Erased From Memory (3 page)

So for most of my life my household consisted of me and my father. Daddy tried to take care of me and I tried to take care of him. “You are so capable, Carla. I do admire that quality.” And if I didn’t deflect him, he would go on to talk about Hatshepshut, the Egyptian queen who was indeed capable, so much so that she combined the offices of king and queen. “I do appreciate your helping me, darling,” and he’d reach out to squeeze my wrist.

We went to Egypt together a lot. That was something else he thought of to do with an adolescent girl. We went to Cairo and Thebes and Luxor and to the Valley of the Kings. He would be down at the bottom of a hole sending up shovelfuls of rocks or baskets of dirt or slings containing pottery figures along with occasional other finds—stone carvings, beads, bits of clay tablet. I would collect these, list them in a notebook, put them in a box. Until he found the coffin lid, which changed his future and his reputation, Daddy never discovered anything exciting.

The coffin lid was important not because it was a coffin lid—there are a great many of those in Egypt—but because it had on it some hieroglyphs that were repetitions of the ones on the tomb wall, and by comparing the two versions, Daddy was able to settle several major disputes in Egyptian scholarly circles.

After our first time in Egypt, Daddy took our next-door neighbor’s son along on our explorations. This was a boy named Rob, who was three years older than I. I was frantically in love with Rob. It’s hard not to be in love with someone you have been to Egypt with, and sat under the stars there with, and discovered archaeological firsts with. Later we lived together in Santa Cruz and still later we loused things up between us pretty thoroughly. But we still see each other all the time and have a mutual reliance system in crises.

It’s Rob whom I am trying to summon now by punching angrily at my cell phone.

Rob is a doctor and works in a hospital twenty miles from here. I can hear the hospital intercom intoning, “One—four, one—four.” That’s Rob’s number; he chose it because it was our campsite number at the tourist camp in Thebes.

“Carla?” he says now. “Hey. How. What gives?”

When I have partly explained, he cuts right to the jugular with “My God, my God, your dad, in jail? What’re you doing, who’ve you called . . .”

I don’t say I haven’t called anybody because what I’ve done is to commit mayhem on a sheriff ’s deputy. But Rob deduces some of what my silence means. He says, “Honey, oh Jesus, ohmigawd, I’ll be right over; I’ll meet you at your dad’s place; hold on there, chin up, okay?”

One of the big troubles between me and Rob was that each of us thinks of him/herself as the caretaking one.

Now I am waiting for Rob in Daddy’s apartment in Green Beach Manor. My father, of course, is not here. He is off at wherever Sheriff Munro has taken him.

Daddy has lived in this elegant retirement colony for a year. Green Beach Manor has everything—romantic Victorian architecture, assiduous staff, fairly decent food, seacoast climate, a capable director who is a friend of mine. I know all about the Manor, all its ins and outs; I live here, too. I am the assistant director. I didn’t intend to do that, become the assistant director of a retirement colony; it just happened. It keeps me close to my dad; it gives me housing and a salary. And it makes me feel that I’m wasting my life. I want a different job; I’m ready for something new.

I’m twenty-six years old. I want an occupation that will Make a Difference.

And my father, who is eighty-six, also has aspirations. He wants to feel needed. He does not feel needed here at the Manor, but he feels that way at the museum. And so we visit Egypt Regained at least twice a month, where he looks at his coffin lid while Director Egon Rothskellar, who likes superlatives, says “Wonderful” at him. The museum is Daddy’s lodestar of the ideal place where he is truly needed.

Rob bursts into the apartment now in a gust of warm air from the hall; his trench coat flares out behind him. He grabs me by the shoulders and kisses me. He says, “You’ve been crying.”

“That was half an hour ago.”

“Tell me everything, how in hell did this happen?” And then when I’m halfway into my chaotic story, he stops me with, “Oh, God, I forgot. I brought Susie, she’s on her way in; she stopped to make a phone call.”

Susie is Rob’s mother, Daddy’s and my former next-door neighbor. She is also my oldest friend, my best friend, my surrogate mother. She’s the one who got me through my difficult childhood.

She’s loving and overwhelming and I don’t want her around now.

A minute later she billows through the door in a surge of purple wool, trailing an embroidered cape. “My psychic is going to do an intention for Ed, that will help enormously; this psychic is totally powerful. And I’ve brought this”—extending a bunch of fibers—“a bayberry smudge; we’ll burn it to expel the harmful influences. Darling Carla, I am so sorry, how is it possible, Edward is such a complete human being.”

Susie is a sexy old hippie who likes tie-dye dresses and macramé jewelry. She says she wants to continue the image of the sixties. Tie-dye is fashionable again this year, but I don’t tell Susie that.

“Mom, we need more than a roseberry smudge.” Rob sounds cross, which is the way he usually sounds around her. She corrects him, “Bayberry,” and then kisses me, enveloping me in purple fabric.

“Love will find a way; love will get Ed out of jail, although going to jail is a sign of your personhood; many of my friends have done it.” And she subsides onto Daddy’s couch.

Rob sits on a chair and looks at his knee. He gets a notebook out of his pocket and asks, crossly, as if he’s addressing somebody feeble-minded, will I please try for a
sequential
account of what happened. But right away he’s sorry. “Oh, hell, Carl; jeez, I’m out of line,” and after that he’s good about listening. It’s only when I’m almost finished that he starts firing inquiries like, “Where is he now? You don’t know? Well, what did they say?” and tries to look patient.

I don’t tell him, “Hey, Rob, that was my
dad
it was happening to.” He knows I’m not usually like this.

He makes more notes. “We need a lawyer.”

He adds that he has a good friend who is a lawyer, but this friend lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

I remember that the Manor has two lawyers. But they’re the stocks, bonds, investments, bequests kind of lawyers. “They wouldn’t get anybody out of jail.”

“Well,
I
know a lawyer.” This is from Susie, who has been crossing and uncrossing her knees on the couch. She smiles her sunny Susie smile. “I know a very good lawyer. She would be fine for getting somebody out of jail. She does it all the time.

“And I just called her. She’s on her way over here.

“She was my lawyer for the grocery store,” she adds.

Susie owns a natural foods grocery store in Berkeley. These days the Berkeley landscape is littered with organic stores, but when Susie started up her store it was the only one. She got sued frequently. She needed a lawyer. People love to sue natural foods stores because, what with organic fertilizers and no pesticides, the products get multiple worms and dirt, which customers don’t want; they just want the ORGANIC label.

“She was wonderful,” Susie says. “She saved me a bunch of times.”

 
 
I stare at Susie, who still surprises me pretty often. In my childhood I alternated between loving her passionately and being cross at her for being so scattered. It was usually when I was most cross that she came up with one of her interesting and helpful solutions. But I’m not so sure I want to trust her with choosing our lawyer.

“Her name is Cherie Ghent,” Susie says. “She is really, really good.”

 
 
Cherie Ghent shows up half an hour later. The three of us have been speculating about various questions: Where is my father? What’s he charged with? How long can they hold him? How do we get him out? That’ll take money; where do we get money? Susie says she has money, which is a lie; Rob claims he has money, also a lie. We are deep into this discussion when Cherie Ghent arrives.

Cherie doesn’t inspire confidence. I look at her and reject her hands down. I have a preconception about the ideal lawyer. That ideal lawyer is a tall woman who wears a pantsuit and glasses on a chain and has wider shoulders than usual. She commands respect.

Cherie is the opposite of all this. She’s a small enameled person with blond lacquered hair, turquoise eyes, and a curvy figure in an exquisite gray suit, size two. She looks as if she has been wrapped in bubble wrap and sent direct from the top floor of Saks Fifth Avenue. “How do ya do,” she inquires in a deep, strong Southern accent. “I’m Cherie.” Yipes.

“Your daddy is eighty-six years? I am so sorry. Eighty-six. And to meet up with arrant cruelty. Did you know, there is a survey”—she pronounces it “suhvey”—“a U.C. survey; it shows that rural police forces”—“po-lice,” she says—“are more corrupt, more prejudiced, hidebound, narrow, easily bribed . . .” She moves manicured hands in an inclusive gesture.

Susie watches proprietarily. “She’s a pistol,” she informs us. “Lawyer for every demonstration. She did a peace march across Central America and got arrested in Costa Rica.”

I try to imagine Cherie, with her trim gray suit and lacquered nails, in a Central American jail.

“Of course, I believe,” she says, “that most police are corrupt. There is another survey, from the London School of Economics, that compares the police forces of four European countries . . .” Cherie plunks her briefcase on the floor and sits down.

“Now,” she says, “less jus’ get to work. Less jus’ figure it out, because, you know what? I am very good at this sort of thing.”

She smiles a dazzling smile, gets out a binder, and starts quizzing me on the details. “We got to be specific,” she warns. She makes lots of notes. She likes numbers. She likes facts. She produces a computer and a pocket dictionary and a pocket crisscross directory. She makes phone calls.

“Your dad is in Innocente Prison,” she announces finally, emerging from a long e-mail exchange. “You all here in Del Oro County, you’re too poor to have your own prison, you got a contract with Innocente.” She doesn’t give us time to exclaim about Innocente Prison, which is a famous dropping-off point where they used to send war protesters and now incarcerate Latino farm workers. She says, “We’ll get him outta there. Count on it. I’ll grab those bastards by the balls.

“Let’s us get on over there.”

Chapter 3

Innocente Prison is out in the California hinterland.

It’s in a world of undulating golden-gray fields punctuated by expanses of cultivated green stuff, rows and rows of it, sometimes with large, proud identifying labels: ARTICHOKE, LETTUCE, GARLIC—CALIFORNIA AGRICULTURE AT WORK FOR YOU. Off in the distance are plywood houses for the workers who tend this stuff, and here in the foreground are the workers themselves, lines of workers bent double along the rows, brown people in brown clothing, followed by vast Rube Goldberg machines with many triple-jointed arms.

We churn through dusty towns with names like Esperanza and Purissima, towns heavy with signs for Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Marlboro cigarettes. The Marlboro cowboy broods reflectively over tin roofs. “They smoke a helluva lot around here,” Cherie says.

She drives capably, mostly with only one manicured hand on the steering wheel. Her car is a handsome white Mustang convertible with leather upholstery and bright spoke wheels. Rob reacts enthusiastically, “Wow! A ’sixty-six!” and leans forward to appraise the lighted turquoise dashboard. He and Cherie launch into a half-hour’s review of the car’s history: Cherie bought it from a friend who bought it from a garage dealer; he bought it from the original owner. “Just three previous owners and I paid only five thousand,” to which Rob says, “Hey, a steal, but the wheels are new? The paint job’s new?”

And so on and so forth while Susie and I in the back seat lament the venality of a penal system that could jail my father for . . . “Carla dear, what
is
he jailed for?”

I haven’t wanted to think about this. I’ve been squeezing it into the background. “I don’t know, Sue. It was a mess. Somebody died.” There it is; what I don’t want to think about.
Somebody died
.

Susie says, “Awful, that place is so death-oriented.” She means the museum, of course. “But you can count on Cherie; Cherie will get him off.”

“Cherie,” I interrupt the automobile discussion in the seat ahead, “does this jail have a hospital?”

“It’s a prison, darlin’. And yes.”

She doesn’t ask why I want to know. I guess she understands. I’m picturing my dad, incarcerated, restrained. Medicated. Overmedicated. “I mean, a big one.”

“Yeah; it’s big.” She turns around in the seat, keeps on driving perfectly straight, gives me a wide, lipsticked smile. “Don’t worry, darling, he is
not
goin’ to end up there.”

Oh, yeah,
I think.