Daughter of the Queen of Sheba Read online

  I remember peeling a date, so at ease, cleaning it and chewing, and buying postage stamps of Saddam Hussein at a kiosk, beneath the signs of Babylon that pictured Saddam as the direct descendant of Nebuchadnezzar, his fantasy. I was thinking of Sheba. She was my conqueror. She was at my back, always, her hand on my spine, pushing me before I woke each morning, pushing me even to Iraq as I waited for a war to begin, pushing me or I would not be writing this down. A veil slips from Sheba, and underneath I see ... wind through the date palms, an eddy of limbs dancing. Her fingernails are like the crescents of moon that adorn the mosques of all believers.

  For just like that, our lives had a way of falling prey to her guile, as my mother herself fell, a slippage, a breath, nothing very great, no time to look back, to grab each other's hands. Just my mother turning around to say, "I must be dreaming," and our lives fell away at a touch, mine with hers—throughout my life as a college student, girlfriend, journalist in Belfast or Baghdad, Chicago or London, the life that paralleled her life as a cocktail waitress, a hotel clerk, a model. Reality fell in waves with unreality, commingling, and washed out to sea. But I could never re-create myself as completely as my mother had. Returning from an assignment, I would fly home to Menomenee, Wisconsin, to discover my mother in a new guise: a millionairess or a coronated duchess, a CEO patenting great inventions, a racehorse owner. Once I found her intent on tracing some trajectory of her brain, using the kitchen knife as a quill on Kate's ribs. Kate's arms, thank God, were too strong for her.

  When I was growing up, my mother's bouts of madness usually lasted a few months and then melted away like ice in the spring. But before she was dragged back to her ordinary life, after the forcible administration of drugs to her bloodstream as she writhed under leather restraints, something monstrous showed itself beneath the rind of ice. Let us call it desire. I am not suggesting that my mother went mad because she felt, as a beautiful woman, that she deserved more. Yet unanswered longing and betrayal leave their scars. Men have played some savage parts in her life, have failed to come to her rescue. For myself I would like a cross between Albert Einstein and a Canadian Mountie. But we manage to save ourselves in the end. Everyone does.

  For me, my mother's deliriums were like the tides created by the moon, growing in force as I grew older and pulling me after them, with a precise gravity, pulling me ineluctably from whatever bank I clung to, no place too far. My grandmother and sisters felt these nethertides too, and every time they summoned me I went home. No one seemed to be able to corner my mother without me, and I couldn't stay away. The women in my family learned to relay the signals, beginning in earnest when I went away to college. My grandmother would call me at all hours of the day and night to say that my mother had deposited a basket of kittens at a car dealership in lieu of payment, or purchased a carload of lingerie, or legally changed her name so that it somehow matched the name of a department store. Dolores Gimbels of Gimbels Schuster.

  "She's ashamed a' the name I gave her," my grandmother said, sobbing. "She dassn't want to be reminded a' me! Like I'm not even her ma!" Oh so true, Grandma, so true, your muskrat soup, your tacky flypaper trailing over the kitchen sink, your worn, crepey slippers that flap as they shuffle on the stairs. I mentally turned over the several last names that my mother had acquired over the years—real name changes, phony ones, temporary pet names from books or songs—and thought of how we all called one another by our first names now, my grandmother, mother, and I. More like sisters that way, as Mabel, Dolores, and Jack. A boy pulled Dolores onto his lap when she visited me at a college party, both of them flirtatious. She was past forty. Bruce, I said, meet Dolores. Mom, I said, meet Bruce. His momentary recoil, then his change of heart! He pulled her to him, his face lusty as if it didn't matter what age she was! Meet any nice mothers, Bruce? his friends teased him later. Is that your sister? people would say, looking at my mother and then at me. Yes, I would answer, convincing them easily, feeling the truth to be private knowledge. She was at such moments not my mother but the essence of womanhood, drawing on some fount beyond age.

  As the years passed and I entered my twenties in Chicago, Mabel, my grandmother, would call deep into the night and sigh down the phone line. Sometimes she left the line open even if I was nearly silent, my head buried between pillow and phone, the cord coiled between the night's hangover and perhaps a lover in the bed, hummocked and sleeping beneath my sheets. I lay awake listening to my grandmother, her sibilant hisses like a membrane webbing us together. As I lay still I could hear her smoking. I could see the smoke rings in the air. My grandmother lived only eight miles from my mother, in a bungalow on Lake Puckawasay. My grandmother's house was always damp and musty from the lake's decaying presence. Mildew flowers bloomed on her furniture. It was easy to picture my grandmother, sitting up suddenly at night in her cheap tin bed, her gray hair spiked and twisted like a poppet's. The flannel collar she wrapped around her arthritic neck would be slipping down. Her puckered fingers, red and rough with bleach, would poke at the collar. "Can'tcha come up, Jack?" she'd say into the phone, her hoarse insistence rousing me. Her voice was rustic, a peasant's voice, a linguistic hand-me-down left behind by the Swedes and the Germans and the Irish-speaking to one another over plows and stone fences in the late 1800s. "I dassn't know what t' do. I'm sweatin' bullets. Can'tcha come up, Jack, can'tcha come up?"

  I would sigh, and then inhale, smelling the clouds of Woolworth's talcum powder that floated in her bedroom where she was forever dabbing it on her broad, hot feet. She said, "Can'tcha come up?"

  On the morning of a particularly blinding hangover in 1979, with the trace of someone—the Mexican waiter who poured the flaming blue aquavit—outlined onto the sheets and my head thrumming like a tuning fork, Mabel called and croaked, "Your mother's dead." It was a Sunday in December, 10:45 A.M. exactly. The quivering pain in my head exploded.

  I looked outside at a dog barking on the street, its breath a blot of cloud. How could this dumb creature be alive and not my mother? I remembered that fraternity party, 1973, six years before. She'd worn a sweater dress the color of French vanilla, a thread trailing from the hem in a smudge. I had watched her leap up, the thread tracing an arc of energy. She could not be dead. "How?" I asked Mabel. "Car accident," she wailed. "Smashup on the highway. Just her." She was dead, and immediately the thought followed that I wanted her gone. I felt the most sickening sort of relief, entering that gyre of the forbidden. To be rid of her felt like a simultaneous blessing and curse.

  On that snowy December Sunday in Wisconsin, a small woman in beautiful clothes had parked her soon-to-be-repossessed late-model sports car amid the crowds of Christmas shoppers at a mall, clutching her faux fox collar around her neck to avoid detection. Slipping inside a phone booth. Faking a terrible Bavarian accent. "Hello, iss this Mabel Palkovic? Hef you got a Dolores Taylor there? Oh no? That's kass we hef her, dead on the highway, smashed like hickory nuts, a terrible car accident."

  Then the poseur, also known as Mom in schadenfreude dialect, told my grandmother to order a funeral wreath. "Such a shame, too young to die, yah?" I couldn't believe that my grandmother had fallen for this, even though she fell for everything, a fibber's courtesy. It took me not five minutes to check with Wisconsin highway authorities. Hickory nuts were the tip-off. We three girls had flattened them with our father, with big stones, on the shores of Lake Puckawasay, fishing the mild nutmeat out with bent nails and scattering the shells in the water.

  But my mother was missing on that December Sunday: vision, essence, and corporeal self. That night I did the first radio show of my life, pretending to talk to that "one special person out there," as the veteran disc jockey whom I adored advised me to do. For him, that one special person was a lonely salesman hopefully selecting a shirt for his Saturday-night date, a new mother rocking a tearful baby with one hand as she tuned the knob to the Doobie Brothers with the other. And my one special person was my mother, Dolores, missing in action, faking her own death, torchin
g the tame moment, a different fantasy with every succeeding hour. I fantasized that she could hear me, my debut on the air of this Chicago FM station, WKQX. I am talking to you, Mom, I thought. Goddamit. Listen to me for once. Wherever you are, this is me, your daughter, speaking. My voice on the radio at last! Damn, damn, damn. Give yourself up. Or I will— what? Manacle you to my side? Put you in a pumpkin shell, a closet, a hospital ward?

  I was an invisible denizen of the radio band that Sunday night, talking as if I knew what I was talking about, talking on an absurd late-night public affairs show, talking about the gold standard and how it was a hedge against inflation and trouble in the Middle East, the region of unstable tribes. I was twenty-six years old and knew nothing of gold or OPEC or the tribal scores settled among Arab nations. Talking, hearing myself chatter. I would never own any gold. Dhahab, in Arabic. "You're listening to 'Backtalk' on WKQX, Chicago. A gazette for the informed listener, every Sunday night." Do I sound as ridiculous as I feel foolish? Mother, might that be you? Are you laughing at me? Can'tcha come up, Jack? Can'tcha come up? I'll manacle you to my side.

  The show finished at midnight. "Good night, Chicago. Hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have." But you can't know what I know, Chicago, now can you? I flew to the car and behind the wheel, with Jack Daniel's as my co-pilot. In those days I thought absolutely nothing of speeding up to a hundred miles an hour. I thought that's what highways and odometers were for. So did my grandmother. My foot was welded to the pedal, and I shouted over Willie Nelson on the radio, singing, "Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys," the tollbooths just a smear behind my eyes, the odometer jagging upward like the fuel gauge on a juggernaut. Snow slanted into the headlights and there was nothing more to see in the middle of that black December night on a highway in the Midwest, except the cornstalks frozen in the headlight's beam, snow draped over them like the altar scarves on crucifixes.

  My brain, stirred by the loss of sleep and ancient agitations, rolled out images of my mother as vivid as the sunrise over Lake Puckawasay: my mother in her Menomenee Legion Band marching uniform, 1958; my mother in her gold brocade dress, second wedding, 1960; my mother in her afternoon-tea outfit of houndstooth check with matching cape, 1970. That would be for the Lac La Jolie Golf Club Women's Auxiliary. And after 1975: my mother in her sales clerk's apron, her waitress's dirndl, her flat-soled shoes laced up and her elegant costumes of decades past pushed to the back of the closet like discarded circus finery.

  My mother was the one who showed me how to pull my hair into a French twist. She was auburn-haired, like me, a petite woman. She had perfectly even teeth in a bright runway smile and huge, startling brown eyes. What transformed her beauty was her belief in it, and her belief in its protection. She romanced trouble; it was a gold bar, a bar of dhahab, that she gave to me as a hedge against boredom. She believed in risk. She taught me to say, on a day when the high school seniors dressed like characters from old movies (God, how innocent that seems now...), "When you get an eyeful, fill your pocket." I said it a hundred times to everyone, a phrase lost on me but not, apparently, on the high school principal, who asked me about it later, red-faced in the privacy of his office. My mother.

  I pulled off the highway at two A.M. My mother, now divorced from my stepfather, was living in a bald suburban development then, so new and raw that it smelled of the cow manure pasture it had once been, even in winter. Her home was as dark as Calvary. I crept into the house delicately, listening, letting the door swing open and calling out to her. She could be dangerous in the dark. "Mom," I shouted at the door. "Are you here? Answer me if you are!" I stayed there, trembling. When I was little I used to sing to my mother, "I love you a bushel and a peck, a hug around the neck." I hummed it now in my head, past the dark, past the blue demons I was sure lined the hall. I sang loudly, making the notes dance toward the basement and up the stairs. A hundred bushels and a thousand pecks, I do, I do.

  That's when I realized that the house smelled awful, a smell of dead fish. I snapped on the lights. Dizzy. A mistake. It was a house party for an acid trip, the Mad Hatter's tea party, and I felt as if I had drunk the Red Queen's dram. My mother had taken reality away with her and turned it inside out like a glove.

  The Christmas tree had been spray-painted gold and stuck in a bucket of plaster of paris. The spoon she had used to mix the plaster was stuck in the bucket too, like an ice cream scoop frozen into a dish of vanilla. The dead and gilded tree leaned over at a drunken angle, like a cocktail parasol in a shot glass, and when I gave the tree a tap, the brittle needles prattled onto the carpet. Starlights twinkled in what scraggly limbs remained. The crackling, shrunken branches of the tree were festooned with dog biscuits and expensive, lacy bras, and a baby bracelet that I recognized as belonging to one of my sisters. A pair of gold panties dangled from one branch. I breathed slowly, listening to more needles patter into the booming silence. This was my mother's Christmas tree, a gold shrunken skeleton, wearing panties. On the walls, my mother had stuck large drawings, diminishing the living room. There were giant praying hands and an Infant of Prague, the Catholic icon of childlike confidence, at least that's who I thought this crowned baby was, a pudgy blue fist clutching a real-life rosary tacked onto the wall with nails. In the basement rec room, my mother had set up brightly colored directors' chairs, strewn around the green carpet like a day at the beach, their backs painted with whatever catch phrases had jolted into her head: "Once is never enough" and "Take what you need" and "Girls just want to have fun." They had a gay, Annette-meets-Frankie quality, as my mother herself did when she was well.

  The smell like a rotting catch of mackerel came from the dining room. My mother had laid on an elaborate and careful party, betraying days of manic effort: radishes carved with tiny faces and spelling out the word love on a silver tray, steak tartare decorated with whipped cream and tiny plastic ballerinas on swizzle sticks, dancing merrily: oysters on platters with paper feet cut from magazines; and clams with pink feather fluffs. I checked the Christmas place cards, little angels bearing names. Lord Jesus the Christ, of course, was at the head of the table, and there was Mary Baker Eddy, the Christian Scientist founder who was always a portent of my mother's insanity. Harvey the Six-Foot Pooka had a place of honor. ("You can't see him," it said on his card, "but he's here! Shake Paws with Harvey!") And there was a card for my sister Sarah, announcing that she was now the CEO and treasurer of my mother's new business, Ant Trap Zap, designed to lure ants into old bottle caps and electrocute them. "They die as they fry," my mother's curly handwriting crowed. And there was a card for Alfred, another potential problem. Alfred really existed. A wealthy local brewmeister who'd decamped to Menomenee County from Milwaukee, Alfred had no idea who my mother was, despite the fact that he was her secret lover. And yet I had come to think of him as an interloper on our peace. When my mother was ill, she sent Alfred things, all sorts of things. The sheriff once called to tell me that he'd picked up a roomful of such stuff from Alfred, who was mulling over whether to file some sort of lawsuit. I tried to imagine his mystified face as he received a pack of silk G-strings with a note from my mother. "From your Secret Admirer, Zippity Doo-Dah! And I know you can fill these up! Zip, Zip!"

  I picked up a polished silver butter knife. Every piece of the Eternally Yours silver pattern had been tied with a pink bow. Every bit of crystal sparkled. And yet no one would raise a glass to my mother to offer her Christmas cheer. On the table and growing stale, indeed, petrified, were platters and platters of cheeses and sausages, accompanied now by an odorous whiff of my mothers famous sour cream dip, coagulated and turning spotty. In the middle of the table was a black cast-iron cherub, lying on its back, all fat belly, its legs splayed and a pickle placed between them in unmistakable suggestion. A slip of pink paper in the cherub's mouth said "Ha!" Ha, yourself, I thought. We'll see who has the last ha! I plucked the pickle and ate it.

  Then I picked up one of my mother's homemade cookies, the lumpy brown joke cookies t
hat she'd baked before, containing whiskey or chile oil or anchovies, even soap. They were a variant on a game we used to play in Girl Scouts when we'd have to eat bits of mystery food wrapped in foil and placed in a paper bag. A relay race followed. Failure to eat the mystery morsel meant that you had to drop out. Once my mother wrapped a clam like a candy kiss. The first person to eat an anchovy cookie and throw up lost.

  I moved slowly up the stairs to Dolores's bedroom. Her white twin beds looked hard, even virginal, as though they belonged in a convent. A crucifix hung over the one she used, on the left. Neat stacks of paper lay on the spread of the other bed. She'd been busy. Mania eats up slumber, grabs at repose and shakes the body awake for dances, for plots, for a carousel of tales that spin on the mind's gimbals. Sleep was ravaged, but sometimes my mother did fall into a kind of trance, a numbness showing a half-drawn eyelid, the white showing beneath the pleated pink like blank paper lying in a drawer. Her room was strewn with notes and diagrams that I hoped would be the clues to her netherworld—fictitious family trees showing her to be the daughter of Mary Baker Eddy, divine instructions, Bible verses torn and glued with cutouts from the newspaper crosswords, SEE. CRETE. ALFRED IS THE SON OF GOD DIVINE.

  Her hands were always busy trying to translate her brain. "Fantastic," she would say, staring at the horizon like the Sphinx, and jot something down. Months of manic jottings. Reams of paper. The prosaic and humdrum modes of life were her alchemy. She could make rituals out of pencil and ink.

  On the mirror over the low bureau something caught my eye. At first I thought it was another Infant of Prague diorama. But no, it was I, the Infant of Dolores. A baby picture of me and of my two sisters, our heads cut out, pasted to the mirror with fruit stickers, pineapples and bananas, from Dole. We were like seraphim, with crayon wings drawn around our disembodied heads and magenta lipstick applied to our lips. Our mouths were bleeding, open wounds, demented. Above our decapitated trio, my mother had written in more lipstick, "I like myself. Thank you, God. Tra-La!" But what of your children? I wanted to know.