Swallow the Ocean (10 page)

We sat on the living room floor and watched the president on TV. His cheeks trembled as he spoke. My sisters and I cheered. The hatred we felt for him was very pure. He was a bad guy—both my parents agreed.

“The tide is turning,” my mother said quietly, from her chair. I turned my head to look back at her. She meant more than the White House.

She could name the forces of evil. Rasputin, Nixon, Kissinger, Lee Harvey Oswald, Del Monte, Mattel, Lieutenant William Calley: they were all on the list, forces whose influence extended back and forth through time. Playing with a toy made by Mattel, taking a bite of food made by Del Monte, hearing a story about Rasputin—these things marked you as indelibly as napalm. She didn’t say it directly, but I knew my father was on that list too.

I listened to her. Took in every word she said. I carved out a place for them in my mind. Doubt and belief were beside the point. I lived in her world, was latched to her side; I needed to understand the rules.

My mother’s family—my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and fifteen cousins—lived in Colorado at this time, and each summer the whole clan gathered for a reunion at a church camp in the Rocky Mountains. We hadn’t been for two years, though my mother kept promising us a trip. She was still in close touch with her parents. And there had been phone calls back and forth all summer, Amos and Sadie urging my mother to come for the reunion, my mother equivocating. We packed our suitcases—they sat in the front hall for two weeks, but our departure date kept slipping. My mother even bought plane tickets. Only we never made it to the airport.

After he moved out, my father phoned my mother’s parents and begged them to get more involved, to come out and see my mother, to intervene where he had failed. My grandparents were in a tough spot. My father was the estranged husband, and my mother their favored child. Why should they listen to him? Plus they had no daily contact with my mother, and she could be quite convincingly sane, particularly on the phone. Not to mention a little intimidating. And most of all, it was just too painful for them to believe she was ill, even though they’d been through this before.

Amos’s older brother Frank had had similar trouble. It started one morning in the mid-1940s when Frank’s wife called Amos for help. He found Frank locked in a bedroom, exhausted after a long night up “fighting the devil.” Frank had an iron poker from the stoker furnace in his hand. He’d somehow bent it into a perfect circle. Did my mother know about this? Or about the little book Frank wrote that described a hitherto unknown force that repelled just as surely as gravity pulled? Did she know about Frank’s hospitalizations, about the electric shock and insulin shock therapy he received over the years? I know only because late in life Amos recounted this story in the autobiography he wrote for his grandchildren. Did my mother know, did any of them know, that there is a genetic component to mental illness?

We never made it to Colorado that summer. In fact, my mother never got on an airplane again. She must have felt she owed us a trip, though. The week before school began she roused herself, left the house for the first time in months, and took the three of us on an impromptu midweek car trip.

We drove up to Clear Lake, a sleepy resort town northeast of San Francisco. We listened to country music on the radio, singing along with the now familiar voices of Merle Haggard, Mel Tillis, and Tammy Wynette, whose D-I-V-O-R-C-E song seemed to play every hour. It felt vaguely dangerous to have my mother at the wheel—my father had always driven on all our trips.

The hotel where we stayed had a miniature golf course. I could not have been more charmed: moving drawbridges, tiny castles, waterfalls, little German towns. My mother was surprisingly good. After three days at the hotel, Sara and I were gaining on her, just a few points off par.

I felt certain my father would be happy to hear about our trip. We had been out of the house for three days. Plus, miniature golf was a sport. He’d like that. When we piled into the car the next Friday and told him about the trip, he didn’t say anything. He let us chatter on as we drove to Vince’s, the neighborhood Italian restaurant we’d been going to for years, even back when we lived on 12th Avenue. People crowded into the front vestibule, lined up waiting for tables. Toni, our waitress, gave my father the high sign, and we slipped past the line, into a booth in Toni’s territory, where an open Heineken was already waiting for my father on the table.

My father fished change for the jukebox from his pocket—three songs for a dime. Each booth had its own machine. Plastic grape leaves hung from the ceiling. The oil paintings on the walls were of ships in the harbor of Genoa, the city Toni and Vince, the owner, had left twenty years before. I flipped through the metal pages inside the glass bubble on the wall. I chose “Blue Suede Shoes,” Sara picked “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” and Amy chose “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Old Oak Tree.” The sap.

Toni came back with three glasses cupped together between her hands. The milk came in small thin glasses, and it was always just slightly warm.

“A cannelloni, and three half and halfs?” she said, writing the order on her pad before we even nodded back at her. Half and half—half spaghetti, half ravioli.

There’d been a rough spot at the start of summer when we’d started coming without my mother, and my father had had to explain to Toni and Vince that they’d separated, but now everything was running smoothly.

Amy asked if she could go up front and watch Vince toss the pizzas. My father nodded, and she slid out of the booth, a month shy of her fifth birthday but already at ease in the crowd. She made her way to the front of the restaurant and stood beside the stainless steel counter to charm and be charmed by Vince, his eyes moving easily between her and the white dough, which he first punched, then tossed on his fists higher and higher into the air.

After she left, my father turned to us.

“If your mother took you away some place, like Portland, you’d call me, wouldn’t you?” he asked.

“Why would Mommy take us to Portland?” I asked.

“Say she did.”

“We’ve never been to Portland,” I said.

“We’d call,” Sara said.

He looked at me. I nodded. “We’d call,” I said, sipping my milk, trying to make it last until the half and half came.

He made Sara and me repeat his telephone number out loud three times each.

Chapter Nine

THE BELL SOUNDED, and thirty-five pairs of eyes turned to Mrs. Pirelli, who stood at the front of my third-grade classroom. “Earthquake drill,” she said, and then, with a downward motion of her hands, “Drop.” We dove under our desks, doing the California version of duck and cover, turning our backs on the windows to shield our heads from falling glass. There wasn’t enough desk cover for all of us. We giggled and squirmed, banging our heads up against the metal undersides of the desks, but we were not afraid. It was just a drill. And in any case, earthquakes didn’t scare us. They came with the territory.

Personally I liked earthquakes, even hoped for them. When I woke in the night and the windows were rattling or the bed was softly shifting under me, I felt more excited than afraid. In the morning I’d go to my mother’s room and get in bed with her for a few minutes before getting ready for school. She’d ask if I’d felt the quake, and I’d remember it like a dream. We’d listen to the news on her clock radio to find out how big it had been. I rooted for high scores, and though I have no solid evidence for this, I have the feeling my mother did too.

The biggest quake I’d ever been through was in the fives, which rattled the house but did not break anything. I wanted to know what a six felt like. My mother had explained, my teachers had explained, about the Richter scale. How it is exponential, how eight is much, much bigger than two times four. But still.

Ritchie Meyers crawled over from another desk to get next to me. I stopped giggling and scrambled over Lisa, my best friend, to make sure he didn’t touch me. He said he was my boyfriend. He said this frequently, loudly, in front of the whole class. It shamed me, utterly.

Once Mrs. Pirelli made Ritchie and me team captains for kickball. We stood at the front of two lines of children, and Ritchie said, so everyone could hear, “Two lovebirds together.” Without even thinking, I kicked him in the shin. Unfazed, he smiled at me and said, “A love tap from my girlfriend.” My head spun in impotent rage.

At recess three times a day he chased me. The other two worst boys in our class, his friends, rode herd across the playground to help him corner, then catch, then kiss me. I spent many recesses trapped inside the girls’ bathroom, the only safe spot. Even there, Ritchie and his friends taunted me from the doorway, slapping a foot over the threshold, threatening to come in, then jumping back again.

Sometimes Lisa spelled me. She’d put on my big blue fake suede coat, pull up the hood with the fake fur, and set off running. I’d wear her navy blue parka. For a while they’d be fooled and chase her. She ran fast, much faster than I did. They rarely caught her, and even when they did, when she turned around and peered at them through her thick brown frames, they peeled away, unwilling to kiss a girl with glasses.

Lisa Adelson and I had met the year before, thrown together as the only girls in our reading group in the second grade, and had been inseparable ever since. Lisa wore her straight brown hair in two high riding ponytails, gathered tight above either ear. She was skinnier and faster than I was, and she wore glasses. Otherwise we were the same. Her parents had been divorced since she was five. Now that I too packed a backpack on Fridays and went to my father’s, we were even more closely bound.

We were in third grade now, and at least for me it was not going well. My teacher was tall and strict, and for the first time in my life I was not the pet. Everybody could read; I was no longer a prodigy. We were concentrating on penmanship instead, and my letters would not grow smooth and even like the script on the laminated sheets of paper over which we labored. Also, Mrs. Pirelli did not like it when I was late for school. I was late pretty much every day.

And then there was Ritchie, ever at my heels. At the end of each school day, Lisa and Laurie Mori escorted me from the schoolyard, two small bodyguards on either side of me. Ritchie and his friends followed, one step behind us, talking about us loudly, while we pretended they were not there. Laurie lived just a block up from me on 24th Avenue. I’d hide out at her house until Ritchie and his friends got bored waiting for me outside.

Something dark, something ugly was working its way over me, latching onto everything in my life. Those boys knew it. They smelled my fear, sensed my shame, knew I wouldn’t have the guts to turn around and dare them to kiss me, knew I wouldn’t have the confidence to go to a teacher for help, knew I’d make a perfect victim.

So I hunkered down and waited them out at Laurie’s house, determined not to let them anywhere near my house, not to lead them straight into the core of my weakness.

At home my mother grew both vaguer and sharper. Her presence in the house shifted between a kind of vacant absence, when for hours at a time she was unaware of us, to an unshakable vigilance, when she required knowledge and control over the most minute details of our lives.

Though she was often unreachable, lost in reveries, communicating with presences we could not see, her illness did not bring on collapse. She never became an invalid, someone to be taken care of. Rather she pared down, whittled herself to a fearsome point. For the things that did concern her, she had an inexhaustible energy. Her authority over us grew with her illness. She occupied the center of my consciousness as surely and completely as she had in my early childhood, only now the central chord was dread, not wonder.

Her hands were still on the reins of the day-to-day workings of our lives. She deposited the rent checks, which the neighbors who were our tenants slipped under our door. When a tenant called to report a leak, she got a plumber. She paid the mortgage each month. When people moved out of the building she painted apartments, placed ads in the paper, and rented them out. She still made lunches and got us off to school. To the outside world she appeared normal, or normal enough. She never really lost her grasp on reality, in the sense that she always understood how other people would see her. Her paranoia was self-protective; to the uninitiated she kept mum about her true purpose on this earth.

When summer ended, she began to leave the house again. Done erasing the past, she now had business to attend to in the world. She’d take the station wagon—which had collected parking tickets on the windshield all summer and miraculously had not been towed—and go to the grocery store, or the bank, or to the fabric store to buy more patterns and polyester print fabrics for the tops and pants she sewed for us. Sometimes she’d be gone for hours at a time, and we had no idea where she was or when she’d be home.

When she went out, she no longer wore dresses or skirts or high-heeled pumps. She’d shed femininity and sexuality along with marriage and domesticity, adopting a uniform of her own—baggy polyester pants with elastic waistbands and plain blouses on top—in dark colors: navy blue, hunter green, and gray.

Amy and I still liked to rummage through her deep walk-in closet and play dress-up. We’d work our way through the hangers and piles of old clothes on the floor—short, tight, 60s-style dresses with A-line skirts in funny swirling oranges and greens—clothes from the days when my parents went out every Saturday night, my mother in black patent leather heels, a blue dress that came just above her knees, and an onyx brooch set in curling silver at her throat.

The sky blue wool coat with white rabbit cuffs and collars that my father used to help her into still hung in the back of the closet. If I pressed my cheek to the sleeve, ran my nose over the soft fur of the cuff, I could still catch a whiff of my parents’ romance, could imagine my mother stepping down the stairs of her hotel in Paris. That was the woman I aspired to be, even if she no longer did.

She took to wearing a beige-colored trench coat whenever she left the house. Summer, winter, spring, and fall, that coat covered her body, muffled her shape, and redefined who she was. That coat loomed across the playground when she came to pick me up from school. It was instantly recognizable as she rounded the corner of our block. It harbored anger in its folds. It flapped in the wind. That coat made scenes wherever it went.

A woman in a trench coat, with graying hair of a certain length, can still make my heart stop—perhaps because my mother always wore the coat in public, and it was in public that she was most damaging. On the city bus I sat next to her. She laughed out loud. At nothing—or something that came from the inside. People on the bus turned to look. The pressure of their eyes on my skin exhausted me. The gaze of a woman across from us passed over my mother, then rested on me. I had a choice—look the other way and pretend not to be a part of her, or move closer and try to make it look as if we were talking, as if something I said made her laugh. Own her or disown her.

In the Tea Garden we came upon two teenage girls with long hair and thin faces, wading in the pool under the wooden bridge. Feet bare, pants rolled to their knees, they were scavenging coins from the bottom of the pond. People strolling through the garden turned their heads to follow the girls with their eyes as they passed, but no one said anything.

My mother stopped dead in her tracks. She watched for a moment, her face stiff, her lips drawn in. She moved in towards the girls suddenly, leaving me holding Amy’s hand on the stone path that traversed the water. The girls turned; they could feel her coming.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked, her voice sharp and staccato. They stared back, blank and stunned. “Get out of that pond,” she yelled with enough menace to bring them out fast. They grabbed their shoes, not looking up at the small crowd that had now gathered around us. They pulled their socks on over wet feet. My mother stood over them.

“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” she said.

The girls fled, edging past Amy and me, frozen on the narrow bridge. I wanted to sink into stone. One of them turned as she passed me, her long straw-colored hair rising and falling on her back. “Fuckin’ crazy,” she muttered.

I looked to my mother. She stood steady, stalking the girls with her gaze as they went, her coat billowing behind her in the afternoon wind.

At school we read the story of the Five Chinese Brothers. Each of the brothers had a special power. The first brother could swallow the ocean. He knelt down on the shore, and in one long gulp he drank the water. When he stood up, his head was huge and wobbly-looking on top of his thin body. From the picture you could see how hard his cheeks were straining, pulling at the seams, the way they do when you try to hold in a big gulp of air. He sent a little boy out to gather all the fish flop-ping on the exposed sand. The boy walked farther and farther out. Maybe he got greedy, or maybe each time he was about to turn around and go back to shore, he saw one more thing he wanted, a lobster scuttling over the sand, an abalone shell iridescent in the sun. The first brother waved his arms in the air, but the boy could not see him. He couldn’t yell—his mouth was full of ocean. He wobbled back and forth, nearly toppling under the weight of his big head. Finally he burst.

“It is hard,” the book said, “to hold back the ocean.”

In the aftermath of our trip to Clear Lake, my father got a restraining order prohibiting my mother from taking us outside the city of San Francisco. This, like the divorce papers, arrived in the mail, and like the divorce papers it sent my mother into a rage.

Perhaps that’s what set her off. Or maybe it was something else entirely—some minor infraction of the rules committed over a weekend visit to my father’s—that made her yell at Sara and me. All I know for sure is that Sara’s guitar was leaning against the wall by the piano in the front hallway. My mother reached for it, wrapped her fists tight around its neck. She lifted the guitar high above her head and brought it smashing down into the wall. The amber frame crushed into the hollow interior. The strings howled as they snapped. The smell of splintered wood bit the air. My mother stayed in motion, too fast to track, plumbing between walls. Standing tall, lifting what was left of the guitar, she brought it crashing down again and again and again into the doorjamb. When she was done, she clutched six inches of guitar neck in her hand. The metal strings, still wound tight round the tuning keys, hung loose like severed veins.

I was very still—breath hard in my chest, straining to my throat as I watched and waited to see if she was done, ears perked, every muscle straining to the noise, fingers and toes slightly numb from the blood pulsing into them.

Did she stalk away? Run from the house? Retreat to her bedroom convulsed by sobs? Perhaps she sat in silence in the big chair at the head of the dining room table, so that none of us could move. I didn’t know if it was over, or if she was just pausing for breath. I was fixed in place for an hour, for two hours, waiting to see if she would rise again, my body still, my heart noisy against my eardrums, long after my breathing returned to normal.

Maybe that day with the guitar it was like this: She went to the kitchen. She made toasted cheese sandwiches in the electric griddle. She called us in for dinner and we ate, together, in blistered silence.

Once she threw her purse through the living room window. I didn’t see the window break, but she sent me to retrieve the purse from the front yard. I crept through the bushes, under the acacia tree, where shards of glass were buried in the deep green ivy. The purse was white. I was wearing my tennis shoes without socks. I was afraid I would step on glass. I was even more afraid someone would see me.

Less than every day, but more than once a month, my mother tore up the house. She broke windows, battered walls, scarred furniture. Amy would hide under my bed. Or both of us would hide in the deep walk-in closet off our bedroom, listening, on our knees, following my mother’s heavy footfall through the apartment, and then the sound of things shattering. (Dishes against the wall? The iron through a window? An upholstered seat ripped loose from a dining room chair flung against a mirror?)

Over time her rage shifted from the inanimate objects in the house to my sister Sara, who, with each passing day, was drawn deeper and deeper into conflict with my mother. Sara, who was twelve, thirteen, then fourteen, running through her shoes, becoming lanky and curvy all at once, painfully aware of how awkward she looked in the clothes my mother sewed for us, chafing at the regulation of our lives. Sara, who’d come up in easier times and lacked the instinct for dissembling that Amy and I quickly acquired. Sara, who stumbled again and again into my mother’s fury unwary and undefended. Sara, whose body stretched inexorably towards womanhood, filled with the threat and promise of sexuality, which seemed in itself an affront to my mother. She would have kept us all small, towed behind her by the invisible string of her will, like the baby ducks in the Tea Garden, knowing nothing but their mother’s wake. Sara would not stop growing.