One afternoon when I was angry, I tried to understand what was happening to me. Why would I forget the bad things that happened with my dad, the yelling, the touching? How did my mind wipe those memories clear? I looked up the word ‘amnesia’ in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary:
1. loss of memory due to... shock, fatigue, repression
2. a gap in one’s memory
3. the selective overlooking or ignoring of those events or acts that are not favorable or useful to one’s purpose or position.
I read the words at my long Formica desk, under the wall of windows looking towards our gardens. Then my mother called me to set the table for dinner. By the time I returned to my room later, I’d forgotten my anger, the word ‘amnesia,’ and the bad things that happened. My mind was wiped clear, again. I had a happy family, I mean really. Sure my family was unusual. We weren’t boring like lots of other parents. Our house was amazing. I flopped the dictionary closed, burying the word ‘amnesia’ into that dark maze of words on thin paper.
I TRAINED MYSELF from an early age with two urgent assignments; I had to save my parents, each in a different way. With my mother, I often felt older than her, being a serious little girl watching her try to figure out how to keep house, how to entertain. Now it seemed she was growing up with us. I was helping her, encouraging her independence, taking her shopping, teaching her how to chose her own clothes. I corrected her when she mispronounced words when she read aloud to us. She had left college with relief at twenty to get married, but now she had gone back to college to study criminal justice. I listened to her read her first papers and cheered her on.
With my father it was more complicated. No matter what was happening to me, no matter how bad it was, I still felt a deeply rooted requirement to keep my dad happy and alive. When there were good times between us, when we talked about a new sculpture or about racing cars, I was flooded with an engulfing love for him. I felt like a child gazing at him filled with adoration. A daddy’s girl. But when times got bad, I somehow survived by managing my memory. I sorted my memories of my dad into three boxes.
There was the cool stuff that crowded my memory bank, providing me with stories to tell about my life. Driving me and my best friend to school in his Jag. The sculpture he brought home. The Kandinsky lithographs he’d bought when he was poor and living in New York when he was just out of school and paid for them at $3 a week. How he cooked out of James Beard and Julia Child cookbooks when everyone else’s mom cooked out of Betty Crocker. Being the Architect’s daughter and knowing about buildings. Learning to sail the twenty-five-foot racing catamaran. Never mind that he took us out sailing the first time in gale-force winds, terrifying my mother, who couldn’t swim.
As a teenager, that was so cool. I loved the wind. I loved being out on the trapeze slung out over the waves rushing below me. My mother was scared of so many things. She was so scared of thunder and lightning she’d sit on the stairs with us when we were little kids and sing songs. I wasn’t. I’d sit at the window and watch it all. My dad wasn’t scared. When I was a little kid, he raced cars on weekends, rally-racing on dirt roads across country. I loved the photograph of him, airborne on a curve in the XK 140 Jag. “That’s my dad,” I’d tell a friend.
There were the “He was kind of crazy” collection of memories. How quickly we erase pain. How quickly nightmares disappear with morning. Oh, yeah, my dad would get down and stay in bed a lot. But other times he was excited about things and was the most exciting, interesting person you’d ever heard. That’s how people talked about him. “Oh yeah, Woodie, he’s a bit nuts, but what a great architect!” Or they’d say, “You either love him or hate him.” I guess if everyone else thought he was okay, then he must not be too crazy. And isn’t everybody’s family kind of crazy? My parents didn’t get drunk and stumble around, like some parents I knew. Now that was awful. I guessed we were lucky.
Those times he went to bed, our mother said he was tired, he’d been working hard. He needed to rest. But a weekend in bed became a week, and then longer, and we got used to it. “He’ll be better soon,” she’d say.
When I was fourteen, our family had been invited to an afternoon party to meet Eileen Ford, the head of the famous modeling agency in New York. My father had known her from debutante parties when he was in college. My mother, my brothers, and I were all dressed and ready to go, but my father lay in bed on his side reading architectural journals and smoking cigarettes.
I felt desperate to meet this icon of fashion, hoping I might be discovered. My mother kept us busy picking up the house, folding clothes, doing homework while we waited. Every so often she would go into the bedroom. I’d hear her cheerful voice say, “It’s time to go, if we want to get there in time.” Another hour would go by before she tried again, her voice upbeat, pleasant. “It’s getting late, we need to get going.”
The day of the Eileen Ford party, my brothers and I stayed out of sight, waiting. The afternoon ticked by. More phone calls were made. “We’re still coming. We’re running late, so terribly sorry.” I kept hoping we’d go, until the afternoon light greyed, and the day ground down into dullness. The last call, “I’m so sorry we weren’t able to make it.” My mother made dinner. We sat quietly around the table and she took his dinner in to him. I passed by his bedroom that night. At his bedside, a glaring spotlight on a folded-over page, his long shadow stretching out the door.
My mother had explained to me that my father was Manic Depressive, that he had highs and lows. Lows were when he couldn’t get out of bed, and highs were when he would say he was as high as a kite, bringing home stacks of new jazz records he’d listen to all night, or the finest Japanese or German cooking knives, a new Bertoia sculpture, or the Jaguar. That’s what I thought it was, highs and lows, you get used to it, you normalize it. It’s just the way my father was.
Finally there was the weird stuff. But even that fit in with the kind of crazy stuff. He was modern. He was against everything Victorian. He thought we shouldn’t be shy and embarrassed about our bodies. That’s why we are forbidden to close the bathroom door when we’re in the bathroom. That’s why he walked naked around the house, even though it’s a glass house with no walls in the living room. He told us there are nudist camps and he had wanted us to go. He even showed us a magazine with pictures of nudist camps. Gross. Weird. But other people do that too, so. So.
Well, it must be okay, then, to require us to be naked when we went on vacation on an island in Canada. He said, “Here’s our chance to be naked all day, in the wind. It’s so beautiful and natural.” My best friend Linda said, “That’s crazy,” and she wore her bathing suit. That night when my brothers and I lay in bed on our stomachs, our sunburned bottoms burning, she giggled.
And when he put his hand under my nightgown every night to slide over my bottom when I kissed him good night, he was checking to make sure I wasn’t wearing underpants. He said we need our bodies to breathe at night. It was all about being healthy. He wanted us to love our bodies and see how beautiful they were. That’s what he said, when he gave me a back rub and then a front rub. See how beautifully you are developing. It was weird. I just had to lie there and get through it. He didn’t do it to anyone else. I was sure of that. My brothers were okay. Then I’d go to sleep. I never thought to tell my mother. She was off at meetings. The next day, I’d forget it all, chatting with Linda about homework on our way to the bus. I tried not to think about it.
Each time I left home, I’d quickly forget about the crazy and the weird stuff. I’d just talk about the cool stuff. My dad. “Wow,” friends would say, “he’s so cool.” And when I was with my dad, I tried to have a great time like we always did. Tried to keep him upbeat and happy and excited about the things he loved, and then it was better for all of us.
SUMMER OF ‘69
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
AS I SHIFTED DOWN THE GEARS IN THE VW BUS and pulled to a stop in
front of the Corryville Rec Center, a heavy waft of chlorine hit me. At fifteen, with a learner’s permit, I’d driven into the city on the highway with my Dad. He looked at me approvingly. “Great job, Lilibet. Once you learn to double-shift down like a racing driver, I’ll let you drive the Jag.”
“Really? The Jag.” I was shocked.
“Someday, Sugar, someday. You’ve got a lot to learn first.”
I glanced at my watch. “Time to go teach my swim class. Bye, Dad. Have a great day.” I jumped out of the driver’s seat.
He walked around to the driver’s side of the bus and gave me a kiss on the cheek before getting in the van. He waved to the director of the Rec Center, walking towards us in front of the crumbling concrete city pool surrounded by ten-foot-high metal fences. He said, “Have a blast!” before driving off to walk the Sander Hall construction site a few blocks away.
“Sorry I’m late, Mr. Flannigan. My first time driving this far! Guess I’m still a little slow!”
“Hey, that’s cool, that’s cool.” A wiry man with a large afro grinned at me, the skinny white girl from suburbia in a hand-sewn sleeveless dress. “We haven’t opened the gate yet.” Crowds of kids were climbing up the metal mesh fence and shaking the gate. “They are going nuts to get in the water. Another hot one! That pool isn’t going to be much cooler.”
“Yeah, it’s another hot one.” I nodded, blushing. My first day, he guessed I was a college student. I wrote in my journal that he was as cool as a cucumber.
He looked around at his team, two life guards and three of us swimming teachers. “Hey, ready to go?” We all nodded and he opened the gate. A cheer and stampede of kids of all colors ran to crash into the water. As the only white girl there, I was afraid I might say something stupid and offend someone.
At my training for the job, the white woman from the Recreation Commission had said, “You have to keep these kids at arm’s length and stay in control.” But the kids just wanted me to play in the water with them.
“Miss Garber, look at me do a big ole cannon ball.”
“Miss Garber, look at me put my head underwater.”
“Miss, Miss, Miss.” They climbed on my shoulders, hung on my arms, threw their arms around my waist. “Miss, Miss, look at me!” Mondays and Wednesdays all summer. I taught swimming classes and then they had free time to play.
Two hundred kids in water two feet to three feet deep. All morning in the hot sun. Afternoons we closed the pool for lunch break and the team had a break upstairs in the rec room. The muggy, dark room was lit over the long padded pool table, where teenagers leaned over cue sticks and shot endless games of pool. Miss Jackson taught me to play pool, and I was thrilled when I beat Mr. Flannigan my first practice game. Thrilled by the click and roll of heavy balls slinking into pockets.
This had been my dad’s idea, for me to learn about the real world. I had suggested working at our local private club where we swam all summer, the Glendale Lyceum, but he said he didn’t want me being treated like hired help in our town. He said people there can be vicious with the help. I thought maybe they might be that way if you were Negro, but I didn’t think they’d treat me that way. But he said, “Absolutely not.” Then he found me this volunteer job.
In 1969, Corryville was a predominately African American community punctuated by burned-out buildings and empty blocks like broken teeth, remains from the riots two years before. The University had devoured the town block by block, razing whole streets of brick row houses for a stadium, parking, and my dad’s dorm. Urban renewal projects tore out more blocks and rerouted roads and plotted highways through the poor neighborhoods. Sander Hall dorm was slowly rising to tower over the community.
Most days Dad drove his new BMW because he had to carry around a lot of architects who were flying in to tour his buildings. As we commuted into town, I asked, “Sorry, Daddy, I don’t mean to be rude, but would it be okay if I read in the car? Extra credit summer reading before junior year. It’s so thick but I love it.”
He glanced over. “What’s the name of the book, Missy?”
“Five Smooth Stones. Have you heard of it? About a black man growing up in New Orleans.”
That summer, it seemed we were all practicing saying “a black,” ever since six Negro men from Lincoln Heights had come to our church to present “The Manifesto Addressed to the White Christian Churches and Jewish Synagogues in America” for five hundred million dollars in reparations for the cost of slavery and racism. I watched the seated congregation, women in summer dresses and hats, men in summer weight suits, some faces serious, some furious, some nodding with concern. The six men read the statement out loud. The funds would be for buying land for evicted farmers, printing presses and TV stations for Black Americans to have an alternative to white propaganda. At the end they chanted “Brothers and Sisters, We are no longer shuffling our feet and scratching our head. WE ARE TALL, BLACK, AND PROUD!” Some people stood up, angry, sputtering, “Who are you to demand money from us? Don’t you see all we’ve done for you?”
I was proud of Dad when he stood up. “We have no idea the kind of violence that Negros face every day. This is important for us to begin to understand.”
In the car, I continued explaining the book. “The hero comes North to go to college to become a lawyer. He falls in love with a white woman. He tells her it’s too dangerous to get married. But she’s sure they’ll be ok.”
Woodie nodded. “He’s right. It’s a terrible risk to take with all the racism in this country.” I’d seen a photograph of a black and white couple in LIFE Magazine surrounded by hateful white faces. On the cover of this book was a painting, like a Klimt, of a biracial couple with their arms around each other. I never imagined that in two years my first love and I would stand together the same way in front of a mirror, gazing at ourselves.
Dad was on his way to give a tour at The College of Nursing he had designed; it was next door to the Rec Center. I said, “Just park at the College. I’ll walk over to the pool.”
I didn’t want to be seen getting out of this expensive car when I got dropped off at the Pool. Didn’t want anyone to think I was a spoiled rich kid.
One day I pointed to the Nursing School across the field to Mr. Flannigan. “My dad designed that school.”
“That’s cool,” he nodded.
“It is, I mean, really cool.” I stumbled awkwardly to explain about the crushed white stones pressed into epoxy panels that reflected the sun. I pointed, “And those levers move to block the sun to keep it cool inside.”
“Man, we could stand for some of those over here!” He laughed and then looked towards the campus. “But seriously, who ever thought to put that big ugly tower on campus? We’re no New York City! It’s like the Man hanging over us, casting a big shadow across our town.” We turned towards campus, to see cranes on the top of the tower, hauling materials up to the top. “It keeps getting taller and taller, like the Tower of Babel. When will it stop?”
I stared into his handsome, serious face. I’d never thought people wouldn’t like my dad’s tower. I hadn’t imagined how it affected people living next to it. In the beautiful painting at Woodie’s office, the dorm was shown with trees and grass around it. It didn’t show the crowded, nineteenth-century four-story apartments on Jefferson Street across the street.
I offered, “It must feel like a big intrusion on the neighborhood.”
He added, bitterly, “What’s left of it. Okay, back to swimming lessons.”
MY JOURNAL FROM 1969 shows a culture in flux and the changes slowly seeping into our life at home. I planted fifty-four tomato plants, countless pachysandra to cover hillsides, weeded for days in ninety degrees, and spent all my babysitting money on fabric to sew mod outfits on my Singer sewing machine. My father got crazy over the groundhogs and put rags and gasoline down the hole to burn them out. My brothers were disgusted. They said he burned the babies to death and the mother ran out another hole. My best friend got tipsy on champagne at a neigh
bor’s outdoor wedding while I got moody and sarcastic. We continued on my father’s grand plan for landscaping around the house: “August 3rd. It’s a relief when the weekends are over. We are presently building a little canal on the west and north sides of the house. Digging out earth, digging up rocks, and dumping them. Wow—my back has never hurt like this.”
At thirteen, my brother Wood was growing his hair longer so he could tuck it behind his ears. He spent afternoons making gunpowder with his best friend. On a hill in our yard he was trying it out, blowing up his collection of car and ship models he’d spent years carefully gluing together. I complained to my mother. “Isn’t using gunpowder against the law?”
“Oh, Elizabeth, it’s just fine. Just as long as they don’t blow off their fingers. And I made your brother swear he wouldn’t.” She laughed. “Relax. He can do what he chooses to do. It’s fine.” Our father would have forbidden it and yelled at him, but my mom had been developing a philosophy with us. She would say to us, “I trust your ability to make a decision. Just walk it through first. Once you make your decision, I completely support you, even if I don’t agree with you.”
That summer I became lonely without realizing it, hungering for a deeper connection. My best friend, Linda, adored my family and went with us everywhere, on vacations or swimming, or helped us garden. She knew some things were weird in our family. When my father sometimes answered the door stark naked except for TIME magazine in front of his groin, she’d say, “Hello, Mr. Garber, is Elizabeth home?” as if this was the most normal thing. She’d laugh it off. “Your dad is such a character.” She sighed, “You have the best family.” We conferred on clothes and sewed constantly. Our latest project had been the Seventeen Magazine Model Search. We made outfits, took black and white photos of each other posing on granite boulders in our gardens with my mother’s Brownie camera.
But I had a secret side I didn’t understand. I apologized in my journal about getting upset about things. Linda started leaving and waiting until I got over being grumpy. Intense moods came over me. I was consumed with feelings and wrote my first poem. One moment I’d been happy to show off a new outfit I’d sewn to my friends, and then in the next I couldn’t stand chatting. I suddenly was aware we were standing on a planet spinning in a vast universe of planets and suns. How could people act like nothing was going on? I saw my life from a telescope and a microscope at the same time. Everything changed, and writing in my journal seemed to be the only thing that helped.
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