Storms 01 - Family Storms

Mama late in life, and my grandfather, who was a fisherman, died in a fishing accident during a bad storm. Just like us, Mama and her mother were left to fend for themselves. Both of my maternal grandparents died before I was born, so I had never seen my grandfather in person, either. All I had were the few old photographs of her parents that Mama had brought with her. She told me they were taken when she was only ten, but her parents looked as if they could easily be her grandparents.
    Mama said the struggle, which was what she called their lives after her father died, was responsible for aging and killing her mother. Her father hadn’t made a lot of money and had had very little life insurance.
    Despite our struggle, Mama would say that my daddy’s desertion of us was no great loss. I knew she was just speaking out of anger. At least we ate and had a roof over our heads when he was with us. We never really expected to have much more. Daddy had barely graduated from high school and then enlisted in the army, where he learned some mechanical skills, and got a job as an appliance repairman when he was discharged. That was what he was doing when he met my mother at a bar in Venice Beach, California.
    Mama had left Portland with a girlfriend right afterhigh school because her English teacher and drama-club coach lavished so much praise on her acting skills that she thought becoming a movie star was inevitable. She was in every one of her school drama productions since the eighth grade.
    Of course, after endless rejection and only very minor acting opportunities, she blamed her teacher for ruining her life. “He got me full of myself until I couldn’t see anything else, Sasha,” she would say. According to her, he was right up there, just below Daddy, as the cause of all our troubles. “Beware of compliments,” she told me. “Half the time people you know tell them to you so you’ll like them more, not yourself.”
    She and her girlfriend were waitresses in the bar where she met Daddy. Her girlfriend was already going hot and heavy with someone she had met there, and according to my mother, “The writing was on the wall. I knew I’d be on my own very soon, and with what I was making, that was nearly impossible. The real possibility of my having to go home to Mama Pearl was looming. That’s why I fell in love so quickly with a spineless, unambitious clod like your father.”
    She admitted, or rather used as an additional excuse, the fact that Daddy was very handsome, with his crystallike cobalt-blue eyes, firm lips, and wavy light brown hair. I had his eyes but Mama’s hair, which Mama said made me even more beautiful than she was.
    “When I first met him,” she said, “he looked like he could be a movie star himself. He had a sexy smile, the kind that could unlock anyone’s chastity belt.”
    “What’s a chastity belt?”
    “Never mind that,” she said. “He was built like a Greek god in those days, too, but I mistook his silence for strength. It took me a while to realize that most of the time, he was silent because he simply didn’t know what to say. He never read anything, parroted whatever sound bite he had heard on television, and rarely went to a movie. At the time we first met, he had never been to the theater. Now that I think about it, Sasha, I must have been out of my mind.”
    She would eventually tell me that he had gotten her pregnant with me, and when he proposed, she thought maybe she should settle down and become a wife and a mother. She tried to make it sound as if I wasn’t just a mistake. She said she was surely not going to be the famous movie star she had hoped to be, and she was just not tall enough to work as a model.
    “Becoming a mother seemed to be the right thing for me to do. Besides, I needed you. I needed someone else. Your father wasn’t much company.”
    There was no question, however, that she had once been very beautiful. Her half-Asian look was quite exotic, and she once had silky, long black hair down to her wing bones. Both men and women turned their heads to look at her when she sauntered down the street. I was proud to be walking beside her then. She walked like an angel, practically floating, her soft smile imprinting itself on the eyes of men who surely saw her often in their dreams. I wanted to be in that aura that rippled around her so I’d grow up to be just as special.
    “If I would have had the sense to hang out where more well-to-do young men hung