What falls away : a memoir by 1945- Mia Farrow Read Free Book Online Page B

though never as frequently as I would have wished, because it was a substantial drive from Beverly Hills, and we had a well-equipped beach house in Malibu. But each Fourth of July, toward evening, a bright yellow school bus jogged down the steep hillside to the plateau, conveying my family, friends, food, drink, and all manner of
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    fireworks. In cardboard boxes we carried the things down steep wooden steps to the beach—by July our feet were tough as shoes.
    Blankets were spread upon the sand and the women settled into soft, intimate talking and the men and boys gathered driftwood and dry seaweed to build a fire, and the kids flew like kites on summer wmds. When the signal came, we pulled off the sweatshirts covering our bathing suits and on borrowed bravery we waded after our father toward the rising palisades of water and followed his deep dive beneath the waves. Out past the breakers, fear of the dark heaving ocean and the riptides and all manner of creatures in its chill depths kept me close to my father, and when I grew tired I held on to his strong shoulders. Coming back through the waves I stayed near, so when they pounded me, churning the last breath from my lungs, he would find me and deliver me to the welcoming of rough towels under which I shivered into dry jeans and a white sweatshirt, with sand in everything. Then we sat with our mothers on blankets and looked into the fire. With the warmth swelled a sense that all was well and our thoughts returned to familiar things.
    After hot dogs sloppy with mustard and potato chips, we waved sticks over leaping flames, blackening our marshmal-lows, and when at last it was night, fireworks hissed and boomed and bejeweled the summer sky. Awed, we shouted and shook our sparklers on the Fourth of July. When it was over our father threw sand on the dying fire, then weary from the hard sun and wind and the demands of the terrible swim, with the night chill settling into blackness, we gathered our things and climbed the steps to the plateau, where the bus awaited the sleepy journey home.
    Visits to that place by the sea inspired intense and indecipherable feelings, a confluence of wildness and order, of magic and the commonplace, of vitality and death, content-

    ment against unutterable yearning, instantaneous and eternal.
    When I was ten, and had resumed full school days, I began playing with an El Salvadoran girl who spoke little English, named Roxanna Tinocco. Soon, she was one of my closest friends, but her family was going back to El Salvador, and who knew i£ we'd ever see each other again? So we were shuffling morosely around the school yard, arm in arm, when Roxy invited me to El Salvador for the summer. The thought of going so far for so long was frightening, but by the time her parents made the invitation official and my own parents got enthusiastic, I could see that it would be an adventure.
    My mother insisted on taking me out to buy new clothes for the trip, even though shopping was an ordeal we avoided whenever possible because I hated it so. I hated having to look at clothes and hated trying them on and invariably I became cranky and literally faint from boredom. But this time she kept the expedition brief and cheerfril— soon we were sipping tea at the Beverly Hills Hotel, eating delicious cakes and chatting happily. And as we sat there, I became aware that my mother was talking to me like a friend, as if I was grown-up. In that moment some essential part of me, stirring in my most intimate, shadowy center, was acknowleged and stepped blinking into the bright afternoon light.
    The departure was wrenching. The Tinoccos had to pry me off my parents and I cried all the way to San Salvador, where, within hours of our arrival, the resident seamstress came to measure me for riding clothes. Later, three sets of snow-white jodhpurs and shirts arrived, neatly folded and wrapped in brown paper and a perfect fit, for my lessons the following morning.
    On a tour of the