But I asked her again in 2017, laying out the two stories. For the first time, she said with some bemusement: “No—you taught yourself to read. I read you the first book, maybe three times, and then you knew the whole thing and you wanted another one. We were so poor, but you just wanted a book, and I went to Stater Bros. [the local grocery] and spent my last quarter to buy one of those little books with the gold at the edges.”
I was so surprised.
She’d bought me a Little Golden Book. Maybe Poky Little Puppy, she thought. Then President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed, a public murder so graphic and visible on television, shocking to the nation. My mother sobbed and grieved in front of the small black-and-white television, and I lay on the floor listening.
My mother had become an American citizen in November 1960 so that she could vote for John F. Kennedy in the presidential election. Before that, for five years, she had been an immigrant with a green card. “I wasn’t in any hurry to become a citizen,” she told me the other night. “Not until I saw John F. Kennedy.”
“You didn’t vote for—” I blanked.
She called to my stepfather, John—“Who was before Kennedy?”
“Eisenhower,” he replied dryly.
She waved her hand dismissively. “No,” she said to me. “I didn’t feel any reason to vote until President Kennedy. He was different.”
She was pregnant with me, in late 1960, when she began the citizenship class at the Riverside courthouse. “You had to renounce your other citizenship, back then,” she said. “I didn’t want to lose my Swiss citizenship, but I really wanted to vote for him. It wasn’t hard at all, back then, to become a citizen,” she said. “We learned some history.”
She had me in October. The following month, she said, “We went to the courthouse. Dad and me. We just happened to be there at the same time.”
That dad was not my father, Richard Straight, whose name my mother never ever said aloud. That was John Paul Watson, my future stepfather, born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. They became citizens together, taking the oath in the same room.
She was truly an American then, when she cast her vote for John F. Kennedy in a white skirt and blouse, her hair carefully risen in a Jackie Kennedy bubble.
But by the night of November 23, 1963, she was on her own, two weeks overdue in her pregnancy. “I had taken the week off from work, because your brother was so late,” she told me. “But he didn’t come, and I couldn’t afford to take any more time off. I had no money. I was desperate. I was watching television, and there they were, he and Jackie, and then he was shot. It hurt me to the quick. I just cried and cried, I couldn’t stop crying.”
I remember the crying, the black-and-white images going past my face, which I held close to the thick curved screen where the static from the constant dry wind would shock me so hard I could feel it inside my nose.
“I couldn’t stop crying, and your brother wouldn’t come. I went to see Grandma.”
That was her stepmother—Rosa. I said, “Where was I? I didn’t go.”
My mother frowned. “Where were you? I took you to the neighbors. I drove to Fontana and Grandma said the best thing when your baby is late is to walk. That’s all she told me. So I walked all around Fontana. I didn’t know what to do.”
She went into labor and the following morning she had my brother. In 2017, telling me this story, she sat in her sixth house, each one a bit bigger than the last, but all within a ten-mile radius. I ladled out the chicken and rice I brought on many Sundays. “Then the TV was on in my hospital room, and I saw that man shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. Who was that man?” she called to my stepfather.
“Jack Ruby,” he replied.
She said to me, “I saw the whole thing. Over and over again. That was terrible, too.”
The next day, Rosa drove her from the hospital with my brother, and dropped her off at the dream house. “She didn’t come inside. She said, ‘You made your bed. Now you must lie in it.’ That’s what she told me. Then she drove away.” My mother was quiet for a moment.
I knew this part. I said, “The neighbor had left our door unlocked and the wind blew it open.”
“I took him inside and there was dirt everywhere. I was so tired. And I had to get out the vacuum.”
That door faced east, into the brunt of Santa Ana winds screaming down off the foothills. The door was wide open and the house full of dirt from the fields. My mother, though abandoned, had spent the last weeks feverishly knitting a new layette for the baby—soft yellow jacket and booties. She had a new bassinet. These were the things she cared about most, having spent all those years knitting thick woolen socks for her Swiss father and brothers, and now knitting fine booties for her son. The bassinet and its lining, the layette she’d left displayed there, for herself, if no one else—all of it was filthy, and the wind was hot as hell.
My baby brother, Jeffrey, was screaming, his fists held on either side of his face all clenched tight and red, like puckered tomato bottoms three in a row. Then he threw up all over the bassinet. (His hands were fists for the rest of his life—larger than the rest of his body, so powerful, knuckles and wrists swollen with work, scarred from fighting and farming and burning old paint off buildings.)
I had my book.
She was broken. It is the only time my mother ever described to me feeling as if she were defeated and could not go on. No food. Swimming in dirt and thorned weeds. My brother blind with fury. I had my book.
Rosa Leu’s words seem particularly ironic and cruel, since my mother had slept only two nights in the hospital, and she sure wasn’t going to be lying in her bed, alone, while her three-year-old and three-day-old children lay in the dancing dust on their blankets.
She went back to work the next day. We went to the babysitter. I read my book. While my brother’s hands remained fists, my eyes remained the hungriest part of me. As long as I had a book, or a Sears catalog, or a cereal box, or a Betty Crocker recipe book, I would eat what I was given. As long as I had something to read, I could imagine I was somewhere else, speaking with the strangely colonial Mr. Quaker Oats with his long gray curls, wearing new Sears dresses with smocking, while Betty Crocker with bouffant hair served us lattice-crust pie on a checkered tablecloth.
Nothing was ever the same for my mother. The motorcade, the beauty and hope and pillbox hat and handsome jaw, the accent so patrician, the way her president spoke, and his wife with her clean smile and cheekbones. Then that wife held her husband’s brains in her hand. She was alone.
My mother was alone, too, with two children. Her president was buried. She never missed work. At the branch was John Watson, from the citizenship ceremony, who had worked with her at Household Finance before Richard Straight came in for that damn loan. (My mother’s dating pool was apparently very small—men inside the savings and loan building.)
She left us, my baby brother and me, with a babysitter who lived at the edge of the orange groves, and married her friend from Canada. I loved him because the first time he met me, he gave me a Tonka truck. He had asked what I wanted, and I didn’t say doll, but truck. Earthmoving seemed important where we lived—that is what I saw every day, bulldozers and tractors and turkey feathers and trucks hauling oranges. We lived in an unincorporated community, not even a town. I moved a lot of dirt in that yard, after my stepfather married my mother. Less than a year later, she had another baby—another boy, John Jr.—and we moved across the Santa Ana River to the city of Riverside.
We