Hanging Up

“You brought that over?”

“I did.” Esther arranged the ruffles around her neckline.

“Leave it here,” said my dad. “You know where the refrigerator is.”

“I certainly do.”

She was not anything like my mother. My mother was not coy, did not wear ruffles, and would never make the words “I certainly do” into a sexual innuendo. At least I didn’t think so. But every time Mom brought Tom Winston a beer—that’s what I imagined a large, meaty science teacher drank—maybe she sat in his lap and blew the foam off for him.

My mother wasn’t here anymore. That was clear from the neglected roses. But her leaving made everything about her behavior when she was here mystifying. Not only didn’t I know who she was now, I didn’t know who she was then.

Before disappearing into the house, Esther waved goodbye by holding her hand up next to her shoulder and flapping her fingers.

“Great gal,” my dad whispered.

“Are you dating her?”

“Yeah, she’s a great lay.”

“Dad, please, I don’t want to hear about that, all right?”

“Sure, kid. Let’s go sit with the bullet.”

On the mantel in the living room was a gold-colored bullet standing straight up like the Empire State Building. John Wayne had presented it to my father when he wrote a movie called Luck Runs Out, in which Wayne played a sheriff who had to track a killer named Lucky. The year was 1956. I was five years old, and I met John Wayne on the set. There was a fake saloon and five cancan girls. “Your father’s a great writer,” Big John had said, and he patted me on the head. I always insisted I had no memory of this, because my father had told the story so many times it made me perverse, actually made me perverse by age ten, but I did remember. I had looked up at this tall man. I remembered his red neckerchief and stubble—little black hairs sprouting like grass on his cheeks and chin. I remembered knowing that this was supposed to be a really important moment. I had said, “Howdy,” which had made him laugh three times, “Ha, ha, ha.”

My father didn’t write movies anymore. After several westerns, he switched to television, and worked on a sitcom called Ghosttown, which sounded like a western but wasn’t. Supernatural shows were in, like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, and his show was similar. It was about this town where a husband lived with the ghost of his dead wife, and you knew when she was around because you could see the couch cushions in their house getting punched and puffed, and a vacuum cleaner moving back and forth across the carpet.

My father settled in on the living room couch and put his feet up on the coffee table. I couldn’t decide where to sit. The logical place, the chair directly across, was where Mom had always situated herself when we had company. I noticed one of my father’s tennis shoes was untied. “How’s school?” he asked.

“Fine. What did you tell Esther about Mom?” A picture on the wall was lopsided. I straightened it.

“Oh, nothing. I just said she went down in that crash over Denver.”

“What crash over Denver?”

“Kid, you heard it here first. People always think they remember plane crashes, even when they didn’t take place. Or maybe they did. You think we know about every plane crash?”

“But Mom’s not dead.”

“She’s in Big Bear, it’s the same thing.”

I laughed.

“See, I can make you laugh, can’t I? Your old man’s still got it.”

“Have you seen Maddy lately?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Your sister’s a bitch. I’m her father. I can say it.”

“It doesn’t seem too horrible here.” I was in my room that night unpacking while I talked on the phone to Georgia. “The only thing in the refrigerator is iced tea, which he didn’t make, and packets of soy sauce, but I don’t see why Maddy had to move out. She probably wanted an excuse.” It was nine in L.A., midnight in New York. I could hear Georgia yawn. “Why don’t you and Richard come out for Christmas?”

“What? Next week?” She sounded incredulous. “First of all, Richard works nonstop. Lawyers kill themselves. Besides, coming there could be a disaster for me. I’ve been assigned to Makeup. At Mademoiselle, Makeup is the fast track. Remember my friend Ursula? She went to the dentist, and when she came back, she’d been transferred to Health, a dead end.”

I could hear Georgia moving around as we talked. “What are you doing?”

“Getting out my clothes for tomorrow.”

Georgia always made a “flat man” on the floor, putting her clothes in the shape of a body. She even placed earrings approximately where the earlobes would be. “Do you wear base?” she asked.

“No.”

“That’s good. I thought it was bad, but it turns out to be good. You want to show your natural skin color as much as possible even if it’s blotchy. Yellow covers red, did you know that?”

“I had no idea. What does it mean?”

“It means if you have a big red nose, you put yellow makeup on it. You know what your nose is like when you have a cold, Evie.”

I checked my nose in the mirror. It was a nice pinkish white. When I was eleven and Georgia was fifteen, she had informed me that my skin was the color of a scallop—an insult with so much power I think about it every time I see my reflection. In truth, my skin is my best feature: clear, fair, delicate. “It’s like porcelain,” I had shouted back at her. This was a description I had picked up from a romance novel. But she was right about my nose: it did turn bright red when I was sniffly.

“You’re not going to believe this, but Dad’s dating Esther with the nails from Dr. Seymour’s.”

“Esther?” Georgia was appalled. “After Mom, he’s dating Esther?”

“I know.” We contemplated the comedown of it. “Does Mom miss us?”

“I doubt it. Do you miss her?”

“No. I don’t know,” I said. “I feel like something’s wrong.”

“In the house?”

“Maybe. No, with me.”

“You might need analysis.” Through the phone I heard a doorbell. “That must be Richard,” said Georgia. “He doesn’t have his key. Bye.”

“Bye.”

I sat cross-legged on the bed with the phone in front of me. It was silent in the house, more dead than quiet. I couldn’t hear the TV, which my father almost never turned off now. I wondered if I should buy a Christmas tree tomorrow and get out all the ornaments. That would be so weird.

I spotted my tennis racquet propped against the wall. The wooden kind nobody has anymore. I got off the bed and picked it up. I switched my grip a few times from forehand to backhand.

I did a service swing: dropped the racquet down, then lifted it high, a big stretch, dropped it behind my back and circled, then up again, and snapped it down. Wrist action. I repeated this a second time, trying to make the racquet hit my nose. I couldn’t. My father got the strangest injuries. His accidents were impossible to replicate. There was a knock on the door. “Eve?”

“Yeah, Dad.”

He came in, in his blue pajamas, and stood there, filling up the space. I could smell scotch. He smelled like Mom. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Want to go for a ride?”

“Not really. Why don’t you call Esther?” He swayed gently from side to side. “What about your friends?” I threw out a few names, people he and Mom had seen regularly.

“That’s couple stuff.” His eyes became watery. “I can’t sleep without her.”

“Yeah.” I started thinking about my dorm room, wishing myself there. “Where do you want to go?”

“Does it matter?” The odor of scotch was really strong. I considered not breathing. Get out, Dad, get out, please. “Let’s just drive, okay, Evie?”

“Okay, get dressed. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

I drove around Los Angeles while he slept stretched across the backseat, snoring loudly. Listening to these noisy wheezes over and over and over, I felt like a victim of this water torture Georgia had told me about in which a man had to lie under a leaky faucet and after a while just waiting for the next drop to fall drove him mad. I tried to blot Dad out by reciting poems that I’d memorized in the fifth grade. “Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!” “The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville Nine that day.” As I tried to blanket my brain with them, my father snorted, a sound so sudden and gigantic that he woke up sputtering. He took a moment to orient himself. I watched in the rearview mirror while he jerked his head, looking out one window, then the other, before crashing back down on the seat. And the snores began anew.

Eventually I drove home and parked in the driveway. It took me a while to get out because I tried to open the car door silently so I wouldn’t wake him. Probably nothing could have awakened him, but I didn’t want to find out.

These drives became a routine.

I stopped sleeping and lay in bed each night waiting to hear his footsteps on the stairs. I didn’t want to fall asleep. I didn’t want him to surprise me.

“Move in with us,” said Maddy, who was calling from her neighborhood taco stand. I was lying in bed with the phone receiver tucked between the pillow and my ear.

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“He’s so lonely. It would hurt his feelings.” I was listening for his footsteps then, dreading to hear them. “Where did all his friends go? Did he dump them or vice versa?”

“Probably vice versa. He’s a drunk, Evie. He drinks scotch. Who drinks that anymore? Isaac says Dad should smoke dope. Then he wouldn’t be a drunk, he’d just be out of it.”

“Goddamn Mom. This is all her fault. If she’d stayed, this would never have happened to him. Not that she cares about anyone but herself.”

“She cares about me,” said Maddy.

“Oh, right.”

“I see her every couple of weeks.”

“What?” I sat up in bed. “Did she phone you? She didn’t phone me.”

“She gave me her address when she left. She’s not much for the phone.”

“You have her address? Does Georgia have it too?”

“No, only me.”

“Who cares, anyway. I don’t want to see her. I have no interest in it.”

The next day I called Big Bear information.

“I have a Thomas Winston on Coot Street, would that be it?”

I guessed a number. “One thirty-five?”

“No, twenty-six,” said the operator.

I started driving south on the San Diego Freeway, then cut east to the San Bernardino. With each mile the ground got flatter, the buildings uglier, and when it seemed that the world could get no duller, civilization stopped, and the only things on either side of the road were cactus and tumbleweed. The turn for Big Bear was modestly marked with a wooden sign. As I negotiated the winding road up the mountain and into a forest of pines, I felt more and more ridiculous. I passed motels—built of whole logs, just as Georgia had promised—with names like Hitching Post Inn. I couldn’t turn back, I’d come too far, but I felt as if, on a lark, I was heading for Dodge City.

At elevation four thousand feet there were patches of snow between the trees. I didn’t even have a sweater with me, and my radio now was picking up only one station, which played country-western music. I stopped for gas but didn’t want to ask the man how far it was to Big Bear. He might guess why I was there, and I would be found out: girl needing to see mother. In the gas station office I browsed among the maps. There was a street map of Big Bear, not officially printed but something that had been run off on a mimeograph machine. I chose it in what I imagined was an offhanded way, so the guy who was paying no attention to me wouldn’t notice.

Driving the twisty road was beginning to make me carsick, when the road suddenly straightened and I passed into town—almost through it, actually: Big Bear General Store, the Bear Claw Diner, a bowling alley, many more motels. All the buildings on the left had a shiny blue lake as a backdrop.

At the edge of the main drag was Spruce Street, which headed away from the lake up the mountain. At the first curve I found Coot—not a proper street really, but a gravel road with houses turning up every so often. One was a trailer; some were prefabricated shacks with water tanks and stacks of wood in the front yard. But then I hit Twenty-six. The number was painted in whitewash on a pile of rocks by the driveway. The same type of gray rocks, only much larger, formed the foundation of the house, which, like almost everything else, was constructed of logs.

It wasn’t a one-room cabin like Abe Lincoln’s. It had a big wide porch and even a second story, although the second story was much smaller than the first. But it was as different from our home in Westwood as a little grass shack in Hawaii would be. Dad always called our place a “Father Knows Best house”—graceful but sturdy, two stories, gray with a white door and white wood trim around the big bay windows, which proudly offered a peek at the comfort within: wall-to-wall carpeting, upholstered couches and armchairs in sensible rectangular arrangements.

I started to get out and then realized that the lumps of brown that I had mistaken for more tumbleweed were squirrels. At home we had one squirrel per block, but this place had squirrel armies. I was terrified to leave the car. I sat there trapped, occupying myself by trying to figure out how to explain my arrival. I couldn’t say that I was passing by. That was ludicrous. Suppose I said that I was on my way back from Palm Springs and detoured on a whim? That seemed okay, I thought, as a pickup truck pulled into the driveway and my mother got out. She walked around to the passenger side and opened the door. Oh my God, she has a kid. I had this panic that she might, in three months, have produced a five-year-old. Instead two dogs bounded out. Golden retrievers, I guessed, but then I didn’t know dogs.

“Mom?”

“Eve, is that you?” she said in a way that sounded pleasantly surprised. The dogs barked, chasing off the squirrels.

As I followed her into the house, I rubbed my bare arms for warmth. She was wearing a jacket stuffed like a pillow, a kind I’d never seen before, and she’d exchanged her shirtwaists and pumps for jeans and heavy brown laced boots. She tramped, placed her feet down solidly with evident pleasure. My mother’s identity is all tied up in her shoes, I thought, watching her whack the soles with a piece of kindling to clean off the snow and mud before she opened the front door. I just wiped my feet on the mat and felt, as I did so, that I was maintaining allegiance to Westwood and my father.

I tried to get past the entry but the dogs kept sniffing me. “I’ll put them out. Muffin, Daisy.” My mother snapped her fingers. The dogs immediately trotted after her into the kitchen, leaving me alone in Frontierland.

The floor of the living room was wood, something never seen in my neighborhood, and scattered here and there were small multicolored circular rugs. There was a huge stone fireplace. The pine cones on the mantel seemed less like decoration and more like a scientific display of forest vegetation. The furniture was made of branches tied together and bent into shape, with the barest concession to comfort—flat corduroy cushions. A plump throw pillow sitting by itself against the back of the twig couch frame was embroidered with these words: “Take nothing but pictures. Leave nothing but footsteps. “There was a framed photo of Mom with Tom Winston, standing by the lake. He had his huge pale arm around her, and she, barely visible, looked like a plant tucked into the crevice of a very large rock.

“Would you like coffee?” she called out.

I looked at the photo. I couldn’t answer. She appeared in the doorway. “Do you drink coffee now?” I shook my head. “How about orange juice?” I nodded yes.

She waved me into the kitchen. It had no conveniences. There weren’t even cabinets, just shelves with pots and pans and a jumble of canned goods piled on them. The tile on the counters was chipped. Out of an ancient refrigerator she took a carton of juice, then handed it to me with a glass. This was what she would have done at home, let me decide how much I wanted. As I poured, she put the kettle on and opened a jar of Sanka. “She’s switched from scotch to Sanka,” I prepared to tell Georgia.

I stood there holding the juice carton. It seemed too forward for me to stick it back in the refrigerator. The carton got heavier and, in my mind, more prominent. Finally I placed it on the counter. While my mother spooned some Sanka into a mug, I examined my glass, running my fingers over the design of dancing balloons which was almost worn off.

“So how’s college?” my mother asked.

I burst into tears. She stood there watching. She did not come over and put her arms around me. She just waited. Eventually I stopped crying long enough to ask for a tissue. She disappeared into another room and returned with a box. I wiped my eyes. “Come home, Mom, you have to.”

The water in the kettle started to boil, sending a scream into the room. My mother poured hot water into her cup. “Why don’t we sit in the living room,” she said.

She pointed to a rocker as if it were the most comfortable spot, and seated herself opposite on the couch, her back squarely against that embroidered pillow. She looked the same, really, her hair just longer, curling now around her ears. Probably there wasn’t a decent place in Big Bear to have your hair cut. The pink lipstick hadn’t changed. So if I poured her back into her old clothes … “Why did you leave, Mom?”

She dusted some imaginary spot off the corduroy while she considered. “I turned forty-five.”

“That’s not a reason.”

“You’ll see,” she said seriously.

I glanced at the picture of her and Tom again. I didn’t mean to, but … once I had a toothache, the tooth really hurt if I touched it, yet I couldn’t help myself. I kept poking my tongue there to see if it still ached.

“We were looking for aeries,” she said.

“Huh?”

“When that picture was taken, we were looking for aeries.”

“What’s that?”

“Eagles’ nests. I knew the word only from the crossword. It’s always used, I guess because it has so many vowels. Who thought I’d ever see one?” She laughed, almost embarrassed.

“Are you still drinking?” I startled myself with this question, but my mother didn’t blink.

“Tom said he wouldn’t be with me if I drank.”

Tom set conditions? He actually told her something like, “I won’t be with you unless you …” That made their relationship so ordinary it was finally real. My mother was going to spend her life in this log cabin with these dogs, these twig chairs, this man.

“What about me? What about me and Maddy and Georgia?”

“Darling, look at you. You’re fine.” She sat back and crossed her legs. She didn’t seem disconcerted. Or guilty. She took a sip of Sanka. “Let me think how to put this.”

“Yes?” Now I was in no danger of ever crying again.

“Motherhood doesn’t turn out to be a reason.” That idea sat in the air for a while.

“For what?” I asked.

“What I mean is”—she considered again—“I’m not one of those women who needed to be a mother. When I was growing up, all girls wanted to be, so I did too, only—” She leaned forward as if she was about to blurt out a whole paragraph, set a record for revealing herself. Then she changed her mind. All she added was, “I’m being honest.”

“Thank you.”

“I do not believe you thanked her,” Georgia told me later. “You do need analysis.”

“You have your father’s brown eyes,” my mother said. “Have I ever told you that?”

“Lots of times. Should I pluck them out?”

“Eve, don’t get smart.” She was mad, drawing the line, brooking no backtalk. For a second, she was my mother.

Then she said, “Tom makes me happy.”

I stood up. “Well, good, great. Look, I was just stopping by because I was on my way home from Palm Springs and Maddy gave me your address. I’d better get back.”

“Are you sure you can’t stay? Tom will be home soon. I’d like you to get to know him.”

“I really can’t.”

“Would you like to come by for Christmas?”

“I’m spending Christmas with Dad. We’re going to do it the way we always have.” I took my purse. “I’ll see you,” I said, moving toward the door. As soon as I was out, I saw the squirrels. I picked up the piece of wood that Mom had beaten her boots with, and tossed it into the yard. The squirrels scattered and I ran to the car.

When I got home, I practically fell on the telephone. “She doesn’t need to be my mother, fine. I don’t need to be her daughter.” That was the first thing I told Georgia; then I ran her through the entire encounter. “It’s like she’s turned into an earth mother, minus the mother part.”

“Thank God she waited until we grew up,” said Georgia. “Suppose we had to live there?”

“Look, I’m not going to tell Maddy. Oh, maybe I will, I don’t know.”

As soon as I hung up with Georgia, Maddy called. “But didn’t you think it was beautiful there?” she asked.

“What are you talking about, it’s nowhere. And the squirrel situation is completely out of control. They probably have a million cases of rabies a year.”

“But did you notice the sky? If you’re there at night, it sparkles.”

“It sparkles,” I said sarcastically. “I’m sure you didn’t make that up yourself. Did Mom say that, or Tom?”

“You’re impossible.” Maddy hung up on me.

I went downstairs and into Dad’s study. He was in his tennis outfit, which he now wore during the day even when he wasn’t playing, and he’d swiveled his chair around to stare out the window. A yellow legal pad lay in his lap. “Are you still working?”

He showed me the pad was blank.

“Let’s buy a Christmas tree.”

He bounced up, as if he’d been ejected. “Great idea, Evie.”

He drove, which was a switch. “There’s a big lot on Third and Fairfax,” he said. “I noticed it last week.”

It felt luxurious to sit in the passenger seat, to have him know where he was going, to be able to fiddle with the radio dial. I hunted for some Christmas music.

“Let’s get a big tree.” My father slammed his hand against the steering wheel defiantly. “Like always.”

He was humming along to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” when we pulled into the lot. “I see it,” he announced. “I’ve got my eye on one already.”

“But who will make the turkey?” I asked.

“Esther,” said my father. “We’ll invite Esther.”

So Dad, Esther, and I had Christmas dinner together. My dad looked snappy in suit, tie, the works. Esther had a wide red ribbon wrapped around her hair and tied into a bow. “I’m your gift,” she told my dad. She presented me with a roasted turkey.

While Esther prepared the rest of dinner, Dad and I loaded the tree with ornaments. The history of our family was on the tree; at least the public history. The angel Maddy and I used to fight over. The garlands Mom was partial to. The clay elf Georgia had made in Girl Scouts. The clear glass ornaments with wreaths inside, our pride and joy. “Put those where they show,” my dad said happily, knowing it was something he’d said all the years before.

We ate turkey, sweet potatoes, creamed onions, and string beans. Esther was a better cook than my mother—not much of a stretch—but she informed us that she had broken a nail while opening the can of cranberry sauce, and had left the nail on the windowsill. “Remind me to take it home,” she said.

By dropping by her place to apologize for my behavior, I had managed to talk Maddy into paying a visit. She gave us all, even Dad, homemade bead necklaces, and he reciprocated by giving her money to install a telephone.

Later my father turned up the Christmas music really loud. You could hear “Joy to the World” in every corner of the house. “I forgot about celebrating,” he said. “I forgot all about it.” He closed his eyes for a moment and let the music wash over him. “Evie?”

“What?”

“When you don’t celebrate, you might as well be dead.”

“Hardly, Dad.”

“Hey, wait a second.” My father chucked me on the chin. The gesture was so cliché-paternal it might have come from a sitcom, maybe even the one he wrote. “I don’t say too many smart things anymore, sweetie pie, so when I do, listen up.”