into it. “I want to get your name. You’re not allowed to call at this hour. I’ll report you.”
“Who was it?” I asked when she’d hung up. At the time I believed they were people calling to sell us things. Later I learned it had been the purchase of the couch, chair, and ottoman at Ralph Lauren that day that led to the debt she could not pay, then to the stress of creditors calling; and later, when I was in high school, unable to pay off the cards, she went through bankruptcy.
I heard her complain about the carnations Ilan sometimes brought—he might have sprung for better flowers. Later she told me that one night when he said he had to work late, she bought a ticket to an opera at Stanford, went alone, and saw him there with another woman. Over the course of the next couple of years they were off and on, sometimes fighting, sometimes separated or back together, broken up for the last time before I started high school. When they weren’t getting along, she and I fought more too.
“You know Ilan’s pinkies? How they twist inward?” she asked me one day in the car. The second joint of both his pinkie fingers bent in at a thirty-degree angle. “It’s a sign that someone isn’t faithful.”
I felt myself above the menial tasks she wanted me to do. I felt humiliated and bored taking out the trash or doing the dishes, and so I would perform these tasks with lethargy and carelessness, doing a sloppy job and then rushing back to my room to work at the earliest opportunity, lazy about anything that didn’t result in academic praise. One night she was still in the kitchen when I came back from dragging the trash to the canister at the side of the house, waiting for me with an air of expectancy.
“Look at the counter,” she said.
I looked for the sponge, but she’d already grabbed it and wrung it out, and was furiously wiping crumbs on the countertop into her cupped hand.
“All I’m asking,” she said, “is that you do the dishes and wipe the counter. Dishes, counter. Get it?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll do it next time.”
“No, you’ll do it this time,” she said.
“But it’s already done,” I said.
“You need to change the behavior.”
“I will,” I said. “I promise. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, mimicking me in a high baby voice. “Little Miss Princess,” she spat.
At the beginning of these mounting arguments, I would try to reason with her, in case I could calm her down. Later, when it was clear she wouldn’t stop, when it was clear that the fight would go on and on, I stood very still and stopped speaking.
A few times before, the phone had rung at the beginning of a fight, interrupting it; she took the call in her room, where I could hear muffled noises. Her friend Michael or Terry had called. Later, when she came to say goodnight, she was no longer upset. I was innocent, I thought, her unhappiness nothing to do with me—she was lonely. This is what I believed and told myself when she started screaming, and it was one of my excuses for being lazy with the dishes, and unhelpful around the house, and contemptuous of her.
“Do you think I’m your maid?” She said it through her teeth, snarling.
“Mom, call a friend,” I said. “Please.”
Besides me, the people my mother yelled about during our fights were Jeff Howson, my father’s accountant, who sent the monthly child-support checks that I was acutely aware were lifelines and, increasingly those days, Kobun. (Compared with how much she mentioned these two men, she rarely brought up my father.)
“Kobun said he’d take care of us, then left me to rot.” Her voice was almost gone. “That crook,” she said, wrinkling up her face.
I didn’t know what she meant. As far as I knew, Kobun didn’t have much to do with us. He was just a Zen Buddhist monk my parents had once known, who’d officiated at the wedding, and who hardly spoke.
Only later would I learn that because her own mother was mentally ill and my father was unresponsive, it had been Kobun my mother had turned to when she got pregnant, asking him what he thought she should do.
“Have the child,” Kobun had advised. “If you need help, I’ll help you.” But in the intervening years he had not offered any help. No one had promised as much as Kobun