She doesn't live here anymore.

In the middle of the weirdness that was first grade, one day my parents drove us across town and got out of the car in front of a patch of dirt covered in pine needles. They said we were going to be building a house there. Wasn’t that exciting?!

Much like the baby in the tummy, my reaction was akin to, “What the hell are you people talking about?” I mean, we already had a house. Why would we build another one?

But they were going to sell our house. Whatever. Except now we had to keep it extra super clean all the time and periodically total strangers would knock at our door and be allowed to walk through. Before long, in a flurry of things I didn’t understand at all, there were boxes everywhere and my parents said we were moving into a rented house a few blocks away.

Before the actual move, we went to look at the rented house. They said we would only be living there for a short time while our new house was being built. My antennae for my mother’s moods had become fairly refined and I could tell that she did not like the rental house. At all. For starters, we were going to be putting all of our stuff in storage and using the furniture that came with the house. The house was decorated in a Depression-Era-Old-Lady style. The dark wood furniture creaked and all of the upholstery smelled like old fried chicken. The living room and kitchen were small. My sister Mandi and I would be sharing a room with two twin beds for sleeping, but the house had a finished basement that we could play in. It worried me that my mom didn’t like the house, although I secretly thought that it was kind of cool that we would basically be pretending like this was our stuff. It was the ultimate make-believe game.

Another strange thing was happening around this time: Both of my parents were on a relentless campaign of reminding me that I was a big sister and that Mandi was my responsibility. That’s literally what they said. She was my responsibility. It was my responsibility to make sure she didn’t get hurt and to play with her and to make sure she ate at meals. I generally loved any assignment that put me in an adult-like role, and I was growingto like her more, but she wasn’t even two yet. Part of the campaign included my parents repeatedly telling Mandi that she had to do what I said. Not surprisingly, I became pretty bossy, but it was frustrating to be on the hook for everything I did and (nearly) everything she did.

And then one day Mandi and I were sent to a neighbor’s house for several hours so that my parents could finish packing up our stuff. It was just getting dark when they picked us up and brought us back to what had been our house so that they could finish cleaning it. My eyes nearly popped out of my head as we walked in the door. The house was completely empty. At first I ran around the living room with glee. Nothing to crash into or watch out for – just open carpeted space! I ran down the hall to my room.

It was empty too. No bed. No drawing table. No dolls. I could barely see in the twilight. I shut the door muffle the sound of vacuums and started to cry. This was my room. I didn’t care where we lived, but I wanted my room. My parents came in and found me, and I told them I wanted them to saw off my room and bring it with us.

And then we were in the rental house. I agreed with my mom. It sucked. I hated sharing a bedroom and the stupid basement playroom with Mandi. I was with her all the time and my parents always seemed to be in a bad mood. The dirt lot where our new house was supposed to be was still a dirt lot. One day I took a detour as I walked home from the bus stop to walk past our “old” house where new people were living. I crept onto the front porch and looked in the window of what had been my room. There was a big bed in there covered in an ugly bedspread. In the corner was a small  wastebasket. It looked awful. It looked like the people who were living in the house didn’t even like my room.

A few weeks later there was more “exciting” news. We weren’t going to build a house on the other side of town. My dad had gotten a new job and we were moving to someplace called Riverside.

You break, you buy.

(This is another installment in my little autobiography project, which started here.)

And just like that, kindergarten was done. First grade. Big time.

Being in the kindergarten reading group meant that I would be in an experimental class of a handful of first graders and a bunch of second graders. Unfortunately, my first grade teacher, Mrs. Barton, was unimpressed with the grand experiment because it was her last year of teaching before retirement. She and the regular first grade teacher, who was also retiring, had become best friends. So they did some teaching here and there, but mostly we watched a lot of film strips and listened to records while they snacked on jars of Planters Peanuts and talked about how great retirement would be.

Mrs. Barton seemed to like me well enough at first. But then one day my mom told me that she’d gotten a call from Mrs. Barton who said that I would no longer be chosen to do one of the prized classroom tasks: taking notes from the classroom to the office. Being the note-carrier was a huge honor – you got to walk through the quiet hallways alone, during class time, and interface with the secretaries in the office who were always especially nice. And carrying messages from the teacher to the office felt like a big, important job. But I would never get to do it again because Mrs. Barton had figured out that I was opening her notes in the hallway and reading them before I got to the office. She was right; that’s what I’d been doing. I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to do that. How else was I going to find out what was really going on? It seemed very unfair.

First grade slid further down the slope when a little girl in the other first grade class decided that she didn’t like me a lot. She said it was because I wore glasses. I was flabbergasted. I had to wear glasses. I certainly didn’t want to wear them. Why would she be so mean to me over something I couldn’t control? This girl had very long, blond hair and always wore white patent-leather Mary Janes. One day she and her rotten little friends tied me to the chain link fence at the far side of playground with a jump rope during recess. The bell rang and they ran to get in line to go inside, leaving me there. I started to scream in panic, so the girl ran back and untied me, but then started to shake me by the shoulders until my glasses fell off and broke.

Holy. Shit.

It was almost more than I could take. My parents were forever commenting on how expensive my glasses were and how careful I had to be with them. I didn’t want to even think about how much trouble I was about to be in for allowing them to break. Between hiccupping sobs, I blurted out the whole story to the teacher who had been on playground duty. While that teacher looked for someone to take me to the nurse, the sociopathic perpetrator kicked me in the shin, hard, with her white Mary Jane. I reported that too. While the other kids lined up, I was whisked to the nurse’s office, where I waited with icy fear to find out what was going to happen to me and my broken glasses. And then the nurse came in and said that my dad was there.

My DAD?? Is HERE??

Until that moment, I had known one thing for certain about my dad: On weekdays between 7:30 in the morning and 5:30 in the evening, he was at work. Period. Sometimes he even worked into the evening. My dad did not come to anything that occurred during the week. Not to doctor’s appointments. Not to school.  And now the nurse was leading me by the hand to the front office where she said my dad was waiting. I could not begin to process how much trouble I must be in if my dad had left work.

But there he was, in his tan coat and his tie. He saw me and smiled and bent down to hug me. And that’s when I really lost it. I wasn’t in trouble. He felt bad for me. I cried and cried and cried. My mom had been out running errands with my sister when they called, so when they couldn’t reach her, they’d called my dad. He dried my tears and said he would take me home and they would get me new glasses. And he wanted to know who this little bitch was who’d done this to me.

That’s not quite what he said, but I’m certain that’s what he was thinking.

"Come here, Janet!" said Mother.

(This is another installment in my little autobiography project, which started here.)

There was really nothing for me to do but ignore the baby. So I did. Except once when we were at my Grandma’s house. My mom had put my sister in a portable crib in my Grandma’s bedroom, shut off the lights and closed the door. Then she returned to the living room to talk to whatever adults were there. I was bored and I suddenly felt bad for the baby who’d been left awake and alone in a dark room, so I slipped in there. She was definitely alert to my presence and started chattering in baby gibberish. I was delighted to think that she knew who I was and that she wasn’t crying at the sight of me. I reached through the crib slats and gently rubbed her back. Within a few minutes she was quiet and asleep. I felt incredibly powerful.

But I had bigger things ahead of me. Or one big thing – kindergarten. Kindergarten would happen at the Big Kids School and I would have to ride a school bus to get there. On the first day, my mom took my picture in front of our house before we left. The morning was cold and my bare legs shivered underneath my short dress.

This is the age when my real memories start – when I started to try to make the image of myself that my parents were trying to build mesh with what I was feeling inside. I was painfully shy and my mom would try to counter that by pointing out when I had been brave. I had spent the summer before kindergarten taking swimming lessons with my mom’s friend’s son, Tim. Tim was terrified of the water and would scream and cry when the teacher tried to pry him from the side of the pool. I loved swimming. I didn’t understand why Tim was afraid of it and didn’t see swimming as an example of any bravery on my part. It would’ve been like perceiving bravery from watching me eat an ice cream cone.

But summer was over and it was time for kindergarten. I didn’t feel brave at all. As with preschool, the other kids usually scared me. The good news was that I loved my teacher, Ms. Steffens. She was a friendly Asian woman with a bright smile and a voice like Disney bluebirds. And I felt confident that she had a special fondness for me because her ten-year-old daughter and I had the same first name.

Plus, kindergarten was fun! Instead of the free-for-all of preschool, in kindergarten we were always doing things: learning songs, making spoon rests out of clay, learning how to make scrambled eggs. And I made a friend – a little girl with red hair named Emily who got off the bus at my stop. It turned out that she lived only a few blocks from us. One day, as we walked home, Emily suggested that I come with her to her house. I knew I wasn’t supposed to go anywhere if my mom hadn’t approved it, but here I would be confronted with a situation that challenges me to this day: I didn’t know how to say no. I walked with Emily to the front door of a small apartment. We went inside to find the TV on and her mom putting her hair in rollers in front of a mirror as she smoked a cigarette. I felt like I was being ripped in half. I said that my mom was going to be mad at me, and turned and left. I was right. My mom was furious. I’d been a couple of minutes late coming home, and it became clear that my mom knew who Emily was and didn’t want me to play with her. Something about Emily not having a dad and her mom having to work too much. I didn’t know it at the time, but Emily would be the first in a long line of friends my mom didn’t like.

Kindergarten only lasted the morning. But one day my mom excitedly told me that a few other kids and I were going to get to stay after school for something. I didn’t know why we were staying, but I thought it was neat. I knew the big kids stayed after lunch – only kindergarteners went home early. Maybe I was a big kid. After school, instead of getting on the bus, my mom appeared with my sister in her arms. About four other kids’ parents showed up too and we all sat at a table. We were going to read. Ms. Steffens passed out a  soft-cover book to each of us. We went around the table and each of the kids took a turn reading a page aloud. The story was stupid. Janet and Mark were siblings who didn’t do anything but have awkward, stilted conversations and play with their cat, Midnight. I could read all of the words except “Midnight” without help. It seemed like the other kids in the little group could too. Everyone acted like this was a Very Big Deal. I liked feeling like I was making the adults happy, but I didn’t understand what the fuss was about.

Shortly after that, I read a book about a little bear, a girl, named Frances. Frances wanted to hide and found a great spot in her dresser drawer. I thought this was brilliant. My dresser drawers stuck, but I had a small nightstand next to my bed with three drawers. The bottom one was the biggest and held all of my coloring books. I opened it, took all the coloring books out, and tried to climb in. Things didn’t work out as well for me as they had for Frances. The nightstand tipped over when I put my foot in the drawer and the lamp that had been on top smashed into a million pieces. My mom came running in, saw the lamp and started yelling and spanking. Hard. I was confused and scared, and I started to sob. My sobs seemed to make her madder because we were supposed to be getting in the car to drive for an hour to my ophthalmologist. My recollection is of her yelling at me for the entire ride about the lamp being an antique and from my Grandma. I had no idea what this meant, other than that it was an especially bad thing to have broken. We arrived at the doctor’s office – a specialist in pediatric ophthalmology. He always spoke in a sugary, sing-song voice. As I walked in he grinned and said, “Hi Kimmie! How are you today?”

“I’ll manage,” I said dryly and not smiling.

My mom loves to tell that story to this day. I actually hate that story.

And one more

(A continuation of my little autobiography project, which started here.)

So there I was, a shy and bespectacled four-year-old, when seemingly out of nowhere everyone started asking me about a baby. What baby? Whose baby? And then came some cockamamie story about my mother having "a baby in her tummy.” It was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard. Why was it in her stomach of all places? When was it coming out? Why had they put it there in the first place? The whole thing seemed too bizarre to be true, so I stopped responding to the seemingly endless stream of questions about it.

And then, even though they didn’t really know for sure, my parents assured me that it would be a girl. I ignored them. But they tried to sell me on the idea that she would be someone for me to play with once she magically got out of my mom’s stomach. My mom pointed out the big scar across the bottom of her belly, which she said the doctor could open again and get the baby. The scar made the whole thing seem more plausible. And it would be nice to have someone to play with. I started to get a little excited about the idea. I pictured a girl, just my age, with long hair that I could play with. Someone who would talk to me and swim with me and make it not matter that other kids scared me. She’d be my sister, so she would have to like me and be nice to me.

Suddenly my mom was going to the hospital for a week and it was going to be just me and my dad. There were lots of warnings about being helpful, because my dad didn’t really know how to do anything when it came to me. I had long, thick hair that he didn’t know what to do with. He only knew how to cook chili and scrambled eggs. I’d have to go to preschool every day, and then a neighbor would bring me to her house until my dad got home from work.

On one of the first evenings of this adventure, my dad didn’t come to get me until late in the evening, but he had good news. The baby was, in fact, a girl and everyone was doing well. Then why can’t they just come home now? I thought.

What followed was a succession of mornings where my dad would wake me up before sunrise and attempt to brush my hair. He would try again and again, with increasing frustration, to make a ponytail, pigtails, something. No go. So I would be sent off to preschool in pants and a shirt (instead of the dresses my mom made me wear) looking like a little cavegirl. One night he took me to a restaurant for spaghetti, along with the neighbors who had been helping to care for me. While the adults chatted, I picked up the noodles one by one and slurped them into my mouth so that the end of the noodle would whip into my shirt and face, splattering sauce.

No one noticed except my mom, whom we went to see at the hospital after dinner. I was too young to go to her room, but she waved to me from down the hall.

A day or two later, it was time for them to come home. My aunt came over to try to help my dad wash my hair.  This ended with me shivering in the tub while they tried in vain to get the soap out of my hair.  They gave up and an hour or two later I was sitting on the couch next to my just-arrived mom who was holding this ... thing.  A small thing with no hair whose eyes were closed.  Someone asked me if I wanted to hold the thing.  And before I could answer, it was being placed in my lap while the rest of the recently-assembled family peanut gallery shouted instructions to me: "Don't hold her by her head!" "Lean back -- you're going to drop her!" "Don't touch her face."  She opened her eyes a tiny bit and screamed and screamed.  Her face turned a brilliant purple.  Whatever it was that I was supposed to do, I'd done wrong.  And it was becoming clear that she was not something I could play with.

I felt ripped off.  And my shirt was still wet from my hair.

There are a lot of women in this story.

And then there was my mom’s side of the family. Unlike the fresh, cool lake near our house when I was a pre-schooler, my mom’s family could be quicksand.

Let’s start with my great-grandmother, who was alive until I was in my late twenties. We called her Gram. A sweeter, kinder, more lovable woman would be hard to find. Her gray curls fanned out in wings from her head, and she would always flash a 10,000-watt smile as she twanged “Hi Angel!” in her native Oklahoma accent. Gram was the youngest of nine or ten kids (I can’t remember) and she had moved to California, Steinbeck-style, in her late teens. Her husband, my great-grandfather, was called Papa by the family and he died when I was three or four. I have flashing recollection of him sitting in his armchair when we came to visit shortly before his death. Though no one would ever say this, from what I gather he was a mean-spirited alcoholic and a bit of a tyrant.

Gram and Papa had three girls: My grandma, Patrica; my great-aunt who everyone calls “Sug” (short for “Sugar”); and my other great aunt, Marilyn. Marilyn suffered a brain injury during childbirth when the doctor clamped forceps around her head too tightly. She never spoke and could barely sit up on her own. She lived with her family until she was seven or eight and then was moved to an institution. Her mother, Gram, visited her every week until she (Gram) died. To be clear: My great-grandmother visited her severely disabled daughter in the institution where she lived every week for nearly sixty years. I never met Marilyn, who died about eight years ago. When I was a child, everyone thought it would be too upsetting, and by the time I was older, we had left California. This isn’t much of a reason not to meet her, I realize. I guess it’s fair to say Marilyn’s mother and sisters never had the emotional bandwidth to handle anyone else’s reaction to her.

Sug married very young, had a daughter, Patty, and got divorced. I don’t know why, but he must have been pretty bad because obviously divorces weren’t common in the 1940s. Everyone hated to admit that Sug had ever been divorced. Later, she met a man name George, married him, and had a son, Casey, who was twelve years younger than Patty. Patty had four daughters, two older than me and two younger.

And Pat, my grandma, married my grandfather when she was in her early twenties. My grandfather died of lung cancer when I was two and I don’t remember him. If you ask pretty much anyone in my family, he walked on water and spun straw into gold. He was in the navy and at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked. After the war, he came back to California and joined the family business, which was owning and running a furniture store. They had two daughters, my mom and my aunt.

My grandma and Aunt Sug always lived within a few blocks of each other until my grandma moved to an assisted living facility about six years ago. When I was a kid, they both lived on Balboa Island in Newport Beach. Aunt Sug and George lived in a large, beach-front house, as George’s real estate business had been extraordinarily successful. After she was widowed, my grandma lived in a tiny beach bungalow in the middle of Balboa Island. Sug and George owned half of the house, on paper. Today, Balboa Island is some of the most expensive real estate in the country. Then, it was a little beachy area, though it was quickly becoming quite the pricey zip code. In other words, if my grandparents and great aunt had waited ten years before buying the little beach house where my grandma lived, they never could have afforded it.

And this was the way I came to understand things as a small kid. Uncle George was “rich” and therefore so were Aunt Sug and my cousins. Although as a kid, it just seemed that my aunt and uncle lived in a bigger, cooler house and they had a boat and my cousins got to travel a lot. My grandfather had died when he was only 52, and for dying that young, he left my grandma in good financial shape but her means were far more modest than her sister’s. But grandma wanted to keep up. She wanted to be every bit as well-dressed and well-decorated and socially sought after as anyone else on the Island. What this meant was that Grandma had very specific, definite opinions about what all of us should wear and do and say. And she would (verbally) cut you to the quick if you deviated from her world view.

Nevertheless, I usually liked going to visit her. Because my granddad’s family had owned a furniture store, her 900-square foot house was crammed full of the furniture that had been in their house in Whittier (just outside of Los Angeles) before he died. It was always neat as a pin, and the whole place smelled of the bay tree outside her front door and the salty ocean air. She could be counted on to have roasted, salted almonds in her refrigerator and chocolate hidden somewhere. We could walk just a few blocks from her house to go out to dinner or get ice cream. If there is a place in this world where I feel like I came from, my grandma’s house was it. Only the knickknacks and the framed pictures changed from visit to visit.

It wasn’t always beaches and almonds though. The worst visits were when she wanted to go shopping, and she and my mom would drag me to a terrible children’s store and march me into the dressing room with a half-dozen scratchy wool dresses to try on. When I would complain that I didn’t like them or that they were uncomfortable, my grandma would harshly and swiftly point out that one of my older cousins had a very similar dress and looked “darling” in it. And then my mother would pull me aside and hiss that the dress was expensive and that my grandma would be hurt if I didn’t like something she wanted to buy for me. I distinctly remember sitting on a cushioned dressing room stool at age five, alone, with silent tears fogging my glasses as I stared back at the awful kilt I’d been forced to try on. I knew it would be my Christmas present that year.

And you've probably already figured this out, but my dad and my Grandma could scarcely stand the sight of one another.