Where Babies Come From

Watsonville, California: 1939

Our house was right on her way home from grammar school and Marceline (Uncle George and Aunt Verda’s daughter) loved to stop off and visit mom. Marceline held her Aunt Babe in high esteem, elevating her to a kindred spirit and favorite aunt. She thought our mother a much better mother than hers: Mom wasn’t as proper and strict as Verda, didn’t fuss about what the house looked like, didn’t care if her kids ran wild, didn’t give a whit about going to mass. She also talked to her niece about anything that she wanted to talk about.

Day family: George Jr, Jimmy, Aunt Verda, Marceline, Uncle George in Watsonville, circa 1939

Eleven-year-old Marceline was there so often she seemed to be part of the furniture. One warm afternoon she quickly tripped up the porch stairs just as Aunt Babe woke up from her daily nap on the living room sofa. Babe hadn’t been feeling well, and when Marceline asked why, she confided to her young niece that she would have a third child soon.

Marceline was crazy about babies, and wanted her parents to have another one, too. She loved taking care of my sister Carleen (Marceline was six years older) and wanted more than anything to have a little sister of her own. It had been on her wish list forever. She’d asked her parents, but they’d emphatically said no, they couldn’t. Left to her own devices, and thinking hard, she worried that perhaps they didn’t know how (disregarding the glaring fact that she already had two older half-brothers and one younger brother, not to mention herself).

Marceline had all kinds of questions for her Aunt Babe: “How did you get Larry and Carleen? Where do babies come from? How long does it take to make one?”

So my mother—being Mother—took a drag off her cigarette and told her.

At dinner that night, Marceline, beside herself with excitement and thinking they could use this information, explained the process pretty well to her parents­. George exploded, his fist slamming the table. “Cheesus.H.Christ! Goddamnsonuvabitch! Jesuschristalmighty! Who in the goddamsonuvabitchinhell told you WHERE BABIES COME FROM?”

“Aunt Babe,” supplied Marceline helpfully.

George glared at Verda, “Your goddam sister …” In high dudgeon, he grabbed Marceline and Verda by their arms and marched over to our house, bounded up the porch, pounded on the screened door, stormed in, and bawled his sister-in-law out royally for taking it upon herself to inform their daughter of life’s private details.

Jabbing his finger with fury towards Babe, he ranted, “You had no goddam business talking to Marceline about this, especially at her age! That’s our job, goddammit! What in the hell were you thinking, and why for chrissakes do you think you had the right to do such a goddamn foolish thing?”

The women in my family don’t mince words, which is unfortunate as it would make them so much easier to eat later. Babe simply looked at him, shrugged, and said, “Well, she asked me.”

Carleen, Larry, Betty (seated), Watsonville 1940

That December, my sister Elizabeth Ann “Betty” Clemens, the third child in our family, was born—and perhaps as a result of Marceline’s coaching, her own much-wanted sister Judi was born almost exactly a year later.