Four decades later, Michael, right, and Carla Rockliff with their granddaughter Cassidy, and, standing from left, daughter Mara and her partner, Doug Souloff, son Cory, and daughter Consuelo and her husband, Steve Stein.
July 10, 2008
Carla and Michael Rockliff have just celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary, but they still smile politely at references to the way the earth shook when they met. It actually did; it was April 8, 1968, the day of an earthquake in Los Angeles.
The truth is that they didn’t notice — and not because they were star struck; they hadn’t yet spotted one other. Each had come into a bakery to buy pastries, and Carla thinks there was so much activity that no one registered the tremors.
Apparently, it did have an effect on Michael’s three-year-old daughter, Consuelo. She stumbled forward and almost hit her head against the glass display case. Carla, idly admiring the dark-eyed toddler as she waited to be served, instinctively shot out her hand and cushioned the child’s fall.
As a nurse involved in the day-to-day care of children, it was an instinctive action and she thought nothing of it, but Michael was grateful. They chatted briefly, focusing mainly on the child, and then he asked Carla if he might take her out — maybe for coffee — by way of saying thank you.
Carla’s memory of those events 40 years ago is photographically vivid. She has been writing an autobiography that is almost completed, and going back over the chapters of her life, she can describe details as specific as what she was wearing, what car she was driving, what people said, and just how she felt.
Carla and Michael Rockliff on their wedding day in 1968, with their little cupid, Michael’s daughter Consuelo.
“I was disgusted,” she said, relating the story over a cup of carefully selected tea in the couple’s immaculately pretty Cranford home. “I told him I didn’t go out with married men, and how could he behave like that in front of his daughter?” She scuttled off toward her car, but Michael yelled out after her, “I’m not married!”
That stopped her in her tracks. “I felt awful. I’d just been horrible to someone whose wife must have died,” she said. As it turned out, Michael was getting divorced from Consuelo’s mother and had custody of the child. They had married as teenagers, and caring for a baby turned out to be more than she could handle. For Michael, by now 23, caring for his daughter was priority number one.
He was working at the time in a bookstore, but had just landed a job with Random House publishers, the company with whom he would work for the next few decades. A passion for literature was one of the first things these two discovered about each other when they did go on that first date — that and their mutual pleasure over the little girl.
“I thought it was just a ‘thank you’ date,” Carla said. “I didn’t know if he was interested in anything else.” Having recently come out of a painful breakup, she wasn’t sure she was ready to risk rejection, and was even more wary of forming a bond with this child if nothing was to come of the connection.
Michael persisted. The following day, he called and invited her to come out to spend Sunday afternoon with the two of them. And then he invited her to a dinner with his new employers. That event almost put an end to their prospects. Michael’s new boss, intending to be funny, congratulated her on their engagement. She was furious. She thought Michael had told him they were engaged to help get the job. It took an indignant denial from him to calm her down — and awaken an appreciation of his honesty.
Along the way, they discovered they were both Jewish — not a crucial factor to either of them but something they were glad to share. And then another event pushed them closer. She came into work one morning and was told that one of her young patients had died during the night. Every death hurt, but this particular loss was devastating. “I needed someone I could turn to for comfort, and I found myself calling Michael,” she said. “He was very sweet and understanding.”
The final clincher came soon after that. Michael had to go to New York to visit his new company, and he asked her to come with him to drop Consuelo off with his parents, who were going to care for her in his absence. When the child realized Michael and Carla were leaving her behind, she wept inconsolably.
Seeing her sadness tore at Carla’s heart. She knew that his new job was going to involve a lot of travel. When Michael began talking about her moving in with them, she agreed — so long as they got married. She wasn’t about to give up her single life for a casual arrangement. Michael readily agreed. The stood under the huppa on June 8, less than two months after their meeting in the bakery.
At their 40th anniversary party were the daughter and son they had together, Mara and Cory; Mara’s five-year-old daughter, Cassidy, their treasured grandchild; and, of course, big sister and aunt Consuelo, dark-eyed as ever, and beaming over the celebration of the union she helped create.
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