by Laurie Fox
“Okay, okay, okay. I get it. It’s jealousy time. You’re jealous of my music.” He began pacing perfect circles on the pier, always resorting to geometry when things got heavy.
“No, I’m jealous of your childhood. Can I have it? I mean, could you just give it to me for Christmas?”
Freeman stopped in his tracks and squinted at the water. I detected a smile inside the squint. “You think my life was a breeze? That I’m a shoo-in for Best Childhood by a Child Prodigy?”
“Yep, I do,” I said with a confidence only the clueless can afford.
Freeman knelt at my side, still refusing to look me in the eye. “Well, you pinned the tail on the donkey: my childhood was pretty darn near perfect. My mother, Eleanora Duse Ullman, was so beautiful she dazzled me into thinking I could be another Mozart if I wanted it badly enough. My sister, Babette, was already a virtuoso on the violin by age seven. My father—Dr. Max Ullman, Polymath—wholly expected his son to follow him on the polymathic path to freedom. Let’s just say I was a major disappointment to my father by the age of ten. He was always out of town, being brilliant full time. Listen, if you want to be jealous, be jealous of something simple. Nobody, not even me, gets out of childhood without putting up with brain-fucking complexity.”
I nodded numbly in the direction of San Francisco. It was true: Freeman was gifted with a mother who’d been mesmerized by his boyishness; a woman who’d responded to his cleverness and humor with the kind of affection reserved for babies. In turn, he’d suffered an emotionally distant father who was also geographically beyond reach (those Ullmans were nothing if not peripatetic). So with a windfall of devotion from one parent, and a dearth of discipline from the other, Freeman had no reason to do anything other than what he wanted. What he wanted to do was get lost in a world of sound.
I sidled up to my boyfriend and nuzzled his cheek. “You’re right, Man. I just feel so alone with my own story sometimes.”
“So why don’t you tell it? Write about people instead of forest creatures.”
“I’m hardly ready for that. I can’t even smell things, let alone write about real stuff, especially the past. Those Darlings, the ones who have spilled their beans, have paid dearly for the spilling. I’m talking isolation, shock therapy.”
“More cryptic allusions. Help me, Wends. Help me understand just five percent.” He selected an empty Coke bottle from the rubble on the ground, and cast it out to sea. “Wow. Listen to that plink.”
But I was too far away in my thoughts to hear a bottle skirt the waves. An aristocratic gentleman sporting a topcoat, a tweedy three-piece suit, and a ridiculous, Dali-like mustache was sizing me up, running his hand down my calf as if I were a beast of burden. “Good God!” he cried, nodding and smiling crudely. “We’ve a strong girl here. A girl who could serve a higher purpose. My purpose.” Then he smacked his lips, drawing his tongue back and forth over a voluptuous lower lip until it glistened in the moonlight. Moonlight?
I drew a sharp breath. The man brushed my cheek with a cold, metal protuberance fastened to his French cuff. No! I tried to scream, but no sound formed in my mouth. He flashed a snaggletoothed grin and, with his palm, forced my jaw to meet his. Though the warts on his nose were massive and his acne scars unkind, he obviously fancied himself a handsome chap. With a jerk, he let go of my head and began swaying to and fro, rocking to some internal melody. I spotted a neat, oily braid tucked inside the collar of his topcoat. Cheap cologne assaulted me.
“I know you,” I said quietly.
“Of course you do,” he assured me. “All girls know me.” He paused, as if to consider the magnitude of his claim.
“Go away,” I pleaded.
“Re-al-ly?” he said with obvious pleasure.
“Yes, really.”
“Oh, darlin’, I can’t. I really can’t.” The man removed a handkerchief from his coat pocket and dabbed at the saliva on his bottom lip. I noticed the cloth, initialed J. H., was practically drenched. “But I can serenade a pretty girl. That I can do.” He cleared his throat of a surfeit of mucus, then recited a vulgar sailor ditty:
A pirate’s got to ply his trade
By stealing all the things God’s made.
When stealing doesn’t do the trick,
Use a stick or gun, a knife, a prick!
Then he forced a laugh—a maniacal, cartoon laugh as startling as his steely touch. I withdrew from the menacing hook, which was ingeniously attached to his wrist.
I MUST have passed out on the pier, because Freeman was shaking me awake, his voice thundering in my ear: “Wendy, come back! Follow the sound of my voice: Ahh-ohh-ahh . . .”
I looked into the bugged-out eyes of my boyfriend, the adrenaline of the moment before still pumping through me. I took a couple of deep breaths and, lo and behold, could smell all manner of things: salt, fish, the hot chocolate on his breath.
As relieved as I was to regain my sense of smell, I was nonetheless terrified to the bone: the past was quickly intruding on the present—whether or not I wrote about it. And whether or not I had the courage, I would have to confide in Freeman. I prayed he wouldn’t turn my little melodrama into a comic opera, or worse, another Broadway musical. I had always preferred the anonymity of my illusions. But what’s private only feels manageable. Soon I would follow my Great-Nana’s lead—spill my beans and suffer the consequences.
PART
TWO
Children do not give up their innate imagination,
curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them
to get them to do that.
—R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience
VI
THOSE who say the present is informed by the past are being kind, being courteous. The present is routinely blown up by the past, again and again, as if by pirates, whereas the past never shatters—it’s steadfast, fixed in memory like the brightly colored pages of a beloved children’s book. The words, the pictures never fail you. Unlike real life. Real life pales in comparison with the past. It’s flatter, grayer, disturbingly dim. We could do without it altogether if we believed in something bigger. If we truly believed.
Nana always said that real imagination requires patience with a world that pushes it aside. For the world does not wait for anyone: it plunges headfirst into the reality most of us call misery. To counter this, she said, we must wade courageously in a different direction, towards what most people call fantasy. What I now prefer to call faith. For if you can look at frosted corn flakes and see fairy dust; if you can find beautiful pictures in a breast cancer scar; if, by glancing at it cockeyed, you can transform a hovel into a home, you begin to see how believing is really a kind of seeing. Why would we want to believe, otherwise?
* *
WHEN Freeman related my little incident at the pier to Mummy, he abandoned any nuanced detail in favor of the graphic and sensational. “Listen, Mae,” he said on the phone, “Wendy’s off the hook. She’s gone.” I took this as a criticism, but was really too dazed to protest.
Mummy raced over to our apartment in her Ford Galaxie 500. Not bothering to knock, she blew through the door like a funnel cloud. Perhaps it was her cacophony of scarves and the flowing bell-sleeves of her djellaba that made me think of weather. Or the hot air that all worried mothers expel.
“Wendy, darling, it’s your mumsters! I am here to save you from yourself!”
Frantic, Mother whirled about the futon, on which I was laid out like a casualty. Then she produced, prestidigitously, a hot-water bottle from her backpack. It was still burning to the touch as she placed it on my forehead. For what purpose, I cannot be sure; I mean, my forehead was not the problem.
“My poor, beleaguered puss.” She bent over to give me the sort of insinuating kiss reserved for girls who have outgrown their mothers, and I turned my face away. “So, we’re a bit green about the gills? Well, I’ve got some Chinese herbs that are brilliant. Voilà.” From a rumpled paper sack, she poured a mound of stinky roots and leaves into he
r palm. “Delicious,” she confirmed, sniffing at the aromatic twigs.
I winced at the faint penciled writing on the sack. “Mummy,” I croaked, “that stuff’s for rising wind. You know, gas.”
“You brought her medicine for farting?” Freeman said. “Jesus, Mae. Can’t you concentrate for once on Wendy’s issues? Rising wind is your thing, I believe.”
Mother gave him the evil eye, a scolding more Snidely Whiplash than Mr. Hyde. “Freeman, dear, would you please catch up? Wendy requires the most enlightened remedies available. And anything that becalms the stomach also becalms the mind. The stomach is our way in.”
“I prefer to focus on the mind,” he said. “I prefer that Wendy see someone who actually has initials after her name. Not one of your witch doctors. Someone whose wisdom isn’t written in Sanskrit or pictograms. You know, someone who can talk theory and prescribe. A little Valium wouldn’t kill her.”
“Valium schmallium. Wendy’s not going to take something so common. Her problems are special and so should her drugs be.” She repositioned her own photograph on the library table. “This really should be framed,” she said.
Noting the lack of furniture in our apartment, Mother reclined on the hardwood floor as if on a chaise lounge, and took a moment to adjust her frenzy of scarves. From a deep pocket she removed two dainty, silver bells, courtesy of Gump’s department store, then closed her heavily mascaraed eyes and hummed. There she sat, my little Buddhist/Wiccan mother, droning on with the best prayer bells money can buy.
In Perry Mason–like deliberation, Freeman crossed over to Mother and kneeled beside her chanting, swaying body. He clapped his hands twice, disrupting her showy communion with the spirits. But Mother hardly blinked; apparently she’d lapsed into a deeply meditative state.
“Christ, Ullman,” she eventually moaned. “Have you no respect for the weird?”
“None whatsoever,” he answered, then made a grab for the bells. He proceeded to ring them offensively, like a village idiot.
All too quickly Freeman was absorbed in the bells’ sweet tinkling. Inspired, he tossed a bell down Mummy’s back and she howled. As her laughter fed on itself, I heard its echo of desperation, perhaps the feeling that she’d failed me.
“Earth to Mummy, Earth to Freeman! Hel-looo!” I waved. Their eyes wandered leisurely over to me on my pillowed throne, as if acknowledging someone faintly familiar. I threw up my arms: “C’est moi, the lunatic.”
“Hush, darling. Don’t talk that talk.” Mother held a fertility-ringed finger to her lips, at once the kind kindergarten teacher. I may have spotted a tear making its way down her cheek, but with Mummy you could never be sure. Her moods turned on a very unstable dime.
Dashing over to me now, as if some new emergency had just availed itself, she ordered Freeman to plug in a heating pad she’d stuffed into her well-stocked backpack. Then, with genuine feeling, she fluffed my bangs and petted my brow, which mainly served to knock the water bottle off my forehead. “Who’s my girl?” she sang out for the world to hear, then whispered furtively: “Have you told him yet?”
“Just now,” I said weakly, “in the broadest strokes.”
“Oh shit,” Mummy said. “Then don’t expect him to be psychic. He’s a good man, but remember: he only believes in three dimensions.”
“Yeah, Bartok, Boulez, and the Bee Gees.”
“Now don’t underestimate the composer. He will get it in time.”
“Well, why don’t you start the conversation?” I challenged her. “Why don’t you get him up to speed?”
“You know it’s not my place to say anything,” she said. “I may be an interfering bitch, but I know how these scenes must be played.”
“Hey, kids, I don’t wish to spoil the party,” Freeman said, joining us on the futon, “but we really need to find someone Wendy can talk to. I know she saw everyone in town when she was a teenybopper, but surely there’s some new guru around. Someone who specializes in ...”
“In?” I said mournfully.
“In advising beautiful young women who, uh, live with talented composers and hallucinate.”
“Brilliant save,” I said.
“Well,” Mother smacked her lips, “there’s this supposedly phenomenal Marxist psychologist, a Dr. Milton Pease, whom my rolfer recommends. Did I mention how brilliant he is? Furthermore, he’s a stand-up comic! Wendy, doesn’t that sound perfectly yin-yangy?”
I wheezed like a beached whale.
“So the question is, sweetie, would you consider seeing another doctor in a long line of nutters?”
“Sure,” I said foggily. “The comedian angle might come in handy when I tell him some whoppers.”
“Don’t make fun,” Mother said.
“Yeah, I’ll see the guy.”
“Good girl,” Mummy cooed and pinched my cheek. “I’ll ring him up tomorrow. And now for some tea,” she announced with false good cheer. “Freeman, would you mind brewing some of this?” She foraged in her backpack for a wax-paper packet of more stalks and leaves, and tossed it with a pained look to Freeman. He caught the packet and returned the look, which to my mind read “hopeless,” like a last-ditch prayer.
I AGREED to see the Marxist-comic shrink—two times a week for six weeks—on his economical trial plan. Disappointingly, though, Dr. Pease approached my personal history with a complete lack of humor. During our first meeting he accused me of being an “ersatz Scheherazade.” I blanched at this but was secretly flattered. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be compared to history’s greatest spin doctor!
Pease’s office was offbeat, bordering on slovenly. The moldy walls were hung with a couple of amateur seascapes and a “Free Albania!” poster; the place stank of old socks and gym shoes. Displayed among the textbooks on dust-coated shelves were props that appeared to be rejects from a Gallagher act: a giant blowup banana, a meat grinder with fake sausages hanging out its mouth, jelly jars of confetti, a tired rubber chicken.
Though the setting had dramatic potential, our communication, it turned out, was a flop. During my testimony Pease often appeared restless or sleepy; he was periodically dismissive. His long beatnik face grew creases as I spoke, and his ungroomed Jewish Afro scared me.
It didn’t take much time before a few of the comic props—Harpo Marx horn, shaving-cream pie, seltzer bottles for spritzing—proved more entertaining than the doctor himself, and I took to toying with these whenever Pease appeared either bored or excessively serious. Over the weeks, he turned downright morbid, his eyes watering at the wrong parts of my story and using inappropriate language: “You really put a nail in the coffin with that anecdote” and “You’re depressing me, dear.” When I finally complained to Mother about the doctor’s ill-timed gravitas, she did some checking around. From her druggist, a gossip of the worst sort, Mother learned that Pease’s career as a comic was presently in the toilet. It turns out that, during the wrap-up of a painfully unfunny night at the Comedy Store in Hollywood, the good doctor had punctuated a weak joke by taking out his penis. No one in the audience had been the slightest bit amused—the LAPD especially lacked a sense for the absurd—and Pease had spent the night in lockup entertaining the other fuckups.
So this was the person in charge of my psychic health? The finest the Bay Area had to offer? I wondered whether Mother had an opinion; she usually had three. But she just pooh-poohed the penis rumor, chalking it up to envy.
“Not penis envy?” I groaned.
“No, professional envy. Other shrinks do half the business Pease does. He’s that good. Supposedly.”
I committed to finishing the program; Mummy had such high hopes and it would get her off my back. Ironically, the only progress I made was of the comedic sort. As Pease slid deeper into the jaws of despair, I sharpened my storytelling chops. The forest creatures of my fables began to lighten up, find the laughter inside the tears, even throw off their legendary bitterness. With tales of their newly droll exploits I entertained the doctor as best I could, as he s
ank further into an unprofessional funk. Every once in a while, he manifested a tortured grimace, which I took for a smile, a vote of confidence in my work. This made me feel all warm and fuzzy, if only for a second. My private thoughts were still haunted by the image of the snaggletoothed, one-handed gentleman; his visitation was not something I could easily laugh off. Was he a figment of my past or a harbinger of my future? He had wanted me to join him. But where? How? When?
During our final weeks together, Pease managed to rally his emotions and sense of duty, and he delivered the psychological goods. In two dimly illuminating sessions, he tried heroically to teach me that “fantasy can’t add up to anything solid.” With very little time left on the clock, he labored like a hostage negotiator in an effort to make me understand just how flimsy and untrustworthy my illusions were, assuring me that “il-lusion only results in delusion.” Like that’s a bad thing. After a battery of bizarre tests (“Fill in the blank: The Vietnam War was an atrocious—” “Atrocity?” I answered), Pease arrived at an underwhelming diagnosis: “Wendy, all this Neverland talk suggests you are a profoundly gifted and enterprising woman. But—and here’s the thing—you also have a distinct tendency to avoid responsibility.”
He looked away from me then, as if ashamed of his own lack of faith, and I gifted him with the flicker of a smile.
At the conclusion of the trial plan, Pease telephoned Mother and Freeman. He made a big deal about their participation in my cure and demanded that we convene as a foursome. Within twenty-four hours, we congregated on a rustic bench at the Berkeley Rose Garden, a spectacular terraced amphitheater designed by the Works Progress Administration. Unfortunately, the day was such a knockout, the four of us could hardly focus on what we had come to discuss. The sky was that woozy Technicolor blue most people find irresistible, and the roses, which through most of the Spring had been shy and reticent on account of the drought, were now strutting their florid stuff.
