One of the first significant connections I made in Bakersfield that spring of 1951 was with a woman named Ruby, our landlord. Ruby’s court consisted of four little attached apartments lined up in a row, each with its own small porch, walkway, and yard. At the far end of the court, facing the street, was a larger apartment meant for the caretaker or owner. That’s where Ruby lived with her dog, Muffet, a black cocker spaniel that spent most of its time curled up in the shade of a large oleander bush just outside Ruby’s front door.
Ruby was a bountiful woman in her fifties with wild red hair and an equally wild spirit. Even her name seemed romantic to me. She was what I would later come to think of as a “free spirit.”
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,
