Dedication
To Jeff
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
1. “This Isn’t My House and You Aren’t My Parents”
Discuss
Father: Elementary
At The Dinner Table: 1977
2. “This Isn’t My House and You’re Not My Children”
Story
Begin Again
“You Can’t Go Home Again And Chew Gum At The Same Time If You Won’t Listen To Me”
Initiating Event: “The Phone Rings”
My Brother Eddie
Boulder Sections
19. Boulder: “Colorado Ceramic Arts”
19(b). “Colorado Ceramic Arts”
4. Nepal / 20. “Colorado Ceramic Arts”
21. Boulder: 109b Pine Street
18. “Colorado Ceramic Arts”
Initiating Incident: “Business Opportunity”
22. 109b Pine Street
23. Boulder: 1203 13th Street
25. Colorado – California (Montara Beach)
24. Boulder: 1203 13th Street
What Happens
“You Can’t Go Home Over My Dead Body Until You Wipe That Look Off Your Face”
Upright Considerations and Doubts: “Where Children Come From”
After Dinner: 1975
Easy in Hindsight
Back in the Bedroom: A Caparisoned Elephant
Cairo Sections
11. 1987: The Pyramids of Giza / The Sahara Desert
Preface
10. Cairo International Airport / First Sight
12. The Sphinx
9. Perspective: Turkey (10 days previously)
Facts for Tourists: The Mosque of Al-Hakim
13. Cairo: The Hotel Raffles
Book Report: The Celestine Prophecy
“You Can’t Go Home Again In My Room, I Have To Sleep There”
Alien Spacecraft Section
Synopsis: Denise Aimee Cadwallader
The Whole Point
Reason to Cry
The Interpretation of Nightmares
Dahab Sections
Facts for Tourists: Dahab
14. Cairo: Loose Ends
15. Dahab: seven days, seven nights
16. Paradise: what, ever after, Eddie pictures when you say “love”
7. Perspective: Quito (12 years previously)
17. Dahab: Day Eight
How to Play Casino Blackjack for Profit
“You Can’t Go Home Again Without Me, I Will Be Desolate”
The Big Day
“What Happens To You After You Die”
Alien Spacecraft Sections (continued)
2. Santa Clara, California, 1965
Lola Sections
Irene Michaelson
26. Montara Beach, California: One Hour Earlier / Eddie Knocking on Ralph’s door, unwelcome
4.
“You Can’t Go Home Again On Your Own Two Feet”
Back in the Bedroom: A Tenacious Burro
We have Sex Finally
A Battle Between the Forces of Good and Evil
What Happens Next
“I Am Not Getting to the Point If I Can’t Take You With Me / Sentimental Drivel: As Good As It Gets?”
“You Can’t Go Home Again If You Have Never Been There Before”
August
Lola Sections (cont.)
3. Princess Margaret House, Shoreditch, 1973
Book Report: On Beyond Zebra by Dr. Seuss
Epilogue
Montara Sections
January
A Representative Day/“You Can’t Go Home Again if That’s All You Care About”
28. Montara Beach, California, April 1999
Airplane Sections
29. Changi International Airport, Singapore
27. Rotterdam, the Netherlands (three weeks earlier)
30. Singapore – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
French Sections
6. Café Casino, Avignon, France, 1973
5. Casino Avignon, France, 1973
6. Café Casino (cont.)
In Depth: Denise Cadwallader’s Luck
Emotional Digression: Before It’s Too Late “The only good thing anyone has ever done”
8. Casino Atlantic, Quito, 1978
31. Airplane Sections (cont.) / Waiting for permission to land
The Main Dread Secret
Facts for Tourists: Pullau Pangkor
“You Can’t Go Home Again Because You Are Poisonous”
The Origin of My Concept of God
Endgame
Day Four, as I begin to wake
Malaysia Sections
Context
32. Pullau Pangkor, Malaysia: at a picnic table on the beach, the sun setting and the sea reminding us, in waves
On the beach, with the sparkling waves done and undone, in black and white, Guatemala:
Segue: to the point
Beside the point: all tarnation
1. July 4, 1971: Operation Pretty Boy
An Essay on the Futility of Earthly Love
1. Momostenago, Guatemala (continued)
Why you can’t go home again
33. Pullau Pangkor, Malaysia: Deus Ex Machina
Edward John Moffat
34. Heathrow International Airport, London, England, 2000
Appendices Appendix A: Pro Blackjack
Appendix B: What Happens To You After You Die
About the Author
Praise
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
“This Isn’t My House and You Aren’t My Parents”
1My name is Chrysalis Moffat.
1.1I was born in Peru.
1.2When I was three, I was brought to the United States.
1.3Here I was adopted by rich white people.
1.4Insofar as that is possible, I became just like them.
2I am brown, and my face looks like a South American mask because my parents were South American Indians.
2.1My body, too, is foreshortened, plump; next to Anglos, I look rudimentary.
2.2PC people make a point of saying I’m beautiful, even to my face.
3Although I am so brown, I give an impression of whiteness.
3.1People often remember me wearing white clothes when I was not wearing white clothes.
3.2They also think my surname is White.
3.3It’s a supernatural phenomenon, I think.
4My father gave me the name, Chrysalis.
4.1He was a biochemist.
Discuss
No one in my family is interesting or praiseworthy; only my father. Born in rural poverty to alcoholic parents, he worked his way through Berkeley, received his PhD and was expected to have a brilliant research career in microbiology. Instead of pursuing it, however, he volunteered for Vietnam.
My father fought in Vietnam for four years.
Although he would refer to the evils of that war, this was more polite, I believe, than sincere. Nor did he seem – though this must surely have been the case – to have fallen in love with jungles, technicolor murder, freewheelingness – to love the smell of napalm in the morning. In all he did, he was rather the simple, honest man. He was, pre-eminently, a man who loved dogs.
He got down on the floor and rolled with dogs; he swung children around and around by the hands, playing “airplane.” Mom and Dad were always laughing behind their bedroom door, when we were very small.
You got the sense that, when all else failed and the world had weakened utterly, succumbing to corruption and mean-spirited trivi
a, still there would be Father, taller than everyone else and irreducibly blond.
He looked like John Wayne.
5On the drive to my Uncle Jerry’s, we used to pass my father’s work.
5.1It was called BSI: Something Something Institute.
5.2It had a chicken-wire fence and a checkpoint hut with an orange barrier.
5.3No buildings were visible from the road, only set-piece maples.
5.4Eddie and I would try to get the guard to wave.
5.5Mom would sing out; “Hello, Bull Shit Incorporated!”
6Early on, we realized there was something about Dad’s work.
6.1He was always going to Chile or Guatemala, conducting studies.
6.2We couldn’t know what he studied; that was a state secret.
6.3The date of his return was likewise secret.
6.4Where in Chile too.
FATHER: ELEMENTARY
Asoldierly, upright:
he strode, and grinned, and gave
manly firm handshakes.
A is for Astronaut, like them,
like many Army men, he was
Bpermanently boyish,
brash, bluff, broad-shouldered
like a B-movie hero.
Or,
just,
BIG.
Moving on to
Che was a cowboy.
A cracker born in Cody, Texas.
“Howdy, podner, I’m headin’ out t’the corral,” he’d go, corny for us kids.
We’d cackle,
cry, capsize
curl up with glee
because he was never there.
Conspicuous by his absence.
“Comin’ home real soon, chicken –”
DNow he’s dead.
But these big heads that watch over our childish night skies, a nightlight left on to the end of time in a darkened bedroom;
indecipherable and throbbing
nauseous
headachey
with its lolling top-heavy heap of cheap significance.
AT THE DINNER TABLE: 1977
Dad looks like John Wayne. He has grown his hair out of its familiar crewcut and dyed it black to stop the women in Peru asking him for autographs. People in Peru don’t know John Wayne is old. Those movies are all brand new there.
Mom is laughing and laughing. Dad sits up with his hands folded. I think he looks very fair, like when Eddie and I fight and Dad makes us sit down in “court” and come to a “settlement.” Next to me, Eddie is making faces because we haven’t had dessert yet and he knows there’s chocolate chip ice cream.
“I’d kill to have been there,” Mom crows, “the ladies in their ponchos mobbing the shady operative – Señor Wayne! Señor Wayne!” Then she does my father, talking into his wristwatch; “Operation Kookamunga, abort!”
“Lannie,” says Dad, “I am not a shady operative.”
“Señor Wayne! I see all jour movies!”
“Lannie. Nobody’s laughing.”
“Laughing? It’s an effing laugh riot!”
Mom starts coughing and finally looks in her lap, distracted. Eddie pipes up:
“Mom? Are we having ice cream? I can get it, I can reach.”
“Just one minute, Eddie, honestly.”
And cause it’s the dinner table, Mom has her tequila glass to hand, to grab to her mouth and her head bucks
chucks it down hard
two-handed, one
palm spread over the glass bottom to shove the liquor home
and hold the dry glass for a moment, leaving it time to shine and be seen:
2
“This Isn’t My House and You’re Not My Children”
1My mother was an art historian.
1.1That’s what she put on forms.
1.2And she held a Master’s in art history from Berkeley.
2Really she was just rich.
3It was family money.
3.1Her father had made a killing in real estate.
3.2Pictures of his suburban developments hung in the dining room when she was a child.
3.3My mother used to think he built the houses himself.
4Her family were rich people all day long.
4.1They held their children as if they were vases; the dog was groomed by a company.
4.2Salad fork for salad, full dress for breakfast.
4.3They were, in these respects, profoundly, paranoiacally, arriviste.
5My mother was just, common.
•She was never persuaded to like shoes.
•Her knees were skinned, somehow. From her clothes, you knew she had a dog.
•She always looked as if she had just washed her face.
6Girls who wore makeup were weak, according to my mother.
STORY
When she turned eighteen, my mother’s birthday present was a mansion. It was strategically chosen for its location on a dull stretch of California coast. Her father thought the town to be ripe for development. A gift, then, bought in my mother’s name for tax reasons.
“But I can’t even live in it,” my mother squalled. “I’m going to college, remember?”
“It’s an investment,” said her father. “For your future.”
They had the hackneyed screaming match, in which father laid down the law and daughter wept; mother fretted, saying patient reasonable things.
Around them were the beautiful acquisitions – like a jury. High ceilings and marble and even the placid air with its scent of autumnal roses; my mother fought bitterly, at that age, against their sway.
“I’m going to burn it down!” she screamed finally. “I’ll invite you all over and burn it down!”
Her parents died in a car accident one year later.
She lived in that mansion for the rest of her life; Eddie and I grew up in it.
Her mother, Lily, who really was like a white funereal flower, and trembled, used to say that tomboys grew up to be the nicest big ladies.
Her father used to say, “Lannie’s going to blow everything we’ve worked to save, you wait and see!”
1After her parents’ death, she moved into her mansion.
1.1No one else lived there; there was no gardener, no maid. There was no furniture.
1.2The derelict guest wing leaked, and moss grew, demarcating the parquet.
1.3It was 35 rooms, two towers, a private beach, and a cultivated wood.
1.4In the wood, she found a pointy-eared white mutt she called Remember.
1.5They used to sleep together on the beach on summer nights.
2Her brother Jerry got away with the bulk of the family fortune.
2.1She hated him, she called him “King Jerry,” she was implacable.
2.2There were court cases all her life; she never forgot that money.
2.3The rest of the family backed him because my mother rode a motorcycle.
2.4She never forgave them either, though she attended polite family gatherings.
3When she was at Berkeley, she rode two hours to get to class.
3.1She was penniless.
3.2She sold all the mansion’s antique doors.
3.3She had three million dollars tied up in a lawsuit, but wouldn’t borrow in case the bank “stole” her house.
3.4When the money came through, she bought three cars.
4Her mattress on the floor was surrounded by cigarette butts.
4.1She’d taped cardboard over the broken windows on the ground floor.
4.2In the courtyard lawn, one of her boyfriends had dug his name.
4.3“It brought tears to your eyes,” my dad said, “Lannie was such a slob.”
For a while, he was only one of many rotating boyfriends. Then he put his foot down. He turned up at her house one weekend, wearing a suit, to say, “Okay, Lannie. Now we’re going to buy furniture and then you’re going to marry me. I had about enough of this runaround.”
He was standing on her cracked white step, in sunlight, bearing a sheaf of flowers. The engagement ring wa
s hooked on the first joint of his pinky; a diamond solitaire she wouldn’t like. His stance was easy, friendly. They knew each other well; and he wanted, badly, to put the flowers down and touch her face.
She said, “No!”
But he was right.
Then he was in Vietnam.
Then he was in Chile at a secret destination, conducting studies.
For the rest of her life, my mother always had a mutt who would follow her down, down our private beach and out of sight, on summer nights.
BEGIN AGAIN
1When my parents married, they were both 21.
1.1They
•smoked marijuana
•drank
•rode her motorbike down to Baja
1.2When there was no party on the weekend, they threw one.
1.3Wet hair; sun-tender skin; sand in the toe of a canvas shoe.
2No one had seen anyone so much in love.
2.1They had inside jokes. She rode him piggyback to bed.
2.2Dad once broke a man’s nose for calling her a slut.
3He was doing his doctoral work.
4She bought art and sold it to friends of the family.
5There was always money; there were always friends; there were pre-booked tickets and dinner reservations.
5.1“There was a little place with a patio where we used to have breakfast. I don’t think I cared then if the whole world exploded.”
5.2“People were different then. You did what was expected of you, even if it was no fun. You didn’t try to run the world.”
Mother sat beside the pool and Father swam. We were not yet born, and Mother sat in her wet bikini bottoms on the concrete, and green light swam in tiger stripes in mimicry of the tiger stripes that swam down Father’s back in muscles as he swam;
it is water but it all comes to a point like the last note of a perfect rock anthem and
here you are kneeling on wet concrete with both hands thrust down into the water as if you could catch something
The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done Page 1
