Blue Plate Special (4 page)

Somehow, probably because it was obvious, I had picked up on his yearning for a son, and so I strove to be as boylike as I could—I was verbal like him, and I looked like him, with a long face, strong jaw, thin mouth, and flashing eyes, and I was the firstborn of this new clan, so I felt like a viable candidate. And my personality was very much like his, easygoing and affable on the surface and hotheaded and paranoid just below. In fact, whenever my father was around, I remember feeling almost manic with attention-getting wiles (which were no doubt highly irritating to him). He didn’t say much to me as a general rule, but whenever he talked, I absorbed it all; when I asked what he did at work, he told me that he stole the jailers’ keys when they were at lunch and let innocent people out of jail. Naturally, I believed him. I believed anything and everything he said.

I also wasn’t afraid of him. His violent rages were between him and my mother. He never once threatened to explode at me. I understood that he was dangerous to her, and I feared him for her sake, but I felt safe enough with him. My greatest concern with my father was getting, and keeping, his attention, which was never easy, because I so clearly bored him most of the time, or maybe it was just that he had no idea what to do with such a small girl.

Still, I’ve always believed that he was born with this dark
side, the only son of a successful Minnesota businessman who owned an envelope company. Ralph Johansen, Sr.—broad shouldered, unsmiling, a full head taller than his son—is rumored to have said to my father, his last words before he left the Bay Area and choked on a chicken bone and died shortly afterward: “You are a big disappointment to me.” My mother wonders whether Ralph’s father regularly hit him; everything I know about my father suggests to me that he was probably an angry iconoclast from birth—that his rage and rebellious nature were as much a part of his makeup as his rich singing voice and roguish charm. When Ralph was a teenager, his father sent him to Shattuck, a military school, after he was caught stealing a bottle of Coca-Cola from the side of a truck. (Fittingly, Marlon Brando was his roommate there.) I imagine that my father hated his own father, and authority, and the system, and the man, for every second of his life afterward, and I suspect that he still does, wherever he is now.

As it turned out, my father had been having an affair while my mother was pregnant with Emily, repeatedly punching my mother in the stomach to try, no doubt, to get rid of the fetus. When Emily was born, and he learned that he’d had another daughter, he turned around without a word to my mother and went out of the room.

Nonetheless, he was surprised and puzzled when my mother announced that she was leaving him. When Emily was still a baby, we moved out of our father’s huge Victorian house on Regent Street in Oakland, which he’d bought recently with the money he’d inherited from his father, and into a small but beautiful, bright, airy stucco cottage on Acton Street in Berkeley.

Our new house had a fireplace in the living room, wood floors, a glassed-in front porch with a floor of red terra-cotta tiles; two cute little bedrooms and one bathroom; and a kitchen in back with a breakfast nook by a big window, where the four of us ate all our meals and spent much of our time. We would also invent things in that kitchen, make whatever concoctions we could come up with without interference. I remember putting flour, milk, eggs, and various other things I thought might be good together into a bowl, stirring madly, pouring the result into a greased pan, and pulling it out of the oven to
find a flat, dense rectangle that tasted like Play-Doh, salty and gummy and bland.

All through my early childhood, I had had allergies to chocolate, peanuts, and strawberries, some of the cruelest things a kid can be allergic to; they gave me eczema and asthma, which we called “itchies and wheezies.” I’d been taking allergy shots for months. As soon as we moved out of my father’s house, and the bouts of violence toward my mother stopped altogether, my food allergies went away: the correlations between these allergies and the unacknowledged, internalized stress I felt, watching my father beat my mother, seem fairly clear to me now.

To supplement the small child-support checks from my father, which he sent every month according to their divorce agreement, my mother turned our Acton Street house into a day care center. I therefore became the tallest and oldest, and the de facto leader, of a gang of kids. There were Susan and Emily; and our neighbor from across the street Frieda, who was Emily’s age; and my mother’s charges: Norwegian Bjorn with his sweet blue eyes and curly rust-colored hair; Eduardo, a cute little boy with a throaty chuckle; Dhoti, a weird kid with bug eyes and permanent snot problems; and Dorothy and Eugene, a scrappy, sturdy, funny brother and sister duo who were always up for any game, any challenge. All their parents were just as poor as we were, and therefore they often couldn’t pay my mother, and meanwhile, she fed and cared for their kids all day, but she never seemed to mind. Berkeley in the late sixties was a world in which people bartered, got by. Life was loose and easy. And we always had enough to eat, as I remember, thanks to food stamps during our last year there, and my mother always managed to pay the rent on time.

My mother seemed happy and carefree in those years, away from our father. She hung out with other cool, sexy
young mothers, a cabal of hot chicks in their late twenties and early thirties. In my memories of her during this time, she was always surrounded by friends, always laughing, having fun, drinking Gallo, dancing to the Beatles and the Stones. And all the people she knew were part of the political and cultural movements going on in the Bay Area in the sixties. As a result, I thought all adults everywhere were long-haired activists and that most men had beards. I thought the whole world was politically charged, exciting, sometimes scary, and always left-leaning, radical, subversive. “Pigs” were bad and “the man” was the enemy and “the establishment” had to be overthrown. I thought everyone in the world knew that, as a matter of course. I thought “boycott” was a kind of grape.

At McGee Avenue, in the early years, my mother had cooked big pots of spaghetti for my father’s political friends, and they all sat talking for hours. After my parents were divorced, my father was still a frequent presence in our lives. I rode on his shoulders high above the crowd at peace marches in San Francisco, looking down at a sea of headbands and beards, granny glasses and ponchos. We went to happenings and demonstrations in People’s Park, to potlucks and parties. I remember when People’s Park was built and destroyed and the protesters were teargassed; and I remember when it was rebuilt and destroyed again. We got clothes from the free box and protested its destruction, twice, and ate potluck food at long tables there under the trees.

On University Avenue—which smelled of pot, incense, and various hippie perfumes and oils, where electric guitar-and-sitar rock vibrated psychedelically in every window and doorway, where everybody was protesting something or looking for a high or trying to find peace and truth—the black dudes walked along like the panthers they’d named themselves after, lithe and feline, with rich, glossy Afros, in tight paisley or bright-hued bell-bottoms and billowy shirts unbuttoned to
show their gleaming chests, their medallions and beads. They wore high-heeled boots and belted leather coats. They knew and loved my father, like everyone else back then.

I sat with my mother’s friend Paul Opokam, a Nigerian writer, on a hillside at a happening in a San Francisco park when I was three or four. He ate grass to make me laugh and pretended to be a cow on all fours. We hung out together like pals, little white me and tall black Paul. I loved him; he was one of my favorite people as a very small kid. And then Paul disappeared suddenly; for many years, I remembered only that something terrible and sad had happened to him. My mother told me later that Paul had been there when the National Guard stormed the San Francisco State campus, where she was taking psychology classes. They seized Paul, took him down into a men’s room, and, after planting some drugs on him, beat him up. Paul, a peaceful, sober man who had never done any drugs in his life, spent a number of years in San Quentin before being taken in handcuffs to the airport and deported back to Nigeria.

T
he Bay Area in the 1960s was, of course, a fortuitous time and place for a budding writer to grow up. But unfortunately, all the hot foment, the hullabaloo, the questioning of authority, the endless discussions everyone was having all around me, failed to turn me into a political creature of any stripe. In fact, it all made me squirm a little with the same detached embarrassment I felt watching a group of naked, hairy grown-ups getting stoned in a park: I was a prudish romantic, daydreamy and internal. I liked thinking about castles and princesses. It was all too noisy, too druggy, and too strident for me. I would have preferred the decorous strands of pearls, glamorous fedoras, cigarette holders, and gloves of a much earlier era, when grown-ups smoked only cigarettes.

I
n second grade, I went to Washington School on Bancroft and McKinley, and so did Susan, who was in kindergarten. We walked the three quarters of a mile to school by ourselves every morning and home again every afternoon. The two challenges of our daily commute were getting past Princess and Bumblebee, two snarling, lunging, enormous-seeming dogs who guarded a fenced-in yard about a block from our house, and then crossing Sacramento, which was tricky because the traffic was in four lanes rather than two, but there was an island in the middle where we could wait on the grass under the palm trees until the other lanes were clear.

Washington School had open classrooms, a pedagogical fad, which meant that there were older and younger kids in every classroom. A gang of glamorous third-grade black girls in my class somehow adopted me as their mascot. I wore thick glasses by then; I was skinny and reserved. They called me “White Patty” and teased me affectionately and kindly for being so shy, trying to draw me out. I worshipped them.

At recess on Fridays, the teachers played R&B records in the playground over a loudspeaker system, and the kids danced on the asphalt. I sat by the sidelines, too shy to shake my booty with the cool kids. I watched those older, bigger black girls with their hair in many ponytails clipped with bright plastic bobbles, wearing their mod dresses and polyester bell-bottoms, grooving to the music. All year, I was dying to get up and dance with them, and they always encouraged me to, but I didn’t have the nerve until the last day of school, my last chance ever, when I flung myself into their midst and shook my bony little butt to the slinky beat of Sly and the Family Stone. My idols surrounded me, clapping, cheering, egging me on.

B
irthdays in our family were the usual bacchanalian, delirious affairs with balloons, streamers, signs, paper crowns, heaps of presents, kids high to the gills on sugar games, and manic excitement permeating the whole day. On my seventh birthday, my father came over for the party. Afterward, my parents announced that they had a big present for me, but I had to go out to the garage to find it. The garage was a little wooden structure in back that we never used; I had no idea what I’d find out there. The door lifted, and I saw that they had turned it into a playroom for me, with a big rug, an old couch, a table and chairs my father had built himself, and a bookshelf. It was meant to be my own place, my own room, to go into and be alone in whenever I wanted, where I could read in peace without shushing my sisters every ten minutes, where I could close the door and do whatever I wanted. It was the best present they could have given me. I never got to be by myself; none of us had any solitude. I shared a room with both my sisters, and there were all those other kids around all the time. My mother could have taken the garage for herself, but she gave it to me instead. I was only seven, but I was a very serious kid, a bookworm, anxious and overly responsible; I felt the full weight of my status as the oldest kid and my mother’s helper. Now the advantages of being the firstborn had never been clearer. I went into that garage and wrote stories. In my first completed story, “My Magic Carpet,” the narrator and her sister went around the world and into outer space on a magic carpet and got home in time for “tea,” as I called it.

O
n Christmas Eve in 1969, we went to a party at the house of my mother’s friends Bobby and Christine in the North Berkeley Hills. They were rich, or, at least, they seemed rich
to me. Bobby was a chemistry professor at Berkeley with curly dark hair who played the piano. His wife, Christine, was my mother’s age, but she had long silver-gray hair, a smooth, pretty, oval face, and a high, fluty voice. I always thought of her as the Good Witch of the East. Their three daughters, Diana, Juliet, and Katherine, were all our same ages.

Christine and my mother had met on a bench, watching their kids on the swings at the local kiddie park, Totland. Their house on Indian Rock Road—so named because the Indians had carved bowl-like depressions into the boulders—had a grand piano and a curved staircase and huge leaded windows overlooking their deep, green, lush yard. Diana, who was my age, had her own room, which was actually two rooms, since there was a large sleeping porch attached to her bedroom. She lived like a princess, with a canopy bed, a window seat, and a Victorian dollhouse with real-looking furniture and a family of dolls with jointed limbs and painted porcelain heads. Driving to their house, we left behind our ordinary, familiar world on the Flats of little bungalows, straight wide streets, and palm trees and ascended in a swooping, steep trail to what seemed like a mountain castle.