Mom,
You stuck with NOFAW and its sister organizations about two years, longer than most of your projects. You had huge ambition, but an issue with follow-through. As soon as you came upon any stumbling blocks, hit any walls, you dropped the project at hand and were on to the next scheme.
The first thing you did when you had a fresh idea was order business cards; seeing that rectangle of stiff paper made your new calling more real for you. I found many of them after you died.
You and Dad started Mercury Marketing Direct after his company went bankrupt in the mid-’80s and the two of you launched a new direct mail marketing business together. I suggested Mercury in the name—I was heavily into mythology at the time, and thought Mercury would connote speed and power and communication, all good for advertising. MMD fizzled out, though, and Dad, at seventy, was hired by a hip ad agency in Chicago, where he became a much beloved and admired figure in HR. He was working there when you tried to kill him. Work became his refuge, his truest home.
After you disbanded NOFAW and your other organizations, you reached out to Dad. You never apologized to him. You never stopped believing he was hiding a fortune. But you were lonely, and you seemed to remember better times; you seemed ready to let him back into your life. You invited him to meet you at an Italian restaurant on Rush St. for dinner. He was cautiously ecstatic. He had missed you terribly.
The two of you never lived together again, but—other than times when you were having one of your episodes and were awful to him—you quickly resumed being one another’s world. You talked every morning, saw each other almost every day. As always, you were worried about money, so Dad set you up as a recruiter, a head hunter, for the ad agency where he worked. You resurrected Mercury Marketing Direct for this endeavor, printing the same logo on your business cards, but using your maiden name so it wouldn’t seem as if Dad was showing favoritism. He hired many of your clients; you ended up making more money than he did.
You ultimately gave up headhunting when you decided to move to San Diego. You were in the midst of a long, bad episode; if you wanted to hunt anyone’s head, it was Dad’s. You removed yourself, instead, seeking the geographic cure of California.
When you were around ten, you and your mother and two of your nine siblings—Rochelle and Mickey, the brother who poured milk in the mouth of your Betsy Wetsy doll, then plugged up the pee hole so the milk curdled and a maggot wriggled out between her lips—had your picture taken on what looks like the back of a train, an “Off To California” sign by your feet. Rochelle looks beautiful, her dark wavy hair pulled back from her pale face; Mickey looks like a bully, staring down the camera; your mom has a bit of a smirk on her matronly face, and you, sitting on a tall stool in the center, your face broad and Eastern European looking, your hair pulled back in braids, look happy, excited, as if you know California is your destiny, as if you know you’ll be the only member in your family to actually move to California. As if you have no idea California is where your story will end, and not well.
DECEMBER 5, 2009
We caravan to the Oceanside harbor. I keep thinking the back of Larry’s head in the car ahead of us is the back of my mom’s head, hair cropped close, ears flaring at the same angle, and when I remember she doesn’t have ears anymore, doesn’t have a head, that all that is left of her head, her ears, the rest of her, is inside a wooden box inside a fancy looking bag on the floor of the car, I feel like I’ve been zapped by a cattle prod.
We pull up to the Dolphin Dock, which feels appropriate—my mom liked to think of herself as a dolphin when she swam—and walk down the rickety ramp in procession. It’s a gray day, lots of clouds, the water beaten pewter. A sea lion bobs its head up, and it feels like a good sign to have one of her beloved “critters” here.
We gather in an oblong circle on the dock. Sue passes the yellow roses we asked her to pick up—our mom’s favorite flower—so we’re each holding one. Asher is wrapped against Michael’s body with the long stretch of green cloth and tucked inside Michael’s peacoat; I keep peeking over to make sure he isn’t getting smothered.
I read “Meaning,” the stately Czeslaw Milosz poem my mom had told us years ago she wanted to have read at her funeral. The poem asserts that everything will make sense upon death, and goes on to say that if everything doesn’t make sense, there will be something of us that remains, some part of us that will protest this lack of meaning, even after death. My mom had added a few lines of her own at the end:
And then, in that new dimension,
We’ll become whale riders
In the oceans of the universe.
So emblematic of her, thinking she could improve upon a Nobel-winning poet.
Elizabeth opens the simple wooden urn, untwists the tie that cinches the plastic bag within it.
“I need to touch it,” she says, her voice almost a growl, the words coming from a deep, raw place. She digs into the ashes. Later she says her whole hand felt electric until we got back to our dad’s house. She says, “I love you, Mom,” and releases some of the ashes into the water. I dig my hand in, too; it feels impossible that this grit is all that’s left of my mom, her eyes, her heart, her womb, her bones. I toss some ashes, a paler, softer gray than I had imagined, and watch them enter the water. It’s so beautiful, the way some billow and bloom under the surface, like jellyfish, or a mushroom cloud, while others swirl on the surface like oil. We shake the rest of the bag out into the air—some of the ashes fly back at us, stick to our jackets, our hair, our lips. We laugh and cry all at once as we brush ourselves off, then take turns tossing our yellow roses into the water, some of us saying a few words, some of us casting our flower in silence. Light slices through the clouds like in a religious painting; the yellow roses are vibrant, so vibrant against the silver water as they slowly drift away.
Later in the day, Elizabeth, Michael, Asher, and I drive to my mom’s house for the first time since her death—the first time for me and Elizabeth and Asher, at least; Michael was here earlier with Nancy and Jenn to try to clear out some bad energy. Just as we pull into her driveway, a giant crow—so big, it looks like a raven—swoops down close over the windshield. Elizabeth and I both say “Whoa” at the same time. A chill passes through me. When I look down, I see the odometer reads 666, which gives me a deeper chill, even though I don’t believe in hell.
From here on out, every time I see a crow, I’ll think of my mother, wonder whether the crow is her.
We sit in the car a while longer, not ready to go inside. I try to eat the sandwich Michael and Elizabeth had picked up at the Sprouts deli while I waited in the car with the sleeping baby, but can only choke down a couple of bites of cucumber and hummus before I fold the rest back into its paper wrapper. Michael and Elizabeth aren’t able to eat much of their sandwiches, either.
We get out of the car. Michael unlatches the car seat. Elizabeth and I hold hands in the driveway and look at each other, take a deep breath to give each other strength. It helps to know Nancy and Jenn had burned sage, had shaken rattles, had washed the mirrors with salt water, but I’m still scared to enter the house, as if my mom had killed herself here, too, and we’re about to find her body.
Her arty wind chimes clink in the breeze as we pass, give an eerie soundtrack as we move down the walkway. She had painted the front door a dark brown to mask the splintering faded wood carved into a grid of raised squares, like a door of a small castle. She had done a lot of work on the house, stripping away the red flocked wallpaper, the deep red shag, turning it from what looked like a vampire bordello into a classy joint filled with art and light.
Now the air inside feels stale. Elizabeth and I keep holding hands, walking in slow motion as if something is going to jump out at us. And little things do jump to our attention—the books she had stacked against the door of the water heater, as if to block out fumes, a small dish of vitamins next to an open bottle of water by the sink, two thin brown dress socks crumpled on the floor. They, more than anythi
ng, move me; they, more than anything, bring back her living body, her living feet, her chaotic state of mind.
Each object in the house feels fraught with meaning; every object feels like a heartbreaking gesture of hope. People only buy things if they believe they’re going to use them, if they believe they’ll be alive awhile to use them. Each item of clothing in the closet feels wildly infused with the future, the promise of dinner dates, art openings, evenings at the opera. Each one now hangs empty.
We walk into the bathroom together, the mirror streaked with salt. Our reflections blur before us, ghostly. We are ghosts visiting the house of a ghost.
FOUR DEAD BROTHERS
ARLENE: Now, this is another big story for the cardiac community to look at, and I am convinced that Dr. Sheldon Pinnell, who told me to take high doses of vitamin C when I had my genetic testing at Duke University Medical School, and he was one of the major researchers in the field, and he said take two to five thousand milligrams of vitamin C. Well, I used to bruise very easily; I mean, I would do this (touches hand) and have a bruise, and since I’ve been taking vitamin C, that doesn’t happen, and since reading Linus Pauling, actually after we began the filming for this, I had only my own history to go by, knowing vitamin C is so crucial to this issue, and when I think of hospitals taking away people’s vitamins, and the keloid scarring which can happen—my mother had abdominal surgery and had this huge, raised, pink, whitish-looking scar that was really unusual, and I had never heard the term “keloid scarring,” but I know Linus Pauling suggests that when people have surgery, they be given vitamin C intravenously.
I don’t think it’s commonly known by most people how important it is to the body; it’s the building block of our tissue, and 80 percent of our body is made up of collagen. I mean, it’s your skin, it’s your organs, it’s your vascular system, it’s your digestive system—it’s all made out of collagen. So knowing how to keep that healthy is really important.
It is all about the sudden death of my four brothers. All healthy, vital men. One died at a gas station on New Year’s Eve, gassing up his car, where he was alive, ready to go out with his wife for the evening, and the next minute he was on the ground, dead. That was Leonard. My brother Harvey died at work; they found him in the morning. Sheldon, also at work, was an insurance broker and died at his desk, and Al, who died in his sleep, was the only one who had an autopsy and they found nothing wrong; they found his heart was normal size, normal weight; they found there was no plaque, no clot, no nothing. So when I told this to Dr. Byer, who is another specialist in Ehlers-Danlos syndrome—I went to an Ehlers-Danlos conference that was held about five years ago in LA, shortly after I moved to California—and he said that if, during the autopsy, they had lifted the liver and looked at the artery under the liver, that with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, that is the most common place to have a rupture. If they had only known about vitamin C, I mean, you know, they could still be alive today.
Mom,
The first time you went to the opera was with Eli. You were probably nineteen. You sat in the Lyric Opera House and felt a whole new world of majesty open to you, open within you. Nothing in your blue collar upbringing had prepared you for this. This was a different kind of electroshock therapy—your whole body electric, shocked into life.
You convinced Dad to buy season tickets during your courtship; you kept these season tickets most of your married life. When I was an infant, you dropped me and a babysitter off at Dad’s office and would zip over during intermission to nurse me, racing back before the curtain opened again.
You ultimately found your way behind the curtain, yourself, serving as a supernumerary, the fancy opera word for “extra”—first at the Lyric, starting in 1992, and then later, after you moved to California, at the San Diego Opera. Your first production as a super was Electra; at the audition, the choreographer said she didn’t see you as a slave; she thought you’d make a good high priestess. You wrote, “My debut was the Electra procession scene, carrying a bowl of dry ice above my head on a catwalk above the stage. It was the biggest forty-five-second thrill of my life.” I had the chance to see your second production, The Masked Ball—my family was visiting Chicago; Arin was a toddler, and Dad drove around the city with him while Matt and I watched you glide about in your large-skirted gown with other party goers while the principals sang. It was a rush to see you look so graceful and elegant, like you were born to be on that stage. This was the year before your delusions started, so I was able to enjoy the performance without getting distracted by the many layers of fantasy and reality you came to inhabit.
You had amazing costumes as a super—for Aida, your whole body (at least all that was exposed) was painted blue. In several productions, you were dressed like royalty, the sort of dress you felt was your birthright.
I can’t remember when you decided to put together an anthology of writings about opera, what the impulse was behind it (although there may be some clue in the introduction you drafted, which ends with “I should thank those few older ‘regular’ super women who have been so unwelcoming and rude to me over the years . . . I’ll be thinking about them and their pre-adolescent behavior, only briefly, when I’m on my book tour.”).
I helped you put a call for manuscripts in Poets & Writers magazine and you were deluged with submissions, some from well-known writers. I was too busy to help you with the anthology—I think you had expected me to do most of the work and were livid when I couldn’t find a way to make myself more available. The anthology became too big a task for you alone—“I’m a little dyslexic,” you often told me; “I can’t handle so much paperwork”—so you let it go, all those poems and essays and short stories about opera conscripted into silence. After you died, I didn’t know what to do with the box of writings, and ended up heaving it, heart heavy, into the recycling bin. Perhaps some of those poems have turned into paper towels or newsprint. Perhaps when someone lifts a paper cup to their lips, they kiss the ghost of Madama Butterfly.
You ultimately bowed out of the San Diego Opera because of the “pre-adolescent” women involved; you ended up bowing out of your work as a museum docent because you thought you were being undermined. It’s possible you were asked to leave.
You decided to turn your docent experience into your own art presentations, which you pitched to upscale hotel chains and cruise lines—if any of them ever said yes, it could be a way for you to travel for free (and you loved to travel, taking Dad on cruises to Greece and Turkey and the Bahamas with your head-hunter money when you were well enough to enjoy his company). You envisioned Artful Conversations as virtual “tours” of art and architecture—slide shows, essentially—that you could give to travelers looking for a little cultural enrichment.
Part of your proposal read
In addition to being a Museum Educator, I am a part time actor. I bring a down to earth approach which is not intimidating to the viewer, but fun and entertaining. My presentations have been referred to as:
• Informative
• Filled with wit and humor
• Appreciated for revealing issues sometimes difficult to understand
• Giving attendees a real handle on Contemporary Art to take away with them.
• And much more.
Other than your supernumerary experience, the only work you’d done as a “part time actor” had been to awkwardly walk through a party scene in a made for TV movie filmed in San Diego—you didn’t look at home in front the camera the way you had on the Lyric stage. The times I’d seen you docent, you had clearly gone off script and added your own questionable interpretations to each piece of art, gazing at the audience after each pronouncement as if you had just imparted some deep wisdom.
You decided you wanted “sacred architecture” to be part of your presentation; you wanted to weave together facts about the pyramids of Giza, Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, Chichen Itza, and, asynchronously, the Salk Institute in La Jolla, where you had also been a docent, and thought it would be goo
d to experience some of the ancient sites first hand. You traveled to Egypt with a goddess-themed tour in 2006. The trip was supposed to be rapture, revelation, but when you called me a few days after you arrived in Cairo, you said a male housekeeper had drugged you and possibly sexually assaulted you (you had woken up in just a turtleneck, no bra. You had some itching; you worried about STDs).
I didn’t want this to be true, but I didn’t want to doubt you, either—all people who report sexual assault need to be taken seriously. I did my best to help—I passed along the number of the embassy; I convinced you to go to the hospital. I was relieved when all the tests came back negative.
Dad was behind it, you were certain. Dad and his son Jon, who had recently produced a series about Middle Eastern music for PBS; you assumed he had used his contacts, had put Dad in touch with the right people. You thought Dad and Jon were in cahoots, that Dad had paid for Jon’s large house in the Malibu hills, that Dad was a closet misogynist, that he was sharing his vast secret fortune with his son and leaving his wife and daughters in the dust. You thought they had arranged to have you drugged and raped in Egypt; you imagined they had arranged to have you killed, that they were responsible for dropping a bottle from an overpass that hit your windshield shortly after you got back home, but you had outsmarted them; you had survived.
DECEMBER 28, 2009
My mom’s death certificate arrives in my Redlands mailbox a couple of weeks after my sister leaves town, after I’ve weeded through all my mom’s stuff, after we’ve had an estate sale company arrange to sell everything we don’t want to keep. We’ve been waiting for the certificate so we can take care of business—shut off her cable, access her bank accounts, transfer the title of her car. I find myself a little scared of the stiff paper inside the manila envelope, but I slide it out, let its flimsy weight settle in my hands. I can barely look at my mom’s name. I focus, instead, on the image of the native woman at the center of the page, part of the watermarked seal for the County of Los Angeles, focus on the light radiating from her head.
The Art of Misdiagnosis Page 16
