“Lay on, Macduff,” Mr. Burkett said, “and damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’ ” Which meant yes, and we had it with whipped cream.
In my memory that’s the best Christmas I had as a kid, from the Santa pancakes Liz made in the morning to the hot chocolate in Mr. Burkett’s apartment, just down the hall from where Mom and I used to live. New Year’s Eve was also fine, although I fell asleep on the couch between Mom and Liz before the ball dropped. All good. But in 2010, the arguments started.
Before that, Liz and my mother used to have what Mom called “spirited discussions,” mostly about books. They liked many of the same writers (they bonded over Regis Thomas, remember) and the same movies, but Liz thought my mother was too focused on things like sales and advances and various writers’ track records instead of the stories. And she actually laughed at the works of a couple of Mom’s clients, calling them “subliterate.” To which my mother responded that those subliterate writers paid the rent and kept the lights on. (Kept them lit.) Not to mention paying for the care home where Uncle Harry was marinating in his own pee.
Then the arguments began to move away from the more or less safe ground of books and films and get more heated. Some were about politics. Liz loved this Congress guy, John Boehner. My mother called him John Boner, which is what some kids of my acquaintance called a stiffy. Or maybe she meant to pull a boner, but I don’t really think so. Mom thought Nancy Pelosi (another politician, which you probably know as she’s still around) was a brave woman working in “a boys’ club.” Liz thought she was your basic liberal dingle-berry.
The biggest fight they ever had about politics was when Liz said she didn’t completely believe Obama had been born in America. Mom called her stupid and racist. They were in the bedroom with the door shut—that was where most of their arguments happened—but their voices were raised and I could hear every word from the living room. A few minutes later, Liz left, slamming the door on her way out, and didn’t come back for almost a week. When she did, they made up. In the bedroom. With the door closed. I heard that, too, because the making-up part was pretty noisy. Groans and laughter and squeaky bedsprings.
They argued about police tactics, too, and this was still a few years before Black Lives Matter. That was a sore point with Liz, as you might guess. Mom decried what she called “racial profiling,” and Liz said you can only draw a profile if the features are clear. (Didn’t get that then, don’t get it now.) Mom said when black people and white people were sentenced for the same type of crime, it was the black people who got hit with the heaviest sentences, and sometimes the white people didn’t do time at all. Liz countered by saying, “You show me a Martin Luther King Boulevard in any city, and I’ll show you a high crime area.”
The arguments started to come closer together, and even at my tender age I knew one big reason why—they were drinking too much. Hot breakfasts, which my mother used to make twice or even three times a week, pretty much ceased. I’d come out in the morning and they’d be sitting there in their matching bathrobes, hunched over mugs of coffee, their faces pale and their eyes red. There’d be three, sometimes four, empty bottles of wine in the trash with cigarette butts in them.
My mother would say, “Get some juice and cereal for yourself while I get dressed, Jamie.” And Liz would tell me not to make a lot of noise because the aspirin hadn’t kicked in yet, her head was splitting, and she either had roll-call or was on stakeout for some case or other. Not the Thumper task force, though; she didn’t get on that.
I’d drink my juice and eat my cereal quiet as a mouse on those mornings. By the time Mom was dressed and ready to walk me to school (ignoring Liz’s comment that I was now big enough to make that walk by myself), she was starting to come around.
All of this seemed normal to me. I don’t think the world starts to come into focus until you’re fifteen or sixteen; up until then you just take what you’ve got and roll with it. Those two hungover women hunched over their coffee was just how I started my day on some mornings that eventually became lots of mornings. I didn’t even notice the smell of wine that began to permeate everything. Only part of me must have noticed, because years later, in college, when my roomie spilled a bottle of Zinfandel in the living room of our little apartment, it all came back and it was like getting hit in the face with a plank. Liz’s snarly hair. My mother’s hollow eyes. How I knew to close the cupboard where we kept the cereal slowly and quietly.
I told my roomie I was going down to the 7-Eleven to get a pack of cigarettes (yes, I eventually picked up that particular bad habit), but basically I just had to get away from that smell. Given a choice between seeing dead folks—yes, I still see them—and the memories brought on by the smell of spilled wine, I’d pick the dead folks.
Any day of the fucking week.
15
My mother spent four months writing The Secret of Roanoke with her trusty tape recorder always by her side. I asked her once if writing Mr. Thomas’s book was like painting a picture. She thought about it and said it was more like one of those Paint by Numbers kits, where you just followed the directions and ended up with something that was supposedly “suitable for framing.”
She hired an assistant so she could work on it pretty much full time. She told me on one of our walks home from school —which was just about the only fresh air she ever got during the winter of 2009 and 2010—that she couldn’t afford to hire an assistant and couldn’t afford not to. Barbara Means was fresh out of the English program at Vassar, and was willing to toil in the agency at bargain-basement wages for the experience, and she was actually pretty good, which was a big help. I liked her big green eyes, which I thought were beautiful.
Mom wrote, Mom rewrote, Mom read the Roanoke books and little else during those months, wanting to immerse herself in Regis Thomas’s style. She listened to my voice. She rewound and fast forwarded. She filled in the picture. One night, deep into their second bottle of wine, I heard her tell Liz that if she had to write another sentence containing a phrase such as “firm thrusting breasts tipped with rosy nipples,” she might lose her mind. She also had to field calls from the trades—and once from Page Six of the New York Post—about the state of the final Thomas book, because all sorts of rumors were flying around. (All this came back to me, and vividly, when Sue Grafton died without writing the final book of her alphabet series of mysteries.) Mom said she hated the lying.
“Ah, but you’re so good at it,” I remember Liz saying, which earned her one of the cold looks I saw from my mother more and more in the final year of their relationship.
She lied to Regis’s editor as well, telling her Regis had instructed her not long before he died that the manuscript of Secret should be withheld from everyone (except Mom, of course) until 2010, “in order to build reader interest.” Liz said she thought that was a little bit shaky, but Mom said it would fly. “Fiona never edited him, anyway,” she said. Meaning Fiona Yarbrough, who worked for Doubleday, Mr. Thomas’s publisher. “Her only job was writing Regis a letter after she got each new manuscript, telling him that he’d outdone himself this time.”