It was in the basement, she said, The hope chest. My brother's gun shot holes in it. He didn't. Just his gun. I wanted to hear the story, but too many rounds of ammo shot into stumps across the trout pond from my own brother's 22 at Weston's trout farm in Big Sur made me hear too loudly the rounds she described. I saw, in my mind's eye, the holey chest full of linens, smoke rising out the holes. The linens hoping for a better spot in life... in someone's life maybe even in the life of my friend, now telling me about the hope chest full of holes in the basement. I'm glad the gun didn't shoot her in the chest.
In 1954, the summer I was six and my brother was twelve, he pointed his 22 at my head by the back door we shared. The parents were home, but not really there. They were drinking and talking but not yet fighting. A glass door in a wood frame went out our bedrooms to the yard. His bigger bedroom was separated from mine only by a hinged heavy plywood trifold wall on wheels. He could throw things over the top of the ziggedy zaggedy door. He could also, because he was six years older than I, leave whenever he pleased out that door and run free into the wilds of Elysian Park. I was too little he'd say. With the gun to my temple this summer night, he told me he’d be doing the world a favor if he pulled the trigger. Mom and dad didn’t love me. I was adopted that’s why I was freakish with red hair and freckles. And didn’t I ever notice they all had black hair? I held still as the red concrete floor. I held my breath. We heard the parents moving around. He put his gun back in the closet and left out that glass door. I stayed behind and plugged my ears with my pillow against the yelling and sounds of glass breaking as my parents fought in the living room. That's where they lived. They were always living there and yelling... or at least he was. She was often hiding or playing the Wurlitzer organ loudly - leaning heavily into the bass notes of the foot pedals - trying to shake down the house around us I thought. I hoped some nights she would. Eventually, I got my wish. Daddy left four months before my eleventh birthday and that shook everything. Mom took me to Mexico. She swore, after seventeen years she’d had enough and got brave enough to put him out. She told him she was leaving and he needed to be gone before we got back. Mom told dad's friend Jim to make sure he DID leave. It was Jim who told mom my dad was going to kill her for putting him out, so she'd best get out of town for a couple months, let him cool down and he would watch out for my dad, help him move. So we left. Brother Mel was living that summer down in Anaheim at Ye Olde Mill Stream, Cole Weston's trout fishing concession at Knott's Berry Farm. Brother Mel made one big sandwich once a week out of a long loaf of sourdough with salami, bologna, and cheese and mustard and he'd cut off a hunk every time he got hungry. He kept that sandwich in the refrigerator alongside the fish bait.
Mom and I flew from Los Angeles to Guadalajara. Her college friend Margo and Margo's daughter Elli who was four years younger than I met us at the airport. Margo was born and raised in Mexico. Her husband worked with my dad at the Los Angeles Times. Elli's brother was about the same age as my brother Mel. The flight was memorable. It was my very first plane ride. The Pan Am propeller plane got caught in a lightning storm. All the cabin lights went out and the walls, ceilings, and floor were bathed in blue-white light with every crackle. I looked out the window and saw the lit-up clouds going up and down very fast. Mom tightened her already white knuckles around my skinny arm. Elli and I got along well enough in the back of the bronze colored VW bug that was Margo's. As long as we kept some of the luggage between us and she didn’t cross onto my side, everything was all right. A little whiney, Elli would often say, I wish I could have such and such… and sigh deeply. Her mama gave her almost everything she sighed for. We could only drink Squirt - grapefruit flavored soda pop. No water. No milk. In Mexico it was unsafe to drink those things in 1959 and the mothers wouldn’t let us have Coke.
In Guadalajara, we stayed at the Grand Hotel. A green pool with moss on the sides was so cool and welcomed in the heat of the June swelter. Elli and I got to the business of playing as best an almost eleven year old and six year old could play. She was tiny with long black braids looped behind her head and tied with flowery ribbons. I was white as a sheet, and looked like a stick figure drawing of a human with wavy sproingy orange hair sticking out the top. Mom made me wear a rubber bathing cap in the water because my hair would get so ratsy matsy and neither one of us liked her to comb it out. The cap was white with three red rubber flowers on it. I didn’t like the smell of the rubber, but it got familiar and if I dared put my head under water, it filled with air and seemed to help me float to the top. My bones stuck out everywhere. My bathing suit swam on me. I did not know how to swim. My dad and brother tried to teach me how when I was six, at the Hollywood YMCA on Friday Family Night, but that meant each picked up one of my arms and one of my legs and on THREE they threw me into the water and stood on the edge shouting swim, swim! I swallowed a lot of water and went to stand under the hot shower in the women's area and stayed under the blasting hot water long after I stopped coughing and shaking. I stayed in the shower until I was beet red and Friday Family Night was over. I learned to swim at age 25.
In the green cool pool, at the Grand Hotel, in Guadalajara, Mexico, Elli and I clung to the sides. Hailstones began to fall. We ducked under. I didn't dare let go of the side. My feet couldn't touch the bottom. My toes were clinging to the long strands of moss on the sides. My hands got bruised by the golf ball sized hail. It was a toss-up when we were in the car whether to stop under a tree so the hail wouldn't crack the windshield or to keep driving because to be under a tree meant we might get struck by lightning.
We drove all over Mexico in that bug, but we never got to test the rumor that it could float. We encountered neither flood nor stream. We sang. Mom was a good singer. Margo so-so. Elli and I alternately rolled our eyes or sang along depending on which song it was. We liked This Land Is Your Land.
One day, in Guanajuato, the grown-ups wanted to go into the catacombs. I asked what that was. Bones of people who couldn’t pay rent on their graves, so their bones got stacked in a big cave under the graveyard, the mothers said. No thank you, I said. I’ll wait for you right here. Elli trailed after the mothers. Traitor. I was waiting in the graveyard when the next big lightning storm passed through. The only people I knew in all of Mexico were under the ground with dead people. It was hot, but I was trembling with fear. The wind so fierce it blew the green umbrella inside out. At least I caught some hail in it like a bowl. I hoped it wouldn't melt before mom and Margo and Elli came back up. Hail on the corrugated tin roof of the nearby open market was deafening.
Pátzcuaro was a tiny town on the shore of lake Janítzio. Fishermen used butterfly nets that looked to me like huge dragonfly wings. Translucent but with a touch of blueish-lavender. We were there to see the cathedral. As we approached, I saw on the steps a statue of a one-legged man with a stick, I thought, and a dog at his feet. As we got closer, the statues moved. The man was real. His eyeball was hanging on his left cheek. His dog was so skinny, I could see all its ribs and every knob of its back bone. His dog eyes were huge and sad. I gripped my mom’s hand so tight, I had white knuckles. I was afraid the two hungry ones, man and dog would die right there outside the church. Mom pulled me away through the heavy wooden door and inside the church, reminding me it’s not polite to stare. Once our eyes got accustomed to the dimness, I saw the entire back wall behind where the priest stands, was made of gold. It shone in the afternoon sun bathing it through stained glass. It was dazzling how gold it was. Shiny, luminous, bright gold statues of Jesus and Mary and angels and seraphim and cherubim. I squeezed and pulled my mom’s hand and scowled till she looked down at me. WHAT? She bark-whispered. Make them take down this gold right now and buy that man and that dog some food. DO it NOW. I whisper-cried. I was frantic to make sure the man and his dog wouldn’t die right there on the steps while all this gold was just sitting there looking pretty but not helping anybody.
San Blas was on the edge of the jungle, la selva. The ocean was made gentle by the curve of the coast containing the water like a giant bathtub. We walked into the tub-like warmth of the salt water for what felt like miles and it only came up to our waists - even little Elli could walk way far out. In that water, I floated like an air mattress. So buoyant, even without my airhead bathing cap trick. One rubber flower had torn loose against the edge of the cardboard suitcase making a hole in the cap so I couldn’t do the airhead floating device trick anymore. It was there in San Blas where I got bit by one teeny tiny mosquito and my right calf swelled to three times its normal size. I kind of enjoyed imagining what I might look like if I had a little meat on my bones. It felt strange when it jiggled as I walked downstairs from our room on the second floor. A cold bottle of Squirt held on my calf made it feel better and less hot. The next day we went on a boat ride up river from the bay. The dug-out log came with a guide. He had a long pole he used to push us along upstream. Maybe I was logy from the bite. I leaned my head against my arm on the edge of the boat and watched the black water as the orchid pink reflections from the live canopy of flowers above us danced by each time he pushed us along. The jungle came all the way to the edge of the river. Trees, fronds, flowers, a few people on the shores. I sat up for the people. They were waving. I waved to, then rested again. I saw the reflection of the guide’s pole suddenly out of the water and a white squirmy bundle as long as the pole was coiling and uncoiling, then splashing into the black water. The mirror full of pink orchids shattered. Mom and Margo screamed. I sat up. The man was laughing. Elli gripped her mama’s hand. We were lucky. The guide kept the snake from landing in the boat on top of us.
Soon we drifted into a circular pool, the birthplace of the river we were told. It was a cold spring and felt delightful to splash in, such contrast to the throbbing heat of the air so thick with steam it was hard to move it down into our lungs. Elli and I put on our swimsuits in the talapa and went to play in the shallows. The cold water soothed my swelled leg. Mom and Margo, already dressed for water, waded over to the palm covered bar and ordered drinks.
Next stop: Mazatlán where the Bel Mar Hotel behind a huge sea wall kept cobras in baskets in the dining room to let out at night so they could keep the rodent population down.
Forty years later, well past mom’s eightieth birthday, I asked her about that trip. What she told me warmed my heart. She had tried for so long to save her marriage to my father and finally realized he was an empty well. Even if she could have thrown her entire life down into his hollowness, he could never be filled. She couldn’t fix what was wrong with him. For her children’s sake, she had to leave his loud and scary and crazy-when-he-drank sorry ass.
Now that I live by the Bay, I see my childhood friend Elli from time to time. She's become a wise woman, potter, and lawyer. Over lunch recently, we looked at some of the photos from our time together that summer of '59. She corroborated my recollections of that San Blas boat ride and the cobra baskets in the Bel Mar Hotel in Mazatlán. It's reassuring to know we share the memories.
My friend with the holey chest in the basement must have some stories to tell. I think we may be sisters under the skin having survived our earlier lives by the hair of our chinny-chin-chins. I have lots of hairs on my chinny-chin-chin lately. They're a reminder to me I made it through some big bad wolf times. I am very lucky.
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