by See, Carolyn
“If only you loved me,” I wailed. But he wouldn’t budge. He couldn’t.
I tried to think of the summer in front of me. Tom was taking my daughter and me to Reno. The prize money from the Goldwyn Contest would pay for my divorce. Tom liked Lisa and she seemed to think he was OK. Tom had told me (in the mildest way) that he had a terrible temper. Tom was a runner. He wanted to spend time in Mexico. He had a daughter, Katharine, Lisa’s age, who’d been taken from him in a treacherous custody fight. He wanted a family, he said. He wanted to take care of me. He wanted to live at the beach. He had all those Hong Kong suits. I had to get away from this family, away from this morose drunk.
And I’d be the morose drunk the next time.
6. GETTING MARRIED AGAIN
Tom Sturak and I celebrate at the Foreign Club in Tijuana on our wedding night
Tom Sturak had been hanging out in graduate school at UCLA, getting over a five-year first marriage and playing out a tempestuous love affair with a Latvian would-be American immigrant named Sylvia, who waited—with her family—to be allowed in from Tijuana to the USA. For years after this, when we’d go down to Tijuana to get the car upholstered, or buy penicillin or methamphetamines, or check out the bullfights, or lay in a supply of rum or tequila, we’d see Sylvia. Whatever photography shop we passed in that dusty town, we’d see heavily hand-tinted pictures of his exgirlfriend, rouged and with her blond hair glowing like lemons, smiling out of a gilded frame with that whipped-cream smile of the well-brought-up Mexican adolescent girl—so prized were Sylvia’s looks south of the border.
But Tom had got tired waiting for Sylvia and spotted me. Tom seemed the very antithesis of Richard. Tom was clean-shaven, had decisive cheekbones, intense eyes. Tom refused to sleep with me until Richard and I had separated. (He could not do that, he said, to another man.) I fell madly in love with him. He was so beautiful, so funny! And so honest. Tom’s grandparents had immigrated from Slovakia. His paternal grandmother worked as a charwoman in a Pittsburgh men’s club, on the graveyard shift, in the kitchen, so that she could come home every morning, her bulky frame padded with a dozen half-eaten rare steaks. Her family ate well, no matter what.
Tom’s aunts slept three in a double bed, head-to-toe-to-head. They were a rambunctious, giddy lot. They were the Sturak family and they couldn’t remember any stories about home in Slovakia. The general feeling was that they hadn’t had a home. The same grandma who “walked like ’lectric,” she had so much energy, didn’t have much use for her older son, John. When John came home after a night of carousing, he’d try the door to see if it was open, and if it wasn’t, he’d stretch out on the porch of the ramshackle building on the steep hillside that overlooked the steel mills of Pittsburgh. He must have been dumb to do that more than once: when Grandma Sturak came out and found him in the early morning, she’d beat him soundly with a broom handle.
The Sturaks were fierce; you had to look sharp just to stay alive. When Tom was a little kid, his young mother took him home to visit the family. As Tom read a comic book, one of his cousins came up behind him with a hammer and knocked him out cold.
John Sturak, the strapping delinquent, took a liking to a pretty blond girl from downstairs. Mary Shack (who looked like Norma Shearer, everybody said so) was sixteen, worked in a bakery, and spent an entire week’s salary on a hand-tinted photographic portrait. John, who would turn out to be a fabled miser, took Mary out on their first date. They were walking in the park, and Mary said she was thirsty. John took her to a public drinking fountain. (Later he would refuse to flush their toilet more than once a day, and never watered the backyard lawn, calling it “force-feeding.”)
John would be going into the Navy. He might stay out of trouble in the service. The two married. John was twice her size, but Mary stood up for herself. She fielded her husband’s brutality over the years with humor, distance, contempt, and sometimes with tears. They had the one beautiful boy, little Tommy, whom Mary would use as a buffer against her husband all her adult life—or until John died. One Christmas, when Tom and I drove down to spend the holiday with his folks, Mary opened the front door in tears: her brother had shot his wife to death on Christmas Eve. Nevertheless, when we went inside, the tree was up and sparkling, the presents wrapped, the turkey sizzling away in the kitchen. Mary sat on Tom’s childhood bed, weeping. I perched on the other side, thinking dark thoughts. I’d betrayed Richard only to find myself in another domestic hell.
The door opened. Tom’s father, pulpy, unevolved—a dead ringer for my own stepfather, if truth be told—peered in.
“Don’t you think the turkey might be overcooking?” he asked.
In a hundredth of a second, his son was at him. It looked like he was trying to tear out his father’s throat with his bare hands. Mary and I pried them apart. “I only said the turkey might be overcooked,” John repeated, and backed cautiously out to the living room, where he settled himself back into his Lazy Boy and again became a part of the furniture.
Back in Pittsburgh, Tom had grown up with a puny cousin, Andy Warhola. Andy had been raised by a crazy mother who couldn’t afford milk for the little kid and raised him on black bread and strong coffee—“Coffee-Nerves Warhola,” the neighborhood kids would cruelly call him. When his mother went on errands, Tom’s teenaged aunts—those rowdy girls who slept toe-to-head-to-toe in double beds—would baby-sit Coffee Nerves. They’d tie him to the bed with scarfs, where he’d scream until he couldn’t scream anymore. The girls would put up their hair and leaf through movie magazines, all the while watching out the window to see if the old lady was coming home. When they saw her, they’d untie the kid, collect their money, and go home, while the scrawny little victim screamed. It made a good story and they told it a lot, and went on telling it even when “Coffee Nerves,” who was Tom’s age, grew up to be Andy Warhol, trying for the rest of his short life to forget his squalid beginnings.
So when my unevolved father-in-law—who would address twenty sentences to me during the ten years I’d be married to his son—opined to me that watering the lawn was simply force-feeding it, I’d feel curiously at home. Tom and I had been through a lot, and though some of it was different, a lot of it was the same. We felt the same light-headed relief when we drove home—from his father’s, or my mother’s. We’d place hypothetical bets: if we matched them in a boxing ring, who would win, his father or my mother? We both agreed it would be my mother, going away.
Tom hated bullies, because he had been so relentlessly bullied. When we first stopped by my mother’s place after I left Richard, she asked Tom nastily, “What do your parents think about this state of affairs?” Tom got up, gave her a look of limitless contempt, and left the room. I’ll love the guy for that courage until my dying day.
—
In the summer of 1959, Tom and I drove to Reno for a six-week divorce. We had a good time. We went to stock-car races and watched Steady-Eddy Monjar on the track. We went to triple features at the drive-in movies. I went for six weeks without watching anyone get drunk. But for the first time in my adult life, someone made fun of my birthmark to my face—and it was Tom. I was talking seriously to him about something and he got tired of listening. He puffed air into his right cheek, probably thinking he was mighty funny, but I went into the bathroom of our little bungalow and howled like a coyote for an hour.
Much worse, and far more unsettling, Lisa, who had always seemed to like Tom well enough, yearned for her dad. Her disposition, which had remained miraculously sunny for the three years she’d been alive, shrunk down and got sad. She was, as always, “well-behaved,” but she didn’t talk much. She was unhappy and I felt I’d caused it—although, to be fair, how could I have stayed with Richard much longer? But I thought of myself when I was three, and of how much I’d loved my dad. How could I have done this to her? Once, when Tom left the car during a triple feature at the drive-in, Lisa, sitting quietly in the back seat, screwed up her face and began to cry. “When are we going to go home? Aren’t
we ever going to go home?” When Tom came back to the car with hot dogs and lemonade, she shut right up, stifled her sobs, calmed herself with a great effort of will. Already, at the age of three, she had more control of herself than I had of my own life. God.
Now, in Reno, an acrimonious correspondence sprang up between Richard’s parents and me. They were enraged at my leaving, saw me as a slut, and threatened to sue for custody of Lisa. I countered passionately and at length about what a good mother I was. None of us mentioned Richard’s drinking. I didn’t say: Look! I had to get out of that little apartment. I’m afraid of him. You didn’t see him in Trieste, when he drove into town on the wrong side of the street. You didn’t see how he drove down the stone steps of the medieval castle, stopping only when the front tires of the Renault rippled the surface of the Adriatic. We all could have drowned. You don’t know that he throws up through his nose. I’m out of my depth here! I don’t know what to do!
I bleated on about what a good mother I was and what a nice future Lisa would have with Tom, who was such a solid citizen. They countered with vague threats, but they were a mixed-race couple who had never gotten properly married themselves because of miscegenation laws. We ranted, used up paper, and never brought up the real issue: Richard had a drinking problem that was destroying his life. I found out later Richard had stood up to them on the question of Lisa, but the issue of his drinking remained unresolved.
—
Up in Reno, then in a pretty house in Manhattan Beach—where Tom went surfing and running—I saw a new kind of drinking. We drank at graduate student parties. But Tom got nicer when he drank! We went down to Mexico, and listened to wonderful mariachis. Tom wore his white linen suit. We avoided margaritas and drank tequila straight, in that sweet way which takes just a little coordination and somehow simulates a health drink. It tastes so fresh! It feels and seems so breezy! Down in the watery depths of the old Foreign Club in Tijuana, with its huge arrangements of either fresh or artificial flowers and an enormous, unused roulette wheel decorating the far wall, you ordered tequila—Siete Leguas, never José Cuervo—that came to you clear and almost yellow-green in perky little glasses.
They served you a dish of coarse salt and a saucer of sliced limes on the side. You sprinkled a generous pinch of salt on the soft flesh between your left thumb and forefinger, held the tequila in your left hand, licked up the salt, swallowed down a bracing oily mouthful, and then cut through those two tastes with a quick crunch to the lime that you held in your right hand. Then inhaled! Aah. By then the mariachis had strolled and sidled up alongside you, and Tom had been writing down his favorites on a napkin: “El Niño Perdido” (where a trumpet player gets “lost” in the restaurant) and “Escaleras de la Carcel” (“The Steps of the Jail,” which Tom said marriage meant to him), or “Los Barandales del Puente” (“The Railings of the Bridge,” which prompted in Tom an always-beautiful soliloquy about the imagination of the Mexican people, who were so poor in material wealth but blew it off by creating songs about nothing, and making the best drink in the entire world from the ubiquitous, lowly cactus). And then they’d play “La Negra” the happiest song in the world, or the song in the world which most accurately gets the configuration of the anticipation of happiness, and they’d serve up another round of tequila and another saucer of bright-green limes, and Tom’s face would glow with happiness and almost celestial contentment.
I could watch him then, seeing how the shimmering, underwater light of the Foreign Club would glance off his cheekbones, and how his blue eyes closed, listening to the music, and how his blond mustache looked so good. I was happy, in a beige linen dress, some carnelian beads that Tom had bought me, and I thought, wow!
But it wasn’t always so great. Tom was an athlete. It took me fifteen minutes to run once around a track, and I couldn’t see the point to it. I studied; Tom studied and ran. In Manhattan Beach, where we lived the first two years of our marriage, Tom surfed, ran, swam, and occasionally ranted. I kept house and studied. As with Richard, we both had teaching assistantships, enough money to call ourselves “nouveau poor.”
A strange thing happened. I’d be sitting home in our little living room close to the beach, reading for maybe four hours before Lisa came home from school and Tom returned from working out—reading something tiresome like The House by the Medlar Tree, something terrific like The Red and the Black. But about two in the afternoon, I’d feel an overwhelming need to make a cheese sandwich and have a beer and then a beer and then a beer. I grew out of my beige dress within six months. Tom was disgusted with me.
Then the Russians shot down Francis Gary Powers in his U2. The Russian leader banged his shoe. I suddenly realized the repetitive whine I’d been hearing during the last year in Manhattan Beach wasn’t waves, as I’d assumed, but mad scientists just down the road shooting off trial rockets. I went into terror, positive that World War III was going to start any minute. I worried that Tom was disgusted with me again. I worried that he’d gone from a scarily abusive home to a failed marriage, to a romance with a Latvian who spoke often of suicide, to a harmless-seeming graduate student who, as soon as they got married, began to pour in the beers, cry for no reason, and cringe like a whipped dog every time they ran a routine test at Rocketdyne!
But our will to make things normal and right was such that I ironed two hours a day, and Tom shoplifted so many filets mignons that we never worried about protein. He planted a vegetable garden so replete with turnips that if we wanted to we could still be eating turnips. We read Lisa a story every night, and made untold pans of “health cookies” full of wheat germ. And I (with a big glass of cold beer by my side) translated Italian after Lisa went to sleep.
Tom and I would often put Lisa in our Volkswagen and hit the road south. Eighty-five miles down the freeway, my father lived with Lynda. They’d make us a great meal and Daddy would tell us his same silly stories, play on his ukulele, engage us all in a game of proverbs.
Then we’d head farther south to San Diego and check into Tom’s house, where, while Tom’s dad still lay out on his Lazy Boy like a big slug, we’d huddle in Tom’s old room and make plans, which usually meant going to the Navy Base and buying up consumer goods at a discount price. Then a short stop by his aunt and uncle’s—Tom always chatting about the metaphysical experience of running along Sunset Cliffs at sunset, or how much he preferred the white pavement of San Diego to the black pavement of Los Angeles. Then, on Saturday afternoon, we’d head south some more. We’d cross over the border and the minute it happened things always changed for the better.
The air itself would thicken up with the charcoal smoke from hundreds of open fires. We’d head for El Pulpo, a café for the gilded youth of T.J., where we’d feast on apricot nectar and the best taquitos of our lives. High school girls would come in, in groups of two or three, and eligible bachelors would linger at the counter. Tom told me about jalapeño peppers—that the seeds were the hottest part. We’d spend the afternoon on a shopping spree. We, who were poor in the States, could buy whole sets of cobalt-blue glasses, or bright-green glass plates, or trees of life that went ape crazy in their ceramic manifestations of the nature of the spiritual world. We’d hit the grocery stores to buy jalapeño mayonnaise and Mexican Nescafé, so much better than its American counterpart, and big big bags of pan dulces (you wandered through the bakery, picking up what you wanted with cumbersome tongs), and then to the liquor store, where you could get rum and tequila for about eighty cents a quart, and we’d buy a dozen bottles.
We’d drive up into some residential section of the city, park on a dirt road, pull out the back seat of the Volks and stash our liquor under it, along with a wonder drug we’d buy at the Bótica Sherr, something from Smith Klein and French for women who had difficult periods—pure Benzedrine with a relaxant for the smooth-muscle system.
Then it would be time for the bullfights, and a long, very interesting lecture from Tom on bullfighting. We saw so many fights! Good fights, one of them so go
od that the bull itself was allowed to live, and spend the rest of his life at honorable stud. Then back to the Foreign Club, where we’d drink tequila and listen to music until our ears rang with it, Lisa picking her own songs and loving the music. We’d spend the night at the Hotel Lee’s, which cost two dollars and fifty cents, with sheets as old and soft as tissue paper. We’d wake up in the morning with a cold beer or two, maybe go to another bullfight, maybe drive down to Ensenada, but finally get in the line to go back home again, putting something over on the customs men, sailing through with Lisa perched on hundreds of dollars of contraband in the car. Then we’d go to the Old Globe in San Diego, take in some Shakespeare, and drive on home.
Aah! The good life, or it should have been, except that I’d pulled Lisa out of one life and into another without telling her why, and Tom’s first wife, Carman, had married a man in the Foreign Service, who, since he couldn’t adopt Tom’s daughter Katharine, settled for the next best thing, hopping from country to country, so that Tom was half wild with worry over his kid, writing her and writing her and never getting an answer. And I was going nuts. There’s no other way to put it.
By early 1961, I was totally convinced that a nuclear war was going to occur. Tom and I decided to go and live in Mexico, down in Mazatlán. He argued, perfectly correctly, that being a thousand miles south of San Diego wasn’t going to aid our health very much if the nuclear war everyone was promising by now actually did occur, but I didn’t care. And on an earlier trip to visit his daughter Katharine, we’d come into Mazatlán around midnight on a moonlit evening. Tom saw half a dozen athletes running on the wide, deserted boulevard by the harbor. It looked like heaven on earth—the Pearl of the Pacific—to him. We both got fellowships, persuaded UCLA to send the checks to Mexico, packed up our books and—with two friends, Gerry Carson and Tom Mauch, in matching Volkswagens—headed south. As we drove through the California desert town of Indio on August 13, 1961, the news came over the radio: the Russians were building a wall straight through Berlin. See? I wanted to shriek at Tom. Am I the crazy one? Am I? But Tom was disgusted with my craven fear, and actually in pretty good spirits about going to live in Mexico. We crossed over, taking the highway across Baja, rode south past Caborca, where we spent the night in a roach-infested hole and a drunk Mexican danced in front of me saying, “Me Tarzan, you Jane!” Gerry Carson threw up after too much tequila, and invented an ironic name for four timid travelers and one little girl: Los Extravagantes. Some extravagantes!