One afternoon, sitting by the living room fire, our knees inches apart, her crimson lipstick gleaming, winged eyebrows drawn together and then rising in surprise, my mother-in-law, Alberta, waited for me to hand her Gaila—my first daughter, finally fallen asleep with milk on her lips. Then Alberta spoke softly about Sunflower County, Mississippi.
Other days, under the eucalyptus trees shedding their creamy beige bark around us, their leaves like silver sickles, our cousins and uncles would hold paper plates of barbecued meat on their laps, speaking of Denton, Texas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
In the dry-grass-scented night of the Colorado prairie, in a tiny house moved from a ghost town fifty years earlier to Nunn, a town going ghost now, five elderly cousins of my grandmother told me for the first time about a country dance.
On a November evening, my mother crying, the wooden clock from Switzerland clacking implacably above us, the clock from the tiny village in the Alps where she was raised, like Heidi, where when she was nine, her mother died, just like Heidi’s, and my mother told me she went down in the night to see her mother’s body in the living room, and now her life was ruined here in Glen Avon, California.
When I went outside the next day, the chain-link fences were white with feathers heaped onto the wires like insanely monstrous snowflakes, and the Santa Ana winds were blowing, and I tried to figure out how someone would lay a dead woman on a table. I was three years old, and felt as if not just me but our entire street could be lifted up and moved to a different world by that wind, which always blew west, into my face, so that I had to close my eyes.
Here in the land of tumbleweeds so immense and fiercely mobile, a windstorm in November sent so many skeletal balls of thorn blowing across the fields that the small house where my mother and I lived was buried in brown. It was a valley of granite boulders and turkey ranches. Tumbleweeds six and eight feet across packed in drifts around the windows, which were coated with dust from the famous Santa Ana winds. “It was like a snowstorm,” my mother told me years later. “I couldn’t even open the door.”
My mother, Gabrielle Gertrude Leu Straight Watson, grew up in the Swiss Alps, in a chalet built in the 1800s, the wood nearly black with age, the balconies carved with floral designs, and in winter the snow reached the roof. She told me stories of skiing to school, the beauty of glittering icicles, drifts of sparkling white crystals nearly blinding in the sun. But when her mother died and her father remarried, he took them to Canada, a place about which she told me no stories except these: she worked in the fields, her stepmother, Rosa, tried to marry her off at fifteen to a pig farmer, and my mother ran away.
My father, Richard Dean Straight, grew up in the Colorado Rockies, in rough wooden ranch outfits built in the 1800s, the wood nearly black with age, but no balconies or flowers, just corrals filled with cattle and sheep, and his feet damaged by frostbite, his memory damaged by terror. His mother, Ruby, left his father again and again, but always returned. My father went from Colorado to California, from remote ranch to the city of Los Angeles, and back to the mountains. He was born for leaving, as the cowboy songs go, but when he left my mother and me, he didn’t go wandering on a horse back to the ranch. He never came back for more than five minutes at the curb, once a month, while I climbed into his Mustang and went to his house for two days. Never longer than that.
It’s stunning to gather the stories now and see the parallels in their lives, my parents, and to think they spoke about twelve words to each other in the last fifty years.
In November 1963, I was three years old. The tumbleweeds were everywhere. My mother was crying, and I was trying to climb up onto her lap, but there was no lap because she was eight months pregnant, so I sat near her feet. The Santa Ana winds blew incessantly and dust filtered through the cracks around the windows until a golden sparkle of haze moved on the floor in the light from the streetlamp.
My mother had brought few things from Switzerland. She was allowed one small trunk on the boat to Canada. How she came into possession of the wooden clock, I don’t know. But three things she had are now mine: a black lacquered bowl painted with Swiss wildflowers, one pair of silver scissors she used to cut our fingernails, and a strange little folder of cloth into whose pages are inserted sewing needles of all sizes. I was taught to sew, knit, crochet, and embroider when I was seven.
My mother had spent her childhood darning socks for her father and brothers, and knitting new ones. She taught me to knit in the way that her mother had taught her: I sat across from her, holding the heavy loop of yarn as it came from the store, and she pulled the yarn to make a large ball. Now and then she wove yarn tightly around pieces of Brach’s hard candy, which could be bought cheaply by the pound, butterscotches and peppermints and oblong toffees, all in bright cellophane or foil. She wrapped yarn so fast her hands were nearly invisible, and the strands covered the candy like a sped-up cartoon.
Then I sat in a chair and knitted, the ball of yarn at my feet—exactly as she had. My head was bent, my hair was in a braid, and I was required not to touch the ball of yarn, even when I saw a flash of foil or yellow cellophane. The piece of candy had to fall out onto the floor, after I had knitted enough to remove those strands of yarn. I was always glad when the cats batted the damn ball and the candy fell out early.
She told me she hated the darning of socks. I knew I didn’t have to learn to darn because we lived in a place where it was over 100 degrees for weeks at a time, and my siblings and I went barefoot until our feet were so dark and callused we were proud to not require shoes to walk on glass and thorns.
She had made it all the way to southern California to get a job, get married, buy a small house, plant roses, and have a baby. Me.
She worked as a teller at Household Finance Savings and Loan in Riverside. One day in 1955, a man came in to apply for a $50 loan. He was on strike from Boeing Aircraft, living in his car for the moment, and recently divorced, he said. Why she agreed to go out with him is an enduring mystery to me. Richard Straight. Why she married him is even more confusing. But he was handsome.
They lived in a tiny wooden bungalow behind a larger house on Tyrolite Street in Glen Avon, an unincorporated community people called Okietown. My mother was very good at saving money. After four years, they bought her dream house, an eight-hundred-square-foot stucco cottage off Pyrite Street. The new freeway and poultry ranches and granite quarries to the north; to the east, the Santa Ana River. My mother still had her job. But my father had met another woman, and he was gone.
Now she was abandoned. On the west side of the river, fifty miles from Los Angeles, we lived in an area where white people had arrived from dust bowl farms, Mexican people from Michoacan and Zacatecas, black people from Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. Japanese-American strawberry farmers and Spanish-Mexican native Californians had been there for decades. My mother was the only one from Europe.
We had oatmeal and a can of beans. I recall the oatmeal, but in a vague way. My mother says we had a conversation on the third day of oatmeal. My mother: “I told you to eat the oatmeal, and you said you wouldn’t. I slapped you so hard the oatmeal flew off the high chair. You said, ‘You can hit me again but I won’t eat it.’”
She shook her head. “You only wanted your book.”
I had one book. I knew all the words.