On a Wednesday afternoon in June 1967, my mother fell asleep on a sun lounger parked under the bone dry of a Californian cobalt heaven that domed over our back yard, vaulted over our rented house on Pasea Laredo, soared creaselessly over the neighbourhood of La Jolla, bowed over the vast Pacific, arched to Earth and tucked itself beyond the tight rim of the ocean.
The thing is, my mother liked to read in the afternoons to pass the time and because she was lonely. My father was at work at the Salk Institute, my sisters were at the high school and the neighbours didn’t like Jews. (It wasn’t until December, when my mother had insisted that we should buy a Christmas tree and decorations from the Mission Valley Center, that a neighbour, Mrs Myers, had then ‘dropped by’ from across the road to welcome the ‘new’ foreigners from Europe. All that was over my head).
But that afternoon, my mother had fallen asleep on her side. I remember her sunglasses on the patio’s crazy paving beside a bottle of Coppertone and an oil stained paperback. The patio doors rattled with the fault-line tremors like they did.
When my mother woke later in the afternoon and raised herself uncertainly, I had already stepped out of the house, upset at the threat of the earthquake; the violence. A glass had danced off the kitchen table and had smashed. All the windows in the house were agitated and bad tempered.
And there stood my mother, the right side of her face flushed and raw pink with sunburn against the shadow of her pale left cheek, itself waffled by the plastic weave of the sun lounger — a perfect line between the two sides.
The heavy tremors had subsided and she had slept through it all so that, in spite of my upset, I didn’t know what to say.
