Читать книгу In the Country of Women - Susan Straight - Страница 16
ОглавлениеWhen I was twelve, my mother was at the wheel when our 1966 Ford station wagon, the Country Squire, ran over me. This was at Yogi Bear Campground in the San Bernardino Mountains, and I lay on Boo Boo Lane. I couldn’t make that up.
The ultimate car of motherhood, used to ferry all her children—the three she bore, the five foster children she cared for over eight years—all of us used to lie on our bellies in the taupe metal storage area playing cards and sharing one box of Crackerjack. I remember the oily darkness of the undercarriage when the wheels thumped over me, and the smell of the asphalt under my cheek. My poor mother, seeing me crumpled there. She hadn’t wanted to take me down the mountain to cheer camp. She never wanted me to shake pompons, because then I’d act dumb even though I wasn’t, and I’d probably get pregnant.
When she was fifteen, her stepmother had tried to marry her off to a pig farmer in Canada. The worst fate my mother could imagine was being pregnant.
For my mother, cheerleaders and pompon girls were the kind who cared about beauty, and beautiful girls caused trouble.
At twelve, I had nothing going for me other than my national prize from Reader’s Digest for speed-reading, and a four-year record of perfect spelling tests. In my neighborhood, those were liabilities. It was the time of Farrah Fawcett and Pam Grier—big hair and boobs mattered in junior high, and it looked like I’d never have either. My chest was flat, and the summer of 1973, my hair was a disturbing shimmery green.
I was a girl who already imagined entire novels in which bodies were discovered in idyllic locations, moss-covered waterfalls and pine glens where the tree trunks glistened with golden sap. A girl detective had to figure out that a killer was always watching, and find out how the victim died, while keeping herself hidden from the killer. On hot nights, I lay with my face close to the screen of my bedroom window hearing teenaged boys walk past with stolen beer, hijacked construction materials, and money from marijuana deals. I figured neither Nancy Drew nor Agatha Christie had been offered weed in sixth grade.
Clearly, my reading was now dominated by the murder mysteries in my two sole sources for books: the bookmobile, and my parents’ single bookcase, which held only the 1970 Encyclopedia Britannica collection, meaning I knew thousands of random facts about arachnids, Constantinople, and zoology, and the Reader’s Digest Condensed Novels, meaning every month I read a new crime novel.
I had no idea how to look acceptable. We five kids grew up in matching T-shirts my enterprising mother sewed from double-knit fabric she got on sale from TG&Y. Boy-style crew-neck T-shirts—only one pattern. The fabric was horizontally striped or in sad small patterns of chevron or stick figures. We each got a single pair of Toughskins jeans per year, from Sears. When we were small, she actually put small Tupperware bowls—milky green or white plastic—on our heads to cut the hair of my foster sisters and me. In spring, the boys were shorn with clippers.
All young boys were shorn in spring this way in my neighborhood, no matter their race or age. Boys needed only skulls, as far as I could see. But other girls had braids and ribbons and curls and barrettes. By sixth grade, some girls had eye shadow.
Not me. My mother hated the entire concept of natural beauty conferring upon a woman more value than her hard work, or of mild attractiveness enhanced in not-natural ways. My mother hated makeup and nail polish.
Three boys in the tub, and then two girls. We washed our hair under the faucet, neck bent awkwardly so it always felt like I was offering myself up for sacrifice as the water hit my forehead. A showerhead didn’t occur to her. My mother had a lot to do, feeding us, keeping us alive, and trying to attend classes at the city college. She’d never been able to graduate from high school in Canada.
Our neighborhood, a tract of houses between orange groves and boulder-strewn foothills, was full of people from somewhere else. Most of our neighbors were military men stationed at the nearby Air Force base, and many had foreign-born wives. The moms in my neighborhood were from Japan, the Philippines, England, Germany, and nearly every state in America. My close friend since kindergarten was Delana (not her real name). We both got glasses in fifth grade, and were teased mercilessly. But aside from her glasses, Delana was beautiful. Her Filipina mother bequeathed her tawny gold skin and thick wavy black hair, and her American military father his large amber eyes and perfect teeth.
I was elfin and useless to boys with my flat chest, terrible hand-crocheted vests, and tragic attempts to tie a thrift-store silk scarf around my throat like models I saw in my stepsisters’ Seventeen magazine. I wouldn’t let my mother cut my hair now, and it grew past my shoulders, so I braided it in a crown around my head, the way Anne Shirley did in Anne of Green Gables. I looked like a tiny French grandmother. The new glasses made things worse. At least Delana got tortoiseshell rectangles. I got blue-framed cat-eye glasses, which are very much in fashion now—definitely not back then.
I was the size of a Chihuahua compared to other girls. For three months of summer, my hair was alien green from swimming in the heavily chlorinated city pool. My black and Chicana classmates thought this comic and mildly frightening, and referred to me as a Martian. I had the cat-eye glasses, miserable teeth—a gap between my front teeth, one of which was already chipped from constant roughhousing with my siblings, and one fang perched visibly way up in my gum line. My legs were so thin they resembled peeled mulberry branches.
Just before summer, Delana took off her glasses, in class, and put them away. She never wore them again. I was stunned, not by her lack of camaraderie. “How can you see the blackboard?” I whispered, and she replied, “I don’t care what the blackboard says. It doesn’t matter. We’re going to junior high.”
It didn’t matter what was on the blackboard. It mattered that we become cheerleaders, to get boyfriends and survive junior high.
The first weeks of summer, we walked through the orange groves and over the canal to the newly built junior high, where the eighth-grade girls studied us with disdain and impatience, sternly demonstrating the complicated tryout routines.
“Cheerleaders are brainless fools, jumping up and down like idiots,” my mother said, when she saw my arms moving robotically in the backyard. “It’s not a sport. It’s a beauty contest and I don’t want you doing it.”
I had spent years going to my brothers’ Little League baseball games, but though we girls played ball in the park, and I could hit, girls couldn’t play baseball, or Pop Warner football, or any other organized sport, in 1973. I was allowed to work the snack bar, where I’d been maneuvered under the bleachers and pushed into the dark supply room and felt up by older boys. That wasn’t a sport I wanted to continue.
I made the pompon squad only because the older girls needed a Chihuahua-size mascot who could climb to the top of the pyramid and stand with little feet on the shoulders or thighs of other girls. I was told to put away my glasses, do something with my hair, and get measured for a uniform.
I went to the house of Mrs. Yoshiko Smith, from Japan, who would sew uniforms for the pompon squad. My mother didn’t like the cost of cheerleading. She made odd pronouncements about the older girls: Pretty but brainless. Spoiled rotten and won’t ever work. She’ll have a baby in a few years and she’ll never go anywhere.
We were twelve and thirteen. How could she deduce these things by simply observing my friends? She never talked to them. Our class president wore velvet hot pants, thigh-high boots, and her long hair was ironed straight. Other girls wore hip-hugger jeans and baby-doll shirts, their hair curled back and sprayed into permanence as if they were facing forward from a ship’s prow, flying in the breeze.
During one visit to my father, I’d seen my stepsisters actually ironing their hair, on an ironing board, their cheeks pressed to the fabric while the iron’s point traveled near their ears. I held my breath. At home, I starched bathroom curtains and delicately moved the iron’s point into the ruffles.
And rather than going to Disneyland, where the eighth-grade cheerleaders had organized a group outing, we packed our small travel trailer, pulled by the old station wagon. We went every year to Yogi Bear Campground because my mother loved the mountains. My brothers loved Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo. We were the apex of uncool.
I never thought about how much my mother missed the mountains of her childhood, which she lost as quickly and silently as a coffin lid closed over the face of her own beloved mother.
My mother, Gabrielle Gertrude Leu, grew up in Burgistein, Switzerland, a tiny village in the Swiss Alps, on the slopes of steep mountains in a narrow valley. Their chalet was named Sunnenschyn—Swiss houses always had names carved into the balconies. That house was Sunshine.
When my mother was six, my grandfather Paul Leu tried running a sauerkraut factory. The valley grew cabbage well, and the shredded cabbage was salted and placed in large wooden vats with boulders holding down the wooden lids; my mother remembers the vivid overwhelming smell of that failure, and the constant work of pressing moisture out of the cabbage and fermenting the leaves. He and his wife, Frieda, then had two small sons, and my mother spent her time working in the garden, darning socks, and skiing to school.
She was tiny, my mother, and excelled at theft. She told us about walking home from school, stealing cherries and pears from trees in the farms along the road. She stole Tobler chocolate from the small store her mother ran on the house’s first floor. My mother hid the bars in the precisely stacked woodpile all Swiss men keep beside the house. She sold the chocolate to American soldiers who came through the village in Jeeps during World War II.
Frieda, her mother, was always smiling, a gentle, dark-haired compact woman who loved to draw and paint. When my mother was nine, Frieda Leu grew ill with ovarian cancer. There was no cure—she was sent home from the hospital. “She was bedridden,” my mother told me, and I imagined that terrible word—a disease rode my grandmother’s body while she lay helpless in the sheets. The illness lasted for months, and a stern young nurse named Rosa Erb was hired—essentially to ease Frieda into death, and to take care of the three children. When Frieda died, my mother crept down the stairs to see her mother’s body lying on the kitchen table. Frieda was thirty-nine years old, and my mother was nine.
Gabrielle Gertrude Leu near Wohlhusen, Switzerland, wearing her apron, 1939
She told me about these years only in fragmented shards until she turned eighty, when these memories began to spill out. Now, every week, she remains incensed by this loss, and retells me the story.
Shortly after Frieda’s burial, Rosa Erb, twenty-eight, was married to Paul Leu. No man took care of his own children back in 1943 in Switzerland. My mother says her stepmother treated her as a small plain burden useful only for hard work, until she could be rid of her. The way my mother described her life in the Swiss forests and snowy mountains, her stepmother might as well have been roaming the woods looking for a huntsman to take my mother’s heart.
I have one photo of my parents shortly after their marriage, taken in Las Vegas—it is a postcard taken by the casino that my father addressed to himself, at their tiny house behind a real house. My mother looks as she does in every picture, stoic, sturdy, and suspicious. Her hair is short and brown. No-nonsense. One wave of curl near her forehead. She wears sensible clothing. Her lips hold half a smile.
I didn’t realize that was because she had already lost all her top teeth, due to the poor hygiene common to 1940s Europe, and a California dentist who told her he would just pull them all and give her a denture. She was only twenty. Who does that? She was an immigrant, her English wasn’t great, and he probably wanted the money. When I was little, her teeth—pink and white and floating in a glass by her bed—were terrifying. But it wasn’t until I was grown that I thought about the sadness of that plastic.
Christophe Leu, Rosa Erb Leu, Paul Leu, Gabrielle Leu, Thun, Switzerland, 1944
Gabrielle and Richard Straight, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1956
Richard Straight left her for a lovely woman named Ruth Catherine—my stepmother, my father’s third wife, told me many times she’d been an Ivory Soap model in Texas, where she was born. She was seven years older than my father. Taller than my mother, with black hair, green eyes like alexandrite, red lipstick, “a full bosom,” as she liked to say, and carefully gracious mannerisms. I know she had been born on a hard-luck ranch in rural Texas, and that a tornado had tossed her into a tree trunk when she was a child; her left arm still held scarring at the elbow, and she always wore long sleeves, even in summer, which made her seem ever more exotic and polished to me. She put mandarin oranges and almonds in green salad. I had never eaten a mandarin orange in my life.
She loved jewelry and clothes and makeup and nail polish and shoes; my mother was four feet eleven, had trouble finding women’s shoes that fit, didn’t get her ears pierced until she was sixty-two, and gave me her wedding ring when I was a teenager, saying she hated rings, along with weddings.
My stepmother worked as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, in a sad irony for my mother; when my father went in for a filling, Ruth Catherine told him she studied astrology and she had seen their love in the arrangement of the stars. She was divorced, and lived in Pomona. He fell in love instantly, and loved her passionately and obsessively until she died in 2004. He kept her ashes on his dresser until he died in 2018.
I have no idea whether my mother had ever seen this woman, but she hated the accoutrements, accessories, and aspirations of beauty more than anything else in the world. On my weekend visits, my stepmother and stepsisters had painted my nails. Now I was carrying bedraggled blue-and-white pompons everywhere.
On the third day of camping, the day of the Disneyland trip, I mutinied. My mother didn’t want to drive me the hour down the mountain highway, but I argued long and hard. At dawn, there was heavy cold fog all around the campground, and my mother, with a mix of anger and resignation, started up the old battered Country Squire. My youngest brother got into the front seat to keep her company on the way back. Poker-faced, hating my old clothes, I got into the back seat and opened my book.
I can’t remember what I was reading. A library book. I was so engrossed that I didn’t notice the engine stalling repeatedly in the cold. My mother finally backed out onto the steep downhill campground road. The station wagon died again, rolling backward, gaining speed. (That model of Country Squire weighed 4,300 pounds, and was the last model without a system to circumvent brake failure.) My mother says she tried to pump the brakes, then yanked on the emergency brake, which stripped immediately. In the rearview mirror, she saw a deep ravine at the end of the road. She shouted for us to jump, but I was reading. My little brother, who was eight, opened his front door and threw himself out. My mother yelled at me again, and then she jumped out the driver’s door, accidentally wrenching the steering wheel.
I felt a swerve. I pushed down with my elbow on the handle of the back right door, and the car swung sharply, throwing me out. Then the station wagon curved gracefully, front wheel thumping over my crossed legs, and the long car backed itself gently into another slot in the campground and died on Boo Boo Lane.
The femur is the largest bone in the body. I didn’t learn that until my left femur was snapped in two. I remember the pain shaking my body as if a dog held me in its jaws. I remember the smell of the asphalt. I remember being put into the ambulance and blacking out a few times on the hour-long ride down the twisting road to the Riverside hospital where I’d been born. They didn’t give children painkilling medication back then. Not for the whole ride. Not in the emergency room where I spent the night on a gurney alone, while a shadowy night nurse hissed at me to stop crying so loudly because I was waking up the baby in the crib nearby, a middle-aged woman in her terrifying winged cap telling me in a German accent to be quiet and stop moving around and my broken bones would stop rubbing against each other, or she would give me something to cry about. She sounded exactly like my grandmother, Rosa Leu, Nurse-in-Charge, who always frightened me. I blacked out again.
Traction in 1973 was pretty primitive. I lay on my back in a bed, my left leg strapped into a device with weights at the end of my foot to hold the pieces of bone perfectly still while they knitted themselves back together. This was for seven weeks.
I learned all the Latin names for bones from the orthopedic surgeon. My femur was snapped in half between the hip joint and the patella; the tibia and fibula and phalanges remained intact, though covered with blood. The weights were attached to tape stretching along the sides of my lower leg, tape changed frequently when it pulled off my skin and slid down toward my feet. I had bloody stripes along my lower leg. I could move only my head and arms. I had a bedpan. I was not a child, but not an adult. I was supposed to be learning how to be a teenage girl. My various roommates were grown people who arrived and disappeared in the day and the night, whose ailments and surgeries entailed their moaning and crying and shouting. Sometimes I believed they died in the night, when a nurse pulled the curtain around their screams.
I was terrified. My mother was terrified of hospitals, too, maybe because of her own mother’s death. For the first few days, she came at visiting hours, but she had my three brothers and one sister at home, and children were not allowed to visit the orthopedic wing.
Then it got worse. My father wanted to visit. My mother and father could not be in the room together. My father insisted on renting a small television to hang near my right side. My mother was furious. She hated television. She listened to the Dodgers on the radio while knitting.
The second week, my stepmother brought me a makeup kit, on a Saturday. She knew my love for the thirty shades of beauty in tiny compartments—glittery gold and purple and green and blue, cream blushes in bronze and mauve.
My long hair was filthy. That evening, Miss Ledesma, the young Chicana LVN who checked on me every night, saw me with the kit. Her makeup and hair were always perfect. She brought a plastic basin and gently lowered my head into warm water, while I stared up at the ceiling. She lathered my head, her fingernails long and careful on my scalp, and I closed my eyes. No one had been that tender to me in many years. She rinsed out my hair, and combed it through, and blow-dried it. Then she helped me put on eye shadow, blush, and pink lip gloss.
My thin face, the dark circles of pain under my eyes, the scaly grime gathered in rings around my throat: in the hand mirror Miss Ledesma brought me, I was hideous.
On Sunday my mother walked in with yarn. Since I was laid up, she thought I should crochet granny squares for a blanket or new vest. She must have seen the sparkly powders on my face like a violent sunset. She handed me a hot washcloth and told me to scrub off that junk because it made me look like a hooker.
That week, my mother brought to my room the woman who cut her hair short every month. Too much trouble to take care of waist-length hair in the hospital. Her friend sheared my hair to my ears. Now I was a hideous elf. Without any sun or fresh air, my hair darkened to ash, and my skin looked like wax.
I was a completely different human.
When school began, a tutor was sent to my hospital room. I read all day, but there were not enough books. The skin on my left shin and calf was disappearing, long bleeding stripes turned to scabs and then reopened. My muscles were withered by disuse, and the bones reknitted themselves with a ball of calcium that stuck out as if a doorknob had been inserted into my upper thigh.
It was September. I watched hours of televised college football, hating the cheerleaders so much that I paid attention to the games. Football was complex and inventive, the formations intricate, and I was never bored by the passing routes, the offensive line blocking. When people asked what I wanted to be, as a girl of that time, I was given two choices: teacher or nurse. By now, I didn’t want to be a nurse, a woman who yelled if I didn’t eat the gooseberries in my fruit cocktail. Who the hell wanted to eat gooseberries? Why would you name them that? They looked like veined green eyeballs.
I decided to be a sportswriter. In my notebook, I wrote articles for each game, the plays and yardage, star quarterbacks and leaping catches and even the way the light hit the field.
I returned to junior high in November, wearing a body cast. It wrapped around my waist and contained my entire left leg, except my filthy toes. For weeks I’d had a bedpan; now I had to slant my body on the toilet and use a cup. My siblings found this hilarious.
I had crutches. No one remembered me. Everyone stared. Guys whispered to girls about sex, but the only thing guys asked me was how I went to the bathroom. I did not mention the cup. Not sexy.
My friends had swelling curves, tight jeans with two-inch zippers, and platform shoes. I had baggy pants that could stretch over plaster, sarcastic signatures near my knee, and really strong arms.
After two more months, the cast was sawn off. I stood in the hospital parking lot on my crutches, crying. My left leg was so thin and helpless that when the winter wind blew, my foot swung of its own volition. My calf was scarred deeply from the traction tape, with stripes of brown as if someone had spilled hot chocolate down my shins. It took weeks of physical therapy until I could walk again.
My grandmother Rosa paid a professional visit to inspect my leg. She said with detachment, “He did a good job, that orthopedic. He could have put screws. I thought her leg would be two inches shorter than the other. I thought you would have to pay for the special shoes—the ones that would make her normal.” Then she turned away.
Since she felt no love for us, I tried to study Rosa with my own literary detachment. She was a combination of Great-Aunt March in Little Women and the grandfather in Heidi. I knew by then my mother was like Francie’s mother in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn combined with the mothers of Toni Morrison’s novels The Bluest Eye and Sula. I didn’t fully understand those women, but their soliloquies about illness and laundry and hardship were monologues I heard while I ironed or sorted my brothers’ jeans with dried mud like small hubcaps at the knees.
There is a watercolor painting here in my house: a still life of wine bottle and gathered fruit. My mother kept it in a folder that we children only glimpsed a few times. When I was an adult, and she moved, I rescued the painting from the trash. She said to me, “I took a painting class at the YWCA. Then I found a book—teach yourself to paint. My mother was an artist. She made beautiful sketches of our garden and our house in Switzerland.” She studied her watercolor, and said dispassionately, “Just after I finished this, I had you, and then I never painted anything again. My life was over.”
Also in the trash, I found the teach-yourself-to-paint book, with her last, half-finished still life of fruit and flowers. I have it here in my office.
I cannot draw anything. But I loved paintings, sketches, and photography. Maybe I got that from my mother’s mother, Frieda. Because I inherited nothing from Rosa, the only grandmother I ever knew.
