Lithium for Medea

2

I walked into my mother’s house, wingless, hopeless. Francine still sees me as that six-year-old, pale and puffy. By ten, I was a marshmallow woman, pasty and white, almost as tall as I am now and afraid of everything. I did not accept easily. The sky was never simply a matter of air and space and color. The flametips of stars seemed to burn. My skin felt scarred from the constant abuse of a stalled white noon or a night black as a sea of rats. Summers wounded me, too yellow and hot, too molten and unmoving. Winters were bitterly short, a brief sharp bristle above singed lawns pushing stiff lilies with fat gaping toothless white mouths.

I was a brooder, caressing demons in my nine-year-old darkness, making pacts and spinning into sleep reciting my long lists of resentments. I could not forgive. I was sly, listening at locked doors and frowning at my mother pointing a camera, making certain she would remember and later, sifting drawers, discover a girl staring at her with twisted lips and mouth snarled. I was listless, always refusing, my mouth forming an iron no while I stored invisible scars from air torn by slammed doors. I wandered alone and practiced abandonment in parks of low drained hills. I was the one wearing childhood like a rare disease, already bored by fairy tales, already knowing better. I was the one with straight A’s and secrets, the one who moved slow and said no and meant it. I was cold, closed, never learning to charm or beg. I was the one who spun webs and made night a contagion.

“You look terrible,” Francine observed. It’s a standard greeting between us.

“What are the odds?” I asked.

I knew Francine would compute the possibilities into odds. My mother and father had spent their first three years together on the road. My father was a gambler. The thoroughbreds were his passion. My mother and father rode trains and slept in hotels while following the thoroughbred horses from New York to Florida and back again. Their map was not cities or states, but race tracks. Tropical, Hialeah and Gulfstream, Havre de Grace, Monmouth and Garden State, Aqueduct, Jamaica, Belmont and Saratoga. That was before I was born. That was before the first cancer.

“Even money says he’ll make it through the surgery. But there’s more involved.” Francine lowered her voice. “You know those bastards.” She meant the doctors. “There’s always more involved.”

I was staring across the living room at my mother. Francine and I are always studying one another across a savage gulf of space neither of us wants or understands. It is dark. Things stir, rustle and peck. The path sinks. There are thorns. A dull wind thick with debris settles over the surfaces, the edges blur.

“Are you going to have a nervous breakdown?” Francine asked.

She walked to the bar. She sat on a stool with narrow cane legs. A mirror, round and the size of a child’s globe, was perched near her elbow. The mirror was framed by small bright bulbs, pinkish and looking hot. Francine was rubbing a bluish cream into her eyelids. From time to time, she sucked in her cheeks and tilted her head, studying her reflection from various angles.

“Well? Are you going to break down?”

Francine made it sound like a race horse breaking a fragile leg. A horse that would have to be shot.

“I want to know what this is going to cost me. How many hospital tabs do I have to pick up? Just his? Or both of you?”

Francine held a small black brush in her hand. She was putting on mascara. Her cheekbones were high, rouged. They looked as if an electric current ran through them. Her neck was thin. Her mouth was full, expressive. I could see her thoughts float across her lips. Her hair had been arranged into a perfect auburn swirl. The telephone rang.

“No way,” Francine said, holding the receiver lightly and opening a tube of brownish lipstick. “My husband’s got cancer.” Francine always calls my father her husband, despite their divorce. “I don’t care if they’re giving it away free. I can’t get to New York now. Screw Barbara Walters.” Francine hung up the telephone.

Francine’s house is large and cool, elegant in an antiseptic way. Her house is a series of tans and beiges, caramels, browns, bones, oysters, bronzes, coppers and creams. Nothing of an earlier Francine remains. Here the past has been completely eradicated. There is not one single chair or table, not even a small lamp or vase, recognizable from childhood. The new tan sofas and light-brown rugs, the new suede chairs and camel-colored pillows came all at once. There was no birth. The house existed fully formed from the beginning, a house without mistakes, not even one tiny mismatched throw rug in a rarely used back room.

Over the years, Francine has been bleaching herself of the past and the invisible black scars it left embedded in her flesh. Francine has pronounced her past useless. Here, on the other side of the country, in the lap of the Pacific, in the land of always summer and peaches hanging big as melons on branches, Francine found her second chance. She was reborn. She ascended, white and pure, with the others, the elect, the white dazed, white bleached, white capped.

Despite her stiffness, and she is a stiff woman, Francine has a strange gaiety, a kind of unnerving optimism. I have observed her in lobbies and elevators, subtly alert, watching men out of the corner of her eye. She is waiting for the one who will take the sting out of darkness with a snap of his fingers. She is waiting for the one in particular to cross a crowded room and hold her close, hold her through everything — the childhood of orphanages, the lifetime of nightmares, hypochondria, chronic depression and the grinding tedium of endless budget meetings.

I have watched my mother straightening her shoulders when she feels a man glancing in her direction. Slowly, as if unconsciously (and perhaps it is unconscious), she rearranges the thin strands of gold necklaces at her throat. I feel her sucking in her breath, wondering, is this the one, is this him, has he finally come, at last?

In my mother’s house, in the layers of tans and bronzes, brown-golds, creams and pale salamanders, I realize that this woman is not the same person I knew in childhood. Francine is something newly created, both inventor and invention. For her, the future is white and amorphous, flat and etched in something hard like stucco. The past never happened. It was savage and painful and now it is gone, over, finished, less than dust, less than the memory of dust.

“It’s going to be a long haul. Months in the hospital, if he makes it. Months to recover, if he recovers. Are you going to collapse?” Francine asked me again.

“I’ll try to hang on,” I said finally. The ceiling looked dangerously low. The far side of the room had developed a slant.

“You’ll do better than try, kid,” Francine said. “We’re in this one, this shit heap, together. I was twenty-seven years old the first time, alone, in a strange city. They said he wouldn’t live through the winter. I had to beg the train ticket money. I didn’t know a single person in this town. I had a child, an invalid husband, no education. You don’t know. You couldn’t know. I breathed life into him. He wanted to give up. He wanted to die and I wouldn’t let him. It was August in Philadelphia, 102 degrees. He was lying under blankets, shivering. I bent down and breathed air into his mouth. Are you following me? I wiped him, washed him. I emptied bedpans. I changed bandages. I saw the blood, the scars, the horror. I went to work, paid the rent, put food on the table and clothes on everybody’s back.”

The phone rang. Francine held the receiver while blotting her lips with a Kleenex. “Sacramento?” She tilted her head. She lit a cigarette. “What kind of car?” Pause. “No, I’m not going to Sacramento for a goddamned Volkswagen.”

Francine hung up the phone. She looked disgusted.

The phone rang again. Los Angeles is a city dedicated to the telephone. In part, everyone is constantly on the phone because they are continually making, breaking and changing their deals. They’re constantly on the phone because here, in the City of the Angels, where the elect have ascended, they often find themselves perched on cliff tops, on canyon tops and hilltops, absolutely alone.

I sat down in my mother’s den on a caramel-colored sofa with coral and tan stuffed pillows. For no particular reason, I began thinking about my ex-husband, Gerald. We were living in Berkeley, in a one-room attic apartment with a hot plate in the closet and a Murphy bed on the wall. The one window was small and permanently jammed shut. By April, the stiff air was unbearable. Heat dulled us into a terrible mindless lethargy.

Gerald had changed his college major for the fourth time. He had already lost his scholarship and his teaching assistant position. He said he needed entire days to ponder and reflect. A job, any job at all, would be degrading to the intellectual climate he lived in. When he spoke about his intellectual climate, I imagined he had a large fluffy white cloud inside his head.

We didn’t have money for luxuries like soap and shampoo. We bathed at neighbors’ houses. We ate Ritz crackers dipped in ketchup and salad dressing from the student cafeteria. I had completed one year of college. I was in the honors program, permitted to take special classes taught by visiting professors from Europe and the Orient, men and women who spent the semester dazed, in culture shock. When Gerald developed an inability to hold a job, any job, I dropped out of school.

I became a waitress in Giovanni’s Italian Restaurant on Shattuck Avenue. The pasta sat steaming in big black pots and the smoke was hot against the thickening spring air. I had to wear my long reddish hair pinned up for work. I stuck the bobby pins in tight against my head each night. They felt like thorns. My feet ached continually. It didn’t matter, I told myself. Wives often supported their husbands. Gerald would find himself, commit himself to some program of study, sooner or later. There would be grants and scholarships, a sense of progression. I wouldn’t be working in Giovanni’s forever.

Gerald and I hadn’t made love in a year and a half. I was filled with an indescribable sense of futility. Gerald had gained weight. His flesh seemed oddly leaden, a heavy, awkward thing that had to be willed, jolted and forced into motion.

When Gerald wasn’t reading, he was sitting in the lotus position on his straw mat in front of the television. Each night, at six o’clock, as if a gong, had been struck summoning the faithful back to prayer, Gerald assumed the lotus position on his straw mat and turned on Star Trek. He sat there, barely breathing, rapt, as if in a religious communion.

The program was about a star ship, a gigantic machine holding a crew of four hundred human beings who seemed to be wearing flannel pajamas. The star ship Enterprise was one of only twelve such ships in the fleet. Its five-year mission was to roam through the galaxy seeking new worlds and new civilizations and boldly going where no man had gone before. After a while, I realized Gerald planned to watch the entire five-year mission.

Sometimes the Enterprise found parallel universes remarkably similar to earth, like planets patterned on mob-ruled Chicago of the thirties, or the Nazis, or ancient Rome with the added attraction of modern technology.

There were planets where the rulers lived in a cloud of magnificent splendor while the majority of the population suffered cruel exploitation below, in the mines, where a poisonous gas retarded their intellectual development. There were planets of aliens with antennae on their paper-thin white faces and the power to alter matter at will. There were green men, horned men, giants, dwarfs, blobs, monsters, Amazons and wayward telepathic children. There were decadent civilizations run by computers. There were witches, soldiers, merchants, kings, scholars, warriors, peasants and killers.

The Enterprise was run by Captain James T. Kirk. Gerald dismissed him as meaningless. Gerald was only concerned with Spock, the first officer, a scientist who was half human, half Vulcan. Vulcans had conquered their aggressive tendencies by severe mental discipline. Vulcans were freed of the scourge of unpredictability and emotion and love.

Gerald had a special appreciation for the forces and events that occasionally allowed Spock to have emotion. Once Spock was hit in the face by a kind of psychedelic plant that made him climb trees and laugh. And once Spock went back in time to an ice age generations before his people had conquered emotion. Spock reverted to barbarism, ate meat and had sex with a woman. Normally Spock had sex only once each seven years. And then the sex consisted of something like an intense handshake. The rest of the time Spock amused himself with a special neck grip that made people instantly collapse, a more than genius IQ and a form of telepathy called the Vulcan Mind Meld. Spock also had gracefully arched pointed ears and greenish skin. Gerald seemed to love him.

“It’s a metaphor,” Gerald would say.

“But we’ve seen this one before. At least three times.”

“Five times,” Gerald corrected, sitting in the lotus position, transfixed.

Gerald claimed each new viewing revealed another aspect of the ship’s functioning or Star Fleet Command. Gerald wasn’t concerned with the plots. He was interested in the details at the edges.

“This is a poem about humanity,” Gerald said, staring at the screen.

“But we’ve seen this show five times.”

“The man of knowledge is a patient man,” Gerald said, dismissing me.

I came back to Los Angeles to talk to Francine. I was nineteen and vomited all the time. I was seeking guidance. There were other problems. There was the revolution. Gerald had been in the library. He stopped to watch the demonstration in Spraul Plaza, the puffs of angry white smoke rising from the tear gas canisters. He had been listening to the explosions and the screaming. An Alameda police officer, tape covering his badge number and riot gear covering his face, hit Gerald from behind, across the back of his legs, with a billy club. Gerald collapsed on the cement.

“You look terrible,” Francine told me.

I was sitting inside my parents’ house, the house where I grew up, a modest pastel stucco in West Los Angeles with small square rooms and a sense of sturdiness and purpose. It is the house where my father still lives.

My mother and I were whispering. Francine and I whispered together, as if my father were a foreign agent. He politely ignored us. He was standing outside in the small square strip of fenced backyard watering the avocado and peach trees, watering the perpetually balding ivy, the rubber trees and patch of wild black grapes growing up along the bamboo garden gate.

“You wanted him,” Francine cried, trying to keep her voice down. We were sharing a marijuana cigarette, discreetly, a secret from my father. My father was watering the apricot tree. I could see him outside the window, his back turned, his hand directing the hose.

“I told you, no, hold out, you’ll get something better. But you didn’t listen. Oh, no, not you. You never listen.” Francine inhaled marijuana deep into her lungs. “He’s nothing. What was it? The Greek and Latin bit? Boy, oh, boy, did you sell yourself cheap. Cheap even for you,” my mother added.

I began crying. There was a long period of my life when I cried and vomited almost continually.

“You’ve got to be tough,” Francine explained. “Move out. Divorce him. Just go. He’s nothing. Forget him. He’s slime. Take a suitcase and don’t look back. Maggots will do the rest.”

Francine was getting dressed for a film premiere. She pulled a silk blouse over her head. Her arms looked like wings. She kept spraying herself with perfume. She was elated. Recently, she had crossed an invisible boundary whereby her name was now automatically included on special-invitations lists. She had joined a new, smaller, more elite inner circle. There were cocktail parties now before film premieres and dinner parties afterward. Francine showed me her new evening purse. It was made of round white beads that glistened like so many hard gougedout eyes, or the backs of hard white insects. She sprayed more perfume on her neck. I couldn’t bear her desperate optimism, her certainty of perfect ascension.

Los Angeles is like a white world, filled with ever smaller white circles, leading to some perfect white core. Los Angeles is where the angels, with their white capped teeth and their white tennis dresses, gradually edged closer to the pure center, ambrosia, the fountain of youth.

Francine swung her skirt in a peach swish against her legs. In her way she was saying, look at me, I’m not really an orphan. See the box they just hand-delivered, the big one with the fat round red ribbon? That’s for me. I’m on a list with engraved invitations. I’m not alone.

“He isn’t worth death by maggots,” Francine said to the mirror. She was talking about Gerald. “You could probably get him committed, but why bother? He’s got no assets, right? Christ, he’s an embarrassment. He’s garbage,” she added.

My father wasn’t going to the film premiere. He was going to watch a boxing match on television. My parents never went anywhere together. Once they had quarreled violently, kicked holes in doors and broken windows. Twice neighbors called the police. No one on the street spoke to us. They said our shouting made the dogs bark.

Now a strange calm had settled between them. They rarely spoke. There was a terrible sense of finality, of bitter ends beyond the possibility of synthesis or regeneration.

“We have nothing in common,” my father explained. I stood near his shoulder while he picked avocados. “She has no sense of values. Her priorities are shallow.” My father studied an avocado. He put it down gently in a rounded wicker basket. “She’s been one hell of a disappointment.”

“I’ll call the lawyer for you,” Francine said. She was walking down to her car. She was still talking about Gerald. “We’ll nail that bastard. Maybe he doesn’t have anything now, but when he does, we’ll know about it.”

I watched Francine get in her car. I watched my mother disappear down the street. I never seriously tried to talk to her again.