Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir Page 3

  Over the years Amos had made extra money for the family working on road construction crews during the summers, often making more in a single summer than he did from a year of preaching. In 1955, Amos left the ministry and, along with his older brother, started a road equipment and building company. Buoyed by the massive public investments made in the interstate highway system in the 1950s, Barton Construction, which Amos staffed with brothers, sons, and nephews, built roads from Florida to Michigan, elevating his family from a threadbare preacher’s life to very well-to-do almost overnight. The family moved to a large remodeled house in Normal, Illinois. My grandfather had a “fleet plan” with Ford Motor Company. In 1959 he bought an airplane, which he used for business, but also for hunting trips; the boys learned to fly.

  My mother did go to college in the end—to Knox College, a small liberal arts college founded by abolitionists in Galesburg, Illinois—and there she managed to keep up not only her grades but an active social and sorority girl life. By the time she graduated she was restless and alienated, and the future was rapidly closing in on her. She’d picked up on the undercurrents of distress with the culture of conformity that was America in the 1950s. No one was saying anything about “the system” yet—no one she knew, anyway. The movements that would name the sense of suffocation she felt were yet to be born.

  She taught elementary school for a year in Chicago. Teaching was never her passion, more a safe harbor, a respectable way station for a well-educated girl until she got married. At the end of that year she decided she couldn’t face another year of teaching. She had boyfriends and proposals but was adamant about not getting married. She didn’t want to go home and work for her father. She was face-to-face with the limits of middle-class femininity in 1959 America. She seized upon the idea of a trip to Europe as her escape. I doubt she knew exactly what she was looking for—a measure of freedom, romance, some fantasy of a bohemian life she’d conjured for herself out of the sepia-hued photographs of Europe she’d seen. Did she imagine herself on city streets, visiting bookstores, frequenting cafés, meeting expats like herself who could not tolerate the narrowness of America? Perhaps the idea of doing things, even the same things, in French seemed less distasteful. So she saved her money and convinced her parents it was just for the summer, just a few months to perfect her French.

  But inside her something had hardened—enough to make her believe she could reject everything she had ever known and leave her parents and this country behind forever.

  One weekend, word spread on our block that the Mulligans were at war with the Kitteridges, who lived across the street. From where we played in front of the house, Sara, Celia, Celia’s little brother Jake, and I watched the Mulligans buzz in and out of their driveway. They stocked weapons, filling water balloons from the spigot in their driveway and piling them in their garage. Then they began scouring the neighborhood in regiments of three and four.

  The constant but impersonal harassment the Mulligans bestowed on the rest of us was nothing before the sharply honed hatred they felt for the Kitteridges. The Kitteridges were hopelessly outnumbered. There were only three of them: a boy who seemed to me vastly older, a girl even older than him, and one sad-eyed little seven-year-old known to all of us as “dirty Suzie.” It wasn’t clear what ignited the war. There may have been an altercation between the oldest Mulligan and the oldest Kitteridge. Michael Kitteridge was a tough, skinny kid, probably only twelve or thirteen years old, with the thinnest instinct for survival. He was gutsy, foolish enough to stand up to the Mulligans alone, perhaps because life had already dealt him blows worse than anything the Mulligans could deliver.

  The Mulligans were the Irish Catholic brood of working-class parents. The Kitteridges were hippies, or so we said, because they were sloppy and undisciplined, because they wore strange clothes, because no one ever called them in to dinner, and because their father, thin and no better kempt than they were, sometimes wandered down the street without really going anywhere. In 1972 these differences mattered. Culturally, politically, socially, our family probably fell on the Kitteridge side of the Mulligan-Kitteridge continuum. But with the unerring instinct of children to align with the dominant culture, we sided with the Mulligans.

  There was something else. Something everyone knew, but no one talked about. The Kitteridges no longer had a mother. They had had one once—I remembered her messy and huge, with lank brown hair, dressed in gauzy skirts and sandals. Something bad, something very bad, had happened to her, and the shadow of her absence, a dark halo of shame, had attached itself to her children, making them vulnerable to attack.

  Late in the afternoon Patrick and Eddie rode their bikes down the block to where we played four-square in front of our house. We scattered as they came, a flurry of long hair, bell-bottom pants, and navy blue Keds. We expected them to ride straight through our game. Instead, Eddie came to a stop, planting his feet on the ground on either side of his pedals. Patrick came up behind him, took the same stance, and glared at us through the opening of the maroon football helmet he wore.

  “You’re all drafted,” Eddie said unceremoniously and then turned to go, motioning for us to follow. Patrick stood still, waiting for us to move, ready to enforce orders. No words passed between the brothers. They had an instinct for coercion.

  Among ourselves there must have been a bewildered exchange of looks. I looked to Sara. Sara and Celia looked to one another. Sara moved first; the rest of us followed. Like an egg from the shell, once the yolk is committed, everything else follows. We walked behind Eddie in silence. Scared. And excited. We’d never played with the Mulligans before. They’d never asked us.

  Through the course of the day everyone on the block was bullied into the Mulligan army. No one resisted. The Mulligans had discipline, equipment, and organization on their side; we fell in.

  The Mulligans distributed arms: squirt guns, slingshots, rubber bands, and redcaps and firecrackers for noise. They marched us up and down the sidewalk, lining us up by size, me and Jake Jeffers at the rear, chanting, “Two, three, four, hut, we’re gonna kick the Kitteridge butt.” There was dizzy pleasure in these chants—my guilt at being mean and saying bad words evaporated in the echo of a dozen other voices chanting with me.

  The Kitteridges made themselves scarce in the neighborhood; the war was really more of a prolonged hunt. Patrick marched us at a near-run, barking out a rapid “hut, two, three, four, hut.” I gripped a metal garbage can lid tight in one hand, my shield, and a majorette baton in the other, my weapon. I kept my eyes on the feet of the boy in front of me and tried to keep pace, hoping we would not find the enemy.

  The farther I got from home, the more I felt the gnawing certainty that my mother would not be happy if she saw me. She had very strong opinions about things. Back then she favored the weak over the strong. She was against candy and Barbie and television and Vietnam—fiercely and with disdain for those who did not agree with her. The candy store on the corner, the trading and gathering center of our young lives, where children went to store up reserves for the afternoon play, was directly on our route home from school, but Sara and I were not supposed to go in. And we were absolutely forbidden to watch cartoons on television because they were violent. For my sister and me my mother’s rules, aimed as they were at television and candy, at the very heart of childhood, led us to early habits of deception. Sara and I were allied in a daily exploration of the shades of disobedience. Going inside the store ourselves was crossing the line. Standing around outside the candy store while our friends went in was OK. Sneaking the TV on at our house and watching cartoons was definitely bad. But perhaps staying in the room when the TV was on at someone else’s house was OK.

  I knew we were against the war, maybe even all wars. Vietnam loomed at the edge of my consciousness: a glimpse of helicopters on TV, the sweaty faces of soldiers under hard round hats, the jowly face of the president, whom we did not like, the angry demonstrators, whom we did like. I don’t remember the antiwar demonstrations myself, but my father assures me I was there. Each year from 1966 on, my parents marched, pushing the Wonder Chair, carrying first one child, then the next, in crowds 100,000 strong towards Kezar Stadium in the park, where all the rallies ended.

  Growing up in Michigan, my father had sworn he’d never work in a factory or join the army. He told us this so frequently and fervently that it was a core piece of family myth, a coda of his personal identity. For years I had it in my head that my father had “burned his draft card,” as if the simple act of burning the card was enough to keep him out of Vietnam. The real story was a bit more complicated. He graduated from college in 1963, and, once his student exemption expired, he was called in for a physical. My parents had been married for two years at the time. They decided to leave the country rather than face the draft. They bought plane tickets for France, but at the eleventh hour, my mother discovered she was pregnant with my sister Sara. My father wrote to his draft board and received a new exemption, which lasted until he was twenty-six, too old to be drafted.

  However mangled the story had become in my mind, the message was clear enough: the right thing to do in the face of a draft was to resist.

  Here I was three blocks past the street I was not supposed to cross, armed and marching with the strong against the weak. This would not be OK with my mother, not by any stretch.

  The Kitteridges stayed out of sight for two days. The Mulligans, bored and frustrated with their undersized and elusive enemy, understood that an army of our size, once armed and fielded, must fight. They divided us into two forces and staged a battle on the sidewalk midway up our block. When the battle began I tossed my water balloon, which plopped down a few feet from me but didn’t break. I huddled close to the ground under my metal shield. Balloons exploded
onto the sidewalk around me. I heard rubber bands zinging into metal and children shrieking at the cold of water. Dozens of feet fled in all directions. I stayed down. In a matter of minutes, the ammunition was gone, and the sides were advancing, sticks in hand. Sara and Celia came running from the front lines soaked and shaken. Sara pulled me from the ground, and we all went AWOL.

  That evening, I leaned against the countertop in the kitchen, watching my mother make meatloaf. She dropped sliced onions, spices, salt, and pepper into a glass bowl. Her fingers curled into the meat, kneading and mixing, growing greasy from the ground beef. She asked about my day. I’d never outright lied to her. Even evasion was new to me. The separation between mother and child needed for deception did not yet exist. Maybe she asked why the ends of my hair were wet. If I told her about the water balloons, that would have led to more questions. In the end, caught up in the excitement again, I told her the whole story: the weapons, the battle, the days of marching, the war.

  “Who is this war against?” she asked. My face grew red. I shifted against the counter. She’d honed in on the part of the story I’d been skirting.

  “The Kitteridges,” I muttered.

  “You all ganged up against the Kitteridges?” she asked. In the spotlight of her righteousness I was flooded with shame. I said nothing, working my fingers against the smooth surface of the countertop. She turned back to the meatloaf. “Those poor children,” she said. Her hands were still, resting for a moment in the meat. Then she lifted the whole of it from the glass bowl and pressed it into an aluminum loaf pan. She turned back to me, eyes like beams. “Would you like it if somebody treated you that way?”

  I could not answer. “We were drafted,” I tried to explain, the paltriness of this excuse apparent even to me as I uttered it.

  “Drafted?” she said, her eyebrows jumping up.

  “If we didn’t join, they were going to beat us up.”

  She offered no sympathy. On matters of principle she did not bend. She placed the meatloaf on the top shelf of the oven. “Then play inside,” she said, letting the oven door snap shut.

  In the aftermath of the Kitteridge-Mulligan war, my mother cast our family definitively into the hippie-peacenik camp by inviting dirty Suzie over to play with me. “Be nice to her,” my mother said. “She doesn’t have a mother.”

  I knew this, and knew I should feel sorry for her. Left on my own, with Suzie in her house and me in mine, I could get to feeling pretty sad for Suzie. But I didn’t want her in my house. I feared the censure of the neighborhood. I feared that her motherless condition, along with her famous dirtiness, would rub off on me. She appeared at the front door all the same. Her ratty white blonde hair matted, her face smudged, wearing a plaid skirt, no longer pleated and much too big, and no tights, just skinny bare legs, all cuts, bruises, and yellow down.

  Soon enough Suzie and I were sprawled on the living room floor, eyes shut tight as a man’s deep voice moved like a ghost across the room. His footsteps came darkly towards us, the sound of stiff man shoes tapping against hardwood floor. He talked about stereo sound. But I didn’t listen to what he said. That was the surface. Below that, in the calm insinuation of his voice, was some kind of menace.

  Next came the train, a whistle shout off somewhere down the street, and then a rhythmic chug coming closer, louder, stronger. Careening around the last stretch of track, it blew over the couches, over the carpet, and over Suzie and me in a final crescendo of steam and steel. We lay spent, arms and legs spread, prostrate and stunned as the train pulled away. Suzie giggled, a low gurgle. The album, Stereophonics, had come with our new, first-on-the-block stereo. I jumped up to place the needle very carefully in the first track, and we listened again.

  My mother was upstairs finishing some schoolwork before taking us to the park for a promised paddleboat ride at Stow Lake.

  “Let’s make a fort,” Suzie said, bored finally with the stereophonics. She eyed the fat, leafy green cushions on the two big sofas.

  “I don’t think my mother will like that,” I said. I rarely played in the living room, and knew we were only in here because my mother felt sorry for Suzie.

  “Go and ask her.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Come on, don’t be such a baby.” Suzie, dirty or not, was still a year and a half older than me. I could not say no.

  I went slowly up the stairs, taking my time, smoothing the dark wood of the banister with my hand as I went. From upstairs I could hear the music of my mother’s electric typewriter—the rapid-fire of the keys, the quick bell at the end of every line, the whoosh of the carriage as it returned. It was an Olivetti, gray, with green keys. Like the piano in the living room, like the sewing machine in the sunroom, it was one of her special things.

  That year she’d gone back to school, inspired by the women’s movement, freshly minted in 1971, which she greeted with great excitement. My father now says he’d always assumed my mother would go back to school at some point. “She was just so smart, she had to do something.” The school she chose was called Lone Mountain College, which seems apt, because for my mother any search for knowledge would have to be a solitary struggle.

  As I came into her bedroom I could just barely see the top of her desk, where the pages of her paper were resting lightly at her side. Her fingers were curled down towards the keys, which struck out at the page one at a time, as if each had a life of its own, a path it must follow. She put one arm around my shoulder as I came close to her, and with the other hand she cranked the typewriter wheel several times until the page came loose at the top of the tray. She drew it up and held it in the air for a moment, not reading it, just examining it. The text was crisp, each letter tight where it had scarred the delicate white paper. The typing paper was strange to touch, thin, but rough. If you held it up to the light you could see the word bond, embossed in the paper like a secret message. Satisfied, she put the page down and turned to me.

  “Mommy, can I build a fort with Suzie in the living room?”

  “Oh sweetie, we’re going in just a few minutes. Don’t let’s mess up the living room. OK?” She smiled at me and I said, “OK.” It was OK; it was right and simple. We were of one mind, united now against the wild child in the living room. I went down the stairs quickly, ready to lord it over Suzie. It was my house, my mother. No fort.

  But Suzie wasn’t waiting for me to tell her what to do. She didn’t live in the simple world of mother love and obedience. In the living room the naked insides of the couches glared up at me, insides I had seen only on the rare occasions when my mother vacuumed under the cushions.

  Suzie was gleefully dragging one last heavy cushion towards the window, where she had already heaped the others.

  “She said no,” I gasped in genuine horror.

  “We’ll put them back before she comes,” Suzie said, tossing her head and trying to shake her eyes free from her straggly hair while both hands struggled to balance the cushions.