Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (5 page)

“What was your favorite game?” I asked, since we were walking past the carnies.

“The water balloons! The wall of water balloons that you pop with a dart,” he said, grabbing my hand to show me the exact marquee he was talking about.

“Why those?“ I never would have picked that one.

“I won all the time!” he said. “You throw the dart like this — pfft! — high a
nd limp-wristed through the air! The less macho the better! That’s why I was so good at it.”

D – I – V – O – R – C – E

T
here is more than one way to unpack a breakup. I’ve hosted a score of explanations for my parents’ dissolution, only to grab my kit and run for higher ground.

My mother and father had an old-fashioned divorce — the kind where you have to sue each other and assign blame. The rhetoric of “extreme mental cruelty” appeared in their court documents. There was a court-appointed psychiatrist. Though they separated in 1960, it was still the morality of another century when they dissolved their partnership — a scarlet “D” etched on their permanent record. My mother’s complete estrangement from the Catholic Church was concluded when she was informed that her divorce meant she could never receive the sacramental host again.

By the time I hit puberty, the marriage climate had turned upside down. In 1973, I was in a Los Angeles high school, where I was dressed down by an English teacher who informed the entire class that I was “out of line” because I was “from a broken home.” My classmates looked blankly at Miss Baltheir. One of the cheerleaders, who wouldn’t have ordinarily crossed the street on my behalf, spoke up: “But Miss B., everyone’s parents are divorced.” I could see our teacher’s lip quiver — she just didn’t know what to say to this hell-bent mob.

But in 1960, a female saying she was divorced was a little like whispering “I’m a lesbian” into your pillow. You’d obviously failed as a woman, although it was almost compulsory that the woman got full custody of the kids. Men were considered incompetent as caretakers. The disgraced couple was then presumed to be adversaries for the rest of their lives.

In the years since my parents died — and death was the card that had to be turned — more truth has arrived, the kind of surprises I’d never have expected while they both were alive.

After my mom passed away in 2004, I got a letter from the woman who inspired my middle name, Ellen. Ellen Eicke was my mother’s best friend when my dad was in the army, a German neighbor of theirs in Kassel. Bill was in military intelligence (“the greatest oxymoron every made,” he said) during the Korean War, listening to Soviet Czech radio traffic. He hated the army, but he and my mother loved living in Europe. They consumed opera like it was buttered toast. They were befriended by dear Ellen. And she and my mother wrote to each other, at Christmas
and Easter, every year until my mom passed away, even though they never saw each other again after 1956.

Upon her death, I realized how odd it was that my mom had once had a best friend, a bosom buddy, because I never saw her enjoy another woman’s company. She never had anyone over to the house; I never saw her on a date, not platonic, not anything. It was as if there were two of us, plus the specter of my father, and no one else.

My father had many relationships in his life — was widowed twice, divorced twice, and, in the end, happy in his last marriage. He went from someone who had a secret book about “the problems of being shy,” which I once found in his closet — he never thought he’d be able to have a social life, let alone a love life — to becoming a man who loved to meet new people, thrived at parties, couldn’t wait to get to know someone. In a way, the fact that Bill knew so many languages and could make small talk with virtually anyone in the world was a product of his enthusiasm for making new friends.

My mother and father seemed to transform between young adulthood to maturity. My dad went from shut-in to social butterfly, my mother went from the Most Popular Girl on Campus to a wary woman whose very skin seemed to flinch from getting close to anyone.

I look at Elizabeth’s high school and early college scrapbooks and see a beautiful, tall ringleader, laughing her head off with a bunch of other curly-haired girls. Where did they all go?

After her divorce, she stayed close with only one pen pal, Ellen.

I wrote to my namesake after my mom died and explained why her yearly Christmas letter had gone missing for the first time. I cried as I scribbled it all down; I had never before directly communicated with this woman my mother had held so kindly in her memories.

Ellen wrote her condolences and asked if I would like to have the correspondence Bill and Elizabeth sent to her when they left Germany and went to live in India, and then when they returned to the United States.

She added, “Of all the lovers in the world, I never thought Bill and Jo would break up; they seemed like the perfect couple, so well-suited to each other.”

Perfect couple!
I howled.

I can remember my parents together in the same room only once. It was so frightening that even decades later, when I got pregnant, one of my first thoughts was, I can’t have Bill and Elizabeth visit the baby and me at the same time. I once considered that even if I were the marrying kind, I could never walk down the aisle with anyone because my parents couldn’t possibly control their fighting.

Such a picture makes them sound evenly matched. It wasn’t like that. My dad would say something low that I could barely hear. My mom would ex
plode. Then he’d leave, and she would go berserk, swearing that I favored him, in looks as well as personality flaws. One thing I figured out early on — whatever divorced parents tell their children about their arguments, it is surely misleading.

Ellen’s innocent observation that my parents were such lovebirds gave me pause. Even before I received the letters, which she sent wrapped in a satin ribbon, I gleaned that, in some respects, my parents were each other’s fond companion. My dad told me that until he met his last wife, Lise — thirty years after he and Libby divorced — he never thought he’d meet a woman his intellectual match again. They were brainiacs; they were language, poetry, and music fiends; they took enormous pleasure in big ideas and the power of word. They were literary sensualists.

My mother could say things like “Your father is a cruel, oblivious, selfish pig,” giving me examples about how he once made her, his wife, go to the back of the college cafeteria line because it wouldn’t be fair to let her cut in with him. He humiliated her in front of all his male friends who didn’t think a woman should even be at the university. Then a few hours later, she’d sit down at her desk and gaily prepare him a news clipping about a personal dispute she’d read in the the New Delhi edition of
The Times
that had made her laugh. She said Bill would be the only one who would “get it.”

They were both idealistic and cynical at the same time. My mother told my dad she was moving us to Canada after the fourth political assassination in five years, (JFK, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, Dr. King). She said she “couldn’t take this country anymore.”

Bill told me he was devastated to contemplate my departure — but impressed at her guts.” She said he was the smartest person she knew. But then it was back to daggers and swords.

When I was little, my mother, if she could steady herself, would tell a couple stories about why my father was beyond redemption. She said that his mother had done everything for him, that he couldn’t even make himself a sandwich. I had a mental image of my dad staring at a slice of baloney and white bread, uncertain how to stack the slices.

Later, at fourteen, when I moved in with my dad, I did take over most of the cooking; I enjoyed it. Bill explained to me that my mother’s complaint was true, that he had been waited on hand and foot in every domestic respect by his mother, who believed a genius needed to be left alone with his books, undisturbed by housekeeping, farming, or “making things.” He wished very much that hadn’t been the case, that he felt retarded by it.

But by the time Bill married Marcia, his third wife, he was waking up to feminism, if not domestic self-reliance. He was no longer oblivious to the inequality. Even if he couldn’t make meat loaf, he could at least do the dishes. He asked me if I would like that trade: he’d do all the dishes and I’d do the cooking unless we went out. And he loved to eat out! I was ecstatic.

My mom always snorted when she launched into her legends of my dad’s crimes against humanity. That breath of utter disgust. She’d blow out her cigarette smoke, contemplating one of his marriages, before she added she “wasn’t cut out to be a faculty wife.” An epithet she used the way most people would say “pathetic loser.”

Well, she never got her chance to be a faculty wife and hate it, since she was with my dad only when they were penniless grad students and she worked as a secretary. But she had a vivid imagination. It’s true; she would’ve been bored. I remember one of my dad’s mentors, Murray Emeneau, had a wife who truly loved being the domestic arm of their relationship. One time a student said, “Mrs. Emeneau, do you collaborate with her husband?”

“Oh no, dear,” Mary replied, in full drag-queen trill — “I’m only for his leisure hours!”

My mom was the opposite of that. She reported that when they were grad students, people would talk in hushed tones around my father, but they would act like she was a potted plant. The university people assumed Elizabeth’s academic credentials consisted of typing his dissertation. (In fact, they were both the fastest, most competent typists I’ve ever seen. I would be hard-pressed to say which one was better.) She said that in private Bill talked to her about their work as an equal, but among his male peers, it was as if she vanished.

Bill would’ve argued that she refused to be seen; although, as the years went by, he became discouraged with academic sexism himself. I do know my dad never doubted his academic prowess; he was so relaxed about it. He was like one of those big dogs that never has to bark or go nuts.

My mom was on the defensive. She had the opposite of his family protection — she was lucky to be alive, or, as she put it, damned to be alive. She got so mad about the way her academic elders condescended to her that she insisted on returning all the fellowship funds she had received as a backhanded way of returning the insult. “You don’t think I’m worth it. Fine. Take all your money back.” Bill told her she was nuts, that her work was outstanding and the Regents of the University of California were indifferent to her protest. She didn’t care.

I got that from her. It’s the technique of hurting yourself in front of people who are being shits, to see if they even notice. They don’t. Other people who love you do, though.

I see Halloran self-immolation in every Irish martyr. Look at the Republican hunger strikers, with their “monomaniacal willpower,” as journalist Andrew O’Hehir puts it. They resist Goliath to the point of sacrificing their dignity and, finally, their lives. “Their resistance,” Andrew says, “by its very nature, is morally unstable.”

After my mother’s death came a revealing coda. She did a lot of linguistic work on the Patwin language, from a tribe in northern California, parallel to my father’s work in Karuk. Members of the Patwin tribe — some of their librarians and language people — contacted me six months after she died and said, “Your m
om did so much for us, could you tell us more about her?” They wrote me over and over. They were ready to name a plaque after her, and she never even knew.

These kinds of stories led to my teenage explanations to myself about why Elizabeth sued for divorce and then acted as if she’d been the one who’d been abandoned. I’d think, My mom is crazy! or My mom is a proto-feminist! or My mom is a crazy proto-feminist!

But the more I learned about my parents’ childhoods, the greater I understood their estrangement. They had gaps between their childhood views of the world that neither of them could put words to, for years.

One of the causes of my mother’s death was a weak heart due to scars from rheumatic fever. In her seventies, she told me of her doctor’s discovery, and that this would likely be the cause of her death, slowly but surely.

I asked her what that “rheumatic fever” was, and she brushed me off. That made me suspicious. I looked it up in the medical dictionary, which indicated it was a disease of poverty, not seen in modern American lives.

My mother’s doctor asked her if she could remember being sick in her youth, and she said, “Oh yes, when I was thirteen years old, I was sick for a long time. I used to be the fastest girl on the block — I could outrun everyone, even the boys — but after I was sick I couldn’t run anymore.”

She didn’t tell them: “My mom died when I was almost thirteen, and we were home alone without food.” It was then that she became so ill and unable to run anymore.

So yes, I think my mother was affected by poverty, domestic violence, hunger, grave illness, the Catholic Church — the whole Angela Ashes cocktail. She got her second chance at life because of her defiance and extreme intelligence.

My father was from a different class background, modest but well-fed, appearing on the outside to be stable, even though he had his share of family secrets, too. They were the secrets of the well-fed, of the Protestant veil, of small-town, conservative, rural California. He functioned like someone who had been encouraged and reassured from babyhood. He had a youthful sense of entitlement and good health. His folks were behind him no matter what. The Brights owned their own homes, their ranches, their farms. They were frugal and thrifty, and although there was nothing fancy, everyon
e ate meat and had shoes for every occasion. My grandparents were thrilled that my dad got a Pepsi-Cola scholarship to go to Cal at age sixteen.