In the Country of Women. Susan Straight
the ruffles.
And rather than going to Disneyland, where the eighth-grade cheerleaders had organized a group outing, we packed our small travel trailer, pulled by the old station wagon. We went every year to Yogi Bear Campground because my mother loved the mountains. My brothers loved Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo. We were the apex of uncool.
I never thought about how much my mother missed the mountains of her childhood, which she lost as quickly and silently as a coffin lid closed over the face of her own beloved mother.
My mother, Gabrielle Gertrude Leu, grew up in Burgistein, Switzerland, a tiny village in the Swiss Alps, on the slopes of steep mountains in a narrow valley. Their chalet was named Sunnenschyn—Swiss houses always had names carved into the balconies. That house was Sunshine.
When my mother was six, my grandfather Paul Leu tried running a sauerkraut factory. The valley grew cabbage well, and the shredded cabbage was salted and placed in large wooden vats with boulders holding down the wooden lids; my mother remembers the vivid overwhelming smell of that failure, and the constant work of pressing moisture out of the cabbage and fermenting the leaves. He and his wife, Frieda, then had two small sons, and my mother spent her time working in the garden, darning socks, and skiing to school.
She was tiny, my mother, and excelled at theft. She told us about walking home from school, stealing cherries and pears from trees in the farms along the road. She stole Tobler chocolate from the small store her mother ran on the house’s first floor. My mother hid the bars in the precisely stacked woodpile all Swiss men keep beside the house. She sold the chocolate to American soldiers who came through the village in Jeeps during World War II.
Frieda, her mother, was always smiling, a gentle, dark-haired compact woman who loved to draw and paint. When my mother was nine, Frieda Leu grew ill with ovarian cancer. There was no cure—she was sent home from the hospital. “She was bedridden,” my mother told me, and I imagined that terrible word—a disease rode my grandmother’s body while she lay helpless in the sheets. The illness lasted for months, and a stern young nurse named Rosa Erb was hired—essentially to ease Frieda into death, and to take care of the three children. When Frieda died, my mother crept down the stairs to see her mother’s body lying on the kitchen table. Frieda was thirty-nine years old, and my mother was nine.
Gabrielle Gertrude Leu near Wohlhusen, Switzerland, wearing her apron, 1939
She told me about these years only in fragmented shards until she turned eighty, when these memories began to spill out. Now, every week, she remains incensed by this loss, and retells me the story.
Shortly after Frieda’s burial, Rosa Erb, twenty-eight, was married to Paul Leu. No man took care of his own children back in 1943 in Switzerland. My mother says her stepmother treated her as a small plain burden useful only for hard work, until she could be rid of her. The way my mother described her life in the Swiss forests and snowy mountains, her stepmother might as well have been roaming the woods looking for a huntsman to take my mother’s heart.
I have one photo of my parents shortly after their marriage, taken in Las Vegas—it is a postcard taken by the casino that my father addressed to himself, at their tiny house behind a real house. My mother looks as she does in every picture, stoic, sturdy, and suspicious. Her hair is short and brown. No-nonsense. One wave of curl near her forehead. She wears sensible clothing. Her lips hold half a smile.
I didn’t realize that was because she had already lost all her top teeth, due to the poor hygiene common to 1940s Europe, and a California dentist who told her he would just pull them all and give her a denture. She was only twenty. Who does that? She was an immigrant, her English wasn’t great, and he probably wanted the money. When I was little, her teeth—pink and white and floating in a glass by her bed—were terrifying. But it wasn’t until I was grown that I thought about the sadness of that plastic.
Christophe Leu, Rosa Erb Leu, Paul Leu, Gabrielle Leu, Thun, Switzerland, 1944
Gabrielle and Richard Straight, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1956
Richard Straight left her for a lovely woman named Ruth Catherine—my stepmother, my father’s third wife, told me many times she’d been an Ivory Soap model in Texas, where she was born. She was seven years older than my father. Taller than my mother, with black hair, green eyes like alexandrite, red lipstick, “a full bosom,” as she liked to say, and carefully gracious mannerisms. I know she had been born on a hard-luck ranch in rural Texas, and that a tornado had tossed her into a tree trunk when she was a child; her left arm still held scarring at the elbow, and she always wore long sleeves, even in summer, which made her seem ever more exotic and polished to me. She put mandarin oranges and almonds in green salad. I had never eaten a mandarin orange in my life.
She loved jewelry and clothes and makeup and nail polish and shoes; my mother was four feet eleven, had trouble finding women’s shoes that fit, didn’t get her ears pierced until she was sixty-two, and gave me her wedding ring when I was a teenager, saying she hated rings, along with weddings.
My stepmother worked as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, in a sad irony for my mother; when my father went in for a filling, Ruth Catherine told him she studied astrology and she had seen their love in the arrangement of the stars. She was divorced, and lived in Pomona. He fell in love instantly, and loved her passionately and obsessively until she died in 2004. He kept her ashes on his dresser until he died in 2018.
I have no idea whether my mother had ever seen this woman, but she hated the accoutrements, accessories, and aspirations of beauty more than anything else in the world. On my weekend visits, my stepmother and stepsisters had painted my nails. Now I was carrying bedraggled blue-and-white pompons everywhere.
On the third day of camping, the day of the Disneyland trip, I mutinied. My mother didn’t want to drive me the hour down the mountain highway, but I argued long and hard. At dawn, there was heavy cold fog all around the campground, and my mother, with a mix of anger and resignation, started up the old battered Country Squire. My youngest brother got into the front seat to keep her company on the way back. Poker-faced, hating my old clothes, I got into the back seat and opened my book.
I can’t remember what I was reading. A library book. I was so engrossed that I didn’t notice the engine stalling repeatedly in the cold. My mother finally backed out onto the steep downhill campground road. The station wagon died again, rolling backward, gaining speed. (That model of Country Squire weighed 4,300 pounds, and was the last model without a system to circumvent brake failure.) My mother says she tried to pump the brakes, then yanked on the emergency brake, which stripped immediately. In the rearview mirror, she saw a deep ravine at the end of the road. She shouted for us to jump, but I was reading. My little brother, who was eight, opened his front door and threw himself out. My mother yelled at me again, and then she jumped out the driver’s door, accidentally wrenching the steering wheel.
I felt a swerve. I pushed down with my elbow on the handle of the back right door, and the car swung sharply, throwing me out. Then the station wagon curved gracefully, front wheel thumping over my crossed legs, and the long car backed itself gently into another slot in the campground and died on Boo Boo Lane.
The femur is the largest bone in the body. I didn’t learn that until my left femur was snapped in two. I remember the pain shaking my body as if a dog held me in its jaws. I remember the smell of the asphalt. I remember being put into the ambulance and blacking out a few times on the hour-long ride down the twisting road to the Riverside hospital where I’d been born. They didn’t give children painkilling medication back then. Not for the whole ride. Not in the emergency room where I spent the night on a gurney alone, while a shadowy night nurse hissed at me to stop crying so loudly because I was waking up the baby in the crib nearby, a middle-aged woman in her terrifying winged cap telling me in a German accent to be quiet and stop moving around and my broken bones would stop rubbing against