Why I Write It Down

Nineteen seventy-seven was a big year for me.  A lot happened.  Some of it was wonderful and some of it wasn’t, which can probably be said about most years.

I was 19 and 20 in 1977, a college student living 3,000 miles away from home most of the year.

These are some of the things that happened to me:

--My father died;

--I fell in love;

--I read Madame Bovary in the original French.  It was the first time I was able to read a “real” book in another language;

--I took my first road trip without my family (from Pennsylvania to Fort Lauderdale for spring break);

--I worked during the summer in a friend’s gift shop.  I remember wearing a beige, knee-length, thin-wale corduroy skirt with an elasticized waist a lot that summer.  Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” always reminds me of that skirt;

--I met the man who would eventually become my husband and who is now my ex-husband (but I didn’t fall in love with him until 1978);

--I learned to do the Hustle.

Nineteen seventy-seven bisects my life, even though I’ve lived far more of my life afterwards.  I do a tally with every memory as it occurs to me, mentally inserting it in the “pre-1977” or “post-1977” slot.  It was the year I grew up, the year I became myself.  Everything that came before is sepia-hazy: fuzzy and ancient.

This is a picture of my mom.  She’s the one on the right.  I think she was in her early twenties when the photo was taken, which would mean that it’s from the early forties, probably snapped on the streets of Cleveland, Ohio.  The woman on the left is her friend Estine.  One of my favorite stories about Estine is that my mother was going to fix her up with a man whose last name was Key.  They figured out that if they got married, Estine’s name would sound like Stinky, so Estine said to forget it.  She never did get married.  The last I heard, she had advanced Alzheimer’s. 

My mother still knows who Estine is, but she doesn’t remember her name anymore.  More and more of her memories have faded, bleached away by age.  If she’s upset by this, she’s doing a good job of pretending she’s not.  But really, I don’t think she’s pretending.  I think something in old age protects you from this particular horror.

I don’t want to lose 1977.  Or anything.  I know that the odds are against this, that if I live long enough, I won’t remember the things I do now.  How the late spring looked that year from my dorm window: the trees lush and green and heavy in a way that California trees aren’t, the air thick with the smell of cut grass, the sun as warm as it is possible to be without slipping over into hot.

What the Hell Am I Doing in Fresno?

Actually, that’s rhetorical.  What I’m doing is taking Robert out for Armenian food for his birthday.  Fresno has a large Armenian presence and several excellent Armenian restaurants

Fresno is the Rodney Dangerfield of California cities.  I have lived in California for all but seven years of my life, and this is what I know about Fresno:

--It’s the city you drive through to get to Yosemite;

--William Saroyan was born here;

--If you have to get out of your car to get gas in the summer, it occurs to you that it is physically impossible for any human to survive for more than seven minutes in this heat;

--Just about anything you like to eat that comes out of the ground is grown here;

--I would not live here under any circumstance.

One of the reasons we are here is that I like to visit places I wouldn’t want to live.  I am curious about who does live here and why (and if) they like it.

Dinner at Diana’s (inauspiciously located in one of a seemingly endless array of strip malls) was wonderful.  Maybe the best hummus I’ve ever eaten.  Lovely chicken and lamb kebabs.

Robert and I have celebrated six of his birthdays together.  The first year, we spent the weekend at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, where we had massages and drank martinis.  Other years, we ate at Plouf in San Francisco, the French Poodle in Carmel, and Picasso, at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.  I like being able to say that we can now add Diana’s in Fresno to the list.

Tomorrow we’ll poke around a little and see some of the neighborhoods.  We will probably go out for breakfast.  Tonight I realized that I won’t be able to eat a doughnut, which is a treat I always used to allow myself on car trips.  Wheat allergies suck.  

To torture myself, I just googled “Fresno doughnuts” and found several establishments.  Donut Hole, Donut Queen, Christy’s Donuts, Best Boy Donuts, Dough Boy Donuts, Fresno Donuts. 

This is killing me.

On the plus side, tomorrow’s weather forecast calls for showers and a high of 60.

Good News and Bad News

The good news is that my mother is speaking to me again.  I don’t know if she’s forgotten that she said she didn’t want anything more to do with me.  She doesn’t call me “dear” or “honey,” and she only says “I love you” if I say it first.  I’m glad that she isn’t telling me I make her life miserable anymore, though.

The bad news is that she was in a car accident.  She drove to a consignment store to buy fake plastic leaves ($6), and when she got in her car, she put her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake and plowed into a cement wall.  She knew that she had a suspended license.  She bruised her sternum.

My brother, aka Mr. Crazypants, brought the car back to her house the next day.  He thinks we need to believe her when she says she won’t drive. 

I have been up to visit my mom four times this week.  That’s 800 miles of driving.  On one of my visits, I asked her if she would mind if I borrowed her car while she was recuperating from her injury.  She reluctantly gave me the key.

I took her to the doctor so he could check her bruise again.  I heard him say, You mustn’t drive anymore.  She told him she is an excellent driver and has never gotten a ticket.

My heart is bruised.

On the way home, I said, What if you’d killed a kid?  Someone’s baby?   She said, cheerfully, But I didn’t.

I have a lot of people gathering information, trying to decide what to do: doctors, geriatric social workers, lawyers.  And friends, and my kids, and Robert.

But I still feel all alone.

Tomorrow I am going to work on final edits for my new book, due out next year.  Then I’m going to fill a plastic water bottle with pomegranate juice and vodka and go down to the beach and look for dolphins.  And not think about any of this.

Casting Off

Last Friday, I got my cast off.  Also, my mother told me she didn’t want anything more to do with me.

My mother has had some sort of mild dementia for quite some time, but it’s apparently getting worse.  Her anger at me stems from my having made a request to the DMV to give her a driving test.  An actual driving test, in a car, not a written test.  You would think that the state of California would assess the driving skills of 91-year-olds routinely, but it doesn’t.  You have to ask.

I got my cast off a few hours before my mother told me she didn’t want anything more to do with me.  In the car on the way home from the “fracture clinic,” I thought about other things I had cast off recently:

--glasses;

--anything made with wheat;

--curly hair;

--gray hair;

--suburbia;

--people who blame me for their own unhappiness;

--jobs in which I have to wear suits and have a boss;

--friends who aren’t really friends;

--the conviction that I would always have a dog;

--as many delusions about myself as thirteen years of therapy will allow;

--tax returns from 1997;

--aluminum pans.

I’ve talked to my mother almost every night since she first yelled at me.  She has hung up on me twice and been rude and nasty.  Every once in a while, she has called me ‘dear’, as she used to.  She sounds scared and confused.  She is steadfastly unwilling to accept any kind of assistance with grace.

I don’t know if my mother is going to continue to take her fear and frustration out on me.

But I am going to call her every night.

God Is a Big Talker

I had a horrible day yesterday.

--While jogging, I got a call from my doctor.  The x-ray taken of my hand showed a break.  Please get a cast at 3 this afternoon, she said.  (I broke my hand when I tripped while jogging last Saturday.  I kept thinking it was just a really bad bruise.)  Then she yelled at me for waiting so long to get an x-ray.

--When I went into the garage, I saw a huge mass of wet sheetrock sitting on the roof of my car.  Further inspection of the garage ceiling revealed an enormous hole, directly under the shower in the master bath.  I called Robert, who was in the middle of a 40-mile bike ride, to tell him that the house was collapsing and also to please call our insurance agent before 5, because it was a three-day weekend and I would do it except I was late and my hand was hurting, and also, the house was collapsing.  Robert didn’t pick up his phone.

--I drove about a hundred miles to get to my bank.  (Don’t ask; it’s complicated.)  I tried to deposit a check made out to me. This check was from an investment account that I had liquidated.  I set up the account years ago with the intention of giving the money to my son.  But because I was named in the check as the custodian of the account for my son, the teller wouldn’t let me deposit it.  Can my son deposit it? I asked.  No, she said.  Can we deposit it together?  No.  Plus, the “bank” is in the baked-goods section of a Lunardi’s.  And the teller looked as though she was dressed to go gay-clubbing after work.  And it was 99 degrees.

--Got back in my car.  Called my son to say I wasn’t exactly sure how we were going to pay for the first semester of graduate school, and could he stall?   He didn’t pick up his phone.  Called Robert to ask if he’d gotten my message about the house collapsing.  He didn’t pick up his phone.  Called the “fracture clinic” to tell them I would be late.  Woman at the fracture clinic yelled at me for not being a better judge of traffic conditions.

--Got to the fracture clinic a half an hour late.  Read a back issue of Modern Maturity.  Felt nauseous.

Finally, I was ushered into the casting room.  I sat there feeling sorry for myself while the casting guy told me the cast would extend from the top of my fingers midway down my forearm.  Four weeks.  Don’t get it wet.  Don’t stick forks down there.  I wanted to cry.

And then I realized someone was crying.  A young woman in a beautiful almond-colored sari sat on a nearby bed holding an infant who was shrieking.  The baby couldn’t have been more than six months old.   Another casting guy was putting his entire tiny leg in a cast.

A doctor walked through the room and saw the woman.  Another break? he asked kindly.  She nodded yes, exhausted.  When’s his surgery? the doctor asked, yelling a little to be heard over the screams.  Two weeks, she answered.

You think you already know things, but sometimes, God sends you a message just to be sure you really get it.

This morning, I sat down in front of the TV to begin the herculean task of straightening my hair with only my left hand.  I was grumpy.

I turned on TV to a show about an albino woman from Tanzania.  She is armless, because in Tanzania, people believe the limbs of albinos contain magic properties, and barbarians traverse the country, cutting off arms and legs of albino people and selling them to witch doctors.

Another message, even when I say I get it, even when I really think I do.  And I’ll bet He’s laughing about my hair, which looks ridiculous.

Here’s a link, if you want to help: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/tanzanians-albinism/story?id=11463812

Hair Apparent

I have very complicated feelings about my hair.  I think most women do.

When I was little, I had the kind of hair that old ladies thought was beautiful: almost black, soft, and very curly.  My mother loved to brush it.  I didn’t like it at all, though, wishing that I could be in all ways like my best friend Laurie Bradshaw, who had silky, smooth brown hair with bangs, as well as a white canopy bed.  My hair was too curly for bangs.  It seemed grossly unfair to me that some girls got bangs AND a canopy bed, and others got curly hair.

As I grew up I learned that, older women’s comments notwithstanding, curly hair was a mixed blessing at best.  It resisted attempts at styling, it frizzed in the rain, and it refused to grow long.  It was cantankerous and unmanageable.  I—a good girl, the ultimate pleaser—was mortified by my hair’s unwillingness to behave.  I longed for conformity and tractability.

I went to high school in what must have been the blondest town in the United States.  Moreover, in the early ‘70s, hair was under strict orders to be as straight as possible.   This was a long time ago, before African-American models and actresses routinely challenged outdated notions of what beautiful was.  Cybill Shepard and Christie Brinkley and Lauren Hutton were the women in the magazines, and I was from a different planet entirely.  I set my hair with orange-juice cans; I sat for hours—hours!—under one of those old-fashioned bonnet hair dryers, with a hose and a rubber cap.  After each session, my ears and the back of my neck were red and burned, but my hair—even curlier than when I was little—would not be cajoled. 

(My best friend is someone I first met in high school.  To this day, she has magnificent blonde hair.  We still laugh at how my mother, running into her at my house about ten years ago, whispered to me, It’s so sad about Tracy.  What’s sad?  I asked.  That she feels she has to dye her eyebrows, my mother said.)

As an adult, I learned to forgive, if not actually love, my hair.  I grew it long and wild and marveled at the compliments I received from women whose hair was the color and consistency of thatch.  I wish I had yours! I always said, out of habit, but as time went on, I wasn’t sure it was true anymore.   Living in the suburbs, I found I was happy to have difficult hair.  It was my way of thumbing my nose at people who wanted to look (and think) like everybody else—a quality I’d come to dislike.  Living in the suburbs taught me a lot about myself.  I learned that my hair and I were more alike than I had previously thought. 

And, as if on cue, straightening wands were invented.  My hair finally learned to submit.  At long last, we called a truce to our decades-old war.

A few weeks ago, on our cruise to Alaska, I defended my decision not to dye my graying hair to the stylist who was cutting it.   But I began to doubt myself.  I asked Robert what he thought.  He said I should do whatever I wanted, but, in typically wonderful fashion, added that I shouldn’t be afraid to try something new, to play.  With that in mind, I had my hair colored about two weeks ago.

I’m still trying to adjust.  The color is beautiful, a multi-dimensional intertwining of red and chestnut, with blonde highlights.  It’s like Beyonce’s hair in the “Irreplaceable” video, only without Beyonce.  I pass the mirror and experience a momentary and disconcerting sense of dislocation.  Where am I? 

I’m having it tweaked next month.  In the meantime, I’m learning to get to know myself all over again.  I’m not a pleaser anymore.   I still don’t like it when people don't think for themselves.  And I’m 54, with straight, reddish-brown hair. 

For the time being. 

Maybe that’s the real lesson here: everything is mutable, and anything can happen.

Mistaken Identity

Today I was jogging the path to Hidden Beach when I saw a man young enough to be my son coming toward me.  He was walking very slowly with a toddler I presumed to be his daughter.  She was adorable, about fourteen or fifteen months old, with a fluffy cloud of hair so pale that God must not have decided what color it should be yet but was leaning toward red.  She was wearing camouflage pants and a blue sweater. 

As I got close, she pointed at me and said, very seriously, “Mommy!”

Her father looked embarrassed.  “That’s not Mommy.  Mommy is back at the house with Auntie.  We’re going back to the house to see Mommy.  Let’s go.  Come on,” he babbled.  It was funny, that he was the babbler.

I know that the little girl didn’t think I was her mommy.  Maybe she just knew, in that inexplicable, baby way, that I was a female in the same way Mommy was.  Or maybe Mommy jogs.  Who knows.

But I feel happy.  It’s as though she saw an invisible badge on my chest.  Or a tattoo that will never fade away.