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I foraged for clues the same way Dad made pictures: voraciously. “Your memory is like a steel trap!” Mom liked to tell me. I could tell by the fullness of her voice that this was a very good trait, and that she had it, too. Memory was proof that you were clever, that you were observant, and this was a quality that my father, as a photographer, deeply admired.
Remembering, then, became a way to please both of my parents at the same time. This was not always easy to do, as they were nearly as opposite as two people could be: my mother the buoyant go-getter, my father the thoughtful, introverted artist. I loved them both with great and equal, though entirely separate, devotion, so I kept my eyes and ears open, harvesting scenes and details and smells, imprinting them into the nubby weave of memory. There they lodged, crisscrossed and notched one upon another like the miniature pioneer cabins I built out of Lincoln Logs, imagining wayward wolves prowling the perimeter and plucky sisters in calico bonnets, safe inside, standing guard.
Entire years and passages of time were blank, while other moments stirred out of the shadows and stuck. The barrel of roasted peanuts at the wine store, the hollow, dusty crackle the shells made as I squished them open between my fingers; sitting with Meg on the carpeted landing of the stairs in our house, neither up nor down but halfway in between. There was a hexagonal window at ankle height on the landing that was too low for grown-ups to see out but was for us a secret child-size porthole.
One memory is recurring: standing in my crib in my upstairs bedroom, staring into the mirror on the wall. I can’t be more than two. On the bottom right pane, someone—me?—has stuck a small, round yellow smiley-face sticker. The idea it stirs in me is: happy. The rectangular glass is divided into six panes and hangs horizontally, like a window. I grip the rail, puzzling at the reflection staring back, looking out at the same time I am looking in.
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We lived in an off-white clapboard-and-stone colonial on Legation Street, in a residential neighborhood of northwest Washington, D.C. My parents stretched and bought the house for $29,500 in 1967, two years before Meg was born, the year my father, David L. Arnold, landed his dream job as a picture editor and photographer at National Geographic.
Dad had always loved pictures. As a seven-year-old growing up in Claymont, Delaware, he would sit on the front steps every Friday afternoon, waiting for the mailman to deliver Life magazine. He studied the first grainy images of the Normandy invasion, the Americans taking Rome. He examined the textures and faces, the expressions of joy and pain, of the places and people he didn’t know but thought he could, if only he observed them carefully enough.
His father, Harold, a chemist at DuPont, built a darkroom in the basement of their house, using tin cans with their bottoms snipped out, a paper safe made out of plywood. For the timer, he gutted an old electric clock—two dark-red bulbs, filaments like glowing worms. Dad was eight when he was invited in for the first time. My grandfather closed the door, turned on the enlarger, and slid the paper into the liquid. Wordlessly, my father watched the faint gray ghosts appear on paper, slowly thicken, and gradually take on substance, rising from the celluloid negative into recognizable black-and-white forms.
Through the ceiling Dad could hear the radio in the kitchen, his mother, Mary, making pot roast and his younger brother, Philip, pushing a toy car along the floor. Philip had been brain-damaged at birth when the doctor yanked him out too forcibly with forceps. Mary was small and birdlike, with a propensity for worry. Her own mother had died of cancer when she was eleven, and she’d been raised by her older sister and her father. After Philip was born, Mary became ever more fragile, rattling with nerves, expecting the worst, because it had already happened.
Though he was still young himself, Dad believed that Philip was his responsibility now. Privately, he tried to teach him to read, pulling slips of paper from a hat, helping him decipher the letters. Philip managed only a few words at first, then sentences, eventually a whole book, Fun with Dick and Jane. Dad was sure there were depths to his brother that no one, not even he, could see. Dad carried this duty the rest of his life. Several times a year, he visited Phil at the communities where he lived in upstate New York and, later, Wisconsin, took him on road trips, sent him funny cards and pictures, and brought him to Huntly Stage for holidays. Below Dad’s loyalty lay the guilt. The healthy son would have to be the one to shine, to live out his life not only for himself but for his parents and his brother, too.
As a boy in the cozy basement cave, though, Dad was free of all entanglements. How could there be such a beneficent, quiet place to hide in his own house? It reminded him of his favorite book, Robinson Crusoe. His bed was the sailing ship that wrecked in the great storm, and the darkroom his hut, all of the castaway’s necessities cached and close at hand, fashioned out of imagination and simple, utilitarian things—salvation in the wreckage.
Years later, Dad inherited his father’s darkroom equipment for his first job, as photographer for The New Era, a weekly newspaper in Essex, Connecticut. It fit perfectly into a crude little closet in the apartment he rented. After he met my mother, Betsy McDonald, in 1961, and she dropped out of Smith to get married, he lugged the darkroom with him as they moved around the Northeast, lighting out from one photography job to another.
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PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Dad aboard the Talitiga, South Pacific, 1973
October 29, 1973: an ordinary slow Monday at the National Geographic Society. A cable arrives from the governor of American Samoa, inviting the magazine to send a representative on a voyage aboard a vessel called the Talitiga, leaving in two days’ time. The expedition will visit tiny, uninhabited atolls in the South Pacific to survey seabirds and nesting green turtles and assess the need for conservation in the region. Dad gets the nod. By noon, expenses have been advanced, film drawn from the locker, six cases of photographic equipment organized, wife consulted, plane reservations requested. He packs hastily, and the next day, my second birthday, Dad’s on a flight to Los Angeles.
A few days after he left, our furnace broke. It was damp and cold in Washington that fall, and Meg and I both got sick. Mom had to go down to the Geographic to ask for an advance on his salary so she could afford a new one. Dad’s only communication was a cable he sent to the magazine while steaming toward their last port of call.
The Talitiga was a roller, grossly unfit for high seas. She pitched back and forth with an abandon that my father initially found exhilarating but that soon turned nauseating in twenty-foot swells. Dishes ricocheted off the galley shelves, the engine caught on fire and was swiftly doused, and all on board were felled by a horrific, churning seasickness. Dad lay sweating and hallucinating in his overheated berth, emerging two days later to calm seas and high opera playing on the deck. At one stop, they exhumed the body of a Samoan man whose bones they would return to his proper home, and at another they performed emergency surgery on a wizened old hermit with skin cancer. Dad shot dozens of rolls of film. On the flights back to Washington, he transcribed his notes, wrote haiku, drank one too many gin and tonics.
Even when Dad was home, though, he seemed to hover just out of view, the suggestion of someone rather than the person himself—appearing at bath time, and after, stretching out on Meg’s bed beside us, the picture book One Morning in Maine propped open on his lap—a transient figure slipping back into darkness. Often in my memory he is a blurred silhouette climbing the stairs to the third floor, a cramped room under the eaves with shag carpet the color of flames. I see only his back, disappearing from view. The attic was his private place, where he played his bass violin and recorder, where we ventured only when we’d been invited.
Music had been his first love, even before photography. It was his family’s language. In the evenings, his parents sat together at the piano, his father singing in his booming bass-baritone while
his mother’s fingers raced across the piano, trying to keep pace. When he was seven, Dad began taking recorder and violin lessons; by high school he was playing second chair in the All-Eastern Orchestra. At Wittenberg University, in Ohio, he learned to play the bass violin, joined a jazz trio, the Collegiates, and made a record.
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Dad and his father, Delaware, 1945
His bass violin was six feet tall—taller than him by an inch. Made from a glossy maple, it loomed in its corner of the attic, fragile and intimidating. I feared it a little, in the same way I must have feared my father, abstractly, the passing shadow of authority whom I so badly wanted to please.
The blur in my mind is Dad, whirling after me, or maybe it is me, toddling away in the seconds after I accidentally bumped into the bass and knocked it to the ground, breaking its delicate neck in two. In that moment, the music is gone from the house, replaced by a bellowing rage, brief, and then buried. What I remember is not his anger as much as my shame. I had done this. I had broken his beautiful instrument, which he loved almost as much as us, and some days maybe even more.
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On May 24, 1974, two days shy of their twelfth wedding anniversary, my parents split up. Dad was thirty-seven, Mom just thirty-three, Meg barely five. I was two and a half. For many years, no one talked about the day Dad moved out or what came later. It was the strangest kind of demarcation: utterly forgettable but absolutely defining.
Dad took his bass violin, its neck repaired with wood glue, his jazz records, the darkroom equipment, a few books, his tent and camping gear, and a rough slab of driftwood shaped like a fish, a black knot for an eye. Everything else he left behind. Later, according to the terms of the divorce, Mom would get the white Peugeot sedan with red vinyl interior and an unreliable starter, 60 percent equity in the house on Legation Street, and, as was typical of the time, full custody of Meg and me.
With Dad gone, the music in our house changed. Mom listened to sappy seventies love songs on the radio as she whirred the vacuum across the carpet, leaving straight lines in the pile like stripes in fresh-cut grass. You’d think that people would have had enough of silly love songs. Sometimes while she made dinner, Meg and I crawled under the side tables on either end of the sofa, pressed our ears to the stereo speakers, and sang along to plaintive lyrics we didn’t understand: Walkin’ in the rain and the snow when there’s nowhere to go and you’re feelin’ like a part of you is dying…
One evening before bed, Mom lay facedown on the living room floor and wept. Alarmed, I lay next to her and reached for her hand. What had I done wrong? It must have been that night, in my tiny, hammering heart, that I vowed not to do anything that might make her cry again, that I began my silent, stalwart campaign to keep myself together, always, no matter what, so that she would, too.
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In the 1970s, there wasn’t a road map for how to get divorced. My parents’ separation dragged on for nearly three years as they muddled along, in and out of each other’s lives. Dad occasionally came over to tinker in his workshop. Sometimes he minded us—“babysitting,” it was called back then when fathers watched the children—while Mom finished night school to become an accountant.
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Mom, Meg, and me at the C & O Canal, Washington, D.C., 1976
Some weekends, we stayed with Dad at his apartment on Newark Street. Dinner was fried chicken at Roy Rogers, spinning on the shiny red plastic stools while a jolly, larger-than-life Roy in his red neckerchief beamed down on us from above the counter. His winking smile lit a flame of pure joy in my heart. How could you possibly be sad, basking in the glow of a grin like that? Afterwards, Dad would tuck us into sleeping bags on canvas cots he’d set up under his desk. On one wall he’d painted an enormous mural of the sun setting behind a thatch-roofed cabana, inspired by his trip to the South Pacific. We fell asleep to Miles Davis on the stereo, turned down low.
The year I started kindergarten, Mom got a full-time job as a CPA at Price Waterhouse. Meg and I walked ourselves six blocks home every day after school, crossing Nebraska Avenue, the front door key dangling like a cliché from a red-and-white bakery string around Meg’s neck. Sometimes we stopped at the corner store to buy long sticks of grape-flavored Big Buddy bubble gum, which we gnawed on, smacking bubbles all the way home.
We had a string of live-in babysitters, TrishSharonTrishLaura, who snuck cigarettes in Dad’s attic, which Mom had converted into a guest room. They wore their long brown hair parted in the middle and pulled back in pigtails and smelled of smoke and wool sweaters. Their chief duties seemed to consist of being in the house with us in case their cigarettes caught fire and reheating the tuna fish casserole that Mom fixed for dinner when she worked late.
On weekends, Mom took us ice skating or pedaled us around on the plastic seat on the back of her ten-speed bike. We walked through the woods in Rock Creek Park and went out to Arlington to watch the planes roar over the bike path on their descent into National Airport. Sometimes in the evenings, when it was still light, we’d ride our tricycles down the alley that sloped past our one-car garage to the street.
In our neighborhood of northwest Washington, alleys functioned as shared driveways. Ours ran up from Legation Street, along the side of our house to Military Road; halfway up it T’ed into the back alley that came in from 32nd Street. A tall wooden fence enclosed our backyard on two sides, with a gate leading from the alley to our kitchen door. When the neighbor boy came over to play, he slithered under the fence rather than opening the latch. His name was William, but we called him Lowly Worm, after the character in the Richard Scarry books Dad read to us at bedtime.
The alley is long and steep, a thrilling sliver of fast-flying asphalt. Mom positions herself in the street at the bottom while we push our tricycles to the top. Mine is a plastic Big Wheel, Meg’s an orange, metal trike with white handlebar streamers. They are too small for us, and we have to pull our knees up to our chins so our feet don’t drag on the ground, hunch over the handlebars, and wait at the top until Mom gives us the go-ahead that the coast is clear.
Side by side, we haul off down the hill, gathering speed, lean on the foot brakes, and clatter to a stop in front of Mom. She is clapping and beaming the way she did with her whole face—her green cat eyes and straight white teeth and deep dimples. The plastic wheels jar and bump along the uneven asphalt. We do this again and again, until it’s too dark to see. It seems entirely probable we’ll whiz right past Mom, clear across the street, and into the neighbor’s front shrubs, like an avalanche thundering down its slide path and up the other side.
At the time, I thought this was what all mothers did: work full-time and fix leaky toilets and wash our wool tights by hand and run the car pool and call us down the hill until it’s almost dark, and then get up and do it all again, by herself. Only now that I’m a mother do I see how radical this was, how tired and lonely she must have been.
Not that she ever let on. In my memory, she is waving madly, her smile throwing sparks at the bottom of the alley, yelling “All clear!”
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On Wednesday afternoons, Dad took us out for mint-chocolate-chip ice cream cones at Baskin-Robbins. Maybe it was on one of those Wednesdays that he taught me how to ride my blue two-wheeled Raleigh. There I am, high astride the bicycle seat, head turned back to look at Dad and make sure he’s still holding on, and he is, pushing and grinning at the same time. I look ahead, pump the pedals uncertainly, look back again. Dad five steps behind me, mouth stretched wide in a silent cheer, arms flung open in a last big send-off, palms to the sky as though in supplication. I am riding, flying. I’m off.
This is where I stop. This is where my memories of Washington cluster together, pressing inward like fortress walls, summoning a defense, a
s though they might possibly prevent what happens next.
I don’t want the girl to leave.
The girl leaves.
My mother has met a man named Ron, and they’ve decided to get married. Ron is a divorced naval officer and self-made Wall Street investment banker, with a son and daughter almost exactly our ages. He lives in New Jersey. We’re moving there. That’s all I am told.
I tell no one we’re moving. Not my teachers, not Lowly Worm, not my friends. In mid-April, I walk out of Lafayette Elementary School for the last time. I’ve left my first-grade cubby cluttered with books, pens, and papers—all of my school supplies shoved into the back of my desk in a miserable pile. I imagine my teacher’s shock when she finds them the next day, after I don’t return. The mess shames me, but not nearly as much as leaving does.
There is one thing I take: a library book called All-of-a-Kind Family. The cover depicts five sisters in old-fashioned blue-and-white pinafores on the steps of their brick New York City apartment at the turn of the century—the safe, sure confines of home. The due date is stamped on the slip in the back: 6 APR 1978. It is already overdue. I take it deliberately, for keeps, knowing I will never bring it back.
My memory of the day we leave Washington is fuzzy and unreliable. Is it true or a conflation of all our subsequent partings, merged into one burned-on-the-brain goodbye? Dad stands on the sidewalk, squinting into the bright April sun. Or maybe it is raining. He has come to see us off. The dogwood in the front yard is bursting with pale-pink blossoms, and the magenta azalea unleashes its fragrance as it has every spring, indifferent to our departure. Meg and I are on the front steps, watching men load cardboard boxes into the green-and-white moving van; the dining room table is shrouded in cotton batting. Unaware of how our lives are about to change, we hang upside down by our knees on the curlicue black metal railing, spinning round and round until we’re so dizzy we have to stop. Then the truck is pulling away, with all our belongings in it. Dad shields his eyes with his hand, watching it go, knowing that in a moment we will, too. His face begins to buckle, a single fat tear squeezing out of the corner of one eye.