Free Borrowed Finery: A Memoir by Paula Fox

trapped inside the cotton folds. I had learned it was dangerous to complain within my mother’s hearing. My hand flew to cover my mouth and hold in my startled cry.
    Several weeks earlier, I had murmured to Daddy that I had a toothache. My mother just then entered the room. In a neutral voice she said, “I’ll fix that for you.” She turned, smiling, to my father. “Would you put her in the rumble seat?” It may have seemed to him that she had nothing in mind but a short drive in the open air, but I heard sounds of distant thunder.
    She drove on the steep, curving hills that rose across from Malibu. Through the back window, I saw how rigidly she held her back, how stiff her neck was, as she drove like the wind and I was shaken like a rattle.
    The drive lasted twenty minutes or so—the drive lasted forever. When we returned to the beach house, she emerged from the car and stood like a statue for a moment, staring at me in the rumble seat with her great dark eyes, her face stony. “Do you still have a toothache?” she inquired politely. Driving me on the mountain roads had not lessened her rage but intensified it.
    *   *   *
    One afternoon I found my father slouched in a canvas chair on the “captain’s bridge,” a bottle of gin on the floor next to his right foot. “Colonel Fear,” he called out, in a stupefied voice. I glanced quickly back at the door, thinking someone might be there. No one. “Have you ever met him? Ah, if you’d met him, you’d not forget him,” he muttered. Briefly his bloodshot blue eyes came into focus. He saw it was me. “And whose little girl are you?” he inquired, in a comical falsetto voice. When I laughed, he said, “I knew when I took you to the Adirondacks that I’d won you. I licked up a bit of salt I’d spilled on my hand, and you said, ‘You’re funny,’ and that’s how I knew.”
    It was true that he had won me. Part of the time he was an ally, part of the time a betrayer. I was not afraid of him, only of what he might do. One afternoon when he dropped me into the ocean, and I was sputtering as I dog-paddled—though by that time I had overcome my terror to some extent—he asked me whom I’d prefer to be stranded on a desert island with, Vin Lawrence or himself. Perversely, I said, “Vin!” to his bobbing head a few yards away. He laughed, swallowed water, swam to me, and held my arm all the way back to the beach.
    *   *   *
    Vin Lawrence told me about an evening walking along the beach with my father. He said that earlier they had lifted a few glasses. As they walked, they found themselves treading on hundreds of tiny fish puffing and flopping on the sand. My father threw them back into the ocean, handfuls at a time. The surf flung them up on the beach again. “He was frantic,” Vin said. When I grew up, I learned the fish had come to the beach to mate and then to die.
    *   *   *
    One night, along with an actor, Minor Watson, my father drove us to Venice Amusement Park. The roller coaster’s dark coil lifted up from the surface of the black water and flung its length farther into the darkness. Only a few small bulbs hung from a wire, casting a dim light on the narrow tracks. Daddy persuaded me to try the ride. I was reluctant. Still, I stepped after him into one of the open cars where Minor Watson was already sitting, a vague, kindly smile on his face.
    We plunged and ascended. I howled to be let off, howled in fright, clutched my father’s jacket until, as the track leveled out, the car slowed down before coming to a halt.
    Dazed, I stumbled along the pier until I heard my father’s voice calling me. I turned around to see Daddy and Minor standing together in front of a glaringly lit shooting gallery, their faces in shadow. I felt I didn’t know anyone in the world, and no one knew me.
    Daddy picked up a rifle chained to the counter, shot, hit a target, and won a stuffed animal. On our return to Malibu, he drew the car up in front of a