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.

Strength of Character

Very rarely, when I finish reading a novel or watching a movie, I walk away with a hugely pleasurable feeling that is equal parts contentment and excitement.  It’s a visceral, robust sense of well-being, hard to describe.  After years of thinking about it, I finally realized that it comes from having spent time with a character who is both 1) like me in some fundamental way and 2) relaxed in her own skin, happy to be herself.

The first character I remember eliciting this feeling in me was Annika Settergren, the little girl who lives next door to Pippi Longstocking.  You’d think I would have preferred Pippi—a much more fully developed and interesting character—but I didn’t.   Pippi had unattractive hair, for one thing.  And I found the name ‘Pippi’ alarming.  I recognized in Annika a quality I saw in myself: the ability to take pleasure in quirky, exciting people without actually being—or wanting to be—quirky and exciting herself.  It was her presence in the books that compelled me to reread them many times over the course of my childhood.

I think I had a seven-year-old lesbian crush on Karen Dotrice, the young British actress who played Jane Banks in Mary Poppins.  (She was also the non-feline lead in The Three Lives of Thomasina.)  I was utterly taken with her.  Another blonde, but this one had a British accent and spectacular clothes.  I remember longing in some desperate, wordless way to be her, and feeling gloomy on the drive home from the theater as my own tedious, mid-sixties, suburban life in California slowly came back to me.

Other characters who’ve had this powerful effect on me:

--Mary Clancy (played by Haley Mills) in The Trouble With Angels,

--Francie Nolan in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,

--Annie Hall (played by Diane Keaton),

--Sarah Cooper (played by Glenn Close) in The Big Chill,

--Joan Wilder (played by Kathleen Turner) in Romancing the Stone,

--Harriet the Spy,

--Isabelle Grossman (played by Amy Irving) in Crossing Delancey.

I could go on.

I just finished a book (We Were the Mulvaneys, by Joyce Carol Oates) that offered up no character with whom I could identify in this way, which is to say, no character who is at home with herself.  Writing a character like this is different from writing a character who is likeable or sympathetic.

Does this make sense?  If so, which characters in books or movies have especially appealed to you, and why?   I’m really curious.

I Love A Parade

A small-town parade—like a ripe peach or a child who says “thank you” and means it—makes you believe in the goodness of life.   I did not grow up going to parades, but I enjoy them immensely now, especially if they are small and rag-tag.  Fourth of July parades are especially wonderful, being inclusive (unlike St. Patrick’s Day parades) and accommodating of nearly everyone: in a town like mine, you could round up a few people behind a banner reading, “People Who Hate Parades” and everyone would clap and cheer for them.

No such group at this year’s Fourth of July festivities, but we had fire trucks and classic cars, dogs and horses, cheerleaders and Little League players. 

The Daughters of the American Revolution dressed in long frocks and bonnets. 

A couple of kids walked on stilts.  The people who till the community garden received lots of applause, as did representatives from the local Democratic Party Club and a guy driving a 1904 Oldsmobile. 

My daughter was thrilled to see a pony.  Yes, she is in her twenties.

 

Someone dressed up as Smoky the Bear.  Someone dressed up as a camel and spit.  The grand marshall drove a motorcycle with an attached passenger seat occupied by a black standard poodle who looked just like my Henry.

Robert liked the community ukulele club. 

I love the Klingons, who make an appearance every year.

This guy does, too.  We see his car around town all year.  Not exactly clear who he is or what he’s about.  There’s a blow-up doll in the passenger seat.

We missed the Lyme Disease Survivors Support Group from last year, and the guy dressed as a pigeon squirting shaving cream out of his ass. 

This guy brought up the rear.  He collects supplies for those in need, especially in New Orleans, and makes deliveries several times a year. 

Sometimes the world is a good place.  Yes, it is.