Heart Berries: A Memoir(10)

Simon gave us a choice: American dollars or a family trip to New York. Julia Roberts attended the opening. A woman who would later star in Grey’s Anatomy played my mom. We missed the opportunity to see it all to buy school clothes. Mom spent the rest on bills, food, and things.

It could have redeemed her, like my words on the page—like I would have myself believe articulating her grace and pain could be redemptive. I didn’t want Paul Simon to be my father, but I wanted him to save us. More than a few thousand—I wanted him to see us and decide we were worth a play in our own right. I wanted him to see my mother, beyond a groupie, or a cliché, or an Indian woman—because she was more. He didn’t see her.

The play reduced Mom to an “Indian hippie chick,” as Variety’s Greg Evans called her. A “prison groupie,” and I had only known her as an outreach worker. Prison was part of that, getting them to write or draw, to find sanity in isolation. I’m trying not to make excuses, because she did fall. It’s in the text and on my mind every day how she fell. It could be like Eve. The old texts say we get menses for the fall, feel pain for the fall. God couldn’t watch it; he sent us his boy, but I doubt he watched his son die. I think he just waited for him on the other side.

One of my mother’s old friends, Richard, wrote about her breasts and Salvador’s womanizing for his non-fiction book. He wrote with provocation and sentimentality while the iron was hot. Dick flew from California to Seabird to show Mom the book. He told me about his Jeep and that he would take me to the city someday, and Mom grew suspicious. He handed her the book after tea. She went to her room, came out, and told him to leave. Mother cried. I found the book underneath her bed and understood the contents like Hildegard, a prophet without an education. Her heart was inflamed, and she knew the scriptures and the gospel. She didn’t understand the tenses or the division of syllables, but she could read it.

The pain was a process to understanding. Men were born to hurt my mother in the flesh and the text, and she was my savior. The language was always wrong. Even in this account I can’t convey the pulse of her. In her sleep I couldn’t turn away, in love with her heavy breathing. She rarely slept, but, when she did, it felt generative and sacred like a bear’s hibernation. Her small palms were red with heat. She always fell asleep with a book on her chest. It was the illumination of living light.

You were my only visitor this week. I’m surprised you came. I said nothing I meant to say. You said ambiguous things: Maybe in the future . . . You want the best for me.

You are going to Colorado for Christmas. You brought a bra for Patricia like I asked.

Patricia cried when I gave it to her. Her family lives away from her, and when her husband died, she wanted to die. She seemed certain that it was her time. Sometimes suicidality doesn’t seem dark; it seems fair.

The therapist says that instead of thinking of the loss of you, I must visualize a space for myself and focus on the details of that space. I have old spaces in my registry to recall. I think of you often, but there are still spaces unchanged by you.

Uncle Harold’s shack: a teal, crisp marshmallow since his wife allegedly burned it down, with him in it. I can imagine the charred teddy bear in the middle of his den. I run my hands over the craggy ends of every black cupboard. I wonder what Uncle Harold looks like in his grave. His hair is twelve dead strands that stick to my hand. His knuckles look like Liberace’s, because, thank god, my mother and her siblings were flamboyant. He has long, white cuffs. His slacks are wool and pleated. His brown mouth is closed and tight. I’ve gone mentally to Uncle’s home, and his grave, because of the intrusive thought that while I color in the evenings you are sitting across from a woman at a restaurant table. While I’m walking along dull-blue lines or gluing Popsicle sticks, you are with a white woman named Laura. She plays tennis. She’s an ethereal white woman who thinks dogs are people too. You think, Isn’t this nice. You’re tempted to mention the sad woman in the hospital, your ex. It might assuage your guilt or get you laid, and it might kill me to imagine this here.

You tell her that your last relationship was all-consuming.

When you told me that I want too much, I considered how much you take.

Laura tells you that she got out of something too. She has a frailty I don’t have. Even if I never ate again, I could not present myself so meekly: bird-boned Laura. You treat her like a pal and are happy with the passionless art of settling—of forgetting.

I try not to imagine you laughing at her dog stories.

I return to Harold’s home. It’s dark. Abandoned. It’s night. The old, dead walls are illuminated by the truck stop across the street. I can hear you telling me that the shack will fall on me. By the time I get out of this hospital you’ll be missing the smell of her on your pillow.

I tried to cry into a wall as silently as I could. I tried to call my friend to get me from your house. It would be dangerous to forgive you for that kind of abandonment. I think it’s dangerous to let go of a transgression when the transgressor is not contrite. I think of myself in black lingerie, crying against your adobe wall.

It might hurt you to know that another man loves me, but I’m not sure. For several days I did crazy things before I committed myself. I begged you to see me. I went to your bar, and my friends let me have my grief, in long drives, close to your home, while they explained that love is like this. They read endless letters of mine and told me that it was all enough. I was enough and sometimes people break up. I felt juvenile. A friend is in love with me, and when the town lit the luminaries outside of your bar on a December night, I told him that I was not finished loving you.