Life Span: Impressions of a Lifetime Spent Crossing and Recrossing the Golden Gate Bridge

1945

If I start to behave like a normal three-year-old girl, my father will let me sit in the front seat of the moving van with him. But I will have to crawl out from under the kitchen table, wash my hands and face, and stop snarling. He did not come back from The War to be attacked by a wild tiger. He doesn’t like having his ankles nipped at. He doesn’t like being growled at. He doesn’t think it’s funny.

She’s not used to you yet, my mother explains. She stands in the doorway holding my sister Bridget in her arms. The only men she knows are the milkman, the iceman, and that mounted policeman she tries to follow down the block every morning.

Can do? my father asks, nudging me with the tip of his shoe.

I nod.

Look slippy, he says. I’m leaving in five.

I scrub the crayoned whiskers off my cheeks and scramble down the stairs after him. I do not need help getting into the van. I do not need help closing the door. Slam it again, my father says, and, a minute later, slamming it himself, Jesus. When I kneel to look out the window, he pushes me down onto the seat. You don’t get carsick, do you?

I shake my head.

Good-o. He lights a cigarette, starts the van, and turns the radio on to a baseball game.

I am too shy to look at him so I look out the window. Mommy is right. I am not used to him yet. Ever since he’s come back from The War, things have been different. I can’t sleep in Mommy’s bed anymore; I have to sleep with my cousins and Bridget and they are all still in diapers; I can’t talk at dinner or run up and down the hallway; I can’t swim in the bathtub or hang off the banister. No one listens to my stories; no one looks at my art. She’s spoiled, my father says. You’ve let her run wild.

Grrrr.

Still, there is something about him. When my father walks through the apartment, I follow behind, trying to put my own feet where his have been; if he turns around, I stop; when he starts to walk again, I start too. I sneak into his closet and press his Army jacket to my cheek, so warm and rough. When I’m alone in the bathroom I stick a finger in his shaving cream, lick it, and spit it out before I get caught.

I’ll give you three, he says, to stop kicking the glove box.

I didn’t know I was kicking the glove box! It’s just that I have never sat this high up before. I have never seen so much of San Francisco—apartment houses and trees and cars and jeeps crowded with soldiers sitting on their duffle bags and old women walking their dogs down the sidewalks. A bus passes and another little girl waves at me, but she is gone before I can wave back. Approaching the Golden Gate Bridge, I catch my breath; it is like entering a tall orange palace with no walls and no roof. Gulls swoop above us, gray fog swirls around us, boats sail below. My father points to a car with people leaning out the windows taking photographs. Look at those idiots, he says, and, in the same breath, I told you to sit down.

No, you didn’t.

No, I didn’t? He laughs without making any sound. Do you know those are the first words you’ve actually spoken to me?

I take a long deep breath of his cigarette smoke. It tastes warm and burnt toasty and I like it. I like the way his big hands look on the steering wheel and I like the way he sings to himself underneath the chatter of the radio. I hear the baby’s crib and Mommy’s typewriter and my rocking chair clink and jangle from the back of the van. They are going to the new house in Sausalito where my father will start his new job at the stock exchange and my mother will start a new novel and I will start preschool. I stretch my arms up higher and lean back to look up as one by one the bridge towers overhead hug us and let us go.

1946

For my fourth birthday, I am allowed to invite a friend over, which makes Mommy laugh because I don’t have any friends. That is not altogether true. I have Miss Buck, our upstairs neighbor when we lived in San Francisco. All right, Mommy agrees, as she lifts the phone and waits for the operator. I’ll ask her. I just hope she doesn’t have a heart attack and die on us. Miss Buck is eighty-two and has had one heart attack already, but I hope she doesn’t die for a long time. She has curly brown hair and sunglasses and walks with a cane. We used to bake sugar cookies together up in her room, and make paper dolls; she spread the funny papers out on her rug and taught me to read them.

She wants to come but she’s not sure, Mommy says, hanging up the phone. She needs to figure out how she’s going to get over the bridge.

That bridge! That long orange stick that keeps Sausalito so far away from San Francisco! We have to cross that bridge any time we go to the zoo or the doctor or Sunday School. Daddy doesn’t commute on it anymore; he takes the ferry to work. Granny comes over on the Greyhound Bus.

I suppose we’ll have to pay for a cab, Mommy says, angry with me. Miss Buck doesn’t have any money.

Miss Buck arrives on the night of my birthday with my favorite book tucked into her black purse. She rubs my head like she used to, and she and my parents have highballs on the porch and talk about The War and the stock market. Miss Buck wants to know how Mommy’s novel is coming along and Mommy says it’s almost done. Daddy wants to know if Miss Buck knew a friend of his, Flynn Fasbinder, who used to teach at an elementary school in the city too, although, Daddy adds, that was probably after Miss Buck’s time.

Bridget and I listen, yawning, sitting on the front steps and killing ants with our fingertips. Nora sleeps in the bassinet beside us and although Bridget pays no attention, I secretly make a face when Miss Buck says again what a beautiful baby Nora is.

We have cake and ice cream, and I open my birthday presents—a fake wristwatch, a new nightgown, some soap bubbles, a coloring book. Miss Buck hands me a soft package wrapped in tissue and when I open it, I see she has sewn me a doll. I say thank you at once, hiding my horror, for despite its pretty embroidered face and long yarn braids, I know the material this doll has been sewn from. I recognize the ribbed nylon fabric. I have seen it drying many times on Miss Buck’s towel rack. This doll has been sewn out of an old pair of her underpants.

What are you going to name her? Mommy asks.

The names that come into my head are so terrible I clamp my lips shut. Panty. Poop. Pee Pee.

She looks like a Ginny to me, Mommy says.

Ginny, I repeat.

After dinner I stick Ginny face down behind my dresser and go in to say goodbye to Miss Buck. She is sitting on the porch with The Counterpane Fairy on her lap. I am too old for it now, but I nestle beside her as she reads, stopping to point out a word here and there, waiting for me to sound it out, coaxing me when I stumble. Soon, she says, you’ll be able to read all by yourself. She closes the book and scratches my arms up and down like she used to; I rock against her and think about the sick boy in the book, and how the fairy who visits him lets him choose any square of his quilt he wants and then takes him on an adventure to that square, off to the Arctic on the sea-green square, off to a magic circus on the black-and-white square.

They left some colors out, didn’t they? Miss Buck says.

I nod, and start to say my favorite word from the crayon box, Flesh, but stop because it reminds me too much of poor Ginny, and I do not know what I am going to do about Ginny yet.

Orange, Miss Buck says. Now where can the counterpane fairy take the little boy that is orange?

The Golden Gate Bridge, I think. Take him there and burn it down.

1947

I have it, Granny repeats. She again extends a dime, two nickels, and five pennies pinched in her beige cotton glove. Mommy, behind the wheel of the Hudson, bats the gloved hand back as we near the toll gate.

You paid last time. The car sways over the dividing line to the right.

I certainly did not, Granny says.

Yes, Mommy says, digging for a twenty-five-cent piece through the open purse on her lap, you did. The car sways over the dividing line to the left.

I think I know what I did and did not do, Granny says. She reaches across Mommy to thrust the money toward the open window. Mommy slaps her back. Granny plants her elbow in Mommy’s chest. Mommy backhands her. The coins from Granny’s glove shoot across the dash; the coin from Mommy’s purse rolls onto the floor. Our car lurches and brakes. The car behind us screeches to a stop. Two other cars honk. A man yells. We kids sink down in back.

Now look what you’ve done, Granny scolds.

Look what you’ve made me do, Mommy snaps.

My cousin Susan and I search our pockets. I have three pennies. Susan has a nickel. We roll down the back window and give the man in the toll booth our change. He waves it away, nods toward our mother and grandmother hugging each other, each of them weeping Sorry Darling So Sorry and says, Just get them out of here.

1948

The bus to the city is full but that’s all right, I don’t need a seat, I can stand in the aisle, I don’t even have to hold on, I can balance like a circus star, better than a circus star, the trick is to hold your hands at your sides and keep your toes pointing straight ahead and stare at one thing only without blinking and I stare at the dead head of the red fox biting its own tail on the lady’s neck as we go around curve after curve and into the tunnel (don’t breathe) and out toward the bridge and I do not fall down once though sometimes I teeter and have to grab the back of the lady’s seat and she turns and frowns but the red fox whispers You’re The Best.

1949

The Boys have broken the swings again, so I put Nora on the roundabout and push as hard as I can to give her a long spin. Bridget has already disappeared into the honeysuckle hedge with Jimmy. I would never go into the hedge but Bridget isn’t afraid of anything—except The Coodie, who wakes her up at night and looks a little like Mommy. Bridget shows Jimmy her gogo and Jimmy shows her his peepee and sometimes he gives her a Life Saver and sometimes he doesn’t.

I climb up the jungle gym, sit on the top, and look down at the playground. I can hear people on the tennis courts nearby and I can look over the fence to the Bardwells’ rose garden and I can see straight down the row of dark cypress trees where the crows squawk. Far off in the distance there’s the Sausalito harbor, a bright wedge of bay and sailboats, and when I hang from my knees upside down, the boats sail back and forth. Nora calls my name and for a while I pretend I don’t hear her but finally I climb down, annoyed because she has another butterfly in her underpants which means I will have to change her, but before I can do that, The Boys stampede up, all of them, Stevie and Pete and Stuart and Bobby, grinning as they circle around us.

Guess what this is? Bobby thrusts a battered red shoe in my face.

I am too terrified to speak. I know I shouldn’t be. The worst The Boys can do is set your hair on fire, like they tried to do to Judy before she grabbed the lighter and threw it away. The Boys never really have the snakes or spiders they say they are going to shove down your dress. But there are so many of them. And they are so fast.

Nora takes her thumb out of her mouth. It’s a shoe.

A dead girl’s shoe. Bobby presses his freckled face close to mine and lowers his voice. This little girl was in a car accident on the Golden Gate Bridge, see, and her car was hit so hard this shoe flew off her foot and landed clear over here.

Bridget comes up, tugging at her waistband. No, it didn’t, she says.

No, it didn’t, Nora echoes.

Oh yeah? Bobby ignores my sisters, his widened eyes on mine. See that stain? Know what that is? Blood! The little dead girl’s blood. Want to lick it? Here. Want to try it on? It’s your size.

One shoe’s no good, Bridget says calmly. Where’s the other one?

Shark ate it, Bobby breathes. With the dead girl’s foot inside. He thumps the shoe on top of my head, then he whoops and wheels away and the rest of The Boys follow him.