by See, Carolyn
We drove in simmering heat through the last customs check at Sonoyta, where Tom bribed officials with Playboy magazines and an electric fan. We stayed the night in Navajoa, waked to see the sun coming through the slats of our windowless hotel shack. Spent the night in Culiacán, where the Sonoran Desert had really (if temporarily) turned to green jungle and you crunched roaches three deep on your way to the hotel room, and by this time I was having serious second thoughts. Lisa, six years old, had given up talking. She curled into the little baggage slot of the old Volkswagen and only came out three times a day to order huevos tibios (barely poached eggs) and una Coka, since we knew the milk was unpasteurized. We kept telling her how much fun she was going to have—learning Spanish, going to Mexican school, but she wasn’t buying it.
We got closer to Mazatlán, checked in at the Hotel Olas Altas—right on the beach, but old and cheesy and alive with flying roaches. The next morning, when Tom Mauch slung in drunk Gerry and drove his own black VW north along the malecon to catch the highway out of the city, we watched from our damp, salty balcony and waved. We were alone, and Tom looked chipper.
—
Mazatlán in the early sixties was boiling hot and far away. Outside of two other families we were the only Americans in the city. It was so hot that when you sat down to write a postcard the sweat from the back of your hand trickled down and obscured your message. Mazatlán—the Pearl of the Pacific—was a medium-sized town with a medium-sized harbor. You came down out of desert, turned off the Western Highway, drove through dense, alligator-infested jungle until you emerged in the city: a pretty place, bound on the south by its harbor, on the west by its mile-long strip of seedy hotels, on the north by a peninsula that dead-ended in clear water, and on the east by solid jungle.
We looked at places to live in the heart of the city, where sweat poured off us all and old ladies fanned themselves with limp, folded papers, saying “Mucho calor.” We’d go back to the Olas Altas, sit on the veranda, and watch the sea splash up on a lot of rusted gear, leftovers from some marine project long forgotten.
Tom found us a house to the south of town, where the city slanted up into cliffs. There, next to a couple of mansions, stood three stucco cottages clustered at the top of a cliff overlooking the sea. Each house was painted a different color: yellow, blue, and ours was pink. You went into the living room, floored with flesh-colored tile. To the left was a kitchen and a laundry room. Then a bathroom, bedroom, and a wooden balcony for cooling off, having breakfast, checking out the dazzling ocean below. Between the houses and the ocean, growing out of the cliffs, hundreds of pine trees sang in the breeze.
Katharine Sturak, Tom’s daughter, and Lisa See. Two beautiful girls sweating it out in Mazatlán. (Courtesy of Tom Sturak)
We moved in, next to the other two American families in town; one older couple who’d worked for Wrigley in Belize, and a younger one, a millionaire guy who was trying to write a novel, with a nice wife from Wisconsin. George Gage, the millionaire, and Tom Sturak took to each other right away, assembling skin-diving gear, finding a “mole” that jutted straight out into the harbor, made of enormous rocks that sheltered perfect homes for moray eels. Virginia Gage took me marketing every morning at five, before the sun came up and the heat became unbearable. In September, Tom and I enrolled Lisa in Mazatlán’s best private school, El Collegio del Pacífico, just at the bottom of our cliff.
After marketing, dropping Lisa off at school—she was too demoralized to tell us she needed school uniforms—the four grown-ups would repair to the mole. Virginia and I would bake in the sun—my hair bleached to almost white—then we’d come home for lunch. Lisa would go back to school, crying. She was sinking, and I didn’t know what to do. Every afternoon, I’d drink a six-pack of Pacifico beer (eight cents a bottle) and read a novel for my doctoral dissertation. Tom would go back to swim and fish, and return, wild-eyed, with a dozen lobsters or a hundred-pound grouper, or lugging a stingray as big as a one-room apartment. Drunk as a frog, I’d watch him wrestle his catch through the kitchen door and into the laundry room, where he’d clean and cut it up. By that time I would have switched to rum and lemonade, a great drink.
I’d drink one rum drink after another, and cook fish, rice, and beans. The three of us lived on about a dollar a day. Two or three nights a week we’d go out to the rat-infested movies. Back at home, we’d turn on the lights and hundreds of flying roaches would flash and crack around us.
Lisa slept in the living room. Mosquitoes lived in the curtains, and at night they came out to bite her in droves. Our bedroom windows opened on to the balcony, the pine trees, and the sound of the ocean below. There was no screen and we didn’t even think to ask for one. We kept the lights on, reading in bed, and every living insect came through the windows and landed on our bodies. Once, after the lights were off, when Tom and I were having disconsolate sex, I felt something in my hair as big as my hand and let out a shriek. Tom turned on the lights. It was an enormous iridescent praying mantis.
Thirteen hundred miles to the north, I knew they were still planning World War III, which by now drove Tom into an apoplectic frenzy. “You can get killed in a car,” he’d scream at me, so loud that far off in the jungle the jaguars must have flinched. I’d pour myself another glass of Jerez, my nighttime drink.
Mazatlán. A neighbor, George Gage, and Tom Sturak, with one of their numerous fish.
At Christmas my mother and Rose came down for the holiday; of Mazatlán my mother said, “What’s the big deal? It’s just a beach where everyone speaks Spanish,” and to Rose, as she sat reading the back of a Soupy Sales album: “You make me sick!” After my mother and Rose flew home, Tom and I drove back into town. I burst into tears. “Oh, Tom,” I wailed, “I feel so terrible I even miss my mother! That’s how terrible I feel!”
Me in Mazatlán, working. Note empty glass.
—
So maybe I felt like the world was blowing up because I was blowing up. Maybe my alcoholic genes were just kicking in. Maybe what I’d done to Lisa made me too guilty to live. Maybe I wanted to be a writer, but knew for sure I couldn’t. I looked at Tom gaining fame for running in every city track meet, labeled by the newspaper as “The Godchild of Uncle Sam,” loved him, envied him, died of shame because I was so out of control. So I’d have six more rum drinks.
In spite of everything, Tom and I believed in love. Believed in it, experienced it, as laughing or longing or even yelling (because wasn’t that an aspect of “passion”)? But with all our running and traveling and “learning,” our lust for scholarship, etc., etc., none of that meant shit. We were going to be thirty soon, but we could have been abandoned kids in playpens. We were trying as hard as we could to escape our pasts; we couldn’t see the future. We were inventing ourselves, but we were both running out of ideas. Dreaming up the ideal life, but—not to be tiresome about it—running out of dreams.
Tom and I, with the best intentions, had created a holograph of the kinds of homes we’d come from. He had evolved into an exasperated bully, and I’d become—how easily and quickly—the drunken, hysterical bitch from hell. Lisa, poor Lisa, was either little lonely Penny, or little lonely Tom, depending on how you sliced it.
I knew the world was going to end, knew it, knew it. I was nuttier than a fruitcake, out of my mind. But by now it seemed to me that dying in LA was infinitely preferable to dying down here. I knew I had to go home. Tom seemed relieved. Poor Lisa just hung on for the ride.
Tom always had marvelous manners. When, earlier—along with a group of graduate students, visiting Tijuana—we’d stopped by a Mexican brothel, he shook hands with all the ladies and told them how beautiful they were. When, in a fluorescent-lit, windowless room, an earnest prostitute “inhaled” a cigarette in her vagina, blew out a smoke ring, and then—what a test of race and behavior!—handed it to a friend of ours to take a drag on, he drew back. Before she had time to be angry or hurt, Tom leaned forward, grabbed the cigarette from her, took a deep drag and ex
haled a huge cloud of smoke with a happy smile. “Delicious!” he exclaimed, and made such a nice impression on the ladies that they all lined up to hug us as we left.
He loved carnaval and he loved music and he loved fishing and he loved races. He loved winning races but he loved losing too, because that gave him ample excuse to analyze the race in meticulous detail. A lot of things made him laugh. He was capable of rough kindness and generosity.
He had a gut-level hatred of marriage, and so did I. But we both had an equal stubbornness: we would transcend what our parents had been and done. When we returned to LA in September of 1961 to go back to school and finish our degrees, I was sure the world would end; barring that, we were both pretty sure we’d stay married forever.
—
In October 1962, we visited my mother in Victorville. I once again opined the world would end soon. My mother sneered at me.
“You’re a fool!” she slurred. “You’re a coward.” “I don’t know,” I said stubbornly. “I’m just sure something is going to happen.” Tom sighed. How many times had he listened to this?
That Monday morning we drove “the back way” from Victorville down to LA. It was packed with convoys. Every truck from March and Edwards and every other base they had up in the desert was roaring along to somewhere else. Tom lost his temper: the whole point of the back way was to avoid traffic! He turned on the radio to hear what was happening, and of course it was the Cuban crisis. I went into terminal terror, but Tom got mad. We had to drive a little over a hundred miles in second and third gear and he knew what was going to happen to his Volks. By the time we’d got home, he’d thrown his camshaft.
On television, the news showed people buying four shopping carts of groceries at once. Helpful news commentators suggested that citizens should search out the manhole cover closest to them in the street, and be prepared to jump underground at a moment’s notice. I found an intersection with a manhole cover and went out to look at it. The idea that we should pry that thing out of the street and live beneath the pavement when all of civilization as we knew it was being vaporized above our heads was so ludicrous that I went back inside, poured myself a beer and began to do the ironing. I watched Richard C. Hottelet at the United Nations totally freak out on our black-and-white TV, I watched Adlai Stevenson get totally betrayed on that same TV, I drank and lay down on our Naugahyde couch with a stomachache and lost five pounds in seven days.
That Saturday night we had people over for dinner. We played Mexican music and Ray Charles at top volume. Everybody got smashed out of their minds and nobody mentioned Cuba. The next morning I woke up with a hangover, and turned on the radio to see what our chances were for staying alive another day. John Steinbeck had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and someone had him on the phone, asking him how he felt.
“How do you think I feel?” he answered crabbily. “I’ll get to enjoy it for about a week, if I’m lucky.”
I gave Tom one of those see?! glances, because the nature of our relationship was that we’d be arguing up to and right through the Big Blast itself. But Tom declined to open his eyes. He had a hangover himself and was feeling pretty rocky.
In a couple of days it was over. Some Russian explosion wasn’t going to get me off the hook. I had no choice but to get better. I began a strenuous diet, stopped drinking (temporarily), wrote five pages a day on my dissertation. We moved back down to the beach, turned thirty, tried to have a kid, gave many a dinner party and a great big party, where the pattern was: we’d eat as well and fancily as we could afford, listen to great music, drink all the wine we could possibly put down, then get up from the table, roll out the door, and go skinny-dipping in the cool passage that ran from Marina Del Rey out to the ocean. No moray eels here.
Tom in our Mazatlán living room looking seductive, along with our cat, Mary Ballerina See, who lived on a diet of tortillas and beans.
I believe that many people lived that way in the late fifties and early sixties. Marriage was an imperative from the last world war. Domesticity was an imperative. Drugs, as we know them now, weren’t readily available to the common man or woman. If I have to be frank about how I got through my own late twenties and early thirties, I’d have to say alcohol, the beach, silly jokes, and the telephone. For Tom, I’d guess skin diving, the beach, silly jokes, alcohol, and running. For all our fancy talk and heated arguments about high things, great literature didn’t even make the list.
—
Sometime in January of 1964, Tom and I lay propped up in bed, reading. We were still in Marina Del Rey, by the beach. Tom looked up from his book and said, “You know Mark Del Vecchio, down at the office?” (Tom worked part time now at the RAND Corporation while he finished his PhD, and so did a lot of our friends.)
“Yeah?”
“Mark’s been house hunting, and he said he found a house the other day up in Topanga Canyon that only a crazy person would buy.”
“Yeah?”
Tom distrusted property even more than marriage. He said it tied you down, made you a permanent member of the sell-out bourgeoisie. “Mark said there’s this cabin at the top of a cliff. You can’t even get there by road. You have to walk up a switchback path.”
“Yeah?” I knew what he was getting at but I couldn’t believe it.
“But they have a tramline you can haul things up on. And he says there’s this old lady who goes out on the cliff every day, she holds on to the dirt like an octopus.”
“Really?” One of my most irritating afternoons in Mazatlán had been when Tom had caught an octopus and told me to keep it in my handbag. By nature, an octopus doesn’t want to stay in a handbag.
“So. You want to drive out next Sunday morning and see this place?”
“Sure.”
We went back to our reading. The next Sunday we drove up Pacific Coast Highway and turned into Topanga Canyon. Tom began to rave. “This can’t be right! This has to be wrong! He must have said Tujunga Canyon!”
He had a point. Parched brush receded straight up on either side. This was a two-lane highway to nowhere. There was nothing like a house even remotely in sight. But Monday evening Tom came home looking quizzical as he changed from his RAND clothes to his skin-diving gear. “Del Vecchio says it’s Topanga Canyon. He says we didn’t go far enough. He says we’ve got to go up.”
The next Sunday, a sizzler, we drove again up Pacific Coast Highway, turned once more into the scorched canyon. It began to smell pretty good; arid, mentholated, medicinal, the air-equivalent of a margarita with plenty of salt and lemon. We passed a Quonset hut on our right (Fernwood Market), a post office and jerry-built building down to our left (Topanga Center), a sign pointing to the elementary school, and then Circle Trail. It went straight up, coiled in a tight circle, and if you didn’t watch it you were down on Topanga again. But we knew to stop at the top of the circle and look for the trail. We trudged up the switchback, past eucalyptus and prickly pear. On the last triangle of steep cliff in front of the house, calendula and Martha Washington geraniums bloomed in crevices between hot rocks.
And there was a beautiful German lady in her eighties, with a tan, athletic body and long blond hair. She’d made dresses for Theda Bara and Mrs. Igor Stravinsky. Her friends, she said, had told her she had to sell. They were worried about her, they said, but she thought they just couldn’t take the hike up the switchback path—and they were afraid of taking the tram. (I didn’t blame her friends: the tram looked like the thing Humphrey Bogart used to haul out the gold in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.)
The lady showed us the inside of the cabin. In places you could see air between the slats. “Rain comes in, in the winter,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do.” She showed us the kerosene water heater, which you lit by pouring in a saucer of kerosene, making a spill out of newspaper, lighting the liquid, waiting forty-five minutes to let the water warm up. If the kerosene went out, you had to wait thirty minutes before trying again, or you could blow yourself to kingdom
come.
Out on the splintery balcony there were two old-fashioned metal camp beds, piled with pillows bleached gray by the sun. You could sit down on a bed, hook your feet in the balcony, and your body balanced perfectly, haltered between gravity and light, brushed by breezes.
She took us out to the narrow backyard and there, on the other side of the house, was an equally steep cliff going down. If you had a party up here, you’d have to be careful. She took us along the bony ridge out to the side of the house, and showed us the outdoor shower, a shed with a tank on top. In it was a bleached-gray, two-legged wooden table with a cake of soap on it—it took up most of the shower. “My husband decided we needed a soapdish, and he sawed the kitchen table in two. Would you believe it? He never had a hammer in his hand before!”
All over this ridge, bamboo grew. Eucalyptus, three monster ones, shaded the patio. Big shimmering clumps of Scotch broom shouted how yellow they were. The lady pointed out all the different colors of ceanothus—California lilac—from silvery white to lavender to deepest purple. She never had trouble with snakes, she said. The best thing was to ignore them. When the toilet overflowed the best thing to do was let it run right through the patio to the back cliff and down the side. You could help it along with a hose. Putting in an actual pipe would be illegal. On the other side of the tram motor by the house where the tramline ended was a small flat patch of land, where you could plant asparagus or artichokes or tomatoes.