Why Did I Ever

by Mary Robison

  additional praise for Why Did I Ever

  “Mary Robison, almost as an afterthought, has created a novel that speaks volumes about life in Los Angeles: its stopping and starting, its rushing and emoting, its whimsy and its suspicious, subversive humor.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “The author, who is known as a minimalist, here creates a narrative out of fragmented paragraphs, and the book works best when she strips Money’s most explicit fears away. A simple sentence fragment—‘Canoe, moon, ukelele’—seems a close to perfect expression of lost beauty.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Robison’s characters are vivid, colorful, and likable, and their story is absorbing. Her humorous presentation does not cheapen the tragic content of her novel but realistically portrays one method of survival. Highly recommended for all public and academic fiction collections.”

  —Library Journal

  “Robison’s incandescent soliloquy on the absurdity of existence hones fiction to a new and exhilarating measure of sharpness.”

  —donna seaman, Booklist

  “[A] tour de force of minimalist yet mind-expanding prose . . . [Robison] makes you think—hard—about life’s unavoidable travails, while making it impossible for you to suppress a smile.”

  —lisa shea, Elle

  “What makes Money memorable, and Mary Robison essential, is that her fundamental bearings are the right ones. Love and compassion are her nature, and they suffuse the page whenever she is talking about her children, even the exasperating daughter.”

  —richard dyer, The Boston Globe

  “Why Did I Ever is a rarity: an experimental novel that’s both engaging and wholly successful.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Robison . . . possesses a precocious alertness to the incongruities of life . . . At the center is a disciplined and clear-headed novel full of humor and an occasional glimmer of optimism.”

  —rob stout, The Charlotte Observer

  “I wish to live in [Money’s] mind for a while because its perilously funny pratfalls make me want to laugh so badly that I cannot laugh at all.”

  —molly mcquade, Newsday

  “It is a rare novel that can manage to convey the coexistence of tragedy and pleasure so immediately without lessening the reader’s enjoyment of either.”

  —The New Leader

  “Mary Robison has done for the Hollywood culture of our time what Joan Didion did thirty years ago. Spare and ruthless, precisely chiseled, Why Did I Ever is the Play It As It Lays of the twenty-first century.”

  —madison smartt bell, author of All Souls’ Rising

  “Mary Robison’s stunned and plunging characters are the truth. This is pure, grim poetry.”

  —barry hannah, author of High Lonesome

  “Deeply strange, hilarious, heartbreaking, and just stupidly great . . . Robison is something approaching brilliant, and Why Did I Ever is hard-bound proof.”

  —darcy cosper, Hartford Courant

  also by mary robison

  Days

  Oh!

  An Amateur’s Guide to the Night

  Believe Them

  Subtraction

  Tell Me

  One D.O.A., One on the Way

  Why Did I Ever

  Copyright © 2001 by Mary Robison

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Robison, Mary, author.

  Title: Why did I ever : a novel / Mary Robison.

  Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017037859 | ISBN 9781619029644

  Subjects: LCSH: Middle-aged women—Fiction. | Psychological

  fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3568.O317 W49 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037859

  Jacket designed by Jenny Carrow

  Book designed by Wah-Ming Chang

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  for my daughters

  my sisters,

  my mother,

  and for Gray

  Chapter One

  1

  I have a dream of working a combination lock that is engraved on its back with the combination. Left 85, right 12, left 66. “Well shit, man,” I say in the dream.

  2

  Hollis and I have killed this whole Saturday together. We’ve watched all fourteen hours of the PBS series The Civil War.

  Now that it’s over he turns to me and says, “That was good.”

  Buy Me Something

  I end up at Appletree—the grocery—in the dead of the night. I’m not going to last long shopping, though, because this song was bad enough when what’s-her-name sang it. And who are all these people at four a.m.? I’m making a new rule: No one is to touch me. Unless and until I feel different about things. Then, I’ll call off the rule.

  4

  Three ex-husbands or whoever they were.

  I’m sure they have their opinions.

  I would say to them, “Peace, our timing was bad, the light was ugly, things didn’t work out.” I’d say, “Although you certainly were doing your all, now weren’t you.”

  I would say, “Drink!”

  5

  Hollis is not my ex-anything and not my boyfriend. He’s my friend. Maybe not the best friend I have in the world. He is, however, the only.

  6

  Daughter Mev confides in me. She says that at the Methadone clinic whenever a urine sample is required, she presents a sample of the soft drink Mellow Yellow.

  “You won’t get caught,” I tell her.

  She says, “Some folks hand over Mountain Dew.”

  “They won’t get caught either,” I say. “Not to worry.”

  “If they think you’re hoarding your dose, though,” says Mev. “You know, like you’re going to save it and spit it into your thing? Because who wants to go to the clinic every day? You could never do drugs! If they think that, they go, ‘Say good-bye, Mev.’ And they make you say good-bye.”

  7

  Nowadays, I don’t try to talk. I try to do the talking. So I don’t talk. Or, at least, I try not to.

  8

  Here I have retrieved from beneath the refrigerator these thirty or forty fur-covered toy mice. These cost me hundreds of dollars over the years and have a street value of many hundreds of dollars. So why doesn’t the cat—lying on her side there with her eyes squeezed shut—show any appreciation?

  9

  I’m sitting alone in my vehicle, on the street before my place. It’s only just after dawn, yet here’s Hollis, strolling up, munching from a box of Cracker Jacks.

  He stoops at my window and says to me, “Uh-oh, I hear Marianne Faithful.” He straightens, shakes his Cracker Jacks box empty, scrunches i
t, and lobs it into the side yard. The shirt Hollis is wearing has a pattern of skylarks, I believe they are, depicted on it.

  He plants a hand on the car now and drums his fingers. He stoops again and says, “I’ve been reading an interesting book on John Wayne. You are what, here? Feeling neglected?”

  “No,” I say, turning to look at him. “No. Nor do I feel hungry for apples, Hollis.” I say, “Those are two among the feelings I do not have.”

  10

  The name I use is an annoying problem. Everyone wonders about it. No one doesn’t ask.

  My name is Money. I picked it up and kept it and now it’s what I’m called.

  I say I’m tired of telling how I got the name. Or that the story isn’t all that great.

  Still Something Missing

  “I need plywood,” said my son, Paulie, in his sleep. Or I heard wrong. I know it was “need” something.

  That was my first day there, at his flat on St. Anne, before NYPD began hiding him.

  He looked like this: in white cotton socks and frayed blue jeans, a cowhide belt and a petal-green sweater. His hands in their horrible bandage gloves must’ve been on his lap and I couldn’t see them because he was bent over, with his plate pushed aside and his face on the dining table, and he was all-the-way asleep, with a tiny chip of emerald glinting there in the lobe of his ear.

  12

  Days went by and he still kept ignoring all the stuff I’d brought for him. Fine stuff, but Paulie couldn’t get in the mood. And he was in something like pain when I finally set each thing out and presented it as though it were for sale. What, could’ve been wrong with me? Handkerchiefs! I told him about the quality. “Just wait’ll you go to use one of these.” He was three weeks out of the hospital. I should have ground the things up into bits and shreds in the garbage disposal.

  A World of Love

  I’m a script doctor, as far as I know this afternoon at three o’clock central time. And I’m due back at the studio according to Belinda who’s the development producer or whatever is her job.

  She has some hair shirt or other laid out for me.

  Belinda is not warm. She’s small-minded, mean, picky-petty.

  Someday I will learn kickboxing and I will show up at Mercury Brothers and kickbox the stuffings out of her.

  14

  For my living room I have forged three paintings and signed them all “Robert Motherwell.” The paintings aren’t that successful really as I went too fast. They might fool a rich fellow who doesn’t expect to see a fake if anyone like that ever comes over here.

  I was spurred further to autograph and personally inscribe all my books. My handwriting in them experiences a change or two and can seem manly or decorative or as if I were rushed.

  The inscription in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks reads: “Party girl. Bring back my VCR.”

  I’m fairly proud of the Rothko I forged for my bedroom. Whereas the blacks in the paintings at the Rothko Chapel can look a little steely and cold, my blacks are rich with the colors of hot embers and dark earth.

  15

  “Now my throat hurts from screaming at you!” I tell Hollis.

  We’re in my bedroom, standing before the Rothko, with our feet planted wide apart and our arms crossed.

  “What’s missing here is a focal point,” he says. “Something for our eyes to fix on, finally, and rest upon. Something we end up gazing at.”

  “It’s! A! Copy!” I shriek at him.

  16

  Something else that makes me angry is that I got too old to prostitute myself. I wasn’t going to anyway but it was there, it was my Z plan.

  17

  Nine West, I’ve never really had great luck with their shoes. They can look terrific but they have sharp arches and hard fucking soles.

  Once in New York on my way to Penn Station I had to stop and remove the Nine West shoes I was wearing. I had to walk on in my stocking feet. Barrabus, I think he was called, was with me. My husband then but he wouldn’t wait up, wouldn’t take an extra minute out, oh no.

  “Just keep going!” I called to him. “However eventually, I will meet you there.”

  That ex I heard was arrested for stealing food. Maybe I only dreamed it. It’s what I tell people, anyway.

  18

  I call my doctor’s office to ask for some Ritalin. His nurse answers and says, “This is Annabelle. According to our records, you’re not due for a prescription at this time.”

  I say, “Annabelle, this is not what it appears.”

  “Oh?” she says and waits because she was trained to wait and force me to do the synopsizing.

  I will take that challenge. “There was a series of mishaps,” I tell her. “Some were spilled at the sink or ruined by moisture. Then a vial I use for travel got mislaid and they’re gone. I’m out,” I say. “Who can explain it?”

  But I’m a stupid woman for asking that question. Nurse Annabelle can explain what happened to my drugs.

  Without Ritalin I can sustain an evil thought or two, such as: “That there feels like cancer of the esophagus.” However, I’m liable to skip over more routine kinds of thinking, such as, “Move up in line here,” or “Steer.”

  So I’m in bed. I’m in bed unless Dr. Rex himself calls to inform me he’s written new prescriptions.

  More emphatically, I am in bed until.

  19

  I notice on the news when they’re interviewing people, there’s an attractive man in Chicago. His name goes by too fast but I’d know the guy if I saw him again.

  Empty Your Pockets

  I hate Bell South and so raise my voice and warn their representatives that I will take my business elsewhere.

  I mention this to Hollis and tell him of the many new friends I have made—others who were present in the Bell South office, customers who overheard my threat. These are the same people who feel shamefaced, I explain, for falling behind in their phone service payments.

  “Well . . . ,” Hollis begins. Ah, but I have my eye on him.

  21

  Now he and I are watching some men with a ball. No matter the shape or size of the ball, what team or for what country the men fight. The TV is showing men with a ball so we’re watching.

  22

  “In my head,” I tell him, “are the works of John Philip Sousa. And so loud that at first I thought the high school’s band was practicing. I went and checked outside. I don’t even know the words to ‘It’s a Grand Old Flag.’”

  “Oh, come on,” says he. “‘It’s a grand old flag, dunt dunt high-flying flag. Dunt dunt duh, dunt dunt duh, dunt dunt duhhh.’”

  23

  There are real and scary sounds from outside my place. They are like a woman running.

  While I have the door opened an inch, trying to see what’s what, Flower Girl my cat skitters out.

  And now the running woman is gone.

  I call 911 but hang up when the operator asks whether I’m phoning from a home or a residence.

  There’s disorder out there under the traffic light. At the intersection, a bread truck has been tipped up onto its nose and then—it would seem—hammered.

  Hollis crowds me for a view through the window.

  I say to him, “See that girl behind everything? In the pink midi-top?”

  I say, “Suppose you were standing next to that girl. You wouldn’t reach out and grab her breasts, now would you?”

  He takes a drink from his bottle of red vegetable juice. Wags his head, no.

  “You’d behave decently toward her and uphold your own personal standards, correct?”

  His head moves, yes.

  I say, “O.K., then let’s start all over at the beginning. Because I still really believe in my heart that men can be educated.”

  “That’s a Roman Meal bread truck,” he says,
“that got hit. You want me to go see if I can snick us a couple of loaves?”

  I Should Be Going

  I take a lengthy drive in case there’s some music I want to buy.

  I drive to Montgomery, Alabama—thousands of miles from my home. It’s three or four or five in the morning. All that’s open here is a Wal-Mart and the very best music they’re selling is an old Michael Jackson single, “Blood on the Dance Floor.”

  Which, it turns out, isn’t so bad. Especially if you eliminate the treble.

  The police think it’s bad. Their patrol car slows as they ride alongside me. They shine a light, bark a warning. I click the sound down. They surge ahead. I switch the sound up loud again. The patrol car slows, same flashlight, same warning.

  I’m tempted but I dissuade myself from going through it all a third time. My excuses are just excuses and they are not good enough.

  25

  I get lost driving back and do the same exits and merges for hours and hours. I wonder if an aerial view of me might be fun to watch.

  And now I’ve made an error and there are eighteen-wheelers stopped ahead of me, eighteen-wheelers behind. And not for a great long while will I be released from the lineup for this weigh station.

  Could Stand Here for Hours

  “You need more than just the bangs cut,” says the hair stylist. “You look like Cochise.”

  And I see in the restroom mirror as I’m drawing on lipstick that I don’t want my mouth. I say, “Don’t ever use a straw again. Don’t whistle. Or whisper. Or say ‘What,’ or ‘Who.’”

  27

  I do know some horrible stories. One story about my son may never have an end to it. Or the story will have an end I don’t want to know because it’s horrible. Want to or not, I have to wait, wait, wait.

  28

  Both my kids have flame-glo hair and turquoise eyes. One summer after they had earned all their college degrees, they found work doing the cake displays in a bakery and we had sweets to eat. That was in D.C. or someplace we lived then.

  Mev went on to a job carving wooden forks and spoons. Paulie moved to New York and, I believe, checked skates at the counter in Roller World.

  29

  Here now is Mev, on the walkway, her face fired green from the sun through the trees. She’s standing lopsided, with her arms raised unevenly in question. She asks, “How is it that with red Rit dye, the stuff always comes out that Krishna color?”