SHARP NEEDLES
My mother, brother, and I moved from the cavernous old house on Doswell, surrounded by lilac bushes, into a brand new—but tiny—apartment in Berkeley. Mom gave the two small bedrooms upstairs to Doug and me and slept downstairs on the sofa. At last she had the modern apartment she’d always wanted. She decorated it with dispatch, choosing modern furniture with walnut veneers from Montgomery Ward. The carpet was pragmatically speckled black and white and didn’t show the dirt. My main memory of that carpet is of my brother taking a golf swing that tore loose a patch of it that flew across the room. Luckily Mom wasn’t home. I sewed it back on, and she was never the wiser.
There was a balcony over the carport that we never used, except for a little tree my mom bought to be our Christmas tree in the years to come. But the needles were so sharp you could hardly decorate it.
My bedroom was pale green, and this time I chose my own furniture. I got a white corner desk with matching chests of drawers on either side, also sheer curtains that flowed from light blue to moss green over a long slatted window that started just above the floor. My main memory of that window is of my brother murmuring, in a high falsetto, “I love you, Karl,” through the open slats when Karl, the teenage boy who lived in apartment one, was sweeping the sidewalk below. I’d hidden my diary in a box tacked to the back of a drawer, and somehow Doug had found it and discovered my secret crush.
The staircase to the second floor was slatted as well, a construction that always seemed flimsy and unsafe to me. Sometime during that first year in California my mom began to have recurrent nightmares—about a sinister intruder who would break into the apartment in the dead of night and creep up on her, intent on killing her in her bed. From my own bad dreams, I’d hear a thin, eerie, high-pitched wail for help—and start awake, terrified, myself, until I remembered what it was. The first few times it happened, I called, “Mom?” and she woke up. But soon my calling stopped working because she incorporated it into her dream. So I started going to the head of the stairs and snapping on the hall light, which lighted the downstairs too, since the steps were slatted. And that would wake her up. Eventually, however, she integrated the light into her dream too, and the only way I could wake her from her nightmare was to go downstairs and shake her.
As for me, I was having difficult nights of my own:
“I dreamed Mom had a baby that was so heavy I had trouble cradling it. I accidentally allowed its head to drop to one side, and after that it held its head crookedly, as though it were injured. Worried, I told her I wondered if it had broken something, but she seemed unconcerned. When blood started dripping from the baby’s nose, I became distraught. A moment later it died in my arms. My mother turned away, unperturbed, while I began to keen with despair.”
A block away lived my mom’s younger brother Bill, his wife Audrey, and their son Billy, a year older than my brother. Bill and Aud had married at ages eighteen and sixteen respectively, and at twenty-one Bill had contracted polio. (For the rest of his life he walked with a brace on one leg.) In the years that followed, Mom would spend much of her free time over at their place, forging a life-long friendship with Audrey, while Doug would find a companion in Billy, as well as our other male cousin, Nick. But I would never experience, with any of my California relatives, the emotional connection I’d hoped for. As for a stepfather, as far as I know, when the only man Mom ever dated after the move turned out to be married, she swore off men definitively.