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

by See, Carolyn

  Richard and I went fishing in the bay and caught sculpin and lobster but we couldn’t get water to boil on our dinky wooden stove. The lobsters would languidly swim in the warm water until we’d toss them back out. Miserable? We kept learning new definitions of the word. One morning as I moped in our room watching the sleet and snow swirl by, Bride Kelly knocked. “We’re burying a baby, would you like to come along then?” They’d folded a newborn into a shoe box and a teenager slung it under his arm as we piled into a van and drove to the top of a cliff overlooking the sea. All the graves were laid out east-to-west, but young Clement Kelly, who’d been sent up earlier to dig the baby’s grave, had dug it north-to-south. Bride Kelly lost her temper and screamed at the kid, who shifted his feet and looked away. Six or seven of us stood sheepishly as the sleet came down. Then they stuck the shoe box in the ground and piled up the dirt so that it looked like the grave went east-to-west.

  The Kellys were sweet people. They were kind to us. They made sure we went to dances if there were any, and they told me I’d be close to God when I had my baby, and they scratched their scurvy and told tales of what it was like in the “San” when their TB flared up. At night, they left us to ourselves, and Richard drank.

  When Richard drank he went out of control, his arms waving, knees buckling. He howled, he kicked, he cried. He was a handful, and his friends routinely pitched in to keep him vertical and OK. Once we spent a Sunday in the neighboring town of Placentia across the ford from Freshwater, where we lived. The ferry back was an open dinghy and Richard, drunk, kept making expansive, would-be leaps into the icy black water. I sat, furious as usual, as his friends gamely tried to keep him in the boat. The ferryman who was rowing us finally lost patience. “Aahh, let him go, then, if he wants to so much!” His friends sat back. Richard quieted down.

  As for the sex, it went this way: I was undecided about sex, but I loathed drunks, and when Richard wanted sex the most, he was drunk. This ongoing argument about sex gave us a way to structure our time. He said I was “frigid.” (What a dated word!) I opined that he was a drunk. Also, if he wouldn’t “love” me, I’d keep some of my compliments about his amorous abilities to myself.

  Richard and me on the Queen’s Birthday, May 24, at a “garden party” in Freshwater, Newfoundland. It was sleeting.

  But—what the hell? If we could just stick out six months in Newfoundland, we could get to go to Paris, where Richard would live the life of an artist and I could have a baby in a foreign land, away from my mother. So we lived our first married days in the town of Freshwater across the bay from Placentia and down the road from an army base so inefficiently run that they once misplaced a $250,000 bright-orange crane and never did find it. It’s a good thing we weren’t fighting the Germans, because they would have certainly won. The sun came out fourteen days in the six months we were there, and those had been the summer months.

  We had our year in Paris. Richard was gravely depressed by life, but we had some fun. We lived in the same room with Joan and Marliss in another whores’ hotel, on the Right Bank, very close to the Arc de Triomphe. A red-velvet curtain separated us from a sumptuous bathroom. Marliss was in love with a French jet air ace; Joan played the field, bringing home Siamese merchants with cowboys painted on their neckties, and Nigerians with tribal markings. Once Joan brought a guy back to the room, and while Richard and I feigned sleep, he tried his best to seduce her. He was American, so it was going to be a little harder than usual, because Joan felt that she had to draw the line somewhere. He got his nose down under her black turtleneck sweater, found that she was covered with an allergic rash, and his moans changed tone. Joan, Richard, and I laughed until we cried. The American left, sucker-punched.

  Melancholy, but strangely organized, we drifted through winter days in Paris. Sometimes we went out to a museum, or to the Alliance Française. More often we stayed in the room playing 500 rummy. Marliss kept on being gaga about her French jet air ace. She brought a diaphragm over the border from Belgium, at great inconvenience and expense. It was corrugated and looked like a Goodyear tire. She spent whole evenings holding it up to a lightbulb checking for holes. She’d end up staying in Europe. Joan, a nice, well-brought-up Jewish girl, was desperately dodging her future. Her mother had platoons of Jewish doctors waiting out there somewhere for her, but Joan wouldn’t have any of it. She looked for Central Americans on a spree, or Christian Arabs. Richard let his goatee grow again. He bought some paint, and did some paintings. But the art world of Paris was utterly closed to him and to all of us. We knew nothing about anything and were paralyzed about finding anything out. If we managed to buy pastries and not screw up, we walked home in a haze of joy.

  Six nights a week we trooped out with various acquaintances to a restaurant six flights up in an almost deserted building. We ate with showgirls from the Lido. The restaurant’s name was Melanie. The seventh night we went south from the Champs-Elysées to another, slightly more expensive place called Valentin. Joan and Richard always ordered the cheapest thing on the menu. Once Joan ordered calf’s head, and that’s what it was. Once Richard asked for peas and that’s what he got.

  I wasn’t Penny Laws anymore; I was Carolyn See. I checked out books from the American library. I took long walks for the baby’s sake. The baby didn’t seem real to me yet. When Christmas came, Richard painted ornaments for a tiny tree, and then drank himself to sleep. When my birthday came, he didn’t give me a present, and drank himself to sleep. Thank God for Joan and Marliss. Thank God for Paris, where everything seemed free and sweet, even if we couldn’t understand it.

  I had my baby in the American Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine, with the midwife shouting out, “Poussez, Madame!” The sun was shining in the room, and the baby, beautiful Lisa Lenine See (because Lenin used to study down the street from where we lived), gave me a stern, measuring look, and then went right to sleep. I was pleased and proud, but later that first night, when, again, I was looking at her and she was looking at me, I admit I cried. I knew the world we lived in was a sad place, and if Lisa was looking for good parents, she could have done a lot better.

  When Lisa was six weeks old, Richard bought a 1926 Renault for about a hundred dollars. We went touring, with Lisa stashed as a handy piece of luggage in a blue canvas carryall called a Bébé-Confort. We drove down through Auxerre to Chalon-sur-Saône, to Avignon to La Ciotat, over the Italian border to San Remo, La Spezia, Firenze, Ravenna, Venice, and then over that border as far as Trieste and finally Rijeka. Then—desperate, regretful, and out of money—we turned around and came back. We were fleeing for our lives, as far away as we could go.

  Poor Richard—in so far over his head he didn’t know what had hit him—drove on the wrong side of the road into the town of Trieste drunk out of his mind on slivovitz as I blithered and wept. Lisa snoozed, oblivious, as he drove down the stairs of a picturesque castle and stopped just as the front wheels of the Renault hit the lapping waves of the Adriatic. The next morning the poor guy had to back up those circular stairs, without any of his drunken confidence, afflicted by a humbling hangover, prey to the scornful appraisal of the man who owned the ancient hotel-castle, and the injured martyrdom of Carolyn-the-mom, as I held the baby and sniffed back my tears.

  Quel dommage.

  And even then we drove the extra day into Yugoslavia like hooked fish on a long, long line, and the town of Rijeka peacefully welcomed us, and everybody fussed over the baby, who was so beautiful, and the next morning the three of us sat outside the hotel, a family in spite of everything, kicking back on the terrace. Richard and I drank steaming coffee and chewed on fresh rolls, and felt the new day and loved it so much. It was as far as we could go. We’d run out of money and had to head home. Time to fake our way into the adult community.

  —

  They waited for us in hordes at the airport, ten thousand Chinese relatives and my wailing mother, who grabbed Lisa in a tearful tantrum. Then Richard’s father, Eddy, wrestled the kid away. My shy mother-in-law
opened her mouth and tried to finish a sentence. She always got the subject OK, batted five hundred with the predicate, and never made it to the direct object. Her husband finished her sentences for whoever cared to listen. Richard looked haunted, and I remembered one thing he’d said—when he was drunk—in Newfoundland: “I’d like for us to be a team.”

  But later that night, over at Richard’s house with the smell of incense and furniture polish and fresh oranges, and bronze Buddhas everywhere, and Eddy peering at Lisa, making the first of many daily grandfatherly inspections, Richard looked around the spotless little kitchen where Eddy had removed the ceiling to expose the bare rafters; gazed at the old-fashioned stove up on high legs with the oven door open to reveal their silverware; surveyed the barrels of bulk soap powder and rice under the sink. I heard Richard sigh and say, “It’s good to be home.” It didn’t sound right to me. It wasn’t my home.

  Over the next few days, I began to understand pretty thoroughly that if I wanted to go to school, be somebody, get to be treated like a human being, I hadn’t made the best move by marrying into this family. Every time I saw Stella begin a sentence and then stop and look over to her husband to finish it, I wanted to cry, for her and for me. When I was with my in-laws I went to sleep. I still loved to be at my father’s house with Wynn, but at my dad’s house Richard had to go to sleep.

  Our first day home, Richard suggested we live with his parents. I said no, and screeched for a while. Our second day home he said—I don’t know how seriously—he didn’t want to go back to college, he wanted to be a gardener in a convent. I said no, and screeched some more.

  We found a first little house that rented for $35 a month. We really didn’t have $35 a month. Richard went to school and got the G.I. Bill. I went to work at Van de Kamp’s, waitressing once more. Wynn gave me some of her extra couches. The Sees laid some artifacts on us: a pigskin chest where we would store our family photographs, some Japanese funeral figures from Cheun and the rest of the folks. We found a cute little secondhand crib. After a few months, a friend of the Sees, a chubby Chinese guy named Albert Fong, said he owned a slum apartment downtown that we could manage—“the prestige apartment of the neighborhood.” For no rent we’d have a roof over our heads.

  The Sentous Apartments had thirty-six units, and was infested with rats and roaches. Richard went to UCLA graduate school three times a week, where he was a teaching assistant, and I went to the newly built Cal State LA over in East LA two days a week. Lisa put in some time at the Salvation Army nursery school.

  Dear Mgr! I still have the bugs in bed! That was the note we found on our door the first day we moved into the Sentous Apartments. The people who lived there were more dreadful reminders of what could go wrong in life: a woman named Mrs. Morrow with an awful pair of false choppers, whose children never visited her because she had such a bad personality; a man who lived in one room with his three children and didn’t pay the rent for a solid year; a woman, walleyed and obese, who pined for her husband in jail and stowed her used sanitary napkins under the bed—Richard and I got to clean them up when she left. A flock of Native Americans, who rented an apartment and sold all the furniture in it, paying us with a watch with no works or a ten-dollar bill soaked in blood.

  Richard and I loved each other, I believe, but it was in the cards that we couldn’t get along. I had too much ambition and he had none. He drank huge amounts and at that point I drank very little. We were bemused and bewildered by each other. We lived mostly off his parents. I’d been supporting myself for five years and was mortified to be handed cans of peaches or ski outfits from Richard’s friends and relatives. When my dad held creditors at bay on the phone, Richard was amazed.

  For two days a week I escaped from it, into a neutral world where you learned about semantics or philosophy, and hung out in the bare little Quonset huts of Cal State LA, a heaven where once again I found my friend Susie, and met La Monte Young, who would make a respectable run on becoming the father of avant-garde music in America, but then was just a perfumed little squirt who made the sweetest impression on me in semantics by lightly touching the bottom outline of my birthmark and saying, “I love that color. It’s like pool chalk.”

  At least once a week we’d have dinner at a Chinese restaurant with Richard’s parents. Eddy would be sure to order something he knew I didn’t like. He was mean to me every chance he got, but I was Kate Daly’s daughter, and I was mean to him every chance I got. I paid him no mind and gave him no respect. Eddy took me to lunch one time and lectured to me on the value of family, that the individual was nothing, family was all. I could barely be civil to him, because of the way he treated his wife.

  At my father’s, Wynn, who had never had kids, took care of Lisa on many weekends, went out and bought baby furniture, lavishing care upon her. They never gave us anything but a good time. Meanwhile, Lisa turned into a beautiful redheaded toddler who seemed to like the whole bunch of us.

  Many years later, I was apologizing to Richard for something—my bad temper, or the breakup of the marriage—and I said that maybe it wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t lived downtown, in the god-awful Sentous Apartments. “Oh, it wasn’t so bad,” he said, putting a good spin on a trying time. “It was just a way for us to live.” And though the roaches fell into our salads and crawled over our toothbrushes, it had its diversions. There was a pay phone directly outside our dining room. One night when we had people over for dinner a man crawled around the booth pouring kerosene, planning to murder the man inside the booth making the call. But the man with the kerosene couldn’t find a match.

  A tenant got so angry at us for not defrosting the thirty-six refrigerators in the apartment by pulling a switch in the basement that he demolished his own refrigerator with an ice pick, letting loose a lot of Freon gas. We evicted him and he killed someone in a bar the very next week. A woman attempted suicide on the third floor. I opened the door one night to see another woman tenant, unrecognizable because a friend of hers had attacked her with his crutch, laying her forehead completely open so that the skin, pink and seeping, flapped down over her nose and mouth.

  Richard studied hard during the week, he pulled his share of vile chores. But on the weekends he drank, and drank hard. I’d beg him to take me to listen to jazz—Warne Marsh was back in town—but he’d stay home and drink, and one of his army buddies who’d come to stay at the Sentous would escort me over to hear Warne—a beautiful sound.

  By now, we were both in UCLA graduate school and I was a teaching assistant too, so we made a poor but honorable living. But if I felt marginally better, Richard felt marginally worse. He wasn’t that crazy about graduate school. On weekends he drank whatever he could get his hands on, but mostly red wine. Red Mountain was his brand. It made his teeth loose, it made his arms break out in a rash that looked suspiciously like Newfoundland scurvy.

  I lived my life on two tracks—toughing out nights in Chinese restaurants, or at my mother’s watching the two of them get blotto, or at the Sentous, cleaning up after sleazebag tenants. But my secret and better life was at UCLA, where I took classes and taught. I’d finally fallen in with a wonderful bunch of buddies. Two of them would mean the world to me. Judith Wilson, a single mother, was making it on her own, working as a TA. Her baby slept in an easy chair. And Tom Sturak, a beautifully groomed Slovak-American who’d been in the Navy and swanned about in handsome Hong-Kong suits: he appeared one afternoon in my office doorway. I began to plot and scheme and wonder how I could get out of this cockroach life in the slums, and away from this comatose drunk I was married to. Could there be a way? Judith Wilson had left her husband; she seemed all right.

  I’d already written a novel about the Sentous Apartments, about a tenant who “still had the bugs in bed.” I’d put in Warne Marsh and his ratty little nightclub that had so much beauty. I’d picked a friend of the long-gone Dick Jones and imagined him into my book. My secret life had to have some purchase on the intolerable real life I was leading.
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  Meanwhile, my father underwent an explosion of his own: he began to feel strongly that he had to go down to Tampa, Florida, to go into the frozen shrimp business. He and Wynn said au revoir on amicable, even pious terms, but fifteen minutes after he got there, he found a sweet girl who was exactly my age, thirty-three years younger than he. Lynda was unloved, fatherless, and dying for a dad. I wouldn’t want to speculate on what George was looking for. Wynn let Richard and me know that she wasn’t exactly perishing for my dad’s company, but later she gave me a piece of excellent motherly advice: “I speak of your father, and all my ex-husbands, with such affection that people think they’re dead. I suggest you learn to do the same.”

  Richard, Lisa, and me at a tourist attraction coming home from a visit to Victorville. It was hard, sometimes.

  Because I was going to have an ex-husband soon. Tom Sturak and I had been carrying on an absurdly chaste romance. Richard, Tom, Judith, and a flock of our friends all took the PhD qualifying exams in June of 1959, Richard in anthropology, the rest of us in English. My first novel won second prize in the Samuel Goldwyn Creative Writing Contest, and pretty much made it OK for me to pass my exams and go on for the PhD. Tom passed, beautifully. Richard passed.

  On a Saturday in late June, Richard and I went house-hunting in Venice, and found a great place at the beach. We could even afford it. I still hadn’t made up my mind to leave. That night, at the beach, we visited some of his anthropologist friends. He fell over, he threw up, he waved his arms and legs, and when we went to walk down to the water, he crumpled in a rag-doll heap on the sidewalk. I stayed half a block behind, finalizing my plans.

  A few nights later, just sobbing away, I told Richard I was leaving. He listened impassively and said, “You like this guy now, but he’s new. What are you going to think of him in five years? What will he think of you?” Behind his goatee, the Richard I’d known in high school peered out, a scared little kid who used to play poker with Anna May Wong.