by Laurie Fox
At the age of thirteen, I was wholly taken with the idea of mermaids and even gave some thought to joining their ranks. A pipe dream, yes, but as the whole island was one massive pipe dream, why not?
I met my first siren while hiking on the coastal cliffs one gray, draggy afternoon. (The islanders’ mood was regularly projected onto the canvas of the sky.) The sea creature had the dreamy look of a young Elizabeth Taylor—snow-white complexion, plump lips set in a closed smile, ropes of sable-colored hair pasted to her bosom, eyes like chocolate kisses. Needless to say, she set my heart aflutter. Coiled around a missile-shaped rock that broke rather violently through the waves and ended in a single spire, she spotted me, arched one brow, and simply uttered “Oi.” I couldn’t tell if this was a mermaidian gurgle, a Cockney hello, or a Yiddish lament. “Oy!” I shouted in return. To this she let out a shriek, slapped her muscular tail so hard it created a wave of its own, and sank back into the indigo water.
I sat down on the cliff and waited for what felt like an hour before the water parted again. Just when I questioned the integrity of my vision, up shot the raven-tressed girl. She was in the company of two other sea creatures: a flat-chested waif with blond, Twiggy-short hair and a voluptuous, brown-skinned siren whose spiral locks were woven into what we now call cornrows, dozens of them, tied at the ends with wisps of seaweed. I stared openly at her breasts. My eyes then traveled nervously from one mermaid to another—studying, gawking, ogling. I was so taken with the sirens that I forgot to compare myself unfavorably to them! So transfixed was I, the impulse to lower myself into the water became all-powerful and, after negotiating the steep path, I slipped into the opaque liquid to join them.
Dog-paddling over to the fish-women, my unsexy nightgown stuck to my skin like an unwanted shadow and my ponytail shook loose until the sopping strands plastered themselves to the little buds that were my breasts, not unlike the tresses on the dusky-haired beauty! I was swimming among the mermaids now, splashing and blowing bubbles and feeling somewhat overheated, despite the gelid water. I wasn’t certain whether I’d been accepted into their sorority or if they were merely tolerating me, but as far as initiations go, I couldn’t imagine one more sensuous—or troubling. For immediately after the mermaids convinced me of their friendship, they deserted me to toy with a sailor. He’d drifted into the lagoon in a sad, leaky boat, sloshed in more ways than one and unaware that his actions would lead to an erotic dead-end. No sooner had he jumped from the boat than the women surrounded him and began cooing ooka-ooka, ooka-ooka. In concert they nipped at his flushed cheeks and pawed at his wind-cracked mouth. I couldn’t see what was transpiring underwater, though his sighs suggested a few epiphanies were in progress. Each time I descended into the murk, I could make out only a tangle of shadows.
Now ribbons of torn clothing floated desultorily to the surface. Two knee-high boots bobbed aimlessly on my left. Finally, it seems, the fellow had had enough, for his lusty laughter dissipated into grunts of exhaustion and only the smallest hint of pleasure remained on his lips. Frankly, his despair was palpable.
I decided against intervening—at the time I had little experience in the ways of men and women, let alone men and mermaids. Instead I offered a meek hello. Assuming I was another sea creature come to sample him, the sailor swam to his boat like a man pursued by the Devil. When I turned back ’round, the three mermaids were gone, foamy swells and pearly clusters of bubbles sputtering in their wake.
SO what did I learn from all this? That women are bad, or mad? That sensuousness hurts others? God, no. I learned that women tend to overwhelm men; men simply can’t handle our presence, it is that rich. I learned that we should stand back a few feet to let men breathe. Of course we can’t. It is our nature to be close, to dig in, to nestle in the arms of another. We crave and deserve nearness, contact. “Touch me and I’m yours,” we say. “I give myself to you.” And this is a good thing. It is a good thing to devote ourselves so fully, a spiritual thing if you will. Too bad it comes off as clingy. Too bad it makes monsters out of us.
It would be years before my daughter bothered her pretty head about the conduct of women and men; fourteen years, in fact, before I had the temerity to utter Peter’s name in her company. One could say I was afraid of my own shadow, to lose the one thing that had roused me from my long-held dream: a person who really needed me. Berry ushered in an era of glorious selflessness, a reprieve from my preoccupation with abandonment, a chance to pay attention to worldly matters. She was better than any story I could have made up. Freeman, too, adored her, though there was a lot of white noise in his head for his daughter to compete with.
In the beginning, the Darling-Ullmans were a comic, motley crew: a father with no life experience to speak of, a mother with little experience outside her books and delusions, and a prescient child who had her whole life spread out in front of her like a magic carpet.
It took all of ten minutes to discover that Berry was unlike the other Darlings. After she wriggled out of me in record slow time—Mummy cheering me on with “You’ll kill the munchkin with indecision if you don’t push harder!”—Berry didn’t make a peep. The whole scene at the hospital was downright eerie. Even as the doctor patted her on the behind, Berry remained mum. It was only when he tripped over his own valise and took a spill that Berry acknowledged our presence. She volunteered a gummy grin and let go with an almost depraved chuckle. “Nice kid,” the doctor said before he limped off to attend to a badly skinned knee.
Berry turned out to be a regular tomboy. The least dreamy of all the Darlings, she was action personified, forever tree-climbing, roof-climbing, pinning down horrid little boys on the grass. And did I mention the mouth on that child? I don’t know where Berry picked up the words she knew.
She was stocky with small, defined muscles and had a habit of swaggering down the street like a bantamweight boxer. Unlike the rest of us, she didn’t freckle: she wasn’t cursed with our chalky, quick-to-burn complexion. Neither were her locks strawberry-blonde, straw-blonde, or claret—there was not a hint of red in her hair. On the contrary, Berry came into this world with creamy olive skin and a dense, chestnut mane; she appeared somber instead of lighthearted, Gothic instead of lyrical. Her emotions flickered not on the surface, but burned deep in a well. We were surprised by her severity—surprised is not the word, we were grateful. Our daughter was a wake-up call, her tough-guy stance a breath of fresh air, her moodiness just the tonic for our fantasy-centered lives.
Berry wasted no time in establishing her turf. By the time she’d turned one, she was in the throes of the “terrible twos,” scratching and biting like a feral cat, and yet conversant in the alphabet and the names of animals. At two, she could write her own name, to which she added teeth and whiskers. She “mellowed” at the age of three, at once dropping the fierce feline act and adopting the persona of a skittish mouse. We let her play this out until she tired of eating cheese and scurrying through holes in the cardboard wall we erected for her.
In late Fall of that year, Berry began crossing the street to Tilden Park, where she quickly learned about snakes and newts and salamanders. She also learned that acting human could be interesting, even lucrative. We showered her with stuffed animals and gave her a tour of the Oakland Zoo, where she could see firsthand how animals were treated by humans. When Berry was four, we finagled our way into a private showing of Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and exposed her to those “benevolent” fairies Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather (though I was a bit anxious about perpetuating certain falsehoods about “imaginary creatures”). We even took her on her first airplane ride—in a Learjet with Daddy at the helm—to give her a sense of the Big Picture.
By the age of five, Berry had logged a lifetime’s worth of sensory experience: she loved rolling in the earth, covering every brown inch of her skin in soil. A born guttersnipe, she pocketed stones and shiny trash that she found curbside, displaying her finds triumphantly each evening at the dinner table. She ate flowers. She p
erked up at the sound of horns and sirens (no doubt a product of her father’s aural fixation), and was elated on the most miserable, wet days when the hills were socked in with gloom. She considered moths and aphids her “pets” and had an inexplicable fondness for bees, which she stuffed live in her overall pockets and then forgot for a spell. Later in the day, she would fumble in her pockets for a tissue and end up getting stung. But she never complained: the pain was her reward for forgetting, she said.
Yes, Berry was an odd girl. But oddness was practically encouraged in mid-eighties Berkeley, and my daughter soon fell in with a formidable clique of oddball children. Many of the kids were older than she and wilder. Many of them had tried pot or had been subjected to therapy before they could read. Some of them wore dreadlocks; others swore like pirates. A few were pesky thieves and none seemed happy; at least I rarely saw them smile. But Berry found their darkness comforting and I couldn’t blame her: by the time she started school, her father’s music had gone “loony tunes” (à la Spike Jones), and her mother’s fairy stories had become treacly, frivolous affairs. Berry turned out to be the rare child who eschewed sugar on her bran flakes and wrinkled her nose at chocolate bars. In her opinion, sucking on lemons was “rilly cool” and pickles were the finest dish on the menu. She even rooted for the villains in cartoons. (A Cruella DeVille poster became a staple on her bedroom wall, which was painted a beastly shade of green.) As much as I had wanted a normal life for my daughter, I had to admit that Berry would never make prom queen or even first runner-up. She was destined for graver things.
LOOKING back on our early years as a family, it was Berry, not me, who abetted Freeman in his quest to come up with sounds. Freeman and his young collaborator used Saturday mornings as a kind of mad-scientist laboratory, setting up shop in front of the television with a collection of high-end electronic gear. Together they embarked on a weekly ritual of making a ridiculous amount of noise. First, Berry would spin the TV dial until she landed on a cartoon series that the six-year-old didn’t find “dumb.” Then she’d cry, “U-ree-ka, I found it!” To this, Freeman would perform a “hallelujah” jig in front of the TV screen until Berry called “Places,” an announcement to which Freeman would respond by racing to his equipment and Berry to the remote control, where she’d lower the volume until you could barely make out the cartoon voices and background music. Then the two would settle in for hours, creating sound effects for a rich assortment of humans, aliens, and beasts; animate and inanimate objects; actions, gestures, movements; meteorological and geological events; explosions and implosions. I was impressed. Freeman had a real gift for coming up with the appropriate clangs and plops and gassy projectile sounds, which Berry would embroider with her kiddie hiccups, raspberries, and oogaoogas. The sound he conceived to accompany the Roadrunner as he raced off cliffs (only to flatten into a pancake on the hard earth) was unparalleled to my ears.
Devoted to pushing the envelope until it could hardly bear more pressure, Freeman began to spend more time refining his cartoon sounds than writing “serious” music. (After seven years of living with me he’d given up completely on looking for work, claiming that his skills were “too specialized for the market.” Besides, the Ullmans wouldn’t let their son starve—though they weren’t as sanguine about Berry and me, whom, they felt, siphoned off energy from his genius.)
Like most geniuses, Freeman insisted on one hundred percent innovation, generating sounds that were “profoundly new.” With his Mellotron and Moog synthesizer and a medley of effects pedals, he was able to produce the coolest space-alien bleeps and the most stirring elephant stampedes. Over the months, he began to record his sound effects for what he christened the Ullman Library of Din, and the tapes quickly became fodder for musician gatherings around Berkeley. At one particularly lifeless party where the guests listened sleepily to Esquivel records, Freeman produced a tape he’d made to accompany an old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon. Not only did it energize the party, it motivated a shaggy, bearded guy from Fantasy Studios to approach him on the couch to talk shop. When Freeman left the party, circa 2 A.M., he was drunk on praise and a couple of beers, and the lightheaded recipient of an honest-to-god job as a sound engineer.
WHILE her father was in the studio he had created in the garage, wrestling with his first assignment (he had only the weekend to come up with credible sounds for a robot spider on a children’s record), Berry sat at her usual post in front of the TV watching the parade of Saturday morning cartoons. I disapproved, but I was working.
Berry ran into the kitchen, where I was agonizing over a story about two weasels who attend charm school. “Mu-Mu,” she cried, “listen!” She opened her mauve O of a mouth and out came a torrent of madcap characters: a haughty British queen, a big-hearted Brooklyn gangster, an adenoidal astronaut.
“My,” I said, utterly floored.
Once again she ran through a repertoire of voices. Her lisping bunnies and smart-ass parrots were spookily on target, her arch-villains downright scary.
“Go show Daddy,” I urged. But Berry remained willfully in place, fingering her swarm of curls. “Honey,” I assured her with a pat on the head, “your father needs to hear this.”
She gave me a hangdog look, so I scooted her, both hands nudging that diminutive tush, into the garage. We found Freeman at his mixing board enmeshed in a snarl of patch cables, tapping his bare feet and whistling a grating rendition of “The Love Boat.”
“Go on,” I coaxed her.
Berry took two steps forward, swinging her ropy arms at her sides. “D-Daddy,” she stammered. But her father barely lifted his head, which was encased in top-of-the-line Sennheiser headphones. After five minutes of quiet observation, Berry mounted a Bose speaker, then scaled her way up Freeman’s back. She pried off the headphones and hollered “Boo!” into his right ear.
Now she tried out her best stuff on him: a husky-voiced femme fatale; a pip-squeak weight lifter. Anything to get a rise. Freeman listened to his daughter with glassy, faraway eyes. At one point he smiled and nodded before being consumed by what could only be his own inner music. This served to increase Berry’s volume—the more she was ignored the more proficient she became, trotting out chatty cows, caustic crows, wily wolves. And for her pièce de résistance, she aped the president, Ronald Reagan.
After this showstopping performance, Freeman pried Berry off his back as if to say “your time’s up.” Then, without warning, he scooped her up in his arms and gave her a whirl. “That’s my girl!” he sang before setting her down on an amplifier as though she were a cup of coffee, and returning to his mixer. “Now tell me,” he instructed, “what do ya think of this cool spider sound.”
“S-spiders don’t make s-sounds,” Berry replied. Hopping off the amp, she sprinted through the garage and back into the house, a rattlesnake hiss sputtering from her lips. Freeman glanced up at me, standing erect at the door.
“Spiders don’t make sounds,” I said, echoing my daughter, and returned to work on my weasels.
* *
UNLIKE a lot of girls her age, Berry got her rebellious rocks off. She had come into this world with a surplus of aggression that didn’t sit well with society’s notion of sweet young things. I was certain that this negativity hadn’t come from me and wondered if Mummy’s unresolved feelings for Daddy—or her own mother—had skipped a generation. Fortunately, my daughter’s uncanny ability to moo and howl and squawk and bleat, all in the name of creating a character, allowed her to let out a great deal of hostility without hurting anyone, including herself. Thus, she ended up being the first Darling to enter adolescence without leaving a host of mental health professionals in her wake.
Throughout the run of her childhood Berry was never demonstrably happy, but she didn’t seem to be looking for good times. Freeman and I took her grimness as a reflection of our leftist politics and wore her creativity as a badge for our postmodern parenting. We were especially fond of Berry’s need to personally break the sound barrier.
/> The night she turned eleven, the neighbors reported Berry to the police—she was hollering “Killers!” at the top of her lungs, straddling the side fence and laying into it with her cowboy boots. She seemed to be screaming at no one—I hoped it wasn’t us.
I ran outside to check on her; the howling had become cadenced and strangely musical. Her concentration thrown off, Berry stopped mid-scream and blinked at me. “Howdy,” she said hoarsely.
“Berry, what’s wrong?” I asked.
“Name’s not Berry,” she said.
“All right,” I allowed.
“The name’s Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds.”
“Okay, Miss Destroyer. What’s this all about?”
“We saw a movie in school today,” Berry reported. “About that nuclear bomb guy.”
“Bomb guy? You mean, J. Robert Oppenheimer?”
“Exactomundo!” she cried, getting worked up again. “Oppenheimer the Terminator. You see, when they tested his bomb and he realized all this shit was gonna rain down on innocent people—he said, actually said, Now I am become Shiva. See, he knew he was a murderer.”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded thoughtfully, as if I understood anything about the mind-set of preteen girls. “And how did that make you feel?” I asked therapeutically.
“What?” she barked.
“And that made you feel all what?” I repeated softly.
“Mu-Mu.” She paused dramatically. “Sometimes you have too much energy.”
“Me? You mean me?”
“I mean people. People explode. People have explosives inside them. Like dynamite and plutonium. So much of this stuff, they need to kill something. But they don’t. But they still feel guilty about wanting to. They feel ashamed, like murderers.” She tucked her head into the crook of her elbow and let her forearm hang loosely.
