In the Country of Women Page 5

  The sisters were five young women with heart, with what used to be called verve and grit and spunk. Those midwestern and prairie words that came from odd places themselves. They loved their few dresses, their hats, their tablecloths, and singing. They were romantic and sentimental. They always had one another.

  Ruby lived with Hazel when she first arrived in Colorado. Then she went to the dance at the schoolhouse in Purcell.

  I have a map of America here at my desk, and for years I’ve traced with pencil the long journeys of our ancestral women. Fine was born outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee, during the same three-year period that Alice Amanda Baldon, Ruby’s mother, was born at Bear Creek, Hancock County, Illinois. They were five hundred miles apart—but their states were south and north, their skin black and white, their lives defined by immigration and enslavement. Then there were the men.

  What changed women’s lives was not just a man, but having a baby with that man. Who married a girl, who slept with a girl, who hunted a girl and took her, who accidentally met a girl, who was told to marry a girl for her land, for her car, who was told not to marry a girl.

  Fine met Robert Hofford in the blackberry thickets.

  Ruby Triboulet danced with Robert Straight because no one else asked her.

  Robert Straight was the man he was that night, in Purcell, because his own father had just stolen his girlfriend and married her.

  My grandfather, Robert Bates Straight, was the tenth generation of Straight men to be born in a territory farther west than the previous one—from pre-Revolution Massachusetts to Weld County, Colorado. My own father, Richard, said he knew none of this. None. He had hated his father, and knew little about his father’s father. What scraps he finally told me were in the last five years of his life, the memories often unmoored by painkillers or anesthetic, so that while I was in a hospital room with him, or driving him around the landscape of his teenaged years here in southern California, or talking to him late at night on the phone, all the scary pieces of his youth came flying at me in random fashion, like T-shirts shot out of a cannon; I’d catch them at high speed and later smooth out the material and read what was written on the chest.

  Those fragments were always about his desperation and fear, of being unwanted, of being beaten, freezing, and abandoned.

  I spent two years finding the previous ten generations on Ancestry, and when I finally wrote down all the names in order, in blue pen on a yellow legal pad, and told my father I’d bring them to him when we ate breakfast, he didn’t want to see the pages. They are right here. He never knew any of the names that came before Daniel Casca Straight, the father of his father, a man he remembered as being very intelligent, manipulative, having a steel plate in his skull from combat in World War I. My great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my father had engineering and mechanical skills that should have led them to great success. But those three generations of Straight men had tempers and no capacity to take orders from anyone, so they worked for themselves, and then quit themselves in disgust, to start a new enterprise.

  My great-grandfather Daniel Casca “DC” Straight, born in 1876 in St. Croix, Wisconsin, was brought to Clay County, Nebraska, in 1880 and raised on a ranch. At twenty-two, he married Laura Bates, who was eighteen. Their oldest son, my grandfather, was born that same year, in 1902, in Loveland. Laura had ten children who lived, and at least two who died, in sixteen years. On November 1, 1918, when the youngest baby was only a year old, Laura died.

  By 1921, when Robert was nineteen, he had a girlfriend named Ethel Dickerson. But in June of that year, DC Straight, who was forty-three, married Ethel, who had just turned twenty.

  They had two children. Robert left the mountains of Loveland and went to work on the ranches down in the prairie, in Ault and Eaton and Greeley. One night, he went to the dance at Purcell.

  The schoolhouse doubled as social hall, meeting room, and community center for those scattered prairie communities, so the Triboulet girls knew everyone. The building was crowded with young men and women, some already married, some not. The young men were ranch hands who rode the prairies rounding up heifers, or milked cows daily in freezing barns, or plowed miles of earth for wheat seed, or harvested sugar beets and transported them to train cars. The sons of Vara Barnaby spent their lives on threshing machines, cutting down wheat.

  Ruby stood against the wall and waited. She wore her best dress. Though the young men all danced with other girls, they averted their faces and didn’t even look her way. She was nineteen.

  If you dance with her, I’ll wait until you get outside and I’ll kill you.

  Song after song. Did he watch her face? The hopefulness and lifted chin, the glimmer in her eyes when the music began and boys came to girls with one hand outstretched, the other holding a hat. Do you want to dance? Song after song, and she was invisible. Did her face grow softer and crumble, or did she lift her chin higher? How did this man, who was only twenty, know what he wanted? Did he want to crush her from the moment he saw her face, and then judge how her face changed? Was that the way he’d observed his own father, or other men? Had Ethel’s face changed when she saw his own father, or had his father made her face change with a threat or compliment? Was this way of hunting a woman, of choosing a wife, embedded in his genes?

  Whether he’d decided on a particular song to end her torture (every one of us knows how it feels to be left alone on a wall, or a bench, or a folding chair, while music plays) or judged this exactly to the amount of desperation and longing and hurt on her face, he finally stood in front of Ruby Triboulet. Not a year later, in April 1922, they signed a marriage license at the courthouse in Greeley, Colorado.

  The first thing he did was take her away from her sisters and the wide-open prairie where everyone knew one another in that grid of county roads, could see every truck and horse and wagon that passed and even the dust that moved along with them, every ranch or farm known by the number, and if you didn’t know the horse or vehicle, you could find out at the schoolhouse or the church picnic.

  They went to the Rocky Mountains, where Robert Straight had been born. Not the romantic ideal of the mountains, of ranching and the west, of cowboys and the frigid beauty of one of the loveliest places in America. Robert Straight’s life had always been high-altitude isolation, snow and ranch, horses and sheep and grizzly bears, hard work and violence, and always, a gun. No one, not wife or children, would ever change that.

  Ruby and her four children never changed that. By the time my father, Richard, was born, things were so bad that Ruby kept leaving, taking her youngest son to California. But each time, she went back to Colorado.

  My father only ever got the leaving part down. When he left someone, he never went back.

  Bear Creek, Hancock County, Illinois, to Nunn and Fraser, Colorado: 936 miles, not counting the times she went up and down the steep narrow highways of the Rockies to the prairie, to the leased ranches where Ruby had her babies, closer to her sisters.

  4

  The Country Squire

  Riverside, California, 1973

  When I was twelve, my mother was at the wheel when our 1966 Ford station wagon, the Country Squire, ran over me. This was at Yogi Bear Campground in the San Bernardino Mountains, and I lay on Boo Boo Lane. I couldn’t make that up.

  The ultimate car of motherhood, used to ferry all her children—the three she bore, the five foster children she cared for over eight years—all of us used to lie on our bellies in the taupe metal storage area playing cards and sharing one box of Crackerjack. I remember the oily darkness of the undercarriage when the wheels thumped over me, and the smell of the asphalt under my cheek. My poor mother, seeing me crumpled there. She hadn’t wanted to take me down the mountain to cheer camp. She never wanted me to shake pompons, because then I’d act dumb even though I wasn’t, and I’d probably get pregnant.

  When she was fifteen, her stepmother had tried 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 named Sunnenschyn—Swiss houses always had names carved into the balconies. That house was Sunshine.

  When my mother was six, my grandfather Paul Leu tried running a sauerkraut factory. The valley grew cabbage well, and the shredded cabbage was salted and placed in large wooden vats with boulders holding down the wooden lids; my mother remembers the vivid overwhelming smell of that failure,
and the constant work of pressing moisture out of the cabbage and fermenting the leaves. He and his wife, Frieda, then had two small sons, and my mother spent her time working in the garden, darning socks, and skiing to school.

  She was tiny, my mother, and excelled at theft. She told us about walking home from school, stealing cherries and pears from trees in the farms along the road. She stole Tobler chocolate from the small store her mother ran on the house’s first floor. My mother hid the bars in the precisely stacked woodpile all Swiss men keep beside the house. She sold the chocolate to American soldiers who came through the village in Jeeps during World War II.

  Frieda, her mother, was always smiling, a gentle, dark-haired compact woman who loved to draw and paint. When my mother was nine, Frieda Leu grew ill with ovarian cancer. There was no cure—she was sent home from the hospital. “She was bedridden,” my mother told me, and I imagined that terrible word—a disease rode my grandmother’s body while she lay helpless in the sheets. The illness lasted for months, and a stern young nurse named Rosa Erb was hired—essentially to ease Frieda into death, and to take care of the three children. When Frieda died, my mother crept down the stairs to see her mother’s body lying on the kitchen table. Frieda was thirty-nine years old, and my mother was nine.

  Gabrielle Gertrude Leu near Wohlhusen, Switzerland, wearing her apron, 1939

  She told me about these years only in fragmented shards until she turned eighty, when these memories began to spill out. Now, every week, she remains incensed by this loss, and retells me the story.

  Shortly after Frieda’s burial, Rosa Erb, twenty-eight, was married to Paul Leu. No man took care of his own children back in 1943 in Switzerland. My mother says her stepmother treated her as a small plain burden useful only for hard work, until she could be rid of her. The way my mother described her life in the Swiss forests and snowy mountains, her stepmother might as well have been roaming the woods looking for a huntsman to take my mother’s heart.