Take This Man (23 page)

“You really don't have
any
plans to come home again at all, do you?” my mother said. She was right, but I couldn't tell her that.

“We'll see,” I said.
Please disappear
, I thought.

• • •

On the December night I left Portia Street, my grandmother clutched me by the porch railing she had leaned on a thousand mornings watching me walk to school. When she had seen me off for college, my grandmother christened me a man and encouraged my mother to release me. Then she showed my mother how it was done. My grandmother shouted my name and clasped her hands together over her head like a prizefighter. How she let me go was a gift.

I walked down the stairs that night with Rudy and my mother. With Pat's Christmas lights turned off, my grandmother's silhouette blended into the web of jacaranda tree branches she'd spent years ­trying to amputate. I was around the age my biological father, Candido, had been when he left me. Had he known he wouldn't see me again? Was this the last time I'd see my grandmother, or my home? Did he look back the way I was looking at the house now, his guilt tempered by a sense of liberation and joy? Did he sprint down the stairs with the same lightness in his feet I had in mine?

“Take good care of my mother,” I told Rudy, because it sounded like the kind of thing a protective son would say instead of good-bye. It was a feeble attempt to be menacing; I knew there was nothing I could do from across the country.

Rudy and I embraced in an awkward pat-down. Then I hugged my mother.

If our good-bye had a hint of dramatic tension or anger, or a portentous exchange that foreshadowed the future, I'd have done a better job of remembering it. It was a simple “See you soon” and a hug. It was a hug, in memory, that seemed to go on forever, one that clung around my neck like a weighted anchor.

Driving off, they—my family—blended into nothing but darkness. I exhaled a comic-book bubble sigh of relief, confident it'd be a long time before I had to see them again.

• • •

I was out of contact for a month while my girlfriend and I lived at her brother's place in Hoboken waiting to move into a high-rise waterfront apartment in Jersey City. Within minutes of getting a live phone connection, my mother called, and we talked for an hour.

“Here's what I want from New York,” she said, and rattled off a list of souvenirs I pretended to write down. When I ended our call, she said, “All right, Brando! C'mon, New York City!” She sounded upbeat, animated, as if she'd saved up all her energy from the past few weeks for this one phone call with her
son.

Sometime that evening, a Saturday, she came down with the symptoms of a mild cold.

On Sunday the symptoms of her cold worsened, and she stayed in bed. At some point, she used the phone and pressed “record” on a machine she'd purchased to tape calls. She recorded one side of an unintelligible conversation that I'm convinced was with herself. When I listened to this recording later, her voice was muffled, drugged, almost deranged, like sleep talk. The tape ends with the only word I understood: “Good-bye.”

Late Sunday night and then on Monday, her condition worsened. She sprayed Lysol in her crotch instead of changing her days-old underwear and staggered out of bed several times, complaining to my grandmother about the temperature in the house.

“I'm cold, Momma,” she said. “Why am I so cold?”

My grandmother gave her a stack of musty Southwestern pastel bedspreads and a jar of Vicks VapoRub, and then made her some soup. On her stereo, my mother played not her beloved Stevie Nicks but Julia Fordham. (Her CD player would spit Fordham's
East West
out the next time it was plugged back in. The first track is called “Killing Me Slowly.” The album sits unlistened to in my record collection.)

“I'm coming to the end of my life,” my mother had written several months ago. “I don't even care or give a fuck about the pain that will be inflicted. Sure, I will be screaming at the top of my lungs, but I feel, or fear, that pain is normal.”

My mother was quiet the next day, Tuesday. She hadn't left her bed. My grandmother checked on her in the afternoon and asked if she wanted some soup for dinner.

My mother said, “Yes, Momma. I'd like some.” My grandmother closed my mother's bedroom door behind her, out of habit.

“There has to be something more than my closed door and my room,” she wrote. “I wonder what AIDS patients think of. What is everybody's last moments like?”

• • •

On Tuesday, January 6, the same date my great-grandmother Lucille had died at the age of thirty-eight, Rudy left a message on my machine: “Brando, I need you to call me back right away. Okay? Call me as soon as you get this message.”

My mother had left hundreds of similar emergencies on my machine, so I avoided this one at first. I didn't want her to feel I could be paged three thousand miles away. There was a crackling fear in Rudy's voice, though; an insistency that sounded like backbone. The previous year, a college buddy had called to tell me a mutual friend had died in a Yosemite hiking accident. He had that same edge and crackle in his voice, as if the words were stuck in his throat and he had to use all the strength in his stomach muscles to dislodge them, like a bit of food blocking your windpipe. He had to force the words out before they choked him.

When Kitt came home from work, I played her the message. “Either my grandmother fell down the stairs or my mother died.” I said this with a flippant, macho laugh, though I don't know why.

Rudy picked up the phone. “Your mother is dead, Brando.”

I leaned over to Kitt and parroted, “My mother is dead.” She covered a gasp and put her head on my shoulder. I stiffened, shrugged her head off, and listened impassively. Rudy passed the phone to my grandmother.

“The paramedics tried for half an hour,” my grandmother said, sounding chastened. “And the cops were so nice. I'll never say anything bad about ‘pigs' again,” she said.

My mother had been acting erratic, it's true, but nothing seemed wrong. “You know how she always complained about everything,” my grandmother said. “I thought she was faking. She just seemed a little sick. How could I know anything was really wrong with her?”

I didn't blame her. My mother feigned so many illnesses over the years, how could my grandmother distinguish a fake malady from a real one?

An autopsy determined the cause of death as “dilated cardiomyopathy.” A flabby heart. No blood poisoning, no brain tumor, not a trace anything else was wrong save that her heart was too weak to support the strain of her weight and sedentary living. She was fifty.

My grandmother scoffed at the report's wording. “Obese?” my grandmother said. “She wasn't obese. They act like she was some kind of carnival freak.” Later, she'd find the speed and a hoard of illegally prescribed fen-phen in nonchildproof jars that my mother had been cocktailing to lose weight.

I had years of practice losing fathers. I had a lifetime to learn how to try to live with my mother. I had a day to learn how to live without her.

Then another day.

And another.

And another.

And another.

10

“Y
ou sound like something bad happened, Brando,” Frank said.

“Are calls this late at night ever good news?”

“No, I guess not.”

I told him my mother had died.

“What?” he asked. “That's impossible. I
just
talked to her. I mean, I'd just gotten a few calls where someone hung up on me. You never told her I got married, did you?”

“No,” I said.

“Good. I didn't want her to know that. Did I ever tell you how we met?” When he finished, he said, “God, she was
such
a babe. That is how I'll always remember her. I can't believe I was fortunate enough to have known her.”

• • •

My grandmother asked me, “When are you coming back for the funeral?”

I'd promised I wouldn't run home the first time my mother asked because I'd never return to New York if I did, and yet here my mother was, “asking” me to come this one final time. The house in Echo Park felt like a point where space and light collapsed around it, swallowing lives whole. Returning home meant helping my grandmother “for a few days” that would turn into weeks and months, maybe years. Would I take my mother's place in the house? I'd have to end my relationship with Kitt. Worst of all, I'd have to share a house with Rudy. I knew he wasn't going anywhere now.

I sent a bouquet of flowers—the path of least inconvenience—and then tried to cheat my way out of guilt by reconnecting with Sofie, asking if she'd attend the service.

“You meant a lot to her,” I said. “She'd want you there.”

“I can't do that,” she said. “We're not dating anymore. Besides, wouldn't she want
you
there?”

I told my grandmother I wasn't coming to the funeral. “If I go back to LA now,” I said, “I know I won't return to New York.”

“This is about what I expected from you,” she said.

My grandmother sent funeral service announcements that gave my mother's name as Running Deer along with two of her married ones. She listed my mother's real name as a pseudonym.

“She always wanted to be an Indian,” my grandmother said. “Now she gets to be one.”

About twenty mourners came to the service and offered their memories of my mother. My half uncle Oscar said, “She helped me with my alphabet.”

“What kind of dumb fucking thing is that to say at a funeral?” my grandmother asked afterward. She praised Frank for showing up and his heartfelt eloquence. “I never realized how good a man he was until now,” she said.

Frank phoned me later. “It was a lovely ceremony. I'm sorry you couldn't be here with us.”

The late-night hang-up calls that plagued him for years stopped when my mother died.

• • •

My grandmother searched for my mother's mythical “cash stash” that she'd bragged about for years and claimed was somewhere in her room—a room she had lived in for forty-five of her fifty years. The one plausible hiding area was her bookshelf of true-crime biographies. I pictured dozens of flopped-open, face-down books with their spines cracked around my grandmother's feet like a pile of dead birds. Amid those pages, she found a single fifty-dollar bill. (The state of California holds an additional $62.64 in my mother's real name, waiting for me to claim.)

Both Rudy and my grandmother said they'd wait until I came home to spread my mother's ashes. “No matter how long it takes,” my grandmother said. “We want to do this when you're ready.”

A month later, my grandmother had waited long enough. She and Rudy scattered my mother's ashes illegally somewhere into the San Pedro Harbor.

• • •

I didn't cry over my mother's death. I couldn't cry because I was incapable of crying. When my tears came at last, I cried because I'd been deprived of a chance to lash out at her for my pain. I was stricken with a paranoid depression more brutal and unforgiving than my college bout, leaving me incapable of leaving our thirty-first-floor apartment. I couldn't collect the mail during the day because I thought the elevator cable would snap. I gained fifty pounds and grew my hair out for an entire year down to my waist; my mother had liked my hair long, so to rebel I'd always cut my hair short instead of growing it out. I listened to the wind howl against the sides of the building and imagined jumping from our window, wondering how many seconds I'd have in the air before I hit the sidewalk. I turned away from Kitt whenever she touched me because I
couldn't
respond to her touch. I wasn't
feeling
a thing for the woman I loved. I sat in a single spot on the couch from the time Kitt left for work to the time she came home, cataloguing the passing hours based on the way sunlight moved through the apartment. She would shout out to me from the front door every day she arrived from work, desperate not to hear the whooshing sound of an open window, dreading a suicide letter cocked on an end table jutting out at her like a spoiled tongue.

I didn't want to live or to die. I was afraid to do either.

I started therapy to combat the depression. On my way to a ­session, I was distracted by the Stevie Nicks song “Landslide” on the radio and almost got slammed by a car running a red light.

Running low on money, I asked Rudy if he could send me a few dollars to help me out.

“I don't want you to sell my car,” I said. “I just need a little help until I feel better.”

“I can do that,” he said. “Your mother wanted me to take care of you, and I gave her my promise I would.”

We'd never speak again.

• • •

“Rudy is a good man to take all this crap. I would have been gone a long time ago. I realize I will never love him, but I do like him as a dear friend,” my mother wrote in her unfinished book. After she died, my grandmother found a xeroxed copy of my mother's ornamental marriage certificate to Rudy. On it, my mother wrote: “Nov 26th, 1996, at 9:42 P.M. Rudy asked me for a divorce.” Rudy then signed his name under her note.

My mother had never legally married anyone except Candido, so a divorce was impossible, but it was the first clue that Rudy had envisioned a life without my mother. Now that she was dead, my grandmother saw what his idea of that life was. She said he stopped coming home right after work. He stopped eating dinner with my grandmother. He stayed out for several days at a time, stopping by to shower, change clothes, and sleep. Confronted by my grandmother one night, Rudy said, “My bed is cold. Do you want to join me?”

“I don't take my daughter's lovers,” she told him.

It's conceivable this happened. Rudy may have thought that this was the one way he could stay in the house and perhaps inherit it. My grandmother wanted to evict Rudy but said she couldn't do it on her own.

“You need to help me move Rudy out,” she told me. “With force if you have to.”

Seeing catastrophe stalk every decision I made, I opted not to fly and bought a cross-country train ticket. Kitt sat with me at a TGI Fridays in Penn Station before I left and talked me through why I was going back home. What did I hope to accomplish out there? What could I do that my grandmother couldn't do by changing the locks? Would I come back? Wasn't my life with her now?

She was right. I called my grandmother and cashed in my ticket. When Rudy came home and found that his keys didn't work, he didn't
tap-tap-tap
on the door but tried to force his way into the house. He yelled, screamed, and kicked at the security gate. My grandmother threatened to call her now-beloved “pigs” if he didn't leave.

“At least let me have my clothes, you fucking bitch!” he shouted. She kept the door shut and called the police. Rudy stormed down the stairs and didn't return.

A few days later, a repossession officer gave my grandmother the rest of the story. Rudy used the car I signed over to him as collateral to borrow money and secure a number of credit cards he couldn't have gotten with his bad credit record. These cards were all maxed out. The officer gave my grandmother his business card in case Rudy reappeared, but I knew there was no chance of that. I'd been through this four times before. This time a father's leaving wasn't a shock, or a heartbreak, or a betrayal, or a loss of innocence. It was a cure.

• • •

In a memoir, a day of your life can be a long chapter; a month a single line of prose; a year can be a text break or an entire blank space. Time doesn't work that way. It forces us to give each moment we embrace the same amount of room as the moments we want to forget. Here, on these pages, it's easy for me to cover in a few words the year and a half between my mother dying and my grandmother getting sick. I can ignore the months that passed where my grandmother waited in her house for my phone call, or the weekend I set aside my fear of flying to attend a friend's wedding in Los Angeles but didn't drive up to my grandmother's house to spend a few hours with her. Back then I had to outrun memories of my grandmother to pretend I hadn't turned as callous as I was acting. I called what I was doing “protection.”

Without my mother by her side to heckle at life, my grandmother had no more errands to run, no more arguments to fight. A year and a half after my mother died, my grandmother fell ill. An incorrect diagnosis of gallstones kept her in the hospital; the correct diagnosis of terminal cancer would bring her home. We spoke on the phone before she checked out of the hospital.

“I haven't heard from you in a long time,” she said. It was a shock to hear my grandmother now sound like the seventy-nine-year-old she was.

“I've been busy with work,” I said, and then decided to make the leap that a year of therapy had suggested I take. “And I didn't want to fight with you anymore.”

“Yeah, fighting is bad,” she said. “I don't like the fighting.”

“When we fight, Grandma, it's hurtful to me,” I said. “I would really like if it you didn't yell at me anymore, because you're my grandmother, and I love you, and we're the only family we have left now.”

I thought I could see her nodding her head in agreement.

“You're right,” she said. “I'd like for us to have a better relationship.”

Was it this easy to clear the air? Could years of turmoil have been avoided with one honest conversation? I'd never said these things to my mother and regretted it. My grandmother was sick, but perhaps we could live out whatever remaining time we had together bonded by our longing for my mother and unburdened by the mistakes of our past.

When she was released, my grandmother sent me a blank Snoopy birthday card. Inside was a short, eviscerating note about how “rotten and ungrateful a grandson” I was to have had such a terrible conversation with a dying woman. I don't remember the note's wording except the last line: “You could have at least waited until I was dead to bad-mouth me.”

I didn't save that letter. In its place, what I've chosen to keep and read from when I need to hear my grandmother's voice is a dedication she signed in an Agatha Christie book and gave me as a gift the spring before I moved to New York:

“May the roads rise up to meet you, May the winds always be at your back, May the sun shine warm upon your face, The rains fall soft upon your self, and until we meet again, May God hold you in the hollow of his hand.

“With love always, Grandmother June. OOXX”

• • •

We'd meet again two months later in October. I hadn't seen her since I left for New York. Frank called and said, “I stopped by to check in on Grandma. The doctors say she'll last a few weeks, but man, I don't think she'll last more than a few days. You should get out here.”

I didn't come home for my mother's funeral out of fear I'd become my grandmother's keeper. That I'd take my mother's place in the house. That I'd
become
my mother. Now the fear of losing my other mother without saying good-bye pushed me back to California. I flew home three days after Frank's phone call to find a boarder living in my mother's room. By request or design, he'd kept it almost ghoulishly intact from the way she'd left it when she died eighteen months earlier. I was also greeted by a woman I'd never met before nor would ever see or hear from again.

“I'm one of your mother's close friends,” she said, offering a name I didn't recognize. Throughout my mother's nearly twenty years working from home, she mentioned just one close friend. It wasn't this woman.

“Your mother asked me to look out for you,” she continued. “So I looked at your grandmother's trust. She was very angry with you, so I helped her change it.”

Years before, my grandmother had set up a living trust that left her house to me and my mother. She gave my uncle one dollar for what she told me was “a lifetime of neglect and being a wicked son.” When my mother died, Oscar visited my grandmother on occasion, offering for both of them what I'd hoped was some solace or companionship. With the help of my mother's friend, the trust had been amended six weeks before I came back home to give my uncle half the house. My grandmother's signature was unrecognizable, but then so was she.

I hadn't seen my grandmother since the night she set me free from her front porch. She was unconscious in her bed, a glucose bag by her side, unable to speak and jaundiced from cheek to leg. Her arms and body were flattened out across the bed, her periwinkle caftan riding up past her varicose thighs. Her mouth was slack open, her hands clumped into fists, a fighter on her deathbed.

I asked the boarder, “Shouldn't we close her window? It's freezing in here.”

“I don't think that'll help anything,” he said.

There was no movement in her hands, no response in her body, just the sound of my grandmother's heavy breathing, catching in a soupy sputter, stalling out, and then breath again.

I found a
Peanuts
collection of strips in a stack of old books preserved in my room that I'd read to my grandmother aloud as a child. Next to her clock radio, one of the many “crappy” gifts she said I'd given her over the years, was a cassette sleeve for an Ella Fitzgerald greatest-hits album. I played the tape, unballed one of her hands to hold it, and read to her from the
Peanuts
book.