Thy Neighbor (7 page)

It's really sad.

Before she married she'd been an aspiring actress. She'd made a few toothpaste commercials, or maybe voiced-over one of those animated ads for feminine hygiene products, but she'd never done anything more serious than community theater. Still, the love of it hasn't died in her, and she's doing her best work, even if it is just to a plate of glass.

Glass, that is, with a camera in it. Or near it.

I think Damian somehow put it in the frame and tilted its angle of sight, because it's a straight-on shot on my monitor. It's now the second camera I have in there. Originally, I just had a wide angle for the whole bedroom, but when I saw her start the mirror monologues a while after the divorce, I had Damian make a courtesy call and rig me a better setup. Now it's like a Bergman movie in there for real.

But look, putting aside all the bile in me, I mean this.

Dorris Katz is in pain. Real pain. And who am I to say that it's any less legitimate than mine, or less debilitating just because it springs from a less newsworthy source? I'm not a big believer in the calculus of suffering. I don't think there's a scale with genocide survivors at the top and washed-up celebrities at the bottom. Not that I don't think you can legitimately say to a person, “Get over yourself, honey, it's a hangnail,” or whatever, but I do think that suffering is suffering and is, by definition, subjective, no matter what the cause.

What's more—and maybe this is the Catholic in me, though I'm pretty sure the Buddha would back me up on this—I believe that suffering unites us. The one thing I did get from catechism, the one message that made its way through and stuck, was the idea that Christ was not to be revered because he suffered for our sins or because he suffered more than most—he didn't—but because he suffered
as we do
.

His suffering isn't what made him special. It's what made him just like everybody else. It made him understand what it was to live on the earth as one of us and, so the argument goes, that's why he could not forgo it. It wasn't the final exam, the last push before apotheosis. It was the whole show. The point. This is life, my friend, and welcome to it. He was just lucky it didn't last longer than it did.

He got a taste of this shithole at its worst, and
subjectively
he suffered, just like—exactly like—Dorris Katz. And the likeness goes both ways. Sitting in front of that mirror sobbing her heart out and shouting up to the angels—
Is anybody there?
—or to God—
Why have you abandoned me?
—Dorris—okay, I'm going out on a less than orthodox limb here, but I think I'm right—Dorris reenacts the Crucifixion. She is Christ. Again. And so is every other sorry sad sack sitting in his room suffering immeasurably in his mind.

In her monologues, as I've heard them, Dorris herself is making these same links, links to other people's suffering, though like most of the rest of us she tends to compare pains relatively and berate herself for dealing less well than, say, Mrs. Bloom, or me, with what she believed was a far less tragic fate.

Dorris, like everybody in the neighborhood, whether they've just moved in or were around for the actual events, knows about my parents and the Blooms, about Karen's death and Robin's disappearance. It is part of the lore of our subdivision, something the real estate agents still avoid discussing but which has found its way nonetheless into the ears of every person who has bought property or lived in the vicinity since 1997.

Dorris looks at Isaac, who is now the same age as Robin was when she disappeared, and at Miriam, who is younger and just as vulnerable a little girl, and she asks herself why she can't love them more, or love them better, when she knows that they, too, could be lost on the streets somewhere or in captivity being repeatedly raped and impregnated by some jackal of a man. She knows they could be dead, and that to some tortured parents thinking your kid is probably dead is a relief given the alternatives. She knows all these things all too well, and has made them part of her punishment, further evidence of failure at the one and only thing she feels she was groomed to be: a mother.

She looks searchingly into her own tearful eyes and she asks herself why she could not have made her marriage work, if only for the sake of the children, and to spare them seeing her deflate like this, like the Wicked Witch of the West, cursing and hissing the whole way down into a heap.

So, you see, I do her a grave injustice to say that she's a bimbo or a fleshpot or anything else wholly pejorative, because there is more to her. A lot more. But who would ever know it? People are only themselves when they're alone, when there's no one there to see it. And sometimes, as with Dave, that's a good thing, because it's the only thing keeping them out of prison or the psych ward.

But with a lot of people, it's just beautiful. Breathtaking. So delicate and subtle and original that you think it might just redeem the whole species. And it's all hidden or reserved, kept in the speeches we make to ourselves in the middle of the night or the excruciatingly long empty afternoons in lonely houses when the pain is so bad that we're on the verge of killing ourselves, but can't. That's the good stuff. The best stuff. The truth. And the only way I've been able to see it is through a lie. A deception. An unconscionable intrusion into someone else's private hell.

Monica's the only person I know or have ever known who's like this all the time. Real, I mean. And she pays, has paid, a high price for it, no doubt. But even she isn't without some pretense. She can't be.

When we're in the presence of another person, there's always a mask, even if that mask is our face. There's no escaping it. And so the vast majority of what we say to each other, whether it's to our spouses, our family, our confessor, or perfect strangers, amounts to cocktail party chitchat all the same, or, at best, a crack audition for that juiciest of all parts we're literally dying to play: ourselves.

But alone.

Fuckin'-A.

Alone, we're genius.

Onstage doing
Our Town
with the other avocational thespians, or in the studio hocking fluoride whiteners and panty liners, Dorris is as Dorris does: a Trotsky Kugel no-talent
who-uh
, as they say in Brooklyn, whose best asset was always and ever her cooz.

But damn.

Alone, Dorris Katz is Antigone. Actually, Medea is probably the more appropriate choice, because, let's face it, she's thought about killing her kids, or being rid of them at least. Who hasn't? And she's thought a million times about how to save them, too, about what motherhood is, in all its triangulated affections, running between father and child and back again. She's thought, too—aloud—about what motherhood is but shouldn't be: the only love you never get over.

She knows a lot, Dorris, and she's wrestling.

She's in there fighting the hardest, timeless human fights that any pretentious patron of the arts ever goes to Euripides or Sophocles to purge himself of in the abstract.

Those tragedies are paper cutouts compared to the source.

Try sobbing until you vomit and going on with the monologue anyway, or cutting your thighs with a dull paring knife because it's the only way to leech out the poison in your underrated soul.

Dorris.

She and Dave inhabit the same world. The same five square miles, give or take. Can you believe that? They've even had a go at it in the sack, which is like something the laws of metaphysics should prohibit, or the voice of an overheated droid should warn you about.

Danger, Mrs. Robinson.

They met through me, of course. At the Swan. And the D-man, being the turkey vulture he is, took up the roadkill I declined.

I can't even talk about what they've done together or how bad she's felt about it afterward, or the fact that she's repeated the encounter anyway. It's enough to give you posttraumatic stress disorder. It has me. Thinking about it is like an abuse flashback. Makes me go clammy all over and want to shower.

I know, I know. You're saying: He's
your
friend, bro. Your best friend if, and I quote, “time wasted together is any indication.”

7

Yeah, motherhood.

There's something for you.

It's something for me for sure.

Big.

That's why watching Dorris exercise her sensibilities in front of the mirror made me weep until the front of my shirt looked like a bib, and why watching Dave tup Dorris as if her boudoir were a barn was just too much for me.

Here's one for the books out loud. Take it down.

My mother was murdered.

Full stop.

That in itself is quite enough for anyone, without the coda of Dad as murderer tacked on.

All in the same crime.

All in the family.

I just cannot understand.

And my ignorance is killing me.

I have no information but my own past—the one I had with them, which was so partial anyway. After the age of fourteen I was away at school so much of the time.

I have summers and holidays to go by. And before that, I have the warped view of a child looking up at his progenitors in awe and wonder and, sometimes, impotent rage, as if at the colossi of Easter Island.

Maybe that's right. Maybe our relationships were always mediated by distance and therefore mystery, and that made them both easier and harder, but artificial all the same. And maybe that's why I have so much trouble remembering, because so much of it happened in small bursts, punctuated by long separations.

How much easier it was in this context to build up a theology around my parents. To love them so much and so falsely.

This I know is true, and I know it now for certain in a way that I never did then: it is impossible for me to love a person, or even know a person in any meaningful sense, because I do not believe that there is any such thing as a person.

To me, people have no substance but flesh. Bodies. The rest is purely ideas, a performance on one side, met by projection, and inference on the other. Minds meeting other minds, where minds themselves are just ideas, and the conference between them, illusory. Not a meeting at all. Just a ricochet of mistakes.

I have only an idea of a person, even the person that I call myself. That's all. And when I love another person, or think I do, it is only the idea of that person that I love, and it is only the idea of me that is doing the loving.

And why not love ideas when ideas are so easy to love? So perfect, and ordered, and beautiful, and narcotic. Even chaos has become a theory.

That is the whole history of man, to me. Human events boiling down to this: living, breeding, killing, and dying for ideas, and loving them unrequitedly.

We are no more capable of loving people than we are of loving dirt. We love the ideas that we attach to carcasses, the meanings we ascribe to them, and the image we form of them in our minds, minds that are no more substantial than anyone else's.

Show me where love is, where it exists, and I will show you a cerebral circuit board of signals and crossed wires. Saying you are in love with a person is like saying you are in love with a radio, or a TV, the box itself, not the broadcast coming from it, which is always hopelessly muddled anyway with the broadcast that is coming from yourself.

We are talking past and over each other all the while, and we take the resulting cacophony for music.

So, I suppose, my memories, patchy though they may be, are as legitimate, or as chimerical, as anything else.

I see the picture of my mother in my memory's eye.

It's a lie, but I will speak in the language we all understand, just as I have been doing all along, even to myself.

I will say that I loved my mother, and you will know what I mean. Sort of. We will agree to the common misconception and bask in it.

I will tell you that I smelled my mother's ghost again this afternoon when waking, and you will understand what I mean when I say I trust the hallucinations of my nose to conjure feelings that are not true but that I want to indulge anyway.

I learned this bitter lesson of love from my mother, over time and with repeated frustration. Much and desperately as I loved her and thought I communed with her, or was an intimate part of her and she of me, the fact remains: there was no one there.

My mother was a mirage. I made her up.

And, of course, she helped me along, because she was especially good at faking it. I don't mean that she faked loving me. She bought into that business as much as the rest of us. No, I mean she was good at faking being a person—which is, again, what we all do—but she
knew
she was doing it. She knew she had to do it, and she knew it much sooner than the rest of us ever do or can.

She knew probably by the time she was a young teenager that she was empty, that this person whom everyone called Diana and looked to for responses, opinions, signs of recognition, for substance of any kind—she knew that this person did not exist.

And I'm sure, especially coming as it did at such a young age, that this insight was disconcerting to say the very least. Horrifying, I bet. She probably thought that there was something terribly wrong with her. Who wouldn't? In fact, I'm sure she did, because she spent the rest of her life, and the immensity of her intelligence, first carefully figuring out what was required of her on any given occasion, and then expertly constructing, honing, and perfecting the required delivery.

Psychiatry will tell you that such a person is a narcissist or, more precisely, suffers from a narcissistic personality disorder. But that's reductive and, to my mind, just more proof (if any was needed) that many of the things we call disorders are just unpleasant truths about the so-called human condition that we don't want to face.

My mother was a genius at being a person from scratch, and she sustained that illusion till the day she died, which must have taken more energy than anyone could possibly imagine.

It's boggling, really.

Think of holding up the constant trick of your existence, knowingly, effortfully, and all for the sake of the people around you who haven't got a clue.

That's the part that really gets me.

What can it mean to murder such a person? How do you kill someone who isn't there? And how can they come back to haunt you? I ask myself that all the time. And then I think—maybe that's exactly why she's still here in some form, as much or as little as she ever was (and he, too, come to that), a broadcast still bouncing around in the ether.

I smelled her when I woke today. I smelled her in the form of clay. The grotto, wilted lily smell of a woman's compact, and the residue it leaves on her face; the feather catch of powder and blush, just in the back of your throat, and the candy sweet of lipstick. The humid confines of her favorite cavernous leather purse and all its contents came down on me like a blinding bag, as it did when I was a boy when I would plunge my entire head in there, breathe, and look out through the seams at a world too bright for hiding in.

It was all there again in the scent. The leaky ballpoint pen, the used tissues, crumpled and frayed, her wide lady's wallet with the change pocket that clipped, its belly full of grimy dollar bills that smelled of pencil lead, and crisp new twenties that didn't. There were pennies, nickels, and dimes fallen loose in the bag's cotton lining, mixed with a handful of aspirin and rolls of sugar-free mints. There were pieces of torn notepaper, a paperback book, a hairbrush full of hair. Oh, and yeah—who could forget?—there were always those three or four tiny bottles of Jack Daniel's, clanking.

When you ask the question how she did it, how she pretended so hard for so long, there is the answer. She drank. She drank a lot. And she pretended about that, too, hiding just how drunk she was or how often.

I guess now you know where I get that from.

I wonder, actually, if she puked as much as I do, or if she drank like a woman, a sip here, a sip there, just enough to top you up but not enough to throw your stomach into your throat.

She must have been hungover in the mornings, though, because after I was about ten years old she stopped getting up to make me breakfast on weekday mornings, and I had to fend for myself with peanut butter.

When I was just about ready to leave the house, I had to wake her to drive me to school, and that was like raising Lazarus, I can tell you. It was as if the woman slept in a bog with one arm protruding, and you had to pull her out by that appendage. Dead weight like nobody's business, and a spindly kid on the other end huffing and whining, “Come on, Mom. I'm gonna be late. Again.”

I'm amazed she didn't belt me in the face. If some chipper fucker tried to wake me before I was human, I'd smack him clear across the room without even coming to consciousness.

But somehow, she always managed not to take the morning woozies out on me. It helped a lot that before I went to the bedroom to wake her, I'd brew her a cup of coffee that was as thick as the sludge she was sleeping in. I practically had to pour it down her throat from a kneeling position while plugging her nose, like some kind of EMT trainee.

That was enough to get her into her ratty robe and slippers, which is what she always wore in the car. We got into a fender bender once in the school's drop-off zone, and when she got out to give the other mother our number, her hair all wild and matted, her face still greasy with night cream, she looked like she'd escaped from the state asylum.

But what did she (or I) care what the housewives of Pelsher County thought of her? As far as she was concerned, they were a bunch of bubbleheaded cookie-bakers whose only purpose in life was to fatten up the next generation for the slaughter or the factory floor, or whatever else she thought the children of morons were meant for.

Actually, I know what she thought they were meant for, because now and again, at the right hour and after the right vintage, she'd say things like:

“This is a nation of idiots breeding more idiots, a rabble whose only useful function is to fight our foreign wars and donate organs.”

Still, I'm thinking she must have been pretty well three sheets to the wind when she said those things, which wasn't that often, because midday, most of the time, when she was probably just mildly buzzed and playful, she rarely had a rude word to say about anybody. She was basically a good person, if a bit caustic on the delivery when you touched a sore spot. And before the drinking got really out of hand, she was a good mom, too.

A mom who even made breakfast.

Weird breakfast. But breakfast nonetheless.

Other kids got Cheerios and Count Chocula on weekday mornings, or at the very least oatmeal with milk and honey. I got frozen fish sticks and canned lentil soup.

I wasn't allowed to eat sugar during the week. Not even after school or after dinner. Only on the weekends and on vacation. So brekkie in the Walsh house was always a savory affair, and the only desserts I ever got, as Mom was so fond of saying, were just ones.

If I'd known at the time that in a few more years I'd be getting no breakfast at all, except what I could forage out of the pantry, I probably would have appreciated the hot meals a lot more, even if they were any kid's nightmare menu for supper, let alone breakfast.

But it's hard to have that kind of perspective when you spend the occasional sleepover at various pals' houses and in the morning you get Mrs. Sappy Sunshine serving you hand-squeezed orange juice and blueberry waffles shaped like stars and crescent moons.

The comparison was not favorable.

Except on rare Saturdays or holidays, when we all slept late and with Dad's help Mom managed to fork over something resembling pancakes, the closest Mom came to traditional breakfast was eggs, invariably scrambled into dry gray balls. Other times I got bean with bacon or cream of tomato soup, which was miles better than lentil, but still.

Breakfast trauma aside, I never really resented Mom's refusal to play homemaker. She was a highly educated woman who didn't take tips from women's magazines. She didn't need the guidance of other women, or the culture, which, as she pointed out, was just a bunch of C-students with dicks sitting around a conference table trying to sell you crap you didn't need, or trying to make you feel inferior if you balked.

Mom was impervious to criticism in this regard. Most regards, actually, but this one in particular. You couldn't make her feel inadequate as a woman or a mother. It was impossible, because her logic was airtight.

To the woman charge she'd say:

“Last time I checked, I had a vagina. QED.”

And to the mother charge she'd say something equally cunty but hilarious, like:

“Motherhood? What is this ‘hood' business? I whelped the bugger. Trust me on this one. I was there.”

Where it counted emotionally, she was there, too, or, as I've said, she put on one hell of a performance of being there. And when you're a kid and you're in the presence of the Sarah Bernhardt of the fucking doll's house, you don't know the difference.

Trust me on this one. I was there.

Or don't trust me, and tell me that you would have known better, when even victims of cult abuse love their captors as moms and dads. And why? Because this “hood” business is actually powerful brainwashing, and damned near impossible to resist.

It sounds confusing because it is. Nobody's love for a parent is simple, and usually it's made up of numerous, opposing points of view, none of which on its own gives a true picture, but which together are more than the sum of their shards.

Contrary things can be true of a person at the same time, and usually are. This was no less true of my mom than my dad. That's just how personality works. It's fickle and abstruse and kaleidoscopic, and trying to order it predictably into something called character is just an exercise in futility and gross oversimplification.

Like mistaking a movie for the real thing, or—hey, now here's a useful simile—like taking a ghost for a real person.

All this—my mother, my father, our family—doesn't need to make sense. It can't. I've learned that much after thirteen years of chewing on it. When I see my parents, especially through the warped lens of memory, and describe what I see, I'm just gilding an illusion. That's all. And that's okay now.