That October, just before we were divorced, Dwayne and I walked down a dirt lane into the spangled cottonwood and sycamore trees near the Santa Ana River, where we both had grown up catching crayfish, where our daughters now looked for crayfish. The Santa Ana is the longest wild river in southern California—concrete-channeled in Orange County, but here in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, flowing from the mountains and through the wide riverbed that begins at the arroyo below our dead-end street.
I had just gotten home from work, and the girls would be with my mother for another hour. After we returned from the walk, Dwayne would take his nap and then head out for the night shift, after the girls were in bed. They didn’t even know he was going to leave. I did. It was near my birthday—pretty soon I would be thirty-six, divorced, with three kids.
But we’d been walking here forever. I was going to miss walking with this man, who had walked all the way to the playground to meet me for the first time, who’d walked with me up the Swiss Alps, around tiny Italian villages where everyone thought he was Magic Johnson, around New York City when we took the bus there from Amherst to see the beginnings of wild-style dancing and hip-hop music on the sidewalks, and down the boardwalk in Venice, Italy, and Venice, California.
We headed toward the river, on a narrower trail near a thick tangle of wild grapevines, and heard a huge shuddering in the arundo cane nearby. “Damn,” my husband whispered. Yes. He whispered. We both froze. “Must weigh four hundred pounds.”
The cane shook. A strange deep noise came from the dry stalks. An inquiry. It was the vespertine hour. Pink and gold light before sunset.
The wild pig had heard us. It stopped moving, and the cane quivered. Dwayne pulled a black 9-millimeter handgun from the back waistband of his jeans. I couldn’t believe it. I knew he was getting more paranoid because of the juvenile criminals, because of worry about protecting his daughters, but I didn’t know he was carrying.
“Go,” he whispered to me, and I backed away, and he backed away, aiming at the canestalks. The pig must have stomped or smacked its head against the cane, and then it thundered off, crashing in the direction of the river.
“What the hell are you doing with that?” I whispered fiercely when we got back to the main path. We were passing a homeless encampment, with clothing in orange crates, a blackened fire circle, a bamboo chair suspended from a tree.
“I brought it for people or dogs,” he said. “Not one of Floyd’s escapees.” And as we walked in silence, I felt a visceral stab of sadness—because we had known each other since we were fourteen and fifteen, we had our own language, and who else would ever know all our people and our vocabulary, know immediately what he meant?
Floyd Walker was like family. He was a longtime friend of General II, since his mother-in-law and Daisy Carter had been very close. Floyd had retired from the military, and he loved pigs. He loved pigs so much that he was famous for driving down the alleys behind restaurants, his huge truck with the flatbed enclosed by wooden pallets, filled to the top with discarded produce he collected every day for his pigs. About thirty of them, living in corrals made also of salvaged plywood and pallets, across the river in Rubidoux. We’d fed Floyd’s pigs for years. Rarely did any leave alive.
But pigs had escaped from other nearby farms for a century. Colonies of feral pigs had terrorized the river since we were children. Those pigs had tusks. They confronted people walking, people on horses, and they weighed up to five hundred pounds.
I knew Dwayne had his father’s old hunting rifle, and he’d bought a shotgun. I had no idea he was keeping a handgun in his car, and carrying it with him. The 9-millimeter Ruger was a favorite with law enforcement, solid and black and menacing, and he held it with affection. “Well, if you shot it in the head, we were in trouble,” I said. “People say bullets bounce off their heads. The pig would have just been pissed off, and he wouldn’t go for you! He’d have tried to kill me, except I would have climbed a tree.”
He’d put the gun back under his shirt. He was a bigger man by then—three hundred pounds. When we did get divorced, my mother was angry with me, saying I had not been a good enough wife, and I should have cooked more, and kept the house cleaner. Very Swiss. My house was perfectly acceptable, though Barbies were strewn everywhere and Dwayne had hopped through the hallway sometimes with a Barbie high heel embedded in his own heel. Pretty sure he’d always had enough to eat.
My husband had become a mystery to me. He wanted more freedom to spend with his brothers and friends; he’d bought the Kawasaki, and a Ford Ranchero, which seemed another message as the bench seat clearly couldn’t hold three girls, the baby in a car seat. His mother was gone. She could not chase him home from the couch on Michael Street.
We had gotten married too young, he said; he wanted to learn to be independent, he said. Every time I heard that word, I imagined Herbie, the elf who wanted to be a dentist, in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I couldn’t help it. I heard the word in four syllables—in-de-pen-dent—in Herbie’s nasal pronunciation, and had to keep myself from laughing. “You gonna be a dentist?” I’d say, and Dwayne would shake his head.
That day at the river, the gun wasn’t funny. But he grinned and said, “Yeah, but if I killed him, think of the old days, how happy somebody woulda been to get that meat. That streakalean.”
How could I hate him? We spoke a secret dialect no one else would know.
Floyd prepared a few of his pigs for slaughter when the weather cooled in November, separating them from the others, feeding them only corn. He’d get orders from families like ours; we’d put in $50, along with Alberta and General. One man would shoot the chosen in the head, and other men hung the bodies from chains in the trees and butchered them expertly.
We took part of the bacon and fresh pork loin chops. Others took ribs, feet, head cheese, and fresh ham—everyone wanted some part of the pig.
Then there were the chitlins. Joe Killer, a family friend, taught me how to clean chitlins on Alberta’s Formica counter. Alberta said she’d done enough chitlins to last her a lifetime, and soon, I saw why. Scraping with a short paring knife, scraping the foul mess of digestion from the waxy white tubes, I listened to Joe Killer’s stories of all the places he’d cleaned chitlins.
But Alberta taught me how to fry the fresh bacon, to sprinkle it with a bit of brown sugar. “Streakalean,” she called it, laughing. Streak of fat, streak of lean.
Each night, while Dwayne was at work and the girls were asleep, I sat here at my old mahogany desk, bought for $10 from an elderly woman down the street who had been an accountant. I thought about the gun, and the wild pig, and how hungry our ancestors had been. The first year we lived in this house, we’d trapped a smaller possum in the yard and Daisy, a neighbor born in Kentucky, came by and told me, “I can show you how to cook that up right.” I remembered Alberta chewing a piece of pork chop from one of Floyd’s pigs, sliding the softened bits into Gaila’s mouth, and then Delphine’s. Rosette is still sad, to this day, that she was never held in Alberta’s arms, like her sisters.
When we were teenagers, I told Dwayne the story of my dad’s junkyard dog, which once bit my brother. He countered with his Rubidoux cousins’ junkyard, where cars were kept for parts to sell. One cousin had a fierce hungry guard pig. “A junkyard dog might bite you, but it probably wouldn’t kill you,” Dwayne said, laughing. “That pig? She weighed four hundred pounds. She’d kill you, stomp you into pieces, and eat your sorry ass. Bones and all. No one would even know you tried to steal something.”
That junkyard was just across the river, near Floyd’s leased land, which was adjacent to a long narrow one-third acre owned by General II. When Gaila and Delphine were small, we’d collect excess apricots from the old tree in our yard, and shovel heaps of fallen carob pods from the city tree at our sidewalk, and take trash barrels full to Floyd and his pigs. We’d lean on the plywood fences, the girls holding tight while the pigs gleefully rooted into the soft rotting apricots, crunching th
e pits. They crushed the carob pods with their hooves, sweet brown powder the pigs licked up like tinted dust from Pixy Stix. Floyd threw overripe avocados into the mud, and he laughed and pointed to one very large male pig, alone in a big pen. He said, “Watch that one—he spit out the pits like a natural man.”
Floyd spent every day out there with his pigs because he loved them; they were his piece of South Carolina under the California sun. No pines or oaks, but pepper trees, with their feathery branches and red berries, and eucalyptus windbreaks with bark shedding under our feet.
But at night I thought, Those pigs would kill us if they could. I remembered my father, Richard, talking about the ranch near Purcell, Colorado, on the prairie where they lived when he was only two. He fell into the pig enclosure and the animals tried to kill him, but his sister Beverly rescued him, though one pig broke her arm. She was nine.
Of course, I’d read Charlotte’s Web to my daughters. But they heard scary real-life fables, too. Mr. Gainer, father of our childhood friend Penguin, put on our new roof. After the tar and shingles were done, he’d sit on the porch with iced tea. My girls were terrified of him. His turquoise eyes seemed unearthly in the sunburned brown of his face, and he had no teeth, because he’d fallen from a roof onto his face some years earlier and refused to wear his dentures.
He would say: “My daddy worked that teppentime. North Florida. He died before I was born. Worked in that pine forest, gettin’ teppentime, and he was ridin’ on a cart. Cartwheel fell in a hole in the road. Them barrels crushed him. I was in my mama’s belly. Never known him.”
“I was so hungry, all the time. All the time. My brothers and sisters wouldn’t do nothin’. My mama was hungry. I was seven. Took me a hammer and walked in the woods where I knew this man had pigs, and I hit one them pigs in the head with the hammer till he died. Squealin’ and squealin’. Then I dragged him home. I told my mama come out there, and she seen the pig, and I told her, ‘Cook me some meat.’ And I ate me some meat. My mama had meat.”
My girls were required to come out and greet him, to sit for a few minutes. This was an obligation of our extended family of kin, and they performed it gracefully. He would tap them roughly, examine their faces, say, “You scared of a old man like me?” It was his eyes—the intensity, the supernatural beauty of blue-green. It was his words. “You eat you some ham for Christmas?” He’d lean forward. “I can smell it in your house.”
Alberta taught me to make a fifteen-pound bone-in ham, basting with honey and mustard and cloves. The streakalean was sweet and dark. That was 1992—long before gourmet America talked about pork belly or home-cured ham. At book events in New York and Boston and Chicago, talking about Floyd’s pigs and the butchering, other writers were appalled that I lived in a place where people killed pigs and grew marijuana and were routinely shot at by police, gang members, and criminals, and that I expressed no desire to leave home. I went home to write about a cynical assassin dumped into a junkyard, his body disappeared by pigs.
My husband and I had been hungry, but never as hungry as our parents in their desperate childhoods, and our daughters had never been hungry at all. We had been poor—finding our furniture on the street, walking when we had no car, eating beans or ramen for days. But not until I had children, and I got divorced, did I understand the fierce desire to fill their mouths with meat.
So of course they all three became vegetarians.
19
The Santa Ana River
I have walked along the same river trail for thirty-five years now, since we returned from Amherst. I walk it nearly every day. I climb the steep foothill called Mount Rubidoux that overlooks the Santa Ana riverbed and think about what I told my daughters: No matter race or wealth or religion or desire, there are people who leave and people who stay. I had to stay. If we’d left, my girls wouldn’t have had the safety and tether and history of our families. Dwayne wouldn’t have had them. Since we stayed, I’d make sure we went around the world, like Alberta had said, so my daughters would know how big it was, in order to run it.
They had to spend days in the driveway, or at the city park, or in the car with my mother, to know their history. They had to have a father, especially one like theirs. And I needed the country of women to help raise them. They had to watch their aunts and cousins and me serve the food and listen to Marvin Gaye and the Bar-Kays and be sentimental; they had to watch their father and their uncles go crazy over a lowered 1964 Chevy Impala, those men always ready to defend the girls if they were scared.
Also there was this little house I couldn’t leave behind, because it was the museum of children. (Once a neighbor counted the children on our long dead-end block—fifty-four kids.) There were children under the old maple table, with sheets draped over, kids sleeping on blankets and eating fruit snacks and Teddy Grahams. There were children in the tree, with sheets draped on branches, spying on people moving along the sidewalk. There were children in the driveway, shooting baskets on the gravel that messed up their dribbles. These children were truly the heritage of our defiance of casta—school friends who were Mexican-Scottish, Hawaiian-Filipino, Ecuadorean-Irish, Chinese-American, and all the cousins who were everything.
My two older girls rode their Big Wheels, with baby Rosette at the handles, until Dwayne bought the most beloved vehicle on the block: a comically tall red-and-yellow plastic car he found at the swap meet, which Rosette pedaled like a mad queen. She never had her grandmother Alberta, not for one hour, and I’d never had Ruby or Frieda, so I wanted to make sure she had everyone else. What had those women passed down to her, and to me, that we’d never be able to show them?
20
A Secondhand Lonely
Riverside, California, 1998
There’s no need to lie. I barely survived. The first Christmas Eve, when the girls kissed me somberly and went to their father’s house, I lay on the cold maple floorboards and cried like I’ve never cried before or since. I lay near the spruce tree we’d bought as always at the tree farm, hung with the decorations of my childhood and theirs, and cried until I couldn’t see. Christmas Eve tradition was that Dwayne went to work, and the girls and I watched Little Women. I turned on the movie and cried for another hour. But Susan Sarandon’s Marmee is raising her daughters without a husband—by the time Mr. March comes home, he just mopes around in the library. My girls had memorized the story—they were three sisters, and they already recited our own traditions matched to the story’s lines. We took cakes and cookies around our streets, to neighbors and to homeless people, as had the March sisters. Also, the Sims sisters wanted epic lives. A collapsed mother wouldn’t help. So I got up and went to bed.
At dawn I turned to my books. I read Sula for what must have been the thirty-third time. Sula and Nel were childhood friends, the kind you find only once. But years later, Sula took Nel’s husband away, and then rejected him. Nel raised her three children alone. When Sula is dying, and Nel finally visits, Sula says that no man is worth keeping. She tells Nel:
“Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.”
“Really? What have you got to show for it?”
“Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.”
“Lonely, ain’t it?”
“Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is someone else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.”
I had read this many times, but now I would live it. I would keep my own mind, and my own lonely. No man would hand me anything. I would never hand my girls that secondhand lonely, either.
Then I opened a novel I’d found in the library in 1987, Lovers of the African Night, by William Duggan, a writer I’d never heard of before. This book was a totem for me as well. A girl raised by her single mother in a South African village, where the women cook for visiting men, remembers looking at the world upside down near her mother’s cooking pot, her mother who is strong and comic
and independent, who whispers to her child, “You work so hard . . . Mothers dream of daughters like you.”
A secondhand lonely had been given to me by my husband; and I had never heard my own mother say that to me. Her only daughter. But my mother-in-law said many times to me, “You’re the best wife my son could ever have.”
I regretted not one moment with her son. Later in Duggan’s novel, the young woman has fallen in love with a young man who reminded me so much of Dwayne—and even though later he abandons her, and her life is difficult, she recalls always the first time her new love had a bath, and his knees rose like islands in the soapy water, and he grinned. The tenderness with which some images stay with us cannot be lost. No matter what. That is what the novel taught me. There is nothing wrong with still loving the past, the way it looked and felt and smelled and sounded. The way someone looked at you. That cannot be secondhand.
21
Dew Point—A Pack of Four
Riverside, California, Endless
When it was so hot in the summer that the fig beetles died flying in the air, falling onto the grass beside us, shining iridescent green as tiny Christmas ornaments, my girls held that beauty in their small palms. It was so hot, butterflies landed on our arms for sweat. Yellow finches flew with their beaks open, panting. Golden baby lizards slipped under the screen door to sleep in shoes deep inside our closets.
Just as when I had Rosette, it would be 108, 109, 112 for days in August. My old house still had no air-conditioning, and three girls were sleeping in one small stifling bedroom near those fig trees, beetles crashing into the window screens like drunken bombers. The girls trooped into my bedroom.
I put two sheets outside on the grass around 11:00 p.m., and we lay in the yard, staring at the sky, the impossible night blue. My first years at this house, I’d planted a seed packet of Italian sunflowers—all colors, from white to lemon yellow to buttery gold to deepest red. Now the sunflowers had all hybridized and came up from new seeds every year, growing to twenty feet tall around the fences. At night, the yellow finches that hung upside down on the seedheads were still so hot their sad chirps fell like mournful commas around us where we lay.
In the Country of Women Page 15