Yes, she baked cookies and taught me to swim and took me for doctors’ checkups.
She tucked me into bed and drove me to school.
But she doesn’t really like being a mother.
Even at thirty-eight, Isadora looks like a tree nymph—earthyand feral and somewhat magical. She’s petite, with strong features and wild black curls. We look alike, if you describe us only as five foot two with lots of dark hair and big eyes.
But Isadora looks romantic. Creative men who like to feel strong and vital adore her. And she adores them.
She has a remarkable ability to charm people who are more sophisticated or better educated than she is. She never acts meek, never apologizes, and always follows her impulses. To Isadora, all her whims are valid. She puts herself first because no one else ever put her first, when she was young.
I admire her for all that, but my skin crawls at the way she glows in the light of a new man’s validation.
As I grew up, she was a muse (or lover, or companion) to a long series of male artists, of which my father appears to have been the first. He’s the only one I didn’t meet. Until I was three, we lived in a Santa Fe art studio with that sculptor. I slept on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by aloe vera plants.
Then Isadora left the sculptor for a video artist who was documenting people who decorate their cars. We lived with him until she found someone else. And then someone else.
When I was six, Isadora packed two small suitcases and took us to Rome. There, she was the lover of a famous installation artist. We lived with him in a rented villa. I ate spaghetti every night and slept under a canopy.
A few months later, just as I began to understand Italian, the artist abandoned us. Isadora and I woke up one morning to find ourselves alone. Her boyfriend and his entourage had left in the night. No message.
My mother had zero cash, no work permit, and a maxed-out credit card. We lived off what was left in the fridge while the villa’sowner tried to force us to leave. We were there for several weeks. We got down to eating pickles and stale crackers.
We were eventually rescued because Isadora put on her prettiest dress and went to a gallery opening, where she met an aging ceramicist whose work was displayed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He was English, and he grandly whisked us off to a thatched-roof cottage he owned in his home country. We lived with him until Isadora attached herself to a singer-songwriter who was big on the folk music circuit.
A year after that, we were living with his rival.
We lived with (let me count them) seven other men, and I had seven other schools or remote-school situations. At some point, Isadora got me a handheld gaming console. And later, an iPhone. Even though I was limited to small screens, games became everything to me—probably the same way books become everything for readers. The games were friends I could rely on. There was escapism in the story worlds, but more important was the feeling of being in a flow—surfing subway cars or running through a temple. The jolt of solving a puzzle. The release of vanquishing enemies. The buzz of being good at something.
Saar Adler was my mother’s second-to-most-recent boyfriend. When we met him, Isadora was thirty-five and I was fifteen. Saar had won an Oscar at age twenty-seven in a supporting part, playing a squirmy, anxiety-ridden gangster in a movie full of dark cinematography and brutal violence. But he hadn’t become a star after that. He isn’t a typically handsome actor. He’s short and kinda hairy, a white guy with five-o’clock shadow and a hangdog look. He ended up playing small roles: criminals and sidekicks, mostly. He got married and later divorced. No kids.
Three years before we met him, Saar got hired last minute on aTV show, substituting for a lead actor who got injured on the second day of filming. WhenHighly Classifiedbecame a hit, Saar found himself at forty with a regular gig. He plays a scrappy criminal turned elite CIA operative, and the job has enabled him to buy a nice car and a two-bedroom bungalow in Venice Beach, California. The bungalow is small, but it’s newly renovated and has a plunge pool.
Saar was an artist of a whole different kind, said my mom. He’d been to Juilliard. He’d won that Oscar. She felt his TV show was beneath him and that he was on the verge of becoming a film star of major proportions. But Saar was happy in his two-bedroom bungalow. After having so little acting work for so many years, he felt seriously lucky to have this regular show. He wasn’t aggressive or driven, like his character. He had anxiety, which he treated with medication and a weekly therapy appointment. In the mornings, he worked out for ninety minutes. In the evenings, he memorized lines. On weekends, he slept late, made vegetable omelets, played video games, and went to dinner with friends.
That was it. Saar wasn’t much caught up in the passion of creation. He was no mysterious visionary, no international sensation or enfant terrible of twentieth-century neoclassicism. He was a television actor who was happy to be settled down in sunny California with his girl and her kid.
One night, Saar left a dinner party early. He often had to wake up at five a.m. for all that exercise before work. My mother stayed.
At the party was an American sculptor who lived in Mexico City. Isadora slept over with the sculptor in his hotel that night, and a week later she was invited to follow him to Mexico and live with him there.
Same old story. The only difference was that this time, I had just turned eighteen. I was a senior in high school and a legal adult.
I refused to go with her. I had a boyfriend, Luca, and with Luca came a group of friends I really liked—bright, talkative people who had parties and played in bands. Luca dreamed of making explosive, edgy movies, like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. His low chuckle when he thought something was funny made my stomach flip, it was so sweet. When he first asked if he could kiss me, he bit his lip and looked at the floor like he thought I’d say no. But of course I just kissed him.
After that, Luca and Matilda were in the sunny haze of
making each other laugh,
riding down the freeway in his car, and
losing track of whatever the teachers were saying in assemblies,
so intent we were on the feel
of one another’s skin,
palm against palm.
