My forays into Oma’s world changed. I was working in the summers now. The summer I sold men’s bathing suits, I ate lunch alone in a dark bar and played the numbers for a quarter every week, right there in the underworld. I no longer went to the Lake with Amy. But for a few spring vacations after our grandfather died, Amy and I visited Oma and Mary in their apartment in Pompano Beach, Florida.
On my last visit, I was fifteen. Everything I was required to do, such as sit at a table with other people, either bored me to fury or infuriated me to a kind of benumbed lethargy. I was finding it difficult to live—finished with everything I knew and ignorant of anything else. I woke every morning full of hope, and was livid with rage before breakfast, at one thing or another.
Oma and I argued that year, over a word. Because something I was talking about seemed to require it, Oma said the word for padded, upholstered furniture was “overstuffed.” I wouldn’t hear of it, having never heard of it. “It’s not overstuffed; it’s stuffed just right.” Oma pointed out that it was just barely possible that she knew something on earth that I didn’t. I couldn’t quite believe her.
In Oma’s Pompano Beach apartment, I lounged on the bright print bamboo furniture and looked at the Asian objects she had been collecting all her life: gaudy Chinese cloisonné lamps, lacquered chests, sentimental Japanese porcelain figurines—women in whiteface with cocked heads and pink circles on their cheeks—gold, bossed mirrors, foot-long yellow ashtrays shaped like carp, and a pair of green ceramic long-tailed birds, which took up the breakfast table. It was years before I learned that Asian art was supposed to be delicate.
In Florida, Mary Burinda drove the machine. Oma rode in the front seat; Amy and I sat in back. That year, Oma’s current, roseate Cadillac had an extra row of upholstered seats, which folded against the front seat’s back—like, but not very like, the extra seats in a cab. An especially long distance stretched between the front seat and the back.
One day, we were driving back from Miami; Oma had been “looking at shoes.” (Oma had announced at breakfast, “Today I want to look at shoes,” and I repeated the phrase to myself all morning, marveling, to learn what it might feel like to want to look at shoes.)
Without provocation, she broke down, grieving for our grandfather. She rubbed her round face in her hands. Mary, at the wheel, expostulated, shocked, “Missus Doak. Oh, Missus Doak.” She added, “That was two years ago, Missus Doak.” This occasioned a fresh outburst, which broke our hearts. I saw Oma’s red hair and her lowered head wipe back and forth.
Then she rallied and began defensively, “But you know, he was never cross with me.”
“Never once?” someone ventured from the depths of the back seat.
“Well, once. Yes, once.” Her voice lightened.
They were driving, she said, on a high mountain road. I saw the back of her round head swivel; she was looking up and away, remembering. The two of them were driving along a dreadful road, she said, a perfectly horrible road, in Tennessee maybe. Her voice grew shrill.
“There was a sheer drop just outside my window, and I thought we were going over. We were going over, I tell you.” She was furious at the thought. “And he got very cross with me.”
She had never seen him so angry. “He said I could either hush, or get out and walk. Can you imagine!”
She was awed. So was I. We were both awed, that he had dared. It cheered everyone right up.
The bird-watching was fine in the nearby Fort Lauderdale city park. Right in the middle of town, the park was mostly wild forest, with a few clearings and roads. Oma and Mary drove me to the park early every morning, and picked me up at noon. There I saw some of the few smooth-billed anis in the United States. They were black parrot-beaked birds; they hung around the park’s dump. The binoculars I wore banged against my skinny rib cage. I filled a notebook with sketches, information, and records. I saw myrtle warblers in the clearings. I saw a coot and a purple gallinule side by side, just as Peterson had painted them in the field guide; they swam in a lagoon under sea grape trees. They seemed, as common birds seem to the delirious beginner, miraculous and rare. (The tizzy that birds excite in the beginner are a property of the beginner, not of the birds; so those who love the tizzy itself must ever keep beginning things.)
Often I was startled to see, through binoculars and flattened by their lenses, glimpsed through the dark subtropical leaves, the white hull of some pleasure cruiser setting out on a Lauderdale canal. Who would go cruising beside houses and lawns, when he could be watching smooth-billed anis? I alone was sane, I thought, in a world of crazy people. Standing in the park’s smelly dump, I shrugged.
Afternoons I wandered the blinding beach, swam, and read about tide pools in Maine; I was reading The Edge of the Sea. On the beach I found skeletons of velella, or by-the-wind-sailors. From the high apartment windows I looked at the lifeguards around the pool below, and wondered how I might meet them. By day, Oma and Mary shopped. Evenings we went out to dinner. Amy was as desperately bored as I was, but I wouldn’t let her follow me; I addressed her in French. Everyone knew this was our last Florida trip.
It was on this visit that Oma asked me, when we were alone, what exactly it was that homosexuals did. She was miffed that she’d been unable to command this information before now. She said she’d wondered for many years without knowing who she could ask.
Amy and I boarded our plane back to Pittsburgh. It would be softball season at school, and a new baseball season for the Pirates, whose hopes were resting on a left-handed reliever, Elroy Face, and on the sober starter, Vernon Law—the Deacon—and on the big bat of our right fielder, Roberto Clemente, whom everyone in town adored.
Flying back, looking out over the Blue Ridge, I remembered a game I had seen at Forbes Field the year before: Clemente had thrown from right field to the plate, as apparently easily as a wheel spins. The ball seemed not to arc at all; the throw caught the runner from third. You could watch, this man at inning’s end lope from right field to the dugout, and you’d weep—at the way his joints moved, and the ease and power in his spine.
I was ready for all that, but it was only late March, and snowing in Pittsburgh when we got off the plane, and dark. At least we were tan.
WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, I FELT IT COMING; now I was sixteen, and it hit.
My feet had imperceptibly been set on a new path, a fast path into a long tunnel like those many turnpike tunnels near Pittsburgh, turnpike tunnels whose entrances bear on brass plaques a roll call of those men who died blasting them. I wandered witlessly forward and found myself going down, and saw the light dimming; I adjusted to the slant and dimness, traveled further down, adjusted to greater dimness, and so on. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it, or about anything. I was going to hell on a handcart, that was all, and I knew it and everyone around me knew it, and there it was.
I was growing and thinning, as if pulled. I was getting angry, as if pushed. I morally disapproved most things in North America, and blamed my innocent parents for them. My feelings deepened and lingered. The swift moods of early childhood—each formed by and suited to its occasion—vanished. Now feelings lasted so long they left stains. They arose from nowhere, like winds or waves, and battered at me or engulfed me.
When I was angry, I felt myself coiled and longing to kill someone or bomb something big. Trying to appease myself, during one winter I whipped my bed every afternoon with my uniform belt. I despised the spectacle I made in my own eyes—whipping the bed with a belt, like a creature demented!—and I often began halfheartedly, but I did it daily after school as a desperate discipline, trying to rid myself and the innocent world of my wildness. It was like trying to beat back the ocean.
Sometimes in class I couldn’t stop laughing; things were too funny to be borne. It began then, my surprise that no one else saw what was so funny.
I read some few books with such reverence I didn’t close them at the finish, but only moved the pile of pages back to the start, without breath
ing, and began again. I read one such book, an enormous novel, six times that way—closing the binding between sessions, but not between readings.
On the piano in the basement I played the maniacal “Poet and Peasant Overture” so loudly, for so many hours, night after night, I damaged the piano’s keys and strings. When I wasn’t playing this crashing overture, I played boogie-woogie, or something else, anything else, in octaves—otherwise, it wasn’t loud enough. My fingers were so strong I could do push-ups with them. I played one piece with my fists. I banged on a steel-stringed guitar till I bled, and once on a particularly piercing rock-and-roll downbeat I broke straight through one of Father’s snare drums.
I loved my boyfriend so tenderly, I thought I must transmogrify into vapor. It would take spectroscopic analysis to locate my molecules in thin air. No possible way of holding him was close enough. Nothing could cure this bad case of gentleness except, perhaps, violence: maybe if he swung me by the legs and split my skull on a tree? Would that ease this insane wish to kiss too much his eyelids’ outer corners and his temples, as if I could love up his brain?
I envied people in books who swooned. For two years I felt myself continuously swooning and continuously unable to swoon; the blood drained from my face and eyes and flooded my heart; my hands emptied, my knees unstrung, I bit at the air for something worth breathing—but I failed to fall, and I couldn’t find the way to black out. I had to live on the lip of a waterfall, exhausted.
When I was bored I was first hungry, then nauseated, then furious and weak. “Calm yourself,” people had been saying to me all my life. Since early childhood I had tried one thing and then another to calm myself, on those few occasions when I truly wanted to. Eating helped; singing helped. Now sometimes I truly wanted to calm myself. I couldn’t lower my shoulders; they seemed to wrap around my ears. I couldn’t lower my voice although I could see the people around me flinch. I waved my arm in class till the very teachers wanted to kill me.
I was what they called a live wire. I was shooting out sparks that were digging a pit around me, and I was sinking into that pit. Laughing with Ellin at school recess, or driving around after school with Judy in her jeep, exultant, or dancing with my boyfriend to Louis Armstrong across a polished dining-room floor, I got so excited I looked around wildly for aid; I didn’t know where I should go or what I should do with myself. People in books split wood.
When rage or boredom reappeared, each seemed never to have left. Each so filled me with so many years’ intolerable accumulation it jammed the space behind my eyes, so I couldn’t see. There was no room left even on my surface to live. My rib cage was so taut I couldn’t breathe. Every cubic centimeter of atmosphere above my shoulders and head was heaped with last straws. Black hatred clogged my very blood. I couldn’t peep, I couldn’t wiggle or blink; my blood was too mad to flow.
For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn’t remember how to forget myself. I didn’t want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else—but swerve as I might, I couldn’t avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn’t hush.
So this was adolescence. Is this how the people around me had died on their feet—inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the sun for so many years the world shriveled around them, and when at last their inescapable orbits had passed through these dark egoistic years it was too late, they had adjusted.
Must I then lose the world forever, that I had so loved? Was it all, the whole bright and various planet, where I had been so ardent about finding myself alive, only a passion peculiar to children, that I would outgrow even against my will?
I QUIT THE CHURCH. I wrote the minister a fierce letter. The assistant minister, kindly Dr. James H. Blackwood, called me for an appointment. My mother happened to take the call.
“Why,” she asked, “would he be calling you?” I was in the kitchen after school. Mother was leaning against the pantry door, drying a crystal bowl.
“What, Mama? Oh. Probably,” I said, “because I wrote him a letter and quit the church.”
“You—what?” She began to slither down the doorway, weak-kneed, like Lucille Ball. I believe her whole life passed before her eyes.
As I climbed the stairs after dinner I heard her moan to Father, “She wrote the minister a letter and quit the church.”
“She—what?”
Father knocked on the door of my room. I was the only person in the house with her own room. Father ducked under the doorway, entered, and put his hands in his khakis’ pockets. “Hi, Daddy.” Actually, it drove me nuts when people came in my room. Mother had come in just last week. My room was getting to be quite the public arena. Pretty soon they’d put it on the streetcar routes. Why not hold the U.S. Open here? I was on the bed, in uniform, trying to read a book. I sat up and folded my hands in my lap.
I knew that Mother had made him come—“She listens to you.” He had undoubtedly been trying to read a book, too.
Father looked around, but there wasn’t much to see. My rock collection was no longer in evidence. A framed tiger swallowtail, spread and only slightly askew on white cotton, hung on a yellowish wall. On the mirror I’d taped a pencil portrait of Rupert Brooke; he was looking off softly. Balanced on top of the mirror were some yellow-and-black FALLOUT SHELTER signs, big aluminum ones, which Judy had collected as part of her antiwar effort. On the pale maple desk there were, among other books and papers, an orange thesaurus, a blue three-ring binder with a boy’s name written all over it in every typeface, a green assignment notebook, and Emerson’s Essays.
Father began, with some vigor: “What was it you said in this brilliant letter?” He went on: But didn’t I see? That people did these things—quietly? Just—quietly? No fuss? No flamboyant gestures. No uncalled-for letters. He was forced to conclude that I was deliberately setting out to humiliate Mother and him.
“And your poor sisters, too!” Mother added feelingly from the hall outside my closed door. She must have been passing at that very moment. Then, immediately, we all heard a hideous shriek ending in a wail; it came from my sisters’ bathroom. Had Molly cut off her head? It set us all back a moment—me on the bed, Father standing by my desk, Mother outside the closed door—until we all realized it was Amy, mad at her hair. Like me, she was undergoing a trying period, years long; she, on her part, was mad at her hair. She screeched at it in the mirror; the sound carried all over the house, kitchen, attic, basement, everywhere, and terrified all the rest of us, every time.
The assistant minister of the Shadyside Presbyterian Church, Dr. Blackwood, and I had a cordial meeting in his office. He was an experienced, calm man in a three-piece suit; he had a mustache and wore glasses. After he asked me why I had quit the church, he loaned me four volumes of C. S. Lewis’s broadcast talks, for a paper I was writing. Among the volumes proved to be The Problem of Pain, which I would find fascinating, not quite serious enough, and too short. I had already written a paper on the Book of Job. The subject scarcely seemed to be closed. If the all-powerful creator directs the world, then why all this suffering? Why did the innocents die in the camps, and why do they starve in the cities and farms? Addressing this question, I found thirty pages written thousands of years ago, and forty pages written in 1955. They offered a choice of fancy language saying, “Forget it,” or serenely worded, logical-sounding answers that so strained credibility (pain is God’s megaphone) that “Forget it” seemed in comparison a fine answer. I liked, however, C. S. Lewis’s effort to defuse the question. The sum of human suffering we needn’t worry about: There is plenty of suffering, but no one ever suffers the sum of it.
Dr. Blackwood and I shook hands as I left his office with his books.
“This is rather early of you, to be quitting th
e church,” he said as if to himself, looking off, and went on mildly, almost inaudibly, “I suppose you’ll be back soon.”
Humph, I thought. Pshaw.
NOW IT WAS MAY. Daylight Saving Time had begun; the colored light of the long evenings fairly split me with joy. White trillium had bloomed and gone on the forested slopes in Fox Chapel. The cliffside and riverside patches of woods all over town showed translucent ovals of yellow or ashy greens; the neighborhood trees on Glen Arden Drive had blossomed in white and red.
Baseball season had begun, a season which recalled but could never match last year’s National League pennant and seventh-game World Series victory over the Yankees, when we at school had been so frenzied for so many weeks they finally and wisely opened the doors and let us go. I had walked home from school one day during that series and seen Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue emptied of cars, as if the world were over.
A year of wild feelings had passed, and more were coming. Without my noticing, the drummer had upped the tempo. Someone must have slipped him a signal when I wasn’t looking; he’d speeded things up. The key was higher, too. I had a driver’s license. When I drove around in Mother’s old Dodge convertible, the whole town smelled good. And I did drive around the whole town. I cruised along the blue rivers and across them on steel bridges, and steered up and down the scented hills. I drove winding into and out of the steep neighborhoods across the Allegheny River, neighborhoods where I tried in vain to determine in what languages the signs on storefronts were written. I drove onto boulevards, highways, beltways, freeways, and the turnpike. I could drive to Guatemala, drive to Alaska. Why, I asked myself, did I drive to—of all spots on earth—our garage? Why home, why school?
An American Childhood Page 21