Raised in Oberlin, our delicately comely mother hailed from a solid, formerly industrial family of some standing; her father edited the local paper for decades. When she met Hugh at a regional horse show in Dubuque, I doubt she took seriously his aspirations to act, assuming he’d soon put the pipedream aside to tend his parents’ farm. After all, a life of pies cooling in windows and relief about long-awaited rainfall would have suited her well. My mother has long been a touchstone of authenticity for me, and my migration to the Midwest was an homage to her of sorts.
Yet at parties in L.A., she was at a loss how to dress, and confided to me once that she waited out many a drunken gathering in a locked bathroom, while other revelers tiddled on the door and finally went away. Detesting her husband’s pompous, self-promoting new friends, Magnolia Halfdanarson privately wept every time Joint Custody was renewed for another season. (She only went by “Appaloosa” in public, to humor our father; her checkbooks were printed with the name of the man she thought she had married.) So she may have been depressed, and in that case the condition had worsened after Solstice was born three years earlier. But I’d only had the one; how was I to know whether a mother sleeping whole afternoons was normal? Likewise I couldn’t be expected to differentiate between depressed as in has-a-serotonin-deficit and depressed as in for-good-reason. If the question was whether she knew Travis was cheating on her, the answer was probably yes, if only because the answer to that question is almost always yes.
Edison had come to glory in having a mother who killed herself, which told well in New York jazz clubs. Remember—he’s the one who went by look-at-me Appaloosa, which even for those never brainwashed to accord it legitimacy every Wednesday at nine was still bound to raise eyebrows as no convincing family surname but a breed of horse. Not looking to differentiate myself with a sleeve-tug bio, I never thought her death was suicide. Though obviously devastated to have lost her so young, I didn’t regard having a mother die of natural causes as a narrative letdown, much less as a personal insult.
She was standing at the intersection of Foothill Boulevard and Woodland Avenue, and she stepped off the curb. That is the whole story, though as it happened a UPS delivery truck barreled past a fraction of a second later.
Edison would have it that our mother sighted the truck and gave herself up to its bumper on purpose, a lateral variation on hurling oneself off a bridge. Magnolia despaired of her husband’s betrayal, ergo the loss of our bashful, winsome mother in our teens was Travis’s fault. This simple, durable construction had long bulwarked my brother’s preconceived opinion: that Travis was an asshole.
If I held few opinions, I did cling to a handful—like the view that facts are not the same as beliefs, and that most people get them confused. When your mother dies, you want the loss to mean something, reprieving grief from its purest, most intolerable form, in which there is only loss, with no compensation, no takeaway. Driven by this craving if not for a moral then at least for an accusation as a kind of mortality kewpie doll, even commonly honest people will reconfigure the mangle of the truth into a form that has pizzazz. By contrast, here is what I reconstructed:
Hundreds if not thousands of times per day we make small rudimentary decisions while thinking about something else. When I ascended our front porch steps, I was never thinking, “Raise your right leg; establish firm footing, lift left heel and push off.” No, I was probably wrestling with whether I could sneak a little sour cream into our evening’s casserole without Fletcher noticing. I’m no neurologist, but there must be a watchful part of the brain that carries out routine tasks and frees the rest of your head to ponder the telltale pastel effects of dairy products.
If so, the watchful part is not perfect. I’ve experienced it enough times myself: those instants when the overseer blinks out like a flawed digital recording. When the bit that allows the rest of your mind to be distracted itself gets distracted.
My mother stepped off a curb. She was a good mother in a traditional sense, and had inculcated in her children the importance of looking both ways. This time she didn’t.
You could say that left me with pure and therefore intolerable loss. But I did derive something from Magnolia’s fate. One afternoon in my mid-twenties, I was cycling along a deserted two-lane street in New Holland, and I ran smack into a parked car. Picking myself up and examining the crumpled bike frame, I thought of my mother. What I took from her moment of inattention was incredulous gratitude: that I did not plow my bike into parked cars all the time. That for decades I had been devising recipes for salsa, guiltily dreading Solstice’s impending visits, or contriving phrases for my husband’s pull-string doll, all the while making incalculably numerous, crucial negotiations of this perilous world, and I still hadn’t died.
That was enough for me. But so minor a matter as thankfulness for the competent multitasking of the human brain 99.9 percent of the time would never be enough for Edison, for whom plot had always to be writ large. Perhaps this seems a stretch, but for me it was all of a piece: his appetite for Cinnabons and suicide alike, his insistence on building his life along such drastic lines that thinking big had manifested itself in his proportions. If my brother’s weight was symptomatic of something wrong, then it also emblemized a vanity. He wasn’t the type to submit to slings and arrows with a bit of a paunch. In the same style in which he’d schemed to succeed, so also would he fail: on a grand scale.
Over the next ten days I offered to show Edison Baby Monotonous several times, but he always begged off to check out some jazz interview online. In the end I rather insisted. If Vanity Fair and Forbes were interested in my business, my own brother might express some small curiosity about what I did for a living.
Edison had been sleeping late, so I arranged to drop back by the house mid-afternoon and ferry him to the premises. Aside from the preparation of meals—a large enough issue to defer for the moment—I wasn’t sure what my brother got up to while I was at work. I think he spent a fair bit of time on the Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity—although Fletcher said that down in the basement he could hear the yammer of the TV, too, for hours on end. What Fletcher did not hear, unless Cody was practicing “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” was the piano.
Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy and might have learned to relax more, but I did find it disturbing how, especially with the assistance of media gizmos, it was possible for time and time and more time to pass in the process of doing absolutely nothing. I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for whole afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house, waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu.
When I returned to Solomon Drive to escort Edison to my headquarters around four p.m., I found him faced off with Fletcher in the kitchen, surrounded by groceries on every counter. Edison’s face was red. He was huffing, hands held out from his jeans, quick-draw. Fletcher stood rigidly opposite, his expression steely. If this was a duel, my husband was the sheriff, my brother the outlaw.
“Edison,” I said. “You ready to go?”
“Better believe it,” he said gruffly, eyes narrowed.
I surveyed the counters, mounded with corn chips, pork rinds, canned beef