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Chapter One
In later life, when I grew up and went out into the world, I was astonished to hear people speak of California as if it had no seasons. Winter was long, it brought huge rains that swelled the creek to a brown torrent and made lakes of backyards, and it brought tule fog so thick that lights burned through the day, gleaming dim and haggard along the streets. Then suddenly one morning the trees stood sunlit, their bark still black and sodden, but tightly budded, and within a week, through banks of poppies, the creek flashed clear as quartz. Summer moved in fast and stayed long; the creek dried out to a powdery gulch, backyards cracked like clay, under a white boiling sky the town lay bleached and blistered in a drone of gnats; then abruptly the sky cooled, grew high and clear like blue glass, gutters of yellow leaves swirled, carried higher each day by winds that finally shook the windows, and once more the rain and fog engulfed us.
I liked the different kinds of weather, and though I myself was not methodical--my sister often informed me of this--I liked the weather in its ordained cycle. Whenever a gray day appeared in June, or a brilliant one in December, I felt uneasy, as if God had lost His bearings.
In the dark I plagued my sister with questions. She had metal curlers in her hair and lay with her back to me.
"Karla. Who's God?"
She would drag the pillow over her head.
I would stick my head under the pillow. "Tell me."
Silence.
Karla was a kind and generous sister, but at night she wished to sleep. And it was then that my questions came to me.
"Tell me."
Silence.
I would lie back again. I had no religious bent at all,yet God had wormed His way into my thoughts. At Sunday school we learned about Christ, but He was only the son. I wished to get to the source. My parents said God was the spirit of kindness in each of us, but there must be more. Otherwise, why did the local nuns cause a fit of respect in even the worst Ferry Street drunk? Why did people say God damn, God knows, and God help us? But I was never able to put it all together.
One afternoon, walking by the construction site of our first skyscraper, a three-story union hall, I decided to climb up. At the structure's top, at the very edge, I looked out. Many-colored roofs and bright green trees stretched to the glassy bay. The big dry hills rolled golden into the distance. The sky was huge, blue, intoxicating.
After that I found I no longer asked about God, so I supposed that I must have caught sight of Him up there.
But for all the impact of that view, I never gave much thought to my surroundings. Thirty miles east of San Francisco, hemmed in by two high ranges of hills and the Suisun Bay, its population a fixed 5,000, Mendoza was as familiar and absolute as my face. We had an old yellow train depot, a long tarry wharf, and a large white ferry. We had a stone courthouse with a dome, an L-shaped Woolworth's with creaking floors, and a small dim library that smelled of flour paste. We bad a tule marsh, eucalyptus groves, and tall scruffy palms, and we had steep dry hills that you could slide down on a piece of cardboard.
We also had Shell Oil refinery. It was our main feature, our reason for existence, but it was of no account to me. First, my dad did not work there, but at a body shop off Main Street. Second, the glaring storage tanks and belching smokestacks were not rewarding to look at, so why look at them?
That the whole area was industrial escaped me. Within a ten-mile radius stood Shell Oil, Standard Oil, Union Oil, the Hercules Powder Plant, the Benicia Arsenal, the Port Chicago Ammunition Dump, and Mare Island Navy Yard. When you took a Sunday drive, you could not help seeing these ugly, boring blots. But they quickly faded into the abundant countryside, and you forgot them.
My dad drove an old 1931 Model A Ford, black and shiny and high off the ground, so that you had a good view. When I was small, the whole family went on Sunday drives together, but by the time I was ten, in 1941, my sister was seventeen and my brother sixteen, and they had begun going their own ways. Karla wanted to be a painter and to study at the Hopkins Art Institute in San Francisco. Peter wanted to be a great drummer like Gene Krupa and tour the nation. Soon they would both go out into the world. But I felt that our way of life, like the seasons, should not alter.
I was happy, except for school, which sometimes caused me to run away. The varnished rows of desks, the cold, busy squeak of chalk on blackboard, George Washington's pale eyelids drooping at us from the wall--all this inspired me with a hopeless sense of wasted time, my object in life being to climb and swing from trees and other high things. I had thick yellow calluses on my palms that I sliced off with a razor blade. I planned to be a trapeze artist. With such an ambition, school could only be an intolerable bore, and so on occasion I ran away; but already at the outskirts of town the vast unknown wilted me, and I had to turn back.
I eked out passing marks, but I was late for class each morning, though our house stood directly opposite the grammar school. It was the bars and handwalkers I couldn't resist.
"You can play after school," my parents tried to drill into me.
