Swallow the Ocean (11 page)

My parents met once a month or so—someplace neutral—to talk about finances, our progress in school, or perhaps just so my father could take her temperature. My mother could be quite civil, attending to the business side of our lives undisturbed. And maybe she had her own strategic reasons for meeting with him. Keeping an eye on the enemy.

Once, late in the school year, they met at a coffee shop across the street from his office on Union Street. They talked calmly for an hour or so, and then as my father prepared to leave, he reached into his suit pocket for a pen to write out the alimony/ child support check. He pulled out a Cross pen that Sadie, my mother’s mother, had given him as a present years before. My mother recognized it at once and snatched it from him. Why did he still have it? Did he carry it every day? Did he keep it close to his heart? He asked her why it mattered. She said his carrying the pen was bad for Sadie.

“Why?” my father pressed.

She took a napkin from the dispenser on the table and drew a line with the pen across the middle. On top of the line she wrote
Laura, Amy, Sadie
. Under the line she wrote
Russell
and
Amos
. Then,
Sara
.

My father stared at the napkin.

“Why is Sara below the line?”

“She’s crossed over,” my mother said. “She’s with you. She may as well be dead to me.”

Then she got up, put the pen in the pocket of her beige overcoat, and walked out of the coffee shop.

My father was stunned. He’d known that eventually he would have to sue for custody. He’d delayed because taking us away from her seemed too cruel. She’d already lost so much—he felt losing us would remove her last anchor to reality. Without us, he thought, she’d slip away completely into her own world. He’d never imagined that my mother would turn on one of us.

He walked back across the street to his office, jaywalking in front of traffic. He picked up the phone, called the lawyer who had handled the divorce case, and asked him to begin custody proceedings against my mother.

Chapter Ten

I DON’T REMEMBER when or how my father told us he was suing for custody, only that this pending decision, attached to the word
custody
, hung over us for a very long time. The possibility of leaving my mother would never have occurred to me. In all her strangeness, violence, and chaos, my mother was my life. How could that change? But once my father raised the possibility of a different life, I began to hold the possibility in my mind, and everything shifted. My father trying to get us, my mother violently opposed, became the framework for our lives for two and a half years. At some point a decision would be handed down. But the when and the how of it was a moving target, the subject for me of constant fantasy and fear.

For Easter my father took us to Lake Tahoe for a week. His new girlfriend, who worked at his real estate office, came with us. We’d met Jeni before on weekend outings—gone for dinner at her apartment, eyed her cautiously, quietly pushed the onions she put in the spaghetti sauce to the side of the plate (my mother did not put onions in spaghetti sauce), and remained painfully polite. On this trip to Tahoe we got to know her better. Each day we all went sledding on a huge hill near Lake Tahoe. That hill has long since been closed to sledding—a lawsuit waiting to happen. But in the less litigious days of the 1970s my father was a demon on the toboggan. Against all reason we felt safe, as long as he was the one steering.

In a series of pictures from this trip my sisters and I stand in rubber boots, three feet deep in snow, triumphantly wielding huge icicles we’ve wedged loose from the eaves. We look a little raggedy, in too-short bell-bottom pants and funny belted coats (the same blue faux-suede one I traded with Lisa at school). But then everyone’s photos from the 1970s look like this. We are also—children in the snow—undeniably happy.

The strongest image I carry from that trip is not captured in a photo. My sisters and I ran into the cabin one afternoon after hours in the snow, legs and butts frozen, wool gloves soggy, and found that Jeni had hot chocolate waiting for us in the kitchen. She’d set out cookies. On a plate. It was almost too much to take in—utterly seductive, like something off TV. The way children and mothers were supposed to be. How could I resist?

I began to hold images in my mind’s eye: clean sheets, the dark indigo of store-bought blue jeans, the gleaming surfaces of clean kitchen appliances, chocolate chip cookies on a plate. Of course I wanted to live with my father. What was not possible to imagine was how this might be achieved, the means by which I would be severed from my mother.

When summer came my mother again promised we would go to Colorado for the Barton family reunion. Each week she spoke with her parents by phone, and each week she assured them we would come this year, but she’d made no signs of preparations for a trip.

She did get out of the house more that summer. Refugees from Vietnam were arriving by the planeload at the military base in the Presidio—a stone’s throw from our house. My mother followed the war intently to its bitter end. We’d all watched TV together as those last helicopters took off from the roof of the embassy in Saigon earlier in the spring. My mother was so affected by those images that she offered herself up as a volunteer at Letterman Hospital, which was a reception center for arriving Vietnamese orphans. Given how erratic she was at home, it is hard to imagine how she pulled this off, but she did, coming home with stories of holding Vietnamese babies in her arms.

My sisters and I, under very loose supervision, ranged farther and farther from home. I had Lisa to play with, and most days we’d meet up somewhere between my house and hers. Or Sara and Amy and Lisa’s sister Naomi joined us—Lisa’s mother entrusted Sara, who was now twelve, to keep an eye on all of us. We’d walk down to Baker Beach, a few blocks from our house, to play in the surf.

In her flurry of activity my mother took us to a series of county fairs—to Sonoma and Napa and all the way to Sacramento for the state fair. We went on roller coasters, looked at prize pigs, and attended the inevitable country music concerts that were probably what drew my mother in the first place. I remember a singer in a short white suede dress and cowboy boots—I want to say it was Tammy Wynette, but I can’t be sure—singing in an outdoor amphitheater with lots of hay bales and the certain feeling that we did not belong there.

For my ninth birthday my mother organized a party for me. The apartment across the hall was vacant (and clean), so we had the party there. I was able to invite friends over for the first time in years. My mother baked an angel food cake and decorated it to look like a carnival carousel. She used a Japanese paper umbrella for the roof, held in place by red and white straws. Animal crackers stood in a circle on top of the white frosting—the horses and animals on the ride. It was the most charming cake I had ever seen—have ever seen—which is to say that, even then, my mother could still summon her former magic. She made a pin-the-tale-on-the-donkey set from scratch, and we all played games and ate cake in the empty apartment. Even my father came, with gifts—six brand-new T-shirts, one of which said, “I’m a women’s libber.” My mother was brittle and suspicious whenever my father was around, but she let him stay for cake. She took away most of the T-shirts after he left, but she let me keep the women’s libber one.

One weekend towards the end of summer, my father picked us up and announced as he pulled away from the curb that we were going out of town the next day.

“Where?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Tahoe?”

“No.”

“Yosemite?”

“You’ll find out tomorrow.”

“Does Mom know?”

“Don’t worry.”

I felt the bottom of my stomach lift from its pilings. Sara turned to me from the front seat, and our eyes met in alarm.

My father drove us to the Sears on Geary Boulevard to buy some clothes for the trip. “Pick out whatever you want, enough for a few days,” he said. We looked nervously at one another. We hadn’t been in a department store in two years, and my mother never let us choose our own clothes.

My father pulled a red and white pair of shorts with a matching red halter top off the rack. “How about this?” Sara and I exchanged looks again. Even if she’d let us buy clothes, she’d never let us wear a halter top, not in a million years. “Try it on,” he said, handing me the hanger.

We loosened up soon enough, and each of us carried a bagful of forbidden clothes back to my father’s apartment, waiting to see what act of open revolt would follow.

When we got on 101 South the next morning, we realized we were headed to the airport.

“Are we going to Denver?” I asked in amazement.

My father nodded.

“Mom doesn’t know?” Sara asked.

“I’ll call her after we get there. You guys can tell her I didn’t tell you where you were going.”

“You’re kidnapping us?” Sara said.

My father laughed. “That’s right, I’ve kidnapped you.”

And then we were all laughing, nervous and excited—a week with our cousins whom we hadn’t seen in years, new clothes, an airplane ride, this dangerous but fun complicity with my father—and sick to our stomachs—god only knew what hell we’d pay when we got home.

In Denver my father rented a car and called my grandparents from the airport. He hadn’t said a word to them ahead of time because he didn’t want them to alert my mother. They were so shocked and upset about being forced into open conflict with my mother, they almost didn’t want us to come.

My father stayed only one night. His intention had been to deliver us to Denver in time for the family reunion, which was to be held up in the mountains later in the week. He thought that after being promised this trip so many times, we needed to go. He also wanted to have a face-to-face conversation with my grandparents.

My grandmother made fried chicken for dinner and baked us a pie. She was thrilled to see us, even though she did not like crossing my mother this way. We had corn fresh from the garden. Amos always grew his own, even in the bone-dry Denver suburb where they now lived. “If you trip on the way in from the garden, the corn’s not fresh enough anymore,” he said.

At the table we all joined hands, while Amos said a solemn lengthy grace. He thanked the lord for our presence with them and then asked the lord to watch over Sally, who couldn’t be with us tonight. When he mentioned my mother, my sisters and I twitched in our seats.

During dinner my father pressed my grandfather, asking him to play a more active role in urging my mother to get treatment. Amos bristled. Sadie was near tears. By now they must have known that my father was right.

“Russ, let’s not discuss this in front of the children,” Amos said.

I looked from my father to my grandfather. Amos’s white head was bent over his plate. He forced us all into silence with his solemnity. Even my father had had to bow his head in grace. I felt a flash of anger towards Amos. Not talk about Mom in front of us? We lived with her. Did he think we hadn’t noticed?

After dinner Amos phoned my mother from his office in the basement. My sisters and I waited upstairs for the verdict. We were terrified he would send us back right away—before the reunion, before we could see our cousins or wear our new clothes. Our return was inevitable, her fury was inevitable; we pinned our hopes on putting it off as long as possible. My mother, of course, wanted us home immediately. She had custody of us—my father had no legal right to take us. Amos nearly gave in. Under extreme pressure from my father, he did let us stay, but only for four days, not the full week my father had planned. My mother also extracted a promise from Amos not to take us to the mountains. She had a bad feeling about the mountains.

After Amos finished I sat in the huge black leather chair behind his desk and heard my mother’s voice, panicky and wired, come across the line. “You’re going to come home on Tuesday,” she was saying. “You’re not going to go to the mountains,” she was telling me, as if to reassure herself. My father’s taking us away had caught her completely off guard. She wasn’t even mad, just desperate for us to come home.

For our sake, the family reunion was held early in the city at my grandparents’ house. All fifteen grandchildren slept over—lined up in sleeping bags on the floor of the living room. We played pool tournaments and foosball in the basement. Our cousins taught us how to play kick-the-can, which consumed our days and evenings. We wore the halter tops and brightly colored shorts, knowing they would disappear as soon as we got home, and roamed through the brand-new, sparsely populated subdivision like prisoners on leave, exhilarated and taut, knowing the string that attached us to my mother would snap back hard when we got home.

As it turned out, our return was rather uneventful. My father picked us up at the airport, and we drove home with increasing dread. Once we got inside, my mother was extra-glad to see us, hugging and kissing us, keeping us close that day. She wasn’t angry with us at all. My father had effectively taken all the blame. For once she didn’t even want to hear about what we’d done while we were gone. We were bursting with stories to tell her about our cousins and our grandparents’ new home. She didn’t ask. In fact, she seemed to want to pretend the whole thing had never happened.

So there was no great scene. Just a makeshift dinner of creamed tuna on toast, the stale smell of the apartment, the country music on the radio, and our own homemade clothes to welcome us back.

The next year—fourth grade—I didn’t make it to school every day. The alarm clock would go off in the bedroom, and my mother would call to me to get in bed with her. Sara, in junior high now, was out the door before I ever got up. Amy, now in first grade, could sleep a little longer since her elementary school was nearby. I had to catch a school bus two blocks away for an interminable ride across town.

When I got in bed with my mother, she would wrap her legs around me and ask about my dreams. The white numbers on the clock radio by her bedside flipped along until it was too late to make the bus.

“I’ll drive you to school,” she’d say, or “I’ll write you a note if you’re late.” She searched for the car keys, while I dragged a brush over the tangles in my hair.

Outside the schoolyard, I sat in the passenger seat, unable to open the door of the Oldsmobile. The car smelled like sour milk. The sight of the empty schoolyard filled me with shame. I had to cross that yard and then the silent hallways, skulking along, late, moving quickly, praying I would not cross paths with anyone. I’d go up the staircase, down the long hall to my classroom. When I opened the door, thirty-five pairs of eyes would fix on me. I’d have to put my coat in the closet while they all watched, and weave my way through the maze of desks to my spot up front. I sat near the chalkboard so I could see. For two years now, after I failed the eye test at school, the nurse had sent me home with a note for my mother saying I needed glasses. My mother took the notes, but did not take me to the eye doctor.

Lisa would smile when she saw me. I would tuck my books into the space under the desk and only then, slowly, as the class resumed, would I fold back into anonymity.

“You don’t have to go. I’ll write you a note.”

On those days, instead of going to school my mother would take Amy—who made it to school even less than I did—and me to Golden Gate Park to our old haunts at the Tea Garden or across the Bay to Mount Tamalpais. My mother had taken up photography. She used my father’s old Nikon. She developed the photos herself. I suppose she must have taken classes. Somewhere in the city there was a darkroom where she went to work while we were at school or in the afternoons when she left us alone. It seems implausible now that she did this, had the wherewithal, the focus, to learn something as new and technical as photography. But I have the photos, glossy black-and-whites of Amy and me in the Botanical Gardens—just across the way from the Tea Garden in the park. Amy looks happy. Her hand reaches out to toss a crust of bread to a white swan. She is much too close to it. I’m in the background, awkward in a dark blue coat, a miniature version of my mother’s trench coat. I’m only nine, but already you can see in the slump of my shoulders, in the refusal to muster a real smile, in my utter self-consciousness, how unwilling I am to be there.