“That was not me,” she wrote. “The woman who killed herself—that was not the real me.”

It was the first time I had heard my mother’s voice, her true voice—calm, reassuring, not strained with paranoia—in a long, long while.

I woke knowing we had to buy the house.

 ***

Michael and I had been house hunting for the better part of a year. Every weekend, we visited a handful of properties in Redlands, California, where my daughter went to high school, twenty miles from our home in Riverside. We were hoping for one of the cute bungalows in town, a Craftsman, maybe, or a mini Victorian, but the pickings in our price range were dispiriting. Some places had potential, their character hidden beneath years of paint and questionable design decisions, but we didn’t have money for the serious renovations needed to restore the homes to their original glory. Over the course of our long search, our yellow Hummer-driving realtor got a boob job, met a man and got married. Over the course of the search, Michael and I got married, too, and moved to a small mid century rental house in Redlands so I wouldn’t have to spend two hours in the car each day taking my daughter to and from school, a task that had grown more cumbersome with my pregnant belly. Our son was born in that house a couple of months later, in a dark bedroom with a high narrow window the owner had shaded with cloth napkins clipped to a dowel. The house was the last place I saw my mom alive, the place where we learned she had hanged herself one week after Asher’s birth.

 ***

We toyed with the idea of trying to buy the house from the owner, who was in foreclosure, but decided against it. The bathroom had cool vintage blue tile and my office had French doors that looked out to a lovely, deep back yard, but the laundry room smelled like cat pee, even after we removed the linoleum and doused the floor boards with enzymes and vinegar, and the dishwasher made the whole house shake, and the sewer had a nasty habit of flooding the side yard, and sometimes bubbling up the shower drain. Plus, grief had become synonymous with the address, had seeped into the very walls of the place. Post-traumatic torpor led us to neglect the back yard, where the weeds grew taller than our heads. It was remarkable to watch nature take over, to see what human entropy wrought, life growing lush and unchecked around us as we sat on the couch, but we received a nasty letter from the “Buena Vista Beautification Committee”—likely a solitary neighbor hiding under the first person plural—threatening to report us to the city if we didn’t mow everything down.

When my daughter moved back with her dad and transferred to a high school in Riverside—a move that gutted me at first, but ultimately bettered our relationship as mother and daughter—we realized nothing was keeping us in Redlands. I started to scroll through Riverside listings and found one that began: “Are you sick and tired of the same old humm drum tract house? Bored with cookie cutter details and flat walls? Have you ever dreamed of being different than all of your neighbors? Then THIS is the home for YOU!” The ad went on to describe an open floor plan, a sunken living room, a vine-covered trellis, an abundance of fireplaces. The house was at the far reach of our budget, but we were intrigued. We made an appointment to check it out.

Michael and I found ourselves on a quiet, tree-lined street in a little neighborhood I hadn’t known existed; there was no mistaking the house when it came into view—it dwarfed all of the smaller ranch style homes and cottages on the block. A big boxy mountain lodge plunked in the middle of the city. We unhooked Asher from his carseat and walked beneath the wisteria vines that dripped from the arbor-framed driveway, amazed that such a place could be in our reach. The original 900 square foot Streamline Moderne house was built in 1939—the year my mom was born—but a local fireman had more than tripled it in size, turning it into the cabin of his dreams in the late 70s and early 80s. The whole house had a funky, homespun vibe, full of quirky touches—the lectern inexplicably built into a wall, the giant photo murals in the living room and bedrooms, the bathtubs up on platforms—that only added to its charm.

The seller had played up the mountain retreat feel of the house—a “Welcome to Camp Runamuck” sign was nailed by the doorbell, and she had peppered the wood and brick walls with fishing rods, canoe paddles and the like. A plaster bear swam at the bottom of the first floor bathtub; an animatronic deer head jutted out over the living room fireplace, ready to come to life at the touch of a button. The air was filled with cricket chirps and other outdoorsy sounds from a machine in the stairwell. Under all the kitsch and god-awful brass-and-glass fixtures, though, the bones of the house were grand, the beamed ceilings high, the use of space generous and modern.

Michael and I were stunned and giddy as we drove away, me next to Asher in the back seat.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“It’s pretty awesome,” he said, grinning.

“It’s pretty wacky,” I said. “It’s a pretty wacky house.”

“I kind of love it,” he said.

“I kind of love it, too.”

I watched Asher fall asleep with the movement of the car and imagined him learning to walk in the house, running around the balcony that ringed the second floor with friends, asking to live in the basement apartment as a teenager. It would be a fun place to grow up.

Michael and I told each other we should take some time to think about it, but the house had already lodged itself someplace deeper than our brains. When I dreamed about my mom’s letter, the deal was sealed. It was as if she had given us and this big crazy house her blessing.

 ***

“It’s a lot of space to fill, energetically,” our friend cautioned when we invited her to see the house after our offer was accepted, but that didn’t worry me, even though most of the other houses we had looked at could have fit within its main floor; one of them, which we had unsuccessfully bid for, could have fit in its living room. Inside this house, I knew I wouldn’t feel claustrophobic, trapped with my grief. Inside this house, I would have the room I needed to breathe—and, I hoped, the room I needed to write.

I had been wanting to write about my mom for years, but she had asked me to not write about her while she was still alive. I pretty much honored that; I didn’t think she’d mind when I wrote a mostly-celebratory essay for a mother-daughter anthology, but she honed in on the one negative sentence and threw the book away, refusing to speak about it again. That’s what we did in our family—hide away from anything that showed us in a less than flattering light. After she died, one of my first thoughts was “Now I can finally write about her.” I was able to cope with sorting through the chaos of her house by telling myself I was doing research for a book, putting on my detective hat, looking for clues and connections. I felt driven, on fire. I couldn’t wait to get to the page. Until I did, and then I froze.

Be gentle with yourself, my friends and family told me, don’t expect too much of yourself right now; maybe it’s too soon to write about her. I tried to heed this advice, but I wanted to capture the experience while it was still white-hot, and when I couldn’t, I felt like a failure. I blamed sleep deprivation. I blamed post-partum brain mush. I blamed myself for not being brave enough.

***

I threw most of my creative energy into the house. My mom had left me some money, so we were able to make some changes, make the place our own. We found reclaimed hardwood flooring on Craigslist and gleefully ripped out the hideous shag carpeting that blanketed the place, including the strange skinny master bathroom with the his and hers toilets. The owner of the wood estimated he had about 1700 square feet, so we figured we could take care of the downstairs, but the haul turned out to be enough to floor the entire 3,000 square foot house and then some. The guy had been storing it in his workshop for over 50 years; his father had salvaged it during a renovation of one of the oldest middle schools in town, and had floored his home with it, as well. Supposedly the wood came from the cafeteria. I told myself that if I ever wanted to write another middle school novel, all I had to do was lie down on the floor and soak in its memory of lunchroom angst.

Down came the pine cabinets and white tile in the kitchen, where my mother had spoken to me in my dream. I found locally made recycled glass countertops on Craigslist, which had become our main source for all things house, along with the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. The style we chose for our kitchen, speckled with watery shades of glass, turned out to be named Oceana, the same name as the community where my mom had lived in Oceanside. Our kitchen was clearly her new domain. Then Michael’s mom died unexpectedly a month before we moved in to the new place, four months after my mom’s death, and the kitchen became her domain, as well; we took the money from selling her modest furnishings and bought the light fixture that went over the kitchen island. It felt right to take the double suckerpunch of mother loss and use our moms’ legacies to build a place of nourishment.

 ***

I wasn’t writing much, but I told myself I was learning about revision through renovation. Tearing rooms down to their studs, moving walls around to make the space more usable, choosing sustainable materials, updating switch plates and doorknobs and pendant lights, bringing an ever-changing vision to life–all of these things felt applicable to writing, and offered their own creative gratification. Still, my lack of real writing had left me with a gnawing, growing sense of guilt and unease. When Asher was 17 months old, I hired a babysitter to come a few mornings a week so I could attempt to seriously dive back into the world of words.

My downstairs office has no door, just an archway, problematic with a mama-seeking toddler, so I would retreat to my daughter’s rarely used second floor bedroom and park myself at her Parsons desk on her fuchsia velveteen chair. I wrote little bits about my mom, although I could only approach her death in a sideways way. I wrote short fragments of a novel. Mostly, though, I responded to my students’ work and watched the blue jays dart in and out of the wisteria vines outside the window and futzed around Facebook, “liking” things, not having the energy to comment or post any updates of my own.

***

Then my 92-year-old dad broke his hip in March. This new family crisis forced me into some needed detachment from my mom’s death and I found myself able to write about her more freely. As I attended to my dad’s care, words about my mom bubbled to the surface, and I would scribble a few down in my little notebook when I took a break to use the bathroom or grab a bite to eat. Perhaps the path for this was cleared the day before his fall, when my dad gave me his blessing to publish work about my mom, something I had worried would hurt him. “Maybe it will help me understand why she had to leave us,” he told me. I hoped it would help me understand, too.
Things are more stable now—my dad has made great strides with his physical therapy and is adjusting to an assisted living place ten minutes from our house, and Asher recently started preschool—so I’ve reclaimed my metal tanker desk in my office downstairs as a place to work, not just pile mail. A large French educational poster leans against the wall at the back of the desk—“La Multiplication Vegetative,” with drawings that detail several growing processes—”Les Metamorphoses Florales,” featuring the growth cycle of a rose, “La Greffe,” showing how to graph one tree to another, and “La Taille des Arbres Fruitiers,” illustrating how a pear tree bears fruit. I bought it the day before my novel Delta Girls came out in 2010; the book is set on a pear farm, and I thought the pears were a good omen, plus I knew it would be nice to have a reminder of organic process in my writing space.

When my sister saw the poster the first time, she pointed to the word “ligature,” where a cord binds a graft to a branch.

“That’s the technical term used in a hanging,” she told me, and I couldn’t help but flash on the electrical cord listed on our mom’s death certificate. My sister has happened upon some obscure hanging trivia since our mom’s suicide—because of her, I know that asparagus grows well beneath gallows, fed by the urine and semen let loose by the hanged, and that weeping willows, our mom’s favorite tree, are associated with that kind of death. She flinched, her face full of apology. “I hope I haven’t ruined the picture for you.”

She didn’t ruin it, but she definitely changed my relationship with the poster. Now when I look up from my work, I am reminded by that word, that image, to look my mom’s story straight in the face. The reality is always there; I don’t want to shy away from it.

I write in the house my mother built, the renovations all around us made possible by her generosity, but also the house within the house—the house of my body; my body that formed within hers, that learned equivocation from hers. I think of the reclaimed flooring we bought for the new house, covered with years of different shades of varnish and stain, and how our floor guy was able to sand it down so we could see its original color, its true grain. That’s what I want to do as I write: break through the varnish my mom helped me shellack over my truth, the stains we both used to deny our imperfections, hide our dark places. I want to lie down on the stripped naked floor of myself and listen for the stories beneath the habitual stories, the stories that remain.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• Where I Write #22: A Room of One’s Own in the Middle of Everything
• Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying
• WHERE I WRITE #21: On the Edge of Sky and Sea
• WHERE I WRITE #20: Towers Diner
• WHERE I WRITE #19: With Love From My Desk From A Dumpster

Last time.

The phrase echoes through me every few seconds—last time, last time—as I nestle large black olives into the curves around the edge of the dish, drape whole green onions over the top, balance some radishes in between. As I add a couple of ice cubes to keep everything cool and crisp.

Last time, last time, last time.

This has been my job at my mother-in-law’s for the last 20 Christmas Eves: arranging the crudités into an intricate vegetable Jenga. It always feels like serious work. It always feels like art. Like love.

Last time.

I am leaving my husband on New Year’s Day. The new house is rented, the boxes half packed. The beginning of a trial separation I know in my heart will be permanent. Everyone knows, but no one says a word—not my husband’s mother or sisters or their significant others; not our kids, not my husband. Certainly not me. Christmas Eve goes on—my mother in law dumps the clear plastic tub of oysters and their brine into a copper pot along with some cream; she rubs the usual garlic clove along the inside of the salad bowl, takes the wide loaves of moist, dense, delicious bread—the batter of which she whips with a spoon rather than kneads–from the oven.

Last time. Last time. Last time. Last time.

My mother in law has become more of a mother to me than my own, especially in the fourteen years since my daughter’s birth, when my mom’s delusions first surfaced. I watch her pour a glass of white wine, her jet black Louise Brooks hair falling forward into her face, and love her so fiercely, so desperately, my chest aches. I waited so long to ask for a separation partly because I didn’t want to separate from her.

Last time.

She usually makes a pot of Christmas borscht to accommodate me, her Russian Jewish vegetarian daughter in law, but this year, she’s made split pea. It bubbles and snaps on the stove next to the oyster stew. “I thought I’d try something new,” she says, but I imagine it’s her way of starting to pull away from me, to loosen me from her heart.

After dinner (last time) and buttery jam-filled cookies (last time) and the distributing of presents under the tinsel-dripping tree (last time), the instruments come out. My husband’s family is a musical one; their gatherings often involve guitars and piano, sometimes fiddle and accordion. The usual carols are played, along with some bluegrass songs that give them a chance to harmonize; then the grownups retreat to the kitchen to clean up, and my 17-year-old son starts to strum Belle and Sebastian.

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I had never heard of Belle and Sebastian until I saw the movie High Fidelity, and then I thought they were a made-up band, a fictional excuse for Jack Black to lose his shit. It wasn’t until my kids became fans that I realized they were an actual group. If it weren’t for my kids, I’d probably still be listening to Prince and the Talking Heads on a near exclusive basis.

I help wash the gold-trimmed stemware my mother in law inherited from her mother, almost the exact same set my mom inherited from hers. I find myself violently gripping each goblet, and I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t want to let them go or because I want to crush them with my hands.

My son launches into “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying.” The song sounds so peppy but the lyrics slay me, even though I don’t catch most of them, just the title phrase and “You’re so naive” and “I always cry at endings.” That’s enough. I set down the glass, tear off my yellow rubber gloves, run to my mother in law’s TV room and wail. Deep subterranean sounds that rip  through me and seem to last for hours. No one comes in to check on me, no one asks if I’m okay after I finally emerge, embarrassed, my eyes completely red. They all love me, but not enough to forgive what I’m about to do. When we’re walking to the car, though, my husband’s older sister pulls me aside and gestures to her leopard print coat. “I bought this for myself when I knew I had to leave my ex,” she says, then wraps her arms around me. I start to cry all over again, tears matting the fake fur.

I always cry at endings.

***

The first weeks of the separation, I feel like I’m falling through space. Our shared circle of friends has tightened around my husband and I am careening out of orbit, into someplace vast and dark and cold. I have taken to crying at night in huge, jagged sobs that make my face fall asleep, make my body disappear.

“I think you’re going crazy,” my daughter tells me, “I think you’re going crazy like your mom.” It feels like the most hurtful thing someone could say, but I see her concern and wonder if she’s right. Still, when I catch myself in the mirror, I am surprised at how the whites of my eyes look—clearer and brighter than I’ve ever seen them.

A friend leaves a ritual-in-a-bag on my doorstep. I am to cast a circle of salt, put a figure eight made of ribbon in the center, my name in one loop, my husband’s in the other. I am to eat a blood orange, taste the sour and sweet together on my tongue. I am to take the scissors and cut the eight in half, severing what I thought would be infinite. I sob some more, but feel the release of it, the light creeping back, as I wish each newly separate circle well.

New circles form. Love rushes in. Life enters the space blasted open by all that crying. I find out I’m pregnant at 41, nineteen years since my first pregnancy. I find myself saying, “I do.”

***

I rest in bed with my two-day-old son, and listen to my sister and my new husband whisper in the hallway outside the closed door. I can’t make out what they’re saying, but I know it has to do with my mom. They are trying to keep her away from me, to keep me and the baby in a protective bubble inside the room where he was born. I nuzzle my nose against his new head and breathe in his raw, sweet scent.

My mom has had delusional “episodes,” as my family has taken to calling them—undiagnosed, untreated—on and off for almost sixteen years now, but nothing like this. When she picked my sister up at the airport the day before, she had a flannel nightgown wrapped around her nose and mouth, a barrier against the poison she thought was coming through the vents. A Jack in the Box cup full of pee in the cup holder that she planned to have tested to see what drugs my dad had sprayed at her from his cell phone. When she held the baby for the first time yesterday and he immediately fell asleep, she was sure she had gassed him from the fumes lingering on her clothes.

My older kids come to meet their baby brother, and I venture out of the dim bedroom to have dinner with them, the table covered with aluminum take-out containers full of red-sauce-heavy pasta delivered by the local pizza place. My mom is still wearing the same purple turtleneck and black pants she had on yesterday, and looks disheveled and sweaty; disconcerting, as she normally takes great pains with her appearance. Her eyes look different than usual, too, beady and dark. After we eat, she corners my 19 year old and tells him she’ll give him $100 dollars to drive her to her friend’s house in Carlsbad, an hour and a half away. She doesn’t tell him she’s scared to take her own car because she thinks it’s being followed by numerous Middle Eastern men. She doesn’t tell him she’s been driving as if she’s in the Bourne Identity to escape them. He agrees—he has to study for an exam, but who wouldn’t want a quick $100? When my mom goes to the bathroom, my sister and husband swoop in to give him the scoop. His face drops.

“I’m sorry, Nana,” he says when she returns. “If we leave now, I won’t be back until 11, and I have a lot of homework.”

My mom immediately charges toward my sister. “Sabotage!” she yells, one arm in the air as if she’s rattling a saber. My husband steps in between them.

“We’re going to a hotel,” he says firmly. He had taken her to a hotel three nights ago after she showed up at our house unexpectedly, a cushion from an outdoor chaise under her arm so she could sleep on our floor, and she and I got into a shouting match. I went into labor a few hours later. “You can’t come into my house and talk to people like that.” My husband’s face and voice both sharpen; I’ve never seen him like this before. The papa bear in him rising up, protecting his clan. It’s both terrifying and exhilarating.

My mom grabs my sister’s batik scarf, the one she bought during a trip to Sausalito with an ex-boyfriend many years ago, and throws it over her head.

“You don’t know how dangerous this is for me,” she says, her entire face covered, then races out the door into a world where she thinks she’s being chased and drugged and conspired against.

For a moment, we’re all silent. It’s as if she’s pulled all the oxygen out of the house behind her. “Fuuuck,” I say under my breath, not a word that often comes through me. We all stare at each other, eyebrows raised, reeling. Then my son points to my arms and says, “Look! A baby!” and everyone laughs and the oxygen whooshes back in.

The rest of the night feels like a party. The kids start messing with instruments. My son puts on my daughter’s blue Snuggie and looks like some sort of crazed monk as he plays guitar, swaying wildly in his chair. My sister and I sit side by side on the piano bench, laughing so hard, I’m worried the stitches in my perineum will pop. Then he starts to play “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying” and she and I turn to each other and burst into tears.

“What if that’s the last image we ever have of her?” I ask and we fall into each other, the baby nestled between us.

A few days later, we get a call from the coroner’s office.

A car crash, I first imagine, as I watch my sister on the phone, color and emotion streaming across her face like a time-lapse film. But no, I learn, as she drops to her knees, as she crawls around the room, as I stumble after her, crazy wails ripping through my throat—our mom had hanged herself in a parking garage.

***

For weeks, I can’t get the Belle and Sebastian song out of my head. I still only know those three lines “Get me away from here, I’m dying,” “You’re so naïve,” “I always cry at endings,” but they’re enough. They stiffen the hair on the back of my neck, send cold rivers of adrenalin down my arms, tighten my chest. They take me straight into my mother’s desperation, my poor mom with my sister’s scarf over her head, the scarf that was among the clothes in the paper bag from the coroner’s office, the things she had been wearing when she died. I had wondered if it was what she used to hang herself until I saw the electrical cord listed on her death certificate.

Get me away from here, I’m dying. I’m dying. I’m dying.

***

The baby looks into my eyes with the wise, direct gaze he’s had since he was born. “He was brought here to be a healer,” a friend said shortly after his birth, and it feels true. It feels like he is the reason for my painful separation and divorce, like he came when he did to help me get through this monstrous grief, to ground me with a pure and simple love. I don’t want him to feel that responsibility his whole life, to be his mother’s healer, but for now, I’ll take it. “You’re so naive,” the song warns me, and maybe I am. I always cry at endings. I cry at beginnings, too. I lift my shirt and he latches on and I am all tears and milk and sweet deep ache, alive with the mothers I’ve lost.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• Where I Write #23: The House My Mother Built
• The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup

Anyone interested in fiction and the Internet should read this now.

Sappho and banjos! (via Bookslut)

“Why does everyone hate the small bookstore?” (via Bookninja)

In the age old rivalry between Batman and Superman, Batman comes out on top by $75,500.

Dear Martin Amis, Just stop. And no more palling around with Hitchens. Someone’s gonna get hurt.

Related Posts:

• 0–9
• THE NEW YORK COMICS SYMPOSIUM: DANNY FINGEROTH, PETER SANDERSON & JEFF TREXLER
• Sunday Rumpus Fiction: Nobody
• When Fiction Won’t Let You Lie to Yourself
• On Being A “Vile, Loathsome, Despicable Pig”