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

by See, Carolyn

  Then it began to end (although neighbors would complain good-naturedly that the loud music went on way too long). We finally stopped dancing. Clara and Chris were among the last to leave. “Whatever else,” Clara said contentedly, “this has shown me that I can exert my will, and things will go my way.” John said later, “Everyone came in to the wedding as though they had just met that very day. There was no past, only the present.” I thought that I had seen my family—like so many other ordinary families in America—stretched right to the breaking point, stretched and pulled by drugs, drink, and divorce until it had to break, and in fact it had exploded. But what explodes implodes. What blows up can come back down. Another dialectic had been brought to bear.

  “It was the strangest thing,” Chris Chandler, Sr., said. “Peace broke out.”

  Two people hadn’t come to the wedding: my mother, who said that “under the circumstances” she would not attend, and Rose, who never RSVPed, but admitted on the phone the next week that she’d been scared to come. “You don’t even see it,” she cried. “We still live in separate worlds.”

  And within the year, that guy Carl, who’d been going to marry her in the church, drifted off.

  SESTINA COMPOSED IN CELEBRATION OF THE MARRIAGE OF CLARA STURAK AND CHRISTOPHER CHANDLER

  13 June 1992

  Love knows no laws, and yet each age commands

  Tribute to Erato, of marriage vows the muse.

  And who are we here gathered on this green

  To risk the breaking of an ancient law?

  For sweeter tongues than mine have gladly lent

  Their music to her service, gladly sung.

  Sappho has burned, Theocritus has sung,

  Each answering an age’s strict commands;

  And after them Catullus’ passion lent

  His playful singing to evoke that muse.

  Each voice its own, yet each obeyed the law,

  And we still answer them, they are still green

  In ageless youth, and we too on this green

  Have gladly gathered, spoken more than sung,

  Our sanction, our obeisance to that law,

  Our wishes answering the stern commands,

  Our hopes together asking of the muse

  That all her blessings to this pair be lent.

  For once the power of her gift is lent

  To bless this couple here upon the green,

  No earthling can deny the granting muse

  Her wishes, but, her praises sung,

  Gladly will answer all that she commands,

  Gladly obey her great, yet gentle, law.

  To Clara, beam of light, indeed a law

  Unto herself, now let my voice be lent

  To celebrate her beauty, her commands,

  Her spirit ever young, forever green,

  Her glowing talents ever to be sung,

  Herself a magic figure, her own muse.

  To Christopher, who finds in her his muse,

  Wisely obeying most of her soft law,

  Knowing the song is best when it is sung

  In harmony, his wit and kindness lent

  To keep this union flourishing and green,

  Answering to her and to his own commands.

  Now I have sung, my voice have gladly lent

  To woo for them the muse, and give them on this green

  To our own man of law, to answer his commands.

  —John Espey

  15. DREAMING

  Lisa, John, and me as “Monica Highland.” We’ve had a lot of good luck.

  I’m almost the only one around here who drinks anymore. But I like to sit out back and look at the steep walls of Topanga and sometimes—after or during a third glass of chardonnay—I dream a little bit about my family. I think of hot days and nights in Victorville, with scorpions and centipedes in the corners of the room. My Aunt Helen, frisky after work, tucking her legs up underneath her, waiting in the evening heat for Uncle Bob to bring her a drink. “It’s Toddy Time!” Or I think of Uncle Bob, watching television with Tom, shyly remarking, as Godzilla smashes an aircraft carrier to bits and sends it to the bottom of the sea, “I guess this reminds you of the old days.” Because Tom has been in the Navy. I suppose this reminds you of the old days! I dream of Aunt Helen: “Hi, Hi! Let’s have a short snort!” For forty years she said it, never flagging.

  My mother loved her sister, just loved her, and sometimes, when they stopped being hell on wheels, they’d sit down at the piano with much giggling and nudging, and play a duet—“Nola,” or “Kitten on the Keys.” Having fun, repeating fun that they must have dreamed up long ago.

  My mother, before her divorce, was a beautiful woman, and sometimes she’d look through the kitchen window and sing as she did the dishes. “That old black magic has me in its spell, that old black magic that you weave so well …” When I was six or seven or eight, spending the night at a schoolfriend’s house, I’d get so homesick, thinking of mother singing that song, I’d cry myself to sleep. Once, later, when I was in my teens, driving in the car with my dad, and he was on his same old welcome litany about what a nice kid I was, what a wonderful kid I was, and I was dreaming, dreaming, taking it in, soaking it up, taking it as it came and for what it was—just comforting talk—his conversation took an unexpected direction. “I really don’t know why you turned out so well, except that Kate used to get you down on the floor when you were six months old or so, and play with you for hours.”

  What? What? What? Play with me for hours? Well, it must be true, because my dad would never tell a lie.

  Something must be getting to me. Maybe it’s the skyline of Topanga, where I look when I’m dreaming. There’s not a rock, a star, an indentation in those mountains everyone in this family hasn’t wished on, hasn’t thanked. Thank you, God! Thanks for Charlie, who came out of nowhere and brought groceries for my broke and brokenhearted mom, and did that until he couldn’t do it anymore. Thanks for Harvard, who did the same thing for me and my kids, so that one year when I was doing my taxes, it looked as though my total income was $2,800. Add on the hundred a month from Tom, that brought it up to $4,000. Not enough to live on! But the invisible part of the equation was Harvard, trudging up the hill with great food and great wine for seven, eight years, and he wouldn’t have heartbreak! He wouldn’t stand for it.

  And I think of poor old sewn-up Jim, a desperate man. He threw shoes, he burned up my baby pictures. Such timid crimes! How lonely he must have been, with no one to love him, no one to laugh at his jokes—if he ever made a joke.

  That loneliness! I remember Richard—who’s still here, sober as a judge, right here in the present, married to his Beautiful Black Woman. He’s handsome as ever. Sometimes, at some garden party at our daughter’s house, I want to ask him, What was the story, Richard? Why couldn’t we pull it off?

  And I want to ask Tom the same thing, but he couldn’t answer, any more than I could answer him. He said, “Ah, Carolyn,” at Clara’s wedding. Gave me a one-sided hug. Maybe that is the story. Absolutely enough of the story.

  How did we get so lucky? I think of Rose, back in the seventies, stubbornly telling her story only to me, while Mother seethed, unnoticed, in a corner of Nate ’n’ Al’s. Rose told me about living in Kauai, in that cave, swimming all the way out, two miles, and floating in the ocean on acid, looking back at clouds and mountains, surveying the entire known world. “So that’s what I’ve done,” she said that day. Does she miss that world, clean and sober now in her little apartment? Does she miss her own majestic dreaming?

  How did we get so lucky? John Espey, when he came up to see his old graduate student, must have been lonely. When I went to his apartment, it didn’t have a couch in it. When tough little Clara spit in his Coke, trying to run him off, he drank that Coke right down. He hung in, wanting a family as much as we did. And drank, and stopped.

  How did we get so lucky? When I think of my children I can only think I don’t deserve them, and then I think, “Get a g
rip.” We all deserve the very best and now is the time for it! I think of Lisa, beautiful and sixteen, vulnerable and wild, burdened unbearably with responsibility, having to carry our family as much as any mom, and Clara, six, laughing as much as she cried, yelling that any marijuana we smoked could get us arrested, standing on her head having a tantrum, her tears sliding from her eyes across her forehead and down into her hairline. She was my Rock of Gibraltar. They were both my lifelines.

  I think of the weekends in the summer, when the girls and I would all drink coffee in the old Topanga cabin and the sun would pour in and we’d get under the same quilt and talk until we got so hungry we had to fix breakfast. Or those times when Harvard had made up his mind to cook Indian food, so when we did get up and forage in the morning we’d find his vegetable curry in the refrigerator, one of those magic foods, so much more than the sum of its parts that you had to eat it until it was gone.

  How did we get so lucky? My stepdaughter, Katharine, Tom’s kind girl who discovered that rattlesnake in the patio so many years ago, learning we were coming to Australia for a visit, turned her house upside down for us. Her message, so sweet: See? I turned out OK. See my beautiful and accomplished French husband, my three gorgeous kids, Eloise, Yara, Marius—bilingual, well-cared for?

  Jean-Pierre made us one of the great French Sunday dinners; a roast with a billion vegetables, and quantities of red wine. Katharine’s mom was there, and we tried out a little conversation about Tom, the husband we once shared. Carman got up, actually stood up, and made a speech: “I was only married to Tom for five years. And we were barely in our twenties. I hardly remember him. But if not for him, I wouldn’t have Katharine. So I thank him, always.”

  Jean-Pierre, beaming, filled all our glasses. What a devil! The story they tell is: he turned my mother-in-law, Tom’s mother, on to marijuana, she all the while maintaining she couldn’t feel a thing, until she got the giggles and the munchies.

  Penny, are you strong? I don’t know, but the people around me are, and have come to live lives of moderation and temperance. My daughter, Lisa, has constructed an existence as complex as Sara Murphy’s, a life of fine accomplishment and perfect beauty, with a husband devoted to public service, and her two boys, so elegant and funny.

  My baby half brother, Dad’s son with Lynda, Robert Headsperth Laws III.

  My daughter Clara, married now, in an airy apartment with a dedicated student, and they love each other! If you stand in the center of their place, and turn slowly, you see light flooding into every room. Light means everything.

  I talk on the phone to my friend Jackie late one Saturday afternoon. We used to sleep under newspapers at her house when we were in the seventh grade; now we’re both looking at sixty. We’re chatting along and she says, “Wait a minute! Someone just crossed my lawn! It’s your brother, in white boxer shorts, hiding his face with newspaper, so nobody will see him! Oh my gosh. What a sight!”

  Brother Bob, my dad’s son, only twenty-five, boards with Jackie now, in her ex-husband’s dance studio. My stepmother worries that he has an “addictive personality.” He loves to drink and he goes to the track, but he’s in graduate film school, he stays away from hard drugs, and he’s wonderful to his mom. My father would be so proud. Maybe, of all of us, Bob will make it in the movies. To look at him is to love him: his sweetness shines out, direct from his mom and dad.

  The next day Bob turns up cheerful, with a bruise on his face. “I was out doing my laundry at Jackie’s house, behind the pool,” he says. “I must have been sleepy because I slipped and fell. Can you believe it?”

  As his big sister I want to believe it, believe that respectability has come so far in our family that on a Saturday night my brother Bob is filled with nothing so much as a burning desire to do his own laundry. But on behalf of our granddad, who killed a man in a gunfight and drank himself to death, and our own dad, party doll until almost the very end, I hope—I can’t help hoping—that Bob hasn’t hung it up so soon. I hope he got that little bruise from hard living and the heedless pursuit of pleasure. Most of us have found the way to get out of the abyss and onto the calm and placid golf course. But there’s something to be said for free fall, the wild life. It’s ruined us, but it’s helped to save us too. It’s given us our stories; and made us who we are. It has to do with dreaming, inventing, imagining, yearning, and there’s more of it—like blue smoke—in the American Dream than we’re ever, ever, going to be able to acknowledge or admit.

  FOR

  MICHAEL DORRIS

  AND MAUREEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted more than I can say to Ann Godoff, Anne Sibbald, Linda Kamberg de Martinez, and Jean-Isabel McNutt, for bringing this book into being.

  To Healers and Friends: Marina Bokelman, Dorothy Anderson, Noel Lustig, Crystal Pritchard, Brian Murphy, Harvard Gordon, Sara Mitchell, Jackie Joseph, Joan Weber, Nancy Stone, Beryl Towbin, Sasha Stone, Gretchen Kreiger, Buzz and Kristin Kreiger, Tracie Reid, Virginia Wright, Karen Stabiner, and Larry Dietz.

  To Family: Richard See, Stella See, Richard, Alexander, and Christopher Kendall, Tom, Jacqueline, and Michael Sturak, Mary Sturak, Chris Chandler and the entire Chandler family, Bob and Lynda Laws, Susan and Jordan Espey, Alice Espey Heidseck and Ralph Heidseck. To Katharine Sturak, Jean-Pierre Mignon, Yara, Eloise, and Marius. Special thanks and love to Lisa See Kendall and Clara Sturak, angels in my eyes. To Maureen Daly for being so brave. And to John Espey for his steadfast sweetness, affection, and good heart.

  In Memory of: George Laws, Nell and Bob Laws, Klein and Ada Ault, Red and Ted Tedford, Wynn Corum Laws, Jim Daly, Charlie Lentz, Jim and Solveig Andrews, Eddy See, John Sturak, Michael Sturak, Bob and Helen Turner, and Anne Cox.

  In a class by herself: Kate Daly.

  ALSO BY CAROLYN SEE

  The Rest Is Done with Mirrors

  Blue Money

  Mothers, Daughters

  Rhine Maidens

  Golden Days

  Making History

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CAROLYN SEE is professor of English

  at UCLA and a book reviewer for

  The Washington Post. She has two

  daughters and lives with John Espey

  in Topanga Canyon, California.