Visiting only occasionally, my brother stayed removed from most of the family chaos, first in Berkeley, where he received his PhD in physics, then in Long Island, New York, where he lived for several years to do postdoctoral research at the Brookhaven National Lab. But in 1973 he moved back to Pasadena along with his wife, Jimmie, and their son, Jason, who was only a few months younger than Eli. Rick would be working at Caltech with the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman, which ultimately became an important working relationship and a powerful friendship.
Maybe the lure of having Ricky and his young family living so close was part of the reason why my mother moved back into her childhood home, though it couldn’t have been easy for her. Over the years, my brother had become impatient and emotionally distant with our mother, like he was holding back from her any real affection. And though his disregard was palpable, she never asked for more or turned away, but always stood with her eager face toward him, waiting to be forgiven for things they never talked about. Joy once confessed to Jimmie that she could hear my mother crying every night—a tiny piece of information that Jimmie only recently told me, and the thought of that stays in my head. Baa must have felt injured in whatever direction she turned: Her husband had left for a younger woman; she was living with her mother, who criticized her constantly; and while her son was distractedly disrespectful, her oldest daughter was resentfully dependent.
And yet, on a moment’s notice she’d drop everything to drive to the Topanga Beach house and wrangle two young boys for the day. Then, when I’d drag myself home from some dumb game show, I’d walk through the door and turn into someone I didn’t want to be. Steve most often was nowhere in sight, while my mother led a little band of playtime junkies on a rampage through the house, looking for their next imagination fix. Blankets would be strewn across every piece of furniture, deck chairs pulled into the living room, and pillows piled into every woolen cave, leaving the house looking as if it had been ransacked. Never mind that she had taken good care of my children, that they had been entertained and creatively stimulated. All I could see was the fact that the toys—which I’d carefully organized into buckets and bins—were scattered everywhere, as if from a deliberate need to undo everything I’d done.
But the thing that turned me from Jekyll into Hyde was the sound of Baa’s high-pitched voice playing Bob or Joe or Martha and having a conversation with Peter’s character or Eli’s—and he, at that point, was pretty much preverbal. Most of the words were undecipherable, except for my mother’s piercing “walky, walky, walky,” which meant that whatever stuffed animal or Weeble Wobble she held in her hand was hopping around their make-believe world. The walky-walky game, as I called it. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be included in their game—which I never was—or was glad to be free from it. Not knowing what I wanted from anyone, including myself, I’d begin to clean up the kitchen, slamming pans around as I fixed dinner, torn between my gratitude for her devotion and my frustration with her presence. Eventually I’d have some sort of dinner ready and with an irritated ring to my voice, I’d call them to the table, only to hear Peter emphatically yell, “Mom, go away. We’re playing.”
Unvoiced resentment brewed into quiet rage, keeping itself hidden until suddenly that’s all I was: mindless red rage, unable to control impulses I didn’t want to have. One evening, Steve and I were sitting outside in the midst of an argument, and I remember crying and wailing, going round and round in emotional circles because I either didn’t know what was at the bottom of it, or didn’t want to admit it. Steve, in a last-ditch effort to break through, got on his knees in front of me and said, “Hit me. Will that make you feel better? Then hit me.” He kept saying it while refusing to let me move away. Suddenly I felt as if I were in someone else’s body, a body whose clenched fist hit him again and again, mashing a club of a hand into his face until his nose began gushing blood. Only then did I stop. Wrapping my arms around him, fearfully clinging as if we had faced some terrible dragon together. Me. Steve never hit me. Not ever in his life.
In early 1973, a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Jon Voight and Faye Dunaway, was being mounted at the Ahmanson Theatre in downtown Los Angeles and I wanted to be in it. I knew that sending them my picture was a good idea, but I still didn’t have any eight-by-ten glossies, and the only publicity photos I had were either with my hair in pigtails or a cornette on my head. Instead I mailed them a family photo showing me looking worn and motherly, talking to Peter as I discreetly breast-fed his little brother… thinking maybe it made me look older. I had worked on three scenes, knew them, owned them, and was being given the rare opportunity to audition—albeit not with Mr. Voight or Ms. Dunaway. Arriving a half hour early, I walked around the courtyard of the Ahmanson Theatre trying to calm myself, and when that didn’t work, I stretched out on a stone bench directly across from the artists’ entrance. The day was hot and the stone felt cool as I looked up at the sky, breathing in deeply and out very slowly, like I was in the first stages of labor. “You have a right to be here, you’re good at what you do, you have a right to be here,” I chanted over and over, while flapping my trembling hands in the air to release any visible tension. But I couldn’t quiet my heart, which pounded with such force that it made my thin cotton dress bounce around rhythmically.
I could say the reason I didn’t get this part was because of my size, that I’m too small, that I didn’t fit with the rest of the cast, or that though I was twenty-six years old at the time—the right age for Stella—I’ve always had a childlike, girly quality, and I didn’t know how to leave it behind. All of that is true. But the real reason I was crossed off the list was because I didn’t know how to audition. By the time I walked onto the stage, a huge magical dark theater—empty except for the producers and the director who would judge me—I was overwhelmed by it all, overwhelmed with longing, disconnected from myself and the work and from any chance of finding my version of Stanley Kowalski’s pregnant wife. I don’t remember hearing my voice reverberate through the lofty space, don’t remember playing any of the scenes I’d worked on. Maybe I never made it that far.
What I do remember is the bumper-to-bumper traffic, and the afternoon sun smacking me in the face as I drove away from downtown Los Angeles, feeling powerless to move my life or even my car forward. Finally, I walked into a house turned upside down, as usual, while Steve lounged on the deck smoking a joint, strumming his guitar, and watching the sun go down. From Peter’s room, I could hear the dreaded “walky, walky, walky,” and as I tried to sit down on the floor with them, Peter snapped, “No, Mom, no. We’re playing. Go away.” I then trudged to the kitchen, hoping to find something to scrub, which, of course, there was never a shortage of.