Chapter 24

DURING SCHOOL VACATIONS WE often drive to Palm Springs and stay at a place called The White Sun Guest Ranch. Jodi loves it because she likes riding and because she has an enormous crush on Ed, the stable manager—never mind that he’s almost seventy-five years old. My riding days end abruptly there after “Cochise” runs away with me, charging down some very steep dunes to get back to the stables. After this happens twice, I am too afraid to go again. Instead, I sit by the pool with my dad.

We talk or read out there, and he gives me change to buy him Cokes and myself chocolate drinks. My sister is off riding all afternoon, and my mother, golfing.

Sometimes we go with family friends, the Arlens. Liz Arlen and I are good friends, and her older brother Mike is a year younger than Jodi. Hal is a psychiatrist, but we don’t know him in that capacity. Hal and Mary and my parents spend a lot of time together. They play cards, go to social events, movies, dinners, and parties. Knowing my dad’s fixation with the weather, Hal buys him a small weather radio that does nothing but give updated forecasts. This is years before there is such a thing as a weather channel. My dad lies out in the sun, listening, as this tiny, tinny radio announces the temperature, the wind speed, and makes promises of sunlight or storms.

On one trip to the desert, we pass the Arlens on the freeway and Mary throws dozens of candy bars into our car. I remember our hands reaching out the windows and catching all but a few that scatter on the road behind.

It is not, though, the actual vacations that I recall as vividly as the time spent getting there and back. It is the hours in the car, sitting behind my father and watching as he drives. His arm stretched out across the seat, my mother beside him, and my sister and I in the back, as far away from each other as possible, like typical siblings. The breeze from the half-open window blows through my father’s hair. I notice there are a few streaks of gray, but I don’t tell him that.

He always listens to the radio, mostly to baseball games, and he slaps his open palm on the steering wheel when some exciting play is announced. It startles my mother, and she jumps a little and shakes her head. She is not a big sports fan. That’s an expression my dad uses a lot. He calls people “sports fan.” “Hello, sports fan!” “Good morning, sports fan.” “How you doing there, sports fan?” This does not amuse my mother, but it does me. I am a good audience for my father. Even in my teens I think he is a riot.

Almost without fail, when we drive through the desert, a strong wind kicks up the sand. My dad has a thing about cars, so I know this disturbs him; he worries about the car’s finish.

There are three items on which my dad splurges: (1) the paddle tennis court, (2) two boats, and (3) cars. The first boat he purchases, unbeknownst to my mother, is a thirty-foot Chris-Craft he names The Carolyn I, after her. He also has mats, pillows, and a boat bag initialed with her name. After that, how can she resist? The Carolyn I is eventually replaced with a thirty-six-foot Chris-Craft, The Carolyn II. My mother loves the boat trips they take every summer through the Finger Lakes to the Thousand Islands, my dad at the helm, shirtless and tan, my mother in a hat and huge Jackie Onassis sunglasses.

One year the boat is damaged while going through the locks and is taken to Hibiscus Harbor for repairs. After my parents pick it up, my dad shifts into reverse and instead it goes forward onto the shore. The mechanic had inadvertently put the props on backward.

My dad loves cars. He has a rebuilt Auburn Speedster. After that, a black Excalibur. Every time the horn is pushed, it blares “The Colonel Bogey March.” My mother refuses to ride in it. She thinks it’s garish and hideous with its exhaust pipes hanging out on either side. She prefers “sensible” practical cars.

Sometimes my dad picks me up at school in this car, and one Saturday morning he drives my friends and me, all piled in the back, around the neighborhood.

Once, driving home from the studio with the top down, my dad is listening to big band music. He tells me that when he stops at a light, he is completely immersed in the music, “playing” select instruments, holding midair his imaginary horn and trombone and tapping the “drum” on the seat beside him. He looks over at the car beside him where a woman sits very still, watching him, unsmiling, like he has clearly lost his mind.

 

 

My dad smokes constantly, even on these relatively short drives back from the desert. His smoking, combined with my mother’s, arouses ardent complaints from my sister and me as we madly wave away the smoke in the backseat, shouting in unison, “Put the cigarettes out! It stinks back here! We can’t breathe!” and often we launch into some dramatic coughing spell.

They open their windows wider, but it doesn’t really help. The noise drowns out the radio, and my dad has to turn it up louder to hear the sports announcer. Whoever is on third has made a run for it; my father bangs his hand on the steering wheel again, my mother jumps, and the four of us head home on the Santa Monica Freeway.