Tension increased as we drove. Your yearning. Dad’s jealousy, barely contained. I lay my head against Antonio’s shoulder, but he stiffened when you turned around and invisibly touched his wrist. I began to sob. Dad drove faster. I couldn’t hold back the tears.
“A carelessly dropped cigarette could cause a terrible fire.”
Silence.
He swerved around a car, narrowly missing an oncoming van.
“Aaron, be careful!”
Still ignoring my sobs, he slowed down a bit. You also ignored me. “Stop!” shouted Antonio. “Your daughter is crying.” He put his arm around me. “Stop!” But Dad kept driving as the sun sank lower in the sky.
Later Antonio said, “Your parents are bastards!”
“Did you make love with her?”
“It was necessary for communication.” His voice filled with emotion.
“I don’t understand.”
He put his forefinger to his temple in a gesture as if to say he held secret understanding.
“The only way to get through to Eleanor is through sex. That is how I break through the barriers. Because she loves me, she will love Isabel. She will help us. Because you are with me, she will no longer despise you.”
“You did it because you loved me,” I whispered, clutching at a straw. Mother, I wanted to believe he seduced you in order to clarify the patterns that ran through our lives. To bring what was hidden into the light of day. His outrageousness actually had the effect of helping me to recover belief in myself. All these years, my perceptions about you had been valid. I wasn’t crazy after all. But I half wanted to give him up, because when you were with him, you came to life in a way I’d never seen before. If Antonio was the sacrifice I needed to make, part of me said, “Here, take him!”
For the next few years we led a turbulent life, sometimes together and sometimes apart. I did office work in San Francisco, while Antonio found odd jobs as a house painter, a carpenter’s assistant, or short order cook. But he was likely to get laid off because of his drinking or erratic behavior. There were long stretches I lived alone with Isabel. But when I felt I could not go on any longer with Isabel, that I was not strong enough, that she was suffering, somehow he would sense this and appear on our doorstep.
He held my hand, guiding the knife as I sliced an onion. “Like this, Petite.” His voice filled with tenderness. A shaft of afternoon sun shone through the kitchen window, illuminating his features. The smell of onion juice filled my nostrils, and tears welled up in my eyes. Fleshy white spirals fell onto the wooden cutting board. His hands felt warm and strong. There was tenderness in his touch and above all in his mind’s eye. If only for an instant to experience someone’s pure love flow through me, I would do anything.
Isabel began to cry. “Go tend to her, Petite.” His voice was now harsh.
She was soaking wet. While I changed her diaper, he heated up a bottle of soup that he had made from fresh vegetables and beef bones. After my milk dried up, she had little appetite for the first few months. We worried because she was not gaining enough weight. Then he began making this soup. She drank the first bottle with a voracious appetite, and from then on she thrived.
Now I carried her into the kitchen, freshly diapered, nestling my chin against her silky hair. He put his arms around us. Isabel sighed, sensing harmony between us that was all too rare.
On her third birthday we went to Chinatown. We bought her an ivory elephant. We ate steamed rice with snow peas and chicken, and he showed her how to eat with chopsticks. Afterwards she laughed happily as we held her between us, and she let her feet in their little red sneakers drag along the sidewalk. We walked faster. Her feet left the ground, and she soared. When Antonio stopped for cigarettes, he bought a banana and pasted the Chiquita label on her forehead. “Who is the most beautiful girl in the world? You are, Isabel,” he said, lifting her up in his arms, hugging her close, as if trying to compress a lifetime of nurture into that moment.
He awakened my compassion. Before I met him, something in me was cold, untouched, virginal. He touched my spirit in a way no one else had. This helped me grow sane. It didn’t matter how many black eyes and bruises he gave me or how many women he slept with. But sometimes he aroused in me an unease that flowed into electric revulsion and panic.
We separated again, and for a long time we didn’t see each other.
Then he began coming around. Sometimes I would miss him by just a minute. If that happened, I would despair because telepathy still guided our movements to and from each other, and I felt we had willed it. We began to confide in each other about our love affairs and comforted each other in times of difficulty. He told me of troubles he was having with his girl friend. “She is becoming a hysteric like you.”
I smiled. “You see, I’m not the only one.”
He was sitting beside me on a green couch in my living room, and he took a sip from his can of beer. I crossed my legs Indian style, covering them with my long skirt. Then I told him that my boyfriend had left me because he thought I was too emotional. I laughed, but tears welled up in my eyes. “I’m such an idiot. I always mess things up.”
“He is the idiot! American Puritans. They do not like women. They do not like sex.” He lit a cigarette. “You would be more at home in South America, Petite. They would adore your emotional nature.”
He alone was constant. Any other man I could frighten away as easily as he blew out the match. Other men were made of flimsier stuff. That night he seemed so much older than he had in Paris. He had lost weight, and the sleeves of his short sleeved shirt were far too wide for his skinny arms. His khaki pants bunched at the waist, held up by a worn belt. He hadn’t shaved in days. It hurt to see his old Jesuit high school photo that showed him carefully dressed in suit and tie, hair slicked back in the style of the day. (My fault! My fault!)
When Isabel was six, he found a little house in Mill Valley with cheap rent and we moved in together for the last time. In the morning he would be sober, as he sat smoking cigarettes and looking out the window at distant hills covered with dry grass. Then he would go off to his job—if he had one. Usually he worked as a cook. Then in the evening, if he had been drinking, a frightening and unpredictable person would emerge. He might rouse me from bed and talk on and on, his passion for some half-crazy idea burning into me.
“I need to sleep. I need to get to work in the morning.”
“Listen to me, Petite. Listen. This is more important than sleep …” and he would continue his tirade about how the U.S. was a fascist state or whatever else gripped his mind.
Every weekday morning at seven, Isabel would clutch my hand and we would walk down the steep steps from our house to my car. I would leave her at the sitter’s. Later on another mother would take her to school. I was working as a secretary for an insurance firm in downtown San Francisco. Gleaming office. Sterile air. Manual typewriters. Carbon sheets.
During our forty minute lunch break I wrote on a yellow legal pad in the cafeteria, trying to transform chaotic emotions, thoughts, sensations into words. Difficult alchemy. Yet I had to get it out, or it would choke me.
At night when I came home from work I tried to continue writing. But usually I was too tired. Thoughts and words blurred.
“DANCERS WANTED. $300 a night,” said the newspaper ad.
“I could work two nights as a dancer and make more than I do now.”
“I want that you express your sexuality,” said Antonio. “Your father did not want you to become a woman. I want that you express who you are.”
It was a sleazy place in North Beach with dim lights and an MC with greasy black hair in a strawberry colored jacket who made coarse jokes. “Swing your bootee… swing your bootee… Taxman.… Taxman.” The rhythms moved through my body.
We danced on round tables above the customers. Dance. Dance. We were bare-breasted. Beneath my disguise I was free, transformed with a long auburn wig and makeup that changed the contours of my face. Through artificial lash
es I gazed down at businessmen from out of town and sometimes at their wives. There were four of us. One was a ballet dancer whose career had been cut short by a car accident. Another dancer, very skinny with tiny breasts and waist-length black hair, was an art student. A third brought us home-grown marijuana to smoke in the dressing room.
A band played satiny music with lots of rhythm. Hips wriggled, encased in turquoise silk panties with glittering sequins. My lips felt thick and creamy with scarlet lipstick. My cheeks itched beneath the pancake makeup, dusted with powder. After a while I managed to forget those eyes looking up at me as I swirled, swayed, undulated.
One night Antonio came in. At first he didn’t recognize me. I waved and smiled. Standing at the bar, he looked at me with a curious expression. He only stayed for a few numbers. When I got home that night, he came into the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth, and he stroked my cheek with the edge of a knife. “So easy to strangle la bébé while she sleeps. So easy to kill all three of us. We are foutu, Petite.”
“No!” I cried. “You’re crazy! You wanted me to dance in the club.”
“You desire many men. I don’t satisfy you.”
More frightening than his words was the charged atmosphere he emitted.
In the morning, after I dropped off Isabel at the sitter’s, I found a cheap apartment for eighty-five dollars a month, hired a moving truck, and moved our few possessions out while he was at work.
“Mommie, why are we here?” asked Isabel. I held her close, her warm child’s fragrance mixed with the odor of soap. At a loss for how to explain it all. I stroked her soft hair. Finally I muttered, “Sometimes your father has thunderstorms. He loves you, but we need to be safe.”
Many years later Isabel said, “He battered you, Mom. He hit me too—only once.” Then she added softly, “I had a dream where you and Antonio and I were together, and I had a little brother. That was the Divine Plan. But things change.”
CHAPTER 32
BERKELEY FLATLANDS
Isabel and I moved across the bay to Berkeley. I sold my car and bought a small bicycle for Isabel and a larger one for myself. We lived in a duplex on the fringe of a ghetto. Isabel picked up black street talk and learned to defend herself from bullies. “Umbawa-black powah,” she would chant along with the neighbor children. “I said it. I meant it. I’ve come to represent it.”
Slow and difficult as it was, writing was my path to sanity. A lifeline in the midst of turbulence. In order to write, I needed time. Hours and hours of time. We went on welfare. For extra cash, I cleaned houses. As I ran a vacuum cleaner, swept, or dusted, my mind could wander freely, and I could think about what I was writing. “Words create windows into reality,” I wrote. Then, too, words could also erect walls against reality. Words could form a reflective mirror.
“Was it wise to leave your job?” you asked over the phone. (After leaving Antonio, I’d retreated into the safety of secretarial work.)
“I had to.”
“Other artists manage to hold jobs,” said Aaron on the extension.
“I’m not them. I’m me. I can only do what I can do in this body.”
“I taught for twenty years.”
“You were lucky,” I said. “You were able to work part-time just two days a week. You didn’t have a child to raise alone.”
He sniffed in disbelief.
Isabel and I lived on a street of bungalows and two-story dwellings with lots of children and a Chinese grocery on the corner. A lone palm tree rose high above the houses and other trees. When we moved in, I found a bullet hole in the front window. There were occasional sounds of gunshots. Discarded beer bottles in the gutters. Screeching tires late at night. You always had to be on the alert. Keys in hand, ready to open the door. Listen for footsteps. Don’t leave your purse unattended or the door unlocked for even a moment. During winter mornings I huddled by the old-fashioned wall furnace for warmth. In the summers I would sunbathe in the back yard under a tree that shed bitter orange loquats.
It was because of Molly that I moved in. When I first saw the duplex, she was hanging laundry out on the line in the back yard. A large-hipped, ample woman with disheveled hair and a pleasant smile, she welcomed me. “The landlord’s cool,” she said. “This is better than Vallejo, where we used to live.” Her husband, Sean, taught Latin at the University and was writing his dissertation. Shirts, diapers, jeans, children’s clothes hung on the line as well as a woman’s cotton panties with faded menstrual stains. Just then a plump little girl about Isabel’s age ran out into the yard. “This is my daughter Beth,” she said. “I hope you move in.”
A woman sobbed as she ran down the street in bedroom slippers. Rhythm and blues sounded from the stereo next door. People talked in loud voices. Their emotions were more out in the open than in other neighborhoods I’d lived in, and this comforted me. It reminded me of the streets where blacks lived in Westbury, where people’s lives seemed more honest.
When we first moved in, curious children came by to visit. We were a strange white woman and little girl. I gave them crayons and sheets of paper to draw on. I entertained them with stories. I offered ice cream made with honey. At first they were afraid the ice cream was poison. Gradually they grew to trust us. They played with Isabel’s kitten and taught her their street chants.
Umgawa
Black Powah
Your momma needs a showah
Your daddy needs a shave
Mama’s in the kitchen cookin’ rice
Daddy’s down the corner shootin’ dice
Brother’s in the jail house raisin’ hell
Sister’s on the corner yellin’ pussy for sale.
We ate lots of brown rice and soybean casseroles. Isabel made herself frugal school lunches of yogurt, carrots, and apples. Thrift shop furniture and clothes. I sewed curtains and painted the walls white. With a little guidance from Sean, I laid linoleum tile in the kitchen. Polished the wooden floors. I felt stronger and more myself than I ever had before.
Structure. Echoes of the days after the hospital on Long Island. Up at six-thirty in the morning. Yoga. Meditation. Struggle to put into words a substance that demanded form. Isabel, too, had structure. After school, she would practice on the old upright I had bought. She would play with children on the block or with classmates.
At times she was lonely. I was always writing, reading—everything from Greek poets to Carlos Castaneda and Alan Watts, whom Antonio had once met at the No Name Bar in Sausalito. Isabel went to sleep to the sound of my typewriter clicking away at night, as I began to write even more, and as the structure slipped. The novel I was writing grew longer and longer. And my writing went so slowly.
I was lonely, too. I wanted more. I wanted love, a vanishing mirage. Woke up in the morning wanting love. Want to sleep a while longer so as not to face the day. Maybe I was a fake, not a writer after all. To create characters, plot, rhythm, a form for the wordless kind of intensity that drove me was terribly difficult. Yet I felt compelled. I didn’t know why I had to do this. Perhaps what I wrote would never find an audience. Perhaps this struggle to create words, story out of chaotic emotion was only to affect some intangible substance in the universe.
I fell in love with a married novelist. (Echoes of the musician.) I grew obsessed with him, waiting for his daily phone calls, waiting for our weekly trysts. It was intimacy I craved. The moments after love-making, when barriers had dissolved, and when our talk flowed with more honesty and depth. I craved his touch, his tongue, his genitals, the feel of his body, which gave me energy to keep on writing, to keep on through gray days and little money and so much solitude.
We lay on my foam mattress on the floor. Blue translucent curtains like the sea. White walls. My green wooden desk. “Baby, your skin is so soft,” he murmured. “You taste so good.” His lovemaking left me limp, satiated. Afterwards I made herbal tea and brought it along with cheese and crackers to bed. If it were cold, I wrapped myself in the quilt. He had a squat, muscular build, a p
ropensity for brightly colored jockey shorts, and was quite vain. I found his vanity appealing. It was worth being on welfare, he said. The writing was worth it. I was worth it. Since he had achieved a measure of success, his words carried weight.
There was constant fear about money. Mother, you helped with Isabel’s orthodontist and her dance and music classes. I hated needing your help because I was so angry with you and Aaron. But I didn’t want to deprive Isabel. Money was power. If an emergency arose, you didn’t give help easily. “We’ll see,” you would say. And I would wait in a state of anxiety.
I couldn’t control the fury that sometimes erupted.
It had been so deeply ingrained in me to repress emotion that it would finally explode, like molten lava. I would rage at Isabel, and she suffered. One day I sent her to the corner grocery with food stamps to buy bread. She came back with too little change. I raged at her. Raged and raged. Something that seemed alien poured through me. I chased her outside onto the sidewalk, screaming at the top of my lungs, heedless of who heard. A group of children followed us.
I hated myself for these volcanic rages. Hated what I was doing to her.
One day when she was a few years older, I was raging at her again—I was ironing in our small living room—something changed. Up until now she had been passive, silent when I raged, infuriating me even more.
But today she stood there defiantly, a small thin girl in jeans and T-shirt, braids half way down her back. “I hate you!” she shouted, stamping her feet. “I hate you I hate you I hate you!” I put down the hot iron. Something electric passed between us, and I found myself laughing and crying at the same time. “I’m so glad you can speak up!” I cried, hugging her to me.
Ever since then, she has stood up to me. But emotional scars remain.
A blue sunny day. Malaise. Driving back from a Sunday at the beach, I might feel unaccountably fearful and anxious. A nameless dread. An internal voice about something undone or something done wrong. Your voice. In this way I kept you close to me.
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