Blue Plate Special (3 page)

At five, she was sent to a “normal” Waldorf boarding school, in Pennsylvania. She didn’t live with her parents again until she was ten, when she moved in with them in New York City and was sent to the Steiner school there. Her father, Hans, a childish, rather stupid man given to tantrums, ignored her. Her clever, literary mother, Ruth (who had told my mother that she’d given birth to her solely as a companion and caretaker for Aillinn), made it clear to Lizzie that she could expect no affection, since her husband and older daughter demanded all the energy she had.

My mother refused to be the pliable, respectful, spiritual daughter her parents expected and wanted her to be. Instead, she rebelled against her upbringing, rejected the teachings of Steiner, got into trouble constantly, and excelled at everything she did. She was sent away once more. She graduated from High Mowing, another Waldorf boarding school, this one in New Hampshire, at the top of her high school class with straight A’s, having been the captain of the basketball team and student body president. That summer, she took her cello to the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy, to take a master class with Pablo Casals. After that, she went to Swarthmore for one year, then studied cello at the Yale music conservatory for another year, and then she went to Juilliard as a cellist, all on full scholarships. Then, with one semester to go before she
would have graduated from Juilliard, my mother decided she wasn’t cut out for the life of a concert cellist, so she quit and bought a train ticket to Berkeley and moved there in June 1960.

She was exotic and beautiful, with olive skin, long dark wavy hair, deep-set brown eyes, broad shoulders, long legs, and a figure both slender and curvaceous. She had been a model in New Haven as a student in the 1950s; her photograph adorned the sides of buses in a milk ad. In Berkeley, when I was little, she was never a hippie, or even particularly bohemian; she was just sexy. She wore cropped peg-leg jeans with wide belts, ribbed cotton turtlenecks, big sunglasses, pendant necklaces, dangly earrings.

Before she met my father, she had heard about him from mutual friends, who raved about their handsome, dynamic, politically aware, funny, interesting friend Ralph Johansen. She knew instantly somehow that he’d be her husband and the father of her children. When they were finally introduced, in the summer of 1961, she was twenty-five and he was thirty-seven; she saw right away that her friends had been right about him. He was not tall, but he was athletic, well-knit, and charismatic. And he was ridiculously handsome: he had black hair and piercing blue eyes, an expressive, intelligent face, and a strong jaw.

They stayed up all night talking under the stars. They became an inseparable couple right away: Liz and Ralph, good-looking as movie stars, cool, smart, and fun. They were great pals, extremely well matched, even though he was twelve years older than she was. They hung out with a pack of interesting friends. They went to parties. They ate in Chinatown at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant where a famous waiter named Edsel Ford Fong screamed at the customers and told them what to order. They went camping in Aspen and Arizona and the Tetons with two other couples, a pair of musicians nicknamed Oboe Bob and Oboe Molly who rode motorcycles, and my mother’s old
Juilliard friends, Peter Schickele, the composer who would later invent P. D. Q. Bach, and his wife, a dancer. They laughed a lot, sang together, bantered in fake accents, and cracked each other up.

But my mother was pregnant with me by the time of their Carson City wedding the following winter, and in her last months of pregnancy, as they settled into a cheap, tiny shack of a bungalow on McGee Avenue in Berkeley together—and then for several months after I was born—she stopped feeling sexual. This was a normal enough occurrence, of course, but it greatly upset my father. He called her frigid and gave her books to read about this so-called unnatural condition, books that had been written, naturally, by men. My mother sensed that something was wrong with my father’s interpretation of things, but had no idea, in those days, what it could be.

My mother wanted to name me Katherine, but my father, who had some unpleasant association with the name from some ex-girlfriend in his distant past, refused to let her. He agreed to compromise on Kate as a middle name. My mother’s mother suggested Laurie for my first name, possibly because she’d always liked the boy in
Little Women
; and my father, who had no associations with the name, agreed to it.

As soon as I was born, my mother became instantly vapor-locked on me. Most mothers tend to be somewhat obsessed with their firstborns, but her fixation on me was a little more intense than usual. Photographs taken shortly after my birth show her staring down at me, clutching me, engrossed, mesmerized, as if she could not believe I existed, as if she were afraid that if she took her eyes off me for a split second, I might disappear.

I was a frustrating baby for her in many ways. I had no interest in breast-feeding, or in solid food either, when that came along. I had likewise no interest in lap sitting or cuddling. My mother yearned to enfold me in her arms and rock me as much as I would let her, which was not at all. Possibly I sensed her extreme focus on me and tried to shield myself from it. I was and am by nature averse to being stared at, solitary, and fierce about my autonomy. My poor mother, who wanted a chubby little lap child to suckle and dandle, a sweet-tempered
baby who would coo and gurgle with cuddly placidity, had given birth to me instead.

I didn’t want to be looked at; I wanted to do the watching myself. As long as my baby seat was turned toward whatever conversation was going on, and I was left alone to watch and listen, I was perfectly happy. If I couldn’t hear the grown-ups talking, I fussed. If my mother tried to hold me too long on her lap, I made an impatient grunting sound to be put down and left alone. I was too busy eavesdropping to eat. A little suck on the nipple, a bit of tapioca or Cream of Wheat, and that was that, time to get back to business.

Consequently, and not surprisingly, I was a very skinny baby. Old ladies stopped my mother in the Berkeley Co-op, to her chagrin, to poke at my sticklike little arms and instruct her on what I should be eating and how she should be feeding me. It got worse. When my hair grew in, it did so in white-blond wispy tufts that stood up on my small head. I had huge staring green eyes set into a small, pale face. In photos, I look like an elf or an alien. I was never babyish in any way. It was probably a bit eerie for someone else to be watched so intently by those gleaming, saucerlike eyes.

When I was nine months old, well before I could walk, I looked up at my mother from my baby seat on the table and said very clearly, without a trace of baby talk, “I want more Cheerios.” My mother was naturally startled to have her incontinent, tiny infant not only speak but address her in a complete sentence. I’d never said anything before, never babbled or baby talked.

From the get-go, I felt a nervous, headlong urge to catapult myself into life, to start realizing the desires I seem to have been born with: to learn as much as I could about people, to figure out how words worked, and to collect as many of them as I could. I wanted words the way other kids wanted fun experiences or toys or friends: intensely, greedily, as many as I could
get. I stood between my parents in the McGee Avenue house when I was about two, raising my arms toward them. I had just learned that there was such a verb as “comfort,” and I was pretty sure I knew what it meant, but I wanted it demonstrated.

“Comfort me,” I said to them, feeling deeply and totally focused on this. They looked down at me, puzzled; was I upset? I was not. I was calm but insistent. “Comfort me,” I repeated, shaking my upstretched hands for emphasis.

They must have figured out what I was after, because they picked me up and theatrically pretended to give me soothing, reassuring affection—first one of them, then the other—while I watched them closely. There they were, my parents, comforting me. This memory is one of the nicest ones I have of my father. There he was, being a father, just for a moment. I had to ask him to, in the spirit of curiosity about a word, but he complied. I have always kept this memory in the mental equivalent of a velvet box at the back of a top shelf in a closet, where rare things are hidden so no one steals or breaks them.

A
s if to compensate for me, my sister Susan was a fat, cute, cuddly, sweet baby who laughed as early as I had stared fixedly at people, hard peals of merry laughter even while she nursed, milk running down her chin, until my mother had to laugh, too. Right away, Susan sent me into fits of hysterics; I lay gasping feebly on the floor like an exhausted beetle. She was a pretty baby and a pretty little girl. She was hilarious with her family but quiet and meek and shy with strangers. And she was given to explosions, wordless fits of emotion during which she could only cry, kick, scream, and howl. She was unable to talk, to tell my mother what the matter was. There was something vulnerable and tender about Susan that made me fiercely protective of her from the start. She was my sweet companion throughout childhood, always stalwartly by my side. She came
running up to my classroom, crying, when she wet her pants in kindergarten so I could help her get home to change. She came to me on the playground at recess when her jacket zipper was stuck so I could fix it. We bolstered each other. I got as much from her as she got from me—her absolute trust in me gave me confidence, made me feel tough and strong.

We never fought as children. We were both docile peacemakers by nature, but we were also terrified of the possible repercussions of overt conflict, having seen it firsthand from our father.

And then, when I was four and a half, Emily arrived—a placid baby with a big round head, fat kissable cheeks, button brown eyes, and a button nose. Her arms and legs and stomach were all dimples and pudge. As soon as she was born, I decided that she was mine and claimed her. She was born with thrush, a yeast infection in her mouth; the pediatrician treated it with gentian violet, so my mother’s shirts all turned purple around the nipples. In her early months, Emily had several very high fevers and had to be rushed to the ER and packed in ice; if she had been born with a docile personality, it was burned out of her, and a headstrong, willful, oddly singular bent took its place. She became increasingly eccentric and stubborn as she got older, but the fevers didn’t affect her warm sweetness or her deep, thoughtful intelligence.

Having babies more than made up for the years of yearning and loneliness my mother had endured. She had been in a fog before she became a mother, she told my sisters and me repeatedly: we were the sun breaking through, the one real thing. And so everything my sisters and I did—any triumph we brought to her attention, no matter how small—was lauded, praised, applauded, exclaimed over.

My mother had been engrossed in my father before I was born. Now he must have felt that he had been supplanted, in classic style, by a manifestly unworthy rival: a female baby, and
then another and another. And it wasn’t the first time this had happened. He’d left his first wife, Nancy, a decade before I was born, after twin daughters had wrecked his fun with her. Nancy had grown up just down the lake from him, and their parents had all known one another for years. She and Ralph had had a lot of fun together, partying, playing bridge, and going to big band dances at ballrooms and clubs around the Twin Cities in the late forties. They were a glamorous couple, and music was a huge part of their romance: Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney, Anita O’Day. But when he was around twenty-seven, the age of life-defining decisions, he got her pregnant, and then they’d married, and then came the twin babies. Maybe he missed the fun life after that, or maybe he didn’t really want children, or maybe he’d never planned to stick around for long in the first place. Whatever the reason, in 1952, Ralph abruptly quit his new wife and their one-year-old twin daughters and left Minnesota behind forever.

He’d moved out to California, where he became a social worker. After he met my mother, he passed the bar exam with her adamant encouragement and became a lawyer. And all was well until more babies came. Now here we were, first me, then my sisters—more daughters—wrecking his fun with his second wife.

His perplexing (possibly to him, as well) tantrums of violence toward my mother came out of nowhere and then they were over, and both my parents acted as if they’d never happened. Although he all but ignored us kids, Ralph gave every impression, to those outside the family, of being a devoted husband and father. He was a Marxist lawyer, defender of and hero to Black Panthers, rabble-rousing politicos, and draft dodgers. In court, he was a low-key, articulate, persuasive advocate, often pitted against more bellicose, ham-fisted lawyers, and so he won more of his cases than he lost.

He loved music. He was a jazz lover, a guy’s guy; he and his
Marxist lawyer pals regularly went to hear live shows in San Francisco together. At night sometimes, he stood in his blue plaid bathrobe over the forced-air heating vent in the hallway floor and snapped his fingers with unself-conscious enthusiasm to a Mingus or Monk record. And he loved to sing, songs with a lot of words, fast. As I got older, it turned out that I could quickly memorize any lyrics he threw at me and sing them right along with him in my high, fluty voice, and I used this talent to get his attention whenever I could, since, regardless of his violence, I adored him.