Swallow the Ocean (12 page)

Mount Tam smelled of eucalyptus and bay laurels. We collected bay leaves off the ground to put in spaghetti sauce at home. My mother put little black briquettes in the grill to cook hot dogs, but she didn’t light them. On these trips she always forgot something, like lighter fluid or the hot dogs, and we were always hungry long before the food was ready.

Mount Tam was deserted. Everyone else was where they were supposed to be, at work or at school. Amy and I lodged our tiny cans of grape juice in the stream that trickled down the mountain, so they’d be cold when we wanted to drink them. The branches of the live oaks curled up through the sun. Tall straight Douglas firs thrust up through the jumble. Long curling moss hung off the trees.

“It’s an enchanted forest,” I said to Amy, looking around, casting my plot. “And you have to cross the bridge.”

My mother sat quietly at the picnic table, her hands cupped before her on the table, watching the water flow over the rocks.

I crawled down under the wooden bridge that crossed the steam and squatted on a rock. The rushing water threw up a chill that soaked me.

Amy walked over the bridge. I called out, “Who’s that walking over my bridge?”

A laugh came from my mother’s direction. Amy turned to look.

“Don’t look,” I whispered. Amy’s lips puckered up in hurt. I resumed my troll voice. “Ay, my pretty, don’t look away. You can’t escape me,” I said. She giggled and fell back into the game.

We took off our shoes, rolled up our pant legs and dipped our feet, wrinkled from our sweaty socks, into the water. The rocks were sharp as we hopped back and forth, shouting at our bravery and the cold.

Late in the afternoon, when we were hungry, I went over and sat on the bench next to my mother. She didn’t stir. I traced lines into the surface of the picnic table, the soft wood giving easily under my fingernail. My mother was still, gazing out at nothing. I tried to look where she was looking and saw a shaft of sunlight filled with gnats and mosquitoes. Redwood trees channeled light up their trunks. Spiders traced the lateral spaces between the trees. Flies flickered in and out of shadow, visible to us for only seconds. Memory works like this, tossing you a shimmering detail, but holding whole seasons of your life in shade.

“Mommy,” I murmured, “shouldn’t we light the charcoals?”

She started. “We’re going to in just a sec, sweetie.” We sat there together in silence for several more minutes, watching the bugs dance in the light.

Finally she roused herself and lit the charcoal with bits of paper we tore from a brown paper grocery bag. Amy and I ate oranges while we waited for the coals to get hot.

On the way back down to the parking lot, I slipped crossing the stream and soaked one foot. My tennis shoe slogged along, leaving a single set of wet footprints on the trail all the way down to the car.

Near the parking lot we ran into a ranger. He was the first person we’d seen all day.

“How are you ladies doing?” he asked in a friendly way that I knew would rile my mother.

She paused—too long—then said, “We’re just fine,” in the curt voice she used with strangers.

The ranger looked at her a long moment from under his hat. He glanced at Amy. She smiled back at him. She could always charm strangers, and remained open and unguarded long after Sara and I had become wary. I shuffled my wet foot in the dirt. “You ladies have a nice day,” he said, and walked away. His glance seared me. I knew what he was thinking
. Why
isn’t
she
at school?

In the car Amy wanted to sing. I pushed her away and leaned my head down on the open window frame to let the wind rake me. I watched the trees fly by until looking at them gave me a physical nausea to match my mood. Days like this would lead only one place: to picnic tables and park benches in the middle of the day, when everyone else was in school or working. I’d be the grown-up, staring at bugs, laughing out loud when nobody was there and nothing was funny.

There were many days like that. Days of sun or fog when I stayed home with my mother or we roamed the city, making pilgrimages to JFK Drive and watching the ducklings come of age each spring in the Tea Garden. My mother told me things. She told me that she watched the Lawrence Welk show each night at seven, not because she loved polkas but because there was a girl in the chorus who looked like me. Every good person who watched helped me be good; the bad ones pulled me onto the bad side. My mother watched for me.

She told me that the drought we were experiencing was a good thing. “Normally the bad side has control of the weather,” she explained. “Lately the good side is doing better; that’s why we have this drought.” The whole state was on voluntary water rationing, yet my mother would leave the faucet in the kitchen sink on full blast all afternoon and sometimes she put the garden hose in the bushes and left that running too, at a trickle, overnight. The neighbors were not pleased, but I think they were too intimidated by my mother to say anything. I figured this was her way of helping the drought along. It made sense. Everything she said made sense in a way. There was a pattern to it, and if I could get a handle on it, map it all out, I’d be safe. I’d be able to manage her, keep her from getting mad, or at least keep her from getting mad at me. Up to now her fury had been directed at my father, at presences I could not see, at the walls and furniture of the house, and more and more at Sara, but so far not at me.

Amy and I had a new plotline for our dolls. It involved a voyage to Europe, a shipboard romance, trunks of clothes, a young woman away from home for the first time. For romances we held the dolls’ faces together, pressed lip to molded-plastic lip, the way people kissed in the old black-and-white movies we watched on TV on Saturdays.

This plot too was drawn from the pages of a book—Amy’s trip to Europe with Aunt March in
Little Women
. In our version that boat set sail a hundred times, streamers unfurled from the side of our bunk bed, a young woman standing at the railing—but I don’t think it ever arrived. It’s only now that I realize the obvious—that Amy and I were faithfully reenacting my moth er’s voyage of 1960, bringing a more attractive version of her back to life. What part of my mother’s story did I imprint on my own imagination as we played? Is it my mother standing at the rail, or is it Jo in her long blue dress? Is it 1960 or 1860?

Sometimes I played with Jo alone. She stood with her arms out and to the sides a little, wavering there as if she were trying to keep her balance. On her fingers there were tiny plastic ridges that looked just like knuckles. I would try to wrap her stiff arms around her dance partner and spin them together as if they were one thing, but Jo wouldn’t cling to her partners. She put her arms out when she twirled, to feel the air rushing through her outspread fingers, the same way I did when I spun in the living room, twirling faster and faster, holding my arms out against the force that pushed them in, until I collapsed in a breathless heap on the still-spinning floor.

Sara did not play dolls with us anymore. She was always angling to get out of the house now, over to a friend’s to play. She’d bought a Barbie with her own money and she kept it at her friend Nancy’s house. Nancy had a whole collection of Barbies—Ken, Skipper, the camper, the works.

Sometimes, Sara smuggled her Barbie into our apartment, inside a sock, in a shoebox, in her backpack. She and I played with it in the bathroom off her bedroom, the most remote spot in the house from my mother. She had to come through Sara’s room to find us, and we could hear her coming.

When we weren’t playing with it, Sara put the Barbie back in the sock, in the shoebox in the back of her closet. My mother found it anyway. She had a nose for these things, a Geiger counter for the toxic objects we brought into the house. I ran out to the hallway when I heard my mother screaming, but froze when I saw her. She had the Barbie in one fist, Sara’s hair in the other. I couldn’t see Sara’s face—it was blocked by my mother’s body—but I heard her shriek, an incoherent, “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to.” My mother shook Sara by the shoulders, shoved her against the wall. Small bruises, the size of my mother’s fingers, appeared on Sara’s upper arms the next day. She slammed Sara into the wall, and I heard my sister’s jaw rattle. “Do you think you can hide things from me?” my mother was asking. “I am your mother.” She raised the Barbie in the air and swiped its rubbery legs across my sister’s face.

Chapter Eleven

MY FATHER FILED for full custody of my sisters and me in the summer of 1975. His suit did not go before a judge until the fall of 1976, a full year and a half later.

Finally, in preparation for the hearing, during the fall of fifth grade, the child welfare department sent a social worker out to visit. He was supposed to speak to all the parties involved, observe the home, and make his recommendation to the court.

My mother prepared for him. We helped her clear a path—right down our old running track—through the long front hall, past the piano, to the couches in the living room. The doors along the hallway—to the bedrooms and the kitchen—were pushed closed, and everything that might have blocked his path we piled behind them. The dining room, which opened to the living room and could not be concealed, we arranged so that it looked clean as long as you didn’t get too close. We transferred everything from the dining room table—the sewing machine and all the material and patterns, plus all the bills, papers, and books that had settled in on top of that—to the floor of my mother’s bedroom. The back hallway was so crowded with all the mail and newspapers we’d lugged from the living room and front hall that Sara could barely get in and out of her bedroom. The back door was impassable. All the junk on top of the coffee tables and the parquet floor in the dining room we scooped up and jammed into the drawers of the buffet in the dining room, flattening them out so the drawers closed. Our stuff—clothes, games, toys, and books, which had spread throughout the house—we shoved into the large walk-in closet in the bedroom I shared with Amy.

When my mother swept the front hall and living room, the vacuum cleaner heaved and rattled, choking on tacks, coins, rubber bands, on two years of debris, but somehow got the job done. After, the sight of our naked, sky blue carpets, the ones that had seemed so open and limitless just four years before when we moved in, shocked us. The vacuuming revealed ugly spots, oily and coarse, brown stains in the carpets that would not come out. We pushed the couches and armchairs and throw rug around as best we could to cover them. Then we waited in the unfamiliar clean of the living room for the man from child welfare to arrive.

Mr. Judson sat at one end of the green sofa, looking down though his glasses at a sheaf of papers he’d taken from his black briefcase. I don’t remember if he asked to see the rest of the house—our bedrooms, the kitchen. Surely the jig would have been up if he’d seen the kitchen. My mother would have headed off any suggestion of a full tour. She had a way of foreclosing certain lines of conversation.

He was round and middle-aged. His suit—perhaps it had fit better a few years earlier—made it difficult for him to get comfortable on the sofa. I sat at the other end, backed all the way up to the arm, so that I could feel the bones of the sofa through the upholstery hard against my back. I hugged a small cushion to my stomach and traced the spiraling pattern on its fabric as I waited for him to speak. My mother hadn’t coached us on what to say, but she stood, I assumed, just behind the closed door in the hallway, listening. The way Sara remembers it, my mother stayed even closer, in the dining room, where she could follow every word.

Mr. Judson shifted and settled, then finally drew a steno pad from his briefcase, lowered his horn-rimmed glasses on his nose and looked down at me over the rims. I tried to keep my index finger on the outside of the green paisley design and follow the swirls in and out. Each time the pattern would switch, and my finger would end up on the inside again. Mr. Judson smiled and asked a few questions about school, my grades, my friends. I told him my teacher’s name was Mrs. Collins, and my best friend’s name was Lisa, and I had just been put in gifted. He nodded. Preliminaries.

Then he shifted gears. “You should feel free to tell me anything you want. Neither your Mom or Dad is going to know what you say, so don’t worry about that. OK?” He pointed a trained look of concern at me over the glasses.

“OK,” I whispered, hoping he would take my cue and lower his voice.

“Where do you like it better, at your mother’s house, or your father’s house?”

I looked down, pressing my nail into the green tapestry of the pillow. I wanted to tell him that I wanted to live with my father. I intended to tell him this. But I felt the question had to be answered exactly the way he’d posed it.

“I like it at my father’s,” I said, looking up at him. “It’s very clean.”

He nodded, wrote something down.

“I like it here too,” I said, looking down again. I paused, shifting my eyes to the dining room. “There’s some problems.” Tears welled in my eyes, but I thought I could manage them. I took a breath, searching for words. Even under less stressful circumstances it took me time to gather my words.

“I understand, this is very difficult,” Mr. Judson said, interrupting my thoughts. “You love both your Mom and your Dad.”

“Yeah,” I whispered. True enough, though hardly the point.

“There’re some problems,” I ventured again, hoping to stir his interest.

“I understand. Every family has problems. You know,” he said, as if the thought had just occurred to him, “you don’t have to choose between your Dad or Mom.” I looked back at him, eyebrows knit. Of course I had to choose—that was the whole point, wasn’t it?

He reached into his briefcase, drew out a small pack of Kleenex, and handed me a tissue. I wiped my eyes, and he made more notes on his steno pad. I tried out sentences in my head:
My mother is not very well. My mother gets very angry sometimes.
My mother gets very angry with my sister sometimes
. Ever polite, I waited for him to finish writing.

He looked up at me suddenly, “OK then, I’ll talk to your sister now,” he looked back down at his notebook, “Sara. Would you go get Sara for me?”

I sat there a second while he looked at me expectantly. “OK,” I said, slowly moving the cushion from my lap. I stood up, glanced back at him once, confused and shamed, knowing I had muffed it somehow, had lacked the nerve to do what needed to be done. I could only hope Sara would do better.

Several weeks later my mother held up a thick sheaf of legal papers, folded over four times. “This is the court’s decision,” she said.

I sat at the foot of her bed, my heart pounding. She sat above me, Indian-style, among the swirling sheets and blankets on her single bed, which was pushed up against the wall. All the junk from the dining room was still in there, so it was crowded on the floor. And dim, as the shades were always drawn. I couldn’t see her face clearly.

“It says that Sara and Amy want to live with their mother, and Laura could not decide.” I did not dare look at her, but my neck hunched down between my shoulders as I waited for the fury that must surely finally be unleashed on me. She went on, almost without missing a beat. “They made a mistake; they got your name mixed up with Sara’s.”

She continued to leaf through the pages, not even looking to me for confirmation. I didn’t offer any. Just sat there on the floor, feeling the moment mow me down. Mown like that, I couldn’t correct her, could only watch mutely as the moment passed. There was time enough to calculate that this, like everything else, would not go down easily for Sara, time enough to take in something I had already intuited: if you say nothing, people assume you are on their side.

In bed that night, finally away from my mother, my disappointment bore down hard. The judge had granted my mother full custody, based on the recommendation of Mr. Judson. My father retained weekend visitation rights, but that was all—we were not going to live with him. We were going to stay right here, in this mess with my mother. This reality was so wide, and heavy, so unexpected, I didn’t think I could withstand it. For months now my existence had been rooted in the belief that everything around me was temporary, that another future, free of my mother’s stifling presence, a future of clean carpets and dinners on the table every night, was coming. Holding that future in my mind was what made it possible to get through the days.

The television crackled in the other room. I could hear the hollow sound of laughter—my mother watching Johnny Carson do his nightly monologue. The sheets felt hot; I knew I wouldn’t sleep.

And what about Sara? She wanted to live with my father even more than I did. Why hadn’t she told Mr. Judson the truth? At least I’d stuck my neck out a little—and for what? I was furious at her. I couldn’t be furious at her. She hadn’t said anything, and she was still the one in trouble over what I’d said.

I was furious at my father too. He’d been so sure. Now he’d lost. He’d promised we would live with him. Promised things would change and soon. I’d counted on his ability to know the future. What did he know? It felt like the floor falling out of the earth. Maybe he didn’t know anything; maybe he wasn’t stronger than my mother. And yet I could no more be mad at him than I could be at Sara. He was my only lifeline.

So I focused on Mr. Judson. A pure and uncomplicated hatred for him carried me through the dark hours of the night. He’d promised me my mother would not find out what I told him. Then he’d written it all down and mailed her a copy. He must have known he was going to do that all along and lied just to get me to talk.

At some point as I lay on my stomach in bed, I steepled my hands together, leaned them against the bedstead, and addressed my words to God. I told him my story. I began as far back as I could remember. How we’d moved to this apartment and my mother had changed. How
He
needed to help her. But most of all, how
He
needed to help me go live with my father. I listed my complaints. The mess covering all the floors, which surely God in his heaven could see. That she talked with devils. That she got very angry. Wouldn’t let us leave the house. How everyone was afraid of her—my grandfather, my teachers at school, the neighbors, people in stores and on the street.

And somewhere in that night, when I had exhausted myself in tears and words, I felt calm, the cathartic release of confession, felt the sense of a sympathetic presence listening in the night. And finally I slept.

In the days that followed, on the bus to school or sitting by the window in the living room reading, when my eyes drifted up from my book to check the progress of the fog up the Bay, my thoughts would turn to escape by way of disaster. Fire. Flood. Earthquake. Something powerful that could wreck the house and force us to leave. Kidnapping. Especially kidnapping. Patty Hearst, who’d been taken from her dorm room at Berkeley just across the Bay, filled our imaginations. Images of her kidnapping played over and over in my mind, though of course there was no actual footage. Then I’d imagine my own mother standing in front of a row of microphones, wearing her trench coat and big black glasses to hide her tears like Mrs. Hearst. Here the fantasy faltered. My mother would be more angry than sad. She’d say something not right to the reporters, something no one would understand. They’d get the sharpness, though—the fury barely contained under her coat. Everyone would look around, embarrassed.
Jesus, we
didn’t
kidnap
her daughter
, they’d think. Not my mother, though; she’d keep eyeing them with her perfect knowledge of their complicity. She’d ruin the whole thing.