the naming of things
february 2023
Much was planned -- the time, the place, the doctor -- and so she must have walked in calmly, or as calmly as you can have a baby when completely alone. It was springtime, when she opened up, not like a turkey but not exactly like a flower either, and let everything into my world. Now I must retrace the world she let me into, her world, the one which time buries to all children through the urgency and exhaustion of motherhood. A mother’s love may be the only one which grows towards separation, and as the expanse widens, the past fills the vacuum. I try to trace my steps backwards towards her.
I once made her a Mothers Day gift that cut and pasted lines from Maya Angelou’s poem “Mother, a cradle to hold me”. At twelve, the line “Mother, I have learned enough now// To know I have learned nearly nothing.” already felt salient. I did not know what I did not know then.
I wish there was a word, not atheist, not agnostic, that means ‘to believe in the cosmic entanglement one shares with their mother’.
*
The room is paneled wall to wall in sand-colored wood. It runs vertically but the ceiling is low, so it gives the effect of a stunted jungle. The floors are carpet. At the back wall rises the judge's massive stand and a column of black fabric from which a thin white man’s head and glasses jut out. This is the culmination of several hundred dollars, countless hours, a few gallons in gas, and my childhood. I’ve paid a newspaper nobody reads to announce me, where it sits orderly alongside anonymous others fulfilling the requirements of the Los Angeles County Court. The official rationale is: in order to legally move from one thing to another, one must give the public a fair chance to object. But the irony is that, like being sick and suddenly noticing illness around you, changing your name forces you to suddenly stare at yourself and wonder, with a thud, what it is, if it’s not a birth certificate, that can actually change you. Or what it was, which formed you into this thing that is just now congealing.
*
Picture a flat place, a gray sky, a wind that blows down nothing, and her, blonde then, looking without a single topographical feature to poeticize about, deciding whether to go East or West, bound to no criteria other than “AWAY”. The choice between New York or Los Angeles came down to a coin toss, a blizzard, and the guy from her theater class (for she had enrolled in one-credit at the local state college) who offered to drive across the country. She insists she had only $50, and remembers nothing about him except the fact that they were stranded in a snow storm in the Rocky Mountains.
The house I would visit was not the one she grew up in, but the perfect one with clapboard white siding she had bought her mother. It had a peculiarity to it, an indescribable fragility, that I realize now was the particular smell of my mother’s forceful reinvention. It is something like heavy-bond-glue holding together a house bursting at the seams with old memories, so cozy to me, so haunting to her, the house and her at war over which of them is the artificial narrative. She tells stories from the garage, where we sit with my grandmother and her sisters eating sweet corn on plastic chairs, and she speaks in the gentlest past tense she can. Her joy, at having made something different for herself, is palpable. Only now that home has also become a place I only return to, do I realize, what questions bringing me here must have asked her, how the holiday-summer-pilgrimage-circuit would have for the first time since leaving demanded of her smug reacquaintance with the cycle of history. I realize only now how very hard it is to protect against your own inheritance, and how the suffocation one often feels from their mother is in fact the feeling of a human shielding. Her father, in fact, won a purple heart for throwing his body over a man in Germany. She always admired him for it.
You can hear, from miles away, the creaking of the ferris wheel at Cedar Point, the oxymoronic “amusement park” which is made of wood and feels as doomed as the Great Lake Eerie that it sits on the shore of. She whispers “I grew up here. Can you believe it?” Yes, mama.
*
I’d like to frame it as my mother, who is indeed always up for a challenge, as having molded herself from the clay, in a cosmic rhino-mammo-nomo-plasty. But the fact of the matter is that she was confronted by an economic proposition which Hollywood runs on -- success at the price of constant reduction, be that weight, heritage, or, in many well-known tragic cases, a feeling of fundamental reality and self. Her name came from some B-Rate actress her mother liked, a real starlet with a nose that turned up in a little button from a manufactured line. The new name was cleaner, clearer, it invoked a historical past and a legacy to which she did not belong but could pass unnoticed through.
Today a legal name change will cost you five-hundred and thirty-five dollars in clerical, filing, and publication fees. You must have a copy of your birth certificate, which she must have carried west, along with the $50. The rest is a mystery to me-- there are no photos, no record. She made her second and final foray into academia with a one-credit calligraphy class at UCLA, to perfect her autograph.
*
I was in a class titled “Dostoevsky”. The mononym is what appealed to me from the directory. We studied definitively the work of one author -- his history, his ideology, his country, his religious beliefs, his relationship to women (briefly), his imprisonment, his new ideology after prison, his letters, his poems, his diaries. It is ironic then, that most of his books are marked by scenes of supplication -- of men falling on their knees, prostitutes begging God for forgiveness.
The only consistency in these characters' poor lives are their names. Russian patronymics are derived from the father's given name, and end with -ovich or -evich for men, -ovna or -evna for women. I.e, Lizaveta Ivanovna is the son of Ivan, and even if this fact is much to Lisa’s chagrin, to not address her by this full name is a huge insult, as was explained at length by a professor whose severity was matched only by her haircut and her anecdotes about post-Soviet Moscow. I asked her once how a child born to a single mother (aka a prostitute or widow, who, along with ‘bitch from the nobility’ comprise all the female characters) might be named. She laughed and said “Smerdyakov”, referring to the bastard child who’s name roughly means “stinky boy”.
My mother was only mildly amused by this story.
*
Her new face was hidden behind an analog phone, before “Face” and “Time” were conflated into one, my mother called Stella. The chain of telephone, or so I speculate, went like this:
MOM: “I’m gonna be in the Breakfast Club!”
STELLA: “What is that, some kind of circus?” *(to be fair, my mother had threatened to join the circus well into adulthood)
MOM: “No, it’s a movie, where I play a teacher.”
A swim teacher, found practicing her laps in a swimsuit. I’d speculate she was filmed from above, or slowly panning up from below, but I digress, one can’t blame John Hughes for not pretending to care.
And then another call.
PRODUCER: “...that’s your name, right?”
MOM: “Yes.”
PRODUCER: “I wanted to give you a call before you see the movie…”
MOM: “Oh, thank you!”
PRODUCER: “...before you see we had to cut you. I’m sorry we forgot to call. Oh, and, Merry Christmas.”
So Stella calls Karen back, and this part is not speculation, because my mother repeats it often, saying:
“It’s okay to be a failure, honey. Come home.”
*
The painting still is, or was, in my grandmother's house. It’s a peach and an apple. My grandmother was, though no one ever got to see it, a terrific artist. Apparently it had come out on napkin edges and paper scraps lost to the bottoms of purses and stacks of bills and grocery bags, and the accouterments which set weight to life's options. The only story that survives from her childhood is the one she passed down to my mother: how an art teacher told her “You’ll never be an artist” and she put down her pencil, and never returned to school again. My grandmother didn't become a painter, she married my grandfather because he gave her a ride from the train station one day. She waited for him when he went to war, and for a while, at home, until she was forced to go to work to pay off his debts. When she could again on her own terms, she chose to wait by the TV, which one year informed her of this thing called the ‘orgasm’.
Apparently, years later, as my grandmother was dying, my mother and her sisters found a series of letters in the attic. They brought them to my grandmother's hospice bed downstairs. They told an unbelievable story -- of my grandmother falling in love with an Italian soldier being held in a POW camp in rural Ohio. She and some of her mischievous friends would drop off baked goods and then linger around the edges of the enclosure, flirting and talking with the boys in a mix of broken english and italian. The letters saw he belonged to a well-off family of fabric makers in Milan. He asked her to marry him and join him there. One day, she stopped writing him back.
I have a vague memory of my aunt being there one of the times my mother rehashed this, and saying “that’s not the painting, we got that at a yard sale”.
*
I’ve always hoped to buy my mother a house. We have one only by an incomprehensible amount of outmaneuvering that happened in 2008, a house that was for me little more than a staging ground for the much more sweeping narratives of my American Girl Dolls, who, probably because of my mother’s detesting of children's television and my desire to be just like her, were often entangled in divorces, infidelities, or part of a part coop, part coven women’s commune that occurred on the coffee table, also known as a marooned matriarchy I imagined existed somewhere in the Caribbean, unknown to the world but believable to my mom and I.
While I sat at the coffee table, she sat at the kitchen one. Using a thumbtack to push the plastic T part of a tag without breaking so she can reattach it later, organizing receipts. While I tended my small estate, she drew the blinds and hid from collectors, typing furtively, pressing Decline Call. I remember her best by the sounds -- furtive typing on an Old Macbook, the phone ringing, the phone not allowed to be picked up, the slow unlocking of the door, in case the ever-threatened law enforcement actually showed up this time.
Sometime in 2008, my grandmother called. “Come home honey.”
*
“Home” was not the house my mother grew up in, it was the one she bought. She turned to writing out of plain destitution, and when she finally sold something, she first called her mother.
“Mom, quit your job. I’m buying you your dream house.”
It was a white clapboard two-story, with a garage and a sunken living room, and two bathtubs and a fireplace. It had a yard my grandmother grew tuh-may-tUhs (one syllable) in.
This was the ‘home’ threatening return. But it’s story requires unraveling.
*
Her mother had taken them all three to the gas station. The car was a lemon. An old gray banged up gas bomb with brown insides, which three sets of girlish legs had gotten stuck to under their dresses. They stayed inside to avoid the horrible ripping feeling of an Ohio summer produced between buttocks and superheated leather. “Don’t talk to anyone,” said their mother, who was almost at the whitewashed attendant's stand before she shut the car door behind her.
I imagine my mother staring at the empty seat where her mothers handbag sat, which she never left her handbag in the car. I imagine she opened the bag and retrieved the thin silver case to procure a cigarette from, and kept it in her mouth while play-acting something with her sisters. I imagine she was repeating some conversation to them, I imagine her playacting, leaning back in the beat up car with her beat up shoes on the dashboard, and repeating something she’d heard on the phone between her mother and her aunt, something like “John’s a goddamn wet bag. I don’t know why I married him.” And her sisters-in-arms, little parochial Sharon and naive Kim, telling her she was brutish and boyish and how-could-she-not-want-to-get-married, and entertaining a game of French restaurant or traveling circus or all the other worlds she wanted to be a part of.
I imagine they were all caught up in a game of my mother’s invention when a man’s face appeared in the window instead of their mother’s. All six eyes jumped back from the glass. His blue coveralls and thin white cap flopped with him as he bent down. He apologized and wished he could do something, because he wouldn’t ask if he didn’t have to, and it was wrong to involve a wife in such matters, but it had been months, and he didn’t want to have to involve less-generous folks. I imagine my mother knowing something was wrong in her mother’s eyes, knowing that an implosion was brewing below the surface, that everything had just fallen apart, and they were just watching the aftermath by what no longer remained, imperceptible.
In the coming years, when my grandmother would divorce their father, and begin working 10 hour shifts at a rubber factory every day to pay off the debts he owed for gambling off their life savings, my mother would do schoolwork hidden behind a counter while her aunt sold dresses. I’d imagine she stared at beautiful mannequins much of the time, and auditioned for plays, and noticed they had perfect noses. When her mother was able to buy them an apartment, her treat was to sit on the roof and try to become a blonde. I never said being a daughter was kind.
*
Perhaps unluckiness always begins with an omen, like when my grandparents first bought a house in the country, and then a mall was erected in what was a cronfield, and the neon lights illuminated the house. Perhaps my grandmother stayed up all night, unaware her husband was out gambling away their life, trapped in the same pink amber my mother was. My mother must have been whispering to herself about escaping, her mother in the room next door, refusing this neon omen as too obvious. The biggest signs are set by a more humble god; the one who places little plus marks on little sticks, who likes to surprise a mildly nauseous 45-year-old with a baby.
Our house is the last holdout of the old California-ranch houses in the neighborhood. Its popcorn siding, which is always peeling, rebukes the faux-pastoralism of the two clapboard-sided cruise ships which now flank us. My mother sometimes cries about them, or the noise of jackhammers, or the way they literally look down onto the house from their third stories. But she is holding out.
*
The first petitioner approached the podium. She had given her daughter a long, poetic name, combining cultural references, gemstones, and flowers. The name, she describes, took her months to come up with and settle on while she was pregnant. But now, upon learning to speak, the little girl has been diagnosed with severe autism that leaves the name unpronounceable. Now, the woman is asking the court to grant her petition, so that her daughter will be able to say her own name. Two other women give no explanation other than divorce. Both move to the cadence of avoidance; yes, nod, yes, no longer married, for professional reasons, yes, nod, thank you. They share the same tight smile. A young man is here with his mother. They both cry when the judge declares it officially. She is shorter than he is, a Black woman with her hair shaved close and died magenta-red. Her lipstick matches and she kisses her son on the cheek. She christens the name she did not give him. The bailiff, who is in charge of keeping order in the courtroom, tells me to sit down. He instructs me that soon, the judge will ask me to say my names, first the old, then the new. When I approach the stand, the judge asks me to hand him my petition and state my rationale, but he is clearly looking for a brief answer.
*
My father liked to tell me: “Your mother spends her life begging other people for money”. He was referring to her trade, not himself or any other partner. I have never been able to, despite angered trying, to get this supplicatory image of my mother out of my head. In it, she is sort of bent like a monk, but wearing a signature outfit of hers, with black motorcycle boots although she’s never ridden one -- her blonde hair, always worn long, shades her eyes partially. She is mouthing “Please?” and has a brilliant idea in her mind, but only I can see it. She is in an empty place, but it’s unclear what dark figures she’s asking.
*
“Her dad’s a big name in the industry” is one of the most linguistically complex phrases of the Southern California dialect. It is at once a damning indictment of someone’s authentic ability and a quiet recognition of their utter superiority. Growing up in LA, you love to hate the girl who’s dad’s a big name, as much as you want to be her. This law does not apply to boys -- they simply have dads in the industry and rightfully assume roles in a family of industries Industry-ers. Don’t ask me to explain this phenomenon -- I could try, but it’s likely not worth the time -- I can only say what occurred.
This was the kind of thing said in grocery store parking lots and middle school yards of the neighborhood my mother fought to stay in. She stuck out, too beautiful to be a sore thumb, but still, from the mothers around her, who had designer leggings, SUVS and increasingly, as their children passed double digits, various injections, lifts, and reconstructions. They inevitably had their husband's last names. She was never resentful of them, but only ever said, frustrated, “I don’t have someone to help me like she does.”
Once she took me to a birthday party in Beverly Hills. I made her drop me off down the street as I lumbered towards the mansion of a producer. It was a small act of cruelty, which I have lost among many in the act of being a daughter. It is time you can’t get back, time which laughs at your begging it to heal all wounds. Anyways, this birthday party had a burger truck outside and a DJ floor installed in the yard, the air of thirteen-year-old longings that are deeply anti-erotic but entirely all consuming.
*
My mother was always very strict about authenticity (though not much else). I have disappointed her most when I have failed to be myself. Even when I was too young to know what that was, it was her strictest expectation, and her most vicious condemnation. It is hard to be raised by someone who insists on defining themselves when you cannot define them. I think it was by her artistry, though no doubt success played a role, pulling a piece of her with it everytime it fled the scene. Success, fame, name-recognition; we know these are the words which haunt the artist’s life.
When I changed my name, it was a small homage to her, an assertion that I would try to hold up my end of the bargain. It has never been clear to me exactly who she wants me to be, but obviously she knows. She invited me into a world to work for.
It matters to try and trace back the world she inhabited before me, and imagine what she may have felt without me, in fact to try and understand how pain works in circles and circles alone.
*
My father pursued my mother through a traumatic custody battle which resulted in the uprooting of my life and the implosion of hers. The betrayal and utter disintegration of stability that the Los Angeles Court initiated with one stroke has never healed, but irreparable consequences ae ubiquitous among family-court decisions with, mine ranks rather low. Nonetheless, the court took the liberty of demanding the minor be placed in five sessions of remedial therapy to ensure something like a ‘smooth transition’ from a happy life into an obliterated one. I remember only a few things about them:
We played mancala for 4 of the sessions, a game where you move marbles from one well to another on a board, and basketball once as part of an anger-releasing activity.
Her asking “So, do you think your parents love you?”
She had a two-door system with heavy duty locks meant to protect the interior chamber of her office. There was a very loud buzzer, with a doorbell half emergency alert, which would signal the beginning and ending of our sessions.
She made organic chocolates out of her kitchen as a side business. The caveat was they were finely dusted in edible gold, which made them very expensive, and there was some sort of falling out between her and my mother when she expected to be paid for the chocolates I had eaten from her desk.
*
In the car, she was telling me about a therapist whose definition of insanity was to repeat the same action and expect different results. I had just received a new driver’s license with my name, her name, printed on it. It was a big deal, if only because we had nearly killed each other ‘learning’ how to drive. Pre-empting some Exodus from childhood, I drove her to the primordial desert of Joshua Tree National Park. The landscape betrays photos, though I lugged a large, ancient box-camera, the kind you have to hide your face under a blanket to capture anything with. Under the sheet, I watched her hair blow in the wind, finally undone by time, blowing in the wind against prehistoric time. The cactus towered above her. It’s a very ancient species, with a long Latin name I’ve forgotten. She looked comfortable against the prickly creature. They spoke the language of outlasting, I think.
*
When a mother omits something from her history, it is almost as impossible to imagine as it is to deny anything she includes, true or not, if you can even separate such a thing out. The word, story, face, is a wash. Her care is forceful. It is given and it can be taken away. The only thing judges, carpets, and names decrees fear more than this care is its revocation. Hence their grip.
The world I have come of age into is quite obsessed with the personal. A person’s content, once lying below their face and name, has become nothing more than that. A person’s content is their product.
I was not taught to be attached to many boundaries. The one between reality and curation might have looked flexible, but that’s deceptive. One always antedated the other. I believe I might be inheriting a world which denies the former in favor of the latter. I worry about the hours I have spent in early childhood, curating reality before I experienced it, following other children before I met them, comparing myself before there was really a self to compare. I say all this to usurp real concern; that I will never live up to my mother’s authenticity, which is made powerful by its contradiction. How will I learn to be a powerful contradiction? Perhaps this is the daughter’s task in life.
*
Reader, you are lucky to be implicated in one of my mother’s stories now. In fact, she tells me, as I tell her about writing this, so as to prove I write, so as to show I am like her, she tells me in fact she never went to the court.
“I must have gone to the Social Security office…yes, I’m remembering now, I must have gone there…” but her voice trails off.
“So you just got a drivers license and stuff?” I ask.
“I don't know”, she responds, thinking audibly over the sound of clanging dishes in the background, and sporadic asides to our dog, who has replaced me. “I must have just told them who I am, and they believed it.”
*
In one of my earliest memories of her, my mother is drawing a number eight on a large sheet of paper. Other children are there, somehow I’m aware this is my preschool classroom, and she is teaching us how to draw the figure. I think maybe, discovering one’s mother is a question of how closely you can trace a figure eight, or setting it on its side gently, each of you at an end, undulating towards the collision of the center, where each orbit collapses, then momentarily relieved by the distance, then craving that explosive closeness once more. I wonder if my mother’s way of passing on is a dying art. I know it is the act of passing that makes the art.
x