Yellow rudbeckia gazed at us with large coco-powder eyes near the split-rail fence where cow-pokes once hitched their rides. We were headed to a single-story house with a low-pitched roof. The first in a line-up of engine-red living quarters and barns. A big-wheeled wooden cart holding late season produce and flowers for sale stood near the open doorway. I was smiling ear to ear wearing my new hot pink go-go boots mother bought me

“Judy is being a Brownie,” I ventured, as we walked.

In my mind I could see my schoolgirl friend standing in front of the Girl Scout club house on the corner of Lafayette Elementary School property built like a log cabin. She was smiling, wearing her new brown skirt and matching top with room on the front sash for future badges. Several of my classmates were joining, even Noreen Johannsen. Noreen had pretty blonde hair cut in a straight blunt page-boy. I wanted to be like Noreen and have her bouncy personality, smiling, dressing in cute culotte skirts. I liked watching her mom pick her up from school. One day I saw them from where I was playing hop-scotch with Judy on the playground as I threw a charm into a square, there was an air around them that became sunnier when Noreen looked up and saw her mom coming. She was pretty and blonde, too, kneeling down to Noreen’s height, her arm reaching out to take in Noreen’s body as it leaned in. Comfort in belonging to each other. Fluttering like mama and baby butterflies flitting off to nice places, I wondered where they were going after school time.

‘Oh, you don’t want to do that,” mom closed the door on that conversation as we approached the threshold.

The old Moraga Ranch in a nearby town was now a collection of small shops and businesses living in spaces that used to be occupied by horses and hay. Ducking through the low-slung ranch-house door a parlor greeted us, filled with long tables draped in checkered picnic cloths where ladies met to learn the art of cake decorating. I tagged along with my mom and her plastic case of frosting tips. Pointed metal cones lined up in rows according to size and shape.

“This one is for leaves,” she let me help.

I could smell the sugar as se held her hand over mine and squeezed the parchment tube filled with green-dyed frosting onto a sheet of wax paper for practice before tackling the project in front of her.

I marveled at her ability to knit baby sweaters out of yellow buttercream for a cousin’s baby shower. Sewing little candy buttons on with dollops of sweetness. Grape vines with leaves curled around corners, pink roses mounded, or purple sweet-peas twined all stored on sheets of wax paper in our refrigerator at home waiting patiently for their turn on a splendid creation.

When it was time for my brother’s birthday, out came the castle cake. Square and round pans both used to create the shapes to cut up and build the edible white towers and walls. Parapets were festooned with gumdrops and a drawbridge built of chocolate-bars.

“Who is this for, mom?” we would ask while licking spoons from the remains of icing in a bowl.

“It’s a wedding cake for your new Aunt Lil who’s marrying UncleBob,” she said.

“ ‘course, she’s a smoker,” mom added, making a sucking sound with her lips. Many cousins and family friends marveled at and enjoyed my mother’s beautiful cakes.

“I made Toll-House cookies,” mother often greeted us when we came home from school, usually wearing an ironed apron, her Doris Day hair freshly blonde and curled. Generous with a box or bag of baked goods, dipped chocolate balls or banana bread she would wrap in foil with a bow to press into the hand of a neighbor.

My mother like to cook as well as bake. Coming through the front door after church on Sundays, the fragrant smell of pot-roast and caramelized onions often met my nose. A Hershey recipe chocolate cake with fudgey frosting might wait on the yellow-tiled kitchen counter, or a freshly made lemon pie, the meringue peaks weeping translucent brown syrup.

These delicacies took some of the sting out of sitting on a hard pew all morning, but nothing sweetened my Baptist upbringing enough to make it palatable. Although fed a steady diet of “Amen,” and “Praise the Lord,” I never developed a taste for it; however, was raised the way my mother had been and felt right about.

“Catholics are going to Hell,” she declared. Eventually adding that the statues of Mary, Joseph, and the saints were all idol worship.

My father was raised in the Catholic church; but, deferred to mom saying she was right that children might be confused to be raised in two different religions. He dutifully attended church with us on the Sundays he was not at work. Quietly, though, he practiced his own beliefs. His rosary sat in his bureau drawer, or in a dish for coins and his family rings. Sometimes I came across him kneeling and praying with his rosary in the stillness of my parents bedroom, the morning light coming in from a corner window. Those private moments seemed imbued with solace and humility. That he never coerced or scolded me into his faith planted a seed in me that grew the fruit of contrast. I felt the linoleum cold, and pious competitiveness of the church my mom chose, compared to the quiet, dedicated peace of my father.

Sunday school, with mid-week Bible study, I memorized scripture, sang songs and proselytized. Yep, proselytized. Although mortified, I was herded along with other children, and an adult or two, going door to door throughout neat, white, well-educated neighborhoods in Lamorinda to win souls for Jesus. I was ten.

“Good morning, ma’am, do you have a personal relationship with the Lord, Jesus Christ?” one of the chaperones would ask some poor woman interrupted from just about anything that was better than this. Housewives politely listened to the beginnings of the spiel eager for a moment to wedge into the proclamations of the world coming to an end, to say a pot was on the stove, or some other life-saving excuse to close the door after a pamphlet had been thrust into their hands. My mother was not along for the ride, neither was my brother, two years younger, nor my dad. As I look back, I can't help but wonder why I was the chosen one? Other children talked about picnics or ball games they’d gone to over the weekend. When it was my turn to chime in I left out the part about saving souls.

When I wasn’t being an Onward Christian Soldier for God, I was in school. Miss Crilly was my fifth grade home-room teacher. Her dresses and skirts crisply ironed and belted. Sensible shoes, salt and pepper hair worn neat and tightly curled. The light shadow of a mustache on her upper lip. When it was time to practice earthquake drills she guided us calmly out onto the tarmac of the playground with the watchful eye of a mama duck.

California history was part of her curriculum, and dad helped me make a covered wagon out of a wooden cigar box, cheese-cloth covering the top. Tiny pots and pans borrowed from my Troll family attached to the sides and pulled by a donkey he volunteered from a set of Democrat (donkey) and Republican (elephant) figurines he had. I got an A.

There was buzz around the school-yard that Miss Crilly was really “a man”, or some other coarse phrase. All I knew was she was smart and firm and kind. And when she leaned down to talk to me, yes, I smelled the cigarettes and saw her scant make-up and bits of mustache, but the little animal inside me gentled around her and felt safe.

When The Facts of Life were being unveiled in her science class I was one of two children not allowed to be a part of this education.

“The pastor says you children shouldn’t be learning such things,” mom said. Our pastor and his wife, who played the organ, had seven children.

So as soon as Sex Education was about to be presented, Miss Crilly quietly told me to go outside and sit on a bench until the lesson was finished. All eyes on me as I walked down a row of wooden clam lid topped desks, I was filled with shame to go sit out there with the only other child whose mother had notified the school that we were to be excused from learning about the birds and the bees.

“Why’d you have to leave?” one of the boys asked me later on the playground. A few of the girls from class looked at me, silently. I do not remember what, or if, I answered. I felt as though I had fallen down hole with no bottom.

Erin Morton, a sweet, quiet, blonde-haired girl, whose mother was none of the above and looked like Nurse Diesel in Mel Brooks’, High Anxiety, was not someone I wanted to play with. Not because Erin wasn’t likable. Like me, she did everything possible to be liked and invited to other girls’ homes. And for each of us, play-dates became less and less as if some word got out that we were not okay.

“What church does Mrs. Morton go to?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” mom said, “but I do know she thinks she’s so ‘holier than thou’. What I think is she’s so heavenly perfect that she’s no earthly good,” mom laughed.

I visited Erin’s house once and it was all prickly feeling. Mrs. Morton being a very tall, stern woman sporting the 60s’ hair-helmet of the times, she was as cold and sour as the cottage-cheese sandwiches she served us for lunch.

What our mothers didn't have in common was that my mother could cook; however, what both of them shared were pious notes to the principal. I can only imagine what went through Miss Crilly’s mind as she fulfilled her duties, our mothers voting for ignorance, marking us as oddities.

Maybe a week or two later, I was home listening to Beatles’ music as it played on my little pink record-player while I tacked up a poster of Paul on the back of my bedroom door. My mother knocked. I opened it just wide enough to see what she wanted, holding tacks in one hand.

“You know what sex is, right?” she said in a hurried, forceful voice. Embarrassment and anger tinting the edges of her words.

Uh, oh, I thought, this cannot not be good. I nodded quickly. Not because I knew, I simply wanted to stem the tide of whatever Brillo Pad lesson might be coming from the dark hallway.

“It’s this”, standing on the other side of the barley open door, she made a tube out of the fingers on one hand while poking the empty space with the forefinger of her other.

“Miss. Crilly called. You can go to those classes next week.”

. . .

 The next year, I won the lottery and got Mrs. Raverby for sixth grade. A tall, elegant swan, she wore nice clothes that fit her slim figure. Dowdy she was not. Her make-up was always done up as pretty as her hair was, with nails painted soft, sophisticated colors of mushroomy pink or light coral. She smelled heavenly. I once spied her in conversation with another teacher after school as she leaned against the wall of a building, cupping an elbow in one hand while smoking a cigarette. A serious look on her face as she listened intently, nodding, not in a hurry, not interrupting.

The color of gray stones under a river’s current, intellect and understanding glowed in her large pale eyes. She was a woman who took notice of things in a composed, unruffled way.

I was fortunate she took notice of me, wrapping a gleaming white wing around my shoulders, fostering who I was ever so gently and encouraging me about my art work. When I made drawings at my desk in free-time, she talked to me about them, inquired sincerely, and looked me in the eyes.

“These are really good, Sande. Tell me about this one.” She never told me what to draw, just watched and listened.

When a classmate copied my work, she was protective. I wanted to go home with her. I wanted to be her. And began to blossom under the warm sun of her care.

After school one day, my mom picked me up in her station wagon. It was warm and dry out even though some of the first Autumn leaves were falling from large sycamores flanking the schoolyard. I climbed into the back seat, feeling the heat of the car through the caramel-colored vinyl. A small bag of candy waited for me. When the car door ka-chunk-clicked closed, my mother rounded on me from the front seat, she was livid, “That fancy teacher of yours phoned, telling me you should go to Oakland Museum art classes. Well that’s never going to happen!” Her voice was so loud, “She doesn’t have children, what does she know?”

“And when we get home, make a card for your cousin’s birthday.”

My shoulders hunched in and my stomach tightened as I stared out the window. I was used to that back seat where mother was the driver.