It seemed funnier when we were in eighth grade, but our parents laughed—well, Jason’s and other people’s parents laughed. My mom didn’t attend the performance, of course.
Jason tried to send Charles Barkley—who was a rookie playing for the 76ers at the time—free tickets to our play, but the organization never returned his call.
Jason Malta’s mom got sick shortly after that, and he stopped writing comedies. He became transparent as a window. You could see right through him for years. And when he made love to me for the first time, I swear to God, he became flesh and bone once again, if only for a few seconds, which was when I first realized that sex and womanhood were powerful.
He used to buy me roses from the Acme, a dozen at a time. Cheap flowers that wilted and turned brown within hours. I thought I loved him, and maybe I did. He wasn’t very good-looking—red hair, pale skin, and a concave chest. But he was kind. Even when he stopped being funny, he was still kind.
The smell of trash from the alley behind my childhood home makes me feel nauseous again, but I manage to avoid the dry heaves.
She’s inside, my mother; I know it. I can feel her heavy presence. But I’ll need strength to face her, more than I have right now.
The finality of what has happened—it sinks in.
It cuts.
It mutilates.
I try to shiver myself to sleep.
In the cushions, I think I smell the Drakkar Noir cologne I once gave Jason Malta for Christmas, and which he wore dutifully for the rest of our high school tenure. I hope Jason Malta’s happily married with kids and is wildly successful. Maybe he’s even writing comedies again. Maybe.
It’s a nice thought.
“Portia Kane,” I say to myself, thinking about the vibrations of those syllables floating away into the night. “Portia Kane. Portia Kane. What has become of you, Portia Kane?”
I close my eyes and try to erase the world.
In my mind, I keep seeing a fish riding a bicycle.
The fish is singing a song about how she loves to pedal her bike, and I can’t figure out how she can move both pedals with a single tail, which is when I realize I’m still drunk.
I’m spinning.
Bile runs halfway up my throat like some horrible acidic tongue and burns as it licks its way back down.
“Fuck you, Gloria Steinem,” I say, although I am not exactly sure why.
CHAPTER 4
“Portia?” I hear. “Portia? What are you doing out here on the back porch?”
I open one eye and see my large mother in a pink bathrobe. Her breath is visible; her short gray hair—which she cuts herself—juts out in untamed triangular bursts that make her head look like a weird diseased flower.
“I took out the trash this morning, and what did I find? You. Happy! Happy! May I give you a kiss? May I hug you, my darling? Are you real? Am I dreaming now?”
She doesn’t wait for an answer.
Every inch of my face is kissed.
It’s like an octopus has attached itself, her mouth sucking like so many tentacles, somehow all at once.
Or maybe it’s like being licked by a hippopotamus.
She throws her ample weight on me. I feel the rough burn of her aging terrycloth robe and make a note to buy her an update, even though I know she won’t use it and probably has a dozen brand-new unworn backups stuffed somewhere in a closet.
“I can’t breathe, Mom.”
“Have you been drinking, Portia? You smell like alcohol. Stinky, stinky.”
“I could kill a Bloody Mary right now,” I say, and think about why I haven’t been home for years.
My mother’s lack of a filter.
Her penchant for being honest as a mirror.
Her often creepy childlike demeanor.
Her proclivity to annoy and embarrass and depress, like a genetic oracle that screams out my doom whenever I am within earshot.
It all strikes blunt as a hammer to the thumb.
“Where’s Ken?” she says.
I listen to cars driving up and down Cuthbert Boulevard for a second before I say, “Ken died. Was shot with his own handgun. Colt .45. They made it out to be a random intruder. A burglary gone wrong. But Ken had many known enemies. Made the five o’clock news in Tampa even. But they didn’t get the story right. Not even close. The detectives said they could make Rorschach tests out of the blood-splattered wallpaper and then laughed like hyenas, which I thought was insensitive, even if their observation was completely accurate. Regardless of all that—so long, Ken. Nice knowing you and all that. Sucks to be you.”
Mom pulls in a dramatic gulp of air. “That’s simply terrible, Portia! Horrible! What is a roar-shock test? I feel so sad for you. Ken is really dead? Or are you kidding? I can never tell. Why didn’t you tell me earlier? I’m so confused.”
“Didn’t want to worry you, Mom. It’s probably for the best, Ken’s murder,” I say, thinking I really shouldn’t be talking like this anymore now that the booze has worn off. But I can’t seem to stop myself. “I was getting tired of him. He couldn’t even get hard anymore. I’d been wanting to recycle him for more than a year. Our sex life had passed away long before that.”
“Portia!”
“Why did you name me Portia anyway? You’d never even heard of The Merchant of Venice, let alone read it.”
“Was Ken really shot? Is he okay? You are kidding, right?”
“Ha ha! No. He wasn’t shot. He’s not really dead. But he’s definitely not okay either. He is the antithesis of okay. And—”
“You’re making my head hurt! One minute you tell me Ken was murdered, the next you’re asking about your name—and I haven’t even seen you in many years. You just show up and—”
“Focus, Mom. One thing at a time. Forget all the rest. Concentrate. Why’d you name me Portia?”
She closes her eyes and shakes her head hard enough to make her cheeks ripple like two red Jell-O molds experiencing a small earthquake. Then she looks up at the porch ceiling. “I guess your father liked the name.”
Liar!
“Why?” I say.
Her eyes grow huge. “How would I know that?”
“Didn’t you talk about what my name should be when you were pregnant?”
“I’m sure we did. We must have.”
“Well, then?”
“Too long ago. Too, too long. I can hardly remember what I did yesterday, and you want me to talk about all of the old things. Your father was a good—”
“And kind man,” I say. “Yeah, I know. I would have loved him.”
“The accident—”
“The accident,” I echo, cutting her off, because it’s all just bullshit and we both know it. A nameless coworker took advantage of her simplemindedness and knocked her up. She made up the story of a nice and kind man without ever bothering to report the rapist, let alone hold him responsible for child support. I’m okay with her lying about all that in the past, because I let go a long time ago, but the never-ending ongoing lies are inconvenient when you want answers—real answers. You can get lost in Mom’s madness. It’s like a maze of tall bushes, all thorns and no roses. And she insists I navigate while blindfolded. “So you really have no idea why you named me Portia?”
“It suits you, doesn’t it? It’s a pretty name. I love the name Portia. It was the best I could think of. The best we could think of. The best.”
My name sounds like the type of sports car middle-aged men buy while fantasizing about fucking girls half their age, the type of car Ken will buy now that he is free and clear of me. I see him and Khaleesi riding around with the top down, her golden mane trailing like a comet over the hand-sewn leather interior and a candy-apple-red paint job.
“Did you like Ken?” I ask. “You can tell the truth now. He’s gone. Finished. Not coming back.”
> “He’s very handsome, but I only met him one time! And for only ten minutes!”
Mom’s smile is childlike, and I feel a wave of guilt overtake me.
Has it really been three years since I’ve seen her? And did she really only meet Ken that one time?
Are those things possible?
Absolutely.
Portia, you are cruel in addition to being stupid.
“What’s the state of the house?” I ask.
“You’re not throwing anything away!”
“Easy, Mom. Do you have any orange juice? Coffee? Basics?”
“Sure. Sure. Come on in. We’ll both catch our deaths out here.”
“One can dream.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Let’s go inside.”
“Welcome home, Portia,” she says, and then kisses both of my cheeks once more. “I’ve missed you. Thank you for visiting me.”
“Is the house that bad?”
“I just—it’s that . . . well, I . . . I have Diet Coke for you! With lime inside!”
“I bet you do.”
I mentally prepare myself as Mom and I stand.
She looks like she may have become even more rotund—Grimace, kids used to call her when I was in elementary school, referring to the fat purple McDonald’s monster, and I never stood up for her, even though she would have happily flayed off her flesh with a blunt butter knife if I had asked her to.
She’s looking at me, blocking the door. She outweighs me by at least a hundred pounds, and she’s shaking.
“It’s really good to see you, Portia. So good,” she says, squeezing my arm until it hurts.
“Good to see you too, Mom.”
“I didn’t know you were coming.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered. We both know that.”
“I would have straightened up for you at least.”
“You would have worried and obsessed, but you wouldn’t have gotten rid of a thing.”
“I have Diet Coke for you. With lime inside!”
“I know, Mom.”
“Portia, this is my home.”
“I promise I won’t throw anything away. You have my word.”
She lights up like a plastic lawn Santa on Christmas Eve. “Promise?”
I draw an X across my heart with my forefinger and say, “Swear to God.”
“I love you,” she says. “I love having you home!”
She opens the back door, and when I step inside I see the cans of Diet Coke with Lime stacked three feet high, twelve or so deep, on the counter, and I want to cry. Boxes of cereal and rice and bags of flour and crackers are all piled around the cabinets so you couldn’t reach them if you tried, let alone open any. Not one square inch of counter space is uncovered.
“Would you like a Diet Coke with Lime?” she says.
“Okay, Mom. But it’s, what”—I look at the timepiece hanging above the sink, a black cat turned gray by dust with the face of a clock in its belly; its tail acts as a pendulum; its eyes insanely darting in the opposite direction of the tail . . . right, left, right, left, right—“almost eight a.m. Yep, just about time for a Diet Coke with Lime.”
She opens the refrigerator. The bottom three shelves are stocked wall to wall with silver soda cans.
Mom doesn’t drink Diet Coke with Lime—ever.
These are all for me, on the off chance I might come home thirsty enough to drink seven hundred or so cans in a single visit. I’m sure most are at least five years old.
“Mom,” I say, and wipe tears from my eyes, because I have almost allowed myself to forget how my mother’s life is even more fucked up than mine.
“I know you love Diet Coke with Lime, right? Right?”
“Yeah, I do. You know me,” I say, taking the cold can from the clutch of her plump fingers and thumb.
When I bend the tab, the drink hisses, and a million bubbles come to life.
I sip.
“Good?” Mom says, nodding and looking up at me from under her thick gray eyebrows.
The truth is that this is a bribe. My mind flashes back to the last time I tried to clean out the house and get her help. I had my old Olive Garden waitressing friend drive Mom and the insanely long shopping list I gave her to Kmart. Armed with more than one hundred extra-strength trash bags, I started stuffing like a madwoman. I had the living room completely done when Carissa and Mom returned, much too early. Kmart had run out of pink sweat suits on the sale rack, which had triggered one of Mom’s panic attacks. When she found me cleaning, Mom started screaming, “No! No! No! No! No!” for minutes, then began punching herself in the side of her head hard enough to leave a bruise. Carissa and I restrained her on the cleared-from-shit-for-the-first-time-in-years couch. Since Carissa and I were planning a move to Florida at the end of the summer, we acquiesced and calmed Mom by helping her rearrange her piles of trash. She kept mumbling over and over, “Your room is yours, Portia. The rest is mine. Your room is yours, Portia. The rest is mine,” which muted Carissa and drained all the color from her skin.
Back in the present moment, Mom says, “Like you remember from the last time you were here? Diet Coke with Lime? Good?”
“Very good. But they have Diet Coke with Lime in Florida too, Mom. You can get these pretty much anywhere in the world, so you don’t have to keep so much of it—”
“Your room is just as you left it. I haven’t touched a thing!”
“A little Portia Kane museum. Just like the dining room, I bet.”
I walk into the next room, which doesn’t have a dining room table in it like you might think, but instead boasts a five-foot-square tower of my grandfather’s lifetime magazine collection, National Geographics stacked with yellow spines out, the rest with spines facing in—who knows why, maybe they’re old girlie magazines—and the whole thing towering so high the cheap dusty gold chandelier rests atop, its chain piled limp next to it. These were moved up from the basement when we started getting water leaks. The dining room table is now down there, each leg up on a cinderblock, mostly because that makes no sense whatsoever and this is a mad, mad home. You could kill someone by pushing the magazine tower onto them. The walls of this room are wallpapered floor to ceiling with taped-up pictures of me. There is a two-foot-wide walkway separating the four sides of the magazine tower from the million or so versions of my always-aging face.
If I could bear to look, I could trace the history of my entire life.
Baby pictures. First day of kindergarten and every other year, all the way through college. Every Halloween costume. Every Easter and Christmas outfit. My fat phases. My acne. Every date in an ill-fitting suit or out-of-fashion tuxedo who ever slid cheap flower arrangements around my wrist while pretending not to look at my hoarder mother’s many piles of dusty junk before taking me to a dance—me wearing poofy Disney-princess sleeves and shiny cheap fabric that made me into the shape of an uppercase A.
My mother’s life work is on these four walls.
I am her single contribution to the world, the poor woman.
It’s amazing that she’s never had an existential crisis.
Of course, the fourth wall is mostly pictures of Ken’s and my wedding, all removed from the very expensive leather-bound album I sent her and in which she doesn’t appear, because—even though Ken purchased her first-class airline tickets and an ocean-view suite at the hotel—she refused to travel to Barbados to attend the ceremony, claiming it was “too dangerous for an unmarried white woman.”
And then beyond the wedding photos on the fourth wall are all of the shots I’ve sent her over the years from trips Ken and I’ve taken around the world—scenes I do not wish to revisit. And yet I know them all by heart already and can’t help imagining me smiling stupidly in front of the Eiffel Tower holding a flaky baguette like a sword in two fists, the Great Pyramid
of Giza resting like a tray of food in the palm of my hand, me in a black bikini sipping rum and sugary milk from a coconut with a ring of flowers around my neck in Hawaii, me pretending to talk on the phone in one of those red booths they have in London, me standing next to a koala bear in a tree at an animal refuge in Australia, the underwater shots of me and Ken in flippers and the silly snorkel gear floating over the Great Barrier Reef, me with my arms spread Christlike with the great white iconic statue looming over my shoulder in Rio de Janeiro—so many stupid pictures we took all over the world ended up here in this hellish place, with my mother circling endlessly around her National Geographics tower to fuel the merry-go-round narrative of my life, wearing out the dusty carpet even, an endless zero of obsession and insanity keeping her from having any adventures herself, from ever experiencing anything but the piles of trash with which she surrounds herself.
For some reason, I envision ancient ape people finger-painting on cave walls, the glow of a torch illuminating their Neanderthal faces as they squat and make stick figures and hide in sunless godforsaken dankness from the saber-toothed tigers that roam freely with huge top-of-the-food-chain teeth and ferocious appetites.
What is my mother’s real-life saber-toothed tiger? I’ll probably never know.
Now we have reality TV shows, memoirs, and all sorts of information and resources about hoarders, but when I was a child I didn’t even know the word for what my mother was. There was never a diagnosis, so how could there have been a solution? No one found my mother grotesquely fascinating enough back then to put her on television and make her disease part of popular culture. I can’t decide if that was a blessing or a curse. And regardless, I’ve come to believe that there is no cure for Mom now. Her mind’s been rotting for far too long. Some people you just can’t resurrect, no matter how much you love them.
The living room is almost inaccessible, as Mom has made a mini city of out-of-date phone books and expired coupon clippings tied up with string. There are pyramids of cheap teddy bears and plastic-faced baby dolls, more cases of Diet Coke with Lime stacked and waiting to quench my mythical thirst, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton records purchased by mail order and still in the original plastic because Mom owns no record player, shoe boxes crammed with receipts older than me, endless cans of spaghetti sauce, never-been-cracked cookbooks, my grandfather’s childhood baseball card and tool collections in boxes labeled DADDY’S STUFF, and so many other useless items, stacked and teetering in a way that reminds me of Dr. Seuss cartoons.