by Linda Grant
She remembers how she had read R. D. Laing when she was a student. All madness is derived from the family, the mad are sane and the sane mad. But if this illogical warmth, this exuberance, this atavistic understanding of what you should cling to in life and what you should let go of is madness, then she is all for it. She does not understand Si and Ximena at all. The Newmans touch each other constantly, they are tactile people. Stephen’s mother sits for a few moments between courses, holding Andrea’s hand for no reason Andrea can understand other than a natural affection she herself has had to teach herself how to feel. To live is simple and obvious, is the point that is being made.
Still, the nausea of revulsion. She persuades herself that her persistent knot of anxiety is probably due to the long flight across the Atlantic and the van trip, and worrying about the kids. Because she needs to snap out of this snobbishness right now. This is where they are going to live, it has all been decided. She has given her consent to becoming an American, even if it involves a mink hat. The one thing she is not giving up is her husband, for whom she has fought. She, not he, insisted that they were going to make a real, not fake, marriage. She gave birth to two children. Always she has been bedeviled by those crows and their many meanings in her life, but she won’t put up with them spoiling this. She loves her husband and nothing will possess her to inflict a broken home on her children. Stephen is a fantastic father: he even irons their little clothes when he gets home from work; there is no way he will abandon them.
In the future, when she sees clients whose marriages are faltering, and are wondering whether they should leave or stay, she will remark (despite the rule of nondirectional counseling she must abide by): “Marriages last because the people in them want to be married.”
So what choice does she have?
“It’ll seem different in the morning,” she says. “I’ll be fine.”
“Good. I’m going to sleep. This is all nothing. It’s just a damned hat.”
He closes his eyes and the road rears up in front of him.
All across America he had been noticing cripples. Boys his own age, with long hair, earrings, bandanas, jeans, in wheelchairs or on crutches, missing an arm or a leg or two legs or two arms. He had seen for the first time a fleshy stump in shorts. He had noticed an eye permanently dragged open, with no eyelid, which must have been burned away. A missing nose. Scorch marks across the neck and chin. The maimed children of America. In Denver he saw a boy in a chair screaming at his parents in the street as they pushed him across an intersection, the poor mom and dad were in jail along with their kid. He thought of his parents like this, wheeling him around for the rest of his life, wheeling him to the bar where he would have sat and drank and wept. He’d known cripples, but they were poor bastards who were born that way and came up living in their own world on which he could gain no purchase, nor wanted to. Or they had had an accident (there was always some fool who really did jump off the roof for a dare). And in the neighborhood there were those who had come back from World War II no longer in one piece, people his parents’ age whom you could never imagine young and they stayed at home in a permanent twilight on military pensions.
Shocked and frightened to see what has happened to his own generation, that his decision to stay on in England to avoid the draft was well-founded, he lies thinking of those crippled men. For while he has often imagined his own death in combat, he had never given any thought to the war’s damaging him for life. That could have been me, been me, been me. He has no idea who he would be if he had no legs. Where, for example, would he have found a woman, unless she was some poor creature who would take a partial man because she could never get a whole one?
For several days Stephen is behind the wheel again, as the family takes in the sights of Los Angeles and eats at the Brown Derby restaurant, a diner in the shape of a hat, where they spot Farrah Fawcett with her hair in a flick, a sight so charming and innocent, Stephen thinks, so absolutely American, a buttered corncob kind of girl. But alone, he drives the van to the campus to see his old professor who had guided him through the process of applying for his Rhodes Scholarship. They had always liked each other and he had written to Professor Whaley to confess that he had been sent down, and what exactly for, a difficult letter to compose. The response had been cool but without any tone of moral outrage, and at the outset of this journey across America, he had hoped that this misdemeanor would be long forgotten.
“A research job?” Professor Whaley laughed. “With only a bachelor’s degree we could just about offer you a position as a lab technician.”
“What?”
“I’m so sorry, but what did you think? You’ve been out of your field for nearly a decade, you really don’t have any qualifications, for getting back into science. You were doing your research back in the solution phase, we’ve been automating peptide synthesis. Of course, if you want to come back and start your doctorate again, I’ll take you on as a student, but someone who graduated this summer is more up-to-date than you are.”
“That’s not true. I read up.”
“No, Mr. Newman, it’s not the same thing at all. Here’s what has been happening just here in our department.”
And Stephen is totally fazed. He has no idea what Professor Whaley is talking about, he can only just keep up.
“But what am I to do?” he cries.
“Well, we always need science journalists. Have you thought about trying Popular Science? Though of course you’d need to relocate to New York.”
Is this how Professor Whaley thinks of him? A guy who writes dumbed-down articles for Popular Science, which marvel over new inventions such as Velcro? He understands that his old professor is punishing him, he feels personally let down that his kid, his protégé, has turned out to be one of those hippies whose eyes have never been on the prize.
“Are you sure there’s no other opening, no avenue I could go down? What about the commercial sector?”
“Yes, you could try something like General Foods.”
Develop new breakfast cereals and potato chips? He would rather die.
“So you said in your letter that you got married,” says Professor Whaley, changing the subject.
“Yes, I have. And two kids.”
“Is your wife a scientist?”
“No. She’s a shrink.”
“Ah, the voodoo science.”
This is it. Professor Whaley has made it clear what he thinks of him, the defector, the second-rate phony. The verdict is agonizing because Stephen’s self-image is so bound up with his being the blue-eyed boy, the Rhodes Scholar with everything ahead of him, and now he is caught, trapped in a tight corner from which he can see no obvious escape.
He walks out to the van under blue skies and past palm trees, the Pacific only a mile or two away lapping the shores of the continent. I’m a nobody, he thinks.
Behind the wheel of the van he finds himself not heading home, but striking south toward San Diego. This wasn’t his intention, but he needs half an hour to clear his head, to take in what he has just heard. Half an hour is not enough, though, for the cataclysm which has occurred. With his eyes ahead of him, it seems entirely possible to keep on driving south until you run out of road but that’s a long long way in the future, you can reach near the end of the world before the road dies. Crossing America he was intent on a destination, going home, but now he is just a hand on the wheel and a foot on the gas.
When things like this happen to him, when he got sent down from Oxford because they found his acid-making factory, he experiences a heavy numbness. Andrea is always asking how he feels and the answer is, he feels nothing. He is encased in a thick membrane of indifference. That’s what envelops him now as he drives on. Fog.
The signs to San Diego remind him of his uncle Enrique, and of the merchant seaman’s document he has carried always in his wallet, proud of its possession, that once he was a sailor and still is, with the papers to prove it. The key to life is in the oceans. He could do it, he
could just take himself to the hiring hall and leave the van at the dockside and Andrea, Marianne and Max at his parents’ place to console themselves any way they can and find their own way home. He could be clear across the Pacific, sailing down past the coastline of Patagonia. Anything is possible.
Brooding on these thoughts, at Carlsbad, he picks up a lone hitchhiker who is working her way down the coast to Mexico. Standing at the roadside with her rucksack, her long hair swinging round her face, her tight jeans and cut-off top, she awakes in Stephen memories of long ago, of his forgotten college girlfriends who all looked much like she does. There is a type, this Californian kind of girl who dresses simply and is fresh and natural and does not have too many complicated European ideas in her head. She looks about twenty, more than a decade younger than him, and on an impulse he does not want to think too hard about, he pulls over and picks her up.
Susie is not Californian, she’s a girl from the real north country, way up in Canada, up and over the high line, Alberta, a place where you look out and you see endless nothing and the longer you stare the more you start hallucinating. But it’s not even where she is originally from, she was born in a cold, cold town in Ontario where nothing worthwhile has ever happened or will, and her dad moved the family out West to find work in the oil fields. So here she is, running away to find the Aztecs and eat peyote buttons and learn to fly like the guy in the Carlos Castaneda book.
“You know that’s not possible?” Stephen says. Back in college, a few of his customers had read the same book, The Teachings of Don Juan, and figured that if a Yaqui shaman could fly under the influence of mescaline, it ought to be possible to take off from the window of their college. All this had produced was broken legs and broken necks but adherents of the guru claimed that this was to do with the lack of a higher consciousness in Oxford undergraduates, the purity of whose minds were corroded by Western precepts like the Enlightenment.
“I heard people did,” says Susie. “Someone flew right across the Grand Canyon, a lot of people saw it.”
“It’s just an urban legend. No one can fly unless you’re a bird. No ingested chemical can overcome gravity.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“What do you mean? I’m not your dad.”
“You sound like my dad.”
“I’m not old enough to be anyone’s…” But he is. Not only does he have two kids of his own but technically, just about, if he’d started really early, if he had been precociously sexual, and found someone willing to do it with him (though he wasn’t and no one would), this girl could be his daughter. Which was absurd because he was not that old, just thirty-two.
The scenery of the southern coast is utterly beguiling, this is where someone like him could live, with the ocean ever present and a few strange plants whose names he doesn’t need to know growing by the roadside. Everything is big and meaningful and Susie, leaning her head out of the van window, points up to the sky, to a bird she thinks she’s seen there. “Is that an eagle?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know what an eagle looks like.”
“Do you mind if I sing a little?” she asks, turning to him. Hey! she has dimples.
“Do you have a good voice?”
“I sang in the church choir.”
“Okay, give it a try, I’ll listen. But no hymns. I’m not into that stuff. What else can you sing?”
“Are you okay with Leonard Cohen?”
“Of course, I grew up on him.”
“He’s super cool for an old guy.” And opening her mouth she begins to sing in a lovely voice of Marianne, to whom the speaker is saying good-bye. “That’s my daughter’s name. She’s Marianne, also. A friend of ours named her for that song, that is, she and my wife cooked up the name, I had no say at all but I’m glad that’s what they chose.”
Stephen remembers Grace standing by the bed in the hospital, as he might have thought the bad fairy would have hovered over the cradles of newborn infants in fairy tales had he been brought up in European darkness, where lives were fated and doomed from the outset. But he merely thought that Grace cast an unwelcome shadow over the sleeping head of his baby girl whose startling blue eyes and dark head-down marked her out as a human being with visible characteristics. Grace had lit a cigarette, the smoke wreathed around the newborn’s head, drawn into her lungs by the two tiny points of her adorable nostrils. “I think she’s Marianne, like in the Leonard Cohen song. So long, Marianne, because I’ll always be saying good-bye to her.”
The girl next to him scratches her flat belly. “I got a bite,” she says. “I slept in the forest somewhere and it was full of bugs.”
“You slept in the forest all by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t frightened?”
“No, I grew up in the wilderness, it doesn’t scare me.”
“What will happen when you get to Mexico? Do you know people there?”
“No. But I’ll be okay. I’ll find the people with the peyote and they’ll take care of me.”
“People can be nasty. You should watch out.”
“I never really met any who were, not in my hometown.”
“You’re too innocent. You really should reconsider this whole thing. Are you in school? Don’t you have studies?”
“I was, but I didn’t find it interesting. I don’t think I could survive if I didn’t have this trip. I know it’s going to be amazing. I just have to get to Mexico. I read up all about it, it’s the place I should be, I’m sure of that.”
“Here’s San Diego,” says Stephen. “I can’t take you any farther. I’ll pull over somewhere, you shouldn’t find it too hard to get a ride. If you get in any trucks, just tell them you’re angel beaver.”
“I know that already.”
“Good.”
He pulls over and she leans across and puts her arms round him. “Here’s a hug for you,” she says. He lightly kisses her on the cheek and on the same impulse which caused him to pick her up, he suddenly asks (and the words come out of his mouth before he’s thought them), “Listen, can you do me a favor?”
“What do you want?”
“A kiss, that’s all.”
“You want me to kiss you?”
“Yes, and that’s it, I promise. I won’t touch you anyplace.”
“Sure.”
She smells not too clean from her long road trip and her hair is dirty close up, but she kisses like she means it, which is all he really wants, with his tongue in her mouth and hers in his. His hand moves automatically toward her breast but he stops himself. “You can if you want,” she says. “I don’t care.” So he feels her breasts. Over her shoulder he can see the mattresses in the back where his kids have slept their way across America. Can he do this? Does he even want to? Oh, Susie. Oh, Susie Sue.
Hamster Years
In the house in Canonbury there were rooms that Marianne was not permitted to enter. It was a house which was all stairs, and corridors, doors with numbers on them, and some of these doors were always locked and others were not. Behind certain doors she could hear the sound of cats. In your childhood places seem more vast, they contract with age, but the house in Canonbury went on expanding, even after Marianne eventually left home.
A closed door would open suddenly to reveal an empty room, the carpets decorated with faded ivy patterns, and where the cats had lived there were stiff ammonia-smelling patches. Cold ceramic plates of gas fires stood in the fireplaces. Workmen came and removed them. False ceilings of Styrofoam squares were taken out to reveal ornamental ceiling roses and decorative cornices. Weeks later, the rooms were high, light and painted white or dragée-colored pastels. One afternoon, her father took her by the hand and opened a door which led to a place she had only seen from the window of her bedroom, the garden. The house just went on growing as Marianne grew.
A single door was always closed to her. Behind a sign, Do Not Enter, Silence, she could hear the sound of low voices, often weeping. One visitor to the closed room a
rrived in a chauffeur-driven car and the driver waited for her outside, smoking on the street.
Marianne dismissed these arrivals and departures. Her mother had a great many friends who came and went at exact intervals but she was always there, from when Marianne awoke in the morning, was given her breakfast, walked to school, was picked up again for lunch, returned back to school and then there her mummy was, waiting yet again at the gates with the other mummies. And only in the school holidays did she understand the vast extent of her mother’s social network and how implacably she was prepared to ignore her own daughter when these idle gossips were present, behind that closed door with its unfriendly signs.
(There is no point to a little brother.)
When they returned from America, back to the top-floor flat in Canonbury, Stephen went haywire for a few weeks. Every evening after the kids had gone to bed he lit a joint and put on his Beach Boys, Lovin’ Spoonful and Jefferson Airplane records, leaving Andrea to do the housework and look after the children. It was the point in the marriage when Andrea, looking back, could see that the whole thing could have gone under. He turned away from her in bed as if her flesh was repugnant to him, he averted his face when she was changing into her clothes, stripped down to her bra and panties. The children were patches of fog moving across the floor. He was going to leave her, she didn’t know he had already failed.