Life teaches us

More tales from the Boardinghouse... and a poem

Photo by Richard Stachmann on Unsplash

During his stints as my babysitter, Colby would sometimes take Kyle to a kiddie fun palace, run as a franchise, that gets its identity from a giant, semi-animated rat. It’s a loathsome mini gambling casino for the primary school set.

The children stand in rapt abandon before the token-devouring game machines, gladly giving the expensive tokens in exchange for what often seems like an arbitrary disgorgement of prize tickets (which they greedily clutch in their hot little hands). Then what disappointment, what agony of decision-making, when the tokens are all spent and it comes time to have one’s enormous wad of tickets weighed! The disappointment in their faces when they are struck by the insignificance—the puniness—of what moments before felt like the spoils of Troy. A collection of tickets so numerous, so unwieldy, that they could hardly be held by two small hands is reduced to the heartlessness of a low three-digit number. Too low to buy the Barbie doll (don’t make me laugh!). Too low even to get the tiny, cheap plastic checkers set, embossed with the company logo’s faintly sinister rat face, on which your chess-playing son has set his innocent heart.

For those big-eyed children gazing straight into the glassed-in display, the tacky gee-gaws take on the gleam of the Crown Jewels. The barely literate teenager behind the counter (who has trouble subtracting 25 from 137, even when she uses pen and paper), gives your child his or her first lesson in the undiscriminating heartlessness of the outside world.

Before the prize counter at the rat palace, even your child’s most winning graces count for naught. The scale weighs impartially. Chances are that only the most compulsively determined child gamblers ever get the Barbie dolls.

Cleverly, the corporation places in the same display some pricey toys that can be purchased for U.S. currency to soothe the anguish of the child and assuage the guilt of the parent bearing witness to it all. How can I have been so weak and foolish to give in to my child’s pleas to be taken to this nefarious, germ-laden, corrupting hellhole?

Later, in the parking lot, when you discover that your child’s friend has lost her cheap plastic-bead, happy-face bracelet in the boiling soup-pot of the ball cage—where children turn, tumble, dive, mingle and step on each other’s heads—you have no choice but to do the chivalrous thing, run back in, and buy another (for cash, this time). When you explain the situation, the barely literate teenager shows that she has a heart, if not much of a head for numbers.

“It happens all the time,” she says, giving you a replacement bracelet for free.

You feel unreasonably grateful for this boon, which probably cost the franchise all of three cents.

At least, you comfort yourself on the drive home while the children bounce around in their car-seats like excited molecules, you avoided buying or consuming what is known to be the most wretched pizza around.

You have principles, after all.

***

Someone who saw Camille at a club in San Francisco said he could hook her up with a modeling agency in Paris, where her all-American-girl good looks might win her some runway jobs. In any case, she’d had it with her job at the salon, with her old boyfriend (who did nothing all day but sit around in his apartment spinning records and smoking pot), with Allison, with the crotchety “colored” people in Union Square, who had lately cut her out of a major gig at a Marin millionaire’s party.

Camille saved her tips, put them together with her last month’s rent she got back from me, begged a few bucks from her father and bought a one-way ticket to France. She would take a backpack and her make-up kit. I suggested that going gray in Paris might be more in keeping with the architecture and statuary—more Old World. I could picture Camille as a beautiful marble statue with her striking, pale-blue eyes. But purple-ness was the essence of her act for Camille. She had an investment, both emotional and financial, in the color.

Kyle was fond of Camille. With her big, goofy smile and her generally naïve take on things, she was singularly well equipped to play with him on his own level. An avid collector of stickers, she would invite him into her purple-draped room to sit on the floor and paste these into albums with her. They’d discuss the stickers’ relative merits, and she’d always select a special one to give to him.

One weekend Camille brought her young half-sister—a blue-eyed blond seven-year-old beauty—over to spend the night and play with Kyle, and he came immediately under her spell. After setting the two of them to sweeping the decks outside with the promise of a dollar for each of them, I overheard her from the open window of my bedroom, ordering him around without mercy. Kyle was too captivated by her, apparently, to do anything but comply. Later he confided to me that Camille’s sister was bossy—although he seemed more mystified than upset by this observation, and expressed an avid desire to have her visit us again.

I called the home-stay people and said I had another room becoming available. No problem, they assured me. They had a series of groups coming over for three-week stays during the summer.

***

Kyoko, a sixteen-year-old girl from Japan, was our first three-weeker. Daniela took care of her, showing her how to use the bus to get downtown, where to catch the bus to get back home, which phone booth (remember phone booths?) to use if she got stuck down the hill after the bus stopped running and needed to call me for a ride. The three of us went walking together in the hills, and Kyoko seemed to get a good deal of pleasure out of listening to Daniela and me talking, as we had taken to doing, nonstop. I think she lived a rather sheltered life—her father was some sort of high-level engineer working in Thailand, where Kyoko attended the American school. She was hungry for role models for the adult life she seemed more than ready to embark on, and she listened carefully, as if sifting our words for hidden instructions.

Like Daniela, Kyoko was extremely helpful in the kitchen. Virtually every evening she offered to assist me with dinner preparations, and she did so with an unobtrusive, easy-going competence I came to depend on. When I asked her if she was this helpful at home, she laughed and said that she wasn’t—her parents were always complaining about her lack of cooperation.

In a culture that put a high premium on academic achievement, Kyoko was something of an outlier, preferring sports to scholastics—although her English was remarkably good. She found the ten-hour school day at home to be oppressive. She liked American music and basketball, and said she wished she could just stay with us until she was done with high school.

Such a sweet girl! I sent Kyoko away with a letter to her father, inviting her to come stay with us again if she ever had reason to be in the Bay Area. With great ceremony, she gave me a Chinese-made cotton lace cover for a tissue box. I hadn’t seen anything as useless or quaint since the brightly colored poodles my Great Aunt Bertha used to crochet, designed to conceal stacked rolls of toilet paper. All of us cried a little when the Airport shuttle arrived and Kyoko, in her jeans and high-top tennis shoes, turned for a last time to wave goodbye.

***

Both my sister and my mother were devastated, though for different reasons, when I announced my intention to attend a college some 350 miles away from home.

In a desperate last-ditch effort to change my mind (and keep her free babysitter and bottle-washer in residence, as I saw it then), Mom announced that she would keep the child support money my father sent for me every month if I insisted on leaving.

It wasn’t that much, but it would have meant a lot to me. It would have paid my rent and tuition, allowing me to avoid going into debt. I might have stayed single a while longer and stayed on campus if the parental support had been there. I most certainly would have opted to do a junior year abroad.

What I failed to see was that my single-minded resolve to leave would turn my little sister into a latch-key kid without a protector.

Throughout my years at college, I tried to nurture Dori from afar. I sent her illustrated letters with a serialized fairytale about a little man who lived in an antique beaded purse in our bedroom closet. (Kind of creepy, looking back on it now.) I never lived at my mother’s again after I moved away; but when I went on vacation with my boyfriend (later, briefly, my husband), Dori would fly up and travel with us. We all three pretended, rather improbably, that Dori was our child.

While school was in session, I would call from Santa Cruz, where Tom and I were living in a rented cabin in the mountains, and urge my mother to feed Dori—who suffered from asthma and psoriasis—more fresh vegetables and less processed food. Understandably, my mother was only infuriated by my interference, which she interpreted as criticism of her rather than love for my sister.

I’ve come to believe that I share with my mother, now long dead, an inability to do more than glimpse at the scariest realities and then look away. She knew our home wasn’t a safe place: so did I.

Sisters, Love, Longing

I can still see your smile as I saw it, thirty years ago,
as you lifted your laughing infant daughter in the air.

I look with envy now at pairs of sisters from families
happier than ours—the tender bond between them
as they gaze at the camera, the younger one
leaning her head on the other’s shoulder.

I wanted to be that for you, as we grew older.

Instead, you decided, in your fifties,
to hide from me. I’m haunted by the memory
of your pretty face—the little hand that held my big toe
in the gap between your crib and my bed,
in the room we shared.

I can still remember the lyrics to those endless Irish ballads
I crooned to you as lullabies. And my cluelessness as you hinted,
when we were grown, that antipathy, resentment, or both
had replaced the trust and affection you’d always shown.

And at seventeen, when you were only eight years old,
I left home, leaving you on your own
to sort out the love from the lies.

Copyright © 2024 by Barbara Quick

Photo by Jannis Lucas on Unsplash

Apologies that this edition of “Life-boat” arrived so late. It was a particularly hard one to write.