“It’s true many of us feel betrayed by Woody Allen.”
“If he lived in L.A., he’d probably send his kids to Campbell Hall. Episcopalian, ponies, like seventy percent Jewish. As I like to say, in Los Angeles we have three types of Jews, Orthodox, Reform, and Equestrian.”
“Ha-ha,” she notes. “I still don’t understand the point about the fire engine.”
I take another slug of limoncello and enjoy the burning. “Argh!”
“This cheesecake is fabulous,” Ruth says, carefully lifting a slab onto my plate.
I press on: “What I mean is that, in my travels, I’ve discovered I’m far from alone in craving a more epic female life. Every day I’ve met a new woman waking up from her Sleeping Beauty bier. The experience has been tarot card–like, Middle Aged, Chaucerian, a veritable Canterbury Tales. There are all sorts of visions women are waking up to. In my case, on my particular journey, many of the women I’ve met along the way—Joan, Brenda, even Aimee—they all did not begin as but, after going through the fire, BECAME public-school mothers. Even Aimee, uptight Aimee, was so shattered and angry by seeing the inside of Wonder Canyon, she has quit her job to start her own gifted charter thingy…”
“Gifted charter wha—?” Ruth asks, lifting up her page to go back in her notebook. She is starting to look tired. I glance at her watch and with startlement realize we have been talking for three and a half hours. Thank God I’m not paying for this!
“And look what we’re building!” I exclaim. “The cornerstone of democracy—it’s Jeffersonian! Good public schools EVERYWHERE! Knowledge is for EVERYONE, not just for a precious few. And it’s not a grim old Jonathan Kozol that’s going to make it happen, it’s the mothers! And it’s so counterintuitive! Look at what we were up against!
“Surely, when historians look back on early-twenty-first-century America, they will see that educated mothers were overwhelmingly conditioned for fear. For us—they will note—daily life felt like a pulse-pounding jockeying for position in a fragile bubble floating slightly above a yawning maw of unsolvable ills, a senseless Mad Max movie of destruction. Down below, on the ground, there was no longer any village, of Hillary Clinton fame. No, the village was in smoking ruins, thanks to Bush’s tax cuts and suburban sprawl and Proposition Thirteen and, you know, all that dependence on foreign oil. Foreign oil! Alone in the world as mothers, even our first breast-feeding crisis—”
“Which you even called me about—the engorgement—”
“Exactly. Engorgement. Too much milk—no place for it to go! What a metaphor! So you hit your first breast-feeding crisis, and instead of being able to place an emergency call to Grandma, it is all the VISA-wielding mother can do to place a call to an eighty-dollaran-hour lactation consultant from the Booby Station! And after that first swipe of the VISA, it gets ever easier to parent that way, to have things FedExed up to the Parental Fear bubble—the Baby Einstein videos, the organic wheat-free crackers, the leafy-walled ‘progressive’ schools where the other bubble students are handpicked, to avoid infection from the down-there Mad Max feral children—who also, famously, bully. Which is not allowed in the bubble. Nor is puberty. Such is my generation’s aversion to middle school that it’s as though middle schoolers have become their own unwanted ethnicity. We only hope that with today’s medical advances, the unsightliness of puberty is a kind of temporary allergy that CAN be nutritionally treated.
“But no. That’s why these Mothers on Fire, running about together, chasing the fire engine? They are breaking the Darwinian mold. Breaking from the pack. They are doing the opposite of what statisticians would predict. Instead of cliché affluent lives of anxiety, paranoia, narcissism, and buying overpriced baby products online, modern motherhood has catapulted us atop a roaring new tsunami of optimism and oxytocin—old school, archetypal, biological! It is the ancient statue, the stone urn, the giant pair of Venus of Willendorf breasts shooting out milk to feed the entire planet! You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a euphoric, seemingly forty-seven-week-pregnant mother wielding a sledgehammer to break ground on a new ‘teaching garden’ at the hideously scrubby L.A. Unified school she has determined her as-yet-unborn child will attend in five years, along with one thousand poor neighborhood immigrant children. ‘Jesus—that’s a sledgehammer!’ you yell, but the cosmos always seems to protect them, the crazy and the pregnant…”
There is a slight glazed-over quality to Ruth’s eyes, which may be the wine. For a second I feel I remember that glaze—the glaze in the eyes of the parents at Valley Co-Op Preschool, watching Joan as she first gave that Lord of the Rings/frantic troll speech. Before any of us became brave—or frankly desperate—enough to join.
Before I realized that optimism is the only worldview our family can afford.
“It’s about trust,” I implore. “Trust between humans. In all those private-school tours I took, they kept stressing how the head of the school said hello each morning to all the children, how the parents were all on a first-name basis, how it was like a small-town ‘community.’ At twenty thousand dollars a year. Community apparently being something we have to buy now. You have to pay twenty thousand dollars so a teacher will say hello. We’ve put a price tag on this. People no longer have the trust that everyone simply deserves this.
“Because that’s what it feels like to live in the parenting fear bubble, which so afflicts my generation, where you have…
“Loss of trust in people.
“Loss of trust in children.
“Loss of trust in the universe.
“But the opposite pole of Fear is Love, I tell you! Love! Love is everywhere!” I spread my arms. “Community—LOVE—is everywhere! We can go from fear to love, from consumer to citizen, from a sense of scarcity to a sense of…abundance!
“Of course, we may just fear everything because we’re so damn fragile. What happened to us? We’re so high up on the pyramid of needs, we simply can’t function anymore. We ask, ‘How am I feeling about my job? Is it fulfilling me spiritually, mentally, physically?’ as opposed to the Guatemalan person who is cleaning our house, thinking, ‘Can I catch the eight o’clock bus home or the eight-thirty?’”
I draw a sketch on a napkin.
Parental anxieties: A timeline
Pre-1800s
Potato famine, death of entire villages
1900s
Trying to keep dad’s job through depression so entire family does not starve or have to sell off children to agribusiness
2000
Infringement of Parenthood on sense of Personhood
“And at bottom of all this parental consumerism is a lack of hope. Mothers today, we must plan our three-year-old’s K-through-12 future because my family is alone. There will be no help. Other families are only there to compete. Our boats sail alone. It’s a time of apocalypse. Choked by money, people have literally lost their faith. But in fact, my child was never in kindergarten danger. Trying to save Hannah, trying to get her onto the last helicopter out of Saigon, I lost hold of the rope and fell. Not knowing there was a safety net below the whole time. There was a gossamer infinite spider’s web of love, Charlotte’s, stitched together by the hands of women, many invisible hands.”
I finally stop talking.
We sit absolutely still before the darkened Pacific.
Ruth finally breaks the silence.
“Dear heart,” she says, “it’s called the manic defense against despair. I’m giving you a prescription for an antidepressant, and the name of an extraordinary Waldorf school in Pasadena run by my former Jungian colleague Rebecca. Not expensive.”
Her words are like a record-needle scratch.
“Have you not understood even one word I’ve said!” I shriek.
Ruth grabs both my hands in hers. “Listen to me. You don’t understand. Times have changed. I’ve lived in Los Angeles all my life. When I was a teenager I rode the bus all the time. But things are different today. No one rides the bus.”
“Three hundre
d thousand ride the bus in Los Angeles every day!” I shoot back in disbelief. “Who are they? I guess the same ephemeral three thousand ghost shapes who go to high school at—at GRANT!”
“That’s why I’m moving out of state, dear heart,” Ruth says sadly. “Over the years I’ve been practicing, I’ve seen our society get much more crass than it was. In the sixties, people were idealistic. And we had great leadership. JFK, Martin Luther King! There was change in the air. But today…That’s why we’re moving up north. I don’t know that there’s any hope anymore. People are like animals. There’s no decency. Look at Bush—with this No Child Left Behind!”
“We love our tattered little public school!” I shrieked.
“It’s irresponsible to keep Hannah there,” Ruth says. “You know how delicate YOU’VE been. It’s only decades of therapy that has helped you. In a No Child Left Behind environment, your child will be crushed.”
“I cannot even believe after over four hours this is where we’ve ended up!”
“Oh dear heart, don’t beat yourself up,” Ruth murmurs comfortingly, lifting up a prescription written on Glaxa stationery. “You’re a mother. Of course you’re obsessed with schools. Motherhood does narrow one’s focus.”
And at that moment my Fuck You comes out.
I sweep aside the wineglasses, the cheeses, the pastries, the pad Thai.
“You…You…You…You!” I say, getting up. I wave my arms wildly. I feel as though I could start smashing books, sculptures. I could take paintings and snap them in two, right over my leg.
“Oh my God!” Ruth exclaims at the violence of my movements. “Marta!”
Marta rushes over, but I have a brilliant light pouring off my head and I am unstoppable.
“THE BOOMERS ARE TO BLAME!!!!” I scream.
“It all started under your watch! All that busing—and fleeing—began in the seventies, when, excuse me, it was YOUR generation who were just becoming parents. Rosa Parks…Of course her grandchildren can sit anywhere on the bus now—they can have the whole damn bus…Because all you former Freedom Marchers just speed along on an entirely different freeway system in hybrid SUVs!
“You boomers have presided over the greatest decline, the greatest return to public-school segregation in U.S. history. Consumers rather than citizens—it is entirely your doing!
“You boomers have ALWAYS been in Sanyassin! When have you not been in Sanyassin? Even raising children you were in Sanyassin! Wake up and smell the Sanyassin!”
I lean over the tiny wooden model of Sanyassin. “Where is that fucking steam room? Where is that fucking meditation room? Where is that fucking yoga room? Stop doing yoga! I destroy your yoga room! We—the next generation—are poking our faces up against the windows of your yoga room, trying to get your attention to yell…FUUUUUCKKKK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!”
“Ah!” Ruth screams, cowering with Marta.
I yell out: “Don’t fucking medicate me with chamomile herbal tea packets…And FEAR!!!!!!!!!”
My whole body vibrating over the little white tabletop model of Sanyassin, I make the violent irreversible decision. Defiantly I—I…put my thumb through the thin Styrofoam walls of the yoga room!
“Aiiieee!!!!!!!” Ruth screams.
11
Surf’s Up
So here we are, gathered as always near summer’s end, on the beach in Malibu.
Our family and a ring of Malibu surf dudes, a melange of white-blond hair and wet suits twisting off their bodies, amputated arms and legs. We sit in a circle in the cooling sand, before the great cyclorama of the sky, which is fired with orange, purple, red, and blue, and a tumbling abundance of puffy clouds, a splendid coil of fantastical shapes.
The earth is cooling, in the evening of this day, the last gasps of balmy summer air simmering, in waves, across the dunes and ocean.
It’s the after-burn.
The burn is gone.
The heat is off.
At the far edge of our circle is an old surfer guy, in a knit cap, so crusty he literally looks covered in fine powder. His whitened hair and skin look perhaps like what those Easter Island–like heads would look like after a yearlong sandstorm. He sits in a ragged beach chair and plays a beat-up guitar.
He appears to be playing an old Beach Boys tune, “Surfer Girl.”
It sounds slightly mad and cacophonic, on his out-of-tune guitar. But it is as relaxing as a moldering-around-the-edges plant or crispy lawn, which is soothing because of the mere fact that it does not have an anxious army of white-shirted staff hovering over it.
We watch my father swim. Sort of.
My father is so old, he moves with almost Tai Chi slowness, like a prehistoric brown lizard. To us, he appears as but a single leathery brown arm rising and dropping, above and below the waves, which are wine-dark in the sunset. He rises and drops, rises and drops, breathes in and exhales, breathes in and exhales.
Grunting, he emerges from the waves, his black ladies’ underpants like a wrinkled second skin about his boney hips.
A cry goes up from the circle.
Tecate beers rise, in salutation.
“Dr. Loh!”
He looks at the group in pleasure, and almost surprise, so focused was he on the arduous matter of his nightly swim, or at least his nightly flop, in the placid waters.
My father lifts a sinewy arm, yells out a throaty greeting.
“Hey!” he exclaims.
“Mr. Loh!” the surfers yell out, in camaraderie. “The Naked Handstand Man! How was your swim?”
“Oh, very nice,” he replies. “No current today!”
“Yeah, the water was mellow. How about a beer?”
“Oh no,” he replies. “I’ll just take a sip of Cindy’s.”
Cindy is a somewhat blowsy fortyish frost-’n’-tip blonde with light pink lipstick. She raises meaty, welcoming arms. “Come sit here next to me, Dr. Loh.”
“Soy beans?”
Proferring a Tupperware of soy beans is…my ex-boyfriend Bruce.
Bruce…the fourth boarder.
Bruce, the mystery man who now…lives in my room.
Over the decades, I’ve tried to introduce Bruce to so many of my single girlfriends. How wrong I was. It turns out, the soul mate who was waiting for him all along was…my dad.
Bruce’s $450 a month includes, aside from my own tattered childhood bedroom, use of this private beach club, and of Malibu West’s private tennis courts!
I’m glad at least somebody found their Mr. Darcy! The man with Malibu land!
It’s funny, really…
And suddenly I hear myself murmuring to Mike, “You know what? I just realized something quite wonderful, quite relieving.”
“What?” he says.
“I realized I don’t hate white people.”
“That’s a good thing, because I am rather pale, as are your two daughters.”
“I realize I don’t hate any people.”
“Smoked fish,” he asks, opening the cooler.
I take a bite.
It is so moist and fleshy and sweet.
“Oh my God,” I say.
“Fluffy are my pancakes,” he says.
All around us, the surfers’ wet suits flap on the fence, like immigrant laundry, or Tibetan prayer flags, or…Well, like Malibu surfers’ wet suits.
And I realize, in my forties, I have had my exotic adventure.
As my father strips off his “swimsuit” to change into his pants, his brief nudity draws a chorus of approval, and indeed of marvel, from the throng.
“Go, Mr. Loh!” everyone yells.
“Your dad is so amazing,” Cindy says, a little tearfully. “My dad would never have been so free.”
“I’ve seen your dad do naked handstands since I was five,” says another surf dude.
“I grew up with him.”
So I realize, for many, my father IS, with his ball-flying nudity, a kind of spiritually freeing Paolo the Swordfisherman.
And I realize that
I have lived my own 28 Beads.
Without leaving my city, I have belly-danced with giant Bedouin women, jumped on trampolines with Chihuahuas, consorted with the Virgin of Guadalupe.
I have had the most exotic and life-changing adventure right here in town.
To our right is Broad Beach, of multimillion-dollar glass castles…no one is in.
No one lives there, called away with the pressing business of making money.
But here we sit on the beach.
Malibu’s oldest residents. The VW van drivers. The perennials. The natives. The beach bums. The fixtures. The originals.
But this doesn’t matter anymore.
There is no ocean of money before me—it is merely an ocean.
Los Angeles is merely land.
California is only a coast.
And finally, there are no castes or classes or divisions but only souls, some lost, some found, all trying to spawn up whatever river they are swimming. Trying to yellow-highlight, to MapQuest their way through the ever-shifting rapids.
It is a vast nirvanic vision, and only now, after this journey, do I finally feel large enough to contain it.
I lie back on my beach towel, a massive pulsing letter—an omega—with my children on each side, my husband to my left, father to my right, in a ring that is my community, in the circle that is my city, in the heart that is my world.
Up above me, circling high up in the sky, higher and higher…
Birds.
12
Julie Andrews
I am impervious to the artificial cultural offerings that are supposed to give a stab of sentimental comfort to women of my own flabby upper-armed age. These include but are not limited to:
The rose-covered CDs of lite tenor opera classics
Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! Page 26
