MOTHER, OR THE WOMAN who said she was my mother, settled in California, finally. That was where she finally went alone and where I found her. She bought a home, which she insisted was a first home because, unlike all of the others, she had picked it: a modern twist done in taupes and railings, built-ins, islands, skylights unexpected. More sun and more sun! On the days when she was well, she cut gardenias and floated them in silver ashtrays; she opened the terrace doors. The ocean brought a breeze; although she was halfway up the canyon, some few blocks from the beach, the sheer curtains caught the wind and looked like surf. I saw such days as these with her in the summers I went to visit—high-pressure high-colored days—Mother’s cats flopped dog-wise on the driveway in the sun. “Don’t drive over them!” this new and cautionary mother was calling from her bed.
I was driving now; Nonna was dead, and I was doing the leaving.
“But you only just got here! Don’t leave. Who is there to watch TV with me? Can’t you stay another week?” Mother said, “I don’t understand how you can leave in this weather.” She asked, “How can you?”
I told her it was hard, but it wasn’t really hard to leave her, not at all. I had fingered the dust of split capsules and licked the insides of drawers. Waxes, razors, jellies, whatever I had found that could be used on the body, I had used it, powdering the mound between my legs and walking through the modern house fearlessly undressed and shaved. The air against the newly shaved part was a pinprick thrill.
I was interested in meeting new men, but Mother’s friends were mostly women. The men who fixed her car, the gardener, these men she knew only in passing. California was women and cats and time spent on the flat, flesh-colored beach beneath the rusty cliffs near La Jolla.
Poor Mother in her mother’s body. I thought about it and about my own body. I shaved obsessively. Summer to summer, my goal was to be hairless and smooth and all one color—tawny.
We often went to the beach.
We went to Sea World a million times.
“Vons,” Mother said. “We need something for dinner.” I criticized her for the way she lived.
Mother said, “I’m sorry I don’t know any men for you,” and she offered me her sticky wand, swearing, “It works, believe me. Try.”
“No.”
I knew the sound the wand made. I had heard my mother’s voice swoop, and the consequences! Animals snarled in their clothesline-tethers or retching what was spiked for them to feed on, I had heard the calamitous tread of pets; I had heard the sounds of women singing off-key. Fires in the fireplace crackling in August, stalled cars, spills, glass, glass stepped on, accidents, emergencies, the wail once of an ambulance—for Mother? I think it was for Mother, but all of this happened when I was half asleep. Maybe I was dreaming; I didn’t ask about it,
I said, “We’re doing all right without men.”
She said, “But we could use more money!”
“We were laughing then, Mother and I; we were loud with what bodily pleasure there was to be had in it, in making noise, in breaking one object over another, in saying, fuck, fuck, fuck, why did we let them do it?
“But with Nonna,” I started to speak.
“With Nonna you could have whatever you wanted.”
“A respectable life,” I said.
“Arlette there to make your bed for you. For money and the comforts money buys you lived with your grandmother, and now look at what we missed.”
There were times I would have missed. The night she threw herself over the hood of his car—who was it?—to keep him from leaving. I reminded her. I knew enough to make her cry.
And she knew enough to make me cry, but she didn’t, and she never mentioned Walter, my own, unmet. She never reminded me of all he broke. She could guess at what I remembered; Mother had had a terrible Walter, too.
“I really don’t like to fly” was what Mother said as if I had asked, “Will you visit?” She said, “It didn’t have to be this way.” She said, “My mother. My mother, my mother, my mother was behind it,” and then she cried, and I was satisfied but embarrassed and went to get us new drinks. No one visited; my mother mostly slept. “What time is it?” she asked every time she waked.
Nearly one in the afternoon, nearly two.
“I was thinking,” she would start.
“What?” I asked. “Thinking what?”
“Of, of, of.”
Oh, I was tired of finishing Mother’s sentences.
It was time to go home now.
But I came back another summer to California and stayed until the books I had brought and intended to read stuck to what they were pressed to, and the stationery curled, and the stamps dampened, and the addresses in my book looked to have been written long ago by a much more serious, constricted person. The person I was here in California was always touching herself with dreamy half purpose, touching herself absently in front of other people—once, the man come to wash the carpet, in sight of him, I fretted and held my hand over, and I walked too soon on the carpet and left behind prints.
And shoes? I rarely wore them in the California summers at my mother’s house, one of a complex, where she lived, a condominium complex beehived in the canyon. Neighbors only glimpsed; the condo staff sucking up leaves or vacuuming the pools, otherwise a terrifying quiet here. Only visiting children and small nippy dogs walked on glittery leashes by women who did not speak English.
“Hola!” Mother called to Bertita and gestured. She pointed to the sheets, the cabinets, the paper products. “Mas?” Mother asked, her nails ticking shelves nearly empty except for cat food. At least the house was well supplied with cat food.
But lonely women and shedding cats turned joke-depressing, and it was time to go home.
“Already?” Mother asked.
“Sadly, yes,” I said, excited.
Home then to the city I went and not to the site of our losses, not to where my father and Nonna were buried, but to a brownstone block, landmarked and ginkgoed, old trees—very pretty. Old trees, old city. New York, New York. Teaching was what I did for money. “I want to be a poet,” was what I confided to no one.
“School starts in two weeks, Mother. I really have to go.”
The woman in California who said she was my mother had how many cats? They were not run over; the coyotes in the canyon ate them, or that was what she said when I came back the next summer and found new kitties. Found new friends, too, while the friends from before were less friendly. Their greetings sounded more like a question. “Alice?” they said, as if, like me, they weren’t sure of Mother’s identity. From summer to summer this mother changed. Her shoulders narrowed, and the weight in her arms dropped. She was growing crooked and used to her bed. It was hard for her to walk. Her hips were replaced; and then, the next summer, the doctors were at her spine.
The doctors took out and put in.
She talked of bolts and special metals and her hip socket growing cold. She said, “When I drink, I don’t feel it—the awful pain.” She asked, “Do I clank?” She asked, “Am I okay?”
“Better,” I said.
“Let me see,” she said. “Did you ever hear of blend?”
My thumb on her lids, I tried to blend; but I could not make her what she was, and what we both thought she had been a long time ago—beautiful, beautiful.
This woman, who said she was my mother, was not beautiful.
This woman said, “I give up,” and then she drank. She liked grape drink and vodka mixed. She liked such food as made her retch and in this way was similar to the mother from before, the same who had said, “Think I care?” then used a razor on her wrist—too lightly but to bloody effect.
“Didn’t they teach you this in college?” she asked, steadying herself against the bathroom sink, wiping at her mouth. “A friend of mine told me that in college anorexics rot the plumbing.” She looked hard at me then. “All that acid,” she said.
“I should go home now,” I said.
“Why?” she asked. “We’re just having fun,” and she smoothed a part of the bed for me to lie on. She said, “Come here, I’ll scratch your back.”
The skin on my back was not yet loosening, and it was easy to be naked before her and lulled by her distracted scratching. We were watching TV, and the TV picture was growing larger, the set giving off heat. Even the show we watched, it seemed, was louder. But outside was quiet and closing in. The sky had clouded up; the sun surely had set, though we could not see the ocean. Soon it would be dark. Her touch grew repetitive and faint when the only light in the room was the fluttering light on TV.
“Shush, no talking.”
“Was I talking?” she asked and fell back to sleep.
Like me, she had to sleep near a glass of water.
Also, I noticed, our feet were alike—cracked heels and bunched toes. Nothing anyone would want to be in bed with, and a sign, I thought, those overlooked feet, that no one had kept company for a long time.
Mother fell into a sleep from which she yet kept speaking.
“What do you want?” I asked. She didn’t answer clearly but played with her lips.
“I should go home now,” I said.
At home, and witness to a clearer change of season, I saw my hair grow in—largely, darkly. Outside the foliage tendrilled, and the bees frenzied the playgrounds’ sweet refuse—apple cores and squeezed cartons of juice. The market stands were full of polished gourds and knotted ears of garnet corn. The ginkgos yellowed; the backyard gardens browned—blow-weed and thistle, late summer’s drift, and the swimsuits I had worn on the California beaches were packed away now, salt-dried. I was growing in. I was making lists and using the phone. I was letting people know I was home again and that the area rug, summer-stored and cleaned, could be delivered, the boxed blankets, newly banded, would soon be needed; I was home again and preparing for the record colds, for the short unlit days and suspending snows, for the frayed, iced wires, the shut-downs, the winds, the space heaters, the fires, the tireless coverage of the ravaging winter that is winter in the city.
The urge to loll in a warm place is the same wherever I go.