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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Love stories / Romance
- Subject: Novels
- Published: 02/07/2021
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Chapter 1, Santa Clara Valley Before Silicon, A Poor Girl Faces the World
On the morning of June 8, 1950, I met the world in a ramshackle farmhouse surrounded by a pear orchard. As I gasped for air, then screamed to announce the importance of my arrival, the Mexican midwife carried me outside and bathed me in cool water from a hand pump. Properly bathed and blessed in her Mayan dialect, she carried me back to be soothed with the milk of my mother's breasts. My father selected an auspicious spot and buried my placenta and umbilical cord.
The "ranch", as orchards were called, was between Alviso at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, Moffet Field Naval Air Station and the little town of Santa Clara. Its trees were part of a vast lattice carpet of fruit orchards that spread from the Bay to the surrounding foothills of Santa Clara Valley. The fruit grown shifted from pear, to prune, to apricot, to cherry as the elevation rose with patches of dairy, bean, tomato or other farms sprinkled in.
The orchard’s owner had moved into a modern home with my family occupying their dilapidated; old house with farm work in lieu of rent. Dad interpreted my being born in the orchard a good omen for our surname, Lin, 林, which means forest in Chinese. He named me, Zhen zhu, meaning pearl, which he made me learn to write as 珍珠. Mom and a priest christened me Elizabeth. At home, I was tagged Shu by Dad meaning virtuous, Liezel by Mom, a Tagalog diminutive of Elizabeth meaning God’s abundance and simply Sis by siblings.
None then could imagine the tech tsunami coming to change the area into Silicon Valley. I tried to locate my provenance birth ranch recently and concluded it’s either within the San Francisco 49's Football Stadium, next door at the Great America Theme Park or in the parking lot between them. Among the throngs who come, there is a small spot blessed with my afterbirth.
Soon after my birth, our house was demolished and we moved and continued to jump about to low rent, rural, semi-abandoned houses as three siblings were added to my older brother and me, all boys. Once in rent arrears due to penury distress, we hastily packed our few belongings and moved at night.
In 1963, when I was thirteen, we finally settled in San Jose, off Story Road, east of Highway 101, in a vast, low-cost subdivision, known as Tropicana Village. Our eleven hundred square feet, concrete slab floor, low pitched tar and gravel roof and stucco sides enclosed a small kitchen, single bath, and four tiny bedrooms, one of 10,000 hastily constructed in 1958.
The houses had a brick fireplace to proclaim status, but they were mostly unused or burned trash. While It became San Jose's east side slum, to us, it was a giant move up, a home with a garage, piped hot and cold water, electric kitchen stove and a living room gas floor heater, where we huddled around on cold winter mornings. Until my older brother was drafted, only I had my own bedroom. We fought to get occupancy of the single bathroom.
The development was a lower-income, working-class, white area, peppered with Hispanics and a few blacks when we moved in as a step up while middle-class whites fled. We were the only Asians, hard to believe now. Driveways, frontage streets, and even front yards were used to repair cars or abandon them.
Mom grew vegetables to supplement our dinner table in the small fenced backyard with my watering and weeding assistance. Dad and my siblings often urinated in the back yard due to bathroom congestion. Mom scolded them to stay away from her garden as they exited the backdoor.
Once a month, there was, the hundred- dollar rent is due, crisis, which often required my babysitting money contribution. I was glad to be able to help.
Chapter 2, Father Looked Up to Who Doesn’t Provide
Dad was Chinese, six-foot-plus tall and of trim and strong build. He had a light tan complexion and a stern face which easily broke into a sincere smile. Gravitas in appearance, he looked like a military officer out of uniform. His voice was resonant, as if in command but he had trouble pronouncing “L” sounds. He was good looking, charming and able to sing but a poor provider. He was good at cooking, siring kids and womanizing.
Mom, in contrast, was Filipina, four-foot nine inches short, strong too but of squat stature with a dark complexion. She was good at having kids; putting up with Dad and making her not enough paycheck on payday meet the next. We lived on the financial edge.
I never saw physical contact between my parents but with five kids, knew something was physical between them in the past. It was a mixed marriage of sorts. I had four known siblings, was the second oldest and the only girl. My brothers, except the older, took after Dad in responsibility but lacked his charm and looks. Some said I was the only one to get these. At five feet seven inches, I was between Mom and Dad but like many things, closer to Dad.
Dad worked off and on but preferred off. What he earned, he mostly spent on himself. He dressed well and wore a suit and tie when leaving the house. His white shirt was starched stiff and ironed by Mom, then me when I was older. His ties were silk, his shoes, wingtips and he always wore a hat. All except the ties and shirts were of a brown hue, darker than his tan complexion which made him appear lighter in color. He had a knack with knots. I loved to watch him knot his ties, typically with a Windsor or Hanover knot. Superstitious, the day’s tie selected was dependent on perceived omens to give him luck.
Dressed, he stood before the mirror, swept his straight black hair back with a comb, then set his fedora atop at a slight downward slant to the right. The only wrinkle detracting from his military bearing was a tendency to clutch his left shoulder and left leg stiffness getting in and out of the car, assumed signs of arthritis. Once satisfied with the mirror’s reflection he strode to the garage.
On his way out, he flipped open his Zippo lighter with a Chinese dragon character, spun the flint wheel with his thumb, the spark ignited the wick and with the wick flame, he lit his morning cigarette. When the door closed behind him, you heard the metallic cluck of the lighter close as he dropped it back into his coat pocket. Ensconced in the car, he cranked the engine alive and backed quickly from the garage to the curb, a whiff of smoke trailing his hand out the car window to mark his departure.
He loved to gamble and was a regular at the Bay Meadows race track in Belmont and at Vahl's, an Italian restaurant in Alviso, which had an illegal card club upstairs.
He drove Buicks, each about ten years old when purchased, then sold after a couple years for another. Once we had a convertible.
Putting the top down on a sunny day we drove around as if rich Californians, if a bit out of date. I remember the first one with power windows, I think it was a 1953. Us kids moved the windows up and down in amazement. He parked his car in our single car garage, took it to a car wash on Fridays and bought gas by ordering five gallons, not by dollar amount, which in those days was still under $2.00.
He could play the piano and sing, mostly Chinese songs he sang to himself. While I didn’t understand the words, like Latin Church music I loved listening to the sound of his singing. I remember one song he preferred, The Girl With Her First Love, which he translated for me. He would also sing in English and liked the ditty Yankee Doodle Dandy which always caused me mirth as he struggled with the “L” sound in Doodle.
When he was home, he filled the house with personality if not wealth. He was a good cook, worked occasionally as a chef and made not only Chinese but American and ethnic culinary fare. I learned cooking from him, tried to please him and thrived on his attention. I treasured the times we cooked together or when he let me sing a Chinese song for him even though I didn’t understand the words. He never disciplined us or helped around the house except for cooking. He left the operation of the household to Mom and me when I was older.
Dad's happy go lucky personality gave him many friends but only good time ones. He attracted women, white ones when it was a cultural racial taboo with his looks and charm. Some were so bold they phoned the house to ask for him. Most Friday evenings, he backed out of the driveway without a word and returned either Sunday night or Monday morning. We, kids, pretended nothing was happening but Mom often cried silently before the kitchen window as she watched him drive away.
He never talked about his past. We knew nothing of his parents, immigration status or how he came to marry Mom, or if, they were legally married. We did know he was born in northern China’s Shandong province, was not Cantonese like most Chinese in the area, could speak Mandarin and read and write Chinese, all of which he was proud of.
We knew when Chinese New Year came. He announced what animal the year was, what it meant and then disappeared for three days or more when it arrived. Us kids got our, tao hongbao, our lucky red money envelope, after wishing him good luck with a "Kung Hei Fat Choi!" greeting.
Inside were a shiny new copper penny and a crisp twenty-dollar bill. It was the only time he gave us money. The amount was carefully squandered making Chinese New Year a holiday bigger than Christmas where the gifts from Mom were modest. Before leaving on his New Year escapade, Dad set off a long string of firecrackers early in the morning from the eaves of the house front porch to protect the house and us from devils descending from the sky. Superstitious, he saw odd omens as part of his day’s routine in such things as animals or numbers. A dead bird or the number four meant trouble. A stray cat or the number eight meant good luck as did the color red.
With his Chinatown connections, Dad bought my brothers firecrackers for the Fourth of July. They paid him five cents a pack and peddled them to neighborhood boys for twenty-five cents. The lucrative markup created a temporary, family influx of contraband cash flow and made the Fourth of July our second biggest day of the year after Chinese New Year. The labels had a picture of a Camel, with sand dunes background, emblazoned on colorful red, green and yellow wrapping paper with, "Made In Macau" written on it.
Our family’s patriotism, prestige, and disposable income were enhanced with the retort of firecrackers in the neighborhood, evidence of our sudden popularity and wealth. Occasionally the fire marshal attempted to hunt down the source of the noise. Mom provided a good cover of pidgin English innocence at the front door. It was Dad who taught me how to lie. Serving as a courier to brothers with firecrackers in my purse, I was stopped and grilled by the fire marshal. I tried to lie to him but he saw through me. After my confession, he let me off by confiscating the ten packs I was carrying with the comment I was the first girl he'd ever caught with firecrackers.
After my run-in with the law, Dad advised me.
“Shu, in life sometimes it’s best to lie. When necessary, look directly at the person, never look away. Keep the lie simple and something they’ll believe. Say something they know is true for a diversion. Don’t forget your lie.”
With his advice, even he believed my lies when they were necessary.
Dad’s superstitious luck deity mostly ignored his pleas despite his careful observation of perceived omens. Occasionally he did win big. Then we would be rich for a day or two and eat out.
While leaving us on the financial edge, I still looked up to him but vowed never to marry one like him.
Chapter 3, Admired Hotel Maid Mother
Mom appeared shorter than her four-foot, nine inches, diminutive height, standing next to Dad's erect six-plus feet. Her hunched posture, as if carrying a great weight, was because she was. Despite drooped shoulders and squat stature, you could tell she once was pretty, perhaps even delicate pretty. It was time and hardships which had robbed her of beauty. Despite her weathered appearance and streaks of gray hair, she retained a dignified look when viewed closely. She broke into a broad smile over just a little good fortune, accepted everyone as is and was a worker bee.
Our house, while modest, was clean and the yard tidy while many neighbor’s homes were unkempt and their yards allowed to return to nature. She made clothes for us on her pedal sewing machine and cooked when Dad was absent but her cooking skills did not match his.
We knew Mom was born in Hawaii, on the Island of Maui, but like Dad, we knew little more of her past. She never told us how she left there or met Dad. She rode the bus and never had a driver's license. She was a farmworker when I was born and afterward when we occupied run down rural houses. With a priest's help, she secured work as a housekeeper at the Sainte Claire Hotel, San Jose's downtown grand dame back then. It was her steady maid income which allowed us to rent our house in Tropicana Village, our permanent home of sorts.
The Saint Clare also provided employment perks. We bathed with guest's little remnant, soap bars, half-empty sample size shampoo bottles and dried with hotel logo discarded towels worn thin. The few discarded because a guest used them for shoe shining or nail polish removal were luxuries. On the toilet, we used stub paper rolls with too little left for motel guests. Mom was the inherent honest type. She took home only what was permitted, never stole and ensured whatever of value a guest left behind in the room was turned in to lost and found.
As her only daughter, we were close. Guests don't see hotel maids but they see all and Mom shared guest gossip with me. I learned the married white mayor had a Japanese mistress, a married city councilman was gay and which big wigs brought prostitutes or had one-night stands at the hotel. I even learned there was a priest who met there with a married woman from his parish. I wondered if he gave her confession afterward in the hotel room. His sins eased the guilt of mine.
Occasionally a hotel guest left a small housekeeper tip. Mom converted these into Kennedy silver half dollars and saved them in a cigar box. It was our monetary reserve. Dad, however, often raided the box and sent me to the market with a note authorizing my purchase of two packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes.
The shop keeper kept Mom’s half dollars separate in his cash drawer for eventual retrieval. While the box was heavy, it never filled due to one financial crisis or another.
Mom’s other savings stash was trading stamps, S &H Green and Blue Chip licked and pasted in little books. Each stamp reflected a 10-cent purchase. The only way to divert Mom’s shop loyalty was for another store to offer double stamps. Books were carefully saved with their wrinkled pasted pages to be redeemed for our household luxury items, the toaster, iron, coffee maker, etc.
A devout Catholic, President Kennedy a martyred saint, Mom attended Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation. Her faith centered on Christ crucified on the cross, the Blessed Virgin Mary, saint's statutes, candles, the rosary, and holy water. She kept a bottle of holy water on her bedroom nightstand to sprinkle on our cuts after the bathroom’s Mercurochrome and Band-Aid treatment.
At church, she prayed fervently, mouthing her prayer's in a complex mix of Hawaiian Pidgin English and Philippine dialect. I hoped God understood what I couldn’t. Before each saint statue was a rack of candles. Mom always selected a saint to plea bargain with when attending Mass. Before the statue, she inserted a dime in the black metal box, lit her candle in a red glass, crossed herself as she knelt and with bowed head whispered her request. When finished she re-crossed herself and checked to ensure her candle remained lit.
To find something lost it was before Saint Anthony but usually it was before the Blessed Virgin Mary. The statues, like Dad's luck deity, mostly ignored her prayers, including her pleas to protect her first-born, Rickie, after he was drafted. She took what siblings she could collar to Mass but I went willingly. If there’s a Catholic heaven, she’s on an upper tier.
Before Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley, I and my siblings picked fruit and vegetables during the summer and brought some home to eat. If we made a rare family outing to the coast it was also a food gathering trip with fishing off a pier and dropping crab nets.
I remember the first day Mom used food stamps. We ate crab without a coast trip. I was fourteen, the age one learns their societal place. We were at our local market, the neighborhood kind before they were snuffed out by supermarkets. The owner, employees, and customers knew one another and their families. Mom put four crabs in our little cart. I was amazed and assumed Dad had made a big win.
At the cash register, Mom pulled a food stamp booklet out of her purse and tore out dollar stamps to pay. The store owner looked askance while ringing our purchases up. I was embarrassed and looked away in shame as she handed over the stamps. Humiliated as he counted them, I walked alone to the car.
We ate better afterward but I never accompanied Mom to the market again.
Chapter 4, Catholic Parochial Grade School, God Loves Me
Mom enrolled only me at Saint Clare’s, a Catholic parochial school, two blocks from Washington Elementary and Santa Clara Intermediate/High, public schools that my brothers attended.
Baptism, according to Catholic Church tenets, leaves an indelible mark on one’s soul. The nuns inculcate catechism lessons etched one on my mind.
The second sacrament after Baptism, First Communion, is a major Catholic event. It occurs when one has attained the age of reason, the ability to sin or not. At Saint Clare's it was a second-grade event for seven to eight-year-olds.
Requirements for First Communion were a soul cleansed of sins by a priest’s confession, memorization of the Our Father and Hail Mary prayers and knowing the ten Commandments. We also leaned God was a Holy Trinity, three in one, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit My wonderful second-grade teacher, Sister Mary Joseph, was kind and could explain complicated religious concepts in second grade eloquence.
With trenchant logic, she explained the Holy Trinity is within us. God the Father, our mind, God the Son, Jesus, our heart and God the Holy Ghost our soul. When we received Holy Communion, they became one with us.
She explained, we each had our personal guardian angel, sent by God, to always protect us from harm and to ensure we were never alone. When we prayed, our angel, carried our message to God by wings, a form of special delivery before the internet. The angel also protected us from Satan, a fallen angel, who was lurking about to trick us into evil.
She described the Blessed Virgin Mary as super Mom, someone who we could always call on in a pinch, calls I frequently made later in life. Heaven was filled with saints, each with a unique assist position for things which might afflict us. If prayed to, like an attorney, they’d eloquently plead our case before God in their troubleshooting specialty.
Other, more sophisticated, theological aspects were also introduced. Good and evil, heaven and hell and praying had been introduced in first grade. Sins, in second grade, were divided into mortal and venal, or felony versus misdemeanor. Purgatory was a temporary sentence in hell where venial un-repented sins were burned off before God’s Peter let you pass heaven’s gate. I liked this concept. A younger brother needed purgatory time for teasing me and being a pest. Limbo was where unbaptized babies who died went. When I asked what limbo was like, the good nun described it as a nursery. I asked what happened when they got older but was told they never grew up but they were comfortable, well-fed and had their diapers changed.
Hell was the big news. It was operated by devils who horribly tortured those who died in mortal sin for all eternity.
While Mom, I and my brothers were baptized, Dad wasn't. I asked if he was going to hell as Limbo was out due to his age but she did a theological leap and explained, by being a good person, he was baptized, via time and action, as were all good non-Catholics. I don't know if this was true theologically but it satisfied me, however, I worried because Dad wasn’t always good.
She also versed us in the 10 commandments to ensure they weren’t just rote memorizations. I can still recite them:
1. I am the Lord your God. You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve.
2. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
3. Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day.
4. Honor your father and your mother.
5. You shall not kill.
6. You shall not commit adultery.
7. You shall not steal.
8. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
9. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife.
10. You shall not covet your neighbor's goods.
The first was easy enough; Mom and I attended Mass when required, so we were covered. I worried about Dad who never went to church and those not Catholic. Sister Mary Joseph explained they were just confused and God, in His justice, forgave and accepted them if they were good. When I asked.
“God’s a man?”
She winked and replied.
“No, His is just a pronoun, God is everything, he, she, it, male, female, everything.”
The second was another easy one except again I worried again about Dad. He cursed in Chinese if he had bad luck or stubbed his toe. His curses, however, were explained by the good nun, as against a Chinese pagan god not covered in commandment one.
The third was easy, kind of a repeat of number one. Again, I feared for the rest of the family and others I knew who didn’t go to Mass on Sundays. I didn’t want to be in heaven with Mom the only one known. The kind sister said not to worry.
“They don’t sin because they don’t know better.”
This caused a flash of heresy.
“Sister is it better not to know too much?”
“No, my dear girl, if you know God, you are closer to God.”
Not wanting to pursue this further, I accepted Dad and my siblings would be in heaven with me but at a little distance from the center of action, yet still close enough to visit.
Number four was the big one. I worked hard on it and did what Mom asked. Dad was an easy pass. He never asked me to do anything.
Five was a no brainer, I’d never kill anyone, not even a bird with a BB gun like my brothers. When I asked about war, the good nun said, killing then, was only for people God wanted dead.
Six and nine were confusing as I didn’t understand the details referred to. When questioned a bit, she explained adultery as kissing or hugging when not married and nine was when a man wanted another man’s wife, kind of like stealing.
Seven, eight and ten were simple don’ts, don’t lie, steal or want to steal. I never lied except when Mom told me to tell salesmen she wasn’t home when she was. This was explained as not really lying because Mom was not home to that person.
While ten crossed my mind a few times, especially at Christmas and birthday parties when a girl got a present, I wanted, I never stole.
The ten Commandments were a little more complicated than when first read and covered some things not understood. I didn’t fret further over details, accepted Sister Mary Joseph’s clarifications, memorized the required prayers and the ten commandments until I could repeat them by number, out of sequence, when asked.
When saying the Hail Mary prayer, I didn’t understand “Immaculate Conception” or even “Virgin” but she explained these simply meant Mary was pure, without sin and I put them down as additional titles like Blessed.
To this day, I mentally talk to Sister Mary Joseph. She explains complicated moral dilemmas and reconciles what I’ve done and need to do to get me back into God’s grace.
With one more memorization, I was ready for my First Confession. I memorized what to say at confession. It was simple enough, as tested on the good sister, who was my first confessor. She was one who I could tell all to except she couldn’t wipe the sins off as she was not a priest.
In response to the priest’s introduction,
“Bless you child, is this your first confession?”
My response was.
“Yes, father this is my first confession.”
“What are your sins?”
“I disobeyed my mother and did not do the dishes when first asked. I also wish I had a Schwinn bicycle like other girls.”
The priest in response would mete out the appropriate penance and I’d be free of sin after I performed my punishment. It worked. When I left the confessional with a penance of three Hail Mary’s, a great feeling of relief swept me. I crossed myself, quickly recited my penance, re-crossed myself and was sparkling clean before God.
Mom and I made my First Communion outfit. When the big day arrived, Dad said I looked beautiful, a little bride he called me. He gave me five dollars. I doubled down on good deeds and gave each brother a dollar. Dad also gave me a rabbit’s foot with a brass metal case holding the stump on a little chain. He said it was for good luck by his deity.
"Shu, always keep this with you. Often in life, we need a backup. Sometimes you lose. Pet it to make you feel better and have good luck."
My First Communion was the only time Dad went to church until I married. I was so proud he was there with Mom. I carried the rabbit’s foot to the altar with me and in life, my talisman and petted it as needed.
Sunday, the boys and girls were segregated and assembled on the church steps for photo ops. Mom brought her little Kodak. When the bells rang, we were marched in, boys first filling the front pews, then us girls. The boys were dressed in little suits or attired with a white shirt, tie, and corduroy pants. They were not the center of attention. We girls, in our first communion outfits, were the big act.
We stood, sat and kneeled through the Latin service until the altar boy rang the bells announcing the transubstantiation as Eucharist host became the flesh of Jesus Christ. We kneeled, back straight, with aching knees, waiting for Sister Mary Joseph to signal our pew to the altar.
When she reached my pew, I rose kept my hands together in prayer supplication and followed the procession to the altar, relieved my knees finally got a break. At the marble altar railing, I knelt with hands reverently upon the starched linen covering the railing, knees again sore. As the priest approached, I opened my mouth wide and extended my tongue. The priest plucked a host of Jesus Christ from the gold chalice, held it between his thumb and index finger, crossed it before my face and gently laid it on my stretched tongue as he blessed me in Latin.
With God within, I bowed my head, crossed myself, rose and walked back to my pew with hands in prayer, filled with the Holy Trinity. I was, careful not to let the Eucharist host touch my teeth and let it slowly dissolve on my tongue as told by the good sister. She’d explained, God didn’t like to get chewed up before entering one’s body. Kneeling in the pew, a wonderful feeling of joy filled me. My soul was in a shroud of light. God the Father, Jesus His only begotten Son and the Holy Spirit were united with me. My knees no longer ached.
Holy Communion is a mystical and emotional experience those not Catholic cannot comprehend. Thereafter, I loved going to Holy Communion and did so every Sunday and racked up a slew of plenary indulgences, a Catholic Church tenet of get out of purgatory cards, much needed later in life.
In addition to receiving communion, I loved to hear and sing with Mass choir music. Gloria in Excelsis Deo, (Latin for "Glory to God in the highest") and Kyrie Eleison, (Greek for "Lord have mercy"). Even the Gregorian chant was beautiful to my ears. With my atypical contralto singing voice, the nuns put me in the school choir as a semi star. In grade school, with the sisters urging, I decided to be a nun. Dad laughed and said I would be a penguin but Mom encouraged me and prayed it would happen.
On the top of my school papers, I initialed J M J, for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph each page dedicated to the Holy Family. In my little purse, I carried a Saint Teresa's holy picture as my role model. She died a virgin rather than be raped. I also wore a Saint Christopher's medal which ensured I would have a chance to make a last confession and save my soul before I died.
In school, we learned death was our fate, a fate drilled into us which could happen any second. This appeared imminently possible from nuclear attack, its probability reinforced with school air raid drills.
With Moffett Naval Air Base nearby, we were part of a big X on a Russian atomic bomb map. Periodically the air raid siren would suddenly wail to let us know we were under attack. The fifty-plus students in each class marched in strict, doomed silence, under the direction of the nuns into the corridor. There, we formed long columns in the crowded hallway, crouched on our knees and put our foreheads on the floor. We covered our heads with our arms and waited to be blown to smithereens.
As the air raid siren continued to wail, the stern eyes of the nuns watched to ensure no head rose, an infraction resulting in an immediate rap on the head with a nun’s wooden clicker.
Once the fire marshal was satisfied with our response, the siren would wail a wobble, all clear, which meant we had been bypassed for nuking, the Russian bomber was shot down or the drill was a test, the latter always the case. We arose and nosily marched back to our desks, impressed with our good fortune of again avoiding death by an atomic bomb.
In the classroom, the nuns used the air raid drills as reminders of our potential sudden death and the danger to our souls if tainted by mortal sin. We were immersed in the idea, life on earth is fleeting but life after death is eternal. If we tripped up in this life, were caught dead with even a single unconfessed mortal sin, the punishment was an eternal hell. The good news was a priest’s confession, no matter how bad the sin, immediately cleared the slate.
Hell, and its opposite, heaven were constant classroom themes. Pictures were used for religious teaching reinforcement. In the classrooms, nuns kept a large roll of fantasied colored pictures on wood pictorial frames. Setting it up in front of the class the desired picture could be flipped to for the class to see.
The vivid pictorial roll consisted of winged angels looking blissfully down from clouds, saints and martyrs, some horribly tortured, the stages of Jesus's life including crucifixion, the Blessed Virgin Mary and the fate of sinners caught in mortal sin at death.
These sinners were pictured in hell, roasting over burning sulfur, gnawed on but never eaten by wild beasts, and my favorite, cooking in a giant boiling pot, each suffering their punishment for eternity. I didn't question the nun's punishment orthodoxy of hell but did think eternity in hell for eating meat on Friday too severe. I rationalized the punishment was for being stupid. How could anyone wantonly eat meat on Friday, our family loved seafood.
In school, I was Miss Lin or Elizabeth to the nuns, Lin, Liz, Lizzy, Lizard, slant eyes and eventually Cobra to classmates. While tagged “slant eyes” I never experienced racial prejudice that I recognized. Many got physical trait names. “Slant eyes” was like “big ears”, “whitey”, shorty, etc. I preferred Elizabeth but in fifth grade, I’d made the mistake of sticking out my extendable tongue in reply to “slant eyes”. Thereafter I was nicknamed Cobra. I tried to ignore this tag, kept my tongue in but it stuck and Cobra followed me into high school.
Saint Clare’s racial mix blended from blond white to dark chocolate brown. There were Portuguese, Mexicans, even a few Italians darker than me. In school, we were taught, all humans are part of God’s Mystical Body, each an integral piece of equal importance to the whole. I, however, thought myself part of the Mystical Body’s brain, my rationalization of superiority.
In the eighth grade, we learned the evils of other faiths starting with Martin Luther and his church door list of orthodoxy errors. Judaism was lightly skipped over as old news and Islam never mentioned except for the liberation of Granada from the Moors when Spain was at last free.
One Protestant heresy perked my interest, John Calvin’s Presbyterianism tenet of predestination. God, knowing all, knows all, including what we did and what we will do. If God knows everything I will do before I do it, it means what I do is predetermined. There is, therefore no free will. None, even sister Mary Joseph, could not give me a satisfactory explanation of our having free will if God knows everything.
While boy shy, I experienced boy crushes. In eighth grade, I was a secret admirer. He had a Hispanic last name, Castro, but was blond and blue-eyed. I attended his basketball games and cherished his dribbling from the bleachers but never talked to him, afraid of being rejected.
When living in rural farmhouses, I sneaked on the public-school bus with my brothers, hopped off with them at their school and walked the two blocks to Saint Clare’s. After school, I traipsed back over, got in the school bus line, clambered on in the rush with others and returned home with my brothers. None revealed my stowaway status but in hindsight, I suspect the bus driver knew.
Public school provided another perk not available at parochial school. It served a cafeteria hot lunch for a quarter. To cash in, I slinked away from Saint Clare's when the noon yard watch nun looked the other way and ambled to the public-school cafeteria. My cheap hot meal stratagem, however, was complicated by segregated cafeteria service periods for public grade and high school students. My lunchtime was when the high school students were served.
At the cafeteria, I looked down, squeezed in line, took my stainless-steel tray with indentations, slid it along the meal line and they plopped the food on. The elderly women servers never gave me a second glance and my quarters were accepted without questions by the cashier. I carried my tray to a vacant chair, gulped my meal down in unmolested silence then scurried back to Saint Clare's.
Again, in hindsight, my stealth cafeteria meals probably fooled none. They dished out the food and took my quarter without care where I went to school. By sixth grade, my older brother was in high school during mealtime and looked out for me.
Attending parochial school and our frequent rural house re-locations made me comfortable as a loner. As a bus stowaway, I lacked common school attendance with those on the bus, missed walking to and from school with Saint Clare's students and my sneaked cafeteria meals limited my lunchtime with them.
Parochial school holidays were different than public schools. They got out the week before Christmas and Easter, we the week after. My classmates didn’t visit my house due to distance and if they would, I’d not invite them due to home turf embarrassment.
Once ensconced in our Tropicana Village home, I left early in the morning on the city bus line and got home late, a stranger to neighbor kids. At home, I retreated to my tiny bedroom to escape family din. The bedroom was my sanctuary where I studied and fantasized about a world of my own, a world where I was queen.
Chapter 5, Notre Dame High School, Puberty’s Puppet Shadow, Perhaps God Doesn’t Love Me
Between thirteen and sixteen, puberty transformed me. Hopscotch and jump rope were abandoned and I sprouted to my full, five-feet seven-inch height, too dark, too skinny and with teeth and lips too big. My younger siblings called me frog or rubber lips due to my full lips before then added bean pole and duck because of my skinny long neck. Dad and my older brother retorted I was a swan confirming my neck was too long. I kept my lips pursed and my head down between shoulders to compensate.
On Saint Clare's graduation, the “select” were “chosen” for gender-segregated high schools. Notre Dame was the exclusive, all-girls, Catholic high school in downtown San Jose. Bellarmine, safely miles away, was for boys. Entrance was based on school grades, an entrance exam and probably parental influence. Catholicism also retains some of Jesus’s teachings of, “Blessed are the poor”. I suspect a few were given credit to retain this ideal.
I and the other 26 girls in Sister Mary Emanuel’s graduating class took the Notre Dame High School entrance exam. The boys took Bellarmine’s.
Notre Dame selected me and five others as among Saint Clare’s “chosen.” Without parental influence, my isolation in grade school ensured good grades, I knew I aced the test based on the questions and perhaps Sister Mary Emanuel or the priest who occasional visited Mom played the poverty card for me. I accepted going despite tuition cost because Mom was ecstatic, I was shy of attending public high school, none ever refused the honor of acceptance and I was proud to be among the “chosen”.
With Notre Dame near Mom's work, we rode the bus together. I earned my tuition and two dimes a day bus fare babysitting and working summers. I made my school uniforms on my little portable singer sewing machine Dad had unexpectedly bought for me for a birthday present. The uniforms were simple enough to make, a checkered long skirt with a white blouse. The homespun marked me as one who couldn't afford a uniform from downtown Hart's Department Store which carried a wide selection of parochial school girl's uniforms. I was proud to make my own and smugly looked down on girls who couldn’t sew.
My sex education during grade school consisted of misinformed school girl whispers.
My breasts developed fuller than expected for skinny me. As they grew, they tingled and ached. In bed at night, cupping them in my hands as I fell asleep, I wondered when they would stop growing. I knew their expansion became noticeable when Dad and my siblings noticed them and then looked away from them when talking to me.
Alone, without direction, I purchased my first bra and Kotex pad, not unusual back then. One didn't talk about those “things”.
I was prepared for menstruation from girl gossip and it occurring for me after most my age.
By sixteen, I was fully equipped, to the point some boys whistled or made comments when I walked past. At first, I assumed it was catcalling about my long neck but soon realized my breasts were the object of their attention. Turning brown-red and quickly walking away only encouraged them. It was my first sense of sexual power but I didn’t think of it as such then. Instead, I thought my breasts, like my long neck, were another deformity.
I carried my school Pee Che folder in front to avoid boy’s whistles and snickered remarks.
Chapter 6 Mortal Sin, A Secret Puppet Shadow’s Birth
The first-time sex was openly mentioned in parochial school was when I was 16 at Notre Dame during a three-day religious retreat in the school chapel. There, in its little elevated pulpit, using illustrated stories, the Jesuit priest, Father Newhall, inoculated us against communism and the perils of sex.
He wasn't a bible-thumping firebrand. He was much more persuasive, a good story-teller who began in a whisper gradually increased his tempo and paused when needed for emphasis. We listened spellbound. Once the scene was properly set, he'd rush into a staccato roar of incredibility over the evils of communism and sins of sex.
After the first day to cover the godless evil of communism, he switched it the real danger, sex. Initially, I inferred he meant intercourse but it was worse, much worse. Even impure thoughts or kissing a boy for longer than three seconds were mortal sins. My reaction was.
No problem, I’ve never kissed a boy and don’t think impure thoughts.
On the third day, he expanded into sexual depravities, self-abuse, and lesbianism. I sat enthralled, not on the perils of hell but his expansion of sins never imagined. As he ranted, I moved my hands from my lap to ensure a safe distance.
He concluded the retreat with a vivid story of a girl, sent to the eternal flames of hell. Again he started softly, almost in a whisper, how she was invited and visited a girl classmate for a sleepover. He related how they did girl things, put on make-up, dressed up in heels, danced to records, talked about boys, told one another secrets, then put on nighties, hugged one another and went to their beds.
His tempo and volume increased as he described, with the light off, the girl who lived in the house, clambered out of bed, slid in bed with the girl visiting, awoke her and kissed her lips. From this shocking revelation, he stuttered how her hand drifted down to breasts and swept down to her private parts. The girl aroused from sleep, returned the kiss and willingly descended into the depths of grinding sexual pleasure.
After an intense pause to allow this depravity to settle in our minds, his tempo and volume picked up to an incriminating crescendo as he asked.
“How could it happen, why would a girl risk eternal damnation by allowing hands to touch her private parts for a moment of perverse sexual pleasure? “
Starting anew, he related how in the morning, on the way home, the visiting girl's car was struck by a speeding train at the local railroad crossing. In a rising tone of voice, he graphically described the violent impact, her body crushed in the crumpled car, the firemen struggling to get her out of the twisted wreckage, the blood as it oozed from her popped out eyes. With another pause, his voice switched to a verbal rampage of her offending hand. It was severed by broken glass and laid asunder, splayed on a steel rail track, flattened to a squishy mess by the train.
We sat stunned in silence. After his next pause, he then thundered in a staccato frenzy, how that hand corrupted her soul, tainted it with self-seeking pleasure, her soul twirled down into eternal damnation. He then switched his voice and tone back to conclude calmly, as matter-of-fact, her screaming while stuck upside down in a boiling sulfur pot, her punishment was not only fair but too good for her transgression.
Wow, I’ve never imagined touching myself or another girl!
The pin-drop silence as he stared accusingly at us from the pulpit at his finish was broken by a wail. In a pew, a girl collapsed, thrashed about and sobbed. Nuns rushed over and led her out, obviously guilty of the travesty the priest warned us about.
I knew from eight years at Saint Clare's to admit nothing at school but was relieved I was innocent of this new self-abuse and lesbian sins. I also wondered why one girl was sent to eternal damnation, while the other could get off scot-free with a simple confession, an obvious miscarriage of justice. My questioning God's mysterious ways, with heretical thoughts, was occurring more frequently. The retreat resulted not in a recommitment to faith but my questioning it. I never saw the girl who collapsed in a wail again.
I retained my close friend, Julie, at Notre Dame. We shared a common sense of humor and aversion of parochial school orthodoxy. Contrary to most, who accepted what was taught without further question, she was someone I could talk to, not chit chat but mind and heart talk to without the filter of caution. We talked about sex and boys of course but shared jokes about nuns and priests, our social world, even Father Newhall’s stories as we bonded closer.
Julie helped put things in perspective. More importantly, the city bus allowed me to visit her house. Her house a mansion to me was inhabited by a stable family, an envy of orderliness. It inspired me to want the same. I admit, however, with hindsight, my friendship with her was tainted with an agenda. What I said, always carried a slant of equalization, no, a hint of my superiority. Seeds, I now worry, eventually sprouted into weeds in her mind.
Puberty marched on, my breasts grew and hormones coursed through my body in stronger and stronger swirls. Working on a math problem, reading a book, staring out a window, it didn’t matter, my attention would suddenly divert to boys as hormones ended their journey in my brain. There was no thought taboo. They fought for attention despite my attempts to divert them by thinking of holy images. If I closed my eyes to convert an impure thought to that of Jesus, crucified on the cross, the hormones lifted His lion-cloth.
A few girls at school admitted, "doing it" and a wild one even bragged about, "doing it" with different boys. She became an instant authority. We virgins listening intently to any scrap of information she imparted. We learned we bled, it hurt the first time, boys constantly wanted it and there was a "rubber thing" to avoid pregnancy.
Bookish, I returned to the downtown city library with my close friend Julie as things sexual were absent in the school library. In books, we saw, black and white sketched pictorials of the female anatomy, uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, wandering egg, vagina tunnel and a little bean clitoris. We also checked out male anatomy but having seen younger brothers naked there wasn’t much to learn for me other than things got a lot bigger at puberty. As an only child, Julie pestered me about what I knew with brothers but of course, I knew little. We learned when a man ejaculated, millions of sperm in semen rushed from his testicles, spewed out his penis, smeared about the vaginal tunnel, squiggle raced up fallopian tubes and if a fresh egg lay on the uterus wall, the winning sperm invaded it, slammed the door behind him and bam, the girl was pregnant. Nine months later, the girl was a mother for life.
As the hormonal pressure cooker heated up, when 16, I committed my first mortal sin. To save on water and gas bills at home we turned off the shower once wet and soaped up with one of the little-used soap bars Mom brought from work. Admonishments against self-abuse kept me from playing with my private parts but I rationalized, this excluded my breasts. I soaped, lathered, squeezed them, washed them again then rinsed them and rubbed them dry with a towel.
Menstruation justified a thorough washing of my pubic area. I kept telling myself it needed more soap. It felt good but after a few quick soap strokes to my clitoris bean, I diverted my hand away to a breast, the priest's admonishments of self-abuse fixated in my mind. Still, my hand would dash down for another quick stroke then move back up to cling to a breast. As I showered, I fantasized about male TV or movie figures.
Then it happened. I tripped across the forbidden line. I couldn’t stop stoking, I was Louisa, (Pina Pellicer), the girl who smuggled a gun to Rio (Marlon Brando) in jail, in the movie, "One-Eyed Jacks."
We were escaping on a galloping horse. With eyes closed, bent over, I stroked to the gait of the bouncing saddle while clasping a breast with the other hand. Just one more stroke, another squeeze, just one more stroke, another, I couldn’t stop. Bent over, one hand squeezing a breast, the other stroking my clitoris in a fury, it happened! A wave of intense pleasure spread from head to toe. I discovered sex, not as discussed or thought of but as felt. It felt great.
Worried others in the house heard, I turned on the water full blast to cleanse away guilt but knew I’d committed a mortal sin, a sin the priest lectured about during my freshman retreat. I’d committed, an impure act of self-abuse. The squished hand on the railroad tracks, imprinted in my mind, stared at me as I dried and dressed. My sin was not with a boy. It was much worse than three seconds of kissing, worse even than intercourse. It was a perversion. I had played with myself, committed self-abuse, an admission no girl, even the “expert”, at school admitted to. I descended into despair knowing I was in mortal sin, that only at confession could I avoid eternal damnation, being stuck in burning sulfur or in a boiling pot.
I must confess at next Friday’s confession session. How am I going to say it?
I scripted my confession like I did before my first Holy Communion but now it was complicated.
Bless me father, I have sinned. In the shower, I touched my private parts and experienced an impure act. No, sounds like I’m a pervert. It’s worse than intercourse.
I committed self-abuse, skip the touched my private parts. No, he’ll ask what was my self-abuse, what private parts, what was I thinking, was it the first time, how did I come to commit this act of perversion? The questions could be endless.
I’ll keep it simple. I committed and impure act father. No, he’ll think intercourse, want to know the name of the boy if we thwarted God's plan and used a "rubber thing" if I was pregnant, where we did it? Better to plead an impure thought. No, you can't lie in confession. It had to be the perversion of self-abuse, then the questions.
There was, however, a glimmer of hope for an easy out. When we went to the nearby Saint Joseph's church for our weekly Friday confession, three priests heard them. One, was old Father Frankie, known among the girls as "Father Chomp" because of his loose dentures. He never asked questions in the confessional. He was the chaplain for San Jose Hospital and could do a Mass under half an hour, the sermon limited to a few words of, "Be good until next week".
In the confessional, he waited until you finished enumerating your sins, blessed you clean and sent you out with a three Hail Mary penance, end of story. It was also rumored he was a bit deaf. Father Chomp was a get out of hell easy pass.
The other two were not easy outs. One knew me personally. He was old and stopped by at our house on occasion to visit and check up on Mom. I was his little angel. I enjoyed going to confession to him because my sins kept me his little angel. To confess to self-abuse would change everything.
The other was Father Pastoria, nicknamed by we students, Father Pastrami, due to his breath. We also tagged him “the ferret”. When saying Mass, his sermons dragged on and pushed the length of his Mass up to the next hour's Mass time. In the confessional, he wanted to know every detail, always on the lookout for sins committed unknowingly or omitted. Even a standard, "I disobeyed my parents," was pursued with which, why and how.
Marched over to Saint Joseph’s for our Friday’s confession session, two priests were hearing confessions. Neither had Fr. Pastoria on the door. I shifted to the pew for Fr. Frankie, relieved to have an easy out. While the pew line for him was longer he flipped the girls out quickly. Soon I ended up second to the edge of the confessional. As the next girl went in the rest scooted over and pushed me to the pew’s edge placing me up next. I was nervous but calmed myself with assurance Father Franke was an easy pas and I could whisper my sin.
Then it happened. Fr. Pastoria strode up, tapped his door and replaced Fr. Frankie. Dear Fr. Chomp, got up and left. For the first time, I faced the confessional curtain with trepidation. My imagination expanded my terror as I awaited my inquisition as the girl stuck in the confessional booth now faced.
I prayed Hail Mary's for strength, to tell the truth as my mind raced for the best phrase. Mostly, however, I prayed for Father Chomp to return.
Finally, the light above my side of the confessional blinked off and the girl exited. I rose from the pew, entered the confessional, pulled the loose draped velvet curtain as closed as possible and knelt on the hardwood kneeler. My lips were a couple inches from the screen. The little wood door on the priest’s slide in front of me. A sense of doomed fate took hold. My heart pounded. I kept reminding myself to keep my voice low to avoid being overheard by classmates.
Suddenly the door slid open with the priest's ear bent to the screen. Even in the dark I could recognize him and knew he could me, Father Pastrami, no escape."Bless you, what’s your confession?"
"Bless me father, it’s been one week since my last confession. I’ve sinned. I disobeyed my mother by not helping with the dishes. I teased my younger brothers. I argued with my father."
“Why did you argue with your father?”
Relief, a diversion, I lied.
“He won’t let me get a driver’s learning permit.”
A brief lecture ensued on needing to wait to drive and the virtue of patience. Knowing as he rambled on about patience I needed more, I blurted as he finished.
"I cheated on a test"
The latter an offering gasp to offset my failure to mention self-abuse. As I said it, I knew it was another sin, a lie.
I’m lying to a priest! Must I now add my lie to the sin of self-abuse?
"Is there anything else?"
"No father."
“Which subject did you cheat on?”
“Geometry”
With a little further of his inquiry, my expanded lying and his lecture about studying to make cheating unnecessary, I was let go. My penance, three Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers, normal venial sins retribution.
Drained, I crossed myself, rose from the hard kneeler, pulled the curtain aside to face the exterior light and left the confessional. Instead of feeling clean as the curtain closed behind me and the next girl approached, worse guilt assailed me than experienced before entering.
As I walked to the altar, I noticed the pew line for Fr. Pastrami had shrunk while the line for the other confessional was longer.
Kneeling before the altar to do my penance, my arms on the cool marble railing, my palms together in supplication, I knew I was among the damned. I was in mortal sin, my soul black, doomed to eternal hell if suddenly killed in an atomic attack or by a car. My vile hands would send my soul to perpetual hell of burning sulfur.
As I mentally reviewed my plight, I considered doing a bigger penance but knew only a priest could wipe away my transgressions. I was damned unless I fessed up to it all, self-abuse and now confession lies, which I couldn't.
Sunday, Mom, as usual, insisted I attend Mass and take Holy Communion. I tried to eat something in the morning to disqualify my ability to take communion. The Catholic Church required not only a soul cleansed of mortal sins but also a fast from midnight before communion back then. She, however, watched to ensure I didn’t eat.
At Mass, I genuflected and crossed myself as we entered a pew. As the liturgy of the Mass progress, my mind raced for an excuse to skip communion. Kneeling in the pew, head bowed, as the altar boy rang bells to announce transubstantiation of the host my quandary found no resolution. With no excuse; I morosely tagged after when Mom rose in the pew and motioned me to follow. At the altar railing, I knelt, stuck out my tongue, and took communion then walked back, head down, to our pew. Jesus was stuck to the roof of my dry mouth, my soul in unredeemed mortal sin.
Back in the pew, kneeling with eyes closed, I accepted I was an obdurate sinner.
God’s in my impure body, there’s no salvation for me. I’m on the dark side.
I tried to behave in the shower but soon sinned again. With a plethora of mortal sins piling up, unable to wipe the soul slate clean, I repudiated my parochial orthodoxy, removed Saint Teresa's holy picture from my purse, took off the Saint Christopher medal hanging from my neck and converted to unrepentant sinner, never to be a nun. Only my close friend Julie knew of my conversion.
Accepting my soul was damned; other mortal sins accrued no longer mattered. I created an elaborate new me but a hidden one, a secret puppet shadow, to placate my self-abuse. Instead of guilt she looked forward to soapy showers, ritualized them with erotic fantasies while I inculpably took holy communion. Eventually, she led to a life of adultery.
Chapter 7, Driver’s License Kiss
While puberty’s puppet shadow romantically fantasied during soapy showers, I remained boy shy, embarrassed of my background, full lips, big teeth, skinny body, and enlarged breasts. If a boy tried to talk, I assumed he wanted to mock me. My siblings already assured me I was ugly. I didn't need supplemental verification.
Attending Notre Dame ensured there weren’t boys to evade at school. Riding the bus meant I left too early and returned home to late for interaction with neighborhood boys. My good grades, ability to cook, sew, help run the house, these were the assurances I was better than others, if unattractive.
In the morning, Mom and I walked to a bus stop on Story Road, a couple blocks from our house. We rode the bus together, her to work and me to school. In the afternoon, if we met at the downtown bus stop, we rode home together.
On a cold, 1967 January afternoon, Mom and I walked home together from our Story Road bus stop. Next door to our house, I met my future husband. He was twenty-one, I, sixteen.
His family, in a step-down, had just moved in. They were white. He was washing his car on his driveway. As Mom and I passed, he looked up, a washrag in one hand, a hose gurgling water in the other and smiled openly. I assumed it was a smirk about us being Asians or my looks and pretended not to notice him. Mom smiled back.
The next afternoon, again blustery cold, I walked home alone, a hand-knitted sweater over my school uniform blouse. When I turned the street corner to our house, I saw him on his front porch. I changed my gaze to the discarded Christmas trees along the curb awaiting pick-up and increased my gait. I wanted to pass by unnoticed, my books and Pee Che folder held in front for defense.
He left his porch perch, boldly stepped on the sidewalk, blocked my path and asked, when I tried to go around him.
"What school do you go to where you need to ride the bus?"
Who does he think he is to speak to me without an introduction?
I hugged the books and Pee Che folder closer, looked down at my feet, then back up to face him.
He knows where I go to school by my uniform. He knows why I ride the bus. What makes him think he can block my path?
His hair’s almost blond, cut short, not a crew cut, just short with a little wave in front. He’s just short of 6 feet, not a lot taller than me. Crystal blue eyes, he’s got crystal blue eyes.
Glancing away I responded meekly.
"Notre Dame"
Wishing I’d said.
"It's none of your business!"
He replied.
"I go to San Jose State in the morning, the college downtown, near Norte Dame, I'll give you a ride in my car tomorrow."
More affronts, asking me to drive with him and not asking my name, then admitting he knew about Norte Dame and assumes I’m stupid don’t know about the college.
"No, I can't. I ride with my mother."
Relieved I had an excuse to get away.
"I'll take both of you".
"I know her answer, no!"
I walked past him without replying to his asking what my name was. In my room, I was pleased I’d, at last, summoned the courage to put him down. After setting my books on the dresser I wrote on my Pee Che folder, "Crystal Blue Eyes" then scribbled it out. I didn't tell Mom what happened.
After dinner, he showed up at our front porch and told a brother he needed to talk to Mom. When she came to the front door, he introduced himself.
"Hi, just moved next door and drive to San Jose State in the morning. You take the bus. Would you like a ride instead?"
"No, I leave early, go work, 7:15, go with daughter."
"That's when I leave, we can all go."
Mom thought about saving dime bus fares.
"What you charge?"
"Free, I just don't want to see you wasting time and money on the bus. It’s a free ride."
“I think about it. I ask husband."
She closed the door on him without saying more. He stood on the porch a moment then realized she wasn’t coming back and walked away. Her saying she was asking Dad was her excuse to get rid of him, her polite no. The next morning, however, his car was waiting in our driveway.
With no reason not to, we climbed in the back seat and exchanged names. I expected an agenda such as charging a dime or snide comments but he simply chatted about the cold weather and possible rain then dropped me off and said.
"Study Elizabeth."
He sped off with a pop of the clutch to take Mom to work. Girls standing around by the curb asked who he was.
“He’s just a neighbor.”
The pattern was repeated but after a week, when I got out of school, he was waiting for me.
“Elizabeth, over here, I’m here to pick you up. Hop in. We’ll go pick your Mom up. Come on, I’m not going to bite you. I promise.”
I stood next to the passenger door as he coaxed me in through the open window, nervous to ride alone with him. I’d have to sit on the front seat. It’d look stupid to ride in the back as if he was my chauffeur. Disconcerted, hesitant, I got in and scrunched next to the door. Classmates looked amazed to see me get a ride, a ride with a young man with a 1957 hardtop Chevy.
Mom was walking toward our downtown bus stop when we caught up with her. She smiled seeing us, got in and forced me next to him. For the first time, I could smell him, a hair pomade scent with a hint of vanilla, possibly, greasy Dixie Peach.
The next morning, we sat in the front with Mom sitting next to him. I became relaxed on the afternoon trips and scooted next to him if we picked up Mom and enjoyed the envy of classmates.
At sixteen, I was old enough to get a driver's license. After being chauffeured awhile, he showed up at the house on a Saturday morning. When I opened the front door, he asked.
"You want a driver's license?"
He replied to my vigorous nodded response.
"I'll get a learner's permit application and test study booklet. When you pass the test, I'll teach you to drive."
Worried Mom would overhear and say no, I put a hush finger to my lips, smiled agreement, closed the door and told Mom he’d just came to say he’d drive us Monday even though it was his Spring Break. She had started to worry about his interest in me but counted the dimes saved.
With his Spring Break, the week before Easter and Norte Dame's the week after, I went to school on Monday while he didn’t. He drove with the excuse he needed to study at school. In the afternoon pickup, he handed me a learner's permit application and study booklet before we met Mom.
I hid them in my Pee Che folder and in the security of my room, completed the application and read the booklet. Tuesday, during school lunch break, I walked to the county courthouse and got a copy of my birth certificate from the county registrar. I learned my mother's maiden name; I was born at home and was relieved my father's name was on it.
My next-door driving instructor got an affidavit for my parent's signature to allow me to get a license as a minor. I shuffled it among school papers for their unquestioned signatures. Neither read what the school had them sign. With the study book memorized, application and parental consent completed, I subtly said while driving to school with Mom.
“I’ve studied, completed my homework and am prepared for my test.”
“Great, you’re ready to rock and roll.”
Mom assumed we co-conspirators were referring to a school exam. That afternoon, before we picked Mom up, he asked when I could take the test.
“On Good Friday, the nuns, troop us over to Saint Joseph's for the Stations of the Cross. I’ll sneak out of the group when we walk through civic center park and hide at the corner behind an aspen tree. Pick me up there at noon.”
As a condemned sinner, I no longer cared about church orthodoxy. If the priest knew my soul status on taking communion, I’d be excommunicated.
At noon Friday, the students were trooped over to Satin Joseph’s, herded by vigilant nuns. As the group gaggled through the park, I drifted back and hid behind a tree, my school uniform an exclaiming of my escapee status. His car drove to the curb, I scrambled in and escaped undetected. Free for three hours, we drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles where I answered simple questions and got my learner’s permit. Before we picked up Mom, I agreed to take my first driving lesson early the next morning.
I was up, out the door and at his house by 6:30 AM before anyone at home was awake. He sat in his car with the engine running awaiting me. I climbed in and, as usual, scrunched next to the passer door. He smiled.
“My little mouse, always ready to scurry away.”
At least I am not his duck or bean pole. Is he commenting on my Oriental nose? What’s this, I’m his?
He patted the seat area next to him. I scooted over, the biggest move in my life. Thereafter, I was his.
He drove to a secluded hill, faced the car downhill, parked, got out, came to the passenger side and eased me behind the steering wheel. Sitting close, he explained the ignition key, the parking brake, the floor brake, clutch and gas foot pedals, and shift lever leaving me totally confused.
With the gears in neutral, the parking brake on, he said.
“Use the ignitions key to start and turn off the engine. Turn the key right to turn off and left to turn on but before you turn it on, tap the gas pedal on the floor to goose some fuel into the carburetor.”
I turned the key to the right. The motor shut off. I tapped the gas pedal, turned the key left and restarted the engine. After I mastered this, he showed which was the clutch pedal, had me push it in with my right foot, took my hand and guided me through the “H” pattern of the gears. It was our first physical contact, a nervous sweaty one.
Confident I knew how to locate each gear on the stick steering wheel column, he had me shut the car off and let me release the clutch pedal.
“Elizabeth, you’re going to start the car in neutral, push in the clutch pedal with your right foot, shift to first gear and ease off the clutch until the car jerks forward. It’ll probably kill the engine but that’s okay, you can just restart. As soon as you feel the car wanting to jerk forward, push the clutch pedal back in until you get the feel of the transmission engaging when you release the clutch.”
“I don’t think I’m ready for this. Tell me again what to do.”
“Just do as I say.”
I followed his directions, the beginning of doing what he said to do. Soon I could tickle engage the transmission and quickly push the clutch in without killing the engine.
“Good, good now we’re ready to let the car creep forward in first gear. First, put the transmission in neutral.
Good, now let the clutch pedal out and push on the brake pedal with your right foot. Good, good, now release the emergency brake."
“Emergency brake? Where’s the emergency brake?”
"Sorry, that's the parking brake. It's also called an emergency brake. Good, good, now let the brake pedal out a bit. Good, push on it again. See how the car wants to roll down the hill when you release the brake?”
“I think I’d better go home now.”
No, no, you’re doing great. Don’t worry. Now we’re going to cheat a little. Push the brake pedal with your left foot and take the right foot off.
Good, now push the clutch in with the right foot.
Good!
Now slide the shift lever into first gear.
No, that’s third.
Okay, good, now it’s in first. Now ease the clutch out to tease the transmission in.”
The car jerked forward and the engine died.
"Okay Elizabeth that's the trick of driving a stick shift, It's three pedals, brake, clutch, and gas. You ease out the clutch to tease the transmission in while easing off the brake then switch the right foot to the gas pedal. It appears complicated but once you get the knack, it’s easier than riding a bicycle.”
‘It took me a long time to learn to ride a bike. My older brother showed me.”
To simplify it in my mind, I named the pedals, brake, God the Father, clutch the Holy Spirt and gas, Jesus.
With the car in first gear, I released first God the Father, eased out the Holy Spirit and as the transmission kicked in gave Jesus a tap.
The car lurched forward with my sweaty palms clutching the steering wheel.
“Okay, okay, push the clutch and brake pedals back in!”
Confused, I left my right foot on Jesus and slammed my left foot on the Holy Spirit as the car coasted down the hill, the engine racing.
He leaned over me, pulled on the emergency brake, took control of the steering wheel and shifted the transmission into neutral. The car slammed to a stop.
I took my foot off Jesus and the engine idled.
“We better stop now before I destroy your car.”
No, no, that was better than I expected you to do! We just need you to keep doing it until you get the knack.”
It was a lie but I liked it and submitted to his control.
With the help of gravity, repeated attempts, more stalls, the Trinity eventually magically joined in harmony and the car moved forward in first gear. Soon the knack of comingling God the Father, the Holy Spirit and Jesus was easier than riding a bike.
He switched to the level stretch at the base of the hill. There, I repeated the process without the aid of gravity and after a few more stalls and jerk starts, I got to where I could move the car without killing the engine or jilting forward. Once I was confident at this, he made me shift to second, then third gears as the car raced to fifteen, then twenty miles an hour.
With wet palms, steering wheel and shift lever, I changed gears without his hand guidance. Relentless, he gave no succor and had me drive back to face the hill upward. There, I struggled again, until I could get the car into gear and move uphill, without stalling.
We stopped after this accomplishment at a donut shop where he had coffee and me, tea. I rushed to the restroom to dry as much of me as I could. Back at the table, he kept smiling and telling me he knew I could do it while I fretted about body moisture.
Back at the car, he told me not to use my left foot unless necessary or I’d wind up pushing on the brake and gas pedals at the same time. He kept me driving until I could do stop signs and stop lights but after three hours, I panicked. I’d been gone longer than intended and knew my absence would be questioned at home. Why wasn’t I there to fix breakfast?
I had him drop me off at the Pink Elephant Market on King Road where I bought a bottle of maple syrup, then walked home, still fretting over perspiration. By 10 o’clock, everyone was up. They stared at me when I walked in. Mom demanded to know where I was.
“I’m sorry. I ran to get here. I met Julie; you know Julie. She has a new hairstyle. Cut short and bobbed in the back. I told her to stop by the house but she couldn’t. She has a boyfriend! I ran home when I realized how late it was."
I lifted my hair as if bobbed. As a condemned sinner, I’d become a good liar with Dad’s example.
He’d told a whopper with me in the passenger seat when stopped by a cop for speeding. He convinced the cop he wasn’t really speeding, just rushing home, a falsehood created by saying I wasn’t well. Then he diverted with a couple of truths. He explained Mom was Filipina and was the hysterical type. The officer asked where I felt ill. I whined.
“All over!”
He gave us an escort home and Mom was hysterical to see a cop car pull up. Dad tied his lie to diversion. When I questioned him about it he, explained how best to lie but to save them for when necessary.
Julie did have a new hairstyle and a boyfriend. I used the ran home to cover my clothing sweat marks.
Lying with diversions sidetracks inquiries of your falsehood. If your lie is subsequently questioned, remembered the diversion and forget the lie, that’s what Dad said.
My lie was forgotten as they gulped down the overdue pancakes. The topic of conversation shifted to why I wasted money on real maple syrup, a second schemed diversion. Dad didn’t eat pancakes. He looked at me askance and smiled while he ate his fried noodles but asked no question.
The following week was my school Easter Spring Break. Each afternoon, I walked to the Story Road market and drove out its parking lot for another lesson. Monday morning, after my Spring Break, he stood next to the car in the driveway and announced to Mom as we approached.
"Guess what? Elizabeth’s driving today."
Mom didn't believe him but he had me pull my learner's permit from my purse. Behind the wheel, I started the car, he sat next to me and Mom was next to the passenger door. To her amazement and muttered protests, I adroitly backed out the driveway. On the street, her amazement grew to a comfort level. I pulled up to school, the girls nearby stared in amazement, I hopped out and he drove off to take Mom to work. My school status rose.
Soon afterward, I went with him, chaperoned by Mom, for my driver's test. With my rabbit’s foot talisman as backup, I passed without difficulty and was issued a California driver's license with standard-issue, deer headlights picture, stare. My dark face, slanted eyes, and big lips looked back at me. It was my certification passage to adulthood, more defining than the Catholic Church’s sacrament of Confirmation. Dad let me drive the Buick to get his cigarettes and take Mom to the store for shopping.
My family status increased but Mom, worried about, "boy next door", as she called him. Dad referred to him as, "white devil", "yáng guǐzi" in Mandarin or as "guǐlǎo", in Cantonese if on a second bottle of plum wine.
Until getting my license, we were just neighbors. Soon after teaching me to drive, he came on a Saturday morning when Dad was on one of his weekend escapades and asked me to drive to San Francisco. Mom protested but with insouciance, I got in his car backed out our driveway and drove off, he next to me, an unofficial announcement he was a boyfriend.
I drove the Bay Shore Freeway, (aka Bloody Bay Shore), without a divider back then, to San Francisco. There he had me park at the base of a steep hill. I had sweaty palms from driving the freeway and on the city's confusing streets but he didn't let me rest. He told me to drive up the hill and stop at the crest.
With his prodding, I succeeded in not stalling at its crest and other steep hills he selected. By the end of the day, I could stay stopped at a steep hill's crest and make the light when it turned green without killing the engine. My legs were and ached but I was proud I’d harmonized the Trinity pedals on San Francisco’s steep hills.
He then guided me to Fisherman's Wharf. There, I assumed the next lesson was about parking but he had me park in an easy diagonal slot and turn off the engine. Turning to him questioningly, he leaned over and kissed me on the lips, my first boy-girl kiss.
Before I could respond, he got out, came around, opened my door and took me by the hand to Alioto's Restaurant. In the restaurant I tried to act sophisticated with a boyfriend old enough to drink with a driver's license that aid I was a sixteen. I ordered cioppino, the first suggestion of the waiter.
Afterward, he drove home, me next to him. In front of my house, he kissed me again, longer and harder.
I giggled. He asked what was funny.
“I’m sixteen and never been kissed.”
I opened the door, ran in the house, undressed, showered and lay in bed with one hand cupping a breast and the other feeling my lips in wonderment. I had a boyfriend, me an ugly duckling.
Chapter 8, Engaged At 17 With Parent’s Consent
After his chauffeuring, driving lessons, hanging around our house, and more kissing he was an official boyfriend, we always together. I couldn't believe a man, someone old enough to drink, a college student, wanted ugly me.
The weeks flipped past. Our entwined free time shifted from driving lessons to getting to know one another chatter, but not conversation. We talked about what songs and movies we liked, public affairs opinions, who our families were at the surface level. It was not intimate like with Julie who I blabbed everything to, including the kisses he took, none of which were longer than three seconds. It was puppy love, me the puppy.
At the end of my junior year, on my seventieth birthday, he asked me to see the musical movie, Camelot, at the California Theater on downtown’s First Street.
He showed up at the front door wearing a tie and sports coat. An elusive premonition overcame me as I changed to more formal attire. Re-dressed, back in the living room, my perplexed conjecture was the evening included a special birthday present.
Downtown, he splurged and parked in an attended parking lot rather than drive blocks looking for a free space as normal. When the attendant gave him two quarters in change for his dollar, I checked to see if they were silver which were disappearing from circulation. Double luck, both were silver. I proffered two replacements but he simply gave them to me. Instead of requisitioning them as additions to my silver coin stash, I decided to convert them into a Kennedy silver half dollar for Mom.
Double luck but why’d he squander fifty cents to park, then give me the quarters? Is he treating me like a queen for my birthday? No, he’s afraid for his car. Downtown’s seedy now. Even Heart’s Department store’s closing.
The theater, now restored, was sinking into disrepair back then. The "old days", of ushers with cone flashlights guiding patrons to their seats a distant memory. Even in its faded glory, however, the theater's stereo speakers, big-screen presentation, opulent art deco décor, and opera-like balcony provided a presentation not experienced at a drive-in or on a television screen. They lack a grand movie theater's dark, intimate connection with fellow viewers, a mystical connection only vaguely captured in modern multiplex theaters.
There was, however, smoke. Each seat had its little ashtray on an armrest. Moviegoers could puff away during the movie. To ask them not to would be met with an incredulous look, of.
“What’s your problem?”
Looking up, the projector’s flickering light passed through the haze on its way to the screen creating a kaleidoscope of hues.
Seated together with popcorn and drinks, my mind wandered into the world of the movie.
What's the message, music, songs, love, love’s betrayal, happiness?
What do the simple folk do?
It’s a Cinderella tale. Guenevere’s an idiot. What more does she want? How can she be unsatisfied? Sir Lancelot’s a liar and a betrayer. I’d be loyal to my king.
After the show, we strolled, hand in hand, among the First Street throng to Original Joe's, a popular Italian restaurant landmark. The movie’s lyrics flitted about in my mind as melody residue.
In short, there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
In Camelot.
Tra la! It's May!
The lusty month of May!
That lovely month when ev'ryone goes
Blissfully astray.
I find humility means to be hurt
It's not the earth the meek inherit,
It's the dirt
That’s my inheritance, dirt. I’d never be Guenevere, a fool for Sir Lancelot. I’d be happily-ever-aftering, Queen of Camelot, Camelot my Cinderella story.
Down the street, a WWII era searchlight scanned the sky in front of a war surplus store, the hum from its diesel generator faintly audible. Its light beam pierced the night sky in a rotating pattern, seeking shopping moths, not the enemy bombers it was built for.
Dad took us on a family searchlight adventure. He drove us packed in the Buick, to its source which announced the momentous event of a new furniture store, a marketing gimmick.
How about me? I yearn for a beam to pierce my night sky. Like Dad, I look for hidden meanings. Does the beam foretell an omen? Is it predicting a domestic furniture future for me? Is my newfound boyfriend
a gimmick?
He had a reservation at Original Joe's. With name confirmation, we were led from the crowded entry to a red leather upholstered booth.
I’d eaten lunch there a few times with Mom when I was flush with cash. She’d come over from the hotel next door and I walked over from school. It was the first time I was there for dinner. Seated, we smiled in silence at one another across the booth table. The waiter came and handed us menus.
I noticed things cost more at dinner time versus lunch. He ordered their signature custom made ravioli dish for us. It was more expensive than spaghetti, an omen the night was special.
Our order taken, we returned to staring at one another as the waiters, with a white towel draped over one arm rushed to and fro. Pasta at Original Joe’s came with a sniff of sophistication. We piled on parmesan cheese to ensure we got our money’s worth. With bread dipped in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, we ate our ravioli and mulled mundane observations about the movie.
I drifted into thoughts of Mom who worked as a maid next door.
Mom works so hard. She saves her Kennedy silver half dollars but never manages to fill her little stash box. How I love her, her and her maids naughty guest tales.
Interrupting my musings of silver and Mom, he asked.
“Penny for your thoughts.”
My mind switched to him. What’s he thinking? Why me? What’s he think about me?
“A penny, aren’t they worth a dollar, a silver dollar?”
Silver was stuck in my mind since getting the quarters.
“Worth more than that. So what do you think?”
“I can’t believe I’m seventeen and going to be a senior.”
He kept staring, as if trying to say something but stuttered something inane about King Arthur. It was as if something eminent was up. At last, I said.
“You want a picture of me?”
He returned his attention to his pasta, dusting it with more parmesan cheese.
Getting dressed up, paid parking lot, silver quarters, movie theme, searchlight beam, Original Joe's ravioli were omens. I didn’t connect them.
Parked in front of my house, he kissed me, kissed me again, for almost three seconds, as if for reassurance. He pulled away, looked at me oddly, reached to the glove compartment, opened it, fumbled about, and took out a small jewelry box. He handed it to me but said nothing. Opening it I saw a ring, its little diamond light beam in a silver setting beaconed up.
Without taking it out, I turned and asked, incuriously, "You want to go steady?"
"No, I want you to marry me."
Closing the box, I looked down in confusion, a tear in my eye, saying nothing.
"Are you saying no?"
A few months earlier I’d never been kissed. Now I was facing a marriage proposal, one by a man hardly known. I sat silent, then asked.
"You want to marry a skinny, just seventeen, Asian, still in high school?"
My question, in truth, was to me.
"Me, poor, high school girl, just turned seventeen, Asian, marry a white man, five years older, graduating from university?"
"When I first saw you, I wanted you. We won't marry until you graduate. I’ll have a good job. I know I can’t offer Camelot but give me time, I can. Just nod yes."
I wouldn’t graduate for a year, a forever time to me then. Confused and seeking a diversion I replied.
"You need my parent's permission."
I gave back the ring.
"I'll ask them in the morning,"
He kissed me passionately, for the first time longer than three seconds. My breasts pushed up against him. He interpreted it as my consent to marriage. Breaking free, I ran in the house. On my bed, I tossed in confusion, still, a girl, life-changing too fast but wanting out of my house. Then I realized, it didn't matter.
My parents will say no.
The next morning, Saturday, he came over. Dad atypically was at home for the weekend. I stayed by the stove, looked down, absentmindedly cooked breakfast and pretended not to know the purpose of his visit.
He knew enough to ask Dad first and motioned him to the backyard as the house was too small for a private conversation. Dad, glad for an excuse to smoke, got his cigarettes and followed with his cup of tea.
I assumed Dad would say I was too young, still in school and he was not letting his only daughter marry a white devil. After Dad's cigarette and tea they returned with Dad nodding to me and smiling, his blessing. Next, he took Mom. It took longer and she returned crying but also nodding acquiescence.
He told them we wouldn’t marry until I graduated, he had a good job and he would "honor and protect" me. I suspected Dad's agreement was due to one less in the crowded house and the potential of a son-in-law to borrow from and Mom's tears of my not going to college were offset by my marring someone responsible, unlike Dad.
My brothers were excited at the potential of having their own bedrooms. No one asked if I agreed as they congratulated me while I served breakfast, stunned at the spontaneous change of my status.
So, it was, that Saturday morning, the day after my seventeenth birthday, my fate was decided. I was engaged, a girl, already taken, who in a year would leave home and school to become a man's wife, a man hardly known. It was as simple as that.
Suddenly, home and school, my focal points, no longer mattered. They were temporary lapses until marriage and having kids. I was "promised to another" and expected to be an adult but was still a girl. The parking lot, quarters, movie, searchlight, restaurant were omens. I just didn’t connect them and mused.
What’s a simple folk girl to do? I’m engaged, a simple girl is getting married, that’s what I got to do.
Chapter 9, My Fiancée Honors and Protects Me
My fiancée’s parents were initially not pleased their only child chose a young, poor, Catholic, Asian to marry. Well, mostly they were upset with my being Catholic but could say little due to their failed status.
My fiancée and I helped support our parents versus their supporting us. We both endured Dad cash raids, he for drinking bouts, me for gambling sprees. I also endured sibling "borrowing" but hid my savings in a secret bank, a carved-out niche in the sheetrock, inside my bedroom closet, above the door. No matter how hard they searched, my safe was never discovered.
I suspect my safe's still intact and the current occupant unaware it’s there. My fiancée opened a real bank account in our names, one which required both signatures for withdrawals. Our marriage nest egg grew even while helping parents.
His infatuation with me remained a mystery but I accepted I was to be married on graduation by wearing his ring, except to school where it was prohibited. There I wore it on a gold chain concealed from the nun's view under my blouse instead of the Saint Christopher's medal I’d once wore.
While poor and from a dysfunctional family, like me, he had a future on his college graduation. I wanted an escape from the pernicious monthly rent is due crisis, out of my cramped house and have a husband who didn't leave on the weekends. Not the best reasons for marriage but, for me, good enough. I wanted a husband who went to work in the morning, didn't drive away in the evening, a home we owned, a nice neighborhood, and two kids. In return, I'd be a super wife and mom. He didn't want to be his Dad and I was determined not to be Mom, a housekeeper, supporting a womanizer, stuck with a brood of kids.
I knew he was going to be successful, enjoyed cooking for him and enjoyed my “already taken” status. While controlling, he never belittled or physically threatened me and appeared to be genuinely attracted to me. With him, I was safe, safer than being alone or at home were lack of money was a constant hazard.
A man loved me, whatever love was, the only man ever kissed. I didn't think of romantic love. I loved a secure economic future.
Engaged to him provided self-confidence. He brought groceries to our house for me to cook, ate there and took leftovers to his parents resulting in my cooking for two families and our engagement pleasing all. I was happiest with him at our dinner table and me at the stove cooking, especially if Dad was there and we cooked together.
Saturday nights we saw a movie and went for pizza afterward or drove around but rarely stayed at either of our dingy houses.
We went to the County Fair and spent more time looking at the animals than the carnival rides but he did foolishly try to win a teddy bear for me. He had to settle on a pair of fuzzy dice to hang from his car mirror.
We did things which didn’t cost much like roller skate at the rink on the Alameda, watch San Jose State’s football team lose and go to the Rosicrucian Museum and look at mummies which were free. Once, we spent an evening at San Francisco Airport and watched travelers arrive and depart to exotic locations. He took me to my senior ball with a dress I made.
He continued to live at home after his January graduation professional employment to be next door to me and save money. All went orderly to the path to our marriage except one issue, the military draft.
His student draft deferment ended on graduation. Our wedding was not until June when I graduated from high school. The draft could swoop down like it did on my older brother Rickie and take him away. The Vietnam War required draftee fodder. Losing Ricki two years earlier was a crisis in our family which seared the danger of the draft in my mind. While he said we would marry regardless, his being in the army was not the requisite security promised. His draft status initially kept our scheduled marriage uncertain, my future vague and our marriage unassured, despite the engagement.
Just after his graduation, his student deferment status switched to ll-A, a technical civilian deferment due to his employment as an engineer at Lockheed Aircraft in Sunnyvale. It was the good job promised with no draft risk. With my graduation and his "good job" my betrothal sealed. I was taken, promised; marriage assured on high school graduation as an eighteen-year-old bride.
Mom became more pleased with our engagement as she knew him better due to his "honoring and protecting me" but still lectured about not getting pregnant. Like the nuns she didn’t talk specifics, just don't, inferring I was to remain a virgin. Once marriage was assured with the “good job”, however, being a virgin on the altar was no longer important to me.
Like puberty and menstruation, no adult talked to me about birth control. The church stridently condemned "the pill" which was changing the world. Among the girls at school, it was THE topic with the talk mostly of how to get the “the pill." A few, very few, had a mother who went with them to the doctor and got them on the "pill". The nuns seemed flustered girls could "do it" and not be punished with pregnancy. The church was in turmoil over this earth-shaking change.
For me, it didn't matter. At seventeen I couldn't get the "the pill". You had to be eighteen to see a doctor without a parent present. Mom would never agree to take me to get "the pill". Sex was a taboo subject. To say,
"Mom, take me to the doctor and get me on the "the pill" so I can have intercourse.”
would in my mind, stop the earth's rotation. It was don’t ask, don't tell. She lit a few more. candles in church and I never broached the subject of what happened alone with him.
My fiancée could be arrested if we had intercourse, me being under eighteen and he over twenty-one but that didn’t happen back then. Lots of girls got married at seventeen and eighteen, pregnant on the altar. While we came close, we didn't, “do it”. With our wedding assured I was okay with having intercourse despite Mom's extra candles and the nun's admonishments. I figured my fate’s sealed; it doesn’t matter if I’m pregnant on the altar but he "honored and protected me." As with other things he took responsibility for my virginity, I belonged to him and he wanted me a virgin on the altar. I was pleased he wanted that, it meant he loved me.
We shifted, however, from kissing goodnight to ‘necking” and "petting" as it was called. Our kissing went well beyond the church's three-second limit for a mortal sin to occur. Then it happened. After a movie, parked overlooking Steven's Creek Dam, we were grinding against each other on the front seat, fully clothed, what was called “dry humping” back then. I felt his erection pressing against his pants, pulled my blouse and bra up and had him kiss my nipples for the first time. While he did, I lifted my skirt and put his hand on my panty crotch.
As he kissed my breasts and rubbed my panty. I climaxed in a shudder, four months before our scheduled wedding. He was the more surprised at my ardor and exclaimed I was, “Vixen,” as I straightened my clothes and sat up.
“Necking” and "petting" became our sex life. Soon after the Steven’s Creek Dam climax, we were alone in his house while his parents went out to a movie. He kissed me while we watched TV. I got up from the sofa and led him to his bedroom. I laid on his bed, opened my blouse, unhooked my bra, pulled my skirt up, and my panty down while he kissed, fondled and pawed. I opened myself for him. He laid aside me, rubbed my vagina.
I then unbuckled his pants, pulled them and his shorts down and saw for the first time his penis. Unlike my brothers, he was circumcised. I stroked it until he ejaculated.
When his semen spurted out, I jumped back in amazement. Proud of my accomplishment, awed by a feeling of power, hereafter his penis was tagged Squirt.
Dissipated we lay next to one another and he fell asleep. We were almost caught by his parents when they returned home early. I woke him up and we rushed out of the bedroom as his parents came into the kitchen from the attached garage. I suspected they thought we did more than we did.
Even with our "petting" he remained inexperienced and didn’t understand my magic clitoris button. He scolded Vixen we could not "go all the way", preached our marriage was still inchoate when she became too aggressive and kept his “honor and protect” promise.
Vixen still took soapy showers. I fantasized about movie scenes, making bad boys spew and a penis ejaculating inside me.
Chapter 10, Girl’s Night Out
In the summer of 1967, just after my engagement, I got a job cleaning dishes at The Plaza Lanes on White Road near our house, with fibs I was eighteen and had quit school.
The pay, much better than baby-sitting or picking fruit was augmented with tips shared by the waitresses. At the start of my senior year, I confessed to the manager who hired me and quit. She loved my work but hated my lying to get hired and quitting but I’d saved enough to buy a neighbor's car for three hundred dollars, a two-door, 1956 Desoto, hardtop.
The Desoto, a tank with tail fins, rumbled when driven. Inside, it had big front and rear bench seats, power window controls, a push-button automatic transmission and a miracle radio bar which shifted to the next clear station when tapped, an expired status symbol. The driver's door was jammed shut and required a passenger door entry and exit, reflected in the purchase price.
The Desoto gave me freedom, like its namesake, to explore new worlds. Turning the corner from home, no one knew where I was, where I was going, or where I had been when I returned. I loved my new independence.
With my own car, I provided family transportation and drove Mom shopping but stayed in the car and listened to the radio if she went to the grocery to avoid food stamp stigma. I drove her to work, parked the Desoto at her hotel and I walked to school. No longer did we wait for a bus, endure its frequent stops and comingle with other riders. My one-year younger brother got his driver’s license in the Desoto with me as an instructor. Its automatic shift meant he didn’t learn to drive manual shift and I retained a smug driver’s superiority over him.
Dad made us park on the street so he could park in the garage. Thereafter the front of our house was cluttered with our cars, typically with my brother’s '52 Chevy in some state of disrepair. None of us bothered with car insurance.
With the Desoto, I blossomed into school popularity but retained only my one close friend, Julie. Only she knew about Vixen and Squirt. In high school, she had blossomed into the beautiful category. Boys chased her. She was attracted to the "bad boy" type, with fast cars and lost her virginity in the back seat with one. As a “fast girl”, I was stimulated by her escapades and quizzed her about sex details to prepare for my marriage. Her veer to the wild side, however, skewed her life's universe to an unhappy ending.
My fiancé took control of not just my life when with him but all of it. His directives were, finish high school, plan the wedding, work weekends, save money, avoid boys and be with him. It was simple enough. I agreed with one concession due to my high school status, “girls' night out” on Fridays. The 1956 Desoto meant I was the driver for the girls.
My new friends, in exchange, invited me to their slumber parties and taught me about makeup. I learned how to look older, hide minor blemishes, make my eyes more oval, paint my nails and style my hair. It was my first experience of looking pretty to be noticed. I loved red lipstick and nail polish.
We tested how much makeup we could get away with at school until forced to go to the lavatory and wash it off.
Shoes concealed our polished toenails from the nuns. We painted our fingernails on Fridays after school then smudged them clean Monday mornings. I applied lipstick before the rear-view mirror as soon as entering the Desoto after school in Mom's hotel parking space. The hems of my skirts were raised to the limit imposed by the nuns and higher after school.
Neither Mom nor my fiancé was in favor of my driving on "girls' night out", attending slumber parties or the makeup sessions but I loved them. They were my weekly allotted highlight. Fridays, at a girl’s house, we put on makeup, dressed risqué and then I drove them to a drive-in, usually the El Rancho. Sometimes a girl hid in the trunk to avoid paying but mostly to get away with it. The movie presentation was unimportant.
At the drive-in, they flirted as they walked to and from the concession stand among the forest of mounted speakers and herd of cars. If a car was spotted with fogged windows or even better, rocking, they rapped on a window for laughs.
Afterward, we cruised downtown San Jose, American Graffiti style, up First and down Second Streets.
The rendezvous spots were Mel's or Spivey's Drive-Ins for close encounter flirting.
Boxed in among the parked cars at the drive-in, we ordered cokes. The carhop mounted her tray on the passenger side window as I kept my window up to keep boys at bay. Sipping cokes, we listened to radio music, made crude jokes about boys considered losers and the girls flirted with the cool ones until we forced to leave for lack of additional purchase.
The girls gave phony names and phone numbers to those not desired and real ones to those sought. If they were asked why my window was up, they explained I was stuck up and an old engaged woman.
At Mel's Drive-In, two months before my graduation and scheduled wedding, my rolled-up window was tapped. He was tall with shoulder-length, dark brown hair. He had a mustache, pale blue eyes and wore a multicolored shirt with big lapels, a wide belt and bell-bottom pants, a hippy, not my type. He also had a cute smile with a narrow gap in the center of his upper teeth, suggesting mirth.
I pushed the window button and rolled it down. His droll voice, jovial when introducing himself, informed me his name was Gary, a twenty-year-old, San Jose State University sophomore. His1965 burgundy colored Pontiac GTO was parked nearby.
Bantering, I learned he graduated from Los Gatos High School, a school in a town of rich people. His only job was attending school, which I envied. The other girls tried to get his attention but he stayed by my window. When he asked about me, I told petty lies but gave him my name. When the car hop told me to leave, he asked.
"What's your phone number?"
As I maneuvered out of the parked cars, he tagged along next to my window. Turning the steering wheel to squeeze by another car, I blurted, “Cypress 8-2021,” my real number.
Back then phone numbers were simple to remember. There was no need for an area code and prefix words made the first two digits letters of three words, AXminster, CHerry, and CYpress. The first number after the word was limited to six for Axminister, two or eight for Cherry and the four even numbers for Cypress. With the prefix word and its associated number, you only had to remember the last four digits. The word and first digit also revealed a phone’s general location. CYpress 8 meant East San Jose, and me, a poor girl.
The next day he called. Summoned to the phone by Mom, I rued having given my number when I heard his voice. His clever words, however, kept me on the line even though I had to keep my end of the conversation low and ambiguous with family present.
After chit chat to know a little more about each other, he asked a strange question.
"You ever go to Alviso?"
"No, why?'
I knew Dad gambled there at a place called Vahl's because once he came home and proclaimed, he’d broke the bank at Alviso’s Vahl's. For a month thereafter, we ate well. Gary wanted me to walk with him on Alviso's train track to the salt ponds, a weird request, something never heard of.
Instead of answering, I turned away from Mom and whispered.
“Do you know of a place in Alviso called Vahl’s?”
“Sure, everyone knows Vahl’s. It’s an Italian restaurant, an Alviso landmark. Supposed to have good food but I’ve never ate there.”
"Take me there Monday after school and I'll see your salt ponds."
"Deal! How about four o'clock?"
"How do I get there?"
"Take the Alameda to Santa Clara, turn right on Lafayette Street, drive all the way to Alviso and turn left on Taylor Street, you can't miss it."
“Good, I’ll see you then.”
As I set the phone back in the receiver, I told myself.
It’s not a date. I just want to see where Dad gambles.
I told no one I was going.
Chapter 11, Alviso Train Kiss
Everyone had heard of Alviso, had a vague notion of where it was but few had ever been there, including me. Its reputation put it on the, best if skipped list. After class Monday, following his directions, with a map and my lucky rabbit foot for backups, I drove to Santa Clara, then headed north on Lafayette Street.
Leaving Santa Clara, the scenery shifted to a mix of small industrial and agricultural until the 1930's pink stucco and red tile roof buildings of California’s vast Agnew state mental hospital complex was reached. Agnew was a place the State of California locked up the mentally insane, like in the movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Agnew was another place everyone heard about but avoided. I was more familiar with it than most because when young, our family temporally occupied a rural farmhouse near it. Occasionally we heard howling emitted at night from the campus, as if simians were proclaiming jungle territory.
Relieved to be past Agnew, the two-lane country road continued past smelly dairies, pear orchards, a city dump, the start of wetlands and finally to the hump of Highway 237. Highway 237 was elevated to prevent its flooding and blocked my view of Alviso. As my Desoto crested the highway to the stop sign atop, Alviso revealed itself, poor, rundown and unprotected from flooding.
Lafayette Street, in a twist of irony, turns into Gold Street entering Alviso. I passed ramshackle and abandoned buildings with growing apprehension. At Taylor Street, I turned left one block to another misnomer, El Dorado Street.
Fronting it, on the left corner, was Vahl's. Like Gary said you couldn't miss it. Vahl's appeared much nicer than my expectation. It was an island of clean, respectability among the surrounding decay with fresh exterior paint and a neon sign on the second floor proclaiming Vahl's. I thought.
Dad comes here to seek his El Dorado but like those of yore rarely finds it.
Gary’s car was parked in front. I drove past and parked in a secluded corner of the rear parking lot. Dad usually stayed home on Mondays after a weekend of carousing but I didn't want to take a chance. Gary re-parked next to me and came to open my car door. He was dressed for hiking, no longer a hippy.
At the window, I explained the door was jammed, scooted over and exited the other side. I came in my school uniform, unprepared for hiking but had brought a nylon windbreaker and wore sneakers.
The building entrance opened to a cocktail lounge that included a bar, a little stage, and piano. Stacked before the mirror behind the bar were green, blue and pink glasses. The dining area was accessed via a leather-clad door with window porthole.
When we passed through it, we entered a dining room with sturdy wood tables, covered by red and white checkered tablecloths suggested Italian fare. All was neat, clean and of 1950’s-time warp decor. An elderly, short, stocky woman with blazon, red-dyed hair, hustled out of the kitchen to greet us. As the sole diners before the dinner time rush, she fussed over us like a grandmother. At my request, she seated us in an inconspicuous rear booth.Seated, she scurried off and returned with large, leather-bound, menus. I scanned mine, saw Cioppino and ordered it. Gary seconded me. A twinge of fiancé-guilt percolated up.
Cioppino, what I ate at Alioto’s after my fiancé’s first kiss.
My high school uniform stated my age was eighteen or less. She asked if we wanted a bottle of wine with our meal then looked askance at our coke requests. It was obvious things were different in Alviso.
As we ate, the crowd began to show. Soon the lounge filled and a small group gathered around the piano. They took turns singing Italian and old Sinatra songs. Finished with my Cioppino, I excused myself to the restroom to case the place, the purpose of my being there. After washing up, I sauntered out and observed a small staircase to the second floor near the foyer. I dawdled over to it.
With an ear cocked up, I heard male voices above. Emboldened, I took a couple of steps and observed a wispy layer of ceiling smoke and heard the distinctive sound of cards shuffling, mingled with laughter. Obviously, the second floor included a card room.
Dad goes up and down these stairs. He tells jokes while he shuffles and plays cards up there. His Lucky Strike pack of cigarettes sitting on the card table, the ones he often sends me to the store to purchase.
I didn’t go up.
Back at our table, I told Gary it was time to see his salt ponds. He rose, took our tab to the front cashier and paid in cash; the only payment permitted as declared by the large sign on an old fashion heavy, brass cash register. I asked the grandmotherly matron, as she rang up our fare, if they only sang Italian songs. She smiled and told me, one gentleman, on occasion played the piano and sang in Chinese. Gary left an impressive five-dollar tip.
Outside, it was a late, warm and sunny afternoon. A salt-tinged breeze from the Bay tussled my hair. It
pushed aside the odors of tidal mud, distant dump, and sewage treatment plant. I worried Gary was going to trip out on marijuana or a hallucination drug like LSD sweeping America as part of the hippy culture.
My fiancé and I avoided drugs. We expected rich hippies to self-destruct and make it easier for us to get ahead. I hated smoke too and had nagged Dad into smoking outside the house. If Gary was going to light a joint or drop acid, I wasn’t going to the salt ponds. I’d seen what I came for.
Instead, he acted as tour guide, explained the rail line embankment on the other side of El Dorado Street was elevated, like Highway 237, due to periodic flooding and it led to the salt ponds. We climbed atop and looked down to the Guadalupe River Slough behind it. The slough rose and sank with the tide and the tide was out. Its banks were decorated with hulks of decrepit boats stuck in mud plus a few stilt pole boat houses where boats were built on the cheap.
Gary resumed his guide role and led forward to the salt ponds. We walked between the iron rails atop the graveled embankment, the rails supported by large black wooden timbers embedded in the gravel. They gave off a strong odor of creosote and were set apart to un-match any gait we tried. We varied our steps as best we could as we stumbled from timber to gravel to timber.
He narrated an Alviso history lesson during our jumbled stride, how it once was a San Francisco Bay bawdy, boomtown of shipping, bars, sardine canneries, oyster beds, market duck hunting and a getaway for less than respectable behavior. He explained it became a rundown semi-ghost town due to being the low spot of Santa Clara Valley and at the end of San Jose's sewage line. It’s topographical subsidence and subsequent periodic flooding was the result of the Valley’s aquifer being tapped for agriculture.
He was enjoying himself. It was obvious he was enamored with Alviso, liked to reminisce about its colorful past and explain its unique desolate beauty as we trekked between the rails toward the salt ponds. Suddenly he stopped and pointed.
"Elizabeth, look there. That's the old Bay Side sardine cannery, once the largest cannery in California until the sardines disappeared. A Chinese guy owned it. Next to it was a worker's dormitory, gone now. The workers slept in bunks and lived on rice.”
I looked up from the timbers I was attempting to pace with to avoid tripping and saw an old abandoned brick and stucco building. The Bay Side name was still visible. Looking down to pace the rail line timbers again as we trekked, I wondered.
Did Dad once work there, sleep and eat rice in the dormitory?
Two blocks north of Val's was a weathered Alviso street sign printed in old-style black on white porcelain proclaiming, Elizabeth Street. It was chipped and rusty from age to match its woebegone surroundings. At Elizabeth Street, Gary pointed to the decrepit Laine's grocery store and the adjoining Victorian mansion, which could serve as the stage set for the movie Psycho.
"See the old building across the street?
That's Laine's Grocery Store. Beyond it are the salt ponds. The mansion next door is where the owner used to live. Laine's has been closed for years but I met him when I was young. I used to stop here, drink a coke and talk to him after duck hunting. He told me a lot of Alviso history.
Before it was a store it was a saloon and before that a Chinese gambling den. That’s why it was originally built. Let's keep going, I want you to see a ghost town among the salt ponds, called Drawbridge."
As we crossed Elizabeth Street and passed Laine's I experienced another sensation of connection.
Are Val's, the shuttered cannery, Elizabeth Street and Laine's parts of Dad's mysterious past? Is this street name the source for my name?
As we left Laine's, we entered a surreal world. From the rail road's secure high rock embankment, we viewed the cordgrass and pickleweed estuaries, the sterile gray colored salt ponds, the dry, dusty gray dredged levees which formed them and beyond the open Bay. Waterfowl clustered in sloughs.
On the right, following the rail line, were high wire, electric transmission towers with concrete feet anchored in tidal muck. They once were connected by wood elevated catwalks now bleached grey and often rotten or missing a plank.
In the distance were dim lines of civilization, the General Motors plant in Fremont where the rail line seemed to go, the blimp hanger of Moffett Field in Mountain View to the left and next to it the vast complex of Lockheed Missile and Aircraft Company where my fiancé worked. The spring green hills of the Diablo Range rose above the horizon in front of us, clearly visible unlike from the much closer view at home viewed through smog's haze.
Gary explained it was a world created by Leslie Salt Company who built levees to create evaporation ponds by dredging. Salty Bay water was shuttled from pond to pond as the salinity increased with evaporation until the water turned pink. In the end, evaporation created a pond surface crusted with salt to be scraped up and piled up into a silver-white crystal mountain before packaging. In the far eastern distance, Gary pointed out the salt mountain created by pond water shuffling.
Eventually, we reached Coyote slough and the rail line’s humble Drawbridge, built when boats connected San Jose with the Bay, obviously long unused. Gary explained it wasn’t actually a drawbridge but one that swung open to let boats pass. I wondered when and what was the last boat it opened for. Surrounding it was a ghost town of abandoned buildings on stilts. Gary related how in its heyday oyster pirates, market duck hunters, gamblers, a famous Chinese madam and other misfits populated it. Again, I felt an odd sense of connection.
Drawbridge was the end of our trek. We paused against its railing above the slough to take in the open expanse view, desolate beauty of its own.
He asked.
"What’d you think?"
"It's a beautiful, a hidden but open world. I'm happy I came. I'm having a strange mystical experience."
"I knew you'd like it because you, like me, are different."
"How am I different?"
"You're like here, mysterious, different but beautiful. It's a compliment. I'm not saying it right. What I am saying is like me, you see the beauty, most don't and you're beautiful too."
Beautiful, my fiancé never says that.
"You're making me smile. You compare me to Alviso, say I'm beautiful like the salt ponds? A strange compliment, no? I love this place but how am I beautiful like it?"
"What I’m trying to say is you're beautiful, not pretty, beautiful. Not that you look like this but your beauty is mysterious like this."
Silent, I let his attempted beautiful compliment explanation become part of the strange connection felt. After a moment in the wind, now brisk and chilling, he said,
"It's time to go back; the best is still to come. Follow me and keep up."
We trekked back, the wind from the Bay, now up to buffeting, as we stumbled between the rail’s wooden timbers and gravel. My hair swirled by the wind, flayed against my face as I stared down to avoid tripping. The smell of creosote hastened my step.
He walked ahead, set a fast pace and then waited against the wood wall of Laine's for me to catch up, well ahead of me. We had met no one. It was the evening's dusk. He looked at his watch as I finally arrived.
"It's coming, soon."
"What's coming?'
"Listen! Lean against the wall next to me. I hurried here so we wouldn't miss it."
Standing on the tracks, I soon heard it. I moved next to him, out of the wind and leaned against the old wood wall of Laine's facing the rail line. A long, slow, freight train soon turned a bend and approached. The engineer seeing us gave a recognition horn greeting as the big diesel engines reached Laine’s.
Leaning against the wall, the embankment's rails close before us groaned under the train's weight. The wood timbers, we recently stumbled on, thumped up and down in their gravel beds as each rail car wheel passed over.
The train cars' steel wheels click-clacked to the rail joints. Those needing grease screeched steel complaints.
The sounds and movements echoed against the wall, a wall encasing histories past. Our bodies absorbed the vibrations, noise, and echoes. By the time the caboose passed and silence returned, we were holding hands. As it rumbled away, he leaned over and kissed me.
I broke free, walked quickly in the early evening to my car behind Vahl's, tears in my eyes. He followed, said nothing while I raced through emotions. I was still experiencing the vibrations of the passing train, the echoed sounds, our holding hands, his kiss and the strange connection to Alviso's past as I hurried to my car behind the now crowded restaurant. Vahl's was aglow in neon lights. Its emitted muffled Italian singing added to my confusion.
When I opened the car door and scooted to the driver's side, he followed. We sat silent a moment, him next to me. With ardor, he leaned over and kissed me and kissed me again. I couldn’t stop, nor say no. As we embraced, his deft hand unbuttoned my blouse, slipped behind and unhooked my bra. He kissed my exposed breasts back and forth as I slid down, my head below the steering wheel, he above. His nimble fingers reached under my skirt pulled down my panty and caressed my vulva.
Stroking my magic button, my pelvis arched up to his caresses. His tongue darted in my mouth, out to my ear, back and forth. My head under the steering wheel, body pinioned on the bench seat, partially undressed I yearned for his kisses and nimble caresses. I drifted into physical and emotional oblivion.
His embrace suddenly released me. He rose, sat up, loosened his pants and exposed his erect penis. Freed, I sat up from under the steering wheel, stunned. He fumbled in his scrunched pants pocket and took out a condom.
He wants to take me while my fiancé tarries!
My clothes in disarray, Vixen panting yes, facing the muzzle of his throbbing erection, my mind in disbelief, I turned aside to the window and whimpered, not knowing what to do.
Tears streamed down my cheeks.
He asked.
"What's wrong?
I turned to face him and mumbled once the sobs subsided.
"I'm engaged."
"Wow. When's the wedding?"
"June, June 15th. Everything’s ready."
"That's only two months away!"
"I shouldn't be here. I should’ve told you. I can't. I'm sorry. "
"Maybe you're not ready. You're still in high school."
His voice was calm, persuasive, rational, hopeful. He was thinking I was old enough to seduce, if not marry. He leaned closer to kiss again, his penis still at attention, ready if I was or not. I pulled back, pressed my head against the door window. Emotion ebbed, rational thinking crept back. My voice returned.
"I'm a virgin. I gave my phone number because of your smile but then wished I hadn't. Then you called. I only agreed to come because you mentioned Alviso. My Dad gambles at Val's. I wanted to see it. That's why I agreed to come. Now I realize, I'm starving."
With the word starving, I returned to sniffling.
"I'll take you back to Val's. Any place you want to eat."
"No, no you don't understand. Not food, I'm starved for beauty. Seeing the beauty, you showed, knowing what I miss, that’s what I’m starved for. It overwhelms me. Then the train, your kiss, I'm sorry. I don't know what I want. I'm scared, lonely. I’m crying for myself. I need to think. I'm confused. I need to go home."
Pulling his pants back up over his now deflated member, he moved to the door, opened it still clutching the unopened condom and got out, confused too. He walked to the driver's window while I pulled my panty back up, re-hooked the bra and fastened blouse buttons. He waited patiently until I finished and opened the window. With the window down, safe behind the jammed door, I noted the condom was re-pocketed.
He pleaded.
"I want to see you again. You're beautiful.'
"It won't work. I'm taken, promised to another. I'm not free to give myself."
"Even if engaged, I want to talk to you. We can just be friends. We can see many beautiful things together. Let me follow you to make sure you get home safely."
"No, no, I'm okay. Please, just let me go. I need to think about my life."
I started the car, rumbled the Desoto tank out of the parking lot and drove back to Tropicana Village. As I dove, I thought of how he had unexpectedly filled my gritty world with beauty. Feeling oppressed and sorry for myself while listening to radio music, the beautiful musical Love Is Blue came on, so apt.
My only beauty is radio and church music!
My drab life churned in my mind until parked in front of my house.
I straightened my rumpled blouse. My eyes were red in the mirror, my lipstick smudged. I opened my purse, used its hanky to wipe my lips, dapped my eyes and went inside holding the purse to hide a lipstick smear on the blouse. In the living room, behind the little entry, Dad snored on his recliner, an empty bottle of Chinese plum wine on the floor. My siblings were splayed about on floor and sofa watching Gilligan's Island on TV. Mom was ironing in the small dining area.
She asked why I was late but not answering, I went to the sanctuary of my bedroom, to think. On the bed, I stared at the ceiling, clutched my rabbit foot talisman and thought about my life’s fate.
I’m just a poor girl in a gritty world. It's not the earth I’ll inherit, it's the dirt.
The phone rang. Called by Mom, I came out, picked up the phone on its little table and heard Gary's voice. I carried the phone with its long extension cord to the safety of my room and closed the door. Mom looked at me askance, questions on her face.
Late from school, arriving in disarray, a male stranger calling, and now taking the phone to my room, something was up. It was. She was by now a staunch fiancé defender.
In the safety of the bedroom, I was pleased he called. Answering my hello, he asked, "You okay?"
"Yeah, I just need to sort things out."
"I'm glad you walked the tracks with me."
"I'm glad you took me but now I'm confused about a lot of things."
"Well, life's confusing, isn't it? Don't worry about it. Can I see you again?'
"I don't know if it is a good idea. I'm committed to someone. Have you ever been committed to someone?"
"I just go day by day but I want to see you again."
"Can you make a commitment if I see you again?"
"I'm only a sophomore in college and want to go to law school so I guess I have a commitment until then. I still want to see you."
That was it, not the answer sought but an honest one.
"I’ll always remember our hike on the tracks, the train as it passed while we held hands. I cherish your kiss. You have your commitment, I mine. Please don't call again. Let me be."
I set the phone slowly and reluctantly in its cradle not listening to his plea to see me again.
When I brought the phone back out to its little hall table, my fiancé was standing in the living room. Mom obviously had summoned him from next door. He looked at me uncertainly. Setting the phone down, I went and embraced him, to the relief of both he and Mom.
I vowed to leave my gritty world of dirt and find life's beauty. Gary honored my no contact request, removing his temptation. I still think of him now and then and wonder about life's possible alternate universes, entered into by a simple choice or chance but of unknown consequences.
I have no regrets of a missed alternate fate or the different universe I'd have entered if I'd seen Gary again. I'll stick with my universe, the one I've lived and experienced. In it, I’ve found the beauty yearned for when I drove the Desoto home that night by choices and chances which came thereafter. It’s the universe I’ve inhabited with my husband, the man I embraced that night.
Chapter 12, Wedding Bells Peal
Things after Alviso’s train passage went as scheduled with one minor change, the wedding’s week delay to avoid it occurring while on my period. The reschedule also provided one last Desoto “girl’s night out”, a bachelor party of sorts. It was uneventful, except the girls made me hide in the trunk when we went to the drive-in movie.
On Saturday, June 15, 1968, a bright summer morning, my fiancée and I were joined in marriage, on the cheap. The groom was a twenty-three-year-old college graduate, with the good job promised. The bride was an eighteen-
year-old high school graduate, the virgin the groom ensured. Everyone except us thought the bride too young with the groom kidded about robbing the cradle. I had no qualms of being too young even though I still thought of myself as a girl, not a woman. My fiancé was the responsible ones in our households. I would be the good wife and he the good husband.
We married "In the church", meaning a Catholic wedding and a happy mother. This required my’ non-Catholic fiancé, to take Catholic dogma lessons and sign papers raise our offspring in the faith. The civil paperwork was simple, just birth certificates and signatures.
The parish priest initially was more difficult. He thought of me as a poor, young, Catholic girl taken advantage of by an older protestant. After the priest knew more about us and our families, he became less critical but admonished us in his pre-nuptial consulting not to use birth control. He explained, in detail, how it interfered with God's plan for marriage, the birth of children. He omitted mention of how medicine interfered with God's other plan, death.
I kept my dogma heresies to myself and used the confessional to manipulate him. My confessions, untruthful since the first soapy shower, let me confess lies. The sanctity of confession meant he was gullible to what I said. In the dark confessional booth, I kneeled before his little screen door and turned him, convinced him my fiancé was good.
I concocted whoppers of hating school, jealousy of rich people, confessed truthfully to everyday venial sins and fessed up to kissing longer than three seconds, all to establish veracity. Tossing in the failure to observe the Catholic orthodox arbitrary kissing time limit of three seconds was needed plausibility as a priest is not that naïve. In confessionals, they’ve heard it all. Fessing to it, allowed him to think he was monitoring my sex life, a sex life limited to kissing, excluding "petting" and Vixen's pleasures, lies of omission.
I "befriended" him by seeking his advice. In the confessional, I explained I had confusion over how to be a good wife. He loved providing guidance on being married and being a wife even though he never was either. Summed up, his curator's advice was; obey my husband, sex is good if for procreation, never divorce and ensure the children are raised as good Catholics. He admonished me to control my protestant fiancé’s sex urges until the wedding vows were exchanged. Once they were, I was to submit to them but not use birth control.
With my veracity established, the admonishment was my cue to put my fiancé’ into the priest’s good graces. While I admitted my fiancé liked kissing, I confessed truthfully, it was he, not me who drew the sex limitation line before marriage. With the marriage date confirmed, I was okay with his sexual urges but my fiancé’ insisted I remain a virgin until we met on the altar.
The priest gobbled it up. He was convinced, I was
a good Catholic girl; my fiancé did love me and we were “behaving” before marriage. He respected my fiancé, ’even though Protestant by my telling the truth in confession after establishing veracity with lies.
I figured if I didn’t give him a few mortal sins, the questions would start but more importantly I wanted him to authorize my marriage to a non-Catholic. My confessions assisted him to do so, to even approve of my fiancé.
My fiancé put his time in but never changed his agnostic beliefs. His parents, initially upset about his marrying a Catholic and taking Catholic tenet lessons, relaxed when told it was all a charade to keep Mom happy. In the know, they became co-conspirators. Dad didn't care but did tell me to take the rabbit's foot on my trip to the altar. He always liked a backup.
We exchanged vows at the Most Holy Trinity Church, which had been recently built to serve Tropicana Village. Its name was appropriate for my First Communion experience. Just immediate family attended plus a friend each for bridesmaid and best man. My bridesmaid was my sole, true friend, Julie, one who knew more about who I truly was than anyone at the wedding. Dads wore ties, the only time I ever saw my father-in-law do so. I made my gown, white, including veil, reflecting my virginity.
Our parents didn’t socialize, and we worried how they would interact, he over his father's drinking and I if Dad would even show up. When he did, I was relieved and proud when he walked me down the aisle. Mom sobbed through the short ceremony from my walking down the aisle in my father's arm to when I walked out, a married bride holding my husband's hand, my rabbit’s foot talisman in the other.
Before the altar, the priest said Latin prayers, recited the necessary civil code and blessed us. We said "I do's", exchanged small gold bands blessed with sprinkled holy water, my veil was lifted, we kissed, turned and walked out the aisle as church bells pealed to proclaim us man and wife.
Outside, a younger brother tossed rice and after a few hugs and handshakes, we clambered into three cars and went to my parent's house for the reception. At the house, Mom was no longer crying but smiling and hugging everyone. Dad cooked a combination of Chinese and American fare with prime rib and chow mein, ingredients I purchased.
Our belongings were stashed in a recently rented duplex in Mountain View. Our honeymoon suitcases were packed. We were anxious to depart but did our reception duty. With music from a portable record player on the rear concrete patio, I danced with my father for the first time, amazed to discover he was a good dancer, better than my new husband.
My siblings behaved themselves as did my in-laws. We were presented with wedding gifts. Dad gave two Waterford crystal wine glasses which I still have. My in-laws gave a $500 check as if to pay back some of their prior saving raids which my new husband was afraid would bounce but didn't. My mother gave a little statue of the Virgin Mary which I still pray to. My siblings gave a set of quality dishes as if to say they were sorry for the past bean pole comments.
After a dance with the few who desired, the food eaten, toasts given, clothes changed, my wedding dress stored in a bedroom closet guarded by Mom, it was time to depart. By then, I too was crying. My new husband dabbed away the tears, led me to his car, put in our packed bags and we drove off, the car smeared with "Just Married" rude comments plus two tin cans tied to the bumper by the younger brother who threw rice on the church steps.
I looked back as we drove off. My father in law and Dad were arm in arm waving goodbye. Dad held a bottle of Chinese wine in his free hand and my father in law a bottle of Jim Beam in his. Our Moms were waving with one hand while wiping tears with hankies by the other.
It was as good a wedding as I could have hoped for. I turned back, left them behind and looked out the front window, forward to a new life as a wife.
Chapter 13, Honeymoon Highway, Past and Future to Be
Disneyland, our honeymoon destination, was a two day, four hundred-mile trip before I-5. We took the US Highway 101 coastal route, it being scenic and more appropriate for our honeymoon versus the more direct US 99. Neither of us had ever ventured so afar, which made it also an exploration of the unknown.
Leaving the reception, sitting next to my new husband, now his wife, his '57 Chevy, now ours, we started off nostalgically, drove to downtown San Jose and turned south on First Street. As we drove past Original Joe’s, I looked about to see if any Notre Dame girls were cruising and flirting with boys. None were seen.
First Street merged into Monterrey Road, aka US 101. We sped past other prior haunts, the El Rancho Drive-In, Trader Lew's and Frontier Village Amusement Park. Passing them I reminisced about my past.
Highway 101 followed the trail blazed by the Spanish Missionary, Father Junípero Serra who built California’s 21 missions from San Diego to Santa Rosa. Each mission was one day's walking distance apart, so the nuns taught us at Saint Clare’s. It was known differently as it twisted and turned through towns. Locally, it shifted between El Camino Real or The King’s Highway, in Spanish, The Alameda or The Avenue in Arabic and Monterey Road in English as it traveled south from San Jose to Gilroy.
Once on Monterrey Road, as the car’s wheels spun, I imagined each tire rotation equivalent to the good friar’s stride as he established his Missions in the California wilderness. I concluded, however, the story, while beautifully said, was a lie. The road simply followed a preexisting Indian trail.
Back then, Monterey Road between San Jose and Gilroy was a 3-lane highway. The middle lane was a two-directional passing lane, known as the suicide lane. We used it to pass slow vehicles while squinting ahead at headlights to see if another was using it coming from the other direction. I silently threw in a Hail Mary each time we passed, a doubting heretic.
The highway was lined with giant black walnut trees. These were planted by Father Serra to provide travelers shade and nuts to eat according to the nuns. As they whizzed past, I again overrode their version and concluding they were products of Cal-Trans or the WPA. I knew those trees, whose sturdy trunks which often killed when a car veered into them. They triggered my thoughts back to when I first saw them and was introduced to life’s
disillusions.
Hearing from the nuns the potential of free nuts, I checked at the local market and saw the little packages of black walnuts were more expensive than the English ones. My dream to buy a portable electric Singer sewing machine for seventy dollars was beyond my babysitting earnings of fifty-cents an hour. Suddenly, it appeared possible to be able to afford one selling nuts. While I loved Mom’s foot pedal sewing machine, I wanted my own, one in my room which could do zig-zags and buttonholes. Collecting, shucking and selling black walnuts would be better than pushing firecrackers.
I reported this potential treasure trove to the family. All became interested in my proposed enterprise, each with their own desired monetary windfall agenda. On an October Sunday morning, we piled in the Buick with empty onion sacks, baskets and paper bags to scoop up nuts and get rich. The trees stretched for miles on both sides of Monterey Road. Black walnuts perched by the thousands in the trees, exposed naked as the leaves fell. Even more laid strewn on the roadsides, hidden within large gold, green and black rotting husks. As if plump eggs, they lay awaiting our harvest except for unlucky ones that had fallen on the road. Those were squished flat by speeding cars.
Dad steered off the road, down a little embankment and parked as I heard the crunch of walnuts trod over by the Buick’s wheels. I rushed out of my cramped back seat quarters between brothers with my sack and exclaimed.
“It’s an Easter egg hunt!”
I rushed about to get rich while cars zoomed past. Mom took the two youngest brothers to gather nuts along the road ditch, away from traffic. Dad, I and the 2 older siblings scooped up the easy pickings among the golden fall leaves near the road.
Picking them up, however, we discovered their thick husks were messy and fell apart in our hands. True to the tree’s name, they stained our hands black. Our paper sacks fell apart in soggy husks and the onion sacks oozed black juice. Dad got upset about the mess on the Buick's floor and in its trunk. After a couple of hours, we all clambered back in the car and returned home to reap our surfeit harvest with blackened hands.
Back home, the rotten husks further blackened us as we attempted to remove the messy husks and whack open the tough shells with hammers. Soon dreams of a Singer sewing machine and the purchase agendas of the others began to dissipate. Expectation of a wealth windfall turned to disappointment, disillusion, and anger, anger at the guilty one for the family disaster of black paws.
Mom, with black hands, apron and dress, exasperated after pounding on nuts to crack their hard shells, meticulously digging out the small amount of meat within a nut, took her desperation out on me. Squatting before a pile of big husked nuts and the little bowl of extracted meat, she muttered, "toink", Tagalog for "silly girl", then worked her way up to "gaga ka", "stupid girl".
Fully worked up, she arose, stood before me, lack hands waving, shouted and belittled me for my nutty idea. My siblings egged her on. It was the first time she yelled at me, me her always obedient helper.
Crying, I ran to the bathroom, ashamed. It was Dad who rescued me. He got up from his nut shucking, laughed about the family effort of sudden wealth and dumped the nuts in a backyard into a causality heap and came to coax me out of the bathroom. As I sobbed behind the locked door, he whispered.
“Shu, my little virtuous swan. It’s okay. Please don’t cry. I have your rabbit’s foot. It needs petting. Please open the door. It’s all going to turn out okay.”
It was the first time Dad ever pleaded with me. I stopped my lamenting and meekly opened the door. Standing before him, I took the rabbet's foot. He smiled and hugged me and again reminded me I was his little swan.
It was the only time until my wedding day he hugged me. He had me wash my blackened hands then drove me to the San Carlos Street, Sear’s store, my paws still blackened despite scrubbing. On the way, he sang songs and got me laughing with his Yankee Doodle Dandy ditty.
At the store's entrance, he stopped and said, “Shu, life’s full of black walnuts. Success is how you move on with hands dirty.”
There, he bought me the portable Singer sewing machine which had launched my Monterey Road quest. He said it was for my next birthday, a beautiful lie. The truth was, it’s the only birthday present he ever bought me. His store entrance advice about life, I try to abide by.
I shifted thoughts to him puffing his Lucky Strike cigarettes, his love of cards.
I love Dad. He's irresponsible but he loves me.
I made my wedding dress with the little portable sewing machine and still have and use it. It and its memories became the true treasure gleaned from the walnut trees.
Years later I learned the trees were planted by a good Samaritan and his son, Horace Keesling, entirely on their initiative, to provide the thirty-mile stretch between San Jose and Gilroy with shade for those traveling by horse and wagon. It’s a better story than the one told by the nuns.
I returned to the present. The throaty muffler of the Chevy's V-8 manifold echoed against the tree trunks. Car light beams commingled with their leafy canopy. The effect was, eerie fluttering shadows mixed with the steady throaty hum of the engine, an appropriate backdrop for the uncertainty of our beginning new lives as man and wife. My thoughts switched from the past to the future to be.
Will my husband hug me and make things all right like Dad when I do something stupid? Does he really love me? Will he grow tired of me, find another, divorce me? Will he drive away in the evening to meet others? Will we have kids, grow old together? Who will outlive the other? Will my honeymoon be wondrous or turn into disillusionment?
I ran down the possibilities without answers and concluded humming the lyrics from Mary Poppins:
"Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours to see
Que sera, sera
What will be, will be."
He heard me humming, Whatever will be, will be, smiled and we sang the words together, he out of tune. With the last repeated stanza, I switched to praying the car wouldn’t break down. It never occurred to me I would betray him but I did, over and over.
Past Gilroy, the furthermost of our combined prior travels, I settled down to a travel's blank reflection as we passed the dark countryside, interrupted by the small agricultural towns of Salinas, Soledad, Paso Robles, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Maria.
Santa Barbara was our first night's destination, out first night married. The place of the night's big action.
Chapter 14, Motel 6 Virgin Gets Pregnant
Past Santa Maria, the next town was Santa Barbara, our wedding night’s destination. Approaching it, my mind awoke to the unmentioned, "big event”, the scheduled end of my virginity.
My mind raced through questions.
Will I prove my virginity and bleed? Will it hurt? What will his penis feel like inside? Will I feel his ejaculation?
And over and over the lyrics from the song,
Will, You Love Me Tomorrow by the Shirelles,
"Tonight with words unspoken
You say that I'm the only one
But will my heart be broken
When the night meets the morning sun?
I'd like to know that your love
Is love I can be sure of
So tell me now, and I won't ask again
Will you still love me tomorrow?"
Finally, after seven hours of driving, we pulled into the Santa Barbara, Motel 6 parking lot, parked. He turned the key. The rumbling drone of the Chevy engine manifold ceased. The kiss upon lifting my veil in church was only a symbol for the real thing. Now it was time for the real thing, marriage’s consummation, the event which cemented church vows.
Back then, Motel 6 meant a six-dollar night’s stay, nationwide, a great deal for a motel near the California coast. Booking required a long in advance reservation. As the wedding planner, this chore was mine. It cost fifty cents to call directory assistance to get the motel’s phone number and another fifty cents for the long-distance call to make the reservation a Motel 7 to me.
Stiffly we stumbled out of our "Just Married" smeared car, tin cans long gone, stretched and then remembered to hug. It was a warm Southern California, late evening, the sky clear with a luminescent moon. The faint rolling noise of coastal surf and the smell of the nearby ocean made for a romantic first-night backdrop, so far so good. We sorted and carried luggage to the front desk where he signed us in, our first proclamation of Mr. and Mrs., a cause for a kiss.
Dragging our luggage up the open concrete steps to a 2nd-floor room, we fronted our honeymoon suite. After fumbling with the key and its green plastic room number tag, he unlocked the door and swung it open. Beyond the threshold was a sparse room, devoid of charm. A double-sized bed took up most of the space. He entered and drew the shabby curtains closed. I waited outside. He remembered, came back, picked me up and carried me across the threshold. We kissed, broke apart, went back out, picked up our luggage and re-entered. I took my bag to the small bathroom, shut and locked the door, stripped, showered, towel, dried and brushed my teeth.
Naked, apprehensive, I opened my bag. Inside was a white 3-piece bridal peignoir set from Macy's Department Store, the most expensive attire I’d ever purchased up to then. I slid on the sheer nylon negligee and the chiffon jacket but skipped the panty as an unnecessary hindrance for the night’s big event. I dabbed on Channel 5 perfume purchased also for my taking, reapplied lipstick and checked the mirror.
As I studied my reflection, I thought of Dad. He could wrap a small gift so artistically the present took on greater value. I hoped I was wrapped to present greater value. Reminiscing of Dad, I went back to his old tweed striped suitcase he’d lent me for my honeymoon, opened it and took out my lucky rabbit’s foot from its satin pocket. I gave it a little stroke for luck, returned it to its hiding place and was ready.
Opening the bathroom door, seeing the worn carpet I went back and put on my white wedding pumps and came out to surrender to his unwrapping.
He sat on the bed in his T-shirt and Jockey underpants. He wore socks to also avoid touching the carpet. Jumping upon seeing me, he stood before me. I smiled a demur consensus in my white gown and pumps. He bent forward and kissed my lips, lips he assumed incorrectly touched only by his. He was ready for action if not dressed for it. He turned and led me to the bed, sat me down, untied my chiffon jacket and slid it past my shoulders. His look was a bit uncertain if I was ready. I was.
He laid me down on the bed, stripped except for his socks, his penis straight out, ready to claim me as his wife. This time there would be no hand stroked finish on a towel. He climbed on the bed with the light on, spread my legs with pump adorned feet, knelt before me and raised my negligee with my arched assistance. He stared down, admired my breasts, then my sparse, straight, black pubic hair, assumed incorrectly again as only his, untouched by another.
He reached to the nightstand and opened a tube of Vaseline he had set there. Confident, he spread Vaseline on his penis. Then in a rush, presented it lubed to my virgin vagina. Confronted, it resisted. He kissed me, forcibly thrust forward, with a sharp pang of pain, it gave way. He was inside me.
On the squeaky Motel 6 bed, twelve hours after the wedding bells peal my cherry vagina cork popped open to his thirst.
I felt his sperm rush in. Finished, he looked down at me almost as if guilty. I smiled assurance it was okay. He pulled out, rolled over and went to sleep. Left to sleep on the wet spot of his signature taking, I rolled into a fetal position and slept too, truly married.
I awoke to the early morning as I’m wont to do. The sun’s light filtered through the window’s dreary drapes. It was the first time I awoke next to a man. It felt good. He faced the other side of the small bed, curled in a fetal position. I looked about the room, creeped out of the bed, walked barefoot to the bathroom and sat on the toilet to pee. Relieved, I reflected on what had happened.
The wedding night was a disappointment. Even though with foresight he’d brought lubrication, his penetration hurt. The room was unromantic. The small black and white TV, hung on a wall mount, required a quarter. There were no soap bars, only a liquid soap dispenser. You could hear and feel the vibrations whenever someone passed the room on the concrete balcony. The El Rancho drive-in would have been more romantic.
I crept back to bed and spooned behind him. He awoke, rolled me on my back and took me again with grunts, without words, as I stared at the ceiling. I thought of the priest’s admonishment of heeding to a husband’s urges.
After he finished, I arose and got out of bed and traipsed back to the bathroom to shower. I looked back at the blood spot which had dripped through my negligee on to the sheet during the night, my warranty of virginity. I wondered what the maid would think when she saw it.
Showered, caked blood commingled with semen, washed away, no longer the virgin, a legally inseminated wife, I dried off on a towel that could compete for flimsiness with Mom’s hotel discards. I looked up to the small bathroom cabinet’s mirror. My lips were lips recently kissed in passion by another. My breasts and pelvis were sullied too. I was the virgin he wanted but not as he assumed. What would he have thought if he knew of Gary? When I set the phone down, walked to him and hugged him, he knew something had happened. He never asked but now was assured I was the virgin he wanted.
Although the surroundings of our wedding night were dingy, I was pleased, pleased we finally did it, pleased I gave him my virginity, pleased he was the one who took it, pleased I was officially married and most pleased when the night met the morning sun, he still loved me.
I lacked guilt as I dressed. Instead, I wondered about his experience. How did he know to bring Vaseline? What women could also lay claim to his penis? As I opened the bathroom door, I knew it best to forget all. Why question the past, why think of what alternate worlds could have been, why dwell on what ifs? What would have happened if Gary said he was ready to make a commitment? I pulled open the window curtain. Light flooded in. I was ready for the present and its future to be. Gary was history.
“Honey, get showered, get dressed. Let’s go to the Uncle John’s pancake house we passed last night. I’m starved.”
As he showered and dressed, I packed up. I stuffed our dirty laundry in a bag but carefully folded my peignoir set with its soiled negligee in Dad’s suitcase. It’s kept a faded spot after many washings, proof of my wedding night’s virginity. As I sip wine and write, it pleases me seeing it now.
Packed, he checked out while I carried our bags to the car. Back in the Chevy, we drove to Uncle John's Pancake House and ate breakfast, the beginning of our marriage routine.
Sated, we preceded along the coast on Highway 101, past Ventura, through Thousand Oaks, then up, over, and down the oak clad hills to the vast sprawl of the Los Angeles basin with its rug of smog. We entered the big city often talked about but never seen other than on TV’s Dragnet. Our Chevy became another ant among millions spewing smog on its freeway spider web.
US Highway 101 became the Ventura Freeway and connected to downtown LA, mostly low-rise buildings back then. From there, directed by me as navigator with maps strewn on the front seat, we took the Santa Ana Freeway until we reached Anaheim. We were more amazed seeing remnant orange groves and strawberry fields than the never-ending subdivisions and shopping centers as we drove. Los Angeles was not a real city like San Francisco. It was endless San Jose's connected by freeways. Off the freeway in Anaheim, we pulled into a motel called Cinderella near Disneyland.
Mornings and evenings, he took me with his pent-up sex drive. Soreness ebbed and on the fourth night, I experienced an orgasm during his huffing and puffing. It came as a surprise like the first ones in a soapy shower and "petting" but was different. It was more intense, he atop, his penis inside, my arms around him, my vagina stretched and clasped to his penis, my clitoris humming with his thumps. I returned upward thrust to his downward strokes. We climaxed together. I liked it. I wanted more.
The next morn I woke him, fondled his penis erect, climbed atop, slid it in with the last of the Vaseline. I rode my merry-go-round horse to an orgasm controlled by me; our heads pressed together. Surprised by Vixen's ardor, he flipped me over once I finished, and thumped hard until he spewed inside me. For the rest of the honeymoon, we got our money's worth out of the motel's bed.
Disneyland then was divided into four themed lands, Adventure, Frontier, Tomorrow and Fantasy with the later my favorite. I enjoyed Disneyland like a kid. I rode the merry-go-round, "The Mad Hatter's" teacups and "It's A Small-Small World" over and over reflecting my maturity.
"It's a Small World After All" echoed in my ears from the many times I waited through the throng line to ride again and again. It summed up my mindset.
It's a world of laughter, a world of tears
It's a world of hope and a world of fears
There's so much that we share, that it's time we're aware
It's a small world after all.
Food was expensive in the park. We ate breakfast at a Sambo's restaurant with its 5-cent cup of coffee and today’s totally incorrect logo theme of Little Black Sambo and the tigers.
We discovered Ralph's grocery store chain where we purchased takeout food for dinner. We also visited Knott's Berry Farm and spent a day at the Long Beach Pike boardwalk, now gone.
The ship Queen Mary had recently arrived and sat berthed at the Long Beach pier. It was being prepared as a tourist attraction, not yet open to the public. We walked out on the pier to see it up close. It looked like the Titanic. From the wharf, I peered down at the lowest level of portholes, just above the waterline.
A wave of terror swept me. I shuddered thinking how my family would be in steerage if on the Titanic. As it went down, we would be trapped below deck, pleading behind locked steel grates. Depressed, my new hubby hugged and comforted me but he thought me a silly girl. We went back to the beach. Wading in the warm surf offset the gloom of seeing the Queen Mary.
LA freeways meant either creeping bumper to bumper or speeding over 60 miles an hour, bumper to bumper. The smog was real, the sprawl endless. Everything was expensive. Our honeymoon money exhausted, our time up, we headed home but on US 99, from a wondrous honeymoon.
We switched turns driving, kept our fingers crossed the wheels would continue to spin and drove nonstop. Late at night, we arrived at our new home, one half of a duplex. Exhausted but elated to have avoided car trouble, he carried me across the threshold to the bedroom. On the box spring and mattress on the floor, sans bed frame, we fell asleep, too tired for sex and me pregnant.
The Wedding(Elizabeth Lin Johnson)
Chapter 1, Santa Clara Valley Before Silicon, A Poor Girl Faces the World
On the morning of June 8, 1950, I met the world in a ramshackle farmhouse surrounded by a pear orchard. As I gasped for air, then screamed to announce the importance of my arrival, the Mexican midwife carried me outside and bathed me in cool water from a hand pump. Properly bathed and blessed in her Mayan dialect, she carried me back to be soothed with the milk of my mother's breasts. My father selected an auspicious spot and buried my placenta and umbilical cord.
The "ranch", as orchards were called, was between Alviso at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, Moffet Field Naval Air Station and the little town of Santa Clara. Its trees were part of a vast lattice carpet of fruit orchards that spread from the Bay to the surrounding foothills of Santa Clara Valley. The fruit grown shifted from pear, to prune, to apricot, to cherry as the elevation rose with patches of dairy, bean, tomato or other farms sprinkled in.
The orchard’s owner had moved into a modern home with my family occupying their dilapidated; old house with farm work in lieu of rent. Dad interpreted my being born in the orchard a good omen for our surname, Lin, 林, which means forest in Chinese. He named me, Zhen zhu, meaning pearl, which he made me learn to write as 珍珠. Mom and a priest christened me Elizabeth. At home, I was tagged Shu by Dad meaning virtuous, Liezel by Mom, a Tagalog diminutive of Elizabeth meaning God’s abundance and simply Sis by siblings.
None then could imagine the tech tsunami coming to change the area into Silicon Valley. I tried to locate my provenance birth ranch recently and concluded it’s either within the San Francisco 49's Football Stadium, next door at the Great America Theme Park or in the parking lot between them. Among the throngs who come, there is a small spot blessed with my afterbirth.
Soon after my birth, our house was demolished and we moved and continued to jump about to low rent, rural, semi-abandoned houses as three siblings were added to my older brother and me, all boys. Once in rent arrears due to penury distress, we hastily packed our few belongings and moved at night.
In 1963, when I was thirteen, we finally settled in San Jose, off Story Road, east of Highway 101, in a vast, low-cost subdivision, known as Tropicana Village. Our eleven hundred square feet, concrete slab floor, low pitched tar and gravel roof and stucco sides enclosed a small kitchen, single bath, and four tiny bedrooms, one of 10,000 hastily constructed in 1958.
The houses had a brick fireplace to proclaim status, but they were mostly unused or burned trash. While It became San Jose's east side slum, to us, it was a giant move up, a home with a garage, piped hot and cold water, electric kitchen stove and a living room gas floor heater, where we huddled around on cold winter mornings. Until my older brother was drafted, only I had my own bedroom. We fought to get occupancy of the single bathroom.
The development was a lower-income, working-class, white area, peppered with Hispanics and a few blacks when we moved in as a step up while middle-class whites fled. We were the only Asians, hard to believe now. Driveways, frontage streets, and even front yards were used to repair cars or abandon them.
Mom grew vegetables to supplement our dinner table in the small fenced backyard with my watering and weeding assistance. Dad and my siblings often urinated in the back yard due to bathroom congestion. Mom scolded them to stay away from her garden as they exited the backdoor.
Once a month, there was, the hundred- dollar rent is due, crisis, which often required my babysitting money contribution. I was glad to be able to help.
Chapter 2, Father Looked Up to Who Doesn’t Provide
Dad was Chinese, six-foot-plus tall and of trim and strong build. He had a light tan complexion and a stern face which easily broke into a sincere smile. Gravitas in appearance, he looked like a military officer out of uniform. His voice was resonant, as if in command but he had trouble pronouncing “L” sounds. He was good looking, charming and able to sing but a poor provider. He was good at cooking, siring kids and womanizing.
Mom, in contrast, was Filipina, four-foot nine inches short, strong too but of squat stature with a dark complexion. She was good at having kids; putting up with Dad and making her not enough paycheck on payday meet the next. We lived on the financial edge.
I never saw physical contact between my parents but with five kids, knew something was physical between them in the past. It was a mixed marriage of sorts. I had four known siblings, was the second oldest and the only girl. My brothers, except the older, took after Dad in responsibility but lacked his charm and looks. Some said I was the only one to get these. At five feet seven inches, I was between Mom and Dad but like many things, closer to Dad.
Dad worked off and on but preferred off. What he earned, he mostly spent on himself. He dressed well and wore a suit and tie when leaving the house. His white shirt was starched stiff and ironed by Mom, then me when I was older. His ties were silk, his shoes, wingtips and he always wore a hat. All except the ties and shirts were of a brown hue, darker than his tan complexion which made him appear lighter in color. He had a knack with knots. I loved to watch him knot his ties, typically with a Windsor or Hanover knot. Superstitious, the day’s tie selected was dependent on perceived omens to give him luck.
Dressed, he stood before the mirror, swept his straight black hair back with a comb, then set his fedora atop at a slight downward slant to the right. The only wrinkle detracting from his military bearing was a tendency to clutch his left shoulder and left leg stiffness getting in and out of the car, assumed signs of arthritis. Once satisfied with the mirror’s reflection he strode to the garage.
On his way out, he flipped open his Zippo lighter with a Chinese dragon character, spun the flint wheel with his thumb, the spark ignited the wick and with the wick flame, he lit his morning cigarette. When the door closed behind him, you heard the metallic cluck of the lighter close as he dropped it back into his coat pocket. Ensconced in the car, he cranked the engine alive and backed quickly from the garage to the curb, a whiff of smoke trailing his hand out the car window to mark his departure.
He loved to gamble and was a regular at the Bay Meadows race track in Belmont and at Vahl's, an Italian restaurant in Alviso, which had an illegal card club upstairs.
He drove Buicks, each about ten years old when purchased, then sold after a couple years for another. Once we had a convertible.
Putting the top down on a sunny day we drove around as if rich Californians, if a bit out of date. I remember the first one with power windows, I think it was a 1953. Us kids moved the windows up and down in amazement. He parked his car in our single car garage, took it to a car wash on Fridays and bought gas by ordering five gallons, not by dollar amount, which in those days was still under $2.00.
He could play the piano and sing, mostly Chinese songs he sang to himself. While I didn’t understand the words, like Latin Church music I loved listening to the sound of his singing. I remember one song he preferred, The Girl With Her First Love, which he translated for me. He would also sing in English and liked the ditty Yankee Doodle Dandy which always caused me mirth as he struggled with the “L” sound in Doodle.
When he was home, he filled the house with personality if not wealth. He was a good cook, worked occasionally as a chef and made not only Chinese but American and ethnic culinary fare. I learned cooking from him, tried to please him and thrived on his attention. I treasured the times we cooked together or when he let me sing a Chinese song for him even though I didn’t understand the words. He never disciplined us or helped around the house except for cooking. He left the operation of the household to Mom and me when I was older.
Dad's happy go lucky personality gave him many friends but only good time ones. He attracted women, white ones when it was a cultural racial taboo with his looks and charm. Some were so bold they phoned the house to ask for him. Most Friday evenings, he backed out of the driveway without a word and returned either Sunday night or Monday morning. We, kids, pretended nothing was happening but Mom often cried silently before the kitchen window as she watched him drive away.
He never talked about his past. We knew nothing of his parents, immigration status or how he came to marry Mom, or if, they were legally married. We did know he was born in northern China’s Shandong province, was not Cantonese like most Chinese in the area, could speak Mandarin and read and write Chinese, all of which he was proud of.
We knew when Chinese New Year came. He announced what animal the year was, what it meant and then disappeared for three days or more when it arrived. Us kids got our, tao hongbao, our lucky red money envelope, after wishing him good luck with a "Kung Hei Fat Choi!" greeting.
Inside were a shiny new copper penny and a crisp twenty-dollar bill. It was the only time he gave us money. The amount was carefully squandered making Chinese New Year a holiday bigger than Christmas where the gifts from Mom were modest. Before leaving on his New Year escapade, Dad set off a long string of firecrackers early in the morning from the eaves of the house front porch to protect the house and us from devils descending from the sky. Superstitious, he saw odd omens as part of his day’s routine in such things as animals or numbers. A dead bird or the number four meant trouble. A stray cat or the number eight meant good luck as did the color red.
With his Chinatown connections, Dad bought my brothers firecrackers for the Fourth of July. They paid him five cents a pack and peddled them to neighborhood boys for twenty-five cents. The lucrative markup created a temporary, family influx of contraband cash flow and made the Fourth of July our second biggest day of the year after Chinese New Year. The labels had a picture of a Camel, with sand dunes background, emblazoned on colorful red, green and yellow wrapping paper with, "Made In Macau" written on it.
Our family’s patriotism, prestige, and disposable income were enhanced with the retort of firecrackers in the neighborhood, evidence of our sudden popularity and wealth. Occasionally the fire marshal attempted to hunt down the source of the noise. Mom provided a good cover of pidgin English innocence at the front door. It was Dad who taught me how to lie. Serving as a courier to brothers with firecrackers in my purse, I was stopped and grilled by the fire marshal. I tried to lie to him but he saw through me. After my confession, he let me off by confiscating the ten packs I was carrying with the comment I was the first girl he'd ever caught with firecrackers.
After my run-in with the law, Dad advised me.
“Shu, in life sometimes it’s best to lie. When necessary, look directly at the person, never look away. Keep the lie simple and something they’ll believe. Say something they know is true for a diversion. Don’t forget your lie.”
With his advice, even he believed my lies when they were necessary.
Dad’s superstitious luck deity mostly ignored his pleas despite his careful observation of perceived omens. Occasionally he did win big. Then we would be rich for a day or two and eat out.
While leaving us on the financial edge, I still looked up to him but vowed never to marry one like him.
Chapter 3, Admired Hotel Maid Mother
Mom appeared shorter than her four-foot, nine inches, diminutive height, standing next to Dad's erect six-plus feet. Her hunched posture, as if carrying a great weight, was because she was. Despite drooped shoulders and squat stature, you could tell she once was pretty, perhaps even delicate pretty. It was time and hardships which had robbed her of beauty. Despite her weathered appearance and streaks of gray hair, she retained a dignified look when viewed closely. She broke into a broad smile over just a little good fortune, accepted everyone as is and was a worker bee.
Our house, while modest, was clean and the yard tidy while many neighbor’s homes were unkempt and their yards allowed to return to nature. She made clothes for us on her pedal sewing machine and cooked when Dad was absent but her cooking skills did not match his.
We knew Mom was born in Hawaii, on the Island of Maui, but like Dad, we knew little more of her past. She never told us how she left there or met Dad. She rode the bus and never had a driver's license. She was a farmworker when I was born and afterward when we occupied run down rural houses. With a priest's help, she secured work as a housekeeper at the Sainte Claire Hotel, San Jose's downtown grand dame back then. It was her steady maid income which allowed us to rent our house in Tropicana Village, our permanent home of sorts.
The Saint Clare also provided employment perks. We bathed with guest's little remnant, soap bars, half-empty sample size shampoo bottles and dried with hotel logo discarded towels worn thin. The few discarded because a guest used them for shoe shining or nail polish removal were luxuries. On the toilet, we used stub paper rolls with too little left for motel guests. Mom was the inherent honest type. She took home only what was permitted, never stole and ensured whatever of value a guest left behind in the room was turned in to lost and found.
As her only daughter, we were close. Guests don't see hotel maids but they see all and Mom shared guest gossip with me. I learned the married white mayor had a Japanese mistress, a married city councilman was gay and which big wigs brought prostitutes or had one-night stands at the hotel. I even learned there was a priest who met there with a married woman from his parish. I wondered if he gave her confession afterward in the hotel room. His sins eased the guilt of mine.
Occasionally a hotel guest left a small housekeeper tip. Mom converted these into Kennedy silver half dollars and saved them in a cigar box. It was our monetary reserve. Dad, however, often raided the box and sent me to the market with a note authorizing my purchase of two packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes.
The shop keeper kept Mom’s half dollars separate in his cash drawer for eventual retrieval. While the box was heavy, it never filled due to one financial crisis or another.
Mom’s other savings stash was trading stamps, S &H Green and Blue Chip licked and pasted in little books. Each stamp reflected a 10-cent purchase. The only way to divert Mom’s shop loyalty was for another store to offer double stamps. Books were carefully saved with their wrinkled pasted pages to be redeemed for our household luxury items, the toaster, iron, coffee maker, etc.
A devout Catholic, President Kennedy a martyred saint, Mom attended Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation. Her faith centered on Christ crucified on the cross, the Blessed Virgin Mary, saint's statutes, candles, the rosary, and holy water. She kept a bottle of holy water on her bedroom nightstand to sprinkle on our cuts after the bathroom’s Mercurochrome and Band-Aid treatment.
At church, she prayed fervently, mouthing her prayer's in a complex mix of Hawaiian Pidgin English and Philippine dialect. I hoped God understood what I couldn’t. Before each saint statue was a rack of candles. Mom always selected a saint to plea bargain with when attending Mass. Before the statue, she inserted a dime in the black metal box, lit her candle in a red glass, crossed herself as she knelt and with bowed head whispered her request. When finished she re-crossed herself and checked to ensure her candle remained lit.
To find something lost it was before Saint Anthony but usually it was before the Blessed Virgin Mary. The statues, like Dad's luck deity, mostly ignored her prayers, including her pleas to protect her first-born, Rickie, after he was drafted. She took what siblings she could collar to Mass but I went willingly. If there’s a Catholic heaven, she’s on an upper tier.
Before Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley, I and my siblings picked fruit and vegetables during the summer and brought some home to eat. If we made a rare family outing to the coast it was also a food gathering trip with fishing off a pier and dropping crab nets.
I remember the first day Mom used food stamps. We ate crab without a coast trip. I was fourteen, the age one learns their societal place. We were at our local market, the neighborhood kind before they were snuffed out by supermarkets. The owner, employees, and customers knew one another and their families. Mom put four crabs in our little cart. I was amazed and assumed Dad had made a big win.
At the cash register, Mom pulled a food stamp booklet out of her purse and tore out dollar stamps to pay. The store owner looked askance while ringing our purchases up. I was embarrassed and looked away in shame as she handed over the stamps. Humiliated as he counted them, I walked alone to the car.
We ate better afterward but I never accompanied Mom to the market again.
Chapter 4, Catholic Parochial Grade School, God Loves Me
Mom enrolled only me at Saint Clare’s, a Catholic parochial school, two blocks from Washington Elementary and Santa Clara Intermediate/High, public schools that my brothers attended.
Baptism, according to Catholic Church tenets, leaves an indelible mark on one’s soul. The nuns inculcate catechism lessons etched one on my mind.
The second sacrament after Baptism, First Communion, is a major Catholic event. It occurs when one has attained the age of reason, the ability to sin or not. At Saint Clare's it was a second-grade event for seven to eight-year-olds.
Requirements for First Communion were a soul cleansed of sins by a priest’s confession, memorization of the Our Father and Hail Mary prayers and knowing the ten Commandments. We also leaned God was a Holy Trinity, three in one, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit My wonderful second-grade teacher, Sister Mary Joseph, was kind and could explain complicated religious concepts in second grade eloquence.
With trenchant logic, she explained the Holy Trinity is within us. God the Father, our mind, God the Son, Jesus, our heart and God the Holy Ghost our soul. When we received Holy Communion, they became one with us.
She explained, we each had our personal guardian angel, sent by God, to always protect us from harm and to ensure we were never alone. When we prayed, our angel, carried our message to God by wings, a form of special delivery before the internet. The angel also protected us from Satan, a fallen angel, who was lurking about to trick us into evil.
She described the Blessed Virgin Mary as super Mom, someone who we could always call on in a pinch, calls I frequently made later in life. Heaven was filled with saints, each with a unique assist position for things which might afflict us. If prayed to, like an attorney, they’d eloquently plead our case before God in their troubleshooting specialty.
Other, more sophisticated, theological aspects were also introduced. Good and evil, heaven and hell and praying had been introduced in first grade. Sins, in second grade, were divided into mortal and venal, or felony versus misdemeanor. Purgatory was a temporary sentence in hell where venial un-repented sins were burned off before God’s Peter let you pass heaven’s gate. I liked this concept. A younger brother needed purgatory time for teasing me and being a pest. Limbo was where unbaptized babies who died went. When I asked what limbo was like, the good nun described it as a nursery. I asked what happened when they got older but was told they never grew up but they were comfortable, well-fed and had their diapers changed.
Hell was the big news. It was operated by devils who horribly tortured those who died in mortal sin for all eternity.
While Mom, I and my brothers were baptized, Dad wasn't. I asked if he was going to hell as Limbo was out due to his age but she did a theological leap and explained, by being a good person, he was baptized, via time and action, as were all good non-Catholics. I don't know if this was true theologically but it satisfied me, however, I worried because Dad wasn’t always good.
She also versed us in the 10 commandments to ensure they weren’t just rote memorizations. I can still recite them:
1. I am the Lord your God. You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve.
2. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
3. Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day.
4. Honor your father and your mother.
5. You shall not kill.
6. You shall not commit adultery.
7. You shall not steal.
8. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
9. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife.
10. You shall not covet your neighbor's goods.
The first was easy enough; Mom and I attended Mass when required, so we were covered. I worried about Dad who never went to church and those not Catholic. Sister Mary Joseph explained they were just confused and God, in His justice, forgave and accepted them if they were good. When I asked.
“God’s a man?”
She winked and replied.
“No, His is just a pronoun, God is everything, he, she, it, male, female, everything.”
The second was another easy one except again I worried again about Dad. He cursed in Chinese if he had bad luck or stubbed his toe. His curses, however, were explained by the good nun, as against a Chinese pagan god not covered in commandment one.
The third was easy, kind of a repeat of number one. Again, I feared for the rest of the family and others I knew who didn’t go to Mass on Sundays. I didn’t want to be in heaven with Mom the only one known. The kind sister said not to worry.
“They don’t sin because they don’t know better.”
This caused a flash of heresy.
“Sister is it better not to know too much?”
“No, my dear girl, if you know God, you are closer to God.”
Not wanting to pursue this further, I accepted Dad and my siblings would be in heaven with me but at a little distance from the center of action, yet still close enough to visit.
Number four was the big one. I worked hard on it and did what Mom asked. Dad was an easy pass. He never asked me to do anything.
Five was a no brainer, I’d never kill anyone, not even a bird with a BB gun like my brothers. When I asked about war, the good nun said, killing then, was only for people God wanted dead.
Six and nine were confusing as I didn’t understand the details referred to. When questioned a bit, she explained adultery as kissing or hugging when not married and nine was when a man wanted another man’s wife, kind of like stealing.
Seven, eight and ten were simple don’ts, don’t lie, steal or want to steal. I never lied except when Mom told me to tell salesmen she wasn’t home when she was. This was explained as not really lying because Mom was not home to that person.
While ten crossed my mind a few times, especially at Christmas and birthday parties when a girl got a present, I wanted, I never stole.
The ten Commandments were a little more complicated than when first read and covered some things not understood. I didn’t fret further over details, accepted Sister Mary Joseph’s clarifications, memorized the required prayers and the ten commandments until I could repeat them by number, out of sequence, when asked.
When saying the Hail Mary prayer, I didn’t understand “Immaculate Conception” or even “Virgin” but she explained these simply meant Mary was pure, without sin and I put them down as additional titles like Blessed.
To this day, I mentally talk to Sister Mary Joseph. She explains complicated moral dilemmas and reconciles what I’ve done and need to do to get me back into God’s grace.
With one more memorization, I was ready for my First Confession. I memorized what to say at confession. It was simple enough, as tested on the good sister, who was my first confessor. She was one who I could tell all to except she couldn’t wipe the sins off as she was not a priest.
In response to the priest’s introduction,
“Bless you child, is this your first confession?”
My response was.
“Yes, father this is my first confession.”
“What are your sins?”
“I disobeyed my mother and did not do the dishes when first asked. I also wish I had a Schwinn bicycle like other girls.”
The priest in response would mete out the appropriate penance and I’d be free of sin after I performed my punishment. It worked. When I left the confessional with a penance of three Hail Mary’s, a great feeling of relief swept me. I crossed myself, quickly recited my penance, re-crossed myself and was sparkling clean before God.
Mom and I made my First Communion outfit. When the big day arrived, Dad said I looked beautiful, a little bride he called me. He gave me five dollars. I doubled down on good deeds and gave each brother a dollar. Dad also gave me a rabbit’s foot with a brass metal case holding the stump on a little chain. He said it was for good luck by his deity.
"Shu, always keep this with you. Often in life, we need a backup. Sometimes you lose. Pet it to make you feel better and have good luck."
My First Communion was the only time Dad went to church until I married. I was so proud he was there with Mom. I carried the rabbit’s foot to the altar with me and in life, my talisman and petted it as needed.
Sunday, the boys and girls were segregated and assembled on the church steps for photo ops. Mom brought her little Kodak. When the bells rang, we were marched in, boys first filling the front pews, then us girls. The boys were dressed in little suits or attired with a white shirt, tie, and corduroy pants. They were not the center of attention. We girls, in our first communion outfits, were the big act.
We stood, sat and kneeled through the Latin service until the altar boy rang the bells announcing the transubstantiation as Eucharist host became the flesh of Jesus Christ. We kneeled, back straight, with aching knees, waiting for Sister Mary Joseph to signal our pew to the altar.
When she reached my pew, I rose kept my hands together in prayer supplication and followed the procession to the altar, relieved my knees finally got a break. At the marble altar railing, I knelt with hands reverently upon the starched linen covering the railing, knees again sore. As the priest approached, I opened my mouth wide and extended my tongue. The priest plucked a host of Jesus Christ from the gold chalice, held it between his thumb and index finger, crossed it before my face and gently laid it on my stretched tongue as he blessed me in Latin.
With God within, I bowed my head, crossed myself, rose and walked back to my pew with hands in prayer, filled with the Holy Trinity. I was, careful not to let the Eucharist host touch my teeth and let it slowly dissolve on my tongue as told by the good sister. She’d explained, God didn’t like to get chewed up before entering one’s body. Kneeling in the pew, a wonderful feeling of joy filled me. My soul was in a shroud of light. God the Father, Jesus His only begotten Son and the Holy Spirit were united with me. My knees no longer ached.
Holy Communion is a mystical and emotional experience those not Catholic cannot comprehend. Thereafter, I loved going to Holy Communion and did so every Sunday and racked up a slew of plenary indulgences, a Catholic Church tenet of get out of purgatory cards, much needed later in life.
In addition to receiving communion, I loved to hear and sing with Mass choir music. Gloria in Excelsis Deo, (Latin for "Glory to God in the highest") and Kyrie Eleison, (Greek for "Lord have mercy"). Even the Gregorian chant was beautiful to my ears. With my atypical contralto singing voice, the nuns put me in the school choir as a semi star. In grade school, with the sisters urging, I decided to be a nun. Dad laughed and said I would be a penguin but Mom encouraged me and prayed it would happen.
On the top of my school papers, I initialed J M J, for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph each page dedicated to the Holy Family. In my little purse, I carried a Saint Teresa's holy picture as my role model. She died a virgin rather than be raped. I also wore a Saint Christopher's medal which ensured I would have a chance to make a last confession and save my soul before I died.
In school, we learned death was our fate, a fate drilled into us which could happen any second. This appeared imminently possible from nuclear attack, its probability reinforced with school air raid drills.
With Moffett Naval Air Base nearby, we were part of a big X on a Russian atomic bomb map. Periodically the air raid siren would suddenly wail to let us know we were under attack. The fifty-plus students in each class marched in strict, doomed silence, under the direction of the nuns into the corridor. There, we formed long columns in the crowded hallway, crouched on our knees and put our foreheads on the floor. We covered our heads with our arms and waited to be blown to smithereens.
As the air raid siren continued to wail, the stern eyes of the nuns watched to ensure no head rose, an infraction resulting in an immediate rap on the head with a nun’s wooden clicker.
Once the fire marshal was satisfied with our response, the siren would wail a wobble, all clear, which meant we had been bypassed for nuking, the Russian bomber was shot down or the drill was a test, the latter always the case. We arose and nosily marched back to our desks, impressed with our good fortune of again avoiding death by an atomic bomb.
In the classroom, the nuns used the air raid drills as reminders of our potential sudden death and the danger to our souls if tainted by mortal sin. We were immersed in the idea, life on earth is fleeting but life after death is eternal. If we tripped up in this life, were caught dead with even a single unconfessed mortal sin, the punishment was an eternal hell. The good news was a priest’s confession, no matter how bad the sin, immediately cleared the slate.
Hell, and its opposite, heaven were constant classroom themes. Pictures were used for religious teaching reinforcement. In the classrooms, nuns kept a large roll of fantasied colored pictures on wood pictorial frames. Setting it up in front of the class the desired picture could be flipped to for the class to see.
The vivid pictorial roll consisted of winged angels looking blissfully down from clouds, saints and martyrs, some horribly tortured, the stages of Jesus's life including crucifixion, the Blessed Virgin Mary and the fate of sinners caught in mortal sin at death.
These sinners were pictured in hell, roasting over burning sulfur, gnawed on but never eaten by wild beasts, and my favorite, cooking in a giant boiling pot, each suffering their punishment for eternity. I didn't question the nun's punishment orthodoxy of hell but did think eternity in hell for eating meat on Friday too severe. I rationalized the punishment was for being stupid. How could anyone wantonly eat meat on Friday, our family loved seafood.
In school, I was Miss Lin or Elizabeth to the nuns, Lin, Liz, Lizzy, Lizard, slant eyes and eventually Cobra to classmates. While tagged “slant eyes” I never experienced racial prejudice that I recognized. Many got physical trait names. “Slant eyes” was like “big ears”, “whitey”, shorty, etc. I preferred Elizabeth but in fifth grade, I’d made the mistake of sticking out my extendable tongue in reply to “slant eyes”. Thereafter I was nicknamed Cobra. I tried to ignore this tag, kept my tongue in but it stuck and Cobra followed me into high school.
Saint Clare’s racial mix blended from blond white to dark chocolate brown. There were Portuguese, Mexicans, even a few Italians darker than me. In school, we were taught, all humans are part of God’s Mystical Body, each an integral piece of equal importance to the whole. I, however, thought myself part of the Mystical Body’s brain, my rationalization of superiority.
In the eighth grade, we learned the evils of other faiths starting with Martin Luther and his church door list of orthodoxy errors. Judaism was lightly skipped over as old news and Islam never mentioned except for the liberation of Granada from the Moors when Spain was at last free.
One Protestant heresy perked my interest, John Calvin’s Presbyterianism tenet of predestination. God, knowing all, knows all, including what we did and what we will do. If God knows everything I will do before I do it, it means what I do is predetermined. There is, therefore no free will. None, even sister Mary Joseph, could not give me a satisfactory explanation of our having free will if God knows everything.
While boy shy, I experienced boy crushes. In eighth grade, I was a secret admirer. He had a Hispanic last name, Castro, but was blond and blue-eyed. I attended his basketball games and cherished his dribbling from the bleachers but never talked to him, afraid of being rejected.
When living in rural farmhouses, I sneaked on the public-school bus with my brothers, hopped off with them at their school and walked the two blocks to Saint Clare’s. After school, I traipsed back over, got in the school bus line, clambered on in the rush with others and returned home with my brothers. None revealed my stowaway status but in hindsight, I suspect the bus driver knew.
Public school provided another perk not available at parochial school. It served a cafeteria hot lunch for a quarter. To cash in, I slinked away from Saint Clare's when the noon yard watch nun looked the other way and ambled to the public-school cafeteria. My cheap hot meal stratagem, however, was complicated by segregated cafeteria service periods for public grade and high school students. My lunchtime was when the high school students were served.
At the cafeteria, I looked down, squeezed in line, took my stainless-steel tray with indentations, slid it along the meal line and they plopped the food on. The elderly women servers never gave me a second glance and my quarters were accepted without questions by the cashier. I carried my tray to a vacant chair, gulped my meal down in unmolested silence then scurried back to Saint Clare's.
Again, in hindsight, my stealth cafeteria meals probably fooled none. They dished out the food and took my quarter without care where I went to school. By sixth grade, my older brother was in high school during mealtime and looked out for me.
Attending parochial school and our frequent rural house re-locations made me comfortable as a loner. As a bus stowaway, I lacked common school attendance with those on the bus, missed walking to and from school with Saint Clare's students and my sneaked cafeteria meals limited my lunchtime with them.
Parochial school holidays were different than public schools. They got out the week before Christmas and Easter, we the week after. My classmates didn’t visit my house due to distance and if they would, I’d not invite them due to home turf embarrassment.
Once ensconced in our Tropicana Village home, I left early in the morning on the city bus line and got home late, a stranger to neighbor kids. At home, I retreated to my tiny bedroom to escape family din. The bedroom was my sanctuary where I studied and fantasized about a world of my own, a world where I was queen.
Chapter 5, Notre Dame High School, Puberty’s Puppet Shadow, Perhaps God Doesn’t Love Me
Between thirteen and sixteen, puberty transformed me. Hopscotch and jump rope were abandoned and I sprouted to my full, five-feet seven-inch height, too dark, too skinny and with teeth and lips too big. My younger siblings called me frog or rubber lips due to my full lips before then added bean pole and duck because of my skinny long neck. Dad and my older brother retorted I was a swan confirming my neck was too long. I kept my lips pursed and my head down between shoulders to compensate.
On Saint Clare's graduation, the “select” were “chosen” for gender-segregated high schools. Notre Dame was the exclusive, all-girls, Catholic high school in downtown San Jose. Bellarmine, safely miles away, was for boys. Entrance was based on school grades, an entrance exam and probably parental influence. Catholicism also retains some of Jesus’s teachings of, “Blessed are the poor”. I suspect a few were given credit to retain this ideal.
I and the other 26 girls in Sister Mary Emanuel’s graduating class took the Notre Dame High School entrance exam. The boys took Bellarmine’s.
Notre Dame selected me and five others as among Saint Clare’s “chosen.” Without parental influence, my isolation in grade school ensured good grades, I knew I aced the test based on the questions and perhaps Sister Mary Emanuel or the priest who occasional visited Mom played the poverty card for me. I accepted going despite tuition cost because Mom was ecstatic, I was shy of attending public high school, none ever refused the honor of acceptance and I was proud to be among the “chosen”.
With Notre Dame near Mom's work, we rode the bus together. I earned my tuition and two dimes a day bus fare babysitting and working summers. I made my school uniforms on my little portable singer sewing machine Dad had unexpectedly bought for me for a birthday present. The uniforms were simple enough to make, a checkered long skirt with a white blouse. The homespun marked me as one who couldn't afford a uniform from downtown Hart's Department Store which carried a wide selection of parochial school girl's uniforms. I was proud to make my own and smugly looked down on girls who couldn’t sew.
My sex education during grade school consisted of misinformed school girl whispers.
My breasts developed fuller than expected for skinny me. As they grew, they tingled and ached. In bed at night, cupping them in my hands as I fell asleep, I wondered when they would stop growing. I knew their expansion became noticeable when Dad and my siblings noticed them and then looked away from them when talking to me.
Alone, without direction, I purchased my first bra and Kotex pad, not unusual back then. One didn't talk about those “things”.
I was prepared for menstruation from girl gossip and it occurring for me after most my age.
By sixteen, I was fully equipped, to the point some boys whistled or made comments when I walked past. At first, I assumed it was catcalling about my long neck but soon realized my breasts were the object of their attention. Turning brown-red and quickly walking away only encouraged them. It was my first sense of sexual power but I didn’t think of it as such then. Instead, I thought my breasts, like my long neck, were another deformity.
I carried my school Pee Che folder in front to avoid boy’s whistles and snickered remarks.
Chapter 6 Mortal Sin, A Secret Puppet Shadow’s Birth
The first-time sex was openly mentioned in parochial school was when I was 16 at Notre Dame during a three-day religious retreat in the school chapel. There, in its little elevated pulpit, using illustrated stories, the Jesuit priest, Father Newhall, inoculated us against communism and the perils of sex.
He wasn't a bible-thumping firebrand. He was much more persuasive, a good story-teller who began in a whisper gradually increased his tempo and paused when needed for emphasis. We listened spellbound. Once the scene was properly set, he'd rush into a staccato roar of incredibility over the evils of communism and sins of sex.
After the first day to cover the godless evil of communism, he switched it the real danger, sex. Initially, I inferred he meant intercourse but it was worse, much worse. Even impure thoughts or kissing a boy for longer than three seconds were mortal sins. My reaction was.
No problem, I’ve never kissed a boy and don’t think impure thoughts.
On the third day, he expanded into sexual depravities, self-abuse, and lesbianism. I sat enthralled, not on the perils of hell but his expansion of sins never imagined. As he ranted, I moved my hands from my lap to ensure a safe distance.
He concluded the retreat with a vivid story of a girl, sent to the eternal flames of hell. Again he started softly, almost in a whisper, how she was invited and visited a girl classmate for a sleepover. He related how they did girl things, put on make-up, dressed up in heels, danced to records, talked about boys, told one another secrets, then put on nighties, hugged one another and went to their beds.
His tempo and volume increased as he described, with the light off, the girl who lived in the house, clambered out of bed, slid in bed with the girl visiting, awoke her and kissed her lips. From this shocking revelation, he stuttered how her hand drifted down to breasts and swept down to her private parts. The girl aroused from sleep, returned the kiss and willingly descended into the depths of grinding sexual pleasure.
After an intense pause to allow this depravity to settle in our minds, his tempo and volume picked up to an incriminating crescendo as he asked.
“How could it happen, why would a girl risk eternal damnation by allowing hands to touch her private parts for a moment of perverse sexual pleasure? “
Starting anew, he related how in the morning, on the way home, the visiting girl's car was struck by a speeding train at the local railroad crossing. In a rising tone of voice, he graphically described the violent impact, her body crushed in the crumpled car, the firemen struggling to get her out of the twisted wreckage, the blood as it oozed from her popped out eyes. With another pause, his voice switched to a verbal rampage of her offending hand. It was severed by broken glass and laid asunder, splayed on a steel rail track, flattened to a squishy mess by the train.
We sat stunned in silence. After his next pause, he then thundered in a staccato frenzy, how that hand corrupted her soul, tainted it with self-seeking pleasure, her soul twirled down into eternal damnation. He then switched his voice and tone back to conclude calmly, as matter-of-fact, her screaming while stuck upside down in a boiling sulfur pot, her punishment was not only fair but too good for her transgression.
Wow, I’ve never imagined touching myself or another girl!
The pin-drop silence as he stared accusingly at us from the pulpit at his finish was broken by a wail. In a pew, a girl collapsed, thrashed about and sobbed. Nuns rushed over and led her out, obviously guilty of the travesty the priest warned us about.
I knew from eight years at Saint Clare's to admit nothing at school but was relieved I was innocent of this new self-abuse and lesbian sins. I also wondered why one girl was sent to eternal damnation, while the other could get off scot-free with a simple confession, an obvious miscarriage of justice. My questioning God's mysterious ways, with heretical thoughts, was occurring more frequently. The retreat resulted not in a recommitment to faith but my questioning it. I never saw the girl who collapsed in a wail again.
I retained my close friend, Julie, at Notre Dame. We shared a common sense of humor and aversion of parochial school orthodoxy. Contrary to most, who accepted what was taught without further question, she was someone I could talk to, not chit chat but mind and heart talk to without the filter of caution. We talked about sex and boys of course but shared jokes about nuns and priests, our social world, even Father Newhall’s stories as we bonded closer.
Julie helped put things in perspective. More importantly, the city bus allowed me to visit her house. Her house a mansion to me was inhabited by a stable family, an envy of orderliness. It inspired me to want the same. I admit, however, with hindsight, my friendship with her was tainted with an agenda. What I said, always carried a slant of equalization, no, a hint of my superiority. Seeds, I now worry, eventually sprouted into weeds in her mind.
Puberty marched on, my breasts grew and hormones coursed through my body in stronger and stronger swirls. Working on a math problem, reading a book, staring out a window, it didn’t matter, my attention would suddenly divert to boys as hormones ended their journey in my brain. There was no thought taboo. They fought for attention despite my attempts to divert them by thinking of holy images. If I closed my eyes to convert an impure thought to that of Jesus, crucified on the cross, the hormones lifted His lion-cloth.
A few girls at school admitted, "doing it" and a wild one even bragged about, "doing it" with different boys. She became an instant authority. We virgins listening intently to any scrap of information she imparted. We learned we bled, it hurt the first time, boys constantly wanted it and there was a "rubber thing" to avoid pregnancy.
Bookish, I returned to the downtown city library with my close friend Julie as things sexual were absent in the school library. In books, we saw, black and white sketched pictorials of the female anatomy, uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, wandering egg, vagina tunnel and a little bean clitoris. We also checked out male anatomy but having seen younger brothers naked there wasn’t much to learn for me other than things got a lot bigger at puberty. As an only child, Julie pestered me about what I knew with brothers but of course, I knew little. We learned when a man ejaculated, millions of sperm in semen rushed from his testicles, spewed out his penis, smeared about the vaginal tunnel, squiggle raced up fallopian tubes and if a fresh egg lay on the uterus wall, the winning sperm invaded it, slammed the door behind him and bam, the girl was pregnant. Nine months later, the girl was a mother for life.
As the hormonal pressure cooker heated up, when 16, I committed my first mortal sin. To save on water and gas bills at home we turned off the shower once wet and soaped up with one of the little-used soap bars Mom brought from work. Admonishments against self-abuse kept me from playing with my private parts but I rationalized, this excluded my breasts. I soaped, lathered, squeezed them, washed them again then rinsed them and rubbed them dry with a towel.
Menstruation justified a thorough washing of my pubic area. I kept telling myself it needed more soap. It felt good but after a few quick soap strokes to my clitoris bean, I diverted my hand away to a breast, the priest's admonishments of self-abuse fixated in my mind. Still, my hand would dash down for another quick stroke then move back up to cling to a breast. As I showered, I fantasized about male TV or movie figures.
Then it happened. I tripped across the forbidden line. I couldn’t stop stoking, I was Louisa, (Pina Pellicer), the girl who smuggled a gun to Rio (Marlon Brando) in jail, in the movie, "One-Eyed Jacks."
We were escaping on a galloping horse. With eyes closed, bent over, I stroked to the gait of the bouncing saddle while clasping a breast with the other hand. Just one more stroke, another squeeze, just one more stroke, another, I couldn’t stop. Bent over, one hand squeezing a breast, the other stroking my clitoris in a fury, it happened! A wave of intense pleasure spread from head to toe. I discovered sex, not as discussed or thought of but as felt. It felt great.
Worried others in the house heard, I turned on the water full blast to cleanse away guilt but knew I’d committed a mortal sin, a sin the priest lectured about during my freshman retreat. I’d committed, an impure act of self-abuse. The squished hand on the railroad tracks, imprinted in my mind, stared at me as I dried and dressed. My sin was not with a boy. It was much worse than three seconds of kissing, worse even than intercourse. It was a perversion. I had played with myself, committed self-abuse, an admission no girl, even the “expert”, at school admitted to. I descended into despair knowing I was in mortal sin, that only at confession could I avoid eternal damnation, being stuck in burning sulfur or in a boiling pot.
I must confess at next Friday’s confession session. How am I going to say it?
I scripted my confession like I did before my first Holy Communion but now it was complicated.
Bless me father, I have sinned. In the shower, I touched my private parts and experienced an impure act. No, sounds like I’m a pervert. It’s worse than intercourse.
I committed self-abuse, skip the touched my private parts. No, he’ll ask what was my self-abuse, what private parts, what was I thinking, was it the first time, how did I come to commit this act of perversion? The questions could be endless.
I’ll keep it simple. I committed and impure act father. No, he’ll think intercourse, want to know the name of the boy if we thwarted God's plan and used a "rubber thing" if I was pregnant, where we did it? Better to plead an impure thought. No, you can't lie in confession. It had to be the perversion of self-abuse, then the questions.
There was, however, a glimmer of hope for an easy out. When we went to the nearby Saint Joseph's church for our weekly Friday confession, three priests heard them. One, was old Father Frankie, known among the girls as "Father Chomp" because of his loose dentures. He never asked questions in the confessional. He was the chaplain for San Jose Hospital and could do a Mass under half an hour, the sermon limited to a few words of, "Be good until next week".
In the confessional, he waited until you finished enumerating your sins, blessed you clean and sent you out with a three Hail Mary penance, end of story. It was also rumored he was a bit deaf. Father Chomp was a get out of hell easy pass.
The other two were not easy outs. One knew me personally. He was old and stopped by at our house on occasion to visit and check up on Mom. I was his little angel. I enjoyed going to confession to him because my sins kept me his little angel. To confess to self-abuse would change everything.
The other was Father Pastoria, nicknamed by we students, Father Pastrami, due to his breath. We also tagged him “the ferret”. When saying Mass, his sermons dragged on and pushed the length of his Mass up to the next hour's Mass time. In the confessional, he wanted to know every detail, always on the lookout for sins committed unknowingly or omitted. Even a standard, "I disobeyed my parents," was pursued with which, why and how.
Marched over to Saint Joseph’s for our Friday’s confession session, two priests were hearing confessions. Neither had Fr. Pastoria on the door. I shifted to the pew for Fr. Frankie, relieved to have an easy out. While the pew line for him was longer he flipped the girls out quickly. Soon I ended up second to the edge of the confessional. As the next girl went in the rest scooted over and pushed me to the pew’s edge placing me up next. I was nervous but calmed myself with assurance Father Franke was an easy pas and I could whisper my sin.
Then it happened. Fr. Pastoria strode up, tapped his door and replaced Fr. Frankie. Dear Fr. Chomp, got up and left. For the first time, I faced the confessional curtain with trepidation. My imagination expanded my terror as I awaited my inquisition as the girl stuck in the confessional booth now faced.
I prayed Hail Mary's for strength, to tell the truth as my mind raced for the best phrase. Mostly, however, I prayed for Father Chomp to return.
Finally, the light above my side of the confessional blinked off and the girl exited. I rose from the pew, entered the confessional, pulled the loose draped velvet curtain as closed as possible and knelt on the hardwood kneeler. My lips were a couple inches from the screen. The little wood door on the priest’s slide in front of me. A sense of doomed fate took hold. My heart pounded. I kept reminding myself to keep my voice low to avoid being overheard by classmates.
Suddenly the door slid open with the priest's ear bent to the screen. Even in the dark I could recognize him and knew he could me, Father Pastrami, no escape."Bless you, what’s your confession?"
"Bless me father, it’s been one week since my last confession. I’ve sinned. I disobeyed my mother by not helping with the dishes. I teased my younger brothers. I argued with my father."
“Why did you argue with your father?”
Relief, a diversion, I lied.
“He won’t let me get a driver’s learning permit.”
A brief lecture ensued on needing to wait to drive and the virtue of patience. Knowing as he rambled on about patience I needed more, I blurted as he finished.
"I cheated on a test"
The latter an offering gasp to offset my failure to mention self-abuse. As I said it, I knew it was another sin, a lie.
I’m lying to a priest! Must I now add my lie to the sin of self-abuse?
"Is there anything else?"
"No father."
“Which subject did you cheat on?”
“Geometry”
With a little further of his inquiry, my expanded lying and his lecture about studying to make cheating unnecessary, I was let go. My penance, three Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers, normal venial sins retribution.
Drained, I crossed myself, rose from the hard kneeler, pulled the curtain aside to face the exterior light and left the confessional. Instead of feeling clean as the curtain closed behind me and the next girl approached, worse guilt assailed me than experienced before entering.
As I walked to the altar, I noticed the pew line for Fr. Pastrami had shrunk while the line for the other confessional was longer.
Kneeling before the altar to do my penance, my arms on the cool marble railing, my palms together in supplication, I knew I was among the damned. I was in mortal sin, my soul black, doomed to eternal hell if suddenly killed in an atomic attack or by a car. My vile hands would send my soul to perpetual hell of burning sulfur.
As I mentally reviewed my plight, I considered doing a bigger penance but knew only a priest could wipe away my transgressions. I was damned unless I fessed up to it all, self-abuse and now confession lies, which I couldn't.
Sunday, Mom, as usual, insisted I attend Mass and take Holy Communion. I tried to eat something in the morning to disqualify my ability to take communion. The Catholic Church required not only a soul cleansed of mortal sins but also a fast from midnight before communion back then. She, however, watched to ensure I didn’t eat.
At Mass, I genuflected and crossed myself as we entered a pew. As the liturgy of the Mass progress, my mind raced for an excuse to skip communion. Kneeling in the pew, head bowed, as the altar boy rang bells to announce transubstantiation of the host my quandary found no resolution. With no excuse; I morosely tagged after when Mom rose in the pew and motioned me to follow. At the altar railing, I knelt, stuck out my tongue, and took communion then walked back, head down, to our pew. Jesus was stuck to the roof of my dry mouth, my soul in unredeemed mortal sin.
Back in the pew, kneeling with eyes closed, I accepted I was an obdurate sinner.
God’s in my impure body, there’s no salvation for me. I’m on the dark side.
I tried to behave in the shower but soon sinned again. With a plethora of mortal sins piling up, unable to wipe the soul slate clean, I repudiated my parochial orthodoxy, removed Saint Teresa's holy picture from my purse, took off the Saint Christopher medal hanging from my neck and converted to unrepentant sinner, never to be a nun. Only my close friend Julie knew of my conversion.
Accepting my soul was damned; other mortal sins accrued no longer mattered. I created an elaborate new me but a hidden one, a secret puppet shadow, to placate my self-abuse. Instead of guilt she looked forward to soapy showers, ritualized them with erotic fantasies while I inculpably took holy communion. Eventually, she led to a life of adultery.
Chapter 7, Driver’s License Kiss
While puberty’s puppet shadow romantically fantasied during soapy showers, I remained boy shy, embarrassed of my background, full lips, big teeth, skinny body, and enlarged breasts. If a boy tried to talk, I assumed he wanted to mock me. My siblings already assured me I was ugly. I didn't need supplemental verification.
Attending Notre Dame ensured there weren’t boys to evade at school. Riding the bus meant I left too early and returned home to late for interaction with neighborhood boys. My good grades, ability to cook, sew, help run the house, these were the assurances I was better than others, if unattractive.
In the morning, Mom and I walked to a bus stop on Story Road, a couple blocks from our house. We rode the bus together, her to work and me to school. In the afternoon, if we met at the downtown bus stop, we rode home together.
On a cold, 1967 January afternoon, Mom and I walked home together from our Story Road bus stop. Next door to our house, I met my future husband. He was twenty-one, I, sixteen.
His family, in a step-down, had just moved in. They were white. He was washing his car on his driveway. As Mom and I passed, he looked up, a washrag in one hand, a hose gurgling water in the other and smiled openly. I assumed it was a smirk about us being Asians or my looks and pretended not to notice him. Mom smiled back.
The next afternoon, again blustery cold, I walked home alone, a hand-knitted sweater over my school uniform blouse. When I turned the street corner to our house, I saw him on his front porch. I changed my gaze to the discarded Christmas trees along the curb awaiting pick-up and increased my gait. I wanted to pass by unnoticed, my books and Pee Che folder held in front for defense.
He left his porch perch, boldly stepped on the sidewalk, blocked my path and asked, when I tried to go around him.
"What school do you go to where you need to ride the bus?"
Who does he think he is to speak to me without an introduction?
I hugged the books and Pee Che folder closer, looked down at my feet, then back up to face him.
He knows where I go to school by my uniform. He knows why I ride the bus. What makes him think he can block my path?
His hair’s almost blond, cut short, not a crew cut, just short with a little wave in front. He’s just short of 6 feet, not a lot taller than me. Crystal blue eyes, he’s got crystal blue eyes.
Glancing away I responded meekly.
"Notre Dame"
Wishing I’d said.
"It's none of your business!"
He replied.
"I go to San Jose State in the morning, the college downtown, near Norte Dame, I'll give you a ride in my car tomorrow."
More affronts, asking me to drive with him and not asking my name, then admitting he knew about Norte Dame and assumes I’m stupid don’t know about the college.
"No, I can't. I ride with my mother."
Relieved I had an excuse to get away.
"I'll take both of you".
"I know her answer, no!"
I walked past him without replying to his asking what my name was. In my room, I was pleased I’d, at last, summoned the courage to put him down. After setting my books on the dresser I wrote on my Pee Che folder, "Crystal Blue Eyes" then scribbled it out. I didn't tell Mom what happened.
After dinner, he showed up at our front porch and told a brother he needed to talk to Mom. When she came to the front door, he introduced himself.
"Hi, just moved next door and drive to San Jose State in the morning. You take the bus. Would you like a ride instead?"
"No, I leave early, go work, 7:15, go with daughter."
"That's when I leave, we can all go."
Mom thought about saving dime bus fares.
"What you charge?"
"Free, I just don't want to see you wasting time and money on the bus. It’s a free ride."
“I think about it. I ask husband."
She closed the door on him without saying more. He stood on the porch a moment then realized she wasn’t coming back and walked away. Her saying she was asking Dad was her excuse to get rid of him, her polite no. The next morning, however, his car was waiting in our driveway.
With no reason not to, we climbed in the back seat and exchanged names. I expected an agenda such as charging a dime or snide comments but he simply chatted about the cold weather and possible rain then dropped me off and said.
"Study Elizabeth."
He sped off with a pop of the clutch to take Mom to work. Girls standing around by the curb asked who he was.
“He’s just a neighbor.”
The pattern was repeated but after a week, when I got out of school, he was waiting for me.
“Elizabeth, over here, I’m here to pick you up. Hop in. We’ll go pick your Mom up. Come on, I’m not going to bite you. I promise.”
I stood next to the passenger door as he coaxed me in through the open window, nervous to ride alone with him. I’d have to sit on the front seat. It’d look stupid to ride in the back as if he was my chauffeur. Disconcerted, hesitant, I got in and scrunched next to the door. Classmates looked amazed to see me get a ride, a ride with a young man with a 1957 hardtop Chevy.
Mom was walking toward our downtown bus stop when we caught up with her. She smiled seeing us, got in and forced me next to him. For the first time, I could smell him, a hair pomade scent with a hint of vanilla, possibly, greasy Dixie Peach.
The next morning, we sat in the front with Mom sitting next to him. I became relaxed on the afternoon trips and scooted next to him if we picked up Mom and enjoyed the envy of classmates.
At sixteen, I was old enough to get a driver's license. After being chauffeured awhile, he showed up at the house on a Saturday morning. When I opened the front door, he asked.
"You want a driver's license?"
He replied to my vigorous nodded response.
"I'll get a learner's permit application and test study booklet. When you pass the test, I'll teach you to drive."
Worried Mom would overhear and say no, I put a hush finger to my lips, smiled agreement, closed the door and told Mom he’d just came to say he’d drive us Monday even though it was his Spring Break. She had started to worry about his interest in me but counted the dimes saved.
With his Spring Break, the week before Easter and Norte Dame's the week after, I went to school on Monday while he didn’t. He drove with the excuse he needed to study at school. In the afternoon pickup, he handed me a learner's permit application and study booklet before we met Mom.
I hid them in my Pee Che folder and in the security of my room, completed the application and read the booklet. Tuesday, during school lunch break, I walked to the county courthouse and got a copy of my birth certificate from the county registrar. I learned my mother's maiden name; I was born at home and was relieved my father's name was on it.
My next-door driving instructor got an affidavit for my parent's signature to allow me to get a license as a minor. I shuffled it among school papers for their unquestioned signatures. Neither read what the school had them sign. With the study book memorized, application and parental consent completed, I subtly said while driving to school with Mom.
“I’ve studied, completed my homework and am prepared for my test.”
“Great, you’re ready to rock and roll.”
Mom assumed we co-conspirators were referring to a school exam. That afternoon, before we picked Mom up, he asked when I could take the test.
“On Good Friday, the nuns, troop us over to Saint Joseph's for the Stations of the Cross. I’ll sneak out of the group when we walk through civic center park and hide at the corner behind an aspen tree. Pick me up there at noon.”
As a condemned sinner, I no longer cared about church orthodoxy. If the priest knew my soul status on taking communion, I’d be excommunicated.
At noon Friday, the students were trooped over to Satin Joseph’s, herded by vigilant nuns. As the group gaggled through the park, I drifted back and hid behind a tree, my school uniform an exclaiming of my escapee status. His car drove to the curb, I scrambled in and escaped undetected. Free for three hours, we drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles where I answered simple questions and got my learner’s permit. Before we picked up Mom, I agreed to take my first driving lesson early the next morning.
I was up, out the door and at his house by 6:30 AM before anyone at home was awake. He sat in his car with the engine running awaiting me. I climbed in and, as usual, scrunched next to the passer door. He smiled.
“My little mouse, always ready to scurry away.”
At least I am not his duck or bean pole. Is he commenting on my Oriental nose? What’s this, I’m his?
He patted the seat area next to him. I scooted over, the biggest move in my life. Thereafter, I was his.
He drove to a secluded hill, faced the car downhill, parked, got out, came to the passenger side and eased me behind the steering wheel. Sitting close, he explained the ignition key, the parking brake, the floor brake, clutch and gas foot pedals, and shift lever leaving me totally confused.
With the gears in neutral, the parking brake on, he said.
“Use the ignitions key to start and turn off the engine. Turn the key right to turn off and left to turn on but before you turn it on, tap the gas pedal on the floor to goose some fuel into the carburetor.”
I turned the key to the right. The motor shut off. I tapped the gas pedal, turned the key left and restarted the engine. After I mastered this, he showed which was the clutch pedal, had me push it in with my right foot, took my hand and guided me through the “H” pattern of the gears. It was our first physical contact, a nervous sweaty one.
Confident I knew how to locate each gear on the stick steering wheel column, he had me shut the car off and let me release the clutch pedal.
“Elizabeth, you’re going to start the car in neutral, push in the clutch pedal with your right foot, shift to first gear and ease off the clutch until the car jerks forward. It’ll probably kill the engine but that’s okay, you can just restart. As soon as you feel the car wanting to jerk forward, push the clutch pedal back in until you get the feel of the transmission engaging when you release the clutch.”
“I don’t think I’m ready for this. Tell me again what to do.”
“Just do as I say.”
I followed his directions, the beginning of doing what he said to do. Soon I could tickle engage the transmission and quickly push the clutch in without killing the engine.
“Good, good now we’re ready to let the car creep forward in first gear. First, put the transmission in neutral.
Good, now let the clutch pedal out and push on the brake pedal with your right foot. Good, good, now release the emergency brake."
“Emergency brake? Where’s the emergency brake?”
"Sorry, that's the parking brake. It's also called an emergency brake. Good, good, now let the brake pedal out a bit. Good, push on it again. See how the car wants to roll down the hill when you release the brake?”
“I think I’d better go home now.”
No, no, you’re doing great. Don’t worry. Now we’re going to cheat a little. Push the brake pedal with your left foot and take the right foot off.
Good, now push the clutch in with the right foot.
Good!
Now slide the shift lever into first gear.
No, that’s third.
Okay, good, now it’s in first. Now ease the clutch out to tease the transmission in.”
The car jerked forward and the engine died.
"Okay Elizabeth that's the trick of driving a stick shift, It's three pedals, brake, clutch, and gas. You ease out the clutch to tease the transmission in while easing off the brake then switch the right foot to the gas pedal. It appears complicated but once you get the knack, it’s easier than riding a bicycle.”
‘It took me a long time to learn to ride a bike. My older brother showed me.”
To simplify it in my mind, I named the pedals, brake, God the Father, clutch the Holy Spirt and gas, Jesus.
With the car in first gear, I released first God the Father, eased out the Holy Spirit and as the transmission kicked in gave Jesus a tap.
The car lurched forward with my sweaty palms clutching the steering wheel.
“Okay, okay, push the clutch and brake pedals back in!”
Confused, I left my right foot on Jesus and slammed my left foot on the Holy Spirit as the car coasted down the hill, the engine racing.
He leaned over me, pulled on the emergency brake, took control of the steering wheel and shifted the transmission into neutral. The car slammed to a stop.
I took my foot off Jesus and the engine idled.
“We better stop now before I destroy your car.”
No, no, that was better than I expected you to do! We just need you to keep doing it until you get the knack.”
It was a lie but I liked it and submitted to his control.
With the help of gravity, repeated attempts, more stalls, the Trinity eventually magically joined in harmony and the car moved forward in first gear. Soon the knack of comingling God the Father, the Holy Spirit and Jesus was easier than riding a bike.
He switched to the level stretch at the base of the hill. There, I repeated the process without the aid of gravity and after a few more stalls and jerk starts, I got to where I could move the car without killing the engine or jilting forward. Once I was confident at this, he made me shift to second, then third gears as the car raced to fifteen, then twenty miles an hour.
With wet palms, steering wheel and shift lever, I changed gears without his hand guidance. Relentless, he gave no succor and had me drive back to face the hill upward. There, I struggled again, until I could get the car into gear and move uphill, without stalling.
We stopped after this accomplishment at a donut shop where he had coffee and me, tea. I rushed to the restroom to dry as much of me as I could. Back at the table, he kept smiling and telling me he knew I could do it while I fretted about body moisture.
Back at the car, he told me not to use my left foot unless necessary or I’d wind up pushing on the brake and gas pedals at the same time. He kept me driving until I could do stop signs and stop lights but after three hours, I panicked. I’d been gone longer than intended and knew my absence would be questioned at home. Why wasn’t I there to fix breakfast?
I had him drop me off at the Pink Elephant Market on King Road where I bought a bottle of maple syrup, then walked home, still fretting over perspiration. By 10 o’clock, everyone was up. They stared at me when I walked in. Mom demanded to know where I was.
“I’m sorry. I ran to get here. I met Julie; you know Julie. She has a new hairstyle. Cut short and bobbed in the back. I told her to stop by the house but she couldn’t. She has a boyfriend! I ran home when I realized how late it was."
I lifted my hair as if bobbed. As a condemned sinner, I’d become a good liar with Dad’s example.
He’d told a whopper with me in the passenger seat when stopped by a cop for speeding. He convinced the cop he wasn’t really speeding, just rushing home, a falsehood created by saying I wasn’t well. Then he diverted with a couple of truths. He explained Mom was Filipina and was the hysterical type. The officer asked where I felt ill. I whined.
“All over!”
He gave us an escort home and Mom was hysterical to see a cop car pull up. Dad tied his lie to diversion. When I questioned him about it he, explained how best to lie but to save them for when necessary.
Julie did have a new hairstyle and a boyfriend. I used the ran home to cover my clothing sweat marks.
Lying with diversions sidetracks inquiries of your falsehood. If your lie is subsequently questioned, remembered the diversion and forget the lie, that’s what Dad said.
My lie was forgotten as they gulped down the overdue pancakes. The topic of conversation shifted to why I wasted money on real maple syrup, a second schemed diversion. Dad didn’t eat pancakes. He looked at me askance and smiled while he ate his fried noodles but asked no question.
The following week was my school Easter Spring Break. Each afternoon, I walked to the Story Road market and drove out its parking lot for another lesson. Monday morning, after my Spring Break, he stood next to the car in the driveway and announced to Mom as we approached.
"Guess what? Elizabeth’s driving today."
Mom didn't believe him but he had me pull my learner's permit from my purse. Behind the wheel, I started the car, he sat next to me and Mom was next to the passenger door. To her amazement and muttered protests, I adroitly backed out the driveway. On the street, her amazement grew to a comfort level. I pulled up to school, the girls nearby stared in amazement, I hopped out and he drove off to take Mom to work. My school status rose.
Soon afterward, I went with him, chaperoned by Mom, for my driver's test. With my rabbit’s foot talisman as backup, I passed without difficulty and was issued a California driver's license with standard-issue, deer headlights picture, stare. My dark face, slanted eyes, and big lips looked back at me. It was my certification passage to adulthood, more defining than the Catholic Church’s sacrament of Confirmation. Dad let me drive the Buick to get his cigarettes and take Mom to the store for shopping.
My family status increased but Mom, worried about, "boy next door", as she called him. Dad referred to him as, "white devil", "yáng guǐzi" in Mandarin or as "guǐlǎo", in Cantonese if on a second bottle of plum wine.
Until getting my license, we were just neighbors. Soon after teaching me to drive, he came on a Saturday morning when Dad was on one of his weekend escapades and asked me to drive to San Francisco. Mom protested but with insouciance, I got in his car backed out our driveway and drove off, he next to me, an unofficial announcement he was a boyfriend.
I drove the Bay Shore Freeway, (aka Bloody Bay Shore), without a divider back then, to San Francisco. There he had me park at the base of a steep hill. I had sweaty palms from driving the freeway and on the city's confusing streets but he didn't let me rest. He told me to drive up the hill and stop at the crest.
With his prodding, I succeeded in not stalling at its crest and other steep hills he selected. By the end of the day, I could stay stopped at a steep hill's crest and make the light when it turned green without killing the engine. My legs were and ached but I was proud I’d harmonized the Trinity pedals on San Francisco’s steep hills.
He then guided me to Fisherman's Wharf. There, I assumed the next lesson was about parking but he had me park in an easy diagonal slot and turn off the engine. Turning to him questioningly, he leaned over and kissed me on the lips, my first boy-girl kiss.
Before I could respond, he got out, came around, opened my door and took me by the hand to Alioto's Restaurant. In the restaurant I tried to act sophisticated with a boyfriend old enough to drink with a driver's license that aid I was a sixteen. I ordered cioppino, the first suggestion of the waiter.
Afterward, he drove home, me next to him. In front of my house, he kissed me again, longer and harder.
I giggled. He asked what was funny.
“I’m sixteen and never been kissed.”
I opened the door, ran in the house, undressed, showered and lay in bed with one hand cupping a breast and the other feeling my lips in wonderment. I had a boyfriend, me an ugly duckling.
Chapter 8, Engaged At 17 With Parent’s Consent
After his chauffeuring, driving lessons, hanging around our house, and more kissing he was an official boyfriend, we always together. I couldn't believe a man, someone old enough to drink, a college student, wanted ugly me.
The weeks flipped past. Our entwined free time shifted from driving lessons to getting to know one another chatter, but not conversation. We talked about what songs and movies we liked, public affairs opinions, who our families were at the surface level. It was not intimate like with Julie who I blabbed everything to, including the kisses he took, none of which were longer than three seconds. It was puppy love, me the puppy.
At the end of my junior year, on my seventieth birthday, he asked me to see the musical movie, Camelot, at the California Theater on downtown’s First Street.
He showed up at the front door wearing a tie and sports coat. An elusive premonition overcame me as I changed to more formal attire. Re-dressed, back in the living room, my perplexed conjecture was the evening included a special birthday present.
Downtown, he splurged and parked in an attended parking lot rather than drive blocks looking for a free space as normal. When the attendant gave him two quarters in change for his dollar, I checked to see if they were silver which were disappearing from circulation. Double luck, both were silver. I proffered two replacements but he simply gave them to me. Instead of requisitioning them as additions to my silver coin stash, I decided to convert them into a Kennedy silver half dollar for Mom.
Double luck but why’d he squander fifty cents to park, then give me the quarters? Is he treating me like a queen for my birthday? No, he’s afraid for his car. Downtown’s seedy now. Even Heart’s Department store’s closing.
The theater, now restored, was sinking into disrepair back then. The "old days", of ushers with cone flashlights guiding patrons to their seats a distant memory. Even in its faded glory, however, the theater's stereo speakers, big-screen presentation, opulent art deco décor, and opera-like balcony provided a presentation not experienced at a drive-in or on a television screen. They lack a grand movie theater's dark, intimate connection with fellow viewers, a mystical connection only vaguely captured in modern multiplex theaters.
There was, however, smoke. Each seat had its little ashtray on an armrest. Moviegoers could puff away during the movie. To ask them not to would be met with an incredulous look, of.
“What’s your problem?”
Looking up, the projector’s flickering light passed through the haze on its way to the screen creating a kaleidoscope of hues.
Seated together with popcorn and drinks, my mind wandered into the world of the movie.
What's the message, music, songs, love, love’s betrayal, happiness?
What do the simple folk do?
It’s a Cinderella tale. Guenevere’s an idiot. What more does she want? How can she be unsatisfied? Sir Lancelot’s a liar and a betrayer. I’d be loyal to my king.
After the show, we strolled, hand in hand, among the First Street throng to Original Joe's, a popular Italian restaurant landmark. The movie’s lyrics flitted about in my mind as melody residue.
In short, there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
In Camelot.
Tra la! It's May!
The lusty month of May!
That lovely month when ev'ryone goes
Blissfully astray.
I find humility means to be hurt
It's not the earth the meek inherit,
It's the dirt
That’s my inheritance, dirt. I’d never be Guenevere, a fool for Sir Lancelot. I’d be happily-ever-aftering, Queen of Camelot, Camelot my Cinderella story.
Down the street, a WWII era searchlight scanned the sky in front of a war surplus store, the hum from its diesel generator faintly audible. Its light beam pierced the night sky in a rotating pattern, seeking shopping moths, not the enemy bombers it was built for.
Dad took us on a family searchlight adventure. He drove us packed in the Buick, to its source which announced the momentous event of a new furniture store, a marketing gimmick.
How about me? I yearn for a beam to pierce my night sky. Like Dad, I look for hidden meanings. Does the beam foretell an omen? Is it predicting a domestic furniture future for me? Is my newfound boyfriend
a gimmick?
He had a reservation at Original Joe's. With name confirmation, we were led from the crowded entry to a red leather upholstered booth.
I’d eaten lunch there a few times with Mom when I was flush with cash. She’d come over from the hotel next door and I walked over from school. It was the first time I was there for dinner. Seated, we smiled in silence at one another across the booth table. The waiter came and handed us menus.
I noticed things cost more at dinner time versus lunch. He ordered their signature custom made ravioli dish for us. It was more expensive than spaghetti, an omen the night was special.
Our order taken, we returned to staring at one another as the waiters, with a white towel draped over one arm rushed to and fro. Pasta at Original Joe’s came with a sniff of sophistication. We piled on parmesan cheese to ensure we got our money’s worth. With bread dipped in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, we ate our ravioli and mulled mundane observations about the movie.
I drifted into thoughts of Mom who worked as a maid next door.
Mom works so hard. She saves her Kennedy silver half dollars but never manages to fill her little stash box. How I love her, her and her maids naughty guest tales.
Interrupting my musings of silver and Mom, he asked.
“Penny for your thoughts.”
My mind switched to him. What’s he thinking? Why me? What’s he think about me?
“A penny, aren’t they worth a dollar, a silver dollar?”
Silver was stuck in my mind since getting the quarters.
“Worth more than that. So what do you think?”
“I can’t believe I’m seventeen and going to be a senior.”
He kept staring, as if trying to say something but stuttered something inane about King Arthur. It was as if something eminent was up. At last, I said.
“You want a picture of me?”
He returned his attention to his pasta, dusting it with more parmesan cheese.
Getting dressed up, paid parking lot, silver quarters, movie theme, searchlight beam, Original Joe's ravioli were omens. I didn’t connect them.
Parked in front of my house, he kissed me, kissed me again, for almost three seconds, as if for reassurance. He pulled away, looked at me oddly, reached to the glove compartment, opened it, fumbled about, and took out a small jewelry box. He handed it to me but said nothing. Opening it I saw a ring, its little diamond light beam in a silver setting beaconed up.
Without taking it out, I turned and asked, incuriously, "You want to go steady?"
"No, I want you to marry me."
Closing the box, I looked down in confusion, a tear in my eye, saying nothing.
"Are you saying no?"
A few months earlier I’d never been kissed. Now I was facing a marriage proposal, one by a man hardly known. I sat silent, then asked.
"You want to marry a skinny, just seventeen, Asian, still in high school?"
My question, in truth, was to me.
"Me, poor, high school girl, just turned seventeen, Asian, marry a white man, five years older, graduating from university?"
"When I first saw you, I wanted you. We won't marry until you graduate. I’ll have a good job. I know I can’t offer Camelot but give me time, I can. Just nod yes."
I wouldn’t graduate for a year, a forever time to me then. Confused and seeking a diversion I replied.
"You need my parent's permission."
I gave back the ring.
"I'll ask them in the morning,"
He kissed me passionately, for the first time longer than three seconds. My breasts pushed up against him. He interpreted it as my consent to marriage. Breaking free, I ran in the house. On my bed, I tossed in confusion, still, a girl, life-changing too fast but wanting out of my house. Then I realized, it didn't matter.
My parents will say no.
The next morning, Saturday, he came over. Dad atypically was at home for the weekend. I stayed by the stove, looked down, absentmindedly cooked breakfast and pretended not to know the purpose of his visit.
He knew enough to ask Dad first and motioned him to the backyard as the house was too small for a private conversation. Dad, glad for an excuse to smoke, got his cigarettes and followed with his cup of tea.
I assumed Dad would say I was too young, still in school and he was not letting his only daughter marry a white devil. After Dad's cigarette and tea they returned with Dad nodding to me and smiling, his blessing. Next, he took Mom. It took longer and she returned crying but also nodding acquiescence.
He told them we wouldn’t marry until I graduated, he had a good job and he would "honor and protect" me. I suspected Dad's agreement was due to one less in the crowded house and the potential of a son-in-law to borrow from and Mom's tears of my not going to college were offset by my marring someone responsible, unlike Dad.
My brothers were excited at the potential of having their own bedrooms. No one asked if I agreed as they congratulated me while I served breakfast, stunned at the spontaneous change of my status.
So, it was, that Saturday morning, the day after my seventeenth birthday, my fate was decided. I was engaged, a girl, already taken, who in a year would leave home and school to become a man's wife, a man hardly known. It was as simple as that.
Suddenly, home and school, my focal points, no longer mattered. They were temporary lapses until marriage and having kids. I was "promised to another" and expected to be an adult but was still a girl. The parking lot, quarters, movie, searchlight, restaurant were omens. I just didn’t connect them and mused.
What’s a simple folk girl to do? I’m engaged, a simple girl is getting married, that’s what I got to do.
Chapter 9, My Fiancée Honors and Protects Me
My fiancée’s parents were initially not pleased their only child chose a young, poor, Catholic, Asian to marry. Well, mostly they were upset with my being Catholic but could say little due to their failed status.
My fiancée and I helped support our parents versus their supporting us. We both endured Dad cash raids, he for drinking bouts, me for gambling sprees. I also endured sibling "borrowing" but hid my savings in a secret bank, a carved-out niche in the sheetrock, inside my bedroom closet, above the door. No matter how hard they searched, my safe was never discovered.
I suspect my safe's still intact and the current occupant unaware it’s there. My fiancée opened a real bank account in our names, one which required both signatures for withdrawals. Our marriage nest egg grew even while helping parents.
His infatuation with me remained a mystery but I accepted I was to be married on graduation by wearing his ring, except to school where it was prohibited. There I wore it on a gold chain concealed from the nun's view under my blouse instead of the Saint Christopher's medal I’d once wore.
While poor and from a dysfunctional family, like me, he had a future on his college graduation. I wanted an escape from the pernicious monthly rent is due crisis, out of my cramped house and have a husband who didn't leave on the weekends. Not the best reasons for marriage but, for me, good enough. I wanted a husband who went to work in the morning, didn't drive away in the evening, a home we owned, a nice neighborhood, and two kids. In return, I'd be a super wife and mom. He didn't want to be his Dad and I was determined not to be Mom, a housekeeper, supporting a womanizer, stuck with a brood of kids.
I knew he was going to be successful, enjoyed cooking for him and enjoyed my “already taken” status. While controlling, he never belittled or physically threatened me and appeared to be genuinely attracted to me. With him, I was safe, safer than being alone or at home were lack of money was a constant hazard.
A man loved me, whatever love was, the only man ever kissed. I didn't think of romantic love. I loved a secure economic future.
Engaged to him provided self-confidence. He brought groceries to our house for me to cook, ate there and took leftovers to his parents resulting in my cooking for two families and our engagement pleasing all. I was happiest with him at our dinner table and me at the stove cooking, especially if Dad was there and we cooked together.
Saturday nights we saw a movie and went for pizza afterward or drove around but rarely stayed at either of our dingy houses.
We went to the County Fair and spent more time looking at the animals than the carnival rides but he did foolishly try to win a teddy bear for me. He had to settle on a pair of fuzzy dice to hang from his car mirror.
We did things which didn’t cost much like roller skate at the rink on the Alameda, watch San Jose State’s football team lose and go to the Rosicrucian Museum and look at mummies which were free. Once, we spent an evening at San Francisco Airport and watched travelers arrive and depart to exotic locations. He took me to my senior ball with a dress I made.
He continued to live at home after his January graduation professional employment to be next door to me and save money. All went orderly to the path to our marriage except one issue, the military draft.
His student draft deferment ended on graduation. Our wedding was not until June when I graduated from high school. The draft could swoop down like it did on my older brother Rickie and take him away. The Vietnam War required draftee fodder. Losing Ricki two years earlier was a crisis in our family which seared the danger of the draft in my mind. While he said we would marry regardless, his being in the army was not the requisite security promised. His draft status initially kept our scheduled marriage uncertain, my future vague and our marriage unassured, despite the engagement.
Just after his graduation, his student deferment status switched to ll-A, a technical civilian deferment due to his employment as an engineer at Lockheed Aircraft in Sunnyvale. It was the good job promised with no draft risk. With my graduation and his "good job" my betrothal sealed. I was taken, promised; marriage assured on high school graduation as an eighteen-year-old bride.
Mom became more pleased with our engagement as she knew him better due to his "honoring and protecting me" but still lectured about not getting pregnant. Like the nuns she didn’t talk specifics, just don't, inferring I was to remain a virgin. Once marriage was assured with the “good job”, however, being a virgin on the altar was no longer important to me.
Like puberty and menstruation, no adult talked to me about birth control. The church stridently condemned "the pill" which was changing the world. Among the girls at school, it was THE topic with the talk mostly of how to get the “the pill." A few, very few, had a mother who went with them to the doctor and got them on the "pill". The nuns seemed flustered girls could "do it" and not be punished with pregnancy. The church was in turmoil over this earth-shaking change.
For me, it didn't matter. At seventeen I couldn't get the "the pill". You had to be eighteen to see a doctor without a parent present. Mom would never agree to take me to get "the pill". Sex was a taboo subject. To say,
"Mom, take me to the doctor and get me on the "the pill" so I can have intercourse.”
would in my mind, stop the earth's rotation. It was don’t ask, don't tell. She lit a few more. candles in church and I never broached the subject of what happened alone with him.
My fiancée could be arrested if we had intercourse, me being under eighteen and he over twenty-one but that didn’t happen back then. Lots of girls got married at seventeen and eighteen, pregnant on the altar. While we came close, we didn't, “do it”. With our wedding assured I was okay with having intercourse despite Mom's extra candles and the nun's admonishments. I figured my fate’s sealed; it doesn’t matter if I’m pregnant on the altar but he "honored and protected me." As with other things he took responsibility for my virginity, I belonged to him and he wanted me a virgin on the altar. I was pleased he wanted that, it meant he loved me.
We shifted, however, from kissing goodnight to ‘necking” and "petting" as it was called. Our kissing went well beyond the church's three-second limit for a mortal sin to occur. Then it happened. After a movie, parked overlooking Steven's Creek Dam, we were grinding against each other on the front seat, fully clothed, what was called “dry humping” back then. I felt his erection pressing against his pants, pulled my blouse and bra up and had him kiss my nipples for the first time. While he did, I lifted my skirt and put his hand on my panty crotch.
As he kissed my breasts and rubbed my panty. I climaxed in a shudder, four months before our scheduled wedding. He was the more surprised at my ardor and exclaimed I was, “Vixen,” as I straightened my clothes and sat up.
“Necking” and "petting" became our sex life. Soon after the Steven’s Creek Dam climax, we were alone in his house while his parents went out to a movie. He kissed me while we watched TV. I got up from the sofa and led him to his bedroom. I laid on his bed, opened my blouse, unhooked my bra, pulled my skirt up, and my panty down while he kissed, fondled and pawed. I opened myself for him. He laid aside me, rubbed my vagina.
I then unbuckled his pants, pulled them and his shorts down and saw for the first time his penis. Unlike my brothers, he was circumcised. I stroked it until he ejaculated.
When his semen spurted out, I jumped back in amazement. Proud of my accomplishment, awed by a feeling of power, hereafter his penis was tagged Squirt.
Dissipated we lay next to one another and he fell asleep. We were almost caught by his parents when they returned home early. I woke him up and we rushed out of the bedroom as his parents came into the kitchen from the attached garage. I suspected they thought we did more than we did.
Even with our "petting" he remained inexperienced and didn’t understand my magic clitoris button. He scolded Vixen we could not "go all the way", preached our marriage was still inchoate when she became too aggressive and kept his “honor and protect” promise.
Vixen still took soapy showers. I fantasized about movie scenes, making bad boys spew and a penis ejaculating inside me.
Chapter 10, Girl’s Night Out
In the summer of 1967, just after my engagement, I got a job cleaning dishes at The Plaza Lanes on White Road near our house, with fibs I was eighteen and had quit school.
The pay, much better than baby-sitting or picking fruit was augmented with tips shared by the waitresses. At the start of my senior year, I confessed to the manager who hired me and quit. She loved my work but hated my lying to get hired and quitting but I’d saved enough to buy a neighbor's car for three hundred dollars, a two-door, 1956 Desoto, hardtop.
The Desoto, a tank with tail fins, rumbled when driven. Inside, it had big front and rear bench seats, power window controls, a push-button automatic transmission and a miracle radio bar which shifted to the next clear station when tapped, an expired status symbol. The driver's door was jammed shut and required a passenger door entry and exit, reflected in the purchase price.
The Desoto gave me freedom, like its namesake, to explore new worlds. Turning the corner from home, no one knew where I was, where I was going, or where I had been when I returned. I loved my new independence.
With my own car, I provided family transportation and drove Mom shopping but stayed in the car and listened to the radio if she went to the grocery to avoid food stamp stigma. I drove her to work, parked the Desoto at her hotel and I walked to school. No longer did we wait for a bus, endure its frequent stops and comingle with other riders. My one-year younger brother got his driver’s license in the Desoto with me as an instructor. Its automatic shift meant he didn’t learn to drive manual shift and I retained a smug driver’s superiority over him.
Dad made us park on the street so he could park in the garage. Thereafter the front of our house was cluttered with our cars, typically with my brother’s '52 Chevy in some state of disrepair. None of us bothered with car insurance.
With the Desoto, I blossomed into school popularity but retained only my one close friend, Julie. Only she knew about Vixen and Squirt. In high school, she had blossomed into the beautiful category. Boys chased her. She was attracted to the "bad boy" type, with fast cars and lost her virginity in the back seat with one. As a “fast girl”, I was stimulated by her escapades and quizzed her about sex details to prepare for my marriage. Her veer to the wild side, however, skewed her life's universe to an unhappy ending.
My fiancé took control of not just my life when with him but all of it. His directives were, finish high school, plan the wedding, work weekends, save money, avoid boys and be with him. It was simple enough. I agreed with one concession due to my high school status, “girls' night out” on Fridays. The 1956 Desoto meant I was the driver for the girls.
My new friends, in exchange, invited me to their slumber parties and taught me about makeup. I learned how to look older, hide minor blemishes, make my eyes more oval, paint my nails and style my hair. It was my first experience of looking pretty to be noticed. I loved red lipstick and nail polish.
We tested how much makeup we could get away with at school until forced to go to the lavatory and wash it off.
Shoes concealed our polished toenails from the nuns. We painted our fingernails on Fridays after school then smudged them clean Monday mornings. I applied lipstick before the rear-view mirror as soon as entering the Desoto after school in Mom's hotel parking space. The hems of my skirts were raised to the limit imposed by the nuns and higher after school.
Neither Mom nor my fiancé was in favor of my driving on "girls' night out", attending slumber parties or the makeup sessions but I loved them. They were my weekly allotted highlight. Fridays, at a girl’s house, we put on makeup, dressed risqué and then I drove them to a drive-in, usually the El Rancho. Sometimes a girl hid in the trunk to avoid paying but mostly to get away with it. The movie presentation was unimportant.
At the drive-in, they flirted as they walked to and from the concession stand among the forest of mounted speakers and herd of cars. If a car was spotted with fogged windows or even better, rocking, they rapped on a window for laughs.
Afterward, we cruised downtown San Jose, American Graffiti style, up First and down Second Streets.
The rendezvous spots were Mel's or Spivey's Drive-Ins for close encounter flirting.
Boxed in among the parked cars at the drive-in, we ordered cokes. The carhop mounted her tray on the passenger side window as I kept my window up to keep boys at bay. Sipping cokes, we listened to radio music, made crude jokes about boys considered losers and the girls flirted with the cool ones until we forced to leave for lack of additional purchase.
The girls gave phony names and phone numbers to those not desired and real ones to those sought. If they were asked why my window was up, they explained I was stuck up and an old engaged woman.
At Mel's Drive-In, two months before my graduation and scheduled wedding, my rolled-up window was tapped. He was tall with shoulder-length, dark brown hair. He had a mustache, pale blue eyes and wore a multicolored shirt with big lapels, a wide belt and bell-bottom pants, a hippy, not my type. He also had a cute smile with a narrow gap in the center of his upper teeth, suggesting mirth.
I pushed the window button and rolled it down. His droll voice, jovial when introducing himself, informed me his name was Gary, a twenty-year-old, San Jose State University sophomore. His1965 burgundy colored Pontiac GTO was parked nearby.
Bantering, I learned he graduated from Los Gatos High School, a school in a town of rich people. His only job was attending school, which I envied. The other girls tried to get his attention but he stayed by my window. When he asked about me, I told petty lies but gave him my name. When the car hop told me to leave, he asked.
"What's your phone number?"
As I maneuvered out of the parked cars, he tagged along next to my window. Turning the steering wheel to squeeze by another car, I blurted, “Cypress 8-2021,” my real number.
Back then phone numbers were simple to remember. There was no need for an area code and prefix words made the first two digits letters of three words, AXminster, CHerry, and CYpress. The first number after the word was limited to six for Axminister, two or eight for Cherry and the four even numbers for Cypress. With the prefix word and its associated number, you only had to remember the last four digits. The word and first digit also revealed a phone’s general location. CYpress 8 meant East San Jose, and me, a poor girl.
The next day he called. Summoned to the phone by Mom, I rued having given my number when I heard his voice. His clever words, however, kept me on the line even though I had to keep my end of the conversation low and ambiguous with family present.
After chit chat to know a little more about each other, he asked a strange question.
"You ever go to Alviso?"
"No, why?'
I knew Dad gambled there at a place called Vahl's because once he came home and proclaimed, he’d broke the bank at Alviso’s Vahl's. For a month thereafter, we ate well. Gary wanted me to walk with him on Alviso's train track to the salt ponds, a weird request, something never heard of.
Instead of answering, I turned away from Mom and whispered.
“Do you know of a place in Alviso called Vahl’s?”
“Sure, everyone knows Vahl’s. It’s an Italian restaurant, an Alviso landmark. Supposed to have good food but I’ve never ate there.”
"Take me there Monday after school and I'll see your salt ponds."
"Deal! How about four o'clock?"
"How do I get there?"
"Take the Alameda to Santa Clara, turn right on Lafayette Street, drive all the way to Alviso and turn left on Taylor Street, you can't miss it."
“Good, I’ll see you then.”
As I set the phone back in the receiver, I told myself.
It’s not a date. I just want to see where Dad gambles.
I told no one I was going.
Chapter 11, Alviso Train Kiss
Everyone had heard of Alviso, had a vague notion of where it was but few had ever been there, including me. Its reputation put it on the, best if skipped list. After class Monday, following his directions, with a map and my lucky rabbit foot for backups, I drove to Santa Clara, then headed north on Lafayette Street.
Leaving Santa Clara, the scenery shifted to a mix of small industrial and agricultural until the 1930's pink stucco and red tile roof buildings of California’s vast Agnew state mental hospital complex was reached. Agnew was a place the State of California locked up the mentally insane, like in the movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Agnew was another place everyone heard about but avoided. I was more familiar with it than most because when young, our family temporally occupied a rural farmhouse near it. Occasionally we heard howling emitted at night from the campus, as if simians were proclaiming jungle territory.
Relieved to be past Agnew, the two-lane country road continued past smelly dairies, pear orchards, a city dump, the start of wetlands and finally to the hump of Highway 237. Highway 237 was elevated to prevent its flooding and blocked my view of Alviso. As my Desoto crested the highway to the stop sign atop, Alviso revealed itself, poor, rundown and unprotected from flooding.
Lafayette Street, in a twist of irony, turns into Gold Street entering Alviso. I passed ramshackle and abandoned buildings with growing apprehension. At Taylor Street, I turned left one block to another misnomer, El Dorado Street.
Fronting it, on the left corner, was Vahl's. Like Gary said you couldn't miss it. Vahl's appeared much nicer than my expectation. It was an island of clean, respectability among the surrounding decay with fresh exterior paint and a neon sign on the second floor proclaiming Vahl's. I thought.
Dad comes here to seek his El Dorado but like those of yore rarely finds it.
Gary’s car was parked in front. I drove past and parked in a secluded corner of the rear parking lot. Dad usually stayed home on Mondays after a weekend of carousing but I didn't want to take a chance. Gary re-parked next to me and came to open my car door. He was dressed for hiking, no longer a hippy.
At the window, I explained the door was jammed, scooted over and exited the other side. I came in my school uniform, unprepared for hiking but had brought a nylon windbreaker and wore sneakers.
The building entrance opened to a cocktail lounge that included a bar, a little stage, and piano. Stacked before the mirror behind the bar were green, blue and pink glasses. The dining area was accessed via a leather-clad door with window porthole.
When we passed through it, we entered a dining room with sturdy wood tables, covered by red and white checkered tablecloths suggested Italian fare. All was neat, clean and of 1950’s-time warp decor. An elderly, short, stocky woman with blazon, red-dyed hair, hustled out of the kitchen to greet us. As the sole diners before the dinner time rush, she fussed over us like a grandmother. At my request, she seated us in an inconspicuous rear booth.Seated, she scurried off and returned with large, leather-bound, menus. I scanned mine, saw Cioppino and ordered it. Gary seconded me. A twinge of fiancé-guilt percolated up.
Cioppino, what I ate at Alioto’s after my fiancé’s first kiss.
My high school uniform stated my age was eighteen or less. She asked if we wanted a bottle of wine with our meal then looked askance at our coke requests. It was obvious things were different in Alviso.
As we ate, the crowd began to show. Soon the lounge filled and a small group gathered around the piano. They took turns singing Italian and old Sinatra songs. Finished with my Cioppino, I excused myself to the restroom to case the place, the purpose of my being there. After washing up, I sauntered out and observed a small staircase to the second floor near the foyer. I dawdled over to it.
With an ear cocked up, I heard male voices above. Emboldened, I took a couple of steps and observed a wispy layer of ceiling smoke and heard the distinctive sound of cards shuffling, mingled with laughter. Obviously, the second floor included a card room.
Dad goes up and down these stairs. He tells jokes while he shuffles and plays cards up there. His Lucky Strike pack of cigarettes sitting on the card table, the ones he often sends me to the store to purchase.
I didn’t go up.
Back at our table, I told Gary it was time to see his salt ponds. He rose, took our tab to the front cashier and paid in cash; the only payment permitted as declared by the large sign on an old fashion heavy, brass cash register. I asked the grandmotherly matron, as she rang up our fare, if they only sang Italian songs. She smiled and told me, one gentleman, on occasion played the piano and sang in Chinese. Gary left an impressive five-dollar tip.
Outside, it was a late, warm and sunny afternoon. A salt-tinged breeze from the Bay tussled my hair. It
pushed aside the odors of tidal mud, distant dump, and sewage treatment plant. I worried Gary was going to trip out on marijuana or a hallucination drug like LSD sweeping America as part of the hippy culture.
My fiancé and I avoided drugs. We expected rich hippies to self-destruct and make it easier for us to get ahead. I hated smoke too and had nagged Dad into smoking outside the house. If Gary was going to light a joint or drop acid, I wasn’t going to the salt ponds. I’d seen what I came for.
Instead, he acted as tour guide, explained the rail line embankment on the other side of El Dorado Street was elevated, like Highway 237, due to periodic flooding and it led to the salt ponds. We climbed atop and looked down to the Guadalupe River Slough behind it. The slough rose and sank with the tide and the tide was out. Its banks were decorated with hulks of decrepit boats stuck in mud plus a few stilt pole boat houses where boats were built on the cheap.
Gary resumed his guide role and led forward to the salt ponds. We walked between the iron rails atop the graveled embankment, the rails supported by large black wooden timbers embedded in the gravel. They gave off a strong odor of creosote and were set apart to un-match any gait we tried. We varied our steps as best we could as we stumbled from timber to gravel to timber.
He narrated an Alviso history lesson during our jumbled stride, how it once was a San Francisco Bay bawdy, boomtown of shipping, bars, sardine canneries, oyster beds, market duck hunting and a getaway for less than respectable behavior. He explained it became a rundown semi-ghost town due to being the low spot of Santa Clara Valley and at the end of San Jose's sewage line. It’s topographical subsidence and subsequent periodic flooding was the result of the Valley’s aquifer being tapped for agriculture.
He was enjoying himself. It was obvious he was enamored with Alviso, liked to reminisce about its colorful past and explain its unique desolate beauty as we trekked between the rails toward the salt ponds. Suddenly he stopped and pointed.
"Elizabeth, look there. That's the old Bay Side sardine cannery, once the largest cannery in California until the sardines disappeared. A Chinese guy owned it. Next to it was a worker's dormitory, gone now. The workers slept in bunks and lived on rice.”
I looked up from the timbers I was attempting to pace with to avoid tripping and saw an old abandoned brick and stucco building. The Bay Side name was still visible. Looking down to pace the rail line timbers again as we trekked, I wondered.
Did Dad once work there, sleep and eat rice in the dormitory?
Two blocks north of Val's was a weathered Alviso street sign printed in old-style black on white porcelain proclaiming, Elizabeth Street. It was chipped and rusty from age to match its woebegone surroundings. At Elizabeth Street, Gary pointed to the decrepit Laine's grocery store and the adjoining Victorian mansion, which could serve as the stage set for the movie Psycho.
"See the old building across the street?
That's Laine's Grocery Store. Beyond it are the salt ponds. The mansion next door is where the owner used to live. Laine's has been closed for years but I met him when I was young. I used to stop here, drink a coke and talk to him after duck hunting. He told me a lot of Alviso history.
Before it was a store it was a saloon and before that a Chinese gambling den. That’s why it was originally built. Let's keep going, I want you to see a ghost town among the salt ponds, called Drawbridge."
As we crossed Elizabeth Street and passed Laine's I experienced another sensation of connection.
Are Val's, the shuttered cannery, Elizabeth Street and Laine's parts of Dad's mysterious past? Is this street name the source for my name?
As we left Laine's, we entered a surreal world. From the rail road's secure high rock embankment, we viewed the cordgrass and pickleweed estuaries, the sterile gray colored salt ponds, the dry, dusty gray dredged levees which formed them and beyond the open Bay. Waterfowl clustered in sloughs.
On the right, following the rail line, were high wire, electric transmission towers with concrete feet anchored in tidal muck. They once were connected by wood elevated catwalks now bleached grey and often rotten or missing a plank.
In the distance were dim lines of civilization, the General Motors plant in Fremont where the rail line seemed to go, the blimp hanger of Moffett Field in Mountain View to the left and next to it the vast complex of Lockheed Missile and Aircraft Company where my fiancé worked. The spring green hills of the Diablo Range rose above the horizon in front of us, clearly visible unlike from the much closer view at home viewed through smog's haze.
Gary explained it was a world created by Leslie Salt Company who built levees to create evaporation ponds by dredging. Salty Bay water was shuttled from pond to pond as the salinity increased with evaporation until the water turned pink. In the end, evaporation created a pond surface crusted with salt to be scraped up and piled up into a silver-white crystal mountain before packaging. In the far eastern distance, Gary pointed out the salt mountain created by pond water shuffling.
Eventually, we reached Coyote slough and the rail line’s humble Drawbridge, built when boats connected San Jose with the Bay, obviously long unused. Gary explained it wasn’t actually a drawbridge but one that swung open to let boats pass. I wondered when and what was the last boat it opened for. Surrounding it was a ghost town of abandoned buildings on stilts. Gary related how in its heyday oyster pirates, market duck hunters, gamblers, a famous Chinese madam and other misfits populated it. Again, I felt an odd sense of connection.
Drawbridge was the end of our trek. We paused against its railing above the slough to take in the open expanse view, desolate beauty of its own.
He asked.
"What’d you think?"
"It's a beautiful, a hidden but open world. I'm happy I came. I'm having a strange mystical experience."
"I knew you'd like it because you, like me, are different."
"How am I different?"
"You're like here, mysterious, different but beautiful. It's a compliment. I'm not saying it right. What I am saying is like me, you see the beauty, most don't and you're beautiful too."
Beautiful, my fiancé never says that.
"You're making me smile. You compare me to Alviso, say I'm beautiful like the salt ponds? A strange compliment, no? I love this place but how am I beautiful like it?"
"What I’m trying to say is you're beautiful, not pretty, beautiful. Not that you look like this but your beauty is mysterious like this."
Silent, I let his attempted beautiful compliment explanation become part of the strange connection felt. After a moment in the wind, now brisk and chilling, he said,
"It's time to go back; the best is still to come. Follow me and keep up."
We trekked back, the wind from the Bay, now up to buffeting, as we stumbled between the rail’s wooden timbers and gravel. My hair swirled by the wind, flayed against my face as I stared down to avoid tripping. The smell of creosote hastened my step.
He walked ahead, set a fast pace and then waited against the wood wall of Laine's for me to catch up, well ahead of me. We had met no one. It was the evening's dusk. He looked at his watch as I finally arrived.
"It's coming, soon."
"What's coming?'
"Listen! Lean against the wall next to me. I hurried here so we wouldn't miss it."
Standing on the tracks, I soon heard it. I moved next to him, out of the wind and leaned against the old wood wall of Laine's facing the rail line. A long, slow, freight train soon turned a bend and approached. The engineer seeing us gave a recognition horn greeting as the big diesel engines reached Laine’s.
Leaning against the wall, the embankment's rails close before us groaned under the train's weight. The wood timbers, we recently stumbled on, thumped up and down in their gravel beds as each rail car wheel passed over.
The train cars' steel wheels click-clacked to the rail joints. Those needing grease screeched steel complaints.
The sounds and movements echoed against the wall, a wall encasing histories past. Our bodies absorbed the vibrations, noise, and echoes. By the time the caboose passed and silence returned, we were holding hands. As it rumbled away, he leaned over and kissed me.
I broke free, walked quickly in the early evening to my car behind Vahl's, tears in my eyes. He followed, said nothing while I raced through emotions. I was still experiencing the vibrations of the passing train, the echoed sounds, our holding hands, his kiss and the strange connection to Alviso's past as I hurried to my car behind the now crowded restaurant. Vahl's was aglow in neon lights. Its emitted muffled Italian singing added to my confusion.
When I opened the car door and scooted to the driver's side, he followed. We sat silent a moment, him next to me. With ardor, he leaned over and kissed me and kissed me again. I couldn’t stop, nor say no. As we embraced, his deft hand unbuttoned my blouse, slipped behind and unhooked my bra. He kissed my exposed breasts back and forth as I slid down, my head below the steering wheel, he above. His nimble fingers reached under my skirt pulled down my panty and caressed my vulva.
Stroking my magic button, my pelvis arched up to his caresses. His tongue darted in my mouth, out to my ear, back and forth. My head under the steering wheel, body pinioned on the bench seat, partially undressed I yearned for his kisses and nimble caresses. I drifted into physical and emotional oblivion.
His embrace suddenly released me. He rose, sat up, loosened his pants and exposed his erect penis. Freed, I sat up from under the steering wheel, stunned. He fumbled in his scrunched pants pocket and took out a condom.
He wants to take me while my fiancé tarries!
My clothes in disarray, Vixen panting yes, facing the muzzle of his throbbing erection, my mind in disbelief, I turned aside to the window and whimpered, not knowing what to do.
Tears streamed down my cheeks.
He asked.
"What's wrong?
I turned to face him and mumbled once the sobs subsided.
"I'm engaged."
"Wow. When's the wedding?"
"June, June 15th. Everything’s ready."
"That's only two months away!"
"I shouldn't be here. I should’ve told you. I can't. I'm sorry. "
"Maybe you're not ready. You're still in high school."
His voice was calm, persuasive, rational, hopeful. He was thinking I was old enough to seduce, if not marry. He leaned closer to kiss again, his penis still at attention, ready if I was or not. I pulled back, pressed my head against the door window. Emotion ebbed, rational thinking crept back. My voice returned.
"I'm a virgin. I gave my phone number because of your smile but then wished I hadn't. Then you called. I only agreed to come because you mentioned Alviso. My Dad gambles at Val's. I wanted to see it. That's why I agreed to come. Now I realize, I'm starving."
With the word starving, I returned to sniffling.
"I'll take you back to Val's. Any place you want to eat."
"No, no you don't understand. Not food, I'm starved for beauty. Seeing the beauty, you showed, knowing what I miss, that’s what I’m starved for. It overwhelms me. Then the train, your kiss, I'm sorry. I don't know what I want. I'm scared, lonely. I’m crying for myself. I need to think. I'm confused. I need to go home."
Pulling his pants back up over his now deflated member, he moved to the door, opened it still clutching the unopened condom and got out, confused too. He walked to the driver's window while I pulled my panty back up, re-hooked the bra and fastened blouse buttons. He waited patiently until I finished and opened the window. With the window down, safe behind the jammed door, I noted the condom was re-pocketed.
He pleaded.
"I want to see you again. You're beautiful.'
"It won't work. I'm taken, promised to another. I'm not free to give myself."
"Even if engaged, I want to talk to you. We can just be friends. We can see many beautiful things together. Let me follow you to make sure you get home safely."
"No, no, I'm okay. Please, just let me go. I need to think about my life."
I started the car, rumbled the Desoto tank out of the parking lot and drove back to Tropicana Village. As I dove, I thought of how he had unexpectedly filled my gritty world with beauty. Feeling oppressed and sorry for myself while listening to radio music, the beautiful musical Love Is Blue came on, so apt.
My only beauty is radio and church music!
My drab life churned in my mind until parked in front of my house.
I straightened my rumpled blouse. My eyes were red in the mirror, my lipstick smudged. I opened my purse, used its hanky to wipe my lips, dapped my eyes and went inside holding the purse to hide a lipstick smear on the blouse. In the living room, behind the little entry, Dad snored on his recliner, an empty bottle of Chinese plum wine on the floor. My siblings were splayed about on floor and sofa watching Gilligan's Island on TV. Mom was ironing in the small dining area.
She asked why I was late but not answering, I went to the sanctuary of my bedroom, to think. On the bed, I stared at the ceiling, clutched my rabbit foot talisman and thought about my life’s fate.
I’m just a poor girl in a gritty world. It's not the earth I’ll inherit, it's the dirt.
The phone rang. Called by Mom, I came out, picked up the phone on its little table and heard Gary's voice. I carried the phone with its long extension cord to the safety of my room and closed the door. Mom looked at me askance, questions on her face.
Late from school, arriving in disarray, a male stranger calling, and now taking the phone to my room, something was up. It was. She was by now a staunch fiancé defender.
In the safety of the bedroom, I was pleased he called. Answering my hello, he asked, "You okay?"
"Yeah, I just need to sort things out."
"I'm glad you walked the tracks with me."
"I'm glad you took me but now I'm confused about a lot of things."
"Well, life's confusing, isn't it? Don't worry about it. Can I see you again?'
"I don't know if it is a good idea. I'm committed to someone. Have you ever been committed to someone?"
"I just go day by day but I want to see you again."
"Can you make a commitment if I see you again?"
"I'm only a sophomore in college and want to go to law school so I guess I have a commitment until then. I still want to see you."
That was it, not the answer sought but an honest one.
"I’ll always remember our hike on the tracks, the train as it passed while we held hands. I cherish your kiss. You have your commitment, I mine. Please don't call again. Let me be."
I set the phone slowly and reluctantly in its cradle not listening to his plea to see me again.
When I brought the phone back out to its little hall table, my fiancé was standing in the living room. Mom obviously had summoned him from next door. He looked at me uncertainly. Setting the phone down, I went and embraced him, to the relief of both he and Mom.
I vowed to leave my gritty world of dirt and find life's beauty. Gary honored my no contact request, removing his temptation. I still think of him now and then and wonder about life's possible alternate universes, entered into by a simple choice or chance but of unknown consequences.
I have no regrets of a missed alternate fate or the different universe I'd have entered if I'd seen Gary again. I'll stick with my universe, the one I've lived and experienced. In it, I’ve found the beauty yearned for when I drove the Desoto home that night by choices and chances which came thereafter. It’s the universe I’ve inhabited with my husband, the man I embraced that night.
Chapter 12, Wedding Bells Peal
Things after Alviso’s train passage went as scheduled with one minor change, the wedding’s week delay to avoid it occurring while on my period. The reschedule also provided one last Desoto “girl’s night out”, a bachelor party of sorts. It was uneventful, except the girls made me hide in the trunk when we went to the drive-in movie.
On Saturday, June 15, 1968, a bright summer morning, my fiancée and I were joined in marriage, on the cheap. The groom was a twenty-three-year-old college graduate, with the good job promised. The bride was an eighteen-
year-old high school graduate, the virgin the groom ensured. Everyone except us thought the bride too young with the groom kidded about robbing the cradle. I had no qualms of being too young even though I still thought of myself as a girl, not a woman. My fiancé was the responsible ones in our households. I would be the good wife and he the good husband.
We married "In the church", meaning a Catholic wedding and a happy mother. This required my’ non-Catholic fiancé, to take Catholic dogma lessons and sign papers raise our offspring in the faith. The civil paperwork was simple, just birth certificates and signatures.
The parish priest initially was more difficult. He thought of me as a poor, young, Catholic girl taken advantage of by an older protestant. After the priest knew more about us and our families, he became less critical but admonished us in his pre-nuptial consulting not to use birth control. He explained, in detail, how it interfered with God's plan for marriage, the birth of children. He omitted mention of how medicine interfered with God's other plan, death.
I kept my dogma heresies to myself and used the confessional to manipulate him. My confessions, untruthful since the first soapy shower, let me confess lies. The sanctity of confession meant he was gullible to what I said. In the dark confessional booth, I kneeled before his little screen door and turned him, convinced him my fiancé was good.
I concocted whoppers of hating school, jealousy of rich people, confessed truthfully to everyday venial sins and fessed up to kissing longer than three seconds, all to establish veracity. Tossing in the failure to observe the Catholic orthodox arbitrary kissing time limit of three seconds was needed plausibility as a priest is not that naïve. In confessionals, they’ve heard it all. Fessing to it, allowed him to think he was monitoring my sex life, a sex life limited to kissing, excluding "petting" and Vixen's pleasures, lies of omission.
I "befriended" him by seeking his advice. In the confessional, I explained I had confusion over how to be a good wife. He loved providing guidance on being married and being a wife even though he never was either. Summed up, his curator's advice was; obey my husband, sex is good if for procreation, never divorce and ensure the children are raised as good Catholics. He admonished me to control my protestant fiancé’s sex urges until the wedding vows were exchanged. Once they were, I was to submit to them but not use birth control.
With my veracity established, the admonishment was my cue to put my fiancé’ into the priest’s good graces. While I admitted my fiancé liked kissing, I confessed truthfully, it was he, not me who drew the sex limitation line before marriage. With the marriage date confirmed, I was okay with his sexual urges but my fiancé’ insisted I remain a virgin until we met on the altar.
The priest gobbled it up. He was convinced, I was
a good Catholic girl; my fiancé did love me and we were “behaving” before marriage. He respected my fiancé, ’even though Protestant by my telling the truth in confession after establishing veracity with lies.
I figured if I didn’t give him a few mortal sins, the questions would start but more importantly I wanted him to authorize my marriage to a non-Catholic. My confessions assisted him to do so, to even approve of my fiancé.
My fiancé put his time in but never changed his agnostic beliefs. His parents, initially upset about his marrying a Catholic and taking Catholic tenet lessons, relaxed when told it was all a charade to keep Mom happy. In the know, they became co-conspirators. Dad didn't care but did tell me to take the rabbit's foot on my trip to the altar. He always liked a backup.
We exchanged vows at the Most Holy Trinity Church, which had been recently built to serve Tropicana Village. Its name was appropriate for my First Communion experience. Just immediate family attended plus a friend each for bridesmaid and best man. My bridesmaid was my sole, true friend, Julie, one who knew more about who I truly was than anyone at the wedding. Dads wore ties, the only time I ever saw my father-in-law do so. I made my gown, white, including veil, reflecting my virginity.
Our parents didn’t socialize, and we worried how they would interact, he over his father's drinking and I if Dad would even show up. When he did, I was relieved and proud when he walked me down the aisle. Mom sobbed through the short ceremony from my walking down the aisle in my father's arm to when I walked out, a married bride holding my husband's hand, my rabbit’s foot talisman in the other.
Before the altar, the priest said Latin prayers, recited the necessary civil code and blessed us. We said "I do's", exchanged small gold bands blessed with sprinkled holy water, my veil was lifted, we kissed, turned and walked out the aisle as church bells pealed to proclaim us man and wife.
Outside, a younger brother tossed rice and after a few hugs and handshakes, we clambered into three cars and went to my parent's house for the reception. At the house, Mom was no longer crying but smiling and hugging everyone. Dad cooked a combination of Chinese and American fare with prime rib and chow mein, ingredients I purchased.
Our belongings were stashed in a recently rented duplex in Mountain View. Our honeymoon suitcases were packed. We were anxious to depart but did our reception duty. With music from a portable record player on the rear concrete patio, I danced with my father for the first time, amazed to discover he was a good dancer, better than my new husband.
My siblings behaved themselves as did my in-laws. We were presented with wedding gifts. Dad gave two Waterford crystal wine glasses which I still have. My in-laws gave a $500 check as if to pay back some of their prior saving raids which my new husband was afraid would bounce but didn't. My mother gave a little statue of the Virgin Mary which I still pray to. My siblings gave a set of quality dishes as if to say they were sorry for the past bean pole comments.
After a dance with the few who desired, the food eaten, toasts given, clothes changed, my wedding dress stored in a bedroom closet guarded by Mom, it was time to depart. By then, I too was crying. My new husband dabbed away the tears, led me to his car, put in our packed bags and we drove off, the car smeared with "Just Married" rude comments plus two tin cans tied to the bumper by the younger brother who threw rice on the church steps.
I looked back as we drove off. My father in law and Dad were arm in arm waving goodbye. Dad held a bottle of Chinese wine in his free hand and my father in law a bottle of Jim Beam in his. Our Moms were waving with one hand while wiping tears with hankies by the other.
It was as good a wedding as I could have hoped for. I turned back, left them behind and looked out the front window, forward to a new life as a wife.
Chapter 13, Honeymoon Highway, Past and Future to Be
Disneyland, our honeymoon destination, was a two day, four hundred-mile trip before I-5. We took the US Highway 101 coastal route, it being scenic and more appropriate for our honeymoon versus the more direct US 99. Neither of us had ever ventured so afar, which made it also an exploration of the unknown.
Leaving the reception, sitting next to my new husband, now his wife, his '57 Chevy, now ours, we started off nostalgically, drove to downtown San Jose and turned south on First Street. As we drove past Original Joe’s, I looked about to see if any Notre Dame girls were cruising and flirting with boys. None were seen.
First Street merged into Monterrey Road, aka US 101. We sped past other prior haunts, the El Rancho Drive-In, Trader Lew's and Frontier Village Amusement Park. Passing them I reminisced about my past.
Highway 101 followed the trail blazed by the Spanish Missionary, Father Junípero Serra who built California’s 21 missions from San Diego to Santa Rosa. Each mission was one day's walking distance apart, so the nuns taught us at Saint Clare’s. It was known differently as it twisted and turned through towns. Locally, it shifted between El Camino Real or The King’s Highway, in Spanish, The Alameda or The Avenue in Arabic and Monterey Road in English as it traveled south from San Jose to Gilroy.
Once on Monterrey Road, as the car’s wheels spun, I imagined each tire rotation equivalent to the good friar’s stride as he established his Missions in the California wilderness. I concluded, however, the story, while beautifully said, was a lie. The road simply followed a preexisting Indian trail.
Back then, Monterey Road between San Jose and Gilroy was a 3-lane highway. The middle lane was a two-directional passing lane, known as the suicide lane. We used it to pass slow vehicles while squinting ahead at headlights to see if another was using it coming from the other direction. I silently threw in a Hail Mary each time we passed, a doubting heretic.
The highway was lined with giant black walnut trees. These were planted by Father Serra to provide travelers shade and nuts to eat according to the nuns. As they whizzed past, I again overrode their version and concluding they were products of Cal-Trans or the WPA. I knew those trees, whose sturdy trunks which often killed when a car veered into them. They triggered my thoughts back to when I first saw them and was introduced to life’s
disillusions.
Hearing from the nuns the potential of free nuts, I checked at the local market and saw the little packages of black walnuts were more expensive than the English ones. My dream to buy a portable electric Singer sewing machine for seventy dollars was beyond my babysitting earnings of fifty-cents an hour. Suddenly, it appeared possible to be able to afford one selling nuts. While I loved Mom’s foot pedal sewing machine, I wanted my own, one in my room which could do zig-zags and buttonholes. Collecting, shucking and selling black walnuts would be better than pushing firecrackers.
I reported this potential treasure trove to the family. All became interested in my proposed enterprise, each with their own desired monetary windfall agenda. On an October Sunday morning, we piled in the Buick with empty onion sacks, baskets and paper bags to scoop up nuts and get rich. The trees stretched for miles on both sides of Monterey Road. Black walnuts perched by the thousands in the trees, exposed naked as the leaves fell. Even more laid strewn on the roadsides, hidden within large gold, green and black rotting husks. As if plump eggs, they lay awaiting our harvest except for unlucky ones that had fallen on the road. Those were squished flat by speeding cars.
Dad steered off the road, down a little embankment and parked as I heard the crunch of walnuts trod over by the Buick’s wheels. I rushed out of my cramped back seat quarters between brothers with my sack and exclaimed.
“It’s an Easter egg hunt!”
I rushed about to get rich while cars zoomed past. Mom took the two youngest brothers to gather nuts along the road ditch, away from traffic. Dad, I and the 2 older siblings scooped up the easy pickings among the golden fall leaves near the road.
Picking them up, however, we discovered their thick husks were messy and fell apart in our hands. True to the tree’s name, they stained our hands black. Our paper sacks fell apart in soggy husks and the onion sacks oozed black juice. Dad got upset about the mess on the Buick's floor and in its trunk. After a couple of hours, we all clambered back in the car and returned home to reap our surfeit harvest with blackened hands.
Back home, the rotten husks further blackened us as we attempted to remove the messy husks and whack open the tough shells with hammers. Soon dreams of a Singer sewing machine and the purchase agendas of the others began to dissipate. Expectation of a wealth windfall turned to disappointment, disillusion, and anger, anger at the guilty one for the family disaster of black paws.
Mom, with black hands, apron and dress, exasperated after pounding on nuts to crack their hard shells, meticulously digging out the small amount of meat within a nut, took her desperation out on me. Squatting before a pile of big husked nuts and the little bowl of extracted meat, she muttered, "toink", Tagalog for "silly girl", then worked her way up to "gaga ka", "stupid girl".
Fully worked up, she arose, stood before me, lack hands waving, shouted and belittled me for my nutty idea. My siblings egged her on. It was the first time she yelled at me, me her always obedient helper.
Crying, I ran to the bathroom, ashamed. It was Dad who rescued me. He got up from his nut shucking, laughed about the family effort of sudden wealth and dumped the nuts in a backyard into a causality heap and came to coax me out of the bathroom. As I sobbed behind the locked door, he whispered.
“Shu, my little virtuous swan. It’s okay. Please don’t cry. I have your rabbit’s foot. It needs petting. Please open the door. It’s all going to turn out okay.”
It was the first time Dad ever pleaded with me. I stopped my lamenting and meekly opened the door. Standing before him, I took the rabbet's foot. He smiled and hugged me and again reminded me I was his little swan.
It was the only time until my wedding day he hugged me. He had me wash my blackened hands then drove me to the San Carlos Street, Sear’s store, my paws still blackened despite scrubbing. On the way, he sang songs and got me laughing with his Yankee Doodle Dandy ditty.
At the store's entrance, he stopped and said, “Shu, life’s full of black walnuts. Success is how you move on with hands dirty.”
There, he bought me the portable Singer sewing machine which had launched my Monterey Road quest. He said it was for my next birthday, a beautiful lie. The truth was, it’s the only birthday present he ever bought me. His store entrance advice about life, I try to abide by.
I shifted thoughts to him puffing his Lucky Strike cigarettes, his love of cards.
I love Dad. He's irresponsible but he loves me.
I made my wedding dress with the little portable sewing machine and still have and use it. It and its memories became the true treasure gleaned from the walnut trees.
Years later I learned the trees were planted by a good Samaritan and his son, Horace Keesling, entirely on their initiative, to provide the thirty-mile stretch between San Jose and Gilroy with shade for those traveling by horse and wagon. It’s a better story than the one told by the nuns.
I returned to the present. The throaty muffler of the Chevy's V-8 manifold echoed against the tree trunks. Car light beams commingled with their leafy canopy. The effect was, eerie fluttering shadows mixed with the steady throaty hum of the engine, an appropriate backdrop for the uncertainty of our beginning new lives as man and wife. My thoughts switched from the past to the future to be.
Will my husband hug me and make things all right like Dad when I do something stupid? Does he really love me? Will he grow tired of me, find another, divorce me? Will he drive away in the evening to meet others? Will we have kids, grow old together? Who will outlive the other? Will my honeymoon be wondrous or turn into disillusionment?
I ran down the possibilities without answers and concluded humming the lyrics from Mary Poppins:
"Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours to see
Que sera, sera
What will be, will be."
He heard me humming, Whatever will be, will be, smiled and we sang the words together, he out of tune. With the last repeated stanza, I switched to praying the car wouldn’t break down. It never occurred to me I would betray him but I did, over and over.
Past Gilroy, the furthermost of our combined prior travels, I settled down to a travel's blank reflection as we passed the dark countryside, interrupted by the small agricultural towns of Salinas, Soledad, Paso Robles, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Maria.
Santa Barbara was our first night's destination, out first night married. The place of the night's big action.
Chapter 14, Motel 6 Virgin Gets Pregnant
Past Santa Maria, the next town was Santa Barbara, our wedding night’s destination. Approaching it, my mind awoke to the unmentioned, "big event”, the scheduled end of my virginity.
My mind raced through questions.
Will I prove my virginity and bleed? Will it hurt? What will his penis feel like inside? Will I feel his ejaculation?
And over and over the lyrics from the song,
Will, You Love Me Tomorrow by the Shirelles,
"Tonight with words unspoken
You say that I'm the only one
But will my heart be broken
When the night meets the morning sun?
I'd like to know that your love
Is love I can be sure of
So tell me now, and I won't ask again
Will you still love me tomorrow?"
Finally, after seven hours of driving, we pulled into the Santa Barbara, Motel 6 parking lot, parked. He turned the key. The rumbling drone of the Chevy engine manifold ceased. The kiss upon lifting my veil in church was only a symbol for the real thing. Now it was time for the real thing, marriage’s consummation, the event which cemented church vows.
Back then, Motel 6 meant a six-dollar night’s stay, nationwide, a great deal for a motel near the California coast. Booking required a long in advance reservation. As the wedding planner, this chore was mine. It cost fifty cents to call directory assistance to get the motel’s phone number and another fifty cents for the long-distance call to make the reservation a Motel 7 to me.
Stiffly we stumbled out of our "Just Married" smeared car, tin cans long gone, stretched and then remembered to hug. It was a warm Southern California, late evening, the sky clear with a luminescent moon. The faint rolling noise of coastal surf and the smell of the nearby ocean made for a romantic first-night backdrop, so far so good. We sorted and carried luggage to the front desk where he signed us in, our first proclamation of Mr. and Mrs., a cause for a kiss.
Dragging our luggage up the open concrete steps to a 2nd-floor room, we fronted our honeymoon suite. After fumbling with the key and its green plastic room number tag, he unlocked the door and swung it open. Beyond the threshold was a sparse room, devoid of charm. A double-sized bed took up most of the space. He entered and drew the shabby curtains closed. I waited outside. He remembered, came back, picked me up and carried me across the threshold. We kissed, broke apart, went back out, picked up our luggage and re-entered. I took my bag to the small bathroom, shut and locked the door, stripped, showered, towel, dried and brushed my teeth.
Naked, apprehensive, I opened my bag. Inside was a white 3-piece bridal peignoir set from Macy's Department Store, the most expensive attire I’d ever purchased up to then. I slid on the sheer nylon negligee and the chiffon jacket but skipped the panty as an unnecessary hindrance for the night’s big event. I dabbed on Channel 5 perfume purchased also for my taking, reapplied lipstick and checked the mirror.
As I studied my reflection, I thought of Dad. He could wrap a small gift so artistically the present took on greater value. I hoped I was wrapped to present greater value. Reminiscing of Dad, I went back to his old tweed striped suitcase he’d lent me for my honeymoon, opened it and took out my lucky rabbit’s foot from its satin pocket. I gave it a little stroke for luck, returned it to its hiding place and was ready.
Opening the bathroom door, seeing the worn carpet I went back and put on my white wedding pumps and came out to surrender to his unwrapping.
He sat on the bed in his T-shirt and Jockey underpants. He wore socks to also avoid touching the carpet. Jumping upon seeing me, he stood before me. I smiled a demur consensus in my white gown and pumps. He bent forward and kissed my lips, lips he assumed incorrectly touched only by his. He was ready for action if not dressed for it. He turned and led me to the bed, sat me down, untied my chiffon jacket and slid it past my shoulders. His look was a bit uncertain if I was ready. I was.
He laid me down on the bed, stripped except for his socks, his penis straight out, ready to claim me as his wife. This time there would be no hand stroked finish on a towel. He climbed on the bed with the light on, spread my legs with pump adorned feet, knelt before me and raised my negligee with my arched assistance. He stared down, admired my breasts, then my sparse, straight, black pubic hair, assumed incorrectly again as only his, untouched by another.
He reached to the nightstand and opened a tube of Vaseline he had set there. Confident, he spread Vaseline on his penis. Then in a rush, presented it lubed to my virgin vagina. Confronted, it resisted. He kissed me, forcibly thrust forward, with a sharp pang of pain, it gave way. He was inside me.
On the squeaky Motel 6 bed, twelve hours after the wedding bells peal my cherry vagina cork popped open to his thirst.
I felt his sperm rush in. Finished, he looked down at me almost as if guilty. I smiled assurance it was okay. He pulled out, rolled over and went to sleep. Left to sleep on the wet spot of his signature taking, I rolled into a fetal position and slept too, truly married.
I awoke to the early morning as I’m wont to do. The sun’s light filtered through the window’s dreary drapes. It was the first time I awoke next to a man. It felt good. He faced the other side of the small bed, curled in a fetal position. I looked about the room, creeped out of the bed, walked barefoot to the bathroom and sat on the toilet to pee. Relieved, I reflected on what had happened.
The wedding night was a disappointment. Even though with foresight he’d brought lubrication, his penetration hurt. The room was unromantic. The small black and white TV, hung on a wall mount, required a quarter. There were no soap bars, only a liquid soap dispenser. You could hear and feel the vibrations whenever someone passed the room on the concrete balcony. The El Rancho drive-in would have been more romantic.
I crept back to bed and spooned behind him. He awoke, rolled me on my back and took me again with grunts, without words, as I stared at the ceiling. I thought of the priest’s admonishment of heeding to a husband’s urges.
After he finished, I arose and got out of bed and traipsed back to the bathroom to shower. I looked back at the blood spot which had dripped through my negligee on to the sheet during the night, my warranty of virginity. I wondered what the maid would think when she saw it.
Showered, caked blood commingled with semen, washed away, no longer the virgin, a legally inseminated wife, I dried off on a towel that could compete for flimsiness with Mom’s hotel discards. I looked up to the small bathroom cabinet’s mirror. My lips were lips recently kissed in passion by another. My breasts and pelvis were sullied too. I was the virgin he wanted but not as he assumed. What would he have thought if he knew of Gary? When I set the phone down, walked to him and hugged him, he knew something had happened. He never asked but now was assured I was the virgin he wanted.
Although the surroundings of our wedding night were dingy, I was pleased, pleased we finally did it, pleased I gave him my virginity, pleased he was the one who took it, pleased I was officially married and most pleased when the night met the morning sun, he still loved me.
I lacked guilt as I dressed. Instead, I wondered about his experience. How did he know to bring Vaseline? What women could also lay claim to his penis? As I opened the bathroom door, I knew it best to forget all. Why question the past, why think of what alternate worlds could have been, why dwell on what ifs? What would have happened if Gary said he was ready to make a commitment? I pulled open the window curtain. Light flooded in. I was ready for the present and its future to be. Gary was history.
“Honey, get showered, get dressed. Let’s go to the Uncle John’s pancake house we passed last night. I’m starved.”
As he showered and dressed, I packed up. I stuffed our dirty laundry in a bag but carefully folded my peignoir set with its soiled negligee in Dad’s suitcase. It’s kept a faded spot after many washings, proof of my wedding night’s virginity. As I sip wine and write, it pleases me seeing it now.
Packed, he checked out while I carried our bags to the car. Back in the Chevy, we drove to Uncle John's Pancake House and ate breakfast, the beginning of our marriage routine.
Sated, we preceded along the coast on Highway 101, past Ventura, through Thousand Oaks, then up, over, and down the oak clad hills to the vast sprawl of the Los Angeles basin with its rug of smog. We entered the big city often talked about but never seen other than on TV’s Dragnet. Our Chevy became another ant among millions spewing smog on its freeway spider web.
US Highway 101 became the Ventura Freeway and connected to downtown LA, mostly low-rise buildings back then. From there, directed by me as navigator with maps strewn on the front seat, we took the Santa Ana Freeway until we reached Anaheim. We were more amazed seeing remnant orange groves and strawberry fields than the never-ending subdivisions and shopping centers as we drove. Los Angeles was not a real city like San Francisco. It was endless San Jose's connected by freeways. Off the freeway in Anaheim, we pulled into a motel called Cinderella near Disneyland.
Mornings and evenings, he took me with his pent-up sex drive. Soreness ebbed and on the fourth night, I experienced an orgasm during his huffing and puffing. It came as a surprise like the first ones in a soapy shower and "petting" but was different. It was more intense, he atop, his penis inside, my arms around him, my vagina stretched and clasped to his penis, my clitoris humming with his thumps. I returned upward thrust to his downward strokes. We climaxed together. I liked it. I wanted more.
The next morn I woke him, fondled his penis erect, climbed atop, slid it in with the last of the Vaseline. I rode my merry-go-round horse to an orgasm controlled by me; our heads pressed together. Surprised by Vixen's ardor, he flipped me over once I finished, and thumped hard until he spewed inside me. For the rest of the honeymoon, we got our money's worth out of the motel's bed.
Disneyland then was divided into four themed lands, Adventure, Frontier, Tomorrow and Fantasy with the later my favorite. I enjoyed Disneyland like a kid. I rode the merry-go-round, "The Mad Hatter's" teacups and "It's A Small-Small World" over and over reflecting my maturity.
"It's a Small World After All" echoed in my ears from the many times I waited through the throng line to ride again and again. It summed up my mindset.
It's a world of laughter, a world of tears
It's a world of hope and a world of fears
There's so much that we share, that it's time we're aware
It's a small world after all.
Food was expensive in the park. We ate breakfast at a Sambo's restaurant with its 5-cent cup of coffee and today’s totally incorrect logo theme of Little Black Sambo and the tigers.
We discovered Ralph's grocery store chain where we purchased takeout food for dinner. We also visited Knott's Berry Farm and spent a day at the Long Beach Pike boardwalk, now gone.
The ship Queen Mary had recently arrived and sat berthed at the Long Beach pier. It was being prepared as a tourist attraction, not yet open to the public. We walked out on the pier to see it up close. It looked like the Titanic. From the wharf, I peered down at the lowest level of portholes, just above the waterline.
A wave of terror swept me. I shuddered thinking how my family would be in steerage if on the Titanic. As it went down, we would be trapped below deck, pleading behind locked steel grates. Depressed, my new hubby hugged and comforted me but he thought me a silly girl. We went back to the beach. Wading in the warm surf offset the gloom of seeing the Queen Mary.
LA freeways meant either creeping bumper to bumper or speeding over 60 miles an hour, bumper to bumper. The smog was real, the sprawl endless. Everything was expensive. Our honeymoon money exhausted, our time up, we headed home but on US 99, from a wondrous honeymoon.
We switched turns driving, kept our fingers crossed the wheels would continue to spin and drove nonstop. Late at night, we arrived at our new home, one half of a duplex. Exhausted but elated to have avoided car trouble, he carried me across the threshold to the bedroom. On the box spring and mattress on the floor, sans bed frame, we fell asleep, too tired for sex and me pregnant.
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