Portland, OR, June 4th Conversation: On the Bus Ride Back

I’m on the bus. The Weather People have promised biblical rain and lightening. But it’s still fair outside. Very humid, and I’m glad the bus is air-conditioned.

My cell phone rings. The ring tone is the theme song from I Dream of Jeanie. It’s my mom.

“Do you know what happened today?” is how she starts off. I had been on various busses for an hour and a half already—interviewing for a job that had come to nothing.

“What?”

“David Carradine’s dead.”

“I know,” I say. “He hung himself. I mean hanged himself. In Bangkok.”

“He hanged himself?” she says, like she can’t believe it. “He was off drugs. He didn’t even drink anymore.”

I’m awfully beat, but it’s nice to have someone to talk to, even if it is my mom, so I try to keep the lust for sleep out of my voice. “Prolly why he killed himself,” I say.

She brays (very familiar). “That’s exactly the sixth funniest thing you’ve ever said,” she says, marking detail like she thinks she’s J.D. Salinger. “Because I’ve been keeping track. But hell.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Your father and I knew him.”

“I know.”

“He got your father arrested.”

“I know.” I know the stories as well as she. I know them better, probably, but I don’t say anything to upset her. History’s her subject. “How are you?”

“I’m good, I’m fine. I went to your sister’s award ceremony the other day.”

“I didn’t even know she had an award ceremony.”

“Well, she did.”

“Did she clean up?”

“Do you know what she got?” Mom asks. “She got the Spanish award. I didn’t even know she spoke Spanish.” “She’s terrible at Spanish.” I know. I used to conjugate the verbs for her homework.

“I don’t really know her,” she says. And then, “She got the Spanish award. And she got the lawyer award, or whatever. And she got the Psychology award, which I like to attribute to me.”

I laugh, hard. I bray. I cover my mouth, because people on the bus look at me. “That’s the funniest thing you’ve ever said,” I say. Dancing on the edge of a knife. When I’m done laughing—and my eyes are wet I’m laughing so hard, inappropriately so, my laugh turning into a cough that I try to disguise so my mom won’t guess I’ve been smoking for the last 10 months— I ask, “Was she happy?”

“I didn’t see her.”

“What? Why not.” The knife. I shouldn’t have asked.

“I’m not welcome at those things. I had to ask Pamela to come with me I was so nervous.” She brays, again, like what she’s talking about a particularly hysterical sketch on SNL. “I wore sunglasses and a black turtleneck. Haha. We sat in the back like the Blues Brothers. Ha. I had to have a beer beforehand I was so worked up.” Everything she says is careful and deliberate. I am, I know, her last surviving audience from the previous world.

“I saw the Bellwoods the other night,” I say. I like to think that I’m above the emotional word games we play, but I feed her ammunition like a animal eager to get shot. “Peter sends his love.” Peter always, always sends his love.

“Oh god,” she says, her tone her own perfected composite of weary disgust. “I don’t care.” I am silent on my end for a second too long. “Or it’s just that we don’t even have anything in common anymore, and they chose their side and everything.” We might as well be reading off a script, one that has been tattooed on our hands or on the insides of our skulls, ones that we ourselves wrote.

Peter and Sarah, or definitely, at least, Peter, don’t think that they chose sides. They are under the impression that they were dumped—unceremonious casualties of divorce.

“Your mother,” Peter, with his comforting Londoners accent, says to me whenever I see him, “was very special. People were inevitably drawn to her. She would start talking to her and everyone would fall in love with her. I loved her, I love her still, very much.”

I want to lecture him. I want to tell him how many friends she once had. I want to tell him how many business partners she’s chewed through and abandoned. I want to tell him that she’s good for a few years and then she makes you into her enemy: her mother, her father, her brothers at one point or another. Her best friends. Her husband. Her. Daughters. I’d like to shake his hand and congratulate him, I’d like to look him in the eye in all sincerity and say, “god, man, don’t you understand the bullet you dodged? Don’t you know how much easier it is to be without her? Don’t you realize that all my therapists have told me that she is incapable of real love? Don’t you see that she has no one with whom she started out?”

I don’t know what I really think. I know what I really think. My mother taught me to confuse think and feel. My mother taught me how to answer the phone properly;

“Is Hallie there?”

“Yes, this is she…”

She taught me how to hold the steering wheel of a car, how to make up golden excuses, how to lie. She taught me to like Yeats, and Raymond Carver, and Dorothy Parker. She taught me that a clean cook is a good cook. She taught me how to run. How to fasten your pants lying down so your jeans fit. She taught me quarter tricks and bar games. She taught me that boys always fall in love with girls who can play the guitar. She taught me that there is nothing more important than my family.

Family cannot abandon you.

Family can abandon you.

Family. Abandons. You.

“When are you coming back to California?” she asks. I’ve told her this a million times. Every time I’ve talked to her since Dad got me the plane ticket back.

“I fly to San Francisco on the eighth,” I say. “I’ll be in Santa Barbara on the ninth.”

“Well, come around if you want.”

“Mom…”

“I know, but come around sooner, too, if you want. You always, always have a place here.”

“I know.” I know what I know. History is my subject.