A Certain Kind of Accident : Clara Sturak Always Believed That What She Gave to Others Would One Day Be Returned

It was the first professional stage show that Clara Sturak had ever produced; she was breaking even, and she was happy. She spun her sturdy red Nissan down Pacific Coast Highway in the florid pink twilight, on her way to the Saturday night performance of “A Mum and His Symbols”--those Mums, three darling guys juggling to protest American intervention in Central America. Next to her, head down, counting the night’s receipts, was an Australian actress, Julie Forsythe--Clara had toured with her the year before, all through that continent.

Clara drove in the inside lane. Traffic slowed. She felt a dull thud from the right, which pushed her into the central lane of the highway, where a luckless Asian couple turning left into a beach parking lot were forced to change their weekend plans. The Asians’ car was totaled. A ghost car sped off into the night. The red Nissan burst apart. The steering wheel came up into the center of the car, shredding Clara’s lips, flinging out her teeth. Her chin ripped open, her left arm went smush. And her left foot, instinctively pushing away the accident, shattered like a thrown dish. Ten- and 20-dollar bills scattered and blew across the beach traffic and the highway. Julie plunged out of the car and fell into the arms of a bystander, who began to ask her meaninglessly, “What year is it? Who’s the President? What city are you in?” Tragedy ghouls began instantly to gather along the sides of the highway and along the bluffs above, as money flew and blew around the car, convinced that they were watching a robbery or a drug bust. And behind them, all the Saturday night beach traffic began to back up.

Clara had become part of what she’d so often seen on this road--a very bad car accident on PCH.

The first person at the scene of the crash was a lifeguard who had loped up across the sand. He crouched down beside her--she’d already turned off the ignition key because she couldn’t stand the irritating ding ding that signified that the door was open, when in fact it had been torn off--and began saying, “Calm down, lady. Don’t move your head, lady. What year is it? What city are you in?” And she was able to answer, “Aren’t you David Moore? Didn’t you go to Topanga Elementary?” When he said yes, he was, and yes, he had, she felt she could allow herself to cry.

But she was raised to a certain kind of California life, and she didn’t cry for long. Even as the lifeguard was searching through her mouth with thumb and forefinger for stray teeth, she began requesting--demanding--that someone inform the theater that she and Julie wouldn’t be in. She began what would be a long evening of thanking people. She thanked the lifeguard for rescuing her teeth and the ambulance drivers for being so careful and efficient. By the time her mother and sister and the first few friends had arrived at the emergency room of Santa Monica Hospital, she was thanking her mother’s friend John for having the control to count the blood-stained money that police officer Zirenberg had retrieved from the crash scene. Clara thanked officer Zirenberg herself, who obviously didn’t believe the story of the phantom sideswiper, but was far too polite to say so. Clara thanked orderlies and nurses and clerks and anyone who would listen, even as the blood gathered and caked in her ears in dark little pools.

For years she had consciously lived a certain kind of life. She tithed to charities and gave blood and answered every thank-you note. She wanted to End Hunger and Wage Peace; she gave to the Salvation Army. She joked that the Santa Monica parking tickets she paid was her fourth big charity. She knew that what you gave out in life was what you got back, so that when she had a play produced when she was just a freshman, or took that Australian tour, or even got this chance to produce the Mums, it wasn’t an accident that these things happened; she was playing life according to rules that were both ancient and new; steal-ribbed and irrevocable: What you gave out, you got back.

So naturally--as the attending emergency room doctor began taking tens of minuscule stitches in her lip, and she thanked him as best she could--and her distraught family discussed who should be the orthopedic surgeon to put the dozen shattered bones in her left foot back in place, the doctor who sailed in turned out to be Todd T. Grant, surgeon to the UCLA Bruins--whose son she had gone out with for a while--another friend.

“Is that you under there, Clara?” Dr. Grant said, because by that time the only part of her face that was visible to him was a crushed red mouth and a circle of green surgical paper. “You’ve sure got some good manners under there.” She thanked him for his attention, and though she went clammy with pain, she didn’t change the rhythm of her breathing as the doctor examined her foot and exchanged information with her mother on what young Matt was doing now--taking a crash course in French this summer at Berkeley? Clara was afraid of scars and frightened about the operation to put her foot back together. Dr. Grant put things in proper perspective: “Yes, all this is trying, but you want to know some really bad news? Wilshire Car Wash is going to be torn down soon.”

“No!” said her mom, who was holding her daughter’s hand so hard during the stitches in her lip that Clara’s knuckles cracked.

“No!” said her older sister who had driven in minutes down Pacific Coast Highway from her Palisades home and stood, swaying a little, so pale her freckles stood out like tiny specks of blood, “The car wash is closing?”

“Pretty bad,” a nurse agreed solemnly, and a mugging victim in the next cubicle, dressed in nothing but Levis and a tuxedo tie, joined sociably in the small talk: “Uuh-hunh!” Clara lived in a certain way, and so she wasn’t even surprised that when she woke up from the surgery the next day (her mother, her sister Lisa, her boyfriend Chris, her dad, her little brother Michael, and Gretchen and Erin, her two best friends, all hanging around and about), that Bill Hoffman, technical director for the juggling Mums, had already brought her a potted plant and strung his own big, heavy, man’s watch over the metal rungs around her bed--so that she’d always know what time it was. She wasn’t surprised that Ron Kittlesrud, her prop master, had gone to the tow yard and taken Polaroid snapshots of the smashed car while every dent was still fresh. That her friend Keith had retrieved all of her cassette tapes from the front seat floor of the car, even as the windshield fell in on him.

As soon as her eyes were fairly open, her father was there with a smoothie. An old schoolmate, Sharon Rosen, took over her job as producer and kept Clara supplied with cups of daiquiri ice from 31 Flavors.

She’d had a brush with Death. The woman next to her was very ill, perhaps dying, but her sons were with her night and day, and women friends came and sat quietly--their arched feet in very high heels primly crossed at the ankles--speaking softly in Spanish. Yes, Death was everywhere, and would win, maybe, in the end. But there was a coziness to all of it.

One Mum, Albee Selznick, said to her on the phone, “Santa Monica Hospital? I got my stitches there!” And their director let it be known he knew a good plastic surgeon. And Tori Horowitz, daughter of David “Fight Back” Horowitz, came by with a discreet selection of X-rated comic books and a drugstore tabloid that revealed a Baboon Boy had been found in a thicket of bamboo. The Saltzmans sent Mylar balloons, so did their daughter. So did the Kriegers, so did their daughter.

So first there was the pain. But then there was the love, expressed in so many ways. Her face had been bruised so badly that her two missing teeth were just black pieces, so to say, in a grisly blue and red jigsaw puzzle.

But just about the time she was able to get out of bed and look at her face in the hospital mirror, a dour young man who some people maintained was the very finest chef called up and said with great tenderness, “You know what you look like with your teeth missing like that, Clara? You look like a little kid who got banged up during recess.”

And Chris Chandler, her boyfriend--from Chicago, so he hadn’t quite gotten around to learning to drive--took an hourlong bus ride every night after work and cajoled the nurses so that he could stay late and remind her of her beauty.

Coupled with the ancient teaching that if you cast your bread upon the water you shall receive it again a hundredfold, was the whole sense of a life out here, balanced teeteringly on a fulcrum of pure chance. On the one hand, Death; the quake, the bomb, the car crash: “Oh my god,” her insurance man blurted, seeing pictures of her Nissan, shredded as if by a cosmic Cuisinart, “It’s a miracle you’re alive!” On the other hand, there was the unrepentant, unregenerate sense of being alive in California, now. At a dinner party her sister gave during that first week after the crash, a writer--a famous one--said, drinking Chardonnay and watching the sun set over the Pacific, “Some day people are going to write about this place, all of this, and how we lived now. Paris in the ‘20s will pale beside us.” (At that same party, the dour chef, David Barber, sent along a container of cantaloupe ice for Clara. His girlfriend sent art supplies, and her mother sent flowers and “holy cards” of the various saints.)

Clara came home, after five hard days. She’d given all her balloons to the children in the hospital and to a nurse whose kid was having a birthday. Now, propped up in the living room with flowers beginning to wilt, she began to see the contour of the days ahead. More pain, more time. Melancholy came to her. August and September days. Her leg in a cast. Two glum little temporary teeth, sitting out on the coffee table, gave her a merciless chipmunk grin.

But she was Clara Sturak! Twenty-one and already a producer, who wrote out checks Against War and For Peace, and supported the city of Santa Monica with her parking tickets. Once again her goodness came back to her: a scarf in a package from Rome from Burt and Jacqueline Briskin. An ice cream maker from Betty Shapian and Connie Terry. The judicial system of Santa Monica came through, because two strangers, Richard and Doris Littlestone, had followed the hit-and-run driver, gotten his license, and there would be a court hearing; Clara would be off the hook, and it looked like the poor guy would only get probation. The policewoman would get tears in her eyes and say, “You were so hurt! I’m so glad it wasn’t your fault! It hardly ever turns out that way, you know.”

But first there was more pain, and nightmares of the crash. The first two nights at home, Clara woke up crying. Once she blurted in tears to her mother, “I can never say I’ve never had a broken bone again. I can never say that all my teeth are mine! I’ll always have a scar on my chin. I can never wear high heels.” Then she cried like a little kid locked out of a party.

Her mother liked to think she had been stoic through this whole process. But as the end of the first week after the accident approached, she began to fret. She’d had tickets to a Van Morrison concert for months. She and her daughters loved him, loved his work. Clara was stretched out--incapacitated, in pain. How could she go anywhere? A wheelchair was rented, another batch of balloons was floated over to the house, Chris coaxed Clara to get ready for this, her first night out. There were more tears, but then the longest, whitest limo in the world came up the driveway, with a chauffeur named Stan, who wore reflector glasses. The young couple had their picture taken, and their smile showed a knowledge that hadn’t been there a week before. They smiled at Death outside the door, and with the best manners in the world, they said , No thank you. Not now.

Then they were inside, and met, by chance, a few friends, who came to sit in the wheelchair section. Van Morrison appeared with a dozen or so musicians. Lots of people in the audience wanted him to sing “Brown-Eyed Girl,” or to indulge in the sorrow of “TB Sheets.” But Morrison’s mind was in a different place, and as a series of clear, bright blue, pink, yellow and green lights lit up the stage, he sang about how John Donne raved on, about “Walt Whitman, nose down in wet grass,” about, “you and I and nature, and the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, in the garden wet with rain.” He sang about “the inarticulate speech of the heart”--that mute, sweet speech which so many of her friends had tried to express during this past week, both in symbol and in word.

Alive! What a kick. Halfway into the concert, her mother threw her arms around her and mashed her stitches and wept, “I’m so glad you’re alive.” And Van Morrison went on singing words that so clearly tapped into another, better world. He sang of the bridge where angels dwell. He snorted a repeated invitation to meet him “down by the pylons.” Of course the phrase that really applied to her was his continuing absolutely certain contention that--through friends and strangers, cops and lifeguards, merchants and doctors, step-parents, almost-parents and parents, her sweetheart, and come to think of it, probably divine intervention--”the healings had begun.”

She wanted to say thank you.

And so did her mother.