Her Beautiful Brain Read online

  Later finally came along last week.

  It’s research, I told myself. I’m trying to write about Mom and Dad and their marriage and divorce because it’s part of Mom’s story, the story of her life, the story of the pile-up of stress that may or may not have been part of the deadly mix that triggered her Alzheimer’s disease. I need to remember what it was like, those summers of being twelve and thirteen, when she was racing through college and I was babysitting and we were all getting used to a new kind of summer, a season that now featured much less of the Tennis Club and many more daisies in sidewalks.

  But the act of remembering is hard to direct. And sometimes props—dusty steno notebooks for example—just get in the way.

  What I truly, viscerally remember from that time is my face feeling perpetually hot. Especially if I try to recall any scene starring my dad. Before the details swim into focus, what I first remember is that warm pooling of blood somewhere behind my eyes, in my brain, in my ears, and how I hated the divorce for making me hate, like Maria at the end of West Side Story when she turns to the Sharks and the Jets, Tony’s body lying between them, and shouts, “You have taught me to hate! You and you and you!”

  This is what I remember. But there is nothing of this in the penciled poems that fill the spiral notebooks that I have saved for four decades. Nothing.

  “We scooped the clouds with silver spoons,” begins one poem.

  “If I have no food, I will eat sunshine,” begins another.

  “A poem is a daydream on paper.”

  They’re all like that, until they start getting religious.

  “A Christian is an eternal fire.”

  “Thank you God/for letting me in/even though/I’ll probably/get mud/on/your carpet.”

  I didn’t write one word about Mom or Dad or the divorce. It’s all clouds and sunsets and ladybugs and God. There are a few furtive poems about feeling lonely. And sometimes I wrote anti-war poems—“Waiting for that deadly cry,/waiting for the word/That tears him from his home … ” But I wrote nothing, nothing at all, about the hate and sorrow that had ripped through my heart and head, that I tried to drown out by praying and writing poems about nature and focusing as hard as ever I could on goodness and light.

  And what I remember is that it didn’t work very well. Viscerally speaking.

  It was 1969 and there was darkness not just in my heart but everywhere I looked: riots, war, hypocrisy. It was 1969 and I was twelve and everyone in the world was angry and my father was gone, living in a cramped apartment and spending his time with some other children and their mother. My big brother and sister had changed too: they weren’t home much but when they were, they closed their doors and stayed in their rooms or they took over the living room stereo and played their music louder than ever. Meanwhile, my mother had left me to babysit while she tried to paper over her own broken heart with pages and pages of literature: Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens. And I didn’t know how to write about all this darkness so I comforted myself by writing poems full of light.

  The only people willing to acknowledge that the shape of the world was shifting and we all might need some help finding firm ground were the new youth group leaders at the church up the street, a church my parents had required my brothers and sisters and me to attend so that we would be “exposed” to religion, as if it were chicken pox and they wanted us to contract a mild childhood case in exchange for lifetime immunity. But I began going beyond exposure. I began paying attention. I wanted to hear them explain what life was supposed to mean. I needed to know, because it was clear to me that my parents did not know. I was so thirsty for what they had to say.

  Even now, though I’m back in church in a grateful, muddled, middle-aged way, even now I wince when I remember my fervent adolescent faith: when I pick up the dog-eared Bible I bought at thirteen and underlined with yellow, pink, and aqua pens; when I find the old poems or leaf through my teenage journal, full of prayers and Lenten resolutions. I wince and I also wonder, because I’ve lost this specific bit of memory: I wonder at what moment, somewhere around age twelve, I began to really truly believe. Another question left unanswered by the scribble-filled steno books.

  But last week, when I sat down to re-read the poems, I began to finally get past wincing and to marvel at what I had done.

  What I thought I was—the apple of my father’s eye—had just been ripped away from me. Where I thought I was—in the middle of a big family that spent its long summer days at a fancy club where everyone was richer than we were but hey, we didn’t mind too much because we had each other—that was gone too. Who I was—a dreamy, nearsighted girl who could swim but couldn’t play tennis, who liked knowing there was a book in her beach bag—that girl was gone.

  Now I was a twelve-year-old who had responsibilities. And nowhere to swim.

  Everything had changed, and there was this dangerous river of darkness running through the world and through me. But there was also a shore of sudden freedom. And I found it.

  I found the freedom, suddenly, to decide all kinds of things. I decided to go to youth group and listen to what they had to say. No one made me go and no one stopped me. I decided to get up in the morning and watch the sun rise and write a poem about it. I decided a daisy in the crack of a sidewalk was worth describing. I may have had pointy, awful glasses but I also had my own brand-new form of 20/20 vision. I could see that I didn’t want my dad’s Tennis Club life. I could see that I might want some version of my mom’s—reading famous books and writing papers about them—though I didn’t want her franticness, her always having to squeeze the reading and writing in with feeding us and paying bills and having tense conversations with Dad on the front porch or on the phone.

  What I could see was that writing and reading and praying and paying attention to sunrises and sunsets might somehow save me. As in, save me from disappearing.

  I was deciding who I was. It was exhilarating. It was brave.

  Later, I did the usual, less brave teenage stuff, like discovering how great smoking a little weed can be, now and then, for a girl whose problem is that she thinks too much. But I’m so grateful that I didn’t do that at twelve or thirteen, that instead I wrote my poems and went to youth group and even stuck it out in the Girl Scouts so that I could hike. And I’m grateful that my parents either saw what was going on and chose not to try to curb my cornball tendencies—or, more likely, were so busy getting their own new lives going that they didn’t notice.

  Their new lives: this, really, was the unbearable thought. That my parents, whose love story had created our family, our lives—had moved on.

  We already knew much more about divorce than most families, because Mom was divorced when Dad met her in 1956. Johnny and Kristie had a different last name and a different dad, a sort of extra dad it seemed to me as a little girl, who showed up now and then on Sundays. He, that extra guy, hardly mattered when you opened the album and looked at the pictures of Mom and Dad when they were newly married: so movie-star beautiful, so clearly meant to be together!

  Mom’s version of the story of how she and Dad met was sort of like one of my poems in its cloud-scooping aversion to the realities of her life at the time. She had dropped out of college after a year and worked to help put her first husband through dental school. Johnny was three and Kristie was one when John left her for a woman Mom had believed was her closest friend—a fellow wife of a dental student, young and smart and fun like her. More fun, probably, since she didn’t yet have children. Mom found a tiny apartment, asked her widowed Aunt Helen to come from Montana and help with the kids, and went back to work, this time as a rate clerk for Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance at Third and Pine in the heart of downtown Seattle.

  One of her jobs was to train the new salesmen, most of them boys fresh out of college, just a year or two younger than she was. One of the new boys was Dad.

  “He was one tall cool drink of water. Six foot three! And such a smooth talker. I just couldn’t get him to le
ave me alone,” she would say.

  I used to love trying to picture this: my lanky, blond Dad in a starchy shirt and skinny fifties tie, leaning over the desk of my beautiful Mom, her dark hair swept back in a French roll like Audrey Hepburn, her sweater smooth and lipstick perfect as she punched her adding machine and rolled sheets of carbon through her typewriter and told Mike Hedreen to get back to work.

  But I could never quite get Dad to reminisce like that, even when we were sitting in that very same building at Third and Pine. A few years ago, my uncle’s real estate development company moved into the old Northwestern Mutual space and transformed it into a swanky, minimalist suite with concrete walls. Dad, who is semi-retired but still has a few insurance clients, keeps an office there. I viewed the move to Third and Pine as a sign that it was time to do something I had wanted to do for years: ask Dad to talk to me on tape.

  He agreed. We set a date.

  The morning I arrived, nearly everyone in the office was out at a meeting. We found an empty conference room that looked more like a men’s club lounge—black leather furniture, sports magazines, a big screen TV—and settled in. I turned on the tape recorder and asked Dad to tell me the story of him and Mom.

  My dad is not one of those terse, reticent dads. He has a big, mellifluous voice and he loves to talk. So this was not torture for him, even though the situation—talking to his grown-up daughter about his ex-wife, now dead of Alzheimer’s disease—was a little challenging. But he began.

  He remembered that one day he was waiting for the bus to go to work and “quite by chance,” Mom saw him and gave him a ride. And then one night they went on a double date—he and another girl and a friend of his and Mom—and they “changed partners” by the end of the evening.

  “And our romance progressed and progressed and then we decided to get married,” he said, by way of wrapping up.

  Maybe it’s just too hard, too much to ask, to go back and conjure up the magic of a marriage that ended badly forty years ago.

  I asked him what Mom was like at twenty-five, when he met her. He talked about her “natural intellectual inclinations,” and how much he learned from her about classical music and how even today certain pieces remind him of Mom, but then we got bogged down trying to remember the composer of the “Preludes” he was thinking of, someone Slavic but “not Dvorak”: Rachmaninoff? Chopin? He talked about how she was “very domestic” and “assumed the burden of running the house,” though he knew that not having finished her education was something that always frustrated her.

  This was all—fine. But I wanted to hear how beautiful she was. How smitten he was. How in love they were. I wanted him to say those things without me prompting him, but he didn’t.

  I brought up as delicately as I could the fact that their wedding day was a little under seven months before I was born.

  “We certainly were very involved with one another so you certainly could say that it could have happened but it could have gone the other way too. So I can’t say. I think you want me to say, well it would have happened. But I just don’t know,” he said.

  I can hear that now and appreciate the honesty of what he said. If I’d heard it at twelve or even twenty-five, I might have been horrified. But at fifty-three, I can look back and see all kinds of forks in the road of my own life that I could have taken, almost took, barely missed—so I do understand what Dad was trying, really honestly, to say. What if, for example, he had been accepted into the Naval Officer’s Candidate program that rejected him probably, oh, not long at all before I was conceived? Would I exist? Or would I have been born on a naval base? Who knows?

  Later in the interview, we talked about Mom’s parents.

  “The Grundstroms were somewhat of a culture shock to me,” Dad said, carefully.

  After Mom and Aunt Jo Ann finished high school, Grandma and Grandpa had moved from Butte, Montana to Buckley, Washington, a small farming town southeast of Seattle. It was Grandma’s dream fulfilled: to get Grandpa out of the unhealthy mines, to be near her sisters, to live somewhere green. They both worked the swing shift at the state school for the mentally disabled; it was hard work but stable. They bought a few acres in the shadow of Mt. Rainier, which you couldn’t see from where they were because of a thicket of trees along the fence line. Their house was a converted chicken coop and it never felt tall enough for Dad, whose loud voice and six-packs of cold beer made him popular with Grandpa and unpopular with Grandma.

  I asked Dad about his first trip back to Butte when he and Mom were newly married, a road trip he took with Mom and his new in-laws. I thought he might wax on about the Rocky Mountains or have some funny memories of meeting old Finnish relatives.

  But what he remembered was how few rules there were. Washingon at the time had all kinds of puritanical liquor licensing laws. Montana did not.

  Dad recalled being in a bar with Mom and Grandma and Grandpa when “some nice music” came on the jukebox.

  “Arlene and I enjoyed dancing,” he said. So he asked the bartender if dancing was allowed. “He treated my question like it was absurd. So we danced and I was in hog heaven, having a good time and loving it.”

  Arlene and I enjoyed dancing.

  “Some nice music” came on the jukebox.

  I was in hog heaven.

  It’s not much, but it’s something.

  I can paint it. There’s a shaft of light slanting in, Edward Hopper style, onto a battered wood floor and a high-backed mahogany bar with bottles on mirrored shelves and a shiny copper counter. There are just a few tables. My grandparents are at one: Grandma in a slippery flower print dress with buttons down the front, a little velveteen hat on her head; Grandpa in his brown suit and tie, his fedora on the table.

  And Mom and Dad, dancing in the shaft of light. She’s wearing a full, black skirt with a print that looks like cocktail olives, the one we called her gypsy skirt, and that black bateau top that showed off her sexy collarbone. Dad’s in khakis and a button down shirt and a tie, because they’ve just been to dinner. They’re dancing to Perry Como or Frank Sinatra or maybe Elvis. They’re glowing with love and youth and the kind of big-city glamour that was long gone from Butte by the late 1950s, when the copper veins were all tapped out and the grim business of open pit mining had just begun to gouge the town. Everything about them says, We are the future. This old burg, that old couple sitting there, looking all worn out by the Depression? They’re the past. We’re young and we’ve got it all ahead of us: peacetime, prosperity, plenty of everything we want. And for now? Love’s enough.

  Our romance progressed and progressed and then we got married and it was all going to work out.

  But it didn’t. And I tried to ask Dad about that too.

  “That’s a very hard thing to discuss, particularly with you,” he said. “I would say that there was—now these sound like clichés—but kind of a growing apart, an indifference to some extent, a lack of interest a little bit, and then of course in my case in particular, there was this horrendous impact of meeting Maryjane, which I freely concede was a direct factor. However, it’s always been my theory that if that hadn’t occurred, I’m sure that things were not proceeding well. There were no dramatic fights or incidents or things of that nature but another one of my theories is that I met attractive people every day and still do today, but a good marriage has to have enough strength and attraction and so forth to withstand these things. That you can’t live in kind of a sterile cocoon as it were.”

  Growing apart? No dramatic fights? Sterile cocoon?

  The bedroom I shared with Lisa was right above my parents’. Many, many nights we lay in bed and listened to them fight. Physically fight. First we would hear talking, then yelling, then screaming, then something physical happening, then Mom sobbing and Dad slamming the door on the way out. The next day we would see bruises on her arms or legs, never her face. If she was going to play tennis and had to wear a tennis dress, she would put makeup over the bruises. Maybe those fights came af
ter the “horrendous impact of meeting Maryjane.”

  The best I could muster, sitting on the black leather couch in Uncle Dick’s conference room, was, “But Dad. Our room was right above yours. Your fights scared the pants off me.”

  He called it “arguing” and said it was “not the result of Maryjane, it was a symptom of a poor marriage.” And then he talked about how they argued, for example, when they played bridge, because “You could make quite an argument: ‘What do you mean, one diamond? That’s a stupid bid!’ So yes, there were stormy times like that and I well remember them but probably one of my psychological tricks is to try and shove them [away]—but yes, we did and I can see. One of my theories is I think it’s a bad environment for children. I mean there’s the one idea of holding the marriage together. But I read a great deal that this can create a lot of uncertainty in small children … ”

  And then he trailed off into a kind of magazine-style rumination full of hypothetical divorce scenarios and custody arrangements, giving me time to work up some kind of response.

  “Well,” I said, “I think my misfortune was to be just old enough to listen and understand, but not old enough to really know how to process it or talk about it or any of that stuff. I sometimes look back and think that’s one of the reasons I got involved in religion. But also it made me very judgmental. I’ve laughed about it with Maryjane but as a teenager, I looked at the situation and thought, Dad’s bad and adulterous and Mom’s good and the victim and that’s how I saw it.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I went on. “I look back and it’s too bad and I sometimes wish that you and I had been able to talk about it then. I couldn’t bring it up. I was too young and shy.”

  “Well, I would have felt very awkward trying to verbalize it too,” Dad said.