My
family landed in a spanking-new stucco bunIgalow in
Holly Park Homes, in Gardena, California, after the
construction of the San Diego Freeway leveled our
first house. Our new house had been built along with
hundreds of close cousins, all promptly sold off to
a generation of young families striving to inhabit
the American Dream-- three bedrooms, two baths, eat-in
kitchen, two-car garage. Block after block, laid out
on a grid as predictable and contained as the houses
themselves. Controlling the interior environment,
the terrain of memory and emotion, was the peculiar
art my parents practiced every day.
Banked by the commercial avenues
Van Ness and Rosecrans and the abyss-like 135th Street
drainage ditch and sandy Rowley Park, the Holly Park
kids biked, skated and ran, stripping hydrangea bushes
for pretend-bride bouquets and cycling the endless
loop of Ardath, 141st Street, Daphne, 139th Street
as summer mornings stretched past noon into lazy,
hot, white-sky afternoons.
The summer I turned eight my mother
returned to fulltime work and my life took on an air
of autonomy. Our babysitter, Mrs. Mozell Rollins,
an Ozark Baptist quilter, was so besotted with my
toddler sister-- she of the long ringlets and liquid
eyes, the spider-web eyelashes and sweet baby scents--
that I had comparatively free rein. It was my opportunity
for adventure.
Summer afternoons, I hopped on my
bike and rode the three-quarter miles to Purche Avenue
School, where Mrs. Owens, the school librarian, presided.
Mrs. Owen's first name was Charlotte. Charlotte, my
mother's name! Her newest name, that is, after her
birth name Tsirla and her nickname Cesia, which became
Czeslawa when she went underground on Aryan papers,
in Warsaw, in 1941. Now her friends and my father
called her Cesia again, but at work, where my parents
strove to keep the facts of their lives a secret,
she was Charlotte. That she shared the librarian's
name was an omen to me; Mrs. Owens stood in for the
grandmothers whose faces I had neverseen.
Every weekday was the same: Ride
to school, get a book. Read the book overnight, go
back. Biographies, novels, mysteries, series-- I ate
the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew for breakfast. Fridays
were the best, because I could keep the book until
Monday, and because Mrs. Owens often had something
special put aside for me. One Friday in July, she
gave me "A Cricket in Times Square," and
my life changed forever.
New York! Lively, loud, vibrating
city! People from all kinds of different places, with
faraway names and strange accents confusing their
speech. California was sameness to me, even then,
and I did not fit in. My friends were blonde and fair,
I am dark. They had patent-leather cases filled with
blonde Barbies and red-headed Midges; my Auntie Celia
gave me my brown-eyed, black-haired Barbie, a mini-misfit
among her 11-inch peers. All my girlfriends had -ee
names-- Vicky, Kathy, Debbie, Ruthie, Randi and I
was stuck in the old world, with a name for aunties
and old maids. My sister lucked out: she was named
Edith, but became Edie (that -ee ending!) right away.
Me, I am Helen, named for my grandmother, named for
a dark and foreign place, for a time lost to fire
and history.
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