In spite of some good things happening, time seemed to be inching by. I did get on the honor roll, but I was so bad in math that I couldn’t keep it up. And being on the honor roll didn’t help me make friends with the girls I admired. I couldn’t wait to graduate and leave Bakersfield behind.
Even though we were now miles from any farms, Bakersfield had a cloud of pollution hanging over it. The town was surrounded by mountains on all sides, which meant that the dust the wind stirred up and the residue from the insecticides that were constantly being dumped on the fields by crop-dusting planes were trapped with no place to go, making my mother and me cough incessantly and making me feel as trapped as the pollution.
And even though our apartment looked good on the outside, it was dark and dreary on the inside. We had only two small windows facing the front, and they were recessed so deeply into the building that very little light could enter. A common walk-way extended around the periphery of the front of the building, so we all kept our blinds closed for privacy, keeping even more light out.
I often felt claustrophobic because the front of our complex faced a busy street and the back door opened up to the chain-linked fence of the house next door. Opening the back door was like walking into a prison yard: there was just a narrow walkway leading to the laundry room and the alley alongside our building. And the next-door neighbors were often in their backyard tending to their fruit trees, so again, there was no privacy. In the past, if things got too rough, I’d always had the option of going outside and sitting in a tree, or at least sitting on the stoop of a porch, but here there wasn’t any place to escape to.
Adding to my claustrophobia was the fact that my mother’s cigarette smoke left a sticky residue all over our stucco walls, ceiling, and baseboards. Everything in the apartment reeked of stale smoke. I’d try to air the place out during the day when she wasn’t home, but it didn’t help much.
I needed to get out of Bakersfield. I needed clean air. I daydreamed about moving to San Francisco, where I could be close to the ocean and breathe in the ocean air. I’d never seen the ocean but I imagined it must be magical. I escaped my claustrophobic feelings by spending hours making a watercolor from a scene of San Francisco on a postcard Uncle Frank had sent me: a cable car at the top of a hill with the harbor and ocean below. I worked on the watercolor for hours, meticulously drawing in every detail and then carefully painting each tiny aspect of it.
I’d seen a movie about Paris in the 1920s, when artists like Picasso and Matisse and writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald would gather at cafes and have intellectual conversations about art and culture, and I imagined how wonderful that would be. I’d heard there were lots of artists living in San Francisco and that they met up at coffee houses where musicians came to play. I imagined what it would be like to sit with a group of artists and writers and share ideas with them. I could almost taste what it might be like.
chapter 27
My mother hadn’t seen her sister, Natalla, for many years— not since she’d moved to California when I was just a baby. And she didn’t talk much about her, but even so, Natalla had been part of my life in a unique way: she was our “benefactor”—the nice lady who sent us a care package every Christmas.
My mother seemed to have mixed feelings about these boxes. She was grateful to receive them because my aunt had married into a rich family and the clothes she sent us were expensive— nice dresses and suits my mother could wear to work. And when I was little she had no choice but to accept Aunt Natalla’s gifts of sweaters and coats—items to keep me warm in the bitter cold of Bakersfield winters—and little tailored dresses and jumpers, which helped me to look decent when I went to school.
But as I got older Aunt Natalla began to send us hand-medowns—clothes that she had bought but hardly worn, or clothes that didn’t fit her anymore and Momma seemed to resent this.
By the time I’d entered junior high, I was taller and bigger than most of the other girls in my classes and was the same size as my mother. My aunt was not an alcoholic like Kay and Frank, or a drinker like my mother, but she had a weight problem that seemed to get worse as she got older. Because of this, I could fit into many of the clothes my aunt sent us, and this continued throughout high school. Although Aunt Natalla’s hand-me-downs were sometimes a little mature for me, I didn’t care; I loved receiving them. There were expensive suits, jackets, and skirts that I wore over and over for years because my mother couldn’t afford to buy me new clothes.
During high school, my mother and I started playing a kind of game about the large box Aunt Natalla sent, which would arrived about a week before Christmas. We’d open the box on Christmas Eve, and I always felt like an excited child as I tore into the few wrapped presents. At the bottom of the large box would be the folded “used” clothes that Momma and I would each try on and decide who it looked best on.
I felt proud of my mother for being able to put her pride aside instead of holding on to her resentment that my aunt was sending us her cast-offs. And I felt rather proud of both of us when it came to making our decisions. Since we were the same size and both so much
