Dreaming : Hard Luck and Good Times in America (9780307807274) Read online

  After a long time she rests. She can’t be said to lose her temper because she’s already lost it, but she loses something more. “Get that look off your face!” She’s panting with exertion. I don’t and won’t get that look off my face. (There’s another reason I can’t get that look off my face and she knows it and I know it. I’ve got a birthmark, something I’ve already begun to think of as a map of North and South America, on my right cheek. It’s purple, with a fingerprint of dark blue at the bottom. So I can’t get that look off my face.)

  I raise my chin and look right at her. Whatever she can give, I can take. She knows it and I know it. She pulls another switch from the hedge, peels the leaves off with one skinning gesture of her left hand and whales away at me again. The roses shimmer behind her, and the sky above is a deep afternoon blue. I breathe hard and squint.

  Finally, as she must, she gets tired. “All right. Go to your room. Think about what you’ve done. Wait until your father gets home.”

  I walk slowly, showing as much freedom, as much contempt, as I possibly can, across the soft green grass, then down the driveway—where once I saw, after my father left for work in the morning, a runover, flattened-out frog, all his red guts spilled out from his mouth—until I get to the back steps of the house. Once I get there, I begin to run, and run through the house—through the back porch with its wringer washing machine, through the spotless square kitchen with the oilcloth on the table, the dining room with fruit on that table, and my mother’s needlepoint on all the chairs, past the clean little living room with a pink-flowered couch and a green-flowered carpet. I turn into the hall and head for my room, full of sparkling bungalow windows, freshly waxed hardwood floors, and twin beds with freshly washed chenille bedspreads. There’s a night table. There’s a bookcase full of children’s books. It’s a pretty room.

  Because I go to Catholic school, my father has made a little shrine for me, a kind of birdhouse for statues which he’s hammered up above my bed. There’s a statue of the Virgin there—actually two, one about eight inches high of pink and blue ceramic, the other, two inches high, of glass. There are a couple of others made of soapstone, a material that tastes sour to the tongue. Sometimes I pray to the Virgin, or hope that I really have a guardian angel, but on this afternoon, I could be said to be praying to the Devil. I want my mother dead, and the whole lot of them dead—the kid who got me in trouble in the store, the nuns who give me grief down at St. Dominick’s, my mother.

  I know she won’t “tell my dad when he gets home,” because I haven’t done anything. She does this—and always has, since my very earliest memory. If we’re supposed to go to the zoo on a Saturday afternoon and it starts to rain in the morning, she’ll knock over a glass of milk at breakfast, accuse me of doing it, and say, “OK, we don’t go to the zoo this afternoon.” It’s so dumb, because she knows and I know that: A) it’s raining, and B) she knocked over the milk. I get blamed for shifts in the clouds and movements of the moon. My only weapon is that I’m on to her, and she knows it and I know it. I could go to my father about all this. But he works hard all day, comes home at six-thirty, I’m in bed at eight. And he plays golf on the weekends. Besides, he’s always joking around.

  The only clue I have that he knows is that once my mother promised me that he’d spank me and he did. Then he lost his own temper and told my mother never again. He plays the ukulele and tells jokes. My mother beats me until she’s ready to drop. The truth is, she hates me. The other truth is: I’m not too crazy about her either. The contest is and will be: who’s stronger? I know the answer, even though I’m six. I know I’m right, too. No contest. This doesn’t cheer my mother up any.

  In my room, I sit on one of the twin beds and look out the window. It must be close to five by now. I can hear Mother getting dinner ready. It’s all so self-contained. She’ll be scrubbing potatoes with an awful scrub, or snapping string beans with an awful snap. She’ll be slicing beets to make her pickled beets. She’ll be peeling a clove of garlic to put in her French dressing. She’ll shake the living daylights out of the dressing in its big mason jar and put it on the kitchen sink right next to Daddy’s bottle of scotch and her bottle of Hill and Hill Blend. We use jelly glasses for everyday and mother will, in the middle of cooking, pour out half a glass of Hill and Hill Blend, toss it down in one gulp, make a terrible face, pour a belt of tap water to chase it down, then go on cooking.

  When I come out, I set the table, under my mother’s careful eye. Then I go into the little living room to wait for Daddy.

  He’s always glad to see me. He walks the block from the end of the Five Car Line and so he always comes in smelling of fresh air, and tobacco, and scotch, and good wool. He’s careful about his clothes, and he’s handsome. He acts as if seeing me, coming upon me here in the darkened living room—because it’s dark by now—is the greatest thing that’s happened to him since last night.

  We go into the kitchen, where Mother is working. He hugs her, but she’s got other things on her mind: “I took the whole stove apart today, piece by piece,” she’ll say, or, more often, “I didn’t sit down once. I didn’t sit down all day!” Or sometimes, “I took Penny out shopping, and we were dressed and out of the house by ten o’clock. I don’t think you can call it shopping unless you spend the day doing it.”

  My father wants a kiss. He dances around the floor. He works in advertising now. “I’m the backbone of the agency,” he says. “Milt and Bernie always say that.” He’s the only gentile in an all-Jewish ad agency. He’s from central Texas, with a high school education and a love of literature. He wants to be a writer, but now, in 1940, coming out of the Depression, he likes his job. The Weinstein Agency carries “The Pep Boys”—Manny, Moe, and Jack—and Daddy swears that he’s the handsome guy in the middle of the logo—Moe, with the mustache and the big ears. My mother once persuaded me to write, in colored chalk, “My daddy is out of shape and has big ears,” on the sidewalk in front of the house.

  By now we’re at dinner. The levels of both the bottles have gone down considerably. It’s the kind of thing I didn’t notice then; I only remember now, or find out later. My father is cheerful as always. Only every once in a while will he say things like, “Sometimes, when you go away from home they give you a party, and you’re gone for six months and when you come home you think it will be some kind of big deal. But you come home, and they say, ‘Oh, it’s you, George. How’s it goin’?’ You’ve been gone for six months, and they haven’t even noticed.” Or, “Sometimes when you get up in the morning, you’re so lonely and down that you can’t think of a reason for getting up, but you do get up. And then it gets better.”

  Usually he talks about his childhood in Oakcliff, a suburb of Dallas, Texas: the Methodists singing, “Will there be any stars in my crown?” and the Baptists answering back, “No, not a-one. No, not a-one.”

  My part of the night is getting done by now. I have to be in bed by eight. From seven-thirty to eight we listen to the radio: I Love a Mystery. “The Decapitation of Jefferson Monk—a new Carlton Morse Adventure Thriller!” My dad gets a kick out of this show. He gets a kick out of anything. He gives it his best shot. My mother, exasperated and bored, insists I finish my potatoes and beans and halibut. She generally makes a dessert—apple brown betty with Grape-Nuts.

  Mother turns in the same time I do. She’s sick to her stomach; she has a headache, she feels “as if rubber bands are snapping” inside her head. She pulls the covers way over her shoulders, but leaves the bright lights on. She loves to go to sleep in what looks like broad daylight.

  When I get up at night to go to the bathroom, I’ll see my mother in bed, and if I look out into the other side of the house, my dad will be sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, or out in the living room in lamplight, reading a book. Mark Twain, or James Branch Cabell, or Herman Melville. Maybe, around one, he’ll go to bed. Both bottles will be empty. New ones will be up on the sink the next morning, as Mother, in a bad mood, squeezes fre
sh orange juice, pours a tablespoon of cod-liver oil into me, and fries up bacon and eggs.

  Where’s the sex in all this? Well, there’s a six-year-old masturbating furtively in the front bedroom, but things aren’t as bad for Dad as they seem. He will tell me when I’m twenty-five that he had a new, a different, woman every day of his adult life. This story may not be completely true but there’s truth in it.

  If weekday life seems a little too lonely, angry, heartbreaking, weekends are a horse of another color. Kate and George love to party. Dad used to be a newspaperman, working city-side for the Daily News, the cool paper of the day, and his friends are still hard-boiled newspapermen and their wives. Their names mean something in Los Angeles in the forties. Matt Weinstock, who writes a column for the Times. Erskine Johnson. Gene Coughlin, a freelancer who’s always getting a cover story on this magazine or that. One wonderful woman journalist, Virginia Wright, drama critic for the News, always gets us free tickets to the circus. Virginia and Hugh, her businessman husband, don’t come around much, but we spend some Sundays on their yacht.

  Our house fills up on Saturday night. The dining-room table gets covered with green baize, and the sideboard opens up to reveal packs and packs of playing cards, poker-chip holders that look like lazy Susans, and a wonderful collection of shot glasses with goofy sayings on them. A clutter of ashtrays—all Catalina pottery—little jars for matches, and jars of cigarettes. My father, party doll, attacks the big chunk of ice in the icebox with a dangerous ice pick, cracking off jagged shards to slip down in tall glasses.

  No fancy cocktails for this crowd. Just bourbon and scotch, and water and sometimes soda. The ratio of liquor to water is about fifty-fifty. There’s plenty of laughing and shouting, but nobody throws up. The whole idea is to hold your liquor, to “do it standing up,” to be a hard-boiled newspaperman—or his cool, alienated wife. To be handsome, to be pretty, to play poker well, to stay up late.

  On Sunday morning, Daddy gets up and puts away the chips and the glasses. Mother vomits every twenty minutes, groaning. But she stays in pretty good spirits. They talk about who lost what and who won what; about how Gene Coughlin came in late and his wife wouldn’t speak to him and no one else would either, and how Gene went around and around the table dejectedly, hoping someone would make room for him, but nobody would. “I just want to be part of the family circle,” he mourned, but he didn’t get to be that night, and the sentence passed into the language of the group, ironic and resonating.

  Around four o’clock Sunday afternoon, my dad goes into the back bedroom carrying a scoop of vanilla ice cream basted with a couple of tablespoons of Hill and Hill Blend. If it’s before four o’clock, Mother can’t keep it down. If it’s after four o’clock, she can. About four-thirty—if it’s winter, the sun will be slanting through the glass curtains, turning the living room rosy pink and lemon yellow—here comes Mother! Daddy laughs. I like it! I poured some of the drinks last night, I was part of the family circle, last night and again today.

  Other weekends we’ll hop in the car and make the hundred-mile drive from LA up over the Cajon Pass to the high Mojave Desert, where mother’s half sister Helen lives with her husband, Uncle Bob. Victorville, by the beginning of World War II, is swamped with young soldiers and their wives, living in back bedrooms, or hotel rooms, or even garages rigged with electric lights. Uncle Bob served in World War I. He was an air ace until he fell out of his plane and got a silver plate in his head. On top of that he got a good dose of mustard gas, so (I’m told pretty often) he’s not what he was when Aunt Helen married him, which is why they tend to live in property owned by his family, and why Aunt Helen works as an insurance agent in this godforsaken little town crawling with scorpions and centipedes and rattlers and tarantulas—but which still has the greatest fresh air and the most wonderful number of stars in its night sky.

  Aunt Helen and Uncle Bob live in a grim little motor court on the outskirts of town, but Aunt Helen is joviality itself when we drive up there. “Hi, Hi!” is her invariable greeting. “Let’s have a short snort!” Or, as variant: “It’s Toddy Time!” Daddy doesn’t mind this kind of family trip. He hates Aunt Helen, but he kind of likes her too. He used to go out with her. When she heartlessly stood him up one night in the deep past he took immediate revenge by taking out her much prettier younger sister, Kate. Listen, no hard feelings, at least not until further on into the weekend. Uncle Bob drifts about, silver-haired and courtly, always wanting to talk about “the British Isles,” but nobody takes him up on it. The whole bunch are mean to him, but he blows it off with quiet dignity. He’s done what they will never do. He stands still and takes their bad manners, with a cocktail in his hand.

  The drinking starts on Friday night and the atmosphere is festive. Sometimes the men jump off a garage with a beach umbrella as a parachute. Sometimes they sneak a veal chop into another person’s coffee. When this happens, the person with the veal chop in his coffee will solemnly remark, “You floored me,” and then stretch out flat on the floor.

  Kate and Helen ricochet with energy. What they love to do is sit down together at the upright piano and pick out “Nola” or “Kitten on the Keys.” On Sundays, no matter how hung over anybody is, everybody (Kate and George, Helen and Bob, sometimes my cousin Anne and always me) has to dress up and go to mass at St. Joan of Arc Church. But mostly they drink and play cards (bridge up here in Victorville) on a folding card table, with bridge cloth, bridge napkins, scoring pads of every variety. I’m locked out of the house for hours at a time while they play, out there in the hot little tunnel of the motor court. Once I get some revenge. When I’m nine or so I’ve been to see For Whom the Bell Tolls with Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper, and as we sit outside to catch a little afternoon breeze—again, with matching cocktail napkins and coasters and drink trays painted with sleeping Mexicans—I pipe up, commenting on Aunt Helen’s new haircut, “Gee, Aunt Helen, you’d look just like Ingrid Bergman if you weren’t so old and fat!” Even my father gets mad at me that time.

  But there are fresh Sunday mornings in Victorville, when my mother wakes me early and we walk on down through the scruffy little town to the railroad tracks, turn left and hotfoot it to one of several truckers’ coffee shops under huge green cottonwood trees. We have French toast and a stolen good time, until we have to go back home to Aunt Helen’s scrambled eggs.

  Everybody knows there’s a dark side to this. My father has a story he likes to tell about a reporter friend of his named Ed. Before Daddy was married, he and his reporter friends used to go over to each other’s parties. When Ed came over, he always got drunk in a big hurry and then threw up on the floor, broke some dishes, put his fist through the wall, and so on. When the time came for Ed to hold a party at his house, Daddy and a friend named Phil devised a plan. They sauntered into Ed’s house, downed about a bottle of scotch each. Phil threw all the highball glasses against the wall. Then he turned a bowl of potato salad over on the floor. My father staggered to the window and pulled down some drapes. Then he decided he needed a cigarette, and, taking out his lighter, reeled over to another set of drapes and the highly flammable, absolutely mandatory glass curtains that fluttered between them. Ed got the point. “OK, boys,” he said quietly to his drinking buddies, as his own wife wrung her hands at her trashed house, “I’ll lay off. You lay off too, will ya?” Daddy loved the story.

  Drinking meant a chance to turn over the rocks of daily life and see the crawly stuff underneath. It meant a chance for my Aunt Helen to tell her daughter she was “homely as a mud fence,” and triumphantly repeat, as Cousin Anne sat weeping, “Well, you are, you are! It’s best that you know the truth”—Helen being enthusiastically seconded by my pie-eyed mother: “It’s the truth, Anne. Face it now. Get it over with!”

  Back home, my dad’s friends were fun because they were supposed to be. My mom’s friends aimed to be respectable and genteel. My mother had met a fellow mom down at St. Dominick’s Elementary, Mary Sheehan. Her husband, John, had be
en a victim of the Depression: he pumped gas. Their little California bungalow, only four blocks away from us, was crammed with her mother’s good late nineteenth-century furniture. The walls were covered with family pictures. (My family didn’t have any pictures of their parents around at all.) Mary Sheehan, dressed in long, rustling silk hostess gowns, waited every night for her husband to come home. She served them both red wine in crystal glasses, poured from a crystal decanter. It really came from two-gallon jugs of very dubious rotgut under the kitchen sink. There might be as many as six of those jugs, ranging from full to empty.

  My dad made fun of the Sheehans, but Mary Sheehan, for five or ten years, was my mother’s soulmate in Eagle Rock. (Because they were friends, Molly, their daughter, was my friend.) Molly and I spent afternoons together, spent the night together, learned (more or less) how to keep house from each other’s moms. But Aunt Mary had a rich sister, Aunt Pete. She and her husband, Uncle Pat, patronized their poor relatives dreadfully. When Pete and Pat visited, Aunt Mary would implore my folks to come over.

  Pete would be decked out in heels and a knit suit. Pat would be in business wear, in contrast to my dad’s writerly tweeds and Uncle John’s gas-station work clothes, or freshly ironed white shirt. They’d bring their own bottles (as would my folks), and a horrid frivolity would begin: “Penny! Molly! Why don’t you two act as bartenders so we can all sit and talk?” Molly and I would check out Aunt Pete’s makeup—her bleached hair and store-bought hairdo. Her penciled eyebrows. Her bright gash of lipstick.

  Then we’d line ’em up; highball glasses with plenty of ice, fill them three-quarters full with scotch (or, for my mother, blended bourbon), tip in a little soda, put the glasses on trays with salted peanuts and ashtrays, and scoot politely around the living room handing out these bombs. Within forty-five minutes, five out of six adults would be reduced to blubber. My father would be conscious, irritated, but drinking right along. Mother, Aunt Mary, and Uncle John barely held their own, but Pete and Pat, the two fancy pushovers, would disintegrate before our eyes.