Chapter 18 Liz
When Liz called Angela, her mother didn’t seem particularly impressed when Liz said she needed to talk to her about something important.
In fact, it was like she hadn’t heard it at all, which was typical—but Angela did tell Liz that the timing was uncanny.
She was in town! The art fair in Taos had been a bust, filled with tourists with no taste, all turquoise jewelry and Pendleton shirts.
Angela was done peddling her wares to collectors with no class; she was focusing on her craft for art’s sake alone.
Liz tried to interrupt this diatribe, thinking that she could probably recite her mother’s monologue from memory at this point.
Finally, Liz demanded the address for the Yellow House Foundation, the artists’ colony where her mother was staying in Topanga.
“Why?” Angela asked. “Are you finally going to come see my goddess series? This is a highly coveted residency, you know.”
Liz stifled a primal scream. “I just told you I need to talk to you about something important,” she said.
Angela eventually rattled off the address, which Liz scribbled down on a scrap of paper. Of course Angela was staying at some so-called artists’ colony. It probably had signs: “Failed artists unite!” and “Dying dreams fade away here!”
Liz stomped to her car, put the address into Waze, then blazed a path of fury through the canyon roads, barely noticing the serpentine twists that were dotted with fresh farm stands, funky vintage shops, and markers noting that day’s wildfire risk.
Smokey Bear said it was high. No kidding.
Liz was about to go scorched earth. She was filled with a rage that bordered on delirium right up to the second she parked in a dirt patch in front of a bunch of yurts decorated with dream catchers and wind chimes.
“Where’s Angela?” Liz asked the first person she saw, a guy in his sixties with tanned skin and huarache sandals who looked like he enjoyed stained glass and acid trips.
He pointed, unbothered by Liz’s lack of pleasantries.
Liz strode over to one of the yurts. “Angela!” she shouted through the door.
Liz didn’t care enough to peer inside and get a glimpse of the setup at this world-famous artists’ colony.
A dead fly was trapped in the doorframe, its green-black wings glinting in the sunlight.
“Angela!” Liz yelled again.
Her mother ambled out with barely concealed annoyance, as if she were a great master who had been interrupted during the creation of something that would soon hang on the walls at MoMA. The cheap plywood door banged shut in the frame behind her.
“Why are you shouting? This is quiet creation hour,” Angela said.
“How could you tell me that my father didn’t want anything to do with me? How could you let me think that all these years?” Liz watched Angela’s face harden in the sun, which was beating down on them, but it didn’t betray any guilt.
“Who told you that?”
“He did!”
“He who?
“My father!” Liz thundered. “He found me. Or I found him. Accidentally. It doesn’t matter. What does is that you lied to me.”
Angela thrust a hand on her hip. “What was a lie? That we got to travel all over the world together, and live in Ubud and Marfa and Nosara? You met Osho! And Ed Ruscha! You had seen the Taj Mahal and Angkor Wat by the time you were ten. What other child could say that?”
“That isn’t the point. You changed your phone number and told him I was better off without him,” Liz said, not to be deterred.
“Will you stop screaming?” Angela gestured around. A tumbleweed blew across the dirt and the faint scent of palo santo wafted through the air. Liz noticed a smear of orange paint on her mother’s forehead.
“Who are you worried about hearing us?” Liz asked. “Some stoned potter with delusions of grandeur? Artists at work. Better alert the Met!”
“You are so high and mighty,” Angela sniped.
“Just because you could never grasp the life of a creative spirit, you want me to apologize for not being the kind of mother who lives for a bake sale? I don’t aspire to mediocrity, Elizabeth.
And boo-fucking-hoo for you that you grew up around different kinds of interesting people, having adventures, seeing this world instead of being stuck in one tiny pocket of it, collecting Girl Scout badges like a feeble little mouse.
What a terribly deprived childhood you had. ”
Liz started trembling with anger. “You don’t get it.”
“What? Tell me what I’m missing, since you suddenly seem to have all the answers.”
“All I ever wanted was the tiniest amount of stability. A house with four walls that we’d stay in long enough for me to remember where the bathroom was if I woke up in the middle of the night. People I could count on. Some kind of family.”
“We were a family. You and me. We didn’t need anyone else.”
“I did!” Liz cried. She thought she saw Angela flinch, but she plunged ahead.
“I needed someone who was a constant, even a few times a year, instead of a commune sister named Poet I’d never see again or a boyfriend or girlfriend you’d be really into for three to six months and then really not into, just as quickly.
” Liz paused briefly and looked Angela straight in the eye.
“I needed my dad, who wanted to be part of my life.”
“Easy for him to say that now,” Angela said. “How about when I was pregnant and alone? Where was he then?”
“Trying to be there!”
“Really?” Angela said, her voice suddenly becoming rattled by something that sounded like sadness. “Sending money isn’t the same as being there. Saying that you’re ready to do the right thing isn’t the same thing as being a father.”
Liz took this in. Angela deflated further, a blow-up mattress unplugged from its power source.
“Every time he flew in, I saw that we were holding him back. That we were a duty to be fulfilled in the name of doing the right thing. I didn’t want to be an obligation, and it’s the last thing I wanted for you.
I wanted you to be loved. Not because someone felt they had to, but because they chose to.
Actually—no, because they didn’t have a choice about it.
Because loving you wasn’t even a question. ”
Liz felt knocked sideways. Had Angela really made the decisions she did for Liz’s benefit?
Liz pictured her mother, practically a child herself, cast out by her own parents, with no one to lean on, still making the bold and brave choice to do it alone.
To shield her child from the insufficient and subpar involvement of a Disneyland dad who popped in from time to time bearing a Barbie or jumbo-sized Hershey’s bar.
That wasn’t parenting—that was visiting.
And yet, even though Liz yearned to embrace this vindication of Angela’s actions, she couldn’t fully endorse this rendition of events.
It was like trying to believe in the stories of the Bible but bumping up against the facts: How exactly did the Red Sea part? Was it God or just the tides?
Liz said, “You didn’t even tell me that he had met me. You let me think that he was never part of the picture. You just wiped him out of existence and left me feeling…”
“Loved. Inspired. Lucky.”
“A lot of other things too,” Liz said, fighting as always against Angela’s inability to contemplate a narrative other than her own. “I should have at least known he tried. It wasn’t your place to deny me that.”
“Then whose was it? Besides, I’d say Osho and Nosara were a better trade.”
“Why can’t you ever admit you’ve done something wrong?”
“Because I haven’t,” Angela said.
“You are TOXIC!” Liz screamed, years of pent-up frustrations and resentments that had been snowballing abruptly finding expression in a blizzard of rage.
“I’m done with you, Angela. I am done. I don’t want me or my baby around your narcissistic bullshit.
” Angela opened her mouth to respond, but Liz cut her off.
“I mean it. Don’t text my boyfriend, don’t call me, don’t break into our house. Stay away.”
Liz turned and walked to her car without looking back.
When she got into the old Audi and sank into the driver’s seat, which was practically molded to the shape of her body, Liz took a deep breath.
On some level, Liz recognized that this had been brewing for a long time, and that she had finally expressed so many things she’d been keeping a lid on for years.
Jayne would be proud. Jayne, the therapist whose calls Liz was ducking because she was running out of reasons to keep skipping and rescheduling appointments.
Jayne, whose job it was to tease out irregularities in Liz’s demeanor so she couldn’t get anything past her, the way Liz could with Preston, or Cara and Madison and Freya, or her favorite barista at the coffee shop.
Liz knew she’d have to confess everything to Jayne soon.
Liz also realized that even though she had technically regained a father, without having him or Angela or Victoria in her life anymore, she had essentially orphaned herself. Liz was truly alone.