Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986)

by Tomlinson, Sarah

  “How should I know?” Betty laughed.

  “Do they still have lighthouse keepers?” I asked, my commentary eventually puttering along on its own when I got no response from Betty.

  Like my father, Betty wasn’t accustomed to children, and so she didn’t take the usual parental approach of trying to make every moment into a lesson. Instead, she laughed at me, not feeling the need to pretend to be polite.

  She was old. I amused her. She didn’t care how I felt or what anyone thought. She was going to laugh. She was on the vacation she had earned, and she was going to read her paper and smoke her cigarettes and eat as much salt as she wanted.

  This second cabin was also near a restaurant that held an epic place of honor in my mind: the Gosnold Arms. It was across the road from the New Harbor Co-op, where Mom and Craig took visitors to eat fresh lobsters served on paper trays at picnic tables overlooking the harbor. At that age, and with our strict health food diet, I loved any excuse to eat out. I fancied myself a bit of a sophisticate, though, and looked longingly across the road at the Gosnold Arms, located in a regal building with a long front porch.

  I’m not sure whether Betty and I arrived as the restaurant opened in an attempt to be thrifty, or because we’d both been waiting for dinner for hours, as it was one of the day’s only distractions. But we happened to hit the early bird special.

  I braced myself as the server approached. Who knew what Betty would say? She had a habit of demanding sliced lemon at the end of a seafood meal and rubbing it over her fingers to erase the fishy smell she imagined to be lingering there.

  “We have two options for the early bird special tonight,” the server happily chirped. “Lamb and veal.”

  Mom was raising me as a strict vegetarian. Although I enjoyed breaking the rules when I stayed with Grammy, eating one of her dry hamburgers was one thing. It was quite another thing to consume one of the cutest animals I’d ever seen. I had to have the alternative. I waited for the waitress to leave.

  “What’s veal?” I asked.

  “Baby cow,” Betty said without a second thought.

  When the waitress came back to take our order, she beamed down at me.

  “And what would you like?” she asked.

  “Veal,” I said, the word sticking in my throat.

  As much as I was eager to join the big world and saw Betty as a means to get there, I was uncertain of my ability to handle the vast options it included. And yet, my longing only grew.

  That summer, my dad visited again. As usual, it had been more than a year since I’d last seen him, so I was shy but eager. It didn’t take long for him to win me over with his special way of talking, as if he were picking up our great ongoing conversation. I sat with him in his cab, which he had parked by Mom’s garden, where the nasturtiums rioted red, orange, and yellow blooms over her wooden beds, the beans and peas in orderly rows.

  Inside my dad’s taxi, it smelled of his essential oils and something clean and healthy, like a natural food store, and also the incense he burned in the ashtray, a habit I took up when I got my first car. It was orderly, like everything about my father, with a slightly eccentric attention to detail. He always had at least one notebook going—pocket size with a Bic pen in the spiral binding, containing pages and pages of affirmations.

  For each visit, he’d borrow a different cab. Some were generic modern sedans, but at least once he got an old Checker cab. All of the cabs had bulletproof glass between the backseat and driver—a scary detail I thankfully didn’t have the mental sophistication to comprehend. I loved nothing more than to climb in back and push pennies through the money slot, pretending I was one of his fares. But today I was sitting next to him, his ever loyal copilot.

  “John Lennon’s coming back,” he said in a conspiratorial tone of voice that suggested I was the only person in tune enough to get the message.

  I nodded sagely, as if I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “There’s this woman who’s been channeling him, and he’s gonna give a television interview, and tell us all about where he’s been, and what we need to do.”

  I knew it was sad that John Lennon had died. I was interested in this TV appearance, but I think I was also looking for proof it was safe to believe my dad—that he knew truths about the world in the way adults were supposed to, and he could be trusted in his explanation of them. I watched for that TV special for years. In my mind, it’s as if it actually happened.

  The next summer, Betty’s visit took a turn for the glamorous. She asked Mom to rent us a room at a bed-and-breakfast in Portland, sixty miles south and metropolitan by comparison. It had city buses, which Betty soon mastered. It had a department store, Porteous, which she waltzed us through as if I were Annie in a Daddy Warbucks montage.

  At the bed-and-breakfast, as always, I feared Betty’s interactions with the owners and other guests, but I was glad for an alternative to the tedium of past summers. Coffee was served in the salon. I loved the accompanying Hydrox cookies, which I washed down with the sugary coffee I began drinking as part of my endless bid to seem grown-up.

  It wasn’t always easy to fold myself back into regular life after my time with my dad or Betty. I was being raised to be disciplined and hardworking. But I was a kid, and one with a natural affinity for the big life—big cities, big meals, big emotions. I learned to live treat to treat, the way the orphans in after-school specials put all of their faith in that big Christmas miracle. When I was occasionally allowed one of the indulgences I loved—putting flowered barrettes in my hair for a restaurant outing when family visited, riding the roller coaster for hours at an amusement park during my summer stay with Grammy, or even just the delicious sensory overload of seeing a movie at the theater, rather than viewing public television on our staticky little TV, I savored every moment, abuzz with joy.

  As much as I was desperate to go everywhere, and do everything, a part of me never wanted to leave the safe, perfect oasis Mom and Craig had carved out for us in the wild woods of Maine. Melancholy with longing, I became aware early on that wherever I was, a part of me would always want to be somewhere else.

  chapter three

  I STILL DREAM OF ORGONON

  On Christmas Eve when I was nine, Mom and Craig sat down across from me, looking solemn. Christmas has always been sacred for me. Growing up without organized religion, and naturally drawn to ritual, I elevated the holiday to a holy place. I loved the Christmas tree with its sparkly glam-rock decorations. I loved the schmaltzy music. I loved the television specials, most of all It’s a Wonderful Life with its seasonally palatable existential angst. Not to mention it was one of the few occasions we were allowed to eat sugar. In a sugar-soused reverie, I stared back at Mom as she spoke. “What if Santa brought you a little brother or sister for Christmas?”

  I took this in—was it possible? This was the first I was hearing of it, and Santa was due in just a few short hours. Even I could do the math on this.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m going to have a baby, so you’re going to have a little brother or sister.”

  She and Craig looked at each other, and then Mom smiled and looked at me.

  I got it now. My nine-year reign as the castle’s sole princess was about to end.

  “Noooooooo,” I shrieked, as I ran upstairs to throw myself onto my bed.

  Just as our house had grown up around the unit we had been, now that Mom and Craig were expanding their family, the house had to expand, too. Plans were made for an addition that would double the size of our living space and create a room for the baby. For months and months, as Mom’s stomach grew with the baby inside of her, we were once again living in a construction site. But there was an upside; I would have my own room, with a door that closed, and I could paint it whatever color I wanted (pink, of course), and even install wall-to-wall carpeting, which Betty financed.

  That summer, when I was ten, just before we found out whether Santa had chosen a boy
or a girl, my dad took me on our second, and final, dad-daughter vacation. It had been several years since he’d taken me on a camping trip to Rangely Lake. We didn’t go to Disneyland, or even Palace Playland, the white-trash amusement park an hour away. Instead, he took me to Orgonon, the home and laboratory of the late psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich.

  My father and Phyllis had broken up, and he was all mine again. I did not waver in my attention to him for an instant. It was as if I went into a kind of a trance during our hours together, where nothing could bother me, and there was nothing before or after the pocket of time we were spending together. He always marveled at our special relationship, and how it allowed him to say anything to me. And say everything to me he did. Of course, he had no experience with children and spent his time with cabdrivers, men from the track, rebirthers and new age types, and women he was sleeping with (or trying to sleep with). He went on at length about his latest health craze, macrobiotics and rebirthing and isolation tanks. About astral projection and reincarnation, how he had been a city planner in Atlantis and a drunken Irishman in Dublin, who disappointed my mom and me with his drunken ways. About affirmations, which he was obsessed with and devoted much of his time to when he was parked in his cab in Boston. About his foster parents, who told him and the other two foster kids that only one of them would be adopted, so they all had to be extra good, but none of them were actually adopted, no matter how good they were. About how when he got into a car crash in a stolen car while AWOL from the navy, the car was worth less than a hundred dollars, which resulted in the lesser charge of “borrowing a car without the owner’s permission.” About living in a hearse in Haight-Ashbury, where he sold acid. And, always, how I was the only person who really listened to him.

  “My next frontier is freedom,” he said, talking fast as he caught the wave of his own words. “I read this guru book by this guy, Muktananda. He’s just this little cool guy all of the guys I know are hanging out with. He’s their guru. Well, their guru is Baba G, but Baba G never comes to America. You have to go to India and go way up on this mountain to see Baba G. But Muka travels around, and his thing is he has a peacock feather, and he touches people with it. He’s this cool-looking guy, and he has the red dot on his forehead. There’s a chapter in the book on recognition. I’ve been thinking about that when I’m in the process of recognizing things. And then, another chapter is realization. And when we have those, recognition and realization, we have freedom. That was something I never got until the other day, when I realized I was on the verge of being free. But you can’t assume it. You’ve got to really see it. It’s so great when you see it on the horizon, but you can’t cheat to get there. You’ve got to do it yourself. You’ve got to realize, and then you’ll be free. But the freedom I have is that I can see that for the first time, and even before, I think I was seeing something, too, but it was my ego that was seeing it. It wasn’t the real thing, and the thing about the ego is it’s always fooling you.”

  “Okay,” I said, soaking up every word like a bedtime story.

  His words carried us along for hours until we inched our way down a narrow, rutted driveway and arrived at a modern fieldstone house with blue trim around its many windows. It was desolate in the mideighties, even for rural Maine, and easy to imagine it would have been horror-movie remote in 1950 when Reich first settled there. It had a noble beauty, but also a still, haunted quality that made me sad and watchful.

  Through a path in the woods we approached a metal contraption that looked like the guns from a tank pointed up into the sky.

  “Reich’s cloud buster,” my dad said, leading me over to its base.

  I was instantly transfixed. In school the previous year, I’d been inundated with the drought in Africa, “We Are the World,” the sad sight of starving kids my own age. Here it was, deep in the wilderness of Maine, the solution to hunger: a machine that could make rain. I climbed up beneath it, as if to aim the metal tubes. The cloud buster would give us rain. John Lennon would come back. My father would be proven right.

  Too awestruck to maintain my usual stream of questions, I followed my dad silently through the tour of Reich’s house. Everything was wonderful to me. The fact that he purposely designed the fieldstone steps to be shallow and deep, so that when he was an old man they would be easy for him to navigate; the laboratory where he cut open mice, the violence of which made him seem to me like a very serious scientist; his orgone accumulators, makeshift wooden boxes that he said cured cancer, which were later popular with William Burroughs and William Steig and immortalized in song by the space-rock band Hawkwind.

  The house seemed to float amid the mountains. Broad windows looked out onto pretty fields and dense forests, the inspired architecture giving the vista a gold star the very similar woods outside my own house did not merit. Reich was clearly an important man, and yet he chose to live a life much like mine. I knew influential events happened in New York City and Washington, D.C., so I couldn’t quite make sense of all this, but seeing that place that afternoon legitimized my existence in Maine in a way. The great world I was so desperate to see and experience was closer than I had thought.

  My dad and I were ushered into a small theater, alone. We were the only tourists there that day, a number that probably wasn’t unusual. I didn’t have to understand Reich’s counterculture status to realize this was not like other historic homes I’d toured—Mount Vernon or Monticello, with their school groups and gift shops that sold old-fashioned candy that tasted like molasses and mothballs.

  The lights dimmed. I sat next to my father, watching the documentary about Reich’s life and exile to Orgonon with his young son, Peter. When he’d run afoul of the FDA, his books and accumulators were destroyed. He was sent to prison, where he died.

  My dad leaned down to whisper in my ear, “Reich was poisoned in jail. The government does things like that, you know.”

  I shivered, the magic of our outing shadowed by something dark. That’s what happened to dads who were different, who believed in things no one else did. I hadn’t known about such things before. But now I did.

  That July, when my mom went into labor, I was in the hospital room. Mom had done a great job of including me in her pregnancy. She was careful to explain what was happening, step-by-step, just as she had with the construction of our house. I think, at age ten, I was probably more distressed by watching Mom give birth than she was by actually delivering the baby. And yet, I was already old enough to understand in some fundamental way that all of these inclusions were how she was trying to make this big change okay for me.

  She was one of those moms who was always interested in what I was saying or doing—in almost all of the photos from my early childhood, she is looking at me, as if her happiness depended on mine. When I became obsessed with ballet, she not only found a way to afford lessons for me, but she and Craig also took me down to Boston to see Rudolf Nureyev dance in Don Quixote with the Boston Ballet. She could be counted on to drive me to the library when I’d read all of my books, to help me with Brownie badges, and to encourage my love of baking, even if she modified the recipes to include honey and carob instead of sugar and chocolate. I was important to her, and I knew it. But something was shifting.

  Now that she had gotten us to this special sheltered place, she could relax enough to have another family, her “real” family. That’s how it felt. They were a unit that fit together—they had the same last name, which I would not take, as if refusing meant I was indifferent to it. They were a part of something that did not entirely involve me, even though I was still Mom’s daughter, and Andrew’s big sister.

  My little brother was a happy child, and exceptionally cute, with a halo of golden blond ringlets and big, blue eyes, the kind of baby strangers stopped to compliment and artists wanted to paint, the antithesis of everything dark about me—my dark eyes, dark hair, freckles, and the dark thing inside of me that had made my father go away, and that kept me yoked to him.

  A letter my fathe
r sent to Mom that summer starts out: “I just wanted to write and let you know a little of what’s going on with me lately, to explain a little of why I’ve been so out of touch.” He went on to make excuses about how he had been giving her privacy around the birth of her new child, had been occupied by an acute back attack, and that his rent had been raised a hundred dollars, so he could not afford the $375 a month and would have to move.

  The card he sent me, along with a Madonna tape I’d requested, simply asked: “How’s your new brother or sister?”

  That fall, Mom and Craig brought home Kate Bush’s album The Hounds of Love and listened to it nonstop. I, in turn, fell under its spell. There was one particular song, “Cloudbusting,” that riveted me: “I still dream of Orgonon. / I wake up crying.”

  Orgonon really did exist! Those wonderful, brief interludes with my father when he told me things that split open the rest of my childhood like an atom of energy exploded by Reich in his lab. I listened again and again, until I knew every word. I understood its longing for a time that would never come back, its declaration of love in the face of adversity. That was exactly what it had felt like to go to Orgonon with my dad, and to love him from a distance. But no matter how close the song made me feel to him and our time together, during the months I listened to it, he was gone away from me. And I had no idea when I would see him again.

  When my father did materialize, just after Christmas of my sixth-grade year, he had a new woman with him. Her name was Eva, she was German, and she had short, dark hair. Having come to America to improve her English, she worked as an au pair in the Boston suburb of Weston, so she was much better with kids. I liked her much more than I did Phyllis.

  At nearly eleven, I wasn’t the emotionally feral young girl I’d been during Phyllis’s reign, which helped me to accept Eva’s presence during this rare visit with my dad. I was also just so glad to see him after several years apart, especially during a time I’d felt estranged from Mom and her new family. My dad understood me in a way no one else did—he lived the existence I craved, full of ideas and experiences—and I felt that even one day with him gave me sustenance for my regular life.