Lisa and I waited patiently in my grandfather’s Mercedes in the parking lot of the Hostess outlet store on Gaffey Street in San Pedro. I’d opened the windows against the heat of the spring afternoon, and the sweet, yeasty smell of fresh Wonder Bread from the factory wafted through the open windows, setting both of our stomachs gurgling. It was after school, and I was hungry anyway. Finally, my grandfather pushed through the frosted glass door, his arms loaded with two large cardboard boxes of two hundred small cookies each. Lisa whined from the back and put her snout on my shoulder. Her wagging tail thumped against the seat. Oatmeal was her favorite.
We headed down Gaffey, then turned left on Channel Street, went under the 110 Freeway, then took John. S. Gibson Boulevard to the entrance of the American President Lines terminal, but instead of entering the yard, we veered off to the small dusty road that led to Donahue’s. We waved at Gray, APL’s security guard, as we passed. We drove by the red barge crane that was so seldom used that tall, green weeds grew on its wooden deck. We drove by the pack of rusty, black barges chained to their rusty metal pilings, all of them frosted with bird poop. Then came our boat at its end tie, then the rest of the marina, until we bounced into the dirt parking lot.
My grandfather carried the boxes of cookies, and I held Lisa’s leash. Lisa peed all over the sidewalk outside the marina office, the amber flood carving a path through the dust. While we waited, my grandfather sent a friendly wave to Chuck, who sat in the marina’s dark office.
“Sir Richard! Hey!” he called, but did not come out from behind the desk.
We walked down the ramp to the dock. A woman passed us wearing a belt with a Mercedes emblem as a buckle. I looked at it carefully as she passed, the emblem to my grandfather’s car having been broken off and stolen at the marina only the week before. Hers was gold plated; it wasn’t ours.
When we got on board the boat, I took Lisa and the cookies to the front cabin while my grandfather went upstairs. The doorknob to the cabin’s plywood door was a hole with a string pulled through and latched to a nail. Inside, there was a cheap twin bed, a couple of rickety chairs, and windows shaded with faded Ronald McDonald sheets. It was the only room so far that had windows, huge ones custom made to my grandfather’s specifications at Gandy Glass in Wilmington and delivered in special crates.
My grandfather had named our boat the Intrepid, not the Athena. Just after he’d bought her, he’d had her entire cabin torn down and the lower decks gutted. He paid a marine architect—a slight man with bad breath and a collection of pens in his shirt pocket—to design a new two-story cabin with a galley, dining salon, and living quarters on the main deck and a chartroom and pilothouse on the upper. He only came to dinner at our house once. When he wouldn’t make the cabin’s ceilings as high as my grandfather wanted them to be, my grandfather fired him, took the plans, and simply wrote new heights for the cabins. The result was a boat that looked something like a three-tiered wedding cake, whose tall superstructure would catch the wind like a wooden sail, making her difficult to maneuver or dock.
Upstairs, a saw whined, then grated against wood. I could hear the end piece fall to the floor above me. Then I heard my grandfather’s heavy steps, and the saw turned off.
My grandfather had hired Guillermo, a fifty-something Argentine carpenter with a perpetually bad back and delicate stomach, along with a revolving assortment of other laborers, to build the boat’s new cabin and interior. By now, he’d built the cabin’s main deck and was working on the top. Guillermo lived in his own tiny boat perched on top of a cradle in a small boatyard in Wilmington. He became a regular at dinner. Sometimes he brought his friend Mexican Jack, who also lived in the boatyard. Jack was in his seventies, tall and thin, with silver hair, dark brown skin, and eyes that always glinted with some kind of friendly mischief. Guillermo was his straight man, and together they’d keep me laughing with silly joke after joke. Jack worked with Guillermo on our boat sometimes, lifting heavy loads and moving swiftly from woodpile to saw to scrap heap. Sometimes they’d bring me gifts carefully chosen at the Goodwill or Pic ‘N’ Sav: multicolored sweaters, a used silver chain, a framed print of an Indian princess and her canoe. The Indian princess sat on my shelf for years, and I’d daydream myself into that lush, moonlit forest, piloting that sturdy dugout down the silent, silver stream.
Guillermo was a slow, careful worker, and a nervous one as well, inclined to ulcers and diarrhea when stressed. It was stressful to work for my grandfather, who visited the boat every week. If Guillermo had made enough progress to satisfy him, all would be well: We’d all sit in the front cabin, my grandfather and I drinking tea made on a hot plate and served in perpetually dirty mugs, Guillermo sipping mate from a silver straw stuck into a silver cup. We’d eat cookies, scooping them straight out of the box, and watch boats go by.
Just as often, however, something was wrong. As it was this day.
“What the fuck are you playing at?!” I heard my grandfather scream upstairs, and I knew there’d be no tea and cookies. My stomach tightened. Soon I heard footsteps ranging over the boat, my grandfather shouting as he took Guillermo on a tour, showing him what he hadn’t done or what he’d done wrong. Once in a while Guillermo would try to get a word in edgewise.
“But Mr. Richard,” I’d hear him start, his words drowned out by the stomping of my grandfather’s feet and more shouting.
Lisa lay on the floor, whining softly. She looked up at me with her brown eyes.
After a while, Jack knocked on the door to the cabin and sat down on a chair across from me. His skinny brown ankles stuck out between the hem of his dirty jeans and dusty, black orthopedic shoes. His eyes were wide behind his big glasses.
“I hate it when he gets like, this, you know?” he said. “No offense.”
“It’s okay,” I agreed. “I hate it too.”
“He shout at you like that?”
“Sometimes,” I shrugged. It wasn’t that often.
I felt ashamed of my grandfather, the way he raged at people for no reason. It made me nervous too; my stomach, a little like Guillermo’s, tied itself into knots and twists. Together, Jack and I waited for the storm to subside, watching the empty channel through a gap in the sheets. When it was over, my grandfather opened the door to the cabin and called in.
“Come on. We’re leaving.”
The way he screamed at the people who worked for him made no sense and neither did their loyalty to him, except that he was also a very generous employer. He supplemented paychecks with cash under the table, paid doctor and hospital bills, made interest-free loans, cooked dinner, and poured drinks. When somebody was sick or had to go home to visit family for extended stays, he held their job for them until they returned.
Guillermo would disappear for a week at a time after these episodes, then come back when he and Jack were running low on money. He’d apologize, my grandfather would apologize, and for a few weeks, all would be well. Work on the boat was very slow.
• • •
That evening, after dinner, I spread a picture of Bob Dylan over the coffee table and lined up my pencils: 3H, 2H, 2B, 6B. I didn’t really know the difference between them, but lining them up with the tortillon, art gum, kneaded eraser, and silver-tone pencil sharpener made me feel like a real artist—though I didn’t feel like a very good one at that particular moment. One of Bob Dylan’s nostrils was too big, and I was trying to erase it without ripping the newsprint or erasing any more of his nose than I had to. Our fourth-grade art teacher, Mrs. Mole, had shown us how to draw enlargements. You took a small photograph or a drawing and drew a grid of squares over it. Then you drew a grid with the same number of bigger squares on a much larger sheet of paper. You reproduced each small square in the larger square, drawing the same lines, filling in the same shadow. At the end, the squares combined to make a larger version of the picture you started out with. It was painstaking, required a sort of mindless focus, and took a very long time—the kind of meticulous art project I liked best. Drawing was my favorite thing to do after reading; when you drew, it was like you walled yourself off from the world around you while you created a better world all your own. But because procrastinating was maybe my third-favorite thing to do, I’d left too much of the project until the night before it was due, and my heart was beating a little too fast in my chest. What would happen if I didn’t finish? I always turned my homework in. Always. And now Bob Dylan’s nostril was too big.
Of the many black-and-white photographs she’d brought for us to pick from, I’d chosen a torn-out Life portrait of Bob Dylan. Beautiful, supercool Mrs. Mole, in her black denim skirt and Chucks, had nodded approvingly. “Dylaaan,” she’d said, in a way that suggested we shared some significant knowledge, which, in fact, we did not. I had no idea who Bob Dylan was.
For days, I’d colored each small square with an artist pencil, evening out the pencil strokes with the tortillon and carefully erasing stray marks. That night, as I worked on my picture, kneeling at the coffee table, Marilyn sat on the couch behind me, watching the news. My grandfather still sat at the dining room table behind us. Bowls containing the dregs of beef stew were strewn across the table, a half-eaten baguette sat in its own crumbs. Peter Jennings was busy telling us what was wrong with the world, and I’d just fixed the nose, when Marilyn jerked forward and threw up on the coffee table.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, softly, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
I’d never seen Marilyn sick like that before. “Are you okay? What’s the matter?” I asked.
“What’s going on?” my grandfather hollered from behind us.
I went to grab a glass of water for her and some towels to clean up. When I came back, he was telling her she only had herself to blame: “That’s what you get when you drink on an empty stomach.” She hung her head like a scolded child.
“Are you okay?” I asked again as I helped her clean up. I didn’t understand the worry I felt; I knew I shouldn’t be so scared.
“It’s okay, honey, I just don’t feel good.” She let me wipe her freckled legs, the spatters on the table.
“She drank too much,” my grandfather said, still seated at the table, spraddle-legged. “You drink too much on an empty stomach, then eat too much rich food, that’s what happens.”
“It wasn’t that, Richard,” Marilyn said with a sigh and got up to wash her face and brush her teeth.
For as long as I could remember, Marilyn had had a cocktail or two while making dinner. She usually drank rum and Cokes—a drink we called an “Engineer’s Special” after some naval engineer my grandfather knew. Sometimes she drank sherry, the Dry Sack my grandfather kept among several bottles on the small table by the door. The rum and the sherry were among the few that needed to be replaced regularly. The others were the Beefeater Gin and the Johnnie Walker Scotch that our across-the-street neighbors drank when they came to visit. I’d never thought twice about Engineer’s Specials or sherries; they were just a treat for the person who cooked.
That night, I was worried that Marilyn was sick, but I was mad at her too. The portrait was splattered with reddish-brown vomit; it had soaked through beneath a curl of Bob Dylan’s hair. I dabbed it with a wet towel and got most of it off, though the paper was now stained with brown dots. I stayed up late to finish, moving to the table in my room, shading squares as hastily as I dared. An argument began in the living room.
“We’ve got to get income up!” I heard my grandfather say. “We’re spending more than we’re taking in. Any fool can see that.”
“Well, maybe we should spend less money on the boat,” Marilyn offered.
“It’s not the fucking boat.”
“Well, what the hell is it then, Richard? We can’t magically make more money out of thin air.”
Soon there were sounds of shouting and cabinet doors slamming, chairs being shoved into the table, Marilyn stomping into the kitchen, my grandfather stomping after her. I hated hearing them fight.
Nothing really bad happened when my parents fought. No one was beaten; few things were broken. It always started as a rumble, usually at dinner. Perhaps Marilyn, who’d started working more and more on the business, had been delayed running errands and made dinner too late for my grandfather’s liking. Perhaps the food wasn’t prepared quite the way he thought it should be. And so the fight would start with a one-sided dissection of the meal gone wrong:
“Yes, you’ve got to be careful with fish. It gets overcooked so easily. Of course, this fish wasn’t so great to begin with. You’ve got to get fish at Bristol Farms, not Hughes or Ralphs. I’ve told you that.”
“Okay,” she’d say, looking down at her lap.
“Now, the potatoes are quite good. If you’d put just a touch less salt in them, I think they’d be very good indeed. The brussels sprouts, I’m not sure what you were thinking. You’ve overwhelmed them with all this crap.”
The brussels sprouts, as it happened, had been a hit with him two weeks before. They were smothered in tomatoes, onions, and bacon—even I liked them.
“I thought you liked them,” Marilyn would say, lifting her chin. “You liked them last time.”
“No, no. I’ve never eaten these before. The thing is, when you cook them this way, they get bitter.”
“I like them,” I’d pipe in.
“No one asked you.”
And things would progress from there to the store, the boat, money.
That night, I closed the door to my bedroom to muffle the voices and went into my closet. I’d put the step stool I’d used as a little girl to reach the sink into the far end of the closet for just such occasions. I sat on my stool in the dark, breathing in the smell of my clean clothes and Marilyn’s dry-cleaned coats and dresses in their plastic sleeves.
Lisa nosed her way into my bedroom and shoved her head into the closet, wagging her tail wanly. I got up and closed the bedroom door again, pushed aside some clothes to make room for her. Together we waited it out.
Dear God, I thought, please don’t let them get a divorce. I was scared of divorce the way I was scared of nuclear war, another Great Depression, the “big one” on the San Andreas Fault. I knew if they got divorced, I’d have to go to live with my grandfather and that Marilyn, unrelated to me by blood and not my legally adopted mother, would have no rights to see me. My grandfather had told me as much after one of their arguments.
“And I wouldn’t give her any, either,” he’d said. “If she leaves me, she loses you, as far as I’m concerned.”
That particular fight was a memory so hazy even then, as I sat in the closet at nine years old, I think it must have happened when I was much younger, before we started looking for boats. It might have been the summer I explored every inch of our house, narrating my adventures in pseudo-documentary style, like the National Geographic specials we watched on TV; the summer I’d climbed up the shelves of our pantry like the side of a mountain and found old, battered tins of Lapsang Souchong and Coleman Mustard Powder, mysterious artifacts of a time before Twinings tea bags and Grey Poupon in glass jars. It was the summer I’d first spotted Michele’s ashes in the garage, the summer I’d found Marilyn’s collection of bath salts and tiny, beautifully wrapped, rose-scented soaps piled beneath the sink—years of gifts from ESL students. And next to the bath salts, Marilyn’s diaphragm, nestled in a box that looked like a cosmetic case, which is why I’d opened it.
When I asked her what it was, she’d calmly explained that it stopped her from having babies. This made me profoundly sad because I’d wanted a little sister; I’d even asked her for one. Perhaps she saw my crestfallen look because, almost as an afterthought, she added, “Not with Daddy. With someone I wasn’t married to.”
That evening, she let me use the bath salts and little soaps. She sat on the closed toilet while I washed, patiently opening each one and letting me smell so I could pick the right scent.
The fight during that summer of exploration hadn’t been especially loud, and so I hadn’t heard what it was about. What was different was what happened the next day. The morning after, Marilyn had refused to get out of bed. My grandfather shooed me away when I knocked on her door. Around lunchtime, she left the house without taking a shower and without saying goodbye.
“Mommy’s gone for a drive,” he told me.
“Why?” Marilyn never just went for a drive.
“She’s had a nervous breakdown.”
A breakdown, I thought; she broke. Something had been too hard for her to bear, like the donkey and the straw. That was a breakdown.
“Women have them sometimes,” he explained.
I thought he meant a drive around the peninsula, something short, but I waited hours for her to come back. My grandfather was preoccupied, too busy to play or watch a movie. We ate TV dinners.
“She’ll either come back or she won’t,” he said when I asked. I think I must have panicked when I heard this, but I don’t remember reacting at all.
Finally, I lay on her bed in her quiet, clean room, and breathed in her smell from the sheets. I watched the sun set against her silver, bamboo-patterned wallpaper, making it shine orange and gold, then watched it fade into smoky shadow. I fell asleep.
She woke me in the dark, scooping me up and cradling me tightly against her chest.
“I thought you were gone,” I mumbled.
“Oh, honey,” she sighed into my shoulder and rubbed small circles on my back. “I wouldn’t leave you.”
Afterward, she seemed sad for days.
• • •
I turned in my picture of Bob Dylan the next morning. When Mrs. Mole gave it back to me, she circled the throw-up spots with her red pencil. Don’t drink or eat while you’re working on your art, she wrote in the margins, MESSY. I felt ashamed that Mrs. Mole thought I was a pig, and another shame that stopped me from explaining what had really happened.