(Chapter Twenty-Five)

Seahorses and Mermaids

I never want to leave New Mexico. I’d been in Albuquerque for a New Year's retreat, a quest, with my women friends of many years. My plan was to meditate and ask for guidance; how to help Linda with her next months, with her final wishes.

Linda said, “The sunflower is my symbol of hope.” Like the sunflower, she kept turning toward the light, toward hope, and away from the tasks that accompany dying. Even though I went in and out of denial about her prognosis, I felt that she needed the calm that would follow the resolution of her estate and funeral plans. Just in case.

During the retreat, an emergency call from Boston interrupted my quest.

Erich said, “Mom I need your help.” His pregnant wife Laurie was experiencing complications and her doctor had ordered bed rest until the birth of her twins. Could I come and care for their older child, my grandson Danny?

When the sun came up the next morning, watermelon pink washed over the snow-dusted sandias. Sandia means watermelon, but the mountains were named for the Indian tribes who inhabited them. I didn't want to leave. On this trip, I’d planned to drive to Zuni for Epiphany at the village church, with its murals of Pueblo gods dancing then toward the risen Christ and shaggy buffalo heads over the pulpits. I intended to journey on to Chaco Canyon, to walk through Pueblo Bonito in the snow, before returning to California and Linda.

Instead, I would fly to Logan Airport. The desk clerk at La Posada came out to say good-bye to me. “Did you hear about the big storm? They've closed airports on the East Coast."

“And I'm headed for Boston,” I answered.

“Don't go,” he said.

I thought twice about getting on that flight. Was the storm an omen? I wanted to focus on Linda, but Erich’s desperate voice on the phone tugged at my heart. I had to go.

The roof and ledges at the Albuquerque airport were still lined with electric Christmas luminarias, made to look like the traditional paper sacks that hold candles embedded in sand. They would be lit for the last time on El Dia de los Reyes, but I’d be in Boston by then. I wished Linda were with me. She and I had tramped through the snow together in New York ten years earlier, in silence and sorrow after Michael died.

From the air, I saw that the mountain lakes between Albuquerque and Denver were frozen at the edges with liquid centers, the color pattern of agates. It looked as if there were lights in the center of each one, as if dolphins were swimming in circles, the banded patterns following like the wakes of their tails.

As we flew, I pondered a dream I had during the Albuquerque retreat. I was in a dentist’s chair. All of a sudden the rinsing tube flooded my mouth with water. I felt like I might drown. A figure with crossed-out eyes appeared before me. It pleaded with me, “Why did you murder me, why, why?” It was a recurring dream that I had first had in Iowa City graduate days. The people of the dream were different but always brought with them paralyzing guilt —I had neglected my poetry mission, smothered my vision.

In an earlier chapter, I kept referring to Henry James’ The Golden Bowl in describing my marriage. Portrait of a Lady, the story of Isabel Archer who had so many gifts she could not decide how to use them, also parallels my own story. Poetry, publishing, ranching, mothering, gardening—the reality is that to focus exclusively on your profession is challenging when you are a mother. Even to focus on one child’s need is very difficult when the others call out to you.

The spectacular quiet flight made it hard to believe the report of east coast turbulence until the pilot announced, “Flights to JFK and Dallas have been cancelled,” just before we landed in Denver.

I found my gate in the airport for the second leg of my flight. The agent confirmed the plane to Boston would try to go ahead, although conditions were worsening there.

“It won't be a pretty flight,” she offered. “It's the only one going east today.”

Only my love for Erich and the vision of him waiting for me at the airport, tired and worried about his wife, got me on that plane. As I sank into a chair to await boarding, I turned my full attention to my second child.

Erich, then in his mid-thirties, looked like a young Bill Clinton without the bodyguards.

When Clinton first emerged in the 1992 campaign, Linda remarked how Erich's rugged good looks resembled the candidate's. Gaby noted that they both loved fast food. I was touched at Clinton's support for his mother during the many years she was a single parent, how they battled the world together, just as Erich and I had. The clincher in this resemblance came when Tom read in The New Yorker that Bill Clinton once stomped out of a room over a Risk game. Risk was Erich's favorite board game when he was younger. I never knew what violent reaction his losing Turkey and Afghanistan might precipitate.

As a boy, Erich was Tom Sawyer, always hauling home treasures he found in the desert. Once I looked out the window to see him free-wheeling an old bicycle tire while dangling a large blue-belly lizard from a grass noose he had made. He kept the lizard as a pet. Sometime after its demise, I found a small faded cardboard marker, glued to a popsicle-stick and pushed into the hard caliche behind the house, where he had buried the lizard. It read, “Here lies George, a true and loil lizard.” Later when we moved to San Luis Obispo, fishing became his passion and he bought mealworms with his allowance, which metamorphosed into black beetles. They swarmed through our garage, unto their next reincarnation.

Erich divines my nature and needs, sometimes before I do. He sticks with me through life’s adventures without criticism. He and I were closest during the disintegration of our family. When Martin left, thirteen year old Erich moved his dinner plate to the head of the table without comment. He seemed to take on the yoke of pulling the family wagon alongside me as easily as he took my hand when we walked, well into his teens. When Martin told the judge at our custody hearing that I was unfit to raise my children, Erich reminded me that it was not I but Martin who had ripped apart the fabric of our family through his erratic behavior, drawing Linda and Gabi into his alliance.

After the divorce, high-schooler Erich took a job at a restaurant in San Luis Obispo. I thought its name, The Silent Woman, was degrading. Once, when I dined there with friends, the food was so terrible that I asked to see the chef. To my surprise it was Erich. I had thought he was bussing tables or washing dishes.

I asked him, “Erich how could you serve that food?”

He replied, “Sorry mom. I just did what they said, ‘Put package A into package B.’ Honest!”

Erich left cooking and baseball to go to college and become a lawyer. Once, when he was a sophomore in college, he called me in the middle of the night.

“Mom,” he said, “I’ve found out that there’s no meaning to life.”

Gathering my thoughts together from deep sleep, I paused and then said to my son, “We can only receive life. It’s a gift.”

Erich also was a joker. One afternoon in the mid-seventies, I was struggling to finish organizing a poetry and jazz festival in San Luis Obispo for my performance group, Solo Flight. We had run into community opposition roused by a previous event, during which Lawrence Ferlinghetti supposedly had uttered obscenities during a public reading at Mission Plaza. In reality it was a lesser-known poet who had stood up. The good people of San Luis Obispo didn’t recognize who Ferlinghetti was and confused the situation. As I sat perplexed and fearful that the poets I’d selected would raise public ire, someone telephoned.

“This is Kenneth,” squawked the voice on the line. I suspected it wasn't really Kenneth Rexroth on the phone. It turned out to be my Erich, who had developed a pitch-perfect imitation of Kenneth's special rasp.

Kenneth Rexroth had become a frequent consoler and counselor to my son during those years between my divorce from Martin and my marriage to Bill, a time when Erich really needed a father. To Kenneth, Erich confided his worries about being head of our household, whether he could try for a baseball career, whether he could even go on to college. He assured him that he could go wherever he wanted, that he would become educated whether he went to college or not.

Kenneth was a kindly muse, however roughhewn. He inspired both Erich and me. I was very worried about the success of the upcoming Solo Flight event, if anyone would even show up, if a poet would use a bad word on stage. I feared that, in total repudiation of my vision for an arts community in San Luis, the city arts council would make me repay their grant.

Kenneth was unflappable. His input and presence ensured the event’s success, like the "Seventy-Six Trombones" scene in The Music Man, when all the great musicians came to town on the 4th of July. So many people crowded into Cal Poly’s Little Theatre for the performance that the Fire Marshal had to ask latecomers to leave, including the city councilman who had voted against the project and called us dangerous "Bohemians."

Subsequently, the City of San Luis Obispo funded other readings we sponsored: Ernest Gaines, Carlos Fuentes (who came to my class at the prison, as did Robert Bly), John Rechy and Gwendolyn Brooks. When I visited her not long before she died, she spoke of that reading in San Luis Obispo.

I never saw Kenneth again. He died a few years later. Erich went to Kenneth's funeral on the same day as his graduation from UC Santa Barbara. From the podium as he received his diploma, he said, "Farewell to Kenneth Rexroth." Later, he told me that, since Kenneth had told him he could do it, he knew he would graduate.

Later, I was to read one of Kenneth's poems at Aunt B’s funeral beneath the Jacaranda trees. At his words, I recalled once again that Rexroth was among the giants of modern poetry, but during the days he befriended Erich, he was part of the family. He was both erudite and natural.

I shook myself out of my reverie and filed with others into the crowded plane, full to the last seat with rerouted passengers.

The pilot maneuvered the plane through the rough weather in a zig-zag pattern like a Wild Mouse ride, catching an updraft, bearing down on the left, swerving to the right.

I thought of the Taoist story about the butcher who managed to saw through the innards of an ox, cutting through without effort. No bones in these clouds. The plane seemed to pierce through without effort. The ride turned out to be exuberant and not risky. It reminded me of the Christmas when Tom bought us tickets to fly over the Grand Canyon. I’d decided to be thrilled instead of terrified as we dipped low over the Temple of Vishnu.

As the day waned, I thought I spotted the lights of Boston below. But the plane turned left and the intercom crackled, “We’ve been advised to turn north. Logan Airport is closed right now. The runway crews are trying to get the snow off the ground. We’ll be circling for a while.”

Forty minutes later, we plunged through a snow-filled sky toward the airport. The buildings below looked like constellations wrapped in angel hair, lights on an old-fashioned Christmas tree. The crowd applauded when the pilot touched the ground in a perfect landing.

My son stood at the gate. He grinned and waved. But the scar on his forehead where he fell off the piano as a toddler throbbed and his eyes looked haggard.

"What's wrong, Erich?" I asked, hugging him.

"Laurie's in Brigham Women’s Hospital. She's had some vaginal bleeding."

"Where's Danny?" I asked.

"Laurie's mother took him home with her, but she has to work tomorrow. I'm so glad you got here. The airport's been closed all day. How’s Linda?”

"Happy. I’ll see her for her birthday next week."

Erich and I both breathed with an unspoken gratitude that she would celebrate another birthday.

The road spread before us, a confusing pattern of red and blue reflections on a wet pavement. Drifts crusted along the roadway as we parked near the hospital. Erich led me across the plowed snow.

We hurried down the hospital corridor. Laurie sat on the gurney in an emergency room cubicle, her arresting black hair spilling over a hospital gown. My daughter-in-law’s enormous dark eyes were dull with exhaustion. I hugged her, too hard. “How are you?” I didn’t want to ask how the babies were.

The nurse hurried in, nodding at me.

"We've got to get some ultrasounds, quickly," she said. Seven months pregnant and weak, Laurie could still hoist herself onto the table. The nurse wheeled in a computer-like apparatus and spread gel over my daughter-in-law’s abdomen, then moved a spoon-like instrument in circular motions across the firm flesh.

We looked at the overhead monitor and saw a pattern like swirls in water. The babies were so big, it was hard to distinguish them.

"Can you make out anything, Glenna?" Laurie asked. “The last time I saw them they were pretty babies, swimming around like dolphins."

"I thought of dolphins swimming today," I said. "The scan reminds me of some lakes I flew over after we left Albuquerque."

The image looked like the first day of creation, with rock masses and bone formations amid the swirls. "There's a spine" I said. "I think it's a sea horse."

"A sea horse and a dolphin," answered Laurie.

"We should give them mermaid names, then." I smiled, relaxing a little.

Laurie tipped her head. "I still like Alexandria and Savannah."

"The nurse wiped the gel from my daughter-in-law's belly. She punched a button on the computer. "I'll get a copy of the print-out for you."

This was a new world for me, seeing my twin granddaughters on the ultrasound, and then holding a description of them in my hand. Baby one weighed three pounds, four ounces. Baby two weighed three pounds, two ounces.

"It looks like Alexandria is getting more than her share,” I said.

As soon as we returned to Laurie's ER cubicle, an intern stepped in.

"Let's put some weight on those babies." The doctor turned to Laurie. "See if you can keep them in there for another month. At thirty-two weeks, they should be able to live without tubes. But take it easy and try to keep them until thirty-six. That's a normal gestation for twins.”

"I've seen the way they handle preemies," Laurie said. “Like toxic waste, in little plastic sacks. I want my babies to go full term so I can breastfeed them and get them off to a normal start."

"Then keep her off her feet, Grandmother." The intern stepped out.

"I'll get the car," said Erich, who had been unusually quiet, holding Laurie’s hand. I helped Laurie to the hospital entrance. We rode home through falling snow, a peaceful city night. I thought I saw lightning once when I woke up later. But it was only the beam of light from a midnight snowplow.

“Snowplow” turned out to be the most common word in Boston that week, followed closely by “shovel.” One man sold 15,000 snow shovels over the weekend. Laurie's mother fired the snowplow operator for destroying her driveway landscaping.

"I'll have Erich shovel out my driveway," she said.

"Please call Triple A,” I pleaded. "Erich’s so stressed right now. I'm afraid he might have a heart attack."

My children’s health vulnerabilities haunted me after so much worry about Linda. At that time, no man in my family had lived beyond his late sixties, though now, twenty years’ later, my brother is still going strong in his seventies. The many pressures on Erich's life at work, and the added stress of Laurie’s condition, worried me.

One Saturday, he and I spent the whole day standing in an endless line at the DMV for a safety sticker, buying groceries, shopping for a bed for Danny.

"There's no time, no matter how I try to manage it, there's just no time," Erich said, shaking his head.

"Erich, tell me what I can do to take the pressure off. I don't want to frighten you but it alarms me to see you racing all the time. Tell me how I can help. I’m here for you.”

"You’ve always been there when I needed you, Mom."

Tears welled in my eyes. "One thing I can promise you is that there will be a delicious meal for you every night and someone to put Danny in bed and read to him, so that you and Laurie can get a good rest. Also, I'll take over the laundry.” I’d peered into the basement earlier—huge drifts of sheets, towels and underwear.

"I feel more rested already, with you here," said Erich.

When I was a child, my Grandmother Stevens responded to all emergencies on her Nebraska farm by cooking up a huge meal. I used to push corncobs into her woodstove for her while she whipped up bowls of mashed potatoes, piles of roasted chicken parts, rows of pies.

As a little girl, I went with her to buy ice for the front porch icebox and scooted out of the way when the man loaded it into the back of the wagon with giant tongs. I helped her pour hot water over just-slaughtered chickens before she plucked them. I remember the unshelled eggs, each one smaller than the last, that grandmother would take from the hen carcasses, cook whole and serve with homemade noodles. Lemon meringue pie came from her oven, too, along with the best Yankee pot-roast anybody ever ate.

At Erich’s, deep in northern Yankee country, I put a New England pot roast in the oven. A hearty meal for my lawyer son when he got home from his current trial, if he could make it through the snow, cresting at six feet. Strong wholesome fare for Laurie and Danny.

What a peaceful moment, as I cooked, looking out on a snow-coated pine forest from the kitchen window, while Laurie rested and my two-year-old grandson watched a video.

That day, Tip O'Neal's funeral showed on three networks. Two deaths filled the news while I visited Boston—Speaker O'Neal and Virginia Kelly, President Clinton's mother. Family and Senate colleagues lauded Tip O'Neal as the common people’s friend. Every time he came home from Washington, one man noted, he visited Boston’s small shops and shook hands with customers. Commentators said of Bill Clinton's mother that she had instilled fearlessness and determination in her son, and he credited her for the success of his presidential campaign.

I went to check on Danny.

"Spot," he said, holding out his book, Where’s Spot?, and flashing his wide smile at me.

My first grandson’s beauty always made my heart quicken. As a toddler, Danny looked like a perfect proof of both his parents, Laurie's black hair and large dark eyes, combined with Erich's fair coloring.

As I watched the mourners at Tip O'Neal’s funeral, Ted Kennedy among them, I thought of a question posed to us at the Albuquerque retreat: “What would you regret when you look back at age ninety-five?"

What would Tip O'Neal regret? Of what would he be proud? I could hear him say in his Boston Irish brogue, "I never sold out, even in all the deal-making a politician must do."

I could hear Virginia Kelly chime in, "I never backed away from adventure."

That's what I want to say, I thought. I never sold out and I never rejected adventure. I too want to be remembered as a person of strong will who didn't get steamrollered by life. What would Linda say?

“Let’s give Linda a call,” I said to Erich.

The next night I searched the cupboards to see what I might throw together for dessert. I found some vanilla custard mix—a perfect base for persimmon pudding. The persimmon that I brought from California stood out on the kitchen counter, bright as an oriole.

As I searched Laurie’s bookcase for a cookbook, I came across Michael Callan's Surviving AIDS. He had died just before New Year’s Day, three weeks after we heard him sing when he and Linda received their Life Achievement awards from the City of Los Angeles. Wanting to lessen hers, I hadn’t mentioned my sadness to Linda. I think that this was a mistake I made too often—not talking about grief never lessens it. As I thumbed through the book, my heart rang with his beautiful song, “Love Don’t Have a Reason.”

Callan listed characteristics that helped a number of long-term survivors stay alive. They were all fighters like Linda. They insisted on experiencing all that life could offer rather than settling for being an invalid. In his story about Rita, Callan described her as a robust woman, who people would not believe had AIDS. Just like Linda, the picture of health.

My oldest daughter used to say she had more vitality than people who were not infected. We all believed it. Later that night, after pot roast and pudding, I called her again. I’d put Danny to sleep with a song from my grandmother, "Mommy closes eyes, Daddy closes eyes,” then I sang through the list of relatives and baby-sitters. Danny added, "Aladdin closes eyes and Spot closes eyes," and then he was out.

Linda picked up the phone on the first ring. She asked about Laurie.

"She’s better, resting. The twins are okay. I'll be back for your birthday," I said. "Bill called this morning and said he picked out a pair of cymbidia for you at the nursery."

"That's wonderful," she replied. "I want to fill my house with orchids. I bring fresh flowers in every day. Steve and I have a special restaurant we want to take you to when you come down to see us.”

"Oh Mom," she added, "I want to swim with dolphins."

"Dolphins," I said. "That's remarkable. Laurie and I were talking about dolphins at the hospital. That's what the twins look like on the ultrasound. And the light on the lakes I flew over on my way to Denver looked like dolphins swimming."

Just then I heard Danny howling from upstairs, not asleep after all. "Oh, Danny's awake! Talk to you later. Love you, bye."

My life. Pulled in all directions. But as my Buddhist master, Suzuki, says, “Calmness in activity is an achievement.”

"The Power of Prose"