The moon shone brilliantly over our little picnic scene. We ate and laughed and wondered in awe why people didn’t have moonlight picnics more often. We gloated in our unconventionality and creativity. We felt special, and we felt close to one another because of this feeling of specialness.
chapter 11
Shortly after our moonlight picnic, my mother decided to move us to Sonora, a small mountain town 220 miles north of Bakersfield in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Momma had hated Bakersfield ever since she had moved us there. And when a 7.3 magnitude earthquake had hit a couple of years earlier, my uncle Forrest and his wife Opal had started pressuring her to move up to Sonora to be close to them. The quake, which killed twelve people, injured eighteen, and nearly destroyed downtown Bakersfield, was the strongest earthquake to occur in California since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. I don’t know why she suddenly decided to move but I think it was mostly because she missed my uncle Forrest, the only relative she was really close to.
I was devastated about moving away and leaving Pam. In my eight-year-old mind, I didn’t think I could go on without her. I pleaded for Momma to change her mind.
“No, Momma, no. We can’t go. Don’t you understand, I can’t leave Pam!”
“I wish you didn’t have to leave Pam behind,” she said. “But sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do, and this is one of those times.”
I could tell by her tone that, as far as she was concerned, the subject was closed.
I broke down in deep sobs of sorrow. My sobs were so deep and my crying went on for so long that I became sick and threw up. I even had to miss a few days of school.
Pam’s friendship was my life’s blood, the very air I breathed. I got so little from my mother, we had such an insubstantial relationship, that Pam was all I had when it came to real closeness. And while my visits with Ruby were certainly important, it was clear that she invited me into her world when she felt like it, and when she tired of me I would be asked to leave. Pam was my sister, my other half. I didn’t just go into her world, we created our own world together.
Momma’s plan was a complete surprise to me. I knew she hated Bakersfield—she complained about it all the time—but she hadn’t talked about any plans to leave. She just made an announcement one day, and within a few weeks we were on our way.
Momma always rented furnished apartments because we didn’t have any of our own furniture. So she didn’t have to worry about selling or moving furniture. All she had was a shadow box she kept her perfume bottle collection in and a used stereo she’d bought from a neighbor, both of which she managed to sell by putting an ad in the paper.
She also decided to sell my set of encyclopedias she’d bought from a door-to-door salesman and paid for over time. She got really angry with me when someone came to see the books and found red underlining all over the pages.
“Why in the world would you mark up your encyclopedias like that?” she said angrily. “You told me you love those books.”
“I do love them, Momma. That’s why I underlined them with a red pencil, like you see in the Bible.”
In spite of the red marks, Momma managed to sell the encyclopedias.
Since we didn’t have a car and had to take the Greyhound bus, Momma said she didn’t want to have to lug a bunch of suitcases around. She said we could each take one suitcase and we only had room for our best clothes—that was it. Of course, she took her photograph album and jewelry too. I didn’t really have any toys except for a stuffed Humpty Dumpty we’d found in the cabinet of the stereo when Momma bought it. Momma said that since I didn’t play with it anymore, I’d have to leave it behind.
The day we arrived in Sonora it had been snowing and the beautiful white snow lay on the ground like a velvety white carpet. I had never seen snow before, and I was thrilled. My mother wasn’t. It was early June, and she was totally unprepared for the weather being so cold. Neither of us was even wearing a coat. We slipped and slid and shivered as we attempted to walk down the ice-paved streets.
I was feeling excited about this adventure, but my mother was overwhelmed. She had to carry her suitcase and purse and watch out for me as I plodded behind carrying my own suitcase.
“I need a drink,” she declared, more to herself than to me.
She spotted a little tavern nearby, and we trudged and slipped our way to it.
“A hot buttered rum,” my mother announced to the bartender even before she’d had a chance to get us settled on the bar stools. “And a cup of hot chocolate,” she added, glancing in my direction.
This was a day of firsts for me. I’d never seen snow and I’d never been in a bar and I’d never heard of a “hot buttered rum” before. I’d heard of hot buttered popcorn, but I was pretty sure my mother hadn’t ordered that. I knew it was an alcoholic drink of some sort, so I pictured a beer, which is what
