I Will Be Complete Read online

  I have a typed history my mother gave me, a hundred or so single-spaced pages transcribed from nineteenth- and twentieth-century notes. It’s a catalogue of all the fortunes the family made by hard work then lost by disaster or betrayal or profligate offspring. (A startling number of officials, shifty bankers, and ugly merchants who did us wrong are identified as “no doubt Jewish,” which makes me wonder how accurate the rest of it is.) It seemed like we were cursed, and our only inquiry was whether we could break free of it, and the answer was obvious to everyone: We would never be free. So don’t struggle. Chin up.

  When Rosemary died, I realized: I am a person who is 50 percent made up of this.

  * * *

  —

  It was spring break sophomore year and I was staying at my father’s house. He was doing well, working for Atlantic Richfield in their solar division, where he claimed he was in charge of a project to sell the sun to the Arabs. (My father was the kind of engineer who had an engineer’s sense of humor.)

  A few days after I learned about Rosemary’s death, I met my mom for dinner at a restaurant nearby. An old friend of hers was going to join us and as we waited for her, my mother told me about her current situation.

  I can’t remember when I started referring to my mother’s “situations,” but the word was meant to indicate something transitional, a way station ill-suited to her but certainly not of her choosing. I’d been using it long enough that I didn’t think twice to use it now.

  Mom needed a neck brace. She had been doing laundry at a Fluff and Fold, and had stood up into the dryer door. She needed to see a doctor, but couldn’t quite afford it. However she had been to a lawyer, who thought she had a good case for suing the laundromat, so things were looking up, she said. She tested me with a glance to see if I thought they were looking up, too.

  She had a business plan, but it was on hold for now. In the meantime, she didn’t want to type and file for a living. She wanted to work in sales, phone sales preferably, so she wouldn’t wear out her shoe leather. Her English accent was something she’d learned that people responded to.

  But she hadn’t landed that kind of job yet. She was working at a job, an office job, but not the job, driving there in a terrible car she’d bought at a police auction with brake lights that were always on, one door unworkable. For now, she said, everything was a compromise, there were sacrifices to make in the short term for her greater ambitions.

  “Bear says hello,” she said.

  My mother was dating a man named Bear. I’d met him once. He wore aviator shades, cargo pants, and a bandanna neatly folded into a headband. He lived in Long Beach, by the oil derricks. He told my mother he was a deposed Samoan prince, which she repeated to me in wonder, but even I recognized the ink on his arms as Mexican gang tattoos. When I went to the beach with my mother and Bear, who was very polite, and who didn’t ask me any questions, but instead talked about the ways karate could make me a better person, I was thinking, “My mother is under stress. When she’s not in this situation, she’ll be calm enough to see this clearly.”

  Jen arrived at the restaurant. She and my mother hugged. They had met in the 1960s, when my parents had bought an apartment building as an investment and Jen and her then husband had managed it while setting up their own businesses. It had been a good arrangement—though my parents were in a better position than their friends, there was enough prosperity for everyone. Jen and my mother both got divorced, and for a while they’d been two attractive women with money and options.

  I liked Jen. She was pretty and funny and cautious, a little conservative, maybe what an anchorwoman was like off-camera. She often told stories about men, one eye on me to see if I might learn how to treat women right. She was a successful banker now, and that was often a problem. I remember her saying, “You go out with a guy, he realizes you’re driving a Mercedes, and that’s when the competition starts, but he doesn’t want to admit he’s uncomfortable so soon it’s all, ‘Hey, Flat Stuff, what happened to your tits?’ ” This was addressed to my mother at first but she was also looking at me with a faint smile, and I thought, “Yes, I will never insult a woman’s tits, especially if she’s making more money than I am.”

  I can tell you what Jen was wearing that night: a couple of elegant pieces of gold jewelry, sandals, white linen slacks, a striped silk shirt unbuttoned a bit too much, as if it was still the 1970s. I remember her outfit because it was the last time I saw her.

  I don’t remember what my mother was wearing, but her makeup would have been immaculate. She was just as stylish as Jen as long as you didn’t notice how her fingers drummed on her pocketbook like she was tapping out a message to assuage unknown forces.

  Jen asked me about school. I told her about my Japanese classes, and she was quick to leap past the philosophy and language and into how smart I was to study Japanese from a business perspective. It showed foresight, she said, and she was now looking from me to my mother.

  “How’s the job search,” Jen asked.

  My mother said she was working and she had a job. It wasn’t ideal, she was doing more secretarial work than she wanted, but she knew there was opportunity to take on more responsibilities if only she could get over this hump. Her boss, Ken, was too demanding. He found flaws in her when she was actually helping him more than he knew. She would do work after hours to help out and he never acknowledged it. Sometimes he yelled at her and she could smell alcohol on his breath. He was writing bad checks and asking her to sign them. He’d stopped paying her a salary. After he lost his apartment he’d started living in the office.

  What was so different about this story this time? Only that I was seeing Jen hear details accumulate until they formed a kind of teetering stack.

  When the check came, Jen took it. “Pay me back when you get a job,” she said. I thought this was kind. Then I saw my mother’s expression. It was a nonexpression, her face caught between one reaction and another.

  “I have a job,” she said.

  “But he isn’t paying you.”

  “He will. It’s just a crunch right now.”

  “You want a more steady job, right? What about being an executive assistant? There are benefits you could use.”

  “It’s important to keep your options open,” my mother said.

  “What sort of salary are you looking for?” Jen asked.

  “Commissions,” my mom said.

  “Just get an office job,” Jen said. “What’s wrong with that?”

  It was the kind of question I didn’t know the answer to. I knew my mother would have an answer. But she was just staring at Jen with a half-defended expression, like she was going to run or strike her if necessary.

  “I know you don’t want secretarial work, I know it’s boring, but it’s safe. Do that while you look for other work. Okay?”

  My mother had a friend who cared about her, I thought. But my mother’s eyes flicked from Jen to me, and she realized she was sitting with not one enemy but two. She said nothing.

  When dinner ended, my mother led me to her car. She tried to open the passenger door, having forgotten it didn’t work, and then she had to open it from the inside. We both got in. She put her key in the ignition. We sat quietly and I wondered what it was like at the beach right then. It wasn’t a cold night and the stars were out.

  My mother exploded. She slammed the palms of her hands against the steering wheel over and over. “How can people be so ungrateful when you give them a piece of your soul?” she cried. “She doesn’t know what it’s like to take dictation when you’re almost—almost—” She heaved and sobbed.

  “Fifty?” I was only trying to be helpful, but she looked at me like I’d stabbed her.

  “Jen loves to give advice,” she said. “It’s why she can’t get a man. She’s too aggressive,” she declared. It was a condemnation, an underlining to Jen’s flaws. “She’
s always asking me why people think she’s a dyke,” she yelled. “Well, now you know!”

  We sat like that for a while, my mother sobbing, and me feeling the urge to get to the beach so strongly I could barely stand to be in the car. I was feeling this dire force, dark as angels, pulling me out of my body. I saw myself on a beach, swinging a golf club at the sky, driving a ball up the coastline. I’d never held a golf club. I wondered where you could get one late at night.

  “She thinks she knows better than I do. The typing pool. She wants me to work in the typing pool,” she said. She was wiping her nose, blowing it, her eyes at once hard and watering.

  I was supposed to drive with my mother from here to Long Beach, forty-five minutes on the freeway, and then I was supposed to stay with her overnight. Then wake up in the morning at her apartment and spend the day. This was like imagining holding my breath while diving under a glacier.

  I no longer thought that if I were smart and empathic enough, I could come up with a comment that would make adults laugh in any situation. Instead, I started to say something that I’d learned in my Eastern philosophy classes, as it struck me as helpful. I said the cessation of desire could be a key to happiness. When it came to courting enlightenment, there was a wisdom, I said, in acceptance—

  She said, “Never borrow money from a friend. They think they own you.”

  Then she started the car and drove, jerkily, brake lights on. Along the way, she told me details of her debt to Jen, a crummy, lousy four hundred dollars that I didn’t want to know about.

  She stopped at my father’s front door, which hadn’t been the plan. This was awkward. I was relieved we weren’t on the way to her house and I felt guilty because of that. Pausing here, or maybe stopping here—there was a difference—was to give me a choice, I understood. She said carefully it was okay if I didn’t come with her.

  I said I thought she might need me.

  She told me not to come. She said she could be fine without me.

  Was I going to lean into this permission? She needed to hear a response. In my mind I was running, and I could see palms by the cliffs of Santa Monica in my mind, and I could imagine the sweat running off me as I flung myself at oblivion. Golf club. Sand fanning out when I drove it against a ball.

  “I could come,” I said.

  Her eyes almost clicked as they swept back and forth across mine. “Next time,” she said. When I came back from school in the summer, I could come down and visit. That would be better for her, actually, now that she thought about it. Really? I asked. Yes, she said, sure, her business would be up and running more, and there would be more to do. Plus she would pay me five dollars an hour then, she could afford that. We could make a weekend out of it.

  So I said, “Okay.” “Okay,” I thought, was a word that meant acceptance. I hugged her goodbye.

  She left me at the curb, and as she drove off I could hear the sound of an axle scraping like a knife sharpener.

  No matter how long your parents are divorced, the transition between them, even the steps across a well-trimmed lawn, past a swimming pool, feels like a trip in a bathysphere. In those seconds I was thinking about Lao Tzu. I was trying to understand the difference between feeling acceptance and feeling nothing. When I closed the door inside my father’s house it was like my ears might pop.

  My father already had a low opinion of my mother. I didn’t want to tell him how the evening had gone. But here I was, about to start talking to him for reasons I didn’t understand.

  When I’m confused or I know I’m missing the key point of a story, or when I question my own perceptions, my explanations come out backward. I seize on details that mean nothing and then I try to make them spring to life with meaning. I am trying to find a perch from which I can seem like I’m not ignorant.

  In the kitchen, leaning against a counter while my dad thumbed through mail, I half-explained what had happened, and then wondered how he was taking in what I said, then tried to adjust what I was saying so that he wouldn’t think poorly of me or Mom, and then I wasn’t talking for a while.

  I tried to wrap up.

  “I guess she’ll muddle through,” I said.

  He said, immediately, “Into another muddle.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “People don’t change,” he said.

  I wanted to challenge this. He’d changed since marrying Ann. Maybe he understood that me not bringing that up was a kind of loyalty to him. He and I would not notice, together, how he was gruff and impenetrable in a way he hadn’t been when I was growing up.

  My dad was, with exceptions we’ll get into, good with money. He wanted me to be good with money, too, and he often said aloud he worried I would inherit my mother’s sensibilities rather than his. So he tried to teach me things at moments like this.

  “Your mother lacks self-awareness,” he said, then nothing more. With that, he was back to the mail. Lesson over.

  This means something, I thought. I tried to absorb it like modern poetry or koans, until it bypassed my brain and sank into my body. Be here now. I felt heat on my face. My father was saying my mother was in this muddle because of her. Not because of fate or curses or the cruelty of her bosses and boyfriends.

  I wanted to argue about that. My mother had had a terrible run of luck, I thought, and blaming her seemed like tying an anvil to her when she needed sympathy. I didn’t argue. I went up to my room instead.

  This was a few days before my nineteenth birthday. I already knew to never have a character in fiction stand in front of a mirror, because people never look at themselves in real life in the evaluative way authors need characters to do it. However I did look in the mirror then to confirm I was no more and no less handsome than I’d been earlier.

  Rosemary had taken Valium with gin because—maybe—she saw no way out of being herself. If depression is blackness, does it fall on the end of the spectrum where you lack all self-awareness or have entirely too much?

  Here was an avatar: Heidi, reading psychology texts to get ahead of all that ridiculous work an uninformed mind had to do, so she could be more efficient at being human. My classes in Eastern philosophy bubbled with parables about simpletons, dough heads, who were unable to see the light. But sometimes enlightenment hits you like the crack of a stick, subitism. I had a plan. The pathway to happiness for me was to, unlike my mother, become completely self-aware. Self-awareness would lead to tranquility—no, start with tranquility, then let self-awareness settle in. I would be exactly the person I was capable of being.

  I would spend the whole summer trying, if necessary, but I thought it wouldn’t take that long.

  FASHION & STYLE

  THE NEXT MORNING, my father listened with mild patience to my explanation of how I was looking to change. I was going to reflect the cessation of desire, I was looking directly at the uncarved block—that went nowhere. Anything that smacked of trying to plug an existential crisis struck Dad as a luxury better indulged after I had a paying job.

  Finally I realized what would make more sense to him: I was turning nineteen that week. I asked him to take me shopping for blue-and-white-striped cotton shirts.

  Dress shirts don’t come up much in Buddhism, but changing within is hard. Also, I was in Los Angeles, so my externally based approach made some cultural sense. I must have seen an article in one of Heidi’s issues of GQ about how to dress appropriately. Choose natural fibers. Skinny ties and tiny lapels are in. Be neat and crisp. This is what Tenax hair gel is. Here are actors and models you wish you looked like. Glance at a unifying vision and see how you measure up. Feel the terror of looking like you care how you look.

  My father bought me four blue-and-white shirts. Button-down collars on three, a tab collar on one, a compromise. He wanted me to get cotton-poly blends, for convenience; I was determined to get some all-cotton shirt with collars that came to starched poin
ts. (He did not believe I would actually iron them and I was determined to prove him wrong.)

  We got the cotton ones. Calvin Klein. Perry Ellis. Some were white with faint blue pinstripes and others looked flashy, like distress flags from a sinking yacht. Also black jeans. Ray-Ban Wayfarers. Black Converse high-tops. I wanted to buy a skinny silk tie, but my father told me he would not buy me a skinny tie as long as he lived. If I were getting a tie, it had to be something I would wear in the workplace, which he wanted me to join when I came back home for the summer.

  For some reason I argued strenuously for a straw fedora, which I authoritatively checked off my list as if it completed my outfit. I will not bring it up again.

  My hair was of no discernible style. I’d done myself no favors when I’d grown a beard after Connecticut raised the drinking age to twenty-one. So I shaved. I went to a barbershop near the Veterans Administration and got the same haircut everyone got, short back and sides, and when I left I looked like I was on my way to see Josephine Baker in Berlin, circa 1928.

  There was not much I could do about my nose. It was now a backwards S and not particularly functional. The careful haircut actually made the nose more aggressive, as if I was telling people I was proud of my flaws.

  The effect when I returned to Wesleyan was that I was well-groomed and I dressed in clothes that fit. I wore my neckties with the black jeans and the Converse high-tops and even when it wasn’t sunny I wore the sunglasses.

  I got better at Japanese. I dreamed in it a couple of times. I thought I looked serious, perhaps even, if you caught me looking intently at something, mysterious.