The Margolians: Patrick Plants the Seed

December 26th, 2001.

I drank at least one entire bottle of red wine last night and do not feel even the slightest bit hungover. Nor do I feel that I've slept, although I must have because I feel incredibly well rested. Nor do I remember getting into bed. I can't seem to wrap my mind around how last night ended. At a certain point I just disappeared. I stood there in the kitchen, drinking glass after glass of red wine and felt like a ghost, an invisible witness to my own life. Maybe that's why it feels as if I'm melting into this mattress. It's like I've re-materialized into my own skin. I have only one image. My brother, Max, standing in the corner of my office, pressing his forehead into the wall, "I hate my life. I hate my life. I hate my life..."

My brother also hates buttons. Really hates them. Becomes almost physically ill by the sight of them, which brings us to our first important tangent.

The first time my boyfriend, Patrick, meets my mother he arrives at my house clean and fresh, dressed in light summer khakis and a white linen shirt. A boat neck. With three buttons going down the chest. My boyfriend has only met Max on a few occasions so he may not realize the great sin he is committing by wearing such a garment. Picture this. You've been dating this woman for close to four months. You arrive at her house to meet her mother. Her brother, who has just had knee surgery, comes hobbling into the kitchen from the back porch, takes one look at you, winces and says, "Whoa, man! That's a high risk shirt you've got on." He holds his hand in front of his face to block out the hideous display of your chest, begs you to please, please change your shirt. His nerves are already rattled. Have you seen what his mother is wearing? It's what most people call a slip. The straps keep slipping off her shoulders. One gust of wind and you are likely to catch a glimpse of her underwear. Her underwear tend to hang rather loosely. This is stressful enough. He can't be expected to go out in public with her in that outfit AND Patrick in those ridiculous buttons. Plus there's no barrier. There's just the linen fabric of his shirt against his bare chest. Nothing in between. This is yet another intolerable sin. "Please, please I beg you. Can't you just borrow one of Karen's shirts?" You can't figure out if you're actually supposed to take this request seriously. You meet Mother. She is on the back deck sitting on a big pillow, a lit cigarette, a full ashtray, only one sip into her second glass of white wine. It does, you will admit, look like she's wearing a slip. You say something like, "Hi, how are you." To which she replies, "I'm fucking drunk. How are you?" Then she laughs and starts coughing. The wind blows. Max asks again. "Please. I am begging you. Can you please change your shirt?" You change into a purple t-shirt. You go out for sushi. You do not break up with your girlfriend.

December 26th, 2001. My boyfriend lies beside me. He is wide awake on his back. It seems as if he's been lying here like this all night. We've been dating for over eight months and I still feel content to lie in bed and stare at him for hours. His eyes are never quite the same. They drift from green, to gray, to blue, to all variations in between. Today they seem almost silver as they skim from side to side, absorbed by some sort of slide show that seems to sift across the white slant of my bedroom ceiling. He has not yet noticed that I'm awake. Whatever he's watching has him mildly amused. I drift into my own slideshow. The mushy corn noodles Max overcooked. A weird creamy clam dish his friend Mike made. Cameron Diaz screaming, "I swallowed your cum!" My sister, Jen, and I waiting in line for the bathroom, averting our eyes as people bitched about those "awful people" who practically ruined their enjoyment of Vanilla Sky. The wooden skeleton jammed between the doorjamb and the doorknob. Inel on its shoulders. Inel, my mother's "name" flipped backwards. Inel, the little doll with the plastic head, plastic limbs, and a bean bag belly - an incongruous sin that affects my sister, Abby, in much the same way certain buttons affect Max. Inel, an entire story in and of herself, a prompt for another time. But there she was, my mother flipped backwards sitting on the shoulders of a wooden skeleton. So we screamed and we panicked and we unraveled in front of two non-family members.

We thought she might be hiding out there in the dark. Behind the couch? Under the porch? In the back yard? We called her name. We racked our brains for any explanation of how Inel could be here if our mother was still in Mexico. We were scared to walk in the house, scared she might be hiding in there, scared she might leap out at us. As soon as we walked in, before we even had a chance to turn on the lights, the phone rang and we screamed at the top of our lungs.

It was our dad calling to say Merry Christmas. My sisters, Abby and Nicky, were there as well. We got them all caught up in the drama. Where was mom? Had they heard from her? Did they think she had come back to Portland? Did she get one of her friends to do this just to freak us out? We were all pretty sure she had come back from Mexico, but why like this? Then again, what other way is there but this? No one has ever accused our mother of being too straight forward. Before she followed Max and me out to Portland, she hemmed and hawed for months about how she wasn't planning to live in the city. She was going to live on the coast. That way she'd be near us. She promised she wouldn't be a burden. She loved the idea of living in Florence. We could come visit once in a while. Wouldn't that be great? Every conversation was some variation on this same theme. I would listen and pretend to go along, knowing full well that she was deluding herself, until I finally just snapped. "The coast, ma? Please. This is not North Carolina we're talking about. Do have any idea how freezing you will be? How emphatically un-tan you will get? Why don't you just say the words. Admit it. I'm coming to Portland. Stop pretending and say the fucking words." That was less than a year ago and we've been trying to adjust to her on again, off again presence ever since. She keeps setting up mini adventures for herself, so she doesn't have to admit that she's really moved out here. That's part of the reason this whole stunt of hers has us so rattled.

We are too agitated to sit still. We cook dinner. We pace. We open the front door and call her name. We search the skeleton and Inel for a note. A note, maybe with a phone number or some other little"hint" as to where she is, is that crazy of us to expect? Is that too much to ask? Finally, the phone rings. There's no "surprise!" There's no "Ha-ha! Gotcha!" There's just, "Don't worry. I'm only here until Friday." She is at the Travel Inn down on Burnside. It's dark and it's raining. She needs someone to come pick her up. But not if it's going to be a burden.

When she walks in the door I am startled as I always am when I have not seen my mother for a long time. She seems smaller than I remember and even beneath those ridiculous layers I can tell that she's spent way too much time starving herself and cooking her skin in the sun. There is a scabby growth on her nose. We berate her because of it. And that's where it all fades away. That's when I dissolve into the background of my kitchen and open a bottle of wine. That's when the evening turns into an out of body experience. I cannot recall anything that happened after the moment my mother walked in the front door. There is just that lone image of my brother with his head pressed into the wall.

Patrick and I seem to snap back to reality at the exact same time. He smiles, opens his mouth as if to speak, shakes his head and sighs. His eyes drift back to the ceiling and he smiles again. "The Margolians," he says, "That's what I'm calling you now. Seriously. Y'all are beyond just crazy. You're like your own alien race."

And thus, the Margolians were born.