hello blog. last night i spoke at a storytelling event for the first time, see below.
i've never really read anything i've written aloud, except for some tragic experiences in a high school sketch comedy group's "writers room", which was 6 of us in the linoleum tiled drama/multipurpose room we called "home" in the pejorative sense. nonetheless, i've written stuff that's meant to come out of other peoples mouths, and this was an interesting first try. i don't think im a great public speaker, as now the page this was printed on is sort of wrinkled and see-through where i was gripping it. my mom was here last week, and i've felt emotional about her and my life here ever since. the feeling of floating without an anchor comes to mind. Here goes:
Storytelling Night 10/6: Theme: “Something Borrowed, Something Blue”
I can't do accents – but this line will be best if you can imagine it spoken by my grandmother – a woman who is from Italy but has lived in Ohio for the last 50 years. So: my grandmother turns to me and says
Milly, I think your mother might go to jail for this.
We – her, i, my mother and her sisters – were in the parking lot of the local TJ Maxx of Sandusky, Ohio. But more on that later.
My mother has told me a story often, about the year they built the mall in what used to be the fields behind her childhood home.
She’s not superstitious, but she feels strongly that the way her room was suddenly illuminated by a 24-hour neon sign was an omen, because soon after, my grandmother found out my grandfather was a compulsive gambler who had lost all of their life savings, divorced him, and went to work the only job she could get, the night shift at a rubber factory.
From then on, my mother and her sisters mostly raised themselves, with the help of their aunt, who would die by the time they were 13. Needles to say, they had bad luck.
People like to use euphemisms like ‘fortitude’ or ‘grit’ or ‘survivor’ to describe what comes out of childhoods like my moms. I think that’s true in some ways, but what I’m positive she learned to be is a scam artist. The woman has an incredible capacity for conniving, scheming, low-balling, twisting-the-knife, vaguely fucking-over, subverting, diverting, and occupying the etchically gray area.
She left Ohio for LA and at 45 years old, in another twist of fate, I emerged from what she calls an unexpected but not unwanted pregnancy. My mother raised me alone, and did a damn good job. But no one, not even a gorgeous, single, LA blonde – my mom, not me :) – was a match for the 2007 housing bubble. The situation of our existence, already discreetly fragile, was quickly spiraling. After 40 years, she was going to move back to Ohio, and I would get a new room, one with a view of a mall.
Somehow, however, through aforementioned schemes, scams, diversions, tricks, and almost certainly lies – the details of which she still won't tell me – she avoided an imminent foreclosure and sent me off to elementary school.
One of the first things you learn at that age is how to borrow. The conditions are simple: give it back, treat it well while you have it, thank the person you borrowed it from, never steal.
She must have foreseen the way clothes would be so huge a part of girlhood in LA. I don't think i'd always known what she was doing, but eventually i caught on that my clothes would disappear after i stopped wearing them. I learned by watching her sit at the kitchen table with any new item and a thumbtack, that she’d find the spot where the tag was attached, widen the hole, and then, with her glasses on, bend the tag back until it could be folded and fit back through, so that the tag would emerge without the plastic attachment piece broken. She’d keep this tag in a large envelope of tags, and I would wear the item until the party or school year was over, i’d outgrown the piece, or the chaotic fashion trends of the mid-2000s had moved on, and she’d decided i hadn’t worn it enough anyways. She’d slip the tag back through the hole and return it. Most of the time this was at the iron triangle of TJ Maxx/Marshalls/Home Goods, though a couple lucky times it was Nordstroms.
If you’ve ever been to a discount department store like TJ Maxx, you must know how adrenalizing it is. There is a Pavolvian response to seeing a 19.99 tag on something made of cashmere. It’s a feeling like you are constantly winning, beating the shitty, cruel system that asks you to pay to express yourself, all the while knowing you’re not expressing anything at all except the desire to be desired. Our generational differences make me more esoteric about this, but it doesn't matter. We loved to shop.
Going to – and inevitably, back to – TJ Maxx was a strange sort of pilgrimage. Given that she wanted me to look like I came from a good home, it’s ironic how homey the place is to me. It’s imbued with the essence of who my mother is, along with the words, usually spoken to a manager, “No, I was just here yesterday”. The exchange seemed to satisfy some innate need in her to constantly reinvent both herself and our circumstances. In exchange for avoiding sweating, eating anything with sauce, or sitting in the dirt, my mother gave me a world of opportunity, a childhood of dress-up without consequence of judgment, of imagination brought to life so forcefully it teetered on delusion. Whether or not this was ‘healthy’ or ‘good parenting’ is of little interest to me and even less to her. My mother stole nothing, and gave me everything she could not see through her own window.
I want to share one last memory. I said one of the rules of borrowing was giving thanks, reciprocity, and all that. I don’t want to paint her as some sort of con-artist; My mother is really, very beloved at TJ Maxx. Because the employees know her – and me, and our dog, and probably a lot else – I can’t imagine they don’t know what she’s doing. I think they just genuinely enjoy her. In our ‘busiest’ years, she often brought cookies around, she knew about their home lives, I think she genuinely felt they were undermining the man together, and maybe made them feel the same, though I can’t assume. I remember the woman who worked at the jewelry counter, Mary, even started coming to our Thanksgivings. My mother, who is not a good cook, and hates hosting, makes a point to hold Thanksgiving for all the odd birds in LA who have nowhere else to go. These are people she's picked up over many years – other single moms, hermetic writers, neighborhood widows, former musicians, Venice-Beach dwellings artists turned weed dealers, the list goes on (and on, trust me).
She is by nature a borrower, or a scavenger, or a collector – I think they are all the same. Every year, we get dressed up for Thanksgiving. Most of the time, we’d return the outfit. This year for the first time I won't be home for the holiday, I'll be here instead, because of her years of borrowing. The rules are simple: give it back, treat it well while you have it, thank the person you borrowed it from, never steal.