The Fear and Kosher Ham

[mallorys_camera]

Saw Marybeth yesterday. Not really a successful outing -- we'd intended to go hiking in Garland Canyon but my legs felt wobbly and I was coming down with some intestinal flu. The trail through the live oak and poison oak wilderness was not so very steep but my legs felt as though I were pushing through four feet of water. At the juncture of the trail with a jagged rut that cut steep along the canyon's edge, I turned to Marybeth and said, "I'm very sorry. Don't hate me. But I can't do this."

I have vertigo. Some times I can ignore it. But today it was clear that one misstep along that narrow, spiky path and I'd plunge off the side of the mountain. My body still hasn't forgotten that bike mishap of several weeks back when I saw my front wheel go into the rut even as I felt the speeding bike begin to tilt and fall. It didn't hurt all that very much when my left hand and leg hit the ground. I stood back up, shaken. Some divers called over, "Are you okay? Did you get clipped by that guy?" -- meaning the cyclist who was speeding off in the opposite direction. I didn't know. I took a step experimentally with the injured leg. Sharp pain. But there I was, three miles away from home and the fastest way to get there was to ride. So I climbed back on the bike.

Big mistake. I peddled a mile or so then braked and put my leg out to brace the stop. Whoa. My leg went out from under me and I almost fell again.

I stayed off my bike for ten days and when I began to ride again, I was riding with a difference, riding cautiously, braking to just above a crawl when I coasted down hills, walking my bike through obstacle courses like curvy intersections or heavily trafficked streets. I just didn't trust my own maneuvering abilities. I'm a middle-aged woman now, almost 50. The damage I do to my body is hard to repair. My left knee still throbs on foggy mornings but more acutely; I'd caught The Fear.

If I tumbled off the side of this mountain, I'd shock myself with my own attempts to be a sport, to save face, to laugh off the fractured knee or the fractured arm, and it would only be when I was alone afterwards that the real pain would begin.

"It's fine," said Marybeth. "We'll turn back. I'd forgotten that you hate going down hills -- "

"I'm fine going up hills," I said. "And going up hills is the hard part."

"You did great on the Jeannie death-march too," said Marybeth, referring to the hike that Jeannie had taken a group of her girlfriends on last February, to celebrate her forty-somethingth birthday. We'd rendezvoused somewhere in Big Sur and hiked seven miles straight up the face of a coastal cliff. The trail down had been about a mile and I was on my tiptoes the whole time.

"Yeah. Well. By the time I figured out what all that was going to entail, it was too late to do anything about it... So I just shut up. I figured I'd do what I had to do and talking about it would only make it harder. "

Without a set agenda, the social nuances between the two of us grew awkward for me. Marybeth's life is so perfect, so ... focused. She'd just returned from a series of summer trips -- New York City with her son and nephews, three weeks driving through bountiful British Columbia with her husband Kim; a week in the Sierras at her summer cottage. Three generations ago in Oakland, a Marybeth ancestor has been smart enough to start his own plumbing business. The bloodline had been living off the largesse ever since.

"Oh, I know how fortunate I am," said Marybeth comfortably. "For a postal worker and a part-time teacher to be living the life that we're living. I've always been in favor of inherited wealth. But you know, I put in my time as a bank teller, a motel maid, a classroom teacher."

Truth to tell, I was feeling ... jealous. Jealous and somehow pathetic, as though this outing -- our first in four months -- was the social equivalent of a mercy fuck. All around me my friends are leading comfortable, well-organized lives while I teeter perpetually on the fringe of chaos: a messy, dysfunctional house which I rent rather than own; a significant other with first-hand knowledge of the federal penal system; un-house-broken pets; no set career path; misplaced financial priorities. (Marybeth is too well-bred to say so but I know she and Susan both think that it's insane for me to be paying $18,000 for Max to go to RLS...)

This wasn't friendship. This was sufferance. I saw myself as I imagined Marybeth might see me -- a self-involved, overly loud, overly big woman who wore her flamboyance the way an eighty year old woman might wear the bright red lipstick and marcelled curls that hadn't changed since she first spied them on Joan Crawford in the pages of Modern Screen some sixty years before. Grotesque artifacts of a youth that happened very long ago...

We drove over to the $900,000 plus Carmel Valley house that Marybeth's sister Martha had just bought. "Isn't it spectacular?" Marybeth asked. "I'm going to be doing a lot of house-sitting!"

In truth, I thought the house was ugly. Lot to lot with all those other houses -- a million dollars doesn't even buy you acreage in California. I thought of my dream house -- that eighteenth century limestone mansion in Owls Head, Maine with its view of the bright blue waters and its Historic Landmark plaque. I had enough money in the bank to buy it outright. The only problem was ... what would I do in Owls Head, Maine? In fact, what would I do anywhere?

The house was a sprawling wood-beam-and-glass, Frank Lloyd Wright knock-off in the middle of a live oak glade. The dirt around it was barren and unplantable. In 10 years, I thought, when that fungus that's killing off all the live oaks in California levels all these trees, it'll be even uglier than it is now.

Money was on my mind and I chattered about it compulsively. That old chestnut, my primordial obsession: why do the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Why is the hardest work in the world -- backbreaking labor, sweating in agricultural fields or those hours of numbed indenture under fluorescent lights in a retail graveyard -- always compensated at the lowest rate while money in the bank burbles and mitoses into ever richer and more virulent streams of capital? Why hadn't I had ancestors smart enough to go into the plumbing business?

We drove to one of those organic flower farms dotting Carmel Valley Drive and thence to a gallery where Marybeth was showing some art. By this time whatever was churning in my stomach was threatening to burst and I wondered what would happen to our friendship if I had an attack of diarrhea in front of her latest series of collages. It was her Demeter series, collages painstakingly depicting the kidnap of Persephone, the earth's punishment by the goddess of fertility, the descent into hell and subsequent rescue of the maiden who had eaten four pomegranate seeds, hence dooming mankind to four months of barrenness forever. The collages were meticulously assembled and pretty. The pieces would look attractive on the wall of a house just like the one her sister bought. But you'd pass them a hundred times and never think to look. They lacked the dark edge, the terror, the awe that one might expect to document the birth of the Eleusian mysteries. They were pretty and unremarkable. Trust me to be the consummate art snob even at my lowest ebb of self-esteem.

Marybeth is going back to teaching part-time. This decision took me aback. I'd talked about it with Susan last year after Marybeth's mother died and left her the small fortune that made day jobs unnecessary. So much of having a circle of mutual friends is the cosy deconstruction of those overlapping lives...

"Of course she's going to keep working," said Susan. "What else is she going to do?"

I was shocked. "Susan. Marybeth is an artist. She'll have time now to really make something of her art."

"Oh, that's right, I forgot," laughed Susan. "And you're an artist too. See, I don't have a creative bone in my body. All that fuss over creativity. It's always struck me as an awful lot of hand-wringing with very few tangible results to show for it."

I was overjoyed when I spoke to Marybeth afterwards and she told me she'd changed her mind, that she was going to really throw herself into her creative work. Score one for our side.

But...

"It was a very difficult year," said Marybeth. "I felt very unbalanced, teetering on the brink psychically. And part of that, I realized, was an immense sense of isolation. I'm better at everything if I do a little of it all, like sampling tampas..."

I was silent for a few minutes. Then I said slowly, "Marybeth, I didn't know last year was difficult for you. Why didn't I know?"

"Oh, you know. You weren't really around. You had that awful job. You were always driving. Or recovering from driving, Or battling some domestic crisis with Ben."

"I feel horrible that I didn't know. I think of you as one of my very dearest friends, Marybeth. It's always a puzzlement to me that we live so close and see each other so infrequently -- "

That was the cue. It was her turn to say, "And you are one of my very dearest friends -- "

Instead she said, "Well, the circumstances of our lives don't really overlap. Our children are different ages. It's not as though we do things where we're apt to run into each other."

"But isn't that the crux of friendship?" I pleaded. "There are congenial people you kind of harvest from the shared circumstances but friends are the people you keep close to your heart when those circumstances change."

I was crushed by this sudden revelation of the lack of intimacy between us. Had I really been such an awful friend this year past? Had I really behaved all that badly? I knew the hysterectomy had been a hard time for her -- but I hadn't called because I thought she didn't want to see anyone...

At the end of the day we somehow ended up on Huckleberry Hill. The trail up was very steep but broad enough to assuage my fear of gravity. "Do you miss your mother?" she asked.

I sighed. "I don't know," I said. "I kind of think it hasn't hit me that she's dead yet, in some essential sense. I mean, it feels as though we're just feuding and in another few weeks, I'll get tired of feuding and pick up the phone and call her. Part of me thinks she committed suicide and I'm pissed about that -- "

"What do you mean?"

"I think she starved herself to death," I said slowly. "I think she didn't have to die."

It happened so fast when it finally happened. I remember getting that phone call from her when we were in that auto supply place in San Jose, on the way up to Sacramento for Max's Mathletics competition. "When are you coming by to pick up my taxes?" she demanded. Those taxes had been a sore point between us for months. I'd offered to do them way back in the fall. No, no, no, she'd told me. Michael's father was going to do them. Michael's father had offered to do them. Michael's parents really, really liked her and so did Michael. Michael was the former student of Jane's that Janie had been paying to hang out with my mother, an Aidan Quinn lookalike with startlingly blue eyes upon whom my mother had developed her last fatalistic romantic fixation. I found the emails on my mother's computer after she died. "If only I were 20 years younger," she'd written him, "I'd give Tricia -- " Michael's fiancée "-- a run for her money."

My mother refused to see Janie, of course, and bad-mouthed her every chance she got. But she primped and preened to see Michael. We kept the secret from her that his attentions had been bought and paid for.

After she died, I also found the email exchange with Michael's father -- the disinterested but polite refusal to become involved with her financial status. Poor Mom, post mortem, all her little frauds unmasked... After that, her focus shifted -- Ricky would do her taxes.

"You need to pick up my taxes and bring them over to Ricky," she said. "I don't want you looking at them."

I sighed. "We're on our way over. Sorry. Traffic has been a mess. That's why we're late." Her voice had eerie resonances with the voice I remembered from when I was 12 and she had her first nervous breakdown. Whenever she called that spring it was like talking to a ghost who was dialing from the other side of the grave.

"I'm hungry," she said. "There's nothing to eat."

"Do you want us to bring you some food?" I asked. "Just tell me what you'd like to eat and I'll bring it."

"I want ham, " she said. "Bring me ham. Kosher ham."

"Mom, " I said. "Mom. Ham's not kosher. By definition."

"Kosher ham. I fell," she said and made a gasp that could have been a sob.

"Mom, " I said. "Mom. Do you want me to stay with you? Mom, listen. I'll come up and stay with you. You shouldn't be alone."

When we hit San Francisco, we pulled the traveling circus into Andronico's parking lot and braved the crowd around the delicatessen counter. Ben was pissed off. "How am I going to handle the kids by myself in Sacramento?"

"Ben, she's my mother. I can't leave her alone."

I bought ham, bagels, cream cheese, orange juice and the raisin bread that was her particular favorite. We drove over to her apartment. I made Ben and the kids wait outside in the van -- I'd had a big fight with my mother just a few weeks before when she told me that she didn't want me to bring Max up for a visit. "I don't want him to see me like this. I want him to remember me the way I was."

I was startled when she finished fumbling with the complicated set of locks that kept the world at bay and opened her door. I'd seen her only a few days earlier that week when I came to have The Conversation: "Mom. You can't take care of yourself anymore. We've got to get someone in here to take care of you." At that time she'd seemed weak but recognizably her feisty self.

Now, I was looking at a stranger. Emaciated as a concentration camp victim with a terrible green fury in her blazing eyes and a weird smile playing on her chapped lips.

To be continued...