The Home I Know: Progeny
Chapter 3
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Often after a meal of messy spaghetti, my parents dragged our tomato-sauce-splattered bodies to the pool at the local tennis club. My father threw my brothers and me into the deep end, while screaming:
“Sink or swim!”
In a panic, we doggy paddled to the shallow side where my father jumped in and invited us all to cling to him. Then he spun rapidly like a washing machine — back and forth, back and forth — making the peaceful water into whitewashed chaos, requiring an exhausting amount of effort as we flailed and failed to keep hold of him. The last kid to hang on won, while the rest of us made our way to the wall to take a breath and a break, feeling defeated. It was just a game.
~ ~ ~
As a child, I ached to learn how to read the words I saw printed on pages and stuffed between bindings stored on the few bookshelves around the house. But my parents kept me from learning how until my older brother became confident in the skill. When I could finally see the letters as sounds, and the sounds as words, and the words as sentences, and the sentences as stories, learning became my highest priority.
Naturally, my father had other plans for me. Once I sat at the kitchen table for hours, while my mind focused so intensely on school work that I lost track of time. My father burst into the kitchen, pulled the chair out from the table, pushed the books aside, picked me up, threw me over his shoulder, and put me down on the lawn outside.
“Play!” He demanded.
But my dreams still called to me through stories. One book especially captivated me: The Giver, by Lois Lowry. In this chronicle, Jonas’s world had been in such perfect order that it had no color and no conflict, no feelings and no memories of the world before. But his life began to change when he noticed the side of an apple shine red, when he felt attracted to his childhood friend, when he realized that maybe the world that was built for him didn’t actually make a lot of sense. His community recognized his captivation with these questions and his premonition towards the importance of the fullness of the human experience. So they introduced Jonas to the Giver, the man in charge of holding the community’s memories. Slowly, the Giver gives Jonas back the history of humanity, then he sets himself free.
Somehow, my little world felt similarly. Newport flirted with perfection in a way that only other cities that attract the rich and famous do. The season was singular: endless summer. Perfectly manicured lawns nestled against coordinated homes with glowing sidewalks and evergreen pavement. Outdoor malls glistened with storefronts and restaurant patios that sported the sprinkling view of sunlight reflected upon ocean water. People vacationed here, but for my family and me, my neighbors and friends, it was just our everyday reality.
Growing up in a place polluted with perfection meant those living there had to gleam just as exquisitely. My neighbors were to act consistently happy, suppressing any internal complexities, while flaunting what looked good externally. White, wealthy culture reigned supreme in this city where men made millions, while women clung to their arms to be flaunted like trophies. Authentic Louis Vuitton bags decorated women’s shoulders, expensive Tiffany’s diamonds adorned their necks, while inauthentic, even more expensive bulging breasts sat on their augmented chests. Girls and boys got nose and boob jobs for their sixteenth birthdays.
Attending Church on Sundays felt like a spiritual ritual combined with the neighborhood’s weekly fashion show, as congregants walked the aisle turned catwalk in their newest and truest designer styles. Eastbluff tried to keep up with the wealth of our neighbors in the coastal mansions, but failed. So, due to the proximity of the parish, our side of town earned the term, “The Catholic Ghetto.”
“There’s no love in poor homes,” my father once spouted while reading the morning paper.
He had chosen Newport Beach as the place to raise his family. As a teenager, he sold Kirby vacuums door-to-door, finetuning his sales skills. Then after a brief time in college, he dropped out, hopped trains to concerts like Woodstock, then eventually moved to New York City to work as a trader on Wall Street. From there, he became a Venture Capitalist and an entrepreneur. The glitz and glam of Newport Beach’s new-money culture appealed to him as a young professional, so he transferred his life to the Southern California coastline where he started dating.
“I wanted a blonde, big-breasted USC girl,” my father told me. “I settled for your mother based on the advice of a church parishioner: ‘She’s such a good person, she’ll make a great partner and an even better mother.’”
He laughed when he admitted the instances of lying to women so he could sleep with them, totaling his first car because he was checking a woman out in hot shorts, dragging a woman he had been engaged to down the street with another car. Frequently, my father groped my mother in front of my three brothers and me.
“Tim, not in front of the children!” She’d scream.
When we made my father angry, he called us into my parents’ walk-in closet. Before we went, we all ran together to the accused’s bedroom and helped them pull on as many pairs of pants as possible. Then, one of my brothers or I would walk hesitantly across the hallway, through my parents’ bedroom and attached bath, and into the closet, where our father awaited us.
“Pick a belt!” He yelled angrily.
I could always count on my father for one thing: to use his big hands to untangle the chains of my necklaces. I never had the patience to do it myself. For whatever reason this simple task set his being to rest and he was always happy to help. So, whenever I pulled a necklace out of my jewelry box tangled from the disorganization that reflected my entire life, I called to him. He came to me, sat down, and slowly fixed the chain. It seemed to settle him. For as long as it took, he worked to untangle the unintentional mess between the metal of my necklace and its place around my neck.
My mother, on the other hand, involved herself in the day to day lives of her four children sometimes with help from nannies. From making us lunches with a lipstick kiss on the brown paper bags to volunteering in our classrooms, keeping score at our sports games to creating church activities to suit the needs of our ages, my mother’s presence was a constant for me.
Elaine played the saint of the family and the community. To me, she was a natural beauty. Usually kind and calm, always well dressed, simple and elegant, she kept my father’s boisterous personality and the superficiality of Newport in check. While my dad dreamed of bigger houses and luxury vehicles, Rolex watches and vacation homes, my mother cut coupons for groceries at the kitchen table. She tried her best to resist the materialistic pressures of our neighborhood.
Often after school, I ran up to my mom’s room and laid on her bed while she played digital Solitaire, or I sat on the steps of the jacuzzi bath in her bathroom to discuss the day. Often, I needed advice on how to manage the next social issue between my classmates and me.
“Mom, this boy in class is being really mean,” I began. “What should I do?”
“Kill him with kindness, Annie,” she advised.
In high school, the circles of my life expanded beyond the familiarity of Bunya St. I now drove the 30-minute stretch from home to school early every weekday morning, then 20-minutes to the pool for water polo practice, then 20-minutes home for dinner, then 20-minutes to Huntington Beach for water polo club practice, then 20-minutes home once more for homework. On the weekends, my team and I traveled to play games against other schools in the county and the state.
Once we had a tournament nearby our house with early games beginning the next day. so my parents invited all twenty girls over to Bunya St. to stay the night. We worked hard, played hard, and ate a lot. My father knew this about us, so drove to the Kentucky Fried Chicken nearby right before they closed.
“I’m sorry sir, can you repeat that? What would you like?” The cashier asked him.
“I want ALL of your chicken,” he said again.
Boxes and boxes of fried chicken arrived to the girls gathered with sleeping bags in the den, furniture pushed up against the walls so that we could all fit. Like my father had anticipated, we ate every single bit of it. The oil from the fryer dripped off of our fingers, which we cleansed with our tongues, and the smack of our lips. We slept the best we could all cuddled on the ground with various heads of taxidermied animals staring us down from the walls: the bounty of my parents’ African safari years before.
As my father’s wealth grew, so did the expense of our family activities. He and I frequently strapped boots on our feet, clicked into skis, and headed to the peaks to go skiing. Most often it was Whistler, CA, where my father had bought a two-bedroom condo for my family to spend the holidays. On our way up to the mountaintop, he took up more space than the metal chair that hung from the ski lift offered us, bragging:
“You know Annie, I never fall! You watch all these men my age wipe out time and time again, while my legs have stayed strong. I still ski just like I did when I was young, racing down the Rocky Mountains in Colorado as fast as I could! I nearly made the Olympics, you know?”
“Oh, I know dad,” I said in a tone that suggested I was once impressed but now annoyed by the repetition of this tall tale.
When we arrived at the top of the mountain, my father pushed off the chair first and I followed. Then suddenly, he fell deep into a ditch covered with lightly packed powder. Both of his skis popped off immediately, while his poles dug into the depths, and his face planted right into the snow.
“You never fall, huh dad?!” I chortled between belly aching laughs.
“Consider me humbled,” he replied as he pulled himself up, gazing to his right and left to check out who had witnessed his fall. “Owie, owie, owie, owie!” He shook the snow off of his clothes, wrapped his poles around his wrists, beat his boots with those large sticks to clear them of packed powder, and clicked back into his skis.
“Okay, follow me!” he continued, as he pushed himself forward sliding across the slick surface passing below our feet.
He led me like usual to a slope too steep for my skill set. At 6’3” tall with legs like trees, Timothy Jr. grounded into the snow easily and bounced back up shifting quickly down the hillside, while my light frame barely broke the surface. Terror flooded me as familiar jitters crept up from their deep hiding place within my body.
“Take your brain out and leave it on the couch!” My dad yelled from the bottom of the powdered slope, now tracked with the shape of his skis in graceful curves, while I feared I might freeze to death.
“Come on, girly, bloom where you’re planted!” I stayed stuck at the top of the mountain.
“There’s only one way down, Annie!” He called up to me sympathetically.
~ ~ ~
As high school graduation neared, my father made it very clear that he wanted me to get into one of the top four water polo schools in California or an Ivy League. Then he could wear one of those “Stanford Dad,” or “Harvard Dad,” or “Princeton Dad” sweatshirts. So I followed my father up and down the East Coast on a college tour, not feeling at home at any one of those institutions. But when I arrived at the bluff of LMU in LA, I instantly knew this was the school for me. Like my bones wanted to be there, my soul to belong there.
So, I left a few pages out of my mail-in Ivy League applications “accidentally.” A few universities sent letters stating my applications needed to be completed. I hid them away quickly. Then, when the big white envelope came inviting me to LMU, I knew this was the first opportunity I could say yes to my body, and no to the future my father had planned for me.
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