A native can stand on the sandy spot where the biggest and deepest blue ocean in the world touches land and know there are more hungry sharks behind them than in front of them.
California native was just one of many things that defined March: woman, daughter, artist, wife, mother, friend, businesswoman, now grandmother, a title that sounded too decrepit for a baby boomer who still wore string-bikini underwear and listened to rock music.
Growing up on the West Coast in the 1950’s and 60’s, March and her sister May were known as those Randolph girls with the strange springtime names. Back in Connecticut, where the Randolph family had deep roots, names like March and May were simple tradition, appropriate as Birch and Rebecca, and not uncommon to girls with a great aunt named Hester, who had pointed out during one family holiday, “California is a fine place to live if you happen to be an orange.”
One bright blue day when March was eight, someone called the Randolph girls California natives. So with the peacock feathers from her mother’s vase sticking out of her ponytail, March stood at the medicine cabinet mirror and war-painted her face with blue and white tempera paint left over from vacation bible school.
For those few weeks during an incalescent and sullen August, she ran around with a rubber
Cochise
tomahawk tucked into the waist of her seersucker shorts, speaking to everyone in bad Indian dialogue from an old black and white western.
At night, in those deep, still, blue hours, the Randolph girls lay in bed with thoughts of secret crushes and dreams of grown-up lives. Her sister May had a passion for heart throbs like Tab Hunter and James Dean. March dreamt about falling in love with someone like
Cochise
, a noble man with a big dream. That was 1958. Ten years later, she met him.
A year after
the Summer of Love, 1968 was filled with youthful dreamers fast becoming disillusioned. The sweet legacy of
Haight
had suddenly become hate. Every night the broadcast news about Viet Nam was too bleak to watch and too important to miss. In a single year both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were gone. Coffee house talk and the underground presses compared recent events to history’s anarchies. The city’s street-corner disciples railed at the establishment, shaking their fists as they cried over the injustice of men killed here and overseas.
At home, where it was supposed to be free and safe, someone was assassinating the country’s heroes. Most people carried a silent, dark dread down to their bones, and the youth of San Francisco sought anything available to pull away from a world so out of control they had to shout at it.
March’s father was only a single generation away, yet a continent stood between their ideas. He taught math and geography, was logical, conservative, a genius, a veteran. Her mother was a housewife who sewed from
Butterick
patterns, played bridge and the organ at church, and served dinner at six o’clock. March was raised to be standardized and conventional, the perfect round peg to fit in the perfectly round hole.
Her sister May fit precisely into the Randolph mold. She was stockings and white shoes. May was the one who went off to Smith and was picked as one of Glamour’s college girls, modeling in the magazine in her plaid skirt and cashmere sweater, her hair cut in precise angles and her smile as perfect as piano keys, even without braces.
March, however, was bare feet and Bernardo sandals. She regularly forgot to wear her retainer and lost it often enough that she had to get mouth molds for new ones at least three times a year. Right after graduation, she was out of her parents’ house and living on her own near the
Haight
in a room cut out of the attic in an old Victorian. She worked a small part-time shift in a coffee house bookstore and attended the Art Institute, where thought was free,
ungendered
, and where those East Coast kinds of traditions her sister May wrote home about were nowhere to be found.
San Francisco’s artists worked in loud, in-your-face-you-can’t-ignore-us colors that defined the place and time. At the Institute, among so many unique individuals, March didn’t have to be exactly like her family.
A close friend from a graphics class created psychedelic posters advertising local rock shows at the Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms. Another designed velvet, lace and leather clothing, fringed sweaters and beaded tops for a trendy boutique frequented by local rock singers. Some poster work came to March via her graphics friend, and by connection she was soon part of the San Francisco music scene most weekends.
It was dark inside the Fillmore that night in mid-June, one of those down moments between music sets. The place was filled with three times more people than city hall permitted, because Joplin and Santana were on the bill. The cloying, sweet scent of hashish floated above the crowd in foggy clouds of contact highs, and crudely-rolled cigarettes were passed from hand to hand, glowing like red fireflies through small, compact circles of people.
As one of her friends dragged her through the crowd, she spotted a stranger a few feet away, standing alone, wearing a Nehru jacket, faded jeans and sandals. His hair was thick and dark and almost to his shoulders. His profile was noble. Even the lack of light and his close-clipped black beard couldn’t hide his dark, intense looks, the kind of guy girls noticed but only the bravest or silliest would ever approach. Within seconds, the music started again and she lost sight of him when he was engulfed by a flood of half-stoned people making for the stage.
By midnight the Fillmore’s light show rose up from behind the band in those vibrant, poster-colored hues, pulsing with the ragged voice of Janis singing a spiritual turned into hard rock by Big Brother and the Holding Company. Near the stage rim, March danced in a circle, barefooted, her sandals stashed in the deep pockets of her long velvet dress, her arms raised high in the air and five inches of mismatched bangle bracelets rattled down toward her elbows.
Freedom rang through the notes of the music and the words of songs: there was nothing left to lose, something that felt more true lately than ever. Her loose, uncut hair hung freely, and beneath the heavy velvet dress she wore nothing—free after being held captive by elastic garter and Kotex belts. Even the apples in a copper pot by the Fillmore stage were free for the taking, but often laced with something to make your mood too free.
When she looked up, he was standing in front of her, his hand out as if they’d known each other forever. But she kept dancing, shouting over the music. “What do you want?”
“You.”
His eyes weren’t drug-shot, but clear, his manner too confident and too-knowing for her. He’d caught her off-guard and she didn’t know how to react, so she shook her head and turned her back to him, cutting him dead and feeling surprisingly calm about doing so.
Earlier, in a ballroom filled with people, she had looked at him and felt something she couldn’t name, then an odd sense of regret when he’d melted into the crowd. When she had thought about it a little later, she told herself the moment had been silly and Hollywood, the kind of moment that called for elevator music playing in the background.
A numb second or two passed before she felt his breath above her, the heat of his body as he came closer. Guys came onto to girls all the time, three, four or more times a night someone would hit on her. But they gave up easily when she always hesitated. You couldn’t go two blocks without seeing a sign that said: make love not war; love was as free as thought, as free as speech, and as free as most girls nowadays.
But he hadn’t moved on to some other girl who would give him what he wanted. He stayed by her, but didn’t touch her, a good thing since she might have incinerated right there.
The music stopped with a loud end note from the band. In that first heartbeat of silence, he leaned in and said in her ear, “You’re a fraud.”
She faced him. “What?”
“I see a barefoot girl, dancing alone, dressed in velvet, and with ribbons in her hair. If I stand close enough, when she moves, her jewelry sounds like tambourines.” He touched the necklace she wore. “Tell me those are love beads.”
She stepped back and pulled the necklace with her. “Do I know you?”
“No. But I’m trying to fix that mistake.”
“Who are you?” she asked.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“You called me a fraud first. Let’s stay strangers for now and deal with that.”
He shrugged. “You disappointed me, Sunshine.”
“March. My name is March.”
“That’s different.” He sounded surprised. “I like the name March.”
“My mother will be thrilled.”
“Good. You can take me home to meet her. Mothers love me. My own can talk about me for hours.”
“I don’t live at home.”
“Even better. Where do you live?”
“I’m not going to tell you where I live.” She laughed then. “I don’t even know your name.”
“I’m Michael Cantrell. Don’t disappoint me, Sunshine.”
Sunshine? The truth was she liked him calling her Sunshine, gave her a light case of butterflies, but out of self-protection she ignored that. “Okay, Michael. Look, you don’t know me so how can I disappoint you?”
He didn’t answer immediately, but studied her thoughtfully, seeming to find his words with care.
She knew she was giving him a hard time, and she had the awful thought that the word he might say next would be “Goodbye.” He could easily turn around and leave, when secretly that was last thing she wanted him to do.
“You look to me like the kind of girl who chooses to walk in the rain. Who stands on the breakwater, arms spread wide and laughing as a storm rages in. A girl who sings, even when there’s no music playing. And quotes poetry. Who’ll eat raw oysters and drink Ouzo. The rare girl who will easily jump out of a plane or into my arms. Someone who’ll love me so long and hard I can’t stand up in the morning.”
It took a minute for his words to sink in. His words? Oh . . . his words. So far from what she’d expected. She had always thought in a visual sense, the natural artist in her, believing life was most powerful if spoken through the eyes. Through vision, life had volume and depth, color and impression. The things you saw, you could always remember in color.
But his words came with more feeling than any first visual impression she could ever paint in her mind. She understood clearly at that moment the color of words.
What he said to her was so different from anything anyone had ever said to her. Until that moment, standing in front of this one guy, she would have never believed a minute of conversation could affect her so completely.
She heard his voice over again in her head saying those things about her. Is that who she was? A free spirit. Or was that only who she wanted to be?
This stranger before her was suddenly something else altogether, and he watched her as if her reaction were the most important in his life. He was perfectly serious, waiting, and a little on edge. The way he looked at her made her feel exposed, film out in the noonday sun; vulnerable, like he could see her past and into future; and sexually charged, naked and out of control.
The music started again, loud and vibrant, and the crowd closed in. She has moved back as far as she could and felt the hard edge of the stage against her shoulder. Still, only a few inches separated her from him—they were breathing each other’s air—like a helium balloon she felt as if she needed to be anchored to earth. The poetry of what he had just said to her, the images it created, his honesty, all deserved more than her usual smart comebacks and flip comments.
Clearly this was one of those seminal times in her life when a new door opened wide. She could choose to walk right by it, or through it. There was still enough of the good girl in her to make her pause. Her sister May would not understand and would run in the other direction. Her friends might see open possibility. But did anyone else really matter?
In a crowd of almost a thousand, at that single moment, there was only the two of them. Michael Cantrell stood in front of her and asked her to love him. So without a word, she took his hand and left.