Читать книгу Criminal of Poverty - Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia - Страница 16

We lived at the edge of the ocean, my father, mother and I. My memories of that time are always at night, backlit by fog, tinted by rays of moon glow. Our nineteenth-century Victorian sat on a hill above a crashing sea. The house tilted precariously on the edge of a little patch of grass and a maze of gnarled ice plant, reaching out like a finger over the glimmering waves.

My room was small but tall, like a distorted corner in an Alice in Wonderland story. The walls and the curved Victorian windows seemed to reach up into the sky beyond where my four-year-old eyes could see. Every night before I went to bed I would peek at the sea, which always seemed to be busy doing so much—waves crashed to meet their shore deadlines, the phosphorescence busily recreating itself, the lobsters and clams, sea-anemones and sharks all caught up in their complicated ocean schedules. I was afraid to gaze too long for fear that one of the ocean people would notice and become angry with me for spying and decide to kill me so that I wouldn’t reveal their secrets.

But the fear that permeates those memories doesn’t come from the ocean, nor my room with the large cartoon-like monsters who convened in the uppermost corner of my ceiling—I had a scratchy blanket to take care of them. It’s a filmy memory of the nights that were played out downstairs between my perpetually wet-suited dad and my increasingly desperate mom.

It all began when we moved there. My mother had taught herself to be the perfect wife: dinner was on the table at precisely 6 P.M., a juicy rare roast beef, boiled potatoes, green salad, and a bright green or dark red vegetable, things that I’ve never forgotten because I couldn’t have any of them. For the first three years of my life I had horrible food allergies and was relegated to a nauseatingly watery rice cereal, delicately served in a beautiful antique bowl with a large silver spoon. I never understood in my toddler head why I was only allowed the rice cereal soup while my mother and father delighted in bloody carnivorous feasts.

At that time my father was slowly but surely having a mental breakdown. He hadn’t really wanted to be a psychiatrist; his real love was reading and writing, and he’d wanted to be an English professor, but that was not the will of his parents who had made it very clear that they expected him to attain power and money, preferably through a career in medicine.

To this end they had “accepted” my mother, though they wouldn’t let her mother, my grandmother, enter through the front door of their palatial beachfront house because she was “shanty Irish,” unworthy of anything more than the servant’s entrance (she worked as a maid). But they had realized early on that my mother was willing to devote herself unconditionally to the whims of my very odd father and facilitate his successful graduation from seven grueling years of medical school.

After finishing medical school and his residency in Hawaii, he began a successful private practice in Redondo Beach, chosen for its good surf and proximity to Los Angeles. This was when the brief period of very rich times began for all of us. I was enrolled in an expensive Montessori school, my mother designed her own clothes, mostly dashiki’s and muumuu’s, and had them hand-sewn. I wasn’t old enough to remember much about this time except that everything was really big, big televisions, big stereos, big tables and most of all big toys.

Back then, my cousin Annie was always present at our dinner table, another example of the generations of very poor women in my family. She was there because she and my mother loved each other dearly, and of course, because there was always a good meal and Annie was always hungry. Annie was pretty in a small brown animal sort of way. She was all of 92 pounds, and this was not because she was anorexic. Rather, she had been starved as a child due to the severe neglect of her poor, withdrawn mother, my aunt Jan.

Annie’s mother, my mother’s older half-sister, would disappear for several days at a time when Annie and her younger sister were growing up. Jan would leave the girls in an assortment of California micro-shacks that were endemic to areas like Pomona, City of Industry and San Bernardino. The paint was perpetually peeling and there was never any furniture, but the worst thing was that there was rarely any food in the house. In good times Annie and her little sister would concoct food simulations like “vinegar sandwiches,” which consisted of a two pieces of white bread drenched with vinegar, or if they were lucky enough to have some ketchup in the house, the delicacy of a “ketchup sandwich” could soothe a hungry stomach for a while. In spite of all this, everyone loved Annie’s mother. Sometimes the most harmful people can also be the most charming, and Jan never meant any harm. She just couldn’t stand to become dependent on anyone or anything, and saw it as the utmost form of failure to receive a “hand-out,” such as welfare or food stamps. Jan had been beautiful once, but she’d lost her teeth before she turned 21, which meant she always had to hide her mouth when she talked. She never had much use for food herself and survived on a steady diet of cigarettes and coffee, which colored her thin face a pale yellowish gray.

Annie was always happy to be at our dinner table. She was in awe of my father, the handsome, rich doctor, who was always “accidentally” getting out of the shower whenever Annie happened to be using the toilet. This furthered Annie’s admiration of my father, as he was apparently well endowed, and Annie was somewhat obsessed by the size of a man’s penis.

As the years passed, the basic niceties and appropriated conformities between my father and mother were replaced by furtive glances, loud clanks of dishes, whispers behind doors and subsequent slams until the house became permanently divided. The division was accentuated through music. My father was a fan of Don McLean, Bob Dylan and any other folk singer type, while my mother favored rock-and-roll and rhythm-and-blues, with a heavy dose of disco and salsa thrown in. These musical camps were blasted at each other across the house in place of normal conversation. My mother, who had given up dancing due to my father’s disdain for it, began to take it up again with a new vengeance. My father, on the other hand, began what he and his equally insane friend called “rescue operations” of large luxury boats (sailing for dinner cruises and the like) that didn’t want or need rescuing, which didn’t seem to matter to my father. He would leave the house for his self-appointed harbor duty to the tune of some plaintive ballad, with a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea-like set of harpoons, goggles and fish tackle, murmuring,“Godspeed.”

I was never clear on what, exactly, was the last straw for either of them, or if there even was one, only that things grew more hateful, more violent and more tense with each passing day, culminating in a huge fight during which my father broke my mother’s arm, the police came and then they left, and then my parents separated for what seemed like a very short time.

My father bought FBI-quality tracking devices in an attempt to catch my mother in the act of cheating on him while they were separated. This was a precursor to the case he would make against her in their extremely painful and bizarre divorce proceeding where he brought in her dressmaker to testify that my mother was having miniskirts made, which proved her status as an unfit mother.

My father didn’t actually want to have custody of me, but for some reason he was determined to harm my mother as much as possible while also avoiding any alimony or child support payments. This experience was terrifying for my mother, as she was really no match for my father’s heavy-handed tactics and high-priced attorneys. He knew the worst thing he could do to her was to take me away, and so he set about doing that at all costs. In the end, some of my mother’s friends testified on her behalf and she was awarded custody, but she was left with a bleeding ulcer, a minimal child support settlement, an order to sell the house for almost nothing, and a fear of ever entering the courts again.

The mini-chapter of privilege, comfort and security in my mother’s life was over, and in its place a bloody wound of pain, betrayal, and fear opened, one that would never properly heal. As for me, at four years old I wasn’t really sure what had happened; I just wanted my mama to stop crying.