Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir Page 2

  We went down to the pond to see the ducks we had been following since early spring. My mother drew a plastic bag filled with bread crusts from inside her purse. The mother duck appeared with five babies trailing behind her. Her heather-gray feathers circled back in a pattern of light and dark, coming together in the final thrust of her tail. She stayed close to the shore, gliding through the reeds so that the ducklings moved in and out of sight. They picked the bread we tossed them off the surface of the water. I imagined myself coming back a mother duck in another life, coursing through the water, propelled by feet unseen.

  Our last stop before tea was the bronze Buddha, set in his alcove at the top of a steep set of stairs. “He’s holy, just like Jesus,” my mother said.

  I didn’t think he was like Jesus at all. He was sturdy and smiling and he sat up very straight. Jesus, most times I had seen him, was skinny, stretched, hanging on the cross, skin pulled against his ribs, head drooping onto his chest, eyes full of suffering. Buddha was not like that. He was calmness cast in bronze. You didn’t have to feel sorry for Buddha.

  My mother read from the placard, “He is known as the Buddha who sits through sunny and rainy weather without shade.” Amy and I each picked a flower from the azalea bush at his side. My mother lifted us, in turn, to reach up and place a single pink blossom on his upturned palm.

  We had the teahouse nearly to ourselves. The wooden sandals of the Japanese women in kimonos who served the tea clattered on the concrete floor. They took tiny steps, toes gripping the wood of their sandals through white socks that puckered around the thong. I cracked open the two wings of my fortune cookie. It split like a wishbone into uneven halves. I slid the white strip of paper through the opening in the shell, careful not to tear it. Lips moving, I read my fortune slowly to myself. I could already read—I don’t remember learning, just that at some point before I went to kindergarten the letters above my mother’s fingertips had drawn themselves together and formed words for me.

  The fortune can only have been good. Or if it wasn’t, I passed the paper to my mother and waited while she held it close to her eyes to read. With her head cocked to the side, she’d think a moment and then reinterpret the fortune in my favor.

  We ate the salty rice crackers, smooth as the lacquered table before us, and played past lives. My mother was quite taken with reincarnation; she let us try on former selves like Halloween costumes. Sometimes you were a squirrel; sometimes you were a boy. Amy, we all agreed, had recently been a tiger because she had a nasty bite. In another life, my mother said, I might be the mother and she the child. Each of us had a soul, precious and indestructible, the part of ourselves that would carry on and over into the next life. This she was sure of; this we could count on. I imagined mine as a small white cloud, something like Casper the friendly ghost, able, should need arise, to float out of my body and on down the street.

  My mother reached over and ran a hand through my shoulder-length hair, tucking some stray ends behind my left ear. Amy wiggled in her seat. I held out my hand to my mother. “Read my palm,” I said, hoping for something more substantial about my future. She took my hand and held it up in the sunlight. My palm and fingers were covered with a maze of lines, like an old woman’s. “You’ve lived many lives,” my mother said, not for the first time. She traced the deep line that circled my thumb. “This is your life line. You’re going to have a long life.” Then she moved her fingernail lightly across the straight line that crossed my palm. “This is your love line,” she said. “It’s a deep one.”

  Then we begged for stories from her childhood, or, best of all, “the story of when you and Daddy met.” She always obliged.

  It was 1960. She was living in Paris at a small Left Bank hotel. She and Mary, her friend from college who’d traveled with her on the Queen Mary, were coming down the stairs of the hotel, headed out to a jazz club or a bar and dressed for it—no doubt navigating the steep staircase as women in heels do, each foot wavering for a moment in the air before locating the next step. As they came to the landing on the second floor, a door stood open, blocking their passage. They stopped. My mother peered around the doorjamb into the room. Her eyes locked with my father’s for the first time. He smiled and told her she could only pass if she agreed to have dinner. She smiled back and stepped gamely over the threshold.

  My mother must have told us this story a thousand times. For her, for us, this was the moment, the hinge, the fateful coincidence upon which the rest of our lives turned. And we lapped it up: the open door, the romance of Paris nights, the not-so-subtle idea that some force in the universe was bending events in our favor.

  Why not? We were lucky that way: born in this most beautiful of cities, our future on the whispering sliver of paper pulled from the fortune cookie, bread for the ducks, a penny for the pond, the storing of good deeds for the next life. With the weightless motion of the water striders, we moved on the bright plane of our existence. And, of course, we thought my mother walked on water.

  The subdued sweetness of the fortune cookie melted into the saltiness of the rice crackers. A blackbird flew onto the counter, then under the table to clean our crumbs from the cement floor. I looked down and saw two pairs of small feet in matching white sandals, dangling in the air. My mother’s legs were crossed, ladylike, at the knee, so that her right foot was suspended. Her shoe was coming off slightly at the heel. She stretched out her toe, angled it towards me and placed it just under the sole of my sandal. She tapped lightly, raising my foot and holding it for just a second in the air. Then, gently, she let it fall so that our feet bounced together in time.

  Chapter Two

  EACH HOUSE on our block had a narrow but deep yard in back. Many were paved for simple upkeep. Ours was not; we had dirt, some grass, and orange and pink geraniums for making and decorating mud pies on summer days when the fog went away. We had a small swing-set with poles painted red and white, which my father had just put together for my fifth birthday. But mostly the yard was mud and flowers.

  A blade of grass in hand, I sought out and worried potato bugs into perfect black balls. I would block their path, lift them in the air, and place them back on ground they didn’t recognize, until they curled into beady retreat. Then I rolled them across the tight packed dirt of the yard, onto the cement pathway, until, remembering the being inside the ball, I felt sorry. I would stop and sit perfectly still, waiting and watching, willing the potato bug to be brave again.

  Squatting on the ground, huddled deep within myself, I watched the floaters—airborne dust bunnies caught on the wind—mesmerized, as they drifted like sunspots across my vision. Sometimes I would look down at my own hand, and an odd feeling would run through me. I am me, I’d tell myself. This is my hand, my body, my life. Laura, I’d think, I’m Laura. This yard, this block, this family. How odd. Not that my life felt odder than anyone else’s. It was the oddity of life itself. The everydayness of it, the get-up-and-walk-to-schoolness of it. Or, perhaps more precisely, it was the disconnect between this and that, between in here and out there. The self I knew best was holed up in my head, imagining, thinking, worrying over the potato bug. This was deeply familiar. To imagine this inner self as the owner of that hand was a stretch. Not a bad feeling. Not a good feeling. Just a sharp jolt of recognition.

  I held my hand still on the ground in the path of bright red ladybugs until they tickled onto my finger. I raised them to my eyes and examined their uneven black spots. Then, unable to resist the urge, I cried, “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children are all alone.” The ladybug opened her red shell, splitting in a line straight down her back, and unfurled flimsy black wings. Chastened, she flew away.

  What I did not do was to take a mirror or a magnifying glass and burn black beetles on the sidewalk. The Mulligans, who lived in the small blue house near the corner, who terrorized and utterly dominated our block, did this. My sisters and I watched in horror. Such straightforward cruelty. Boys really were rotten, made out of cotton and so on. But then, they played by an entirely different set of rules. The rightness or wrongness of their actions did not preoccupy their imaginations as it did ours. Which is not to say we were not cruel. We might exact a slow simmering toll, toy with a thing and test it, but never did we focus the sun’s rays directly on a thing so it burned. But then, these boys were not my mother’s children. If I felt remorse at torturing the potato bug, it was because I knew that her “do unto others” extended to even these.

  My mother was, after all, a preacher’s daughter. She was born in Wood River, Illinois, in 1937, the eldest of five, followed closely by four brothers, and, according to my grandfather, their “almost perfect child,” “smart as a whip.” She spent her childhood as the darling of her father’s congregations, watching him in the pulpit every Sunday, first from her mother’s lap and then from her own seat up front in the children’s choir.

  My mother’s father, Amos, both demanded and commanded respect. Charming, charismatic, overbearing, he saw his own life as a morality tale, to be shared with children, grandchildren, family, or friends—anyone in need of moral instruction. He’d been a farm boy in rural Missouri, a ruffian, he claimed, who was saved by the grace of God. He was already eighteen the first time he entered a church—and he’d only come so he could play basketball for the church team. He stayed because that first Sunday he’d spotted my grandmother, Sadie, the minister’s daughter, in the front row of the choir. Their courtship lasted several years and paralleled Amos’s conversion. One night, already engaged to Sadie, alone in his room, he saw the light. I mean by this that he literally saw light. Afterwards, on his knees at the side of his bed, he asked God’s forgiveness for his sins and promised to give his life over to the ministry if God would open the way for h
is education.

  God apparently did. Amos and Sadie were married, and somehow in the darkest years of the Depression, taking heavy course loads and working road construction jobs in the summers to feed his growing family, Amos managed to plow through college and the seminary in six years. On the strength of his oratory he was called to his first pastorate in a large, prestigious Baptist church, while still a student at Eastern Baptist Seminary in Philadelphia.

  Not a fire-and-brimstone Baptist, Amos tended towards a more intellectual, highbrow Christianity. But he had a strong authoritarian streak and a great affinity for the apostle Paul, which included subscribing to Paul’s doctrine on women: as Christ is the head of the church, so man is the head of the family and so on—hardly a novel position in the Christian culture of the 1940s and 1950s in which my mother was raised.

  By the early 1970s, we may have been living in free-love San Francisco, but not much had really changed. On our block, at least, all the mothers stayed home and the fathers worked. My father left each day, briefcase in hand, black oxfords on his feet, to walk to his real estate office just three blocks away. Sara and I, lunchboxes in hand, walked together to our elementary school five blocks away. On weekends we helped my father wash his car in the driveway. On Sunday we went to the imperial-looking Episcopal church on Nob Hill, dressed in white tights and Mary Janes.

  My mother was mostly home with my sister Amy, who was just two. When my mother decided to go back to school, taking graduate classes at a nearby college and leaving Amy in the care of a cleaning lady who came three times a week, it seemed a radical thing to do.

  We lived in the fog-prone Richmond district, built just after the 1906 earthquake, as San Francisco expanded out over the sand dunes towards the Pacific. These orderly blocks were the closest thing San Francisco had to suburbs. Our street was lined with two-story Edwardian row houses, with big front windows and no front yards. Just stoops that gave way to a very wide span of concrete crawling with children—for in those pre-stranger-danger days, the street was where we lived.

  On the sidewalk in front of our house I tested my balance, the training wheels of my brand-new bicycle steadying me as I rode. Then I began to pedal long, smooth circles. One foot pressed, the other floated, alternating left and right, between effort and ease. The soles of my tennis shoes were thin enough that I could feel the flatness of the two bars beneath the curve of my arches. The pedals gained momentum, the clicking of the wheels turned to a whir, and I sailed away from our stoop.

  Midway down the block, my sister Sara was playing hop-scotch with her best friend, Celia Jeffers. Sara held her arms stiff and close to her body as she jumped through the boxes chalked out in pink and yellow on the sidewalk. She landed twice on one foot, then on two, then one, and then precariously she leapt over the square where her marker had fallen. Her dark hair flew behind her as she jumped. The red plastic knobs on the elastic that held the bangs she was growing out bounced and slid a little farther off-center as the hair worked itself loose. In one final double-hopping lunge, she staggered out of the box.

  Sara was eight. I was five. Despite the age difference, I considered her my best friend. At home, she mostly played along, allowing me to co-star and co-conspire in the doll games we played in the sunroom in the back of our house. On the street my status was sadly reduced. I approached Sara and Celia tentatively, slowing down and circling once, awkwardly navigating the tight turn around the tree in front of Celia’s house. I studied their faces for signs of welcome. Celia glanced over at me blankly, hard blue eyes under curly red hair. Sara collected her marker but did not look up at me. I pushed off quickly with one foot and began pedaling hard, trying to look as if I had only slowed but never intended to stop.

  I wasn’t allowed to cross the street, so I circled the four sides of our city block over and over again. Once on every trip I had to pass the Mulligans’ house near the corner. Halfway down the block, the sticky dread began to rise. I tightened my grip, bent my head down low between the tall handlebars, and pedaled hard to build up speed. There were ten Mulligans, all boys except one. An endless horde of Patricks, Eddies, and Bobs in toughskin jeans and beefy tees; it was impossible to know one from the other. Sheer numbers gave them enough force to rule the neighborhood. They were tough to boot, and made us all feel utterly bullied and small. The black lines of bicycle skids and the ashy remains of redcaps and Chinese fire snakes strewn on the pavement marked the territory in front of their house.

  Mulligans lurked unseen inside the garage or hidden behind a planter box on the circular stairway that led to their front door. They came from nowhere, bees from the hive, kamikazes on mean, low-to-the-ground boy bikes, pedals pounding furiously, not in circles at all, but in a brutal one-two that sent them crashing over curbs and popping wheelies across my path. A rubber band zinged before me, just missing my bare arm. The taunting Mulligan singsong rang out for the whole neighborhood to hear. “Training wheel baby, born in the navy.” I steeled myself. My brain pumped words—sticks and stones may break my bones, sticks and stones may break my bones—coming up with the wrong half of my mother’s mantra. Mostly I pumped the pedals hard; once I rounded the corner, the assault would end. The Mulligans were territorial, but they never gave chase.

  Three blocks of solitude lay before me. As I turned the corner, the sidewalk narrowed, slowing me automatically as I navigated between driveways to my left and tightly pruned sycamore trees to the right. The trees ran the full length of the block, each planted neatly in a cube of dirt the size of one square of pavement. Going up Cabrillo Avenue, I pedaled due west. The ocean was directly in front of me, though I couldn’t see it. The sun was setting through the fog. The whole sky was a hushed pink.

  I took my time sailing up Cabrillo and gliding down Funston. Floating, falling, floating, falling, I pedaled long slow circles and settled into myself. The final short block was opposite Golden Gate Park. The towering fir trees in the park cast a dark gloom, but I felt safe on my side of the street, out here, where I knew no one and was not known.

  Only when I turned the corner back onto our block did I feel a shift. I stopped pedaling, coasted a bit, suspended for a moment between the quiet exhilaration of solitude and the warmth and safety of home. Somewhere inside, my mother was making dinner and would soon call me in. She was always at the center of the orbit I was tracing, and if I had the courage to venture to the far side of the block, the grim determination to pedal through Mulligan territory alone, it was because I knew she was there.

  My grandmother Sadie occupied the center of my mother’s childhood as surely as my mother occupied mine. When I knew her, Sadie was a small, rounded woman, with a beautiful halo of perfectly white hair, bright clear blue eyes, and a sunny and sentimental temperament. Sadie had lived her entire life within the bounds of church and family. She never wavered from her faith, and she dedicated her entire life to her husband and children. And this is the kicker: she did it, for the most part, joyfully. My mother’s only problem with Sadie was that, given her own temperament, her strong will, her aspirations, there was little in Sadie’s life to give direction to her own. Growing up within the girdled prison of the feminine mystique, my mother probably had a hard time putting her finger on her discontent, but something rankled.

  In high school my mother rebelled in all the predictable ways. Her grades plummeted; she took up with the son of the town drunk, “a disreputable fellow,” according to my grandfather. She smoked and drank and climbed out her bedroom window at night to meet her boyfriend. She announced to her parents that she did not intend to go to college, implying that she would marry this “ne’er-do-well.” It’s hard to know just how bad she really was. Since she was the eldest, my grandparents had no experience with teenagers. They allowed no alcohol in the house, and my grandmother, also a minister’s daughter, wasn’t allowed to dance when she was growing up; it wouldn’t have taken much to shake her.