Raising Myself

by Beverly Engel

  To the outside world, my mother was Glenda. She was beautiful, gracious, and charming. She had an air of dignity about her that made her seem like royalty—especially compared to most people in our little agricultural town. People respected my mother. They listened to her, gave her special treatment and considerations. Men, no matter what age, always fawned over her and women instantly took to her and wanted to be her friend. She might as well have been wearing a beautiful glittering gown and carrying a wand. She sparkled.

  I was the only one who saw the bad-witch side of my mother. She saved this special privilege all for me. I’d watch as she smiled sweetly at a neighbor who happened to drop by unannounced. I’d watch as she invited the neighbor in and offered her a cup of coffee. I’d watch as she listened attentively as the woman told her stories or gossiped about other people. I’d watch as she ushered the neighbor out the door, saying to her, “Come by any time. It’s always good to see you.”

  And then I’d watch as she turned to me, rolled her eyes, and said, “I wish that woman had some manners. What’s wrong with her that she thinks she can just drop by that way, unannounced?”

  I was the only one who knew that the charming woman who everyone loved was not so charming after all. I was the only one who knew that she always had something cutting to say about every person she knew. Her good friend June, who worked with her at Thrifty Drug Store and sometimes came to pick us up on Sundays, who drove us all the way to her house in Oildale to have Sunday dinner, with whom she spent long hours drinking beer and talking and laughing, was made fun of and called “Juney Pie” behind her back.

  “Little Juney Pie with her petite little body and her perfect little house,” my mother would mock.

  Alone in our small apartment after her long hours of working at the drugstore, my mother let her hair down, so to speak, as she drank her first of many nightly beers. That’s often when the Wicked Witch of the West came out. Her messages to me were subtle but deadly, and they were often nonverbal, delivered only with her eyes, facial expression, and exasperated sighs. The messages were clear: “Leave me alone, I’ve worked hard all day.” “Can’t you just be quiet?” “Can’t you just entertain yourself?” “You are in my way.” “I wish you would go away.”

  Being a smart kid, I got the messages loud and clear. I learned to stay clear of my mother when she was drinking. Talking to her too much, making too much noise, asking for anything, was risking her wrath. And this I would avoid at all costs, for when she got angry I saw the real witch—the witch with the sharp chin and the sharp words, the witch who could melt me into a puddle with one look from her glaring, hate-filled eyes.

  I knew I was walking on thin ice with my mother—that she was just tolerating me and it wouldn’t be long before she banished me altogether. I tried to become invisible around her when she was drinking. If she couldn’t see me, she wouldn’t be so annoyed by me. If she couldn’t see me, I was less likely to catch her wrath once she’d finished her fourth or fifth beer. I was the vanishing child. I could make myself and my energy very, very small. Or I could vanish outside, where I was free of her scrutinizing gaze.

  Although my mother mostly only showed her good-witch side when she was in public, I do have a few fond memories of times we spent alone together. She didn’t play games with me or read to me like some parents did with their children. I knew not to ask for those things. I knew to be grateful for the fact that she worked hard to put food on the table. I knew to be grateful that she kept me instead of sending me away to a convent—her frequent threat if I dared to disobey her.

  But very early on, while I was still cute and couldn’t yet talk back or be bad, there were times when my mother bounced me on her knee and sang this little ditty:

  Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross

  To see a fine lady upon a white horse;

  With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,

  She shall have music wherever she goes.

  This last part would be said with great relish and I remember laughing with glee. In those moments, long before I was introduced to my mother’s Wicked Witch side, I felt loved. I felt blessed by her magic wand, showered by the glitter and fairy dust she sprinkled upon me.

  When she had the money, she’d take us to the movies, another thing we did well together, perhaps because there was mandated silence. We’d take the bus downtown to the Fox Theater, one of those old theaters decorated in a grandiose way, with baroque pillars and heavy purple drapes. I felt proud to be with my beautiful mother. I loved sitting in the dark theater listening to the dramatic music and anxiously waiting for the movie to start.

  My mother loved keeping up with movie stars like Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart. She adored them, perhaps because their lives were so glamorous compared to hers. I always thought she was beautiful and charismatic enough to have been a movie star herself if she’d been at the right place at the right time for a talent scout to discover her.

  Momma liked dramas filled with romance and pathos. The first movies I remember seeing were Three Coins in the Fountain, Magnificent Obsession, East of Eden, and The Barefoot Contessa with Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner. Most of the movies we saw were not appropriate for young children because they were filled with simmering sexuality and other adult themes. But I loved the sweet darkness of them, their intensity and pain—pain that echoed the deep pain I felt.

  Momma wasn’t just a fan; she was also a critic, and this is where her Wicked Witch side would slip out. She talked about the stars as if she were an expert in acting. And she gossiped about them like they were personal friends of hers. She’d say, in hushed tones, “You know, Sammy Davis Jr. only has one good eye. The other is an artificial one.” When he married Brit Eck-land, a white Swedish actress, she strongly disapproved. “Who does he think he is, marrying a white woman!”

  She also had strong opinions when Eddie Fisher left Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor. “I can’t stand that Debbie Reynolds. She’s too sweet and squeaky clean for me, so I don’t blame Eddie for leaving her. But Liz is just playing with that boy. She’s going to eat him up and spit him out.”

  My mother also kept up with the singers of the time, like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and she loved composers like Gershwin and Cole Porter and Jerome Kern. She loved to sing and she had a beautiful voice. One of her favorite songs was “All the Things You Are,” by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein. She often sang it to me when I was small. The song was a lovely description of how a man felt about his lover, including the idea that she embodied “the dearest things I know.” The song ends with the idea that someday his happy arms will hold her and all the things she embodies will be his.

  I sat mesmerized by her beauty and the loveliness of her voice, soaking up every line. I knew those words weren’t meant for me, but I pretended they were. I wanted to believe she was singing them to me, that this was how she felt about me. I wanted to believe it so much that sometimes I did.

  Momma often cried when the song was over, and I wondered who she cried for—her mother? My father? I never knew. All I knew was that Momma seemed to feel real love and emotion toward someone, and I wished that someone could be me.

  I carry a vision in my mind of my mother as she was when she left for work in the mornings, all powdered and perfumed and made up, her hair done just right, her clothes and jewelry matching perfectly. She was the Good Witch then, and I adored this version of my mother—the fantasy mother who was gracious to others, so proud and regal. I put her on a pedestal. She was a queen and I was her lowly servant. She literally made up a game in which she was a queen and I was her servant in order to get me to clean the house for her, and I happily went along with this ruse, one that continued for years.

  Even as an adult, I hold this version of my mother in my mind. I respect this version. I am proud of the fact that she was so beautiful and so smart and so well loved. I eventually learned, however, that holding on to this image also m
ade it harder for me to let go of the negative messages she conveyed to me—the messages that I was bad, that I was unlovable, that I was “less than.” It’s nearly impossible to reconcile the woman I put on a pedestal—a woman whom I loved, respected, admired—with the woman who despised me, wanted me out of her way, and seemed to want to destroy me at times. How can both of these things be true?

  chapter 10

  I had known Ruby for over four years, and during that time she had always been alone. Her son Don had come to visit her once or twice, but other than that I never saw her with anyone—no friends, and certainly no “boyfriends.” She mostly stayed to herself, except for some late-night talks with my mother and her afternoons with me.

  But one spring day she brought a man named Steve home with her. She invited both my mother and me over to her little apartment to meet him.

  “Olga, Beverly, I’d like you to meet Steve.”

  “Hello, nice to meet you,” my mother said politely, eyeing him up and down.

  Steve reached out to shake my mother’s hand. “So happy to meet you,” he said enthusiastically.

  Then he turned to me. “Hi there, beauty.” He beamed at me.

  No one had ever called me “beauty” before.

  “Hi,” I said, feeling a little shy.

  “Steve is an Indian,” Ruby announced. “Not an Indian from India, an American Indian.”

  She seemed proud of this fact, and this made sense to me, since she liked exotic things. She seemed kind of giddy and childlike as she looked up at Steve, who was much taller than her. This wasn’t like the strong woman I was used to and I didn’t like seeing her this way.

  Steve reminded me of the emblem on Ruby’s Pontiac convertible. He had the same chiseled features: a long, sharp nose and strong chin. He was very dark and very big—not fat, but tall and muscular. He was charming and good-looking. I liked him.

  Although she had been pleasant enough in front of Ruby and Steve, as soon as we got back to our little apartment Momma said to me, “You know, Steve is too young for Ruby. He must be at least fifteen years younger than she is, because she’s almost fifty. And she told me he just got released from a mental hospital for beating his ex-wife. I don’t know what she’s thinking, getting involved with a man like that.”

  She shook her head in the same way she did when she disapproved of something I had done.

  In spite of my mother’s reservations, Steve brought adventure and romance into our lives. One night in early May he suggested we all go on a “moonlight picnic.” The very idea was exciting and mysterious. We all piled into Ruby’s Magic Carpet and sailed off into the night—Ruby, Steve, my mother, and me. We were all bursting with excitement, and for a change my high spirits weren’t squashed by my mother’s typical warning: “Calm down, you know when you laugh too hard you always end up crying later on.”

  When we reached the foothills outside of Bakersfield, Steve stopped the car and we stumbled out into the night. Because there was a full moon we could see almost as clearly as if it were daylight. As we made our way up the hillside with our picnic basket, I felt an excitement growing in my chest. I’d never in my life done anything this thrilling. I was used to staying up late at night because my mother often worked late, and I was accustomed to spending most of my time with adults, but this was an entirely different experience. I wasn’t just being tolerated; Steve made me feel welcome, like my presence was part of what was special about the night.

  “Come on, Bev, let’s race to the top of the hill,” he called to me. “Let’s leave these two slow pokes in the dust!”

  When we reached the top of the hill, Steve spread the blanket on the ground and Ruby retrieved a bottle of wine and some glasses from the huge picnic basket. She had remembered to bring a Coke for me—the glass bottle still cold and frosty. Steve pulled a contraption from his pocket and snapped the cap off my coke, then used the same object to open the wine bottle. He suggested we all drink a toast to our friendship—Steve and Ruby and my mother and me. Ours was a unique friendship—a wild-haired, bohemian woman in her fifties, a prim and proper beauty in her forties, a precocious eight-year-old, and a thirty-five-year-old American Indian man just out of a mental hospital. Who could have known how this friendship would damage all our lives?

  The moon shone brilliantly over our little picnic scene. We ate and laughed and wondered in awe why people didn’t have moonlight picnics more often. We gloated in our unconventionality and creativity. We felt special, and we felt close to one another because of this feeling of specialness.

  chapter 11

  Shortly after our moonlight picnic, my mother decided to move us to Sonora, a small mountain town 220 miles north of Bakersfield in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Momma had hated Bakersfield ever since she had moved us there. And when a 7.3 magnitude earthquake had hit a couple of years earlier, my uncle Forrest and his wife Opal had started pressuring her to move up to Sonora to be close to them. The quake, which killed twelve people, injured eighteen, and nearly destroyed downtown Bakersfield, was the strongest earthquake to occur in California since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. I don’t know why she suddenly decided to move but I think it was mostly because she missed my uncle Forrest, the only relative she was really close to.

  I was devastated about moving away and leaving Pam. In my eight-year-old mind, I didn’t think I could go on without her. I pleaded for Momma to change her mind.

  “No, Momma, no. We can’t go. Don’t you understand, I can’t leave Pam!”

  “I wish you didn’t have to leave Pam behind,” she said. “But sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do, and this is one of those times.”

  I could tell by her tone that, as far as she was concerned, the subject was closed.

  I broke down in deep sobs of sorrow. My sobs were so deep and my crying went on for so long that I became sick and threw up. I even had to miss a few days of school.

  Pam’s friendship was my life’s blood, the very air I breathed. I got so little from my mother, we had such an insubstantial relationship, that Pam was all I had when it came to real closeness. And while my visits with Ruby were certainly important, it was clear that she invited me into her world when she felt like it, and when she tired of me I would be asked to leave. Pam was my sister, my other half. I didn’t just go into her world, we created our own world together.

  Momma’s plan was a complete surprise to me. I knew she hated Bakersfield—she complained about it all the time—but she hadn’t talked about any plans to leave. She just made an announcement one day, and within a few weeks we were on our way.

  Momma always rented furnished apartments because we didn’t have any of our own furniture. So she didn’t have to worry about selling or moving furniture. All she had was a shadow box she kept her perfume bottle collection in and a used stereo she’d bought from a neighbor, both of which she managed to sell by putting an ad in the paper.

  She also decided to sell my set of encyclopedias she’d bought from a door-to-door salesman and paid for over time. She got really angry with me when someone came to see the books and found red underlining all over the pages.

  “Why in the world would you mark up your encyclopedias like that?” she said angrily. “You told me you love those books.”

  “I do love them, Momma. That’s why I underlined them with a red pencil, like you see in the Bible.”

  In spite of the red marks, Momma managed to sell the encyclopedias.

  Since we didn’t have a car and had to take the Greyhound bus, Momma said she didn’t want to have to lug a bunch of suitcases around. She said we could each take one suitcase and we only had room for our best clothes—that was it. Of course, she took her photograph album and jewelry too. I didn’t really have any toys except for a stuffed Humpty Dumpty we’d found in the cabinet of the stereo when Momma bought it. Momma said that since I didn’t play with it anymore, I’d have to leave it behind.

  The day we arrived in Sonor
a it had been snowing and the beautiful white snow lay on the ground like a velvety white carpet. I had never seen snow before, and I was thrilled. My mother wasn’t. It was early June, and she was totally unprepared for the weather being so cold. Neither of us was even wearing a coat. We slipped and slid and shivered as we attempted to walk down the ice-paved streets.

  I was feeling excited about this adventure, but my mother was overwhelmed. She had to carry her suitcase and purse and watch out for me as I plodded behind carrying my own suitcase.

  “I need a drink,” she declared, more to herself than to me.

  She spotted a little tavern nearby, and we trudged and slipped our way to it.

  “A hot buttered rum,” my mother announced to the bartender even before she’d had a chance to get us settled on the bar stools. “And a cup of hot chocolate,” she added, glancing in my direction.

  This was a day of firsts for me. I’d never seen snow and I’d never been in a bar and I’d never heard of a “hot buttered rum” before. I’d heard of hot buttered popcorn, but I was pretty sure my mother hadn’t ordered that. I knew it was an alcoholic drink of some sort, so I pictured a beer, which is what my mother usually drank, with a pat of butter resting on top of it. But I couldn’t imagine a beer being hot.

  The man behind the bar gave Momma a drink that looked something like the hot chocolate he gave me. Both were in a tall mug and steaming hot. As my mother blew on her drink, I could see a pat of butter sitting on top of the hot liquid, just like I’d imagined.

  After we finished our drinks, my mother asked the man behind the bar if he would call us a cab. Momma explained to me that Uncle Forrest didn’t drive and didn’t have a car, so he couldn’t pick us up.

  When we got to Uncle Forrest’s place I was immediately impressed by how tall it was. All the houses in Bakersfield were one-story buildings, so Uncle Forrest’s house looked like a mansion to me. It was sitting on a hillside, with dozens of steps leading up to it.