Origins of the Universe and What It All Means (20 page)

“Here's the best part of the song,” my father shouted into the wind, and he turned up the volume on the radio. I don't remember if he sang the words aloud or not, but I do remember how the road ahead ribboned up and down like a roller coaster, and how I held my breath every few seconds so I could hold onto the falling feeling in my stomach with each decline.

“Faster,” I yelled.

 

Forty-Two

 

My father has been married six times (twice to my mother). I don't know much about his first wife other than that she was a student of his when he lived in San Francisco, the marriage ended quickly, and I believe there was some sort of trading-grades-for-inappropriate-relations scandal surrounding his termination from that academic post. From there he landed a tenure-track job at Cal Poly Pomona, in Southern California, where he met my mother during her freshman year. They were married from 1963 to 1973, until I was ten and David was three, but it wasn't a traditional setup. Besides my father's numerous living spaces, he often invited students to live with us. I vaguely remember one long-haired couple who kept mostly to themselves, occasionally shuffling glassy-eyed and giggly from behind the closed door of their love den to pour me a bowl of Trix cereal, pat me on the head, and gush at my cuteness—but often the boarders were unattached females my father was either sleeping with or wanted to sleep with.

I'm not sure why my mother went along with this. I attribute her tolerance partly to the 1960s free love culture, and partly to my mother's unusual frame of reference. She'd had a traumatic and unstable childhood. My grandmother committed suicide when my mother was a child. My grandfather, a raging alcoholic and career criminal (among his many schemes: running stolen car parts for the “fence”; moonshine distribution; an elaborate check-cashing fraud), abandoned all four kids in the Ozarks of Arkansas when my mother was ten years old, leaving her to look after her younger siblings, the family living on blocks of government cheese and buckets of water hauled up from the stream. It's nothing short of miraculous that my mother found her way to Cal Poly—a first-generation college student with more family complications than an academic application could possibly reflect. She married my father at eighteen, had me at nineteen. All this is to say: I have a hunch that my mother's unusual upbringing skewed her perception about what a marriage should or could look like.

Although my father was quite busy between his teaching, his secluded study time, and his comings and goings between two houses, he often responded if I asked for his attention outright. I recall one particular Sunday afternoon—I was in first or second grade at the time—when I wanted him to pick me up from home so I could spend the day with him at his Magnolia Street pad. It seemed like it had been quite a while since I'd seen him, several days or maybe weeks. When I complained to my mother that I missed Daddy, she said to call him on the phone and tell him so. I lifted the receiver from its cradle on the kitchen wall and dialed his number. I remember the brightly painted cabinets, yellow and green, and watching my mother wash dishes in the sink. “Busy signal,” I said to her. She shrugged. I redialed. Still busy. Again and again I dialed, maybe twenty times over the next three or four hours, and got nothing but a beep-beep-beep. The cuckoo clock above the pantry door had chirped several hourly melodies by the time I got through.

When we got to his pad, I told him about my frustrating day, about how many times I'd gotten a busy signal. “Who were you talking to for so long?” I asked.

“I wasn't talking on the phone. I took the phone off the hook,” he said. “Here, let me show you what I was doing.”

He went to the bookshelf there in the living room and reached for a large book with a white cover:
The Joy of Sex
. He sat down next to me, cross-legged on the shag carpet, opened the book, and pointed to several of the illustrations—drawings of couples in various lovemaking positions. “This is what grownups like to do,” he said, then proceeded to explain what was happening in those pictures and the mechanics of what went where.

When I recount this incident to people now, the story makes them uncomfortable, which in turn makes me uncomfortable. I don't know if that's because my vocalization shades the incident differently for me, like I'm hearing someone else's story, or if I'm reinterpreting my memory based on the facial expression of the person I'm talking to. But while the act of articulating this memory makes me uneasy now, I don't recall such feelings when I sat in my dad's living room that Sunday afternoon. I don't think he meant to be inappropriate with me—I'm not saying he got a charge out of the situation or anything like that—but rather, I believe he meant this as a teachable moment, a time when the topic of sexuality could naturally segue into a conversation with his daughter. An organic birds-and-bees moment.

Or do I protest too much?

Good father or bad?

We had a lot of those moments, times when the double yellow line faded nearly away, blurring the boundary between acceptable cultural norms and inappropriate parenting. The whole question, what's appropriate and what's not, wasn't in his universe.

Around that same time, when my father was staying at our Ninth Street house, I remember joining him in the shower. Some people might be horrified by a six- or seven-year-old girl showering with her father, but times were different then. Surely other people who grew up when I did tell stories about their laid-back hippie parents, about skinny-dipping in a neighbor's pool or growing marijuana plants in the backyard. Perhaps it's a generational thing. For a certain segment of society, the late sixties and early seventies culture was considerably lax and earthy and everybody-runs-around-naked compared to now—at least that's how it was in my family, or else, how I now choose to contextualize the situation.

As I stepped over the side of the tub and behind the plastic shower curtain, my father handed me the bar of soap he'd just lathered up. I held the bar to my nose and inhaled the minty scent of lavender and hot steam. “Wash everything,” my father said as he rinsed his hair. He gave me an impromptu lesson on hygiene, telling me how important it was for me to get all the nooks and crannies of my female anatomy. He wasn't overly explicit, but I do remember clearly his exact words: “It's important for me that a woman is clean. I like my women clean, very clean.” I lathered, rinsed, shampooed, rinsed. End of shower, like any other day.

I don't recall feeling uncomfortable that day. But the funny thing is how vivid the memory is. Like the
Joy of Sex
memory. Not bad memories, or good memories, but in high-definition clarity: the silver-framed mirror above the bathroom sink, patterned with droplets of steam; a bar of soap, foamy with the smell of purple flowers; the living room carpet in my dad's Magnolia Street pad, with its brown specked pattern in floppy strands of shag. Isolated chunks of tiny details loom disproportionately large in the landscape of my mind, like pieces of desert gravel the size of mountains.

Images of certain objects from that time in my life—the mirror, the carpet strands, the peace-sign necklace hidden in my father's desk drawer (
Fondly, P.
), the grooves in a Jimi Hendrix album, or isolated appendages of objects, if not necessarily the articles in whole, like the fuzzy arm of a sweater wrapped around my fore-head—these objects hold so much space in the archive portion of my brain that they push against, almost crowd out my recall of the events themselves. And these objects, none of which I physically possess today, I nonetheless hold dear, keep them clutched in my collection of memories. These objects of my affection are inanimate, objective by their very nature, and they possess no moral ambiguity. A sweater is just a sweater, nothing more. We use it—wear it, wrap it, wash it, toss it. The sweater asks for nothing. Not my affection or my attention. When I—of my own initiation and volition—when I love the sweater, use it, discard it, it truly is an object of my chosen affection. I can objectify the sweater, notice and employ at will. Ah, such power.

I choose to believe that my father had the best of intentions. As with all his other views, when it came to his views on sexuality, he was quite forthcoming. Honest to a fault. He shared his views with me all the time, over and over, then as he does now. “Women are baby-making machines,” he said to me many times, occasionally as offhanded humorous asides, but usually during one of his talks about sex and where babies come from, and then, later, when he interpreted for me the meaning of the lyrics of “Afternoon Delight.” I suppose from an evolutionary stance, he's right. Female scorpions lay eggs, female primates give birth. “Women are,” as he's said many times, “baby-making machines.” And I suppose that's partly where he was coming from: when this happens, that happens; cause and effect; action and product. Objective observation.

Only once do I remember having a strong reaction during one of our sex talks. I was six or seven years old. My parents had been locked in their bedroom all afternoon. I'd been running around the house nearly naked, wearing only a pair of underpants because it was a warm day, and playing in the front room where natural light beamed through the window. As soon as my mother emerged from their darkened doorway to shuffle toward the kitchen in her robe, I immediately slipped into their bedroom. The pull-down roller shades blotted out all sunlight. “Can I come in?” I asked in the dark. My father said of course I could, but he was going to take a nap. I slid in bed beside him, billowing the thin blue top sheet as I got underneath it, then let it fall down again to drape across my legs. The clink and hiss of my mother making tea in the kitchen punctuated the afternoon heat that seeped in through the edges of the closed window shades.

I don't remember how, but my father quickly segued into another sex lecture, which I listened to with great interest, as usual. It wasn't the setting that made me uncomfortable—not the intimacy of being in bed with my father, both of us in our underwear, or the darkness of the room. And it wasn't the information or the way he conveyed it—holding his fist overhead and explaining that a penis is like a thumb without a bone. These things did not brush against the nap of acceptable father-daughter-ness as I understood it. The information, the digital visual aid, my proximity to my father: so far, so good.

What bothered me were two questions he came around to.

First: “When you're older, say eighteen, will you let a man do those things to you?” he wanted to know. He said that some women are frigid and not interested in sex, and I should not be one of those women. “Will you?” he pressed for an answer.

“I don't know,” I said.

He asked several more times, explaining that it's never too early to think about these things, that if I could make him one promise, this would be it.

Each time he repeated the question, I stuck to my answer. “I don't know.”

Then he asked the second question: “When you're older, do you think you might pose for
Playboy
?”

Again, I said I didn't know. He repeated the question several times, and I repeated my answer.

Of course I could not have articulated it then, but on some subconscious level I think I understood that if I answered “yes” to either question, I would be making promises I wasn't ready to make and I wasn't sure I wanted to keep. Even in my six- or seven-year-old mind, these promises carried weight, an agreement to carry out specific actions. I might not have had control over who lived in which house, but I had control of my word—to utter, or keep silent. I also understood that my father was not the person I wanted to make those promises to. I already knew so very, very much about his needs and his desires and what he found attractive in women—he'd often pointed out to me what he liked about each one of the centerfolds thumbtacked to the walls in his office.
She has long hair
, he'd say of one photo.
Every man likes long hair
. And then of another photo he'd say,
See how she wears just one piece of draped clothing? That's much more attractive than total nudity. It creates interest, mystery
.

So yes, I knew what he liked—long hair, the fresh scent of lavender, this going into that—and I still wanted to like some of the things he liked, but some part of my child's brain recognized that pieces of a person are not a whole person. If I allowed myself to be bullied into making a promise, I would be giving away an intangible piece of myself. I would objectify my own free will, my autonomy and sense of control; I'd forfeit the sensation of flying I could create at will, depending on how high I trampolined on the bed, how close I got to the ceiling. The prospective acts my father spoke of, the
doing
and the
posing
, those were not what concerned me most, but rather, his request of a promise—that's what violated my senses. Making a commitment that day, that hour, in that room, would have been like slicing my own vocal cords from my throat, cutting loose an utterance that lacks volition when severed from its speaker: a word—a
yes
—that would no longer be my own. I'd be handing something over—like a peace-sign necklace or the arm of a sweater—but that something was an intangible object inside myself: my will.

I don't know how I knew those things, but I swear I did, in my seven-year-old way, and with a certainty that burned through my skin from the inside out. Heat radiated from deep inside my chest, then pulsed through my fingertips and the skin of my cheek and the soles of my bare feet.

And I believe that was the first time I withheld the answer an adult, any adult, expected of me. As we reclined on separate sides of the bed, several times my father again asked, “Will you?” and each time I repeated myself like a scratched record: “I don't know...I don't know...I don't know...” until he rose from the bed in frustration.