Later, when my mother told others about this incident she told them how she arrived home scared out of her mind to find me nonchalantly playing in my sandbox, as if nothing was wrong. She was infuriated. Here she had been worried sick, and I was oblivious to it all. She saw me as a selfish child who didn’t care about her. She later told me how she beat the daylights out of me for worrying her so much. I don’t remember that part.
It seems we’d just missed each other. She’d been inside the babysitter’s house all along, talking—as she often did—with the women in her life. When she finally decided it was time to come get me, I wasn’t there.
My mother and I would repeat this type of scenario all our lives, me looking for her even though she was physically there, her misunderstanding my behavior and reactions and assuming the worst about me.
Oh, how I loved my mother in those days. I thought she was the grandest lady of them all. With her delicate features and creamy complexion, she looked like the beautiful china dolls I had seen in shop windows. She was a regal woman with silver-highlighted hair piled on top of her head and swept away from her face. She walked with her head held high and her shoulders back, conveying an air of dignity and fine breeding.
Everyone else loved her too. She was quick and articulate, always impressing people with her knowledge and wit. As far back as I can remember, I noticed how people warmed to my mother immediately upon meeting her. Their faces softened, their eyes showed a keen interest, and they smiled broadly—far different from the reactions I seemed to elicit in people. And my mother’s face, in turn, was transformed in the presence of others, her typically tight-lipped mouth softening and turning into a knockout smile. Her eyes sparkled, sometimes with mischief, as she told one funny story after another or laughed contagiously over someone else’s tale.
It always took someone else to bring out the best in my mother. When it was just the two of us she seemed to always be sad, worried, anxious, or tired. I was horribly jealous of the people who made her laugh, and always, always I carried with me the feeling that there was something wrong with me because she never laughed that way around me.
Of all the places on this lush, beautiful earth to grow up in, I ended up being raised in Bakersfield, California, located in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, two hours north of Los Angeles but millions of miles away, and considered by many to be a “hick town.” It is sizzling hot in the summer, with temperatures as high as 115 degrees, and freezing cold in the winter—not cold enough to produce beautiful, white snow, just enough to freeze the ground into a dirty, slushy mess and numb your nose, lips, hands, and feet if you had to be out in the air for very long.
Bakersfield has a dry, desert-like climate, so the summers aren’t hot and muggy like they are in the South. Instead it’s an intense heat, the kind that takes your breath away when you open the door to leave your air-conditioned house or car, the kind of heat that makes the asphalt soft and the land hard.
As far back as I can remember, I always felt like I didn’t belong in that God-forsaken town. Mostly it was because my mother was so out of place, so different from the people we knew there. The majority of our neighbors were from states like Oklahoma and Arkansas, many having settled in Bakersfield after escaping, like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, from the dust storms of the 1930s.
My mother was born and raised in Missouri, and somehow that was supposed to be better than being an “Okie” or “Arkie.” Even though my mother and I were actually poorer than our neighbors—she was a single parent, after all, raising me without a husband to help her—she felt superior to them. On hot summer evenings we’d sit on our little front stoop, trying to cool off from the heat of the day, and she’d look around at our neighborhood and sigh. “Those Okies and Arkies don’t have any manners or pride in themselves,” she’d say. “Look at the way they park their cars on their front lawns. It ruins the whole neighborhood. They act like country bumpkins, walking around bare-footed. And who wants to see some man’s hairy chest and beer belly all the time?”
My mother hardly ever spoke of her own childhood or her life before I was born, but she often spoke of Missouri: “Poplar Bluff was a beautiful town, full of the loveliest trees you ever saw,” she’d tell me. “In the fall all their leaves turned red and gold and it was the most wondrous sight . . .” Then she’d look around at our little court with its dry lawns and scrawny little trees, and once again she’d sigh.
I spent most of my childhood twisting myself around in order to please my mother, take care of her feelings, or at the very least not upset her. Then I would act out my misery and loneliness when I was away from her. In some ways, she never knew me because I was two different people: the Beverly I was with her and the Beverly I was without her. It seemed I had to be away from her in order to find myself.
When I was around my mother
