by Sarah Reith
She saw nothing mysterious about the creatures that absorbed her so entirely—though she never did find out why that one colony abandoned a perfectly good hive in the spring of ’79, or where they went when they did. She accepted the bees on their own terms, and didn’t take their sudden passions as a personal affront. She took refuge from pathetic fallacy in stern reality, accepting, even, the fact of descendants whose behavior she declined to explain.
Reality, in my grandmother’s childhood home, was as stern as the preacher who took his own eldest stepdaughter as his second bride in Christ; who reduced her mother to the status of a cast-off concubine and did not ever spare the rod to spoil the children who never did grow up quite right.
I never met my great-grandparents. I don’t even know their names. But I have an impression of a sturdy two-story farmhouse with cedar trunks full of handmade quilts. I have a memory that is not a memory of a clean-swept yard, dotted with fine red hens. It is very much like my grandmother’s house, transplanted to a big flat state with a wide-open sky. I would like to see it someday, with its wrap-around porch and its hayloft and the attic with that one small window where so many silent horrors were endured.
The day she turned sixteen, my grandmother made an unauthorized sortie on the family’s strictly inventoried pantry. She removed a day-old loaf of dark bread, a large wedge of hard cheese, and a sizable chunk of cured ham. With these provisions, she made her way to Texas—though she never said how far she went, or where the road began.
She called home once. She was in a hospital after a car accident, with injuries the doctor told her might be fatal. “You’d better call your mother,” he told her. “Before we go into surgery.” I linger on that scene sometimes, where an old-fashioned surgeon, perhaps a veteran of the European killing fields, looked at my wounded young grandmother and recognized her need to hear the truth. I think something came alive in her then. Something was seen and spoken to, with the respect that it deserved.
She obeyed. Or maybe someone did it for her. Maybe a very young nursing student stood twisting the cord of a heavy rotary phone in her fingers. Maybe she was about to hang up when an old woman finally picked up the receiver in a farmhouse gone silent and empty. Maybe a stranger heard a stranger’s voice say coldly, I do not have a daughter by that name; and then the decisive clunk of a receiver, falling back into its cradle.
In her childhood home, Francine earned double rations of contempt. She was an undutiful daughter and a disobedient wife. She stole her mother’s bread. She drove an automobile, in the days before the mandate that all windshields be made of laminated glass. For the rest of her life after the accident, gleaming slivers of windshield worked their way out of her scalp, spawning like bloody stillborn fangs onto her pillow at night.
Eventually, she married an aspiring oil tycoon and began to place cucumber slices over her eyes so she wouldn’t lose her looks. When her husband died, she bought a piece of property on the outermost edge of Monterey County, at the foot of a red-rocked mountain bristling with yucca and blanketed with sage. At night, coyotes howled meaningfully into the bowl of the star-studded sky.
On one of her very few visits to Francine’s farm, my mother decided to read Titus Andronicus with me. It was very important for us to be better than all the sentimental little girls who were reading Wind in the Willows and Anne of Green Gables—though Caitlin never did explain what the consequences would be, if we failed. We cannot possibly have watched Anthony Hopkins as Titus when I was seven years old, because Julie Taymor’s film version of the play did not even exist until I was a grown woman. Still, it is Hopkins’ Titus I see, snapping his daughter’s neck, when I remember my mother saying, “I’m enough of a Darwinist that that makes sense to me.”
What did she mean by that? Did my mother really believe that honor killings are a form of natural selection? Never mind the lapse in feminist theory. How closely had she read her Darwin? Surely no scholar, amateur though she was, would blurt that out by way of discussing bedtime stories with a child.
Maybe her mind was coarsened by then: by Marek, who never tired of a very proper teahouse ceremony wherein Caitlin known as Isis, dressed like a drawing by Toulouse-Lautrec, reached into her innumerable ruffles and expertly aimed a stream of urine into Marek’s waiting cup; by Georges, who masturbated fiercely as my mother called Inanna, wearing rubber gloves and nurse’s whites, prepared catheters for him while talking dirty in Latin; by all those countless men and all the countless ways they demanded she fuck them in the ass.
Even worse—and I hold my breath every time I think of it, like that woman I knew who was so afraid of spinal meningitis that she held her breath whenever she passed a trash can, is this: my mother believed her own mother should have been destroyed, like a nightingale too wounded to sing. Following this logic, she herself never should have been born, and I, Isobel Reinhardt, am the undesirable consequence of someone neglecting a duty to murder a child.
That—and now I exhale, because it is a tremendous relief when the worst thing happens—is what she meant when she read about a tragic hero murdering his ravished, mutilated daughter; when she put her finger on the line so she’d remember her place; thought about it for a moment; and said, yeah. That makes sense to me.
My mother the feminist. My mother the whore.
“IZZIE. I AM so sorry.” She sighed tragically. My mother was the first person I called when I came back to San Francisco from Germany in the summer of 2008. Already, it was not going well. “I wish I had known about this before—well, sweetie. I’ve made plans.” She lowered her voice, as if she were sharing a secret I’d begged her to tell. “I have Company.” My mother’s orthography is so flawless I can actually tell by the tone of her voice when she has made an unconventional decision to capitalize a noun.
“Mom.”
I rested my forehead on the cool cinderblock wall beside the payphone. It was soothing, until I noticed a glistening spray of wet blood on the vomit-colored paint. It looked like a junkie had used an open vein to make a graffiti piece on the nature of longing and fulfillment.
“You did know,” I began reasonably.
I have an illogical belief in the power of reason, especially when it comes to my mother. I have a conversion of the heathens fantasy that at some point, I will say something so reasonable that she will cry out, “Of course! That makes perfect sense! From now on, I’m going to interact with you in a way that indicates my undying respect for your intellect and maturity.” I continue to believe in the inevitability of this scenario, in spite of the fact that I have duplicated exactly the opposite result, more times than I can count.
“You knew,” I went on, “because I told you.”
“Oh, honey.” My mother barely sighed this time. She could have been yawning. “You know I don’t keep track of those things.”
I pounced. “So you didn’t have the information, or you had it and it wasn’t important enough to keep track of?” This is what happens to people who raise their children to believe they are more intelligent than everyone else. “Are you just high?”
“That is not a relevant question, Isobel,” she replied, italicizing my name to signal the impropriety of the inquiry. I hated how casually she claimed the right to behave like an upstanding citizen, now, after years of X-rated anecdotes and revolting observations. As if I went around making gratuitous drug references in spite of how well I’d been raised.
“You’re right,” I conceded. “I am way out of line. I should have known that whatever you dragged in off cougr.com would be a lot more rewarding than being supportive of your boring daughter. I’m just crawling home from the greatest humiliation of my life.”
“You don’t even know what humiliation is,” she promised. “Humiliation is powerful medicine.”
“Which we know by how much money rich perverts pay for it,” I agreed.
“Will you let me have the floor for longer than a soundbite, Isobel.” My mother hates my name. To be precise, she hates the f
act that my father named me. She likes to imply that she was so in love with him that she never dared to contradict him. It makes my flaky, philandering dad sound so much more thrilling than he was, so forceful and sure of himself; so much like he gave a shit. You’d think I’d be used to my mother’s sexual revelations, but this nostalgia for my father’s potency still makes me squirm. It’s an irritating tragic chorus that always opens with several repetitions of my first name, unabbreviated and without diminutives. But this time she had something different for me.
“The reason people pay to be humiliated,” she began, enunciating as clearly as if she were reading a statement to the American Psychiatric Association, “is that humiliation is a powerful tool to gain access to what is inside them.”
Like the giant dildos you bury in their colons, I managed not to add. I may have a latent sense of propriety, after all.
“I’m just saying that some of the people I’ve met in my life—” My mother, the foul-mouthed oracle, has a wide-ranging spectrum of euphemisms so banal they don’t even register as such.
For example, “people I’ve met” can be directly translated as, “people who have paid me thousands of dollars to do things they would pay thousands more dollars not to have anyone find out about.” This makes it difficult to tell a simple anecdote about something cute the dog did.
“Some of the people I’ve met in my life are very powerful, very creative individuals,” she continued meaningfully, “specifically because they have been able to use their suffering as tools to get where they need to be in life.”
It sounded like something a trust-fund coprophiliac would say as he reclined on Egyptian cotton sheets, an artisanal vintage mellowing in a cut-glass crystal vessel, his eyes overflowing with feeling as he bared his soul to the discreet and understanding beauty at his side.
“You should write a self-help book, Mother,” I told her. “You could call it Fuck Your Way to the Top. Seriously. Think about it.” I hung up the phone.
THERE IS A level of proficiency in a foreign language where it can be said that you know just enough to get yourself hurt. Thus, if you weep at Gretchen’s final speech to Faust or plunge into a pit of black despair following some Herr Professor’s undisguised contempt, you should consider yourself rewarded for all the sunny afternoons you’ve spent toiling through grammar books. What else did you expect from a language with sixteen ways of saying “the?” Once you are capable of absorbing the nuances of cruelty in a new language, you have achieved a measure of something that is often called success, by those who use humiliation as a tool to get where they need to be in life.
In the German higher education system, success or failure depends upon a final oral exam. Which I failed, my premise being fatally flawed. I had thought, after muffling my life in wifery for three and a half years, to make a brilliant career as a German-speaking academic. Why not attend an elite European university and read Nietzsche in the original, present a talk on Nietzschean metaphysics, and be hailed as an original thinker? It was a singularly unphilosophical line of inquiry.
After my humiliation, which I had enough linguistic aptitude to appreciate in most of its subtlety, I did what any self-respecting solitary Nietzschean with a will to power would do: I called my mother. Crying.
“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “Why don’t you stay with your dear old mom in the city for a while.”
So I gave her my flight information and limped home with one red suitcase full of second-hand clothes and little yellow German volumes I fully intended to read. Now, in addition to being a failure, I was the forgotten daughter of aging whore.
I called Alizarin.
Part Two
A Schedule of Drugs
Digitalis
I AM NOTHING like my mother. But both of us are like that silent woman who walked all the way to Texas, eighty years ago or more. We have been experts at walking away for all our generations now. We are very good at giving up hope. And Mendocino County is where we go to give up. It’s where we go to consort with our demons, which is quite a bit different from facing them down.
WHEN I FLED to Mendocino, after skulking away from Germany, I rented a room in a mansion with a beautiful widow named Reina Serrano. I felt like a character in a Hawthorne novel, though I couldn’t remember which one. The widow had big friendly teeth and enormous fake breasts and great, long, liquid eyes, all of which gave her a tragic, laughing air.
Reina picked me up hitchhiking at the airport in San Francisco, which was probably not the most ill-considered thing either one of us had ever done. We drove north from “The City” (as Caitlin calls it, since there is no city but San Francisco and Margo St. James is Her Prophet), enumerating the shortcomings of men all the way home. A five-gallon bucket of paint sloshed along in the back like it was chiming in on the conversation. I found out later Reina had a rental cottage she repainted so often the back seat of her car had a permanent bucket-shaped dent in it.
As we climbed north along the 101, she told me her husband was addicted to porn. “He would rather watch it online than have . . . real intimacy,” she told a stranger in the darkness of a speeding sedan. I’d been a foreigner so many months, I’d gotten used to secrets in the dark; to how generic people are in the most private parts of their lives.
For example: there is a hulking stone church in Germany that’s been dark since the end of the Enlightenment. It’s a place people go to be at one with the Almighty while snapping selfies with religious art, some of which is conceptual and modern. To the right of the altar, there is a large screen which I think is supposed to symbolize the inside of a confessional. People file up to the altar, light a candle, and write a secret on a small piece of paper. The screen is eight feet tall and twenty feet long, and is covered with scraps of secrets and shame. I know, from being in the dark and far away, that there is a woman with a spiky cursive hand and a child with an unknown father; that someone with a doctor’s scrawl never loved his mother; and that a hundred and twenty miles north of San Francisco, there is a man who would rather watch porn than get laid.
“What a fucking douchebag,” I said, by way of analysis. I had no way of knowing. Still, by the time we reached our destination, we had agreed that I would rent one of two empty bedrooms in the second-story southwest corner of her Dutch Colonial Revival home. We sealed the deal by pressing hands, her right and my left, both a little greenish in the console lights. We were keeping an eye out for deer and highway patrol, so it was like we made a major life decision during the boring part of a suspenseful movie.
The house had a gambrel roof that made it look like it was wearing a Mennonite bonnet. There were cobblestones on the outside walls, and alcoves shaded with wisteria and sprawling oaks and white-barked plane trees with prickly red seed pods. It was the kind of place that only exists in fairytales and novels, where houses have names and no one has to explain their income bracket. It had a circular drive. It had a wrought-iron fence and a gate with heavy hardware that clanked.
Why shouldn’t I live in a mansion for a while? Virtuous peasants in fairytales did it all the time. In Germany, I had lived at the foot of a hill with a castle on top. I had traveled to ancestral lands in search of learning, and learned only that I was a fool. I had married for love, and been lonelier than I had ever known. I’d been setting goals and laying plans, as if my life were a series of intelligible events. Now I understood that life would be a magpie’s nest, littered with sparkling things. It would be a fascinating miscellany, like the flea market in Berlin, art made of trash, or Chewing Gum Alley in San Luis Obispo. If I based my life on a model like that, I would find it full of fascinating junk: the accidental haikus of partial shopping lists and the occasional careless treasure. It would be a new beginning, made of scraps and cast-off things.
I dragged my bright red suitcase into the marble foyer of a labor of love.
Reina began to show me the light switches. She dimmed the uppers and brightened the lowers and lit a few lamps on the side. She did it
again, like she still wasn’t used to how much fun it could be.
“We gutted this place,” she explained. “We basically built it up from the ground.”
I wondered where this porn-loving husband of hers was, and how I’d compose my face, so soon after deciding his wife was too good for him. It would be inconvenient if he turned out to be insightful and kind.
My new housemate showed me the cabinets, the couches, the fountains, and the banisters. She told me how she’d worked out each design with artisans and tradesmen. She’d done so many careful things; and then she decided to share them with me. Of all the hitchhikers I have ever picked up, I cannot think of a single one I’d share my zip code with, let alone my living quarters.
We made our way back to the living room off the open foyer. In the morning, the windows would offer a near-panoramic view of the grounds around the house. The mist rising from the creek would look like gently heaving smoke.
“This is where Zack died,” she told me softly.
It took me a moment to understand that Zack was the man I’d called a fucking douchebag. I remained silent as I slowly readjusted my perceptions. This home was a memorial, this room the last a flawed and dying man had ever seen.
We were standing in a vast expanse of exposed-beam loveliness. Reina was looking at me steadily. I realized then we’d come to a stop in a civilized place. We weren’t speeding through the darkness anymore.
“I want to be careful to respect his energy,” she went on softly. “This is Zack’s house.” A draft of cool air rose up from the marble floor.
Zack Hill had been a cardiologist from “back East,” which in California can be as far west as Nevada but in his case meant the Atlantic Seaboard. He was old money: a “big man,” Reina emphasized. “He had very big energy,” she specified meaningfully.
