Blue Plate Special (5 page)

When we arrived, all the grown-ups were dressed up, drinking wine. Music and conversations billowed on the warm, food-scented air. The six of us girls raced through the house shrieking, chasing each other in tutus and princess dresses and Christine’s high-heeled shoes. Hungry, we crowded into the enormous kitchen, where Christine was setting out platters and dishes for the buffet help-yourself dinner. It smelled so good, so strange and new—I had never smelled food like that before. There was some sort of rice pilaf with golden sultana raisins and pine nuts and a thrilling spice that must have been cardamom, alongside chutneys and breads, a roast leg of lamb, vegetables, other things—an elaborate, exotic feast.

I distinctly remember the taste of those raisins with the
pine nuts and cardamom. It was a revelation—spiciness with sweet with nutty. I ate so much, I had to lie down on the big, soft, white couch afterward with my head in my mother’s lap.

I
n May 1970, when she was almost thirty-four, my mother finally graduated from Mills College with a B.A. She had gone to a total of thirteen colleges over the course of almost half her life. For the graduation ceremony in early May, she wore a proper cap and gown over a minidress with strappy high heels. She walked in the procession with all the other students, most of whom were far younger than she was.

My mother had decided to go to graduate school to get her doctorate in psychology. She’d started taking psych classes after I was born, as a way to better understand her marriage to my father, and had ended up leaving the marriage and finding her calling. She applied to many graduate programs, but the only place that accepted her with enough money for us to live on was Arizona State University in Tempe. This was far from her first choice. Tempe was a politically conservative desert, wildly different from Berkeley, and we didn’t know anyone there.

W
e’re moving to Arizona!” our mother announced.

“Arizona!” we trilled, having no idea what that meant.

Our mother always made everything seem exciting. All changes, upheavals, and surprises, big or small, were occasions of adventure, to be met with optimism and courage.

In late August, just after my eighth birthday, we packed up our little Acton Street house and sent our things on ahead with movers, and then we left the Bay Area forever.

Our father stayed behind.

SOFT-BOILED EGGS

With a spoon, into a saucepan of rapidly boiling water, gently place 4 eggs, one by one. Boil them for 6 minutes. Meanwhile, toast and butter 2 slices of bread. Turn off the flame, run the eggs briefly under cold water, then tap the hat off each one with a knife and carefully slide the innards out of the shells with a spoon. The whites should be firm, the yolks still runny enough to soak into the toast. Break one piece of toast into each bowl. Salt and pepper generously. Serves 2.

TAPIOCA PUDDING

There were two kinds of tapioca: the disgusting large-pearl slippery-fish-egg kind that grown-ups ate and pretended to like, and the smooth creamy puddinglike delicious kind that we kids loved. My mother made the latter kind, adding 3 cups of milk, ½ cup of sugar, and 2 beaten eggs to ½ cup of small tapioca pearls with a little salt and vanilla extract, simmering it on the stove for 5 or 10 minutes. She served the fluffy, warm pudding as a bedtime snack. It was just sweet enough and rich tasting, but mild and fragrant with vanilla. We lapped it up like kittens.

We landed in Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix and walked out between the automatic sliding glass doors, my sisters and I all wearing matching purple-checked cotton dresses and sandals, carrying our little flowered zippered suitcases and inflatable inner tubes, out into the dry heat and intense sunlight that would be our “outside” for years to come. On the drive from the airport, there were saguaros, drab stucco buildings, billboards, and flat, baking, dun-colored land. After the cool, foggy, gentle Bay Area weather, it was a shock—an exciting one, like every new experience.

“Wow, girlie Qs!” my mother said. “Look at all the cacti!”

For $185 a month, she had rented a small cinder-block three-bedroom ranch house on East Wildermuth Drive, a semirural, pockmarked lane only a block from the busy commercial strip of Apache Boulevard, but somehow seeming to exist in its own enclosed world. The floors of our new house were concrete covered by a polyester moss-green wall-to-wall carpet. The swamp cooler ran with a constant whir and a trickling noise and made the whole house smell like a brackish pond. There was fake-wood paneling in the kitchen-living room and a sliding glass door out to the patio. The kitchen had an avocado-green electric stove, whose coiled burners clicked as they heated, and a matching fridge with slotted iron shelves
and rickety crisper drawers in the bottom. There was a stiff, tall hedge in front of the picture window in the playroom that grew hard little blue inedible berries. At the back of the house was a covered concrete patio with a barbecue pit and a big, wild yard where we built forts and climbed trees and invented long, elaborate adventure games.

My mother had the so-called master bedroom, which was hardly bigger than the others, but it had its own separate bathroom. Thrillingly, I had my own room while Susan and Emily had to share a room with a bunk bed. This was hard for Susan, who was sensitive and keenly concerned with social protocol. Emily, by contrast, was a headstrong individualist, dramatic and loud. Their room was always full of activity and noise and the occasional fight.

Small and drab as our house was, it was a mansion compared to the other houses on Wildermuth. Next door to us lived the Tates, who’d moved to Tempe from West Texas, although they looked like they were from central casting. There was Mister Roy, the gun-toting, cowboy hat–wearing, potbellied father, and Miz Joyce, his slovenly, scattershot, enraged wife. Then there were the kids: Rusty, the oldest, who was eleven and blind and who was madly in love with me, although I couldn’t imagine why; Shelly Renee, who was my age and who was banished from our house for a few days when my mother caught her stealing an apple from our fruit bowl; two other brothers whose names I don’t remember; and Runt, the youngest, a wily little savage.

The Tates lived in one half of a run-down one-story duplex whose other half was occupied by Mister Bob (the Tate kids were raised to call all adults Miz or Mister with their first names; my mother was therefore Miz Liz), a mild-mannered geologist who always, on his way home from work, stopped by the rock stand I set up at the end of our driveway and picked
out a couple of choice pieces of quartz for a quarter each; he was my best, and often only, customer.

On the other side of us, in a dark shabby little house all the way on the corner, lived my friend Beverly Begay, a Navajo princess, or so she said, with her vast, extended clan and many siblings. Her parents were always in the backyard on aluminum folding chairs, drinking beer with other adult family members, smoking cigarettes. They paid little attention to the wild gang of kids they’d spawned.

I had another Navajo friend named Debbie Shelltrack, who lived down in the trailer park at the end of Wildermuth with her mother, a nurse who always seemed to be at work, and her little brother. Debbie was in my third-grade class at Flora Thew School along with Shelly Renee and Beverly. After school, Debbie took care of her little brother, fed him his dinner, and put him to bed. She was a very intelligent, very unhappy girl with a big, splotchy face and stringy black hair. She was quick and funny and dark. She was skinny; we all were, back then, but she was especially so. When her mother didn’t have time to buy groceries and there was nothing for her and her brother to eat for dinner, Debbie went to the dingy little trailer park market and begged for cans of chili or corn. She picked up cigarette butts from the gutters and smoked them because she was “hooked.” She pretended to French-kiss big, flat leaves that fell from trees, claiming she was practicing for when she had a real boyfriend.

When these neighbor kids first came over to our house, they seemed amazed, entranced. My sisters and I had a lot of books and toys. Our mother was almost always in a good mood and laughing. She encouraged our games. We played together constantly, we three sisters, elaborate, dramatic games of make-believe. We sang together and put on plays and variety shows. The other kids just watched us at first, and then they figured
out how to join in. We became a big gang, running through the huge cornfield across from our house, following the irrigation ditches far back into the tangle of desert between the big thoroughfares, roller-skating and riding our bikes along the wide, empty streets.

Summer lasted year-round in Arizona, and therefore, swimming pools were a big part of our regular life. Sometimes my mother’s friend Carol would have her consciousness-raising group, which included my mother, over for pool parties, with all their kids. Carol was divorced and she lived with her four pretty, perfectly blond, blue-eyed girls, Marcia, Julie, Jeannie, and Janelle, in a huge air-conditioned stucco house. I remember spending the entire day in their pool, all of us kids shrieking and jumping into the blue water, playing Marco Polo and racing from end to end, pushing against the side and shooting off like launched rockets to the other side of the pool, throwing ourselves on and off rubber rafts and inner tubes, and taking turns running down the diving board and belly flopping or dive bombing into the pool.