Swallow the Ocean (8 page)

He’s withholding his dreams. He goes to work in a rush of anger and comes home silent, bringing that hardness into the house. He watches the news. He yells at the children. His lust for the deals he makes at work hangs like a moldy film on his body. His voice is metallic and hard, distant, as if he’s in the next room. Not right before her—telling her she needs help—she, who has struggled for his soul so long. She who has listened and interpreted for him, scouring both their dreams for signs. So many years, doing the work for both of them, for all of them. And now every gesture, every step confirms it: he’s crossed the line.

And even then once she
knew
, was his old face restored to her from time to time? Were there still mornings when they talked, nights she turned to him and told him how frightened she was? Did their bodies still fit together in love?

The front door closes behind him. She sits up. Enveloped in terror, she rocks slowly on the edge of the bed. He’s made a deal. He’s crossed the line. He’s on the other side. He’ll take her down. He’ll take the children down, if she lets him. She does the only thing possible: she steels herself against him, draws the children in tight, and prepares for battle.

My father remembers one last scene. He sat with my mother on a bench in Golden Gate Park in the late spring of 1974. My sisters and I were at school. He was home from work. In fact, he hadn’t worked much that year, hadn’t closed a deal, hadn’t earned a dime in months.

“Sally,” he said, “I can tell you exactly what’s going to happen.” She didn’t look at him. “First, you’re going to lose me,” he said. “Then I’m going to take the children.” She turned slightly, her gaze flickered over him. “You’ll lose the house,” he went on. “You’ll end up living in one of my buildings in the Tenderloin.”

She shook her head. She almost laughed. She didn’t argue. Everything he said was beside the point. Her mind was fixed on something else altogether. Then turning full on him, her eyes focusing in for just a second, she said sharply, “No one will ever give
you
the children.”

On the day my father finally moved out, after he’d shuttled his suitcases to the car and the front door closed behind him, my mother turned to us and said, “There goes a very bad man.” Her words startled me, but I didn’t doubt her. Doubting her was not yet a part of my makeup. And now that she said it, now that she put it that way, it seemed true. He hadn’t been very nice for a long time, and he was leaving us—that was bad.

My mother sat up tall in her high-backed gold armchair and spoke almost without malice. She was calm—surprisingly so under the circumstances. My sisters and I sat across from her, lined up on the living room couch. It was the first day of summer between second and third grade. I don’t remember the days that led up to this one, if there had been more fights—surely there were—or if I’d known ahead of time he was leaving. Just this scene: my father carrying suitcases out to his car, my sisters and I very quiet on the couch. He came back to kiss each of us on the forehead before he left. I didn’t look him in the eye. My mother’s coiled anger trumped whatever sympathy I had for him—trumped everything, in fact.

When the door closed, I turned to look out the window behind me and caught the back of my father’s head, craning slightly forward as he walked down the staircase to the street. He wore a corduroy jacket, lemon-colored, with patches at the elbows. For a second I saw the spot at the top of his head where, at thirty-four, his scalp was just beginning to show through.

“A very bad man,” she repeated with a rapid movement of her head that shook the dark, loose curls of her hair. “This summer we will erase the past,” my mother said after he drove away. She held up her arm, an imaginary eraser in her hand, and swept the air in front of her. “We’ll wipe the slate clean.”

We sat there for a long time that day. My mother laid out the new terms of our lives. They had to do with staying inside and cutting all our ties to other people, with being careful about what we ate and what we wore.

Across town, in the one-bedroom apartment he’d rented the week before, my father—whom I’ve never seen shed more than a few tears—cried for two days.

From my perch on the living room couch, I watched the fog flow in like a second body of water over the Bay. When it was rolling in I could see where it ended, where it began. I could watch its shape change as it came slowly towards us. First the bridge disappeared, then the trees in the Presidio, then the houses and the street down below. And then suddenly, there was nothing to see. The fog was just a white melancholy that hung in the air, punctuated by the double wail of the foghorns, low, and lower, moaning through the afternoon. Gazing into the distanceless space, there was no way to know the whole world wasn’t like this: muffled and dim, shrouded in white.

Chapter Seven

AFTER MY FATHER LEFT the shades went down, and the acacia tree in the front yard grew up over the windows. My mother didn’t leave the house for months at a time, and for three full years no one came inside. Days slid into night and night into day. Bedtime receded; mealtimes dissolved. The house grew messier and messier. My mother more and more manic, hovering over our every move, then by turns impassive, retreating to her room or to the enlarged universe inside her head.

My memory of those three years remains cordoned off from the rest of my life. The images are sharp, but there’s a sequencing problem, a tendency for scenes to repeat. When I try to bring order, I get no traction. My memory is compressed, as if everything that happened inside that house during the whole of those three years is singular—one long unrelieved bad dream.

I want to say
fog
. I want to say
shade
. I want to say the air was thick, movement ponderous, as if we were underwater. I want to say it was an effort to raise our limbs, that we all heard voices whispering in the hall, but of course none of that is true. My mother heard voices; we heard only her whispered responses, the crackling laughter that slipped through her lips, the muffled sobs from behind her bedroom door, the pulse of her anger rising around us.

Outside the house, my life moved along at an even pace. Weekends with my father, vacations to the beach. Hot days in September, cooler days of fall. Third grade: Mrs. Pirelli; fourth grade: Mr. Stover; fifth grade: Mrs. Collins. Field trips to the Mint, ferry rides to Angel Island. Cursive, fractions, kickball, dodgeball, being chased by the boys at recess. Lisa Adelson and Laurie Mori, and Fiona, whose last name I cannot recall, whom we called fleabag and kept at the margin of our circle because she was a Jehovah’s Witness and couldn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance or go to birthday parties. Seagulls pick at our lunch leavings on the pavement of the schoolyard. And on rainy days we cram three to a seat, wet plastic slicker against wet plastic slicker, into the school bus. I watch the lightning through rain-battered windows, then splash through puddles arm-in-arm with Lisa, my best friend, whose house in the long afternoons after school will become a refuge.

But inside our house, time refused to flow in a normal way, as if the density of my mother’s illness pulled at its very fabric.

What grew, the progression I hold onto even now, was my own awareness of her illness. That first summer after my father left, it was just presentiment, an unformed sense of dread. I still saw the world through the glass of her perception. The distortions in the lens troubled me, but I had no language for what was wrong.

Stuck inside the house with my mother, who was intent on unwriting our lives, erasing the past, and cutting all our ties, my sisters and I grasped for a narrative that would hold. We spent our days playing dolls, telling each other stories of loss, abandonment, and escape over and over again. Every game began like this: “We’re orphans,” I’d say, or Sara would say. Then we’d dispense with parents by way of illness, train wreck, or civil war.

Only Amy didn’t want to be an orphan. But then she was lucky to be playing with us at all. Up until then, Sara and I had only let her watch while we primped our dolls for fancy dress balls, then swirled them with imaginary partners on the parquet floor in the dining room. Now that we had let her in, the game had changed.

The three of us were gathered in the room Amy and I shared, all still in our nightgowns—there were more than a few days that summer when we did not get dressed. We rarely left the house. My mother did not leave at all. Our Little Women dolls—sent to us by my grandma Sadie for Christmas—were spread on the floor in front of us, their long dresses fanning over their legs. These dolls, with their Victorian-era clothing, petticoats, aprons, stockings, and long hair that could be brushed and styled, had displaced all the rag dolls and stuffed animals that made up our menagerie before. I’d abandoned Big Baby for good, and an era in which all our games took place in “olden days” had begun.

Meg was Sara’s doll, Amy was Amy’s, and Jo was mine.

Beth—who was technically my mother’s—was a hot potato. Doomed, in her pale pink dress.

“You can be Beth if you want,” I said to Amy.

“I don’t wanna be Beth,” Amy answered. “You guys are gonna make her die.”

“No,” I said, glancing at Sara. “We won’t.” She could go blind, I thought. She could be crippled.

Amy looked to Sara.

“We promise,” Sara said.

The six years between them gave Sara room to mother Amy. She was right on my heels; I didn’t cut her any slack.

Amy and I were wearing pink and white nylon shifts, faded from much washing. Matching, because my mother always bought two of something she liked, which was fine in the beginning when the clothes were new and I wore the small dress and Sara the bigger one. By the time the larger dress was tight on me, and my mother still insisted that Amy and I wear them, the whole matching business lost its charm.

Sara’s nightgown barely covered her knees when she stood up. The three of us had always been evenly spaced in height: Sara was just able to rest her chin comfortably on the top of my head, and I could do the same to Amy. But this summer, Sara had shot up. I was only to her shoulder now. The baby fat on my limbs and belly matched Amy, not Sara. Worse, Sara was growing breasts under there. Already it was getting harder to lure her into our games. She thought she was too old to play dolls with us. I had to make the game particularly intriguing to keep her.

“The lady at the orphanage is very mean. We have to run away and go west,” I said. Sara and I were in thrall to the prairie. We were racing each other through the
Little House on the
Prairie
books. A trip to the bookstore on Clement Street was one of the few outings my mother would still sanction.

I seized on the idea of getting real provisions for the journey west and interrupted the game to run to the kitchen. In the hall I heard the radio, Charley Pride singing “Kiss an Angel Good Morning,” and behind that the hum of the sewing machine. I found myself singing along.
And love her like the devil when you
get back home
. My mother kept the radio on and tuned to the country music station pretty much all the time.

Dishes from last night’s dinner were piled around the sink in the kitchen. Boxes of Wheat Chex and Special K, milk cartons, finished but not thrown away, cluttered the counters. The garbage can overflowed. In the corner tiny flies hovered over the fruit bowl. A piece of bread, toasted but forgotten, waited in the hollow of the smooth silver toaster.

I got a chair and pulled the boxes down off the shelf. Flour, sugar, and salt don’t rot. I poured out rations in plastic bags and took them back to our bedroom.

We picked out the two strongest-looking specimens from Sara’s model horse collection. We bundled up all the extra doll clothes, piled in the sacks of salt and sugar, then packed the Little Women in. They stood up ramrod straight in the back of Amy’s circus wagon.

Sara walked the horses forward. I pushed the wagon. Amy scooted along on her knees in front of us, clearing a path in the hallway. Without my father, there was nothing to impede the messiness of the house. My sisters and I didn’t clean. My mother had always done the housework. We knew she didn’t want things disturbed. The rules were complicated and ever changing, but
don’t
throw anything away
stayed firm.

We decided to make camp on the shore of the Mississippi River. We had to cross before spring—before the ice broke. The game stalled there because Sara and I could not agree on which state the Mississippi was in. I was a stickler for authenticity and historical detail, so I went to the dining room to ask my mother.

My mother sat at the end of the dining room table, her head bent over the sewing machine. She wore a white terrycloth bathrobe with a zipper up the front. She’d grown larger during the past year. Her hair curled in around her neck, but not stylishly as it once had; now it was just overgrown. The first gray hairs clustered at her part. I don’t know what happened to the round John Lennon glasses—or the sensibility that chose them—but now she wore glasses with gray plastic rims, the kind that swoop down, telescoping not only her eyes but the skin under her eyes, which had grown coarse and bagged. She’d stopped taking care of herself, but it was more than that. Those few years wrought rapid changes on my mother’s body. Almost overnight she transformed from a striking young woman to the shapeless, ageless person she would remain for the next twenty-five years.

The room was dim, the shades were drawn, but the little light on the sewing machine illuminated a circle of fabric directly in front of her. My mother’s foot moved steadily up and down on the pedal of the sewing machine. The needle raced, then slowed as she let up on the pedal. She placed her right hand on the wheel to lift the needle, shifted the fabric, brought the needle down again, pressed the pedal, and then set the needle trotting back over the same seam.

The table was covered with her sewing materials: piles of fabric, some with thin patterns pinned to them, bobbins, thimbles, plastic cases of sewing needles, a plump cushion sprouting straight pins, packets of buttons and snaps still on the cardboard, and rolls of fat white elastic that come wound like shoelaces, which my mother sewed into the waists of the pants she made for us.

She had a large clear plastic box for storing spools of thread. When I was younger I loved to play with the thread, rearranging the spools to make new patterns with the colors, putting them in the order of the rainbow. I’d go through the little compartments and examine the buttons my mother collected: tortoiseshell, bone, metal, gold, brass, and silver. Now the box yawned open on the table. Half the spools of thread were missing from their pegs, buried under the fabric, or fallen under the table, where they would in time unwind and tangle with stray scraps of elastic, or the black cords of zigzag edging my mother sometimes sewed on blouses. Already the thick black basting thread was twined with the yellow measuring tape and lacing its way across the long formal table where we used to eat.

“It depends,” my mother said, in answer to my question about the Mississippi. She got up heavily from the chair and dug the
New York Times Atlas
out of a pile of books on the floor in the corner of the dining room. She showed me the fat blue line of the Mississippi River running clear down the middle of the country. She pointed out the town on the banks of the Mississippi in southern Illinois where she was born. I decided that was where we would cross.

I passed back through the living room, joining Loretta Lynn briefly for the second verse of “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Since my father had left, we’d had this strange new music—Conway Twitty, Dolly Parton, and Glen Campbell—on all the time. Foreign, twangy, alien, mournful, this music was from some part of the country, some way of life I was not familiar with. The singers rolled out their words in a deep, slow complaint, drawing out the vowels as if each one had to be carried up from the coalmine by hand. It was not a happy music. But the lyrics were great, the songs told stories, and it was easy to sing along. You could usually guess what was coming—these singers went for the rhyme, no matter how far the stretch. Only my tongue tangled trying to get “hard” to rhyme with “tired.”

Since my mother had determined not to leave the house at all that summer, Sara and I did the grocery shopping. Every few days we made a trip to a mom-and-pop store five blocks from our house, bringing home all we could carry in a single trip. Sara was eleven. I was seven. My mother would write out a list for us on adding machine paper while we got dressed to go outside, pulling on our homemade duds, polyester tops, and elastic-waist pants, searching out our tennis shoes from the piles in the living room or bedrooms. If we couldn’t get a brush through our hair, we’d tie a bandana over it.

In the store Sara would hold the scrolling list in her hand and send me out for two or three items at a time. We’d meet back at the cart to consult the list again. Inevitably, there were things we couldn’t find. Then we’d whisper together in the aisle, weighing whether to ask for help. The owner, the butcher, and the checkout guys all knew us. They knew my mother too, from before when she’d shopped with one or another of us in tow. They were unfailingly nice to us. We found this mortifying.

Asking for help was dicey because, though the grocer could easily find the items on the list, he did not appreciate the importance of getting the brand my mother asked for. Hunt’s tomato paste was good; Del Monte no good, in a way we could not explain. We found everything on our own and tried to get in and out of the store before anyone could ask if we needed help.

The vegetable freezer we faced together. The long metal bin with sliding glass doors on top wasn’t always well stocked, which meant the boxes of frozen spinach, broccoli, and fancy mixed vegetables that my mother wanted were all the way down at the bottom. Neither Sara nor I could reach in that far. We waited until no one was in the aisle, then I plunged in, head first, feet dangling off the floor, the metal side of the freezer slicing me in two at the waist. Sara held on to the elastic at the back of my pants so I wouldn’t fall in.

At the checkout counter, we watched warily as the grocer rang up each item. My eyes tracked between his hands and the register. When the total came up, Sara pulled out the wadded bills my mother had given her. We were short. Again.

I looked at Sara and then at the pile of food before us, trying to figure out what we could safely put back. But it was her call: she had the list; she had the money. She lifted a pound of spaghetti, set it back down, lifted the dishwasher detergent, hesitated. “Is this enough?” she asked, picking up a can of tuna (Chicken-of-the-Sea, never, never, Bumble Bee).

The grocer took the tuna from Sara. Pushing the can back across the counter, he said, “That’s OK. Just tell your mother you owe me two dollars and forty-five cents. Next time.”