Reinventing Mona

by Jennifer Coburn

  “Don’t be silly, Laura,” Francesca assured my mother. “We’ll be fine here. I think she needs one good day of rest, and with you all gone, she’ll kick this thing and be good as new.”

  The truth was that I had already kicked it two days earlier, but enjoyed the solitude the flu had afforded me. I loved my humongous patchwork family, of course, but in a full house like ours, there was rarely a moment of silence. Never a minute to just sit and think before some little kid would whiz past yammering about who knows what. Hardly a second to just perch myself at the window and daydream about what I wanted to do with my life. Barely time to be one person. There were so many of us under one roof, it was impossible to hear one’s own thoughts.

  We were peaceful people living in a house of perpetual chaos. It is tempting to try to rewrite history now, and idealize life on the commune. Glorifying the dead and the life I lost seems to be the virtuous thing to do. As virtuous as dishonesty can be, that is. I remember hearing the adults talk about how disingenuous it was when people eulogized the deceased as though they were saints or living sages. How every thought the person had ever uttered suddenly became prophecy. I remember Asia saying that when she died, she wanted to be remembered “true and real,” for who and what she was, good and bad. “May my tombstone have many chips,” she said, raising her glass of red wine one evening. “A life well-lived is a life filled with mistakes and stupid shit you should’ve never done.” The rest of the family toasted her for this pearl of wisdom, which, in the height of irony, was Asia’s final prophecy. I tried to remember life in Montana as it really was, not to reproduce it in my mind as a blissful childhood singing “Kumbaya” with my soul sisters. How I wish they gave me permission for such honesty while they were alive.

  Even as a teen—the time of separation from one’s parents—I felt extremely guilty about not appreciating this “paradise” the adults created for us. My only consolation was that my best friend Jessica shared my antipathy for commune life. We rolled our eyes and charaded a finger-down-the-throat during the Womyn’s Forest Walks where the moms and younger girls sang “Siyahamba” in three-part harmony. Jess nearly died of embarrassment when her mother hosted a “Red Party” when she got her first period. All of the women and girls blew some goofy hollow animal tusk and shouted these crazy guttural chants at the full moon. The men served us all tea and fruit bars they actually baked, and kept calling us Goddess Jessica, Goddess Mona, Goddess So and So. When I think of it now, their baking for us really was kind of sweet. Really. I don’t just want it to be sweet, it really was. At thirty years old, I can see this with greater ease than I could as a teenager trapped on a commune.

  As Jessica and I churned the compost, we fantasized about what it would be like to live with normal families. We’d never met any mainstream families, and we didn’t own a television so the Cosbys were strangers to us, but somehow we knew they were out there. Our parents acknowledged the people of “Babylon” (which Jessica and I actually thought was somewhere in Montana) with thinly masked disdain. They valued things instead of people, my mother told us. They had become a culture of disposability, said Freddy. They were out of touch with their human capabilities, said Asia. They watched too much television, Morgan said. Francesca was the only one who’d interrupt these self-righteous tirades with, “Oh, let them be. You chose your lifestyle, now be happy and live it.” I always took great comfort when Francesca piped in with these comments, because it showed that our parents weren’t always right. Someone older and wiser could—and did—chide them for judging others. She never knew it, but Francesca always equalized the ever-present, taxing guilt I felt about desperately wanting to take a field trip to Babylon, not to attend a nuclear disarmament rally, but to go to the mall, flirt with boys who watched TV, and drink half of an Orange Julius from a Styrofoam cup.

  The night I spiked a fever of 104 degrees, guilt was the furthest thing from my mind, though. I felt only a shivering, painful delirium with spoonfuls of joy about getting to sleep in my very own room. Normally, I slept in a large dorm room shared with other kids from age four-to-Todd, the wavy-haired seventeen-year-old son of Asia and Morgan. The babies slept with their parents until they were weaned, which was just fine by the three of us teenagers. We heard enough sniffling, moaning, and giggling as it was. My father and Freddy built bunk beds for the boys, and for some reason, all of us girls had futons on the floor. On the ceiling was a sky blue, sheet-thin tapestry with cotton clouds that my mother made after our first year in Montana. When she tacked it to the bedroom ceiling, the sheet billowed down, creating a soft illusion of natural sky. My mother said ceilings were oppressive. She even wove threads of gold subtly into the sheet so in the daylight it looked like the thinnest rays of sunshine. For the four days I was sick, I got to stay in my very own room, which was really the sewing room, but I didn’t care. It was such a luxury to spend my days in absolute silence that I decided to extend my illness for just a little longer.

  “So what are we going to do today, Miss Camille?” Francesca asked after the school bus filled with anti-nuke protestors had pulled out of our driveway.

  I smiled at the reference to the film.

  “We have time to braid your hair if you still want,” Francesca offered. I nodded, went upstairs to grab my brush, and returned with a skip. It was liberating to be able to walk with the energy I felt instead of pretending to drag sluggishly in my attempt to ditch the protest. “Now I can’t do it like that Bo Dudley character, mind you, but I’ll do what I can.”

  The thing I remember most about Francesca is her set of reaching and nimble fingers. Her hands were older than she, bony with blue veins pressed through papery skin. But they moved like a pianist, quick and soulful. When her long nails separated sections of my hair and she combed through it with her fingers, I almost curled up like a cat and went back to sleep.

  “Will you tickle my arm when you’re done?” I begged. Francesca agreed, but we never made it that far. Two hours later, as she was wrapping colored thread around the last of my hundred or so braids, the phone rang with the news.

  “Hold on a sec,” Francesca said when she heard the phone rang. We had no idea that was the last minute of life as we knew it. “In a second,” she reprimanded the phone for ringing a third time. “Hello. Francesca’s House of Beauty,” she lilted, expecting it to be my parents.

  After a moment of silence, she said, “It sure is,” equally chipper. Francesca then fell silent as she listened to the caller. She dropped her full weight onto the chair under her and she cupped her forehead with her palm. Tension flooded the room as tangibly as if it were water rushing through a broken dam into our kitchen. Francesca kept glancing at me, then returning her attention to the caller. She sighed a deep, painful exhaust and rushed the caller to the bottom line. When people have to break bad news to someone, the preamble is a futile attempt to pad the fall. She was undoubtedly listening to the details of the crash. Our painted blue school bus slid on a sheet of ice, I later learned. It had a head-on collision with a truck and fell off a cliff. “So tell me,” Francesca interrupted. “Was anyone seriously injured?” She paused again and tears fell from her eyes. She was silent for a few seconds, then exploded into tears.

  “What happened?” I asked, though I already knew the accident must have been very serious.

  Francesca inhaled deeply to regain some composure and wiped her nose with her sleeve. “Mona, I don’t know how to tell you this,” she started.

  “Is everyone okay?” I asked. It was odd. Even though I knew that everyone was definitely not okay, I felt that the question provided a last grasp at not knowing. At the tragedy not being real.

  Francesca shook her head, scrunching her face with pain.

  “Are they at the hospital?” I begged urgently. With each question, my hopes for a happy ending were skidding downward.

  Her head shaking was then accompanied by more sobbing.

  “Did someone die?” I asked meekly.

  “They all
did, Mona.” She began sobbing again and held her arms out for me to hug her. I was immobilized by shock and half held on to the notion that if we didn’t move, didn’t cry or acknowledge the fatal crash, that we could halt the progress of time and perhaps even rewind it.

  “Maybe it wasn’t them,” I offered. “Maybe it was another school bus.” Another blue school bus with tie-dyed curtains and peace signs painted on the windows.

  I remember trying to hold as still as possible, desperately clinging to the hope that if we just stayed absolutely motionless, we could navigate our way out of this. With every tear that fell from Francesca’s eyes, it became clear that the phone call apologizing for the mix-up was never going to come. Still, I stood frozen, feeling a pulse in my ears and nothing else. I know Grammy came to get me because she told me so, but for the life of me I can’t remember even leaving Montana. In my mind, Francesca is still sitting in that same chair and has been grieving for fifteen years.

  Chapter 5

  A week later I stared at a pink lace canopy over my queen-sized bed at Grammy’s house. Except I couldn’t call it Grammy’s house anymore. It was my home, too, now. Just she and I living together in slightly less square footage than the commune, on an island with roads that had never been touched by ice. My new home was on Ocean Drive in a brick estate with seashell pink trim and gold accents. A gate with our family crest and an intercom separated us from the tourists who drove down our block to gawk at homes. Inside, the house was a tribute to royalty with everything overdone in a European golden lacing. Hand-painted vases were the size of my toddler brothers. An oversized chessboard held hand-carved ivory pieces. Rugs looked as though they had never been walked on. Everything had a remote and unwelcoming feeling, like a museum of wealth.

  Standing in the marble-floored foyer for the first time, I must have looked like Julie Andrews walking into the von Trapp home in The Sound of Music. “I hope you’ll be comfortable here, my dear,” Grammy said with a voice that was as icy and unfamiliar to me as the Queen Mum’s. “I’ve asked Patrice to make up the room for a teenage girl. You may put your personal touches on it, of course; my only rule is that I don’t allow any Scotch tape on the walls,” she explained.

  I cannot blame Grammy for having her maid furnish my room, but I did find her timing on the no-tape rule a bit odd. It definitely could have waited until we made it out of the foyer. After losing all but one person in the only family I’d ever known, it wasn’t as though decorating the room was my primary focus. It’s not as if I spent our plane ride telling her about all the decorating-with-tape ideas I had.

  Grammy didn’t seem as though she reveled at all in the idea of being my legal guardian, much less a grandmother. I got the distinct impression that she had an entirely different vision of her retirement years.

  For the first few months after the accident, I used to play a game with myself where I’d imagine how life would be different if I’d been in the bus with the others. I closed my eyes and pictured the morning fog. I tried to imagine which sweater and turtleneck I would’ve worn to the rally. Which mittens I’d have chosen, which seat I would have taken in the bus. And there I was in my own mind, sitting beside Jessica, talking about how ridiculous these rallies were, and how no one would ever change their hard-bribed political stance on account of some past-due hippies in an aqua blue school bus. We hear the deep honk of a truck, feel a moment of sheer terror, slide out of control, crash into the truck, plunge for five seconds, and fall back into each other as our bus nosedives to the ground. I hear the crushing metal and breaking glass, and I am dead. I wonder if it hurts to die or if it’s the euphoric freeing sensation Francesca used to tell us it was. No one on our commune ever questioned how this very alive woman knew firsthand what death was like. We all just seemed to accept that since she was the oldest, she somehow knew. I wondered if we died on impact together, or if some of us grasped for life in the last few moments. I wondered who screamed. Who had the presence of mind to exchange a final thought? Who was lucky enough to have slept through the whole thing?

  I wondered what—if anything—would be different today if I’d gotten on that bus and died. After pondering this several times, I stopped playing this game. It was too depressing realizing that my life had made no significant impact on anyone.

  Patrice told Grammy she had a telephone call from the assistant headmaster at the Academy. It was just two days after Christmas, a holiday we spent having dinner at the Hotel Del Coronado and window-shopping for gifts we’d purchase the next day when the stores reopened. “Hello,” she answered, removing her clip-on mother-of-pearl earring. “Yes, Kyle.” She waited for him to speak, shifting her weight impatiently. Digging her wide patent leather heel into the plush blue carpet, she occupied her time before it was her turn to speak. “Of course I understand. What you fail to understand is that my granddaughter will start at the Academy next week. I don’t care what type of strings you have to pull.” She listened for almost a full minute. “This is so crass, Kyle. I just lost my daughter, for God’s sake. Just make this happen and of course I’ll be generous with the school.” She slammed the phone down, and with that I knew that I would be attending whatever academy Grammy wanted me to.

  Grammy smiled tightly with her thin coral lips and asked if I’d like an omelet. “Okay,” I replied, almost frightened to decline. Patrice brought us two omelets with huge cubes of ham and potatoes and melted cheese resting on sprigs of charred rosemary on white china plates. I smiled as I picked up my gleaming silver fork.

  “What?” Grammy asked, not necessarily amused.

  “It’s just that this is the way she used to cook her eggs, too,” I told Grammy. “The ham and potatoes perfectly square, and the burnt rosemary.” I smiled. “Just without all of this other fancy stuff,” escaped.

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it,” she said sadly. “Laura hated all my fancy stuff.”

  “You look just like her,” I told Grammy.

  “I know. She hated that, too.”

  “No, she didn’t,” I quickly corrected. “She loved that she looked like you, she just didn’t like all of your…” I trailed off.

  “Fancy stuff,” Grammy finished.

  “No, um, plastic surgery,” I said awkwardly, and was hugely relieved when Grammy burst into laughter.

  “Laura and I were different people. That is indisputable,” Grammy said heavily. “Maybe she was right with her communist thinking. It’s not as though any of these things ever really bought me happiness.” She sighed. “I always felt as though I failed your mother. If I’d done a better job as a mother, she wouldn’t have run off to that crazy ranch.”

  “That’s so untrue,” I jumped in. “She didn’t run away from anything. They created their version of paradise. They used to talk about it at Berkeley all the time, and finally they all had the guts to quit their boring jobs and make the simple and fulfilling life they’d always dreamed of.” This description was almost verbatim from Asia’s evening grace. I continued with my own spin. “She couldn’t have done any of that if you hadn’t done your job well, Grammy. She said that all the time. That her mother had a lot of things to give her, but the best gift of all was the freedom to think for herself and live her own life.”

  “She said that?” Grammy gasped.

  I nodded emphatically. “All the time.” She said it once.

  “What else did she say?” Grammy asked. “Tell me everything, Mona. I feel as though we were truly strangers these past few years. Tell me about her. Anything you can think of, even if it seems inconsequential.”

  “Um, okay,” I replied. “What does inconsequential mean?”

  “Do you like driving, Mona?” Grammy asked. I shook my head. “After breakfast, I’m going to show you around San Diego. We’ll start on the island. I’ll show you your new school, then we’ll head up the coast for the afternoon, and you’ll tell me all about Laura. Even the little things that don’t seem important. That’s what inconsequential means: of no consequence.”r />
  We did so much driving that day that when we returned home, my ten-day-old braids degenerated into something frighteningly similar to dread locks. I looked at my image in Grammy’s gold mirror and began to cry at the sight of myself. I frantically rummaged through the bathroom drawers until I found a pack of loose razor blades. I sliced each braid from my head and watched them fall to the ground like thin sardines wrapped in colored fishing wire.

  Chapter 6

  “Please stop apologizing already,” I told Greta. “I know what you meant. You’re so used to working with lunatics, you expect everyone to go off the deep end over the slightest thing.”

  Relieved by the reprieve, she laughed. “Mona, I work with people saner than you. My clients mostly tell me that after ten years of marriage they don’t know who their husbands are anymore—not that they didn’t know them before the wedding. I think your time would be wiser spent discovering who you are rather than trying to land a husband you can’t possibly know if you’re truly compatible with. How can you find a soul mate when you’re not sure of your own?”

  I adamantly defended myself. “I will use this time to figure out what I want from the rest of my life, but the thing I know for sure is that I want to be Adam’s wife. He’d make a great husband and father, and from what I know of him, he’s exactly the type of man that can give me what I want.”

  “Mona, you need to give yourself the life you want. How exactly are you going to discover who you are when you’re busy trying to find out who this person wants you to be?”

  I smiled sheepishly because Greta knew me well. I can’t even count how many times I wondered if Adam was looking for a pantsuit-wearing intellectual equal a la Katharine Hepburn in Adam’s Rib, a tomb-raiding Lara Croft, a small town girl like Mary Bailey, or a flighty Holly Golightly. Without my even telling her, Greta knew that my life makeover after shot would look a whole heck of a lot like Adam’s dream woman.