My grandfather hated mountains. What kind of Swiss man hates the Alps? The Matterhorn in a valley not far away. Chalets, waterfalls, the pristine blue lakes. Paul Leu felt claustrophobic in the deep narrow clefts between the famous mountains. He was tired of working as a train conductor. The war had made survival hard. He wanted adventure. He bought maps and planned to take the family to Venezuela, then the Belgian Congo, then New Zealand, but none of those worked out.
Frieda Steiger Leu, Burgistein, Switzerland, around 1936
He and Rosa had one daughter now, Christine—blond, blue-eyed, fragile and fairylike. In 1950, he and Rosa and the four children took a train through France, crossed the channel to England, and took a ship to Canada. In Oshawa, thirty miles from Toronto, there were farm jobs.
The Leus were given an ancient wooden house, more like a barn, split in half between their Swiss family and a Czechoslovakian family who were war refugees. My mother worked with her father and stepmother hoeing, weeding, picking corn and strawberries. The younger children went to school.
Did Rosa tell my mother she was unattractive? Not destined for love? Not deserving of love? Not living in circumstances that allowed for love?
My mother only says that shortly thereafter, Rosa told her to marry a neighboring pig farmer. The man came to inspect her. My mother refused. Then she ran away. She told me for the first time, two years ago, “Those people were idiots! My father couldn’t even handle a housepainting job. He was too short! He was forty-five years old! They said they were going to America. They were going to buy a trailer and go to Florida. So I packed my suitcase and left. I wasn’t going to live in a trailer.”
She had been babysitting in Oshawa for a family with three children. “They had a brick house,” she told me. (My mother has always loved the finer distinctions of real estate.) “They said I could live there. I babysat the children, I went to school.” She had one and a half years of high school, but quit to work as a night waitress in a hotel coffeeshop, where men came in on break from the General Motors auto plant. Men from Poland and Hungary who had been doctors and architects in a former life. Even more, my mother wanted to make enough money to escape poverty.
That year, my grandfather took Rosa, his sons Christophe and Markus and daughter Christine, across the border to Detroit. He bought a Pontiac and a travel trailer. The family headed to Winter Haven, Florida, where he thought he had another great job, but it turned out to be more crop work. Florida was a place of sandy roads, shacks, hard labor, humidity, and spiders the size of pancakes, according to Rosa. After seven months, she’d had enough. She’d seen postcards from southern California, the images famous for drawing immigrants to the Golden State—orange trees loaded with fruit in the shadow of purple mountains capped with snow. Fontana, California. But more important, someone had told her about Kaiser Steel, which was hiring nurses.
They drove across America to Fontana, parked the trailer in a court among other trailers, and Rosa was immediately hired as a nurse. This was 1952, when Kaiser Steel was a huge manufacturing plant, employing thousands of men, many from Kentucky. My uncles remember getting beaten up by Kentucky boys for their German-sounding Swiss accents.
My grandmother was so stern, unflappable, and orderly that she received in short time her plaque, which read:
ROSA LEU, R.N.
NURSE-IN-CHARGE
My mother received a letter from her family, and decided to come to America when she was twenty. She arrived in Fontana to find her family still living in the travel trailer, using a common bathroom in a cement shed. She lasted three months there. She rented a single room in a boardinghouse on Seventh Street in Riverside, and got a job at Household Finance. She was a teller, Swiss-efficient, and soon she basically ran the branch. She wrote a letter to the corporate headquarters of Household Finance stating these facts, alluding to her boss’s shortcomings, and received a letter back that said, It will be a cold day in hell before we let a woman be manager. This story she told me many times, as evidence that I would have to work twice as hard for half as much.
She lived on the second floor of the boardinghouse, was so poor she ate a banana for lunch, and tried to keep her small transistor radio from being stolen, which it often was. At night she listened to the Dodgers. Vin Scully’s melodious, resonant voice, his vivid enunciation, was how she learned perfect English. (This is true of thousands of immigrants in southern California. When Scully retired last year, at eighty-eight, many told this story on televised tributes, people from all over the world. My mother cried.)
Scully’s voice was magic. My mother has no accent. No one ever assumes she was not born here in California.
When my grandmother died, at ninety-six, she had left instructions to display her starched nurse’s cap and the beloved wooden plaque. Nurse-in-Charge. She always said, “We had only a little cement building at Kaiser back then, and they brought those men to me with broken legs and arms or they were bleeding. I took care of them all.” Kaiser Permanente Healthcare became America’s first HMO, with millions of enrollees now across the nation. Rosa Leu was the oldest living member, and one night, I sat beside her hospital bed as she gave curt instructions to Filipina- and Jamaican- and Mexican-born nurses who marveled at her stories of the early days. I looked at the faces of all these women—traveled from elsewhere, just like Rosa, their constant ministrations to the bodies in the beds, their eyes narrowed in assessment of IVs and needles. The nurses applied lotion to my grandmother’s hands, so crippled by arthritis and hard work that her fingers slanted away from her thumbs like bent wings.
Aeschlen to Thun, Switzerland, to Calais, France, by train; to Dover, England, by ferry; to Montreal, Quebec, by ship; to Toronto by train; to Oshawa, Ontario, to Detroit, Michigan, to Winter Haven, Florida, to Fontana, California: 7,942 miles.
6
Hey Now
Riverside, California, March 1974
When I could walk well again, it was spring. On rainy days, we ate lunch in the gym, sitting in the bleachers with our sack lunches or cafeteria trays. Someone would pull out the record player—yes, an actual record player, with an album spinning, hooked up to speakers—and music blasted onto the hardwood floor between the basketball hoops. The boys got first choice—they played James Brown, Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie,” and “Funky Worm” by the Ohio Players. They locked, the precursor to wild-style hip-hop dancing. They did the Robot, the Worm, handstands and backflips.
But the girls took over and changed the record to the Jackson 5, the Stylistics, and the Spinners. Some of my friends from the pompon squad held out their hands to me. They taught me to dance.
There was a new girl, from Chicago, Michelle Nicholson, with afro puffs and a big smile, and she took over the squad—said she would give us some Chicago style. After all these years, I still find myself walking down the street softly chanting the first cheer Michelle taught us, which we performed with verses I can’t believe any teacher or coach heard us singing on the sidelines of the football games, in 1974. Call and response—Michelle shouted and we sang back.
I like peaches (Hey Now)
And I like cream (Hey Now)
And I like the Lobos (Hey Now)
’Cause they so mean! (Hey Now)
I went to the railroad (Hey Now)
Put my head on the track (Hey Now)
Started thinkin’ ’bout the Lobos (Hey Now)
Took my big head back! (Hey Now)
I went to the liquor store (Hey Now)
Just to buy me a taste (Hey Now)
Started thinkin’ ’bout the Lobos (Hey Now)
Bought a whole case! (Hey Now)
By eighth grade, I was the tiny mascot. In my yearbook, water damage has erased my face, and I see now that my name is the only one omitted—I am actually listed as “(Mascot).” My glasses had been updated to granny rectangles, and I was called Rabbit because I got so tired of pushing them up onto my nose I just did it by alternating twitches of my cheeks. My untouched leg wa
s bowed and the foot slewed permanently to the right like a duck. My repaired leg was straight and covered with scars. My silly grin displayed the crooked teeth. My hair is still tragic. Your father was running past us on the basketball team, not noticing me at all.
But Michelle Nicholson taught me that it didn’t matter what I looked like—as long as I got the words right. As long as we did the song together.
Yearbook photo, Riverside, California, 1974
7
Olympia—One Can Could Get You Pregnant
Riverside, California, June 1974
By the summer before freshman year of high school, I could run again, and my hair had grown out into a short lion’s mane, sunned back to blond after I mowed lawns and washed cars for money. I spent all my spare time with Delana, Dawn, and Tari (not their real names). We lived within three blocks of one another. But during my time in the hospital and then limping through unpopularity, most kids I knew had developed a serious taste in drinking.
Everyone’s parents drank, at those ’70s backyard parties with fondue and guacamole, but our refrigerator held only a few cans of Coors and Olympia. Other parents had full bars and hard alcohol, and were far more oblivious than my immigrant mother, who was strict, rude to interlopers, and could smell a cigarette from the next block. No one ever spent the night at my house, crowded with kids and chores. We always stayed at Tari’s. Her parents were from upstate New York. We spent Friday afternoons mixing their gin, vodka, whiskey, brandy, and vermouth with Cherry Kool-Aid in a huge yellow Tupperware bowl. We called it sangria.
I don’t understand how alcoholism works in my family genes, considering how many of my male relatives were alcoholic, but all this liquor had very little effect on me. I was too scared of my mother to be drunk. She required me to be home by exactly 7:00 a.m. Saturdays. My dad had bought an appliance repair shop, which came with a junkyard. Saturdays we cleaned the junkyard office and laundromats. Delana would pass out, Dawn would laugh, and Tari would throw up. I stayed awake until the early hours, holding someone’s head as she vomited, firmer in my resolve not to be a nurse or a mother. At dawn I walked home to face dryer lint collected like fallen thunderclouds, and the bathroom of men who patronized a junkyard.
Finally, in the late spring of 1975, two boys waited for my friends and me at the park where my street dead-ended. I was in charge of liquor that night, and I headed toward the front door, sad that my offering would be completely meager. My mother saw the unnatural way I held my jacket, covering two cans of Olympia. All we had, but I thought someone might like the waterfall logo, which was pretty. My stepfather shouted, “Don’t you realize you could get pregnant from one can of beer?” He must have had some sangria.
Actually not a terrible version of sex education, since in junior high I knew girls who’d gotten pregnant in eighth grade. Lucky he didn’t know who was at the park: two senior guys with a van—yellow, pinstriped, with only the two small windows at the back, like fish eyes. One had given me thirteen marijuana joints in a manila envelope, for my thirteenth birthday. (I was extremely popular for a few weeks, because I smoked one, hated the taste and coughing, and gave the other twelve away.)
I was grounded for three months for two cans of Olympia and the obstinate belief that I could handle my life. My mother didn’t like these things: I had asked for a blow-dryer, I was sewing halter tops and hemming up my shorts, and I wore root-beer-flavored lip gloss as blusher, so sheer I thought she hadn’t noticed.
She gave me the ugly talk.
We sat at the maple dining room table she’d bought when she married, the one where I’d done my homework every night, every spelling test and math problem, the imprints of my own handwriting and calculations in the golden wood. Every week I rubbed those smooth edges with lemon oil. My mother said sternly these things: “You don’t have a lot going for you. You’re not athletic.” (I thought, well, yeah, I did have to learn to walk again after the Country Squire.) “And you’re ugly.” (She insists that she used the word plain.)
I know this part by heart, though. “With your looks, you’ll probably never get married. The only thing you have going for you is your brain. So you’d better not mess it up with drugs. You’d better use it, because it’s all you’ve got.”
I sat there for a moment. Then she got up and went to listen to the Dodgers in the other room. I went into my bedroom, where there were novels, and albums by Chaka Khan, Al Green, and Earth, Wind & Fire.
I believed her. I was still very thin. My healed leg had the huge bump of calcification. During cold foggy weather, the healed place hurt, and I didn’t know if it was the hurt of memory, or whether icy moisture got into the ball of new bone. I tried not to limp. I still had no braces, because my twelve-year molars hadn’t come in although I was thirteen. (They didn’t appear until I was sixteen. I got braces hours before junior prom, and my future husband was quizzical but rather dismissive, except for the blood when we kissed.)
I looked into the mirror. My mother was right. Behind my forehead was my brain. Weed was supposed to leave black tar residue smeared over your brain cells. Drinking made people pass out and choke on their vomit. And it took constant vigilance to not be raped.
My girlfriends and I, along with every other girl we knew, had been hunted for years. I had survived torn clothes, hands that bruised, violating fingers, pinching and twisting of body parts, random bites inflicted by older teen boys, my hair pulled and throat exposed. This was less than many other girls I knew had experienced.
I wanted to be beautiful. I wanted amplified eyelashes and curled hair, cleavage in a baby-doll smock, a perfect smile with canine teeth tucked sedately where they belonged. Not feral.
Boys didn’t know what to make of me, even the young man who’d given me the marijuana. He actually said, “I think I’m in love with you, but you just know too much shit about the world.” We leaned against a tree and he laughed. “You read too much. You know shit that doesn’t make sense.”
I accepted ugly. It seemed safer. I went only two places all summer, while my friends partied. I had the bookmobile. I read two books a day. I started hitting tennis balls against the wall at the local university, and watching our high school basketball team’s summer scrimmages. I wrote sports articles in my notebook. But really, I went to see Dwayne.
We had met in the junior high gym one day. Then we met again on the freshman-year school bus heading to a field trip, he and his friends in the rear seat causing trouble, me and a friend in the seat ahead laughing. Very tall, a huge natural, and a gap between his front teeth much wider than my own.
I sat in the bleachers of the college gym in my cut-off jeans, holding my tennis racket, learning about offensive rebounds and defensive boards, waiting after the games for him to meet me under a tree. I walk past that tree every day at the university where I have taught now for thirty years. I try not to tell my students.
By the time we were high school seniors, some friends had moved away, and others got deeper into drugs and alcohol. By then, Delana came to school with rings of purple hickeys around her throat like a lovely blurred choker. When I came out of the locker room, after changing for the tennis team, and waited for Dwayne to finish basketball practice, she and I would talk. Sometimes she held out her hand to show me the contents of her corduroy pockets. Black beauties, red Darvon, blue Tuinal.
I had friends addicted to speed, to cocaine, to Super-Kools, meaning marijuana cigarettes dipped in any liquid thought to be an enhancement to the high: even embalming fluid or liquid angel dust. At a party I met a guy who died the next morning of a heart attack, after smoking a Kool cigarette dipped in PCP. Other friends died in wrecked cars, driving high or drunk, or both. For some friends, both was their favorite way.
I got my first job, at the local theater. I drove the damn Country Squire there until it tried to kill me repeatedly, stalling, jumping curbs at midnight, rolling backward to induce an early heart attack. Then I took the bus or got a ride. I wore my candy girl uniform a
nd sang along to the soundtrack of Car Wash, which showed for twelve weeks. I got Dwayne and his friends in free to the balcony. I tried not to limp unless the day was very foggy and chilling, the dense white droplets that I hated shrouding the eucalyptus trees into silver wraiths.
My mother bought me a little blue Smith Corona typewriter for high school graduation.
I went through college and graduate school typing on that little machine, first as a sportswriter, then as a novelist. My first published short stories and first novel were spooled through those old ink ribbons. I met Vin Scully, my mother’s idol, the man whose broadcast voice taught her precise and resonant English, while covering a Dodger game for a newspaper. I told Vin Scully my mother loved him, and although she was on her second marriage she would leave any man for him. He smiled.
After I published my first novels, I told the story of the Country Squire, and then the ugly talk, to large audiences of women. They were shocked. I called my mother on this, and she said defiantly, “Well, it worked, didn’t it? You’re not dead.” (Once she even told someone, “Well, if I wanted to kill her, I’d have run over her head, not her legs.”) But I knew she was still trembling inside. I didn’t think about the words her stepmother, Rosa, must have used to make her feel plain or ugly. And though I vaguely remember being in a church basement gluing macaroni sprayed with gold paint, I didn’t know back then that the minister had told my mother her divorce meant she was not fit to raise me or my infant brother. He told her to give us up for adoption.
In the Country of Women Page 7