Swallow the Ocean (18 page)

I understood that the police were coming. I understood that nobody was going anywhere soon. But I stayed alert. I watched the cars coming towards us on Geary, keeping my eye out for the lumbering brown shape of my mother’s station wagon, which I could spot two blocks away.

My father put an arm around me. “You OK?” he asked. “Yeah,” I said, holding out my hands. “Just my wrists hurt.” He made me bend my wrists back and forth several times. Then, satisfied that nothing was broken, he handed me a dollar. “Why don’t you take your sister inside and get something to eat from the snack bar.”

“OK.”

“Take your time.”

“OK.”

I took Amy by the hand. She was wide-eyed but not crying. Together we walked through the double glass doors into Sears. The anonymity of the department store swallowed us instantly. A Muzak version of “I’m on the Top of the World” was playing over the stereo system. Involuntarily, I filled in the words:
And the only explanation I can find
.

In the children’s clothing section mothers were picking out back-to-school outfits for their children. I held Amy’s hand tightly. “Everything is going to be OK,” I said. Saying this, having to take care of Amy, was good. It gave me something to fix my mind on. I pulled Amy onto the escalator. The snack bar was on the second floor. We rose slowly into an overpowering smell of popcorn. Amy looked at me—her face revealed nothing.

We stood in a long line at the concession stand—teenagers buying slurpies, mothers with strollers getting snacks for their kids. Large white and yellow appliances circled around us. A front-loading washing machine with a glass window was running. We stared into the white swish of water and clothes.

“How come Dad didn’t let me go with Mom?” Amy asked.

I turned from the washing machine to look at her.

“He’s got custody of us now,” I said, stammering across this gulf.

“But how come he had to make her mad?” she asked. “Mom bought ice cream. She made me a cake.”

I looked into the tumult of the washing machine. Then back at Amy. We were almost to the front of the line. There was nothing to say. That’s how it is sometimes. You think you’re in something together; you think you know exactly what’s going on in another person’s head. Then you get a long, dizzy view in, and you realize you have no idea what’s swirling around in there.

When we got to the front of the line, Amy wanted candy-coated peanuts. I let her pick. It was her birthday. The lady behind the counter handed over a small red and white striped paper bag. She had no idea that my mother had just slammed her car into ours. Seven times. I led Amy back to the escalator, still holding her hand. We ate our peanuts. Nobody looked at us. My heart was still thumping. My wrists ached. My whole body was still a jangle of nerves and adrenaline, but nobody in Sears could tell. The worst thing you can imagine could happen to you. Five years, five days, five minutes later no one’s the wiser unless you tell them. There’s almost no limit to what you can shelter within you.

Chapter Nineteen

SAN FRANCISCO is surrounded by water on three sides, but ocean on only one, so the name Ocean Beach is not as redundant as it sounds. The coastline here straightens so you can see beach for miles in either direction. Sand slopes away from the concrete retaining wall for fifty yards and then gives way to the Pacific, big and blue and thundering. Twenty-foot waves break far out and then break again and again until they are tame enough to lap and bubble onto the shore. The tide here changes so drastically that sometimes the water comes clear up to the wall and that fifty yards of beach is gone.

When I was a child I thought all beaches were that big, all salt water that cold. Ocean Beach dwarfed all beaches to come.

First memory: my father and mother on brightly colored beach towels high up in the sand. Fully clothed, they keep their bodies close to the ground to stay out of the wind. My father’s head is propped on his bent elbow; my mother’s head rests on one pale arm extended straight out in the sand. She wears a man’s loose shirt over her stomach, which is still soft from giving birth. Their bodies, turned towards one another, form a curved
V
in the sand. Amy, a newborn, wrapped in a soft cotton blanket, is sheltered in the space between them.

Sara and I flirt with the tide. She is six; I am three. Barefoot, we dance on the wet corridor of sand that sparkles in the sun each time the water pulls away. The beach is strewn with great long ropes of seaweed, curling, hairy, monstrous things with impossible waterlogged bulbs larger than my father’s fist.

“Go ahead, touch it,” Sara says.

I bend down and touch the widest ropy part, just resting the tips of my fingers on the kelp’s brown surface. It doesn’t move. It’s slippery but firm under my fingertips.

We grow brave, hefting its hollow limbs on our shoulders. We watch the line it draws in the sand as we drag it forward.

“Let’s wash it off,” I say. I want to see it shine.

The sun is out, which makes the day bright but does not make it warm. I’m wearing green polyester shorts and a cotton T-shirt with tiny green and white stripes, a brand-new outfit my mother has just bought for me—perhaps to make up for the loss that’s come with Amy’s birth. For the first time in my life, her eyes are not constantly upon me.

Sara and I drag the kelp to the water’s edge. When the tide retreats, we place it in the hard sand and back away to watch. The water laps at it, tentatively at first, licking the sand from the skin of the kelp, then more insistent, pushing, nudging, recognizing its own. The kelp quivers under its force.

A large wave sends us squealing up the beach. Our feet have long since frozen, but this one threatens our calves and thighs. On the dry sand, we turn. The kelp is gone. We wait for the tide to flow back. Then we see it, caught in the curling, pulling spot where the receding water meets the next wave. The kelp lies on the tight sand, resisting the water funneling under its weight.

Kelp like this, giant kelp, grow best in cold, shallow waters like those off the coast of Northern California. The brethren of the giant sequoias that once lined the coast, the kelp too grow in groves, forming vast underwater forests. Each plant latches onto a rock, holding fast, then sends huge, stem-like stipes to the surface where the broad, leathery leaves receive the sun. Kelp make use of every wavelength of light and can grow up to twelve inches in a day. But they hide their greenery with a brown so brown it masks the bright chlorophyll. It’s the smaller weeds, the winged kelp, sea palm, turkish towel, devil’s apron, sealace, and tangle that flaunt their colors.

My father’s voice comes, sharp and crisp, across the wind and noise of the surf. We turn to look at him. He stands on the towel, his brown hair, which he wears below his ears, blowing straight up in the air.

“Sara,” he yells sharply, “hold your sister’s hand.”

Behind him I see my mother, sitting upright on the towel, straining towards us, the tension of her body an exclamation point on his words.

My parents don’t see Sara’s face as it flashes first surprise, then dismay. At six, she takes the business of taking care of me very seriously. She grabs my hand, our fingers interlace. My mother nods at us firmly, her eyebrows locked down in concern. Sara squeezes too hard.

We dance back into the surf after our quarry. In one brave charge, Sara leading, we each grab hold of the kelp with our free hands and scamper backwards, bent forward at the waist over our haul. We make it two feet, when another wave rolls up and we drop our prey again to run to safety.

The water splashes against our churning legs. Sara runs slowly so I can keep pace. My shorts are dark green where they are splattered, and strands of my hair clump together where they are wet. My hand is stiff in Sara’s frozen grip.

This time the kelp has hardly moved. The last wave looked big, but it didn’t pull hard. Emboldened, we spring forward together. Reaching down in the swirling water, I grasp the skinny end of the kelp at my feet. I have it firmly in my hand and pull hard, thinking Sara will grab the thicker end. I see the wave approaching, but it doesn’t look that big. Sara tugs at my hand, I pull back, willing her to lift her end of the kelp.

“We just looked away for a minute. We were watching the baby,” my father will say with a rueful shake of his head whenever this story is told later.

The wave slams into my chest and throws me on my back. Sara’s fingers slip through mine and I go down into freezing water. I’m inside a powerful darkness, eyes clamped shut against the saltwater. I’m dragged along the bottom, against sand and coarse pebbles, then lifted, only to be pummeled again by a force that rolls me and holds me under.

My father drags me from the surf coughing and choking. I hit the air panicked, arms and legs wild, the saltwater tearing at my nose and throat, more terrified than I’ve ever been. My mother pulls me to her, wraps me in her huge orange beach towel, and rocks me in her lap until I can breathe again.

When I get home that day, I stuff my new outfit, my shorts and green and white T-shirt, far into the back of a dresser drawer. I’ll never wear them again.

“It was the meditating, that’s what started it,” my father says, or “It was those goddamn Edgar Cayce books.” Or, softened by a glass of wine, he’ll say, “Maybe if I hadn’t gone into real estate, if I hadn’t worked full-time, if I’d been home more . . .”

My grandmother blamed my mother’s crazy diets. “I just don’t think she got enough vitamins back then,” she’d say, her blue eyes brimming over, “it made her susceptible . . .”

I thought it was the apartment we moved to when I was six. Later, in college, in the first flush of feminism, I said, “Maybe at a different time, if she’d worked, if she’d had choices, if she’d found something to believe in . . .”

In the end, these things we tell ourselves, the names we give the loss we cannot fathom, the demon we fear may still come back for us, are as sad and as small as a child’s sea-soaked clothing trying to absorb an ocean.

In my family we’ve lived our lives as if we are still on that beach. If Amy is always the baby, if Sara never lets go of the small hand entrusted in hers, if my father is always strong enough to drag any of us from the surf, and if I am willing to drown, won’t she be there too, my mother, whole and waiting, on the shore?

People talk about how fast life can go from good to bad. How one day you’re happy, everything is going fine, and then something happens. Someone dies or someone leaves. There’s an illness or an accident. Life as you know it slips away. But it can go the other way too. You can go from god-awful to pretty OK in a single day. That’s what happened to us, and it was just as jarring.

After that day in front of Sears, I didn’t go back to my mother’s. I didn’t pack a suitcase or bring my books or the Little Women. My father took us home, and I began living with him and my new stepmother. My father and Jeni had gotten married a few weeks earlier, and overnight we were a nuclear family again—almost. Jeni was everything my mother was not. She worked full-time and had a successful career. She was organized, neat, and punctual. She took care of things. Dinner was at seven, a cleaning lady came on Tuesdays, and there were vacuum lines on all the carpets when I came home from school. We were normal—stunningly, blindingly so.

We had to get all new clothes of course, which was exactly what I’d dreamed of. Only it didn’t go as I imagined. Jeni was always the one who took us shopping. (Poor Jeni, she was thirty-five years old and inherited three daughters—eight, eleven, and fourteen—just in time to see us all through adolescence.) All I wanted were jeans and T-shirts. Jeni favored a more buttoned- down look and wasn’t used to buying clothes for kids. She’d pull blouses with little peter pan collars off the rack and ask what I thought. “That’s nice,” I’d say, my face revealing absolutely nothing. I’d lost the ability to be direct, to risk asking for what I wanted. Instead I let her take the lead and then ended up hating the new clothes almost as violently as the old ones.

I had one very good year, though. In sixth grade we were the oldest in our elementary school. I was in “gifted,” and my little clique of friends was in charge of the school talent show. We were on an “independent learning system,” which from a practical point of view meant we were frequently excused from class to go across the street to Sears to buy slurpies for our teachers or down to the school auditorium for unsupervised rehearsals. We spent a great many hours refining the moves on our ensemble “Hustle” for the talent show.

The euphoria did not last. By seventh grade I was in a new school, separated from my friends, and almost overnight I seemed to lose my ability to speak, at least outside our house. The sadness of my separation from my mother caught up with me, or maybe it was the long hand of adolescence, which got hold of my voice box. Whatever it was held on for six years.

At first my mother called every night. Then less and less. The phone calls were wrenching, like being forced back underwater when you’d gotten used to breathing air. At the end of each phone call she would say, “I love you.” And I would echo her, with a mechanical, “I love you too.” When she stopped calling altogether, relief was the only feeling that rose to the surface.

The year after my father got custody of my sisters and me, my mother’s brother sued to become her legal conservator. The courts declared her incompetent, and my uncle was given legal power over her finances. She owned the apartment building where we’d lived, part of the settlement from my parents’ divorce. My uncle sold the building so that she’d have money to live on, and she was forced to move. This enraged her further, and she cut us off, swearing none of us would ever know where she lived again.

As a teenager, I was only vaguely aware of these events. Twice in the aftermath of the court proceedings my mother was picked up by the police on what is known as a 5150, a request from a family member that a relative be held for psychiatric evaluation. Twice the doctors who interviewed her confirmed a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. And twice, after determining that she wasn’t a threat to herself or anyone else, they released her after seventy-two hours. That was the law in California: no one could be institutionalized against his or her will. No one could be forced into treatment unless there was imminent danger. My father recalls going to see her once while she was being held at Langley Porter, the psychiatric hospital. She was strangely cognizant of her own situation. “I’ll be out of here by tomorrow,” she told him. “I can fool all these people.”

“Why not just stay, let them help you?” he asked. She laughed at him.

We were at the legal limit of what could be done. I recently learned that while I was in high school in the 1980s, my uncle seriously considered kidnapping my mother and tak- ing her to Colorado, where he and the rest of her family lived. The laws there were different. She could have been forced into treatment. My uncle was in contact with someone who would do the job, the kind of person you would hire to kidnap and deprogram your child from a cult. In the end, he lost his nerve. It would have been a felony. And he must have doubted whether he really had the right. My mother had always been able to get by on her own. In retrospect, the psychiatric determination made all those years ago has proven accurate; strictly speaking, since she lost custody of us, my mother has not been a danger to herself or anyone else. She’s lived a life of almost unspeakably limited circumstance, but it is
her
life.

Most of all, I think my uncle was afraid. My mother would never have forgiven him. She was ferocious. I can still see her standing on the street in front of my school that last day, her body nearly shaking with rage under her trench coat, daring him to defy her. She cowed all of us into doing nothing. In the end the ferocity of her anger, the steeliness of her will, protected the disease. As if the true battle she waged was on behalf of the disease, as if her mission was to let it run its course unimpeded. It’s the only battle she won.

At home with my father and stepmother in the years that followed, we spoke less and less about my mother. What could we say? We were powerless, and you can only rub your nose in that kind of pain so much. My father was determined to move on. I was the hardest case: a moody, serious teenager, a bookworm in a family of tennis players. I brooded over my mother. I could not banish two thoughts from my mind. She was suffering—the echo of her sobs behind the bedroom door stayed with me—and she was alone. My initial relief at being free morphed into searing guilt at having abandoned her.

Sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep at night, a blood-chilling thought crept into my head:
What if she is right? What if my father
is the devil?

By the time I got to high school, I was terribly shy, socially isolated, and convinced that the one person who might have given me guidance was gone from my life. If she had been the one with the magic touch for me, then shouldn’t I have been the one to be able to reach her? I was not the oldest but had been the last one close to her. I felt horribly responsible. I was far too terrified to take any steps towards seeing her, but I skewered myself for what I believed was my own cowardice.