MY MOTHER’S STORY

My grandmother Edith—I called her “Granny”—was raised on a farm with fruit orchards near Sonoma. Her father died of TB when she was little, and her mother never married again, saying there would never be anyone like her Tom.

Because my grandmother was raised in the country, she didn’t contract all the usual childhood diseases but got them as an adult, instead, when she moved to San Francisco and married my grandfather. In a photo of her as a young woman, her face is plump and round—in another, at forty-something, she looks emaciated. Throughout my mother’s childhood, my grandmother frequently took to her bed.

As a result my mother, the oldest daughter of four children, had to take care of her siblings. Despite the responsibilities she shouldered, too young, she never felt appreciated by either of her parents—it was her pretty, musical younger sister Dory and especially her baby brother Bill they loved. My grandmother was disapproving, my grandfather aloof. He was a machinist and could only get part-time work during the Depression, so for a number of years they lived in poverty on the wrong side of the tracks. What’s more, all my mother’s siblings were strikingly good-looking, while she had decayed and protruding teeth. Even when she developed a voluptuous figure as a teenager, she still felt like the ugly duckling of the family. She was happiest at school, where she made good grades and was encouraged by her teachers, and at the “ranch,” where she spent summers with her grandmother, who, she felt, did love her.

When her father reneged on his promise to help pay for her higher education, she got another job and tried to put herself through college­—but her grades slipped and eventually she gave up, feeling like a failure. She joined the army, became a staff sergeant, and worked in the psychiatric ward of a hospital—an experience that led her to choose the profession she did when she was able to resume her education after the war. In the meantime, she had all her rotting teeth pulled and began to wear dentures, which turned her overnight into a beautiful woman.

But a fear she had ever after that was being seen without her dentures. If, as a child, I started to open the bathroom door, not realizing she was inside, she would yell frantically for me to close the door—and in all my life I never did see my mother without her teeth.