Swallow the Ocean (6 page)

We traveled cross-country for three months that summer, camping in KOAs and national parks, visiting family “back east,” which was really just the far end of the Midwest. We moved through breathtaking country. Only I don’t remember it. What I remember is the rhythm of the days: the inside of the car, the sound of my mother’s voice, the close air of the trailer, the pine scent of the national parks, the subtle bouncing from one parent to the other that had already begun.

My father claims that one morning we woke to find long scratch marks across the door of the trailer, the mark of the bears that stalked the collective imagination of the campgrounds. I have no memory of that either.

What I do have is a photo of my sisters and myself sitting with my mother on the edge of a raft on the Snake River in Wyoming. I’m leaning my head against my mother’s shoulder. Sara is in profile, her teeth already jutting forward in an overbite. Amy, just three years old, tucked under my mother’s arm, is smiling straight into the camera. My mother wears round, John Lennon sunglasses. She’s very thin, in a white cotton sweater that looks too heavy for summer, a crocheted beret, and a very large blue cross, edged in gold, hanging at her throat. She’s half smiling, looking at the camera, but the sunglasses obscure her gaze. My sisters and I have dark green life jackets strapped on over our T-shirts. My mother isn’t wearing a life jacket. The three of us are tethered to her. She is tethered to nothing.

At Glacier my father perfected the kickball round robin he had devised so Sara, Amy, and I could play an evenly matched game. Standing in the middle of the diamond we had drawn in the stubby grass, my father pitched the rubber ball in a modulated bowl. It bounced unevenly and then rolled straight into home. I stood back to get a running start, then blasted the ball to the left. My father dove for the ball, alive with the limitless energy that physical exertion and competition unleashed in him, caught it on the bounce, righted himself, shifted directions, and beat me to first base.

My third time up, I kicked a hard line drive that he couldn’t reach. He turned to the side, put his hands on his hips, let out a low whistle as it passed, and said, “Nice kick, Laura.” I ran the bases happy, his praise the only prize that mattered.

After my home run, I went into the trailer to pee. I found my mother seated with her legs crossed under her on the flat space of my parents’ foldaway bed. She sat up straight, her head almost reaching the low ceiling of the trailer. Her eyes were closed and she was still. The trailer hugged the summer heat, incubating the morning, but she didn’t seem to mind.

I was quiet because I knew I wasn’t supposed to bother her when she was meditating. As I came up the stairs she opened her eyes.

“How do you meditate?” I asked.

“You try to feel your breath and make every thought leave your head,” she said. “You think nothing. That’s the hard part.”

I wanted to try, so she let me climb up next to her on the bed. I crossed my legs and placed my hands very gently, palms up, on my knees as she did. I touched my thumbs to my middle fingers like the fat Buddha in the park. I closed my eyes and thought, “Nothing, nothing, nothing.” That part was easy.

I sat very still and tried to feel the stream of air flow in and out of my body. I felt nothing. I raised one hand quickly to my mouth. No air. I opened my eyes and looked over at my mother. She was far away. Her eyelids rested over her eyes as gently and calmly as her hands rested on her knees. Her chest rose and fell. Her breasts lifted the heavy gold cross she wore, then let it drop again. I looked down at my own chest and saw nothing. No breasts, no movement, no breath.

Outside I heard the soft punt of the ball as Sara kicked it, then the scramble of her feet over gravel. I was up next but decided to let my turn pass.

I closed my eyes again, clamping them down this time, thinking, “Breathe, breathe, breathe.” Searching for air, I came up with nothing.

A long time passed. The small refrigerator next to the bed hummed. A fly searched the screen of the window behind my head for an opening. It landed and crawled in silence for a moment, then lifted off and buzzed again. Behind the buzzing, low and constant, was the hum of the gnats that hovered at the screen. I had to pee.

My mother opened her eyes.

“I can’t feel my breath,” I said.

She nodded. “It takes a lot of practice. Years and years.” I knew she had missed my point, but I didn’t press.

In the days that followed, as we began the slow trek home, I watched myself. I must be breathing all the time, I reasoned. Maybe it was just when I thought about it that I stopped. In the backseat of the station wagon, turning towards the window so my sisters would not see, I quickly drew my hand to my mouth, to catch the breath before it fled. Nothing. Standing next to the trailer, I would sneak a sideways glance at my own reflection, murky in the aluminum surface of the Airstream. It was always the same. My chest didn’t move. Even holding a hand in front of my mouth and counting to sixty, I couldn’t flush myself out.

By now, alive but not breathing, I was as intrigued as I was worried. The inescapable conclusion was that I was not like other people. Perhaps it was all the Bible stories, the miracles and chosen ones. Being different from other people struck me as a good thing, possibly even holy.

I took a chance and told Sara. “I don’t think I breathe.” I knew as soon as the words were out of my mouth that I sounded like a dope.

“You don’t have to think, dumdum, you just do it. If you didn’t, you’d be dead.”

Out loud I knew she was right. Inside I wasn’t convinced. I went on testing, but kept the results to myself. Half terror, half visions of grandeur—as we made our way back to California, I too waited and watched for more signs.

When we got home Big Baby was waiting there for me, lying on my bed just where I’d left her. Only she seemed like a stranger to me. A few months later we moved to a new apartment, and I lost track of Big Baby. Much later, I found her again, naked and abandoned at the bottom of a cardboard box in a closet. The sight of her nearly broke me. I sobbed uncontrollably into her soft belly, stricken, not because I’d lost her, but because I’d forsaken her.

Chapter Five

OUR NEW APARTMENT was on West Clay Park—a three-block cul-de-sac that sloped down 24th Avenue across two blocks lined with beautiful homes, each one unique, with trees and flowering plants in the front yards. The street turned and came back up 22nd Avenue to Lake Street. The neighborhood was more affluent than our old one. We were already strange here: the only kids who lived in an apartment building and the only ones who went to public school. The apartment was much smaller than the old house had been—but because we owned the whole building, it was a step up in the world. There were six units in all, occupied by people who shared walls and ceiling with us. Buying this building was pure audacity on my father’s part. He leveraged everything else we had, our house on 12th Avenue and his shares in another building downtown. When you came down to it, all we had amounted to debt, which is how real estate in California works: you turn a little debt into a lot of debt, and then you wait for everything to appreciate.

I saw the apartment for the first time the day before we moved in. It was clear of furniture. Sky blue wall-to-wall carpet had just been laid down from the long front hallway, straight through the living room all the way to the bay windows that looked out on the Golden Gate Bridge. While my parents poked around, making sure the windows opened and closed after the new paint job, Sara and I ran up and down the track, arms out from our sides, soaring through the open space of our new pad in our thin-soled blue Keds. We ran at full speed, stopping dangerously just short of the full-length windows each time, leaving our fingerprints on the panes.

Bliss like this had its price. Later it was discovered that one or both of us had stepped in dog shit and trailed it up and down, again and again across the brand-new carpets. I don’t know for sure if it was Sara, or me, or both of us—but she took the blame and I slipped through unnoticed, a pattern that would repeat. The carpets had to be shampooed—my father was very angry. The apartment was already soiled.

We had a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge, and we would gather for sunsets in the living room. We watched the reflective red drama light up the Bay, then deepen down into night. Sometimes in the middle of the day, my father would call, “Hey, girls, come look at this.” We’d run to his side to see a tanker, a barge, or, rarest of all, a cruise ship, all lit up, gliding through the Golden Gate. My father stood leaning against the tall window frame. We waited for the boats to pass under the bridge. When my sisters and I tired of the hushed feeling, we slipped back to our games. My father would stay there, his right arm raised against the window frame, his left hip jutting out to the side, gazing after those ships until they reached the open sea.

One evening as we sat at the dinner table, Sara raised her fork to me in a silent challenge. I smiled my assent and piled as large a hunk of steak as I thought I could manage onto my fork. We counted in our heads, punching our forks forward in the air to synchronize our signals:
On your marks, get set, go
. Then we settled in for a long, slow chew. This was not a race; it was an endurance match. Whoever chewed longest without laughing won. I stood a fair chance of beating my older sister at this game.

Swiss steak was one of my mother’s mainstay meals. I loved it. I loved the taste of everything stewed together, tomatoes, green peppers, onions, and the meat itself, which was both tender and stringy, requiring long chewing. Our game was born at a moment, long ago, when Sara and I caught each other’s eye across the table and giggled at the absurdity of so much chewing.

As I chewed, I glanced over at my mother to see if she was watching us, if she was annoyed. She was gazing out the window over my father’s shoulder. Her eyes looked very blue against the pallor of her skin. I leaned forward to see what she saw. The top of one orange tower of the Golden Gate Bridge peered through the fog. I swallowed without thinking, and then, realizing what I had done, looked up to see Sara’s eyes gleaming with victory. A smile was slowly growing around her mouth as her chewing came to a stop. Not wanting her to gloat for long, I quickly forked another piece of meat, and we began again.

My family sat around the long oval table where we ate each night with my mother at the head, near the swinging kitchen door, and my father at the other end, his back to the tall windows that looked out to the bridge. Sara, Amy, and I were spread between them. Though we had been in this apartment for over six months, it still felt strange to me, as if the table, the high-backed chairs, the room itself, demanded more of us at ages three, six, and nine than my sisters and I could possibly manage.

Tonight we were eating early, while the sun set, so my father could resume his vigil in front of the television when we fin-ished. The images on the screen never changed—a permanent specter of old men hunched over microphones. The drone of their voices, formal, but always with a barely veiled indignation, filled the apartment every night. Watergate. I had never seen anything as joyless, yet my father relished it. He watched with the bitter glee of one who is finally vindicated, though the world must crumble in order for him to be right.

Sometimes I would sit on the arm of his chair, trying to be companionable. “Who’s winning, Daddy?” I’d ask. He’d glance over at me, eyes fixing on my face for just a second, and say, “I think we are, sweetie. I think we are.” Then his eyes would shift back to the television screen, rapt.

At the dinner table, as Sara and I began another round of chewing, my father told my mother the story of his day. The conversation floated over my head, and I heard only the comforting refrain, rhythmic and steady, the “he says,” “and then I say,” “and then he says to me” that marked these stories of verbal sparring, of the deal making and deal breaking that were my father’s business.

Sara and I were nearing the end of a particularly long bout. Eyes locked together, chewing with exaggerated strain, we struggled to stave off giggles. On the periphery of my vision, I saw Amy, her chin just clearing the plate in front of her, sitting between Sara and my mother. She fidgeted in her chair, rolled her eyes up under her lids, and twisted her face to try and break my concentration. I held Sara’s gaze without wavering.

My jaw was sore from chewing. I held one last shred of meat, all the taste chewed out of it, in my mouth, when Sara finally cracked a smile. We both dissolved in giggles, heads coming down to the table in unison.

Almost as soon as we began to laugh, I realized the laughter was wrong. The current of the conversation above me had shifted. My mother was no longer listening passively. Her attention, which wandered so often these days, had caught on something. She was roused, and when she was roused I was roused too, vigilant, careful, watchful. I straightened in my seat.

My mother shot sharp questions at my father. “Who’s Hawkins? I’ve never heard you talk about him before.”

“He’s just a guy, Sally. A guy in business,” my father said.

“Well, he doesn’t sound like a very good guy.”

“I don’t know if he is good or not, Sally. I’m just selling him some property.”

“Well, I don’t think you should work with him,” she said, her voice rushed and rising to a pitched finality. “I don’t think you should work with him at all.”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Sally,” my father exploded. “This is real estate. You don’t choose who you work with.” He stabbed his fork into his steak, ratcheting up the anger despite himself, then fell silent.

He chewed hard as he ate, so that his sideburns jumped when his jaw clenched. My mother watched him. Her face was still, and she had stopped eating. I tried to catch Sara’s eyes across the table, but they flickered past mine and fixed instead on my father.

“Well, I don’t want you to work with him,” my mother said, her head shaking slightly but rapidly back and forth. “There’s something wrong about him.”

My father swallowed hard. “Sally, you don’t know him,” he said.

“I don’t need to know him,” she said slowly. “I know.”

I arranged my peas across my plate with my fork. The fork was heavy in my hand, weighty silver, but dull and tarnished. The peas were a vivid green against the white plate. They rolled and bounced as I moved them. The almost perfect spheres created patterns on the plate, choosing a twin, forming a triad, then shifting alignments again.

My father sat back in his chair, his shoulders slumped down slightly. He spoke sharply, down into his food. “That’s great, Sal. That’s just great.” He looked straight up at her again. “I’m not going to drop a client every time you get a bad feeling or have a goddamn bad dream. Somebody’s got to earn some money around here.”

I turned towards my mother. The table was silent, except for the sounds of my father eating. His fork clanked against his plate. My mother was perfectly still, her delicate features stiff, all her concentration fixed on my father.

I pushed a few peas onto my knife, and glanced back up at my mother, trying to catch her eye. This was a cue for her, an old, familiar one. I wanted her to smile and recite for me, “I eat my peas with honey. I’ve done it all my life. It makes my peas taste funny, but it keeps them on my knife.” She didn’t move.

“Sally, can’t we just finish eating our dinner?” my father said, still making a great show of eating his own steak.

My mother didn’t move, didn’t speak. I watched her, but her eyes were glued on him. Because she was so thin, her cheekbones stood out. Her mouth was closed, but the outline of her teeth showed under her upper lip. There was a hardness on her face that I didn’t recognize. Her hands, in fists, rested on either side of her plate. She gripped her fork in her right hand.

Sara, sitting next to my father, brought her food slowly to her mouth. Her straight black hair had fallen forward on both sides of her face, making a veil that hid her eyes from mine. She took very small bites, chewed them with care, then swallowed.

My father broke first. Looking up again to face my mother’s cold stare, he quickly put both his hands against the edge of the curved table and pushed his chair back. “I’ve had enough,” he said.

She rose with him, fast and sudden, leaning into the table as if to reach out and restrain him. In one deft movement, her body charged with energy, she raised her fist in the air and sent the heavy fork straight at my father.

For just a split second, I met Sara’s eyes in horror as we both tracked the path of the fork. My father, thin and agile, shifted his weight back just in time, almost losing his balance, then catching himself on the arm of the chair. The fork just missed him. It slammed into the china cabinet behind him, the one that held my mother’s cut glass collection. The thin glass of the cabinet door shattered. I sat very still, my hands gripping the sides of my chair, blinking at the long, sharp, curved shards of glass that lay on the hardwood floor.

Afterwards, we all sat in the living room in a silence punctuated by my mother’s sobs. She was huddled in one of the big wing chairs, her knees pulled up close to her chest, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, her head down. My father sat on the green couch leaning forward, elbows jammed into his knees, looking down at the floor. Then his eyes fell on me. I sat on the floor with my legs folded under me, tracing the lines in the throw rug with one finger. This rug had come with us from our old house on 12th Avenue; it was a color my mother called midnight blue. The pattern etched in the carpet formed a huge, circular maze that extended across the room. I had been tracing these lines as long as I could remember. I would begin at the outer edge of the circle, keeping my forefin-ger nestled in the track. When I butted up against a dead end, I reversed myself, retracing my route until I found an open path. Slowly, I wound my way into the center.

“Laura, go give your mother a hug,” my father said quietly, gesturing towards her with his head.

A loud sob wracked the room. I looked at my father doubtfully. I was not ready to forgive her, much less touch her. Her sobbing made her terrible and strange. I could not understand why he felt sorry for her, why he, her target, was ready to forgive—or why he sent me to comfort her.

He nodded at me again, more firmly this time. Under his gaze, I slowly lifted myself up off the rug and went to my mother. I put my fingertips on her shoulders and began to give her a tentative hug. She lifted her head and raised her bloodshot eyes to me. I started to cry. She opened up her lap and drew me in. She keened back and forth, rocking me with her. “It’s OK, everything will be OK,” she whispered over and over. Her body was deeply familiar. I let myself be rocked and soothed, let the rocking of my body soothe her, but it was not OK—my mind fixed on its own dark mantra in counterpoint to hers.