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For several summers, we camped at Huntington Beach. Dad pitched our tent next to a veritable tepee city filled with other middle-class families. As soon as we stepped outside, the beach became our floor. I’d take Randy’s hand and race to the shoreline to make sand castles. Dad would secure our striped umbrella while Mom fried hamburgers on the gas burner.
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One memory, an idea I had, stands out: What if I was able to collect at least a couple dozen 7UP bottles and take them to the A&P grocery store, where a salesclerk would give me two cents per bottle? That way I could start saving money to buy a Mele Gold Brocade Covered Jewelry Box, including the real Gold Key. Offering to split the take, I enlisted Randy to come along and help. But he just lingered with an inexplicable grin on his face as I ransacked trash cans and searched the early-morning abandoned beach for green bottles. What was he thinking? Why didn’t he want things? I figured at some point I’d do an investigation into his reasoning. It never happened. None of my bossy ways were documented in Mom’s Randy Scrapbook, yet we did search for 7UP bottles near the old saltwater plunge in Huntington Beach. And I did walk away with six dollars and fifty cents. I have to confess I didn’t share the money I made, but of course, Randy never asked.
My happiest early memories of being Randy’s big sister were at the beach, in the waves, making sand castles and acting out fantasy stories based on The Wizard of Oz. Randy never took the lead role in any of our scenes, but I remember him taking it all very seriously. I also remember how much Randy loved our walks to the pier. Mom would carry a bag of bread crumbs as Dad held little Dorrie in his arms. Robin, Randy, and I fed the seagulls. Randy was enchanted by the big bird’s ability to catch bread in its mouth midair. He was convinced they did it in slow motion. With their big webbed feet and their giant-sized wings, seagulls were his idea of magic.
The bonds we once shared in our bunk-bed days were thinning. But Randy stayed loyal to me. He didn’t, for example, rat me out on the day I pushed him off a dirt hill and onto an old sycamore log, where he broke his leg. He told Mom it was an accident. It was the same year I voted myself in as president of the Beaver’s Club, a secret society whose sole mission was the acquisition of pelts, particularly rabbit’s feet. I reminded myself that being self-elected to supervise its six members was a huge responsibility, so I informed Randy I’d chosen Rilla Jean Williams as vice-president, over him. After all, she had access to her grandfather’s seven rabbit’s-foot key chains. Randy didn’t seem to care. He agreed it was important to make Rilla Jean happy. What a pushover. It was just like the 7UP bottle money. He didn’t care. He just didn’t care.
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On a hazy summer day in 1956, Dad took a photograph of eight-year-old Randy, thirty-five-year-old Mom, and ten-year-old me at the Zzyzx desert resort, tucked away in San Bernardino County. In the foreground we form a triangle in the swimming pool. A wind barrier cuts the Soda Mountains in half. My body is turned away as I begin to lift myself out of the water. At the edge of the pool, Randy stands on tiptoes. He leans forward with his arms outstretched as he reaches for Mom, who’s wearing a fetching black swimsuit with a white bathing cap. As I study the four-by-four-inch black-and-white snapshot, I see Mom’s wide-open fingers waiting in anticipation. I also take note of Randy’s head. Was it always so large?
A series of haphazard memories comes rushing in. Mom and her friend Willie Blandon, my Dad’s friend Bob’s wife, watching us kids play in the waves at Diver’s Cove Beach in Laguna. I remember overhearing them share a private conversation on the subject of giving birth. When Randy’s name came up, they used a series of unusual words to explain something I didn’t understand. “Forceps” was repeated several times. What did that mean? A few years later, we were eating lunch when Mom, once again with Willie, spoke of a friend who’d lost her first baby while giving birth. As they elaborated on the difficulty some infants have coming down the birth canal, Randy’s name was once again brought up, along with words like “cervix” and “forceps.” More puzzled than ever, I wondered what they meant.
Twenty-five years later, lying on a couch and looking at my analyst Dr. Landau’s white plastered ceiling in New York City, I listened to her describe forceps as having the appearance of large salad spoons with pincers. Sometimes they were used to assist babies with heads too large for the mother’s pelvis as they came down the birth canal. If pulled too hard, some infants had lasting psychological issues. She described learning difficulties in children that could be traced back to birth patterns, which included issues relating to stress, decision making, and, for some, even the inability to initiate and complete projects. As she went on, I kept thinking of all the assumptions I’d made about Randy and his so-called Problems. Had he been the victim of a botched medical procedure pulling him into life? I never had the courage to question Mom. I never asked her if Randy’s had been a difficult birth. I never asked her what it was like for her to have a son like Randy. I must have been afraid of her responses. I didn’t want to know her sadness. I didn’t want to know anything about these parts of my mother’s life. Not only back then, but for a long time after. Now, as life would have it, I study her journals and scrapbooks, photographs and letters, still looking for clues.
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In the photograph of the three of us at the Zzyzx desert resort, I look at the distance between Randy’s outstretched arms and my mother’s waiting hands. When Dad clicked the camera before the instant Randy leapt, he must have been caught off guard by Mud’s beauty (Mud’s what he used to call Mom when he was smitten). Maybe he wanted to capture her allure forever and ever. Maybe Dad, like Randy, needed a mother to take care of him too. I doubt he could have foreseen the enormity of the challenges that were yet to come. Mom did, though. Mom knew.
After she died in 2008, I became the family documentarian. Suddenly I was in possession of her thirty-two journals, fifteen family scrapbooks, twenty photo albums, hundreds of letters, plus Dad’s yearbook from USC, and his brochures for Hall and Foreman Inc. Later, when Randy could no longer take care of his things, I became the sole possessor of his two published poetry books, five hundred collages, fifty-four notebooks, and seventy random journals filled with his own brand of cartoons—including my brother’s entire collection of the intimate feelings, fantasies, and disappointments underlying the mystery of his life. I want to understand that mystery. Or at least try to understand the complexity of loving someone so different, so alone, and so hard to place. I wanted to write Randy’s story, and my story of being his sister, because there are so many people who live through the sorrow and pain of not knowing how to manage a family member who has a singularly unique view of life: a sibling who doesn’t fit in or follow the paths the rest of us take; who challenges and bewilders, upsets and dazzles us; who scares some of us away; but who still loves us, in his or her way.