Mother

I called from the laundry matt in the center of Los Gatos.

“It would only be for a night or so,” I explained. “You know how Daddy is, he’ll let me back in later.” I leaned against the coin machine looking out the window to the small city park as I talked to her. There were mothers on park benches chatting while their kids chased after birds and crawled on the grass.
“Just like that – he locked you out?” she said. I imagined her shaking her head as if she would never do such a thing, even though she'd kicked Deney out at seventeen.

The laundry mat was empty but bright like a hospital. There was something about the place that calmed me. Maybe it was the order, the cleanliness. Maybe just the lingering warmth from the dryers.

“I don’t think he’s taking his meds,” I said. I picked up an old copy of Ladies Home Journal and flipped through it while I waited for her to say yes to letting me stay at her apartment. If Rachel was in town I would have called her up, but no one was sure exactly where she was – perhaps someplace in Central America. Being lost, out-of-reach was exactly what Rachel wanted when she left six months ago.

“Sure,” she said then added, “Debbie and Latika live here now, you know.”
“I know that,” I said. She’d been complaining about Debbie and the way she didn't take care of her daughter properly ever since she’d moved: Debbie left the milk out. Debbie wiped the floor with the same papertowel that she’d wiped the baby’s milk cup. Debbie took a shower for fifteen whole minutes. Can you believe that?

I felt for Debbie. I too liked a good long soothing shower just letting the hot water run over me, filling every square foot of the bathroom with a mildew producing steam, zoning out not wanting to start the day.
“It’ll only be for a couple of nights. I’m sure. I’ll just sleep on the couch.”
“If you like. Or, you can sleep with me.”
“That’s okay, the couch is good,” I said. I thought our old yellow couch from the good room that we were never to sit in as kids, would be just fine.

“Debbie! Debbie!” she hollered into the phone. I held the headset away from my ear but I could still hear her telling Debbie to watch Latika. And Debbie’s calm, unriled response, “Carol, she’s fine. Don’t worry.”
Rachel’s voice said Don’t do this. Don’t move in there. Rachel stayed with my mother to save for her trip to Central America. A arrangement that ended abruptly.

"I just can't take the hypocrisy" Rachel had said.
"The hypocrisy of what?" I asked. It sounded like a phrase she'd picked up somewhere. I don't know where exactly.
She’d called me from San Jose airport saying I could use her car until she got back and that our family was totally fucked.
“What happened?” I asked but I didn’t really need specifics.
“You know all the stuff with Deney and her cheating on Daddy.”
“Oh that. Do you think she really cheated on Daddy?”
We’d sometimes theorized that Rachel was my mother’s love child. She was the only that had a pet names. She was Sweetie, Honey, Pumpkin. Deney didn’t get talked to at all. Sometimes Fraser got called the dog’s name, but that didn’t really count.
We had this conversation often and everywhere: in supermarkets, waiting for buses, in line for a movie. It seemed normal to us, but often I wondered did other families talk like this.

“I gotta go. Don’t smash the car, please,” Rachel had said.
I made a half-hearted attempt to explain that our family was as messed up as everyone else’s family.
“What about Elizabeth’s?” she said. “I just want out of here. That’s all. I just need to get away,” she said. It seemed like she’d been saying this ever since she was a kid.

After I hung up with Rachel, I 'd tried to think of a few messed up things about Elizabeth’s family but there didn't seem that much. There were things that bugged Elizabeth, like her mother constantly calling her Liz even though she’d told her not to; or her father working too much in the fashion business; or her sister Rebecca getting passed over for roles on Broadway because she was overweight. And Elizabeth's father making her live in Manhattan and take over his fashion business.

But was it really fucked?

“When will you get here?” my mother asked. “I’ve got stuff to do. I can’t be waiting around all day to let you in.”
“What kind of stuff?” I asked. I was curious really. I wanted to know how she spent her days since AMD laid her off. Was it wrong for daughter to ask her mother what she had on her plate for the day.
“Stuff, Emily. Just stuff, I need to take care of some stuff and can’t put off waiting around to let you in. Okay.”
I thought maybe she hadn’t much to do but who was I to have any say, really. Or maybe she was going to meet her sometimes boyfriend Ashok or drive by his house and to catch him with his wife and baby.

Don’t do this.

But I really didn’t have any options. There was a youth hostel somewhere in town, up in the hills. I could stay there until my father took his medication and reached a more stable, and charitable equilibrium. Rachel had camped out in the hostel after her last nannying job came to another explosive ending. She’d met a group of girls like her, on their way somewhere else -- heading up to Mendocino, or down to Baja – going somewhere other than where they were. Piper and Audrey. She got into mushrooms, vegetarianism, long flowing skirts, and hair braids.

“I’ll take the bus over then,” I told my mother “Thanks.”
“Sure, that’s fine,” she said. I could tell she was put out. But there was something in her voice too – or maybe I was just reading into it – that she really wanted to help me out. So it was settled. I would move on to my mother’s apartment. I leaned against the coin changer and stared at the the park outside of the laundry mat. There were kids running across the grass with their hands out wide chasing pidgeons. Mother’s hovering close by ready if they should fall. And when one little fat one tipped over and the mother rushed to scoop it up, felt so black, so damn depressed, that I picked up the receiver and dialed Elizabeth in Dallas.

The sound of the dial tone produced in me a sensation that was probably what drunks felt when they stepped into a bar and heard the clink of glasses. I felt the dreariness of the world disappear and a simple beautiful clarity take its place. And as I waited for her to pickup I felt how thin, how very fragile the line dividing these two states was.
“Elizabeth?” I said when I heard her answer.
“Emily?” she said, “Is this the one and only Emily?” She had a lovely sing-song lilt to her voice that sometimes made me feel that there were two meanings to everything she said.
“The one,” I said. I tried to add a little dramatic tone to my voice just so she wouldn’t think I was taking her too seriously. I could hear her answering the phone from any one of our friends from college and calling them the “one”. But still it warmed me to hear her say it.
“Hang on a second, will you, Em. Honu is beckoning,” she said. She coved the receiver but I could still hear her shouting to her mother, somewhere in their rambling Dallas house.

I guessed she was lying in her bed, her down comforter puffing all around her like she was the center of some fluffy meringue dessert. I saw her room with everything in its perfect place – slippers by the foot of her bed, the box of tissues on the night table, her dressing table with the art deco lamp the one with the bronze woman holding the glowing orb that she had shipped to Santa Barbara. Her Oscar de Laurenta lotions and purfume. Maybe a cup of tea next to her bed out of place – the teabag smashed dry on a spoon that, Gloria, the maid would whisk away while Elizabeth shopped or her met a friend for a drink.

She came back on the line, “I may have to strangle her,” she said.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Dear Dad wants me to go with him to Italy in November to learn about the business of buying ugly fabric. But I don’t want to learn about the business. I don’t particularly like the business, Em. It’s old lady wear. Fat old lady wear. And Honu is set on taking me out shopping each and every day for sweaters, coats, scarves, gloves, ear muffs. You’d think I was going to Antarctica, not Florence, where – I remind Honu – they have a few clothing stores.” She put her hand over the phone muffling her voice again, but I could hear her still, “No, just capers”.
“You’re going to Florence? For how long?”
“I don’t know. A month. More. I don’t care. Tell me about you. Take me out of myself.”

It was a line from Brideshead Revisited and it saddened me to hear it now. Still it brought back a sudden flash of a memory. We were rolling on my bike down to the beach. Her arms wrapped around me. Late in the afternoon. She would have to get back soon. She always had to be somewhere. But we had an hour, maybe less. The ocean sparkled. Birds and wind swirled around us. “Take me out of myself,” she’d said.
“There’s nothing to tell. I’m a waitress and my dad has locked me out.’
“Em, that’s not good. That’s very bad.”
Keep it light. Do not go on. But sometimes I found the nerve to test her, just a little, see what she might do if I said something more serious. “I keep thinking about things…” I said.
“I do too,” she said.
“What things?”
“Everything. You, of course. John Joe too.”
The laundry mat came back into sharp focus. I watched a man in loose grey shorts that rode up between his legs when he walked shove everything from a canvas army bag inside a washer. He held a cigarette between his lips as he fished in his shorts for change.

“How is JohnJoe?” I asked.
“He’s the same. A Peter Pan, now in dental school.”
“Ah,” I said. I wanted the conversation back in our direction. But how to steer it there “What school?” I asked and wondered if she’d already told me.
“San Francisco. Just think, my two favorite people so close.”
“What a coincidence,” I said. I was losing interest in the conversation and found my eyes scanning the junk pinned to the cork board by the phone for a bus schedule. Someone had tacked up a piece of binder paper with a scrawled message: “Need a place to live. Prefer cottage with garden, own entrace . Own two dogs”. I noticed to the left of the want ad, someone else had a studio for rent: “Studio available, no dogs, smokers or unemployed. Hotplate.”

The dream and the reality, I thought.

“You know what I would like?” Elizabeth said. She was crunching food. I imagined Gloria slipping into her room quietly, setting a plate at Elizabeth’s side and Elizabeth mouthing Thank You, then pushing the capers across the surface of her bagel with a flick of her finger, until they were all evenly distributed.
“If you and JJ could be close.”
“Close? How close?” I asked.
“However close you wanted.”
“I think we’re close enough,” I said.
“I know, I was just thinking.”
“I see."
There was a silence between us while I pondered what exactly she was asking and she yawned.
“Will you write me a nice long letter,” she said. The letter writing suggestion, I'd ome to learn, meant she wanted off the phone.
“Yes, sure,” I said.
"Promise?"
"Yes."

I hung up and vowed not to call her for at least a week. I ripped off one of the pre-cut tabs with phone numbers for the small studio. Of the fifteen tabs seven had been torn off. I figured the sign maker had torn off a few to make the place seem more desirable.

I dialed the number and waited.

“Haylo,” a man answered. Something in his voice reminded me of suspenders, a shotgun leaning against a rocking chair on the porch.
“The studio, is it still available?”
“I suppose,” he said.
“Is that yes?”
“Well, I suppose it could be available,” he said. “I suppose it could be.”

My life in the supposedly available studio flashed before me. I saw myself heating Top Ramen on the hotplate, stirring the chicken flavoring that was clumping in globules of yellow paste. I saw the window -- if there was one -- steaming up. My clothes stacked in a milk crate, my Broken Egg clothes tossed in the corner, a futon on the floor, a postcard from Rachel taped to the wall, while the sound of the man’s voice on the phone to someone just like me – without direction or plans -- “I suppose the studio could be available. I suppose it could be.”
I hung up and went in search of a bus schedule.