This was probably the summer in which I began to dislike my mother’s body. I did not know it by touch. My mother was not someone who hugged or even put her arms around another person. I knew her body by sight, and sometimes it was embarrassing. Her bosoms were especially irritating. She always left too many of the buttons on her shirt undone and she didn’t wear a bra. She didn’t even bother to put a towel around her when she walked from her turkey cabin to the pond.
At one of her lunchtime beach picnics my mother and a few of her friends gathered right at the bottom of the dune. When Penny Jencks, Blair, and I took the path from the Turkey Houses to our ocean beach and came over the dune and saw all the naked grown-ups, we sat on the outskirts of their circle. Mary Grand, a woman of more than Rubenesque proportions, seemed not in the least chagrinned by the rolls of fat below her belly button. Beside her sat Dwight Macdonald sprawled with his legs straight out. His penis and testicles were so pale and ugly that I had to look away. In spite of his unabashed nakedness, Dwight remained my favorite adult. He understood what children wanted. Once a week he would take a bunch of us to the movies in Wellfleet, and he always asked the ticket lady to give us movie posters. Mine was of Montgomery Clift, the actor I most adored.
I should have been used to naked grown-ups. Nudity was the tradition on what was then called Phillips Beach. Once when my mother and a group of her friends were sunbathing naked on our beach, a fat man who they knew to be a voyeur came along and stopped and goggled. My mother jumped up and ran at him hoping to chase him away. Terrified of her naked body, the man turned and rushed along the shore as fast as he could go. Not only did my mother and father swim naked, I was told that in the 1930s they sometimes walked to cocktails at other people’s houses in the nude. My mother was not ashamed. She knew her body was beautiful.
My mother’s idea of a picnic was sloppy. She never prepared sandwiches at home. Instead she just put food in a basket—Portuguese bread, a chunk of cheese, some links of chorizo, fruit, and tomatoes. At this picnic with Mary Grand and Dwight, she opened a can of sardines and fished them out with her fingers. She tore off pieces of Portuguese bread for Penny and Blair and me. Then she took a tomato and pulled it apart with her thumbs. The juice ran all over her fingers and dripped on her thighs. I was revolted and refused the half tomato that she offered. It seemed so selfish of her to stick her fingers into food that she expected someone else to eat.
Dwight Macdonald holding a seagull. My dog Chata is behind him, 1951
My mother with her dog, Cape Cod, 1936
About once a week we had nighttime beach picnics to which everyone came from our pond area, which we called the “back woods.” There were friends from the bay side in Wellfleet as well. We made a fire and cooked hamburgers and frankfurters and marshmallows. As it grew dark and the fire lapsed into embers, we sang. The person who led the singing was David Chavchavadze, a handsome man at least ten years older than the oldest of us. David was the son of my parents’ friends, Nina and Paul Chavchavadze, who lived in South Wellfleet. Paul was a Georgian-Russian prince, Nina a Russian princess, a Romanov. Exiled from their country, the Chavchavadzes made do, and lived like the rest of us, a little bit from hand-to-mouth. David Chavchavadze knew songs in English, French, and Russian. Blair sang with him. She knew how to harmonize. Those of us who knew the lyrics joined in. Someone would go off in the dark to fetch more kindling for the fire, and we sat like spokes on a wheel with our feet near the flames to keep them warm. I loved the fact that our bundled-up bodies were invisible. All you saw was faces flushed with the glow of the fire.
Serge Chermayeff’s youngest son, Peter, then a student at Phillips Andover, came to most of the picnics. He had a beautiful speaking voice with a hint of an English accent, and when he smiled, he looked so tender. I had a crush on Peter, so I tried not to look at him. Once, Peter sat next to me at a beach picnic. He didn’t sit there because of me. It was just a good place for him to get near the fire. His arm was about four inches from my shoulder, and I felt like putting my shoulder against his, but of course I would never do anything like that. I couldn’t even sing when he was beside me. I was afraid that my voice would crack. I could sing best when I was next to Blair and could copy her notes and timing. Her voice drowned mine out, and that was the way I wanted it.
Closer to my age were Charlie Jencks, Mike Macdonald, and Reuel Wilson. We all referred to them as if it were one word: “CharlieMikeandReuel.” They ignored me except when my beautiful friend Grania Gurievitch came to visit. She looked older than me, and she was thin with glossy brown hair and a mischievous smile. Her high-pitched voice and English accent were perfect for flirting. I tried to copy Grania’s intonation, but it felt fake, so I stopped.
I had known Grania from infancy. Every Christmas we went to her mother Nemone’s caroling party and I spent many nights in Grania’s family’s wooden house in Manhattan’s East Nineties. I had envied Grania for having an Austrian housekeeper-nanny who made quarter-moon-shaped cookies dusted with powdered sugar. A plate of these cookies would be waiting for Grania when she came home from the Brearley School. Since Grania was skinny, she could eat as many cookies as she wanted. This Austrian woman loved Grania, which was good, because Grania’s mother, Nemone, was a manic depressive and sometimes was so sad and helpless that Grania had to tie her shoelaces. In Grania’s childhood bedroom, expensive toys were neatly arranged on shelves. When we were about six, we traded toys. I cannot remember what I gave Grania, but I treasured what she gave me—a small book about bears, its covers lined with real fur. I always felt guilty that I had gotten the better deal.
20 Coche de Mama
Every year autumn announces itself too early. In mid-August a few branches of the tupelo trees along the pond’s edge turn red, and the tops and bottoms of the reeds lining the shore become yellow. Seeing that red and yellow fills me with dread. Crows flap from tree to tree, first they go caw, caw, caw, then they make four caws and finally a steady caw noise reverberates in the forest like a chain saw. Their squawks foretell winter darkness and loss. With summer over, Blair and I always have to leave our pond. This means leaving either our mother or our father or both.
In September 1950, our father was on the Cape checking on his rental properties. For a few weeks, Blair and I lived at the Turkey Houses just with him, and we vied to get his attention and to make him happy. It felt like an extra piece of summer even though the turkey cabins had become chilly at night, and my nose and hands got cold if they were outside of the blankets. This was the time of year when, by half past three, the sun was gone from the beach in front of our porch, and you had to swim almost to the middle of the pond to be in the sun.
One morning, when our father had gone to Orleans to buy something for one of his houses, our mother turned up at the bottom of the Turkey Houses driveway. When she opened her car door, she looked angry. Maybe she always looked angry when she was tense. After kissing Blair and me, she stepped back to give us her appraising look (to see if we were fatter or thinner, prettier or uglier). She then announced that she had a new secondhand station wagon. “This is the Coche de Mama,” she said. “We are going to Mexico.” The car was a huge Chrysler with real wood paneling on the outside. In the back she had packed her belongings—her paints, her folding easel, and a duffle bag with clothes. All of this was covered with a mattress. She reached into the front seat and handed us each a little wooden lacquer-covered box hinged at the back like a sailor’s trunk. Mine was black, decorated with blue and pink flowers. Blair’s was red, decorated with exotic birds. We would take these with us, our mother said. “In Mexico you can buy silver jewelry for almost nothing. These can be your jewelry boxes.”
My mother arriving at the Turkey Houses in the Coche de Mama, 1950
Blair and I had not spent much time with our mother since the fall of 1948 when, after putting us on a train to go to boarding school in Vermont, she drove to Mexico to get a divorce. Then I was almost eight. Now I was almost ten. Blair was thre
e and a half years older. Whenever our mother did turn up, she brought presents from Mexico, animals made of clay or embroidered blouses for Blair and me. She always made everything sound wonderful. She was like sunshine. Blair and I moved toward her like two Icaruses, but we never touched her golden rays.
From the back of the car, she pulled two duffle bags, carried them into our turkey cabins, and helped us pack. All we had was shorts, blue jeans, T-shirts, and bathing suits, plus a couple of sweaters, and, of course, underwear. Blair looked pensive. “What about Daddy?” she asked. “Anna will tell him where you have gone,” our mother said. Anna Matson and my mother confided in each other. They talked about their lovers and husbands and about their experience of sex—things they never told their children. Our mother surveyed our clothes laid out on our beds. “Don’t you have any proper shoes?” she asked. All I had was worn-out sneakers with holes near my little toes. We had gone barefoot most of the summer, and I was proud that my feet were tough enough to walk barefoot in the town of Wellfleet even when the sidewalks were hot. The occasional stick on the path to the ocean didn’t bother me. The only painful thing was when the squirrels broke up the pine cones and scattered prickly pieces on our pine needle paths.
Our mother drove Blair and me to Provincetown, parked on MacMillan Wharf, and led us across the street to the New York Store, the only store in town that had everything. It was full of back-to-school supplies. We found the aisle for shoes and socks and our mother bought brown lace-up Oxfords for me and a pair of loafers for Blair. She gave Blair two dimes to put in the slots over the loafers’ arch. I wished I were old enough to wear loafers. My mother thought that to wear them you had to be at least twelve. I loved it when my mother bought me things—anything, even just an ice cream cone or a Little Lulu comic book. Instead of being hurt or angry that she had gone to live in Mexico without us, I was grateful that she had come to get us.
After shopping, we had club sandwiches at the Mayflower Café. The place was dark and smelled of alcohol. For me that smell went with the pleasure of going to a restaurant intended for adults only. There was a big brown wooden bar with men sitting on stools. The walls were lined with cartoon drawings of Provincetown characters. My favorite was three-hundred-and-fifty-pound Fat Francis, who used to walk up and down Commercial Street wearing a tuxedo and a top hat. There were cartoons of two handsome Portuguese fishermen that my mother and her women friends thought were “divine.” One of them, Herman Tasha, gave my mother fresh fish whenever she asked for it, and every year he took us out on his boat for the Blessing of the Fleet. Kaki Captiva was not quite as good-looking as Herman, but he was equally virile. He caused a crisis when Dodie, Jack Hall’s first wife, fell in love with him, divorced Jack, and went off with Kaki to live in the south.
Back at the Turkey Houses, our mother stuffed our packed duffle bags under the mattress in the back of the Coche de Mama. Anna Matson came to say good-bye. It felt funny not saying good-bye to my father. Anna promised to give him hugs and kisses from Blair and me. The casual way Anna and my mother talked made me feel there was nothing unusual about leaving the Cape and driving to Mexico. Blair and I had a last swim. The pond was colder than it had been a week earlier. A gust of wind chased ripples hither and yon. I loved my body when it was submerged in water. No one could see it, but I could feel every part of it because water touched me everywhere. We dried ourselves, dressed on the sandy shore, and walked up to the Coche de Mama. I looked back at the pond one last time. There were still water lilies floating among the lily pads and, closer to shore, light caught the tops of the ripples making them look like black and silver stripes. I wished I could hug the pond. Once I took a jar of Horseleech Pond water with me when I left in the fall. But it was pointless. After a week, I threw the water away. If we had waited an hour, pink clouds would have bobbed up and down on the water’s surface, and if we had waited even longer, a path of light would have led across the water to the rising moon.
Our mother slid onto the big maroon-color leather front seat. Her hands on the Bakelite steering wheel looked so competent. Blair and I crawled into the back of the Coche de Mama and sat on top of the mattress, which would be our home for the whole week that it took to drive to Mexico City.
I liked the idea of Mexico. I had seen pictures of it in children’s books—dancing girls in China Poblana costumes. They wore long red skirts dotted with sequins and white puff-sleeved blouses embroidered with flowers. Around their shoulders was a rebozo and around their necks, multiple necklaces of shiny colored beads like miniature Christmas tree balls. Their hair was done up in braids that were sometimes looped up and fastened with big bows. If the book was about a boy, he might be sitting by a cactus or riding a donkey. Mexican boys in children’s books always wore sombreros. In the Coche de Mama, our mother kept telling us how beautiful Mexico was—the flowers, the mountains, the pink, blue, and yellow houses behind whose walls lay turquoise swimming pools.
Our road trip took us south through Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas—farther and farther from our father, farther and farther from our father’s pond. By the side of the road in Louisiana I caught sight of turtles resting on a log half sunk on the shore of a slow-moving river. My whole body went into catch mode. I wanted to run down to the riverbank and scoop the turtles up, but my mother was in a hurry to get to Mexico. I could picture the way Horseleech Pond must have looked right then—its silver ripples lifting the edge of a lily pad and then rolling through pickerel reeds until they disappeared upon the shore. At this exact minute, a little black turtle head might be poking up between the lily pads. There were still so many to catch. The Coche de Mama kept moving south. Enormous trees by the side of the road were hung with Spanish moss. It looked like mistletoe. I tried to look at the trees and to not think about Cape Cod. Our mother was being a real mother. She really wanted us to live with her in Mexico.
We stopped for lunch at a drugstore that had a soda fountain. In front of the counter was a line of high stools with round leatherette seats. Our mother ordered hamburgers, and Blair and I asked for milkshakes. On the wall above the grill was a sign that said that only white people could sit at the counter. I was enraged. Gaga had taught Blair and me that discrimination was wrong. Our mother admired black people. Hers was, however, an admiration that focused on how beautiful they were and how different they were from us. I felt like remonstrating with the waitress but, with her bouncy ponytail and her clean white apron, she looked like a nice person, and I thought maybe it was not her fault. After seeing that sign in Louisiana, I did not like the South. I don’t think the southerners liked us either. They could tell from our accents that we were northerners, and since we were on our way to Mexico, they probably thought we were communists.
Sometimes Blair and I got to sit beside our mother in the front seat. I loved to watch my mother drive. I liked the firm way her hands held the wheel, the little movements left and right as she steered. The line from her forehead to her chin was as beautiful as a movie star. Her nose had a curve like a bow that made her look as if she were always pointing forward.
Our mother was a brave driver. She seemed to know exactly where she was going, and pretty soon we were in Texas, an unending expanse of cracked earth punctuated by olive-brown cacti. No matter where you looked, nothing was really green. I missed the bright green lawns of New England. “Do you already have a house?” Blair asked. “No,” my mother said. She hoped to find a house with a garden and a pool.
The reason she had decided to keep on living in Mexico was that she was in love with a Mexican man named Edmundo Lassalle. He had almost pure Indian blood, she said, and when he was young, he had been a spy and had married an Austrian princess. He was handsome. We would like him. As we drove south, Blair composed a ballad about this romantic figure. Every day she invented new verses that went with the tune of “The Streets of Laredo,” a ballad we both knew.
The closer we got to Mexico City, the more excited we were about meeting Edmundo.
The road in Texas was a straight line all the way to the horizon. When I got bored, I tried to count the sections of yellow line in the middle of the road. Most of the time we went so fast that the lines vanished under the hood of the car before I could count them. I liked it better when the yellow line was unbroken. It’s more peaceful. Everything in front and everything behind is just one path and you are not sure whether you are seeing the same piece of yellow line over and over, or whether at each moment the line is new. It must be a lonely job to paint such a line. My mother told me they do it at night when there are no cars on the road. I pictured a lonely line painter dragging his paint pail from town to town.
Sometimes I counted telephone poles. The spaces between them were tiny when the poles were far ahead of us, and they became wider and wider until we were beside them. Space keeps changing. Nothing is fixed. In the far distance, I saw water in the middle of the road. Maybe there is an oasis in this desert, I thought. But when we got to where the puddle had been, the road was dry. “It’s a mirage,” my mother explained. “The heat causes mirages.” After that I kept my eyes on the farthest point in the road, trying to see a mirage as long as I could before it vanished. For a while the mirages seemed miraculous, but later they became humdrum. Something else to watch out for on the hot, flat tarmac was a kind of bird that my mother called a roadrunner. These birds were about the size of a small chicken, and they would dash out of the brush and cross the road in front of us.
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