A WEEDY SWIM

Oct 19, 2020

A WEEDY SWIM

Yesterday I went swimming at the little beach beyond the tunnel in Point Richmond—the first time I’ve swum in seven months. And I have to say, it felt like a fool’s errand when I set out. The day before, cars had been parked bumper to bumper alongside Miller-Knox Park for as far as I could see, so where was I going to plant my car? Besides that, the water was liable to be freezing in October, I fretted. Under my clothes, I wore an ugly swimsuit that after seven months of disuse still smelled of chlorine. Why would I wear something ugly? you ask. Well, here’s the thing: it’s indestructible. I bought it online—and though I was dismayed when I took it out of the package that it didn’t look anything like the picture, I felt obliged to wear it to get my money’s worth. Now, I’m accustomed to my swimsuits lasting about six months before they become baggy and faded to colorlessness. But four years have come and gone since then, and I’m finally resigned to the fact that this ugly suit of mine is never going to succumb to the ravages of chlorine —and I’ll be wearing it into my advanced old age.

Anyway, miracle of miracles, I did find a parking place near the path to the beach—but noticed, as I descended the steep embankment, an unpleasant stench wafting up from below. It was low tide, I saw—a great expanse of wet sand, littered with piles of seaweed, stretching far out into the bay. There were a handful of adults on the small crescent of dry sand and a dozen kids in the water, all of whom I gave a wide berth as I strode out towards the deeps—though I never got there. As far as I went the water never came up higher than my chest. The good news: it wasn’t any colder than Lake Anza or the Russian River; the bad news: the ground felt ickily squishy and spongy under my feet, and I had to fight my way through long tangles of seaweed—all of which made me nostalgic for my swims at Lake Anza, which has remained closed throughout the pandemic:

 

FREE

I didn’t know till I stepped out on the deck after 3:00 this afternoon whether the heat wave had ebbed. Nope. So I grabbed my swim gear and hustled out. When I got to Anza, I saw there were no lifeguards. Yay! I thought. The season’s officially over!

Sunday, when Ella and I arrived close to 5:00, both parking lots were full, and people were still arriving! “The sun is going to drop behind those eucalyptus trees on the ridge,” I told her, “and the whole left side of the beach will be in shade.” So we settled on our towels on the far right. As I reeled towards shore after my swim—water in my ears throws me off-balance so I can’t help staggering like a drunk—I saw that the sun and trees had neatly divided the beach in half; the dark side was now completely uninhabited, the bright side mobbed because its population had just doubled.

Today I swam under the rope of the first set of buoys, the second, the third—and then I was free. I can’t describe the rush I feel when I pass beyond those flimsy barriers and feel myself loosed into wildness. Two years ago, with no lifeguard to admonish me with his bullhorn, I promptly swam two lengths of the lake. Today I only swam the width, which was as much as I could manage. On the far side I approached a boulder—cautiously because my one fear is that my legs could get entangled in seaweed—and saw a turtle sunning himself. He let me swim right up to him. I guess a turtle’s reaction time is slow, because it took him maybe five seconds to rouse himself enough to high-dive it into the water. He poked up his head from time to time to see what I was up to, but thankfully chose to stay as clear of me as I did of him.

For a while I swam along the reeds, the cattails still sleek and small. (Oops, we just had a little earthquake…) As I was saying…I swam along the reeds on the far bank, where there were pockets of warm water, hoping to ward off hypothermia before my swim back and feeling deliciously comfortable and—perhaps, foolishly—safe in the water, despite my debility. The other day I noticed that I could actually stay afloat vertically, provided I kept air in my lungs. Well, sort of. Now that my behind has gotten so big, it does tend to rise to the surface and tip me forward, but other than that…

My body looked a greenish gold beneath the water. I know what Igor means about experiencing your body as integrated. Sometimes I float on my back to relax, with my elbows out and my fingers locked behind my head, as though I were lying in grass, looking up at the sky. This releases something in my neck and shoulders, and when I roll over to do the breaststroke, I can feel the water streaming over my body, caressing it like soft veils, as though every nerve cell in my skin just woke up, and for a while swimming feels utterly effortless.

I remember a day I felt so peaceful floating out on the lake that it felt OK to die right then and there, to simply dissolve back into nature—perhaps the way Frost felt when he stopped by the woods on a snowy evening and heard the Mystery calling him to itself.

SPLIT

SPLIT

Oct 14, 2020

SPLIT

I loved finding out from my mother that my first word was “light,” it seems so apt—because so much of my life has felt like a journey from the darkness into the light. And though it never occurred to me until now, even the names I chose for myself reflect this aspiration. “Sunny” was the nickname I chose for myself before I left Minnesota for California. And “Selena”—moon—was the alter ego I chose for myself in my writing many years before I knew what my first word was. When I came across this old drawing of a sun with a dark side, it seemed to me the perfect symbol of myself.

When Britte, Meryl, and I reached New York, we stayed with her psychologist friend Jim, and one morning while he and Meryl were still sleeping, as we quietly talked, Britte admitted to me that she’d been having an affair with another teacher at the high school but that she felt even more for me than she did for him. She loved me, she said. Realizing for the first time in my life that my love for someone was reciprocated worked an almost miraculous change in me. The way I conceptualized it at the time, I seemed to split cleanly into two disparate selves—a dark and a light self—and I found I could transition from one to the other. (I also began to pun, for the first time in my life, because I was no longer afraid of appearing foolish.)

This transition first happened one afternoon when we went into a little theater in a museum—I was smarting over something I thought I’d heard Britte say to Jim—and as I sat in the darkness I decided, with an act of will, to “halt” my insecurity, anger, and sense of grievance. The effort it took felt Herculean, like braking a locomotive with my bare hands, but I left the theater feeling light-hearted. It seems to me now that in that struggle, I finally gave myself over to trusting another human being.

JOKE

Oct 13, 2020

JOKE

By the time we crossed the Canadian border into Minnesota, intending to drive the rest of the way to the east coast through the states, I was completely recovered.

But as we sped south through the wilderness, I was suddenly seized by the notion that I wanted to visit one of the lakes I’d fished at with my father as a child. I no longer remembered their names, but began to comb the upper quarter of a Minnesota map, anyway, hoping that if I saw one of them again, I would. Land of 10,000 lakes—and they were all on that map, I concluded after a couple of hours. It was only when I finally threw it down in frustration, feeling utterly defeated, that Meryl picked it up. Of the first three names she reeled off, I recognized two!

Soon we were bouncing along a dirt road headed deep into the woods. Eventually we came to a fork in the road with a sign that pointed one way to Lake Owen, the other to Lake Radison. For no particular reason, at least none I can explain, I chose the left-hand road. I’d known all along that it was unlikely there would be a vacancy—fishermen reserved the cabins as early as February.

Incredibly, when we got to the lodge, the keeper announced they’d just had a cancellation—and pointed to a cabin on the hill. The first thing I did when I went inside was grab a bucket and trot down the hill toward the water pump. Walking toward me on the road was a red-haired man. As I approached, he stared at me without recognition. “Dad?” I said incredulously.

Back at the cabin with my pail of water, I found my knees wobbling and couldn’t get over the notion that Someone up there was laughing at us, enjoying a little joke at our expense. My father and I had arrived within five minutes of one another, had adjacent cabins—and this was the only weekend of the entire summer he had planned to be there. We were estranged at the time, not having exchanged letters in…well, I don’t remember how long.

He had two male friends with him—and we all spent the next couple of days getting acquainted—and reacquainted.

TURNING POINT

Oct 12, 2020

TURNING POINT

At the end of my sophomore year, Britte, Meryl, and I traveled across the country together. Our destination was New York, where they would see me off to Spain on a student ship, the Aurelia, for my junior year abroad. We went north to Seattle first, then headed east through Canada, where we camped until I came down with tonsillitis. Foolishly, I asked the doctor I saw to give me pills, not a shot, because I remembered from my childhood that the injections in my bottom were painful.

Day after day, as we traveled, my condition worsened. My fever soared and my throat became hugely swollen, until swallowing was so excruciating it brought tears to my eyes. I took the maximum dose of aspirin every four hours, but that only provided relief for an hour or two. Eventually I became so nauseous from all the aspirin that I couldn’t always keep it down. By evening I was so hysterical with pain, I asked Britte to take me to the nearest hospital. She called one and talked to a doctor, who said to get some aspirin with codeine, which was sold over the counter in Canada, and if my fever didn’t break by morning to bring me to the emergency room.

Instead of camping, we stayed in a motel, and Britte and I shared a double bed. All through a long night I woke up repeatedly, and every time I did, I found her awake, as though keeping vigil over me. She was so solicitous, so devoted that I felt cared for in a deeper way than I’d ever experienced before. By morning the penicillin had kicked in and my fever had broken.

VIRGIN?

Oct 11, 2020

VIRGIN?

I don’t know how many months passed before I went back to the student hospital, but I did—partly because I had a terrible secret to tell. I knew that therapy wasn’t going to help me unless I was prepared to be completely honest, yet the weight of my shame was so crushing it felt impossible to reveal this particular truth: that sometimes I lay beneath the flow of water from the tap during my bath. Many years later I would learn that I wasn’t the first to do this, but at the time, I thought it was a perversion.

Dr. Camarer, the psychiatrist I began seeing at the student hospital, was a middle-aged man with a rather fierce expression who listened intently and didn’t say much. When I finally made my excruciating confession, he suggested—quite matter-of-factly—that I should get some birth control before I went to Spain. In a single stroke he undid much of the anguish and conflict I’d been feeling about my sexuality.

Because from the time my mother first told me about sex—when my period started—she issued an absolute prohibition against sex before marriage. Much later she would tell me that she’d embraced a theory in psychology at the time which held that to help teenagers deal with their burgeoning libidos, parents should take a hard line against sex. But what she communicated to me was a reality in which females didn’t have sex drives, which made me feel grotesquely abnormal. And part of the reason she was so convincing was that she lied about herself. Actually, she kept on lying to me all the way into my middle age. From the beginning, she insisted that she was a virgin when she married my father. It was only after he told me the truth—decades later—that she finally owned up to it. What she’d been hiding all those years was the fact that she’d slept with her fiancé, Jimmy—the one who had all but left her at the altar—and she’d been date raped as well.

Why, oh why, I’ve often asked myself, do parents think the truth isn’t good enough? Because for the most part, the platitude is apt: The truth will set you free—and often, others as well.

Little did I know at the time that the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco and the start of the sexual revolution were right around the corner—and that my childhood best friend, Kathy, who’d grown up in a conservative family, would visit me in the Language Lab stoned—a new convert to psychedelics and free love.

DESOLATION

DESOLATION

Oct 10, 2020

DESOLATION

When I moved out of my mom’s house as a sophomore in college—and rented an apartment with Nikki and Rianne a block from campus—I became deeply depressed. I’d always imagined that when I was able leave home, I would feel liberated, but, as Toni tells me, this isn’t unusual for people from very dysfunctional families. Years later, I wrote about this time:

“I’m remembering the desperation that used to send me running out into the night in that first apartment—the loneliness of being barely adult and not ready, of needing there to be some place to go, and knowing, when I faced the street, there was no place. The sense of void was unendurable, and I walked or ran until the sharpness of my desolation was blunted…somehow.”

I also wrote about a dream I had at the time:

“I had a dream

And the grief and panic I felt in it were so awful

That I cried in my sleep

Waking before the anguish had faded from my mind

I knew with alarm that these feelings churned

Beneath my carefully constructed and maintained composure

Somewhere in my mind

Half exposed to the eye of my consciousness

Were overwhelming fear and sorrow

Responses of a child’s wounded heart”

“I went to the student hospital to ask to see a therapist, but when I heard a couple of staff members laughing and joking in the front office, I walked out. I suppose the darkness of what I was feeling inside and their levity made me feel too vulnerable in that moment.

“When I look for the sources of what I was experiencing, I still can’t gauge how much was ‘intrapsychic’—that is, related to my childhood—and how much was situational, beginning with the fact that my relationship with Britte had become a rollercoaster, it stirred up such deep and conflicted feelings in me. To me, she was a surrogate parent, friend, and mentor all it one. Early on, I’d sometimes wished she would hold me, even kiss me, but that’s as far as my longings went, though I wondered if this was because anything more was forbidden. What was most painful to me was being at social gatherings with her. She had a way of wooing other people wherever she went that would leave me feeling completely disregarded. In these situations I would lapse into silence, unable to utter a word I was so jealous and hurt. Later I would anguish over my behavior, convinced that she was going to dump me eventually because I was so screwed up. And then there was the fact that I still had turbulent feelings about Steve and couldn’t avoid him at the language lab, that my Spanish professor was called, in the Slate Supplement, ‘a vicious tyrant to be avoided at all cost,’ and that Nikki and Rianne, who both were in sexual relationships, were forming a deep bond and once again I felt excluded.

“By spring I was so depressed I felt like I’d died. I lost the capacity to feel anything positive so absolutely that I wasn’t able to experience even the faintest or most fleeting satisfaction in things I would normally have enjoyed—rocky road ice cream, a good movie or book, the company of a friend. Nothing, it seemed, could touch me. I remember getting drunk one night on gin and tonics when Britte was over (I threw up—the only time I ever did) and feeling like I was something that had been flayed, that there was nothing left of me but bloody pulp.”

MEXICO CITY

MEXICO CITY

Oct 5, 2020

MEXICO CITY

When the study program was over, two of my American roommates and I went to Mexico City:

“Dear Britte,

“Right now I’m lying down, there’s a girl I’ve never met in the opposite bed, no one’s up yet, and I’ve just discovered that my left eye is swollen half-way shut.

“I got back to Guadalajara from Mexico City yesterday morning by Pullman, and there were mariachis singing everywhere—a celebration for someone who was arriving, I suppose—and everyone was laughing and hugging each other. It was beautiful!

“Later that evening on a dark, crowded bus, some creep stuck his hand in my purse and lifted my wallet. I felt something and jerked away, thinking that whoever it was hadn’t succeeded in getting into my purse. But no, the dastardly deed had already been done. Later that night Jose made arrangements with Dona Veva, a friend of his family, for me to stay with her. (Carmen was going to charge me twice as much to stay on with her, which still smarts.) Anyway, that’s where I am now.

“Ay! There’s so much to tell. I feel like faces and experiences are beginning to blur as my mind gets more and more crowded. Patty, her dad, April, and I had a wonderful trip to Mexico City. We traveled about nine hours each day, but the countryside was beautiful and we stopped in many small towns to wander through the markets. After arriving in Mexico City in the rain, April and I set off to find La Casa de la Proteccion de la Joven. The woman who was supposed to introduce us to the nuns there wasn’t at home, so we just prayed that they would accept us. And they did.

“There were some hundred girls there who worked away from home or had problems with their families or were orphans. The place had a tennis court and a swimming pool (which April and I couldn’t use because we hadn’t had a physical). It was cheap—about $2 a day, room and board. And the nuns were gracious and even affectionate towards us. Lo malo era…well, there were four malos. The location—the cab drivers meandered around for hours trying to find Calle Pople. The curfew—we had to be in at 9:30 every night. Obligatory mass—a nun came through the halls, ringing the loudest, most ghastly bell at 6:30 on Friday morning! And last, but not least, the regulation of meal times. When April and I didn’t make it home in time for cena one night, Silvia, my roommate, smuggled some bread and fruit to our room for us to eat later.”

The last paragraph of the letter, which I won’t include, was about meeting Salvador de la Mora, the man Britte had been so taken with the previous summer. One evening April went out with him alone. The next morning at breakfast she told me that he’d really gone after her—her words—the night before and she’d had to fight him off.

MY FIRST BOYFRIEND

MY FIRST BOYFRIEND

Oct 3, 2020

MY FIRST BOYFRIEND

I was the first American to arrive at the senora’s, but shortly three more girls joined me. I wrote:

“Dear Linda,

“This afternoon nothing’s going on for a change. My American roommates and I have been going like mad—to the movies, shopping, to dinner. Last weekend the four of us went on our own to a little resort town, Manzanillo, about six hours away from Guadalajara. We stayed in a big old run-down hotel with peeling paint and rickety beds that was once a really posh place. We wiled away the hours sunbathing on the beach, drinking pina coladas that waiters serve you in pineapples, and floating in inner tubes. I got scared when I got too near some huge rocks jutting out of the ocean and the current started to carry me out, but except for that I don’t think I’ve ever felt so peaceful in my life.

“I’ve missed a couple of days of class—dysentery. Actually, I was sick for a week and a half, but it wasn’t really bad until the last couple of days. Jose had me taking three kinds of medicine for “turista” at once. Other than that, I’ve been having a great time—I’m just awfully tired today. Jose doesn’t get off work at the hospital till between 8:30 and 10:00 every night, so wherever we go, we get a late start. This weekend we went boating. He’s promised to take me to a town in the mountains that’s supposed to be beautiful and to the seashore.

“Meanwhile Carmen can’t understand why he’s interested in me—she thinks it’s because I’m giving him something Mexican girls won’t. And she’s right. We have been doing some necking, even a little petting. It bugs me, though, that he doesn’t like my freckles; he even suggested I buy some make-up to put on my arms to cover them up! One thing that makes me sad is that he calls himself ‘feo’—he thinks he’s ugly because he’s dark-skinned and looks Indian. The truth is he’s nice-looking (even if he is a little paunchy around the middle). Down here, the more Caucasian you look, the more attractive you’re considered and the more status you have. His beautiful sister Cristina thinks she’s lucky to have a fair-skinned boyfriend, even though he isn’t half as good-looking as she is.

“Another eye-opener that happened when I first arrived—Carmen took me to a sort of shantytown to find Chulo, a young woman she hires as a maid from time to time. That night, there were Carmen, who’s a wealthy widow—her husband owned a plastics factory—and Chulo, her maid, kneeling at the foot of her bed, praying together. Lovely!

“Well, I’m starting to hear sounds of people getting up and around, so I guess siesta is over.”

GUADALAHARA

GUADALAHARA

Sep 29, 2020

GUADALAHARA

The summer after my freshman year of college, I went on a study program to Mexico. I’m including the photo above, remembering this was one of the dresses I packed in my suitcase.

“Dear Britte,

“Hola! I’m sitting here on my bed again because it’s siesta time—a welcome relief because I get so exhausted trying to speak Spanish, trying to understand, and blundering through a million new situations. The first afternoon and night here I slept (calculate, calculate) eighteen hours!

“Benita, who works with my mom, and her husband drove me to Mexicali, where we all boarded the bus for Guadalajara. The air conditioning conked out, the bus broke down in the middle of the night, I hardly slept in two days, and my period started. Oh, it was a delightful trip.

“I’m living with a widow, Carmen, who’s terribly gracious and concerned and kind. She putters around the house, whistling and singing, but she tries a little too hard—I mean, it bothers me because I don’t want to be a burden to her. She’s never had Americans in her house before, and she’s so anxious to please. Her daughter Lolita lives downstairs—she’s married and has four little kids, though she’s only twenty-three. She has to spend all day in bed because she’s pregnant again and could lose the baby if she’s up and around. Then there are a couple of maids and millions of relatives who call or visit all day long. Something that amuses me is all the yelling; Lolita is always calling, ‘Mama! Mama!’ from downstairs, and Mama is hollering something back, and the kids are crying, and Lolita is scolding, ‘Callate, nino!’

“Yesterday one of Carmen’s nephews, Jose, came over; he’s an intern, young and unmarried—and of course there I was alone, having to converse with him. By the way, it isn’t talking that‘s so hard. If something pops into my mind, I make myself do a rapid hurdle over my inhibition and just blurt it out. Even then I don’t talk much, but the problem is understanding. It’s a trial to deal with each new acquaintance because at first they refuse to slow down, and I have to say, ‘No comprendo, no comprendo’ till I’m blue in the face. If they talk at normal speed, 99% of the time I am completely lost! Anyway, he told me he had seventy to eighty cousins. That’s what I mean about a million relatives—his mother, Carmen’s sister, had seventeen children, but three died.

“In the two days I’ve been here, in spite of the fact I’ve been sleeping so much, I’ve been to the market, to dinner with all the older generation, and to a movie—that was particularly strange. Carmen and I went with Cristina, Jose’s nineteen-year-old sister, and her fiance, and my God, the two of them were so constrained and formal with each other! Cristina is exquisite, with a funny high-pitched voice. She is very shy with me, which hardly anyone else is, but demonstrative—she warmly took my hand to say goodbye to me. Apparently she’s gone with this guy for a year, but the most they can do is hold hands, since they’re always chaperoned. One time she was biting her fingernail and he took her hand away from her mouth—that was the most intimate gesture I saw between them.

“Well, the house is stirring again, so I’ll sign off!”

UNSOPHISICATED

UNSOPHISICATED

Sep 22, 2020

UNSOPHISICATED

“Now, suppose a mind of the latter of our two classes, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who take its facts “hard;” suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the craving for communion, and yet to realize how desperately difficult it is to construe the scientific order of nature either theologically or poetically—and what result can there be but inner discord and contradiction? Now, this inner discord (merely as discord) can be relieved in either of two ways: The longing to read the facts religiously may cease, and leave the bare facts by themselves; or supplementary facts may be discovered or believed in, which permit the religious reading to go on. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience

In English 1B at Cal, one of our first assignments was to write a paper on Hamlet answering the question, “Does he change in the course of the play?” My instructor, Mrs. Griffith, was impressed enough with my brief essay that she offered to suspend all my other assignments for the semester to give me the chance to develop it.

Maybe I became as engrossed in the project as I did because I identified with Hamlet’s struggle. Eventually it took over my imagination to such an extent I would leap out of bed with an inspiration after just having turned out the lights—and start pounding away on my typewriter—or stumble to my desk in the middle of the night. Sometimes I got so excited I found myself sitting, not in my chair but perched atop the back of it, hunching over the keys.

In my paper I described how Hamlet starts out by feeling “put upon, confounded by forces outside himself, by ‘fate,’” at the same time believing that the most courageous defy her. “’And blest are those whose blood and judgement are so well commedled that they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger to sound what stop she please.’”

But by the end of the play, I argue, he has come to believe in a Grand Design of which he is a part—he has, in fact, found faith. “On his return from England, Hamlet relates to Horatio how, driven by strange anxiety and foreboding, he sought out the commission of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz and found it to be his death warrant.”

“’Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well

When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.’ (V, ii)

“Because he was carrying his father’ s signet ring, Hamlet was then able to draw up another commission ordering them to be executed. ‘Even in that was heaven’s ordinant,’ he says. He is now convinced of a directing force, a supreme influence, which he chooses to call heaven, that guides the universe. He is not “subject to” natural law but its expression. His will cannot work in opposition to Divine Plan, because Divine Plan includes his will and all else. He has come to believe that there is ‘Providence in the fall of a sparrow.’”

As the semester drew to a close, Mrs. Griffith, apparently beginning to doubt that I was really working on my essay—since I didn’t have anything ready to show her—changed her mind and directed me to start doing the weekly assignments again.

I finished my paper a few days before the individual oral final each student had to take in her office. After my oral test, she opened her grade book and pointed out my grade. “I’m giving you the only A+ I’ve given in ten years of teaching,” she said quietly. “I know it won’t be reflected on your report card, but I wanted you to know.”  Then she called my essay “a beautiful, beautiful paper,” saying parts of it were brilliant, and told me she’d tried to enter it in the freshman writing contest—but the deadline had already passed. She suggested I give some thought to becoming a writer.

I sent my paper proudly off to my father, hoping that at last I’d done something worthy of his respect, but he dismissed it contemptuously in a telephone call, saying in so many words that I was too intellectually and emotionally unsophisticated to appreciate the complexities of Hamlet’s state of mind.