“No, ma’am,” I said. “Just the Hayward Plunge.”
She squinted at me. “Do you have the measles?”
I touched my still-smarting face. “No, ma’am. My stepfather squeezed some blackheads.”
“You shouldn’t squeeze them. All you need to do, wash twice a day with soap and water.”
I went to the movie alone. I loved the Del Mar Theater. It had a huge photograph of Harold Peary on the billboard. Harold Peary was a Portuguese actor who played the Great Gildersleeve on the radio. He was from San Leandro and the entire town was proud of his success.
Darwin had polio. I visited him once in the Oakland Children’s Hospital. He was in a long white room that had a dozen iron lungs in it. The breathing sound of the twelve iron lungs was eerie. The lungs were silver canisters about seven feet long. The paralyzed children were lying on their backs inside the canisters. Only their heads were outside the lungs. I sat next to Darwin and looked at his face in the mirror that was placed at an angle directly above him. The mirror allowed you to sit down and talk face-to-face to the person in the lung. The trouble was, the person in the iron lung could only talk when the machine had allowed his paralyzed lungs to draw enough air, but the machine was slow. I asked Darwin how he was feeling, and the machine would click and sigh and then Darwin answered, “Not too good.” I wanted to cheer him up, but it didn’t seem possible.
“How’s your transversus perinei profundus?” I said.
A nurse making an adjustment on the iron lung next to Darwin’s turned to look at me.
Darwin’s machine clicked and sighed. His face in the mirror was expressionless. “How’s your clitoris?” Darwin asked. The nurse raised an eyebrow and shook her head at us. Darwin closed his eyes and when I spoke to him again he didn’t answer. He’d fallen asleep.
Shortly after school started, Dan Sneed left home for a job in Fort Worth, Texas. I wasn’t sure if Mother and I were supposed to join him later or not. Mother found a job in an Oakland department store demonstrating yo-yos, which had become a postwar fad. It didn’t pay nearly as much as her welding job, but it was all she could get. The job market, now that the defense plants were idle, was depressed. A man moved in with us. His name was Mel Sprinkle. He’d worked at the Kaiser shipyard, too, and had yet to find another job that suited him. He made me nervous. He hung around the house most of the day, reading the newspaper and making phone calls. “There’s not much work for a man like me,” he’d say. I took that to mean either that he was overqualified for most of the jobs he saw advertised or that his skills were rare and generally unappreciated. He was muscular and athletic-looking and he ate everything I cooked, but he didn’t seem to have much energy. He wore one of Dan Sneed’s old bathrobes around the house while he drank coffee and studied the want ads.
Now that Dan Sneed was gone, I was out of work, too. I hated hanging around the house with Mel Sprinkle, and so I spent afternoons and weekends out in the garage or wandering through the neighborhood, watching work crews frame new houses in the bare fields next to Sobrante Park.
On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, I went to an air show at the Oakland airport. The Army Air Corps’s first jet fighter, the Bell P-59 Air Comet, was the star of the show. It flew circles around the heavy, slow-moving fighter planes of World War Two. It was a point on the horizon, coming at you, making no sound. Then it was right in your face, fifty feet over the field, a silent flash of silver followed by its own slow thunder. One by one, the outclassed piston-powered fighters landed, clearing the sky for the future. They taxied to their hangars in an embarrassing flourish of waddling turns as they exercised their obsolete maneuverability. Quaint propwash made skirts billow and hats fly while the Air Comet stood on the fire-belching nozzles of its twin jet turbines and climbed vertically into complete invisibility. The crowd, faces painfully upturned to the zenith, made no sound.
The week Darwin came home from the hospital—on crutches with steel braces holding his useless legs rigid—I broke my arm in two places. I jumped a curb on my way home from school and lost control of my bike. I came down hard in the middle of a busy lane of traffic. A woman screeched her brakes to avoid running over me, then pulled her car over to the curb. She saw my bent arm and told me to get into the car. She picked up my bike and put it into the backseat. It was a bad break, a compound fracture. A shaggy tip of bone peeked through the ripped skin. I gave the woman directions to my house, while marveling at the fragile architecture of human anatomy.
“You’re a calm one, aren’t you?” she said. “Are you in pain?”
I looked at my wrecked arm. It fell away from itself midway between wrist and elbow, making a perfect Z. Ulna, radius, I thought. “No, ma’am,” I said. I was insulated from pain by shock. I felt light-headed, as if I’d been breathing gas fumes in the garage. I let my face rest against the cool glass of the window. She drove slowly, in second gear, trying to avoid bumps that might jar my arm. She talked to me as she drove, her soothing voice rich with motherly concern, as I imagined myself in the Plexiglas nose of a B-29, on the one-way mission that would carry me into the rest of my life.
From THE VOICE OF AMERICA (1991)
Desert Places
Fred Ocean wrote to his wife, Sara, twice a week—amusing, energetic letters meant as much to cheer himself up as to entertain her. He made the stark Arizona landscape bloom with Disneyesque exaggerations: “It’s so desolate out here the red ants look up at me beseechingly when I walk to the post office. They want me to kill them.” He described with good-natured cruelty the geriatric midwesterners who came here to Casa del Sol to retire among the scorpions, lizards, and black widows. He assembled the details of the daily skirmishes between their sixteen-year-old daughter, Renata, and his mother. So far it’s a bitchy little war of hit-and-run raids and long-range sniping,” he wrote. “But it’s going to escalate into a full-scale nuclear exchange if we don’t get out of here pretty soon.” He didn’t tell her that his panic attacks had returned full-blown since he and Renata had arrived in Casa del Sol, or that because of them, he’d started drinking again. Nor did he mention the woman in Tucson, Germaine Folger, who had become his de facto drinking partner.
The high spirits he mustered for his letters home did not extend to his daily life. He was exhausted from being on edge most of the time, anticipating the inevitable snide remark from his mother, Mimi Ocean, and the wild mood swings of his daughter. He felt like a tightrope walker, his mother and daughter sitting on opposite ends of his balancing pole. Renata hated the desert retirement community and begged at least once a day to return to Seattle. “I need green,” she said. “Nothing’s green here. I’ve got to see a green tree, green grass, green water. I feel like I’m stuck in a million square miles of kitty litter.” But he had promised Sara to keep Renata here for at least a month. What had been a close mother-daughter relationship had become a contest of wills, beginning about the time Renata started high school. Renata hated high school and wanted to quit. Both Sara and Fred believed that a month of exile would give Renata the perspective she needed to take stock of her life and to reconsider.
So far the strategy was a failure. The hoped-for tranquilizing effect of the remote desert community did not materialize. The opposite happened. Renata had become more hostile, more headstrong in her poorly thought-out plan for total independence. She wanted to go to work as a gofer for a rock band, even-tually breaking into the management side of concert tours—all this on the basis of having talked to one of the Eurythmics for three minutes in a Portland hotel lobby. They had tried to force her back into school, but neither Fred nor Sara— aware of what went on in big-city high schools these days—had the necessary belief in the quality of the education Renata was receiving to give their efforts moral authority. In any case, they would have had to tie her hand and foot and deliver her to the school grounds, but even then she’d eventually walk away, refuse to do the work, or find some other way to defeat them.
Fred’s mother hadn’t seen Renat
a for three years. In that time, Renata had grown to adult size. She was five feet ten inches tall, with a strong, wide-shouldered build. Her only interest in high school had been the swim team, but that hadn’t been sufficient to hold her. Her punk costume and hairstyle—a collection of colored spikes that made her look like an old representation of Miss Liberty—put Mimi Ocean off immediately. “Good Christ, what in the hell did you let her do that for?” she asked Fred at the airport in Tucson, well within Renata’s hearing. “She looks like she’s on leave from some halfway house for mental cases.” His mother, who had just had cataract surgery, inspected Renata at close range through special eyeglasses that looked like goggles.
“Luckily,” Fred wrote, “Rennie finds the wild life around here interesting. For example, there’s a swallow’s nest in the entryway to my mother’s house. It’s tucked up in a comer and has three or four baby swallows in it. Rennie checks on them every morning, fattening them up with toast crumbs. There’s a big aggressive roadrunner that passes through the backyard every afternoon. He pokes around for a while before moving on. Rennie calls him Big Bopper.”
It struck him that his letters to Sara were a kind of espionage, treasonous to both his mother and his daughter. For that reason, he had to write them late at night in the privacy of his bedroom, or at the local cemetery where his father was buried. Needing an afternoon escape, he’d drive his mother’s white Cadillac convertible out to the local “boot hill,” the grassless, hardpan graveyard that had once served the adjacent nineteenth-century mining community of Doloroso. Doloroso had been partially restored into a certified “ghost town,” the owners of which had their cash registers primed for the permanent tourists of Casa del Sol. “I like this cemetery,” Fred wrote. “It’s filled with the bones of miners, gunfighters, and Civil War deserters—a worthy cast for a big-budget western. I think of Dad and the other retirees who are buried here as sort of underground tourists, mingling with the local color.” He wrote his letter seated on a bench-high stone next to the flat concrete slab that marked his father’s grave. His father’s slab looked—appropriately, Fred thought—like a section of prestressed concrete used in bridge construction. It was more of a barrier against burrowing animals than a memorial.
Renata hated the cemetery and would not accompany him there, even though it meant that she’d be in the house alone with her grandmother. She liked Doloroso, though, because it had a cafe, and this was where Renata took most of her meals. She couldn’t bear her grandmother’s cooking. “Mother is essentially blind,” Fred wrote. “All kinds of debris winds up in the food—hair-pins, buttons, even animals. Last night—I swear to God—something crawled out of the paella. It was cricket-size. Rennie and I watched it drag itself across the table trailing a saffron slick. It moved badly, as though it had left a couple of legs back in the casserole pan. Rennie retched, excused herself, plunked down in front of the TV with a can of cashews and a Pepsi.”
The stone Fred sat on marked the grave of one Henry Phelps, a man killed in something called “The Arrowhead Mine Disaster of 1912,” according to the inscription on the brass plate attached to the front of the stone. He imagined that Phelps and his father would have had common interests—Ivan Ocean had started out as an iron-ore miner in northern Michigan back in the 1920s. The notion that the two men were somehow compatible satisfied a relic curiosity in Fred. Perhaps they were sharing a mild and unharried eternity, trading memories in the closeted earth. Why not? If the Mormons could give their honored dead entire planets to rule, why not this simple and unembroidered afterlife for the honorable bones of Henry Phelps and Ivan Ocean?
When Fred wrote his letters in the cemetery, he felt as if he were addressing both his wife and his father. He whispered each word out loud before committing it to paper, even though he knew his father wouldn’t appreciate his humor, or, more accurately, the whimsical melancholy in which it was couched. He remembered how his father would sit behind his no-nonsense steel desk, his barrel-like torso erect, glancing at his watch impatiently, only half listening, picking out a phrase now and then to single out as evidence of his son’s faulty and perilous grasp of reality. “Life makes no apologies, son,” he once said. “And self-pity is the worst reaction to hard knocks.”
The mottoes of rust-belt capitalism had always been easy to make fun of, but Fred had come to understand that, hokey as they were, these mottoes aptly represented his father’s honest strength, his untethered spirit. Ivan Ocean had risen out of the iron-ore mines of northern Michigan to become the owner-manager of Decatur Metal Fasteners, Inc. “Rennie is Dad all over again,” Fred wrote, “just as stubborn, just as impatient, hating all forms of dependence, waiting for her chance to cut the ties. No wonder she wants out of high school. Yesterday she called it a ‘day-care center with team sports.’ Dad quit school when he was fifteen—did you know that? Ran off to Escanaba, lied about his age, got a job in a Negaunee mine, worked his way through Michigan Tech, bought his ticket for the capitalist gravy train. He doesn’t know it—” Fred scratched that out and rewrote, “He didn’t know it but he was never able to accept discipline, either. He was a wild mustang with frontal lobes. They say character traits leapfrog the generations. Think of the Fords. Henry was the mustang, his son Edsel a sweet old plug—nice guy, but he went swayback under the saddle—but Henry the Second, the grandson, was the mustang reborn. So it is with Rennie, me, and Dad. (Hey, am I leaving you out of this formula, darling? But you’ve always said that Rennie is one-hundred percent Ocean.) Mother can’t see the similarities, but I can, and they are real, even to the physiognomy—the big, peasant build, the tough jaw, the unblinking eyes that both you and I have trouble meeting head-on. I’m the Edsel of the clan, honey, the rageless caretaker, the nice guy with a music box tinkling where there ought to be a snarling dynamo. I’m just the conduit for the genetic fire.”
Whoa, he told himself, dropping his writing pad and pocketing his pen. He didn’t like the drift of this letter. He didn’t like the metaphors, the deft but unconscious switch from witty reportage to dark confession. (He could almost hear his father coax, “Don’t stop now, Freddy, you’re on the right track. You’re headed for a solid dose of reality. Go for it, boy.”) “Reality is overrated, Dad,” he said out loud. A sudden gust of wind, a dust devil, sucked a plastic rose from the grave of another retiree, carrying it high in a violent spiral. He watched the dust devil vandalize the old graveyard, scattering the unwilted artificial bouquets. It rocked the Cadillac as it crossed the road that paralleled the cemetery and moved toward Doloroso, where it seemed to lose interest, allowing its hoard of fake roses and bits of twigs and litter to settle back to earth.
That night he dreamed of dust devils grown to tornado size. They were coming for him. He drove the Cadillac into the desert, trying to escape, but the engine gradually lost power and finally quit. He put the top up, rolled up the windows, turned on the air conditioner, the tape deck, the radio, but nothing worked for long and the wind chuckled insanely against the pitching car. He woke up sweating, sick to his stomach. He reached for the Rolaids on the night table, then realized that the nausea was from adrenaline and that he wasn’t sick but frightened, the fear coming to him disguised as an idea that could be worked out or ignored. He rolled over, pulling the covers up, hoping to slow down his accelerating mind in the bogs of sleep, but the adrenaline kept coming and he began to shake. He got up, moved down the dark hall toward the living room, switched on the lights. His mother kept a stock of gin and tequila in a cabinet against the wall. He took down the gin from the top shelf, poured himself a quiet glassful, drank half of it down. He went out then onto the patio, under a night sky that seemed blistered by a million stars. He sat in a deck chair and took small gulps of gin. “Jesus, Jesus,” he said, rocking back and forth.
When he went back into the house, it was nearly dawn. His mother was already up, making coffee. He tried to slip back into his bedroom unnoticed but she saw him and called him into the kitchen. “You’re drinking,
” she said.
“Medicinally,” he said, not wanting a lecture or an argument or even permission, but she was a drinker herself, well into her cups early every evening, and did not press it.
“When are you leaving, Freddie?” she said.
“Eleven days,” he said—too quickly—and he realized that he’d been marking time.
Without her goggles his mother’s eyes seemed unnaturally dark and liquid— nocturnal eyes capable of absorbing more of him than ordinary sight would permit. “Eleven days won’t change anything,” she said. “Eleven hundred days won’t be enough.
“Oh, Mother, come on,” he said. “Rennie’s not that—”
“Rennie’s not the problem, Freddie. You are. You’re afraid of your own daughter.”
“Brilliant,” he said, turning away from the black, unfocused eyes.
“Say what you want, it’s true. You’re afraid of her, afraid she won’t love you. But you’re fooling yourself, Freddie. Rennie’s a whole lot tougher than you are. She’s a steam roller and she knows it. As long as you treat her with kid gloves, she’s going to walk right over you.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll take the belt to her.”
His mother sighed. “No you won’t. You couldn’t. And even if you could, it’s far too late. Let her do what she wants. She will anyway.” The coffee finished perking, and she poured out two cups. After taking a small, hissing sip, she said, “Freddie, I’d like the two of you to leave. I’d like you to go back to Seattle as soon as you can.”
Borrowed Hearts Page 22
