The Unfolding, page 30
“I’m sorry,” Meghan says. “That sounds awful.”
“It wasn’t all bad, because the first person I met at school was your dad. And look at me now.” They all laugh.
“Chicken smells good,” Charlotte says.
“It’s almost ready.”
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Palm Springs, California
4:30 p.m.
The sun sinks behind the San Jacinto Mountains and the house grows dark. Tony turns on the Christmas tree lights and cranks up the music, and they all dance. Anyone looking in through the large glass windows would see a beautiful winter paradise with a middle-aged woman twirling her daughter with her hand, and an old fart and his dandy best friend doing the same. Then they change partners, and Charlotte and the Big Guy do a strange kind of tango while Tony and Meghan dance. They switch again, and it’s the Big Guy and his daughter, and he is prouder of her tonight than he has ever been. She has risen to the occasion, proving herself to be an incredible young woman. As they are dancing, he tears up, wishing he could have offered her better and more. He wishes he could rewrite history, but absent that power, he is all the more determined to create a new history, a new road forward. He commits to hauling the past, as if it were Santa’s enormous Christmas bag, through the mud, the snow, the rain, the shit, and the hell that’s before them so he can deposit it and her firmly in the future before he dies.
“How stoned are you?” he asks Charlotte.
“Very,” she says. “It’s nice. You might want to try it.”
“I’d like to, but not today. Someone needs to remain on deck.”
“You’re the night watchman.”
“I’m the dog,” he says.
“Did Mom always love to dance?” Meghan asks her father.
“I’m not sure. But she can really cut the rug.”
As they’re about to sit down to supper, the doorbell rings, scaring the crap out of everyone.
“Is it the car?” Charlotte asks.
“What car?” Meghan wants to know. “Did you get me a car?”
The Big Guy peeks outside before opening the door. “It’s not the car; it’s FedEx. My heart is pounding; I could just see the headlines: ‘Desert Drug Den Discovered at Prominent Republican Donor Vacation Home.’ ”
He opens the door and signs for the package. “From our friend in Winnetka, of all places.”
“Open it,” Tony says.
“I don’t know,” the Big Guy says, laughing. “I’m a little bit afraid, still not sure how well that meeting went.” He rips the box open. It’s a bottle of murky liquid that looks like swamp water sealed with wax and resting in a clear plastic vitrine as if it were a little coffin of Christmas cheer. A handwritten note is attached: “Special Edition Holiday Ball Water—Sativa with clove and cinnamon.”
“I guess I can’t have any,” Charlotte says.
“No, you cannot,” Meghan says, and it comes out sounding very strict.
They sit down to dinner. Meghan has created a feast worthy of a photo shoot. Not only did she pull off something truly spectacular, but she made it look effortless.
“I wondered what those things were,” the Big Guy says, twirling his reindeer antler napkin ring.
“I made them myself,” Meghan says. “Out of things I found around the house.”
“It’s a beautiful table and a beautiful meal. Look at you. Look at all you did,” Tony says.
Meghan blushes.
“This is so good,” Charlotte says. “It may be the best chicken I ever had. I will say this, while I was in rehab and now at the sober house, I try not to be a snob, but the food is bad. Godawful, really.”
“In what way?” Meghan asks.
“It’s not made for humans to eat. The ingredients come out of giant industrial jars marked Heavy Mayonnaise or Extra Thick and so on. My friend told me that industrial food is allowed to have more insects and foreign debris per jar than the food we buy.”
“Is that really true?” Meghan asks.
“That’s what she says. And she should know. She’s been through rehab a number of times and even briefly went to prison once.”
“Wow,” Meghan says.
“Do you want to know what it was really like?” Charlotte asks.
“Yes,” Meghan says.
“I don’t know that this kind of talk is right for a child,” the Big Guy says.
“I want to hear.”
“Thank you,” Charlotte says, bowing toward Meghan. “Well, I didn’t even remember arriving there. For days I had no idea where I was; I thought I was still on my cleanse and that something had happened and they’d moved me to a local hospital where the people were nice but a bit touchy-feely. I kept waking up thinking there was someone else in my room. At first, I thought it was a private-duty nurse, then one night I woke up thinking it was a man who meant me harm. And I screamed—or I thought I did. One time I thought it was someone like a candy striper who was offering me apple juice. Then I came to know this figure as someone who would dance around the room naked except for white nylon underwear. In the middle of the night, arms over her head, she danced while listening to a Sony Walkman with big padded headphones. Like this.” Charlotte gets up and demonstrates. “She pumped the air over her head; her body lean, tan, not shaped in a traditional female form. Her granny underwear went halfway up her body, and her small low breasts with deep-brown nipples were slightly swaying along to the music.”
“It’s too much,” the Big Guy says. “Stop.”
“Keep going,” Meghan says.
“Every night the woman would dance around the room, her feet softly sweeping the linoleum floor, dancing like she’d once taken a ballroom dancing class, dancing like she had a beat of her own. It looked like she was all alone at a disco party for the deaf—because of the headphones—or like she was in some kind of 1960s experimental film or an avant-garde show. No noise except for her bare feet gliding over the linoleum floor. All of it was a little like being stuck in a dream state or a hallucination. As I started to be able to keep track of time, I saw that she was just one person. She was the midnight dancer in the dark, and in the daylight, she was a man in a plaid flannel shirt, worn jeans, and cowboy boots. I would see her go outside and smoke in the area where cigarettes were allowed. For the longest time I didn’t know exactly who or what she was. I thought she worked there and that her job was to clean the rooms with a giant floor duster. Then we got into a fight.”
“What kind of a fight?” Meghan wants to know.
“One night I woke up and she was standing there, and I said, ‘This is my room.’ ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I’m quite sure that wherever I am my husband paid for me to have a private room,’ I said, and she laughed like that was big-time funny. ‘In the world of drunks and drug addicts, there are no private rooms,’ she said. I didn’t speak to her for days. Finally, she said, ‘Aren’t you ever going to talk to me? We have something in common.’ ‘Like what?’ ‘A problem.’ ‘I don’t see that there’s a problem,’ I said. ‘Don’t shut me down,’ the woman said. ‘Well, I’ve been married for twenty-five years; I’m good at not seeing things. How do you think I ended up here?’ ‘So, why don’t you fill me in?’ she said. We got to talking and it turned out that we did have any number of things in common.”
While Charlotte tells her story, the Big Guy eats biscuits. He eats the biscuits so intensely it’s as if he were trying to suffocate himself or silence Charlotte by stuffing himself. Bite after bite, he’s pushing bread into his craw while she’s talking. Meanwhile, as she’s telling the story, Charlotte is picking at the chicken carcass. By the time she’s finished, the bird has been plucked clean and the meat divided into two piles on the cutting board, light and dark.
“You could make soup out of the bones,” Charlotte suggests.
“We’re leaving soon,” Meghan says.
“Where are we going?” Charlotte asks.
“Church, then Washington,” Meghan and the Big Guy say simultaneously.
“I’m exhausted,” Charlotte says. “Maybe bed.”
“Church,” Meghan insists.
“What time is it now?”
“Nine thirty,” Tony says, getting up from the table and starting to clear the dishes. “I ate too much.”
“I definitely can’t stay up for Midnight Mass,” Charlotte says.
“Let’s go to the early show,” Meghan says. “That one has better songs and the children’s pageant.”
As they’re leaving the house, Keith from the car dealership is in the driveway trying to stealthily attach a massive red ribbon to the top of the new car.
“Did you get me a car?” Meghan asks.
“No,” Charlotte says.
“Do you need a car?” the Big Guy asks.
Meghan shrugs. “In the future I’ll need a car.”
“Well, this is a car from the past,” Charlotte says. “And it’s for a friend of mine. When it’s your time, we’ll get you a car for the future.”
That seems to appease Meghan.
They pass several churches. Our Lady of Solitude. The Living Water Church of the Desert. They don’t know what to do, so the Big Guy drives around for a bit.
“What a strange, strange place,” Tony says. “A beige sandy world punctuated with mounds of fluorescently green grass, outdoor candy canes, indoor ice sculptures, and—”
“Let’s just go to whichever one comes up next,” Meghan says.
“Amen,” Charlotte says.
As they drive, they debate what’s behind any and all the decorations they pass, including an enormous crèche with figures so tall they look as though they might have been carved from telephone poles.
Charlotte tells a story that none of them have heard before about being in a Christmas pageant as a young girl. “The Christmas play was called ‘A Living Crèche’ and I actually had to pick up the baby Jesus, who was not a doll but a real, warm, wet, wiggling four-month-old. It was terrifying. He was asleep in the wooden cradle until suddenly he wasn’t. He was bleating, then full-throatedly wailing, and I didn’t know if I was supposed to break character and pick him up even though it was earlier than the moment in the script. I looked to the choir director for a cue and got nothing. Then to the audience; all I could see were their expectant faces beaming back at me; they thought it was all too adorable. When I finally did pick him up, he was entirely soaked through with pee and I thought it was disgusting and I had to carry him just so—all the way down the main aisle and around the choirboys and the sheep. When we got backstage to the dressing area, Jesus’s mother took him from me and whipped off his diaper—it may have been the first penis I ever saw—then after she changed him, she pulled out her tit and fed him. I’d never seen that either. Most traumatic Christmas ever.” She laughs.
The Big Guy pulls into the parking lot of the Desert Oasis Chapel, a large tan building with the words “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink,” from John 7:37, written in foot-high Gideon Plexus font on the outside.
“I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost,” Tony says, as they’re walking into the building.
“What’s that?”
“Another part of what’s written on the outside,” Charlotte says.
“Revelation 21:6,” Tony says.
Meghan smiles.
Church is amazing. “Awesome” is the expression Meghan would use. She is with her mother, father, and godfather, and they have their hymnals open and are holding white candles in little wax-catcher paper cups that look like ice cream cones. “Gloria in excelsis Deo! . . . And Heaven and nature sing . . . Repeat the sounding joy. Repeat the sounding joy.”
Repeat the sounding joy. Is that even possible?
Friday, December 26, 2008
Palm Springs, California
7:05 a.m.
Early in the morning on the day after Christmas, Charlotte is picked up by someone from the sober house. Startled by the beeping horn, Charlotte hurriedly gathers her things. Before exiting, she slips into the room where Meghan is sleeping.
Charlotte brushes Meghan’s hair off her face. “It was lovely to be with you,” she whispers. “But I have to go back to my cage.”
“Love you,” Meghan mumbles. “Merry Christmas. You sing good.”
And as she is falling back to sleep, Meghan wonders if Charlotte has to go back to her cage because she is safe there or because others are safe from Charlotte when she’s there.
Her father wakes her at nine a.m. “Time to get the show on the road. Did Mom give you a kiss goodbye? She left very early.”
“Yes,” Meghan says.
“Fine thing,” the Big Guy says.
Meghan packs her bags and her Christmas loot and a car takes her and Tony and her father to the airport. Leaving Palm Springs, she feels as though she were being escorted out of her childhood. Her father and Tony walk on either side of her, like security guards or fence posts. In the airport store, she looks for something to buy—a memento, a placeholder, a bookmark, a keeper of information. She finds a notebook embossed with the slogan of Palm Springs, “Give In to the Desert,” and a cactus-shaped pencil.
As someone who is always thinking about what just happened, living her life in the rearview mirror, Meghan knows that her life will never be the same. While it may be true that every second is new, what happened to her family is a shock. She knows and then she forgets. Then she knows again. Each time she knows comes with a little jolt, a pang of deception and discovery.
Neither Tony nor her father is an airplane talker. They carry files for review, highlighters in different colors, and reading glasses of assorted magnifications. “Variations of fatigue,” Tony calls his collection. “The first pair is a little tired, the second is deeply tired, and the third, exhausted and basically blind.”
“I’ll try ‘a little tired,’’’ she says, and Tony hands the glasses to her. She tries reading a newspaper. The letters are nauseatingly blurry. “Not for me,” she says, handing them back.
“They will be one day,” he says. “It happens to everyone. You think it won’t happen to you, but then you wake up on your fortieth birthday and the cards that come in the mail are a little harder to read.”
“The only move is forward,” she writes in her new notebook. She makes a chart of what she expects of herself: resilience, fortitude, homework done on time. “Mom has a good voice,” Meghan writes. “She used to sing in a choir.” She skips halfway down the page. “Turns out Mom is not really my mom. What does that mean, ‘not really’? Dad says that despite not biologically being my mom, she is my mom. Not really. Not real. Real lie.” Anxious about what she has written, she crosses out the whole paragraph.
I am not who I thought I am/was/am/would be. Where does that leave me?
Like a fugue, an extended hallucination, the fog of lost identity is a milky primal swirl of confusion and contradiction that settles in the center of her lungs. She breathes around it, breathes through it, but it remains, marking her like a scar.
Fibrosis—the thickening of connective tissue, usually as the result of an injury.
And because there are moments of disbelief, she writes—“Did this actually happen?”
Friday, December 26, 2008
The Hay-Adams Hotel
Washington, DC
11:45 p.m.
In Washington they drop Tony at his house and go to their hotel. When Meghan was younger, her parents had an apartment in the Watergate overlooking the Potomac River. She remembers getting dressed there for a party, her mother in a yellow silk dress, sleeveless, cut straight like a tube. Charlotte had short hair and was wearing something on top of her head, maybe jewelry or a tiara. She had high gloves to her elbows that matched the dress. A woman in a pink uniform came to babysit and brought Meghan a pink helium balloon. Meghan remembers playing balloon games with the babysitter after her parents left, and that the next morning, when she woke up, the balloon was on the floor by her bed. She cried because it wouldn’t stay up in the air without the woman in the pink uniform. Until now, that was her idea of trauma. Meghan thinks it’s weird how specific and vague a memory can be at the same time.
She is in a fancy hotel wishing she could return to school. She feels a sense of urgency; until she gets back to school, all of life is suspended, and if she doesn’t go back soon, Meghan feels she won’t be able to go back and that she’ll never go to college and her life will not continue. Why? Because she doesn’t know who or what to continue as—her sense of self is gone.
“Can I see my birth certificate?” she asks her father.
“I don’t have it with me, but I can get it for you.”
“Thank you.”
He calls Godzich, who promises to fax a copy the next morning.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
The Hay-Adams Hotel
Washington, DC
9:30 a.m.
“It’s a fake,” Meghan says, when her father shows her birth certificate to her.
“No, it’s not,” he says. “This is a faxed photocopy. Godzich has the real one in a safe in the office. You can see that it is embossed with the seal from Washington, DC. You were born here just like it says.”
