by See, Carolyn
Rose and I lounged on the metal cot older than the century, covered with mattresses and those pillows bleached cleaner and cleaner by the sun. Around us the Canyon turned deeper and deeper black. You could hear it (the cats, coyotes, squirrels, rats, voles, rabbits, raccoons, skunks, snakes, shrews) but you couldn’t see a thing except the stars in the sky.
We took the drug and in fifteen minutes felt that scrabbling in our chests. The sky, with those bright stars, got really busy. Whenever a plane flew over, looking like some marvelous Oriental caravan, carrying blue and green and red lights in its underbelly, and leaving ribbons of that color behind it, it would push the stars out of the way. They’d whirl back to their original position, some of them swirling in a circle like certain kinds of breakfast pastry. (It came as another dopey revelation—how Van Gogh had seen the sky, where bakers down through the ages had gotten their ideas.)
Tom, posing with his portrait by Joan Weber.
“Penny?” Rose asked, “Have you had many men?” (Because in my family I was still Penny, and would be forever.)
It had been my worry since I’d lost my virginity that anything more than one man a year would mark me forever, to myself, as a slut. I went a little above my self-imposed average before I got married to Richard, and way below after I got married. Since Tom had left, and it looked like I was soon going to be thirty-five with two divorces under my belt, who knew what would happen? I felt gloomy about the question.
I pondered for an eternity, did some sixth-grade math, and came up with a provisional answer. “Eight.”
She thought it over, her baby face changing in the starlight. “Oh, kid! Oh, I’m sorry! You haven’t had any fun at all, have you? Gee, what’d you do when you were young? I’ve had fifty-three and I’m only eighteen!” The universe, curious and intelligent as always, buzzed along. Issat so? Issat so! Stars whirled around.
I tried to explain to Rose that when I fell in love, or felt like doing it, “it” didn’t last very long for me. And besides, it seemed to me that some of the men I’d been with had been assholes (although cute).
“Tom wasn’t an asshole,” Rose offered loyally.
“I don’t know, Rose. I don’t know.”
“Take a look,” she urged. “See what you think.” She turned me around to look through the window. There was that guy! Covered with toys, the Devil’s own liar. Was he a good man or a bad man?
I watched as his face moved from loving to treacherous to deceitful to spiteful to sad to lonely to loving to childlike. If only my heart didn’t hurt so much! If only I didn’t have this pesky broken heart! And I realized that acid can’t tell you what you don’t already know.
“Beats me,” I mumbled, and Rose and I lay back to watch the stars. The stuff was strong, stronger than anything I’d ever had. It came to me with embarrassment that while this night was a big, big deal to me, this was what Rose did a couple of times a week. I asked her, and she allowed as how that was true.
Amazing.
My little sister. And God only knew what my little girls would grow up to be doing.
But a thousand years later she stirred and asked me another question: “Penny? Are you strong?”
I thought about that one. About the furnished rooms. About my mother. About my dad. About the kids. About my friends.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m not,” Rose answered. “I don’t think I am.”
By dawn it had worn off. I spent the day doing chores. We put on the TV and there was interminably boring Ed Sullivan. He waved his arms, and on the black-and-white set his arms flashed red and blue and green and sparks came out of his hands. Heavens, I thought. Even Ed Sullivan. That was the end of acid for me. I had to become a responsible mother.
But that year stayed like a silver wire in all our minds.
I have another memory from that time, visiting Rose when she was still working as an au pair girl. The house, which could have been attractive, was pretty foul. Rose didn’t know any more about taking care of kids than she knew how to train fleas. There were toys all over the floor and dirty dishes all over the furniture and the kids smelled like a sump.
She talked about her life in Victorville, and down here in LA. She talked about some of the drugs she’d done, because they’d been all over the place up there. She’d had all the pot she could possibly smoke, and meth, and Benzedrine, and she’d shot acid into her foot. “I felt it climbing up my body and it hit my heart, right here. There are things I don’t remember now, but I can’t remember what they are. I’m not what I was, Penny. I’m not what I was.”
It was hot as hell inside that cracker-box house. The kids were sniffling and prowling. Rose sat in a skimpy shift. Her face was pale and sweaty.
Tom used to have a fairly standard rant-and-rave about the nature of the world. There is no absolute meaning, he’d boom along, driving like mad in the car. Dostoyevsky knew it all along! If God does not exist, then all things are possible. I never listened to it very much (one of our ongoing troubles, obviously). I put it down to generic male grumpiness, the kind of thing that made Tom go crazy every time they inaugurated daylight saving time.
But watching Rose, or hearing her later on the balcony, or wondering why America changed from grass and acid in the sixties to speed and heroin in the seventies, and cocaine and crack cocaine in the eighties and nineties, it occurs to me that Dostoyevsky (and Tom Sturak) had their emphasis wrong. If God does exist, that’s when all things are possible. You can see smart stars and hear the humming earth. You can see your life down as far as you can see. And if you care to look, you see the abyss.
Rose wasn’t strong.
She’d seen it all along.
8. DIVORCE
Lisa, Clara, and me. Our passport picture now that Tom had gone. Someone said we could be a rock group—Rapunzel and the Split Ends
For years, since I met them both in 1958, Tom Sturak and his best friend Jim Andrews had been ragging on women. So that while there was nothing Tom and Jim loved to do better than crank up the Mexican music and polish off a bottle of tequila and laugh, there was another side that Jim’s wife, Dot, and I, sometimes saw. Late at night at dinner parties Jim loved to get out his bullfight cape and practice his verónicas, his media-verónicas, in front of his house. “Where have all the dreams gone?” he asked Tom, periodically. Jim drank a lot, and worried about his health. He had noticeable swellings in his armpits.
Tom had been going to write a novel, but after Clara was born he more or less gave up on it. “Wives and children have killed more artists than the cholera,” he liked to say.
Tom had divorced his first wife, of course, but Jim kept his, and one morning in 1967, as Jim was enumerating Dot’s faults to Dot—her inability to dream, to aspire (which closely corresponded to Tom’s kidding-on-the-square complaints about me: when I gardened, I always looked down at the dirt, never up at the sky)—Dot suggested that since Jim didn’t like her, and since she wasn’t about to change, he probably ought to get out. He got out, but he was flabbergasted.
This left the door open for him to follow his dreams, though, and he was happy. There was Solveig, his own Latvian girlfriend from Tijuana, up in America now, working on a landing gear for some rocket. I was understandably griped because Tom’s Sylvia still kept calling our house at midnight, drunk as a hedgehog and twice as disoriented, asking where all those dreams had gone! But Solveig was a nice woman, and since she’d been Jim’s great love for over ten years, he decided to marry her in the winter of 1968. The wedding would be at our house. There would be at least a hundred guests and roast suckling pig. We would tape “Escaleras de la Carcel” instead of the wedding march, and the wedding party would drink golden gin fizzes before the ceremony.
Solveig didn’t have a family. Most of her family had been massacred in World War II; her father had hanged himself and she’d discovered him, so I was the hostess for this event. I became obsessed. We would have my father’s marinated vegetables, and every dip known t
o man. We would have enough tequila to float a battleship. (For weeks ahead the boys made Tijuana runs, smuggling cases of booze over the border.) We would have the best music—Ray Charles and Otis Redding and Janis Joplin and all the mariachi music we could pull together. Tom commissioned a green ribbon shirt from JoAnn Lopez and I ordered a flowered pink chiffon dress. “He’s the stem,” she suggested poetically, “and you’re the blossom.”
The wedding day dawned bright and clear. The pig, when I picked it up, laid out with a very small apple in its mouth, looked frail and sick. I’d forgotten it would be just a baby. But there were mountains of other food, beer from FedCo, all that tequila, gin for the fizzes, and our two big connections, Marina Bokelman and my dad, were bringing up mountains of grass.
So everything was going to be OK. The judge huffed up the switchback path, took a look at all of us in our hippie finery and said, “If I’d known, I’d have worn my robe.” Someone switched on “Escaleras de la Carcel.” In the sweet morning breeze they got married. We drank the golden gin fizzes, which made us a little bit sick. Then, as I drove Clara over to the baby-sitter’s where she would spend the rest of the day and night, I got a traffic ticket. That’s all right, I thought. That means nothing else can go wrong.
By the time I got back to the house the reception had started. The house acted as always like a boom box: it shuddered with sound. People got drunk too fast and there were a lot of people we didn’t know. Office workers! Everything seemed slack and sad. Daddy stood in his usual place in the kitchen rolling joints and passing them out to disappear in the party. It was his duty by now. But the dope soaked up the conversation. I cursed the damn suckling pig. There wasn’t enough food.
As the sun went down, I tried to get Tom to dance, but he wouldn’t. A light mist fell and he sat in the living room, not looking out to the patio where the party was, but out on the other side, into the abyss of the canyon. I felt a wave of tired resentment. I’d worked so hard on this thing! And it was turning out to be a dud. By ten that night it was pretty much over. Lynda and Lisa and I worked putting leftovers away, Daddy hung around the kitchen making uneasy jokes. In the patio, Tom put furniture back the way it usually was.
I was on the stairs when I heard one of the last leaving guests say to Tom, “So how is Jennifer doing in school? Studying hard?”
And Tom said, “She’s got exams right now, three courses, she’s stressed.” Jennifer, Tom’s editorial assistant at RAND, whom he had mentioned every minute for two weeks after Clara had been born three years before, and then never mentioned again. Jennifer? And I got to have a true Jamesian epiphany.
On the porch I asked him, “Tom, are you sleeping with Jennifer?” The patio light caught his deep-set eyes. “Yes. Yes I am.” He swayed from everything he’d drunk and smoked, and took a stack of dirty dishes into the kitchen.
A lie! It had all been a lie! The last five years and everything he’d said and our wonderful parties and the feeling that life was getting better—all that was a lie. I took a bottle of tequila and thrashed out into the field by our house. In the black night I screamed like a bat. “You fool!” I screamed. “You fool! How could you have done it?” It seemed to me that he must have been out of his mind to throw away a life and a family and a place and a direction. I rolled around in the wet ryegrass and sobbed. Over there in the house Tom and Lisa and my dad and his wife, Lynda, waited it out. It wasn’t until years later that I figured a good part of those screams were retroactive and directed at my dad. You fool! How could you have done it? Thrown away a life, a family, a place, and a direction? Sure, Daddy, you said you “had to leave or go mad.” I get it! I understand it. But what about me? You jumped ship, you bastard.
The next morning, when I came into my house covered with foxtails and leaves, poor Lynda was washing mountains of dishes from the party. Daddy looked like he wanted to kill himself. Lisa was out of sight, holed up downstairs. Tom and I went to pick up Clara from the baby-sitter. We parked and Tom talked. He still loved me. We drove Clara home and resumed our lives. Because he certainly wasn’t going to see that Jennifer again.
Sometime during the six weeks after that, Rose’s boyfriend Tony, who worked so hard for the phone company from midnight to eight in the morning, got off work early, right around three. He was pleased. He’d get a chance to sleep, and the next day he and Rose could go to the beach.
But when he got home, instead of finding Rose asleep, he discovered her wide-awake out in the kitchen, washing a sweater in the sink. It was funny, because she was wearing a sweater, and that was all she wore.
“What are you doing up so late?”
But Rose couldn’t answer. Her teeth chattered so much she couldn’t talk.
Tony looked at Rose for a minute or two and then began to search the house, looking behind the couch and under the bed until he finally opened the closet that had a naked man standing in it. Tony ignored the naked man and went back to get Rose. He punched her and punched her again and then pushed her down and banged her head against the floor so many times that the naked man began to get concerned. “Don’t you think you might want to let up on her a little?” he asked, as he slipped into his jeans, grabbed his T-shirt, and made his way to the door.
And one night, three weeks after Jim had married Solveig and I’d found out about Jennifer, an hour-long monologue, Tom more-or-less changed and launched into The Limitations of Monogamy. He jawed on for about fifteen minutes without, perhaps, noticing what he was saying and he’d just about gotten to the part about Wives and Children Killing Art when I hauled off and slugged him. I’d never done a thing like that before, but I was filled, for that one moment, with pure joy. One punch, to knock out about a decade of what were getting to be really tiresome lectures.
It was a language old Tom understood. He’d fought a dozen bouts in college, winning all except the last. Tom flew along the length of the couch, then laughed, then said something about getting it out of my system. He had a few knocks he wanted to get out of his system too. But it was never a question of “wife-beating.” We duked it out fair and square—for the next three weeks.
The kids heard all this, of course, and took cover.
Six weeks after Jim’s wedding, Tom decided he had to go down to Ensenada to go skin diving. Because life wasn’t worth living if I didn’t trust him. From the kitchen I watched Tom Sturak, brown, blond, high-strung, hosing down his wet suit, peering down into his snorkle, sharpening the spears on his speargun. Then came the weekend and he drove away. I had lunch at the Polo Lounge with an editor from Little, Brown, who told me I ought to be writing books. Either that information or tainted shrimp kept me throwing up all night.
The next day, Sunday, Tom was due home in the late afternoon. Clara came down with one of those classic kid fevers where I had to put her in a basin of cold water and alcohol to keep her from going into convulsions. (Or so Dr. Spock said.) About eight at night my trust dried up. I called the person Tom had gone fishing with and got his daughter.
“I just want to know if your dad is back yet.”
“What?”
“I’d like to know if your dad is back yet, or if Tom is over there.”
The little girl got fed up. “Oh Dad, you take this, will you? I can’t remember what it was I was supposed to say.”
Later on this Sunday night, after I’d looked up Jennifer’s address in the phone book, I was down in Venice Beach, waiting for the happy couple. Clara was home, teeth chattering with fever, getting dunked in ice water every fifteen minutes by her harried sister. What a world. Tom had betrayed me and now I betrayed Clara and Lisa, leaving them to fend for themselves while I chose to play out a part in a hackneyed soap opera.
I’d never laid eyes on poor Jennifer. What got me is that all her luggage matched. Cream-colored Naugahyde, including one of those girlie-pieces in the shape of a hatbox that they advertised in the pages of Seventeen. She saw me and burst out crying. Tom started laughing. Jennifer’s little house was bare and immac
ulate. It had African violets on the windowsills and one of Tom’s shirts, blue with a white pinstripe, perfectly ironed and hanging from a doorknob. I’d wondered where that shirt was! Tom said, “I really love you both, you know.”
He offered me an envelope of time; he sent me home first. I could have picked up the girls and left, but I was too scared. I stayed and the next hideous six months began: Tom and I fought over this little twenty-three-foot cabin, eleven and a half feet for him, the same for me. I refused to take alimony: how could I take money from such a slime? He happily agreed.
He’d said that no one with a PhD could write. But by sending off twenty pages about the carnaval in Mazatlán to a newspaper, and getting paid for it, I’d stolen Mazatlán, and stolen his dream of writing. If there were a gun around the house—except for that rifle it took fifteen minutes to load—he’d kill me. If there were a gun around the house, I’d kill him. He lived with Jennifer, and called me twenty times a day.
Insanely, we went to Europe for six weeks, because we’d already bought the tickets. Jennifer stayed home with a broken heart. Tom won a big race in Germany. We traveled to the far end of Slovakia, arriving late at night. Tom banged on the door. “I’m here to run the marathon!” he yelled. “Are you crazy?” someone yelled back. “Don’t you know the Russians have invaded? There isn’t going to be any marathon!” Tom was revolted. What kind of world was this, that war came before a marathon? Each night we’d decide if we were sleeping together or not. That determined the kind of hotel accommodations we got.