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 ai
r, 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.
5
Nurse-in-Charge
Rosa Leu, Aeschlen, Switzerland, 1944
In the tiny village of Würzbrunnen, in the central mountainous German-speaking part of Switzerland that is called the Berner Oberland, which looks like a tourist brochure come to life—the brown cows with huge bells ringing as they walk and flower garlands around their creamy necks, the grass full of wildflowers and the wooden houses perched on the steep slopes—there is a very small church famous in Switzerland.
The Wolf Church, it is called by our Erb relatives, the family of Rosa Erb Leu. The Erbs have been in this part of Switzerland since the 1600s, in the village of Aeschlen and surrounding area. This church is beautifully simple, pale wooden interior carved with flowers and garlands and biblical verses, no flourishes or gold. It is Anabaptist, the precursor to the Mennonites, plain and devout. But in the base of the stone walls, plastered over with white, are interred the bodies of four women.
Their names are inscribed on the exterior foundation. They were four mothers who all died within the space of a year, just after giving birth, their bodies wracked by fever and infection spread by a traveling doctor who never washed his hands or sterilized his equipment, back in the early 1800s. They would have been better off with a midwife. The babies had to be raised by others.
Rosa Erb was a distant descendant of one of those women. Her relatives told us this place was called the Wolf Church because the last wolf in Switzerland was killed near here. There are no large wild predators in Switzerland now—no wolves or bears, because they were all hunted a century ago. Cows and goats and sheep were always how farmers survived in the mountains. The Erb family has the most successful chicken hatchery in the area.
I remember standing in this place, the dark forest all around us, the vision of wolves and dying mothers and babies bundled in cloth and given to someone else. It felt like I had stepped inside the Grimm’s fairy tales that my mother read to us with commentary, unlike most other mothers. She had lived in the forest. She had walked with a wooden basket. She had a little apron. She had a stepmother who wished she would disappear.
My mother has returned to Switzerland only briefly, three times since she left in 1950. The first time, my stepfather sold his laundry business and took all of us to the place where she was born, which she hadn’t seen for twenty-eight years. We tried to find her mother’s grave in Wattenwil, in a tiny cemetery. We walked the rows again and again, as her face crumpled. No stone with the name Frieda Leu. On the narrow lane through the village, an older woman told my mother that after a few decades, another person is buried on top. “There is no room,” the woman said, holding a wooden basket filled with cheese.
A week later, we went to the Wolf Church with Marie Erb, who married Rosa’s brother Fritz and had six sons. The Erbs had become our Swiss family, though Rosa Erb Leu never went back home.
Rosa was born in August 1916 in Oberdiessbach, the ninth of ten children. Her mother died when Rosa was three. Her stepmother, whom the children had to call Mrs. Erb, hated the girls. Too many daughters in that family, and three of the girls were sent off to marry widowers with children. Men who needed a woman to clean and cook and run a house. Rosa had dealt with blood, injury, and disease for her entire life. She never had a chance at love, and in all my years, I never saw my grandmother smile, touch anyone with joy, or behave in any way as if happiness and pleasure were not terrible ideas, and extremely unhealthy.
Rosa’s first job, when she was sixteen, was to train as a nurse in an insane asylum in another valley, about fifty miles from her home. I found this out only when I was an adult, and she was nearly blind. I went to visit her, at her mobile home in Hemet, California, twenty miles from here, a mobile home whose décor had never changed in the thirty years she’d lived in it. I stood close to my favorite painting, the first piece of art I had truly studied, when I was very small. This was the world my mother had left: a scene by the Swiss artist Anker, a woman leading a parade of children down a rural lane with the Alps in the distance. But this afternoon, when I spoke to her about the picture
, my grandmother stood beside me and pointed to a building tucked into a fold of the mountain behind the road. “I worked there. That is the krankenhaus for the people ill in their brain,” she said. As she got older, half her words went back to Swiss German. “It was a terrible place. That was mein arbeit when I was sixteen. With those terrible people. I was always a nurse.”
Then she said, “You can go see if there are tomatoes.” For Christmas, she gave us flannel pajamas. We did not live in the snow. We lived in a place where Christmas Day sometimes reached 85 degrees, but she didn’t want us to catch cold.
As a child, I loved the homes of parents from other places. Our neighbors were from Japanese cities, and they had rice-paper screens and kimonos; from the rural Philippines, with lemongrass in the garden and the smell of adobo cooking; pueblos in Mexico from which parents brought plaster statues of the Virgen of Guadalupe, veladora candles lit on altars, and pan dulce left as ofrendas for the dead; rural Louisiana, where huge electric cookers would be full of gumbo and the fathers spoke Creole French; Mississippi, where fried chicken and greens were on the stove and blues by Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were on the stereo.
No one knew where Switzerland was, and no one had a mother and grandmother from the land of Heidi, featuring florally accessorized cows, cheese with holes that seemed to emanate stink, and a weird wooden clock.
In the only photo I had ever seen of my real grandmother, Frieda Steiger Leu was wearing the Swiss costume of her canton, smiling widely, leading a parade of schoolchildren down a rural road. Exactly like the famous painting. My mother showed us the photo maybe three times during our entire childhood. Not until I was fifty, and asked a friend to make a digital copy, did my mother point to one child and say casually, “That’s me.” She is holding her mother’s hand.
In the Country of Women Page 6