Pat Before Me
Pat at her grandparents’ house in Paradise.
When I met Pat, she was twenty-two years old, newly arrived in Iowa City. Over time she would let slip little scraps and shards of those first twenty-two years. She was less than forthcoming about her past; she had worked so hard to break free of it. The more she shared with me, the more I came to realize her decision to leave California and move to Iowa, to start over, to reinvent herself, was an act of great courage.
Patricia Lyn Schmid was born in Marin General Hospital in San Rafael, California, twenty miles north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge. Her parents, Robert Lenard and Charlsie Elaine Schmid, lived on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, the main drag through Kentfield, a small town just west of San Rafael in the eastern foothills of Mount Tamalpais.
Her father was a tall lanky man of whom Pat often spoke fondly, but Robert and Elaine[1] divorced when Pat was six, and a year later he died of smoke inhalation in a fire that killed nineteen others and destroyed the Thomas Hotel, a five-story boardinghouse on Mission Street in San Francisco. I pointed out to Pat once that many of her favorite actors had the same gangly physique that her father had – Donald Sutherland, Hugh Laurie, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeff Goldblum, Tim Robbins – as did I. We agreed it was her way of holding onto one of the few good memories of her childhood.
Elaine was nineteen when she gave birth to Pat. Born in Sullivan, Missouri,[2] in 1933, Elaine was one of seven children of a farming family who, in response to the Great Depression, packed up and headed to California, becoming part of one of the largest migrations in American history. The family settled in Paradise, a town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, 85 miles north of Sacramento.[3]
Pat at the beach with her mom, who’s holding Janet.
After the divorce, Elaine moved to Santa Clara with her two young daughters, Pat and Janet, and married George Ballas, a Greek immigrant who owned a string of laundromats. About those years, Pat’s usual terse comment was “George was an awful man who treated me cruelly.” Her younger sister, on the other hand, was the golden child, who used this favoritism to her advantage. Pat and Janet did not get along, and in adulthood, became estranged and never reconciled.
Her maternal grandparents, Elmer and Charlsie Jones, were another matter. Sincere and generous, they owned a rambling house with a large kitchen garden in Paradise. Elaine would take her daughters to visit in the summer, and often left them in the care of her parents. The passel of cousins who lived nearby supplied her with instant playmates. And Paradise – a small town perched on a ridge between deep canyons formed by the Feather River to the east and Butte Creek to the north – offered plenty of room for wandering and exploring.
Pat, second from the right, and her cousins in Paradise.
Living with Pat, I came to realize her aptitude for tending a big garden and canning its produce came from her grandmother. Likewise, the source of certain recipes in Pat’s repertoire – honey-glazed cornbread, flaky biscuits and bulldog gravy, chicken and dumplings, chicken pot pie, deviled eggs, peach cobbler – was Grandma Charlsie.
Pat’s relationship with her mom was fraught. In the 1960s, Elaine was prescribed Valium to treat anxiety and “psychic tension.” Hailed as a wonder drug but highly addictive, Valium was, by 1968, the most-prescribed medication in the United States.[4] Elaine became one of its victims, first sent away to an inpatient rehab center when Pat was twelve. She and her sister were shipped off to stay with their grandmother in Paradise. Over the next three or four years, Pat tried to hold the family together, scouring the house for her mother’s “little yellow pills” and eventually signing her commitment papers. It wasn’t until I’d known Pat for four decades that I heard all the facts of this story. The memories haunted her. In her final year, when she began taking hydrocodone and using fentanyl patches to provide relief from the constant pain, Pat became unduly afraid she’d become addicted, like her mother had.
Over time, Pat revealed more about her relationship with her stepfather: that he often hit her and, when she was eleven, molested her. She was also sexually abused by another man – an unnamed uncle – who’d been entrusted to care for Pat and her sister. She never wanted to dwell on those memories, and I never pressed her to dredge them up. Although I didn’t know all the details, I did know she blamed her mother for not protecting her.
Elaine moved to Iowa City in the early eighties to try to mend fences with Pat, working as a frat house mom for a few years. She would invite us over to the house to watch movies on her TV (we didn’t have one then), feeding her grandkids all manner of junk foods. Before she moved back to Santa Clara, she left us a small packet of documents – Pat’s birth certificate, her grade school and high school diplomas, and some photographs from her childhood. One of those photos seemed particularly ominous, hinting at aspects of Pat’s past – the evil and constant threat embodied in men – that she’d hidden away in the murkiest recesses of her mind.
Photograph
It’s your birthday.
You wear your white party dress.
Shy but resolute, you stare at the camera
with brown eyes large with wonder or fear,
hugging a doll still wrapped in plastic,
a new toy cash register poised in your lap.
Your fat, bratty cousin grins over your shoulder.
He can’t wait to pull the head off your doll.
Uncle Bob’s head hangs like a trophy
from the border of the photograph.
He’s giving you one of his looks.
He reeks of gas stations & bowling alleys.
Your stepfather sits in the shadowy background
& smirks, a Miller’s High Life by his feet.
Behind him, a bulbous Philco TV,
a refrigerator & a clock that tells the time
in California forty-odd years ago
when you could show your age with one hand.
Pat would share other memories of growing up in Santa Clara less sinister than those. She spent whole afternoons sunbathing at the municipal swimming pool, surrounded by orchards. Santa Clara County was still the leading fruit-producing county in California, often referred to as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. In the spring, its orchards were draped in white and pink blossoms. In the summer, tree branches bowed beneath the weight of purple prunes and golden apricots, not to mention peaches, persimmons, almonds, walnuts, figs, lemons, kumquats, and loquats.
Pat and Elaine , grade school (eighth grade) graduation?
By the time Pat started high school in 1967, the burgeoning tech industry was starting to transform the area from farmland to densely populated cities, from Valley of Heart’s Delight to Silicon Valley. She went to Buchser High School and was, by her own admission, a problem student and an adamant nonconformist. She rarely wore shoes to class. She would proudly reminisce that when Nixon announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia in 1970, she led a walkout at her high school.
That spring, Elaine divorced George. She found an apartment big enough for her and Janet and then turned to Pat: “What are you gonna do?” A junior in high school, Pat panicked for a moment but decided to marry Clifford Sniatowski, who’d graduated a year earlier from Buchser and held down a steady job as an auto mechanic. Pat always spoke of their marriage as her escape hatch, a way to cut all ties with her parents. But Clifford physically abused her. I wonder how Pat, who bruised bright yellow and purple at the slightest bump against a table or chair,[5] explained those injuries to friends.
High school Pat, sporting a beehive a la The Ronettes and Dusty Springfield.
I sometimes marvel at her perseverance during that time, her ability to take matters into her own hands and stay strong in the face of unrelenting obstacles. In later years, if she ever admitted to doubts about herself, I had an inkling of the source of that self-doubt. And whenever she’d react to my failings as a partner by shutting me out, I’d remind myself of the reasons for that protective shell she’d retreat into.
Clifford and Pat rented a small place in Mount Hermon, among the old-growth redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Next door was a large communal house known as Air Castle. Pat became friends with the good folks who lived there – John Higgins, Paul Bergmann, Hector Tellez, Amy Prinky, Alice Cates, Lyle Anderson, Margaret, Pam, and Barb Bailey. While Clifford was at work, Pat often spent her days at Air Castle and was introduced to the possibilities of another kind of life. Pat later followed those who had moved to Iowa City, reconnecting with them and building lifelong relationships.
When Clifford worked on cars at home, whether tuning one up or restoring an old one, he expected Pat’s help. (She knew far more about cars than I did.) They divorced in 1973 and, as far as I know, never spoke to each other again. When the judge during the divorce proceedings asked her why she didn’t want to keep her husband’s name, Pat replied, “Why the hell would I?” The only thing she wanted from that marriage was their 1964 Dodge Dart, a sweet ride with a slant-six engine and a push-button gear shift, the car that would eventually transport her to Iowa.
That winter, Pat and her friend Sue Martinez celebrated her hard-earned independence with a road trip to Mexico. They hitchhiked to the border and then took trains down the Pacific Coast to the quiet Oaxacan beaches of Puerto Angel. She would talk about how light and happy she felt traveling with Sue. When they returned, Pat moved in with Kevin Walker – finally, a good man! – in nearby Felton and began to take classes in the fall of 1974 at Cabrillo College, a community college in Aptos, just east of Santa Cruz, a twelve-mile drive from Felton.[6]
Pat with Felix, the dog she shared with Kevin, the winter before she left California.
Leaving California the following September was Pat’s determined effort to break free of a past whose traumas far outweighed its joys. On the day she left she quit smoking cold turkey. She was not merely turning a page or starting a new chapter; she was beginning a whole new book.
Footnotes
[1] Although Charlsie was her first name, she preferred to be called Elaine.
[2] A small town seventy miles southwest of St. Louis, Sullivan was known as a sundown town. A sign warning Blacks to leave town before dark still existed in 1990. In the 2010 census, the town was 97.4% white.
[3] Known as Poverty Ridge before it became Paradise, much of it was destroyed in the 2018 Camp Fire wildfire.
[4] In 1966, Valium was portrayed by The Rolling Stones as “Mother's Little Helper”: “She goes running for the shelter of her mother's little helper/ And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day.”
[5] One of the signs of the Loeys-Dietz Syndrome that would present in Pat in her late fifties.
[6] Another student at Cabrillo College was Ed Kemper, the “Coed Killer.” Between May 1972 and April 1973, he brutally murdered eight women, including five college students and one high school student whom Kemper picked up while they were hitchhiking in Santa Cruz County. One victim was a Cabrillo College student. I include this only to suggest another reason why Pat decided to move 2,000 miles away from the place she’d always called home.