Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  I returned the incorrigible escapee to my mother who took up the reproaches where I had left off. Then, as if her dog were not responsible for his mad dash across the busy intersection, she turned her splenetic angst on her nurse. “You have to watch out for Snapper, Joy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You smoke too much Mary Jane,” she shot back viciously. “That’s why you forget.”

  “Okay, Mom, okay,” I said sharply, anxious to quash the enmity building in the back of the van. “He’s back. Everything’s cool. Now, just calm down.”

  My mother returned her attention to Snapper. “Oh, Snapper, why do you make me worry like that? Huh? What would I do without you?”

  I turned the engine over and started out of the Shell station, following the audio directions issuing from the GPS. A couple of times I glanced in the rearview mirror. Joy had her head turned away from my mother and was staring out the window, as if transfixed by the landscape. But that landscape had nothing transfixing about it. It was clear Joy resented being chastened by my mother. In my solipsistic way I hadn’t given much thought to all the hours they had spent together and how my mother probably–no, for sure–treated her like a slave on a plantation she ruled over as dynastic matriarch. Because Joy was shy, and because the pay was so generous, she remained uncomplaining, but I worried about my mother’s belittling treatment of her. Worried that the emotionally repressed Filipina was going to explode.

  Merced is a city of fewer than 100,000 residents. It’s blisteringly hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Mostly lower middle-class, it boasts a large Asian population. The residential area looked pretty rundown, and included a lot of RV and trailer parks that were pictures of bitter communal neglect.

  The GPS finally guided us to our destination. I braked to a stop in front of a single-story stucco structure. I rolled my mother out while Jack and Joy, who had no interest in this stop–in fact, were grumblingly annoyed by it–remained inside the air-conditioned van.

  My mother and I parked ourselves on the sidewalk before the house that she and my father had once owned and where I had spent my earliest infancy. The front yard was a riot of weeds and unwatered grass, parched brown by the punishing heat, littered with discarded toys, so much flotsam on a polluted waterway. A cheap, inflatable pool, bone dry, sat like a massive, turquoise carbuncle in the middle of the desiccated lawn. In the driveway was parked an old, rusted Datsun pickup, its bed piled high with unrecognizable junk parts salvaged from God knows where.

  “Do you remember the time you ran away at night and we found you sitting on the railroad tracks?” my mom said, staring at the dilapidated house.

  I had a vivid memory of it, in fact. I remembered running on the tracks, across the street, as if wanting to escape. “Yeah, I do.”

  “We were so worried,” she said. “We thought a train was going to come and kill you. Why do you think you did that?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. I’ve actually told four headshrinkers about that to get their interpretation.”

  “You’ve been to four shrinks?” she asked.

  “Well, five, if you count the biofeedback guy.” I paused, and journeyed back in the impressionistic memory. “One shrink, a woman, said that maybe there were problems in your marriage, and maybe I was, in my preconscious way, trying to commit suicide.” I looked down at my mother. Her face had grown ominously dark all of a sudden as if I had disinterred something unpleasant from her memory bank.

  “I’ve always wanted to ask you something, Mom…”

  “What?”

  “When we were little, you went away for a year, do you remember that?”

  She receded into a stony silence.

  “Dad said that you had to, for work. What was the real story?”

  Her expression was devoid of affect.

  “Did you have a nervous breakdown or something?”

  “No,” she replied harshly.

  “Where’d you go? Huh?” I tried to make light of it. “Take the cure?”

  “I want to go back.” With her one good arm she tried to wheel her chair away from me, but a wheel was stuck in a crack in the sidewalk.

  “What’s wrong, Mom? It was a simple question. It was forty years ago. What does it matter?”

  “I want to go. Take me back.”

  “Okay. Okay.” I got behind her chair, one wheel of which she was still trying to dislodge from the sidewalk crack. “Are you sure you don’t want to go up to the door and knock and see who’s living there?”

  “No!”

  I rolled her back to the van. “I didn’t mean to upset you, Mom. It was just something that I always wondered about.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it!”

  “Okay.” I massaged her shoulder but she shrugged my hand away.

  “I think you’ll like Sonoma a lot better,” I said.

  As I wheeled her up the ramp into the back, she stuck to her petulant silence.

  Jack glanced from my mother to me, uneasily. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Personal.” I threw a backward look at my mother. She avoided my gaze.

  Inspiration lit up my mind like a flare as I roared away. “Jack, see if you can pull up the address for Domaine Carneros.” A beautiful, chateau-styled winery that specialized in champagne, but did nicely vinified still wines as well. I remembered their outdoor restaurant as lovely, with panoramic vineyard views under creamy blue skies. And the food was scrumptious.

  I punched the address Jack gave me into the GPS, was gratified with the news that, a mere 150 miles away, we could easily make lunch. After the punishing heat of Fresno and the white-trash environs of Merced, and the frostiness of the exchange with my mother, Domaine Carneros would be an ethereal transition. Moods, I reasoned–especially my mother’s fickle ones–would be quickly ameliorated. I prayed! Invoking the deity. After begging for absolution for my transgressing soul. LAU-ra. You will be my anima. You will rescue me from this morass without my having to resort to the latest SSRI. I chuckled.

  “What?” Jack said.

  “Nothing. A little private tête-à-tête with myself.” I snapped my fingers. “Hey, I’ve got a brainstorm. Go to the Domaine Carneros Web site and see when they close for lunch, then call them and book a reservation for whatever’s their last seating. Have you figured out how to do that on your iPhone, big guy?”

  “I can do anything,” Jack said. “Except fuck!”

  I laughed.

  “It’s not funny.”

  We rode the 99 north through Modesto and other landlocked dystopias where lives were squandered and wrecked by low-paying jobs and futureless aspirations of a mostly soul-crippling nature. Jack got through to Domaine Carneros’s number and made a reservation for two o’clock.

  “An hour-and-a-half there, we should have no problem making Mendocino,” I calculated out loud. “And from there, just a day’s run up to the IPNC. Jack, did you know that the Willamette is planted in 2/3’s Pinot?”

  “I know. You already told me.”

  “Sorry. Anyway, most of it is so small-production it never gets out of the state. You’re going to be drinking some really great stuff.”

  “I’m looking forward to it. Looking forward to getting off the road for a few days and cooling our heels.”

  “Amen, brother, amen.”

  We arced off the 99, hooked back onto I-5 and headed toward Stockton, where my mother made me stop so she could relieve her bladder.

  “I’ll take her in, Joy,” I said, hoping to diffuse the no-longer latent animosity hanging over the two women like a poisonous gas.

  Joy just nodded.

  Jack went into the convenience store for a pack of cigarettes and more Red Bulls as I wheeled my mother into the bathroom. In the handicapped stall, I held out my right hand for her to grasp and hoisted her out of the wheelchair.

  “Pull my pants down,” she instructed, the tinge of hostility for asking her those personal questions sharpening her words.


  I worked the polyester slacks down to her knees. I was shocked and mortified to see she wasn’t wearing any underpants. “Don’t you wear underwear, Mom?”

  “No. It’s too hard to go.”

  Averting my glance, I swiveled her until she was plopped on the toilet.

  A moment later I heard pee tinkling into the bowl. When she was done, we reversed the maneuver and got her back in her chair.

  As I wheeled her out of the bathroom, I said, “I didn’t mean to bring up anything uncomfortable back in Merced, Mom.”

  “It was a long time ago,” she said enigmatically. “I’m hungry.”

  “Lunch is soon,” I said.

  Back in the cool of the van, Jack offered me a Red Bull.

  “I hate that shit. Tastes like industrial waste. Give me one of those waters.” I turned around. “Anyone need anything back there?”

  Joy remained mute, as was her wont. She had her eyes glued on the scene out the window.

  “I’m fine,” my mother said.

  “All right. Domaine Carneros in an hour.”

  A little ways up the I-5 we veered left on rural Highway 12 in the direction of Napa. The scenery improved dramatically. Parched fields surrendered, first, to lush, green rollercoastering farmland, then finally to vineyards cooled by the prevailing winds streaming over the chilly waters of San Pablo Bay. Highway 12 turned into the two-lane 121 and bent north toward Yountville, and Domaine Carneros. A few wispy clouds had amassed in the deep blue sky, a half-hearted threat of a late-afternoon thundershower.

  We pulled into the parking lot at Domaine Carneros, a gorgeous parcel of vinous acreage. We were a little early so we decided to sample some of Domaine Carneros’s finest before eating. Jack and I definitely needed a libational adjustment and I was positive a little bubbly would pacify my mother’s unrepressed peevishness.

  As we trudged up the concrete path to the winery, the tasting room loomed before us, a grand above-ground grotto, its sloping facade decorated with an abundant arbor of intertwining ivy.

  Inside it was cool and the musky smell of all things wine-related greeted our senses. We bellied up to the bar which was manned by three pourers. Open bottles glinted on the oak-paneled surfaces, interspersed by spit buckets. This being a weekday, it wasn’t too crowded–maybe four or five samplers of Carneros’s exquisite champagnes, Pinots and Chardonnays.

  I turned to the three of them and said in a lowered tone: “Mom, Jack, don’t mention the movie or the book, okay? I just want to enjoy my wine in anonymity for once.”

  They nodded in agreement.

  I handed one of the pourers my credit card. He placed four tasting glasses in front of us and poured into each a dollop of their Pinot Noir Rosé–lovely, dry, perfumed, and pinkish-hued. After tasting through a couple of their low-end champagnes and a Chardonnay, we journeyed to their Pinots.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to try this with us, Mom? All you ever drink is white. Maybe it’s time to light the other pilot.”

  She scrunched up her face and shook her head no. “I don’t like red wine.” She held out her champagne flute and pleaded, “I’ll have a little more champagne, please.”

  After a series of samplings that seemed to elevate everyone’s spirits we climbed a short flight of stairs to The Restaurant Patio. Round, white-clothed tables, shielded from the sun by large blue-and-white umbrellas, were arranged on the terrace overlooking the vineyards, just as I remembered. I flashed back to fifteen years ago, when Victoria and I honeymooned up here to go wine-tasting. We splurged on the posh Sonoma Mission Inn, laughed and drank our way through the Sonoma Valley, dreaming of the films we would make together. We made them. They went unrecognized. And the marriage foundered on the shoals of artistic failure. As the Maître d’ seated us, removing one of the chairs so that Joy could wheel my mother up to the table, I tried in vain to shake the image of Victoria and me and that youthful, starry-eyed time, to stave off a bout of melancholy that the alcohol only exacerbated.

  We were handed lunch menus and a wine list. As everyone perused the menus I turned my attention to the wine list. When our waitperson, a slim guy in his twenties with thinning blond hair, appeared I said, “Bring us a bottle of the ‘99 Vintage Brut, will you? And some water.”

  A few minutes later he returned, and expertly uncorked the champagne, bearing down on the heavily pressurized cork as it emerged from the neck of the bottle. When it neared the top, he gently bent it sideways, producing just the slightest, barely audible, pfft.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Can’t let those bubbles escape.” He poured us all around. “It’s all about the bubbles.”

  I held my flute out to the center of the table and proposed, “Let’s have a toast.” All three extended their glasses. “First of all to Jack–a little under the weather for reasons I won’t elaborate on–for accompanying us on this journey and sharing the driving. My best friend, the only one I can divulge my deepest secrets to, and vice versa.” Everyone clinked glasses with Jack. “To Joy, who has taken on the thankless task of caring for my cantankerous, sometimes racist and demeaning moth–”

  “I am not,” my mother chopped me off mid-word.

  “…who forgets, because of the devastating brain injury she suffered, that we do have her best interests in mind, won’t abandon her–unless she becomes a total pain in the ass!–and merely hope she will stop her caviling and caterwauling.” I placed a hand on my mother’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “But we still love her.” The tears once again sprang to my mother’s eyes and she nodded like some sad Buddha figurine come to life. “A toast to you, Mom.” We all clinked glasses with her, even Joy, who had borne the brunt of my mother’s ill-temperedness. “And, finally, to me, for opening up my wallet and funding this roustabout freak show. I’ve had my doubts, I admit. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and think I’ve gone AWOL from the reservation, but if we can get my mom to Wisconsin to be with her sister and have some fun along the way, then it’ll all have been worth it.” I thrust out my glass and circled it around the table, as they clinked theirs against mine.

  The lunch menu was small, but eclectic and had something for everyone. The view was bucolic and peaceful, the surrounding countryside a merciful remove from the brambly dessication of Central California. The irritability that seemed to be fomenting with the detour to see Bud and the house where I grew up, the personal contretemps between my mother and me, had evaporated. We were in the heart of wine country now, with cold, wondrously tasty vintage champagne, cooling breezes, lush greenery, and life suddenly seemed, for once, haloed with pleasantness. After a single glass of champagne, I broke the bank on a bottle of Chandon’s Carneros Pinot, a rich, jammy one that had Jack exulting and smacking his lips. My mother, of course, liked the fact that we had abandoned the champagne in the ice bucket to her. Joy, as was her preference, drank abstemiously.

  Once sated on the kitchen’s terrific offerings, we left the table and headed back to the Rampvan. Jack, popping a Red Bull and arguing that he was fine, commandeered the wheel.

  “Just keep it at the speed limit, okay? We don’t need a reprise of last night.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t the mental midget who did a left on a double-yellow, short horn.”

  “Okay. Guilty.” I punched in the address of the B&B in Mendocino and the Brit-accented woman’s voice transformed us back into directionless robots.

  A little high on wine, I said to Jack, “I wonder what the chick who does the GPS voice looks like?”

  “Yeah, I’m starting to get horny for her.”

  I laughed. The wine-buzz had raised our moods. We were past the halfway point and now it was going to be wine and more wine all the way to the Willamette.

  With less than two hundred miles between us and Mendocino I tailored the route options to take us through the picturesque Sonoma Valley, hoping that the dramatic change of scenery would continue to elevate our collective mood as we bore down on the Willamette Valley, where the
three days off the road would certainly rejuvenate us all.

  As we drove through the increasingly wooded landscape on a tortuous single-lane road flanked by vineyards and orchards and wineries, Jack annoyed me with his frequent requests to pull over for “a little taste.”

  “Let’s just wait until we get up to Anderson Valley,” I said, as we fled by yet another quaint sign, complete with arrow pointing down a dirt road. “I’ll take you to Ridge and we’ll pound some awesome Zins.”

  “All right. I’m going to hold you to it.”

  In the back my mother had fallen asleep, her head listed to one side. Joy was leaning against the window, hypnotized by the traveling terrain. She looked lonely, far away from where she had grown up.

  “Were you born in the Philippines, Joy?” I asked.

  She nodded yes.

  “Your parents?”

  She nodded, her eyes still trained out the window.

  “Any brothers or sisters?”

  “Two. Sisters.”

  “What do they do?”

  “One’s a doctor. The other’s an architect.”

  “Oh, really. Where do they live?”

  “You ask too many questions.”

  “I’m just trying to get to know you. We’ve still got a long way to go.”

  “They’re on the East Coast,” she said evasively.

  “What about your parents?” She made a face as if hoping I would stop. “Are they still alive?”

  “My father’s dead.”

  “He must have died young.”

  She nodded, bent her head toward the window and lost herself once again in the fleeting verdancy.

  I turned back to the windshield. With all the wineries we were passing I was jonesing for a drink. “You know,” I said to Jack. “My mom’s crashed out. We’re coming up on Gary Farrell. We should run in and get a quick taste. Used to be a great winery.”

  Jack turned to me and smiled broadly. “You’ve got your ESP working now, Homes.”

  As the sign for Gary Farrell came into view, I wordlessly signaled Jack to make the left onto a narrow asphalt road. We climbed through towering trees that dappled the steep acclivity. I told Joy, my voice lowered so as not to wake my snoring mother, that we were going to go in for a little taste, that I had a few friends to say hi to, and would be back shortly. She nodded, a flicker of disapprobation in her expression.