Autumn 1934 Cappy Love Hanson

2016 Creative Writing Celebration: Memoir, 1st Place

I’m still sitting behind the wheel of my fifteen-year-old Plymouth Barracuda fastback when the sodium lights come on in the parking lot, turning the blue hood a shade my family refers to as sickety green. My therapist has long since come out of the tinted-glass-windowed building — itself now turned a Halloween hue of blackish yellow by the lights — has gotten in his late-model Volvo, and left. In fact, most of the cars that filled the lot when I came out at five o’clock are gone. As I stare out the windshield mottled with salt from the nearby southern California beaches, a janitorial service company van pulls into one of the reserved front-row spaces. It’s gotten that late. This is what happens when I’ve had one of those sessions that ends with Dr. John saying, “It’ll be interesting to see how you handle this.” The way I’m handling it right now is by not trusting myself to negotiate the boulevard, the onramp, the freeway, the offramp, another boulevard, a grid of smaller streets, and finally the parking lot at my large, anonymous apartment complex. Because oblivion — by accidentally-on-purpose changing lanes without looking, running a red light, or turning in front of an eighteen wheeler — is a little too tempting. Oblivion, if I examine it closely enough, doesn’t mean physical destruction so much as it means an end to feeling the despair and hopelessness that sometimes result from my sessions. Dr. John and I have had the talk about the permanent solution to the temporary problem, and I’ve promised not to go there. And promised not to break my promise. I don’t numb out with drugs, booze doesn’t agree with me, and the chocolate and sugar that used to produce euphoria now knock me out of balance and into depression. An imperfect but useful form of oblivion — the one I’m choosing to indulge in tonight — consists of imagining how I might not have come to be at all, ergo would not exist, therefore would not have to feel.

This tactic drags me back to the autumn of 1934, where I imagine that what did happen, didn’t.

The man who will be my father — a dozen years before my birth makes him a parent —stands on the broad, red-brick porch of the house his father can afford on his AT&T salary. His Boston-bred mother is inside, cleaning the post-Victorian to white-gloved perfection, as if this act of gratitude will allow them to keep their home, Great Depression or no. The specter of a third of the workforce jobless—of former bank presidents picking grapefruit in California’s Coachella Valley — haunts even the most fortunately employed and their dependents. A tall man, my potential father, sapling-slender, fair skinned, wavy brown hair clipped short and brushed back from the beginnings of a receding hairline. Tan slacks, white shirt, blue Cal Berkeley sweater-vest with gold trim. Cherubic cheeks flushed with the autumn breeze. His mother’s friends, even now, can’t resist tweaking them between their fleshy thumbs and forefingers when they come for tea and bridge. At the moment, his head is bent over the mail he has collected on his way in from a Saturday afternoon Cal football game: utility bill, bank statement, the wonderful missives people write by hand and post with penny stamps. Because he is searching for a university letter about changing his major from paleontology to math, he doesn’t look up through that brief window in time, through the side of the covered, white-columned porch, down the narrow driveway and slender field of chance to where a group is walking home from the same football game. One is an acquaintance from his calculus class, another the woman who will — or in this scenario, will not — become my mother.

When I tell this story with their names, instead of who they will become to me a dozen years later, the myth of their not meeting takes on a wholly different slant. They are more real somehow, more themselves, unseared by the burning glass of the future. Ardath,

freshly graduated from business school, working as a secretary for a screen door manufacturer. One day, she will take dictation from Henry J. Kaiser, distill the salient information from the steel magnate’s brilliant if disorganized ramblings, and compose coherent, businesslike correspondence. David, three-quarters of the way to his bachelor’s degree, has spent the last summer excavating petrified dinosaur bones in the neatly layered and conveniently eroded uplifts of northern New Mexico, near Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch. Confined to a tent during monsoon rains, he ruminated on his future and concluded that to make a living at paleontology, he must either dig, and spend months away from his current and hoped-for future families, or teach, for which tutoring has taught him that he has neither talent nor patience. This is three years before he applies for the bookkeeping job at Steel Tank and Pipe in San Francisco that will launch his corporate finance career and provide him with a job-related deferment during World War II, ST&P being a war material manufacturer. My fantasy scrolls on like an old black-and-white movie. I smile at the idea of watching it at a drive-in theater, especially since most of those cultural icons from my childhood and early adulthood have been torn down for condo complexes and shopping malls. I picture how, at the pivotal instant, a car turns off of Piedmont, pulls up on Garber. A 1930 De Soto CK, let’s say — tan, considered sportier than black. (“It’s de-lightful, it’s de-lovely, it’s De Soto,” their radio jingle insists.) The driver honks for the young people’s attention. He leans across the pregnant woman in the passenger seat and rolls down the window. Heated air exhales over the pedestrians as he asks if they could tell him how to get to the drugstore on Tunnel Avenue. Ardath knows. It isn’t far from a house she lived in as a child, before her father died from complications of tonsillitis — an infection for which no antibiotics yet existed — and she, her

siblings, and her mother had to move in with her grandmother and maiden aunt to reduce expenses. She steps up to the idling roadster in her matching navy blue sweater and fitted knit skirt, the back pleated at the bottom in the style of the day. Her black hair flows in waves to her waist, pinned back from an exotic face reflecting a mixture of German, African, and American Indian. With the dance of hands that typifies her manner of speaking, she describes the route to the drugstore so clearly that the driver takes it with him like a living map. This is what she’s doing at the moment David hears the idling De Soto but can’t see it for the neighbors’ six-foot hedge. Shrugging, he carries the mail inside and closes the oak door carefully, so as not to rattle the beveled-glass windows on either side. Ardath and her friends walk on past the house. The young men critique the football game in knowing voices borrowed from their fathers. The young women drop back a few paces, critiquing the young men and their prospects with sighs and knowing glances acquired from their mothers.

I run this story through different versions like a film with alternative cuts and outcomes. In one, I pause David on the covered porch just long enough for him to glance up, call out to his calculus classmate, invite them all up the steps. While his mother serves a plate of cheese and crackers, and hot tea in cut glass mugs, they pro-and-con the news of the year — Hitler’s election as Führer (he’ll bring order, he’ll bring war), Gloria Vanderbilt’s custody trial (her wealthy mother loves her, she’s an unfit bimbo), Bruno Hauptmann’s arrest in the Lindberg baby kidnapping (he did it, he didn’t). Ardath settles into the white wicker rocker, trying to appear more at ease than she feels with a man one social and economic step up. She crosses her shapely, stockinged legs at the

ankles and smiles her dark-eyed, red-lipsticked smile. She has learned to play to her strengths, and it has the desired effect. By the time she leaves, David has invited her to Sunday dinner with him and his parents, and she has accepted. Here, I’m not the author of what will be my own creation, but the reteller of my mother’s tale, so often related that itseems I’ve known it since before I was born. It’s as if I were present that afternoon in the latent ovum, vibrated by the electricity of their glances, their laughter, my father’s crinkle-eyed smile, the touch of his hand at her elbow as he steered her down the steps.

In another version, I flit invisibly, as angels and their evil counterparts are said to do, hover next to David on the broad porch and whisper in his ear: The university letter is hiding there, between The Star Grocery’s advertising flier — free delivery — and a picture postcard from his father’s brother — waves crashing against boulders in Maine, near the family’s ancestral home, built in the seventeen hundreds. David will find the letter, I wheedle, if only he will step inside, where the lamps are coming on beneath the hands of those who made him. It is I who conjure clouds in the De Soto driver’s mind, concoct the wrong turn into the unfamiliar neighborhood, whisper that it’s his idea to stop the young people and ask for directions. Here, I’m the sinner/saint who saves the innocents from themselves, from each other, at the price of my own existence. Why make such a sacrifice but from compassion gained in retrospect, from decades as their daughter? Therapy has taught me to mistrust my surface motives and to dig deeper, into selfpity, revenge, grief. No doubt the aggregate of my motives is as conjoined as our blood types, as convoluted as our chromosomes.

Ardath and David, strung on opposite ends of the driveway, beaded together by a mutual friend, the will of genes,

the tantalizing hope and innate optimism of hormones. What future, inconceivable on this expectant autumn evening in 1934, could I possibly impress on them? Could I convince them that David will beat her in a drunken rage when his boss lays into him about expenses (too high) and revenues (too low), figures that David is responsible only for recording in the proper columns? Could Ardath imagine that she will follow him down a prescription-drug and bourbon-bottle-littered path behind the civilized veneer of one landscaped suburban house after another? That David will do things to his daughter — terrifying, scarring things that will send her into therapy and sometimes make it unsafe for her to drive? That Ardath will feel inkling twitches in the belly that nurtured and birthed her child, will bathe in guilt, and will offer no protection? If I could tell them — there, in the autumn of 1934 — would I? Now firmly ensconced in middle age, sitting behind the wheel of a car whose odometer has passed two hundred thousand miles, I want whatever life they gave me. I dally briefly with the inescapable science-fiction conundrum: If they heed my warnings, then I will never exist to come back and manipulate them. They will marry, and I will sit here — fifty years after their first encounter — playing at this cerebral diversion. Besides, their antique urges would only have driven them into the arms of others like each other. Each would have sparked the life of someone not too different from their actual, eventual daughter — someone who would ramble through these or similar speculations. And who, as a second janitorial service company van pulls into the parking lot, feels at last that she can trust herself enough to pump the gas pedal, turn the key and, when the Barracuda comes to internal-combustion life, guide it out of the parking lot and begin the drive home.