Rosalinda's Eyes Ch. 03

"You're a pilot now, Becky," I whispered in her ear. "And I'm so proud of you."

Bettina was next of course, and I held Rosalinda's shaking hands as her daughter charged the runway, and I looked at her up there, so proud of her -- proud like a father, maybe like her father would have been -- when she turned on final and the landing light popped on. My fingers were shadowing hers, I was feeling my solo again for the first time on a long time. I watched her landing with something more than pride in eyes, too. I loved her, simple as that. When I turned and saw Rosalinda's tears, she reached up and wiped a few off my face, too.

Flying was far from over in the little house on Academy Road. Classes were still held every Tuesday and Thursday evening from six 'til nine -- and for the next four years, too. I took them through their instrument and multi-engine ratings, let them use 6-8 Romeo to build hours and hone skills, then they got their instructors tickets. Then they graduated from UCLA and both were soon gone, following in my footsteps one more time, both of them, into the Navy. Both of them, in time, pilots.

One more thing happened that summer. Rosalinda and I drove up to Vegas after the girls started school, and we tied the knot, made it official. Strange too, telling Bettina that next week she could call me Dad now.

She smiled, told me she had been for a while, if only to herself.

But of course, you knew that already.

After a certain age, getting old is funny. Like a series unexpected, not to mention unwanted compromises sneak up on you. Maybe we should expect the unexpected that attends aging, yet getting old is something relatively new for our species. Some people did indeed live to old age even thousands of years ago, but for most it's a relatively recent development and I think that's why more people are blindsided by the changes.

First, things start to break, things like bones, but then maybe your hearing or sight starts to fade, yet I soon figured out that the real killer is losing your sense of humor. If that breaks down you're screwed, because all the rest barreling down on you soon becomes unendurable. Think of it this way: no one likes a sore loser, and you're going to lose this one, one way or another. This thing called life...and no matter how well you take care of that meat and bones sack thingy that holds your brain, it will stop working the way you expect it to one day.

Before that day rolls around things are going to start to hurt. All those broken bones in high school, when you were growing up? Yup, they're gonna hurt. The time you fell and twisted your ankle? Yup, that too. Then the real fun starts. The colonoscopies. The prostate exams or the PAP smears. Maybe a mitral valve will fail or your arteries will clog, or this or that and on and on. All those medical specialties in the hospital? They each represent the myriad ways we can take on our way out of this life.

I had two other sisters and I've not mentioned them here as both checked-out early. Deirdre in an automobile accident when she was seventeen, and Stacy, of uterine cancer at thirty. And then there was Michael, in Afghanistan. My parents and Brenda. You get used to the idea as the years roll by that this is a one way trip and no one gets out alive, but that's not the point. It's the time between birth and light's out that matters, assuming anything at all really matters.

Judd came home one day and found PJ curled up in her favorite chair, not breathing. No warning. She'd had a stroke of some sort, an aneurism up there somewhere, and lights out. Nothing dramatic until the funeral, then all kinds of drama.

Rosalinda prepared one of her massive blowouts that night, and all our friends came over a few hours after the services, including half the LAPD, and I cooked steaks out back, just like my dad and used to. By the way, did I tell you about that?

It was a ritual, Dad and I, cooking steaks. Ever since I was a spud.

Twice a year he bought a side of beef, literally -- half a cow -- and twice a year we got a load of steaks wrapped in white butcher paper, ground beef, sausages and ribs -- half a cows worth all packed into a chest-style freezer he had in the garage. Mom made a huge salad and cottage fried potatoes, and the night before Dad whipped up his marinade, and pay attention here, 'cause I'm going to pass on his recipe.

In a two cup measuring cup, put about a cup of catsup in, then around a half cup of plain yellow mustard, add a hefty dash of Worcestershire sauce, a splash of soy sauce, a dash or two of Tabasco, some garlic, a pinch of cumin and, to top it all off, an ounce or two of bourbon -- or, in a pinch, whiskey. He had this little metal skillet he used to simmer this concoction in, reduce it to a thick sauce over low heat, then he added a little more bourbon and lime juice, salt and fresh cracked pepper and stirred it until well mixed. He'd take six steaks and rub that sauce all over them, wrap 'em up and stick 'em back in the 'fridge 'til cooking time.

When it was time to cook he got his fire going super hot to cook down the charcoal, and once he had a good bed of coals he'd toss a couple of stumpy cubes of mesquite wood on the coals, then toss the steaks on.

After PJs services I cooked forty New York strip steaks just like that, and I'd like to think she would have appreciated the gesture. She rarely ate meat -- unless I was doing up 'steaks a la Dad,' at which point she became a ravenous carnivore. I had the same old metal skillet, the same recipe, the same brick and mortar Bar-B-Q in the back yard, and the results were -- the same. Rosalinda, however, did not make potatoes and salad. Heaven forbid. Two paellas, enchiladas, empanadas, taquitos and enough guacamole to feed four hundred people. I charcoaled some flank steak and chicken and she made fajitas -- as snacks for the main event! Judd called all the local patrol officers over for dinner, and they drifted in one by one, giving me a new perspective on how popular she'd become with all his friends in the department.

Of course Becky was there, Bettina too. Becky, still in the Navy, still flying, and Bettina now with, gulp, United, flying 777s from Houston to London twice a week. She told me she was engaged that night, to a flight attendant of all things. A nice guy who was trying to get into med school, flying to make ends meet when they collided. Becky? Devastated, in the end closer to PJ than she had been to her biological mother, but more than that she told me. PJ was her best friend that last year in high school, when we started flying together, another thing I never knew.

That's another thing about getting on in years. You start to learn where all the bones are buried, where all the skeletons have been hiding, but in truth I think I found they'd always been there, waiting for me to get smart enough to figure it all out.

Judd gave me all PJs diaries; little books she'd kept under lock and key since high school. All of it, the cause of all her anxieties laid out in nauseating detail. Her fights with Dad, the guilt my mother laid on her doorstep, how she looked up to me -- yet hated my guts because I was the boy and so got all the good time with Dad. I read through them one night a few weeks later and I was stunned to realize how central to all our lives my father had been, yet how peripheral Mother had been. He dominated everything about our lives while she remained in the background, he was always the main course while she kept to the shadows, making her salads and potatoes, yet PJs sketches of my mother revealed a troubled soul. Kind of mean, a borderline alcoholic by the time she was in high school, the classic portrait of a woman who could have, and should have done so much more. She was a woman who chose to remain at home and raise her kids, probably because her mother had too, and she saw no way out of the deal.

There is a little attic space in the house, and I hadn't been up there in years, yet I found references to a box PJ had put up there buried in her diary. She'd labeled it 'Mom's stuff' after we cleaned up the house, after Mom's funeral, yet I'd never seen PJ do it. We'd always kept some stuff up there, things like Christmas tree lights and ornaments, things we didn't use often, and I didn't think there was much else up there, so this came as a surprise.

And so I crawled up there one day, flashlight in hand, and I tripped and stumbled my way around the rafters until I found PJs scribbling on a dried out box, and I carried it downstairs to my flight training classroom, opened it up like an explosive ordnance technician might open a suspect suitcase. Pictures and lots of academic transcripts lay on top, some of the things she'd written in high school, and in college under that layer.

I picked up the photographs first, most in black and white, though a few were color prints -- and those had faded badly in the attic's heat. Yet one thing was immediately clear: my mother had been a babe. Runner up in a Miss Pasadena contest, 1938, images of her on bandstands at a county fair, images of a sort of vitality that seems forgotten these days. Report cards, from first grade through high school. All As, not one B, not in any subject, over twelve years. Her transcripts from USC, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude, top of her class, an English major. Her senior dissertation, on Milton's Paradise Lost. Transcripts from work towards her Master's degree, said work cut off abruptly two months before I was born. Never resumed.

I carried her dissertation to bed that night and read it, all 117 pages of it. I didn't understand half of the things she wrote about -- she was so far over my head I felt like a dullard -- but I learned enough to understand that I'd never known her in the least. She was this dull creature who kept to the shadows, right? Who made salads and cottage fried potatoes while Dad designed airplanes that carried movie stars around the world.

Madeline moved back in a few months later, after her husband passed, and we stayed up nights talking about mother a lot after that. My surprise was a surprise to Maddie, because she'd known mother quite well. She was also, I'd never known, an accomplished pianist, yet father didn't think that warranted buying a piano, which had devastated her. All kinds of little contests of the will played out between them during our childhood, too, and in the end I ended up with this image of my mother as someone my father had slowly worn down over the years, beaten in a war of attrition, and as father wanted nothing more than a son to follow in his footsteps I got all his attention. The girls got the leftovers, maybe a little more after I left the house to go to USC, yet what struck me was how much the girls wanted time with him. It had to be obvious to him, yet he never relented, never spent much time with them at all, and I had to wonder why.

I found her diary in the bottom of that box, wrapped in brown paper, bound tightly with old shipping twine -- like there were secrets inside she couldn't quite get up the nerve to destroy -- but I thought long and hard about cutting the cords, releasing those memories. I fixed myself a glass of iced tea and went to the living room, sat in the light, hoping to find resolution in her wanderings.

It's a remarkable document, a chronicle of her times as much as it is about her life. Starting at age fourteen, she wrote a new chapter once a year, on her birthday. She recorded the most important things of the past year, both in her immediate life and the momentous happenings in the world around her. And she loved to write, apparently. She wrote beautifully, too, in handwriting so shatteringly clear, in prose so lucid there was no way you couldn't see the point she driving home.

Growing up in the 30s, destitute lives all around her, the glamour of Hollywood just a few miles down the road. December, 1941 was important to her not because of events in Hawaii, rather because of a movie that came out just days before -- Sullivan's Travels -- which at first seemed to sum up her experience of the Depression. Her own divergent dichotomies, if you will. Stranger still and unknown to everyone in the family, or so I thought, she had been one of five actresses to audition for the role Veronica Lake played in that movie.

Say what?

My mother? An actress? This was news to me, so I read through her undergrad transcripts again. I found the classes in drama, more classes in stage and film production. Oblique references to casting calls at Paramount and MGM. All news to me, so I asked Maddie.

"Did you know about all this?

"Of course."

"I had no idea."

"You were never close to her."

"That's not true."

"Oh?"

"She was my mother. Of course I was close to her."

"Is that why all those years you sent Dad birthday cards, but never one to her?"

I didn't have a pithy comeback ready for that one, did I?

"Father didn't want her acting," Maddie told me with an air of finality, and I guess that really was that. She loved my father, and the idea of having a family, more than she was willing to entertain the notion of striking out on her own. And Rosalinda listened to that exchange with a world-weary, all-knowing glaze in her eyes, like yes, she too knew all there was to know about men and Hollywood, and how choices were narrowed and narrowed until there is little left beyond the burned our shell left by compromise and compliance.

There were more surprises in that box, more cause for introspective analysis and a sense of how thoroughly I'd betrayed my mother, but in the end it felt like some sort of choice had been demanded of me, some oath of fealty, that I never understood. Some forced choice very early on. Like I could be my father's son or a mamas boy, and that was the divergent dichotomy that stumped me. Probably the first choice life threw at me, yet even so one I just couldn't remember anything about. Maybe the choice was lost in a haze of unconscious denial or, more likely still, lost in some obscure coding sequence in my Y-chromosomes; whatever 'it' was, I felt I had grown up almost completely cut off from my mother.

Yet a few days later Maddie had one more insight to share, one more bombshell to toss my way.

"I was thinking about it after the other night, and I remembered something she told me once. She said something like she resented you from the first because she'd wanted a girl, someone who could help her stand up to Dad."

Rosalinda was working in the kitchen just then but she heard those words and froze. Like some cosmic tumbler had just slipped and fallen into place.

Then she turned to Maddie.

"And you just now thought of this?" she said. "This most important thing? Do you want to torture your brother, too? Like all of you tortured your father?"

And Rosalinda ran out of the kitchen. Maddie sat and wept for a while.

Families are complicated things. Dangerous, too, if not handled carefully. Like marriages, families can swiftly move from beneficial love-love relationships into uncharted love-hate toxicity, and I was left reeling in unseen implications after that revelation. Like: when had my mother's resentment settled in to roost? When she first picked me up and held me? When I suckled at her breast? And had father seen her reaction and stepped-in, tried to intervene? Only to make things worse, to drive her to new extremities?

I reread her diaries after that and the most obvious things stood out. No mention of me over the years -- until I graduated high school.

Then, the last words about me in all her writings: "He's gone now."

Was that a sigh of relief, or an admission of failure?

What had I been to her? Why had all my sisters wanted attention from my father, attention he was unwilling to give them? Had my mother's resentment of me fueled his resentment? Not only towards his wife, but his daughters, too?

Is that why PJ made her way to my doorstep in San Francisco? Why the boundary she saw between us was so amorphous, or is polymorphous a better choice of thought? PJ always seemed in a state of flux, pulled by different tidal flows. Had she been caught up in the ongoing drama between mother and father and been unable to pull free? Or had her biochemical imbalances predisposed her to a kind of schizoid break -- like manic she took Dad's side, then depressive she recoiled to Mother's point of view. If so, I don't know how she survived.

The point is, I think, she didn't. Not well enough to break free of these flows, certainly not well enough to stand on her own as an adult. Not until Judd came along and helped her over the bridge, to walk free of the tides to the other side.

Yet now I had to ask myself one last question.

Had those tides affected all of us? And how? Did the difference between PJ and me reside solely in our coding, or had something else been put in place to get me through?

Mother's resentment?

Had the walls she placed between the two of us actually served to protect me?

Odd, I thought. Kind of ironic, too, in a 'what if' kind of way, because pretty soon I realized there were no answers in these speculations, just all sorts of new, unexpected doubt. Casting memory in these new lights did little to settle the matter, did nothing to ease my mind, because I didn't want or need to redefine my existence, my relationship with either of my parents, or PJ. They were gone now. Even Brenda and Michael -- gone. Why redefine everything?

I remember reading an article about that time, something about astronomy. About galaxies colliding. About how those huge spiral bands interact in such collisions. With all the vast distances between stars still in play, stars within the galactic bands of each galaxy could avoid collision when the two galaxies 'collide' -- or there could massive, devastating collisions. Stars could be literally ripped apart, their remains set adrift -- until, that is, gravity pulls these remnants back together -- and new stars were formed. In the endless seas of space, such collisions are more common than you might expect, too.

And maybe families are like that, too.

Random collisions tear us apart, and in the aftermath we reform in other, more comfortable gravities.

+++++

We had a big coming together when Bettina got married, not quite a collision but we had our moments. She'd met this big, garrulous Texan during the 'meet & greet' -- when your pilot stands by the door as you deplane -- and they'd sparked a wildfire and took off from there. Scott Kelly was working for an oil company, spent all his time flying to Africa and Saudi Arabia, but he wanted to settle down some, maybe have a kid or two -- his words, not mine -- and Bettina was good with that. Sort of. Really, I didn't think she wanted to get off the merry-go-round just yet, give up her seniority and so miss making the captain's list, but where women and biology are concerned I plead ignorance.

I thought maybe we could block off Beverly and have a street party at Tommy's but Rosalinda wasn't having any of it, so we settled on a church wedding and a street party centered at my house. Most all the neighbors were up for it, and there was kind of an otherworldly, old world vibe about the whole thing. Everyone, and I mean everyone walked down to the church together, and we walked back up and the festivities began in earnest. Rosalinda had set it up where each house had a little party going and people wandered from house to house, party to party, and tequila and champagne flowing in surreal abundance. As the sun went down the party moved to the street, and the band played while people danced out there under billions of light strung up across the street. Bettina and Scott cut the cake out there and a roar went up when they danced, and not long thereafter they cut another rug and took off to the airport to catch a plane headed for some island in the South Pacific. I thought the whole thing looked a little like colliding galaxies, but maybe that was just me.