The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (12 page)

Judge Connor: “As I said, the fine is fourteen hundred dollars. How do you plan to pay that today?” Repeat loop eleven times. Eventually my father runs out of gas. Perhaps he has not consumed enough calories from the Dumpster to draw this all out into a second hour. When the judge finally threatens to cut him off, he delivers his final braying statement:

“I won’t pay it because I can’t. I am poor! I am an old man, I have no car, and I eat out of the garbage.” I do a quick calculation of just how severely he has perjured himself. The last three statements are, yes, technically true. However, he does own a paid-off house in Malibu, although arguably it is a teardown. That said, due to his penny-pinching habits, he has accumulated all that cash. Were I to point this out he could—and would—respond: “Well, but where is it? Eugene Loh has no money!” And that, of course, is also true.

This is because he has transferred a great deal of his money into accounts bearing my name—I don’t know exactly how much, as he has forged my signature for so many years now to evade the tax consequences. I only tend to discover that my name is first on things via the occasional odd penalty notice from the IRS.

Judge Connor terminates the proceedings and dispatches a nonsmiling African American lady bailiff to give my dad some forms. My father hands the forms to me with a trembling hand. I look at them. They are requesting disclosure of all of his bank information—names, branches, accounts, routing numbers—as well as such personal data as his social security number. He is to write down all this information and give it to red-eyed Janice so she can go after his assets personally (
CRYSTAL PILLS! BAD HEADACHES! THE DEVILS BIBBLE
!).

Mechanically, because the judge has requested it, I begin to fill out the forms for my dad. But then I stop and think: What am I doing? Pen in hand, I am getting that feeling in my chest—the involuntary aorta squeeze, the fluttery palpitations, the shortness of breath. It might be the change of life, or it might be an actual
reasonable cortisol-firing stress response
. I realize that if we fill out this form we can well lose everything, every cent of it, including the house (even just the Malibu land must be worth—what?—half a million?), over a silly fourteen-hundred-dollar fee.

I realize how much I have been counting on my dad’s money being there, how much I have expected some kind of inheritance one day and college tuition help for my kids. It is a vague kind of—I don’t know—remote distant financial island I have been swimming toward all my life. It has lent a sense of emotional security, a sense of not being left abandoned.

And now? Over a single crazy tenant?

I step into the hallway to call Kaitlin.

“What should I do here?” I ask. “Instead of having him disclose his social security number and all of his personal bank account information to an insanely litigious person, isn’t it simpler if I just write the fourteen-hundred-dollar check myself and give it to the judge? Without telling Papa, of course.” We know that with our father it’s not about not having the money, it’s a matter of principle. Pretty much giving anyone any money at all for any reason offends his sense of justice. And this is bad tenant Janice! Rather than give up a dime, he would prefer to come to court every day for a year. As I said, he loves a lawsuit, even if he loses.

My sister is having yet another of her amazing Pema Chödrön days. She is able to look deeply into the prism of her own long experience with our dad to give some extraordinarily wise advice. “Walk away,” she intones. “Walk away. He’s a lizard. He has his own ways. Getting involved just pulls you into the muck and won’t solve anything. You have to just let it go, let it happen.”

Some stories have an elegant shape to them. Sadly this is not one of them. Which is to say what happens is that I give the forms back to my dad, crying out with an awkward angry bleat, “I can’t help you!” My father takes the forms and stubbornly begins to fill them out with his shaky spotted hand, and I leave. Somehow the whole procedure sort of trails off, and another court date is set.

WHICH IS
to say—yes, people—three months later on another Monday morning at ten we are all back at the Malibu courthouse again. The principals arrive, three months older and in different and wilder outfits (Janice has dropped the business wear and is in what I can only describe as a paisley gypsy skirt and space-age turban; Alice appears to be oddly in one brown and one black shoe), and the exact same proceedings occur. Again my father steps up to the podium with his exact same braying speech, again the judge (same judge) reminds him that he is here for one reason and for one reason only—to pay Janice fourteen hundred dollars.

Do you see what I am saying?

As if in a dream, we are here again.

I have sometimes come to feel, in midlife, as though my life is in a loop. I have stared out of my car window at an El Pollo Loco parking lot, waiting for my dad to finish going to the bathroom or something, and have literally seen paint dry. Literally! Seen. Paint. Dry! While my body ripples up and down in flame.

Anyway, again my father and the judge have their interchange. Again the humorless black lady bailiff brings forward exactly the same form. Again my father and Alice murmur, and peck at their brown paper and Abercrombie & Fitch bags in bewilderment. The shaky pen drops. The effort grinds to a halt. Once again.

Now the judge calls Alice forward. “Mrs. Loh?” he asks. “Do you have a checking account?”

“Ye-e-es,” she says, in her unsure English.

“Where?” he asks.

“Bank of America?” she replies.

“
The Bank of America on Point Dume?
” Judge Connor asks, as though speaking to a hearing-impaired person.

“Point Dume,” she says. “Yes?”

“And, Mrs. Loh, do you have a savings account?”

“Chase,” she says. “Malibu. Chase.”

And now, without changing his expression, Judge Connor turns to Janice and says: “Ms. Kolakowski, I am satisfied that you have enough information you need to go secure your payment.”

Janice’s face turns white.

“What? What about his social security number?”

“No, Ms. Kolakowski,” Judge Connor replies, friendly yet firm. “I am satisfied that you have all the information you need to approach the Lohs directly for the money they owe you. Best of luck.” He raps his gavel.

My father stands still for a moment, ingesting this sudden turn. Then he erupts.

“Oh
thank you
!” my father bellows operatically. While a slow mover, he is a very quick thinker. “Oh
thank you
, oh wise and intelligent judge! You’re a very intelligent and honorable man, not like that
bad tenant
Janice—”

“That’s enough, Mr. Loh,” the judge says curtly, rapping his gavel again, harder.

And that is the end of the bench warrant.

What—?

One take-home is that, if you’re going to violate the law, do it in Malibu.

The second is that, upon reflection, I have to acknowledge some grudging admiration for my father’s Byzantine techniques. It is not just my signature my father has forged to open checking accounts but those of elderly mothers-in-law in remote parts of China who are actually dead. This is the brilliance of ghost checking accounts. If dead Chinese people—with unpronounceable names like Xi and Qi—are on a checking account that only my father knows exists, and that only he has the paper checks to . . . Well, I’m telling you—as opposed to how everything online today is in danger of being hacked, it’s actually an amazingly secure system.

The third take-home is probably the best, though. It’s a story my sister shared when I gave her the final report.

“Ah!” she says. “It reminds me of the Chinese folktale I once heard. A restaurant owner was upset by the fact that above his restaurant lived a poor student. Every night the poor student would eat his simple bowl of rice but would be able to smell the aromas of the delicious food being cooked below him. The restaurant owner believed the student should pay him a fee for the privilege. The judge heard the case, and then asked the student to come forward. ‘Do you have any money on you?’ Whimpering, the student said he had very little, emptying his pants of just a few copper coins. The judge took the coins and passed them back and forth between his hands three times. Then he handed the coins back to the student. ‘So there,’ he said, to the restaurateur. ‘For the smell of food, you’ve just enjoyed the sound of money!’ ”

And this is why I enjoy the taste of vodka.

Which is to say his money is safe for another day.

But little do we know how those days are numbered.

Losing It

W
HILE MANY AMERICAN WOMEN
are obsessed with their weight, I, for one, am calmly and happily not, thank God. Can you imagine? On top of everything else?

This is because after spending forty-nine years together, my weight and I have finally struck a deal. Yes, by necessity, we still cohabitate. We eat together, we sleep together, I still drive the two of us—somewhat heavily—around town. But it doesn’t ask after me, and I don’t ask after it. You’ve seen my life. I have enough on my plate without having to worry about that next volatile personality, my weight.

In the eighties and even the nineties, we used to check in anxiously with each other every day, in a minute-by-minute dialogue. But over the decades, with our far-too-close relationship, my weight and I have become increasingly dissatisfied with each other.

My weight is clearly disappointed with my inability to ingest only eight glasses of water and some steamed broccoli a day, and makes its displeasure known by eternally serving me papers filled with these ridiculously inflated numbers.

In turn, for my part, I’ve come to the realization that I will never have a weight I’m going to be proud of, or that even looks nice on a page. I will never weigh 115 pounds, 120 pounds, or even 125, which for some reason has always been ingrained in me as what adult women—or at least adult women mannequins—should weigh (in the same 1960s way, I suppose, that one’s dinner table should be set with folded cloth napkins or that your purse should match your shoes).

I don’t even weigh what it says on my driver’s license: 137. I’m going to guesstimate I’m maybe ten pounds heavier than that, which I consider essentially identical, given the vagaries of wildly differently calibrated scales and water retention. Even when I was eighteen and first got my driver’s license, 137 was a random dart throw, and to be even anywhere close to that, three decades later, I think is absolutely amazing.

Plus I was pregnant twice, and when you join that community, there is this whole galaxy of new numbers to obsess over (and to be competitive about): “That’s right—I’m already twenty-four-and-a-half weeks pregnant.” “Going to the hospital, I was dilated six centimeters and was over 70 percent effaced, but I still bravely said no epidural.” “You were able to pump just three ounces of milk this morning? Jeez, if I don’t pump at least ten, I feel like these are going to burst—!” That said (and I don’t want to be harsh), I believe that when you are twenty pounds over the weight listed on your driver’s license, police officers should be able to pull you over and give you a ticket. Thirty pounds over, this is false representation, and an actual violation; it’s like failing to report a concealed weapon or a third leg. You may as well put down that you’re the opposite gender or an entirely different species of mammal. Forty pounds over, and you should be immediately deported.

I am kidding, of course. Just a little. To tell you the truth, I have no idea exactly what I weigh these days, as I no longer own a bathroom scale. I banished it a few years ago as a conscious midlife protest against my post-boomer generation—that group of women whose chief contribution to the culture, as Judith Warner suggested in
Perfect Madness
—was arguably anorexia. I’m taking back the night, ladies. That’s right, I’m lifting up my Hadassah arms and chanting, “My fat body, my fat self!”

Not that I’m remotely what a team of medical judges could call fat. Even though I’m five foot eight—well, -ish. True, I have bad posture and am shrinking—probably even five foot seven is a stretch. Anyway, even though I’m taller than the average American woman (five foot four), I’m sure I must weigh less than the average American woman (162.9 pounds). Just in case, though, to hold myself in check, I keep a couple of pairs of jeans on the floor of my closet like loaded guns that I eye warily, knowing that at any moment I could disturb my equilibrium by trying to pull them on. I don’t try to pull them on, ever, but the threat is there.

Anyway, I’m not too worried because I’ve cobbled together a pretty reliable weight-control regimen based on my four-decade survival of Pritikin (briefly), Atkins, the Zone Diet, South Beach, and even the marvelous seventies diet Ed McMahon espoused called “martinis and whipped cream” (where you can have all the steak, butter, and gin you want, but no carb-filled carrots). Of course, now, thanks to my rigorous training, I can have carbs, too, in moderation (cue light wrist slap).

The secret to getting things back on track (if they’ve gotten off) is to eat just one meal a day. How I do it (when I am doing it) is to ingest nothing but coffee (with milk) starting from the time I get up in the morning until the clock reaches the magical number 5. (Am I sometimes tempted to sleep till noon to shrink the window until cocktail hour? Sure.) At 5:00
P.M.
, I slowly and mindfully break my fast, although as you can imagine I’m pretty hungry by 5:00, so before dinner along with wine and some artisanal slicings of cheeses, I may enjoy some olives and two or three chunks of salami and just a bit of sourdough baguette (it is eyed very warily and very sternly as judicious pieces are ripped off).

Meanwhile, if I’m going to take a brush to my own canvas here, and begin idly sketching across the white space, I think of my weight as being an entity that generally exists in the 140s, within which 142 feels trim-ish (really, I’d like to weigh 138, but at this point I’m only going to get there via a light bout of hepatitis), 145 is profoundly depressing, and a terrifying reading of 147.9 (I used to have a digital scale that measured tenths of a pound) is practically a reason to leap off a bridge, although clearly the gigantic cannonball when I hit the water may well cause cataclysmic local flooding reminiscent of an action movie by Jerry Bruckheimer.