by Laurie Fox
“Something’s wrong,” I whispered to Berry. “I can see the walls! There’s a bolt, Ber. A screw.”
“It’s okay, Mu-Mu.” She patted my arm maternally. “You just see more now.”
Could it be my perception was so fully ripened that I could make out the interior walls of an amusement park ride? The moment of clarity yielded to anarchy: we were thrust down another dark alley, our trusty ship swooping low, then banking sideways. I heard Berry wail but couldn’t take my eyes off the silly cardboard faces that assailed us—caricatures of Hook and his sidekick Smee, and oh, dear me, was that a dewy Wendy Darling? Before any of this could register, we were spit out of the ride. “Thank you for flying with us,” the sound system echoed. Our ship came to an unkind halt and sat dully in place, cruelly illuminated by the park’s party lights. The lights also revealed my daughter, sitting as still as a statue. She was not visibly unhappy.
The safety bar released us and I helped Berry from the ship, guiding her over to a bench that, I swore on my life, wouldn’t move. She smiled at this, and then I knew the ride had gotten to her. If I was right, and here I could only make a wild assumption, she’d experienced something of history. Despite the ride’s corny stylings, she’d flown to The Neverland like all the Darlings before her had. Of course, without Peter—without the Boys and the birds and the wind at our backs—it was just a three-minute whirl.
“Mommy, it was so beautiful,” Berry said, warming her hands inside her tee-shirt. “I see what you mean.”
“What, darling? What do you see?”
“You and Grandmummy and Triple—you shared something totally cool.” She shifted her weight on the bench. “And what’s more, it was radical.”
“I’ll say.” I hugged her to my breast, if for only the briefest of pleasures, and then let her go. We sat there, stupefied in Fantasy-land, until the park attendants asked us to “Please depart the park.”
As we started back to the motel, the sky above us was nothing like the sky on the ride; between the smog and the haze of headlights, we could see very little at all.
XVI
IS it not surprising, then, that Berry left us again, in spite of the flicker of happiness she had known? I daresay that happiness is not a reliable measure of one’s well-being; there are other, more trustworthy criteria. Self-tolerance, for one, if not self-love—because who ever achieves that? For another, a brand of chemical makeup you can’t find at the drugstore or in any fine shop. And, since I’m going out on a limb here, how about the faintest glimmer of structure? If I hadn’t disciplined myself to write during the first two hours of my day, I wouldn’t have lasted long, either.
And so she didn’t last. Berry fell apart, every other month it seemed, sometimes theatrically in public, where the city of Berkeley would pick up the tab; other times at home, in the pristine rooms of her mind. Whereas Berry’s initial breakdown had been pinned on a drug overdose, Dr. Song ultimately defined Berry’s mood shifts, instability, intense anger, and self-damaging impulses as borderline personality disorder. This gave us something to say to her friends, but offered little help. As before, she still experienced moments of stabbing clarity, times when her stew of “bad” chemicals simmered on a low burner and she’d coast along for weeks. During these intervals she’d make us vow to keep her out of institutions, insisting that she’d die, even promising that she would.
Eight months after our trip to Disneyland, Berry and I began to make a little progress by using movies as a way to be together. We’d go off on Sunday mornings to see the most emotionally brutal films available—Pulp Fiction and Interview with the Vampire and, God help us, Natural Born Killers. The bleak wordviews expressed in these films comforted Berry, and she even gave some thought to becoming a screenwriter. “Movies know how I feel,” she said.
One morning in November after sleeping in her own bed, Berry dropped her guard at breakfast: with a languor I found chilling she spoke about a relationship with a guy named Mason or Jason or Chazz, an older man who frequented Telegraph Avenue and preyed on smart, potty-mouthed girls. With a sleepy smile, she described how she allowed him to dominate her for a few hours each week, an unsettling scenario whereby she’d pretend to be frail or in jeopardy. The older man enjoyed “saving” her again and again, and during each visit they’d concoct a new fantasy—Berry snared by a shark, Berry tied to the tracks, Berry forced to walk the plank. The plank! In each episode, Chazz or Jazz or Mazz would show up at the last possible second, swoop her into his arms, and carry her off to People’s Park. They had their own spot there, a hedge of ivy, where he would press her into the dirt and they’d eventually make love. She maintained that it was worth it: he’d leave her with a few dollars and some great take-out, usually a goat cheese pizzetta with sweet potato fries. The only drawback, she said, was his smell—like moldy books or something that had died long ago—and she’d be in need of a shower, pronto.
Berry possessed a flair for making the kinds of statements that quarter your heart and then make you wonder how there could be any heart left to slice. I might have written a book on the regeneration of the heart organ, but I was under deadline to my publisher. Over a year before I’d promised them a trilogy of issue-oriented fables—Bunny’s Blue, Bunny’s Bored, and Bunny’s Got a New Step-mother—and was trying my best to concentrate, lest my bunnies would end up homeless too.
By now my so-called healthy anger, the rage that had erupted at the hospital, had blessedly gone underground: I couldn’t imagine how it could be of any use. Still, the gloom that had descended upon our house in the hills was no mere fog—it looked and smelled like smoke, for my daughter’s mind was surely burning up. Freeman and I staggered through our rooms, like firemen looking for the source of the burn. We hardly recognized each other, and spoke slowly in order to prevent new and even more grievous errors. We became isolated and wary of outsiders. Wisely, our few friends stayed away. Mother couldn’t handle the inertia and soon found herself in more exotic climes and more hopeful vistas. I would have handed her an Oscar for Crowning Achievement in Selfishness, if her strategy didn’t appeal to me, too. Staying away was a good idea. If only we could do the same. At least Freeman could rely on work that was all-consuming, but I suspected that even he’d grown tired of his job’s upbeat nature. Imagine having to work on a cartoon when your own child is going loony tunes. I didn’t envy him.
I finished my children’s book trilogy in spite of myself. I was certain that the deadness with which I approached it had worked its way into the prose, but for once I didn’t have the strength to worry about quality. My editor stood by me: he felt the illustrations would carry the weight of the stories, going so far as to tell me that “no child paid much attention to the text anyhow.” This was of little consolation as the drawings had been done by a gifted twelve-year-old boy living in New Zealand; his star was on the rise, my editor assured me. When it came time for the usual bookstore appearances, he suggested that I stay in the background and let the boy do his meteoric-rise thing. I spent one afternoon gnashing my teeth about this and then let it go. I didn’t have the courage to read to strangers about depressed bunnies anyway. Berry was on the streets again, and the temperature at night was threatening to dip below forty degrees.
ONE morning in early February, when the world was fast asleep and dreaming avariciously of Spring, Daddy pounded like a madman on the front door. Already in town a week for an industry conference—“Revisiting the Golden Age of Air Travel”—he had yet to make time for our little injured family. Now panting and wild-eyed, he greeted me with a bear hug. My eyes, only partially open, made out a wiry man in a rumpled business suit. For the first time in recent memory, Daddy’s eye patch covered his left orb.
“Snap to it, princess. Daddy’s got a surprise for you. It’s absolutely huge!”
“Daddy, it’s five. In the A.M.” I rubbed my eyes. “Besides everything’s huge with you. You find clichés exciting.” I tightened my robe, but the air bit right through it.
> “Are you even listening?” he said. “I tell you, Wends, this is it!”
“All right, all right,” I said, secretly happy to spend time with him. While our relationship was as sketchy as ever and our visits as infrequent as meteor showers, I happened to be in the mood for a surprise.
“Daddy, I’m sorry,” I said, now stepping outside. “I can’t stand this thing a minute longer.” In a bold move, I stripped Daddy of his eye patch. It snapped against my wrist, then hung from my fingers like a limp bra. “I haven’t been able to look you in the eye for forty years!”
“But princess,” he protested, forgetting which eye to protect. “You don’t expect me to look plain? Plain Jane Daddy?”
“Impossible. Couldn’t happen.” I smiled as widely as possible for the early hour.
For once, both of Daddy’s pupils regarded me. Then, cocking his head like a spaniel, he gazed blankly at the house. “Can’t see a bloody thing,” he said.
“It’s the fog, Daddy. We’re socked in.”
Recovering from the strangeness of his vision, he nodded. Then, ever the showman, Daddy steered me by the elbow to his car, what turned out to be a military-issue Humvee.
“Why are you putting me in the backseat?” I asked.
For a fleeting moment he actually reflected on something I’d said. “Don’t know, really. I just thought it made everything more special.” He regarded my thin flannel robe. Why don’t you glam yourself up a bit, yes?”
I slipped back in the house and scribbled a note to Freeman, in case he noticed I’d gone missing. The loss of Berry had been too much finally and he’d taken to sleeping on a cot in his studio at the Ranch, returning only to wash clothes and rummage for music gear in the garage. We were treating each other respectfully, albeit with a vagueness that would have broken my heart if my heart wasn’t busy breaking over Berry.
I threw on an ankle-length, gray-flannel skirt, a white fisherman’s knit sweater, and some thick socks and boots, then coiled a muffler around my neck. In minutes I was out the door and ready for life to smack me in the face. I only hoped the occasion wasn’t a formal one.
Daddy’s Humvee cut across the summit of the foothills, negotiating the curves of Grizzly Peak with unexpected zip. We were heading south, in the direction of Oakland, taking the most treacherous switchbacks too swiftly for my taste. “The thing’s not a Porsche!” I hollered into the wind.
“Jolly good!” Daddy called out. “I can really see better. So, ladybird, care to hear the company’s new slogan?”
“Slogan?” I repeated.
“Straighten up and fly right!” he shouted over the noise of the road. “Brave Hearts Airlines does it in the air. Sheer genius,” he said, clearly dazzled with himself.
I nodded sleepily; the rearview mirror confirmed the twinkle in his newly visible eye.
The vehicle now coasted downhill, making short work of the endless blocks of Broadway and speeding through the flatlands of Oakland, heading towards those square miles of concrete I recognized from serial childhood visits. In twenty minutes we were at Oakland International, the general aviation airport reserved for small planes.
“Let me guess,” I teased him, “we’re taking the train?”
Daddy’s smile was a wonderful thing to behold: movie-star pearly-whites, but lots of exposed gum, too. A cross between Jack Nicholson’s and Bruce Dern’s, the grin looked hungry and sexy at the same time.
As the Humvee pulled up to the tarmac, a young man in a tan jumpsuit ran up, threw open the doors while the vehicle was still moving, and took great pains to hustle us out. “All systems go?” Daddy asked once we were safely out of the vehicle.
“Four by four,” the assistant answered, without fear of mixing metaphors.
“Roger,” Daddy said, further confusing the issue. Then he turned to me and said, “Can Daddy give you a twirl?”
“What?” I said, at a genuine loss.
“It’ll be just like old times.”
I couldn’t fathom the meaning of this but I recognized genius, too, when I heard it. “Sure,” I said, “yeah.”
And so I allowed him to scoop me, his grown daughter, into his arms. With the finesse of Fred Astaire, he spun us in circles on the runway, rotating our twinned bodies faster and faster. Though I was long out of practice, my childhood training kicked in—my arms spanned out in a vee and my legs followed suit, size-ten feet flexed for balance.
“Round we go, dear petal!” Daddy shouted into the wind.
I am not under attack, I whispered as the cosmos wheeled around me. My cheeks burned in the nippy air and happiness came to me like my natural inheritance. “Cowabunga!” I yelled.
This had to be the ultimate journey in my brief history as a bird. For in spite of the blur that enveloped me, one thing was clear: The Neverland should have been more like this, an experience that embraces flight while holding you tight. One without the other won’t do.
About to crash us both into the pavement, Daddy returned me to the ground, coughing as he took in air.
“Daddy,” I said, regaining my balance. “What brought that on?”
“Sssh,” he ordered.
“Don’t shush me. I’m not a child.”
“Not now,” he instructed. “Look!” He pointed to a vintage Sop-with Camel partially cloaked in vapor. It sat on the tarmac about fifty yards away.
Emerging from a corona of blue haze, a tall handsome woman with sandy, cropped hair, khaki slacks and knapsack, and a chocolate-brown bomber jacket sauntered towards us. Her resolve was frightening.
“Amelia?” I said, with a shudder. “Amelia Earhart!”
“No, princess,” Daddy said. “Your grandmother.”
“Nana?”
“No, Jane. Granny Jane.”
The slender, boyish woman now stood before us; she gave Daddy a curt if solid hug, then bent over formally and extended an athletic arm to me. “Wendy,” she said. “My dear, dear girl.” She seized my right hand and shook it firmly. When I went to kiss her, she shifted her weight and rose to her full height. She must have been at least six foot one. “It’s very good to see you,” she said in the wake of my awe. “It’s been an awfully long time. One could say, a lifetime.”
“Yes,” was all I could think to say.
“Come, let’s sit down, shall we?”
Daddy nodded for me. He escorted the two of us to Johnny K’s Cantina on the second floor of the terminal, where we could peer down at the planes as though we were minor deities. We were about to seat ourselves when Daddy waved his cell phone in our faces. “Sorry, girls,” he said. “I’ve some desperately boring business to attend to. You’ll have to get by without me.”
“How will we ever manage?” I said, smiling.
I settled into a sparkly, emerald-green booth across from Jane, all the better to ogle her strangeness, her lithe, laddish beauty. Granny Jane—if indeed this was who sat before me—appeared preternaturally young. She must have been a good eighty years old in Earth years, yet she betrayed no signs of advanced age. While her face flaunted a few winsome character lines, she carried herself like a twenty-year-old, moving with grace and speed.
“Well,” we both said, nearly in sync. “Well,” Jane began again, “tell me everything. No, tell me something small, something I can digest.”
Now where had I heard this voice before, a voice with such startling self-possession?
Shy and suddenly skeptical, I faced the window and watched the coastal fog recede. A ghostly landscape revealed itself, one I had memorized over the years like a favorite painting: dove-gray waves licking the deserted shoreline; rows of dew-slicked planes patiently waiting, waking up only in the presence of their pilots; blips of scrub on the tarmac, spindly weeds and stubborn grass. “I can’t. I can’t tell you what you want to know.”
“Little Wendy,” she said, affectionately fluffing my bangs. “Why on earth not?” Then she peeled off the heavy flight jacket, unknotted her wool scarf. She rolled up the sleeves of her
blue Oxford shirt, and waited for an answer.
“I can’t tell you about me because you—you don’t seem real yet. You better start first, you better tell me about you.”
“Oh. Well. Fair enough. Let’s see.” She instinctively reknotted her scarf. “I suppose you already know about your mother and me.” I shook my head no. “Oh, dear. Now that would be a mouthful.” I remained silent. “I won’t start at the beginning, then, the whole bit about me as a fetus? Perhaps I’ll begin a little later in the story?”
“Yes,” I encouraged. “That would be better.”
The waitress set two mugs of coffee before us, which Jane largely ignored. Out the window I observed a suspicious, Daddy-like figure climbing into a small plane; soon after I heard the roar of its engine, watched its silver wings glint in the first light of day. So Daddy was out of here.
Jane stretched her long, tanned arms over her head and yawned expansively. “Where was I? Oh yes, the nightmare called your mother.” There was no doubt about it: she was one of us. “I suppose that she says terrible things about me, says I abandoned her?”
“Not really,” I answered. “Actually, Mummy says nothing about you at all. Any details about you, we’ve had to make up ourselves.”
At this, Jane threw her head back and laughed throatily. “Oh, that’s rich,” she said. “So, what myths and lore have you cooked up for me? Am I hero or villain? God or mortal?”
“Neither,” I said quietly. Jane looked crushed, her equanimity fading. “You’re what in books would be called a cipher. A blank.”
Jane stood up woodenly in the dimly lit booth and cast shadows down on me. “And I suppose you’re content to leave me that way?”
“No, please,” I prodded. I rose to meet her eye. “Tell me your story. I deserve to hear it.”