let down. It had been so quick. And I had expected her to be happier, more relieved. If the other lawyer had handled the case, she’d be locked up now. I even said this to her, fishing for compliments.
“Hey, how about a little elation, er, gratitude?”
“Jon, forgive me. Of course I’m elated. Of course we’re grateful. And I know what you charge. We really owe you thousands and thousands of dollars. More than that was that we got to know you, and you liked us. And we love you now.” She gave me a warm hug then, a big smile.
I was ashamed, told her to forget the money, that it had gone beyond a case. We got into the car.
“Jon, I need a drink. We both need breakfast.”
I stopped and bought her a half pint of Jim Beam. She took some big gulps before we got to Denny’s.
“What a morning. We could be in Cleveland. Look around us.” Denny’s in Redwood City was like being in the heartland of America.
I realized that she was trying hard to show me she was happy. She asked me to tell her everything that happened, what I said, what the judge said. On the way home, she asked me about other cases, what were my favorites. I didn’t understand what was going on until we were on the Bay Bridge and I saw the tears. When we got off the Bridge, I pulled over and stopped, gave her my handkerchief. She fixed her face in the mirror, looked at me with a rictus of a smile.
“So, I guess the party’s over now,” I said. I put the car top up just in time. It started to rain hard as we drove on toward Oakland.
“What are you going to do?”
“What do you advise, counselor?”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Carlotta. It’s not like you.”
“I’m very serious. What would you do?”
I shook my head. I thought about her face, reading Nathan’s letter. I remembered Jesse holding her throat.
“Is it clear to you? What you are going to do?”
“Yes,” she whispered, “it’s clear.”
He was waiting on the corner by Sears. Soaking wet.
“Stop! There he is!”
She got out. He came over, asked how it went.
“Piece of cake. It was great.”
He reached in and shook my hand. “Thank you, Jon.”
I turned the corner and pulled over to the curb, watched them walk away in the drenching rain, each of them deliberately stomping in puddles, bumping gently into one another.
Mama
“Mama knew everything,” my sister Sally said. “She was a witch. Even now that she’s dead I get scared she can see me.”
“Me too. If I’m doing something really lame, that’s when I worry. The pitiful part is that when I do something right I’ll hope she can. ‘Hey mama, check it out.’ What if the dead just hang out looking at us all, laughing their heads off? God, Sally, that sounds like something she’d say. What if I am just like her?”
Our mother wondered what chairs would look like if our knees bent the other way. What if Christ had been electrocuted? Instead of crosses on chains, everybody’d be running around wearing chairs around their necks.
“She told me ‘whatever you do, don’t breed,’” Sally said. “And if I were dumb enough to ever marry be sure he was rich and adored me. ‘Never, ever marry for love. If you love a man you’ll want to be with him, please him, do things for him. You’ll ask him things like ‘Where have you been?’ or ‘What are you thinking about?’ or ‘Do you love me?’ So he’ll beat you up. Or go out for cigarettes and never come back.”
“She hated the word ‘love.’ She said it the way people say the word ‘slut.’”
“She hated children. I met her once at an airport when all four of my kids were little. She yelled ‘Call them off!’ as if they were a pack of dobermans.”
“I don’t know if she disowned me because I married a Mexican or because he was Catholic.”
“She blamed the Catholic church for people having so many babies. She said Popes had started the rumor that love made people happy.”
“Love makes you miserable,” our mama said. “You soak your pillow crying yourself to sleep, you steam up phone booths with your tears, your sobs make the dog holler, you smoke two cigarettes at once.”
“Did Daddy make you miserable?” I asked her.
“Who, him? He couldn’t make anybody miserable.”
But I used Mama’s advice to save my own son’s marriage. Coco, his wife, called me, crying away. Ken wanted to move out for a few months. He needed his space. Coco adored him; she was desperate. I found myself giving her advice in Mama’s voice. Literally, with her Texan twang, with a sneer. “Jes you give that fool a little old taste of his own medcin.” I told her never to ask him back. “Don’t call him. Send yourself flowers with mysterious cards. Teach his African Grey Parrot to say ‘Hello, Joe!’” I advised her to stock up on men, handsome, debonair men. Pay them if necessary, just to hang out at their place. Take them to Chez Panisse for lunch. Be sure different men were sitting around whenever Ken was likely to show up, to get clothes or visit his bird. Coco kept calling me. Yes she was doing what I told her, but he still hadn’t come home. She didn’t sound so miserable though.
Finally one day Ken called me. “Yo, Mom, get this…Coco is such a sleaze. I go to get some CDs at our apartment, right? And here is this jock. In a purple Lycra bicycle suit, probably sweaty, lying on my bed, watching Oprah on my TV, feeding my bird.”
What can I say? Ken and Coco have lived happily ever after. Just recently I was visiting them and the phone rang. Coco answered it, talked for a while, laughing occasionally. When she hung up Ken asked, “Who was that?” Coco smiled, “Oh, just some guy I met at the gym.”
“Mama ruined my favorite movie, The Song of Bernadette. I was going to school at St. Joseph’s then and planned to be a nun, or, preferably, a saint. You were only about three years old then. I saw that movie three times. Finally she agreed to come with me. She laughed all through it. She said the beautiful lady wasn’t the Virgin Mary. ‘It’s Dorothy Lamour, for God’s sake.’ For weeks she made fun of the Immaculate Conception. ‘Get me a cup of coffee, will you? I can’t get up. I’m the Immaculate Conception.’ Or, on the phone to her friend Alice Pomeroy, she’d say, ‘Hi, it’s me, the sweaty conception.’ Or, ‘Hi, this is the two-second conception.’”
“She was witty. You have to admit it. Like when she’d give panhandlers a nickel and say ‘Excuse me, young man, but what are your dreams and aspirations?’ Or when a cab driver was surly she’d say ‘You seem rather thoughtful and introspective today.’”
“No, even her humor was scary. Through the years her suicide notes, always written to me, were usually jokes. When she slit her wrists she signed it Bloody Mary. When she overdosed she wrote that she had tried a noose but couldn’t get the hang of it. Her
