Dirty Secret (5 page)

It's hard for me to imagine this, because my mother and father are both so shy. But over the next few weeks, they walked along Haight Street and through Golden Gate Park, they went to concerts and a few antiwar demonstrations, they talked and laughed.

Helen was signed up to take a teacher training course in New Haven, Connecticut, so she could begin teaching elementary school in the fall. They kept in touch with occasional letters. One evening, about nine months after Rick and Helen had met, Rick and his friend Tom decided, while drunk, that they wanted to go to Europe. So they packed their bags and left that very night for the East Coast—figuring that would be a better departure point than California. They stopped in Providence, Rhode Island, Tom's hometown. There, they decided they needed to save some money for their trip and found jobs casting jewelry in a workshop. And given Providence's proximity to New Haven, Rick called Helen.

Helen was happy to hear from him, though a bit wary. She liked Rick but didn't want to get too attached: Her biggest fear was (and still is) being abandoned and she couldn't imagine things ending any other way. Still, he was just a few towns away. She invited Rick over to the house she shared with Yale students and workers; when he arrived they went into her tiny room and closed the door. They smoked cigarettes and a little pot. Helen was funny and witty, in the ways she still can be, and she was shy and awkward, too, which eased Rick's own nerves.

Not that first night, but soon after, Helen tells Rick about her earliest memory: She's a baby, definitely under a year old, and she and her parents are living in Connecticut temporarily, while her father is in the merchant marines. They live in a house that's built partly on a small hill. The back of the house is raised, as if on stilts, though the front is level with the ground. Helen
is crying. Her mother, Esther, has no idea what to do with her. She wraps Helen in a blanket, carries her out to the back deck, and sets her down close to the edge, where the railing should have been. The deck is ten feet above the ground. Esther goes inside the house, closing the door behind her. Helen is out there alone. She cries, pumping her tiny fists in anger, rocking from side to side; when she turns far enough in one direction she sees, through the spaces between the wooden slats of the deck, the dirt and patchy grass below. Beetles live down there. She doesn't want to fall down where they are. Helen needs to keep herself from falling. Though she has no words, she cries out for her mother again and again, trying to hold still so she won't fall. She waits. Finally her mother comes back, lifts Helen up, and brings her inside.

But it was too late. Helen had been abandoned. She couldn't forget the feeling, still can't.

Rick understood being left behind. His father jumped off a bridge into the Mississippi River when Rick was nine years old, and he instantly became responsible for his younger sister and schizophrenic mother. That's part of the reason he was already so responsible, able to go anywhere and find work, even though he was just twenty-two and a heavy drinker.

Over the next few weeks Rick made the decision to stay in New Haven; he found an apartment and a job painting houses. Within a month, he and Helen were engaged.

But soon Rick began to wonder if he was too young to get married. He was so inexperienced—Helen was his first real girlfriend. Then one night, in New York City, while visiting some college friends of Helen's, the couple has an argument.

They're in the kitchen of an apartment they don't know. It's after a party and there are bottles everywhere, full ashtrays, dirty glasses, and wooden bowls with remnants of crackers. The
hosts of the party are asleep; the other guests are gone. Rick mentions the future and says, “If we get married—”

Helen's on her feet in seconds.
“If?”

“I mean
when.
”

But it's too late. Helen's grabbed a knife from the counter. She runs at Rick. He tries to block her—at five feet ten he's almost a foot taller than she is, and he thinks he can hold her back, but she's strong, stronger than usual because she's furious. Rick has just done the one thing Helen can't tolerate: He's tried to abandon her. She pushes forward at him, her teeth bared, yelling, “You asshole, you fucking asshole—”

He runs from her, around and around the kitchen table. Helen's right behind him. He makes a break for it, sprinting through the apartment. Just as he reaches the front door and turns the knob, she stops. She's gasping for air, her hand on her stomach. She's just a few yards away and with each breath her face becomes less red, less pinched. Could it all have been a joke? Is there an explanation? Rick searches her face for clues, hoping. Helen's still holding the knife. She looks at it in her hand, slowly straightens up, and walks into the kitchen where she sets it down on the table. She collapses onto one of the chairs, puts her head in her hands, and starts to cry.

But Rick is too freaked out. And he'd already been—at least on a subconscious level, which is why he said
if
in the first place—thinking about calling things off.

So he does.

They return to New Haven the next morning, both defeated. They remain friendly yet cautious as they see each other a few times over the next week. And as the days pass, Rick convinces himself that her behavior was an overreaction but not worth breaking up about. They're edging toward getting back
together, at least he thinks they are, when Helen makes an announcement: She's pregnant.

They're getting married after all.

MY MOTHER'S PARENTS
didn't attend the wedding, though they were invited and lived just a few hours from New Haven. They'd met my dad once before. Myron, my mother's father, said to my dad, “You're Norwegian? Norwegians are all drunks.” As if he were one to talk. And they didn't like that my dad wasn't Jewish, even though they weren't observant themselves.

For the wedding, my mother wore a paisley minidress; my dad wore jeans and a jacket with a Nehru collar. Right around this time my mother was informed that her teaching contract wasn't being renewed. Helen didn't care. She'd hated teaching kindergartners anyway. So Rick and Helen, both up for an adventure, decided to go back to Berkeley, with a quick detour to Minneapolis so my dad could check on his mother.

Between Minneapolis and Berkeley, just outside Livingston, Montana, there was a car accident. My dad was driving. A bee flew into the car, ping-ponging itself against the windshield, trapped by the glass. My dad swatted at it. Right as his hand came down on the glass one of the car's tires blew out.

The car swerved, out of control—they flipped down an embankment, then tumbled over and over and over again. When the car finally stopped moving, Rick and Helen said each other's names, asking,
Are you okay?
They both answered yes. My dad's hand had been on the outside of the car, cradling the window shell; the tip of his middle finger was crushed, permanently forming the nail into the shape of a bird's beak. But when he looked down at my mother, lying still across the car's front
seat, he knew something was seriously wrong. The base of her spine was bent backward—what should have been concave was convex.

“Helen,” my dad said, “are you sure you're okay?”

“I think so. I don't feel any pain.”

And then they heard the sirens.

Other drivers had seen the accident and called for help. Rick and Helen were pulled from the car and the bystanders were shocked that the people inside had lived.

At the hospital in Livingston, my parents were informed that my mother's back was broken. The doctor wanted to perform surgery to fuse her spine, but there was a problem: me. They couldn't do the surgery while she was pregnant, nor could they put on the body cast that would be necessary for six months after the surgery. So they put her in a brace and said she'd have to be as still as possible until I was born. Then she could have surgery.

Helen was in the hospital for a month in Livingston, then my parents carefully drove the rest of the way to Berkeley.

Within a week of my birth, my mother had the surgery to fuse her spine and then the full body cast applied. My parents went on welfare so my dad could take care of my mother and me.

Because of the body cast, my mother didn't hold me until I was six months old. Even though I know that's true—both my mother and father have confirmed it—I still have a hard time believing it. It's too easy, too heavy-handed, too forced a metaphor for my mother's inability to provide maternal warmth or comfort: not when I was a baby, not as I grew up, and not now. My mother has told me that when I was a baby—this must have been after she was out of the body cast—and I was in my crib crying, she'd stand there, unable to decide what to do, and simply let me cry. She makes no connection between those
times and her earliest memory, when she was left on the back deck. She's said that when my brother was born, a year and a half after me, she considered him her chance to make up for the things she'd done wrong with me. Though when I ask what she did differently, she can't think of anything.

WHEN I WAS
about a year old, my parents brought me to a protest at People's Park in Berkeley. The University of California was planning to turn People's Park, which had become a hippie campsite of sorts, into a parking lot. The protest turned violent. My dad dropped my mom and me off at a church basement where a makeshift nursing station had been set up; we waited there while he drove through the protest picking up people who'd been hurt and delivering them to the nursing station. While we waited for him, tear gas, thrown by the police, wafted in. I scratched at my eyes, howling and crying. A few years before, my dad's history class at the community college in Oakland had been hijacked by the Black Panthers, who taught their version of the class for the hour and then let everyone free. But now, my parents concluded, Berkeley had turned too violent and unpredictable. So they loaded up the station wagon and we headed to my dad's hometown.

In Minneapolis, my dad opened a used record store, called The Wax Museum, with his own record collection. At first we moved from apartment to apartment, rarely staying in one place for long. After my dad's store started doing well and he opened more—eventually he'd have eight—he did what he thought was expected of him: bought a Cadillac and moved us out to the suburbs.

I didn't know what “the suburbs” meant, but even at five years old I knew that we didn't belong there, surrounded by rolling
lawns and aquamarine swimming pools. We were impostors, trying to hide our fraudulence behind the nice house and the nice car. My mother's hoarding zenith was more than two decades in the future, but she was already showing signs of excessive accumulation and lackadaisical cleaning standards. My brother and I wore secondhand clothes that were often stained or torn. Sometimes I'd look at myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth at night and see a big smear of dirt across my cheek; I'd wonder how long it had been there. Maybe I'd even gone to school like that. I'd try to remember if people had looked at me weirdly and conclude that they had. And when I thought of the way my mother yelled at us out on the sidewalk with everyone watching from behind their perfect parted drapes, I sank even further into myself. I became shy, quiet.

My parents, on the other hand, were getting louder. Inside that oversized house they screamed, swore, and threw plates and glasses at each other while my brother and I huddled together at the top of the stairs. We cried because we didn't know how to get them to stop. Once we cried because it was Christmas Eve and we were afraid their fighting meant the next day there would be no presents—we weren't foolish enough to believe in Santa Claus. My mother had told us long ago that he didn't exist, happy to smash that illusion before it could take hold. Ditto the Easter Bunny. Ditto that ludicrous tooth fairy.

The best thing about that house in the suburbs, according to me anyway, was the remarkable laundry chute that led from the second floor to the basement, so you wouldn't have to carry your laundry down the stairs. My brother and I would pour liquids down the chute—water, orange juice, hot chocolate (though not the dregs of coffee we'd find in unwashed mugs on end tables; the coffee was for drinking while pretending to smoke one of the roaches from joints or cigarette butts that
filled the ashtrays). The liquids would land directly on the baskets of clothes waiting to be washed. No one ever noticed.

The other notable feature of that house was the enormous picture window in the living room. Birds were constantly flying into it: We'd hear a plunk, and then go outside to see a hummingbird, a sparrow, a house finch dead on the ground. Eventually my dad put a big X in masking tape across the glass to warn them. It looked terrible, and I'm sure our uptight neighbors despised it, but it was better than the alternative.

My favorite times were when my dad brought me with him to work. I'd walk through the aisles and he'd let me pick out any album I wanted. I'd hover in the Linda Ronstadt, Beach Boys, and Elvis sections, choosing the Elvis imports because they were rare. I coveted an Elvis double album set from Germany and was elated when my dad let me take it home. I adored hanging out in the back room in my dad's office among the filled ashtrays and stained coffee cups, and being in the store the day a contest winner got to run through, piling everything she wanted into a cart; she was so excited and methodical as she plotted her course before the buzzer rang. I used to beg my dad to let me work at The Wax Museum once I turned twelve. That seemed old enough.

“Fourteen,” he'd always say.

When I was seven, my father went away for a month. I only knew it involved drinking. During that month we visited him on the weekends in a smoky place that looked like a motel, with two beds in each room. The four of us would play the card game War, eat potato chips, and drink RC Cola because the vending machines sold only soda with little or no caffeine—they didn't want the residents trying to get high on it.