Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (8 page)

This time his letter to me had a second page, unusual. It said:

Dear Susie,

“My wife Marcia has died after a long battle with breast cancer. I am very sad. I have sold our house in Topanga Canyon and moved to an apartment in Malibu — you will find my address below. I hope I will see you this summer.”

Daddy

I didn’t know Marcia had cancer. Or that she was sick. Or for how long. I hadn’t seen either of them since 1969. How long? I put some water in the teakettle on the stove and steamed open Bill’s letter to my mother.

It said the same thing, except nothing about his emotion. Marcia was dead, and he wanted to see me.

Marcia had a daughter, I thought. Karen — she was a year older than I. What about her? I remembered Karen from when we had a couple of both-kids-a
t-the-same-time custody visits. Marcia saw her little girl, and Bill saw me. We shared a bed in the guest room. I liked her — of course, she was older than I was and knew everything. Daddy said that Marcia had given birth to Karen when she was seventeen, with an older guy, and that the guy had taken the kid because Marcia wanted to go to college and he said she couldn’t do both.

“But wasn’t she upset?” I asked. I was eight. “Doesn't she want her daughter?”

Bill told me that it was better this way for Marcia, and that she loved her daughter anyway, even if they didn’t live together. Then he told me he loved me very, very much.

When my father died, in 2005, he told me Marcia’s story more completely. My childhood intuition was right. Marcia was not “fine” about her daughter’s absence in her life.

Bill explained, “Her parents were Swedes. They didn’t speak to her when she got pregnant. It was never mentioned. The baby was supposed to be put up for adoption, but the birth father, an older fellow, said he’d raise it, with his then-new wife, and Marcia would have to accept her punishment. It was like she had done something wrong, and he was the savior instead of her impregnator.”

When Marcia was diagnosed with cancer, she went to her bed, like Barbry Allen, and looked up at Bill one last time. “Karen …” she said. “Karen. I have failed her completely now.”

I was finally old enough for that to sink in.

I had never thought about my dad losing people. He must’ve been sad — more than that — to lose my mother, or me. Yes, that must be true. And then his second wife, Janie — they had barely been married eighteen months when she was killed by a drunk driver who slid over a highway median strip. What did he do after that? I hadn’t seen him for a long time after Janie died. He married Marcia a year later, and now she was dead, too.

I’d never heard of someone who lost two wives in a row to untimely deaths. Was he going to kill himself? That’s where my mind went. What was my mom going to say when she found out? She wasn’t good with letters like this.

I rubbed my cheek. She would probably have a fit. She would be jealous and say that Bill loved Marcia more. Loved all of them more. She might start hitting. And then cry really hard and want me to comfort her.

I could endure Elizabeth’s blows, but I could not stand to comfort her. I took Bill’s letter and folded it back in the envelope, fastened the seal with a little bit of school-supply paste, and pressed it all back together so it would look like it hadn’t been opened. Then I put it with the bills that sat on the table.

I wrote a note on a yellow foolscap pad Momma kept at her desk:

“I am practicing my PE-class routine with Christine Haffke at her house. I will eat there. There is Italian Hamburger Helper and potatoes in the oven.” I took my letter from my dad with me.

I bundled up for the snow. I would ask Christine if I could stay the night. Then I wouldn't have to see Elizabeth until the next evening, and by then, she’d either have calmed down — or she would have killed herself. I could walk into the apartment and find her body, and it would be calm and I would call the emergency operator and they would be nice to me. I could do that.

Christine’s family were Estonian. Her dad was talented at making ice sculptures. He had carved a Santa and eight tiny reindeer on their front lawn. His wife and he slept in narrow twin beds with pink crocheted coverlets, like Ozzie and Harriet. Christine was an only child, just like me.

“What do you want to practice?” Christine asked when I arrived.

We had a modern dance final coming up. I pulled a Simon and Garfunkel forty-five out of my satchel. “Have you heard this s
ong?” I asked. “It’s really good.”

She looked at the label. “‘The Sound of Silence,’” she read. “That sounds a lot better than ‘Puppy Love’ — that’s what Betty Buggers is doing!”

The most unpopular girl in our school was nicknamed “Buggers” and nothing made me happier than laughing at her snotty nose. In Canada, I was no longer the pariah. I was bleeding, and I was part of the elite.

Christine had me in stitches, crooning, “And they CALL IT (pause, huge breath) PUPPY LUH-UH-UH-UVE. …”

“My tampon is going to come out,” I begged her. “Stop it!”

Christine looked impressed. I could tell she had never used one. “My Oma won’t allow it,” she said. “It will ruin you for marriage.”

“We are never going to get married, Christine,” I said, putting the needle on Simon and Garfunkel. “Married people just die and get sad, and that is never going to happen to us.”

We reached up with our hands in a ballet flourish and then caught each other, leaning back until we could spin, faster and faster, pivoting on our toes, until we fell into a heap on the floor.

The Time Has Come, the Walrus Said

E
lizabeth didn’t say anything for a few weeks after my father’s letter. Then she made an announcement: “I’m going to send you to your father’s this summer; it’s time he did something for a change.”

I was careful not to show any expression. If I was happy, she might take it back. I just said, “Okay.”

So in June, I took a plane by myself to Vancouver to meet my dad. That way I didn’t have to cross the border by myself. I hadn’t seen him in two and a half years.

I didn’t know what to call my father when I saw him … was I too old to say “Daddy”? But nothing else seemed to fit. When he picked up my suitcase, I asked, “When we’re in a big place, and I have to call you across a room, could I call you Bill?”

He held me very tight. We went to Denny’s Coffeeshop for pancakes, which I thought was the height of luxury. Bill said I could order whatever I wanted. There was a customer feedback form on the bill, and they asked what you thought of their eggs. He wrote “execrable,” and that made me laugh so hard tears rolled down my face.

Bill didn’t get mad at me about anything. His eyes crinkled when I apologized, as I did about everything, every five minutes. But I wasn’t feeling sorry most of the time, I was … happy. If you were to ask me what the happiest days of my life were, I would say the day that my daughter was born … and the first week I spent reunited with my dad. We went to the Empress Hotel for high tea. We went to smell the roses in Butchart Gardens. We took a ferry, and then a small boat, to a little island where we picked clams and blueberries and made a huge fire at night. We stayed with Marcia’
s brother, who looked just like my dad, with his long hair and beard. Everyone talked to me like I was the most interesting person, and pretty soon I couldn’t stop talking myself.

At the end of a week, I told Bill about the attorney’s letters my mother had received. I didn’t tell him about what happened in the car. I just wanted to know what he knew. What had happened to my aunt Frannie?

Bill’s face crumpled. “She hanged herself. She lost her kids to your uncle, because of alcohol and pills, and she’d been very sick.” He stopped. “I know your mom tried, a long time ago, to help her — your aunt Frannie was the sweetest kid, the nicest one in your mom’s family. She’d give anyone the shirt off her back.”

He came over to hug me. “I’m so sorry, honey. I don’t know what happened.”

Many years later, when my mom was dying, I finally asked her one little question about Frances. I took a chance because she was high on pain meds.

It came up because my mom was talking about how fast she used to be, how she could outrun everyone when she was a girl.

I asked her, “Mom, you ran, Molly ran, Bud ran, why didn’t Frannie run?”

Ordinarily, Elizabeth would’ve looked daggers at me. No questions allowed. Was I trying to make her cry? But she was hospitable on her morphine.

“Frannie got the worst of it. Dada beat her over and over with an electric cord. She hanged herself in his apartment on Third Street. Her son, your cousin Brian, he found her.”

She looked at me, cross. “Why can’t you get me some butter for my bread?”

That’s morphine for you. We needed these little interruptions.

“Make it snappy!” she called out after me, and laughed, like we used to laugh at Uncle Swithin.

That summer, my dad told me everything he knew about my mom’s family, as well as his own. It was like a blank book suddenly ablaze with story after story. We’d take a long walk, to pick those berries, or to hunt for clams, and the whole family tree would come to life.

At the end of the British Columbia visit, he asked me if I wanted to come to California with him. Of course. I didn’t ask to talk to my mom — I didn’t wish her any bad fortune, but I was scared that if I heard her voice, I’d be put magically back on a plane, that the spool would reel back. I never wanted to return.

My dad was like … heaven. All the groceries I ever wanted, and I could talk about anything with him. He was never scared about the things I was scared of. He said I was an inspiration.

The first year we lived together, Bill started going to group therapy, an exercise I found fascinating. I asked him every night he came home about what each person said.

One night he came home stunned. He said the group’s leader, and all the participants, had encouraged — insisted — that he pick up one of those soft foam “encounter bats” and bop one of the other big men in the group as hard as he could, that he give him a good wallop!

My dad was big as well … six feet two inches. It was surprising even to find another man in this small group who was his size.

But he didn't want to do it. He felt like crying. “I don’t have any quarrel with this man!” he said.

“Of course you don’t!” the others replied. “That’s the whole point!”

“But I’m weak! I’m small,” he protested. Of course everyone laughed and said, “You really need to learn how wrong you are. You need to know it in your body.”

He gave in to their cajoling and whomped his fellow mountain man a good one, which made them all laugh — except for my father, who laughed first but then cried. The discovery that he was not a “weakling” was potent, to be sure. But he felt something swinging that bat, feelings that had nothing to do with anyone in the room.

“In my family, you never get angry,” he said. “You never show anything you feel, especially anger.”

“Well, what did you do with my mom?” I asked. “She lets loose all the time!”

“I know,” he said. “I always thought I’d done something terribly wrong, I’d screwed up, and that if only I fixed it, she would never get angry with me again. But I just kept screwing it up, and so there was no respite.”

“And now you know.”

“Yes, now I do. But I knew even back then that she was depressed, and that was not so different from my mom, that yearning to make her happy, the fear that she would go away.”

“When did your mom ever leave you? Grandma Ethel?” I couldn’t imagine Grandma going more than two blocks down the street.

“She had what they would call a ‘nervous breakdown’ today,” Bill said, “but I was just a toddler, and so no one called it anything to me. I don’t know where she went, she didn’t say goodbye and when she returned, there was nothing said then, either. My aunts folded me into their care while my dad was working, and some months later, Mother came home as if nothing had happened. They told me she couldn’t have any more children.”

In 1990, when I became a mommy myself, my dad explained to me that that year I’d moved in with him, 1972, Elizabeth had asked him to take custody of me permanently, before she made arrangements for me to leave Edmonton. It wasn’t just a “visit” in her mind; it was a custody transfer.