Diary of a Misfit, page 29
Chapter Sixteen
(2014–2015)
FOR HALF A DECADE, I scratched out the same New Year’s resolution in my journal: Finish this documentary. I wrote it in black ink in 2012, blue in 2013, and a slanty green the year after that. Every January, I drew a little box where I planned to mark the film’s completion, and every December, I looked at the unchecked square and told myself I needed a few more months.
I’d thought, after Mark sent me the photographs, that he would give in on the journals soon, but every time I asked, he told me he didn’t feel right turning over Roy’s thoughts. Without the diaries, I tried to find other ways to finish the film. I wrote to the health departments in Arkansas and Missouri to see if either state had a birth certificate for Roy, and I combed an old newspaper database for clues, but none of my searches yielded anything. Occasionally, I logged on to a Facebook group dedicated to remembering the olden days of Delhi, and I asked if anyone knew Roy. Their replies were genial but empty: “Sweet woman always heard she had a bad childhood.” “All us kids would pile up on her porch ’n visit early 70’s.” “Sweet lady.” “I remember her mowing yards.”
In 2014, for the first time in five years, I didn’t book a single trip to Louisiana. The flights south were expensive, and I suspected there was no one left in Delhi for me to interview. I’d contacted at least a hundred people, a tenth of the town’s white population, and I’d run down every rabbit hole those people suggested. I’d interviewed a few Black residents, too, but as far as I could tell, Roy mostly talked to other poor white people. The Black people who lived on Chatham said they’d seen Roy, and they’d smelled what they described as “the aroma” that emanated from his house, but they’d never said anything more than hello to Roy, and he tended to say less than that.
“We never really knew what went on in that small house,” a young man named Dequantae McDowell told me outside of the single-wide, white-and-yellow trailer he shared with several family members. “It had been going on for so long, and no one understood.”
Dequantae said he and a bunch of neighbors stood out in the street and watched the day Mark King took Roy to the nursing home. Dequantae told me the story in April of 2013, ten years after Roy had left the street for good, but Dequantae said he remembered every detail.
“Once they actually got her out of the house, buses, truckloads of cats came out of that house. And they weren’t your typical, everyday, run-down-the-street cats. I don’t know what those cats were bred with, but they were some strange-looking cats. I would not be caught dead with one of those cats in my house. But she was drawn to them. The way she acted toward them, you would think they were all accounted for. She knew them by name.”
Were those anecdotes enough to drive a movie? Aubree and I applied for half a dozen grants that year, and in every application, I took the depressing facts I’d gathered and pieced them together into something like an arc. I described the kidnapping the way my grandma had. I wrote about the porch concerts and the animals Roy hoarded, and I hinted at the scandalous ending my cousin Jennifer believed happened in the nursing home. But none of the organizations handing out money to filmmakers chose us for one of their awards.
I gave up for a while. I told myself if grant makers didn’t see the value in my movie, maybe it had no value. I stopped trolling through Newspapers.com, and I spent my vacation days on actual vacations. Frankie and I went to Nashville and the San Juan Islands, and I documented every delicious thing we ate on our trips. Hot chicken and raw clams, prawns fresh from the ocean. Oregon legalized gay marriage on my birthday, and that summer, the paper got a new editor, a two-time Pulitzer winner who told me I was “fucking awesome” and my articles were “fucking beautiful.” He believed in me in ways the previous editors never had, and he gave me time to write the long narratives I’d always wanted to write.
“It was a super good year,” I journaled in late December. “But the big albatross is the movie. How can I ever finish?”
Though the grant makers didn’t believe in my project, I knew that plenty of people did. The mayor of a suburban town I’d once covered for The Oregonian called me every few months to ask if the film was finished. People who’d donated money to the Kickstarter campaign wondered when they’d see it, and my relatives continued talking as if we would all attend the Oscars together someday. The truth was, even if Aubree and I had won one of those awards, even if someone had given us a lot of money, I probably would have stalled out in 2014. After five years, I still didn’t know whether Roy had been kidnapped. I didn’t know if he’d really sold any of his songs, and I didn’t know how he felt about his own life. I kept returning to the same sources, as if this time, I’d find the newspaper article that would render everything clear. I loaded Final Cut Pro, and I moved scenes around, hoping the right documentary arc would suddenly appear, but every time I watched the footage through, something seemed to be missing.
The longer I wrestled with a draft, the more I came to believe that one more trip to Louisiana might crystalize everything. Plus, Frankie had never been. We were planning to marry in August 2015, and it felt wrong to spend forever with someone who’d never seen my hometown, so I bought us tickets south for a long weekend in February, six months before our wedding.
At the airport, Frankie loaded up on gifts to take to my parents. She’d only met them once, over corn dogs at the pub in Portland right after we started dating, and she wanted to make a good impression, so she bought hazelnuts and marionberry jam—Oregon specialties—for my mother, and she picked out six local beers to take to my dad. As our plane descended into Shreveport, I imagined the scene my mother would make. Usually, she stood at the edge of security, sobbing and shaking and clasping her hands together as if she had waited her entire life to lay eyes on me again.
“She’s probably going to cry a lot,” I told Frankie as we deboarded the plane.
I pretended to be embarrassed by the thought of it, but the truth is, I’d come to see my mom’s showy tears as a kind of ritual, the first signal that I was home. Her smeared mascara sealed something inside me. Tears meant she loved me.
Shreveport Regional Airport is small, so we reached the lobby in a few minutes. I looked around, but I didn’t see my mother. There was another family, holding helium balloons and hugging as if a million years had passed since they’d last seen each other, and I thought, at first, that maybe my mom was waiting behind them. She wasn’t. I thought maybe we were supposed to meet at the baggage claim, so Frankie and I took the escalator down to the basement level. My mom wasn’t there, either. Finally, I spotted my dad, sitting and scrolling through his phone. I called his first name. Alan. He looked up, smiled crooked, then walked toward us. He grabbed me in a sideways half hug.
“Your mom wants Mexican food,” he said, taking my book bag off my shoulders. “We need to stop and get some.”
I must have asked why she wasn’t there, but I only remember flashes of that night. My dad, Frankie, and I ate fajitas at the Mexican restaurant. We ordered chips and queso to go for my mother. When we got to my parents’ house, my mom was asleep in a recliner, so my dad put the cheese dip in the fridge. The next morning, my mom was still sleeping in the same spot. She woke up mid-afternoon, just long enough to reject Frankie’s hazelnuts with a silent sneer, then she microwaved the queso until it liquefied in its Styrofoam cup. She carried the chips and dip back to her recliner, but she fell asleep almost as soon as she started eating. I remember walking into the living room and finding her frozen, hunched over the bag with one arm in the air and a chip hanging out of her mouth. The queso had hardened again.
“Is she sick?” Frankie asked.
I shrugged. I was sure my mom was on pills, but I was too embarrassed to tell Frankie that. I’d told her a little bit about my childhood, but I worried if she knew too much, she’d pity me. Back then, I couldn’t think of anything worse than being pitied by someone I loved. I thought real strength meant living as if nothing had ever shaped or broken me, and so I walked away from the living room as if the woman sleeping with a chip in her mouth had no bearing whatsoever on my life or well-being.
Frankie and I puttered around the house for a bit. I wanted Frankie to have what I thought of as a quintessential Louisiana experience—not Louisiana as I had lived it, but Louisiana as a movie might render it—and so I suggested we go out and buy a king cake, the cream-cheese-slathered cinnamon rolls that bakeries sell in February and March to celebrate Mardi Gras. Every king cake has a tiny plastic baby hidden inside, and whoever finds the baby has to buy the cake next season.
“Hopefully you’ll get the baby,” I told Frankie. “Then you have to come back next year and buy a cake for us.”
My dad wanted to get out of the house, too, so he offered to drive us to a place he said made the best king cakes. He grabbed his keys, scooped up the Shih Tzu he’d recently adopted from a rescue shelter, then headed toward the car. I looked back at my mother before we left. She was still sleeping, chips in hand.
We were gone for maybe half an hour, but when we returned, Frankie found an entire bag’s worth of Dove chocolate candy wrappers in the bathroom trash my dad had emptied that morning. Frankie didn’t speculate, but I did: My mother must have eaten several dozen pieces of chocolate while we were gone. I looked at the recliner. She was still passed out exactly where we’d left her, but the chips were on the floor. She’d probably spilled them, I thought, on her way to eat the candy. My dad’s dog charged toward the chips, but he picked her up before she reached the scraps.
“Let’s go outside,” my dad said. He was talking to his dog, but I followed them out anyway, still carrying the king cake. The temperature had notched above sixty degrees, and my dad was wearing shorts. I took off my jean jacket, then sat on the grass next to him. We didn’t talk about my mother. We never talked about her when she was on pills. I don’t know if it was too painful or just too familiar to make new conversation about, but we always found ways to avoid it. We could have talked about ways to help her, but instead, that afternoon, we talked about shrimp. My dad told me he’d learned how to do a Louisiana boil in the backyard using an old camping stove and a propane tank. He’d bought a seasoning mix and three pounds of shrimp, along with a pound each of corn, potatoes, and mushrooms. He had smoked sausage, too, but he wasn’t sure if he should cook it on the stove before throwing it into the pot with the vegetables. After a while, we decided sautéing it was best, so Frankie and I headed inside to cook the meat while my dad set up a burner. When we stepped back inside, I saw that my mom was standing in the middle of the living room. She was wearing a threadbare cotton nightgown, and her hair stuck out in chunks. She was fifty years old, but she looked at least seventy.
“I got new boobs,” she said.
My mother had had her breasts removed a few years earlier. She’d told me two different stories about why doctors had taken them. First, she said that a brown recluse spider had bitten her when she and my father lived in Oklahoma after I graduated college. As proof, she regularly emailed me photographs that showed her right breast turning black with rot. Later, she told me she’d had breast cancer. I never found out which story was true, and I never asked my dad or brother if they had any theories, but I know something real must have happened. Her breast was bruised and oozing black in the pictures she sent, and doctors don’t perform double mastectomies for no reason. I never believed she had cancer, though. Wouldn’t she have lost her hair? Wouldn’t she have called me to complain about chemo or radiation? She posted funny dispatches on Facebook every time she came down with shingles or kidney stones, updates that inspired her friends to leave a flurry of encouraging messages, so I know she wouldn’t have wasted a good hospital visit. She would have posted photos from the oncology ward. She would have listed her room number and asked her friends to call. Wouldn’t she have? I could have pressed her for more details, but I didn’t see the point. She was an excellent liar, and I suspected she’d talk her way around any holes I pointed out.
“Wanna see them?” she asked.
She didn’t wait for an answer. She lifted her nightgown up over her head. She showed us her entire naked front. Frankie closed her eyes and backed away, but I saw the ragged, purple scar my mom had had etched across her stomach since 1988, when she had her gallbladder removed. I saw the skin that had gone loose and empty when she lost a hundred pounds while I was in Portland. And I saw her new breasts, firm B cups, scabbed from construction, nipple-less.
“Mom. Put your nightgown down.”
Frankie didn’t react. She’s unflappable, or at least, she always seems unflappable. She stood on the edge of the living room as if this spectacle were one she’d seen a dozen times. I kept sneaking glances at her, waiting for her to look as distraught as I felt, but she gazed off to the side of my mother as if the wall were suddenly very interesting.
“But they’re perky,” my mom said, lifting her left boob up. “You don’t understand because you’ve always had perky breasts, but mine, they hung down and bowed to the moon.”
“Well, you’ve had kids. You breastfed. It’s natural. Put your nightgown down, and you can show them to me later, okay? Frankie doesn’t need to see everything you got.”
My mom snorted. She huffed and let her nightgown fall back over her frame.
“Aren’t we about to be family?” she asked.
She put her hands on her hips, sassy as if she’d just made a great point. I stared at her in a way I hoped she recognized as disapproving. She sank back into her recliner, then twisted around to turn up the electric heating pad she’d been lying on. I told her we were doing a shrimp boil, but she didn’t say anything as Frankie and I passed into the kitchen. By the time we finished the sausage, my mom was asleep again.
She didn’t wake up until the next morning, until Frankie and I were packing our suitcases to drive to Monroe to see my grandma. Around 8 a.m., I carried my bag through the living room, and my mom flung herself out of the recliner. She was still wearing the same nightgown. Her left eye was completely closed, and the rest of her face sagged sallow in a way that looked as if her skin might slip completely off. Later, in my journal, I wrote that she’d looked “an evening away from death,” as if that were the kind of thing people said about their fifty-year-old mother.
“I have something for your wedding,” she said. “Go into the computer room and grab the box at the foot of the bed.”
The computer room was just a spare bedroom where my parents kept everything that didn’t fit somewhere else. The room did have an ancient desktop sitting on an iron Singer sewing machine table, but it was also filled with unhung wall sconces, half-used rolls of Christmas wrapping paper, and a stack of homemade quilts my mom had owned since before I was born. I looked around and saw the cardboard box she wanted me to take. The box reeked of something floral, and when I opened it, I saw different colored soaps, all stamped with a fleur-de-lis. There were two antique teacups in the box, mismatched ones that looked as if they’d been part of fancy sets at some point. One of the cups was lavender with scalloped edges and a heart-shaped handle. The other was white and gold-rimmed with a kind of pastoral scene painted on the side. I set them back on top of the soaps, then grudgingly carried them to the living room.
“What are these?” I asked.
“They’re for your wedding. The soaps will go into the teacups, kind of like a sachet, then we’ll give them out as favors to your guests. Are you planning to invite any of my cousins?”
I’m sure my face gave away how ugly I thought everything inside the box was. When my mother looked up, her expectant smile fell into a frown. I can’t remember if I took a breath or tried to find a nice way to tell my mother there was no way I was giving out soaps and teacups. Frankie and I didn’t like girly things. We wanted to hand out mix CDs and coasters stamped with an Oregon fern Frankie had drawn.
“The fleur-de-lis is a Louisiana thing,” I told my mom. “Frankie has no connection to it.”
“But you’re the bride!” my mom choked out.
She bent over and cried so hard and silent, I worried she had stopped breathing. My stomach thudded. I knew my mother had been planning my wedding in her head since the moment she first held me. She used to tell me when I was little that she’d make sure my ceremony was better than hers. It wouldn’t be rushed, as hers had been, and I wouldn’t throw up on the preacher. The reception would be catered, not a potluck, and I’d go on a real honeymoon—somewhere that required plane travel. I knew how much my mom had adapted over the years. She’d given up dreaming of the groom, and she’d even accepted that I didn’t plan to wear a dress. But I realized, watching her cry over the box of soaps, that she’d held on to a few of her expectations.
“Mom, there are two brides. It’s not just about me.”
I don’t remember how we resolved that conversation. I think we may have yelled at each other. I was still angry that she’d never answered the phone the night I proposed to Frankie, and I think I may have told her that morning that she had no right to collect things for my wedding because she hadn’t been present when I needed her to be. Maybe I cried, too. I wanted my mother to help plan my wedding. Portland didn’t have a ton of cool formalwear stores, so Frankie and I had talked about going to San Francisco to look for wedding outfits, and we’d agreed that we wanted to take our mothers with us. In fact, I’d suggested San Francisco instead of another city because my mother had always longed to go there. It feels uncharacteristically girly of me, but the few times in my life I ever pictured getting married, I always imagined my mother would help me find an outfit. I wanted her there, drinking champagne, vetoing the ugly ensembles and thumbs-upping the good ones. I wanted her to taste cakes and choose the flowers with me. I even wanted her to give out wedding favors if that was important to her, but I wanted it to be something we did together. I wanted her to know me well enough to pick something other than teacups. I wanted her to answer the phone. I wanted her to wake up when I flew down, and I wanted her to live until August.
