to marry her off to a pig farmer in Canada. The worst fate my mother could imagine was being pregnant.
For my mother, cheerleaders and pompon girls were the kind who cared about beauty, and beautiful girls caused trouble.
At twelve, I had nothing going for me other than my national prize from Reader’s Digest for speed-reading, and a four-year record of perfect spelling tests. In my neighborhood, those were liabilities. It was the time of Farrah Fawcett and Pam Grier—big hair and boobs mattered in junior high, and it looked like I’d never have either. My chest was flat, and the summer of 1973, my hair was a disturbing shimmery green.
I was a girl who already imagined entire novels in which bodies were discovered in idyllic locations, moss-covered waterfalls and pine glens where the tree trunks glistened with golden sap. A girl detective had to figure out that a killer was always watching, and find out how the victim died, while keeping herself hidden from the killer. On hot nights, I lay with my face close to the screen of my bedroom window hearing teenaged boys walk past with stolen beer, hijacked construction materials, and money from marijuana deals. I figured neither Nancy Drew nor Agatha Christie had been offered weed in sixth grade.
Clearly, my reading was now dominated by the murder mysteries in my two sole sources for books: the bookmobile, and my parents’ single bookcase, which held only the 1970 Encyclopedia Britannica collection, meaning I knew thousands of random facts about arachnids, Constantinople, and zoology, and the Reader’s Digest Condensed Novels, meaning every month I read a new crime novel.
I had no idea how to look acceptable. We five kids grew up in matching T-shirts my enterprising mother sewed from double-knit fabric she got on sale from TG&Y. Boy-style crew-neck T-shirts—only one pattern. The fabric was horizontally striped or in sad small patterns of chevron or stick figures. We each got a single pair of Toughskins jeans per year, from Sears. When we were small, she actually put small Tupperware bowls—milky green or white plastic—on our heads to cut the hair of my foster sisters and me. In spring, the boys were shorn with clippers.
All young boys were shorn in spring this way in my neighborhood, no matter their race or age. Boys needed only skulls, as far as I could see. But other girls had braids and ribbons and curls and barrettes. By sixth grade, some girls had eye shadow.
Not me. My mother hated the entire concept of natural beauty conferring upon a woman more value than her hard work, or of mild attractiveness enhanced in not-natural ways. My mother hated makeup and nail polish.
Three boys in the tub, and then two girls. We washed our hair under the faucet, neck bent awkwardly so it always felt like I was offering myself up for sacrifice as the water hit my forehead. A showerhead didn’t occur to her. My mother had a lot to do, feeding us, keeping us alive, and trying to attend classes at the city college. She’d never been able to graduate from high school in Canada.
Our neighborhood, a tract of houses between orange groves and boulder-strewn foothills, was full of people from somewhere else. Most of our neighbors were military men stationed at the nearby Air Force base, and many had foreign-born wives. The moms in my neighborhood were from Japan, the Philippines, England, Germany, and nearly every state in America. My close friend since kindergarten was Delana (not her real name). We both got glasses in fifth grade, and were teased mercilessly. But aside from her glasses, Delana was beautiful. Her Filipina mother bequeathed her tawny gold skin and thick wavy black hair, and her American military father his large amber eyes and perfect teeth.
I was elfin and useless to boys with my flat chest, terrible hand-crocheted vests, and tragic attempts to tie a thrift-store silk scarf around my throat like models I saw in my stepsisters’ Seventeen magazine. I wouldn’t let my mother cut my hair now, and it grew past my shoulders, so I braided it in a crown around my head, the way Anne Shirley did in Anne of Green Gables. I looked like a tiny French grandmother. The new glasses made things worse. At least Delana got tortoiseshell rectangles. I got blue-framed cat-eye glasses, which are very much in fashion now—definitely not back then.
I was the size of a Chihuahua compared to other girls. For three months of summer, my hair was alien green from swimming in the heavily chlorinated city pool. My black and Chicana classmates thought this comic and mildly frightening, and referred to me as a Martian. I had the cat-eye glasses, miserable teeth—a gap between my front teeth, one of which was already chipped from constant roughhousing with my siblings, and one fang perched visibly way up in my gum line. My legs were so thin they resembled peeled mulberry branches.
Just before summer, Delana took off her glasses, in class, and put them away. She never wore them again. I was stunned, not by her lack of camaraderie. “How can you see the blackboard?” I whispered, and she replied, “I don’t care what the blackboard says. It doesn’t matter. We’re going to junior high.”
It didn’t matter what was on the blackboard. It mattered that we become cheerleaders, to get boyfriends and survive junior high.
The first weeks of summer, we walked through the orange groves and over the canal to the newly built junior high, where the eighth-grade girls studied us with disdain and impatience, sternly demonstrating the complicated tryout routines.
“Cheerleaders are brainless fools, jumping up and down like idiots,” my mother said, when she saw my arms moving robotically in the backyard. “It’s not a sport. It’s a beauty contest and I don’t want you doing it.”
I had spent years going to my brothers’ Little League baseball games, but though we girls played ball in the park, and I could hit, girls couldn’t play baseball, or Pop Warner football, or any other organized sport, in 1973. I was allowed to work the snack bar, where I’d been maneuvered under the bleachers and pushed into the dark supply room and felt up by older boys. That wasn’t a sport I wanted to continue.
I made the pompon squad only because the older girls needed a Chihuahua-size mascot who could climb to the top of the pyramid and stand with little feet on the shoulders or thighs of other girls. I was told to put away my glasses, do something with my hair, and get measured for a uniform.
I went to the house of Mrs. Yoshiko Smith, from Japan, who would sew uniforms for the pompon squad. My mother didn’t like the cost of cheerleading. She made odd pronouncements about the older girls: Pretty but brainless. Spoiled rotten and won’t ever work. She’ll have a baby in a few years and she’ll never go anywhere.
We were twelve and thirteen. How could she deduce these things by simply observing my friends? She never talked to them. Our class president wore velvet hot pants, thigh-high boots, and her long hair was ironed straight. Other girls wore hip-hugger jeans and baby-doll shirts, their hair curled back and sprayed into permanence as if they were facing forward from a ship’s prow, flying in the breeze.
During one visit to my father, I’d seen my stepsisters actually ironing their hair, on an ironing board, their cheeks pressed to the fabric while the iron’s point traveled near their ears. I held my breath. At home, I starched bathroom curtains and delicately moved the iron’s point into the ruffles.
And rather than going to Disneyland, where the eighth-grade cheerleaders had organized a group outing, we packed our small travel trailer, pulled by the old station wagon. We went every year to Yogi Bear Campground because my mother loved the mountains. My brothers loved Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo. We were the apex of uncool.
I never thought about how much my mother missed the mountains of her childhood, which she lost as quickly and silently as a coffin lid closed over the face of her own beloved mother.
My mother, Gabrielle Gertrude Leu, grew up in Burgistein, Switzerland, a tiny village in the Swiss Alps, on the slopes of steep mountains in a narrow valley. Their chalet was
