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

by See, Carolyn

  “And the only other time he spanked me was when I crossed the street without asking, to play with some friends and they couldn’t find me. That was the worst, my father being mad at me. He spanked me really hard. When I came home, I had to sit in a chair in the middle of the living room for hours. I was in deep shit that night.

  “And, no, I have no recollection of them fighting or being drunk when he was alive. And I don’t remember her being physically abusive. She’d shake me a little, but only when I was bad. And I remember when you brought Lisa over to spend the weekend when she was real little. Mother thought that was great. And I remember another time when you came over for the afternoon and she cried after you left. She said she missed you. I’m going to say that the only strange thing I remember from when my father was alive was once our cat caught a mouse and Mother chased them outside, but later, after it was dark, she took a flashlight and the two of us went out back, so she could show me how the mouse was still alive and the cat was still torturing it.

  “So that’s what I remember! Until one morning, when I was seven and a half, my mother came in the room and didn’t get me ready for school. She was medium grouchy, and she said, ‘Just put on your robe and slippers and go next door to Mrs. Davis.’ There was only one way out, through the living room, and as we went through we passed my father’s chair and she said don’t look, don’t look! So, of course, I looked and I saw him in the chair. I got a pretty good idea of what was happening during the morning because all the cars were coming and going. Finally, she finally came over and looked me straight in the face and said, ‘Your father’s dead.’ She didn’t let me go to the funeral and she never took me to the grave. She’d always say, ‘Get somebody else to take you.’

  “And then it began to set in with me that there were just the two of us now. She began sitting in his chair. All my friends, all my Brownies, all that was over. All my tap lessons were over. We couldn’t afford it, she said. We couldn’t afford anything. What I found out later, and I mean really later, was that my father left all his money to me, in a trust fund. She had to show a man named Mr. Ford receipts for all the money she took out, like for my dental bills and my clothes. She couldn’t spend money on herself. It was all for me.

  “I’m going to say it was early spring of 1958 when she moved us both up to Victorville to be with our aunt Helen. And for a while we actually had to live with Aunt Helen? I’ll always remember the smell of that horrible den! And all that yucca furniture. It was so hot. And that lifestyle she had. Like she’d come home from work and they sat down and drank and bullshitted from five-thirty to about eight-thirty and so if you got dinner at nine you were really lucky. I had to play outside a lot. They were always sending me outside. There were absolutely no kids to play with. Everybody was grown. Nothing but adults. So when we got our own little house just down the street, I was happy, but mother was bitter, bitter. She was a working single mother, coming home to nothing but a kid. Oh, she had her girlfriends. They played poker every once in a while. And when I listen to Oprah Winfrey now I see that things certainly could have been a lot worse. I mean, Mother didn’t bring any men around! She was so lonely, so lonely.

  “But Aunt Helen! She was the ringleader! As bad as Mother got to be, Helen was worse, much much worse. You know how Mother hated snakes and sometimes my father used to torture her, when she’d be in the kitchen and he’d be watching TV, and a snake would come on Wild Kingdom or something? He’d call, ‘Kate! Oh, Kate! Come on out and watch! Perry Como’s on, and isn’t he your favorite singer?’ And Kate would come out and see the snake and scream? Well, once the phone rang over at our house, and Aunt Helen went over and picked it up and got this surprised look on her face and said in a real important, low voice, ‘Kate. It’s George. Calling for you.’ And our mother’s face just lit up with joy. It’s the only time I ever remember her ever looking like a real woman. But, of course, it was nobody. It was just Aunt Helen being mean.

  “I decked her once, I did. Knocked her glasses off and sent her falling back into a chair. We were standing in my mother’s kitchen, our mother’s kitchen. Mother was out back, watering something in that shitty little backyard in the desert. You know how she was always trying to get things to grow? Well, Aunt Helen said something bitchy about Mother and I couldn’t take it, I decked her. I’m surprised they never told you that, the Ungrateful Rose hitting her dear Aunt Helen!

  “I never hit Mother. But I remember a time when she was trying to strangle me. She had me over on the bed and her hands were around my neck and I was beginning to get really scared so I put my feet into her stomach and pushed her off me. It was really more like self-defense.

  “Then Aunt Helen killed somebody in a drunk-driving accident. He died and she had to spend some time in the hospital. Mother said, ‘She’s in the hospital, but she’s OK.’ Then Helen came home and sat on her couch. She had to have a sedative. Mother made fun of her for that. She had to have a sedative! Then she said to me, ‘Oh, this man died. But don’t talk about it.’ It never got into the papers.

  “Mother wanted me to be declared legally incorrigible. But I was bad! I was really bad! I took Mother’s credit card! And I took the car without her permission and drove down to San Bernardino so I could look in the stores. I smoked pot under her own roof. And there was one day in junior high, two other girls and I pulled three fire alarms in three separate periods. So we had all the kids in school standing out on the lawn three separate times in one day. That was a felony offense. It was, really.

  “But if Mother had ever taken me shopping, like mothers are supposed to take their teenaged daughters, maybe I wouldn’t have taken the car and the credit cards. I was trapped, you know? I was trapped in Victorville. I never even had a bicycle. She said, ‘You’ll ride out in front of a car and get run over.’ ”

  My mother, Aunt Helen, and Rose. It makes me sick to look at this picture.

  Right now, in present time, Rose sits in a kitchen drinking coffee. It comes to me that I don’t remember too many bad things before my dad left, and maybe that’s comparable to Rose remembering her early childhood as OK. Our mother made plum jam. It doesn’t seem possible, but anything is possible, and the biggest example of that is: here I am, sitting at a kitchen table with Rose. She’s forty-five now, and plump. But—as with anyone in any family—I can see past the middle-aged lady to the little girl in tap shoes, to the sad little kid, twelve years old and fooling with mascara, to the forever-laughing madcap zany seventeen-year-old whose favorite pastime was the True Diet, so she was svelte, and always giggling. Her favorite piece of clothing was a white feather boa. Rose, the giddy goofball! My little sister.

  “You know,” Rose says, “Aunt Helen liked to slap people. She’d slap you for your elbows on the table, she’d slap you for a wrong word. She’d even slap her grandson when he was sixteen, and came in the house with a new date. Why’d she have to use such violence? Sometimes, later, much later, when Mark and I had jewels and drugs and money in the house, we’d keep guns, but we never had to use them. I hate violence!”

  5. GETTING MARRIED

  Richard See and I cut the cake at the traditional Chinese wedding banquet

  There is such a thing as the time-bomb theory of existence, that all of us are wired like a string of Chinese firecrackers, that explosions wait in all of us, and we’re just as surprised as everyone else when they go off.

  After I moved out of my dad’s house, my sense of anger was so strong that at some level I couldn’t even feel it properly. I blamed Wynn and I blamed AA. Because Wynn and the organization she put so much faith in had the absolutely enraging habits of always being right and always having it both ways. Wynn had been wickeder than anyone and now she was better than anyone. When Wynn had sent away for a correspondence course for me in speedwriting so I could make my living as a secretary when I graduated from high school, I gnashed my teeth and cursed God and Wynn and my poor dad. All around me I saw reasonably raised daughters putting together wardrob
es to go to college. There was a “normal” world out there, but not in my immediate vicinity.

  So that, beginning with the day in June 1951 when I moved out of Daddy and Wynn’s house—and for the next three years, when at twenty, I married for the first time—I may have felt loneliness and desperation, but I also had the most amazing days of relief, peace, pride, and elation. Put another way, according to the time-bomb/Chinese-firecracker theory, my fuse was burning quietly along but I was between explosions.

  I lived with my girlfriend Jackie, who lived with her own single mom, Belle, who drank and laughed and took us to all-you-can-eat buffets, where, with purses lined with wax paper, we’d load up on chicken—enough for a week. The three of us lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Atwater Village, down by the Los Angeles River, close to Griffith Park, a blue-collar section in the middle of nowhere. Ah, the relief of it. The wonderfulness of that first summer! Jackie worked at a refrigerator repair shop, I worked at an insurance company, where I typed the words Arthur K. Rowe all day long at the bottom of form letters. I paid rent to Jackie’s mom. I was free.

  We were so unknowing about the world that when Jackie got accepted at Occidental College, a flossy private school, she went over there to sign up and was flabbergasted when they asked her for five hundred dollars for the first semester’s tuition. So we both took streetcar and bus over to City College, where we enrolled as drama majors for two dollars and fifty cents a semester.

  The campus was layered with thick fog on our first day, but the place shivered with energy, excitement, the euphoria of poor kids actually getting to live out their dreams. Everyone was going to be a doctor or a lawyer or a businessman or a dress designer or an actress or a professor or a writer or a director, and it was going to start right now, right here! That first day I met a boy who is now chairman of a fine English department, but then he’d come from a home where they’d chained him in closets. Jackie, who would have her own television talk show, had not come from your average stable home. But good things would happen, and we knew it.

  So to take a class where you learned pantomime was great. To learn the difference between horsts and grabens was swell. Even to take a look at a cheap reproduction of Les très riches heures du Duc de Berri, was a revelation.

  My first conscious happy moment since the time my father left my mother—which was only a matter of seven years, but it seemed longer—occurred across the street from City College in a shabby little patio behind a burger joint on Vermont Avenue. I had taken up with a kid named Dick Jones, who ran track but always wanted to run gracefully so he hardly ever won. He came from a family of prison guards, whom I would never meet. He was taking classes in comparative religion and beginning a collection of rare books, most of which he shoplifted. He played Ravel’s “Bolero” for me. And “Pavane for a Dead Princess.” He read Kenneth Patchen to me, and I still love Kenneth Patchen! I had gotten a night job as a waitress at Van de Kamp’s, a huge coffee shop out on Wilshire. I took classes in the morning, and I would need to take the bus to work at about four. But here, in this sunny patio, Mr. Jones and a friend of his and I sat out under a pepper tree and the sun flickered through it. They chatted along about Zoroastrianism and how those folks put their dead bodies out on walls and the vultures picked the bodies clean. Two more hours of peaceful discussion stretched in front of us. I was dressed in black—the total beatnik—because there was no one to tell me God wouldn’t like it or that no one could stand to live with me. Indeed, Mr. Jones was pressing hard to live with me; we would split the expenses, be partners in scholarly poverty, he soldering aquariums, I waitressing.

  I looked across at their two sweet, unconcerned faces, their own beaming sense of being alive in life, and watched the pepper tree and the sun and thought: “Wow! I’m happy.” It had nothing to do with love—I don’t even remember if Mr. Jones and I ever used that word—but only freedom and peace. You could live like this! You could learn in the morning, rest in the afternoon, work at night, stay up late, read Kenneth Patchen.

  —

  I was already, by spring of 1952, a connoisseur of furnished rooms. I’d lived in a nasty boardinghouse with pitiful single women, presided over by an elderly lady who hung on to her own breasts all the time. I’d lived alone in a house behind a house where a would-be rapist followed me home, but I scared him as much as he scared me. I’d lived in a studio apartment filled with roaches. Once Daddy and Wynn visited me at one of these places. They praised me for my independence, looked around, and left. After they’d gone I sat on my bed—I lived in a little gallery above a driveway in an eight-by-ten room—and I saw a ten-dollar bill on top of my stack of schoolbooks. Wynn had scrawled a note: I thought you could use this. I knew the ten came from her own tip money.

  Dick went out looking in Hollywood, in places close to public transportation. He found a pretty hotel just off Santa Monica and Vine, about three blocks away from the all-night Hollywood Ranch Market.

  The Brevoort Hotel housed a lot of hookers and seedy men, but it was a pretty place—three stories, white stucco, tiled roof, French windows that opened out, and in the back courtyard a few dilapidated bungalows where Gary Cooper was said to have brought his secret friends. And a swimming pool, empty, dotted with refuse and leaves. Mr. Jones insisted on twin beds, so we could study more easily. What a good idea it was! We would spend some nights crammed into one bed, but just as many others propped up in our own separate islands of light, working, thinking, whatever it was we did.

  It was a big room, with those two twin beds floating in it, a little table with two chairs, a writing desk, a place for Dick’s trunk. The rent was $21 a week; we each paid $10.50. We got maid service and a great deal of sweetness from the people behind the front desk. We must have looked to them like Hansel and Gretel—so young and dumb.

  Our lives were isolated. We got up early every morning, ate breakfast at a coffee shop on Vine, took the streetcar on Santa Monica to Vermont, walked down to our classes, met for lunch at the College Grill, where we ordered scallops and string beans, took the streetcar home, rested a few hours, went off to our night jobs, came home by eleven, and went to sleep.

  I had Thursday nights off and we took the Melrose bus to the Coronet Theatre, where we saw Kenneth Anger’s Fire Works, or Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, or Un Chien Andalou, or The Sex Life of the Rhesus Monkey. If a movie was French and had Louis Jouvet in it, we saw it. On Saturday mornings we walked up to Hollywood and played records at Music City and had cheese omelets.

  On Sundays, I’d take the streetcar out to the Valley, one week to see my dad and Wynn, one week to see my mother and Rose. They never, in fourteen months, asked where I lived. Daddy and Wynn would greet me cheerfully, and fill me up with food. I imagine I was taking the opportunity to remind my dad he had a daughter out there. He told me again and again how proud he was of me. He just didn’t give me any money, and I didn’t ask for it.

  Every other week I went to see my mother. Now I was showing off, standing around with my (invisible) curled lip. Because every day I logged in class made me different from the dog-family in this house. Even though they didn’t ever notice the difference, I noticed the difference. I had Un Chien Andalou under my belt, and my mother would never see a foreign movie. And I was earning my own living and would never again have to hear her say, “As soon as you’re eighteen, you’re out of here, that’s where my responsibility ends!” Because I was eighteen, I’d been out of that house for two years, and when I woke up in the morning I never fixed breakfast for anyone—I went out to breakfast, one fried egg, bacon, and hash browns, and I always left an enormous tip, because since I worked for a living I knew how important that was. I went to see my mother to remind her that you could get out—if you had the courage, or if someone had been imprudent enough to kick you out.

  Dick Jones and I lived in hardworking suspended animation for fourteen months. We only quarreled twice and once it involved alcohol. Dick got sad about something and brought home bottl
es of cheap red wine from the Ranch Market. “I bet you won’t drink this,” he said, “because you don’t dare.” I got mad and took his dare and drank two bottles of red wine. I woke up with the first crashing hangover of my life, throwing up every twenty minutes, while Dick looked on, bemused.

  I called my dad and asked him what to do. He sighed and said, “Don’t ever drink red wine if you’re going to get drunk. Drink vodka and don’t ever drink mixed drinks, they’re murder.” But he didn’t ask me why I’d gotten drunk, or where I lived.

  The Van de Kamp’s life was fun. Another place full of young kids on the brink of (in their minds) amazing adventures, a future just out there, hanging in air like a glossy ball. Every night from five to eleven, sometimes Saturday afternoons from twelve to five, I and fifty other girls sailed in to take our place at this gleaming food factory. Older women groaned that if you could hold on at Van de Kamp’s you could work anywhere.

  We waltzed into the place wearing uniforms of teal-blue cotton with plunging necklines and wide lapels of dazzling white. We had name tags that displayed our last names (Miss Laws, I was named, for the four or five years I worked there), white rubberized plastic aprons that tied around our waists. You scrubbed them down with bleach to achieve the dazzling cleanliness they were looking for. On our heads we wore hand-folded hats of “Dutch” lace that made our customers laugh. Miss Nace, our exasperated supervisor, who trotted around the place in four-inch heels and an iron corset, could strike dread into any girl with the sneering words, “Fix your hat!” Older, sobersided waitresses made secondary livings fixing hats for the uncoordinated teenagers who couldn’t do it. The trick, they said, was to soak the lace in heavy heavy starch, paste it to the refrigerator, let it dry, peel it off, fold and pin it like an intricate flying diaper. Then, never work too close to other girls on the floor, or you’d have a hat accident.