In the Country of Women Page 3

  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.

  I 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.
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  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 the land for miles, broken only by a few farmhouses. Mine is one of those. A bungalow with green shingles and burgundy window frames, once solitary in the trees, but now anchoring the corner of my block. A house that my eldest daughter’s friends told me I could not paint a different color, because they wouldn’t be able to find their way to the place where they could always be sure of food and a couch on which to sleep, and the right book to take with them in the morning.

  My house—which I made into the home from Robert Frost’s poem: “When you go there, they have to take you in.”

  I learned that from my marriage family, from Alberta and General Sims.

  Every night, I stand there for a moment with my dog, the brittlebush quivering in the wind, thinking that all those years, no matter which way I looked, I was never alone.

  The women who brought us here were utterly alone. Sometimes they had only what they held inside to call company. Even as children, they had no one but themselves.

  2

  The First Bullet

  Fine, Near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 1876

  She was

  called Fine when she was orphaned. Then her name changed for each man in her life, for seventy years. She became Fin Hofford, Viney Rollins, Fannie Rollins, Tinnie Kemp, Fanny Kemp, and finally, in letters carved onto her headstone in a historic black cemetery outside Tulsa, Oklahoma:

  BELOVED GRANDMOTHER

  FINEY KEMP

  1874–1952

  nothing but

  a new possession to the white people who took her from the former slave cabin in the countryside northwest of Nashville, where she was born maybe in 1869, only four years after the Civil War
ended, according to an 1870 U.S. Census document, or maybe in 1874, according to information written on an application for social security just before her death.

  It doesn’t matter. By the time she was five or six, Fine was a child bereft. Adrift.

  Like countless children during Reconstruction, a violent maelstrom of greed and revenge and ruined land, Fine moved through the world alone. Small wanderers were everywhere along the roadsides, among the trees, in the edges of the yards.

  Bereft of all love and care. Bereaved is what we feel when someone dies. Bereft is when we are left without anything.

  Henry Ely, her father, had been “run off by the law,” Fine told her grandchildren, said to have made his way to Texas. Shortly afterward, her mother, Catherine, died in the place where she and her own sister had been enslaved for their entire lives. Fine was the youngest of five children. Imagine the children in the cabin doorway, watching wagons enter the yard to take them away.

  Fine told the story of her life to her daughters and her grandchildren in Oklahoma and California; as her grandchildren became our elders, they recounted the details at family gatherings, and now the last surviving grandson of Fine, our beloved uncle John Prexy Sims, is eighty-two years old and tells her story to our own children.

  “They took her by herself,” he said. “Her mother was dead and her father was gone. There was no one to contest the white people who came and picked the little ones out like puppies. The family that took her called her Fine simply because she looked strong and healthy.” She never saw her family again.