by See, Carolyn
—
The next morning I wake up on a bare mattress with blankets piled inefficiently around me. It’s freezing in this room. I try to remember where I am and where the others are. Lisa took one bedroom and kept Clara with her. Rose defiantly kept on sleeping in Tony’s bed out in the living room, since she thought that’s what sent Mom into her fit. Mother took one twin bed in here and I took a bed in this room with her. With her.
My head is splitting. We put away some brandy last night after the wine ran out. Christmas morning, my second Christmas since Tom left me. I’m sleeping in a bed without sheets next to my mother. I know Rose is leaving the country soon, she can’t stand her life the way it is now. I think of Lisa, who asked for only one thing after the divorce, a sewing machine. She’s had her head bent over a sewing machine since the week Tom left—working, working. I think of Clara, all child-bluster and bitten fingernails. She started biting them when Tom and I took that stupid trip to Europe. How could we have done any of this?
I think of the future and I don’t see anything. I don’t see anything at all. Then … I begin to get an awful feeling at the small of my back. I hear … tap tap tap! My mother’s nails drumming on a hard surface. With a feeling of dread I turn over to face her bed.
She’s sitting straight up on the mattress ticking, fully dressed in polyester slacks, clean blouse, Orlon cardigan sweater. Her face is bright; she’s ready to talk.
“Do you know that man you brought up here? He sleeps with his hat on!”
After this holiday episode, I begin to lose heart. It’s so hard, so hard to keep things going. It takes me forever to write out the bills—I never learned how to do it before. I have terrible times with editors: one of them locks me in an office until I get a 1,500-word piece right. Lisa learns to drive. Her dad gets her a car. She begins wearing turbans and staying out late. I take Clara in for a new school wardrobe and unerringly pick up a bunch of stuff in polyester: the poor kid has to go to school in pink polyester.
But Tom perceives that things might be getting better for me—or at least that’s what I perceive—because he cranks up his case against me. Maybe it’s because the actual legal divorce is finally going through. He calls me more often than when we were married. I look out of the kitchen window and see him pacing the patio at all hours: “This is my house, my house!”
I go so far as to put a spell on the house, scattering ashes and praying: “If anyone lives at this house except me and my children, may they get sick and die an awful death!”
Talking (screaming) to Tom on the telephone about which of us is going to pay the property taxes this one last year before the divorce comes through, or why he stole certain Mexican records when he knew I was out of the house, I feel myself beginning to lose it. We begin calling each other to hang up on each other. Sometimes we don’t even say anything at all, just call, hang up. We’ve got to get every last insult in before the papers are signed.
“You live every day as if it’s the first day of your life!” Tom says.
“I do not,” I reply, stung to the core. “I live every day as if it’s the last day of my life.”
“It’s the same thing,” he replies grumpily. But he picks up on this theme a week or so later. My magazine pieces are beginning to come out and Tom says: “Sidney says you write every sentence as if it’s your very last sentence.”
Sidney? Sidney’s the guy who pretended he was going spearfishing with Tom, and he’s got the fucking nerve to comment on my prose style? Nevertheless, I ponder, and try to tone the prose style down. (And to get over it about Sidney, since my friend Judy went off to join her lover—who got dumped by the naked girl in the American flag—on the Island of Yap, and I’ve been covering for her for two weeks now, saying, to the man who thinks he lives with her, and that she’s visiting me, “Oh, she just stepped out.” Yeah, stepped out of this house, down the switchback path, and eight thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean.)
The glass of Cinzano sticks to my hand so steadily that when I have pictures taken for the jacket of my first novel, it’s there in the picture.
I get so strung out that I scream at Tom on the phone, “All right! You can have everything, you weaselly little scum, you blackhearted lying bastard! You can have EVERYTHING! You can have the Mexican records, TAKE THEM ALL! You can have all the first editions, you BOOK SNOB! And all the good pictures, TAKE THEM, TAKE THEM! But there’s one thing you can never have, never, never, NEVER! You can’t have MY GOOD OPINION!” (But Tom takes no more than his fair share of stuff.)
I drive the kids down to Cardiff, where my father lives with Lynda and my brand-new half brother—thirty-five years younger than I am—Brother Bob. He’s a big baby, calm and placid. I complain to my father, I cry. But my father has gone through some changes. Maybe it’s because he finally has a son. Maybe it’s because my howling reminds him way too much of my mother. Whatever it is, he seems unmoved by my grieving.
Wynn, his AA wife, is finally dying. The cancer has caught up with her. Wynn’s mother has called my dad, asking for money to pay the hospital bills. He’s told her no, and is having Lynda answer the phone now. There’s no way he’s going to pony up, and no way he’s going to talk to her. Lynda doesn’t venture an opinion. But I hit the ceiling. “She was your wife.” He looks at me, uncomprehending as a steer. “She was your wife.” I can’t help it, I just don’t get it. I’m astonished at how these guys can be married, death-do-us-part, and it’s all a total lie, they’re scot-free, they’ve been lying from the beginning: they help you out the way cats help mice.
I call Wynn up, to say good-bye. She mentions God, her Old Friend, and how she’s not worried about death. But she doesn’t sound as confident as before. The last thing she says to me is, “I always loved you, Penny.”
Rose by this time has dumped the steady Tony. She’s taken up with a Hungarian named Ferenç and has been conning my mother for enough money to leave the country. I get a postcard from Rose. She’s left without telling me. She has a way of sneaking out. She sounds happy and says she’s living with Ferenç in a tree.
Now Clara and I live pretty much alone in our little house. Lisa spends most of her time with her boyfriend. Tom has taken up with a new woman. He hasn’t dumped Jennifer yet, but it’s coming. The new woman soaks up a lot of his time; he doesn’t call ten times a day anymore. Sometimes he goes weeks without calling. I’ve been so tough on Harvard that I go weeks without hearing from him. Clara, who’s five by now, doesn’t sleep downstairs but upstairs in the double bed with me. When she goes to sleep, the silence is some goddamn silence. I’ve never heard anything like it.
My first novel has come out and sunk like a stone. I don’t know what happened. I thought it was pretty good.
I don’t even feel like going out anymore with those weird divorce-fish at the bottom of the sea. Besides, I know by now I can’t be trusted more than anybody else.
When Clara leaves for school in the morning, I’m alone. I cry the day away, just like my mother. One afternoon in 1969, after five or six hours of this, I pick up the phone and call the Suicide Prevention Clinic. I tell them I can’t stand it.
“Are you holding a weapon?” the voice asks urgently. “Have you taken any pills?”
It’s as if someone has pulled a commonsense lever in my chest. Well, no! I’m only saying I can’t stand it! I’m certainly not going kill myself this afternoon! (And I’m reminded of my mother, who used to threaten suicide so often when I was a kid that when I grew up I’d tease her about it, saying that if I had a nickel for every suicide threat she’d made, and invested it wisely, we’d all be millionaires.)
The voice, just a little vexed, refers me to a woman psychologist. I get the first six meetings free.
I hang up and call the woman to make the appointment. No one in our family or in our circle of friends has done anything remotely like this before. This is far stranger than going to Europe or going to college or dropping acid or even writing a novel.
Our whole heritage, as far back as I can remember, and including everything I’ve heard about, has been about suffering. That’s been a given, like a stain on your suit, a birthmark on your cheek. What I think—and I can hardly formulate the thought, since I’m winding down from a daylong crying jag, and a domestic explosion that’s lasted for years or maybe a century, and gone through all our family—is: what if we could manage a way to try to sneak out from under all this? What if we could all manage to sneak out?
PART II
9. ROSE’S STORY
Mother and Rose
After Tony beat Rose up so badly, she began to take a look at her options. The carefree sex life she’d told me about on our acid trip wasn’t exactly as easygoing as she’d portrayed. When she was still an au pair girl she’d been screwing some guy on the couch and felt so incredibly sad about everything that her vagina had actually done that thing people joked about: it had clamped down on the poor guy. It was terribly painful and terribly embarrassing.
Her boyfriend Tony bored her to tears. He was good and kind, but his idea was: go to work. Go to the movies. Take a class, hear a lecture, buy a few beers, smoke some dope, zone out in front of the TV, sleep, surf, be peaceful. It worked, off and on, but it wasn’t going to work forever. Then, one night, a girlfriend came over to visit, and brought a friend with her. Ferenç Balaz. “I could see he was interested in me. He was funny and smart and different. He was exactly my age, born in 1950. We were both twenty-one. He was Hungarian, his father had been a Freedom Fighter, and he and his mother were refugees, living in Basel, Switzerland. He’d come over to America with this chick. I think he saw a meal ticket. Her father was a studio musician. Ferenç wanted a music career. He played the guitar and he was good.
“But the girl was so dumb! She kept bringing him around. By that time I’d inherited the little money that was still left to me from my dad’s trust fund. So Ferenç just ramrodded into my life. We took off in my Volks and drove north. Then we stopped in Big Sur and we were sitting in a meadow by a river and he was smoking hash right out in the open. He never got it that what you could do in Europe you couldn’t do over here! So up comes a ranger and a great big dog and busted him. So already they wanted to deport him! But, as I remember, we bailed out, cash. We bailed out.
“And not too much longer after that, we took our first trip to Europe. Ferenç figured it was time to go back to where he knew what he was doing. He regretted losing his family ties. He kept waiting for me to pull rabbits out of the hat, but I didn’t have any. What we did do, though, was go all the way on up to Northern California where your friend Marina was living by then, remember? We slept out in back of her tent in sleeping bags and we bought ten thousand hits of acid for ten cents apiece. Blotter acid on those clear sheets of paper? We just put them inside a book and put the book in a suitcase. We sold the acid in Basel for six dollars a hit.”
Rose and Ferenç stayed with his mother in a fourteenth-century building that had been completely renovated. This was Switzerland, middle-class land of poor old Tony’s dreams, but Rose was living there with shifty Ferenç. “It wasn’t scroungy Europe,” Rose would say. “There was no poverty. Everything ran. Everything worked. But we didn’t stay long that first visit. We stayed through the winter. I got every virus there was. And we didn’t do many drugs then. Just an occasional pipe of hash.” When I ask her what Ferenç was like in those days, she says, “I would say he treated me the way Tom treated you. Like I was an idiot. Of course, he spoke five languages and I only spoke one. So to him I was an idiot! So we lived in this good place, you could cross the street and be in Germany—I had a German dentist—and you could take the train to Paris to buy clothes. But I didn’t know the language. I didn’t know Swiss-German. I felt very isolated over there. I was very sad. I was very lonely.”
They came back to LA, smuggling in reverse, purchasing quantities of hash and opium for almost nothing, returning in the summer of 1972, when they settled in with me for approximately one week. Divorced by then, teaching sedately at a Catholic college, I was now infatuated with an entertainment lawyer who was on his own sixties quest of going back to nature in Bolinas, California (and trying to find a woman who would put up with his mean-spirited ways). He had already worked his way through two of my women friends—Joan and Judy—and had settled, like a sweet leech, on me.
That’s why it took me about a week to notice that when before Rose and Ferenç had moved into our little cabin the phone had rung maybe ten times a day, now it rang about two hundred times a day, with desperate, harassed voices saying into the phone: “Melrose and Vermont, northwest corner in two hours,” or “Sheraton Hotel, the lobby, nine tonight.” I was too busy to notice that two professional drug dealers had moved into my house.
I couldn’t stand Ferenç. He looked as if he hadn’t had a bath since childhood—though in fact he hogged the bathroom and repeatedly used up all our hot water. He also hogged the television set, always finding terrible shows like Let’s Make a Deal and then sneering, “Isn’t that America in a nutshell? Let’s make a deal!” But that didn’t mean he ever stopped watching Let’s Make a Deal.
Finally, I told Rose that they had to move out—and they couldn’t use the phone for their dope deals. To tell the truth, I was scandalized at what they were doing, and what she had become. Rose and Ferenç did move out—to the patio. They came in to take showers, and they sat restfully in the patio all day, except for when they went out to sell drugs.
The killer question was: what had happened to my sister Rose? In my eyes, she’d gone from the sweet, horridly put-upon victim of my mother, the scapegoat of a desert town, a funny girl, a real sister who could ask me: “Penny, are you strong?” to a fairly scary criminal. Or if she wasn’t, she certainly hung out with a criminal, and he had a bad personality besides. When I tried to talk to her about it, she just glanced away like a bad female in a Raymond Chandler novel.
One day on the patio they were joined by a pale, tiny, petrified Swiss teenager named Tom-Tom. I was at the end of my rope by then. My ex-husband Tom was yelling that he, in fact, owned half of the patio, and my sordid relatives had to vacate the premises at once. The entertainment lawyer, whom my daughters detested, had invited the three of us to spend a long weekend in Bolinas, at his lovely farmhouse with two private lakes. (But he’d already begun to tell me, in a series of circuitous conversations, that he felt my daughters were sadly lacking. I’d been a bad mother to them, and it would actually be to their advantage if I packed them off to their respective fathers for the rest of their/our lives. Then he and I could live in Bolinas forever.)
I knew there were grave things wrong with this logic, but as I’d try to pin this elusive emissary of the Devil down, Ferenç would sashay through the house wrapped in nothing but a skimpy towel, brandishing a bar of soap, on his way to his third shower of the day.
The momentous weekend in the meadows of Bolinas was coming up. Lisa and Clara might even have been looking forward to it. But here were these three reprehensible hard druggies on the patio, and Screaming Tom having a tantrum about his property rights.
I told Rose I was going away for two days and that she was absolutely not allowed in the house. I locked the upstairs and the downstairs, gave the key to a neighbor, and told Tom what I had done. For once we were in agreement, since stealing seemed to be Ferenç’s second hobby after dealing dope.
The next day, a Saturday, in the middle of the morning in Bolinas paradise, where the girls and I had been fed a squash casserole in the shape of a mandala, escorted back to check out the two exquisitely beautiful private lakes, and refreshed with cinnamon rolls and wonderful coffee, the phone rang. The lawyer answered it, and handed it to Lisa. His face registered prissy distaste that any teenager should receive a phone call within the confines of his very own farmhouse.
Lisa’s face looked suddenly intent. “What are you saying, Rose? What packets? What nineteen packets? Nineteen packets of opium? No, I did not take any nineteen packets
of opium!”
I grabbed the phone and heard a hysterical Rose accuse my daughter Lisa of stealing nineteen packets of opium and planning to sell them for enormous profit—perhaps even now, up in Bolinas. The entertainment lawyer, with his look of prissy superiority, hung back. He was Jewish and very rich, and he knew he was looking at white trash. Rose insisted, sounding crazy, saying, “Because if she didn’t, who did? They were at the bottom of her chest of drawers. Down there, in her own room, where she sleeps.”
All this made for a good deal of discussion, Lisa denying, Clara crying, the attorney sneering, and me trying with a pitiful lack of success to be a grown-up. But I was angry now. Marijuana, sure. Everybody did it. Acid, yes! It was the key to the Divine. Mescaline, sure. We were just out of the sixties, after all. But nineteen packets of opium? That was dark, fetid, low, criminal. And they’d been hiding it in my daughter’s room.
We decided there was nothing we could do about Rose and her sidekicks. We would wait until we came home on Sunday night. We spent the afternoon swimming and watching hawks float across the perfect blue sky, listening to Van Morrison, picking apples and nasturtiums. It was heaven, all right.
Except that on Sunday morning my screaming ex-husband called, and he didn’t even need to use a telephone, you could have heard him without one, straight from LA. He was incoherent with rage. I couldn’t get his tirade clear, but it had to do with Rose and “his” half of the house. I listened to his voice and watched Lisa, distancing herself from it all, Clara looking forlorn and pale, and the attorney looking prissier than ever. I was deeply, deeply into my own ongoing persona of the hardworking woman-alone-with-two-children (except that, of course, here I was, picking flowers with a man who hated children).
I agreed to meet Tom with the kids that night as soon as we got off the plane in LA, at the China Palace—a low-priced haven for harried divorcées and all their children. A safe place, because Tom sounded violent. But that night, as we ate dried sautéed string beans and moo-shoo pork, even as Tom told the story, he began to laugh. He’d gone up at dawn that Sunday morning to check on “his half of the house”—all eleven and a half feet of it—and peering through a window into the living room, found the remains of a landmark party. Beer cans, liquor bottles, chairs turned over, and a few unconscious people passed out cold. Livid with rage, he went downstairs, and found, sleeping in Lisa’s bed, the very tiny Tom-Tom, just in from Basel. (He was the owner of the nineteen packets of opium: they were his grubstake for a new life in America.) Tom began to roar at this intruder but soon realized that the little kid couldn’t understand a word. “So I was reduced,” Tom said, grinning in spite of himself, “to yelling, ‘Aus! Aus! It’s my house!’ ” Tom-Tom, terrified, put the pillow over his head and prayed in Swiss-German that the foreign monster would go away.