“Steph, that’s not true! I love Iris and Mike, but you got married and had a baby and that was kind of it for us.”
“So I abandoned you?”
“That’s not what I meant. We just stopped being best buds—or at least that’s how it felt.”
The door opened and my mom walked out holding the baby who needed to eat.
And the conversation was over.
29 Ten Months, Three Days
If I were Mom, I can’t imagine wanting to celebrate another birthday ever again now that you’re gone. I certainly don’t. And yet her birthday comes again this year the same as it has every other year. Six of her friends put together a small birthday lunch in honor of her sixty-fifth birthday and ask me to join them. I pick Mom up around noon and we ride over to the restaurant together. In the car, we talk about you. We always—and only—talk about you. Or Iris. We talk about her, too.
Once seated, everyone pours a glass of prosecco and makes a toast to beautiful Maureen. They say all sorts of loving, supportive things, which she deserves a thousand times over.
I am last to speak. I raise my glass high, say “Fuck this year,” and pour it down my throat.
• • •
A decade ago, things were good. You were alive in body and spirit. You were the real Harris, the one before the drugs. We made that elaborate birthday video for Mom on her fifty-fourth birthday that she loved. Remember that video? We drove around Houston all day, smoking cigarettes and shooting hours of footage, which you edited—expertly, in my opinion. We seem so happy in it. I watched it several times in a row after Mom’s birthday luncheon. I love how it starts. You used the first section of that Bright Eyes song about the woman who’s flying to meet her fiancé and the plane crashes, and as it’s going down, the stranger beside her pretends to throw her a birthday party, and he says, “Happy birthday, darling. We love you very, very, very, very, very, very, very much.”
We loved that part. Even though it’s about a bunch of people plunging to their deaths, there’s still something so uplifting about it. You used it to underscore the intro title card, which read: “Happy Birthday, Mama. Your family loves you very, very, very much… So, here you go.”
The first shot fades up on you at our first location. You’re sitting at a table, a textured wall behind you, distracted by the goings-on of the noisy restaurant. “So basically,” you say, “before we started shooting this video, we thought, let’s get into the mind of Mom. You know, let’s delve into the depths of—”
The camera pans up to a bouncy, boyish waiter at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant, the go-to when the bars close at 2:00 a.m.
“What’s up, how you doin’?” he asks.
Focusing the camera on the waiter, I ask him to say happy birthday into the camera: “Happy birthday to me!”
I laugh. He bounces around a little bit more.
“To who?” he asks.
“To Mommy,” I reply.
Exuberantly, he shouts “To Mommy! Happy birthday, Mommy!”
I pan back to you. You’re laughing and genuinely enjoying the spirited exchange.
“I’m gonna put some fish sauce here,” the waiter says. “Use it for your fried egg rolls. Here are some tofu spring rolls.” He turns to the camera as if he’s addressing Mom and says: “It’s what your daughter likes.” (He knows this because I used to come in there no less than four or five times a week for these spring rolls. God, they’re so good. I want them right now.)
“My mom likes these, too,” I tell him.
“She likes that, too? Okay!” And he darts away.
I pan back over to you, giving me a thumbs-up. “Okay, carry on, young Harris.”
You raise your eyebrows and smile. “As I was saying, we decided to come to Mai’s because, you know, Mom loves the spring rolls. We figured this was a good place to start our venture into the world of Mother. And also, um, thank you for lunch, Mom. We are charging it to the credit card.”
The next shot is you swiping the credit card at the checkout counter. “Thanks, Mom.”
Title card: We then wanted to speak with all the people who come into contact with Mom on a regular basis. As it turns out, all of them are Vietnamese.
Next, we interview the lady who used to do all of Mom’s tailoring and several women who work at her nail salon. One of them says, “Happy birthday, Maureen. We love you all here!”
Title card: Isn’t that sweet? They love you all here. Every single one of you.
Later that night, we interview your drunk friends. All of them are sitting around a green-felt card table in the extra room of our old house that was haunted and always ten degrees colder than the rest of the house. Remember when Mom held a séance with that woman named Madame Buttons the summer we moved in to exorcise the bad energy? So fucking weird.
We tore down the house that used to sit on our property and built a new one when I was in the third grade. A Jewish family of four had lived there before us. We knew them peripherally. They belonged to the Jewish Community Center and went to the same neighborhood schools. They looked like us: a mother, a father, a son, a daughter. They seemed so normal. But the husband snapped one day and pulled a knife on his wife in the kitchen. His son was in the house. The mother screamed at him to run and get help, but by the time he got back, it was too late. His father had killed his wife and then killed himself. And their kids were left without parents. They were the token tragic story everyone talked about. I wonder if this is how people feel about us now. Are we the token tragic story everyone
