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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Against maternity clothes
What does a hipster mom-to-be do when she has to trade her leather jacket for pink jumpers? She cries.
By Sarah Madsen Hardy
[10/20/99]

Beached whale or bitchin' babe?
Turns out pregnant is sexy. Who knew?
By Helene Stapinski
[10/20/99]

For the bad times
Sometimes a friend in crisis is better than a friend for life.
By Lauren Kessler
[10/19/99]

For all the girls
First, my daughter came out. Then, she took me out with the girls -- to see the Sinatra who packs a dildo.
By Lee Uttmark
[10/18/99]

I cannot tell a lie
What happens when a hooker confesses to her parents.
By Tracy Quan
[10/15/99]

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Dwayne spent hours in the garage cleaning and oiling them and making his own ammunition with a reloader. He spent hundreds of dollars on weapons, bullets and accessories. Hobbies are expensive. But these were weapons. Not for play -- they could only shred targets or skin and bone.

"Only a shotgun, for intruders, and the shells are somewhere else," I'd been told that day, after the closet. But then I found a handgun on the dresser under a knit cap, within easy reach of our daughters. There was a gun in the camper when we took vacations, a gun in the glove compartment of the car. All those years, I'd been afraid of the police stopping Dwayne, a black man, and now I was even more scared, because what if they saw a gun in the glove compartment?

Every night, while I graded papers, Dwayne was in the garage making shells or sorting bullets or oiling a gun barrel. I watched him, I asked him about the guns and I wrote about them in my last novel. I imagined being a teenage boy, surrounded by gangs and death, who falls in love with weapons as defense; who cannot kill but who cleans and stores and loads the guns to protect his own sanity. But my imagination was still afraid, and when I knocked on the closed wooden door, very late, my husband answered wearing his 9 mm in a shoulder holster. Who was I? Was I on the threshold?

We had three children, and suddenly he had 10 guns. I didn't feel protected. I felt like I was living with a different man, one who didn't play basketball and read Sports Illustrated like before, one who baked his guns clean and read Guns & Ammo. Our house and garage and vehicle, my spouse, carried instruments of death. The 9 mm handgun on the dresser, shockingly heavy to me, could have been picked up, dropped, fired, by fingers smaller than mine. And I couldn't forgive that.

When we visited our old neighborhoods, drugs and guns were everywhere. Our girls approached the car of a childhood friend and I saw an Uzi on his front seat. The stubby barrel was barely hidden. I nearly screamed. A relative had a derringer, tiny and palm-sized, in his car. When I finally told Dwayne I didn't want to live like this, he replied, "This is real life." But I didn't want it to be my life, my children's lives. Guns and his work and this real life had engendered a paranoia, a mistrust, a secrecy and a fatalism that I couldn't share.

On our last walk together, without the kids, we took a trail in the nearby river bottom, a place we'd explored as children. Stepping down a narrow path through fall-browned brush and wild grapevines fallow for winter, we saw in the tall bamboo a homeless encampment where dogs barked at us from the entrance. Then we were in a clearing near the water, and a huge snort came from the arundo cane. Feral pigs lived there, though we'd never actually seen one. They can weigh 200 pounds, tusks included, and they've charged riders on horseback.

Dwayne pulled a 9 mm handgun from his back waistband and aimed toward the cane. I was amazed. "Back up," he whispered. We both did. The snorting was grumpy, not enraged, and then the cane trembled as the pig crashed the other way.

I stared at the gun. "So you were gonna shoot the pig?" I said, and Dwayne tucked the gun under his shirt. "And when that pissed him off, he was gonna charge the littlest person -- me."

"I didn't bring this for wild pigs," he said unapologetically, as we walked back. "I brought it for wild people."

I know he's right -- the wild people are out there, but inside my house, there are no wild people. My daughters hate guns. They hate seeing guns in constant advertisements for movies, and on TV news, which in Southern California often consists of freeway chases ending with drawn guns, or videotape of convenience-store robberies where people wave guns. They hate their uncles' guns, and they hate their father's guns.

Is this because I've told them to? Because they're girls? No. It's instinctive fear. I'll never forget volunteering in a kindergarten class, sitting near the circle of children while they talked about a book. Then a boy said his dad's gun could have killed the monster. The teacher said, "Guns are scary." She looked shocked. "How many people in here have seen guns?"

I drew a quick breath when my middle daughter Delphine raised her hand, along with nine or 10 other kids, and said, "My dad has a gun in his car."

"Mine does, too," the first boy said. "It sits on the seat next to me."

The teacher glanced at me, incredulous, and I was ashamed. For all of us.

Next page | "It's scary to sit on the guns"