Swallow the Ocean (9 page)

I cast a nervous glance at Sara. This seemed worse. Owing.

The grocer took his time bagging. He distributed everything carefully, separating the half-gallon milk cartons, lifting each bag to test the weight. When he was done there were three bags for Sara, two for me.

He handed me my two bags slowly. “That OK?” he asked. How must we have appeared to him? Shy, long-faced girls, unusually close, and close-mouthed. I mumbled, “It’s OK,” from behind the paper, anxious to wiggle loose from his gaze.

We walked the five blocks home as fast as we could. The serrated tops of the bags cut into my chin as they bobbed up with each step. My fingers got numb from clutching the coarse brown paper, so we had to stop every half block and rest on someone’s stoop. Then we’d shift the bags between us and set off again.

Getting home, getting the key in the door and the door closed tight behind us—quickly, so that if anyone was in the hall, they couldn’t see into our apartment—was a relief. We were friendly with all the neighbors. Mrs. Franks, the elderly lady who lived upstairs, sometimes invited Sara and Amy and me for tea. But it was awkward to see them now since no one was allowed in our apartment anymore. The weight of the bags was nothing compared to the pressure of people’s eyes upon me. Outside, I could not help knowing that our lives were strange and wrong. The messy house, Sara and I doing the grocery shopping—and not just going for a quart of milk, but all of it—staying inside all the time, weird country music that the neighbors complained about. And my mother. She was not like anyone else. I knew it, though I could not have explained exactly how. Just that she was shameful and that hiding our lives from the world required constant vigilance. Sara must have felt it even more acutely than I did. She was coming up fast on adolescence, straining at the bit, but in my eagerness to keep up, I took in the censure of the world early.

Once inside the house, I went straight to the big chair in front of the window in the living room and sank into my book. The part of that summer that I didn’t spend playing dolls with my sisters, I spent slumped in that chair: head against one armrest, one leg flopped over the other, inhaling the classics of children’s literature, gathering up plotlines for our games.

I read with the intensity of a novice. The boundaries between books and life were not yet fixed. I entered wholly into whatever lush and lovely world was available:
Charlotte’s
Web, Black
Beauty, Heidi, Little
Women
—books not only lovely, but full of heartbreak. From early on, crying and reading went together. I remember a long afternoon curled in my chair reading the last third of
Little Women
, after Beth died, through tears. Those losses felt as real to me as any loss I had ever suffered. Or maybe they were just cleaner.

Mostly that summer I read the
Little House on the Prairie
books. Sara and I bought them in pairs and then drew straws—toothpicks my mother broke in half and hid in her fist—over who got to read the books in the right order. On the cover of my book, a barefoot girl ran through high grass. On Sara’s book, a girl on horseback in a bright red dress rode without a saddle, her body flat and low, straining forward, across the back of the galloping stallion.
The Little House on the Prairie
books weren’t steeped in tragedy like the other books I was drawn to, but they had a deep hold on me. The main character, the writer herself, was the middle of three girls, named Laura, and she, like me, had brown hair.
Little House in the Big Woods
was the first “chapter” book I read. When I finished it, I told both my parents, and anyone else who asked, that I was going to be a writer when I grew up. To prove it, I started writing little stories in notebooks.

The doll game went on for weeks. The ice broke while we were crossing the Mississippi; we barely managed to forge the rest of the way across. We built a dugout house on the prairie, planted crops, lost them to locusts, survived a barren winter, went further west. It took most of the summer to get our wagon train out to California. In the living room, we staked our claim before the bay windows, in sight of the Pacific. We cleared space at the foot of the green couches. With a ruler Sara marked the borders of our homestead. She made nice, even hatches in the carpet, which looked the way farmland looks from an airplane. I got the Lincoln logs and we built a cabin. The scale was all off—the dolls could never have fit in a Lincoln log house—but the cabin looked right next to the patchwork fields, sturdy enough to weather a storm.

Chapter Eight

ON FRIDAY AFTERNOONS my father came to get us for the weekends. I’d watch for his cream-colored Mercedes from the window in the living room. Sometimes he came later than he’d promised, and I’d pass the time counting cars.
Daddy’s
will be
the tenth car to come down the street
. When the tenth car passed and he still hadn’t come, I’d try a bigger number. Or I’d try to guess, to practice my ESP by closing my eyes and letting the number come to me.

Usually it was when I gave up waiting, when I picked up a book or wandered back to my bedroom to do homework, that he came. The three of us ran down to the street with backpacks full of clothes for the weekend. He never came up, which was fine. Keeping things calm between my parents meant keeping them apart.

In the car, as we headed to the still unfamiliar part of the city where he lived, my father would ask about our week. He’d want to know if we’d played outside, if we’d gotten out of the house. Since he was clearly much happier if we said we’d been outside, we were in the habit of saying yes, even when we hadn’t.

“How’s your mother?” he’d ask, drawing out the final two words as if putting “your” and “mother” together had become hard work—emphasis on the possessive pronoun. He’d always called her this: your mother. But his removal from the scene changed the meaning of the term. What bound my parents together could be dissolved. She was rapidly unbecoming his wife. But she was ours forever. Immutably. Even more so now. Whatever dread and strain weighed upon his words accrued automatically to us.

“Fine,” I’d answer. Or Sara would answer. And Amy kept quiet, because she knew the drill, knew we didn’t want her to talk. Though we never discussed it among ourselves, we knew our parents were at war, knew we were the territory under dispute, and knew that the less information we gave to either party, the smoother things would be for us. We were uni-fied, bound by the first commandment of sibling loyalty—the coerced, whispered, or hissed imprecation—
don’t
tell
.

My father’s new apartment was spotless, with glossy hardwood floors and a sparkling kitchen, or so it seemed to me. Now I realize it was just a one-bedroom in an older high-rise building. My sisters and I slept in rainbow-striped sleeping bags, two on the living room floor, one on the couch. In the morning, my father made pancakes and bacon on the tiny grill in his kitchen. Dinner we ate out.

During the day he took us swimming, at public pools or at the home of friends of his who lived in Marin County (who had their own swimming pool!). We went to the park, to the beach, to Angel Island on the ferry. Overnight he became like a dad on TV again: telling us funny stories while we hiked up Mount Tam, giving shoulder rides to Amy when she was tired, playing shark in the pool and overturning our rafts, coaxing me from the end of the diving board.

I remember a poolside afternoon that summer. The four of us were assembling salami sandwiches in someone else’s kitchen. I was barefoot on the cool tile, a heavy towel wrapped round my waist over my swimsuit, wet hair clumped across my forehead, chlorine biting in my eyes. My father handed me a soda. He noted that he saw us more now that we spent weekends with him than he did before he moved out. I smiled up at him, teeth against the edge of the glass, the carbonated mist of 7-Up (forbidden by my mother) tickling my nose: “You’re nicer now than you were then too.” He laughed, loose enough now to be teased.

On a rainy day, when finally it just wasn’t possible to go outside, we bought a new Monopoly set for my father’s apartment. We’d been playing Monopoly since we were old enough to roll dice. Our games were long, intense, and hard fought. My father had his own rules, which changed over time, growing more complex as we got older.

I had to have the railroads, all four of them. I liked the steady income—two hundred dollars a pop each time someone landed on one, something I could count on even if they never gained value, could never be improved. No amount of steady losses could convince me that trading valuable property to get those railroads was not a winning strategy.

My father had no sentimental favorites when it came to property. He employed a high-risk, opportunistic strategy, buying every property he landed on and going into debt early in the game to do it. His rules allowed for bank loans and mortgages on properties you already owned, creative financing to make new purchases. He engineered complex swaps, three-way trades if need be, to put together monopolies. Then he started making improvements, putting houses on all his properties to crank up the rents. His rules encouraged more wheeling and dealing than the rules on the box top did, making it possible for a single player to accumulate great wealth.

He cupped his hands together, brought the dice to his mouth to blow on, shook them, caught my eye in exaggerated glee, tossed them with a flourish, and said, “OK, you turkeys, read ’em and weep.”

He pounded his marker—the cowboy boot, he was always the cowboy boot—around the board. Inevitably his marker came down just where he wanted it to—on Kentucky Avenue, say, when he already had Illinois and Indiana. He grinned, looked up at us, then stuck out his tongue, curling it so it flared at the sides, then came to a fine point, which he planted firmly, intently on the end of his long nose: tip of tongue to tip of nose, his quintessential gesture, accompanied by a self-appreciative laugh, an exclamation point on acts of skill, luck, and cunning. When he landed a shot in the garbage can, or found a parking spot right in front of the restaurant, he did this sly little victory dance, which echoed the crude
nyah nyah
nyah
tongue sticking of childhood, but had been refined over the years into this more dexterous, self-referential, elegant, if you will, flourish. The tongue, turned back on itself, pointed not to the defeat of the opponent but rather to the prowess of the victor.

My sisters and I practiced long and hard to capture this gesture. It was beyond our reach. Lacking sufficient length of nose or tongue to pull it off with ease, we had to strain and pull. And if you have to strain, well, the effect is lost. The best we could hope for was to be on the inside of his gesture—to share his glee. He always won. That was a given. For us, the trick was how to maneuver to make sure we were on his team or, failing that, how to enjoy the reflected glow of his glory.

A few hours later, my father had monopolies covering half the board and four houses on every property. My sisters and I held our breath when we rolled. Sara and I had a couple of monopolies each, but we couldn’t buy houses because there weren’t any left. And my father would never convert to hotels and free up the houses when he had us over a barrel like this. Amy was always the first to succumb; she didn’t put up much of a fight. When she landed on one of his properties and couldn’t pay, she handed over everything she had to him and became his “limited partner.” For the rest of the game he’d whisper strategy in her ear, and her eyes beamed as she nodded along.

Sara and I had to soldier on. He always had some scheme to bail us out and keep us in the game. He’d take the railroads off my hands when I owed him money, in a kind of pawn arrangement where he’d get the two hundred bucks every time someone landed on a railroad until I could get them out of hock. He gave good, honest advice. But mostly he taught by example. Think big, take risks, show mercy only when you’ve already got your opponent pinned down. The rest of the game was a slow bleed; the only real contest was to see who could last longer, Sara or me. In the end my father got title to everything.

We didn’t mind; we felt lucky to be playing with him at all.

When Sunday afternoon came, we all turned glum, my father included. We were quiet in the car. As he dropped us off, my father would hand Sara the check for alimony and child support. The three of us made the slow walk up the long concrete stairs to the sidewalk above the street—then on up into our building. We could feel my mother watching from the window.

She did not actively obstruct our seeing my father, but she wanted us to spend as little time in his presence as possible. The time of our return was one of the fronts in the multipronged battle she waged against my father. My father, feeling we needed as much sunlight, oxygen, and freedom as he could supply, tried to stretch thirty-six hours into forty-eight.

The radio greeted us when we came in the door. Something mournful and sad like “Rhinestone Cowboy.” My mother gave each of us a hug and a kiss, pulling us back into her hawkish possession. Then she sat us down in the living room to give a full report on the weekend, beginning with what we ate on Friday night.

“Hamburgers,” Sara said.

“Did he make them, or did you go out?” she asked.

My mother didn’t see my father face-to-face very often, but he loomed large in her imagination. She tried to gauge the extent of his influence over us. Every detail counted. I’d gotten in the habit of rehearsing what I’d tell her in my head on the car ride home. Coming up the stairs, I’d search for innocuous phrases. A neutral tone. Not as if we enjoyed being with my father, but not showing any sign of distress either.

“We went out,” I said.

“Where?”

“To Clown Alley,” I said.

“Which one?”

“The one on Columbus,” Sara said.

“Then what?”

“Then nothing. We went to bed,” Sara said.

“Did you see anyone else?”

“No,” we answered in unison.

“Did you take a shower?”

Sara and I both hesitated, careful not to look at each other. My mother didn’t want us to take showers at my father’s house. Something to do with washing off the protective halo of her influence, which we carried on our bodies when she bathed us, the same aura that clung to the clothes she made for us by hand. But you couldn’t really explain all that to my father or refuse to bathe at his house.

“No,” I lied.

My mother rubbed her hands as she listened to us. Her skin was shiny and distressed. She had ailments, itchy rashes that crawled up her fingers. Her toes were afflicted as well. The nail on her little toe grew straight up—thick and yellow.

I watched her face, her movements. I gauged my story by the tone of her voice, the rise and fall of her interest, shifting topics when she got too interested, going on and on when her attention drifted, trying to sound as if I were withholding nothing, but not being expansive either, because then her grilling would never end. A space opened between my thoughts and my words. It yawned wider over the years. The habit of rehearsing everything I said would become so ingrained, I no longer even noticed.

I glanced into the dining room. A piece of cardboard covered the lower half of one of the windows. I stared for a moment and then looked quickly away so my mother would not notice me looking at it. I didn’t dare ask her what had happened.

“Daddy told us a story about a book he read,” I said.

“What book?”

“About Russia,” said Sara. My father often worked from books or movies when he told stories. This particular weekend he’d told two, one based on a history of the Russian Revolution he was reading and one based on the plot of the movie
Deliverance
. Don’t ask me why.

“What was the story?” my mother asked.

“About the czar,” I said, hoping to steer clear of
Deliverance
.

She nodded for me to go on.

“And his family,” I said, stopping short. This was bad too. I didn’t want to tell her about the czar’s family getting shot. So, scrambling, I told her it was about Rasputin instead.

“Rasputin?”

Too late I realized the dead czarinas were nothing compared to the demonic otherworldliness of Rasputin. She made us tell her the whole story over again. Three times.

“I don’t remember anything else,” I said. “Just he cured the czar’s son from bleeding to death, that’s all.”

“But you said he had long fingernails?”

“Yeah.”

“What did your father say about that?”

I shrugged.

Sara shrugged.

Finally we took showers—Sara in the bathroom off her bedroom, Amy and I in the bathroom we shared with my mother. She stood next to me by the tub, while the water poured over me. Though I was nearly eight, my mother always washed my hair and Amy’s hair herself. She was tense, her knuckles rough against my scalp as she scrubbed, presumably rinsing me clean of my father’s influence.

Afterwards, the three of us sat on the living room floor, watching the
Wonderful World of Disney
with towels turbaned around our wet hair. My mother made Sloppy Joes for dinner—she was back on meat now. We ate in front of the TV. She sat in her chair behind us, knees tucked under her.

“Why did your father tell you this story?” she asked.

I turned around to look at her. “He likes to tell us history.” I turned back to the TV, but I knew she would not let it rest. She would return to this story again and again over the next week.

All that summer we shuttled between parents, learning how to navigate the terrain between them. By learning what to say to each of them, I managed to be loyal to both. I could even think one thing with my father, another with my mother. My father regained our favor almost effortlessly with pancakes and hikes, the orderliness of his home, and the irresistible draw of his charm. In my heart I no longer believed he was “a bad man.” He was a winner, and if you were on his team, you’d always win too. But even knowing that, if I’d had to choose between them right there, right then, I’d still have chosen her—down with the ship if it came to that. She commanded my loyalty and love in a way my father never could, partly because he didn’t demand it. He didn’t mind if we loved her too, and anyway he could get along without us. He’d land on his feet no matter what. With my mother there was no guarantee. You were either with her or against her, and in that demand for absolute loyalty lay an unspeakable need. She was our mother; the whole of her will was bent on holding us to her. If one of us betrayed her, what would happen? And without us, what would she be?

In August 1974, two things happened that remain connected in my mind. My mother got divorce papers from my father in the mail, and the president resigned. My mother was very happy about the resignation, but not about the divorce papers. Not because she objected to the divorce, but because she’d planned to file first. She just hadn’t gotten around to it. Getting the papers in the mail made her furious. It proved just how sneaky my father was: planning all the time, strategizing against her, getting the jump.