The Homes They've Haunted
I remember raspberry jelly and dead fish all over the kitchen floor. I remember feeling the earth shake like a wet dog and watching the air around it vibrate into particles like water lifting off its coarse surface. A month later we carried what was left in bags from Los Angeles, the city of riots and earthquakes, of fungus and fever chewing the smog bitten air, to Cornwall, on the south west tip of the English island, where the air looked like a wool sweater.
Days there at Goonwinnow Farm started for me when our mother released us children into the lush, moist landscape. Above us the the sky was drooping gray everywhere down to the horizon and illuminated within by a strange tone of sunlight trying to break through it. The hills were green, rolling and dipping one after another as far as I could see in one direction, and as far as the edge of a deep forest in the other direction.
This forest was full of treasures, buried reminders of the old life surrounding us always. All around us there was never any new life. We’d unearth pieces of chipped china in the forest, or a smoothly weathered tea cup handle, or old coins. I remember once finding a spoon, the handle curved like letters in my name I’d learned to write, and the soft green color of aged copper.
One morning my brother and sisters went off to the field beyond the chicken coop to jump off the hay bails. I didn’t want to go. The night before I’d broken my mother’s glasses getting out of the bath. She’d left them on the floor beside the tub and her cooling cup of tea, and I smashed them with my little heal. I promised her a new pair from the treasure forest when she tucked me into bed.
That was my purpose that day. Even at that young age I could feel the urgency of promises, of the need to keep them, and if the other kids wouldn't help me, I was resigned to search on my own.
I climbed my way up over one hill after another, our dog Choo-Choo, a spotted mutt I named after watching him chase rabbits, trotting ahead of me. My brother hated the name. But I was the youngest. My hair was cut short, near white, and when I cried my thick cheeks would plume red. When it counted, I cried. When I cried I could get whatever I wanted. When we reached the top of the last hill Choo-Choo ran ahead in a blur that looked orange against the cool backdrop of the surrounding nature. Going to chase rabbits. Fine. I didn't need him either.
I walked deep into the forest. I gazed at the languid elm limbs reflecting off the puddles at my feet. All around the forest moved by invisible forces. Sometimes it was just the rustling of rabbits or sleek bodied lizards gripping branches on tree and bush with their suction thumbs. But sometimes I imagined it was a great city of winged people, no bigger than my fingers, fluttering around the damp leaves, and the wind slithering through the tree trunks was actually their laughter. I imagined they loved me at that moment, even more then my sisters or brother, and were so happy I was with them they could laugh with joy.
Yet I was frightened. I’d never been so deep in the forest before, and never so alone. And if this ancient Moorland was home to tiny winged people, what else could live here? My imagination couldn't paint a single picture of what it could be, but managed to infect me with a feeling of dark lonesomeness.
I’m on my own, I thought, and reached into the wet ground and pulled out a split piece of latticed fencing that stained my palms orange with rust. I walked on kicking over shattered pieces of plates and bowls. I gripped the fence that rested on my shoulder like an axe.
Up ahead I saw a large stone, a granite outcrop, so alone in the forest that it must have been dropped there by a giant who tills the forest like a vegetable garden. The way the loose strips of light through the gray sky landed on the rough stone’s edges invited me to it. The glasses. The glasses are in the stone!
I ran to it dropping my weapon. But before I could reach the stone, something in the mud on the forest floor seized my foot. I shrieked in terror. Nothing could make me to look down to see the bubbling hand that held me. I called for someone to help. I called for the dog. But nobody heard and nobody came. Soon though my struggling freed me and I ran all the way home. I felt the tears soaking my cold cheeks, and felt my nose red and runny.
Our mother never let us walk through the mud room until we are all checked for ticks, but I was so frightened I ran straight to the kitchen calling for my mom to come to me. The house was empty. It was cold and silent, as if the gray sky had flattened down on the roof of the house and seeped in through the windows, enveloping my mother in its mystical cloak, making her invisible to me and deaf to my calls.
“Mommy!” I called.
The stove ticked as it heated. A single drop of water splashed at the bottom of the kitchen sink. A deep moan burst through the shut bathroom door and bounced down the long wood paneled hall, a hall that seemed to grow longer as my fear intensified.
“Mommy!” I called again.
The moan turned into a painful wail. The pain it carried down the hall sharp enough to pierce through my eyes. Something unfamiliar was chewing into the roof of our now unfamiliar home.
I was motherless and scared, and knew it was coming for me.
For as long as I can remember the lives of adults seemed to exist in a reality far removed from the one of fantasy my imagination would conjure in that forest, and farther still from the reality I shared with my brother and sisters, the reality of children. Adults were a wholly different kind of being that I was at once eager to be near and fearful of. I remember the moment I became aware of the vast distance between me and them.
Between our life in L.A. and our life at Goonwinnow, my family spent three years living in a trailer park in Cornwall. For our large family the trailer was small and crowded, but I loved the way we stuffed ourselves into the tiny space, the nights I slept between my sisters on a flimsy mattress, sharing a big scratchy electric blanket our father would never allow us to plug in. I slept easily with them.
But I began noticing something different happening between my parents. Looking back from now, I see the that the small space, that for a child seems to bind the family more tightly, was for the grown-ups, eroding a gulf between them.
The trailers in the park were arranged in a wide circle, so if you were to look at it from above, it would be a dartboard with the bulls at the center a rickety playground and sandbox that was always cold and dark from the ceaselessly damp air. At the outer rim of the park was a club house with a bar and a pool table. For the families in the park the world of children and the world of grown-ups was separated by a layer of trailers, the shared space of home, where the two worlds found ways to coexist in the variously strange ways that families do. These separate families would come together in the clubhouse, where the presence of so many unfamiliar worlds created an air of delicate tension, where each word spoken between the grown-ups was a praise and curse on the body of the stranger before them.
The lights were always on in there and entering through a heavy side door, we kids walked over a cement floor in the section of the room with the pool table. I found my mother smoking a cigarette at one of the low tables that surrounded the pool table. I tried to sit on her lap but she wouldn't let me up, and sympathetically put her arm around my waist. My brother walked to the bar side of the room to push the buttons on the pinball machines. That side of the clubhouse was carpeted with a stoney green material dotted with patches of black mould from years of spilt beer. My father was on that side of the room. He brushed away my brother’s request for quarters and leaned back against the bar, holding the pool stick against his shoulder. He twisted it in his fingers. Light hit his ring and split into rays like fingers on a hand. An old man with a face I recognized was taking a shot. His white jeans were tucked into the top of his snake skin cowboy boots. Behind his bent body, a woman sat with a beer in her hand. A sleeping baby in a car seat was propped on the table beside her. Above the bathroom door beside them the clock was frozen at some time.
I whispered to my mother that the clock was broken. She said to my father, “Well, I must say that surprises me Eric. I figured most men would be thrilled to have a chance to earn a little something for their families.”
My father swallowed some beer and let the glass land firmly on the bar top. He walked to the other side of the pool table.
“It surprises you Anne? Is that right?” he said.
When they used one another’s names with this sharp intent it triggered something in me. To my eyes, their bodies would lose their form, like they were turning into lumpy potato things with melting faces. At moments like this, my parents, who when alone looked to me like warm, familiar wholes, morphed into grotesque, unrecognizable others.
I felt a strange muddiness seep coldly through my shirt where I thought my mother’s arm had been. I saw my father as a lumbering monster, gangly and wet, when he leaned over to line up the cue ball.
My mother pushed these words through her now overgrown and fang filled mouth, “Yes! I’m always surprised at what a right bastard you’ve allowed yourself to become!”
When my father hit the cue ball it sailed off of the pool table and bounced off the wood paneled wall, nearly hitting the sleeping baby in the head. It fell solidly to the cement floor. The childs mother shrieked. My mother shrieked too, and pushing me aside, shot out of her chair and began beating my father over the head with open hands. He dropped the pool stick and covered his head until he finally escaped my mother’s anger through the side door.
The baby didn't even wake up, but its mother had turned white and sick from fear. My mother was orange with rage and tried to cover each of her leaking eyes with her sharp fingers.
The smell of burnt nicotine and sweat suddenly became oppressive to me, and sticky. It felt like the smell was clinging to me. I looked again at the baby, so removed from its own danger, and saw that the clock wasn't frozen at all. I had seen it wrong, or my eyes had tricked me. But there it was, moving steadily, and unavoidably forward.
By the time my family moved back to California, to Los Osos, I was old enough to understand. I had done the arithmetic on our time in England, added up all my experiences and sensations, and the sum was this - a child is essentially alone in this world. The troubles of adulthood are too expansive to leave room in parental hearts for the troubles of childhood. My pain is not their pain, and more importantly, their pain is not mine. Parents give a child words to speak and the strength to stand and move, and I realized that now that I had those powers, the rest is up to me. I realized if I was going to make it in this world I would have to do it on my own.
This began a long process of trying to separate myself from my parents and from the adult world all together. As the youngest I was able to hide in plain sight. Arguments and jokes erupted in the space around me but never penetrated through as anything but background noise. Choices and decisions were made for and about me by everyone else in the family. I ignored all that I could. I wanted no attention, only to be left alone.
I began to imagine adventures for all of my stuffed animals. I’d arrange them on my bed, my dresser, my desk in separate clans and picture them as an ancient race of mountain creatures, their lives clinging heroically to the sides of crystallized slopes. Compared to my world, these stuffed bears inhabited such a mystical reality and I thought of it and them often. While my mother was shuffling me from the porch to the car to school, or back home again, while my father, half drunk, and surrounded by television noise lectured me on why I should care about learning to write checks, I’d be thinking of the bears in my room, what they were doing without me, of their private sorrows and desires. I became convinced that their black bead eyes had the power to see, and when I scratched their worn cotton heads, they could feel it.
These fantasies maintained longer than they perhaps should have.But the severity of life moving around me made it all the easier to dig myself deeper into a world that was only as severe as I made it, where time only moved when I allowed it to. As conversations between my parents began ending in arguments more frequently, when my mother began choking on a woman’s name I’d never heard before, and when words like affair, office, whore, and secretary, started sprouting up in quiet corners of the enormous house, I only wondered if my bears looked at or touched one another when I was gone.
This thought gave me a kind of pulsating fulfillment that for months drifted into my dreams and wake me with a feeling of beautiful disconnect from the room, and like my body had been squeezed over and over again by a warm, wet hand. One morning I woke up and changed my underwear before joining my family for breakfast. When I got to the table there was only my mother and sisters.
“Where is Dad? Where is Lonnie?” I asked.
There was a brief silence as they looked at eachother, before my mother said, “For Christ’s sake child, we’ve been over this. You’re father and I are divorced. He and your brother moved out months ago. Now please, don’t ask me again.”
And I never did.
The University of San Francisco School of Law's Public Interest Law Foundation presented its 2012 Public Interest Excellence Award to David Boies, third from left, at a recent auction and award ceremony. Congratulating Boies are Dean of the School of Law Jeffrey Brand, event co-chair Natasia de Silva, and event co-chair Catherine Crider, right. (Photo: Rick Gerharter)
When each of them remarried I didn't ask anything either. When each of them got divorced again a few years later I didn't ask anything. There was nothing I wanted to know, and anyway, I saw it as a good trade off. Mom and Dad, I am happily staying out of your business, avoiding it at all costs when you bring it swinging into every room of your respective houses, it is not unfair for me to expect that you will both do the same. Yet of course they didn't. Throughout high school my every move was scrutinized and inspected. In a strange way, it was their collective concern over me that brought them something like back together again, on a Monday afternoon when my father came bursting into my mother’s house.
I was sitting on the back porch looking out on the circular bay below, watching the ocean eat away at the golden strip of sand dune to the west. My friend Kylie was there with her cousin Jessica, who brought a handful of pills she’d taken from her house keeper’s purse. The pills were arranged on the deck table’s glass top like gems peeking up from the bottom of a stream. Kylie was telling us that her boyfriend’s uncle got drunk and cornered her at a barbeque the previous weekend when we heard the back door slide open. “What are you doing here”, I demanded to know.
“You’re mother said you’ve been skipping school,” my father said, and shuffled us all into the house, scooped up the pills and flushed them down the toilet.
Though it was the worst my parents had seen from me, they knew, I think, after the stresses of my siblings, that it wasn't that bad. I had had no drunken car wrecks, no abortions, no streaks of drug dealing or shoplifting. “My mother used to say, ‘at least none of my kids have been in jail.’ I wish I could say that too,” my father would mumble through his aged and sagging cheeks. And I’d say nothing out loud, but think to myself, that has nothing to do with me. Besides, he and my mother had brought these stresses on themselves. I can’t remember any of us kids asking to be born.
By the time I moved to San Francisco for college, I think my parents saw it as something like their exiting of a long tunnel. Parenthood over, they could now escape into the sunlight in the next phase of their adult lives. So by the time I moved into a beat up Victorian on the edge of the Pan Handle with eight men from school, their faces had changed again. The flesh on them had tightened and taken on new light and color, the summery effects of a year into a grown-up childhood.
My face had turned sallow and pale. The winter I spent in that house was one of the last rainy seasons I or anyone I know can remember touching the City. We were all so broke. PG&E turned the electricity off and nobody could figure out how to get it back on. The roof leaked, and after a few months we began longing for the darkness, inviting it into each of our makeshift bedrooms like it were a stray cat lurking from room to room with a handle of Popov between its teeth.
Rampant depression. Too many nights to count spend drunk and crying. “Do you realize,” I’d cut off Max, my roommate mid sentence to say, “Do you realize. I’m an art major, I say I want to be an artist, and I don’t make art. The only time I paint is the day before something is due, and half the time I don’t wake up for class the next day.”
He’d blow smoke from the cigarette we shared through his nose, and his eyes were so big, quiet and inviting to all my new struggles that they made me want to cry. I’d cry and sleep and wake up hungover, and call my mother from the pillow, without knowing how to ask her what I need to ask her, how does one go about being a grown woman? But her voice on the other end of the telephone was so weightless. Not only weightless, but resistant to the weight I tried hard to put on it. No matter how awful I tried to make things sound, she would only be reassuring. She never once broke. She never once cried for all the things I cried for.
I hung up the phone this one morning, resigned to fight off this black room feeling with nothing but the actions of a moving body. Today I will move, I will work. Today, I will.
I pulled my head off the pillow and held my eyes open as wide as I could, trying to reenact the motion of emerging from water, emerging from this musty, moldy, cold air hovering between the damp walls surrounding me. Out of this muddy flesh that clamped itself to me while I slept, despite my best efforts to say spring fresh and young.
