the sober blogger

In Darkness

2009-09-09T15:10:00.001-07:00

I had prepared myself for the fact that when my brother passed, I wouldn't be able to drown my sorrows in a bottle of Absolut. I had prepared myself to feel my feelings, however overwhelmingly sad they might be. I just hadn't expected to have to feel them so soon.

Sarah and I left the hospital after midnight. Drained and numb, not quite believing that what we'd just experienced wasn't some nightmarish hallucination, we went in search of a hotel. I followed Sarah's Prius in my rental car. Her iPhone led us to us a Best Western, where we checked in without baggage. The room was drab and forlorn, nothing special. Sarah took a shower. I turned off the room light and turned on the bedside lamp, which cut a hole of the gloom and filled it with yellow light. I lay on the bed in my clothes and listened to the running water. Sarah emerged from the shower complaining about ants. "They're everywhere," she groused, toweling her hair. She asked me if I had anything to help her sleep, so I gave her a Seroquel and popped one myself. I turned off the lamp. We lay down in our double beds and waited for them to work. We said nothing because there was nothing to say, though we each knew what the other was thinking: We are the only two left.

I had also prepared myself for the fact that when Kevin passed I'd be the only sibling left who remembered our father. That Kevin refused to discuss him was an ongoing source of frustration for me, but I knew he thought it best to leave the past locked up in its cast-iron safe. While we were in Washington in July, Sarah and I had speculated on what would have become of us had our father lived. She said she'd probably gone more toward a technical field of some type. I said I'd have probably married a Republican. It was Kevin, we agreed, who had suffered the most from his loss. A strong father figure, like a lighthouse, could have guided our brother safely to shore, helped him find his way, made sure he had health insurance so that, when the symptoms first emerged, he could have afforded to see a doctor.

For the past two years, Kevin and I been waging two parallel struggles, his against cancer, mine against addiction. This notion was nothing new. In Colorado we had groped through our solitary lives, each trying to shake a legacy of sadness off our hides, not knowing how to help each other through the pain. For a while our lives had fallen into something resembling a normal routine: marriage, children, steady jobs. And then it all fell apart once again. Our lives shattered like a piece of vintage pottery on a hard-wood floor. I'd lost one of my favorite pieces a few weeks previously, a piece of 1950s Gouda with angular lines and a marvelous patterned glaze. As I often do when I break pottery, I tried to glue it back together, but the shape was too complex for a perfect repair. So I did my best and placed it back on the shelf with its best angle showing, an imperfect version of its former self.

I was lucky. I could glue my life back together. Our diseases were not the same, not at all. Mine is survivable. His was not.

I remembered how I'd dreaded breaking the news to him about losing my pinky. "What?" he'd barked into his phone, astonished. I gave a bare skeleton of the circumstances--I'd drunk too much and fallen off a ladder at a friend's apartment--and then tried to pass it off as no big deal. "Don't worry, I've got nine more!" But I sensed that he finally realized the seriousness of my problem. This was not something he could fix, McGyver style. This was not a broken zipper or a faulty alternator. This was life and death.

Nine months later, he and Sarah and I took our bonding trip to Catalina. I hadn't entered treatment yet, and the lure of alcohol and drugs kept calling to me like a ship's bell through the mist. Back on the mainland, when we parted ways, Kevin had barked in his usual blunt fashion, "Stop drinking!" I haven't touched booze in the eight months since, as much for him as for me. I didn't want to add to his burden. His burden had been lifted; mine remained.

Sasha's burden hadn't lifted. It had killed her. Everyone in treatment had known had someone would relapse--the recidivism rate is 30 percent. But a fatal overdose? It was a shock to the system, and a warning. She and I were both born in San Diego a generation apart. I didn't known Sasha well enough to understand what old pain or tragedy might have driven her to use, only that her self-destructive impulse had been breathtakingly fierce. I thought about her parents in San Diego, so desperate to remove her from bad influences that they sent her to live in New York with her older sister, a banker. She had signed Sasha up for rehab, and for a while, it had worked. I'd watched her transform from a sullen bad girl with black-rimmed eyes and belly shirts to a fresh-faced beauty who wore spectacles and a smile. I recalled how one evening in the elevator, she had noticed my peace-symbol earrings and exclaimed, "I have the same ones!"

"Bought on sale at Macy's?" I asked, smiling.

"That's right!" she'd said, and we'd both laughed. I was pleased that a 20-year-old and I could have something in common besides a birthplace and substance abuse.

I lay in a dark motel room on a mattress where countless others had tried to find sleep. Kevin and Sasha converged in my mind, a Venn diagram of irony and grief. Two lives that overlapped only in their relationship to me. My brother and Sasha, both gone within a day of each other. A pair of deaths that left two pair of survivors: Sarah and I, lying on adjacent beds, and his two children, now fatherless. They had to organize a memorial service; go through Kevin's things and figure out what to save, what to discard; and travel to a remote bay on Catalina Island with their father's ashes in a coffee can. They would scatter them in the part of the Pacific that he loved the most. Then Rai would return to her home in Washington and Scott would move to Riverside County. He and Louise had lined up a house about a mile away from her parents' home. Like many units in Kevin's complex, his condo was worth less than the mortgage, and Scott, who couldn't swing the payments on his CVS salary, had no choice but to lock the door and walk away.

I wished that the four of us could have been closer in our mourning, but my outburst had embittered an already heart-wrenching situation. I felt deeply pained by the entire episode. I wished Kevin's passing could have been more peaceful on every level. Nothing came easily in our family. Nothing went as planned.

Sarah's breathing had taken on the regular rise and fall of sleep. I drifted off thinking of Kevin and Sasha, who were now assigned to permanent darkness. Tomorrow I would wake up in light, determined to stay sober, to honor their lives by saving my own.

The Nestling

2009-09-05T13:21:00.000-07:00

The time comes to take Kevin off life support. The nurse will wean him off the sedative while giving him high doses of morphine. To "keep him comfortable," she says. He will be awake when they remove the breathing tube, but he will not be in pain.

We have to wait for the morphine pump. It takes about 30 minutes to arrive. Sarah puts her bow to the viola strings and begins to play Ave Maria. I touch Rai's arm and tell her I'm sorry for my outburst, and she seems to accept my apology. Scott holds his head in his hands and cries. I ask the nurse to remove the soft restraints from his arms, so she unfastens the Velcro straps and takes them off and puts them aside. Then she begins to clean his face with baby wipes, gently, softly. When Rai asks if she can help, the nurse says of course and hands her a wipe. I'm sitting in a chair on the far side of the bed facing the doors. Restless, I reach for Kevin's gym bag.

"I found his bible," I say, removing it from the side pocket.

"Read something," Rai tells Scott. "One of the Psalms."

Scott turns to Psalm 27 and begins to read aloud. "The lord is my light and my salvation/Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life/of whom shall I be afraid?" The room resonates with competing sounds: Scott's deep, rumbling voice, the viola's beautiful notes, the respirator's regular wheeze, the beeping EKG. I can't take my eyes off the various ragged lines that limp across the screen: heart rate and blood pressure, both systolic and dyostolic. Medication and the ventilator are keeping the numbers steady, but it's all a ruse.

As I sit and listen, as I watch Kevin lying in the bed, so quiet and helpless and still, my mind returns to a memory that has come to haunt me.

It was 1970. We had just moved to San Jose. I had become a gloomy, preoccupied child, prone to dreaminess and obsessive thoughts, largely friendless. I had, as they say, a rich inner life. On the street side of our corner property, a strip of grass was sandwiched between a high fence and a concrete walkway that ran alongside the house. A family of birds had nested in the eaves, and one day, while walking toward the backyard, I found a baby bird on the path. I knelt to inspect it. It was thumb-sized and featherless, only days out of its egg. Translucent lids were drawn tightly over its bulging eyes; its wings were pulled in tight to its body, and its minuscule beak was slightly parted, as if interrupted in mid-song. Whether it had been pushed from its nest or falling I couldn't say, but it was quite obviously a goner.

I decided that this dead baby bird was about the loneliest thing I'd ever seen.

I didn't know what to do. I couldn't save it, but I couldn't leave it there, either. Throwing it onto the compost alongside the old lettuce and the melon rinds was out of the question. So I snapped a broad leaf off a nearby shrub, nudged the end under the bird and scraped it off the walkway like a piece of gum. I carried my prize into the kitchen and set it on the counter, but not before making sure mom was nowhere around since she wouldn't appreciate my germing up the clean Formica. I opened the door of the cabinet where mom kept the empty baby food jars. After Sarah had consumed the contents, mom would wash the jar, being sure to scrape off the Gerber label and the glue, let it air- dry and put in on the shelf, saying they were perfect for storing small things like nails or screws.

Kevin enters the memory. "What are you doing?"

"I found this baby bird outside. I wanna keep it."

"It's gonna decompose and stink up the house."

"So what should I do?"

"You need to keep it in formaldehyde." We stood there, considering this fact. Formaldehyde being in short supply, I suggested an alternative. "How about vinegar? Pickles stay good forever."

The young scientist knitted his brow and pondered for a few beats. "It's better than nothing I guess." He retrieved a bottle of Heinz white vinegar from the pantry cupboard. "Put the bird in first."

Gingerly, I extricated the bird from the leaf and transferred it to my palm. I picked it up with my other hand and placed it in the jar with the precision of a diamond cutter setting a stone. Kevin filled the jar two-thirds full with vinegar and screwed on the metal lid. The bird didn't float, but stayed on the bottom of the jar.

"Now what are you going to do with it?"

"Put it my room."

Any other brother might have considered this a weird thing for an 10-year-old girl to do. But I can't recall one time where Kevin was cruel or demeaning to me. Considering what we'd been through in the past few years, this was pretty normal stuff. Besides, he was his father's son; he'd trapped enough kangaroo rats and hooked enough fish and caught enough bugs that he knew nature's cycles weren't so much mysterious as they were predictable and fascinating; that all God's creatures were worthy of being poked, tested, examined, collected. So he just nodded his head. I carried the jar upstairs and put in on the window sill in my room where I could see it from my bed. Once in a while, while reading or listen to American Top 40, I'd look up and consider it for a while. It made my heart hurt in a way that I almost enjoyed. The bird may have died alone, but I wanted to make sure that its death didn't go unnoticed.

The vinegar did a good job because it took a couple of months before decomposition set in. Eventually I had no choice but to give the dissolving nestling a decent burial, which I did, under a lemon tree off the back patio.

Scott hands me the bible. "I'll read Psalm 23," I announce. I know it well, having memorized it at bible camp in exchange for a woven patch. The valley of death is yawning before us, hemmed in on both sides by mountains of grief. I read it slowly, solemnly, and when I'm done, I close the bible and hand it to Rae.

A male nurse enters the room, pushing the morphine pump. Sarah stops playing and puts her viola in its case. We stand by, slightly dumbfounded, as the other nurse hangs the bag of morphine and begins to adjust the sedative levels. Then she leaves.

Almost immediately Kevin opens his eyes and begins to stir. He'd been lying on his side, and now he rolls onto his back so that he's facing the ceiling. He begins to choke. "Get the nurse," I plead to no one in particular, but she comes back of her own accord and suctions out the back of his throat, which had filled with saliva, cooing comfortingly to him all the while. Another nurse enters and together they remove the breathing tube from Kevin's throat. No amount of television medical shows can prepare you for seeing these procedures in real life; it is painful to watch, every second of it. They settle him down and pull the blanket up to his chest and up the morphine and leave.

Disoriented, Kevin's eyes scan the room wildly until they settle on me. Our eyes lock for a moment and a confused look crosses his face, as if he to ask me, What the hell is going on?

Rai and I are standing on his left side, Sarah and Scott on his right. We are stroking his arms and forehead, holding his hands. He flings his right arm up over his head and it lands on the pillow. We think he is trying to find a more comfortable position until the nurse comes in and pushes his morphine level as high as it can go. "He's agitated," she says. "We'll give him some Ativan to relax him." She injects the drug into his IV and leaves again. Kevin immediately becomes calmer. He brings his arm back down to his side. We hold his hands and tell him, through our tears, that it was all right, that he can let go, that the pain is going to end. His breathing becomes labored and slow. As he exhales through his open mouth he makes two small sounds, uh-uh, as if replying in the negative to some question we can't hear. His eyes are fixed on a point in the far corner of the room, near the ceiling as if looking at someone or something we can't see. I watch the numbers on the EKG go down, the lines begin to flatten. His exhalation slows to a single uh. The lines go flat. The nurse comes in. "He's gone," she says gently. But he was not alone.

High Noon in Fire Season

2009-09-04T16:30:00.000-07:00

He died as the worst wildfires in decades swept through the San Gabriel Mountains. The drought-fueled inferno sent a mushroom cloud of smoke into the sky and drew a brown scrim across the horizon. It turned the waxing moon into an amber disc. In Mission Viejo, the leaves on the trees withered, once-lush lawns grew bald spots and the tinder-dry landscape began to return to desert. Thermometers hit the triple digits. Even for Orange County in August, it was hot. But the climate inside Saddleback Memorial was as cool as an icebox, as a last good-bye.

After I saw Kevin, I was shown to a small waiting room. My nephew Scott and Scott's half-sister Rai were there, ages 20 and 24, too young to lose a father. Rai, whose height and build disguised the fact that she was in her second trimester of pregnancy, sat on a ledge by the window, legs dangling. She had arrived from Seattle that morning. Scott, his face flushed from crying, sat looking at his hands. I gave each a hug and was introduced to a gentle middle-aged woman named Vicki. She represented Saddleback Church, where Kevin had worked for 20 years before leaving to sell real estate. We were all surprised, not to be here, but to be here so soon. We thought we had more time to prepare ourselves.

"What happened?" I asked Scott. "Did the doctors explain it to you?"

My nephew looked at me steadily, strongly. "They thought he couldn't breath because fluid was pressing on his lungs. But they didn't find as much as they thought they would. Instead they found a giant tumor pressing on his lungs."

"But why did he fail so suddenly? When I talked to him on the phone he didn't sound that bad..."

"When I talked to him yesterday morning, he told me he was ready. And I think he let go. The will has so much to do with it."

The church had kindly offered to pay for Kevin's cremation and to host a memorial service. Vicki told me she had discussed his final wishes with him a few weeks earlier. She said that he had accepted his fate with the same practicality with which he approached fixing a toaster or building a birdhouse. He wanted his ashes put in a Folger's can.

"Why a Folger's can?" I asked Scott.

"It's a scene from The Big Lebowski. Two guys put their friends' ashes in a Folger's can, but when they go to spread them, the wind blows them back into the faces. He loved that movie."

We discussed the logistics of reaching the remote bay on Catalina Island where Kevin wanted his ashes spread. When Scott said it was a three-hour hike from Two Harbors, I chirped, "Oh, I've always wanted to see Catalina's interior."

Scott and Rai exchanged a quick glance. "It looks like the rest of California," he said.

Then he left the room to visit his father again. "I'd love to have some of the ashes to keep," I told Rai, yet at the idea, she looked panicked. "You'll have to ask Scott about that," she said, and that's when I realized that the two 20-somethings were in charge. It made sense that Kevin would rely on the two people to whom he was closest, but I still felt a slight sting of rejection, like the quick, darting attack of a horsefly on a warm summer day.

A few people from the church arrived. They gave us their condolences and sat with us for a while. Before leaving, the only man, an elderly fellow in a Hawaiian shirt, led us in prayer. I had no choice but to go along with it. I closed my eyes and half-listened as he murmured for about two minutes, but when he said something about Kevin being saved, my ears perked up. My brother had never mentioned that detail; in fact, he once told me he went out of his way to avoid the religious aspect of his job. I remember wondering how he could get away with that seeing as how he worked in one of the largest evangelical Christian mega-churches in the nation, but Kevin had made staying below the radar into an art form.

Kevin's ex-girlfriend Bette, the woman he should have made his second wife, arrived from Huntington Beach. She had spoken to him on the phone the day before and had come for what she thought was a routine visit, not realizing his sudden turn for the worse. She was shaken and crying and kept apologizing for being shaken and crying. I'd only met her once, years earlier, while she and my brother were still dating, but suddenly I liked her immediately. We went out into the heat to buy snacks and Starbucks, and during our outing she told me she'd worked as a hypnotist until the economy drove her to switch to selling insurance. I told her I wished Kevin had married her. She told me they'd gone so far as to drive to Nevada so Kevin could ask Bette's father for permission to marry his daughter. But for some reason, he never asked, and he and Bette broke up soon thereafter.

By the time we got back to the ICU waiting room, Sarah had arrived from Miami, where she'd been on vacation with her family. She'd flown into LAX, dropped her kids off with a friend and driven south, making sure to bring her viola.

Together we went to our brother's room. "Kevin, it's Sarah, I'm here," she said softly. She had brought Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suites, arranged for viola, and as I sat with him, she began to play, knowing he could hear her. The deep, rich notes filled the room and drowned out the beeping machines and wheezing respirators. The notes drifted past the sliding glass doors into the rest of the ICU, and when she was finished, the nurses told her how beautiful her playing was. But he couldn't tell her. He couldn't speak at all.

Sarah left and I sat with Kevin for a while. I couldn't think of anything to say. It was an exaggerated version of one of our telephone conversations--a drawn-out pause, a practiced silence. Then I spotted, sitting on a chair in the corner, the gym bag he'd packed before checking in. Feeling only slightly nosey, I unzipped it and examined its contents. I saw his laptop and began to cry as I recalled how he took it everywhere, including dialysis and chemo. It was his lifeline to a world beyond his apartment and doctor's offices and the cubicle at the church's administration building. I cried when I saw the blue fleece sweatpants he always wore, and a pair of gym shorts, and his toiletries, all packed when he assumed he'd be checking out. I unzipped a side pocket and found a book. I pulled it out and saw it was a bible. It was a new edition, probably a gift from the church. Inside I found the hospital chaplain's card. That Kevin had brought a bible surprised me at first, but then I thought that it would make sense that as he approached the end he would turn to its promises of eternal life. I wondered if he'd been saved recently, or if, knowing I'm a skeptic, he'd kept his religious status a secret for fear I'd find it corny or delusional. I would have, once, but now I respected anything that gave my brother comfort in his final days.

Kevin's ex-wife Rhonda was the last person left to say good-bye. She was coming in from Seattle. Her father and sisters and nieces, who live in the area, showed up first. They were there to support Rae, Rhonda's daughter. Our growing numbers necessitated a move to a larger waiting room, beyond the locked double doors of the ICU. We'd have to push a buzzer and give our name to be let in. "Kevin meant so much to our family," one of the sisters told us, though as far as I knew, they hadn't seen him for years. Sarah and I didn't know them at all, and I found it ironic that we were outnumbered by relative strangers.

Finally Rhonda got there. She was much heavier than I remembered, but her blonde hair still fell past her backside. Her blue T-shirt, blue as her eyes, bore the name of the holistic wellness center she owns with her third husband. We shared a tepid hug. In the years following the divorce, retinitis pigmentosa had claimed most of her eyesight, and she had to be led by the hand to the ICU to say good-bye to her ex-husband. Scott, her son with Kevin, was already there.

With little to do but worry and wait, I opened my phone and pulled up my contact list. I scrolled down, weeding out the people I rarely called. Most of them were my fellow IOPers from the treatment center. I saved Danielle, saved Toby, saved Michelle. When I came to Sasha, I hesitated, then pressed erase. If I wanted to contact her, I could do it via Facebook. I'd been keeping tabs on Sasha on Facebook, and the photos she'd posted over the course of the summer--trips to Vegas and the Hamptons with friends--had concerned me. I looked for signs of a relapse--a drink or joint in her hand, a wasted expression. In one photo I saw what looked like a hookah pipe. She was so beautiful, always smiling, a 20-year-old with everything to live for.

I heard my cell phone beep on a table, indicating I'd gotten a text. I left Sarah to read it. I was surprised to see it was from Danielle, my young friend from the treatment center. I hadn't seen her since July, when she'd asked me to speak at an AA meeting she was chairing. I received her daily "Just for Today" text, we left the occasional comment on each other's Facebook walls.

Her message read: "I can't believe about Sasha."

I didn't know what she meant. What? I texted back.

Her reply: I'll call you in two minutes. I had a bad feeling.

"What happened?" I asked when she called, though I already knew.

"Sasha's dead. She overdosed yesterday." Danielle's voice was trembling.

"No!" I moaned,. "Was it heroin? Did she inject heroin?"

"Yeah. I don't know anything else." Her voice rose. "I can't take this anymore. I'm surrounded by death. My friends are dropping one by one. I've lost four this summer alone."

By this time I'd left the waiting room and had walked into the hallway crying no no no. Danielle was crying on the other end. When I told her where I was and why, she cried even harder. I asked her where she was; she said was at home in Texas. "Danielle, just promise me you'll be careful. You need to keep yourself safe. Get back to New York, away from all those influences, those friends. Get away from them."

This was unfathomable. While my brother, who fought so valiantly to live, was dying in another room, Sasha had thrown her life away as casually as a smoker tossing a cigarette butt onto the sidewalk. I had erased Sasha's name from my phone only 10 minutes ago, and now she was dead. Sarah would have called this eerie coincidence a sign, a premonition of the coming news. Whatever it was, I was shaken to my core, though not as much as Danielle, who was Sasha's age. They had entered the IOP a week apart, and now one of them was dead. The overwhelming irony of the moment set me to such a howling that Sarah and Vicki rushed out into the hallway to find me curled in a fetal position.

"I have to go," I whispered into the phone.

"I love you," Danielle sobbed.

"I love you too. I'll be in touch. Please take care of yourself."

Sarah and Vicki helped me back to the waiting room as I was the blind one. Like Danielle, I felt besieged by death, reeling. And I was still reeling when Rhonda returned and joined her family. She shook her head, which set her long hair to swaying, and looked into the distance, beyond the walls of the waiting room to the nearby duplex where the four of them--Rhonda and Kevin and Rai and Scott--had lived happily, at least for a few years. "He didn't even look like himself."

Then Rai came into the waiting room and said, "It's time." It was 11 p.m.

Scott was still in the UCI room. Vicki sat in a chair. Rai was standing in the middle of the room, near Vicki. But when Sarah and I stood up to go with Rai, she turned to us and said, "Dad told us he only wanted Scott and me in the room with him when he passed."

The sting blossomed into a body blow. I was literally breathless. He didn't want his sisters there when he died? I couldn't believe it.

Sarah said, "I feel like someone just punched me in the stomach." And then she burst into tears. I stood up and said, "I don't accept this."

"We're just trying to respect Kevin's wishes," Vicki said quietly.

"He explicitly said he didn't want us there?" I asked sharply.

"He said he didn't want a crowd," Rai replied for her.

"You consider us part of the crowd?" Now I was livid. I regretted attacking Rai, whom I liked. My brother loved her; she'd brought him joy and happiness. But my fury had jumped the firebreak. It could not be contained.

"I'm sorry, I've never done this before," Rae said plaintively, showing her palms in a gesture of helplessness. Sarah was sobbing uncontrollably. They had no idea who much we needed to be with him, no idea at all. "Why are you telling us this now?" I said loudly. I didn't want to shout but I couldn't help it. And all the while I was shouting I was thinking how Kevin, the man for whom drama and fuss were akin to third-degree burns, would have hated this. Discord was the last thing he'd have wanted, but I couldn't just roll over.

Rai fled the room and joined her family in the hallway. I could see her crying in her mother's arms. I felt horrible about yelling at her, so I walked into the hallway to apologize and ask if we couldn't find a compromise of some kind. But before I could say that, one of Rai's cousins, a young woman I'd never met before tonight, emerged from the crowd of relatives, looked me straight in the eye and said, "It's about respecting Kevin's wishes."

She said it in a mild, matter-of-fact sort of way, as if she was trying to help. She didn't. "Sometimes it's not about what the dying want but what the living need," I snarled, and I stalked back into the room. Sarah was curled up in a chair in the corner, disconsolate. I sat down and put my arms around her, too angry and confused to cry. "I've always felt excluded from his life," she cried, gasping for air. Her misery fueled my rage further. I would fulfill my reputation as the out-of-control, nine-fingered, drug-addict sister with the unpredictable temper. The scary one, made no less scary by sobriety. The heat of my anger and grief would scorch the countryside, leaving no one spared.

"Who are you to tell me when I can be with my own brother?" I screamed at the cousin across the room. "Where were you when it was just the three of us?"

The remarks were directed at all of them, strangers except for Rai. He had planned to adopt her years earlier, but then her mother left him and took Rai with her. Still, he had accepted her as his own, bought her prom dresses and taken her camping and sailing and been the father she'd never had. Suddenly, we were on opposite sides, rivals for the affection and attention of a dying man. The same cousin who'd spoken to me in the hallway closed the door to the waiting room to shut out my ranting.

In the middle of this crisis strode Bette, Kevin's ex-girlfriend. She'd been elsewhere in the hospital when the dispute erupted. I briefed her on the problem and she said, "Let me talk to them. Maybe we can reach a compromise."

Bette had temporarily dampened the flames, yet I was still smoldering when she returned, followed by the cousin who'd offended me so deeply. "We all grieve in our own way," the cousin said in a gesture of peace.

"Rai and Scott say you're welcome to stand outside the glass doors," Bette said. And then Rai came in and said, "You can go in now."

I pushed the button and said my name and we were buzzed into the ICU. Rai followed us to Kevin's room. I figured Sarah and I would be allowed to say good-bye to Kevin and then asked to leave. But when we got there, Scott, who hadn't witnessed the uproar but had heard about it, simply shrugged and said, "It's all right. You guys can stay."

And with that, the fire was out.

What the Jade Plant Taught Me

2009-08-29T16:58:00.001-07:00

As I believe I've already told you, my brother's condo had a small patio off the kitchen area, beyond a set of sliding glass doors. He liked to sit out there and smoke cigarettes and listen to the birds. The first time I visited him after his diagnosis, in the winter of 2008, I saw that he had let it fall into disrepair. Since he was usually a neat person, this was a sign of how ill he was. Sara and I spent hours cleaning it up until he told us to stop messing with his environment. There were several plants he had rescued from our mother's backyard jungle after her death, including an elephant philodendron and a tall, spindly jade plant. Right before I left, he asked me if I wanted a cutting off of the jade plant. I said sure. He took a kitchen knife and sawed off a sprig as I watched.

I couldn't get used to the way he looked in sickness. His fluid retention was so severe that he could barely walk. He looked nine months pregnant and his legs were swollen and spongy to the touch, yet his upper body was emaciated. His head seemed too large for his shoulders and the skin hung off his upper arms. His skin was yellow and waxen, and his eyes had the wild, frightened look of an animal caught in a leg trap. When I first saw him, we hugged hello, and then I went out to retrieve my suitcase from my rental car. The lot was reserved for residents, so I'd parked at the curb. Once there, I leaned against the car door and sobbed. He was already stage V; tumors had entwined themselves like kudzu around his vital organs. Later, Kevin told me that the doctors had given him two years at the outside, secreting their terrible fluids, overwhelming his kidneys and shutting them down.

As Kevin cut the sprig off the jade plant, I thought of our mother, and not just because it had been her plant. All the years they spent together must have rubbed off on him because he'd picked up many of her mannerisms and habits, such as sending me off with a botanical parting gift. I can't remember all the times she lopped off an aloe vera leaf and handed it to me, its mortal gash oozing a clear, sticky with the admonition to use it on a sunburn or a cut. When it came to aloe, she was ahead of her time.

The jade plant's twiggy stem was about ten inches long, and its thick, glossy leaves were the size of baby's teeth. Holding the cutting his his puffy hand, Kevin shuffled into the kitchen and wrapped it in a damp paper towel to keep it moist during the flight home. "When you get home just stick it in some dirt. It's pretty hard to kill."

When I got home to New York, I stuck the cutting in some dirt, put it in the dining room window and forgot about to water it. The cutting withered in the weak winter sunlight. One by one, the tiny leaves dropped off until nothing was left but the stem.

A few months later I returned to California. Twice-weekly dialysis had returned Kevin's legs to normal but his belly was still distended and his arms thin. He'd been undergoing chemo and had lost enough hair that he decided to shave his head. His skin was crackled and pale, ghost-like. He was always cold. Yet he insisted on cooking dinner for everyone, on driving and grocery shopping and all the other activities that, if he stuck to them, would prove he wasn't going anywhere. He asked me how the jade plant was doing.

"Um, I think it died. All the leaves fell off."

He shook his head and went to cut me another one. I stuck that one in a pot, too, but this time I took care of it. I watered it every week. I took the dead twig and stuck it in dirt and put it next to the healthy one in the dining room window. And then a miracle happened. It came back to life. Tiny green leaves appeared and grew and multiplied. Kevin was right: jade plants are hard to kill. With a little care, I'd brought the first cutting back from the dead.

When I saw Kevin last December, he looked astonishingly well, especially considering his appearance a few months earlier. The experimental treatment he'd received at City of Hope Hospital seemed to have made a difference. He and Sarah and I were able to go to Catalina for two days. We did sightseeing stuff, such as taking a submarine ride into the bay. It was just the three of us in that womb-like space, staring out the windows at the sunfish and perch. We didn't go very deep. I was mesmerized by the kelp gardens, the way the golden seaweed waved and shimmered in the currents. I looked at Kevin looking at the fish. He was as handsome as I'd ever seen him, and I told him so. Unaccustomed to flattery, he simply blushed and said, "Yeah, cancer looks good on me."

I returned to California in June, unsure what to expect. And when I saw that the ascetis had returned, as had his wasted appearance and tired shuffle, my spirits fell. He was an expert at hiding his true feelings, so if he was frightened, I couldn't tell. When I left I told him I'd see him in September, when I planned to come out for Sarah's 40th birthday.

Upon returning to New York, I continued to tend the jade plants. I watered them and tied their fragile branches together, and when the first cutting was strong enough I transplanted it into a pretty vintage flower pot. Then I placed them outside in the secret garden where they could catch the frequent rains. One day in July, deciding they deserved to be shown off, I moved them to the front porch. I put the second cutting on a wicker table and the first one, in its pretty orange pot, on the front step. Two weeks later, Sarah and I went to Washington, D.C., but I returned to find the jade plant missing from the steps. Astonishingly, someone had stolen it. Though I live on a street with a lot of foot traffic, theft is rare. Someone had walked through my gate, picked up the pot and taken it home. I drove around the neighborhood for an hour, hoping that the perpetrator had been stupid enough to place it on their own front porch. But it was gone.

Last Tuesday, I got an email from Rae, Kevin's daughter. She wrote that Kevin was entering the hospital in order to have fluid drained from around his lungs, one of which had shrunk to the a size of a lemon. He would be in the hospital for four or five days. She also said that the doctors told him that he had three to six months to live.

I called him right away. "I hear you're going into the hospital," I said.

"I'm already there. I'm in a bed right now, getting drained," he replied. His voice sounded relatively strong, but he was coughing a lot. "I've been having trouble breathing." Then he paused. "I have something else to tell you."

"What?" But I knew what he was going to say.

"Three to six months. That's all I've got left."

I pretended I hadn't known. I said, "Shit," followed by, "Let me know if there's anything I can do for you."

"There's not much you can do now."

"I guess not. But I'll be out in a couple of weeks, and we'll talk about stuff then."

My brother had a funny way of saying "bye." It came out in one quick syllable that sounded like bah. It was a light-hearted farewell, one meant to convey a lack of worry or concern. He said "Bah!" to which I replied, "I'll call you tomorrow."

But the next day, when his voicemail picked up, I had a bad feeling. He usually answered his cell in the hospital simply because he had nothing better to do.

On Wednesday night, around 12 a.m., the phone rang. Nothing good comes of a midnight telephone call. Dave answered, and a few seconds later handed me the phone. "It's Sarah. She won't tell me what's wrong."

What was wrong was that Kevin had crashed. Sarah said the doctors felt he'd make it through the night, but had no more than 24 hours left.

I was on a plane the next morning, and by 2 p.m., I was at Saddleback Memorial Hospital in Mission Viejo. I was directed to the ICU, and as I was buzzed through the double doors, it hit me that this was the same unit where, in 2001, our mother had passed away. Neither Sarah nor I had been there when she took her last breath. I did not intend to make the same mistake this time. "He's on life support and heavily sedated," the nurse told me. She was kind. "He tried to put out his breathing tube this morning, so we gave him a paralytic to keep him immobile. But you can go in and see him. He can hear you speaking, he'll know you're there."

Kevin was lying on his back, but his face was turned to one side, toward the respirator. Every few seconds the machine forced air down the tube and into his lungs, causing his head to jerk a bit as if he was having a nightmare from which he couldn't awaken. His arms were wrapped in Velcro sleeves which I later learned were weighted to keep him from raising his arms. The sight of him, so helpless and close to death, forced the tears out of my eyes and down my cheeks. I told him I was there and I held his swollen hand. Cruel-looking sores and scabs covered his forearms. Machines beeped and hummed, and an IV stand held a half dozen plastic bags containing clear liquid. The respirator wheezed like a scuba diver drawing breath from his oxygen tanks. I sat him with for about half an hour, not knowing what to say, but saying what I could. His eyes were closed. I asked him to squeeze my hand if he could hear me, and he gave a feeble squeeze. I stroked his forehead, massaged his feet, ran my fingers through his thin red-blonde hair, which showed not a speck of gray.

"I love you," I said. "I'm sorry if I never said it often enough." Then I bent over to kiss his forehead. His skin was slick with perspiration and had a pungent, unpleasant smell. Perhaps it was the odor of imminent death. There would be no miracle comeback for my brother, but I'd never expected one. The jade plant's return to life never fooled me into thinking that death could be thwarted with a little water and direct sunlight. It taught me that tending to any living thing shouldn't be about the outcome--that will take care of itself-- as much as the act of nurturing for its own sake. If you do your job well, the result is a thing of such fragile beauty that when it's taken from you, you're not really surprised.

A Thousand Cranes

2009-08-21T09:12:00.001-07:00

That very same August, 1,200 miles north of Albany, Georgia, a nine-year-old boy sat at a picnic table with a dozen other kids, folding paper cranes. This was his second summer at Camp Trywoodie in Hyde Park, New York. Trywoodie was a progressive sort of place founded in the late 1950s by a two teachers who were drummed out of the New York City public school system during the McCarthy witch hunts, and the boy's mother worked there as a group leader. The new John Lennon song drifted from a radio turned to WABC. All we are saying is give peace a chance, the boy sang softly to himself as he worked the colored paper into a bird. Every finished crane was tossed into a cardboard box, and when they'd reached their number, the box was sealed, addressed to President Richard Nixon c/o The White House, and driven to the post office.

The kids have been told that according to Japanese custom, if you fold 1,000 paper cranes you'll get your wish. The kids wished for an end to the war. Peace was the theme of their camp Olympics. They sang Woody Guthrie songs and sailed the Hudson on Pete Seeger's sloop, The Clearwater. They staged plays about the equality of all people, whatever their color or station in life. The boy doodled peace signs on everything. One time, while driving through the South, he'd made the peace sign out the window to passers-by. When his mother noticed, she'd quietly but firmly put her own hand over his and lowered it out of sight. "Not here," she told him.

The Kent State shootings upset him terribly and not just because they happened on his 10th birthday: He couldn't understand why American soldiers would shoot American citizens simply for speaking their minds. He almost canceled his party. On May 8, 1970, he and his mother boarded a bus for Washington D.C. Two among 100,000, they held hands and walked quietly along with the other protesters. He asked his mother who those men were taking their photograph, and she answered, "People from the government, probably."

The boy who would become my husband grew up believing he had a file with the FBI.

Dave was a doctor's son. He lived in a brownstone on Manhattan's Upper East Side with his father, a psychiatrist, and his mother, a teacher. In the sixth grade he started taking the subway downtown to The Little Red Schoolhouse, a private school founded by the same lefties who'd started Camp Trywoodie. His mother enrolled him in Hebrew school, but he didn't go. He got away with it for a while, then one day, his mom asked him how class had gone. "Fine," he said, whereupon she'd informed him that the school had called wondering why Dave had never shown up. He refused to have a bar mitzvah because he didn't believe in God and bar mitzvahs were all about envelopes full of money anyway.

His parents separated in 1972. Dave and his brother lived in the brownstone with their mother for two more years before moving to a high-rise apartment on East 82nd Street. Dave's love for his mother was unquestioned, but his relationship with his father was more complex. He couldn't forget the way his father treated his mother, how demanding and self-indulgent he was. When he left her for an old med school friend named Paul--though it took him years to admit that's what he did--Dave wasn't surprised, and neither was his mother. His younger brother, on the other hand, was in denial for decades. It took 11 years for the divorce to finally happen. Dolores just wanted to be done with it, with him, so she asked for nothing but child support. Determined to provide for herself and her sons, she returned to school and became a psychiatric social worker. Dave couldn't stand watching his mother struggle to make ends meet while his father bought property and antiques and traveled the world.

Dave always worked. During the summer and school holidays he bused tables at a fancy fish restaurant, working his way up to waiter. The summer he was 17, he took a two-week baby-sitting for a wealthy family iwho lived in the city but raised trotters in Pennsylvania. An Israeli family was staying as houseguests, and one day the beautiful teenaged daughter lured him to the pool house. She returned to Israel, and today he can't even remember her name. Dave enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in psychology and minoring in film, with an emphasis on partying. After college he moved in with his mother and took a series of slave-wage jobs in the film industry. By the summer of 1984, he was working as a freelancer making $150 a day for driving cargo vans around New York City. He spent Labor Day weekend helping his best friend Josh make an industrial film about Alzheimer's Disease. Steve's friend from California was due to arrive on Friday, so he left a key with the doorman along with a note saying that his mother was away for the weekend and to make myself at home.

By the time he got home it was almost 9 p.m. He found me sitting in his mother's bedroom watching The Bridge Over the River Kwai. It was the part where the bridge is about to be demolished. I looked up from the television and saw the most beautiful smile I'd ever seen on a man. Josh was behind Dave as they entered the room, and even her felt the visceral electricity that crackled between us . I'd never felt anything like it. And, apparently, neither had Dave. Maybe it was because we each had less hair than the first time we'd met in California: he'd shaved his scraggly red beard, and I'd cut off most of my hair. In other words, we could see each other much better this time, and we liked what we saw. The three of us went out for Thai food, and our rapport was so easy it seemed as if we'd been friends for years.

Dave had to work on Saturday too, so I explored the city from stem to stern. As with Dave, I'd met the city once before. It was a longer time ago, yet the metropolis felt familiar. In the mid 1980s Manhattan was dirtier, edgier and more dangerous, and I loved it. It felt as if I'd come home to a place I didn't remember yet had never forgotten.

That night, in a city of 1,000 restaurants, Dave and Josh and I went back to the same Thai restaurant for dinner. I liked the pad thai.

I spent Sunday with several of Dave and several of his friends from Penn. They included a big teddy bear intellectual named Donnie and a whip-smart brunette named Katrina. She had lost a leg to cancer as a child and gets around on crutches, unbothered by her empty pants leg. I admired her grit and energy and lack of self-consciousness. I wondered what it would be like to lose a piece of one's body, and how long it had taken until the leg became an acceptable loss. They were a whole new level of smart, Ivy League smart; and for the most part, I listened. We wandered around Central Park sharing a joint. Dave and I walked closer and closer, and every once in a while, until our fingers would brush against each other. I talked about my father and Vietnam and the years after. I talked about my impending trip to Japan. Dave listened attentively. He was different from the other men I'd dated recently. He was kind and empathic and entirely focused on me. He looked into my eyes, not at my chest. I liked his strong, solid build and warm hazel eyes. We met more of his friends for dinner on the Upper West Side. It rained that night, so we ducked into coffee shop and found seats on the mezzanine level. We ordered dessert and coffee. A damp curl had fallen over one of his eyes. I ran my fingers through his hair, slicking it back away from his face. The gesture seemed to leave him in a mild state of shock which he would later describe as intense surprise and desire. Finally we said good night to his friends and returned to the apartment.

I wondered if it would happen. I wanted it to, and I didn't. I was leaving early the next morning, and in four months I was leaving for Japan. It wasn't the time to start a new relationship--already I knew that if it happened, it wouldn't be a one-night stand. He didn't seem like the type. I was the type, but I didn't want to be the type that night. We sat in the guest room and talked for hours. He said good-night and left. I sat there waiting for him to come back. And he did, but without his shirt on this time.

It happened. We slept together on the narrow bed in his mother's guest room, and when I woke up the next morning and saw his beautiful gray cat lying on her side next to the bed, it seemed like a sign.

I was broke, and he gave me $100 to get home. The cash came in handy. My plane landed hours late and the buses were no longer running to Orange County, so I had to take a bus from LAX to Disneyland and a cab back to the trailer. I sent him a check right away along with a long letter. In October he came to visit me for four weeks. The trailer became our love shack, our hideaway. Once in a while I crawled out of bed to go to my Japanese class at a local community college. I had also secured a teaching position in the English department for the fall semester. Now that I was out of school, the government money had dried up, and I was broke. Society had paid its debt to me. We went camping in the desert and made love in a palm oasis. Steve had a new girlfriend, Maria, the most beautiful woman in the English department. A Phd candidate, she had pale skin, red lips and black hair cut in a smooth, straight pageboy. It was easy to envision her lying on a sofa in Modigliani's studio, posing for a portrait. We took a double date to Tijuana. "Hey honeymooners!" the cab drivers and bar owners would yell at us . And wouldn't you know, Steve and Maria ended up getting married too.

I couldn't believe that I'd fallen for someone weeks before leaving the country for a year. I could have easily bailed out on the English school that was holding a job for me and move to New York. But I'd foregone so many opportunities for men. I felt as if I'd let my need to be wanted supersede my need to be me, and I didn't want to do that again. If it didn't work out I'd kick myself for missing a chance at adventure. One night, on the phone, I told Dave I'd made my decision. I was going to Japan as planned. Then I burst into tears.

"I'll come to see you," Dave said. "I'll get the money somewhere. You can count on it."

The Summer of '69

2009-08-20T07:43:00.001-07:00

I'm getting a little tired of all this Woodstock hoopla--it only reminds me that this summer is the 40th anniversary of something else, something known only to a few select people, but of no small magnitude to the people involved. It didn't occur to me until fairly recently that 1969 was not only a turning point for the culture, but on a micro level, a turning point in the lives of my family. It was a big year all around, a terrible year.

Six weeks before Woodstock, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, after seven months in the Gulf of Tonkin, my father's reconnaissance squadron catapulted off the U.S.S. Enterprise and flew to Albany. Five RA-5C Vigilantes landed at the air field, one jet short of the number that had left in early January. I stood on my front lawn and watched the families, excited at the imminent reunions, pile into their cars and head for the airfield. I crawled into the firethorne and let it scratch me bloody.

A week later, as the Enterprise sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge for its home port at Alameda, a few anonymous sailors unfurled a white sheet on which they'd painted, in black paint, a giant peace symbol. I only know about this last detail because it was mentioned in a condolence letter that one of the squadron pilots had written to my mother that summer, along with the promise that an investigation was underway to find the perpetrators. But for all intents and purposes, the war was already lost.

Had my father lived to hear about this act of treason, he would have been furious. Had he lived to see news reported from Woodstock, he would have been appalled. He would have seen it as a hippie-dippie horror show, the apotheosis of all he despised, a slap in the face to servicemen like him who were dying in order to salvage the freedoms that allowed a mob of unwashed young people to drop acid, fornicate in the mud and sing along to anti-war songs. Indeed, if you were to conjure the polar opposite scene of the farm in Bethel, New York, where, in August 1969, 400,000 music fans descended to celebrate the age of Aquarius, it would be Hill Village Housing Area in Albany, Georgia. Like an itinerant thunderstorm, the Age of Aquarius missed us. It poured up north and out west. In the South, nothing broke the heat.

In the South, the local boys liked to play POWs. Kids in Los Angeles didn't play POW, at least not that I could see during my two months there, living with Kevin and my grandparents while our mother was in Hawaii. Given that we received such bad news upon our return to Albany, I spent a week out of school, and by the time I went back, there were only a few weeks left. I was expected to get back on my brother's old bicycle, the one I'd learned to ride only a few months previous, and resume pedaling to school. In those three weeks between the report of my father's loss and the determination of his death, I came and went in a trance while the world around me changed itself irrevocably.

The woods near Sylvandale Elementary were pitted with shallow holes that may have been the result of erosion or shovels. The local bullies would grab their prisoner--some poor kid on the way to school--and throw them in a pit. Then they'd jump into the hole and attempt to extract information from him. One kid would get behind the prisoner and hold a stick across his neck and threaten to choke him if he didn't tell them what they wanted to know, whatever that was. I never played myself, but only watched them in the time it took to pedal past.

At night, in my bed, when I let my fantasies run wild, I prayed that my father had been taken prisoner. He might be tortured and starved, but at least he'd be alive. Even after the navy declared him dead I indulged my fantasies for a little while long. I wanted to hold that small gem of hope in the palm of my hand and watch it sparkle. The hope was hypnotic. It held me in its thrall.

In my memories of that summer, I am alone. My mother was understandably consumed by her pregnancy. Kevin must have been around but he is hiding in my memory banks, refusing to be found. It was as if I had been marooned on a desert island, the sole survivor of a boating accident. I spent a lot of time in the living room playing POW with Barbie and Ken. This gender twist injected a bit of sexual tension into the proceedings. At eight I was beginning to feel that warm, ineffable fuzziness of desire in the scary region below my belly button, and my dolls were ideal avatars for sexual role play. Barbie was the prisoner, Ken the guard. He tied her up and made her lie on the bookcase and then he laid on top of her. He made her do what he wanted. I pulled down his pants and examined the hard loaf of plastic that stood in for his penis. I wasn't clear on what a penis looked like, but I was pretty sure it didn't look like that.

Through the sliding glass doors that opened onto the backyard, I could watch the neighborhood boys playing football and freeze tag, oblivious to heatstroke. Eventually I decided to join them again. We played as before, though this time I was tackled less and allowed to score more often. The boys went easy on me. And then the new kid showed up.

He was older and taller than the rest of us. Kids were always coming and going, chained to their father's deployment schedules, so we figured his family had just moved into officers housing. He asked if he could play football with us. We said sure, but then we stood and looked at each other, wondering which team would get him. He was big enough to be a team all on his own. We ran a few plays, but the kid was so dominant it ruined the game. Everyone drifted away, everyone except me and the new kid. This fact made me nervous, for reasons I couldn't articulate.

A long hedge ran behind the Woods' house, and it had a tunnel big enough to crawl in and out of. Whenever I felt anxious I looked for a place to hide so I crawled into the hedge, the same way I'd hide in the firethorne. I sat there for a few minutes hoping the kid would be gone when I emerged from the other side. But when I went to do that I almost crawled right into the pointy end of a big stick. He was standing over me, holding a branch as big as a jousting staff. He'd carved one end of it into a point the way you whittled a pencil tip with a pen knife if a sharpener wasn't around. I don't know where the stick came from--he must have brought it with him. He must have kept it hidden waiting for a moment like this.

We stayed frozen in our positions for what seemed like minutes, our eyes locked. His handsome face was pinched into a scowl. He was good-looking. Not as good-looking as Ken, but Ken wasn't real. My mind flashed to an old-time movie poster I'd seen once in a book. An actor in a sheik's costume and a beautiful maiden were clutching each other in a fierce embrace. He was staring into her eyes almost angrily, as if he didn't want to be feeling such passion, but he had no choice but to love her. The kid's glare lit that warm feeling in my lower abdomen I'd felt while laying Ken on top of Barbie. I recognized it from my days playing baseball in Florida, when my first boyfriend guarded me with his body. I was pretty then, a little girl with blonde pigtails and feminine dresses, not this androgynous tomboy with short hair and grass-stained knees and scabby, scratched-up arms.

"You're my prisoner," he said. He was holding the pointy end of the stick about six inches away from my eyes.

"No I'm not." I tried to sound defiant. I backed out the other end of the tunnel but suddenly he was there, on the other side of the hedge, pointing the stick at my behind. Lip trembling, I sat Indian-style and crossed my arms.

"Let me go." I meant it, and I didn't mean it.

"What do I get if I do?"

My mind clicked through the options. My marble collection. My Hippity-Hop ball. "I dunno. What do you want?"

This question seemed to put him off balance. He hesitated, then put down the stick and crawled into the tunnel next to me. He took up the entire space, and I felt small next to him. His face was close to mine. I wondered what he wanted with me--I looked like a boy, not a Barbie, not a girl a boy would want. And then I realized I was deluding myself because all he said was, "I heard your father died. That's too bad." He crawled out of the bush, grabbed his stick and walked away, across the connected backyards, toward the little playground. I never saw him again, and to this day, I wonder what he wanted from me.

Fight Night

2009-08-09T12:53:00.001-07:00

I neglected to tell you about the outcome of my Hall of Heroes inquiry. On the last day of the conference, as Sara and I were about to enter the ballroom, the handsome captain who had made it his mission to help approached me and said, "I have an answer for you. It turns out that the exhibit was taken down a long time ago and warehoused. But here is the number of the person in charge of Pentagon exhibits, and he's willing to talk to you. He might be able to get someone in the warehouse to dig up the plaque and see if your dad's name was ever corrected."

I took the number and thanked him for his efforts. Had he been a bellboy I would have tipped him. And I thought, Of course the exhibit is gone. What made me think it would still be up after twenty-five years? I imagined the display crated up and buried in a giant storehouse filled with thousands of similar crates. If the name was still misspelled, at least no one would see it. Still, this outcome only underscored my sense of deja vu, of dwelling on an era that had long since past for everyone else.

This morning I was watching CNN. The new anchor was interviewing a former daytime star. She was written out of the show when her character fell off a cliff, never to be seen again. The anchor asked her if she might return to the show. "Well, they never did find a body," the actor replied, laughing. "Soap operas thrive on ghosts."

In the 1980s and 90s, my mother also thrived on ghosts. She began to watch the daytime drama of her life go by as if waiting for her favorite actor to return to the show, miraculously resurrected, living proof that he had survived the plane crash that had presumedly claimed his life. Her return to the past threatened to hold me back as well, hold all of us back, and I refused to let that happen. I was determined to live, not to watch my life go by, and inevitably, the heat of this friction sparked an explosion.

I returned from my first League of Families Meeting in 1984 feeling pleased that finally, our loss was being recognized. It left me as emotionally wrung-out as a well-used dishrag. Yet I certainly didn't come away with a sense of hope that my father was alive. My mother's fantasies, on the other hand, seemed to intensify. She seemed determined to find her way back to him in any way she could, including rekindling an affair with one of his best friends, a fellow naval office I'll call Randall. My father and Randall, pilots who had known each other since 1956, were both stationed in Japan in the late 50s, serving on separate aircraft carriers. Their deployments did not overlap, and my father had to head to sea for several months. One night, in the officer's club at Atsugi, he said to Randall, who was also married, "Take good care of her until I get back." Randall took this request literally. One night he came to her house on the imperial grounds with two lobsters and a bottle of champagne. She was still beautiful. Their affair continued until my father returned, but eventually they lost touch.

In 1982, Randall re-entered my mother's life. He lived in Northern California, and every once in a while he'd come through Orange County on business, which had something to do with airplane parts. When I was interning at the Times, they spent several days together. She seemed so happy, whizzing around town with him in the Austin Healey. She let him drive. One time mom, Sara and Kevin met him in Phoenix where he was picking up an old airplane fuselage. They were driving past an aviation graveyard when Sara spotted an RA-5C Vigilante, dusty and broken, baking in the triple-digit heat. She called out for Randall to stop the car. She got out and ran toward it and laid her hands on it the way a pilgrim might cup her hands to catch the water at Lourdes and so be healed of some very old, very pernicious wound.

It's ironic to think of it, but mom and I were equally unlucky in love. By mid July, my relationship with Hans had ended badly. His girlfriend was coming out from New York for several weeks so he'd broken it off for good. I'd done my best to keep it casual, but my heart was a casualty nonetheless. I didn't want to be on campus while his girlfriend was there, lest I run into them, so I decided to take a vacation. At first I mulled visiting the guy from the League of Families conference in Georgia, but I didn't like him that much. Finally I settled on a cross-country jaunt wherein I'd visit poet friends in Indiana and Massachusetts before ending up in New York City. I hadn't been there since 1966, when the SS United States deposited my family there on our return from France, but the city's was magnetic. My mother hated big cities, particularly Manhattan; she'd often complain of the time she went there with Arnie and all he wanted to do was ride the subway.

I couldn't afford a hotel room in Manhattan so I asked Steve if he had any friends I could stay with. "There's that guy who came to my poetry reading--what was his name, Dave?" A week later he told me that Dave had agreed to put me up. "He lives with his mother on the Upper East Side, but they have a guest room. He said, 'Any friend of yours is a friend of mine."

The Summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles that year. The events were held throughout Southern California, including Mission Viejo, where the road cycling events were staged on its wide boulevards with their manicured medians. This gave mom the chance to finally use the deck for its intended purpose, and she invited friends and family to watch the races from this wooden platform which occupied most of in her stamp-sized backyard. At the time it was strong enough to hold a crowd. I spent the day sitting on the deck in a lawn chair, moping over Hans and fending off a friend of Kevin's who who kept offering to massage my back. I drank beer but not to excess.

The gathering doubled as a going-away party for mom and Sara. Like the deck on which we sat, the family was on the verge of splintering. Mom had abruptly decided to relocate to northern California so Sara could study with a new music teacher who lived in Stockton. She wanted to relocate before the school year began, which meant they had to move in early September. Kevin would stay behind in Mission Viejo (not that he minded) while I was scheduled to jet off to Japan after Christmas. When I'd told mom I was moving to there for a year, she accepted my decision to relocate 8,000 miles away with the same calmness with which she'd left me behind in Colorado seven years earlier. She knew she couldn't talk me out of it nor, I suspect, did she want to. We had both reached the unspoken conclusion that now, as then, our emotional distance demanded a geographical equivalent. Her only comment was, "You're following in my footsteps."

At first, I was confused--in what way could I possibly be emulating her? Then I remembered her stint in Japan in the late 1950s. I inwardly recoiled. Of all the footsteps in the world, hers were the ones I was least likely to step in. Any connection was purely subconscious. I simply wanted to experience as exotic a culture as possible without needing a malaria shot; I'd chosen Asia because I was less likely to be attracted to its male population. I needed a break from men and from five years of higher education. But mostly, I needed to escape my mother mom and her delusions about my father, which had become as lush and overgrown as her jungle-like garden. I couldn't bear to hear that lumber mill fantasy one more time.

The start and finish line was down by the fake lake, a long stone's throw from mom's deck. Cycling fans had been picking their spots along the race route for days in advance, and by start time, spectators were lining Marguerite Parkway, the road that ran below mom's neighborhood. Much to mom's chagrin, they included two young men who decided that the hillside in back of her house, just on the other side of her containment wall, would make a dandy place to set up camp while they waited for race day. I was telling Kevin's friend one last time that his services were not required when a commotion broke out on the far edge of the deck. Mom and the spectators had gotten into a shouting match, and I turned around just in time to see her toss a glass of soda, ice and all, onto their heads.

At dusk the races were over--the Americans swept--and mom's guests headed home, but her bad mood stuck around. I had to drive north to Irvine. As I headed down the short hallway toward the back bedroom to get my things, mom followed in full harangue. She was yelling at me about going off on a trip over Labor Day Weekend when she needed my help and what an ungrateful bitch I was to leave her to pack up the house, what with her being an accident victim and such, and I couldn't expect Kevin and Sara to do everything, and don't walk away from me when I'm talking to you!

I hadn't seen her this upset in a long time. Surely my trip east wasn't the only reason she was angry with me. There was also my utter lack of sympathy for her after the car accidents; my seven years of college with no real job to show for it; my refusal to settle down and have children. I was not the daughter she'd bargained for when they plucked me from the foster home 23 years previously. I was young and attractive and she was not. I had the world in front of me and she did not. And as she voiced her displeasure with me, decades of standing in the exhaust blast of her rage, of being seen and not heard, rose up in my throat like bile. I whirled around and shouted at her to shut the fuck up.

By this time we were in the back bedroom. Sara had used this room for a while but recently moved into the front bedroom. Now it held a twin bed, a small metal table and chairs my grandfather had made in his machine shop, and an antique cabinet filled with old dolls from her youth. They had porcelain heads and tiny teeth and eyelids that clicked open and shut. They wore gingham dresses and ribbons in their real human hair. They watched the drama unfold from behind the glass door of the cabinet that held them. They saw me standing with my back to the glass door. They saw mom's eyes turn black, just as they had that day she looked at me while holding the disemboweled rabbit. They watched her curl her fingers into a fist and pull her fist back and step toward me. They saw Sara crying in the doorway as Kevin wrapped his arms around her from behind and held her back and said Stop it, both of you. And it's a good thing he did because had she tried to punch me, I would have stepped aside and her fist would have smashed through the glass door of the cabinet. Unlike those minor car accidents, there would have been blood and screaming and an ambulance ride.

But not that night. Another night. It would take twenty-four years, but it would happen.

Washing the Headstone

2009-08-07T12:45:00.000-07:00

Twenty-five years ago, when I first visited the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, I approached it from the south end of the Mall, and as I crossed a broad stretch of grass, I kept saying to Sara, "I don't see it. I don't see it."

She replied, "Trust me, it's there."

I was almost on top of The Wall before I realized the memorial was placed into the hillside, practically one with the earth itself.

We came around to the front and found the directory. It was the size of a phone book. I flipped through it until I found the page. I ran my finger down the list of names until it settled on his. I following my finger across the line to find its location. 28W 101. Translation: West wall panel 28 line 101. Then I looked up his navigator's name. They died together and ended up four lines apart.

We began to walk along The Wall. Five hundred linear feet of etched granite. Sara had been there the year before, so she led the way. What struck me, as it strikes everyone who visits the Wall for the first time, is that it isn't black at all. It's a mirror that reflects the colors of the world it faces, from the green of the grass to the clothing of the tourists. The names, almost 60,000 of them, seemed to run together. How would we find his? Our father was one of so many. And then there were the names behind them. I could see right past the names to so many more casualties--the parents and the siblings, the wives and the children, holding hands, not holding hands. Speaking, not speaking.

"It's this way, toward the middle."

I followed Sara along the path. I saw that people had placed offerings at the foot of the wall: roses, photographs, letters, small American flags. I had brought nothing but myself and my expectations. The Wall got taller and taller. We passed a pony-tailed man in a green army jacket, resting his head again the wall and crying. I tried not to look. A few yards later, Sara stopped and pointed. "Panel 28W. This is it." I counted down to line 101 but the name seemed to be hiding from me. I ran my hands along the surface of the panel, the rough letters and the smooth granite. I could see my own face and my newly shorn hair. Two days before getting my degree I went to see my friend the bisexual hairdresser poet and asked him to cut it off. I watched my long blonde hair fall to the floor of the campus apartment he shared with his wife and kids until all that was left was a dishwater pixie cut. I asked him to leave only a tail, which he bleached a light champagne color. I saw myself wearing a white tank top and a blue gingham skirt that used to belong to my mother. She wore it in the 50s, long before I was born. When I twirled it encircled my hips like the drip protector on a congregation candle.

Finally I found his name. I ran my fingers along each letter. I put my head against the Wall and cried. And then I took a photograph of the name. When I got home I had it enlarged and pinned it to my bulletin board in the trailer. There, I've done it. I've seen it. Now I can go on.

"I was wearing mom's skirt, remember?" Sara and I have left the Hilton and are heading for the National Mall.

"Why would you want to wear anything of hers?" Sara asked, incredulous. She is looking at her iPhone screen and giving me directions.

"Because it was vintage. It was cool. I had to hold the waist band together with a safety pin. My waist was never small like hers. And yours."

But Sara has a good point. Why did I wear my mother's skirt to see The Wall on that damp-towel day in 1984? Perhaps it was a subconscious attempt at connection a time when she and I were barely speaking. But my mother had always been more willing than me to find a common bond between us. While I couldn't forget past transgressions, her memory was shorter, more discriminating. It was as if she had poured our shared past through a colander and strained out the butchered rabbit and the bloody nose, the whippings and the cruel remarks, ending up with a watery gruel in which floated her best efforts to raise three children on her own.

Holding hands, not holding hands. Speaking, not speaking.

Pierre L'Enfant may have have a cohesive vision when he designed the nation's capitol, but whoever created the modern city's road system owes him an apology. Or maybe it's Steve Jobs who should issue a mea culpa. Sara's iPhone GPS leads us in circles, directs us onto one-way parkways to nowhere, promises us highway exits that don't exist. The more we drive the farther away our destination becomes. I know we have to find Constitution Avenue, and acting on a hunch I take an exit that looks vaguely familiar. Finally we pass the Washington Monument and know we're in the vicinity of the Wall.

"It was trying to take us to the Jefferson Memorial!" Sara says, tapping on the phone's screen. "That's so weird."

"How could technology mislead us?" I muse sarcastically. "When all else fails, trust your instincts."

Parking is always a challenge along the mall, so I pull into an illegal spot on Constitution Avenue--my rear bumper extends into a no parking zone-- and we set out for The Wall. The weather has turned seasonably hot and humid, much as it was in 1984 when I first came here with Sara. That time, we held each other and cried again. The Wall struck me as a giant tombstone, and I figured it was the only one we were going to get. The novelty of that first viewing wore off with each subsequent visit until finally I could see it without tears. Which is not to say that the Wall itself lacks impact for me now--I've simply run dry.

I know where to find our father's name now, but I want to re-create that first visit as fully as I can. I find a directory and flip to the Ws and run the index finger of my bad hand down the list until I arrive at his, and then across to its location. We walk to the left side of the memorial, past the Three Soldiers and the Women's Memorial, which were not yet there in the summer of 1984, and begin to walk toward the center. The crowd is relatively thin, unlike that first time, when the line of visitors resembled the theater queue for Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi. Again, Sara takes the lead, and I try to imagine this beautiful woman with the waist-length hair and mod ankle-length sundress, now almost 40, as the eager teen in shorts and a striped T-shirt who, having seen the Wall in 1983, was introducing me, her distant big sister, aimless and jaded at 23, to this public acknowledgment of our loss, still so raw then.

By 2009, the number of offerings left at foot of The Wall has dwindled. I stoop to pick up a candy wrapper. You know the novelty of a war memorial has worn thin when the littering begins.

I decide to make a rubbing of his name, just as I had the first time. I get the paper and stick of graphite from one of the park rangers who assist the viewers. I bend down to the name, place the paper across it, hold it with my left hand and begin to rub the graphite vigorously across the paper with my right. When I had 10 fingers it came out perfectly. This time, however, without the pinky's vital anchor, the paper shifts after the middle initial E. I re-set the paper and kept rubbing, but the last name veers uphill. It seems I can't do anything right.

Sara is standing a few feet away and quietly crying. She has been teary all week; she chalks it up to all the emotional energy she's absorbed from the other family members. During the candlelight ceremony a single teardrop had left a glistening path down her right cheek. Finally, I tell her we need to go, that we still need to go the cemetery and time's a-wasting. She nods and wipes her face and we walk back to the car, seeking out the shadiest path. Sara cheers up when she sees we didn't get a parking ticket. "Dad would never allow it," she says.

Where I see coincidence, serendipity and luck, Sara sees spiritual forces at work. Her visions used to bemuse me, but in the past year I've tip-toed closer to belief. What's the harm in believing that a higher power brought him back to us? Maybe the energy of deliverance and healing comes from within, that we push it into the sky where it swirls and merges with the energy of the dead and gives birth to miracles. I prefer this notion that that of a conventional God, the kind you find in church, who takes your loved ones away and forces you to justify the loss by saying things like, "It was God's will." Well, screw God's will.

Before heading to Arlington we need to buy water and a sponge to clean the headstone. We find a CVS on 14th Street and I wait at the curb while Sara runs in. Coldplay is on the stereo: Those who are dead are not dead, they're just living in my head....

I think about what I didn't say this morning at the Q&A. I didn't say that there was a time when I wished they hadn't found him. When I wished they'd left well enough alone. I didn't ask, who are you to scrounge around in the jungle looking for the bones of people's fathers without asking permission? I didn't mention losing my pinky or my struggles with the alcohol and drugs or the string of addiction that connects the past to the present. Stick to grief. Always a good plan.

Sara comes back with the goods and we head for the cemetery. This time, her iPhone leads us there straightaway. I pull up at the curb in front of Section 7. Sara says, "I'm going barefoot" and kicks off her sandals. "Me too," I say. The grass feels prickly and dry underfoot as I walk uphill to the headstone. I've made a point of memorizing its location: under the stand of cedars, next to the much larger headstone of Colonel Henry Bailey Barry and his two wives, Catherine and Esther. Sara is carrying the plastic bag with our washing supplies. I take the bottle of Poland Spring and pour some over the bird droppings, darkening the granite. Then I take the sponge and scrub with the abrasive side. The headstone's crown has a rough-hewn surface and I need to bear down. I pour water along the base of the stone and start scrubbing there as well, concentrating on the task at hand until I hear Sara exclaim, "Oh my god, look!"

I glance up and she's pointing toward something. I look the other way and see three deer, standing still as stone under a large cedar about 20 yards away. They are magnificent specimens, all males, with impressive racks, and they are staring at us. I stand up and feel a shiver of of adrenaline race up my spine. It can't be a coincidence that there are three of them, one for each sibling: Kevin, Sara and me. "Oh!" Sara squeals, and I see it too: a large hawk landing in the cedar above the deer's heads. "It's dad!" she whispers.

"So where is mom?" I ask. What does it mean that her animal totem hasn't appeared?

"We have to call Kevin and tell him!" Sara adds urgently.

I whip out my cell and call him. He usually answers these days. "Hey, it's Elizabeth. Sara and I are at Arlington visiting the grave and suddenly three deer appeared, one for each of us. It's like a sign!"

I hear him snort. "No, really. I mean it." I pass the phone to Sara. "Here, you convince him it's a sign."

She talks to him for a minute and then hands me the phone. "He's not buying it." I tell him we think it's a sign and then I ask him how he feels. "Fine!" he says, trying to sound upbeat. Trying, as always, to be the strong, rational brother, wary of superstitions and signs.

I push the end button and we just stand for ten minutes, the deer and us, gazing at each other. Sometimes they shift their delicate legs but otherwise they stand firm. And then, without warning, they bound away, leaving Sara and me breathless. I turn to her and she is crying again. She tells me a story I've heard before: about the time she saw a psychic, and our parents appeared in the room. Then she added a detail I didn't know. "They told me that the one thing they wanted was for the three of us to be closer." She sniffles.

I finish washing the headstone. We wait a few minutes so that I can see it dry, since dampness can camouflage stains. I turn to tell Sara it looks a lot better but she's staring into the distance, somewhere else. I walk up behind her and wrap my arms around her waist and put my head on her shoulder. Just so you know, this type of affection is unprecedented in our relationship, as I am not the touchy-feely type. And I say, "I guess they got their wish."

We walk back down to the car. Sara's window is down, and as I turn the ignition, a ladybug flies into the car and lands on her arm.

"Oh, there's mom," I quip. Sara chuckles as I add, "Go on ladybug, fly away home." And she leaves us.

Speaking My Piece

2009-08-06T07:02:00.000-07:00

The National League of Families conference wound up on Saturday with a question and answer session between the experts and the family members. If past experience was any indication, this should prove to be the most contentious session of the week. Afterward, Sara and I planned to visit the Wall and return to the cemetery to clean the bird droppings off of our parents' headstone before I dropped her at Dulles for a 5 p.m. flight and headed north. Unfortunately, this meant we would miss the League's evening bingo tournament.

By the time we packed, checked out and drove across town to the Hilton, the Q&A was well under way. The round banquet tables in the Admiralty Ballroom had been replaced with rows of long tables covered with blue cloths. They faced the dais, where the experts who'd been speaking all week were sitting. A mike stand was set up at each side of the room. Karen McManus, the League treasurer and longtime activist (her brother Kevin, an Air Force pilot, was a POW who came home in 1973) was cross-examining Ambassador Ray about the design of the POW/MIA Remembrance Day poster. She wanted to know why the black POW/MIA flag wasn't flying on the flagpole, underneath the stars and stripes. "And why is the American flag flying at half-mast?" she demanded. "Are you implying that they're all dead?"

Ray stood there, tight-lipped, unwilling to state the obvious: That's exactly what I'm saying. Bones are all we're going to bring home, bones and teeth and dog tags if we're lucky.

Ray was rescued by a retired Air Force veteran who stood up to respond. "The law says that no other flag can fly with the stars and stripes when it's at half-mast," he said with a "how could you not know that?" tone in his voice. (Actually, I believe he was wrong--no other flag can fly above it.) This answered only one of her questions, but the other didn't need a reply. Everyone knew the answer. But in this group, saying out loud that there are no living MIAs in Southeast Asia is tantamount to high treason.

The debate continued for a few more minutes. McManus complained that the POW/MIA flag wasn't visible enough; Ray said that was right there, at the bottom of the poster. "You can barely see it!" McManus retorted. Then another woman got up and asked why the DOD didn't consult The League when they were designing it. Ray chalked it up to creative license. This went on for a while. It was not my fight, but as I listened, an idea dawned on me. I leaned into Sara and said, "I think I'll say something."

I walked up to the mike and awaited my turn. Griffiths was at the other mike, pressing Ray about staffing issues at the DOD. Couldn't they hire freelancers to scan documents into the database because some of them pertained to her brother's case and time was of the essence. As I waited I breathed deeply and arranged my thoughts and reminded myself: Don't say something stupid or offensive like you usually do. Don't try to be the cleverest person in the room. Just speak honestly, from your heart.

I was on. I gave my name and my father's name, rank, service as well as the dates of his death, repatriation and burial. Then I spoke my piece.

"I have more of a statement than a question, and it's not about logistics or technical issues or semantics," I began. "It's about emotions. I've been coming to these meetings for decades now, and in all that time, I've never heard anyone address the emotional fall-out of all the good work that you do. In 1984, I came to my first League meeting with my sister, Sara, who's sitting back there at the last table. My brother was eleven and I was eight when our father died so we knew him--as much as military kids can know a dad who's gone all the time. But my sister didn't get that chance. Our mother was six months pregnant with her when he died.

"Everyone in this room knows what it's like to open the door and see those officers standing there. It changes the course of your life, and not for the better. I didn't cry that night; I understood what was happening, but the full weight of it didn't hit me until later, and then it was too late to cry. But 29 years later, after we buried my father, or what was left of him, I cried for a year. I fell into a deep depression. I know you say that do this for us, the families, so we can have closure, but closure isn't all it's cracked up to be. In fact, I experienced the opposite of closure. I realized for the first time what I had lost. It was so devastating that I'm only now able to think about it clearly and objectively.

"I know we're supposed to be heroes in all this, that military families are supposed to keep marching ahead, no matter what. But not all of us are wired to be heroes. My mother was forced to make decisions she wasn't equipped to make, that she wouldn't have had to make had our father lived. The legacy of the war followed us our entire lives. And just when I thought I'd made my peace with the lack of a body, it all got dug up all over again.

"You can dust off your hands and say case closed, but when your work is finished, our emotional work begins. And it can be very, very hard. So I want to suggest that you provide grief counseling for family members who require it. And to all you children out there who are lucky enough to bury your dads someday, I say: Brace yourselves. Because you may be shocked by the feelings that come up."

Then I thanked them and the room applauded. As I walked back to my seat I spotted a woman about my age mouthing the words thank you. I smiled and nodded and sat down. There was one last question, blessedly short, and the session ended. Sara and I stood up to leave, and we would have, had it not been for the small crowd of people who approached us to talk.

A tall blonde guy whose bad skin made him look younger than he was standing to my right. I'd seen him as I was speaking; he was sitting near the mike and hadn't taken his eyes off of me the entire time. The pain his eyes was almost visceral. His name tag said Matthew, son. "I'm glad you got up and spoke," he said. "Growing up, I always thought I was alone."

"You are definitely not alone," I said.

The words came tumbling out of him. "I always thought of myself as a wimp, like, what's wrong with me? Why can't I accept my dad's loss and just move on? I felt like he was always there, a shadow."

"Do you look like him?"

He rolled his eyes. "Exactly like him. I wasn't born when he died, so I just reminded everyone of my dad. The more people told me how much I looked like him, the more it hurt."

I motioned to Sara. "Talk to my sister. She knows exactly how you feel."

Another woman, a widow in her 60s, was waiting to speak with me. She told me that I reminded her of her daughter's self-destructive behavior. "She seems determined to kill herself. She volunteered to go to ironic as a civil contractor, and now she's in Afghanistan."

"I was determined to kill myself by accident too," I replied, "only I tried a little closer to home."

"I never remarried, and she couldn't forgive me for that. She didn't understand why I couldn't move on. But I was never convinced that my husband was really gone."

Then a woman my age, whom I'd met earlier in the conference, approached. Well dressed and perfectly coiffed, clearly successful, she had told Sara and me that she hadn't known the military was looking for her father until she got a phone call from asking her to give a DNA sample in case they found his remains.

"Thank you for speaking for all of us," she said. She hugged me tightly. "I would love to stay in touch." She handed me her card. "I work for a company that makes automobile breathalyzers. They prevent you from starting your car if you've been drinking."

I took the card. "That's a coincidence. I've been in recovery for alcoholism. I'm seven months sober."

She looked a little surprised at my confession."I guess you won't be needing one of these then," she said.

"Not anymore."

"If you're ever in Texas, please look me up."

"I just might do that."

Everyone exchanged cell numbers and email addresses, and a support group was born. My words had clearly touched a chord. Or maybe that melancholy note had been plucked four decades ago and was only now being heard.

Until the End of the World

2009-08-05T11:28:00.000-07:00

For two and a half days, Sara and I sat in the Admiralty Ballroom at the Crystal City Hilton Hotel and listened to presentations from a dozen different government agencies that make up the "personnel accounting community." The ballroom held about 40 tables, eight chairs each. At each place was a Hilton notepad and a pen. I estimated that there were 300 people in the room, but at least a third of them were with the military or the government. Most of the tables were half empty. The League members were middle aged and older. They had white hair and golfer's tans, ponytails and Rolling Thunder T-shirts. They had grandchildren. Many wore metal bracelets engraved with their loved one's name and rank and date of disappearance. I know for a fact that a little girl wore a bracelet for my father's navigator, so I imagine that someone, somewhere, wore a bracelet bearing my father's name. Hopefully it was spelled correctly.

I also hope they know that they can take it off now.

The meeting was convened. A color guard marched in the flags of the five services, and the League chairman, a delicate Southerner who spoke with a soft, almost hypnotic twang, gave the call to order and opening remarks. She said that "God has used the National League of Families," and quoted Matthew 28:20: "And lo I am with you always even until the end of the world." Then we said the Pledge of Allegiance, and I was seven years old again, standing in a schoolroom in Albany, Georgia, hand over my heart, the only kid in class who could not only pronounce "indivisible" but spell it, too.

We took our seats. No one in the room was smiling, but no one seemed overtly angry, either. The last time I sat in one of these ballrooms, there was a small army of malcontents determined to make trouble. They were called "The Rambo" contingent. Since the 1980s, they'd been convinced that the government was covering up evidence of live POWs and that the League leadership was in cahoots with them. They didn't like Clinton one bit. Citing Hanoi's cooperation in the accounting efforts, the President had dropped the trade ban with Vietnam in 1994, and only days before the 1995 convention, he restored diplomatic ties as well. The keynote speaker that year was Anthony Lake, Clinton's National Security Advisor. I missed his speech, but I arrived at the top of the hotel escalator just in time to see the Secret Service hustling him out of the room as a handful of malcontents showered him with invective and scorn.

The 40th anniversary meeting was not nearly as controversial as the 1995 meeting or as impressive as the 1984 one. There was no visit to the White House, no Presidential speech, no coffee and pastries on the South Lawn or tours of the Pentagon. In 2009, the keynote speech was delivered by a navy admiral on the verge of retirement. The big "field trip" was to view the U.S. Marine Corps Evening Parade, which takes place every Friday evening in the summer for any tourist who cares to watch. In 1984 we were in the spotlight, part of the cause du jour. In 2009, we were merely die-hards who refused to give up the ghost.

Sara and I heard many interesting things during our time in that ballroom. We heard that in the first six months of this year, a serviceman from World War II, Korea or Vietnam was ID'd every two days, every 7.4 days for the Vietnam Conflict alone. We heard that 75 percent of the sites on the list are in North Vietnam, and that there are dozens of American intelligence officers, mostly civilians, stationed in Southeast Asia who spend their days combing through documents, visiting potential crash sites and speaking with potential witnesses in fluent Vietnamese. We heard that the worst thing that could happen to the accounting efforts is a full-scale war with a major power like Russia, China or Iran. "There's the threat that current accounting could swamp historical accounting in the even of large-scale military operations," said one DOD official. Though if you ask me, in the event of a full-scale war with Russia or China, accounting for our military dead might be the least of our problems.

We heard that weather patterns, location and even the bird flu dictate when and where teams will work. We learned that Cambodia imposes the fewest restrictions on search teams from JPAC (Joint Prisoners of War Missing in Action Accounting Command), allowing them to dig wherever and whenever they like. We heard that Laos was the most restrictive at first, demanding they work in a tight north-to-south pattern of crash sites, but that today U.S. teams can "go where the work is." They conduct five joint field activities per year. Of the 570 men unaccounted for from Laos, the remains of 320 men, most of them pilots have been repatriated. One of them was our father.

The more I heard about how difficult this work is, how subject they are to the vicissitudes of politics and weather, the more amazed I became at our outcome. At one point I wrote on Sara's notepad, We are so lucky.

We also heard, over and over again, the promise that this mission will not end "until they come home." Considering the numbers--70,000 missing from World War II, 8,000 from Korea, almost 1,800 from Vietnam, a handful from the Cold War and the Middle East--we'd best leave the lights on because we're going to be up very late, waiting for that final knock on the door. My practical side considers this endeavor absurdly far-reaching and nigh impossible, and thinks that there must be a better use for the millions of dollars it requires. My emotional side tells my practical side to shut up, says, Who are you to judge, especially since you've reaped the benefits of their efforts?

The highest government official who spoke was Ambassador Charles Ray, Deputy Assistant Secretary for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs & Director, Defense POW/MIA Missing Personnel Office. In other words, he runs the show, along with Admiral Donna Crisp, who heads JPAC in Hawaii. And quite effectively, apparently: Everyone, even notoriously skeptical League members, praised her work to the heavens. Crisp came to JPAC from the Pentagon's Department of Manpower and Personnel, which makes sense: The accounting issue is fundamentally a human resources problem. She is retiring soon as well.

Ray read a letter from President Obama assuring the League that he's on their side. This seemed to drain some tension from the room. Then he unveiled the poster for the annual National POW/MIA Recognition Day (which happened to fall on Sara's birthday, a good omen indeed). It pictured an American flag flying at half mast, and behind it stood the ghostly images of combat troops awash in a heavenly glow. Scattered applause. Later in the hallway I heard grumbling about the poster. Some of the League's members didn't care for it much, but I wasn't not sure why. It looked good to me.

At the lunch break, Sara and I found the table where we could pick up our free poster. It was manned by a guy whose name tag read Phillip Ritter, Son, Captain George L. Ritter, Laos, 1971. He looked to be in his late 40s, soft around the middle, bald on top, with sad blue eyes that reminded me of someone I couldn't place. "What happened to your father?" I asked. He told us that his dad was a retired Air Force pilot flying men and supplies for Air America. At the time, his entire family--his parents, him and his two siblings--lived in Vientiene, Laos' capital city. "It was a great place to grow up," Phillipe said. "Within the city limits, Americans were perfectly safe. You just couldn't leave." One morning his father and two crew members took off for what should have been a routine flight and never returned. They were captured alive, but their fate remains in question. This made Phillip's dad one of the 39 cases known as LKA: Last Known Alive. These cases are the most pressing and the most promising--what if those men are still alive, held somewhere against their will to their day? A preposterous notion, too unlikely to be taken seriously--unless you are that pilot's son. Unless you kissed him good-bye that very morning and sat in the hotel airport, waiting for him to come back. Unless you were told instead that his plane had been shot down but that he probably survived.

"And what about you?" he asked us as he rolled up our posters and put them in a cardboard tube.

"Oh, well, uh, our dad was shot down over Laos in 1969. His remains were recovered in 1997. We buried them in 1998, in Arlington."

It felt a little awkward telling him this. We had attained what he wanted: proof of death. This is the way it felt the entire week, whenever we told our story: like lottery winners walking among the penniless, unable to share the spoils. Phillip handed us our tube and we said good-bye and good luck with everything.

Sara and I bought sandwiches at a nearby cafe and gobbled what we could before the next speaker, The League's Executive Director, Ann Mills Griffiths. She's been running the group since 1978, and her job is personal. Her brother, James Mills, his copilot and the Phanton F-4 they were flying disappeared in 1966 during a bombing mission over North Vietnam. Her brother remains one of the 1,737 men whose ghost walks among us, homeless. She has fought for 31 years for answers, yet her brother is still missing. I sat back and did next to nothing, yet my father was found. Fate takes no prisoners, plays no favorites.

Back when I was seven years old, living in officer's housing at the height of the Vietnam conflict, playing with other children whose fathers were over there risking their lives to get images you can now call up on Google Earth, I began to draw the same picture over and over. It was a bald eagle. My eagle wore a fierce scowl and a Captain America-style breastplate bearing the stars and stripes. Its mighty wings were outstretched, and it clutched shafts of lightning in its claws. This was the fearsome image of patriotism as I understood it. I didn't know that love of country comes in many shades of gray, that it can be quiet and subtle as well as blatant and scary, can be expressed through dissent as well as blind obedience. I love my country because to refuse to do so would negate everything my father died for. I love my country because I dare not do otherwise.

Which is why I got so confused that evening, at the 40th Anniversary Annual Dinner & Candlelight Ceremony. I knew that League members tend to be conservative. I am not, but that doesn't mean I don't respect the military; you could say that I've never admired and respected the military more. In fact, I admire and respect the military too much to see its troops sent into harm's way for no reason other than power and money. If there's a bigger conspiracy than the Iraq War, I'd like to see it. So I was surprised when Ann Mills Griffiths, the director of a citizen's activist group dedicated to finding the bones of the wartime dead, took the mike and said that Paul Wolfowitz had entered the room. She called him a "longtime friend" of the League. I turned to Sara and whispered, "Why she's friends with a guy who helped to drum up a phony war that's killed thousands more servicemen like her brother is beyond me."

The Vietnam veterans in the room, all of them quite elderly, began to walk the room, lighting our candles. The lights were down and the dark room glowed. I craned my neck to get a view of the neo-con in the room, with no success. Just as well. I didn't want to see him holding a candle while a young woman sang "You Raise Me Up." I didn't want to see him honoring the dead. I preferred to see him burn.

Smoke Signals

2009-08-01T09:28:00.001-07:00

On our way back from the cemetery I stop at 7-11 so that Sara can buy cigarettes and a lighter. The ghost has insisted that she have a smoke and she doesn't want to disappoint him. I remind her to get me a sugar-free Red Bull: "The biggest one they've got."

I quit smoking 26 years ago, but in the summer of 1984, I was still operating under the delusion that cigarettes gave me an air of sophistication and worldliness. At the time, I was seeing a German Phd candidate named Hans who burned through two packs a day, so I adopted the habit as well. He was in love with a German/Indian woman who lived in New York City. They'd met as undergrads in St. Louis, and she then transferred to Columbia University. Like the open-minded bicoastal Europeans that they were, they had an arrangement: They could have sex with other people as long as they loved only each other. This made me Hans's fuck buddy. I'd never been a fuck buddy before, and I wasn't very good at it. I pretended to be worldly enough to sleep with Hans without falling in love with him, but I started yearning for his late-night phone call, the sound of his bicycle braking to a stop outside the trailer's back door, the tap of his knuckles on its aluminum skin.

Sara climbs back in the car with a pack of Marlboro Lights, a Bic lighter and my energy drink. She unwinds the cellophane and opens the pack. I've been pondering falling off the wagon ever since we left the cemetery. Is nicotine a slip? The other night, during a phone call to Kevin, I told him I was seven months sober. He replied that one of his neighbors in his condo complex is going on five years, adding, "He had a sober party the other night, and they all sat around the pool smoking and drinking Red Bulls."

"I'll take one," I tell Sara.

How strange it feels to light up, how nostalgic. I don't inhale deeply lest I get dizzy; I simply let the smoke loll around in my mouth before blowing it out. Sara actually takes the smoke deep into her lungs. She eschews soda and non-organic foods and warns me that Red Bull will give me a brain tumor, so this lapse is distinctly out of character. But the urge to smoke is the ghost's idea. I hold the cigarette with my right hand and steer with my left. Driving with four fingers is tricky--the pink provides crucial leverage on the wheel, an added point of contact in oncoming traffic.

"Your hand is looking great," Sara says. "You really can't tell. And your ring finger is straighter than ever."

"The surgeon said it would take a year for the finger to fully heal," I reply, exhaling. I'm beginning to feel light-headed. "I've got about 75 percent use of it. I think that's as good as it's going to get. I might have another surgery called a scar release. We'll see. I'm in no hurry to see the inside of Bellevue again."

Sara's iPhone directs us back to the Westin. It's on the other side of Arlington, which I never considered a real city so much as a cluster of hotels and a very large military cemetery. I decide we need to get blow-outs and we stop at a salon next door to the hotel. When the stylist asks me if I'm Sara's mother I feel like jumping off the top of the Washington monument. "Her sister," I correct him peevishly. He apologizes profusely, trying to salvage his tip. "Though I am eight years older," I add. As he works he talks about the particularly restaurant in Georgetown where, every Wednesday night, the elderly congressmen take their young foreign mistresses. "They like the back rooms," he says.

"Do they do drugs there?" I ask.

"No. They do that in the bathroom."

When it's Sara's turn I go outside for another smoke. I struggle to light the cigarette in the wind. I draw hard to get an ember going, but two or three drags later I remember how much I dislike smoking. I drop the cigarette and grind it into the sidewalk with my shoe. I go back inside to wait for Sara, and when we're done I say, with what I hope is the appropriate level of sarcasm, "Well, if I want to score coke in Washington, I know where to go."

Back at the room we rest and change our clothes. We need to drive back to the Hilton Crystal City Hotel to pick up our registration materials. The Westin screwed up and gave us a room with a single king, but sharing a bed doesn't bother us. I tell Sara that I don't snore anymore since kicking coke, though it took six months for my nasal passages to get back to normal.

Sara is the only person I know who uses an ironing board. Her blonde hair is very long, almost to her waist. My blonde hair is not as long, only to my bra strap. We used to be vaguely competitive about our weight, our hair, our tans--as much as sisters who are one continent and eight years apart could be--but it looks like the scale has tilted in Sara's favor. I've gained 15 pounds since losing my job--unemployment and Oreos are a dangerous combination. At least my tan is better, thanks to water aerobics. My ego still smarting from the stylist's mother comment, I rummage through my suitcase looking for something that fits.

"II wonder why mom wanted us to come here together that summer," I remark as I watch Sara press her skirt. "Maybe she thought it would be a bring us closer together." I snort. "Only in our family would attending a POW/MIA convention qualify as a bonding experience."

"I can think of better places to bond. Cancun, for instance." The iron hisses, emits a puff of steam.

I laugh out loud. "Yeah, she should have sent us to Mexico!" The thought is so absurd I can't stop laughing. Mom's dream vacation was to rent a house boat and float around Lake Powell. She could never understand why the rest of us couldn't get on board with that idea.

The iPhone directs us to the Hilton Crystal City. We'll be at its mercy for the next few days, letting this gadget direct us around the city. I have brought a paper map but it suddenly seems ludicrous, an antique. Sara pushes a button and a telecommunications satellite hundreds of miles overhead redirects us to avoid traffic tie-ups and construction delays. In space lies the answer to a tragedy like ours. Men like my father risked their lives to capture images that now can be taken by spy satellites. Not that long ago, I was looking through the two-dozen reconnaissance photos of North Vietnam he took during the war. Curious, I went to Google Earth and typed in "Vinh." And there it was, the same river he'd flown over so many times, the same coast line, the same once-lethal landscape.

Once at the Hilton, we find the registration area. A bleach-blonde woman who looks too young to be a daughter--a granddaughter?-- takes our names and hands us name tags along with a black POW/MIA tote bag. The name tag is pink. The bag contains the schedule of events, updates on NLOF trips to Southeast Asia, copies of the Powerpoint presentations we'll be seeing, meeting procedures, and the League's annual report. It is $75,000 in debt. I also find some NLOF note cards bearing the slogan "Honor Their Service, Fulfill Their Trust." In a mesh side pocket I find a small zip-loc bags containing a 40th-anniversary NLOF pin. Like the tote bag and the note cards, it bears the POW/MIA logo. You know the one. A white circle in a black chevron. In the circle, the silhouetted profile of a captured American, his face cast downward, and smaller, behind him, a guard tower. Next to him, a strand of barbed wire. Above the circle reads "POW-MIA", below it, "You Are Not Forgotten."

The first time I saw this flag was that day in 1984, flying above the White House. In the years that followed it started showing up everywhere. I couldn't turn around without seeing that flag flying from government buildings, post offices, gas stations, car dealerships, and Harley-Davidson's. Just off the Santa Monica Freeway, a few miles from Sara's house, someone flies a massive version the size of a football field. While I appreciated the flag's symbolism, over time its ubiquitous presence began to grate. No matter how much I wanted to honor this flag, I couldn't shake the feeling that it represented a misuse of his memory for political gain. But it is only a flag, a scrap of black cloth. It will outlive me, so I have learned to live with it.

After registering Sara and I browse the vendor table. There are hats and T-shirts and replicas of military pins and badges. In 1996, the last time I came to one of these affairs, there was a greater selection of POW/MIA merchandise. Where are the coffee mugs and pen sets? The artist who, for a fee, would paint your loved one's portrait among celestial-looking clouds? I look through the program. It includes no trip to the White House, no presidential speech or trip to the Pentagon Hall of Heroes. The entire affair has a distinctly end-stage feel to it, a whiff of irrelevance not unlike the paper map of Washington D.C. that sits in the back seat of my car, unopened.

As we're leaving, I spot two navy officers in summer whites standing with a civilian in a suit. I recognize the civilian immediately: He was the mortuary affairs officer who assisted us in 1998 with the funeral plans for my father. He looks exactly the same, only heavier. While Sara looks on, I introduce myself and remind him of our case, but he draws a blank.

"You came to Southern California to brief us in 1998, remember?"

He looks uncomfortable. "Where, exactly?"

"In Mission Viejo, at my brother's house. You were with Dave Greco, the CACO."

"Oh yeah," he murmurs, but I can tell he doesn't remember. It was a long time ago, after all. I turn to one of the naval officers standing with him. It turns out he is a CACO (Casualty Assistance Care Officer) in Tennessee. He is one of the officers who has the terrible job of knocking on doors to tell parents and wives that their son or daughter is injured or dead. Since all casualties fall under his purview, he also serves as a liaison between the military's POW/MIA office and the families of the unaccounted for from Vietnam and other wars. He has a slim runner's build and four gold bars on his epaulets, which means he's a captain.

"I was wondering if you could help me," I say to him. "In 1984, during this convention, my sister and I visited the Hall of Heroes at the Pentagon. The names of all the POW/MIAs were engraved on plaques, but our father's middle name was spelled wrong. We were hoping to see if it was ever corrected. Do you know how we might do that?"

"You can't get near the Pentagon since 9/11," he says as nicely as he can.

I affect my best crestfallen look. "Oh. That's too bad. I really wanted to see it..."

"I know people in the Pentagon. I can call and see if one of them will do a fly-by," he offers, smiling. I don't believe there is such a thing as a bad looking navy captain.

"Could you? That would be so great!" I give him the correct and incorrect spellings of the middle name and my cell number. "We'll have an answer for you before the end of the meeting," he tells me.

Feeling accomplished--We're networking! We're engaged!--Sara and I go downstairs and sit in the lobby. It's 6 p.m., and we don't have a plan for the evening. The hotel bar is directly behind us, and I'm suddenly hit by the desire for a drink, something tropical, celebratory. A year ago I'd be on my third cocktail by now. "I want to have a drink with somebody," Sara mock-wails. I feel badly, as if I've let her down. One of the toughest things about being in recovery is my new role of official buzz-kill. This time, she's the grownup, I'm the kid who needs to be watched.

We finally decide on dinner and a movie in Georgetown. We find a nice Italian place and sit outside, eager to enjoy the remains of the day, which is uncharacteristically cool for August. Sara is determined to help me stay sober so she sticks with Pellegrino at dinner. Before, we'd have ordered a bottle. Or two. I need something to fill the void, so I ask Sara if she has the cigarettes.

"I thought you had them."

I rummage through my purse. "I must have left them at the salon."

"Don't worry about it. We weren't meant to have more than one."

"You're right. This time, one was all we needed."

Fingered

2009-07-31T18:43:00.000-07:00

One year ago tonight, I was loaded into an ambulance on Madison Avenue, bloody and screaming, my left hand swathed like a Q-tip, and transported to Bellevue Hospital. There, I spent several hours in the emergency room, partially sedated on a gurney, my blood-spattered clothes in a plastic bag, while my husband and mother in law stood vigil, almost against their will. I lay in an ER where violent drunks pissed onto the floor and the cops who had brought them here stood on the other side of the curtain where I lay, bantering so loudly I finally had to yell at them to shut up, What did they think this was, a fucking night club?

"I'm sorry officer. She's badly hurt. She doesn't know what she's saying."

If you want to chew out New York City's finest, I recommend you lose a finger first so they'll let it slide. And make sure you also have a long-suffering husband who will stand by you, no matter what, until the next time you end up in the ER, when he'll finally say, "I'm sorry. I can't come."

Make sure you have a mother in law who will drop everything and rush to your side, not once, but twice, until finally you say to yourself, You can't do this anymore. Go ahead, kill yourself, just don't kill her.

Make sure, also, that you have a younger sister who will fly out to be with you, bringing all the good energy she can muster, as well as the phone number of her spiritual adviser, who will tell you that St. Michael did this to teach you a lesson, that he was tired of protecting you and so took the one thing you could live without, yet never forget.

Never forget what you lost. A father. A finger. Forty years apart. And the string that connects them, like some tragic game of telephone, is your addiction.

That is what Stephanie tells you. That the grief you never expressed as a child, the grief you weren't allowed to feel, is at the root of your addiction. You became an addict and an alcoholic to numb the pain. To avoid feeling your feelings.

"And what about the 11 years since we buried him?" you ask her. "Why did my problem suddenly get worse? Wasn't closure supposed to solve everything?" Maybe it was the birth parents who rejected you, quadrupling your sense of abandonment and unworthiness that one man's love couldn't change, no matter how many times he told you how beautiful you were, how intelligent, how special. How he knew the moment he saw you that you were different. Complicated and intriguing. How he had to no choice but to walk back into the guest room that Labor Day Weekend in 1984, because if he didn't you would leave and he wouldn't never know you at all.

"It was all that," she answers. "And probably a biological predilection." A perfect storm of nature and nurture that blew you into Bellevue Hospital on a warm summer night, in a bloody turquoise dress and four-inch wedge heels poorly-suited to ladder climbing, especially after five glasses of pinot grigiot on an empty stomach.

Eight weeks later you started at a new magazine. The big time. Lousy timing, for sure, but what choice did you have? It was the dream job you're worked toward for 20 years. You pretended it was easy, losing a finger. No big deal, happens all the time, to men anyway. Only one in ten accidental finger amputations happens to a woman, and it's usually a kitchen accident, a slip of a Ginzu knife while chopping bell peppers. You've taken a licking plenty of times and kept on ticking. The old boot straps, remember? So frayed by now they finally break. That's what military kids do. They keep on marching until they fall flat on their faces.

The ghost takes your damaged hand in his and shakes his head. Look at you. I didn't die for my country so that you could get sloppy drunk in public, abuse illegal drugs and cheat on your husband. So that you could permanently disfigure yourself. You were doing so well. You had it all. What made you screw up so badly?

And you whisper, You did. You died for your country instead of living for me.

America's Most Wanted

2009-07-27T18:20:00.000-07:00

I spent most of last week in Washington, D.C. The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia was holding its 40th annual convention at the Crystal City Hilton, and though my father's case is closed, I was curious to see how the organization has evolved since the mid 1990s, when I last attended one of these grim confabs. I'd also read that the NLOF was at risk of going dark due to a lack of charitable contributions, and I wanted to show my support.

I also went because I had something to say, something that had been gnawing at me for 11 years. They're digging up more than bones and teeth out there in the killing fields of yore--they're digging up grief that has never seen the light of day.

When I called Sara in California to tell her of my plans, she said, "I want to come too. I haven't seen the headstone since mom's name was put on it." We quickly nailed down the details. She'd fly to Washington, I'd drive. On the way down from New York I'd pick her up at Dulles before heading to our hotel in Arlington. The NLOF meeting was headquartered at the Crystal City Hilton, but by the time I got around to reserving a room at the special convention rate the hotel was booked solid. So I made reservations at a nearby hotel, or what I thought was a nearby hotel. It looked close on the map.

After we hung up, I realized that, coincidentally, this month marked 25 years since we attended our first NLOF meeting together. It was July of 1984. I had just graduated with an MFA in creative writing (surely the least useful graduate degree ever created) and Sara had just completed the ninth grade. Having attended the NLOF meeting the previous year, mom suggested that this time, Sara and I go together. The Department of Defense was picking up the tab for the flight and the hotel room. In honor of National POW/MIA Recognition Day on July 20, Reagan was scheduled to speak to the families on the south lawn of the White House. It wasn't every day you got to sit within spitting distance of the President of the United States, even if I didn't plan to vote for him. I was now a Democrat, albeit a stealth one: I hadn't told mom I'd changed my party affiliation.

President Reagan had made accounting for missing servicemen from the Vietnam conflict a high priority, and that spring, the Department of Defense had interred the remains of one of them in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Mom was now on the POW/MIA mailing list, and she received a telegram from the Navy Casualty Division inviting her to the ceremony. "Clearly the interment of a Vietnam unknown can be a springboard for heightened activity concerning the POW/MIAs," it read. But she was in no condition to go. Two car accidents in the space of three months had left her damaged and traumatized. At the time, she was driving a bronze Lincoln Continental that she'd bought from her married boyfriend whom she'd met in an Optifast clinic. The previous December, she'd been rear-ended in a parking lot while shopping for wall paper. The second accident, in March, was more serious: While turning left to go to the fake lake, she and Sara were broad-sided by a another driver who ran a red light. That was the end of the Lincoln, and while both of them emerged relatively unscathed, the accidents only cemented our mother's perception of herself as a victim. From then on she became a professional "accident victim," entangled in lawsuits, constantly traveling between home and her chiropractor's office, where she became such a common sight I yearned to suggest, jokingly, that she keep a toothbrush there.

Reagan's speech was a nice carrot, but not the reason I agreed to go. The Vietnam Veterans War Memorial had been installed four years earlier, yet I still hadn't seen it. I had envisioned the moment many times, how I'd trace the incised letters of my father's name with my own fingers as if decoding the braille edition of my life's direction, the one I could fathom only by touch. This was my chance to see what answers the Wall might hold.

I couldn't remember the last time Sara and I had gone anywhere together, just the two of us. Since I'd moved to California, the longest stretch of time we'd spent in each other's company was that afternoon making curtains for my trailer. And the way things were looking, that record was liable to stand for a long time. I was moving ahead with my plans to relocate to Japan by the end of the year, and mom had abruptly decided, yet again, to move. Sara had clicked with a new viola teacher at a music camp in Lake Arrowhead so mom, despite her injuries, decided they should relocate to Northern California, where he lived and taught. Kevin would live in the Mission Viejo house and find a roommate to help cover the monthly mortgage payment. By the end of 1984, Kevin, Sara and I would have resumed our roles as satellite siblings, connected only by the occasional letter and telephone call.

On July 18, Mom drove Sara and me to Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino. We took the Healey, the only car she had left. "Take good care of her," mom told me. She stood on tarmac, waving us off as we boarded a military cargo plane bound for the nation's capital. Imagine a commercial 707; now strip it of all luxuries and accoutrements, from flight attendants to seat cushions, and what you have left is a bare-bones carcass of an aircraft designed to carry soldiers and cargo. We strapped ourselves into our seats and an airman in a flight suit handed us box lunches. The in-flight entertainment consisted of a deck of cards and whatever reading material we'd brought: Sylvia Plath for me, Jane Eyre and sheet music for Sara. I gazed out the window but there was nothing to see, so I looked at nothing but clouds. By the time we began our descent into Andrews Air Force Base darkness had fallen, and as the ground got closer the cloud cover lightened, revealing streets of neat white Colonial homes set among lush dark trees.

It was a long time ago, that trip, but I can muster the high points. We wore name tags printed with our names, our father's name, and the date of his loss. Finally, an official version of the albatross I'd worn around my neck for fifteen years. There were several hundreds other family members, but Sara and I were among the youngest people there. Most of them were elderly or middle-aged, parents and siblings, and all of them wore the weary, haunted look of people for whom the war lived on.

On July 20, a sultry summer Friday morning, the family members were bused from Stouffer's Concourse Hotel in Arlington to the White House. There, we were ushered to folding chairs set up in rows on the South Lawn. Photographers readied their cameras on the media scaffolding. I looked up at the roof of the White House and spotted the black POW/MIA flag flying underneath the United States flag. Honor guards stood at attention on the South Portico. The United States Navy Band played for about an hour, their brass instruments filling the air with round, robust notes. There was a 21-gun salute--a stirring sight indeed, one I hadn't seen one of those since my father's memorial service--and when the band struck up "Hail to the Chief, the Reagans walked out. She was wearing a white suit and he wore a khaki blazer and navy blue pants. Everyone clapped, even me. Nancy Reagan introduced Casper Weinberger who introduced The president. He stood at the podium and spoke of self-less duty and dedication and national priorities and so on, but I was mesmerized by his hair. His auburn pompadour looked like a flame against the hazy sky, reminding me of Tintin's blonde up-do.

Yet when the President said that "Our nation deeply appreciates the acute suffering and pain experienced by the families of the servicemen held captive or missing in action," his words amplified a growing sense of unease that I'd felt since arriving. The fact is, my father was neither POW nor MIA, the latter category being reserved for men who were seen alive and never seen again. No, our father was KIA/BNR. Most of those 2,500 men were KIA/BNR, but for some reason the larger group had been absorbed into the smaller group. True, being called "MIA" had a lot more impact than the unwieldy "KIA/BNR," but it was a little misleading. Our father was dead, I was quite sure of it by now; all that was missing were his bones. Besides, MIA kin were the ones to really pity. They were the angriest, the most outraged and desperate. You didn't want to belong to an MIA family for anything.

After the benediction, we heard a low rumble in the distance. Four F-14s came roaring overhead, a sound like no other sound in the world. Suddenly the middle jet broke away from the pack and rocketed straight up toward the thin, high clouds and disappeared. At that moment, in the diminishing din of a missing man fly-over, Sara and I held each other and for the first time, cried together over our shared loss. I was transported back to every air show, every empty hangar, every time I stood in the street at Albany and watched other families pile in their station wagons for the short drive to the airfield, where their husbands and fathers were due to land, finally home from the war. Sara was reminded that though she'd never seen these things, she carried his spirit in her DNA and his absence in her soul. For her, almost fifteen years of knowing he would never hold her in his arms or kiss or cheek or show her how to tie a fly; and for me, the tears I hadn't shed that awful night, or ever: All of it finally crumbled the seawalls of our resolve and flooded our hearts. It felt good to cry, to breathe out great, hungry sobs.

It should have bonded us forever, that moment. But it didn't. Fifteen years of distance couldn't be closed in five minutes, however dramatic and epiphanous they were. Maybe those weren't the tears we were supposed to cry. Maybe that reservoir of grief was still too deep to be tapped. Maybe this was merely a prelude to the crying to come.

After the ceremony was concluded we dried our eyes and helped ourselves to coffee and pastries, served by waiters in tuxes under the trees. Then we were bussed to the Pentagon. By this point, I was beginning to feel like one of those accidental celebrities who become known not for they'd done but for what had been done to them. John Walsh for example, the Florida man whose six-year-old son Adam was kidnapped from a Sears store in 1981. Sixteen days later, police found Adam's head in a drainage ditch. Walsh re-directed his grief to hunting down criminals, and I followed his story closely. If only I had what it took be be a crusader like him. All I did was write poems.

At the Pentagon we were led to he POW/MIA Corridor. There, the names of the 2,500 unaccounted for men were carved into bronze plaques hung behind the glass. On the glass were images of barbed wire and photographs of some of the missing. Sara and I began to search out our father's name, and when we found it, I was dumb-founded: His middle name was misspelled. What should have read Ellithorpe was Ellithorne. I instantly remembered mom's story about how he didn't want his name carved into any memorials or plaques because they'd probably misspell it. And what do you know, he was right. I couldn't exactly whip out an eraser and a No. 2 pencil and correct the error, so I pointed it out to the nearest white uniform I could find. "We'll straighten that out right away, ma'am," he said. I hated being called ma'am.
We were later told that the Pentagon had indeed fixed the misspelling, though proof never materialized.

I wasn't crazy about the politics of the conference, either. Like a reluctant witness to a criminal act, I didn't want to get involved. I avoided the briefings and meetings. Had I put my ear to the closed doors of the hotel meeting rooms, I'd have heard voices raised in anger and debate. I'd have gotten wind of internal power struggles. Instead Sara and I went sightseeing: Ford's Theater, The Smithsonian, The National Gallery. We had a free trip to Washington D.C. and we were going to make the most of it.

On one of our bus rides, I met one of the few other young people at the meeting. His cousin had been lost in Vietnam. He owned a T-shirt shop in Georgia, and he was cute enough, so when he invited me to go to Georgetown with him one night, I agreed.

"You'll be okay by yourself, right?" I asked Sara. She was sitting on her bed playing solitaire.

"Oh yeah. Have fun. I'll just hang out in the room."

The date did little but convince me that I wasn't physically attracted to the T-shirt dealer. After a rainy cab ride back to the hotel, I said good-night in the lobby and let myself into my room. I pushed open the door and heard rustles and whispering in the dark. I flipped on the light to find Sara and some strange teenage boy frantically readjusting their clothes.

"What's going on here?"

"Nothing! We were just talking."

The boy made a quick exit, but I was no danger to him, stunned as I was by the realization that my little sister was a sexual being. That was all I needed: to bring her home pregnant. On second thought, mom might give me a medal. But still.

"You know, I'm supposed to be in charge here," I admonished, trying to sound like a big sister who had never, of course, done such a thing herself. "What if mom hears about this?"

Sara lowered that familiar chin and murmured, "I won't tell if you won't."

"Who was he, anyway?"

"He's here for the meeting. He wasn't born when his dad died in Vietnam, just like me!"

"That's no reason to let a guy feel you up."

This time, there'd be no hotel room make-out sessions, no shenanigans of every time. Sara and I were wives and mothers now, but this week, it was out status as daughters that mattered the most.

Last Tuesday, I met Sara at Dulles at 5 p.m., exactly as planned. She found me in the baggage claim area and we embraced. She looked great, having traded her tummy tuck shuffle for a normal-looking gait. We retrieved her bag, got my car and headed to Arlington. As I drove, Sara pulled out a new iPhone. "I just got it yesterday and I'm still trying to figure it out," she said. "Let's try the GPS function." Unlike me, Sara is a gadget person. Unlike me, she is a social animal. Unlike me, she can have a glass of wine without making it five glasses of wine. She inherited the best of both our parents: our mother's domestic and bookkeeping skills as well as our father's precise, analytical mind and bas-relief bone structure. She is also psychic and deeply attuned to spiritual energy, which always lends an air of unpredictability to any outing.

The conference kicked off on Thursday morning, giving us Wednesday free. After breakfast, with the help of Sara's iPhone, we made our way to Arlington National Cemetery. I showed my pass and we were waved through. I've been to the cemetery half a dozen times in the past 11 years, and every time, it feels like the first. Something about the place makes my memory go blank, and I have to search out the grave, as if my father's remains still refuse to be found. But this time it was relatively easy, thanks to Sara's internal GPS. I turned left onto Grant Avenue and proceeded slowly, looking for Section 7. "Over there," Sara said. "I remember those trees. There are three of them, all in a row."

I pulled over and parked. We got out of the car and began to walk up the grassy slope. I wandered among the headstones like an amnesiac. Is it over here? No, this way. On the other hand...

"There it is!" Sara had spotted the marker among a stand of cedars. By the time I got there she was standing in front of it, eyes closed, palms resting atop the granite. I could see her shoulders shaking. "I don't know why I'm crying," she said, sniffling.

"Because you're visiting your parents' grave." I looked down at the ground and imagined two bronze urns buried side by side. "Together at last, for all eternity. That's why she finally agreed to have the bypass surgery, you know. She was ready to die. She finally had a place to go. She fought for it, in the only way she knew how: relentless nagging. They went and found him just to shut her up."

Yellowed grass clippings had accumulated on the base of the headstone, and I bent to brush them off. Bird droppings spotted the granite. I tried to remember the last time I'd visited them. I should come more often, I thought. I should give her more credit. When everyone else was telling her to throw in the towel, she stuck with it. She never gave up.

Sara and I took photos of each other standing by the headstone. I sat down on the grass with my back against it, and Sara joined me. We just sat there silently, propped against the cool stone, listening to the birds and the distant rumble of airplanes taking off from Reagan National. So many headstones, and under every one of them a particular story of pain. A tram went by, carrying tourists through the place, Disneyland-style. I resisted the urge to wave. And on your left ladies and gentlemen, two sisters who waited 29 years to bury their father, and three more to bury their mother. But don't think of them as orphans. Think of them as friends, finally."

Suddenly Sara said, "I'm dying for a cigarette." Sara doesn't smoke.

"Dad's sending you a message, huh?" She nodded. "Well, let's go then."

"We should come back and clean the headstone," she said as we walked back to the car. But before we got in, I stopped to look at a small oval headstone. It was old and had sparkly bits, like quartz. The names of two sisters were engraved on the one side. "They must have been twins because they were born on the same day in 1954," I said. "And died on the same day too, in 1962."

Sara looked at the front. "There are three more names here. And they died on the same day as the sisters." We were looking at the communal headstone for five siblings, all dead in the same tragedy. House fire? Car accident? Plane crash? Their parents' grave was nowhere to be seen. "They might still be alive," I said.

Sara became emotional. "How do you bury five children? How do you go on?"

"You just do. You survive. Some better than others."

As we drove toward the exit, we passed the sections with the newest markers: 2007, 2008. 2009. We passed acres of empty land waiting to be filled with the dead from the new wars even as the ghosts of the old wars still wander among us, homeless.

Bird by Bird by Bird

2009-07-19T11:33:00.001-07:00

This morning I wake up to the smell of blueberry pancakes and turkey bacon. The kids are still asleep: Bob in his bottom bunk in his bright-blue room, Ethan in his white room across the hall. Ethan's friend Jeremy sleeps on the floor next to his bed, on a foam chair that unfolds into a mat. Ethan has so many friends who spend the night though if you ask him, he has few friends at all. I got tired of finding them draped across my sofas in the morning, especially the one in the living room where I like to drink my coffee. So I bought two of the chairs for his room, to give them proper beds and to get my living room back.

Dave is cooking the pancakes. He is the cook in the family. He brings me coffee in bed. He takes care of us.

I rouse the boys and usher them downstairs for breakfast. They eat in front of the TV in the family room, and Dave and I eat take our plates out back to the secret garden, where we sit and eat and bird-watch. There seem to be so many more birds this summer than in years past. I keep my father's copy of Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds in the dining room for handy reference. To facilitate the search he typed the birds' names in alphabetical order on two pieces of paper and taped them into the front of the book. I imagine he did so in 1947, the year the book was published. He would have been 16, living in Los Angeles with his father and stepmother, dreaming of a career as a naturalist. The tape is brittle and caramel-colored. All of the pages have detached from the spine so I handle it carefully. I supposed I should leave it on a shelf, but this book deserves to be used. I leaf through the color plates until I spot the bird in question and give it a name. Flicker. American goldfinch. Magpie.

Dave and I enjoy our pancakes. The dog relaxes over by the pond. The air has felt soft all week, as if spun through a dryer with a fabric softener sheet. A couple of sparrows land in the pond and begin to bathe. Their wings kick up tiny splashes. Then a whole squadron of sparrows land in the crabapple, and one by one, drop into the pond. This was how the jets landed at the airfield when they came home from the war, or so I'm told.

Dave and I first set eyes on each other in the fall of 1983, just another of Steve's college roommates blowing through town. They liked to keep track of each other, to see where each of them had landed after Penn so they could carry a picture in their minds of their buddies' new lives. Steve had the spot, they all agreed: a basement apartment yards from the beach where he could entertain his lady friends and write. It was a nice set-up. Steve introduced me to his friend in the Backlot, but I was too nervous to pay him much mind: I was giving a poetry reading in an hour. He had auburn hair and patchy reddish beard that was clearly his first attempt at growing facial hair. During the reading, I saw him sitting right in front, listening intently.

"I thought your poems were really good," Dave says, picking a blueberry off his plate. "Steve had told me all about you. He talked about all the women he was interested in. He said you were one of his best friends in Irvine."

"And I wanted to keep it that way. Besides, I was still obsessed with Javier."

Stuart was at the reading too. I didn't speak to him afterwards, but I heard later that the poems that he'd left feeling depressed. Not surprising, since a couple of them were obviously about him. Steve's friend left town and I didn't give him another thought. My life had become a series of relationships that represented each phase of the life cycle: dead, living and embryonic. I had no idea that a new love was on the verge of breaking open as I was so wrapped up in the living one. Like most long-distance love affairs, this one required constant nurturing lest it be allowed to die on the vine. And of course it did, inevitably. My letters to Paris dwindled. His letters to Irvine became more desperate, beseeching. Je t'aime! he wrote in large letters on a piece of paper. But the final nail was an odd photo he sent of himself. He was standing in front of the camera, pointing straight at me. He had gained weight and grown a beard. He looked, not like the sexy Javier of nine months previous, but like a stalkerish hermit. Our fairy tale was fini.

After taking our plates to the kitchen, Dave and I go back outside to look at his garden. He's carved six beds out of the gravel expanse off the barn and planted vegetables, flowers and herbs. We sit on a pile of gravel and survey his handiwork. With the pride of a new father, he points out his baby's attributes: the perfectly formed yellow squash, the adorable Thai basil, the robust chard. Before I'm even awake he's been weeding and watering. He worries that all the rain will stunt the tomatoes. When he spots a bit of poison ivy peeking through the neighbor's fence, he carefully pushes it back to the other side. And in so doing, he tends to himself.

"This garden saved me last year," he says. "At a time when there'd been a big blow to my self-esteem, it was good to be able to nurture something, to do something good."

Dave really talks like this. It's one of the things I love about him, one of the reasons he's such a great father. He's had to be considering those years when I was anything but a great mother. And he's tenacious. His tireless, almost relentless courtship won my heart 25 years ago, and over the past year, his refusal to give up on me--on us--has won my heart all over again. I always tease him that for a city kid born and raised he's got a way with farming. I even went so far as to write him a song called "Farmer David," sung to the tune of Frere Jacques, my favorite childhood ditty. This required finding a word that rhymed with arugula, no small feat. I settled on meshugeneh. One of the benefits of having a Jewish mother-in-law is picking up the Yiddish words she drops into her sentences. Meshugeneh means "crazy."

A crazy woman is a meshugener. Only a meshugener takes love for granted.

After dropping Javier, I became a bit meshugeneh. I drank more than ever, one bend after another. I'd wake up with a hangover and a nameless man in my bed. I was compensating for all those months of celibacy with a vengeance. I met men in bars and the Backlot and Albertson's and took them back to the trailer. The next morning, when they'd ask for my phone number, I'd say, "It's on the telephone," knowing full well that those seven digits were left over from my trailer's days as an airport office. I had a several-week relationship with a lute player. He had the hair of a pre-Raphaelite angel and skin as pale as milk. He ate only dairy products and smoked more pot than Cheech and Chong. I'd come back from class late in the day to a dark trailer and discern his presence by the glowing ash of his joint. There was the hunky English student who, desperate for a passing grade, showed up at my door one night, hoping to seduce a D out of me. We ended up in bed but nothing happened. Let's just say he didn't get an A for effort.

There was an actor, star of the university's drama school. He had blonde hair, a bodybuilder's physique--even though he never touched weights--and a low, gravelly voice that made him the perfect villain. He had landed a job at Universal Studios' Conan the Barbarian Show and moved to L.A. I drove up to see him a couple of times but his swordplay left much to be desired.

Mostly, I was alone. I spent hours doing nothing but staring out my west-facing window at the hills beyond the trailer park. Sometimes, I would watch the white-tailed kites hunt their dinner. My father's bird book calls the white-tail kite a rare species, and in 1947, it was almost extinct. But by 1984, I saw them all the time, hovering above the barbed wire fence under which I'd shimmied so many times. The kites hovered high above a field mouse or a snake, motionless except for their palpating wings, treading the air as they waited for the moment to drop and strike. Cibo had disappeared into those hills. He had gone out one night and never come back. I heard the coyotes baying and knew, as I'd always known.

I'd heard that these hills were slated to be developed as faculty housing. I had a sense of something large coming to an end, both within myself and in the larger world. By the spring of 1984, it had become clear that my career as a poet was destined to be as short-lived as my affair with the lutist. It had been merely a phase, an accident, and now it was over. I was recycling old poems in workshop and passing them off as new. I must have fooled someone because I received a graduate writing award, along with a $100 check. I continued to teach and was selected to lead an undergraduate poetry workshop. I threw all my energy into my classes and received my students' goodwill in return. On the last day, they gave me a thank-you card bearing all their signatures and words of good luck with my future. My future! I had no idea what it held. Other MFA candidates were applying to the Phd program, determined to suckle on the university teat as long as possible, but I knew I had had enough formal education to last me a lifetime. I didn't know my next step was, but I knew it was going to take me out of Orange County, the farther, the better.

In May I picked up a copy of the New University and found, in the classifieds, an ad for a school in Japan that was looking for teachers.

Japan. Last time I checked, Orange County was nowhere near it.

Orange County, Mon Amour

2009-07-17T11:19:00.001-07:00

I can't speak for Sara, but my mother and me couldn't leave that melancholy trip from Paris to Rome behind us. Perhaps it was a result of our failure to recapture the joy of those past European jaunts, when my father, her husband, was both full of life and alive. Or Louis Matisse's simmering anger, how he refused to budge from his chair in front of the television except to sleep and eat and argue. Or my own impatience with her relentless infirmities, from her MSG allergy to her blood sugar levels to her headaches. As for l'affair Javier, this sudden romantic development had alarmed my mother. She was quietly furious at my tendency to fall for penniless artists and musicians rather than the successful if vanilla men she tried to set me up with. I did not dare to remind her that she herself had married a penniless grad student who would finally agree to accept his commission only because now he had a wife to support. A wife who wanted more than he could offer at the time. He wanted to give her more than the inexpensive wallet he bought for her birthday in 1955, into which he slipped a note: Dearest Alice, may this wallet be full someday.

Granted, I couldn't remind her of that last point, as it would be years before I found that wallet. All I knew was her version of the story: that he joined because he was on the verge of being drafted and he wanted to choose his own destiny. Which he did, of course. He chose his destiny, and ours. Yet my mother refused to claim responsibility for the dismal aftermath of his death. In the stories she told of her childhood and marriage, she was always the victim, always on the receiving end of life's broken promises.

My feelings for Javier led to keep a promise to myself, a promise of love. You see, l'affair Javier did not end in Gijon.

I was scheduled to fly out of Heathrow in a week. Upon reaching Paris, I spent a few days exploring the city on my own. I dragged my lovesick self from one sight to another, imagining what it would be like to view Notre Dame or the Eiffel Tower while holding hands with Javier. I took the roll of film from Gijon and had it developed so I could look at him anytime I liked. I even sought out his apartment building on Rue Bachelet. It was an austere, modern structure in the 18th arrondissement, steps from Sacre Coeur. I day-dreamed about the night Javier had driven me around the Spanish countryside under a flashlight moon. He pointed out bunkers and other visible remnants of the Spanish Civil War, and took me to a ruined palace where we watched thousands of bats blacken the dark blue sky. I wanted to dress like the stylish young Spanish women of Gijon, so he took me shopping, rendering his opinion on the outfits I tried on for him. I bought a pair of green pants in a light cotton weave, and in Paris, I never took them off. While strolling down the Boulevard Ste. Germain, an expensive convertible pulled up next to me full of Middle Eastern men. "Allemagne?" they asked, assuming I was German. I ignored them and kept walking. They idled alongside me, entreating me to get in. But I was in no mood to be drugged and gang-raped. Besides, there was only one man who would get into these Spanish pants, and I didn't know if I'd ever see him again.

The thought was unacceptable. Once I got to London, I changed the return date on my airline ticket and called my mother to let her know I was extending my stay by two weeks. "I've met someone!" I said breathlessly from a phone booth in Trafalgar Square. "He's a Spaniard who lives in Paris!" She agreed to my plan--she had no choice--but even through the phone line's transatlantic cackle I could hear the hesitancy in her voice, and even a little envy. "You take care now," she intoned. Then I called Sal Paradise to let him know that his trailer sublet had been extended. Giddy, I hung up and booked my passage on the next ferry to France. When I arrived in Paris I hopped the Metro to the 18th arrondissement, found a hotel near Sacre Coeur, and then walked to Rue Bachelet. Javier wasn't scheduled to return from Spain for another three days, so I slipped a note under his door giving him my whereabouts and the phone number. And then I waited.

There was a chance my surprise wouldn't work; that he wouldn't leave Spain when he said he would, that I would have wasted this time and money. Or worse, that he wouldn't be happy to see me. This last thought was so distressing, my nerves so jangled, that I turned to drinking to calm myself. I spent two days swigging red wine straight from the bottle and wandering Montmartre in a daze, fending off the entreaties of the bad portraitists, imagining myself to be Colette, or better, Anais Nin, instigator of a thousand sexual adventures. I was desperate to create a Parisian sequel to our unlikely love story, desperate to live the life I was destined for.

A few months earlier, during the spring semester, the poet Carol Muske had led our MFA workshop. An attractive, moon-faced blonde who wore feminine flowered dresses, she struck me as pretty normal for a poet, which is to say, not overly neurotic or self-absorbed or doped up on anti-depressants. She also had an almost otherworldly radiance about her, and about halfway through the quarter, she revealed the reason. She had recently met the actor David Dukes in Italy, and it had been love at first sight. She was not only smitten, she was pregnant. "It was like a fairy tale," she said with the bedazzled look of a teenager describing her first crush. I was insanely jealous. I wanted my own fairy tale, and this was my chance to write it.

I waited in my hotel room for a phone call that never came. I repeatedly stopped by his apartment to see if he had returned. The fourth time I stopped by, I knocked and waited, and when no answer came yet again I turned to walk away, disconsolate, when the sound of a door creaking open made me whirl around.

"Leez! What are you doing here?"

"I came back to see you! Didn't you get my note?"

Flustered and surprised, Javier said he thought I'd left it when passing through Paris on my way to London, but before he could finish explaining I'd pushed my way into the apartment and onto his bed. My appearance could have been a fiasco. There might have been a woman in his apartment. There might have been a man in his apartment. But my sequel would play out as planned, and we spent a storybook week together. We spent nights in his studio apartment and most of the days, as well, leaving only to stroll along the Seine and dine at his favorite restaurant in Montmartre. The day before I had to leave, really leave, he took me to some sort of Marxist festival outside Paris where his band had a gig. It wasn't very crowded--France's Communist party was on the wane. We strolled past T-shirts silkscreened with the hammer and sickle. I bought a raffle ticket for a 40-inch television set and told Javier he could have it if I won. A big topic of conversation was Korean Airlines flight 007, which had been shot down over Soviet air space two days earlier. Even when Javier and his comrades claimed the incident was an American ploy to test Soviet military readiness, I stood by and held my tongue. My betrayal of my father's legacy was compete. I was not only a flower child, I was a Commie sympathizer to boot.

Another tearful good-bye, another choppy crossing of the English Channel. Seasick and lovesick, I sat below-decks and cried some more. Aboard the plane, the in-flight movie was Local Hero, and in one scene, where the Irish couple begins to make love, my insides gave a visceral lurch.

Late the next day, I arrived at my trailer to find Sal Paradise holding court. Quasi was there, Cibo parked in his lap, along with a few other park slackers I'd taken pains not to befriend. Sal jumped up when he saw me, as if they'd been sharing child pornography instead of a joint. "Honey, I'm home!" I said. I gave the slackers the evil eye and they made themselves scarce. I picked up Cibo and began to scratch his ears as I walked toward the back of the trailer. I turned on the kitchen light and shrieked so loudly Cibo sprang from my grasp and bolted out the door.

"Sal, what the fuck!?"

The light had sent a herd of cockroaches scattering across my hot plate and into the crevices around the kitchen counter. My mind immediately spun backward to Georgia and the earwigs, how I'd turn on the bathroom light and see them skittering down the bathtub drain. I shuddered now just as I'd shuddered then. "Where did these fucking things come from?" I was enraged.

"I think they came in in a box of books," Sal squealed. He grabbed a duffel bag and his pork pie hat and said, "Well, thanks for letting me crash at your place" before running out the door, leaving his souvenir postcard from hell. And these weren't your average cockroaches, but beatnik cockroaches, which are the toughest kind to get rid of--they'll hang around forever. The fact that the infestation was limited to the kitchen did little to ease my fury at this invasion of my beloved home. I finally did get rid of them, thanks to a small city's worth of roach motel's, but i couldn't help thinking of those roaches as a bad omen, like the evil flies in The Amityville Horror, who invade the house even though it's the dead of winter.

With a deep sigh, I began to unpack. The first thing I did was find the photograph of Javier that I'd taken in Gijon. He was wearing a white fisherman's sweater and a loving gaze in his dark-chocolate eyes. I pinned it on my bulletin board, right next to the monster face photo of my father. I recalled the moment I'd taken it. I'd said, "Hey, look at me!" and when he turned, I'd pressed the shutter.

The next day mom called and requested my presence in Mission Viejo. I knew she wanted to size up my mood, to see if I was thinking about quitting grad school and skedaddling back to Paris. I drove down, wearing the Spanish pants--I don't think I'd taken them off in a week--and a sleeveless mock turtleneck. I entered the house to find her lying on the sofa. She looked me up and down and said, "Well you didn't get as fat as I thought you would."

I should have asked, "So how fat did you get?" But my death wish was still on vacation.

She wanted to know how the rest of my trip had gone, especially the part involving Javier. I told her that he was a nice guy, just a summer fling, really, but I could tell that she didn't believe me. Her worst-case scenario was that I would choose passion over prosperity, just as she had. And look how that turned out. This was the on-going drama of our relationship: what she wanted for me and what I wanted for myself. It was a sort of competition: which version of my life would come out ahead? I had not found work as a translator at Disneyland. I had not won a Fulbright to study French in France, as I was not a fluent speaker, a fact that became all too apparent at the humiliating interview, when the panel started bombarding me with sentences I couldn't understand. That had been her idea, too. I had not finished my father's thesis about wildlife and public relations. I had not married a man of her choosing and begun to produce grand-babies, one after the other, my womb the baby factory hers had not been.

But this Javier fellow, he was dangerous. Because the only thing worse than my not having children was my having them on another continent, far from Orange County, from her.

What I wanted from her at the time, without consciously realizing it, was an apology, no matter how brief or superficial; or if not that, then at least a verbal recognition, some sign of awareness, that she bore partial blame for her actions toward all three of her children, but particularly towards me: an acknowledgment that it wasn't my fault that I wasn't the dutiful, domestically inclined daughter she'd hoped for; that she did not marry Arnie because of me; that I did not make her hurt herself in the act of hurting me. That she was not always the victim, but sometimes the perpetrator. But I asked for too much, and so I kept my distance.

I tried to pick up where I'd left off with school, but it was hard, what with my aching heart and Charles Wright's departure. And then there was Stuart. He still lived with his brother on the other side of the trailer park, and I could practically sense him out there in the dark, sending bad vibes in my direction. Fortunately, I had Margot to listen to my troubles. She'd patiently sit on the love seat as I aired my lovelorn complaints, and when I was done she'd flick her wrist and say airily, "L'amour, c'est une bitch, n'est-ce pas?"

Of the new MFA students who arrived that fall, I became closest to a Penn grad named Steve, a hyper-kinetic East-Coast import for whom words were as plentiful as sunny days in Southern California. Russian Jew on his father's side, Irish-Italian Catholic on his mother's, possessing huge dark eyes, a Muppet-like shock of black hair and long, expressive hands that seemed to speak their own language, he'd been wooed by several grad schools but had chosen the West Coast for the change of scenery. Steve was an original, at least in these parts. For one thing, he was from Cedarhurst, Long Island. For another, he didn't take poetry so damn seriously. We were required to produce only two poems per quarter; Steve produced about 20, all linguistic mash-ups of vernacular jargon, stream-of-consciousness babble and Middle English parodies. For someone like me, who eked out lines of verse as tightly-wound as pocket watches, Steve's casual volubility was intimidating. I can't say I admired his poems, but I admired the spirit from which they sprang. His early works at Irvine included a rock opera and a series of poems by his literary alter-ego, the Uncouth Swain, whose goal was to work his way through every Fair Lady in the English department. He got through quite a few before he was done, but I wasn't one of them, stuck as I was on my Spaniard. But I enjoyed his company tremendously since he was as greedy as I was to drink life to the lees.

Yet whereas Steve mined heartache for every gram of poetic gold, I felt stymied, distracted. I spent hours I should have spent studying writing love letters to Javier. I wrote him in English, he replied in French. I asked him to come visit me, to see California. You'd love the Pacific Ocean, the endless sun, how you can go to the beach on Christmas Day. You could move here--California needs pan pipe players, too! I spent hours reading his letters to me, a French-English dictionary in one hand and a glass of Southern Comfort, to ease the pain of our separation, in the other. He explained that it was the busy season and he couldn't leave his group in the lurch. He sent me photos of Paris and of himself playing the guitar in his garden apartment. He sent me tapes of his band, which I played endlessly on my little stereo. At any hour of the day or night the ethereal, high pitched Andean pan pipe music, or Sikuri, filled from my trailer. Desperate for my fix, I haunted the free-standing wall of mailboxes by the entrance to the trailer park when I wasn't mooning over Javier's photo. I believed myself destined to love only men I couldn't have. I left them, or they left me. There was no coming back.

As for my father, I could find nothing more to say. I desperately wanted to write a poem called "Trucks at Vinh." When I thought of him, it was as if I was looking at the earth from a great height, able to discern only the broadest strokes of its topography. I needed someone to decode his meaning, his secrets, because I was clueless on my own. Though I'd produced only a handful of poems, the effort of writing about my father had exhausted me. I had hit a wall of understanding and desire, but unlike the cats who pounded against my door at night, I was tired of throwing myself against its shiny marble surface, begging to be let in.

Head Above Water

2009-07-14T13:19:00.001-07:00

Last month, Dave and I decided it would be nice to do something together other than go to movies and have sex (though that is nice too), so three days a week we take a water aerobics class. We both need to work out, and since our middle-aged joints creak and throb--I now require two ibuprofen at bedtime--water is the perfect low-impact medium. We enjoy it so much that we've bought the requisite gear. I have a flotation belt, Dave has foam ankle cuffs, and we both have webbed gloves that give us Creature from the Black Lagoon hands. The place in the left glove where my pinky would go is empty. Last winter, I switched from gloves to mittens.

This is more strenuous than the geriatric variety where you stand in the shallow end doing bicep curls with foam dumbbells: We spend an hour in the deep end of the pool while our instructor Lynn barks orders from the pool deck. Thanks to the flotation belts, we can "run" from one end of the pool to another, both slowly and a little less slowly. We do cross-country ski drills, scissoring our arms and legs through the water; side kicks where both legs kick out simultaneously like a Russian cossack dancer's; and T-flies, a sort of backwards jumping jack. If you were to watch us from the deck, you'd see our heads bobbing above the surface, but below the water, our arms and legs are moving like mad.

Today Lynn asked our nine-person class to form two circles. The outer circle ran clockwise, the inner, counter-clockwise. Every so often we'd turn and run the way we came, two group of people trying to make forward motion against the resistance our own bodies had created in the water. Dave is the only man, we are the only married couple in the class. Whenever I passed him, I'd give him a wink or a pat. We clearly get along. In fact, our classmates no doubt believe we have a happy marriage. But what they're seeing is a calm surface. They have no idea of the turmoil that occurred below the surface, or that this deep-water class is a way to exercise, not just our bodies, but our relationship.

I've been working on the honesty thing; now I'm working on togetherness. Before, I didn't see marriage as a shared experience so much as two people swimming in parallel lanes that crossed once in a while. We each worked, had our own sets of friends, spent money without consulting the other. I've kept my maiden name, and I kept my own checking account for years before agreeing to merge our incomes. Having worked so hard for my autonomy, I was loathe to give it up. Except for that time in Pittsburgh, Dave and I have spent almost four straight months together, and in that time I've worked hard to remind myself that his is my partner, my best friend, not simply a lover with whom I share property and children.

Dave, whose paternal instinct runs strong, had always wanted kids, and it took him seven years to talk me into it. After having Ethan, I stayed home for eight weeks, and when I returned to work, Dave took a hiatus from his career. I continued to breast feed. I pumped twice a day at work and rushed home, my liquid gold in a portable cooler, my breasts full to bursting. I'd hand Dave the cooler and he'd hand me Ethan and I'd rush upstairs to the bedroom, place my hungry son next to me on the bed--his mouth already working the air--and let him nurse until he fell asleep, lips slightly parted, breast milk dribbling down his tiny chin.

When I think of how close we were, how much he wanted and needed me, it makes what's happened between us all the more painful. Like many other parents, I've done everything I can to give him the childhood I felt I didn't have. He and Bob have lived in the same town their entire lives. They have friends they've known since pre-school. Dave and I have determinedly stayed together through our various crises, this last one being by far the worst. That I came so close to sabotaging these efforts remains a source of confusion and intense guilt.

For while my recovery is going along swimmingly, while my marriage, I believe, is as strong, as together, as it's ever been, Ethan is drowning. For a while I thought we'd been making progress, but lately he is depressed and quick to anger. During the past school year he started cutting classes , and now he's going to summer school every morning because he failed geometry. We got him a job bussing tables at a friend's restaurant but he refused to continue. I worry that he's smoking pot, though so far we have no proof. We ask him if he'd like to speak to a psychiatrist but he refuses. When pushed, he yells, lashes out, becomes confrontational. He's even stopped asking Dave to take him driving, though I'm not sure why. Perhaps he doesn't want to give his father the power to tell him what to do. Or perhaps it's because he has a tendency to run stop signs. There are so many things to think about, to look at, all at once, and the cost of failure can be so high. He is sixteen, and the world overwhelms him.

My teen moodiness made me an extremely unpleasant person to live with. I certainly wasn't easy on my mother, but she took my moods as a personal affront. "I won't be your emotional whipping post!" she'd tell me, even as she prepared to give me the whipping. I fear that Ethan has inherited my angry, depressive personality. With one big difference: He is allowed to use his words to express his discontent with us, with the world, with himself. The irony is, I can't remember a time when I've felt happier. It's as if I'm standing on solid ground while Ethan is struggling to stay afloat on stormy seas. I throw him a life preserver, but he refuses to catch it. Thank god for Dave's calm, patient interventions, since I can't imagine dealing with Ethan myself. I must constantly remind myself that he is caught in a rip tide of hormones, brain chemistry, teenage angst and anger at what I did to myself, to all of us.

Almost a year ago I fell off a ladder and lost a finger. I lost a finger. What kind of mother does that? And how could I not expect that fact to frighten my children, to shake their faith in my own stability and resilience?

A couple of weeks ago, after one of Ethan's rants, I said to Bob, "Will he ever like me again?" Bob, whose almost-13-year-old cranium houses a 50-year-old brain, replied, "He doesn't know what to think about you."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Well, you're all nice and stuff now, but when you were drinking......" His voice trailed off.

I have to remind myself that when I was drinking was only seven months ago. Ethan is afraid to trust that I have changed, and I can't blame him. He says that all we do is disappoint him. He seems to be referring to trivial things like the fact that we bought him a reconditioned MacBook instead of a new one, but I feel he is articulating a deeper resentment directed at me. Smiles are rare as buffalo nickels. For about a week he wouldn't speak to me at all. He did have a talk with Dave recently where he said, "Was there ever a time where mom was with me when she wasn't wasted?"

After Dave told me he said this I cried, "Of course there were! Plenty of times!"

The other evening, I knocked on Ethan's door and asked if I could come in. I heard a grunt from the other side of the door which I took as a yes. I found him in bed with his laptop, watching a DVD. I sat down next to him and said, "Can I tell you something?"

No reply. He kept his eyes on the screen.

"I just want you to know that what I did, the problems I had, were weren't about you. They were about me. I am so sorry about all that time when I wasn't present, and I'll spend the rest of my life making it up to you."

No reply.

"Do you believe me?"

Nothing.

"Just grunt or something and I'll go away." He grunted. I chuckled and left his room. But I think my words made a difference. The next morning, when leaving the house, he gave me a little smile and said, "See you later."

When I was a teenager living in Colorado, squandering my summers at the country club pool, my favorite game was to picking up pennies from the bottom of the pool. Treading water, I'd toss in two big handfuls and watch them drift to the bottom twelve feet below, turning and catching the light as they went. Then I'd fill my lungs to capacity with oxygen and dive below the surface, reaching the bottoms with three big strokes of my arms, and begin snatching them up as quickly as I could before my lungs could hold out no longer hold out and I'd shoot for the surface, hands brimming with copper coins. Almost four decades later, I feel I am diving into the deep end once again, but this time I'm scrambling frantically for all the forgiveness I can get before my oxygen runs out.

At the end of every class, Lynn has us stretch against the sides of the pool. The last thing we do is try to float without moving. We extend our arms and extend our legs straight down, making a letter T. This is harder than it sounds: Our belts and cuffs keep us buoyant, but it takes strong abdominal muscles to stay motionless and keep our legs from wandering.

"Take a deep breath and feel yourself come up higher in the water," Lynn intones, and we do as we're told. We fill the balloons of our lungs. We rise.

Europe on 10 Teardrops a Day

2009-07-11T10:49:00.001-07:00

"Elizabeth is going to fuck her way across Europe!"

This is how my friend Margot characterized my upcoming trip. But I assure you, this was not the case. My goal was to escape men. After the Salesman fiasco it occurred to me that I had come to depend on their approval just as much as I had on alcohol or weed. For five years I'd pin-balled recklessly from one man to the next, searching for myself in the shadowed hollows and hirsute plains of their hard, muscular bodies. Bodies at rest and in motion, bodies in ecstasy and lax repose. I hoped that Europe, with its cultural and scenic wonders, would be my passport to a fresh start, a place to wean myself from my various addictions. Where I could go cold turkey and come home clean.

On the transatlantic leg of my flight, I found myself seated next to a British chap in his 40s who began to chat me up almost as soon as we took off. A swarthy, intense man with hairy fingers, he told me he was taking his brother's body back to England. His brother had been a merchant marine who was washed overboard under mysterious circumstances. The Englishman produced a notebook full of newspaper clippings about the death. It had been ruled a suicide, but the man said his brother would never kill himself, not in a million years. He was convinced of foul play.

At first I listened to his story with half an ear, but I was captive audience, and after several screwdrivers the story became more interesting, and more relevant. At least you have a body to bring home, I wanted to say. And, You want a conspiracy theory? I got a good one.

I'm sure I told him about my father. Like the Cadillac owner in the Berg cartoon, I did not hesitate to bring him up. The parallels were obvious enough. It was odd thinking that his brother lay in a cargo container in the hold beneath us. And the Brit was obviously distraught and determined to get justice. He said his brothers and sisters had arranged to meet at the airport hotel. They had all booked rooms, and they were waiting for him, to discuss the situation and figure out the next step.

The Brit took our shared experience to mean we were destined to meet. Three hours in he began to order drinks for both of us, and the seduction began. I had lived through this pattern many times: First, you get her drunk. He showed me photographs of his villa on the Isle of Jersey. He indicated he had money. When the plane touched down in Heathrow, he invited me to his hotel room. He said he would show me London from the back of a limousine.

I don't know why I went. Perhaps I saw it as a buffer between me and the journey to come, a journey I was ambivalent about taking. I felt disoriented, at sea. I didn't mind having a tour guide. I had let men lead me on my entire life--why stop now? We retrieved our luggage and went through customs. The man was a British citizen and had only an overnight bag, so he went through quickly. I found myself wondering what happened to the container with his brother's body. He waited for me. A car was waiting, and a few minutes later we were at the hotel. When we got to his room, a group of people were already there. His brothers and sisters, all dark like him. They looked like gypsies, not your typical pale Brits. They gave me the once-over and then began to talk as if I wasn't there. As if they half-expected their brother to pick up a young American woman on the flight and bring her with him to the hotel.

I sat in a chair while they talked. They huddled together, voices low and humming, dark heads nodding yes and shaking no. Eventually they left, and the man and I were left alone. He said he was going to take a shower, and did I want to join him. I said no. He went into the bathroom and I heard the water come on. As I sat on the bed I knew what was coming. I guess I'd hoped that it wouldn't come to that, but I was being ridiculous--it always came to that.

I thought of the other times I'd been in hotel rooms I didn't want to be in with men I didn't know. That time at the resort hotel, with the conventioneer from Texas. My mother had let me go, had wanted me to go. I thought about the Saudi Arabian boy I dated at the private college, the richest kid in school. The one who took me to expensive restaurants and gave me that big bag of weed. How one day he picked me up at my dorm in his convertible. A friend of his was in the back, another rich kid from out of town. We drove around for a while and then we went back to the Saudi's dorm room, one of the single rooms where you didn't have a roommate. His friend and I sat on the sofa, and the Saudi said he was going to take a shower. The friend began to kiss me but I wasn't into him, I didn't even know his name. The Saudi emerged from the bathroom wearing only a towel. I could see what was coming and I didn't want to be his whore. I got up and said so and left and walked across campus to my room, where I sat on my bed trembling with anger and disillusionment. He stopped by to drop off my sweater, and I never saw him again.

The Brit came out of the bathroom wearing a robe. He laid down on his bed. I told him I wanted to go to London by myself, that I'd take the train. He got angry and told me that he would take me tonight, why didn't I just wait? I insisted. I said, I have to go. As I left I heard him yelling, "Go ahead, take the fucking train if you want!"

That was my first two hours in Europe.

In two weeks I was scheduled to meet Mom and Sara in Paris. We hadn't visited England when I was a child, so London was all new. I stayed in a large hostel full of kids from all around the world; the place even had its own disco. I spent three days seeing the sights one is supposed to see. I saw a show with a couple of other Americans, but when I left I left alone. My mother always said I was equal parts Scottish, Swedish, German and Greek, so I figured I'd visit one of my four homelands in an effort to learn something about my purported ancestors and in the process myself. I headed north to Scotland, with stops in Cambridge, Bath, and York. I didn't have one drink. In Cambridge I walked past the busy pubs, heard the boisterous toasts, and was too timid to go in. I went to see Flashdance instead. I bought my first and last kidney pie in Bath, took one bite, and threw it to the pigeons, vowing to live on bread, chocolate and bottled water for the rest of the trip.

In York I met a young American law student who was going to Scotland, and I asked if he wanted a traveling companion. He was a husky bearded redhead, nice enough, and I yearned for male companionship to assuage a growing loneliness so intense that I'd find myself crying while walking for miles in search of the hostel that was supposed to be only steps from the train station. We hopped a train; it traveled through the night and stopped in Glasgow. I looked out the window and saw an old man lying in a dark doorway, slack-jawed, his toothless mouth yawning open as if frozen in mid-howl. He was either drunk or dead. "Scotland has one of the highest alcoholism rates in the world," my new friend intoned. There you go, I thought. You did learn something about yourself.

In Edinborough we took separate rooms in a small B&B and spent two days exploring the city. It was entrancing, with its ancient city center, flower-filled parks and kilt-wearing punks with Day-Glo mohawks. We roamed the wild, magnificent bluffs and talked about our lives; he was coming off a bad breakup and taking a year off before law school. I felt the sexual tension rising like a storm cloud, but he wasn't my type. The next day we checked out and arranged to meet at a tour bus, but I forgot my camera and had to run back for it. He was irretrievably gone, and I continued on to the Isle of Skye. The tour book had made it sound rapturous, and it was, from the ruins of Castle Moil overlooking Loch Alsh to the fern-carpeted inland. I didn't get very far, being on a bicycle, but I did manage to find a poem there, on a lonely, rocky beach.

Skye was soulfully, achingly beautiful, yet the fact that I was seeing the island alone tarnished some of its brilliance. My loneliness had a desperate quality I hadn't experienced since Colorado, when I'd drive around for hours looking for a party or a boy who had cast me aside. Now that I had my freedom I had no idea what to do with it. I saw other young women traveling in pairs, but I had no longtime friends. In Bath I'd shared a hostel room with two American college students who spent an hour getting ready in the morning--hot rollers, full make-up, perfect clothes-- before taking in the sights. I saw them that afternoon, sitting on a bench, looking polished but bored. Still, I admired their friendship. My relationships were finite affairs with a distinct beginning and end. I could catch a man or make a friend, but not for long. The only human constants in my life were my mother and my siblings, but we couldn't even hold a normal conversation.

Nevertheless, I was relieved and a little amazed when my train pulled into Gare du Nord and I spotted mom and Sara standing on the platform, at exactly the time and place we'd planned. I could also see that Mom still possessed that unnerving thousand-mile stare, even in Paris--or perhaps because of Paris. Surely the city brought back memories of a better time. Until the rabbit incident, our stay had been pleasant, for Kevin and me at least. We came to Paris quite often, and I wonder if she was hit with a feeling of deja vu every time she turned a corner.

Their trip hadn't been easy, either. After boarding their flight in L.A., Mom had fallen violently ill, probably from MSG in food. She was taken off the plane and given medical attention while poor Sara stood by, both worried and mortified. Mom re-boarded and the plane took off 90 minutes late. Though only 52, mom's long decline had begun. Sara felt torn between her role in the orchestra and caring for mom, making sure she didn't fall sick again, and she could barely contain her relief at having reinforcements. From our base in a simple, clean yet spartan hotel near the Champs d'Elysee, we spent a few days sightseeing in and around the city and keeping an eye on everything that went into our mother's mouth. Then we rented a car and took off for the French countryside. Our first stop was the village where I had lived as a child. Louis Matisse and his wife still lived there, though they'd moved to a smaller house. Less than an hour later I was standing in front of our former home, convinced we were in the wrong place. Surely this house was too small, too modest. And I remembered a long gravel driveway to the front door, not this short, unimpressive path.

If the home disappointed me, I disappointed Louis Matisse. He was no longer the fun-loving Frenchman who let me sit on his lap and sip wine. For the two days we visited he barely moved from his easy chair, a pack of Pall Malls--my father's brand--on the table next to him. The Tour de France was on the television. When I entered the room to say hello, he turned his head slightly and nodded and said, "You used to be platinum blonde. Now your hair is darker." And that was the sum of his remarks to me. Later he and Sara had a misunderstanding and he made her cry. His wife was impressed at how quickly I showered, how little water I used--an old habit from the motor home days. Bored, I'd explore their little yard. It was hemmed in by hedgerows, and from deep in the bushes came the soothing, hypnotic coo of mourning doves, as if to reassure me that no one was the way they were, least of all Louis Matisse, who never fully recovered from the death of my father, his good friend. I have a letter Louis wrote to him after we moved; it was forwarded from Florida to Georgia and arrived in our mailbox several weeks after my father was lost. In the letter, Louis asks why he hadn't written him in such a long time.

Finally we left the past behind and headed south, for Rome. Somewhere around Lyons we got lost. Mom needed to use a bathroom, so we trouped into a bank. I knew enough of the native tongue to ask the teller for assistance. She looked at me, perhaps stunned that an American could speak French, and pointed toward the WC. "Thank goodness you speak French," mom sighed afterward.

We reached Rome via the autostrade. The hills were covered with olive trees and vineyards and, here and there, crumbling ruins appeared in the smog. But I never said, "Look!" or, "Isn't that beautiful?" Mom and I rarely spoke except to discuss directions or hotels or where to eat. Sara rode silently in the back. If you were to create the opposite of my family's joyous, impromptu romps through Europe in the 1960s, you'd come up with our tense, quiet threesome. Whose idea was this trip? I wondered. What were we hoping to come across?

Unfortunately, the glories of Rome went largely undiscovered. Europe was suffering from its worst heat wave in decades, and mom came down with heat stroke. She spent two days vomiting in the hotel room. The only food she could keep down was watermelon, so Sara and I spent our time running out to buy melons and bringing them back to the room. I could see that Sara was quite practiced at caring for mom; she cooled her forehead with a damp compress and cleaned her up with the calm efficiency of a nurse. For my younger sister, this was nothing new. Many times they would be driving home from a restaurant when mom would suddenly pull over to the side of the road, open the door, and start vomiting. Sara, too young to drive, would patiently wait for her to finish so they could continue on.

My European trip--I hesitate to call it a vacation--was stacking up to be the most desultory in the history of tourism. When we parted ways in Rome, I was ready to be on my own again. I had two more weeks left, and I planned to spend part of it in Provence, the region that had inspired Van Gogh and Cezanne to create their greatest work. I hoped it would inspire me as well. At Roma Termini I hugged mom and Sara good-bye, pulled on my backpack and boarded the night train for Marseilles. The platform was crowded and chaotic; hundreds of drunk Italian boys were hanging from every window, waving good-bye to their families. I spotted another blonde tourist with a backpack and, taking him for Australian, yelled above the din, "What's going on?"

"They're going away to the army!" he yelled back in an accent that confirmed my assumption. "In Italy all young men must serve a year in the military!"

I wedged my way onto the train and began to walk the aisles, looking for a seat. Every compartment I peered into was already occupied by boisterous young men swigging from wine bottles and accosting any young woman unlucky enough to be seated among them. The train began to move, and I lurched from car to car, the backpack throwing me off balance, through aisles packed with frenzied boy-men groping every female in reach. Some of the women were crying with frustration and fear. As I neared the end of the train, I grew more concerned that any empty seat I found would make me a lamb in the lion's den. But in one compartment, the male occupants were decidedly better behaved, demure even. Then I saw why: Two nuns sat across from them--and in between them was the last empty seat on the train. I was the only woman on the night train to Marseilles who managed to get some rest.

It took another day of train travel to reach Aix, but it was all the Impressionists made it out to be and more. I could have held a frame up to every view and had an original Cezanne. Even the hostel was beautiful: a centuries-old villa retrofitted to house dozens of young backpackers determined to see the world, or at least this slice of it. I didn't find any poems in Aix, but I did meet a Canadian Ph.d student. He was skinny, bespectacled and not at all sexually attractive, but he was easygoing and he made me laugh, something I hadn't been doing much of. He was headed to Switzerland, and I tagged along. We stopped in Geneva so he could visit with an expatriate colleague he'd met at university in Toronto. They held deep intellectual conversations about trends in modern French linguistics while I read one of her Joyce Carol Oates paperbacks. She kept calling him "a precocious Francophone." Then we trekked to the Jungfrau, but by now he was getting on my nerves, so at a mountaintop hostel I traded him in for a Jewish guy from New York City named Goldberg. Goldberg was in his 30s and coming off a bad breakup. "She was a real ball-buster," he kept saying of his ex. Goldberg was keen to visit Germany, where many of his relatives had perished in the death camps. We made our way to the Black Forest to Munich. Every time we stood on a platform waiting for a train, he'd peer intently at the elderly Germans and whisper, "Were they one? Were they one?" As a blue-eyed blonde, I half-expected him to start grilling me about any potential Nazi grandparents I might have.

Our next stop was Amsterdam. The train station was surrounded by strung-out young people and smelled of urine. Finally, I could get stoned. We rented a room in a narrow hotel and set out to find one of the infamous pot cafe, but I found the local weed lacked the desired potency. One night, after touring the red light district, where hookers stand behind glass like slabs of beef in a butcher's window, I relapsed: Goldberg and I had half-hearted sex in our room. He lacked the desired potency as well, and the next morning, while he was still asleep, I took my backpack and tiptoed down the steep stairs and fled to Salzburg. Another fortress, another quaint cobble-stoned square, another meal of sausage and sauerkraut: I was ready for a change of scenery.

Deep in my primordial memory slept recollections of a trip to Spain in 1964 with my father's Aunt Mary, his adoptive mother's sister, who had come from Fresno to visit. I caught another night train, this one to Madrid. It took two nights and a day to get there, and a little longer as well, since Spanish train workers tended to strike at the drop of a sombrero. By the time I reached Madrid I'd traveled to a very dark place indeed, this one in my own mind. I found a hotel and went to sleep. I woke up at 3 the next afternoon and wandered the city. Its Rococco architecture was an eye-popping surprise, but many of its inhabitants seemed to have stepped from a Goya painting: dwarves, cripples, blind men, thieves. Heading back to my hotel one afternoon, I passed a curly-headed young man about my age. He sat on a wall, a drawing pad propped on his knees. "Are you American?" he asked. I said I was. I peeked at his pad--he clearly was only pretending to draw. We hung out for the rest of the day and arranged to meet the next afternoon to go to a bullfight. "You know, like Hemingway," he said. But I overslept and missed him. That was okay, I'd heard the slaughter of the bull was so gory that many spectators became physically ill. Instead, I hopped a train to Toledo to view the El Greco paintings hung in the Church de Santo Tome.

So where to next? I recalled something Goldberg had said about a place on the Spanish coast called Gijon. He had run into some travelers who called it the most beautiful place they'd ever seen. At the Madrid train station, I asked the ticket seller for a ticket to Gijon. He didn't understand me and I had to repeat myself several times, but soon enough I was settling into my seat. I felt relatively cheerful as I watched wheat fields and the occasional castle fly by, pleased not so much with where I was going but simply with the fact that I was going somewhere.

The conductor appeared and moved down the aisle, checking tickets. When I handed him mine, he looked at it closely and began yelling at me in Spanish. I stammered that I didn't speak Spanish, and this only enflamed his apopletic rage, as did the hot tears that began to spill down my cheeks. Suddenly a male voice from the seat behind me said, "He is telling you that your ticket is for Irun, not Gijon." So that was it: The ticket seller had misunderstood me, and had sold me a ticket for the wrong city. "He says you owe him $1,500 pesos," the voice added. I paid the conductor the additional fare and whispered "Gracias" to the helpful Spaniard sitting behind me. Hours passed and the train began to chug into mountains. Then it began to make local stops, one after another, well into the night. A fog settled over the land, and I began to get nervous. Where was this place?

Gijon was the last stop on the line. I stepped down from the train in a city at the end of the world. It was midnight, and I had no place to sleep. I spotted a young man who'd just disembarked the train and asked, in the best Spanish I could muster, "Donde esta al hotel?"

"Now you need a hotel?" he replied in English, and I instantly recognized the voice from the seat behind me.

"Oh it's you," I gushed, gratitude oozing from every pore. "Thank you so much for helping me back there."

He looked at me quizzically and said, "Come on, I know a place where you can stay." Then he stopped and stuck out his hand. "My name is Javier. It is my pleasure to make your acquaintance." I told him my name but he couldn't pronounce it. "Just call me Liz," I said.

"Okay. Leez."

He hailed a cab, put my backpack in the trunk and got in next to me. I snuck a peek at him. He was handsome, short and slim with light brown skin and liquid, dark-chocolate eyes. A few minutes later we pulled up in front of a lovely inn. He spoke briefly with the manager and then turned to me. "He has a room and will give it to you at a discount. He is a friend of mine." After I settled in I came downstairs to find Javier waiting for me. "Are you needing dinner?" he asked, and before long we were making our acquaintance over large slabs of beef and goblets of wine. In his adorably formal English, Javier explained that he lived in Paris but was visiting his family for a couple of weeks. I told him I was a graduate student wandering around Europe by myself. His eyebrows went up and he shook his head. "You American girls are crazy." After dinner he stood up and shook my hand again. "I will be here in the morning to show you Gijon."

I did not go to Gijon to fall in love, but I had no choice. A month of moping about the Continent and my relapse in Amsterdam had set me up for an emotional high dive into the shallow tub of passion. Javier showed me the harbor, bought me pastries and posed for my camera. He took me to the apartment where he was staying with his brother and sister in law and their little girl. They welcomed me, if a little hesitantly, but I saw Javier give them a reassuring nod. After dinner he said, "You should stay here, not at the hotel. Stay here with me."

Javier possessed the desire potency. He treated me like a lucky coin he'd found in the dust. He told me about his apartment in Paris, which opened onto a jardin. When I asked him what he did for a living, he said he was a musician, and when I asked which instrument he played, he replied, "the peeps."

"The peeps?"

"You know...." and he pantomimed playing a set of pan pipes. He was also a Communist but I didn't hold it against him. When it was time for me to begin the long trip back to London, he gave me tapes of his music. We exchanged addresses and promised to write. We stood at the train like two lovers in an old movie and kissed good-bye. I sobbed all the way to Paris.

Shaken

2009-07-08T13:33:00.000-07:00

When I picture my family in the mid 1980s, I'm reminded of the volunteer maples that pop up in my own garden every spring and summer. They are stubborn self-starters, the product of wind-borne seedlings that take root wherever they happen to land, even in ashes. The four of us had all established ourselves in the same county, at the same time, not through any plan or forethought, but because the winds of circumstance had blown us there. We three kids were making the best of it, trying to move forward. It was time to turn our leaves to the sun and grow. But history and my mother had other ideas.

She wasn't quite the same after returning from Washington, D.C. I didn't see her that often, but when I did, she seemed cosmically distracted. She'd drift off in the middle of sentences, while getting her gas pumped, standing in a grocery store check-out line. I'd have to honk the horn or whisper Mom to snap her back to reality. If Sara and Kevin were there, we'd exchange perplexed glances. Usually, though, we'd just sit there in silence, waiting out one of her endless reveries. Finally she'd shudder, as if a ghost had grabbed her shoulders and given her a little shake, and she'd say, "Where was I"? Or, "What was I saying?"

Usually, she was talking about our father. This was also a new development. In the dozen or so years since his death she'd barreled relentlessly toward whatever new life she could find for herself and for us. But that hadn't turned out so well. She began to say that she had never been happier than when she was married to our father, and now she had returned to him, even if was only in memory. I'd never asked her or Sara how they'd reacted when visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in January--we weren't the kind of family who asked after each other's feelings. It was okay to have feelings but dangerous to express them. Best to keep them inside. To squeeze them into the over-packed suitcase where you stowed all your other feelings, the suitcase that every month got harder to close. But I couldn't help but wondered what effect the Wall had had on her. I wondered if she'd stood so close to its black marble surface that she'd fallen through to the other side, like Alice through the looking glass, and found on the other side a warmer, more hospitable world where the spirits of the dead were waiting, arms outstretched. Where the ghost had said to her I am here if you need me. If you try hard enough, you can bring me back.

In the 1970s, I was an avid reader of Mad magazine. I loved its subversive wit and its movie parodies. My favorite cartoonist was Dave Berg, who drew "The Lighter Side of....". One strip in particular has stuck with me. It goes something like this. One guy is whispering to another, "There's so and so. He just got a new Cadillac and he's always finding ways to fit that fact into a conversation. Just watch." The guy introduces his friend to the Caddy owner. They shake hand and the Caddy owner says, "Wow, your handshake is strong--almost as strong as the mechanic's who fixes my Cadillac!"

That's how it was with mom now. You'd be talking about a movie or a recent experience and before you knew it, she'd wormed dad into the discussion. One day, I mentioned that on the way to Squaw Valley, I'd spent an afternoon exploring San Francisco and how much I'd loved the city. "Whenever your father was at Moffett he avoided going into San Francisco," she replied. "Too many hippies. Everyone on drugs. If he had to go he never wore his uniform." I doubt she intended this comment to be an implicit criticism of me, but I couldn't help thinking that if he could look down from on high at who I'd become, the shock would probably kill him all over again. His good girl who stayed inside the lines had gone rogue. At 22, I was a pot-smoking, tofu-eating, thrift store-shopping, free love-loving bohemian, no better than the tousled young women he'd shunned on the streets of San Francisco when they offered him flowers.

Nor do I think mom realized how bad my drug use had gotten. I have a feeling she didn't want to know. She rarely came by my trailer, probably for fear of what she'd find me doing. And this was fine with me. My days of writing evasive letters from Colorado had taught me the fine art of self-censorship.

Mom also began to weave crazy conspiracy theories about the cause of his death. She said that his jet could have come apart in the sky: "It was just a bucket of bolts, always breaking down." I don't know where she got this idea, but I didn't like it. If my father had to die in a war, at least make it from enemy fire, not because some mechanic missed a screw. Not because of some fucking mistake.

But this theory was nothing compared to The Big One.

It was so absurd that I actually remember where we were when she first floated it. Her favorite restaurant was a Mongolian barbecue joint tucked into a strip mall off of El Toro Boulevard. One late afternoon toward the end of the school year I met mom, Kevin and Sara there for the early-bird special. We got on line at the buffet and piled our bowls high with freeze-dried meat and raw vegetables. Then we handed them to a cook, who stir-fried the ingredients on a giant round griddle while we watched, finally whisking it in a bowl with a final, theatrical flourish. Our meals came with two dough pockets that we filled with meat and vegetables. The food was filling and cheap and contained no MSG, to which she claimed to be deathly allergic. I liked it because it had a full bar. Alcohol loosened my tongue, made everything so much easier to take.

The place was always busy, even at 5 p.m. We sat in a booth. She liked to sit in a booth. She always ordered two more dough pockets even though she shouldn't, she'd say. She had to drop some of this darn fat. We ate quietly, a silent table in the bustling dining room. It had red walls hung with long scrolls on which an artist had painted soft gray landscapes--misty mountains, winding rivers--along with a few Chinese characters.

I was already on my second screwdriver when she said, "From what I heard in Washington, the DOD hasn't closed the door on the possibility that some of our men are still alive over there." She took a big bite of her stir-fry-filled dough pocket and chewed methodically. She took eating very seriously. We pondered this statement as she chewed, as she swallowed. "I spoke with this very nice man who's convinced of it. He said I should get a copy of your father's service records."

"Why?" I asked, sucking hard at my vodka and orange juice. I was using one of those tiny straws meant for stirring, not sipping.

"Like discrepancies. Clues. Things that could point to a cover-up. So I sent away for them. I read the accident report and guess what I found?"

"What?"

"There was a lumber mill not far from the crash site. Your father was an expert in forestry management. So who's to say he didn't built it? Who's to say he didn't survive the crash? Maybe the chase pilots just didn't see the chute open. Maybe they were distracted, in a panic. So he walks away it. Or he's wounded. Let's say that's the case. His jungle survival skills were excellent."

Kevin, Sara and I exchanged concerned side-long glances.

"Well, that area of Laos is populated by the Hmong. So maybe a tribe of Hmong found him and nursed him back to health. It's not out of the question. So let's say he stayed and helped them build a lumber mill. Maybe he fell in love with a Hmong woman and they had a bunch of half-breed babies."

"So why...." I paused to take a long hard sip on my tiny straw while pondering the least-combustible combination of words, the most neutral tone with which to challenge her without actually appearing to challenge her. "When the war was over, why didn't he come home?"

I could tell she hadn't thought that far. She put down her fork and gave me a look of unalloyed annoyance. I held my breath, glad we were in a public place. "Well," she started slowly, "maybe he figured that since he'd been there that long, he might as well stay. But the DOD wouldn't want us to know that, would they?"

There was nothing one could say to this. I looked at Kevin. He was studying his plate, his face flushed. I looked at Sara, who seemed on the verge of tears. She carried the burden of her biology like a barbell, some days lighter, others heavier, and this absurd notion had added about 5o pounds. I swore I saw her shoulders sag. It was so typical of mom not to contemplate the effect her words had on people like her daughter. He had stayed and abandoned all of us, including his only biological child.

"I'm done." Kevin thew down his napkin.

"Me too. I've got to get back to school. I have finals to grade." Grading papers was the worst part of being a TA. I had a friend whose sister was a nurse and kept him supplied with black beauties. He kept me supplied. Sometimes it took two of them to get through 30 labored student essays about Fitzgerald's use of metaphor in The Great Gatsby.

"So soon?" Mom asked. "Well, okay. I guess I'll see you when our shadows cross!" This was one of her favorite expressions. It meant that than our next encounter remained vague, undetermined, left to the whims of the gods or the wind. She pointed at my uneaten food. "Do you mind if I take this home? It'll make a great lunch tomorrow."

Nursing my two-screwdriver buzz, I headed north on the 405 toward Irvine. I could make this trip on autopilot, though every time I did so, the landscape had less land and more buildings. Car dealers, furniture outlets, the world headquarters for Oakley--all this used to strawberry fields as far as the eye could see. I took the Campus Road exit, but if I were to keep driving, to Long Beach to see Margot perhaps, on reaching Westminster I would spot the green highway sign that reads Little Saigon. It was easy to miss, a small sign on the shoulder, but I never missed it. Never.

Thousands of boat people had settled here after the war and now comprised about a third of Westminster's population. But to take the exit and explore the area struck me as a small betrayal. My knowledge of the conflict was so elementary that I didn't understand that these immigrants came primarily from the friendly south. They were on our side. The fact is, I knew about as much as the war's history and specifics as I did quantum physics. I couldn't tell you the difference between the Viet Minh and the Viet Cong, that Saigon was in the south and Hanoi in the north. As for that aerial photograph on my bulletin board, I couldn't tell you where Vinh was or explain its strategic importance to the Communists. I was content to leave "Vietnam" as a personal bete noir, an umbrella explanation for the sadness and depression I couldn't seem to shake.

Because like my mother, I was obsessed with my father. I wrote about themes that mattered to me: the dark side of patriotism, the affect of a nomadic military life on children, the notion of my father as a martyr. To me he was most certainly dead. It had taken me years to scrub all hope residue from my mind and heart, and I assumed my mother had too. She had remarried, for god's sake. So where had this fantasy come from? Surely she didn't believe this crazy story. Maybe someone at that conference had gotten her ear and filled it full of poisonous nonsense, someone who didn't realize what fertile soil their ideas had found in my mother, who was already paranoid and prone to conflict. The pugnacity that had served her well in the years after my father's death had begun to work against her. She couldn't calibrate her inner fire or tone it down for a routine existence no longer framed by adversity. The emergency was over, but in her mind, the sirens kept blaring. Our relationship, while never easy, had deteriorated into a series of disagreements. Every interaction was fraught with anger, some new, most of it old.

The end of the school year was a big deal in Irvine Meadows West. The Darma Bums were planning a big bonfire, and the drugs were flowing heavier than usual. I finished my grades and handed them in and wrapped up my classes. I'd produced a few decent poems, but my output was hardly prolific. The poems came slowly and they extracted a high price on my psyche. I was scheduled to leave for Europe in two weeks, a trip I wasn't sure I even wanted to take anymore. The Salesman was history. I could recognize the signs by now: his sudden aloofness and avoidance, the panicked look in his eyes when I said I might not take the trip after all. Finally, the purse I saw in his living room the night I drove his house five times before finally peeking in his window like a cat burglar. It was not my purse. I sat outside his house and leaned on my horn and shouted curses into the night.

The speed and the heartache and mom's apparent insanity sent me into a funk. I was moping around the trailer one morning, watching Chris pile up wood for the bonfire, when I heard a knock at the back door. I peeked out the port hole and saw Quasimodo standing there, holding a plastic garbage bag. Quasimodo was a troll-like character with stringy blonde hair dangling from his pinkish scalp. He had brown teeth and clubbed fingers that bulged at the tips like light bulbs. He walked with a slight stoop and spoke with a pronounced hiss. He tended to hang out at the Winnebago across the way, and he always had good drugs, so I put up with him. I asked him what was in the bag.

"It's shake," he hissed merrily. "It's lousy for smoking, but I thought maybe we could so some baking." And with that he pulled out a box of Betty Crocker brownie mix.

I pushed the door open wide. He dragged the bag into the kitchen area and opened it. The distinct odor of skunk weed filled the trailer. There was a good three pounds of the stuff, a ratty compost of seeds, stems and leafy matter. "Where'd you get it?"

"It's a secret," Quasi whispered. He wiggled his eyebrows in a way he probably thought was sexually alluring. I found him easy to resist. "Actually, from a dealer friend of mine. He sold the buds and this was left. He asked me to get rid of it."

I turned my toaster oven on 450 degrees and we set about preparing it for baking. First we mashed it through a colander to weed out the detritus. This left us with about a pound of usable weed, enough to fill a large mixing bowl. I got out my blender, which had never blended anything except daiquiris and margaritas, and pulverized the stuff until it was a fine green powder. As I watched it whir I was reminded of the Miller moths that migrated to Colorado every June. Every day, at dusk, clouds of them would spin around the tall blue spruce trees as if caught in a whirlpool. At night you could hear them banging against the screens, looking for a way in, just as the cats banged against my door, and in the morning I'd find hundreds of dead moths littering the living room floor. It was my job to sweep them up. The scales from their wings had a resiny quality, and by the end of the job my hands glittered with bits of wing and moth dust. Even soap couldn't get it all of it off.

As Quasi and I worked, pot dust filled the air and made us cough. We mixed the brownie batter and stirred in the pot dust and I poured it into a small pan. It took about 30 minutes to bake. I cut it up into brownies, put them on a plate to cool and poured in another batch. We made about five pans altogether. I hadn't eaten anything all day, and as I worked I devoured the warm pot brownies. They tasted like hay and chocolate, and I washed them down with glasses of water. Quasi told me I'd better slow down but I was hungry. When we were done every surface in the trailer was skim-coated with a fine green dust and the air was potent with pot scent. The blender looked as if it had gone ten rounds with an alfalfa field.

Quasi took his share of the brownies and scuttled over to the Winnebago while I set about cleaning up the mess. But the high was beginning to kick in and I got distracted. I looked out the small kitchen window and saw Allen, a recluse who'd built a second story onto his trailer, walking along with his umbrella and wearing nothing but a raincoat. Just as it hit me that it was raining I heard the crunching of gravel outside that signaled someone was approaching my front door.

The last thing I needed right now was company, what with the brownies beginning to take effect and pot dust all over the place. The wind must have found the front door because when I turned to see who was there it was open and I saw my mother looking back at me. My heart began to thrum madly, my breathing went shallow. My worst nightmare--that mom would personally witness my debauched lifestyle-- had come terribly, horribly true.

"Hi." I tried to stand in front of the blender. I tried to pretend everything was perfectly normal, that I wasn't getting more wasted by the second. I opened my mouth and forced some words to come out. "Um, what brings you here?"

She stepped up into the living area. "I was just in the neighborhood and thought I'd stop by. I need the registration to the Mustang, so I can change the title over to you." She looked around. "Well, the place is coming along." Her voice sounded as if it was very far away. I had the feeling of moving through the world but not being a part of it. Panic began to swell in my chest. I needed to get her out of here. "It's in the car. I can go get it."

"I'll come with you."

Yes come with me good. My keys, fuck! where are my keys? Your purse, look in your purse, breathe, there it is, on the love seat, pick it up, look through it, there they are, little metal things designed to open doors, good girl, deep breaths, now walk past her and out the door and for god's sake don't look at her just tiptoe quiet there you go now you're walking on the gravel crunch crunch crunch deep breaths--

If mom noticed something was off, she didn't mention it. If she didn't notice, then she was more oblivious than I realized. I looked up at the sky. It was roiling and boiling with ominous black clouds that entered my head and turned my thoughts black. I had never had a bad trip before, not even on acid, but this was more than bad, it was intense to the point of being apocalyptic. My paranoia was indescribable. I could feel my mother walking next to me but I didn't want to look at her. I was overcome by a terrible anxiety. The world was ending. The jig was up.

Somehow we found the car. I fumbled with the keys and by the time I opened the passenger door to open the glove compartment big fat raindrops were falling from the sky. I slid into the seat and closed the door and mom got in the driver's side and the heavens opened. The rain streamed down the windshield with the force of a car wash, obliterating the outside world. I was trapped with the person I feared most in the world. I was a 22-year-old woman and afraid that my mother would hit me. The THC magnified my insecurity and panic and sadness. The flood water rose and broke through my wall of resistance, and I dissolved into great, gasping sobs that emanated from the deepest well of my being.

I don't know what's wrong with me. I feel so unhappy all the time. The world confuses me. I need help.

The entire time I was melting down, my mother just looked straight ahead, expressionless. She seemed carved from stone and just as heartless. We sat there in silence, my chest heaving with quiet sobs, until finally I stopped, as did the rain. She turned her eyes on me and said dourly, "Ever since you were a little girl, you've felt sorry for yourself. I'm sorry that what happened happened. I'm sorry life hasn't been easy for us. I've done the best I could. It's time for you to grow up." She put out her hand. "The registration, please."

I fished it out of the glove compartment and gave it to her. She got out of the car and left me to survive the the apocalypse alone.

Wild Things

2009-07-05T11:22:00.000-07:00

My cat can't get the outside out of his system. The first time we saw him, five weeks old and Oreo-hued, we were told he'd spent his first weeks in the wild. He was obviously good at it since he survived long enough to be found by a police officer. She wanted to keep him but her other cat would have none of it, so she brought him to the animal shelter. This was eight years ago. Coerced into life as a house cat, Cupcake (they also told us he was a female, but the name stuck) is always trying to connive his way out. Lately, he's figured out how to paw at the screen door in the dining room until it snaps open and he can make his getaway.

The dramatic tension arises from the fact that I'm petrified to let him out of my sight. I adore this creature, his soft, black and white fur, the way he head-butts me for attention before collapsing next to me for a good long petting session. A couple of years ago, when I was still drinking, he disappeared. I almost had a breakdown. I downed a bottle of wine and collapsed in a friend's arms, a blubbering mess. Three days later Cupcake showed up at the back door, asking to come in. I said to him, "I know you can't get the wildness out of you so I forgive you."

Almost every day I let him out once or twice under strict supervision. He yells at me and loiters by the door until I acquiesce. He loves to hang out in Dave's garden, chewing on the sunflowers and rolling in the dirt until the white part of his coat turns dingy, but his favorite hideaway is the dark, cool space beneath the front porch. This morning I let him out the back, and after sitting on top of the compost for a while, he made a dash for the front yard. I gave chase but he shimmied under the porch. I got down on my stomach like a worm and peered through the lattice, trying to spot him. There he was, hunched in a far dark corner, pretending to be a bear. The day is warm and sun-dappled, so I decided to wait him out. I took my glass of soda and sat under one of the towering maples that stand sentry in the front yard.

If it were windy, I wouldn't have dared: These old trees are fragile and prone to losing limbs. Last July, a week before my accident, a massive branch fell to the ground, right where I'm sitting, taking a chunk out of the round boxwood. It weighed almost 100 pounds. That was a year ago. Then, as now, the yellow day-lilies were in bloom, and the purple hydrangea was following suit. The tall scapes of the hostas were festooned with new lavender blossoms. Two of the old, leggy rhododendrons had not yet rediscovered the joys of blossoming, but this afternoon a few white flowers, tinged with pink, bowed from the highest branches. It's gratifying to see a long-neglected garden come back to life, giving me hope that the soul can do the same.

I understand how freedom is catnip, intoxicating, almost irresistible. That same yen is what drove me, in the spring of 1983, to finally cut Stuart loose for the final time. He did not go willingly and tried to woo me back with poems and long, woeful looks. But I had to reassert my independence. He stood between me and the life I thought I wanted, where I answered to no one except my instructors I wanted to hard to please, poets like Louise Gluck, who had arrived as a guest instructor with a head full of neuroses and a purse full of pills.

After breaking up with Stuart, I got a new roommate. I spotted a flyer for free kittens in the communal shower and soon brought home a six-week-old orange tabby. My new friend Margot suggested I name him Cibo. Margot was a freshman. We met in the Backlot, where the MFA students spent most of their time looking for poems in the bottom of empty beer pitchers. Margot was large in both size and spirit, brilliant and bawdy and creatively gifted. She wore a leopard beret atop her naturally blonde bob. She lived in a turn-of-the-century bungalow in Long Beach with her younger sister, her father, a firefighter, and her mother, a creative writing teacher.

Margot spent many an hour at the trailer. We smoked joints and talked literature and sang along to the Violent Femmes. "Why can't I get just one fuck?!" we'd yell at the top of our lungs. Margot made me laugh, made me feel like I was capable of making friends on my own. I needed this affirmation at a time when I was beginning to chart my own course, apart from the cool embrace of the Darma Bums. I did not know that Margot was tormented by eating disorders and depression, or that she envied my boho- feminist MFA lifestyle, just as she probably didn't know how much I envied her easy genius. I was quite awestruck when, not long after we met, Margot won Seventeen magazine's prestigious fiction contest. She could speak a smattering of several languages, including Italian, which is how she knew the Italian word for "food." (A word to the wise: Do not name your cat Cibo if coyotes stalk the hills. Nothing good can come of it.)

The trailer was as homey as I could make it. Mom had given me some plants, which I placed on a sunny shelf under the front window. The jade plants in particular attracted an endless thread-line of ants, but I got used to them. Everyone in Irvine Meadows West had ants; that's why you stored your food in hanging baskets. By the trailer's front door was a small sliding window created, I guess, so you could pass drinks or food to the outside without opening the door. I liked to leave the window open for ventilation. One day I came home and found three cats eating my kitten's food. I didn't mind sharing, and pretty soon the entire feline population of Irvine Meadows West--those that hadn't yet become coyote food--was crashing at my place. If I forgot to leave the window open they'd throw themselves against the door to get my attention. At any given time, there or four cats would be crashed in the main living area on the striped velvet love seat I'd bought to replace the homely green vinyl bench. Stuart's cat Freud was among them, and it must have annoyed Stuart no end that his cat was welcome, but he wasn't.

The cats had their human counterparts in the characters and eccentrics who'd drop by unannounced at all hours of the day or night. I fancied my trailer the low-rent version of a Paris salon where bohemians and free-thinkers of all stripes were welcome, particularly if they came packing illegal substances--which is how I came to smoke opium and heroin and freebase cocaine for the first time. My schedule left plenty of time to party. The Juggler, who had a serious girlfriend by now, often stopped by, and brought with him a new member of his troupe, a medical supplies salesman and part time street performer. I'd often watch them practice in the grassy infield. I slept with The Salesman, thus driving a stake through the heart of Stuart's hopes for reconciliation--a bad move, even by my standards, as the Salesman turned out to be an utter cad. As a result of my treachery, the Darma Bums ostracized me once again, and this time, it was permanent.

There was more bad news. Toward the end of the term, my mentor, Charles Wright, announced he was leaving UC Irvine for the University of Virginia, where he'd been offered a prestigious chairmanship. He'd long felt like an exile from his beloved South anyway. After 17 years in the hinterlands of Southern California, he was going home. Since studying with him was such a draw, several poets opted not to return for the second year, though I was not one of them.

I opted to leave town for the summer. Given the state of affairs in May, it seemed like the logical thing to do. Sara was going to tour Europe with a youth orchestra, Mom in tow. Since we hadn't returned since leaving in 1966, I decided to fly over on my own, do the Eurail Pass thing for a few weeks, and meet up with them in Paris. Two months of solo vagabonding around Europe struck me as the ultimate expression of my new independence. Maybe, I thought, I'll find some poems along the way. Sal Paradise eagerly agreed to sublet the trailer for a month. The night before I left, Jules, Clare's ukelele-playing ex-boyfriend (she'd since moved on to an artist named Keith), took me out for margaritas in Newport Beach, and I was still drunk when I collapsed into my economy-class seat bound for New York City and then Heathrow.

So many mistakes, so long ago, and I didn't learn from any of them.

A rustling broke my reverie, and I spotted Cupcake slinking through the foliage. Good, I don't have all day to watch a cat. I got up and walked over to him. As usual, he growled at me because he didn't want to come in. I bent one of the hosta scapes down to his face and tickled his nose. Still holding my glass of soda in my right hand, I bent to scoop him up with my left hand. He growled and hissed. I walked to the porch, Cupcake under my arm like a baguette. But as I climbed the steps toward the front door he began to kick me with his hind legs, which are not declawed, and I squeezed him to my side with my elbow. He began to slip out. My right hand was occupied with the glass, so I tried put him down on a rocking chair, keeping him pinned with my left hand. I managed to put my glass down but when I went to pick him up he sank his fangs into the base of my thumb. This was unprecedented. I howled in pain but didn't release because I knew he'd run back under the porch. By now he was thrashing violently, clawing my arms and biting my hands and hissing like the demon zombie cat in Pet Sematery. The kids heard my howls and came to my rescue; Ethan grabbed Cupcake and Dave led me to the kitchen to wash my wounds.

Cupcake's ferocity left me in a state of shock. "I can't believe he attacked me!" I cried. "What's wrong with him?" I had a deep scratch near the bottom of my pinky scar and my left thumb was sprained from the battle; an hour later it was swollen and sore, incapacitating my left hand even further. Blood still oozed from the puncture wounds. Walking down the hall, I saw the cat standing at the front door. He turned and looked at me and meowed pitifully as if our cat fight had never happened. Yes, I will forgive him yet again, though this time, it will take longer.

Boomerang

2009-06-30T12:40:00.000-07:00

Last night my younger son Bob and his friend Stephen walked downtown to the see the village's annual Fourth of July fireworks display. They're shot off from a barge on the river before a large crowd assembled on the shore. Stephen said he knew of a better vantage point: a funeral parlor that overlooks the river. "The owner is my friend," said Stephen, who is almost 13. His parents own a flower shop, and all the local morticians are steady clients.

"Cool!" I said with the enthusiasm of someone whose all-time favorite show is Six Feet Under.

In the village where I live, there are almost as many funeral parlors as there are churches--these big old houses make marvelous anterooms for the afterlife. I'm a sucker for old cemeteries, roaming for hours among headstones worn smooth by time. I'm fascinated by the funereal rituals of different religions and cultures, the various approaches to seeing the dead's souls off safely to the other side. I suppose this is natural, given my lack of actual experience with the subject until fairly recently.

My mother's people are all buried at Rose Hills in Whittier. They bought a huge family plot, and one by one, they filled it. If the funeral programs are any indication, she attended all of them. July 13, 1939: John Luther Lawson, her uncle, only 17 when his appendix burst. The infection took him. In the old black and white photos he is a beautiful slender boy, sitting on a rock in a lake. Three weeks later, Nellie Mae Hollenbeck, her father's mother, passed away. She lived a long life for the time, dying at 60. Two funerals in less than a month. My mother had just turned eight. I picture her standing at the gravesides, holding her father's hand, her aunt Ruth's hand. The funeral programs identical except for the human particulars. A rose tossed into the grave before the shovels cover it.

April 3, 1951: Edwin F. Hollenbeck, Nellie Mae's husband, my mother's grandmother. March 8, 1960: Edwin V. Gladish, her half-sister's husband. He died after his truck's brakes failed and he drove off an unfinished overpass. There were rumors of suicide. September 27, 1963: Ray Hardy, Aunt Ruth's husband, my mother's uncle by marriage. From a heart attack, I believe. Mom left France to attend his funeral and was gone for two weeks. Apparently she took a few side trips, including one to see The Dentist. That was the time my father left Kevin and me with friends in Paris. May 29, 1972: Arlington "Arlie. F. Hollenbeck. Her beloved, distant father, the man who turned her over to be raised by the Lawsons because he, a widower with a living to make, couldn't care for two little girls, half sisters who grew to despise each other. December 1, 1980: Kenneth Hollenbeck, her favorite uncle, whose passing saved her from financial ruin. April 7, 1987: Ruth Hardy, my great aunt, the woman who raised my mother.

Yet I can't find a funeral program for Mary Lawson, my mother's mother. Killed in a car accident in 1935, leaving behind a long-suffering husband and two daughters with different fathers. A spirited young woman who squeezed a lifetime of living into 19 years, and whose loss shaped the course of my mother's life.

Of all these people, I knew only three: Kenny, Arlie, Ruth. Yet I barely noted their passings. All of these people are mere shadows to me. I could go to Rose Hills and find all their headstones and pay my respects, but why? As far as I think it says something about mom's relationship with her family that she didn't want to be buried among them. That would have worked against her desire to keep them at an uncomfortable distance. All except her "daddy," as she called him, up until the day he died, having spent weeks in the hospital after a stroke.

As for my father's people, I couldn't tell you where they've been laid to rest. All over the place I assume: Fresno, Los Angeles, Buffalo. His mother, Martha, is in Pennsylvania, where she and Ernie Thorpe had a home for years. Ernie's next to her I imagine.

My father didn't have a grave, so my mother couldn't be buried next to him, and for a while, she wanted to be buried at sea. Despite the fact that she was always threatening to die, I never thought about her last rites much. It's funny, but funerals were things that other people had. Both members of my immediate family--Lisa and my father--were not lain to rest in a conventional sense. Mom scattered Lisa's ashes among her rose bushes, all by herself, probably at night while Kevin and I were sleeping. Or maybe it was during school hours. And dad, well, the animals and monsoons and scavengers got what was left of him. Left there, for 40 years. Which is probably what he would have preferred, given a choice: to become part of some wild, lonely place, one with the nature that he loved so much. Given a choice, he certainly would have opted for this fate rather than a cemetery burial. As I've said, he had a low opinion of land-gobbling cemeteries.

And if my mother's story about his reaction to the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial is even half true, if he didn't want his name inscribed on any big slab of stone, he would found the wall that went in 1982 a true affront.

On November 13, 1982, one month after my trailer arrived, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. I had observed the controversy surrounding the wall from a geographical distance, but personally, the issue hit close to home. I didn't have a television, so I rode my bike to a local bar. I sat by myself, propped up on my elbows and sipping a screwdriver, as I saw, for the first time, footage of the memorial inscribed with almost 60,000 names. I knew my father's was one of them. I also knew that for he and about 2,000 other men, the Wall, as people were already calling it, was the only headstone they had. To me it resembled, not a black marble wing, but a boomerang: You throw it out into the sky, and it finds its way back to you.

"You know, my dad's name is on that wall," I told the bartender. He was wiping some glasses.

"No kidding." He turned and looked at the television. "It looks pretty weird if you ask me." He turned to put the glasses away and said, "So you gonna go see it?"

"Someday I guess." I looked in the mirror on the other side of the bar and saw my face among the rows of pretty bottles gleaming in the dim light. Their clear and amber contents called to me. I had two more drinks. A guy sat next to me and tried to start up a conversation but I ignored him--I was too busy reveling in my own misery. I had two more drinks and teetered for the door.

"You okay to drive?" the bartender asked.

"I got my bike."

It was a new second-hand model, picked up for $10 from another student who was moving off campus. Like my first bike, it was black, which matched my typical mood. The night was warm and aromatic and soft around the edges, and I rode through campus with my usual pell-mell ferocity, as if, if I pedaled hard enough, I could out-race the boomerang. My long hair streamed behind me like a flag.

Once at my trailer I jumped off while the bike was still in motion. Coming home was still a novelty. There were two doors, a front and a back, both with portholes windows that reminded me of those in our stateroom on the SS United States. The back one opened onto the sleeping area; this was the one Stuart usually used, though sometimes I found him sitting in the front, on the green vinyl bench seat that had come with the trailer. We were battling over his place in my home, and my life; I had not invited him to move in with me, nor did I intend to, but since I rarely locked the trailer--I'm not sure I even had a key--he was free to come and go as he pleased. Most of the time he respected my desire to be alone "with my art." He still had his shack on the other side of the park; I could almost see it from the picture windows that faced westward. I had a big view of the open sky and a coral tree that stood about ten yards away in the grassy infield. I knew it was a coral tree because Stuart had said so.

The large windows on the front and sides of the trailer turned it into a lit stage set at night. It was Stuart's idea that I get curtains, lest the trailer park denizens be privy to our every nocturnal move. When I expressed my need, Sara--who considered the trailer the coolest thing on wheels-- volunteered to help. One day, Mom dropped her off with a bolt of heavy gold velveteen left over from an upholstery project, and I hauled out my sewing machine. We rolled the fabric on on the grass in front of the trailer. I found my cloth measuring tape in a tin box with extra needs and spools of thread and we set to work measuring, cutting and sewing. It took an entire afternoon. Left to my own devices, I would have ended up with a bunch of uneven remnants, but Sara saw to it that the job was done right. At 13, she was bright, beautiful, musical and astonishingly mature for her age. She had inherited the best from both her parents: Her father's steadiness, grace and bone structure; her mother's energy and prowess at the domestic arts. At one point, I asked her why she'd cut off her lovely waist-length braids.

"Because," she replied solemnly, "I was tired of her dragging me down the hall by them."

Her answer revealed that mom was repeating the same brutal tactics she'd inflicted on me. At that moment, whatever resentment I'd felt toward Sara in the past dissipated. Instead I felt pity for her, having to deal with mom's mood swings on her own. I had a hard time imagining what transgressions Sara, the miracle child, could have committed to merit such treatment. I had always thought that Sara's DNA made her special, preferable even. Yet clearly mom's fury played no favorites, even where her husband's biological child was concerned. That Sara bore his face through the living world had become a burden for both of them.

Every night, after working myself up into a state of dark existential angst, I sat down at my typewriter, my father's thesaurus and a bottle of something potent within easy reach, and cobbled poems together. Sometimes they came quickly, sometimes after hours of revision, but always they came. For inspiration, I had three photographs thumb-tacked into the blonde wood paneling: the old "monster face" photo that I'd carried all these years, now quite distressed; an official Navy portrait of my father taken for his records before his Vietnam tours; and an aerial reconnaissance photo taken in the spring of 1968 with the cameras aboard his jet. It showed truck movements and munitions depots in the northern Vietnamese city of Vinh. It's an "after" picture because bomb craters pock the landscape. The "monster photo" and the reconnaissance photo, taken within weeks or even days of each other, represented a time in my life that I was determined to decipher. Poetry was self-therapy, the answers coded into meter and rhyme and metaphor.

The California seasons tend to run together. When the coral tree dropped its leaves, I knew winter had arrived. December limped along, rainy and cool. I bought a space heater to warm the bedroom, and it worked a little too well. Some mornings I'd wake up, Stuart dozing beside me, and listen to the two-step of rain on my aluminum roof. The heater had an opiate effect on my senses, cottony and dull. I knew he was not good for me, on this my mother and I actually agreed. After Stuart and I reunited, I had brought him to her house for dinner. It was one of the hottest days of the year, but the air conditioning was off. The heat of the sun beating through the bay window and the heat radiating from the oven turned the tiny dining room into a dry sauna. She had prepared a heavy repast more suitable for a cold winter night: roast, mashed potatoes, corn bread, and yellow squash cooked in butter and milk. Stuart ate and sweated and chatted and made jokes. He laughed his Snagglepuss laugh, doing his best to get on her good side, but it was no use. At 33 years old, with few prospects and a shack as a home, he was hardly suitable husband material. Yet here he was, lying beside me once again, having talked his way into my bed. Stuart didn't have the answers to my questions. In regards to my father, he grew impatient, almost competitive, as if aware of the mental energy his ghost was siphoning off, energy that Stuart wanted turned on him.

I didn't have a television or a stove or a toilet or a shower, but I had a telephone. It was a urine-yellow wall-mounted phone that had come with the trailer. I'd changed the phone number yet left the old airport number that someone at hand-written on a scrap of paper and slipped into the plastic phone-number slot designed for that purpose. In the middle of January 1983, my mother called to tell me that she had received a telegram from the Department of the Navy inviting her an event in Washington, D.C., to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Paris peace treaty. The event was sponsored by the National League of Families, a nonprofit organization created in 1970 but a group of wives whose husbands were POW or MIA. Convinced the government was covering up the truth about their husbands, they sought strength in numbers and arm-twisted the military into accounting for all 2,000 servicemen whose whereabouts were unknown, even if it was just their remains. That my father was one of them struck me as highly unlikely, surreal even. I imagined myself standing in front of that Wall with a big pink highlighter and running it across his name to make it stand out from the pack. And I'd say, Look! He deserves a proper burial, just like the rest of these fallen heroes. A little paper program with all the details: date of birth, date of death, date of burial, place of interment, name of minister, name of pallbearers. A headstone where his family can lay flowers and reflect on his sacrifice and say, It is over now. This is our right, our deepest wish.

Mom said the government was providing financial assistance (called "coin assist" in military parlance), so she was going to bring Sara with her. But of course a conflict ensued because the navy was only going to pay for one seat on a military transport plane, but she thought it only right that she be able to bring the daughter who'd never known his father and it was unpatriotic to think otherwise, and so on.

In late January, the phone rang again. Mom wanted to let me know that she'd persuaded the navy to pay for Sara's flight. They were leaving the next morning. She was eager to hear Reagan speak and visit the Wall. As I listened to her talk I was watching dark storm clouds, battle-ship gray, plow through the sky beyond my windows. That night, rain pounded down in relentless sheets. The grassy infield was flooded, and the next morning, in the parking lot, came the sound of engines grinding over, refusing to start. But elsewhere, in the skies overheard, something big was propelling itself forward, a movement powered by lingering suspicions and pain. And Mom and Sarah were flying straight toward it.

Beetle Juiced

2009-06-28T12:23:00.000-07:00

Being in recovery tweaks the way you see the world, particularly the drinking habits of those who inhabit it. Every person holding a cocktail or a bottle becomes an object of wonder. That is, we wonder whether they have a drinking problem or will someday have a drinking problem. Maybe they're one of those "successful recreational drinkers" we hear so much about and despise with every fiber of our being, because we can't drink just one or two and call it a night.

On Thursday evening I needed some air, so I walked over to the St. Ann's Parish Festival. There's something about rinky-dink carnivals that I find both charming and almost unbearably poignant. The little ones spinning in the flying teacups or making an endless circle in a little car or boat, convinced that this is the most fun they'll ever have, ever. The pre-teens dipping their toes into the warm pool of romance, pairing off--boy/girl, boy/girl--so they can ride the ferris wheel as couples. The way the colorful bulbs on the carnival rides compete with twilight's afterglow until the festive lights win out.

And then there's the Budweiser truck. Every year it's in the same spot, spigots dispensing $2.50 worth of beer into plastic cups. Everywhere I looked, people were holding cups of beer. This observation isn't charming or poignant, merely nostalgic. I can't buy $2.50 beer at the beer truck anymore. I can't sit under the huge blue and white striped tent on a warm summer night, sipping a foamy Bud by the light of a caged bare bulb. In that respect, summer can never be as it was, which is at it should be, I guess. I watched the beer tent from a distance, wondering who among the revelers might start a fight or throw up on the Tilt-a-Whirl. I didn't want to join them; I don't crave that feeling of drunken disequilibrium. I like being steady on my feet.

They were playing Michael Jackson songs over the sound system because he'd died that day, killed, most likely, by painkillers and self-starvation and greed. He was a victim of his childhood, as I am of mine, as so many of us are. Susan wants me to see a bereavement counselor who specializes in childhood loss. I'm 48 and still trapped in the past, though maybe, through sobriety, I can finally look ahead without fear.

When I got home I collapsed on the family room sofa and watched Real World: Cancun. I didn't mean to; the TV was tuned to MTV when I turned it on. Let me just say that reality shows can drive a recovering alcoholic mad. With the exception of Intervention and Sober House, they weave drinking to excess into their artificial narratives as a way to create drama; indeed, the sleaziest ones--think Daisy of Love--rely on booze-addled idiots to keep things interesting. I can name any number of Bravo's "real housewives" who are candidates for the Betty Ford Clinic. Mandatory drunkenness must be written into the Real World contract, because the latest cast of pretty 20-somethings started to booze it up the second they hit Mexican soil. Before the episode was over, the obnoxious tattooed musician from Massachusetts had passed out and the brawny big-mouth from Pennsylvania had thrown up on the muscle head from California, inside the night club. I'm amazed the cameras didn't show them doing bumps in the bathroom.

But kids are supposed to party, right? That's what I used to think. Drinking and drugging was an unofficial by-law of being young and single. I didn't come by this frame of mind by example--neither of my parents got drunk in front of me (that I remember), and it wasn't until I was nine that I smelled booze on a grownup's breath. It was the night of mom's big Parents Without Partners bash in San Jose, when one of the male guests wanted to tuck me into bed. There is nothing pleasant about this memory, his sharp whiskey stink. In fact, it wasn't until September 1982 that I witnessed first-hand the alcoholic parent in his natural habitat.

In late August, I returned from the wild, wonderful week in Squaw Valley not sure of where I was going to live. School was scheduled to start in two weeks, and despite previous assurances, no space had yet opened up in the trailer park. I couldn't continue to live with my mother, I knew that much. I'd rather live with strangers who wouldn't fly off the handle and play toss-the-butter-knife at my head. So I scanned the classifieds and found a room in a private home in Costa Mesa. The owners were a middle-class couple in their early 40s with three kids, two of whom had left home, leaving them space to take in a boarder. The house seemed nice enough, one of those small mid-century ranches with an amoeba-shaped pool and lush, mature landscaping. The wife struck me as normal and nice, but the dad was a buffoon, fat and pink with a porcine snout and a huge, bristly head that gave him an astonishing resemblance to Porky Pig.

I moved in with some clothes, a few books and my typewriter. I got a push-button telephone and my own number. I'd lent my television to the star writer and I needed it back. This wasn't fun, since he'd dumped me rather cruelly. I got there to find two chicks in bikinis lolling about his living room. I took my TV and left, and he waved his fingers and said, "Toodles." Must be a San Francisco thing, I thought.

By that time mom had taken the Cadillac and given me the Mustang. For someone who cried poverty, she had assembled an odd string of automobile purchases, including another Austin Healey and a vintage London taxi. Only years later did she tell me that Uncle Kenny had left her $50,000 in his will, which she used to pay off her mortgage. He'd also co-signed on the house for her. To this day I wonder where the money went that she made off the Colorado house, having sold it as a profit.

I commuted to UC Irvine for the start of classes. I was taking two dance classes and a graduate writing workshop. Whenever I felt guilty that the government was paying me $750 a month to have fun, I reminded myself that they owed me, that their debt could never be repaid. Another source of income appeared when the English department, inundated with new freshmen, needed more graduate students to teach English 1o1. As an accidental teaching assistant, I was given a syllabus, a desk downstairs in "the pit" with the other TAs, and my own class. Three days a week I stood in front of students only three years younger than me. I hadn't read "The Egg" by Sherwood Anderson either, yet now I had to teach it. I approached teaching as I had acting. I recited my lines and pretended to be a serious academic. I disliked grading papers, primarily because of our doctrinaire and unfair grading policy: three grammatical errors earned a failing grade, content be damned. My female students would come to my desk and weep and say they'd never gotten anything lower than a B in high school, but there was nothing I could do except hand them a tissue and urge them to do better next time.

I lived in the house in Costa Mesa for one long, awkward, uncomfortable month. As a poet who took inspiration from her surroundings, the place left me dry. Every night a depressing tableau took shape. After dinner, the owners would sit at the card table, a glass and a freshly opened bottle--gin for him, vodka for her--placed at the ready. All night went the shuffling and dealing and drinking, until the bottles were empty. Gin rummy, I think it was. Usually I'd find Porky Pig passed out with his forehead on the table. Yet they'd be off to work by the time I left in the morning, and I marveled at their stamina. I don't know what he did for a living--sales, I think. She was a schoolteacher. She was always saying, with some envy, she couldn't believe I was teaching a college course without a credential.

Their 17-year-old son was the only kid left at home. He was athletic and good-looking--luckily for him, he took after his mother. I helped him with his English homework and grew to like him. He and his dad had been visiting colleges, but Porky Pig, in his cups, would talk like the Ivy League was a sure thing. "My kids goin' to Harvard," he'd boast in his abrasive, piggish vice. The more he drank the surer Harvard became. I'd look sideways at his son's reddening face, at his tight, furious expression, and I'd hate his father as much as I've ever hated any man except Arnie. The man appalled me. On weekends he'd start drinking at noon and jump into the pool with an enormous splash. His fat pink head floated on the surface like a beach ball.

One of the few times I went in the backyard, I spotted a jewel-like beetle in their fig tree. It looked like a giant emerald with legs, and it had been feasting on a ripened fig. On closer inspection I saw that the bug had sucked the fruit dry of juice, leaving it shriveled and deflated, with nothing left to give.

The owners had two daughters, but I only met one, briefly. She was a female version of Porky Pig, poured into skin-tight white jeans and teetering on four-inch heels. "She's lost a ton of weight so she can catch a man!" Porky Pig crowed. I didn't know what to say other than, "Good luck." To myself I add: And may you catch a man that bears no resemblance to your asshole of a dad. Maybe it was better to have no father at all than a father like that, who played so thoughtlessly with your hopes and dreams.

Perhaps I was looking for an out the day I stopped by the trailer park after class. I hadn't been there since reporting my story in July. I walked the familiar concrete ring to Chris's trailer and found Stuart and the other Darma Bums drinking espresso at the communal picnic table. I saw the hills of wild artichokes and prickly pears. I saw the wrecked cars and the chickens and Freud, Stuart's white long-haired cat. In writing the article, I'd painted the trailer park as a bastion of free thought and creativity, and suddenly it hit me how much I missed it. When Stuart saw me, he got up and strode in my direction and just stopped and looked at me, as if to say, Aren't you ready to admit your mistake? And I was. He drove with me to see where I was living. He took one look and said, "We've got to get you out of here." By coincidence--or maybe not--the next day I got a call that a space had opened up. Now all I needed was a trailer.

After a week of looking in L.A. and Orange Counties, Stuart suggested we broaden our search to the middle of nowhere. We headed to Fallbrook, inland of San Diego, and sure enough, we found a hot lead in the Pennysaver: an old trailer that was used as the office for an ultralight airfield. We called and got directions and drove a few miles into the country. And then there it was, an aluminum-skinned beauty, about the size of the Hindenburg but much older, sitting in a meadow all by itself. It was a 1945 Spartan Royal Mansion. Unlike many vintage trailers, this baby had a bold, squarish profile and picture windows that wrapped around the front. The owner met us there. She invited us inside and I was sold. By trailer standards, its spacious interior, built-in bookshelves and lofty headroom made it a mansion indeed. It lacked a stove, fridge and toilet, and the blonde wood interior was scruffy in places, but the price--$1,800--was well worth it. The owner told us that another party was interested, but she'd let me know as soon as she could one way or the other.

For two days I agonized. I'd felt a connection with the trailer, just as I did when I saw the house in which I currently live. I had to have it. When I told mom about the trailer, she agreed to lend me the $1,800 if I got it. "You can pay me $100 a month," she said. "By the time you get your MFA, it'll be paid off." I got the call I'd been waiting for, and the trailer was mine. I gave mom one payment, but to her credit, she ended buying it for me outright. She hadn't paid a dime toward my education since Colorado, so I didn't argue. I thanked her and I meant it.

Stuart and I found the trailer on October 2, and on October 6, a tow truck driver delivered it to space B-25. I only know the exact date because I'd written TRAILER!!!! in red block letters in my "Great Literary Love Affairs" wall calendar.

The drunks were sad to see me go. I'd tried my best to be a good boarder, so I pretended to feel bad about leaving them in the lurch. I told them I'd found campus housing, and it was too good a deal to pass up.

Stuart helped me whip my new abode into shape. I bought a refrigerator that he lugged back for me, all the way from Cypress. He gave me his spare hot plate, and he made a platform bed out of the old sofa from across the street. He really did have amazing carpentry skills. Little did I know he believed that he was preparing the trailer for the two of us. This was the first place I'd ever had to myself, a trailer of my own, and I was in no mood to share it with a roommate, even if he was my boyfriend. But all that played out later.

I loved my Spartan Royal Mansion, and I still miss it. I thought about it the other night as I walked the one block home from the carnival: how it gave me independence and responsibility, how it inspired my poetry--for a year at least; how I did too many drugs and slept with too many of the wrong men and hosted at least one kick-ass party. All that was part of the experience, and I wouldn't trade it for anything, even if I did have to leave it behind, along with the striped tent and the beer truck and the plastic cups of Bud, forsaking them in favor of the chain-hung porch light shining me home.

Newspaper Wars

2009-06-27T07:21:00.000-07:00

In June of 1982, when she was 13 years old, my younger sister was published in The Sandpiper, her school's literary magazine. "Wise Bamboo" told the story of a slender old man named Bambusa who dared to consider himself wiser than the gods. Athena challenged Bambusa to a question-and- answer contest, which he lost. Instead of showing humility, he boasted that he could beat Zeus, the King of all gods. This pissed Zeus off. Transforming himself into a roaring gust of wind, Zeus blew across the mountains to deliver a Mt. Olympus-style smack-down. "The mortal bent down to the ground begging for mercy," Sara wrote, "but Zeus was in a terrible rage. So at that instant he turned Bambusa into a bamboo. And that is why the Wise Bamboo always bends down to the ground when the wind passes by." She gave me a copy and inscribed it, "To my sister, Love, Sara."

I found The Sandpiper the other day, and in reading the piece again all these years later, it strikes me as an allegory for the war of wills I waged with our mother in the early 1980s. Sara, the bystander, must have been taking notes.

By June of 1982, I'd racked up a string of moderate successes. I'd graduated with honors from college at the age of 21, despite taking five years to get my degree, and gained admission to a prestigious graduate writing program. Two of my poems, including "Officer's Housing," had appeared in UCI's literary journal. I would spend the three summer months between school years toiling as a summer intern at the Orange County bureau of the Los Angeles Times, the second-largest newspaper in the country. Afterward, I'd head north, to Lake Tahoe, for the Squaw Valley Writer's Conference, where I'd received a scholarship as a result of being "promising." And I'd accomplished all this despite ingesting enough illegal drugs to start my own cartel. Imagine what I could have accomplished sober.

The internship was a result of serendipity and ambition, the latter a quality I'd rarely exhibited before. That spring I'd overheard The New U's culture writer bragging about her summer internship at the L.A. Times. I thought, If Melanie can do it, I certainly can. I don't know where this over-confidence sprang from--I'd written all of five pieces for The New U, and I only got those assignments thanks to Atticus's overactive hormones. Soon I'd secured an interview with the Orange County bureau chief. I curled my hair, put on a hot-pink skirt and blazer purchased I know not where, and high-heeled pumps. I looked nothing like a Darma Bum; in fact, by courting the media establishment, I was betraying everything they stood for. I felt I needed to test the waters on the far shore and see if they were to my liking. The editor and I talked for about five minutes in the lobby; he asked me about my education ("Just graduated cum laude from UC Irvine, sir!") and my journalistic qualifications ("I was the events writer for The New University, surely you've heard of it!") Somehow I talked him into giving me a shot. Maybe he saw my enthusiasm and drive. Maybe it was the hot pink suit.

I thought mom would be proud of me. She'd given me my father's thesaurus, after all, which I took as further proof that she backed my literary ambitions. And I had some vague notion that he had edited The Lumberjack, his college paper at Humboldt State, so didn't that prove I was following in his footsteps? Yet apparently, what she wanted was for me to follow in hers as well.

As far as my relationship with mom is concerned, the early 1980s were its nadir. We could find no middle ground, no truce. We wanted things from each other that were impossible to give. I wanted sanity and empathy; she wanted obedience and respect. Her dream for me was to complete my father's master's thesis, begun in 1954 and left unfinished when he joined the navy. His carefully typed overview sits in my files: "Wildlife and Public Relations," dated May 16, 1952. The gist, as far as I can fathom, is to find ways that wildlife technicians can disseminate news of their research to the general public. She'd kept all his research materials just in case, two sea chests full of wildlife magazines, index cards, notebooks. At the same time, she was eager for me to procreate. "Oh you're going to be a baby factory," she'd remark. Or, "With those hips, you shouldn't have any trouble delivering." I was now 21, more than old enough to get started on producing "grand babies." I hated the word, the infantile way she pronounced it, the insidious implication that my sole purpose in life was to compensate for her infertility. I felt I'd been adopted to support a life not my own, like those cases where parents have a child to harvest its healing stem cells for a sibling with cancer.

When I refused to bend to her will, she retaliated. We'd have terrible fights and then she would hold me and tell me how afraid she was that I'd reject her and go find my birth mother. She was practically daring me to do so, but I knew I couldn't and wouldn't, not until she was gone. I knew the origin of our mutual animosity, but she seemed genuinely mystified by our lack of connection. Didn't she realize what that long-ago barbarism had done to me, to us? I couldn't tell her how afraid I'd been ever since, how that bloody memory negated any act of kindness or act of love she might bestow on me. And the cruelties that had come after--was I just supposed to forgive and forget?

I was the first person in the family since my father to graduate from college, yet on what should have been a big day for all of us, mom and I argued and she drove off with Sara. There was no celebratory dinner, no loving group photo. It was probably my fault; I could be brusque with her, inconsiderate. I went back to the Cloneville apartment, where my few belongings were already packed, and still wearing my cap and gown, cried for the state of my family, for the man who should have been there with us. Without him, we were coming apart.

I had sworn to never live under her roof again. But I'd been told that a spot in the trailer park would be mine by the start of the school year, and since I couldn't afford to rent an apartment, I bit the bullet and moved in with her for the summer. Kevin had moved to Santa Ana, and I took the guest room. And that's how I felt that summer: not like a daughter, but as someone simply passing through.

I started at the Times in the middle of June. On the morning of my first day, I was sick with nerves. When I entered the kitchen, mom was scooping Maxwell House into her small electric coffee pot. She was wearing one of the caftans she preferred when she was in a heavy phase. She turned and looked me. I had made an attempt to look feminine yet businesslike, trim in a faux-silk blouse and slacks, both the color of rust. She said nothing. I stuck a slice of wheat bread into the toaster oven, and when it was ready, I fished a dinner knife out of the drawer and began spreading butter on my toast.

Mom liked to say that she was never expected to go to college. Her family didn't have the money. She got married off instead and went to work as a bookkeeper. Her talents were squandered, unrecognized. That my talents weren't was a source of both pride and envy for her. And often, envy won.

Without warning she grabbed the knife out of my hand and blustered, with unnecessary force, "You don't butter bread with a dinner knife! I raised you to know better!" She pulled open the silverware drawer and grabbed a butter knife and lobbed it at me, as if she'd mistaken me for one of those circus performers who doesn't mind getting knives thrown at them. I easily ducked the flying utensil, and it clattered harmlessly on the counter. I stood there, open-mouthed, while she held onto the open drawer, trembling. Then she stalked away.

As always I said nothing. Arguing with her would only inflame the situation. Just let it pass, a summer squall. Be wise and bend before the wind. I sat in the dining room picking at my toast. Mom and knives: not a good combination. The coffee began to percolate merrily. When it was finished, I filled a Thermos and left.

The L.A. Times building was just off the 405 on the Irvine/Costa Mesa border. I was early so I went into a Denny's to have my coffee. A waitress told me I couldn't drink my own coffee there so I ordered some eggs which I was too nervous to eat. At the appointed time I entered the lion's den, or that's how I came to think of the newsroom. I was extremely insecure and intimidated. I felt I didn't belong among these seasoned writers and editors, and I was right. the managing editor wasn't sure what to do with me. Ironically, my first assignment was to drive out to El Toro Marine Base with a photographer. They'd heard about a soldier out there who was a pretty good artist; maybe it would make a good human interest story. I had an El Toro military I.D. in my wallet, so I was familiar with the place, since mom went there often for everything from groceries to new tires. The soldier was a nice young man; we stood in a hangar and he showed me his work, sketches of men at machine guns and standing by tanks. But he was no Picasso, and there was no story. I did blurbs for photo essays about nature fairs and carnivals. I was sent to the scene of a stand-off between cops and a disturbed Vietnam vet who had holed himself up in a motel. But he gave up quickly.

My first by-line was a story about a new hospital in Anaheim Hills. My second was about how Disneyland was discounting tickets by $3 after 7 p.m. for Orange County residents. No one was exactly dusting off my Pulitzer. But I quickly learned how to wheedle intriguing quotes out of people and paint a scene with a few telling details. And when the paper came out with my name under the headline, I couldn't help but smile. I brought it home and left it on the table where mom could see it, right next to her copy of The Orange County Register, the Times' right-wing competitor. Every time I got a byline I waited for her feedback, a compliment, anything. But there was nothing.

I reported from an animal shelter where people could swap pets in the parking lot. I reported on ladies' day at a car wash. The other reporters and editors had little to do with me, but I studied them, as if sizing up their jobs to see if it would fit me. The managing editor was a sad sack type who always looked like he'd slept in his clothes. Newly divorced, he wore his son's school portrait on the other side of his I.D. badge. The star writer had been recruited from a San Francisco paper. He had a dark beard and hair and wore corduroy blazer with elbow patches and an oxford shirt stretched over a small firm pot belly that revealed his love of chorizo and beer. He'd hover around my cubicle and say funny things like "I look like a pea stuck in a straw!" Joni, a beat reporter with the swagger of a gangster's moll, sat in the next cubicle over. She spent her days listening to the police radios. One day Joni got up from her desk and grabbed her notebook and purse. "Murder/ suicide in Leisure World," she said off-handedly, referring to a local retirement community. When she came back she threw her stuff down with a sigh. "Not much of a story. Wife was terminally ill and husband was sick, too. He shot her first and then killed himself." I was shocked at her cavalier tone. I didn't wanted to become that jaded, inured to tragedy and pain. I even wrote a poem about the incident, something about two lives compressed into a single column inch. I must have discarded all the drafts because there's no sign of it.

My learning curve wasn't steep, it was vertical. Every assignment brought a new lesson, a fresh humiliation. In July I was sent to do a story about a vegetable garden at Leisure World (known as Seizure World by everyone under 50). I spent a full day interviewing the elderly gardeners and hearing their stories. I spoke extensively with the manager, a young guy who over-shared about his job and his unkind attitude toward the residents. Unfamiliar with the art of quote selection, I included some of his more-controversial comments. After reading a draft, the lifestyle editor stormed up to me and yelled, "You can't use these quotes! You want us to get sued?" It eventually ran, heavily revised, along with a photo of a 94 year old man holding his tomatoes. I reported and wrote a long piece on how the rainy summer was cutting into business at the local amusement parks. The business editor found it good enough to the mothership in L.A. That was the sign of a successful piece: When it ran in all editions. Alas, it did not.

Every week a pitch meeting was held. These were torture since I had few ideas. But one day, when my turn came, I said, "Well, UCI has this trailer park where students live. It's the only one of its kind in the country, and its full of artists and other characters." They liked it. The story ran on the front page of the Orange County section and featured a shot of Chris with his Earth harp, which he'd built out of scrap metal and beer bottles. It felt odd being at the park in the role of reporter, not Darma Bum. I felt like Brenda Starr crashing an R. Crumb cartoon. Stuart and I ignored each other, but I felt a strange twinge when I saw him, and it worried me.

My last day at the paper was August 27. The next day, I left for the writer's conference, happy to be returning to the world of poetry. I can't say I enjoyed my stint as a newspaper reporter. Not only was it stressful and hectic, I had a brief, unfortunate fling with the star writer. It was doomed from the start: He was a miserable soul, a frustrated fiction writer still struggling with a break-up, and I was a lonely young woman who'd seen plenty of the world without becoming worldly, who drank too many margaritas one night on a double date and did or said something that scared him away. If she only remembered.

"I always considered poetry a parlor trick," he told me once, during a newsroom chat, before the bad sex and the blackout. But I felt far more comfortable in that parlor than his. I had the time of my life that week at Squaw Valley. I made great friends with whom I drank and laughed and cried. We tore our clothes on the dance floor between shots of tequila. We heard Sam Shepherd read from his latest play and took a gondola up a mountain and made snow angels in August. Everyone at the conference had a fling but me. When it was over I had no home to go back to. And that was the way I wanted it.

By the Book

2009-06-22T20:42:00.000-07:00

For a while, I was considered "promising."

In September 1981, finally a college senior, I signed up for advanced poetry writing. It was led by Charles Wright. If you follow poetry at all (and you know who you are), you'll recognize the name. In the realm of words, he is one of America's master craftsmen, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. A gentle Tennessean who spoke so softly and haltingly you had to lean in to hear him, he always wore meticulously pressed blue jeans, a blazer over an open-collared oxford shirt, and a hat of some type. Over 17 years, Wright had presided over the rise of UCI's graduate poetry workshop, green-lighting every applicant. I didn't know it at the time, but this undergraduate poetry workshop was an audition of sorts. He wanted to see if my performance in Peter's class had been a summer fluke, or if I really had the fire to dedicate my life to verse.

But I wasn't thinking about the future. I didn't consider it a sure thing in my case. At 20, I had mastered, without even trying, the art of "living in the now." Not only did I save myself from having to read Eckhardt Tolle someday, I spared myself a lot of stress. Other students wanted to be doctors or lawyers or engineers. I had no goals beyond the next poem or the next glass of wine or the next joint. But I did have a passion for poetry and for Stuart, and the two became entwined.

My muse was my man. I'd follow him around the perimeter of the trailer park as he watered his garden and fed his chickens and listen to him talk. He was always reeling off some trivial fact or other: the name of this tree or that bird, the tidal patterns of the Pacific Ocean. I worked these details into my work. Everywhere we went, I discovered poems. When we went to Newport Bwach, I found poems fishing off the pier and dancing on the moon-spackled sand. When we hiked into the hills, I found poems hiding among the wild artichokes and in the prickly pear's sweet ruby flesh. When we took camping trips out to the desert, I found poems snagged like torn shirts on the ocotillo and bristle brush.

I found poems in the oddest places. One night, Stuart and Christopher and I drove some beach community to see their younger brother. The houses in the neighborhood were closely spaced, and as I leaned against the car, hearing the mumbles of the three brothers discussing some topic to which I was not privy, I realized that the drapes weren't drawn on a large picture window on the house next door. Inside, silhouetted against the blue glow of a television set, I saw a man and his cat. He was standing, the cat sat on a table, and the man was stroking the cat, over and over, very methodically, entirely focused on this simple act. Other than his petting arm, he stood motionless, though once in a while he'd sway on his feet and then right himself like a palm tree in a heavy wind. Next to the cat, on the table, stood the distinct shape of a Tanqueray bottle. The man, in his drunkenness, was so immersed in his pet that the rest of the world had ceased to exist. When the three of us left, he was still standing there, still lost in the feel of skin on fur.

I took these poems home and cleaned them up and presented them to Charles Wright. Everyone in the workshop was serious about becoming a poet, though some clearly had more talent than others. Wright did not give praise lightly, so any positive comment was lapped up like milk. If he told he liked a line or an image "a good bit" (that was one of his Tennessee-isms), the other students would flash you jealous looks and snub you after class. Naturally I had developed a crush on him, as I did any handsome older man whose approval I craved, any man who could fill the void, if not the shoes, of my father. Each poem was an offering devised to get his attention. If poetry was my bicycle, then he and Stuart were the hubs on the wheels that kept it rolling.

But the ghost played a part as well.

That summer, I'd occasionally steer the green Cadillac south to Mission Viejo to see mom and my siblings. Sara was in middle school, and Kevin was taking courses at a community while bunking down in the guest room until he could afford a place of his own. I'd usually find mom on her hands and knees in her garden. Where once there had been nothing but dirt and slabs of concrete, a lush jungle had erupted. The garden was her therapy. She didn't have a job or a hobby, just her green world off the patio. She spent many hours weeding, potting, and battling snails. Her methods were merciless. She'd sprinkle broken egg shells into the beds so that the snails would cut themselves and die. When she came across one in her weeding, she'd toss it against the brick retaining wall without missing a beat. On a good snail day you'd hear a steady wet tick of shell meeting brick. On seeing me, she'd exclaim, "Oh, you're hear! I was just putting mulch around the fig tree, but I could use some tea."

We'd go into the kitchen. She'd put on the water and plop the tea bags into mugs while reeling off a monologue about her newest health crisis or how she really had to lose all this weight. But she was still vital then, sun-browned and bustling. The tiny dining room off the kitchen was stuffed with the heavy walnut furniture she and my father had bought in Florida. All around the house were these visual bombshells, reminders waiting to go off. The etching from Germany, the porcelain monkeys from The Netherlands, the framed piece of paper from a Japanese inn that warned, in amusingly mangled English, not to throw "piece of fruit, fibration, piece of cigarette, etc." into the toilet. But no photographs of him, or them, together. Such a handsome man to keep hidden away.

My mother took etiquette seriously. She always set the table, even for tea: sugar, milk, place mats, napkins, spoons, perhaps a small plate of homemade banana bread, toasted and buttered. "I shouldn't have the butter," she'd say, taking a hardy bite. "But I've been so good." This absurd rationalization to overeat drove all of us nuts, but there was no use in pointing out her foibles. Easier to tune her out.

Whatever other criticisms I may have of my mother, she was proud of the small successes I'd had as a writer, and she supported me however she could. She bought me an electric typewriter and drove me all the way to Denver that time I won a writing prize. She stood by my side so proudly that day. One day in Mission Viejo, as I was sitting at the dining room table, talking about how much I loved Peters' class, she said, "I have something for you." She pushed herself from the table, and few moments later returned holding a red book with a black spine. She must have pulled it off the rickety old 1960s book shelves, the ones that had followed her from Florida to Georgia to Colorado to California. She handed it to me and said, "Your father would have wanted you to have this."

I took it and looked at the spine. Roget's Thesaurus in Dictionary Form. I opened it and there was the bookplate, just as I expected. It is a beautiful woodcut of four beech trees leaning along the shore of a lake. Two rocks sit in the water, and there are low mountains on the distant horizon. When my father first went off to college, he'd special ordered a whole stack of these bookplates, printed with his name, and he pasted one into every book he owned, whether it was Statistical Analysis, The Art of Plain Talk, or The Ducks, Geese & Swans of North America. I had often browsed that teetering bookcase, pulling off his books and flipping through them, though it was the bookplate I was looking for. I loved books too, and while I hadn't been alive when he was reading these--they pre-dated his military service--that beautiful bookplate indicated that we had a love of reading in common.

She'd given me his college thesaurus. I was surprised I'd never seen it, and extremely touched at mom's gesture. I thanked her and we hugged tightly. These small moments, rare as they were, were the anchors that prevented us from drifting apart irrevocably. As I drove back to campus in the Coup de Ville, I put the thesaurus on the white leather seat next to me, giving it the occasional glance to make sure that, unlike its former owner, it wouldn't disappear into thin air.

That thesaurus became part of my writing ritual, the invisible third wheel. If Stuart provided the inspiration and Wright the approval, my father's thesaurus provided exactly the right words. In poetry, word choice is crucial, and I'd could spend an hour conjuring the perfect one. If I got stuck, I'd open the thesaurus and flip its yellow pages to the word in question. It was alphabetical and easy to use. For "How a Drunk Man Strokes a Cat" (the title often popped into my head first), an exercise in surreal imagery and thwarted, gin-soaked dreams, I needed a synonym for limp. I quickly flipped to the word and ran my finger along the line of alternatives.

limp, adj. flabbly, flexible, flimsy, drooping, soft. See SOFTNESS.

I chose flaccid. To describe his hands.

If men were the hub, drugs and alcohol were the spokes. I believed that they deepened my connection to the natural world, gave me an insight into the cosmic workings of the universe that I wouldn't otherwise have had. Hardly a day went by that I didn't drink or smoke or swallow something, yet I didn't think I had a problem. If anyone had a problem, it was my new roommate, Jeri. She was a painter and a problem child. Surely she was bipolar: smiling and buoyant one minute, manic and screaming the next. She'd hole up in her room with a jug of white wine and her oil paints and a too-loud radio and paint large, mad canvases that resembled vulvas. They were Georgia O'Keefe on acid.

Jeri would tell anyone who'd listen about her problems. Her mother drunk herself to death. Her father made her jerk him off at least once a week when she was a kid. Now, I'd had my share of childhood bummers, but Jeri indulged her Mad Genius persona in a way that struck me as unseemly, and we were expected to humor her manic behavior. While I yearned to forge an artistic alliance with her, her mental instability simply didn't allow it. You never knew where you stood with Jeri, or which Jeri would show up: crazy Jeri or functional Jeri. She was also a mean drunk. I was the one who'd read all the Dylan Thomas and Anne Sexton, but Jeri was the one who came closer to living out their destructive legacy.

My other new roommate, Bonnie, was also a heavy drinker. Bonnie wanted to be a dermatologist, probably to get access to free pharmaceuticals. Sometimes, on a good night, we'd go out to a Mexican place called Acapulco and sit and drink and bitch. Jeri was usually on some type of upper or downer, and she didn't mind copping to her addictions. "I believe in drugs," she said one night over her fourth glass of house chardonnay. "I believe in how they make me feel. I believe in the drug mentality."

"Me too," I said, though I knew my belief took a less venomous form. Since I was underage, I had ordered white wine too because it seemed more grown-up.

"I'll drink to that," Bonnie chirped, lifting her margarita. Bonnie had a fiance but she behaved as if she didn't. In fact, I doubted his existence, given the steady stream of men who appeared at our sliding glass doors. Bonnie was a small, curvy brunette, just short of beautiful, and like a small boat that leaves a deceptively large wake, she created an out-sized amount of drama. I spent most nights at the trailer park with Stuart, and one morning I came home to hear that Brenda had been kidnapped from the Red Onion in Newport Beach, where she was on a date with a man not her fiance, taken to a nearby yacht and forced to ingest various illegal substances. Now, everyone knew she'd dumped her date and left with someone richer and better-looking, but it was best not to call Bonnie on her bullshit lest the drama queen turn on you. Besides, her escapades made for entertaining cocktail chatter.

At Acapulco, we got drunker and the conversation got hotter. Inevitably, it turned philosophical. Jeri and Brenda had different ideas about men and such, so I sat back and watched them go at it. We were all trying to avoid the chips because they were fattening, but pretty soon Bonnie gave in and devoured the entire bowl--half a box of Ex-Lax later, they'd be history anyway.

"I don't need a man," Jeri claimed loudly. "I am strong. I am an individual, an artist, and I believe in my own ability to be a person without some man there to tell me I'm okay. Brenda, you're fucked 'cause you need men as an escape mechanism."

Jeri liked to use fancy psychological terms like "escape mechanism"; she probably picked them up during her recent stay at a psychiatric hospital, which I forgot to mention.

"I'm strong too!" Bonnie slurred. She was trying to apply lipstick but missed. "I can handle life. I wanna be a doctor but I need my fiance 'cause he makes me happy and he can teach me how to change myself because I don't like myself. I'm too emotional. It's a sign of weakness. I never cry, I can't cry."

This was Jeri's cue to crank up the psycho-babble. "Emotionality is a sign of strength and letting go," she said. I saw tears spring to her eyes. "Letting go takes more courage than being strong. I've cried every day of my life and I'm strong because of it and I'm going to cry every day for the rest of my life." As if to prove it, she started to sob and motion for another drink. "Where's the fucking waiter? Where's the fucking waiter?"

Thank god crystal meth and crack hadn't been invented yet. As it was, Jeri's tantrums could be volcanic and terrifying, especially when they were turned on me, and I'd storm into my room, trembling with rage. But at least I got a good poem out of it. Entitled "Tarot," it began: "You've strung your voodoo here/(hangman, mad driven/madder by a hanging moon)/your pills, your paints/your asylum gate/Now the walls rage like inmates...." and ended with images of sacrifice: "The numb bleat of stars/red spatter/shorn light."

Wright said liked this a good bit. He said it seemed to "invent experience." I wasn't sure what they meant, but his praise elated me. I felt as if I'd passed some sort of unwritten Darma Bum initiation rite: "Write a poem that Charles Wright likes." I floated home on my bike, its wheels barely touching the pavement. Up to this point I'd been writing first drafts in Stuart's boho palace and typing them at the dining room table in Cloneville, as the Darma Bums called Campus Village. But a poet needed a real desk. And not just any run of the mill desk, but something different, creative, to reflect my new status as A Poet. Since I was broke--tuition and rent in Cloneville gobbled all my government money--it needed it to be free.

I glided up to the Cloneville apartment and, as was my wont, jumped off before the bike had come to a stop, just like in those John Wayne westerns Mom used to drag me to. And since I wore clogs--not known for their supportive attributes--I tended to twist my ankle a lot. But I kept doing it anyway. This is how they define "addiction" at the treatment center: "Continuing to engage in risky behavior despite negative consequences."

I opened the sliding door, walked through the living room and down the hall to my room, passing Jeri and Bonnie's room along the way. I glanced in and stopped. There was Dirty Doug, a leading campus radical and practicing anarchist, and the filthiest person in town. He was so smelly and obnoxious that even the Darma Bums would keep him at arm's length. No one was sure if he was a student or a vagrant. Dirty Doug lumbered around campus in a green army jacket and shredded army boots. His glasses were held together with a yard of duct tape, and his hair and beard hosted lice parties. He was the last person you wanted lying on your bed. Thank god it was Bonnie's bed.

When I asked him he was doing in our apartment, Doug said he was waiting for Bonnie.

"How do you know Bonnie?" I asked.

"Beers at the Backlot." Doug had trouble with complete sentences.

"Oh." A thought crossed my mind. "You get around, Doug. Seen any abandoned desks in your travels?"

He grunted, which I took for a no. "You need a desk?" he asked. Yes, I replied, but only if it was free. Dirty Doug heaved himself off Bonnie's mattress. "I got an idea."

Why Dirty Doug offered to help is beyond me. Maybe he was grateful that unlike most people, I hadn't screamed and run away at the sight of him. We set off toward the trailer park. Dirty Dave seemed intimately familiar with every pile of junk on the property, and before long we'd assembled a door (with knob) and two sawhorses. We lugged the items back to my room and set the door across the sawhorses, against the wall. I set my typewriter on top, along with a pencil cup, a dictionary, and my father's thesaurus. I screwed a red desk lamp from Aaron Bros. and nailed up three abstract masks that had gone unclaimed from the ceramics kiln.

This was my base of operations for the rest of the school year. I spent less time at Stuart's and more time at my desk, hammering out deeply personal poems and papers on Faulker and Borges and Sartre. I also began to express my grief and frustration for my father's death through poetry, using the thesaurus that he had once depended on during his own college days. In my first effort, entitled "Officers Housing," I wrote about 30 lines about life in Albany: the frustrated wives, the oblivious, haunted children, the menace of the war. I don't remmeber much about the original version except the phrase "mothers mumbling in husbandless beds." I thought it had a ring to it.

The English department's brand-new Xerox machine was kept under lock and key. So before workshop, students had to type a copy of their latest poem on special paper and run off copies on a mimeograph machine downstairs. This required much cranking and spilling of blue ink, and by the time you were done, you looked like you'd been fingerprinted by the FBI. I loved the semi-toxic scent of the ink and the heft of the damp poems as you held them in your hands. Before class, you stuck a copy in your professor's box so he could read it before workshop.

The day "Officer's Housing" was to be critiqued, I got a message that Wright wanted to see me. This made me a little nervous. His office was in the English department, the first door on the left. As I sat down I saw that he had not only read my poem, he had edited it. He'd taken a pencil from the row of freshly sharpened pencils he kept on his desk and crossed out the first few stanzas of my poem. He'd not just crossed them out, he'd obliterated them, as if the rejected stanzas offended his sensibilities. All that was left were the last nine lines. But they were good lines. Great lines, he said, especially the first one. He read it aloud.

"'It's easy to envision the dying sun.' That, Elizabeth, is a line of poetry."

It's a good thing that Wright gave me the affirmation I needed, because Stuart certainly didn't. He could be aloof and condescending, even cruel. He called me "his fat little Barbie doll" (though I was hardly fat, just curvy) and enjoyed torturing me with reminiscences of his ex-fiancee, the love of his life, who had dumped him a few weeks before their wedding. The truth was, I could see why. I was tired of being demeaned, but I stayed with him, unable to let go, and not simply because he was my in with the Darma Bums. I described our complex dynamic in this rather prescient journal entry:

Stuart taught me to see. He is full of the most minute information. From listening to him, I learned to look for those things that others don't notice, but which, when put in a poem, make it transcendent. So Stuart is my trivia king. Even though our passion has died out, I keep him around because sometimes something he says will set me off. I'm addicted in a way. Does a junkie love the junk? No, but he needs it. Sometimes I pump him for information and he'll say, Are you going to put this in a poem? He knows I'm using him. My poetry devours him.

I hung onto Stuart for the rest of the school year, through poem after poem. Bonnie moved out and Jeri stayed on. Carina moved in. She was a freshman drama student, tall, gorgeous, Italian, and spoiled, with long, dark, lustrous hair, mile-long legs, and remarkably large gray eyes. It took about five minutes before she and Stuart's brother Chris were a couple. He called her "Carina Romantica!" and drew her portrait. I was a little envious of her. I was infatuated with Chris yet stuck with Stuart. We did a lot of double-dating, if you considered sitting around Chris's trailer shooting the shit a date. Darma Bums had the starving artist shtick down cold. We luxuriated in our decadent indolence, unconcerned with such trivialities as salaries and mortgages and children. My Modernism professor, Dr. Rowe, was also my department guidance counselor. He was a practical sort of man, always concerned with how his students were going to make money "out in the real world," as he put it. One day, in his office, he asked me what I planned on as a career.

"Well," I replied, "I'd like to be a poet."

He knitted his brow and said, "Don't you think you should take some computer courses?"

I shrugged, not quite sure what a computer was exactly. As it happened, Dr. Rowe shouldn't have worried about me; I ended up having a fulfilling career as a magazine editor, making more money that I ever dreamed of. But this was several years in the future.

I gathered my best poems into a manuscript and applied to the university's Program in Writing. On March 19, 1982, I received a letter from Charles Wright, informing me that he'd recommended to the Graduate Dean that I be admitted. "The other members of the Writing Committee who read your application feel, as I do, that your poetry is among the best and most promising that we read this year."

My future, for the next two years, was decided. I would be a graduate student and devote myself to my art. By May, I'd broken up with Stuart. I didn't need him anymore. Only much later did it occur to me that Stuart's knowledge of the natural world mirrored my father's. If only Stuart had had one iota of my father's courage, ambition and tenderness.

Stuart, Charles Wright, my father: all three men are long gone from my life, but the thesaurus remains. It sits on my desk right now, next to the laptop computer on which I write this blog.

Atticus Flinched

2009-06-22T11:24:00.000-07:00

In the spring of 1981, sitting in the student union and needing something to read, I picked up a discarded copy of the The New University, UCI's campus paper. Inside, I spotted a small house ad announcing that positions were available for editors and writers. My high school English teacher, Ms. Ethan (she insisted on the feminist honorific) had often entreated me to write for the school newspaper. It took me a few years, but I finally got around to it. I called the New U's phone number, and someone on the other end told me to come by the newsroom, on the 3rd floor of Gateway Commons, for an interview.

The newsroom held a few rows of cluttered metal desks with telephones and manual typewriters. At the far side, near the windows, sat a nerdy guy with bushy brown hair and tinted aviator glasses. He was leaning over his typewriter, sucking on a cigarette. An ashtray piled with butts and an open bottle of beer sat on the desk next to him. When he looked up he spotted me and stood up so quickly he knocked over his beer. He was very tall. His mouth opened laxly and his eyes bugged out behind his glasses, giving him a look of permanent amazement.

He asked if I was Elizabeth, and I said yes. He said his name was Atticus and he was the editor-in-chief. He took a drag on his cigarette and let the smoke find its own way out of his mouth.

I sat opposite him. He asked me if I had any journalism experience. I said not exactly, but I'd written a lot of short stories, and had even had one published in the local newspaper. And I always got As in English.

He fixed his bug-eyed stare on me for a few seconds and then said, "When can you start?"

My first assignment was covering the annual Earth Day festivities. Tom Hayden was the featured speaker, and he gave a gloomy assessment of humanity's prospects. He said that our generation had the worst prospects of any generation ever, and that by the year 2000 the planet would have one foot in the grave if we didn't start "acting decisively to alter current trends." I scribbled notes so fast my hand ached, along with such atmospheric tidbits as "crowd sunburned" and "everybody hates nukes." The Juggler bobbled bowling pins while balancing on a unicycle. When he spotted me he winked, without missing a beat.

I went back to the newsroom and typed up the story and handed it in to the copy desk. Then I pedaled back to my apartment. I had a sign to make.

Spring was a big season for outdoor events at UCI. That Saturday was Wayzgoose, UCI's version of a Renaissance fair. There would be plenty of entertainment and fund-raising activities, people in medieval get-ups flailing away with swords and shields, and booths selling food, leather goods, and so on. Back in Colorado I'd made a little money painting designs on people's faces (flowers, butterflies, smiley faces) and discovered it to be a great way to A) capitalize on my artistic skills and B) meet men. So I signed up to have a face-painting booth. I spent hours making a sign and even dreamed up a name for my business: "Temporary Tattoos." Okay, I was no Bill Gates, but it was all I had. Besides, I'd discovered the perfect outfit at a junk shop in Laguna Beach: a two-piece ensemble consisting of suede hot pants and a matching suede bustier with rawhide laces that held it closed. If there had been biker chicks back in medieval times, they would have worn this.

By Friday afternoon, I'd gone to all the meetings and painted the sign and left it to dry outside the double glass doors that opened onto a grassy quad.

I had just started hanging out in the trailer park and my relationship with The Kid was in its final days. I had not yet slept with any Darma Bums, and The Juggler, who was responsible for introducing me to the place, was still trying to get with me. He struck me as the type who tried to get with lots of girls. I had an aversion to sleeping with players, but not so averse that I wouldn't share a bottle of wine with him, under a bush by the student union. I had just turned 20, so he must have bought the wine, at my request. Fittingly, I guzzled the whole thing. I'm not sure why I drank to black-out on the night before Wayzgoose, except to say that it wasn't the first time I'd sabotaged my own ambitions, and it wouldn't be the last. The Juggler, frustrated yet far too classy to exploit the situation, got me home, though I can't say how, as he didn't have a car. Maybe he balanced me on his head while riding his unicycle.

I was sick all night and all the next day. I vomited and thrashed in my bed through Wayzgoose and through Saturday night and into Sunday. Which was the day I was scheduled to go to brunch with The Kid and his parents. I felt like ass. I ate little and said less. As I mentioned before, they despised me, and were probably overjoyed when I dumped their darling bubbeleh.

But I recovered, as I always did, and returned to classes and my budding career as a news writer. I specialized in "soft news." Atticus gave me only the choicest assignments, like covering the biology department's first annual Biofaire. When I handed in my copy Atticus, from his nimbus of smoke, pronounced it brilliant. Unfortunately, he hadn't sent a photographer and so had no illustration to accompany the piece. Determined to save the day, I jumped on my bike and pedaled to the trailer park. One of the denizens had a beautiful rose bush, so I dashed off a pen and ink sketch of a rose in bloom, pedaled back to the New U office and presented the drawing--ta da!--to Atticus. He looked at it, at me, and said, "It's nice but.... couldn't you have added a dragonfly or something?" But he ran with it.

Soon enough it became clear that Atticus' slack-jawed response to my presence indicated he kept me around for a reason other than my stellar copy. I liked him, but not, as they say, in that way. I just enjoyed his company, having never met anyone like him. If I had to compare Atticus to a contemporary actor, it would be Jeff Goldblum, only not Jewish, not as dark, but possessing the same cerebral quirkiness. He spoke in five-syllable words and chuckled throatily at his jokes. Despite being born and raised in Orange County, one of several children in a large Catholic family, Atticus's world view was decidedly leftist, and the New U reflected his activist bent. He published opinion pieces about the university's ties to the production of nuclear warheads; a new story on the lack of a black studies program; and a first-person piece on what to expect when you're jailed for a victimless crime like smoking pot. Campus feminists had already criticized the paper's sexist headlines and occasionally racy content, putting Atticus at the forefront of Orange County's nascent political correctness movement. He was at odds with the school administration, the journalism professor, and the journalism professor's daughter, who was hired to critique the newspaper's journalist standards. She called my big feature on Irvine Meadows West "a major waste of space," not so much for my copy, but for the psychedelic layout that gobbled up most of the spread.

Yet Atticus persevered. While I did my best to not offend anyone, he enjoyed offending everyone. He jousted joyfully with his critics, bashing them in print, daring them to return fire. I admired his courage, as I admired all iconoclastic rebels because I myself yearned to be one so badly. I told him he would make a perfect Darma Bum but he said he liked it in Santa Ana, where he lived in a big old house with several roommates and hosted ironic croquet parties.

One day our discussion turned to my father. I had no trouble telling people he'd died in Vietnam (it was Laos, but I didn't know that at the time, because this was Top Secret Information). I wore the tragedy on my sleeve. Desperate to be cool, I turned to the one thing that truly set me apart from everyone else. While it wasn't unusual to meet someone who'd lost a brother or a son to the war, I knew of no one who'd lost a father. So I used this fact in a pathetic attempt to enhance my standing in people's eyes.

But Atticus surprised me. He informed me that my father was a victim of the imperialistic military-industrial complex, and how sorry he was about that. Of course I knew this sentiment existed, but this was the first time I'd heard anyone voice it about my father.

"My dad loved his country. He was a patriot," I countered, slightly offended.

Atticus took a deep drag off his cigarette, just as dad used to, and, clearly trying to cushion his opinion in empathy because he wanted to get with me, said, "There are kinds of patriots, Elizabeth. The people who protested that fucking war were patriots, too." At that moment I knew he was referring to himself. But that was okay. Pacifists didn't bother me the way they bothered my mother. Still, I should have asked him if maybe he didn't feel a little bit sorry for the kids who had to squish themselves down into the back seat because the protesters were yelling into the windows, calling their dad a baby-killer, even though he didn't just took pictures from the sky? But that would have required a more sophisticated approach to political debate than I possessed. I was still wrestling with feelings that, four months later, would bust out of my typewriter in the form of angry, injured verse. So I let it go. There were drugs to do.

One day we ate 'shrooms together. We slugged them down beer in the newsroom, trying not to taste them as we chewed, and then went and sat outside on the steps of the campus radio station. It was a sunny day, and as the 'shrooms took effect the world began to melt under the weight of its own beauty. There was so much beauty in the world I couldn't stand it, and Tom Hayden was wrong, we weren't doomed to extinction, how could we be on a day like this, when the breeze smelled of sea salt and eucalyptus? And I wanted to tell Atticus that, but when I looked at him, his face was morphing into a horrible leer and I could see his sexual desperation oozing out of his nostrils and ears. I had to nip this in the bud, right now. "Elizabeth is not going to sleep with Atticus," I said very slowly. My words vibrated between us, a terrible echo of rejection. And then I got on my bike and rode away, to the trailer park, to the wild artichokes and the Darma Bums.

Six days after the Biofaire piece came out, I found a letter in my backpack. It was a love letter from Atticus, the first real one I'd ever gotten. He had scrawled a six-page epistolary appreciation of what he called "Being with Elizabeth," and it set a new standard for purple prose. But it was sweet and flattering and I've kept it all these years, along with the other unrestrained, off-kilter letters he wrote me.

But Atticus was undone by his own excesses. He wanted to do a humor insert in the worst way, having acquired a copy of a very funny example from UC Berkeley. Atticus felt very competitive with those northern university liberals, and his had to be even more funny and clever. On the afternoon before it was due at the printer's, we got high and brainstormed, with little success. Atticus was getting more and more agitated, pacing, smoking, literally pulling at his hair. I wanted so badly to solve his problem, to be the hero, just as I was that day I drew the rose for the Biofaire story, but I was of little help, and finally I left Atticus to his own devices.

What Atticus hatched from his fevered, sex-addled brain was a Playboy parody called Playant. (For those who don't know, UCI's mascot was an Anteater.) Atticus posed for the cover, leaning naked against a wall and holding a copy of the New U so it coyly covered his genitals. Inside was a full-spread centerfold of Atticus laying naked on his desk talking on the phone. Features were entitled "One Time on Marijuana," "Greek Gets Drunk, Laid," and "Doc Finds Source of Apathy," starring a drug-peddling researcher from the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and a poem entitled "Butt Watching" by another campus eccentric, a bisexual black hairdresser named Tyrell ("That blond coming/got a butt that bunches/fresh strawberry pudding/wiggling a giggling....). You get the idea.

The campus establishment went bat-shit. The long knives had been out before Playant, and after its debut, their blades were dripping with blood and gore. All copies of Playant were ordered collected and destroyed. Atticus was brought up in front of a kangaroo court and hanged for his offenses. Which is to say, he was fired. He probably would have been expelled had he not been a month away from getting his degree. Atticus retreated to Santa Ana to roll joints and lick his wounds, taking nothing with him but, as he put in a letter to me later, "a huge load of alienation, small knowledge of some technical aspects of literature, and a strengthened disgust with large institutions."

I saw him only a few more times. In February of 1984, we sat on his roof in Santa Ana, smoking a joint, as he listened while I complained about Stuart's controlling ways. Stuart and I had broken up and made up about three times by then, and I was going to end it for good this time. I can't imagine Atticus enjoyed listening to me talk about another man, but then he had a girlfriend himself, who lived under this very same roof with him. As I recall, she never did like me.

Reckless

2009-06-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

Six months sober today, and I am haunted by the image of the injured girl. The adorable blonde child being led toward the villa's front door, wearing a too-big raincoat, her arm in a sling, yet smiling, as if she enjoys being hurt. That it is her left arm seems like a premonition of the left pinky she will lose 43 years later.

When the image appeared on the sheet last Thursday night, it brought with it a memory so ephemeral and non-specific that it was more of a sensation than a recollection. I had hurt myself, I felt it in my bones, yet I couldn't remember the cause. How does a four-year-old sprain her arm? By falling off a bike, out of a tree, off a piece of playground equipment. By running and stumbling and putting out her hands to protect herself. From a skiing accident. By being yanked too hard by someone bigger.

On Wednesday I called Kevin to check in, and during our conversation I asked him if he remembered the injury. "Yeah," he answered slowly, indicating the image as I'd described it in the blog post had reawakened a long-dormant memory in him as well. "I think you broke it." But he couldn't recall the accident either.

After I hung up with Kevin I called Sara. She was feeling much better and packing for a family trip to Oregon. I brought up the little girl in the sling, how the cause of the injury was so elusive as to be maddening.

"You know, when I started thinking about it, I realized that I have a long history of getting hurt," I told her. "First, there's this mysterious broken arm. Then there's the time I fell off my bike in Albany and skidded about 10 feet. I was a big patch of oozing road rash. The fish hook in my right arm at Yellowstone. Fainting after mom pierced my ears. When I started drinking heavily, I'd get myself in all sorts of trouble. It was as if I was trying to destroy myself, indirectly. I'm terrible at anorexia or self-mutilation, but I'm good at surrendering to fate. That way, if I died, it was as the result of outside forces. A car. A snow-covered mountain. A man. But I wasn't fearless, far from it."

"You were reckless," she clarified. "Look at Anthony. He's fearless, but he doesn't take stupid chances."

So that's the difference between me and a five-year-old. Good to know.

"It's about feeling that you're worthy of living," she continued. "You've got to learn to love yourself."

Love myself. Yeah, I've gotta figure out how that works. As soon as I figure out what it means.

Then I say, "Remember the sand-sailer incident? Boy, was that stupid."

I think I've mentioned the sand sailer. When we were living in San Jose, Kevin picked up a copy of mom's Sunset magazine and found an article on the growing sport of "land-sailing." He saw pictures of men steering their wheeled land-yachts across parking lots and hard-packed beaches, and he, too, began to dream of skimming across the earth's surface, the wind in his sail and his hair. He bought a plan and, in the summer of 1973, Kevin flew down to Los Angeles and stayed with our grandparents, just as he did in 1969, and spent two weeks welding his dream machine together in their machine shop. Somehow he got it back up north. Mom promised to sew the sail and went so far as to buy the pattern and many yards of canvas. But she never got around to sewing it. While I imagine Kevin nudged mom as gently as he could, he knew, as I did, that prodding or goading her would not only be ineffective, it could be hazardous. So he was left with a heavy, A-shaped framework, with two wheels in the back and one in the front--more of a land-tricycle than a land-sailer.

When mom married Arnie and we moved from San Jose to Colorado, the sand sailer came with us. But it sat in the garage, unused, until one day, Kevin couldn't control his itch to get it rolling, in whatever fashion he could. He cast his eye upon the steep horseshoe driveway belonging to the house across the street, owned by a retired admiral with whom mom had become friendly. (After the divorce, she developed a particular affection for retired admirals.) He got an idea, and I was more than game. We pushed the sand-sailer out of the garage, across the street, and to the top of the admiral's driveway, high above the street. "I'll sit at the very front," I volunteered, meaning right behind the front wheel, perched like the figurehead on a pirate ship. Kevin would steer. Sarah stood in our front yard, our sole spectator and witness.

"I have a very vague memory; I was pretty small," she told me over the phone on Wednesday. "I remember it going down the driveway. And I remember it not being a good thing that it was going down the driveway."

Kevin gave the sandsailer a push, bobsled style, and hopped into the seat. It inched forward slowly until gravity took a hold and pulled it down the driveway, faster and faster. The wind blew my hair around and I was smiling. We must have been going 30 mph once we hit the street. Kevin had to crank the thing hard to the right so it wouldn't fly into our front garden; this sudden turn further engaged the laws of physics, and when the vehicle turned sharply to the right, I kept going straight. I flew off the thing, sailed about five feet through the air and hit the street hard, rolling a half-dozen times before coming to a stop. Kevin brought the sandsailer to a halt (I don't recall if it had brakes or not) and ran back up the street to where I was sitting, head hanging, arms on my knees. "Are you okay?" he asked, horrified, looking for blood on my face or a shattered bone piercing my skin.

But there was nothing. Not a scratch, not a bruise, not a speck of road rash. I got up, brushed myself off, and said, "I don't think we should do that again."

That was the sand-sailer's first and last voyage. When Kevin moved out to the kennel, he took his dream with him. And when he moved into town, he left it behind.

By this time, we were both on our own in Colorado, feeling our way through largely separate lives. I began to drink regularly, heavily. Fearlessness implies the presence of courage, and there is nothing courageous about being a drunk. The subtext of addiction is self-destruction. A drunk hurts herself. A drunk does stupid things. A drunk destroys friendships. A drunk attempts to dance while balancing a glass of scotch on her head. The glass shatters on the ballroom dance floor, in front of her date's fraternity brothers and their dates. Later, the drunk teeters toward her dorm in high heels on early snow that has melted and frozen into a treacherous sheet of ice. She is wearing a homemade dress she sewed on her own sewing machine, in her own dorm room, from a Butterick pattern, because she couldn't afford to buy a new dress in a store, and she wants to make a good impression on her date, a rich kid from back East. She still couldn't believe that out of all the girls in college, he had picked her. "Doesn't she look beautiful? She made this dress herself!" her date had gushed to some other girls, two rich girls probably, but they'd just glared at her, so the drunken girl hit the open bar. It's a frigid November night, the air sharp as glass, and now she is skating along in her high heeled shoes, arms outstretched like a high-wire walker, trying to negotiate the steeply pitched road. She falls not once, but twice, hard, ripping the hem of her homemade dress. The drunk girl manages to make it up the two flights of stairs to her garrett room, where she passes out on her bed. Her roommate is out of town for the weekend. She wakes up the next day and her arm hurts like hell, but she goes to a Denver Broncos game as planned, with The Bald Man and his father. During the game it snows and her arm is killing her. A day later, she calls her brother to take her to the hospital at the local Air Force base (she still has military insurance), and a few hours later she leaves with her arm encased in plaster, having fractured her ulna at the elbow. The lesson she takes away form this incident is not the relationship between scotch and broken bones and humiliation, but the fact that her pain threshold is so high she could walk around for two days with a broken arm!

Her date never spoke to her again.

Addicts don't learn from their mistakes; they repeat them, again and again. We're always waking up in our miserable morning beds with miserable, mysterious injuries. We scratch our throbbing heads and wonder, What happened? What did I do this time? I'm reminded of the time I spoke at Safiri's AA meeting last spring. After I'd said my piece, the floor was opened up for the "share" portion of the program, where attendees talk about how my tale of woe reminded them of some aspect of their own addiction or recovery. It's the good part, the nitty-gritty, the specifics. One guy, a recovering cocaine addict who looked to be in his mid 30s, described how he'd lock himself in his apartment for days, just him and his pile of coke. He got so paranoid that he put sheets up on all the windows because he knew he was being watched. He began to have seizures, terrible episodes where he'd wake up and find himself on his kitchen floor or collapsed at his desk. One day, he went to the dentist because his jaw had been hurting. After examining him, the dentist said, "It's no wonder you're in pain, considering how many teeth you've broken." And the guy said, "No I haven't." The dentist took X-rays as the proof. Sure enough, he had five cracked molars and a fractured jaw. The guy theorized that he'd been doing lines at his desk when he'd seizes up and slammed face-first into the heavy oak desktop. This happened more times than he cared to remember.

At UC Irvine, my vehicle for self-destruction was a bicycle. It was a real junker purchased at the Golden West College swap meet. Kevin and I had brought our old skis from Colorado, all seven pairs, to sell, along with other miscellaneous items from the past. We laid it all out on blankets in the parking lot and began selling stuff for next to nothing. Once in a while, when foot traffic slowed down and I got bored, I'd wander among the other junk. I bought my first antique that day, a gorgeous Art Deco clock by Hammond that I never did get to work. Then I spotted the black bike, posed coyly on its kick stand. It was $20. I needed transportation to get around the sprawling campus, and the deal was done. I got it for $15.

I became a familiar sight around campus, clattering about my crappy old bike, carrying my books in a JanSport backpack. I rode to dance class, to English class, to visit friends who lived on the far side of the campus. But I needed to do more than get from point A to point B; I needed to make the trip death-defying.

The campus today has been expanded so as to be unrecognizable to me. In the early 1980s its layout was far simpler, with buildings erected around a wide circular drive open only to pedestrians. Campus Village was about 100 yards away, and at the point where I entered the walkway on my bicycle, it pitched steeply toward a line of thick steel rods standing at three-foot intervals to block car traffic. At the top, I'd aim my bike at the three-foot space between two of the rods, let go of the handlebars and fly down the hill, exquisitely balanced on my seat, arms hanging loosely at my sides, wind in my hair. One slip, one misjudgment, and the result would have been very, very ugly. Going to class became a study in brinkmanship, a stare-down contest with fate. And every day, fate blinked. But I wasn't always so lucky.

I tended to wait until the last minute to leave for class, so I had to ride at Tour de France speeds to make it on time. The dance studio was two parking lots and one intersection away, and I'd do my best to make the green light and save a previous minute. I ran a lot of yellow lights. One of them was more red than yellow--a deep orange. I pedaled madly through the intersection, but before I could make it through a car clipped my back tire and sent me flying onto the street. As I hopped up, picked up the bike, climbed back on, and kept going, I saw, through the car's windshield, a young woman wearing the same horrified expression that Kevin had had that day in Colorado. Don't worry lady, I made it, I thought as I pedaled on to class, where I performed every plie and jete on a right ankle that hurt like hell, because apparently the car's bumper had kissed my leg as well.

The other accident was messier.

One day I was riding along the sidewalk that runs in front of the administration building. I was heading over to see a fellow student who lived on the far side of campus; we had a project to finish or something. I pedaled madly along, not late, not drunk. I liked to take acid to eat mushrooms and ride around, relishing my freedom, the way the world turned soft and colorful, like a white T-shirt given a tie-dye makeover. But this time I was entirely sober. I was taking in a clot of parents and their kids standing about 20 yards ahead of me, probably taking a campus tour, when my front tire got wedged between the sidewalk and the grass. The bike stopped dead and I kept going. I sailed dramatically over the handlebars and landed, thunk, head-first on the sidewalk, right in front of the tour group. Their collective gasp could be heard for miles. When I sat up, blood cascaded through my long blonde hair, plop, plop, plop, puddling on the sidewalk. I sat there for a few second, astonished at the sight of my own carnelian life force, thinking, God how embarrassing. I'm glad I don't know any of those people. I got to my feet, picked up the bike, got back on and rode a quarter mile to the health clinic. "You're a lucky young lady," the doctor said as he closed the small cut. It only needed two measly stitches. The lesson I took away was not that there's nothing wrong with taking your sweet time, but that if you want to lose a lot of blood without coming close to dying, then a scalp wound is the way to go.

The problem with being told that you were lucky enough times is that you begin to believe it. You imagine yourself invincible, impervious to fate's sledgehammer. You think you can drive home on the 405 freeway, blind drunk from a night of fierce partying with your cousin and his friends, and get home in one piece. And you do. You think you can get pulled over, wasted yet again, and talk your way out of a trip to the hoosegow. And you do. You think you can make it home on the train after five vodka Red bulls on an empty stomach, and you do. Barely. Someone, you think, will help you. Someone will take care of you. Someone will get you home and not steal your wallet; not kidnap and murder you; not note your address and come back later and rape you, even though they're cops. Your husband won't know what to do other than implore you to stop because he can't believe what you're doing to yourself, to him, to the kids. Especially the kids. And here's the deal: You are not invincible. If you don't knock it off, then eventually, inevitably, you will pay a price, and I'm not talking the dry-cleaning bill. Just as I did. As I always will.

These days, my idea of risky behavior is eating the wrong whipped cream. I know Susan read that blog post from the UCLA event I attended with James because she was not happy with me yesterday, at our session. "It was only whipped cream," I say crossly, convinced she's blowing the whole thing out of proportion.

"You knew there was alcohol in it, and you went back for seconds."

"It might've been vanilla. Sara's gonna call the caterer to find out."

"It doesn't matter. Your intent was to have more."

"Yeah. I love whipped cream and strawberries. It's my favorite dessert."

"That you allowed yourself to enjoy it is the latest sign in a disturbing pattern. First you stopped going to your group in the city. Then you stopped coming here...."

"I came back, didn't I?" I'm sitting on her love seat, feeling like a kid at the principle's office.

"After being gone for a month! And then you tasted alcohol and went back for more. The first bite was an accident. The second was a slip. And with the emotional difficulties you're facing, and your lack of a recovery plan, you're facing the very real possibility of relapsing."

"I went to a meeting!"

"One."

Geez, I can't do anything right. "Look, I was surrounded by people drinking wine, and I didn't have any. I had no desire to have any. I had more whipped cream, big deal. And then I stopped. If I have to have a slip, this seems like a pretty innocuous one."

"You're always testing your limits, pushing your boundaries."

"I guess I like to live on the edge," I say, trying to sound ironic. "I don't need as much support as you think I do. I have what I need, who I need. My family, a few friends, a desire to be a better person. Besides," I add, holding up my incomplete left hand, "not just anyone gets to carry around a remind of their failures like this."

"You're too progressed to do it yourself. If you pick up again, you're going to go right back to where you were, and worse. It might take a couple of weeks, but you'll get there. We know where that was, and where it could lead."

Finally we agree to disagree, for the time being. I leave knowing my six months is an accomplishment, but that in the scheme of a life, it's merely a rim shot in time's spittoon. I want to tell Susan I've learned my lesson. I want to tell her about falling off the bike, all those years ago, how the bloodstain rooted itself to the sidewalk. I'm capable of changing, I want to say, just like the stain of my own blood. I want to explain that over the years, I'd revisit the scene of the accident to find that the rusty amoeba-shaped spot, while still visible, got lighter and lighter with each passing year. How when I checked this last time, it was finally gone.

La Boheme, or, Trailer Trashed

2009-06-17T09:53:00.000-07:00

Europe had Paris in the 1920s. New York had Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Irvine in the 1980s had Irvine Meadows West, a bohemian enclave in a county that has gone Republican in every presidential election since 1940, or thereabouts. At the trailer park, I found, for the first time, a community that I not only embraced, but that embraced me back, until the relationship soured, as my relationships always did.

The only one of its kind in the nation, the trailer park proper occupied an area the size of a football field. There were 110 spaces on an inner ring and an outer ring. The spaces were covered in gravel and had electric and plumbing hook-ups. While indoor plumbing wasn't a challenge for newer trailers and RVs, the old ones rarely came with toilets or full kitchens, but the wonderful blonde wood interiors and overall funk quotient made up for the lack of such conveniences. In the early 1980s you could get an old trailer for under $1,000; add in a $75 per month space fee (by the end times, the price had skyrocketed to $130), and you had the best housing bargain in the county. As I've said, the park's unofficial population far outstripped the number of official dwellers. At some point, residents, in a search for more space, had begun building attached structures, which began to attract relatives, friends and chronic slackers of all stripes. Eventually some residents--and their parents--got the great notion that the trailer park offered an opportunity for cheap housing, not only for one kid, but for all of their kids who attended the school. One father oversaw the construction of the trailer-trash equivalent of a luxury condo onto the side of his oldest son's trailer that was inhabited by one son after another. The campus housing office inevitably sent up a red flag, but it took 20 years for a resolution. Unfortunately, it involved bulldozers.

Irvine Meadows West's population ranged from artists to computer nerds to at least one Bible thumper-slash-pornography addict. Most of them kept to themselves, content to come and go in relatively anonymity. But a few core denizens formed a clique I'll call the Darma Bums, after their occasional newsletter, The Darma Bum Chronicle. They were mostly artists and intellectuals, and quite attractive, in an off-beat way. It was as if MTV had created The Real World: UC Irvine and put out a casting call for the best-looking beatniks and hippie-wannabes on the West Coast. It reminded me of the old brick building in Colorado where I took life drawing classes, where it was okay to be different and eccentricity was admired, even embraced.

First, there was The Shaman, the park's spiritual guru, a painter with a long brown pony tail and dark eyes that glittered in the firelight. He lived in a tiny trailer shaped like a tear drop, old enough to have been hauled behind a Buick with tail fins. The trailer, not him.

Mack, aka the Juggler, was a dance student, a street performer, a comedian, and straight. He had the body of a god, which explains why he walked around shirtless all the time. He slept in a modified metal tool shed next door to his older brother, Dirk. Dirk had sun-kissed hair and a way with an espresso machine--espresso, of course, being mandatory. Dirk, a member of the university sailing team, lived in with his wife, a graduate student, in a trailer barely large enough for two children. I always wondered how two people managed to get along in close confines for more than a weekend.

There were a few married couples in the park. Matt and his wife were proof that over-achievers had their place here. He was an engineering student with a movie-star smile; she was pursuing an advanced degree in mathematics. For the entire two and a half years I hung out and then lived in the park, Matt was working on the only thing separating Irvine Meadows West from the Playboy Mansion: a hot tub. This one would be solar-powered, and I'd sit for hours watching him weld the solar panels together. They were eventually erected, behind the Shaman's house near the vegetable patch, but alas, I didn't stay long enough to see the tub become a reality.

Clarice was the park vamp. A theater major, she was a drama queen of the first order, petite and profane and, from what I could, sexually insatiable. Her boyfriends soon learned not to go out of town for more than a week lest they come home and find a new man had taken their place. She chain-smoked and spoke her mind, no matter how insultingly blunt. When Clarice walked, her long thin braid bounced jauntily off her ass. If one day she'd ridden naked through the park on horseback, her long brown hair draping her A-cup breasts, no one would have been surprised. Once she realized I wasn't really competition, we developed a complex love/hate relationship. I later wrote a short poem about Clarice that portrayed her as a needy tramp. She loved it, and incorporated it into one of her performance art pieces.

When I first arrived on the scene, in the late winter--or what passes as such in Southern California--of 1981, Clarice was sleeping with Christopher. After The Shaman, Chris was the Darma Bum's No. 2 alpha male. He was a slightly manic yet altogether charming lothario, a gifted artist and thinker, with angular good looks, bushy hair that never knew a brush, and a crazy smile. Clarice lived in the trailer next door. Chris made the mistake of going out of town for work, and when he returned, Clarice had shacked up with Jules, who worked in the A/V department and had a passion for Depression-era music and films. Shaggy and affable, Jules liked to drink and play the ukekele, which he did quite expertly. He and Clarice lasted quite a while and remained friends, which is fortunate, since he ended up building a palatial shack about ten yards from her back door. Jules broke new ground: His shack was freestanding. He lived there for years, drinking and strumming and singing. If you wanted to drink gin and croon along to Jelly Roll Morton, Jules was the guy to see.

Most of the Darma Bums lived on the western edge of the compound's outer ring. This was the most desirable location. While the east and north sides of the park were bordered by a parking lot and a road, respectively, the west and south sides were bordered by undeveloped land that no one else (i.e., the school establishment) seemed interested in. So Christopher and The Shaman and others put in in vegetable gardens and chicken coops and fire rings and a giant round garden surrounded by a low wall of bricks made from mud and straw, for primal verisimilitude. It goes without saying that the garden was The Shaman's project, though I've long since forgotten its spiritual significance.

I yearned to be a Darma Bum more than anything. A lot of people did. The trailer park attracted hangers-on the way old meat attracts flies. Sal Paradise was really a Jewish kid from New Jersey who'd read too much of the Beats for his own good. He took his pseudonym from the protagonist of Kerouac's On the Road and he could often be spotting padding about the park barefoot, a copy of Howl tucked under his arm. Like many of us, he found the past more preferable to the present. I enjoyed Sal, the way I enjoyed anyone who vehemently expressing their individuality, regardless of whether that assumed identity disguised a distressed or damaged psyche. Back stories packed with discontent and alienation not only came with the territory, they were practically a prerequisite. I'm not sure where Sal lived, if anywhere; for a while, a charitable denizen let him shack up in a particle-board hut for a few months.

When it came to becoming a Dharma Bum, I had an advantage over Sal in that the fastest way to become part of the scene was through a man. I started out with The Shaman. But the Shaman and I didn't click sexually, and I was handed off to Stuart. (I think they had some kind of gentlemen's agreement.) Stuart and I hooked up right around his 30th birthday, which made him nine years older than me. Stuart was Christopher's older brother. He had curly black hair and a moustache, and less body fat than a greyhound. Stuart was so skinny and loose-limbed that when he laughed his Snagglepuss laugh, his entire body shook.

Like Chris, Stuart was highly intelligent, but his IQ was matched only by his utter lack of motivation. Stuart had slacking down to a science. He lived in a shack behind Chris's trailer. Every six months they switched their accommodations; when I arrived, Stuart was living in the trailer. It was about 30 feet long and ancient, with a tribal safari paint job. Soon after we became an item, Stuart moved into the shack, Chris into the trailer. They were skilled carpenters, so as shacks go, this one was a bohemian show house. It had glass windows, a proper door, and an artfully worn exterior built of salvaged wood. Kerouac could have retired here, guzzling scotch while banging out stream-of-consciousness prose on his old Underwood. As it was, Stuart seemed to be going nowhere, and I guess you couldn't blame him. He spent his days weeding the vegetables, smoking cigarettes and weed and screwing his cute young girlfriend. There were four brothers altogether; the eldest had a painting company, giving Stuart and Jules a built-in income. The youngest brother was a mysterious character I met only a couple of times. He had a serious girlfriend, but one day they broke up, suddenly and irrevocably. Stuart would never tell me why. "It was a tragedy," he'd whisper. He liked to fuck with me, in more ways than one, though it took me a while before I realized it.

By the spring of 1981, I was spending most of my time at Irvine Meadows West. It beat life in Campus Village across the street with my three uptight roommates. They would have hated the trailer park, with its piles of junk and unwashed inhabitants. And walking to the bathroom to take a shower, toothbrush and soap in hand--too much like camping. These girls wanted a tract house in a gated community with a pool and furniture that matched and two sets of flat ware, one for everyday, the other for dinner parties. True, the whole camping vibe made it more of a guy thing, which may explain why they outnumbered women 5 to 1. But for some reason, the park plucked my anti-establishment string. Perhaps it was a reaction to my mother, whom I felt had more in common with my roommates than me. Or the perfect revenge for all those weeks spent in The Hindenburg, yearning to be home watching Emergency and mooning over Randolph Mantooth. These, on the other hand, were homes on wheels that went nowhere, and I wanted one.

But the waiting list was years long. Fortunately, my status as a Darma Bum girlfriend gave me an all-access pass to the trailer park and its environs.

While the western area was probably park property, the southern expanse was most definitely off limits, at least if the barbed-wire fence was any indication. It was nothing but scrubby arid hills covered with wild mustard and artichokes and prickly pear cacti, but I found it wildly inspiring. I loved nothing more than taking LSD and hiking into the back country. One day, my ex-boyfriend, The Kid, tracked me down. He found me on the inner ring, lying in a hammock strung between two propane tanks. The acid was just starting to kick in. He came jogging by, wearing nothing but bermuda shorts so new the crease was still sharp. His father was in the garment business, so The Kid had no lack of new clothes. He asked me how I liked his shorts. They were so red they hurt my eyes. I told him to go away and leave me alone. I hurt the poor kid, but I didn't care. Once in a while I'd spot him outside the student union, sitting at a table piled with polo shirts wrapped in plastic. I figured selling the shirts was his dad's idea, and I felt badly for The Kid. I think he may have become a dentist.

That summer, I signed up to extend my stay in Campus Village. My mother lived only 30 minutes to the south, but that was 30 minutes too far from Stuart and the trailer park. Besides, I would have lived on the streets before I lived under her roof again. To keep the government money flowing, I signed up for two summer courses: ballet and poetry writing. With my generous bosom, sturdy bones and rebar hamstrings, I was hardly ballerina material, but I liked the way ballet lengthened my neck and slimmed my legs. The poetry class was an impuse move. Just back from the beach, I was sitting in Stuart's shack, leafing through the class offerings, when I saw the listing for poetry. The class started in ten minutes. Something--a muse? a hole in my schedule?--made me get on my bike and ride to the English department. I walked in, still in my bathing suit, shorts and flip-flops, and found a desk. The professor was a well-known poet named Robert Peters. A large man with bristly crew cut and a cutting wit, he took one look at me and remarked, drily, "I see the beach bunny has arrived."

It turned out that the beach bunny had a natural way with metaphor and phonetics and interior rhyming, that there were endless poems banging around her brain just waiting to be released. I found inspiration everywhere: in the ocean, in the hills of wild artichokes and mustard, and in my relationship with Stuart, which was run through with a strange antagonism, almost from the start. I made the same mistake with him that I made with The Bald Man in Colorado. I thought older men would provide guidance and stability, but instead they tried to control me, to bend my spirit to their will. I was torn between being what they wanted me to be (adoring, pretty, subservient) and being who I wanted me to be (stoned, artistic, free).

Peters was glorious in his idiosyncrasies. He was overly dramatic and unapologetically gay and dipped in a sweet narcissism that fueled his prolific art. He spoke at length of how his young son had died of meningitis when he was only three, how that tragedy led him to acknowledge his sexuality and start writing verse. I got to thinking that writing could be a form of therapy for me, as well, that perhaps the defining moment of my life, my father's death, could be a catalyst for healing.

I didn't write about my father or my military childhood that summer; that would come later. My early poems from that summer were erotic fantasias that reflected my own push-pull dynamic with Stuart. "The Chinese Maid" is narrated by a man recalling his grandfather's beautiful Asian housekeeper who doubled as his drug dealer: "the finest opium she brought to him/and left to him/his sticky black and/sustaining dreams..." She is both servant and master, feeding his desire while keeping her distance: "She'd peel outsides/off jordan almonds, feed him/the meats, sugar gone/and gumming his prize/he'd ask me, boy when you grow up/wouldn't you love/a chinese maid/to peel your needs, an/unstrung pearl/hard to look at/hard not to look at...."

I got an A in the class, and Peters became one of my biggest advocates. It so happened the UC Irvine's creative writing program was one of the best in the nation, and I'd stumbled onto it by accident. The poetry muse held my hand and fed me poems and served me drinks until finally she grew bored of my self-absorption. But that took two years. And in that time, my life was transformed. In that time, I tried my best to drive a stake through the heart of my military past. I scrawled outside the lines. I used men and was used in return. I was intoxicated by themes of life and death and sex, convinced that drugs and alcohol were the indispensable gatekeepers to my creativity.

That was my mistake, one of so, so many.

The Time Machine

2009-06-15T12:36:00.000-07:00

I got home to New York on Saturday night. Dave met me at JFK airport and we hugged and kissed with great enthusiasm. Then we waited for my bags for almost 90 minutes. The conveyor belt broke down, and after about half an hour someone figured out that the emergency "off" button had been pushed. It took another 20 minutes for someone to push the emergency "on" button. The bags appeared in fits and starts, and there was a 10-minute lull in which the conveyor belt conveyed nothing but emptiness. I began to get nervous--one of my suitcases contained irreplaceable photographs discovered in Sarah's garage. "Don't worry, it will show up," Dave said confidently.

Finally, my new brown luggage began to descend from the baggage chute. Despite Kevin's attempts to fix the zippers on my old suitcase using paper clips, on Thursday I went to the fabulous 1940s-era Sears in Santa Monica and bought my first-ever set of matching luggage, four pieces for $70. Which struck me as a good deal, even if the fourth "piece" was a chintzy little makeup pouch.

I also needed new luggage because Sarah's garage had yielded a wealth of new material for my growing archives, and I figured it was cheaper to buy more suitcases and bring it home with me than to ship it via UPS. Yet what had begun as a simple search for some photographs of our father as a young man turned into an emotional journey through old images we had never seen before, hidden for decades, first in mom's home, then in Sarah's garage, waiting for this moment in time to reveal themselves.

Sarah told me where to look: in the last storage cupboards on the right, in front of the Austin Healey. I recognized two metal file boxes from mom's house and brought those inside, along with long, narrow metal boxes used to store files. I opened them up and realized they were slides my father, an avid photographer, had taken when he was studying the natural sciences. They were his first passion, before flying turned his head. He had painstakingly identified the slides on a numbered sheet of heavy paper that corresponded to the slides in the box, but I didn't go through them because they were images of wildflowers, desert plants and and various mammals, and I was on the hunt for humans.

Inside the file boxes I found the vintage family photos I described in my previous post. I knew about them, having seen them a few times over the years. But as I dug through plastic storage bins in the garage, surprises began to surface. A program from the Grand Nuit du Cercle Militaire, the big military ball my parents attended in 1965. Oh look, General Charles de Gaulle was the host, which means that story about my mother sliding down the bannister drunk and landing at his feet could well be true. A trove of memorabilia from the SS United States, including menus, passenger lists, and a deck plan, all pilfered during our 1966 voyage across the Atlantic. I never realized that we sailed to our doom in first-class. But there are our names, all four of us. The birth announcement, printed on pink paper, that mom sent out on the occasion of Sarah's birth on September 18, 1969, as well as a cache of cards and letters she received in return from friends and well-wishers. Their hospital bands. Sarah's isolette card, filled out before she had a name. Sarah's original birth certificate. A photo I haven't seen in years, of mom holding the newborn Sarah, gazing at her lovingly. Mom looks very pretty, with her short dark hair, pin-curled by the ears, pearl earrings, and a sheer-sleeved peignoir. A receipt for the total bill upon their discharge a week later: $14, paid by Martha.

I read the cards and letters. An old family friend named Blanche wrote, “Do you know, I can hardly believe after all these years you came up with a Baby, all your own!" (Blanche, she didn't do it "on her own"; there was a husband involved. Oh, and you're an insensitive twerp, whoever you are. Or were.) The more I read, the more I realize that many friends and even a few relatives never knew about Lisa. In my mind, this only deepens the mystery of her birth.

I find dozens of photographs from the 1970s, of relatives with baby Sarah, with Arnie and the boys, of me and all my lousy haircuts. And finally, the old photographs of dad I'd been looking for. My plan was to get them copied while I was out there, so I could add them to an album I'm putting together, but I didn't have time. On Friday afternoon, I ask Sarah if I can take them with me, have them copied in New York, and then bring them back on my next trip to California, which will be in September, for her 40th birthday party. She knows that I'm writing this family history for all of us, so says I can take them. I can take everything. I gladly accept her offer. "You'll know where to find it when you want it," I tell her. And then I head out to buy new luggage.

When I get back, I organize the photos and papers into piles and put them in Zip-Loc bags. I think I've got everything I want from the metal file boxes, but I take one last look. I find some old slides I hadn't noticed. I pull one of the slides out of its box, hold it up to the sunlight, and seconds later I'm rushing into Sarah's bedroom, asking, breathlessly, "Do you have a slide projector?"

She does indeed, and it's a wonderful 1950s model that belonged to our parents. And it still works, underscoring the quality of mid-century American workmanship. Sarah pulls herself from her sickbed and I find her and Rosa, her housekeeper, pushing up the murphy bed in the guest room and trying, unsuccessfully, to secure a sheet at the corners. I ask for blue painter's tape, and soon we've taped up our makeshift screen. Sarah sets the machine on a bureau. We can't figure out how to load a carrousel, so Sarah inserts each slide individually, and we proceed, over the next two hours, to travel back and forth through time, one slide at a time.

Click. The first one is the slide that prompted my request for a viewing party. It shows our father on Christmas day in France, helping Kevin and me open presents. A cigarette dangles from his mouth, as always. We're in the living room of the villa. Kevin and I wear gold paper crowns, probably from the Galette des Rois we'd eaten at school. Mom is the photographer, which explains the poor exposures. With its tall fireplace and dark woodwork, the room has a gloomy, medieval air; the built-in shelves are laden with platters and the dining room table and chairs look like cast-offs from Charlemagne's estate sale. It's all rented, except for the turquoise vinyl sofa and armchairs with the mod Jetsons lines, brought over from San Diego. They stand out like clowns at a priest convention.

Click. That's Kevin, age seven I'd guess, pushing a red wheelbarrow in the backyard. The blossoming fruit tree and red tulips tell us it's spring. I feel a twinge in my heart, a minor breakage.

Click, click, click. More photos from Christmas Day. Our presents are American, probably purchased at the PX at Camp des Loges.

Click. A yellow poppy against a blue sky. Dad probably took this in California during one of his flower-hunting expeditions.

Click. The A-Bomb dome at the Hiroshima Peace Park. It's a stunning photo, taken from across the Motoyasu River, all muted grays and browns, suiting the subject matter. Our parents must have traveled to Hiroshima while living in Japan in 1959. I feel a sudden kinship with them, having traveled there myself, in 1985, during my own stint as a gaijin in the country.

Click. Our stone wishing well in France, when my wishes still had currency. Its conical shingled roof resembles a Japanese peasant hat.

Click. Kevin and I in the backyard with two little French girls, probably neighbors who I don't remember. I'm wearing a red swimsuit and have short hair, indicating this was taken early on in our stay. There are several variations on this scene, including one of my parents at an al fresco lunch with three people I don't recognize. I am sitting on my mother's lap in the red swimsuit.

Click. A fresco in Italy of what looks like the Last Supper. Unrestored yet ethereal nonetheless, taken, I assume, during one of our road trips through Europe in the 1960s.

Click. The marvelous Duomo in Florence, with its white, green, and red marble exterior. I've seen that first-hand, too.

Click. A squadron of airplanes, probably F4-D Skyrays, taken from what looks like the cockpit of another plane, the one my father is flying. Mom said he used to fly with his camera, and here's the proof.

Click. A battleship at sea, taken, I assume, from the aircraft carrier on which he is standing.

Click. Vintage Venice: a bridge over a canal, pink-striped mooring poles. And there, in the right-hand corner, looking impossibly cute: It's Kevin and me! In Venice! Standing by a canal! "How is it I've never seen these before?" I exclaim.

Click. Kevin and I stand next to an ornate wagon, some type of European calliope, in a country I can't quite place. He's wearing a mod checked jacket and black pants, I'm in a pink dress and the gray wool cape from Germany, the one currently hanging in Sarah's front closet. There are so many photos of Kevin and me, as if we were inseparable, and in almost all of them we are smiling, laughing, thrilled with the life we've found ourselves in.

"Where did those happy children go? What changed them?" I whisper, knowing the answer but wanting to hear myself say it out loud anyway. I'd cry for those lost children if I weren't so doped up on anti-depressants.

By this time Anjelica and Anthony are on the floor watching the slide show and making shadow animals with their fingers. James joins us, and then Shania, a good friend of Sarah's who's stopped by to see how she's doing. We finish one box and start another, then another. Each new slide is a sort of surprise party, a message from a distant place and time. We are time traveling through our parents' past, all of it pre-Sarah, much of it pre-me.

Click. Oh my god, it's Kevin, standing on the rocky shore of a river in what is clearly Japan. There's a woman beating clothes in the water behind him, and he's crying. He's cold and he wants to be held. He is less than two years old. I haven't been born yet, to the unwed Marine private in San Diego.

Click. Oh my god, it's me, sitting on the back of Kevin's blue bike while he pedals madly down a bumpy village lane in France. The weather must be chilly because our cheeks are rosy and he's wearing a jacket.Kevin and the scene around him are blurry, but my father's strobe flash has frozen me in complete focus. I'm wearing a black sweater and pants, red turtleneck, pink shoes. My blonde bob is side-parted and clasped with a barrette. I look like I'm sitting on the back tire but there must be a rack, and I'm holding lightly onto the seat, as casually as a kid on a swing, unafraid of falling even though Kevin is pedaling as fast as he can. My mind flashes forward, to all the risks I've taken, all the times I've fallen. This time, I'm looking straight at my father with an expression that's overly grave for a child of five. Those eyes know more than they should. Those eyes, I'm willing to bet, have seen the rabbit, disemboweled in the sink. Those eyes grew old in an instant. This is the bike that I was forced to ride in Albany, on the day my father left for the second and last time, the day mom decided that a hairbrush would make a handy learning tool.

Click. The Grand Canyon. Been there too. Did not enjoy it.

Click. Holy cow, it's mom in the window of our French villa, holding a baguette and smiling that smile she used to call "wicked." She looks lovely and happy--is this the same woman who killed the family pet and served it to us for dinner? The same woman I feared for the rest of my life, until the last few years, when we called a truce? No, it's simply a happy American housewife holding a loaf of French bread and laughing for her handsome husband's camera. The photograph brings their marriage into focus for me. We were happy once, all of us. Look closely. This is what war and fury take away.

Click. I'm four or five and being led by the hand by a lovely young mademoiselle. The red Austin Morris sits in the driveway behind us. I'm wearing an over-large khaki raincoat and my right arm is in a sling. I don't remember hurting my arm. Come to think of it, I do have a vague memory of the injury, but I can't recall the why or the when. Maybe I fell off the bike.

Click. Wow, it's Dad, in a blue sweater, rolled up jeans and worn leather boots, his hair slicked back, looking like an extra from The Wild Ones. He's standing in a patch of old snow in the mountains, and flashing his signature grin. He looks so young, a teenager. "Those are probably the San Gabriels," James says. "He looks like he's in high school," I say. "He's so skinny!" Sarah says.

Click. A couple of what must be Dad's old friends from his college days. They're sitting on a couch, a homely man with caterpillar eyebrows and a lovely, slender young woman. She has Joan Russell hair and bright, laughing eyes; fuschia lipstick limns her flawless smile. "Can I see that?" Sarah removes it from the projector. In Dad's handwriting, which I've come to know all too well, it reads, "My honey in the arms of another." Could this be the mysterious fiancee that mom used to refer to, the daughter of a wealthy family to whom he was engaged when he and mom met? She used to complain about that fact, forgetting that she herself was married. Later I come across a slide of a painting on which he'd written, "Joyce's portrait." The Joyce in the painting looks an awful lot like the honey in the first slide. I wonder what came between them.

Click. Kevin as a baby, sitting on grass and clutching a wooden mallet. He wears only a diaper, and next to him sits one of those old Fischer Price toys, where you hammer the colored pegs. He's crying hardily, which indicates he might have hammered his thumb instead. There are many slides of this scene, and in each one, he wears a silky blonde sausage curl, his skin white and smooth as milk. This was taken when they lived in the Bay Area, before Dad was sent to Japan and Mom, refusing to be left behind again, took Kevin and followed him over there.

Click. More Hawaii pictures. A pig roast. A guy scaling a palm tree. Lots of pictures of pretty hula dancers. My hunch that these were taken during their last weeks together on Oahu is confirmed when I see aerial photos of the beach in Makaha where they lived. I'm proud that I can make such educated guesses. That's what 11 years of research will do for you, if nothing else. And the find is exhilarating. All these fresh images I've never seen make me feel as if I've uncovered a fresh vein of gold in a mine I thought I'd exhausted.

My mind is reeling. I need to push my brain's emergency stop button, so I excuse myself to go to the bathroom. When I return a few minutes later, the mood in the room has turned sober. Every time an image of our father appeared, Sarah's eyes would well up and her lips would quiver, but now she's all-out bawling. When I look at the sheet, I can see why. Of all the hours our father logged in various jet aircraft, there was never a decent portrait of him sitting on the tarmac, smiling from a cockpit. But here it is, and it is a sight to behold. Our dashing father is seated in the cockpit of an F4-D Skyray, bonnet up, wearing an orange suit and holding a helmet. All we can see of the plane is the cockpit, part of a star and above it the word RESCUE painted in an arrow that points toward the ejector seat. The date is January 1959, which means these were taken in Moffett or Japan. I need to check his records. His orange flight suit looks alike like the one I wore to the Springsteen concert, where I was arrested for smoking pot.

"I see Anthony in his face!" cries Shania. "Look at the jaw!"

"Yeah, I think Anthony may have inherited that chin," I add. "I was looking at him on the ferris wheel yesterday, and I think I saw it."

Sarah is still crying. "Why didn't they listen to that word?" she wails, pointing toward the makeshift screen.

"What word?"

"Rescue! Why didn't they rescue him?" I realize her mind has jumped ahead 10 years, to March 21, 1969. The day he and our happiness died.

"They tried, sweetie, but there was nothing left to rescue," I say softly, putting my hand on her shoulder. "The plane exploded. He was probably dead before he hit the ground." I sigh deeply and let the wall hold me up. "Boy, do I need a drink."

"Tea," Sarah says empathetically through her sniffles. "I'll make us herbal tea." And because it's an evening where the past has found full voice, she serves it to me in one of mom's rose-patterned tea cups, maybe even one I gave her. Later we finish the slides, but they're mostly sightseeing shots and nature close-ups. I do not sleep well.

The next morning, as I'm packing the photos and other memorabilia into one of my new suitcases, I ponder what to do with the metal slide boxes. I'm not even sure whether to bring them or not, so I begin to look through the transparencies, to see what I'd be leaving behind. And then I'm racing to my sister's bedroom and saying, "Um, Sarah, there's more."

Click. It's Kevin, in his earliest days. The slides are dated 11/24/57. He is three days old, which means these are the first photos taken of him, after they brought him home. There are two dozen slides. He lies on a blanket, naked and wrinkly. He sucks his thumb in his bassinet, hungrily. He is being held by Aunt Ruth and great grandmother Lawson. In one beautiful, delicate scene, a watery light enters a multi-paned picture window and spills over an empty chair and Kevin's bassinette, though you can't see him in it--it could be empty, too. Furniture waiting for a young woman and the newly adopted baby boy who has finally made her a mother.

Later, when I remark on how poignant the window photo is, Sarah says from her bed, "It reminds me of how Kevin's birth mother would drive by the window, trying to get a look of him."

"She did?"

"Yeah, mom used to tell that story all the time."

"What else are you hiding from me?"

"Oh right, like I'm hiding things from you," she retorts so crossly that I feel obliged to say teasingly, "Just kidding."

And when I call Kevin to say good-bye and tell him of what we found, he says, "Oh yeah, I've seen those. Not in a long time though." His voice sounds strong.

"You've seen them? Was anyone going to tell me about them? They've been sitting in Sarah's garage for nine years! Have you seen the ones of you as a newborn? I found them in one of Dad's slide boxes, among the pictures of muskrats and prickly pears."

I can hear him pause on the other end of the line. "Really? No, I haven't."

I promise to scan and email the best ones to him, and then I say good-bye, and I'll call him later. Then James drives me and new suitcases to the airport. All the way across the country, the poignancy and irony of these slides' appearance, on the last day of my visit, as Kevin fights for his life an hour south of here, stays with me, through beverage service, through turbulence so severe I clutch the arms of my seat and gasp. I can't help but wonder what he did, what we did, to deserve this, any of this crap that fate has served up. It reminds me of one of my favorite songs from The Sound of Music. It came out in 1965, and my family saw it at Camp de Loges, which screened the latest American films, including, a year earlier, Mary Poppins. After they fall in love, Julie Andrews (as Maria, the nanny) and Christopher Plummer (as Von Trapp, the retired naval officer) ponder their karmic luck, crooning, "Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good."

So did the three of us do something bad, somewhere along the line, in a previous life, perhaps, since it all started in our youth and childhood? That's what Sarah wondered aloud the other day, during the slide show, and it's what I've been wondering for 18 months now, ever since Kevin's diagnosis. In antiquing circles, the light, spidery cracks that cover old pieces of pottery are called "crazing." They indicate age and wear. That is how I'd describe my heart tonight, as I finish this: not broken, merely crazed.

Rai of Light

2009-06-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

Last week, I spent hours sifting through old photos of adoptive relatives dead and gone. The four clans--Hollenbeck, Ellithorpe, Lawson, Webb--are all represented. Some I recognized, many I didn't, simply because our lives never overlapped. Charles Hollenbeck, the family patriarch, looked proper and buttoned-up in tintypes from the late 1800s; he and his wife Nettie, produced five children, including my grandfather Arlie and his brother, Kenny. On the Ellithorpe side, I find old photographs of Eleanor, who adopted my father, who adopted Kevin and me. And Martha, his birth mother, who later resurfaced in his life, and who we came to call Grandma. On the Lawson side, there are many photos of Aunt Ruth, from South Alma Street. In early photos she is tall and slim and lovely, here in a flapper dress and cloche hat, there in a wet swimsuit that clings to her curves. It becomes obvious the appeal she held for her second husband, whom she met on a factory swing shift during World War II while still married to her first. In some images, her mother Rose, whom I knew only as a spectral old woman, stands next to Ruth, dark-haired and robust and every inch the Lawson matriarch.

There are a few photos of my mother's mother, Mary, looking as high-spirited as her letter from jail suggests. And here is a surprise: the baby book she kept for her first child, born when she was only 16. There is the first photo ever taken of my mother, as a newborn. The crumbing diary, with its childish entries, is heartbreaking because Rose will be dead in four years, her two daughters, half sisters, handed over to relatives. And the father, Arlie, will remarry, to the battle axe from Kansas. Here is Beulah's baby picture; she was homely then, too. And here's their wedding picture, where she towers over her new husband. I see that his brother Kenny traveled to Kansas to serve as the best man. Of the two men, Kenny was my favorite, he of the old Indian motorcycle, the childless gentleman farmer--unless you count the scary stepson-- whose laid back demeanor concealed the fact that he was wealthier than all of us put together. When he died in 1980, the fragmented survivors descended like crows, including Mom and me. I'd just arrived in California, seeking my first start. Mom's half-sister Myra Jean and three of her surviving children--Tommy, released from death row, had just died of a heart attack--attended the wake afterward at Kenny's house. Sitting in the dining room over coffee and cake, one of Jean's sons kept giving me the eye, even though we were cousins. Maybe he was thinking what I was thinking: There is no blood between us. No true relation.

When I look at these pictures, I see merely characters from a collective past to whom, today, I feel no particular affection or attachment, god rest their souls. Except for Martha, who I wish had lived longer. She was such a beautiful little girl, and if my memories and her letters to my mother are any indication, she was down to earth and very normal. To know your son only nine years before losing him, and then to live for another 15 years knowing what you'd lost, not once, but twice, must have hollowed her out.

I'd found the photos in Sarah's garage. She'd told me where to look. I moved American Girl boxes and old Halloween costumes and an unused bike rack to get to the cabinets when they were stored. Over an afternoon I unearthed hundreds of them, and soon Sarah and James' dining room table was covered with photographs representing all branches of a century-old family tree.

"Are you looking for something in particular?" James asked on Thursday evening. He was going to bed, I was not.

"No, just answers," I replied. "To questions I'm not even sure of."

The photos came from different sources: Mom; Martha's daughter-in-law, Elsie, who no one's seen in years; and Beulah, before she died. The images mix uneasily, like feuding friends forced to attend the same wedding or reunion. The Hollenbecks and Ellithorpes came west from New York State; the Lawsons and Webbs from the Midwest. All four ended up in California, where their respective bloodlines mingled and blended. Kevin and I were recruited from some undisclosed location, always the interlopers and outsiders to the others, no matter how much they pretended to accept us. This is the way extended families happen. This is why they come apart.

My people came from Greece and Sweden and Texas. My people rejected me. I'm left with these people who are no more no more than tintypes and old Kodak black and whites. As far as flesh and blood goes, I embrace the people in my life today. We're of family of the mind and the heart and the paradox of disparate DNA, where bloodlines are beside the point, yet the point entirely.

Take little Anthony, my five-year-old nephew. At six, he probably doesn't realize the position he's in, as the last surviving male of the Ellithorpe gene pool. This shouldn't make him any more important than his older sister Anjelica, but she clearly resembles the Hollenbeck side. In some early photos, she looks breathtakingly like her maternal grandmother, with her round face and wavy brown hair. The more I look at Anthony, the more I think I see him. I hope this resemblance, whether real or imagined, doesn't become a burden.

I had plenty of time to look at him on Friday. Sarah, while increasingly mobile, still needs her recuperative downtime. James had a gig playing on the score of an upcoming film starring singing hamsters, and Anjelica has two weeks of school left before summer vacation. Anthony was set free on Thursday, so Sarah suggested I take him to the Santa Monica pier, for some aunt/nephew bonding time. "He loves the pier," she said. I recalled a year ago, when Anjelica had put her hands on her hips and scolded me, saying, "Auntie Liz, you're not spending any time with us at all!" This was true. I was too busy being stoned and lying in the sun on the new deck. So I will take Anthony to the pier, and we will ride the rides, and he will get to know his New York aunt. I wonder if he senses a change in me, or if he's simply got a better idea of what I look like standing up.

Besides, I don't want him and his sister to be sitting around in 40 years, reminiscing about their old relatives when suddenly one of them says, "Hey, what was the name of mom's sister again? You know, the one with nine fingers. And what was the deal with that?"

The Santa Monica Pier is Amierca's last surviving example of the glittering pleasure piers that once dotted the California coast. Pieces of its historic past still exist, such as the hippodrome that houses a vintage carrousel, but the amusement park has been rebuilt. There is no rickety wooden coaster like Coney Island's terrifying Cyclone, which I've ridden several times, fearing for my life and screaming like a crazy person. The rides at Pacific Park are relatively tame and kid-friendly. I buy Anthony and myself unlimited ride bracelets and he's off, running from ride to ride, while I try to keep up. We do three fast rides in a row: the West Coaster, where Anthony sits in front and holds his arms up to prove his courage; the Sea Dragon, one of those pendulum rides that swing back and forth until you're nearly vertical and ready to puke; and Inkie's Scrambler, in which nine wildly spinning two-person cars that seem to barely miss each other. By the time the Scrambler winds down, I'm feeling a little green, though Anthony is raring to keep going. Thankfully, he is tall enough to do the Pacific Plunge, one of those free-fall rides, by himself. Then we take a break with a few arcade games, and thanks to my stellar coaching, Anthony gets four softballs in the wash tubs and wins his first arcade prize ever. I get us another stuffed animal at the Whack-A-Mole game. Ever since I got sober I've craved the feeling of true joy, not fake joy, not dope joy, and watching an adorable mop-topped six-year-old clutch a stuffed cow and crow, "We won! We won!" brings me pretty close.

He wants to ride the Sea Dragon again, and I agree only on the contingency that he ride the ferris wheel with me, which I love for its astounding view of the ocean and beach.

"But it's too slow!" he complains.

"Well the Sea Dragon is too nauseating!" I counter. We strike a deal. I ride the Sea Dragon, again. I find that it helps to scream at the very top of the highest swing, in that weightless moment when I feel like I'm going to fall out out of my seat, leaving my heart behind. While I'm screaming Anthony is laughing. Thank goodness he doesn't want to go on the ride that twirls and goes upside down.

I'm glad to disembark from the Sea Dragon. I buy us ice cream and we head for the Pacific Wheel. It has large covered cars, big enough for eight, so I won't get nervous when we stop, swinging, at the very top, the way I do on the Erector-Set ferris wheel at the local carnival that visits St. Ann's for five days every July. As the giant wheel goes round and round, I drink in the broad stretch of sea and the vignettes that play out on the beach far below. A man and his pregnant wife stand in knee-deep water, and he holds her from behind to keep her steady. A lifeguard swims strongly out to the lifeguard boat, hauls himself on board and pours a jug of fresh water over his head. An Indian woman enters the waves, her sari floating around her, and she is laughing.

On the blurred horizon, Catalina Island fades in and out like a recurring dream, and I remember my two days in Avalon with Kevin and Sarah. We realized it was the first time we'd traveled together without a wedding, a funeral or a motor home being involved. Kevin looked great then, slim, handsome, but quiet as always as he followed us from shop to shop, his hands stuffed in his coat pockets. Stoic as always, watching his sisters spend money. I watched he and Sarah walk ahead of me, talking, and I was glad they'd found their way back to each other after years of barely speaking.

And then I imagine I can see all the way to Orange County and to last Saturday evening, my final night with Kevin. He had wanted to have a beach picnic, so Scott and Louise and their friend Cameron drove south to Doheny State Beach at 10 a.m. to claim a fire pit. Coincidentally, Kevin's stepdaughter Rai, who lives outside Seattle, decided to visit at the same time I did. I hadn't seen Rai in at least ten years, since before Kevin and her mother split up. Like me, Kevin's ex-wife wasn't known for making brilliant choices, but their marriage did not survive her mistakes. Scott, Rai's half-brother, stayed in California with his father, and Rai went to Seattle with her mother, who remarried and went to work for a giant software company. Rai has no contact with her biological dad; she told me she stopped speaking to him after she discovered he'd been lying about their shared ethnicity, saying he was Native American when in fact he was Mexican. By that time Rai had realized that Kevin was the more reliable and stable of her two fathers, and he became her Dad. Kevin and Rai's mom divorced before he could formally adopt her, but the man and the girl informally adopted each other.

I remembered Rai as tall, outgoing and chipper little girl, and she's grown into a tall, outgoing, chipper young woman. At 24 she's already been married for four years and is trying to get pregnant. She is Kevin's Rai of light: talkative, outgoing, enthusiastic, and optimistic about everything, including Kevin's prognosis. "I know my dad is going to beat cancer!" she wrote on her blog last year, and as proof of his "toughness," she posted a photo of Kevin in the act of killing a snake. It was taken at night, and the camera's flash froze him in mid-lunge, holding a stick overhead like an axe ready to fall. "A pointy stick, people," Rai wrote. "This is some hard-core toughness."

Though she posted the photo more than a year ago, I saw it for the first time yesterday. I didn't now she had a blog, though now I read it daily. And to be honest, the post made me a little jealous. I realized that for years, their relationship has existed apart from his and mine, and after seeing them together for two days, I see that they share a rare closeness. He calls her simply "my daughter," and that she is, as completely and surely as Scott is his son. I hear about how he hired a stylist to help her shop for her prom dress; I see the photos on his mantle and his walls of them fishing and camping together. She is strong and solid, her spirit and energy a lighthouse on the rocky shore. I'm happy that Kevin has had a daughter all these years, and pleased that I got to know Rai better. And that she got to know me all over again, but as I am now--sober, calmer, softer.

Rai, Kevin and I drove down to the beach at around five, after stopping to pick up fried chicken, cole slaw and soda. We arrived to find the three kids had erected a light tent over a picnic table and a flimsy volleyball net. They have a special beach chair for Kevin, one that reclines like a Laz-E-Boy, and he kicks back for the duration, dressed against the chill in a light coat, safari hat, and sunglasses. He looks a little like Hunter S. Thompson. After a pathetic attempt at beach volleyball--I might as well be in Catholic school all over again--I take a walk up the beach. I see boys in a raucous game of wiffle ball and think how as a girl, I'd have been right in the middle of it. I see burled mounds of driftwood and kids holding Daliesque clumps of kelp at arm's length. I see that when the waves recede, they leave a foamy scalloped edge on the wet sand. I see people on a beach, side by side yet apart, disparate contributors to a calm, communal Saturday night in Southern California.

When I get back to our camp site, I sit next to Kevin and we look at the ocean, saying little. Sails fleck the surface of the water. The horizon is as sharp as a paper cut. Kevin, an experienced sailor, is getting a kick out of watching a sailboat struggle in the distance. The mainsail comes down, then the jib, then the boat is motoring toward shore.

"I would think that knowing how to sail is a prerequisite for taking a sailboat out for the day," I quip. Were Kevin well enough to sail, he'd show the guy how it's done. But today it is enough to rest and watch Rai and Scott and Louise and Cameron play something resembling beach volleyball. Rai has changed into a pair of Scott's shorts. We sit side by side, just as we used to in the hard back seats of the Austin Healey, which is parked in Sarah's garage. Later, as we're eating at the picnic table, I mention that it's nice the kids didn't bring any alcohol. "We're not old enough to buy it," Scott reminded me. "Still, it's nice," I said. "I hate it when I feel like a buzz kill because I can't drink."

In fact, the entire scene is sober, mostly families and couples on double dates. I see wine and beer being enjoyed, but no one is shouting or fighting or throwing up. At one point, detecting the strong aroma of pot, we suss out two young guys sharing a joint about 25 yards away. That would have been me not too long ago. Not too long ago I'd be wasted by now and snoring loudly on a beach towel. I like having fun sober. I like knowing its possible, even preferable.

After dinner Rai starts making s'mores. She makes the graham cracker, marshmallow and chocolate sandwiches and folds them in aluminum foil until she's created a stack of small shining gifts. The sun sets and the moon appears, one night away from fullness. It rises over a palm tree, and bonfires begin to glow up and down the beach, the signal fires of human coexistence. This is the family we've made, brought together through biology, marriage and chance. On a night populated by lives that have barely missed each other, ours are the lives that collided.

The Slip

2009-06-09T11:38:00.000-07:00

Sunday night I relapsed, in a manner of speaking. It had nothing to do with the difficulty of saying good-bye to Kevin, not knowing when I'd see him next. It had nothing to do with the cocaine cravings I'd been experiencing, or the fact that in California, they sell hard liquor at CVS. The other day I went in to buy Tylenol PM only to run into my old friends Jagermeister and Jack Daniels and Southern Comfort on the other side of the aisle.

No, my slip was perfectly innocent. Perfectly unexpected.

Sarah lives in a beautiful area of Los Angeles County with her husband James and their two kids, Angelica, 9, and Anthony, 6. Staying at their house is a little like going to the Four Seasons. She's added a small deck on one corner of their small lot, with a Jacuzzi on one side and drop-dead views of L.A. on the other. I used to lay on the outdoor sofa after three Coronas and a few puffs off a pipe, my face turned to the sun, lost in my buzz. These days I lay there sober, and the sun feels just as warm, just as therapeutic.

When I got there on Sunday afternoon, Angelica and Anthony were in the living room, watching their huge flat-screen TV, which is mounted on the wall next to their baby grand piano. "Auntie Liz!" Angie cried. I gave her a hug and ran my fingers through Anthony's curls, looking, as I always do, for any resemblance to his late grandfather, dead now almost 40 years. But if he looks like anyone, it's his dad, James. Then I went to Sarah's bedroom. I found her awake in bed, surrounded by pillows and amber pill bottles, recuperating from her tummy-tuck surgery. After giving her a gingerly hug, I sat next to her on the bed. She eyed me through her pain-pill haze and said, "You look more like you."

"Really? What did I look like before?"

"I dunno," she said tiredly. "But when people use, they start to look.... different. Like someone else."

She pulled down the sheet to show me her gruesome incision. It extended from one hip bone to the other, a straight line that curved up slightly at each end, like a shark's smile. I cringed. "The Vigilante's completely gone," she said, referring to the tattoo she got in the mid 90s. At the time, she was leading an orchestra that toured Taiwan every year playing theme songs from Hollywood films. Apparently the Taiwanese were rabid for this stuff. She went over there five times, and on the fourth, she and a cellist decided to get tattoos. Sarah was always looking for ways to honor the father she never knew, so she called James and asked him to fax a line drawing of his plane, the RA-5C Vigilante, to her hotel room. Using that, a one-armed tattoo artist inked the jet just under her bikini line, where only she and James could see it.

"Why there?" I asked her on Sunday, even though I sort of knew the answer, having asked this question, incredulous, when she'd first gotten it.

"To get it on my ass would have been disrespectful," she said, taking a sip of water. "I did it at a time in my life when I needed to strengthen the connection with Dad. I didn't see it as the plane he died in, but the plane he loved to fly. I believe that everyone should spend their life doing what they love."

"No matter the cost?"

"Yes. Sometimes."

"Well I'm glad it's gone," I said bluntly. "It's a symbol that we're moving on." Some of us faster than others.

I went to the store to stock up on Red Bulls and get a smoothie for Sarah, and when I came back, James was home from working a Sunday gig. He is one of the world's foremost performers on a particular brass instrument, a longtime member of a well-known orchestra in Los Angeles, and a busy studio musician. He has played on the soundtracks for half the blockbusters in Hollywood--in fact, you've probably heard him play without even knowing it. He asked me if I'd accompany him that evening to a benefit concert at UCLA in which he had a starring role. Grabbing any excuse to wear something other than sweat pants and flip-flops, I readily agreed. Fortunately I'd brought a drapey tunic that was suitably dressy. I styled my hair with Sarah's curling iron and, needing some bling, sifted through her jewelry, settling on a long chain with a large peace sign in a hammered gold finish.

The benefit was a showing of a restored version of Charlie Chaplin's classic 1925 silent film, The Gold Rush, with the score performed live by a noted chamber orchestra. I'd never seen the entire film, though I was familiar with Chaplin's earlier work, including The Cure, where he played a drunk hoping to dry out a sanitarium. While Chaplin played a convincing lush, he was not a big drinker, having witnessed his derelict father die of alcoholism. (Chaplin's weakness was young women.) I can't remember how many films and concerts I've slept through, and it was a joy to watch The Gold Rush with my faculties intact, marveling at Chaplin's physical slapstick, still funny enough after all these decades to make a modern 12-year-old seated in front of me laugh uproariously.

After the film, there was a buffet dinner. It was a beautiful mild evening, clear and cloudless with a round moon glowing at full wattage. James and Sarah have been together for 20 years, so he is quite familiar with our family history, including my battle with addiction and its concomitant traumas. Most everyone else was holding glasses of wine or champagne, but I stuck to ice water and so did James, both as a show of support and because, as he told me, "the wine at these events is crap." As we ate we chatted. I told James how much I'd enjoyed the meeting at Warren's church, and I described how one woman had confessed to drinking alcohol "by accident." She'd taken a sip of what she thought was guava juice, from a can her boyfriend had brought home, but it turned out to be one of those newfangled booze/juice beverages. Her inadvertent slip-up upset her greatly, and she asked the group, "Does this count as a relapse? Do I have to start counting days all over again?" We debated the issue for a few minutes, eventually deciding that since the consumption was accidental, and since it didn't trigger her to drink more alcohol on purpose, that she could be forgiven. I also told James that I'd accept a six-month chip two weeks prematurely but was confident I'd make it. "Today is day 167," I said. "I'm 13 days away."

After eating we mingled. James introduced me to his illustrious musical friends, and I have to say, it was nice knowing I wasn't going to embarrass my brother-in-law by drinking four glasses of wine and making remarks that I considered witty and smart but which were in fact inappropriate, if not vaguely insulting. I shake hands and smile and murmur niceties and people-watch while James talks shop. Wine may be a social lubricant for most people, but for me, inebriation, even a mild case, imbued in me a certain self-aggrandizement, a need to be the cleverest woman in the room. As a sober person, I can simply be myself. And I think I'm getting closer to figuring out who she is. Who I am. While I'll never be confused with Mother Teresa, I do find I've become softer, kinder, more approachable. I'd drink and use drugs out of insecurity, desperate to become more likable, more lovable, when in fact I was merely masking my authentic self. I'm getting closer to my pre-adoption core. To who that child born almost half a century ago in San Diego was supposed to become.

Eventually James and I saw people walking around with plates of strawberries and whipped cream. Dessert was being served, and we wanted some. There are few things in this world I enjoy more than strawberries with freshly whipped cream. Ethan feels the same. Recently, at a dinner with old friends, we ordered strawberry shortcake, which arrived sporting a squat tower of berries and cream. We polished it off in about five minutes flat. I enjoyed, not just the dessert, but the fact that Ethan and I were happily sharing it.

So I piled my little plastic plate with strawberries and spooned on gobbets of whipped cream from a tall bowl shaped like a giant champagne glass. As I usually do, I swept an index finger through the cream, stuck the finger in my mouth--and froze.

"Oh my god James," I whimpered. "There's booze in the whipped cream."

"Are you sure?" He sampled it as well. "You're right. Cognac, I think."

It was my first taste of alcohol in almost six months, and my senses absorbed it like a deprived sponge. It was absolutely delicious. "Brandy, maybe. Amaretto." I turned to him. "Does this count as a slip? Did I just relapse? Do I have to start counting days all over again?"

I was surprised when he replied, "Yes."

"Really? You think so? I mean, it was inadvertent. I didn't know the whipped cream was spiked!" I thought for a moment. It had tasted divine.

"Nah. Doesn't count." Standing in the middle of the room, I took my spoon and slurped down the rest. When it was gone I fought the impulse to create my own Chaplinesque slapstick by sticking my face into the plate and rubbing it around in the aromatic cream. Instead, I went back for seconds.