Paris Was the Place (6 page)

“You got the grant. Don’t worry.”

“You’re right. I got the grant.” I’m not going to tell him about Macon Ventri. There’s nothing to tell. And he will only make a joke, and whatever it is between Macon and me is too early. Too tender in my mind for Luke’s jokes.

“I think you should book a plane ticket to Delhi.”

I take a sip of wine. “Rajiv said I would be an English teacher at the asylum center. But it’s more complicated than that. Why did I agree to teach there?”

“Because you are weak and Rajiv took advantage of you.”

“I feel a little like a giant from outer space in that center.”

“Normally you’re graceful, and you are very, very short. You always pull the classroom stuff off. You’re good at it. It’s what you do. You certainly shouldn’t have said no to Rajiv.”

“How do you know anything you’re talking about?”

“I don’t.”

“You’ve never seen me in the classroom.”

“You’re right, I haven’t.” Luke laughs. It’s a low laugh. More
throaty. Like my father’s. When I think of my dad I’m filled with missing and white-hot anger. The longer I hold this anger the longer I hold my mother. Anger and love. Twins maybe.

“So, really, everything you’ve just said is guessing?”

“Exactly.”

“There are no mothers and fathers. Can you believe that? They have no parents to help them in there.”

“You’re going to be good at this, Willie. Give it time. If they don’t have mothers, then what an amazing thing that they’ll have you as a short stand-in with flaming red hair that needs a trim. You must not quit, sweetness. You’re not allowed to quit. Mom wouldn’t want you to ever quit.”

Our mother’s name was Kate. She had long, dark hair parted in the middle, which she pinned up with two tortoiseshell combs. When I was five, I used to sit on her lap in the rocking chair in the kitchen and run my hands through that hair. I wanted to swim in it. It smelled elemental—like vanilla and her skin. Sweet and earthy. She spent the first ten years of her life in southern Thailand near the coast, where her Dutch father harvested rubber trees for export with a French lumber company. When she moved to Montana, my mother said, she was already an outsider.

When I was growing up in the sixties, she wore Thai sarongs like skirts over pants. She wasn’t like other hippie mothers. She was sterner and more serious. She drank glass thimbles of espresso at lunch in our kitchen and swore out loud, and she was one of the first women psychologists in San Francisco. Her specialty was cognitive therapy, a type of psychotherapy developed by a doctor named Aaron Beck, who’d been my mother’s teacher. For years she thought this brand of therapy would save even her most troubled patients. She believed it could change dysfunctional thinking and alter emotional reactions and transform entire belief systems.

Her standards for people were so extremely high. In her mind, personal change always lived just around the corner. So she was on
alert for it. She’d stare at me when I stepped off the school bus and into our driveway, as if I was going to say something brilliant. Sometimes I was paralyzed by her, and I said banal things or, worse, I whined and knew I’d let her down. She was so intense. She held the world accountable. She believed that everyone she met was as devoted to their passion as she was. But she’d put her arms around me in the driveway and hold me. Sometimes she’d even cry standing there because, she said, she loved me so much.

She gave wild parties and took them almost as seriously as psychology. In 1970 she had a Halloween fondue party and asked everyone to come wearing a hat. Our house was a single-story redwood with skylights in the kitchen that Dad had put in himself. I got to greet people at the door. Luke took their coat in the hall if they had one. When the party was half full, Mr. Stevens, our neighbor, rang the bell. He was a neuroscientist at San Francisco State, and the only thing he had on was a blue beret. His genitals looked loose and ropy and scary, and I screamed for Mom. When she saw him, she laughed so hard she cried. Then she went upstairs to get him her kimono.

At the dinner table, everyone had to stab cornichons and little pieces of beef with skewers and dunk them in the bubbling cheese. My mother stood up in her felt cloche and said, “You can’t drink the water tonight.” I leaned against the dining room door and stared. Who was this woman in the exotic hat? Where was my mother? It was hot for October in Marin. The dimmer on the pewter chandelier was turned low, so the room took on the glow of Sterno cans under the fondue pots. “You can only drink white wine!” She raised her glass and took a sip to demonstrate. “Water will harden the cheese in your stomach like stone.”

She played Joan Baez during the meal and smiled at her neighbors and friends, who slowly and systematically got lit. My dad liked it once my mother started things for him—the talking, the people, and the food. But he didn’t seek people out the way she did. He didn’t need people. He had his math and his desert and he had her. “The Weight” by The Band came on, and everyone jumped up from the table and ran to the sunken living room and sang “Take a load off Fanny.” My
mom had just painted the walls salmon the day before, and my father had hung his Indian weavings from Arizona.

My parents lifted their hands together like London Bridge Is Falling Down, and everyone went under their bridge. My mother closed her eyes and bounced on the balls of her feet. I was embarrassed for her intensity and enthralled by it. I couldn’t look away. Luke came out from his bedroom down the hall and watched, too. “Why don’t they let us sleep? They’re not teenagers.” But he was a teenager, and this meant he went back to bed. I couldn’t stop staring. I was eleven. My parents had this whole other life.

The following January, my mother left on a trip to Greece with a group of intuitive healers from the Bay Area—seventeen of them on a 747 from the Oakland airport with a layover in Zurich and a visit to the Jungians there, then a tour bus in Crete. She was gone for thirty-one days. The longest month of my life. Sausalito got stuck in a wet fog, and she only called once from Athens. No telephone credit cards back then and it cost her a fortune. The line echoed so that she sounded underwater while she screamed into the receiver, “I’m coming home soon, Willow! But I’m testing the marriage theory I’ve been working on. I’m looking at the matrilineal bonds in generations of Greek families. The marriages are very strong. I’m doing interviews. It’s so sunny here!”

She was supposed to stay in Greece for two weeks, and now she’d thrown our house off its axis. My brother cooked hamburgers for my dad and me every night while my mother was gone. You got to choose: burgers with a slice of American cheese on top or a bowl of cornflakes with milk. This was when Luke began to help raise me. He didn’t say anything about it. He was just organized with the clothes washing and making sure I had food for lunch. Even then he carried my sadness for me.

The first night she was back, my mother unpacked the gifts at the kitchen table: a strong Greek liqueur called ouzo for Dad. A traditional black velvet vest for Luke; a white cotton dress with red embroidering for me. Her cheeks were flushed while she handed out the presents. Was she feeling guilt? Shame for leaving us? What I
remember is a mild defensiveness that flashed on her face if you questioned her too hard. I wanted to sit on her lap. I was too old for this, but I did it anyway and stared and stared at her green eyes to see if she’d changed. Then I buried my face in her chest. I didn’t have words for my longing for her. When she put me to bed that night, I asked her why she’d gone. I couldn’t not ask. I had to know. She said, “I just needed a little break.” Then she kissed me on the head like this was normal—like mothers flew to Greece and took breathers all the time. This wasn’t the answer I needed. I wanted her to tell me her research called to her. That it was vital work. I could understand that. Did mothers really need breaks? This was different. Muddier. It made me feel funny. Overlooked. Passed by.

Had she gotten bored with her marriage? Her spell in Crete was nothing compared to running off with the artisanal cheesemaker on Mount Tam like our neighbor Mrs. Gallant, three houses down, did. The real problem was my father. I loved him entirely and he gave hugs that involved spinning me on his back in a circle, but my father was a mathematician. Yes, he listened to Jim Croce and smoked his homegrown weed, but he was not a real hippie. He liked structure. My mother had left and come back and my father was not done processing this information; there was more to come from him on the subject.

It’s not that he was anti-feminist or anti-women or anti-anything, really. He just loved her with a mathematical conviction, and even though he’d sanctioned Greece, he couldn’t believe she’d actually stayed away for so long. “One time,” he said to my mom in the kitchen the fourth night she was home. I could hear him from my bed. “I got married one time. You’re not going to leave me and make me do this all over again with someone else, are you?”

I watched him out my bedroom window that night—a small man with dark sideburns who threw one leg over the seat of his motorcycle and kick-started it and drove away. He waited two more months to actually leave my mother. Maybe her trip made him see how much he loved her. Maybe he couldn’t handle that kind of vulnerability. Or maybe he was just too stubborn and proud. It was May 1971. A Monday.
One week before the end of seventh grade. He loved us, didn’t he? He gave those hugs.

His leaving was the worst feeling I’ve ever known. He returned to the house on Thursday in his pickup to collect more of his maps—piles of old folded drawings and elevation charts and a pair of rare celestial globes by Vincenzo Coronelli. I found him in his basement office putting the globes in a blue plastic milk crate. I said, “You’ve ruined my life. I hate you with all my heart.” I wanted to tackle him and hold him to the ground and make him stay.

This was the week in middle school when I began to spend a small part of third-period study hall reading the dictionary. Part of me felt like I was spinning off the flat surface of the earth. The words made my brain feel good. When I memorized definitions, it quieted my mind. Each dictionary entry was like an orderly, prescribed planet. How generous of the authors to give two or three alternative meanings and an archaic definition and to use the word in a sentence.

Luke was in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
that week. He came home from school on Friday to cook the hamburgers before the performance. He was nervous about the play. He made the burgers very thin, with Swiss cheese and onion. I sat at the table in the corner of the kitchen with the two windows behind me, and the word “divorce” appeared in my head. The letters were spelled on a small blackboard nailed to a white wall. It seemed pretty obvious why the word was there, even though I didn’t know where the letters had come from. But I could define “divorce” and so I did, and the word went away and I had a bite of the hamburger. I thought maybe the word had just been a bad omen and I was done with it.

But the next word was “empty.” An easy word. I defined it to myself while Luke poured us glasses of milk. Then it disappeared, just like “divorce.” After that, things got a little out of control for a few minutes. Luke sat at the table next to me, and I thought he must know about the words in my mind because they were coming so fast. Maybe he was getting them, too? There was no reason for them and I still had to define them and I thought I was getting sick. He put ketchup
on the inside of one of his hamburger buns and scraped around in the mustard jar with a knife and I decided he wasn’t seeing the words.

It was hard to come up with definitions so quickly and eat the burger and it was close to time to leave for the play. I thought seeing these words in my head was worse than being sick and that I was crazy. My mother came downstairs in an Indian tunic dress and Greek leather sandals. “Let’s go, my lovelies. Luke needs to get to school early. The play will be sublime.” I didn’t know what “sublime” meant. I hoped that word wouldn’t come for me now, because what would I do when I didn’t know a word?

“Please, Mom. Cut it out. No big words. This is serious.” But I didn’t tell her why. I kept the words to myself. I was scared. I didn’t want her big words to come over to the blackboard in my mind and ask me to spell them. That would be more trouble than I could handle at the moment. The three of us walked out of the house and climbed into the Beetle. I think each of us thought Dad was going to surprise us by jumping out from behind a eucalyptus tree.

We drove to the play without him. I sat in my chair in the dark theater and clenched my hands in my lap and worried about Luke. Would he remember his lines? “Shakespeare” and “brother” came, and I defined them. Then the play started and Luke was Puck and he was so good up there on the stage. I relaxed and laughed out loud and cheered for my brother in my deepest of hearts.

I kept reading the dictionary—just ten minutes or so every day at school. I liked to do it. The words were like a nervous tic that lasted through eighth grade and on into the fall of ninth. They came only when I was rattled. I’d define them and they’d leave. I didn’t usually mind them. They were almost a comfort, something I could count on, and they kept my mind busy.

After he left us, Dad became famous in the geology department at Irvine for the series of undergrad girls he brought to the desert with him. He lived in an old blue REI tent in the Sonoran Desert and kept a studio apartment near the university when he was back in town, and he sort of unraveled for a little while. He was thirty-five. Too old
to be drafted for Vietnam, but he hung out with the anti-war protesters in the desert. There were many of them. And the girls at Irvine dared each other to go camping with him. He lived with one for a time in town, and Luke got to meet her. Dad wrote the girls great job recommendations and helped them get government grants. He was not unkind.

He moved back in with us after close to two years because a flash flood almost killed him. It was 1973. It wasn’t the only reason he came back, I’m sure, but the flood changed everything. He started sleeping at the house again, and the words stopped appearing in my head as suddenly as they’d arrived. They’d been a phase, and now they were over. I didn’t even need to read the dictionary at study hall anymore. Dad said the water had carried him downstream, but he’d kept his head up and looked for things to grab. He’d found a small tree in the middle of a basin and held on to it all night, and for the first time in his life, he began to talk to God.