could barely move, but she swooped forward with astonishing speed and grabbed Barbara’s elbow, then marched her the two remaining blocks to our house. All the while, Barbara kept defiantly braying, “Hee haw!”
I trotted behind them, trying to will Barbara to be quiet … at the same time as I was transfixed by the drama. I’d never seen Barbara so naughty. Or Mama so furious.
Mama kept her grip on Barbara as she pushed through our front door and into the hall.
“Hee haw!”
Mama slapped her. Then she flung open the door to the hall closet and shoved Barbara inside. Coats and jackets were jammed into the closet, hanging on a rod. Barbara fell into them, and for a moment it looked as if the coats would push her back out. But Mama slammed the door, grabbed the key hanging on a nail, and locked her in.
“No!” Barbara pounded her fists against the door.
“I can’t stand to have you in my sight!” Mama yelled.
“Let me out!”
“Elaine!” Mama commanded, and I jumped. I hadn’t done anything, but that wouldn’t save me if her wrath turned toward me. All she said was, “We’re going outside.”
Trembling with the effort of not crying, I followed Mama into the kitchen. She got us glasses of water, then went into the backyard and lowered herself heavily into one of the beat-up wooden chairs Papa had found in the street and placed under the fig tree, next to our garden.
Fruit trees—figs, apricots, peaches, loquats, pomegranates—grew in the yards of many houses in Boyle Heights. Our tree was a Black Mission fig, with purplish skin and fruit that was amber with a touch of pink. I thought of the tree as Zayde’s. The tree was the reason he’d chosen our house to rent when he moved the family to Boyle Heights, he said, and he sometimes sighed in contentment and said something (which I learned came from the Bible) about dwelling under his vine and his fig tree. Zayde tended the tree carefully, checking it on summer afternoons for the wilting leaves that meant it needed water and harvesting the figs just when they were ripe, not letting them spoil on the tree.
I usually loved to sit beneath the fig tree, lounging on one of the chairs or, even better, sitting on the ground, where I’d find a perch in a crook of the twisty roots. When I began to read, it became one of my favorite places to retreat with a book.
But today I wanted to be anywhere but here. I could still hear Barbara screaming. And Mama said, “Sit down. Sit! And don’t you move, or I’ll put you in there.”
I sat.
Now that it was May, Mama, Papa, and Zayde often lounged beside the garden after dinner. The early evenings were pleasant, just cool enough for a light jacket or sweater, the air scented with night-blooming jasmine from the bushes along the back of the house. In the middle of the day, though, I was soon hot and uncomfortable. Mama had to be hot, too. She kept fanning her face. But she didn’t say a word; she just sat and stared at nothing.
There were things in the closet behind the coats, dark old things whose musty reek mingled with the sickly sweet odor of mothballs. And there were spiders. Once Mama was getting her coat out, and she screamed at a giant spider on the sleeve. Thinking about it, I felt like it was me trapped in the dark, with horrid things I couldn’t see crawling on me.
And worse than that fear was the way I felt toward Mama. Like any child, I accepted the behavior of adults in my world even when it baffled me. But imprisoning Barbara in the closet on a sweltering afternoon … Yes, I knew that Mama’s upbringing had been harsh, and in the 1920s there was no such thing as “parenting”—parents simply reared their children, they didn’t have bookstore shelves filled with expert advice. Still, in what Mama had done, even my five-year-old self recognized a streak of irrationality that terrified me. A wave of dizziness sent me pitching out of the chair.
I crouched on the ground, drenched in sweat, and cast a frightened glance at Mama. Would she put me in the closet for leaving my chair?
But Mama’s eyes were closed. She was asleep.
Carefully, not making a sound, I stood up, planning to return to the chair.
She didn’t stir.
I took two steps away. Mama continued to sleep. Another step. Then, moving