The Falling Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

further questions. For once, the world inside my head was dark and quiet. The plane was taking me south and there was nothing I could do to speed it up or slow it down.
    No action was required of me now. I could not stop even if I had wanted to.
    My memories of the past two weeks were hazy, but some moments stood out clearly. I remember the night before my father's funeral. I could not sleep, and at some point, around about midnight I think, I got the bottle of Scotch from my father's liquor cabinet, and I started drinking.
    The liquor did not stop the noise in my head, but the buzz of the alcohol helped drown out the nagging voices that told me about how badly I was behaving, about how ashamed my father would be to see me. I turned on the television and idly flipped from station to station, never lingering beyond the first commercial, until only one station remained on the air, playing old movies until dawn.
    I sat in my father's easy chair and watched a pretty blond actress argue with a craggy-faced man. I knew, without seeing the rest of the movie, that the argument would come to nothing. Sooner or later, the craggy-faced man would sweep the blonde into his arms and she would allow herself to be swept, forgetting all past disagreements. I knew that by the end of the movie they would kiss and make up. They always kissed and made up in old movies.
    My mother and father had fought, but somehow they never got around to kissing and making up. When they fought, they never shouted—but even when my mother kept her voice down, her words had a bright sharp intensity, like the touch of alcohol on an open cut. And my father was stubborn too—he would not give an inch. I remember the time that he told me that my mother was crazy. There was a hard edge of reproach in his tone, as if somehow her insanity had been her own fault.
    A commercial came on, and I downed the rest of my Scotch. I left the television talking to itself and wandered out onto the balcony. My father's house was perched on the edge of a hill, and the balcony offered a panoramic view of Los Angeles, a carpet of twinkling lights, freeway interchanges glittering like distant mandalas, neons flashing, streetlights, houselights, headlights. I stood at the railing, looking down at the city and thinking about my mother. In a moment of sudden dizziness, I closed my eyes.
    I opened them to darkness and silence. No lights, except for the pale crescent moon that hung low over the dark valley. No freeways, no houses, no neon. The cool breeze that fanned my face carried the scent of distant campfire smoke. I could hear an owl hooting in the distance and the rapid beating of my own heart.
    I clutched the railing with both hands, fighting a wave of vertigo. Panic came over me: I feared I would tumble over the railing and fall into the black void beyond the balcony, plummeting forever in endless darkness. I closed my eyes against the vision and when I opened them I saw the lights of Los Angeles, distant and cold, but infinitely reassuring.
    I quit drinking. I did not sleep, but I quit drinking. And in the small hours before dawn, I decided to find my mother. The need to find her seemed linked to my drunken vision of falling and to the restlessness that had plagued me even before my father's death.
    I shifted uneasily in my seat, listening to the reassuring hum of the jet's engines. I tried to imagine my mother's face, building it out of the darkness. A thin face, dominated by restless blue eyes. Short and unruly hair, brown with streaks of gray, the color of an English sheepdog. A slight woman whose clothes were too large for her, whose hands were always moving, whose eyes were bright and curious. The picture of my mother that formed in my mind was static, frozen, but I remembered my mother as being constantly in motion: walking, cleaning, cooking.

    When I was a child, I had daydreamed about my mother constantly. I dreamed that she would come home. How and why she came changed with