and the final third of the story… Through Any Given Door, a Family Memoir
Part III
Home Movies
La Habra and San Francisco
1958 – 1968
by Catherine (Clemens) Sevenau
~~~~~~~~~
June 1958 • La Habra, Orange County, California ~ I had my picture taken with our neighbor Renie, said goodbye, then Mom boarded me on a plane for California to stay with Carleen for the summer. Having traveled alone on buses I wasn’t afraid to fly by myself. I knew as long as I got on the right plane and Carleen was at the gate to meet me, I’d be fine. Nearly eight hours later it landed at Los Angeles International Airport. I could see a few jackrabbits out the window as we taxied to the terminal. Carleen was waiting, waving to catch my attention as I made my way down the portable metal steps. My sister took one breath of the reeking air of neglect hovering about me and knew Mom hadn’t left me on the back porch to die, but just about. I looked like a rack of bones with long blonde hair, my thinness barely disguised by my blue top, contrasting pedal pushers, and several strands of nearly crushed plumeria leis that I’d made to give to everyone. She’d worried about me since the family separated. She wasn’t going to worry any longer; as soon as she set eyes on me, she knew was keeping me.
God finally granted my prayers for a different mother. I turned ten that summer, and for the next nine years, until I graduated from high school, I lived with Carleen and her family. I’d been the youngest of five, had lived with another family for six months, was an only child for a while, then was the youngest of three, and now I was the oldest of three; Debbie and Randy were closer in age to me than my own siblings. For the first time since I was four years old, I felt as if I belonged. Chuck gave his blessing when Carleen told him they weren’t returning me to Mom; it was one of the few things they agreed on during their marriage.
Debbie was nearly five when I arrived to live with them on East Verdugo and Randy was a year-and-a-half; Carleen was twenty-two when she stepped back into the moccasins of mothering me.
Chuck worked nights as a machinist in a shop in Vernon that made airplane parts for Boeing. My early memories are of him sleeping during the day, disappearing into the depths of his garage on weekends, and stabbing the backs of our hands with his fork if we reached across the table at dinnertime. Fortunately, he worked long hours.
We were a family. I didn’t miss Mom, and I didn’t throw up anymore.
Late 1950s – early 1960s • La Habra ~ In 1956, Orange County, once acre-after-acre of orange and lemon groves, was transformed into row-after-row of identical single-story crackerbox houses sold on the GI Bill to young families with lots of kids. Chuck and Carleen bought one in 1957 for $12,950: a brand new, four-bedroom, two-bath 1,165 square-foot cream-colored yellow-trimmed stucco tract home on East Verdugo Avenue. The kitchen wasn’t much more than a long, narrow galley, the master bedroom so small our butts bounced off the walls and dresser when we made the king-sized bed.
I now lived in one house and had my own bedroom. There was a gleaming Amana filled with food, homemade chocolate birthday cakes with candles, and real Christmas trees. Ornaments and tinsel and presents were newly wrapped around my life. There was a family who was there when I got home from school, went to bed at night, and woke up in the morning. We ate dinner together, watched television, and went camping. We pulled weeds and cleaned house. We baked cookies and made ice cream. We watched Saturday cartoons in our underwear and read the Sunday funnies in our pajamas.
There were overnights with my friend Frances who lived across the street and hamburger barbecues with Rudy and Carmen next door. There was camping with Wayne (Chuck’s cousin) and Joan and their kids at Lake Arrowhead. Once a Coleman lantern exploded in Wayne’s face as he was leaning in to light it. All of us were sitting around the picnic table as the sun was setting. The cigarette in his mouth ignited the leaking fuel and a ball of flame exploded. Wayne was badly burned, his hair singed and face scorched by the fireball. Chuck and Joan ran him to the nearest hospital where they cut off his melted shirt. His face had to stay wrapped in white gauze for a long time. I’d not seen anyone hurt before, and I was horrified. I thought back to how lucky I’d been every time I tried to light the kitchen stove when I lived with Mother and thought to myself, “see, I knew it was dangerous!” Chuck, who saved everything, was furious when Carleen gave away all his Coleman lanterns shortly after the accident. Her response, “too goddam bad.”
Carleen took us to Huntington Beach, the Brea Library, and drive-in movies with Randy hidden under a blanket on the floor of the back seat so it was cheaper. We swam at Wayne and Joan’s in the summer and went to the Corn Festival and County Fair in the fall. We went to Knott’s Berry Farm and Disneyland. Disneyland was huge, clean with not so much as a piece of litter in sight, and had crowds standing in lines for the rides. The King Arthur Carousel and Peter Pan’s Flight were fun, but not the Mad Tea Party. I don’t like rides that spin or jerk; they make me sick. I liked Knott’s Berry Farm better; nothing spun and it was cozier and far less crowded.
We had visits from Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. Dad drove down from San Francisco a couple of times a year. My brother, sisters and their families (there were fourteen children born between 1953 and 1967) all visited, along with Chuck’s family, and often Mom too, who tended to overstay her welcome. Chuck worked swing or nights and he’d call home to see if she was still there; if she was, he’d tell Carleen to tell Mom that she needed to be gone before he got home. Everyone was there at one time or another for Easter brunches, Thanksgiving turkey, and Christmas holidays, for baptisms and birthday cakes, for card games and Cuba Libras. After living in a house alone with Mom, with times of unbroken silence and no one to talk to, it could get overwhelming. I don’t know that I ever got used to it. When it got too crowded and noisy or there was too much excitement, I disappeared into my room with a book. When my stress level increased beyond my ability to cope, I’d get sick and end up in bed, usually during holidays. It felt safer than trying to grapple with all that went on.
1958 – 59 • La Habra ~ I knew the way to Sierra Vista Elementary: up our street two blocks, left at the corner, then six blocks up the hill. My grades improved and I became a “B” student in Mr. Powell’s fifth-grade room. He had a way with kids: when any of the boys disrupted class, he’d grab them by both upper arms and shake them so hard their teeth rattled. The girls didn’t get hollered at or shaken because he knew we’d cry. Our teacher was interested in two things, keeping order and teaching art: charcoal and chalk, line drawing, and watercolors. For a fifth grader, some of mine were pretty good. Randy told me my watercolor of the Oakland Bay Bridge was still on the board nine years later when he was in Mr. Powell’s class. I liked Mr. Powell even though I was afraid of him when he yelled. He taught me perspective.
We sat in alphabetical order, and I had the biggest crush on Jon Byerrum who sat in front of me. I had this weird desire to skim his greased flattop so I could see how it felt on my palm, but I didn’t—nor did I look at, talk to, or smile at him. I didn’t want him to know I liked him. Debbie started kindergarten the same year so we walked to school together. Mrs. Proud was her teacher. As Debbie got out earlier every day, she walked home by herself. None of the other kindergarteners walked with her because they always wanted to race, so one day she took the bus to beat them but she never got off, and ended up back at the school. Everyone looked for her when she didn’t show up at home and she caught holy hell when she did. That was the same year she set out to sell Campfire nuts door-to-door in her Blue Bird outfit and got sidetracked playing with a neighborhood girl. After being gone for a couple of hours, Carleen frantically called the police to help search for her. She was found by one of the neighbors, happily playing jacks in her little blue skirt and cap, white shirt, and red vest. She caught holy hell that time, too. She also hadn’t sold any boxes of nuts.
1959 • La Habra ~ We had a boxer named Nana. Deb wanted a puppy and when a guy at Chuck’s work brought in a passel of puppies he brought one home for her. Debbie got to name her. Nana was good with us kids but rambunctious, jumping up and knocking over the little kids. She wasn’t allowed in the house but had the run of the backyard. Chuck fenced in the side yard for a dog run, and that’s where she stayed at night and when no one was home. He figured she’d be a good watchdog since she barked at everyone. I wasn’t so sure why we needed a guard dog; it wasn’t like we lived in Compton, or had anything worth stealing, and the only stranger that came up the driveway was the Fuller Brush man. Carleen played with Nana in the front yard, throwing a ball for her to fetch. Chuck built her a big doghouse to escape the sun, but Debbie spent more time playing house in it than Nana did. Debbie was the one who discovered she had puppies. Nana had dug a hole between the two Washington palms in the corner of the backyard and delivered her litter there in the protected shade.
“MOM! MOM! Nana had PUPPIES!”
“No way.”
“Way,” piped Debbie with utter excitement, tugging on Carleen’s white blouse. “Come see!”
Sometimes Nana jumped the fence and took off like the wind, which of course was how she ended up having puppies. Chuck always beat her for getting out. He wasn’t an animal kind of person. I’m grateful my brother-in-law was good to me, but I wish he’d been nicer to poor Nana, and to my sister.
1959 • La Habra ~ Mom moved back to California soon after I did, and upon her return stayed with us for a short time. Taking me shopping, she had me try on a blue and white ruffled one-piece bathing suit, flowered shorts, matching crop top, and Capri pants. Then she had me put my own clothes back on over all the new ones, her finger to her lips as we walked out of the dressing room and the store. I didn’t like my mother acting like some garden-variety thief; by then, even I knew better. When I told Carleen, she wouldn’t let Mom take me shopping anymore.
In February, a month shy of seventeen, Claudia gave birth to her first child. Carleen helped her, teaching Claudia how to hold the baby, how to nurse and burp her, and how to change a diaper. Claudia and Sherry had been home from the hospital for a week when the conversation turned to baby poop. Claudia didn’t know that a baby was supposed to poop every time it ate, and Sherry hadn’t pooped at all. She told Carleen, Carleen felt the baby’s tiny distended tummy, rolled her eyes at Claudia, and inserted a suppository in Sherry’s little bottom. That baby pooped and pooped and pooped, from black to every color of the rainbow then back to black. Mom was around, but other than holding the baby, she wasn’t much interested in helping out. She’d done her mothering time early on, and having grandchildren was in no way going to rekindle those defunct stirrings.
In early March, Bobby finished his stint in the Navy and he too returned to the mainland. He, Claudia, and their new baby moved to a small furnished house on Green Street near downtown La Habra. Betty and Tony lived in nearby Whittier where she was pregnant with her first child who’d be born in January of 1960. Mom stayed in La Habra for a short time then moved to Long Beach to live near Larry and Marian where they were both teaching school. She had a job for a while as a live-in cook and housekeeper for a big name potato-chip manufacturer. In June, Sherry was baptized at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, the occasion memorialized by family photos. Other than Dad, we all now lived in Southern California, not too far away from one another.
1959 • La Habra ~ I had the two coin collections Larry gave me when I lived in San Jose with Mom. The Album for 20th Century COINS of the WORLD was a large, green, four-paneled book with plastic strips sliding over 144 holes which held the coins in place. I had forty-seven holes filled with coins from Australia, Canada, Haiti, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Panama, and Peru. I also had coins from British North Borneo, the Irish Free State, Malaya, Monaco, Morocco, Palestine, the Republic of Guadeloupe, and Siam. Most of the coins were already in it when Larry gave it to me, and he gave me new ones from his later travels.
My Lincoln Penny Coin Album, dated from 1909 to 1960, was easier to fill. I was ten, and Bobby (Betty’s little brother-in-law), was twelve. Sitting on my bedroom floor with the penny book open on my bed, poring over it with Bobby, I noticed my Lincoln 1954 plain was missing, the empty red hole on that page staring out at me. I was confused at first and thought maybe it had rolled under the bed or caught in the metal lip of the mattress frame. Bobby knew it was a hard-to-find penny. He mentioned it was one he didn’t have in his collection.
I asked him if he’d seen it.
He helped me look.
My heart sank. I knew it was only a penny, but it was one of my best coins, and now it was an empty red hole.
For years, and I mean years, every time I’d be on the phone with Betty and she’d mention Bobby, I’d end our conversation with, “and tell that little sonofabitch I want my 1954 plain back!”
1959 • La Habra ~ Along the rear side fence I planted three huge sunflowers, a patch of blue lupines, and vines of sweet peas. I loved the sweet peas; they were Dad’s favorite flower. And that’s what Carleen called me, “Sweet Pea.” My sister was my sun and my saving grace, and along with my dad, I loved her more than anyone in my world.
She and I played gin rummy, Monopoly, and Clue. We did thousand-piece puzzles and paint-by-number pictures and tiled the top of the blonde coffee table. She taught me embroidery, how to iron on the patterned tissue transfers and how to work the hoop and the embroidery needle so my stitches weren’t too loose or too tight. Our white pillowcases became magically edged at the open end in flowers or princesses, the blossoms and flowing dresses billowing from corner to corner, until we ran out of pillowcases. We moved on to decorating the house with pictures from the Junk of the Month Club kits we made using Elmer’s glue and colored pea gravel-sized rocks.
We watched Thriller and The Twilight Zone, laminated to one another on the new tweed covered couch, eating popcorn and me covering my eyes. Carleen loved those shows. They scared the wits out of me. We watched Rawhide and Maverick and Paladin. I ached to be cool and confident like Zorro, instead of being clumsy and confused, like me. They were my heroes, these cowboys who didn’t care what anyone thought, who rode into town, saved the falsely accused or the family farm, then finished their business and rode into the sunset. They were outsiders, separate from the townsfolk, not part of anything or anyone. Alone. They were brave and independent and strong. They didn’t need anyone.
We watched Carleen’s favorite, Roller Derby. The San Francisco Bombers with Joan Weston and Bobbie and Ann, hard chicks racing low and playing mean and dirty. I was fascinated and wanted to race my skates fast and low like they did, but I didn’t want to be like them; I knew they weren’t good girls. I also didn’t want to get hurt. I wasn’t that good on skates.
We watched Ozzie and Harriett and Leave it to Beaver and Lassie Come Home. Lassie completely undid me. I sobbed through them all, hiding my face behind a pillow sucking my fingers, desolate that my mother didn’t want or love me, convinced everyone else in the whole world had a mother who did.
“Get your fingers out of your mouth.” Every time Carleen turned around I was sucking them and she figured that at ten, it was high time for me to stop. She reminded me. She nagged me. She threatened me. She got orange medicine and coated my two fingers which was nastily bitter, and it didn’t stop me. The unconscious urge simply had me in its grip. She resorted to taping a white sock of Chuck’s over my hand, which ruined the whole experience, plus it was embarrassing going around with a sock at the end of my left arm. She threatened to make me wear it to school if I didn’t stop. It took a year to break me of the habit, which I simply replaced with nail-biting. Too young to take up smoking, I needed something to suppress my nagging anxiety.
1959 • La Habra ~ Cruising Whittier Boulevard, we took a spin to the A&W for frosted mugs of root beer or to Tastee Freeze for fried taquitos and banana splits with extra chocolate and whipped cream, Debbie and Randy in the back, Carleen and me in the front, riding low in the seat with the windows cranked down and our hair blowing in the wind, all of us loudly singing off-key:
Eighteen tons,
and whadaya get?
Another day older
and deeper in debt
We cranked the radio and lowered our voices an octave:
…Saint Peter don’t you call me
’cuz I can’t go,
I owe my soul
to the company store…
We were no Tennessee Ernie Ford, but we were cool: snapping our fingers, popping our gum, grooving in time to the music. On the way back we punched the dashboard to KRLA and belted out “day-o, daaay-o,” punched it to KFWB to sing “wake-up a little Susie, wake-up,” then punched it back to 93 KHJ Boss Radio crooning, “Taammy, Taammy, Tammy’s in love.”
1959 • La Habra ~ Carleen had this thing about not running out of food. Her cupboards were loaded with bags of pasta, rice, and beans. Boxes of Cheerios, Wheaties, Trix, and Kix were lined up next to loaves of Wonder Bread, rolls, and buns. There were Twinkies, Oreos, HoHos, and Snowballs. There were rows stacked three high of Campbell’s, Dole and StarKist. She kept on hand six cans of fruit cocktail, each row neatly stocked, labels forward, not a one out of place. There was Bisquick and Crisco on the shelf below the peanut butter, jellies, and jams. There were bookend rectangle boxes of chocolate pudding and red Jell-O. Standing tightly in the spice cupboard were small red tins of Schillings. Resting on the top shelf were two large yellow bags of Toll House chocolate chips.
The Amana was the size of a 1957 Cadillac without the fins. Its shelves were stockpiled with lemonade and milk; sausage, bacon and eggs; strawberries and cherries and a watermelon wedged in tight. There were Tupperware containers of tamales, chili, and spaghetti, drawers of salami, baloney, and ham. The crispers hid carrots, artichokes, asparagus, and iceberg lettuce. The door guarded butter and Best Foods (never Miracle Whip, we hated Miracle Whip); a plastic lemon, a jar of Maraschinos and a quart of dills. The bottom freezer section was crammed with fryers and chops, fish sticks and fries, frozen peas and onion rings. Crammed in between were half-gallons of rocky road and mint-chip ice cream along with popsicles and fudgesicles. There were Swanson chicken pot pies and aluminum covered roast beef or turkey TV dinners for special occasions when Chuck wasn’t home. We had our own private supermarket, with enough food to last through another Depression.
Even when I wasn’t hungry, I’d slip in and quietly pull the handle on the refrigerator just to look, the rubber seal making a long, slow sucking noise as the door opened. Standing in my bare feet in the cool blue light, listening to the smooth hum of the motor, the sight made me swoon. I remembered earlier times when I sat on the curb, my lunch a Wonder Bread and Bosco sandwich and a package of Kool-Aid, my dinner often the same. I remembered my stomach growling so loud it was hard to fall asleep some nights. It had been a while since I’d sat on that curb, but I was still so hungry. I’d no idea there could be that much food in one place, and that I could eat anything I wanted whenever I wanted, just so as long as I didn’t spoil my dinner.
And I wanted it all. I wanted to sit right there on our yellow linoleum, back against the cupboard, knees bent making a hollow to hold my plate, and eat until I needed to eat no more, until finally, I felt fed. It took me a while to believe Carleen when she said it was okay to eat; that I didn’t need permission. Bless her heart. I loved my sister, but I may have loved that brown Amana even more.
1959 • San Francisco ~ In the late afternoon on August 7, 1959, my step-mother, while stepping off a downtown bus in San Francisco, fell, had a heart attack, and died shortly after. She was 73. Carleen flew to San Francisco to be with Dad for the funeral; she was more broken up than everyone there put together, not because Irene had died—there was no love lost between them—but because Dad was so distraught. It had been a long time since he’d been happy.
Irene had been widowed twice before marrying Dad and was 19 years his senior. They were an odd match, a tee-totaling strait-laced storekeeper and a bourbon drinking hoity-toity dowager. I’ll bet he was roped like a rodeo calf into this marriage just like the first time around, and like the first time around, hit the ground before he knew what happened. Her daughter, Norma, who was Dad’s age, was one of the girls who worked in the store for Dad. When I figured out that we were related, I asked him if that made Norma my step-sister. In no uncertain terms, he told me no.
Irene’s son-in-law suspected Dad had married Irene for her money. He didn’t know my dad. When she died he didn’t want anything from her estate. The only things he kept were his wedding ring, a pearl tie-pin, and a set of diamond cufflinks, along with a tan leather suitcase engraved with his initials and a set of Old Fashioned glasses etched with CJC that she’d given him as anniversary and Christmas presents. After she died, he used them for water; he wasn’t much of a drinker to begin with.
It would have been no skin off Irene’s nose to be nice to us, and we missed our dad during those two years, but she made him happy. I have to hand it to him; it was probably one of the few times in his life he did what he wanted, and to heck with what anyone thought.
1959 • La Habra ~ My brother-in-law’s idea of a family outing was a Sunday drive in his 1956 two-door Mercury Monterey, a two-toned gray and salmon (“titty-pink,” my sister called it) hardtop with a 312 engine, white-walled tires, and big chrome bumpers. He didn’t take us to the local fair or Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm. Carleen took us those places. She went on the rides with us, bought us cotton candy and saltwater taffy, and ate snow cones and hot dogs and onion rings with us. Sometimes she even played hide-and-seek even though she was a mom. No, Chuck’s family outings were to places out in the middle of nowhere or to one of the California missions. He didn’t tell us where we were going so it was invariably a surprise, usually an hour or two away, always with the three of us kids trapped in the back seat, and all the windows up except when he rolled his down to huck one (I never sat behind him again after the first time), the car filled with cigar smoke so thick we could barely see outside. The radio was regularly tuned to the static of football or some talk show, and up so loud our brains ached, his right hand cradling his scotch and water, a half-empty pint tucked under the seat.
When we finally got there, did he let us get out and walk around? Not that there was all that much to see that would fascinate a ten, five, and three-year-old at an abandoned mission that was often surrounded only by cactus and tumbleweeds. No, we’d look at it through the rolled down windows, then turn back onto the El Camino Real and head home.
One Sunday we drove an hour to Mission San Juan Capistrano to see the swallows that had already gone. I threw up in my one and only paper bag on the way there. On the way back, l told Chuck I wasn’t going to make it home. He warned me I’d better not vomit all over his vinyl seats or clean carpets, ordered me to stick my head out the window, then yelled at me not to puke all over the side of his newly waxed door. I couldn’t get my window cranked down fast enough to get my head out far enough, and I barfed right into the opening of the window well, which then trickled down the inside of the door into the ashtray. Chuck’s beloved Mercury reeked as bad as when that forgotten half gallon of milk exploded in the back seat, particularly when parked in the driveway all day in the hot Southern California sun.
1959/60 • La Habra ~ Carleen always called Randy a schnook, but he wasn’t, he was just innocent. On the opening day of the Pomona Fair, we were in line at the cotton candy stand when three brass-buttoned uniformed women in garrison caps smartly walked by.
“Mom, what are they?” Randy asked.
Carleen answered, “They’re WACS.”
He squinched up his baby blues, peered a bit closer, and said in awe, “They’re wax? Gee, they sure look real to me.”
A couple weeks later he spotted three nuns dressed in white wimples and black habits in the hosiery department in Hinshaw’s.
He tugged on Carleen’s hand and asked quite loudly, “Mom, Mom. What are they?”
Carleen shushed him. “Quit staring. They’re just nuns,” she said under her breath.
Randy stared intently and whispered back, “Gosh. They look like they’re something to me.”
When Dad came to visit, he’d ask Randy with straight-faced sincerity if he had his socks on the right feet. Randy took off his Vans to make sure, then switched them, thinking they might not be. He wasn’t old enough to read yet, but he thought the small printing on the side of his socks must’ve had something to do with the rightness of it all. My Dad loved his grandkids as he did all small children. He saw them as funny, charming, and heartwarming, just as he was with them.
My mother, on the other hand, was not much of a grandmother. She saw small children as noisy, snotty, and bothersome, useful only for pouring Cokes, getting aspirin, or fetching cigarettes while she sat on the couch with her feet on the tiled coffee table being waited on hand and foot. When Carleen informed her that the children weren’t her servants, Mom just raised her nose and sniffed.
Sweet Randy ~ One morning we loaded the car and took off for another one of Chuck’s Sunday family drives. I pinched Deb hard not to say anything and we were at Central Avenue before Carleen noticed it was too quiet in the back seat.
We’d forgotten Randy.
Chuck U-turned the Merc and headed the four blocks back. I saw my three-year-old nephew sitting on the curb, dressed in his striped tee shirt and brown corduroys held up by suspenders, his arms covering his sweet little head buried in his knees, sobbing. I hadn’t thought about his feelings, or that he might be scared, or that he was so young. I felt terrible, like it was the worst thing I’d ever done. I promised I’d never be mean to him again, never make him re-dry all the silverware or refold all the washcloths, never complain about ironing his stupid button-down shirts or giving him baths, and let him win when we played Chutes and Ladders or Go Fish.
I was still mean to Debbie sometimes. She and I shared a bedroom off and on, depending on who was living with us. I didn’t want her touching any of my stuff. She was so messy with hers I couldn’t stand it, so I hung a white sheet right down the middle of the room on a string nailed to the walls, banning her from my side, except that we shared the bed and the sheet ran down the middle. At night she tickled my back, her fingers lightly drawing circles and pictures and patterns. Promising to tickle hers in return, I usually reneged, pretending to fall asleep to avoid it.
I finally got the mother I wanted, but I resented having to share her, even with her own children. I couldn’t help it; at times it simply got ahold of me.
1959 • La Habra ~ Chuck wasn’t prejudiced; he hated equally all those he believed were inferior to him. His spewing slurs insulted every race, color, nationality, and ethnic origin. His left middle finger was constantly raised in salute as he angrily cursed the wops, cut off the chinks, and careened past the beaners. The darker their skin, the more contempt he rained upon them. Carleen was constantly screaming at him to slow down, calling him a goddam gutless wonder, and threatening to get out and walk. Then there was me in the back seat, green to the gills, barfing into a brown lunch bag.
Driving anywhere with him was not only dangerous, it was butt squeezing scary. He raised tailgating to an art form, following the semis so closely we’d be sucked along in their backdraft.
“Saves gas,” he’d boast.
When the big-rigs didn’t go fast enough, Chuck whipped around them, cutting them off just a hair too close for comfort. He reveled in the squeal of their tires and the blare of their horns. With his arms flinging, face twisted, and bloodshot eyes dilated, my brother-in-law looked like a crazed Wile E. Coyote hurtling down the open road.
On a divided four-lane highway, two eighteen-wheelers spied Chuck coming up on them. They must have radioed each other. Watching in their oversized sideview mirrors, they positioned their trucks side-by-side to block us from passing, then slowed down to have a little fun. But no goddam sonofabitchshitkickin asshole truckers were going to make a fool of Chuck and hold him hostage, oh no, not Chuck.
He downshifted. The V8 lurched forward as he hunched over the power steering wheel (he loved power steering) and stomped on the gas, the transmission screaming, the speedometer ratcheting to sixty, then seventy, then eighty miles an hour. Hurtling in slow motion up to the two trucks’ mirrors, I saw the drivers high up in their cabs, saw their heads turned towards us, the looks of horror on both their faces reflecting the horror in mine. They raised their sunglasses in disbelief, the big bearded one shaking his bald head, the thin tattooed one gritting his crooked teeth. They see a lunatic, maniacally waving his arm in triumph as he slips between them with three children in the back seat and a wife in the front. They see all of us frozen except for our lips praying frantically to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. My guess is we were the only reason they didn’t squeeze us like a tin of sardines, then run him over and leave him like flattened road-kill on the black macadam.
There was another time I thought we were going to die. Roaring down the highway into the setting sun, a rear whitewall blew and we spun full circle then slid sideways a couple of hundred feet. Gravel splashing and metal scraping, the Mercury left a trail of rubber and skid marks in its wake, the right rear rim embedding to a halt in the burning Southern California asphalt. Betty was with us. We clung to the armrests and one another, each making personal bargains with God—except Betty—who was swearing a blue streak at what an asshole Chuck was. Betty never did think much of him. She thought he was a chicken-shit bastard. He thought she was a backbiting bitch. I think they were both a good judge of character.
Chuck didn’t spill a drop of his Cutty Sark. He finished it off, spit out his cigar stub, swung open the car door and hopped out. As if this was simply a blip in an otherwise normal Sunday family outing, he popped the trunk, pulled out the jack, spun off the lug nuts, and threw on the spare.
1959 • La Habra ~ That summer Chuck bought a boat, bringing an end to our Sunday drives. It was a fifteen-foot, white wood-hulled, mahogany-decked Trojan Chris Craft powered by a 50-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor with a 75 lower end. We didn’t visit missions anymore, now we went on camping and ski trips to the Salton Sea, Back Bay, Lake Nacimiento, and Lake Havasu. The ice chests, canvas army cots, cooking supplies, sleeping bags, grocery sacks, bathing suits and sun hats, zinc oxide, beach towels, and musty brown tent would be packed and ready by the front door. We’d wait for Chuck, who was out in the garage chewing on his dead cigar butt and hunched over the Evinrude, grease up to his elbows, swallowed up by his stuff that was stacked from floor to ceiling. Useful items he might need someday, emerging only to refill his tall frosted Collins glass, then disappearing under the engine again.
We waited, and we waited, and then we waited some more. Sometimes we waited all day. Once we went to bed and got up the next morning and waited half the next day until he was ready.
Chuck spent most of his time hanging out in the garage with Jack Daniels or Jim Beam, tinkering on engines in the middle of his junk. Chuck didn’t throw anything away. He kept stacks of old newspapers and piles of magazines. He saved pieces of wire and lengths of rope. He had drawers of gloves and jelly jars of tacks, nails, and bits, and coffee cans of nuts and bolts and rusty washers, Dutch Masters boxes of small brass screws. He stored oil rags in dented tin buckets. There were small boxes of screwdrivers, medium boxes of rasps, and big boxes of power drills. He had wood crates filled with engine and machine parts along with lawnmower, car, and boat parts. The garage was so crammed with workbenches, toolboxes, and cabinets that his treasured Mercury sat day in and day out in the sun-beaten driveway. When it finally died, it rested on blocks there for years, discarded like last year’s faded orange and black Halloween costume.
1959 • Salton Sea, California ~ My least fond memory of that summer is water skiing at the Salton Sea, a huge inland lake in the desolate Sonoran Desert. The place is a forsaken moonscape: saltier than the Pacific Ocean, hotter than blazing cinders, and smellier than rotting catfish. No benches, tables, trees, or grass. There’s one water spigot and one outhouse so gross none of us want to use it. Our tent is moldy, the sleeping bags smell, and our cots are rickety. They call it “beach camping.”
There are a zillion red dragonflies; if you swing your arms, you hit 200 of them. I don’t swing my arms. There are miles of migrating birds and acres of bird crap and we step gingerly in our flip-flops, praying the rubber thongs don’t break. Bird droppings squish between our toes. I share my ham sandwich with hordes of tiny gnats. Wasps and giant horseflies attack me from the rear, stealing a piece of my flesh on their way to bigger and better meals. There’s no shelter from the wind, sand, and bugs; not a leaf in sight to protect me from blistering 119-degree sun. Everything is sandy and salty and grimy, including me. The only relief is in the boat or the water—and no one swims in that water, not by choice anyway.
It doesn’t improve by moonlight. There is nothing but mile after mile of barren salt flats. I don’t like sleeping in the open. I don’t like any of it, except the stars. There are millions of them, the likes of which I’ve never seen. They dance and shoot across the sky. When spent, they twinkle and fall, sprinkling me as I drift asleep.
It’s my turn to ski, my first attempt. Bobbing in the water, I hang on, waiting for the slack nylon rope to straighten. Chuck perches patiently at the throttle, his black hair slicked back, dark sunglasses tilted, ever-present cigar butt clamped between stained teeth.
A litany of instructions floats across the water: “Keep your tip up! Pull the rope straight! Lean back!” he hollers. “Get your elbows in. Keep your knees bent. Sit back on your heels. Open your eyes, Cathy, you have to see where you’re going. Great, you’re doin’ great! Don’t let go. Let the boat pull you up!”
Trying to follow Chuck’s directions and not drown at the same time is a trick. Why in the world would anyone want to do this? Inhaling the nasty salt water and slimy brown foam as the boat picks up speed, my arms are ripping from their sockets which is a blessing as the life-vest armhole seams have rubbed off what skin I have, not to mention I can hardly see because it is riding up my chin, the canvas strap strangling me. I hang onto the thin yellow rope like a lifeline. I’m not a good swimmer. I’m also terrified there’s something lurking in the lake, and I don’t want to be in it longer than I have to. I steady myself, then nod. Chuck gives me the high sign and I yell, “Hit it!” He opens the throttle, brackish water shoots at me like a fire hose, flushing down my throat, up my nose, and out my ears. My blue ruffled bathing suit bottom vacuums toward my bent knees, but I don’t let go of the towline. I’m tumbling on spin cycle, then out of the water into another hell.
“I’m up!” I scream. I’m on a wild bronco, bucking through a flashflood. Then a voice whispers in my head: this is a bad idea.
“Ski out of the wake!” my sister shouts. The fear I have quadruples. I’m going twenty miles an hour, more than twice the speed than on my blue-fendered Schwinn and I thought that was reckless and she wants me to slice sideways? While I’m crossing a tsunami on a toothpick? My eleven-year-old heart pounds so hard I’m afraid it will split me open. I tighten every muscle I don’t have, murmur a Hail Mary, and go for it. My ski snags the wake, rips off, and I shoot away, still gripping the handles of the towrope, catapulted toward the Goliath of concrete water. There is a God, and He’s punishing me for all those Storybook dolls and Slinkies I stole. Chuck circles back, cuts the engine, and idles toward me. He hears my banshee wail as I surface from six feet under. I’m so stunned, I don’t even cry. Gasping, I check for attached body parts. I’m still in one piece; my bathing suit bottoms, however, float several yards away.
“You’re all right. Wanna try again?”
“No,” as I dogpaddle to get my pants.
“It’s like falling off a horse. If you don’t get back on, Cath, you’ll …”
“I don’t care,” and think, Oh please… like a horse is something I’d consider getting on in the first place.
“C’mon.”
“NO!”
“I’ll pull you a little slower. Try it one more time.”
So like a dope, I do.
I’m up again! But I want to be anywhere on the planet except in the wake, so I lean into the ski and to my right and magic pulls me across. The world, in an instant, changes. I’m gliding on silk. I don’t usually change my perspective, but I didn’t get it before. Before, it wasn’t fun. Before it was perilous and painful, and I knew I was going to die. Everyone in the boat is applauding, waving their arms and cheering, “Come on, Seabiscuit!” Debbie and Randy are grinning like maniacs with white zinc faces, their heads sprouting little flowered hats, their bodies bloated by orange life preservers. I’m happy to be alive. I promise God I’ll never steal again. Chuck banks the boat and I slice the wake from the outside, the edge of my ski catching the churning vee. The rope-holds whip out of my hands, the rubber boot snaps off and the ski flips up, grazing my head as it rockets past. All hands shoot up in the boat—like one isn’t enough—announcing my fall to the world. Chuck circles back. I float face up, arms and legs extended like a sodden Raggedy Ann, choking on salt water and gasoline spewing from the Evinrude. He leans over the edge of the Chris-Craft and hauls me in by the seat of my blue ruffled bottoms. I lay lifeless in the hull, a flounder out of fight.
“Who’s next?” he asks.
And that’s what I remember about camping—that—and the Milky Way shimmying in the sky, blinking back at me in wonder.
Early 1960s • La Habra ~ Sequestered by the murky outline of the San Gabriel Mountains, Orange County had constant smog alerts, sometimes the air so awful they closed the schools. Everyone was told to stay inside; outside was smothered in a pea soup of haze so dense that not even a Santa Ana wind could blow it away.
The cigarette smoke enveloping our card games was worse than the pall outside. Carleen inhaled Pall Malls and Claudia smoked Salems.
Betty preferred Parliaments, or when she was feeling la de dah, Vogues, slim colored menthols at 75 cents a pack, a normal 25-cent pack considered beneath her. Her hair in brush rollers covered with a scarf tied around her chin and her black-lined eyes squinting to avoid the constant spiraling plume, she often had two lit at a time, one hanging from her Coty Red lips, the other burning away in the ashtray overflowing with lipstick-stained butts. She smoked two, three, sometimes four packs a day, blowing me perfect smoke rings whenever I asked.
In those days, everyone smoked: Mamie Eisenhower, Ricky and Lucy, John Wayne, Grace Kelly, Liberace, my sixth-grade teacher Mrs. Wilcox (she kept a bottle in her desk drawer, too), my mother, and my three sisters.
I was happiest playing cards with my sisters. The four of us sat at the dining table for hours, the little kids locked outside the front screen door to play in the neighborhood, the babies in playpens napping while we shuffled, cut, and dealt. Eyes rolling in unison, they drew to see who had to be my partner. When it was my turn to deal, they cursed every time they had to throw in their cards for a re-deal, not realizing until halfway through a hand I’d misdealt again. If they’d just let me deal slower, and not three at a time, it would have worked better. The only reason I got to play was that they needed a fourth for partner hearts, canasta, or pinochle. I didn’t interfere with their conversations, I laughed at their jokes (which were over my head), and ingratiated myself by serving Danola ham sandwiches on Melmac, refilling their coffee, and emptying their ashtrays.
Sometimes on weekends we’d be at it all day and all night, only taking breaks to feed the kids. Betty lost a babysitter once because she didn’t make it home until dawn.
“One more hand,” we’d say, “just one more hand.”
1960 • La Habra ~ My sisters drank pot after pot of Folgers and smoked pack after pack of filters, complaining the whole time how crappy their hands were, bad-mouthing Mother, and bitching about their husbands. I was clear I didn’t like coffee or cigarettes, clear I was not going to grow up and be like Mom, and real clear I was not going to marry some s.o.b. like they had.
Playing Hearts, I carefully organized my cards by suit and value, alternating the reds and blacks, trying not to drop any face up on the table, when it dawned on me what I had. I held the Queen of Spades, all the high hearts, and enough lower ones to shoot the moon. Yabba dabba doo!
“Yessss!” I hid my crooked grin behind my fanned cards, so excited I could barely contain myself, my cowlicks and peepers popping with glee.
“Whooeee!” I slapped my free hand on the table.
“Yaahooo!” my butt cheeks danced on the chair.
“Oh yeahhh!”
Swearing, the three of them threw in their cards and didn’t let me play my hand.
“I hate you!” I whined.
“Oh shut up and shuffle,” they replied.
There’s nothing like a common enemy to unite sisters, and we had Mom. When she pulled up in her black-and-white Buick Special with the four chrome holes on the sides, we readied ourselves. Mother’s redeeming value was that she was a card player. However, she wasn’t as sharp as she once was, her thinking ability leached by alcohol, pills, and recent shock treatments. My sisters took full advantage and cheated when they played with her, slightly fanning their cards to each other and passing under the table whatever they needed to fill out their hand. Snarky about Mom, they referred to her as “your” mother, as if she wasn’t theirs, just mine, though I didn’t want to claim her either. Carleen and Betty didn’t like being stuck with her as a partner either, but since “either” had to go to school during the day, they tolerated her as my fill-in. I also knew not to align myself with Mom; defending her was a bad idea. Claudia straddled the fence as far as Mom was concerned; she didn’t defend her, but she wouldn’t join in trashing her either. Betty’s stand: if you weren’t with her you were against her, and fence-straddling eventually put Claudia in the enemy camp.
I learned a lot more from playing cards than just shuffling, cutting, and dealing. Like how to win and how to lose. I realized that pouting didn’t improve my hand one whit. I got the hang of the rules, how to keep score, and how to count. I learned how to bluff. I mastered keeping my cards close to my chest, when to hold ’em, and when to fold ’em. I learned to lead with my strong suits, and to play my bad cards as well as I could. I got cheating wasn’t fair, or all that much fun. I learned to play the cards dealt me even when they were rotten, and that it was only a game and not to take it too seriously. I learned about the Ace of Hearts and the Queen of Spades, and that hearts trump everything and hope trumps anything. And I learned that there was always a new hand soon to be dealt, and possibly, a better one.
1960 • La Habra ~ The Fuller Brush man, the Good Humor man, and the Helms man were regulars in our neighborhood. I loved the Helms man. I loved anybody who brought food around. Bow-tied Gus Gustavito drove slowly up our street, a distinctive hoot-hoot tooting his daily arrival. His mustard-yellow 1962 Chevy panel truck had an awning that swung open and arched over the rear doors. Sliding out his wooden shelves, he displayed his wares: jelly doughnuts, glazed twists, crullers, cream-puffs, sugar cookies, brownies, fresh baked Olympic bread, and aluminum pans of chocolate frosted single-layer cakes (my favorite). He knew all of our names, pinched our cheeks, and chuckled, “Howyadothismornin?” shaking them hard enough to loosen our cheeks from our gums. We’d race to the truck, our palms protecting our faces.
The Good Humor truck was the other regular on the block. We heard him as soon as he turned our corner on Verdugo, his distinctive calliope music sounding from his roof, calling us out our front doors to chase him down the street until he had a small crowd hopping barefoot on the hot asphalt, our coins jingling in our pockets.
The Foremost trailer, a traveling photography studio, rolled up twice a year and parked at the end of the street. The kids in the neighborhood were scrubbed and shined for sittings. The photographer and his assistant cupped our chins, turned our cheeks, and tilted our heads to shutter snap, advance, and shutter snap again. Three weeks later proofs arrived in the mail, documentation of happy children on that year’s calendar.
1960 • La Habra ~ Debbie, Randy, and I had daily chores. We made our beds, cleaned our bathroom, and fixed our breakfast. We vacuumed, swept, and dusted. I helped with dinner. Debbie set the plates and Randy got out the silverware. After dinner I washed the dishes, Debbie dried, and Randy put away the utensils. He was so small he sat on the kitchen drainboard to reach the drawer.
The most tedious job delegated to us was to separate the small red gravel from the small white gravel that got kicked together when we ran through the four gravel-filled triangles along the walkway. It was Chuck’s idea of creative landscaping.
Every six months Carleen turned into a cleaning fanatic. I could see it in her eyes, and there were no idle hands in our house when she was possessed. No cobweb, dust ball, tub ring, fingerprint, carpet spot, sink stain, scuffmark, or messy closet, drawer, cabinet or shelf escaped her. Even the kitchen junk drawer got organized. Shooting down the hall in a frenzy, she’d whip us kids up to participate in her whirl to get the house spotless, arming us with something from her arsenal.
If we weren’t dusting, we were vacuuming. If we weren’t vacuuming we were polishing, disinfecting, sweeping, shining, washing, waxing, or scrubbing something. Every cleaning product made was crammed under the sink: Comet, Brillo, Borax and Ajax; Windex, Tuffys, Pine-Sol and Lysol, Lemon Ammonia, Lemon Joy, Lemon Pledge and Lemon Bleach. There were SOS pads, sponges, bottle brushes and toothbrushes. There were towels, dustpans, dust rags and dishrags, with barely enough room for the brown paper garbage bags.
When her cleaning furies didn’t calm her, we rearranged the furniture, painted the walls, or scraped the waxy-yellow-build-up off the narrow linoleum strip of kitchen floor. We used old teaspoons; their curved edges didn’t knick the floor like the flat metal spackling knife or wide paint scraper did. We got down on our hands and knees, Carleen, Debbie, and I, and cleaned that floor a scrape at a time. My knees and elbows hurt along with my back and blistering finger. It took us the good part of an entire day. When we were finished, my sister got out two cans, one can of Johnson & Johnson’s Floor Wax, and a can of Johnson & Johnson’s Overcoat. A single coat of yellow wax was poured and smoothed all over the newly scraped floor, then a second coat and after that, a coat of shellac Clearcoat to protect the new wax from wearing away. The first time she did this I wanted to throw my body on the floor, flailing my arms and legs like a stricken snow angel to stop her. What was she thinking?
Each week we’d mop; once a month we’d wax; once a year, when she’d gone totally mad, we’d scrape. Thankfully, someone finally invented floor stripper. Then she discovered paint stripper, furniture stripper and wallpaper stripper.
1960 • La Habra ~ A letter to my father:
Dear Daddy,
I don’t want to live with Carleen any more. I am taking the bus to come stay with you. Please pick me up at the Greyhound station this Saturday. Please. Carleen is mean, and she doesn’t really love me. She just wants me here to be her slave. All I ever do is clean the toilet and scrub the tub. She makes me iron all the pillowcases and Randy’s stupid little button-down collared shirts. I have to peel all the potatoes, slice all the onions, wash all the dishes, and fold all the clothes. All she does is sit on the couch and read and smoke and boss me around. I won’t be any problem and I can work in the store and earn my keep. Please pick me up. I’ll be waiting for you.
Love, Cathy
I had no stamps, so I asked Carleen to mail my letter.
Saturday morning, all my two-dollar bills in my pocket for bus money, my suitcase packed with Peter Pan blouses, crop tops, peddle pushers, seven pairs of underpants embroidered with the days of the week on the backside that Carleen gave me for Christmas, along with my toothbrush, Johnny Tremain, two coin collections, my dolls Meg and Jo, I slipped out the front door and headed down the driveway.
Leaning against the doorjamb and waving my opened letter over her head, she called me back.
“Cathy, am I this mean?” Taking a drag on her cigarette, she continued, “Do you really think I don’t care about you? Am I really Simon Legree? Do you really feel like you’re just a char girl?”
“No,” I lied.
She’s mad at me. What if she doesn’t love me anymore? What if she sends me away? I broke out in a sweat, feeling like I’d been punched in the stomach and unable to breathe. I wanted to disappear and hide. I could tell her feelings were hurt. I felt like I’d been caught doing something really bad, that I’d betrayed her, even though what I wrote was true. But I was mad too. It wasn’t her business, opening my letter.
To my surprise, she apologized. I unpacked. I still had to help around the house. I still scrubbed and ironed and peeled and washed and folded, except she thanked me now. I don’t know why, but it made a difference. But never again did I write private notes on pale blue lines, never again did I put anything in writing that could be used against me. Never again. Not ever.
1960s • La Habra ~ My brother-in-law—a jug-eared, skinny 6’4” guy with a dark flattop, a two-day-old shadow, and an Elvis Presley lip—worked as the night foreman at National Tapered Wings. Over the years Chuck built airplane parts for Lockheed, Boeing, and Gulfstream. When his cousin opened his own aerospace parts business, Chuck joined him, working with Wayne at Astrospar for more than twenty years. Chuck loved work. Wearing his blue pocket-covered jumpsuit over his clothes, he loved the feel of engines, the smell of grease, and the hum of machinery. Other than my dad and my brother, I never saw a man work harder than Chuck.
Proud of having four kids (Laura was born in 1962), Chuck included me in that number, introducing me as his oldest. He let me stay up late during the summer and play pinochle with Jack and Vera Rosencrans, even though it made five of us. He taught me to ski, no matter how many times he had to circle the boat. He shaved his face, scrubbed his fingernails, and wore a suit to my junior high and high school graduations. And he never laid a hand on me; he knew I’d cry if he even looked at me sideways, so he was more tender with me than others. But at times he made me uneasy. I saw his hands all over Carleen; she’d say “Chu-uck” and make him quit because us kids would be sitting right there. My eyes glued to the TV, wishing he’d stop, I kept my head turned away. I didn’t get too close him; I hadn’t forgotten Bobby.
He had another side and could be an ill-tempered and mean-mouthed man, mostly to my sister. He’d start in on Carleen and when she’d had enough, she’d nail him with narrowed eyes, turn on her heel, and flip him a kiss my ass out the corner slit in her mouth past her dangling cigarette. When he couldn’t browbeat her, he’d go after Randy.
Randy was maybe four. Chuck, a permanent toothpick in mouth, a smelly cigar butt between fingers, and a Scotch over ice in hand, made his child stand at attention and salute him. Randy stood, his chubby arm crooked up with his fingers held facing out on his sweet crew-cut forehead. My nephew would have to stand there “at attention” and listen to Chuck lecture him, responding with a “Yes, SIR” until Chuck finished. It was painful to watch. I wished Chuck had just beaten him and gotten it over with.
Steering clear of him I escaped his churlishness; besides, other than knocking my milk over every night at the dinner table, I didn’t cause any trouble. I liked Chuck when he wasn’t drinking, which wasn’t often. He’d go on a rant if he thought any of us was trying to get away with something, and ask, “Do I look stupid?” I wasn’t about to answer that question. I wasn’t going to pull on his outstretched index finger when he told me to either. Did I look stupid?
Working nights and swing, Chuck wasn’t often around except on weekends. Actually, for a few years, he wasn’t around much at all. I think Carleen was happy he was gone, so she didn’t ask too many questions. Betty and I suspected he had another family somewhere.
When he was around, dinner was an ordeal. Sitting ramrod straight with our hands folded in our laps, we waited for him to come to the table while our food got cold. Manners were a big deal: no speaking unless spoken to, no laughing, definitely no giggling, no eating with your fingers, no chewing with your mouth open. No elbows, no talking, no gulping, no reaching. Stabbing the backs of our hands with his fork, he threatened to give us a bloody stump if we reached across the table again. After dinner, when it wasn’t so nerve-wracking, I scarfed down the leftovers. Carleen was sure I had a hollow leg.
1960s • La Habra ~ The women in my family are not victims, however, we do come from a long line of martyrs, and our mother learned from the best. With her bromides she nagged my oldest sister like a scolding fishwife. “You’ve made your bed… ,” Mom’s voice withered, then she’d snidely remind Carleen that that’s just the way the cookie crumbles or the mop flops.
Now it was Chuck who constantly wore on Carleen. Her handsome high school sweetheart had once stolen her heart; she didn’t realize that ten years later this is what it would look like. Their constant bickering wore her down. His drinking worsened, his cutting sarcasm bit deeper, and the hours he kept her waiting lengthened.
Chuck was stingy—stingy with his time, his love, and his money—except on Christmas Eve. Then he spent a fortune on foolishness, frantically splurging that one night trying to buy himself back into the family. He worked nights so my sister had use of the Mercury during the day, but she had to ask for gas money to go grocery shopping, the Brea Library, or to spend the day swimming at Wayne and Joan’s. Gas was thirteen cents a gallon, so two bucks a week was enough to get us anywhere and back, with quick side trips to the A&W or the Tastee Freeze, and two bucks was the length of her leash.
Yes, Chuck was generous in supporting the unending stream of relatives that stayed with them over the years, and I never heard him complain, not once. Yes, he took the family to Chinese food or fish and chips once a month which was a big deal, and yes, he brought Carleen weekly bouquets from the roadside flower-stand (except the one Friday when he made the mistake of taking advantage of a deal on a huge gladiola and lily arrangement meant for a funeral that threw her into a complete snit and which she whacked him with across his chest so he knew enough not to be stupid enough to do that again), but those things didn’t outweigh the binges, the bullying, and the way he basically treated her.
That man wore on my sister enough to give her migraines. Some days she wouldn’t get out of bed, other days she couldn’t get off the couch. There were days she’d lock the kids out to get some peace and smoke a pack of Kents until the wracking pain passed. After a final straw, the details escape me now because it probably didn’t seem like that big a deal at the time, she snapped. “If you pull this again, I’m gonna spread eagle you, duct tape your hairy wrists and skinny ankles to the four corners of our bed frame, and burn your eyes to the sockets with my lit cigarette—and if that doesn’t put an end to your goddamsonofabitchin’ meanness, the next time you pull this crap I’ll wait until you’re passed out and then I’m going set your sorry white ass on fire.”
Then one day she simply said, “That’s it.” And with her “that’s it,” her migraines stopped.
I could tell she was still unhappy and felt trapped. And I could tell she wasn’t going to do anything about it. She quit fighting. She quit bitching. She quit worrying. The fact was, she simply no longer cared. Chuck tiptoed some after she got her titties in a twist—was a little nicer, tried a little harder—but it was too late. We may be martyrs, but only to a point. When we reach that threshold, we turn our backs, and you can never get to us again. She turned hers, and with that turn, she shut him out of the last tiny soft space in the center of her chest.
I kept quiet but paid close attention. I wondered about things, so sometimes I asked Carleen questions, questions about “why or when or how” questions about “who and what.” She seldom answered me with anything other than, “What, you writin’ a book?”
I wasn’t trying to be nosy. I purely wanted to know. I wasn’t about to make the same mistake.
1960s • La Habra ~ Mom rotated between Betty’s and Claudia’s, but their welcome mats finally wore out. Larry wouldn’t deal with living with her because she smoked and he didn’t want her smoking around their new baby. Carleen was the one who took her in when she had no place else to go. What with our mother’s pills and drinking, what with her depressions and self-pity, and what with her mood swings, hypochondria, carping and complaining, along with her constant lament of, “why doesn’t anyone love me,” she wasn’t easy to be around.
My mother bounced from job to job moving from town to town, working as a live-in cook and housekeeper for Catholic priests or the well-to-do. She stayed with Carleen when she was sick, jobless or homeless, recovering from some surgery, or once again having checked herself out of one of the mental asylums up and down the state. Whenever she stayed with us for any length, I ended up with another vomiting spell.
She committed herself into Norwalk, Agnews, or Camarillo State Mental Hospital when she had no place else to stay, where someone would take care of her and she didn’t have to cope on her own. One day, I was maybe eleven, I went to the State Hospital in Norwalk with Carleen to pick up Mom. The asylum smelled sickly sweet, a mixture of the sharp odor of urine, the reek of cigarettes, and the burn of Lysol. It was a din. Some of the women on the ward were fighting, screaming, and crying, some were curled up on the floor, some were tied to their beds with leather restraints. They were taking a woman away who’d just eaten the lenses from her glasses and women were freaking out. Narrow single beds with thin gray mattress ticking on painted metal springs lined the dingy walls, a chair at the foot of each one. When it calmed down, vacant people remained, wailing and weeping, hunched over tables mechanically playing board games, sitting quietly, and rocking… just rocking. The weirdest thing was, some of the women looked normal. Maybe they were the ones who had too many choices on the outside which made them crazy, so they stayed on the inside where life seemed more sane.
My mother had problems, but she wasn’t insane; I couldn’t believe she checked herself in there on purpose. It scared me. It scared me for her, and it scared me for me, that I might end up like her in a place like that. I had nightmares about it. Carleen promised me I didn’t have to go back, that I didn’t have to go see her in there again.
More than once Carleen moved a hospital bed for Mom into my room. Propped up with her green, over-stuffed reading pillow, wearing her nightgown with matching dust jacket and her black-rimmed cat-eyed glasses, her glass of water and bottles of pills on the metal TV tray, she’d call me in and have me close the door behind me, making the room and my breathing tight and small. The room had a sickly sweet smell that reminded me of ether, making everything even worse.
The final time I had to perch by her side I sat in a hard-backed dining room chair, listening to her litany of complaints: how lonely and dreadful her life was, how she hadn’t done anything wrong to any of us, how come I didn’t love her and why did I desert her? I retreated in tears from that room of moans and sighs, thinking that somehow it must be my fault. Carleen caught me in the hall and asked me what Mom said. When I told her, she charged in and told Mom that was it, she had to leave. She could still come and visit, she just couldn’t stay. When Mom took me aside and cried, “You don’t want to live here anymore, you come live with me,” that’s when Chuck put his foot down; she was no longer welcome, period. I didn’t see much of her after that.
Southern California ~ Mother attempted suicide like clockwork, usually with pills and alcohol and always next to a hospital or police station so someone could rescue her in time. My mother wanted to kill herself, but she didn’t want to die; there’s a difference. Carleen no longer took the calls to come get her, so Larry, now living in Carmel, got the call from Loma Linda, a teaching hospital 400 miles away in Riverside. Trying to end her life just outside their doors, they found a final letter on Mom, donating her body to Loma Linda for medical purposes. Larry called Betty because she lived closer and told her to call and find out what was going on.
After identifying herself as a next of kin, Betty queried the head nurse, “Is my mother dead yet?”
“No, but she doesn’t have long. She’s not going to make it.”
My sister called Larry back with the good news. He immediately drove down, picked up Betty, and insisted she come with him to say goodbye to Mother.
“I’m not going,” she snipped. “Cole of California is having their yearly 50% off warehouse sale and I’m not about to miss it.”
They had a terrible row and he finally browbeat her into seeing Mother. The hospital had sent him the letter they found on Mom and on the drive over he demanded Betty read it. She refused.
“I’m not reading this junk. It’s the same old crap, Mother whining and wallowing. I’m not interested …grumble, grumble, grumble.”
“Read it,” he ordered.
“No!”
“READ IT!”
She finally gave it a cursory once-over, just to get Larry off her back. Then she wadded it up and threw it on the floor.
Mom, unconscious when they got to her room, was on oxygen, tubes up her nose, needles in her arms and ankles, the needle holes ulcerating. Arms crossed, Betty leaned against the wall in the hall outside.
“This is the last time you are ever going to see your mother,” Larry snapped, “Get over here and say goodbye to her!”
Betty refused. “Thank God. It’s about time. I’ve seen this once too often …grumble, grumble, grumble, and I’m not interested in seeing it anymore.”
She didn’t go in.
After saying final his goodbye to Mom, Larry made Betty take Mom’s 1959 Hillman Minx packed with all of her belongings back to Huntington Beach. The mailman, who at Christmas delivered twice a day during the week and once on Saturdays, knew Mother from her occasional stays with Betty and recognized the car in my sister’s open garage.
“Your mother’s car has been here for a few days but I haven’t seen her around. Is she visiting you?”
Betty thinks, What am I going to tell him—my mother’s in the hospital from her umpteenth attempted suicide? so said, “No, she died.”
Southern California ~ Larry phoned a week later and asked Betty what she’d heard about Mother.
“How would I know?” Betty retorted. “I haven’t called.”
“Call the hospital! Right now! Find out!”
Betty got the head nurse on the phone, identified herself as Noreen Clemens’ daughter, and asked, “Is she dead yet?”
“No. Actually, your mother is fine and we’re getting ready to release her. You know, I’ve been talking to your mother and she’s told me her dreadfully sad story. I just don’t understand. It’s Christmas time and none of her children seem to even care about her. How could this be? This is your mo… .”
Betty cut her off. “Wait just a damn minute! Think about it! This woman has five children and none of them want her around them. Doesn’t that tell you there may be another side to our mother’s pitiful sad-sack story?”
Tony drove Betty to Loma Linda to pick up Mom and waited in the car. As my sister entered into her hospital room, Mom noted her angry countenance and whined, “Oh Betty, all you girls have let me down again.”
Betty stalked over to Mother, leaned hard into her face, and hissed through clenched teeth, “Listen, Dearie, who’s the mother and who’re the children here? Get this straight—who’s let whodown?”
Mom ended up at Betty’s until she got back on her feet. Larry wouldn’t take her, Claudia’s place was too small, and Carleen refused to ever take her in again after the last time Mom feigned her death, slicing her wrists just deep enough to make a mess. When Carleen walked in and found blood everywhere, she threw a fit and tossed Mom out. “I have three kids in this house and you pull a goddam stunt like this? Get out! Get out! GET OUT AND DON’T COME BACK!”
Well enough to be up and around, Mom was rummaging through her car in Betty’s garage when the mailman showed up. As Betty walked out to get the mail he said, “I swear I saw your mother in the garage going through her car. I thought she died.”
“Ahh, …ahh, …ahh,” Betty stuttered. Oh my God. I’m not explaining this to him. “Ahh, ahh, no. Ahh, that’s her sister.”
1644 Haight Street, San Francisco ~ From the time I was twelve I spent my summers with my dad and worked for him in his store in the Haight, and when I got older, I worked Christmas and Easter vacations too, saving my earnings for milk shakes, school clothes, and college.
As you walked through the double swinging doors of his five and dime, there was a four-sided counter nearly the width of the store; it had glass candy bins that ran the length of the front and back of it with a big black cash register at each end. On each side of the store were long wood counters with glass dividers creating the stock bins. At the front right were the bolts of yardage and pull out drawers filled with patterns. In the middle of the store stood the same divided counters that lined the sides. They all had closed cupboards beneath for back inventory, and each counter had a second level of suspended shelves filled with more stock. Toward the rear of the store were the oilcloths on long rolls and and a row of hanging plastic curtains for sale.
On the shelves you could find kite string, ribbon, thread and rope; diapers, dishrags, dustpans, soap; vegetable, bird and flower seeds; he had fish food, underwear, white socks, and handkerchiefs for any mood. The side bins held balloons and beads, ribbons and bracelets; the shelves above were stacked with tea sets, toy trucks, stuffed bears, and board games. The back aisle was stocked with sandpaper, paint, hammers, and nails; the front with erasers, paperclips, pencils, and lunch pails. By the register were Life Savers, Mars bars, Big Hunks and Jujubes along with Aspergum, Beechnut, Dentyne, and Wrigley’s. The covered candy bins in front held rock candy, turtles, and jellybeans, orange sticks, gumdrops, and vanilla creams. In the corner stood spinning racks of Golden Books, greeting cards, and comics: Casper, Archie, and Mighty Mouse Atomic.
My dad, who was tall and elegant and always wore a white shirt, suit and tie, taught me how to work as soon as I was old enough to be employed. First, he showed how me to sweep: to maneuver the big push broom up and down the aisles. He taught me to stock shelves: yarn and yardage, nylons and paper napkins, silverware and dishes; he taught me to stock the under-shelves from the back room, to write down and keep track of inventory, to keep the wooden bins neat, clean and full. I learned to use the adding machine, the pricing gun, and the cash register; to count money, make change, and fill out bank deposits. He taught me to balance the till, wait on customers, and watch for shoplifters; to open the store in the morning and lock it back up at night. He broke it down one job at a time, and didn’t give me a new one until I learned to do the last one. I liked working; I got to be with my dad.
I earned fifty cents an hour, not what he paid the “girls” who were three times my size and four times my age, but I was part-time and twelve. The girls made a dollar an hour. They didn’t make much in a dime store, but they loved my dad and worked for him for more than fourteen years. “Mr. Clemens,” they respectfully called him. Angie, Norma, and Clara came with the store when my father took it over in 1953. If Sprouse-Reitz hadn’t closed the store I imagine they’d have stayed on until they died. Josie came later, working there only a short time. She was younger, sweet, funny, kind, and worried about her weight, she went to a doctor who gave her diet pills. Sweet Josie was dead less than a week later. It was awful.
Clara—the oldest with thick legs, wide hips, gray hair, and glasses—didn’t like me interfering with her yarn section; on her day off I’d overstock it just to get a rise out of her. She acted like it was her store. Angie loved me and let me stock anything I wanted in her sections. She was from Malta and wore three-inch heels during work hours. She took the 8:00 a.m. bus in and ran in her tennis shoes for the 6:00 p.m. bus home, making several transfers in the 45-minute ride to her family in the Mission. Norma, who owned the flat my dad once rented on Belvedere, had fancy bleached blonde hair, heavy pancake makeup, and was the same age as Dad. It was her mother, Irene, who was married to my father for three years before she died from a heart attack which I suppose sort of made Norma my stepsister.
Those three women worked their feet off. When you worked for Dad, he’d better not catch you sitting down, and you’d best not dawdle and chat, either. “I don’t pay you to stand around all day,” he’d snap. I worked half days at first. For some reason, my stomach ached when I stood for a long while; Dad let me sit, maybe because I was twelve, or maybe because I looked pale. When it kept getting worse and I doubled over because it hurt like a knife stabbing me in the center of my stomach, he took me to a doctor at St. Mary’s Medical Center just up the hill from the store. The doctor determined I had something wrong with my pancreas and put me on a low-fat diet. He also told me to quit eating the bonbons and turtles out of the candy bins which also helped some. Even today, if I get too worried, stand too long, or eat too much greasy food, my stomach bothers me. But even when my stomach doesn’t hurt, I have a constant restlessness gnawing inside me, like a cache of crickets. When my anxiety envelops me, the restless feeling escalates to a swarm of grasshoppers gone berserk, then moves to a horde of voracious locusts ricocheting off my insides.
1960s • San Francisco ~ Tightly wedged between Sprouse-Reitz and Superba Grocery was Sweeney’s candy store. The Sweeneys were a sweet white-haired couple who lived in the flat above their Haight Street shop. Actually, now that I think about it, Mr. Sweeney was on the crusty side, a balding man with wild eyebrows; he always wore a white half-length lab-coat style jacket. His wife was short, wore wire hexagonal glasses and a white apron, and called me “dear.” Once when I was in the store they had in a little monkey wearing a red cap and vest. Their big German Shepherd guarded their living quarters and barked furiously when any of the local boys teased it through the metal gate at the foot of the exterior staircase. I was afraid of the monkey, even though they had it on a leash, and terrified of the dog.
The store was once an old soda fountain and the Sweeneys still sold milk shakes and ice cream. When it was hot, which was seldom during the summer in San Francisco, Dad and I’d pop in after lunch at the Glen Ellen Diner or the Russian restaurant for a single chocolate cone or a cold orange soda pop.
Sweeney’s was a rather dark and dingy narrow establishment with rows of begrimed glass cases filled with penny candy. The long candy counter was to the left, and to the right were perpendicular tables loaded with kites, PeeChee folders, and wrapping paper. As you stepped through the front door a swirl of stale vanilla, banana taffy, musty cocoa, and a hint of mice wafted up your nostrils. You were greeted by gumballs and gumdrops in tumbled mounds, by lollipops standing quietly waiting to be adopted, by elbowing jumbles of jelly-beans and jujubes hoping to be chosen instead. The chewy Abba-Zabas and Sugar Daddys begged for attention while the Tootsie Pops were shy, their scarves wrapped tightly around their long skinny necks. The caramels joked around with the strawberry taffy and the bubblegum teased the jawbreakers. The red wax-lips flirted shamelessly with the candy cigarettes every time Mr. Sweeney turned his back. Aloof at the end of the counter were the bins of stale cherry, raspberry, and coconut bonbons, thinking they were something else, having no idea that they smelled or tasted nothing like the buttery smoothness of See’s. The pedestrian Mallo Bars jealously jousted with Peppermint Patties dressed in their elegant silver jackets, while the button candies stood in polite lines on paper strips, glad not to be part of the fray. The worldly licorice whips slumped side-by-side, naked and bored by the whole thing. The black licorice never called to me, nor did the Fireballs, but the Pixy Stix did, doing the Hokey Pokey in their tall glass jar and frantically waving their folded ends, aflame with hope, shouting: PICK ME! PICK ME! They leaped into my pocket as I flipped my nickel heads or tails and clinked it on the glass countertop.
In those days, a nickel could buy you a small brown sack of your heart’s desire at a penny candy store.
Summer 1960 • San Francisco ~ I was eleven when Dad began courting Tweedledee. When I first met Marie she reminded me of a life-sized, inflatable Tippy Doll, the kind with sand in the bottom that when you knocked it over, it popped right back up. She worked in Margo’s dress shop up the street from my father’s store on Haight Street. When Dad’s second wife died, Marie attended Irene’s funeral. A week before, when Marie’s husband died, Dad acted as one of Mac’s pallbearers. Two years later my dad managed to once again marry a woman who liked her highballs.
My father still got as bashful as a thirteen-year-old farm boy when it came to women. He and Marie sat on her living room sofa and held hands and giggled. I heard he took her to the Ocean Beach overlook near the Cliff House where all the teenagers went to park. Picturing them necking in his little black convertible made me twitch.
1961 • On September 25, 1961, on their mutual birthday, Dad (who was 56) and Marie (age 44) married in a civil ceremony in San Francisco. They were both Catholic but couldn’t wed in the church as my dad was divorced and Mother was still living. I had a new stepmother and two new sisters. I needed a longer scorecard.
Marie had two teenaged daughters; Irene, a perky blonde, and Janet, a lanky redhead. They were Mercy High girls. They rolled up the waists of their Catholic uniform skirts, had lots of boyfriends, smoked cigarettes, swore, and silently rolled the 1950s DeSoto out of the garage after school and before Marie got home from work. They thought their grandmother wouldn’t hear them as they popped the clutch a few doors away. As near as I could tell, those two got away with murder. Grandma never ratted on the girls for taking the car; she figured it was none of her business.
Marie’s first husband’s mother lived in their house on 45th and Noriega. Grandma McCartney did most of the cooking and cleaning. The remainder of her time she manned her corner post in the kitchen near the front window, dressed in her Navy blue sweater and her hair in a dark hairnet. She rested in a hard backed dining room chair and talked to her bird Tweetie and kept watch on the neighborhood. After dinner she covered the bird cage and retired to her room to read her bible or listen to the radio. I seldom heard Grandma speak other than to her little yellow parakeet. She died at 84, just before Christmas in 1961. I don’t know what happened to Tweetie.
Irene had graduated from Mercy in 1960 and worked at the Noriega Street Hibernia Bank where several years later Patty Hearst and the SLA would make a withdrawal at gunpoint and shoot two bystanders. Irene was not much interested in a younger stepsister. Janet, however, was delighted and sometimes invited me to tag along with her and her friends. The first time I met her, she and her best friend Pat Barrett had come in from roller skating; they didn’t bother to take off their skates until they clanked to the top of the wood staircase. I was shocked they didn’t get in trouble. I was even more astonished the way Janet and Irene back-talked to their mother. If I ever spoke to anyone in my family that way, I’d be peeling myself off the wall.
Janet shared her downstairs bedroom with me that first summer when I stayed with them for two weeks. When she graduated from Mercy High and went off to nursing school, I occupied her vacant room (Irene had taken over Grandma’s room after Grandma died), played her 33s, and dusted her ceramic knick-knacks. I kept my clothes in part of her closet and three of her drawers. I slept in her bed. I didn’t make it my room because it wasn’t. My room was at Carleen’s in La Habra, where my real home was.
1962 • San Francisco ~ At the end of a long day, rather than taking 19th Avenue home after work, Dad occasionally drove home by way of the Panhandle then through Golden Gate Park and past Kezar Stadium. For a few years he had a little black, white-topped convertible Ford. As far as I knew, he never once put the top down. In 1962, he bought a new sky-blue Chevy Impala. We cruised slowly by Stow Lake and counted the squirrels and rabbits, their tails and ears raised in permanent alert—six bunny sightings made for a good evening—then we stopped to watch the bison. The next year when I got my learner’s permit he let me drive. With his hand gripping the door armrest and his left leg jammed into the floorboard, we were unable to unwind and concentrate on rabbits. I put him through the roof the evening I pulled into the driveway on 45th and mistakenly tapped the gas pedal rather than the brake. The car lurched forward when I hit the brake. The front end barely kissed the garage door so the only damage was to Dad’s nervous system, though he was pretty jumpy to begin with.
Mid 1960s • San Francisco ~ After Dad and Marie married, I spent my high school summers in the Sunset where there was no such thing as summer. June hits and the fog rolls in, blanketing block after block of adjoining lookalike houses built on sand dunes in 1947. They were all attached, two-story block-long stucco homes painted white or shades of beige with slightly different rooflines, barely different fake balconies, and faintly different front doors. I had to memorize the houses on each side of Marie’s so I could find my way home. Half the time I missed it and had to step out into the street to get my bearings, looking for the Pisias’ peaked roof and upper balcony, the double brown roof and white shelf on the front of the O’Brien’s, and the flat roof on our house in between. You’d think I’d have checked the house number.
I also spent a lot of time next door at Nanette O’Brien’s kitchen table where we gossiped about the neighborhood happenings and I complained about Marie. Even though I was embarrassed, I appreciated her when she kindly counseled me about keeping my skin clean and washing my hair more often; I think my hygiene was not that great as I never noticed the caked Clearasil that rimmed my hairline. I secretly wished that she was my mother. Nanette worked as Christmas help for the City of Paris in Stonestown. She started in women’s dresses but ultimately worked in handbags for over 25 years. City of Paris was bought by Liberty House which was bought by Macy’s where she was “the old bag in handbags” until she retired at age 83. Irene Pianezzi, who lived next to Nanette on the other side, was her best friend. They played double solitaire many afternoons and knocked on the adjoining walls between the houses as a signal to talk to one another out their upper back windows. Their two families celebrated holidays together. Nanette’s husband was an inspector with the SFPD Juvenile Department; he worked a lot of evening shifts and brought his partners home during their breaks for coffee and Nanette’s homemade cookies.
I was friends with their daughter Missy, who was a year older than me, and I avoided their ornery Dalmatian, Daisy, who didn’t like me any more than I liked her; sensing my fear she growled and snapped at me whenever I attempted to slide past her. I hung out with the two younger Sayre boys across the street; their dad left when Jackie was seven and Marie Sayre, all 4’8″ of her, had her hands full with her secretarial job and trying to raise her four wild sons who were often in and out of trouble; she was a computer and could write anything in scribbled shorthand. My other friends were the Pianezzi twins, Diane and Elaine, who were two years older than me, and their brother Phil, who was my age.
After Sunday Mass, I’d sometimes hang out with Mr. Pianezzi and listen to the Giants and Dodgers baseball games on his radio while he mowed their strip of front lawn and washed his car. That’s how I knew about Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax, the two Willies, and the three brothers whose names I loved to roll off my tongue, Matty, Jesus, and Felipe Alou. I didn’t have a favorite team since I lived in both places, but I dared not root for the Dodgers; I didn’t want Mr. Pianezzi not to like me. He was over the moon when the Giants trounced them four games in a row at Candlestick Park that June of ’64.
1964 • 45th Avenue, San Francisco ~ I wasn’t a problem teenager. I didn’t lie, I didn’t cheat, I didn’t steal. Nor did I sass, drink, or smoke, and I didn’t fool around with boys. Not because I thought fooling around with boys was bad, but because if my Dad ever found out, and he would, he’d banish me.
One night Dad thought I had. I’d gone down to Ocean Beach with the neighbor boys and we met Julie and Shirley, a couple of girls our age visiting from Southern California and sophomores at Montebello High. We walked them home over the Great Highway to 35thand up Noriega, ten blocks past our houses. I was nearly fifteen, and these were neighborhood boys I sat on the curb and talked to, boys I played summer baseball in the street with. That was all.
It was nearly dusk when I got home, and I was supposed to be in by eight. Phil, his tee shirt tied around his slender waist, his beachcombers slung low on his hips, disappeared up his walkway. Jackie waved good-bye, his blonde-headed body scooting into his front door trying to escape his mother nagging at him from her upper window to get inside and help her. Ray, who didn’t say much, was the gentleman of the group and walked me to my front door. He also liked me. The front door was locked and the lights were off. I didn’t want to ring the bell and wake Dad and Marie, so Ray tried to figure out another way in and just as he rounded back into the entry to say he couldn’t, I heard the deadbolt unlock.
Flinging open the door, Dad snapped at Ray, “Get away from this house!” He grabbed my arm and yanked me inside, banging the door closed. Daddy hadn’t ever grabbed me like that.
“Get in here,” he hissed in a low voice. “Pack your bag. You’re leaving tomorrow.”
“We were just walking a couple of girls home and it got later than I thought. I’m sorry, Daddy. Please. I didn’t do anything wrong! Please don’t send me away.”
At first I was confused and thought, “How did I get here, how could this be happening to me? I didn’t do anything wrong! We are sitting on my bed downstairs. Marie was upstairs and it dawned on me they hadn’t gone to bed—my father had locked me out on purpose and was waiting for me. Then something snapped inside me. I got mad. I got mad at him for accusing me of doing something bad, which I hadn’t; mad at him for not trusting me, which he didn’t; and mad at him for threatening me, which he was. However, I didn’t dare get mad at my father, so I burst into tears instead, begging him to change his mind and hoping he’d feel guilty for misjudging me.
Then he said, “If you stay, you have to pay rent.”
“What? You want me to WHAT?” A mounting voice, not mine, emerged from my mouth. “I do more than my fair share around the house, I work full time at the store, I save my money, I pay my own way, I get paid $1.00 an hour, and you want me to pay rent?”
He paused a beat. “This is Marie’s house. She wants you to pay rent.”
I was now on an uncontrollable roll. “It’s not fair! SHE’S A LAZY DRUNK AND SHE WANTS METO PAY RENT? Forget it. I’ll go home.” It’s not like I hadn’t caught her more than once swigging gin straight out of the vinegar bottle she kept hidden in the back of the small corner pantry, stagger around the kitchen, then collapse on the living room chair.
I couldn’t believe I’d talked back; no one talked back to my father, and I waited for lightning to strike. But I was stunned at what happened next. Dad’s shoulders sagged. His head hung. He was silent. He went someplace else, someplace in the past, to a place I didn’t know anything about. When he returned some seconds later, he looked at me like I was someone else, and backed down. He let me stay and never brought it up again. My next paycheck had a fifty-cent an hour raise, the same pay he gave the girls.
1964 • 1644 Haight Street, San Francisco ~ At times my father amazed me. One late June afternoon, a boy not quite my age, maybe fourteen, slender, blonde, and nervous, came in the store. He wanted to buy a bra and needed help. Too embarrassed, especially when I realized this kid wanted it for himself, I summoned Dad. While I busied myself in the yarn section, my father measured and fitted him, rang him up, bagged his purchase (he bought two white Maidenforms, size 32AAA), politely thanked him, and didn’t batted a lash.
Then the next day, two tall, brassy, beautiful black bombshells with high cleavage and spiked heels promenaded through the swinging front doors and over to the yardage section, browsing the Butterick, Simplicity, and McCall’s patterns in the large pull-out drawer, then moved on to investigate the bolts of dime-store velvet. Unless it was Christmas or New Years, our customers tended toward solid cotton or calico.
I thought they were hookers. As the redhead fingered the shiny sateens, the bleached blonde settled on the scarlet velveteen. While I ran the bolt through the metal measuring machine anchored to the pullout shelf, I surreptitiously observed them from the corner of my eye as they picked out two spools of matching crimson thread and a card of plastic red buttons. Their deep voices and large hands hadn’t caught my attention until I rang up their purchases. I checked out their false eyelashes, arched eyebrows, ruby lipstick, and faces heavy on the pancake makeup. I smiled when one of them winked at me. As they turned to leave, they primly adjusted their tight mini-skirts and sashayed out the glass front doors. Standing next to me and pretending to busy himself filling the candy bin, Dad elbowed me, nearly knocking me over.
“Quit gawking,” he said under his breath, barely moving his lips.
I couldn’t help it. I’d never seen a transvestite. And for the second time in two days, I was stunned when my father didn’t raise an eyebrow. For a man who was a complete and absolute prude—and who made it quite clear that anything having to do with sex was improper, indecent, and unacceptable—it didn’t compute.
1964 thru 1967 • The Haight, San Francisco ~ Viewing the world through the plate glass windows of Sprouse-Reitz, I seldom ventured out of the store and Dad didn’t want me wandering the streets. When you have no sense of direction and are born in a box as my sister Betty claims I was, I figured it was best to stay inside anyway. Whatever ambled in that store was my sum total experience of the larger world, and I was fascinated. In the early sixties the Haight was a middle-class white neighborhood with a smaller community of Negro families. Over the next couple of years many of the whites left and more blacks moved in. The black families moved away when the gays took over, then the transvestites and transsexuals came, then the hippies, then the drug addicts, then the black-gay-transvestite-drug addicts. My father managed the Sprouse-Reitz store from 1954 until it closed in 1968; dime stores didn’t do well in that grittier climate. Wrong stock.
My father was straight, white, middle class, Catholic, and German, and he treated his customers with utmost respect—unless he saw them stealing. Sometimes the old Russian woman would stuff things in her skirt and he’d make her put everything back, then quietly escort her out. However, if it happened to be a young black kid, he’d grab him by the scruff of the neck and seat of his pants and dropkick him out the storefront door, muttering “goddam little pick-a-ninny.” I always worried an older brother would come back and break Dad’s legs, or at the very least, his windows.
In the summer of 1965, thousands of runaway middle-class kids joined the flower-power phenomenon erupting in San Francisco, seeing a whole new world through granny glasses and windowpane acid. The hippies swapped flowers, love, and sex for peyote, mushrooms, and mescaline. Teenagers from Des Moines, Dayton and Duluth tripped on purple haze and orange sunshine, joining the spiral dance.
Then came 1967 and the Summer of Love. My dad hated shoplifters, abhorred riffraff, and detested hippies with their light fingers, dirty long hair, and love beads. They came in mainly to steal ribbon, gum, and balloons. They didn’t bathe, didn’t shave, and didn’t work. They smoked pot and dropped acid. They engaged in open sexual behavior. On a cosmic peace train, they wanted to stop the war, stoned on love, love, love. The boys in their Nehru jackets, tie-dyed shirts and paisley bell-bottoms and the girls in their flowing skirts, patched jeans and braless tops represented everything my father stood against. My father hated the Summer of Love.
Kids often slept in front of his store. Dad stepped around them in the early morning fog to open up, muttering, “Goddam good-for-nothin’ dirty hippies.” After mopping the floors, he’d throw the bucket of raunchy cold mop-water on the young runaways sleeping against his red storefront. Later in the day he’d take his big push broom and sweep them off the sidewalk as they loitered in the slim rays of sun.
A policeman tried to stop him once. “You can’t do that, Mr. Clemens,” he said, holding his hand up to halt my father.
“When I see shit,” Dad retorted, “I sweep it in the gutter where it belongs.” With a final push, he turned on his heel back into the store. I pretended I’d never seen him before.
1961-1966 • La Habra High School ~ Four years of high school blended together, neither the low nor high point of my life. My first year afforded me little self-assurance; the second tallest girl in my freshman grade, I tripped up and down the long halls between classes praying to be invisible, hoping no one would look at me, especially the boys.
In those four years I wasn’t part of any of the cliques, but rather danced at the edges of the circles of girls. I ate with some, played softball with others. With many I had classes, the beach, and football games in common. A rotating handful of us walked the halls together and met in the quad during breaks and lunch. A number of girls were friends since fifth grade and junior high, and remained so throughout high school. I didn’t feel as if I was popular, but I always felt I was liked.
My sophomore year was better, as was my confidence. I’d grown out of my geeky stage, and I became close friends with Laura Schaffer. She was beautiful and far more sophisticated and accomplished than most of us, so I was kind of surprised that she chose me to be her friend. We ate lunch in the cafeteria or outside in the quad and she called me “Clemens.” I took Russian with Mr. Haverson in the early morning before first period. I made an apron and a skirt in homemaking, learned to type 60 words a minute in business class, and other than Moby Dick and Emily Dickinson, loved English and literature. We studied classical music and I could differentiate Rachmaninoff from Tchaikovsky. I toted my history books back and forth but don’t remember reading them; I somehow missed the American Revolution and the entire Civil War; memorizing generals and battles was boring. Math was not my strong suit and I nearly flunked algebra. In P.E. we played field hockey, basketball, volleyball, softball, and had archery. We participated in President Kennedy’s Physical Fitness Program, doing calisthenics and the 50-yard dash. Shocked and shaken, we wept together in journalism class when it came over the P.A. system that he’d been shot.
I babysat nearly every day after school. Most families paid me 50¢ an hour except Carol around the corner, who me paid 35¢. Carleen, in a huff, demanded I quit when she found out that not only was I watching Carol’s three kids, I was cooking them dinner and cleaning her house; she didn’t appreciate me being taken advantage of.
We lived across the street from Gary Baker and I ducked whenever I saw him. One day he and I actually got into a conversation at the edge of my driveway and he asked if I wanted to go the drive-in. I broke out in a sweat and told him I’d have to ask my sister. I was much relieved when she said no, that I was too young to go to a drive-in with a boy. She was no dummy, and I still was. She knew how accidents happened. She had to get married in high school, and then had Laura as another “oops” at this later stage of her game.
By 1964 I had eleven nieces and nephews: Larry and Marian had two girls, Carleen had three kids, Betty three, and Claudia three. Betty would have a fourth in 1966 and in 1967 Claudia would deliver twins. My siblings and their children were all at Carleen’s house at one time or another, and often all at the same time. Mom showed up on occasion, so it was quite a fiesta. Or a zoo.
1964-1965 • My junior year was a definite improvement. That fall I had my first high-school romance with Forrest Brown, a boy on the varsity water-polo team. We went to hear folk music at the Mecca and the Golden Bear where we saw Hoyt Axton, Jose Feliciano, Joe and Eddy, Jackson Browne, and Tim Buckley. Forrest picked me up in his parents’ car. It was a 1964 four-door, six cylinder, turquoise Dodge Dart. He could borrow the keys only after being interrogated: “Who/what/when/where/why/how and what time will you be home?” His mom was also my typing and business class teacher, which seemed a little awkward for all of us. Fortunately, Mrs. Brown liked me. He needed to go Christmas shopping for his mom and asked me out on a “shopping date.” We went to SaveOn in the Whitwood Shopping Center because it sold his mother’s favorite perfume. It was there, after three months of dating, that we held hands for the first time. And we shared only one remembered kiss standing in the front porch alcove beneath the bright light Carleen left on for me. It must have been too much for both of us, or maybe too much for me, as our short love affair flamed out soon after. These are my penned parting words in his high school yearbook: “Forrest — Stay the coolest of guys. I’m very glad we remained friends. Last year didn’t work out too well, did it. We have both changed and for the better I think. I’ll never forget the Mecca and the other places you took me. Best of luck to you always. I’ll miss you next year Forrest. Love and kisses (what a change!), Cathy Clemens”
My first two years I hiked three miles to and from school every day; it was easier to walk than to try and roust Carleen out of bed at that early hour to drive me. Then my friend Laura got a shiny new gold 1964 Pontiac LeMans for her sixteenth birthday, and every morning she drove from her house north of Whittier Boulevard in La Habra Heights—a ways out of her way—to my house on the other side of Harbor Boulevard; she picked me up at the curb if I was ready, honked for me if I wasn’t, then ferried me home every afternoon. I loved her for that, more than she’ll ever know. Laura, Kay Grether, Linda Des Jardines, Peggy Moniz and I formed a car club, the Shalimars, even though only Laura had a car. We started our own since the Kappa Chi’s didn’t invite us into theirs, but you can only get so many girls into a car. On Friday nights we cruised up and down Whittier Boulevard pretending to be lowriders, then went to Coco’s or Bob’s Big Boy for hamburgers and fries. We all had to be in by 10:00.
1964-1966 • La Habra High School ~ In my senior year I had my second high school romance with another boy in my class, Dave Sheldon. He was a nice guy with a streak of worldliness, but had a neediness about him that kept me at arm’s length. He wrote in my yearbook, “Cathy, I wanted to find a space where I could say more but I guess I was on the end of your list. Good luck, especially in Europe. It really is a wonderful place and I know you’ll have a marvelous and memorable time. If I can make it down from Berkeley, see you next year. Dave.”
The only other high school date was with Don Dessens, a blonde surfer two inches shorter and ten degrees quieter than me. He took me to our LHHS Homecoming Dance. We said hardly a word to one another the whole night, and I don’t think we danced more than two dances. Neither of us knew what to say, so we sat next to each other in folding chairs along the gym wall in awkward silence. I didn’t go to any of the sock hops. I felt graceless and klutzy on the dance floor unless it was a slow dance, and I didn’t really know how to do that either. I remember watching my sisters jitterbug and bop to “Johnny B. Goode” and “Tutti-Frutti,” in awe at how fast and rhythmic their moves were. Cutting a rug was not my forte; actually, making it across the room without tripping or knocking into furniture was dicey at best.
In my last two years of high school I also had a summer boyfriend, Bob, who of course Dad didn’t like. Bob Sevenau was my stepsister Irene’s husband’s younger brother. Bob’s father, a Sergeant on the San Francisco Police Force, fixed all his speeding tickets. His mother held his hand until he was twelve. A Mission Dolores and Riordan boy who lived in the Parkside, he was going to San Francisco State, worked three jobs, lived at home with his family, and wrote me letters signed, “keep good thoughts.” I was in love and he was all I could think about. My brown paper-bag book covers were camouflaged front and back with his name penned inside red hearts. Two years older, Bob brimmed with confidence and bravado, with a bad boy “don’t know, don’t care” attitude.
I spent my summers and Christmas vacations in San Francisco, but my main life was in La Habra, so Bob drove down in his Plymouth and took me to the Springtime Ball and my Senior Prom. I made my dresses for both dances and had heels dyed to match, and Kay Grether did my hair. She did my hair for my graduation picture too. Kay did everyone’s hair for the dances and graduation. Prepping included 1,000 bobbie pins, scores of plastic rollers, numerous cans of hairspray, fake hair pieces, and styrofoam heads. The smell of Aquanet, which could hold hair in a hurricane, enveloped everything. She had appointments on the hour from 8 a.m. until late afternoon, and when everyone was done, she readied herself for her prom date with Eric Hodges, an easy-going guy who liked to party and body surf. Kay was as handy with a sewing machine as she was with a teasing comb. Her father, overly strict, was continually putting her on restriction for questioning his decisions, and when she persisted, he extended her restriction even further; she spent a lot of her high school nights in her room, falling asleep with patterns and pins scattered across her bed.
Sallie Collier and I became close friends, sharing tears about boyfriends and family over hamburgers at Bob’s Big Boy. After my third year of Russian, I could finally remember the letters of the alphabet; it looked a lot like algebra, which made no sense either. Laura continued ferrying me to and from high school. Carleen let me go to Palm Springs for a week during spring break with a group of girls in my class. It was my first taste of freedom and it was wild, Palm Canyon Drive lined with boys, bikinis, and beer as far as the eye could see. Like lemmings, thousands of high school and college kids descended yearly upon the desert town. One of the girl’s aunts chaperoned us, but we barely saw hide nor hair of her.
Life was good. Actually, life was excellent. For the first time in my life, I fit in. It finally didn’t matter that I may have been the only person in my high school of 3,000 students who lived with a family that had a different last name and whose parents were divorced and married five times between the two of them. It didn’t matter that I was 5’9″, that my capped front tooth didn’t match my other teeth, that I wore a padded bra. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a straight-A student or a cheerleader or class anything. All that stuff didn’t matter any more. I was fine the way I was.
January 1964 • Bug Sur ~ Written by brother’s wife, Marian Clemens … So the adventure began. The property was a campground and cabin business in Big Sur. Dressed in jeans and warm jackets, we met the realtor that Saturday in December 1963, and he showed us some old cabins in a forest of redwoods, laurels, oak and alders, green meadows and pathways, hills and valleys, and the sparkling Big Sur River rippling through. A long suspension foot bridge went from one side of the river across to the hill and cabins on the other side of the river valley, so that during winter rains when the road bridge was out, there was access to the cabins. We noticed the earthy smell of the soil and redwood duff still damp from a recent rain and the fresh scent of redwood trees that reached to the sky. We loved it.
That night when we went to bed, we sat leaning against our pillows, excited, talking about the possibility of a new adventure.
I asked, “Do we know how to run a campground?”
Gordon (aka Larry) answered, “No, but we could learn.”
I asked, “Do you think we can remodel a bunch of 50 year old cabins?”
“Probably.”
Did we have summers off and the time to do this? Yes, Gordon was a school counselor and wanted something interesting to do in the summer months. I was taking a break from teaching, with a three-year-old and a one-year-old at home.
Both of us had grown up loving the out-of-doors. Family vacations for me were in a campground and Gordon grew up in Sonora in the foothills and with Boy Scout adventures. The summer after our first year of marriage, we borrowed Mom and Dad’s little umbrella tent with its pole in the middle and visited favorite Sierra Mountain camps. It made perfect sense that we would own a camp; we loved being outdoors and this seemed the opportunity to guarantee we would be.
Reworking our finances in our minds, we thought about what kind of down payment we could come up with. They were asking $73,000 for this 33 acres of land that included 45 campsites and 4 cabins. They would carry the loan. We were only thirty and had been married for seven years. It seemed like a lot of debt and a big responsibility, but exciting. We slumped into a short sleep after we decided that we should try to buy it and run it for a year. Then we could decide whether to keep it or sell it. We didn’t sleep much that night.
The next morning we were up early, Gordon sitting tall at the breakfast table, his wavy hair brushed, looking assured and ready for the day. He often did things spontaneously. I remember the unexpected walk at the beach after going to a party in Santa Cruz when we were students in San Jose, and his quick stop at the side of the road to buy red roses when he was seeing me off at the airport. Not to say that he didn’t plan carefully while he put himself through college, working three part-time jobs. On the other hand, I am the planner with the long thought-out lists, always with one project on it completed so that it begins with something checked off.
We were ready to make a low offer, appropriate for us. We decided we could offer $67,000 with a $6,000 down payment. Gordon earned $8,000 a year as a school counselor, which seemed like a lot of progress since we had each started teaching for $4,000 only a few years before. We knew our home would be easy to rent for the summer and that would take care of house payments. Before the day was over our offer was accepted. One month later on a crisp winter day in January, after signing escrow papers, we drove home in disbelief that we were now the owners of a campground.
That was the beginning of a dozen-year adventure. Every year at the end of the season, around Labor Day, Gordon and I asked each other if we had finished and were ready to sell. It took twelve years before we agreed that all of our projects were done, and so were we.
In the winter of 1966, there was a huge flood. It rained without stopping for many days and the Big Sur river valley flooded. Gordon lashed our 35 foot office trailer to trees with cables. We watched the news and worried about what was happening. When it was safe to be on the road, we drove down to see if our campground was still there. The brown river was swift and dangerous, huge logs bobbing like corks, the force of the river unstoppable as it surged through the whole width of our campground. Some of the fireplaces washed away along with tons of soil, some trees, and three whole campsites at the end of the campground. The river rose ten feet, as high as to the base of the cabin steps. It was frightening. We didn’t know how it would turn out. The power of water was awesome.
When spring arrived, we went to work moving dirt and debris, reshaping the land with a bulldozer, until eventually riverbed and rock, soil and deposits from the flood were pushed into shape and the campground was usable. We even reclaimed the three campsites at the end of the campground. We also replaced our 8 x 35 foot trailer with a 10 x 50 foot mobile home. That was something to celebrate.
Gordon decided that our little wooden bridge that went in and out each year needed replacing. It was not adequate for heavy vehicles and trailers, and pick-up campers were becoming more popular every year. There were still many tents, but camping was changing. Even the propane gas truck that serviced us had to come through neighboring property, as it was too heavy to be safe on our bridge. This is when Gordon drove up to Tracy to the train yard and purchased two railroad flat cars with wheels removed with strong steel frames and wood top beds. They were delivered to the campground and maneuvered into place. After scooping up dirt embankments on each side of the river for the first car, the second car was put in place to make the roadway join the campground road. We knew we were doing unusual things. I’ve never known anyone else who bought a flatbed train car.
Gordon’s four sisters came often; Carleen, Liz (Betty), Claudia, and Cathy brought their kids and joined us along with his Dad and step-mother, Carl and Marie. For Carl’s 70th birthday (1975), step-sisters Janet and Irene also brought their families. (Note: there were 35 of us who’d descended upon them, and that was just the Clemens side of the family; some of Marian’s were there too.) Sometimes many of the campsites and cabins were full of relatives. When I walked by the playground and every child called out, “Hi, Aunt Marian,” I knew business was bad, but my heart felt good.
When the family first arrived they ate normally, but after hiking and swimming and being in the out-of-doors for a day or two, they ate as if food had just been invented.
June 1966 • La Habra ~ In 1966, Orange County was a bastion for the John Birch Society, LBJ was President, and Ronald Reagan won the Republican nomination for governor. Opposition to our involvement in the Viet Nam war was growing. Sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll were making inroads, but had not yet hit my graduating class with the force that it would the following year. Many of the girls were still virgins (that I knew of anyway), only the surfers smoked pot, and rock and roll was still pretty tame. The boys’ hair could not touch their collars, the girls’ hems had to skim the ground when we knelt. Minimum wage was $1.25, first class postage was a nickel, and gas was 32 cents a gallon.
I graduated from La Habra High that year, but four events preceded, events so wonderful who’d have thought they could happen to me, and two of them within minutes of each other. First, at Christmas, my brother and his wife gifted me a scholarship to college. I’d saved $700 from babysitting and working for Dad, but with their gift I had enough to pay my tuition, room, and board.
Granted to Cathy Clemens—
Scholarship of $500 per year for four years,
based on full time attendance at the college of her choice
starting in 1966.
Larry and Marian, Dec. 25, 1965
Then I received a high school grant of $250 for college, an equally unexpected gift. My left front capped tooth (it was broken off at the base when I took a backswing hit by a baseball bat the summer I turned ten) had snapped off again and I was excused from the auditorium scholarship presentations to go to the dentist. I was greatly relieved not to have to stand up in front of the whole school to accept it. They gave it to me anyway, though I was willing to forgo it; the prospect of facing that many people terrified me. I received the award because Mrs. Brown, my business class and typing teacher who’d taken me under her wing, recommended me. The school counselor interviewed me to see if I qualified, though it certainly wasn’t based on grades as I was a “B” student, at best. I felt awkward when she asked about my family and why I lived with my sister; I seldom mentioned my home situation to anyone except a few friends. She asked if my sisters were as pretty as me. I hesitated, then told her no. I wished that I hadn’t said that they weren’t. It was a dumb thing to do and I felt like I betrayed them. (Years later, I found out that Mrs. Brown provided the scholarship money from her own pocket.)
And then in early June, a letter from San Jose State arrived announcing my acceptance for the fall of 1966. Sallie Collier and I would be going together and I was overjoyed! Not fifteen minutes later our blue wall-phone rang.
“Clemens! My parents are sending me to Europe for the summer and they want me to take a friend. I’m inviting YOU!”
Laura had ferried me to and from school for two years, and now she was taking me to Europe! And her parents gave each of us $500 in spending money! I was struck by their huge generosity and at the same time embarrassed to have them do that for me. They didn’t really even know me and I felt like I didn’t deserve it, but I was ecstatic. It was the happiest fifteen minutes of my life, until I got off the phone. Carleen, holding my acceptance from San Jose State, was listening to my conversation with Laura. Her shoulders curved inward and her neck bent down. I saw the look on her face. I saw the look of resentment, of jealousy, of missed youth and missed opportunities, worse yet, of no opportunities offered to her at all, her arm hanging down, my notice in hand, her shadows passing over her saddened face. I saw it, but I wasn’t thinking about her, I was thinking about me. I wanted her to be happy for me, but she couldn’t, not right then. My feelings were hurt. I didn’t say anything; instead I turned and went down the hall to my bedroom.
Maybe the break between us needed to happen. Maybe she didn’t know how hard it was going to be for me to move away, how afraid I was, how I wasn’t looking forward to being on my own in college. Maybe it was the only way she could let me go. No longer my mother, she was my sister again, and it was time for me to leave the hive.
In June, along with 665 other seniors in my class, I graduated from high school. Never again would I have to sit in the quad and listen to a blaring “Ba ba ba ba Barbara Ann” rockin’ and a reelin’ from the school sound system; for that alone, I was grateful to be leaving La Habra High.
Under my cap and gown I wore a soft butter-yellow outfit that I’d worked on all semester in my homemaking class. It was a beautiful cotton/linen with satin lining, an invisible zipper up the back of the dress, and five hand-bound buttonholes on the collarless jacket. Dad and Marie drove down from San Francisco to attend my graduation ceremony and my Aunt Elizabeth came from Laguna Leisure World where she lived upon here retirment. Carleen and Chuck of course were there, and of course my mother was not; with Dad attending she probably wasn’t invited, though, I don’t think we even knew where she was.
Summer 1966 • Europe ~ Boarding a plane for two nights in New York and then a second flight to London, Laura and I, along with our classmate Patty Corb, were off to visit cathedrals, castles, and crypts. I loved Europe. I loved the art, the museums, and the stunning architecture. We were twenty-nine college students from all over the United States and we rode in a green and tan bus to eleven countries in Western Europe. For eight weeks we roomed, drove, ate, read, laughed, sang, napped, talked, hiked, shopped, and saw sites together. We went to the Coliseum, the Acropolis, and the Louvre. We cruised the Greek Islands. We tanned on the Riviera where I bought a French bikini. We had an audience with the Pope; he blessed my new gold St. Christopher medal when St. Chris was still a Saint.
Arriving at our second stop in Amsterdam, a letter was awaiting me from Dave Sheldon. His dad recently died, and he wrote me saying how hard it was to lose him and what a comfort I was to him at that time. Dave saw something in me that I couldn’t; I didn’t think I could mean that much to anyone.
Postmarked La Habra, July 3, 1966
Cathy—
I’m sorry I couldn’t come to the airport to see you off. By now La Habra and its inhabitants must seem blessedly far away.
I don’t think you’ll ever realize just how much you meant, and still mean, to me. After my father’s death, I felt more alone than I’ve felt in my whole life. My time with you was my only salvation. I’m afraid I wasn’t very good company. I’m sure he knew he was dying because he said to tell you he was sorry he wouldn’t be here to meet you. Well that was my father—in part. The other part, something I remember more of, doesn’t seem to matter any more. In writing, he made me understand many of the things that had been bothering me. It affected me a great deal and by the time I see you again you’ll find I’ve changed a great deal—maybe even enough for you to decide you like me. You’re the only person I’ve told all this to and I’ll probably never tell it again. I hope you can achieve some sort of understanding of me in it all.
You’ve no doubt seen many interesting sights and met many people already. Remember them all, especially the people. You can only meet the people by actually going. That’s the only reason I didn’t go on a tour. I see it’s time to go.
All my love, Dave
P.S. That last kiss wasn’t long enough, I miss you already, and your air of sophistication and James Bond humor
P.S.S. Take care—but not too much.
I celebrated my 18th birthday in St. Mark’s Square where I smoked my first and last cigarette. And then I threw up all night. I scaled the cliffside of the Isle of Crete on my first and last donkey ride; on the way up it used the mountainside to try to scrape me off its back. I walked back down. I studied Rembrandts, Rodins, and Renoirs, and saw Manets, Monets, and Matisses. I peered at Michelangelo’s frescoes, sculptures, and paintings. I witnessed Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art, medieval, Romanesque, Renaissance, Gothic, and Baroque art. I saw more beauty than I ever suspected existed. I was in another world, and it was heaven.
Until then, the sum total of my art experience were copies of Pinkie and Blue Boy hanging in our Sonora house, making a Father Junipero Serra hand puppet from burlap and papier-mâché in the fourth grade, and learning about perspective and watercolor in Mr. Powell’s fifth-grade class. I doubt making pictures with colored rocks and Elmer’s glue qualified.
In the afternoon of July 16 we arrived at the Hotel Schiller in Lucerne, and upon checking in, a second thin blue letter was waiting for me at the hotel desk. I recognized my mother’s careful handwriting. I was surprised. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I’d heard from her, or how long it had been that I had even thought about her. I went to the room with Laura, unpacked my suitcase, took a shower, then wandered downstairs to read it in privacy. Sitting halfway down the staircase overlooking the doorway to the street, I carefully opened it:
Dear Cathy,
I haven’t heard from you in a long time. I don’t understand why, I haven’t ever done anything to you. How can you ignore me this way? How could you treat me like this? It’s not fair and it hurts me. Why don’t you love me anymore? Why don’t you care about me? None of you girls ever cared anything about me. I’ve been a good mother to all of you, and you at least I would have expected to behave differently… blah, blah-blah, blah-blah, her long sad tale followed by a litany of her health problems.
It sucked the air out of me. My mother had the ability to buckle my knees from 3,000 miles away. She must have been saving up as she covered every inch of the paper on both sides, writing more than she’d ever said to me in her life. I wanted to scratch my name off the top, write hers in, sign mine at the bottom, and send it back. How dare she. Tears brimmed as I folded it back up and tucked it in my breast pocket.
That night the group of us went to dinner; I had pommes frites, salad, and shrimp, my favorite. We went back to our hotel and Ed and Malcolm bought some gin and vodka. I had little experience with alcohol. When we played Pinochle, Carleen and Chuck let me drink a weak Cuba Libre: a Coke, a wedge of lime, and a teaspoon of rum. I’d been to a couple of parties in high school and drank beer, and I had beer a few times in Palm Springs for Easter break. That night I had a 7up and vodka and then I tried a gin and tonic. The next day I woke up sicker than a dog; I didn’t think I’d had that much to drink so it couldn’t have been alcohol poisoning. It must have been food poisoning, but I wasn’t the only one to have shrimp. I couldn’t stop throwing up and after three days I got so dehydrated I looked like a skeleton hanging in the corner of the science classroom. They helped me on and off the bus. When we got to Germany and into our hotel, Laura, Patty, and Mary put me in a tub of warm water to try to rehydrate me, got me into bed, and called a doctor. I could see the concern on their faces. When the doctor examined me (he didn’t speak English and I don’t speak German), I realized what he planned. What the hell is he doing? He’s putting a suppository UP MY BUM, like that’s going to help? It did. It stopped my vomiting.
I hadn’t been sick like that since I was nine years old, since that last summer I lived with Mother in Hawaii.
Years later, going through a box of cards and keepsakes, I came across that missive from Mom. I sat on the bed and unfolded it, hoping it didn’t sound as bad as when I’d read it on those red-carpeted steps in Switzerland. It did. I tore it into a hundred pieces and threw it away. I was finished being reminded.
Fall 1966 • San Jose ~ In September I started my freshman year at San Jose State, majoring in Humanities with a minor in English. I went there because Sallie was, and I suppose, because my brother had. Scott Wardlaw, a fellow high school classmate, also attended. Because our SAT scores were high, he and I were accepted into the two-year Humanities Program which covered all of one’s basic required education classes with a perspective on Western civilization. The course integrated history, literature, philosophy, religion, politics, music, and art. I especially loved it because of my trip to Europe and had just experienced everything we were studying. It also asked questions that have long preoccupied human beings: “Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?” Being clueless in my own life and pre-occupied with figuring out how I got here in the first place, I found that conversation fascinating.
Scott and I bantered and cracked jokes in the back of the classroom. I wrote notes and drew daisies on his brown book-cover. He liked my snarky humor about school and life in general. I took a shine to anyone who thought I was funny.
I lived on the second floor in Royce Hall. I loved the cafeteria, the campus, and my classes, however, college wasn’t the best time for me. Standoffish and shy, I didn’t make new friends easily, and I got stuck with this roommate who was the most unattractive girl I’d ever seen. Her elongated face was covered in pimples set off by a mouth full of braces, the whole mess topped off by a mop of stringy blonde hair. She was six-feet tall with terrible posture, huge pigeon-toed feet, and a body shaped like a gangly overripe pear. She was also super intelligent, studied hard, and had a new boyfriend within a week. Apparently she had a lot more going for her than I did; she probably went on to win a Nobel Prize, marry a scientist, have two brilliant children, and live happily ever after.
Oct 1966 • San Jose ~ A month into school, I received another letter from my mother:
Oct. 14, ‘66
Dear Cathy,
Carleen told me how homesick you were and wanted some one to write to you, I have been waiting patiently to hear from you so I could write you. Surely you have my address, or is it because you didn’t want a letter from me. Honestly, Cathy, I don’t know what has come over you, since you have grown up you have treated me just like Betty does, sometimes I feel like just bowing out from my own kids lives altogether, it hurts me very much to be so ignored. I have given you all I could but you know I don’t make much. Would you rather I just ignored you as you have me, because it that’s what you want, I will do so.
I am enclosing a clipping I cut out of the paper weeks ago to send you but not knowing your address I could not very well send it.
You will get over being homesick and begin to enjoy college soon. I remember when my sisters and I were sent to a convent boarding school. For about the first two weeks I cried every night, then I began to enjoy it and not be homesick, then my eyesight failed and that was the end of real school for me.
I heartily dislike my job here but the old lady is so dependent on me, besides she is failing fast now and maybe death will soon release both of us. I would sure be up that well known creek without a paddle if I became old and crippled like her and depending on my children to care for my financial needs. I would soon starve to death, that is why I am putting every dime I can scrounge in a savings account. I’m going to need it.
I never go anyplace except to the market and I know I am getting into a terrible rut but don’t see any way out of it right now.
Write only if you want to.
All my love, Mom
Well, she never was one to cook me chicken and dumplings.
San Francisco ~ In May, towards the end of my first year of college, Bob proposed to me. I hadn’t had a boyfriend whom I loved. Yes, in my junior year I had a crush on Forrest and in my senior year Dave had a crush on me, but with Bob, it was different. He courted me and made me special. He visited me in La Habra. When I spent my summers in San Francisco, he took me to dinner every Friday and the movies every Saturday. And on Sundays, rather than going to Mass, we snuck out to Playland to ride the bumper cars, play Skee-Ball, and share some fish & chips and an It’s-It. He wrote me cards. He bought me a ring, a white pearl ensconced in the middle of four gold leaves. He kissed me and held me close. He whispered he loved me.
We met the summer of 1964 just before I turned 16; he’d graduated from high school and I was going into my junior year. My step-sister Irene married his older brother Steve, and Bob and I were both in the wedding party. Irene still worked at the Hibernia Bank on 19th and Steve worked in management for the post office. He was handsome, charming, and over-educated. He spent his formative and high school years in the seminary, preparing for the priesthood. He must have never forgiven his parents for sending him there as he came out cynical and condescending. Or maybe he was like that early on, unforgiving that he wasn’t an only child. He was mean to his brothers; the three of them were each seven years apart, Bob in the middle, Mike the youngest, and he relentlessly belittled them both. Empathy was not in Steve’s make-up. My most vivid memory of him was at the house on 45th Avenue. He and Irene had recently become engaged and he’d tossed onto my step-sister’s lap what she thought was a big bouquet of flowers bundled in newspaper. Unwrapping them, she let out a terrified scream and one movement levitated and flung it away from her onto the floor. It was a giant dead fish, and she still married the guy anyway.
May 1967 • San Francisco ~ We were all at the Sevenau house on 33rdAvenue for Bob’s twenty-first birthday party. Seated next to each other, our index fingers hooked together under the mahogany dining room table, his left foot atop my right. I said no over the JELL-O salad. I said no over the canned ham (his mother always served canned ham), and I said no again over the mashed potatoes. Then somewhere between the mashed potatoes and the carrot cake emblazoned with “Happy Birthday Bobby” (his mother always called him Bobby; actually, she called him my little Bobby), I changed my mind. I don’t want to go back to college and live in the dorm. I don’t want to live with Dad and Marie. I don’t want to move back with Chuck and Carleen. I can’t afford to live by myself, and I don’t know any friends I can live with. At that moment, marrying Bob seemed like a reasonable solution. Besides, I wanted to sleep with him and couldn’t do that as long as we weren’t married because I knew my father would know and he’d cut me out of his life and never talk to me again and I wasn’t about to risk that. Necking in the back seat of Bob’s shiny 1952 midnight blue Plymouth, a high school graduation gift from his parents, Bob said to me one night, “Look, I’m not going to tell him and you’re not going to tell him, so how would he know?”
“Trust me,” I said, “I don’t know how, but he’ll know.”
So Bob was thrilled that I finally said “yes.” He didn’t want to live at home any more either. He was also dying to get into my pants and knew that marrying me was the only way in. He stood up and chirped to the whole room, “Cathy and I are engaged!”
At those five words, my dad shot out of his chair like a newly freed upholstery spring and blurted, “OH NO!”
It wasn’t so much that I wanted to get married. Part of what I wanted was the college ring ceremony with candles, poems, chocolate kisses, and all the girls sitting cross-legged in a circle on the second floor rec-room of Royce Hall. I’d sat through a half-dozen of those ceremonies, the lights off, the ring passing from girl to girl until it stops with the lucky one who blows out the candle and the lights come on and all the girls scream and shower her with glitter, chocolate kisses, and hugs. I wanted to see the look on Sallie’s face and have her happy for me. I wanted to feel like I fit in with the girls, like wanting so badly to be a Brownie again.
I also wanted to feel like someone loved me.
October 1967 • San Francisco ~ Five months later, on a crisp October day, my father slowly escorts me down the tiled aisle of Holy Name of Jesus, our church in the Sunset. I look like a princess dressed in the white wedding dress that my stepsister Janet wore when she married. It fits like a dream, white lace, quarter-length sleeves, darted to the waist, not a dress I’d have chosen, but beautiful, the train following behind me. With my knees shaking, I can barely smile as my mouth is so parched that my lips are stuck to my teeth, like a tongue stuck on a frozen lamppost.
Six-foot-six Father O’Shaughnessy in his black robes, smiling his handsome crooked tan smile, our four bridesmaids (my three high school friends and 14-year-old niece Debbie) dressed in matching full-length empire-waist coral bridesmaid dresses holding bouquets of dyed carnations and baby roses, our four ushers (Bob’s two school friends and two brothers) dressed in gray ascots and black tails, and Bob, looking baby-faced and nervous, wait for us expectantly at the altar. It’s better that I didn’t invite Mom. It would be too hard on Dad and she would have wrecked this and besides, I haven’t seen her in years and she wouldn’t care anyway. I know how much work Marie has done to make this a beautiful wedding, I realize the cost and how Dad used his inheritance money. I think how far everyone has traveled, and I’m not courageous enough to not go through with it and disappoint everybody.
I don’t make promises lightly, but as I peer from under my white net veil at 150 people, our families, our friends, our parents’ friends, Bob’s mother… oh my god she looks like a leprechaun! Velma is wearing a green knee-length, lace-covered dress with green pantyhose, a green flowered hat and veil, and green eye-shadow. She’s holding a matching handbag and her feet are stuffed into three-inch, dyed-to-match high-heels which just barely makes her five feet tall. As I near hysteria, I glance sideways at my father looking so handsome in his tuxedo and smell his splash of Old Spice. It settles me down and brings me back to earth. And then I blame him for this whole deal.
“How did I get here? How could this be happening? This is your fault! If you hadn’t jumped up at the dinner table and added your two-cents…”
And so, with my family and friends as witnesses and against all my better instincts—with a confused heart, a white train, and a full Mass—I married a boy with about the same thimble-full of common sense as me.
1968 • Northern California ~ In April of 1968, Mom found herself, along with everything she owned in her car, on the doorstep of a niece. Surprised, her sister’s daughter not seen or heard from my mother in two decades. She sensed Mother had no place to go and graciously gave her a place to stay. She also sensed something was wrong but didn’t ask. Mom seemed in good spirits but not in good health, constantly smacking her lips, continually thirsty with little appetite. It seemed like my mother’s cup was only half full. She had no idea that Mom’s cup wasn’t half full; it was nearly drained dry. Mom was quiet, preoccupied, and stayed to herself, sleeping, reading, and walking, or watching the deer that ventured out of the northern California foothills into the backyard. My mother was in her own world, killing time.
Mom asked about her sisters, “How’s Nella May? And Ina? Do you hear from Verda?” She wanted to see them. They had an Easter dinner and Nella May came. A lot had happened in the years since she and Mom had spoken. They caught up on their children and grandchildren. They talked about where they worked and what they did. They reminisced about their earlier years in Chico, about the Diamond Match Factory, and about their brothers, three of whom were now dead. They spoke of their parents, who were also long gone by this time. Mom talked about how Grandpa was disappointed in life, how Grandma was disappointed in Grandpa, how Grandma never respected him, how Grandpa was a gambler and a drunk. Nella May simply listened. She wouldn’t say anything disrespectful about their mother or father, and simply said, “Well, she could have been kinder to him.”
They talked about their health. Mom’s physical state of affairs was her favorite conversation opener and she always felt the need to give a complete report. Three of the sisters suffered from migraines, Nella May’s so bad they made her throw up. She had a melanoma on her left thumb that had split her nail so she had her thumb cut off to the first joint, but the cancer came back and she had to have her whole thumb amputated. Over time Mom had had a number of organs removed, so she sympathized.
My mother stayed a month. Though grateful for her niece’s hospitality, she couldn’t stay forever. Before returning to Southern California, Mom gave her a ceramic fawn, like the fawns in the hills and fields she saw near the house. Over the years, one delicate foot was broken, then lovingly mended. The small deer stands quietly on my cousin’s glass shelf, by itself, holding a place in her heart for my mother.
Haight Street ~ 1968 was the year to spread my wings. Dad couldn’t pay me more than he paid the girls (who were all making $2.00 an hour) so after seven summers and five Easter and Christmas vacations working in his store, I flew across the street and got a teller job at Great Western Bank for $2.25. I was newly married, nineteen going on twenty, and Bob and I were ensconced in a one-bedroom apartment in Daly City just below all the boxes on the hillside made of ticky-tacky that all looked just the same.
1968 was the year Eldridge Cleaver published Soul on Ice. He and his wife Kathleen banked at my window on Fridays; I didn’t know they were famous, I just knew she had this huge hair. It was the year of the Yippies and the Black Panthers, and the year Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, sparking riots across the nation. The day after his death hundreds of black kids from Poly High rolled down Haight Street in a tidal wave breaking storefront windows and overturning cars. While Dad boarded his windows, the bank sent us home in cabs to get us off the street. 1968 was during Viet Nam, the year of sweeping anti-war protests, the Tet Offensive and the My Lai massacre; the year the war turned our country inside out. It was the year Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, the year of the Chicago Democratic National Convention riots, the year women were branded as bra-burning feminists and the year the Summer Olympics in Mexico City was boycotted by 32 African nations. It was the year Apollo 7 and Apollo 8 were launched, and the year Richard Nixon was elected.
I existed in the center of this turbidity—not oblivious—but neither overly concerned nor connected to the chaos around me. Dressed in my starched white buttoned-down blouse, navy blue A-line skirt, white pumps, and Coral Sea lipstick, I watched the swirl of tie-dyed humanity through the plate glass windows of a five-and-dime and a neighborhood bank. In my world it was the year the neighborhood stores closed one-by-one, leaving empty shells with boarded windows: first the barbershop, then Mulreadys, then Margo’s and Riley’s. The shoe store closed, Superba Grocery, and then the Glen Ellen Diner, followed by the meat market, Woolworth, the bakery across from Riley’s, the Russian restaurant down the street, and the movie house. The holdouts were Holcombe’s Jewelers (where Bob and I bought our wedding rings), Robert’s Hardware, the Aub Zam Zam Club, and Sweeney’s.
The once steady customers, no longer willing to fend off grungy panhandlers constantly asking for spare change to feed their mangy dogs, now hailed street-cars and shopped on Irving, took the bus to Market Street, or moved out of the Haight altogether. They were tired of tripping over stoned fourteen-year-old longhaired runaways looking like five miles of blank road six days in from Wichita. They’d had it with being hustled by dreadlocked junkies, spaced out punks, and the barefoot bums flashing back from too much blotter acid. They were fed up with the potheads vying for joints, the druggies peddling bennies and black beauties, the dealers hawking balls of opium, balloons of heroin, and bindles of coke.
Grayline tour busses, overflowing with flabby, white–thighed Midwesterners in souvenir tank-tops and Bermuda shorts, slowly tootled down Haight, past what used to be the Haight Theater and was now the Straight Theater. Looking like bird-watchers with their cameras and binoculars hanging from their necks, the tourists searched intently for dwindling hippies or their children who hadn’t overdosed or left for communes in the country by this time.
In the aftermath of the Be-In and the Summer of Love, the Haight slid straight downhill. Many of the deteriorating Victorians were now a mixture of psychedelic-colored crash pads and rundown heroin haunts, with an element of criminals and pimps pervading the streets. Rows of empty store windows were plastered with the Diggers’ “Free Love, Free Food, and Free Huey” handbills.
1968 was the year Dad closed the store. The Summer of Love, the riots, and the changing times did my father’s business, and my father, in. The pounding reverberation of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll that he had survived fifteen years before finally cracked my Dad’s foundation and walls. He surrendered, and for the second time sold his stock, boarded his windows, locked his double glass doors, and left town. Adding insult to injury, the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic moved into 1644 Haight Street, letting the hippies and addicts—hoping for some spare change and a ray of sun in the morning fog—finally rest in peace against the red and gray storefront.
1968 was also the final straw for my mother. 1968 was the year she ended her life in a small motel in Whittier, closing a chapter in mine.
Fall of 1968 • Whittier ~ Over the years Mom managed to get along. She worked for room and board with a small monthly salary for clothes, her car, doctor bills, and prescriptions. By the end, she couldn’t hold a job, couldn’t care for herself, the hospitals wouldn’t keep her anymore, and family refused to take her in. No longer permitted to carry her suitcase through their doors, the children she abandoned abandoned her, not to punish her, but to get away from her.
She spent much of her life seeking help, looking for cures, trying to find out what was wrong. She never did. I don’t know what was wrong with her either. She wasn’t crazy or insane, nor was she demented or deranged. She was desperate at times, habitually detached, and regularly depressed. You might even think her disturbed (one of the things she was disturbed about most was having children). Yes, she was narcissistic and yes, she was a hypochondriac, but all the drugs she took didn’t help. She had several doctors—none aware of who was prescribing what, nor how much she was taking—creating a system that worked well for her. Having lifted a number of their prescription pads, she could write her own. One doctor thought perhaps shock treatments might work. Mom thought maybe they did. I didn’t. The life in her eyes was dimmed even more.
She once bought a mayonnaise jar of speed from Joe Duchi. Joe, Betty’s husband’s older brother, was a convicted felon just out of San Quentin. A part of their catch-and-release program, his history ranged from stealing garbage cans and dealing drugs to armed robbery and murder. Mom paid him $35 for what turned out to be a quart-sized jar of vitamin C tablets. That was a lot of money considering it was half her monthly salary beyond room and board. Joe was back in prison by the time she figured it out. Those were probably the only pills she never took.
Speed, Hot Cross Buns and Dexies kept her weight down and restored her energy. Rainbows, Red Devils, and Yellow Jackets got her through the nights. Codeine eased her pain and Librium calmed her days. She washed them down with Alka-Seltzer or a little whiskey. Toward the end, she graduated to the big guns, Thorazine and Stelazine. She thought drugs were the answer to whatever ailed her, but nothing eased her pain. She didn’t take them to feel good, she took them to feel less bad.
After the month with her niece, Mom drifted back to southern California. In September she turned 53. In early November, the week before she died, she was mugged and robbed. Badly shaken, it may have been the final incident that pushed her over the edge. On November 9, she checked into a small motel on Whittier Blvd., a block from the police station in one direction and a hospital in the other. The following morning she was found by the maid. Dressed in her black slip, propped up in the middle of the single bed, my mother had downed more than enough sleeping capsules and alcohol to be certain she couldn’t be saved this time, a plastic bag over her head and taped around her neck, just to make sure. Her Certificate of Death states: immediate cause of death, ASPHYXIA, PLASTIC BAG OVER FACE, in all caps. My mother took her own life not because she’d gone mad, but because she was done.
The Whittier police called Carleen, and Carleen called Chuck. Chuck said, “She’s your mother, you go identify her.
Just the idea of needing help, but worse, of having to ask for it, comes hard in my family. No wonder. My sister went to the morgue by herself. My brother-in-law added another nail to his coffin.
I was baffled and befuddled, not that Mom was dead, but that I fell apart. At first I was confused, like I didn’t get what Carleen had told me. The room was white and all I could hear was a silent roar. A couple of minutes passed. I simply sat there, not breathing, perplexed. And when it hit me, a river poured out of me, watering my regret as I slumped on my sister’s couch: regret for my mother, for her wasted life, for myself, for the dashed chances of her loving me, my slim chances evaporating into none, and regret that I would never understand the why of it all. I also wanted her to apologize, not so much for being a crappy mother, but for the disappointing way things turned out. My mind was relieved. My body was slammed by a hurricane.
November 1968 • La Habra ~ When my mother died, what remained of her life was packed in her small Hillman, now parked in Carleen’s driveway. The front bench-seat held her clothes, small feather pillow, and jewelry; the back seat, her black and gold Singer, button collection, and sewing box. In the trunk were her pots and pans and meat grinder, her mother’s round deco mirror, and her family pictures. On top was her blue Samsonite overnight case, filled with bottles of pills that through the years kept watch over her like toy plastic soldiers with white caps, standing silent sentry atop her dresser. She carried with her a pharmacy: diet, pain, and sleeping pills; pills for her stomach, anxiety and depression, and for everything else in the world that ailed her. Over the years Mom lived on green tea, rare steak, and pills: Benzedrine and Dexedrine. Nembutal, Tuinal, and Seconal. Librium and Valium. Darvon. Thorazine and Stelazine. There were over-the-counters: aspirin, Excedrin, and a large, cobalt blue bottle of Bromo-Seltzer. My mother, the cosmic omnivore and pharmaceutical zombie.
The five of us spread Mom’s possessions on Carleen’s living room rug. Larry chose her silver charm bracelet and costume jewelry. Carleen took her sewing scissors and white half-slip. Betty picked the sewing machine, the round mirror, the Dutch oven, the cast iron pans, and the meat grinder. Claudia ended up with her full-length white evening coat and a handful of jewelry. I claimed her Liberty head necklace, her delicate Gruen wristwatch, and the worn deck of blue Bicycle playing cards. We split up her family pictures. Then we flushed thousands of white pills and colored capsules down the toilet and unceremoniously tossed out the stack of receipts that accompanied them. Her button collection and clothes we gave to the Salvation Army. Nobody remembers what we did with the Hillman, though for months it sat in the driveway in La Habra along with the long-abandoned Mercury, keeping it company.
There was no funeral, nor flowers or friends; only her children came to witness her ashes ensconced in a small cemetery in Brea, and that was only because Larry made us. Carleen was stone-faced and Claudia wept. Betty was disgruntled there was no grave to dance on. Our mother’s ashes were interred behind a small bronze door at the top of a mausoleum wall, high enough where she could no longer get me. Standing there, the five of us were filled with a mixture of relief, regret, remorse, and resentment; we said goodbye and left—and except for my brother—never went back. It didn’t matter anymore. I thought none of it mattered anymore.
If you’d asked me, I would have told you I’d given up hope years ago of her ever wanting me, of listening to or seeing me. But secretly, I’d always harbored hope that my mother loved me, my false hope better than no hope at all.
Full Circle ~ Over the decades my mother has been following me around, showing up in my stomach, my bones, and my dreams. She used to be a dull ache inside me, but not so much anymore. She wasn’t cruel or abusive—there was no sliver to take out, no bullet to remove, no thorn to pluck. In the five years I lived with her, I wasn’t raised by co-mission, I was raised by omission, by neglect, but neglect doesn’t leave a scar, it leaves a hole. Some say holes are harder to heal.
I’ve spent years trying to fill this hole with sex and recreational drugs (God bless the ’70s!), with work, and now with writing. Much like Mom, I’ve been looking for answers. She went the conventional way of the 1950s, going to doctors up and down the state trying to find out what was wrong with her, getting prescriptions for depression, weight, sleep, and for whatever else possessed her. I’ve gone from A to Z in search of understanding to let go of the resentment and pain I hold in my body. Time and understanding have reshaped me, transforming this hole into a kind of wholeness, and out of this wholeness, a kind of holiness has emerged.
So after all my seeking and searching, hoping for some comprehension, I’ve come full circle back to my mother. “Why?” doesn’t matter nearly as much as I thought. My mother didn’t think about the ripples caused by the rocks she cast in the waters. She wasn’t out to purposely make my life unhappy or irritating, didn’t have me in mind when she made her choices. It wasn’t about me. Somehow I knew that, even as a kid.
I imagine she’d have preferred everything to have turned out some other way, to not have stumbled and tripped through her life leaving a batch of chipped and broken china in her path, waltzing a mindless waltz in endless circles. Don’t you think she would have liked to have held the hemmed edge of her billowing skirt and elegantly danced? I do. Like her, I too can be a little clumsy, but unlike her, I learned to dance, to waltz and twirl and two-step. I love when I float across a shiny wood floor, swirling like a warm breeze on tiptoe; I never dreamed I could be a dancer.
Many of Mother’s belongings found their way back to me. Her heavy pinking shears are now in my sewing box. Her black cast-iron griddle cooks my grilled cheese sandwiches. Her delicate gold watch with the narrow black cloth wristband, her Liberty half-dollar necklace from the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair, and her silver charm bracelet crowded with mementos from her life all keep my jewelry company. Her pictures are on my wall and in my photo albums. Her mother’s round deco mirror hangs in my bedroom, reflecting all three of our images in my face. I also have her metal meat grinder (the one she tried to run me through when I was not yet two), stored in an old workman’s aluminum lunch pail, way up high on a shelf in my garage where it can’t get me. My sisters and brother must have thought these things important to me, that I should have them. They are. I’m pleased when I use or look at or wear them. They remind me of Mom, remind me of some good parts of her. And they remind me of what I missed.
For years I didn’t think about her at all. For a while I thought about her more than I needed to. Now, when I think of her, it’s easier, and it feels like we can dance.
The End
Epilogue ~ My parents were like black and white, oil and water, sin and prayer. My father, not one to boil over, married a kettle of emotions. If he could have loosened his grip and if my mother hadn’t completely unraveled, perhaps my childhood would have been different. But it was what it was. Look, we all have moments of grace and we all experience unfortunate events, I simply happened to have been inoculated early. Babe was not the mother I wanted, but she was the one I got. Was she a good mother? No. Did I love her? No, I can’t say I did; I’m not that big. But as life would have it, having Babe as a mother turned out to be in my best interest, though it took me a long time to see that, and though she may not have been “good enough,” I’ve had many stand-ins who were.
Writing this memoir introduced me to my mother. It also introduced me to who I am. In addition, it connected me to my ancestors and living relatives about whom I knew little or nothing. Through the unions and reunions, through the phone calls and e-mails, and through the writing and reading and weaving of our stories, I’ve come to know us, to see our strands are woven in the same translucent web. There are striking physical resemblances. I look at my brother’s wedding photo and I am startled to see my younger son staring back at me. I study my father’s baby picture and I see my grandson. Sitting next to my Uncle Joe, I sense my dad. Joe looks so much like my father, stands and walks and talks like him. I sit close so I can feel that father energy I miss so much. Aunt Agnes and Sister Ann have Dad’s laugh and his same twinkle in their blue eyes. I look a lot like my brother and some of my cousins. My female cousins on Mom’s side are younger versions of their mothers. When I search for my mother’s face in theirs I can’t find her—I see my sisters’ faces instead. My cousins remembered Mom and liked her. They thought she was honest, humorous and hip. And smart. They said she held her own on just about any subject, was well read in history and well versed in sports, rattling off team stats and scores with the best of them. Until I’d met the cousins, I’d never come across anybody that liked my mother. Now that I write this, I think it’s not true. I only know four people who didn’t like Mom, my father and my sisters (Larry somehow managed to steer clear of her). They were the ones who had issues with her, and I think Claudia simply went along for the ride. Even my brothers-in-law liked Mom, well, sort of. I was glad to find she had people in her court. My mother wasn’t as “out there” as I thought. She was just like the rest of her family; who, compared to my father’s family, were all a little out there. It’s all relative.
My sisters and I are much like her, likely to have fall out of our mouths whatever flies into our minds. I’m a hardheaded woman like my grandmothers, Barbara and Nellie, who were two peas of the same pod. I live in that pod too, that place of righteousness and rightness, of rules and regulations, of stubbornness and inflexibility. I just don’t take myself quite as seriously as they did. I also appreciate my flip side; my will and willingness, my doggedness and determination, my trust and persistence.
I got the best of my father and the worst of my mother. I have his frame and posture. I have her moles and droopy eyelids. I have his sense of rightness and fairness and goodness, which get me through. I have her vanity, her stinginess and mouthiness, which get me in trouble. I have Dad’s common sense, work ethic, and reliability; I have Mom’s foolishness, self-absorption, and pride. I have his manners, his conduct and character; her resentment, her entitlement and disdain. I have my father’s sociability, my mother’s sarcasm, his loyalty, her indifference, his modesty, her arrogance. I carry his confidence and live with her self-doubt. I have his good intentions and her unattended sorrows. I suppose I turned out as well as I have because I had other good mothers throughout my life: sisters and friends and lovers who filled that mothering gap for me. It pays to be adoptable. Besides, if it’s not one thing—it’s your mother.
I survived my childhood. I raised two sons as a single mom (I got by with a little help from my friends). I’ve gone from welfare to two successful businesses and a longtime career in real estate, I learned to dance, no small feat for someone with two left ones, and I wrote this book. I thank God I’m a hardheaded woman. I’m not so sure my sons would agree, but they’re entitled to my opinion, too.
I’ve fallen in love with this family, this huge, funny, strange, interesting and odd assortment of kith and kin scattered about the country. I’m part of this lineage, my roots deep in their soil. I’m not alone. I’m not the waif I thought I was as a child. I’m not lost. Okay, so maybe a little dazed and confused, but not lost. I have found redemption. I belong.
© 2018. Catherine Sevenau.
All rights reserved.
Debi Risinger says
I really loved your story. My family life was different, but the rest was so much like myself. I wish I would have gotten to know you in school. You brought back a lot of great memories.
Catherine Sevenau says
Thank you Debi. So many of us back then did not know one another as there were so many of us. Nice to make your acquaintance here though!
Bruce Reid says
Serious great writing. I am envious. And you even closed with a line… dazed and confused… from Led Zeppelin. Aren’t we all? Those early LaHabra years: drive-in sneak-ins… sleepovers… teachers shaking students (been there). I might have missed it. Did you have an aluminum Christmas tree with rotating floor light? An admirer
Barbara Jacobsen says
Wow! Thanks Catherine. Well done.
Catherine Sevenau says
Ta Da! With any luck it will grow legs and find its way into the larger world. And if not, this is good enough. I’m happy it’s done.
Eric Hodges says
I’m at a loss for words except for “WOW!!!”
Catherine Sevenau says
Thanks, now find me a publisher or movie maker…