Falling Apart
It probably took a few months to disassemble the house on Shannon Road. There were the bedrooms I knew as my mother’s and aunts’ bedrooms since they were little girls and my grandparents’ bedroom with the stained glass window. There was the breakfast room off the patio with the round table where I’d spend hours drawing. There was the parlor room with the billard table and the upright Story & Clark piano, next to the large window looking out at the manicured expanse of grass in the backyard framed by a bramble of shrubs and birch trees. There was the dining room where we all gathered over meals, the tiny bathroom off the back hallway decorated in ornate wallpaper, and the other bathrooms in Spanish tile. I’d run my hand along the wrought iron staircase to the foyer that led to the living room, complete with my grandfather’s rocking chair and ottoman where he propped his feet up after work. Nana’s upholstered armchair sat in the corner where she liked to relax with a glass of wine and watch her BBC programs — all of these rooms would soon hold other stories of other people’s lives. And that’s the thing with houses, they know the whole story with all of the secrets, but they can’t tell you the entire epic tale.
My grandparents sold the house during their divorce, a decision that came as swiftly as my first period that June. I was thirteen turning fourteen. I felt as if I fell off my bike after careening down the steep hill in front of their driveway, only to run to the front door with my scraped knees all bloody and find the house empty. The family, as I knew it, gone. I had overheard “sold the house” when I learned that my grandparents were following through with the deal. They tried to rent it out while we lived in Arkansas, but it was trashed by the shady tenants who turned out to be drug dealers. “Horrid, mattresses on the floor, and paraphernalia,” Nana shuddered. It was like a bad dream repeating in my head, imagining the solid wood front door with the brass lion knocker opening up to reveal nothing but a barren entryway.
This emptiness echoed in my mind for days as I rode my beach cruiser down the sandy path near our new house. The rotating rubber tires upon sand made a hollow sound. My stomach knotted in hunger. And it was in those summer months when I began to notice the absence of what was.
The smallest fragment of my family left intact in our new house was my mother and my younger brother, hardly a consolation in the whole wreckage, definitely not ideal lifeboat partners. They couldn’t throw me back into the churning waters, but I’m sure my brother would have left me to drown if he could, or at least he entertained a few ways it could happen.
The move back to Los Angeles settled us into a 50s tract style home in Mar Vista. We left behind kudzu and humidity for palm trees and ocean breezes and unpacked what was left of our belongings from several moves. Each time, the downsizing, the getting rid of things, piles of clothing to give away, remnants of who we were, and new clothes for who I was becoming. I’d examine my face in the mirror, and outline my cheekbones with a blush brush, trace the outer line of my eyes with black kohl liner, swipe a slick of strawberry gloss on my lips. I wasn’t a child anymore, but I wasn’t yet an adult.
It was astonishing timing, the synchronicity of entering womanhood at the same moment when my entire family began to unravel. I was unaware of my placement in the whole story but didn’t yet know. My mother figure, Nana, the one who became both grandmother and mother, was absent at a time when I blossomed into a young woman. She was going through “the change” and was also abandoned, unexpectedly, although she knew her husband was a philanderer.
My bedroom was big enough to fit a bed positioned within corner windows overlooking the backyard and garage. It was summertime. A gardenia bush below my window filled the morning air with its sensuous perfume, and the night-blooming jasmine wafted in as I left the window ajar at night to sleep. My mother was already gone by the time I awoke, stepped into the shower, felt the cool tile under my feet, and water running down my tanned body. I went off on my bike most days to the Venice beachfront in search of a slice of pizza, and to flirt with the older teenage boy who worked at the pizza stand. He was Israeli, tall, dark-haired, sixteen. I thought he was cute enough to kiss on the beach once until my instincts told me better. He joked about things that didn’t make sense, his hands were sweaty as he tried to hold mine, and then he mentioned a girlfriend in Israel. My summer crush intrigue quickly soured.
A dapple of beach umbrellas, lifeguards, stationed in their towers with bright orange rafts fastened to the sailboat blue tower siding, and endless hot sand. Anything felt possible on a sunny day with the waves rolling into the shore. I rode a boogie board into the surf, sea salt in my mouth, soaking in every ray of the sun. The exhilaration of being alone among throngs of people sunbathing on colored towels, with their coolers and radios and bottles of Coppertone, was a newfound pleasure. When I was younger, the ocean current used to take me further down the shore until I’d burst into sheer panic, fearing I was lost. I’d scour the crowd with my heart racing, searching for my family.
During that time, I didn’t know where Nana went to stay during the divorce, possibly with one of my aunts in Manhattan. Our new house was quiet without the ruckus of family dinners. Since my mom was working in an office position until late, I microwaved whatever I found to eat in the freezer. The toaster oven fit two slices of a thawed onion bagel covered in a snowy layer of shredded Romano and Jarlsberg. The hiss of the melted cheese as it dripped on the bottom of the little toaster, and the ding when it turned off, fed my growing sense of independence. My mother’s leftover calamari in a styrofoam container, mistaken for onion rings, turned into inedible rubber after a zap in the microwave. My cooking attempts were generally made out of pantry findings, like a jar of artichoke hearts tossed with plain spaghetti, smashed cocktail olives upon stale toast, instant packets of brown sugar and cinnamon oatmeal swirled with a heavy pour of Mocha Mix.
Unfamiliar with my new surroundings, I took bike rides around the streets where I saw an older boy who lived around the corner. He was washing his Chevy Camaro, and being a fourteen-year-old girl, I rode by again to see if he was there before jaunting downhill. I was entering middle school, once again, as I had been skipped up a grade during our move to Arkansas and Tennessee. Still, I didn’t want to continue in the higher grades. A new school near the beach, a new house, it all sounded so nice, as if it were all going to be just fine.
I don’t really know the details of how my grandfather told Nana he was having an affair with another woman, but she handled it, as she did, with the sort of grace and the reserve that only a lady born to an upper class family from England can manage. She just didn’t fall apart. It was always a best not talk about it and keep your chin up way of handling things.
The only time I ever saw Nana completely lose it was a year earlier when she chucked the phone receiver at me because a friend of mine from school had called. The white phone receiver came flying through the kitchen like it was catapulted from a slingshot, springing back from where it was attached by its long cord on the wall mount. My aunt Denise, who witnessed the whole thing, shook her head and laughed it off casually, I guess Mommy started menopause, I dunno know what that all is about.
We had all moved from Los Angeles to Arkansas and then again to Memphis, Tennessee, and back to Los Angeles. A boomerang move, a slingshot. Shannon Road divided up in moving boxes, sectioned into categories in my mother’s angular Sharpie handwriting, “Pam’s bedroom” and “kitchen utensils” and “silver tea set” all thus taken to various appointed locations. Her writing was distinctly expressive of her personality, the serifs to disguise sans serif. Each letter attached yet unattached, leaning away.
My grandfather had a penchant for hoarding stuff in storage units, mainly his medical books and Physician’s Desk References, which I found so fascinating to read as a child. They were already long ago boxed up from the rest of the items in the house. Then the grandfather clock was carefully wrapped and shipped to my grandfather’s new home to enjoy with his new wife. As the ink dried on his divorce papers, he whisked the clock out of the house first thing.
I held this childlike notion that all grandfathers had grandfather clocks, as I associated him with the clock and its chime. Every now and then, he wound the clock to make sure all of the weights and pendulums were functioning. My grandfather was as towering as the clock itself, able to adjust the setting for its Westminster Chime to gong every midnight and noon. This timepiece set the stage for daily life at Shannon Road, as he did, and now that we moved, and the clock went with him, that era was over.
It was difficult for me to fathom our family was yet again broken apart by divorce. My parents were often arguing, separated, getting back together, arguing, and separated, and divorced. I should have some semblance of understanding that marriage could be complicated. But I simply could not believe that my grandparents were newly divorced. Nana moved into her own apartment on the Westside of Los Angeles.
They called kids “latch key kids” who walked home from school to an empty house. I didn’t see the problem with this. It was thrilling to open the front door with my house key and know that I had total dominion over the kitchen, living room. I’d sit for hours at the piano, playing fragments of what I knew, romantic arpeggios, dreamy treble trills into deep largo endings. I’d relish the moments when no one was home. It was fine until we moved after I graduated from elementary school, and moved again, and again. The small tremors were almost unnoticeable until the seismic jolt of divorces broke us apart.
I was about seven or eight when my father moved into a bachelor’s apartment in Santa Monica. He shared a place with a roommate named Steve, an art history teacher that kept to himself while we kids were around. My younger brother visited our dad more often, as I refused to go on many occasions. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see him, as I remember it, the two times I did visit, I was just left incredibly hungry for the duration. My dad wasn’t a cook unless it involved steak or burgers. Otherwise, he was good at fixing up some Eggo toaster waffles drenched in puddles of Aunt Jemima syrup and scrambled eggs doused with Lawry’s seasoning salt. One of my complaints was that it was uncomfortably cold sleeping on the couch with nothing but a tattered cotton throw as a blanket. The next day, I was poorly dressed in shorts and a tank top, unprepared for the blast of relentless cold desert winds. Dad had me tag along to Mojave to watch him take a flying lesson. I shivered outside of my dad’s locked Mercury Cougar, staring into the sky, as sharp wind whipped my long hair around. I eagerly attempted to spot my dad flying in a small Cessna. Her returned to the car, triumphant and a bit hopped up from his first flight. We didn’t eat dinner, nor did he have anything to snack on in his car but Red Vines licorice. As dad drove me back to my grandparents’ house on Shannon Road, I had come down with a fever.
Yet my dad wasn’t the type of guy to father a young girl who preferred books about Elizabethan history and glittery note cards with matching stickers. He once made a gallant effort by taking me to see the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures at the Getty Museum, then afterward to an epic sitar performance by Ravi Shankar. I nodded out in the incense-filled auditorium, lulled by mesmerizing ragas.
The mother I knew as my mother was even more emotionally distant and unavailable now that I was turning into a teenage woman. She seemed a pretty stranger of sorts, protected behind a visage of Clinique foundation and bronzer. Every morning she’d spend an hour with the blow dryer, round brushing her salon-perfect hair, freezing it into place with a final mist of Aqua Net. A dab of perfume at the nape of her slender neck. Chanel №5. Revlon Moon Drops lipstick in Moonlit Mauve. Honey Blush pressed powder by Clinique. Bronze Satin eyeshadow for her lids with Ivory Bisque for accenting the arch of her eyebrow. I’d carefully inspect the contents of her makeup drawer, giving into the temptation to apply iridescent powders in gold and reddish-pinks to my face, eyes, and lips.
I knew when she returned from work, she’d light a Benson & Hedges cigarette and leave it perched in the ashtray, as smoke curlicues spiraled into the air. As smoke, she was there and not there. Mother and not mother. It was an unspoken agreement for us both, to pretend to be mother and daughter. I didn’t quite know how I had agreed to this precarious position. But as I knew she had lost her first baby, my older brother, David, a bright-eyed little towheaded boy who was hauntingly alike to her own baby pictures, I didn’t ask. It wasn’t my nature to ask for her affection or to question the lack of it. I knew she felt sad when she saw his face in the photos. In my innocence, I wasn’t sure what losing a baby meant, as I couldn’t entirely comprehend the sorrow. I, therefore, could not imagine how children and babies could die. I knew that old people died, and they died because they were old. I had no concept of illness or disease or radiation poisoning.
David died in April 1970. He was one and a half years old. I was told he was born with cancer. It was likely from radiation poisoning, as doctors didn’t yet take precautions with x-rays in the late 1960s. My mom worked as an x-ray technician alongside her father, the radiologist. I had found the gold locket my mother kept, indented from his teething, and a few of his baby photos hidden away in a closet drawer. I also knew my mother couldn’t stand the smell of mashed bananas. It was all he could eat. There were few, if any, baby photos of me, born a month and a half later after David’s death.
Years before my grandparents’ divorce, I’d ride my bike up the narrow roads, swerving my bicycle tires around the asphalt cracks from earthquakes. Tarry lines made black veins along the street, as I climbed the twists and turns of each road up to the top of the hill. I found a spot where a cluster of sunflowers grew. It was an empty lot back then, with a view of Glendale. It was there that no one knew where I was until I’d head back down and rush into the house before dinner. I wondered why I longed to wander up to that space, the open lot with the view, the hope that grew in the middle of it where nothing else could. There were so many feelings inside of me, magical, inexplicable, and elusive as I tried to describe them in my handwritten journal. I just knew there was a reason why I looked out there as if a lost part of me could be found, as I gazed down from the outlook, the tall weeds shimmying, hay-like, the sunflower heads, cheerfully yellow. There must be someone I longed for, and I knew they were out there waiting for me, somewhere.
