A Simple Distance (8 page)

The meanest thing I ever did was never write her back; never tell Susan that if we were in the second grade I’d have picked her for my best, best friend, told her everything in my whole world, like who was cuter, Mark or Brennen, candy bars just went up to twenty-six cents, and how to cross the monkey bars two by two. But I am not in the second grade anymore, and wanting her that much got all complicated and threatening. And so I tripped. Left us both to land on our own.

There are things I’ve done I can’t forgive. I know what it is to disregard an outstretched hand.

A fog had settled along the trendy street, unusual for early afternoon, obscuring visibility. I bussed my table of its still-full mug, readied myself to leave the coffee shop, leaned against the glass door, taking three tries to push it open, and retraced my earlier frantic flight, diffuse in the blue-gray mist.

Making sure to make noise as I climbed the steps, I opened the door braced for the chill of my mother’s reproach. But she wasn’t there, the only things staring back at me, my four bare walls and all her bags.

* * *

At 10 o’clock I called the Oakland Police. My mom, missing only eight hours, was not a priority for them, but they did, after half an hour on hold, take my report over the phone. They told me to look in places familiar. And to check the local hospitals.

But I didn’t move. I didn’t make any other calls. I sat in the center of my futon, wedged between two of her too many bags, stared out the window, and waited.

That, I knew how to do: wait. The day my sick uncle looked me in the eye and asked me to leave his island—disgraced that I’d been caught with Susan—I did as I was told. I kissed both his cheeks, drove back to Godwyn, a passenger in my mother’s jeep on an unfamiliar side of the street, and packed my backpack. I hadn’t needed the black mourning clothes, after all.

And then I waited. I sat on my mother’s bed, stared out her open window, out past Grampy’s grave, the spreading baobab, the steep drop to the bottomless ocean—Baobique nothing more than an ancient volcano, raised to the surface of the water from depths unimaginable.

I sat there for hours, until Rascal and Lucia started raising a ruckus underneath the window. The intrusion of their barking more than I could bear, I got up to shush them. And when I moved to the window, Susan was there; the mixture of our smells, still on my skin that day. The dogs had allowed her cautious access.

She reached up her hands to meet me halfway, slowed my drop as I climbed out my mother’s window.

We matched each other step for step. And held on, out back, for all the ghosts to see, until the sun dropped below the horizon, took its final rest.

This is not the way we will end, Jean. It isn’t a forever goodbye, just a temporary one.
She promised.

But the next afternoon I got on a plane, and for the next year, every time Susan took a step toward me, she took it alone.

* * *

The night sky never turns all the way black in Oakland like it does on my mother’s island. In Baobique, when it’s dark, it’s just the same to have your eyes open as to have them shut. But in Oakland, the streetlights and the fog keep it white underneath—my mother missing that night, everything reflected back to me, making it impossible to throw a single thought away as I waited for her to return. Like playing handball against a brick wall, the ball just coming back faster the harder I swung.

The telephone rang me awake at dawn. A man with a gentle voice apologized for the hour of his call, hoped he had the right number, said to me,
I believe your mother just spent the night on my front porch.

Where are you? Where do you live?
Breath shallow and fast, shallow and fast.

I live in Redwood City, 245 Mira Vista. At—

The corner of Alta Mont.

How do you know?
His gentle voice inching toward concern.

Is my mother all right!?

Well, she’s having some tea. She told me you were her lawyer and gave me your business card. I don’t think she’s well. She thinks I’ve stolen her house. She’s asked me to leave.

Oh God. I can be there in forty minutes … We used to live in your house. It was a long time ago … My mother is going through a rough time. I’m sorry. I’ll be there as soon as I can.

CHAPTER 11

I pulled on my jeans, stumbled into my little gray Mazda, and raced to the freeway. Six-thirty Tuesday morning. Traffic was already clogging here and there across the bridge leaving Oakland, driving into San Francisco. The day had begun, whether I liked it or not. I took the 101, perhaps as punishment; its sound-resistant walls, their brick veneer, preventing, like the white of the night before, the escape of my thoughts. I was stuck with myself and the reverse-commuters leaving San Francisco, heading down the peninsula.

I would not, I admit, have been an easy child for my mother to raise alone after the divorce, often thinking myself, at twelve or thirteen, more capable than she at governing my life. Even when she had the strength to try, I resisted with all my might.

Once, on the 4th of July in junior high, Becky, my sometimes best friend, and I both made the All-Star softball team. We got to play under the big lights that night, stayed out on our bikes way past the end of the fireworks at the local commons, soft wind growing cooler as each hour deepened toward morning.

Becky lived just a few houses down, and when we got to our street, we could both see the cop car parked in front of my house. It was 2 o’clock in the morning.

My mom, scared something happened to me, had called the police. I remember carrying my bike up the front steps, walking it through the screen door, wondering what we had for anyone to steal.

But what I remember most about that 4th of July was thinking,
Who’s she
to be calling the law, playing parent, imposing punishment? Near as I could tell, she was always upstairs in bed, half-gallon jug of cheap white wine propped up by the stack of condensed classics that covered the half of the bed that used to be my father’s, and would soon belong to Harold, her second boyfriend, the one I wouldn’t have liked no matter what, the one who would throw me against the refrigerator for flipping him the bird, the one who would save her, or so she thought, from laying upstairs indefinitely. Near as I could tell, when my mom wasn’t at work, selling men’s clothes to our middle-class neighbors, on her feet for eight, nine, ten hours a day, she was at home in bed—hadn’t taken notice of me in years.

Harold took my mother from Illinois to California; he took the money she made from the sale of our Victorian, peeling paint and exposed wood, its weathered façade so close to the Wright houses the new owners didn’t care they’d have to repaint, the fairness of their skin alone restoring property values more than any coat of red or white.

They’d met in the men’s department at Marshall Field’s.

She’d sold him a gray wool suit just before closing and he’d seen her in the parking lot, offered her a ride home in his ultra-compact Honda Civic.

Six months later, she sold our house and Harold drove us across the country.

Harold was white, like my father. But unlike my father, he was American, which made all the difference. Harold had served in the Pacific during World War II—he was
that
old—my mother’s brown skin reminding him, perhaps, of a time when it was acceptable to take open advantage of someone like her.

I would like to think my mother loved me more than she did Harold. But the truth is, I don’t know. It took Harold to get her out of bed. Not me. I used to sit at the top of the stairs, just in front of her closed door, listening for signs of life until it was time to fix myself dinner or put myself to sleep.

It took Harold to move us from Illinois to California. Redwood City. Mira Vista at Alta Mont.

I used to hear them in the master bedroom, creaky bed springs, slapping skin, rhythmic cries of relief from my mother’s lips as if he was pumping the life back into her that my father, years ago, and I, daily, drained out.

My mom put all the money from the sale of our house into Harold’s, helping him lower the monthly mortgage payments by nearly a thousand dollars.

Of all the places Harold took my mom, and all the things he took from her, mostly he took her for granted. The only thing they ever did together was have sex and eat dinner: cubed steak, potatoes, and frozen vegetables in the middle of California.

After dinner he’d sneak into the garage, through the door that led down from the kitchen, where he hoarded day-old baked goods in greasy brown paper bags on top of a loose two-by-four in the ceiling; each night he’d eat stale jelly doughnuts by himself.

Those other things they did—creaky bed springs, breathy cries at night—I mostly heard from the other side of the wall. But through the keyhole I could see the little lump of them, single and pulsating: up and down, up and down.

Maybe I’m more like Uncle Martin than I’d like to admit, because my body responded. Breathy and imminent. Wet and taut. Maybe if I’d had a little banana between my legs, it would have been standing, straight to, right then, like his did watching Susan and me. Maybe sex just shames us; makes us angry at everyone involved.

The way Harold was made it easy for me to hate him: old, closed, and inflexible. It was easier than I could have imagined, sneaking into the garage, stealing his day-olds, feeding them to the squirrels underneath the persimmon tree in the backyard, leaving the greasy bags empty and balled up on the counter by the sliding-glass door so he’d be sure to see.

It was much easier than blocking out my mom. I remember clearly, deciding that night not to see her over there, in the doorframe leading to the hallway that separated our two rooms, right and left, as Harold’s face, red with anger, moved into position between me and the ceiling, blocking out the light from the round florescent fixture that buzzed and buzzed and buzzed throughout our silent dinners, like a thousand dying mosquitoes, one by one flying into an electric zapper at the end of an unbearable summer.

It came, his palm that night, hard and fast and whole, into my chest; only after his face was all I could see, as if that was the important thing: that I knew it was him knocking me off balance, up against the kitchen wall.

Zzt, zzt, zzt
, went the light, my mother and I marching like mosquitoes into his path.

I know she was relieved when I finally went to college. Early admission. She had already given up one man for me; was not about to lose another. Not voluntarily, at least.

The month I left, Harold kicked my mother out and kept the house she half paid for. When I visited her that Christmas, she was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto, working in a department store selling clothes, again, to her better-off neighbors.

Years later, my mom would pay a lawyer thirty-three percent of the settlement she got from the lawsuit, which in the end was less than she’d originally put into Harold’s house. But at least they didn’t go to trial, because then she’d have had to pay her lawyer forty percent. The money left over was just enough for her to buy a brand new jeep and ship the entirety of her belongings back to Baobique. I helped her pack, just before starting law school.

The thing that frustrated me most about my mom was that she never learned, she didn’t pay attention when life left her clues. I told her when she moved back to Baobique, started fixing up Godwyn, I told her point blank, so she couldn’t misunderstand:
Remember what happened with Harold. Don’t do anything with Godwyn until it’s yours.
But she never listened.

* * *

As I pulled into the drive on Mira Vista, the stranger with the gentle telephone voice opened the front door. He waited patiently for me on his porch as I cut the engine, smiled wide and fake, and stepped into the cold morning air toward what was once our home.

From the top of the stairs, the man smiled back, whispered loud, but not loud enough to break into voice.
She’s fallen asleep on the couch.

After I woke my mom and shepherded her into the passenger seat, the man looked deep into my eyes, placed his hand on my shoulder, and confided,
My mother had Alzheimer’s, too. It’s okay.

I looked at him. And left. Waited until we were safely in the car.
What, in God’s name, was that? That man thought you’d lost your mind, Mom. And right now, I’m inclined to agree.

She puckered her lips in disgust, sucked her teeth, and looked out the passenger window.
No one is ever on my side. I feel I have no family left,
she said.

We took the alternate highway back to San Francisco. Edgewood Road. San Mateo. Half Moon Bay. Designer houses perched on their very own crests, peering past the highway to the reservoir, and the other way, to the bay. The wind combed the hair of the matted perennials thick, thick along the hillsides, just like in Baobique, the knit of the tree cover buffering our anger.

* * *

As soon as we walked through the door to my studio, she was at it again, picking up the phone, dialing long distance straight to Baobique, straight to Granny.

Mama, it’s me … I need to know when I can come back home …

I couldn’t hear my grandmother on the other end of the cables, fiber optic, buried far below her ocean floor, that brought her words to Oakland, the receiver pressed against my mother’s ear with a hand beginning to tremble. But my mom started to beg:
We’ll do anything you want …

That did it. I grabbed the phone from her limp wrist, demanded an explanation from the other end.
Granny, this is Jean. I need to know what’s happening. What is my mom talking about? Why can’t she come home?

The receiver to my ear, I heard her even through the distance. As skilled a politician as Uncle George ever was, Granny ignored my questions and answered instead with her own agenda.
Apparently, the two of you don’t care that you have dragged this family’s name through the dirt. But I do. And I will not stand by to see you and your mother finish us off.

Okay, Granny. If you have something to say to me, say it. I’m not sure what we’re talking about.
I lied, waited to see if she had the courage to really air our laundry.