The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (11 page)

My sister nods thoughtfully.

“I think Hannah is basically okay and that you can relax a little around this transitional time. You know? Let her have those experimental conversations!”

“Those what?” I ask.

“Whoops,” Kaitlin says, furrowing her brow. “Maybe this is one of those secrets she said absolutely not to tell you?” She shakes her head. “
Meh
—I can’t keep track. Anyway, apparently Hannah says at school she is experimenting with different ways of having a conversation. Like sometimes, when her friends are talking about boys, which Hannah is not interested in, she will suddenly interrupt and say loudly, ‘I’m really bored with this!’ and will flounce away. Hannah says she is also experimenting with this really loud British-accented voice, based on the nanny of those kids in that show.”

“What show?”

“I don’t know—I try to block a lot of this out.”

“She sounds sometimes maybe a little histrionic,” I admit.

“I wonder where she gets that?” says Kaitlin.

I AM
depositing some laundry on that horn of laundry plenty known as Hannah’s bed. I notice that hidden behind her headboard she has penciled the word “SADNESS,” augmented by a row of about a dozen tears. That’s the final straw. I snap.

I go and get her immediately. She is cheerfully cutting out Internet cat photos and using a lot of Scotch tape from the dispenser that is supposed to live on my “desk” (the dining room table). On top of her open science book is a striped legging and the wrapper from an ice-cream sandwich.

“Hannah,” I inform her in no uncertain terms. “I know you are a preteen and you are going through a tough transitional time, emotionally.”

“Uh-huh,” she says guardedly.

“It’s like this,” I say in exasperation. “
So am I
. Listen, everybody has a different kind of mother! I’ve done a lot of reading about this. There is the difficult mother, the reactive mother, and the envious mother. I of course had a depressed mother. And right now you have a mother who is going through that thing right now, perimenopause, which means you have a medieval-times mother. Everything for me right now is medieval times. George12 brings dishonor upon you, I ride my horse to George12’s castle and disembowel him with a giant spiked metal ball on a chain, singing lusty Gaelic chantey tunes the whole time and I twirl his spraying intestines above my head. Like with my middle-aged Volvo, I don’t have a temperature or emotional thermostat that actually works.

“This means that if you are going to noodle around and do teen-goth things like penciling ‘SADNESS’ on your wall with a row of arty tears, you’d better be prepared to be yanked out immediately of that ridiculous performing-arts middle school you are in where half the class is named Savannah or Chloe and to be transferred immediately instead to Van Nuys Middle School where everyone is either a six-foot-tall Latino or Armenian or Egyptian boy with tats and where I will put you in seventh-grade Running. You’ll be on the running team! Either that or I am going to lock you up until you turn forty, and I am not joking around. I mean it.
Capisce?
”

“I love my school!” she cries out in alarm. “No! And I’m actually not that sad! I was just experimenting with drawing eyes!”

“Well, missy,” I say. “Then you’d better pull it together.You are simply going to have to manage your emotions like a school extra-credit project. If you want a teen-goth wall, fine, put it up, but really go big with it. Don’t do something sad like pencil it on a hidden place on your wall because that alarms me. And also please take down that ridiculous mood meter on your Facebook page because there is only room for exactly one moody person here, and that is your mother. Who is the biggest middle-schooler of all? Your mother! So toughen up, TTYL and BRB!”

So in the end we two infertile and possibly “unfeminine” females shake hands, step over our piles of laundry, and go downstairs to make popcorn, which we douse with Tabasco and chili powder while discussing the fascinating architecture of the dishes piled in the sink, which neither of us chooses to wash at that moment. We may not have solved all of middle school’s problems, but there’s a temporary truce over the battlefield, and in an hour there will be a new episode of
Family Guy
. We will continue to take an elaborate break from the chores of discussing our feelings. Which in a way is a kind of female liberation.

Bench Warrant for My Father’s Arrest

T
HANK GOODNESS,
GIVEN THE
wreck I’ve made of my midlife, I have someone solid to depend on, regarding the futures of my daughters. Thank God there is Grandpa, standing by with his wisdom, support, concern, and, last but not least—money.

Oh but wait a minute—no!

Which is to say, a call now comes from Grandpa. It is not, as one might hope, an announcement that he is transferring new funds into his granddaughters’ college accounts. Rather, he asks, could I rush out to Malibu to help him? There appears to be a bench warrant for his arrest.

LET US
pause for a moment of explanation.

My eighty-eight-year-old, thrice-divorced, retired Chinese engineer father is the local Malibu eccentric. He has the unkillable disposition and leathery constitution of a lizard. (His resting pulse rate is something like 34.) His cheapness is legendary: It goes beyond frugality into actual sport. He doesn’t just hitchhike, he Dumpster-dives (it may be expired grocery sushi, but it’s free!). When my mom was still around, when she was running in her lipstick and heels and my dad was disappearing daily into his aerospace job, our family had to hold it together—sort of. Sure there were beakers of green tea bubbling like in a mad scientist’s lab on the stove and stacks of his company washroom’s stolen paper towels in our bathrooms. Sure my parents fought (always about money), but my mother maintained at least a physical order. The fridge was full, the beds were made, and overall our 1964 Southern California tract house was gleaming. However, now my mother is gone, my elderly dad still lives at home, and sad to say, the house has never been updated or even really cleaned. In a sort of Miss Havisham–style, the family house still has the same sparkling cottage-cheese ceilings, 1964 sunburst linoleum, grease-spattered—and that’s several decades of grease—O’Keefe and Merritt stove, and cracked glass shower stalls, since repaired with duct tape. It’s the sort of a home where you might find a broken toilet currently being used as a planter. I say “might” as I have not dared to enter a bathroom there since the (first) George Bush administration.

Who lives in the house? For a while it was my dad alone. But then he started to get lonely. Having as we did wildly mixed feelings about growing up there, given how constantly my parents argued and how unhappy our mother grew, it’s not as if Kaitlin and I made it a point to visit often. So when my father reached his seventies, he decided he should procure a new Chinese immigrant wife to help him into his dotage. As opposed to “difficult” Western women, like my German mother had turned out to be, an obedient Chinese wife would accept the distinctly nonfeminist role of cutting up his fruit and massaging his bunions in exchange for U.S. citizenship. And indeed, after several spectacular misfires, on his third try he found Alice. A Manchurian twenty years younger than himself, Alice was able to bear him, it seemed, because of a particular innocence and sweetness of her own that allowed her simply to block him out when he started raging (often).

In addition to Dumpster-diving, a love for which they shared, the thrifty Chinese couple soon cobbled together yet a new cash-positive scheme: renting out Kaitlin’s and my bedrooms and even the den in their Miss Havisham house to boarders. Where did they list the ad? Craigslist, of course. Do I help him post listings? Yes—because it’s something I can do from a distance, and the longer he thrives in his murky ecosystem the longer I can stay away. Is there a vetting process besides seeing if a check will clear? No. So we’ve had some problems. Once, when I posted a listing with the clearly too-optimistic title “For the Adventurous Beachcomber!” to my surprise I got a deluge of letters from people frantic to spend $550 a month to live in my dad’s (eerily not pictured—which I thought was a dead giveaway) hellhole. These eager renters were, almost to the last man, twenty-nine-year-old British construction engineers from London—by unusual coincidence, too, all were nonsmoking Scorpio vegetarians who had to get out of the UK immediately due to the strict requirements of their twelve-month construction contract and who thus all wanted to rush me cashier’s checks for two months’ advance rent. In short, they were Nigerians.

Even more exotic, however, were the renters who were not scams. There was the transsexual alcoholic whose operation was apparently not 100 percent totally completely successful. He/she would call me at home late at night and accuse me of trying to steal his/her identity. There have been sixty-something beachcombers, vitamin sellers, hollow-eyed Manson-looking types on disability. There have been knife fights at midnight over misplaced sprouters and juicers (vegans can be very edgy). There has been some lightly botched drug dealing. One guy was a diabetic (he said) who left an explosion of blood and medical supplies in the kitchen.

Kaitlin has described my father’s place as less halfway house than all-the-way house.

Then again, some of the tenants are “pretty nice.” Overall, barring some of the obvious spectacular misfires, my dad says he generally enjoys his tenants’ company.

And what do I say? I say fantastic. It may not be pretty, but if you saw their spreadsheets, you would know that my dad and Alice are actually making money. They’re completely independent. They are continuing to sock away cash. Dumpster-dive away!

But of course now the first wrinkle in this madcap Craigslist adventure is apparently this bench warrant. The bench warrant, I learn, is because Janice, a former renter, apparently had a yappy dog even though my dad claims vociferously she was not supposed to. There is little way of confirming anyone’s side of this story. My father is my father, and Janice was, I recall, the sort of tenant given to writing notes to other tenants literally on paper towels. Here is a sample excerpt (because I track all the paperwork) to a fellow tenant named Douglas:

You don’t need to know that God made my receptors-magnetic field down When I get BAD HEADACHES the medicine changes me May God strike you down with the DEVILS BIBBLE after the other day you told me all about your GIRLFRIEND MARIA and I heard you with her Doing It with ur marijuana muffins and CRYSTAL PILLS??? Dr. Loh’s house is all your dishes dishes dishes cups and cigarettes GET A LIFE Is rooted in you Americans—Me—Me—Me. Lost my dog Pebbles and then lee came behind me call me a WHORE f— YOU!!!

Bottom line, Janice got into some sort of altercation with my father, she accused him of harassing her dog, and then she threw a lawsuit against him with a court summons. Thanks to the advice of his legal counsel (a mellower tenant with a few years of law school who was a practitioner of the Bahai religion), my father did not bother showing up. But unfortunately this was like traffic court: No matter how whimsical the charges, you have to show up, otherwise you owe the suer fourteen hundred dollars, which my father now owes Janice. He hasn’t paid it, and that’s why there is a bench warrant for his arrest.

• • •

I ARRIVE
at 10:00
A.M.
on a Monday at the Malibu courthouse, over an hour’s drive from my home. My father looks pretty close to a bag person today. His unmatched clothes hang limply, he carries his usual “briefcase” of a brown paper shopping bag, his unshaved gray beard looks, no way around it (shaving accident?), a tad bloody. He shuffles a bit with his Parkinson’s—sometimes he uses a wheelchair, though not today. Alice sits next to him, anxious, birdlike, fuzzy black Smurf-doll hair, in strange girl-doll clothes with white socks in tiny buckled sandals. She carries a clearly repurposed Abercrombie & Fitch bag.

On the other side of the courtroom, several rows behind, is Janice. Her shoulder-length hair is wet and severely combed back; her eyes are red, her mouth is grim, and she is dressed in a wrinkled gray business suit.

Judge Connor calls the court to order, and summons my father and his ex-tenant to their respective stands. My father wrongly believes that this is his cue to heatedly argue his case. Bench warrants aside, he enjoys a good lawsuit. To be sued is to know you’re alive. (At one point both of his previous Chinese wives had thrown million-dollar liens against his house, but as a precautionary measure, he had already gotten his kids to throw million-dollar liens against him first, so the ex-wives won’t get anything. I think.) My father immediately begins bellowing a mile a minute about how terrible this woman Janice is, what a bad tenant, what a criminal, and how menacing her dog Pebbles.

Judge Connor stops him cold.

“That’s all well and good, Mr. Loh. But that has nothing to do with the fact that a court date was set and you failed to appear. There is nothing I can do about it. By county law the fine is fourteen hundred dollars. It is not my decision to make. It’s county law. How are you going to pay this fine, Mr. Loh?”

The ensuing dialogue has a predictable rhythm—the sort of circular cadences one associates with small children.

My dad: “But blah, blah, blah! Over and over again I told her about that dog! Bad tenant! Bad tenant! Blah, blah, blah! You should have heard the barking—”

Judge Connor: “Yes I know, Mr. Loh. But the case is closed. Sir, how are you going to pay this fine?”

My dad: “Oh but blah, blah, blah! Late with her checks! Oil-leaking car! Terrible disco music!”

Judge Connor: “Mr. Loh. As I said, it doesn’t matter. How are you going to pay this fine?”

My dad: “But Mr. Judge! I am an old man! I need quiet! I need ice cream! Where is the ice cream?” My corns! My bunions! The nation of Islam! Seventeenth-century Flemish haberdashery!” (You see the general point I am making—he is getting more and more worked up about matters entirely unrelated to today’s case.)