But now, at the baths, our hair was still dirty, itching and plastered to our skulls, but neat. Mom had stayed behind at the parking lot with Anton to take care of things, check in.
“We’re the Fureys and I’m Sofia. Sofia means wisdom,” said one of the girls, coming toward us with a smile. She was a strong girl, and beautiful, with deep dimples and at the corner of her mouth a dark hairless mole. She offered us her hand and then introduced us to the others: Caroline; Nicholas; Timothy; Finny.
The Fureys. We’d thought about their name a million times. Anton Furey. The Fureys. A glorious name, pronounced fiori like flower in Italian, that’s what Julia said. Furey like fury, is what Jane said. We wondered if Mom would take that name when she married Anton.
“We call Finny ‘Bone’,” Sofia said pointing to the naked boy. He was tiny, I imagined about five. “Bone for his bones because he rolls a fine bone. Do you know what a bone is?” Julia said yes and explained that it was a hand-rolled marijuana cigarette.
Sofia acted as if she owned the place and told us to come into the water and we did, after changing into our suits. Jane held me close in front of her like a shield. She could be so shy. I let her hold me, pretending I was the shy one. I liked protecting her. The idea of loving all these people frightened me. I wondered what would happen if I didn’t. I slid beneath the water. It was hot and made me dizzy. I needed to pee. I’d never thought about loving my sisters. I just did.
“Watch out for amoebas,” Nicholas, the oldest, said to me as I emerged. He had a big half smile just like Anton’s, and beautiful teeth. Watching him was like watching a younger version of Anton, and he flirted with us as Anton had back at home. “They live in sulfur baths and if you put your head under water…”
“They crawl in your ears and eat your brain,” the little naked one, Finny, finished Nicholas’s sentence. Nicholas tickled him, scooping him up in his arms. It was clear Nicholas liked to tease. I wondered what it would be like to have an older brother who teased and loved me. Jane, Julia and I listened to them. Since it was Anton’s world we were entering, it was also theirs – more theirs than it would ever be ours – and they knew it. We sat on the edge of their world, wondering how we’d fit in. We were all quiet for a moment, and awkward in the quiet. Then Timothy farted. He wasn’t much older than me. He had a boxy head and long teeth. He laughed, picked his nose, examined the snot and wiped it on Finny, then farted again.
“Do you go to parochial school?” I asked. None of them looked like a religious kid to me.
Sofia let us know that they went to free school in Dallas, “Erehwon. Nowhere spelled backward.” That ‘Erehwon’ was a word that they would trumpet. They loved the fact that it spelled ‘nowhere’, that it was their school – the best school in the world, everything about them had to be the best. Timothy told us that they could study whatever they chose to at Erehwon. Mostly, he said, they chose to play football or stay in Europe with their mother and not go to school at all.
“Erehwon was a book about a Utopia by Samuel Butler,” Julia said. The Furey kids all looked at Julia. I hated when she showed off. I was afraid they wouldn’t like her.
“That’s right,” Nicholas, the oldest, said. “A Utopia was Dad’s big idea for our education. But Dad refers to it as ‘Now Here backward’ instead of nowhere.”
“Dad has lots of big ideas,” Sofia said and rolled her eyes.
“We’re Catholics,” Caroline said to me. “We don’t go to parochial school, but we are Catholics.” She was soft and gentle and seemed so old and wise. She looked about thirteen. She tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled warmly and with that smile she welcomed us, made us feel comfortable – like we belonged. I fell in love with her instantly. She asked which religion we were and I tried hard to remember. I wished we were Catholic just to be like her.
“Presbyterians,” Jane whispered.
“Presbyterians,” I repeated out loud.
Sofia did most of the talking. She told us they were millionaires and that they had flown here from Europe. I could tell she was the kind of person it was better to pretend you liked, stay on the good side of. “Our grandfather was in oil in Texas, so Mom’s a millionaire, but she left it all to us when she went to India.”
We know, I wanted to say. Your mother’s a Texan oil heiress and also a nun. But I didn’t, because Julia said it made you weaker if you knew too much about someone, as if you were curious and interested in other people because they were so much more fascinating than yourself.
Sofia didn’t seem to be suffering very much. In fact, none of them seemed to be. I thought of all the money Anton used to carry around. Then I thought about my twenty dollars.
“We’re Europeans, of course,” Sofia said and then explained that each one of them came from a different country and that each one of them had a different passport to prove it. She was French, Caroline Dutch, Timothy German, Nicholas was ‘almost’ African because he had ‘almost’ been born there, and Finny was Italian. “But Dad and Mom are both Irish, so of course we’re also Irish.”
“The fighting Irish,” Timothy said proudly. That was another thing they’d trumpet, the fact that they were Irish.
We’d lived in Europe too, several times, because Dad was working there. Once for five months when I was three years old. We’d sailed on the QEII, since Mom was afraid to fly. I remembered, or at least I thought I remembered, that trip, I’d heard about it so many times. One night we all turned green and threw up into little paper bags that Dad had knotted to the posts of our bunks. I remembered it clearly. I wanted to remember simply because Dad was there. On the arid island of Arran, in a dark stone church by the edge of the Firth of Clyde, I was baptized by the cold hand of a Presbyterian minister. For a long time I thought that made me Scottish.
“I’m Scottish,” I said. In school it was the big thing to come from somewhere else, anywhere but America.
“No you’re not, Kate,” Julia said. I wished she’d call me Toad, but Toad had been forgotten on that long stretch of road. “We’re New Yorkers.” Julia flared her nostrils. “Born in Harlem. All of us.”
“I am not Italian,” Finny lashed out suddenly. His eyes widened, enormous eyes. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t wearing any clothes. We weren’t allowed to go naked. Sofia started fighting with him, insisting he was Italian. I didn’t see that it mattered where he was from. I thought maybe he was suffering.
“He wasn’t planned,” Timothy told us. “He was a mistake.” Planned. Planned. That was another thing we asked each other in school: “Were you planned?” As if being planned meant being loved. It was clear to me Timothy liked to speak. There was nothing shy about him. He was all over the place – a wired energy. I preferred Finny, who was tiny and shy, younger than me.
“Let Finny be,” Nicholas said. His eyes were sharp. Caroline took Finny into her arms and held him for a moment. His blue eyes caught mine and then he pulled away from her. Marks from a too-tight elastic banded his stomach with the promise of clothes. I loved him just then and wanted to tell Mom. I wanted to tell her that I loved Caroline too. I saw it then, our lives coming together. It would be easy to make this work. I looked up the bluff to see if Mom was coming. Instead came a procession of naked grown-ups, marching solemnly toward the other tub. Quiet, like ghosts. There were four of them, with pasty pinkish skin and dark patches of pubic hair. Heads bowed. In their hands they carried white candles, which they set around their tub as they sank gently into the water. The wicks flickered and hissed, the flames opaque in the steam.
♦
Naked bodies. Everywhere naked bodies. Traipsing the grounds with their heads turned toward the sky in meditation. Sitting in groups, Indian style, deep in concentration, speaking of the process of processing emotions. Fat: stomachs bulging over penises. Fat: tubular breasts blending with bellies. Thin: all the private parts conspicuously revealed. Short and tall, old and shriveled: on the lawn doing calisthenics; in the baths and the pool; in the woods. Flat breast
s and big breasts. Long penises and puckered penises. Big, dark nipples. Cherry nipples and nipples like sores. Hairy bodies and smooth bodies. Hair from beneath arms and between legs. Black hair and orange hair and blond hair, and one lady with blue. Unruly hair and trimmed hair and penises that flapped over large hanging sacks for the balls.
All over the place were signs, poking from the grass, dangling from fences and buildings and doors, warning kids. They didn’t like kids at Esalen. KIDS DON’T RUN, KIDS NOT ALLOWED IN WORKSHOP AREAS, KIDS STAY OUT OF GARDEN, KIDS NOT ALLOWED AT BATHS UNATTENDED, KIDS STAY OFF THE GRASS, KIDS BE QUIET, KIDS NOT ALLOWED TO EAT IN THE LODGE.
♦
At Esalen we were supposed to love a lot of things and out of love our new life would emerge. It didn’t matter, therefore, if our car was gone, if we had no money, if Mom had had to borrow money from me. We were to love this new world, love it instantly and permanently. We were to love Anton as Mom loved him. Love his children, of course. Love Esalen, love the turquoise camper, you-name-it-love. Love, simple as that, as if the word meant eat or breathe. Love. The future was ours now, big and bright – a promise, a surprise.
We stayed at Esalen for just over a week, while Anton taught his workshops. As soon as he finished, though, we left, because he got in a fight with his supervisor, Helmut Kimp. It turned out they fought about jealousy and forgiveness and trust and love, love, love. Later we would all find that funny, since everyone was suppose to love one another so much at Esalen.
At first, though, Anton was busy with his ‘Romantic Love’ seminar, so we barely saw him. When we did it was just briefly, and he seemed impatient, ordering us (and his kids) around organizing the camper so that all our luggage fit in properly, giving us all jobs. His big blue eyes weren’t so flirtatious anymore. Rather they were determined, squinting, anxious to see that we did what he’d asked us to do. Then he was gone again. Even so it was clear that a lot was over. No more poker games or flirtatious stories about Texas meant to win us over. No more bills on our bedroom doors. Even our town, our pasts, had absolutely nothing to do with this new world – so utterly different, so out there, from what my sisters and I had known.
Mom told Jane, Julia and me not to worry about Anton’s impatience. She said it only meant that he felt comfortable around us now, that he could be himself and treat us like family.
When Mom wasn’t with Anton she was trying to help us settle in, being extra loving to Anton’s children so that they’d fall in love with her. Only Caroline paid any attention to Mom. The others ignored her and I was glad, because it annoyed me, all the attention she gave them.
Then Mom disappeared. After Anton taught the ‘Romantic Love’ seminar, he and Mom vanished into a seventy-two-hour session on ‘sensitivity training’, and for almost three days we didn’t see them. While they were gone we blended into the Furey family hierarchy.
They had an order: everyone watches out for themselves.
Our new home, the camper, was disgusting inside, even though everyone had ‘jobs’ to take care of it. Jane was quick to point out that our ‘jobs’ were so that Anton didn’t have to do anything himself. The camper was dark, with a kitchenette on one side and a dining booth on the other. The faint smell of old milk lingered in the indoor/outdoor carpet and a curling yellow strip of flypaper dripped from the ceiling light. Mom had scrubbed out the camper, trying to clean it up the way she used to clean our house back at home, but the effort was useless and I felt sorry for her. Since there was no iron, the calico curtains looked worse clean than dirty. And the Fureys by nature were sloppy. Her cleaning meant nothing, so she gave up.
At night, beds appeared from everywhere – the walls, the dining booth, the ceiling. Bunks hung above the windows, and the cab seat was used as ‘a cot’. That’s how Sofia put it. She said the camper slept ten ‘uncomfortably’, and I believed her. Anton and Mom had a bungalow on the Esalen grounds.
“It’s my father’s camper,” Sofia said and looked at Jane, Julia and me. “He bought it with our money.”
Good for you, I wanted to say. It was the ugliest place I’d ever slept in, uglier than the gas stations, and it was close inside and we kept knocking into each other, and Anton’s kids, everyone but Caroline, loved to fart. The place stank. They lit each other’s farts.
“You guys sure do fart a lot,” I said. They didn’t seem so sophisticated anymore.
In their world they wrestled and shot dart guns and listened incessantly to music. After a short time, even I knew the words to ‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down’ and ‘Old Man’ – songs that Dad would not have liked: he called this kind of music ‘pimple music’. In their world, they gave each other ‘dead legs’ and ‘Hertz doughnuts’, ‘hurts don’it’, which were both punches. Finny and Timothy pulled the wings off flies and then watched them try to fly. “Did you know that every time a fly lands it throws up?” Sofia asked us. “Watch out when you’re eating and one lands on your food.” Nicholas had a movie camera and filmed everything, getting the little kids to star in his features – that’s the word he used.
Jane did her needlepoint or read, keeping to herself. From a cassette of theirs Julia learned by heart the words to ‘Aquarius’, ‘Sodomy’, ‘Air’ and ‘Frank Mills’. She sang the songs over and over until everyone told her to shut up.
It didn’t take long for Julia to love this place. She was fascinated by all the nakedness and all the sex. She loved to watch naked masseurs massage naked bodies at the baths. She loved that there were so many children she could teach things to. On the chalkboard in the camper she drew pictures of vaginas and penises, diagramming them, and with a pointer pointing out the ‘labia majora’ and ‘minora’, the ‘clitoris’, and other words I’d never heard of and didn’t remember for long because I didn’t pay much attention. Her drawing of the vagina looked more like a sailboat than anything else; that’s what Timothy said and he laughed. And then we all laughed.
“You know what they do in workshops?” Sofia asked, interrupting the laughter. It was clear to me that Sofia didn’t like that Julia had everyone’s attention. “They get naked and paint each other’s bodies with blue paint. All of them, even your mother.”
For my part, I didn’t like all the nakedness. I started wearing a lot of clothes. I even wore underwear beneath my bathing suit. The more I noticed naked people the more they seemed to multiply. Even the scarecrow in the garden was naked.
We came together and then separated into the ‘big kids’ and the ‘little kids’. The big kids were Nicholas, Caroline, Jane, Julia and Sofia. Jane and Caroline mothered us, making sure we ate. They cooked elaborate dinners with beef hash and hot dogs and beans and things Mom never let us eat at home. Julia spent her days falling in love with Nicholas and helping him with his movies. She said she wanted to feel like Mom; she wanted to know how Mom had felt falling in love with Anton.
The little kids were Timothy (nine), Kate (eight), and Finny (five). Timothy resisted being a ‘little kid’ and tried hard to be a ‘big kid’ and that was fine with me and Finny. We preferred it to be just us. For a while it was fun to have no one telling me what to do and even my sisters left me alone. I was independent now, like a grown-up.
♦
“Put on clothes,” I said to Finny. That was my first order. It wasn’t only at the baths that he went naked; he never wore clothes and I couldn’t play with him like that’. “I can’t have you following me if you’re naked.” And since he obeyed, I loved him, and together we explored.
Bands of shadow and sun striped the trees and we marched through the forest behind the camper to the giant buttresses to collect rocks. The first game I taught Finny was the game of following me. The second was finding rocks. I carried my prospector’s pick and my chisel and my stout collecting bag. “Stout,” that was the word Dad had used when he’d given it to me. I wanted to show Finny the fruitcake melange of the Big Sur cliffs. I wanted to show him how geology was so active out here we could see it happening. I remembered my f
ather pulling off the road with my sisters and me to dissect road cuts and outcrops, examining the lost geology of New Jersey. He’d explain that two mountain ranges, both as high as the Himalayas, had come and gone, but that now it was static and the only way to know what had occurred was to read it in the rocks. The West was a different story, young in contrast. In the West, plates were sliding under and alongside each other, sending up mountain ranges, causing geysers and springs to burst steaming to the surface like pimples, causing volcanoes to erupt and sea floors to disappear, and it was all happening now. The way Dad spoke, in geological time, it was as if you could see mountain ranges rising, feel the land folding in on itself – see the earth being made. Dad would put his hands out in front of him and slide them alongside and under each other to show us how plates worked. I did the same with Finny. I wanted to show Finny all of this. I wanted him to listen to me the way my sisters and I listened to our father. Just showing Finny about the rocks made my father feel nearby. I didn’t know what I was saying or what I was doing with these tools, of course, but I acted as if I did.
We roamed. Esalen was beautiful, a brilliant green land with the ocean smashing on the rocky beach in front. There were lots of rocks in Big Sur. Serpentine; sandstone; schist. We found a lot of limestone inlaid with the fossils of conical shells – Gastropoda conacea. They were my favorite. Tiny shells trapped in permanence for so many years. Limestone of calcium carbonate. “Teeth are made of the same ingredients,” I said to Finny and tapped my front tooth. “And so is the Empire State Building.”
Bright Angel Time Page 7