Life From Scratch (4 page)

Drawn in by the culture of the times, Mom transformed into a wild child, her knit sweaters and pillbox hats replaced with belted tunics and hair so big that it looked like an Afro.

Some might say they married too young. Some might say they should have lived a little before having a family. But by 1970, James and Mom were headed for divorce. When it finally went through, Mom was 29; the kids were 7 and 4. She successfully fought to get an annulment, to the bewilderment of her navy-man father: “How can you get an annulment? You have three kids!” he exclaimed.

Mom stood her ground: She and James had been too immature when they made their vows for the marriage to count. She wanted to be free to remarry, not just in the eyes of the state, but also in the eyes of God.

Although Mom was awarded custody of the kids, she agreed to transfer custody to James, since he was a good father and had a secure career. She knew it was better for the kids to have that stability. In the bitter turmoil of their split, James decided to move to New Jersey, so he could raise the children near his mother, sister, and her four children. Mom still gets mad when she talks about it. She says the six-hour drive might as well have put them on the other side of the world. From then on, she only saw them a week or two out of every year.

As Mom likes to say, “When it rains it pours.” By 1973, her brother and mother had both died, months apart: he, murdered by his drug-addict tenant, and she after succumbing to cancer. With the kind of blind, mechanical resolve that can only be mustered in the face of extreme grief, Mom opened a leather shop on Cape Cod with her new boyfriend, Ed. She used her savings and borrowed a couple thousand dollars from Ed’s brother, which she repaid in two months. Mom’s true talent and passion was sewing, learned at her Grammie’s side. It allowed her to express her creativity without the rigid rules that had come with working in the school system. But she still made good use of her math degree, setting the prices, tracking overhead, and keeping the books.

With modest pricing and creative designs, business boomed almost immediately. Within months, Mom and Ed had eight employees. Give Mom five minutes to reminisce and she’ll recount the time John Lennon ordered a custom leather suit from her. Dig a little deeper, though, and she’ll admit that the summer help turned Lennon away because he wanted the suit made the next day, a Sunday. The 16-year-old cashier informed Lennon they were closed on Sundays, explaining that it takes more than a day to make a custom leather suit.

Mom shouted, “You don’t say ‘no’ to
John Lennon!
You close the store for a man like that.” But when she ran down the street hoping to bring him back, he had disappeared.

Mom saved her profits to buy a few rental properties. In the summer, tourists filled the apartments and provided enough security that she could travel in the winters. Together, she and Ed explored Machu Picchu, the Amazon rain forest, Ecuador, Columbia, and the Galápagos Islands. They even stayed a few days with Patricia and Pierre, who were then living in Venezuela—their first reunion since Mom’s good friends had left the States a year earlier.

While abroad, my mother watched how the locals ate. South America never left her. Inspired by
agua fresca
, the blended fruit drinks made throughout Central and South America, she concocted smoothies well before the leotard- and leg warmer–clad ladies of the eighties. She kept avocados in a bowl and made fish a weekly affair. And there was always a piece of chocolate hidden somewhere in the recesses of her kitchen.

Three years later, on a blinding spring morning in the mid-seventies, a man named Oliver walked into the shop and introduced himself as an artist and an inventor. He wanted Mom to make wineskins for him out of her finest leather. He showed her his drawings and said they’d make millions.

For weeks Oliver’s lanky silhouette moved, barefoot and shirtless, through warrior poses on the private lawn directly across from the shop. Soon, Mom was bringing her famous smoothies out to him, basking in his crooked smile.

Ed didn’t like all the attention Mom showered on Oliver, but found himself outmaneuvered in the face of his rival’s charisma. Three months later, Ed and Mom ended their relationship. Their business became a casualty of the breakup.

Once Ed moved out, Oliver offered to help Mom convert the garage of one of her rental units into an apartment, lining the walls with cedar planks scavenged from a construction site. Soon, they settled in together. Since Oliver didn’t believe in working for the man, they scraped by with Mom’s tenants’ payments.

Michael was born a year later.

Mom repeatedly asked Oliver to marry her, but there was no pinning this tumbleweed down. He was temperamental, prone to disappearing for days, even weeks or months at a time. One day he took their Volkswagen bus down to the five-and-dime for milk and ended up 1,200 miles away in Florida. Another time he vanished for three months, reappearing to explain he felt like camping in the mountain mists awhile. Mom used to say he probably had kids all over the country. Their relationship was explosive and, like a postcard of the seventies, riddled with drugs and chaos.

By 1979, Mom was pregnant with me, and had taken Oliver back several times. Eventually he convinced her to sell off her rental properties for cash. When he disappeared with the money, she grabbed Michael and the emergency funds she’d secretly stashed behind the kitchen stove and ran halfway around the world to Samoa.

Years later, I asked Mom why she went abroad while seven months pregnant instead of selecting cribs, stocking up on diapers, and knitting booties. She paused, then gave three explanations. The first was that she wanted to put flowers on Robert Louis Stevenson’s grave. The second was that she wanted to see the setting for cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead’s research on teenagers in Samoa. And the third was that she wanted a break from winter on the Cape. I soon intuited that the silence between her answers had everything to do with my father and their on-again, off-again relationship.

During this capricious adventure, my mother astonished locals. Not only was she unmarried and pregnant, with a small child, but she also immersed herself in the culture by renting a
fale
for six weeks. Fales are houses without walls, where crickets and spiders and cockroaches are free to wander in and out. At night, gauzy, white netting was her only protection from the giant mosquitoes.

Still, Mom says a life without walls is the most efficient and harmonious way to live. And it’s also the only way to live in Samoa, where the sun smolders so deeply that it settles into a person’s very marrow. Without walls, the slightest breeze can work its way into the fale and bring a whisper of relief.

Whenever Mom walked through the village, the women along her path would ask her the same questions over and over: “Where are you going?” and, in the same breath, “Where is your husband?” Before she could answer, they’d scoop up little Michael, whose baby blond hair entranced them, and walk a ways with Mom. They soon learned there was no father, no husband.

The women fawned over Mom’s widening belly, bringing her roasted pork, breadfruit, taro, coconut crème in taro leaves—all cooked on brick and wood fires. They made Mom part of their community. Michael and Mom washed these gifts down with Samoan cocoa while I grew strong from within.

Mom planned to stay on those islands forever, wrapped in nothing but the traditional lavalava dress. But as my due date drew closer, reality set in. I was born back on the Cape, where Mom found a small apartment to rent with government assistance. She wrote to my great aunt: “I’ve been paying into the system all these years. Once this baby is born, I’ll need to be a full-time mom.” She certainly couldn’t count on Oliver, and she wasn’t about to put us kids in child care to work as a teacher. “There’ll be time enough for a career,” she added, “
after
I raise Michael and this baby.” It almost seemed as if she was trying to make up for the time she’d missed with her first three children.

Once she’d settled in, Oliver started hanging around again, only to vanish three weeks before the birth. When she went into labor, Mom sent all her friends searching for him. A buddy finally brought him back to their apartment. While she labored through the night, Michael played with blocks on an old mattress nearby while Oliver led a raucous game of cards with a friend on the other side of the bedroom door. The closest my mother got to him was the smell of his cigarette smoke trailing into the bedroom where she lay or the pop of his laughter through the papery walls. Sometimes his voice crackled accusingly when his friend would drop a beer bottle. Other times, he’d call out “Cheater!” when a questionable hand was played.

It was just Mom, one of her friends from the shop, and a midwife in that darkened room when I arrived around midnight. After they left, Mom remembers showing a sleepy Michael his new baby sister. In the still of the night, he leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Mom waited for Oliver to fawn over me, but he never came. When she registered my birth a few days later, he was long gone. There is no father listed on my birth certificate—just a blank spot underscored.

Mom named me Musashi. The most famous Japanese samurai of all time, Musashi was a fearless and calculated warrior whose skill with the sword is said to have been so great that he never lost a duel (including his very first, which he fought at the age of 13). These fights were always to the death: Losing one would have cost Musashi his life.

When I asked Mom why she chose such an ancient and macho name for a newborn baby girl, she simply rolled her eyes and said, “I thought your father would like it.”