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safety net if something went wrong, which was making her nervous. Her doctor had
agreed to up the dosage on her Valium, but she didn’t like the way it made her feel.
While she wanted to stop taking the pills entirely, she needed them to stay functional.
Something was amiss at the apartment house, too. It had been so fun-loving and gay at
the beginning, but the parties had turned dark, and there were drugs now. (By then it
was the mid-Seventies, so maybe.) Worst of all was the driving—the trac, the heat, the
lack of air-conditioning. Something was going to have to change, or she’d suer a
nervous breakdown.
Then, to my surprise, on the heels of the eeing cowboy, there was suddenly another
man in her life. Several years younger and recently divorced, he was clearly crazy about
her. I’d met the man and liked him, though something didn’t seem right. She was always
a sucker for style, and the men she was usually drawn to—like my father and the most
recent fugitive—were invariably handsome and had a certain swagger, a boyish, selfdestructive
charm, a hint of danger. Russ had exactly none of that going for him, but he
was good-natured and solid, the kind of man who might actually be good for my mother
if she could learn to see past his unromantic virtues.
“Well, I think he loves you,” I said when she asked my opinion about what she should
do. “Do you love him?”
She didn’t answer, so I said, “It sounds like you have a decision to make,” and she
agreed that she did. Neither of us needed to articulate the exact nature of the dilemma:
she could marry a man she didn’t love or return to Gloversville.
The marriage lasted a couple years, one in Phoenix and another in San Francisco,
then crashed and burned. After the split she moved to nearby Pacica, which sat under a
permanent bank of dense, wet fog. Her apartment was situated on a cli, and from it
you could hear the waves pounding on the beach below, and there she went about the
business of once again putting herself back together. She had no job, though, and no
means of getting one. I’d inherited the Gray Death when she and Russ went to San
Francisco and was willing to give it back, but she said no, she was through with driving.
So, when the money from the small divorce settlement ran out, there was nothing to
do but return to upstate New York. It was midsemester, and I was now in grad school,
but I stole a few days and ew to San Francisco, where I rented a truck, packed her
books and other possessions, put them in storage, and promised to drive them to
Gloversville that summer. My grandparents found money for a one-way plane ticket to
Albany. My aunt and uncle picked her up and drove her to Helwig Street, where my
grandparents had evicted their upstairs tenant to make room for her. She arrived in
Gloversville with two suitcases and an ocial narrative. She had not failed to make a
new life for herself out west. Moving to Arizona had not been a mistake. She was not
returning home in defeat, but rather because her father was failing fast, on oxygen all
the time and for the most part conned to his armchair. The burden of his declining
health on her mother was too much, so she was returning to help out. As with so many
of my mother’s narratives, this one was designed for people who knew better—her
parents, her sister and brother-in-law, me. She never cared whether people believed her,
simply that her version of events was never publicly questioned.