I grew up in a house on a hill. The hill was steep, paved in black tar and lined with a gargantuan hedge on the right, and magnolia bushes and an ornamental plum tree on the left. The hill curved slightly near the top, evening out into a flat terrace where the house sat. The house was white, bordered with black. The door was made of a wood I now realize I cannot identify, but the curved swirls and brass handle distracted from this. On either side of the door, embedded in the structure were two panels of stained glass. Their brilliance was subdued from the outside, but once the door was unlocked, you could see the light filtering through the panels and scattered on the tile floor. I never knew what to call this room. Some might call it a mud room, or a foyer, but in my mind it sticks as the “key room.” She keeps her keys in there, on a key hook shaped like, well, a giant key.
This was not a house for us. Nothing was child proof. Priceless mementos and souvenirs of travels abroad were displayed all over: a Moroccan canteen, giant china plates depicting the English hunt, a painting of monks in their monastery, pictures of people long dead and decaying, preciously bound books, and a silk Chinese outfit in the hall closet. The kitchen was tiled like the key room, with a floor that was a strange shade of green, neither frog nor olive, and which always smelled of turpentine. The table looked like something out of a Vermeer painting, with indented edges and scrolled feet.
Her room was one of three. A single bed, pictures, watercolors, La Donna Velata hanging by her closet, a wicker bench to sit and put on her sandals, a portrait of her mother looking like a Gibson girl. There was always a rosary on her bedside table and a picture of her husband on the dresser.
It disturbs me to write of these objects, this place, her, in the past tense, for none are gone, and I have no idea when they will be gone. This is only preparation. Because someday I will lose at least some of this. This thought is unbearable, you should know. Unbearable in every way. Thinking of never being able to hold her leathery hand, help her knot her Rapunzel hair (still browning at the edges), never hold her tight and smell that smell I have known my whole life, never kiss her hollowed, satiny cheeks, never hear her sing tiny excerpts from La Traviata or Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, to never experience these things again will leave an immeasurable hole in my heart. The hole is not there, thank anything sacred. But someday it will be. Someday I will not know how to hold myself up straight. I will not be able to think or remember clearly. I need to write these things down now while I can stand up straight and remember. I remember everything.
I cannot really put things in order. We lived in another house before. It was a suburban house, and one of my first memories in it was a nightmare, and then waking up in a panic. I could not have been more than four years old. I shot up in my bed. My room was dark. My sister was still a baby, sleeping in her netted crib in the office. I cried out, and my mother rushed into my room. The door’s opening cast a golden triangle of light into my bedroom and my mother laid her hands on my curly head,
I had a dream that Nana was being cooked in a pot by a witch.
The nightmare is fresh in my memory. The space is dark. There is the witch, somewhat of a combination between Snow White’s witch and The Wicked Witch of the West. She stirs her pot, and in the pot I see a swirling purple vortex, with my helpless grandmother falling down. She calls my name, and I can do nothing to help her. Even at four years old, I wanted to save her, to make sure nothing happened to her, to ensure she would always be there.
Nana, promise me you won’t die until you are one hundred years old.
Oh, sweetie, I can’t promise that. I will go whenever God takes me.
I woke up in the suburban house on more than one occasion to the scent of her sizzling bacon in a pan, her hair in the magical knot that somehow, when unclipped, let loose a cascade of beautiful brown and silvery hair. When I was older she would let me braid it and make ornate hairstyles out of it. She leaned her head back and smiled, as my tiny fingers rubbed her scalp and combed through her waves, not fully comprehending that I gave her a relaxing, quiet moment she deserved.
My parents were young and unlucky in love and career. We moved in Nana’s house before I started kindergarten. At the top of the hill there are pictures of me in my sailboat dress, holding a Minnie Mouse folder, ready to face my first real day of academia. I hold my sister — my twin is all aspects save for the fact we were born 15 months apart — before I head off into the bright world of Kindergarten. We look happy, if in a nervous way. Our skin glows from the sunlight peeking through the foliage that surrounds the house…My sister and I became a part of that house almost immediately. We marveled at everything about it. It was some kind of strange sanctuary. A museum, but one that hummed, one that was alive. There was so much to discover and explore and learn.
My Nana showed us it all. Where she got her ornate wall clock, when she painted a portrait of Grandpa Jim (I am convinced we would have called him Granddad), her trinkets, her perfume, her boxes of stained glass. She procured endless sheets of paper for us to draw and write upon. She herself created makeshift homework for us on the weekend, little papers with addition and subtraction problems, spelling, sentence structure. She had taught high school art, and in due time she brought down her cloth-bound art books, complete with colored plates of masterworks. There were two specifically that I spent endless amounts of time with, gazing at Da Vinci, Tiziano, Gainsborough and Lawrence (I fancied Blue Boy and Pinkie to be in love). One day I happened upon Fragonard’s The Swing. It was as if someone had reached their hand, wavering and sweaty out of the colored plate, grabbed me by the hair, and pulled me into the painting. I recognized that world. I knew those trees, those stone structures, the light filtering through the leaves. I knew the shadows and I knew I was a voyeur upon a most intimate scene. For some inexplicable reason, the 18th century France of this painting was the doppelganger for a small town in the Peninsula.
Woodside is inhabited by the wealthy and the few. The only reason we could afford to live there was because my grandparents bought their house on the hill in the 1950s, when everything was manageable and everything was shiny. They bought the adjacent property as well, and they paid it off over time like good hardworking citizens. They remodeled the house at some point — expanding it, putting in a deck, and a loft with a kitchenette over the garage. We were lucky to live in this house that existed thanks to their foresight and prudence, for Woodside is a hidden gem — an English country village dropped in the middle of the Bay Area.
Woodside. The name itself evokes endless images for me — but above all are the trees, the sheer green of it all. Hills rise above that I can see through the windows, hills that hid something mysterious and wonderful and frighteningly beautiful. My school sat amongst the green, perfect on an autumn morning with the scent of an early rain permeating the asphalt and my nose. A creek bordered the school property, and I would gaze at it through the chain link fence, aching beyond anything to go explore there.
On most days, my sister and I were picked dropped off and pick up from school by Nana in her teal Cadillac. Generally we would pray on the way to school — “Hail, Holy Queen” was a favourite — and sing on the way home — usually “Poppies, Golden Poppies,” which went like this:
When I was little, I didn’t know what the “Golden Gate” was, but I fancied it to be just that, a golden gate that hid some magnificent garden straight out of a Hodgson-Burnett novel. Nana had a beautiful voice — pure and slightly strained with age. She would start out with Poppies, golden poppies…and by the second line my sister and I joined in, our eyes on the back of her head or on the sides of streets, leading up to green hills and greener trees and golden poppies.
He was tall and handsome. Many people would remark on his uncanny similarity to Errol Flynn — he had the mustache curving along the edges of his upper lip. His eyebrows enhanced his perfect brooding blue eyes, his hair was never out of place. When he smiled a rare smile, it was a smile to light up the whole room. He was born James, known as Jimmy, and then Jim. Even though he looked like a movie star, he was just a regular guy from Missouri — a simple man with deep thoughts, looking for a wife.
When he saw first saw her, there was no way to avoid the spirit that exuded from her strong, beautiful, capable being. She was a pretty Italian girl from Colma, fresh out of college, unassuming and humble — but that’s what he liked about her — what everyone liked about Louise. She could hold a conversation, had a good sense of humour, and a good sense of practicality. He liked that about her. He also liked that she didn’t know just how utterly lovely she was. Maybe he could see the small jolt in her when he approached — she was smitten, gazing up adoringly at him, relishing his touch around her shoulders, her waist. And in his quiet way he adored her too — this woman that would give him everything, and that he would give everything in return. As they sat in the bar one night, her luscious golden brown hair curled and her eyes sparkling, he held her left hand in his palm, and examining the fingers, stated, “We’ll have to get a ring for that finger.” It was the most perfect proposal — intimate, just them, no fuss, no shouting, no horns and confetti. Just Louise and Jim.
My sister and I are being carefully packed into the van — not unlike boxes that hold precious objects. We are just as important, but no more so it seems, than ski gear and gloves and a cooler full of weekend food — accessories if you will — at least to our dad. We leave in the late afternoon, California sweeping past us, until the repetition makes our eyes close and our heads tilt to the sides of our car seats. Shhh, the twins are asleep as the winding begins. The highway that wends its way up into the High Sierras acts as our mother this night, rocking us gently and fervently.
At ten o’clock we reach our destination — the only time we are allowed to stay up to this impossible hour. As we approach Kirkwood we are gently shaken awake by Nana and Dad softly says, “We’re here, girls.” My sister and I sleepily and excitedly rub our eyes and peer out the window. All we can see is white as the van’s tires crunch the graveled, snow covered road. Soon I can see our condo building — teal, just like Nana’s Cadillac. It’s called The Meadows, for the giant meadow sleeping underneath the snow behind the building. The most perfect hill leads up from this meadow to our condo — the ultimate hill to sled down, and trudge back up.
We are taken out of the car, but not before strapping on our ski jackets and gloves for the walk to the front of the condo building. We have done this countless times before, but each time we step out of the condo I am amazed at the dome of black night about our heads, and the cold stars that gaze back. It is unbelievably silent here — snow seems to do that, make everyone and everything hush in this alpine country. Icicles as thick as harvest carrots hang from the rain gutters, and per usual, I beg my dad to snap one off for me to lick. But at night, he never does. I breathe out, same as my sister, and we watch our breath magically create steam in the frigid night air as we are ushered towards the front door of the condo building. Inside we stamp our boots free of snow, leaving slush on the carpet as we turn right and head down the hallway which smells slightly of chlorine. Our condo is the third door from the very end.
My Nana, unlike my dad who returns to the car to unpack it, understands the urgency of getting the twins to bed. With drowsy urgency, we are made to brush our teeth with Sesame Street themed pink toothpaste that we’d rather eat than brush with. Nana hastily, but lovingly, undresses us and pulls on our pajamas. We stand and wait for her to fix up the pull-out couch, and soon enough my sister and I are snuggled next to one another, breathing deeply as my Nana and dad quietly, but not too quietly, go about their business.
Her mother — my great-grandmother Irene — is likened to a Rapunzel haired Gaia, a Lady Godiva of the harvest whose heather was San Francisco legend. Her heather was special, plucked and packed with tenderness and understanding. No photos exist of Irene at work, save a sculptural rendering done by her daughter in later years. This molded mother seems older, wiser — intimately indented with the impressions of her daughter’s sturdy fingers. However, there is evidence of my great-grandmother as a thing of nature, a veritable Primavera. Two photos exist of her in her twenties: The first I had seen all my life, which is of course the aforementioned Gibson Girl shot. “That’s my mother,” Nana repeated to me many times. From a bluish-blackness Irene rises, seemingly a reflection in a midnight-shaded pond. She wears an extravagant hat, beautiful clothes — she herself is unmistakably beautiful. However, despite this beauty she remains indignant, possibly haughty — undoubtedly posed by the photographer in this manner. How do I know this? The second photo. Ah, the second photo.
Here she is, standing in front of an old house, her golden cascade of hair filtering over her shoulders. Her gaze casts down, not timid but modest and natural and anything by haughty and Gibson Girl-ish. How I loathe the fact that no more pictures exist of her unposed, natural, the sprite that my grandmother sprung from, a nymph in her own right. “My mother was an amazing woman. We never went hungry, even if all we had to eat was bread and catsup,” Nana said more than once. Somehow, Irene kept the Great Depression at bay from her family. Perhaps it was because the Lagomarsinos continued under conditions that kept their family steadily working the land for years and across oceans. They would never be the sodden and dusty subjects of world-famous pictures published in LIFE Magazine. They existed — sleeping at night, but always living.
We are at a lake. I cannot pinpoint which lake, where — it could be any lake, but more likely Caples, or some little-known lake in the Gold Country, surrounded by gilded hills and oaks. My Nana brings out her dollar-store markers as my father fishes and my sister and I frolic. She picks up her cheap tools and from them pours the essence of the landscape onto her dollar-store paper. Purples mountains, hills ablaze with cedars, lakes the color of cut green bottles. Each lake is like this — my sister and I swallowing water, diving like landlocked mermaids while our father stalks elsewhere, intent on his seclusion and possibly catching a few trout for dinner. Every lake was like this…until Lewis Lake.
Lewis Lake resides in the grandest of the National Parks, Yellowstone, and it was a big hullabaloo when the four of us took our annual summer trip there. I was eleven, my sister ten. It took us three days to drive through Nevada, Idaho, and then onward through Wyoming to reach it. Living in Yellowstone was probably the closest we ever came to living like Nomads, or Native Americans. We camped near Lewis Lake either accidentally or purposefully (I have no idea of my father’s plans then), but either way it became our hub — the source of bathing, play, the place which our day centered around.
Lewis Lake was one of the few places I recall my Nana swimming with my sister and I (Dad once again stalked elsewhere, letting us to be tended by Nana). She waded in with her straw hat, adorned with a singular but extremely lovely pin in the likeness of a bumble-bee. She paddled and floated with us, and held us tight when we became irrationally frightened of a giant tree branch sticking out the water — my macabre sensibilities wanted it to be a dead elk ( undoubtedly influenced by the scene in “Dances with Wolves” when Kevin Costner uncovers a dead deer in the pond by his post.) At night Nana heated up cans of Campbells Clam Chowder and we huddled around the fire in our designated campfire chairs, telling stories or being quiet. Sometimes I read my book, but more often than not I was content to gaze at the stars, stars which I now realize I took for granted.
One Yellowstone night in particular is seared into my memory. The four of us wanted to attend a small lecture at an open theatre-like area given by a park ranger on the constellations. We were late, and I really didn’t care for what the park ranger was saying. Instead, I looked up at the stars and gave myself some sort of lesson. I remember clinging onto somebody’s arm whilst this occurred, this piercing of my eleven-year old soul. I believe it was my grandmother (I have a vision of my sister clinging to the sweatered arm of our father), and even if it wasn’t, I’d like to believe it was her. For it was as if she, every night, took a cup and poured the stars directly into my eyes, as if she was saying to my sister and I every night, Look. And remember this.
They were married in December, she in a lace dress and bobby-pin-curled hair. Her smile is one of pure joy, and his eyes sparkle with utter contentment. They pose by the Christmas tree, comically feed each other wedding cake, and are without a doubt the prettiest newlyweds anyone ever did see — Errol Flynn and the Nice Italian Girl, entwined in ways nobody will ever be able to recognize or understand…save for them.
Recreating their wedding night is something I don’t wish to do, and is something I desperately wish to do. A simple kiss would suffice my interests (anything but prurient, but in all fairness completely intoxicating), for nothing exists. Their love, their relationship is nothing but stardust, or the pale sunshine on the red deck in the morning, or the snort of a barned Quarter-Horse. It has been lost in shouting boys and scratchy Mexican blankets and debt and lung cancer. But I would like to imagine on that cold December evening Jim gave Louise a tender kiss and told her he loved her. She tells him that she loves him too, but her heart is too full for any more words.
Many years later my Nana pulls from a drawer the negligee she wore on her wedding night. Silky and modest and yellow — quintessentially her. There’s a glint in her eye as she pulls it out to show me, and as always, a soft, blue sadness. For only Louise is left, and every December is one more December without Jim’s smoldering eyes and profound silences, without him lean and mustachioed, sentinel and there.
We had two Christmases every year, which contrary to popular belief, did not mean double the presents. However, it did mean that we had just that, two Christmases, different in tone and theme and it seems, with one, we time-traveled back to the Christmas of 1949.
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