Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

by Susie Bright

  One time she was teaching English and German at a local high school in Contra Costa County, the barren eastern side of the San Francisco Bay Area. It was Christmastime, and she decorated her classroom with a few UNICEF cards, National Geographic-style photographs of people celebrating winter seasonal holidays all over the world. I remember urging her to put the Diwali card in the best-lit corner, because I loved the photograph of the little Indian girls surrounded with candles, bangles sparkling on their arms.

  Elizabeth had costume jewelry pins to wear for all the holidays; I loved helping her clasp them to her Jackie Kennedy shifts. She was so slim she could carry them off like a model — and would wear every bright color, including fuchsia lipstick, especially on drab days. For Diwali, she wore some of her blue and gold glass bangles from the early days of her marriage when living in Bangalore with my father.

  The vice principal came into the classroom the first afternoon of Diwali — you had to wonder, who’d tipped him off about a Hindi holiday?

  “He told me to take the cards down,” Elizabeth said, “this instant — that UNICEF was a front for the Communist Party and would not be tolerated at Amador High.” She laughed, as if CP members would take an interest in a rural spur of California that was about to change from walnut groves to suburban tract homes.

  “What did you say, Mommy? What does that mean?”

  Elizabeth dragged in some empty milk cartons from the car to load our records and books. She had already made the decision to move. “I told him he was an idiot.”

  I didn’t get explicit political rhetoric in our house. It was all inferred. I had no idea what communism was, or what its opposite might be. Hating winter solstice?

  What I understood is that there were bigots and bullies everywhere, and you coped with them by giving them a piece of your mind and then turning your back on them forever. Did the silent treatment teach them a lesson? I was never there long enough to find out.

  After 1965, I knew the drill. I lifted my most beloved possession, our fifteen-inch black-and-white Zenith, into the front seat, tucked under my feet. I couldn’t wait to get to our next destination and plug it in. From Contra Costa County, we moved to Riverside County, in the tumbleweeds. Then the San Gabriel Valley Mountains. Up to the Bay Area, back down to Los Angeles. There was a tiny hole in the VW’s running boards where you could see the road rushing underneath us, like water. I daydreamed that if I was small enough, I could slip right through.

  I was thrilled when my mother turned her sword of indignation on others — but I was afraid to be alone with her. She’d get in these moods. I didn’t see them coming when I was small, but by the time I was six, I was adept at avoiding her. Just not adept enough. Sometimes she’d ambush me in the night, storming out into the living room where I slept on the sofa and throwing a bucket of dishwater on my snoring body. An excellent cure for snoring. Or she’d turn on me in the kitchen with a wooden spoon or her hand across my face. I was “an idiot,” too. Then she’d cry and say she was sorry. She wanted me to hold her tight. She couldn’t help that she wished me dead, along with everyone else who was tormenting her.

  The Boys’ Dean at Amador High School got off light, in my estimation.

  As I grew older, I wished Elizabeth would leave me, and go away forever. Finally, she did. The bite is quite lasting, isn’t it? Only now can I look at some of my memories, the ones I don’t have a photograph to prompt, and see how all the little marks come together.

  India

  Pretend I was born in India. I’ll wind your worn sari around my shoulders and waist. I’ll take your bright pink lipstick and put a mark on my forehead. We’ll pretend that all the freckles are gone. I’ll bathe in lemon juice, and they’ll disappear. My hair will be so black, glossy, and long that I’ll be able to sit on it, or twist it up on top of my head like Sita.

  I know where all my mom’s Ravi Shankar records are. I can put the needle down on the vinyl without scratching. I know the location of the jam jar where she keeps her sandalwood.

  My mom didn’t make jam, and her mom … I don’t know. Agnes Williams Halloran, my maternal grandmother, died from pneumonia in 1932, shortly after giving birth to her fifth child. I do know she had a lively life before she married and started having babies — she was the first Nickelodeon piano player in Fargo, North Dakota. She got beautiful autographed photographs and letters from all the early stars, and judging from her collection of the dark-eyed femme fatales, like Theda Bara and Pola Negri, I think she would have understood why I wanted to pretend I was born in India, somewhere very far away from milquetoast and freckles.

  My first memories are of this game: “Pretend I Was Born in India.” I would beg my mom to play with me in our apartment in Berkeley, on McGee Street, shortly after my parents’ divorce. They had lived in Bangalore in the fifties, as linguists and travelers, and my mom had gotten pregnant on their voyage home. The things they brought home in their suitcases were the furnishings I lived with as long as I stayed with my mother. It had nothing to do with the hippie embrace of all things Indian that emerged in the sixties. It was mythological. It was proto-beat Berkeley.

  When we moved to a new apartment, we’d turn one of the moving boxes upside down, put the red-and-white Indian tablecloth on it, and that was the coffee table. The prayer statue of Krishna dancing with his flute might go in one corner of sunlight, and the one where he is a baby, playing with his ball of butter, might go next to him.

  My mom had a set of twenty-some cloth dolls representing all the castes in India, every sort of person, perfectly dressed and bejeweled. The pale-skinned raja has a sword and red satin jacket with gold braid and pearls, while the untouchable mother is barefoot, her baby tied to her back and a brass pot sewn at the top of her soft kinky braids.

  She told me all the stories of what each caste meant — and I was beside myself over the inequity. I foisted my Cinderella fantasies on the entire doll collection, making the Brahmins leave their castles in disgrace while the teachers and carpenters and slaves got to take all their jewelry.

  I was actually born in Arlington, Virginia, as my parents stopped in nearby D.C. as they reentered the country, looking for English as a Second Language jobs. I have some photos of them lying on a blanket on the banks of the Potomac with me, an infant, in April, and they look very hot but blissful. My mom said they were in brick government housing that was like an oven. She hated it there.

  When I would ask her later what it was like “having a baby,” she said that as they wheeled her into the hospital, she was so mad that it had turned out to be the “Confederate” Virginia location, instead of D.C., that her last words were, “I don’t want my baby born in the South!” Then they gave her shot, and she didn’t remember anything else.

  At my christening, in a Catholic church, the witnesses — other linguists — are also recent arrivals to the United States. The women are dressed in saris; my mom’s long hair is in a bun, and her gold bangles cascade down her arms.

  My dad, who had been studying every writing system and language in India, writing books on Tamil, essays on Sanskrit, was finishing his PhD in a different kind of “Indian” language, the Karuk Native American tribe in northern California, on the Klamath River. My mother had published her field notes, songs, and stories on other California tribes such as the Patwin, Hoopa, Yurok. Even after their divorce, they would still go to Brush Dances, sometimes to hand me off for a weekend or school break visit.

  To say that I didn’t really get the difference between “Indian” and “Indian” for a very long time is an understatement. I gathered only that there was this sensual, spiritually omnipresent world, a “gone” world that was under attack, and then there was white, square world, pinched and plastic, away from which parents couldn’t distance themselves enough.

  My parents found that world, their India and Indians, through their education in Berkeley. In my young childhood, I had no idea how far they’d come.

  The Irish Side

&nbs
p; Irish are Spaniards who got lost in the mist …

  — Bob Callahan

  The first person in my mother’s family to come to California was my great-aunt Tessie Halloran, who went to make her living as a governess in a Hollywood home.

  She came home to Minnesota one Christmas “a great success,” loaded down with navel oranges and wearing a two-piece suit the color of a peach. No one in my family had ever worn any other color than blue or black or brown. The children didn’t know that peach-colored fabric existed, and when they touched Tessie’s outfit, they worried that it would melt away like ice cream.

  In St. Paul at the time, there were signs on respectable establishments that said No Dogs, No Indians, No Irish. There was no work in the ghetto, and Tessie’s good fortune Out West was intoxicating. Soon one Halloran after another was either joining the service or moving out to San Francisco to work in the Hunters Point shipyard.

  My mom stopped speaking and corresponding to her blood relatives when I was seven, after several years of brinkmanship. It started out, from what I could see, as a solitary silent treatment against her father, to whom she never introduced me. Nor did I ever see her turn to him for a look or a word. Not once: his eldest daughter. That was Jack Halloran.

  Then there was her brother, Patrick James, or “Bud.” I never met him, the oldest of the five, and my mom would offer his name only reluctantly, spilling out a few tearful words: “I worshiped Bud when we were kids.”

  My dad, the “leak” for every fact of my maternal history, told me that Uncle Bud had joined the army, was a sergeant of a division in the CCC, and was a regular war hero … but that he came back a regular drunk. He abandoned his wife and eight children just like his father had done to him and the girls in the Depression.

  My mom would sob, as if marked for damnation, “And I introduced him to Georgia” — Bud’s wife. I never met her, either. At nineteen years old, she looked so pretty, in her Red Cross outfit in a portrait I discovered in my mother’s hatboxes. My family threw themselves into the war effort. But my mother could never face Georgia again, either, for the sin of her matchmaking.

  The shame of all the history, the errors, the regrets. A river you could drown a city in. No Dogs, No Indians, No Irish. There was something about being the last group on that sign that was the last nail in the coffin.

  Why were the Irish so despised? They were dirty, they were drunk, they were hungry, and they were liars — the final two being somewhat related. And their religion was full of smoke and powders and infinite chambers of ghosts — mysteries for the sake of mysteries.

  My mom didn’t drink … I rarely saw her with a beer. She was obsessive about cleaning up one side and down another. If I never scrub another floor again, it will be one too many.

  One time when I was just little, she put two yardsticks like a giant X on the bare floor, and taught me an Irish jig. She laughed and threw her head back, the sweat making her flat hair curly. Her feet never tripped or hesitated. She could sing or recite epics that went on for verse after verse, as if she was inventing them on the spot. Maybe she was.

  But if we were around other Irish Catholics who did the same things, the corners of her mouth drew tight. She was thinking something vicious, and her parting words would pinch as hard as her hand on my shoulder, to steer me away from “that awful clan.”

  She’d take me to church, refuse Communion for herself, and after all that trouble to get dressed up in our patent leather shoes, she’d leave at the end of the service, furious that they’d given up the Latin and provoked at the priest’s banality. “Those bastards!” she’d say.

  When I was in my thirties, I got an invitation from a gay group in Belfast who invited me to speak at an exhibition. I was flattered and thought, Here’s something I can tell Mama, and she’ll be proud.

  She was ticked off. “Who’s paying for it, Susie?” she asked, as if she’d just caught their hand in her pocket.

  “Don’t trust a word they say,” she said, when I told her the hosts were still fundraising. “Don’t you forward them one penny, because you’ll never see it again.”

  My mouth dropped. My mother, who wouldn’t tolerate a single cliché related to any racial stereotype — was a bigot when it came to our cousins across the way.

  My mother was born in Fargo, North Dakota, christened Elizabeth Joanne and nicknamed Betty Jo. Then just Jo. She was the first of the first generation to break away. Patrick James, Betty Jo, Molly, Frannie, and Pid — but she was the “smart” one. People who’ve wondered what my parents had to say about my path have no idea that my parents were the ones who broke the cardinal rules, not me. My mom was the first in her family to go to college. The nuns told her she would burn in hell if she attended the public University of Minnesota in Dinkytown. She cackled, reliving the story every time, proclaiming, “I couldn’t wait.”

  She was the first in the family to marry outside of the faith, to divorce, to bear only one child. More important, she didn’t die bearing children — the number one cause of death among Halloran women.

  She played footsie with my father in Greek class. She was the first girl he ever kissed. She and he agreed, in separate conversations with me, that he was the only straight man studying classical languages and anthropology at the University of California. When I “came out” to my parents, it was anticlimactic — together, they’d had far more of a gay social life and witnessed more emerging queer history after World War II than I’d seen in my lifetime. They preferred gay life, intellectually, socially, but were really relieved to find each other, an erotic and intimate connection in an otherwise lavender universe. My dad would say, “I wondered if I was gay. But I dreamed about Rita Hayworth, Esther Williams, and your mom.”

  My mom would never have described herself as a fag hag: first of all, because she would never, ever use an epithet, no matter how good-natured; and second, because she really thought of herself as Lucy Van Pelt, completely fed up with virtually everyone.

  When my aunt Molly died, the one sister who didn’t let my mother disappear altogether, I found out that Molly had collected what was left of the family scrapbooks. I was amazed to find a “baby book” for my mom and her brother, which their mother, Agnes, had kept until the first two kids were toddlers. I was shocked at the prosperity the little book implied. How could they have kept a lovely illustrated diary like this when a few years later my mom was on the street collecting rice from relief wagons with her head hanging down?

  My grandmother Agnes died in my twelve-year-old mother’s arms while the little ones screamed. Her family’s farm had been foreclosed on, and her husband had abandoned her.

  But in her teens, my grandmother had had another life. She was the glamorous Nickelodeon piano player, Fargo’s one-and-only. When Agnes was first married, things were … okay. She had the time and good health to make a baby book. Her husband Jack’s writing was beautiful and filled some of the pages with their first two children’s accomplishments. Jack was selling tractors for John Deere, and he would send perfectly fountain-penned postcards from the road: “Wish you were here; kiss the babies.”

  “Yes, he was famous for his hand,” my mom admitted when I showed her the evidence that her father once had been something more than a complete basket case.

  She looked at the postcard I showed her as if it was a museum piece, not connected to her. How could this be the same guy who hid out and let the orphanage come pick up the children when his wife died, the man whose hands shook in photographs, the one who looked like Ichabod Crane in his black duster?

  The baby book was composed before the crash, in the mid-twenties, before the banks took Grandmother Halloran’s farm, before skid row claimed my grandfather’s allegiance. The baby books were full of promise. On the page where the doting parents record Baby’s First Word, instead of “Da” or Mama,” Elizabeth first word was: “Bud.” Written in that beautiful cursive pen.

  When my mom was dying a few years ago, she was on a lot of morphin
e, and she gaily told stories I’d been waiting to hear all my life. I wasn’t ready for it; I’d given up so long ago ever hearing anything from her lips.

  When I was a child in Berkeley, I would make the mistake of asking, “What was it like when you were my age?” She’d cry as if I’d stuck her with a pin, her face accusing me, as if she was the little one and I was too cruel. I didn’t ask her again after I was old enough to read.

  When my mother died, cancer protruding all over her body in giant lumps and bumps, she wasn’t grieving. She could recite a chapter of her life without blinking, even laughing at it. She didn’t cry at all, except when she was looking for her grandmother, in bouts of sleepwalking.

  I realized after one of her nocturnal walks that my mom could barely remember her birth mother, because her only childhood memories were of a sick and dying woman who kept getting pregnant. “Mama” was a saint, not a person.

  Instead, my mom looked to her real mother figure, her grandmother. “My grandma,” she told me, during one of her loquacious Fentanyl-patch moments, “was the only person in my family who ever praised me or told me I was good. She told me I was smart and I could do anything.”

  Forty-plus years it took to hear that.

  My mother was a star; when I meet people who still remember her, they shake their heads and remember an incandescent anecdote, where she burned hot, either in temper or passion or blistering empathy. She felt things so deeply, and she could bury them just as long.

  Elizabeth told me a story one morning, when we were meditating on the plum blossom outside her window. “When Grandma still had the farm,” she said, “there was a fence at the edge of the property right on the highway, where the Greyhound bus passed every day on its way west.

  “There was a song on the radio I liked then — it was Jules Verne Allen, that Texas cowboy — “The Red River Valley.”