Then Again - Diane Keaton [18]
We moved into the beige board-and-batten tract home surrounded by acres and acres of orange groves at 905 North Wright Street, Santa Ana. It was 1957. The utopia Southern California held out to those of us who grew up in the fifties was irresistible. We believed happiness would come from owning a Buick station wagon, a speedboat, and a Doughboy swimming pool. It didn’t take long before the orange groves started disappearing in favor of more developments, with names like Sun Estate Homes. Leveling the Orange out of Orange County made me sad, and I told Dad. His response was concise. “That’s life, Diane, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.” In my own misbegotten way, I bought into his belief of living out the American dream, but the loss of the orange trees lingered.
The move to Santa Ana was my prelude to adolescence. Not only was I going to be a young woman; Dad started telling me how pretty I’d be and how some boy would love me all up, and wouldn’t that be fun? I didn’t want any boy loving me, not at all, not for a second. I began to formulate how much better it would be if a lot of people loved me instead of one confusing, hard-to-understand boy. This barely realized notion, among others, unwittingly helped drive me toward acting. Many of Dad’s messages became justifications for seeking an audience in lieu of intimacy. Intimacy, like drinking and smoking, was something you had to watch out for. Intimacy meant only one person loved you, not thousands, not millions. It made me think of Mom on that stage at the Ambassador Hotel and Dad’s unhappiness about having to share her with others.
We found our way to better conversations after I won a debate at Willard Junior High School. Thus began many nightly discourses over solutions to family problems and local politics. Dad was a Republican. He argued for lower taxes and better behavior. Mom, a determined Democrat, believed in higher taxation and more leniency with us kids. I chose to argue in her defense. What happened in the heat of our deliberations became a determining factor in my future. The more intense things became, the better I argued my point. Following my impulses did something wildly exciting; it triggered thought. Fighting for something within the safety of a formal context became my path to personal expression, but, more important, it gave me the opportunity to know Dad in a different way. He was a great debater. And fun too. It wasn’t the subject or the content of our deliberations; it was the shared experience that meant so much. I couldn’t care less if I lost. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a turning point in my relationship with my dad. I was learning how to navigate something new: Dad’s mind.
C-Minus
In my fourteenth year, Mom handed me “My Diary” after a parent-teacher meeting in the eighth grade. It was her way of addressing my C-minus in English. I had been put in the so-called dumbbell section, with bilingual Mexican girls, bad boys, and drifty dreamy types like me. Bound together by a lack of skills, the buxom Mexican girls and I became friends. They took prepubescent, big-personality Diane under their wing. They were kind and generous and a great audience to my pratfalls. After three years in remedial English, I still didn’t know a conjunction from a preposition or a proper noun from a common noun. In those days there were no alternative teaching methods to help kids like us. I had a lot of feelings, but I didn’t understand what we were being taught. Were we even being taught? I don