It is 1977 and we are moving to California. My mother drives my brothers and me across the country in our VW bus, pulling out cardboard boxes of romaine lettuce, cucumbers, and celery; bags of raw almonds; and her tire-size wheel of raw, unsalted cheese from the back of the van to juice and blend all our meals at each motel stop, before packing everything up again the next morning when it’s time to get back on the road.
For the summer, while my parents look for houses, we live on Sunset Boulevard, in hotel apartments not far from the new health food store my mother has found called Erewhon, which, Greg points out, is almost nowhere spelled backward. Bernadette Peters, the actress, lives across the lawn in the same complex that used to house movie stars in the old days of the Hollywood studio system. I see her sunbathing every day by the pool in a white bikini. I tell myself that if someone famous likes it enough to live here, we should like it, too. But my parents are fighting more than ever, and in the small space—my brothers and I are sleeping on a futon in the small living room—it’s impossible to get away. I walk to the black wrought-iron gate at the bottom of the complex and look out over West LA. The apartments are perched on a hill, and I can see for miles and miles, all the way until the sprawl hits a hazy horizon. The seemingly endless stretch of houses and buildings and streets extending as far as the eye can see reminds me the world is vast and how far I am from New York. My friends, my life there has, seemingly overnight, become a memory. I try not to think about the fact that, come fall, my friends at Dalton will have their senior year without me or that it’s July and Francesca is in Point Lookout right this moment, going to the beach every day, seeing Gilly and Pat, that life is going on in the places I love most, for everyone but me.
* * *
It’s the beginning of September, and, at our mother’s bright encouragement, we have signed up for surfing, which counts as PE at our new California high school, Beverly Hills High. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 8:00 A.M., we ride the school bus to Santa Monica. Whatever we imagined of California beaches when we were still in New York, this isn’t it. Mornings on the beach in Santa Monica, it turns out, are freezing and foggy and cold. The sky hangs low and gray; the sea is thick and dark and foamy. Though my brothers manage, I will never, the entire semester, find a way to stand on the board. All surfing class in the morning does for me is ensure my skin feels slick with salt and my hair dries flat against my forehead for the rest of the day. My mother drives Braddy to middle school, so, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, my brothers and I ride bikes to BHHS. As most mornings are foggy inland, too, riding my bike, which I have named Red Flame, in the damp air ensures my hair is flat against my forehead even on the days that don’t begin on a cold beach. Whatever confidence I had found in Point Lookout has quickly vanished. These kids drive BMWs and Mercedes to school, and I’m a senior, riding a three-speed that I pretend is a horse, wearing clothes that are stuck to my body with sweat or salt by the time I get to school. My brothers and I bring our packed blended salads in lunch boxes every day and meet in the halls to eat them. My brothers are tall and tan and curly-haired and blond and the girls flock. I am cooler, by association, than I would be otherwise, but I feel intimidated by all the easy, slinky West LA beauty around me. Unlike at Dalton, at Beverly Hills High, my brothers and I don’t stand out in any way. We are in a show-business town that is unimpressed by show-business offspring, and no one notices our diet. But I’m in culture shock. There are names for groups of kids I have no reference for: Surfers, Jewish American Princesses, Stoners. There were so many Jewish kids in my New York high school, no one thought to call anyone else a princess or even a Jew. There were no surfers, and smoking pot was something almost all the self-proclaimed intellectual private school kids around me did. This is also the year the last Shah of Iran is deposed, and a third of the school is suddenly Iranian. The marble statues in front of the mansions on Sunset Boulevard, one of them belonging to the shah himself, have their pubic hair painted in black. Our new house on North Roxbury Drive sits across the street from Lucille Ball’s and a few doors down from Jimmy Stewart’s. Tour buses drive by every fifteen minutes. My brothers play a game with the buses, donning sunglasses and pretending to duck behind our front hedge as a bus rolls by, which they say causes the sightseers inside to sit up and strain to get a better look at what they believe are reclusive celebrities. My mother sits in the sun on the stucco deck off my new bedroom with peroxide combed into her hair, which is gradually tinting blond. She constructs an eight-foot-high mail-order aluminum pyramid in my closet, which she aligns to the east and sits under to meditate. She reads Aldous Huxley’s Vedantic teachings and Carlos Castaneda’s journals about his apprenticeship under a Yaqui Indian shaman. She tells me if she places an apple under a properly aligned pyramid, the apple will never rot. My father is tanned and wears tieless pastel-colored shirts with a few buttons unbuttoned and rubber-soled leisure shoes. Instead of a briefcase, he carries a soft leather bag slung across his shoulder. He acquiesces to blended salads and eats his Program meals at home. Our mother treats him, at least when things are quiet, like a work still in progress, encouraging him with pats on the head and kisses on the cheek when she brings him his bowl. But once, when I am hanging out with him on a Sunday on a drive, he stops at In-N-Out Burger for a hamburger.
“Want one?”
I say no.
“Don’t tell your mother,” he growls as he wolfs it down.
A month into school, my mother tells me she opened the door to my father’s office on the Burbank Studios lot, where she had stopped by to say hello, to find my father hugging an associate, a much younger female assistant.
“They were embracing,” she says. “They pulled apart quickly when I walked in.”
If I have any reaction to this news, I can’t find it. Nothing feels the same in California, anyway, though I try out for softball and make the team. During practices I crouch in a ready stance by the mini oil rigs that pump away ceaselessly in left field, cradle my mitt, and wipe away tears.
There is another social category at BHHS—Swimmer—and the captain of the team, Mike Pullman, has been watching my softball games. He has an on-again, off-again girlfriend, but he high-fives me after my games and calls me Brown Eyes, though my eyes are hazel. One night he asks me on a date, my first. In the dark, we climb up over the twelve-foot-high chain-link fence surrounding the Beverly Hills Country Club golf course, half a mile from my house, and drop down onto the grass, still wet from the sprinklers. He spreads a blanket and opens a bottle of wine he produced from under his sweatshirt. He leans me back on the blanket and kisses me. He has broad shoulders, a convex back, and no butt to speak of. He’s nice, but I can’t find anything about him that sticks to me in any important way.
After the date, when he drops me off at home and drives away, my mother says, “You don’t need a boyfriend.”
Having a boyfriend sounds like a chore when she puts it that way. I can also hear her real message: In the quest for purity, boyfriends get in the way.
I can still feel his kiss on my lips, warm and wet, but neither it nor he are worth fighting for.
* * *
My father is making a television series about a Native American tribe, the fictional Tales of the Nunundaga, filming in Arizona. Like the old days, we get to visit the set, for me a reprieve from the heavy ache of homesickness, and a reprieve from this strange place we have landed in. In Beverly Hills the smell of honeysuckle and orange blossoms hangs thick in the air. I would have never thought that sweet and unhappy could go together. My mother has come upon turquoise in Arizona and now wears it in thick bracelets on her wrists, in large decorative pieces hanging heavily on her neck. She wears blue jeans, clogs. She says turquoise has healing powers. She spends time on this set, unlike my father’s other movie sets. She tells me she feels a kinship with the Native Americans, who were forced from their lands, and reminds me that she was forced from her own land, her childhood farm, by the United States government. On the set, Dick Lundeen, the wrangler, as per my father’s request, allows me to ride some of the horses that are being used in the filming. They are tricked out with Native American bridles and saddle blankets, no saddles, and when he gives me a leg up, he tells my father that I have a good seat. I am given carte blanche to ride any horse I want wherever I want. I choose a big half-thoroughbred paint named Lizard, and he and I wander the scrub, over hills and into canyons, no limits. When I return, my mother is sitting in my father’s director’s chair, chatting with the makeup ladies about the power of vortices, the energy forces that the Native Americans believed swirled in special places on the earth. Tucson was one of them.
For our first Thanksgiving in California, my mother invites Dr. Cursio to our Beverly Hills house. He is seeing clients, thanks to her, in West LA.
“Dr. Cursio is making us a special Thanksgiving dinner!” She is alight with joy.
He cooks as my mother flits around, cutting and chopping as he instructs. She is laughing, giddy, light as a feather. Dr. Cursio shows how we can put vegetables on a platter and bake them, our first-ever veggie roast, which is a wonder to us. We can eat vegetables that aren’t steamed? That are crispy on the outside and tender on the inside? He makes a soup with a light broth and large pieces of Swiss chard floating in it. He mashes yams and bakes russet potatoes. When we sit down around the table, my plate is full and everything tastes good, though I still miss salt. I try to shake the sense that the meal feels like a series of side dishes. I curse the label of the holiday. I’d probably be happy eating this food if it weren’t for the fact that what we’re supposed to be eating is turkey.
* * *
My father has invited me to go with him to the Beverly Hills Hilton for the Golden Globe Awards. Raid on Entebbe has been nominated. As we arrive and walk down the red carpet, it’s like the old days, when just by being my father’s daughter, I felt like a star. Inside, where the tables are set around the stage, we are surrounded by real stars. Richard Burton, Richard Dreyfuss, Vanessa Redgrave, Sally Field, Henry Winkler, Woody Allen, Carol Burnett. When my father’s category, Best Motion Picture Made for Television, is read, I freeze. Then Raid on Entebbe is announced, and around us, everyone claps for my father as he takes the stage.
The next day my father is in the backyard with British stage and film director Tony Page and Tony’s best friend, classical actress Rachel Roberts. I feel the enormity of having these gods descend to our patio. My father is happy and awake and energized. He is doing the jitterbug now on the outdoor tile. He grabs Tony’s elbow and pulls him over, twists his hand, forcing the gangly director to join him.
“Sir Tony,” my father sings as they soft-shoe. Buckingham Palace conferred knighthood last month.
Rachel Roberts is perched on a stool, drinking water with a slice of lime. Our mother fills my brothers and me in: Rachel and fellow stage legend Rex Harrison can’t live with each other, can’t live without each other, though they’ve been trying some variation of one or the other for four decades. Rex, my mother says, brings out the alcoholic in Rachel and vice versa. She is on the wagon now, hoping to stay there.
“Ra-chel,” Tony calls to her, drawing out the first syllable and reaching for her with his long arm. She clasps his hand for a moment, then lets go. His caramel-smooth Oxford British accent makes the angular slant of his narrow shoulders, his lisp, his balding head beautiful. He sits on our sun-bleached redwood lounge chair, one giraffe-long leg over the armrest. His shoes, which are soft and furry and have no backs, look like slippers.
Later that month, my mother will take in Rachel Roberts. She will feed her blended salads and talk about cleansing and about God, and about how addiction is caused by a clogged liver. Rachel Roberts will stay in my room and follow the Program for two weeks. After that she will leave her tortoiseshell Siamese, Daisy Mae, to go home and swallow a fatal number of sleeping pills. We keep the cat.
* * *
“I should be able to have a drink to unwind at night, Carol. Goddamn it. It relaxes me. It doesn’t hurt anything.” My father’s voice is loud. I’m upstairs in my room and I can hear him clearly, but he’s not screaming or out of control. He’s trying to make a point. “One drink at night doesn’t hurt anyone.”
When I come downstairs, he has a glass filled with amber-colored liquid in his hand. He’s sitting in the wicker chaise with it, watching the news.
My mother is at the sink washing the juicer for the night. Clara, our housekeeper, who arrives each morning with her cat-size poodle, Tiny, and leaves each evening, has gone home.
“Alcohol is a poison; it poisons the body and the liver. It’s toxic.” Her lips are parchment white as she hisses this so my father can’t hear her. She is as angry as I’ve ever seen her. “If he wants to poison himself, so be it. What can I do?”
Later, after the fight, my mother tells me, “I dreamed about Bob Pettit.” Bob Pettit is the basketball star she dated in college.
“Why didn’t you marry him?” I ask.
“Oh, he wasn’t interested in me in that way. He had so many women around him.”
Does she notice how sad this is? That the man she is still dreaming about didn’t love her enough even then?
She has begun talking about Pierre, a French art dealer whom she met at the West LA ashram. She tells me Pierre is gentle and soft-spoken. Her face glows.
In the spring she takes a trip by herself to France. She is completely out of reach, leaving us with our father and Clara for two weeks, something that has never happened.
“What kind of a mother just leaves her children?” my father says. “Chasing after a homosexual art dealer?”
Homosexual? This was something she had failed to mention. When she returns from France, our mother is pale and quiet. She doesn’t talk about her trip and we don’t ask. She never mentions Pierre again.