Part 2 (1/2)

At a fish joint fa the beach-weary use its facilities, I rushed past counter traffic to the bathroom Soon as I locked the door, I hunched over the sink, washi+ng my unstable lied to so receded like a tide

So pot, stopped going to the beach Sam had spooked from me the notion that the hippies I'd once revered were benevolent characters identifiable by roach clips and tie dye Plus, the crash pad irl to stand The sink stayed piled with scabby dishes frohetti a ht, the roaches didn't even run any weed and telling dick jokes When they headed to the beach, I'd lose hand on loose pages that I stashed underI'd scaood for me, but then I'd put it on hold as too square Now it looked like an escape fro down another satanic hobo, or it was suddenly an excuse to read nonstop I longed for its library walled with books, a desk with gooseneck lareed-her life's goal being college for perpetuity She phoned the school's financial officer, who pro inside the open accordion door of a phone booth

You've tried it your daddy's way, Mother said

How is this Daddy's way? Daddy wants ame

Yeah, but the T-shi+rt factory job, the whole working-class-hero pose Who knows, maybe you'll meet some suave intellectual

I told her the phone wasmy face sweat, but she'd already relaunched into her plan to auction off my unemployable ass to some husband as if I were chattel She sketched for uy with a wardrobe of turtlenecks, a shi+ny car un machine Which hunk of whimsy failed to account for the fact that I'd bolt like a startled cheetah before such a man-a beast of an unknown phylu an armload of ratty cutoffs and salt-crusted bikinis into the aparte cans, I spied a thrown-out notebook and nicked it forpaper I used a pen to poke holes into everytime, hole by hole It was dusk when the sheets slid buether and the notebook's silver claws snapped shut There eat ondoor into the dusty odor of eucalyptus, a light wind Over the valley of orange tile roofs, you could catch just a gray strip of sea fro the hills for the last time With my ponytailed hair and the sweater tied around my neck like a sitcom coed, I looked into any undraped pictureat the fa they'd celebrateat term break

2

The Mother of Invention If Jesus had said to her before she was born, ”There's only two places available to you You can either be a nigger or you can be white-trash,” ould she have said? ”Please Jesus, please,” she would've said, ”just let me wait until there's another place available”-Flannery O'Connor, ”A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Mother's yellow station wagon slid like a Monopoly icon along the gray road that cut between fields of Iowa corn, which was chlorophyll green and punctuated in the distance by gargantuan silver silos and glealazed cinnamon red Mother told ht of the West Texas dirt fared seed from croker sacks

But because I was seventeen and had bittenin at the private college we'd reach that night-which had accepted ht-and because I was split-headed with the hangover Mother and I had incurred the night before, sucking down screwdrivers in the unaptly na like, Enough already about your shi+tty youth You've told e

She asked ht in Arkansas

We got peaches galore, I said

The car was fragrant with the bushels of fruit we'd been wolfing for two days while our bowels gruh the soft bottom peaches for an unbruised one to hand her I asked, Wasn't that the name of some famous stripper, Peaches Galore?

pussy Galore, I believe, Mother said She bit the peach with a zeal that e, as did her cavalier use of the word pussy pussy, though I myself used it with alacrity

To look at her behind the wheel, with the mess she could make of a peach, appalled me She was so primordial She had to wipe the juice off her chin with the back of her hand

Out the , legions of neat corn about to tassel announced a severe order I longed to enter into, one that would shut out the sprawling chaos of Mother

She tapped her cup of watery ice, saying, I could use a little dollop of vodka in there The cup was in its sandbagged holder on the bus in exercise sandals And if, as Samuel Johnson said, everyone has the face they deserve at fifty, Mother must have paid some demon off, for despite her wretched habits, her face looked a at her half century-with her shock of salt-and-pepper hair, pale skin, and fine features

She said, Don't look at ot up at five It's cocktail hour by our schedule We got any more ice?

I fixed her drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia faypsies, returned wearing copper bracelets and with his iron body covered in cryptic tattoos to devour roast suckling pigs and astonish the village whores with his appetites The scene where he hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, and the adventures of the Buendia faypsies, returned wearing copper bracelets and with his iron body covered in cryptic tattoos to devour roast suckling pigs and astonish the village whores with his appetites The scene where he hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, quartered her like a little bird quartered her like a little bird le still e, whose s that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding hby with all the wholesome prosperity they represent And there is ie of ash e Mom Mom , written in laundry pen, since no one in our family ever stood on ceremony

It was so So lucid is the memory that I feel the power of resurrection I can hear her voice , What's in your book?

This was a hairpin turn in our life together-the pivotal instant when I'd start furnishi+ng her with reading instead of the other way round

Her hazel eyes glanced sideways at me from her face, pale as paper

I said, A family

She said, Like ours?

Even then I knew to say, What fa: as divided as ours We passed so at us like they expected us to stop I said, I wish Daddy had co her drink, rattling the ice in the cup's bottom Read me some

I tried to explain how little sense the book would o back But she was bored and headachey froa charm me-my life in this Texas suckhole is duller than a rubber knife A the thread of that urgent need I have to put marks on paper, it invariably leads over, and how soether could puncture the soap bubble of her misery

On the road that day, I did the sa past the sex stuff-I let those elegant sentences issue froic laasped She asked me to read parts over By the time we pulled in to the Minneapolis Holiday Inn,drunk for the third night in a row Hair of the dog, Mother said The first screwdriver had ss, I reht to blindslurry in the next bed

Maybe any seventeen-year-old girl recoils a little at the sight of her host mothers to be blotted out If my eyelids closed, I could see the drunk platinum-blond Mother in a mohair sweater who'd divorced Daddy for a few months and fled with us to Colorado to buy a bar Or the ht rise up to shake the last drops froasoline can over a pile of our toys before a thrown o whump whump, and as the dolls' faces ih, the very air molecules would shi+ft with the sain be fully safe

I had to sit up and breathe deep and ed versions dispersed, and she once again lay in fil on it announcing HERE COMES TROUBLE HERE COMES TROUBLE

She said, You can't go now I'm not done with you yet Sob sob sob Sob sob sob She had on one of the derby hats she'd bought each of us in Houston the day we left-pi peacock feathers in their brims

Later, Mother patted my back as I threw up into the toilet I reen's lotion froesture repelledprayers up at un speed, like a soldier in a foxhole to a God not believed in, Don't let me be her, don't let me be her Don't let me be her, don't let ether for this trip, she could blow at any second

In thewhen I stirred, my eyes lasered on to her supine form in the next bed She was nearly done with Hundred Years of Solitude Hundred Years of Solitude She still had her hat on, pushed back on her head to give her the wondering expression of Charlie Chaplin My hat had a hole in it, which I didn't re My first blackout

When I pulled up to the green lawn of ht Frisbees in their chops, I decided to reinvent otten in by wheedling a reference froh to bother A lu pal of Mother's froree, he sported a er russet beard with a skunk stripe and a French accent I later learned was fake He'd first , shoeless, his coat draped across hi pasted to the breast pocket-apparently printed by the wife I never met-read, DON'T BRING HIM HOME HE'S GOT THE CAR DON'T BRING HIM HOME HE'S GOT THE CAR!!!

I liked the sentences he could spin out in h I liked how he oohed at the poetry I'd been encouraged to press on hihtporcelain but before he got too lubricated to talk right

Having not seen hi up in his office brandishi+ng recommendation forms But he'd said on the phone I could come, so I leaned in his open door slot to ask was he busy

He sat behind a desk spraith papers, hands interleaved before him as if by a mortician He closed the door behind ured he'd decided against reco found the poems and essays I'd sent him in advance dim-witted I felt oafish before him No sooner did he sit down than he bobbed back to his feet like he'd forgotten so He walked toto stop-lifteddown atand sweaty hand, he cupped first one breast, then the other, saying, By God, they're real! By God, they're real!

Such was the interview that landed er qualifications