Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,

  But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,

  Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;

  And I am desolate and sick for an old passion,

  Yea hungry for the lips of my desire:

  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.

  She gleaned from the romantic poets of the turn of the century: Dowson, Oscar Wilde, Swinburne. She tried to create a style of life to fit the year 1930, and she imagined a passionate and beautiful life, a semblance from her reading.

  Libby had no mother, not even an aunt who was her model. How was she to know what to be? She married straight out of boarding school, and her children were born before she had time to learn what she wanted from life; by the time she was nineteen she was a mother, a wife with a husband much older than she was, and keeper of a large household with servants. George remembers the title and one line of one of Libby’s poems: “Come into my Parlor / I live on a sheet of glass.” The poem accurately expresses her feelings; Libby was the spider waiting for the males, exposed and living transparently. Was she beautiful? Her brother says, “To me Libby did not seem beautiful, she was too intent on others’ eyes on her, she was always searching her mirror with agonized eyes.” Her love for her brother and for her father was faithful and childlike, but Libby never achieved self-love, and so her love for anyone else was also wanting. As a child she had only her father and her brother. Her father, who was a well-loved man, was her model. Libby sought by conquest and daring the love of men, but no man loved her with a love that nurtured her, and no woman really loved Libby except her daughter Andy.

  I entered this family when I was eighteen. Libby would have liked to be my friend—I know it now, but at the time I was a stranger, a newcomer, a new young wife. Libby would drop in (we lived in two little houses built out over the water), and for her this was a second house, to which she came on weekends with a maid to cook and to care for the children. Our house was full on weekends with friends from the university—Nellie and her friends from the department of anthropology and Jack who invited his associates. Our friends and favorite teachers filled our lives as well as our house.

  From our porch we climbed down the ladder to the rowboat to row down Raccoon Straits to search for the oysters which grew on the rocks and which we ate as soon as we found them. A curious young sea lion swam along behind us, keeping a distance but traveling with us, slowly sinking from sight when we slowed or stopped. We rowed home—Dorothy, who was from Crete, was going to cook our meal, and Nellie and I were going to learn by watching her. We had asked Libby to go with us on this expedition in the rowboat, but Libby declined our invitation; we had not included any men, and she did not know how to talk to us, or how to enter this friendship of women.

  George and I loved boats and the water, as did Libby, but in such different ways that boats and the sea were not a bond between us. Libby, afraid that she might not appear graceful or beautiful in case a man might see her, always consulted her mirror, and she became so lost in gazing deep into her own eyes that by the time she was ready to go we were already out upon the water.

  George, Jack, and a friend of Jack’s who was a professor in the department of psychology were discussing Jack’s work—he was running laboratory rats in mazes and had been finding that the rats apparently improved their abilities to run mazes and that a heritage of improved learning ability seemed to be in their offspring. We all discussed the possible consequences if this were true—we all entered the discussion. These weekends were busy, happy and interesting. After our meal, when it was dark and our neighbors had turned out their light, we swam naked from our porch, returning to dry ourselves in the warmth of our fireplace.

  I sometimes saw Libby standing in our doorway looking on, her clothes too provocative, her bathing suit too daring. She wondered at our youthful spirits, she who had no experience of exuberant living. Wistful, lonely, she looked on at us as an eight-year-old might have looked at us, but when she entered conversation with one of the young men it was with epigrams and shocking statements, and the young man was stopped speechless, surprised at this femme fatale talking to a college kid, embarrassed for her. The next time I looked for her she would be gone. Libby was bewildered by our talk and by our enthusiasm for learning to cook; our discussion seemed to her to concern men’s work or servants’ tasks. Where were the clever epigrams, the romance, the glamor which formed Libby’s imagined world?

  Libby’s children woke from their nap, and in the quiet of the house they crept downstairs, climbed down the ladder, and swam to our porch, and climbed up our ladder amid surprised welcoming cries and laughter. Every weekend they escaped the nursemaid and their mother; they loved to be with the young people in our house who picked them up, whirled them about and teased them a little to make them laugh and talk. But Libby, who did not know how to enter our youthful, high-spirited life, could not allow her children to enter it without her, and they were quietly removed as soon as it was discovered that they were gone from their house. I looked at the younger little girl sometimes and thought, “When I have a child I want her to be like Andy; I feel that Andy should have been mine.”

  George and I sometimes set off for a walk in the hills to gather mushrooms; after I had filled my bag we sat on a hill to look out over the bay to San Francisco, and when we returned to our house we had a feast of mushrooms. Or sometimes we drove to the city for a meal in North Beach in one of the speakeasies where we could dance after dinner as we had danced when I first came down from Oregon two years before. (Libby seldom joined us in these undertakings.) Or we sailed; we did not ask anyone to sail with us because we sailed to be just two together.

  Now it is clear to me that I was with good reason afraid of being engulfed in Libby’s family, and that although poor Libby was no danger to me, if I had accepted her into an intimate place in my life I would have been drawn into the family. My identity was other than to become like Libby, with only marriage and a couple of children for a whole life. Once, returning from a long sailing trip, as we approached Belvedere we saw Libby, who swam marvelously, swimming toward us a mile out, to meet us and welcome us home. She wooed us, and we wooed her children. When Libby asked me, “Would you make me a yellow dress like yours?” I sat down at once to my sewing machine to make it for her; and when we began to talk of going away she asked me, “Will you give me your kitchen curtains, the ones with the red embroidered dots?”

  When we prepared to leave Belvedere at the end of summer Libby came out to the street to watch us packing our car, and in the confusion and our busy-ness the children crept into the back of our car and hid. Andy, the littler one, was discovered, and her mother laughingly dragged her out, but Andy clung to our legs, trying not to cry, and Libby had to pull her away and hold her. We said our goodbyes and drove away. After a few miles of driving, the older little girl suddenly stood up in the back of the car, laughing but challenging us with blazing eyes, and sadly we turned and drove back with her to abandon her.

  We traveled between Belvedere and Berkeley to spend time with our friends; Nellie and Jack were finishing their degree work at the university. On weekends our house was full, and we found after a few weeks that we could not invite so many people because we could not pay the grocery bills and also save money for the books that we were going to France to publish. We also found that anywhere in California was too close to George’s family for us to live our lives. We were still finding it hard to break away from our families and we returned as though we were not sufficient in ourselves; George’s father and sister influenced the way we lived in California, and we were trapped into a semblance of their lives. Although we had left San Francisco several times, we found we were still in the process of leaving home. Leaving is not easy; the first time I saw Grants Pass I was thirteen years old, and I decided then to leave, but it took at least five tries before I co
uld go and not feel the need to return. In downtown San Francisco there is a little bar with a sign over the entrance, “we are itching to get away from portland oregon.” I like to sit in that bar sometimes and reflect that it was hard for me, too, to get away from Oregon. George and I were fully agreed on staying together, on being independent, and on pursuing our own lives without following his family’s pattern, and yet we returned to San Francisco; but each time it was less home to us, and each time it was easier to leave again.

  With Nellie and Jack we went up the estuary to the Oakland flats, where many old schooners from the Alaska fishing fleet were tided out. A few sailing ships still came into San Francisco, but most of the fleet was retired, and the ships were sitting in the mud, side by side. In a forest of masts we clambered over bulwarks from ship to ship, hunting for a life-boat that was in good condition; Jack wanted to buy one and convert her to a sailing boat. He picked one with thirty persons written on her bows. He named her the Thirty Persons, brought her around to Belvedere and set up shop on the beach next to our house; he came over on weekends to work on her.

  Jack and Nellie had many friends, and we met them all. Jack Lyons, our beloved teacher from Corvallis, was also in Berkeley often.

  Entwhistle, a neighbor lad in love with our boat, the Thelma, sailed with us for a few days. The trade wind blows several hours a day, and we reeled along south, down the California coast, past nearly-bare hills which roll back from the sea to high mountains behind. In the rainy season these same low hills turn brilliant green; I love these hills, and my heart grows tight when I see them again after a long absence. Few harbors were to be found, but many small beaches stretched along the northern California coast—small pockets of sand shone out where hills came down or where a stream or river debouched. We noted the fog settling in, a wall that slowly enveloped us. As we approached the land, Entwhistle asked, “How are we going to find the buoy in this fog?” Although we had laid out our course on the chart, estimating any current that we knew of or had read of in the Pacific current-book, and although we had tried to vary our steering equally on each side of the point on the compass we had set for ourselves, how were we to be sure we had not by-passed the buoy? It was important to find it, for by its number, color and shape it was to tell us where we were on the coast and what our next course was to be. I was forward on the bowsprit, peering into the fog; it seemed to me that we were in a circle of not more than a hundred feet of visibility. When the wind is carrying the sound away from the boat it is nearly impossible to catch the sound of the bell buoy, but just as we were getting very tense and knew we were near the coast, I saw the bell. I shouted to George, “Veer off to leeward, there’s the buoy!”

  We grazed it, and the impact even removed a little varnish from the rail; I shouted, “We found it! We hit it!”

  This sort of thing has happened to us quite a few times. Despite the fallibility of a sailboat and the impossibility of steering a straight course, despite currents, fog or nighttime, we still find our way. George and I both have good vision, which is a great help; I can see after dark, but George usually makes out the numbers on the buoys before I do. Such abilities become valuable when sailing small boats. Binoculars are of little use, as the boat is moving in all directions, bouncing on the waves or sliding up and down. We always test our compass and make sure it will be as accurate as possible, but there are currents that change with the tides and with the winds. We seem to have an uncanny luck.

  We spent the first night in Santa Cruz, which is not a protected harbor. An arm of mountain forms the north point of Monterey Bay, ensuring shelter from the north, and a pier is built out into the water at the town of Santa Cruz, but there is no protection from the winds from other directions and no end to the constant swell of the Pacific, day in and day out year round. We anchored off the pier and went ashore to stretch our legs a little before returning to sleep aboard the boat.

  No weather-watch in 1929 aided seafarers, nor did we have a radio. We watched the weather ourselves, and in somewhat increased wind we sailed south the next day, the wind quartering off our stern; we had no intention of stopping until we reached Santa Barbara, but off Piedras Blancas, with the neighbor boy steering, the wind caught our sail on its lee, and boom! she jibed. The helmsman was so horrified at what he had done that he jibed her back again, and the sail ripped. With the mainsail parted, the shreds quickly wrapped themselves around every stay and became an entangled mass—in fact, a terrible mess. We continued sailing on the jib and jigger sails. George prepared to go up the mast in the bos’n’s chair to clear the sail so that we could get it down on deck. We limped into San Simeon and anchored, where we found only a slight indentation in the coast, not a harbor at all. A pier had been built there for the Hearst ranch above this spot on the coast; Hearst’s castle was being constructed from numbered blocks of stone from an ancient European castle which had been dismantled and shipped to this forlorn spot on the California coast. To land at the pier, George rowed alongside and held the skiff off the pier in the huge swell until a good moment came for me to jump, rope in hand, to the pier. We ordered a new sail, sent our young neighbor lad home on the bus, and settled down to two weeks of waiting. Every morning, as the wind came up, we could feel the vibrations of our anchor as it slid over the sand bottom; we would start the motor, move up near the pier again and let the anchor go again, waiting awhile to see that it held before we left the boat to go for a daily walk, usually to the park surrounding the castle where many kinds of imported grazing animals roamed the hillsides.

  Our sail arrived; we rigged the boat with the dazzling white sail and continued south to Point Conception, which is one of the most westward points of the continent at latitude 34° where a weather break occurs. The weather is much warmer south of Point Conception, and Santa Barbara has a mild climate compared to that of San Francisco. We moored safely in front of the yacht club beside the breakwater, with a very large yacht, almost a breakwater in itself, alongside us to seaward. Outside the breakwater a great bed of kelp stilled the waves and decreased the swell that entered the harbor. We appreciated being in such an anchorage after our two weeks of insecurity in San Simeon. The Yacht Club members welcomed us, and we brought the Thelma into the Yacht Club pier to take on fresh water; we sloshed the decks to wash off the salt with which the boat was covered. Two wide bunks were in the main cabin, and we kept extra gear in the two narrow bunks forward in the peak. In her lockers were two long black overcoats such as my father had worn in Montana years before, which buttoned from chin to ankle; we laughed at these coats, but except when we were in harbors, we wore them the whole way down and back up the coast—I don’t remember that we even took them off when we went below.

  We were eager to sail to the islands which lie out in front of Santa Barbara. With the same prevailing winds, but with a blue sea and without the driving towering waves of the northern California coast, we sailed around the eastward end of the islands and skirted the wooded shore, watching for the break in the rocks that was the entrance to the harbor on Santa Cruz Island. We were sailing in when—boom! and again boom!—someone started shooting a cannon at us. We turned, but as we sailed out we realized from the shouts of our new Yacht Club acquaintances that they were firing a salute of welcome! We sailed back in and anchored to spend the evening with everyone on one boat; we had supper, and then in the warm night with a light shining on the sail, we collected the flying fish that hurtled themselves at the sail and landed on deck. Next morning the other boats sailed back to Santa Barbara, and we were left alone in the small harbor.

  Living on Santa Cruz Island were three people: Hjalmar, Paul and Marie. These two Swedes and the American wife of one of them had lived on the mainland, but an earthquake took their living place, and they had decided to come to the island. Sheep roamed wild, fish were plentiful, and they had a garden, but most important to the two men was the beer they brewed, which was essential to their sense of well-being. In 1929 the
brewing of beer was illegal, but Paul and Hjalmar had to have their beer. Once, as Paul rowed out to greet us in the morning, he said, “Now take me, this morning I’ve only had five beers.” They drank so fast they couldn’t keep up with themselves; it was new beer, which we sampled and didn’t like.

  On the upper beach in the sand banks we found Indian beads, pieces of pottery, and a few arrowheads. In times past the neighboring mainland Indians had come to the island to catch and dry fish for winter food.

  The two men were sailors from their childhood in Sweden. As one of them hauled our anchor, the other had the mainsail up, and with George at the wheel of the Thelma we were sailing. Marie and I sat, talked or made coffee; George and I were like guests on our own boat. We knew that no matter what winds blew, all was going to go smoothly on the Thelma with competent hands to do the work.

  Hjalmar and Paul went hunting for a wild sheep, and they brought us the hind quarter as a parting gift. We hung the meat forward in the coolest place in the boat and used it as fast as we could.

  Back in Santa Barbara we invited a young Scotsman we met at the Yacht Club to sail part way up the coast with us. He was a fine sailor, and we were glad to have him with us, for the Thelma was too big for us to sail alone—the sails and the anchor were too heavy, and in bad weather we grew tired. Our Scots friend described to us a boat he had recently owned, on which he had taken his little boy sailing with him. Bowling along in a fresh breeze, his son had fallen overboard; alone in the boat, he brought her around and, while keeping his eye on his son in the rough water, sailed by the spot where the boy was. Before the child went under, he swept him with one arm out of the water and into the boat—an incredible feat. Afterwards he sold his boat and sailed only occasionally on other people’s boats. At San Luis Obispo, our next stopping-place, our Scots friend took the bus home.