It is easy for me to remember moments when Mom and I didn’t get along, or when one of us said something cruel, because they stand in such contrast to the rest. I still feel pain or embarrassment or disappointment when I think of fights or misunderstandings we had, most of which occurred in that final year, on the forward edge of adolescence. But I’m glad for these memories. They assure me that my idea of our relationship is accurate, not some rosy thing I constructed after her death.
I remember, so clearly, one Thursday evening. Thursday was Seinfeld night—we never missed an episode, and we both loved to talk about the show when we saw her friends or sisters. I knew that other kids my age were watching Beverly Hills, 90210 in that time slot, and I liked that Mom and I had this instead. It proved we were special, somehow more sophisticated.
On this particular Thursday, I was reading in our spare room. Mom let me read almost anything I wanted, and by then I was mostly interested in adult novels. I read with intensity, dropping into a book as if into a deep, cold lake, my pulse slowed, my hearing muffled. That day I was reading a thick romance that had racy scenes I didn’t want her to know about. Mom knocked on the door, then opened it and stuck her head in. “Hey! It’s almost time for Seinfeld!”
I was irrationally, incredibly frustrated. I sighed like the worst parody of an annoyed teenager. “Uhh, I don’t know . . .” I said.
“What?” She frowned a little, looked hurt but mostly confused. “Well, I’ll come back and let you know when it starts . . .”
The conversation devolved into an argument. I didn’t want to be interrupted, Mom thought I had a tone, and so on. Finally I said, “I don’t care about stupid Seinfeld! Go watch it yourself!”
I know that pushing away your parents is a natural part of growing up, the first step in becoming your own person. I know this. But if I’d known how soon she would be taken from me, I would never have begun the process of leaving her.
20
* * *
after
Over that first summer I spent without her, I occasionally went to Gwen and Dave’s for the weekend. Their spare, modern apartment on the second floor, with a front door that opened out to the brightly lit interior hallway of the building, felt safe and separate from the rest of the world. And then one weekend, we watched a white Bronco drive slowly up a Los Angeles highway, a murderer hiding in the back. When we changed the channel, we saw the same shot, the only difference a slight shift in color. Redder. Bluer. Redder. All around the dial. Nicole Brown Simpson died one month and one day after my mother. Her daughter was only eight, but I kept thinking she was twelve. Her neighbor found her, but I kept thinking her daughter had. I remember watching that slow-motion chase intently, hoping O.J. would follow through on his threats to kill himself. He entered my life, however distantly, just when I needed a killer upon which to focus my anger.
For years, I remembered the Bronco chase as occurring the weekend of Mom’s funeral. I remembered sitting on Gwen and Dave’s couch, puffy-eyed and exhausted, the smell of afternoon coffee filling the room, the sound of the news chopper cutting through the air. But of course on that day, Nicole still had twenty-eight days left to live. In the days and weeks after Mom died, time was a movable thing, a fluid substance that pushed the meaningful and the terrible closer together and crowded out everything else.
* * *
Months earlier, Mom had bought us tickets to fly that summer to Texas, where my aunt Tootsie was stationed in the Army, having finally returned to the States after eleven years in Germany. Mom and I had flown only once before—years ago, with Dale, to Disney World in Florida. This time, it would’ve been just the two of us. I can imagine her leaning over me toward the little window, looking at the tops of clouds, so solid-looking, like soft hills you could step right out onto. I think now about how excited she must have been while planning that trip. How she would have already arranged to take time off from work, a rare vacation. She’d never been to the Southwest before. She would have loved all that sunshine, all those pretty pastel colors.
Instead, after a month or so at Carol and Carroll’s, I flew alone. I wanted to get far away from supermarket whispers and the six o’clock news, put half a country between me and the killer. When I flew, I did so weighed down with a grocery bag of quarters and nickels, dollar bills and fives: the collected kindness of the surviving Shoe Shop hand-sewers. In Portland, I was surprised when airport security failed to find that bag of shrapnel. Only after I passed through the metal detectors did I realize they had been silent, and I was afraid of this silence—it took the place of some kind of necessary witness. I wondered if it would be permanent.
* * *
I touched down in the middle of the West Texas desert, tumbleweeds and dust devils greeting me. I came in the night, ferried from the airport in my aunt’s minivan, and stumbled into a bed made with crisp blue sheets. I woke to bright sunshine and a big, empty room—bigger and emptier than any I had ever slept in before. I could hear my steps swishing on the carpet, and the faint echo of that sound on the walls, which were textured to resemble half-polished stone. I opened the closet door and discovered a space big enough to step into, lined with shelves and many-leveled bars on which to hang far more clothes than I could imagine owning. Tootsie had left stationery on one of the shelves, personalized with my name and bearing a filigreed border of muted purple and brown. In that closet, there was also a small scorpion.