I eyed her up and down, from truck to keel, before I answered:
“Are you going to let me have my seagull and cats here?”
Mother laughed and said:
“You can keep them in the back yard.”
With that compromise settled, I let down my barriers of hostility. I don’t know whether I was thrilled at being in a house that was a home or whether I was terrified. I remember I felt shut in and cramped, and my brothers and sister standing around staring at me as if I were a mirage instead of a real person didn’t put me at my ease.
“Joan, you change your dress because it is dinner time. We have dinner for the boarders at twelve o’clock,” was the next thing Mother said.
“I haven’t got any other dress,” I answered. My voice, attuned to the open sea, boomed like a cannon in that small room.
“Don’t talk so loudly,” cautioned Mother.
My mother, to help make both ends meet, kept boarders from the University of California.
“They are professors, dear. You can sit at the same table with them.”