Better Than Sane Tales From a Dangling Girl

9781400041244

1400041244

THE ORIGINAL MARRIED MAN I'll never be anywhere I like better than the veranda off my childhood bedroom in Palo Alto, California. My room was upstairs, fairly large, with a few French windows overlooking the garden. The bedspreads on my twin beds were quilted in cream-colored chintz wing a small chandelier with grapes on it, a friendly presence at night. But the thing that mattered most was the veranda. All the wisteria and magenta bougainvillea grew up onto the veranda, and when I lay there under the green awning on my collapsible chaise with green cushions, anything bad or ugly was automatically blacked out: gone. The house in Palo Alto was made out of sandy-colored stucco, with cream-colored wood trim. Mother's mother and stepfather had built it in 1928. It had a pitched roof with a dark-green front door and a wrought-iron grille over a small window, and all the shutters were painted British racing green. I don't think of the house without seeing fairly bright, undepreth little claret-red rosebuds all over, the same as the curtains on the windows. From the ceiling hussing small green leaves all over it, but it didn't look as cheerful in winter, when the leaves fell off. Facing the street was an enormous blue spruce and two deodar cedars, the kind whose tops tip over. There was another hovering blue spruce (looking old, like the other, because the needles were silver), and a little boxwood hedge going all the way around the house. From the front door to the sidewalk was a winding brick path with violas (blue, lavender, white) on either side and, along the front sidewalk in the spring, purple iris, which looked too thin and unprotected against the street. They died fast. Out in the back of the house, in a corner, stood a huge evergreen tree that could have been in Yosemite. A white owl used to sit in it. Across from a brick terrace, sort of in a row, stood some fruit trees: nectarine, apricot, peach, a flowering Japanese plum. Down in the garden were lilacs, daphnes, dahlias, and sweet peas, and cannas: big white flowers with orange centers. A stone wall went around the back of the garden and along one side of it. The grass out back was scalloped with tuberous begonias (the small ones) in a border. Outside the breakfast room were an orange tree and a grapefruit tree, but the fruit didn't grow very well: undersized, not so sweet, too pale. Not enough sun. I never did think of myself as a person who would get married and live in a house. My mother and father seemed like two separate entities in our house, so to me marriage was a state and a house was a place where people who are wittily mean to each other live in an isolated way. At the dinner table, my sister--she's six years older--and I would sit at our places in our school uniforms, navy pleated skirts and white middy blouses. A little crystal bell sat on the table by my mother's place, to call Nita, the maid. ("Don't forget the finger bowls and the butter balls," my sister told me on the telephone the other day.) My father sat at the head of the table, in a chair with arms. The rest of us sat in chairs with no arms, but all of them, like his, were upholstered in dark yellow-gold damask. Oddly, there was a portrait of me in a white dress on the dining-room wall behind him. Daddy nearly always looked as if he were on the verge of losing control in one violent way or another, as if he were going to laugh at us or swat us away in a fit of bad temper. He had green eyes, a good color, but they often took on a sneering and impatient cast. His hair was very dark and straight, with some hair tonic in it. He usually wore a dark suit and a white shirt. In between courses, my father would rant about his patients (he was a psychiatrist) or his hatred of Communism, and my sister would be mute when he asked her questions about current world crises. Any answer she came up with