Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 1582434611
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Set in 1970s San Francisco, Swallow the Ocean is redolent with place. In luminous prose, this memoir paints a most intimate portrait of what might have been a catastrophic childhood had Laura and her sisters not been resilient and determined enough to survive their environment even as they yearned to escape it.
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as my father prepared to leave, he reached into his suit pocket for a pen to write out the alimony/ child support check. He pulled out a Cross pen that Sadie, my mother’s mother, had given him as a present years before. My mother recognized it at once and snatched it from him. Why did he still have it? Did he carry it every day? Did he keep it close to his heart? He asked her why it mattered. She said his carrying the pen was bad for Sadie. “Why?” my father pressed. She took a napkin from
cautiously, quietly pushed the onions she put in the spaghetti sauce to the side of the plate (my mother did not put onions in spaghetti sauce), and remained painfully polite. On this trip to Tahoe we got to know her better. Each day we all went sledding on a huge hill near Lake Tahoe. That hill has long since been closed to sledding—a law-suit waiting to happen. But in the less litigious days of the 1970s my father was a demon on the toboggan. Against all reason we felt safe, as long as he was
entirely visible to the eye, must have seemed like the least of it. My grandmother shook her head and clucked her teeth over my mother. She prayed for us. But she had faith in my father. And an eye for these things—she could tell who was going to float. She knew my sisters and I would come out OK in the end. On Sunday night my father drove us home. I sat up front with him. Amy was in the back, asleep. The radio was on, a classical music station my father liked. I held my backpack in my lap,
had it all) was suddenly more vividly disturbing. I took the glasses off just to make all those layers of things go away. I pulled the book up close to my face. The Enchanted Castle was much better than it looked, and without my glasses on I could limit the world to the small circle of words directly in front of me. My father gave me a hard-covered composition notebook for my tenth birthday. Until I received it, I hadn’t known that I coveted one, so it was all the more amazing that someone had
sentimental temperament. Sadie had lived her entire life within the bounds of church and family. She never wavered from her faith, and she dedicated her entire life to her husband and children. And this is the kicker: she did it, for the most part, joyfully. My mother’s only problem with Sadie was that, given her own temperament, her strong will, her aspirations, there was little in Sadie’s life to give direction to her own. Growing up within the girdled prison of the feminine mystique, my mother