A Moment With Maralys

A Circus Without Elephants--Chapter Six

2011-12-10T23:57:00.000-08:00

CHAPTER SIX

THE UNDERGROUND FORT

TEN YEARS LATER WE’D become the parents of six children--five boys and a girl--and it was assumed by those who knew us only in passing that we were militant Catholics, when in fact we were simply prolific Presbyterians.

Once in awhile I thought back to those childhood dreams Rob and I had entertained as youngsters, those wholly unrealistic images of ourselves as adults. For a short while Rob imagined he’d be a railroad engineer, and later, with a dawning love of the outdoors, a forest ranger.

I entertained no such lofty ideals. I saw myself as a bride. As though being a bride was a permanent state of affairs, as though brideship was a condition that lasted through maturity and on into senility. How else can one explain a vision that never carried me beyond a few golden moments of twirling before a mirror in a silken wedding gown, radiant to the point of luminescence, and on to a dizzying, forever-float down a church aisle with everyone looking and gasping? Oh, what a fairy vision of a bride I’d conjured up, what a back-lit center of attention I imagined I’d be!

That walk was obviously meant to last forever. Certainly no competing image ever arose to explain what I might be doing after the bride bit.

It was all so ironic.

By 1962, surrounded by half a dozen children in all stages from pupa to butterfly, I was thinking back on how the dream had gone astray: after all my girlish fantasies about a wedding as opulent as a coronation, I’d settled for Spartan vows and no real wedding at all. And having given no thought whatever to children, I was now the mother of six--and I swear they snuck up on me, one by one, when I wasn’t looking.

Along with everything else, the humor in our lives had taken a twist. The funny things that once happened to us when it was just Rob and me squaring off against the world, had now become the craziness created by the two of us pitted against a defiant army we’d created ourselves from scratch—-a phalanx of children that surrounded us on all sides.

We’d moved, of course. No army could possibly be garreted in such tiny quarters as that first house in the San Fernando Valley. Together, Rob and I chose to locate miles away in cooler Orange County, though I maintain he deliberately cultivated a twenty-eight-mile commute to his legal work in Long Beach, a distance which struck him as a bare-minimum separation from the confusion he left each morning. Sometimes he said, only half in jest, “This place is like a circus without the elephants.”

In North Tustin, California, we built a modest house on a half acre of land that backed up to an orange grove. Our children loved the new location; they had endless space for their endless projects, and even better, they could roam unfettered through the grove and stage little wars and bomb each other with oranges.

By 1962 our oldest, Bobby, was eleven and a half, and our youngest, Kirk, only two, and we’d learned what every parent of more than one discovers sooner or later--no matter how painstakingly you work at molding your kids, they will turn out different than you planned, and in fact no two will be remotely alike, and if you don’t believe that’s possible in a nice, consistent, even-tempered environment, just study a few snowflakes.

WE’D KNOWN FROM THE start that Bobby was the stubborn one. Long-faced and quietly intense, he was a skinny child who said frequently, “I don’t want to do what everyone else has done. I want to be different.” From his earliest years he was propelled by an inner force that drove him—-not to play like other children, God forbid--but to re-make, improve, or otherwise conquer his childhood toys. He didn’t play with his train set. He built a virtual train switching yard that crept across the cement and devoured our patio.

Sometimes as he worked, he wheezed. But obstinate beyond reason, he said, “It’s not asthma. I’m not sick.” I was always arguing with him. “Bobby, stop fixing your train set and come to dinner.” He came when he felt like it.

Bobby wasn’t the one getting raised, I was. In his own dogged way, he trained me to equal him in stubbornness. The problem was, I kept imagining myself as the boss who ought to be making the decisions . . . whereas he saw himself as a youthful Alexander the Great who couldn’t be conquered. We lived our lives in a clash of images.

Soon Rob and I discovered he had dreams, but what we didn’t know at first was their width and breadth . . . that an eleven-year-old could think of himself in global terms, that he could vow privately to create a competition-size environment deep in the ground. And then actually do it.

Bobby confided his plans one morning at breakfast. “Dad, I’m going to dig the world’s biggest underground fort.” He said it just like that. No buildup. No explanation. No preparatory speeches.

Rob looked up from his puffed wheat. “How will you know it’s the world’s biggest, Bobby?” Rob was trying to be serious, but of course he wasn’t, how could he be? Bobby was just a child, and even to me this was idle conversation.

Bobby’s long face changed subtly, took on greater eagerness, more resolve. His voice conveyed his certainty. “I’ll just know, Dad. I will.” And I swear, we almost believed him.

And so began The Year of the Underground Fort.

BOBBY DIDN’T WASTE any time. Unlike other eleven-year-olds who begin a project after breakfast and abandon it by supper, Bobby recruited his brothers with an intensity that would have made the Marines proud. He did, indeed, intend to dig for himself and his siblings a noteworthy underground fort, and to that end he conscripted his next-oldest brother, Chris, and then our third son, Eric. By noon, the three of them were hard at work.

I heard them through the kitchen window. The far side of the yard became a noisy, industrial place.

But two shoveling brothers didn’t live up to Bobby’s expectations. “You’ve got to dig faster!” he cried, inciting them to greater effort. Willing to tunnel at a fiendish pace himself, he was dismayed to find that his brothers worked at something less than the speed of a steam shovel.

Clearly, help was needed. As only Bobby could do, he brought in friends, expanding his sphere of influence outward block by block, like a creeping flood, until every neighborhood child with access to a shovel had convened in our backyard. I watched and was mostly amused.

For days, then weeks, our yard was never quiet. The clanking of shovels and the shrill sounds of youthful voices dominated our half acre until our backyard was like an over-subscribed union job, with half the workers bent to the task and the other half leaning on their shovels.

Day after day Bobby led the charge, shoveling furiously one minute, exhorting his youthful minions the next.

Meanwhile, the mounds of dirt grew, and so, presumably, did the underground fort. I never saw it up close until the project was nearly at an end (when Chris, cheerfully but insistently, led me down into the bowels of the earth), but I did see that Bobby had hardened into steel; I could feel his willpower all the way to the kitchen. It hardly seemed possible that such a young boy could keep such tight control over what was basically an unmanageable company of slackers.

And then two things happened. Bobby’s friends, and soon even his brothers, grew weary of being the indentured servants of a relentless taskmaster. “I can’t dig anymore,” said Chris one day, walking toward the house. “I’m tired.”

I happened to be watching through the kitchen window and wondered how Bobby would handle the loss of his best worker—-Chris the faithful, Chris the determined shoveler.

For seconds Bobby stared in horror, and then he ran after his brother. “You can’t be tired!” he howled. “You’re not tired, Chris, you know you’re not. You want this fort a lot, you want it as much as I do.”

Chris gave him a glance and kept walking.

Giving up on mind control, Bobby did a quick, dancing sidestep, trying to cut off his brother’s escape.

Chris wouldn’t be stopped. He just moved deftly around his older brother and continued toward the house.

Bobby followed, desperation on his long face. “Please, Chris, come back. I need you. I can’t do it without you. Everyone needs you. Please.”

At last Chris paused and simply looked at him.

With a glint in his eyes, Bobby pulled out his trump card. Like a gambler, he slapped it on the table. “Chris, if you keep digging, I’ll . . . I’ll give you my marbles. All of them. Even the aggies.” Anxiously he waited to see if Chris would succumb to this, the ultimate bribe.

“The aggies?” Chris stopped to consider, letting the silence grow, thinking hard about Bobby’s offer. Finally he raised his eyes and said with his own fierce determination, “All right, Bobby. I’ll do it. But don’t yell at me anymore, okay? I don’t like being yelled at.”

“You’ll dig?” said Bobby.

“For awhile.” With slow steps Chris turned back toward the fort. Halfway across the yard he called out, “You don’t have to give me your aggies, Bobby.”

The second happening was bigger, much harder to solve. Bobby’s asthma, which he’d had since early childhood, flared up and became so severe that at night we could hear the sounds of his wheezing in the hall outside his room. Still he said stubbornly, “The fort’s not hurting me. Don’t you think I’d know if it was?”

Rob and I finally recognized the truth---that the spores, molds, and fungus inherent in all soil were making him worse. The fort had to go.

But it took both of us and the advice from a doctor and our combined willpowers to bring Bobby to a halt. And even then we might not have succeeded, had Rob not taken an extraordinary step: one night, by the light of the moon, he went outside with a shovel and for hours he relentlessly restored the earth to Bobby’s underground fort.

BOBBY GAVE UP WITH resignation, even grace. And that was only the beginning of his trauma.

Because his asthma was now so severe, Rob and I were forced to consider our last resort--a home for asthmatic children, an institution in Denver where the minimum stay was two years.

Telling Bobby he had to leave all of us, his brothers, his parents, his grandparents, for two years was one of the hardest things we ever did. And harder still when he didn’t argue. As he would do in later years, Bobby fought back when a fight was possible, and when it wasn’t, he just coped.

CHAPTER FIVE: A Circus Without Elephants

2011-11-27T16:44:00.000-08:00

CHAPTER FIVE

THE MOOT COURT COMPETITION

I’VE NEVER WON AN argument against Rob.

Which is not to say I’ve never gotten my own way, it just means I’ve never bested him verbally. If someone rated us on our oral confrontations, Rob would come off as a powerful William Jennings Bryant . . . whereas I, dogged and emotional and trying not to whine, would get a rating about equal to Marge Simpson. He uses words that cut like a scalpel. I fight back with timeworn clichés that are off the mark and slice no deeper than a hurled marshmallow.

I’m smarter now; I no longer do what I can’t win at, and instead I take Rob on in ways that aren’t so obvious.

But in 1953, when he was in his final year of law school, I hadn’t yet seen him operate in any arena larger than our kitchen; I didn’t know what he was capable of.

I soon found out.

DURING ROB’S Third year, a group of young California lawyers calling themselves the Junior Barristers, created a hypothetical legal case known as Roger Blackgold vs. U.R. Dutybound. This complex, at times humorous, petroleum conservation lawsuit was designed for the California law schools’ moot court competition, meaning eight schools employed the same case.

As I recall the facts, Rob was defending U.R. Dutybound, maintaining staunchly that Blackgold had no right to be slurping oil sidewise by slant drilling under Dutybound’s land. But let’s be honest; the real issue, at first, was whether Rob and his UCLA partner, Daren Johnson, could out-argue two law students from Loyola.

The opposing teams met in Los Angeles—-in a real courtroom before three real judges. Except for a bit of histrionics from Johnson (which even I knew was rarely seen in actual trials), and leaving out the Loyola man who referred to “my worthy opponents,” in sneering overtones, the competition was breathtaking only to the wives.

To our huge delight, Rob and Darren won.

FOR THE NEXT MONTH it was rumored around UCLA that their opponents from the University of Southern California Law School, were “out to get” UCLA in the second round. Somehow Johnson and Wills didn’t take these rumors as seriously as their rivals hoped.

When the teams finally met in court, Johnson spoke first. Throughout his argument he kept raising his palms as though in supplication to heaven, and he also pointed, shrugged, and alternated between looks of pain and surprise, a performance worthy of a review in Variety.

Then came the first S.C. man, who strutted about like a legal peacock and decisively shredded every argument Johnson had made.

When it was Rob’s turn, he ignored what everyone else had done and merely offered an uncluttered line of logic. With his arguments still ringing in my ears, the last S.C. man could have been accusing U.R. Dutybound of soliciting oilfield orgies and I wouldn’t have noticed.

It seemed unreasonable, later, that a simple meal could transform two overbearing lawyers from U.S.C. into a couple of slim, eager boys who were actually likeable.

After dinner the judges spoke of “excellent arguments on both sides.” And they gave the vote to UCLA!

Rob and I didn’t drive home that night--we floated!

Far in the future, sometime after the Bar Exam, Wills and Johnson would argue the last round of the Moot Court Competition against the winners from all the law schools in Northern California. This time the argument would be held at The Bar Convention in Monterey--but it was a distant thing, and too much lay before them to think about it.

ON THE FIFTH OF September, our third little boy, Eric, was born. After viewing him in the nursery, Rob came to my hospital room and said warmly, “We have a pretty good mold, Babe, I wouldn’t change a thing. He looks just like the others, but of course he’s pretty small--only nine pounds, six ounces,” which made me laugh. Our oldest, Bobby, had been eleven-two, and our second boy, Chris, only ten, and we seemed to be losing several ounces of baby with each go-around.

On October 1, three weeks after Eric’s birth, Rob packed a suitcase to go take the bar exam. He had the dazed look of a man who is being led to the gas chamber and no longer cares. He seemed beyond discussing it.

“I’ll be at the Mayflower Hotel, Babe, if you need me,” and he scooped up Bobby for a hug, patted Chris, and left us to go downtown for three days--just as someone turned up the thermostat in central Los Angeles.

On October Second, the temperature in L. A. was ninety-seven, the next day, ninety-eight. In those days air-conditioning wasn’t the norm, and the temperature in the Embassy Auditorium, where the bar exams were held, soared into the mid-nineties. Not only was the room filled with perspiring men (and a few women), but almost everyone had a portable typewriter of the old-fashioned, tap-tapping variety, so that the room was at once both redolent of nervous sweat and noisier than a 40’s newsroom.

For three days I pictured Rob roasting and flunking.

I needn’t have worried.

He came home the third night in a state of euphoria, and far from being exhausted he was buoyed by adrenaline and elated at the brilliance of the questions. When I asked about the heat he said, “Heat? That was the least of our worries. We were typing so fast we didn’t even notice it!”

His mother, Ruth, who happened to be there, said, “Gracious, Rob!” and clacked her tongue sympathetically.

Rob described the Bar exam, full of essay questions that literally crawled with issues, and his perception of the intense heat fading away each day, while the din of typewriters rose to a hellish clatter.

And then he abruptly changed the subject and brought up a topic that neither of us had really thought about in months. “Did I tell you that the Moot Court finals take place the day after tomorrow?”

“No!” cried Ruth, who now, in her older years, could turn tragic on a dime. “You’re NOT going from one terrible ordeal to another!”

“Yep,” said Rob, cheerfully. “That’s exactly what I’m doing, Mother. It’ll be hell, but I’m going.”

Which is why we prepared to leave late the next afternoon to drive to Monterey, a distance of 350 miles . . though Rob’s mother rolled her eyes and seemed ready to weep. “Don’t do it,” she cried. “You’re killing yourself, Rob! That’s what you’re doing--destroying yourself!”

Rob grinned and said he was still operating on excess adrenaline and could probably go on indefinitely.

Since Ruth’s advice to her son during his first grueling year of Law School had been, “Don’t let them do this to you, Rob! You just show them--and quit!” neither of us was inclined to pay much heed to her admonishments.

Now Rob rolled down the window of our old green Nash, The Turtle, and waved goodbye. Ruth stood in the driveway with three-year-old Bobby on one side and eighteen-month-old Chris clinging to her skirt. “Don’t overdo!” she called out one last time. “You hear?”

“I’ll probably collapse from the strain,” he yelled back, making a long face just to torture her. “See you in a couple of days--if I’m not dead.”

Still, I wondered why we were going. That morning Rob had announced matter-of-factly, “You realize, Babe, this moot court thing is pretty much a lost cause. The Respondents were winners in both the Northern and Southern law schools, and since we can’t all argue the same side of the case, someone had to switch sides. Johnson and I lost the toss.”

“Then why are we doing this, Rob?” I probably sounded like his mother.

He just looked at me and grinned. “Because I’m a masochist—-why else?”

The news that day continued to spiral downward. Before noon, Daren Johnson called to tell us officiously that the rules had just been changed and there would now be a single winner from among the four contestants--winner take all. (“All” in this case being five hundred dollars worth of law books.) “I’m getting an early start,” said Daren, laughing evilly. “Bringing along a trailer to haul back the books.”

I looked at Rob. “You offered to kill him, right?”

“We’ll just see what he puts in that trailer.”

With tiny Eric in the backseat (he had to go because I was nursing), Rob and I started off cheerfully. Still high from the Bar exam, he drove while I read him the facts on Roger Blackgold vs. U.R. Dutybound--though before we’d traveled ten miles he had begun abandoning his old friend, Dutybound, in a search for redeeming features in Blackgold. “This is amazing,” he said. “There really ARE two sides to this case!”

Clouds scampered along overhead, and there was the feeling in our little car that we were merely pleasure-jaunting up the coast--until abruptly Rob’s adrenaline gave out.

Then the sun went down, and from the rear seat Eric started howling, so I had to bring him up front for supper.

Rob had not finished studying. Somehow he had to keep gathering facts about the wrong side of the case.

With Eric quiet again, I took over the driving and Rob felt around in the glove compartment for some kind of a light. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing anywhere. Wouldn’t you know?”

When he spoke again his cheery mood had vanished. “No gambler would put money on this contest. When I got up this morning the odds of winning were two out of four. Now they’re one out of four.”

“I know,” I said. “So why are we going?”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve been thinking about turning back.”

“We could, you know.”

I said it, but I knew he wouldn’t. Not him. Turning back wasn’t his style. This was the man who stuck with a madcap truck driver barreling down the grapevine, and later, three bumbling contractors who wouldn’t have done well building outhouses, and he never spoke of quitting. Instead he would grumble and swear and predict ultimate failure and make me wish I’d stayed home.

“One way or another,” he said, “I’ve got to study.” But the only interior light was a dim bulb UNDER the glove compartment which stayed lit only when the car door was open, as he discovered when he tentatively pushed his door open a crack. The light flickered on, but then the door slammed shut and out went the bulb.

Anyone else would have resigned himself to darkness. Instead, Rob rooted under the front seat and suddenly said, “Ah-ha!” and held up an old Arden milk bottle, replete with ancient smudges of dried milk. “By gum, it’ll stay open now.” He pushed against the door and wedged the glass bottle into the crack, and the ten-watt bulb under the glove-compartment glowed faintly. With the wind hissing through the opening, Rob cork-screwed himself down under the dash, grabbed his sheaf of papers, and slowly gathered a case for his once enemy, now devoted friend, Roger Blackgold.

In such a posture, he rode the rest of the way to Monterey.

It was ten-thirty at night when we arrived--so tired that we paid scant attention when we ran into Daren Johnson at the hotel and he informed us, rather too cheerfully, that we’d missed dinner at the hotel and now all the restaurants were closed. He was still unbelievably upbeat--effervescing like Alka Seltzer. “Well, Rob, are you all ready for tomorrow?” he asked, and I swear he rubbed his hands together like Scrooge contemplating his next nickel.

His wife gave me a thin, sideways smile, indicating she wasn’t ready at all.

Johnson started for the stairs. “See you down there bright and early, Rob. I’ll have my trailer parked out front.” He grinned wickedly and pulled his wife along. “Come on, Carmen.” Laughing, they disappeared.

Rob studied until midnight, and then we turned out the light, planning to get up at seven.

About one a.m. Eric began to howl. And also at two and four, indicating a basic natal distrust common to Wills babies about being forced to sleep in strange places.

Dawn arrived at five-thirty and we might have slept right through it, except that somebody decided right then to attack the street under our window with a jackhammer. In disbelief we listened to the repetitive pounding of metal on concrete. But Eric, who apparently found jackhammers soothing, slept like the baby he was. From under the pillows, where Rob and I had burrowed to escape the noise, it seemed unthinkable that in just a few hours he’d be addressing the entire California State Bar Convention.

It seemed unlikely he’d be able to speak at all.

Lying rigid as broom handles, we harbored separate grim thoughts of dumping water on the man in the street--except that would have meant getting out of bed. Rob said later he’d considered going home right after breakfast, and I thought he sounded serious, while I admitted to fantasies of pounding nails in the tires of Johnson’s trailer.

With all hope of sleep finished, Rob and I lay in bed, stupefied, waiting for something else to happen—-which, around seven, turned out to be the baby chiming in like a chorus with the jackhammer.

Rob wrenched himself to his feet. His face was ashen and his eyes rimmed with dark circles; he looked about fifty. “Oh boy,” he muttered. “I’m sick. I’m nauseated.”

One glance at his fierce expression made it clear there were no wifely words I could risk uttering.

Before I’d finished bathing Eric in the bathroom sink, Rob was telling me I’d better hurry and get downstairs to order breakfast or we wouldn’t have any. I rushed out, leaving Rob shaving and the baby on the bed.

The waitress in the hotel dining room meandered between tables with a relaxed air. But she wasn’t as slow as Rob, who apparently was NEVER going to show up. I kept looking at my watch and looking at his bacon and eggs and looking toward the stairs, while the time got to be thirty, then twenty, then seventeen minutes to eight.

At fifteen minutes to the hour he showed up looking wretched. “The baby’s been screaming the whole time you’ve been gone. I had to call a sitter. The manager sent someone up, and now Eric’s quiet.”

Oh, thank God. “You’d better eat,” I said softly. “You need something.”

“Eat? I can’t POSSIBLY eat! I feel sick.” He glanced at the fried eggs and said, “Ugh!”

Quickly he paid the bill and we were off--off to make Rob’s grand debut before half the lawyers and judges in California, in the final and most impressive round of the Moot Court Competition.

WHEN WE ARRIVED, THE crowd was all seated and the three other contestants and five judges were sitting on an open stage in front of the audience, though luckily they hadn’t begun.

Rob joined the men on stage and I found a seat in the audience. Only a minute later the first participant stood up.

The other two men were from the University of San Francisco, having prevailed over Stanford, Cal Berkeley, Santa Clara, and Hastings. Somehow I expected them to look ferocious, or at least overbearing—-they had, after all, been steady winners. To my surprise they just looked like boys. Daren Johnson seemed as formidable as any; his skills were obvious and he was no longer part of our team.

After awhile my mind wandered from the speeches, and I began thinking about our circumstances and how Rob had had no breakfast--and for that matter, no dinner the night before. And of course no sleep either. Obviously all those judges and lawyers would never know any of this, but physically he could not have been in worse shape.

When it was Rob’s turn, I could hardly bear to watch. He began speaking in a voice of deadly calm, so deliberative that I was shocked. His words seemed to be coming through some kind of modulating screen, and frankly, I’d never heard him talk like that before.

The truth was, I thought he was going to faint, and I began sending him silent messages: Don’t fall down, Rob. Don’t keel over in front of all these people. Just finish. Stay on your feet. It’ll be over in a minute. Keep standing--you can do it.

As I watched, I saw that he seemed unaware of his audience and of the other contestants, or even of himself. Calmly, very slowly, he directed his argument to the judges. To me it was the voice of a quiet, ponderous stranger--a hungry, over-worked, dog-tired, near-fainting stranger.

When he finally came to his conclusion, still speaking in that tone of lethal calm, I realized I hadn’t actually heard a word of his argument. Only two things seemed important: he had finished. And he was still standing.

Now that he hadn’t disgraced himself, we could go home happy. I couldn’t wait to go fetch the baby and get out of there.

After the last speaker returned to his seat, and we’d all stood while the five judges left the stage, I wiped clammy hands across my gabardine skirt and turned to the lady next to me, because I simply had to speak to someone. “Oh God, I’m glad that’s over!”

She smiled sympathetically.

The audience chatted in subdued voices for a few minutes and presently the judges returned. I was paying them only half attention until one of them stepped to the front of the stage and in a matter-of-fact voice made an incredible announcement: “The winner for the best oral argument is Robert Wills!”

I gasped. He’d won it all. An astonished squeal took me by surprise and I clapped my hand over my mouth. It wasn’t possible!

I whispered to myself, “I don’t believe it!” And then I turned to the lady next to me and said, “I don’t believe it!” and she smiled again, but still I kept saying those words over and over in my head. It simply couldn’t have happened. Not to Rob. Not today.

People around me were smiling and clapping.

I stared at him up there on the stage, looking so pleased, shaking hands with all the judges, courteous and gracious and almost matter-of-fact, as though it were someone else’s victory.

Rob was now the Moot Court Champion for the State of California. And no one could take that away.

Presently he came down from the stage and when we left the hall it was as though we were propelled by feet not our own. Voices not our own said Thank you, and Yes, we’re very happy, and I’m glad you liked it. We couldn’t have known that this triumph would exceed even the joy of passing the bar.

Later we were invited to the assembly luncheon as guests of the convention, where we took our baby, and once again ate almost nothing, as people were exclaiming over the infant and over Rob’s performance, and we were smiling, smiling with pleasure. It’s hard to stuff food into the middle of a smile.

By now food no longer seemed necessary.

And then we were heading home again in The Turtle, its sagging rear made worse with some forty volumes of West’s California Digest and other legal tomes. Never, not once, had we pictured ourselves returning this way.

“Well, Rob,” I said, “you outmaneuvered them all--the baby, the jackhammers and Daren Johnson’s trailer.”

“Yeah,” he said, laughing. “Pretty nice, huh Babe?”

Very nice, I thought, except for one thing: there goes my last hope of ever winning an argument from you!

A Circus Without Elephants--Chapter-Four

2011-11-20T16:29:00.000-08:00

CHAPTER FOUR

ONE UP ON MR. BLANDINGS

UCLA WASN’T STANFORD—-no school was Stanford except Stanford—-but it was okay, because I was there with Rob. After awhile the school began to soften and feel comfortable and even “fit” like an old pair of jeans. What wasn’t okay was where we lived, especially now that I was newly pregnant and had morning sickness, a horse-and-buggy misnomer that stands for day-long nausea, which only fades as your head hits the pillow and your stomach goes to sleep and drifts out of reach of the churning swells.

Our “home” was not a home, but a dingy apartment in a brown stucco building in downtown Santa Monica, designed not around central air but central odor. The place reeked. As we entered the building after school, a familiar smell hit us, as though the tenants were cooking some abominable mix of Brussels Sprouts and cabbage. I found myself breathing shallowly and longing for open windows. Rob wrinkled his nose and said, “Cabbage again?” and I wondered aloud whether it was the same family boiling new vegetables every day, or different families rotating through the same stinky menu. Never mind. The answer was unimportant; in my queasy state, daily contentment was impossible, living as we were among the fumes of simmering garbage.

Even without its odors, the apartment building was charmless: the halls were dark enough for a mole and the wall paint older than the carvings on a Mayan temple.

One Saturday Rob and I went for a drive, looped up over a small mountain and came down again on a winding road, and voila! we discovered the San Fernando Valley.

THE VALLEY WAS just over the hill from UCLA. It was a honeymooner’s dreamscape abloom with freshly minted tract homes and opportunistic contractors charging around old cow pastures with blueprints under their arms. Dairies had once abounded there. Now everything above the well-fertilized soil was new, and even the sun shone brighter. It all looked so promising.

For not much money, which--with a Cal-Vet loan and help from our parents--was all we had, we could swing a brand new house and escape those malignant cooking odors.

“WE’LL TAKE THAT ONE,” Rob and I chorused as our newly-chosen contractor, handsome Mr. Young of Young, Rosenberg and Spiegel, unfurled a sheet of sketches. We were looking at four renditions of an 850-square-foot house: two bedrooms, a bath, a kitchen, a living-room, and a dining nook. A mansion, really. Every sketch was basically the same house except for subtle differences (huge differences we thought), in windows or doors. But just claiming one of them as ours was like staking out a beachfront in Carmel-by-the-Sea. Rob and I pored over the sketches, examining them minutely as though they contained intricacies worthy of Hearst Castle.

Privately, the two of us slipped each other proud smiles, and then we signed important papers and wrote a big check for all the money we possessed, which was somewhere around two hundred dollars.

The house came with its own rectangle of earth, and that, too, was ours! As laid out on a flat piece of paper, the project seemed ideal. “Perfect, don’t you think, Rob?” and he said, “Of course it’s perfect--couldn’t be better!” I was thinking how this topped our first car, even my first wrist watch, which I still remembered—-the thrill of Mickey Mouse and his white-gloved finger, and how I felt so old wearing that watch at age six.

AS YOUNGISH ADULTS with limited life experience, Rob and I knew not the ways of contractors. We were innocently unaware of how some of them operated, or from what shadowy sources they drew the men who did the actual work--some of which we were about to find out.

Now that we’d signed the papers, the newly poured foundation drew us so irresistibly we couldn’t stay away. Our chateau in the San Fernando Valley soon became Rob’s personal challenge. I was growing a baby, but he was growing a house.

At first the place shaped up quickly, like a ripening plum. Exulting in its progress, Rob drove us out to the Valley every day after school just to look. The framing went up so fast we knew we’d have the home sooner than its due date. Much sooner. Which dovetailed perfectly with all the people who took one look at my generous stomach and asked, “Oh, are you due next month?”

One afternoon Rob walked across the cement, squeezed between a couple of two-by-fours and did a double-take. “Hey, what’s this? There’s supposed to be a door here!”

“You sure, Rob?”

“Sure I’m sure. I’m standing in the kitchen. I’m looking toward the garage. How are we supposed to get from one to the other?”

I eased in beside him. “How could they forget something as big as a . . . door?”

“Can’t imagine. We’ll have to find Mr. Young.”

Full of purpose and youth, we sprinted down the row of half-framed houses and finally located Mr. Young. “You say they left out a door?” he asked pleasantly. “Well, that’s a new one. I’ll have to tell Mr. Rosenberg.”

As it turned out, missing doors were new only to us. Days later the framers misplaced a window in the living room. “It’s three feet off center,” Rob explained patiently to Mr. Young, whom he’d found with some difficulty. “It’s butted right up against the front door.”

“Can’t have that,” said Young. “I’ll see that Mr. Rosenberg gets on it immediately.”

But Rosenberg didn’t get on it—-not until the lathers had covered up the frame. Rob marched up to the blank lathe and with a heavy, felt-tipped pen wrote “WINDOW HERE!” Still not satisfied, he drew the outline of a window in bold, thick strokes. Later, someone was sent to rip out half the living-room wall and re-locate the missing aperture.

Rob is nothing if not a man with audacious penmanship. I began to see his oversized words sprouting like modern-art daisies in all parts of the house.

Oddly, to the builders--to Mr. Young--Rob appeared monkishly calm. Aware of Rob’s prickly impatience at home, how his temper sometimes flared like a sudden summer storm, I marveled that he was staying cool.

As the mistakes multiplied, Rob began to make lists, with letters big enough for the blind, which he handed to Mr. Young. Young accepted the lists agreeably and put them in his pocket, and we could only surmise that Mrs. Young ran the pockets through the washing machine with Rob’s lists still in them.

Farther down the line, things got worse. Rob caught the flooring man hiking toward our bathroom with someone else’s roll of linoleum slung over his shoulder. The cabinet maker banged away in the kitchen framing out the wrong kitchen sink. And later he found the concrete man down on his knees busily forming the wrong patio. Still Rob never spoke of abandoning those contractors, and none of them saw the summer storm.

“This place is like a baby bird,” Rob said, with a hint of affection. “We can’t leave it alone for a minute.”

“What do you suppose Young, Rosenberg and Spiegel did before they became contractors?”

He thought about it. “Nothing important. I can’t picture them anywhere . . . even box boys would know the watermelon doesn’t go on top of the bread.”

OUR PALACE DID NOT arrive on time (any more than our first baby). By the end, its creation had slowed to such a crawl that it was two months late and we weren’t given the keys until four days before Christmas.

Before we unloaded our few treasures at the new house, I ran inside to get a drink—-and found no water coming from the faucets. Then I flipped a switch in the kitchen and discovered we had no electricity. Rob said evenly, “I suppose there’s no heat in the floor furnace, either.”

And there wasn’t.

He looked around the living room and began to laugh. “Smile, Babe,” he said, pulling me close and pointing. “Look over there. We’re on Candid Camera.” I honestly thought he’d seen Allen Funt.

He turned serious. “Tonight there’s going to be a cold snap,” he said, and I asked how he knew.

“Heard it on the car radio. They’re warning the citrus growers to fire up their smudge pots.”

“Oh,” I said. I was thinking about how we had no heat for the cold snap and no hot water. But then I remembered we had no water of any kind, either hot or cold.

I began feeling nostalgic about our apartment. It may have smelled of cabbage, but at least it was warm cabbage. And the place had water, too, of both varieties. I said, “What should we do?”

Rob threw a look at our non-functioning floor furnace and said with a grim smile, “I could always go out and buy a smudge pot.”

That evening, as he held a flashlight and we lowered ourselves to a bare mattress, I said, “Honey, do you realize this is our first night living in our very first house?” My voice hit the bare walls and echoed back, as in a cave.

“What you mean is, it’s our first night camping in our first house. Living is when you can turn on a light and flush a toilet.”

“Well,” I said, always the keeper of the flame of optimism, “at least there aren’t any ants or mosquitoes.”

“I’ll grant you that, Babe.” He laughed ironically and pulled me closer. “It’s too cold for ants and you can’t have mosquitoes without water.”

ROB TOOK OVER. Naturally, we had no phone, either, a service that could only be obtained in the exploding frontiers of the San Fernando Valley by submitting a sob story worthy of Queen for a Day: “My husband is stuck on a ten-story roof. He’s waiting for a call from a ladder co.”

Which meant Rob spent every minute until Christmas down at the corner phone booth, pumping nickels into a slot as he tried to score a few basics, like water.

Each problem came with its own excuse: some idiot who thought he understood tractors had graded the front yard and torn out the water pipe; three idiots who considered themselves contractors had neglected to obtain any of the final inspections; an idiot in a cowboy hat who imagined he was an electrician had failed to bring the bathroom heater up to code. Having floundered in their pretenses, they all walked away.

Using his head and an endless supply of nickels, Rob turned contractor and slowly made things right.

By Friday night, the night before Christmas Eve, peace of a sort had come to Lindley Avenue. The furnace was now working, water came through the pipes, and we were the proud owners of a single strand of electricity . . . albeit from the contractor’s power pole. Our mattress was still on the floor, but the floor was WARM. “Just think,” I murmured to Rob, “tomorrow we can take a bath.”

TOMORROW CAME, BUT not the bath. Christmas eve morning we awoke to the sound of something large, an engine of some sort moving back and forth just outside our bedroom window. And then the doorbell rang. A man from the water company stood there asking if I knew we’d sprung a leak.

“A leak!” I howled, looking past his shoulder. In our front yard, a thin stream of water was shooting ten feet into the air. “That’s not a leak. It’s a geyser!”

“What happened?” he asked accusingly, as if he thought I’d been out there hacking at the pipe in my pajamas.

“No idea,” I said. “We were asleep.”

“I’ll have to shut the water off.”

“I suppose so.” After all, we’d had water for eleven hours, maybe our quota for the year. Too bad so much of it disappeared in the ground.

Rob appeared at the door, watching as the geyser slowly receded. “You should see what else this one-man wrecking crew has done.” He ran off to get his pants.

The wrecking crew was in our backyard. About seventeen years old, pimply and male, the lad was sitting atop a small yellow tractor, now stopped, blandly surveying our yard. Here, I realized, was one of the culprits . . . foolishly hired by Rosenberg to grade our lot. It was evident that Rob had already expressed a few opinions out the bedroom window, but that the youth was a bit simple and didn’t comprehend what all the fuss was about.

I stared at the kid curiously, wondering how his mind worked—-or whether it worked at all--and how he’d managed to find and relentlessly destroy our underground plumbing. Not once, it seemed, but twice.

Rob gestured toward the front of the house. “WHY . . “ he asked with exasperation he couldn’t conceal, “didn’t you stop when all the water broke loose?”

The boy looked at him blankly and said nothing.

“He sets off a geyser bigger than Yellowstone and he doesn’t even notice,” said Rob under his breath. “And why did you bury all this stuff I had piled up next to the house? Did you think we wanted cement bags and lathing mesh planted in our lawn?” So much stupidity, Rob seemed to think, must have a REASON.

He was talking to the wrong person. I wasn’t sure the kid was even listening.

“And that’s not all,” Rob said to me, because I was the only one paying attention. “Look over there--in the corner.”

I looked. There was our power line dangling loose--our precious source of electricity doing a little dance in the corner of the yard.

“Why wasn’t he electrocuted?”

Since the boy had had nothing to say so far, not even a comment as to how he’d managed to plow through 120 volts and live, there seemed no point in pushing him further.

Seeing that Rob and I had lapsed into disgruntled silence, the kid abruptly turned on the engine of his tractor. One could almost see him thinking, Well, if they’re through yapping at me, I guess I’ll finish.

Rob came to life and leaped in front of the tractor. “Oh no!” he said. “No you don’t! You’re not running that machine one more time. You’re staying right here until I find Mr. Young.” And with that he trekked off to the phone booth for the 99^th time in four days.

To our surprise and relief, Mr. Young dragged himself away from a holiday party to attend to our problems--but only momentarily. He instructed the KID to find us a plumber, and while he also dredged up another electric wire, he left ROB to install it.

Neither was successful.

The kid wasn’t able to locate a plumber on Christmas Eve, and after an hour’s work Rob discovered the replacement wire was no good.

Also, during the afternoon the garage door blew shut on three of Rob’s fingers, and his yelp was so bloodcurdling I thought he’d been electrocuted and the house had done us in at last.

I raced outside to find Rob hopping around over his smashed fingers, and was so relieved to see him still alive I screamed, “Oh, thank God!” much to his surprise.

Meanwhile, the kid--still plumberless at 4:00 p.m.--brought his father to our front yard, and the two of them knelt in the mud and wrestled with the broken water pipe. I was overjoyed to see them, especially the father.

Ultimately the two made a union of sorts and, lacking pipe joint compound, painted the union with red paint.

For non-plumbers it was quite an achievement, and Rob and I ran to the bathroom to test this latest plumbing job. To our surprise, when Rob turned on the water it came through red. For a moment we just stood there, looking.

And then I started cracking up--I couldn’t help it--and so did Rob, both of us laughing hysterically, because what else could you expect after such a debacle but red water?

I can’t recall exactly how we resolved all this. I do know that Rob found another electrical wire, and this one was good. Also, the water finally came through clear.

Since the banks, unaware of our disasters, had rudely closed early, leaving us penniless over the holidays, the tract salesman kindly lent us ten dollars. That night at 10:30 we found a lonely Christmas tree lot on Ventura Boulevard and bought a huge aromatic spruce for fifty cents and decorated it until three in the morning with popcorn and a few ornaments shipped to us by my mother. Somehow we felt entirely at peace because, after all, this was our first Christmas in our first, our very own home.

THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS, Monday morning early, a familiar sound broke into our dreams. A tractor!

In disbelief, we jerked awake to the ominous growl, the approaching and receding across the backyard.

This time we didn’t lie in bed until the kid had run it through the house. Rob shot off the mattress and was outside in seconds, waving his arms like someone trying to flag down a train.

The kid stopped scooping building scraps into our flower beds and turned off the engine. Rob walked up to him and pointed toward the road. “Take that machine away--and don’t ever come back!”

The last we saw of him, our lad was in the empty field across the street having a race ON THE TRACTOR with a friend in a hot rod.

IN SPITE OF YOUNG, ROSENBERG, and Spiegal, Rob made his house come out all right.

After weeks of negotiation and a masterful letter from Rob, we settled the bill. In essence, Rob obtained their agreement that THEY pay for THEIR mistakes.

ULTIMATELY, THE INFLUENCE OF Young, Rosenberg and Spiegal on our lives was profound. Because of what they did for us--or rather, TO US--our next forty-five years were markedly different than they might otherwise have been.

After Rob wrote them his summing-up letter, he gave it to me to read. He was outside lying on his back under the car when I finished the last page. Only his shoes were visible.

I was so excited I couldn’t wait, and rushed up to the car and yelled down at his feet, “This letter is fantastic, Rob! It’s great!”

“Yeah?” I could hardly hear his muffled response.

“I thought you’d blast those guys, I thought you’d pulverize them, but you didn’t. Your letter is calm. It’s rational. It says everything you needed to say. And every sentence is important.”

His answer was garbled.

“Rob!” I cried, waving the letter excitedly as I made my final point to his shoes. “You should be a lawyer!”

Until then, he’d been getting a master’s degree in psychometrics.

That letter changed his life.

And so, thanks to Young, Rosenberg and Spiegal, Rob did what nature and nurture intended him to do all along. He applied to enter the brand new Law School at UCLA.

A FEW MONTHS LATER, IN June, I wore a cap and gown (the gown designated for an oversized male) which barely covered what seemed to be an unusually generous pregnancy. Three weeks after I graduated from UCLA, our son, Bobby, was born. To everyone’s surprise, even the obstetrician’s, he was eleven pounds, two ounces, and might have been cuter if he hadn’t arrived with padded shoulders and what appeared to be nuts squirreled away in his cheeks. He was also the largest baby ever born in that hospital.

Everyone loved the idea but me. The nurses thought he was quite the handsome little fellow, and peppered me with quips. “We caught him sitting up, reading.” “I expect he’ll be walking to the car.”

They never knew that I was mortified, that I imagined, in my young-girl ignorance, I must have eaten too much and created a monument to gluttony.

I couldn’t wait to take him home.

Rob had no such thoughts. He was endlessly proud and took great pains filling out Bobby’s baby book. When he came to a section labeled “Special Problems,” he sat up straighter and wrote in his great, intimidating hand, “This baby HAS no problems!”

We’d had our son a whole week, now, and maternal pride had finally rushed over me like a tsunami on post-partum hormones. I, too, thought Bobby was perfect.

When I found Bobby’s baby book years later, I read Rob’s words with chagrin, shaking my head. Nobody who’s ever been a parent for more than two weeks would taunt the humility gods with a statement like that!

A CIRCUS WITHOUT ELEPHANTS---Ch. 3

2011-11-06T15:19:00.000-08:00

CHAPTER THREE

MRS. BRITTELL’S BACK PORCH

ROB’S PARENTS WERE EXACTLY as he’d said: his father, Art, gentlemanly and serious--balanced by Ruth, as vivacious and fluttery as a butterfly. Impossible not to like her.

The next month, Rob and I slid out of Stanford quietly, without fuss or fanfare. It was all too unnoticed, too unheralded.

A prideful, bookwormish student like me doesn’t leave a school like Stanford without a backward glance, so I was obviously not thinking clearly, but what did I know then . . . only nineteen and ripe to get married, following the lead of someone so brainy and fascinating I couldn’t imagine my life moving forward without him.

Our leaving took place by degrees--first Rob, then me.

How was he to know that the summer he chose to take two killer science courses--Qualitative Analysis and Organic Chemistry, both condensed (each a year’s work crammed into one quarter), he’d also meet me? His grades slipped and Stanford put him on probation. “Go down to San Jose State,” they said, “bring up your grades, and come back.”

His pride was seriously stung. “I’ll transfer all right . . . “ he said it with a certain grimness, a subtle set to the jaw that I would later see as one of his trademarks, “but I’m not coming back.”

I was only beginning to recognize the hard metal stratum that lay beneath his mercurial outer self.

A few weeks later we were in separate schools, divided by a length of Bayshore Highway and a forty-minute commute in Rob’s newly acquired but almost prehistoric roadster, a munge-green Lafayette dubbed the Turtle because of its low-slung, stumpy-looking rear end.

“This drive is hell on wheels,” he said after a few weeks, “it’s getting more grinding by the day. And where do I fit in homework? Nowhere, at the moment. Changes must be made. I’ve got to study more and see you less.”

“See me less? But Rob . . . ”

Which explains why, at the start of winter quarter, I left my precious “ivy-league” school to join him at San Jose State.

ROB HAD BEEN RENTING a tiny student room--a converted porch is all it was--from a Mrs. Brittell. To understand why we spent our first married month living on Mrs. Brittell’s back porch, you’d have to know that we’d left ourselves only one week between quarters to apply for a marriage license, a college transfer, an admission to San Jose State, a wedding ring and a Wasserman Test--though not necessarily in that order--and there simply wasn’t time to look for an apartment too.

Nor was there time to put together a decent wedding—-or, for that matter, any wedding at all.

Since we’re both terribly romantic--Rob doesn’t admit to this, but he gets misty-eyed in certain movies--the idea of being married in a judge’s downtown office began to give the pair of us a bleak, sagging feeling. As we waited to meet the judge, I looked around his forbidding office--no carpets, small windows, and a lot of dark wooden furniture that would have added layers of dreariness to an office in Tombstone--and I nudged Rob and whispered, “Honey, we can’t be married here!”

Rob nodded. “It’s not exactly a church.”

“Ask him if we can’t do it tonight--in his living room.”

With proper deference, Rob broached the subject, and the judge looked up and shrugged. His face had no more life than his office. “Doesn’t make any difference to me. You can come over if you want to.” He scribbled on a piece of paper. “Here’s the address. Do you have any witnesses?”

“No.”

“I’ll provide a couple.”

That night we learned a useless lesson—-useless because we’d never need it again: if you want a romantic wedding in a judge’s home, you’d better pick a romantic judge.

We arrived at his home at seven, both of us so slicked up and nervous it was almost like having a REAL wedding after all. We’d been thinking about the prospect all week--WE were getting MARRIED--and it was beginning to feel like a serious, grownup step. Driving over there I even dared hope that the judge’s wife might get into the spirit and provide some small touch, like candles, or a slice of cake . . . a simple gift, perhaps . . . anything to add formality and romance to the occasion. But I didn’t mention this to Rob, because in case she didn’t he might be disappointed.

The judge ushered us into his dining room and pointed to one side of a modest table. Starched and unsmiling, or just naturally bored, he positioned himself on the other side, and his young son, about eleven, came out just then and stood stiffly beside him and the father began to intone the ceremony. I looked around. Where was the wife? Would she appear in time to be a witness? Was this even legal?

No, apparently she wouldn’t appear (and I hope no one ever presses us on the legality), because she obviously had a higher calling in the kitchen. We knew she was busy because we could hear her, as sounds of running water and clacking dishes and other homey noises kept coming and going during our nuptials. Mind you, they didn’t take long. The judge must have found an abbreviated version, skipping such trivials as “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health,” and proceeding directly to the “I now pronounce you . . . “ which saved him significant amounts of time but left us with skimpy, pared-to-the-bones vows.

But I felt lucky anyway--partly because I was marrying Rob, and partly because he looked so awed and serious he made the ceremony resonate with significance right through the clatter from the kitchen. After a while I forgot everything except the expression in his eyes. When it was over, a look of profound tenderness came over his face, and he pulled me close and kissed me. He seemed to be saying he meant all the vows of marriage, even the ones the judge had skipped.

My heart melted. We hadn’t needed a cake or candles or a present after all. Rob made it an eloquent wedding all by himself.

Now, years later, I’ve almost forgiven the judge’s wife, since it’s possible her husband forgot to mention he’d be marrying two people right after dinner and please cushion the noise from the kitchen.

We went to a hotel that night, and the next day, after I’d finished registering at San Jose State, I asked brightly, “Well, honey. Where are we going to live?”

He looked surprised. “In my room, of course.”

“Your room? Are you serious? You mentioned something yesterday but I thought you were kidding.”

“I do have a bed in there.”

“Uh, yeah--I guess you do. But Rob, it’s so . . . tiny. And what about my clothes?”

“We’ll run up to Stanford this afternoon and collect your stuff,” he said, missing the point.

Even Mrs. Brittell seemed taken aback when Rob walked up to her front door asking permission with his arms full of my suitcases. “Well, I suppose you can both stay in that room,” she said, hesitating, “if you think you can manage. But the bed’s pretty small . . . “ She looked dubious. “It’s all right with me, I guess.” It was plain she thought there was no accounting for newlyweds.

With one of his charming smiles, Rob thanked her, and now, having solved our housing problem, he led the way around to the back of the house and up the narrow steps to the enclosed porch. The room was about six by nine. He went in and plunked down all the suitcases, then turned to me. “Well--here we are!” It was the same exuberance, the same blind delight he’d had in Hudson Bowlby’s arthritic Model A.

I followed, and barely able to get into the room with both Rob and the luggage already inside, I smiled and echoed with no enthusiasm at all, “Right. Here we are.”

“Let me get these things out of the way.” Rob attempted to shove the cases under the bed, but the bed was too low and too narrow, and they didn’t come close to fitting. “Guess we’ll have to lay them flat on the floor, then,” he said, and while I perched on the bed he spread the suitcases end to end and they filled the entire open space. From then on, we walked across my imitation alligator bags to get in and out.

It wasn’t so bad having a floor made of inlaid suitcases, but we did miss the presence of a desk. Since the bed was the room’s only raised surface, it eventually served as study table, barber’s chair, dinette, and--when we were tired enough--a bed. But first we had to toss our books over onto the luggage and brush the cookie crumbs onto the books.

To say we “slept” in the bed would be a euphemism. It wasn’t a bed, anyway, it was a cot, and though we spent plenty of hours there, we extracted about as much genuine rest as two large people could expect from a narrow padded plank. It was barely possible for both of us to lie on the cot stacked on edge, like two phonograph records.

At first Rob thought it was wonderful. Cozy. “You’re so soft, Babe,” he murmured from time to time, giving me a little squeeze. “Isn’t it nice to be married?”

“Heavenly,” I said, while circulation slowly backed up in my right leg, which was mashed against the wall. “Though I didn’t think marriage would be quite so crowded. I’d like a little more room to be married in.”

“Room?” he sounded almost hurt. “What do we need more room for? We’re so close this way,” pulling me still closer.

Then we began getting tired. Rob cautioned, “Now look, Babe, don’t try to straighten your legs. I like to sleep with my legs bent, and if we’re going to stay aboard a bed this small we have to be shaped the same.”

“But I don’t like sleeping with bent legs—-not all the time. Let’s straighten them once in awhile.”

We began disagreeing as we slept. Since Rob was in charge of nocturnal maneuvers, when he wanted to turn, we both turned. But occasionally I was in the middle of some nice dream that didn’t require a change, and when he went into one of those authoritative shifts, I resisted. Whereupon he jerked the covers until he was rolled up in them like a sausage and I was left blinking and wide awake. Also cold. I’d grab the covers back, and he’d wake up. If this happened several times in one night, we fought in the daytime, too. In those days I wasn’t used to following orders in my sleep.

This went on for several weeks until one day when Rob was in class and I wasn’t, I sneaked out and rented a brand new apartment. It felt like a bold move, as though I’d emancipated myself and gone off to Washington on a bra-less march, and I was afraid Rob would be angry, but he was delighted. “I’m glad you did that, Babe. Cozy is cozy, but enough is enough.”

We said good-bye to Mrs. Brittell, who, as a parting token of affection, sent us off with her old washing machine.

Soon my mother sent down a truckload of furniture from her ranch in Mt. Shasta, and included were some nice things, like a brown Bigelow rug, plus a few old formal chairs of the not-too-sturdy type which collapsed into splinters under our weightier friends.

Then there was a big black sleigh bed--a veritable monster of a bed--but a thing of beauty, I thought, compared to the cot at Brittell’s. It was so very SUBSTANTIAL.

“You know, it’s not that bad looking,” I said as we were struggling to put it together. “It has a homey look--kind of comfortable and old fashioned.”

“That’s one way to describe it,” Rob said, grimacing as he tried to ram an eight inch bolt into a rail.

“I mean, there’s something special about an antique.”

“Yeah, there is. It’s especially old.” He pounded the bolt all the way in while I held the rail in place. “There,” he said at last, straightening up. “That should take care of it.”

“You see?” I said, looking at the two curled ends, quite expansive and very black. “It’s really rather handsome, isn’t it?”

Rob studied the bed dubiously and finally came up with the only compliment he could muster. “I suppose you could say it has some kind of old world charm.”

The bed was listening.

One morning at two a.m. Old World Charm dumped us on the floor. Well, actually, it dumped us on the floor from the waist down. One minute we were sound asleep and the next our legs were bent at the waist and falling precipitously. Crash! The end rail hit the floor and the mattress jarred to a stop.

“What happened? What happened?” I shrieked, wide awake instantly. I thought we’d had an earthquake.

“Damn bed,” Rob growled.

“That was the bed?” The crash of the rail echoed in my ears and I could still feel the sensation of falling.

“Damn rotten, poorly-made bed,” Rob muttered. We were too shocked to move. Our feet were sloped dramatically downhill, and we were gripping the top of the mattress like two people clinging to a wisp of bush on a steep mountainside. Purely instinctive, as even a bird doesn’t want to be thrown out of the nest.

“No-good, flimsy weak bed,” said Rob, at an uncomfortable tilt from which he was still not moving.

“What happened?” I asked for the third time.

“It collapsed. Hell, I don’t know what happened, our bed’s on the floor, that’s all.”

Well, so it was. Eventually, since we had to get back to sleep, we disentangled ourselves from the covers and climbed off the sloping mattress to begin the resurrection. Rob went into the kitchen for a hammer and screwdriver, and I stood by and tried not to seem in any way offensive, lest I be lumped in the same category as the bed.

Rob lifted the foot end saying crossly, “Here!” and I held everything suspended while he pounded and screw-drivered down under. After more cursing and a considerable amount of time, Rob finally had it fixed and we got back in. But now we couldn’t sleep, so we spent the rest of the night giggling, because once the shock had worn off there was something funny about a collapsing bed.

A week later it happened again. Another crash and we were down, every bit as mad as the first time, but even more surprised, because we really thought Rob had made the necessary repairs. This time we didn’t lie around expecting our problem to go away.

He jumped to the floor calling the bed a son-of-a-something a bed could never be the son of, adding that fixing beds ranked extremely low in a list of best things to do at one a.m., and further directing me to “get out of that weak-boned piece of furniture and grab this end!”

Now I was sorry, apologetic, even, that I’d ever had a nice word for the bed. Right then I wished to retract whatever praise I’d uttered for something so mean-spirited . . . and yes, ugly.

Over the months I began to notice the bed was a thick, stubborn lump, so monstrously heavy it wouldn’t budge an inch if Rob tried to move it one way or another, but it moved plenty when it felt like it.

For as long as we lived in that apartment, and for its own temperamental reasons, the black sleigh threw us to the floor periodically, always at strange intervals, and generally just as we’d grown to trust it again. Old World Charm was like a horse with a bad temper--deceptively docile on its better days. But you just couldn’t predict its moods, so you never knew when it was going to turn mean and eject you.

Usually we cursed and dragged ourselves out of the covers, but there came a night when we were just too tired, and instead of getting to his feet, Rob growled, “Oh, the hell with it . . . “ and we slept at a jaunty tilt for the rest of the night.

The next day Rob surveyed the remains of our black sleigh spread across the floor. “Be sure to write your Mother and thank her for this lovely antique!”

The bed wasn’t the only distinctive personality that shared our apartment. There was also Mrs. Brittell’s washing machine, a solid Clydesdale by nature, as doughty and reliable as our bed was unreliable, and in addition, a marvel of Thirties engineering. Neither Rob nor I have ever seen another like it. The machine was approximately the age of our flighty bed, but had a determined spirit and a warm, giving heart--and it did its job with undaunted energy. Shaped like a great iron cradle, it sat on our back porch and rocked violently back and forth, while clothes, soap, and water gathered in frothy tidal waves and heaved from one side to the other.

There were no subtleties about the machine--it neither rinsed, wrung, nor spun, all that was up to us--but it certainly did wash . . . and it could have taught our bed a lesson in fidelity.

The washing machine became our resident comic performer. Since Rob and I had never seen an appliance with such an odd shape and so much vigor, we used to run it just for our amusement, and sometimes we fired it up to entertain friends.

“Come see what’s on our back porch,” we said, “if you want to meet the real character in this apartment.”

But we didn’t take it with us when we finally left San Jose, partly because of its mammoth weight, and partly because neither of us believed its plucky old heart could last much longer.

TOGETHER, ROB AND I FINISHED the school year at San Jose State, where we’d signed up jointly for child psychology and genetics. All I remember about those courses, besides the fact that we were both finally studying and consequently earning stunning grades, is that Rob and I bred a lot of fruit flies, which kept waking prematurely from their anesthetized state and escaping into the classroom, where they bred surreptitiously with other students’ flies and ruined everyone’s experiments.

ROB WAS THE PRIME MOVER behind our transfer to UCLA. “Let’s go back to Stanford,” I said, but his jaw got that look and I knew it was hopeless. Women who aren’t married to flinty husbands say things like, “You should have made him go,” but frankly, I’d just acquired this man and wasn’t ready to push him to an ultimate test.

So we transferred to UCLA, instead of some other large school, for a reason that now seems flimsier than dust. “The surfing’s terrific down in Los Angeles,” Rob exclaimed, and he wore that same bright expression and exuded the same air of breathless excitement that once made me imagine a “beach party” would consist of a significant number of people gathered on the beach.

“Babe,” he exulted, “the sand everywhere is broad and clean. And the water’s warm,” and then he added as an afterthought, “and UCLA’s an excellent school.”

His last statement was true. The rest wasn’t.

Before long I learned that the Santa Monica version of the Pacific Ocean was only slightly warmer than the water that lapped across the shore at Santa Cruz, which, by the temperature registered on my toes and legs, left it pretty frosty as oceans go.

But that never mattered much.

We were soon so busy with all the homework piled on us by UCLA . . . and making new friends . . . and coping with the nausea that accompanied my first pregnancy . . . that we hardly ever saw the beach.

ROB AND I DIDN’T REALIZE it then, but our move South was the first of dozens of paradoxes that followed us through life, accompanying the various choices we made over the years. In fact, if someone asked me, What is one of the inevitable consequences of living? I’d say Irony.

A Circus Without Elephants--Chapter Two

2011-10-30T15:37:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER TWO

RIDING TO GLORY

FOR THE REST OF the summer, the courtship dipped in and out of our classes and ruined most of them. Scholastically, we came out bedraggled and besmirched. But as a couple we were doing fine.

When summer quarter was finally over, Rob asked me to go to Texas with him to visit his parents. “You’ll like them, Babe,” he said, with his old, beach-party enthusiasm. “Dad is smart--fairly serious but basically brainy, and my mom’s a nut and really funny. Everyone likes her.”

“I’d like to go with you, Rob.” What I meant was, I’d like to go with you anywhere, to see your folks in Texas or the moon, but mainly I don’t want our time together to end.

“We can take a train out of Los Angeles,” he said, “but first we have to get to L.A.” We looked at each other—-two naïve students, newly in love. And then one of us said, “Let’s hitchhike!” and the other said, “Why not?” as though the idea actually had a shred of merit. As though spontaneity was a virtue that deserved to be cherished above common sense.

Still, it wasn’t common sense that threatened to scuttle our plan, but sheepishness. There we were, standing beside our suitcases on Bayshore Highway tentatively holding out our thumbs . . . in my case with the same dawning mortification I’d had years earlier when forced to admit to myself I would never fully grasp the logic behind long division. Here was a new way to feel demeaned.

I, who’d never hitchhiked before in my life, could barely get my thumb to point in the right direction. Dressed like other Stanford coeds of the day in skirt, sweater, pearls, and pumps, I fancied myself born to the gracious class, a notch or two above your usual hitchhiker.

But as cars disdainfully hurtled past offering nothing more than a windy aftermath, all that graciousness blew away. Pearls or no pearls, begging rides from strangers had its tacky side, like straightening your panties when no one’s looking. My hand kept faltering and I had to keep pushing it out there, into the visual field of oncoming traffic. Finally I said, “Rob, I’m no good at this.”

“It’s not exactly my thing, either.”

“What if the wrong people come along?”

He gazed at me, for once with no answer.

“How will the right people know we’re the right people?”

“Maybe we can tell them,” he said. He gave me one of his thoughtful looks and then, skinny and driven as he was, he took off running along the highway looking for something, though for what, I hadn’t a clue. With Rob, ideas frequently weren’t expressed out loud, but simply acted upon. Sometimes the deed would merely appear, done and finished and presented with a kind of “Voila!” . . . and it was assumed I’d be charmed.

He soon came back holding a big piece of blank cardboard. “We’ll make a sign, Babe. You got a pen in your purse?”

I didn’t. But then I dug deeper. “How about this?”

“Excellent,” he said. “Good thinking, Babe,” and using my brilliant red lipstick, he consumed most of it printing the giant words, STANFORD TO LOS ANGELES.

“There . . . “ holding up his sign for my scrutiny, “that says it all.” I smiled. He didn’t seem to require my approval, not seriously. It was obvious that this work of genius had arrived pre-approved.

Edging closer to the highway, he blended into his sign and became a billboard with legs. Billboards being nicer than hitchhikers, I felt he’d given us a different aura, splashed us with new respectability. Any minute a genteel college professor would stop and whisk us away in his Oldsmobile.

Not for an instant did I imagine a different scenario, that we might be stepping, instead, into the twilight zone. With my usual optimism flowering away, I stood beside Rob and his sign, composing my face for innocence and trying to convey a message. We may be hitchhiking, but we’re not really hitchhikers, you understand, we’re students, and this is beneath us. A lot to convey in a split second.

Our sign’s tour of duty was brief. In only minutes, an enormous truck with attached trailer abruptly veered off the highway, sending up plumes of dust as it pulled to a stop a block away. I wasn’t even sure the eighteen-wheeler was stopping for us. But before I could comment, Rob had lifted his suitcase and started running toward the behemoth. I called after him, “Tell him thanks, Rob. Thanks anyway.”

While I waited and watched from a distance, Rob and the driver exchanged words, and then Rob was running back to me.

“Did he take it okay?” I said, but to my horror he grabbed my suitcase. “Come on, Babe,” he said cheerily.

For seconds I just stood there, stunned. “But Rob! That’s a TRUCK! We can’t go in that!”

“He’s giving us a ride,” said Rob, as though this was a perfectly acceptable idea, as though this was the kind of transportation we accepted every day. “Come on. He’s waiting.”

“It’s a truck!” I shrilled again, but he was leaving me, and suddenly I had a new and awful choice. Remain on the highway by myself or follow my boyfriend. The deserted island or the shark. With feet so slow they could hardly be construed as moving, I dragged down the shoulder toward Rob. This must have been the moment when I surrendered control of my destiny for all time.

As I reached the alien nether world of rumbling trucks and earthy truck drivers, the man was already deciding my fate. A burly fellow whose belly lapped over his belt, he was just tossing my suitcase up into the trailer, into some kind of void where it simply fell out of sight.

I watched it disappear. Whither my case goest, I thought glumly, I will go also.

The man pointed to the great metal steps. In my nice skirt (all women wore nice skirts back then), I was supposed to climb the three enormous steps and deposit my feminine self inside that yawning cab. Me, a Stanford girl who’d signed the honor code and actually believed in it. At heart an elitist, an intellectual snob. Make that a total snob. And here I was with two men who thought it not at all odd that I should enter the ultimate in a man’s world and ride ingloriously in a commercial truck!

Still on the ground, I looked around. There was no escape, nowhere else to go.

Grabbing a handle of sorts, I pulled myself up and finally landed on a broad leather seat. Rob came up and plopped down beside me. I was stuck. Stuck, stuck, stuck.

The driver came around and started the engine and our world began to move. I could feel every ton of that truck, sense its tires bumping over the dirt and making their way back to solid pavement.

Perched unhappily between the two men, I soon perceived a further problem. Between me and the driver was a forest of gears, one handle after another, and as the man revved through the gears, we both quickly grasped that he had no place to shift except up my skirt. Making a fast adjustment, I pulled my legs out of the way. But then he needed another gear, and another, and the whole sequence became impossible. I didn’t want his gears rubbing my legs, but then neither did he.

Within a block, the man was pulling over again so Rob and I could change places. So now Rob was in the middle and I sat next to the dust-coated window. Right outside the glass, the exhaust pipe belched and roared and filled my right ear with thunderous noise. From then on I could hear little of what was being said.

However, from time to time Rob shouted bits of information in my direction, which is how I learned that our driver’s name was Frank, and that his cargo consisted of ten tons of sugar. While the men talked, I sat there feeling more and more like a bug sucked toward a drain.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. We’d only been on the road an hour, bumping and careening down the highway, when another giant truck-and-trailer swung around us, accidentally veered off the highway in front of us and ran down the shoulder, raising a tornado of boiling dust . . . into which we drove at full speed with zero visibility.

I was aghast--both for the other truck and for us. In my head I was screaming, “Slow down, Frank!” but no words came out.

Rob turned to look at our driver, but strangely, Frank seemed unconcerned. He sat there gripping the wheel, staring ahead into the dust, nodding as the runaway rig regained the pavement. The dust cleared and we were still on the road, even in our own lane, and the incident seemed over.

Except it wasn’t.

Minutes later, our own rig accelerated, swung out to overtake the other truck, pulled hard into the right lane and veered toward the edge. In seconds we, too, were off the pavement, bumping crazily down the dirt, wholly out of control and lurching from side to side.

I was so terrified I felt myself turning white. With no seatbelt for security, I grabbed the dashboard and held on, sure we were about to strike a tree or a ditch, knowing we were seconds from death. The truck careened downhill, as reckless as a truck could get, hurtling the three of us toward eternity. For someone who adores all things sweet it seemed ironic that I was about to die under a runaway mountain of sugar. In my head I was screaming at Rob: I told you this was a terrible idea!

After what felt like hours, but must have been only a minute, Frank ended the horrifying ordeal and brought us back to pavement—-back to some marginal kind of safety.

Releasing my grip on the dashboard, I turned to stare at the man behind the wheel.

He was laughing. “I guess I got HIM!” he chortled, and with a glance in the side mirror, I saw behind us a cloud of dust obscuring the road. Clearly the other truck was now plunging ahead as we’d done earlier, driving blind.

“I really dusted him!” shouted Frank for our amusement . . . except Rob didn’t look amused, and I was so unamused I wanted only to order that idiot man to stop the rig and let me out. Actually, I yearned to throttle him where he sat.

But neither could work . . . the first because we were miles from anywhere.

I waited for Rob to do something. Glancing sideways, I saw his irritation and wondered that he didn’t speak up and tell the driver to drop us off at the next town. But he didn’t, and it was clear that Rob had chosen this singular mode of travel and now meant to stick with it. I wasn’t sure whether “sticking it out” was a good character trait or bad.

The rest of the night was long. Entertaining us further, our man gleefully exhumed stories about runaway trailers that overran their cabs and sliced through their driver’s compartments, instantly killing them. He told heartwarming tales of trucks losing their brakes on the steep, winding Grapevine and accelerating out of control down the endless grade, unable to make the required turns, unable to find an escape ramp in time.

At moments he actually made Rob laugh. But not for one second did I ever find him funny.

I wasn’t sure why he’d picked us up. But finally he revealed his motive: we were there to keep him AWAKE!

With such a driver, there was no danger any of us would sleep. The rest of the night I sat stiff as a tree trunk, and when we began barreling down the Grapevine, I watched each curve intently, judging the sharpness of the turn, waiting for the awful acceleration to begin.

True to the last of my nerdish instincts, I monitored our driver with my own set of standards, the Stanford Debutante Test of Acceptability, and on one of the steeper grades it became obvious our man was not driving at prudent speeds, and in fact the truck had picked up so much wild and dangerous momentum, the driver should be searching for an escape ramp. Any fool could feel the straining of the brakes and sense the trailer’s urgent impulses to overtake the cab. Reaching for the dashboard, I held on, consumed by terror. Oh dear God! Here comes the sugar!

Miraculously, though we flew by an escape ramp, the truck held together and the trailer did not come forward to pay us an unexpected visit.

As the truck finally roared down the last hill and slowed in Los Angeles, light was just creeping up behind the hills. Rob and I got out and for seconds stamped our feet, wondering if we could walk. Before we left, I actually thanked our driver---out of sheer gratitude that we were still alive.

With that event, our hitchhiking ended for all time.

But my life with Rob went on. When I looked back on our early months together, I thought of that trip--the hitchhiking part--as a defining moment, an occasion that caught the spirit of our relationship. Because of Rob I did the unthinkable, pitted my girlish, delicate self against a truck, and somehow came out a winner.

In later years, I would experience something similar with my oldest son, and I would feel that sense of triumph once again. You always win when you take on an experience that lasts in your memory forever.

2011-10-23T15:59:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER ONE

THE MAVERICK “HAWAIIAN”

I DIDN’T GO TO Stanford University to find a husband.

I went partly because of the wondrous Stanford mystique and the thrill of calling myself a Stanford Indian . . . and partly because it was such an exclusive, snooty-tootie institution, if you got accepted you certainly had to go.

Before long, though, I was swept away by classes like Western Civ, where we dug around in the archives to unearth surprisingly modern truths from Plato and Aristotle, and by Russian History as taught by a guttural Russian. The campus beguiled me with its genteel Spanish Mission architecture, and I was soon rooting passionately for the plucky and gentlemanly, if somewhat inadequate, football team.

But I didn’t stay long, only a year and a half, not nearly long enough.

And what I got out of it, eventually and to my surprise, went far beyond what I expected.

IN MY TREMULOUS TEENS before Stanford, I dreamed private, sensual dreams, conjuring up the man I would someday marry. My imaginary suitor never had a face, only dark, passionate eyes that consumed me with admiration and unspoken longing. His key trait, if not intensity, was surely unending kindness, for some part of me was searching for the ever-loving father I never had.

Among the qualities I sought in my unknown faceless lover, “oddball” had never made the list, it wasn’t a trait that would even occur to a serious-minded girl.

Yet oddball was what I got.

I’D BEEN AT STANFORD nearly a year when my life changed. I first saw Rob Wills at a summer get-acquainted dance euphemistically called a Jolly-up. At eighteen I wasn’t expecting much, since so far the campus men seemed to fall into two categories--the nerds or the party animals—-and those who didn’t spend our date lingering on the mysteries of subatomic particles, were inclined to squander it instead guffawing with friends over last weekend’s drunken bash at Mama Risotti’s. (Never mind that to those who held such hi-jinks in high esteem I was one of the nerds.)

To put it more accurately, Rob first saw me at the Jolly-up and I never saw him at all. The flirting I did with the men observing from the sidelines had a kind of high-water mark, based on the fact that I’m tall, over five-ten, and resolutely never made eye contact with anyone shorter than six-foot-two, nor even noticed they were there. All my little smiles and coy glances went to the men who towered above the rest. It’s faintly possible that sometime during the evening my eyes flicked across the top of Rob Wills’s head, but I certainly never saw his face.

The truth was, I didn’t know he existed until he cut in on me.

He introduced himself, and when he took my hand to begin dancing, I saw at once that he wasn’t up to my height standards, his eyes being only slightly taller than mine, and when he looked at me it wasn’t with anything close to desperate unspoken longing, but something nearer amusement. He seemed awfully tan, too, and more so because his teeth were so white. Furthermore, he didn't fit my physical ideal in other ways; instead of the comfortable, filled-out shape I’d envisioned he was as skinny as a mop handle.

All in all, he didn’t seem promising.

"I tried to catch your eye," he said as he guided me across the floor, "but your eye wasn't catchable."

That’s a novel opening line. Having no fitting response, I fell back on a conventional tack and asked him to repeat his name, learning he was called, formally, Robert Victor Wills.

“Where are you from, Robert Victor Wills?”

“Call me Rob,” he said. “Where am I from, you ask. You mean last week or last year?"

Once again he threw me, and being an intensely-bookish type in those days and absolutely no good at fast repartee, I was still fumbling for words when he grinned and said, “I’m from Hawaii.”

Well, that explained everything: the dark skin (I learned later he tans if he walks past an open window) the gaudy aloha shirt, the owlish glasses. What the glasses had to do with such an assessment has now escaped me, but I said, “Oh, you’re Hawaiian!”

“Not exactly,” he said. “That’s just where I lived last. I’m transferring back to Stanford from U of Hawaii. My dad’s a Naval officer, so we traveled. Never stayed in one place long enough to tire of it." He smiled again, a generous smile that conveyed uncomplicated enthusiasm for his nomadic life. "How about you?"

"I grew up in lots of places, too. Los Angeles. Denver. Rochester, New York. A ranch in Mt. Shasta, California.” Unlike him, I’d hated the moving around. "My dad’s a doctor, but I’ve never lived with him. My mom divorced him when I was two. She’s not your normal, everyday mother, she’s sort of a Bohemian.” And she’s been married seven times, I thought, which only my mom considers amusing.

The music changed tempo and we danced faster. I was glad to see that the mop handle was graceful, that in spite of his shortness and not being an inch over six feet, I felt good dancing with him. When the piece was over he seemed reluctant to let me go, and instead pulled me off to one side and asked urgently, "Is anyone taking you home?"

"Yes."

"Who?"

I gaped at him, so surprised at his bluntness that all decent answers melted away. “You want to know his name?” Flustered, I suddenly couldn't remember the name myself.

"Never mind,” he said. “I withdraw the question.” And then an abrupt switch. “Do you like to swim?"

"You mean in a swimming pool or the ocean?”

“The ocean. It’s the only swimming that counts. I used to be a surfer, learned how at Waikiki Beach.” He gave me that smile again. “What are you doing tomorrow?"

Another blunt question; he was so full of them. Well, that depends, I guess, on what you’re offering. Before I could figure out a way to hedge and be cool about it, he said, “How would you like to go to a beach party?”

“A beach party?” I was beginning to sound like a parrot, echoing every word he said, but I needed time to think and he never gave me any, he just kept peppering me with questions and throwing me off balance.

“That’s right, at Santa Cruz beach. We’ll go about eleven. You should come, it’ll be fun, I promise.” He said it with a smile, with conviction, as if there could be no doubt.

I guessed then he was a fraternity man and he’d waited until the dance to nail down a date. But he seemed pretty sure of himself, not at all concerned, and in fact all his words were positive and definitely self-assured. He was looking at me with an intensity that lent his thin face a kind of radiance. Rob Wills was awash in youthful energy and high spirits, but I doubted he’d be serious-minded enough, long run, or mature enough to interest me.

Still, one little date for the beach wasn’t a lifetime commitment, and I thought, What the heck.

"I think I’m free,” I said. “A beach party sounds fine, I’d love to go.” In fact it sounded more than fine, because above all I’d heard the word Party, which meant I’d meet other men, some of whom would no doubt be taller and less frivolous and wouldn’t ask blunt questions.

In due course I went back to my dorm with the somebody else, and whoever he was, he’d already become indistinct and shadowy, dimmed by the brightness of Rob Wills.

THE NEXT DAY EVERYTHING changed.

When I went down to breakfast, late, I found a note from Rob in my box--a note so strange and personal, so shocking, really, I squirmed as I began to read. After the first few sentences I ducked into a secluded corner of the lobby, convinced my embarrassed expression would give the contents away. "You remind me of someone I once loved,” he began. “I was watching you at the dance, waiting for you to spot me, but you never did. You have wonderful legs, Maralys, and an aura that makes me feel I’ve known you forever.”

Oh Lord, I’m not ready for this, it’s too much. A love letter from a stranger. He was making me crazy, this maverick rolling through my life like an escaped tire, as blunt on paper as he was in person. Glancing around furtively to see who might be looking, I decided to get out of the lobby with the thing, lest it burst into flames.

Chagrined, I ran upstairs to talk to my roommate. “Listen to this note, Barbara. You won’t believe it.” She was wise and mature, thoughtful like I was, but quicker, with a tongue ten times faster than mine.

I read her all of it, or as much as I could endure. “In my room alone, I find myself unable to stop thinking about you. It’s as though we’ve been on a collision course, destined forever to meet . . . “

She began to chuckle.

Toward the bottom of the page I had to stop, too embarrassed to go on. “He’s got this image of me,” I said. “He’s put me on some kind of pedestal. Can you imagine, after three dances? What happens when reality sets in and I come clunking down to earth? What would you do, Barbara? How will I face him?”

"When is he picking you up?”

"In about half an hour . . . " A buzzer sounded in our room. "Oh, Lord, that must be him!” I threw a look at the clock. "Can you believe this, he's early! And I'm not even dressed!"

"You'd better get dressed," said Barbara. "And wear plenty of clothes. I'm not sure I'd bring a bathing suit. Not with what he's thinking."

“But it wasn’t a sexy note. It was all poetic allusions, his romantic notions of who I am.”

“Where do you think sex starts?”

I ignored that; it was too much to get into. “And now I have to go down there, feeling like my soul is exposed.”

She said dryly, “It’s not your soul you should worry about.”

ROB WILLS WAS LEANING against a wall in the lobby, loose-legged and careless, smiling the way I remembered from the night before. But he surprised me again, because he didn’t mention the note, nor did he seem the slightest bit awkward. "Did I rush you?" he asked pleasantly.

"Well . . . sort of. I wasn’t quite ready.” I wasn’t ready at all. I couldn’t face him, couldn't look him in the eyes. Please don’t ask about the note. I had my swim suit under my clothes, hoping I’d never have to take them off.

If Rob noticed my silence he didn’t seem to care, but bounded across the lobby in high spirits, expecting me to follow. “Let’s go. Our ride is waiting outside."

"Where are the others?”

He stopped. “What others?”

“You know . . . “

He obviously didn’t know, and gave me a puzzled look, then pointed to the door. “It’s out there,” he said.

Second surprise: Our ride wasn’t a “ride” at all, nor even close to what I’d expected. The transportation waiting for us outside was an aged green Model-A parked randomly to the curb. And the jalopy came with a driver--its owner. Rob’s friend, if that’s what he was, hovered near the car—-a solemn-looking male, thin and desiccated, like an old leaf.

Rob introduced us with an offhanded gesture. "This is Hudson Bowlby,” and Bowlby acknowledged me with bored eyes and the flattest of Hi’s. No mention of friendship there, no hint of who he was. They couldn’t be buddies, I thought, they were acting too distant, almost like strangers. Then why was he here?

"Get in," said Rob, and pointed to the ancient automobile’s one narrow seat. Black, of course.

I climbed into the car gingerly and without enthusiasm. “Not much room,” mumbled Bowlby, an unnecessary comment since I’d already noticed. Only inches were left for Rob, who squeezed in beside me.

Third surprise, revealed after a few pointed questions: everything I’d assumed the night before was wrong. Here, jammed together on the seat of a green Model-A, was the sum total of Rob's beach party--Maralys Klumpp, Robert Victor Wills, and Hudson Bowlby, all bound for Santa Cruz beach in Bowlby’s geriatric car. And two out of three not exactly happy about it.

The car started with an asthmatic wheeze and clunked its way down Stanford's tree-lined Memorial Drive. I could hardly believe what I’d gotten myself into. "You mean nobody else is coming?" I asked for the second time. "Nobody's meeting us there?"

"No," said Rob. He seemed surprised I was still probing.

"This is what you call a party?"

"Sure," he said. “We're going to the beach, aren't we? I've brought some food. It's a party."

It's not what I call a party! "You’re not a member of a fraternity?"

"No. Did I ever say I was?"

I looked over at him, so pleased with himself, so unruffled, so content with this idiotic arrangement, and I couldn’t help smiling. "Do you always exaggerate like this?”

He smiled too, his eyes alive with merriment. "I never promised you anything else."

"No, I suppose you didn't. It's what you implied.” Your word choices, I thought, the way you asked, your voice. You created an illusion--and it was all false. “What other surprises have you got in mind?”

He threw me a Wait and See look.

Right then I realized he was even more unusual than I thought. And maybe a lot more fun, too.

After that, with Hudson Bowlby driving with his eyes straight ahead like the world's best-trained English chauffeur, Rob and I talked without stopping.

To my surprise, Rob was more than he’d seemed at first. A great deal more. Under his outer layer of wacky, offhanded nuttiness, was a different Rob, an intense, serious man. I saw at once that he was keenly aware of the world beyond Stanford, and brimming with insights.

The two of us quickly forgot Bowlby was there, and we went ahead and settled all the pressing world’s problems between ourselves. We found we agreed on War, Sex, Money, Racial Discrimination, Peace, and Students Who Smoke--all more exhilarating than discovering we both hated sauerkraut.

(Some day I mean to look up Hudson Bowlby and ask him just what we did decide, since we don’t agree on everything anymore. Somebody has shifted ground, and I’d like to review Money and Sex.)

Halfway there I glanced sideways and noticed Rob’s strong, distinct profile and I thought, That’s a good face. And then I thought, What a mind he’s got! And right then I stopped caring that he needed to grow two more inches.

Once at Santa Cruz beach, we found the water too frigid for swimming, so we sat on the sand and went on talking. I could never remember, later, exactly what happened to Hudson Bowlby. I do remember asking, "How come you brought him?” and Rob answering, “We had to get to the beach, didn’t we? Bowlby had the only car I could lay my hands on.”

I stared at him--a man who knew how to get what he wanted--then broke into laughter because he was so outrageous.

After a while we ate the peanuts, cheesy crackers, candy bars and grape juice Rob had provided as food.

"I hope you own a bike," he said as Bowlby drove us home again, having reappeared from wherever he'd gone.

"I do, but it's old and doesn’t go very fast.”

"That’s all right. As long as it works. We’ll be able to get around, which is all that counts.”

I WAS HAPPILY AWARE that I now had a close friend on campus--a friend who cared deeply about everything, who was neither a nerd nor a party animal--a friend who was male.

His brains were what did it, the ultimate appeal to an earnest, appallingly-sincere, non-small-talking egg head like me.

I hadn’t thought it would happen.

Of course there was still the screwball side of him to contend with, the Rob who did NOTHING like anyone else. While other men summoned their dates from the dorm lobby via a buzzer, he stood under my third-floor window at Casa Ventura and whistled. The first three notes of the World War I battle song, "Over There," told me--and every girl on that side of the building--that Rob Wills and his bicycle had arrived. He knew they all heard him . . . as though he was whistling for his friend to come out and play . . . he knew but he simply didn’t care.

When I looked down, he’d be staring up at my window expectantly, like an eager Tom Sawyer, with shower water still dripping off his brown hair.

It didn’t bother him that other couples dated in cars. He was happy enough escorting me to the movies and around campus on his bicycle and mine.

FOR THE REST OF THE summer, the two of us were almost never apart. He had a friend take our picture with the bicycles near Casa Ventura. “ . . . so we’ll remember this summer,” he said. “I believe in memorializing the things that count. Come on, Babe, move a little closer.”

It seemed Stanford had delivered, after all, the gift I never knew I wanted: Rob Wills.

No, more—-months later it gave me an offbeat, unconventional, free-wheeling nut of a husband.

THE COOKIE SHEET

2011-07-30T10:50:00.000-07:00

Nothing is forever, but sometimes you come close. I’m speaking of a group my husband and I put together forty-five years ago to discuss current events. Rob and I were young then—and so were all the other couples. But Discussion Group is finally old: yet it lives on.

Now, all these years later, various couples have moved away or well . . . died. We may be the only originals left. But our kids and our friends’ kids have joined, so the group has an everlasting quality--as in Methuselah. Each month, the topic resonates with some and bores others, but about one thing we’re unanimous—we all love the potluck.

Yet there’s this about potlucks—when you bring food to someone’s house, you’re bound to forget something: a hot pot holder, a serving spoon, a sheaf of papers, an outdoor jacket. My potholder drawer is full of unfamiliar potholders, my hall closet wraps its arms around two strange jackets, and for years my best serving spoon has been missing. I keep looking for it at other people’s homes, but I think I must have left it with someone who died.

Four months ago—the last time we were hosts—a couple left a cookie sheet. It was old and rusty, ownership unknown. And frankly, I wasn’t about to make fourteen phone calls. But next morning my friend Micki called. “Yes,” I said, “I found the cookie sheet.”

She lives quite a distance, which explains why she said, “I’ll come get it in a few days. When I’m down your way. Just put it on the front porch.”

For a month and a half, along with a pot of flowers, the rusty cookie sheet hovered near our front door. Nobody ever asked, “Why do you have a cookie sheet on your front porch?” Maybe we were assumed to be a little odd.

At the next Discussion Group, I remembered to bring the cookie sheet. But the couple didn’t come.

The following month, for which the couple DID come, I forgot to put the rusty thing in my car.

At last, this month, the cookie-sheet couple moved into hosting position. Three weeks ago, Rob said, “For God’s sake, Babe, put that damn cookie sheet in your car.” So I stuck it in back, where for weeks it bumped the legs of whoever was riding with us.

Last night, at two a.m., Rob gave a final order. “Move the cookie sheet to the dashboard. Now. Or we’ll forget it again.”

I said sourly, “It’s two a.m. The spiders are out. I’ll move it in the morning.”

“You’ll forget,” he said.

“I’ll put a note over the stove.” All night the note has been hanging there, waiting to be released to the waste basket. And the cookie sheet rests peacefully in its soothing backseat home.

I swear, if I forget it tonight, I'll make a special trip and drive it back to its owner. And I don't care how far away she lives. There's a limit to how long you can play accommodating hostess to a rusty cookie sheet. .

HOW DID I GET IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE?

2011-03-26T14:56:00.000-07:00

For nearly a month I’ve had a watch problem. It all began when my reliable solar wrist watch stopped abruptly, and nothing short of mouth-to-mouth could revive it. Now, after some dozen jeweler visits with other watches that gulp down a new battery, submit to a cleaning, then fail to run longer than a day-and-a-half, the “watch thing” is playing games with my head. I talk about it constantly.

Two days ago, in the midst of all this, the computer also failed. Like other non-techies, I have a love-hate relationship with my computer. When it works I adore it. When the thing fails, I’m ready to do what a few men have done to their televisions—take a pistol and shoot it in the heart.

That morning my e-mail messages refused to “come out” or “come down” or “show up” --whatever they do. Even tapping the send/receive button like a telegraph key tapping out the Morse Code produced nothing. Since the machine was working the night before, I gave it a few hours to rest. Finally in desperation I began calling people. The wonderful man who set up my web sites. My web server. I was ready to call Bill Gates, but I’d run out of time. Anyway, I hoped the mule might yet come around.

That night, at 9:30, in desperation I called Cox. To my amazement, an actual person answered the phone. Graciously, he put me through enough routines to operate a nuclear plant, but produced nothing useful on my screen.

At last he said, “You know, we don’t actually support Microsoft Outlook.” By then he’d given me a new e-mail password, and a few keys to a secret kingdom of Cox e-mails that I never knew existed. Not a great site, but okay as a fallback for the truly desperate. “Guess you’ll have to call Microsoft.”

“But Microsoft charges,” I said. “They cost a bundle.” I heard the equivalent of a telephone sigh. “Best I can do.”

We signed off and I looked down at my newly-repaired watch. It was still 9:30. I stared at the face, at the non-moving second hand. Suddenly I realized it had been 9:30 for quite a few hours.

A creepy feeling came over me and I began thinking Twilight Zone. The computer was down. My just-fixed watch was down. Was I dead and didn’t know it?

Could I even walk away from here? I pinched my leg and took a deep breath and was relieved to feel them both. Still . . . my computer stopped. My watch stopped. Would my heart stop too?

I was actually afraid to go to bed. Gotta stay awake and keep breathing.

Downstairs, Rob heard the story over and over, until he finally said, “I’ve heard it three times, Babe. That’s enough. Let’s go to bed. It’s one in the morning.”

I was thinking, “How do we know it’s one? My watch has been ticking perfectly for three days. It says 9:30.”

I opened my mouth, but he gave me THE LOOK.

Next day, instead of paying a ransom to Microsoft, I called Cox again—for a lady tech’s long and useless session, until finally she said as an afterthought, “You might try turning it off and back on.” I did. And the computer worked.

Back at the jewelers, the man took out the latest battery and found it dead. We talked Twilight Zone. As he installed yet another battery, he said, “This really does smack of voodoo.”

And indeed it does. Because this morning that watch is once again dead.

IF YOU'RE THINKING IT . . . SAY IT

2011-03-17T14:32:00.000-07:00

We could have gone to the Gala. At the Performing Arts Center, Gustavo Dudamel had just led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a stunning Bruchner symphony, and all the program’s most ardent supporters were dressed for The Ritz and ready for a sumptuous, post-event dinner.

Then we learned the price: a thousand dollars. Each. Perhaps we didn’t love the symphony quite that much. So instead, Rob and I went to In And Out. (My choice, as long as they continue serving juicy hamburgers, which for me compete with steak.)

Anyway, in the next booth sat three male high-schoolers and a younger boy, all wearing Loyola tee shirts. For awhile I watched them. They all had decent haircuts, their conversation was subdued, and their laughter not too raucous. I thought they were behaving extremely well. Good kids, the kind you wish there were more of.

When they got up to leave, I suddenly decided to run after them. Outside the restaurant I yelled to their retreating backs, “You kids seem like really nice people. I was impressed with how well you behaved.” One of them turned around and grinned. They didn’t actually stop, but I could tell that the one, anyway, was pleased.

As I re-entered the restaurant, a woman stood just inside. She said, “What did you tell those boys?”

I stared at her.

“I’m their mother. Just wondered what you said.” Clearly, she was expecting the worst.

“It was a compliment,” I said, and told her how impressed I’d been.

She grinned, and it was obvious I’d made her day. “People never say nice things to kids. It’s always something negative. We just got back from a Loyola basketball game. They were pretty happy. I was hoping that wouldn’t change.”

“Well, I was thinking good thoughts,” I said. “Why not say them?”

“Yes. Why not?” she said, and we shook hands.

She’d made my day, too. The whole episode took maybe five minutes. I can’t vouch for the Loyola family, but for weeks those five minutes gave me little zings of pleasure.

A DEVILISH DESIGN

2011-02-01T17:21:00.000-08:00

I can tell people how to write. And I can read a written piece and know whether it's good.

But I've no clue about commercial products--until I suddenly see that they're all wrong. I recall with amazement those few products that lacked the essentials of simplicity and common sense, that were seemingly created by idiots.

Take my earliest stove tops, for instance. Suddenly it's clear there's a link between a succession of stoves, the door on a Lincoln Town Car, and a disastrous pair of tennis shoes—all suffering from unimaginable design flaws.

The earliest of these products was a ridiculous stove top. In order to remove the parts for cleaning, you had to use a screwdriver to take out a few screws, or in later versions, unwind certain parts, or shift one or two levers . . . in essence do a dismantling job reminiscent of Erector sets. The first designers apparently thought that without all these nuts and bolts, parts of the stove might come apart and blow away. The flaws went on through several permutations and various brand names—until some simplicity-oriented man finally figured out that gravity alone—plus a few well-placed grooves-- would hold everything in place. I recall my amazement when I finally bought a stove for which all the parts merely lifted off. No screws, no bolts, no tools. And sure enough, gravity did its job.

My Lincoln Town Car, a decade ago, embodied the height of freakish design. I hadn’t had my new/used Lincoln long before the driver’s side door, curved inward like a scimitar, took a chunk out of my left leg. The second time this happened, I sold the car. Only last night, four of us were comparing our brief and dangerous encounters with this vehicle. All four had suffered significant leg gashes before each of us offloaded our Lincolns. This flaw never achieved public notice but, in the manner of gossip, was damned quietly among its users.

The last design flaw could have killed me. My new tennis shoes, supposedly designed with ergonomic inner springs, were so thick, top to bottom, and so unstable, that occasionally I found myself lurching forward, tripped up by my own footwear. I should have tossed away the shoes. But I didn’t. What happened next was so traumatic that only now, a week later, can I bear to describe that event.

I was bending over to pick some theater tickets off my front porch, and was just straightening when one of my shoes "caught," that is, the toe stubbed and wouldn't allow me to stand straight. In my effort to regain my balance, I began pedaling. But all that footwork merely propelled me forward, and I was soon flying into space, out over our pebbled walkway.

The sensation was horrible. I was literally airborne, and would soon come down on the rocks. In horror, I still tried to regain my balance, but couldn't. I would land and land hard. Virtually on cement.

The sensation of hitting was as horrible as I thought it would be. From my position on the rocks, I tried to grasp how badly I was hurt. I saw that my right wrist was torn open, and some internal injury made it hurt to breathe.

With what breath I could gather, I screamed through the open front door at my husband, Rob.

He didn't hear me. The TV was on, and unknown to me the Challenger accident was replaying, and Rob thought the screaming came from the TV. Over and over, louder, and louder, I shrieked his name. Unaided, I couldn't get off the walkway--that much I knew.

At last, when I was nearly beyond any more screams, Rob heard me and came out. He was horrified at what had happened--but both of us knew he couldn't get me to my feet. At worst, he would go down too.

I said, "Call Chris," (our son--an orthopedic surgeon), and luckily Chris lived nearby and had just arrived home.

For ten minutes, Rob stood and comforted me--the greatest comfort for both of us being that I hadn't hit my head. My glasses were sprung, my wrist was bleeding, my insides were ablaze, but I was alive.

Chris and his wife, Betty-Jo, arrived to find me still sprawled and bleeding. Chris told Rob to go get our walker with the seat, (used in prior knee surgeries), and together, Chris and Betty-Jo gathered me under the arms and lifted me onto the little seat. The pain was horrendous.

With difficulty, they wheeled me inside to the couch. My breathing grew ever more difficult.

Chris did some tests. Gently prodding, he said, "Does this hurt?" "Does this hurt?" and to his relief he said, "You've had the greatest possible luck, Mom. You haven't broken any vertebrae, or injured your head. You've broken some ribs--the best thing that could have happened."

At the moment "best" didn't seem very good. But Chris knew how to be comforting. As difficult as it seemed, I WAS breathing.

"We don't do anything for broken ribs," he said. "We just leave them alone. " And then, with a smile, "Where's your Vicodin?"

And thus began a week of pain killers. But to everyone's amazement, especially Chris's, x-rays the following Monday showed no broken ribs. "I guess you just tore the cartilage," he said.

Injured or not, I managed to give a speech the next day--and a second one two days later. But in one area I flunked terribly. Rob and I are taking a "brain plasticity" course, and the day I arrived in class all doped-up on Vicodin, my scores dropped so low I appeared to be practically brainless. The two big lessons from the accident became agonizingly clear: You don't wear shoes that have ever tripped you, even once. And you can't fool your brain when you're on drugs. No matter how hard you try, narcotics will prove that you've become a moron.

Too bad we can't spread this lesson among all our teenage kids.

PRETTY BOY TAKES WING

2010-12-31T11:40:00.000-08:00

The cats were my daughter’s fault. She kept saying to us, “Mom, you’re upstairs writing day and night, and Dad’s downstairs with nobody. He needs a cat for his lap.”

Rob, being Rob, never agreed that his own company equaled nobody. For years, raised as an only child, he’s been fully at ease with a state of aloneness. On the other hand, he’s always preferred cats to at least half the human population—and I certainly like cats well enough, though I generally veer toward creatures that speak.

Anyway, under continuous pressure from Tracy, we visited a green-spirited animal shelter and brought home two black and white kittens. They were brothers, and, as we soon learned, even related cats come with distinctive personalities.

As they grew, we discovered Bruiser was smart enough to pry open every sliding door in the house—at which point he followed us into room after room, settling down into nearby chairs. But he wasn’t into physical affection, and when we tried to pet him, he ducked. He preferred our company at a distance.

Pretty Boy, on the other hand, was smart enough to learn that Rob’s lap was a nice place for an evening’s nap. Exactly as Tracy had hoped.

By the time they were grown, somebody had given us a huge cat tower, which, as it turned out, was rickety. One day, with two cats aloft, the thing came apart and fell over. Both cats flew away from the spot as though from a roadside IED. Rob repaired it, but Bruiser never went near it again. Only Pretty Boy was willing to give it another try--agreeing to a second, tentative experience with the tower. But when Rob’s repairs failed a second, then a third time, that was it for the tower. The thing had become a mere blight in the room. The cat pyramid went out on the curb, where some unknown animal lover picked it up. I only hope he found larger bolts than Rob ever found. Or that he has a dumb cat.

Meanwhile, Rob’s lap was Pretty Boy’s late evening, slumbering retreat. They enjoyed many a companionable few hours together. Until one evening, sitting in his leather chair with cat aboard, Rob was struck by an attack of gas. At which point—how do I put this delicately? --he did what gentlemen never do. .

At the moment, Pretty Boy was nicely asleep. Beneath him, the chair suddenly rumbled, as though from an earthquake. From a state of utter relaxation, Pretty Boy sprang upwards, to a height of more than three feet. As Rob watched in amazement, the cat gyrated crazily while he rose, with his paws splayed out in four directions. He actually spun around like an gymnast with a pre-set routine, performing moves Rob had never seen before, cat-wise or otherwise.

Rob said, “I wondered how he gained so much traction—all this from a dead-asleep start.” The cat did not remain airborne long. Once his feet returned to the land of earthquakes, he was off. He streaked across the family room and into the breakfast room, seeking, I suppose, some kind of flatulence-free oblivion.

Since then, Pretty Boy has tentatively returned to Rob’s lap. But my guess is, Rob will choose a better solution for any future attacks of gas--especially on a hard surface, like a leather chair. Even Pretty Boy eventually learns what he needs to know. It would sadden Tracy enormously to learn that her dad managed to permanently eject Pretty Boy from his lap.

FAMILY STORIES--WITH THE WILLS

2010-12-18T14:22:00.000-08:00

Welcome--to those who love family stories--in fact to those who love to read everything (even the backs of cereal boxes), and are drawn to real life tales, especially one family's collection of intriguing, often zany but true stories.

Starting today, and continuing every two weeks, this blog will consist of stories drawn from my book, "A Circus Without Elephants." Depending on length, I will include either a half or a whole chapter in each of my bi-weekly blogs.

"A Circus Without Elephants" starts with the day I met my unpredictable husband at Stanford, and continues into the early '80s. Assuming I don't run out of time and energy, I'll finish that book and go on to the sequel, "A Clown in the Trunk."

Of course, both of these books can be purchased from Stephens Press (link included) or, for an autographed copy, by e-mailing me at Maralys@Cox.net.

Here, then, is the beginning of "A CIRCUS WITHOUT ELEPHANTS."

***************
Chapter One: The Maverick "Hawaiian"

I DIDN'T GO to Stanford University to find a husband.

I went partly because of the wondrous Stanford mystique and the thrill of calling myself a Stanford Indian . . . and partly because it was such an exclusive, snooty-tooty institution, if you got accepted, you certainly had to go.

Before long, though, I was swept away by classes like Western Civ, where we dug around in the archives to unearth surprisingly modern truths from Plato and Aristotle, and by Russian History as taught by a guttural Russian. The campus beguiled me with its genteel Spanish Mission architecture, and I was soon rooting passionately for the plucky and gentlemanly, if somewhat inadequate, football team.

But I didn't stay long, only a year and a half, not nearly long enough.

And what I got out of it, eventually and to my surprise, went far beyond what I expected.

IN MY TREMULOUS teens before Stanford, I dreamed private, sensual dreams, conjuring up the man I would someday marry. My imaginary suitor never had a face, only dark, passionate eyes that consumed me with admiration and unspoken longing. His key trait, if not intensity, was surely unending kindness, for some part of me was searching for the ever-loving father I never had.

Among the qualities I sought in my unknown faceless lover, "oddball" had never made the list; it wasn't a trait that would even occur to a serious-minded girl.

Yet oddball was what I got.

I'D BEEN AT Stanford nearly a year when my life changed. I first saw Rob Wills at a summer get-acquainted dance euphemistically called a Jolly-Up.

At eighteen I wasn't expecting much, since so far the campus men seemed to fall into two categories--the nerds or the party animals--and those who didn't spend our date lingering on the mysteries of subatomic particles, were inclined to squander it instead guffawing with friends over last weekend's drunken bash at Mama Risotti's. (Never mind that to those who held such hi-jinks in high esteem I was certainly one of the nerds.)

To put it more accurately, Rob first saw me at the Jolly-Up, and I never saw him at all. The flirting I did with the men observing from the sidelines had a kind of high-water mark, based on the fact that I'm tall, over five-ten, and resolutely never made eye contact with anyone shorter than six-foot-two, or even noticed they were there. All my little smiles and coy glances went to the men who towered above the rest. It's faintly possible that sometime during the evening my eyes flicked across the top of Rob Wills' head, but I certainly never saw his face.

The truth was, I didn't know he existed until he cut in on me.

He introduced himself, and when he took my hand to begin dancing, I saw at once that he wasn't up to my height standards, his eyes being only slightly taller than mine, and when he looked at me it wasn't with anything close to desperate unspoken longing, but something nearer amusement. He seemed awfully tan, too, and more so because his teeth were so white. Furthermore, he didn't fit my physical ideal in other ways; instead of the comfortable filled-out shape I'd envisioned, he was as skinny as a mop handle.

All in all, he didn't seem promising.

"I tried to catch your eye," he said as he guided me across the floor, "but your eye wasn't catchable."

That's a novel opening line, I thought. Having no fitting response, I fell back on a conventional tack and asked him to repeat his name, learning he was called, formally, Robert Victor Wills.

"Where are you from, Robert Victor Wills?"

"Call me Rob," he said. "Where am I from, you ask? You mean last week or last year?"

Once again he threw me, and been an intensely-bookish type in those days and absolutely no good at fast repartee, I was still fumbling for words when he grinned and said, "I'm from Hawaii."

Well, that explained everything: the dark skin (I learned later he tans if he walks past an open window), the gaudy aloha shirt, the owlish glasses. What the glasses had to do with such an assessment has now escaped me, but I said, "Oh, you're Hawaiian!"

"Not exactly," he said. "That's just where I lived last. I'm transferring back to Stanford from U of Hawaii. My dad's a Naval officer, so we traveled. Never stayed in one place long enough to tire of it." He smiled again, a generous smile that conveyed uncomplicated enthusiasm for his nomadic life. "How about you?"

"I grew up in lots of places, too. Los Angeles. Denver. Rochester, New York. A ranch in Mt. Shasta, California." Unlike him, I'd hated the moving around. "My dad's a doctor, but I've never lived with him. My mom divorced him when I was two. She's not your normal, everyday mother, she's sort of a Bohemian." And she's been married seven times, I thought, which only my mom considers amusing.

The music changed temp and we danced faster. I was glad to see that the mop handle was graceful, that in spite of his shortness and not being an inch over six feet, I felt good dancing with him. When the piece was over he seemed reluctant to let me go, and instead pulled me off to one side and asked urgently, "Is anyone taking you home?"

"Yes."

"Who?"

I gaped at him, so surprised at his bluntness that all decent answers melted away. "You want to know his name?" Flustered, I suddenly couldn't remember the name myself.

"Never mind," he said, "I withdraw the question." And then an abrupt switch. "Do you like to swim?"

"You mean in a swimming pool or the ocean?"

"The ocean. It's the only swimming that counts. I used to be a surfer, learned how at Waikiki Beach." He gave me that smile again. "What are you doing tomorrow?"

Another blunt question; he was so full of them. Well, that depends, I guess, on what you're offering. Before I could figure out a way to hedge and be cool about it, he said, "How would you like to go to a beach party?"

"A beach party?" I was beginning to sound like a parrot, echoing every word he said, but I needed time to think and he never gave me any, he just kept peppering me with questions and throwing me off balance.

"That's right, at Santa Cruz beach. We'll go about eleven. You should come, it'll be fun, I promise." He said it with a smile, with conviction, as if there could be no doubt.

I guessed then he was a fraternity man and he'd waited until the dance to nail down a date. But he seemed pretty sure of himself, not at all concerned, and in fact all his words were positive and definitely self-assured. He was looking at me with an intensity that lent his thin face a kind of radiance. Rob Wills was awash in youthful energy and high spirits, but I doubted he'd be serious-minded enough, long run, or mature enough to interest me.

Still, one little date for the beach wasn't a lifetime commitment, and I thought, What the heck.

"I think I'm free," I said. "A beach party sounds fine, I'd love to go." In fact it sounded more than fine, because above all I'd heard the word "party," which meant I'd meet other men, some of whom would no doubt be taller and less frivolous and wouldn't ask blunt questions.

In due course I went back to my dorm with the somebody else, and whoever he was, he'd already become indistinct and shadowy, dimmed by the brightness of Rob Wills.

The next day everything changed.

************

Well . . . here's half of Chapter One. Hope you've enjoyed it.

There has to be a quicker way to do this. Look for the rest of the chapter in two weeks--the first week of January, 2011. By then I'll have learned how to scan--or how to cut and paste.

But more will be forthcoming, I promise.

I'D LOVE ANY AND ALL COMMENTS. I need to know. IS ANYBODY READING THIS?

Thanks to all of you have gotten this far. Maralys Wills . December 18, 2010.

2010-12-11T12:19:00.001-08:00

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