We lived in an apartment with two beds, a pumpkin-colored Parsons desk for me and no other furniture. Our gas and electricity had been turned off a few times. Once, my mother had sent me to the landlord (who, this being Los Angeles, was the actor who’d played the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz”) to ask for an extension on our rent. I was a clean-looking high school girl; we thought he’d hesitate to turn me out onto the streets. The landlord’s wife opened the door wearing a floor-length silk housecoat. The aged Tin Man sat in an old robe at the kitchen counter. She asked me how I was doing in school. “Good,” I answered. “Well, that’s wonderful.” she said. “Just wonderful.” While we talked, a rerun of “Gunsmoke” played on a small portable TV. But our minimal conversation worked: We remained in our rental.

I don’t like mentioning money troubles, because they could elicit pity — an emotion unwarranted in my case. I had friends who turned out to be lifelong, wild fun, and Southern California’s own brand of teenage pleasure, hitching to the beach where we built fires (still allowed in the ’70s) and saw the day out singing with a boy playing guitar. Even so, I’d had an upbringing that would normally encourage an applicant to check the box that said yes (yes, please!) for financial aid.

But that day, my mother looked up at me on the stairs with a smile that meant that there were thousands of things I didn’t understand.

“You won’t need financial aid,” she said, her face proud and closed. “That’s all taken care of. The Syrians promised me.”

So I checked the box that said, no, I would not need financial aid.

The Syrians were my father’s family, whom she’d known before I was born. Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm. “He controlled the price of wheat in the whole Middle East,” she would say. My parents had met in Madison, Wis., where my mother — the first in her family to attend college — worked in a cheese factory to pay her fees. She wore a sari from a thrift store to her Tri Delta formal and started a trend. When my father brought his American bride home to Syria, his father was charmed by my stylish, educated mother and furnished their apartment with the newest appliances.