by Sarah Reith
“Who is Daphne?” I asked. My vision blurred, ever so briefly.
“Oh, she’s not a child or anything,” Alizarin explained. “She’s not anybody’s child, or grandmother or something. I guess Lance didn’t get the memo about sheepdogs: you know, wolfhounds are supposed to hunt wolves, and rat terriers keep the rats off ships, so I guess it makes sense, linguistically speaking, har, har. He’s just a dog. They’re not smart but he’s such a sweetie, poor guy. This the second time he’s done this—did I tell you he got that lamb? I thought maybe he just wanted to play with it but I guess not. Maybe I brushed him too much when he was a little guy you’re supposed to just completely ignore them but I felt so bad for him . . . well, now he’s done it. He only ate part of her back leg.”
For some reason, I always forget that waiting for a period at the end of a sentence by Alizarin is like waiting for a German to get to the verb. I am always precisely as disoriented by it as if I’ve never encountered it before, with the result that I have no coping strategy.
“She’s out there on the table. Would you like to see?” she offered, like she’d just put in a bed of marigolds and there was some chance of a reasonable person wanting to look at it.
Of course I wanted to see. I’d had so little honest blood and guts lately, so much ponderous cerebral back and forth. Maybe a little down-home nastiness was just what I needed to exorcise the fastidious, psychotic spinster spirit of Miss Fiona Jones. I approached the table calmly, like I really did think I’d earned the right not to be horrified by anything, ever again.
Immediately, as if they had sprung into existence that very moment, a cleaver and a large rusty knife appeared before my eyes. The blades were encrusted with blackening blood so dark and rich, it was almost voluptuous. The angles of the negative spaces between them were graceful and compelling. Alizarin spoke with great passion about the importance of home butchering stations. This, she explained, was a significant step toward total independence from the food monopolies, which were compromising the health of the planet with various barbaric practices. I began to think I must be incapable of all human feeling, standing there unmoved and dubious. There was something familiar about that old uncertainty. I tried to place it.
“We have a bucket here, for dog food,” Alizarin told me, exactly like a person who has every reason to be proud of her facilities. Slabs of thick, creamy fat with streaks of bright red meat jiggled, as if they were excited to be examined by us. “That over there is just crap,” she went on, indicating a second bucket containing slices of offal. She eyeballed it sternly, as if thinking hard about possible uses for such worthless material.
In the dead center of the previously white table was a twenty-five-gallon green plastic trash can. It was uncovered, like it wanted all the world to know it had nothing to be ashamed of.
The carcass rose from the can, emitting a thick stench of bodily interiors. It was headless and skinned and bathed in hazy late-afternoon summer sun. It was the kind of light that looks transparent, because so much of it was absorbed by particles of dust and smoke from distant fires. A finer painter than I will ever be would convey it with glazes and invisible brushwork. There were no slabs of meaty light here. This was meatless broth illumination, utterly indifferent to savagery and carnage and the qualities of friendship.
I wondered what stage of medical starvation I would have to be in to be grateful for a taste of dog-gnawed sheep. I had no doubt there was some condition of extreme distress where I, too, would confiscate a carcass from a scavenger and devour it with perfect contentment. After all, that’s what hunting dogs are for, right?
Again, I began to identify something very familiar. I was struggling to find some plausible excuse to agree with a premise that was completely insane. With diligence, each successive scenario that involved eating this thing would seem more and more reasonable. Eventually, diligence and reason would add up to context. Dining on Daphne would become an oddball adventure, maybe even an exercise in overcoming fusty old social inhibitions that prevented all of us from fully inhabiting our destinies. Once I had achieved that level of context, I would open my napkin, place it on my lap, and proceed to eat a filthy reeking carcass named for a nymph so lovely, the god of reason went mad with desire for her flesh. At that moment, Alizarin would cease to be my friend. I would turn her into an oppressor, and submit to her.
Instead, something shifted. I wasn’t ready, not yet, to tell her that sanitation ordinances exist for the sole purpose of protecting the populace from people like her. But I was not about to eat an animal that had been a chew toy for a dog.
“Look,” I said. “I’ve got to get going. I need to get an alignment.”
My father used to say you can’t con the honest; but I maintain that honest people are easy to lie to, because they are not on the lookout for deception.
“I thought you already did that,” Alizarin protested, in a tone that indicated she had so much more to show me.
“Oh. Yeah. Sure. No. That was just my truck. I actually need a separate alignment right now.” I gave her a quick hug and fled. There was only one person I could tell about this.
SHE WAS NOT home when I let myself in. But there were clean sheets in the guest room, on a mattress so fresh it could not possibly have ever been whored on. I folded myself up beneath the blankets and fell asleep to the unaccustomed sounds of the city I grew up in. Sometime near dawn, I heard boot heels clicking on the pavement, and dreamed that men in swirling black capes had come to remove my remains. At last, I said; but they wore masks, so I couldn’t tell if I was rebuking or welcoming them.
My mother lives near a set of steps built into the side of a hill. There are many of these in San Francisco. Hers is built on the side that gets the finest morning light, as if Caitlin Swift were a woman who revels in birdsong and the freshness of lettuce with the dew still clinging to its leaves. She has a giant tin sculpture of a giraffe in her front yard. It is rusting in the damp air, bravely draped with Christmas lights all year round. It made me think of Mariana, wearing all her gaudy brooches as she waited for the end.
It is a minor miracle, when lights come on and water runs in a house where no one is home. I always find myself in a state of pleasant anticipation when I am turning on the lights and faucets in someone else’s house. I know I’m waiting for the part of the story with crimes and enchantment and love.
I helped myself to my mother’s rice cakes. I ate some of her yogurt. In Germany, it is the height of rudeness to make yourself at home in someone else’s kitchen. I’m pretty sure it’s not especially courteous here, either. But it’s so hard to strategize in your own culture, where you know the quality of light so well you can’t always see where you’re going.
I washed my mother’s dishes with the environmentally ethical soap she buys from a large emporium that used to be a dingy little shop on the corner of 14th and Mission, redolent with the odor of things sold in bulk. I sat down at the clean round table she had stripped and finished herself. The enamel in her sink was chipped, and the fixtures were large and soft-edged, the way things were in the year I was born. Like no one was embarrassed about the shape of hands, or the fact that hands would touch things, and want to find them soft.
I had a piece of paper with Reuben’s number written on it in a looping female scrawl. This was the writing that spelled out volumes of instructions and set flocks of yellow memos in flight. Fiona’s notes had been an ever-present monologue of afterthoughts. This one included a second number, and the words Let’s Talk!!! in big, excited letters. She really thought I was going to bear witness for her. She trusted me. She was very stupid.
I remembered her saying, “that information isn’t really useful to me.” I remembered her habit of interrupting me by telling me, “you know, I think most of what people say is just commentary”; as if I were required to produce original insights, every time I opened my mouth.
I told Reuben everything. I felt hyper-obedient doing it, like a loyal family servant wit
h no class consciousness.
By now, it was most emphatically Saturday. The clacking boots were still. The dew was off the lettuce. I had no home, but I had more than doubled my worldly goods with painting supplies. I had a fine old wooden easel and a giant picnic basket full of pigments from Gamblin and Grumbacher. I had Langnickel brushes and a roll of linen canvas. I had been rich on several occasions in the past two years, and the signs of poverty and sudden wealth were all over me, like I’d been redeemed by magic or inheritance.
There is a fairytale quality to untraceable wealth. If Rumpelstiltskin were with us today, he’d be turning weed to gold in brightly lighted secret chambers, hidden in the woods. It is a shining secret to emerge from a trim shack with its fug of smoke and resin. The cold late autumn rain is a revelation. It is bright and clear, partly because you’re stoned; but mostly because you can finally replace the tires on that piece of shit truck you’ve been driving around. You can buy art supplies your talents don’t deserve. You didn’t have to smirk and bat your lashes. You didn’t have to prove yourself. Sooner or later, though, someone guesses your name, and there you are: trapped in the valley of death.
I went back into the guest room and set up my easel with the double portrait. I sat down on the unstained mattress. I was having trouble with the background. There was a shape between the edges of the two faces, like the space between the little fingers when you bring the palms of your hands together loosely and allow the fingertips to touch. In the photograph my mother took, that space was a uterine darkness.
“It looks like a birth,” Caitlin said. “The negative space.”
She was standing in the doorway with her yoga pants and ponytail, looking fresh and trim and unafraid, the way people do when their documents are in order and the kids have turned out fine.
“Did you do that on purpose?” she asked next, exactly as if I were not committing a home invasion in the company of a large oil painting.
She moved closer, peering at it through a pair of red-framed bifocals. My mother, painted lady of the darkest hours, was a spinster wearing librarian glasses.
“I could show you pictures from your own birth, if you like,” she offered kindly. Maybe she was, after all, kind. She offered a bright smile. “You look wiped out. Let’s have something caffeinated.”
So I had a heart-to-heart talk with my mother over steaming mugs of seven spice organic chai, like ladies in the exposition scene of a feel-good summer hit. I talked about painting. I talked about light. I asked her if she knew what WWOOFers were. I fell silent when I realized she was watching my mouth, a sure sign that all she wanted me to do was stop moving it.
Still, she took her time before stepping into the conversation, like a lady who flags down a cab with every appearance of urgency and pauses to check her makeup before getting in.
“One of the things I like about Alizarin,” she began, and paused again. Clearly, the mechanism for liking things about Alizarin was of the vintage diesel variety, the kind where you have to wait for the glow plug to come on before you turn the key. “The best thing about Alizarin,” she tried again, and this time the thing sputtered to life, “is that she doesn’t try to make her students turn out bad imitations of her own work. She can have a classroom with twenty people in it, and they’re all doing something completely different. Alizarin can tell people how to paint without drowning out their voices.” She smiled like was talking about an old friend. “You don’t expect that from someone who never shuts her fucking mouth.”
“Mom?” I felt like I was knocking on the door to a room I hadn’t even known existed. How had I not known about this room? This studio with sunshine pouring in at all the windows, crackling through Caitlin’s then-unstraightened hair, as if to illustrate the intensity of the action beneath. “How do you know that?”
She grimaced. When I was growing up, any time I asked my mother a naive question about sex, she would signal the onset of a sarcastic reply with a grimace just like that.
“Well, dear,” she’d begin drily. “When a man and a woman love each other very much . . .” She favored detailed descriptions of sadomasochistic rituals, which were more effective at maintaining my youthful virtue than any abstinence-only program ever could be.
I thought she was about to do something similar right now; that she considered the answer so obvious, the question deserved the most derisive treatment possible. But the heart-to-heart mood, with the herbal tea and mellow morning light, was firmly in place.
“I did a little painting in my hippie days,” she acknowledged slowly, like she’d come to terms with the indiscretions of her youth and even looked upon them with some amused fondness.
“With Alizarin?” I prompted.
She nodded, still projecting a soft-lit sense of gentle nostalgia.
“What about . . . ?” I eyed her warily.
“Of course.” She was as serene as if her whole life had been so unimpeachable, it was impossible for her to incriminate herself with such an admission. “Most female artists with anything going for them in the looks department do,” she informed me, unable to have a conversation that was entirely free of pedantic insights. “Alizarin supported herself and Jezzie for years, modeling in classes at Fort Mason. Of course, the models’ guild is highly respectable.” She sighed in a way that made it impossible to determine whether she found this to be a drawback or a selling point. “You know your father posed for Alizarin too,” she told me, which I hadn’t guessed but should have. “Poor artists. It used to be so hard for them to find naked men to look at. Especially muscly little circus performers. Your dad was built like a pocket-sized Greek godling,” she noted with some relish. “Classical proportions, portable dimensions.” She spent several moments savoring her memories of my father as a stripling youth. “Everyone slept around back then. It was almost rude not to.” She grinned. “We all know I’ve done my share of poaching.”
And then she looked startled, like she’d come to a point she’d been trying to avoid. She spun her mug in her fine-boned hands, and hot creamy fluid poured onto her fingers. She tried to make a joke about jism and stumbled like an undergrad who hasn’t done the reading. I wished she would either say what she had to say, or go outside and run around the block a few times. Skinny little nervous women are not a joy to behold.
“Which brings me to the question that’s been burning a hole in my whoozit for I don’t know how long.” She was so jaunty and nonsensical that if I were a cop, I would have searched her then and there on reasonable grounds. “I never asked, and you never said anything, so I thought, well, you know how I feel about hangups . . .” You never would have bought a house in San Francisco without them, I thought; but I knew how to look at my mother quietly now. It is the key to treachery; and a certain kind of serenity, too.
Now that she had my attention, she looked out the window for several long moments. I watched her do a thing I’d seen so many times, it had never occurred to me to be properly impressed by it. She did it without any perceptible movements of her face; but when she looked back at me, she was wearing a mask. The eyes were simultaneously sharp and languorous, alluding to the fact that a woman can be vigorous and satisfied at the same time. There was a curve in the corners of her mobile mouth, hinting at precision work in mockery and understanding. And her skin seemed tighter, which made her look inquisitive, but also like she already knew everything, so what was there to ask?
“Are you mad at me about, ah . . . ?” She cocked a perfectly shaped eyebrow, and a corner of her plump-lipped mouth came up a little higher. Was that Botox, or collagen? It was suddenly obvious that my mother, always young and eternally beautiful, had had a facelift. Maybe two. Phlebotomist, my ass, I thought. I’m looking at a damned good ageing whore. This one isn’t going down without a fight. Or a price, I added, because that’s how my mother would finish the line. My mother the liar, true to herself.
“The John?” I supplied.
“Well. Yes.” She paused, which I think is her wa
y of impersonating someone with delicate sensibilities. “You know, I didn’t encourage anyone,” she rushed on, very much like someone overcome by remorse. “That was strictly unauthorized—”
“Mom.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “You did me a favor. Or that girl did. Dim Sum. Karen. Whatever. That guy was bullshit.” Was this really the most soaring oratory I could come up with right now? Wasn’t this supposed to be the serendipitous moment? The one where the discordant notes of our epiphanies found each other’s harmonies and sang?
“Total bullshit,” I assured her, and rubbed her shoulder briskly, like I was trying to get the warmth to return.
Epilogue
MANY YEARS AFTER I returned to California, I took a right turn at a Deodar tree. I was meeting a man whose name I didn’t ask, because I still knew him by the one he’d been using when he gave me my own.
“Turn right at the Deodar tree,” my grandmother said, and settled back into whatever silent train of thought was wending its way through her brain.
“What does a Deodar tree look like?” I ventured.
“It’s native to India,” she replied. “I’m sure you’ve seen it in films set in India.”
There was a time when you were ignorant if you did not know the proper names of plants and animals; could not draw the chambers of a flower and the angles of its leaves with a drawing master’s instinct for the beauty of a line. There is a whiff of that age about my father’s mother, seductress of the cloth. Lisette Saulé, who wears sunglasses indoors like a blind musician or a movie star. Like a woman with secrets, and letters to burn.
We had a visitor that day, a visitor whose letters—though of course there have never been letters—we would have burned immediately. Had there been letters, one would have been filled with diagrams of knots used in the rigging of ships; the next with a detailed account of the behavior of insects, dotted with long Latin puns. In person, his conversational style was highly narrative, accompanied by bodily movements of riveting eccentricity and precision. His physicality was that of a man who has undergone a great deal of esoteric training and is no longer capable of moving like an ordinary human being. He made a series of urgent, repetitive motions with his hands that made my grandmother think he’d either developed Huntingon’s or suffered a severe head injury.
