The Red Parts (7 page)

Shortly after my sister’s release from juvenile hall, my mother and her husband ambushed her again, this time forcibly shipping her off to a “hoods in the woods” school in the deep, Aryan boondocks of Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho. Faced with the prospect of chopping wood, solo wilderness-survival expeditions, and an elaborate structure of experimental group and individual therapies with names like “Discovery” and “Summit,” Emily quickly split. She made it several miles into the disorienting, frigid forest and encountered the frozen corpse of a horse before she was picked up by the local sheriff and returned to the school, where she stayed for the next two years.

With Emily gone I no longer lay awake at night in my basement room listening to her come and go out her bedroom window. Instead I listened to my mother’s husband come and go, either on his motorcycle, or in his painting-company van—a white van with the words FRESH PAINT emblazoned on its side. He played the guitar, although not as well as my father had, and when he was feeling friendly he’d invite me into his “office” to teach me Jimi Hendrix songs. He loved “Red House” in particular.

I never really liked going into his “office,” because it was Emily’s room, which he had cannibalized in her absence. He had replaced her spiraling collages of rock stars and fashion models with blueprints of houses he was working on and enormous color photographs of a strip of beachfront in Belize that he had purchased with some “business partners.” The nature of this business shifted regularly, as did the lineup of partners. He had lived in Belize for a few years in the early ‘70s with his first wife and his daughter, and now dreamed endlessly of returning there to live off the land. When he felt particularly nostalgic he would pull out his slides from Belize and project them on the wall of the living room. Of these I remember only a group of pale Mennonites who had been his neighbors in the jungle. I knew he kept his machete from those years under his and my mother’s bed.

After my stepfather left his “office” at night, I would wander into Emily’s dark and abandoned room. I listened to her records. More than once I guiltily jimmied open a desk drawer. Sometimes I found little plastic baggies, empty but cloudy with the residue of white powder. Other drawers yielded stacks of photographs of her mohawked friends flipping the camera the bird. I rifled through the books she had left behind on her bookshelf, many of which I had given her as gifts. I was happy to see that she had dog-eared several pages in Sylvia Plath’s
Collected Poems
, which I had given her for her eighth-grade graduation.

That same year, when I was twelve, I submitted a poem to a contest sponsored by our favorite band, The Cure. It was a terrible, melodramatic poem called “Shame.” (The band had provided the title; you had to provide the poem to match.) The poem was primarily a collage of Cure lyrics and lines lifted from Plath, and offered an imaginative reconstruction of Emily’s experience of losing her virginity.

Miraculously, the poem won the contest. I thought Emily might be furiously jealous, but instead she was incredibly proud, and showed off “Shame” and the letter I received from the band to everyone at school. It was one of the best moments of my life, hands down.

Another book I had lent her was
Rubyfruit Jungle
, the classic lesbian bildungsroman by Rita Mae Brown. Later I reluctantly handed this book over to “Hal” in his search for potential leads in tracking Emily down. I was torn up about it; I knew it was a betrayal. It came from the sycophantic part of me, the part that has always wanted to impress “the adults” with how smart and helpful I could be. It also came from the fact that I was pissed off at her for running away without telling me. It was the first time she hadn’t trusted me with a secret, and I wanted to see her punished for it.

But another part of me cheered her on. I wanted her to keep going, to keep pulling one over on our mother and stepfather, to keep saying the big Fuck You to everyone and everything, the big Fuck You I did not say. I wanted her to keep running, to make it, at long last, to wherever it was that she so desperately wanted to go.

MY MOTHER had always told us that Jane had been the rebellious, outspoken daughter, while she had remained the dutiful one. Jane was going to change the world by becoming a fierce civil rights lawyer; my mother was going to get married, put our father through law school by teaching high school English, then stop working and raise two kids. Jane had said all the things to their parents that my mother couldn’t or didn’t say—the big Fuck You (or, in 1969,
You racist pigs
). As a result, Jane was no longer welcome in their home. If Jane hadn’t been estranged from her parents, if she hadn’t been worried that they wouldn’t accept her decision to marry a leftist Jew and move to New York City, she wouldn’t have been coming home alone on March 20, 1969. She wouldn’t have advertised for a ride on the ride board, and she wouldn’t have ended up with two bullets in her head, stretched out “puffy and lifeless” on a stranger’s grave in Denton Cemetery the following morning, her bare ass against the frozen earth, a stranger’s stocking buried in her neck.

So wrote my grandfather on March 4, 1968. But things between them did not improve—indeed, as Jane’s relationship with Phil deepened, and as she elaborated her plan to elope and move to New York, things worsened. A year later she was dead. Time did not get its chance to reduce “mountains into mole hills.” Instead her death froze these mountains into mountains, and froze her father into a state of perpetual incomprehension about her, and about their relationship.

RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE
turned out to be a helpful lead. Emily had, in fact, loosely based her travel plans around Brown’s book, which details how one might make money in the East Village by performing relatively painless sexual stunts, such as throwing grapefruits at a guy’s balls.

DURING THESE years my mother and I went to the movies together quite often. It was an easy way to spend time together, sitting in dark places, staring in the same direction. On weekend days we would drive across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, find a good art-house theater, pay one round of admission, and then sneak from film to film: her trick. But a problem recurred—she couldn’t tolerate scenes that involved the abduction of women, especially into cars, and she couldn’t watch women be threatened with guns, especially guns pointed at their heads.

Try going to the movies with this rule, and you will be surprised at how often such scenes crop up.

I left home at seventeen, for college, and for New York, where I soon discovered the deep pleasure of going to the movies by myself. Yet whenever such a scene arose I immediately felt my mother close beside me in the dark theater. Her hands spread across her face, her pinkies pushing down on her eyelids so she can’t see, her index fingers pushing down on her ears so she can’t hear.

I felt her this way acutely when I went to see
Taxi Driver
at the Film Forum in Greenwich Village several years ago. I was excited—it was the first screening of a new print, and a classic I’d never seen. Waiting in line my excitement dampened a little upon noticing that I was one of the only women, and certainly one of the only solo women, at the theater. The crowd was solid boy film geeks, probably NYU film students, who had apparently come prepared to treat the screening like a performance of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
, screaming out in chorus the movie’s many famous lines seconds before the characters spoke them. This was tolerable, sometimes even amusing, until a passenger in Travis Bickle’s taxicab embarked upon the following monologue, which the passenger—played by Scorsese himself—delivers while watching his wife through the window of another man’s house:

Sitting alone in a sea of young men hollering,
Did you ever see what a .44 can do to a woman’s pussy?
was not amusing. Perhaps it was not tolerable, or perhaps I should not have tolerated it. I sat through the rest of the movie, but as I walked slowly home down the dark cobblestone streets of Soho toward my apartment on Orchard Street I found myself thinking about my mother, and about Jane, and about Emily, with tears streaming down my cheeks.
That you should see.

ON ONE VISIT back to San Francisco in 1996, my mother and I returned to one of our old haunts, the Opera Plaza Cinema on Van Ness, to see a movie we knew virtually nothing about, save that it was a “dark comedy” titled
Freeway.
In its opening scenes a wayward teen played by Reese Witherspoon steals a car and runs away from her truly screwed-up family. Her car then breaks down on a California freeway, and a seemingly well-meaning yuppie, played by Kiefer Sutherland, pulls over to help. In his car they have a wide-ranging conversation, which takes a turn for the worse when he starts talking about wanting to rape her dead body. She then realizes that he is the so-called “I-5 Killer,” and he intends to make her his next victim.

By this point in the movie—just about ten minutes in—I could see that we were going to have to pack up. But as we started to gather our things, the movie took another turn. Witherspoon gains control of the situation by pulling out her boyfriend’s gun. She asks Sutherland if he believes that Jesus Christ is his personal savior, then shoots him in the neck several times. Then she throws up, steals his car, and leaves him for dead on the side of the road.

I don’t think he actually dies, but to be honest I remember little to nothing about the rest. What I remember is the moment in the small dark theater, right before Witherspoon pulls out her gun, right before we stood up to leave, when my mother leaned over and whispered to me,
Let’s give it one more minute—maybe something different is about to happen.

T
HE FIRST E-MAIL I receive from
48 Hours Mystery
comes a few months before the trial from a producer who addresses me as “Mrs. Nelson,” unwittingly conjuring up an identity held but fleetingly by my mother many years ago. In his e-mail the producer says that he hopes I will consider working with them, as he feels strongly that “my family’s story of struggle and hope” has great relevance to their audience.

I ponder this phrase for some time. I wonder if he is imagining my family as the kind to print up T-shirts with Jane’s picture and a “we will never forget” slogan on them, as I have seen some families on these TV shows do. I wonder if he read the article in the
Detroit Free Press
in December 2004 in which my grandfather likened the reopening of Jane’s case to “picking a scab.” I wonder what he would think if he knew that after the January hearing, when Hiller asked my grandfather what he thought of the court proceedings thus far, my grandfather said he found them “boring.”

I agree to meet the producer for dinner at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

THE NIGHT before we meet I stay up late perusing the Web site for
48 Hours Mystery.
I learn that
48 Hours
used to focus on “human interest” stories of varying degrees of social importance—the international sex trade, the pros and cons of the “Subway Diet,” the risks of gastric bypass surgery. But as ratings for investigative journalism plummeted and ratings for true-crime shows began to soar,
“48 Hours”
became
“48 Hours Mystery.”
At times they attempt to take on deeper topics within the “murder mystery” rubric—a recent show, for example, investigates the topic
Who Killed Jesus?
and stars Elaine Pagels.

As I scroll down the long list of show titles I feel my spirits start to sink. There are a host of stories about missing or murdered girls and women, with panic-inducing titles like
Where’s Baby Sabrina? Where’s Molly? Where Is Mrs. March?
Others feature high-profile cases—
JonBenét: DNA Rules Out Parents; Is Amber Still in Love with Scott?: Her Father Says She Has Never Gotten Over Him
, while others strive for a more poetic effect:
Dark Side of the Mesa: Did Michael Blagg Murder His Wife and Daughter?
I try to imagine the title they’ll choose for Jane’s show but come up dry.

I FIND the producer on a street corner on Broadway, talking outside the restaurant with some of his college friends, all of whom graduated just a couple of years ago. I’m surprised—I had imagined dinner with a slick patrician, a hard-boiled veteran of the TV business. The surprise is apparently mutual: when we sit down, he tells me that I look way too young to be a professor, and he’s taken aback that I’m not married. I have no idea why he thought I was.

We are meeting early in the evening because he has to fly to Los Angeles first thing in the morning to cover the Michael Jackson child molestation trial. I am not very interested in the Jackson trial, but I try to make small talk about other famous trials. I bring up Gary Gilmore and Norman Mailer’s
The Executioner’s Song
; he says he hasn’t heard of Norman Mailer, but will definitely look him up. He orders us a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, and appears perplexed when it arrives.
I thought I ordered us a red
, he says, decanting with a shrug.