But that side of Muffet wasn’t the full story. When I was five or so, Muffet started going into San Francisco to hang out in the Haight with musicians and artists. It was an exciting time for her, and an exciting place, far different from the conventional and constricting environment at home. The Bay Area was the epicenter of youth culture then. My sister got into all the music that helped make that scene legendary: Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, not to mention dozens of bands whose names have been lost to time. She was part of the Grateful Dead’s inner circle during their early days.
At first, those visits to the city didn’t change much except her choice of food. She started to add in strange things to go along with the tuna: alfalfa sprouts, bean curd. Then she started to bring philosophy along with it. She started talking about how food could change the way that you saw the world, how certain vegetables or grains were more in harmony with the universe.
One night, she came home from the city talking a mile a minute, not just about food but about life in general. She had a theory about how she was a butterfly, because butterflies could fly free if they wanted. “And what is freedom, anyway?” she said. “It’s not just an idea, but the only idea. It’s an element in the air just like oxygen. It flows across the earth like water. We’re in a river of freedom, whether or not we know it.”
She went on. My parents narrowed their eyes and told her to stop talking nonsense. She didn’t. She ended up in Margot’s and my bedroom, pacing excitedly and insisting that dreams could be real, that they were real. Margot wasn’t there, I don’t think; at least I don’t remember her being there. She probably wouldn’t have stood still for Muffet’s monologue. She would have challenged it or mocked it. But I stayed perfectly still and didn’t say a single critical word. I loved it. I fell asleep listening to the sound of her voice.
In the morning, she wasn’t on my bed anymore. She wasn’t in the house at all. The next time I saw her was a few nights later, when she burst into the house with her speech already in progress. The difference was all internal at first, but it quickly started to colonize her appearance: her hair became wilder, her clothes less elegant.
One night, the stars were especially beautiful. “You can see them all,” my mother said.
Muffet got up from the table. “I’m going outside to look at them,” she said. “And then I’m going to fly into the city.” No one took her seriously until she neared the edge of the deck. And then my father bolted toward her, moving fast enough to reach her before she got her feet up on the railing.
Muffet’s personality change was scary and sad for my parents. It was accelerated by drugs, but I didn’t understand that as a small child, and I’m not even sure that my parents grasped it fully. They were part of a generation where the dominant drug—in some ways, the only one—was alcohol. They tried to keep up with youth culture in the sense that they listened to the music or evolved their attitude about hairstyles (maybe it was okay for them to be that long) or hemlines (maybe it was okay for them to be that short). But drugs were a bridge too far. Whatever they thought was causing Muffet’s increasingly erratic behavior, it was a weight that settled over us. I remember once, late at night, hearing my parents discussing Muffet downstairs. It wasn’t an argument with her. It wasn’t even an argument about her—it was a mostly hushed, sometimes intense conversation. “I don’t know what to do,” my father said. “We need to get her back.”
“Whatever has to happen, that’s what will happen,” my mother said. “We’ll do it.”
The voices trailed off, and I heard someone coming up the stairs. I was supposed to be asleep, so I closed my eyes. The door to my bedroom opened. It was my father, and he sat on the edge of my bed and cried. I didn’t like it when I was pulled into the adult world by hearing my parents fighting downstairs, and I didn’t like it when the adult world came to me. Was I supposed to console him? Was there anything I could say? The burden flattened me, and in response I flattened myself further: I pressed down into the sheets again, seeking invisibility. I don’t know if he knew that I was awake and could feel the bed shake with his weeping.
3
THE TRIP IN THE CAR
“I THINK THAT MIGHT BE A COW OVER THERE,” my father said. He said something else after that, but I had closed my eyes and drifted off.
I was five years old, in the front seat of the family station wagon. My head rested in my mother’s lap, and my feet were stretched across my father’s legs as he drove. Kids could ride that way in the late sixties and early seventies: no air bags, seat belts optional. It was so comfortable, like a sixty-mile-an-hour bed. I loved going out for Sunday drives, watching the trees flash by outside the car.
But this wasn’t a Sunday drive. We were moving. Though my father worked as a stockbroker in San Francisco while we lived in Mill Valley, he never liked the job, and at some point he disliked it so much that he couldn’t continue. When I was four, he started to get a small yearly inheritance from my grandfather’s estate, and as that money accumulated, he decided that we would leave Mill Valley and move back to Idaho. Idaho had a good case. Not only was it where the Hemingway family homestead was located, but my mother had been born there too, in Pocatello. My parents bought a place in Ketchum, right near where my grandfather had lived, and packed up the car and left Mill Valley. I was old enough to know we were moving but young enough that I didn’t really understand what it meant. I walked a meaningful circle around my room and then waved goodbye to the house.
For the beginning of the drive, my father told us facts about Idaho. He seemed to have a limitless supply of facts. It had become a state in 1890, only a few years before his father was born. It was nicknamed the Gem State. It was shaped like a rifle stood up on its stock. I dozed off in the car and woke to the sound of my parents shouting at each other. “Things will be better for her there,” my father said.
“Unless they’re worse,” my mother said. They were fighting about Muffet and whether the move would bring her back into line or send her spinning further out into orbit. My mother was needling and criticizing, and my dad was tightening up with anger. In the backseat, both Muffet and Margot were ominously silent. I pulled my blanket around me. It was the same one that had been with me in my crib, tattered down to almost nothing but still soft, with a ribbon of satin trim. It was blue, which was probably because my parents were hoping for a boy, but it was mine. Even that’s an understatement. It was me, as much a part of me as a limb or organ. I loved it. I couldn’t exist without it.
And then, suddenly, the fight accelerated and my dad snapped. His face went beet red. He grabbed my blanket and threw it out the window of the moving car. I went rigid with shock. What had I done to deserve this punishment? My mother screamed for him to stop the car, to turn around and go get it, and he narrowed his eyes and raised his hand and said that he couldn’t be responsible for what would happen if she said even one more word.
There was no screaming now. The car was dead silent. I pulled my legs up close to my body and felt all the air go out of me. For miles I prayed that my dad would come to his senses, that he would turn around and go back for it, but he didn’t. I cried as quietly as I could all the way to Idaho. I don’t even remember arriving there, because I still felt like I was back in the spot where I had been tossed out the window.
Those first weeks in Idaho, my mother spent hours calling back to San Francisco, trying to find a store that sold that same blanket. I slept uneasily at best.
Then one night a package came in the mail. “Look,” my mother said. She reached her hand into the envelope and took out a blue blanket. I couldn’t run fast enough to hold it.
“It’s the same one,” my mother said, but when I smelled it, I shook my head. It was new, harsh, almost chemical.
“No,” I said. I buried my face in my hands. I was even more inconsolable now. But I held out a shred of hope while my mother washed the blanket and dried it on the clothesline. Finally, she brought it to me again. This
time, it passed the test. I kept that blanket for almost a decade, wore it down to the smallest rag, wrapped it around my pillow when I was a teenager.
That was only the first trauma in Idaho. Getting adjusted to a new place wasn’t easy. I felt like I couldn’t make new friends, in part because of shyness, in part because of how I looked. My mother had cut my hair like a boy. The haircut made me self-conscious. And then there was the matter of my teeth. Back in Mill Valley one morning, Margot and I had been waiting for the school bus when I saw some girls coming down the street. There was one girl who was everyone’s ideal of beauty: blonde, long hair, already charming in all the right ways. I was moony-eyed with admiration. Margot was off to the side, making herself dizzy by swinging a baseball bat around and around. As the girls approached, I stepped toward them to say hello and Margot stepped forward with her bat, and it was like the Big Bang, but inside my head. My front teeth were knocked right out. They were gone until I turned eight.
My looks were shot. My confidence wasn’t there yet. And then there was the fact that the Ketchum school wanted me to repeat the kindergarten year I had just completed in Mill Valley. “No way,” I said. I put my foot down. Or at least that’s how I remember it. More likely is that my parents spent hours in consultation with each other and decided that I could afford the year off. Whatever the case, they let me skip kindergarten that first year. Instead of sitting in a classroom, I learned to ski. My father bought me a season pass—my picture was all gums and cheeks—and signed me up for lessons with a woman named Mrs. Sherntanner. She was pregnant and also holding a new little baby in her arms—as I would learn over the years, this seemed to be her permanent state. Mrs. Sherntanner was nice to me in ways I couldn’t have imagined: warm and open, funny, and supportive. She nursed her infants constantly, which was entirely foreign to me, almost forbidden. And she was Catholic, which made her exotic and, to my mother, problematic. Our own religious beliefs were self-styled, somewhere between Episcopalian and Jack-Catholic, some of the faith, none of the confession. One thing we weren’t, though, was the kind of Catholic that Mrs. Sherntanner was. My mother didn’t come right out and say she didn’t approve, but it was easy to tell. She had a certain kind of derision that you came to know intimately if you lived with her. She would go off on someone once, and from that moment on, that person was fixed in that unfavorable position. She never changed her opinion back, no matter how much evidence there was to the contrary.
But I loved Mrs. Sherntanner and everything around her. She was a steady beacon, a reliable source of everything that was hard to come by at home. She had babies she loved unconditionally. She could be stern, but she was never harsh. And I saw her when I was doing the thing I loved most in the world: skiing. I liked nothing more than to bundle up in my ski clothes and head out for the morning; it was the closest thing to swaddling for a five-year-old. I loved the snap of the cold air. I loved my charge account at the Sun Valley cafeteria, which came with a J number to tell the cashier: mine was J3547. I loved the hot chocolate that I had every morning with the tiny gems of marshmallows that never dissolved. Beginning skiers learned on Dollar Mountain, and my father drove me there every morning.
When I started skiing, it was pizza pie — they called it that because it’s the shape your skis make, the wedge of the snowplow. I smashed into lots of people when I was skiing pizza pie. But after only a week or two with Mrs. Sherntanner, I closed the pie up and wasn’t smashing into people so often, and before long, I was going up and down Dollar all by myself. By December of that first year, I was friends with everyone on the mountain: the people who operated the chairlift, the other teachers, the cafeteria staff.
I was one of the youngest students on the mountain, which meant that it was hard to find friends my own age, so I invented one. I had a Skipper doll—Skipper, of course, was Barbie’s younger sister. Barbie was fine, but she had weird bumpy breasts that I couldn’t understand as anything real. I named my Skipper doll Skippy and created a whole biography for her. She liked Skippy peanut butter rather than Jif. She was braver than Barbie, at least when it came to skiing. I bundled Skippy up in wool pants and a tiny little sweater that my godmother made for her and stashed her inside my jacket sleeve. On the chairlift, Skippy and I talked nonstop about the fastest route down the mountain, how my missing teeth made me look strange, how my hat didn’t match my outfit. As I got more confident on my skis, I decided that Skippy needed more action, and as we went up the lift, I would take her out and toss her down into the snow. The second she left my hand, I would start screaming to her: “I’ll be there in a second! I’ll save your life!” I came off the chair like a rocket and sped back down the hill to get her. She was so happy to see me, an expression of joy and relief on that beautiful unchanging face of hers. Once I threw her off to the side into a drift, and I was so worried I’d lose her that I jumped off the lift. It wasn’t as scary as it sounds; there was so much snow that year that it was more like stepping off the chair.
* * *
AFTER ONLY A YEAR OF SKI-SCHOOL EDEN, I was given the fruit of knowledge. It was back to school, which meant back to social life and back to new opportunities for triumph (or, more likely, embarrassment).
That year, first grade, was also the first time that I started to understand the magnitude of my family legacy. From the minute we arrived in Idaho, people had talked about my grandfather in a way that made me understand that he was someone important. When we went to people’s houses, they sometimes had a bookshelf devoted to his work or a picture of themselves with him. “I was just rereading this,” they would say to my father, holding up one of my grandfather’s books, and my father would nod politely.
But then I reported to my first day of first grade at the Ernest Hemingway Elementary School, and that was a different matter entirely. The school was my school, with my name on it. I went around with my chest puffed out. But soon enough, kids started to talk behind my back. “Do you see how she acts?” “She’s stuck up.” “She’s acting like some kind of rich bitch.” I was mortified. I couldn’t talk to my parents about it, and I was almost sisterless: Muffet was in her final year of high school, and Margot, already partying too much as an early teen, had been sent away to boarding school at Catlin Gabel in Portland.
So there I was, with my Hemingway bloodline, stranded in the middle of first grade at a school named for our family. I particularly remember the pain of writing papers. When I turned in my assignments, teachers took them from me gingerly, as if they didn’t quite know what to expect. Did I think I was brilliant? And what if I was?
Those heightened expectations collided with my heightened shyness. In my mind, I was sure that I was doing things right. I thought that I deserved to have my thoughts heard. I spent lots of time at a typewriter writing things down, certain that every sentence was a golden insight. The same thing happened at the piano, where I spent hours composing, or at least thinking that I was composing.
Reality descended. I turned the paper in, and it came back scarred with red ink. I got piano lessons, and it turned out that I was terrible. I was horribly frustrated. Why was there such a drastic separation between who I imagined I was and the way that I showed up in the world? And why wasn’t the world doing its best to help me understand my own talents?
The limits of the body were just as perplexing as the limits of the mind. One afternoon, we did the President’s Physical Fitness Test. It was a big deal back then. If you did well, you got a note from the President. There were a variety of events: push-ups and sit-ups, running for speed, running for agility. “Time for the rope climb,” the teacher said. One kid went, and then another, and they got to the top of the rope quickly. When it was my turn, I got three feet off the ground, and then my brain locked up. I started thinking about how my feet were supposed to hold the rope with my toes. Were my knees involved? That’s when I let go. It was a three-foot fall, tops, but it felt like I was tumbling from a mountaintop.
I hit the ground, feeling the st
ing of failure, and looked around to see if people were laughing at me. They weren’t. They weren’t paying attention at all. Most of them were already heading out of the gym, the boys telling each other jokes, the girls twirling their fingers in their hair.
I sat there for a minute and tried to imagine attacking the rope again. I willed myself to see myself at the top. I sat quietly, immobile, until the gym was empty, and then I tried it again. I was a quarter of the way up the rope, then halfway up the rope, then at the top. My victory was even more confusing than my failure. Why could I do things alone that I couldn’t do in front of other people? Was it shyness? Was it that same old desire for invisibility? I didn’t talk to my parents about it. They weren’t the kind of people you could go to about that kind of thing.
* * *
AT FIRST, AT LEAST, Idaho was markedly better than Mill Valley. My father was especially happy with the move. When he was a boy, my grandfather wouldn’t let my father fish very much, so as he got older my father fished whenever he could. In fact, during World War II, when my father enlisted in the army and was sent as an intelligence officer to help with the French Resistance, he brought his rod and reel. He was almost captured by a German patrol after his first mission because he went fishing. Mill Valley limited him, but in Idaho he returned to fishing. He made it his life’s work—he was a fish and game commissioner some of the time—and became one of the best fly fishermen in the world. He wrote books about fishing and, to the degree that it was possible when you were the son of one of the most famous writers of the century, came into his own.
Out Came the Sun Page 3