In the Country of Women

by Susan Straight

  Gaila was Alberta’s tenth grandchild, and she spent all day with her. Gaila slept in her arms. When she woke, Alberta let Gaila stamp on her thighs, and sang her songs. The endless succession of daily visitors to Alberta’s living room held Gaila as well, telling stories that whispered past her eyes. I came home at lunch to nurse her, and we watched one soap opera—General Hospital. Alberta didn’t cut her fingernails—Gaila would scream when I tried, with the tiny scissors—and cutting baby nails was said to make the child a thief. Alberta gently trimmed the soft nails with her teeth. Then Alberta bit her cheeks softly, leaving tiny marks like miniature staples, and said, “We’re gonna raise you to run the world. That’s right.”

  When Gaila got a fever, my mother came over at night, dipped cloth diapers in vinegar and rubbed Gaila’s hot legs until the fever subsided. My mother’s face would be drawn with worry—fevers took children to death back in the Swiss Alps.

  I was trying to finish my first book, writing in the same notebooks I had used while sitting in our cars as Dwayne worked on the engines in our driveway. I had typed half of the book, sitting at a card table pushed against my side of the bed. The night James Baldwin passed away, I cried because I would never see him again. I would never forget anything he told me. Imperative, he said. I walked Gaila up and down the sidewalk near midnight, weeping at the disappearance of his kindness and his voice.

  She never napped. I walked her for miles after work, the stroller bumping over tree roots cleaving the sidewalk. When she finally slept, I sat down on the curb wherever we were and took my notebook from the mesh storage pocket. I wrote for however long I had. But every time, passing cars stopped. People offered me money or a place to stay, figuring I was homeless, and their conversation woke up the baby.

  I’m sure I looked tragically itinerant. I just wanted to finish my novel. When it won a prize, and was published, I went alone to accept the prize in a city full of writers. At an elegant lunch, two well-known women authors, not married, childless, told me that I’d never accomplish acclaim, because California had no true intellectuals besides Didion. They said my community would imprison me, and so would family. I said I didn’t want to leave my home, and I could never take my baby from her two grandmothers.

  That night, at the reception, I drank champagne and ate caviar for the first time in my life; at midnight I ate five pieces of roast lamb, which I’d also never had. Aha, I thought. Surprising cleavage in the cocktail dress I wore, that Alberta had lent me. Gold sequins, black silk fringe.

  Already pregnant again, I realized, and had to laugh. I tease Delphine that this is the reason for her love of travel and fine food.

  We were never alone, on this corner. Dwayne was now working night shift at the juvenile correctional facility, and that summer he probably slept three hours a day. We had an ancient fuse box that blew the power if we hung one string of Christmas lights or tried one minute of microwaving. I had Delphine in July 1991, so the girls and I spent all summer vacation outside while he tried to nap. But everyone had started to gather on our gravel driveway, where there was a pathway that according to our deed allowed us to “run our pigs along the easement all the way to the river.” Our cousins and friends came to work on cars and hang out and listen to music Dwayne played in the garage. Kids played in the blue truckbed. We were the aunt and uncle who took all the nieces and nephews—ten at a time—to the beach or to Disneyland.

  My mother’s house, when I was a teenager, was quiet. I hadn’t realized how much I wanted a house like Alberta’s—but that open door meant constant company. Our neighbors all had small kids and babies, too. My sidewalk was crowded with Big Wheels and pails and buckets, kids playing in the flowerbeds and under the mulberry tree we planted. I left the branches low and untrimmed so children could climb up into the trunk more easily—and I climbed up there with them to read and hang sheets for pirate ships.

  There was no privacy. People would drive by and holler, “You better put them kids to bed!” or “You got your hair cut?” Cars stopped and women asked if they could enroll their kids in my day care. I said I didn’t run a day care. They raised their eyebrows at the multitude of toys, the plastic pool, and the Radio Flyer wagon. Dwayne sighed and hauled some of the toys up on the porch to hide them.

  I had two small girls. Gaila was turning three, and went to day care at the house of Clarice Collins, Dwayne’s godmother, five doors down from Alberta. Alberta was trying to keep Delphine on her lap, but it wasn’t working. (Alberta watched babies until they could run down the hallway at full speed, which meant she’d miss major portions of the soaps. She always said, “I’m done chasing babies. Once they can run, they go to Clarice.”)

  Gaila had taken my Barbie, meaning my childhood doll, purchased for me in 1966, to day care; while the kids played in the backyard near Jesse Collins’s truck—the one the men used to drive to the night shift at the Air Force base—a girl named Skeeter, who was six, threw Barbie into the alley, where she was mauled by Jesse’s guard Doberman. When retrieved, Barbie had, in addition to the greenish discoloration on her thighs from mold, which resembled bruising, new lacerations to her head and teeth marks all over her body.

  At home that night, sitting on our front porch steps, I tried to prevent Delphine, who walked at nine months and was consistently covered with real bruises, from falling on the cement. Gaila had gotten out the colored chalk. She kept telling me about Skeeter and Percy and Maisha. She told me about her cousin Holla, my brother Jeff’s daughter, who was seven. These were the powerful people in her life.

  I turned around, and she had written in block letters SKEETER on one ancient cement step, and HOLLA on the other one.

  In one of our favorite films, My Mother’s Castle, Marcel Pagnol’s father, a teacher, sees that his son, only three, visiting his father’s classroom, can write. I was stunned. Gaila could read and write. She had taught herself. That moment, it felt as if I would be replicated in the world, even if I were to disappear at that moment.

  But I couldn’t disappear, because Delphine was careering like a baby Michelin Man toward the flowerbed, where she and Gaila had made a secret place inside the Shasta daisies and black-eyed Susans I’d planted after falling in love with them along the Oklahoma roadside.

  From then on, our lives revolved around animals and books. The stack of children’s books I read to my girls, every day, every night: Tacky the Penguin, Owl Moon, The Snowy Day. Soon Gaila could read Junie B. Jones and Amelia Bedelia, whose wordplay was her favorite: Dress the chicken. Draw the drapes.

  I read to them the more dense texts of the vintage books of my childhood—which remain here in the house now: Winnie the Pooh (they loved hearing that their father had a close friend named Woozle!), Heidi, and Little Women.

  We ate ice cream every night, walking the mile to 7-Eleven to get Creamsicles or Drumsticks. Dwayne did bath time, reading the books in the steamy room while the girls threw water at him and Gaila corrected any dubious sentence he tried to invent. Then he went to sleep, and they went to sleep, and I wrote until it was time to wake Dwayne up for work. If I wrote by hand, he’d say, “I thought you were gonna work?” and I’d say I had worked, and he’d say he hadn’t heard the typewriter. He’d say he slept better when he could hear the typewriter because we’d make some money. Sometimes while he put on his shoes, I’d have him check something in a story—what kind of tires would someone put on a dually truck? What brand of .25-caliber cheap handgun often blew up in someone’s hand?

  My husband’s life was like Narnia, I know. He went through the wardrobe door to the world where at midnight, he’d be processing young men who were increasingly violent. He asked one boy why he’d shot a woman in the face, and the kid shrugged and said, “I don’t know.” He had teenage drug dealers, gang members, and boys who’d been abandoned their entire lives. He broke up fights and stayed awake, and then came home at dawn to sleep for an hour before his daughters woke up.

  He returned through our front door to a house
of girls. The opposite world. Little girls and stuffed animals and Barbie high heels were everywhere. I was told by some white women who meant well, “I can’t believe you let your daughters play with Barbie dolls. My daughter will never have something so brainless and clichéd.” I replied, “All the other dolls are white. Or pink. Barbie is the only doll that comes in different races. These are actually Teresa, Kira, and Skipper.”

  Teresa had brown skin, Kira was meant to be Asian, I believe, but she looked multiracial, and I kept my old Skipper from childhood because she was skinny, flat-chested, and dismissable, hopeful and yearning—she was me. I did not believe those other mothers deserved this last information.

  We washed and braided and styled a lot of Barbie hair. The girls always took the right leg off the Ken dolls, which also came in various races. But all of the men were right-legless. Eventually my girls told me it was because they wanted Kira and Teresa to drive the pink Barbie limousine someone gave us. Gaila and Delphine figured Ken was better powerless.

  In the evenings, Dwayne wanted to watch the Lakers or the Dolphins, and the girls wanted to watch Fairy Tale Theater videos rented from the downtown library of my childhood. Sometimes he went out to the garage for sports and male company. On the tan pleather loveseat handed down by my mother, the girls loved The Twelve Dancing Princesses, Rapunzel, and Rumpelstiltskin.

  Dwayne never had a single moment to himself. Our house was evolving into the classic style I’d seen growing up—women inside, men out in the garage and driveway. I was okay with it—I sent the girls out with pie plates full of food for him and his brothers and friends. On his days off, we went everywhere—to the beach, to the snow, to any zoo within one hundred miles, taking whatever cousins would fit in the truck.

  I wrote every night. I published Aquaboogie, dedicated to James Baldwin. I published I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, whose main character was inspired by Big Ma, a woman who’d lived in Daisy Carter’s house, who came by Alberta’s driveway with a lit newspaper torch to smoke out the wasps underneath the eaves, to use the larvae to fish in the Salton Sea. I published Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, inspired by my brother-in-law Derrick, the only black wildland firefighter in the California Department of Forestry. In the driveway, he’d told me stories of deer and snakes and coyotes racing toward him, ahead of towering flames.

  That year, 1994, Alberta said to me, “You don’t want one more? Just one?”

  I did. I had always wanted three kids. But Dwayne had said in the hospital ten minutes after Delphine was born, “I’m headed down the hall to get cut. Two’s enough.”

  He hadn’t.

  He and his brothers and his father would be in his father’s driveway, with an engine dangling on a chain in the huge ash tree. We’d be inside, where we women watched the smaller grandkids play. I told Alberta that her son thought life was hard enough. (He had spent a couple of nights on her couch, as did all the brothers and cousins when someone had a disagreement. There was the day couch, and the night couch, I knew. But his mother had heard him and come from her bedroom to yell that she loved me and he’d better take his butt home. She wouldn’t let him stay. I liked having her on my side.)

  Now she said, “You ain’t gotta ask him. You ain’t gotta tell him you want one more. Just one.”

  Aint Sister nodded in agreement. I told them, “He says if I get pregnant again, he’s getting a Harley. I take that for a death wish.”

  They laughed and said, “He can’t ride a motorcycle away from those girls. Look at them!”

  Alberta had told no one about how blinding her headaches had gotten. When she watched the girls, she returned to bed after we left. We’d come inside midmorning and she’d have gone back to sleep, her face swollen with pain. One February morning, in 1995, she had a small stroke in the living room. When Dwayne got to the hospital, a few hours later, she awakened and felt sick. He held on to her when she tried to get out of bed, and she had another stroke and collapsed in his arms.

  She never regained consciousness. She was transferred to a convalescent facility a few blocks from our house, and we all went in shifts to sit beside her bed and talk to her, touch her face, hold her hand. We hadn’t told her I was nearly three months pregnant, in case I lost the baby. By the sixth day, she looked like a different woman. Her bright brown skin was fading to pale gold, her hair turning silver so rapidly at the roots that we her daughters-in-law and nieces cried. Her breathing was ragged, the violent desperation of inhale that shakes the whole upper body. That night, Dwayne sat alone by her bed and whispered into her ear that I was going to have another baby; he read her his favorite book, Love You Forever, and cried. Then he kissed her, and left. Twenty minutes later, while I was driving there, she died.

  I had never been with women who did their own ministrations of love to the deceased. Her daughters-in-law and nieces and neighbors painted Alberta’s nails, dyed and straightened and styled her hair, chose her blue dress, and did her makeup. The third of Daisy Carter’s daughters was gone. At her funeral, there were six hundred people, and though her lips were red, they were held too closely over her teeth, and we broke down and cried on our knees at the loss of her smile.

  17

  Wild Things

  Riverside, California, 1995

  When I was pregnant with Delphine, the possum showed up. The week after we bought the house, three years earlier, my brother Jeff and Dwayne had gone into the basement and crawled under the pipes to remove asbestos. They found a skeleton—the biggest possum they could imagine. Perhaps she was the mother or grandmother of this large female possum, with gray fur and a dark ruff around her shoulders and cream-colored face looking impassively past me as if I were not there when I saw her in the backyard, rooting around the apricot tree, clawing at the loose screens that led to the basement, and then rustling to the area underneath my bedroom to prepare her home.

  When I was pregnant with Rosette, I felt a renewed fear of hospitals that I didn’t even understand until I began to write this book and remembered my broken femur. Alberta’s time in the hospital had been torturous. Two months later, her sister-in-law Minerva passed away. It was a spring of mourning.

  By August, it was over 100 degrees for ten days in a row, and at night, when Dwayne was gone to work, the girls and I slept on blankets laid on the cool cement of the porch. The air would shift, the leaves of the old carob tree would fall like a few random coins, and finally the night would cool.

  But the night before I had Rosette, the second to last day of August, it had been 108 degrees. I walked up and down the sidewalk at midnight, then went inside to check on the sleeping girls. I walked at one. Two. At three, I sat on the porch steps, drinking iced tea, panting. A coyote floated down the middle of the street, upright and intent as coyotes always run, and I’ll say it was a she. She moved as if parting water, directly down the yellow divider, and looked over at me. Her head cocked, she slowed for an instant, and then seemed to raise her chin. A cool coyote. Native to here. Maybe it was a male coyote. Like the cool guys used to say in high school: What it is? Girls would reply, What it ain’t. And the guys would say, What it shall be.

  I went into labor just after that, pacing, pacing, and three hours later Dwayne came home from work. I told him we should go to the hospital right then. He thought I was messing around, because I never wanted to go to the hospital. I called my mother to come stay with the girls, and when she arrived, she yelled at him to start the car. (She says she slapped him, but I don’t know if she could reach that high.)

  I had Rosette seventeen minutes after we got inside the hospital. I wasn’t tethered to an IV or even hooked up to a monitor. I was still wearing my sunflower-printed maternity dress.

  She was the incarnation of her grandmother Alberta. Her eyebrows, her dimple, her smile, her legs. Rosette was the third girl, like Alberta. Watchful, listening. She had small, perfect black beauty marks on her cheek, chest, and wrist, like the ones Frenchwomen in Marie Antoinette’s t
ime painted on themselves. My childhood freckles disappeared, but I have several of those brown beauty marks, in almost exactly the same places on my cheek, chest, and wrist. When I held her, I sometimes saw the tiny constellations of melanin on our faces pressed together as if we were marking each other.

  The small bedroom now held two beds and a crib, and the floor was reduced to a walkway between sleeping daughters. Every night, they knew to pile up the dolls, books, toys, and shoes into the baskets I bought so we could survive.

  But Rosette had an early evening restless cry, every evening, and someone had to walk her up and down the sidewalk. My neighbors, my friends—we all rocked her on the porch, twirled her around the sunflowers in the yard. By the time the girls and then Dwayne went to sleep, she was still awake. Dwayne got no rest. When he left for work, I brought her into the bed with me.

  He didn’t buy a Harley. He got a Kawasaki motorcycle, which he rode to work. He spent more time in the garage, making shotgun cartridges and bullets with a machine he’d bought, watching the tiny red television we’d taken to Amherst so long ago. We were a house of women and a driveway of men, a division that functioned for so many older couples we knew. It might have sufficed for us, if we had lived in an earlier time, but we both worked long hours, our house was aged and needed repair, the yard and living room full of children not even our own. Three daughters who were so curious and smart and demanding meant the days stretched very long, and the nights, too. Sometimes he just wanted to ride the motorcycle all weekend, by himself—another American dream.

  18

  Pig

  Rubidoux and Riverside, California, 1997 (South Carolina, Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia)