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

by See, Carolyn

  I’d come in as a bankrupt: my own mother didn’t want me, that was bad enough. I was by definition unloved, but beyond that my mother and her husband were alcoholics, unregenerate and shameful. Wynn would never bad-mouth them directly, but her opinion of alcoholics who didn’t choose to turn their lives and minds over to the care of God pretty closely paralleled what a Methodist minister might think of the Devil himself.

  My mother, to justify our poverty, had drummed it into me that fancy clothes were common, that noticeable jewelry was common, that cosmetics were common. When Wynn took a look at our new bungalow and decided she was going to give it “window treatments,” I was appalled. When she looked at the kitchen, and decided that what it needed was black wallpaper on the ceiling studded with cabbage roses as big as human heads, I was stunned. She made up a room for me, without asking me what I wanted. She put pale green flowered wallpaper on the ceiling, and carried it down three or four inches onto the walls themselves, cutting out patterns following the flowers. It was hideous, scary, and full of well-meaning. She had already painted the pure white stucco walls chartreuse. And sewn up slick taffeta rayon bedspreads in flowery chartreuse and green.

  She talked to me for hours, as she Scotchgarded couches, and made sandy yogurt. She told me about her life and my dad’s life. She advised me never to have an affair until I was married. She told me to let God into my life. She told me never to work harder on the first day of a job than I was ever going to work. She bought me every kind of makeup to conceal my birthmark. She gave me interminable lectures on picking up after myself, and I passed them on to my own children and stepchildren and students: “Always pretend a detective is after you, and he’s standing in the house looking for you. There should be no trace of you anywhere.”

  The only currency I had to defend myself with was snippy disapproval. Faced with this, and intense longings that she must have at last realized she was not going to satisfy through AA, Wynn began to zone out. She bought twenty-seven toby jugs in unfinished plaster, and packed them on top of the kitchen sink. She would paint them, she said, and fill them with twenty-seven kinds of homemade cookies. At one time she had five separate couches in the backyard, waiting to be reupholstered. (My friends would come over and snicker.)

  Wynn took on more and more in AA. I had moved in with them in May 1950. After six weeks, we moved into the bungalow in July. By September, Wynn would be on the phone five or six hours a day and far, far into the night. Had someone “slipped” and not admitted it? Was aspirin a “slip”? Had someone used his or her name to gain glory, thus violating his or her anonymity?

  She spent entire days making elaborate checkerboard sandwiches, slicing loaves of bread lengthwise six times in two directions, taking them apart, filling up the holes with pureed avocado, thickened sour cream, lime-and-chive puree, wrapping the whole reconstituted package in wax paper, refrigerating it for twenty-four hours, and slicing it down into a checkerboard pattern for recovering alcoholic ladies. God help them all if it didn’t look like a perfect checkerboard.

  Wynn began to get on my case about my birthmark. She knew it would go away if I prayed every day, and turned my life and mind over to the care of God. But my life and mind were the only things I had. I yelled at her. My dad shivered. Wynn began to wallpaper the dining room, staying up until three in the morning to do it.

  On Thanksgiving, my dad and Wynn gave a dinner for thirty-two recovering alcoholics. Booker and Mabel—that sweet wino and his jolly wife—weren’t much in evidence now. The people coming to dinner were bankers and their wives, businessmen; movers and shakers in this classless organization. Dad and Wynn weren’t speaking. They had cooked the turkey in one of those freestanding portable ovens so popular at the time. The turkey had to be lifted up and out of the oven. They dropped it. The guests were already seated, having drunk their “mulled wine” made from tomato juice and orange juice heated with cinnamon. My father and Wynn looked at each other over the steaming bird. Without a word, they hauled it up off the floor and onto a waiting platter. I desperately swabbed up the greasy linoleum. Five minutes later, Wynn was talking to God again, offering up a particularly effusive grace which asked forgiveness for “every drunk who has slipped,” and every soul, however misguided, who refused to let God into his or her heart. And yet, I have to say it, that was the best Thanksgiving I’d ever had. And those checkerboard sandwiches were great. Wynn was doing the best she could. Everyone did.

  By early December, Wynn had signed up to bring Christmas presents and a Christmas program to a mental hospital. She was just supposed to help the drunk ward, but once again her impulses tripped her up. She would be bringing hundreds of shoe boxes full of toothbrushes and razors and toothpaste and aftershave and the Big Book; sewing kits, and cologne, and rouge and powder for all the ladies, drunk, nuts, or whatever. The house was a jungle of shoe boxes. She put me in charge of the program. Plenty of paranoid schizophrenics got to hear me perform a dramatic declamation as the Prince in Shakespeare’s King John, while my friend Beryl danced en pointe. You never saw such a bunch of depressed crazy people.

  Wynn kept waiting for thanks that never came. She told me that my father was weak, that she was too much woman for him. She complained to him (with reason) about my insolence. She told him he wasn’t following the Program correctly. That hurt, and he yelled at her. I was astonished. I had never heard him raise his voice before. All he had ever done before was leave. So why didn’t he leave now?

  He couldn’t leave. First, he had me to think about, and, because he was a decent man, he had to stick around until I graduated from high school. (The assumption was that I would get a job typing. Wynn said I didn’t have the discipline or confidence to be a waitress.) Second, Wynn had the clout in AA. She was the one in the Book; he was only her opening act. She always had the moral high ground. Her enemies became “dry drunks,” or they had “slipped” and wouldn’t admit it, or—most difficult to fight against—they were still “harboring resentments.” “You’re harboring resentments!? the poor woman would scream at me. “I am not!” I’d desperately yell back.

  “See? That just proves it!”

  Third, by New Year’s Day, Wynn had taken another tack. Secure in her own sobriety, she’d been giving out kisses fast and loose, finally settling in on Phil P., one of the handsomest, sweetest (married) men in AA, very close to Big Bill, one of the oldest timers. Phil P. was tall, so tall that he stood on one step of our front porch and Wynn, taller than my dad, remember, had to stand on a step up from Phil to get in convenient line with his lips. At parties, they stood in broad daylight on the front steps, hugging, kissing, stopping traffic, and effectively becoming the center of attention—since all the people at the party, hearing of this commotion, managed to find an excuse to come in or out of the front door, just to check the scene. What a sight they were, Wynn and Phil, with their astonishing good looks and their sweet murmurs! And how utterly immune to criticism. Their Programs were in perfect order, they were absolutely above reproach.

  It drove my father almost bats. Wynn had preempted his ace in the hole, his philandering, the only thing that managed to keep him sane. Here was Wynn, using his own stuff against him. She had God and country on her side, and now she pulled out the old sexual glamor to put him in his place.

  His pitch at meetings became more clownish, hers more pious, sexy, high-flown. By March, because the stress in the house had become intense, I told my father I’d be leaving right after high school graduation. We sat in my garishly overdecorated bedroom. Daddy had come in to tell me to be kinder to Wynn, more respectful, something like that. I did have some strong resentments by then. Wynn had railed that I should get a job; I was not only Godless, I was lazy, lazy! But I absolutely refused to get a job until after I graduated. They would not get rid of their responsibility until I was out of high school.

  As I sat at the frilled dressing table Wynn had made for me—chartreuse taffeta gathered and tacked all the way around—I registered his lo
ok with sorrow. He was the human I loved most in the world, he had always been kind to me, and he was so relieved that I’d be leaving he couldn’t see straight.

  “Well,” he said, “you’ll be leaving home when you’re seventeen. I guess that’s not so bad. I left home when I was eighteen. Are you going to be a typist? Maybe you can work up to stenographer.”

  “I’ll work part-time,” I said. “I plan to go to college.”

  He sat on one of my slippery twin beds, slouching, his hands slack between his knees. “That takes money …”

  “Don’t worry,” I said haughtily. “I won’t take any money from you. I’ll work my way through.”

  He told me he loved me, and then got up and left the room. Regret, guilt, and misery showed up about equally in his face. But I heard him out in the hall telling Wynn that I’d be leaving soon, and his tone was light.

  Wynn gave me more advice about the outside world: “Always buy modern furniture, because people on a budget can’t afford antiques,” and lectured me some more about my birthmark: “Always blend your base makeup into the area between your eyes and your ears. That’s a patch of skin that you almost always miss.”

  I had been a fanatic about school, piling up A’s, getting the lead in the senior play, winning the journalism award, and in my third year at Marshall there wasn’t one prom I’d missed. It was my ambition to go to my own senior prom with the student-body president, but he was going steady. I wished on stars like a maniac, and the girlfriend of the vice president had to leave town. I ended up going to the prom with him. Only a month to go before I’d be out on my own.

  —

  Alcoholics Anonymous does that one wonderful thing: if people want to stop drinking or doing drugs, they can. AA does a second wonderful thing: for people who are aware of the abyss and worry about it, the outfit builds a wonderful suspension bridge made of the sweetest consolation in the world—the pitch, the story.

  AA can be said to have worked for my father and Wynn. Although they would divorce, neither of them would ever take a drink again. But the organization never addressed my father’s smoking—he was a three-pack-a-day man, and wrote enthusiastic newspaper columns about smokers’ rights up until he died from lung cancer. It never addressed his addiction to women, which broke a lot of hearts, including his. Once, when my dad was old and in a funk, I asked him what was wrong. “I’m thinking,” he said, “about the general sadness of things.” (For after a long, pleasure-filled life, George succumbed to heavy depression and died in wretchedness.) Still, he never took another drink.

  Wynn got cancer within a year after I left—cancer of the uterus—and when her uterus went, so did their sex life. Wynn, with characteristic energy, seized the chance that cancer gave her, and became chairperson of the regional American Cancer Society. Just as she had in AA, Wynn rose high in the organization. She made another gallant run at a rich and prestigious marriage, but she struck out. AA couldn’t fix the fundamental fact that she was a hard-luck girl from the American underclass, with a snowball’s chance in hell of any dignity, respect, financial security, recognition.

  But here’s the other thing: my father wanted, above all else, to write. My first and second husbands wanted, above all else, to write. All I ever wanted was to write. But guess who really got to be the writer? Who’s the one in our family who has actually changed, improved, transformed thousands of lives? The woman who wrote “Freedom from Bondage” under the section “They Lost Nearly All” in the AA Big Book. The girl who lost all her teeth from typhoid when she was in her teens, who slung hash way up into her forties, and who died a cruel death from cancer when she was way too young. She couldn’t have done it if she hadn’t “lost nearly all.”

  The night of graduation day in June 1951 I didn’t go home and I didn’t call. The next afternoon, when I knew neither of them would be in the house, I went back, put some clothes in boxes—leaving in my coordinated closet many of the things that Wynn had picked out for me. I would go to live for six months with my poor but cheerful friend Jackie, and her rowdy, drunken mom. After that I would live alone, in five-dollar-a-week furnished rooms, having a pretty good time until I married at twenty. Daddy and Wynn would stay together for about five more years.

  Across the San Fernando Valley, in a newly purchased three-bedroom house, my sister Rose was growing up in hell.

  4. ROSE AS A KID

  My half sister, Rose, daughter of Kate and Jim Daly

  After I left my father’s, I saw both sets of parents every other week, taking the streetcar long distances from Hollywood out into the Valley. I saw my father and Wynn for a treat. Now that I was out of there we got along again.

  I saw my mother for Rose. I had the idea that I could “save” Rose, do for her what Wynn and my father had done for me.

  Rose, as a baby, would have heard the sound of men’s shoes crashing around her crib. (My mother told me that Jim still threw shoes.) She would have spent days and nights listening to my mother scream and cry. Often, when I went over there, Kate’s face would be swollen to a solid pink slab. During those years, Mother was on a particular kick: “Every day, every day for the rest of my life, I’m going to have to get up, fix breakfast, and get Jim to work! Then every day, I’m going to have to take care of her. Tell me. Tell me! What’s the use of living? Because every day for the rest of my life …”

  Mother had moved out of Jim’s room and slept in the same room as Rose. She had stopped eating again and weighed in at under ninety pounds. When the doctor told Jim to stop drinking, he switched from scotch to vodka. For a few weeks, he really did stop drinking, deciding on maybe twenty or twenty-five Bromo-Seltzers a day instead. They turned him blue and made him so weird that everyone was sneakily relieved when he went back to vodka.

  Poor Jim! He must have been a bad man at heart, and married my mother in the certain hope that he could bully her, fling his shoes around, throw up on the rug, lose his driver’s license and his job, and generally fill the role of asshole the way he had in his first marriage. He might not have been playing with a full deck. He spoke in the cryptic ways of the stone-drunk. He’d peer with glassy eyes at my mother and then remark, “If I were a gopher, I’d gopher you.” Whenever he saw me, even after he’d burned my baby pictures, he’d sigh and say, “Ah! Penny’s from Heaven.” To Rose his signature words were, “You’re my little princess.”

  Jim wouldn’t join AA, he said, because he was “a professional man.” He was doing great if he remembered to say, “If I were a gopher I’d gopher you.”

  Jim developed heart trouble. Looking like some badly drawn science-fiction beast, he’d sit staring at Lawrence Welk on TV, and the terrible pain of angina would overtake him. “Quick, Kate, my pills!” He’d sit there, turning bluer than his usual shade, his face straining to show expression. Mother would stay sitting, then, regretfully, she’d get to her feet and saunter into the kitchen, where she kept his pills along with an avocado seed she’d been trying to sprout. Sauntering still, she’d wander back into the living room, and drop the bottle of pills into his lap.

  Now, the voice of reason and a kazillion years of therapy suggest: why didn’t Jim keep his pills in his own pocket? Why didn’t Mother, on the other hand, saunter out to the kitchen, go on out the back door, get in the car, drive out for an ice-cream soda or a couple of double martinis, and come back in four hours, when the chances of finding him dead would be greatly increased? The answer is that she needed him alive to support her and Rose, and more important, she’d finally found a man who was as awful as her wildest dreams.

  Why didn’t the visiting eighteen-year-old stepdaughter waitress, her tip money securely weighting her right pocket, a couple of semesters of community college already in her accomplishment bank, rush forward, wrest the pills from her mother’s clenched fist, open the damn bottle up, and put a couple of pills into Jim’s hands? Well, he was a person I wouldn’t have minded seeing dead; I also wouldn’t have minded seeing him die in front of my eyes.


  One afternoon I went out after school to visit my mother and sister. I’d bought Rose a gift of a frilly navy-blue organdy dress, and little socks to match. It delighted me beyond words to buy extravagant gifts and negligently toss them in my mother’s direction (a bit like those fabled pills, I see now), and in the toss was the silent insult: “I’m just eighteen, I’m working my way through school. I can afford things for her, what’s the matter with you?”

  Mother was out in the backyard, hanging up spanking clean sheets, making them snap so that they’d hang perfectly. She was smiling, and her cheeks were pink.

  “Where’s Rose?”

  “I was hanging up the laundry and I turned my back, just for a minute, and she upset the basket. She ruined a whole load! I whipped her with a coat hanger and she ran into the house and under her bed. I had to do the whole load over again. I’m going to have to leave this out overnight.” (She hated to leave clothes out overnight, saw it as one of the many marks of a bad housekeeper.)

  “I have a dress here for her. And some socks.”

  She marched into the house and the spotless bedroom. “Rose! Penny’s here. She’s got something for you. Come on out and try it on.”

  Nothing, not a sound. Mother picked up the coat hanger, a wooden one. “Come on! Come on out!” She poked under the bed, as if she were rousting a rat. “Come on. I’m going to get mad if you don’t come out!”

  Not a sound.