The Home I Know: Heredity
Chapter 5
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Often on the weekends, my family and I visited my dad’s parents, Pops and Joan, at their home in Escondido that sat on the edge of a country club. As the sun began to set over the now-closed golf course that doubled as my grandparents’ backyard, my cousins, siblings, and I played on the green. When the nighttime sprinklers turned on, we ran through them wildly in our clothes and bathing suits. Usually, Pops just watched. Then, one day he stood up, suddenly appearing into the mist like the peak of a mountain, placed his hands on my hips, picked me up, and flipped me in the air, then gently set me back down on the ground.
“Again, Pops, again!” I cried, craving more of his attention.
~ ~ ~
Many of the members of my extended family lived within an hour or so driving distance from Newport Beach: some to the South, others to the East, the North, and the Northeast. Often both sides of my family gathered together at my house on Bunya St. because it was big enough to accommodate everybody with its open backyard. Together, we could all watch the fireworks from Disneyland glitter the sky nearly every summer night. Otherwise, we spent time at our families’ houses as well, mostly with Jay and Magdalene — my mother’s parents, in Huntington Beach — or Pops and Joan, who lived just North of San Diego.
Jay’s father and mother raised him at the base of the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia in a one room house with their 11 other children. His father was a coal miner in the same place that Mother Mary Jones came around the mountain to inspire the miners to unionize so together they could improve their lives. During the Second World War, the military drafted Jay into the military, where he served as an Air Traffic Controller. He met my grandmother, Magdalene, who was raised in Spokane, WA. They married and had four children including my mother, Elaine.
Together the military family lived around the world: from Japan, to the Philippines, to Germany. Once Grandpa Jay retired from the Air Force, he moved to Huntington Beach into a one-story, four bedroom house and worked as a mailman to provide for his family. Quickly, he became a respected member of his community, as he walked around town in his blue collared shirt, navy shorts, and high socks to deliver letters and packages to his neighbors.
“What’s cookin’ good lookin’?” Jay greeted me as soon as I walked into his house.
“Chicken, you wanna neck?” I replied, knowing the response he expected.
“You knows, I sent money back to my family in West Virginia, Annie?” He began. “And with it, they were able to build a house. They calls it, ‘The house that Jay built.’ Ain’t that neat?”
Grandpa Jay drove miles to find the cheapest gas station in the city and walked around while shaking the change in his pockets incessantly. A ham radio rested in his garage. So whenever we visited, he took me there, closed the door, sat me on his lap, and flipped the switch. Then together we explored the channels and listened. When we spent the night at Jay’s house, we ate microwavable TV dinners. Then the next morning Grandma Magdalene prepared us pancakes fried in Crisco oil, and grapefruits that she cut in half then microwaved with just a bit of brown sugar. When Jay came to our house, he brought with him recorded television shows on VHS, so we could watch cable channels like Nickelodeon that we didn’t have at home.
My father’s father, Pops or Timothy Sr., was born in Omaha, NB, to a wealthy family. Apparently, at some point his family lost everything, but the reason why was never explained to me. The military also drafted Pops during World War II, but as a Civil Engineer. When he returned back to civilian life, he met Joan. They married and had five children, whom they raised near Denver, CO. Eventually, they moved to Escondido, CA into a one-story, three bedroom house on the golf course, which my family and me frequented.
At night after dinner was done, Pops — who was pale, bald, six feet four inches tall, and looked an awful lot like Colonel Sanders from KFC — leaned against a stool, while we — his children and grandchildren — all sat at his feet. He shared stories. One of his favorites was when the military assigned him to guard the water tower. He sat atop the structure with a gun over his shoulder. Two large lights pointed to the field, so that if the enemy were to come, he could see them. Instead, he pointed the lights toward him, believing wholeheartedly that if his enemy cast their eyes in his direction they would run. Every time he entered a room he proclaimed:
“Shout from the rooftops, ring the bells from the steeple, because I’m back again you lucky people!”
But as big and boisterous as Pops could be, he also often sat back with a certain stillness and observed his family closely and curiously. When my body began to change its shape in my tweens, my other female cousins and I sat in a circle and talked about our developing bodies and boys. They shared stories of their boyfriends, of their first kisses, and of the hands that stroked their bras and breasts, while I listened in longingly and lonely, craving that same male affection. Pops noticed me. He called me over to his huge lap, asked me to sit, and drew me into his barrel of a chest.
“Annie,” he began. “I know you’re lonely now, but just wait until it’s time to get married. The boys will be waiting in a line out the door for you.”
As I grew older, my mother began to share with me the inconsistencies of my family‘s histories. Her mother, Magdalene, beat her incessantly. The wedding ring on my grandmother’s left hand caused boils to erupt on my mother’s skin. My grandfather Jay remained passive when he was around. Otherwise, he shared his insatiable sexual desires in constant conversation around children. He groped female-appearing mannequins in window fronts out in public. Grandma Magdalene’s step-father was hard of hearing. At dinner at a restaurant, he would loudly comment on women’s bodies.
“That one’s got a fat ass!” He screamed while pointing. We’d all laugh.
When my mother began breast feeding her baby covered under a blanket, one man in the family said, “I know what he’s doing under there.” While another relative complained of my cousin’s little girl, under the age of three, running around the pool deck naked.
“She should be clothed!” He screamed.
“Why? She’s just a child.” I asked.
“A vagina’s a vagina, Annie.”
My father used to hide in the closet of his bedroom to avoid the beatings by his father, Pops. While his mother, Joan, believed my father could do no wrong and defended him tirelessly. Once, he killed the neighbor’s cat because he was annoyed. When accused, Joan screamed:
“My Timothy would never do that!”
Secrets began to surface about early marriages to get out of abusive homes, then divorces. Stories of drugs and alcohol abuse, of accidental pregnancies and shotgun weddings, of affairs and abortions, of estranged half-relatives conceived when my family members were teens. By the time I was 15, I could talk to anyone about the sexual frustrations of Joan with Pops, and Jay with Magdalene. The scheduled sex of relatives’ routines. The later divorces due to infidelities. Apparently, the couples in my family didn’t follow the rules of the church as closely as their accounts originally suggested. Instead, my family, like all families, was flawed…just secretly.
My parents met and married in their late twenties and started having babies almost immediately. First there was Timmy, who had enough energy to attract and distract all of the adults in his company. He grew to be tall and handsome, athletic and angry. I arrived just 18 months later with my surgery and seizures and something to prove. I wanted (and still do) to be a little bit of everything. Josiah came 18 months after me a bit blue with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. He grew up to be brilliantly creative and slap-your-knee kind of funny. My parents thought they were done, until another baby surprised us all five years later. My mother and I, outnumbered by penises, wished for a girl. So when Patrick arrived and added to our testosterone-filled house, I sweetly said:
“But he sure is a cute baby brother, mommy.”
My siblings and I all helped raise him, but he bonded to me uniquely as a second mother. Up until I moved out of the house at 18, he slept in my bed with me nearly every night. Afraid I would leave, he held my face with his hands and placed his mouth so close to mine that I could feel the warmth of his breath on my skin. It made him feel safe and me, suffocated. So together we would lay like that until he fell asleep, then I would ever-so-slowly distance myself so I could breathe.
~ ~ ~
As soon as I was old enough and allowed to do so, I walked to the garage, jumped on my bike, and peddled away from home. The wind whipped through my hair as I flew down Bunya St., then rounded Bamboo and Bixia, then Eastbluff. I sped along the Back Bay all the way to Jamboree until I arrived at the sea. A friend of mine lived in a cliff-side house overlooking the crescent shoreline of Corona Del Mar. We’d meet in the alley behind his house. My bike stayed in the garage, while he and I walked to the shoreline.
The waves gently tickled our feet, while our footprints pressed into the wet sand and we talked about everything. When the beach ended, we kicked off our flip flops, set them by the cement steps, then climbed the jagged, black, stacked rocks that stretched into the water forming a boundary between the harbor and the beach. The waves crashed against the jetty, white wash splashing into the air, forcing us to choose our path carefully so we didn’t get drenched.
My friend reached for my hand and pulled me closer to his body, as our skin felt the slippery and scratchy surfaces of the moss and barnacle-studded boulders. We jumped stone to stone until we got to the end of the jetty, where we found two flat rocks that formed a seat. We sat down, cuddled into each other’s arms and rested. Eventually, our lips met. We kissed mostly privately for a long time, only stopping when a boat passed us by. And so, I fell in love for the first time by the seaside.
At dinner, I announced to my family the good news: “I have a boyfriend.” They knew him as the friend who came to the front door with flowers, who wrote a love poem about me and read it in English class, who walked with me platonically on the beach for almost two years before I was ready to be his girlfriend.
“I would rather you date one of those jerk jocks on the water polo team,” my father said. “I don’t understand these good guys, Annie. All guys are supposed to be like me.”
My father tried to keep us from dating by saying I couldn’t have a boyfriend until I was 16, but when I turned 16, he changed the rule again. Either way, my boyfriend and I stayed together against my father’s wishes. Of course, we weren’t allowed to spend time one-on-one, so instead we snuck into empty parks, or jumped into the back of his car, or pretended to meet up to do homework with a group of friends, and instead explored each other’s bodies.
“We can do everything, but…” I said. He knew I was saving my virginity until marriage.
I envisioned our future together. The day we would celebrate our shared sacrament: Marriage. He in the pressed tuxedo and me in the white ball gown. The moment God the Father, through the priest’s hands, would bless us as beloveds witnessed by all those who loved us. We would celebrate our nuptials by the sea, I would take his last name, and when evening finally came after a great party, I would hand him a small box with my ATM (Abstinence ‘Till Marriage) card and give him my virginity. Soon after, babies would join our family, and we would buy a perfect home in our already perfect neighborhoods down the street from our families. But a few years later, everything suddenly changed.
“Why are you crying?” My brother, Patrick, asked sweetly while laying next to me before bed.
“My boyfriend and I broke up,” I replied with a mouthful of salty tears.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Annie,” he hugged me close then fell asleep.
Most mornings, I couldn’t get out of bed, but I had no choice. So I dragged myself from my room to the shower, from my car to the classroom, from my school to the pool, on repeat over and over again. Now the captain of the swim and water polo teams, as well as a lead in a school play, while also completing course work and applying for colleges, I struggled to manage my many responsibilities. Most days, I left the house without makeup, my hair pulled back with a tight headband revealing my high and freckled forehead, dressed in my wrinkled uniform looking like crap.
“It’s like you don’t even want to be pretty,” my mother began to scold me. “You should be using your beauty to attract people to Christ, Annie.”
Ashamed and alone, I biked to the seaside and walked along the shoreline, begging the ocean to hold the weight of my grief. Without my first and I hoped-would-be-my-last love, my identity and all my dreams crumbled at my feet. Within the vacancy of my heart, I turned to God the Father in prayer, while my father celebrated that his only daughter was once again free from the hands of a young man. Frankly, he didn’t like me getting too close to girls either, as he felt threatened by any form of intimacy.
“This is no big deal, Annie. There are plenty of other fish in the sea,” he attempted to console me. “Besides you’re only seventeen, you don’t even know what love is. I didn’t know anything about real love until I was at least forty.”
“What is real love, dad?” I questioned cautiously.
“To love is to sacrifice, Annie,” he replied. “To suffer.”
High school graduation approached. A year before, my older brother Timmy celebrated his own commencement. He sat in a dining chair with a big tall back and looked like a King while friends and family complimented him, condoned him, coddled him. All year, I looked forward to hearing my community’s reflections of me. Then, when my time finally came to graduate a year later, I sat there in that same big chair, ready to receive the love of my community. Instead, they roasted me. Shame crept into my body, as I tried to disappear, then the party continued. A male nanny from childhood approached me.
“Well aren’t you just the ugly duckling who’s become the beautiful swan?” He stood a touch too close for my comfort. And then another dad from the neighborhood addressed me. “What does your name tag say, Annie?” As he ran his hand over the sticker that stuck to the outside of my breast, right to left.
I couldn’t help but wonder, Are these men hitting on me?
I prepared to attend Loyola Marymount University as an undecided major and a team member of the Division I water polo team. While most of my friends expressed fear when leaving the place we all grew up, I felt surprisingly at ease as I left the only home I had ever known at 18.
Wow! Thank you, Jo! I really get a picture of your family dynamics, although I know more will be revealed.