Swallow the Ocean (5 page)

Maybe it was then, just as she put those words on paper, that the idea became fixed in her head: the world was against them, but their love was a powerful, protective force—not a novel idea, but it anchored her existence for the next ten years.

My father had always planned to go back—back to college, back to southern California, back to America. My mother was in deep enough to let him buy tickets home for both of them. They shared a stateroom, choosing the French line because the French were less particular about marital status than the British. According to my father, despite the comfort and the luxury of the
Normandie
, the trip home wasn’t easy. My mother was nauseated the whole time and depressed about returning to the States. To their mutual shock, she had a miscarriage midway through the voyage. Neither had known she was pregnant.

When they separated in New York, nothing was resolved between them. My father alludes darkly to her “hysteria” in the hotel room before they parted. “I knew something was not right,” he says. In hindsight, he sees this as the flashing red light he chose to ignore. He could have gotten out right then, but he didn’t. He was already hooked.

I can’t judge the quality of her hysteria, but I am struck by two things. The ocean voyage from Europe took four days. When they parted in New York, she’d just had a miscarriage, with the attendant crash in hormones that followed. My father may have underestimated the impact on my mother, for whom pregnancy and childbirth caused profound mood swings. Plus, she was back in the United States, where she’d dreaded returning. She had no plans of her own and no firm commitment from my father. Freewheeling it in Europe was one thing, but her family back in Illinois wasn’t going to understand anything short of a ring. Maybe a little hysteria was in order.

She went home to Illinois, my father to California. A few months later, she visited him in San Diego, where he was then in school. She ended up staying, moving in, and six months later, in a midweek civil ceremony, they were married.

Looking back, my father now says my mother was depressed when they met in Paris. Mushroom clouds haunted her dreams, and she felt an almost irrational sense of despair over returning to the United States. His account doesn’t square with Joe’s unqualified “happy times.” I don’t doubt my father, but I can’t help wondering how much the shadow of the intervening years now darkens his memories of her.

All my informants agree on one thing: My parents were deeply in love. Even my father does not stint on this. He’s told me that for years, long after they were married, when they went out together, he and my mother were so intent upon one another, so visibly in love, that people would come over and buy them drinks.

By the summer of 1972, nobody was buying my parents drinks anymore. I didn’t know it, but by then my father was near the end of his wits, and my mother was already considerably beyond hers.

On the day we left, I was upstairs dressing my favorite doll, Big Baby, when I heard a loud crash and then my father’s “mother-fucking hell.” I ran down to the first floor and peered down the entryway steps that led to the front door. My father was crouched on the stairs where he had fallen. The tightly packed cooler he’d dropped had skidded down the stairs and slammed into the front door.

My mother appeared at my side, a basket of laundry in her arms. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. We had planned to leave at one. My father stood up, leaning forward to favor his left ankle. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Sally, are you going to wash everything in the house? If you don’t quit, we won’t get out of here until tomorrow.” This was not hyperbole. We had, on more than one occasion, begun packing the car one afternoon, only to finally pull out of the driveway the next morning.

“Help me with the cooler,” he said. “Then get the kids in the goddamn car and let’s go.”

His anger could still, at times, move her. She left the laundry basket on the step, and went, lifting one handle of the cooler with him. “This thing is heavy as hell,” my father said, by way of explanation.

My mother rushed back upstairs and called for us. “Come on girls, let’s go.” She herded the three of us before her, down the two flights of stairs, and then hustled us into the back seat. My father was sitting in the driver’s seat, looking straight ahead. As she opened the passenger door and started to get in, she turned to look at him, then said, “Oh, wait just a sec,” and ran back into the house. This gave my father the opportunity to expel more angry air. She returned a few long silent minutes later with the laundry basket piled high, wet and dry clothes mixed together. We all turned to watch as she shoved the basket in through the small side door of the trailer. Then she climbed into her place on the front bench seat of the station wagon.

My father drove in silence. He took the turns too hard so the trailer careened dangerously around the corners. We were quiet, held in the tension of his anger. Like being jinxed. Until he said the word, we could not speak.

Sara and I began a surreptitious game of rock, paper, scissors across Amy’s lap in the back seat. We foreshortened and controlled our movements, keeping our arms below the seat so my father wouldn’t catch sight of us in the rearview mirror having fun. I squinted and watched Sara’s eyes on each round, trying to read her mind. Sometimes, just often enough to feed my faith, it worked. Amy, not yet three, followed the steady motions of our hands with her eyes. Sara and I kept score with the fingers of our free hands. Win or lose, we kept a tight silence.

By the time we got on the Bay Bridge, my father’s anger had begun to dissipate. He tried grudgingly to win back our favor. “OK, you turkeys, what did you forget?” he asked. “Everybody got their swimsuits? Blankies? Dolls?” My stomach clenched as I remembered Big Baby sitting on my bed, where I had left her when the cooler crashed.

“Big Baby,” I whispered, mostly to my mother. There was no place to turn around on the Bay Bridge. I knew this. My mother turned to look at me, to judge my level of despair. Then she turned towards my father. “Russ?” she said, testing the waters.

“We’re not going back.” He steeled himself against the shivering wave of sympathy that moved between the four of us, fearing it would swamp the car, reverse our momentum, stop the trailer, turn this whole trip around.

My mother looked back at me again, her eyebrows locked down in concern. I knew that if it were up to her, we’d go back. I hoped she would fight for me.

She said, more slowly now, trying to sound sensible, “Russ, couldn’t we just turn around at Treasure Island and go back real fast?” Then, after a pause, “It’s three months.”

“Sally, we’re not going back for a doll—for Christ’s sake. It’s quarter to four. If we go back now we’re on this bridge until seven o’clock.”

She shot him an angry look, then sat back in her seat. I willed her to speak again, but I knew she’d given up.

Amy flashed a sympathetic look in my direction. A few minutes later my mother turned to me. “Well, pumpkin,” she said, “we can buy you another doll in Oregon.”

I began to cry. My mother reached back over the seat to pat my hand. I pulled away from her and turned into the door on my side. I would rather cry all the way across America than get another doll. I’d take misery and loyalty over betrayal every time. It was something I already knew about myself.

I leaned on my arms against the window, trying to count the silver rails of the bridge as they flashed by, trying to imagine how long three months was. I cried quietly so as not to rouse my father. I wanted to be able to measure out the days, bit-by-bit, moment-by-moment, so I could know how to survive them. But I couldn’t. The silver rails on the bridge blurred together. There was nothing to hold on to. Three months was too big.

Somewhere out there, out past Vacaville, Sara tapped my knee and we began again, silently swinging our fists in time. The words echoed only in our heads.
Row, sham, bow. Rock,
paper, scissors
.

Chapter Four

IN THE FRONT SEAT of the station wagon, my mother sat Indian- style, with Pearl S. Buck’s
New Living Bible
spread open on her lap. She read in a clear rhythmic voice, “Take your son Isaac, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah.”

My father drove silently, one hand poised lightly at the bottom of the steering wheel, the other resting on his knee. We’d been in the car all day, on the road between Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. Behind the station wagon the Airstream pitched gently through the curves. My sisters and I were slumped three abreast in the backseat. The long hours in the car, the summer heat, the hum of the engine, the smooth roll of the tires on the highway, and my mother’s voice had a hypnotic effect. I leaned against the door of the car. Amy, forever stuck in the middle, leaned up against me. I could tell from the weight of her body that she was sleeping. My body was heavy too, but I was wide-awake, transfixed by the story.

“Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his ass, and he took with him two of his men and his son Isaac,” my mother intoned.

She’d decided to read us the Bible from start to finish, beginning the day we left San Francisco. As we traveled north through the deepening green of Oregon and Washington, then east through Idaho and Montana, the slim white ribbon that marked our place in the huge Bible inched its way through Genesis.

We got as far east as Michigan that summer before my father tacked back west to get us home in time for school in the fall. My mother kept up with the Bible reading even after we got home, stopping two years later just short of Revelation.

At church on Sundays in the hard pew next to my mother, I tried to cleave to the minister’s words. The only idea that had really sunk in was that Jesus loved me. The Old Testament was a shock. The language was strange, the morality hard, and this unforgiving God much tougher than anything I’d come up against until then. But the stories held me. From time to time as she read, my mother would pause to explain things to us: what a birthright was and how it could be stolen, what a covenant was and how it could be broken. Some things she could not explain.

“Father, Isaac said, here are the fire and the wood, but where is the young beast for the sacrifice?”

My mother paused for a moment, turned in her seat, and looked back at us. She saw that Amy was sleeping. “Well, that’s enough for today,” she said, drawing the silk marker down between the pages and closing the book carefully. My father glanced at her. He didn’t like the Bible that much. He didn’t go to church with us on Sundays anymore. What he liked were car games, racing to see who could find all the letters of the alphabet on road signs, or who could sight the most out-of-state license plates. My mother didn’t play. Even packed tight into the station wagon, it was getting so you couldn’t be with both of them at the same time.

I sat back in my seat, my mind fumbling over the story.
Poor
Isaac
. I shrugged Amy off my shoulder and turned towards the window to watch the open country. Amy, awakened abruptly, turned to me. Her face was crumpled up, eyes beseeching. All she wanted, all she ever wanted, was to lean up against someone to sleep.

I shook my head at her. Pushing her off me with one hand, I silently redrew the line on the seat that marked my territory from hers.

She turned to Sara, “Can I?”

Sara, staring out her own window, shook her head without looking over.

My mother turned around again. “Come up front, baby,” she said, holding out her arms. Amy went, headfirst, over the bench seat. I watched her go, too lazy even to reach out and slap her butt as it rose up over the seat.

I retreated into my own territory, holed up against the window, trying to get my head around this story. That God would ask, that Abraham would agree. I turned to look back at the trailer. The two propane tanks at the front of the trailer bobbed upright just behind the hookup. The Airstream’s sleek rounded form was reassuring.

On these mountain roads the station wagon couldn’t pull the trailer at much more than a crawl. With the Airstream attached to our wood-paneled Oldsmobile station wagon, we were forty-five feet long. Fully loaded, we could do only forty miles an hour, slower through turns. This pace must have been tough for my father, who normally drove in the left lane, weaving right only to pass.

Cars had piled up behind us, so my father pulled into the gravel arc of a turnout to let them pass. A huge RV camper went by. I caught the eyes of a boy about my age, in the high side window. During the three months of our trip I had come to understand the hierarchy of recreational vehicles. I loved our trailer, but I couldn’t help envying those RV kids. I thought about how that boy could move around anywhere in back while they were on the road. I imagined him lying in his bed, watching cartoons, eating sugar cereal from the box.

This was not the first time my parents had traveled by trailer. In 1965, as Lyndon Johnson ordered the first combat troops to Vietnam, my parents returned to Europe, not to flee the draft as they’d planned two years earlier, but nevertheless pushed by the war. My father says they went because it didn’t feel like a normal time, a time for business as usual. For my mother, no time felt like a time for business as usual. The turmoil of the mid-1960s allowed them to share this sense of crisis for a time. They bought a car and a small house trailer in Germany and traveled like gypsies across Europe for ten months. To me the photos of that trip—of Sara in a bonnet and matching wool coat below the Eiffel Tower, of my mother in black capris holding Sara’s hand on the Acropolis—spoke of a more golden, blessed time.

When my parents returned from this second stay in Europe, they moved to the Bay Area, first to Oakland, because they couldn’t afford the city, and then finally, triumphantly to San Francisco in 1966, just in time for my birth.

My mother convinced my father to pursue a Ph.D. in history. My father always says now that she was the one who should have pursued the degree; she was the real intellectual. For a couple of years he hacked away on his degree at San Francisco State, selling baby furniture and then real estate on the side to support the family. Around the time Amy was born, he dropped out and went into business full-time. It was obvious to him that selling was what he was really good at, but my mother had a visceral distaste for business. She felt it was beneath my father’s talent, and for her it must have echoed her father’s decision to leave the ministry to make money.

After her own brief foray in graduate school, my mother’s vision had turned entirely inward. She cut off ties with most of her old friends, refusing to see people, refusing even to leave the house much. She started reading Edgar Cayce, whose blend of Christianity, prophecy, and belief in reincarnation dovetailed neatly with her own background and preoccupations. Cayce was a Baptist preacher from a small town in the South, not unlike my mother’s father. He died in 1940, but he was in many ways the father of the New Age movement. The story of his life, of the 14,000 psychic readings he’d done, and of his complex cosmology was popularized in books written by his family and followers, published in the 1960s. My mother devoured them.

She’d long been attuned to her dreams. Now she looked to them for signs and portents: Should we move to a new house? Should my father buy a building? What schools should my sisters and I attend? Even her diet was dictated by dreams, and she kept eliminating things—no sugar, no meat, no eggs, no onions—until she was down to a few leafy green vegetables, which in the 1970s came in frozen blocks from deep down inside the grocer’s freezer.

She’d taken up meditation. And sometimes, she admitted to my father, when she meditated she heard voices. Despite this, she meditated every day, drawn forward into her own terror.

All my mother’s interests—the spiritual questing, meditation, macrobiotic diet, mistrust of processed foods—were consistent with the time and place she inhabited. Edgar Cayce’s books were on the
New York Times
bestseller lists throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. The very notion of “mental illness” as illness was under attack. Thomas Szasz published
The Myth
of Mental Illness
in 1961. R. D. Laing’s
The Politics of Experience
, published in 1967, sold six million copies and popularized Laing’s view that normalcy was unconscious complicity with a diseased social order. True sanity, he believed, required the dissolution of the socially constructed ego through meditation and spiritual practice. In this view, hallucinations could be seen as an experiential passage—requiring not drugs or incarceration in hospitals but shamanic accompaniment.

I don’t know whether either of my parents read these writers. They didn’t need to. By 1972 hostility to traditional psychiatry had reached cultural ascendancy, certainly in the borderlands of San Francisco bohemia that my parents inhabited.

Neither of my parents experimented with drugs. My mother had a lifelong aversion, bordering on paranoia, to putting any form of medication into her body. She didn’t take aspirin, and as early as 1963, when Sara was born, had insisted on natural childbirth, despite heavy opposition from the doctors. Those battles over childbirth left her with an ongoing suspicion and hostility towards doctors.

My parents may not have taken drugs, but plenty of people around them did. Widespread use of hallucinogens normalized and even romanticized altered mental states. My father recalls seeking advice about my mother from a friend in Berkeley well versed in the transcendental arts. This friend took my mother’s hallucinations more or less in stride. “There’s a lot of garbage out there in the universe,” he told my father. “When you open yourself to it, you take in the bad with the good.” Such were the times.

In his gut my father, a natural-born skeptic, knew something was seriously wrong. But he didn’t imagine it was permanent. He loved my mother deeply, and he thought he could fix whatever was wrong. She needed to get out of the house; he needed to spend more time with her. He’d made enough money selling real estate to keep us all afloat, so he took the three months off for this trip as an emergency measure, believing that if he could isolate us all in a small space, if he gave my mother his full attention all summer, he could heal the problem that he still could not name.

When we got to Glacier we set up camp. My father unfurled the green and white striped canvas awning from the top of the Airstream. He pulled down the metal stairs that folded out neatly to the ground so we could go in and out the door that swung off the side of the trailer.

My mother sat in a folding chair under the awning, reading a battered copy of Edgar Cayce’s
There Is a River
, while my father grilled hamburgers for himself and my sisters and me. We ate on bright yellow plastic camp plates around the fire. We had to have our hamburgers on whole-wheat English muffins—my mother wouldn’t buy white bread products like real hamburger buns for us, though she didn’t hold the rest of us to her even stricter diet. She joined us around the campfire but ate only her muffin and frozen spinach, which she warmed on the little stove in the trailer.

We sat around the campfire in the evenings, and other men stopped by to talk with my father. He joined in the easy sociability of those camps. The men talked routes and campgrounds: where you could get a hookup, where you couldn’t; Airstreams versus RVs. Here in Glacier, they talked about grizzly bears.

“This,” one of the men said, “is what a grizzly does to an Airstream.” He held up a beer can and crushed it in his hand.

Later, inside the trailer, my sisters and I knelt with my mother at the side of the bed Sara and I shared. We rattled off our lists of god blesses: grandma and grandpa, Sara and Amy, Mommy and Daddy. Together, we recited the Lord’s Prayer. We started strong—
Our Father who art in
heaven
—Sara and me trailing just behind my mother, missing a word here or there. Amy stumbled, pouncing on an occasional familiar word like someone hopping from stone to stone to cross a stream. The prayer rose and fell around us, from
kingdom come
, to
daily bread
, to
forgive
us our sins
, to
forever and ever
until we all landed firmly on
Amen
. When we rose to go to bed, the crisscross pattern of the aluminum floor was etched into our knees.

Sara and I slept on a cushioned bunk about three feet wide, with barely enough wiggle room for both of us. Amy slept directly over our heads in a sling bed, which, when she was in it, hung down so low that it was nearly impossible to resist reaching up and tickling or poking her through the supple pleather of her hammock. My parents slept up front, in a bed that folded out over the table and built-in bench where we sometimes ate.

Lying in bed, I listened to Sara’s even breathing and the intermittent murmur of my parent’s voices from the fire outside. The rangers drove through the campground. The lights of their truck lit up the inside of the trailer, momentarily revealing the curved outline of the low ceiling. I could see the smooth single shell of aluminum, the thick rivets pressed into the metal. The light passed on.

I heard the rattle of the door handle and caught the sharp smell of kerosene as my parents came inside with the lantern. They whispered while they settled into bed. Then the yellow light dimmed slowly as my father turned the key on the lantern’s wick. I slept safe in the knowledge that everyone was close by, cradled in the shell of the Airstream.

In the morning I woke, sleepy, with tangled hair. The door of the trailer swung open and I stepped out into cold air, the scent of pine, and surely—had I raised my eyes—mountains. But all I remember is the stubbly field near the trailer where we played kickball every afternoon, giving way to taller grass, and then in the distance the long log building where the bathrooms and showers were, men on one side, women on the other. I followed my mother to the bathroom, clutching my toothbrush in my hand, in the biting air. The water, which never heated up in those places, numbed my fingers as I washed my hands. My mother rubbed my face with a washcloth, made rough by the cold, wiping the sleep from my eyes.