sweetheart redux

Being Women Together My mother and I were women together.  Well, okay, I was only her girl child for some of those years, but I quite precociously grasped one evening when I heard the plentiful and ebullient family next door having a barbecue that lasted roughly from noon until midnight the summer of my eleventh year the disquieting contrast between those noises and smells and the quiet dusk of our own kitchen. “I’m lonely.  I want more,” my sullen gaze telegraphed itself into her awareness. “I understand, one hundred percent” the squeeze she gave my hand – two short squeezes and a long one that felt particularly sincere and protective – transmitted. So – this was womanhood, was our own version of womanhood anyway – a cloud of dissatisfaction palpable as a self-separate entity, a runty bunny rabbit, white with those gruesome red eyes.

Mom had me on a rain-soaked and rosy-fingered dawn in March, in Beverly Hills, of all places.   Good, bad or melodramatically worse, she loved being a mom, and so do I. My son has my bad habit of only wanting everything or nothing and my bad heart. Yesterday when I told him it was time to take his heart medication,  I forgot to use our magical language, I just said "It's time for your heart medicine." "That's not what it is." "Oh?" "It's watermelon juice."

When I was a little kid my mom lived in this rooftop apartment on Marengo Street in Pasadena.  But rooftop apartment isn’t quite the right description – it wasn’t an open-air bar atop a fancy hotel.  It was this building:    My dad had custody of me during the week, letting my mom have me for the weekends. This apartment was the first and best location for my mom weekends.  I was still crazy about her and she wasn’t out of control yet.  She was an alcoholic but she managed to keep the same part time job for years.  In her later years she became a hoarder; but at the apartment on Marengo she was just a scatter-brained collector with a perfect eye trained towards trash and cheap stuff that was beautiful.  In this apartment, the vintage children’s books weren’t on the floor and soaked in cat pee like they were in her last apartment, and the old toys weren’t mixed in with clothes she never wore in the bedroom she couldn’t ope...