In the Country of Women

by Susan Straight

  We talked about the night blue. All the different blues, in the art and nature books we’d read, the paintings they’d seen at museums, the varying skies. Humans love blue. Winter sky faded pale, summer electric turquoise, Pacific Ocean blue as new denim, so we talked about Nîmes, France, where the material for Levi’s was first made. Lapis lazuli on a street vendor’s necklace. The lakes in Switzerland vivid as Windex.

  When they finally fell asleep, one by one—and I never knew which one would stay awake the longest, ask the last question about a cousin or whether the rustling in the branches was a possum—I would lie there and wait for that moment when the earth changed each night. When the earth below us, under the thin sheet and tired grass, would release the coolness of dew, and the moisture would rise up around us, and the girls’ breathing would deepen into what I imagined as magical sleep. I could smell the invisible drops gathering on the blades of grass near my face. Then along the sidewalk would come a drunk man or homeless guy on a bike or sometimes a woman who liked to stand on my corner and wait for men in passing cars to notice her—she would break off my yellow roses and put them in her hair.

  I’d pray no one would shout and wake up the girls. Sometimes the people spoke to me; sometimes they moved along. I’d wait until we were alone again, realize it must be 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., and I would pick up each girl and take her quickly inside.

  Then of course I was awake for a long time.

  We survived the heat of summer inside museums, which were blissfully air-conditioned. My girls fell instantly in love from the time they were small with the order and quiet and careful display of museums, in exactly the same way I had fallen in love with the public library and then the bookmobile and then every museum I’d ever entered. I had such tenderness for the library, the quiet, and especially the rotating metal numbers and ink of the due-date stamp, which appeared magical. My girls loved each museum entry ticket, each painting or sculpture, each café with trays and elegant “museum food.”

  Those buildings were how we kept the chaos of our lives at bay.

  I went to my first art museum when I was thirteen, just before freshman year of high school, when the “mentally gifted minor” group of students in our city, designated by kindergarten IQ tests, was taken on a bus to the Huntington Library near Pasadena. As things were back in the day, we were allowed to wander for hours through the art galleries in the former mansion home of the oil baron Henry Huntington and the historic gardens designed by his wife, Arabella. I was obsessed by their dour faces and black clothing in stiff portraits. I walked near the arched bridge of the Japanese garden and through the formal aisles of roses, and imagined the garden I would have.

  But the landscape that changed my life hung on a wall inside the gallery: a massive six-by-nine-foot painting of the Stour River, by John Constable, which I didn’t understand fully then. I stand before this painting every year and still thrill to find tiny details anew. The Stour is a small river, with children playing in the reeds and men pulling horse-drawn carts along a dirt road, not an idyllic river but a messy one, like my own Santa Ana. These English trees and woods are not my own. That is why I love them.

  I took my girls to this museum more than any other, from the time they could walk and for all their childhoods, and every year now. I couldn’t afford the admission and to buy lunch, so we four sat on the steps outside, sharing two sandwiches from Subway and one large drink, and then my daughters were immersed for entire days in art and cool air and gardens.

  Delphine remembers the children’s museum that opened in downtown Riverside, where a mist fountain outside kept them happy in summer, and inside, the girls played in the actual ambulance stocked with stethoscopes and bandages and a gurney. (I told them with selected detail about my ambulance ride from Boo Boo Lane.) They sat atop a police motorcycle. They drew pictures of themselves, and put on plays with other kids, while I sat on the floor near the air-conditioning vents and graded student papers.

  We went to every natural history museum in every city we visited, every art museum, even to the historic Mission Inn Hotel, where their father and I had spent our wedding night. We sat in the huge chair built for President Taft’s visit to Riverside, touched the gilded altar from Mexico. In this way, museums shaped so much about the lives of my children.

  But we still had to sleep at night. In fall and winter, at 3:00 a.m., the Santa Ana winds gathered in the desert and swirled screaming down the pass and directly at the girls’ bedroom facing north, hitting their windows. The old metal weather strips would hum like a god playing a terrifying harmonica of our house, and my daughters came into my room to sleep. Four to my queen-size bed, sweating saltier than tears into my eyes.

  Another summer, another heat wave, I’d taken them outside again to sleep in the yard, and I sat near midnight on the porch steps, crying. It had been hot for ten days. I didn’t think I could do this. A white truck with contractor’s toolbox and metal rails rattled slowly past my house. Someone looked at me.

  At dawn, before we were even dressed for summer camp and work, there were two men at the door. Gaila came to the kitchen and said, “It’s Mike.”

  My neighbor down the street, who’d bought his old house the year before we bought ours, who’d become a contractor, stood on the porch. Behind him were wide silvery tubes of metal ducting and an air-conditioning unit. Mike’s father was from Chihuahua, and his mother an American student who’d gone to Mexico. The girls loved his dry one-liners and impassive gaze. He had a two-bedroom house like mine, and two small sons, and was remaking his attic into a loft for them. He said now, “I saw you crying on the porch. I’m putting in AC. You can pay me later.”

  How could I ever leave a place that loved us like that? We were a pack. Rosette in my arms, then holding my hand, then running past me to follow her sisters and the neighbor kids and her cousins and kindergarten friends. We did swimming lessons at the city college pool together, they all got summer pneumonia together, and that was another year. The girls went to nature camp at the river, and rec league basketball. I drove to preschool, elementary school, and practice, and another year was gone.

  Women saved me. My friend Holly, who called every day, who had been divorced with two children, said, “You were with the same man for twenty years! Other people we know are just getting married now, and they’re forty! You’re ahead!”

  My friend Elizabeth who came over to help me trim the mulberry tree, who had been divorced with four children, said, “It’s like a hundred leaky faucets in a house. Everything you feel. You just turn off one faucet at a time. Drip by drip. It takes forever. But one day you’ll wake up and hear quiet.”

  One morning when I was frosting still-warm cupcakes in the back of my van, in the elementary school parking lot, for Gaila’s classroom birthday party, Gaila stood beside me and said, “You’re the best mom anybody could have.” Everything felt backward, and I was dizzy for a moment, but then I recovered and remembered she’d asked for sprinkles, too.

  At night in the old laundry room, which was a screened porch facing east, the full moon rose each month as Delphine sat on the dryer waiting for the last of the thick cotton athletic socks to dry. I folded shirts. Rosette didn’t even have a bed, as she likes to remind us—she had a tiny green fold-out couch printed with zoo animals, and her feet dangled off the edge of the sad not-mattress.

  Perhaps the funniest part was when I reread Joan Didion one summer, still marveling at her tone and the precision of her sentences, the way she wrote about the wind and the earth, and I had a revelation: Many of the women I was closest to had been married three times. They weren’t the divorcees of “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” with aspirations to kill a husband for money. They just kept surviving each husband, having more kids, and making a sisterhood of single mothers.

  There was my friend Terri, with freckles and auburn hair, who ran her own landscaping business. Her trailer bore my favorite sticker:

  GROW YOUR OWN DOPE

  P
LANT A MAN

  Terri kept telling me, “Just find a contractor and sleep with him for a couple years till you get your house in shape. You can dump him then. Come on—you need a new roof and paint and your floor redone.” Her third husband had a tattoo of a woodpecker on his calf; he gave her a ruby ring after a drunken spree, but it turned out he’d stolen it from Sears, and she laughed when she told me he called her from jail. She eventually took her three sons and moved to another city. (I didn’t take her advice on love with repairs.)

  I couldn’t cut the grass because when we divorced, Dwayne, the son of a gardener, took the lawnmower. Within weeks I met Inez, a woman born in Mexico City, whose third husband, born in Guatemala, ran a landscaping business. She and I have known each other fifteen years now. Her first husband brought her and two daughters across the border, and then he died. Her second husband, with whom she had a son, left. She became a citizen ten years ago. She divorced the husband from Guatemala and bought her own house, but they still work together one day a week. She and I share plants and seeds and raising our chickens; she keeps the ancient sprinklers working.

  In the house across the street was Maria, born in the rural forests of the Philippines, who was married to her third American military husband. With the first husband, who was Mexican-American, she had two children; with the second, who was African-American, she had one son; with the current husband, who was European American, she had two teenagers. Maria loved trading my fresh eggs and cherry tomatoes for her chicken adobo and lumpia. On my porch, she told stories of how back home in her village, women turned into black dogs and black birds at night, and you never knew the true incarnation of who you met in the dark.

  At night, the girls and I had visitations from the animals. It was so hot, and the three big windows in their bedroom opened inward, so the visitors were not startled, as they couldn’t see our faces in the screen, watching the characters we knew from books.

  Mother possums wore bonnets and kept babies in tree hollows. Mama bunnies scolded their naughty sons. Templeton the rat was sporadically heroic in Charlotte’s Web. Raccoons were guys, because of the bandit face, eternal sunglasses, and ringed tail. Stellaluna the bat and hundreds of her siblings flitted erratically through the dusk above the carob trees. And Mama Skunk took her babies for evening strolls with their tails waving jauntily, like flags.

  The animals had a primeval homing instinct for our neighborhood of former citrus and walnut groves, and a nesting impulse for my house and yard, which had been theirs long before I showed up. Those pregnant mothers had their own Homeric journeys, which ended in my basement. Especially the largest possum, a marsupial descended from the dinosaurs, ancient in lineage. Every night, at exactly the same time—11:09—my possum of many springs clawed frantically at the crawl space screens, banged against the foundation of the house just below my bedroom window. Maybe her six-times-great-grandmother was born there, underneath my wood floor. Maybe she was the tenth generation of her possum family. I lost count. When I was first divorced, and too tired to reinforce the battlements, she nested there beneath my bedroom, spending the midnight hours chomping happily, noisily, on snails and apricot pits and other loudly crackable delicacies.

  We named her Daisy Mae. A single mother like me. But she got so obnoxious and smelly that we had to get out the old humane trap my elderly neighbor had made for Dwayne and me when we first bought the house. A long, wide trap with a metal ramp that tripped the wire, so the girls and I slid a can of tuna carefully all the way to the end, with a mulberry branch. We watched from the bedroom window. On the sixth day, she finally went inside.

  My girls cheered, Daisy Mae bared needlelike dental work, and Dwayne came to put us all in his truck. We drove her across the river to the other side, near the nature preserve. But in the rippling movement of her creamy underside, the girls saw seven hairless, thumbsized babies. She banged her nose against the metal cage until she bled.

  “Hurry, Daddy,” they said. We parked, he picked up the trap, and we walked partway into the jungle of grapevines. “Happy trails to you,” he sang loudly, the old Roy Rogers song. This is why we still loved him, even though he didn’t live with us. “Happy trails to you,” he always sang even more loudly when he used to descend into the basement or ascend to the attic, “un-til we meet a-gain.” He’d turn to us and whisper, “Just to let any critters know I’m here. I don’t want surprises.”

  The possum scuttled off into the brush near the river. She was back within a week. She swam across the river and walked about five miles. To get to my yard.

  For three years, she returned to have her babies, and for three years we trapped her. She didn’t care. This was her ancestral home as much as ours. The last time, her scarred nose white and thickened, she moved through our backyard slowly as an ocean liner, stately and pregnant, searching for apricots and her condo. She had eleven babies under my bedroom. Ironic, since I’d been divorced for several years by then.

  But it took weeks to catch her this time. By the night she entered the trap, the babies were half-grown, the size of small rats themselves. Some of my neighbors killed baby possums with baseball bats or shovels or guns, when they got into a house, because they looked worse than rats. These babies swarmed over the trap, confused as to why they couldn’t touch their mom, and her nose was bloody again. My girls cried.

  So I spent an hour cleaning out a gray plastic trash can, propping it up with bricks, setting up a ramp with a piece of plywood, and sliding a can of tuna into the bottom. We watched from the girls’ bedroom window, standing on Gaila’s bed. Ten times I went back outside, as each baby slid down into the slick plastic. (The eleventh baby eluded us, and lived in the mock-orange hedge by our porch for about a year.)

  We called Dwayne again. He laughed. But he brought the truck. We rode across the river. He sang the song.

  My mother said I should keep the yard cleaner. Then again, her favorite hiking trail was patrolled one year by a mountain lion. That didn’t scare her at all. She refused to stop walking there alone and defiantly showed us her arsenal: a cartridge of pepper spray, a hockey stick, and a Swiss Army knife. We applauded the America-Canada-Switzerland vibe, but asked whether the mountain lion would wait while she decided whether to use the corkscrew or the nail file on the Swiss Army knife. I actually got out a children’s science book to show her the speed and length of the mountain lion’s leap from a rock. My mother remained secure in her weapons and heritage, and took my daughters down the trail, so of course I had to follow.

  One fall, we had a posse of raccoons. An especially aggressive raccoon was working his way through the unshelled pecans we laid out on the porch to cure in the sun, pecans Rosette and I had spent hours gathering from the trees near the river. Each night, the raccoon found them. Rosette was upset because pecans were her favorite.

  The third night, I confronted him, yelling and waving my arms. He studied me quizzically, and then he charged. I ran inside and slammed the screen door. I opened it to throw a handy brown paper trash bag at him; with the humanlike fingers we admired in our books, he opened the bag, withdrew stale cookies, and had dessert.

  It was a matter of honor then. My daughters were appalled at my inability to take back the porch turf. The raccoon came to the door, actually clawed the screen in my face, like, Yeah, I desire fresher cookies now. From the kitchen.

  Obviously, humans didn’t intimidate him. Next to the front door was an inflated Shamu the Killer Whale, the one Rosette used in the city pool. I hadn’t wanted to blow it up again in the morning. Shamu was about four feet long. I put him in front of my body and charged out the screen door, making eerie high-pitched screeching noises (my best version of killer-whale anger). The raccoon leaped four feet into the air, flew off the porch, and raced across the street to the hollow in the pepper tree. He never came back.

  My girls were stunned. Weirded out. But maybe proud.

  That fall, my neighbor Mike said, “We have to secure the basement. And I can build two b
edrooms and a bathroom, if you take out the wisteria and the two fig trees. You can pay me later.”

  I sold a book and gave him all the money. He excavated part of the backyard. I couldn’t breathe—I was not leaving, we were not leaving, I was gambling on my house and yard and street and Dwayne and my family and my community.

  When the small bulldozer left, there were hills of clay piled in the place where the wisteria had once twined over a rotted lattice gate, the vines that once tendriled inside the bedroom windows. But my daughters weren’t sentimental. They were excited—Delphine held aloft Mike’s pickax, and he said she could use it for the weekend to dig a mine in the dirt. I had once dragged a pickax into the foothills to mine gold with my brothers, so I smiled and went inside.

  Then there were screams, and Rosette came running inside, holding her fingers, which dripped blood, and of course she’d kept putting her fingers in the way of Delphine’s pickax, and of course she didn’t pull them back the one time, and Delphine was crying harder than Rosette, and I smacked Delphine on the shoulder and said “How could you?” and her eyes went obsidian and Rosette fanned open her hand and one finger had just a flap of skin missing. All fingers were still attached.

  That night, I apologized to Delphine and told her that I had once done the same—to my own finger, which made me an idiot. Before she got into her not-bed, Rosette sat on the bathroom counter and said jauntily, “Tighten up the bandage for me, Mommy. I want to take my finger to show-and-tell tomorrow.” Then she studied me critically, my haggard face, two curlers in my hair, and said, “Mommy. Did your pajamas come with the wallpaper? I mean, did you plan that?” Her tone was not admiring.