Sometimes I just need to live inside a different story.
My daughter and I drive across the desert to celebrate Christmas. We are heading to Disneyland to experience the Happiest Place on Earth during the holidays. I expect magic. I expect wonder. I expect to forget the real world and embrace the artifice of fantasy. And I (we) deserve every moment of colored lights, glitter and fairy tales come to life, even if they are paid employees wearing tattered costumes.
We get a late start, so it’s dark by the time we head west. The last threads of sun are threaded between windmills and jagged rocks.
My kid is watching Twin Peaks. If I turn my head toward the screen of her laptop, she scolds, “Keep your eyes on the road Mom. We don’t want to die out here.” You know, end up like Laura Palmer on the side of the road . . .
I tell her I don’t have to watch to know what’s happening. I know the show by heart. There was a time in my life when I could not separate myself from Laura Palmer. The same is true for my daughter. We share that connection though our childhoods couldn’t be more different. She is still my child and as such inherited my experience though I try with all my might to erase it with glitter stars and magic wands.
Lonely Souls is playing. Leland Palmer snaps on rubber gloves. He is preparing to give Maddy the dance of her life. Sarah Palmer slithers down the stairs. The white horse of opiates looms just beyond her reach. The white ghost of her daughter’s face is shattered in a picture frame. Everyone gathers at the bar and cries.
“It is happening again,” announces the giant right at the moment when the sun sinks, the sky turns black, and my daughter and I ascend the rocky mountain pass where cars with dead radiators lie in crevasses like remnants of a forgotten apocalypse.
My daughter and I have many talks of Laura Palmer. Laura is the body that becomes all girls’ bodies or so it seems to me. Laura Palmer is us, and we are her. This has not changed in over two decades.
We drive to Disneyland and spend two days in a world of magic and princesses. I am so happy to disconnect from the real, erase the news, and live nothing but fantasy and unreality. In fact, the unreality of Disneyland is more real than anything because it is actually real. It is not an insane twitter of false news. It is not hysteria from a hysterical world. Whoever knew the Misogynist Chief Elect would be in desperate need of a hysterectomy. But I am disconnected from that filtered mediated world of hyper paranoia and bad news. During this real time in the real world, my daughter and I share joy and laughter. I give her a moment of a blessed childhood and in so doing I live the childhood I never had.
As we watch princesses on parade beaming with smiles and waving at their beauty, we are not Laura Palmer though Laura wears a princess crown in her prom photo on the mantel as Leland beats Laura’s cousin’s face to a bloody pulp with his bare hands. Let’s not think about that now.
We watch the holiday parade and notice that the costumes are a bit worn around the edges. The snowmen are dirty, and the reindeer fur seems to have some kind of faux mange. My daughter says, “Is it just me, or is this parade kind of ghetto?” We laugh at this. My kid says she never would have noticed the dirty reindeer feet when she was little. I think, “But oh she would have.” She has always noticed.
My daughter dreams of being a Disney princess. I look at the girls in costumes and wonder how miserable it would be to have to smile all the time, say on days when you have your period or had a bad fight with your boyfriend. I imagine the boyfriends of Disney princesses are possessive assholes who resent the attention the girls get. I imagine being a Disney princess isn’t all it’s cut out to be. But these are fleeting thoughts I don’t share with my daughter. I get on with the business of noticing how cute the snowmen are even if they are ghetto.
One day it rains buckets, and the amusement park empties. We ride Splash Mountain over and over while I make jokes about thorny rectums and pull a Great Cornholio during the final deep dive splash. Sometimes (almost always) it’s good not to grow up.
Sleeping Beauty’s castle is absolutely magical. I could stare at it forever. It drips lights and crystal wet reflections. We point to the tallest tower and say we want to live there. We want to move in. In fact we do move in when we secure the velvet bench inside a secret chamber, sip hot chocolate and watch Maleficent turn into a wickedly awesome dragon. Fierce. My daughter and I possess the miraculous ability to be both princesses and dragons. This allows us to thrive even in a world where darkness is taking over the land.
We are swept away by spectacle. We wear matching Star Wars Wampa hats and blinking Christmas lights. I swear the teeth in my hat are real, and I will rip the throat out of anyone who threatens my daughter. That includes the T word which we do not mention on vacation. I am sharpening my teeth now. I will not talk about the abomination who has turned the world on its head, but I will stay on guard. I will be prepared to defend my child. I will keep my teeth sharp.
The drive back to Tucson is long and empty. I stop at the place where the interstate meets the border. Plastic bottles blow through the scrub. Anyone who makes it across this landscape and lives to tell the tale deserves to stay. They perform miraculous acts of desperation, and for that they should be awarded with freedom.
Out here, sometimes bodies end up wrapped in plastic, like Laura Palmer’s expect brown.
Across the horizon Mexico looks no different than the land under my feet.
Last week in the elevator a Muslim woman cried with her head down in the corner. She wouldn’t get off the elevator but rode it up and down for most of the day.
The Mexican janitor sold tamales for the holidays. I bought 24.
On the border, the ears of my furry hat flap in cold dust. My feet are dirty. Sand stings my checks into Christmas red blotches.
The word STOP is painted in white letters on black asphalt. It touches the toe of my boot. I am stopped. Here in the desert. Between the magic we left behind and the work that lies ahead. Stop. If only we can. Rewind. Go back to a time when standing in the desert meant that there was no one to answer the phone. News can’t get through. TV played in academy ratio. Machines ate VHS tapes and spat them out. Crumpled snakes.
I want you rocked back inside my heart.Twin Peaks is playing again. I tell my daughter the story of how I missed the Season Finale because someone stole the battery out of my car. Two dozen donuts from my favorite donut shop in the Sunset District coagulated in the back seat while Agent Cooper went on without me, and I stood in line at Grand Auto in Oakland, California waiting to buy a battery with money I didn’t have.
During the parade at Disneyland, I waved madly at Beast and told him I loved him. He waved back. My daughter sighed, “Oh, Mom.” I have always loved Beast. I have not stopped dreaming of him.
I approach I-10 from the east somewhere after 9 but before 10 pm. Time shifts have destabilized me. A giant orange oblong glows from the sky over the horizon the place where desert dissolves into traffic. I think it is a blimp, a relic from history, perhaps from a world’s fair when the world was a different place. When it was fair. As if that was ever a reality . . . Or maybe Disneyland was dragging its light show east. I wouldn’t complain.
As I get closer, I realize it is a red moon hanging low and huge with the top of its head lopped off. It is magnificent. Aglow with lights they don’t sell at Walgreen’s. I tell the moon I love it, just like I told Beast I love him, and of course I always tell my daughter I love her. I love to share the love.
We talk of our tattoos. She and I are joined through ink on our backs. Trees of hope intertwined. We both reach behind and pat our backs. Solidarity. Together we build our own wall. The wall of life with space to breath and room for leaves to grow and spread against the darkness moving in.
When I get home, I buy a 9.5 foot Christmas tree from a recovering addict. He hugs the tree goodbye and tells it he loves it before tying it to the roof of my car. He says he hugs all the trees to keep them safe. He says he can tell it’s going to a good home.
The cats love the tree and treat it with reverence. They have spent the past three days sitting around the tree absorbing its tree aura. Honoring it. We are a house of trees and branches connected through love and life. Me. My daughter. The cats. The tree. The moon.
The castle glows blue back in California. We turn off the lights and look at the ceiling. Yes, streaks of cobalt light radiate from the center. The tree has lights now. By Christmas it will have ornaments. We make our own world. It’s the best we can do.
