Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [87]
“Here’s some!” I said triumphantly and picked up three little diamonds. “Where are we putting these?” I asked, looking up at Kate.
“Um, I say we put them in this little jewelry pouch over here.”
I handed her the diamonds and kept looking. “Move your feet,” I told Kate, and she lifted one foot and held it up for me to look under and then lifted the other and held it as long as she could.
Julia must have thought we were working on commission because she came around to where I had found my diamonds and started searching there, sort of pushing me out of my sales territory. I stood up and began looking on the edge of a destroyed armchair. It had tattered arms from my mother dropping lit cigarettes on it, and big stains on its seat. I gently moved my hand back and forth over the ratty, burnt arms looking for a girl’s best friend.
Julia found six more diamonds in the carpeting and Kate found one single diamond still in the coke bindle tissue paper. At that point we decided to have lunch.
After lunch I resumed my work at the bookshelves. The diamonds somehow reinforced what I had been thinking when I had assigned myself to the bookshelves, that Mom put things in strange places, places she was in no condition to ever find again, and I wanted to make sure that the three of us found everything. The thing is, the three of us weren’t looking for the same things. I was still looking for something very specific, though I didn’t know where or what it was. I wasn’t going to leave this dump without my mother, whatever she was.
I had wanted her to die. In that way, the final phone call was what I had been hoping for. It’s over. She’s dead. She’s finally dead. It was of course shocking that my mother was dead, but the second thought was, My God, what took so long? The woman survived two decades of what Nicolas Cage could endure only a single long weekend of in Vegas. My mother was Leaving Ladue, Leaving East Hampton, Leaving Bronxville, Leaving Naples, Leaving the Upper East Side, and finally Leaving the West Village. Wishing Mom was dead had been a desire for sense. Here was a person who should be dead. She had eluded the most serious of conditions, overdoses, falls, accidents, small fires. Death was the thing that would make sense. Wishing she would go was also a desire to feel loved by her. If she died, then I would have had a mother who loved me but just happened to be dead. If she continued living, then I had a mother who was killing herself slowly while I did nothing. This must have been a very different experience for Katharine and Eleanor and Julia, because they’re not alcoholic. They probably felt bewildered at how this could happen to someone. As an alcoholic myself, I know exactly how this can happen, and furthermore I know this could happen to me.
As I flipped through a Julia Child cookbook, I spotted a recipe in Mom’s handwriting for frozen rum raisin ice cream. It was written in pencil on the back of a card from the Oak Hill School. There was an oak leaf on it and it said OAK HILL SCHOOL at the top and then read: “This is to certify that . . . Jeanne Darst . . . has been recognized for . . . outstanding work and cooperation in French class. Date . . . October 1973.” I think I’ve turned out fairly decently, considering I was learning French at four years old in St. Louis. On the back is the recipe for frozen rum raisin ice cream:
Finely chop ½ cup raisins and soak in ½ cup dark rum for an hour. Whip 1 cup heavy cream and fold in rum raisin mixture, ½ cup macaroon crumbs and ½ cup chopped walnuts. Gradually stir mixture into vanilla ice cream and spoon into 6 dessert dishes and freeze. Garnish and top with chopped walnuts.