Most of all from my childhood travels, I remember the first breath of salt air as we neared our destination. On a California highway overlooking the Pacific or a Florida causeway that cut through the Gulf of Mexico like Moses parting the Red Sea, we would get out of our cramped car, stretch, and fill our lungs in an ontogeny of birth. Melville once said that every path leads to the sea, the source of all life. That conveys the fatefulness of it—but not the joy.
Years later, I saw a movie about a prostituted woman in Paris who saves money to take her young daughter on a vacation by the sea. As their train full of workers rounds a cliff, the shining limitless waters spread out beneath them—and suddenly all the passengers begin to laugh, throw open the windows, and toss out cigarettes, coins, lipstick: everything they thought they needed a moment before.
This was the joy I felt as a wandering child. Whenever the road presents me with its greatest gift—a moment of unity with everything around me—I still do.
—
ANOTHER TRUTH OF MY EARLY WANDERINGS is harder to admit: I longed for a home. It wasn’t a specific place but a mythical neat house with conventional parents, a school I could walk to, and friends who lived nearby. My dream bore a suspicious resemblance to the life I saw in movies, but my longing for it was like a constant low-level fever. I never stopped to think that children in neat houses and conventional schools might envy me.
When I was ten or so, my parents separated. My sister was devastated, but I had never understood why two such different people were married in the first place. My mother often worried her way into depression, and my father’s habit of mortgaging the house, or otherwise going into debt without telling her, didn’t help. Also, wartime gas rationing had forced Ocean Beach Pier to close, and my father was on the road nearly full time, buying and selling jewelry and small antiques to make a living. He felt he could no longer look after my sometimes-incapacitated mother. Also, she wanted to live near my sister, who was finishing college in Massachusetts, and now I was old enough to be her companion.
We rented a house in a small town, and spent most of one school year there. It was the most conventional life we would ever lead. After my sister graduated and left for her first grown-up job, my mother and I moved to East Toledo and an ancient farmhouse where her family had once lived. As with all inferior things, this part of the city was given an adjective while the rest stole the noun. What once had been countryside was crowded with the small houses of factory workers. They surrounded our condemned and barely habitable house on three sides, with a major highway undercutting its front porch and trucks that rattled our windows. Inside this remnant of her childhood, my mother disappeared more and more into her unseen and unhappy world.
I was always worried that she might wander into the streets, or forget that I was in school and call the police to find me—all of which sometimes happened. Still, I thought I was concealing all this from my new friends. Most were quiet about their families for some reason, from speaking only Polish or Hungarian at home, to a father who drank too much or an out-of-work relative sleeping on the couch. By tacit agreement, we tended to meet on street corners. Only many years later would I meet a high school classmate who confessed that she had always worried about me, that my mother was called the Crazy Lady of the neighborhood.
During those years, my mother told me more about her early life. Long before I was born, she had been a rare and pioneering woman reporter, work that she loved and had done so well that she was promoted from social reporting to Sunday editor for a major Toledo newspaper. She had stayed on this path for a decade after marrying my father, and six years after giving birth to my sister. She was also supporting her husband’s impractical dreams and debts, suffering a miscarriage and then a stillbirth, and falling in love with a man at work: perhaps the man she should have married. All this ended in so much self-blame and guilt that she suffered what was then called a nervous breakdown, spent two years in a sanatorium, and emerged with an even greater feeling of guilt for having left my sister in her father’s care. She also had become addicted to a dark liquid sedative called chloral hydrate. Without it, she could be sleepless for days and hallucinate. With it, her speech was slurred and her attention slowed. Once out of the sanatorium, my mother gave up her job, her friends, and everything she loved to follow my father to isolated rural Michigan, where he was pursuing his dream of building a summer resort. In this way, she became the mother I knew: kind and loving, with flashes of humor and talent in everything from math to poetry, yet also without confidence or stability.
While I was living with her in Toledo, my father was driving around the Sunbelt, living almost entirely in his car. Once each summer, he drove back to the Midwest for a visit, his timing always dependent on his mysterious deals. He once wrote me about a short story whose principal character was always waiting for the Big Deal, a story he said could have been about him. Between visits he sent postcards signed “Pop,” fifty-dollar monthly money orders tucked into various motel envelopes, and letters written on his idea of business stationery, a heavy ragged-edge paper without address or his first name—which was Leo—just at the top in big exploding red letters, “It’s Steinemite!”
This way of life ended when I was seventeen, and our Toledo house was sold as a teardown for a parking lot, a sale my mother had long planned so I would have money to pay for college. My sister came during my father’s visit that summer because she had a plan: if he would take responsibility for our mother for a year, I could live with my sister in Washington, D.C., where she was a jewelry buyer in a department store. This would give me a carefree senior year of high school.
I told my sister that our father would never do it—and when the three of us went out for a breakfast together, this was exactly what he said. After she stormed out in anger, my father drove me to my summer job as a salesgirl. Opening the car door to go to work, I surprised us both by starting to cry. I had no idea that a ray of hope had crept in. Because he couldn’t bear to see anyone cry, certainly not the daughter he’d known mostly as a child, he reluctantly said okay—but only if we synchronized our watches to exactly one year.
Somehow my father did manage to take care of my mother, even while driving around California, from one motel to the next. I had a glorious year finishing high school, getting sympathy for being without my parents and secretly feeling free.
When our father brought our mother to Washington to live with my sister and me—and after I left for college in the fall—my sister realized she couldn’t both work and be a full-time caregiver. Instead, she found a kindhearted doctor at a mental hospital near Baltimore, who admitted our mother as a resident and began to give her some of the help she should have had years before.
When I visited her there on weekends from my summer job and then on college vacations, I slowly began to meet someone I’d never known. I discovered that we were alike in many ways—something I either hadn’t seen or couldn’t admit out of fear that I would share her fate. I learned that the poems I remembered her reciting by heart were by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Omar Khayyam; that teaching me to fold a sheet of typing paper into three columns for note-taking had been sharing a tool of her journalistic trade; and that she had wanted with all her heart to leave my father and go with a girlfriend to try their luck as journalists in New York. As I looked into her brown eyes, I saw for the first time how much they were like my own.
If I pressed and said, “But why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t you take my sister and go to New York?” she would say it didn’t matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, “If I’d left, you never would have been born.”
I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.
—
AT COLLEGE I LIVED in a dormitory, happy to be responsible for no one but myself. I think my classmates were mystified by my wall-to-wall cheerfulness and mistook it for some odd midwestern trait. I spent an undergraduate year in Europe,
pretending to study while actually traveling, because I was sure I would never get to Europe again. After graduation I lived for a summer with my mother, who was well enough to live first in a rooming house, then with my sister, who had married and created an apartment for our mother in her home. Then I went to India on a fellowship, and spent nearly two years there wandering and writing.
But at home again, I couldn’t find a job that used what I had learned there. I wandered more, worked in student politics, and finally began to make a freelance living as a writer in New York, always in the familiar land of the temporary. I found an apartment and a roommate but kept on living out of boxes and suitcases. In city streets, I often looked into lighted windows and repeated the mantra of my childhood: Everybody has a home but me.
Meanwhile my mother worked part time in a gift shop near where she lived with my sister, and pursued interests that included Eastern philosophy and an Episcopalian church she loved because it allowed the homeless to sleep in its pews. She would never be able to live on her own, but when she visited me in New York, she seemed both proud and scared that I was where she had once wished to be.
—
I LEARNED FROM MY FATHER’S postcards that he had revisited his show business dreams by buying the contract of a young Italian pop singer. He drove the singer and his wife to gigs at bars and roadhouses, but the singer got few callbacks, made no records, and, according to my father, ate a lot, as did his wife. My father sent him back to his job at an aircraft factory and became a solitary traveler again.
When he heard that semiprecious stones could be bought on the cheap in Latin America, he financed a trip by selling his car. However, when he arrived in Ecuador, he encountered an earthquake, few bargains, and a woman from Germany who wanted to marry a U.S. citizen in order to enter this country, something he didn’t confide in me until after they were divorced. He also made the sole personal comment of our lifetime together: “You know how people say you lose interest in sex after sixty? Well, it isn’t true.” When he discovered he would be financially responsible for his ex-wife in this country, he urged her to return and come back on her own—which he was lucky she was willing to do. Altogether, he ended his Latin American adventure more broke than when he began.
Later, this woman who was so briefly my stepmother called to ask me where she could send my father a birthday card. I’d lived apart from him so long that I’d forgotten my childhood training to never, ever, say more than “Daddy isn’t home.” After all, the caller might be a bill collector. It’s amazing how fast one can learn a way of life, and how fast one can forget it. I actually told her where to write him. This caused my usually softhearted father to shout at me from a faraway pay phone, “How could you?” He was sure she only wanted money.
Yet on his annual trips east, my father was his usual cheerful, good-hearted self. He worried about only two things: avoiding the IRS (he hadn’t paid taxes or even filed a return in years) and dealing with minor health problems that plagued him. At over three hundred pounds, he had what he jokingly called “very-close veins,” plus difficulty moving anywhere outside his car, like a whale out of water. Nonetheless, he never stopped patronizing the best ice cream places and every all-you-can-eat restaurant from coast to coast, or driving even to the corner to mail a letter. And he never gave up on his dreams and deals.
Once he swore me to secrecy about his idea for a roadside chain called Suntana Motels. Each unit would have a retractable roof that guests could crank back, and sunbathe in privacy. Another time he told me about a highly confidential formula for an orange drink that would rival Orange Julius. Mostly he sent slogans to ad agencies—by registered mail so no one could steal them—for example, “You Can Bet Your Bottom Dollar on Scott Tissue,” or “If You’re a Chain Smoker, Make Every Link Old Gold.” When his ideas weren’t accepted, he just thought of more.
After I graduated from college with a Phi Beta Kappa key, he worried about my fate as an overeducated woman. He thought a college degree was nice but unnecessary, for either one of us. He once sent me an ad from Variety, his show business bible, that called for women under twenty-four, over five foot seven, with a Phi Beta Kappa key, to dance in a Las Vegas chorus line to be called the Hi Phi Betas. Scrawled across the clipping, he had written in red, “Kid”—which was the way he always addressed me—“this is perfect for you!”
After I went off to India instead, he had another idea. He sent me eight hundred dollars to buy a star sapphire on my return trip through Burma. He would meet me when my boat docked in San Francisco, and sell the stone for a profit that would subsidize our drive back east in style. When I emerged along with three hundred Chinese immigrants from steerage—the cheapest way home—he met me with his jeweler’s loupe. Right away he saw that I’d picked a lopsided star. When I was in college, he had improved on my short-lived engagement ring by dipping it in water made bluish by swishing an indelible pencil, thus making a yellowish diamond look white. Yet this star problem was something he couldn’t fix. He knew he would be lucky to get his money back.
Rolling with the punches, he offered to introduce me to a friend who made aerosol cans and might employ me to sell this new invention on the road. I would get paid for traveling—in my father’s eyes, the best of all worlds. When I didn’t say yes to that either, he said he had enough gas and food money to get us to Las Vegas. I asked worriedly what would happen then, and he said, “Then you’ll be lucky at the one-armed bandits—beginners always are—and you can help me sell jewelry on the road back east.”
In a windowless Las Vegas casino filled with silent gamblers and noisy slot machines, he staked me to a fifty-dollar bucket of coins. After a couple of hours of twirling fruits and no idea what I was doing, I’d multiplied our money by five. Only then did he confess this had been his last fifty dollars. To celebrate, we stuffed ourselves with the food kept cheap to attract gamblers, saw a free show by his tried-and-true method of walking in after it was well under way, and set off on the road again.
Since I’d won only enough money to get us out of Nevada, his next plan was to sell jewelry to small-town stores along the route east. He was sure that if I wore, say, a ring and a pin or a bracelet when we went into a jewelry store, the store owners would assume they were making a killing at the expense of a down-on-our-luck father and daughter. It was the same technique he had used on condescending antique dealers in my childhood. Besides, as my father pointed out, the stores really were getting a bargain. This tactic worked well enough to pay for gas, food, and motels all the way to Washington, D.C., where my mother and sister waited.
Much later, when I saw the father-and-daughter team in Paper Moon, this trip came back in all its precarious optimism. So did my father’s joy at defeating fate. Only then did I realize that we really were a down-on-our-luck father and daughter. He had turned our plight into a game we could win.
—
MY FATHER’S NOMADIC LIFE continued until he was almost sixty-four. “If we’re ever in an accident on a freeway,” he had said to me as a child, “get out and run—the cars are coming too fast to stop.” On a freeway in the urban sprawl of Orange County, California, this was exactly what happened to him. My father’s car was sideswiped with such force that the driver’s door was staved in, he was pinioned beneath the steering wheel, and the car was spun into the oncoming traffic. Unable to move, much less get out and run, he was hit by another car.
From a hospital that was little more than a battle station by the freeway, a doctor left a message for me in New York. My father must have given him my number, knowing that my sister couldn’t leave her young children, my mother couldn’t travel alone, and I was the most logical helper. But I was also my father’s daughter. I was out of the country, traveling, unreachable.
By the time I got home days later, the doctor had reached my sister. She suggested I fly out a week later, when my father would be ready to leave the hospital and would need help in his furnished room.
I think I sensed tha
t I should go right away, yet somehow the accident seemed like a normal part of my father’s life on the road, nothing to be too alarmed about. Also I felt a cold stab of fear that if I went to California, I would become my father’s caretaker, as I had been my mother’s—and never come back to my own life.
A few days before I was to leave, the doctor called my sister to say that our father had taken a turn for the worse due to internal bleeding. I got on the first flight to Los Angeles, but when I changed planes in Chicago, I heard myself being paged. It was my sister. The doctor had called again. There had been a massive internal hemorrhage—our father had died.
When I arrived at that hospital, I found only a manila envelope with my father’s few belongings, and a doctor who seemed barely able to control his anger that no family member had been present. My father had succumbed to gushing traumatic ulcers, he said, more lethal than his crash wounds. I don’t know whether I was listening with a daughter’s ears or hearing a fact, but I thought he was saying that this fatal bleeding had been caused not by the crash itself, but by trauma, stress, despair.
It was something I could never find the courage to tell my sister. It was something I would never forget.
Still, I thought I could get through the hospital procedures without breaking down. And I did—until I held my father’s worn wallet in my hands, its leather shaped to the curve of his body by years in his back pocket as he drove the road. I can feel it still.
My Life on the Road Page 3
