We Are All Shipwrecks Page 2

  My grandfather rarely talked about my mother, and so I had all sorts of questions saved up for him, all variations of What was she like? Would I have liked her? Would she have liked me?

  “Did she like to draw?” I asked. I loved to draw.

  He leaned back in his chair, his dark blue dressing gown barely reaching across the fat tummy encased in the red flannel nightshirt Marilyn and I had given him for Christmas. His legs beneath were bare, hairless, pale like milk, and marbled with blue veins. His elephant-like feet were shoved into burgundy slippers.

  “I suppose. Doesn’t every child like to draw?” He sounded bored by my question.

  “Did she like dogs?” I reached toward the photographs again.

  “Well, she had a cat,” he said, nodding toward the picture.

  “What was its name?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  In spite of Marilyn’s careful training, I traced a finger along my mother’s back. “What was her favorite color?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “I bet it was green. Mine’s green. What did she want to be when she grew up?”

  “I have no idea.” He was quiet a moment. “She always knew you’d be a girl, though.” He took off his glasses and cleaned their thick lenses with the edge of his dressing gown. “She’d had your name picked out since she was a little girl, not much older than you are now. You were named after a steak house. Kelly’s.”

  I was disappointed to hear this. I thought I’d been named after the Kelly, a famous battleship he’d told me about.

  “I’ll always remember it. She was just a little girl—eight, nine. We were driving along the freeway and she saw a sign for Kelly’s, and she said, ‘That’s what I’m going to name my little girl.’ And I said, ‘How do you know you’re going to have a little girl?’ And she said ‘I just do.’ She was stubborn that way.”

  That story made me feel better, that she’d known I was going to be a girl years before I was born, as if by magic.

  He slipped the two photos into the pocket of his dressing gown. “It’s getting late,” he said and stood up. “You need to get in bed. Mommy will be upset if you’re still awake when she comes home.”

  I knew Marilyn wouldn’t be mad; she never was. But I knew, too, to get up and go brush my teeth. While I brushed, I counted how many naked women and men were in each row on the wallpaper in Marilyn’s bathroom. I counted them all the time, the rows of men in a variety of mustaches and poses, women fat and thin, their nipples pink or black dots. It was something our landlord had picked out.

  I was in bed when Marilyn came home. When she leaned over to kiss me good night, I fiddled with her wooden-bead necklace, the one with the small goat’s horn charm that came from somewhere in Africa. I breathed deeply the dry-cleaning smell of her wool sweater, her minty breath, and the cigarette behind it.

  “Good night, sweetheart,” she whispered. “Go to sleep.”

  The next day when I got home from school, before my grandfather came home, I decided to look for more pictures of Michele, ones that would show her face. I was certain they were somewhere in his desk, that my grandfather had simply misplaced them. Marilyn had hundreds of pictures of me, after all, carefully labeled and filed in specially purchased photo boxes. I assumed the same had to be true of my grandfather and his daughter.

  My hands shook as I sorted through the pile, careful to leave each paper in its original spot, careful to put the gun back where I found it. I sifted through bills and old magazines, scratch pads and newspaper inserts. There was nothing.

  A few days later, I searched my grandfather’s desk again and finally found some pictures. But they were the same two that he’d already shown me, tucked in the top drawer, creased and covered in fingerprints, as if he’d often touched them.

  • • •

  “Blood is important,” my grandfather would sometimes tell me on those nights when Marilyn taught ESL and we were left alone. “Where you come from is important. It’s who you are.”

  He’d sit at the head of the dining room table—a repurposed boardroom table—in his dressing gown, sometimes with his street clothes beneath, an empty ice cream bowl in front of him, a few drops of French vanilla spattered across his shirt. I’d sit sometimes in a chair, but more often than not on the red carpet beneath the framed technical drawings of German U-boats, next to Marilyn’s electric typewriter on its stand, which rested in the corner by my grandfather. I liked to sit on the floor, where sometimes Klutz the cat or Ugly the dog would deign to visit me. Across the living room, visible from the table, the TV would be set to a wildlife documentary, the volume turned low so that bugs ate other bugs in silent, slow-motion pantomime.

  My grandfather didn’t see very well, and when he didn’t have his contacts in, he wore thick glasses with lenses that looked like the bottoms of Coke bottles. It was hard to tell what he was thinking when he wore his glasses, because you couldn’t see his eyes. You couldn’t tell if he was looking down at the table or at you, but you could always tell when he wanted you to believe what he was saying, because he took off his glasses when he said it and looked straight at you with blind eyes. He always took off his glasses when he told me the stories of my family.

  “Your grandmother, Yvonne Spencer,” he’d sometimes begin. “You know, Spence.”

  Spence was his ex-wife, my mother’s mother. They’d divorced long before I was born, when my own mother was a child. I’d lived with Spence and her friend Dee until I was four years old.

  “Well, she was half Hawaiian, on her father’s side. He was full-blooded. Cliff diver. Can’t remember his name.” This, he explained, was why I liked to swim and why I turned so dark in the sun. “He was an alcoholic, though. Lost all of his money on some water deal in Palm Springs. Married to an absolute bitch. Spence’s mother. She hated me, of course.”

  My grandfather, who spoke with the accent of English movie stars, told me he was related to the Earl Grey of tea fame and Lady Jane Grey of beheading fame. Somewhere, in England, our family had a house named Fallodon. This was important, he told me, because it meant we had noble blood. “Blue blood, they call it. Don’t know why. Everyone’s got blue blood. They do! Your blood’s blue until it comes out of your skin.” He pulled his sleeve up to his elbow, exposing his forearm and tracing the blue vein under his wrist.

  “Of course, you’ve got Norman blood too. All over England, little old ladies go looking through churchyards to see if their ancestors are Frogs. You know the Normans, right? 1066? King Harold got his eye speared by an arrow. Bloody fool. Shouldn’t have looked up.”

  I did know, but only because he’d told me before and because I’d read about the Bayeux Tapestry in one of his books. Our house’s entire southern wall was lined with my grandfather’s books: thrillers and spy fiction, the adventures of Hornblower and Hollywood biographies, Miss Marple and Poirot, tomes on navigation and marine architecture, books on the Louvre, pirates, and English castles. Up on the highest shelf was a lone car-racing trophy from the Paramount Ranch Racetrack, engraved to “Richard ‘Dick’ Grey, Second Place.” I asked to see it sometimes, and my grandfather would obligingly bring it down and let me run my finger along the pewter car. “I quit racing not too long after I won this trophy,” he’d say. “Too many near misses.”

  Sometimes my grandfather told me he was a baronet, which I knew must be true because his checks and credit cards were all imprinted with “Sir Richard Grey.” I wasn’t sure, though, if he was called “Sir” because of the baronetcy or because he’d been knighted for his bravery by the Queen herself after World War II.

  “You look at the ceremony and you think she’s just tapping them lightly on the shoulder,” he’d tell me. “But, no, she gives you a bloody good wallop.”

  When we went shopping, sales clerks would sometimes call him “Sir Richard” or “Sir Grey.” Sometimes they called Marilyn “Lady Marilyn” or “Lady Grey,” although she hated it and would ask them to please never call her that again.

  On some nights, my grandfather told me the story of his own childhood, how he was an orphan, how his parents had been killed in 1918 by the Spanish flu when he was a baby, just after the First World War. The Spanish flu sounded exotic to me—something prettier, rarer than the regular flu. He’d tell me how he was raised by many different people—a bishop in the Church of England, an uncle, a cousin—moving again and again all over England.

  “I had a nanny once,” he said. “Her name was Frieda. Good old Frieda. Taught me German.”

  To show me how he spoke German, he’d run his fingers along my side and whisper a rhyme in German about a mouse: Here creeps a mouse, without a house…

  “Frieda taught me that,” he’d sigh. “It’s why I ended up in secret operations during the war. I could speak it fluently.”

  All of these things were important to know, he told me, because where you came from was important to know. Of my English, Hawaiian, and “blue” bloods, the most important was the English: the blood of Shakespeare, Nelson, and Churchill ran in my veins, and I must always remember that. On some nights, he’d tell me that I was half English, because he’d forget I wasn’t really his daughter; he’d forget that my mother, Michele, his dead daughter, had ever come between us.

  When I was little, before he’d finally told me the truth about her death, my grandfather would tell me how my mother had been killed in a car wreck. I was three weeks old when it happened. It was a story I’d heard for so long, I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t know it.

  “She never knew it was coming,” he assured me. “It was painless, fast. You were just a baby, so of course you can’t remember it.”

  And then, after he’d finished telling me stories, he’d put his glasses back on, his eyes once more obscured by the lenses.

  2

  A few weeks after he showed me the pictures, my grandfather picked me up from school. “We’re going to Bristol Farms,” he announced as I got into the Mercedes. “You can help me pick out dinner.”

  A married couple was coming to dinner that night, and my grandfather was eager to impress them. A week or so earlier, we’d had cocktails on their boat, a large motor yacht docked at the Long Beach Marina. It had a fiberglass hull and expansive tinted windows. Marilyn had drunk a glass of pink wine, which our hosts also drank, and my grandfather had a gin and tonic.

  “Heavy on the tonic and light on the gin,” he’d told our host, who’d made a great show of mixing drinks at the wet bar. “The diabetes, you know.”

  I’d been given a Coke, shown a place to sit on the plush, white carpet, and then ignored, so I passed the time watching the adults.

  The man’s bald spot was sunburned, which looked painful to me. When he’d first met us on the dock, he’d been wearing a captain’s hat. His mustache was a pale ginger, bushy and unkempt. He wore a white Izod shirt and khaki shorts and Top-Siders without socks. My grandfather wore almost exactly the same outfit, which I would come to recognize as a kind of yachtsman’s uniform, but my grandfather wore no captain’s hat. “Never trust idiots who wear captain’s hats,” my grandfather said. “It’s a sign they don’t know what they’re doing.”

  The man’s wife perched on a stool next to him at the bar, leaning in to the conversation as if she were supremely interested, but I could tell she was bored by the way she kept looking at her red fingernails. She was wearing white Bermuda shorts and a white and navy striped sweater, and her long legs stretched down the bar stool. In her earlobes were red plastic earrings that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be anchors. Like Marilyn, she was much younger than her husband.

  My grandfather talked expansively while Marilyn sat demurely on the couch next to him, fiddling with the stem of her wine glass. The couple was trying to sell my grandfather the very boat we were sitting on. In fact, this was exactly why we were having cocktails with the couple in their navy whites and nautical flair. My grandfather wanted to buy a boat, a motor yacht to take us through the canals of Europe and to Costa Rica, the Fjords and San Diego. He wanted a boat because he’d been in the navy and because he loved the sea. He wanted a boat so that we could make a quick escape—from what, he didn’t say.

  At the end of the night, he’d invited them over for dinner at our house. On the ride home, he was already planning the meal; he was going to pull out all the stops. Marilyn said nothing and stared out the passenger window.

  • • •

  The afternoon of the dinner, the Bristol Farms parking lot was bustling with BMWs and Jaguars. Inside it was swarming with Friday crowds: Palos Verdes wives—processed blonds fresh from the tennis courts, still dressed in pleated skirts and appliquéd windbreakers—kids just picked up from school, businessmen charged with bringing home something for dinner, and people who liked to eat, like my grandfather. Bristol Farms was his favorite grocery store. I knew we’d be getting much more than we needed for that night’s meal.

  My grandfather’s trips to the grocery store were completely different from Marilyn’s. Marilyn went shopping at Ralphs with a list she’d carefully updated all week. It was written in orderly cursive with her Pilot Razor Point pen and used unappetizing abbreviations like “chix” for chicken. Her list was composed of things we actually needed: staple foods, ingredients for recipes, paper goods, pet food. She had a nylon coupon organizer that she’d ordered from a newspaper insert, the same kind of insert from which you could order a thousand printed address labels or customized checks with five different American patriot eagle designs. Marilyn’s trips to the grocery store were carefully orchestrated campaigns, military operations upon which hung the entire war effort. Keeping house was like war for her, an angry battle against the shoes that cluttered the floor, the dishes that piled up on the counter. Too often, it seemed, I was fighting for the enemy, putting my shirts inside-out into the laundry hamper, leaving my dirty socks under the dining room table and empty glasses on the floor by my bed.

  When she went grocery shopping, Marilyn mapped her trip down the aisles so she’d buy canned goods first and end up at the frozen foods last so they would have less time to melt. She bought a predetermined number of cans of cat and dog food, stacking them in her cart in columns of eight high. She checked each egg in the carton and carefully calculated the price per ounce of cereal, cat litter, and frozen juice concentrate. At the checkout stand, she placed her items on the conveyor belt in the exact order in which she wished them to be bagged. She instructed exasperated baggers how to place them in the sacks: “Double paper, please. And pack them as full as possible—don’t worry if they’re heavy. You can get more in there,” she’d say, placing a bag of celery and a box of crackers on top of an already-packed bag. “See?”

  This was not how my grandfather went to the grocery store. My grandfather did not keep lists. He did not shop the aisles in a particular order.

  The bakery was right by the entrance, and so that afternoon his first stop was to pore over the glass cases of fruit tarts, napoleons, cheesecakes, rum babas, and German chocolate cake.

  “What do you think, Little Toad? Rum babas?” I was about to say napoleons, my favorite, when he told the lady, “Fruit tarts. Six, please. Yes, that will be very attractive.” She filled a perfect, pink bakery box, while I was sent to fetch a baguette from a brass basket.

  “No, best make it two,” he said when he saw the loaf I’d brought, and I went back to get another.

  Then we came to the sushi counter. He grabbed boxes of nigiri and maki—still exotic then, even in LA—tuna, mackerel, salmon, shrimp, roe—California rolls for me because I would not tolerate the others. At the butcher counter, he ordered steaks, chops, roasts; at the fish counter, salmon filets, swordfish steaks, tiger shrimp, clams, mussels, halibut. A short walk to a cooler, and then small rounds of Edam, Camembert, and a wedge of sharp cheddar dropped into our shopping cart, followed by half a dozen candy bars from a display on a farm table, then peanut brittle and Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies, some of which my grandfather would eat in spite of his diabetes and some of which would end up in my lunch box. (He packed my lunch full of candy and cookies every day so that I could trade to make friends, or, failing that, eat them myself. It was usually the latter.)

  My grandfather consulted carefully with the green-aproned wine merchant beneath the fake pergola in the middle of the store, moving on with four bottles of white. Then he gathered the foods from England, which he always bought when we went to Bristol Farms: Devonshire clotted cream in tiny glass bottles; Lyle’s Golden Syrup; lemon curd; Bird’s custard for trifles, its powder packed in a tricolor tin; and, of course, the kippers, flayed and snug in their plastic package.

  On particularly unlucky Saturdays, my grandfather cooked kippers for breakfast. I’d wake to the pungent, salty, fishy smell that wafted into my nostrils, headed straight down my gullet, and squeezed my stomach in an iron vise. I was convinced there was nothing on earth—at least nothing edible—that smelled as bad as frying kippers, although now, as I try to think of the right words to describe them, I find only pleasant ones: sea, salt, savory; the smell of wood smoke and lanolin on a wool sweater; the smell of kelp freshly washed on shore. Perhaps it is only that sometimes I miss my grandfather.

  He’d eat the fish slowly, pensively pulling stray bones from between his full, oil-slicked lips. He seemed to go to another world when he ate his kippers, lost in some cloud of kipper incense, transported to another place where there was nothing but the smoky fish melting on tongue and teeth. But really, it was just that he’d gone home.

  Kippers were one of the strange things my grandfather ate because he was English. He didn’t follow cricket scores or English politics; he didn’t observe Guy Fawkes Day or Boxing Day. He never got letters from England, never made phone calls. The only way you could tell he was English, besides his accent, was by what he ate. His favorite meal to make for friends was roast beef and Yorkshire pudding—the pudding cooked beneath the roast so that it caught the dripping juices. He taught Marilyn to make bubble and squeak, which he made from leftover potatoes, broccoli, and onion, sautéed in plenty of oil and salt. He’d eat jellied tongue and blood sausage, which, of course, were in our shopping cart that day too, sliced and wrapped neatly in white deli paper.