Through Any Given Door, Part II (in full)

the mid-story… Through Any Given Door, a Family Memoir

Part II

Torn Pictures

San Jose, San Francisco, Hawaii
1954 – 1958

by Catherine (Clemens) Sevenau

~~~~~~~~~

1954 • San Jose, California ~ I’d reach up and rap the doorknocker twice.
I’d say, knock, knock.
She’d say, who’s there?
I’d say, Cathy.
She’d say, Cathy who?
I’d say, Cathy me, silly, your daughter! Wouldn’t we laugh!

I don’t recollect how I got there or who dropped me off on her doorstep; in hindsight I suppose Dad did and waited in the car across the street. Who knows, and it didn’t really matter; I was coming to live with my mother! My happy feet did a little jig, the pigeons in my stomach on the wing and my heart thumping so loud there was no need to ring the bell.

Knock, knock. I heard her padded footsteps, the lifting of the inside latch, the swoosh of the door. I looked up expectantly. My knock, knock died in my throat. Her eyes passed somewhere over my head. Her arms hung at her sides. Then my mother stepped back, let me by, closed the door, and did an about-face out of the dim entry. Picking up my yellow suitcase with brown striping, I trailed after her into in the rectory’s dining room where she pointed to the end of the long pew pushed up against the wall. Her wire-rimmed glasses perched on a nose that looked like mine, her round face framed by short jet-black curly hair, her mouth set in a downward frown I tried to mistake for a smile. Her voice tight over her rounded shoulder, she ordered, “Be quiet and behave,” echoing with, “sit there and don’t touch anything,” as her features disappeared through the white Dutch door. With my Naugahyde case deposited beneath me, I dangled my feet, sitting still on the hard bench, obediently folding my five-year-old hands in my lap.

“How did I get here?” I puzzled. “I didn’t do anything wrong! How could this be happening to me?” This is not at all how I thought it would be. I thought she’d be happy to see me, but she didn’t seem to care.

The room waited in pin-drop stillness. I studied the red-flocked wallpaper, the tatted doilies, and the rectangular dining table that was set for the two priests: wine goblets, silver spoons, the scatter of white plates, the linen, crystal, and pewter—all waiting, sitting in silence—like me. I waited most of my life for her to come back for me. She never did.

My mother was living in a small room off the church’s rectory, working as a cook and housekeeper. She couldn’t stay now that I’d arrived, so we moved to a nearby one-room basement apartment down the street. Silence took up residence in our house and we disappeared into it, surviving in the same quarters, living alone together, each in our own world.

Unfortunately, life was going to get worse before it got better.

1954 • San Jose ~ Mom still cooked and cleaned house for the priests. While she dusted and vacuumed the rectory, I starred in my own variety show, singing and doing the Hokey Pokey on the back patio where no one could see me. I had a red plastic portable record player and a record collection of two: I’m a Little Teapot with The Teddy Bear’s Picnic on the flip side, and The Bunny Hop with The Hokey Pokey on the reverse. Those were the only times I could play them over and over, while she was vacuuming.

Once a week she’d cook a dinner for us in her Dutch oven, so there were a few days of stew, soup, or spaghetti leftovers. Some Sunday mornings she’d make pancakes, smothered in roast beef gravy with dime-sized polka dots of catsup. To most people, gravy and catsup on pancakes doesn’t sound very good, but to me, they were heavenly.

I developed a liking for cold spaghetti. I was nervous using the gas stove, afraid of striking the wooden match which either broke in half or wouldn’t catch, and if it finally did catch, of having to light the burner before the match went out, ignite the gas before the stove exploded, or drop the match before burning the fingers on my right hand while holding the pilot light button with my left. I needed three hands so as not to fill the house with gas, start a fire, or blow my head off. After singing my bangs and hair on my face more than once, I decided it was too complicated, not to mention dangerous. The only appliances we had were the small stove, Mom’s freestanding Dutch oven, and a toaster. The only one I was comfortable with was the toaster, and even that was vaguely hazardous as it didn’t always pop up and I was afraid to pry the bread out with a knife. Blackened toast was my specialty.

Along with cold spaghetti or leftover meatloaf sandwiches, my main diet for the next four years was iceberg lettuce with red wine vinegar, or lemons cut into quarters sprinkled with salt, both of which took the enamel off my teeth but helped calm my stomach. I ate Bosco and Wonder Bread sandwiches. I ate teaspoons of powdered sugar and packets of green Kool-Aid and red JELL-O out of the box. I ate Oreos, sliding the dark sides apart and licking the creamy filling first, and Ritz crackers, and bowls of Cheerios with three spoons of sugar. My mother tried to cure my stomach cramps and pinworms with little brown pills. She often dosed me with Castor oil, Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Epsom Salts, Milk of Magnesia, Pepto-Dismal, or her favorite, Bromo-Seltzer. She also used the red enema bag that hung on the towel rack. As I remember, her cures were worse than what ailed me.

1954 • Sonora to San Francisco ~ Dad found a flat on Belvedere Street in the Haight and settled in San Francisco. He made one last trip back to the town that had been his life for the past decade. On a visit to the Davises, where Claudia was finishing out the eighth grade, he asked for some privacy to speak to his daughter alone. He knocked on Claudia’s door (she had her own bedroom). There were no chairs in the small room, so he sat down on the corner of her double bed to talk to her. Dressed in his brown suit, fingering the brim of his creased felt hat perched on his knee, he asked Claudia which parent she wanted to live with.

“I want to live with both of you,” she said. “I want you and Mom to be together.”

“No, you have to make a decision. Do you want to go live with your mother, or do you want to come live with me?”

Claudia knew that Mom loved her; she’d always been sure of that, but she wasn’t convinced Dad did. He was uncomfortable around his daughter. He was uncomfortable with any female older than age eight or nine. Other than holding their hands on the way to church, he no longer hugged or kissed his daughters when they passed that age. When Claudia told him she would go live with Mom, he broke down. Claudia had never seen Dad cry. Sitting at the end of the bed, she never felt worse in her whole life.

To make him feel better she said, “Daddy, girls need to be with their mothers.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Dad told her. “It’s okay.” He rose, unable to look at her, and our upright father slumped out, sad and upset, with no good-bye.

Claudia sat still at the side of the bed, overhearing the final small talk between him and Mrs. Davis. Then she closed her door and cried.

She loved it there at first. JoAnn was her best friend, until the night JoAnn’s mother found Claudia dawdling and daydreaming on the floor with her feet up on the bed.

“Shouldn’t you be doing your homework?”
“I already finished it,” said Claudia.
“Well, why don’t you help JoAnn with hers?”
“Okay.”

Claudia didn’t realize how smart she was until she saw that her friend had only finished three history questions and was stuck. JoAnn flew into a snit, “I don’t need your help!”

Their relationship was strained for the remainder of Claudia’s stay.

March 1954 • San Jose ~ Claudia arrived at Mom’s a few months after me. Besides, she couldn’t stay in Sonora with the Davises forever.

March 1954 • San Jose ~ Word reached Mom that her sister’s husband, George Day, died in Chico on February 17th. He too, like Mom, was high strung, and also like Mom, had suffered a nervous breakdown.

March 23, 1954 • San Jose, a letter to Verda from Mom:
Dear Verda,                    Saturday P.M.
I have waited too long to write. I was shocked to hear about George and am so very, very sorry. We have had our differences and I think they were trivial. I can look back and see the fun we all had, the card games, picnics, etc. George was never anything but good or nice to me. I am truly sorry for you.

Ethyl wrote me today that Mom had had another fall and broken her leg again. I don’t see how she has lived through it all.

We are all pretty good, the kids are fine but I am still having kidney trouble. Don’t know yet what they are going to do for it. I have a stone and it is located where it can’t pass. I guess Larry worries more over it than I do. Do you have a television set? I guess it’s the best investment I ever made.

I have a good job here, like it very much, work seven hours a day, five days a week, have full charge of the record dept. in a music store. They don’t carry pop, most of our business is done by mail and with schools. We have over 600 schools on the mailing list. Don’t ever have to deal with customers. It pays good and I like it a lot.

Hope your family is all well. Guess they have all grown a lot. I wish I could get up to see Mom but don’t see how I can. I missed 2 days off work this past week with a kidney attack, tho’ it’s the first one I’ve had in six weeks. I know she can’t last much longer. Poor soul, what a hard life she has had.

Well, it is 12:30 and we have to be ready for 9 o’clock mass in the morning. Well, Verda, there isn’t much I can say. Words can’t express it, but you know, or I wish you did, how I feel.

Love, Noreen

(Note: we were living at 240 George Street in San Jose)

My father lost George as his best friend when Mom left, blood being thicker than friendship, but when George died, Dad had the honor of acting as one of his casket bearers.

Feb 17, 1954, Chico Enterprise, Chico., California:
George W. Day, Ex-Manager of Ice Firm, Dies Today
George William Day, retired manager of the Union Ice Company, died at his home on Hazel Street early this morning.

Mr. Day was born in Sacramento May 2, 1898, and it was there he received his education. He went into the ice business and became manager of the Union Ice Company’s various firms. He was employed in Watsonville prior to War II and later was transferred to Vallejo and Redwood City.

Previous to establishing his home here four years ago, Mr. Day had lived here a number of years ago with his grandmother, Mrs. Kitty DeVoe, who was one of Chico’s early pioneer families. Mr. Day was a former member of the B.P.O. Elks Club of Watsonville, and spent as much time as his work would permit taking part in lodge and social activities.

Survivors include his wife, Mrs. Verda Day, and the following children: Robert E. Day, of Santa Maria; George L. Day, who is with the United States Navy stationed in Pearl Harbor; Mrs. Marceline Mangini, of Oakland; Leo R. Day, of Ventura; and Judy and Jeffery Day, of Chico. He also has a brother, Guy Day of Stockton as well as three grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are being celebrated at the Bruise Funeral Homes and time of service will be announced later.

Feb 20, 1954: Chico Enterprise, Chico, California:
Funeral Services Held Today for George Day
Recitation of the rosary was held in the chapel of the Bruise Funeral Home Friday at 8 p.m. for George W. Day, retired manager for the Union Ice Company, who died early Wednesday morning. Father Burns of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church led the recitation during which Mrs. L.M. Anderson, organist, played a group of favorite sacred selections.

At 9:50 a.m. today the cortege proceeded to St. John the Baptist Catholic Church where requiem mass was celebrated.

Interment was in the Catholic Section of the Chico Cemetery. Casketbearers included Russell A. Northrop, H.B. Vaurs, Tom Day, Carl J. Clemens, A.C. Zanuker and Roy J. Mangini.

1954 • San Francisco ~ I loved visiting my dad. We played Old Maid and gin rummy. He sang Three Little Fishies or German songs he remembered from his childhood, told me corny riddles, recited limericks, and magically pulled quarters from behind my ear. I even liked playing Five Little Piggies, though I was a little old for baby stuff. He made me giggle. He gave me butterfly kisses by fluttering his eyelashes on my cheeks. And he did this thing with his lip: just as I turned my head to look away, he’d touch his lower lip to the tip of his nose, which is impossible unless you have an under-slung jaw and a Clemens’ nose like my dad. Or he’d click his bottom dentures out of his lower jaw and catch them with his tongue the split second before they flew away. Laughing, with both hands clapping, I’d beg him to do it again because I barely caught it out of the corner of my eye the first time.

When Dad came to pick me up at Mom’s, we’d visit Larry and have picnics on the college campus, my father lying on the grass next to me and letting me wear his hat, telling me stories, tickling me and making me laugh.

When I came down with a cold, he rubbed my chest with Vicks and put some up my nose, which I hated because it burned clear to my brain. Bringing me a hot bowl of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, a warm bottle of Squirt, and two pieces of Aspergum, he sat next to me on the bed, tucked me in and stroked my hair.

“The only time my mother sang to me or stroked my forehead,” he told me, “was when I was sick.”

I could tell it still hurt his feelings because he had tears in his eyes. It hurt my feelings for him, too. As he kissed my brow and patted my shoulder, he whispered good night, and turned out the light. In the dark I said two extra prayers for him, and pondered why his mother didn’t love him either.

After Mass on Sundays we walked hand-in-hand through the big glass Arboretum and the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. We roamed Fishermen’s Wharf and had shrimp Louie with a hunk of sourdough. We slowly strolled by store windows filled with souvenir tee shirts, Japanese tea sets, and lacquered Chinese boxes. We went to Fleishhacker Zoo and watched the monkeys on Monkey Island and fed the seals three smelly pieces of mackerel from a little white wax paper bag that cost a quarter. We ate pink popcorn and hot dogs with mustard and got vanilla ice cream cups with a quarter-moon of raspberry sherbet. I saved my wooden ice cream paddle; I liked to chew on it.

We rode the carousel, sprinting for our seats as the lights flashed, bells chimed, and music blared. I preferred the ostriches, their backs weren’t so high off the ground. When I grew more confident I rode the horse. I was too small for the ring grab, with its high iron rings the size of half dollars just beyond my reach. If you snagged a brass one, you got a free ride, but your horse had to be at the top of its ride to be able to reach it. Dad rode on one with me, stretching me sideways, and hooking his finger over mine. We stretched out as far as we could and snatched it together as our horse flew by. Even though you were supposed to turn them back in, I kept one as a souvenir. I still have it.

We also went to the movies, getting to see Snow White and Bambi. I unfailingly cried; I doubt that I ever recovered when Bambi’s mother died, and Dumbo nearly destroyed me.

March 1954 • Montebello ~ Carleen and Chuck left Sonora and Chuck went to work for National Tapered Wings in Vernon with his cousin Wayne Johnson. They rented a one-story triplex in a pretty tree-lined Jewish neighborhood in Montebello near Wayne and Joan, a tiny Italian spitfire of a woman. Wayne and Joan married in 1951, and their first child Craig, was the same age as Debbie.

On weekends the two couples spent a lot of time playing poker, partying, smoking, and drinking. A lot. It slowed down some when the babies arrived.

After living with the Guidicis in Tuolumne, Betty went to live with Carleen and her family; she didn’t want to be with Mom, and was still mad at Dad. There, she attended Sacred Heart of Mary, an all girls Catholic high school to finish out her freshman year. The school was next to Cantwell High, the boys Catholic school, and the closest the boys got to the girls were stolen glances through the chain link fence. Betty was still a mess from the kidnapping and attack, so she was glad not to be around boys. She confided in a fellow student about the incident in Sonora, and the story got back to the nuns. The school administration called Carleen to straighten it out. I don’t know what happened, but they didn’t kick Betty out.

At the end of that summer, Carleen and Chuck moved to Whittier. Around that time Betty moved to San Francisco to live with Dad.

Dad must have driven to Montebello with Claudia and me in March of that year, as there are two bound Kodak prints of us four sisters, six-month-old Debbie, and the Chevy Bel Aire we took to Minnesota. The packets also included photos of Claudia and me in San Jose where we were living with Mom.

April 1954, Easter Vacation • San Francisco, California ~ I sat next to him on the #7 Haight bus as it wove through the city to the corner stop near his house. He lived just a block from the five-and-dime he managed on Haight Street, a red fronted Sprouse-Reitz. Together, we read every word in the advertisements above the window seats as the bus made its way through the streets of San Francisco. Then we pulled the wire over our heads to signal the driver that our stop was next. I was leapin’ and hoppin’ on the inside. With the sound of my father’s size twelves slapping in a long stride, the sound of my size fours tapping in triple-time alongside him, we trudged three doors up the incline to his rented lower flat at 14 Belvedere Street. He walked on the curbside of the mica-flecked sidewalk, my hand clutched in his the whole way. While trotting along and talking, I brought up Mom. He let go of my hand.

My father, never speaking Mom’s name after the divorce, ordered me not to say it either. I was a five-year-old stranded between parents who couldn’t forgive each other. I used to hope things might change, hope maybe they could give each other another chance, but the rip was impossible to repair. He hadn’t been able to clear away the wreckage from their past, or perhaps he was simply following the stipulation of their divorce decree:

IT IS FURTHER HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that neither of the parties hereto shall in any manner attempt to influence or prejudice the minor children or either any of them against the other part hereto and that neither shall by act, word or conduct attempt in any way to influence or alienate the love and affection of said minor children or any of them from the other party hereto.
       Done in open Court this 7 day of May 1954.
       Signed by the JUDGE OF THE SUPERIOR COURT (Sonora)

We don’t carry memories in my family, we carry grudges, upholding a long-standing tradition of pretending as if we don’t exist. We are convinced of our rightness, even in our misery. We’d go to our grave, or send each other there, before we’d give up being right. I think it’s genetic, like our brown eyes, droopy eyelids, and dumpling recipes. I could be wrong about this, but I doubt it.

1954 • San Francisco ~ “Sprouse as in house, Reitz as in right” was the slogan used by the company my dad worked for. Nobody said Reitz right; they rhymed it with Pete’s. I always corrected them.

Sometimes Dad drove to San Jose and picked me up to spend the holidays with him, and other times Mom put me on a Greyhound bus. He’d take me to work, and while he manned the register at the front, I stayed in his office in the back. Sitting in his big oak swivel chair, I played with his ten-key adding machine and made houses from the rolls of white adding machine tape. He checked on me during his break, and then at noon we ate our lunch at his desk. Every day he sipped a half-sized can of room temperature beer with his sandwich. It settled his stomach, balancing the rolls of Tums he chewed to counteract the Empirin Compound he took for headaches.

On the days we didn’t pack bologna or salami sandwiches, we ate at the Glen Ellen Diner across the street. I loved going there. We’d slip into a booth and while Dad went over the menu, I flipped through the cards on the silver jukebox, reading off the latest hits. I always requested my favorites, “Hernando’s Hideaway” or “Mr. Sandman.” He stuck with “That’s Amore” or “Oh My Pa-Pa.” It was a dime for one song, a quarter for three. We usually played just one, and I got to put the coin in the slot and push the buttons. I nodded my head in tune and hummed along while we waited for the gingham uniformed waitress to bring us the lunch special: half a tuna on toast with a cup of clam chowder.

Above the back office of the store was a huge, dimly lit attic, stacked to the ceiling with Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas stock. Climbing the stairs, testing my courage, going one step further each time, I sat down on each step until my heart stopped pounding in my ears, wiped my sweaty palms on my peddle-pushers, and caught my breath before I braved another until I finally made it into the attic. Surrounded by giant brown cardboard boxes big enough to hold dead bodies, I managed to get myself into a complete dither. I was convinced someone was hiding up there. What if they were dead, killed by the creature from the Black Lagoon? WHAT IF IT WAS THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON? What if it reached out and grabbed my leg? What if it tried to kill me? I was terrified being up there alone.

Brimming with anxiety, I crept up anyway.

Because I was bored sitting at his desk all day, Dad let me stay home by myself for a couple of hours one morning. I was used to it, and told him it was okay; besides, the store was less than a half a block away. With my six-year-old know-how about drying dishes, folding clothes and straightening covers, I tidied his house. I wanted to make it perfect, to have Dad see how good I was, to have him see that I wouldn’t be a problem and wouldn’t be in the way, to see that maybe it would work out and I could stay and live with him.

Finished, I waited impatiently at the bottom of the staircase for him to come through the front door at lunchtime, so pleased with myself.

“Daddy,” I bubbled, “I cleaned your whole house!”

He took off his felt hat, glanced around and swiped his right index finger along the railing. “You missed dusting the banister.”

Fighting back disappointment and tears, the voice in my head said: “You should have known better. You didn’t do it right. Now you can’t stay.”

I couldn’t. I was always sent back to Mom. But you can bet I never missed dusting a damn banister again.

1954-56 • San Jose ~ Mom was seldom around, and when she was, she wasn’t really “there.” She escaped into sleep, her black eye mask blocking out the world, her small feather pillow hiding her head, and her rounded body buried beneath her blanket. The pills she took didn’t help her either, lined up on her deco four-drawer dresser like an army of toy soldiers wearing neat white caps: tranquilizers, diet pills, pain pills, and sleeping pills, all standing at attention. My mother took pills for her head, for her heart, for her stomach, her surgeries, her depression, her nerves, and whatever else ailed her. I’d sit and watch her from the edge of the room, waiting for her to rise from the void.

When she wasn’t sleeping, she stayed in bed and escaped into books. We carried home stacks of them from the library. I loved reading too, disappearing into mysteries or dissolving into Hansel & Gretel and Through the Looking Glass. Reading saved us. It gave us other people’s lives to live.

Mom read hardcover historical fiction or pulp paperbacks by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. She read True Crime and Detective Story. While she turned the pages, I sometimes put my head on her soft stomach and listened to the sounds, the gurgling and churning and popping noises in her belly, the passage of her breath and the cadence of her heart. I loved nothing more than to feel the rise and fall of her, to close my eyes and feel her warm heat. She didn’t seem to mind. I loved the smell of her too, she smelled like Pond’s with a dusting of Lily of the Valley.

When we moved, or I started a new school or returned from seeing Dad, I had vomiting spells, getting so sick I had to be hospitalized because I became dehydrated. At times I was so sick Betty thought I was going to die; at times I wanted to. Everyone was worried and no one knew what was wrong. After the fifth or sixth time, the medical insurance ran out. With no money for the hospital, a kind doctor made house visits and worked out a way to feed me intravenously at home, rigging an IV bottle to a coat hanger over the bed.

I grew some in height over those years when we lived in San Jose, but I was thin, and when I got sick, I got bone thin, like a slice of light toast. My back, arms, and legs were covered with fine blonde hair; my fair skin was speckled with freckles, moles, and needle marks. I spent much of those years on my knees, my head hanging over a bucket or in prayer, praying for a different mother. The one I had wasn’t working out so well.

1954-55 • San Jose ~ On my knees in my flowered flannel nightgown, my blonde head bowed, I leaned against the bed, hands folded together, and said my nightly prayers. Reciting the Our Father and Hail Mary, I ended with “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…” scanning each day, from morning till night, making sure to include anything I had done wrong, could have done wrong, or anything I even thought about doing wrong, my venial sins all falling into the “impure thoughts” category. Then I blessed Dad and Mom and Larry and Carleen and Betty and Claudia. I blessed my grandparents, even the dead ones, and my aunts, uncles, and cousins, even though I hadn’t met most of them. It took a long time since there were a lot of them. Then I blessed all the poor babies who were in Limbo because they died before they had a chance to be baptized. I blessed my guardian angel and asked for her help. Then I prayed:

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
Please let me die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

Every morning I’d wake up and still be there. On weekdays I got myself up and dressed, downed a bowl of Cheerios, and delivered myself to school. After school, I was on my own. I seldom ventured out much past the house, afraid I might get lost or the neighborhood dog would bite me; I mostly stayed inside and read Carolyn Keene: The Clue in the Diary, The Secret in the Old Clock, The Hidden Staircase. Then I’d fix some toast.

I climbed the tree out front, but not past the lower branches. I collected orange poppies and delicate wildflowers from the yard and placed them in torn sheets of folded wax paper, pressing them between the pages of our big, green-bound encyclopedia. I saved them for a time when the weather was gray, for a time when I needed flowers.

At the age of six, I led an interior life, my mind chattering away. I had tea with my paper dolls and read my Nancy Drew books.

I sometimes took the Greyhound bus to see Dad. Mom handed me a bus ticket and a dime to keep in my pocket just in case, told me to keep an eye on the clock, then left me on the bench waiting for the bus. Losing myself in The Mystery of the Moss-Covered Mansion, the world around me disappeared. At the end of each chapter, I’d ratchet back to earth, look at the clock over the top of my book to check the time, panicked that my bus might have come and gone. With everyone rushing around, all the buses coming and going, and the noisy echoes caroming off the scuffed plaster walls, I was constantly worried I might miss mine. It always worked out though. Sometimes I’d ask, or someone would come along and sense my confusion and make sure I boarded the right one.

I always tried to sit up front to the right of the driver so I could see out and not get carsick. An hour later, Dad would be there waiting for me at the depot on 7th and Mission, catching me as I vaulted three feet from the opened door into his outstretched arms.

1955 • San Francisco ~ My dad taught me to sew on a button, how to thread the needle and not make the thread too long because it would knot itself and catch in the fabric. He showed me how to wrap the white thread around the end of my finger and pull my finger and the thread through in one motion, knotting two ends of the doubled thread at the same time. Even though he showed me how to be careful not to hold my index finger over a four-holed white button so I wouldn’t stab myself with the needle coming through from underneath, I always drew blood. Then he showed me how to use a thimble. He showed me how to put a straight pin across the button and sew over it so the looped thread wouldn’t make the button too tight, to sew in one hole and out the other six times, then to knot it on the back side of the fabric. A perfect button!

He taught me to iron his white dress shirts. I had to kneel on a chair to reach the makeshift rickety ironing board. I mostly ironed the backs because his shirts were too big and they kept falling off. He did the rest. I liked watching him iron, breathing in the smell of the starch and the scorched ironing-board cover.

We walked to the butcher shop after work to pick out special double-cut lamb chops. Dad made dinner: the most delicious meat, perfectly cooked, rare and juicy, with canned new potatoes which I liked even though they had this weird rubber feeling, and canned green peas, which I hated. Just the smell of them made me gag. He made me eat them anyway, saying they were good for me. It’s easy to hide canned peas in a glass of milk; they’re like lead. I liked canned spinach better, even though it tasted metallic. When they were in season, we had fresh steamed artichokes or asparagus dipped in mayonnaise, which were our favorites, and the best, the very best, fresh cracked crab from Fisherman’s Wharf with thick slices of sourdough French bread.

We held hands on the way to the Russian restaurant down near the panhandle where we ate piroshkis and bowls of borscht with a glob of sour cream floating on the top. I loved Dad’s huge hands with ropey blue veins and long fingers with clean, clipped nails. One day I put my six-year-old hand in his pocket to be closer to him; he jerked it out and ordered me never to do that again. I didn’t understand, nor did I ask. I knew by the look on his face and tone of his voice and the pace of his walk I’d done something wrong. He told me we couldn’t hold hands anymore either, that I was too old now. My heart sank, and I sorely feared that meant no more butterfly kisses either.

On a day while walking with him to work, we were laughing and telling knock-knock jokes. I told him a riddle with the word nookie; he didn’t laugh. He snapped, “don’t you ever use that word again!” I knew not to ask him what it meant either.

The hardest thing about visiting Dad was leaving him. I didn’t want to say goodbye, to feel as if I was being sent away. I had such a need to be wanted. I loved him, I knew he loved me, and I knew Mom didn’t. When it was time to go, it was with a lump in my throat and an ache in my chest. The catch of my breath turned to huge sobs; I couldn’t see or breathe. I couldn’t find anything wrong with me, but there must have been something. Why else wouldn’t he let me stay?

1955 • San Jose ~ Jefferson Elementary was like all grammar schools, filled with the noise of kids screaming, whistles blowing, and bells ringing. I paid careful attention to my teacher, Miss Harrison, but when she started writing too many numbers on the blackboard, which was green, my mind wandered where it wasn’t so crowded, spending most of its time outside the window, my thoughts drifting around with the quiet sycamores and floating clouds.

I wasn’t about to raise my hand and ask a question. I might get called on, or worse yet, be wrong. I didn’t like sitting in the middle of the room; anywhere on the side or the back, even the front, was better. Quietly observing from the edges, I prayed no one would notice me. I ached to suck my fingers but didn’t want to be called a baby, so I bit my nails instead.

There were things I liked about second grade: reading stories, practicing letters, drawing houses with a peaked roof, a green door, one window and a straight row of tulips in the front yard. And lunch. One day a week I got to eat in the cafeteria, buying a red lunch ticket for a quarter. I liked the feel of the molded trays and thought it was neat the way they were sectioned so the fish sticks, creamed corn, fruit cocktail and JELL-O wouldn’t touch. I never have liked my food touching. Even though the cafeteria meal was good, the pitch and clanging in there made me a wreck, so I usually brought my lunch in a brown bag, lettered with my name and room number, so I could eat outside.

The playground was deadly. The swings, merry-go-round, and teeter-totter were designed to make me throw up or break my scrawny neck. At recess, the other kids played tetherball, kickball, and dodgeball: games that in my opinion were way too dangerous. It was a shock having a ball smashed in my face, kicked in my stomach, or slammed at my back. It hurt. A swinging bat once cracked me in the mouth, splitting my lips and breaking my upper front tooth in half, confirming every belief I held about the dangers of playground weaponry. Foursquare was more to liking; no one was allowed to try to do away with me.

We marched outside for weekly fire drills, holding hands two-by-two, boys in one line, girls in the other, moving away from the low one-story building that was built like a bunker and wouldn’t burn even if it had been doused with gasoline. During air-raid practice to protect us from Communist invaders, we crouched like rolled up pill bugs under our wood-top desks with unused inkwells, our arms protecting our heads, the boys scanning the room and snickering at all the girl’s flowered cotton panties in full bloom. There was never any nuclear attack. Like an inch-thick desktop was going to protect me. Oh please! I had plenty of other dangers in my life to fret about.

I remember a lot about second grade. We had finger paints and watercolors, pull-down maps and afternoon naps. I can still feel the damp winter cloakroom with its piles of dripping raincoats and soggy boots. I remember the screech of chalk and the ticking clock and the whirl of the sharpener by Miss Harrison’s desk. I remember the aroma of paste, of buff paper with wood slivers and blue lines, of clouds of chalk dust from pounded erasers. I even remember how it tasted: graham crackers and cold milk and chewed Ticonderoga pencils, the eraser seldom used on mine; I was careful not to make mistakes. I remember Dick and Jane. “See Spot run. Run, Spot, run.” I knew exactly how Spot felt. I wanted to run, too.

I liked bank day. I’ve been banking with Bank of America since I was in the second grade. Every other Friday I brought my nickels and dimes to school, turning in my passbook and coins in a small drawstring sackcloth bag. Magically, the passbook returned the next week, my latest deposits handwritten on the ledger. It wasn’t so much the money I saved over time that I cared much about, it was my name printed on the inside of my passbook cover. I had three things that were of utmost importance to me: my small green bankbook, my report cards, and my library card. They all contained my name, confirming my existence.

I didn’t have a yellow slicker with a matching billed hat that snapped under my chin, but I wanted one. And I wanted a Brownie uniform too, in the worst way. Most of the girls in my class were Brownies and they all wore their uniforms to school on Thursdays. After weeks of hinting and trying not to beg her, my mother finally gave in and took me shopping for the brown dress with the shiny gold sash, my only store-bought dress. We got the socks too. However, it hadn’t occurred to me that being a Brownie meant going to troop meetings. I only went to one; it was more painful than school. I didn’t want to have to be with the girls and their sashes covered with pins and badges, their hair bouncy and curly. I didn’t know what to say. I just wanted to look like them, to feel like I fit in.

April 1955 • San Jose ~ In April, Claudia came to live with Mom and me, and sometime after she arrived, Betty showed up on the doorstep. Mom wasn’t expecting her as she had chosen to live with Dad after we left Tuolumne. Betty stayed with him in a motel in Castro Valley for six weeks, but living with Dad was hard so she went to live with Carleen and Chuck for seven months in Montebello for the rest of her freshman year, then moved back with Dad in San Francisco. She went to Presentation Catholic School her sophomore year, where she snuck lipstick, rolled her skirts up and bobby socks down, and smoked cigarettes like all good Catholic school girls. One time, walking home from school, she and a girlfriend noticed a candy-apple red convertible parked at the curb with the keys dangling from the ignition. The girls took one look at each other; Betty figured she could drive a stick, so they hopped in and lurched along until she got the hang of it. They gave that shiny red car a spin around town for an hour with the radio up, the top down, and their hair blowing in the wind, then re-parked it with the keys still in the ignition, nervously laughing the rest of the way home.

Dad wouldn’t let Betty date at sixteen. Not only that, he told her she couldn’t date until she was eighteen and he would come along on her dates until she was twenty-one. That’s why she ran away to Mom’s, which as it turned, was not such a hot idea.

Dad and Betty picked Claudia and me up at Mom’s for Easter. We went to Mass and then spent the day with Larry on campus where we had our pictures taken in our new outfits. Then Dad drove us back to San Francisco for dinner at the wharf and to spend the night. When Claudia and I were leaving the next day to take the bus back to San Jose, Betty told Claudia to tell Dad that Claudia lost her ticket so he’d have to buy her another one. Dad found Betty packed and waiting for us at the downtown bus station. He was hurt and disappointed, but he let her go.

Mom’s tiny place grew tinier with four of us living there. We moved to a daylight basement apartment, a one-bedroom with a living room that had a combination sink, stove, and refrigerator unit in one corner, and a bathroom on a raised platform in the other. We could sit in the tub and watch the television below. It was a black and white Philco with three stations and aluminum foil-wrapped rabbit ears for better reception. It took five minutes for it to warm up.

My sisters and I slept on a green pullout sofa bed. Sometimes I slept with Mom in her twin bed to escape them. I cried when they claimed I had cooties, then mocked me for being so touchy. I hated that I cried so easily. Claudia ignored me and Betty entertained herself by teasing me. When she got bored she’d pin me to the floor, sit on my stomach, lock my arms over my head, and with her face hovering twelve inches over mine, water torture me with dangling spit, then dig her nails into my ribs and armpits until I screamed and threatened to pee. It was the only excuse, along with my tears, that got her to let me go. Claudia sat on the couch with her arms crossed, snickering. It was better before they came, but I was glad they were there.

August 4, 1955 • San Jose, another letter from Mom to her sister:
Dear Verda:
Hope you and your family are well as we have been (most of the time).

I was married last Sunday in Carson City to Ray Haynie. No, I know you don’t know him but that’s the name. He is a grand person and the kids are crazy about him. He owns a garage here in town and is in the process now of getting a contract to manufacture manifolds for a firm that builds trucks. Financially, my worries are over. As soon as we get squared away we are either buying or building a new home. Ray has had a garage, service station and Chevy & Buick agency in Guam for the past nine years, has only been back in the States since January. He has been gone for so long that he is just different from these guys you usually meet today. You know how orientals treat a white woman. Don’t get excited, he is half Irish and half Danish, but he has been around them so much he treats me like a queen. Anyhow, I don’t know whether to let Mom know or not. You know how she feels about remarriage. I never thought I would ever do it, but I’m sure not sorry, and even Larry, as little as he says, is all for it.

I’ll tell you a little more about him in case Mom hears. He is 42, about the same build as George was only he is 5’8” tall. Has black curly hair, dark skin, gentle nature. He graduated from college in Boulder City, Colo. He has one brother and a father is all, who are very wealthy, a lot more than Ray is. He was born a Mormon but doesn’t seem to have much of any kind of religion now. I never saw a man more tickled with a family in all my life. He thinks Betty and Claudia are as good as a three-ring circus and loves Cathy like she was his. He took the girls with him last week to S.F. before I quit work and they saw their Dad. Of course, blabbermouth Betty told him I was going to get married. All he said was “the poor sucker”. Betty said he acted like he was never going to see them again. He can see them more often now. I cut down on his support, what he has to send to each, from $50 a month to $40, and Ray said as soon as they get going on the factory for manifolds he doesn’t want him to send anything, in fact he could stop right now. But Carl has a lot of pride and that would be a slap in the face to him. By the first of the year, I’ll tell him he can send $75 a month for all three.

This afternoon I am going to look at houses. I can hardly believe this has all happened to me. My doctor said it was about time I was getting some good luck for a change. You know I had an impacted wisdom tooth pulled last month, and the next day I started uterine bleeding. I flowed for 22 days, went into the hospital on the second of July, had 2 blood transfusions the fourth, and was curetted the fifth. Was off work until last week. I may have to go back to the hospital and have my uterus out, as I have a fibroid tumor. I haven’t stopped flowing since and I am going to the doctor this afternoon. I told Ray what was wrong and the condition I was in and I might have to have an operation but he said that didn’t make any difference to him, that wasn’t what he was marrying me for and he could wait for a normal married life.

Please let me know what you think about letting Mom know, you know her condition. I don’t mind anyone else but if it is going to have any ill effects on her, maybe it would be better for her not to. If she weren’t so rabid, I think she would be happy that we are going to have a good home, a good man and security.

Betty has become a different girl since she has been here. She was running around with a bad crowd in S.F. (never saw a Catholic high school yet that didn’t have more than their full share). Now she runs around with girls her own age, their parents watch them pretty close, none of them smoke or ride around at night. Like 15 and 16 year olds should be, but seldom are.

Wish I could tell you just how happy I am. Excuse the scratching and scribbling but it has been so long since I have written a letter that I am out of practice.

Love to all, Noreen
P.S. By the way Haynie is pronounced hay-knee.

Note: We lived at 183 George Street, San Jose, California. Mom and Ray married on July 31, 1955; she was his fourth known wife.

1955 • San Jose ~ Occasionally Larry made the hour drive from San Jose up to San Francisco to take Dad to a show. They went to the Cinerama at the Orpheum Theatre on Market Street a couple of times. Dad was impressed, even though he was never much of a moviegoer. The year before, Larry took him to see the opera, A Midsummer’s Night Dream at the Curran Theater. My brother thought was great, but it wasn’t Dad’s cup of tea, he not being a fan of opera or Shakespeare.

Feb 14, 1955 • Miscellaneous entry from Larry’s diary (age 21)
Dad came down from San Francisco for a visit and took me and Cathy to the movie, Carmen Jones.

June 1955 • San Jose ~ Larry graduated from San Jose State College.

July 31, 1955 • San Jose ~ Our mother married Raymond D. Haynie in Carson City, Nevada.

Aug 1955 • Ohio ~ In August, my brother moved to Athens, Ohio to attend Ohio University as a graduate assistant, and in 1956 obtained his Master’s Degree in Counseling. He earned his room, board, tuition and all fees, plus was paid a total of $1,500 by the school during his enrollment. He went on to obtain his secondary teaching, school counseling, and administration credentials at Long Beach State in 1957.

When he moved to Ohio, no one knew him as Larry so he took the opportunity to formally use his given first name of Gordon. Until he married, the family still called him Larry, and for years after whenever we forgot, which was most of the time.

Mom was newly married to Ray, and we were now living at 183 George Street in San Jose, just down the block from our last house. Dad often gave me two-dollar bills which I saved, and Larry sent me this Silver Certificate in September from Ohio. The Act of August 4, 1888 is printed vertically on the left-hand side of the bill, and Lincoln and Grant are pictured at the bottom. It was the first piece of mail anyone had ever sent to just me.

Sep 25, 1955 • San Francisco ~ Betty, Claudia, and I were with Dad to celebrate his 50th birthday, so he and Betty must have forgiven one another. We had a birthday cake in his flat on Clayton Street, his small white dinette table covered in a checkered blue and white oilcloth, Claudia commemorating the party by taking a picture of the cake along with Betty, Dad, and me sitting around the table.

Dec 25, 1955 • San Francisco ~ Betty, Claudia, and I spent Christmas with Dad at his place. He had a small tree on a table in his living room, decorated with ornaments and tinsel, and tucked under it, he had wrapped presents for us. In the picture, it looks like I have a new Toni again, so I suppose Betty may have been the one to take over giving me a perm.

We made a lot of road trips back and forth between Dad and Mom for holidays and many a weekend, but as San Jose was only 50 miles below San Francisco, it was an easy bus trip or drive.

Note from my brother to me in 2017 ~ Catherine, because I was working and going to school full time I did not even know where my sisters were in 1953. Mom and Dad did not inform me of what was happening in the family. You, then Claudia, then Betty, eventually appeared like magic in San Jose to live with Mom in 1953 or 1954. When Mom remarried in 1955, I never met her new husband or visited them in their time in San Jose. However, you, Betty, Claudia and Mom did visit me a couple of times while I was at San Jose State College before I graduated in 1955. Dad also brought you all for visits during the times you stayed with him. Gordon

1955 • San Jose ~ He called us Daughter Number One, Daughter Number Two, and Daughter Number Three. Betty figured he called us that because he liked having daughters; Claudia figured it was because he couldn’t remember our names. Mom met Mr. Wonderful in a bar and married him soon after. Following their July 31st Nevada nuptials, we moved from 183 George Street to a real house, an upstairs flat in Willow Glen.

Ray ran an auto repair shop on the south end of town. He was short and swarthy with greasy dark hair and grubby black fingernails. He dressed like a gangster dandy and smelled like a mix of cheap cologne and crude oil. I don’t remember him much, other than what he looked like and that he was nice to me. He didn’t get mad at me when he put out the fire when the high dry grass in the backyard ignited from my Fourth of July sparkler, and he bounced me on his knee when we all sat out on the porch, but he drank too much. He loved lying on the couch watching television all weekend as much as he loved beer, boxing, and gambling. While Mom was at work (she was a seamstress sewing logos and names on uniforms for Singer), Ray’s smarmy friend Frank teetered over and hung around the house all day smoking, drinking, and trying to molest Claudia. Mom didn’t believe Claudia, of course, nor did Ray try and stop him.

My step-father may have been a lush, but he cared for my mother and was concerned about her mental state along with the quantity of pills she took. Drinking was one thing, but drugs were another. She began concealing them, even the Bromo-Seltzer. Mom, taking after her father, downed bottles of the stuff. When Ray pulled a blue bottle hidden inside the flour canister, Claudia thought it was funny. When he told her that Mom was addicted to it, that it wasn’t funny, that he was worried about Mom, Claudia snickered, “You can’t get addicted to something like Bromo-Seltzer.”

Gimme a Bromo… It was a mixture of acetaminophen, sodium bicarbonate, and citric acid, an effervescent antacid, and an analgesic compound. A capful of white crystals dissolved into a half a glass of water relieved nervous tension headaches, heartburn, and upset stomachs.

FFFFFFiiiiiggggghhhhhttttt headache three ways, the talking train belted out a loud whistle on the radio and as the train sounded closer and closer it chanted, Bromo-Seltzer, Bromo-Seltzer, Bromo-Seltzer.

Ray may have been right. Just because she didn’t need a prescription to get it didn’t mean it might not have serious side effects, particularly with prolonged use and especially combined with alcohol, and Mom was drinking again.

The side effects listed on the back of the bottle certainly described her ongoing complaints: Continuing headaches; increased blood pressure; mood or mental changes; nervousness or restlessness; pain (severe/sharp) in lower back/side; swelling of face, fingers, ankles, feet, or lower legs; unpleasant taste; unusual bleeding or bruising; unusual tiredness or weakness; weight gain. It didn’t help her liver or kidneys either. Maybe Mom’s problems didn’t stem from drugs or depression. Maybe Mom wasn’t crazy. Maybe she wasn’t sick. Maybe Ray was right; maybe her problems stemmed from too much Bromo-Seltzer.

Ray lived with us for a little over a year. He passed out one day, coming to in a tub full of tepid water. He went crazy after Mom, accusing her of trying to drown him. Buck-naked and dripping wet, he chased her through the house and down the street, brandishing a butcher knife like an Olympic torch-runner, Mom in a full black slip and barefoot, hollering like a banshee and zigzagging down the tree-shaded block keeping a fair piece ahead of him. Claudia (Daughter Number Two) ran after him, waving Mom’s black cast iron skillet skyward, threatening to bash his head in if he didn’t leave Mom alone.

Larry was raised by Betty Crocker. We got Bette Davis. You think your family is normal but you’re not sure, so you keep your mouth shut just in case.

1956 • Willow Glen ~ It doesn’t take much Catholic upbringing to instill one with guilt, especially if the Church gets its hands on you while you’re young. The nuns prepared me for my First Holy Communion, teaching me to be thankful I’d been baptized so I wouldn’t have to spend eternity in Limbo, and educating me about Purgatory and Hell which I knew were a definite possibility if I died with any sin on my soul. They explained what a sin was, and also explained that something was not a sin unless you knew it was a sin, which I found very confusing. There were church rules to learn too: no meat on Friday, no candy during Lent, and if you were a girl, no entering church with your head uncovered. Breaking church rules was also a sin. I learned the Ten Commandments and the Stations of the Cross. I was taught about the Sacraments and the Holy Days. I memorized the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Act of Contrition—all requirements to make your First Holy Communion.

I remember my first confession. Along with my fellow penitents, I kneeled in the pew just outside the two confessionals. They looked like wooden phone booths with curtains and a light over the door to signal whether they were occupied. When one side vacated, I took my turn. Kneeling in the tiny darkened room, I listened to mumbling on the other side and waited for the closing swish of the black screen and the opening swish when it was my turn. With sweat trickling down the center of my back, I bowed my head, made the sign of the cross, held my hands in prayer and whispered into the shadows.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

It was important to have things to confess. Having had little chance to commit any mortal sins, I had committed a few venial ones so Father wouldn’t think I was hiding anything. I stepped on a crack, said a curse word, and disobeyed Betty, though I’m not sure that counted because she was not the boss of me. After five minutes in the confessional and a penance of ten Our Fathers and fifteen Hail Marys, I was forgiven.

I loved the way this worked. Sins don’t count unless you know they’re sins. Or, you can commit a sin but then receive absolution by going to confession. If you’re lucky and die in that very moment, you go to heaven. If you’re unlucky and die with a venial sin on your soul you end up in Purgatory. And if you’re really unlucky and die with a mortal sin on your soul, you go straight to Hell. Timing was everything.

On May 13th, I received my First Holy Communion at Sacred Heart Church in Willow Glen, a tree-lined neighborhood in San Jose where we lived. Mom made my veil and dress. She took me shopping for lace-trimmed white socks and white shoes. Carleen wasn’t there to give me a perm but my hair still looked pretty good.

From my place in the procession going into the church, I spotted Mom in the crowd, and then Claudia waving to me. I tried not to grin when I spied my dad standing on the other side with his sister, my Aunt Elizabeth, who drove up from Lynwood to attend my ceremony. She gave me a blue leather-covered pocket missal and a First Holy Communion card with a praying child on the cover. Daddy gave me a beautiful silk-padded card with Jesus on the cover. I don’t remember much else about the day, but I have the pictures he took with his Brownie, and I saved the cards. I still have my missal too.

1956 • San Jose ~ By third grade I was in my third school and had lived in over twice as many houses. It made me anxious, moving all the time. It seemed that as soon as I’d figure out how to get back and forth to school or to the dentist or to church, we’d move. I spent a good part of my time standing on street corners, a blanket of confusion enveloping me, puzzling which way to turn, and usually guessing wrong. If I hadn’t already gone too far, I’d try to retrace my steps and start over. I’d wander around hoping something would look familiar, or find someone who could point me in the right direction. The problem with getting lost all the time is that after awhile, everything looks familiar—which makes it hard to get there from here—and where eeny-meeny-miny-moe is of no use at all. 

Willow Glen Elementary was much like Jefferson Elementary. Eating my sandwich (cut crosswise), my three Oreos, and a small red box of Sunmaid raisins, I perched at the corner of the playground. Hunching my shoulders and digging my heels back and forth, I made small hollows in the bald hardpack while I chewed my raisins with my front teeth like a rabbit. I watched the other kids play tag and dodge ball. Some days, Kendra, whose parents were both deaf mutes, sat with me. I fed my crusts to the birds and gave Kendra my raisins; they made my cavities scream.

Kendra taught me to sign. One day she brought me a small card that showed me how to hold my hands for each letter so I could practice. I thought maybe I could teach Mom, maybe break the silence another way. But my mother wasn’t interested; the only voices in our house were the ones in her head.

I’d been praying to God for a number of years and now that I was official from making my First Holy Communion, I hoped that perhaps He would hear me. However, it soon became clear that He didn’t. He wasn’t helping any of us: Betty was skating on thin ice, Claudia had no use for me, and my stepfather, Mr. Wonderful, was busy chasing my mother down our tree-lined street with a butcher knife. I took up shoplifting. I don’t even remember worrying about theft being a sin—probably because by then I was so disheartened with God I didn’t care what He thought.

My mother never got after me for being out and about, never got after me for chores, nor did she ever get after me for stealing. She didn’t care about such things. Actually, she didn’t notice such things. The only time I remember her getting cross with me was for calling her “Ma.”

“Don’t you ever call me, Ma. I am Mother or Mom. Not Ma!”

She had to know I was stealing, as at eight-years-old and not gainfully employed, I had no money and a corner of the bedroom filled with new toys. Within a couple of months, I’d acquired a complete line of Storybook dolls, along with their clothes, shoes, and accessories. I accumulated jacks, Crayolas, Slinkies, marbles, bubbles, balloons, and slingshots in addition to paper dolls, Pick-up Sticks, colored pencils, candy bars, comic books, and squirt guns. I went with Kendra. In the aisle of our neighborhood five-and-dime, we sat and played, taking our time sorting through what we were going to take. Stuffing our cache of the day down our panties (the paddle balls were the hardest to hide), we paid for one item and then calmly sauntered out, breaking into a run once we rounded the corner. We were Ben Franklin’s most loyal shoplifters.

Then I got caught. Kendra wasn’t with me this time. Facing the checkout register paying for a bag of marbles while tucking a package of balloons in my back pocket, I felt a large hand clamp onto my right shoulder. I was scared. The storeowner jerked the contraband out of my pocket, yanked me around, and shoved me out the door with, “If I ever see your face in here again, I’ll call the cops.”

I knew stealing was a sin and I knew it wasn’t right. I also never wanted the frightening—not to mention humiliating—experience of being caught in a wrongdoing again. So I stopped.

I thought it best to skip confession during my time of crime; I wasn’t about to admit to Father that I was a thief, for heaven’s sake. When I resumed going to confession, it was with a clear conscience.

October 1957 • San Jose to the Islands ~ A year and a month into Bobby and Claudia’s marriage, Bobby was transferred to Barbers Point, a naval air station about 20 minutes from Honolulu. My mother got the notion that she and I would move there too. Mom wanted to be near Claudia, she and Ray had just divorced, and as she was not concerned about what would happen to Betty, we followed in their wake. Mother had to get permission from Dad to take me out of the state, but as Dad’s new wife had no interest in sharing him, it was prudent for him to acquiesce. It worked out quite well for Irene, and also took the heat off Dad with no longer having to choose between her and his children.

Mom proclaimed we were going to live in paradise, so a month into my fourth-grade year—while the world still moved at an unhurried pace, when it took eight hours to fly on a Jumbo DC6, and before it was a state—we moved to the island of Oahu.

She left most of our things in storage with a neighbor: her five-piece 1930s semi-Deco waterfall bedroom furniture, her sofa-bed, her yellow Formica kitchen table and chairs, the Philco, her good dishes and kitchenware, and just about everything else she ever owned. She wouldn’t need her satin shoes, velvet stole, or green wool coat in the tropics. We only took what clothes we could fit in four suitcases and a steamer trunk along with her heavy cast-iron pans, her metal meat grinder, her box of family pictures, button collection, sewing box, black and gold portable Singer, and her mother’s round English Deco mirror.

She only let me bring the things I couldn’t live without; my two Little Women dolls that had belonged to my sisters, my two-dollar-bills from Daddy, my dollar Silver Certificate, stamp and coin collections, and the Johnny Tremain book Larry gave me when I was seven. It was his when he was my age.

I parted with the rest of my things. Mom promised we’d get them when we moved back: the toys and family of Storybook Dolls along with all their clothes, shoes, and accessories I’d shoplifted over the past year; my Betsy McCall paper dolls, my marble collection, bubble-gum cards, Archie comics, portable record player and record collection of two. “You’ll live without them,” she assured me.

I was most nervous parting with my library card, my school report cards, and my savings passbook. What if they got lost? What if I never got them back? How would I know who I was?

San Jose ~ I don’t remember Mom being home much. Betty remembers her buried behind a paperback beneath a cloud of smoke, sleeping with her black eye-mask and feather pillow over her head, yelling at us if we disturbed her.

She’d cook herself a rare sirloin steak when none of us were around and if anyone walked in on her, she hunched over it like a dog with a bone, afraid we might try and take it from her. Our mother survived on steak, Kents, green tea, U-NO Bars, paperbacks, and pills.

Sewing was Mom’s salvation. I arranged the silver straight pins in her red pincushion and tidied her metal bobbins and wooden spools of colored threads. I liked keeping her sewing box organized. I also played with her button collection that was kept in an old clear glass jar. There were hundreds of two-hole or four-hole buttons of every color, size, and shape, made of plastic, wood or metal, buttons she’d collected and buttons her mother had collected. I strung them into necklaces as I sat at her feet.

She sewed most of our clothes: for me dresses of checks and plaids with white collars and puffed sleeves, trimmed with rickrack and small ties, shirred and smocked and pleated and tucked. She made our school clothes, all of our yearly Easter outfits, and our flannel nightgowns. She made our blouses and boleros, even our belts, hunched in concentration over her black and gold Singer, foot constantly working the floor pedal while her hands deftly fed the material under the needle, the steady hum ceasing only when she stopped to reverse the stitch or finish a seam. She measured us, laid out the material and pinned the patterns to it, then cut the fabric with her heavy, black-handled pinking shears. With a scatter of straight pins in her mouth, she slipped the newly seamed outfit on us, sticking us with pins as she fitted us, mumbling, “stand still and quit sniveling.” Sewing was the only normal thing she did with any regularity. It kept her basted together.

Sonora and San Jose ~ Carleen always gave us a Toni the day before school pictures; she was making us beautiful. She shampooed our hair, yanked our snarls with a sharp-toothed comb, then sat us in a row at the yellow Formica kitchen table. With old bath towels draped over our shoulders, Betty, Claudia, and I perched on the matching vinyl chairs, waited our turn. First, she Scotch-taped our wet bangs to our foreheads, then with Mom’s good sewing scissors, snipped them straight across. Starting at the crowns of our heads, she carefully wrapped each combed lock with a little white square of tissue paper, then tightly rolled it in pink plastic rods, ordering us to, “Sit still and quit whining.” Finally, she poured the processing solution over our heads, into our eyes and down our backs, tilting her head sideways so she wouldn’t pass out from the reek of ammonia. We held the cotton strips tight to our forehead so we wouldn’t go blind.

By morning, our bangs had shrunk three inches above our eyebrows, four inches where there were cowlicks. Flat on top, the rest of our hair was so tight and curly it stuck out in triangles on each side like Bozo the Clown, but one side was always higher than the other, so it looked like our hair was on crooked. We also stank to high heaven for a week.

One year, the year I was eight, Mom put Betty and Claudia in charge of my hair. They took me to a barbershop and pocketed the balance of what it would have cost at the beauty salon.

Leaving the barbershop in tears, my sisters made me trail ten feet behind, saying I looked like a boy and so ugly they couldn’t be seen with me, laughing and taunting “we don’t even know you” and calling me a “poor little orphan girl.”

However, I think my hair did look better in my school picture that year.

1956 • San Jose ~ Reading was good company. I read whatever was in front of me. I read all four sides of the milk carton and the Cheerios box and the C&H container. I read the editor’s notes and publication dates and fine print in the front of True Detective and Reader’s Digest and Cornet or whatever Mom left on the table. If I’d finished my last stack of mysteries from the library, I read our new four-inch-thick Webster’s Combined Dictionary and Encyclopedia that Larry gave us for Christmas; I studied the slick colored pictures of the plants and animals in it until I knew them by heart.

When I got bored reading indoors, I went outside and read. Sometimes I’d just lie in the yard in the afternoon sun, warming my face and body, feeling the heat on my cheeks, keeping my eyes closed (no way was I going to go blind looking directly into the sun), dreaming of angels. The long hair on my arms stirred in the breeze; it was the grass and I was the earth. Listening to grasshoppers rasping in my ears, feeling a small brown butterfly kissing my arm with its tiny eyelash feet, I breathed in the loamy odor of dirt and chewed on a long stem of sour grass. I talked to myself and to God as I kept an eye out for the mangy dog next door and the honeybees hovering over the alyssum making sure no bees buzzed under me before I settled down. I‘d been stung before when I was maybe three and we lived in our old two-story house in Sonora. It is my first memory. Running to the store screaming for Dad, he caught me, told me to calm down, pulled the stinger out of my back, and said it was only a bee sting and that I would survive.

I flipped over and dug my elbows and knees and wiggled my toes into the dark cool dirt, scratching my bare legs where the rocks and stickers poked through the Bermuda grass. Beneath my nose I studied an army of black ants scurrying with their top-heavy loads, building cities with tunnels and pyramids. One procession transported a dead roly-poly and dragged a squirming earwig to feed their industrious six-legged troops. I was most careful not to squash them or breathe too hard and wreck their work. I did, however, put a twig in their way to make their lives more interesting. I was pretty sure that wasn’t a sin.

San Jose ~ During the time I lived with Mom, I was hospitalized several times for malnutrition and dehydration from vomiting spells. The first time it happened I was five. I only remember a couple of episodes as those recollections are tangled up inside me.

It will only hurt for a second. Close your eyes. Don’t breathe. I repeated this mantra, trying not to be afraid while I was scared half to death. It usually took more than one try to get a vein for the IV, and the nurses had to hold me down until the doctor had the needle properly inserted. Sometimes the needles snapped in half. In the beginning, they used veins in my wrists, on the backs of my hands, or the bends in my arms. Over time, when those veins collapsed, they used those in my ankles and the backs of my knees. I rocked myself with tiny back-and-forth movements, my body shaking as if it would never stop. I held my breath, sharp pain moving through me. My tears slid quietly down the side of my face, filling my ears like small holy cups. Then it got quiet, a profound, white quiet. I felt I was hovering overhead, that I was there but not there, watching everything from the ceiling in a detached way. It was safer near the ceiling.

I didn’t have a satin-edged blanket or a small bear. Instead, I sucked two of my fingers; slipping them into my mouth soothed me and relieved my gnawing stomach. The more agonizing hospital stays happened when the IV was on my left arm. Taped to a long, thin board so my arm wouldn’t bend, I couldn’t get my fingers to my mouth. My right-hand fingers just wouldn’t do. Plus it hurt to breathe; the air burned my throat, dry and rough as hot sandpaper. My lips were cracked and I was dying of thirst but I couldn’t keep water down. Sometimes they let me have ice chips, sometimes a white wet washcloth to suck on, but the washcloth hurt my teeth because the enamel on them was so thin. It also made me gag and reminded me of the rough gauze packed in the back of my throat that filled with blood and choked me when I had my tonsils out.

I watched the long thin hands on the round, white-faced clock high on the wall, listened to the tick-ticking, the red second hand stuck for three counts each time it hit the six, one Mississippi… two Mississippi… three Mississippi, then jump ahead and catch up as the black minute hand slowly circled ’round and ’round without missing a beat. I practiced ellemmennopee, counted as high as I could, glanced back at the clock, then watched the drip, drip, drip of the IV fluid slowly descending through the plastic tubing to the needle, draining into my parchment arm.

The nurses silently floated around me. The younger ones slipped me slivers of ice. Nurse Ratched wandered in every few hours to change the empty glass bottle hanging on the metal stand next to me. When she got to it, she brought me a refrigerated metal bedpan. She didn’t want to be bothered with any requests; patients interfered with her routine.

I didn’t have visitors. I only remember Mom coming once (though I’m sure she must’ve come more than that) with a man I hadn’t seen before. “A friend,” she said. She brought me a Bugs Bunny coloring book and a brand new box of 48 Crayolas. I studied the “M”s in the box: magenta, maize, melon, mahogany, maroon. I loved how periwinkle, Prussian blue, and thistle rolled off my tongue. The flesh, salmon, and carnation pink were sappy colors; the blue-violet my favorite. Mom and her friend held hands, talked to each other, and didn’t stay long. I wasn’t interested in coloring anymore.

When three or four days passed and I was well enough to go home, it was always the same routine. I’d beg the doctor to slowly pull off one small strip at a time the adhesive tape that attached the board and needle to my arm, but he always cut away the whole section, tearing it off in one yank and not even counting to three, ripping out all the hair on my forearm, my shriek startling the bejeesus out of everyone.

I wasn’t abused as a child. I was tortured. My mother attempted to run me through her meat grinder, I was gassed to oblivion while having my tonsils out for no good reason, and have had needles jabbed and stuck and jammed into me. I had every molar in my head drilled and filled by Nazi dentists using horse-sized needles and a concrete pile-driver until the corners of my mouth cracked and my jaw wanted to split, the buzz-saw sound of the drill slicing through my brain and careening off the inside of my skull. I’ve had dozens of moles cut off my body by an Exacto knife or burnt off with a soldering iron, the smell of my burning skin making me nearly faint. I was attacked by our rooster that was as big as I was and the living daylights scared out of me when Mom’s chickens chased me after she whacked off their heads. I’ve been stung by bees that “won’t hurt me” and scratched by cats that “don’t scratch” and bitten by two large German Shepherds that “don’t bite.”

I am afraid. I’m afraid of pain, of having no control or power to stop it, of not being able to bear it. I’m scared of shots and needles and stitches, worried about slivers and stings and bites, afraid of blood and cuts and scrapes. I don’t trust anything that could do any sort of damage to my body. You’d think I’d be used to it. I’m not. There was seldom anyone there to hold my hand or stroke my cheek, to tell me the pain wouldn’t last forever and that I’d be okay, to assure me that I wouldn’t die. I implored God to help, but He must have been busy. After a few years of this, I finally quit asking.

June 1956 • Upland ~ The first time my parents were together after their divorce was at Larry and Marian’s wedding. I have an 8” x 10” glossy reminder of the occasion: the respective parents are flanking the bride and groom, Marian’s parents to her right, smiling big and happy and Larry’s to his left, looking, well, just looking. Mom, having shown up a tad on the drunk side, is white-hatted and gloved, peering through her rhinestone, cat-eyed glasses. Dad, who was Larry’s best man, is tight-lipped and granite-jawed; his fingers tense, appearing trapped and uneasy. My father’s tie is sticking out, looking as ruffled and caught as he is.

The family plot had thickened. Mom was married to Ray and Dad had married Irene, a woman nineteen years his senior with an uncanny resemblance to his mother impersonating Mae West. Irene was a well-dressed matron whose downtown attire was a suit, high heels, hat and gloves; and whose cocktail apparel were gowns, silk hose, furs, and diamonds. If you lived in San Francisco in the 1950s, you dressed for it. She moved in a cloud of pancake make-up, her false eyelashes and kohl-lined eyes slightly sagging above layers of red lipstick that leaked into the lines around her lips. She had bleached-blonde curly hair and smelled like a mix of heavy perfume and mothballs. Irene was the toast of the San Francisco cocktail circuit—married to my conservative, not-much-of-a-drinker father. If he had more than two highballs he got sicker than a poisoned pup.

It was better that Irene wasn’t there for Larry’s wedding. The first time Marian met her, she made the mistake of showing Irene the wedding photos with her new husband standing next to his former wife. Irene was fist-pumping, neck-snapping, foot-stomping furious. She didn’t want any reminders that he’d been married before or that he had children. It was a good thing he and his tie looked so nervous.

June 16, 1956, Upland, California ~ Our wedding was at the First Methodist Church in Upland, a lovely brick church my family attended since before I was born. Many supportive family friends from through the years joined us as well as our relatives. The minister, Dr. Lee, said that if I guaranteed the rope, he would guarantee the knot. I was 23 and Gordon (Larry) was 22. We knew we loved, liked, and were best friends with each other and were ready to spend our whole life together. We met and started dating when we were attending college at San Jose State when I was 19. The year before our wedding, Gordon was working on his Masters Degree at Ohio University and I was teaching 2nd grade in Ventura. It was a time when we were budgeting very carefully, so phone calls were few and letters went back and forth almost every day. In 1955, Gordon came to California on the train to spend Christmas vacation with my family and me. On Christmas Eve we became engaged and started planning our future together.

I knew I had picked out a hard working, determined young man, bright, responsible, and sincere. He had managed to put himself through college entirely on his own, often working several jobs at a time. He was in graduate school on a scholarship and was a counselor in a men’s dormitory. He was also fun loving, positive, and spontaneous. I remember him one day suddenly stopping the car to buy me a bunch of roses. Besides his great interest in his studies, he was a musician playing the tuba in various bands and orchestras.

While dressing in my princess style wedding dress of Chantilly lace and tulle, my mind was less than calm. I remembered wondering what we would talk about day after day with the same person for the rest of our lives. I questioned… and then reassured myself. I was nervous, scared, and happy. I gave my hair a last-minute brush and a quick hair spray, which turned out to be the bathroom Lysol spray can. I hoped my clean disinfectant smell would dissipate before I got to the church. When I slipped the pearl tiara with the fingertip veil on my head and stood at the back of the church with my father’s arm linked into mine, I concentrated on looking carefully at everything so the day wouldn’t be a blur. Light came through the windows with colorful stained-glass symbols in them, windows I had studied and gazed at since I was a child. Large bouquets of white flowers were up front. My teaching buddies and roommates from Ventura, Barbara Lind and Janice Copeland, were my bridesmaids, one dressed in soft yellow and the other in light aqua; they carried yellow and white marguerites as I loved daisies. I treasured my orchid bouquet. Up front, the preacher, Gordon, his Dad as best man, and his brother-in-law Chuck Albertson were ready and waiting.

Mendelssohn’s Wedding March sounded out on the organ and Dad and I proceeded down the aisle. I knew Dad was wishing Gordon and me the very best and I was wishing for a marriage as splendid as his and Mom’s as he placed my hand in Gordon’s and the marriage ceremony began.

In 1956 most receptions were unpretentious occasions in the social hall at the church. That is where our guests joined us and the traditional wedding cake was served. It was simple. It was beautiful. It was joyous.

That evening we began our trip back to Ohio getting only as far as Cucamonga on the first lap. On arrival at the University, we became dorm parents for 300 young women for a summer session, a large family for newlyweds. Before we returned to California we had a real honeymoon trip to Washington D.C., New York City, and some special days at Niagra Falls.

by Marian (McLellan) Clemens

Making Music, by Marian (McLellan) Clemens ~ In 1952 Gordon Lawrence Clemens was a music major at San Jose State College where I was studying to be an elementary teacher. I went to a college basketball game with my friend, June, who played in the band and I sat next to the tuba player. At that time he was known as Larry and one of my dates with him was very different from any other date I have had. I sat by myself in the huge San Jose Civic Auditorium listening to the strains of the San Jose Symphony being conducted by Sandor Salgo. On stage Larry was playing, his large brass tuba sounding out the low harmony notes. When they played “Der Meistersinger” by Wagner, Larry had the tuba solo, and I was duly impressed. It was a clear, pure tone with rapid perfect fingering and it sounded like he had fun with his part.

Larry first played tuba in high school. He also ran the mile in track, so in choosing an instrument the track coach suggested he learn the tuba because it takes more breath to play and might be great for his lung capacity. When he graduated, he received the award for the outstanding music student at Sonora High School.

By the time Larry was a senior in college, he changed his major to psychology/philosophy with a music minor. He continued through graduate school at Ohio University playing in the Brass Choir and becoming a school counselor. With that, his days of marching band and symphony orchestra came to an end.

1956 • San Francisco ~ When they married, Dad was renting a small place on Clayton Street in the Haight. He moved into Irene’s fancy two-story Victorian just two doors up from the flat where he first lived on Belvedere. Her place had soaring ceilings and velvet ottomans, a step up from the Formica dining table and single box spring he’d gotten accustomed to. He now lived amid carved antiques and Persian carpets, oil paintings and gilded mirrors, and Waterford crystal and filigree lamps. 

In November, I stayed three days with Dad and Irene. I was eight. I had to be careful not to walk fast or bump into anything. I was especially not to go into the cold storage room she had built between the living and dining rooms for her two walls of full-length minks, silver fox stoles, and black sable jackets with the end portion of built-in shelves from floor to ceiling, stacked with fancy round hat boxes. My only recollection of Irene was her catching me going through her steamer trunks stored in the basement, and the pungent odor of mothballs. I intended to simply look at her carefully packed away clothes. Well, maybe I did take some out and hold a couple of them up to me to see how they looked. Okay, so I tried one on. She was furious. As I was there three days too many anyway, I was no longer allowed to come and stay.

Irene was gracious to Larry and Marian but didn’t bother to hide her jealousy of her husband’s daughters. When Carleen and Chuck drove up for a weekend visit and had dinner at Alioto’s in Fisherman’s Wharf, Irene kept her back to Carleen at the bar. She never spoke to my sister the entire evening, didn’t even look at her. Not once.

1956 • San Jose ~ Betty was part of the older crowd and on Saturday nights she and her girlfriends ice skated at the El Camino Skating Rink. All the cute boys were there, circling the arena, showing off to the girls and skimming across the frozen floor backward to the music of “Rock Around the Clock”and “Blue Suede Shoes.” Claudia, at thirteen, was too young to tag along. In late January, on one of those Saturday nights, a boy caught Betty’s eye, and as they were all leaving the rink, she invited him over after church the next day. Writing our address on a scrap of paper and slipping it into his hand, she turned to his friend Bobby and said, “You come too, you can meet my sister.”

At noon the boys showed up on our doorstep. Claudia, lowering her long lashes on meeting Bobby, was smitten, and he with her. They soon spent a lot of time together. They didn’t really date, they mostly rode around in the back seat of his friend’s car holding hands and necking while the radio crooned “The Great Pretender” and “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.” Bobby was a blonde, baby-faced Southerner, polite and charming. He was also four years older than Claudia and a lot more experienced. He was on liberty from the Navy, stationed at nearby Moffett Field. He’d enlisted at sixteen but told the Navy he was eighteen so he could get in. Bobby was fun and she liked how he sounded, but Claudia didn’t speak Southern drawl, so couldn’t understand half of what he said. He said he loved her. He said he wanted to marry her. He said if she loved him she’d… and it didn’t take long. Claudia told Betty that they’d had sex, knowing that Betty would give her the right advice, and Betty, who at fifteen knew everything, said, “Oh great—now you have to marry him.”

Claudia, seeing no other choice, arranged to run away with Bobby. Betty went along. Mom found out they cut school when they didn’t come home. She and Ray found them in the early evening on a side street just as the girls were crossing a supermarket driveway near the house. Betty and Claudia, after sneaking around town all day, ran right into them. Mom made the girls get in the car and packed them straightaway to Juvenile Hall. She’d show them. Except my sisters told the Juvenile officer about how Ray and his friend were always coming onto them, about how Mom and Ray were always drunk and fighting and trying to kill each other, about how Mom was a terrible mother, and how they didn’t want to go back home. Mom was furious, and now couldn’t get them released.

Betty was in her element at Juvenile Hall, playing the guardian angel, listening to everyone’s story, giving the other delinquent girls advice. She took under her wing a poor seventeen-year-old whose parents had died and was now homeless. This girl didn’t belong at Juvenile Hall but had to stay until she turned eighteen. In those days, when you had no family to take you in and no other place to go, they put you in Juvie. Betty wanted to bring her home. Claudia just sat at the other end of the table, cupping her chin and shaking her head, snorting to herself, oh wonderful, Betty and another stray cat.

After three days there, Betty, who was not afraid at first, realized they were in a bad place with some bad kids where bad things could happen to them, and suddenly home looked good. So Betty went to the warden and said they had lied, that they’d made the whole story up about Mother, and begged him to please call her to come get them.

When the girls were back home, Mom had a Come-to-Jesus meeting with Bobby and threatened to have him shipped overseas. Bobby promised not to touch her daughter again until she was old enough. Yeah, sure.

1956 • San Jose ~ Claudia was secretly relieved when Mom said she’d have Bobby shipped out. She didn’t know how to say “no” to him, even though it hurt so bad to have sex. She would marry him when she was older, after she’d finished school, when she’d gotten a job teaching junior high. But Bobby wouldn’t take no for an answer. Claudia had sex with him once, so to him, what difference did it make?

By September Claudia had missed two periods, and the minute she told Mom she thought she was pregnant, Mom and Ray drove the two lovebirds to Nevada. Larry couldn’t talk Claudia out of it, trying to appeal to her baser side by telling her she’d miss out on all the wedding presents. Claudia was completely offended. As if she cared about such things! Dad also did his best to change her mind, even if she was pregnant. He finally caved and washed his hands of the whole matter. It was a done deal before anyone else found out. It wasn’t that Claudia wanted to get married. Being Catholic, she thought she had to get married.

Dressed in her ninth-grade graduation dress and Bobby in his blue Navy uniform, with Mom and Ray as their witnesses, they wed on September 15, 1956 by a Justice of the Peace in Sparks, a gambling town in Nevada. The newlyweds were too young to go into the casinos, so they hung out in the cafe while Mom and Ray celebrated the night away. It was hell’s wild ride on the way back home. Ray and our mother were remarkably sloshed, and when Ray got pulled over for weaving all over the road, he slurred his way out of the ticket by telling the officer how proud he wash of hish baby girl in the back sheat who jushed got married, and the Nevada State policeman let him go.

When Dad met Bobby, the first thing out of his mouth was, “You drink?”
“No, Sir.”
“Good. Guess that’s something to be said.”
He turned to his daughter. “Well, you made your bed, I guess you get to lie in it.”

My sister repined in that bed she’d made for sixteen-and-a-half more years. At thirty-one-years-old and five children later, she could no longer stand her husband holding her down so she left. She never remarried. “When you’re Catholic,” she said, “you only get to do it once.”

To this day Claudia still blames Betty, says it’s all her fault she married Bobby.

About my dad: the one thing he struggled against was sexuality in any form, and family life wasn’t going well in this department. What with having to face down the rumors of Mother in Sonora (which Betty kept alive when she told me that Mom supposedly had an affair with the new priest in town and that he was my father but she was just being my blabbermouth sister), then with Carleen getting knocked up and having to walk in her high school graduation ceremony pregnant and married, then with Betty’s kidnapping and rape hitting the front page of the local papers for days, and now Claudia married at 14. Dad was not one bit pleased with this last piece of news and there was nothing he could do about it, any of it. My father believed himself to be upright and moral. My mother, being Mother, believed him to be a stick in the mud.

A year of family comings and goings ~
January 1956 • My maternal grandmother, Nellie Chatfield, at the age of 82, died in Chico, California. She outlived her husband by 14 years, and two of her ten children. Gordon, her sixth child, died in 1948 (the year I was born) from injuries incurred in WWII, and Howard, her third, died of Bright’s disease in 1953. Grandma and Grandpa are buried in the Chico Cemetery, though Grandpa is buried away from the family plots. She was still mad when he died, and wasn’t about to be anywhere near him when her time came.

Mar 30, 1956 • Ohio ~ Portion of a letter from Larry to Marian, who was teaching second grade in the beach town of Ventura, California:
Received a letter from Claudia today. She is spending Easter vacation with my father in San Francisco. Also had nice card from my father. Cathy is also in San Francisco, and Betty is in Santa Cruz for the vacation period. Claudia says she is “working part-time and Cathy is fooling around full-time in the store.” Cute letter.

April 1, 1956 • We always attended Sunday Mass along with going to church at Christmas, Easter, and the other holy days of obligation. Well, Mom didn’t, but the rest of us did. Between the Feast of Mary, Ascension Thursday, the Assumption, All Saint’s Day, the Immaculate Conception, Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, 40 days of Lent, the Stations of the Cross, confession, and all the genuflecting, prayers, disciples and saints, it was a lot to keep track of.

May 13, 1956 • I received my First Holy Communion at Sacred Heart, our church in the Willow Glen area of San Jose. First Communion is not only a big occasion but also a sacred event for Catholic families.

May 21, 1956 • Carleen, Chuck and Debbie are living in sunny Southern California.

Sometime before June • My father, Carl John Clemens (age 51) married Irene Venita (Tregear) Whitehed (age 70), a woman nineteen years his senior. He moved into her flat at 30 Belvedere in the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco.

June 1956 • My brother Larry Clemens graduated from Ohio State University.

June 16, 1956 • Larry (now Gordon) Clemens (age 22) married Marian McLellan (age 23) in Upland, California. It was the first after our parents’ divorce and final time that we would all be together.

July 20, 1956 • My mother’s brother, Leo Chatfield (age 58), a forest ranger in Camptonville, died of a heart attack in Grass Valley, California. Having served in the Mexican Border War and in WWI, he was buried in the military section of Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno.

August • My mother’s brother, Roy Chatfield (age 55), married Josephine Chambers (age 56) in Reno, after a 30-year courtship. Roy and Jo were best friends, more like brother and sister. He proposed to Jo when he was eighteen and she nineteen, but he’d promised his mother he would stay home and not marry until she died. In return, Nellie promised Roy she’d leave him the house for as long as he lived. Jo had also promised her mother she wouldn’t marry until her mother died, and although her mother had passed away some years before, Jo understood Roy’s promise. He lived with Nellie until her death in 1956, respectfully waiting six months to marry. They spent the next twenty-three years of married life in the Boucher Street house until Roy, at age 77, died of heart failure. He left the shingle and clapboard Chatfield house to Jo, and she remained there until her death.

Beginning of September • I started the 4th grade, Claudia entered her sophomore year, and Betty became a senior, all of us attending San Jose public schools in Willow Glen.

September 15, 1956 • My sister Claudia Clemens (age 14) married Bobby McDaniel (age 19), in Sparks, Washoe County, Nevada.

Note from my brother:
“I married Marian McLellan June 16, 1956 in Upland, California. Dad was the best man at my wedding. Mom also attended and I believe it was the last time they ever saw each other; they did not talk to each other as the divorce was a bitter one. Marian and I left after the wedding and I attended school at Ohio University so I could finish my Masters Degree. Exactly three months later Claudia married Bobby McDaniel in Sparks, Nevada. I don’t know if any family members attended the wedding. I attempted to talk Claudia out of it as she was only fourteen, but her mind was made up.”

1957 • San Jose ~ Things were bad between Betty and Mom. My sister wanted to do what she wanted to do, and Mom couldn’t control her. Betty moved out in her senior year and took over Claudia and Bobby’s San Jose apartment when Bobby was transferred from Moffett Field to a naval air station in Hawaii. Dad paid $50 a month child support for each of us, and he gave Betty hers directly; it paid her rent. The only thing Mom contributed was to Betty’s agony, coming over on a regular basis threatening to put her in a convent (her favorite threat) or in Juvenile Hall (her second favorite). You weren’t supposed to be able to live on your own if you were a minor, so my sister bit her tongue and kept her mouth shut.

Her gaggle of girlfriends thought it so grown-up that she had her own pad. Now they had a place to smoke Kents and drink Cokes without being bothered. Most of her Willow High friends had been together since grammar school: Carol, Lynne, Karen, Maureen, Judy, and Joy. Joy was the goodwill ambassador of the crowd and was the one who brought Betty into their circle. Some of them had sisters near my age too, but younger sisters were accessories they avoided.

1957 • San Jose and Whittier ~ When Betty graduated from Willow Glen High School in June 1957, Mom went to the ceremony. She had also gone to the trouble to make my sister’s graduation outfit, even after the ungrateful way Betty acted when Mom made her a whole new Easter week wardrobe a couple of months before. Betty refused to wear them because they were homemade. Mom spent the week before Betty’s graduation working on her dress, staying up late, working the foot treadle on her Singer, making sure the zipper was perfect, adjusting the seams, hand stitching the hem. Betty wore it but didn’t even thank her; she ignored Mom. When Mom went to hug her after the ceremony Betty didn’t speak to her; she never wanted to speak to her again.

My sister left directly after graduation to stay with Carleen in Whittier. She had received an art scholarship at a college in San Jose, so she swallowed her pride and asked Mother if she could move back home for her first year. She’d discovered how hard it was to support herself when she was going to high school and knew she wouldn’t be able to make it through college. Mom said no, then told her that she and I were leaving for Hawaii in the next couple of weeks to live near Claudia. Mom was moving away and hadn’t bothered to tell Betty. It wasn’t the first time.

Betty stayed in southern California, lived with Carleen for a while (like most of us), gave up going to college, and got a job at the mall. That’s where she met Tony who was working at Kinney Shoes. She went in on her lunch break to buy a purse and fell in love instead.

October 1957 • San Jose to the Islands ~ A year and a month into Bobby and Claudia’s marriage, Bobby was transferred to Barbers Point, a naval air station about 20 minutes from Honolulu. My mother got the notion that she and I would move there too. Mom wanted to be near Claudia, she and Ray had just divorced, and as she was not concerned about what would happen to Betty, we followed in their wake. Mother had to get permission from Dad to take me out of the state, but as Dad’s new wife had no interest in sharing him, it was prudent for him to acquiesce. It worked out quite well for Irene, and also took the heat off Dad with no longer having to choose between her and his children.

Mom proclaimed we were going to live in paradise, so a month into my fourth-grade year—while the world still moved at an unhurried pace, when it took eight hours to fly on a Jumbo DC6, and before it was a state—we moved to the island of Oahu.

She left most of our things in storage with a neighbor: her five-piece 1930s semi-Deco waterfall bedroom furniture, her sofa-bed, her yellow Formica kitchen table and chairs, the Philco, her good dishes and kitchenware, and just about everything else she ever owned. She wouldn’t need her satin shoes, velvet stole, or green wool coat in the tropics. We only took what clothes we could fit in four suitcases and a steamer trunk along with her heavy cast-iron pans, her metal meat grinder, her box of family pictures, button collection, sewing box, black and gold portable Singer, and her mother’s round English Deco mirror.

She only let me bring the things I couldn’t live without; my two Little Women dolls that had belonged to my sisters, my two-dollar-bills from Daddy, my dollar Silver Certificate, stamp and coin collections, and the Johnny Tremain book Larry gave me when I was seven. It was his when he was my age.

I parted with the rest of my things. Mom promised we’d get them when we moved back: the toys and family of Storybook Dolls along with all their clothes, shoes, and accessories I’d shoplifted over the past year; my Betsy McCall paper dolls, my marble collection, bubble-gum cards, Archie comics, portable record player and record collection of two. “You’ll live without them,” she assured me.

I was most nervous parting with my library card, my school report cards, and my savings passbook. What if they got lost? What if I never got them back? How would I know who I was?

1957 – 1958 • Honolulu, Hawaii ~ Mom and I settled in upper Manoa Valley, a trolley ride from Honolulu. A valley with a higher elevation than sun-drenched Waikiki, it squatted at the foot of a tropical rainforest shrouded in low rain clouds. When they passed, brilliant rainbows broke through, topping the lush mountains softly draped in emerald velvet. Manoa was populated with old colonial homes completely hidden behind six-foot privacy hedges on paved winding roads. We lived on a dead-end street in a small, one-bedroom, add-on apartment. You could barely find our place hidden behind the giant tree ferns, flowering plumeria, and peeling bamboo stands. Scarlet Hibiscus blossoms spilled over the fence, and there were stiff Birds of Paradise that poked straight up, holding sentry, their orange faces and violet beaks vigilantly looking this way and that. It looked like a jungle.

My memories of our nine months in Hawaii are in slow motion. They were a long nine months. I remember the beach and going to the Bishop Museum with my mother, Bobby, and Claudia. I remember what happened with me and Bobby. And I remember being back in the hospital again, having a tray with warm 7-Up, red JELL-O, and a small bowl of poi—a mashed goo with the texture and taste of fermented wallpaper paste.

I remember the long, blue-flowered muumuu Mom made me. I remember making leis from the two tall plumerias in our yard dripping with fragrant yellow and white blossoms. I remember the King Kamehameha parade and taking pictures of the huge floats.

I remember Claudia taking a photo of Mom and me with my Kodak Brownie camera, a present from Daddy for my eighth birthday. It’s the only picture I have of just the two of us. Standing, my hand is resting on Mom’s shoulder; she is down on one knee, her right arm wound around my bent lower leg, both of us turned slightly toward each other, looking into the camera. I study this black and white for some sign my mother liked me; it seems she does in this picture. She so seldom touched me, or maybe that is the one thing I just don’t remember.

October 1957 • Honolulu, Hawaii ~ Once again I was in a new school. There were four other haoles (mostly the white children of Navy families from the States stationed in the area) in my class and the rest of the kids were locals of mixed heritage, Chinese, or Japanese descent. The locals dressed like any kid except they didn’t wear shoes to school. Some wore flip-flops but most went barefoot, the bottoms of their tanned feet toughened like cowhide.

I did well in reading but spelling and math were a struggle. The class was way ahead of my fourth-grade class in California, already practicing long division, and with dismay I sat in befuddlement, the numbers melting into smudge marks on the board. My report card from Manoa Elementary reads like a mini-biography. My grades were average (except my D in  Spelling and Social Studies). My stay in the hospital sometime after Easter was noted by the seven days marked absent. My mother’s signature indicates she received my report card, the Parent’s Remarks box left blank.

Mrs. Monn marked most of my Social Attitudes and Work Habits as SATISFACTORY. I would like to point out, however, she marked me COMMENDABLE in:

• Obeys school rules and regulations
• Accepts constructive criticism and suggestions
• Accepts share of work and responsibilities
• Practices self control.

It’s not like I made any effort to excel in these behaviors; they were my nature. Of course I was obedient; it was my nature to be a good girl. And yes, I wanted to know what I’d done wrong so I could avoid doing it again. And yes, I was responsible; I’d been taking care of myself from the day I was dropped off at my mother’s doorstep. And I did practice self-control; with no rules at home, I created my own, my berating inner voice and my Catholic God keeping me in constant check.

1957 • San Francisco ~ Letter from Aunt Elizabeth to her brother, my father:
March 13, 1957
Dear Carl:
Just now writing the date, I happened to remember that this is Carleen’s birthday. If it weren’t so late, I would call her. We are having Mass on Wednesday evenings during Lent and with a sermon, it made it rather late.

I received your letter and the wonderful surprise. I am glad to have it but do not want you to send it if it is difficult for you. I have all the correspondence, etc. from the bank but as I remember the amount at the time of the closing your store was $2,100. Since then I received $200 from you in January of last year and now $100. Thank you very much.

I often wonder what would have happened if you had kept the store and tried to get along with it. Do you still miss it a lot?

I was glad to get the news about the children. Carleen told me that Claudia had married but she asked me not to tell you as I think Claudia wanted to do so herself. Anyway, I am glad you know. I worry about all the kids but all I can do is pray for them which I do each day.

I am sorry you cannot go back East this summer. I almost wish I didn’t have to go but since Sister Ann is having her vacation, I feel like I should. I may not go back again for some time.

I hope you get your help situation straightened out and that you will not have to work too hard. Write again soon and thanks a million for the check.

Love,
Elizabeth

Note: Dad borrowed money from his sister to pay off his bankruptcy debts from closing the store in Sonora. It took him a few years, but he paid her back in full. Sister Ann is their sister, a Franciscan Nun and teacher. Back East is Minnesota; I don’t know that any of us thought of it as the midwest.

Nov 29, 1957 • Honolulu ~ I remember the Friday afternoon the hurricane hit. I was walking home with a girl from school who’d invited me to her house, me doing a small skip alongside her, happy to have made a friend. I heard it before I saw it. I turned my face to the sky and felt the insistent air against my skin, lifting the hair on my face and arms.

“I can’t come over,” I nervously told her. “I have to go home.”

I’d traveled only a short distance off my memorized path, a few heartbeats, a dozen steps, but when I turned I had no idea where I was.

The northeasterly trades, the Kona winds, and heat from the sea powered the ferocious energy, and within minutes the edge of Hurricane Nina slammed Oahu. Palm trees bent to the ground, praying not to split. Roofs sheared off like box tops, piercing the air. The gale tore at my hair and shrieked in my ears, ramming me broadside, flinging me around like tossed litter. My slight frame was sucked into the vortex of the wind and heavy rain that seemed to have split heaven wide open. The streets flash-flooded and I could barely stagger in the surging water now above my ankles. What road do I take? Which way do I turn? How do I find my way home?

As I remember, I was more confused than afraid, but the noise was more than I could stand. Few houses facing the streets were visible behind lush foliage, and I slogged along until I came to one that opened to the lane I was on. I saw a woman watching me through her picture window. I stumbled my way up her stepping stones lined with tattered hibiscus and a swamped lawn. I may not have been long on math, but I knew enough to get in out of the rain. When she opened her door, I flung myself through her entrance. She calmed me down, got me out of my clothes, dried me off, and fixed me a cup of warm tea. Wrapped in towels, I hovered on the edge of a chair just inside her entry, the teacup and saucer rattling in my fingers, my teeth and brain clacking in my head. I waited, for the noise to stop, for the hurricane to pass, for my mother to come for me.

Hours later Mom arrived in a cab. The woman had reached her at the store where she worked on Bishop Street and the hurricane had passed enough to let her through. Sitting at opposite ends in the back seat of the yellow taxi, I sat as my mother sat, my lips pursed, my hands folded in my lap, each of us looking silently out our windows at the exhausted sky.

“Some hurricane,” the driver said into the silence. “Island’s upside down.”

The bulk of the tempest had passed, the wind now demoted to a tropical storm. With the skies still coming down, the taxi waded slowly through the muck and debris. The road was a swollen shamble of roof chunks, palm fronds, downed trees, telephone poles, and mangled TV antennas strewn like corpses in our path. I wished for my life to be different. I wished things were the way they used to be, when we lived in Sonora in our white house, when our family was still a family before our lives were turned upside down. And still, it rained.

1957 • Honolulu, Hawaii ~ I remember that Christmas Eve. I wanted us to have a tree, so I made it from a beautiful branch of dark wood I found near our house earlier that day. At each tip where its small thorns crooked out I stuck a sugared gumdrop, then carefully bow-tied the mid stems with colored ribbons from Mom’s sewing basket, glued on cotton-balls for angel hair, and underneath arranged a white pillowcase for snow. I waited by the door for Mom to come home from work, imagining how happy she and Santa would be, even though I knew there was no such thing as Santa, but if there was, he’d like it too. Hearing her footsteps, I ran and stood erect next to my creation, a slim smile on my face. As she entered I exhaled, “Mele Kalikimaka.” She stopped. She stared right through the tree, then right through me. Turning away, she walked into the bedroom and softly closed the door.

Her look told me everything I never wanted to know. At that moment, something in me changed. I knew that no matter what I did, I was not going to please her, not going to matter to her, that she was not going to see me. I didn’t try again. I was no longer willing to nick my heart knocking on a door that wouldn’t open.

1958 • Whittier, Southern Californa ~ On February 1, 1958, Betty married Tony Duchi, the handsome admirer she’d met at Kinney Shoes the prior summer. The first time she laid eyes on him she fell in love with this man who was her measure, who adored her, and who would protect her.

Dropping out of Whittier High at seventeen, Tony enlisted in the Air Force. After a year or so he was medically discharged because of a bad case of hives; smoking pot affected him that way. When he and Betty met, he was nineteen-years-old and back living at home with his family in Whittier with a job selling shoes.

Our dad didn’t go to his daughter’s wedding. It was an affront to Betty and an insult to Tony, who is still mad about it to this day. Tony had some explaining to do to his Italian family about why his fiancée’s parents weren’t there, why her brother was the one giving her away, why only Larry and Marian, Carleen, Debbie, Aunt Elizabeth and her lifelong friend Betty Rose were there (Claudia, Mom, and I were in Hawaii). Tony’s older sister Julie lent Betty the wedding gown that she’d worn when she married two years before. Tony’s family paid for the wedding and reception and welcomed Betty with open arms. His mother was thrilled; she loved Betty.

Who knows why Dad didn’t attend? Perhaps Irene, who pretended our father didn’t have a family and did her best to discourage him from us, kept him from giving his daughter away. Perhaps it was because he was still hurt by Betty trying to run away when she lived with him. Perhaps it was because Tony, in Dad’s eyes, was Eye-talian. Perhaps he thought it didn’t matter if he came. Perhaps my father was an idiot.

Whatever his reason, it was a big mistake, and it hurt Betty as much as when he denied what happened to her in Sonora when she was thirteen.

1958 • Honolulu, Hawaii ~ I have other memories of Hawaii. I remember Bobby. He was blonde, tan, and handsome, a Georgia cracker with a slow Southern drawl and a boyish, white-toothed smile, a swabbie in bell-bottoms of pressed blues or crisp whites. He was nineteen and in his third year in the Navy, married to my sister who was now pregnant with their first child (Claudia was fifteen), and stationed in Oahu. Mom and I came here because she wanted to be near Claudia. They lived in Waikiki in a small second-floor WWII barracks corner apartment. I had a crush on Bobby. He was cute, he was nice, and he was the only person who paid any attention to me.

It was on a Saturday afternoon in April, just before Easter, that it happened. It came up at the psychiatrist’s office. Mom sent me because I’d gotten sick and had to be in the hospital again. When Mom told the doctor about my history of vomiting, he thought it might be emotional, and told her perhaps she should take me to a psychiatrist. I was also as jumpy as a water bug: bumping into furniture, tripping over doorsteps, knocking things over, dropping stuff, falling down all the time. My skinned knees and scraped elbows had scabs on scabs. My stubbed toes were covered with several small Band-aids hanging off. I was also having nightmares.

Sitting in a leather chair next to the psychiatrist, not too close, we looked at pictures: he, carefully handing me—one by one—single sheets from the folder, asking me what they looked like, me carefully handing them back—one by one—saying they looked like moths. Then Dr. Whateverhisnamewas invited me to play with some miniature soldiers and plastic animals in a tabletop sandbox. I did but didn’t see the fun of it nor did they interest me; I no longer played with toys. He asked me to draw my family, which was complicated because Mom and I lived in Manoa and Claudia and Bobby lived near the base, Dad and Irene lived in San Francisco, Carleen, Chuck, and Debbie lived in Whittier, Larry and Marian lived in Long Beach, I didn’t know where Betty lived, I didn’t count Ray because he was no longer married to Mom, and just how was I supposed to figure all this out and fit it on one piece of paper?

The doctor asked me questions. I didn’t say much. What I should have said was: you have the wrong one in here—it’s my mother you should be seeing.

He talked to Mom after my appointment. He told her moving around so much and not having a stable consistent home life might be the cause of my repeated vomiting spells. He also told her about my crush on Bobby, and about my night terrors of a man waiting for me at the top of the stairs with a knife in his hand, and that I couldn’t see the man’s face. Maybe the bad dreams did have something to do with Bobby, but I didn’t tell the doctor about that either. I didn’t tell him because at nine years old I didn’t know what had happened, didn’t even know how to put it in words. Besides, Bobby made me promise. I didn’t say anything to anyone—not for thirty-five years.

April 1958 • Hawaii ~ I remember that Saturday afternoon. I don’t know where Mom and Claudia were, probably off to the commissary for groceries or cigarettes, so Bobby and I were alone in their apartment. He was propped up with pillows at the head of the bed. I sat on the bottom corner, shuffling cards, hoping he’d be up for a few games. He was. I beat him three times at go-fish and he beat me once at war. Then he said he was tired and wanted to take a nap and would I like to crawl in and snuggle. I said sure.

He brushed my hair from my face. We cuddled. He slid his hands down my arm. But when his hands slipped around my waist and I felt the elastic stretch as he pulled at my shorts, I tried swimming backwards off the mattress as he slid my pants down. He held on to me, his breath rolling over my hair.

“Please, Bobby no. Let go. I’m not tired.” He was whispering but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. “Let me go, please. I have to pee—bad, Bobby, really bad. Please. Please. Let. Me. Go.”

“Jes be still a minute,” he said. “‘Kay girl, ’kay? Jes for a minute.” And that’s about all it took.

He let me go. I cleaned myself up on the toilet, scared that there was white stuff coming out between my legs as I peed. Clammy and confused, I stood up and slid my underpants and blue shorts back on while Bobby washed his hands at the sink.

“Ya’ll er fine, ya’ll ain’t hurt,” he said quietly and added, “Ain’t no need tell ‘bout this. Be oursecret, alrite?”

I slipped out of the bathroom and tiptoed outside while he was still in there. Frozen midway on the metal staircase that bridged the yard to the apartment, my world shrunk to one step, the red sun in the sky slowly sinking, neighbor kids with a puppy below, Bobby in the apartment above. I waited, suspended in bewilderment and worry. I was grateful for his attention, but something happened in there; something divided me, something I didn’t understand done by someone I loved.

With my head whirling, my stomach chewing, and my feet cemented to that step, I was unable to move in either direction. I tucked all my uncertainty and sadness into my stomach. All my feelings about my mother, about Hawaii, about Bobby. I slipped all my fear of pain and being sick into it, my homesickness for Betty and Carleen, my wanting to be with Daddy, along with my confusion about everything. I didn’t know where else to put it.

I waited for Claudia and my mother to come; wishing, wishing I was anywhere but here. By the time they showed up, the sinking ball of fire had slid into the ocean and it was nearly dark.

It was not so much what happened with Bobby that dented me—it’s that he’d been my only real friend. I no longer got too close to him after that, no longer went in their upstairs #5 apartment with the Murphy bed when he was in there alone in his white Hanes undershirt and jockeys. I still liked him; I just didn’t get near him. I didn’t get near other men after that either, especially ones that talked slow and quiet to you, in a sing-songy Mr. Rogers-kind-of-voice.

1958 • Honolulu ~ I remember a Friday afternoon soon after what happened with Bobby; a girl and I were playing the cigarette game on our way home from school, racing and keeping score of who stomped first on the empty packs of Kents, Kools, and Lucky Strikes flung from car windows and littering the roadsides. There was a random trail of tattered Viceroys, Marlboros, and Winstons, of Pall Malls, Camels and Salems, some faded, some fresh. She was older, a fifth grader.

“I bet you don’t know what sex is.”
“Well…” I knew that a baby boy had different things than a baby girl, so did dogs, and I also figured that’s not what she was talking about.
“It means sticking his up hers,” she informed me with all the superiority of someone older and wiser.

I made her spell it out—stick his what up her what—then explain it again, real slow. It stopped me dead on an empty pack of Camels. I’d never heard such a thing, and I was sure she was making it up. Until it sank in. That’s what happened. I still couldn’t make any sense of it, but at least I now had words for it. I thought about the conversation at the psychiatrist’s office and about Bobby. I thought about it all for the rest of the day until the final scraps of light were gone. I thought about it clear until it was time to climb into bed with the silent back of my mother, until the time when I no longer said my prayers. I knew what happened in the apartment with Bobby wasn’t okay, and I knew my dad would think that too.

And that’s what I remember about Hawaii. So much for living in paradise.

1958 • Oahu ~ Claudia and Mom stayed in Hawaii for four months after I left, walking the beach, sightseeing, going to movies, swatting mosquitoes and smashing cockroaches.

No matter how carefully my sister cleaned, how much she sprayed, or how many she nailed with a magazine—from tiny clear insects to four-inch black beasts, all with hard-shell wings, malevolent eyes, and quivering antennae—her apartment was still overrun with cockroaches. Even the trophy-sized ones brazenly made their way inside her place. Armed with a yellow thonged zorie, she performed a nightly routine of inspecting every square inch of her small studio apartment: around the walls, along the floors, behind the pictures. She peeked beneath the bed and between the bedclothes. She looked under the tablecloth. When the coast looked clear, she’d switch off the lamp, skip three strides, and leap through the air onto the bed. Of course the coast looked clear. Roaches aren’t stupid. They’re nocturnal, leaving their nests under the cover of darkness.

When Claudia reached over one night and turned on her bed-light to get a drink, she discovered a convoy of them inches from her face, crawling all over the water container on the stand right next to her. The creatures simply gave her the stink eye, made a mad dash and a sharp turn down the side of the table to escape, and headed back to their safe harbor behind the small white stove. She didn’t sleep the rest of the night, or the next night either.

On a humid Hawaiian afternoon in late October, swaying to Don Ho on the radio, the perfume of plumeria wafting through her window, my sister—almost five months pregnant—was trying on clothes to see what still fit. From the back of the tiny closet in the bathroom, she dug out her horsehair slip where it had been crammed in the dank darkness for more than a year. The waist section was silk to the hips, with the horsehair flared out so stiff and wide that only one underskirt (rather than three mesh crinolines) was needed to keep a skirt full. She pulled it from its metal skirt-hanger, lifted the stiff underskirt over her head steadying it like a tent, extended her arms through, then slipped the coarsen brown slip over herself, her arms trapped straight up over her head, the skirt midway to her waist. She heard this curious odd scratching sound. She opened her eyes. The whole skirt was pulsing—alive with cockroaches, crawling with nymphs, juveniles, studs, cousins, aunts, uncles, parents, and grandparents.

“Aaaighhhhh!” Ripping it off in revulsion, she hurled it away and it landed, cattywampus atop the toilet. Frantically brushing hundreds of them off her bare skin, pulling at the ones whose claws were caught in her kinky brown hair, she took off shrieking down the hall. Barefoot, dressed only in her bra and panties, she waited on the edge of her bed—legs jerking, shoulders shuddering, her whole body twitching hysterically—sobbing until Bobby got home. The instant his crooked grin and Navy-blue bowed legs sauntered through the door she flew up and down, flapping like a chicken with its head cut off, screaming and swearing until he got the slip out of the apartment and down to the dumpster.

The next day, when she told her neighbor the story and her friend informed my sister that some species of cockroaches could fly, Claudia resolved to leave. She also could no longer take being plagued with recurring nightmares of a baby in a bug-ridden bassinet. There was no way she was going to have a child in a colony crawling with cockroaches. On the last day of October she fled back to California and moved in with Carleen, too.

Carleen knew to have Claudia unpack her luggage on the driveway, having discovered the congregation that stowed away in my suitcase when I showed up four months before. The small stucco house on Verdugo Avenue was crowded as it was.

End of Part II…

Continued in Part III

© 2018. Catherine Sevenau.
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