by Susie Bright
I’ve been thinking a long time, my darling
Of the sweet words you never would say
Now, alas, must my fond hopes all vanish
For they say you are going away
“I would sit on that fence post every afternoon!” She laughed as if the memory of her legs swinging on the fence was a comic newsreel. “I was waiting for the bus to come by, bawling out ’The Red River Valley’ at the top of my lungs — because I knew that one day, the bus driver would hear me, and everyone on the bus would clap their hands and they’d stop the bus and pick me up and take me out to Hollywood, where I would be a big star!”
I can see the plow behind her, and our California destiny — way, way out, in front of those wheels.
Way Out West
When I was a little girl and asked Grandma Bright, my dad’s mother, where the Brights came from, she said one word: “Kansas.”
I was hoping for a thrilling immigrant experience, like my mother’s — but no, it was the Bright story, an undramatic yawn.
I appreciate my grandmother Ethel now. I’d give anything to sit next to her at my sewing machine or eat one of her egg salad sandwiches. But as a child, although I didn’t see her very often, I thought the lives she and my grandfather Ollie led were dull. My dad, Bill, had me for school vacation visits a couple times a year, and we would always visit Oxnard to see his folks. Oxnard, at the time, was like the Wichita of California.
We had cottage cheese and peaches for lunch. Grandma wouldn’t eat spaghetti because it was a “foreign” food. She made enormous quilts and braided rugs from scraps, all day, every day, plus dozens of aprons and potholders perfectly stitched with rickrack. No store-bought clothes, ever. She canned everything; and since most of the Brights were farmers, there was a lot to can. She let me put on her big smock and go out and pick berries, or take a hoe and make rows in the garden beds. It was the same thing, every day, every visit. Her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were mitered as neat and perfect as every square on one of her quilts.
My grandpa was a butcher and ran a chicken ranch. They had meat on the table every day during the Depression. Ollie was the one who gleefully called me “Susie,” first thing from the hospital, ruining my parents’ intentions to call me “Susannah” in all its three-syllable glory. “Susie” stuck. You can see photos of him lifting me in the air, under the big willow tree in their back yard, his dirty suspenders and dungarees fit to burst, a huge smile on his face.
I would love to remember that smile, and I do feel it when I look at the old snapshots. But by the time I could remember visiting my grandparents, my grandpa didn’t say a word — he had been rendered mute by Parkinson's disease — and he sat in a living room La-Z-Boy, his mouth a thin tight line. I was afraid of him. His hands trembled all the time, and when Grandma helped him to the kitchen to eat, his fingers clattered on the formica tabletop. Grandma would heat paraffin wax every morning and evening for him to soak his fingers and feet in.
He spent a decade in this condition before his death, which was my introduction to the cruelty of “being kept alive whether you like it or not.” Why would no one talk about it? I knew that my grandpa — who’d loved life so much, who’d sing “Golden River” and drive a plow, who couldn’t wait to get a Model T and drive to the seashore — had never wanted to be in a chair watching Lawrence Welk reruns. But that’s how everyone acted in Oxnard — you kept going because you had to keep going and you did not question the rules.
My stepmother Lise said to me once that she had never met anyone who had as much enthusiasm for life as my dad.
I think he got that from Ollie. There’re pictures of my grandpa as a young soldier during World War I in Paris, grinning from ear to ear and feeding a flock of birds in the plaza. He always wanted to travel, be on the move. Bill said that when he went into grad school and stored all his college books back at his folks’ home in Oxnard, his father read every single one and would call him at night, peppering him with questions.
My dad didn’t have the nerve to admit he hadn’t read every page of every book in his collection. After all, Ollie had bought the family a red-leather forty-volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and actually read it — the whole thing. He couldn’t imagine buying a book without devouring it. And besides, it would be a waste of money.
My grandpa was the oldest living son in a clan of eight surviving kids, the valedictorian of his high school. But he wasn’t able to look forward to college. His parents were ill and he went to work, along with his other siblings, until he was drafted.
Oliver was determined that his son Bill become a scholar, a traveler — and that he never, ever be involved in the family trade. My dad didn’t know a steak from a chop — he was never allowed behind the counter of the butcher store. “Go do your homework, Billy,” they’d say, leaving him to his books and the radio and the Nickelodeon and the record player.
At the time, he had no complaints because he loved those things. Every nickel went to the movies; every recording and magazine was treasured. But when I was a teenager and Bill talked to me about his life, he said he regretted feeling so physically inept in a family of big men, powerful men, who used their hands for everything.
He told me the worst mistake his parents made, unwittingly, was skipping him a grade and a half, putting his prepubescent self among the older and more jaded upperclassmen.
“I didn’t fit in at all with the older kids — it was a disaster. I was beat up every day in gym; it was torment. I couldn’t play their games or hold my own — my only friend was your godfather, Bob Thiel, who grew up across the street from me. We would listen to opera and classical music and swear we were going to get out of Oxnard … someday.”
Two generations later, my daughter had the same assignment in third grade that I’d received at her age: “How did your family come to California?” I was determined to pierce the “Kansas” cul-de-sac, and so I encouraged her to press my dad for more information on his side of the family.
Bill told Aretha a different story, alright, the oldest story I’d ever heard of our ancestors. Just think: All those Bright people, all those dusty photographs of characters whose names I don’t know, so much life in them, and this is the one story that survived, passed only in the oral telling.
Aretha’s great-great-great-grandfather, William Riley Bright, took his family to California from Kentucky in the 1800s, by wagon train. They faced every peril and deprivation along the trail.
William Riley was a tough old bird, and he almost met his match. One day on their travels, climbing the Rockies, an eagle swooped out of the sky and plucked Bill Riley’s right eyeball clean out of his head!
Did that stop him? Of course not. He arrived with his family, one-eyed, on the central California coast, in Ventura County.
I think a lot about that toughness. My dad regretted losing a piece of it, although he treasured the soft intellectual fields he was let loose in. He got to do everything his father every dreamed of, and more. And he kept more of his connection to California than he even recognized. Sometimes we’d go backpacking in the Sierras — and he knew how to do everything in the mountains, it seemed to me. He knew how to live in the desert. There wasn’t a patch of California he hadn’t explored, often first with his dad. He wasn’t a city person like my mother, who had grown up in an urban ghetto.
I’d say, “You’re a mountain man; you know every plant and animal here — you did fall closer to the tree than you think.” It pleased him to hear that.
When I first settled with my daughter and partner in Santa Cruz in 1994, where I live now, I took my dad to the Boardwalk. It’s like a small, West Coast version of Coney Island … games of chance, a huge wooden roller coaster. Bill told me he had been on this same roller coaster in the 1930s, that his whole family had jumped in an Edsel and tooled up to Santa Cruz, a two-day journey from Oxnard. “I loved it here,” he said.
“What was your favorite game?” I asked, since we were walking past
the carnies.
“The water balloons! The wall of water balloons that you pop with a dart,” he said, grabbing my hand to show me the exact marquee he was talking about.
“Why those?“ I never would have picked that one.
“I won all the time!” he said. “You throw the dart like this — pfft! — high and limp-wristed through the air! The less macho the better! That’s why I was so good at it.”
D – I – V – O – R – C – E
There is more than one way to unpack a breakup. I’ve hosted a score of explanations for my parents’ dissolution, only to grab my kit and run for higher ground.
My mother and father had an old-fashioned divorce — the kind where you have to sue each other and assign blame. The rhetoric of “extreme mental cruelty” appeared in their court documents. There was a court-appointed psychiatrist. Though they separated in 1960, it was still the morality of another century when they dissolved their partnership — a scarlet “D” etched on their permanent record. My mother’s complete estrangement from the Catholic Church was concluded when she was informed that her divorce meant she could never receive the sacramental host again.
By the time I hit puberty, the marriage climate had turned upside down. In 1973, I was in a Los Angeles high school, where I was dressed down by an English teacher who informed the entire class that I was “out of line” because I was “from a broken home.” My classmates looked blankly at Miss Baltheir. One of the cheerleaders, who wouldn’t have ordinarily crossed the street on my behalf, spoke up: “But Miss B., everyone’s parents are divorced.” I could see our teacher’s lip quiver — she just didn’t know what to say to this hell-bent mob.
But in 1960, a female saying she was divorced was a little like whispering “I’m a lesbian” into your pillow. You’d obviously failed as a woman, although it was almost compulsory that the woman got full custody of the kids. Men were considered incompetent as caretakers. The disgraced couple was then presumed to be adversaries for the rest of their lives.
In the years since my parents died — and death was the card that had to be turned — more truth has arrived, the kind of surprises I’d never have expected while they both were alive.
After my mom passed away in 2004, I got a letter from the woman who inspired my middle name, Ellen. Ellen Eicke was my mother’s best friend when my dad was in the army, a German neighbor of theirs in Kassel. Bill was in military intelligence (“the greatest oxymoron every made,” he said) during the Korean War, listening to Soviet Czech radio traffic. He hated the army, but he and my mother loved living in Europe. They consumed opera like it was buttered toast. They were befriended by dear Ellen. And she and my mother wrote to each other, at Christmas and Easter, every year until my mom passed away, even though they never saw each other again after 1956.
Upon her death, I realized how odd it was that my mom had once had a best friend, a bosom buddy, because I never saw her enjoy another woman’s company. She never had anyone over to the house; I never saw her on a date, not platonic, not anything. It was as if there were two of us, plus the specter of my father, and no one else.
My father had many relationships in his life — was widowed twice, divorced twice, and, in the end, happy in his last marriage. He went from someone who had a secret book about “the problems of being shy,” which I once found in his closet — he never thought he’d be able to have a social life, let alone a love life — to becoming a man who loved to meet new people, thrived at parties, couldn’t wait to get to know someone. In a way, the fact that Bill knew so many languages and could make small talk with virtually anyone in the world was a product of his enthusiasm for making new friends.
My mother and father seemed to transform between young adulthood to maturity. My dad went from shut-in to social butterfly, my mother went from the Most Popular Girl on Campus to a wary woman whose very skin seemed to flinch from getting close to anyone.
I look at Elizabeth’s high school and early college scrapbooks and see a beautiful, tall ringleader, laughing her head off with a bunch of other curly-haired girls. Where did they all go?
After her divorce, she stayed close with only one pen pal, Ellen.
I wrote to my namesake after my mom died and explained why her yearly Christmas letter had gone missing for the first time. I cried as I scribbled it all down; I had never before directly communicated with this woman my mother had held so kindly in her memories.
Ellen wrote her condolences and asked if I would like to have the correspondence Bill and Elizabeth sent to her when they left Germany and went to live in India, and then when they returned to the United States.
She added, “Of all the lovers in the world, I never thought Bill and Jo would break up; they seemed like the perfect couple, so well-suited to each other.”
Perfect couple! I howled.
I can remember my parents together in the same room only once. It was so frightening that even decades later, when I got pregnant, one of my first thoughts was, I can’t have Bill and Elizabeth visit the baby and me at the same time. I once considered that even if I were the marrying kind, I could never walk down the aisle with anyone because my parents couldn’t possibly control their fighting.
Such a picture makes them sound evenly matched. It wasn’t like that. My dad would say something low that I could barely hear. My mom would explode. Then he’d leave, and she would go berserk, swearing that I favored him, in looks as well as personality flaws. One thing I figured out early on — whatever divorced parents tell their children about their arguments, it is surely misleading.
Ellen’s innocent observation that my parents were such lovebirds gave me pause. Even before I received the letters, which she sent wrapped in a satin ribbon, I gleaned that, in some respects, my parents were each other’s fond companion. My dad told me that until he met his last wife, Lise — thirty years after he and Libby divorced — he never thought he’d meet a woman his intellectual match again. They were brainiacs; they were language, poetry, and music fiends; they took enormous pleasure in big ideas and the power of word. They were literary sensualists.
My mother could say things like “Your father is a cruel, oblivious, selfish pig,” giving me examples about how he once made her, his wife, go to the back of the college cafeteria line because it wouldn’t be fair to let her cut in with him. He humiliated her in front of all his male friends who didn’t think a woman should even be at the university. Then a few hours later, she’d sit down at her desk and gaily prepare him a news clipping about a personal dispute she’d read in the the New Delhi edition of The Times that had made her laugh. She said Bill would be the only one who would “get it.”
They were both idealistic and cynical at the same time. My mother told my dad she was moving us to Canada after the fourth political assassination in five years, (JFK, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, Dr. King). She said she “couldn’t take this country anymore.”
Bill told me he was devastated to contemplate my departure — but impressed at her guts.” She said he was the smartest person she knew. But then it was back to daggers and swords.
When I was little, my mother, if she could steady herself, would tell a couple stories about why my father was beyond redemption. She said that his mother had done everything for him, that he couldn’t even make himself a sandwich. I had a mental image of my dad staring at a slice of baloney and white bread, uncertain how to stack the slices.
Later, at fourteen, when I moved in with my dad, I did take over most of the cooking; I enjoyed it. Bill explained to me that my mother’s complaint was true, that he had been waited on hand and foot in every domestic respect by his mother, who believed a genius needed to be left alone with his books, undisturbed by housekeeping, farming, or “making things.” He wished very much that hadn’t been the case, that he felt retarded by it.
But by the time Bill married Marcia, his third wife, he was waking up to feminism, if not domestic self-reliance. He was no longer oblivious to the inequality. Even if he
couldn’t make meat loaf, he could at least do the dishes. He asked me if I would like that trade: he’d do all the dishes and I’d do the cooking unless we went out. And he loved to eat out! I was ecstatic.
My mom always snorted when she launched into her legends of my dad’s crimes against humanity. That breath of utter disgust. She’d blow out her cigarette smoke, contemplating one of his marriages, before she added she “wasn’t cut out to be a faculty wife.” An epithet she used the way most people would say “pathetic loser.”
Well, she never got her chance to be a faculty wife and hate it, since she was with my dad only when they were penniless grad students and she worked as a secretary. But she had a vivid imagination. It’s true; she would’ve been bored. I remember one of my dad’s mentors, Murray Emeneau, had a wife who truly loved being the domestic arm of their relationship. One time a student said, “Mrs. Emeneau, do you collaborate with her husband?”
“Oh no, dear,” Mary replied, in full drag-queen trill — “I’m only for his leisure hours!”
My mom was the opposite of that. She reported that when they were grad students, people would talk in hushed tones around my father, but they would act like she was a potted plant. The university people assumed Elizabeth’s academic credentials consisted of typing his dissertation. (In fact, they were both the fastest, most competent typists I’ve ever seen. I would be hard-pressed to say which one was better.) She said that in private Bill talked to her about their work as an equal, but among his male peers, it was as if she vanished.
Bill would’ve argued that she refused to be seen; although, as the years went by, he became discouraged with academic sexism himself. I do know my dad never doubted his academic prowess; he was so relaxed about it. He was like one of those big dogs that never has to bark or go nuts.
My mom was on the defensive. She had the opposite of his family protection — she was lucky to be alive, or, as she put it, damned to be alive. She got so mad about the way her academic elders condescended to her that she insisted on returning all the fellowship funds she had received as a backhanded way of returning the insult. “You don’t think I’m worth it. Fine. Take all your money back.” Bill told her she was nuts, that her work was outstanding and the Regents of the University of California were indifferent to her protest. She didn’t care.
