“She reminds me of Zsa Zsa Gabor,” Kari said.
I remembered that Zsa Zsa was a Hungarian-born actress and socialite. I’d never seen any of her movies or TV shows, and I’d certainly never attended any of her society parties, but I still knew so many details about her life. As they say, she was famous for being famous. Zsa Zsa was charismatic in the banal and voracious way that reality stars like Kim Kardashian are charismatic now.
“Why does my mom remind you of Zsa Zsa?” I asked Kari.
“Because your mom gets all the attention like a beautiful actress,” she said. “And she has a fancy accent.”
“My mom is from the rez,” I said, and laughed. “Rez accents are the opposite of fancy.”
“You just say that because you don’t like the sound of your voice,” Kari said. “But rez accents make everything sound like music.”
I waved away the compliment.
“Should I marry a man who doesn’t talk to his mother?” Kari asked. “You think I want a mother-in-law who treats her son this way, too? Maybe you two should marry each other. Or marry yourselves. You’re like the same person anyway.”
Kari often said insightful and funny shit like that. She was an eccentric small-town empath. So, because I respected Kari and her opinions, and because I missed talking to my mother, I tried to end the silence, to make amends, to restart our relationship, to do something.
I was desperate.
As I walked toward my mother, sitting alone in the car, I knew she was aware of me. She knew I was walking toward her. She knew I was going to use my words. It was a strangely religious experience, like I was a pilgrim searching for wisdom from a monk who had not spoken in one hundred years.
“Hey, Mom,” I said.
She didn’t respond. She was making a scarf or baby blanket or some rectangular object of beauty. All I could hear was the click-click of her knitting needles.
“Mom,” I said. “Talk to me.”
Knitting needles.
“Mom, please.”
Click-click.
Furious, I spun and rushed back to my apartment. I passed my father along the way.
“’Bye, Dad,” I said. We were poor Indians. It was always a struggle to find enough money to enjoy a decent life, let alone pay for college. I was grateful to him for paying that month’s rent, but I was too mad to properly show my appreciation.
I was an asshole.
Back in the apartment, I yelled at Kari.
“You told me to talk to her! You made me do it! And she just ignored me! It was embarrassing!”
Like I said, I was an asshole.
I screamed, ran at the living room wall, and slammed into it like I was trying to tackle the apartment building. Then I punched the wall once, twice, three times.
I left a shoulder-shaped dent in the cheap plasterboard. And three fist-shaped holes. I was lucky I only punched through the hollow plasterboard and didn’t break my hand on a wooden or metal wall stud.
Now, after years of good mental health care, I can look back and see that my rage—my assholery—was mostly the product of undiagnosed and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar emotional swings. But, in my youth, I only knew that I needed to physically, if irrationally, express my rage. I didn’t want to hit my mother or my father or Kari, or anybody else, so I punched objects. I punched metaphors. So, at that moment, I would have certainly kicked our metaphorical God in his even more metaphorical nuts if I’d been given the chance.
Kari, bored and scared by my self-righteous and self-pitying temper, gathered up her things and walked back to her apartment. We’d flirted in high school and had kissed a few times. And then we dated in college until a year after she graduated. She didn’t want to marry a writer, she said, especially one who was probably going to be famous. Yes, she believed in my artistry if not my marriageability. I used her manual typewriter to write my first two or three hundred poems and stories. You want to know the identity of my first muse and benefactor? She was a math-and science-minded white woman with an auto-mechanic father. Kari fed me when I had no money.
I loved her. She loved me.
But I don’t know how much joy she experienced while loving me. I don’t know much joy I was capable of feeling or providing.
So, after my mother ignored me again, and after I made holes in the walls, and after Kari walked home, I rounded up some poet friends—none of whom write anymore—and we pooled our meager resources and got drunk in the cocktail bar of a Chinese restaurant. We drunkenly vowed to start our own literary magazine, like all drunken student poets do, but we’d publish only “the good shit,” which meant that we’d print only our poems and any poems that sounded exactly like ours.
Then we argued about naming the magazine.
“Let’s call it The Silent Mother,” I said.
I remember that one of my friends—it was probably Old John—said The Silent Mother sounded more like a Bette Davis movie than a poetry magazine.
Zsa Zsa Gabor. Bette Davis. Lillian Alexie. It might sound ludicrous to think of my mother as being a part of that grandiose trinity. But she really did loom that large for me. And she loomed that large in our tribe. She was wildly intelligent, arrogant, opinionated, intimidating, and generous with her time and spirit. She was a contradictory person. She was, all by herself, an entire tribe of contradictions.
What do you call a gathering of women like Lillian? A contradiction of mothers.
At her funeral, half of the mourners talked about being kindly rescued by my mother. For many years, she was the drug and addiction treatment counselor for our tribe. She helped at least a dozen addicts get clean and stay clean. She helped many other addicts get clean once, twice, three, four times and more in that endless cycle of sobriety and relapse.
“She never gave up on me,” said one mourner. “She helped me get my kids back after I lost them to foster care. I raised my own kids because of Lillian.”
Three other mourners also praised my mother for helping them get back their kids.
My mother was a lifeguard on the shores of Lake Fucked.
But hey, my mother’s eldest daughter died in an alcoholic-fueled trailer fire. Two of her other children are active alcoholics. One is a recovering drug addict. And then there’s me, the dry-drunk poet with a Scrabble board full of mental illness acronyms. Only one of my mother’s children is a nondrinker and nonsmoker and nonpill swallower.
Her husband, our father, died of alcoholism.
My mother, the healer, could not heal the people closest to her. I don’t know if she tried to help us.
At my mother’s funeral, many other mourners talked about being publicly rebuked and shamed by her.