Chapter One:
Cheryl Burden’s Mother
Before departing, I had worked for a year in a tiny art gallery. It was a job in which I did dull chores for a lazy owner who invited me to his sheep farm and. chased me around a coffee table until I was fired. Most of the time I worked at the gallery, I had an eye infection which forced me to apply twice a day a thick cream to my eyes so that I saw everything out of focus. I nursed a retired parent and though I was a virgin I thought nothing of it.
Sometimes you know intuitively when it’s time to do something. I thought I should go to the other side of the world. With some trouble I attained a semi-resident visa to Bali, flew there and rooted myself in a shack overlooking a terraced rice field. I told my landlord I would enroll in his painting classes. These were taught privately, in the open air of his porch, and basically involved copying his unsold pictures. He was a thin man who had married his own painting teacher’s wife. Village gossip had it that after making arrangements to inherit the painting teacher’s style, techniques, supplies and clients, and agreeing also to take the aged wife, he poisoned the art teacher to speed everything along.
All the adult women in Bali are called Ibu which means Mother. Because I lived without running water (or electricity), an old Ibu came twice a day to my house with a huge plastic jug of water on her head and poured it into the upright tub where one would use a small cup (the kind shaped in the United States for fabric softeners) for a splash bath. Another Ibu, the wife of the painting teacher, brought little offerings of rice cakes dyed pink and frangipani on dirty banana leaves cut into squares to my yard to placate the gods of evil.
I’d been on the island for a month leading a life as eventless as the one I led in New York when I met Cheryl Burden and her half-brother Paul Nobody. Because I’ve always imagined myself a stick figure in the picture of things, I’ve naturally been drawn to people of vivid color. After an obligatory stay in the hippie-time-warp section, Kuta Beach, Cheryl and Paul moved to Tjampuan (pronounced Chomp-wan), a village in the mountains. Their house, sandwiched between a waterfall and the abandoned home of a Dutch painter, they nicknamed the Bovary. Not far from the Bovary was a pleasant restaurant run by a Balinese woman and her American husband who had been in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan. For no other reason except that this woman had been married once before, I was told by a skinny British exporter that she was known as the Whore of Tjampuan. They had hamburgers and a pretty view. The woman, although she didn’t seem like an Ibu, was completely respectable. If anything, I thought the husband might be a bit of a freeloader sitting below in a cabin doodling while she fed people and washed plates. Actually I don’t think she did much more than oversee a group of lovesick girls who sullenly left your food before you only to go back in the kitchen and cry.
My stomach for the first time was getting soft and round. So what, I thought. It had been flat for decades and what did that get me. Now I’ll sit and drink liquor and eat cookies all day and if my face gets puffy and my fingers fat, so much the better. This I knew had become the philosophy of the friends of my retired parents. They were getting bitter and, when they traveled on a bus, they hated the faces of the young and the pretty and pitied the others. Depressed and angry, they took
turns letting each other off the hook, serving and consuming ice cream at one another’s homes.
When I first caught sight of Cheryl and Paul, I thought they were heroin addicts. I was told there were many heroin addicts in Bali and that you could spot them more precisely in the rainy season when they sat under bamboo awnings staring listlessly at the falling rain.
The Bovary had a long porch facing the usual bunches of poinsettia, frangipani, and orchid. Over the railing hung, as if to dry, purple, red, and deep green scarves with gold, mesmerizing threads running through them. It was my third day walking make-believe-casual when Cheryl waved from the elevated verandah, “Hello! Hello there you! Are you an American? Do you speak English? Come talk to us. What’s your name?”
Sometimes you don’t know that you are going to lie. It will just come upon you clearly and urgently. “Antoine,” I said, taking my self-appointed name from French class in the third grade.
“You’re not French!”
“No, but my father was a French soldier and my mother — ”
“Yes? Go on.”
“And my mother an American saleslady.”
“That’s very interesting, won’t you be our friend, Antoine? I think it would be nice. Would you care for a cookie?”
A cookie, ten of them, was just what I wanted. And swinging my skinny legs like a ten-year-old from their glossy hammock, I heard the story of Cheryl Burden’s mother.
She married in a happy time. The bridesmaids were longtime friends of the bride and wore thin headbands of painstakingly crafted flowers. The groom took a long time to kiss the bride and expected then to settle into a pattern of loveliness. In what seemed like an instant to those who had been at the wedding, Bernadette, already with a baby daughter, thought grimly to herself, I’ve been mismatched. The divorce allowed the mother to collect money even from a distance so that when, at a cocktail party, a woman mentioned jokingly the south of France, Bernadette resolved to pack Cheryl and, without so much as a second language, relocated to Nice.
Cheryl’s mother in Nice in the nineteen-fifties on one of their hundred joyless holidays (“Why stop at a hundred’?” a man in a short cape said in English at a cafe) had spoken to a woman, half scarecrow, half crow, who had been in a war camp for two years. Cheryl’s mother and the thin woman sat in the parlor on the only day it rained while they were in Nice, sat in a room that had been miserably modernized, frantically wallpapered, and, in details told without breathing, the woman itemized every moment from her six hundred days in Germany. Cheryl was in her mother’s bed several rooms away with American paper dolls and two scissors, one large and one for fingernails. In a restaurant they settled on some months later that had broken Chianti bottles and more than one prostitute, a man asked Cheryl’s mother, “Why you bring your daughter here’?” Why not, said her mother. “No good,” he said. For what, said her mother. “Somewhere else,” he said. What for, said her mother and so on, why not, for what, what for, throughout Italy and part of Spain and Greece. With a small knife she kept in her purse, her mother picked at a pew in a tiny church. A beautiful nun said, “You don’t like men, do you?” No, I do not. Nor do I like women or God, how’s that? Later, a cousin of Cheryl’s mother who’d written to her that California looked like the South of France and she should move there, said that it was too easy to be the way she was, that she should straighten up and do something with her life, if she’s miserable with the world do something to change it, if she sees suffering and it makes her suffer do something to relieve that suffering and so forth. Cheryl’s mother, who had not laughed much since the day before that day it rained in Nice, the day before when three Frenchmen, to flirt, had performed athletic antics alternately adept and clumsy to make her giggle (was she a widow, they wondered?), made a ball of the letter and threw back her head and laughed like a woman who, in a funhouse, has been startled and laughs very loudly, at first to cover, and then, convulsively, with abandon.
The original plan was Nice and Greece. Nice in the winter cheaply, Greece in the summer cheaply. There had been so many plans. Cheryl will not attend school, school’s stupid. Cheryl will hold the money, money is less confusing for children. Cheryl will tell me what time to go to bed, and in bed, after wine and brandy, what will there be to dream? Under the sea, Bernadette read standing up in a junk shop in an alley, there is a kingdom with completely different laws and manners. Merpeople shimmy iridescent to each others’ sides with gifts of big pearls. I won’t sweat so much when I sleep there, she thought, following her little daughter out of the dusty store and into the street where Cheryl, after passing cafes, tavernas and hotel restaurants, would suddenly point and they would enter, sometimes barefoot, and eat their dinner.
Somewhere in New York the checks suddenly ceased and after many confusing visits to the banks, Cheryl and her mother flew to California for welfare. There, authorities demanded Cheryl enter public school so, without so much as American kindergarten behind her, she was enrolled in junior high school. Freedom from math and reading skills put Cheryl in the majority but the fact she had been so long out of touch with American culture made her freakish and unpopular. It took several years before she could make any friend at all. That friend came in the form of a boy whose parents and grandparents had been geniuses, he said, and he was a genius too. Alexander was tall, thin and pale, quiet unless provoked to laughter with which he would become suddenly girlish and cover his face with his long fingers. His mother, one of the geniuses, sat all day at a loom and weaved giant rugs. Like her husband and her parents before her, she felt she could not find her equals in society and the better idea was to retreat to a repetitive task that would allow a trip inward where, by diligence, transcendence might arrive. The father had a mocking tone and worked as a lawyer. They lived in Philadelphia. Alexander lived with his grandparents in Santa Barbara. He had the idea that he should be near his grandfather, an ex-inventor, but spent a lot of time with his grandmother who would slash her thumbs cutting open olives her friend had picked from olive trees and handed out for treatment. Because Alexander, with his low, sententious voice, liked to read out loud and Cheryl had never read a book, they became natural friends. Sometimes he would read hatless in the yard, Cheryl still, and his grandmother punctuating arbitrarily with curses as her fingers bled. Later he preferred reading in the Burden living room, stretched out on the green, space-age sofa, book above his face like a sun visor, stopping only when Cheryl’s mother would come in fanning herself with a piece of junk mail.
After some time, Cheryl’s mother and Alexander came together. They revealed this to Cheryl by entering the living loom hand in hand and stating simply, “We’re together now.” This meant they were lovers and would eventually marry.
The idea of love to Cheryl Burden’s mother had always been remote and overwhelming. In college she had lived in a stone building she thought of as a jailhouse for girls. Although the young women tried merriment in all seasons, a cooling sense of emergency tingled at the edge of all days and they worried about their future. In the winter, energy would be burnt making fires with logs they carried solemnly through the snowy woods. They hallucinated a handsome father up ahead just out of sight calling to keep up and they would pick up their stride. When Bernadette, at twenty, announced her first engagement, her father killed a neighbor’s pig (in Bali, too, a pig would be used to celebrate feast days), and threw a croquet party on the sloping lawn outside their soon-to-be-razed-in-a-¬fire home. Girls in floppy straw hats deliberately hit their balls with crazy might down the sharp hill and chased them in clusters, mallets raised above their heads. The only girl who sat, flat-heeled, was Lily. Lily was pious, and, at school, prayed. Although praying in plain sight of those who shun prayer leads to ostracism, Lily’s beautiful face and body were a good mix with this behaviour and she was forgiven. Bernadette idolized her and believed it a wonderfully good omen that Lily had attended her engagement party. But it was frightening contemplating Lily. When someone seemed perfect, an ineluctable sensation of shoddiness about oneself arrived simultaneous with the awe. With the excuse of bringing over a plate from the buffet, Bernadette fearfully approached the radiant girl. She would ask her if she were marrying the right man, if she should be marrying at all or should be turning her attention to something else. She should get on her knees and kiss her feet, beg to follow in her path, do her laundry, spread whatever word she was spreading. Dazed with the possibilities, she dropped the fork, picked it up quickly, wiped it perfunctorily on her yellow dress and handing over the plate brusquely said, “Here, Lily!” and ran off to join the other girls who were laughing hysterically around a stone fountain of putti peeing. Many years later (it would seem like a hundred after a third glass of wine, the fourth glass made your teeth maroon, the fifth made you sob or laugh), at a West Coast reunion she agreed on impulse to attend, these same girls, transfigured by time, ate portions six times what they would have taken years earlier, and jeered violently at the misfortunes of those absent. Bernadette, drunk, heard the women say the name Lily and ran to hide in the kitchen of the suburban restaurant. She didn’t want to hear anything awful about Lily. Let something stay holy in my head, she thought to herself. I don’t want to know if she’s dead or divorced. (On the contrary, the women were discussing an entirely different Lily, one who had married a rich pilot whose sons would die in car crashes.) After a moment she would go back into the party, she would ask someone to drive her home. The kitchen people stared at her. I didn’t think clearly, I didn’t make the right choices when there were choices to be made. But what were they and in what shape did they come and go? She was in wool and the pots on the stove shivered. I know I wanted love, I’d waited for it, it was in the back of my mind always, wasn’t it? Half the century had shown its face and nothingness was its most compelling feature but that wouldn’t last, she had told herself, she would graduate from college, she would marry and accept the blessings of her family (they loved her, they had. . . even that didn’t seem so certain anymore, there was always so much talk of opening one house and closing another; when the largest burnt to the ground, she felt vindicated). But this man she had married, there were hours in the day she could not even tell what letter his name began with. In nursery school, the teacher coaxed the children with scissors and black construction paper to make silhouettes of each others’ profiles which, pinned at home to their clothing closets, were synthesized to gray by the sun through the shutters. Similarly, only faster, she and her fiance, two figures sharply cut by a mutual lack of information, grew more faded as they approached each other as honeymooners and newlyweds. I should have asked Lily what to do, I should have spoken when I could still shape the words. If this girl had the answers she wouldn’t begrudge sharing them. And if she didn’t have them, how then was it possible she could sit in luminous passivity while everyone else seemed thick and slavelike in their own? Maybe she was a fraud, this Lily, and kept her mouth shut because she didn’t have an idea in her head and all the time she was praying she was praying for a trip to Bermuda. No, even weak and pitiful people can recognize goodness even if it should fatigue them and lead them to evil. No, she didn’t have the questions then, but oh she had them now, leaning up against the wall, now the questions were as real as pie pans and you could hear them clang when you slid to the floor.
So when Alexander came along, a teenager, her daughter’s only friend, she thought no, this is another joke by Cupid (she pictured that old fat baby with fangs and cat eyes) but it was love. And if love was something capricious that glued the unglued and unglued the glued, then she and Alexander recognized each other as soul mates (they slept late and stained their newspapers with food) and if Cheryl couldn’t see that, well, then she will maybe when she wakes up one night with the cold breath of the clock in her face. The news hit the daughter and she trembled, letting out a high, short scream. Rather than go the maternal route, the scream led Bernadette to cover her young lover’s eyes and ears with her sharp arms. Yes, there was such a thing as a mother’s natural affection for her child, and she and Cheryl had embraced and cried at the beauty of a sunset in Delphi, but without passionate love, to Cheryl’s mother, all tasks seemed like prolonged, pointless beating at an intractable metal in a high noon sun. So, with the whirligig of adolescence at her heels, Bernadette’s daughter packed the two suitcases she and her mother had lugged across Europe — packed they were mostly empty but Cheryl insisted, in her unchallenged regime of new alliances, that the suitcases were her father’s — and with a book half-started aloud by Alexander on her lap to throw people off from conversation, staring ahead of her, she took the long train trip East, where, after a short call, her father promised to meet her at the station.