Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (34 page)

Back in Redondo Beach, Mom’s anxieties boiled to a head over those three days, as the distressing phone calls from Mason City roused her simmering nerves. Late on the third night, Mom lay in bed next to Dad, emitting whimpers of pain while talking about Geri and venting her worries and frustrations without necessarily organizing her thoughts. “She won’t eat what Leola feeds her. She won’t shave her legs. It doesn’t matter where we send her. She’s still missing her marbles. Nothing we do does any good.”

Dad strained to interpret the flood of anxieties in a logical, linear, and literal way. He grew tired of what sounded to him like the endless criticisms of an unwanted Geri. The more Mom kept chattering away, the more perturbed Dad became with what he perceived to be her incessant complaints. Exasperated—and trying to get some sleep so he could wake up early and drive to work in the morning to pay for all the day-old hamburger that Mom needed to buy at the grocery store—he rolled his face toward her pillow and asked the pointed question: “Have you tried LOVE?”

He had no idea how provocative his four-letter word could be. Here Mom was expressing her deepest feelings, yet here he was accusing her of having none. She was trying her hardest to communicate her emotions, yet he was insinuating that she had none worth communicating. As if he had scratched a festering sore, she leapt from the bed and recoiled in pain. Crying and screaming, she dashed out the bedroom door, ran through the house, and staggered down the darkened stairs. Her cries awakened us kids.

Dad followed her downstairs into the playroom, shouting after her. “Why do you think the doctor said she should live away from home in the first place?” he roared.

Mom cried louder, abandoning the futility of words.

As I lay in the top bunk in the bedroom next to the playroom, a strange paralysis overtook my body. For the first time in my seven years of life, I felt genuinely afraid.

The arguing lasted for about 30 seconds before the 16-year-old Stan sprung out of bed, charged into the playroom, and jumped between Mom and Dad. “Stop it right now! Or else I’ll call the cops!”

The roars and cries subsided into muffled utterances that retreated back upstairs and into the master bedroom. Fortunately, it was one argument that Geri, thousands of miles away and completely unaware, could not blame on herself.

Back in Mason City, Aunt Leola gave up trying to feed Geri. At the end of May, Aunt Elsie, Lynne, and Cyndi admitted Geri to Saint Joseph Mercy Hospital.

Mom flew to Iowa. “Now I want you to do well here,” Mom told Geri in the hospital room. “Be happy here. Don’t worry about what might happen years down the road.”

But Geri couldn’t stop worrying about C. At Saint Joseph Mercy Hospital, she couldn’t do any artwork if it reminded her of C. She couldn’t focus on just about anything, because she kept thinking instead about C.

The doctors gave her five shock treatments. “They made me happy for a little while,” she recalled, “but then it wore off.” The treatments caused temporary amnesia, but she soon remembered the past again, which meant remembering C again, which made her sad again. She stayed in the hospital for six weeks before the doctors released her.

She then settled into a relatively comfortable routine with Uncle Doc and Aunt Leola. “You haven’t been through
anything
till you’ve been in World War II,” Uncle Doc commiserated with Geri. He had never fought in the war, either. Just another inside joke. Meanwhile, Geri overcame her distaste for food, and she had no qualms whatsoever with Aunt Leola’s lavish Midwestern cuisine: pork chops, ham hocks, turkey with gravy, potato salad, mashed potatoes, applesauce, molasses and beans, cherry pie, apple pie, mincemeat pie, and ice cream smothered in Smucker’s sauces. Geri was mostly content, and so was Aunt Leola.

However, Geri couldn’t drink the tropical punch or the cherry drink. Both were so red that they reminded her of the pills known as reds. A girl at Camarillo had taken two reds and tried to burn down Garden Grove High School. Geri made sure not to drink anything red.

She enrolled in the eighth grade at Memorial High School at the age of 14 in the fall of 1969. The school was not really a high school but rather a collection of Head Start programs for younger kids and special education programs for older kids with behavioral or discipline problems. The goal for Geri was to attend Memorial High School for a year and then transfer to a regular school for the ninth grade.

She survived the eighth grade without major incident, but she never shook her greatest fear. “I just thought I was gonna go back there. I just had that feeling. It got in the way of my focusing on the work.”

When she entered the ninth grade at Monroe Junior High School in the fall of 1970, the other teenage girls started making fun of her for not shaving her legs. Her oldest cousin, 22-year-old Sally, tried to help her. “Geri,” Sally gently prodded, “you gotta shave your legs. You just gotta do it.”

But Geri didn’t have the concentration to do many things. She grew so terrified of Camarillo that she literally could not think straight. Originally, she had been afraid of ending up back in Camarillo only if she had done anything wrong. Additionally, she grew afraid that she would end up back in Camarillo even if she did anything right. “I was afraid that if I shaved my legs or did my best or was happy or did my school work, I’d end up back in Camarillo. I was really afraid of Camarillo.”

She didn’t ponder the logical consequences of her illogical thoughts. Her fears of doing anything wrong or anything right implied that she’d end up back in Camarillo no matter what she did. Mercifully, she didn’t dwell on the implications at the time. “That would’ve been too devastating to think about,” she chuckled at the memory. “It’s madness, isn’t it?” she blushed and covered her lips with her fingers. “I think I needed help, and I wasn’t getting it,” she continued retrospectively. And then, decades removed from her teenage torment, she reached the most jarring conclusion of all: “I think I should’ve stayed in Camarillo longer.”

But at the age of 15, C was the last place she wanted to be. At Monroe Junior High School, she tried to draw certain things—a skeleton, a camel, bubbles—but somehow they each triggered the same familiar fear. The arithmetic book bothered her, too, for no special reason.

Geri’s paranoid schizophrenia was one condition that could not be cured with a change of scenery. She faced just as many problems in Iowa as in California. Her cousins could help her only so much with school. Her aunt and uncle could give her only so much attention at home. The doctors in Mason City could treat her only so well. They recommended that she be placed in an Iowa state mental institution similar to Camarillo. A place called Cherokee. Another C.

Mom realized that Geri was no better off in Iowa. She might as well come home.

Geri agreed. Her last day at school in Mason City was November 21, 1970.

She flew home to California the next day. She was aware that it was the seventh anniversary of the assassination. She wore a black-and-white checkerboard suit, a red shirt, matching red shoes, and nylons.

“
You look like a million dollars!” Aunt Leola bid her bon voyage.

Beaming, the genteel Geri boarded the plane.

Mom and Dad saw no alternative but to enroll Geri in the special education classes at Redondo Union High School. Genie was a junior. Geri would enter as a freshman. Maybe Genie could look after Geri. They shared the same bedroom and pink bathroom once again. They had similar schedules. Dad could drive the girls to school each morning on his way to work, and they could walk home together in the afternoons. Beyond that, all Mom and Dad could do was pray.

Geri joined her new classmates in the special education program. Their English class produced a monthly newspaper called
The Sea Hawk
. Geri wrote an article for it, but she didn’t bring it home, because she thought she’d somehow end up back in C.

The math teacher asked Geri to start with Book 6 in the arithmetic workbook series. But Book 6 bothered her for a particular reason, because it sounded like “Buck 6,” as in rebelling or “bucking” authority. So she didn’t do the exercises in the workbook for fear of bucking authority and ending up back in C.

Geri sometimes ate lunch with Genie and told her about the other kids in the special education classes. There were six or seven of them, each developmentally disabled in some way. They were all boys except for Geri and one other girl. Genie knew them all.

One afternoon, Genie caught a group of boys on campus teasing the other girl, calling her names, mimicking her, and laughing at her. The blood coursed through Genie’s veins. Her face turned flush with anger.

Genie dropped her books to the ground, confronted the group of boys, pushed them away, and screamed into their faces, inhaling a bucketful of air before each word and each simultaneous push: “Leave . . . her . . . alone!”

Knocked off balance, the boys tottered in retreat.

“
She has all she can do to just get here!” Genie kept screaming at them. “And you think you’re so smart!”

The boys ran away.

Genie had found a useful new outlet for her rebellious wrath: asshole boys who picked on disabled girls. But Genie was torn between her sympathy for girls like Geri and her desire to detach herself completely from the situation. It was a conflict between allegiance and freedom. On the one hand, Genie could see how hard Geri was struggling and could only imagine how much she was suffering. On the other hand, Genie was having her own teenage problems of juggling friends and boyfriends, and she didn’t feel she could spend every lunch with Geri, introduce Geri to her friends, and invite Geri to their parties. “It was the guiltiest I ever felt in my life,” Genie recollected.

But on their two-mile walks home, it was just the two sisters all alone. Geri kept asking questions and changing the subject without letting Genie get a word in edgewise. Meanwhile, Geri kept veering away from the path toward home.

Genie was at her wit’s end. She didn’t know how to keep Geri’s mind and body from wandering—until she recalled Geri’s uncanny ear for music. Geri could focus on few things, but she somehow had memorized the lyrics, titles, artists, years, and months of release of most of the popular songs. Genie mulled the possibilities. Something with a steady beat. Something akin to a march. Something Geri liked to listen to on the radio.

“
Geri, how does that song go from Three Dog Night?”

“
Which song, Genie?”

“
Oh, you know, ‘One . . . ’”

That was all Geri needed. That was her cue. She stomped to the beat, right foot forward on the very first word: “One,” left, “is the loneliest NUM-BER.”

Genie skipped a beat, then caught up. “One,” left, “is the loneliest NUM-BER.”

They hit their stride: “One,” left, “is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do!” left-right-left-right-left.

They marched down those sidewalks in syncopation through the neighborhoods of south Redondo Beach, singing, giggling, and shouting “NUM-BER” the rest of the way home. For once in their lives, the two sisters were firmly in step.

But there was only so much that Genie, just shy of 17, could do. At the end of her fourth-period class in modern dance one day in February 1971, she noticed the dance instructor waving the girls together for an unexpected announcement. Instead of hollering the usual set of commands that customarily reverberated off the gymnasium walls, the instructor softly begged the girls to “come together closely,” as if to huddle.

The instructor spoke in a calm but somber voice. “I am so sorry to announce this, but we do have a student here who is very, very disturbed. And it is just very, very sad.” Absolute silence. “The janitors will be cleaning it up, but when you go into the locker room right now, you may see some excrement on the lockers.” The girls shifted their feet in discomfort but remained silent. “Please understand that there is someone among us who is going through a very difficult time. Please do not make this any more difficult than it already is.”

“
It’s Geri,” Genie thought. No names were spoken, but Genie knew what must’ve been happening. Geri had P.E. during third period. Geri would’ve been in the locker room during the past hour. As the instructor enunciated her carefully chosen words in carefully measured tones, pleading for nothing more than forbearance, Genie began to realize something that she had never fully comprehended before: “Geri was suffering from a very disturbing sickness, and nobody knew the cure. It dawned on me that Geri wasn’t going to get better. She can go through only so much, and then she flips out.”

Geri had indeed been in the locker room during the previous hour. She had been battling mightily against her single greatest fear in a way that nobody around her could’ve possibly understood. It was late February 1971. That was the problem. It was February. Month Number 2. The Number 2 haunted Geri, because she didn’t want to “buck” or misbehave twice. She didn’t want to be lazy or to rebel a second time, because then she might end up in Camarillo a second time. Because it was month Number 2, her fears were especially heightened. She was afraid that if she went to the bathroom at school during month Number 2, then she’d be doing something wrong that could land her back in Camarillo. She was so petrified of going to the bathroom at school during month Number 2 that she went to the bathroom in her pants. She just happened to be in the locker room at the time. It was kind of hard to clean herself up. She put most of the stuff in a trash can. Then she dabbed a bit of it onto one or two lockers.