My decision to attend college and law school at Arizona State University and not in my native Los Angeles was due to several factors. First among them was my love of the desert. I come by it naturally.
Mom, her name is Charlotte but she goes by Charlie, grew up in Kuruman, South Africa, which sits on the edge of the Kalahari desert. She and her parents - her mother, a Peace Corps volunteer, fell in love with and married a significantly older South African rancher - often hiked and camped in the desert. When her father passed away she and her mom, my grandmother, moved back to the United States, settling near family in Southern California. As a child Mom and I had spent many a long weekend in the nearby California deserts.
I was also in Arizona because I wanted out of Dad's shadow. Dad was a successful transactional lawyer. He was not considered the city's best - a fact that rankled him - but regularly appeared on those ubiquitous best lawyer lists. He could also be an asshole. My decision to leave was regularly confirmed during my trips home during my college years. Dad, never known for his amiability, grew increasingly cranky, often targeting Mom and her career as a legal secretary for his vitriol. While he said he could see her working if her job was something important like a doctor, he asserted that the wife of a high powered attorney like him should not be working as a secretary.
People assumed that is how they met, the familiar story of a lawyer hitting on the help. Their history was a bit more sordid; I suspected part of Dad's objection to her career was a desire to bury this part of his past. Mom had not met Dad when working as a secretary, she had been a sixteen year old court runner - making hand deliveries around town - for his firm, filling in for the summer for a staff member who just had a baby. She had dreams, after a career as a professional dancer, of becoming a lawyer. Instead she found herself pregnant with a child - yep, that's me - of a lawyer twice her age. There was a scandal which Dad made right by marrying her, but neither of my parents ever talked about it. I had pieced the story together from the accounts of various relatives. When I confronted Mom about it on one of our desert hikes, she confirmed its truth and filled in the blanks.
It was my first year of law school when the world blew up. Dad had a stroke. The doctor opined that his increasing irritability of the past few years may have been due to undetected mini-strokes; Dad had refused to see a doctor. Mom quit her job to provide full time care. When I went home at the end of the year I found her exhausted. Dad's negative personality had only grown worse, he had become an angry abusive man. He refused to go into a full time care facility and refused to allow live-in help, considering his decision to tolerate daily visits by a nurse a sufficient concession to Mom.
I suggested sitting out of law school for a year and moving to Los Angeles to help, but Mom nixed the idea. Dad, however, only became worse and despite my frequent trips home during my second year at school Mom often looked like she could bear no more. I was looking into transferring to a local law school when Mom made a suggestion. She and Dad would move to Tempe, where I could help out. It would also allow her to return to the desert and away from Los Angeles, a place she had never fallen in love with. There were, she suggested, few things more rejuvenating for her then the chance escape for long walks in Arizona's barren rock landscape.
I had done well in law school. While mentioning law around Dad was impossible, it sent him into either a snarling rage or a deep depression, I found in Mom a depth of knowledge about the law that was surprising and immensely helpful. One day, after the move, while Dad was with the part time nurse and she and I were hiking in the Superstition Mountains, I asked her if she'd considered going to law school.
"I thought about it. When you were six I enrolled part-time at UCLA, but I was trying to balance being a Mom and helping your Dad's career; we did a lot of client entertainment and his firm made many demands on spouses. And the truth is I felt out of place at the school. I was a 23 years old with a child and driving a Mercedes surrounded by 18 year olds discussing beer pong. I also wanted more children but if I had, balancing that with going to college and law school part-time, well I wouldn't have gotten done to my mid-thirties."
I didn't venture into why she didn't have more children. As a child I had often asked Mom about some brothers and sisters, but she always effortlessly changed the subject. Then, once, I asked Dad. There was a nasty fight that night; it was one of the few times I heard Mom lose her temper. Dad accused Mom of putting me up to ask the question - she hadn't - and was categorical that he wanted no more children. Mom shot back, her voice steely and cold, then he should stop complaining about her career choice. She was not simply going to sit at home all day and she wasn't joining the Junior League. The temperature in the house was sub-zero for a week.
Mom continued, returning me to the present. "And there was something else, I saw how nasty the law could be, the constant fighting, the dishonesty, the cut-throat competition. It was not how I wanted to spend my life. So once you hit fourth grade I took a job as a legal secretary. I figured if I got lucky enough to get pregnant again it would be a career easy to take a break form. Happily, it's something I turned out to love."
That I recalled clearly. Growing up Mom would come home from work with a happy smile and a story of a kindness someone had showed her at the office. Dad would drag in several hours later, complaining about this asshole or that shithead, and start on the scotch, sometimes needling Mom about her job.
"Your Dad didn't like it, he thought that I should devote myself full-time to his career, but I needed something of my own. And I was still a pretty good hostess."
That I also recalled. Dad's clients were constant visitors. Sometime in my teens it became clear to me that Mom was the far more gracious and charming of the pair. She was their social motor, the one that got them out, who smoothed his hard and all too often caustic edges. People respected Dad's skills, they wanted to hang with Mom.
They did make an odd couple. Dad was rough around the edges with a tendency to say the wrong thing. Mom was cool and graceful, always in control. Unless Mom was dressing him his clothes were be rumpled and mismatched. Mom made whatever she wore, whether an old pair of jeans or an evening gown, look good.
Their looks were similarly diverse. Dad was, as noted, sixteen years older than Mom and two inches shorter. There were signs that he had at one time been an athlete, he was broad shouldered and stocky, but his devotion to the office was revealed in his body, until his stroke he carried about fifty more pounds than he should. His once dark brown hair was gray and evident only around the fringes of a balding scalp.
Mom, on the other hand, was beautiful. As a young teen I, despite a few snickered remarks from friends, denied it, but by the time I was sixteen even I had to admit Mom was striking. Now, at forty years old, she remained slender, very slender, five feet nine inches tall and 121 pounds slender. Slim shoulders and hips, flat belly, flat behind and small breasts. Her hair was a light blonde and although in my youth she was always changing the way she wore it, when she reached her mid-thirties she decided to keep it short. Her symmetrical face was longer than it was wide and featured and penetrating green eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a rounded chin. Her skin, although she sported a few wrinkles, glowed a healthy pink. In light of the fact that she spent so much time outdoors in our exceedingly dry climate I once asked her about it.
"Short baths, keep it clean, lots of moisturizer, lots of sun block (the expensive kind), good diet, and drink a lot of water. Why do you ask kiddo? Afraid of looking old before your time?"
"No, its just that you're so pretty. I was wondering."
A smile of genuine warmth crossed her face.
"Why, thank you."
But my parents were not wholly unalike. They both had strong personalities. Dad would get his way, however, through bluster and intimidation. Mom's style was to charm, but there was no mistaking her determination.
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