While the City Slept (3 page)

When they walk onstage, Rachel is in a long dress with her hair in curls, playing the girl who asks in the song’s opening line whether she’ll grow up to be pretty. Teresa, always short and destined never to get above five two, is dressed in brown corduroys and a brown plaid shirt, the little boy who asks in the next line whether he’ll grow up to be tall and strong. It continues like this, two kids aware they are expected to become something in particular and also aware they might disappoint, alternating lines and arriving together at the chorus, and a declaration: “I like what you look like, and you’re nice small. We don’t have to change at all.”

—

Somehow, Teresa never triggers the word “lesbian” at school. “We didn’t even contemplate it,” Jean says. “It was outside our world.” Perhaps, as well, an unseen force in their world. Teresa expresses herself as a seeker, eager for experience beyond the existing confines. The first time Jean cracks open a beer, it’s with Teresa. Her first drag off a cigarette is with Teresa, too. The first time she hitchhikes, it’s Teresa’s thumb in the air, and when they grab Mom or Dad’s keys to the station wagon, long before any of them have their licenses, it’s Teresa grabbing her parents’ keys, Teresa
getting behind the wheel. “We were going to, like, the Taco Bell drive-through,” Jean says. “You would have thought we were orbiting Mars, the charge we got out of it.” The first time Jean and Rachel stay up all night is also with Teresa, during some sleepover or other at the house on Holly Hills Boulevard. The three of them climb out a window and, at Teresa’s urging, sit on the roof to watch the sun come up. She hands around some Kents, probably stolen from her dad. “I just remember feeling kind of wild, sitting up there and watching the sun come up and smoking a cigarette,” Jean says. “I felt, ‘Wow. I’m getting old.’” They were about thirteen.

When Teresa is a little older, her parents decide to move from the house on Holly Hills Boulevard to a new home only a short drive away. It’s a nice place, but Teresa never forgives them, the change triggering her stubborn sense of nostalgia, plus a special umbrage she reserves for people who transform something that’s working just fine into yet another thing she’ll have to be nostalgic for. With Tim, she walks the empty brick house one last time, drinking cans of Busch they probably swiped when their father wasn’t looking, and, before she leaves, climbs the porch’s stone railing, reaches up, steals the sign holding the address numbers, takes it with her. It is like this, too—her nostalgia primed and ready, her special umbrage rising—when Anheuser-Busch sells to a foreign company, and when the Cardinals’ old, arch-rimmed stadium is torn down for a new stadium that has no rim lined with arches.

—

If there is mystery about whom the teenage Teresa is meant to love, she doesn’t help with the untangling. When Jean and Rachel head for an all-girls Catholic high school, Teresa chooses a different route, following her siblings to the coed Bishop DuBourg, a parochial school that by now is giving Norbert senior a bulk discount on tuition. She does keep in touch, and her friends notice that while they’re finding boyfriends, Teresa never has a boyfriend, ever. Her two older brothers at DuBourg, Tim and Norbert junior, notice this as well, although everyone hears Teresa talking a
lot about an extended crush she’s developed on a neighbor boy named Dan Kolath. He rejects her, gently, yet Teresa continues to nurture this crush in a way that gets attention, writing letters to Ray and Ween about Dan Kolath, thinking and talking about Dan Kolath long after it has become apparent there is no chance.

When it’s near time for Norbert junior to graduate from DuBourg, he applies to study theater at Webster University across town but does it in secret, fearing his father’s reaction. When the reaction is as feared, Norbert junior plays a trump card, an offer of financial assistance. His father relents.

Teresa watches all this, watches Norbert junior’s new world forming, watches their parents make peace with it, watches her older brother bring home friends who are lesbian and gay. Soon, Norbert junior lands a role in a production of Larry Kramer’s
Normal Heart,
cast as Felix, the openhearted, HIV-positive boyfriend of a fiery gay rights activist. He’s going to have to kiss a man onstage.

This information is not well received by Norbert senior, who, in the marines, saw a man beaten and then kicked out because Norbert senior himself reported the man making advances. Later, when he was guarding the brig in San Diego, Norbert senior noticed how many of the inmates were soldiers about to be discharged for homosexuality. They seemed to him the saddest people he’d ever seen, forced to shower alone under watch, not allowed belts or shoestrings as a precaution against suicide. “My experience in the brig was, I didn’t know what I was gonna do in life, but I was gonna follow the rules,” Norbert senior says.

Though the subject matter of his son’s play concerns him, he comes to the performance anyway and afterward shows a mix of pride and upset. Teresa absorbs all this, too, Norbert junior believes.

—

Next to graduate from Bishop DuBourg is Tim, and once he’s gone, it’s just Teresa at the school, her two younger siblings still back at St. Stephen
because of the seven-year gap. She’s popular enough to be elected class president, but then her senior prom comes around, and no one asks her to go. “Well, Teresa, you can’t not go to your senior prom,” Tim says. They go together. They dance, drink, attend the after party at a nearby hotel, and then the actual couples begin heading off to their hotel rooms and Teresa begins to cry, telling Tim she’s never going to have anybody, that she’s always going to be alone.

Around this time, she decides to run away. “She was dealing us a fit,” Norbert senior says. “And one night, we got into an argument and she packed a bag and she started walking across right where I’m standing, walking toward the door.” Norbert senior tells her it isn’t going to happen, that she’ll have to go through him first. “And so we had words. I says, ‘Put your bag down.’ I said, ‘You’ve given your mother and I a bunch of bullshit all year. If anybody should be leaving, it should be Mom and I. And we’re staying. We’re committed. You’re committed to staying until you get done with high school.’ And so, she walked towards me, and I’m not proud of this, but I took my two hands and I pushed her on her shoulder. But I pushed her so hard she fell backwards on the floor, right where I’m standing now. And she’s laying there on the carpet. She wasn’t hurt. But I come over, I felt so bad that I knocked her down—not with my fists, I just pushed her and she fell backwards—but I felt so bad I went over to help her up, and she starts swinging at me. She says, ‘Go ahead, I don’t care if you knock the shit out of me.’ You know, you couldn’t scare her. She was tough. A tough young
girl.”

I
n a small adobe house in the mountains, a couple hours north of Santa Fe, Jennifer Hopper. It’s the winter of 1972, and she’s just over a week old. The town holding the small adobe house is Vallecitos, which means Little Valleys, and this is where Jennifer will spend her first years, raised by parents in hiding.

Her last name, Hopper, is a fiction. It was invented by her father, Sam, who is absent without leave from the military. Years earlier, Sam shipped out to help in Korea after the armistice, but at his next assignment, a recruiting center in San Francisco, became disenchanted. Unwilling to send more young men off to Vietnam, he disappeared, with like-minded friends, to this spot along a river through the Carson National Forest. Jennifer’s mother, Marcia, is twenty-five years old and also in Vallecitos to disappear. She dropped out of the University of Washington to sell beaded necklaces on “the Ave,” something like Haight-Ashbury at Seattle latitude, and then at a certain point decided to ditch that scene. A few people she knew were into rock climbing. Vallecitos had good rock climbing.

Sam is about twenty-six, walks around in a snap-brim hat, gray vest over white T-shirt, weathered jeans. Marcia finds it a handsome look. He works summers fighting fires for the forest service, and it pays enough that the entire young family can make it through the fall and winter on his earnings. He takes odd jobs as well, and when not at those jobs helps tend corn and sweet peas in the family’s garden. Marcia begins using his last name, makes it semiofficial by having it typed on a flimsy local
Democratic Party registration card. Later, she makes it a bit more official when she uses it on a hard-laminated New Mexico driver’s license.

In his free time, Sam sketches in ink on paper. Marcia nurses Jennifer and, in her free time, works on beaded necklaces. She appreciates the way the hard days in their valley are wrenching her out of her “spoiled” upbringing in Seattle, making her grateful for basics like indoor plumbing and hot water, especially in winter as she walks across snow to the outhouse. Her hair is wavy, black, long, washed once a week in a big metal tub. Her glasses are horn-rimmed. On balance, she prefers this life. But she finds herself wanting more for her daughter, feels pained that Jennifer’s grandparents haven’t yet been able to hold her. Gnawing at Marcia on a more regular basis: Sam’s drinking. Eventually, she says, “he stayed, and I left.”

—

Around 1974—“could have been earlier, that’s kind of foggy”—Marcia returns to Seattle, to her parents’ brown split-level home in a middle-class neighborhood in the northern part of the city. The place has a two-car garage, a den on the lower level with shag carpeting and wood-paneled walls, plenty of room for her and her two-year-old.

Jennifer’s grandfather Sidney Leavitt works for a jeweler in downtown Seattle. Her grandmother Ida Leavitt works at the American Discount Corporation as a bookkeeper. It’s good that Jennifer now has three people taking care of her, and Marcia also notices that her daughter has a strong tendency toward entertaining herself. “Which I appreciated,” she says. It all gives Marcia more time for figuring out her next step.

As Jennifer grows, she shows an ability to entertain others as well. Spends a lot of time in the basement den with her grandfather, who sits in his recliner watching Lawrence Welk as Jennifer watches with him, then reenacts. “Loved to sing,” Marcia says. “Loved to dance.” Ida Leavitt, seeing this, buys her granddaughter a dress that twirls, pea green with little yellow dots, a design Marcia finds atrocious. Jennifer thrills at spinning in the dress, long black hair in a bun, the overture to
Gypsy
playing
or Lawrence Welk singing in the background, her grandfather amused, and when she can draw more people to the performance, more people amused.

—

They move, mother and daughter, to a small yellow house about a mile away. Marcia’s parents own it and offer it to her for minimal rent. It’s laid out economically, one story and not a hallway in sight, “almost like a circle,” Jennifer says. “You could go from the living room to one bedroom, to the bathroom, to the other bedroom, to the living room.” Marcia is still looking for steady work, but the search halts when she wakes up one Mother’s Day with a disk ruptured in her lower back. The rupture requires surgery. The surgery doesn’t work. A second disk ruptures. She has another surgery. That surgery doesn’t work, either.

It is in this way that Marcia comes to stand as she does now, bent at the waist in a perpetual bow. She and Jennifer end up on welfare and food stamps, and Marcia tries to get help for her back through a state-funded program for people without health insurance. The program pays for Marcia to have two spinal fusions, and after the fusions the program also pays for a cheap pain medication to help Marcia through recovery. “And I didn’t know what it was, but I felt fantastic,” Marcia says. “It came in a big jug, and you could see there was white stuff at the bottom, and you’d have to shake it, and I found out later that it was methadone. And a bunch of other meds. And that was what they called their pain cocktail. And I became addicted to it.”

—

In response, Jennifer becomes a fixture at her grandparents’ house. Her father is out of the picture now, but his parents, who live in rural Washington, are not, and in the summers they take Jennifer fishing on Hood Canal, teach her how to ride a bicycle, show her how to garden. Jennifer also becomes a regular at the methadone clinic, tagging along with her mother, sitting in a waiting room filled with people who have taken many
routes to the same addiction, most by way of heroin but a number of them, like Marcia, by way of addiction to prescription painkillers. A few of her fellow addicts later show up at the small yellow house, dating Marcia. “So I was essentially an only child and had a single mom,” Jennifer says. “But a single mom with lots of boyfriends.” Jennifer isn’t too fond of any of them. Anyway, they come and go.

“I wasn’t a great role model,” Marcia says. “I didn’t go to work. I didn’t do much. I mean, between my back and the methadone and trying to, I guess, find my way about things, it wasn’t a very great life.”

—

Jennifer is too young to do much more than react, and when she isn’t upset, she feels for her mother, thinks, “What a pain to have to go to this place every day, get your little cocktail.” They divvy out her mother’s cocktail, and Jennifer watches as they do this, watches them lower the dose, visit after visit, and then, when there is no more lowering to be done, hears her mother say, “I’m not ready.” This happens many times, and whenever it happens, Jennifer is devastated. She goes to the store near their house carrying food stamps, sees eyes roll or hears a comment made, wonders, “Why are they doing that?” She goes to her grandparents’ house, watches Lawrence Welk, plays her grandfather’s show-tune records, twirls, sings.

—

First Jennifer’s family, then people on the outside begin to notice her singing voice, unusually strong and clear. They ask Jennifer’s mother and grandparents where it comes from. They don’t know. Marcia guesses it comes from Jennifer’s father, Sam. He was adopted, so the deeper origins remain a mystery, but Sam has rhythm, and a love of music, and Marcia is sure of this: “I don’t have it.”

At public school, teachers notice and encourage Jennifer to join the choir. At temple, a cantor notices and offers her a solo. She feels a little guilty. Everyone seems impressed, but to her this is easy, natural. When
she’s eleven or so, she tries out for a youth production of
The Sound of Music,
hoping to be one of the kids singing in the background, but she’s deemed too tall for the background of a youth production. A year later, she tries again and gets cast in
The Music Man
as part of the ensemble. She feels an instant fit. She can memorize, she can take direction, and being one part of an appreciated whole is bliss, as well as helpful contrast.

At home, her mother, deep in the methadone distance, sleeping a lot. Also, her mother’s boyfriends, some of them “quite abusive,” Jennifer says, to both Marcia and herself. Some try to be father figures for Jennifer, which she resists, hoping they’ll just disappear. “The pattern I recognized,” Jennifer says, “was in between relationships, my mom kind of showed up more.” So she hopes for the in-between times, though they sometimes involve grown-up tasks.

Marcia develops epilepsy, from the stress of her situation, she believes. She has two seizures, one of which requires Jennifer to call for help, and then one Sunday Jennifer’s grandmother is driving her back to her mom’s place, and when they arrive, Marcia waves them off. “Saw us pull up,” Jennifer says, “and just said, ‘Hey, guys, I’m really, really, really tired. I’m just, I feel like I need some rest. Do you mind going back to Grandma’s until later?’” Her grandmother doesn’t mind, but Jennifer feels something’s wrong. Feels it all the way back to her grandmother’s.

When they get there, she tells her grandmother to take her back home. Her grandmother won’t, so Jennifer sets out walking, Ida Leavitt following along behind in her car. Eventually, she picks Jennifer up four blocks away from the yellow house and drives her the rest of the distance, and when the two of them walk in, they find Jennifer’s mom lying down, as if for a nap. “House was perfectly clean,” Jennifer says. “She was in bed. Perfectly neat. Just kind of laying with her hands like this”—and here Jennifer places her hands on her stomach, one gently over the other—“but I immediately saw the empty pill bottle, and I got her out of bed.” She carries her mother to the bathroom, hits her to try to startle her back to consciousness, asks her grandma to call 911. She remembers her mom coming to and begging
them to let her die. She remembers not knowing how to respond, feeling a cutting of a cord between herself and her mother. “I don’t know that there was any other way I could deal,” Jennifer says. Marcia’s next memory is waking up in the hospital with her stomach pumped.

—

So, whenever possible, to the theater. “And, you know, I’m sorry, when you do theater or any kind of performance, at the very end people clap,” Jennifer says. “And then people come see you, and they say, ‘Good job,’ and they smile, and they’re happy, and it brings them together.” The adults in the theater become surrogate parents to her, the other young actors a kind of sibling group. The problem is that it ends. “Boom, you’re all alone again,” she says.

The first gay people Jennifer meets are through the theater, all of them men. There is no issue with homosexuality among this crowd, and so it all enters Jennifer’s mind as unremarkable, just something that exists. It doesn’t occur to her that it might be her way. She has crushes on boys in elementary school, a new one almost every year, and no crushes on girls, though she will later look back and see how certain friendships with females really upset her when they ended. How, in grade school, one especially close female friend would come over to her grandparents’ house to spend the night and, down in her grandfather’s den, she and Jennifer would share the hide-a-bed. With lights out, they would touch their lips through the sheet, practice for when the real thing came along.

—

In the spring of 1981, Jennifer’s grandfather dies. Around the same time, her grandmother retires from bookkeeping at the American Discount Corporation at the age of sixty-five. Now, when Jennifer comes over, it’s just her and her grandmother in the house with the wood-paneled den. They become very close.

Jennifer’s mom is dating a new man, Vance, who drives a tow truck and does maintenance at the Nites Inn Motel. Vance has a daughter, and
the two of them move into the yellow house, Jennifer now sharing a small room with someone who might, or might not, become her sister. Marcia is now several years into her methadone addiction, maybe two, maybe five. She doesn’t remember how long it all lasted. What she does remember is how Vance helped her get off the drug cold turkey by checking her into the Nites Inn for about a week. “Holed up,” Marcia says, “and just went through the whole stuff. It was tough. I remember sleeping a lot.”

Jennifer is grateful, but the relationship between herself and Vance is difficult, and Marcia’s recovery is gradual. One day, a small argument between Jennifer and Vance explodes into a loud standoff, things get said that are hard to back away from, and Jennifer leaves home to go live with her grandmother. Around the same time, Marcia and Vance move out of the rented yellow house and call off a wedding they’ve been planning. Where they go, Jennifer doesn’t know. She doesn’t speak to her mother for about two years. “When she left, I felt horrible,” Marcia says. But she also felt grateful. Jennifer’s grandmother would be able to give her opportunities Marcia couldn’t.

—

High school is a slippery place, so while Jennifer makes plenty of friends, she doesn’t tell any of them what’s been going on at home. She has her first boyfriend, tall, handsome, too cute for her in her mind, though she is aware of a certain amount of attention she receives from young men, sees heads turn to take in her olive skin, deep brown eyes, shiny jet-black hair. She just doesn’t put it all together. There’s a lot going on.

She does share a few things with the woman who teaches the school’s vocal jazz class, Susan Bardsley, who notices that outwardly none of it seems to be dragging Jennifer down. “She always had this innate goodness and strength in her,” Susan says. And then there was the voice. “It would be hard to miss what Jen had,” Susan says. “She possesses one of the most naturally beautiful voices I have ever experienced in my life, and I’m a professional musician now. I do nothing but musical theater. A
voice like hers is very rare.” It’s not just the voice, Susan says, but her ear—her control of pitch, her innate sense of musicality and rhythm, her ability to inhabit a song. “It’s as if her cup is very full of the music gift,” Susan says.

The public school Jennifer is attending, Roosevelt High School, is known for its musical theater program, and the director of that program, Ruben Van Kempen, notices Jennifer’s voice, too. Is stunned by it, actually. “A very clear, legitimate soprano voice,” he says. “It was pure. A really great vocal instrument.” In a setting that brings him mostly belters and character voices, Jennifer’s voice remains one of the top voices he’s ever heard.