The End of Eve (7 page)

So maybe this was just the human condition. Or the human condition with cancer. It was something caused or random, a technological problem to be solved or romanticized.

I did the dishes.

IT FELT A
little crazy, this consciously trying to take my hands off the controls, this willingness to follow my dying mother. But it made sense in ways that mattered to me.

It made sense in a Buddhist kind of a way, for one thing, and I was half a Buddhist – philosophically, anyway.

“Anything you're attached to, let it go.” That's the advice
the 11th-century Tibetan yogi Machig Labdrön got from her teacher. “Go to the places that scare you.”

My mother scared me sometimes.

It made sense to me in a Catholic kind of way, too, and I was half a Catholic. My stepdad had been a Catholic priest before he married my mom. I was never baptized, but I grew up praying favors from Saint Martin de Porres, Saint Christopher, and Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I thought of all those images of the pierced heart of Mary – the seven swords that represent the seven sorrows. But they say those swords aren't the things that cause our wounds. The swords are markers of strength earned through struggle. And the first sword was the Sword of Surrender.

I wanted to surrender.

It all made sense in a spiritualist kind of a way, too. And I was probably part that. I lit a seven-day candle with an image of Marie Laveau on it. The voodoo queen of New Orleans, she was the problem solver. Maybe she could solve all this.

It made sense to me in another way, too, maybe a more important way – a way that didn't have anything to do with spirit or dharma or faith or surrender. And maybe this is the part I shouldn't tell you, because I don't want you to misunderstand. But it made sense to me in a journalistic way. Because more than a Buddhist or a Catholic or a spiritualist or an adult daughter, I'm a journalist. I've been making media about parenting and psychology and women's work all my adult life. I've never been a daily newspaper reporter, but I'm a journalist. And when the wildfire changes direction, threatening a town or when those first shots explode and people with any sense grab their children and their poodles and hurry to evacuate – that's when the journalists come in – rushing toward the storm or the crime scene, not because we're adrenaline junkies, but because we know that something important and human is about to happen. Something true and real even if it's tragic. Something that might require a witness.

Maybe I wasn't the kind of journalist who flew into
hurricanes or civil war zones. (I wanted to be that once, but I always had little kids at home who needed their dinners made). Still, I was a journalist. That's how I understood myself. And the only way I knew how to make sense of my world was to do what journalists do, to rush in and try and dispatch some usable truth from the human places that scare us.

MAIA PUSHED THE
Sunset Boulevard
DVD into the player. That Hollywood gutter at dawn. Dead leaves and scraps, burnt matches, and cigarette butts. The credits, then sirens. That classic shot of the body floating in the pool. The voice-over: “Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. It's about five o'clock in the morning. That's the Homicide Squad, complete with detectives and newspapermen. A murder has been reported from one of those great big houses in the 10,000 block. You'll read about it in the late editions, I'm sure. You'll get it over your radio and see it on television ... But before you hear it all distorted and blown out of proportion. Before those Hollywood columnists get their hands on it, maybe you would like to hear the facts, the whole truth.”

My mother leaned back into the red couch. “You've come to the right party,” she mouthed along with the voice over. “You can't beat old Hollywood,” she sighed. “Nothing the least bit interesting has happened since film noir.”

6.

San Quentin

“
IT
'
S IMPERATIVE THAT YOU UNDERSTAND THE NATURE
of evil,” my mother said. We were driving north through the fog across the Golden Gate Bridge, on our way to visit my mother's boyfriend on death row at San Quentin, Pink Floyd on the cassette player.

I was a teenager. I'd run away and come home a couple of times already.

The last time I ran away my mother was the prison art teacher. Now she was in love with one of the inmates and she cried, “I was fired for love! Blacklisted for love!”

So she wasn't a prison employee anymore. Just a forty-something married woman dragging her teenage daughter to visit her boyfriend on death row at San Quentin and talking about all the things I needed to understand. Evil, for one.

I knew she wasn't talking about the death row inmates when she talked about evil.

We parked in the visitor's lot, ducked into a white building and signed in. We stepped through a metal detector, headed up an asphalt walkway, in through another door.

Wait for that door to close behind you before you open the next door.

The visiting room smelled of stale coffee and cigarette smoke.

And here was my mother's boyfriend, hands folded in his lap and waiting for us.

Next to him was The Midnight Strangler, convicted of raping and murdering maybe a dozen women and children in Los Angeles.

And here was The Midnight Strangler's new fiancée, Doreen. She wore a Gunne Sax dress and too much mascara.

And here was another one of my mother's former students, The Suburban Psycho. He looked like Mr. Clean except he was black. He said he was framed by a prostitute for knifing some white land developer in the cul-de-sacs.

And here was a big white guy with gang tattoos on his neck and my mother pinched his cheeks and cooed at him and he snarled before he smiled.

San Quentin. It all seemed perfectly normal at the time, that we should sit down together at a big plastic table.

I lit a Camel no-filter.

The Suburban Psycho lit a Marlboro.

“Cigarettes are bad for you,” someone called from across the room.

“So is cyanide gas,” my mother's boyfriend called back from our table.

And everyone laughed like that was the funniest thing.

I wanted to be back in the car with Pink Floyd. I didn't think capital punishment helped anyone, but I wasn't sure death was the worst fate.

My mother nudged me and whispered, “See that man?” She gestured with her chin toward a thirty-something guy with a handlebar mustache. “Do you see that man, Tiniest?”

He wore prison blues and cursed as he pushed vending machine buttons, trying to get a Snickers bar out of the thing.

“That's Bobbie Harris,” my mother whispered. “He was literally beaten out of the womb.”

I nodded, kept my eye on the man.

“He murdered two teenage boys just to see what it felt like and then he finished their half-eaten hamburgers,” my mother whispered. “That's cold-blooded murder. But you have to understand.
Bobbie was beaten out of the womb. There's no name for that like
cold-blooded murder
, is there? That's how people get to be like that. Beaten out.”

I kept nodding like I understood, like I could understand.

My mother stared at me, wouldn't stop staring.

I felt nervous, didn't want to hold her gaze, so I turned away.

But now The Midnight Strangler was staring at my tits, wouldn't stop staring. He had the darkest brown eyes.

I wasn't sure what to do, so I offered the Midnight Strangler a Camel no-filter.

As he took the cigarette from me, he let his clean fingernails graze the back of my hand.

My throat felt tight.

The Midnight Strangler's new fiancée, Doreen, gave me the stink eye – like I was some teenager moving in on her man.

7.

Clowns and Caregivers

NO ONE THOUGHT I
'
D GET THE PRICE I WAS ASKING FOR
my little house next to the railyard in Portland.

“This neighborhood is all foreclosures,” the real estate agent warned me. She had platinum hair and impossibly white teeth. “You've got to be realistic.”

Our neighbor across the street shook his head at my flyer. “Dream on,” he sighed.

My mother sniffed around the newly beige corners of the place, too. “You'll never sell it. These shades are hideous.” She pulled her green Patagonia jacket tight around her like maybe the colors were chilling, too. “I'll
pay
for you to have this professionally repainted. Even a person who knows
nothing
about color is going to have an unconscious reaction to this. It's like a cross between a hospital and a bottomless bog. Anyone with a
soul
who walks in here is going to feel at once ill and trapped.”

“Project a little, Mom?”

“Very funny, Tiniest. I'm just trying to help you. I don't know why I bother.”

I didn't care. I wasn't going to slash the price or redo the walls. So maybe my house
wouldn't
sell. Then maybe I wouldn't have to move and maybe my mother wouldn't get sick and I wouldn't have to take care of her and then maybe she wouldn't die.

Just because I put a “For Sale” sign in my front yard didn't mean anything had to change, did it?

I buried a Saint Joseph statue next to the sign and the house sold in a week.

Crap.

I rented it back from the new owners.

THE PALE ORANGE
to-do list on the fridge:

Pack

Ship

Medicaid paperwork

Write
Psychology Today
blog

Wrap up teaching gig

San Francisco reading March 25

Reno reading April 13

What to do with the cats?

MY MOTHER COMPLAINED
that nothing was moving fast enough. “Doesn't anyone understand that I'm dying?” she cried when I stopped by her apartment to drop off a prescription from her naturopath. “I have a
death
sentence. I'll be dead in October.” She held a paintbrush in each hand, but had no canvas. Her fingers were just wrapped around those brushes. Her dark red nails dug into her palms.

Everyone had a different idea about when my mother might die, but she marked the date red in her calendar.
October 18, 2010.
Exactly a year from her diagnosis. “I'm running out of time,” she said. “I'll be dead on ten-eighteen-ten.”

I didn't know about 10/18/10, but I knew had to get her moved while she still had the energy. So that night at my kitchen table the five of us ate spicy yam stew from the cancer-free newsletter and hatched a plan. Maia and my mother would go ahead to New Mexico and get settled into the stucco duplex on the dirt road. I'd fly in and out of San Francisco for my reading, then Maxito and Sol and I would drive down from Portland to Santa Fe via Reno come first blossom of spring.

Maxito played with his noodles on his wooden high chair tray and sang “Wo, Wo, Wo your boat ...”

Maia texted someone under the table.

Sol excused herself, saying she had to water the plants in the backyard. She grabbed a lighter off the counter before she stepped outside. Of course we had no plants in the backyard. And it was raining.

I sipped from a glass of sparkling water I'd already spiked with a little gin.

Yes. We were going to do this.

I CHARGED TWO
one-way tickets on my emergency credit card and off Maia and my mother flew, their carry-ons stuffed with chalky naturopathic cancer remedies.

SOL AND I
bought a 1968 Shasta compact trailer to drag behind our car. We painted it turquoise and stitched red curtains. If things didn't work out with my mother in Santa Fe, well, we could always live in the trailer.
A six-foot by ten foot trailer. What more could three people need?

AT A CURBSIDE
table next to the vegan burrito food cart on Division Street, Maxito picked at his cheese-less quesadilla while Sol and I discussed our situation – the date we had to surrender the house and my interior decorating plans for our little trailer. A twenty-something girl with Little Orphan Annie hair and a red clown nose smiled at us from the next table. People often dressed like clowns in Portland. I didn't know why, but I'd gotten used to it. Finally the clown got up, leaned over Maxito's shoulder to pass us a note.
My Dear Fellow Humans
, it started.
Please excuse the written communication, but I have taken a vow of silence. I couldn't help but overhear your conversation and I know an organization that assists homeless families like your own.
She'd jotted down a phone number and website.

I thought to explain to the clown girl that we weren't homeless exactly, that we were moving and maybe it was complicated, but I just thanked her and she bobbed her head up and down
like, “You're welcome,” and I loved her even though she was kind of a cliché.