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

by See, Carolyn

  “Every day I see these women in their suits, with their briefcases, coming by in the morning with these little kids, and I think, how can the mothers do that? Just have them like they were some BMW or a toaster and then walk away and leave? And I can see them, the little kids, crying? It’s like they’re saying I’ll take one of these for my perfect little life, and another one of these for my perfect little life, and then they walk off and leave. And then on the bus, when I go to work”—she was taking care of a woman with Alzheimer’s four hours a day—“I see all these—excuse me!—niggers, and all of them are high on crack and they have more kids on the bus with them than they know what to do with. So I ask myself, how can some nigger bitch have a baby and I can’t do it? Do you think there’s anything wrong with my medical history?”

  It was conversations like this that had pretty much kept me from going up there. I didn’t know anybody, except my mother, who talked like that, and even my mother had given it up in public. But another time, when I’d call and leave a message on the answering machine, Rose would call me back with the greatest sympathy and concern: “What is it? What is it? Are you worried about the kids? Don’t you feel well?” And three out of four times she’d be right on the money.

  We landed at the Oakland airport and drove north to downtown Berkeley. That night we’d rest; the next day drive over to visit Rose, then do the reading, then the next day fly on home.

  Alameda. A sweet little island! Maybe half of it still given over to a naval base. The other half a maze of side streets and California cottages. A fire station. An elementary school. A crowded main street with grocery stores and clothing stores and hardware stores, but no coffeehouses, no boutiques, nobody selling ethnic art: we could have been in Wichita.

  We were just on time. We got out of the car and saw that the apartments had no numbers or letters, but the manager knew Rose and pointed us up upstairs.

  How could one little girl wear so much makeup? (Except she was forty-one.) She wore perfectly fitting jeans, a spotless white T-shirt, a tiny gold crucifix. The apartment, small, was wildly clean. (Except that on the coffee table there were two cups, two saucers from breakfast, and a portable makeup mirror with an opened bag of all Rose’s cosmetics.) She’d neglected the trip to the kitchen in favor of her eyelashes. (To say that my mother had hated her when she’d got up at five in the morning to put on her makeup to get ready for school is to misstate the facts. If my mother could have laced Rose’s cosmetics with a deadly poison and gotten away clean from the murder she would have, without a millisecond’s hesitation.) There was also a curling iron on the coffee table. Rose’s long brown hair had been coaxed to curl out, away from her face, in Valley Girl style.

  Rose sprinted to the coffee table, picked up the cups and saucers. “The time got away from me! I thought you’d be late!” We stood there stock-still, helpless in the living room. Rose seemed so energetic we couldn’t seem to live up to it. We couldn’t think of what to say. “This is the bathroom!” And it was, yellow and spotless. “This is the bedroom!” A small room with a low-to-the-floor kingsize waterbed, perfectly made up, except for one lump. “The cat!”

  In the living room, the furnishings were meager. One black leather couch. One black leather chair. One coffee table. One television set. One stereo. One big picture of a sailboat.

  Rose couldn’t seem to sit down. She put John in the chair, and me on one end of the couch. She sat down at the other end, got up, went out to the kitchen, checked the bathroom, got up again, offered us Diet Cokes, sat down, got up, sat down.

  Rose displayed her left hand in such a way that I saw an enormous engagement ring, a diamond maybe a carat and a half, maybe more.

  “Some ring!” I said.

  “I went out yesterday and got it cleaned. Because you were coming.”

  If I ever wanted a drink in my life, it was then.

  “You’ve got some great diamonds in your ears,” she said. “What would they be, about a carat apiece? Did John buy them for you?”

  But I said no, I’d bought them for myself, to celebrate when one of my novels came out. I was about to say that a lady in that book had stuck a boxful of loose jewels into her blistered hands after an atomic bomb fell in her neighborhood, but it was going to sound too dumb.

  Rose leaned forward, examined those stones in my ears, and then leaned back again. “It was so sad, right after Christmas? Carl couldn’t get any work because his work is seasonal. He can’t work in the rain. So we just sat on this couch. Then we took the earrings he gave me for Christmas down to the pawnshop and paid the rent for that month. They’re still down there. I think we can get them back pretty soon. They’re very good quality.

  “In fact,” she went on, “the best investment you can make now is in jewelry, especially with the recession and the way the S&L’s are going. Because if you get good stones—rubies are good, diamonds are good—they always keep their value, and sometimes they even go up.”

  “Rose! How’d you figure all this out?”

  “From Michael, when he was dealing. Lots of times his customers didn’t have money, and so they’d pay him with a handful of rubies or emeralds. It’s a real good form of currency. And that carried over, you know? Like all the money that the dealers made? Probably the best place to put it is in jewelry stores. So if you look around now, the jewelry stores that are new in the country? The ones that aren’t, like, some old family business from the Netherlands? The new businesses are mostly from dope money.”

  “Tell me about what you’ve been doing, Rose. Tell me about Carl.”

  Rose twisted around on the couch. She arched her back. She touched her neck. She patted her long hair, making sure it was still in place. “I’ve been wanting to ask your advice. Carl really wants to get married, and he really wants a family. But don’t you think I’m too old for him? I mean, it’s all right now, but when he’s forty, I’ll be fifty-six. When he’s sixty, I’ll be …”

  “Careful!” I said, because John, sitting in his chair looking bemused, was seventy-nine.

  “Yes, but it’s different for a man.”

  “What does Carl’s mother think?”

  “Oh, she’s real nice. Carl says, ‘How come she’s turning into such a good mom now when I don’t need a good mom anymore?’ All she ever used to do was work and sleep. So that’s the only way Carl ever saw her. But he must have been a handful!”

  “Like how?”

  “Well!” she said, and smiled. “Besides the dope, he was always getting into accidents. He had this other wife … And one night when he was real young, he and his wife were going home from a party and they’d been drinking and everything else, and they had an argument about who was going to drive, so she ended up driving, and she ran into a tree, and Carl was in a coma for six weeks. He’s real handsome! But his whole skull was bashed in and if you look at his eye and along his cheekbones, you’ll see this line of stitches, and there’s another thing. His eyelashes burned off and they’ll never come back. They don’t have plastic surgery for it. He had to learn to walk and talk all over again, and his memory is still pretty bad. Sometimes he’ll ask me things like, ‘How did Robert Kennedy die again? Can you remind me about that?’ ”

  “Well,” I said. “It sounds like he made a pretty good recovery.”

  “But right after he was getting better from all that? He went out to a biker bar, and he must have said something to get on somebody’s nerves, because during the middle of a dart game a stranger shot him five times in the chest. They really thought he was dead that time! He’s got this tremendous scar from here to here.” She draws a line from her collarbone to her pubic bone. “That’s when he thought God must be trying to tell him something, and so he got into the program.”

  “Is that how you met Carl? In New Bridge?”

  “That was another guy, Ted. Don’t you remember?”

  “Do you ever see Ted?”

  “I haven’t seen him since they kicked me out.” She shifted around, sh
e didn’t look me in the eye. Something about her puffy little cheeks reminded me … reminded me of me.

  “They caught us fooling around, but they had to keep Ted in New Bridge because they had more of an investment in him. They were getting about five times more money for keeping him than for keeping me. Because I was off the streets, and the city was paying the minimum for me, but the Feds were paying a lot of money to keep Ted in the program.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because Ted was, what do you call it? Federated? He had owned such a big spread up north, he did such a huge business, that he was the first man in America to commit this new crime they figured out … they invented it for him. He wasn’t just growing marijuana, he was manufacturing it. So he made a lot of money. And he put a lot of it away. What happened was—the government confiscated all his property and his house and cars and everything. And then he bought it all back with cash. So that’s why they wanted to keep him there. He was like a feather in their cap. But Penny, Carolyn, this is what I want to ask you: should I marry Carl or not? Because he really, really loves me. And he really wants a family.”

  Wordless disorientation came over me then. I could look past Rose and see the open window and leafy green trees and hear birds singing. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon. It was the regular world. The cat in the bed was a cat, the television playing with the sound down was regular Oprah. John lounging in his chair was regular John. But Rose was asking me if she should marry a twenty-four-year-old guy who couldn’t remember how Robert Kennedy was killed.

  I took a cowardly way out. “What does the rest of his family think?”

  “His mom thinks it’s fine. And his dad isn’t there. And his brother—his brother is going through what I guess we all go through. He was going to be this great actor, but he’s a waiter now, and he’s got a job and an apartment. He’s making a living and everything, but he’s dealing with these feelings. Is this it? This is the life I’m going to have? Carl’s been trying to help him with it. Because Carl realizes. You get up, you go to work, you come home. You buy a car. You go out. That’s it. That’s life. And you have to come to terms with that. But, what do you think? Should I marry Carl? Or am I just setting myself up for heartbreak? Because when he’s forty, I’ll be fifty-six.”

  I told her about Clara’s coming marriage, and the bridesmaids’ dresses, strapless and shocking pink. And mentioned Clara’s dress, with a hundred thousand yards of tulle.

  “Little Clara,” she said, absently. “Can you imagine? But what should I do about Carl? Because no one has ever loved me the way he does.”

  “Well, what the hell,” I said. “Go for it. Nobody knows what’s going to happen in five years, anyway.”

  “Do you think so?” She twisted around to look at John and I saw her small waist, her perky breasts under the white T. “John, what do you think?”

  “You should do whatever you think is best for you,” he said mildly.

  “So, are you coming tonight?” I asked my sister. All of a sudden, I felt jumpy as hell.

  “What is it exactly?”

  “A reading at Black Oak Books. Just a few blocks from New Bridge, down on Shattuck.”

  “I know where it is. But what’s going to happen?”

  “There’s this new book. It’s an anthology. Some of the writers are going to read from it.” I felt helpless and sad, like I used to with my mother, trying to explain what it is that I do. There wasn’t one book in this apartment, I realized. Not one.

  “Will there be a lot of people there?”

  “Not many. Maybe thirty. And there’ll be a little party afterward. It would be great if you could come.”

  Back at the French Hotel, putting on panty hose, trying to get at the snap at the top of my black dress, pulling on a Chinese silk coat—all these were like magic gestures, grounding me back down into a familiar world. In the hall, I saw Lynell George, a beautiful girl who’d done a chapter in Sex, Death and God in LA. She seemed thrilled and excited and vigorous and young. And, with a couple of other writers, we walked two blocks to Black Oak.

  Like life, the reading had its ups and down. Yes, there were about thirty people here, from our Los Angeles point of view a little too refined. Five people would be reading, three too many. Friends and strangers, some of them going gray, filled up the folding chairs.

  The first joe who read, read his whole essay. Something happens to people when they get behind a microphone, especially to writers, lonely as they are. Beautiful Lynell got up and was great. Rubén Martinez, a Latino activist who saw the emotional energy was close to comatose in this well-intentioned room, knew he had to keep it short and loud. He didn’t read, but shouted out some poems instead. His Spanish was jam packed with the most outrageous insults to the white community, but this particular white community was either too well-mannered or too bone-bored to react. Then another man, fond of his own voice, elected to read his entire chapter.

  So, at the last, I read only two pages. But they were good pages. Because of my silk coat, and because I chose to be “optimistic” about the dying city, the activist took me on afterward in a moderately spirited debate about how West-Side rich people don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. Rubén, if you only knew. At the party later, another writer—when we bitched to each other about how, on a tour, you have to sometimes put up your own money and go broke—blurted out, “I thought you were rich!” My feeling was: you can get a lot of mileage out of a silk coat.

  People kept drifting in all through the reading, so it ended up a standing-room-only crowd. I kept looking for a heavily madeup lady with a twenty-two inch waist and a perky chest, and a guy with no eyelashes on his left eye.

  But my sister that night had to be Lynell George, black, young, and beautiful. And my raffish brother-in-law, Rubén, personable and loud, sporting his trademark flashy tie.

  I thought of the embrace that Rose had given me when we’d left. You know how, sometimes, arms go around you and hold you, but you can feel somebody’s solar plexus move away at the same time, unintentionally, maybe, but it moves away? Maybe I had done the same thing. Partly, I was relieved that she hadn’t shown up tonight. Because now that we had found each other, what in the world were we going to do with each other?

  Maybe forgetting would become the order of the day. Maybe soon we too would be going around, plucking on sleeves, asking, “Could you just fill me in again, on what happened to those Kennedy boys? There were bullets involved, right?”

  13. MOM STANDS PAT

  Mother, hamming it up at the zoo

  After Rose left home when she was sixteen, Mother seemed to have gotten what she wanted, or at least what she said she wanted: a life free from the responsibility of bringing up children. But the catch was—since she hated men more than cockroaches—she found herself living alone.

  In a terrible irony, she went through much the same sense of abandonment when Rose left as when my father had gone. During my visits I’d see signs and bills and a “will” posted all over the little house in Victorville where she lived now—no more than ten blocks from the bungalow court where Aunt Helen and Uncle Bob had lived during the Great Depression. The “will” went like this: “To my daughter, Penny, I leave everything and to my other daughter, Rose, I leave the sum of one dollar. Because not only did she steal my car, and pull the fire alarm at her junior high school three times in one day, and act up in church, and steal my credit cards, and force me to call the police, but she also …”

  Convinced she was going to be abandoned, Mother did everything she could to facilitate the process. Every time it happened she went through hell again, but every time it happened she proved once again she was right: “family” was a bitter charade. Friends were the only ones you could rely on.

  A space of charged air surrounded her. When you reached over to hug her, her body shivered with revulsion. Still I hung around, the moron-daughter who couldn’t take a hint. But what’s the ultimate torture for a masochist? Not to h
it him. What’s the ultimate torture for my mother? Not to leave her. So even though she’s said a zillion times that I’m “just like my father,” I will be like my father in that I’ll drink too much and have dubious dates after my divorce and develop a paunch from eating too much and tell silly jokes, but I won’t leave my mother. Even more irritating—as she insists that “in life you’ve got to take shit, take shit, take shit!”—I counter by plastering a vacant smile on my face and remark that life is very nice. Toward the end of this twenty-year period, when, by luck, I end up with a little money and respect, she’ll say to me, drawing her lips back over her teeth, “Well, you worked like a dog to get where you are today.” But I know what will drive her the most nuts, and so I always say, again with the most cretinous smile I can muster, “No, Mother, I just love what I do. And I only work a couple of hours a day. I really don’t believe in work! I think life should be fun, don’t you?”

  My father couldn’t have said it better, and I can see it’s all my mother can do to keep from beaning me with a two-by-four. There’s more to it than that. I have in my mind that a person doesn’t leave her mother. Also, I guess I love her.

  —

  The characters in her own life changed. Uncle Bob, who’d been looking peaked, was taken to the Victorville hospital. Before he got into the car he stopped in the driveway on Forest Street and took a long look at the two-bedroom house with the garage turned into a den, and a little rose garden surviving along the side of the house, carefully tended plants in desert sand. He stood in the street-baking heat and looked at the house. He was silver-haired, stooped, the silver plate still sizzled in his head. He still told people that other people sometimes thought he “came from the British Isles.”

  Aunt Helen’s disposition did not improve, sitting as she was in the driver’s seat in the broiling sun. She shouted to him to for God’s sake, come on! Get in the car! Shimmying a little, for he drank constantly from morning to night, he finally did. But he got in with dignity, because his family had, for as long as he could remember, owned this town—two or three blocks of property along the railroad tracks, and for many years, that’s all there was to Victorville.