See What I Mean

The first woman Mom brought home was a server from Thai Fantastic.
That night, the curtained strip-mall restaurant was cleared out, and
we had our pick of the seven Formica tables. We’d arrived long past
a normal dinner hour, but it didn’t matter when Mom got hungry.
Our happiness in those days was hitched to her eating, and cravings
typically didn’t strike until long after sunset, if at all. Something to do
with ketones and air pressure, with brain cancer feeling less of a death
sentence in the dark. Something to do too, probably, with appeasing a
son and a husband, leading us to believe she’d be fine.

“How? Long?” Mom asked the server as she poured our waters. We
were regulars and knew that this girl with the lips, the eyelashes, was
new.

“How long? I do not understand,” the server said. She held a napkin
under the pitcher’s spout to catch the drips. I saw Dad appreciating her
care.

“You? Work? Here? How? Long?” Mom said.

Can’t count how many times Dad and I had told Mom that speaking
staccato English was offensive and, to boot, would likely earn us permanent seating arrangements at the table under the cockeyed flat-screen
hung as if with sticky rice. But Mom wanted to be heard in those days,
demanded it like some in her condition demand empathy, and God
forbid if she was going to let the dictums of tact interfere.

“Two day,” the server said, smiling, proud. Her teeth solid white as
coconut meat, and she wasn’t shy because she stood there itching the
mole on her cheek, clicking a pen in her apron with the other hand,
and looking ready for anything Mom might dish. Please, I begged Mom
silently, please don’t start humming “One Night in Bangkok,” or ask her
if she’s tapped a rubber tree, or if she’s worked at an elephant sanctuary,
or where she got her tits done. “I hear it’s the sex-change capital of the
world,” Mom once told a Thai Fantastic server.

“Welcome. To. Our. Favorite. Place,” Mom said, adjusting her
headscarf, setting free the loop earrings Dad had given her that week.

He’d been buying her earrings like he used to buy her running clothes.
“What? Is? Your? Name?” Mom asked. The server reached around at
the bar counter for extra sugar packets and restocked our table’s supply.
Mom unwrapped her silverware, ceremonially spread the paper napkin across her diminishing lap. So skinny. Getting skinnier while Dad
was growing increasingly awkward and antisocial, as if he suspected
everyone of injecting Mom with defective cells.

“Your? Name?” Mom said, insistent as a cop. “We. Come. In. Peace.”

“Just stop it, Patricia,” Dad said. A blue-eyed man, very handsome
but for his refusal to wear shirts without buttons. “You’re being a total
jerk.”

I ran my knife between the fork’s tines, looking down at the server’s
silver slippers, waiting for the silence to break. Hysterical silence. Silence mounting by the second, an accrual for which I wanted at least
a meager reimbursement. Just an answer was all. How hard is it to tell
my wife your goddamned name so I can get my goddamned noodles? was
the sentiment I read behind Dad’s professorial squint. Condensation
on our water glasses beaded up and scrambled down. The girl’s slim
arms hung at her sides like the paltriest shanks of meat. The golden
Buddha fountain behind her choked on its erratic water supply. The
music was nothing I knew, and I needed to know the music in those
days. I needed to sing along. And then, finally, after the server huffed
faintly as if we’d asked for bread and butter, she said something. Though
inaudible. More like a hush, like the hope of sound.

“Excuse? Me? Did. Not. Hear,” Mom said, freeing her straw from its
paper with the single-mindedness of a wrecking ball. Her gentle nature
exposed itself only when she slept, curled like a fetus, fists tucked to
throat. Not that I watched her sleep, but I’d been finding her dozing
all over the house: on chairs and floors, head fallen like a rock atop
the baby grand’s keys. Wherever exhaustion sprang, she caved to it. “A
small-dicked dictator,” she said one day when I found her asleep on
my bed. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the cancer or President
Bush. Either way, those years go down as my shittiest.

“Boonsri,” the girl repeated, raising her voice loud enough this
time to reveal a lisp. Which was fine, ideal actually, because Dad was a
speech therapist in my school district, and part of his giving-back gig was to help tame the tongues of all mankind. Mom smiled at the girl,
at the good fortune of the lisp, and the next week Boonsri was eating
dinner at our house.

Mom didn’t cook before brain cancer, so why cook with it? Neither
did she possess the sentimentality to compose a bucket list, but she did
have a “shit list” of all the people she wanted to tell off before she died
(as follows, in no particular order):

1. The cable company, with their inane three-hour windows for
   showing up to fix the halting dial-up connection;
2. That simple man in the yellow hat (her words) she sat next to
   during my swim-team practice, who said, “The only difference
   between men and women is that in conflict a man puts his fist
   through the wall, and with a woman, you get tears”;
3. Her insurance company for delaying her first brain scan by a
   year—this metastatic tumor had been operable;
4. The next-door neighbor, Malia, who, even after Mom was gone,
   after I’d moved out and married, would still trim her side of our
   shared manzanita hedge and throw the clippings into our yard;
5. Sherri, the secretary in the front office of my high school, who
   shined Mom attitude whenever I missed the bus and showed
   up late, which was every other morning because Mom gave
   breakfast the same gold-star effort she once gave her career—a
   promising future, Mom lectured me a thousand times, does not
   commence on the crap sustenance of a Pop-Tart.
   
   But that night of Boonsri’s first visit, Mom was in good spirits, out
   to get nobody. Not for revenge, anyway.
   
   “All those years of peacekeeping and emotional governing,” Mom
   was telling Boonsri as they sat at the kitchen table. Boonsri blew at
   the steam rising from her vegan pot pie. Before her six o’clock arrival,
   Mom had made me hustle the pie tins to the recycling bins so our guest
   would not suspect dinner of being anything less than homemade. “It’s
   nice to be coming into the woman I was meant to be. Not to say that
   Grant”—Mom pointed to Dad, winking fantastically, while he grabbed
   for the wine bottle and refilled his glass—“is picky about a woman coming or going, or whatever.” She paused, wiped a jot of gravy off her mouth. “That was weird. What I mean is, he’s very equal opportunity, a very open man.”

Dad didn’t wince, didn’t so much as push up his glasses to allay the
anxiety I could see flushing his cheeks. No, Dad went right along: smiling, sipping the dregs, looking as mildly victorious as he did on days
he’d managed to avoid carbohydrates. And that’s when I realized that
we were not open-arming a new immigrant into the heart of an American home. This wasn’t another benign invite to calm Mom’s chronic
itch for the bigger family she was never able to have. This wasn’t Mom
just being Mom and inviting couples over because she craved worldly
discussion outside of Dad’s speech-therapy and whole-food colloquies.
This was Mom sniffing out a replacement for herself. And it seemed
everyone had been clued in to the setup but me.

After dinner, Dad banged out an abysmal rendition of “Memory” on
the baby grand and returned to the table uncharacteristically talkative,
spouting forth a résumé I didn’t believe but that reeked so badly of
desperation, I wanted to. He’d cozied up with Kate Bush at McClaren’s
Pub (she wrote the first verse of “In Search of Peter Pan” on a cocktail
napkin), he cameoed in an episode of Bewitched as Samantha’s cousin,
his first speech-pathology patient was Barbra Streisand’s kid, and he
beat Reggie Bush in the hundred-meter dash at Mount Carmel High.

She laughed when Mom laughed, Dad laughed when they laughed,
and I snuck off to bed early, listening to Dad make another failing pass
at “Memory.” A bit later, I heard Boon start her car and drive off. All
in all, dinner was a spectacular success. I say just “dinner,” because we
hadn’t yet found the courage to call things what they were. And though
it would be the first of many strategic get-togethers arranged by Mom,
on that maiden night, it was simply dinner with Boon.

It was raining, a first that spring, and rather than leave me at the Aviara
apartment complex a half mile from home, the bus driver generously
took me straight to my front door. Mom was on the porch, or a paltry
remake of a porch as imagined by suburban developers. Before I was
born, my parents bought the Craftsman facade and adorned the front
with a wicker swing from the local hardware store. They said they sat
out there many nights, pink wine at arm’s length, listening to the neighbor kids fight but wishing they could better hear the packs of coyotes
yelping in the canyon. After my arrival, they said, the swing never met
their asses again, though they drank more wine.

On that rainy day, coming up our walkway, I imagined them there
again, young and smooth skinned, Mom wearing cutoffs to showcase
her sculpted runner’s legs, and Dad rounding up neighbors for a drink
to appease his wife’s grander social aspirations. I saw the unbroken
weave of wicker and them holding hands, air under their feet, and not
Mom, alone, sitting too near a street that had become dangerously busy,
on a step shucking its paint in thick slabs. Her legs were skinnier than
the porch’s spindles, her headscarf tucked behind ears that I suddenly
deemed unnecessary. As were all her ten fingers. I’d begun bargaining
with fate to please take the superfluous parts of her so the critical ones
could stay. Let her keep her eyes. Her witty mind. Her feet. There were
so many routes we hadn’t run together.

“New earrings?” I said. I stood in front of her and let the rain fall
on me.

“She’s here,” she said quickly, a warning, as if the carpet had just
been shampooed and it was imperative that I let it dry before entering.

“Boon’s here.”

“For what?” I knew the answer, I did. Boon had been to dinner
two more times, and she had begun sitting with Dad at the piano,
clapping to his discordant attempts. Also, I was a sophomore in high
school; there are profound discoveries a teenage boy begins to make
when he sits next to a girl in Spanish class on a warm day and catches
her sugar-fish scent. But I was still hopeful that Mom just wanted to
have dinners and was merely casting a wider net for friends. I thought
dying inclined you to want to touch masses of people, as many as you
possibly could, and then share your life’s story with each of them so
they could etch it into memory. I thought you’d want to be rendered
larger and insanely important in death’s sneering face. But Mom, no
surprise, bucked her own status quo and cobbled together a smaller
and humbler and strangely affectionate world that I’d officially stepped
into on that wet day.

“Dad says she’s too young,” Mom said. Was Boon actually in their
bed? Did Mom walk them in, or had she come home and just known
that Dad had finally taken the bait? Was Boon talking while Dad gave instruction on where to hold tongue to palate so sounds didn’t stumble
out like drunks? “She’s twenty-seven. Big deal. No one is too young;
you can only be too old,” she continued, not talking to me exactly, but
to the man who was only beginning to emerge from the body of her
boy. As it is when mothers are dying. I stood at attention.

“Don’t you want someone who’s going to be around a while?” she
said. “For you and Dad? I mean, if you go to an animal shelter, do you
adopt an old, crippled dog, or do you get a puppy?” She laughed and
laughed, drowning out the patter of rain on the new fake lawn Dad
had tacked down himself weeks before. He’d grown sick of paying
someone to cut his grass, and his weekends, that year, were devoted
to making large portions of really healthy food and freezing them. I
think he intended to die first. Right then, I wanted to go with him. I
wanted to run from Mom and her strange way of dying, but she made
room on the step. She told me that one day I’d either hate her for this
or love her more.

Before I was born, the story goes, Mom and Dad made a pact to be selfish. They said something to the effect of: We will get babysitters and take
vacations and leave the kids to after-school programs so that our dreams
don’t go unpursued. Most of the prophecy persisted. Though there were
never kids plural, they did date even as a married couple, and they
did take leave of me with a zealous persistence most parents set aside
for the later grind of college applications. I distinctly remember, on
numerous occasions, being left with various top-heavy, grandmotherly
women who, it turns out, worked for a nanny agency. The same nanny
agency Mom called the day after Boon was no more. I overheard the
entire conversation.

“I have a sixteen-month-old, and I will need full-time care,” Mom
said. “Wonderful. Let me check my calendar.” She even thumbed audibly through her desk calendar, empty now of the appointments she had
once kept as a busy pharmaceutical rep. She sold Botox, the botulism
derivative women get injected into their faces to erase wrinkles and
freeze them in a semipermanent state of surprise. “Today works just
fine for an interview. And I’d like someone young, lots of energy to
spare. Charlotte, my daughter, is a real firecracker.”

Charlotte was the kid of our next-door neighbor Jenny. Mom periodically babysat Charlotte because Jenny—being a survivalist, a naturalist, and a conspiracy theorist who made her own baby food and butt creams and handwashed Charlotte’s hemp diapers—desperately needed free help. And so Mom’s offer to watch the toddler that afternoon was
accepted. Within the hour, Charlotte, with her lazy left eye and knees
like biscuits, was sitting on our rug, clanking measuring spoons.

Laverne was the nanny’s name. Though she couldn’t compete with
Boon’s pretty face, she didn’t have a lisp that needed fixing, which had
been the demise of that relationship. Boon had been resistant to Dad’s
speech exercises, and he’s always been repulsed by anyone who doesn’t
want to help themselves. Though that wasn’t what they shared with me
back then. Dad simply announced one night at dinner that Boon wasn’t
who Mom wanted. Mom sat stiff, staring into her pea soup, uncharacteristically letting Dad decide what she needed. Or what he needed. In dying, I’ve learned, there are windfalls of cross contamination.

But Laverne.

Her name set the stage for staunch retro-ness. Everything she wore
was decades out of date, in a way only a red-headed chunk named Laverne could pull off. Baby Charlotte was enamored with the bouffant,
and midway into a conversation regarding feeding and naps, the baby
attacked the poof. It deflated over Laverne’s porcelain face.

Laverne was really keen on Dad, even after it was revealed that the
baby was merely date bait. And it wasn’t until I saw her watching Dad
with a feline hunger as he played a choppy “Some Enchanted Evening”
on the baby grand that I felt like this dating experiment might prove
to be good for me too. Dad and I shared the same DNA, after all. If he
could move past a healthy marriage to empty sex, I could overcome
the larger obstacle of being me. I couldn’t yet look a woman in the eye
without perseverating over the gymnastics of my lips, my long, long
neck, and protruding trachea, but in Dad’s atypical life I saw hope for
a virile future of my own; I might someday land a Laverne too.

During the weeks of Laverne and Dad dating, Mom’s hair began to
grow back in patches, a lawn reluctantly taking seed. She dug out her
old running clothes and removed her earrings, and we resumed our
usual three-mile loop around our neighborhood. Sometimes twice.

She didn’t acknowledge this brief period of renewal, or remission as
the doctors were calling it, but just went with it, as if the cancer were
merely an uncharacteristically harsh winter and now we were enjoying
a mild spring.

“Let’s do it,” she said one evening, decked in athletic gear. We’d
already done the loop that morning, but Dad was out with Laverne and
wouldn’t be coming home for a few more hours.

Laverne owned a flat in Old Town up above a taqueria. That’s all
Dad told me. Enough to imagine mariachi twang rising from below
and him sitting on a platform bed, removing his Atticus Finch glasses
before doing it like a man for hire. Though Mom insisted on him doing
this and would lecture him on the importance of fulfilling her dying
wish, I noticed she was more restless when he went out at night.

“How far?” I asked.

“To the Sky Captain’s Dome.” It was the water tower at the end of
our neighborhood, where the tract houses ended and the brush grew
wild. Where I’d been to a kegger tucked in a dry riverbed a few weeks
prior but walked home early because I thought I heard Mom calling
my name.

Soon enough, Laverne’s rosy scent stopped coming home on Dad’s
clothes. He told me only that Laverne was a nanny who didn’t particularly like kids, and he hated hypocrisy more than apathy.

As we passed the six-month mark of Mom’s terminal diagnosis, her hair
had completely grown back. No more chemo, no more radiation. We’d
surrendered to the whims of her rogue weather. Dad bought her hair
clips and bands by the dozen, and fawned over the regrowth like it was
the seeds of their second child atop her head. However cruel or ironic,
the new hair did spawn a renaissance in all of us. Dad pulled money out
of the vacation account for a pianist, Frank, to play the baby grand during our dinner hour three days a week. No show tunes, just the classics.
The stuff Dad wanted to play but didn’t have the chops for. Melodies
coursed through our rooms and nudged us, note by note, out of our
slump. I started a petition around school to allow Rubik’s Cubes back
on campus. Some tool had mocked up fakes, packed the centers with
joints, and then somehow gotten them in the lockers of every pompous, square-ass football player. Also, Mom and I were running faster;
we’d knocked the loop down from thirty-seven minutes to thirty-five.

“What if he doesn’t meet someone before you die?” I said as we
jogged. It was early morning, before school, and I blurted it. I didn’t want
to say it, but it’d been on my mind, and when I ran, truths came easier.

“He’s meeting them,” she said. “He just doesn’t know it yet. But can
we please talk about you?” She picked up her speed, either to show me
up or get me to chase her as she probably felt she was being forced to do
with me, with my future that she’d get to neither watch nor celebrate.

“First question: Have you thought about going to Oregon State?”

She and Dad had met there, and if I was going to feed her nostalgia,
I’d have said yes. But running. But truth. “Mom, that’s two years away.”

She slowed and then swallowed hard. “Okay, next question: A girl
says she loves you first. What do you do?”

“Mom, this is really weird.”

“No, it’s not. I’m not going to be here, you just said so yourself,
and—” She stopped abruptly, flushed instantly to a full, healthy pink I
wanted to capture so I could give it back when we finished. She looked
at me for the first time as if she were going to hump off into the canyon
with me strapped to her back. Her crying stuttered to laughing. “How
the hell can we keep going if I’m acting like this?”

We sprinted back home. The last of our breathless, ecstatic runs. I
felt the beginning of summer’s thicker heat on my face; the marine layer
was thinning earlier and earlier. Soon we’d wake to loud, knocking light.

A month later, we met Sandy on a run. You didn’t mess with Sandy.
She could do fifty repeats up the forty-five-degree hill to our house and
then high-knee it to the gym to teach back-to-back spin classes. She
was jogging in place at a stoplight when the conversation kicked off,
and I caught Mom’s face brighten.

In sixty seconds, we learned that Sandy hated the fact that we lived
in the only red city in a blue state. She smelled like camphor and sharp
body odor. She had a ten-year-old daughter named Brett. At this revelation, Mom turned and gave me a wide-eyed, forced grin as if she were
dropping me off at a school dance, like, “You got this, sport. It’s gonna
be dandy.”

Sandy jogged home with us that day, on the premise that Mom
needed her to write down an aforementioned smoothie recipe for PMS
or gut flora—who knows. Mom’s chronic lying was phenomenal, and
I wondered if it was something I was supposed to practice alongside
her or wait to do later when I would need all sorts of fabricated walls
to hide behind.

It took Dad a few days to agree to Sandy. He was tired of this. This.
This. “I can’t even tell them my wife is dying. How do you start off anything on those kinds of terms? So I tell them we’re in an open marriage.
I’ve always hated people in open marriages. You know that, Patricia.
They’re anarchists and moral cannibals. Why bother with the marriage
part? Look at us, we’ve never left the room without announcing it,” he
said.

They talked loudly at night in their bedroom, forgetting I was there,
perhaps. But maybe hoping to expose me, prematurely, to the sleazy and
sacred, the necessary duality of survival. My parents believed in early
exposure, believed that deviance was born mostly from overactive but
underfed curiosity. You want to know what smoking is like? they asked
when I turned twelve, and then Dad bought me a pack of Marlboro
Lights and made me smoke three in the car until I begged him to let
me stop. You want to know what it’s like to get drunk? And so when I was
fifteen, Mom and I drank gin and tonics in the backyard until I puked.
You want to know what it’s like to lose your mom to cancer? Nobody asked
me this, but I was coming up to speed quickly.

I’m not sure what Mom did to convince him, but one day Dad came
home smelling like Sandy. Her rank smell is the one I can still conjure
most vividly. This was the longest dating streak to date. They met in
the kitchen over the roar of the Vitamix mid-June, and when I started
my junior year that August, they’d graduated to seeing movies together.

This caught Mom off guard.

“What movie?” she asked Dad as he slipped into loafers while Sandy
idled at the curb in her Tacoma. It sounded like the necessity of establishing parameters had slipped Mom’s increasingly porous mind.

“Please don’t tell me animation.”

Dad hated animation for its predictable dead-parent trope, and
Mom, I suppose, wanted no woman taking advantage of his easygoing
nature and stonewalling his opinions and principles. Agreeing to animation probably seemed, to her, the gateway compromise to becoming a pathetic doormat.

While they were at the movies, we of course went for a run or, more
accurately, a run-walk, as they were all becoming. We’d run to a fire
hydrant, walk to a parked LeBaron, run to a stop sign, walk to a row
of agapanthus, and so forth. “There’s a whole theory that you can run
a faster marathon if you take walking breaks,” Mom said. We slowed,
agreeing to resume running at the leafy sycamore up ahead. “I’d venture there’s a ‘less is more’ message we’re supposed to glean from that,
but I’ve never bought that stupid mantra, or whatever. Less of what is
more? Less rape. Less racism. Less cancer. Sure. Then it works.”

“But if Dad falls in love”—I slowed to gauge the hue of the universe
with this bewildering thought inducted into it—“while you’re still alive,
is that a good thing?” I kept my eyes on my moving feet, the weedy
sidewalk cracks. I told myself I’d have to leave the house as soon as
we got home. Maybe a walk to Sky Captain’s Dome. I could climb the
little ladder to the top and try to find the theater’s fluorescent marquee,
imagine Dad inside with Mom. The movie was out at ten; it would be
the first time Dad came home in the dark-dark. For as long as I could
remember, the nights had belonged to my parents. Them breezing back
home from plays and dinners, decadently perfumed, spectral and chatty,
bathed in a reassuring aura of adult secrets. They’d carry me from their
California king to my twin. Hands cool from driving with the windows
rolled down, tannins on their breath.

“I’m not sure.” She bolted to a run prematurely. The tree was two cars
away. “The good thing would be if your mom could save your dad from
dating and grieving. Who wants to tackle that shit at the same time?”

Dad was still dating Sandy, and happily (so he led us to believe), when
Mom brought home the East German, Elsa. She was more punk rock
than the Lita Ford of my bedroom posters and spoke broken English
with a brutal speech impediment. Mom must have put out an explicit
want ad. How else could she have gotten her entire wish list? I’m guessing her working theory was that in the time it took Dad to remedy Elsa’s
battered R’s, to warm adequately to her habit of wearing more makeup
than clothes, and then to find a movie both could agree on and still be
able to discuss with a modicum of reciprocity, Mom would be dead.

Truth be told, the Wall had come down five years prior, and I was
the only jerk in town who called Elsa “The East German.” Elsa’s East
Germanness was part of the myth I aimed to perpetuate. Similar to my
resistance to accepting Mom’s fate, I wasn’t willing to let this woman,
whom Dad seemed more taken with than even Sandy, exist beyond the
cyclone wire of the Cold War. I was done.

This dating experiment had been going on almost a year, longer
than it should have. None of this was supposed to be dragging on, not
the dating and not Mom. Mom’s stage-IV neuroblastoma should have
stolen her well before we reached Elsa, the ninth woman, where the
count stood at this late August juncture. Dad had dated, I would learn,
more women in his married life than he had premarriage. Like food at
a buffet that all begins to assume a singular flavorlessness, the women
were becoming one indistinct person to me. They looked the same,
acted the same, and continued to bring Dad the same old bullshit baggage he’d mentally sort through at the dirty kitchen table after helping
Mom to bed. These women, and their problems, compounded Dad’s
certainty that life was conspiring to take his wife and trash the last
of his faith in fairness. But I think he kept at the game because if he
didn’t, he and Mom would have to discuss the cancer stuff. And they
were both loath to talk to people they couldn’t help.

During the Elsa phase, Mom picked me up after school one Friday
for an orthodontist appointment. We stopped off at the nearby Shell,
and while the pump ran, Elsa pulled up in a teal Mazda Miata with
an older man driving—not Dad. “Look at that slut,” Mom said to me
through the window that she’d been rolling down at gas stations since
I was a toddler with severe separation anxiety. “Hi, Elsa,” she yelled,
waving her hands in the obscenest display of recognition my indiscreet
mother had ever pulled off. Elsa rolled up her window, pretended to be
occupied with the radio dials. After filling the tank, Mom walked over
and began what appeared to be a friendly conversation as the other
man stood looking on, grooming his goatee with a rat-tailed comb. I
would learn later from Dad that Mom told Elsa to keep her herpes in
check and that if she came around again, Mom would personally, and
violently, confiscate her work visa.

By the time I met my Dar, Elsa had been lapped by Kelly and Isa. It
was January, and we celebrated a solid year of Mom giving a fat finger
to the grim reaper with a trip to Boomers to play miniature golf and
drive bumper cars. Mom hated the beery carpet in Boomers, the clatter of pinball, the glass display case guarding hoards of plastic loot
kids claimed with sticky fists of pink tickets, the precision demanded
by the minigolf experience. Mom wanted Boomers because Dad had
wanted Boomers since their fifth date twenty-six years ago, when their
much-anticipated trip to said house of filth ended en route in a fender
bender on the I-15. At the air-hockey table on that cancer-anniversary
day, Mom admitted to taking a liking to the quintessential white-trash
experience. In the next breath, she made a teary apology for being such
a cold, dying bitch. Turns out, Boomers was part succor, part warm-up
for Miriam, the horse-loving woman whom Mom would bring home
a few days later.

Miriam managed the pet-food store near our house. Mom had gone
in for dog food, for the dog we didn’t have, but her mission, nonetheless, was one of goodwill. She’d worked in various pet-supply stores
during college and recalled the heartiness and affection of her female
coworkers. Days before, she and Dad had listed his most desired characteristics in a partner, and Dad put “self-sufficient” and “kind” on top.
Mom obviously divined her own interpretation, but she was allowed
to; she was allowed whatever she wanted this year, and Dad and I were
helpless but willing spectators who had learned how to smile in the eye
of her storms.

But Dar. Dar was mine.

She was a swimmer with shoulders carved from the mahogany mast
of a pirate sloop, and black hair that, when wet, slipped through my
fingers like a sea creature plucked from the abyss. She was Dar on the
street and Darling at home. An only child, Dar suffered the stranglehold
of doting parents who’d monogrammed her name on everything until
she threw the expensive corpus on the lawn one day in a tizzy of independence. “I cannot be held captive,” she said. She told me everything
on our second date at Thai Fantastic. Boon wasn’t there; she’d been let
go. Not “fired,” but “let go.” A substitute as dumbass weak as “passed
away.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the type” was Dar’s response after I told her
one night that Dad was on a date with Miriam. This must have been
about my tenth date with Dar. Three of which were dinners with the
whole family, when Dad insisted she put in song requests with Frank.
Her picks were always instrumentals by the greats: Charlie Parker,
Wynton Marsalis, Chuck Berry. Dad commented repeatedly on Dar’s
elegant taste in music.

One night, we sat on the deck of her tree house, which was a smaller
replica of her real house, a glassy ranch-style visible from our wood
perch. The tree house was still stocked with tea sets and doll beds and
a miniature ironing board, all of which we swept into a corner when
the lights in the mother ship went out. We had the kind of sex every
virgin plots in his alone time but rarely pulls off. There I was, the son
of a dad who got chicks in his late forties. There I was, wondering how
many more runs I’d have with Mom before she was gone. There I was,
a high schooler who could orchestrate the reversal of a Rubik’s Cube
ban but who couldn’t stare at the forehead of the woman under me
without wondering when she would die too.

“I agree with you: This is all completely weird,” Mom said during our
last run-walk, which we’d actually downgraded days before to a walkwalk after Mom pulled off at the Hannigans’ utility box and began
vomiting. Mom’s organs had become one-trick ponies; how stupid of
us to expect them to withstand the rigors of exercise on top of filtering
twelve, then fifteen, now zero medications.

“The weather is always weird in March,” I said. Winter to spring,
spring to summer—the seamless handoffs had been marked by nothing
more than a single layer of cotton added or subtracted. And here we
were dumbly welcoming spring again, the wet floral heads of April and
then May already breaching. With each casual flip of our paper wall
calendar, I believed, more dangerously, in miracles.

“Are you really going to make me explain myself?” she said. “That’s
one of my favorite things about you; you get it. You’ve always been way
beyond your years. Everyone else is still on the joke, and my kid is at
the punch line.”

“So, this is all a joke?” I said.

“See what I mean.” She laughed herself to a halt under the skimpy
shade of a neighbor’s naked jacaranda. The feathered purple blooms
lay in a pile. Was the sweeper summoned inside or just too lazy to finish the job? Or was this a trick of the wind, to feign the appearance
of being man-made, when all along every pile had been the calculated
handiwork of nature? Mom chipped at the tree’s bark, tossing ragged
pieces, as if casting off the years ahead before cancer did that to her.

Her breath returned. “Does this girl, Darth, like to run?”

“Just Dar,” I said. “She likes to do anything that I like to do.”

Mom squinted in palpable deep thought. “That’s not good. Don’t
allow it. She needs her own shit. Dad was like that with me. Always,
‘Whatever you want, Patricia.’ Not a good place to be in when the other
goes.”

I was floored with sadness for Dad; I knew he didn’t think of himself
like that. He was a self-made man, came from nothing. He shared a mattress with his brother; they ate for free at school. “Don’t say that about
Dad,” I said. I wanted to run home and tell him to stop, stop jumping
through these stupid hoops for Mom. I was sure, by that time, that he
was dating solely for her, her silly whims and good intentions gone
haywire. Her habit of buying a CD from any old band playing pots and
kazoos at the farmers market had transformed into charity work for
Dad. He didn’t need her trying to save him; he could damn well save
himself.

“I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry if it came out wrong. I’m sorry
if all this is ugly and wrong. I’m probably totally fucking both of you
up.” She was crying, though I knew it’d be quick as island weather, so
I didn’t make a big deal out of it. “I just hate to see a man lonely. It’s
worse than any sight, really.” She smiled, regained her authority over
me, maybe even over the disease a bit. As the air shuddered, the tree
we thought bare showered a new purple crop of flowers that stuck to
our tacky skin. She kissed my forehead with her eyes pinched shut.

I was back to feeling sorry for her, a sick mom apologizing to her only
son, the kid she wanted enough to forgo (what could have been lifesaving) chemotherapy. Her first tumor, the cancer that would swim upstream to her brain, showed up in her colon when she was two months pregnant with me. Like a twin, it grew with me.

Dad stopped dating. I overheard him say he needed to catch his breath,
as if someone had been chasing him all these months. After thirteen
months, exactly, is when the dating stopped. But nothing had ever truly
started. Sure, he’d gone out with the women to appease Mom’s screwy
notions of permission and moving on, but he’d never slept with a single
one. Boon left his bedroom that rainy afternoon with a sore ego and a
pamphlet of tongue calisthenics. He sat on Laverne’s bed just for her
hoary lessons in pop psychology, made the sheets damp only with his
crying. Sandy showed him how to roll out his tight plantar fasciitis
with a tennis ball and how to do a sit-up without jacking up his back.
Under her tutelage he lost fifteen pounds, and they did enjoy animaion together, though he was never able to tell Mom. As for the others,
well, his dick was in the game, but his heart kiboshed any action. “One
day,” he told me when I was an exercise-science major at Oregon State,
“you’ll learn that the latter wins the debate.”

I’d wager that Mom was on to Dad’s prudishness. But in this case,
more than any other, it was the thought that counted. It was the thought
of being with another woman that Mom wanted to see cross Dad’s face.
She wanted to see it and concede it. She wanted Dad to see her concession and then know for certain that he was absolved from any future
haunting; there would be no strange apparition breathing down his
naked back when he finally found the guts to do the deed. She wanted
to sign his permission slip and seal it with one of their cinematic French
kisses that I’d bashfully witnessed too many times. They were friends
and lovers, and how lucky I was, and am, to be their history keeper.

“You want a Pop-Tart?” she said as I entered the kitchen one morning
before school. I nodded, knowing that all her previous predictions
of my blood sugar plummeting during second-period Spanish would
come true. Knowing also that she needed to buck her own system. It
was bucking her so hard anyhow.

On the way to school, we stopped off at the grocery and bought
strawberry-iced Pop-Tarts. I shoved one down with a lawless emptiness.
We parked a block away from school and talked about the return of the
Rubik’s Cube and our longing for a day when one chump’s rule breaking
didn’t ruin it for everyone. I told her Dar had signed up, at my urging, for a martial-arts class, despite her parents’ disdain for girls doing boy
things.

I ate another Pop-Tart. Mom ate two. Crumbs dropped from our
mouths to the seat and onto the floor mats. It was a celebratory mess
Dad couldn’t bring himself to clean before our drive to the mortuary
the following week. He was forced to sift and weigh the details. Details
I can’t, to this day, fully comprehend. All I know is that grieving tosses
you on a ruinous path where all you want for your parents is a world
where you weren’t born. Because what if in the process of growing you,
her cells divided too many times or too slowly or not enough, and you
truly were the catalyst for her cancer, and, essentially, for an experiment that saved nobody?

Mom pulled into school and parked in the spot marked School Counselor. “You think they’ll care?” she said.

“Do you care if they care?”

“Not really,” she said, and laughed. “Just don’t do it when I’m gone.
Be better.”

She twisted her wristwatch. “Five more minutes.” She meant until
the bell rang, until we’d be officially tardy and she’d officially catch shit
from Sherri.

When the bell rang, we got out, locked the car.

We entered the front office, where the usual fastidious folk held
their usual posts, including Sherri. Whatever paperwork Sherri was
filling out was more important than our wait. We stood at the desk,
watching the transformative line of her part where incoming gray hair
morphed to bright red. “Can I help you?” Sherri said, still not veering
from her task.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Mom said. I looked down at her feet, half
expecting combat boots or the spiked heels from her power-corporate
days, but found running shoes. We had planned on a walk-walk that
morning, but her energy wasn’t there. She was saving it for this, the first
conquest on her shit list. I wanted it to be great; I wanted to cheer Mom
as she stomped Sherri and her blunt bob and her perfectly articulated
lip mole. “We are late,” Mom said. “Again.”

Sherri looked up, big blue Jennifer Aniston eyes. “I’m really sorry.”
No sarcasm. Truly, I detected none, and this confused me more than
Dar’s refusal to take off her shirt during sex.

Sherri maintained the tender eye contact of a veterinarian. “I mean,
sorry, didn’t hear you. I’m all caught up in this.” She lifted the paper and
waved it, then put a hand to her mouth, the universal sign to lean in
for a secret. Mom closed their gap, but Sherri was born to be a Baptist
minister, so I’m sure the entire office staff heard. “Keep them young,
long as you can. My daughter, she’s incarcerated, as you’ve probably
heard, and she’s asking me to grant her privileges to a facility dance.
Doesn’t call or want me to visit. Damned pregnant too. What do you
do, right? I want her to live like a kid and all that, but what do you do?
Keep on giving, when all a kid’s done is take?”

Dad promised he’d give Sherri a call someday. Mom reiterated where
she’d stuck her phone number. “Not the fridge because it’s losing magnetism. Does that even happen? Does shit really demagnetize?” She
turned to me. “And please, when Frank is done with the piano, please
cover the keyboard.”

If you’d stepped into the kitchen that evening and overheard the
conversation, you’d have assumed Mom was preparing to take a trip.
She was merely traveling abroad and would return with new songs in
her head and tales of incredible street food. Though she wasn’t packing.
She lay flat on the couch with a book, her feet bare. I stared at one of
her toenails, the devastation wreaked after three decades of running. It
was a rutted pink specimen, a badge, and the only evidence remaining
of our hours spent traipsing the suburban streets and trails of Southern
California. That, too, would be gone. I couldn’t even remember our
first run, let alone all the runs in her healthy years. And there were
so many miles I wanted burning my muscles again, so many of Mom’s
infamous speeches I wanted repeated and recorded. I’d had everything
before this year barreled in, but I had no tangible proof of being gifted
a mother who wasn’t afraid to share her wild and generous mind with
her son. Nothing to hold and show Dar.

Yes, it’s true, they would all come to the funeral—from Boon to
whoever was last, I can’t recall. As they were when Mom was alive, the
women would remain singularly kind and intrusive. They would line
up single file at Mom’s casket to pay their respects to a woman who deserved every palsied prayer and sigh of disbelief. She was the force and
humility they would try to encapsulate and swallow, but fail. Everybody who attempted to play any part of Mom’s unflinching role would fail.
But in the kitchen that evening, a piano polka in the background and a
good woman’s phone number in the pill drawer, Mom was still with us.

She rose with a hitch from the couch, holding what I’d thought
was a novel. But no. “A running log. Every route we’ve ever jogged,”
she said, handing me the small spiral notebook. “The dates and times
too. And you know me, anal as all getup, I wrote down every conversation you and I had.” The polka faded to a show tune from Phantom of
the Opera. Dad pulled out a carb-free dinner from the freezer, swept a
finger through its crust of ice crystals. The harsh lights hollowed his
eyes, which were nearly spilling the grief he’d been damming all year.

I flipped open the notebook. Our first run, my sixth birthday, April
15 at 3:00 p.m. We’d talked about the ghost of the lonely man who
swims laps inside the Sky Captain’s Dome; about the sage covered in
red buds, how things bloom and drop with the seasons; how I had to
learn to read as fast as I could run, otherwise I’d never get through
all the great love stories. At which point, I guess my six-year-old self
stopped short on Pinehurst Place at the Faulkners’ Pontiac Fiero, and
while I stood in the full sun, basking, I asked, Who the heck wants to
read about kissing? Who cares so much about love?

Read more from Issue 16.1.