that I look like a man who has just been kicked in the old gwaggles. And one of the other mothers mentions these cramps to my mother one morning, and when I get home from school that day, my mother is waiting. And I have to discuss the ruse with her, which is all about desperate unhappiness, and I cringe, crying, the entire time.
I want to look and be like everybody else, but I feel so weird, so other. Everybody else wants to look like Jean Shrimpton or Cher, so I get my hair straightened and end up looking like a cross between Herb Alpert and the Shirelles.
Sixth grade is easier to take. Men are tearing down the building that contains the turntable in the railroad yard, the roundhouse where they fixed the locomotives, and they fill in the swamps where we used to raft, and build a Safeway, a ritzy hotel and a B of A. My parents march for civil rights. Our teachers show us Reefer Madness films, and we thoroughly believe the message—a mother walks in on her son smoking dope, and screams as if she had found him hanging from the rafters. Bad people, scabby and drooling, use drugs. So it is with a sense of horrified betrayal that I read an article by my father in which he describes an afternoon spent with his writer friends on a porch in Stinson Beach, drinking red jug wine and smoking marijuana. He has pulled the rug out from under me, and I march into the living room, holding the magazine, glare at my father who is reading a poem to my mother, and say slowly, “Daddy? You have brought shame upon this family.” And he howls.
There is always one problem or another in having a father who is a writer. My brother and I secretly believe he can’t hold down a job. Mady White has an uncle who “can’t hold down a job,” who stays at home all day (like our father) and paints toreadors and clowns on black velvet. I stand outside my father’s study after school and listen with despair as he types. I also listen with despair when my parents fight in their bedroom about things that usually stem from there not being enough money; in my bedroom next to theirs I have to lash myself to a tree and wait for the storm to pass.
The allowance he gives her for groceries never lasts the month, and it is only by hook and by crook that she keeps us fed and clothed. I see her meet me at the door one day after school, in fourth grade: she is holding one of my white Mary Janes, but the strap has been chewed off and the rest is pockmarked with the teeth of our mongrel dog, and my mother is actually begging me not to tell my father—she’s so stricken with guilt that you might have thought she had chewed up the shoe herself. She’s whispering, she’ll buy me another pair with next month’s grocery money, and I am so ashamed of her shame, and so afraid of her fear, that I cross my arms and glare.
The hypnotist coaches me, “Earlier, earlier,” and I look through a hundred migraines, the shame of migraines. Shame is where I live, shame and loss. I got migraines at birthday parties, I got one at the Nutcracker, one at the Grand National. I look through all those hours spent lying still in the dark pierced with white head pain, hallucinating. Once I got one at a movie theater with a family of Christian Scientists and I told my girlfriend, who told her mother. I thought they would take me home, but instead the mother whispered to me to rub my temples in a circular motion, and she showed me how to do it. I tried and I tried as the headache was building, expanding in concentric circles; the girlfriend and her mother both massaged their temples in circular motions along with me, all three of us staring at the screen like the migraine version of the monkey-see, monkey-do monkeys. But finally I had to get up and go into the bathroom and throw up, and then I lay on the floor with my face pressed against the cool tiles, and I kept scooting around on the floor because the tiles under my face would heat up the way pillows do. Then I remember them standing there in the doorway staring down at me, afraid, and that is all I remember. I was in second grade.
I can’t see anything else for a minute—and then I see myself at Girl Scout camp for the summer, when I was seven years old, with a marble-sized growth on my arm, a vaccination reaction, and all of us girls are splashing around happily, whooping it up, when all of a sudden the knobby growth on my arm pops off into the water. The girl beside me screams, and all the little girls head for the shore shrieking, as though someone has spotted a fin.
“Ferret them out, ferret them out.” I woke up from a dream at Mady White’s house in first grade, screaming for my father, a dream in which the streets were wall-to-wall with people, and airplanes were dropping us bundles of food. In real life there was a book on the population explosion on the hamper next to the toilet at our house. My parents had explained what the book was about, and I picked it up all the time, and I’d look at the headlines on the back cover, gasping. I was six years old. In the dream I couldn’t find my parents or my brother in the crowd and I screamed and screamed and woke up everyone in Mady’s family, including the new baby, who cried at the top of her lungs for an hour or so. In the morning everyone was tense and exhausted, especially Mady’s four-year-old asthmatic brother, and I sat there politely at the breakfast table, staring into a bowl of corn flakes, asking in a whisper for someone to please pass the milk.
It is getting hard to remember now. I see scenes of being caught by my parents in lies, or with stolen goods. I see myself with Lynnie in her basement on the day after Easter, doing one of our nudie revues, the dance of the veils—Arabian Nights—wearing only face veils and veil sarongs. We have drawn concentric circles around our nipples to represent belly dancers’ brassieres, and we tantalize the sultan—we whip off our sarongs, little Gypsy Rose Lees, naked as baby birds. Then we hear my uncle, Lynnie’s father, clear his throat. He is in the doorway beside our neighbor John—who goes to Cal and happens to be the man I want to marry—and they are both utterly flabbergasted. We scream and cup our hands over our ballpoint-pen brassieres, and both of us burst into tears. I study the moment, move on.
I think I must be five years old or so, and my brother comes into my room one night, anxious and sad. “They’re coming to take you away tonight,” he says.
“Who is?”
“Your real parents, your mother and father. The Negro.”
“No, no,” I cry. “Hide me! Let me sleep with you tonight!”
He shakes his head wearily. “They’ll only find you,” he says.
I am in Children’s Hospital, not yet four years old, standing in a crib in a ward with nine other children. It is morning and I am talking to my parents, and studying seven black stitches above my right eyebrow, where a cyst was removed while I slept. My parents are beaming with pride. I am feeling very grown-up and sassy, and report to my parents that one of the kids screamed all night, woke us all up, and made us all start crying.
“That was you,” says the nurse.
“No it wasn’t,” I say as if she is an idiot, or lying. And she says yes it was; she had been on duty. The world drops out from underneath me because suddenly I remember standing up in my crib, it is pitch dark and perfectly silent and I am completely disembodied and think I am in outer space, and I scream and scream for my parents. There is a rush of humiliation, a sickening aloneness as my parents try to mollify the agitated nurse.
I stay with this frame for a while. I haven’t thought of it in nearly thirty years. But I’m stuck, can’t go any earlier, and so return to the hospital.
“Are you thinking that you’re there?” asks the hypnotist. I nod. “Are your parents in the memory with you?” Yes. “All right then. We’re going to do a little visualization. I want the adult in you to enter the scene. The adult in you can be funny and kind, you said so before we started. Now go to your parents and thank them for raising you, and explain that you are old enough now to assume responsibility for the child.”
Even in the trance I am filled with derision. This is precisely the sort of thing that gives California a bad name. But I swallow my reservations and walk up to my parents. We do not hug. I stand there shuffling. They look concerned, kind. I am the same age now that they are in this moment. It is too painful to see my father. “Go on,” the hypnotist says.
“All right,” I say out loud. In the dreamy trance I stare at my feet and tell them I won’t need them anymore, that I am going to try to raise this child of theirs. I look up to see that they are nodding and it makes me feel shy and stupid and homesick. “Go to the kid now,” the hypnotist says. “Give