Home Baked

by Alia Volz

  “Open it and see.”

  This is how we are, how we’ve always been. No secrets from each other.

  As I extract the single typed sheet from the envelope, a Polaroid photograph falls onto my lap. A selfie of sorts. My dad stands reflected in a full-length mirror, bulky camera obscuring his face. Stark nude. Enormous pink erection.

  I scream, brush the Polaroid off my lap like it’s a spider, scream again.

  “What is it?” my mom demands.

  I hand her the photo. She screams.

  My dad sent my mom a dick pic.

  I’m simultaneously laughing and crying—in actual hysterics. The letter, single-spaced in a tiny font, covers one full page with scribbles in the margins.

  “Read it,” she wheezes. “Read it out loud!”

  “I need a drink for this.” I stagger to the kitchen to pour myself a mostly vodka greyhound. Tumbler in hand, I return to my mom’s bedroom, stand at the foot of the barge, and begin.

  It’s raunchy: seventies porn starring my parents. Choice phrases include “throbbing aching cock,” “rod of power,” and “drink your love juices.” I read the letter in a mechanical monotone while my mom giggles so hard her breath shrinks to a squeak.

  “I want to fuck you on the floor of the men’s bathroom on the top floor of the Hyatt Regency,” I intone. “I want to rape you in the fields of Southern France between the shafts of wheat. Raped by my shaft of heat.”

  The phrase “I love you” appears fifty-three times.

  There are three more letters in the box, all postmarked between January 27 and February 11, 1977. Only the first one is pure smut.

  Mostly, they’re terribly romantic: “I don’t really want to say anything besides the fact that I am beside myself with love for you (interesting picture). I mean, what else matters? You are there (or here), and I am here (or there). There is no space or time.”

  The letters are also rich with anecdotes from the aura readings my dad was doing, his armchair psychoanalysis of their mutual friends, and highlights from his first week of baking and selling Sticky Fingers brownies.

  * * *

  When Meridy’s dad asked her to visit her brother in New Jersey at the end of January 1977, she wanted to say no. The brownie business was in flux and her romance was hitting a new high. Winter would be miserable there.

  Mer had never gotten along with her brother, Jeff. Growing up, the more exuberant she became, the more he seemed to withdraw. Jeff excelled in science and math. He married his hometown sweetheart, attended medical school, became a respected dermatologist, and settled in an affluent suburb. Meanwhile, Mer galivanted around Europe, moved to San Francisco, and dealt weed brownies. Mer and Jeff didn’t bother with frequent telephone calls or letters. Just fine on separate coasts, thank you.

  But with Jeff’s wife due to have their third baby, Bill asked Mer to fly out to help look after their other two toddlers during the birth. And she could never refuse her dad.

  She set out to talk her boyfriend into handling the brownies while she was away.

  Doug hesitated. He didn’t mind the idea of baking, and Mer made the sales process sound fun. But he doubted that Reverend Lewis Bostwick would approve of his getting involved. Doug already felt a little lost in Meridy, too easily swept up in her lush pleasures and giddy schemes. On the other hand, he was broke and tired of feeling sheepish when she paid his way.

  Mer wheedled. “You’re such a wonderful cook. I know you’ll be great at baking. And selling brownies could be very positive for you as a psychic. You’ll meet all kinds of people who need healing.”

  The weed, she suggested, could carry the word.

  Doug felt dubious about it, but he gave in.

  In advance of Mer’s trip, Barb walked Doug and Cam (the driver who would now help with baking and sales) through the recipe.

  Doug was a natural in the kitchen. His mother and grandmother were both superb, butter-heavy cooks, and he’d picked up a knack from them. He liked getting his hands dirty and found satisfaction in ushering raw ingredients into a new form, the end that was greater than the sum of its parts.

  The Saturday before Mer left for New Jersey, she brought Doug and Cam along on her runs and introduced them to her regulars. Later, she drew a map of the businesses she’d broken in and made notes for each stop.

  Army-Navy Surplus. Bill, Southern accent. Buys 3–4 doz.

  Mendel’s art supply store. Bette, curly blonde hair. Buys 2–3 doz. See if she wants a reading!

  She warned the men to be subtle and speak in code—never say outright that they were selling pot brownies. The I Ching hexagrams she’d tossed about Doug and Cam doing the runs indicated that doors would open for them. She handed over her notes and left for the East Coast.

  * * *

  Once Doug gave himself permission, his adventurous nature took the reins.

  Early in the week, he and Cam each reached out to acquaintances to drum up advance orders. “It’s only Thursday and we’ve already sold 8 dozen plus brownies,” he wrote in a letter to Meridy on January 27. “Not bad for a first day of business. Now all we have to do is bake them. Sorry,” he added, “that’s the last time I’ll say ‘brownies.’ It’s just such a strong reality for me right now.”

  Doug found walking around with a satchel full of contraband surprisingly thrilling. He looked passersby squarely in the eye and thought, If only you knew what’s in my little bag . . . Approaching people in stores was more awkward; he lacked Meridy’s natural social ease and found it hard to talk around things. Most customers were ready for him, so he didn’t have to say much, but one clerk in a music store balked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Brownies. You know . . . um, Sticky Fingers? The kind that make you feel good?”

  “I don’t think you should be here.”

  Doug made an about-face and hit the street again, heart thudding. But most exchanges were pleasant. After walking back to Cam’s car twice to restock, Doug decided it was inefficient to carry such small quantities. He could handle more weight if it were well balanced. In the army surplus store, he spotted a rack of olive-green canvas duffel bags. Military grade, durable, voluminous but easy to carry. Mer had encouraged him to do trades with proprietors if he saw things he wanted—“That’s part of the fun,” she’d said—so he picked up four duffels. At the warehouse later that night, he made a large stencil of the letters S and F inside a circle and painted them on the army duffels as a gift.

  Most nights, he dreamed of Mer. Strange, sexually charged, portentous dreams. Having exposed his heart to this woman, he felt vulnerable now that she was gone. He imagined himself leaking pink light into the atmosphere. Despite physical distance, Doug felt more connected to Meridy than ever, their melded minds seeming to stretch like taffy over the land between them.

  He wanted to keep her closer. The roommate situation at the warehouse had been unstable in recent months. Now, when he looked around the open space and the naked walls, he pictured Mer moving in with him.

  Doug poured all of this into letters.

  “I’m just not going to let you live anywhere else, Dear Lady,” he wrote. “I think things could be very positive for us here. For our Great, Infinite Love.”

  * * *

  I grew up in the aftermath of this bliss. My childhood memories center around the fights: epic yelling matches, shattered dishes, a kitchen chair broken against the wall. My parents split up when I was nine, though their relationship had soured years before that. Then came the long cold war of divorced parenting.

  These letters expose facets of their relationship I’ve never seen before—romantic, lighthearted, optimistic. They also contain previews of their later issues.

  In a letter dated February 7, 1977, my dad describes a dream in which my mom was as thin as a fashion model but wearing clothes that were obviously too big, which, he says, “would’ve shocked Yves Saint Laurent.” Her pants were falling off, and she kept bending over to pull them ba
ck up. “Some great beaver shots, by the way,” he writes. Then, “I suddenly noticed how weak you were from the fasting. Your energy was very very low, and I became concerned.” At the end, he warns her to “look after that fine looking body,” both for him and the child he wants her to carry.

  He manages to sexualize a thinner version of her body, shame a fatter version, admonish her not to try too hard to lose weight, and remind her of her destiny to bear his child—all in one paragraph.

  Switching topics, he catches her up on the psychic entanglements of their mutual acquaintances and the minutia of his day. He ends with a return to the sugary language of love: “Rather than write out that damn fool word 54 times, I’m going to use this word just once, and the ripples and emanations will circle the world three times, before jetting off to space. My fine and fancy Lady Meridy, I Love You.”

  Now I want to see the other half: Mer’s love letters to Doug.

  This is trickier territory. It’s natural for me to rummage through my mom’s belongings. But the story is different with my dad. He drifted out of my life after the divorce, our visits gradually becoming infrequent and strained. At sixteen, I cut our communication off completely for a few years. Though we’ve patched things up, we are both still guarded. I can’t predict how he’ll react.

  I tell him about the love letters over the phone. When I mention that one of them was particularly racy and came with a nude Polaroid, he surprises me by cackling.

  “Well, kiddo,” he says. “That’s how you were made.”

  Score one for Doug.

  Then he says, “So . . . do you still have that photo? I’d kind of like to see what I used to look like naked.”

  He lives in Redwood Valley, a rural town two hours’ drive from where I live in San Francisco. His home is a one-room structure with an adjacent bathroom—a sort of hybrid between a trailer and a warehouse—and he’s sharing it with his ninety-two-year-old mother. They each have a twin bed squeezed against the wall opposite an open-plan kitchen, and there’s a pool table in the center of the room. Apart from the bathroom, there’s no privacy. The space feels simultaneously airy and claustrophobic.

  My dad has aged well. He sports a trim gray mustache and shaves his head. Tattoos cover his forearms: a Chinese dragon, a lotus blossom. At sixty-three, he’s thickened through the middle but has retained his good posture and easy movement.

  Over dinner, he asks to see the letters. I hand him one of the tamer ones, which he skims between bites of macaroni and cheese. He reads one passage aloud. “We were sitting and listening to some music,” he says. “I heard the diddle-time theme come floating in on my airwaves, so I looked over at Jerry and noticed his Seventh was closed. So I shot some gold up his spine, blew up the game in his head, and he immediately jumped up, quick as a fox, and ran into the kitchen. Fast reflexes, that man! Then he came back and sat down, but he was looking rather befuddled. I call it Clarity.”

  He shakes his head. “I can’t believe I wrote that.”

  I assume he must be embarrassed at the ideas that used to preoccupy him—at believing he could psychically change someone else’s thought patterns—but I’m mistaken.

  “I mean, I would never mess with someone’s seventh chakra now,” he says. “Like where I say I’m blowing gold up his spine? The seventh chakra is your connection to the godhead. You don’t go in there without permission. That is really messed up.”

  He still perceives the world in essentially the same way, I realize—ruled by numerology, astrology, chakras, auras. The difference is how he understands his role. Back in 1977, he got a rush out of tinkering with people’s heads. Graduating from the Berkeley Psychic Institute inflamed his arrogance. Not only did Doug believe himself capable of entering someone’s mind and rearranging it psychically, he thought they’d be better for it.

  Today, my dad works as a home-care nurse, though he still gives occasional aura readings. He takes pride in his psychic abilities. But he’s become more aware of boundaries and cautious about doing harm.

  After dinner, my dad slides a box from under the pool table. He doesn’t invite me to look through it myself, but we squat together on the floor, and he hands me what he wants to share. His keepsakes are well organized and neatly labeled. His home is crammed with artwork, like my mom’s, but with an eighth of her clutter. He finds six letters from Meridy in the box.

  “Uh-oh,” I say, grinning.

  He reads each missive to himself, voicing some lines aloud and wincing silently at others. He shies from the steamier passages.

  We’re still getting to know each other as adults, and this is a new kind of sharing. Our conversations will end up becoming easier after this, more natural. I’ll feel grateful for his willingness to speak honestly about the old days, and he’ll be grateful for my interest. Later, I’ll reflect on this night as the beginning of a new phase in our relationship.

  At one point in the evening, my dad is reading one of the letters when his face and bald pate turn bright crimson. He grows serious.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  He doesn’t look at me. “I can’t believe Meridy and I lost each other,” he says quietly. “How could we throw this away?”

  * * *

  Mer had barely left the ground when she started her first letter to Doug on complimentary American Airlines stationery. “Altitude: 37,000 feet,” she began. “Location: In the Heavens.” She wrote in a style cluttered with ellipses that the plane was crawling with businessmen: “briefcases filled with lies . . . starched collars pushing up fleshy jowls . . . alcoholic bellies housing ulcers, resistance to the truth.” A young man dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit sat next to her to smoke a cigarette. After a month of aura classes with Doug, she felt she could read him and sensed he had an open fifth chakra—meaning that he was a natural communicator. “The young Gemini, a novice in the game, came to me for the truth,” she wrote. “I told him the truth about himself, grounded him when he lit my smoke . . . Oh darling, you are wonderful, and I am learning!”

  Mailed on the same day as Doug’s letter about “diddling” his friend’s seventh chakra, these missives crossed the country in opposite directions at the same time. Cosmic lovers, heading out into the world and fixing people’s auras.

  Mer saw her trip to New Jersey as a chance to practice healing work on Jeff and her sister-in-law, Sue. They lived in a cookie-cutter ranch house decorated in beige and brown. Jeff was a model of American upward mobility. Mer thought him an insufferable square. For days, she tried to pry open his chakras without his knowing it.

  With nothing to do besides entertain the toddlers and play psychic games with her brother and sister in-law, Mer spent inordinate energy rhapsodizing about Doug. “Our love together seems to define an entire universe,” she wrote, “so vast, so infinite and so damned beautiful. It’s like, as the world begins to fall catastrophically apart around us, we can always climb into the beautiful world which our love has created, our own powerful empire.”

  She tossed hexagrams and did grounding exercises, but the waiting was killing her. She wanted magic, art, and romance.

  She wanted to get stoned.

  On day six, she wrote Doug to ask him to mail her some brownies.

  The irony escaped her. Back in 1969—when Patrolman Buxbaum busted Mer for picking up a kilo of weed addressed to her cousin’s baby in Milwaukee—Sue had gotten arrested with the other women. Now, eight years later, good old Meridy wanted to smuggle pot through the mail again—this time directly to Jeff and Sue’s house. But Doug balked at trafficking across state lines, and Mer dropped the subject.

  One week dragged into two. Stir-crazy, Mer took a train to Levittown, Long Island, to meet Doug’s grandmother, Paula Long-Clayton.

  Paula lived in America’s first suburb, founded in 1947. Her house, which stood on the corner of a quiet street lined with elms and maples, had been a simple Cape Cod model home when Paula bought it in 1952. She added a second floor, an extended garage, and bay windows, a
nd sheathed the whole thing in dark cedar shingles. Fringed by a lush English garden, the result was rambling and asymmetrical. Dozens of stained glass angels clinked against the windowpanes. Even from the outside it looked haunted.

  Paula answered the door dressed in an ankle-length velour caftan and oversize ethnic jewelry, a sweet-faced woman in her late seventies with a curly gray bob and mirthful brown eyes. “Come in, darling!” she said, folding Mer into a hug.

  Paula’s artwork cluttered her home: Egyptian motifs from the Book of the Dead carved into leather and painted in gold leaf and vivid pigments; a detailed mural of ice-skaters on a frozen Pennsylvania river; handmade mosaics and pounded-copper bas-­reliefs. Mer marveled at the rich, creative environment that had nurtured her lover.

  “I’d like you to meet Ed,” Paula said, gesturing to an oil portrait of a handsome blond man in military dress. The painting hung suspended by wires from the ceiling, so it appeared to float in midair. Mer’s skin tingled. The ghost she married! The house did seem inhabited by some unusual presence that became more intense once Mer intentionally tuned in. The air felt alive.

  “Pleased to meet you, Ed,” Mer said to the ghost in the painting.

  Over the next two days, Mer and Paula indulged in long conversations about psychic phenomena and everlasting love, though the older woman did most of the talking. Mer felt like a student; she could sit at Paula’s feet and listen to her talk forever. Paula explained that she and Ed had been star-crossed lovers, kept apart by misfortune and their own mistakes. Then Ed died young of lung cancer. Soon thereafter, his ghost manifested in her bed. Invisible yet warm and corporeal to the touch. He made passionate love to her. Paula had now been married to her spectral husband for five years. They communicated through a Ouija board and, Paula said laughingly, had their share of arguments that way. At one o’clock each afternoon, Paula shuffled into a tomblike bedroom built into the garage for her “quiet time” with Ed—which Doug had already explained meant sex with the ghost. Whenever she talked about Ed, Paula’s skin seemed to glow faintly.