Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (11 page)

Once, I overheard Conrad discussing what he perceived as my recent weight gain with my mother. “Tracy needs more activity,” he told her. “She’s too sedentary.” My body seemed the same to me, but the next week I was enrolled in a three-week round of tennis lessons.

I liked tennis. I liked it when Wanda came home during college breaks and took me to hit balls back and forth on the high school courts. At that point in her studies, she was thinking about becoming a physical therapist and had a T-shirt that read, “If it’s physical it’s therapy”—or as Jean, who liked to antagonize her, preferred to say, “If it’s PHYSICAL it’s therapy,” with an exaggerated shift in volume intended to mimic the way Wanda’s large bust distorted the text. Wanda didn’t much mind the teasing and wore the shirt when we lobbed balls across the net.

No, tennis was fun. I liked watching Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe throw fits on TV and hearing the clean, distant sounds of the ball touching down before being whacked back across the net. I liked understanding the strange score-keeping language of
love
and
advantage
, with its math that skipped wantonly from 15 to 30 to 40, but I didn’t quite take to the lessons. I could hit the ball well enough using my forehand swing, but backhand always made me nervous. If I let the ball bounce on my left side rather than my right, I could never tell what was going to happen. Often enough my racquet managed to make contact with the ball, but I was rarely successful in getting a backhand shot to travel all the way back over the net. I developed a strategy of running around the ball and turning it into a forehand shot, though when I did that, the coach, a scraggly, suntanned pro, would scold me. It wasn’t long before I started second-guessing my every move. Sometimes, I froze with the ball heading straight for me, leaving me with no choice but to squeeze
my knees together and employ the racquet as a shield. The game became a match with my own previously unknown shortcomings and anxieties. And suddenly, yes, I was conscious of my thighs having begun to rub together when I crossed the court. By the time three weeks were over—six lessons in all—my head for the game was shot.

After tennis came T-ball. We were a peewee team of boys and girls, beginners who would presumably graduate to a version of the game where the balls were actually pitched instead of balanced before the batter on a two-and-a-half-foot-tall tee. We didn’t have uniforms or even matching T-shirts. I suppose they didn’t bother with any of that because T-ball wasn’t a real sport. Along with the other girls, I was usually put in the outfield. I stood there where balls seldom came, tossing my mitt in the air and daydreaming about what it would be like to finally start at my new school with all the other MGM kids. Sometimes, I sat down and started up a conversation with another outfielder, though that earned us both the disdain of our coach, a disdain I only helped to justify once it was my turn to bat. It was harder than it looked to swing at a stationary ball, and I struck out to a humiliating degree. Again, the game migrated up into my head, which was so full of the fear of failure that I second-guessed myself into oblivion.

At our final game, with my mom in the bleachers, I did manage to hit the ball. It was a nice, solid shot that toppled the tee and sent the ball down between second and third base and on into the no-man’s-land I happened to know quite well. I sprinted with all my might to first base, where I stopped, out of breath, huffing and puffing, momentarily elated, glad that my feat had not been wasted on mere practice.

“Go on! Keep running!” Coach yelled. “Get to third!”

It was then that I realized no one had taught me the rules of the game. That explanation must have come while I was distracted in the outfield, or else Coach just assumed I already knew how to play. I understood on a basic level that we scored points every time one of our batters made it to home base. And we got sent out to field after a certain number of our batters had struck out (struck out or been tagged out?). But I didn’t know much more than that. My lungs and throat were burning raw from my dash to first, but I decided to make a go for third, bypassing second altogether and running straight through the center of the diamond.

“No!” Coach yelled, sawing at the air with both his arms. “Go back; hit second!”

Shouldn’t I just try for home, see if I could bring in a run for the team? I was beginning to remember some of the language of the game.

“Second!” Coach was saying. “Go back!”

A home run would have been nice, but his emphasis was persuasive. Turning back, I jogged toward second. Someone was waiting for me there with the ball in hand, and then it was our team’s turn to put on our gloves and return to the outfield.

It was a relief when the sports lessons were over, though it meant going back to the flat line of unstructured days. Sometimes, bored and lonely for company, I’d wander out into the front yard. Sooner or later, I’d walk around the corner with the notion of paying a visit to Mrs. Meeks, a black neighbor lady my mother’s age, or so I guessed—she was so overweight it was hard to tell for sure how old she was. The first time I’d ever visited, I’d been playing with a girl who lived next door to the Meekses. When her older brother was ignoring her or when she ran out of ways to entertain herself, she called on Mrs. Meeks, who kept bowls of hard
candy all over the living room: little purple globes wrapped in cellophane, golden butterscotches, and the striped peppermint discs my mom carried in her purse. Even after the girl and her family moved away, I’d think of Mrs. Meeks sometimes when I had nothing else to do. Sometimes, when I rang the bell, Mr. Meeks would answer and call, “Loretta!” to his wife in the back. She’d say, “Okay, Meeks. I’m coming!” It always took her a few minutes to make it up to the kitchen, enough time for Mr. Meeks to offer me a grape soda in a tall glass of crushed ice.

The Meekses had no children, or else their children were already grown. They lived on a corner lot behind a yard plotted with juniper bushes and red lava rocks. Some of the other kids in the neighborhood stole handfuls of the rocks to throw at one another (I did, too, at one time, before I learned better). I liked visiting there, and my mother never stopped me from going. It gave me a feeling of sophistication to have made friends with a grown-up. I’d bring Mrs. Meeks pictures and cards that I’d made, and she’d always clap her hands and say how clever I was:

I wrote this letter to tell you

I wrote this letter to say

Happy Mother’s Day, Mrs. Meeks

Even though it’s not Mother’s Day!

My parents always waved to Mr. Meeks when we drove past him on the street. I think they sometimes even walked over and paid the couple visits, which Mr. Meeks repaid mostly by himself. “Loretta’s a bit of a shut-in,” my father told me when I asked him about it. “I don’t know that I have
ever
seen her outside the house.” His emphasis on the word
ever
told me he was scandalized
by such an idea. When I’d see Mrs. Meeks, she’d give me a great big hug, toppling me into her bosom, which smelled like powdery perfume and, more vaguely, of cigarettes. She wore a silky nightgown and slippers and tied up her hair in a satin scarf. Sometimes, if I learned a new fact on TV or in one of my books, I’d run over to her, knowing she’d clap her hands and say, “Ooh, Tracy, baby, you are so
clever
!” Sometimes my mother would clip some roses from our yard and let me carry a bouquet over, and when I handed Mrs. Meeks the arrangement, stems wrapped in a wet paper towel and then covered with tinfoil, she’d say, “Oh, Tracy, baby, these are
beautiful
! You are so
sweet
.” Other times, I’d ring the bell two or three times before accepting that nobody would answer, though if Mrs. Meeks never left the house, how could nobody be home?

During the same ceaseless summer, my father received news that his next air force posting would be in West Germany and would begin, if he intended to accept it, in September.

Having already begun to cut mental ties to my old school life, the thought of going to a whole new country whipped my heart into a frenzy.

“If we move, will I become German?” I asked my parents.

“No,” my father answered. “No matter where you are, geographically, you will still be American.”

“But if I wanted to,
could
I become German?”

“Theoretically, you could renounce your American citizenship, but that would be foolish. You’re fortunate to be American. This is the best country in the world.”

My father showed the first signs of bristling. And I could feel a resistance mounting in my own core, some part of me that didn’t like the blank sweep of what he was beginning to say. It struck me, even then, as dangerous to be so certain of a thing like that, though
I also knew from watching my brothers argue politics with him that if I pushed back, he’d tighten his mouth and harden his gaze. “Shoot,” he’d eventually say, “if you don’t like it here, then move to the Soviet Union. Or China. You’ll see how valuable this kind of freedom is once you give it up.”

Over the next weeks, Mom and Dad made a show of considering the possibility. “You know, Floyd,” my mother said one morning while Dad was reading the paper and working his way through a pot of coffee, “Conrad and the girls would have to stay here and finish college.” Her voice was full of its usual relaxed poise, and her point—that the family would be split up if we took the assignment—had the effect of tempering my own excitement about going away.

I don’t know if they’d ever thought as hard about any of my father’s previous military transfers; I would have been just a baby, if I was born at all. But it was clear that they’d never before turned one down. Every two or three years, my brothers and sisters had been made to pack up, say their goodbyes, and throw themselves into new schools with a sense of blind hope. I’d grown up envying them that kind of mobility. I was three years old when we moved to California, and I’d only ever known two places before it, though if I’d truly been capable of knowing a place at age one or two, it was a knowledge that had been swallowed up by the part of the brain responsible for forgetting.

Ultimately, it came down to my parents’ decision that we couldn’t go to Germany and leave my brother and sisters alone halfway across the world. And so, just like that, my father said goodbye to twenty-six years of military service. He was forty-five years old. He pushed the uniforms with all their chevrons and colorful decorations to the back of his closet and let a beard grow in.
One Friday afternoon, he brought home the nameplate from his desk and his Swingline stapler, and we became civilians.

In no time, my father found work as an electronics engineer about eighty miles from home in then sleepy Silicon Valley. This was the early 1980s, before the viral explosion of Internet start-ups—long before the Internet itself. Technology had not yet begun to dominate the realm of private life; it didn’t fit so easily into a person’s pocket. Technology was public. It made bombs or launched rockets into space or made sick people well, and so it wasn’t terribly strange that my father ought to be doing some kind of work that the rest of us barely knew how to envision. All we knew was that, instead of the air force blues or fatigues he used to wear, he left the house in sport jackets and ties and made his way to the town of Sunnyvale. It was a long drive away from our maze of neighborhood subdivisions, along overpasses and freeways threading between low wheat-colored hills. Finally, he’d cross the bridges leading him over the San Francisco Bay and continue south along the highway choked with other cars doing the same. It was a slow crawl, morning and night, at least ninety minutes each way, through tollbooths and traffic cloverleaves, to a background of talk radio. I wonder now what he thought about in the car. Did he view this new daily journey and what it led to (more money, for one) as a blessing or something worse?

I felt relief, but I didn’t know why. Not about Germany but something more nebulous. I was only eight years old. I didn’t understand most of the political talk that went on around me, but I could tell when my father was heating up. Usually, that happened when my brothers or sisters sought to challenge his views on things America had done in the world. When Americans made news for refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag, he’d snort at the
TV screen, “If you don’t like it here—” and in my head, without wanting to, I’d finish his sentence. I didn’t know what went on in the Soviet Union, but I didn’t like hearing my father grow gruff and stern, didn’t like watching him screw up his mouth, flare his nostrils and stew. Instinctively, I must have figured that some of this defensiveness had to do with the fact that his job since the age of nineteen had been to protect the United States. I assumed that stepping into an easier kind of life, one where he didn’t have to stand quite so straight or always be so well-shaved, so perfectly shined and exemplary, would help my father to relax some of his stubborn fidelity to Uncle Sam. I didn’t think that his patriotism might have been a choice, something he adhered to out of intrinsic belief rather than duty, yet I can see now how a black man of his age—a man who had been raised in the segregated South and who’d lived to witness the victories of the Civil Rights Movement—might hold tight to the conviction that American democracy truly was remarkable. Still, the very freedoms—to self-criticism, to dissent—that allow democracy to thrive seemed to unsettle him after a point.

I never thought about the anxiety he might have felt leaving the only professional world he’d ever known for one full of people who had, for the most part, only ever known something else. I’m nearly the same age now that he was then, and I’d wager that his discipline and intelligence, like his patriotism, were not traits he acquired in the military but the natural characteristics that had led him to enlist in the first place. The air force must have appealed to his innate love of order and to his belief in hard work. “You just have to
apply
yourself,” he’d always say, slicing the air with his hand. It was his way of encouraging us or chastening us; his version of our mother’s constant “You can do anything you set your mind
to.” Even for a man like him—someone methodical, meticulous, and always reading, learning,
bettering
himself—there must have been times when the task of keeping a family of our size afloat threatened to overwhelm him. But he never showed it. He stood at the prow of our household, steering us through season after season, year after year. Any worries and any fears were kept from our view. “Your job is to go to school,” he’d tell us sometimes. “Mine is to take care of everything else.” He did it so well, and so invisibly, that it never occurred to me he might have done so at any personal cost, though now I think of him as a young black man coming of age during an era when it was necessary, in so many ways, to fight for his rights. That’s no unique feat; thousands have done it, and yet my father emerged on the other side not wearing the kind of brittle dignity that is an act of the will or a mask covering a spirit that has been beaten down enough times to be broken. He came out on the other side intact, ever convinced of his self-worth.