Pretty Mess

by Erika Jayne

  The neurologist was checking my brain functions and he told me to count down from a hundred, subtracting seven each time. I said, “Ninety-three. Uhhhhh . . .” and blanked on the next number.

  “What’s seven from that?” the doctor asked.

  “Shit, she can’t do that when she’s normal,” Renee said. “She’s not good in math.” I started to wish she hadn’t come to the hospital at all.

  Just like almost every teenage girl and her mother, we used to fight. With Renee, things could get really bad. She would sometimes say the most hateful things to me. Once, in the middle of some fight (probably over something stupid), it got so heated she said to me, “I wish that I never had you.”

  That stung so badly. In part, because I knew it was true. People can feel when they’re unwanted. I know Renee loved me, but I knew she would have been okay without me. She probably would have preferred to follow her dreams rather than having to raise me.

  I definitely picked up Renee’s talent for saying hateful things, and I would use it against her. That’s why I’m always so afraid to lose my temper on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. If I ever did, I’m afraid I would really eviscerate someone.

  I would cuss her out every now and again, but I was basically a good kid. I played by the rules, took care of myself, and did not get in trouble, but I didn’t have a lot of respect for my mother.

  That’s not to say that everything was horrible, and I know there are people who had it worse. She wasn’t a drug addict; she never beat me or neglected me. But there was a sense of stability and guidance I wanted from my mother that I never got. I had to develop that on my own.

  I have to hand it to her, though—when I needed it, Renee always had my back. There would be moments when she would be so clutch. One example is the summer before my senior year. Because I was in the musical theater program at Northside High School, there wasn’t time for me to take my economics and health classes during the school year. I had to make them up at summer school. Instead of being at Northside, these classes were at Harper High School. One day after class, I found a note on the windshield of my car.

  “You don’t belong here,” it read. “If you keep coming here, we’re going to beat the shit out of you.” I got home and showed the note to Renee. I was a little concerned about my safety, but mostly I was worried about whether I would be able to finish summer school. I needed those credits to graduate on time.

  The next day, Renee marched down to the school. She barged into the principal’s office and demanded a meeting with him. She showed him the note and said, “What are you going to do about this? I’m not going to have my daughter feel unsafe at your school.” I don’t know if it was Renee’s presence or tone or what, but after that, I never had any trouble. The situation got handled.

  When I was in middle school we lived in a two-story house in Lilburn, Georgia. On weekend mornings, Renee would play classical music at the upright piano in our living room. It was usually reserved for her piano students, but sometimes she’d make an exception. She’d play for hours, the notes drifting up to my room as I would lie in bed and listen. I was scared that if I got up, the music might stop.

  At my house now we have a Steinway grand piano. Whenever Renee comes to visit, I love it when she plays for me. It reminds me of all of those mornings when things seemed peaceful and beautiful, even if just for a short time.

  I think when I went to Los Angeles at twenty-five and moved away from her completely it was the best thing that ever happened to us. I needed to be my own woman. I think she needed to be on her own, too. To focus on herself and not have to worry about me.

  Now I can finally have a good time with my mother. She’s a lot more fun when she’s not stressed out about money and raising a kid. We actually have a fair amount in common. We’re both artistic and creative, very ambitious, and we both know how to work hard.

  Renee is much happier with her life now than she was when I was younger. After working as a bank teller when I was very small, she continued working in the mortgage industry. She was good at it and made great money, but it was never her passion.

  In 2008, the mortgage industry blew up. I told her, “This is the best thing to ever happen to you. Now you can do what you really want to do.” She went back to school at Georgia State and got her bachelor’s degree in fine arts. The moment she got on that path, she became a much freer, nicer person.

  When her parents got sick—my grandfather with cancer and my grandmother with Alzheimer’s—she moved into their house to help take care of them. She would have to commute to downtown Atlanta every day for school, but still managed to make the dean’s list! It was a hard time for her, but like I said, no one is finer in the clutch than Renee. While she was in school, I would send her on a painting trip each summer so she could have a break from school and her parents. She had really earned some time alone.

  When my grandparents died, she stayed in their house. Recently, she decided to put the house on the market. “When this house goes, that’s the last of my parents,” she told me.

  “But this house was their dream,” I told her. “It was never your dream. It was their life. You’re in your sixties. You should go have your own life. You need to do what makes you happy. You need to go where you need to be.”

  “That’s true,” she said.

  “So what do you want to do now?” I asked.

  She said, “Well, I don’t really know . . .”

  Classic Renee.

  3

  FATHER FIGURES

  One of my very first memories is from my third birthday party. I was at my maternal grandparents’ house, and my grandmother Ann was holding me in her arms. “Oh look,” she said in an excited, high-pitched voice. “There is your grandfather!”

  “Who?” I asked. I did not understand that I had another grandfather other than her husband, my grandfather Hollis, in whose house I was living at the time. She meant my father’s father. I had never met my other grandfather before. But then again, I hadn’t ever met my father, either.

  I was looking out of the large plate glass windows that overlooked her beautiful garden in the backyard. My birthday is in July, so the garden was lush in the summer sun. The memory is just a blurry flash. I don’t even remember meeting him, just being told that my grandfather was present.

  I’m told that my paternal grandfather was a very tall man and that he gave me a little carousel as a gift that day. My mother said that I loved it, and for a while it was my favorite toy. That was the only time he visited. He and my grandmother Ann were in contact, and that’s how she’d invited him to come to my birthday party. When I was older, she told me that she used to mail him pictures of me. She hoped he would pass them on to my father, but instead he would just return them. Eventually, when I was in middle school, he sent her a note asking her to stop sending the pictures altogether.

  My paternal grandfather grew up in northern Georgia and joined the military, where, according to family legend, he served as Dwight Eisenhower’s personal assistant. When in Miami, he met Esther, a small Mayan woman. She’d inherited a coffee plantation in El Salvador called Esperanza after her first husband died. My grandfather married her and moved to El Salvador, where he helped expand the plantation and raise the children from her first marriage. They had three sons together, my father, Nicolas, being the oldest.

  The way the story was told to me, the communists were rampaging through their country and seized my grandmother’s plantation. In the middle of the night, my grandfather got his three boys and ran through the jungle to get them on a plane going back to the United States. He left my grandmother there with her three older children. He had been in the military, so he knew things were only going to get worse, and he only took care of himself and his sons. The four of them resettled back in Atlanta when my father was fifteen, his brother Gabriel was fourteen, and the youngest, Alejandro, was three. They moved into a house on Don Juan Lane in Decatur, Georgia. I’m not kidding. I can’t make this
shit up. It was like they moved to Latin Lover Lane.

  I only met my paternal grandmother Esther once, even though she sent me Christmas cards in Spanish for years. She wore a floor-length chinchilla coat and carried a cigarette holder. She was known to get her hair and makeup done every day. She was very grand. She came to my grandmother Ann’s house and gave me one of those dolls that pees when you feed it a baby bottle and whose diaper you can change. She didn’t speak English, but she told me the doll’s name was Lolita. After he took off with their children in the middle of the night, Esther never got back together with my grandfather. I don’t think she ever forgave him for taking her children away, especially Alejandro, being only three.

  These kids—now teenagers—who had grown up in El Salvador, were wild. My grandfather, a former military man, couldn’t handle living in a house with three messy, unruly boys. He built them a shed behind his house where they could live and run wild. He let Alejandro live inside the house, though.

  All three boys spoke Spanish and English with perfect accents. They were all devastatingly handsome and had that Latin bad boy air of not giving a shit. My father and his brother Gabriel carried sawed-off shotguns in their cars and weren’t afraid to let everyone know it. This attitude made them absolutely irresistible to all the girls in their high school. My mom sure found it sexy.

  Renee was friendly with my father’s younger brother Gabriel. He invited her to go to a party with him. Even though he had just broken up with his girlfriend, Renee insists that it wasn’t a date. At that party, he introduced her to the man who would become my father, and the two of them started dancing together. “When are you going to ask me out?” Renee said, and he did so on the spot. It’s funny, because years later, when I was working as a cocktail waitress at Chasen’s, I used a similar trick to get Tom Girardi—my future husband—to ask me out.

  They dated for a few months and fell in love. When Renee became pregnant, they got married. It only lasted eighteen months, and Nicolas divorced my mother when I was nine months old.

  Everyone in my family always liked my dad and said nice things about him, but I think two things were happening here. Number one, my mother was eighteen years old and he was twenty-three. They were both young, and there is a lot of drama and immaturity that goes along with that.

  Number two, I think my grandmother Ann was probably really overbearing and tried to control everything, because that’s who she was. My mother and father lived right next door to her, so they never had the chance to be grown-ups on their own. That couldn’t have been easy for them.

  Just recently, my mother told me that after she and my father separated, she moved back in with her parents. One day, my father called and asked to take her out. My grandparents babysat me while my parents went to the drive-in in the black Dodge Charger he bought brand-new when I was born.

  On their date, my father said to Renee, “Tomorrow I’m going to come by your parents’ house, pick you up, and we’re going to go hunt for apartments. The three of us will live together and be a little family.” It was really romantic at the drive-in, so this was all fabulous.

  He dropped her off at my grandparents’ house. The next day, my mother waited and waited. He never came. He never called. Finally, she called her friend Janet, who had recently married Nicolas’s brother Gabriel. She asked if Janet had seen my father. “Oh no, honey, he’s moved to California. He left this morning,” Janet said.

  When she told me the story, my mother said, “Erika, he had it all planned out. As we were making out in the car at the drive-in, I was wondering why all of his clothes were hanging on a rod in the backseat.”

  I don’t think my father wanted to be a dad. He was a mechanic at a car dealership in town at that time and he wanted a different life for himself. Once he moved to California, my father wasn’t a part of my life at all. I vaguely remember him coming by my grandmother’s house to see me one time when I was very young. But it’s more like I recall his presence rather than actually seeing him or spending time with him. That’s it.

  But that doesn’t mean his family wasn’t around. My mother was very close with my aunt Janet and still is to this day. She even went as Erika Jayne one year for Halloween. I remember when I was very small, before kindergarten, going over a couple of times to the house she shared with my uncle.

  Janet eventually divorced my uncle for what my mother considered more than sufficient cause. He moved in with his brother Alejandro in an apartment complex.

  Janet moved to an apartment and started a new job as a beautician when she left my uncle. She drove a silver Corvette that she absolutely loved. A week after she moved, she came out of her apartment to go to work but couldn’t see her car anywhere in the parking lot. What did she see in her parking space? A big black hearse with a manila envelope taped to the windshield with the word janet printed on it.

  My uncle had taken her car and left a hearse in its place. She had just started this job, so she couldn’t be late for work. She decided to drive the hearse and deal with it later. The worst part was, when she got in and started the car with the keys that were in the ignition, it only went in reverse. She was totally stranded. To this day, no one has figured out how my uncle had gotten this busted-ass car there in the first place.

  The whole situation—between her and my uncle, between my mom and my dad—was just a southern-style shambles.

  After my father left, Renee never really dated. I mean, if she dated, she did it on the down low. She never had anyone over at the house spending the night. My mother was very conscientious about that. She didn’t have boyfriends. She didn’t try to pawn me off on someone else. She wasn’t that mom.

  When I was three, she married my stepfather, John. My mother tells me that I was in the wedding, but I have zero recollection of that. Probably because I knew their relationship was bullshit, even at three years old. From the beginning the strain between them was obvious, and I had enough of a feel for my mother to know that this would never last.

  My first memory of them as a couple is when they were off at Disneyland for their honeymoon. My grandmother watched me, because we were living with her then. I was sitting on my grandmother’s white leather couch when she came over and said to me, “Now that your mom got married, you’re not going to be living here anymore.”

  My mom came back from vacation and we all moved into an apartment near my grandmother’s house. Soon they bought a cute little ranch house in Stone Mountain, Georgia. We had a big backyard and it was very middle class.

  My stepfather was handsome and tall, maybe six foot two. He was from Pittsburgh, from a nice family of Polish immigrants. Sometimes we would go to Pittsburgh, just the two of us, and we’d go ice skating and sledding and do the things we couldn’t do down south.

  He was always very loving and kind toward me. We played sports and bonded over baseball and cars. He was in the car business and would drag me around everywhere with him, even the auto auction. Later on, he owned a used-car lot, so he and Renee were always getting new cars and swapping out their old ones to sell. I knew all about cars, and I would always beg him to bring home the fastest one on the lot. He’s the one who really started my lifelong love of fast cars.

  I’ve always been afraid of the dark, so it was very hard for me to sleep as a child. I would try to sneak into my parents’ bed and my mom would get mad. But my stepfather used to let me sneak in on his side and sleep next to him.

  As sweet as he was with me, he and my mother had a rocky relationship. There was a lot of fighting and volatility. They were both under thirty, trying to hold down jobs, and raising a young daughter. Then my mother found out there was another woman in my stepfather’s life and that was the end of their relationship.

  Renee was working as a bank teller as well as teaching piano. One weekend, she went away on a painting trip to Edisto Beach, South Carolina. The weekend was a bit weird, because my stepfather was sleeping in the guest room. As usual, I fell asleep in my little bed and then w
ent to crawl in with him in the middle of the night when I got scared of the dark.

  I remember lying in bed with him, thinking, Why are we in here? This is strange. I don’t have any connection to this room at all.

  Suddenly I started to get mad at him, like I could intuit that something bad was going on between him and Renee. I was five and looking over at the bathroom, thinking, I don’t want to get up. I don’t feel comfortable. So, I’m just gonna pee in this bed.

  That’s what I did. I have never wet the bed before or since, but that one time I was a bed wetter—out of spite.

  “Oh my God, Erika. What’s wrong?” he asked, startled as he jumped out of bed.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t make it,” I told him. But I was peeing on him on purpose. It’s almost as if I knew what was coming, like, “Fuck you.”

  The next day, Renee returned from her trip and my stepfather packed his car and left. That was the reason we were sleeping in the guest room, because he had been packing up all of his things in their bedroom. At the time, I didn’t know the details of what went wrong with his and Renee’s relationship, just that she returned from her trip and the next day my stepfather packed up and left us. At the time, you could get a no-fault divorce in Georgia in thirty days, and a month later, the papers were signed. It was all over.

  For the next year, there were no men in my mother’s life. Then one day, she said to me, “He’s moving back in.” She meant my stepfather. Unbeknownst to me, the two of them had been talking on the phone regularly the entire year. They had reconciled while he was living back near his family in Pittsburgh. They decided to get married for a second time.

  I still remember staring out the window of our ranch house, seeing his car pull up, and vibrating with excitement, thinking, Oh my God, my stepfather’s back. He’s back.