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Chapter 3

On Saturday Afternoons in 1963

Rickie Lee in fifth grade

When my uncle Bud died of cancer in Chicago, my father flew back to help with the funeral, and my mother found us a new house. When times got tense, Mom would scour the furnished rentals in the Phoenix Gazette, and we knew we were about to leave our cares behind. Dad was not thrilled with the wonderful new house; it was old and rickety and he loved clean modern things. Mom and Dad were like the parents in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Their weaknesses had polarized them into being their worst selves. I adored my father when he did not drink, and hated how my mother began to hate him even when he didn’t.

We moved to the house on Orangewood Avenue in the summer of 1962. It was an antebellum-style farmhouse, probably eighty years old. The last vestige of early Arizona settlers, these square wooden houses once grew like cactuses in the Southwestern desert. This one came furnished with a television set, a dining room table, three dressers and three beds, windows with venetian blinds, and an antique ­Victorian-­type chair with velvet upholstery. I loved to lie upside down on that chair and rub my fingers through the velvet. There were five acres of dirt and a horse stall off the backyard. I was thrilled the moment I saw it. Maybe a real horse would eventually find its way into this stall.

The house sat on cement blocks and had screen doors to keep the air moving. I would lie on the cool cement porch beneath the hornet’s nest, daydreaming with the drops of light splashing on my eyelashes. One day I discovered the earth moving under the house—it was a big family of garter snakes. What a discovery! Mother said to leave them alone, they weren’t bothering anyone. I watched them the way children watch tattooed ladies at the circus, with a mixture of fear and delight.

Sugarfoot was more than content in the new house. There were mice and birds to hunt and saucers of milk and Purina cat food every morning. One day I watched her stalking a bird and was inspired to test her technique. Creeping slowly on my hands and knees while thinking, “You cannot see me, you cannot see me,” I moved as if I was not moving. The bird was about eight feet away. It did not move as I came toward it.

I knew there was a relationship between the bird and the cat that allowed the cat to be unseen, as if nature anesthetized the prey when a predator came near. I understood this so instinctively I figured I could also have that relationship with a bird and be unseen. I was still working as God’s little scientist.

I kept my unblinking eye on the bird. I was the cat. So smoothly and slowly I crossed the distance between me and the wren, slowly, ever so slowly. Then I moved quick—and captured my first bird!

Gently I picked it up from our front yard and brought it into the house. Nobody could be as surprised and flabbergasted as I, certainly not my mother who was more concerned about the fact of a bird in the house than my claim to have just performed magic. This was the first of four birds I would catch in my life.

In my childhood desert playground, I roamed among date trees, orange blossoms, praying mantises, and the deafening humming of cicadas singing in an enchanted dream of lost worlds. Each day was followed by a brighter sun set in a blaze of celestial colored sunsets that were erased by bigger and bigger full moons. I was slowly replacing my invisible friends with real animals.

My invisible friend, Boshla, had also moved to the new house and sometimes he still accompanied me on safaris into the desert. My mother was concerned about me talking to people that no one could see, so she asked my father to speak to me about it.

Father sat next to me on the porch and asked me if Boshla was there right now. I answered:

“Yes he is.”

“You know you’re getting older now Rickie Lee. It’s time to tell Boshla goodbye.”

I was confused.

“Your mother thinks it’s time for you to stop talking to things that aren’t there. So tell him goodbye now.”

I could no more tell Boshla goodbye than I could tell my father goodbye. But I said,

“Okay Daddy.” And then to make a show of it:

I put my finger to my lips and whispered, “Shhhhh,” so that Boshla wouldn’t make any noise that my daddy could hear. Dad saw me do this and smiled, then went back inside the house.

There was no more discussion about getting rid of my imaginary friend.

Years may go by . . .

Each day I would visit Wick’s Market, the family-owned grocery facing the Black Canyon Highway. Mr. Wick cut the meat in back, and the cement aisles smelled like bread and milk. There were ice cream sandwiches in the deep caverns of a cold, free-standing refrigerator. Mr. and Mrs. Wick owned the market and I had a crush on Jack, their son. I was eight and he was twenty-eight, a slight man with receding hair. I proposed marriage to him one afternoon and he said most earnestly, “Rickie Lee, I think that when you grow up you are not even going to remember me. But if you do, I promise, I will go out with you.” I was sure my feelings would last another . . . let’s see . . . seven years would make me pretty and old enough for Jack . . .

The Wicks had a bubble gum machine filled with beautiful plastic diamond and ruby rings you could win for a penny, and I mystically conquered that machine. I could feel the bubble gum mechanism and learned how to turn it just so to get the rings. I won ring after ring. Customers marveled. “Watch me!” I called to anyone who would look. Long blonde braids, many rings on my fingers, barefoot and deeply tanned, with no front teeth, the world was mine.

I had been gathering pop bottles from the field next to the highway (they grew wild there) and was carrying them back to Wick’s Market to collect the deposit, two cents a bottle. I could make about a dime, then hit the bubble gum machine. That was when I noticed the ants walking toward the desert. I had seen them many times but this morning I followed them to a newly tarred parking lot. Red fire ants with jaws like crocodiles. They burrowed into the hot asphalt, fire-walking across it to the dirt where they would attack and kill any unsuspecting bug. I found hundreds there crawling over each other as they entered and exited their ant cave. What was it like to be ant-sized? What did they see when they got inside? I was crouching down low, mesmerized. Then I felt something crawling on me—ouch—and then—ahh!—they were all over me. Red ants bite harder than black, and fire ants are the worst of all. I panicked. AHHHH!

I was running like a child on fire because I was a child on fire! There were ants in my underpants. There were ants in my underarms, even my hair. They were crawling on me, biting me everywhere. I was screaming as I ran, and I had quit trying to get them off me.

Mama came out the kitchen door, jumped over the little white fence into the parking lot, and started hitting me to get the ants off. So now I was getting bit and hit. She pulled me into the yard and yelled at me to stand still. Yelling saves lives! She was spraying me with the hose now, and I was naked. I didn’t care.

Wait! What if Jack Wick sees me? Oh no! That would be worse than the ants and the hitting. Sure enough, he was out there too, and he heard me screaming. I looked over at him but he had quickly started back into the store, saving my modesty after making sure Mom had saved my life.

My first month in the third grade started out well enough. Mrs. Schultz passed around our new books. I loved the smell of the paper. I pressed my nose into the book imagining what the coming year would be like, all the great things I would do and the friends I would have.

Mama had bought me a six-month-old colt named Geronimo. It was a big investment, and neither of us knew how dangerous it was to raise a stallion. Buying the horse for me was the greatest thing my mother could have done in the midst of the changes that were happening to me. Even as I lost my footing at the new school, the colt meant that dreams could come true. If something as magical as a horse could land in my backyard, who knows what else might land there?

The third grade was nothing like the second grade. I could not seem to make friends, or initiate games, and my natural ability to organize was simply not appreciated. The happy and extroverted child I had been receded into a shy character. I began going to the nurse every day. Perhaps my body wasn’t sick, but my heart was. I was lonely.

West Side Story

Then one weekend my big sister took me to see West Side Story at the Palms Theater down on Central Avenue. The movie had an immediate impact on my life. West Side Story became a touchstone, an initiator of friendships, a secret code between outcasts. When I finally had a chance to perform music of my own, West Side Story was the backdrop I brought to my stage.

I received the West Side Story stereophonic LP record for Christmas. Now that I had the music, Riff was alive again. I knelt with Maria in agonizing grief. I was learning the essence of theater using experimentation and improvisation. I memorized every nuance of the orchestration as the Jets and I ran through the sagebrush, snapping our fingers, and soaring over imaginary city streets.

One spring day during recess, I was singing the “Jet Song” on the playground and I noticed a little girl watching me. The next day there were two, three, and then more. I drew a crowd! For the first time at Orangewood I had an identity and a place I fit. I was the singer. I spent the rest of the year singing West Side Story at recess. Sometimes to an empty lawn, sometimes not. Music had built an accidental bridge between me and the world. Here they were at last, my peers, my audience.

The summer came and Geronimo was a yearling now, beautiful and playful. We still raced each other up and down our five-acre pasture but one day Geronimo began to charge me in our games of tag. I had to get out of his way now; the kind little colt who’d been careful not to run me over as I slowly ran in front of him now attempted to mow me down, ears back, hoofs aloft.

Fourth grade was harder than third. I was plagued by an enemy, Jo Ellen Hassle, who took every moment to browbeat me into isolation. Had it not been for Mr. Ellis, the music teacher, school simply would have been unbearable. I looked forward to seeing Mr. Ellis three times a week as I learned to play the violin. Mr. Ellis played every instrument he taught: percussion and piano, cello and bass and violin. He could take the sax out of a kid’s hands and show them what to play right off their sheet music. He played all the brass, and his temperament was always gentle. I admired his patience, knowledge, and his humor. I recall my one concert recital with the orchestra, I could not quite keep up with the reading so I faked what I thought the notes might be. As he conducted, Mr. Ellis looked over at me and shook his head, nothing more. A secret between us. And perhaps the guy sitting next to me.

My dad came home from months of being away, a stranger in our house. That was when he first heard me singing harmony on “Side by Side.” Father came into the kitchen and announced:

“Rickie Lee can sing harmony.”

“Yes she’s been doing it all year long,” Mother replied (as if to say, “If you were ever around you might know something about your daughter”).

Dad seemed to suddenly see me as part of his family of singers. There was a delight in his eyes, he was excited and I was the reason. Father taught me the harmony on “You Are My Sunshine,” recording us together on his expensive new reel-to-reel tape recorder. I liked singing into the microphone and I loved harmony. I understood it immediately. I felt good. I had always been “different” somehow, but now singing with my father I was something special and my father knew it. Not only was I being included, but I was actually “number one” on the hit parade! My dad thought I was like him—a singer!

His mind was moving a hundred miles an hour. I had learned the songs easily: “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “Bye Bye Blackbird,” and then Dad went for the big one—“My Funny Valentine.” A challenging song, I had a difficult time with the change from minor to major (You make me smile . . .), and Father’s expression of impatience as I tried to understand the major note for “smile” told me I was about to lose the attention I had finally won. I was disappointing him. When I finally understood the midsentence change to a new mode, I was able to sing the song pretty much as I sing it today, the way my father sang it, the way he taught it to me that day in 1963.

Dad was so impressed with my natural entertainment ability he took me on an audition for “The Lew King Show,” the local television talent show. They offered to hire me but only if my parents bought an insurance policy from one of the staff there. My father was furious. Mother said they would find a way to pay for it if I really wanted to be on the show. I said no. It was a huge grown-up decision to deny myself a chance to be on television—and to have status in my lonely schoolyard hell. But this was the wrong time, the wrong place, and to accept the prize would hurt my parents. “The Lew King Show” was my first lesson in the dark corridors of the music biz, where favors are exchanged and sins offered up as collateral. Of the many exercises in integrity I have achieved or endured, or failed, this was my greatest. This performance would have served so many devils, least of all my ability to knock the song out of the ballpark. When performances are used to gain footing, or used for anything other than the purity of the performance, bad things happen. My choice to wait for a better opportunity was a turn of the dial of growing up. I went to sleep that night a little closer to my parents, for they came in a little closer to me. I knew, too, that I had something in my pocket now, made from doing the right thing. I had a compass of sorts, the one that comes to children who sacrifice their dreams for family. All around me, childhood was slipping away. But to my north I had a dream. I had one direction I could call my own.

My older sister Janet had a harder time than I in her new sur­- roundings. She had an undeniable sexuality and it had come too soon and probably been taken advantage of. My sister had been my second mother in Chicago, but now something was broken that we could not fix.

In 1962, the higher a girl’s hair was ratted the more available she was, it was simply understood. There was something immodest or worldly about ratted hair. (That was what made Bob Dylan’s ratted hair so complex and interesting—it wasn’t only feminine, it was nasty.) My sister ratted her hair according to her nature. At Washington High School, Janet had a rough Italian boyfriend, let’s call him “Bob M.” Janet was becoming a problem child, lying, sneaking out, and getting into trouble. Her reputation was being passed around like an old cigarette, and my brother got in more than one fight defending her. Bob M. was the local hoodlum, a mean teenager who would pinch me when no one was looking. He pinched really hard, intending to hurt me, and I would cry out, “He pinched me!” and he would say, “Me? I didn’t do anything.” No normal person would believe someone could be so cruel as to hurt a child, then lie about it, so nobody believed me. I was incredulous. This betrayal by my mom and sister? They laughed each time.

Good Shepherd

Eventually the State of Arizona placed Janet in the Good Shepherd Home for Girls. Every Sunday, we would picnic on the lawn where each family’s “troubled girl” sat on a blanket eating chicken or tacos or crying to go home. Sinners on display for all the passing cars to see.

My very first public singing engagement was there in the chapel at Good Shepherd. It was Christmas Eve and I was invited to sing “Silent Night” at the big gathering. As the nun bent the microphone down to meet my voice, stage fright nearly knocked me off the chair I stood on. I sang it a cappella. Midway through my song the whole congregation started singing along. It felt incredible! I was a hit! That—I want to do that again. Sing.

Janet ascended through the privilege and trust levels of her deten­-tion. Maybe she shared my parents’ wishes that she would be a good girl, but she was already a crack manipulator. Now that she was unmonitored, Janet ran away again. It was too bad, I was so proud of her when she took me to see her new “house,” earned through trust. A private bedroom, she was so excited. A room of her own. A week later she disappeared from the Good Shepherd Home For Girls.

Coming home from visiting Good Shepherd, my mother sometimes whipped out a warning out of nowhere.

“Don’t you ever be like your sister. Do you hear me? Don’t you grow up to be like Janet.”

Every time she said this to me I was devastated. I was nothing like my sister. I was me. Didn’t she even know me?

It was a seed of doubt inadvertently planted by my mother. I began to wonder if I was adopted, and so began the year known as, “Was I adopted?” Each week I’d ask a family member, “Seriously, was I adopted?” Finally Danny said, “Yes, you were adopted. Go away.” Nothing they could say could make me stop doubting my place in our family.

“When the policeman come don’t say nothing”

One morning I woke up to find my sister sitting at the kitchen table. I was happy to see her but she was supposed to be “bad” and this morning she seemed normal. Yes, there they were, talking like normal, my mother and Janet. Mom was smoking, as usual. I was confused. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. What should I say?

“Aren’t you going to say hello to your sister?”

Now that was a good question. Did I have a choice?

“Hello.”

Janet smiled at me.

“What are you doing here?” I was careful not to show affection—to anyone. Janet grabbed me and hugged me.

“She’s only staying for a few minutes. She can’t be here.”

She ran away?

“You ran away from Good Shepherd?”

“Yes. I’m not allowed to be here, so don’t tell anyone. If anyone comes to the door . . . I just wanted to stay till you got up.”

Janet seemed so grown-up. Mom seemed to talk to her like an adult.

It was confusing.

I sat down on a chair. The doorbell rang, and as if she knew it was going to ring, Janet quickly stood up as if to run. Mother said, “Stay here,” and she peeked around the kitchen door.

“I think it’s the police.”

My sister was scared but fierce.

“Janet don’t run or they’ll catch you.”

Mother looked at me and Janet said, “Rickie, can you go see who’s at the door without them seeing you?”

Quiet as a mouse and using my powers of invisibility, I tiptoed along the old wooden floor, over the braided rug, and without being seen I looked through the silky curtain to see one single policeman standing there. Waiting.

Janet said, “Can you answer the door? Tell the policeman that your mother is gone at work. Tell him you can’t let anyone in the house because you’re alone. Don’t say anything else.”

I was excited. I had a part in the adult’s play! A part in the Jones Gang!

Mother said, “You know you don’t have to do this.”

Sure I didn’t.

If you do something you know is wrong, is your soul discolored, your future altered? I felt excited to help my family, and ashamed to lie to the policeman. I had been taught never to lie to anyone but I didn’t want Janet to be taken back to Good Shepherd. I wanted to be part of the two of them.

I opened the door. He was a policeman alright. He had a gun. I liked him. He was nice.

“Is your mother here?”

Headshake.

“So you’re here alone?”

Nod.

“And what is your name?”

“Rickie.”

“Janet Adele, is she your sister?”

“Uh-huh. Yes.”

“Has she been here today?”

“No.”

I was acting like I was there alone and I thought he believed me.

“So, she hasn’t been here at all?”

“No.” Wait a second, I’m practicing my Academy Award acceptance speech.

Ad-libbing then, “My mother is at work. She has to work lunch. She said I can’t let strangers in the house.”

He seemed to be going for it.

“When your mother comes home—when is that? Rickie Lee, can you ask her to call us? If your sister comes home . . .”

He called me Rickie Lee. I loved him.

Out of the corner of my eye, right behind the police officer, my sister was sneaking. She was just four feet behind him, tiptoeing across the lawn. A cartoon character, lifting her feet up to exaggerated heights, tempting fate when she could easily have gone another way. Implicating me because now I had to keep her secret as she escaped behind the policeman who up until this moment, I had been taught to respect and admire. Almost to the driveway and teenage freedom, she had the audacity and courage to test it.

“Uh, she . . .”

I tried to stare only at the policeman, but I saw my sister in back of him and my eyes probably betrayed my surprise.

Suddenly the officer turned and leapt in one impossible motion right off the porch and onto my sister, tackling Janet on our front lawn. It was horrifying. His body was on top of my sister, wrestling her as he pinned her arms to the ground. Janet kicked and hit and howled. She fought with all her might and she was a big girl, but he was stronger.

I cried out, “Noooo! Get OFF her!” and then I jumped off the porch, ran to the two of them, and tried to pull him off her. I punched the officer and kicked him, beating him with my little fists. I was on his back as he tried to cuff her. My mother was there then, pulling me out of this horrific scene.

“Let go of my sister! Get off of my sister! GET OFF! LET HER GO!”

The hillbilly neighbors were out of their houses. My mother yelled, “What are you looking at?” as the cop put Janet in the back of his car. Yelling at neighbors! Mom was crossing the invisible barrier to address the audience. Mother, how daring!

“Janet, I’m sorry!” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear me. I was crying too hard. My PJs had grass stains on them. If I had done my part right, she’d be free now. I felt terribly guilty.

The officer, disheveled and disappointed, looked at me, just for a moment, a look that lasted a lifetime. His eyes said that I, a little girl, had lied to him. I was so ashamed. Mother seemed to be passive, neither stopping nor helping Janet—a parenting position she would always take with Janet. Now I was a liar, too. One thing for sure, cops did not shoot kids back then. Not for hitting them, not for kicking them, and not for running away. Of course, back then teenagers didn’t shoot cops. Cops and kids, it was a boxing ring with rules everyone respected. Hard to imagine now.

I was crying as the cop put my handcuffed sister in the back seat. Janet looked out the window at me, tears on her face. I like to think that my sister remembered my heroic actions and turned to smile at me from the car as it drove away. She was like a movie hero on her way to the gallows. Maybe she knew she’d get away again soon. I want to write it that way, if you don’t mind. Yes, she turned and smiled, as if to say, “You did good, kid.”

In reality, I stood there in the yard watching the car disappear until my mama said, “Come inside now.”

No one seemed to notice what had happened to me that morning. Seeing violence on my own sister on our front yard was fundamentally damaging. We did not discuss it except to laugh about how funny Janet looked just before the policeman leaped off the porch and tackled her.

My parents had fiercely protected me, but Mom considered Janet’s arrest as an ordinary part of growing up because of her own childhood. I, however, had not experienced anything like this. I had an entire moral code that had just been shaken to the core.

My father would have been unhappy that Mother had involved me in this criminal scheme. He recognized that the fragile construction of self-esteem had much to do with consistency in teaching kids right and wrong (even though he was not always the exemplar of the ideals he espoused).

My sense of duty, of being a good girl, was a shield between myself and the cruel children around me. They might not like me but I respected myself for my basic morality and kindness, and I could prove my goodness by not lying or doing hurtful things. I had dignity as my shield against childhood cruelties.

Now I was much less than a liar. I had lied and even fought with a policeman! He then confirmed my bad-girl status with his expression of disappointment. With my self-esteem shaken, I would have little to lean on when kids turned on me.

Janet was done with childhood, with Good Shepherd, with all of it. At fifteen years of age she had seen too much of a life that she did not enjoy one bit. She soon ran away again, but this time she got pregnant and moved to Minnesota with her teenage hoodlum, army-bound husband.

Janet, Bob M., their newborn daughter, and toddler son returned to our home two years later. Their firstborn, Bobby Jr., cried every night but Mother insisted his parents get up with him because Janet and Bob M. needed to be the responsible ones. Some nights no one came so I would go to him. One night I went in to check on him and found his father, holding the baby upside-down by his feet and shaking him violently. “Shut up shut up,” he hissed. This was a violence far more horrible than anything I’d ever imagined. I was petrified, unable to move as I stood in the doorway.

My mother appeared behind me, then walked over to the monster and said, “Put that baby down. Get out of here.” Her authority was unchallenged. Bob M. put his son down and moved past us.

As my mother held Bobby Jr., I went to comfort the baby girl. It was odd, she was not crying, not moving. I gently touched her and she woke. Why hadn’t the crying and violence awakened her? It seemed the tiny baby had already lost her hearing from an ear infection that was the result of neglect and not her father’s “special” attention. These children’s only chance at life was to be as far away as possible from their dangerous teenage parents.

Bob M. was out of our house the very next day. One week later, both of my sister’s babies were put up for adoption. Mother knew from experience the terrible realities of both adoption and child beaters, and she knew which was worse. But I did not know what to do with what I had seen.

How could I ever erase the shadow of the baby, a man shaking an infant in the dark? I could not undo it. It would color everything I saw ever after. Yes, when it comes to children, I am a ferocious mama bear.

“A Stranger’s Car”

It was another Saturday afternoon and I was out playing in the field next to our house. I had my eye on a horny toad who thought I could not see him in the sagebrush. Now he jumped to the next pile of sticks, hopping from rock to rock. Gotcha!

I held him in my hands but with lots of room to breathe there in my finger cave. How wondrous you are! I thought as I carefully placed him back on the ground. What else can I catch today? I was feeling rather pleased with myself as my eyes met the horizon. Directly in front of me a brand-new car was parking on Orangewood Avenue. A man in a suit opened the door and, smiling at me, began to cross the street and walk into the field. He seemed to be speaking to me.

I had a feeling in my stomach. Men in suits didn’t walk in the dirt like this, and that car didn’t belong on our street. This man was the man they told us about and he was doing everything they said he would do. He was smiling and moving quickly. What was that he was saying? Something about a puppy.

“Hey there, now, do you know anything about puppies? I have a puppy in my back seat here.”

As he spoke he walked toward me in the field.

“I was taking it home to my son, but it’s crying. I don’t know what to do. Do you think it’s hungry?”

Oh, I definitely knew what to do with puppies, but I also knew there was something wrong. I wanted to feed the puppy but . . . was there really a puppy? This was almost irresistible.

Puppy ruse? Stranger’s car?

Bad man! Still I did not move.

He was closer now. I could see his tie, his dusty shoes, and his smile. Taking it all in, I thought, Do not get into that car, yet I did not think, Run away. I was frozen in my tracks.

Now the stranger was only about thirty feet away. Even as I thought, I know what you are, some part of me was still looking over his shoulder to see if there really was a puppy who needed me in his back seat.

Now he was only fifteen feet away, still smiling, almost upon me when my mother called from the back door.

“Rickie Lee!”

I looked. She had come outside and was moving toward our fence.

“Rickie Lee, what are you doing there? What’s going on?” and “Who is that man?”

The man hesitated, then he stopped. He looked over his right shoulder at my mother, gauging the distance between her and me and him. I was alone and exposed. I thought Mother was too far away to help but he did not agree. In one motion he turned and headed quickly to his car.

“Get over here right now,” Mother commanded. As I started to run toward our house I got there in time for Mama and I to see the man drive past us.

“What did that man want?”

“He said he had a puppy. He needed someone to help him.”

She was furious. “Puppy? You knew there was no puppy, right?”

“I knew, Mama. That’s why I did not go over to him.”

The suit was a ticket into any neighborhood. It gave him authority, it confused people. This man had done this before. He knew how to dress for the part.

Helplessness begets fury. I felt loved as Sergeant Bettye fumed her way across the neighbors’ lawns telling everyone what had happened, almost happened, to Rickie Lee. I was only a second or two from being kidnapped. We both knew there was nothing Mother could have done had the stranger taken the steps toward me instead of away.

Everyone in the neighborhood was now talking about the stranger’s car. The neighbors came to complain about the world we lived in. My father thought it was time to move. The attempted kidnapping was too close for comfort.

Come and meet the angel born today

Inside another stranger’s car

Be still, until this wayward bird

Passes over where we are . . .

(“A Stranger’s Car”)

The Hillbillies Across the Street

Gloria Moore was my playmate from across the street. She and I organized that song and dance performance of “Side by Side” when my dad first heard me singing harmony. All the mothers came out on the street to see our choreography. We were Vaudevillians!

Gloria invited me to go to church with her and all her cousins. They went to church all day long and I wanted to go with them. I just had to ask my mom’s permission.

There was an uneasy peace between my mother and the Nazarenes across the street. Mom had lived under the oppressive rule of evangelicals in the orphanages in southern Ohio so she knew firsthand about their zeal, their sin, and their rolling around on the ground barking. She fumed when she spoke of them because Mother wanted no reminder of her roots, and she knew better than I what might be going on in those houses.

It was hard for me to understand until the first time I went into Gloria’s home. Gloria’s mother did her son’s hair. Elton Moore was thirteen years old, the same age as my brother, and what was nearly as disturbing—it looked as if she had dyed his hair black. Mrs. Moore sat straddling Elton from behind as she watched As the World Turns. Oh my gosh, I couldn’t breathe. They may as well have been attaching body parts, it was so horrifying. Gloria acted as if everything were normal as she led me past them and into her room. We did not speak of it except she tried to separate herself from her terrible situation with:

“My mom likes Elvis Presley.”

Huh?

“She dyes my brother’s hair so he’ll look like Elvis.”

Oh, that I could understand. If Elton looked like Elvis, then Mrs. Moore felt like she was somebody.

That year Elton and his cousin Christian went shooting pigeons with their BB guns. To get a better perch for shooting birds, they both climbed high up a power line pole. Christian lost his balance and grabbed a live power line. The current surged through his body, gluing him to the line which was humming softly as Elton watched from a few feet away. They said by the time Christian finally hit the ground, he had caught fire and shrunk, and he hit the ground as a little piece of coal. Elton was emotionally charred and never recovered.

The notoriety of Christian’s horrible death brought a prestige to the Moores, and suddenly kids who never spoke to Gloria offered their condolences. Gloria’s aunt was inconsolable and her faith shaken to the core. What kind of God lets a mother’s only son die so brutally? Mrs. Moore would go to church alone now. Elvis would not be attending either.

My mother, the moon

To say my mother was unpredictable is to say that the ocean is salty. It was a given, but you went in there anyway, hoping to float on top of the waves.

One day Mom would fight for me like a lioness, the next she would slap me across the face for spilling my milk. She was a storm of her own, reckoning with her inhumane past as she tried to create a human being to mother her children. We watched in awe as she pulled us near and softly bit us—a woman of integrity even when there was nothing left to eat.

President Kennedy was a hero in our house. Our family had an embroidered picture of JFK hanging in the living room and my brother had Kennedy’s portrait in his bedroom. We were inspired by our young Irish-Catholic King Arthur. I remember the night when my mother, brother, and I walked along the road, along acres of onion fields and orange trees, waving our “KENNEDY FOR PRESIDENT” sign at passing cars. My brother was going to run for president himself someday. This was the deciding year—1960—when youth was invited to the future. Kennedy himself extended the invitation. He was a thrilling presence, even to me at five years old. His election meant so much to our family, as if our own efforts had helped change the direction of the future.

Two weeks after my ninth birthday, President Kennedy was murdered. I got sick and couldn’t go to school all week. I cried, we cried, everyone cried. There were tears in the voices of newscasters, tears in the eyes of strangers on the street. America cried for weeks and then we cried for years.

Something was lost that autumn that has never been returned to America. The land itself seemed to grieve, it rained everywhere all week long. Even when the winter sun finally came out, it seemed as if grief was now part of our collective language. My father was gone and our house seemed emptier than before.

Thanksgiving

It was Thanksgiving. I was in the same pajamas I’d worn all week. Mother took an extra shift at work because she got paid double on holidays. She told Danny and I, “I’ll be back at six or seven and we’ll have turkey together.”

“Danny, now listen to me, after you pat on the butter and sage, and stuff the bird—I already made the stuffing—then you put the turkey in the oven at 475 degrees for an hour, and then turn it down to 425 for the next three hours. Keep it covered.”

Danny felt confident he understood what needed to be done. “Don’t worry, Mom, I have everything under control.” He was laughing.

Mom left for work around 10:30, and an hour or two later he put the bird in the oven and set the temperature. Danny sent me out to watch television. Since Dad was a chef, it was important for Danny to do this right.

About two hours later Danny was checking on the bird but I was thinking, it doesn’t really smell like turkey. Sometime around 4 p.m. we were getting hungry, but the turkey was still raw. I looked at Danny and said, “Something’s wrong.” Indeed, the bird was just slightly brown, still cool inside.

Mom came home at dinnertime exhausted and hungry. As she looked at our turkey she said:

“What did you do here? What temperature did you set the oven to?”

“250.”

“I told you 450.”

She was mad. Dan said, “Well, let’s just turn it up.”

“You can’t turn it up now, it’s covered with bacteria.”

We all looked at the stove. We had waited six hours for turkey. Mother tried not to be mad when she took the bird out of the huge black iron baking pan and threw it in the garbage outside.

“I don’t have money to buy another one.”

That was another shock in this week of shocks. I never really knew we didn’t have enough money to buy food. There was nothing else to eat in the house, maybe peanut butter and jelly, maybe tuna fish. She had spent all her waitressing money on the turkey.

I was learning that life was not safe for anyone, at any time. Presidents could be killed, food could become deadly, holidays weren’t necessarily festive, and my family might not have enough to eat.

The next day I was playing out in the front yard when I told Gloria Moore from the hillbilly family across the street the news that we didn’t get any Thanksgiving because Danny messed up the turkey. I guess I was looking for a little sympathy or maybe I was bragging about how tough our family was. We don’t even eat turkey on Thanksgiving. Ha!

The Moore ladies overheard me and that night there was a knock at the kitchen door. Funny, I can still see them, Gloria’s mother and her aunt holding big platters of food: turkey, gravy, green beans, and mincemeat pie. They backed away as my mother opened the door.

“We heard about what happened and we have so much food, we thought Rickie Lee and Danny would enjoy some turkey dinner. Please accept it, we just won’t ever eat it all.” I could see under the foil—a turkey leg, sweet potatoes.

“Thank you,” Mama said, “but we cannot accept this.” She said it so fast I didn’t believe what I’d heard. She was angry again, angry they brought food.

“Oh, but . . . we have too much.”

“No, I mean it, Mrs. Moore. We do not accept charity.”

Mom closed the kitchen door. Danny looked at her, but I was looking out the window at that plate of mashed potatoes. The ladies were still standing there outside the door. They didn’t want to go. I really did not understand. “Mother, why can’t we have the food, they went to all that trouble and it’s right here.”

“We do not accept charity, that’s why.” For my mother, charity meant shame because it included pity. Pity, especially from the hillbillies, meant they placed themselves above her. Mom’s dignity was hard won through sharp-edged lessons and sacrifices as she clawed her way out of an orphanage and up from the bottom of the social strata. There would be no turkey today.

Back at school some children were not as affected by the president’s death as we were. One little boy in my class said, “I’m glad he’s dead. We hated him. We’re Republicans.” I had never heard that kind of hatred before. My teacher Mrs. Halworth interrupted:

“You will not speak about the president that way. Not in this classroom.”

Mrs. Halworth sat down at her desk and gave us a lesson on being American. “I am a Republican and I did not vote for President Kennedy, but he was our president and you will respect him . . . We are all Americans, and our president has been killed.”

Mrs. Halworth then read to us from Charlotte’s Web as we put our heads down on the desk for nap time. For forty minutes each afternoon, the spider, the pig, and I got ready to go to the fair. The teardrops that fell on my desk the day Charlotte died would have made a lovely pool for Charlotte’s children to swim in. Indeed, my desk was my little house away from home, where I ducked and covered, ready to be saved by my magic shelter in case of nuclear war. No book ever hurt as much as that children’s book hurt us all that day. It was like part of my own mother died.

There were also school fairs, the smell of tacos, and the cakewalks for the PTA. There were playgrounds of tetherball, four square, and kickball, plus the many songs that are only sung in childhood but are remembered by a few adults whose hearts keep a piece of the enchantment of their youth.

The Intruder

In the Arizona sky buzzards were always circling. Death was ever-­present and always near. Someday we will circle over you too, called the buzzards, descending on the horizon.

The dust of my nightmares leaves a fuzzy coating on my daytime horizon. In the darkness of sleep, a faraway horror is always present and moving toward me. In morning, my waking molds the little clay figures of my nighttime terrors. Sometimes they come into new life in a song. Sometimes they spring back as a full recall of lost memories.

I had terrible night terrors as a child, and fear of the dark long into my adult life. This story is my long-repressed memory that only found me recently as I forced myself to recall my jumbled life in 1963. It was a childhood nightmare come to life.

I was sleeping when my mother woke me in the middle of the night. She was kneeling beside my bed shaking me to wake up. The wind rustled across the porch, and the light from the street was bright enough to almost see Mother’s face. I awoke to a strange terror, the kind that only comes when your parents are frightened.

“Wake up, Rickie Lee!” Her fingers grasped my arm. “Wake up but don’t make a sound. Roll out of bed. Don’t lift your head up. Someone is outside trying to get in. I want you to crawl with me on the floor to the living room, do you understand? Don’t stand up.”

I was thrilled that something really important was happening but too groggy from sleep to understand this as a child’s greatest horror.

What? Someone? Outside?

“Someone is trying to break into the house. Be quiet now.”

“Mama?”

I was waking to someone trying to get into our house.

I looked at my window and saw the outline of a man. A living shadow, moving to our door to invade our safety. He was trying the doorknob! Was it locked? Even though it was locked, I was terrified. The stranger moved from the door to the windows—he was looking into our living room windows.

I was in every scary movie with rattling doorknobs and strangers’ shadowy faces in the window. “Stay by me,” Mom said. We began to crawl across the living room floor toward the kitchen.

Danny was in the living room, laughing like he always did. Mom was crawling on the ground, something we had never seen before. That was funny, too. Mom was laughing. Why were they laughing?

Sometimes laughter is the only way to stay sane. A child laughs at a shot in the dark, a dog beaten, a sudden raging father. It’s the only way to stay inside your skin, to not be jettisoned out of it, possibly forever.

Mom was unnaturally loud now to scare away the intruder. She bravely yelled at the door, “We called the police. You better go, get out of here!”

He did not go. He pulled harder on the front door. I was making a sound of primal fear, like the one animals make before they die. A kind of uurrruuuuuuhhh. This noise is only heard by the thing that kills them.

Hush now.

Was I crying?

The intruder was looking in more windows, looking for the voices he heard. He was looking for us. We were the prey and we were hiding in the shadows just like every little critter hid from me. I looked for help. The television rabbit ears. The velvet chair. I’d hit him with the chair. If I could pick it up.

Danny got on the phone to the police, and the dispatcher said, “They’re on their way. Stay on the phone.” Dan shouted, “Get out of here, mister!” Then, “I can’t stay on the phone, he’s going to the back door.” Danny yelled:

“The police are coming!”

Were the back doors locked? We never locked our doors. Mom hissed, “He’s going to the kitchen.”

Quick! We got up and ran to the door and he was almost there. Oh my God it wasn’t locked. Just in time we locked the kitchen door. The man tried to open it but quickly abandoned it for the back bedroom.

Dan went there in an instant. The man was at the door, furiously turning the handle. I was sure he would tear open the door somehow. We were separated by three feet and a very flimsy lock.

“Danny get the gun.”

Now Danny was searching for the key to the gun cabinet. He finally found it and got the cabinet door open. The man was like an unstoppable monster—he kept coming no matter what we did. We were doomed, the intruder didn’t care about us, or the police, or that we were going to shoot him. Danny was holding the shotgun. “I can’t find the bullets.” He was laughing because he was scared to death. Then the bullets fell to the ground but they were the wrong bullets. Wrong bullets!

Where in the world were the goddamn shotgun shells?

My brother turned to face the danger with an unloaded gun and a child’s bluff. “I got a gun, mister. You better get out of here. I’ll shoot you if you come in.”

Mom was more direct and more afraid: “You son of a bitch! The police are coming!”

That just pissed him off. He responded by kicking the door. We were braced now with Danny, our empty gun, and the door that separated us from . . . from . . .

The phone was ringing.

Suddenly the man stopped and we heard the scuffle of footsteps. The police were everywhere.

We heard them yelling, “He’s running!”

The police tackled the invader in the dark field next to the house. The police weren’t as alarmed as we were. “He was drunk, an easy arrest.” “He’s Mexican, he doesn’t speak English.” “He’s drunk. He thought this was his house.” We were all speaking at once:

“He did not think he was at his house.”

“Then why did he run away when you guys came?”

“He saw the gun from the window. He knew this was not his house.”

“I think he knew exactly where he was.”

The police weren’t scared like we were. There were more of them, and they had plenty of guns. We were two kids and a mother. I remember the officer telling my brother, “Good thing you didn’t have any bullets. We’d have to be taking you in now instead.”

Outside our door were our hillbilly neighbors who gathered once again to see the Jones family show. They went back inside their homes to talk about us some more before my mom would yell at them.

That night Danny and I slept in Mama’s bed. It seemed to me that sparks were flying from our fingertips. We eventually grew quiet. Before I fell asleep, I watched the lights of passing cars scrawl on the bedroom wall with the urgent movement of people going somewhere. I wondered where they were going and I wished I were going somewhere too. We fell asleep to the touch of our mother, with Danny’s loaded BB gun leaning against the wall.

The next day we recast our terror as comedy as we told the story to each other over and over again. I felt that giddy exultation of the survivor and thrill seeker. It was like my body was firmer somehow, or the air was lighter inside of me. The danger had made us closer as a family. Danny, Mom, and I. Mom started locking all our doors every night, which was unheard-of in 1963. Danny started weight lifting. I simply placed the event where I would not trip over it. Somewhere back in dreamland. Deep in dreamland.

My dad quit his job with Bekins Moving and Storage and, at last, returned to our house. By the summer of 1964 we moved again. I would never again know the gluey feeling of family I had felt on Orangewood Avenue, the endless hours as I seemed to grow inward instead of onward, and stretched the time in every direction it would go.

Geronimo the quarter horse did not make the move with us. He had tried to kill my mother one morning while we were grooming him. He put back his ears and squeezed Mom into the wall. She yelled at me to get out of the stall, and then kept him at bay while I ran under the fence. Then she deftly ducked under him and made a run for the fence herself with the horse right behind her. No time for the gate, Mom hit the fence at full speed and flipped over the top rail. It was incredible. All that gymnastics in school really paid off.

It was terrifying but I laughed. It was the first time I laughed at something that frightened me. A giddy kind of laugh that kids do when things are too terrible. Mom was more hurt that I laughed. We sold Geronimo to a cowboy who said he would teach him to herd cattle. He said he would not geld him and that my horse would be a father to all the quarter horses of New Mexico.

Geronimo!!