cared nothing about our clothes or the single hot dog. Only books. Story was the escape. Cloth diapers and pins that stuck my thumb rather than fat baby brother thighs, weeds and tomato worms I dropped into coffee cans, sliding glass doors with fingerprints like swarms of ghostly beetles I sprayed with Windex the blue of ocean in Anne of Green Gables. I looked at my stepfather and imagined Prince Edward Island, close to his birthplace. I read Heidi and looked at my mother, imagining the Alps. I hid in closets, in hedges and trees, and under beds to read.
In my rough neighborhood, where one man six houses up from us shot a peephole into his front door, and kids set the foothills on fire for enjoyment of the spectacle, I read other worlds, and never imagined anyone had written about a place like mine until I found A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, when I was eight.
At the library, I checked out this novel and stepped into a mirror that made me feel almost lavishly dizzy. Francie is also the dreamy impractical eldest daughter of an impoverished, stern immigrant mother. Francie hates cleaning, and her thrill is the library, where she works her way alphabetically through the shelves. Back at her apartment, she arranges peppermint wafers on a blue plate, and sits outside on the fire escape to immerse herself in another world.
I put one Oreo on a plate, climbed the fruitless mulberry tree in our backyard, lying on a branch above the exposed roots and dirt where my three brothers had set up elaborate military maneuvers with hundreds of olive-drab plastic soldiers, and while I was shot with mud clods, entered 1900s Williamsburg: pickles, carts and horses, men who wore celluloid collars, boys who died of tuberculosis. Brooklyn, I whispered.
That we could control death and violence by writing about it was transforming. I had seen drug deals, wildfires, a man who held a woman so tightly by her hair that her temple puckered. Sometimes I was terrified. There was the man waiting on the narrow dirt path on the way to school, who opened his coat, a clichéd pervert (who the hell wears an overcoat when it’s 100 degrees?), but I’d read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn four times by then, and Francie’s mother shoots the pervert (he’s called the pervert) in the groin, so I just glanced at him (pale and gross and oddly just like the novel) and ran into the weeds, wishing I had Francie’s mother or her gun.
The summer of 1970, the bookmobile arrived in far-flung neighborhoods like mine. No one wanted to accompany me, and I was thrilled. I walked alone through fields of wild oats, past the pepper trees under which older kids smoked marijuana and drank Coors and listened to Grand Funk Railroad and James Brown on transistor radios, across the railroad tracks, down into the steep arroyo where a green trickle of water was my creek, and up into a grocery store parking lot where for two hours inside the air-conditioned hum of a converted bus, I read about death. I found S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, with desperate, joking, hardworking boys as close to my own neighborhood as anything I’d ever read, and then, shaken, walked back home as the branches of the pepper trees shivered with electric guitars and laughter. Tulsa, I whispered.
By then, I’d worked my way through the children’s shelves downtown, and kids didn’t wander the adult sections. But in the bookmobile, no one paid attention to me lying near the mystery shelves while I read Alfred Hitchcock, wherein people were stabbed, strangled, shot, and poisoned, all scary but less likely than drowning by bathtub. A man killed women by surprising them while they bathed, grabbing their ankles and pulling, rendering them unable to clutch the slippery sides while the water overcame them. We had no shower in the bathroom. At home, I drained the bathtub water after my siblings were finished, crouched under the faucet, and shivered.
When I was eleven, I read James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. It altered everything. John, wielding a carpet sweeper on a rug, was with me while I swept the endless windblown leaves on the sidewalk. He was a boy trying to please a father who cannot escape his terrible past, watching his brother and other boys fighting themselves and the world. I was failing to please my mother, and my brother came home bleeding.
Just after that, I saw a slim paperback in a rotating rack, on the cover a pensive young woman with brown skin, a flowered dress, and a yellow rose. She looked like an older sister of a girl in my class. But she was Sula. The voices of the women in Sula were like those of the mothers and grandmothers who came to our elementary school auditorium, the women cheering in the bleachers at the Little League games where my brothers played. Medallion, I whispered.
Along the iridescence of the railroad tracks, abandoned shopping carts lying on their sides in the arroyo, covered with water grass like green fur, I saw all those fictional children like me. I walked home through the wild mustard dried to rattle at my knees.
By the time I was thirteen, books were my addiction, as powerful as the alcohol, Marlboros, and marijuana joints my friends and the neighborhood boys held in their hands. Kids were drinking Everclear and Olde English. I partook of the Marlboros and beer. I was afraid of everything else. I spent my time under the pepper tree branches, and in the vacant lots where parties were held (think Dazed and Confused, but with way more black and Chicano teenagers, and additions of Con Funk Shun, Parliament, and Tierra). But even at the moment when the police helicopters came, or my friends fell off their platforms, lit embers floating in darkness like constellations of red and gold, I was waiting to be somewhere else. Reading a novel.
Back in 1965, my stepfather bought the laundromat next to the market where my mother had spent her quarter on my first book. For the next ten years, we kids swept the floors of landed clouds of lint, restocked the little boxes of detergent. I watched the people move about, descendants of Okies and slaves and braceros and Japanese strawberry farmers. These were the parents of my friends. We drank in vacant lots, Boone’s Farm strawberry wine in Lily Tulip cups, near the Lily Tulip plant with its actual giant concrete cup. (The world’s largest paper cup!) Then we married each other, and our children are American babies, despite what some people think.
A few times a year now, I walk near the old Lily Tulip Cup, the towering cement painted white and blue, near the last orange groves. As a child in the laundromat, I must have known my life would be about language, and place, because I saw people’s baskets full of stories, the way their hands moved when they held up a shirt, their eyes narrowed with private legends of the man or baby or mother to whom it belonged.
But every night, I walk along the Santa Ana River, and up into the steep small foothills along the riverbed. From the rocky slopes, I can see my whole life. That is not an odyssey. I am the woman who left briefly and then came back right away, who has never left home since.
Looking west, I can see Mission Boulevard, the street that leads to the house where I was born, and the lights of the laundromat, in the small place called Rubidoux. That place was rancho land taken from the Cahuilla peoples by the Spanish Californios, and sold to Louis Robidoux, a French-born fur trapper who married a young Spanish woman. Dwayne’s cousins still live near the river in a family compound built by Henderson “Gato” Butts in the 1920s, after he left Oklahoma.
Looking north, I see the Cajon Pass, which everyone in our family navigated when they came to California. My grandmother Ruby and my father, only seven, came down the pass in a bus, down onto Route 66, where all roads led away from her husband: San Bernardino, Ontario, and Echo Park. Dwayne’s great-grandmother Fine, born just after the Civil War, sent all her grandchildren across that same desert and down the same pass to Los Angeles.
Turning east, I see my childhood neighborhood and Dwayne’s, the old tract homes from the 1960s. The avenue I drive every single day to work, that passes the street of Dwayne’s parents, General and Alberta Sims, and the driveway where I learned to be a good human, and the houses of all my relatives and friends.
Turning the last quarter, looking south only half a mile, I see my own house, where I’ve lived for thirty years this spring, where I’ve raised three daughters. In historical photos, acres of citrus and walnut groves covered
