Conundrum (11 page)

The swinging sixties swept into Marin
,
and f
rom time to time I’d
head to bed
after doing homework and hear noises coming from my mother’s room down the hall. More than once I heard giggles and whispering as I lay in bed at dawn
;
my mother
was
either naive
or unconcerned that
her clandestine affairs
got picked up on
our radar. My brothers and I never talked about it, but on occasion we’d make faces at each other across the dinner table, when our mother “hosted” a male friend. She never did remarry, but clearly blamed that all on me.

The only time I ever saw my mother cry was when I turned
fourteen
. She had been dating a man named Elliott Blass, someone she met at one of her parties. Elliott made a regular appearance in our home for a time, even took us out to play miniature golf and see movie
s
.
Of all the men she dated, Elliott was the only one who stuck it out long enough. They had even talked about marriage.

But
I made the mistake of walking into my mother’s room one morning—why, I don’t recall.
T
here was Elliott, standing naked next to the
window
, facing me in all his alarming nudity. I recall my mother turning over in bed and looking at me, her
eyes
widened in horror. I rushed out of the room without saying a word
,
and she never brought it up.

But sometime soon after, I found her sobbing in the small upstairs office in our house.
The sight shook me to my core. My mother was my rock and fortress. Strong, unwavering
—
nothing ruffled her.
Seeing her broken and in despair caused me great fear.
A
s
grown
up as I thought I was, I turned into a sniveling toddler at the sight.

Yet, my panic turned to horror when she dropped her hands from her face and
gave me a look that chilled my heart to ice.

“You have sabotaged every single relationship I’ve ever had. Every chance I had to remarry, you ruined it. You, with your big mouth and hyper personality. Drove every decent man away, as soon as they met you.” And on and on
her ranting
went.

I was struck
by
the truth of her words. I
had been
a difficult, demanding child. My brothers endured humiliation from my fierce competitiveness.
An aggressive
tomboy, I could bat a ball farther, climb a tree
higher
, beat them in a race any
day. I never once considered how it made them feel, and I was a sore loser. We used to go bowling every Saturday, but I was grounded for a whole year when I threw a temper tantrum at the bowling alley because I lost a game.
I went through my early childhood obnoxious and vocal. I spent most of kindergarten and first grade in the corner, for excessive talk
ing
. My nickname was “blabbermouth.”

By age twelve, I had mellowed considerably,
yet
had
lived with the label “hyperactive”
all my life.
How
my mother
lamented that she
hadn’t
put
me on drugs to control my behavior.
That no one ever told her about sugar and what it did to kids.
When I think of all the boxes of Chips Ahoy I ate, the cartons of ice cream we kids devour
ed
while watching TV, the bowls of cereal that began our day—sickeningly sweet Captain Crunch and Lucky Charms—it’s amazing all my teeth hadn’t rotted and fallen out of my mouth by age ten.

I never thought about
the shrapnel damage from my hyperactivity
until that moment when my mother blamed me for her ruined life. I
had
never associated what I considered was my
uncontrollable
medical condition with a blatant attempt at destroying every chance of happiness for my mother.
Seeing my mother cry due to my heartlessness struck a stake through my heart.

The resultant flood of guilt changed me that day, start
ed
me on the path as loyal and fawning daughter. I sought to expiate my guilt over the years, but knew, somehow de
e
p
inside, that I was
not
,
nor would ever be
,
forgiven.
That day stood out as some kind of red-letter day, changing the dynamics of ou
r
relationship.

That day, I had somehow lost my mother
. I
realized
while flying
thirty
-five thousand feet over the landscape of my life,
seeing out of hawk’s eyes the landmarks of my
childhood
,
that I had been trying for the last fifteen years to get her back.

As I stared out the airplane window at the flat patchwork farm landscape, it hit me that maybe the reason I had been so obnoxious was I craved attention from
a
mother
who
had
rarely
been
home. Up until I was
four
, my mother was my life. She was a homemaker, as most wives were back in the sixties before women’s liberation.
My father’s sudden death ripped her away from me. I was shuffled off to
day care
, left with maids who couldn’t speak English, and had to drop out of ballet and piano classes because we couldn’t afford
them
. No wonder I rallied all my energy to one end—to find ways of getting my mother’s attention, of getting her back.

Not long after my father’s death, I went on a stealing binge. I r
o
de my bicycle around the neighborhood and t
ook
recyclable bottles and cans from neighbors’ garages. I pilfered change out of friends
’
change jars and piggy banks, even pocketed Barbie clothing and Tonka trucks from
my playmates’
toy bins. I wandered behind houses, strolled through walkways between homes, looking for what I could take. My success at going undetected made me brazen, which led me to start stealing candy from the local liquor store at the bottom of Molino
Drive
.
Only when I was spotted by the pimply college student running the cash register
—which caused me to
r
u
n a mile uphill
, then
hid
e
for the better part of an hour
—
did I question my behavior
and stop stealing
.
Psychiatrists would probably
have said
my stealing was a cry for attention. I’m sure that was part of it.

Years l
ater, w
ith Raff away at college, my mother busy with her social calendar, and Neal playing baseball and other sports nearly every day after school, I was set adrift. Raff had been a gel that kept us together. His magnetism and authority wove a spell over Neal and me when he was around.
O
nce he left home
, my sense of family disintegra
ted, but
against
the backdrop of my mind Raff was larger than life
:
infallible, awe-inspiring.

Until the night he suddenly appeared at our house, a week before school let out for
summer
.

I had been given no notice. I don’t even recall how Raff had gotten home from the airport. Although I strained my memory, trying to fill in the missing details, I couldn’t place Raff anywhere other than on the edge of my mother’s bed, his face buried in his hands,
my mother’s hand resting on his shoulder as he cried in convulsing jags. I knew he had been driving home in his light
-
blue Datsun—all the way from Colorado, for summer vacation. So where was his car?

Then it struck me. He had told me on the phone before finals were over that he was bringing his best friend with him. That Steve had never seen the ocean, imagine that? They would take a road trip, visit the Grand Canyon, check out Death Valley, then weave up through Yosemite and arrive home by the end of the month. It was only mid-June.
Where was Steve? Had Raff’s plans changed?

My mother had noticed me standing in the doorway of her bedroom
late that night
, speechlessly watching this disturbing display of anguish.
I couldn’t help myself—seeing Raff losing it had the same effect as seeing my mother cry only months earlier. Tears flooded down my face and I started to speak, but my mother held up her hand and stopped me.

“Raff was in an accident. But it wasn’t his fault.”

She turned to Raff and hardened her voice. “You have to tell yourself this, Raff. Because it’s true. It wasn’t your fault.
Whatever you say on the phone, don’t let those words out. I know you feel
you’re
to blame. But if you tell them it was your fault, they will sue me for every penny I’ve got. Tell them how sorry you are, but make sure you say it was an accident. You did nothing wrong.”

My mind frantically chased after my mother’s words. What accident? What happened? I didn’t dare utter a sound as my mother handed Raff the phone receiver.

I could still see that scene so clearly in my mind. The old black dial-up phone sitting on my mother’s lap.
The rumpled bedcovers, Raff’s argyle socks—tan and navy—on his feet,
resting on the pale gold long
-
shag wall-to-wall carpeting.
Passing car lights spattering through the blinds.
I
had
watched in horror as my brother cleared his throat and wiped his eyes, listening to my mother dialing a number
she read off a piece of scrap paper,
and waiting for a voice on the other end.

From where I stood I could only hear Raff’s choppy sentences, phrased between sobs
. My mother kept one hand on Raff’s shoulder to steady him, but even as Raff broke the news to Steve’s parents and recited the words as instructed, I saw little compassion in her eyes. Her intense focus was on the content of Raff’s speech, and after he hung up, she nodded and told him he did well, as if he had just pulled off a stunning performance on stage.
Raff hardly heard anything she said
;
he was drowning in his guilt.

I only learned what happened the next
morning
, as my mother rushed to g
et ready for
a day’s
work
at the office
and Raff hid in his bedroom.
I don’t remember where Neal was.

Raff and Steve had just switched driving. They were traveling through New Mexico when it started to rain. The road, oily and dry, became slick as the
first spatterings of water
wet down the asphalt. Steve was asleep in the backseat and Raff took a curve a little too fast. The car spun out, hitched as a tire caught when Raff tried to correct the skid, and the car tumbled and flipped twice before landing upside down. Steve was somehow thrown out of the car and onto the highway. Three of the four roof supports were crushed. The windshield was smashed, the glass shattered. But Raff, strapped into his seat, his section of the roof still
intact
,
came through the tumble
unscathed. Apart from the bump on his head from smacking the windshield, he didn’t have a cut or bruise.

By the time he
unbuckled
and worked his way out through the broken windshield, the rain
pelleted
steadily. He looked inside the car and
found Steve gone. Moments later he found his friend unconscious
a few yards behind the car. Steve died in his arms.

The officer who took Raff’s statement wrote
i
n the report
how
that particular stretch of highway was known for fatalities. That as soon as it started to rain, people often skidded out and crashed on the curves. He told Raff they needed more warning signs, and that maybe they’d put some up now.
I remember listening to my mother’s detached report of the accident. And her instructions to me to make Raff some breakfast.

After she left, silenced smothered the house. I stood in the kitchen, the smell of coffee and fried eggs
strangling
the air, wondering how my mother had found an appetite to eat breakfast.
Or to leave for work, abandoning Raff to his anguish. How could she have done that?
The
charred
bacon
smell nauseated me.

I kept picturing Raff holding his friend in his arms, crouched on the side of the road, in the dark, in the rain, in an unfamiliar place, alone and afraid. At some point someone drove along and stopped, went and got help, called the police, an ambulance. Who knew how long that took, but I was sure an eternity passed for Raff.
Surely
,
Raff felt Steve’s death was his fault. I pictured them talking excitedly in the car, Raff telling him how beautiful the ocean looked, how they would drive up the coast along the San Andreas Fault, stop in Bodega Bay for fish and chips. Then I pictured the vague face of a woman with her ear to the phone receiver late in the night, wondering who was sobbing on the line, trying to make out some young man’s words that made no sense, no sense at all.