The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon

by Moira Greyland

  When Mother became very wealthy from Mists of Avalon she bought me a harp. It was a beautiful second-hand Salvi Diana, which cost a lot less than it would have cost new.

  For those who do not eat, drink, and breathe the harp, a Salvi Diana is a 47-string full sized concert harp—the sort you’d see in an orchestra. Salvi is an Italian company which makes concert harps. The other major concert harp company is Lyon & Healy. At my teacher’s home, I had had the chance to try both her Lyon & Healy and her Salvi and the main difference is that to me, the pedals on the Salvi were smoother and quieter. Also, the Lyon & Healy had a long rectangular piece from top to bottom in the back over the string holes where the harp sat on the collarbone and the corners digging in drove me a little bit nuts. Rather than play with a washcloth between the harp and me, I preferred the Salvi.

  The harp became a new universe to me and a great and unimaginable blessing. To my future audiences, I would say that I learned to play harp while playing hooky from my voice lessons. This was a nod to the fact that I was supposed to become an opera singer, but the harp was where I was happiest.

  I began performing in local opera companies, premiering Michael Masumoto’s Echo and Narcissus in Berkeley. Afterwards, I auditioned for the Marin Opera and joined them for a production of Romeo et Juliette by Gounod. Again, I sang in the chorus but I was also chosen to be the understudy for Stephano, a brief coloratura role with one aria and one scene: an invented role which exists to start the fight between the Capulets and Montagues.

  I joined the Marin Opera again for their production of Madama Butterfly, but even though I had again been moved into a more prominent position I decided against continuing, preferring to rejoin the Renaissance Faire and play the harp and sing there. I was not very attentive to my auditions and even ignored a callback from the Oakland Opera.

  I changed my mind eventually, and I spent a glorious year singing with the chorus of the Lamplighters. The Lamplighters are a famous and very old San Francisco opera company which specializes in the music of Gilbert and Sullivan: comic operas, operettas, and a very few musicals.

  We began with Iolanthe, then went on the The Gondoliers, Where’s Charlie, and finally the Lamplighters Annual Gala which always has a theme and is original. That year, we were poking fun at corporate raiders, so Iolanthe’s “dainty little fairies” became “dainty secretaries.”

  I had to audition for every show, which was fine. The competition increased and by the time we were doing Where’s Charlie, I was one of only four sopranos chosen for the chorus. Each show had up to seventeen performances and a three-month rehearsal cycle for a year-round schedule.

  When I sang Iolanthe with the Lamplighters I noticed I had let my weight climb a little, so I ate less, went to the gym, and worked hard. By the time Where’s Charlie rolled around, I had become quite slim again. My family was furious. After all, being heavy is good, desirable, feminist, and fat bodies are “beautiful.” How dare I pander to the male establishment by deliberately losing weight?

  Yes, Virginia. Being fat in Berkeley is no accident. If you want to upset a feminist, lose weight; they will lose their minds. The only way my mother could begin to cope with it was by telling herself that as a performing artist I had to look a certain way. After all, who cares about health? Men love thin women, so being thin is hateful and evil and impossible. Can you imagine losing weight and having the people around you be both appalled and critical? I must be anorexic because all thin girls are anorexic, and I must be on my way to death, hospitals, and insanity. What a terrible crime I had committed!

  I enjoyed my time with the Lamplighters very much, but I decided not to continue. Kristoph and Margaret and I formed a Celtic band, Magic Fire. I chose all the repertoire, doing what I usually do. We began with one show with me as lead singer, which went very well. Afterwards, Margaret decided she wanted to take turns being the lead singer with me. Rather than argue with her about it, I opted to leave the band and go solo. Once I left they changed the name to Avalon Rising, and Kristoph has been a very capable front man. The band has been active ever since.

  I did exactly one solo vocal performance after I left Magic Fire and before I left Berkeley. I went to an open mic with Jonnie at La Val’s Pizza in North Berkeley. It was downstairs and very crowded. I sang a Pentangle piece a cappella, “When I was in my prime” as recorded by Jacqui McShee. I got a standing ovation, to my complete shock. I was accustomed to being very successful onstage through personality, but this piece was nothing but singing.

  Just me.

  Chapter 31: The Goldfish Bowl (1985–1988)

  “How I wish, how I wish you were here.

  we’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year

  Running over the same old ground: what have we found?

  The same old fear. Wish you were here.”

  —Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here.

  That song is the origin of the name my father gave our new house on Fulton Street: The Goldfish Bowl. One might imagine that the futility implied within the lyrics could have been an impetus to change something about our lives. If things are impossible and pointless, do something else! Sadly, my father and I differed on an important issue: he felt he was a helpless victim, blown about by every wind while I am convinced each of us can and must take steps to improve our own lives. Indeed, many members of our family persisted in predictable folly and the problems I stepped in to resolve were of the most basic nature: the sorts of things that any reasonable adult should have been able to do.

  Mother now had piles of money which had enabled her to buy my father a house, but Lisa still kept my father on a short financial leash. He had to choose between groceries and his marijuana. I negotiated with her to let him have what he wanted. He was miserable and agitated without his pot, and adding to his misery helped no one. After all these years, he was not likely to give up his dependence on pot-smoking and I saw no point in arguing the matter with him.

  When we first moved in, the movers had put his bedroom downstairs next to the front door, accessible through glass-paned double doors. He was completely convinced that Mother had put him in that room to spy on him and he felt like a caged animal trapped by a hostile trainer. He was the goldfish in the bowl, and she would look in through the glass and make sure that he wasn’t doing anything wrong.

  I understood how helpless he felt, and in my usual meddling way I helped him move upstairs into a real bedroom. The room he had been in was more of a formal dining room, right off the kitchen. It is likely that Mother simply wanted to save him the trouble of going up and down staircases, but what good would it have been to say that to him?

  My father’s friends would routinely drop in day and night at any hour, and he felt incapable of telling them not to. I instituted a “Call Ahead” rule. I told all his friends when they visited that he was very busy with writing, and I asked them to call before they came over and ask if it was a convenient time for a visit. When I had initially discussed this with my father he had expressed relief that the endless interruptions of his work would stop, but he was also afraid that his friends would be angry with him.

  I asked him to blame me for the rule, and to let them call me any name they wished and be angry with me. That way he would have the benefit of the emotional space and time, and not have to weather any storms. Naturally I was sharply criticized for this rule, which didn’t bother me a bit. I could cope with criticism much more easily than my father could, and besides, I did not want visitors at 3 AM.

  I took care of the household stuff including all the chores and cooking, which I expected. I was used to him and I put up with his beliefs, tirades, paranoia, and fearfulness as the price of admission. He was still my dearest friend, or so I thought, and the nearest thing to a parent I had ever had.

  I was going to college and no longer working at the Faire. I was lonely and culture-shocked because I had chosen to separate myself from my community of the past nine years. I was living in much closer quart
ers with my father now, and with his endless paranoia and misery at being closer to Mother.

  During this time, I spent more time with Mother and Lisa than I should have. I certainly saw and heard a great deal more than I wanted to. Mother was not able to have a truthful relationship with Lisa, precisely like their early interactions might have indicated. Mother would triangulate a lot of interactions between herself and either me or Lisa in an attempt to get either one of us to give her back some of the power she had given away. Mother would essentially say to me “Oh, bad old Lisa runs my life, Moira!” Conversely, she would say to Lisa “Oh, bad old Moira forced me to do whatever you are currently objecting to, Lisa!” I was astonished to watch Mother playing these games because I had always regarded her as being so powerful.

  The two of them communicated through money. Mother would buy anything she wanted to for my brother and me, and she didn’t want Lisa to tell her what to do. Every time Mother spent money on us, she would act like a naughty child getting away with something truly dastardly, and Lisa would fume and sulk.

  Mother gave me plenty of money for voice lessons and music. Her success had made her very wealthy but she never cared about money, and gave it away as readily as if it was a heap of old socks. She felt providing for me to become a musician was very important: she was convinced of my talent. In that way, I was very lucky.

  When Mother bought me a concert harp after The Mists of Avalon became a bestseller, Lisa was incensed. She claimed that Mother couldn’t give it to me, and tried to find ways to take it back. As the years went by, Lisa’s financial shenanigans became even more toxic and deadly.

  Mother was diabetic and not interested in taking steps to reverse it. As noted, she hated exercise and refused to do it. She would claim that she had lots of “hard muscle” beneath her fat and that she was not really that overweight, but she became insulin-dependent and her mental status began to decline. She was over 250 lbs and wore a size 24. I saw no evidence of hard muscle anywhere, except perhaps between her ears. Her early cognitive deficits were probably also the result of frequent mini-strokes, or TIAs.

  She had many ideas about healthy eating, none of which resulted in health. Mother read a lot of vegetarian magazines, toyed with becoming vegetarian, and denigrated what she felt was the Western tendency towards chronic overconsumption of protein. Left to her own devices she would eat white toast with butter and jam, and leave off the butter if she was feeling virtuous. If the jam was labeled “no sugar,” she thought it could not possibly be a problem for her diabetes. Of course, not adding sugar to a compound which already contained a huge amount of naturally occurring fructose didn’t change its effect on her blood sugar.

  She was feeding her daily appetite with the sugar found in bread and jam instead of proper meals. This resulted in more hunger, more empty calories, and chronic poor nutrition coupled with dangerous obesity. Her blood sugar was out of control and she was not able to adequately care for herself. One day when we were out together, she told me, “I can have coffee and a doughnut. My blood sugar is only 400.”

  I tried to intervene, and I would take her grocery shopping. I thought that if she had yogurt and eggs around she might have been able to resist the toast and jam, perhaps even start dealing with her health and her weight. However, nothing helped her cognitive decline.

  One day Mother, my friend Elizabeth Rousseau, and I were driving home across the Bay Bridge and Mother hit another car. She was confused and couldn’t figure out how to get the car started again, so I got into the front seat and drove us home. When we got there, Mother told Lisa that the steering had failed and then that the brakes had failed. Kristoph checked the steering and the brakes and said that they both were fine. Then Mother told Lisa that I had made her crash the car, even though I had been in the back seat when it happened. Mother also insisted that I was a dangerous driver—and my having caused this crash proved it. When I left, Mother and Lisa were both pleading with me to “Drive Carefully,” as though I really had caused the whole thing myself.

  I was very upset, because I had fixed the problem that I was now being blamed for. If I had had a shred of perspective at the time, I would have been able to laugh it off. In retrospect, what had happened was that Mother’s strokes and multi-infarct dementia were beginning to severely affect her ability to drive. Instead of confronting Mother about her driving, Lisa chose to let me take the proverbial hit, and colluded with Mother on blaming me for something I did not do.

  My friend Elizabeth was puzzled by what Mother was saying, but she didn’t feel she could contradict my mother. We were able to talk about it in whispers out of earshot: just another instance of the adults in my house being completely outrageous. I felt hurt by the whole thing: blamed and mischaracterized when I had literally done nothing wrong and my only goal had been to help.

  My mother, Lisa, and I used to see a chiropractor together: a kind man who did a lot to help the neck pain I was always stuck with due to head injuries and migraines. He felt I was chronically stressed and exhausted, and much of his treatment of me amounted to shoulder and neck massage, since I tended to be in spasm.

  I went to the chiropractor with Mother and Lisa the day after the accident which Mother had blamed me for. I was acting as the chauffeur, as I had so often. All the way there they were telling me about what a dangerous, unsafe driver I was. When we arrived, I was still quietly distraught from listening to their twin tirades, and I lay on the chiropractor’s table with the tears running into my ears. He laid his hands on my forehead and stayed with me until I calmed down. God bless him for that.

  From my perspective now I can see how silly the whole thing was. Lisa knew how to drive. If I was so unsafe, it would have been a simple matter to have her drive rather than lecturing me as though that could somehow make me a better driver. Lisa apparently wanted to demonize me while validating Mother’s impossible version of events. The triangle turned again and this time, I was a villain the two of them could agree on.

  I was used to being the villain by then and I added one more villainous act to my collection: I told Mother that it was time for her to stop driving. I told her that if she did not voluntarily stop, I would go to her doctor and tell her about all the crashes, and her doctor would stop her. She agreed, though unwillingly.

  Mother finally had one big stroke when we were coming back from the grocery store. She dropped the bag of groceries she was carrying, and I got her into the house. She could not talk. I made sure that she got medical help, and I spoke to her, saying “I know you can understand me, and I know you’re still in there.” She nodded her head furiously yes.

  Mother was severely affected by the stroke, but over time some of the effects became less. She stopped dragging a foot, her face looked more normal, and she became able to talk again, but there was still significant brain damage. I attribute her healing even in part from her strokes to her lifelong habit of reading an entire book every day. Typically, she would write from 3–6 AM, then meet with my father, then do errands, then read for the rest of the day, usually retiring no later than 8 PM.

  Around the time that Lisa established financial control over my mother, she did some genealogy and discovered she was my mother’s ninth cousin, and my ninth cousin once removed. From that day forward, she referred to my mother as her “cousin” and me also, which felt like sandpaper on my ears: How many “cousins” step in and own the lives and financial empires of their “cousin?”

  The slight to my mother infuriated me. How could Lisa deny the twenty-odd years she spent with my mother, and pretend they were never lovers? Why would a “cousin” edge out my father from his own home? How could Lisa twist the nature of her relationship in a dishonest attempt to explain how she got her fingers in Mother’s estate? Kissing cousins, perhaps!

  Lisa began having a straight relationship with a man named Raul under Mother’s nose. Predictably, Raul was put on the payroll, so he had a reason to be there day and night.

  Raul was the perf
ect companion for Lisa. He was a beetling man, timid, angry, and odd. He and Lisa shared an interest in ice skating—he would watch videos of the little girl skaters at night at Greenwalls, which made no sense to me. He was all too happy to agree with Lisa on absolutely anything. When the two of them began to travel together Lisa told me that she and Raul were utterly virtuous, and claimed that although they shared a bed there were pillows between them. Given her long and interesting sexual history, I was completely unconcerned with whether she was building a pillow fort or using the pillows as a place to rest a few dozen sex toys.

  I didn’t care who she was sleeping with, and I didn’t know why she wanted me to think her sleeping arrangements with Raul were so virtuous. Mother cared a lot, though, but loved Lisa too much to show her how hurt she was.

  How could Lisa expect Mother to watch her carrying on with Raul every day, as though it was the most normal thing in the world? And most of all, how could she expect Mother to go along with her pretense and never show a broken heart, the one I know she had? From our conversations, she would have done anything to please Lisa including endure her betrayal.

  Less savory, though, was the financial goings-on. Raul and Lisa would have Mother sign papers, and they would put a piece of grey cardstock over the papers with a cutout a little smaller than a 3x5 inch card: large enough for Mother to sign, but not large enough for Mother to know or read what she was signing.

  Chapter 32: Boundaries, Bathrooms, and Betrayal (1989)

  You always hurt the one you love

  The one you shouldn’t hurt at all

  You always take the sweetest rose

  And crush it till the petals fall

  —You Always Hurt the One You Love, The Mills Brothers

  My father was everything to me. He was my best friend: much more of a parent to me than my mother had ever been, and in many ways he was the only person I could talk to. Multilingual, multi-instrumental, polymath, punster, author, brilliant beyond dreams of brilliant, he had fields of expertise about which I knew nothing. His friends said that he had forgotten more than they would ever know.