Girl in a Band Read Online Free Page B

tossed our cowhides down on the beach for imaginary incoming boats, copying what the early traders must have done. There were no grades at that school—it was all very learn-by-doing.
    My dad was tall and gentle, with a big expressive face and black glasses. He was a gestural guy, physical, emphatic with his arms and his hands, but incredibly warm, too, though the few times I remember his getting angry at Keller or me were frightening. The angry words seemed to start in the soles of his feet and travel up through his entire body. Like a lot of people who live in their heads, he could be absentminded; there was that popcorn story, after all. Once when I was little he put me in the bathtub with my socks on—he hadn’t noticed—which of course I begged him to do again and again from that point on.
    He’d grown up doing chores beside his mother and sister—cooking and gardening, pretty much anything involving his hands—and the habit stayed with him. During cocktail hour, which my mom and he never missed, he made amazing martinis and Manhattans with a chilledmartini shaker kept in the freezer at all times. This was the late fifties and early sixties—people took their cocktail hours seriously. The backyard of our house in L.A. was thick and stringy with the tomato plants he grew. My mom liked to tell me that my dad’s skill with his hands was something he’d passed down to me, and I always loved hearing that.
    Someone once wrote that in between the lives we lead and the lives we fantasize about living is the place in our heads where most of us actually live. My mom told me once that my father had always wanted to be a poet. It is likely that growing up during the Depression with no money made him want to seek security, pushing him toward a career as a professor instead. But aside from his love of words and the self-deprecating jokes and puns he slung around with his close friends, it was something that until she told me, I never knew about my father, which is striking, especially since my brother later became a poet.
    From my childhood I recall days spent home sick from school, trying on my mom’s clothes and watching television show after television show. I remember spooning out chocolate or tapioca pudding from the box— tapioca, a word no one uses anymore. The smell of the house, damp and distinct. The aroma of old indigenous L.A. houses, even inland ones, comes from the ocean twenty miles away, a hint of mildew, but dry, too, and closed up, perfectly still, like a statue. I can still smell the barest trace of gas from the old 1950s stove, an invisible odor mixed with sunshine streaming in from the windows, and, somewhere, eucalyptus bathed in the haze of ambition.

3

    UPSTAIRS IN MY HOUSE in western Massachusetts, I have a stack of DVDs containing old movies of my parents fishing in the Klamath River, just south of the Oregon border. They’re with their best friends, Connie and Maxie Bentzen, and another couple, Jackie and Bill, all of them members of the liberal, food-loving UCLA group my parents belonged to. These were funny, ironic people who also happened to be passionate fishermen.
    Starting in the late sixties, my parents drove up to Klamath every summer, staying in a rented trailer and spending the next month fishing with this core group of people, others coming and going. Klamath wasall about fishing and socializing and cooking and eating, and waking up the next day to start over again. My dad made his own smoking devices—homemade baskets he placed in oilcans and submerged in hot coals to smoke fish, chicken wings, or his famous ribs. There were no social rules except that “good times” were to be had. You ate what you caught, and to this day the salmon right out of the smoker that Connie Bentzen made is the best thing I’ve ever tasted. An actual rule in Klamath: you were only allowed to take home two fish. My mother once smuggled a third fish onto