As scared as I was to tell him, I was excited, too. Maybe even a little proud. We had made this, created a child out of our love, and wasn’t that what I’d been raised to do?
He didn’t loosen his hold on me, that night I finally told him. We were seventeen and eighteen, respectively; kids. He had less than a month of high school left. I had more than a year. We lay in “our” place, in a bower we’d made in Old Man Kreske’s orange grove. There, we’d left out an old sleeping bag and a pillow. We kept our bed in a garbage bag and tucked it into a hedge when we weren’t there. After school, we laid out our sleeping bag and crawled into it. On our backs, always touching, we stared up at the sky. The air smelled of ripening oranges and fertile soil and dirt baked by the sun.
A baby, he said, and suddenly I was imagining you: ten fingers, ten toes, a mop of black hair. In an instant, I fashioned a dream life for the three of us, but then he was quiet and my doubt set in. How could he want me like that, me, who was so damaged?
I can go away, I said into the silence. To … wherever girls go. When I come back—
No. This is our baby, he said fiercely. We’ll be a family.
I had never loved anyone as much as I loved him then.
On that orange-scented afternoon, we started to plan. I knew I couldn’t tell my parents. If they could lock me up and give away my child, I knew they’d do it. And I didn’t think twice about quitting school, either. I was no scholar and I hadn’t even begun to realize how big the world could be or how long a life could last. I was a girl of my time. I wanted to be a wife and mother.
We would leave right after his graduation. He was alone, essentially, too. His mother had died at his birth; he’d come to Southern California with an uncle, after his father deserted the family. They were migrant workers. Rafe wanted something more for himself and we were naïve enough to think we could find it together.
On the date we’d chosen for our escape, I was crazy nervous. At dinner, I couldn’t get a word out. The last thing I wanted was dessert; I couldn’t choke down even a bite of my mother’s Ritz-cracker pie.
What’s wrong with her, Ma? my dad said, frowning at me through the blue smoke of his cigarette.
Homework, I mumbled, then shot to my feet. I washed and dried the dishes while my father smoked his cigarette in between bites of pie and my mother tended to some needlework sampler with a sentimental saying. I didn’t hear them talk to each other, which was hardly unusual. And really, my heart was pounding so loudly I’m not sure I could have heard their voices anyway.
I made sure everything was done perfectly, up to my father’s exacting standards, before I hung the gingham dish towel over the stove’s metal handle. By then, my parents had moved into the living room. They sat in their respective favorite seats—Dad in the olive-green mohair club chair with a fringe hem, and Mom at one end of the cream-colored sofa. Behind them both, bark cloth drapes in an abstract olive green, white, and red pattern framed the view of the neighbor’s house.
I have a lot of homework to do tonight, I said, standing at the edge of the room like a penitent, my hands gripping together, my shoulders hunched. I was trying so hard to be good. I didn’t want to anger my father even the slightest bit.
You’d best go then, he said, lighting one cigarette with another.
I rushed out of the room. Behind my closed door, I waited for them to turn off the lights, pacing, my packed suitcase stowed under the bed.
Every second felt like an hour. Through the thin walls, I heard Danny Thomas’s voice singing something on the television, and from under the door I smelled my father’s cigarette smoke.
At nine-fifteen, I heard them turn off the TV and lock up the house. I waited another twenty minutes, long enough for my mom to slather Noxzema on her face and pin up her hair and cover it in a net.
I was scared when I positioned pillows and stuffed animals in my bed and pulled the covers up over them. I dressed carefully in the dark. It was June, and even in Southern California it could get chilly at night. I put on a boldly colored plaid skirt and a black button-up sweater with three-quarter sleeves. I teased my hair and pulled it back in a ponytail and I opened my door.
The hallway was quiet and dark. No light shone from beneath my parents’ bedroom door.
I crept through the hallway, scared by the sound of my own footsteps on the carpeting. I kept expecting to be stopped, grabbed, hit, every step, but no one followed me and no lights came on. At the back door, with its crisscross faux-barn exterior, I paused and looked back at the house.
I swore silently that I would never come back. Then I turned, saw the headlights waiting at the end of the cul-de-sac, and I ran toward my future.
* * *
It wasn’t until we burned through the first tank of gas that the fear set in. What would we do? How would we live, really? I was seventeen years old and pregnant, with no high school diploma and no job skills. Rafe was eighteen, with no family or money to fall back on. In the end, the money we had took us only as far as Northern California. Rafe did the only thing he knew. He worked on one farm after another, picking whatever was in season. We lived in tents or shacks or cabins. Whatever we could find.
I remember always being tired and broke and dusty and lonely. He wouldn’t let me work in my condition, and I didn’t mind. Instead, I stayed in whatever hovel we’d found and tried to make it homey. We meant to get married. At first I wasn’t old enough, and later, after I’d turned eighteen, the world had begun to change around us, and it swept us into the chaos. We told ourselves that no piece of paper mattered to people in love.
We were happy. I remember that. I loved your father. Even when we both started to change, I hung on.
The day you were born—in a tent in a field in Salinas, by the way—I felt empowered and overwhelmed by love. We named you Tallulah because we knew you would be extraordinary, and Rose because your pink skin was the softest, sweetest thing I’d ever touched.
I did love you. I do.
But something happened to me when you were born. I started having nightmares about my father. Nowadays, someone would tell a young mother about postpartum depression, but not back then, at least not in a migrant camp in Salinas. In our cramped, dusty little tent, I would wake in the middle of the night, screaming. The scars of my cigarette burns seemed to throb in pain. Sometimes I thought I saw them glowing through my clothes. Rafe couldn’t understand.
I started to remember how crazy felt and to feel that way again. It scared me so badly I shut up and just tried to be good. But Rafe didn’t want me to be good, to be quiet; he kept grabbing me, shaking me, begging me to tell him what was wrong. One night, when he was crazed with worry, we started fighting. Our first real fight. He wanted something from me I couldn’t give. He pulled away from me, or I pushed him away. I can’t remember. Anyway, he stormed out, and in his absence I fell apart. I knew I’d been bad, that I’d lost him, that he’d never really loved me—how could he? When he finally came home you were naked and screaming and you’d pooped all over the floor, and I just sat there, dazed, staring at you. He called me crazy and I … snapped. I slapped him in the face as hard as I could.
It was awful. The police were called. They put handcuffs on Rafe and took him away and made me give them my driver’s license. That was 1962, remember. I was an adult, a mother, but they called my father. In those days, my mother didn’t even have her own credit card. My father said hold me and they did.