Benefaction
This novel-excerpt was published in [port.man.teau]
The Future. Oakland, Ca.
Our publisher calls her the Benefactor, Belle Ann Ryson, lady of inherited California wealth, elderly and alone save two older sisters. Beyond the gaudy proclivities of her rhetoric, she exudes a ruminative if not forlorn manner, which I find odd considering, you know, the bucks. Why she funds our newspaper, I haven’t a clue. Neither do I understand why she’s been writing to me. I edit, among other curious perdurances in this menagerie of media postmortem, the obituaries. Belle appreciates my work. “You treat them as elegies.” It’s a compliment, I think. People live a life and they die and I place an ink blot at the insert of a weekly only printed for its Missed Connections, concert listings, and our ever-popular swine suck, the rag’s open forum to local antagonisms—the police, sanitation officers, councilmen, the neighbor whose delinquent fucking spawn is siphoning gas out of your Prius—or otherwise what passes for public discourse amongst our base.
Belle is decidedly not our base. She resides on the estate of her dead parents in the gated community of Shady Ocean Hill just outside Novato. Why Belle has chosen to offload her story upon me, I can only gesture to my bemusement. I stopped calling myself a writer a long time ago. Fifteen years in pursuit of an ever-worsening Bildungsroman written twelve ways from Sunday, you get the point. But we don’t choose what chooses us—just ask the ex—and since Belle’s fiscal benevolence is my sole means to pay rent in this most expensive of West Coast cities, what the hell. I’ll tell it, whatever it is, the best I can.
*
Belle says it was her perennial dearth of acumen in the stratified discourses of mathematics and hard science that left her mother little choice—perforce—but to purchase (the Mother, I’m told, favored terms of magnanimity or benefaction to any nominal verb) the Daughter’s acceptance to Pomona, so like her sisters admitted before her on academic scholarship Belle could attend one of the Claremont Colleges.
Scandalized, Belle slept at her boyfriend’s flophouse in Vallejo three nights straight in retaliation before deciding (sanctimoniously, she admits that now) to enroll at the state university in Sacramento that her father had saved for during the specious impoverishments of her childhood. It’s here that the Mother (full-blooded, first-generation Korean and bonafide Californian) ceased speaking to the youngest of her three half-Anglo daughters. “There’s always graduate school,” Belle remembers her sisters proffering the interiors of the dinning hall, where pronouncement of her decision still undulated with the violence of a car crash.
Belle graduated Summa Cum Laude from California State University-Sacramento at 22 with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Lit. Thirty minutes after commencement the avatar for Shady Ocean Hill alit the screen of her cell: castrated peace emblem of the Mercedes-Benz. It was the Mother, breathing. The silence she placed between breaths. The pedigree of her pause. And that patience, ancient as mammoth.
Belle stood on the quad in an absurdly diaphanous graduation gown, nothing but a purple string bikini and an infected belly piercing beneath, tribal tattoos stamped most unfortunately about her thighs, a never-not-stoned boyfriend—Carl or Milo or Zephyr, she can’t remember—in the hefty Middle West embrace of two parental dumplings nearby. She still recalls the tassel tickling the back of her hand, the phone hot on her ear, anticipating the Mother’s voice, the bombastic vocabulary the Daughter had not warranted in four years.
“Mom?” The diminutive was all she could manage. The Mother held on for another beat and hung up.
Was it Mom that did it? That small intimacy of a word. At once cosmic and viscous, reductive and dumb. All I know—all Belle tells me to know—is that it’d be the better part of another decade before those two would merit an occasion to speak again.
“After graduation, I extended the lease on my studio apartment in Sacramento and took a job at the Proletariate, a coffee shop in a reappropriated commercial drive-in off Folsom. I worked the register then as a barista, where I learned to adumbrate hammers and sickles and anorectic portraits of Karl Marx out of soy froth. Our motto: history may begin as tragedy but it ends macchiato. We hawked that on T-shirts. Bumper stickers. Wonky trucker caps. What else? I had friends. Lost friends. I never thought about Mother. I was always thinking about Mother. Sold the computer my father sent. Disbanded my email. Adored my cellphone. Text messages, remember? And skinny jeans. Fucking loved me some skinny jeans. Skinny, I never had to go jogging. Never went to the movies. I walked to the park, to the store, to the taco truck. Houses where other people lived. Cat litter, bong water, detritus of bedsheets. Seven years carried by and I turned 29. Mother would be 62, I thought, picturing her tall, full-headed, lathered in pricey product, tailored to the jaw. I remember standing in the square hole I rented, staring at the raspberry cupcake I’d bought, pricked with the kitsch of a single white candle, wax dripping gauzily onto all to vibrant frosting. I was considering the sum of my cutlery. Three forks. One spoon. A corroded steak knife.”
Belle and her sisters were raised in Marin County, California, early 2nd Millennia. Home to such empty signifiers as Hot Pants, Urban Fight Wear, Body by Kale, and Flex-Fueled SUVs. Not that the girls could complain. They never went hungry. Never saw the neighbors shot and their bodies burned. It was just their father. He had the sort of job that gobbled up most expression, shoving it so deeply inside there was a blank distance where a mouth should be. A fuzzy for a hole.
“My father possessed the glitchy mechanics of an old VHS. Those rhythmic twitches. An essential absence. Which Mother felt dutifully compelled to shroud in words. Befuddling life in the most blacked-out Latin. Or, as once I heard her summate, A prevarication to the inscrutable proclivities of pain.”
In the loosely qualified lean years preceding what Belle calls her father’s Colossal Promotion to the Purgatories of Corporate Hegemony, the Mother held a part-time job in the stack catalogues at the Novato library. Belle would join her there after school when her sisters, two and three years ahead, stayed behind to study with friends. The hardbacks smelled of the exhausted leather of her father’s shoes, and it was not unusual to discover the Mother counting the alphabet on her fingers, as if each letter led to a different variable that had to be solved before the book could be moved.
At the age of 13, Belle longed to wear anything other than the three couture dresses the family could hardly afford—Gingham, Poppy Jacquard, Duchess Satin. Each with a rotating set of accessories, saris and belts, that helped mask the wardrobe’s sparsity. The Mother paid for these herself, grimly determined to keep the Daughter upstanding.
“It was as if Mother could smell my desire for cheap baggy jeans, bandanas, and oversized T-shirts like a burn coming from the stove.”
After fumbling onto an article divulging the dough women paid for cancer wigs woven of authentic Asian hair, Belle first tried selling hers to Mr. Benedict, her 8th grade science teacher. One of his worst students, she thought without thinking much, perhaps she was his cutest, with her father’s freckles and chestnut eyes, the sunken cups of his cheeks, and the Mother’s slight olivine glow and the magnificent luster of her tresses, her heartbreakers.
Mr. Benedict (balding dad to three dour Aryans) listened, then asked if he could first test the product. He set a loose strand of her hair under his microscope, and removing his thick glasses, he bent to the ocular lens. Moment. He rose, affixed the glasses again upon his face, and removing a billfold from the pocket of his tweed jacket, he handed over a twenty. “I can only use the one.”
The cause for this shortfall, Belle thought at the time, was obvious. Either the Mother had serviced the baser sympathies of Mr. Benedict in the basements of the PTA, or repelled him with such linguistics that he wanted nothing to do with Belle, not even as a commodity. God knows the Mother could be like that. A binary. A bifurcation. An either/or.
“Twenty bucks didn’t buy much, and I wore Gingham and Poppy Jacquard and Duchess Satin until my father earned the boon that brought our family from the malls of Novato to the McMansions of Shady Ocean Hill, where my garments grew exponentially in number and cost as Mother slipped the dangers of her physique into a thick rodent black Mercedes that fed on tiny oceanic stones embedded within the sheets of a newly pressed driveway.”