Fiction Ruined My Family (26 page)

“I'll borrow Kate's car and drive you home if you take a cab there.”

“It sounds like a royal pain in the ass. Brooklyn is a real pain in the ass in my opinion.”

Silence.

“Will you tell Kate and Henry that I'm so sorry Mom's such a burden that they couldn't come pick me up? Tell them I understand what a difficult meal Thanksgiving is to put together, what with the peas and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. It's not like they're making pot-au-feu for twenty-five, which is what I did with you girls. I had huge dinner parties and four babies, not one, and an enormous house to take care of.”

“Can you just get in a cab? Geez. Why do you have to be so difficult?”

“Oh, now I'm the difficult one?”

“You've always been the difficult one!”

“I have had just about enough. I don't have to listen to one more minute of this—”

She hung up. My phone rang a minute later.

“Hello?”

“It's Mother. I wanted to let you know I just put in a call to Bill Shames, my lawyer in St. Louis, because I am going to SUE YOU for everything you've got, which I realize, hah, isn't much.”

“You're suing me?”

“That's right, baby.”

“For what?”

“For acting like an insensitive maniac.”

“You're suing me for acting like an insensitive maniac?”

“That's right. You'll be hearing from my attorney, dearie.”

I should have picked her up.

There was blood on her couch from the day she had the stroke. My father called me the day before we were to go clean my mother's apartment.

“Now, Jean-Joe, should I go over to Mama's and take the bloody couch out of view so that you girls don't have to be traumatized by seeing that? Is seeing that awful blood on Mama's couch going to be . . . uh, traumatizing, do you think? Although where in the hell am I going to drag a bloody couch to . . . I'll probably get arrested . . . I suppose I could just throw a blanket over the bloodstains on the couch so you wouldn't have to see all that blood. I could always do that.” It would simply never occur to my father that perhaps repeating the words “bloody,” “Mama,” “stains,” and “couch” in various combinations might have taken care of whatever traumatizing remained to be done.

We divvied up the jobs at the beginning of each day there, and today I was on clothes. I wondered whether I would find any Lenox Hill Hospital robes. Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side used to have these really chic robes—blue-and-white seersucker, shortish. My mother was a regular there when she lived on East Eighty-seventh Street, and my sisters and I couldn't get enough of them. The problem was that our friends also took a shine to these bad boys, and before you knew it we were fielding requests from all over town.

“Jean, hey, it's Sophia. I don't want to be insensitive, but if your mom goes to detox again in the near future, could you nab me a medium?”

I didn't find any of the robes. I put things in bags that would go in the garbage. I didn't want to give any of it to Goodwill, because I am a serious thrifter and I was horrified at the idea of coming across any of my mother's things in a secondhand store. Though from the apartment I was the only one of us who took anything wearable, anything that required putting a piece of my mother's smell anywhere near me. Nothing could compete with the way my mother smelled at the end. The cigarettes, the old vodka smell mixed with the new vodka smell, the greasy hair, the hundred-dollar-an-ounce Parisian stench called Joy. I think Kate sent my mother's jewelry to the dry cleaners. Figuring I could wash things a few hundred times, I took one totally queer yellow-and-navy-blue-striped boat-neck shirt from L.L.Bean, one fantastic Indian-print muumuu from the '60s, a cream-colored cashmere sweater from L.L.Bean, one navy-blue wool jacket that my dad gave her from Brooks Brothers. She had never even been on the Internet, so L.L.Bean catalogs became her only option for clothes, her one-stop shut-in shop. I don't know why I took these clothes, because they were not clothes that represented her particularly.

 

 

 

Later that day while Julia worked on the kitchen, I transferred myself from closets to the bookshelves, which were loaded with crap. My mother didn't have affairs, she read commercial fiction to make my father insane. There was also the matter of her tendency when she went to rehab to stash money in books, so each book had to be gone through before being sent to Goodwill. It was genetic; her mother, not a drinker, was also a cash stasher, although my grandmother stashed cash in her refrigerator crisper drawer.

There were the expected hits on my mother's shelves: the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous,
How to Quit Drinking Without AA, Sober for Good, Seven Weeks to Sobriety
,
The Neutral Spirit: A Portrait of Alcohol
by friend Berton Roueché. The recovery section also contained the
Social Register—
we were kicked out in the late '80s because we never bought the black-and-orange books put out every year. Going through her books reminded me of the book my mother had given her new granddaughter, Louisa, several years before.

After seeing Louisa for the first time my mother had headed out to Kate's deck to have a cig. Katharine went and put Louisa down for a nap. Coming back inside, Mom announced that she had a present for the baby. Katharine and Mom sat on the couch with Mom rummaging through her bag madly, finally finding the item and pulling it out of her bag and holding it out to Katharine. It was unwrapped. A book traveled from Mom's to Kate's hands and Katharine read the title.

“
Hannibal
by Thomas Harris.”

“Mmm hmm.”

“
Hannibal.
Like Hannibal the cannibal?
Silence of the Lambs
? Anthony Hopkins's character who eats people with fava beans?” Kate asked.

“Right. Did you read the first one?” Mom asked.

“Um, well, no. This is—”

“It's for the baby,” Mom said.

“Right. For the baby. She's two months old.”

“I know, sweetie, you're going to have to read it to her.”

“Right. Thanks, Mom.”

“You're welcome. It's really terrific.”

“Yeah. Well, she definitely doesn't have it.”

Henry came in the door from work.

“Hi, Doris.”

“Hello, Henry. The baby's beautiful, just beautiful.”

“Aw, thanks, Doris.”

“I have to go. I just came to bring the baby a present.” Mom got up.

Henry put his bag down on the couch. Kate held up the book.

“Hannibal
,
”
Henry read, looking like someone had struck him between the eyes with a park bench. “Like Hannibal the cannibal?”

“Yeah.” Kate glared at him. Henry got up and went to the phone.

“Thanks so much, Doris. Here, let me call the car. I know the fastest one.”

On the shelf below all the how-to-quit-drinking books was a photo album of my mother's debutante party, the Fleur de Lis Ball. It was like a wedding album, a professional book of about fifty or so photographs of the party at her house. Everything was so displayed back then. People. Soup. Gifts. Cigarettes. I stared at a picture of a long table where presents were displayed with my mother posed in front of it, while behind me Julia took a piss in the bathroom with no door.

Kate and Julia began boxing up the endless parade of silver: silver brushes, rulers, letter openers, trophies from horse shows, platters, picture frames, bowls, trivets, trays, cigarette boxes, cigarette cases, flasks, decanters. All of it engraved. Engravers must have been busier than McCarthy in the '50s. Ditto for monogrammers. The number of monogrammed linens that my mother had was preposterous. I agreed to take three gigantic boxes of fancy schnoz-blowers, and it is not lost on me that I have inherited a lifetime supply of hankies from the world's weepiest mother.

“Eek!” Kate screamed and then started huffing immediately. Julia and I rushed over to where she was going through a pile of family photo albums and giant framed portraits.

“What? Mouse?” Julia asked.

“Stay back!” Kate yelped. We froze in our places. “There was this grungy old piece of pink tissue paper stuck in this crappy old photo album from Amagansett and when I barely touched it diamonds came tumbling out and now they're everywhere!”

“Fuck,” I said, not being a diamond lover so much as just someone who can relate to spilling shit.

“They're really small, they're not big like a ring or Mom's diamond earrings. They're teeny little diamonds.”

“Like diamond flakes?” Julia asked, putting on her glasses.

“No.” Kate tried desperately to remain calm. “What are diamond flakes? No, they're diamonds. I'm just saying, there's a lot of them and they're very small and this place is a disaster so be really careful moving stuff around.”

We began searching. Kate started with her cleavage, which was a smart move, as stuff does tend to land there: contacts, food, earrings. I bent down to examine the area around Kate's feet. Julia started with the perimeter behind Kate, presumably looking for any diamonds that had jumped out of the coke bindle they were wrapped in and powered themselves off Kate's pregnant belly up and backward, behind her right shoulder.

“Here's some!” I said triumphantly and picked up three little diamonds. “Where are we putting these?” I asked, looking up at Kate.

“Um, I say we put them in this little jewelry pouch over here.”

I handed her the diamonds and kept looking. “Move your feet,” I told Kate, and she lifted one foot and held it up for me to look under and then lifted the other and held it as long as she could.

Julia must have thought we were working on commission because she came around to where I had found my diamonds and started searching there, sort of pushing me out of my sales territory. I stood up and began looking on the edge of a destroyed armchair. It had tattered arms from my mother dropping lit cigarettes on it, and big stains on its seat. I gently moved my hand back and forth over the ratty, burnt arms looking for a girl's best friend.

Julia found six more diamonds in the carpeting and Kate found one single diamond still in the coke bindle tissue paper. At that point we decided to have lunch.

After lunch I resumed my work at the bookshelves. The diamonds somehow reinforced what I had been thinking when I had assigned myself to the bookshelves, that Mom put things in strange places, places she was in no condition to ever find again, and I wanted to make sure that the three of us found everything. The thing is, the three of us weren't looking for the same things. I was still looking for something very specific, though I didn't know where or what it was. I wasn't going to leave this dump without my mother, whatever she was.

 

 

 

I had wanted her to die. In that way, the final phone call was what I had been hoping for. It's over. She's dead. She's finally dead. It was of course shocking that my mother was dead, but the second thought was, My God, what took so long? The woman survived two decades of what Nicolas Cage could endure only a single long weekend of in Vegas. My mother was Leaving Ladue, Leaving East Hampton, Leaving Bronxville, Leaving Naples, Leaving the Upper East Side, and finally Leaving the West Village. Wishing Mom was dead had been a desire for sense. Here was a person who should be dead. She had eluded the most serious of conditions, overdoses, falls, accidents, small fires. Death was the thing that would make sense. Wishing she would go was also a desire to feel loved by her. If she died, then I would have had a mother who loved me but just happened to be dead. If she continued living, then I had a mother who was killing herself slowly while I did nothing. This must have been a very different experience for Katharine and Eleanor and Julia, because they're not alcoholic. They probably felt bewildered at how this could happen to someone. As an alcoholic myself, I know exactly how this can happen, and furthermore I know this could happen to me.

 

As I flipped through a Julia Child cookbook, I spotted a recipe in Mom's handwriting for frozen rum raisin ice cream. It was written in pencil on the back of a card from the Oak Hill School. There was an oak leaf on it and it said OAK HILL SCHOOL at the top and then read: “This is to certify that . . . Jeanne Darst . . . has been recognized for . . . outstanding work and cooperation in French class. Date . . . October 1973.” I think I've turned out fairly decently, considering I was learning French at four years old in St. Louis. On the back is the recipe for frozen rum raisin ice cream: