Chapter 10: Return
Chapter Ten Return
The best mazes are those with complicated, drawn out dead ends where the imagination must fetch up, bang into walls, and turn back towards the right way out. So it was in the summer and fall of 1974, as I careened through two more quarters at the College of Marin, that my bruised mind full of antidepressants and alcohol conjured up the idea that I could go back to Real University right across the Bay.
I wrote a paper to apply for a scholarship for one term at U.C. Berkeley - something about "black and blue", having to do with the civil rights movement from my perspective as the white mother of a biracial child. It was good enough for them to grant my wish, and by December we had renested in a tiny second-floor apartment in the Berkeley flats six blocks from campus. In 1968, the City of Berkeley school board had created the nation's first non-court-ordered busing plan for desegregating the schools and it stayed in effect for 25 years. This meant that Jane and Josh boarded buses each day to separate schools. In a burst of hope, all three of us started in new classrooms but our brave beginning faltered almost from day one.
My courses that last California spring included Abnormal Psychology, Psychology Statistics, Genetics, and Forensic Science (no memory of what my long-term goal was). In my old papers, there is a letter from a teacher telling me that had I just taken his final, he wouldn't have had to give me an F and that he had enjoyed reading my last paper. I remember little of those classes, but somewhere in the month before the term ended I flung myself to the mat, packed us up, and allowed my dad to fly down from Oregon and drive us in our old white Chevy Impala, packed to the gills with our worldly goods and two cats, back to Oregon. By May, the kids were plunked into the Corvallis school system and we were lodging with my parents. By the time I turned 36, I had gotten a job as Secretary to the Department of Anthropology at Oregon State University. On the very day of my birthday, the last Apollo flight splashed down after exchanging gifts with the Soviet Cosmonauts somewhere out in space, but news of the world at large was lost on me.
As Butch said to Sundance who refused to jump from the cliff because he couldn't swim, "Why you crazy, the fall will probably kill you." I felt like I was always falling now and not gracefully. My parents had a decent ranch style three-bedroom home on a nice suburban street in this 99.9% white small college town and their lives were in order. They did politics and their garden and their friends and paid their bills, and we took up their space with our new lives. I felt a slight boost about a new job and new scenery, new clothes, new routine but kept on drinking in my back room, hiding my bottles under the bed and taking them out when empty to leave along a curb somewhere in the dark.
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The children were better at falling than I. They adapted to their new school, for the first time the same one. Josh took to athletics, finding that besides the joy of it, the issue of his skin color was solved by his success. He was strong and big and never unenlisted in whatever season's sport it was. And they had their grandparents who were both hands on, especially my mother. After school, when I was still at work, they had their flesh and blood to come home to.
I fell for a young assistant professor in my department who was newly separated and heading for divorce. He was irresistible - tall, gorgeous, and bright as a steel trap. Looking back, I think he was really just confidence building, dallying, never moving toward a permanent connection. I pressed up against his respectability and backburnered thoughts of a future like the one I might have had long ago with that first doomed teenaged marriage, or like my mother once thought she would have where everything would look and feel exactly right. Trying to keep our relationship low profile, we snuck into each other's lives like culprits.
In fairly short order once my job was established, the children and I moved into a tiny house not far from where my parents lived, so the after school scenario could continue. That fall Josh started second grade and Jane her fifth. No one discussed the future. Everyone plowed ahead doing what they did best - my grandfather had his 98th birthday surrounded by dozens of us, my mother and father's hair turned white, the children completed their year of school, and I slid further toward the summer of my 37th year.
One of my favorite memories of those Oregon summers is that we would go as a family - my parents, the children, and I - to the sea, the patchwork of sand and sky and rocks and chowder and raw wind like a stiff blow to the soul, standing it upright. A few years ago I recreated for myself this old mirage by bringing my grown children, grandchildren, and significant others for a weekend of homage - to brief escape, to the magic of the ions in the ocean spray. I wish it could have started a similar tradition but it seems unlikely.
Jane started junior high in 1976 at Western View, which I just discovered was immortalized in the 2004 movie, The Incredibles, by its writer who once went there too. Neither of us can remember anything about it. In the families of drinkers, there is a well known hierarchy of roles: (1) chief enabler - spouse or parent; (2) hero child - tries to give the family self-worth by over achieving; (3) scapegoat - since the hero child has that role locked up, gets the family to focus in destructive ways (being stubborn, acting out); (4) lost child - stays under the radar to provide relief; and (5) the mascot - uses humor to survive and lighten the damn family up. They say an addict of any kind is like a prizefighter who keeps getting knocked down but continues to get back in the ring. The family and friends close to that person all fall together until one day something happens and the addict gives up the fight. Then the falling of all of them can end.
So Jane kept her nose to the grindstone academically, Josh turned his focus to excelling in sports and before long would find ways to get in scrapes, and I continued to plummet. It was kind of like having an autoimmune disease where the body attacks itself. It was part of the very beginning of a reach for help that I'd made the decision to return to live so near my parents because, while they enabled me to postpone the inevitable, they also helped to keep my children safer than I could have on my own.
There was a drought that year in Corvallis, the driest year on record. How do you measure thirst in a life that is drying up notch by notch behind a layer of chemicals? You wait for the falling to end.
When the dark months began in my 38th year, life got darker with them. The assistant professor went on sabbatical to the other side of the country. No promises were made. It began to feel like my path through each day was a tightrope. Balancing took every ounce of focus I could manage. Somewhere during this time I acquired a shrink who prescribed antidepressants, sedatives, and tranquilizers in various combinations, never checking about the daily alcohol I added. At night I would lie in bed like a frozen stick figure in panic about getting up and appearing in the world the next day. In the day, I would devise elaborate schemes to avoid making eye contact or performing tasks that would show how my hands were shaking. My speech deteriorated into stammering. If walking pneumonia is functioning with fluid in the lungs, this was a kind of walking drowning too. Drowning while dying of thirst - the perfect paradox.
We moved almost across the street from my parents for the last part of our Corvallis stay. We opened our eyes in the mornings to a house that struggled to hold us together. Jane constructed shelves and shower stalls and studied hard for school, while Josh racked up more sports team photos and brought home two kittens from a neighborhood litter that were orange and black, the OSU basketball team's colors. Ferd and Panther stayed with us (and finally just me) for the next almost 20 years and are now buried in my back yard, having shared my home longer than any human ever has.
It was the year Jimmy Carter was elected President and granted amnesty to Vietnam draft dodgers. The Son of Sam killer was arrested in New York City. Elvis Presley died at 42 in his bathroom and Bing Crosby died on the golf course at 73. The U.S. and Panama signed the Canal Zone Treaty. But what I remember was a morning before going to work when I drank my usual large tumbler of red wine, felt my stomach revolt, tossed it back up into the bathroom sink, and immediately poured a second glass and drank it. I was daily shocked, embarrassed, and grateful to remain on my feet to feed my children, go to work, and pay the rent. My mother came one day to my house to give me a gift of vitamins "especially for people who drink" and I reacted with anger.
(this is from CA earlier)
The summer I turned 39 , Jane went to horse camp for three weeks. She was 12, the perfect age for horse love. What is it the mysterious attraction of adolescent girls to horses? (This past year it was my granddaughter's turn at 10.) Camp Tamarack in the Deschutes National Forest in central Oregon - my parents paid $100 for the experience and for my part I wrote notes and sometimes sent a gift every single day she was gone. When she returned, Josh got to visit the beach with friends for a week to make it even.
In the notes to Jane were reports that I too was taking a week's vacation from work because the assistant professor had returned from sabbatical bringing a woman with him. It's hard to remember now, but in fairly short order he left again, taking up employment at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. where he has remained ever since.
For her part, Jane had a classic camp experience - hating it at first and settling in for the long haul later. An early letter said, "Almost everyone hates me or is crude or cruel to me around except for the kind people that usually turn out to be my friends - 9-year-olds or younger. Call me up right away or write me right away because I want to come home. I miss you so bad." This was immediately followed by a letter saying, "For the moment my feelings have changed but they can possibly change again in the close future!!! Please send some thing(s) like cookies, candies or brownies etc. as a care package."
And so the summer passed into fall and winter. The children returned to school, and I clung to my daily routine. It was a winter of honors for my diligent, idealistic, activist overwhelming mother - with commendations from the Mayor of Corvallis, the Sheriff of Benton County, O.S.U. Democrats,and the Myrtle Sykes Grass Roots Award. As winter became spring and I approached my 40th birthday, my spirits were breaking under the weight of all the loss and setbacks of a life reaching halfway through. I didn't know it then, but it would be only five more winters till redemption.
Will you tell me, once and for all, how to open this door.
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