A Parallel Universe

"Hey, Sweet Petunia!"

Fresh from an anti–Vietnam War parade through the streets of Berkeley, California, my mother, Gracie, explodes into my sterile white hospital room decked out in one of her velvety, rainbow-hued robes, three Zuni turquoise necklaces, and her favorite ring that's adorned with a gigantic silver eagle, its wingspan the width of her hand. She's woven a crown of iridescent pheasant and crow feathers into her honey blonde hair, and she's clutching a bunch of daisies I'm sure she's filched from somebody's garden.

"Imagine me a grandmother!" Gracie exclaims in her throaty voice as she hurries to my bedside, plants an extravagant kiss on my nose, and stands beaming down on me.

I've just been in labor for twenty-four hours—during which I have, according to the standards of womanly heroism prevailing in the early seventies, rejected all medication. I resisted the doctor's recommendation of a cesarean section and huffed and puffed my way through labor until I was light-headed. The baby someone finally plopped on my breast was coated with a creamy white substance. I thought he was a fish—a floppy salmon maybe. It was through that haze of exhaustion that I caught a glimpse of my son before two latex-gloved hands whisked him away to a plastic box-bed in a nursery down the hall. Then I surrendered to the painkillers.

Stupefied with both exhaustion and drugs now, I'm sobbing into my pillow, hair matted to my scalp with sweat. I don't know where I am. No notion why I'm here. Before my mother's arrival, a nurse had peeked into my room with a worried look and asked me for my name. I'd stared back blankly.

"How's my Sweet Petunia!"

Slowly, Gracie swims into focus, a blur of lavender against the white wall, reeling me back to reality. I'm twenty-four years old, but my mother's scarcely forty. Though the blonde hair that haloes her face contrasts with my dark flyaway curls, we share the high cheekbones that Gracie has always attributed to a mysterious Native American ancestor. To Gracie's delight, people often mistake us for sisters.

My mother's face is wide eyed, as unwrinkled as that of the fifteen-year-old child she was when she fled her Virginia family to elope with the forty-year-old defrocked, gawky professor, with his unshakable convictions about the malevolence of human institutions, the passionate green eyes and unruly hair I'd inherit. She was carrying only a few pieces of clothing and her arrowhead collection in a castoff suitcase. A year after my mother took off with her professor and headed for California, I was born, but before I turned two, my father wandered off to begin a new life in Los Angeles with a fresh crop of young disciples, leaving Gracie and me to shift for ourselves.

Scarcely out of childhood herself, her own mother dead since Gracie was a toddler, disowned by her family for eloping with her big sister's favorite professor—"that blasted German kike," as her father called him—my mother had turned survival into an elaborate game of chance.

Utterly unprepared for teenaged motherhood, Gracie concluded that rules were for morons. She might launch into a soft-shoe routine or a few bars of "The Beer Barrel Polka" in the grocery store checkout line, while I tried to disappear within the folds of her skirt. Staid matrons of the conservative L.A. suburb where we rented a gardener's cottage stared, their jaws agape, but such reactions only encouraged Gracie. Any attention was better than none.

For my entire life, I've been the quiet one, the mute attendant in Gracie's rackety world. I spent my childhood brooding in her shadow, my tangled hair that I never allowed her to brush spilling over my face, while my mother, in her gauzy skirts and bright, flowing hair fluttered like a moth to the spotlight. When she tried to drag me off to extravaganzas or on extended hitchhiking trips...