“We owe it to ourselves to go on adventures,” my mother said. She was dressed in a kimono, drinking a glass of wine in bed. “I’ve always wanted to go to Santa Fe,” I said, lying next to her in my pajamas, eating a bowl of spaghetti. We had no extended family and, because we were weirdos in our straight-and-narrow Connecticut town (I was a gangly twelve-year-old with a bad pageboy; she spent her free time painting Cubist windmills), few friends. “Santa Fe it is,” my mother said, with a flourish of her arm. “What’s stopping us?”
What should have stopped us was the soon-to-be discovered fact that my mother was a terrible vacation planner: dumbly adventurous, absentminded, and a little unlucky. We packed our bags for New Mexico, dreaming of winding mountain pathways and red deserts. We rose at dawn and hit the road. After a hearty diner breakfast, we turned off the highway, then off the main drag, and then, after traveling for miles, off the trail to take snapshots of each other triumphantly claiming the flat, desolate landscape as our own. When we returned to the car, it was locked: We peered through the window at the keys dangling from the ignition. “The coyotes will get us,” I moaned. “Stand back!” yelled my wild-eyed mother as she ran toward the car, pitched her arm back, and threw a tiny boulder through the back driver’s-side window.
Six months later, we toured the Northern California coast, staying in hippie hotels and making friends with people who owned Volkswagen buses. One day we strolled barefoot down an idyllic, unpopulated beach, gazing out at the cold, blue-green Pacific. “Hey,” I said, hooking my arm in hers, “what’s that big white thing floating in the water?” We got closer, dipped our toes in, and shielded our eyes from the sun. “It looks like a…” she began as her hair started to blow wildly. Several yards away, a helicopter touched down and a team of men in yellow uniforms ran toward the water and hoisted out a dead, bloated body, wrapped it in a tarp, and strapped it on a stretcher. As they filed back toward the helicopter, a swollen foot poked out of the blanket, bobbing up and down. “I don’t feel good,” I said. “Me neither,” she said.
One Christmas we drove through the lush and gloomy Irish countryside, taking tea at hillside manors and writing melancholy poems. In the night, my mother woke with a searing toothache. The cheery hotel clerk gave us a local’s incomplete directions to the hospital (“I’m not sure what the street’s name is, but it’s by Malone’s barn, and after that, take either your second, third, or fourth right”). We navigated our way down foggy, dark, curved roads, passing sign after sign with only large black dots on them. “What do those mean?” I asked, looking at my mother’s white knuckles and imagining her as a racecar driver. “They mean someone died here.”
Over the next five years, we rented a house in Maine that could have been a set for any movie adaption of a Stephen King novel and fled from a bed-and-breakfast owned by a New Age couple who beat drums in the backyard at dusk. My mother caught bronchitis in Paris; I fell off a horse in Utah.
When I was seventeen, we put on matching straw hats and boarded a charter plane to a tiny Caribbean island. It would be our last trip together for a while; I was leaving for college a few months later. “This will be tropical heaven,” my mother said as the craft sputtered onto a small landing pad. “Strawberry daiquiris under an umbrella,” I said. After traveling through dejected villages in the back of an open truck, we arrived at a cheerless hotel owned by an unfriendly clan. We trudged up the steps to a cement room with two cots and one mosquito net. When I stepped into the shower—differentiated from the rest of the room by a drain in the floor—I realized that to keep the water flowing, one had to hold on to a chain.
“I’m sorry,” my mother said hopelessly.
After dark we walked along the shore toward the brightly lit resort in the distance—two dark silhouettes pulling heavy baggage along like smugglers. In a clumsy attempt at gaining speed, my mother swung her duffel in front of her and then fell face-first onto the beach. Instead of standing up, she flopped onto her back, sputtering sand. I looked at her, splayed out, lit by the moon, and began, against my will, to giggle. She joined me. “I really do try,” she said. “Next time I start to plan a trip, stop me.”
But I would never; I lived for our disastrous exploits. Other people messed up and had to answer to their mothers. My mother and I messed up together. Then we extracted ourselves from whatever predicament we’d gotten into. Other people, I imagined, lived boring lives, always explaining themselves and staying out of trouble. I preferred our terrible team of two, slightly bruised and plainly silly, getting into thrilling adventures that pushed the limits of absurdity—each one more delightful than the last.