a glutton or a brute, we would tease her together, mercilessly ganging up on her until she cried. Gabby was a brash, fat, and happy baby, uncomplicated and selfish. We both envied her, loved her, coddled her, and hated her. Why couldn’t we be more like her? we wondered. Why couldn’t we be like my father, for that matter, drunk and demanding and happy and charming? Why were we always watching, afraid to speak in the moment, thinking up clever replies days later? Why did we need, so badly, to paint our stubby nails with black nail polish? Why were we so drawn to books and movies about witches? Why were we destined to be neurotic prey, trembling rabbits clamped between the hot jaws of larger, better, more vital animals?
For me, watching my mother give up during her trial and fall into the depression that consumed her throughout her prison sentence was a betrayal of such epic proportions that it became one of the great before-and-afters of my life. I learned something deep about myself, about her, about love, and it was a lesson that could not be unlearned. I remember being a kid and thinking it was kind of fun when someone broke their arm, jealous even that they got to wear a cast and have everyone sign it. And then I remember being with my mom after my dad broke my little sister’s arm, which of course we hid completely (the official story was that she fell jumping off a swing), and standing next to my mom, fingering the sleeve of her sweater as the doctor explained the odds of the fracture healing well, and understanding that Gabby’s arm would never be the same, never be as good as it was before. It was that kind of lesson, the lesson I learned during my mother’s trial. Maybe it would have been easier for me if she and I had not been so much alike.
But we were.
Now I think I have assembled something, fragile and piecemeal as it is, that might be called understanding, but when I was seventeen to even think of my mother was to enter a world of memories I could get lost in for hours, and even if I set out to remember or understand just one thing, for instance, I was always trying in those days to conclude whether my mother was a good person or a bad person, I would find myself almost drowning in remembered details: how trash collected in her purse, and how she would have to empty it every few months, the dense mat of receipts and gum wrappers that settled in the bottom, how her face looked as she was listening on the phone, the way her mouth was always slightly open to accommodate her underbite, giving her a look of expectant excitement, her short, bestial-looking thumbnails, her love of overpoweringly sweet perfumes. She was intensely dyslexic and she couldn’t spell anything, would get lost spelling the word “Wednesday,” but she was also a kind of genius. She had an extraordinary memory, though her encyclopedic knowledge was limited to music trivia and pop culture. She knew every nuance of Britney Spears’s life, for instance, and talked about Britney as though she were, if not a close friend, then perhaps a saint, someone whose story could be consulted for guidance as one moved through one’s own life.
And so it came to be that I missed my stop, still staring at the picture of my mother and Gabby (“Cat got your tongue?” Jesus!), and rode on the bus all the way down to Manhattan Beach and then had to wait for another bus to take me back to North Shore, and by the time I got home to Aunt Deedee’s house, I was exhausted and disoriented and so sad it felt like my very being was saturated with it and had begun leaking, causing dark stains on the air around me. Aunt Deedee and Jason were in the living room, and when I opened the door they looked up in unison. There was a plastic tray of Oreos on the coffee table. The TV was on, some kind of sports game show with an obstacle course, but it didn’t seem they’d been watching it. I thought Aunt Deedee was going to be mad at me for being out so late, but instead she looked sad and worried. Oh, I thought. It’s going to be bad.