Swallow the Ocean (4 page)

But Suzie wasn’t waiting for me to tell her what to do. She didn’t live in the simple world of mother love and obedience. In the living room the naked insides of the couches glared up at me, insides I had seen only on the rare occasions when my mother vacuumed under the cushions.

Suzie was gleefully dragging one last heavy cushion towards the window, where she had already heaped the others.

“She said no,” I gasped in genuine horror.

“We’ll put them back before she comes,” Suzie said, tossing her head and trying to shake her eyes free from her straggly hair while both hands struggled to balance the cushions.

“Come on—help me,” she said impatiently. I stood and watched, stunned that I had neither the power nor the words to make her obey.

I couldn’t help noticing a small space, a triangle of shade, where one tall cushion leaned against the hard backside of the sofa. It reminded me of the space inside a redwood tree—carved out by fire, shady, triangular, just big enough for a child to crawl into. The cushions were two shades of green, textured and heavy in a paisley, leafy design that caught and reflected the sun where the threads were shiny. Even though it wasn’t a fort yet, even though it was still just a pile of pillows, that first shady place was already big enough to crawl into.

Inside, in the half dark, under the forest of green, I asked Suzie, “Where’s your mother?”

“Dead,” she said, her hoarse voice coming at me out of the darkness. “They found her in the park.”

A picture formed in my mind of her mother’s large body sprawled among the rocks in the clearing at the top of the path that led to the Tea Garden. It was that kind of place, spooky with tall firs, hidden by the rocks. I imagined the flesh sagging on her arms. Terrible. That she let herself be found like that.

Caught up in these images, I didn’t hear my mother’s footsteps on the stairs. Suddenly she was standing in the wide doorway to the living room, hands poised on the high end of her long waist, elbows angled back. I scampered out of my retreat, and the cushions collapsed behind me. The secret place dissolved. My mother was shocked at my direct disobedience. “Laura, what did I tell you?”

Suzie was shy now, her eyes innocently sliding towards me. “We were going to put them back,” I stammered. I looked towards Suzie, but I could see no use trying to explain that I had only followed her lead. Weakness of that kind was no excuse. My mother knew no shades of disobedience. No Stow Lake, no paddleboat.

Out of favor, I slunk to my room. Suzie, to my amazement, reverted to her simpering. Rather than punishing her or sending her away, my mother decided to give her a bath. From my bedroom I listened to the water running into the tub and their light voices. I had no sympathy for Suzie now. She wasn’t even going to be dirty after the bath. Once she was clean—once her yellow hair was washed and shiny—she would look like the blonde girl on the baby shampoo bottle. I rocked Big Baby, my oversized baby doll, in my arms. She was about two feet long, with stiff plastic legs and arms, and a plush, soft torso. I cried into her pink belly.

Afterwards my mother took Suzie into her bedroom and helped Suzie write a letter to her aunt in Manteca. A few months later, Suzie and her brother and sister went to live with this aunt. Suzie’s mother had overdosed in the park, and her father, from grief or drugs, was unstable. The letter my mother helped Suzie write may have been the bridge that got her from her father’s house to a more stable life. I didn’t know or care about those things then. All I knew was that my mother let Suzie use the typewriter, something not even Sara was allowed to do.

Chapter Three

IN THE SUMMER OF 1972, the summer of the Watergate break-in, the summer the last U.S. ground troops left Vietnam, the summer the United States dropped 125,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam, my father decided to take our family on a three-month trek across America. For weeks, he sat at the dining room table in the evenings with road maps spread before him, figuring travel times and mileage. He marked off sights to see, parsing out the weeks between national parks and visits to family in Michigan, Illinois, and Colorado. He traced our proposed route on a large nationwide map. My mother was too distracted to help with the planning, but in red magic marker she circled Livingston, Montana, because the psychic Edgar Cayce had designated that town as a safe zone, away from the coming apocalypse he predicted for the coasts, and she wanted to see it.

The day we were to leave on what we called “the big trip,” I walked home from kindergarten with Sara, giddy with excitement. My father was out front hooking our Oldsmobile to our brand-new Airstream trailer. I stopped to watch, and he let me hold the tools. He knelt at the rear of the car, struggling to fit the iron ball at the back of the station wagon to the metal hitch that extended from the trailer.

I was in love with the Airstream. I loved everything about it—the shiny exterior, the clever use of space inside, the tiny triangular sink in the bathroom, the fact that I got to share a bed with my older sister. There was a tininess about it, an insubstantiality to the walls and doors that put me in mind of dollhouses. I liked the idea of all of us being enclosed in that tight space, of traveling with our beds in tow.

My father muttered curses under his breath from the ground where he lay, trying to force the ball into the hitch of the trailer. The air around us grew thick with frustration, and I began to regret that I had stopped to help. But I was holding the tools now, so I could not slip away.

Most of the mechanical jobs my father did around the house were accompanied by this cussedness. When he had to cut the trunk of the Christmas tree to fit into the stand, when he got under the sink in the kitchen, when he put chains on the tires in a snowstorm—anytime he lay down on the ground in labor, his head hidden from sight—there was this dangerous, angry cussedness. It never occurred to me to question his competence in mechanical matters. He seemed handy and capable to me. He was much handier, for instance, than my mother, handier than my sisters and me.

In fact, he wasn’t all that good at chores like these—an old sore spot. He came from a family of men who worked with their hands. Using his head had taken him far, out of Michigan, away from a factory job, but as a kid being smart had never cut it with his “old man.” Every time he found himself fighting a wrench, he must have felt his own father watching.

My father grew up in a small town just outside Flint, Michigan, the sixth of seven children in an Irish Catholic family. His father worked on the assembly line at General Motors for forty-five years, in the heyday, before the plant closures, before Flint had a 25 percent unemployment rate. Three of my father’s classmates in his graduating class of twenty at St. Mary’s High School were his first cousins. You had two choices after getting out of high school in Flint: join the army or work in the factory. Having sworn never to do either (as my father tells anyone who asks), he left Michigan the day after he graduated from high school.

He headed to California, where he lived for a time with his older sister, Joan, who was married and settled in a brand-new suburb of Orange County. Joan held the distinction of being the first person from St. Mary’s to graduate from college. My father would become the second.

He met Joe Keith—who would become his closest friend of more than forty years—at the community college where they were both working their way to better things. Joe was a few years older than my father, but from a similar background: Irish Catholic, small town, working class. Substitute the steel mills of western Pennsylvania for the car factories of Flint, and the landscapes of their childhoods were the same.

Joe paid his way by working as a carpenter. My father, better with his head than his hands, landed a job selling pots and pans on commission door-to-door. Sometimes Joe worked with him, and the two of them traveled through small, dusty towns in California’s Central Valley and on out through Nevada. They sought out young, just-married couples or—the most fertile ground of all—single women building hope chests. My father’s routine: when he got to a new town he’d stand alone, looking befuddled, on the sidewalk of the main street. Inevitably, a young woman would approach him and ask if he needed help. With one hand going nervously to the corner of his horn-rimmed glasses, he would explain that, yes, perhaps she could help him. He had this job, you see—he was in town to show household items to single women who were employed and might be interested in making purchases. Perhaps she could put him in touch with such women, perhaps invite a group of her friends for a demonstration? This same approach—same story, same nervous touch to the glasses—worked on female bank tellers and drugstore clerks as well. It worked so well, in fact, that within a few hours he and Joe would have names, phone numbers, and appointments for the day. They moved fast, though, getting in and out of town as quickly as possible because, although my father assures me the business was on the up and up, local sheriffs did not look kindly on out-of-town salesmen.

“They were very good pans,” he is always quick to add now whenever he recalls those days. “You couldn’t get pans like that in the stores back then. Not at that price.” Quality aside, some combination of charm, audacity, good looks, and an earnest belief in his product made my father a phenomenally good salesman. After just eighteen months on the job, he was the top Vitacraft Cookware salesman in the country. He was twenty years old and had just finished two years of junior college. Vita-craft rewarded his outstanding sales with a down payment on a new Cadillac. Cars didn’t interest him much by then; he’d seen plenty of Cadillacs in Flint. He used the money to buy two one-way plane tickets to New York instead. In the fall of 1960, he and Joe boarded the
Queen Elizabeth II
to Europe, retracing my mother and Mary’s trip of five months earlier.

Standing next to the Airstream listening to my father curse, I did my best to compensate by holding the tools well, trying to guess which screwdriver he would need before he asked. When my father finally latched the trailer to the car, I followed him into the house. We weren’t in a talking mood anymore. My mother was in the kitchen pulling things from the refrigerator: Miracle Whip, mustard, bologna, packages of individually wrapped yellow cheese, and grape juice. My father urged her to finish loading the cooler so he could put it in the car.

My mother did not like to be rushed. Like a large rock in a stream, time flowed unevenly around her. She never knew where it went. She got up late, stayed up late, and liked eating dinner late. She kept people waiting for hours. Having three small children didn’t help. Three pairs of shoes, three pairs of socks, all that hair to be brushed, so many barrettes to be found. My sisters and I functioned on her time. We could go no faster than she did. We skulked into church after the singing had already begun. We slipped behind our desks at school in the middle of the Pledge of Allegiance. We were accustomed, but not immune, to the disgusted looks of harried receptionists in doctors’ offices when we showed up forty-five minutes late for appointments. Every time we flew to Michigan or Colorado to visit family, the trip to the airport was a nail-biter, with the very real possibility that we would miss our flight. We didn’t know there was any other way to live.

My father, though not punctual by normal standards, always knew what time it was. He didn’t wear a watch, but he knew. Testing him was a game we never grew tired of. Coming home from an all-day hike, I’d run to the clock in the kitchen to ask him what time it was. Walking back to the car after going out to dinner, we’d make him guess the time. He’d pause for just a moment, then say in his most cocky voice, “Oh it’s about ten of nine,” or, “It’s six twenty, six twenty-five.” And always, the clock on the dashboard would be within five minutes of the time he gave.

Before my mother’s engulfing lateness he was powerless. He wielded his anger, his best, his only weapon against her, as the thing most likely to “get this show on the road.”

As it turns out, even the first time they met, my father had to wait for my mother, although “lying in wait” is a better description of what really happened. It wasn’t fate, or even a coincidence, that the door on the landing of their Paris hotel was blocking my mother’s path that evening.

“Russ had spotted your mother and Mary earlier,” Joe tells me. “He left the door open all afternoon, just waiting for them to come down.”

Over the years, I’ve had this story from my mother, my father, and Joe. The basic facts are the same, but the tone and emphasis shifts, depending on who is telling the tale. My father would never use a word like
fate
, nor would Joe, for that matter. Joe recalls my mother and Mary as a dramatic, stylish pair in short skirts and long black coats. He and my father were, he admits, on the make. They’d been concentrating primarily on European women. More fertile soil. My mother and Mary were not good prospects. “Two schoolteachers from Chicago,” says Joe with a smirk. “No chance.” But still.

When my father heard the women’s heels on the stairs, he would have had time to smooth down his hair, perhaps even pick up a book, and arrange himself on the bed. When my mother peeked around the doorframe—dark hair followed by bright eyes—and their eyes met, as he registered the first charge of attraction, he didn’t even have to feign surprise. And she fell weightlessly into the trap.

With the two women standing, my mother resolutely inside, Mary hesitating at the door, they all exchanged names and the regional information that pegged them to home. Michigan, Illinois, western Pennsylvania—they were all from the stolid industrial North.

In a quick aside, or just by some well-greased signal, Joe and my father agreed to pair my mother with Joe and Mary with my father. Mary was tall and Joe was not, so that was that. But as they walked through the Latin Quarter, my mother and father strayed together to the edge of the sidewalk. They fell in step and began to talk.

I think the impression my mother made on my father that night and on Joe, for that matter, stayed in place for years: bold, sophisticated, beautiful, knowledgeable, game for adventure. She knew her way around Paris. She took my father and Joe to a
foyer des
étudiants
for a state-subsidized dinner. Students jammed the tables: French, American, Arab, immigrants from the disintegrating French Empire. The war in Algeria was raging full force. The student foyers were alive with talk of it, and served as a staging ground for the roiling protests that rocked the streets of Paris almost every day.

In the weeks that followed, they formed a foursome and then a threesome. Joe says my mother was disappointed that no romance ever developed between Joe and Mary. But Mary, it seems, could not keep pace with the other three. Joe vividly remembers my mother, fluent in French, stopping strangers on the street to ask questions: What was going on? Who were the protesters? What were the police doing? Where was the best café? Then leading them on.

Once the three of them were running full force from the charging gendarmes, amid tear gas, batons, and rock- throwing students. The heel of my mother’s pump caught in a gutter. All three of them squatted down in the street, huddled around my mother, tugging until the shoe came loose. My father and Joe pulled my mother to her feet. They set off running again.

They never knew exactly who was protesting what. There were the students, there were the right-wing French Algerians who waged their campaign of terror in Paris, and then there were the police, who were shockingly brutal to everyone. For my parents it was all new. The scenes in the streets were thrilling and horrifying. Still, it wasn’t their country; it wasn’t their cause. Mostly they ran.

Among themselves, they spent long nights in conversation. I can see my mother, an inveterate night owl, seated between Joe and my father holding forth with a glass of red wine in her hand, her legs crossed neatly under the table. All of them lean forward in ardent conversation. My mother had a keen interest in politics. She followed the events of the civil rights movement closely. She worried intensely about the bomb. Both Joe and my father admit that she educated them. I imagine her doubly animated in the presence of such an eager male audience.

When the sun came up and they were still out, they walked across the river to Les Halles to eat onion soup and thick bread with the morning workers. Joe says, without qualification, “Those were happy times.”

In early 1961, Joe heard he had a letter from his draft board waiting for him at home. My mother, he recalls, was full of schemes to keep him out of the army. “Sally offered to shoot me in the foot herself.” He declined her offer and went home to join the reserves rather than wait and be drafted.

To force my mother home, my grandfather had stopped sending money. She was dead broke and dependent on my father to pay the bills. Still, they traveled to Munich, Berlin, Amsterdam, and then Brussels. They wrote letters to Joe describing their escapades: car trouble and car accidents, tight money, angry landlords “jabbering” in languages they didn’t understand. In one letter, my mother tells how she had to bring the car around to the front of a restaurant for a fast getaway, while my father gave the police the slip. In Munich, they lived for two weeks on eight dollars, avoiding the landlady, eating every meal at an automat that took their francs for marks, before money finally arrived, wired by my father’s sister from the States. She closes with, “In spite of our troubles, we’re getting along very well and having a good time. Even after this long, we still love each other madly so we don’t care if the whole world is against us.” Only she crossed out
madly
.