Lithium for Medea

1

Everything requires an explanation: Name. Age. Sexual persuasion. Occupation. Incarnation. Marital status. Addictions. Past arrests (note convictions).

There was a sound.

Water.

I was running a bath. It was good to be liquid. I didn’t have skin at all. I had the gleam of a fish, the fine etched scales and gills. I knew the soft channel down. I could burrow into the blue weight. I could wear whitecaps embossed across my back, a kind of spine. I could eat anything and breathe under water.

My paraphernalia was neatly arranged on the floor. I had the cotton and alcohol ready. I had ground the cocaine into a fine white powder. My spoon was balanced on the bathtub ledge, next to my syringe, when the telephone rang.

“I have to talk to you.”

The voice was cold, sharp and precise. I tried to place it. Usually my mother will have her secretary call me. And of course Francine has so many voices, now plaintive and aloof, now cooing and abused. There’s her voice of exhaustion, throat raspy from too many cigarettes and too much coffee at the end of budget conferences. And there’s the whispery tone of caution she uses when she isn’t alone.

“What is it?” My heart jumped.

My life was a set of parallel worlds. Each world had distinct rules and personalities. The chemistry, mathematics and history were different. The basic elements, evolution and development were all as intricate and absolutely different as the life on a carbon-based world might differ from a world built on methane. My parallel worlds were wide and smooth and clearly marked. The atmospheres were mutually lethal. There could be no collision course.

“It’s your father,” Francine said. She let it sit there a long time. “He’s sick.” She paused again. “He’s going to the hospital in the morning.”

“Cancer?” I had been holding the syringe. I put the needle down.

“Bingo,” Francine said. “And bad.”

My wet feet touched the floor. I took the syringe apart and put it on the bottom of my purse. I had a feeling I was going to need it.

I drove east toward Beverly Hills and wound north off Sunset Boulevard. I was filled with something suffocating, painful and dry. The whole world looked as if it had been washed in white paint.

My mother’s house is very white. It is in the authentic Spanish tradition, built around an orange tiled courtyard. The house is nestled on the side of a hill, its long back red-brick terrace flush with the mountain. Francine bought the house the year she divorced my father.

“See what I’ve done?” she demanded.

It was the first time I had come to see her new house, to take the grand tour. Francine was wearing a peach-colored silk dressing gown. She rustled as she walked, now pausing, now pointing to each special feature in the house one by one. My mother has always had an enormous capacity and appreciation for details. She also has an excellent memory. I followed her silently through the thickly carpeted rooms.

“Notice the floor plan, the creative use of space. Only one bedroom.” Francine stared at me. The other bedrooms had been converted to a study, a sunroom and a wood-paneled room housing a pool table.

I understood. In her way, Francine was saying it wasn’t a family house. There wasn’t a family anymore. The only overnight guests Francine planned on would be sleeping in her bed.

“I did it all myself.” Her voice was rising higher, edging into her private danger zone.

Francine indicated the gently arched doorways, the rounded windows which a special crew would come and scrub once each week. I stared at the windows. They were large and sparkling clean. The air beyond was a pale undemanding blue.

“I did this all by myself. You know who’s lived here? Zsa Zsa Gabor. Elliot Gould. Howard Hughes used to keep his starlets here.” Francine grabbed my wrist. She put her face very close to mine. Her eyes were amber, enormous and fixed.

“Why do I tell you this? I want you to be proud of me.”

Francine pointed to the twenty-two-foot-high ceilings. She showed me the fireplace in the bedroom and the mirrors along the far wall. She pointed to the wood (“genuine redwood — I had it tested”) beams in the ceilings. She showed me the dining room with its three glass sides all looking down on the city.

“I was an orphan,” Francine said. Her tone was hushed, conspiratorial, as if she had never before revealed this information to me or anyone. She leaned closer. “I was abandoned. Deserted during the Depression.”

Francine was showing me the bar she had just installed. It had an imported black marble surface and water taps adjusted to accommodate bourbon, Scotch and gin.

“I had no education, no resources.” She looked at me, hard.

I didn’t miss the implications. She was saying I hadn’t suffered gross deprivations as she had. I had been given an education, that nebulous thing she called resources and even the semblance of a family. And I had failed.

“I was sixteen when I married him,” Francine said.

We were leaning against the bar. My mother poured herself a small glass of Scotch.

“Then he got cancer. Cancer!” my mother cried. She drank the Scotch.

“There we were. Bankrupt. Him in bed five years, an invalid. Me alone with a six-year-old kid to support.”

Francine permitted her lower lip to slowly curl with disgust. As far as my mother is concerned, I am still that six-year-old child, helpless, overweight, needing eyeglasses and orthodontia, a terrible burden, a girl with nightmares and bad posture and an inability to make friends, to even say hello to strangers.

Of course, it got worse. And Francine does have her evidence. It’s been dug up. It’s been dropped in her lap. It’s all there, polished and labeled under glass. I failed to graduate from college. I failed in my marriage. I failed with Jason repeatedly. I failed to find a man who wanted me, permanently and legally. A man to install me like a sparkling new appliance in the center of some streamlined kitchen with built-in self-cleaning oven. A man to give me children and Saks charge accounts, security and a future.

For Francine the world is simple. If one has the stuff, the talent, intelligence and persistence, one automatically succeeds. One literally soars above the huddled peasant masses, flies to the peaks of canyons to live on stilts and taunt the elements. Let San Andreas yawn down there in the butchered plateau. I am above it. I have ascended like the angels. If one had the stuff, it was simply a matter of reaching out and plucking one perfect sweet ripe peach after another.

Or else one compensated. One taught blind children or passed out government checks in the ghetto. One played the game right and became invisible. I couldn’t even get off the playing field gracefully. I chose to study the special seasons of the canals and make love with Jason.

“Twenty-seven when my husband got cancer,” Francine told me. She poured another small glass of Scotch.

I could remember what? There were sudden inexplicable absences. The house empty. A note left on the table. My first grade teacher gave me her home phone number. She said I could call her. Why would I call her? There were peripheral people, neighbors I barely knew taking me to sleep one or two nights at their houses. Their houses were filled with odd smells and the spices of alien foods. No one answered my questions.

I would sit in the rooms assigned me by one strange smiling woman after another and wonder how many people lived in each house. Who were they? When would my mother come back? Where was my father? Why was everybody lighting candles? Was it some kind of birthday? I would sit alone and wonder what these people wanted.

Later my mother canceled my piano lessons. My father spent entire days in bed. She brought him lunch on a tray. A terrible transformation was taking place, as if the big man who was my father was becoming a boy. Then a stream of strangers wandered through our house. They left with my mother’s brass lamps. They took her new china plates. They carted out the living room sofa and chairs. I watched the truck drive away. By then I knew the world had collapsed.

“You have no idea what it was like,” Francine assured me. “You were a baby. I shielded you, protected you. I went out to work.” She brought her face very close to mine. I could smell her perfume, her liquor and something hot and damp and sweet, overripe, overwhelming, her skin.

“I went out in secondhand clothes. I didn’t even know how to drive or type. I went to work like that, in Hollywood, no less.” Francine finished her Scotch. There were more implications, things black and darting, dangerous things with claws and teeth, perhaps.

“Do you understand?” Her lips trembled. Tears seemed to leap out of her eyes.

“I never even finished high school. Look.” Francine gestured at the high ceilings, the arches, the sparkling clean windows, the genuine redwood beams, the whole city spread out flat and totally conquered below.

Francine sighed. There were implications, sharp, heavy, like metal splinters. My mother had done incredibly well. She had tested her wings against the airless, cloudless pale blue L.A. skies and soared, ascended. She began as a receptionist, answering telephones and bringing the boss coffee and yes, sir, sure thing, boss, I can do it. Do it better than you ever believed, ever dreamed. Now she was the producer of a television program syndicated by seventy-one stations across the nation.

“You’ve always hated me, resented me,” Francine added. She was staring at the imported black marble bar surface. She sighed again.

What had I done? I had married a neurasthenic borderline psychotic and suffered the added indignity of having him leave me. My God, I had married a Trekie. I had not graduated from any organized, coherent course of study, certified and stamped by diploma.

Instead I had viewed slides of artifacts, bone chips, two-million-year-old skulls and shelves of ancient molars. The flesh shreds, the eyes disappear, the delicate printed wings of flying and hopping things dry to dust. Only the hard bones and teeth remain. The hard evidence.

Once I thought the hard evidence important and that a record of explanation must be left intact. Something undeniable, like trilobites, a kind of permanent fetus etched in the center of paleozoic rocks. The seas in which they lived disappeared before collective human memory. But the seas still exist now, still race their shadows toward some long-eroded shore. There is proof. Salt deposits lie at the bottom of oceans. The seas have dried and returned, again and again. The salt remains. It’s something.

Without the hard evidence the past becomes infinitely malleable. The past can lose solidity, flow and rush the old banks, erasing and drowning. The past can take the road stones, one by one. And the memory of roads. It occurred to me that even hard evidence might not be anchor enough, not sturdy enough to withstand the flow.

I stood on the street in front of my mother’s house for a long time. I looked directly up at the sky, which was an undamaged blue, plain blue, absolutely blue, blue as a piece of roof slate. I wanted some strange parting, an inexplicable red streak, an omen, however peripheral or at the mercy of that monster, interpretation. I wanted something to shake itself loose and take a position, any position at all. Nothing drifted in the sky, not even one spent cloud.

I knocked against the door, sensing, right at that moment as my fist hit the wood, that something was changing. Behind me lay the familiar convenient grooves of my parallel worlds. And I suddenly thought, perhaps it isn’t all random. Perhaps there are patterns. Cause and effect. One thing was certain. The dropped brick lands.