I was not looking forward to any of it, and when I heard the putt-putt of Princess’s old Volkswagen bug (a hand-me-down from Steve, who had since purchased a motorcycle) I felt deeply relieved, knowing that we would have an hour together before Jocko’s expected arrival. As we paced around the living room, my sister recounted her time with the happy couple, having nothing but glowing words about her new stepmother and acting slightly giddy about the whole thing. So much so that when he finally swaggered through the front door, Princess was awash in pure, loving approval. With a Cheshire Cat grin, Jocko introduced me to his wife, while I held Peter tight on my hip like a child hugging her doll, comforted by his clinging.
In one little group, we slid from room to room while I gave them a quick house tour, Jocko walking with his arm slung around Princess’s neck the whole time. Then, awkwardly, he and Autumn (whose name is actually Patricia) sat down with a sigh on the green sofa, and suddenly I felt ill. Autumn looked so frantically eager, like a golden retriever waiting for her stick to be tossed. Pale blond and angular, with a greasy shine to her face, she sat on the edge of the cushion, inching closer to my adjacent chair, focusing on Peter, who would have nothing to do with her. The new Mrs. O’Mahoney oozed warmth, talking of how much she wanted me to meet my new brothers and sisters—her children. I clenched my jaw and nodded, adjusting Peter’s bent leg on my lap. After what seemed like a lifetime, Autumn asked Princess to show her the view from outside, and reached her arms out to Peter, wiggling her pearlized fingernails in his face as if that would seduce him to reach for her. Thank the good sweet Lord, he did not. So, empty-handed, she turned and walked out the glass door toward the backyard with my sister leading the way, leaving me with Jocko.
What on earth did this man and I have to say to each other? In reality, one hell of a lot, but that would never happen. Maybe it would if I could meet him today, with the sturdy legs of my history holding me up, but not when I was twenty-four with my baby son on my lap. Jocko chatted on, telling me how they were going to Hawaii to live on a bird sanctuary, and then, as casually as if he were requesting a glass of water, he asked if he could borrow $5,000. I thought, Crap, didn’t I play this scene before? But when I noticed that his hands were shaking, I quickly looked away, embarrassed for him, not wanting him to know that I had seen. His voice got louder as I left the room, guffawing at nothing while I sat down on my bed and filled out a check: Pay to the order of Jock O’Mahoney. When he and his new wife said their goodbyes, waving from their white station wagon as it pulled into the street, I held a drowsy Peter on the edge of my hip, closed the door to the entrance garden, then leaned into the bushes and vomited. I was pregnant again.
Steve and I stood in the kitchen the morning he was to appear for his draft physical, whispering to each other in the predawn darkness, making sure he had everything he needed. He was still exhausted and numb from his trip to North Dakota, still wondering if he should have found a way to tell his father that he was coming. The man had tried to act pleased, glad to finally meet his son, but during the few hours Steve was with him, he had felt an unmistakable “get lost” vibration. So that’s what he did. He came home to his own son, played with our little boy, and didn’t have much to say about the man who had turned his back on him again and forever. He couldn’t erase him from his mind, so he did the next best thing: He legally dropped the name Bloomfield and became Steven Craig. No more, no less.
Pregnant again as two-year-old Peter hangs on.
That morning I had packed him a few things to eat, including three of the brownies I’d made the night before. Just as Steve had requested, they were gooey, were filled with tiny bits of walnuts and a shitload of marijuana. He walked out the door with his birth certificate, the doctor’s letter, and his brown paper bag.
There were no cell phones in those days, meaning I couldn’t hear from him unless he went to a pay phone, and even though I never expected him to call, as the hours ticked by and morning turned into late afternoon, I desperately wanted to know what was happening. When he finally walked through the door, I was sitting on the living room floor next to a playpen stuffed with toys and a toddler who wanted out. Both Peter and I stood up as Steve—looking frighteningly pale, his eyes red and nearly swollen closed—sank slowly onto the foyer floor, put his head in his hands, and sobbed. Maybe it was the brownies he had eaten or the growing fear of being drafted or the bitter blow of his father’s cold shoulder, or maybe it was being sent to military school when he was four, or spending a year in an institution where there was no one to relate to—or maybe it was everything bubbling up all at once. But when he’d handed the psychologist’s letter to the sergeant at the desk, even before the examination began, Steve started to cry, violently. Eventually, someone had to walk him outside and sit with him on the front steps. Even then he couldn’t stop crying, sobbing and sobbing, unable to speak for hour after hour. By the end of the day, he was officially stamped 4-F and allowed to go home.
I put him to bed, made him drink some water, pushed him to eat some soup, while I kept telling him he was home, he had a family who loved him, no one was going to send him away. He was safe, he was safe. And he went to sleep.
Steve’s flirtation with drugs, which had begun with pot in the midsixties, was now becoming a slightly more serious relationship, and it bothered me. I remember lying underneath Peter’s crib, listening to the rattle of the toddler’s breathing and the rumble of Steve’s friends milling about in the other rooms of the house. Some of the guests I knew, others I didn’t, and all had been invited that night to drop acid, along with a mix of other drugs, I suspected. But since I was frightened of hallucinogenics, or any chemical that might trap me in my head, plus the fact that I was newly pregnant, I felt comfortable sleeping under my asthmatic two-year-old, listening to him breathe, feeling the butterfly-like movements of the new baby.
Two things made this pregnancy different from my first: I wasn’t working all day, every day—although taking care of a toddler is its own kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day job. And Lamaze, or natural childbirth, had appeared on the scene, offering classes for expectant mothers and their partners to learn about the birthing process, along with techniques for handling the pain. I didn’t want to be placed in a room alone and clueless again, so six weeks before my calculated due date, I gathered a notebook, a pillow, a stopwatch, and Steve, and off we went to learn about visualization, breathing, and relaxation, about listening to the body and letting go. Tools I’ve used all the rest of my life, though how much I used during the actual birth, I’m not really sure.
My teacher was the soon-to-be-famous Femmy DeLyser, who in 1982 joined Jane Fonda in her book and video Pregnancy, Birth and Recovery. The Dutch-born maternity nurse and childbirth expert was part of the newly formed Lamaze International and in 1972, when I met her, she had just started teaching night classes at the old Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on Fountain Avenue in the middle of Hollywood. She lovingly explained the three stages of labor and how to recognize each of them, the last being transition. Hitting that final stage of labor, she laughingly told us, we might start demanding that everyone back off or become overwhelmingly irritated with a “let’s call the whole thing off” feeling.