novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- feh. I remember making a round dent in the plaster of the living room wall. I remember the sound when my skull made contact, a loud thud that rattled the sliding glass doors. He let go of my shoulders after my chin richocheted off my collarbone and I accidentally spit blood on his shirt. And then there was a buzzing, and everything felt light. I ran my fingers around the small dome that my head cut into the wall so many years ago, around and around in circles, surprized it was still there. "Where's M?" Dad asked me without taking his eyes off the television screen. "In her office," I answered, turning towards him. M's office was the bathroom that she, my brother and I shared for eighteen years. Once W and I had both moved out, she overtook the small orange room with its water damaged formica countertops and smoke stained ceiling. She would sit on the toilet for hours and smoke, write in her journal, or read. She'd turn on a loud fan for background noise, light a candle, and rest the palms of her feet up against the shower door. It was her safe space, the only room in the house Dad never entered. "Yeah, well. Look at this guy," he said, jutting his chin towards the tv. "The only white guy on the team. Doesn't make as much as the blacks but I bet he gets millions. Marry a guy like that." I snorted audibly, mostly just to make a noise to let him know that I was listening. He would always pick out husbands, hobbies and professions for me, pulling them out of his logic and adapting them to his mental picture of what I should be. To him I should play the bassoon, study math and science, marry wealthy and support my work-worn parents in their old age. This from the man who didn't know I liked to draw until I announced I was going to be spending my freshman year at art school. He looked at my hands as they led his dinner dish away. When I was almost in the kitchen he said, "Get the leash on the dog. We're going to the beach." I kneeled down and held Ludwig's collar to steady him as I snapped on his leash. My eyes met his, this tiny gray dog that has lived with us for eleven years. He stayed solemn until I smiled; then he circled me, happily, quietly, until the leash wound around my legs and pulled me from a squatting position directly onto the floor. He climbed into my lap and looked at me again, apprehensively smelling my breath. I scratched behind his ears and stared at his eyes, amazed at how human they looked. Not looking down at us but already knowing that Ludwig and I were sitting on the floor, Dad walked through the kitchen and muttered: "Finish the dishes. Get a sweater." He continued through the bathroom into his room, a clear signal that meant hurry up. I pushed Lude out of my lap and stood up. I don't know when I learned how to interpret his movements; all I know is how integral his physical vocabulary has become when living with him. It dominates all of the rooms in the house while he is home, it whispers unspoken rules and boundaries. This is strangely comforting whenever I have to visit my parents for a weekend. Being away from a strong current that is also invisible can lead to questioning its actual presence. While I am at my parents' house, and I am feeling it, I am comforted by its realness. Lude followed my ankles around the kitchen, staring at the floor in case I dropped food. I rinsed off plates that M won by saving up enough Betty Crocker points in 1989, dunking them in the sink that I used to get bathed in when I was too small for the bathtub. Once the dishwasher started to sing, I followed D and Lude out to the car, locking the door behind me. Dad never remembers to lock the door. We have been robbed three times but he still refuses to "waste money" on a security system. I came home from school a few days after our second robbery to find warning stickers on all of the windows in our house. When I leaned in and looked closer at the tiny red and black decals, I saw that they were for car alarms. This car is protected by the club. D's car this time was a sports utility vehicle with tires twice as big as our schnauzer and a price tag larger than his yearly salary. All car dealers get to drive a demo -a car off the lot- for a few days before it is sold. Our family never actually owned a car until 1995. He drove the borrowed car like he owned it, cutting corners close to the shoulder and briefly pausing at stop signs, causing Ludwig to steady himself between my feet and me to grip the car door like it was a life saver. These are our standard positions when riding with D; Lude instinctively finds a niche on the floor and I instinctively dig niches into the upolstery with my nails. The sun was setting when he parked, illegally blocking the driveway of a giant stone house. He pointed at it as we walked away, a small gesture that I remembered seeing dozens of times during my childhood. Being with him meant being at his mercy and lack of time managment. We'd go out to dinner or to visit family and not get back until my brother and I had been asleep for hours in the car. Most often, he used to drive all of us on detours towards lavish mansion-like buildings or open houses. We'd take our time inside each empty house, noting the marbled tile or the spiral staircases or the indoor pool. I'd wander around outside, looking in through the windows at the bare walls, feeling like we were invading someone else's nest. D would cluck his tongue and flick his hand in that same familiar gesture while showing us around the house. He always picked out which rooms would have belonged to who, and where the wine cellar would go, and of course where the maid would live... "They remodelled all these houses. V and I lived in a garage down that street (another slight hand movement). It was pretty big. I'd surf all the time. We had a patio." "Which garage?" I asked him. I am always asking him for specifics. "Down that street," he said again, and turned away towards the ocean. We walked onto a jetty with children playing on one of its giant cement stones, shoved diagonally into the sand. The city didn't design the jetties on this beach to look aesthetic; the cement looked like giant can-shaped cylinders of cat food or gelatonous cranberries at Thanksgiving that I would be so careful to take even sized slices from but always forget to eat. The city installed the jetties that dotted this beach in the seventies to break up the ocean's tide. Without the jetties, the small bay's borders would have eventually washed out to sea, straightening out the line of the coast. Ludwig faltered and Dad grabbed his leash, pulling him further out onto the jetty with us. Once we got to where waves broke on either side of our path, Lude froze altogether, and I had to carry him. He arched his back against my grip, stiffened his neck and clawed my shoulders. He hated to be carried, I think it reminded him of his vulnerability. He may have been a tiny dog but in his heart he thought himself a Great Dane. I knew his pride was waning so I turned back towards the dry sand to wait for D there. He watched me, picking my steps on the uneven cylinders carefully due to my frightened luggage. I felt his eyes on me until I set Ludwig down and turned to see how far into the break he had wandered. He lingered there a while, his back to Lude and I, a signal meant to tell me that he didn't care whether I came with him onto the jetty or not. I know his pauses and turns by heart, I can tell his calculations. This signal also meant that he did in fact want me to follow him, that he was hurt I had turned back, and that he thought I was babying the dog. Once he stepped back onto dry sand, he grabbed Lude's leash and kept walking without pausing to look at me. I followed them up the shoreline, trailing a few feet behind. After a few minutes of walking in silence, Dad stopped and decided that Ludwig needed a saltwater bath. He turned to me and declared, "Saltwater is good for the skin. The Lude has bad skin." He smiled at me, a rehearsed grin showing his front teeth, a look meant to show how good his intentions were. I didn't smile back. He reached down and grabbed Lude by his ribcage. I saw Lude flinch and tense up at my father's quick touch. Dad lifted our dog into the air and tossed him into the breakwater, his torso turning slightly once it left my father's arms. I watched his legs shoot out on all sides to find ground as he fell and then his tiny body smacked into the ocean, completing some sort of canine belly-flop. I felt like my arms were glued to either side of my body. This is the same way I learned to swim before I learned to walk. When I was three months old, D threw me in a pool because he was sure babies knew how to float from all that time in the womb. My mother told me this as if it were some joke. "It's all because his dad did it to him too, but they did it in the ocean! Imagine your Grandma B screaming on the beach!" At this, M would break into nervous laughter. I did imagine it though, warped and in black and white like a scene from a horror movie: A 1950's version of Gram standing on the shoreline in L N, flapping her manicured hands against her thighs, wearing a new dress Grandpa Jack bought for her to go with her new hairdo and fur coat. Grandpa looked just like Elvis, only more villanish. He waded out past knee-depth and grin-sneered down at his son who resembled the baby Jesus, wrapped in swaddling clothes and so innocent. Gram's lips, painted over her natural lipline, rose and fell in small arcs, exposing her teeth and then covering them up again. She flapped and wailed out of a soundless, perfectly picturesque mouth. I get the impression that what happened to me marks me as lucky. My brother also got the ocean treatment. I am a girl; I was thrown in the pool. M inched around Dad's borrowed parenting skills and taught us to hold our breath, to float and to dog paddle at the Y, all while he was at work. I inched around D's pet-owning knowhow and guided Lude out of the water, careful to pull the long, hairlike fur away from his eyes so he could see where he was. D had already started walking again. I pulled off my sweater to dry Lude with, and then left it on top of a sand dune to pick up on our way back. My small, eleven year old dog with toothpicks for legs covered by wet fur in the middle of the night ran alongside me to catch up with Dad. Next to him again, he pointed towards a set of floodlights a mile ahead of us on the beach. "It's like you can swim in the daytime," he told me. I looked down at Ludwig and kept walking without saying anything. He continued: "Of course, the lights don't carry as far as where the swells come in, but see where the whitewater is?" He paused and waited for me to respond. "Yeah," I said quietly. And then louder, "Yes." By the time I answered his eyes were noticing something else ahead of us, just before the pier. He started heading towards it. A group of people, the first since the kids back at the jetty. A bonfire. Ludwig was shaking. He was standing so close to my right leg that my shin started to tingle in time to his spasms. Sand caked the ends of his gray curls; oceananic icicles. Reaching down and brushing them off, I wondered how I could get us out of this? Which would be the best tactic? I racked my brain for people I knew who lived nearby. Greg. Taking a breath, I spat, "Hey D I want to take Lude to visit G, he lives really close by, okay?" Dturned around and looked at me, and then at Ludwig. His eyes darkened somewhat, quietly mad again. "Or you could take us home," I offered quickly. "Ludie's really cold and I got my sweater wet so I'm pretty cold too..." "Yeah. Okay." He paused and looked at the bonfire for a minute before heading back towards the car. The last time I used this tactic while visiting, we were stranded in the middle of downtown Ventura, on foot, in the rain. It didn't work because I didn't execute the maneuver as swiftly as needed. After that day's excitement, I ended up with a dehydrated schnauzer, severe phenomia, and a father who was angry at me for spending so much time indoors trying to heal. I have had to prod him, gently enough so that he's unaware of my intent, to get us to leave almost everywhere we've been. This always made me imagine my father with Alzeihmer's, like the patients I used to care for during my volunteer stint at Cy M. I remember Saul, an ancient arthritic wheelchair-bound man who would gaurd the hallway like a sentry, never moving. He thought he was still a gangster in the thirties and I was his maul. He wore a cap so low on his forehead that it looked like it might fall onto his knees if it didn't rest on the bridge of his nose. He would grab my hand and pull it tightly to his chest, and ask me to go and get the car, and bring it around. I had to constantly explain what year it was, who I was, and that he no longer could drive. I can imagine myself repeating how I never played the bassoon or swam in the ocean to Dad, over and over, uselessly. It is like Dad has a semblance of it already, forgetting everything I tell him about myself the second I say it, preferring his version of me to my own. "Yeah. Okay," He said again, taking Ludwig's leash from me. 11:16 am - 12.4.2000 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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