v
This time, I felt centered enough to write back. I’d stopped making copies of my letters to Mike, so all I remember is congratulating him on finding someone with whom to share this part of his life. Then I went on to describe my own journey, leaving out any hint of other men. Not that there were any then.
At Beth Israel I started up with guided therapy, seeing a few clients in the clinic there. At first, listening to their sad tales of rejection, remorse, and general confusion, I felt awkward, inadequate, and a bit of a fraud. After each session, I’d de-brief with my instructor, Dr. Theobald.
“I’m not sure I have my own head together. What right do I have to help someone else?” I asked after my first independent clinical encounter.
“You must remember, these sessions are not about you. You are not sharing your life, your own feelings, with these people. You are first of all reflecting back to them a dispassionate picture of what you hear, then guiding their thoughts toward a constructive solution to whatever is troubling them.”
The rules for that were simple to say, but hard to apply. “Listen. Reflect (repeat). Question non-directively. Guide towards positivity.” Confining myself to those tasks, I gradually learned to stay alert, attentive.
Looking back at that first month, I realize I learned everything I needed to become a therapist. The remainder of my training, and beyond, have been devoted to refining those insights.
“How do I know what her problem is, how do I decide on her diagnosis?” I asked my instructor.
“They tell you, they always tell you,” he replied with a courteous smile.
“What do you mean, how can they know?”
“I start by asking, ‘How can I help you today?’ Almost always, the first thing they talk about is your answer. Let them guide you to their problems, their concerns, don’t try to second guess them. What did she tell you today?”
“She can’t work, take care of her kids, and get enough sleep. It’s ‘making her crazy.’ Doesn’t seem like a mental health problem.”
“It is if she says it’s making her crazy. Where did you go next?”
I tried to remember the conversation, thinking I should have taken notes. “Um, I asked about her work, what kind of work she did.” Dr. Theobald frowned almost imperceptibly. “That wasn’t right?”
He smiled again. “Well, it probably would have gotten you there eventually. But I like to reflect back to them what they’ve said, see if they can expand on it, fill it out a bit more.”
“How do you do that?”
“A little trick I use, is just repeat back to them what I hear as their key thought. That’ll trigger a deeper response. In this case, I might ask, ‘It’s making you crazy?’ Recognize, acknowledge what’s hurting, why they came to you for help.”
That year, I finished up my work with Dr. Brazelton at the CDU. Once we’d submitted our paper on regional anesthesia and newborn behavior, and finished the data gathering for early mother-infant reciprocity, Barry had an evening meeting at his home one weekend to discuss the next project.
“I feel confident we’ve shown that even two-week old infants have a built-in understanding of social interaction. They may not be able to talk, but it’s obvious they have feelings about their caregiver, usually their mother. They not only feel and respond, they also attempt to guide and control the relationship. How they move, vocalize, where they look, their facial expressions – all of these seem hard-wired from the very start, meant to capture and retain the attention of other people. Probably because those who don’t have this capacity were selected against. They can’t get any food, water, anything, unless someone else gets it for them.”
Lauren looked around the group, nodded at me, and asserted, “It works both ways, doesn’t it Barry? Mothers must have the same feelings, the same orientation, right from the start. I remember my own babies…labor hurt so much, first the contractions that never seemed to end, then the pushing and pushing and pushing, and stretching – it was so exhausting, after it was over, you’d think all I’d want to do is lie back and sleep.”
“Sleep?” I reflected.
“No, all I wanted was to look at, to hold, to feel them, right from the start. I wanted them to look at me, to smile at me, so I smiled, and laughed, and…” she misted over with the memories. “Sorry…I’m sorry. It’s just so…”
Barry smiled, saying, “No, thank you, Lauren. You gave me an idea where we ought to go next.”
Where we went next was to upend the reciprocity study. We brought in seven more mother-baby pairs to our little curtain-lined dual video tape set-up. Two we saw six times, for longitudinal data. Three we saw twice, and two more only once. Each time, we recorded two 3-minute interactions, separated by 30 seconds. One of those was as before, simply letting the mother and baby interact as they normally would. The other, we asked the mom to sit still, stone-faced, and observed the baby’s actions.
The differences were striking. One of my little essays for an “entrapment” session felt like I was writing a horror movie script:
“…He arches forward, slumps over, tucks his chin down on one shoulder, but he looks up at her face under lowered eyebrows. This position lasts for over a minute, with brief checking looks at the mother occurring almost every 10 seconds. He grimaces briefly and his facial expression becomes more serious, his eyebrows furrowing. Finally, he completely withdraws, his body curled over, his head down, He does not look again at his mother…rocking his head. He looks wary, helpless, and withdrawn. As the mother exits, he looks halfway up in her direction, but his sober facial expression and his curled body position do not change.”
The differences were striking. The infants smiled less, spent less time oriented towards their mothers, looking at them much less often, ending up slumped down in their seats, withdrawn and, I surmised, filled with existential dread.
Barry was more upbeat about the results. “This confirms infants are active participants in their most early relationships. They alter their behavior depending on how they are treated, They understand the rules of social interaction from the time they are born, maybe even before. They don’t yet have words, but they most definitely have a language, one they can speak and understand. They use those ‘words’ to manipulate their environment, specifically their relationships.”
I found myself saying, “It’s not only words, Barry. It’s feelings, too. They have them, express them, and understand them in their mothers, no? Feelings come before words.”
vi
January, 1976
Bruce Springsteen Plays Santa Barbara
“Geez, do I have the tickets!?” Somewhere past Malibu, I realised I’d left them back in our sun room, keeping company with the philodendrons and African violets.
“It’s a good thing you remembered now – it’s a long way back to LA from Robertson Gymnasium”, April reminded me. Her new-found wonder at the Springsteen phenomenon had propelled me into Wherehouse records to buy tickets for the only Southern California show he’d play on his 1975 tour. The night before, he’d been at the Roxy, a hip club down the Strip from the Whiskey-a-Go-Go, singing to invited industry heavies, trying to build on the nationwide buzz generated by the twin Newsweek and Time cover stories on “the future of rock and roll”.
We’d bought the “Born to Run” album on the strength of a Rolling Stone rave and one listen to the title cut. Eleven years earlier, I’d heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, full of florid cymbals, driving harmonies, and chugging guitar beats. It was so new and different, fuller and more vibrant than anything else on the radio. I felt right through my solar plexus exactly why young girls were screaming and fainting all over northern Europe about these guys. Their bushy-haired head wiggles the next week on Ed Sullivan, full of smiles and knowing humor, confirmed the archetypal definition they provided to our generation. “Born to Run” had the same effect on me – and apparently on April as well. She went out the next day and bought his two earlier records, “Asbury Park”, and “E Street Shuffle”.
“Roy Orbison … ‘Only the Lonely’. That song was everything to me. The beach, the music … I don’t know; ‘Thunder Road’ just did something for me.” She was quite inarticulate trying to justify her extravagance.
We listened to Bruce constantly over the next few weeks, lying on the floor in front of the tinny stereo I’d brought from college. No way it could pick up all the power of the bass, or the fullness of the sax, or even help decipher his muddy singing. But the emotional surge and fullness had the same message for me as the Beatles – this guy was singing to me. And I liked what he had to say. Clearly a poet, he sketched a few quick images into an iconic picture of cars and angst and hope for the future, a potent mix for one still mired in the artificial adolescence of medical training.
We devoured the cover where Bruce leaned, smiling, emoting with great joy, Fender guitar slung over his back, leather jacket hung open, ear ring shining above his dark beard, leaning on the giant sax player, openly loving his life.
In the six weeks between the newsmagazine covers and the concert in Santa Barbara, he went from “the next Dylan” to the current big thing – this year’s boy for the rock and roll cognoscenti in Tinsel Town. And we had tickets to his only show for 400 miles. At the Robertson Gym, no less.
“It’s really a little place”, April told me. She’d gone to school at UC Santa Barbara, whose basketball and intramural teams played in Robertson. “It’s more like a high school gym, you know.” No, I didn’t know, but I’d soon find out.
We left Venice three hours ahead of the start time for the show, knowing we might have trouble parking, so going back to get the tickets didn’t faze me too much; we’d still get there before he started. But I had to rev the Dodge Charger 402 cc up to full bore to slam into the parking lot by 8 PM.
We raced up to the door, and entered the foyer. I could feel the energy, the zoom emanating from that room. The gym was packed. Folding chairs filled the basketball court, stretching to the walls along the sidelines. Above the court, a horseshoe balcony provided about five rows of backless seats from which to look down on the stage, set under the far basket. This room was about 100 feet by 60 feet, and jam full of buzzing 20-something’s, all new to this East Coast myth, talking about his “epic three hour shows”. Bruce never had an opening act. He wanted all your energy for his music.
We hiked upstairs, looking for an empty seat, but found nothing. Wedged under the railing along the balcony’s edge, people dangled their feet into thin air, wedged against the legs of those in the front row behind them. Squatters occupied every aisle, a fire marshal’s nightmare.
Back downstairs, we caucused about what to do. Right in front of us, the sound guys sat by a control board, looking like high tech organists about to program Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The equipment and their three chairs rested on a pair of wooden pallets, raised about a foot off the hardwood floor. I asked the nearest sound guy, “Can we sit here on the edge of this?”
“Hey, it’s OK, but don’t get in our way – we gotta get the sound the way the Boss wants it.” Jerking his head toward the stage, his big grin told me who the Boss was. He got nudged by his buddy. They both looked up at the stage, where a scruffy emcee waddled out, watched the lights dim a bit, leaned down to the mike, and announced, “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN — BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE E STREET BAND!!!”
The lights thunked off, a lone figure walked out facing the rear of the stage, while a white spot slammed onto his varnished classic Fender slung over that shiny leather jacket. Hunched over a mike, harmonica up to his mouth, he started to blow the intro to “Thunder Road”. The crowd went nuts. The sound guys pulled their toggles all the way up to ten. The crowd noise hushed into a cobra-tense energy pushing Bruce through the first eight bars of his harmonica solo. April and I had found our song.
By the time Roy Bittan started trilling his piano, everyone was jumping up on their chairs. When Danny Federici hit the organ, we all clapped our hands or stamped our feet. And when Clarence Clemons brought in his alto sax, we screamed, applauded, and generally went berserk. Those of us who could, whistled.
I myself have a very intense, literally ear-splitting whistle. You do not want to sit next to me at a basketball game. I learned the whistle from Peter Horton, who lived behind us when I was reaching puberty. Two years older than me, he was the coolest kid in the world. One of those natural athletes who make the rest of us feel foolish, he had sandy hair, a killer smile, and a knack for making everything look easy. My sister was in love with him; I merely worshipped him. He accepted it all as his due, or maybe he didn’t even notice it. He showed me how to make a loop out of my thumb and forefinger, press their tips against my curled up tongue, purse my lips, and blow like crazy. Moving the tongue back and forth produces pitch alterations sufficient to drive away the meanest junkyard hound.
I perfected my whistle while coaching little kids on a swim team, the summers between my years at college. It was the only thing they could hear while churning underwater. In the summer of ’69, at the apogee of the age of Aquarius, I had charge of the eight-and-unders. The girls were simply awesome. Each one was a little package of dynamite. We had a magical summer, that year. While the Mets marched to the World Series, the hippies marched on Yasgar’s Farm at Woodstock, the Beatles peppered us with Abbey Road, and Richard Nixon began his own long dark march to ultimate paranoid ignominy, my little girls swept over every team which came against us.
Two moments stand out in my memory. First, in late July, they won the Junior Olympics the same day Neil Armstrong took a small step out onto the stony sterile silent moon dust. I cradled the trophy we won all the way home, and learned for the first time about the depression which hits when you’ve reached a pinnacle, celebrated with everyone, and then, as has to happen, you find yourself all alone with no more heights to scale. And second, at our league championship in August, those little girls won every single race. The final event for us was the freestyle relay – four kids each going 25 meters. A grown woman can do this in under a minute; my girls were only ten seconds slower than that. They were so much better than any of the other teams, our last girl finished her leg when the other teams’ third swimmers were still flailing away at the other end of the pool.
As I watched our anchor, Linda Christian, churning up a wave down that final lap, and heard the crowd, and especially our kids’ parents, going nuts in the background (this was being held at our own pool), I felt time stop. I looked up at the light blue evening sky, a hint of Fall’s coolness in the air. The crowd noise faded away, and Linda’s arms moved into a slow motion windmill. I thought of how much they’d worked, every morning, every day. How they’d actually followed instructions, swum all the laps, improved their strokes, finished each race hard, just like I’d said. How I’d guided them, but couldn’t swim for them. How, in fact, I had very little to do with their success, only making the opportunity available to them. I realised, at that one slight scratch in time, I was transcendently happy, living in a Perfect Moment, where athletic endeavor merged into artistic self-expression. The only way I knew how to capture and celebrate such a feeling was to whistle, putting my every fiber into the shrillness from my lungs.
Bruce standing up there, back to the audience, right hip thrust out, left knee and leg pumping up and down, guiding his band into “Thunder Road” – I saw that, and felt another Perfect Moment, one I would like to live in forever but knew I never could. I jumped up on the sound guys’ platform, threw my left arm into the air, and whistled as loud as I could. It was barely a whisper amidst the amps and cheers.
April and I turned towards each other, smiles shared in pure harmonic joy. “Darlin’, you know just what I’m here for. So you’re scared and you’re thinking we ain’t that young anymore.” Raising our chins up high, two hound dogs howling at the moon, we shouted, “Show a little faith! There’s magic in the night…” We’d found our song.
The evening went on like that for three hours more. Towards the end, Bruce launched into “Twist and Shout” by saying “My doctor told me if I played this song one more time, I was gonna have a heart attack! But I don’t care – you guys deserve it!” Some people, like Peter Horton, are simply nice guys loaded with talent, people it’s impossible to hate. They seem to have such fun, and want to share it with you. That’s what everyone saw in Bruce Springsteen, when they went to his show. It was as if he were looking at and singing to each of us, personally. He and Clarence launched into “Twist and Shout”, the Big Man pumping his sax back and forth in front of the speakers, Bruce jumping up on top of an amp, duck walking across the stage, sliding on one knee, falling down exhausted, still playing and singing. Then, he jumps up, and launches into “Rosalita”.
This precipitated a mass rush towards the stage. Everyone on the main floor left their assigned area (no one had been sitting the whole night), and filled the aisles. The bolder balcony dwellers dropped down from the edge onto the main floor. The whole place was a mass of swaying, singing sybarites, arms overhead, clapping, sweating, almost swooning.
After the third encore, half of us started filing out, still buzzing, while the less exhausted remained inside, clapping, stomping, “Bruuuuce”-ing. And back he came, one more time, pounding out some timeless fifties rock and roll instrumental, ’cause he loved it all so much.
Oh, the strength and endless optimism at age twenty-six, of those of us in the natal class of ’49. I don’t remember driving the two hours back to LA. But I do remember trying to explain it all the next morning to my fellow residents while we whiled away the call day on Gyn. They smiled, but they Just. Didn’t. Get It.
vii
By the end of my first clinical year at Beth Israel, I felt I’d mastered the basics of therapy. I no longer dreaded meeting a client for the first time, armed as I was with the tools Dr. Theobald had given me. Whatever self-doubts lay within, on the surface I projected confidence, assurance, and unforced interest. As with every academic challenge I’d faced, I read voluminously, took endless notes in my tiny handwriting, and followed the rules I learned without deviation. I fell asleep dreaming of how to direct someone else’s thoughts and emotions simply by the questions I asked.
“Sarah, you may be the quickest, brightest doctoral student I’ve supervised.” Dr. Theobald paused, smiling. He went on, “You display all the outward signs of caring and concern, the body language, facial expressions, the words…”
I tensed up, knowing he’d found my biggest fear, that it was all a fraud, done by rote. I stammered, “It’s…it’s…so much to remember…I know, I know, it feels like I’m following some rules, not the client’s stories.”
“That’s interesting to hear. What I see, or, more precisely, don’t see, is a spark of real connection. You might as well be exchanging letters with your client, inserting adverbs every now and then to show your feelings.”
I sighed. “I do feel, I feel I want to help them.”
“Hmm…” he said. “You’ve spent the last three years in research labs, studying isolated behavior, narrowing your focus to specific experimental questions. Have you thought about that, research, as your career?”
His words stung me like an electrical shock.
“Look. You’re almost always the smartest, quickest person in any room. But your clients aren’t coming to you for your intelligence; they expect that of you, that’s not what will impress them about you, make you special for them. For them, you’re not a scientist, a researcher. You are first and foremost another person, who shares the trauma and the drama of simply being human. Without that connection, all your knowledge can’t begin to help them.”
I realized at that moment it was helping people, directly, face-to-face, that had drawn me to psychology. I’d always known that, but never seen it defined so starkly before. “I’ve never thought of myself as a dispassionate researcher. I’m always getting emotionally involved with our subjects,” I said.
“You have to make your clients believe that, your deep and complete sincerity, even if it seems artificial to you.”
I frowned and shook my head. “I don’t know what more I can do.”
He looked towards the ceiling, resting his left elbow on the arm of his chair, chin cradled in his hand, index fingers pressed to pursed lips. Finally, he offered, “What I do, is slow things down. Usually, I know what I want to say, to ask, right away. But when I sense the client has broached an emotional whirlpool, I force myself to pause, and name what I’m sensing to myself. Let her know, by that brief silence, that I’m affected by what she said.”
I nodded. I felt my lower lip quiver, in fear and self-recognition.
“Sarah, you have never failed in anything you’ve put your mind to. You already have that capacity for connection within you, bred by every friendship, every one you’ve ever loved. Start there, use those familiar emotional touchstones as your home base, and you won’t fail here.”
A few weeks later, I met with Dr. Klein, ostensibly to review my initial dissertation proposal. I had something else on my mind.
“Julia, how did you know you wanted to work with kids?”
“It came naturally,” she said. “Never really thought about it, I guess. Why, are you having second thoughts about your topic?”
“No, no, it’s not that. It’s…I’ve been thinking, about whether I should go into children’s therapy.”
“You’ve always said how much you love kids, how they filled your heart.”
“Right, my heart, not my head,” I countered. Her raised eyebrows drove me on. “I think…I think I love kids, little kids, even teen-agers, too much to see them when they’re hurting. I don’t know if I could be a child’s therapist. The emotion, dealing with their problems, the damage that can be done, I can’t think clearly with them, about them.”
“Are you saying your want to change your thesis topic, the one we’ve been talking about?”
“No, I want to press on with that, looking at teen-age moms and how they interact with their newborns, their infants. I can handle that, as long as it’s cloaked in research, and I’m not expected to solve their problems. I always want to have kids around me, I know that. But – and maybe this is selfish – I want them to be healthy, I don’t want to be responsible for fixing the world for them. Just be with them, feel their laughter, their promise.”
“That’s good, Sarah, I’m glad to hear that. So you’ll be re-directing yourself to adult therapy?”
“I’m learning the complexities there. Dr. Theobald tells me I don’t seem as involved with adult clients.” That didn’t sound quite right, so I tried again. “What I mean is, I can be clinical with them, my emotions don’t get in the way so much. I’ve just got to learn how to tap into theirs better. Is it the right decision, for me to be an adult therapist?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. What’s important is that you think it’s the right decision. You’re the only one who can, who should, say what’s right for you.”
viii
November, 1977
THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE
From the glassy waters of the bay, Jandee’s looked like a turquoise mirage. With no wind, the smog filtered west over the beach out to the ocean, and the heat waves curling up from the sand threatened to hide the place altogether.
Bobbing aimlessly on the Hobie Cat, April and I looked up from our seasick torpor as we drifted by the pizza place at the end of Wavecrest. Set amidst the tan and brown stucco of the neighboring buildings, Jandee’s blue-green vibrance seemed not so much out-of-place, as ruling the place. The waters of the bay, though flat, had just enough swell, and the Hobie Cat little enough ballast, to set the inner workings of my stomach on a search and destroy mission into the upper reaches of my esophagus.
It was all I could do to raise my head; seeing Jandee’s, I mumbled out my hallucination: “Look at Jandee’s. That’s the Center of the Universe. We gotta get back there.” With that, I threw up over the side, and waited for a breeze which never came.
We’d bought the catamaran with Rick, used, a year or two ago. When he left, we had to buy him out, and that meant we had to go sailing twice as much to make it seem worth the $1500 we spent. Cats get moored at the far end of a slip, all the way against the concrete walls enclosing the marina. Easily maneuvered, they’re the only vessels capable of making the sharp turn into that tight space. Sort of like the VW beetles of the sailing world. Actually, a Hobie Cat is more like a Fiat Spyder – small and swift, and finicky. With no keel, and large sails, you could actually tip over the buggers, which we’ve done several times in the middle of the main Marina Del Rey channel. The instruction manual said, quite authoritatively, that, with a total weight of 350 pounds, the craft “is easily righted by turning it cross-wise with the mast pointing into the wind.” Then the two sailors pull down on ropes tied to the pontoon rising out of the water. In theory, once the mast rises out of the water, the sail will catch a breeze, and drop the upper pontoon back down flat. It never worked that way for us. Either we couldn’t pull the boat down at all, or we pulled too hard, and flipped the mast back down the other way on top of us. Two or three such efforts usually exhausted us, and we would have to call on a friendly passing power boat captain (there’s always one churning up or down the channel, day or night) to gently tip the mast up towards us.
Once upright, the Hobie has no peer among the sailing craft here in the world’s largest small boat harbor. Once past the jetty, and into the usually reliable afternoon southwesterly onshore wind breezing across Santa Monica Bay, the main and the jib can vault us up over 25 knots with ease. Flying parallel to shore (we never want to lose sight of land, as we have no clue how to tell distance, direction, or speed), we’ve gotten to know the landmarks from Hermosa Beach to Malibu very, very well. Chief among them, from our point of view, is Jandee’s, the turquoise painted pizza house at the end of our “street”, Wavecrest.
Though blessed with street signs, and even stop signs at the intersections with Speedway, the “streets” of Venice west of Pacific Ave are actually pedestrian-only walkways, two sidewalks wide. At the end of Wavecrest, Nick the Greek has his corner store, selling daily papers, Thunderbird wine, and condiments to the locals, and apartments in the three stories above to the affluhip. Across a wide asphalt turn around, Jandee bakes his pizzas and provides a landmark bright as any light house. In the evenings, walking down to the beach, we stop by Jandee’s, and pick up our first whiff of the sandy salty ocean air. The asphalt we stand on has been patched many times in the past eight decades. The police installed squat metal posts to prevent cars from entering Ocean Front Walk via Speedway. They pulled one out some time back to allow emergency access, and the hole has been haphazardly filled over. The blacktop keeps spilling into the void, making a ragged entrance into whatever lies below.
On one particularly dreamy night, we never quite made it down to the water for our nightly walk along the sand. As a matter of fact, we became becalmed right there by Jandee’s, April watching the Venice street life parading in front of us, and me barely conscious, wondering why there was a hole in the middle of the street.
“Here it is!” I mumbled ecstatically. My eyes got wide, and I felt a little dizzy as I peered into the post hole by my feet.
“It’s always here, every night,” April replied. “They come down here every night. Did you ever wonder why they come here, why they walk along the beach every night? Look at them! I wish I had my camera.”
I paused for thought, trying to connect what I saw below me with what she was saying. I knew she was trying to tell me something, but the epiphany clouding my brain only intermittently let in random, disjointed snatches of consciousness. So I let my mouth do the talking. “Well of course they’re here. This is the Center of the Universe, isn’t it? They feel the power, even if they don’t know it’s here. We’re so lucky, to live so close to the epicenter.”
“What are you talking about!?”
“Right here!” I pointed down. “This is it; that spot, that hole, right there … that’s it, that’s the Center of the Universe.”
April laughed, like she was humoring a drunk. “Really? Why?”
I didn’t know. “Can’t you feel it? This is the place we always come to, where we feel most … I don’t know… connected!”
“Huh?”
“Look.” I suddenly felt lucid. “Right here, this place, this spot, can’t you feel it? It’s the place we see from the water, when we’re on the Hobie Cat. This is how we know where home is, when we see Jandee’s. It’s so … purple! Remember, when we look to shore, we always say, ‘There’s Jandee’s’. It’s home! This is where we live!”
“Yeah?” April’s question asked for more explanation. She thought I was nuts, I could tell.
I didn’t know what to say – I couldn’t even think it. But looking back, I know what I felt. We’d become a pair, and built all the things that make a couple’s life. We have jobs, we have a house, we have dogs, we have friends, but most of all, we have a place and a present history. Venice is where we’d become us, and this hole in the street felt like the vortex center, a whirling black hole yanking us into the street life along the Boardwalk, into the surf life along the littoral. Like strings on a Maypole, the pieces of our lives – of our life – play out around the ground surrounding Jandee’s, at the end of Wavecrest.
Out on the Hobie Cat, I felt a little better. We were still becalmed, but, by looking straight at Jandee’s, I found I could overcome the wretched feeling of nothingness which is the hell of mal de mer. I started to sing. “City girls just seem to find out early,/ How to open doors with just a smile/ A rich old man, and she won’t have to worry/ She’ll dress up all in lace, and go in style”. By the time we got to the chorus, April had gotten over her laughter at my totally tone deaf singing voice, and came in with harmony to make Emmylou Harris jealous.
“You can’t hiiiide your lyin’ eyes/ And your smiiiile is a thin disguise/ I thought by now you’d realize/ There ain’t no way to hide your lyin’ eyes”. Our voices, at least to my untuned ear, made a perfect fit for the Henley/Frey song. April, from up on the hill north of Sunset, had always been my little rich girl. But she’d never had lying eyes; I only saw the truth in her. The breeze picked up a bit, just enough to take the edge off the swell, but not enough to take us home. Yet.
“What should we sing next?” I asked.
“Remember Meat Loaf? Remember when we saw him at the Civic?” April looked dreamy, leaning back against the pontoon, legs resting on the stretched mesh platform which served as our deck.
“Oh, that guy was something else. But I can’t sing like him.”
“You can’t sing like the Eagles, either, but that didn’t stop you.”
“I know. We sound pretty good together, I think.”
“Yeah, we do. But remember Meat Loaf? Remember what he did at the end of the show? His a cappella?”
“Oh, yeah! That!”
Meat, of course, is a very big guy, with a very big hit record – “Bat Out of Hell’. The critics hated it, but for some reason, the thing sold 9,000,000 copies. Jim Steinman had written anthems of unrequited teen-age lust, sort of Beach Boys meet Phil Spector, as penned by Bruce Springsteen. Funny, poetic, and loud. And only Meat Loaf, all 300 pounds of him, was up to the challenge of bringing it across with the right amount of vocal power, seriousness of purpose, and just a hint of humor. That night, we watched his theatrical renditions of songs like “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, complete with lascivious tongue kissing and hip thrusting while Phil Rizzuto’s play-by-play staccato’d in the background. For his encore, he came out and did one of his slow-dance numbers, “Heaven Can Wait”. For this piece, he was all alone – no bass, drums, piano, organ or guitar behind him. He started singing quietly, like some Texas-sized tenor trying to win a Tuscan love. He crescendo’d toward the song’s final verse, and then, as if disgusted with the artificial qualities it transmitted, he flung the microphone down on the stage, and finished the number not only a cappella, but sans any amplification whatsoever.
We were near the back of the 3,600 seat Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and we didn’t miss a note. The big guy went deep inside himself, found his center, and sang it back at us, warbling on about never letting the angels slip away. When he finished, bowing with his long hair scraping the light sconce at the front of the proscenium, the whole audience sat stunned for a minute – awed silence seemed the best response to his performance. Then, applause, whistles, and chants of “Meat!Meat!Meat”. We wandered out into the night, and down to the beach for the walk home after the show.
The moon was rising early that night, coming towards full a few days later. Silvered wavelets barely rose above the bay, calm with the evening’s coolness. Distinctly quiet between each break, the waters sounded less like an LA freeway at full bore, and more like some hidden cove on the Sea of Cortez. We could almost imagine ourselves alone under the South California sky. To our left, the moonlight bounced off the buildings along Ocean Front. The bums were gone, even the drunk guys’ gazebo was vacant. The low-slung Venice skyline stood silhouetted against the LA lights from farther inland. Jandee’s turquoise beacon caught the fragrance from the moon, and called us home.
ix
“Have you polished up those hypotheses for us?” Dr. Klein asked. “We’ve got to start selecting the girls for subjects soon.”
Julia had been pushing me for the better part of a year to finish up the background reading and research I needed for my thesis. Books like On Adolescence: A psychoanalytic Interpretation; Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman; Maternal Emotions; and Unmarried Mothers. Articles with titles like “The real world of the teen-age Negro mother”, “The ego in adolescence”, and “The second individuation process of adolescence”. Correspondence with other doctoral students who were doing similar research, such as “The Human Newborn and His Mother”, “Infant Rearing Myths of Adolescent Mothers”. My cubby-hole office in the psych library at B.U. was beginning to overflow like a proper academic’s, papers piled on every horizontal surface, books, filled with torn slips marking key pages, stacked haphazardly, and steno pads filled with thoughts, asides, plans for organization. Dr. Klein and I had met twice a month for several years, and I finally had a vision for what I wanted to study, and what form it would take.
I recited from memory the five questions I hoped to answer. “First, ‘Adolescents who are more separate from their families adjust more easily to motherhood’. Second, ‘Those with firmer feminine identities adjust more easily to motherhood’. ‘Stronger relationships with babies’ fathers and peers correlates with easier adjustment to motherhood.’ Then there’s the Freudian one we’re slipping in, ‘Those with greater ego strength adapt to motherhood better’. And, finally, “Infants whose behavior is less worrisome will have more satisfactory interactions with the mothers’.” I breathed deeply, proud that I had honed my inchoate feelings about a teen-age mother’s relationship to her infant into five hypotheses amenable to study and analysis.
“That fourth one, Sarah, how do you define ‘ego strength’?”
“That’s by accommodation to pregnancy.”
“Meaning?”
“We’ll use the Newborn Projective test that Heidi designed a few years ago in Barry’s lab at the CDU.”
Julia nodded. “All right, sounds like you’re ready to start recruiting at the teen clinics over at Women’s and Beth Israel!”
Every week from June through September, I spent an hour at each hospital, interviewing young mothers about 28 weeks into her first pregnancy. By the time I met with my 30th subject, I had the questions memorized. I was able to look into Doreen’s tired eyes, and smile warmly as she rubbed the top of her belly.
“Hello, Doreen. I’m Sarah Stein. I’m doing research on teen-age mothers, trying to find out how they feel about and take care of their babies. Thanks for agreeing to help me with our study. Did they explain a little bit about what we’re going to do?”
“Yeah, you wanna know about me and my baby, how we get along after she’s born?”
“Right. I’m going to ask you some questions. If you feel uncomfortable at any time, you don’t want to answer, or don’t want to continue, just let me know. We’re not going to do anything except talk. Then after the baby’s born, I’ll do a little exam in the hospital before you leave, then meet you again six weeks later. OK?”
She nodded impersonally. “Awright. Let’s go.”
Doreen was Black, nearly 17, living with her mother who worked as a nurse’s aide at Brigham and Women’s. She’d known the baby’s father since the start of her sophomore year. He didn’t come to the clinic visit, but she said they were ‘still together’, and he planned to ‘stay around’ after the baby was born, even though they both thought she was too young to get married. Her friends thought the pregnancy was ‘cool’, and a couple of them had babies of their own.
I gave her ten pictures to look at, babies smiling, sleeping, scowling, crying, and asked for her reaction to each. Then, we talked about three more pictures. The first showed a woman holding a book, in front of a farm where a man and woman accompanied a horse plowing the field. The second showed a woman looking through a door she’s just opened into a room, where flowers sat on a small table. The last featured a woman reading to a girl holding a doll in her lap. I asked Doreen to tell a story about what led up to the picture, what was happening in it, what the people are feeling and thinking, and how the story ends. Julia and I had designed this part of the interview to give us some idea about my second hypothesis, the effect of a teen-ager’s sense of feminine identity on her interactions with her newborn. Early on in the process, I began to regret that these pictures were wildly inappropriate for my study subjects, all the characters being white, and located in environments foreign to these inner city girls. But Julia wouldn’t let me change after we’d started.
Once I’d finished with Doreen, I went to the hospital for a postpartum interview with another new mom, followed by my favorite part of the study, examining the baby. I floated back to my days in Barry’s lab and all those infants I’d played with under the guise of gathering data for our reciprocity study.
Julia, who accompanied me on several of these visits, observed one day, “Now I see why you wanted to do this study.” She winked both eyes, then said, “I guess it’s OK to like them – the babies, I mean. You don’t want to influence your subject moms with your emotions, but the babies – go ahead, enjoy them.”
Two days after her delivery, I found Doreen’s room. She looked up from the wrinkled little baby cradled in her arms, saying dreamily, “Oh, hi, Missus…uh?”
“Stein – I’m Sarah, remember me?”
“Yeah, you’re the lady who showed me those funny pictures.”
I smiled, looking down at the tiny bundle in her arms. A thin pink cotton cap partly covered curly black hair. “She is … lovely, Doreen. Does she have a name yet?”
“Shalice, that’s what I call her,” she said without looking up.
“I think she’ll love that.” I wondered, “Is it after someone?”
Doreen looked up, beaming. “No. I made it up all myself. It means ‘Precious’ ‘cause that’s what she is. So precious.” Shalice cooed at her mother’s voice.
“Can I touch her?”
“Here, you can hold her, Miss,” Doreen said, handing me the swaddled infant.
My chest tightened as I carefully wrapped both arms around her tiny body. I used the opportunity to start the newborn exam, testing her Moro reflex. “OK if I do a little check on her here?” I asked as I laid her gently, slowly down into the rolling bassinet. I felt the room go distant as I carefully unwrapped the blanket, covered with ducklings endlessly following their mother. I marveled at her sudden startle when the cool air hit her skin. Only Shalice and I were left, her so helpless and I in awe at her miniature fingernails, her long thick lashes, her squinting dark brown eyes. As I’d felt so many times before, being in the presence of a baby, still curled from her journey in the womb, I wondered if this was what a mother does, forget everything else except her own, her precious child.
Wrapping her up after I’d finished, I discovered Doreen had slipped into the bathroom. This meant I could hold Shalice a few minutes more. I thought, this, this makes all those books, all those papers, all those crumpled outlines, all that planning, everything I’d done to get ready – this is what I really wanted.
“She’s pretty, ain’t she, Miss?” Doreen asked as she eased herself back into bed, careful not to sit down too hard.
“She is…she is. So pretty,” I said quietly.
“Pardon?” Doreen said.
“Sorry. Here. Such a lovely, lovely baby. You are so lucky. Don’t forget, I’ll be coming to see you two, again, at home next month.”