Liner Notes

Chapter One

Moons and Junes and Ferris Wheels

These are the two cross-country driving scenarios I have pictured:

One:

My best girlfriends and I drive through random states and pick up crappy souvenirs from each place pens that undress women when you turn them upside down, glass balls filled with snow that flutters over some landmark, shot glasses from saloons called things like The Dirt Cowboy. With the windows rolled down, we listen to ’70’s favorites like Summer Breeze, Hot Child in the City, and Right Down the Line.

We say things like, Gerry Rafferty? I always forget he sings that. I love that song! And when Same Auld Lang Syne comes on, and it’s late and dark and the lights of Vegas or Tahoe are just appearing over the dash, we cry a little, since it’s such a sad song. But then, we gamble and eat steak dinners for $1.99 and stay in a plush hotel and win big. Or, we go to some run-down bar and play pinball and check-in at the Blue Bell Inn, roadside, where we meet handsome, smart guys who are also doing the cross-country thing, but with ’80’s tunes. Together, we’re our own not-sold-in-stores CD.

Two:

Without a shirt and while holding my hand, my boyfriend is a safe, confident driver. Past all the tourist spots like Myrtle Beach, Virginia Beach, even Savannah, we drive for hours a day and sleep at bed and breakfasts with rich cultural histories. At night, there are no televisions, so we read our books out loud to each other. We aren’t sure of our destination, only that we’ll know when we get there. The landscape will reach out to us and we will be sure that this spot is where we are meant to be. Also, the boyfriend is very good looking and an excellent mechanic.

But what happens is:

Neither the friends nor the Road Trip Guy who has never actually existed can make it. Sure, my girlfriends and I had always talked about a cross-country trip, but the reality of hovering at thirty years old didn’t leave us the time to do it. Somehow we’d missed our opportunity at music-video-style driving. Now we’re simply too old or too busy to sling a backpack into the trunk and get our tank-topped selves into a convertible. Or maybe that’s just my excuse.

At the very least, we’re all scattered: Red-haired Casey, my college friend, is in London working as a professional puppet. Tall, glamorous Maggie’s off in Hollywood; her role of being lifelong friend to me is tempered with her role as Superstar Wife to People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Ever. Completing my group of friends-as-seen-in-a-hair-care-advertisement is Shana, whose brown hair is perpetually a different shade. Shana, who is meant for a road trip like this. Shana, my funny, irreverent camp friend, who isn’t here because well, that’s another issue altogether.

What I do know is that my girlfriends and I would have made the perfect shampoo copy—you know, the glossy photo spread ones where each woman has different hair so you can tell them apart, or identify with the one that’s most like you. Oh that’s me! I’m the curly brunette! or She’s got a ponytail just like mine.

And as for my Imaginary Road Trip Man he might be out there, somewhere. But if I’ve ever met him—my ideal—I probably didn’t recognize him. Sometimes I think the greatest guy around could be right in front of me and I’d pick the guy next to him. Or maybe I’d pick the right guy, but manage somehow to mess it up.

So, since I am alone—please, not forever, but at this point, who knows—I’ve looked at the road trip as time to myself. Or maybe that’s just my rationalizing why I’m making the three-thousand-mile drive by myself, unkissed, unadored in the pit of South West canyons. Unappreciated in some revolting motel that, unlike in fantasy, really is disgusting with mothy sheets and someone’s forgotten underwear in the shower.

Of course this isn’t how I planned this trip. But here’s what I figure:

If I can’t have Fantasy Guy along for the trip, I’ll be the heroine of my own never-filmed John Hughes movie, cute and perky with a soundtrack to boot, or moody, quirky, half-filmed in black and white to the tune of Ry Cooder’s eerie melodies following me as I drive through the rock and sand west. To make like a camera and film myself instead of being a part of it and feeling my way. But it’s hard—how do you know why you do what you do? And even when you figure it out, what to do with the knowledge?

My artistic motives professor made us start our final year of graduate school training with our backs to him. Each of us stood in the bright hall facing huge empty canvases. He instructed us to start even though we had no oils, no watercolor, no charcoal, just a dry brush.

I want you to create here, the professor said. He’d been there since the late fifties and rumor had it that he’d smoked pot with beat poets and had his share of undergrads visit his tapestried office, but we all listened to him as he paced back and forth, his painted-splattered shoes echoing on the linoleum. When you can’t make something work, when you can’t figure out your motivation, you become paralyzed. Start with all the images of paintings, of art, of creating something whole, and then stop the fragmenting process …

I don’t remember everything else he said. I just remember standing looking at the plain white sheet ahead of me and thinking, This is what I have to do—not just on the canvas, but in my life. When I’d started my advanced degree in art restoration, when I’d taken chemistry and memorized cleaning calculations, I felt like I was accomplishing something—fixing paintings, degriming unappreciated sculptures, helping. But now I’d finished my degree, earned my papers and lined up a job back in Boston and I wasn’t sure I could do it—make the art or my life whole.

Maybe the hippie-professor guy was right, maybe I’ve patched up enough items—myself included—and now I’m ready to move forward—not distancing myself, making my past into vignettes, but cohering my memories so where I’ve been and where I’m heading fit together.

So this was my plan. I would pack up my things, ship them back east with the ease of hot sweaty moving men, and I would hit the road with my coffee and snacks, with my music, and try somehow to figure out where I came up empty and how to fix it.

And I wouldn’t be truly alone—I had my mixed tapes. Each one signified a piece of my life—two summers months, a year in high school, a boy I no longer knew, a friendship that had crumbled—and this made for excellent time travel. I could listen to each one and be right back there, and maybe regain whatever it was I left behind. In traipsing back into these memories, these specific time periods, maybe I could sort out how I came to be here—three thousand miles away from where I started, and no real idea either how to get back or what exactly I hoped to find once I did.

Of course, I could I fly back to Boston where my new job lies in wait. Where I know I have to face facts—get an apartment (alone), live at my parents’ (with them) until I find a place, and go to a wedding (also alone) where Marcus (call him my Back-Up Guy) is the groom, and possibly reconcile the fact that I might never speak to Shana again (more me alone, but as a withered old woman with no other old granny—we planned on aging together—to dance with). So, sure. I could fly back to Boston and get it over with. But I think it’s time I took this trip—alone or otherwise.

Of course, like my Road Trip Guy, or my fabulous girlfriends who could magically drop their lives to join me on my journey, my alone time vanished, too. But not in the way I imagined, not when I got the phone call that my parents were in town, not when they announced they were coming over. Something in my father’s tone let me know they had something to tell me—something that I knew meant a major change in my plans.

Chapter Two

You know that catalogue that arrives every other week in your mailbox? The one you want to throw out but end up inevitably paging through just in case there’s some new desk or table lamp or wonderful ceramic mugs? That’s my dad’s company. Ceramic Shack. While he does the design and mock-ups in Boston still, the headquarters are in the Bay Area so he comes out here regularly. During graduate school, I’d meet him for a drink or a movie when he came to town, or watch the catalogue layout while assistants pecked at him, and then he d go back home to Mom and I’d return to life as normal. Dad could come into town, exchange some loose banter about consumerism (which he benefited from) and Mom’s illness (which he didn’t) and leave me with a mug he’d just designed or a platter that would never be sold in the catalogue, and I could go home with something new, but not remarkably different myself.

But this June, while he’s supervising the photo shoot for the Ceramics Shack Holiday Catalogue, my father decides he needs to have one of his old original pottery pieces brought out to him in San Francisco for inspiration. Back in Boston, my mother has been working furiously to finish the designs for the collection of antiqued farm furniture which will be sold through the catalogue in the spring. My father calls my mother, frustrated that the shoot’s not perfect. He feels the cover looks bland. He questions whether he should have ever allowed his pottery to become mass-produced, unnumbered things. My mother tells him to relax. This is when he decides he needs to put his Giant Old Blue Bowl on the cover of the catalogue. My mother thinks this is a wonderful idea and says she’ll FedEx it the next day. This is met with a groan as my father envisions his art arriving in a mess of jumbled fragments suitable only for mosaic tiling.

Even though she’s supposed to have stowed it underneath her seat or above her in the overhead compartment, my mother flies to San Francisco with The Giant Old Blue Bowl strapped into the seat next to her. Kisses and thanks from my father, a jolly couple of days in the swanky hotel there, and a stunning catalogue are the results of her trip. The Giant Old Blue Bowl, as it has been known in our family for twenty-six years since the first one was made and I was small enough to sit in it, is re-named The Moroccan Entertaining Dish. it’s destined to become a Ceramic Shack classic; it sells for $189 plus shipping.

When the shoot’s finished, and my parents are scheduled to fly home the next morning, they call me and inform me they’re coming over for brunch. My graduate school days are finished, I’m half-packed into cardboard boxes and suitcases for the drive back East, and have no eggs, no bread, nothing that constitutes a snack let alone the spread they’ve probably envisioned. Plus, my mother’s never come out here before, so why bother now?

I don’t have any food, I say to my mother before she’s even up the front stoop.

We didn’t come for a meal, she says and reaches out to hug me.

I move toward her and let her, and then pat her back. I remember how my friend Marcus always told me that when people pat you during a hug, they don’t want to be touching you in the first place. Then I feel terrible that I’m potentially sending this message to my mom, despite the fact that I’m not sure I want to be hugging her. We do better when we’re seated facing each other, but not necessarily hugging.

I brought the goods, my father says.

He holds up a bag from the Bagel Basement and takes my mother’s arm. She pretends to pull him up the steps, which they find very funny and I show them inside to where the boxes are stacked and labeled. This is my biggest move as an adult. Somehow I’d acquired kitchen utensils and linens, towels—albeit a mixture of junky threadbare cast-offs plus two plush white ones my mother had shipped out to me in one of her bizarre Valentine’s Day packages (each year she sent a card and books with titles like Doors to Hearts: How to Open up and Let Love In or some similarly crappy one like Why Does the Lonely Bird Still Sing in the hopes that somehow this would make my life sunny and simple, but that only emphasized that it wasn’t).

And to make it worse I couldn’t get rid of those lame books. I’d packed them with the rest of my things; lamps and papers, my canvases, some rolled up—some stretched onto frames. I’d moved cross-country before when I’d left New York and my live-in situation with Crappy Jeremy—a name Marcus called him that seemed to stick—and moved out of the dorm at college, out of my parents’ house, too, but this feels larger. I don’t want to think about what and where I’m leaving, I want to concentrate on where I’ll live next, which sink my toothbrush will rest on, which view I might have from my kitchen.

Packing up this time, I realized how effort moving requires. Growing up I’d only moved once. My parents had packed up the house in Vermont while my brother, Danny, and I had created a pathetic kid yard sale out front. We lined up half-broken toys, decks of cards that were missing an ace or king, withered stuffed animals we’d outgrown and marked each one five cents or ten in the hopes of making candy money while our parents ended one part of our lives and readied for the next. Surrounded by boxes and roles of bubble wrap now, I realize I am about to do the same thing. A whole segment of my life is done now, but unlike my parents when they moved us from Vermont to Boston, I’m making this trip by myself.

My mother opens a flap of one of the boxes, and before she can even peer inside I find myself rushing to the box as if I’m protecting it.

That’s just art stuff, I say, Nothing interesting.

My mother sits at the kitchen table where I’ve left the final phone bill to be paid. I know she’s looking around at things not so much being nosy, just making herself at home and looking for evidence, I think, of the Daughter Creature she hardly knew. I know part of her must view me as unknown entity—she’d been around for the previews and the first bit of my life movie, but then suddenly left the theatre for the middle section and now was unable to follow my plot.

I show my father a couple of slides of my work from the art show in town, holding the small squares of film up to the light. He studies each one and makes comments.

This one’s amazing! He holds it up to my mother as if she can see it across the room.

Thanks, I say to him and go sit at the table with my mom, who looks at the photographs I have stacked up. The pictures are not in any sort of order, just ones I’ve kept around from scattered times. My mother looks at an old one my days of summer camp gone by and points to Shana.

She always had such a nice smile, my mother says, tracing Shana’s grin with her pinky. I nod.

How is Shana these days?

Fine, I say. Really, I have no idea how she is, since I haven’t returned her calls and she hasn’t responded to my emails. I make up excuses as to why—maybe I have the wrong address of her sublet in New York City or maybe she’s annoyed that I won’t call her. Email just seems easier, less emotional, more rational.

My mother studies me, able to tell I’m faking. What’s she up to?

So, I say, pretending I didn’t hear her. How’s the catalogue coming? Deflecting questions back to my father’s business was a fall-back, a simple way of showing interest and not having to delve into my own issues.

I collect the pile of photographs from my mother before she can press me for more information and listen to my father’s rambling about pottery. I put the phone bill on top of my stack, noticing briefly how many itemized calls there are to Marcus back in the 617 area code. He’s in Massachusetts, engaged. Engaged! If Shana were here, I’d tell her how I’ve managed to misplace the wedding invitation, and we’d come up with dozens of meanings for this action. But neither Shana nor Marcus are around, so I pretend not to know when the wedding date is, even though I’m fully aware that come Labor Day I’ll be perspiring with the rest of the guests, under an oceanside tent, decidedly not standing next to the groom.

I lead my parents to the porch for our brown bag brunch. My father hands me the latest catalogue—I like to see the thing with only photos, no text, since it makes me feel like an insider to the trade, like I have one up on everyone’s mail.

Quite a view, my father says looking at the slope of the driveway, the mountains behind. He wraps a piece of lox around a wedge of red tomato. He has a smile spilling out from behind his mouthful—I assume due to the catalogue’s success.

Yes, I say, I used to hike up there with friends. I don’t mention Jeremy, even though during his last visit our last attempt at togethering he almost left me up there on the mountain. I shake the memory of that off and focus on my bagel, peeling the outer layer off in glossy strips.

You can hike in Boston, too, my mother says. ‘I’d like to do that some time with you."

Oh, yeah? I have that slightly false-positive tone of a math teacher trying for patience with a student who can’t figure out the equation. My mother hasn’t hiked in years, not since after her first remission. Post-relapse, she’d saved her strength and made it partway up Blue Hill, the only mountain-like place near us. In the cacophony of late fall airplanes overhead, school tour groups learning about nature by collecting leaves, cars cluttering the parking lot—we’d spread out the Hudson Bay blanket on the stubbled grass and pretended we were far off, in another land, looking past the highway out to sea or safari land. So the idea of hiking with my mother seems unlikely at best.

Yes, my mother continues, The only hiking I’ve done, really recently, is up a flight of stairs. She makes a joke of some kind that doesn’t quite fly. I get the first part of a laugh out when my father gives me a look and I stop.

I’m almost done packing, I say and pile our paper plates and plastic knives into the brown bag. I’m leaving tomorrow after the moving van comes.

My father leans on the porch railing and rubs his temples with his hands in a circular motion. Used to be, he’d have wet clay on his hands that would dry in his hair and crumble out at dinner or when he was tucking us in. I was always brushing clay dust from my clothes and sheets like I’d been to the beach and returned with pockets full of sand.

My mother mouths something to my father. He does some secret gesture back to her and then she flaps at him with her hands. I look from my mother and back to my father several times at their indecipherable marital ping-pong.

What’s going on? I ask.

Well … my father begins and turns around so he’s addressing both my mother and me. He gives my mother a married look, a knowing exchange I simultaneously long for with another person and loathe the idea of—my parents almost always know what the other is thinking.

What your father means is, my mother jumps in, Is that I’m all better. She stands up as if this will show me.

All better. Two words that seem to come from a Band-Aid advertisement a simple flat sticky brown strip plastered over a playground abrasion and a television mother saying All better. They are not the words I associate with hearing my mother’s recurrent and resistant Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is no longer controlling and destroying her small frame, the treatment no longer making her alternate between throwing up and falling asleep, slumped, her mouth slack and mellow, sometimes even in mid-sentence.

It’s just fantastic, my father says softly to my mother. And then, louder, less privately to me, Isn;t it? He looks to me. Laney? Isn’t it?

They are waiting for my After-School-Special response, the sobbing and hugging and complete release of more than a decade of being the daughter of an ill mother. In the Norman Rockwell cancer painting that doesn’t exist, we are cartooned, rosy red cheeks and grins as wide as watermelon slices, the happy-tears stuck oil-painted in our eyes as the caption reads Mom’s All Better or The Doctor Fixed Annie’s Boo-Boo.

I remember finding out, hearing the word lymphoma for the first time. It was early summer. We were on the way to Logan Airport to collect my English cousin Jamie and his friend, Ben who were to spend the summer with us. The vinyl of the car stuck to my thigh and I’d peeled myself off from one spot and tried to get into the shade. My brother, Danny, had used his elbow to guard his side of the backseat, and a shoving match ensued.

Soon, my parents had pulled the car over to the dirt-edge shoulder and turned around to face us. Danny and I thought we’d get the usual get-along-and-share talk, even though we were too old for it. I’d put my Walkman headphones on and listened to nothing until my father had started to cry. The yellow plastic U slid down onto my neck, and Danny removed his elbow from my ribcage.

Then we listened to my father’s explanation, how it started with the simple Mom’s sick and moved onto lymphoma, radiation therapy, possible memory loss, fatigue. I remember thinking even then how movies had ruined any hope of gentleness, of picturing Mom lying in bed calmly. Terms of Endearment and that movie with Mary Tyler Moore and the sick daughter who has only the six weeks of the film to live had implanted terror-inducing hospital scenes of shrieking for more medication and begging paper-capped, clipboard-wielding nurses for statistics. And the statistics had been good. Whatever good cancer: was, that’s what Mom had. Everyone said, Of all the ones to get, it’s not bad." She’d weathered her first round of treatment well, diving right into her role as high-spirited patient, the one who never complained as the intern missed her vein and had to restick the needle until her thin wrist was bruised as aubergine skin. If she’d ever felt lonely in the odd quiet hum of the radiology lab, she’d never said anything.

Not until the Hodgkin’s had come back, when we learned to call it resistant, recurrent, like it was an emotion that wouldn’t change, or a song somehow persisting through her body, unable to find another tune, did she seem to give in allow the exhaustion to hover and cling, the fog of it stretching out between us, mapping us away from each other.

I longed back then for the movie scene I’d create again and again in my head: I’d come home from college, or from my job at the museum in New York, from anywhere, the supermarket even, and Mom would be standing in the doorway, greeting me with an embrace that needed no words—I, we, we’d all just know that she was in the clear.

Now, more than a decade later, I have my movie scene right in front of me. Past the porch-lined bushes, crickets make their summer sounds, the leaves unfurl into the morning sun, and far up and above the sloped and shaded side of the mountain, a plane arcs noiselessly away from us.

Are you sure? I ask.

Laney, I’ve been free and clear for nearly twenty-two months. I just had a PET-scan, and have another one scheduled for August back in Boston. My mother grins and breaths deeply, and I go kiss her cheek. I feel immediately that the cheek-kiss is inadequate and half-imagine a scene where a brass band comes out with posters and a parade with me leading and cheering.

Of course, my immune system is always going to be a bit weaker, but the CT scans, everything, shows it’s behind us now.

I’d spoken with my brother two days before, and he’d obviously been hiding this information from me, which is doubly annoying because we’d been allies in the whole mess. We’d slept in hospital lobbies together, made middle-of-the-night phone calls, wondered if Mom would make it long enough to see us graduate, get jobs or licenses, if she’d ever live to be a grandma.

What’s up? Danny had said into the phone, his keyboard clicking away in the background. How’re you doing these days?

You’re the med student, I’d said. I’m fine. How’s Mom? He was e-mailing while talking to me and I was painting while talking to him. The long, narrow canvas—a skyline, a marsh, stretched out in front of me, angled toward the bay windows—and I was distracted since I hardly ever take the time just to paint for myself.

Mom’s … well you’ll see her soon enough when you get back here … but just so you know, she might be acting a bit weird.

Well, I said, She is weird. That’s what we love about her.

At the time, I thought he might be preparing me for more bad news. We were all used to the cycles of health and sick, sicker, sickest, but we still tried to protect each other from the shock that still came when tests came back positive when they should have been negative or negative when they should have been positive. All told, there’d been three rounds of it; the initial diagnosis followed by radiation, then remission. Then, just as we’d begun to relax into that, and Mom had started quilting again, creating a bunch of sample designs for potential retail sale, she’d relapsed. The half-stitched squares of stars and swirled patterns stayed stuck under the Singer’s needle collecting pollen dust from the open windows in her room as she underwent a heavy dose of chemotherapy that made her muscles weak, made her stomach intolerant of almost everything, made her wither under the heat of summer and go into hibernation.

My father explains, as he finishes the lox, that my mother is not only well, but since the third segment of her treatment, the bone marrow transplant, that the doctors at Massachusetts General are thrilled. Her oncologist doesn’t say see you soon at the end of her appointments now. I don’t ask more, because all I can do is feel my breathing increase and watch my mother look at me and my father like we are mimes, like we’re talking about someone else.

My father says to my mother, Annie, now you say something.

Laney, my love, says my mother and she sounds normal, I hope you understand my waiting to tell you in person. I just didn’t want another situation where we all got disappointed again. I wanted it to be real.

Oh, Mom, I say while I hug her, I’m so happy for you.

I’m happy for all of us, my father says. My mother nods.

We all look at different things—my mother slides the seeds from her wedge of tomato using her slender thumb. The guts of it go out in one, fine stream onto a paper plate. I watch the seeds like they are yellowed ants, rowed and organized for action. My father watches my mother nibble on the fruit-as-vegetable and hums a Neil Young song, the one about going back to something or some place. I look at my parked car and wonder if I should make reservations