Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) (11 page)

R
ecently I heard that Twitter redesigned its bird. The logo. The little bird.

I have only recently mastered the language of Twitter—well, most of it. There are still a few symbols I’m clueless about. And I’m worried. Is Twitter going to do to me what Facebook has done?

I’m referring to the Timeline. Although by the time you’ve read this, for all I know the Timeline may be ancient history. For reasons that will make sense only to Facebook and will probably benefit only Facebook (and the advertisers they are pining for), they will have decided their “users” need a change. They will announce
that Facebook has been—this word I am terrified of—upgraded.

In the beginning, the Facebook page was basic. Even a moron (me) could understand it. At the top of the page you posted a message. Below that, “friends” could respond, and below that were your earlier posts. Now, thanks to this newer, better thing called a Timeline—I’m sure many people, younger people, understand why it’s called this, but I don’t—there are multiple columns. The Facebook page is now completely confusing. What is new? What is old? The messages are where? Where? Your eye is flying around having no idea where to land.

Microsoft Word “improves” itself constantly. I just got a new computer and was forced into a $149 upgrade. I also had to spend $199 on a new version of Final Draft, the software program that screenwriters use. “Don’t get Eight, whatever you do, it’s worse than Seven,” I was warned by screenwriter friends. Final Draft 7 is so preferred that the other week I found one for sale on eBay for $400.

Upgrades are rarely better or easier. In the previous version of Word, if you wanted to do something simple like use boldface or italics or perhaps center a paragraph, the options stretched across the top of your screen in a friendly here-I-am-click-on-me kind of way. In the
current version, everything is hidden (as it also is in the recently revamped Gmail). One is helpless in the face of technology marching needlessly on. Where is boldface? Italics? Hello? After endless searching—and it is risky to click on anything unknown on a computer because you can end up in a cyber world you can’t escape from, then you will have to call tech support and that will surely wreck your day—after clicking willy-nilly, I found, under View, something called “Formatting Palette.” Palette? I’m not a painter, but hey, I clicked on it and up popped a small box with all the options—boldface, italics, font size, etc.—crammed into it. I practically needed a magnifying glass to use it. And would I remember where it was when I needed it next?

The television show
Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?
proves that adults often aren’t. When it comes to upgrades, they surely are not. A fifth grader who’s been using a computer, as many have, since kindergarten could have found boldface in ten seconds.

Baby boomers cannot keep learning new things, stuffing new information into their overcrowded brains. We’re already passing out from it. We’re being upgraded into obsolescence.

I don’t want more options. I want fewer options. There are sixty buttons on my remote control, and I have
used twelve of them. Sometimes I hit the wrong button and a tiny screen pops up in the corner of my big one and I can’t get rid of it.

Actually, in fact, I have three remote controls, and I have been told several times that I can have them consolidated into one remote control. I dread everything about this—buying the remote, hiring a techie genius or begging a fifth grader to explain how to use it, and then immediately forgetting how approximately one second after he leaves my apartment.

Which brings me to
Law & Order
, arguably the most successful television franchise ever.
Law & Order
, in reruns at almost every hour of the day or night, is as relentlessly repetitive as a metronome. Every episode begins the same way—a body is found. This discovery is followed by a few ominous musical beats, the same ominous musical beats every episode. Two detectives go from place to place. We know that because each place is announced with the same musical cue, plus words on the screen tell us exactly where they are. Or I should say, more important, the words tell us exactly where
we
are. At between twenty-seven and twenty-nine minutes past the hour, a bad guy is arrested and the show switches from law to order.

When Dick Wolf, the creator, spun out other
versions, such as
Law & Order: SVU
, he kept the format virtually the same. Only the nature of the crimes changed. In this chaotic world of constant upgrades, where I can’t even find boldface, I am so grateful to him. All I want is for someone not to change something I love. All I want is for someone to keep it simple.

Recently Apple unveiled a new iPhone with two hundred more features. Facebook announced that it was going to develop a smartphone. My phone is already too smart for me, and I assume this new phone will be smarter. All a smarter phone means is another way for me to feel dumber.

A
few days ago, I got an e-mail from my sister Amy in Los Angeles saying she and her husband had received boxes from J.Crew. Christmas presents from me, she assumed, since I had ordered them online and told her to expect them.

But for whom? she asked. The cards were buried deep in the packaging, and one of them was missing. Nothing was gift wrapped, either (although I had requested and paid for it). The boxes contained two pairs of shoes (although I had ordered only one pair), a man’s pullover, and a sparkly pink woman’s sweater. The sweater was for a friend who also lives in Los Angeles, but somehow ended up being sent to Amy’s husband.

I called J.Crew to complain, and what followed was tedious and time-consuming, as all Internet dramas are, involving a review of numerous e-mails—“your order has been received,” “your order has been shipped”—in this case to the wrong place and in the wrong ways, some of which I might have prevented if I’d been vigilant tracking the flurry of e-mails.

The customer service representative, consulting records, assured me that the box for my friend had been delivered. It had been left at the front door, she said, and gave me the address, which turned out to be not my sister and her husband’s house but my friend’s office, a gigantic building in Beverly Hills. “Left outside the front door? Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she said, and, as an apology, she would send me a $50 gift card. I e-mailed my friend. Had she received a box from J.Crew? “No,” she said.

My sister offered to gift wrap and deliver my friend’s present. This was especially kind because traffic in Los Angeles is awful, as bad as New York’s during the holidays, which is one reason I order on the Web. But rather than make life easier, Web shopping only complicates it in new, more frustrating ways.

My husband, in charge of buying for all the children in our life, announced one evening that he had bought
all his presents. To be done with Christmas shopping was so exciting that you’d think he’d used up some calories to do it, when in fact he’d never left his desk. The next morning he got an e-mail from Hammacher Schlemmer saying the item was out of stock and would ship after January 1. So he had to phone and cancel the order. He then had to Web-shop all over again.

When I ordered the presents on the J.Crew website and checked a box for gift wrapping, I received a message back that J.Crew did not wrap shoes, my sister’s present. As Amy and I were sorting things out, I wondered why in the world I thought it was okay to send a Christmas present that wasn’t gift wrapped.

It seems to me—a fact I had completely forgotten—that a Christmas present should be wrapped in pretty paper, maybe with some Santas dancing across it, maybe something glossy and glamorous. Shouldn’t the tag be handwritten? Shouldn’t the ribbon be made of paper that curls when you whip it across a scissor blade? A present should beckon you. Who wants a Christmas tree with a bunch of UPS boxes under it?

Last week a UPS box arrived. I opened it, and inside, unwrapped, was a slate cheese board and a gift card that said, in computer script,
Merry Christmas Julia and Jerry, love Anna
.

Anna is my niece. Jerry is my husband. I assume that I am Julia.

Precious holiday giving cannot be entrusted to a website. A gift shouldn’t be something you open by accident—
Hello, what is this?
—ripping open the cardboard outer box with a knife and then having your present fall out naked.

Ordering Christmas presents on the Web, regardless of the dubious ease, has obliterated the idea that there should be some grace to a present, some beauty, and that the receiver should experience it. Instead it’s become as mundane and problematic as all our Web purchases, which in my family include paper towels and toilet paper.

All this joy of Internet shopping was accompanied by our phone ringing several times a day: a computer voice from Virgin America insisting that my husband owes $70—a $50 credit card fee and $20 interest for not paying it. My husband has never had a Virgin America credit card. But to “proceed,” as in clear the problem up, the electronic voice asked him to identify himself by giving the number of the credit card that he does not possess. The telephone, which used to symbolize “reach out and touch someone”—remember that tear-jerking TV ad?—has become a disembodied voice reaching out to drive us crazy.

But I digress. Or do I? It all seems related. Intimacy replaced by expedience.

So this is my New Year’s resolution: I am never ordering another Christmas present on the Web again. Next year I am wrapping all my gifts myself and standing in line at the local post office for an hour or two to mail them. It’s the least I can do for the people I love.

I
n the hospital, when she was dying, my mother famously said to my sister Nora, “Take notes.” By famously I mean, famous in my family. The statement was embraced as words to live by, written about by all the sisters, considered permission to write anything and everything as well as evidence of what a clear-eyed, original woman my mother—so ahead of her time (screenwriter, career woman, feminist)—was to the end.

“Take notes” is a ruthless deathbed directive, cold and unsentimental. Imagine it. I mean really imagine it. You are lying in your hospital bed, stomach distended from cirrhosis, nearing the end after years of dedicated
drinking, of bender upon bender. The alcohol has now not only destroyed your liver but addled your brain. You are facing an imminent all-systems failure, and what do you say to your daughter? “Take notes.”

Imagine all the conversations a mother on her deathbed might want to have with her daughter, all the possible affections that might be tendered. Imagine what you might say to your own daughter. And then think,
This is what she said
.

Perhaps she knew we wouldn’t be crying and was providing an alternative. Something to keep us busy while we weren’t grieving. That presumes a consideration she wasn’t known for—an awareness of our needs. Dependence on alcohol, the illness of alcoholism, sadly breeds a staggering self-absorption. Grieving might have been something she couldn’t wrap her brain around. One other thing about drinking—it blots feeling, numbs pain. Allows you to travel or stumble around in an anesthetic haze. Feelings were the opposite of a comfort zone for my mother. “Take notes.” At the time she said this, she hadn’t had a sober day in years. Still we found wisdom in it. Our brilliant mother. We kept her on the pedestal in spite of evidence to the contrary. Dropped what didn’t fit the myth out of the equation. “Take notes” might be helpful. It is certainly clever, and cleverness, highly valued in
my family, was sometimes mistaken for or confused with wisdom. It is for sure a distancing mechanism:
Don’t be with me, take notes on me.
As I said, feelings were not my mother’s strong suit. She had worked her way around that problem by distilling into pithy rules a remarkable amount of useful information about living an interesting nonconformist writer’s life.

Was she aware, when she was dying, that there was no way for us to miss her? To admire her, yes. To be grateful for her, yes. To be sad for her because she drank her life away, yes. To be relieved, yes. To miss her, no.

But wait. Let me start over.

All siblings have different parents. We are all born at different times in our parents’ marriage. Parents do not treat their children identically, much as they might imagine they do or strive to, and children bond or not and relate differently to each parent. This is obvious, but it is important to state because, in spite of having three sisters, this is my story, only my story, and the sister to whom my mother said “Take notes” was not me. When I wrote in an earlier paragraph that there was no way to miss my mother and used the pronoun
us
, I misspoke. I was referring only to myself.

So let me begin differently.

When I was about fourteen years old, I was hanging
out after school at home in the sunroom. The sunroom was my favorite room, friendly Southern California casual. Glass walls on two sides hung with thick straw shades, straw sisal on the floor, although I don’t think it was called sisal then, so let’s just say a carpet made of straw. I was slouched on one of the bamboo couches with my feet up on the coffee table, reading while I watched television. This is what I did almost every day after school, and most likely there was a pile of chocolate chip cookies on my lap and I was eating the cookie part first and saving the chips for last. The sunroom was two steps down from the dining room, and I became aware of my mother at the top of the steps looking down at me.

“I hope you never tell anyone what happens here,” she said.

Did I nod back? I certainly quickly agreed. This was not an invitation to a conversation, and I was always wary around my mother. She was unpredictable. She could be mean. What she was referring to—“what happens here”—were the drunken brawls and raging fights between my parents that happened at night. Not every night. But often.

During the day things were fairly normal. They got tense around dinnertime, sixish, when the first glasses of Scotch on the rocks were poured. I was always
trying to read the signs, the looks between them, jerky movements: Were they angry? What was coming? Would tonight be one of those nights? Should I finish my homework early just in case? (I was very responsible, as children of alcoholics often are.)

I might be getting ahead of the story. Life is such a jumble. Especially looking back.

“I hope you never tell anyone what happens here” was a reference to the nights made during the day. These are, I should point out, the things that children of alcoholics are sensitive to. Minutiae. Subtle details. Meanings that might sail over another child’s head. I was always decoding. I was hyperalert.

Being hyperalert is a lasting thing. Being a watcher. Noticing emotional shifts, infinitesimally small tremors that flit over another person’s face, the jab in a seemingly innocuous word, the quickening in a walk, an abrupt gesture—the way, say, a jacket is tossed over a chair.

“I hope you never tell anyone what happens here.” This was important. This was an acknowledgment in the day that the nights existed. My mother was admitting this. Startling, really. She never had before.

So: “Take notes” and “I hope you never tell anyone what happens here.” Mixed messages.

Or simply different thoughts at different times?

Or, looked at another way, perhaps Nora was supposed to “take notes” and I was supposed to keep my mouth shut. Perhaps my mother knew which of us was Judas.

So let me begin again.

When my mother was dying, I went to visit her in the hospital. I was about to have my first book published—
The Adventurous Crocheter
, a craft book about crocheting. (This is an important fact—please remember it.)

I hadn’t seen my mother in some months; I was living in Rhode Island. She was so thin as to be nearly unrecognizable, and, weirdly, as a result I saw our physical resemblance for the first time, because my face is thin and now hers was too. I had never felt mothered by her, but I could see clearly that she was my mother. I was twenty-seven, unhappily married, and for the most part without emotional support. My mother and I weren’t close and never had been. If only. Then I could have simply said what was in my heart or trusted that my heart would show the way. At least that’s what I have always imagined, the way mothers and daughters might relate when alcohol is not part of the equation.

Oh, God, let me begin again, because what is really driving me crazy is this: My mother wasn’t funny. I wish she had been funny. I don’t mean that she never said
anything funny. I don’t remember that she did, but she must have because she wrote funny things in her plays and movies.

For me everyone is much easier to write if I can find the comedy in their natures. Comic characters are lovable simply because they are funny. Even if they drive you nuts, seriously nuts, if you can write them funny, the love shows through. This is why I was able to write a comic novel (
Hanging Up
) based on my dysfunctional (
disturbed
wouldn’t be off the mark, either) relationship with my dad.

In fiction and nonfiction I have mostly steered clear of my mother. This conundrum, how to make her funny, may be entirely self-serving, because if a writer can make someone lovable, then the writer is lovable. The reader assumes it. I think. So I have to give that up.

Wanting to be liked can get in the way of truth. Which is essential.

Anyway, my mother was lying in her hospital bed, and I reminded her of a story she often told at the dinner table when I was young and family dinners were fun. My mother had graduated from Hunter College in New York City. At Hunter all students were required to pass a swimming test, and many had never learned to swim. My mother would show up at the pool in a swimsuit with a
swim cap on her head, sign in as someone else, and take their test. In return, she always told us, her classmates took her math exams, because she hated math.

I don’t know why this tale was told time and time again. Why it was a favorite. It’s a story about cheating, but we all found it charming. I have no idea why I fished it out of my brainpan at that particular moment. Small talk on a deathbed. I reminded her of the story, and she said to me, “I didn’t hate math. I hated crocheting.”

I know the alcohol had pickled her brain. Still, that is what she said. That and not something else.

So last words: “Take notes” to one daughter. “I hated crocheting” to another.

That is actually sort of funny.

My mother was an alcoholic. For me that’s where it begins.

She began drinking when I was eleven years old. There was a clear before and after in my life—a sunny before and a dark after. Day/night. Now that I am grateful for the life I have, I think of eleven as a sweet spot—an emotional place that allows me to venture in both directions creatively. In retrospect, eleven is a lot of good years.

I believe having an alcoholic parent is not only something to write about, but that there is an obligation to do
it. Growing up as that child is lonely, isolating, confusing, and damaging. There are lots of us. If I have the power by telling a story to make an isolated person less alone, that is a good thing. Besides, I don’t believe in protecting parents who drink—sympathizing, forgiving, but not protecting. “I hope you never tell anyone what happens here.” Tell everyone. You might never get past it otherwise. The obligation of a child is not to protect their parents. Obviously. Obviously. A mom is supposed to protect her kids. Which doesn’t happen when she drinks.

My mother was an alcoholic before anyone knew much about the disease. Before half the world was sober and the other half related to someone who is or should be. Before AA appeared to have more members than the Democratic Party. Before AA was a place to network. Before people were giving up vices willy-nilly—like cigarettes, carbs, or caffeine. Before people gave up sugar (that is, people who didn’t have diabetes). Before “giving up” proliferated into a national pastime. Before enlightenment.

I say this because environment matters. AA existed, but was not ubiquitous. My mother died in 1971. First Lady Betty Ford, who sensitized the public to the illness of addiction, didn’t confess hers until 1978. When I was young there was barely any information or support for
either my mother or me (Al-Anon was founded when I was thirteen, but I had never heard of it). But even with all the knowledge we have today, children are still keeping the secrets their parents want them to keep. Children are loyal.

My bedroom and my mom’s bedroom shared a wall. (My parents did not sleep in the same room.) Late at night I could hear my mother’s demented drunken ramblings. Who was she angry at—my father, her father? I couldn’t make sense of it. She was the lunatic wife locked in the attic in
Jane Eyre
, only she wasn’t locked in the attic. She was on the loose. I would put my fingers in my ears, bury my head in the pillow. Nothing shut it out. I would hear her door open and she would pad down to my father’s room and the fighting would begin. They would travel all over the house during these vicious shouting matches, sometimes banging open my door and scaring me out of my wits.

“I hope you never tell anyone what happens here.”

She spoke in an even tone. She wasn’t pleading. She never apologized. If she had weepy morning-after regrets, I wasn’t aware of it.

My mother had created a version of herself that she sold to the world: She was completely pulled together. She was a successful career woman. She and my dad
wrote movies together, light comedies and musical comedies. Some of these were
Daddy Long Legs
(Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron),
The Jackpot
(Jimmy Stewart), and
There’s No Business Like Show Business
(starring, among others, Marilyn Monroe). She had no time for the stuff of ordinary women (we had a cook and nurse for that). Superiority was part of her identity. She didn’t meet our teachers—I’m not complaining about that. I was proud that she didn’t. “Your mother is too busy to go to open school night,” she told us. “She has a career.” Having a mother like this set me apart and gave me cachet. Her expectation that I would be a career woman, too, gave me a destiny that other girls didn’t have.

“Elope” was something she told me often. This is really odd—what mother doesn’t want to see her daughter’s wedding? Lesser mothers. Mothers without bigger things on their minds. She never did girlfriend things, not with me, not with girlfriends: shopping, lunches. She didn’t have close friends. She had a life without close friends. That breaks my heart. The phone rarely rang for her.

Once she took me shopping. To buy a dress for the first day of first grade, which means I was six. In a small children’s store on Wilshire Boulevard. There was another girl trying on a dress with pineapples on it. A pineapple print dress. Tropical, I suppose. I remember having
to summon up the nerve—I must always have been intimated by my mother, because otherwise why would I remember that this took nerve? I pointed to the dress. “Could I try that?” My mother said, “I’m not buying you a dress with pineapples on it.”

I don’t think she was being mean. I think she was being funny. Maybe she was funny. That line made it into
Love, Loss, and What I Wore
(the play that Nora and I wrote) in the section called “What My Mother Said,” but we cut it before the play opened because it never got a laugh. So maybe my mother wasn’t funny.

That outing is my first memory of my mother. And my only memory of us together. But she did not have children and ignore them. Having a nurse and cook, which they could afford, freed her and my dad to be with us. We had dinner with our parents. We played charades and twenty questions, hung out in the den together, watching the news,
College Bowl
(a quiz show), Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca in
Your Show of Shows
(which was the 1950s
Saturday Night Live
). We sang rounds. This was family life “before” and, remarkably, even part of family life “after.”