Where I Was From (20 page)

These places survived through my childhood and adolescence into my adult life, sources of a fear more potent even than that of drowning in the rivers (drowning meant you had misread the river, drowning made sense, drowning you could negotiate), the fear of being sent away—no, worse—“put away.” There was near Sacramento an asylum where I was periodically taken with my Girl Scout troop to exhibit for the inmates our determined cheerfulness while singing rounds, nine-year-olds with merit badges on our sleeves pressed into service as Musicians and Assistant Attendants.
White coral bells upon a slender stalk
, we sang in the sunroom, trying not to make eye contact,
lilies of the valley line your garden walk.
I could not have known at nine that my grandmother’s sister, who arrived lost in melancholia to live with us after her husband died, would herself die in the asylum at Napa, but the possibility that such a fate could strike at random was the air we breathed.

Oh don’t you wish that you could hear them ring
, we sang, one by one faltering, only the strongest or most oblivious among us able to keep the round going in the presence of the put away, the now intractably lost, the abandoned,
that will happen only when the angels sing.
If it was going to be us or them, which of us in that sunroom would not have regressed in Royce’s view to that “novel degree of carelessness,” that “previously unknown blindness to social duties”? Which of us in that sunroom could not have abandoned the orphaned Miss Gilmore and her brother on the Little Sandy? Which of us in that sunroom did not at some level share in the shameful but entrenched conviction that to be weak or bothersome was to warrant abandonment? Which of us in that sunroom would not see the rattlesnake and fail to kill it? Which of us in that sunroom would not sell the cemetery? Were not such abandonments the very heart and soul of the crossing story? Jettison weight? Keep moving? Bury the dead in the trail and run the wagons over it? Never dwell on what got left behind, never look back at all?
Remember
, Virginia Reed had warned attentive California children, we who had been trained since virtual infancy in the horrors she had survived,
never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.
Once on a drive to Lake Tahoe I found myself impelled to instruct my brother’s small children in the dread lesson of the Donner Party, just in case he had thought to spare them. “Don’t worry about it,” another attentive California child, Patricia Hearst, recalled having told herself during the time she was locked in a closet by her kidnappers. “Don’t examine your feelings. Never examine your feelings—they’re no help at all.”

Part Four

1

To me as a child, the State was the world as I knew it, and I pictured other States and countries as pretty much “like this.” I never felt the warm, colorful force of the beauty of California until I had gone away and come back over my father’s route: dull plains; hot, dry desert; the night of icy mountains; the dawning foothills breaking into the full day of sunshine in the valley; and last, the sunset through the Golden Gate. And I came to it by railroad, comfortably, swiftly. My father, who plodded and fought or worried the whole long hard way at oxen pace, always paused when he recalled how they turned over the summit and waded down, joyously, into the amazing golden sea of sunshine—he would pause, see it again as he saw it then, and say, “I saw that this was the place to live.”

—Lincoln Steffens,
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens

M
Y MOTHER
died on May 15, 2001, in Monterey, two weeks short of her ninety-first birthday. The preceding afternoon I had talked to her on the telephone from New York and she had hung up midsentence, a way of saying goodbye so characteristic of her—especially by way of allowing her callers to economize on what she still called “long distance”—that it did not occur to me until morning, when my brother called, that in this one last instance she had been just too frail to keep the connection.

Maybe not just too frail.

Maybe too aware of what could be the import of this particular goodbye.

Flying to Monterey I had a sharp apprehension of the many times before when I had, like Lincoln Steffens, “come back,” flown west, followed the sun, each time experiencing a lightening of spirit as the land below opened up, the checkerboards of the midwestern plains giving way to the vast empty reach between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada; then
home, there, where I was from, me
, California. It would be a while before I realized that “me” is what we think when our parents die, even at my age,
who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from.

I
n the aftermath of my mother’s death I found myself thinking a good deal about the confusions and contradictions in California life, many of which she had herself embodied. She despised, for example, the federal government and its “giveaways,” but saw no contradiction between this view and her reliance on my father’s military reserve status to make free use of Air Force doctors and pharmacies, or to shop at the commissaries and exchanges of whatever military installation she happened to be near. She thought of the true California spirit as one of unfettered individualism, but carried the idea of individual rights to dizzying and often punitive lengths. She definitely aimed for an appearance of being “stern,” a word she seemed to think synonymous with what was not then called “parenting.” As a child herself in the upper Sacramento Valley she had watched men hung in front of the courthouse. When John Kennedy was assassinated she insisted that Lee Harvey Oswald had “every right” to assassinate him, that Jack Ruby in turn had “every right” to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, and that any breakdown of natural order in the event had been on the part of the Dallas police, who had failed to exercise their own right, which was “to shoot Ruby on the spot.” When I introduced her to my future husband, she advised him immediately that he would find her political beliefs so far to the right that he would think her “the original little old lady in tennis shoes.” At Christmas that year he gave her the entire John Birch library, dozens of call-to-action pamphlets, boxed. She was delighted, amused, displaying the pamphlets to everyone who came by the house that season, but to the best of my knowledge she never opened one.

She was passionately opinionated on a number of points that reflected, on examination, no belief she actually held. She thought of herself as an Episcopalian, as her mother had been. She was married at Trinity Episcopal Pro-Cathedral in Sacramento. She had me christened there. She buried her mother there. My brother and I had her own funeral service at Saint John’s Episcopal Chapel in Monterey, a church she had actually attended only two or three times but favored as an idea not only because it was a “California” church (it was built in the 1880s by Charles Crocker and C. P. Huntington on the grounds of the Southern Pacific’s Del Monte Hotel) but also because the litany used was that from the 1928, as opposed to the revised,
Book of Common Prayer.
Yet she had herself at age twelve refused outright to be confirmed an Episcopalian: she had gone through the instruction and been presented to the bishop, but, when asked for the usual rote affirmation of a fairly key doctrinal point, had declared resoundingly, as if it were a debate, that she found herself “incapable of believing” that Christ was the son of God. By the time of my own confirmation, she had further hardened this position. “The only church I could possibly go to would be Unitarian,” she announced when my grandmother asked why she never went to church with us.

“Eduene,” my grandmother said, a soft keening. “How can you say that.”

“I
have
to say it, if I want to be honest,” my mother said, the voice of sweet reason. “Since I don’t believe that Christ is the son of God.”

My grandmother brightened, seeing space for resolution. “Then it’s fine,” she said. “Because nobody has to believe all
that.”

Only in recent years did I come to realize that many of these dramatically pronounced opinions of my mother’s were defensive, her own version of her great-grandmother’s “fixed and settled principles, aims and motives in life,” a barricade against some deep apprehension of meaninglessness. There had been glimpses of this apprehension all along, overlooked by me, my own barricade. She did not see a point in making beds, for example, since “they just get slept in again.” Nor did she see a point in dusting, since dust just returned. “What difference does it make,” she would often say, by way of ending a discussion of whether an acquaintance should leave her husband, say, or whether a cousin should drop out of school and become a manicurist. “What difference does it make,” five words that had come to chill me at the bone, was what she said when I pressed her on the point about selling the cemetery. On the Good Friday after her own mother died she happened to be driving across the country with a friend from Sacramento. At the place where they stopped for dinner there had been no fish on the menu, only meat. “I took one bite and I thought of Mother and I wanted to throw up,” my mother said when she arrived at my apartment in New York a few days later. Her mother, she said, would never eat meat on Good Friday. Her mother did not like to cook fish, but she would get a crab and crack it. I was about to suggest that cracked Dungeness crab was hard to come by on the average mid western road trip, but before I could speak I noticed that she was crying. “What difference does it make,” she said finally.

I
had seen my mother cry only once before. The first time had been during World War Two, on a downtown street in some town where my father was stationed, Tacoma or Durham or Colorado Springs. My brother and I had been left in the car while our mother went into the military housing office that dealt with dependents. The office was crowded, women and children leaning against the plate glass windows and spilling outside. When our mother came back out onto the sidewalk she was crying: it seemed to be the end of some rope, one day too many on which there would be no place for us to stay.

The blank dreariness
, Sarah Royce wrote.

Without house or home.

When she got into the car her eyes were dry and her expression was determinedly cheerful. “It’s an adventure,” she said. “Its wartime, its history, you children will be thankful you got to see all this.” In one of those towns we finally got a room in a hotel, with a shared bathtub, into which she poured a bottle of pine disinfectant every day before bathing us. In Durham we had one room, with kitchen privileges, in the house of a fundamentalist preacher and his family who sat on the porch after dinner and ate peach ice cream, each from his or her own quart carton. The preacher’s daughter had a full set of
Gone With the Wind
paper dolls, off limits to me. It was in Durham where the neighborhood children crawled beneath the back stoop and ate the dirt, scooping it up with a cut raw potato and licking it off, craving some element their diet lacked.

Pica.

I knew the word even then, because my mother told me. “Poor children do it,” she said, with the same determinedly cheerful expression. “In the South. You never would have learned that in Sacramento.”

It was in Durham where my mother noticed my brother reaching for something through the bars of his playpen and froze, unable to move, because what he was reaching for was a copperhead. The copperhead moved on, possibly another instance of the “providential interposition” that had spared my mother’s great-great-grandfather from the mad dog in Georgia.

Something occurs to me as I write this: my mother did not kill the copperhead.

Only once, in Colorado Springs, did we actually end up living in a house of our own—not much of a house, a four-room stucco bungalow, rented furnished, but a house. I had skipped part of first grade because we were moving around and I had skipped second grade because we were moving around but in Colorado Springs we had a house, in Colorado Springs I could go to school. I did. They were already doing multiplication and I had skipped learning how to subtract. Out at the base where my father was stationed pilots kept spiraling down through the high thin Colorado air. The way you knew was that you heard the crash wagons. A classmate told me that her mother did not allow her to play with military trash. My grandmother came by train to visit, bringing as usual material solace, thick blue towels and Helena Rubinstein soap in the shape of apple blossoms. I have snapshots of the two of us in front of the Broadmoor Hotel, my grandmother in a John Fredericks hat, me in a Brownie uniform. “You are just out of luck to be home because it’s so nice and warm here,” I wrote to her when she was gone. The letter, which I found with my mother’s snapshots of the period, is decorated with gold and silver stars and cutout Christmas trees, suggesting that I had been trying hard for the upbeat. “But Mommy heard a girl say on the base that ‘Remember last New Year’s? It was eighteen below, and we had just this kind of weather.’ We have a blue spruce Christmas tree. Jimmy and me are going to a party the 23rd at the base. They have a new name for the base. It’s Peterson field.”

I remember that my mother made me give the apple-blossom soap to the wife of a departing colonel, a goodbye present. I remember that she encouraged me to build many of those corrals that Californians were meant to know how to build, branches lashed together with their own stripped bark, ready for any loose livestock that might come our way, one of many frontier survival techniques I have never had actual occasion to use. I remember that once when we were snowbound she taught me how to accept and decline formal invitations, a survival technique from a different daydream:
Miss Joan Didion accepts with pleasure the kind invitation of, Miss Joan Didion regrets that she is unable to accept the kind invitation of.
Another time when we were snowbound she gave me several old copies of
Vogue
, and pointed out in one of them an announcement of the competition
Vogue
then had for college seniors, the Prix de Paris, first prize a job in
Vogues
Paris or New York office.