Don't Let Me Die In A Motel 6 or One Woman's Struggle Through The Great Recession (6 page)

I guess that “some behavioral problems”
included
:

H
er slugging me in the head.

“Ow!” I groaned,
slumping over my bed
.

“Are you OK?”
Aurora asked solicitously.
“Let me get you some ice.”

“But….” I sputtered,
overcome with the farce of it all.
“
You’re
the one who hit me!”

She was
a champion verbal abuser
.
She’d
been trained by the best – her Mom.
“You’re
a
fat
, ugly
bitch!” she’
d
scream at me.
“Your sister is right – you waste money
and never save
!
You should get rid of those horses!!”
She knew exactly what missiles to lob to exact the maximum hurt.

She was there to break up our marriage – to triangulate, as Nigel said.
Though he did his best to help.
She insisted on sleeping in our bed –
between us.

“What kind of marriage is this?” I
asked
the family therapist.

“She needs nurturing,” Nigel said.

Then
came The Incident, the demarcation
that plunged us over the DMZ.
I found out that
Nigel had
taken
a shower
with
her
.
Twice.
Ostensibly, to promote family bondin
g.
This was something he
’d
read in a book.

“
What forty-three year old man takes a shower with a twelve-year old girl
?!”
I screamed.
“This will
never
happen again, do you understand
me
?
Don’t you have an ounce of common sense?!”

He looked at me blankly.
Between his
intellectual hubris
,
immaturity
, and lack of experience in the real world, Nigel’s CPU
was devoid of the
Hey Wait A Minute,
What The Fuck Am I Doing?
chip.

The
general
vibe in our North Bend house, which had
been
pretty
OK
before,
devolved into something
resembling the Syrian riots
.

There was the time I had to grab
Aurora’s
arms and Nigel grab
bed
her legs,
lifting her airborne since
she was hellbent on attacking us.
When she
sang,
ad nauseum
, a little ditty
all the way down
(the very long)
NE 8
th
in Bellevue:
“My Mom is really really cool/My Dad is something of a fool.”
Multiply it by a thousand.
She would take off down the street, running for blocks until Nigel caught her; throw tantrums in the middle of Target
which usually involved hitting and the police.

She grew t
o hate Nigel, and
I
could
understand
why
.
His idea of being “a good parent” was to follow her around, scream at the neighborhood boy (who was
all of
four-feet tall)
who went
into the barn
with her
– to
fe
ed the horses some Mrs. Pasture
s
cookies.
I later
f
orced him to apologize
:
to a sixth-grader.

Nigel’s
OCD
took on the patina of
paranoia, and he started to read our emails; actually stood
against
the closed office door
of our therapist
, listening,
when I
talked to
her
alone
.
He had no clue whatsoever
about dealing
with a pre-pubescent girl.
He commented on
Aurora’s
“budding breasts”;
wanted to know her bra size.
I would creep out
to the drugstore,
smuggling
Kotex
like a drug
mule
, since
she
was mortified he would find out
she’d got
ten
her period
and
email
his
entire
Address Book
.

I was in the middle, and this is no tired cliché:
I was
literally
in the middle.
They would have their
altercations
, Nigel on my right and Aurora on my left, screaming over me and onto me.
I should have listened to my
work
friend Michele,
who
, prior to the adoption,
said
– and knew
–
“Having
children
changes everything.”

“I don’t think so,” I replied,
as
smugly as Nigel.
But it does.

Of course, life with Aurora was not
100%
awful
.
Between her explosive bou
ts, we managed to have fun.
We would go into the barn and do voices for the horses, sending them to school and appointing them
a lawyer: a
black
lab named Barky P. Esquire.
We would dance together in the kitchen, as my Mom had done
so many times
with me.
I would take her to the movies and to Krispy Kreme for a “girl’s day out.”
Being a girlie girl, she would give me advice
on makeup and hair,
and believe me
, I needed
it
.

One time, on a frozen trip to Leavenworth, she’d taken a pair of my underwear (“pants” in British) and attached them to a st
ick, forming a slick sailboat.
My
later
standup line
at The Comedy Store
?
(“That was fine.
But what
really
hurt was when she entered it in America’s Cup – and won.”)
BA DA BING.
Try the veal
.
I
won’t
be here till Friday.

In fact
,
I was the first one on that
2008
plane
out of Seattle
, minimal luggage in hand.
Destination:
Los Angeles.
Home.

Tom
Wolfe said you can't go home again, but I did and found it strangely changed.
The
outer trappings were
the same:
same old
halted
traffic;
same dusty,
trash-strewn Valley; same sun
–
glorious sun
–
spotlighting
this desert
and making it
a place
with
More Stars Than There Are In Heaven
.
Koreans
still
rubbed sho
ulders with African-Americans (
and sometimes shot at them
)
; Latino gardeners staged hunger strikes for the right to rev their leaf blowers; and multimillion
dollar
Venice
townhouses
stood
a stone'
s throw from junkies
who threw
needles over the walls.

I had been gone for five years, and essentially forgotten.
I had missed so many
Hanukkahs
, Birthdays, Fourth
of
Julys
, that I had fallen off the A
-
list and
couldn't crash a
D-
list
party.
My friends were still around but in L.A.,
you rarely saw people even if you lived next door.
It was a silo
ed
society, each container
holding
a house/cocoon with a home theatre, and a similarly insulating SUV.
The sense of what Joan Didion
had
called "a form of secular communion"
–
driving
–
barely existed anymore, unless you were running someone off the road.

So back I ca
me, the prodigal daughter,
permitted to
stay in my
sister
’s
7,2
00
square-
foot house for the duration of
two
month
s
.
These
were
her
rules, and
s
he was
Queen o
f
Her Domain.
I tried to be as unobtru
sive as possible, staying in the guest
Blue
Room with its ceiling-mounted TV (what I really wanted
was a light so
I could read).
At night,
I
walked an enormous distance from the bed to the bath
room
(of which there were
four
, to paraphrase Mr. Collins
of
P&P
).

Unlike Nigel,
the first thing
I did was to try to find a job. My ex-boss Dale
put me in touch with
his ex-partner, Doreen, who
had a small FileMaker business.
FileMaker is a client/server database (I know this is fascinating), in which
, once upon a time, I
was
expert.
But
five years away from the software had made me
as clumsy as the S
carecrow
on his way to
Oz.

With typical hubris, I plunged into several of Doreen's projects.
She knew a lot, and was a
n excellent
teacher.
A little erratic, but who wasn't in this town?

I noticed a strange phenomenon.
Every morning, setti
ng out
in my Rent A Wreck
from
Rachel’s
Castle
On the Hill
,
I
had to hold
back
tears.
A great sadness would well up inside me, and not even the estrogen I was taking
– post-hysterectomy
–
could damp it down.
What was this about?
Was I missing Nigel and
Aurora?
Hell no!
I was in mourning for
WaMu,
my last warm, safe port o' call.
Now I was surfing boardless on a cresting wave, a
n
d where and how it would break was
anybody’s guess.

I
worked hard for Doreen
, trying to untangle the spaghetti code of others, but ended up b
eing hit in the face
by
a
big bowl of
same
.
I had
simply
been
away
too long,
had missed too many
releases
, d
espite my twenty years’
experience.
In short, I
–
she of the Regents Scholarship and 4.0 average; she who had understood
the
meaning
of
Ulysses
–
stunk.
I mana
ged to fuck up one database big
time.

"Hello?" I was sitting in the San Francisco airport, en
route
to
Seattle, when Doreen called.
She was pissed.

"This whole project is hosed!
You used the wrong tables and I sent this to the client!
I ju
st hope I don't lose them!
Dale
said you were good
–
I expected a lot more."