Good Family (15 page)

A
ngus and I moved into a ground-floor apartment in Santa Monica. We could see the ocean from the roof. The apartment building was Deco/Nautical, built in the twenties. Angus ran his fingers across the turquoise tile above the sink and said, “Quintessential L.A.,” as the realtor showed us around. There was a central courtyard with palm trees and pampas grass, but no place for a child to play.

While Angus went on job interviews I’d walk the four blocks to the beach to watch surfers in the distance while the derelicts on benches tried to get some sleep in the harsh light of day. The owner of the taco stand asked me what my husband did, and I said,
Oh, he makes movies
, but I was never quite sure where Angus went from nine to five. He no longer mentioned my train-station film. There were no producers for me to meet. The searing autumn heat of Los Angeles gave way to the gray sort of nothingness they call winter.

Angus still had his Alfa, so I bought myself a used Volvo—a hideous car with an orange interior—but I loved the way it made me feel secure and anchored, the wheels gripping the road, its guarantee of traction. I’d grown up only thirty miles from here, but now I drove on freeways and cut into
neighborhoods where I had never been. Oil derricks sprouted from moonscapes. Mexican kids in cars mounted on bloated wheels cruised La Brea in the afternoon. Onto the freeway, then off again, I was cruising, too—past the parched brown lawns of South-Central, through the oily haze of Long Beach, up Interstate 5 into the upscale malls of Northridge with its sea-vast parking lots and freshly painted curbs.

“I found a place in Pico Rivera we can get the nursery furniture,” I said to Angus after a day of cruising the barred facades of Latino discount stores.

“Are you serious?” said Angus. “Your sister’s giving you a baby shower.”

“Good cheap stuff,” I said. “
No crédito necesario
.”

Angus stared at me. “Maddie,” he said, eyebrows in a V, “what’s with the slumming?”

Eventually, Dr. Anke would ask me the same question using different words, but then, as later, I was unable to describe how I was gripped with the fear of running out of money. This whole movie thing seemed impossibly indulgent. Everyone in California was making films. Each day Angus came home, smelling of smoke, his hair slick behind his ears, talking as if something was about to happen.

It was the Zeitgeist of L.A., this about-to-happen-ness. An earthquake or a fire or a nine-car collision. Even in February when the rains came, turning oil slicks into traffic hazards, there was a sense of impermanence bordering on quicksilver. It could have been my pregnancy. It could have been my mind. I was purposefully avoiding the well-fed lawns of Pasadena. Whenever I went to visit my mother or my sister, they would ask me questions. Was I eating well? Did I have a diaper service? How would we make a nursery if Angus insisted on using the second bedroom as an office? I was driving farther afield, radically changing lanes before veering off into Torrance.

“Names, Maddie,” my mother said. “You’ve got to come up with a name.”

“Did you know,” I told Angus, “that there are no white people in Compton? I drove around for hours and didn’t see one other white person.”

Angus mixed himself a martini. He had begun looking at my stomach
with something between possessiveness and horror. “I don’t understand you. Did you lock your doors?”

But I was seeing everything through filmmakers’ eyes—the faded-beauty-queen loveliness of downtown, the vibrant perishability of the farmers’ market, the chain-linked vastness of concrete rivers—even the red aorta of brake lights that tracked down the 405. Together, the baby and I would explore new neighborhoods. We followed track-house cul-de-sacs into dead ends in the foothills, traversed Melrose looking for movie stars. At the top of Angeles Crest, we drove to the observatory that was built before smog.

By April, my belly was big, and the baby was kicking constantly. And just as cells individuate and become lungs, skin, and heart, I, too, was differentiating, finding a purpose all my own.

“I met Coppola today,” Angus said.

“Did you get a job?”

“I need to work my ideas into the conversation.” He looked at me. “Are you opening tuna for dinner?”

“Protein,” I said, eating directly from the can. Chewing, I jabbed the fork at him. “
I
have some film ideas. Picture this,” I said, going on to describe a shot of a man on a street meridian conducting an imaginary orchestra segueing into the chatter of girls in a shopping mall. Fade out. Fade in to an appliance-store window, rows of televisions showing Reagan giving a speech that sounds like the voices of teenage girls.

“I wouldn’t mind a steak,” said Angus.

I licked the bottom of the can, eyed my husband across the lip of it with such disdain that he shrugged and suggested we go out.

“I was thinking of showing him your train film,” Angus said as we drove down Santa Monica, looking for a steak house.

Besides the fact that Angus hadn’t mentioned my train film in months, I wasn’t sure it was the kind of thing Coppola would go in for—the clatter of Mary Janes, the blur of grown-up legs. Later, I would make documentaries about physicists and musicians, but then I was conceiving of something
more discordant and oddly juxtaposed: the catcalls of Spanish at the local burrito stand becoming the plink of tennis balls at the Hotel Bel-Air; the bullhorn of a Santa Monica lifeguard blaring at surfers turning into shop-girls with voices like leaf blowers.

We pulled into a Sizzler. I heaved myself out of the Alfa. My belly was so big now—so full of baby—I almost toppled over. Angus, eyeing my rounded front, my ballooning breasts, said, “Moo.”

“Very funny,” said I.

“If the shoe fits.”

Arching, I pressed into the small of my back to relieve it. “Nothing fits,” I said.

B
y May, the baby had dropped, and Angus was working for White Bread Studios. Dana insisted on throwing me a shower and taking up collections for a stroller and a crib. No longer able to walk along the beach in Santa Monica, I went to movies, but was unable to sit. I wore espadrilles with the heels squashed down. My one dress was a tent. Food stains collected above my breasts. Angus, fastidious as ever, made comments about my appearance, the one benefit being the copious amount of hair that began to grow as soon as my hormones changed.

“It all falls out,” said my mother at the shower. Dana had assembled an assortment of my mother’s friends and her own, along with a few of the girls whom I’d known in high school. They, too, were mothers, having chosen that route years before I stumbled into it by default. I knew we were different species. They shared their stories of childbirth, each more gruesome than the last.
You need to rest
, said one of my old friends.
You’ll hit the ground running
.

Babies isolate you
, another friend said.

I didn’t know how to tell her I’d been isolated for years and that my life was nothing like theirs. I was already deep in the forest, far from the sunny wisdom of their poolside lives. The look my mother gave me betrayed her
concern. Was she still worried I would run onto the train tracks? Did she think that I was odd like Edward?

I drove back to Santa Monica, my car full of baby gear and tiny undershirts, my head full of admonitions about epidurals and episiotomies and postpartum blues. Heading for the freeway, I passed the train station where we used to depart for our annual pilgrimage to Michigan. The train station was boarded up and abandoned. Its irrelevance hit me like a slap. The morning’s overcast had burned off into smog, and even the mountains had disappeared.

I
was driving on the Santa Ana Freeway, listening to KOLD, the oldies station, rocking to “Stairway to Heaven,” when my labor began. I was in a retro-seventies mode that day, empowered by my Volvo and no clear exit strategy off that particular freeway. I had turned up the volume at the part where the acoustic goes wired and Robert Plant shrieks when, suddenly, I felt the low-belly wrenching of a uterus stretched to the size of a beach ball.

Two hours later, I was in the hospital, and they were trying to find Angus. “Try White Bread Studios,” I said, “in Burbank.”

He wasn’t there.

“Try Killer Post-Production in West Hollywood.”

They’d never heard of him.

“Try Zeno’s Pub on Beverly.”

Angus was on his way.

Seven hours of labor and pushing. No drugs. I pleaded for them, but the labor nurse said,
You’re doing fine, honey. Go!
The labor nurse had a pierced nose and eyebrow. She spread my thighs and looked right up my vagina. “Now push!” she shouted. “Push!”

Angus and I had come up with names—ridiculous movie-star names like Marlon, Troy, or Winston if it was a boy, Zaza, Lana, or Jemima (Angus’s favorite) if it was a girl.

Sounds like a syrup
, said Dana.

After seven hours in the riptide of contractions and pushing, Angus, for
once, deferred to me. When our daughter came out, even the nurses wept. They laid her on my chest after cleaning her up. There was still a spot of blood on her head, but otherwise, she was perfection—wizened, fidgety perfection. No movie-star names for this girl baby. No cute little handles better suited for jewelry stores. I saw my family’s genes in the turned-down edges of her mouth, her eyebrows already mobile and ready to judge. I must have had a premonition.

I named her after a ghost.

H
appiness is an elusive sensation when you’re not intrinsically prone to it. I’d awake with a start to a baby crying, a keening imitation of an ambulance siren. My world smelled sweet from breast milk. I cried, I sweated, I continued to bleed. Dana and I discussed how our mother delivered—oblivious in twilight sleep while the doctors yanked us out with forceps, then prevented her from nursing by swaddling her breasts. The fifties, we agreed, were Gothic. Years later, when Dr. Anke explained maternal projection—the mother’s need to identify with the child springing from her own desire for reassurance and approval (seldom offered by my father)—I experienced some degree of compassion for my mother. But I couldn’t help wondering if I wouldn’t be a different sort of mother—one who looked at her daughter with unadulterated pride, each of us whole and adequate.

I got a diaper service because someone told me disposable diapers were clogging the landfills. I wouldn’t let my baby touch a drop of formula lest her digestive system be contaminated with gunk. My breasts hurt. I was ravenous for water and rest.
It’s perfect
, I thought.
Perfect, perfect, perfect.
But in my heart, I didn’t think it would last.

A
ddison here,” said Angus, “has been auditioning for the part of cabdriver.” He was talking on the phone to his mother, drinking a martini and slunk into an imitation Le Corbusier chair we’d bought at a
furniture store on Sepulveda. Angus wanted our apartment to look steely and modern to fit in with his image as a film editor.

I was nursing Sadie and ignoring him. The more I ignored Angus, the more he tried to goad me into a response.

“I kid you not. All the time she was preggers, she kept driving around. Her parents marooned her in Pasadena. She’s trying to reclaim her misspent youth.”

“Ha ha,” I said.

Angus’s eyebrow shot up. “She evidently disagrees.”

I moved Sadie to the other breast. In point of fact, I was no longer driving aimlessly. I felt perfectly happy staying home, feeding and strolling the baby. Some mornings Sadie woke me at 4
A.M
. Together we would lie on a blanket in front of the television watching
Sesame Street
reruns. I was besotted with Elmo. “El-mo,” I said over and over to Sadie. “El-mo loves Sadie.”

My mother had offered to hire a baby nurse, citing my tendency to isolate, but I had refused, telling her that Angus’s mother would be coming out.

“Make sure she washes her hands,” my mother had said.

“What have you got against her?”

“Nothing. She’s perfectly delightful.”

“Did Aunt Pat say something?”

I could hear my mother lighting a cigarette, thinking things over. “We’re packing the trunks. Do you want me to send anything ahead for you?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Maddie,” my mother said, “when have you ever known Aunt Pat to say anything nice about anyone?”

Now Angus was talking to his mother, who was telling him when she was arriving. She was going to spend the latter part of June and part of July with us, sleeping on the sleeper sofa (also a Corbu knockoff ) and ordering out for Chinese.

Angus set the phone back carefully on the cradle. He looked at Sadie and me. “It warms me cockles,” he said.

A
ngus’s mother was mad for Oprah. And Sally. And Jenny. She would eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and watch daytime talk shows for hours. Other people’s troubles thrilled her—the more grotesque, the better.

“Will you look at that gargoyle?” she said. “Not even her stepfather would sleep with her.” Without glancing my way, she held out her hands and wiggled her fingers, saying, “Here, sweetie. Pass her to me.”

But whenever Mrs. Farley held Sadie, her perfume would linger on my baby’s skin. Once, she handed Sadie back to me with smudges of chocolate on her tiny cheek. I began to see Mrs. Farley through my mother’s eyes. Even Adele’s sly comments rose uncharitably in my thoughts.

Mrs. Farley flicked the remote, surfing her way through news till she found an old movie. “
The Best Years of Our Lives
,” she exclaimed. “I
love
Jimmy Stewart.”

“It’s Dana Andrews,” I said, nuzzling my child. It was almost 6
P.M
. There was no dinner on the horizon. Angus tended to go out with his friends or work late, the most productive time in film editing being when everyone else was asleep. My mother-in-law had little inclination to cook. I assumed it was because of all those years in Zimbabwe when she had staff doing everything for her.