by Susie Bright
At the end of a week, I told Bill about the attorney’s letters my mother had received. I didn’t tell him about what happened in the car. I just wanted to know what he knew. What had happened to my aunt Frannie?
Bill’s face crumpled. “She hanged herself. She lost her kids to your uncle, because of alcohol and pills, and she’d been very sick.” He stopped. “I know your mom tried, a long time ago, to help her — your aunt Frannie was the sweetest kid, the nicest one in your mom’s family. She’d give anyone the shirt off her back.”
He came over to hug me. “I’m so sorry, honey. I don’t know what happened.”
Many years later, when my mom was dying, I finally asked her one little question about Frances. I took a chance because she was high on pain meds.
It came up because my mom was talking about how fast she used to be, how she could outrun everyone when she was a girl.
I asked her, “Mom, you ran, Molly ran, Bud ran, why didn’t Frannie run?”
Ordinarily, Elizabeth would’ve looked daggers at me. No questions allowed. Was I trying to make her cry? But she was hospitable on her morphine.
“Frannie got the worst of it. Dada beat her over and over with an electric cord. She hanged herself in his apartment on Third Street. Her son, your cousin Brian, he found her.”
She looked at me, cross. “Why can’t you get me some butter for my bread?”
That’s morphine for you. We needed these little interruptions.
“Make it snappy!” she called out after me, and laughed, like we used to laugh at Uncle Swithin.
That summer, my dad told me everything he knew about my mom’s family, as well as his own. It was like a blank book suddenly ablaze with story after story. We’d take a long walk, to pick those berries, or to hunt for clams, and the whole family tree would come to life.
At the end of the British Columbia visit, he asked me if I wanted to come to California with him. Of course. I didn’t ask to talk to my mom — I didn’t wish her any bad fortune, but I was scared that if I heard her voice, I’d be put magically back on a plane, that the spool would reel back. I never wanted to return.
My dad was like … heaven. All the groceries I ever wanted, and I could talk about anything with him. He was never scared about the things I was scared of. He said I was an inspiration.
The first year we lived together, Bill started going to group therapy, an exercise I found fascinating. I asked him every night he came home about what each person said.
One night he came home stunned. He said the group’s leader, and all the participants, had encouraged — insisted — that he pick up one of those soft foam “encounter bats” and bop one of the other big men in the group as hard as he could, that he give him a good wallop!
My dad was big as well … six feet two inches. It was surprising even to find another man in this small group who was his size.
But he didn't want to do it. He felt like crying. “I don’t have any quarrel with this man!” he said.
“Of course you don’t!” the others replied. “That’s the whole point!”
“But I’m weak! I’m small,” he protested. Of course everyone laughed and said, “You really need to learn how wrong you are. You need to know it in your body.”
He gave in to their cajoling and whomped his fellow mountain man a good one, which made them all laugh — except for my father, who laughed first but then cried. The discovery that he was not a “weakling” was potent, to be sure. But he felt something swinging that bat, feelings that had nothing to do with anyone in the room.
“In my family, you never get angry,” he said. “You never show anything you feel, especially anger.”
“Well, what did you do with my mom?” I asked. “She lets loose all the time!”
“I know,” he said. “I always thought I’d done something terribly wrong, I’d screwed up, and that if only I fixed it, she would never get angry with me again. But I just kept screwing it up, and so there was no respite.”
“And now you know.”
“Yes, now I do. But I knew even back then that she was depressed, and that was not so different from my mom, that yearning to make her happy, the fear that she would go away.”
“When did your mom ever leave you? Grandma Ethel?” I couldn’t imagine Grandma going more than two blocks down the street.
“She had what they would call a ‘nervous breakdown’ today,” Bill said, “but I was just a toddler, and so no one called it anything to me. I don’t know where she went, she didn’t say goodbye and when she returned, there was nothing said then, either. My aunts folded me into their care while my dad was working, and some months later, Mother came home as if nothing had happened. They told me she couldn’t have any more children.”
In 1990, when I became a mommy myself, my dad explained to me that that year I’d moved in with him, 1972, Elizabeth had asked him to take custody of me permanently, before she made arrangements for me to leave Edmonton. It wasn’t just a “visit” in her mind; it was a custody transfer.
When my own daughter turned twelve, I remembered that revelation. My mother’s mother had died when Elizabeth was thirteen. She had let me go at fourteen. So no one in our maternal line had mothered her daughter through adolescence for at least a couple of generations. What made me think I could do it?
The Red Tide
The Bunny Trip
I was a swim team “score girl” before I was a Commie. I’m glad things ended up that way, because otherwise I never would’ve been able to touch the Playboy Bunny, and carry on my sensual, if guilty, disposition.
The high school swim team was my ticket to an almost-prom; to halcyon school days; to a bartended, dress-up affair. The Trotskyists, the yippies, the lavender pinkos — they came along later and gave me guns and a good deal to think about, but they provided nothing soft or fluffy.
I went to a school called University High — Uni — a white, mostly Jewish school filled with the children of UCLA staff and the diaspora of the Hollywood colony. Marilyn Monroe went there before she dropped out.
In the seventies, there was no truly integrated school in the L.A. district. A discreet number of black students from South Central L.A. (with neighborhood-school names like “Manual Arts”) were bused into white schools from the time they were in kindergarten. It was not a two-way street. It was a cradle-to-cap affair. The neighborhood Chicano and Japanese American students at Uni were tracked, without exception, into blue- and pink-collar trades. They were all but banned from athletics.
Schools like Manual Arts beat Uni in every team sport. Only boys competed, and the girls were either cheerleaders or “score girls.” When tenth-graders like me entered the school — and trailed the halls like lost lambs — a clever opportunist from the guidance office asked us if we’d like to “get involved.” I was signed up to keep stats for the boys’ lightest-weight basketball teams and for the swim team.
I was apprehensive about reentering the American public school system. Edmonton’s classrooms had been a relief, because I didn’t get bullied for being a bookish girl with glasses. My vocabulary was considered “normal.” My wardrobe was as provincial as that of all the other girls. Everyone read books in Canada, even kids who were flunking out. There was no basketball team. You could swim outside maybe two months of the year. I never saw anyone take stats for the hockey coach — would that include how many teeth they knocked out per period?
But in 1974, living with my father for the first time in West Los Angeles, I was entering a new school that observed Jewish holidays and major film debuts.
I had been so sheltered from anything but the Irish Catholic fatalism of my mother that I didn’t know a thing about Jewish stereotypes. My knowledge of bar mitzvahs came from reading All-of-a-Kind Family storybooks. The kids around me at Uni would rail about “JAPS,” and I would blush because I thought they were making anti-Asian slurs. I’d never heard of anyone getting a “nose job” — I thought they did so because they couldn’t breathe
properly.
For my first score girl assignment, I was given printed sheets with diagrams of the basketball court, or the swim lanes, and a clutch of pencils to write down times and errors. It was a job where I remained invisible, with not one person speaking to me during an entire game.
I eavesdropped on the basketball cheerleaders. I learned what a Jewish American Princess was, who the “fat Mexican sluts” were (which I thought meant girls who had just deplaned from Mexico), and how Kelly Kitano got thrown out of school for her skirt being too short — she was not a nice quiet Japanese girl like the “others.” The cheerleaders never talked about the game. Their erotic and racial fantasies ran like diarrhea.
From the boys, I learned that to be a young black man bused in from Watts and expected to play well on the University High “C” team was to be immersed in the depths of personal misery. Every boy on the “B” and “C” teams was called a “fag” by the JV and varsity crowd.
None of the boys who played ever asked to see my stats, either. Coach Lundgrem took my sheaf of papers and slammed them into an ankle-level file drawer at the end of the week. Bang!
One time, he caught his fingers in the file drawer hinge and screamed, “You motherfucking cunt!” I stayed in the room with my mouth hanging open just long enough to make him even madder. I’d never heard anyone say that word before, and the sound of his rage made me shiver with envy. One day, I wanted to let loose with something like that.
I had a private left-wing conscience — private, because I hated being laughed at. I asked Lily Davidson, one of the other score girls, “Why would you call a girl a JAP if you’re Jewish? Isn’t that like turning something against yourself that you’d only expect an enemy to say?”
I had to sputter to get even that far. Lily just shook her head at me: “Because some girls are JAPS — what’re you supposed to call ’em?”
I learned that my outrage about “wrong words” was something only older people talked about. Like, how could someone be “Mexican” if his family had been in California longer than a single white cowboy? My Spanish teacher, Mr. Gomez, liked to rant about such things. We had plenty of radical teachers; the instructors were on the brink of revolt. They wanted to teach women’s history, black history, labor history; they wanted to come out with their gay lovers; they wanted the Equal Rights Amendment passed. Even my typing teacher, who looked like Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, supported the ERA. But most of the students? Not there yet.
One thing I liked about being a score girl was that I got to see the whole city on away games. The night we went to play Crenshaw High, I climbed onto the school bus and there wasn’t a single other score girl or cheerleader on board.
“Where is everybody?” I asked Darryl, one of the prominent “faggots.”
He rolled his eyes. “Crenshaw’s tough … they’re scared.” “Tough” was a euphemism for “black;” I’d picked that up by then.
Wiley, another “C” team member sitting next to him, sang, “Their parents won’t let them go.” And he looked at me like, “What about yours?”
Crenshaw cheerleaders weren’t scared of us; they were a wall of sound. Every girl was a baritone, and when they opened their mouths, they hit the first syllable, “CREN,” like an anvil splitting open the sun — and then the “SHAW!” blasted what was left of you against the earth.
They did military cadence with their feet and their voices. Scary? It was exhilarating. My dad would be glad I was seeing and hearing every corner of the city.
So I took the bus to Crenshaw. Not only did no one beat me up, but I sat with the team for the first time. It was like getting a sex change — the boys talked to me like I was … there. It wasn’t bitchy. I got a slice of pizza and a Coke. I had the best time of my meager American high school social life.
Darryl turned to me and said: “Are you going to the swim team banquet at the end of the season?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s at the Playboy Club, in Century City. Dan and Jimmy need dates.” He tipped his head back, nodding to them on the bench, like they needed socks.
“The Playboy Club? Don’t you have to be twenty-one?”
Plus, I was thinking, And a guy? And … old?
“I guess they’re desperate; my dad says they’ll do banquets for anyone.” He looked at me a little closer, like he was searching for something. “You know who Dan and Jimmy are, right?”
“I know Jimmy.” Jimmy was fine; he wasn’t rude. He was passing as a “not-Mexican” because his mom’s last name was Irish.
“Dan Margolis is his friend, right?” I asked, one eyebrow going up. That was how everyone said Dan’s name, as if dubiousness was in order. Dan Margolis thought he was a player, but he looked like he was going to shit in his pants most of the time.
Darryl laughed. “Yeah, Dan says he’s going to nail a Bunny.”
I cracked up, too. I was getting comfortable. “Does that mean that his date doesn’t have to touch him?”
“Aw, c’mon, you gotta know someone. Everyone’s gotta have a date.”
“Did you ask Tracey?” I thought of her because she was a score girl like me — filling out stat forms no one read, very quiet. I had never heard her call anyone a bad name.
The next day, Tracey spotted me standing in the snack-counter line at recess. I thought she was going to walk up and say, “You hooked me up with Dan Margolis; now I’m going to kill you.”
But instead, she handed me a flyer. A petition, actually. It read: “We … want to bring … lesbians and birth control … on campus. … We demand the administration allow them on campus.”
That wasn’t exactly what it said, but that was the important part: lesbians and birth control! They sounded like a couple of armies that could take on Crenshaw. Of course I wanted them to come. I was bored out of my mind.
“This sounds cool,” I said, signing it. “You’re not going to believe this, but I was going to ask you if you wanna go to the swim team banquet.”
“The Bunnies!” she said. That was the first time I heard her get loud.
“Yeah, if we’re lucky, they’ll be lesbians.” I had to act smart now, because I realized she was so hip I could not, would not, sell her out to Dan Margolis.
“Dan’s already asked me,” she said. She started braiding her long silky hair behind her back, like it was nothing.
“Great! I mean, you’ll be the only person there I know.”
“It’s not till June; you’ll know everyone by then,” she said, as if I were charm itself.
She slipped before me at the snack-line window and lowered her head so her voice could be heard through the wire screen. “Does the burrito have union lettuce in it?”
The lady back there in the hairnet glared back at us, like she’d like to cram union lettuce up our butts.
The Churning Mist
Tracey took me to my first Red Tide meeting. The Red Tide was the organizing force behind the lettuce boycott/farmworker drive, the lesbians-/birth-control-ladies-are-coming plan, and a support caravan to the Wounded Knee occupation in South Dakota, which had already been stopped on the Nevada border by the state police.
The Red Tide was the name of the newspaper that a couple dozen high school students, most of them at Uni, produced and published, much to the distress of the Boys’ Dean and the principal.
The paper’s masthead featured the following preamble:
“It came — flooding the schools, crushing everything that stood in its way, leaving in its wake a trail of destruction, havoc, rebellion. It razed classrooms, flinging textbooks to the winds, screaming out of turn, leaving foul stains on the desks, ripping the flags from their poles. It caught scores of students, sweeping them onward in its headlong course, trapping them in the whirlpool of its frenzy. Administrators reeled, choking on its noxious reek as it tore their offices asunder. Cut slips, tardy slips, suspension notices, bad conduct notices, report cards — all were swept away in its churning mist. It was … The Red
Tide.”
The first issue of the newspaper that I saw had something about the PLO on the cover, condemning Israel. The varsity team’s star forward, David Berry, found me alone, reading it on Coach Lundgrem’s desk before a Friday game. Why was David in there? He was part of the athletic elite; I never got within ten feet of people like him.
“DB” — that’s what I heard his friends call him — was sweating. He’d come to find Coach, but instead found me, reading something that made him lose whatever fragile composure he’d come in with.
The headline set him off.
“Anyone who reads this crap is a fascist and an anti-Semite!” he said, like he was quoting from the playbook.
“It’s not fasc —” I started to say. “It says here that the people who wrote it are Jewish; they’re socialists,” I tried again. “How can it be anti-Semitic and fascist?”
I couldn’t believe this was my first conversation with the most popular guy at school. He had wavy hair with a blond streak; he surfed when he wasn’t playing ball.
“What are you, a fucking communist?” he asked, snatching The Red Tide off Coach’s desk in front of me and ripping it in half. “If I ever catch you reading this again, I’ll kick your cunt in.”
I got out of my chair and realized I was taller than DB. I’m sure I was redder in the face. I grabbed the basketball stat reports for the past week and ripped them in half. Of course, they weren’t Varsity stats. Now the floor was covered in paper. There was a torn photograph of a dead Vietcong person lying on top of the shreds of the “C” team’s pathetic performance the previous night.
“Is that fucking communist enough for you?” I had never used either of those big words aloud. But DB had already slammed the door, and I was alone.
That was my last time in Coach Lundgrem’s office. I couldn’t explain what happened. I started to panic. There was only one thing I really cared about. I ran five blocks and called Tracey from the pay phone at the A&W stand. “Do you think I can still go to the swim team banquet at the Playboy Club? I’ve just eighty-sixed myself from the basketball team.”
