selling it to the first buyer, they’d wait for one with more money, and then for another with even more money, one who never came. And so they’d decide to leave the boat mostly unattended at Cat Harbor, the windward harbor at the Isthmus of Catalina Island, with just an anchor to hold it against the Pacific storms. Ten years after my grandfather died, the Intrepid would slip its anchor in a storm; the wind would drive her ashore and smash her against the rocks.
When I heard, all I could think of was the wood—forests of teak, mahogany, oak—splintered and waterlogged. I saw water pouring into my cabin with no one to close the watertight door, no one to use my escape hatch. The engines flooded and ruined. I mourned a whole forest of wasted wood, a thousand fixtures and components that might have been salvaged but now never would be: portholes, pin rail, compass, bell, swim step. I imagined our dishes, broken, their jagged edges wedged in tide pools and sand. Books and papers and pornography rolling in the surf. The emerald ring my grandfather gave me when I was a little girl—long outgrown—half-buried in sand; the picture of Michele, its glass cracked, her face covered in water; Spence’s badge wedged among the rocks; my Pallas Athena pendant washing away. What had happened to her ship’s bell? I imagined it clanging violently as she was pushed closer and closer to land, ringing an alarm no one heard. The way her hull groaned before it snapped. I want to go home, I thought for the first time in a very long time. It’s not there, I reminded myself. I felt unsettled, nervous for days, dwelling on the absence of a place I hadn’t been to for years—a place, I realized now, I’d loved as well as hated.
It was worse for Marilyn: with the loss of the boat, she lost everything. She couldn’t pay the Coast Guard–mandated environmental cleanup for the crash. She abandoned the video store, whose mortgage she’d long ceased to pay. She and her new husband moved to a trailer with no running water or electricity in the Mojave Desert, miles away from the nearest town.
• • •
But that fall when I still lived with Marilyn, a year after my grandfather died, before any of those other things happened, I loaded up the cute, used Saturn she’d generously given me for graduation, filling it with books and clothes, a stereo, my teddy bear Applesauce, and my pet rat, Gizmo. I left my little altar—the pictures of Michele and Spence—planning, always, to take them with me the next visit. I don’t know why I chose to leave them; they were some of the most valuable possessions I owned. I gave Marilyn a long, long hug, memorizing how it felt, the contour of her arms and shoulders, the smell of her hair, storing the memory in case I should never see her again. And then I headed to Nebraska to be with Ben. I left her once more—the way I’d left her when I went to college—and again, I felt as if I were abandoning her, as if I had failed to save her. And perhaps I was right.
• • •
On the first night of my road trip to Nebraska, as I drove along I-70, the road rising over the Wasatch Plateau in Utah, I felt homesick. I was at that part of the journey where home is too far away to return to, but the destination still seems impossibly far to reach. My stop for the night, Green River, was still a ways away, and the night was especially dark—there were no lights from towns; the only billboards advertised a watermelon festival that I had missed. My radio had been useless through most of Utah and was now only picking up faint static. Gizmo was asleep, quiet in her cage. I wondered if I was doing the right thing: a twenty-two-year-old moving to Lincoln with no job prospects, no idea of what I would do. I missed Marilyn, the boat, even the orange light of the harbor. Suddenly, as I fiddled with the AM dial, a familiar voice came over the speakers. It wasn’t a pastor expounding on the fate of unbelievers or a political commentator calling for Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
“On, King! On, you Huskies!” it urged instead. “On!”
It was Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, hot on the trail of some Canadian evildoer. Suddenly I was a girl again, washing dishes in the galley, at home with parents who loved me—even at our worst, I always knew my parents loved me. I listened raptly, corny as it was, staying in the car to finish even after I’d reached my motel’s parking lot.
After the closing music came the radio’s call sign, a simple “KNX 1070, Los Angeles.” I couldn’t believe it. How could that radio station have found me so far from home? I now know that this is a common phenomenon—AM radio waves, reflected by the ionosphere, can travel randomly for hundreds of miles, especially at night—but back then it seemed like a sign, a valediction from my childhood, a farewell from the city itself. I wiped a tear from my eye, stretched, then went in to the Super 8 to check in.
The next morning when I got back into the car, the signal was gone.