Her Beautiful Brain Page 7
“I know,” I said.
And well, that’s where we left that subject.
I didn’t press him about the fights and the bruises. Or about why he never explained anything to us. I didn’t acknowledge that yes, Mom could be competitive.
The problem here is that I have never stopped loving my Dad. And I don’t want him to stop loving me. For both of us, this interview was a huge dip into the dangerous honesty pool and I just don’t know if we can swim down to the deep, deep end and I’m just not sure why we would or should, now that I’m fifty-three and he’s seventy-six.
If he’s reading this chapter, I hope he makes it this far. I hope he understands that the reason I will always view my parents’ divorce as the first great cataclysm of my life is because I loved him then and I love him now. The hate that poured through me when I was twelve was for a grown-up world I didn’t understand, a Tennis Club–world where a man could get matched with a mixed doubles partner and fall in love with her while his wife was a stone’s throw away, just downhill from the tennis courts on the lovely beach, eating soft ice cream cones with his four children and two stepchildren. The hate I felt was for a world where children were expected to accept and never question what was going on between the grown-ups. A world where the father who spent one whole summer teaching me to swim could start slipping away, gradually at first—we finally taught ourselves to ride our bikes when we realized he was never going to—and then so fast that he was just gone from my daily life forever.
Or rather his whole world was gone from my daily life. And I would, forever after, only be a visitor there.
But now I had worlds of my own. I had my books and poems and guitar-strumming youth groups. I had clouds and sunsets and mountains. Divorce wasn’t all bad: It had given me a chance to find these other worlds. It had given Mom a chance to finally go to college and become a teacher, to be something other than “very domestic.” And Dad? He got his second try at love and marriage. He and Maryjane have been married for forty years.
The summer I was fourteen, I hiked with a group of Girl Scouts across the Olympic National Park. We carried our packs fifty miles, through the groves of thousand-year-old trees waving their crazy scarves of neon-green moss, up the hard, sweaty switchbacks, across the windy passes, into the alpine meadows full of flowers and teardrop lakes. I had never seen anything like any of it. I reveled in the old place names: Enchanted Valley, Honeymoon Meadows, Home Sweet Home, Elwha, Quinault, Duckabush, Skokomish. I lay down and stuck my head in the mountain streams and drank all the cold, clear water I wanted, something we humans can’t do anymore without a filter or an iodine pill. But mostly, what stayed with me from that trip was feeling what it felt to be truly, physically strong. I walked fifty miles, carrying all my own gear. I could see the muscles in my teenaged legs. I watched my blisters turn to calluses.
We sang a lot of songs while we were backpacking, including one I still find myself humming sometimes:
I want to be strong, to be strong as the land around me
I want a heart that is wide as the sky.
I want a spirit like a moving mountain stream
I want to look people straight in the eye.
I knew who I was that summer. I knew I would never be the kind of woman who would make drinks jingle and bracelets jangle. Who could compete in a Tennis Club world. And there were times when that did feel tragic. But I knew I was strong and full of heart and spirit: I knew I could look people straight in the eye.
I hiked part of that trail recently with my husband and daughter. The old Girl Scout memories stirred and sifted, but mostly I had to focus on being strong, on carrying that load, on taking the next step. Your backpacking muscles don’t quite spring to life at fifty-two the way they do at fourteen.
But doing it with Rus and Claire—it felt so much less like something that I achieved by myself, the way it did when I was a teen. This time, what mattered was that I was doing it with them.
And you could say that Mom was there, too. Because she helped Rus and me learn how to be parents. Because Claire looks and is so much like her and was so loved by her.
And Dad? Was he there too?
Twenty-three years ago, I came to one of those terrible forks in the road: I knew I had to leave my first husband but I had no money and no plan. Dad invited me to stay at his house. I stayed for two months. We didn’t talk a lot about the details of what was going on, but he drove me to work every day, just as, forty years ago, he had driven me to junior high school every day, even though he no longer lived at our house and it was about ten miles out of his way.
Dad knew what it meant to have a second chance at love and marriage, and he helped me get mine.
Two decades later, Rus and I have sweated up a lot of switchbacks and crossed some rocky passes, but here we are, hiking the Olympics with our daughter. In a few weeks, our son will get time off from his summer job and all four of us will backpack in the North Cascades.
I can’t give them the Tennis Club. But I can give them my real self.
A Hundred Christmases
There was the one who wore white patent leather loafers—in winter. There was the one who turned the faucet on when he went to the bathroom so we wouldn’t hear him peeing.
There was the one who drove a Citroën and smoked pot once with Kristie.
I hated it when they left things in our house that shouldn’t have been there: Cigarette butts. Whiffs of aftershave. Bottles of rye or cognac or other liquors I had never known my mother to drink.
If it had been up to me, my mom would never have engaged in anything so debasing as dating. If it had been up to me, she would have sworn off men forever, or at least for a very long time, after she and Dad divorced.
When Kristie went to college and, at fourteen, I became the oldest kid in the house, I started drinking coffee so that I could keep Mom company when she drank a cup after dinner. We brewed it Finnish-style—very strong—and drank it black.
It was the only time of day when I had her to myself. But the point was not to talk about anything deep. The point was that this was the one moment when she allowed herself to simply sit. To not hurry: to school, from school, to the store, to the stove, to the table, to her desk to grade papers or pay bills. That she seemed to enjoy my sitting with her made me feel like there was a chance I really might be growing up.
We pushed our creaky rattan-bottomed chairs back from the table and crossed our legs and blew into our big mugs. I tried to resist the temptation to tilt the chair back or clack my retainer around my mouth or twirl a strand of hair.
She told me stories about her day in the classroom: refugees from Vietnam were streaming into the junior high school where she taught, including Hmong children who had never read or written in any language, or even held a pencil. When they did begin to speak and write in English, they had tales to tell of swimming the Mekong River, walking for days, waiting in camps for relatives who never made it. Mom had done her teacher training in our neighborhood’s mostly-white high school. She felt like she was swimming upstream along with her new students, trying to intuit the best ways to teach them.
She gossiped a little about the other teachers, the cranky old fossils who didn’t like all these new faces or the young hipsters who tried too hard to be cool, with their caftans and guitars and peace posters: WAR is not good for children and other living things.
She asked me about my classes: How was sophomore English with her old friend Mr. Bass? Was he making Romeo and Juliet come to life? Wasn’t Mercutio so much more fun than sappy old Romeo? Why on earth did Shakespeare kill him off so early in the play?
But as we sipped our coffee, the one thing we did not talk about was our own romantic lives. I still despaired of ever having one. And Mom knew better than to bring up Mr. White Shoes, or Mr. Citroën, or Mr. Faucet.
And so I don’t recall exactly when Ron slipped into the mix.
I wish I’d been paying more attention. I wish I could write, The first time R
on came by to pick Mom up for a date I immediately noticed his a) shoes b) hair c) car. But that was the beauty of Ron: he was never one to set off alarm bells. No patent loafers, no rye whiskey.
Quite the opposite: He was a doctor, a widower with three children who belonged to the Tennis Club, though he didn’t play tennis. He smoked Newport menthols and had a quiet, dry sense of humor, especially about his lack of interest in athletics. He was slim, dark-haired, thinning on top but not so much that he wasn’t still classifiable as handsome. He dressed with just the right ever-so-subtle bit of flair: a blazer when other men might wear a windbreaker, Levis jeans on the weekends instead of khakis. His name was the name of a river in the Amazon—Tocantins. TOE-kun-teens. It was one of the few names I’d come across that people mangled far more severely and frequently than Hedreen. All I knew about his family was that they came originally from Portugal, spent a generation or two in Brazil and then immigrated to the United States.
Ron married a girl from an old Philadelphia family and took her to Seattle, where he was offered a practice at a major hospital. Their children were sixteen, fourteen, and ten when his wife died of cancer.
He and Mom met at the Tennis Club bar, but he was soon taking her out to plays and the ballet and fancy benefits, the kind of social events she had never previously been anywhere near. The two of them were not head-over-heels, not at first. Ron even occasionally dated someone else, a woman he worked with whom we daughters privately referred to as The Nurse.
And then I went off to college and missed what were the best three years of their romance, when they settled into a tranquil sort of courtship that occasionally included their younger children. Lisa remembers Ron stopping by our house after he went to the supermarket on Saturday, always in his Levis and fisherman-knit sweater. James recalls playing endless games of after-dinner ping-pong with Ron’s youngest son, Charles. Caroline remembers how Mom loved to stroll with Ron through his elegant old neighborhood down to the beachfront business district of Madison Park.
I do not recall my dad ever strolling with Mom.
Kristie, who was home more often than I was because she went to the University of Washington, says that with Mom and Ron, there was none of the competitive sparring that was constant in her relationship with Dad. Maybe it was because they were not raising children or running a household together.
Mom and Ron seemed able to see and hear each other in a way that Mom and Dad had forgotten, or perhaps had never learned, how to do.
Our household was very different than the Tocantins’ in those years, especially at meals. At our table, everyone wanted to talk during dinner. It was hard to wait your turn. At Ron’s, with his daughter Meg off at college, it was an all-male dining club: Ron; his teenaged sons Charles and Bill; and Futuro, a Japanese student who was Ron’s live-in housekeeper. Whole meals went by without a word spoken.
Charles remembers how Mom liked to tell the story of her first dinner with them: “I had just lifted my second bite to my mouth,” she would say, “and I looked around and saw that everyone else was finished!”
It’s a funny memory, but painful. Ron shared so little with his children that Charles can’t recall ever having a conversation with his dad about our mom. And yet Ron would want to stop by our house after grocery shopping, and sometimes, Charles remembered, he would sit so long chatting with Mom that the ice cream he’d just bought would melt by the time he got home.
It was an excellent time for Mom to have an easy-going relationship. In 1975, when she was in her fifth year of teaching, the strain of Seattle’s early-seventies Boeing bust—more than sixty thousand people laid off, with ripple effects through hundreds of supporting businesses—finally reached the Seattle schools: voters turned down the annual school tax levy. Every teacher with less than nine years seniority was laid off. Mom’s small but stable teacher’s salary was replaced by occasional substitute teaching and a promise of commissions—someday—from a motivational trainer. Later, she tried selling life insurance and real estate.
If she turned on the light at night and stared at the eraser smudges and carry-overs and rejuggled columns in her oversized, old-fashioned ledger, if she wondered how long she could keep this up, her daytime face was all about the power of positive thinking, or, as that motivational trainer liked to say, visualizing success. Her letters to me were full of lines like: Real estate can’t go any lower—it’s bound to start rebounding! Everyone needs life insurance. Subbing is great—no papers to grade!
I had a scholarship, so her money stress didn’t directly affect my college life. But I hated that she had to go through this. It seemed so outrageously unfair at a time when I was still trying to make sense of the unfairness, as my young self saw it, of divorce. Of one person simply falling out of love with another person after twelve years.
Mom had earned a B.A. and teaching certificate in seven straight quarters at the University of Washington. She got her master’s degree in gifted education while she taught full time, with five children still at home. She had been a teacher for five years. How did getting laid off make any sense? Of course I understood that she wasn’t alone. That there were thousands of other families like ours reeling from the Boeing layoffs and the school levy failure. But I was eighteen, so I took it very personally.
I took it personally because in order for the universe to make sense to me, I needed Mom to triumph. I needed her to show all those snobby, cookie-cutter, non-divorced moms—and my dad and new stepmom—that nothing was going to stop her from thriving. I wanted her to soar in a way that said, I can be who I am and have a meaningful life; I don’t need to be validated by all of you conforming social climbers. It was a personal and emotional yearning and it was also political. And it related so politically and personally to what I wanted from my own life: success on my own terms. Genuine love: not the sad, bitter version I’d already seen too much of.
Ron fit into my What Mom Deserves scenario. Getting laid off did not. Answering phones for a motivational speaker who kept promising her “more” did not. Borrowing from her ex-husband’s parents did not.
Just as, twenty years later, Alzheimer’s disease would not.
Mom’s financial woes did make me all the more grateful for that scholarship and for the fact that my relationship with her was not about money.
And now I had a grant to go to England my junior year: an unbelievable gift! Many of my Wellesley classmates were amused that I had never had a passport before, that I had never been abroad. In fact, my entire family was passport-free: neither Mom nor Dad nor any of us children had ever been further than Canada. I would be the first one of us to cross an ocean.
It was the fall of 1976. The day I arrived at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, the taxi driver dropped me on the main campus plaza, where a motley but amiable mob of black-booted students were protesting the cancellation of a Sex Pistols concert. I was elated: I could see that this year would be as unlike Wellesley as it could possibly be.
Meanwhile, Mom soldiered on with her hodgepodge of jobs. She fretted in her letters about debts and bills, but always ended optimistically: “By next spring I’ll have my financial situation on a more reliable basis and, even if I have to borrow the money, I will come to see you, so be prepared!”
And then Ron offered her a Cinderella break from it all. He was going to a medical conference in Madrid. How would she like to come with him? Couldn’t Kristie stay with the younger kids?
Now she too would get a passport. Cross the ocean. Leave everyday life behind.
“The trip to Spain was like a hundred Christmases all in one, like living in the middle of a fairy tale,” she wrote to me afterwards. “I can’t believe that life can be the same after all that, and I don’t want it to be.” She went on to lovingly describe the “Gothic Quarter” of Barcelona, the many “star-struck” hours she spent in the Prado while Ron was at his conference, a day-trip to Toledo that was like “stepping into the Middle Ages.”
A hundred Chris
tmases. I had been feeling that way all fall in England: the intense joy of being in a place you’ve imagined and read about and when you finally get there, you immediately grasp the greatest gift of all—it’s not just that you’re in this place, but this place is now in you, in a hundred Christmas moments of delight and discovery, all of them yours to carry in your memory, forever, to unwrap and marvel at and exclaim over again and again. And now my mom was experiencing this too, and knowing that she was—that she understood some of what I was feeling—well, that just added another Christmas or two to my own stack.
The new year brought more good luck. Mom was offered a contract job for the rest of the school year at her old school, setting up a gifted program that might or might not get continuing funding. At last, a job that would actually make use of her master’s degree, an opportunity to put into practice her belief that, as she wrote in a college paper, gifted children, “as adults, armed with a healthy self-image and with their talents more fully developed, can contribute much more to a society of people with many differences.” Now, her paper reads a little uncomfortably, a little like a vision of a utopia for smart people. But then, what captivated her was the notion of everyone being able to live up to their potential, perhaps because she felt her own had been stymied after she dropped out of college and started having babies.
Meanwhile, she and Ron were spending more and more time together. And I was spending a lot of time with a fellow exchange student, a sweet, funny surfer from North Carolina named Dick who loved England and English literature as much as I did.
But by May, Mom’s letters had begun to take on a boxing-match rhythm:
Round Two: no funding next school year for the gifted program.
Round Three: a good sales-training job offer from the phone company!
Round Four: an odd, brief “breakup” with Ron that might have had something to do with The Nurse.
Round Five: seeing more of Ron than ever.