The Seasons of My Mother Page 3

  There are facts I know only because I was told them. The facts are attached to vague pictures in my head—snapshots, really—and then feelings get attached to these snippets of memory. And then there is memory itself.

  Fact: I was born in La Jolla, California, in Scripps Memorial Hospital in a room with a view of the sea. It was the only room they had left. The previous patient hadn’t wanted it because of the sound of the waves; she thought them bothersome. But my mom was thrilled to hear the waves and see them crash as she awaited the final hours of her pregnancy. I even have a painting that my great-grandmother did of the La Jolla cliff that my mom could see from her hospital window.

  (Parenthetical fact: As my marriage was coming to an end in 2011, I was performing God of Carnage in Los Angeles and was spending the time between performing the play and homeschooling my kids, crying and in denial that my marriage was over. During my kids’ Easter break, we joined my sister Stephanie’s family at a resort in La Jolla, and I accidentally fell off a single bed as one of my children unexpectedly jumped across the expanse from the other bed to hug me. My daughter landed in my arms and threw me off balance, and we started to fall toward the opposite bed. Time slowed down. We were falling and her head was aiming for the lower metal rail of the bed with 140 pounds of me on top of her. I could see the rail coming, almost in slow motion, and in that split second I knew that if she hit her head she would be seriously hurt, and somehow I managed to twist around so she was on top of me, and hit the back of my neck on the rail instead. I slammed into the rail and lay on the floor, breathless. The wind had gotten knocked out of me and it took me a few minutes to recover. I stood up, weak-kneed, and almost passed out. I went to the bathroom, and didn’t have the strength to pull my pants down, so my sister helped me.

  On the way back to the bedroom to get my keys so I could begin the drive back to Los Angeles—I had a performance of the play that night—I slowly hugged my children good-bye, brightly assuring them that I was fine, and then I full-on fainted. I was taken by ambulance to the same hospital where I had been born, Scripps Memorial. I woke up as we pulled into the hospital, the scream of the sirens now slowing down to a low growl, and realized that I was on my own, and that my husband wasn’t in love with me anymore, and that in some ways this small brush with oh my God death was a kind of rebirthing for me. Hopefully I wasn’t damaged from the fall. Hopefully I could make the drive back to downtown LA and perform that night. Hopefully I could accept that my marriage was over, start anew, give my kids a great life, and eventually find love somewhere. I was wheeled into a curtained cubicle, and in tears in the emergency room I sobbed to the doctor that I had been born there, and how weird it was that here I was again and I hoped I wasn’t going to die there, and how crazy that my marriage was really over, and wasn’t this a funny full circle to be back in this hospital, and also was I okay to drive? An hour later, still in tears, now sobbing to the technicians that my marriage was over and what were the results of the scan—and oh by the way did I have brain damage? Two hours and several ice packs later, with technicians and doctors waving good-bye in the loading dock wishing me good luck in my “over with” marriage and also the play, I swallowed the aspirin with codeine that I was to take only when I got to the stage, buckled up with a very stiff neck, and began the three-hour drive from La Jolla to downtown Los Angeles. I vowed not to call my husband, but to wait for him to call me. Right out of the driveway I immediately dialed his number, looking for sympathy (perhaps my near-death experience would save my marriage?). He said how sorry he was that I was hurt, and then, quite clearly, that he thought we should proceed with a divorce. I passed Laguna Beach in a blur. Heartache heartache heartache.

  Now what? I called my mom. She said God must’ve put me in that same hospital, in that same place, with a big hit on my head, to help me realize that my marriage was over. She said I had always had to learn the hard way, and I should be grateful that God had hit me on the head. She asked why did I think I was doing a play called God of Carnage about a marriage that was ending? She said it meant something that I had been taken to same hospital where I had been born, and I should take it very seriously. She said it was to be a rebirth. Rebirth. That notion seemed so scary, at fifty-one years of age. Scary, but hopeful.) That’s the end of my parenthetical fact. I did take it seriously.

  Fact: Back at Scripps Memorial hospital, I came into the world as my mother was laughing. The hour was 2:00 a.m., and the doctor was sleeping. My father stormed off to get him, commanding my mother to “hold it, Beverly!” The madder my dad got, the more my mom laughed. “Goddamned son of a bitch, where is that Goddamned doctor?” he cursed. “Damnit! Hold it, Beverly!” She winced, then laughed. I was coming and wouldn’t be held back, and with a great degree of ease Mom delivered me just as the doctor arrived. That was part of the reason that my middle name turned out to be Gay: the merriment of my mother during that moment had to be honored.

  Fact: Speaking of names, I was the middle child of five children, each with their own special nickname. There was Leslie, nicknamed Lezle, then one year later Sheryl, nicknamed Sheryl-Bird, then one year later, me. Somehow I earned the nickname “Marcia-Mutt,” which my sisters later shortened to Marcia-Mudd, then just Mudd. A few years later, my brother Thaddeus Mark was born, but he was always called Mark because my dad was already Thad. And finally, a few years after Thaddeus, came the youngest of us, Stephanie. I loved her nickname, which Dad would sing: “Stephanie Deeee Diiinggg DONNNNGG.” That was our big little family: Mom and Dad, Leslie, Sheryl, me, Mark, Stephanie, and a cat named Elmer.

  Fact: We lived in La Jolla, then Carmel-by-the-Sea, where I have a vague memory of the woods and a rope swing and going into the woods alone with a girlfriend and her brother when I wasn’t supposed to. It is a little bit of a creepy memory—and exciting, because we all swung on the huge rope swing and ran back from the woods when we heard my mother calling. I got in trouble for that one. There is a vague memory of a disastrous Easter when I couldn’t find any eggs. A vague memory of chasing my sisters on a bike, all the while jealous that they were faster. Glimpses of feelings, a snapshot of going to a funeral with my mom, a snapshot of accompanying Mom to a trailer park where we dropped off our ironing to a wispy, brown-haired woman in a polyester T-shirt who smiled a chipped-tooth smile. A body memory of pushing a doll on a swing. A body memory of spanking the doll, because she was a “bad girl” and had fallen off the swing. A feeling that my mom liked me, even loved me, but the absolute knowledge that she wasn’t partial and didn’t play favorites. A sketchy memory later verified by Mom of me coming out so proudly one morning and announcing “I got dressed all by myself!,” and indeed the clothing was matching, it was a job well-done. Remembering Mom not wanting to praise me too much because it might go to my head. And a physical memory of being hugged and enveloped by a kind black woman. Apparently we had had a babysitter when I was three or four, and I just loved her. She was a plump woman with large breasts, and she would wrap me up in her arms and hold me tight, with her head thrown back, laughing. It is perhaps the safest I have ever felt. Even if I do not fully recall the woman, I recall the emotion.

  But real memories of visual clarity don’t really begin until we moved to Garden Grove, California. I was five years old.

  I remember a girl with a barking German shepherd up the street. I remember when she tried to fondle me in the ditch in the park near Ralph’s grocery store. I remember when my sister told me Santa wasn’t real, and she got in trouble because I was inconsolable. (I felt horrible that she got in trouble. And I felt horrible that Santa was dead. And I felt horrible that I couldn’t stop crying.) I remember ants in the backyard. I remember a summer plastic blow-up pool, and I remember stubbing my toe in the driveway and Mom putting stinging iodine on it, soothing me with her cool voice and cooler hands. I remember going to the beach with my family and getting covered in tar, then using turpentine and a hose in the driveway to get it off.

  And I remember my m
om, not yet as a friend, but more as a presence, a presence of love and gentleness and resigned discipline. A presence of beauty. A stabilizer. A tuck-you-in-at-night mom. A woman making her home and garden beautiful, creating a practical nest for her chicks. She didn’t do it to compete with the neighbors for the “prettiest yard” award; she did it because as she put her steel key in the front door, she loved the smell of the gardenia in bloom, and she would angle her brown curly hair toward the plant, inhaling for a second before she dragged the paper bags of groceries across the floor in the foyer.

  In the California neighborhood of our May Day sneak-a-thons, the Garden Grove moms could be seen on weekends in cotton shorts and collared yet sleeveless cotton shirts planting spring bulbs. This was the midsixties, no T-shirts for these middle-class moms, no sweatpants, canvas shorts, or jeans. To school, their daughters wore dresses, or skirts and blouses (always tucked in, thank you very much), skipping in white socks and two-toned shoes or penny loafers or Keds. So their mothers were not sloppy in their gardens, even as they planted. They consumed icy tall glasses of lemonade on their breaks, with perhaps a sprig of mint for garnish.

  We lived in a small neighborhood of three-bedroom ranch houses, of cul-de-sacs and side streets and loops that wove out to the main artery where Ralph’s and McDonald’s and Jack in the Box beckoned. On our street, serendipitously called Beverly Lane, there were cement-block fences, green grass, rubber trees, cactus, and flowers. Our neighbors—the Kraufchecks—had an orange and a lemon tree, and we had our gardenia bush. There were also succulents and tropical bushes and trees in our yard, and to the right of our sidewalk hopscotch game, we had a palm tree.

  Today, I have a snobbery about cul-de-sacs, a distaste for small ranch houses. The seeming sameness makes me feel hopeless; I feel like I am trapped, almost drowning, going round and round the dead-end circle looking for the exit. The dark windows of the houses scare me, and I get an overwhelming sense of We will never get ahead. We will never be special if we live in that house where I can see all the walls, where the ceiling is low. Where the lights are off. Where I am like everyone else. I panic. I can’t seem to pass these houses without wondering about the lives within. I get quite melancholy, wondering if the inhabitants are happy, and as I drive by I think, “That’s not me. Nope, that house isn’t me. Nor that one.” As if the house defines the person. As if I will become a person whose eyes need washing like the windows need washing, whose porch needs painting, whose yard needs mowing, whose trash need emptying. Or if I lived in a wealthier neighborhood, I would become a white-bread conservative with 3.2 kids. So I look for treehouses, boathouses, stone cottages, Japanese designs and colonial pillars, something to define the quirk of the home, something to insist on personality. Most of which is too expensive for me to afford, so I stay in my third-floor walk-up and lug suitcases up and down the stairs when we travel, and so for now I am that girl, that mom, the one who lives in an anonymous third-floor walk-up and lugs suitcases up and down the stairs, and barks at her children to help. The one who lives near the beach and is satisfied that the beach itself provides the quirk, even though I don’t really surf and only sometimes ride my bike on the boardwalk. My aversion to certain houses is rather ridiculous, really, certainly inexplicable, because I do believe we were happy as kids in our little neighborhood in Garden Grove. Happy in our little house. Jumping on the bed and playing pirates as we walked the gangplank. Pretending we were heading out to sea.

  Long Beach marked the beginning of my father’s voyages to sea. He had been on a navy path to become a pilot, but that had come to an abrupt end when a small plane he was flying during training in San Francisco lost both engines and began hurtling toward the Bay Bridge. The plane stood a good chance of hitting the structure, and my father had to make a split-second decision: should he abort the plane and parachute out, saving his own life but risking the lives of others, or should he stay with the plane, steering it clear of the bridge and crash into the water, and almost surely die? He crashed. And saved lives. And, miraculously, survived. He claimed that his training had simply taken over, that he hadn’t thought about it, that the moment he hit the water, he had begun an automatic series of movements to unbuckle his belts and eject from the plane. There is a picture of him looking so handsome in a hospital bed with a bandage on his head, and my mom sorrowfully leaning into him. I just know she was begging him not to be a pilot, to change, to go to sea instead. Which he did, perhaps begrudgingly, but soon he came to love the ocean with a passion.

  In Garden Grove, we were close to Knott’s Berry Farm and close to brightly colored Disneyland, and closer still to the gray steel ships in the Long Beach harbor, where my father drove to work.

  When he was called to duty, we had the departure ritual. After breakfast, Mom cleaned the kitchen and supervised our getting dressed. Then as Dad sat impatiently in the car drumming on the wheel, Mom finished picking up and locking all the windows. We spent the morning crowded in the station wagon, all five kids, elbows purposefully poking into whomever we were sitting next to. The hard elbows were a way of defining space: “DON’T you DARE touch me! This is MY imaginary line!” “Stop it!” would be fiercely whispered because God forbid Mom or Dad should get involved. Even in the way back, bandaged knees and elbows remained rigid as the last two kids divided up the rear spaces, each of us searching for something to call our own.

  Driving the few miles to port, smoothing wrinkles in my green and gold plaid skirt and white blouse with the lace collar, I watched my mom as her eyes darted with the moving landscape. Was she happy? She was playing the role of Military Wife beautifully. Here we all were, dressed so spiffily, and she had her hair perfectly waved and a green cotton checked dress on, and she was preparing for him to be at sea for three months? Or maybe even six months? She would be on her own, probably not so lonely—because five kids is a lot of distraction from loneliness—but then still . . . lonely.

  Lonely for love and for a man and for the jazz music that they played together. Lonely for naps. Once I walked into their room during a nap. Mistake. Blurry shapes and noise . . . Dad barked at me to “shut the Goddamned door.” Gulp.

  Lonely for naps, she would be.

  When we arrived at the dock I felt so special as we were waved in by official navy personnel. Dad parked the car and we all spilled out, pulling up socks and tucking in shirts so that we would be presentable as the five children of Lieutenant Commander Thad Harden. The dock smelled of pine and hemp and tires and tar. We gathered on the pier, black water ominous through the cracks of the wood, and stared up at the immensity of the ship, imagining it protecting him during a bombing, or, God forbid, maybe not protecting him at all, maybe sinking with the sharks! And we waved and waved good-bye to our brave heroes on top of the ship, waved till our arms hurt, hundreds of arms waving on the dock, hundreds of other wives and children waving farewell, farewell to their husbands and brothers and fathers. A sea of hands waving on one side, and on the other side, sailors and officers lined up on the deck of the ship with white hats disappearing into the white clouds and white gloved hands folded behind their backs, legs apart and eyes straight ahead, men going off to sea. Men going off to war. Music played. A horn blasted three times and we all jumped. The ship began to inch away. The men didn’t flinch. The ladies cried. The kids wiggled. Some were relieved because military dads were notoriously strict, but they hid it, the relief, and tried to look sad. The band played a lively tune, sunlight glinting off of tubas and shiny jet wings, and sometimes we watched until the ship was a tiny speck on the horizon. Then we climbed back into the car, Leslie in the front passenger seat because she was the oldest, and we drove away with more space, and relaxed elbows, studying my mom’s face in the mirror as she carefully eased her car onto the highway, watching to see if she was crying or not.

  We returned home, remembering how the night before we had all gone to Taco Bell as a special occasion because it was Dad’s last night and he was leaving for the sea and we wou
ldn’t see him for maybe five months or maybe forever, so we had splurged on beef tacos “TO GO.” Dad played Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass band in the living room when we got home. The album was Whipped Cream & Other Delights, and on the front was a beautiful Spanish lady sitting in a white gown made entirely of whipped cream. Even the white flower on her head was whipped cream, and I could tell it was sexy, that the picture on the album was sexy. She was brown-skinned and naked under the creamy gown, her brown breasts scented with whipped cream—unlike the jasmine scented white virgin breasts of the maypole dancers. Her flower you could lick off of her dark brown hair. This mamacita was unlike any woman I had ever seen! And then I imagined my own mamacita naked, covered in whipped cream, smiling at the camera. It was such a racy thought, it made me giggle. I remembered “shut the Goddamn door,” and naps.

  Dad was proud of the picture on the album, I could tell, and he was proud of the speakers and stereo they had bought. The speakers were a big piece of furniture, and flanked the long stereo cabinet, and when the music was loud it was fun to dance in front of them, my eardrums pounding with the Mexican beat. I danced pretending I was the whipped cream lady, swirling my hips and flinging my hair, stamping out a kind of salsa. Then Mom played another album. We stared at the spinning black record . . . and in anticipation said, “Wait for it . . . wait for it” . . . the needle scratching around for a few seconds . . . “Wait for it!” . . . YES! She put on our favorite song. It was “Tequila”! She turned it up really, really loud: it was the Wes Montgomery version, and we all danced in the living room. Waving our brightly colored napkins like the ribbons of a maypole, we sang “Da da da da da da da dummm, da da da da da da DAHHHH,” and shouted “TEQUILA!” at the top of our lungs. We danced behind the speakers, and popped out on “Tequila!” It became an impromptu game of hide-and-seek: we hid behind the couch, popping out on “Tequila!,” we hid and looked for each other down the hallway and in the bedrooms, music blaring through the small house, shouting “come out, come out, wherever you are,” and we screamed with delight when one of us popped out of the coat closet, perfectly timed to “Tequila!” Still in the living room, Mom and Dad danced in little salsa whipped cream steps, then stood in the kitchen and drank Dos Equis beer because it was from Mexico, and we kids drank milk because, well, we were kids, and we danced around them both, swinging our napkins and shouting “TEQUILA!,” shaking our bums, and dancing wildly, wrapping our napkins around them like a Mexican maypole.