Blue Plate Special Read Free

suddenly bereft of her dreamed-of brilliant musical career—and with a gaping hole in her life to fill—she discovered the trendy, radical teachings of Steiner. She convinced her baby sister Ruth to join her in Europe, where she met Hans Pusch. Meanwhile, Gladys came back to America with a head full of pedagogical steam and single-handedly started the school, whose underlying philosophy was based on Steiner’s teachings.
    Gladys was a mean little troll of a woman, and she beat my mother for her childish infractions and impish curiosity. My mother was expected to do chores even though she was only three. After Gladys took her by the hair one day and slammedher head against the wall over her little bed, then left her crying, Lizzie, as my mother was called when a child, ran off into the fields alone. She stayed outside for hours. She ate ears of corn, raw and warm from the stalks, lay between the rows, looking at the sky, feeling untethered to anything on earth, as if she could float away and no one would miss her or notice. But she also taught herself something important—that she could distance herself from whatever was going on by narrating her life to herself as if she were a character in a book. And that was how she got through her time there.
    At five, she was sent to a “normal” Waldorf boarding school, in Pennsylvania. She didn’t live with her parents again until she was ten, when she moved in with them in New York City and was sent to the Steiner school there. Her father, Hans, a childish, rather stupid man given to tantrums, ignored her. Her clever, literary mother, Ruth (who had told my mother that she’d given birth to her solely as a companion and caretaker for Aillinn), made it clear to Lizzie that she could expect no affection, since her husband and older daughter demanded all the energy she had.
    My mother refused to be the pliable, respectful, spiritual daughter her parents expected and wanted her to be. Instead, she rebelled against her upbringing, rejected the teachings of Steiner, got into trouble constantly, and excelled at everything she did. She was sent away once more. She graduated from High Mowing, another Waldorf boarding school, this one in New Hampshire, at the top of her high school class with straight A’s, having been the captain of the basketball team and student body president. That summer, she took her cello to the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy, to take a master class with Pablo Casals. After that, she went to Swarthmore for one year, then studied cello at the Yale music conservatory for another year, and then she went to Juilliard as a cellist, all on full scholarships. Then, with one semester to go before shewould have graduated from Juilliard, my mother decided she wasn’t cut out for the life of a concert cellist, so she quit and bought a train ticket to Berkeley and moved there in June 1960.
    She was exotic and beautiful, with olive skin, long dark wavy hair, deep-set brown eyes, broad shoulders, long legs, and a figure both slender and curvaceous. She had been a model in New Haven as a student in the 1950s; her photograph adorned the sides of buses in a milk ad. In Berkeley, when I was little, she was never a hippie, or even particularly bohemian; she was just sexy. She wore cropped peg-leg jeans with wide belts, ribbed cotton turtlenecks, big sunglasses, pendant necklaces, dangly earrings.
    Before she met my father, she had heard about him from mutual friends, who raved about their handsome, dynamic, politically aware, funny, interesting friend Ralph Johansen. She knew instantly somehow that he’d be her husband and the father of her children. When they were finally introduced, in the summer of 1961, she was twenty-five and he was thirty-seven; she saw right away that her friends had been right about him. He was not tall, but he was athletic, well-knit, and charismatic. And he was ridiculously handsome: he had black hair and piercing blue eyes, an expressive,