Bridge To Happiness

by Jill Barnett

  Everyday there was something new. He moved the radio by the bed and played the classical station, old standards, musical soundtracks and the Beatles. The eight track tape player in the car had everything from Bach to Bob Dylan, the Smothers Brothers to Hair. One night she awoke to him hovering above her protracted stomach, counting in Spanish.

  About three weeks before Phillip was born, Mike was sound asleep after one Spanish lesson, two Wagner arias, Peter, Paul, and Mary and multiplying the sevens. She was wide awake at two-thirty in the morning, the baby tumbling and kicking her ribs like crazy.

  Since it was partially her husband’s fault she was sleepless, she leaned over and punched him in the arm. “Quick. Mike. Wake up.”

  “What?” He sat up, disoriented. “Is it the baby? Don’t move. I’ll call the doctor.”

  “No. No. It’s not the baby. I want you to get the protractor, honey, and draw an isosceles triangle on my stomach, then later we can go over to the Castro District and I’ll get pi, 3.1416, tattooed right here.”

  Groaning, Mike flopped back on the bed, “Funny. You wake me up for jokes.” He stretched and yawned. “You can’t sleep again, right? What time is it?” He glanced at the clock, turned and faced her. “You laugh at me, Sunshine, but wait and see. This kid’s going to be Nobel Prize material.”

  Months and months later, when their wonderful son Phillip finally spoke something other than baby gibberish (much later than Scott since Scott spoke for him most of the time, a fact that drove Mike crazy) Phillip’s first word was ‘Mama.’

  For two long and wickedly hilarious months he called Mike ‘Mama.’ To March, the only way it would have been even funnier was if the baby had called Mike ‘mamacita.’

  Eventually, from their Nobel prodigy came his second word: “shit.” His first sentence? “You idiot,” which he shouted after March had honked the car horn and waved at a neighbor. Yes, Mike had educated Phillip. Their Pavlovian child had learned from his father that whenever you honked the horn, you had to holler out you idiot!

  Mike had always made his skiboards in his parents’ garage. At March’s insistence, he’d applied for a patent not long after that winter so long ago, when he’d first taken her skiboarding and long before they ever got married. But with marriage and family and work, he hadn’t made a skiboard in too long for him to remember.

  After Phillip was born, Mike went over to his folks place one day to find his dad had put all of his board materials and equipment into the shed because “Son, you have more responsibility now. You aren’t a teenager anymore.”

  No one argued with Don Cantrell, so whenever March asked Mike about his boards, he blew her off with some lie.

  He came home from the job he hated one night, stepping over baby toys into an apartment that smelled like spaghetti sauce and baby powder. He tossed his tie and sport coat on the sofa in the living room and headed for the kitchen.

  March met him with an icy beer in one hand, waving a letter from the Department of Commerce in the other. “We have something to celebrate. The patent came through.”

  He took a sip of the beer, sat down and read the letter with mixed emotions.

  “I have more news. I weaned Phillip early and took a job today.”

  That got his attention. He set down the beer. “Why? I make good money. You don’t need to work.”

  “Yes. I need to work, not only for me. For you, Mike.”

  “You don’t have to work for me. I thought we decided that we didn’t want to farm out the kids.”

  “We don’t have to. I can work from home. Dave Williamson, you remember him from when I was in still at the Art Institute? He called last week. Would you believe he’s with the biggest ad agency on the city? Stone-Morgan and they want me to do some of their graphics. Most of the time, I can work from home, but they have day care onsite—the company’s run by a woman—so when I have to go to the office, it won’t be a problem. The pay is less than you make, but it comes with full benefits and it’s enough for us to get by.”

  She knelt down in front of him and put her hands on his knees. “Quit your job. You hate what you’re doing. I don’t want it sapping all the joy from you. It kills me to see you give up on the skiboards. I know you have, by the way. I can’t get you to talk about them. You’re trying to hide it. What you can’t hide is that giving up your dreams is slowly killing you.”

  “I talked to your mom. She told me your dad packed up all your boards and tools months and months back. You never told me, Mike. You’re supposed to talk to me. You don’t have to protect me.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Dad was right. Chasing after some dream doesn’t make practical sense with the boys.”

  “It makes more sense with the boys. It’s their future. The pregnancies, the marriage and babies, all of it got in the way of what we wanted. The kids are gifts. They are certainly not a reason to turn our lives into our parents’ lives.” She gave a short laugh. “It’s not just you who is changing.” She lowered her voice. “A month ago I actually bought three Butterick patterns.”

  “You? Sew?”

  “Happy-Hands-At-Home March. If I start to play bridge it’s all over for me.”

  He wanted to believe they could shuck everything practical and shoot for the moon. He wanted to work at a job that made him want to set the alarm clock, that made him want to work long hours and take pride in what money he made. But he was a father with two young sons. To chase his dreams felt irresponsible.

  “Look, honey,” March went on. “I believe this letter is a sign. It’s telling us something. Let’s move back to the city. Get a place with space for you to work on your boards. I’ve been thinking all day. Maybe a warehouse or a place where we can live above a shop? It’s only two hours up to the mountains. We can go up to the ski resorts on weekends and you can try to sell your boards. The boys are young now. They’re not in school yet. When they are in school, that’s when we will be tied down.

  “Look. I’d be willing to bet we can get some kind of exhibition meet organized with Rob and his local connections. I can see if we can get support for some kind of race, a special run. Maybe at Northstar? The resort is new. They need publicity. I can get ad sponsors. What if I could get some good sponsors through my new job? This is our time. Our chance.” She took his hands. “This maybe our only chance. Do you really want to look back and think if only?”

  He was acutely aware that his wife knew exactly what to say to him. She knew which buttons to push.

  “We’ll do this together,” she said so easily and confidently. “You can make the boards and I’ll design the graphics for them.”

  Inside he was warring with himself, what he wanted to do with what he should do. What was right, what was wrong. Could it all be so easy?

  “You’re too quiet. You know you want to. Say yes.”

  “I don’t know, Sunshine.”

  “Say yes. What have we got to lose? We don’t own a house. We aren’t tied down financially. If we fail, what’s the worst that can happen? We start over. But at least you’ll have a chance to be happy, even for a while.”

  “Happy with you supporting the family?”

  She stood up so fast, hands on her hips, glaring. “Since when are you Mister Macho-I-Must-Be-the-Breadwinner? Why is this any different than if I were putting you through med school or law school? That’s pretty small-minded of you, Mike. Are you planning on keeping me barefoot and pregnant too?”

  “Not a bad idea. We had a good time making those two.”

  “Both accidents.” She grabbed the letter and waved it under his nose. “Are you, a smart and talented man with honest vision, really going to ignore fate and probably ruin our destiny?”

  “Destiny? Hell, I don’t want to ruin our lives.”

  “You won’t. I’ve always believed in you. Don’t tell me you can’t believe in yourself, too.” She paused and leaned very close to him. “Let’s do it.”

  Of everything that streamed though his head in those few m
oments, the most frightening was her complete and absolute faith in him. This whole thing wasn’t a lark to her. For one brief moment he wondered if he would lose her if he failed, but then thinking that way meant he didn’t have the same strength of faith in her she had in him.

  Maybe because she believed in him he could let go of all of his dad’s hauntingly defeatist phrases. But then self doubt was the worse kind of weakness, worse than anything his father had ever said.

  There it all was: his dream laid out before him, door open—come this way—with all the possibilities flashing through his mind in neon letters. Races. Skiboard runs. Sports shops. Endorsements. TV. The Olympics?

  He almost laughed at that last one and couldn’t even say that improbable pipedream aloud, so he took a drink and lifted the beer in the air. “What the hell. Let’s do it.”

  Chapter Four

  A year after champion board racer Hank Knowles appeared in a national beer commercial on a Cantrell board, and twenty eight months after Sports Illustrated, Good Morning America, and Entertainment and Sports Program Network covered the first National Snowsurfing Championship, March and Mike moved from the first house they owned in the Marina District to a large place on Russian Hill with a hundred and eighty degree view of San Francisco and the bay. Both homes were a huge change from the crumbling, drafty, three-room Eleventh Street apartment over a warehouse, that first place in the City they’d moved back to after Mike had quit his job at Spreckles.

  In that old building, near a knot of San Francisco’s freeway interchanges, was where March chased two small and energetic little boys while her husband worked long hours producing the ski boards he sold in the local mountains on winter weekends.

  One tired and impossible-to-keep-clean-apartment was where both she and Mike took turns cooking dinners in an oven that burned the edges of every casserole they struggled to make, and where they had scraped by on graphics work she did on mornings so early it was still dark out, and during the kids’ nap times.

  As bad as that apartment had been, in retrospect, it was where the Cantrell family really began, and being there brought them all into a time when the boys didn’t need naps, a place where the oven worked perfectly and a job where March oversaw the graphics end of Cantrell Sports, Inc.

  Skiboarding had morphed into snowsurfing, and into snowboarding, a new sport which bred almost simultaneously on both sides of the country—on the West Coast by Mike, and the East Coast by Jake Burton. Both called visionaries, kindred in their love and creation of snowboards, who along with some other enthusiasts from surfing and skateboarding promoted and pushed the sport, met then raced each other at events in Colorado, Vermont, Lake Tahoe and Mt. Baker. The Entertainment and Sports Program Network desperately needed to fill 24 hours a day of air time and began to televise the meets and races on cable TV.

  By the time the Cantrell boys were nine and ten, snowboarding parks were successful at some of the major ski areas and the family move to the Russian Hill came about because of an absurd need for a much larger tax write-off.

  But the truth was: March loved the house from the first moment they walked inside. They were lucky to live in such a romantic, red-blooded city, and certain landmark homes were natural to that terrain. The classic old glorious houses she had driven past so many times began to sneak into her wildest dreams.

  Like some foreshadowing of what was to come, over the years March had felt some odd sense of joy just sitting at the red light and merely looking at that same house. Living there would make life perfect.

  It was a big beauty of a home on a famous corner near the crookedest street in the world, with views that went from foggy bridges and city lights, to glimmering water and all those blue skies. Wrapped in California stucco the color of butter, with a terra cotta tiled roof and dark-timbered doors and window frames, it spoke of the homes on coastal hillsides along the Mediterranean and had once belonged to an infamous Spanish opera singer.

  Shortly after they moved in, March redid the second floor master bedroom in Chinese red, because she’d read enough history of the place to believe the room needed color—passionate color. The night after painting the room red, she and Mike drank a rich bottle of Sonoma County cabernet, listened to Carmen, fed each other fruit and imported cheese and made love three times on a three hundred year old antique silk rug.

  Not long afterward March was sick every morning and sound asleep by seven o’clock every night, signs she knew all too well from her previous two pregnancies. Nine months and three days later, Molly was born, to the instant delight and future dismay of her two older brothers, Scott and Phillip.

  One look at her and Mike had laughed—their own intimate joke—because their daughter had bright red hair. From that day on they always associated her with red, a color of high emotion. More often than not, Molly lived up to that association.

  She came into the family like an earthquake, and shook it up, so different was she from Scott and Phillip. March could gauge her boys and understand when something was wrong, see trouble coming with a mother’s sharp and innately-tuned instinct.

  But unlike the boys, Molly didn’t cling to March even as a toddler. The outside fascinated her. From the sight of her first butterfly to the crowds in Union Square during Christmas, Molly believed the whole wide world was all hers.

  March had come from a family of three women and one lone male, her father, while Molly was born in a family of men, with March the only other woman. Instead of combining feminine forces, they were always at opposite sides, like knights on a jousting field and ready to knock the other one off the horse.

  While March’s strength and control was the fulcrum on which the family pivoted, Molly was the family princess, with an amazing ability to get her way and make everyone circle around her like footmen.

  March and women like her were products of a generation that straddled two feminine cultures, raised to be good girls, like their mothers, yet they ended up rallying for their independence and their individual rights in a society that for all its touting of freedoms and liberties was dismally patriarchal.

  Most women back in the Sixties and Seventies had to have male co-signers for anything financial. Early in their marriage, when March called the credit card company, they wouldn’t talk to her, even though she made most of the income and paid the bills. They had to speak to Mister Cantrell.

  But her daughter Molly was born into a world of men changed by women like March. Almost as if with that first breath of post-feminist air, Molly innately understood how to work inside her world, and it was very different from how March’s world worked.

  Mother and daughter could look out the same window at completely different scenes. Mothering Molly was like some kind of grand game of Where’s Waldo. There was an undeniable sense of irony in that March had wanted a daughter so badly, only to give birth to a diva instead.

  Beatrice’s only answer was, “You were a difficult child. She takes after you, dear. Your father and I always felt your name was perfect. March, in like a lion.”

  “Daddy said that all the time. Funny I don’t feel like a lion.” March was exhausted. “Molly and I are polar opposites. My daughter is nothing like me.”

  “She will be,” was all her mother had said.

  Mike set her straight her in terms more clear, the way men could see the world in black and white while when women saw nothing but a confusing mass of passionate colors. “You are and always have been an independent woman and never afraid to tell the world what you think. Look, you’re a strong woman with strong emotions. Why on earth would you want a daughter who is any less?”

  March was quiet for a long time, knowing he was right. “Because my life would be easier if she were a little more malleable.”

  “And our marriage might have been calmer if you had been that way.”

  She punched him in the arm. “You know you love to argue with me. Makes your life colorful and interesting.”

  “So look at it this way, Sunshine. Our li
ttle red Molly is the color in your day. She will never bore you. I was reading on the plane, a book about how we parents make the mistake of looking for pieces of ourselves in our kids. The psychologist said it’s natural, narcissistic and necessary, that we think if we can catch a glimpse of ourselves in our kids then perhaps we will understand how their minds work. But it’s a scientific fact that traits skip generations. So in the same way our own parents didn’t have a clue about us, neither do we about our own kids.”

  “God cannot possibly be so cruel.” March sank down into a club chair, hugging its pillow to her chest. “And Mother Nature wouldn’t do that to another woman.”

  “Women are toughest on other women. You’ve said that yourself. Motherhood is an emotional extreme for a woman--”

  At that moment she wanted to zip his mouth shut. He was a man who couldn’t pick up his shoes, shirt, or tie, who regularly lost the remote control but like magic could always find her car keys, and he was suddenly quoting some new self-help book about the differences between women and men and telling her about motherhood? If only one of their babies had been born through his penis.

  “--Manhood and womanhood are forced on us by chromosomal serendipity, but we actually choose to be parents. Fascinating stuff. Our choices become some of our biggest mistakes and the hardest to live down. Basically, the point this doctor made was: we can never live down our kids.” Mike took off his tie and hung it on the closet’s doorknob—the tie rack was a foot from his nose—then he kicked his shoes off near the bed and walked away from them.

  If she didn’t pick them up, she would trip on them in the middle of the night on her way to the bathroom.

  He pitched his shirt across the dressing room and missed the laundry basket, then faced her, hands on his belt.

  “Mike?”

  “What?” His belt buckle banged the door as he hung it from the bathroom doorknob.

  “You really have to start reading fiction.” And she threw the pillow at him.