In the Country of Women

by Susan Straight

No one asked why we came home. Everyone we knew came home, unless they’d joined the military, and then they came home once a year. Everyone asked me why I still hadn’t had a baby. You sterile? That what they call it? What y’all waitin’ for? You ain’t figured it out yet?

  I was twenty-three. Friends and relatives had two and three and four babies already. James Baldwin had invited us to St. Paul de Vence, where he lived in France; I dreamed of going there, and then to New York, where we’d have an apartment with a fire escape. Above a restaurant, so I wouldn’t have to cook.

  But we lived in a one-bedroom apartment my stepfather, John Watson, had built in the 1950s. I wrote in our closet on the trunk that Daisy Carter had brought to California from Mississippi, back in 1936. I must have had memories of the Swiss clock, the oatmeal, my baby brother screaming in rage and dust; I told Dwayne I didn’t want to have a baby until we had a house, with a bedroom for the baby, and a yard with grass.

  We moved to a small duplex, and then I was twenty-four, and twenty-five. People said to Dwayne, “Damn, Sims, what’s the problem? We want to see what these babies are gonna look like!”

  Aside from the genetic lottery that was always a fun game in our family, he was hesitant, too. He was fine to wait until we had a little money, because a lot of our friends were in trouble. It was the beginning of the crack years, and already deep into the speed years, and we couldn’t keep bicycles and hoses and trash cans and rakes from being stolen out of our yard. We never knew who we’d see on the street with dark haloes around their eyes, or teeth missing, asking us for a few dollars.

  When I was nineteen, in my second year of college, I came home for summer to work at a gas station. One of my closest friends was pregnant, and decided not to return to college. She asked me to help her make a nursery for the baby.

  She was living a few miles outside the city, in a beautiful old Spanish-style apartment building falling apart now, in a dusty clearing in the foothills. It was a hundred degrees that day in August, and her boyfriend was gone, so we were going to remove forty of his marijuana plants from the closet where he’d rigged up a heat and light system (this was 1980). She was eight months pregnant. We laughed and played the radio while we moved all the pots, sweating and damp, to the hallway. She kept looking nervously at the dirt driveway. So did I. Her boyfriend was six feet two and had a temper. We swept out the potting soil and spiders and fertilizer from the closet, which was large. We washed the plaster walls.

  Then we painted the closet yellow. We penciled in a rainbow on the back wall, painted the arch in five colors, and inside we painted in delicate script the name she had chosen for her daughter. My friend was third-generation Mexican-American, and her boyfriend was L.A. African-American and Oklahoma Cherokee. We talked about what their daughter’s hair and eyes would look like. We talked about what my future babies would look like. Then she said, “You better go now. Before he comes back.”

  I went to work at the gas station, where men drove away with stolen gas and my manager leaped onto the hood of one car and smashed the windshield with his baseball bat and demanded the driver’s wallet, where men lingered in the tiny store where I stood behind the case of heated cashews and peanuts, and in front of the copies of Hustler and Playboy, the men who talked to me forever while waiting for there to be no other customers.

  I wore my Mobil uniform shirt, with the embroidered Pegasus and my name below it. I did not yet want a baby. I knew where the baseball bat was behind the counter, but mostly I learned to look at men’s hands and eyes and throats, trying to judge whether they were dangerous. The day after I quit, the girl who worked nights was robbed at gunpoint.

  Five years later, in 1985, when we were back from Amherst, and Dwayne was working as a night custodian and I was teaching Southeast Asian refugee students at Job Corps how to pass their GED exams, when I was writing stories on the little blue Smith Corona by the light of a tiny lamp on Daisy’s trunk, we were lonely.

  On weekends, we went to my friend’s apartment. She had two small daughters now, and her boyfriend had a thriving business. We barbecued outside, in the dusty clearing under the pepper trees, but the long-haired white neighbors were so high on Tuinals and tequila that they often fell face-first in the dirt and stopped moving. My friend brought us inside. We watched TV from the couch in the living room, her toddler moving around our feet, until someone knocked hard on the front door.

  Her boyfriend gestured, and she went upstairs with their daughter. Then he reached under the couch and pulled out a semiautomatic rifle, aimed it at the door, and yelled for a name. Under the couch was cocaine. We thought we were sitting on weed.

  The name yelled back was that of another childhood friend. When he came inside and saw us, his face was abashed, desperate, and haunted.

  Driving home, Dwayne and I were devastated. He said we could never go back. “When the cops come bustin’ in, they don’t care we’ve been to college. We’re goin’ to jail. Or we’re dead. Just like everybody else in there.”

  Two years later, I was teaching English as a Second Language to refugees and English to city college students, Dwayne was working at a juvenile correctional facility, and we had saved enough money to look for a house. We drove this neighborhood, the grid of narrow historic streets and old homes that seemed quiet. We saw a small shingled white house partly covered with wisteria, a bungalow I’d always loved, and a FOR SALE sign. This street was five minutes from Dwayne’s neighborhood, and ten minutes from my parents’.

  These sidewalks were shaded by old oak and carob trees, and houses had porches. Our house was built in 1910, on the corner of what had been an orange grove. Across the street had been a walnut grove. The first man who owned the bungalow was a farmer and then car salesman; when he was ninety-five, he sold it to the second man, a mechanic who was now ninety-five, a widower, his four kids gone to northern California. His old silver toaster was still in the breakfast nook. The windows had been nailed shut and paint applied thickly into the gaps around the windowsills to keep out heat and street noise. He sold it to the third man, Dwayne, who was twenty-eight, and me.

  We couldn’t yet live in the house, but it seemed safe to think about a baby. I was worried pregnancy might take a long time, that I’d blown it by waiting until I was twenty-seven. We began tearing out stained carpet, pulling vines from the windows, and in the back bedroom, which would belong to any baby who might show up, tried to sand the oil stains from the hardwood floor. The owner had rebuilt engines in that bedroom. My brother, Jeff, moved into that room, and he, Dwayne and I stripped paint from the windowsills and cabinets all night, after work. We put mattresses on the floor, and got ready to leave our old duplex.

  My sister-in-law Margrett, married to Dwayne’s youngest brother, Derrick, came to help me clean the duplex for the deposit. It was June. We had packed everything. We had both worked all day, she at the hospital where she did patient intake, me in the classroom. We scrubbed the kitchen: Easy-Off, Ajax, Windex, bleach. Margrett was at the sink, making fun of all the Sims brothers, and suddenly I knelt hard on the linoleum, dizzy. She had two teenagers; she was seven years older than me. She bent down and looked at my eyes, and said, “Girl, get your damn head out that oven—you’re pregnant.”

  I went to the doctor a week later. Almost three months. And the next day, at the city college, standing in front of my class, I began to lose the baby. After the students left, I went to an office and called Dwayne. He had our only car; I had walked to work. But there was no phone in our house. I tried to call my mother, but she was at work. So I walked from the quadrangle where Dwayne’s mother, Alberta, had gone to high school, when this historic building had been the only high school, down the ravine and toward the same hospital where I’d been born. The pain was intense. I walked up past the baseball field, and into the parking lot, and then I went nearly to my knees, leaning against a car.

  Three older black women taking a lunch break from housekeeping saw me—one was Penguin’s mother. She helped
me inside, whispering, “Baby girl, baby girl, you shouldn’t have worked so hard. Margrett was right.” She took me inside, down a hallway, and then to a gurney, wheeled to the place where the baby was removed.

  When I came out of anesthesia, Dwayne and my dad were there. Penguin’s mother had called Alberta, and they sent someone to find Dwayne, who’d been sanding paint off the wooden sliding doors a few feet from where I sit right now. (Every time I touch those doors I think of that baby. I do.)

  I slept one night at my mother’s house; in the morning, she told me to go to work, because things like that happened to women all the time, and it was best to forget about them right away. But she went back to knitting baby booties and a tiny infant jacket.

  Alberta told me quietly as well that it happened to women all the time. James, the son she had before Dwayne, had died at five months old, and she thought about him every day. At the fireplace, she put her hand on my knee and said, “The next one will be your girl. They’re watching from heaven right now to see what she looks like. My mother dreamed about your baby. That’s right.”

  I thought it would take forever to get pregnant again. In the fall, General II delivered to us a load of eucalyptus trunks from a tree he’d cut. It was hot, and I was grading papers on the porch while Dwayne cut the wood with my brother’s chain saw. The roar and spray of silvery woodchips. Inexplicably, I fell asleep so close to the roaring that when I woke, my clothes were covered with fragrant menthol sawdust. I was two months pregnant.

  Dwayne was of course worried all the time that I’d lose this baby, too. He came home one winter morning looking mildly deranged, something very off-kilter in his face. He hung his jacket on our bedroom door, and stood beside the bed. I was getting up for work. He was going to sleep.

  I asked him what was wrong, and he said nothing. I was six months pregnant. I went off to work, and that evening, while he was sleeping again, I read the newspaper. A juvenile offender at the correctional facility had escaped; an officer had been attacked. Dwayne’s sheepskin-lined cloth jacket had black rings of burn on the chest. An elaborate plot: The juvenile, whose father was a white gangster of some note, had displayed a smuggled bottle of pills; he claimed an overdose, Dwayne had to escort him across the street to the hospital, walking, the kid shackled hand and foot. Old school. From the bushes, a man rose up and shot Dwayne with a Taser, in the chest. Dwayne glanced down, unaffected because of his size and the jacket, and punched the man in the face hard enough to knock him out. The kid was hobbling toward a van parked at the curb. Dwayne caught him there, and the door opened. A .45 was pointed at Dwayne’s face, and he backed away. The gun remained trained upon his forehead until the kid was pulled into the van and the vehicle sped away.

  “Why didn’t you tell me!?” I said, waking him up.

  He opened one eye. “I didn’t want to scare you and you’d lose the baby.”

  The next day, in the driveway on Michael Street, all the women laughed at that. “If bein’ scared by somethin’ would make a baby come, by the time every woman was eight months pregnant she’d be payin’ somebody to shoot her husband with a damn Taser! If gettin’ on a plane would make you go into labor, the sky would be fulla planes just flyin’ pregnant women around! I’da paid for that plane ride! A baby plane! We can make big money on that!”

  In May 1989, a few weeks before I had the baby, I sat on the porch steps with Margaret Chandler, great-niece of Daisy, who was pregnant, and Nygia Preston, granddaughter of Callie, who was pregnant. Margaret named her son Marcus, Nygia named her daughter Porscha; I’d thought for weeks about making both grandmothers—Gabrielle Gertrude Leu Straight Watson, and Alberta Marie Morris Sims—feel honored. I had two choices, Albertagail, which would have been unfair even in 1900, or the name I loved and so did they: Gaila. I had saved Terry McMillan’s book Mama, refusing to read past the first page until I was in labor. During the fifth hour, I asked Dwayne to read it to me. There is a moment when a mosquito roams a bedroom, and the mother exposes her own body to keep the insect from taking the blood of her baby. He read me the whole book. He brought me contraband M&Ms, which I could hold one by one in my mouth. It took forever to have this baby.

  From the moment we saw Gaila, we knew she held the best of all the worlds in her tiny body.

  I was pregnant five times in seven years. I had waited for five years to make sure Dwayne didn’t leave, to make sure my kids would have a bedroom and a yard and a tree in which to read books. I had three daughters, and lost two babies, and sometimes I truly wonder if those were the sons. If boys had been born, everything about our lives would have been dramatically different. As it was, we were a nation of girls and women in this shingled house, north end covered with purple wisteria blossoms that tangled into the two fig trees. Towers of books in each corner, Barbies I stacked like firewood at night, wild animals that roamed the yard, flowers everywhere, and endless bowls of ice cream, for which we would walk one mile to the drugstore. As it was, we were four females whose view of the world began on that front porch, went out to the sidewalk, then two miles to the driveway on Michael Street, and from there into the world.

  I hadn’t realized how much my entire life was about fiction, the images and sentences and ideas of novels and stories, until I looked at my three small girls one night, all of them lying on the sheets I’d spread in the grass to escape the heat. I lay beside them, staring up at the branches of the carob tree and the police helicopter moving like a glittering wasp above us, my daughters murmuring their last questions of the night, and finally falling asleep. All of us facing the stars. I could smell the dew rising from the earth into the grass around us, the smell of silver. Into my head came one of my favorite lines from Toni Morrison’s Sula, altered from the two best friends to how I felt about my children: “We were four throats and one eye and we had no price.”

  III

  16

  Run the World

  Riverside, California, 1989

  I never thought of my first daughter as anything but my companion. The companion of my dreams and books. It was summer. She rarely wanted to be inside the house, hated dim light, never wanted me to put her down. Every single adult I saw said either “Put a hat on that baby or she’ll catch her death of cold!” (it was 95 degrees) or “Put that baby down or she’ll get spoiled and be the death of you!” (Understandably—they had seen too much death.) So we walked the yard looking at branches and flowers while her eyes focused and went from night purple to clearest brown with rays of black inside.

  I had the excuse now to read Little Golden Books and to buy more. I read to Gaila about puppies and kittens and skunks and possums and mice and moles and raccoons and elephants and horses and rabbits. Dwayne read his favorites: Seven Chinese Brothers, which the girls said later was oddly frightening, and Love You Forever, which featured toilet paper and was a hit.

  Gaila never slept. She could hear the smallest sound that made its way through the darkness into the gaps around the old wooden windowsills. Her father worked days then, and when we were sleeping, at 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m., Gaila would stand in her crib and shout, “Train!” We lived about a mile from a rail crossing, and all night the engineers sounded their horns in distinctive songs to their wives and families as they passed through. She would shout, “Dog!” Night-barking dogs talked to one another through our neighborhood, and coyotes came up from the river to roam our streets.

  “Input,” Dwayne would say wearily, hanging towels and thick blankets around the windows. He loved this word. “She never stops wanting input.”

  But I was thrilled, in the daytime anyway, because Gaila was my buddy and I hated being inside, too. She never tired of each story I told her, and she gave the dogs names, and the trees, and the Band-Aid on the sidewalk, and the white stars inside the bougainvillea. Before she turned two, she required three books before considering her breakfast—no oatmeal!—and three books during her bath—no cheating! Dwayne was astonished that she knew when he skipped pag
es, and told him what should be happening to Mama Skunk or the Three Little Kittens.

  We had taken Gaila to Ensenada, Mexico, when she was only six months old, her car seat wedged between us on the bench seat of the pickup truck; we camped on the beach. At the border crossing, a guard questioned me hard, asking why we were bringing a small Mexican boy back to California. I offered to nurse her, and he winced and let us through. When she was a year old, we took her camping in northern California and Oregon, to see elk crashing antlers in fall battles. She practiced her baseball throw with walnuts we found in a hot golden grove in the San Joaquin Valley.

  She got valley fever from that agricultural dust. We messed up a lot.

  I was told to play only Raffi. I had no idea who that was. I sang her “Angel Baby,” from Art Laboe’s Killer Oldies show, and Dwayne played her “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker” by Parliament.

  I was told not to work. I liked being able to pay our mortgage and buy food. If she got a fever or a cold, I held her in front of my classes, rocking back and forth while I read aloud passages from Sula and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, from Larry Brown’s Samaritans and James Welch’s Fools Crow, which I taught to my students, most of whom were the first generation, like me, to attend college, so they could think about their homes and regions as those writers did, with love and tenderness. (Some of my first students back then were from Coachella, El Monte, La Puente, and Indio—they are the writers Rigoberto Gonzalez, Michael Jaime-Becerra, Alex Espinoza, and John Olivares Espinoza. All four write about home with loyal compassion.)

  I was told to make homemade baby food. But Gaila spent her days with Alberta, and she ate with her grandmother—history and love in her mouth. Alberta chewed fried chicken or pork chops or smothered steak into softness and then pushed the meat into Gaila’s mouth. She said, “You’re never gonna starve. Now give me some sugar.”