Excerpt from Chapter Four “Institutional Child”
"What would you say if I told
you that you have another sister?" my father asks Laura and me.
It is 1967. I am thirteen, Laura is ten. We are staying overnight at a motel
somewhere in California’s Death Valley. On summer vacation, we’ve
just driven from San Francisco and will spend about a month driving home
cross-country, visiting the Great Salt Lake, the Grand Canyon, a dude ranch
in Montana, and other places I imagine would thrill most any child.
My parents and Laura and I have almost finished dinner in the motel restaurant. Tired after being in the car all day, my mind is swirling with images of the desert. From the car, basins of sand surround us beneath the hot iron of sun. My mouth watering for a cold Coke, and in between bouts of my hogging the Barbies and leaving Laura one of those flat-staring Ken dolls, as much fun to play with as an ice pick, I watch the mirages that glisten and steam off the ribbon of road sizzling ahead. Every now and then, my eyes fasten on the desert’s huge greenish gray cacti that sprout pale pink blossoms from thorny tendrils. I wonder how such a prickly plant could grow such delicate, soft things.
But what I will remember most clearly about this drive is the stifling heat. Relentless, it hangs heavy in the air. The station wagon we rented in San Francisco, like most cars back then, has no air-conditioning.
“Open your window, Brad,”
insists my mother, fanning her face with her hands. “Girls, you too.”
But Laura and I ignore her. Dice has already explained we’re better
off with the windows closed, and Laura and I still believe that his judgment
is infallible. “You’ll only be letting more heat in,”
Dice tells my mother again, more firmly this time.
When finally in the late afternoon we stop at the motel, Laura and I clamber out of the backseat and race to the pool. We beg Dice to take us swimming before dinner --which he does, while our mother settles into a chair by the pool to read one of the library books she has brought on the trip.
Now Dice’s question hovers above our small round table like some strange desert bird bewildered among the plastic potted plants. This is one of Dice’s jokes, I think, glancing over at him to read his expression. But no, he’s serious, I sense at once. I see it in the steady, concentrated look of his green eyes which are fixed on nothing in particular—just the air in front of him—in the scissorlike rigidity of his fingers holding the cigarette he has just lit, and in the grave set to his lips. What could he mean? What is he getting at?