Chapter Three Virginia Lee
Three
Virginia Lee
In my earliest memory, my uncle Speed scoops me into his arms and sits me on the bare back of his favorite horse.
I am three years old, and it seems as if I am a mile off the ground.
I grab a fistful of the horse’s mane, steadying myself.
I love how it feels up here, but I don’t get to stay very long.
My mother is worried that I’ll fall, and she scolds my father’s eldest brother for putting me in danger.
My first horseback ride is brief, but it changes me.
From then on, I’ll be obsessed with animals, particularly horses.
Even from afar, Shelley imposed a lot of rules on her daughters.
Both my mom and her sister (also named Virginia) were required to keep their hair bobbed short, which my mom hated.
Their grandma Deedee came from money, meanwhile, and appearances mattered to her.
She was hell-bent on turning her two granddaughters into well-mannered Southern belles.
Then Shelley married husband number three, a ranking tennis player named Bucky Walters Jr., and moved to Florida to join the Tennis Club of Palm Beach.
At that point, she sent for her daughters, but after they arrived, my mom made clear she wasn’t interested in having a stepfather, let alone an older stepbrother (Bucky had a son from an earlier marriage).
Mom and Shelley argued constantly. My mom had always been headstrong, and she resented this new family, especially since her mom hadn’t seemed to care much about family until now.
So my mom ran away, hitchhiking all the way to San Francisco.
I don’t know much about what that trip was like, but I do know that she started calling herself a hippie, and let her red hair grow long and wild.
By the age of sixteen, she’d gotten married to an army man named Craig, and they soon had a son, Danny.
By seventeen, Mom was divorced and sharing an apartment with another single mom.
She had her hands full, but somehow she finished high school.
Then one afternoon, while buying Danny a soft-serve cone at Dairy Freeze, Mom met Sky Roberts, a cute auburn-haired boy in a big hat.
They were both smitten, or so I’ve always been told.
Sky loved Lynn’s shiny mane of hair, her freckled skin, and her big toothy smile.
Lynn liked how Sky swaggered when he walked—and how he wasn’t put off by her already having a kid.
Later, my dad would grow a beer belly and develop what I’ve come to think of as the Roberts nose, wide at the base and bulbous at the tip.
But back then, he was long and lean, with a close-cropped beard and mustache. Mom couldn’t stay away.
From the start, Dad treated Danny as his own.
He said he also wanted more children, which tugged at my mom’s heart.
Maybe, she thought, they could make a family that was better than the fractured one she’d come from.
So in December 1982, my parents married at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Elk Grove, just south of Sacramento.
Eight months later, they had me: Virginia Lee Roberts.
Everyone called me Jenna. Family legend has it that my arrival made my grandma Shelley want to reconcile with my mom, her estranged eldest daughter.
In a series of long-distance phone calls, she and my mother patched things up, and soon my dad, my mom, Danny, and I were speeding east in a used Winnebago we’d picked up for cheap.
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The first thing that struck me about Florida was the ocean—I’d never seen one.
I loved its salty smell. We stayed with grandma Shelley in West Palm Beach at first, not far from the beach, and I soon discovered a lot about her.
She wouldn’t let us call her Grandma, for starters; I guess because it signaled her age.
We kids were to call her Gamma. What’s more, she seemed to wake up with a Bloody Mary in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
Gamma always spent peak tanning hours poolside at her tennis club, bronzing her already brown and leathery skin and playing backgammon with friends.
She kept a bottle of baby oil in her purse.
She had other quirks, too. A clean freak, Gamma was the kind of woman who kept her furniture covered in plastic and who made me stand in the driveway when I brushed my hair.
She didn’t have a nurturing bone in her body.
But I admired how she lived life on her own terms.
Given Gamma’s control issues, Mom never intended for us to stay long under her roof.
Soon my parents found a small three-bedroom ranch house on a dirt road in Loxahatchee, about thirty minutes away from West Palm Beach.
Loxahatchee is prime horse country now, but back then it was known for its renegade residents, loose land restrictions, and exotic animals.
Partly surrounded by citrus groves, Loxahatchee edged up against the last remaining section of the northern Everglades.
Living next to something so wild, our new neighbors felt free to keep not only broken-down school buses in their yards, but also iguanas, peacocks, alpacas, and emus.
Years later, one neighbor would stash the body of an endangered panther in his garage freezer.
That was Loxahatchee in the 1980s: untamed and off the grid.
Our new house wasn’t much, but my parents worked hard to fix it up.
Mom planted sunflowers and daisies in the front yard.
Dad seeded a lawn, built a shed, raised a barn.
And me? In the daytime I explored the woods that bordered our land.
There were two kinds of cypress trees in our part of Florida—the pond cypress and the bald cypress—neither one of which resembled the tall Italian cypresses I remembered from Sacramento.
These trees grew in areas saturated by water.
I remember a neighbor explained that the bald cypress, a wispy breed, got its name because it lost its leaves in winter.
But I was more fascinated by how when it flooded, these trees created specialized root structures—everyone called them “knees”—that grew out of the submerged ground, through the water and up into the air, bringing oxygen to the canopy above.
These cypresses were survivors—some had been alive for six hundred years—and I admired that.
I also loved what I could see from the uppermost branches of our tallest slash pine trees, which are the kind that grow on swampy ground.
I would ascend and hang upside down like a possum, laughing at the world flipped on its head.
I got so good at climbing that my parents began calling me Peter Pan.
I couldn’t fly, of course, but I had the fearlessness and confidence of someone who could.
A month after I turned five, Mom put me in kindergarten at Haverhill Baptist Day School.
Classes were only a few hours a day and were mostly intended to get kids used to attending school.
But I still have the report card, which features a drawing of two smiling children, a boy and a girl, sitting together on the floor, both holding books open in their laps.
I remember the delight I felt as I learned to read that fall, and how amazed I was to learn there was a place called a library where anyone could go to borrow books, free of charge.
Five months after I’d enrolled at Haverhill, in February 1989, my little brother, Sky Rocket Roberts, was born.
I called him Skydy Bump, or just Skydy. When he came home from the hospital, my parents put his crib in my room, so I felt almost as if he were my baby.
When he cried at night, I was the one who got up and comforted him.
I adored Skydy, and as he grew up—white-blond, brown-eyed, and handsome—good things began to happen.
My mom worked briefly as a bank teller after Skydy was born, but she quit after being robbed at gunpoint.
I understand now that the robbery must have been terrifying for her, but at the time, it seemed a boon to us kids: we were glad to have her around more.
For his part, Dad began to find work doing maintenance and construction.
My half brother, Danny, was a scrappy kid.
Even after getting one of his front teeth knocked out being rambunctious, he always seemed to lean into trouble.
But he was my big brother, and he looked out for me.
More and more, it seemed Mom and Dad walked around with beer cans in their hands.
Still, I was happy, and I thought my family was too.
In those days, I was buoyed by the knowledge that my mom loved having a daughter.
I still have the baby book she made for me, which is so jammed with photos I can barely close it.
There’s me, perched on a chair next to a favorite tabby cat; me barefoot at the beach, shoveling sand into a bucket; me dressed up as Snow White on Halloween.
There’s a lock of my hair tied with a pink ribbon, and Mom wrote monthly entries, each one addressed to me.
“My Special Girl!” she wrote. When my freckles popped out, just like Mom’s, she called them “angel kisses” and insisted they made me prettier.
And Mom trusted me completely with Skydy.
One day, while playing in the sandpit under the treehouse Dad had built for us, Skydy tugged on my T-shirt.
“Sissie,” he said, and when I turned around, he pointed at a snake slithering toward us.
I wasn’t particularly afraid of reptiles—at one point, I’d kept a lizard in a shoebox under my bed, filling a bottle cap each night so he had water—but something told me this viper was trouble.
I grabbed Skydy and ran for the house, screaming.
Mom came out just in time to see the deadly water moccasin slipping into the grass. Later, she said I’d saved Skydy’s life.