Andersen, Kurt (14 page)

Such as right now, when I put the half-full quart of grapefruit juice back on the refrigerator shelf hastily, and watch the sloshing make the carton swivel and teeter before it rights itself, like a wobbly drunk almost falling and then too firmly planting his feet to stand
perfectly
still. We deprive ourselves if we ignore all the tiny, inconsequential bits and pieces, the flotsam and jetsam of life. Quarks and neutrinos and atoms and molecules, the earth, asteroids, stars, the shaft of light angling through the kitchen window right this second, illuminating the slow-motion Dance of Ten Thousand Dust Motes: isn’t it
all
flotsam and jetsam?

The phone’s ringing.

“Why—why are you there?”

“Greta?” My daughter, Waverly’s mother.

“
Why
are you still at
home
?”

“Because it’s seven-twenty
A.M.
and the drive to campus is only twenty-five minutes even with the construction on Laurel Canyon Boulevard.”

“Right.”

She does this regularly, forgets the three-hour time difference. I think it’s partly because she’s felt abandoned since I moved across the country, and partly because she’s got a lot of things to juggle and lives her New York life in a state of somewhat frenzied obliviousness.

“What’s up?’

“Just calling.”

Ordinarily, she “just calls” at bedtime.

“I saw your ice storm on TV over the weekend,” I say. “I cannot tell you how happy I am to be in my post-blizzard stage of life. And I won’t tell you what the temperature is here.”

“Thanks.”

“Seventy-two. How’s Wavy?”

“Did you tell her that Jungo’s NGO is ‘total crap’? That’s what she told him you said.”

“I didn’t say that.” My son-in-law, Jungo Dixit, an MBA and management consultant who earns his living as a coach for business executives—using what he told me is “a proprietary cross-disciplinary approach to positioning and strategic communications for C-level executives seeking to optimize performance and visibility”—has started an organization called Life Coaches Without Borders. Life Coaches Without Borders sends people like him to places like Haiti and Libya and Myanmar to advise people, pro bono, how to get their lives on track. “I just told her I was surprised Axl Rose was one of his big funders. I may have rolled my eyes.”

“She also says you told her it’s cool to say ‘fuck’ whenever she wants.”

“No, I said she didn’t have to worry about watching her language around me. That’s all.” Jesus fucking Christ. “Is this why you called?”

“No, I called to see how you are. What’s new? How do you
feel
?”

“I’m fine. I’m great, in fact.”

The pause that follows goes on a beat too long.

“You know,” Greta says, “you’re almost sixty-five, and Morfar wasn’t that much older when he started becoming impaired.” Morfar, Danish for “grandpa,” is what all his grandchildren called my dad. Greta and her brother, Seth, loved it because it made him seem like a character from
The Lord of the Rings.
“And
he
didn’t have to remember to test his blood and administer injections.”

“Thanks for the reminder, but don’t worry. My memory is
superb
—in fact, writing this book, I find I’m remembering more and more stuff all the time. I’m fine. Really.”

There is a long silence, followed by what I take for grudging capitulation: “Okay. I love you.”

When the phone rings again fifteen minutes later, I’m in the garage, plugging in my car, which I seem to have forgotten to do last night.

The caller ID tells me it’s from DIXIT-WU: Greta again. “What?” I answer.

“Are you okay? Why are you out of breath?”

“Because I just ran like hell up here to answer the phone.”

“Do you have a minute?”

I sit down. I’ve got no appointments this morning. “Sure.” I wonder if this is going to be another anxious discussion about Waverly’s interest in a career as an actress and her general bohemianism. Last week she and Hunter were caught Dumpster-diving at a Whole Foods on Houston Street, having filled three shopping bags with overripe tomatillos, two-day-old sushi rolls, stale focaccia, and cacao-dusted chocolate-covered goji berries that had melted together. The cops let them go, and the kids took the food to a homeless shelter.

“I just wanted to make sure you feel okay. Because now that I’m not drinking, I feel so much clearer. About everything. And so much more willing to look at the truth squarely. Even when it’s painful.”

Greta gave up booze two years ago, right after her father died. I was on her Twelve Step list of people who had been “harmed” by her alcoholism (Step 8). She flew from New York out to Los Angeles to “make amends” to me (Step 9) in person. Until then I had been unaware that she’d considered her nightly cocktail and two glasses of wine problematic. I always figured our telephone bickering and her long silences and occasional dudgeons were just one of those irremediable mother-daughter things.

“Then we’re in complete sync, honey. What I’m writing, the memoir, is exactly that. Lots of painful truth.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t sound convinced. I’m fine, totally fine. Tip-top, handy-dandy. Why did you call back?” Maybe she wants to tell me she’s realized in her crystal-clear sobriety that she finds Jungo insufferable.

“We’ll talk more when you’re here.”

“In
March
?” I ask. Spring break is a month away.

“I was just wondering if … maybe you’ll let me read some of it. The book.”

A
ha,
now I get it: this kid is worried that I’m spilling unlovely secrets about my marriage to her father and our family’s private life. “Sure, maybe, some of it, if you’d like. But now I’m late, I haven’t packed, really gotta get going, flying to D.C. this afternoon. Sarah’s big anniversary shindig.”

Among other important engagements in Washington. My friend the senior national security and intelligence-community apparatchik has agreed to meet with me.

10

I recently found the numbered list of Reasons for Loving Summer that I made the summer I turned ten. I can date it precisely because it’s crayoned on a mimeographed church hymn sheet in copper, a color that didn’t exist until Crayola inaugurated the sixty-four-crayon box with the built-in sharpener, which I got for my tenth birthday. That gift is my earliest memory of intense ambivalence, because I was just barely too old for crayons. When I abandoned them at the end of that summer, ceremoniously presenting the box to the little kids as “a permanent lend,” I delivered a speech about how lucky they were, how much more austere my childhood had been than theirs—no TV in the house until I was eight, a bedroom shared with Sabrina until we moved to Schiller Avenue, no record player of my own and no Barbie or Hula-Hoop at all

When I became an actual adult, and Greta at age thirteen accused me of being “some kind of Amish yuppie” because I refused to buy her aerosol Silly String or let her dress like Madonna, I laughed and congratulated her on the turn of phrase, which naturally made her all the angrier. Like Danish father, like American daughter.

Among all my Reasons for Loving Summer at age ten—School Out, Longer Nights, Fireflies, Insect Sounds, Playing Frisbee, Going Barefoot, Swimming at Centennial Park, Eating Dinner Outside, Driving to Get Ice Cream—only two were not generic: More Luck Happens and Being with Violet. I rarely saw Violet, our cleaning lady, during the school year because she arrived at our house in the mornings after I went to school and left before I came home. Her presence during the summer—rather, my presence as she cleaned our floors and dusted our furniture—made the summers distinct, more fun and interesting, and somehow
summerier.

Until I became a beatnik, I wore pigtail braids, and first thing every Monday and Thursday morning in the summers, I sat on a red stool in the kitchen so Violet could braid my hair. She did them tighter than my mother, so tight they hurt a little the first hour or so, but I felt improved by the rigor, and loved the feeling of her rough fingers on my neck and head, and never complained.

On summer Mondays, I’d sit on the big lint-covered cushion in the corner of the laundry room and draw or read as she washed and dried and folded our clothes and answered my occasional questions about her sons, and her husband who disappeared after the war. (“Disappeared like—like a
ghost
?” I asked at age six, embarrassing myself.) Down there in the basement on one of my parents’ ancient radios, she listened to horse races from Arlington Park and to what she called her “hillbilly songs.” My mother disapproved of both horse racing and country-and-western music, which made those times with Violet all the more delicious.

For lunch she’d make us waffles covered in bacon and Cheez Whiz, and lemonade. She always let me stir the mayonnaise into her potato salad (“the Hellmann’s,” she called it, as if it were beurre blanc, to distinguish it from the Miracle Whip in her own kitchen), which she always made on Thursday afternoons for our Friday picnic-table dinners in the backyard.

When I was ten, she told me the reason her hours were nine
A.M.
to three
P.M.
was because it took her almost two hours to travel to and from Chicago each way. I thought she was joshing, and when she assured me she wasn’t, I felt terrible. I’d never known about her long commute, and I blurted that she should quit and get a job closer to where she lived. “And never see my Kay-Ray again?” she said, kissing me on my forehead the way she always did. “Uh-
uh.
” I believe the one day she ever missed work was after her daughter-in-law was murdered.

The only complaints I ever heard from her were about her inability to afford bets on the Arlington Park horses she picked every day, and how “they always take away my music”—by which she meant WLS changing from country to rock and roll. She never complained about her asthma, either, and when she got a modern inhaler that replaced her old-fashioned squeeze-bulb gizmo, she told me that it made her believe in progress.

Violet was the only black person with whom I’d ever spoken until I was almost in high school.

The week before I started at New Trier, early on the last Thursday of the summer of 1963, I was lying in the hammock on the back porch reading
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
I shook my head and harrumphed when I read M praising the Swiss because they “cope with the beatnik problem.” No wonder the book begins with Bond wanting to resign from MI6.

“For a girl all done with her summer school, Kay-Ray is up bright and early.”

“Hi, Violet! It was too hot to sleep. I was sweating like a pig up there.”

“
Perspiring
like a pig. Where your mom and the kids at?”

“Choir practice and the allergist.”

“Which dress you plan on wearing at work this afternoon? I’ll be putting a load in the machine after I finish these.” She gripped a paper sack of potatoes in one hand and a big yellow Pyrex bowl full of water in the other.

“Yesterday was my last day. They closed Scattergood O’Donnell and went up to Uncle—my uncle … He and his law partner and their families went up to Tom’s place in Wisconsin for the long weekend, to their, you know, the lake house there.” My mother’s brother, for whose law firm I’d worked part-time, was named Thomas Scattergood, and I’d suddenly realized I did not want to say “Uncle Tom’s cabin” to Violet.

She sat down on the bench, emptied the potatoes into her lap, and started to peel them into the empty sack.

I kept reading, although I wanted to discuss civil rights with Violet. My earliest memory is my mother standing and crying as she listened to a live radio report about thousands of white people down in Cicero rioting outside an apartment building into which one Negro family had moved. And for the last few years I’d read news articles and watched the TV reports about Negroes fighting white Southerners to end segregation. Back in fifth grade, after the Negro college students’ sit-ins at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Uncle Ralph and Aunt Gaby’s town in North Carolina, I’d suggested to my mother and Violet that
we
all go to
our
Woolworth’s lunch counter in Wilmette, at the Edens Plaza shopping center. Mom thought it was a grand notion, but Violet quietly, firmly refused to play along, which mystified and mortified me.

So as the civil rights movement burgeoned, I didn’t talk about it much, because the one colored person I knew had swatted me away when I’d butted in. Nor did it help that my mother and dad were such total bleeding-heart liberals, so proud to be members of the NAACP and sign open-housing petitions and attend vigils for racial justice. With Pope John’s death that summer, Martin Luther King, Jr., had ascended to first place in my mother’s pantheon of living saints. At fourteen, I wasn’t looking for new ways to
agree
with my parents.

But during that summer of 1963, the “civil rights movement” turned into the “Negro revolution,” and I was devouring the coverage. I now felt connected to great events, no longer a child reading stories—I was working in a law firm, and the Negro murdered in Mississippi had been an NAACP lawyer. The first Negro to attend the University of Alabama appeared on
Newsweek
’s cover, a girl not much older than I was. On the news one night, as my family watched the Birmingham police set snarling German shepherds on protesters and then blast the Negroes with fire hoses, my father shook his head, and I saw that my mother was crying when she went to get dinner ready. I found myself performing a charade of sadness that night, feeling not depressed or disturbed, not like I’d witnessed a tragedy, not a bit, but awestruck to be seeing history firsthand, as it happened, absolutely thrilled to watch kids my age—kids Sabrina’s and Peter’s ages!—jumping over the walls of the schools where they’d been locked down, actually
rebelling.
And getting hosed and beaten, paying the price for their rebellion on national TV. I had never seen anything so dramatic in real life.

And now, in late August, there was the large event of the day before. I decided it would be rude not to broach the subject. I would have my first real conversation about the Negro question with a Negro. I closed my Bond book.