Lydia (2 page)

My mother, Lydia Callahan, walked out of the Dublin, California, federal women’s penitentiary at noon on Mother’s Day 1993, a free woman, with nothing but the clothes on her back and a Lands’ End fanny pack full of credit cards. She took a taxi to the Holiday Inn in Walnut Creek, where she checked in as Lydia Elkrunner and gave her address as hell. Then she washed her hair in complimentary Pert and fell asleep. Lydia was fifty-eight years old; in her dreams, she was twenty.

The next night, she telephoned my daughter Shannon in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Lydia said, “I’m out of stir.”

Shannon said, “Stir?”

“Prison. They let me go.”

“That’s wonderful, Lydia. I can’t wait to see you.”

“I want you to pick me up at the airport Thursday afternoon. I don’t know what flight I’ll be on, so you’ll have to meet them all.”

“Which airport is this where you want me to meet every flight?”

“Jackson Hole. I want you to be the one waiting when I come home. No one else.”

“Lydia, Dad lives right there, almost next door to that airport, and I live two thousand miles away.”

“Are you going to do this for me or not?”

Shannon said, “I was being practical.” Then there was silence. In the past, before going underground, Lydia would have flown into a tirade at the suggestion that practicality might take precedence over her will. But prison had taught her the power of silence. Noisy intimidation works on men; women respond to a quieter approach.

After twenty seconds, Shannon said, “I’ll be there.”

Lydia said, “I would also like you to organize a community get-together. No use sneaking back into town.”

“You want a welcome home party?”

“Put up a notice at the GroVont post office. Tell them chicken wings and shitty beer for all. That’ll bring the yokels out.”

“Anything else, Grandma?”

“What?”

“Lydia.”

“Dress nice. This is my triumphant return. I don’t need to come off the airplane and see a slob.”

***

Lydia’s phone call came while Shannon was in the process of breaking up with her tenth boyfriend in ten years. This one’s name was Tanner. They had made love with a device Tanner bought for seventy-five cents from a machine in the truckers-only washroom at the Dixie Land service center near High Point. Tanner was proud of his device, and in his mind, he had just given Shannon the sensual experience of the epoch.

Tanner kissed her left breast and said, “My God, that was great.”

Shannon rolled over on her back to face the ceiling. “I don’t feel the way you’re supposed to feel when you’re in love.”

Tanner said, “Yeah, but the orgasm makes up the difference.”

“There’s more to love than orgasms.”

Tanner was confused. His belief system was based on the concept that sexual prowess and popularity go hand in hand. “What the hell does that have to do with us?”

“I do not love you, Tanner. You’re interchangeable with others.”

“But I’m here now.”

Shannon rolled back to look at Tanner, who had a little scar on his chin she was fond of. She realized the scar was why she had chosen him in the first place. It lent Tanner a sense of fragile danger, but fragile danger is not enough in the long haul. “Tonight was fun,” she said. “I want you to move out tomorrow.”

He said, “No.”

At that point, the phone rang.

***

Tanner pouted throughout Shannon’s conversation with Lydia. After they said their good-byes and hung up, he said he was sorry he wasted his youth on a woman with the emotional capacity of a mud flap. He asked her if their time together meant nothing to her, and she said, “That’s right.” He asked her if she was made of stone. Shannon realized Tanner would not leave her until tears flowed and glass shattered. She would have to make him believe the breakup was his idea, and at the moment she simply didn’t have the energy. Instead she telephoned her father, Sam. This is where I enter the story.

***

I answered midway through the first ring.

Shannon said, “Grandma’s out of the slammer.”

There followed a moment of silence as I adjusted to the idea of a free mother. It’s not as easy as you would think. “I knew it was happening this month; I wasn’t sure when.”

“They let her go yesterday. Seems strange to do it on a Sunday.”

“We express mailed her a loaf of pumpkin bread for Mother’s Day. Do you know if she got it?”

“Lydia didn’t say.” Tanner flounced off to the bathroom and slammed the door. Shannon knew he was angry, but it was hard to take him seriously with a condom dangling between his legs. “She did say I’m supposed to pick her up at the Jackson Hole airport Thursday afternoon.”

I said, “I can be there.”

“She said I have to be the one. Nobody else.” Shannon could hear Tanner’s electric toothbrush. First thing after sex, Tanner always brushed his teeth. “Grandma’s nuts. Prison hasn’t changed her.”

“I didn’t think it would.”

“She wants me to organize a party at the GroVont house.”

“Am I invited?”

“I guess so. She didn’t say invite everyone but Sam.” Tanner came from the bathroom, minus the condom. He picked his jockey shorts off the floor, snatched the seventy-five-cent device from the nightstand, and left the room.

I said, “Will you need a ride from the airport yourself?”

“Leave Lydia’s BMW in the parking lot with the keys behind the gas cap cover. I’ll pick it and her up at the same time.”

“The BMW hasn’t run in ten years.”

“Better have someone look at it. Grandma’s coming home.”

***

The next day I drove out to the TM Ranch. I found Maurey Pierce sitting on the top rail of a buck-and-rail fence, watching a pasture filled with pregnant mares named after movie stars. It was an ideal day—high-altitude blue sky, room temperature, no humidity to brag about. Days like this are rare in the muddy, sluggish springs of the West. I should have been basking in the glory of good weather, but Maurey had permed her hair over the weekend. Changes of any kind, and especially in Maurey Pierce, throw me for a loop. You should know that about me. I hate change.

“How long till it grows back out?” I asked.

“I’m glad to see you too, Sam.”

“I mean, your hair looks nice and all, I just like it the way it was—when you were a teenager.”

“That was twenty-five years ago.”

“What’s your point?”

Maurey patted the rail, indicating that I should climb up beside her. Maurey’s been my friend since I came to Wyoming. We’re so close, we don’t have to talk to communicate. She said, “Lydia called this morning. She’s a free bird.”

I settled in next to her. “She phoned Shannon last night. You think by calling everyone in the family but me, that she’s trying to make a point?”

“Lydia’s not in my family.”

I started to disagree but decided I wasn’t going to convince her of anything new. Maurey is Shannon’s mother; I’m Shannon’s father; Lydia is my mother and Shannon’s grandmother: that makes the whole bunch of us family in my book. And this is my book. One of the mares knelt on her front legs and flopped sideways. Since Maurey didn’t seem concerned, I figured it was normal behavior.

Maurey said, “Uma Thurman will drop first.”

“Which one’s Uma Thurman?”

“The sorrel. Drew beat her by ten hours last year.” Maurey nodded toward a black horse with white feet and a white wedge running down her nose. “But my money is on Uma. She’s set to pop. God, look at her. I’m glad I’m not pregnant.”

We watched Uma for a while, expecting her to pop at any moment, although I wasn’t sure I was watching the same mare as Maurey. I know brown and pinto, palomino in a good light, but sorrel is beyond me either as a color or a horse.

“What did Lydia say this morning?”

“She’s in San Francisco on a shopping spree.”

“Shannon told me Lydia’s coming home Thursday.”

Maurey nodded. “That’s why she called. She’s throwing a prodigal mom party. Pud’s supposed to barbecue a pig.”

“Shannon thinks she’s supposed to organize the homecoming bash.”

“Lydia changed her mind. She doesn’t trust Shannon to get it right, not that she thinks we’ll do better.”

I said, “Lydia has high standards when it comes to parties thrown by other people for her.”

“She wanted a fatted calf on a spit, but that’s where I drew the line.”

My eyes went from the horses in the pasture, across the river line, to the red mountains in the distance. Somehow, the older I got, the less I was able to deal with the difference between nature and people. I’d recently been feeling almost paralyzed by the unlikelihood of life.

Maurey said, “Pud’s over in Idaho Falls now, looking for a butcher who sells whole hogs.”

“Why not buy a live one and slaughter it yourself?”

Maurey’s nose wrinkled. “Yuck, Sam. Do you want to stick a pig?”

“Not me.”

“That’s one of the many reasons we run horses instead of cattle—I don’t have to kill the inventory.”

“You’ve raised cattle before.”

“No need to throw the past in my face. Do I throw the past in your face? Do I say, ‘You once owned a golf cart company,’ which is sure as hell nastier than feeding cows?”

“Sorry.”

“You never know when to back off and let it alone. When I met you, you wore Dickeys and thought hooters were people from Indiana. But do I hold it against you? No.”

After decades of multiple apologies per conversation, I had adopted a policy with women of saying I was sorry once, then keeping my mouth shut till they ran down. In my job, I dealt almost exclusively with women, and the policy served me well.

“What are you going to do about Lydia?” Maurey asked.

“Nobody can do anything about their mother.”

“Got that right.” She grabbed my arm and pointed. “Michelle Pfeiffer’s water just broke.”

“That’s nice.”

Riding airplanes made Shannon feel even more vulnerable than she usually felt, which, she thought, might be more vulnerable than almost anyone else. She wasn’t sure. Shannon sometimes spent entire days on the edge of hysteria, but she hid it so well that she suspected others around her were doing the same thing. Once, as an experiment, she snapped,
“Boo!”
to a rude teller at the Wachovia Bank, and the teller burst into tears. After that, Shannon realized it wasn’t fair to test the hard asses.

Vulnerability in others cannot be judged. It’s like my theory on colors. I told Shannon each person in the world sees colors differently, only this is impossible to discuss, because there’s nothing to compare it to. Color blindness can be quantified since that’s one color against another. But intensity, depth, and vibrancy are isolated in the individual. When I say, “The Coke can is red,” I mean an entirely different thing than when she says, “The Coke can is red.”

Shannon couldn’t see how it mattered, so I tried to explain the relevance. “There is no common ground,” I said.

Shannon said, “What did you expect?”

Airplanes made Shannon feel extra vulnerable, and not just because the passengers have absolutely no control over whether they live or die. There was that. But also, Shannon had no control over who sat next to her. For some reason, my daughter brought out the chattiness in humanity. If there was a Scientologist or past-lives regresser or even a bathroom-fixtures salesman who really loved his job, the airlines plopped Shannon down next to him. Or her.

On the flight from Greensboro to Atlanta Shannon sat next to a girl who believed there is a secret code in the Bible that explains all mysteries—such as why her boyfriend was in prison in Reidsville, Georgia, for selling counterfeit travelers’ checks.

As the girl ate Shannon’s free peanuts, she said, “A man in Florida knows the code. He’ll give it to me for a two-thousand-dollar love donation.”

“Which version of the Bible has the code in it?” Shannon asked.

“The King James, I guess. That’s the one God wrote.” Then the girl showed Shannon a photograph of her boyfriend. He had white hair and a T-shirt that said
fuck off, world—I’m a senior.
“We’re getting married—soon as he makes parole. I’m flying down today to tell him I’m preggers.”

Shannon felt so vulnerable, and the Atlanta airport was so crowded, that she decided to telephone Tanner. Harsh words had been spoken before she left, and Tanner had gone into a sulk. Shannon wanted to tell Tanner that he was a fine man and her inability to love him the right way was not a reflection on him personally. He wasn’t any worse than anyone else.

“I have to be totally honest,” Tanner said, on the phone, after she told him it wasn’t personal. “I believe in honesty above all else. You can ask anyone in Carolina. I tell the truth, first, last, and always.”

Shannon looked down the concourse at the line coming through the security checkpoint and wished she were there instead of on the phone. She knew, whenever a man says he has to be honest, he’s fixing to inflict pain.

Tanner said, “You need to lose some weight.”

“What?”

“No man is going to marry you if you’re fat.”

“Is that your best shot?”

“No. Your pussy smells bad.”

“Tanner.”

“It’s like bad clams down there. I wouldn’t tell you if it wasn’t for your own good. I would heavily advise that you never let a man go down on you again. You’ll make them sick.”

***

I loaded the Madonnaville Suburban with three pregnant teenagers, a nurse practitioner, Gilia, and Baby Esther—who was terrible two and Gilia said we had to stop calling
Baby
soon—and drove down to GroVont to Lydia’s getting-out-of-prison party. The math here adds up to six females and one male, which is the general proportion I am accustomed to living with. It leaves me with a permanent sense of feeling put-upon.

“I can’t believe you had the low class to buy Gilia tires for Mother’s Day,” Eden Rae O’Connor said. At nineteen, Eden was the oldest of the present batch of Unweds. She was also the farthest along—eight months—so she’d appointed herself spokesperson. The other two were fairly new to the Virgin Birth Home for Unwed Mothers, and it usually took a few weeks for the girls to adjust to the point where they felt comfortable criticizing me.

“New tires will give her peace of mind when she drives Esther into town,” I said. “Peace of mind is the most precious gift of all.”

My wife made a snort noise that sounded like a cross between
hmph
and
bullshit
.

Eden said, “You can give peace of mind on a weekday. On Mother’s Day, you’re supposed to give flowers.”

Honor Edmonson stopped playing with the radio. It didn’t get but two stations anyway. “Face it, Mr. Callahan, the romance has left your marriage. The tires are for you.” Honor was the nurse practitioner. She’d been an Unwed seven years ago, one of our first. Then, after her baby was born, she went to school for her nursing degree and came back.

“My daddy always buys Mama things he wants for presents. He says she’ll hate whatever he picks out anyway, so it might as well be useful.” Angel Byron, who sat in the way back, had just come to Wyoming a couple days ago. Angel hadn’t yet decided whether to abort, offer for adoption, or keep the baby, and these were her first nonessential words. Talking was a good sign. It meant Angel was emerging from the scared silly stage.

The company policy is to avoid putting any pressure on the girls either pro or con as to abortion, but nurturing without pressure is stressful in itself. Gilia and I are always tense until the initial decision has been made. After that, the adoption-or-keeping question can go right down to the wire. Sometimes well past the wire.

“I don’t understand why your mother was in prison in the first place,” Eden said. “I heard she was a feminist force for justice in America.”

I glanced in the rearview mirror at Gilia, who sat next to Esther’s car seat, staring out the window at the red cliffs along the river, pretending not to listen. It would be just like her to feed Eden that
feminist force for justice in America
line. Although we’d been together almost ten years, I still had no clue as to when Gilia was being sarcastic. It seemed like an important thing to know.

I said, “Mom FedExed a poison chew toy to Ronald Reagan’s dog.”

Charlie, the third Unwed in the van, whistled through the ring in her nose. “That’s totally spooky.”

“Lydia thought she was doing good for humanity,” I said.

“By poisoning a dog,” Gilia said, as if the girls hadn’t heard it right the first time.

After a moment of semi-stunned silence, Eden said, “Now I see why you’re so squirrelly.”

***

“Look at all those cars,” Honor said. “It’s like they’re going to a baseball game.”

I said, “Maybe someone is having a garage sale.”

Cars were pulled over on both sides of the street. People unloaded lawn chairs and coolers, a few baby strollers. Dogs sniffed each other’s crotches and peed on each other’s pee; kids pretended to hit their friends; women hugged everyone in sight, as if they hadn’t seen all these people yesterday. It had that feeling you get in the parking lot of a bluegrass festival.

“They’re headed to our house,” Gilia said.

I said, “Are you sure?”

“Well, look, for God’s sake.”

I eased between the double rows of cars, narrowly avoiding killing a couple of children, until the view opened up on Lydia’s house and lawn covered by Wyomingites doing what Wyomingites do after a long winter. Everyone even vaguely close to the legal age held plastic cups of beer. Several kids from up in Buffalo Valley were playing a game where you shake up a can of Coca-Cola and open it in another kid’s face. The men were split evenly between one group at the kegs and another group gathered to watch Roger Pierce and Maurey’s husband, Pud, standing on either end of a fire pit, turning a greasy pig on a spit.

Eden said, “Look at Roger.”

I said, “What about Roger?”

“Nothing. Just look at him.”

So we did. Roger was a slender, tall boy wearing jeans and an old cowboy shirt with the sleeves scissored out. He had a tie-dyed bandanna wrapped across his forehead like an Apache, and as we watched, he dipped a mop into a washtub of barbecue sauce. When the mop was good and slathered, Roger wiped it back and forth over the shiny pig.

“You think that mop is new?” I asked.

Honor opened her door. “This is going to be a hoot.”

I repeated what I had said earlier. “Are you sure?”

As the females unloaded, I sat watching the front door of the house where I had grown up. “You guys go ahead. I have an errand.”

Gilia stopped unlatching Esther’s child seat. “What kind of errand?”

“I should run into Jackson for potato chips. This is a bunch of people, it would be a shame to run out of potato chips.”

Not one of the five women bought the gig. Even Esther knew I was lying through my teeth.

“What’s your husband up to?” Eden asked Gilia.

“I’ve found you save a whole lot of time if you don’t try to figure that out,” Gilia said.

As the pregnant girls huffed their way out of the van, Gilia came around to the driver’s-side window. She leaned in and kissed me on the tip of my nose.

“The tires are okay,” she said.

“I could have done better.”

“Listen to me.” I listened. “Your mother will take all the guilt you have to give. Don’t waste any on this.”

***

The whiny kid banged on the bathroom door again, but Shannon ignored him. He could just go piss on a bush like everyone else in Wyoming. The whole state thought nature was one big commode, the way they acted. The kid would have to find a way, if it was the emergency he claimed it was.

Shannon was sitting on the toilet in Lydia’s cabin with her head down between her knees, trying to sniff her crotch. She knew Tanner had only been trying to hurt her, he probably said the same thing to every woman who had the gall to split up with him. She knew he was lying. And yet, the seeds of insecurity had taken root.

Why did men have to go and wreck whatever good memories were left when a relationship ended? That was the eternal question. She and Tanner had been close once—two months ago—so close it was hard to conceive of being apart. They laughed together. They talked all night and held hands in public. There had been deep trust, and now, simply because she wasn’t in love with him, Tanner was smashing every warm moment from the past. You only hate the ones you sleep with. Shannon suspected this was a Southern attitude. Californians didn’t automatically hate everyone they stopped having sex with.

She sniffed again, exploring for rankness. Fish. Sweat socks. She’d read people can’t smell their own body odors, which is why some people get into crowded elevators smelling like week-old roadkill. Deodorant companies spend millions of dollars on advertising for the sole purpose of making us paranoid. Shannon considered this inhumane, right up there with clubbing baby seals. The world is ridiculous enough without commercially caused anxiety.

The kid banged the door. “I gotta go.”

“Stick it in a jar.”

The kid kicked the door.

Shannon gave it up. There was no way to tell if she smelled, and no one she could ask. She stood, pulled up her panties and jeans, and crossed to the mirror to study her face for signs that she was turning twenty-nine in August.

The trip out from Carolina had been a royal pain in the butt. From Atlanta to Salt Lake, she was trapped next to a man whose stomach gurgled. He pretended it was her making all the racket, like a kid in third grade who farts, then blames the girl sitting in front of him, minding her own business. The other passengers believed him.

Then, from Salt Lake to Jackson Hole, it was a woman reading—out loud—from a book called
Attacks of the Grizzly
. “Listen to this, way back in 1923, two cowboys on horses roped a bear, and an idiot Yellowstone Park ranger rammed into the grizzly with his motorcycle.” The woman had Certs breath and leaned into Shannon as she ranted on. “The bear ripped the ranger apart and started to eat him, but one of the cowboys finally killed him. The bear. The ranger didn’t pass out or anything. Just laid there under the bear’s dead body until the cowboys set him free.”

“You think that’s true?”

“In the ’30s, there was a decapitation. Decapitations fascinate me. Do you think the eyes keep working for a while afterward? I don’t see why not. Imagine what it must feel like to see your own body without a head.”

And while the woman went into an hour drone on the subject of blood, guts, and gore, Shannon sat next to the window and stewed over the stupid amount of energy she’d wasted deciding what to wear when she met Lydia’s plane. Shannon’s grandmother was impossible to satisfy, so it was senseless for Shannon to work herself up over clothing. Lydia criticized. Maurey said it was an evil habit Lydia fell into years ago, and she didn’t mean to be mean. Shannon should take it as a lesson on what not to do when she grew up, which you would think would have happened by now, if it was going to.

“We need bad examples even more than good ones,” Maurey said.

“Yeah, but why do I have to be related to so many of them?”

Shannon chose a white turtleneck, black Wranglers, Nike running shoes, and earrings Hank Elkrunner made in the prison jewelry shop from two #12 Royal Coachman dry flies. She changed in the airport restroom, ran out to the parking lot to find Lydia’s BMW, threw her bag into the trunk, then ran back into the airport in time to meet the next flight. Lydia wasn’t on it.

Shannon settled in to read the pile of catalogs she’d brought from Greensboro, but visions of Tanner kept getting in the way. She came up with at least ten things she should have said, most of them having to do with the size of his penis. Then the shape. Then his ability to use it effectively for anything other than a whiz in the wind. Given two days to write several drafts of her phone call’s last line, she could have made him feel like such a loser.