these companionable afternoons of ours would work like goodwill in a savings account that I could draw on when we were back at school, but that turned out to be a particularly naive form of wishful thinking. The next day Alfred would greet me at the bus stop and look me over with those hard eyes of his: “Good morning, Suzie.” Then clack! Toe of shoe—penny loafer, cheap hard leather—striking shin or knee. I hoped for shin, since it was hard to hold yourself rigidly dead with a swollen knee.
When I cast the eye of memory over these scenes, inevitably I wonder, Where were the teachers, the principal? Did the bus driver never glance in the rearview mirror? Was the yard supervisor, under whose watch (whose lack of watch) so many excruciating moments played out, oblivious?
Where were my parents, my aunt and uncle?
My aunt and uncle are simpler to explain. For them, school was where I, all three of us boys, disappeared while they were writing. Once we stepped off the stage of the theater that was their lives, we were offstage in the most absolute sense, non-players, non-characters, simply non.
My parents are trickier. I did everything in my power to make sure they didn’t know what was happening to me at school. If they didn’t know, then at home I didn’t have to acknowledge how grueling and miserable my days were. School was a dream or (more accurately) a nightmare and therefore not real, not happening, not a place of affliction, embarrassment, and shame; or, alternatively, if it was happening, it was happening to a dead person, and therefore had no lasting effect. Home was different. The bookend to going dead at the beginning of the day, after all, was coming back to life at the end of it. When I climbed the hill from the bus stop to our house, I could feel the stiffness thawing and melting away from me as I resumed my more natural self, my regular shape. Home—Greenvalley Road—was my refuge, my retreat, and I did everything I could to keep it that way.
But even the best-maintained refuges can sometimes be breached.
My parents’ attention was often elsewhere in these years. My father was expanding his business and responsible for his brother, for whom he’d created a job in that growing business; his mother, until her death; and afterward his mother-in-law. There were days, many days, when he came home late from work and fell asleep early after dinner; weekends he disappeared into sports and card games. His idea of parenting, for the most part, consisted of providing for us, disciplining us (typically by erupting at us), and trying to engage us in his passion for cars, tennis, and skiing; if we weren’t as captivated by these things as he was, we did not see much of him.
My mother was far more present, but as we grew older and her attention was loosened from having to juggle the logistics of our lives, it began to turn inward, and soon she started to undergo a change of her own, which accelerated in late 1972 and early 1973, around the time Ms. magazine published an article on the subject of consciousness-raising groups. This article lit a fire under a handful of Laurel Canyon mothers, who began meeting in one another’s living rooms on Tuesday evenings at six o’clock to talk about their lives and what they wanted to alter about them and how best to go about it. The husbands were asked—in some houses, instructed—to take the children out to dinner as the wives uncorked bottles of Chablis and opened up runny wedges of Brie that were paired with bunches of green grapes (unless there was a Cesar Chavez–led protest in progress) and plates of Triscuit crackers fanned out just so.
Whenever I saw my mother assemble this array of food and arrange a circle of chairs in our living room, I immediately felt a sense of agitation that I in no way understood. On these and most Tuesday evenings I peppered her with questions: Did she talk about us boys? Dad? Grandma? Auntie Hankie and Uncle Irving? I worried about them—about Auntie Hankie—most of all. “One of the rules of the CR group,” my mother answered, “is that we keep everything private. It’s the only way to sustain one another and ourselves. We have to be supportive, non-judging, and discreet. So I’m afraid I can’t answer these questions, dear. Any questions, really.”
My mother said these words lightly, but they did not sound like her—was that because they were lifted from the magazine? A dog-eared copy of the March 1973 issue appeared alongside the Brie and Chablis in the first months the group met; after that, apparently, the women knew what they were doing without such tangible editorial guidance.
What were they doing? It took me a while—months—before a Tuesday rolled around on which my mother was hosting and my father was kept late at work. When she received this news by telephone, my mother very solemnly gathered us boys together and, as she assembled a tray of sandwiches for us to take upstairs, explained that we were in no uncertain terms to think of leaving our rooms until she called up to us to say that the group had disbanded and the coast was clear.
Even as she was laying out the rules of the evening, I was already planning how to break them. Since the time of my uncle’s daily visits during Huffy’s illness, I had further honed my eavesdropping skills. I had learned that it was never wise to start listening at the beginning of a conversation, because that was when people (= my mother) were most suspicious. I had learned that a good time to slip down a few stairs was when someone had gotten up to, say, pour wine or go to the bathroom, since one bit of unusual noise easily masked another. And I had learned to be patient, endlessly patient, since much of what I overheard was dull and some of it wasn’t even comprehensible to me; sometimes all that patience led nowhere, yet sometimes …
“So, Merona, last week you were talking about how you don’t always feel at home in your own house. I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said.”
“Really? What have you been thinking?”
“Well,” this speaker continued, “it occurred to me that our homes are a kind of metaphor for where many of us find ourselves as women. We’ve arranged them for everybody but ourselves. For our husbands, our parents, our social circle. In your case, your in-laws.”
“Except in my case I didn’t even do the arranging.”
“More of a metaphor—more of a problem. It’s all part of the same issue. People dictating to us what we should be deciding for ourselves. The covering on a sofa can be just as important, in this sense, as the clothes we wear, the books we read, our ideas. When are we going to say what we really mean, wear—whatever we like? Throw out the old—the old—”
“Bronzes. Miniature Greco-Roman statues that have nothing to do with me. Views of French châteaus—when I’ve never even been to France.”
I did not have to peer into the living room to know what the scene looked like. There were eight women sitting in a circle around our coffee table. I knew about half of them. My mother was likely sitting on a low stool, since it was a house rule, or until recently it had been a house rule, that the more comfortable seats went to guests. Across from her and doing much of the talking was Linda Berg, the most outspoken of these women and, as it happened, the mother of Barrie and Wendy, our almost cousins. Linda had recently cut off all her hair and had traded her skirts and sweaters for jeans and T-shirts—she was the first mother in the canyon to alter her appearance almost overnight. My mother’s change had been more gradual. While it had been some time since she had relaxed the shellacked towers of hair she wore when I was a young child, she recently had begun going down to the Hair Palace on Beverly Boulevard where Bobby (whose tight low-riding jeans and flouncy scarf marked him as an antecedent to Warren Beatty in Shampoo) gave her a regular perm that produced a cascade of tightly whorled ringlets. This, together with the lightening up of her makeup, and the jeans and chambray shirts she had begun wearing, distanced her ever further from my aunt, whose bunned hair, bright lipstick, emphatic beauty mark, and proliferation of jewelry remained as entrenched as ever.
But
