Erased From Memory

by Diana O'Hehir

  While I stand free in time to watch my poor dad be hustled away, stumbling slightly, murmuring something indistinct.

  Chapter 2

  My father and I have a complicated history.

  He’s not now the concerned, responsible father that some women dream about. But then, he never was.

  “My dear,” he would say, looking at me in puzzlement when I had some early grief—a lost pet, a classroom argument. “Why, my dear.” He would stare, puzzled; he would frown for a while. And then do the best he could. His idea of how to take an eight-year-old’s mind off her troubles was to teach her some Egyptian archaeology. “This is the way they did the face,” he’d say, showing me a photograph of a mummy. “With a plaster mask. They painted it to look like the dead person.” He surveyed the photo, a gray, smeared encyclopedia reproduction. “Sometimes a little better than the dead person, wouldn’t you think?”

  After all, Daddy was old to be the parent of a third-grade child; he had been sixty when I was born. He seemed fairly baffled that I existed at all, but he also gave me the feeling that he liked me. In fact, despite his confusion about how it had all happened, that he loved me.

  My mother didn’t make me feel loved. She was the opposite of my father. Almost completely. Reserved where he was responsive. Organized where he was scattered. Ambitious where he was indifferent. So unlike him that I often wondered how they had gotten together. Except for the fact that they were both archaeologists, they had little in common. My mother was programmed, calm, and, the archaeology journals said, brilliant. She was also very handsome, which didn’t interest her at all. Removed was the word for her.

  Not that she was neglectful of me, exactly.

  She would lower her book, watch me analytically, and suggest some noninterventionist remedy. The library? A long walk? Thinking about it further?

  I had clean dresses and adequate meals. When Mother was away, there was a capable child-care person, a nice lady, I am told. I don’t remember her.

  Actually, Mother was away an awful lot. She was off at conferences in London, Paris, Rome, Helsinki, where she debated the dates and authenticities of the markings on the Phrygian brass pots that were her specialty. She was off at archaeological digs in Turkey, working carefully with a small spade and whisk broom to uncover more pots. When I was ten years old, she simply remained in Turkey. There was a productive site and a colleague named Dr. Hakim Kasapligl. I think she is still there, in Turkey, digging up her pots, although perhaps Dr. Kasapligl has been dismissed.

  So for most of my life my household consisted of me and my father. Daddy tried to take care of me and I tried to take care of him. “You are so capable, Carla. I do admire that quality.” And if I didn’t deflect him, he would go on to talk about Hatshepshut, the Egyptian queen who was indeed capable, so much so that she combined the offices of king and queen. “I do appreciate your helping me, darling,” and he’d reach out to squeeze my wrist.

  We went to Egypt together a lot. That was something else he thought of to do with an adolescent girl. We went to Cairo and Thebes and Luxor and to the Valley of the Kings. He would be down at the bottom of a hole sending up shovelfuls of rocks or baskets of dirt or slings containing pottery figures along with occasional other finds—stone carvings, beads, bits of clay tablet. I would collect these, list them in a notebook, put them in a box. Until he found the coffin lid, which changed his future and his reputation, Daddy never discovered anything exciting.

  The coffin lid was important not because it was a coffin lid—there are a great many of those in Egypt—but because it had on it some hieroglyphs that were repetitions of the ones on the tomb wall, and by comparing the two versions, Daddy was able to settle several major disputes in Egyptian scholarly circles.

  After our first time in Egypt, Daddy took our next-door neighbor’s son along on our explorations. This was a boy named Rob, who was three years older than I. I was frantically in love with Rob. It’s hard not to be in love with someone you have been to Egypt with, and sat under the stars there with, and discovered archaeological firsts with. Later we lived together in Santa Cruz and still later we loused things up between us pretty thoroughly. But we still see each other all the time and have a mutual reliance system in crises.

  It’s Rob whom I am trying to summon now by punching angrily at my cell phone.

  Rob is a doctor and works in a hospital twenty miles from here. I can hear the hospital intercom intoning, “One—four, one—four.” That’s Rob’s number; he chose it because it was our campsite number at the tourist camp in Thebes.

  “Carla?” he says now. “Hey. How. What gives?”

  When I have partly explained, he cuts right to the jugular with “My God, my God, your dad, in jail? What’re you doing, who’ve you called . . .”

  I don’t say I haven’t called anybody because what I’ve done is to commit mayhem on a sheriff ’s deputy. But Rob deduces some of what my silence means. He says, “Honey, oh Jesus, ohmigawd, I’ll be right over; I’ll meet you at your dad’s place; hold on there, chin up, okay?”

  One of the big troubles between me and Rob was that each of us thinks of him/herself as the caretaking one.

  Now I am waiting for Rob in Daddy’s apartment in Green Beach Manor. My father, of course, is not here. He is off at wherever Sheriff Munro has taken him.

  Daddy has lived in this elegant retirement colony for a year. Green Beach Manor has everything—romantic Victorian architecture, assiduous staff, fairly decent food, seacoast climate, a capable director who is a friend of mine. I know all about the Manor, all its ins and outs; I live here, too. I am the assistant director. I didn’t intend to do that, become the assistant director of a retirement colony; it just happened. It keeps me close to my dad; it gives me housing and a salary. And it makes me feel that I’m wasting my life. I want a different job; I’m ready for something new.

  I’m twenty-six years old. I want an occupation that will Make a Difference.

  And my father, who is eighty-six, also has aspirations. He wants to feel needed. He does not feel needed here at the Manor, but he feels that way at the museum. And so we visit Egypt Regained at least twice a month, where he looks at his coffin lid while Director Egon Rothskellar, who likes superlatives, says “Wonderful” at him. The museum is Daddy’s lodestar of the ideal place where he is truly needed.

  Rob bursts into the apartment now in a gust of warm air from the hall; his trench coat flares out behind him. He grabs me by the shoulders and kisses me. He says, “You’ve been crying.”

  “That was half an hour ago.”

  “Tell me everything, how in hell did this happen?” And then when I’m halfway into my chaotic story, he stops me with, “Oh, God, I forgot. I brought Susie, she’s on her way in; she stopped to make a phone call.”

  Susie is Rob’s mother, Daddy’s and my former next-door neighbor. She is also my oldest friend, my best friend, my surrogate mother. She’s the one who got me through my difficult childhood.

  She’s loving and overwhelming and I don’t want her around now.

  A minute later she billows through the door in a surge of purple wool, trailing an embroidered cape. “My psychic is going to do an intention for Ed, that will help enormously; this psychic is totally powerful. And I’ve brought this”—extending a bunch of fibers—“a bayberry smudge; we’ll burn it to expel the harmful influences. Darling Carla, I am so sorry, how is it possible, Edward is such a complete human being.”

  Susie is a sexy old hippie who likes tie-dye dresses and macramé jewelry. She says she wants to continue the image of the sixties. Tie-dye is fashionable again this year, but I don’t tell Susie that.

  “Mom, we need more than a roseberry smudge.” Rob sounds cross, which is the way he usually sounds around her. She corrects him, “Bayberry,” and then kisses me, enveloping me in purple fabric.

  “Love will find a way; love will get Ed out of jail, although going to jail is a sign of your personhood; many of my friends have done it.
” And she subsides onto Daddy’s couch.

  Rob sits on a chair and looks at his knee. He gets a notebook out of his pocket and asks, crossly, as if he’s addressing somebody feeble-minded, will I please try for a sequential account of what happened. But right away he’s sorry. “Oh, hell, Carl; jeez, I’m out of line,” and after that he’s good about listening. It’s only when I’m almost finished that he starts firing inquiries like, “Where is he now? You don’t know? Well, what did they say?” and tries to look patient.

  I don’t tell him, “Hey, Rob, that was my dad it was happening to.” He knows I’m not usually like this.

  He makes more notes. “We need a lawyer.”

  He adds that he has a good friend who is a lawyer, but this friend lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

  I remember that the Manor has two lawyers. But they’re the stocks, bonds, investments, bequests kind of lawyers. “They wouldn’t get anybody out of jail.”

  “Well, I know a lawyer.” This is from Susie, who has been crossing and uncrossing her knees on the couch. She smiles her sunny Susie smile. “I know a very good lawyer. She would be fine for getting somebody out of jail. She does it all the time.

  “And I just called her. She’s on her way over here.

  “She was my lawyer for the grocery store,” she adds.

  Susie owns a natural foods grocery store in Berkeley. These days the Berkeley landscape is littered with organic stores, but when Susie started up her store it was the only one. She got sued frequently. She needed a lawyer. People love to sue natural foods stores because, what with organic fertilizers and no pesticides, the products get multiple worms and dirt, which customers don’t want; they just want the ORGANIC label.

  “She was wonderful,” Susie says. “She saved me a bunch of times.”

  “Her name is Cherie Ghent,” Susie says. “She is really, really good.”

  Cherie doesn’t inspire confidence. I look at her and reject her hands down. I have a preconception about the ideal lawyer. That ideal lawyer is a tall woman who wears a pantsuit and glasses on a chain and has wider shoulders than usual. She commands respect.

  Cherie is the opposite of all this. She’s a small enameled person with blond lacquered hair, turquoise eyes, and a curvy figure in an exquisite gray suit, size two. She looks as if she has been wrapped in bubble wrap and sent direct from the top floor of Saks Fifth Avenue. “How do ya do,” she inquires in a deep, strong Southern accent. “I’m Cherie.” Yipes.

  “Your daddy is eighty-six years? I am so sorry. Eighty-six. And to meet up with arrant cruelty. Did you know, there is a survey”—she pronounces it “suhvey”—“a U.C. survey; it shows that rural police forces”—“po-lice,” she says—“are more corrupt, more prejudiced, hidebound, narrow, easily bribed . . .” She moves manicured hands in an inclusive gesture.

  Susie watches proprietarily. “She’s a pistol,” she informs us. “Lawyer for every demonstration. She did a peace march across Central America and got arrested in Costa Rica.”

  I try to imagine Cherie, with her trim gray suit and lacquered nails, in a Central American jail.

  “Of course, I believe,” she says, “that most police are corrupt. There is another survey, from the London School of Economics, that compares the police forces of four European countries . . .” Cherie plunks her briefcase on the floor and sits down.

  “Now,” she says, “less jus’ get to work. Less jus’ figure it out, because, you know what? I am very good at this sort of thing.”

  She smiles a dazzling smile, gets out a binder, and starts quizzing me on the details. “We got to be specific,” she warns. She makes lots of notes. She likes numbers. She likes facts. She produces a computer and a pocket dictionary and a pocket crisscross directory. She makes phone calls.

  “Your dad is in Innocente Prison,” she announces finally, emerging from a long e-mail exchange. “You all here in Del Oro County, you’re too poor to have your own prison, you got a contract with Innocente.” She doesn’t give us time to exclaim about Innocente Prison, which is a famous dropping-off point where they used to send war protesters and now incarcerate Latino farm workers. She says, “We’ll get him outta there. Count on it. I’ll grab those bastards by the balls.

  “Let’s us get on over there.”

  Chapter 3

  Innocente Prison is out in the California hinterland.

  It’s in a world of undulating golden-gray fields punctuated by expanses of cultivated green stuff, rows and rows of it, sometimes with large, proud identifying labels: ARTICHOKE, LETTUCE, GARLIC—CALIFORNIA AGRICULTURE AT WORK FOR YOU. Off in the distance are plywood houses for the workers who tend this stuff, and here in the foreground are the workers themselves, lines of workers bent double along the rows, brown people in brown clothing, followed by vast Rube Goldberg machines with many triple-jointed arms.

  We churn through dusty towns with names like Esperanza and Purissima, towns heavy with signs for Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Marlboro cigarettes. The Marlboro cowboy broods reflectively over tin roofs. “They smoke a helluva lot around here,” Cherie says.

  She drives capably, mostly with only one manicured hand on the steering wheel. Her car is a handsome white Mustang convertible with leather upholstery and bright spoke wheels. Rob reacts enthusiastically, “Wow! A ’sixty-six!” and leans forward to appraise the lighted turquoise dashboard. He and Cherie launch into a half-hour’s review of the car’s history: Cherie bought it from a friend who bought it from a garage dealer; he bought it from the original owner. “Just three previous owners and I paid only five thousand,” to which Rob says, “Hey, a steal, but the wheels are new? The paint job’s new?”

  And so on and so forth while Susie and I in the back seat lament the venality of a penal system that could jail my father for . . . “Carla dear, what is he jailed for?”

  I haven’t wanted to think about this. I’ve been squeezing it into the background. “I don’t know, Sue. It was a mess. Somebody died.” There it is; what I don’t want to think about. Somebody died.

  Susie says, “Awful, that place is so death-oriented.” She means the museum, of course. “But you can count on Cherie; Cherie will get him off.”

  “Cherie,” I interrupt the automobile discussion in the seat ahead, “does this jail have a hospital?”

  “It’s a prison, darlin’. And yes.”

  She doesn’t ask why I want to know. I guess she understands. I’m picturing my dad, incarcerated, restrained. Medicated. Overmedicated. “I mean, a big one.”

  “Yeah; it’s big.” She turns around in the seat, keeps on driving perfectly straight, gives me a wide, lipsticked smile. “Don’t worry, darling, he is not goin’ to end up there.”

  Oh, yeah, I think.

  Susie supplies an anecdote about Cherie and somebody accused of growing pot in the chancellor’s garden. Susie’s stories tend to meander.

  Suddenly our miles of sand-colored grass are interrupted by a razor-wire fence with a gate and a guard. Cherie offers him a plastic card; we get waved onward. In the hazed distance, buildings begin appearing, the same color as the fields, low except for four towers with light flashing back from their windows. We slow down; Cherie sticks her chin out at the prospect. She says, “Mordor.”

  Innocente Prison was a tradition around Berkeley. By the time I got to high school, the arrests had slowed down and none of us got sent to Innocente, but we knew that that was where you could end up. The Guerrilla Girls tried hard to get there.

  Closer to the prison is more razor wire and a new guard with a red label pasted to his helmet. He bends to peer in the car window. “Hey, for God’s sake. Hey. Is that Cherie?”

  Cherie agrees, “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, baby, hi. Long time no see. Where in hell ya been?”

  Cherie inches the car forward. “You miss me, huh, Ron?”

  “Hey, sweetie, bet yer sweet ass. Damn right. Got a new kinda clientele these days.”

  Cherie turns her face; she seems to be giving him a
mean stare. “New clientele. Latinos and old men, Ron, right? Incarcerate the helpless, right? No more pretty college protesters. Brand new demographic.” She emphasizes the word, makes it sound dirty.

  Ron shakes his head as if he’s caught a mosquito. He gestures. “Park your car over there.”

  At the barrier to the prison entrance we negotiate three sets of sensors. Susie surrenders her silver jewelry; Rob is told he can’t come in; he’s wearing a blue denim shirt. Cherie says, “Oh, shit, I forgot.

  “The prisoners wear blue denim,” she explains. “Jesus, am I dumb.”

  I tell Rob just to take his shirt off; he has a T-shirt underneath, doesn’t he?

  He looks at me. “Are you scared?” I agree, “Yes.”

  She’s in the booth a long time.

  She sits straight in her chair and looks forceful. I alternate feeling scared and feeling hopeful. Rob draws cartoon pictures of the guard on the back of his prescription pad. “I can’t believe this crap,” we hear Cherie say loudly; she turns and mouths “Crap, crap” at us from behind the row of steel bars.

  The official she’s with keeps his back and his bald spot to us and writes.

  And finally Cherie emerges. She looks smug and is clutching a wad of papers. “Come on, kids, we are going on in. Follow along, all you ducks.”

  The holding room at Innocente greets us with noise—music of all kinds: Latin, country, hip-hop, overlaid with multilingual announcements, outcries, arguments against a background of TV car sounds, explosions, all this resonating across a vast wooden space with a metal-strutted arched roof. I dimly remember that there’s a World War II aircraft hangar in this building’s past. Men in all stages of sleeping, sitting, lying are propped on the floor, against each other, against the wall. Somebody may be playing a guitar somewhere. Somebody invokes Jesus.