In the Country of Women. Susan Straight
grandmother was so stern, unflappable, and orderly that she received in short time her plaque, which read:
ROSA LEU, R.N.
NURSE-IN-CHARGE
My mother received a letter from her family, and decided to come to America when she was twenty. She arrived in Fontana to find her family still living in the travel trailer, using a common bathroom in a cement shed. She lasted three months there. She rented a single room in a boardinghouse on Seventh Street in Riverside, and got a job at Household Finance. She was a teller, Swiss-efficient, and soon she basically ran the branch. She wrote a letter to the corporate headquarters of Household Finance stating these facts, alluding to her boss’s shortcomings, and received a letter back that said, It will be a cold day in hell before we let a woman be manager. This story she told me many times, as evidence that I would have to work twice as hard for half as much.
She lived on the second floor of the boardinghouse, was so poor she ate a banana for lunch, and tried to keep her small transistor radio from being stolen, which it often was. At night she listened to the Dodgers. Vin Scully’s melodious, resonant voice, his vivid enunciation, was how she learned perfect English. (This is true of thousands of immigrants in southern California. When Scully retired last year, at eighty-eight, many told this story on televised tributes, people from all over the world. My mother cried.)
Scully’s voice was magic. My mother has no accent. No one ever assumes she was not born here in California.
When my grandmother died, at ninety-six, she had left instructions to display her starched nurse’s cap and the beloved wooden plaque. Nurse-in-Charge. She always said, “We had only a little cement building at Kaiser back then, and they brought those men to me with broken legs and arms or they were bleeding. I took care of them all.” Kaiser Permanente Healthcare became America’s first HMO, with millions of enrollees now across the nation. Rosa Leu was the oldest living member, and one night, I sat beside her hospital bed as she gave curt instructions to Filipina- and Jamaican- and Mexican-born nurses who marveled at her stories of the early days. I looked at the faces of all these women—traveled from elsewhere, just like Rosa, their constant ministrations to the bodies in the beds, their eyes narrowed in assessment of IVs and needles. The nurses applied lotion to my grandmother’s hands, so crippled by arthritis and hard work that her fingers slanted away from her thumbs like bent wings.
Aeschlen to Thun, Switzerland, to Calais, France, by train; to Dover, England, by ferry; to Montreal, Quebec, by ship; to Toronto by train; to Oshawa, Ontario, to Detroit, Michigan, to Winter Haven, Florida, to Fontana, California: 7,942 miles.
Riverside, California, March 1974
When I could walk well again, it was spring. On rainy days, we ate lunch in the gym, sitting in the bleachers with our sack lunches or cafeteria trays. Someone would pull out the record player—yes, an actual record player, with an album spinning, hooked up to speakers—and music blasted onto the hardwood floor between the basketball hoops. The boys got first choice—they played James Brown, Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie,” and “Funky Worm” by the Ohio Players. They locked, the precursor to wild-style hip-hop dancing. They did the Robot, the Worm, handstands and backflips.
But the girls took over and changed the record to the Jackson 5, the Stylistics, and the Spinners. Some of my friends from the pompon squad held out their hands to me. They taught me to dance.
There was a new girl, from Chicago, Michelle Nicholson, with afro puffs and a big smile, and she took over the squad—said she would give us some Chicago style. After all these years, I still find myself walking down the street softly chanting the first cheer Michelle taught us, which we performed with verses I can’t believe any teacher or coach heard us singing on the sidelines of the football games, in 1974. Call and response—Michelle shouted and we sang back.
I like peaches (Hey Now)
And I like cream (Hey Now)
And I like the Lobos (Hey Now)
’Cause they so mean! (Hey Now)
I went to the railroad (Hey Now)
Put my head on the track (Hey Now)
Started thinkin’ ’bout the Lobos (Hey Now)
Took my big head back! (Hey Now)
I went to the liquor store (Hey Now)
Just to buy me a taste (Hey Now)
Started thinkin’ ’bout the Lobos (Hey Now)
Bought a whole case! (Hey Now)
By eighth grade, I was the tiny mascot. In my yearbook, water damage has erased my face, and I see now that my name is the only one omitted—I am actually listed as “(Mascot).” My glasses had been updated to granny rectangles, and I was called Rabbit because I got so tired of pushing them up onto my nose I just did it by alternating twitches of my cheeks. My untouched leg was bowed and the foot slewed permanently to the right like a duck. My repaired leg was straight and covered with scars. My silly grin displayed the crooked teeth. My hair is still tragic. Your father was running past us on the basketball team, not noticing me at all.
But Michelle Nicholson taught me that it didn’t matter what I looked like—as long as I got the words right. As long as we did the song together.
Yearbook photo, Riverside, California, 1974
Olympia—One Can Could Get You Pregnant
Riverside, California, June 1974
By the summer before freshman year of high school, I could run again, and my hair had grown out into a short lion’s mane, sunned back to blond after I mowed lawns and washed cars for money. I spent all my spare time with Delana, Dawn, and Tari (not their real names). We lived within three blocks of one another. But during my time in the hospital and then limping through unpopularity, most kids I knew had developed a serious taste in drinking.
Everyone’s parents drank, at those ’70s backyard parties with fondue and guacamole, but our refrigerator held only a few cans of Coors and Olympia. Other parents had full bars and hard alcohol, and were far more oblivious than my immigrant mother, who was strict, rude to interlopers, and could smell a cigarette from the next block. No one ever spent the night at my house, crowded with kids and chores. We always stayed at Tari’s. Her parents were from upstate New York. We spent Friday afternoons mixing their gin, vodka, whiskey, brandy, and vermouth with Cherry Kool-Aid in a huge yellow Tupperware bowl. We called it sangria.
I don’t understand how alcoholism works in my family genes, considering how many of my male relatives were alcoholic, but all this liquor had very little effect on me. I was too scared of my mother to be drunk. She required me to be home by exactly 7:00 a.m. Saturdays. My dad had bought an appliance repair shop, which came with a junkyard. Saturdays we cleaned the junkyard office and laundromats. Delana would pass out, Dawn would laugh, and Tari would throw up. I stayed awake until the early hours, holding someone’s