by Mary Oppen
Mornings we drove until we found a roadside place open for breakfast. We discussed farms, animals, horses; I told Linda an endless story about Hoppy the Frog until she began calling me “Hoppy.” We passed horses on the prairie, and George caught one for Linda; he has a poem:
“Horse,” she said, whispering
By the roadside
With the cars passing. Little girl welcomed,
Learning welcome.
California and Exile
1946–1958
We stopped with friends in Los Angeles who were living in a housing project, shared between blacks newly arrived in wartime from the South and whites from the East, also newly arrived. Los Angeles was a strange vast city encompassing hundreds of communities on land which earlier had been planted with orange groves or which had been garden acreage. Our friends had no place for us to sleep, so we drove at nightfall to the foothills and went to sleep as we had slept coming across the country. In the middle of the night police troopers swept up, shone their lights on us and woke us up. I said to them, “Hush, you will wake the child,” and they went away.
We drove to San Francisco to visit George’s father and stepmother. For George and for all G.I.’s the business-as-usual attitudes in New York City and in George’s family when we met them in San Francisco were infuriating. We thought we had fought the war so that anti-Semitism would be defeated, so that the holocaust should never happen again. In a party in San Francisco in George’s father’s house, a very rich man said to George in conversation, “I just returned from Florida.”
“And how was it there?” asked George.
“Oh, it was full of kikes,” he said.
George asked our niece how it was that a Jew could speak so, and she answered, “Oh, he thinks that only Jews speak in that way about Jews.”
Not a house or a chicken coop was to be rented; housing was all in use, and people were pouring into California. George’s father went with us to buy a house-trailer. It had a separate little bedroom for Linda with a sliding door, a table and a bench that folded into a bed for George and me at night. It was well insulated, a snug and comfortable place to live. In 1946 trailer living was a comfortable way to travel and a possible way to have a dwelling place at that moment after the war. It suited our needs, and we found it almost a perfect way to live for a year or two. We had strained our emotions too much with the war and with separation—we had to be at home and by ourselves. George and I had had almost no experience of being equally parents, nor had Linda had a father within her young memory.
George had driven trucks of all sorts in the Army; he had always been a fine driver, and he drove the oversize trailer up the winding cliff-side Highway #1 to Oregon. Linda discovered the abalone shells that were on every beach. George rigged a rope to lower her down and lift her up the steep cliffs, and she collected shells. We carried fifty pounds of lovely shells that she couldn’t part with.
As we drove up the coast George and I discussed how best to talk to my mother. We decided to ask questions; George said, “Perhaps she will speak more freely now, and you may find out what it is that has made you feel guilty toward your mother.” Eleven years had elapsed since I had seen my mother, and she had not seen our child. So much time had passed that I had become a stranger from outside her life, and she could talk to me as she had never talked to me when I lived with her. It was a relief to find that I had not been central in her life. The fifteen years I had been in her house had slipped aside, and she remembered far more vividly the years before she married and the years after my father’s death, when I was gone from her life. On this visit she had presents to give us. For George she had a mandolin (George the poet), for Linda she had the little folding enlarging glass she had used for studying botany at teacher’s college (Linda studied medicine), and for me she had a biography of women feminist leaders at the time of the Civil War (I am a liberated woman). She could not have known what symbolic gifts she gave!
Wendell found five-year-old Linda enchanting and took her to show her how to make ice cream sodas. Wendell and my mother were running a trailer camp, and they had an ice cream parlor too.
It was the end of March, and the higher mountains were still snowy. The Oregon Caves were strange and wonderful to enter by ourselves—it was too early in the season for guides; we were the discoverers, and high inside the caves we saw light coming through a crevice. We climbed to it and wriggled through, to find ourselves in snow. We sat to regain our sight in the bright light and then slid down the hillside.
I was relieved of a burden of guilt with this visit. Mama lived now in a continuation of her girlhood hopes and ambitions, and I thought of her more happily. My presence had made her uncomfortable when I was adolescent. Now, with her death, I sigh and think of her as I never knew her, but perhaps as she more nearly was.
Wendell came to see me in 1972, and he mentioned that Noel had brought down a truck-load of Christmas trees to San Francisco. He asked Noel, “Come along to visit Mary?”
Noel replied, “No, I guess not, she writes me a letter once in awhile, and that’s enough.”
It was one letter, which I had written the previous spring, and it could have been written any time in the past forty years. I told him that he had been the one in my life after my father died and until I met George, I believed he loved me, because he thought about me and asked me to live with him and then let me go freely and confidently. I wrote that as he had believed in me, so I believed in myself. I wrote about our father’s death, how bereft I had felt and how I had turned to the first man who touched me.
I realize in writing this that perhaps I am also describing my mother. I had interpreted her to myself as not having lived the life she wanted, because she once told me that she had at first wanted my father’s older brother. But she lived her life with my father whole-heartedly and with great spirit. For her to have abandoned that spirit at his death would have been death for her too. She was still an attractive woman when my father died, but I thought of her only as my mother. I did not see her attractiveness to men, and I was, in a sense, my father’s eyes on her; I was intolerable to her in her house.
In the woods where the sea meets the land it is beautiful, and on first sight we persuaded ourselves we could live in Eureka. We had made an acquaintance before we left San Francisco who told us, “I left Eureka to come down here to write, but my fishing partner needs someone to fish with him; also, if you go to Eureka, please look up my dog Jody and take care of him.”
So we looked up the man and the dog. George went on one fishing trip for salmon and came home with a boatload of fish, but he did not like the design of the long and narrow boats used there for ocean fishing. Although it is a beautiful life on the sea at this place on the craggy California coast, it seemed to us to be a hopeless life of hard work. The dog Jody accepted us with dignity, and although he would occasionally go off for a trip to sea on some boat with a fisherman friend, he came home to us tired and hungry and ready to play with Linda or to go for walks with us. He had a passion for swimming, for boats, and for retrieving.
My brother Paul, his wife Julia and their many children were living in Eureka, and George got a job driving a truck. We considered buying land and building a house, but the lumber company town was too violent a community for us. We needed a place that was not at war with itself as this community was. A strike was called in the redwood industry which resulted in violence, threats, and even deaths. Also, the community was insufficient for our intellectual needs. We spent a month or two with the trailer parked under redwoods in an abandoned cherry orchard whose trees gave us ripe dark red cherries, and we absorbed the quiet of the forests.
The house trailer was a haven for us. We stopped almost anywhere—in forest, beside the road or beside the sea. We let down the doorstep and we were at home. I liked living in the trailer more than in any house, but the trailer parks or trailer camps were not pleasant, no
r was it easy to find one where children were welcome. As we went back down the coast we inquired of other families in trailers, “Where is there a trailer camp near Los Angeles for us, one that welcomes children?” We were directed to a trailer park in Compton, on the south side of Los Angeles, in a working-class part of town near the new airplane factories and small machine shops. The owner of this trailer park took in only families with children. It was crowded, but for our needs at that moment it was a good place, and in the newly-built school Linda entered the first grade. The project for their work was “My Home,” and the first picture she brought home was of our trailer with the butane tank on the front bumper. The teacher and most of the children also lived in trailers.
Howard, a boy of seven, came by our trailer with a large Mason jar. I asked, “What is in the jar, Howie?”
“Black widow spiders, want to see them?” and he unscrewed the lid to show me dozens of black widow spiders. “I’m going to give them to my teacher.”
I said, “But Howie, they are poisonous; what if you got bit?” I sprayed them with an insecticide; he wept, and I remembered Raymond’s mother who had destroyed the sand-pile park that we had made with ground glass fountains when I was Howie’s age.
A stable adjoined the trailer park on the bank of the dry Los Angeles river-bed, where we rented horses and rode in the afternoons. Linda had been in love with horses since she rode her first horse in the desert on the way across the country. Here she loved Babe, a beautiful golden-chestnut mare who was a perfect horse for a child, but Babe was barn-sour—she would turn suddenly and head back for the stable. George bought Babe for Linda and trained her, just for Linda. One day George rented a horse, a new small red Arab gelding named Little Red, and as he was putting him in the corral, the corral horses crowded Little Red, who did not know the horses, though he did know George a little. He stayed at George’s elbow, nudging George to stay with him. George bought Little Red for himself, leaving me without my own horse. Then for me George bought the horse I liked best, a big gaited gelding named Trigger. I couldn’t sleep that night—I never had thought I would have my own horse.
A small circus wintered in the stable, and Linda and I rode the baby elephant, Zaida. The horses did not like the circus animals; they shied sometimes when suddenly around a corner they met Zaida, and the smells of the caged animals made the horses snort.
Los Angeles encompasses hundreds of small communities, like Compton, which retain vestiges of their small-town identity, although super-highways bypass or go over them. Not a house was available. George worked a short while in a machine shop and then began to build houses with Stewart, a neighbor in the trailer court. These houses were bought before they were finished, usually by Japanese who were returning to civilian life after their internment in the camps where they had been held during the war, or by G.I.’s using the G.I. loan with low interest rates. The houses were on larger-than-usual plots of ground, and the kitchens were well planned and open to the living areas; as far as the banks would allow, George tried to make them attractive. Bank loans for building were based on conservative house plans—no slant roofs, no facing the back of the house to the street or similar slight changes were allowed by the bankers. George and Stewart were on their way to being successful in the building boom that followed the war; hundreds of people were pouring into the state every month, and they all needed houses.
I drove our car a hundred miles a day, taking Linda to school, George to work, and then going to look for a piece of land for our own house. It was strange to me to think of owning a piece of land, a piece of Earth, a piece of our planet. I found an acre of land at Redondo Beach, near the sea and high above the surrounding valley, with two eucalyptus trees on what was called “the soil.” It had been a Spanish land grant, with only two previous owners, and tomatoes had been grown there a short time before we bought it.
In 1946, a land-owner in California could write into his deed any restrictions he liked, and they were binding on future owners; it was difficult to find a piece of land which was not restricted to whites only. Our land had only the restriction that alcohol could not be sold from it. All three of us went to look at the land, and then we bought it. The first thing we built was a corral of cyclone fence. We trailered our horses to the land and came every night to feed and ride them, and we soon knew our neighbors.
In the Depression of the 1930s settlers in Redondo had lived in packing cases or in homes they were building themselves. Redondo had vigilant citizens, many of whom attended city council meetings to protect their rights and the character of the community. An airplane was being repaired in one yard, in another an excavation for a swimming pool was being dug, in another a six-meter yacht was being built; and many families kept horses. After work electric saws could be heard from the valley below us—everyone was building. We made friends with a Finnish couple who had come to the United States as cook and butler; they had saved their money and now were building their own house, with, of course, a Finnish sauna. Mr. Johannon also had a horse seventeen hands high, with fancy tack—black bridle and saddle. He said, “I always want to be cowboy, so when I see ad in paper I buy horse and saddle, but horse not know me. I never been on horse and horse not go. I cluck to him, he still not go, so I knock my stirrups together under his belly. He go a few steps—I do it again, he goes again, that is how I go home. I pass a door with a little boy who yells for his mama, ‘Mama, come and see the cowboy.’ I happy.” Mr. Johannon galloped his horse now, and they made their own rules. Mr. Johannon would yell “Whoa,” and the horse would stop abruptly.
Our neighbors across the street had been dusted out of Oklahoma in the Great Dust Storm of the 1930s, and down the street was an old Armenian couple with a grape arbor and a fine garden. Behind us were a Mexican couple, Lupe and Jose, twenty-five years old or so, with four children; their baby rocked in a homemade hammock from the ceiling. They had romantic tales of the fruit-picking and the dance halls that had been part of their lives. Our own friends Raf and Carlin came to live on our street. Raf was learning the printing trade on the G.I. bill for education, and we all helped one another in building our houses.
We could not move our trailer to our land until we had water, a cesspool and a toilet. George went to the bank to borrow money for the houses he and Stewart planned to build, and the man at the bank said, “But you have no credit rating.”
George asked, “How can credit be established?”
“Oh, you buy on credit, and as you make payments you get a rating.”
I went the next day and bought a 20' by 20' garage on credit, to be built on our land on a concrete slab. With credit established, in one week there stood a little building under the eucalyptus trees on our land. We rented a bulldozer and made a driveway up through the cliff onto our land; we brought our house trailer and installed it beside the little utility building, which was the core of the house we built later, extending the building around a patio of bricks. But we still had no water, and the town did not plan to put in a water line to our end of the street in time for our needs. It took me a long time to find enough pipe to lay our own water line—meanwhile, we used water brought by garden hose from the nearest neighbor’s house. These same neighbors had a pig half grown, already a large animal. Only the woman and her daughter were in their household, as the son was in and out of an Army hospital with injuries from the war. The woman asked George one day to help her put the pig in her car. George had never handled a pig, and he knew nothing about how to put a pig into a car, but he went at the task with aplomb. He grabbed the pig by its hind legs and walked it like a wheelbarrow to the car; the pig walked himself right up the step and onto the seat.
I made a list of all the parts necessary for the model bathroom I had chosen from a Sears Roebuck catalog. I then set out on my daily search for parts. Because of the war, house-building supplies were in short supply, and a real search had to be made. At one point I had twenty weekends of work
scheduled, filling in my list from parts I found as I drove about the outskirts of Los Angeles, hunting. We completed weekend after weekend of work on our house. I bought a how-to book on plumbing, another for electric wiring; George did the plumbing and I did the wiring on the 20' by 20' service building. It was like solving puzzles. We hired a neighbor who was in the business to put in the cesspool, and except for the difficulty about water, we were established on our own land. An acre of land seemed the nearest to farming we would ever come; I said to George and Linda, “If there is any animal you ever wanted, here is the place for it.”
Some friends from the trailer camp, a family with five boys, moved to the opposite side of Los Angeles, fifty miles away. They raised rabbits and had many other creatures too, all of them prolific. On Linda’s birthday and on holidays they came bringing a pair of ducks, or doves, or pigeons—it was like filling up the ark. The pet-store man bought finches and ring-necked doves from us which multiplied in our aviary. He telephoned one day: “Mrs. Oppen,” he asked, “would you please give a home to a gopher snake a little boy can’t keep any longer?” I was doubtful, but Linda and I went to the library and read, “The gopher snake is the most domesticated snake to keep for a pet.” We went to the pet store and were handed a large brown grocery bag. At home in our garden we opened the bag, and out crawled a three-foot-long handsome snake, who wriggled across to a gopher hole. He went down it, and we never saw him again!