Joan, who was eight, and Mimi, who was four, shared a bedroom on the second floor of the Baez’s family’s clapboard house in Menlo Park, California, near Stanford University, where their father, Dr. Albert Baez, thirty-seven, worked in a cold war program to teach physics to military engineers in training. Their older sister, Pauline, ten, kept to herself in her own small room, a converted closet, and their mother, thirty-six, for whom Joan was named, tended to the house while listening to classical music on 78-rpm records a salesman picked out for her. The female contingent of the family submitted reluctantly to rooming-house life until the elder Joan’s sister Tia, thirty-nine, joined them, freshly divorced for unimaginably adult reasons never to be discussed.

Sisterhood understitched the Baez household. The first of Joan and Albert’s children had been named for Tia, whose proper name was Pauline Bridge Henderson (Tia meaning “aunt” in Spanish, Albert’s native language), just as the third born had been named for their father’s only sister, Margarita; Mimi was her middle name, which everybody in the family except Albert Baez preferred. Tia was fair and soft, with long, curly chestnut hair and the free-spirited poise of an artist’s model; she somehow always seemed as if she would prefer to be nude and gazed upon. This may have come from experience: Tia had married a painter, traveled through Europe with him, studied dance with Martha Graham, written poetry. She had, that is, lived all her era’s romantic feminine dreams. Sipping sherry in the kitchen of the boarding house, Tia would regale her sister and the girls—sometimes all three, more often only Joan and Mimi, since Pauline tended to play alone—with stories of her travels and readings from her notebooks. To Big Joan, the relief, the novelty, and the vicarious pleasures that Tia provided nearly outweighed the envy she incited. A strong, handsome young woman, the former Joan Bridge had married young and with ambivalence; feeling sinful and confused for having loved another woman, she yielded to the overtures of a gentle Mexican academic who said he would accept her as she was. In the decade to follow, she fixed her resources on rearing children. “You could feel the house lighten up when Tia came in,” Mimi would recall. “But Tia was not a worker, and so mother was real resentful that Tia’s role was to come around and be the clown, get everyone laughing and basically not to hold her end up. Mother carried buckets of stuff, and Tia told stories—and we loved her, because she really liked to have fun, and she would tell us stories that seemed really naughty, and she went out on dates with men.”

For several years, Tia kept company with a fellow living in the boardinghouse, Rugger, a bit of a roustabout with a child’s sense of abandon that delighted the Baez girls. “He’d take my sister and Joanie and Mimi out together, and they’d have a glorious time,” said Big Joan. “He’d buy them all kinds of candy and ice cream, and he’d take them to double features. He’d ruin them! Their father was furious—‘Why do they have to go to a double feature? Isn’t one movie enough?’ I couldn’t explain it to him. The girls were still girls—they were supposed to have fun. He was beside himself. He was terribly jealous, and so was I.” Evidently picking up glimmers of information from snatches of grown-up talk, Joan and Mimi seemed troubled by the family conflict over Rugger. “Their girls were very upset that the adults were at odds,” Tia remembered. “They thought they were doing something wrong because they were happy, or Rugger and I would doing something wrong because we were in love and enjoying in. I was afraid they were getting the impression that men and sisters don’t mix, and I guess they did. But Mimi and Joanie were fine, as long as they got the same kind of ice cream and the scoops were the same size.”