mother had brought few things from Switzerland. She was allowed one small trunk on the boat to Canada. How she came into possession of the wooden clock, I don’t know. But three things she had are now mine: a black lacquered bowl painted with Swiss wildflowers, one pair of silver scissors she used to cut our fingernails, and a strange little folder of cloth into whose pages are inserted sewing needles of all sizes. I was taught to sew, knit, crochet, and embroider when I was seven.
My mother had spent her childhood darning socks for her father and brothers, and knitting new ones. She taught me to knit in the way that her mother had taught her: I sat across from her, holding the heavy loop of yarn as it came from the store, and she pulled the yarn to make a large ball. Now and then she wove yarn tightly around pieces of Brach’s hard candy, which could be bought cheaply by the pound, butterscotches and peppermints and oblong toffees, all in bright cellophane or foil. She wrapped yarn so fast her hands were nearly invisible, and the strands covered the candy like a sped-up cartoon.
Then I sat in a chair and knitted, the ball of yarn at my feet—exactly as she had. My head was bent, my hair was in a braid, and I was required not to touch the ball of yarn, even when I saw a flash of foil or yellow cellophane. The piece of candy had to fall out onto the floor, after I had knitted enough to remove those strands of yarn. I was always glad when the cats batted the damn ball and the candy fell out early.
She told me she hated the darning of socks. I knew I didn’t have to learn to darn because we lived in a place where it was over 100 degrees for weeks at a time, and my siblings and I went barefoot until our feet were so dark and callused we were proud to not require shoes to walk on glass and thorns.
She had made it all the way to southern California to get a job, get married, buy a small house, plant roses, and have a baby. Me.
She worked as a teller at Household Finance Savings and Loan in Riverside. One day in 1955, a man came in to apply for a $50 loan. He was on strike from Boeing Aircraft, living in his car for the moment, and recently divorced, he said. Why she agreed to go out with him is an enduring mystery to me. Richard Straight. Why she married him is even more confusing. But he was handsome.
They lived in a tiny wooden bungalow behind a larger house on Tyrolite Street in Glen Avon, an unincorporated community people called Okietown. My mother was very good at saving money. After four years, they bought her dream house, an eight-hundred-square-foot stucco cottage off Pyrite Street. The new freeway and poultry ranches and granite quarries to the north; to the east, the Santa Ana River. My mother still had her job. But my father had met another woman, and he was gone.
Now she was abandoned. On the west side of the river, fifty miles from Los Angeles, we lived in an area where white people had arrived from dust bowl farms, Mexican people from Michoacan and Zacatecas, black people from Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. Japanese-American strawberry farmers and Spanish-Mexican native Californians had been there for decades. My mother was the only one from Europe.
We had oatmeal and a can of beans. I recall the oatmeal, but in a vague way. My mother says we had a conversation on the third day of oatmeal. My mother: “I told you to eat the oatmeal, and you said you wouldn’t. I slapped you so hard the oatmeal flew off the high chair. You said, ‘You can hit me again but I won’t eat it.’”
She shook her head. “You only wanted your book.”
I had one book. I knew all the words. I wanted another book.
All my life, my mother had told me two versions of how she taught me to read in a single weekend, when I was three. The first: My father was gone, she had to go to work, and she didn’t want me to bother the babysitter by talking (I’d been dropped on my head once by an inebriated caretaker), so she taught me to read and sit quietly in the corner. Believable. The second: She didn’t think American kindergarten accepted children unless they could already read, and she was eager for me to go to school and not pay for babysitting. Also plausible.
But I asked her again in 2017, laying out the two stories. For the first time, she said with some bemusement: “No—you taught yourself to read. I read you the first book, maybe three times, and then you knew the whole thing and you wanted another one. We were so poor, but you just wanted a book, and I went to Stater Bros. [the local grocery] and spent my last quarter to buy one of those little books with the gold at the edges.”
I was so surprised.
She’d bought me a Little Golden Book. Maybe Poky Little Puppy, she thought. Then President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed, a public murder so graphic and visible on television, shocking to the nation. My mother sobbed and grieved in front of the small black-and-white television, and I lay on the floor listening.
My mother had become an American citizen in November 1960 so that she could vote for John F. Kennedy in the presidential election. Before that, for five years, she had been an immigrant with a green card. “I wasn’t in any hurry to become a citizen,” she told me the other night. “Not until I saw John F. Kennedy.”
“You didn’t vote for—” I blanked.
She called to my stepfather, John—“Who was before Kennedy?”
“Eisenhower,” he replied dryly.
She waved her hand dismissively. “No,” she said to me. “I didn’t feel any reason to vote until President Kennedy. He was different.”
She was pregnant with me, in late 1960, when she began the citizenship class at the Riverside courthouse. “You had to renounce your other citizenship, back then,” she said. “I didn’t want to lose my Swiss citizenship, but I really wanted to vote for him. It wasn’t hard at all, back then, to become a citizen,” she said. “We learned some history.”
She had me in October. The following month, she said, “We went to the courthouse. Dad and me. We just happened to be there at the same time.”
That dad was not my father, Richard Straight, whose name my mother never ever said aloud. That was John Paul Watson, my future stepfather, born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. They became citizens together, taking the oath in the same room.
She was truly an American then, when she cast her vote for John F. Kennedy in a white skirt and blouse, her hair carefully risen in a Jackie Kennedy bubble.
But by the night of November 23, 1963, she was on her own, two weeks overdue in her pregnancy. “I had taken the week off from work, because your brother was so late,” she told me. “But he didn’t come, and I couldn’t afford to take any more time off. I had no money. I was desperate. I was watching television, and there they were, he and Jackie, and then he was shot. It hurt me to the quick. I just cried and cried, I couldn’t stop crying.”
I remember the crying, the black-and-white images going past my face, which I held close to the thick curved screen where the static from the constant dry wind would shock me so hard I could feel it inside my nose.
“I couldn’t stop crying, and your brother wouldn’t come. I went to see Grandma.”
That was her stepmother—Rosa. I said, “Where was I? I didn’t go.”
My mother frowned. “Where were you? I took you to the neighbors. I drove to Fontana and Grandma said the best thing when your baby is late is to walk. That’s all she told me. So I walked all around Fontana. I didn’t know what to do.”
She went into labor and the following morning she had my brother. In 2017, telling me this story, she sat in her sixth house, each one a bit bigger than the last, but all within
