the TV was on in my hospital room, and I saw that man shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. Who was that man?” she called to my stepfather.
“Jack Ruby,” he replied.
She said to me, “I saw the whole thing. Over and over again. That was terrible, too.”
The next day, Rosa drove her from the hospital with my brother, and dropped her off at the dream house. “She didn’t come inside. She said, ‘You made your bed. Now you must lie in it.’ That’s what she told me. Then she drove away.” My mother was quiet for a moment.
I knew this part. I said, “The neighbor had left our door unlocked and the wind blew it open.”
“I took him inside and there was dirt everywhere. I was so tired. And I had to get out the vacuum.”
That door faced east, into the brunt of Santa Ana winds screaming down off the foothills. The door was wide open and the house full of dirt from the fields. My mother, though abandoned, had spent the last weeks feverishly knitting a new layette for the baby—soft yellow jacket and booties. She had a new bassinet. These were the things she cared about most, having spent all those years knitting thick woolen socks for her Swiss father and brothers, and now knitting fine booties for her son. The bassinet and its lining, the layette she’d left displayed there, for herself, if no one else—all of it was filthy, and the wind was hot as hell.
My baby brother, Jeffrey, was screaming, his fists held on either side of his face all clenched tight and red, like puckered tomato bottoms three in a row. Then he threw up all over the bassinet. (His hands were fists for the rest of his life—larger than the rest of his body, so powerful, knuckles and wrists swollen with work, scarred from fighting and farming and burning old paint off buildings.)
I had my book.
She was broken. It is the only time my mother ever described to me feeling as if she were defeated and could not go on. No food. Swimming in dirt and thorned weeds. My brother blind with fury. I had my book.
Rosa Leu’s words seem particularly ironic and cruel, since my mother had slept only two nights in the hospital, and she sure wasn’t going to be lying in her bed, alone, while her three-year-old and three-day-old children lay in the dancing dust on their blankets.
She went back to work the next day. We went to the babysitter. I read my book. While my brother’s hands remained fists, my eyes remained the hungriest part of me. As long as I had a book, or a Sears catalog, or a cereal box, or a Betty Crocker recipe book, I would eat what I was given. As long as I had something to read, I could imagine I was somewhere else, speaking with the strangely colonial Mr. Quaker Oats with his long gray curls, wearing new Sears dresses with smocking, while Betty Crocker with bouffant hair served us lattice-crust pie on a checkered tablecloth.
Nothing was ever the same for my mother. The motorcade, the beauty and hope and pillbox hat and handsome jaw, the accent so patrician, the way her president spoke, and his wife with her clean smile and cheekbones. Then that wife held her husband’s brains in her hand. She was alone.
My mother was alone, too, with two children. Her president was buried. She never missed work. At the branch was John Watson, from the citizenship ceremony, who had worked with her at Household Finance before Richard Straight came in for that damn loan. (My mother’s dating pool was apparently very small—men inside the savings and loan building.)
She left us, my baby brother and me, with a babysitter who lived at the edge of the orange groves, and married her friend from Canada. I loved him because the first time he met me, he gave me a Tonka truck. He had asked what I wanted, and I didn’t say doll, but truck. Earthmoving seemed important where we lived—that is what I saw every day, bulldozers and tractors and turkey feathers and trucks hauling oranges. We lived in an unincorporated community, not even a town. I moved a lot of dirt in that yard, after my stepfather married my mother. Less than a year later, she had another baby—another boy, John Jr.—and we moved across the Santa Ana River to the city of Riverside.
We were feral children, as were most of us then, in the 1960s and ’70s, and our wild kingdom was the orange groves. The other kids threw fruit as missiles and set up bunkers in the irrigation towers. But after the wars, I sat under the white blossoms that fell like stars, and I read.
That night I asked my mother how I learned to read, she looked into the distance and added, “I was an immigrant, and I had no money, and I could never buy enough books for you. But I wanted you to go to school and do well.”
She took me to the Riverside Public Library, where I attempted to check out twenty-two books. She limited me to ten. That fall, I was not yet five. My mother walked me down the street, turned left, walked another long block, and took me into the kindergarten classroom, where Mrs. Dalton, a kind and generous teacher, allowed me to sit in the corner and read. She did not force me to take a nap with the others. I refused to sleep when there were so many books.
The next day, my mother said, “You know the way,” and I was overjoyed to be alone on the sidewalk, along the dirt path through the foxtails and wild mustard, and then into the classroom. I have felt this way for the rest of my years.
I read Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods. Their log house was buried not by tumbleweeds but by snow. The entire Maud Hart Lovelace Betsy-Tacy series set in Wisconsin, with snow and muffs into which girls put their hands before skating; Caddie Woodlawn and the Nancy Drew mysteries (what the heck was a sedan?). In 1965, my stepfather had adopted my brother, Jeffrey. But Richard Straight would not consent to my adoption, and I became the rift that never healed. Every three weeks, he picked me up, alone, and we drove to his new family. There, I was the youngest of five children. My stepsiblings, Jim, Dick, Pam, and Tricia, were ten to fourteen years older than me. From them I learned to macramé, listened to Gary Glitter and the Rolling Stones, and saw my stepbrothers go off to Vietnam.
But in 1966, my mother brought two foster children home. We went to the county juvenile facility to pick them up, at night. It was dark and terrifying. It was a jail. Then we were stair steps, and I was the oldest of five children: Susan, Bridget, Patrick, Jeffrey, and John Jr.
It was a strange place to be—in the middle of two families, step and half and foster siblings, and my brother who now had a different last name than mine.
I know now my mother wanted to give other kids a safe place to live. We all wore the same home-sewn T-shirts and shorts. We each held a hot dog in a bun. We sat in a row on the hot metal tailgate of the Country Squire station wagon. But decades later, my mother said to me, “I never asked how you all felt about it. You didn’t ask children how they felt.”
And my stepfather, John, called out, “You never asked me, either! I’d come home from work and there were two more kids at the table and they stayed for years! You never said a word.”
My mother grinned, and shrugged. My dad and I knew she was the small intractable engine of our lives—she always got what she wanted. She wanted life to be better for those kids. Bridget and Patrick stayed for three years, until they went to live with their grandparents. Only a short time later, my mother found Sandy and Chris, exactly the same age in relation to us, in shelter care, and they came to live with us for five years. The controlled chaos of our house was all we ever knew—we stole oranges and my mother quartered them onto our plates, never tired herself of the magical sections of skin-held juice; we rode skateboards and left our knee-skin on the sidewalk, and she dispensed the rusty-hued pain of Mercurochrome and told us not to flinch or cry. If anyone made fun of us at school, she was staunch in our defense. My stepfather worked six days a week, and came home to look longingly at the dinner table, where we ate a lot of hot dog casserole, tuna casserole, and potatoes.
