Then Again - Diane Keaton [8]
Well, honey, only 38 more days until that wonderful day when I see you again. Diane said, “Whoopee!”
Well, anyway, she smiled—
Bye, honey,
Love,
Dorothy
Looking West
My first memory is of shadows creating patterns on a wall. Inside my crib, I saw the silhouette of a woman with long hair move across the bars. Even as she picked me up and held me, my mother was a mystery. It was almost as if I knew the world, and life in it, would be unfamiliar yet charged with an alluring, permanent, and questioning romance. As if I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand her. Is this memory real? I don’t know.
Certain things stand out: the snowstorm in Los Angeles when I was three; the Quonset hut we lived in until I was five. It had a wonderful shape. I’ve loved arches ever since. One night, Mr. Eigner, our next-door neighbor, caught me singing “Over the Rainbow” on Daddy’s newly paved driveway. I thought I was going to get into trouble. Instead, he told me I was a “mighty talented young lady.” Daddy worked at the Department of Water and Power in downtown Los Angeles. I’d go visit him at his office when I was five. There was something about looking west from the Angels Flight trolley car that mesmerized me. Tall buildings like City Hall peeked over the hill. I loved Clifton’s Cafeteria and the Broadway department store. Everything was condensed and concrete and angled and bustling with activity. Downtown was perfect. I thought heaven must look like Los Angeles. But nothing compared to the joy of tugging on Mom’s arm, telling her to “Look! Look, Mom.” We both loved looking.
It was hard to know what Mom loved more, looking or writing. Her scrapbooks, at least when I was a little girl, were ruined by endless explanations underneath the photographs. As I got older, I avoided the unwanted envelopes with her “Letters to Diane” like the plague. Who cared about letters? I just wanted pictures. After my incident in the darkroom with Mother’s journal, that was it for me. But when I made the decision to write a memoir at age sixty-three, I began to read Mother’s journals in no particular order. In the middle of this process, I came across what must have been an attempt at her own memoir. Embossed in gold at the top of the cover was 1980. That meant she began to write it when she was fifty-nine. Each entry was dated. Sometimes Mom would start an excerpt, then stop, leaving dozens of pages empty. Or she would write a paragraph on an incident one year, only to return to it a couple of years later, only to restart with yet another approach months after. Over the course of five years, she skipped in and out of her childhood events almost as if she was free-associating. For the most part Dorothy’s tone was forgiving, sweet, and sometimes elegiac. But sometimes it wasn’t. She must have been taking stock of her life by dredging up memories of those days in the thirties when she was sandwiched between the harsh rules laid down by the Free Methodist church and the lure of life outside Beulah’s constraints. I hate to believe it’s true, but life threw Dorothy some punches she didn’t recover from.
Family Feelings
My father, Roy Keaton, nicknamed me Perkins when I was very young, maybe three or four years old. He used it when he had “family feelings.” When he felt estranged, he called me Dorothy. Daddy made it clear with all three of Mother’s pregnancies that he wanted a boy. As we girls grew, it became obvious that I was the one he wished had been the boy of his dreams. I was the tomboy, a quiet girl who gave no one trouble. I don’t know why Dad favored me over my sisters. Sometimes he confided thoughts he didn’t even share with Mother. I always listened wordlessly. When he finished he would say, “Isn’t that right, Perkins, huh? Huh?” He knew I would always agree. I think he also knew I always agreed with Mother too.
We moved a lot. When I was 4 we lived in an old two-story frame house on Walnut