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stoned teenagers thought swinging sounded like a good idea. The smell of cedar-chip chimney smoke and the smell of salt from the ever-present, overriding ocean made me bleary-eyed and sharp-nostriled, made me feel that I was home. And then we turned onto the Pacific Coast Highway, the tunnel of wind aggravating our faces and our hair, and the smell of anything else was lost to the fish and salt and seaweed and miles of fine, warm, undissolvable sand.
    Flying by the foamy, swampy Cardiff lagoon on the east side of the highway, I remembered the time my mother drove right down into it, spaced out so completely that she didn’t realize she was veering until she’d veered right off the highway and we were nose-down in ten feet of pollywog-filled lagoon water. She looked stunned when the car stopped, just sat there gaping at her hands on the wheel, her mouth an uncomprehending O, her eyes searching for a way to reverse the actions of the previous moment. Then water started pouring in through the open windows, and I tried to release the latch on my passenger door in order to swim up to safety. But the car had submerged obliquely, swaying to the side, like those Cadillacs at Cadillac Ranch, and my door was wedged in and wouldn’t budge. I wriggled out of my seatbelt, reached across my mother, and opened her door. There was a brief pause after I yanked on the handle, the familiar click hanging in the air almost like a parody of underwater echo-distortion, and then a powerful sucking sound as green water invaded the vehicle, rushing in all at once when it discovered its opportunity. “Come on, Mom,” I mouthed, jabbing her thigh. She looked at me with her mouth still open and I couldn’t tell if she understood me or not. I unbuckled her seatbelt and pushed at her hips. She was heavy and uncooperative, so I crawled over her, plugged my nose, and swam up the few feet to oxygen. When I reached the surface, intending to dive back down and retrieve my mother, I saw that there was already a group of onlookers gathered at the bank of the lagoon. “Oh!” they said collectively when I emerged. A man in a checkered shirt jumped into the water and freestyled aggressively toward me, looking ridiculously dramatic and bizarre. “I’ve got to get my mom,” I said, before he could quite get his hands on me, and disappeared back under the murk. Just as I realized how hard it was to keep my eyes open in the cloudy paint-jar of the marsh, I bumped into my mother on her way up from the bottom. Her hair floated around her head like seaweed. I grabbed her waist and pushed her up into the air, holding my breath and pressing my soggy tennis-shoed feet into the sludgy primordial floor of the swamp. Checkered-shirt man must have grabbed her, because I was relieved of her weight almost immediately and my body buoyed to the surface. After that I just remember being wet and stinky, embarrassed beyond anything I had known, sitting with my ever-silent mother on the side of the road and waiting for the tow truck to arrive.
    Being with my father in the car alone was a much different experience from being part of the carpool gang happily transported to and from school or swim class or the movies. When my friends and I were piled into the car, my dad donned his wacky chauffeur persona, with crazy driving pyrotechnics meant to confuse and amuse us. But a private roadtrip was different, better in some ways since I didn’t feel obliged to laugh at his spastic cursing, or worry about what my friends would think of my obviously peculiar dad. I could laugh, or not laugh, or cry with rage, as my father seemed crammed so tight inside his own head he wouldn’t have noticed if I turned into a giant rooster and started to crow. I was used to being ignored, though, during this ride to the pizza parlor. These were the black frames in between the bright ones, these lapses of attention from my dad. The disappearance of the face behind the hands, the scary momentary loss