Dreaming : Hard Luck and Good Times in America (9780307807274)

by See, Carolyn

  But during the forties it was still cool to drink. People went to see The Thin Man, and they thought it was a comedy, not the story of a couple of childless drunks who solved murders because they didn’t have a life. (And when Paul Henreid lit those two cigarettes and gave one to Bette Davis, they thought he was romantic, not an ad for lung cancer.)

  From my point of view, life started to normalize a little. My mother still began the night with two enormous slugs, then passed out for an hour or so, but Charlie hung out with her during this process. A few new friends—hard drinkers all—began to come around as my mother began a new, monstrously unhappy life. When my dad had gone, he’d taken the books, the records, the pictures, and the fun. These new people were a boring bunch of bad drunks.

  Charlie stayed through it, even the terrible visits to my mother’s sister Helen in the high desert, where the grown-ups referred to me as “Probby,” short for Problem Child, and spoke at length of the terribleness of George, and many tears were shed. Charlie bought my mother a suede jacket and me a charm bracelet—the very height of fashion in its day.

  Every night, as my mother wept or snored or screamed, I did my homework and made phone calls. Charlie held my screeching mom in his burly, boring arms, bearing the burden of being the man my mom didn’t love. (Thank God for these surrogate dads, these strangers who come in off the street and act as grounding wires in houses where the misery level is so high, so high, that, properly harnessed, it could make trains run and airplanes fly.)

  “As soon as you’re eighteen, you’re out of here,” my mother said daily, in her lucid moments. “If you think you’re getting anything more than that out of me, forget it. Because as soon as you’re eighteen, you’re out of here. If you think you’re getting anything more than that out of me, forget it.” (Drunks are nothing if not repetitive.) But since I was twelve by then, I took that as a sign of hope. Six years! Anyone can stand six years!

  I took academic courses, even in junior high. By the end of eighth grade, my incessant hi theres earned me an invitation to Donnetta Dehan’s birthday party. I’d lucked into a cadre of four girls, two desperately poor, two quite rich. The rich girls—Joan and Nancy—had us over to their houses and lent us their clothes. The poor girl, still my best friend, lived alone with her drunken single mom who was wilder than my mother but far less mean. I made up the fourth. (Jackie, my friend, might not have thought so. Her mother stood hopefully by while she developed rheumatic fever, urging her to get out and play.) But when she was in a good mood Jackie’s mom laughed a lot.

  From when I was twelve to when I was sixteen my whole purpose and goal was to turn myself into a rock, a stone, an army tank. When my mother said I was like my father, I said nothing. When she said if I wanted clothes I’d have to work for them, I borrowed clothes from my rich friends. When she said men would know I’d be an easy lay because of my birthmark, I duly noted it. Everything my mother did I watched and thought about. Scorn was my career. When, once, she screamed at me about not doing the dishes, saying that I was lazy and irresponsible, just like my father, I lagged out to the kitchen and began, as slowly as possible, to wash the hated things. Suddenly, Charlie was beside me. “The trick is to do them fast and hard,” he whispered. “It’s only ten minutes if you do them that way.” After that, I did them fast and hard. When, once, my mother let me oversleep and be late for school, so that I’d “learn some discipline,” I was up after that before she was, every day.

  When you’re trapped in a nightmare, the urge, the perverse urge, is to see how and when you can make it worse. My mother was beginning to find life a little dull. After three years, a plain divorce wasn’t enough to warrant her twelve-hour wingdings, and we were running out of breakable stuff. She’d had a kind and faithful man who’d stuck by her four years while she freaked. Charlie kept taking us to places like the ballet and the Ice Capades and Rams football games and the track. Once my mother won eighty bucks off a two-dollar bet on a nag named Alpha down at Del Mar. So what if all the crying and screaming and vomiting and rolling around in agony on the floor had been inappropriate behavior? I don’t believe she could let that happen.

  Events came to my mother’s rescue. When I was fifteen, Charlie developed angina. The man was in terrible pain. It was disorienting, really, sitting at the dining-room table watching someone holding back the tears, and for once it wasn’t my mother. For Kate, this state of affairs got old mighty fast.

  Every Tuesday night Charlie and my mother drove me to a YMCA club in the basement of a Presbyterian church, where I relentlessly pursued my social agenda. They whiled away the two hours drinking at a nearby bar, the Windsor, far less raffish than the cozy SOS. A few weeks after Charlie got sick, my mom dressed up the way she did if she and Charlie were going out. “If Charlie comes by, tell him I went out,” she said.

  I gave her my usual look of scorn and went back to the book I was reading. She’d sold the house, bought a spiffy new car for cash, had money in the bank that she spent on herself. She could go to the moon as far as I was concerned.

  When Charlie came by with his bottles of scotch and bourbon, I realized, by his look, that something was truly up. Whatever was going on, he hadn’t been informed.

  “Can I come in, anyway?”

  “I don’t think so,” I stammered. “I don’t think she’d like that.”

  I went to bed and was woken up around midnight by someone banging on the kitchen door. I went out and saw Charlie through the screen, jimmying ineptly at the door with a crowbar.

  “Charlie,” I cried, “don’t do that, please! You know you shouldn’t. Please, Charlie, go home.” He walked away and I went back to sleep.

  My mother woke me up later, sitting on my twin bed. Moonlight streamed into the room, lighting her face. She looked happier than I’d ever seen her.

  “Charlie tried to kill Jim! He waited under the stairs and hit him across the head with a crowbar! It’s a miracle he isn’t dead!”

  “Jim?”

  “The man I went out with tonight. I met him at the Windsor Bar! I’ve called the ambulance! Jim’s in the hospital now! I’ve called the police. But Charlie ran away! I’ve told them where he lives.”

  “Jim?”

  “He’ll be all right. They said just a half an inch higher up and he’d be dead right now!” Her teeth chattered with excitement. She couldn’t stop grinning. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, her nylons rustling, her high heels trim and smart in the moonlight. She finally trotted back into the living room, calling up her friends, telling them what happened.

  The next day, drama or not, my mother went off to type, and I went to school. Old Jim, whoever he was, stayed in the hospital recovering from his concussion. When I got home from school the phone rang. I was hoping for a call from a cute boy and was disappointed and nervous to find that it was Charlie on the phone.

  “My mother isn’t here,” I began, but he interrupted me. “Penny, I want you to know I’ll always love you and I’m glad I knew you. I want you to be a good girl and do what your mother says.”

  “Well, sure, Charlie,” I said awkwardly. He had hung up. By six o’clock that night they’d fished his body out of the Pacific. My mother was peeved beyond words.

  The next day she was going to bring Jim home from the hospital. He would be spending the night so she could nurse him. I thought it might be smart to spend the night away from home.

  —

  A man sat at our shiny dinette set—Mother had sold our wooden table with its hand-done needlepoint-covered chairs—looking straight ahead into blank nothing. A purplish bruise spread from his temple above his ear down across his jaw. His head had been shaved, haphazardly, so in some places he was shiny bald, in other places his gray hair had been unevenly cut, sticking out at all angles. His whole head was covered with stitches. His face was an unnatural, clammy gray. His eyeballs were sick pink, and his baggy cheeks just hung there. He may have had a concussion, but it was a hangover he was feeling now. He wore one
of those terribly unattractive sleeveless ribbed undershirts that left his white shoulders and arms exposed and barely covered his slack little paunch. But it was his face that made the stone impression. He looked like a sewn-up corpse, Frankenstein’s monster, a dead guy.

  Mother introduced me, in a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth tone. I must have said something, but he couldn’t talk or move his head. He picked up the coffee cup in front of him (our best china), and his hand shook so badly that half the liquid spilled. Mother poured him a little more. Very slowly, he bent his butt-ugly head down to the cup and sucked at the coffee. Mother gazed at him fondly. I went into the bedroom and called up a girlfriend. I knew I was looking at a prospective stepfather, but I just couldn’t believe it.

  Within a couple of weeks we drove up to Victorville, where mother proudly exhibited this vile specimen to her horrified half sister. My Aunt Helen made some tactless remark, and my mother had a high-heel-clicking tizzy fit. She drove Jim and me on up to Las Vegas. Mother dragged her comatose prize up before a justice of the peace, married him, rented a very cheap motel room. They consummated their really gross union, while I kicked pebbles around in a weedy vacant lot. Then we drove home to LA, passing up Victorville where my aunt fumed, to a new life.

  Mother’s aim was to sober this guy up and start him practicing law again. I didn’t get it at the time, and I don’t get it now. My first objection: he was such an ugly dog! How could my mother, so beautiful, and who set such store on looks, tie up with someone who never looked any better, but only looked worse, worse, and worse?

  Second: Jim was mean as a snake. He insisted my mother stop working—which she did with alacrity, but that meant they had almost no money. Broke again! We moved into the second floor of a decrepit duplex out in Glassel Park, close to the railroad tracks. We had gone from nowhere to ultranowhere. My mother had sold off, broken, or given away anything that reminded her of my father, so everything pretty that we ever had was gone. Jim moved in with a set of law books and several jars of Durkee’s dressing, which he said went well with fish.

  I kept the twin-bed set, had my own books, some pictures from my dad, and put together the only good room in the house, a fact that did not go unnoticed by crazy Jim. I “ran away” a couple of times, but only got as far as Jackie’s. (During this time, when I was only in the tenth grade, I was asked to a senior prom, and my mother, from nowhere, found the money to buy me a dress.)

  By this time she was pregnant, and sick as a pig. She’d been married to Jim maybe three months. She threw up and threw up and threw up. She drank grape juice and ate crackers. Jim came home every night, and when he drank, boy, he drank! He played in a different league! He threw his shoes around the house. He passed out cold, falling straight forward from his heels, so that his forehead hit the floor and he got another concussion. My dad got married again about now. At fifteen, I could look at the future and think: three more years.

  During this time, when my mother complained of the agony she was going through, I answered carelessly, “Well, it’s your own fault, isn’t it? You didn’t have to get pregnant!” If she’d had the strength, she would have killed me. Jim, drunk one night, insulted my father, and I stood up so fast I turned over a chair. I was made to apologize, but left an unwrapped and very used sanitary napkin in the bathroom, out on the tub where he could get the message. When I had a canker sore, he suggested I apply alum, which produced such pain that I screamed, “I know you’re trying to KILL me!” When they had company, I borrowed a leaf from my mother’s book, holed up in my room, and cried like a banshee for hours at a time, so that their guests couldn’t hear themselves think.

  Every day I stepped smartly out to school, where I was in the Scholarship Society, worked on the school paper, and was a devoted member of the drama department. My friend Jackie’s mom had gone to work for a flossy clothing store (Matthews, of Beverly Hills) which she cheerfully stole blind so that Jackie might have her own extensive wardrobe. Of our two rich friends, Joan and Nancy, Joan’s mother gave us many dinners, and showed us a life of fine art, beautiful books, and drawers where clean underwear was stacked in perfect little piles. Nancy’s family was generous to a fault, inviting us all out to their perfect Malibu Beach house, where we lolled in the sun and threw parties and necked with cute boys, and stayed in a perfect French-provincial guest bedroom about twenty feet away from the Pacific.

  It wasn’t as if we hid our poverty and chaos, Jackie and me. It was a question of two goodhearted teenaged rich girls, Joan and Nancy, doing pure good for no reason I could think of. What Joan and Nancy’s mothers felt or said, I had no idea. But I knew when I stepped out of my own door I was free until I came home, and even at home there was the phone. I lived for the weekends too, when my dad came by to take me out.

  My mother got further and further along in her pregnancy. She lost weight all nine months, because she’d adopted a policy of not eating at all. One night in May, when I was sixteen and in the eleventh grade, sitting in my room typing a paper, my mother opened the door. She was smiling. “The baby’s coming,” she said. “Jim’s driving me to the hospital.” The old lush hauled himself out of his chair and drove her on over.

  The next day, I had a baby sister, Rose. Jim had seized an opportunity (when my mother was in the hospital and I was in school) to find all my baby pictures, all the snapshots of my mother, my father, me, and burn them in the family incinerator. My mother, home now, weighing ninety pounds and crazy as a loon, wandered through the house in a nightgown. She accused me of stealing Mallomars from the refrigerator. She made Jim steaks and gave herself and me chipped beef on toast. Jim went, walleyed and hungover, to work every morning, came back, drank two bottles of whiskey, and the shoes began to fly.

  One morning, when Rose had been home less than two weeks, my mother sat down at the breakfast table and looked at me spitefully. “You’re more like your father every day! You still have that look on your face! You’re going to have to live with your father. If he won’t take you, you’ll have to go out on your own. I can’t stand the responsibility anymore. You’ll find out what life is really like! Because I can’t believe he’ll ever let you in.”

  As I remember it, I got up, balanced my books on my hip, and left the house without a word. At the bus stop, at a pay phone, I called Daddy and told him what was up. He too was newly married, living in a one-room apartment with twin Murphy beds, but he said he was delighted and I really think he was.

  For the past five years I’d been putting friends in place around me, and at school, my friends, in proper horror, devised a plan. We went to a grocery store after school, picked up cardboard boxes, found a boy with the meanest expression and the biggest car.

  He drove me home that afternoon. My room opened directly off the living room. We went in the front door and made a sharp right. I packed my two straight skirts, my three blouses, my two pairs of Capezio flats. My books. My pictures. We scooped up everything in fifteen minutes flat. The whole house echoed and sang with frightfully bad energy. My mother, I knew, was in the back bedroom, either lying down with a headache or ready to spring into action; to kick me out of the house full of righteous rage, so sure had she been that my father wouldn’t take me.

  She never came out, though. The boy, a nice guy named Harry, gestured with his handsome head. Time to get in the car, time to go. It couldn’t be too soon for me. But before I left, and this is no bullshit, I took my scary-looking rescuer into the dining room, which opened onto a little outdoor side porch.

  “My sister,” I whispered. “Rose.”

  And if I had been older or smarter, I would have phoned or written or called a social service or the police. “Take care of the kid!” I would have said, “because the shit around here is certainly going to be hitting the fan!”

  But I wouldn’t even hear that expression for ten more years. And the little doll-thing all wrapped up in its pram with a mosquito net over it, a baby with a thousand-percent crazy mom and a dad whose veins
ran pure bourbon, didn’t carry any genuine reality for me.

  When we got to the apartment over on Melrose Avenue, my dad helped us with the boxes. My new stepmom, Wynn, gave me a monster hug. Everyone was laughing! They gave Harry some coffee and cake, and then he went home. I talked and talked, giving my side of the story. There was still a month left of school. We figured out logistics. How could I get over to John Marshall High? They’d manage it. Wynn piled on one of her abundant, delicious meals. She was tall, hefty, redheaded. She glowed in the yellow lamplight, and so did my dad. They kept putting their arms around me. We told silly jokes. We stayed up until maybe one o’clock. They were in AA, almost-founding father and mother of that wonderful organization, and in their colors, and their smiles, their goofy jokes, they seemed lighter than the actual air.

  Late, late at night, they pulled down their Murphy beds. (Because they were technically more poor at that time in their one-room apartment than my mother and Jim.) They’d fixed up a bed for me on the couch, no more than six feet away from where they slept. I knew this had to be a big stretch for them, for Wynn in particular, but nothing in their jokes, their embraces, and their firm resolve to say nothing bad about my mother or even her husband, gave away their concerns, or worries about what might happen in the future.

  One day at a time, right?

  Three weeks later, after school, while I was—as always—doing my homework, as relaxed and happy and shook-out as when you step off the most horrid rollercoaster ride in the scariest amusement park, the phone rang. I was sitting at a tiny desk in a little dressing room, next to the upright Murphy beds. Behind me, in the bathroom, Wynn had scribbled I love you to my dad in lipstick on the mirror. I answered the phone. It was my mother, crying. “Oh, please come home, you can come home now, I don’t care about the others, I don’t care about anyone but you, oh, please come home, you can do anything you want, you can have anything you want, because I hate the others, I hate the baby, I hate Jim, I hate them, hate them, hate them! So you can come home now and come home right now!”