Last year, California finally acknowledged the truth that one of my favorite poets, Deborah Miranda, whose father was Ohlone-Chumash-Esselen and mother was Jewish, wrote in her memoir Bad Indians: To glorify the missions of California—built with enslaved labor, the cause of disease and death and rape and murder—and to ask children to construct their own missions, without teaching the true history and cost of those compounds that influenced California architecture and design more than any other buildings, would be akin to asking children to build scale models of plantations in the southern states or concentration camps in Europe without teaching the true history and cost of those places. Most children had begun to build missions from kits sold at craft stores. The California state legislature rescinded the education requirement in 2018.
When it was Rosette’s turn, she was a much more thoughtful, less innocent fourth grader. She knew I’d gone to Mission San Luis Rey, near Escondido, with a friend from the Pala reservation. He and I had lingered at the large outdoor lavanderia where his great-great-grandmother and ancestors had washed the laundry of soldiers and padres on stone steps around a pool. The women had been taken from their homelands in the Palomar mountains.
Rosette chose the mission that seemed the least glorified and most original—San Miguel Arcángel, tucked into a hollow off the 101 freeway between Paso Robles and King City. Women from the small community had been praying in that chapel when we stopped briefly years earlier.
The older girls grumbled. They were thirteen and fifteen; they had basketball and friends, high school and junior high importances during spring break. But I prevailed, stubborn and already afraid of the slipping away of our travels and our own history. We got into the same van; Rosette’s musical choice was S Club 7.
Headed north to San Miguel, they were all old enough now to hear my freeway stories: how when I was a student at USC, and their dad was a basketball star at Monterey Peninsula College and then at a state university, we drove back and forth, or rode the bus, on this long highway to see each other. How we went to many small towns like San Miguel, tucked off the highway, for games and tournaments, and met farming kids who saw sports as a ticket to a bigger life. How their father and other players took pig corn from nearby fields to survive some weekends, how he worked the almond harvest and spiders fell from the trees into his afro.
At San Miguel, heavy winter rains and damage had left the mission closed. Large patches of whitewashed plaster had exposed adobe bricks to the elements. We paced around the chain-link fence, wondering where the parishioners worshipped.
Rosette was crushed. She did that third-kid-nothing’s-ever-as-good-for-me stomp for a brief time. It was late afternoon, though, and we needed a place to sleep, so I decided to cut across the hills to Cambria.
The winding two-lane highway passed through the old landscape once wandered by the indigenous people of this area, the trappers and hunters, and the padres who wanted to enclose them in adobe walls to pray. We saw a flock of wild turkeys moving through high grass, and then deer, with two spotted fawns studying us from the trees. We pulled off the road to study them back, in silence.
That is the moment my daughters still talk about. We were never afraid to be the pack, moving through the world, stopping to listen, to tremble at small wooden crosses half-hidden in yellow grass.
24
Coach—Driveway #2
Riverside, California, 2004
To Delphine,
Do you remember our driveway as it was in the beginning? The place where you spent most of your childhood?
When your father and I bought this house, I fell in love with the driveway. It was gravel and dirt, lined with the original cement curbs from 1910. The roses alongside were choked by crabgrass tangled like old wigs. But I cleaned out the flowerbeds and planted Swiss chard and delphiniums, the tall blue flowers for which I named you; your dad lined up his tools on the curbing. It was our first driveway, and nothing is more important to the Sims family than a driveway. You know this. We have held wedding receptions and funeral repasts in the driveways of your childhood.
Your father finally had a place to hold court—in the old barber chair—while his friends and brothers worked on engines. The oil soaked into the gravel, the pebbles mixed with screws and bolts. Near dusk, we brought out plates of hot food and listened to the men talk smack. You heard them talk about bringing down starlings with a slingshot and roasting the birds in the field. You heard jokes about Pinto doors stolen by Midnight Auto Supply, guys who lifted car parts on order.
He put up the homemade plywood backboard and iron hoop before you were born. After your dad left, the driveway became not suddenly but steadily a girl place, with skates and scooters and bikes replacing the engines and stacks of spare tires. But you were a serious baller by the time you were ten. You needed a new hoop.
You told me you were going to play on the boys’ varsity team in high school.
I took down the old backboard that summer. Your uncle Jeff and our neighbor Mike put up a new one with a breakaway net, which your father bought. Mike poured a concrete driveway so you could practice. I nearly cried to see the forgiving gravel gone. I had raked for years, a zenlike practice, sifting out lug nuts and rose hips and cigarette butts.
Then I was the one out there shooting free throws with you, guarding you with stunning inefficiency while you brought the ball down the long driveway, aiming for the chalk marks where your father said you should take off for layups. I tried to trim the nodding English roses, but their long thorny branches forced you into a sweet head fake.
“Fifty layups!” your father used to shout, when he dropped you off in the truck. “Then put your right hand in your pocket and dribble past your mom left-handed.”
“Anytime you want to step in here,” I used to shout back—do you remember?—but he would grin and gun the engine and drive off to the house he’d bought, three miles away.
We were in the driveway almost every day after school, your sisters and me chasing you while you fended us off and launched your jump shot. I remember one evening after your first Park and Rec games, with mostly boys, the fingers on your right hand swollen and purple. You’d deftly stolen the ball from a boy, and he’d knocked you down and stomped on your hand, saying he’d kick your ass. You’d held up your hand, given him an evil glare, said, “And that’s gonna start when?” You dribbled with your left hand, as your father had taught you.
But at home, you said to me, “They don’t want me playing ’cause I’m a girl.” I felt a jagged pull in the muscles between my hipbones, the one I get when someone messes with my kids. I knew I had only ten seconds to decide—comfort you, or arm you.
“It’s always gonna be like this,” I said. You turned your head so I wouldn’t see the gleam of tears. “You have two choices. Get sad and be a victim, or get mad and kick their butts.” The driveway was where I listened, and tried to figure out what to say.
I remember this. You took the ball and shouldered past me for an aggressive layup, then started shooting free throws with angry precision. With my toe, I nudged the big V-shaped dent in the old curbing, the mark of a missed hammer years ago when someone tried to fix a U joint. Then you went down the driveway, out the gate, and up into the neighbor’s driveway, shooting from the three-point line, which meant over the roses and the concrete-block wall.
You needed your dad. I waited until you all went to bed, and then I made my phone call from where I always made serious phone calls, the ones that mattered, to my friends Nicole and Tanya and Kari, the other single moms, and to your dad. None of you girls would ever enter the laundry room accidentally, or you might be asked to fold something, so I banged the dryer door shut twice to ensure that you’d stay away. Banging the dryer door was my code for I’ve had it, it is hella late and I am in here waiting for your damn athletic socks to dry and they are the thickness of things designed for snowbanks.
I called your dad and told him that if he didn’t coach you, these boys would continue
to talk shit, and one of their dads would coach you, and he might talk shit, and I wasn’t having that. I told him he had to be your Park and Rec coach.
The next year, he coached you with his friend Don Reynoso, also a bear of a man. Two huge plush former ballers, one black and one Mexican-American, and they took their teams to championships with what I always thought was the best fatherhood skill ever: Pass the damn ball, because if every single player scores, we take the whole team to Dairy Queen.
We spent years sitting in that parking lot eating ice cream sundaes.
By 2003, we’d bought him his own shirt. In embroidered letters on the right side of the chest, it read COACH DWAYNE SIMS. Do you remember when you were finished with high school basketball, and your team, with all those girls he’d known since they were ten and twelve years old, had dismantled after making it to the second round of the playoffs? It was almost time for the last high school banquet. You had a letterman jacket, something neither of us ever did. Embroidered on the back: SIMS. The ultimate tribute.
Your father was melancholy—it was ending. He was everyone’s favorite coach. Hearing him shout his simple rules—“Look up! Get back! Watch the trap! Box out!”—to girls who’d never played until that team formed, we could see how much they loved him. When they apologized for fouling, he said, “You ain’t foulin’, you ain’t playin’.” Both you and Gaila came up to me in a kind of sullen wonder, at different times, and said, “You know, Daddy’s a really good coach. It’s so weird.”
When you were a freshman and Gaila a junior, he coached your high school team in the spring league. From the sidelines, I again heard his mantra: Look up! Get back! His two basic tenets for victory: Look up when you get the rebound or begin to dribble, because someone is probably already under the basket, and you’ll have an easy layup. Cherry picking, he loves to point out, is not something to be ashamed of. Get back on defense, because there has to be one person who races down after a shot so the other basket is never left completely unguarded.
He transformed into a man with no name. As with many men who look the part completely, he was now Coach. He will be that forever, to a certain generation of girls we see at the park or the mall. Coach! they call happily. Coach Sims!
He was forty-nine years old then, three hundred pounds in that coach shirt. He had been afraid that his size and appearance would make girls and parents fear him, but instead, because he was so intimidating, he rarely had to raise his voice. “Y’all know what to do,” he’d say. “I’m just sittin’ here.” His advice was simple and doable. For point guards, “When you pass the last defender, cross over so she can’t come behind you and poke the ball.” For posts, “Stay at the free-throw line on the inbounds and look like you’re tying your shoe, and then jump up and snatch the pass. Free layup.”
Not innovative, but it worked. That’s what the team wanted, someone who didn’t scream at them and take them out for the smallest infraction. Someone so low-key he didn’t learn their names for a long time. “D, tell the one with the grandma drive the Escalade to go in for Al’s daughter,” he’d say to our kids, who had to translate. Of course. He knew cars and ancestors. “G, tell little Rubidoux to watch back door.” (The father of that girl had ancestors in the historic community along the Santa Ana River.)
I used to hear your dad’s words in my head, when I drove to work and to Target and took you all to practice and games. Look up. We hardly ever do. We look at the road ahead, the driver we think is too slow, the train stopping our progress, the back seat where you all argued or ignored me or ate hurried snacks.
I started to look up on the way to the high school. The road I had driven hundreds of times skirted an arroyo, where fog lingered like dragon breath inside the canyon. I saw the palm trees washed clean by recent rains and sparkling like giant toothbrushes bent sideways by the wind. The huge boulders on the foothills where I played as a child, like rock sugar sprinkled on the crest.
Get back, I said to myself. Even if nothing I did seemed to work—the possum in the basement, the new novel, my college freshmen who hated commas, PTA meetings I always missed because they were scheduled during work, the stack of bills on the table—I had to race back and be ready for the next onslaught. Or I might as well give up.
After you left for college, he was bereft without basketball. Rosette played tennis in high school. She hated basketball, understandable since she spent her entire childhood in the metal bleachers doing her homework, and then helped me and Tanya, who worked for the IRS, run the food stand. Your father had hated tennis when I played in high school: He found it boring, and inexplicably, in a weird white classist tradition, the audience had to be silent. What the hell was that? he always said.
During Rosette’s tennis matches, sitting on the benches, I said to him, “You should just go home and get some sleep,” because he’d worked graveyard shift. But Rosette was good. She played number one doubles and went twice to the regional playoffs. That wasn’t his proudest moment, though. The year-end banquet was held at the city’s oldest country club, where his father had been allowed to trim and mow the grounds, but never enter the club. Remember? Your father made Rosette put her feet into the pool, and he looked up at the sky and told his father that Sims had put some black in the pool.
I am telling you now that in all the years of driving and tournaments and bleachers and snacks, maybe fifteen years of my life, his words meant the world to me: If you think I was ever resentful, know that even now when I’m walking the dog, or driving to work, I hear Look up! and I see redheaded woodpeckers navigating the palm trunks, and the pale golden spray of new dates, and then I feel capable of Get back! in order to survive.
25
The Batmobile
Riverside, California, 2005
We bought the first car for our daughters together. Gaila was sixteen. A red Honda Civic, circa 1995, with only three dents. She and I were impressed by the chrome rims, but when we brought it home, our neighbor corrected us with a laugh. They were hubcaps. Cheap ones.
Dwayne helped out physically and financially. We checked out the car together, where it was parked in a dirt backyard not far from where we grew up. After we examined the dents, we both glanced at the pepper trees and then squinted at each other. Even though we had by then been divorced for seven years, we knew the other’s thoughts: Wait, didn’t we party in this yard, during high school? Didn’t we party hearty in this big field?
Yeah. We did.
I thought about that day for a long time. My mother still hated my father with an undiminished intensity, forty years after their divorce. She wouldn’t say his name. The hate seemed as insoluble as the granite boulders on the Jurupa hills above that tiny house where we’d lived—rocks so hard that a single massive boulder is famous as an exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Once a month, when my father drove me back to Riverside from his house near Pomona, he would show me a hunk of granite the size of an Airstream trailer, perched near the freeway, and tell me that was my rock. But he never mentioned my mother’s name either.
I never wanted to be divorced like that. I was happy to remember that we partied, and to stand there in the field considering the red Honda together.
Southern California—cars figured in nearly every memory of our lives together. Our daughters and I are the kind of women who know vehicles—the Super Sport, Ranchero versus El Camino, the Crown Victoria as retired police vehicle. Classic Mustang.
I learned to drive with my father, Richard Straight, on deserted vineyard roads in Cucamonga and Ontario. He’d built and raced cars as a teen, told me stories of using a sewer pipe for a muffler to amplify sound. I practiced in his 1970 Mustang, and when I swerved on a dirt road to avoid a ground squirrel, he shouted viciously at me for the first time in my life. “Who’s gonna live—you or the damn squirrel?! Never choose an animal over yourself!”
Dwayne learned on dirt roads, too, near junkyards. But we didn’t have a date, in a vehicle, for a year, until the debut of the
Batmobile. “You went out in the Batmobile last night?” his friends teased me at school the next day, in 1976.
“You let me go out in the Batmobile?” I said to my mother the other night, in 2018.
“What did I know?” she laughed. “I didn’t watch you leave.”
We never had much money growing up, but when we tell our girls our best stories, they all involve cars. (Except for the Country Squire. That was a Stephen King–worthy car.) My stepfather, John Watson, bought a vintage 1965 Mustang from a barn; the convertible top was gone, while a hay bale filled out the missing back seat. During high school, no one wanted a ride home from me. He restored and sold that and bought a 1959 Thunderbird, which I raced against our friend Bonedell in a Pontiac named Maybelle. Where the road narrowed to a bridge, he chickened out. I did not.
We cruised with eight bodies packed into Penguin’s Dodge Dart, and when the Bar-Kays sang “Your Love Is Like the Holy Ghost,” we all moved in unison so that the car leaped up and down without the aid of hydraulics.
We brought the red Honda home for Gaila. The car drove fine, but it didn’t have a radio. I offered to have one put in, but Dwayne said he wanted to take care of it.
He bought an inexpensive CD player at his favorite shopping venue: the Rubidoux Drive-In, where we watched all our movies, which held swap meets on Sunday. When I came home from work, Gaila had her first car story.
“I was doing my homework and Daddy kept calling me with his cell phone.”
“Where was he?”
“In front of the house installing the stereo,” she said, rolling her eyes. “First he said, ‘G, bring me a lighter.’ We didn’t have one, so I gave him some matches. Then he called again. ‘G, bring me some tape.’ I brought the wrong kind twice. The silver tape and the white tape. He wanted that black one.”
In the Country of Women Page 18