Today was the first day of summer. Susan told me so. It was also my birthday, and I was excited because it was the first time and probably the last time I would get to celebrate it in California and Mexico. Daddy was taking us out to eat tonight in Mexicali, across the border. I hoped to find an excuse to count to ten.....in Spanish, of course, during the course of the evening.
Mother was already cooking the poundcake; Jan was helping her, primarily so she could have first dibs on licking the beater. We would put strawberries and whipped cream on it this evening after supper when they sang Happy Birthday and gave me my present. We were having the Whites over this afternoon just for cupcakes and games. Vance had whispered to me yesterday that he and Andy bought me a present. I didn't expect much if Vance had anything to do with it.
Birthdays were always a family event, but not overdone. Sometimes we had parties and invited other kids, but not every year. Sometimes Susan and I had a joint birthday since our birthdays were only ten days apart.
I was a snooper. I usually found things, like presents, before special events, but even though we were in this tiny house with very few hiding places, I hadn't found anything. I had looked in all the built-in dresser drawers except the one Jan slept in, and I had found nothing.
No area was really off-limits in our house in Purdon, except a few drawers in Mother and Daddy's room. We all pretty much knew to stay out of the top drawers of the wide blonde dresser they shared. I still wanted to know what was in those drawers, but there had never been adequate time and opportunity to explore them when no one was around. There was always someone around in our house. I wondered if Neila would go through them with us gone since she'd probably have a lot of time to herself.
She wasn't nosy like me, though. I searched for things because I wanted to know what I was getting for Christmas and birthday, but more than that I sneaked around because finding out things relieved my anxiety. I worried about a lot of things. Mother told me I was a worrier like my dad, and she didn't mean it as a compliment.
For instance, if I were worried that Mother was going to go on a trip
without us (which we hardly allowed), I might start looking for a bus or train ticket. I had only seen one, and that was when she went to White Sands, New Mexico where Daddy was working in the off-season for ginning.
Finding the ticket could increase my anxiety, or it could decrease it. Finding it might give me immediate relief because now I knew the answer. But if it meant that Mother was leaving us, even for a day, I started worrying about that, so I had a new worry to replace the old. It was a difficult and troublesome existence for a five-year-old.
In our family, this unusual behavior had to be closely guarded; it was mine alone to figure out, nurture, or dispose of. If anyone saw me searching in such a frantic manner, they probably would not realize that my anxiety level was extremely high.
My brothers would have made fun of me or laughed it off if I had let them in on my secret. Susan would have found a book about it and told me what it was and how to overcome it. Jan was too young to understand although sometimes I enlisted her to help me snoop, but only a little, because she would tell.
Neila was the only one who might understand, but I didn't have the words to explain it. Anyway, she was too busy with all the activities of high school. Daddy was the wage earner, and he was not to be told about emotional issues. He just had no head for that. And Mother just wouldn't understand either. She never worried, never.
"Que sera, sera," she often sang, doing her best Doris Day impression. "Whatever will be, will be."
Neila said one time that Mother was Cleoopatra, the Queen of De Nile. I thought Mother seemed like a lovely queen, but I didn't know what the other part was, what Neila thought she was queen of. For me, queen of our family was enough for now. But once I heard Neila and Elton say mother was IN denial. I still couldn't figure out what they meant, and when I asked, they just told me I was too young to know.
Life was so busy we just had to keep moving. And my snooping and its obsessive origins had to remain covert. I couldn't risk the ridicule, especially from my brothers. It's not that they meant to be mean; they were just obtusely insensitive at times. I could never explain it to them. My older brother Elton had started acting a lot nicer to me now that Deanna was his girlfriend. I hoped she'd be a good influence on him. I loved it when he paid attention to me; I just didn't see him much right now between his dating and working at the gin and helping Nettie with her cows.
Well, either I wasn't getting a gift because they spent so much on the train tickets, or it was a very small gift. I had overheard my parents talking about the cost of the train tickets. Mother's had cost more than $80, while Susan and my tickets added together cost the same as Mother's. Jan rode for free. They didn't seem overly concerned, just discussing it like they talked about what they spent on groceries, the tone of their voices not hushed or strained as it sometimes was when they discussed money.
I couldn't think of anything I wanted that was small. Not one thing.
Deciding to go outside, I passed through the kitchen where Mother and Jan were putting the batter into a metal pan. Out the back door I went. I tried, but it wouldn't slam. It was too lightweight.
Just as I got outside, I saw a girl a little older than me near the laundry building.
"Hey, watch out. They killed a snake in there," I called. I didn't really want to say my mother did it because she was more of a city girl, and I didn't know how she'd feel about a mother who killed things, even snakes.
"Oh?" she said. "When?" She was holding a nice bunch of purple grapes, picking them off one at a time, studying them, and popping them in her mouth.
"Last week."
"Hmmm. You live here?"
"Yeah."
"Why?"
"We're just living here for the summer while my dad works in Mexicali."
"Oh."
"Where do you live?" I asked.
"Just up the street on Montalvo."
"Do you go to school here?"
"Yeah, I'm in third grade."
"Do you go to church here?"
"Yeah, I'm Catholic. We attend St. Mary's Church."
I suddenly felt very immature, naive, and incapable of asking her anything else. I had no idea what a Catholic was. I had no idea what they did in their dark churches and cathedrals or what they believed, although I did know what a nun was. I liked the black and white uniforms they wore, and most of them seemed kind, if stern.
The nuns didn't have children, so I thought right then I was glad my mother had not become a nun. I didn't think she had ever been a Catholic. I had seen priests on television, mostly in the westerns my dad favored. But I'd never seen one for real.
I kicked the gravel a little with the toe of my tennis shoe. She continued eating her grapes.
When she finished, she said "Well, I need to go home now."
"Okay," I said. I thought about inviting her to my birthday party, but it would be crowded with us and Andy, Vance and their mother.
I watched her long shimmering blonde hair swing side to side as she ran off down the street. I wondered if all Catholics ate grapes and then drank grapejuice when they got older. I'd just never known a Catholic before. She seemed mysterious and sophisticated to me, eating those grapes that way.
Everybody in Purdon was Baptist, Pentecostal, or Unknown, meaning they didn't go to church. It wasn't that we didn't allow Catholics. They just didn't move there. Maybe because we had no Catholic church for them. And just about everybody in Purdon, if you asked them, claimed some religion, but not Catholic.
I forgot the girl that evening as we crossed the border in our car and went to eat Mexican food at a Mexican restaurant in a Mexican town. I just loved saying this because of the repetition. Susan and I said it over and over and over all the way from the motel to the border when Daddy found a reason to stop us. He pretended he needed to say something to the border guard.
"Girls, be quiet here for a minute," he said, motioning with his hand toward us in the backseat.
Jan was standing in the front seat looking back at us.
"Guls, be kite," she said, putting one finger to her lips.
"Where's the border?" I asked.
"This is it," Daddy said, as we passed a little booth with a man in a uniform inside. Daddy waved, and the man waved him through.
Susan and I started up on our repetitive phrase again, but only for a second before Daddy shushed us. He didn't seem as nice about it this time, so we knew we needed to be quiet.
We drove a few blocks, turned a time or two, and there was the restaurant.
Two beautiful little children stood outside the door and begged for money as we went in. Mother dug in her purse. I hadn't ever seen children out by themselves at night. The boy looked a little older than me, but the little girl appeared to be only Jan's age.
"You need to go home. It's too late for you to be out here," she said, gently handing them some dollar bills.
The questions were forming, but Mother waved them away when we got inside. She knew we'd have to talk, not because she wanted to, but because I would obsess over it and ask her questions over and over until she had no choice but to answer some of them.
"Let's just enjoy our evening," she said to me in a way that let me know my questions would have to wait.
Daddy seemed to know several of the people who worked in the restaurant because he had been there to eat on numerous occasions with some of his friends from work. The staff were extra friendly and made a lot of fuss over all of us.
"Que bonita!" they said about Jan. Her blonde hair and blue eyes set her in stark contrast to most of the people on this side of the border.
They used their English on Susan and I. Several spoke fluent English, and those who only knew a little tried to ask us simple questions like, "Oh, you like California? You like Mexico?"
We said "yes", "yes", while I tried desperately to think of a way I could answer with "uno" or "dos". They would be mightily impressed, I imagined. A girl just turning six years old today and speaking Spanish.
The waitress brought us cokes.
"Don't drink the water," Daddy said quietly.
She brought us menus. Now was my chance.
"Uno for me," I said in my most polite voice.
"Oh, thees one know Spanish," she said.
Daddy laughed. "Thees one is trying to show off, I think."
It was dark inside, or at least it had a dark look, almost elegant, but the walls were painted a bright turquoise blue.
I hated turquoise since last year when Mother froze the turquoise and pink clown that had been on my birthday cake when I was four. It stayed in the freezer for several months, and on a day when I craved sugar, I climbed up on a chair, opened the freezer door and got it out. I took one taste and gagged.
It tasted like the ice that came off freezer coils, only with a sickening whang. So disappointed was I with the taste of what I got, in contrast to the taste I was expecting, that I immediately slammed the freezer door, let my upper body fall toward the sink, caught myself with both palms, and leaning over it spat all of the awful tasting sugary mess into the basin. Most of the clown's face fell out on the first "spit", but looking down into that pristine white iron sink, I saw that I was still drooling in the vivid turquoise color of the cake decoration.
Looking at it made me feel very sick, and I started spitting real fast until the whole clown lay on the white porcelain, melted and pathetic. His happy smile slid away into the drain, and I reached and turned on the faucet to wash away the rest of the foul mess. I tried not to look much at the walls because I was afraid I'd start gagging thinking of the clown and the way it tasted. I focused instead on the black iron sconces with their cylindrical amber glass covers.
We ate tamales, soft tortillas, enchiladas and rice and beans. We washed it down with sodas and enjoyed ourselves immensely listening to the odd-sounding conversation around us, trying to identify any word we knew. The staff came out and sang "Feliz Cumpleanos a Ti" to me with the same tune as "Happy Birthday to You".
On the way home, I thought about my present. I was beginning to wonder if I would get anything. Everyone was mum about it. After cake for everyone and another round of singing, Mother disappeared into their bedroom and came back into the room. She took a tiny gaily wrapped box out of her pocket and handed it to me. I peeled the paper slowly back and opened the box to find a beautiful purple agate birthstone ring. It fit perfectly on my finger. I felt a burst of joy and hugged each one of them individually.
The day was over, but it had been filled with new and unusual experiences. Wait till I told the kids at school next year that I spent my birthday in Mexico. That night I didn't kick Susan for territory. I fell asleep running my thumb over and over my bright new silver ring and, presuming that I would never see the blonde girl I met this morning again, wondering how we could get some Catholics to move to Purdon.Installed
Mother was already cooking the poundcake; Jan was helping her, primarily so she could have first dibs on licking the beater. We would put strawberries and whipped cream on it this evening after supper when they sang Happy Birthday and gave me my present. We were having the Whites over this afternoon just for cupcakes and games. Vance had whispered to me yesterday that he and Andy bought me a present. I didn't expect much if Vance had anything to do with it.
Birthdays were always a family event, but not overdone. Sometimes we had parties and invited other kids, but not every year. Sometimes Susan and I had a joint birthday since our birthdays were only ten days apart.
I was a snooper. I usually found things, like presents, before special events, but even though we were in this tiny house with very few hiding places, I hadn't found anything. I had looked in all the built-in dresser drawers except the one Jan slept in, and I had found nothing.
No area was really off-limits in our house in Purdon, except a few drawers in Mother and Daddy's room. We all pretty much knew to stay out of the top drawers of the wide blonde dresser they shared. I still wanted to know what was in those drawers, but there had never been adequate time and opportunity to explore them when no one was around. There was always someone around in our house. I wondered if Neila would go through them with us gone since she'd probably have a lot of time to herself.
She wasn't nosy like me, though. I searched for things because I wanted to know what I was getting for Christmas and birthday, but more than that I sneaked around because finding out things relieved my anxiety. I worried about a lot of things. Mother told me I was a worrier like my dad, and she didn't mean it as a compliment.
For instance, if I were worried that Mother was going to go on a trip
without us (which we hardly allowed), I might start looking for a bus or train ticket. I had only seen one, and that was when she went to White Sands, New Mexico where Daddy was working in the off-season for ginning.
Finding the ticket could increase my anxiety, or it could decrease it. Finding it might give me immediate relief because now I knew the answer. But if it meant that Mother was leaving us, even for a day, I started worrying about that, so I had a new worry to replace the old. It was a difficult and troublesome existence for a five-year-old.
In our family, this unusual behavior had to be closely guarded; it was mine alone to figure out, nurture, or dispose of. If anyone saw me searching in such a frantic manner, they probably would not realize that my anxiety level was extremely high.
My brothers would have made fun of me or laughed it off if I had let them in on my secret. Susan would have found a book about it and told me what it was and how to overcome it. Jan was too young to understand although sometimes I enlisted her to help me snoop, but only a little, because she would tell.
Neila was the only one who might understand, but I didn't have the words to explain it. Anyway, she was too busy with all the activities of high school. Daddy was the wage earner, and he was not to be told about emotional issues. He just had no head for that. And Mother just wouldn't understand either. She never worried, never.
"Que sera, sera," she often sang, doing her best Doris Day impression. "Whatever will be, will be."
Neila said one time that Mother was Cleoopatra, the Queen of De Nile. I thought Mother seemed like a lovely queen, but I didn't know what the other part was, what Neila thought she was queen of. For me, queen of our family was enough for now. But once I heard Neila and Elton say mother was IN denial. I still couldn't figure out what they meant, and when I asked, they just told me I was too young to know.
Life was so busy we just had to keep moving. And my snooping and its obsessive origins had to remain covert. I couldn't risk the ridicule, especially from my brothers. It's not that they meant to be mean; they were just obtusely insensitive at times. I could never explain it to them. My older brother Elton had started acting a lot nicer to me now that Deanna was his girlfriend. I hoped she'd be a good influence on him. I loved it when he paid attention to me; I just didn't see him much right now between his dating and working at the gin and helping Nettie with her cows.
Well, either I wasn't getting a gift because they spent so much on the train tickets, or it was a very small gift. I had overheard my parents talking about the cost of the train tickets. Mother's had cost more than $80, while Susan and my tickets added together cost the same as Mother's. Jan rode for free. They didn't seem overly concerned, just discussing it like they talked about what they spent on groceries, the tone of their voices not hushed or strained as it sometimes was when they discussed money.
I couldn't think of anything I wanted that was small. Not one thing.
Deciding to go outside, I passed through the kitchen where Mother and Jan were putting the batter into a metal pan. Out the back door I went. I tried, but it wouldn't slam. It was too lightweight.
Just as I got outside, I saw a girl a little older than me near the laundry building.
"Hey, watch out. They killed a snake in there," I called. I didn't really want to say my mother did it because she was more of a city girl, and I didn't know how she'd feel about a mother who killed things, even snakes.
"Oh?" she said. "When?" She was holding a nice bunch of purple grapes, picking them off one at a time, studying them, and popping them in her mouth.
"Last week."
"Hmmm. You live here?"
"Yeah."
"Why?"
"We're just living here for the summer while my dad works in Mexicali."
"Oh."
"Where do you live?" I asked.
"Just up the street on Montalvo."
"Do you go to school here?"
"Yeah, I'm in third grade."
"Do you go to church here?"
"Yeah, I'm Catholic. We attend St. Mary's Church."
I suddenly felt very immature, naive, and incapable of asking her anything else. I had no idea what a Catholic was. I had no idea what they did in their dark churches and cathedrals or what they believed, although I did know what a nun was. I liked the black and white uniforms they wore, and most of them seemed kind, if stern.
The nuns didn't have children, so I thought right then I was glad my mother had not become a nun. I didn't think she had ever been a Catholic. I had seen priests on television, mostly in the westerns my dad favored. But I'd never seen one for real.
I kicked the gravel a little with the toe of my tennis shoe. She continued eating her grapes.
When she finished, she said "Well, I need to go home now."
"Okay," I said. I thought about inviting her to my birthday party, but it would be crowded with us and Andy, Vance and their mother.
I watched her long shimmering blonde hair swing side to side as she ran off down the street. I wondered if all Catholics ate grapes and then drank grapejuice when they got older. I'd just never known a Catholic before. She seemed mysterious and sophisticated to me, eating those grapes that way.
Everybody in Purdon was Baptist, Pentecostal, or Unknown, meaning they didn't go to church. It wasn't that we didn't allow Catholics. They just didn't move there. Maybe because we had no Catholic church for them. And just about everybody in Purdon, if you asked them, claimed some religion, but not Catholic.
I forgot the girl that evening as we crossed the border in our car and went to eat Mexican food at a Mexican restaurant in a Mexican town. I just loved saying this because of the repetition. Susan and I said it over and over and over all the way from the motel to the border when Daddy found a reason to stop us. He pretended he needed to say something to the border guard.
"Girls, be quiet here for a minute," he said, motioning with his hand toward us in the backseat.
Jan was standing in the front seat looking back at us.
"Guls, be kite," she said, putting one finger to her lips.
"Where's the border?" I asked.
"This is it," Daddy said, as we passed a little booth with a man in a uniform inside. Daddy waved, and the man waved him through.
Susan and I started up on our repetitive phrase again, but only for a second before Daddy shushed us. He didn't seem as nice about it this time, so we knew we needed to be quiet.
We drove a few blocks, turned a time or two, and there was the restaurant.
Two beautiful little children stood outside the door and begged for money as we went in. Mother dug in her purse. I hadn't ever seen children out by themselves at night. The boy looked a little older than me, but the little girl appeared to be only Jan's age.
"You need to go home. It's too late for you to be out here," she said, gently handing them some dollar bills.
The questions were forming, but Mother waved them away when we got inside. She knew we'd have to talk, not because she wanted to, but because I would obsess over it and ask her questions over and over until she had no choice but to answer some of them.
"Let's just enjoy our evening," she said to me in a way that let me know my questions would have to wait.
Daddy seemed to know several of the people who worked in the restaurant because he had been there to eat on numerous occasions with some of his friends from work. The staff were extra friendly and made a lot of fuss over all of us.
"Que bonita!" they said about Jan. Her blonde hair and blue eyes set her in stark contrast to most of the people on this side of the border.
They used their English on Susan and I. Several spoke fluent English, and those who only knew a little tried to ask us simple questions like, "Oh, you like California? You like Mexico?"
We said "yes", "yes", while I tried desperately to think of a way I could answer with "uno" or "dos". They would be mightily impressed, I imagined. A girl just turning six years old today and speaking Spanish.
The waitress brought us cokes.
"Don't drink the water," Daddy said quietly.
She brought us menus. Now was my chance.
"Uno for me," I said in my most polite voice.
"Oh, thees one know Spanish," she said.
Daddy laughed. "Thees one is trying to show off, I think."
It was dark inside, or at least it had a dark look, almost elegant, but the walls were painted a bright turquoise blue.
I hated turquoise since last year when Mother froze the turquoise and pink clown that had been on my birthday cake when I was four. It stayed in the freezer for several months, and on a day when I craved sugar, I climbed up on a chair, opened the freezer door and got it out. I took one taste and gagged.
It tasted like the ice that came off freezer coils, only with a sickening whang. So disappointed was I with the taste of what I got, in contrast to the taste I was expecting, that I immediately slammed the freezer door, let my upper body fall toward the sink, caught myself with both palms, and leaning over it spat all of the awful tasting sugary mess into the basin. Most of the clown's face fell out on the first "spit", but looking down into that pristine white iron sink, I saw that I was still drooling in the vivid turquoise color of the cake decoration.
Looking at it made me feel very sick, and I started spitting real fast until the whole clown lay on the white porcelain, melted and pathetic. His happy smile slid away into the drain, and I reached and turned on the faucet to wash away the rest of the foul mess. I tried not to look much at the walls because I was afraid I'd start gagging thinking of the clown and the way it tasted. I focused instead on the black iron sconces with their cylindrical amber glass covers.
We ate tamales, soft tortillas, enchiladas and rice and beans. We washed it down with sodas and enjoyed ourselves immensely listening to the odd-sounding conversation around us, trying to identify any word we knew. The staff came out and sang "Feliz Cumpleanos a Ti" to me with the same tune as "Happy Birthday to You".
On the way home, I thought about my present. I was beginning to wonder if I would get anything. Everyone was mum about it. After cake for everyone and another round of singing, Mother disappeared into their bedroom and came back into the room. She took a tiny gaily wrapped box out of her pocket and handed it to me. I peeled the paper slowly back and opened the box to find a beautiful purple agate birthstone ring. It fit perfectly on my finger. I felt a burst of joy and hugged each one of them individually.
The day was over, but it had been filled with new and unusual experiences. Wait till I told the kids at school next year that I spent my birthday in Mexico. That night I didn't kick Susan for territory. I fell asleep running my thumb over and over my bright new silver ring and, presuming that I would never see the blonde girl I met this morning again, wondering how we could get some Catholics to move to Purdon.Installed
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