Raising Myself Read online

  Ruby was very different from my mother. She didn’t seem to have a worry in the world and, most important, she didn’t care what other people thought. My mother lived her life worrying about her reputation and she was raising me the same way. “If you don’t have a good reputation, you have nothing,” she would always tell me. But Ruby didn’t seem to care about her reputation. In fact, she seemed to delight in shocking other people. I liked that about her.

  Ruby took a liking to me as well. I sometimes thought she might feel sorry for me because I was out in the yard alone so often and wondered whether she, like so many others, merely tolerated me as a favor to my mother. But other times I knew she was enjoying my company by the way she smiled at me and how she’d laugh at some of the things I said and did.

  For the most part, Ruby kept to herself. She didn’t join my mother and the two old-maid schoolteachers, Zelda and Kinney, who lived on either side of us, when they sat outside talking. She had a grown son who came to visit her once in a while, but other than that she didn’t seem to have any family or friends.

  Ruby had a red Pontiac convertible that she called the “Magic Carpet.” It had an Indian head on the hood that really impressed me. It made the red carpet feel all the more exotic and magical. The Indian head itself would turn out to be a portent of things to come, when Steve came into our lives—but that came later.

  Sometimes, out of the blue, Ruby would say to me, “Come on, sweetie, let’s go for a ride on the Magic Carpet,” and we’d get up and go, just like that. The first time she suggested this, shortly after we moved to her court, I couldn’t believe how spontaneous she was. My mother had to plan everything ahead of time, and seldom was anything done “just for fun.” But today, Ruby got the idea in her head and within minutes we were driving down the street, the wind cooling our faces, laughing and feeling grand.

  Ruby didn’t care how she looked. When she decided to go somewhere, she just wore whatever she had on. Whenever my mother was going somewhere, in contrast, she needed at least an hour to “pull herself together.” This meant full makeup, jewelry, stockings, and high heels. It didn’t take me long to get dressed and ready to go, so I often had to wait around for what seemed like hours when the two of us went somewhere together.

  One day, Ruby and I were walking toward the Magic Carpet when all of a sudden a gust of wind blew up her skirt. “Whoops!” she said, laughing. “I better be careful, I don’t have any underwear on.”

  I was shocked and secretly impressed. What would happen if we were in an accident and she had to go to the hospital? I thought.

  On this particular fall day the wind began blowing really hard. So much dust was being stirred up that we could hardly see.

  “Oh, it looks like we’re going to have another one of our dust storms,” Ruby said, laughing in her robust way. “The whole house will be covered with dust.” But instead of turning around and heading home, or even putting the top up on the convertible, she just continued to drive.

  Tumbleweeds raced alongside us and darted out in front of us. “Let’s see how many of those suckers we can hit!” she yelled above the whistling of the wind.

  As we drove, one tumbleweed after another attacked the Magic Carpet. They reminded me of bulls charging the red capes of the Spanish matadors I had seen in movies. The dust burned my eyes and crunched in my teeth, but Ruby just kept on driving. Sometimes the dust was so thick we couldn’t even see the road, but still she drove on, laughing at the top of her lungs. By the time we got home, we were covered with dust and you could hardly see the red color of the Magic Carpet. But we didn’t care. We’d had fun.

  Breathless, I ran to our little apartment and burst through the door. “Momma, you’ll never guess what Ruby and I just did—”

  “It’s about time you got home,” she snapped. “The dust is getting in everywhere. Help me put these towels under the doors and around the windows.” She didn’t even notice the dust all over me.

  I understood my mother’s concern about the dust because I normally hated it too. We both had allergies, and dust made us cough and wheeze. But that day with Ruby, the dust hadn’t bothered me at all.

  I looked forward to my outings with Ruby. It was the only time I felt truly free and alive. For Ruby, there was always another adventure around the corner, while for my mother there was always another problem. I liked Ruby’s way of thinking better.

  chapter 2

  My mother was a woman of secrets. She kept the stories of her life to herself, hording them like precious jewels, doling them out over time depending on her mood. She had an air of mystery about her that made her all the more intriguing to people. Even though she seemed to enjoy talking to people, she rarely talked about herself and would evade their questions. This caused them to make up stories about who she really was and where she had come from. I’d sometimes overhear the neighbors talking about her:

  “I heard she was married to a rich man but she just up and left him one day.”

  “I heard she ran away from a rich family who tried to control her.”

  “I heard her husband died, leaving her to raise her daughter all alone.”

  All this speculation was the opposite of what she’d intended. She’d wanted to keep a low profile, to fit into this small town and not make any waves. But because she dressed like someone who had come from money, she stood out. There she was, a single mother living in a tiny apartment at Ruby’s court, working as a sales clerk at Thrifty drug store, but she had all this expensive jewelry and she always looked like someone from a fashion magazine.

  She also stood out because of me.

  “My goodness, isn’t she a little old to have a child?”

  “She looks more like the child’s grandmother than her mother.”

  “And where is the child’s father?”

  The sad truth was that I didn’t know my mother much better than the neighbors did. I knew little of her life—her past or her present. She was an elusive ghost of a person, someone who lived a life separate from me and who could not or would not join me in mine.

  My mother’s secrecy was calculated to protect herself, and, as I would learn much later, to protect me. It also lay at the very core of our misunderstandings. In her attempt to protect me, she alienated me. I interpreted her withholding of information the way I experienced her withholding of affection—as rejection.

  I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t tell me about my father or my grandparents, or even about her childhood. Each time I asked her, she found another clever way to avoid answering me. She was a master at it.

  “Mom, tell me about what it was like when you were growing up,” I once ventured to ask.

  “Oh, you don’t want to hear about that,” she said. “There was nothing interesting about your ol’ mom’s childhood.”

  If my mother was close-mouthed about her childhood, she was even more so about my father.

  “Do I have a father?”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Is he in heaven?”

  “Yes, of course he is.”

  “What was he like?”

  “He was a nice man.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He was a tall man, a big man. You resemble him.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He was a salesman. That’s enough questions for now. I’m tired, I’m going to take a nap.”

  Like the neighbors I, too, sometimes wondered whether my mother was really my grandmother. After all, she had gray hair like an old lady and she was so much older than other kid’s mothers. Or maybe I was adopted. Surely she wasn’t my “real” mother.

  I always had the nagging feeling that I had another mother somewhere. My real mother would be in the kitchen cooking some delicious dish, singing quietly to herself. She would smile sweetly when I came home from school—happy to see me. Then she would bend down and give me a big hug and kiss and ask me how m
y day had been at school.

  This woman couldn’t be my mother—or anyone’s mother, for that matter. This woman hardly ever cooked and if she did she ended up burning the food because she wandered off to do something else. She didn’t smile when I came into the room; instead, she gave me either a blank look or an exasperated one. And she never asked me how school had been or what I was learning in school. She really didn’t seem to care.

  Both of my grandparents had died before I was born so the only image I had of them came from my mother’s old photo album with its scallop-edged black-and-white and sepia photographs.

  Every once in a while, usually on one of her days off when she had been drinking beer all afternoon, Momma would bring the photo album out of the bottom drawer of her bedroom chest where she kept it. I’d come sit next to her on the bed as she slowly turned the pages. She only had one picture of her mother and one of her father. Because it was all I had of my grandparents, I studied the photographs carefully, taking in every nuance, every detail of their faces and their postures.

  The picture of her mother showed a beautiful woman with her hair swept up like my mother wore her hair. There was a warmth and openness to her face and a gentleness about her eyes and she was smiling sweetly. I liked her.

  In the picture of her father, he is standing proudly in front of what Momma called “his masterpiece,” the stone house he’d built for his family with his bare hands. One hot summer day, several months after moving to Ruby’s, Momma was feeling especially sentimental and she explained to me how, one by one, he’d carried and stacked huge stones until the house was complete. She made a point of saying that he hadn’t used any mortar but instead fit each stone together, chipping at each one until it fit precisely next to the other. She sounded like she was proud of her father, and I wanted to like him. But as I looked carefully at the picture, I noticed that there was a sternness about him. He had a scowl on his face and he appeared to be as harsh and bitter as the cold wind that would blow across our fields in winter. He stood tall, with pride, his arrogance frozen on his weathered, chiseled face.

  I learned from the little information my mother would dole out to me that my grandfather was of Scotch-Irish stock—the McCallen clan. On this day, she explained that he was a building contractor and a craftsman who made fine furniture, and he had managed to support his wife and five children even in the throes of the Depression.

  Since she seemed to be more open than usual to talking to me I asked her, “Momma, what was my grandfather like?”

  “He worked hard for his family.”

  “Was he nice? Was he funny?”

  “He was always tired from working.”

  “But what was he like?”

  But Momma was no longer willing to talk about him. “He was a good man. He worked hard for his family. I didn’t know much more about him.”

  Join the club, I thought. A family of secret keepers.

  I yearned for a family. I wondered what it would be like to have a father who came home from work every day and gave me a big hug and kiss. I wished I had grandparents who would come to visit and dote on me like other kids’ grandparents did. And so I clung to the crumbs my mother would give me about my extended family, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant.

  My mother did tell two stories about my grandparents that first summer at Ruby’s, both involving the Great Depression.

  During the Depression, my grandfather had to go out of town to find work. He would send home money at the beginning of the month with instructions to my grandmother to make the money last all month.

  But my grandmother loved to live extravagantly. She’d been raised with money and just couldn’t seem to economize. And she was quite the social butterfly. So each time she received money from my grandfather she’d go to the store and spend it all in one day. She’d buy chocolate-covered cherries and liquor and food for a party. Then she’d invite all the neighbors over. By the middle of the month, they had only potatoes to live on.

  Once, when my grandfather was home for a visit, one of the kids slipped and told him how they’d only had potatoes for weeks. He became very angry with my grandmother and lectured her about economizing. But it seemed she never learned.

  My mother always told this story with great relish and an obvious affection for my grandmother. She’d say my grandmother was a very outgoing, gregarious woman who was loved by everyone. And then she’d begin to cry and have to stop talking.

  My mother’s love for her mother was so powerful and her description of her so loving that I couldn’t help loving her myself. She was so vivid in my mind, partly because of the picture my mother had of her and partly because my mother said I physically resembled her. She told me my personality was like hers as well.

  I felt sad that I never met her. She died just before I was born, hit by a car. My mother had planned to name me Sadie Jane but named me Beverly instead because my grandmother liked that name.

  Momma told me that my grandmother had quite a penchant for exotic names. She was an avid reader and a romantic. She named all her children after characters in novels. Her oldest daughter was named Natalla and my mother was named Olga, both taken from Russian novels. It wasn’t as clear where she got the names for her sons, Forrest and Wendall. Only the oldest, Frank, got a regular American name.

  The other story my mother told me about the Depression was that it finally got so bad that my grandfather could no longer find enough work to support his family. And so the only thing to do was to send some of the children to relatives. They sent Frank, who was seventeen, along with Wendall (they called him by his middle name, Kay), the youngest and only ten at the time, to live with relatives in California. My aunt Natalla married at sixteen, to her high school sweetheart. And my uncle Forrest, fourteen, had to quit high school and go to work in a bakery. He and my mother, who was thirteen at the time, were the only ones to remain at home. This tore the family apart, my mother said, and no one was ever the same again because of it.

  I liked hearing about my mother’s large family and imagining what it would be like to have so many siblings. I hated being an only child. But my mother always seemed sad when she talked about her family, and she didn’t seem to be close to any of her siblings. I wondered why that was.

  chapter 3

  Having no father, siblings, or grandparents created a burden for both my mother and me. My mother’s burden was that she had to raise me on her own, with no help from anyone. That meant that she alone had to provide for me all the attention, guidance, and love a growing child needs and wants. My burden was having to try to make do with the little she could provide for me.

  When you have only one parent to look to, it puts a lot of pressure on that person—more pressure than my mother could take. So instead of teaching me about personal hygiene or how to tie my shoelaces or the multitude of other things parents show their kids how to do, she taught me to be invisible around her, to push down my needs and not bother her with them, and to not burden her with my problems. And she taught me to fend for myself—to get myself up in the morning, dress myself, and go out into the neighborhood to find other people who could give me some attention—even if only for a few minutes.

  I learned to listen, observe, and wait for the rare times when my mother could be there for me—when she was rested enough to spend time with me, when she got hungry enough to cook, when she felt good enough about herself to look at me in a positive way, to see my good qualities instead of focusing only on my faults. I learned to wait until she was holding court with her friends, drinking and laughing and telling stories—when her reminiscing transported her from her mundane, difficult life back to more light-hearted, joyous times. Then, partly because she was in a good mood and partly because she was aware of being observed, my mother would look at me kindly and say something nice about me—or to me.

  One day, while she was sitting on our little lawn with Zelda and Kinney and I was playing nearby I heard my mother say, “Beverly’s such
an imaginative child; she can play all by herself for hours, making up little scenarios in her head.” I knew she meant this as a compliment, that she liked this about me, and realizing this, I felt warmed from my head to my feet. I relished moments like this, devoured them like the starving child I was.

  I loved to see my mother with her friends; in those moments, she became a different person from the one I knew. I wondered what the trick was—how her friends got her to open up like that. What did they do to make her laugh?

  I soon learned that my mother liked to be entertained by people, so I started entertaining her. I became a real song and dance kid. If she’d had just enough beer but not too much, and if she wasn’t too tired, I’d let my outgoing personality shine with her. And when I was really young and cute, she seemed to like that.

  That summer we took a trip to Modesto to see my uncle Forrest. The entire Greyhound bus was full of sailors. Up until that time, I had always been surrounded by women—my mother, Ruby, my babysitters, and Zelda and Kinney—so I was fascinated and excited to see all these young men. And I’d never seen men dressed in funny white uniforms with scarves around their necks. I was delighted. I ran up and down the aisles, talking to one young man after another.

  “Hi, my name is Beverly, what’s yours?”

  “Why are you all dressed the same?”

  “What’s that funny scarf around your neck?”

  The sailors seemed to be delighted with me. They answered all my questions and laughed at all my jokes. Before the trip was over, I had the entire busload singing “You Are My Sunshine,” my favorite song.

  Momma preferred to blend into the crowd, not bring attention to herself. But she was so charismatic and beautiful that people flocked to her. I was the opposite. I was hungry for attention and was seldom quiet. I said what I thought and what I felt, no matter how inappropriate or ill advised. Like most children, I didn’t have a filter, so I told people all about myself, all about my mother, and all about our business—something my mother cringed at. “People don’t need to know that,” she’d chastise me in loud whispers.