Swallow the Ocean (15 page)

Chapter Fourteen

FOR EASTER my father’s parents came for a visit, and we rented a house on Stinson Beach for a week. My sisters and I spent all day running from the waves, burning our fair skin, our bathing suits caked with sand. My father taught us to body surf, egging us on, pushing us farther and farther out, his presence, waist-deep in the surf, allowing us to push beyond the threshold of our fear.

My grandfather cut a dignified figure on the beach, tall and thin, his back bent slightly down towards the sand. He took long walks in the mornings when it was still misty and cold. Sara, Amy, and I would go out after breakfast to look for him, but we could never see him against the horizon of sand. We’d play on the beach, beginning to tunnel into the hard wet sand, until finally, with some relief, we saw his form reemerging in the distance. He was old, and we didn’t want him to get lost.

At my father’s apartment in the city my grandfather seemed caged. He’d fix things around the house, go to the hardware store and buy wood filler, or a new hinge for a door. But mostly he would just sit very still in the living room during the day, beside my grandmother while she embroidered.

At the beach he seemed more at ease. As he came towards us along the shoreline, we watched him bend and pick up stones from the sand. His arm flared out at his side and traced a horizontal line through the air as he skipped stones into the surf. I couldn’t see his hand, but I knew it would be curled, cupping the stone with the surety and grace of a man at ease with things. By the time he returned, reached us on the beach in front of the house, the sun had begun to emerge through the fog and we had built a complex of tunnels that were now flooding with the rising tide.

Amy and I wore matching suits, the same half-cotton tank that had lost its grip around the legs and rode up our butts. Hers was pink; mine was blue. We had matching tummies as well—small round ones that pushed the suits out a little in front. We weren’t exactly fat, but we weren’t skinny either.

Sara was somehow skinny now. At thirteen, all the extra effort in her body was bent on other ends, sending her upwards in long lines that erased the baby curves. She wore a large T-shirt over her swimsuit to hide the progress that had taken place beneath. She rounded and hunched her shoulders down. Several times a day my father would come up behind her and pull her shoulders back. He wanted us to stand up straight and proud.

Sara had settled in at my father’s. The front room became hers, and she had a chest of drawers and a pile of new clothes. Jeni bought her a wraparound denim sundress. It was the single most appealing item of clothing I had ever seen. I don’t remember what we said when we first saw each other after Sara left, only that for a time she and I were brittle and careful with one another. But I could not stay mad at her long. I needed her too much. Plus, it was such a tangle. Nothing was fair. My mother had cast Sara out and clung to me. Nothing either of us did seemed to affect this. Sara had borne the brunt of my mother’s rage for two years, perhaps shielding Amy and me. How could I blame her for leaving?

Yet without Sara at home I stood in a perilous grace with my mother. I had to manage her alone. No long hours talking in Sara’s room. No one to help measure what we might or might not get away with. No one to exchange looks of warning with. My mother’s attention tight upon me. The risk of her discovering that my heart was hardened against her seemed incalculably high. The slightest slip and I would cross the line.

I collected things from the beach over the week: feathers, stones, sea glass, shells. The fine pale grains of sand were velvet between my toes. Stinson was sheltered in a cove, so unlike Ocean or Baker Beach, the ocean was not forever throwing its coarse refuse onto the shore—things were softer here, older, more ground down by time, sun, and care. Peach-colored shells, about the diameter of a dime, were scattered on the sand. A fishing line could be pushed through the opening at the top. By the time the week was over, I’d strung together a tight choker of these shells. It was a pretty thing to look at, but heavy, and tight when you put it on, and when you came right down to it, impractical for actually wearing.

What I loved most was the sea glass. Emerald green, lapis blue. Brighter than stones and shells. Sadly, the smooth stones could not be strung. I collected them anyway, piling them into a bottle during the week, imagining I would come by a small drill so I could make a necklace of them. That was the kind of thing my mother might be talked into. Sometimes she’d throw herself into a project and take Amy and me to the craft store on Geary. She kept us in crayons and glue and construction paper. Once we cut out paper butterflies and shellacked them onto a piece of carved wood.

Sara and I walked down the beach together, and I kept my eyes peeled for sea glass. “Where do you think it comes from?”

“Broken bottles, worn down by the ocean.”

I rubbed the jewel-like green glass in my hand and imagined the thickness, the coarseness of a broken green coke bottle. “It’s so smooth.”

Sara had a rock polisher that was still buried somewhere in her old room at home, a wooden box with a small drawer in front into which you placed the stones. When you turned the crank, the rocks rattled and clanked inside. They were supposed to come out smooth, but we’d never been able to get much more than a slight sheen.

This glass might be a hundred years old. Might have come from across the world, from Hawaii, from China. I imagined women in old-fashioned dresses, so long and heavy they had to lift lace and petticoats when they came close to the water, putting messages into bottles and watching as they drifted and bobbed out to sea. The words, the paper, were gone, leaving only this glass, worn down to its essence—just blue, just green.

In the evenings we sat together after dinner, my father, Jeni, my grandparents, my sisters, and me, reading
Treasure
Island
. Each of us read a page out loud, then passed the book along. My father did craggy pirate voices when he read. When it was my turn, I had to pull the book up close to my face to see clearly. The words glided out of my throat. I would concentrate on reading well, pause at all the commas and the periods, enjoying the sounds passing through my throat. I could never hear and read at the same time. So when I passed the book to Sara and listened again I was lost.

We were like foreigners to my grandparents. We lived in a city, ate produce they had never tried, avocados and artichokes. My grandmother was still waiting for the day that my father would have enough money to move to the suburbs, not realizing that for my father, living in the city was to have arrived. That was part of it. My mother was the other part. After my parents married in 1961, when they went back to visit my father’s family, ripples of judgment fell around them. My mother not only was not Catholic, she was a minister’s daughter. My grandmother’s sister refused to come in the house while she was there. And later a cousin actually said to my father, “Well, that’s what you get for marrying a minister’s daughter.” Not my grandmother. She always liked my mother, and anyway my father, her youngest son, was her favorite. In her tough, wordless way she let us know we were, by extension, her favorite grandchildren. She’d raised seven children, six of them born during the Depression. Now she was watching over the lives of thirty grandchildren. Back in Flint, where the auto industry was tanking and the unemployment rate was topping 25 percent, our teenage cousins were in trouble: drinking, doing drugs, totaling cars, and getting pregnant. Our troubles, which were not entirely visible to the eye, must have seemed like the least of it. My grandmother shook her head and clucked her teeth over my mother. She prayed for us. But she had faith in my father. And an eye for these things—she could tell who was going to float. She knew my sisters and I would come out OK in the end.

On Sunday night my father drove us home. I sat up front with him. Amy was in the back, asleep. The radio was on, a classical music station my father liked. I held my backpack in my lap, toying with the zipper. After a whole week away it was harder than ever to go home. All three of us were silent until we reached the bridge. I couldn’t tell what my father was thinking.

“It’s not going to be too much longer, Sweetie,” he said, as he pulled away from the toll plaza on the San Francisco end of the bridge.

I nodded at him, pulling my backpack in against my stomach. “Can I stay with you like Sara?”

He looked over at me, then back at the road. “If you really want to, you can come.”

We were both silent. I pushed my feet against the floor of the car.

“Do you want to leave your sister there alone?”

“No,” I whispered, pressing harder on the floor.

“We’ll be in court sometime this summer,” he said.

I took all the sustenance from that promise I could, but I also knew that during the week I was on my own.

My mother was watching for us from the window. She met us at the front door. She hugged Amy and then me. She held me to her for a long moment. Her body had begun to repulse me, and whenever she touched me, I had to resist the urge to pull away. When she let me go, I dropped my backpack on the floor in the hall. She sat down heavily on the piano bench. Amy slipped away to the bathroom. I began my long slog through the minefield of questions she had about the week we’d spent away.

“We had corn on the cob.” “We went swimming.”

She wanted to know about Sara. About what she wore and how she got to school now. I told as little as I could. She asked about my grandparents. She ascertained that Jeni had been there all week. This felt like particularly dangerous territory.

When she let me go, I went to our bedroom. I took my bottle of sea glass from my backpack and placed it on the shelf at the foot of my bed. If I kept a little water in it, the greens and blues stayed brilliant. Then I slid under the bed where Amy was waiting for me.

I picked Jo up from where she lay. “The tower was really by the ocean. So when they get out of the tree they’re on a beach,” I said.

“Like Stinson?” Amy asked.

“Yeah, but with cliffs so they can’t get off. They walk up and down but they’re stuck.”

“What do they do?”

“Eat snails and clams. Make bonfires from driftwood.”

Amy lay the four dolls on their sides. She pulled their long dresses down over their bare legs. She put Amy’s arm around Beth.

“Can we make a raft?” she asked.

I looked around the room, nodding. “We’ll have to gather up wood for that.”

We moved the three dolls—the three that could see—across the room. They glided across the floor to gather wood. Lincoln Logs were scattered around the room, along with all our other toys. Finding them was like a scavenger hunt. When we found one, the dolls shouldered it back to camp. We clicked the logs together. When it was done, I put Jo on the raft. Her legs stuck out over the ends.

“It’s no use,” I said.

“The waves are too big,” Amy said.

Chapter Fifteen

FOR A LONG TIME I hadn’t been able to see the blackboard at school. I couldn’t read the list of flavors on the wall behind the ice cream counter, and still my mother ignored the notes sent home by the school nurse.

One afternoon, without warning, my father appeared at the door of my fifth-grade classroom to whisk me to the eye doctor without telling my mother. At the doctor’s office there was much exclamation over the degree of my myopia—twenty/ two-hundred—not so blind on the scale of things, but bad for a first-time visit. Afterwards with eyes still dilated, wincing from the glare of the mirrors, I tried on every pair of frames at the optician’s, and still liked myself better without glasses. My mother had worn glasses since she was a child. She always said it was from reading in bed without the light. And of course I’d done the same thing, read by the shadowy glow of the hallway light, or in the dim circle of the flashlight under the covers. I settled on a pair of copper-colored plastic frames. When I looked in the mirror, all I could think was:
I look like her
.

A week later, still without a word to my mother (my father thought a fait accompli would be better than an open struggle with her) my father took me out of school again to pick up the glasses. As I stepped out of the optician’s with the glasses on, the sidewalk jumped up at me. I reared my head back and to the side, and only slowly learned to look straight at the ground. The pavement was a mosaic of grays, blues, blacks, and whites, some glinting in the sun. Raising my eyes, I saw the sycamore trees that lined the streets were now layered with leaves, each sharp and distinct, where before all I’d seen was the shape of a tree.

I walked home from the bus stop later that day, very slowly, taking in the new texture of the sidewalks, the trees, the cars on the street, but also stalling for time. My father had called my mother to tell her he’d taken me to get glasses. He seemed to think everything would be OK. But I was sure she would be furious with me. Something as important as glasses, something I would wear every day, coming from my father? She’d never let me keep them.

As I started up the stairs in the lobby of our building, the stone statue that stood on the landing loomed over me, a massive Indian goddess, with several arms. “I wouldn’t want to be in her path in an earthquake,” my father had said years before when we first moved in. I always thought of this remark when I saw her and made it a habit to run up the stairs and get by her quickly. Today I dawdled. I could see the features on her face clearly for the first time. She wasn’t as stern as I’d thought.

Before going inside I took the glasses off and put them in their case, then inside my backpack. I let myself in the door.

My mother came to meet me when she heard me come in. “Let’s see your glasses,” she said. I searched her face for the grim tension that came with anger. I took out the glasses, handed them to her, and then stepped back, half expecting her to smash them. Instead she pulled them out of the case and examined them. She moved towards me. I froze. She placed the frames carefully on my face. “They make you look very smart,” she said. And still I waited, sure that the anger would come.

But it never did. Instead we sat down in the living room, me on the couch, her in her armchair, and she told me about when she first got glasses as a girl. Everyone had said, “Boys never make passes at girls who wear glasses,” and she’d refused to wear them. She thought that this, along with continuing to read in bed, had made her even more nearsighted.

“Wear your glasses so your eyes don’t get worse,” she said. “And don’t listen to what anyone says.”

Then she went to the bookcase and dug out a 1940s hardcover version of E. S. Nesbitt’s
The Enchanted Castle
. The book didn’t look all that promising. The dark gray cover with just the title engraved on the front gave nothing away. The corners were dented, the pages rough at the edges. She showed me the inscription inside: for Sally Ann Barton, 1948. She’d won it in a spelling bee in school when she was just about my age.

“This was one of my favorite books when I was little,” she said. “You can have it now.”

I understood she was giving it to me as a kind of consolation. And of course that made sense. Everyone knew glasses and books went together. Neither of my sisters read the way I did, or the way my mother had, compulsively, continuously, desperate for a new book the minute the last one was finished. And neither of them needed glasses. I would never like the way I looked in glasses, but it was the price I’d paid for entrance into those thousands of pages of enchantment.

I settled into the couch to read, opening the worn cover of the book. The crispness of the glasses was intoxicating, dizzying. The letters were very neat and tight on the page. I looked up and across the living room. Inside our house, so much clarity was exhausting. The formerly undifferentiated mess that covered our floors was now distinct: a pink doll shoe here, the little bulbs from the Light Bright set, Marilyn Monroe’s lurid face staring up at me from a magazine in the living room. In fact, the specificity of the books and magazines that made up my mother’s Kennedy archive, which was stacked knee deep at the foot of the couch (
Profiles in Courage
, PT109, Jackie, Bobby, Marilyn, Lee Harvey Oswald, Chappaquiddick, the Cubans, the Russians, the mafia—my mother had it all) was suddenly more vividly disturbing. I took the glasses off just to make all those layers of things go away. I pulled the book up close to my face.
The Enchanted Castle
was much better than it looked, and without my glasses on I could limit the world to the small circle of words directly in front of me.

My father gave me a hard-covered composition notebook for my tenth birthday. Until I received it, I hadn’t known that I coveted one, so it was all the more amazing that someone had finally given me the right gift. It was a studious-looking thing, bound at the spine, with a black-and-white speckled cover, not like the flimsy colored spiral notebooks we used for school. It seemed to me both old-fashioned and grownup all at once.

I’d already laid claim to a future as a writer. At school and at home, I wrote stories on the wide blue-lined paper we used for practicing our letters. But this notebook put ideas in my head, egged me on. I decided that I would write a novel. The form was there—the book already bound—all I had to do was fill in the pages.

I sat in the kitchen, elbows mashed against the white Formica of the table, in the middle of the round booth that was built into the corner of the room. The table was cluttered: cereal boxes with their tops yawning to the ceiling, dishes from breakfast, my mother’s electric fryer, glistening with grease, perched dangerously near the edge of the table. The cord ran over my shoulder to the outlet behind me on the wall. I’d cleared a foot or two of space to work. The notebook lay open before me, and at my elbow was a sheet of lined paper on which my mother and I had mapped out the chapters of my book. She’d written in Roman numerals for each chapter; I’d filled in the plot. In the first chapter Heidi, my main character, was orphaned. In the second chapter she lived with cruel foster parents. In the third chapter she ran away. In the fourth chapter she lived in a barn and was befriended by animals. Chickens gave her eggs for breakfast. In the fifth chapter she was caught by a farmer and had to run away. In the sixth chapter an old woman took her in. In the seventh chapter the old woman died, and Heidi had to run away. In the eighth and final chapter Heidi walked by her old house and saw a light in the window. Peering in, she saw her aunt and uncle, who had returned home from an extended vacation and had been looking for her.

I shifted in the center of the booth, my fingers gripping a blue ballpoint pen. On the first page of the notebook I’d written “once upon a time.” As I looked at the writing on the page I worried that I’d ruined the notebook, marred it with my poor script, which despite strenuous effort would not turn elegant. The letters were bent and cramped, refusing to lean in one direction; some went left, some right, some bolt upright.

My mother stood at the kitchen counter, smoothing Crisco on the skins of potatoes for baking. She looked over at me. “Why don’t you write it in pencil first?”

She opened the oven and set three potatoes on the rack. Her hands glistened from the Crisco. She went to the sink to wash them and then came and stood over me. “I can read it over for you, help you with spelling, and then you can do it over in pen.”

She was, despite everything, still a tremendous repository of knowledge. She helped me with plot refinements, coming up with a job for Heidi’s soon-to-be-deceased father (TV repair man). Writing, books, and imagination remained safe, the last unguarded territory I shared with my mother, where on occasion I was still her charmed child. Her suggestion to write in pencil was the magic word that set me writing.

I worked in this way for weeks, possibly months. I’d clear a spot at the kitchen table to write each day when I came home from school. Some days my mother kept me company. Other days the door to her bedroom was closed and a deep silence echoed from within, broken only by an occasional rif-fle of laughter, something half stifled that slipped under the threshold of the door, or by waves of laughter, remorseless and derisive, as if she were lording it over the folly of an unseen interlocutor. Then I had to labor on alone while Amy watched TV in the living room.

My mother’s sobbing was harder to tune out. Long, sustained cries, which I had to steel myself against or be swallowed by. If I were kind and brave, a good daughter, I would knock on her door, creep towards her bed, crawl in with her, wrap my arms around her, and make her stop crying the way she could still do for me, the way I had once been able to do for her. But I didn’t. Instead, when she cried Amy and I slipped out the back door as fast as we could.

Later, when she emerged from her room, when she roused herself to make a meal for us, red-eyed but slowly recovering herself, she’d read over what I’d written for mistakes. I erased misspelled words, added commas, and then went back over the whole thing, tracing the penciled words with a pen.

Looking back over what I’d finished, the pages flush with ink, gave me a very deep sense of satisfaction. There are few things more pleasing to the eye than a page filled with words of your own making. Even now, if I close my eyes, I can see how it looked, page upon page, the narrow lines of blue ink wavering inside the wider, deeply indented gray of pencil lead, the paper stiff from so much handling, furled and rippling from the double layers of script. It took nearly until Christmas to reach chapter seven. I was closing in on my happy ending, though the stages of loss took more time than I’d expected.

One morning I rushed out to the living room, searching for my saddle shoes, desperate not to miss the bus again and set the whole Mom-driving-me-to-school-but-me-never-getting-there scenario into motion. My shoes lay by the side of the wing chair, right where they’d landed the day before, when I’d nudged them off while reading. My socks nestled beside them. I’d pushed those off too, never looking up from my book, my big toe wedged inside the ribbing, sliding them slowly off my feet.

I sat down on the floor and pulled on the socks. I looked up into the grate of the fireplace. A fresh pile of ash one foot deep filled the grate. The scent of smoke was still in the room. The ashes were layered, piles upon piles, the burnt echo of paper, soot still holding form. My eyes locked on a bit of black-and-white speckled cardboard among the ash. My hands froze in midair over the laces of my shoe, one knee still pulled up against my chest. I swallowed hard. I got up on my knees and crawled towards the fireplace. Remnants of blue-lined paper. Yellowed and brown and black. Transformed. Unfamiliar. My own unmistakable crooked handwriting curling into the charred corners.

I reached in and lifted a piece of the cardboard. It dissolved in my fingers, fell away, raising a cloud of ash. A sound caught in my throat. I couldn’t move. My eyes burned. Rage ran through me. Up and down my legs, shivering in my arms, pulsing into my hands. The charred cardboard trembled in my fingers. I heard the toaster pop up in the kitchen and was suddenly aware of my mother. She was opening the dishwasher, rattling the silverware as she took a butter knife from the tray.

The blue carpet swam around me. I was going to scream. Could feel a scream gathering, thickening in my throat. Could feel blood racing. Hot and tight, pulsing at the boundaries of my body, ready to fly loose.

My mother called to me from the kitchen. I pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth. Swallowed. Swallowed again. I looked down at my shaking sooty hand. I made myself stand, walk to the bathroom. Run warm water over my hands. Spin the white bar of soap between my fingers. Watch the sooty water swirl down the drain. Hold the soap under the water to wash it clean.

I went to my mother in the kitchen. I didn’t look into her face. I hated her.

Why did she burn it? Because he gave it to me? Because I clung to it? Maybe she didn’t even see it. Just picked it up and tossed it into the fireplace without knowing. I hated her.

She handed me a piece of cinnamon toast. “Be a good girl at school today,” she said, and I hated her. She kissed me on the forehead. I stared into the toast. The cinnamon soaked into melted butter made a dark spot at the center of the bread. I hated her. I said nothing about the notebook, not then, not ever.

I took the front stairs two at a time, tossed my toast into the bushes on the patio, hit the pavement running. I hated her. I hated her. I hated her. Blinded by tears, I sought out the cracks between the paving squares. I stretched my legs out in a leap, or foreshortened my stride to land squarely on the lines. I hated her.
Step on a crack, break your
mother’s
back
. I hated her. My feet slapped down hard on every crack on 24th Avenue.
Step on a
crack, break your
mother’s
back
. I hated her. All the way up the four long blocks to the bus stop on Lake Street.