Blue Plate Special (7 page)

I still thought about my father. But now, living so far away from him—just us girls, free to coexist peacefully without fear of violence, without a presence among us of an indifferent, distant, unreachable man—we flourished as a family. Life in Tempe wasn’t easy, not the way it had been in Berkeley, where everything had sort of flowed and people were all in it together. Here, we were more isolated. We were all we had. We didn’t belong to any church or social organization or larger extended family. My mother’s grad school friends were all transients, like us. We had no history here; our history was in Berkeley, and that was over.

The “we” of our family was something we clung to. We banded together, cultivated an identity as a group, defined ourselves out loud to one another—“We’re gypsy WASPs,” my mother told me when I asked what ethnicity we were, looking around at all my Mexican and Indian friends. I understood from my mother that we were different from a lot of the people around us in Tempe. We were Democrats. We listened to Bach and Joan Baez and Benny Goodman. We had Indian bedspreads on the walls. Our bookshelves were filled, overflowing, with novels and essay collections and poetry and literary classics. Our divorced mother smoked pot, had long hair, and wore chunky necklaces and hip-huggers. “We” were weird. And weird meant special, or, at least, that was how I interpreted
it. I needed to feel that my family was special, so this was the story I told myself, instead of seeing us as isolated, poor, vulnerable. We were great, we were tough, even though we had no man around; we couldn’t have the cool, fun junk food or the brand of track shoes Susan and I desperately wanted that all my friends got, but we could afford to pay for her ballet lessons and my violin lessons because “we” valued art more than fashion.

In many ways, my insistence that we were safe and happy and strong came out of a sense of protectiveness toward my mother and sisters—I was afraid to feel anything negative, afraid of opening that door even a crack, for fear of the entire thing crumbling. But while I had books and writing to shield me, imaginary worlds as a buffer, Susan was a realist, pragmatic and clear-eyed, and she was always afraid, always felt vulnerable. Although we were less than two years apart in age, Susan and I had almost completely different childhoods. In some ways, we grew up in two different families. We each adopted a different part of our mother’s personality as if we had chosen our characteristics from birth and agreed not to trespass on the other’s turf. I was the brainy, swashbuckling, tomboyish, overly anxious but adamantly positive one. Susan, on the other hand, was the visceral, emotional, feminine, worried one. She registered every tremor on our mother’s face, every threat from the outside world, every cause for worry like a seismograph. And Emily co-opted another side of our mother entirely: her iconoclastic unorthodoxy, deliberate sureness of purpose, unswerving adherence to an internal truth, no matter what anyone else said or did or thought, an admirable, maddening, constitutional refusal to conform to expectations and social conventions. Sometimes it seemed to me that Susan and I clung to two sides of one life raft together while Emily swam alone.

Something was happening to our mother in those years after she left our father, after she started studying psychology
and joined a women’s group and subscribed to a bold, exciting new magazine called
Ms
. that had just started up. She was waking up for the first time in her life, realizing that her own feelings mattered, that women didn’t have to put up with abuse and bad treatment from men, that women could be friends and allies rather than bitchy competitors, and that she was able to make it on her own, with three little kids, without a husband. When she’d been younger, and then married to Ralph, she had felt as if she were sleepwalking. Now she awoke into a sharper, clearer understanding of her past and her relationships with men, especially her own father and my father. Feminism was a dash of cold water, bracing and invigorating and clean.

My mother discussed all this with me: she always spoke to me as if I were a fellow adult, an understanding ear. Although she prudently, tactfully conducted her sex and dating life offstage, and didn’t tell us kids about it, there were few other things she didn’t tell me. I read every issue of
Ms
. right along with her. I pored over her copy of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
, which made me squeamish and uncomfortable but which contained what struck me as blisteringly important information. I sang along with Helen Reddy, “I am strong, I am invincible.…” I inhaled biographies of Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, and Louisa May Alcott; the latter was called, appropriately,
Invincible Louisa
. I thought of myself as invincible. I also thought of myself as a feminist and proudly bandied the term about at school to my baffled classmates. Being female was powerful, I learned. Being a woman meant I was strong, I could do anything. It was all going to be okay. I look back on that heady time fondly, ruefully. Because of course it wasn’t okay.

In the early summer of 1971, I left my mother and little sisters in Tempe and flew to the Bay Area alone to spend the summer with my father in Oakland. I hadn’t seen him in what felt like a very long time, all of third grade—he felt like a stranger suddenly.

My father had started a commune in his huge Victorian house on Regent Street. I was given my own room on the third floor under the eaves, a small room with a secret passageway behind the wall. There was a tiled koi pond in the backyard. There was a laundry chute in the butler’s pantry off the kitchen and a dusty green velvet couch in the front parlor I liked to lie on.

My father had filled his house with young, righteous politicos, all of whom seemed to revere him. They did a lot of sitting around and talking through clouds of pot smoke. I was the only kid around the place that summer. I don’t remember what I did all day, but I do remember feeling out of place and homesick and intimidated by my father, who was as distant and gruff with me as ever. I felt awkward around him, like a big lummox. I wasn’t sure why I was there. Maybe he just wanted to upset my mother by enforcing his custodial rights.

One night, at a dinner with some friends of my father’s, as I watched an enormous bearded man frying an odd dish he called peachburgers, which were literally hamburger meat mixed with
chopped canned peaches, I blurted out to the entire assemblage of guests, “My daddy hit my mommy, and she cried.”

There was something like a collective gasp from all the grown-ups. No one said anything for many ticks of the clock. They all stared at me as if I’d thrown a live grenade across the room.

After the party, as we were driving home, just the two of us, my father told me tersely, with controlled rage, never, ever, to say anything like that again. I had embarrassed him and upset his friends.

I was deeply, horribly mortified. What had I been thinking? I had wrecked the party. I had pissed my father off and hurt his feelings. I was such an asshole.

“I don’t know why I said that, Daddy,” I confessed wretchedly.

“You shouldn’t have,” he said. “Never do it again.”

I lay awake long into the night, racked with shame and regret.

Soon after that, I took off with my father and his girlfriend, a kind, solid woman named Karen, in a tomato-red VW bus to drive around the Southwest, just the three of us. I remember straddling the Four Corners grid, my hands and feet in four different states. We went to Bryce Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, the cliff dwellings in New Mexico.

I couldn’t stop annoying my father. I didn’t mean to annoy him; it just happened. I pestered him to play cards with me and bragged when I won; I could feel viscerally how tense this made him. One night, very late, long past my bedtime, he left the campfire where he’d been talking with a group of people we’d met and found me whimpering and crying outside the bus, standing in the darkness.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” he asked.

“You forgot to feed me,” I said. “No one put me to bed.”

“You’re almost nine years old,” he said. “Old enough to speak up. Don’t let this happen again!”

I recoiled. I hadn’t spoken up because I was not a kid who whined or asked for things, and I was shy with him sometimes. He gave me a yogurt, which I ate in silence, and then he packed me off to my little bed in the back of the bus. I lay there with a knot in my stomach, still hungry.

One day, Karen walked me into the desert alone and told me that I had to stop being such a pain in the ass. “Your father can’t take it anymore,” she said. “He’s really at the end of his rope.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll try, I swear.”

Following this little talk, which felt like a Mafia hit, things deteriorated. And so, after a summer of looking like a wild animal—with messy hair, dirt-streaked face, and ratty clothes—I found myself suddenly, abruptly scrubbed clean with freshly washed and braided hair, wearing travel-worthy clothes, being driven to the Albuquerque airport.

My father looked at me in the rearview mirror as he drove. “If the cops stop us, they’ll think we kidnapped you,” he joked.

He had called my mother and told her I was flying back to Arizona that night. Luckily, she was home, in the middle of her weekly poker game with her psychologist pals, or she wouldn’t have known. She left my sleeping sisters in the care of a friend and drove to Sky Harbor airport.

When the stewardess who’d been put in charge of me walked me off the plane, there was my mother waiting at the gate. I had never been happier to see her.

I got home from that disastrous summer with my father to find that my mother had painted my room a clear, rich, bright red while I was gone. She had wanted to surprise me; I had repeatedly asked for a red room in the months before I left. I was overwhelmed with joy; my room was now perfect. I had a mattress on the floor instead of a bed, just the way I liked it—all my furniture was flat and low so I could spread my many ongoing projects around my butter-yellow, fuzzy carpet. My bureau was the one tall thing in the room.

I had a low table to write on while I sat on the floor, cross-legged, hunched over my stapled-together books, grasping my pen awkwardly in my right hand. I had terrible penmanship; I was always impatient and slapdash at everything I did, so the aesthetic quality of my writing itself was completely irrelevant to me, far outside the realm of anything I cared about. I wrote as fast as the words could come out: a series of stories about girls my age and their adventures at school (not the most imaginative plots in the world); illustrated animal stories for my younger sisters with such inventive titles as “Sammy the Snake” and “The Bears on Vacation.”

I drew endless pictures of huge families with sets of six or eight siblings in a descending line from oldest to youngest, with their vaguely Victorian names and ages carefully marked below each one: “Olivia, age 15; Abigail, age 13; Seth, age 11; Malcolm,
age 10; Maria, age 8; Genevieve, age 6; Thomas, age 3; James, age 1.” They all had solemn, big-eyed faces, neatly combed or braided hair, and my idea of nineteenth-century country clothes—pinafores, overalls, knickers, aprons.