cheek and smiled her most winsome smile. We all smiled. The whole issue of naming, now that we had left the Old World with its heavy burden of the deaths of ancestors, seemed to be thrown wide open. And Starr, in this context, could arguably be said to have had a basis in scripture. But for Mildred as for her tribe, only the road of excess could lead to the palace of wisdom, and a single allusion to the triumph of giving birth on O Holy Night would never be enough. “Starr Carol,” she corrected herself archly, looking a little, I thought, like a cat who has stuck her paw in the cream, again.
Maria expressed content by finding her least ironical smile and smiling it, and was just blowing her nose into a hankie when Mildred added, “Noel,” and forced her black eyebrows to shoot up again. Ann and I laughed and then clapped our hands over our mouths. Our mother shot a glance our way and then turned back to Mildred. Jokingly, she asked, “Any more names?”
“Of course,” said Mildred, wincing slightly as she shifted her weight in the bed. “Starr Carol Noel Dillard.” She pronounced it as if she had just locked in her baby’s claim to a platoon of harmonizing angels, and in that full, long, magical string you could hear the self-satisfaction of the Spagnola woman who has already got pretty much everything she ever wanted out of her man, and then some.
With a few exceptions, my sister Ann figures so little in the experiences I most remember about early Tucson that I have wondered if she was still too young to be part of them, apron-tied at home while every day my brothers and I adventurously (I thought) crossed a stretch of desert to our schoolhouse, a mile away. I am sure I strove to distance myself from her babyhood—even her girlness—in my longing to be taken seriously by my brothers, whose boy-freedom I envied and whose boy-daring I wanted to emulate.
But it was a continuous struggle: the more I sought them, the more they avoided me. As we followed the footpath home from school they would dart ahead or straggle behind, roaring for joy whenever an unpredictable finger of some evolutionary anomaly called “jumping cactus” flung itself at my head and grabbed one of my thick black braids, or stuck me full on the backside through my shorts, driving me to tearful despair, as if the whole Arizona universe were conspiring to punish me for being a girl.
The family called me “Fluffy,” to make matters worse. It was meant endearingly, a baby name that had hung on as such names do, and my mother used it with an especially tender affection that my little sister echoed. But still, it was a silly, lapdog sort of a name. And especially since my own body made itself laughable and awkward, it could be used against me. I could not seem to shed my baby fat no matter how tomboyishly I ran and played dodgeball and climbed trees. People might patronize me as “pleasingly plump,” but I was never fooled. I had to face it. The plain fact was I loved to eat. Not all of it went to fat, of course. By the time I was eight or nine I was also bigger and stronger than Lou, who was actually rather scrawny and bookish, and I was a giant compared with Carlo, whose misery nickname was the Runt. But to my brothers, I was forever Fat Fluffky. And they knew that the moment they skewered me with that name, I would disappear, hurt and humiliated.
Only the movies brought us together. My father, who ranked Saturday matinees lower than comic books as moral minefields for the impressionable young, must have made an exception for Walt Disney’s Dumbo, or else a restless, pregnant Aunt Mildred had prevailed over his house rule. He was right. Once we had seen that absurdly sweet and doleful, wing-eared circus elephant, we couldn’t get him out of our minds or our bodies. All Lou had to do, when the four of us were cleaning up after supper, was give the signal, and we would jump together and stack ourselves acrobatically on the kitchen floor, me at the bottom holding up the other three.
My brothers made no secret of how impressed they were with this performance of supergirl strength. For a few heavenly weeks I was their buddy. Now and then they would cut me in on a devilish plot, just so I could display my quisling subjection.
Like the day we decided to poison my sister. It was really the silliest ploy in the book. Ann was six, nearly seven, and even if she was tiny and naïve, she was nobody’s fool. The new bars of bluing my mother had begun to use for soaking the bed sheets out in the wringer-tub in the yard were stamped into break-off squares like a Hershey bar, but they were actually blue. When I told her this was a new kind of chocolate she was really going to like, she wasn’t tricked in the least, and said firmly, “It is not.”
Somebody, maybe my mother herself, had said that whatever those bluing cubes were made of could poison you, or at least make you blind, but I still urged Ann to try one. “Try it yourself,” she said, pushing me away, sure that if it was candy and as tasty as all that, I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to share it. But I held her and tried to force it to her lips, just as my mother abruptly came in from the yard and my brothers crawled sniggering from behind the couch and scurried out the door. Ann grabbed her around the knees. “They were trying to poison me!”
My mother glared at me hard, snatching the package out of my hand and reassuring Ann in a voice tight with banked anger. I had watched the boys disappear, and stood there, paralyzed, yet weirdly awake. Ann protested that I had really tried. She was right. I had, to buy an instant of my brothers’ admiration. “They wouldn’t have let you, darling,” my mother had said. But I knew what I knew, and it was like sudden carnal knowledge.
She lay now in the safe circle of my mother’s arms, her hair stroked and kissed, as I slipped guiltily out and across the yard and scrambled into the familiar splayed branch of the cottonwood tree, my own gut tumbling and aching as if I had poisoned myself. Time passed. The screen door swung gently open from the enclosed back porch where Ann and I usually slept together. I could see her tiny shape, in her little blue and white pinafore, emerge tentatively into the yard. Her feet were bare. A mass of hair had escaped from her braids and sprung into irregular loose brown curls around her dusky face. Her face was all wide-open eyes, searching the fading light.
I knew she was looking for me. It was as if I were seeing her for the first time.
I am glad not to have been a mother then. It was struggle enough to learn to be a motherly child. Nothing declared the impotency of parenting more than an apocalyptic Arizona rainstorm, when, after days—weeks—eternities of blanching and relentless blue skies and flaming sunsets, of long, blue-velvet nights flagrant with moonlight, a switch would be thrown on the universe, and rain and wind would flash across the desert, shutting down the world in a solid wall of water and erasing connection to anyone out of the reach of your arms.
My mother, who had a houndlike vigilance about danger (a sixth sense in her, literally, almost as overdeveloped as her sense of smell, which was legendary), would gladly have raised cowards, I think, just to be sure we’d hide safely under our beds like puppies when the power-rains came down. But her sons had just that bit of the blind, gambler’s daring of their father that seemed to have got us to Arizona in the first place, and even something of his queer taste for rousing and then flouting her womanish terrors. When the rain exploded out of the skies that famous year of Aunt Mildred, as suddenly as the lightning plunged into that live radiant soup of September heat, the boys rallied against all cries and dove into the flashing water like crocodiles, disappearing from sight before they had left the horseshoe drive, even before the smashing rain had carromed their reckless whoops and yelps out of the air.
We women and girls stood by, arms helplessly outstretched. But not all of us wanted to stop them. I wanted to be with them, to leap barefoot and bare-chested into that air ocean and let my eyesight be shattered by the sheer force of water and the rain pelt my back like bullets, as I had seen it pelt theirs, and dart and dance into the running river of the road. Here in the house the rain hammered on the metal roof, the wind drove sudden gushes of water at the windows. We could imagine the birds in their screened refuges soaked right through their oily feathers, hunkered down into soft balls, huddling together for comfort as the rushing rain drove deep new freshets into the dirt floor of the sheds. But they were safe, and would not fly, like boys, into the wall of water.
