Pasadena (10 page)

It was because of this diminished stack of coins that in March of 1919, as Edmund’s birthday approached, Linda found herself short of the necessary funds to buy her brother the gift she knew he wanted most: an atlas of California, two feet tall by two feet wide, with accordion maps and a red ribbon marker and gold lettering stamped on the morocco spine. For months she had eyed it behind Margarita’s counter, and when she finally asked to see it Margarita’s eyebrows rose. “I’m afraid that’s twelve dollars.” And then, “Linda, you and I both know your lobster haul isn’t what it used to be.” Linda proposed paying for it on layaway, but Margarita never sold to the Stamps on credit. “They’re good enough people,” she’d say at her counter to anyone who would listen. “But a little too close to the edge to extend a loan. It would take only a fire or a flood for everything to collapse around them.” Instead, Linda decided, she would throw Edmund a picnic, although it wouldn’t be much of a party: just herself and Edmund and Valencia and Charlotte Moss, who by now wrote a weekly column for the
Bee
called “The Whisper of the Sea.”

Linda read in
Rob Wagner’s California Almanack
that at sunset on Edmund’s birthday the tide would be low and the beach wide. She spent the day at Valencia’s stove, stirring the pot of chicken à la Providence, frying the oysters and the salsify fritters. On the beach, she secured an old blanket in the sand and pitched an awning over it with four fishing rods and the sheet from her bed. From above, the fluttering white sheet looked like the sail of a grounded schooner—a shipwreck on the beach.

She spent the afternoon hiking up and down the bluff, carrying the sandwiches and the jug of lemonade and collecting driftwood for a bonfire. How much easier things would be if there was a staircase leading to the beach, and not for the first time she thought of cutting the lumber and buying the two thousand wagon-box nails and erecting the one hundred steps herself; she had tried to interest Edmund in the project late one night but he had only turned away and told her to go to sleep.

She felt that some sort of ritual should commemorate Edmund’s advancement
into adulthood. She thought of a Maypole, but didn’t know how she could get a big-enough pole down to the beach. She thought perhaps they should sacrifice something in the bonfire, something horrible like a leopard shark, but she had never caught a leopard shark in her life. Maybe she should prepare songbooks for singing around the fire, but what would they sing? “Born in the Ocean, Died in the Sea”? “The Farmer from France”? “True Love in the Afternoon”? None of those sounded right, but as she shoveled out the bonfire pit she sang to herself:

With each thrust of the shovel, Linda feared more and more that the party would disappoint her brother. Edmund would hike down to the beach and they would look at one another and have nothing to say or do. He might say, “I’m too busy for all this.” She imagined his voice: “Linda, please leave me alone.” He would climb back up the sea cliff, and Charlotte might whisper, “That Linda. She lives in her own world, doesn’t she?” Linda overheard Margarita say just that once down at the store, as Linda was off in a corner of the shop trying on the little felt hat with the bald-eagle feather. Over the years, the hat had become known as “Linda’s sombrero,” and Linda knew, even if no one believed her, that one day it would be hers. “I wonder sometimes why Linda just can’t keep her feet on the ground,” Edmund once said to Valencia. “Who on earth taught her to reach for the stars?” And Charlotte Moss once wrote in her breezy column:
Guess which Baden-Baden fishergirl dreams of one day leaving us behind?
What was wrong with them?, Linda asked herself, her shovel sinking into the sand and then flipping each spadeful over her shoulder. Sink and flip, sink and flip, and Linda’s bonfire pit deepened, and only when she struck water did Linda turn and see that for the last several minutes each spadeful of sand had landed on her box of oyster sandwiches and chicken à la Providence.

The picnic was ruined. Linda looked to the sky and realized that it was nearly five o’clock and that Edmund and the others would arrive on the beach within the hour. There was no time to climb back to the cottage
for her bathing dress. She pulled her clothes over her head and rolled her wool underpants into a ball, and there Linda stood, naked on the beach, her chest goose-pimpling, her hips white and bright in the fading afternoon. During the past few months, much to her regret, she’d begun to develop a sense of modesty. It would shame her deeply were Edmund to see her like this, fleshy and vulnerable. And so, with her lobster satchel around her waist, she pushed forward into the cold March ocean.

The tide slapped at her shins and her thighs and between her legs, and Linda paddled on, through a bed of bull kelp, the long stalks parting around her. From twenty feet out she could see Condor’s Nest up on the cliff, the tin roofs throwing back the setting sun as if in protest. Edmund, she knew, was in the fields, riding his burro as long as he could before Valencia would make him change his shirt for the picnic. Valencia was in the kitchen, embroidering the blouses she sold at Margarita’s. Charlotte, Linda imagined, was walking toward Condor’s Nest, pulling a notebook from her pocket, ready to record a thought. From this sea view, Linda’s world appeared calm: the three cottages alone on the bluff, ghostly smoke rising from a chimney. It was a world Linda loved more than anything, but she knew it couldn’t contain her; she was sixteen, and she believed she was capable of taking care of herself. She longed for the day.

Her skin blue and cold beneath the water, Linda propelled herself out to the buoy that marked her underperforming lobster pots and tugged the lines. The pots would be stuffed, she could only hope, with three-year-olds banging their tails. She inhaled and began swimming straight to the bottom of the Pacific, her hand around the pot warp guiding her down. At once everything around her was silent, the water dense and icy and black and touching her everywhere. The pot warp was slick with algae, and her hair fanned around her and she motored onward. On the ocean floor there was just enough light to see a few inches in front of her. The pots nestled against a rock covered with a giant green anemone, its tentacles swaying. Surfgrass and sea lettuce and lime-green dead-man’s-fingers and a giant drooping sea palm waved in her wake, as if welcoming her. The sand was fine and scattered with broken-up buckshot barnacles, and the ocean floor swallowed her feet.

She inspected two pots and found them disappointingly empty.
Nothing in the next two as well. Worry rose in her as she turned to the almost invisible slats of the fifth and sixth pots. Both empty. In only a few years the bottom of the ocean had changed, and if she hadn’t seen it herself she would never have believed it possible; hadn’t Linda once gone around saying that the ocean was so big, no man could change it? In the seventh pot, three lobsters waited inside, and in the eighth one hovered mournfully. These lobsters were almost five pounds each, and one of them was so fat and long it was the biggest she had ever caught after Lottie. It barely fit through the mouth of her satchel, and just as she was tucking its tail into the bag and buttoning the flap, Linda sensed something move at her feet.

She nearly gasped.

It could have been a tidepool sculpin or some other bottom-scraper she’d never bother to haul. Near the pots she’d once seen a two-spotted octopus, but when it saw her it had billowed away, a rubbery tablecloth caught in the watery wind. And that was probably what this was, Linda reassured herself, an old two-spotter, with its pear-shaped head and its green-brown skin and its arms sucking mollusks from the rocks. They were the biggest cowards in the Pacific, dashing away at the sight of anything bigger than themselves, and Linda took hold of the pot warp and swam to the surface.

The light poured from above, green through the water, and now she could see the bottom of the buoy. In another few seconds she would push her head into the daylight, but just as she was about to crack the surface and fill her lungs with air and wipe her hair out of her eyes and turn toward shore—where she’d dress on the beach and then show Edmund the giant lobster—just then, still in the clasp of the ocean, still ten feet under March water, Linda saw the slender snout of a blue shark.

It was about five feet long, not quite full-size, its pectoral fins extending from its side like two crescent moons. Its belly was white, its back was dark blue, and its two black eyes were sunk deep in the side of its snout, which was now only a few feet from Linda. At first she couldn’t believe it was a shark, because the blues usually didn’t come this close to shore, and she thought that maybe it was a swordfish that had lost its sword, or a large barracuda—so long and skinny it was—but then it opened its mouth and revealed a row of rounded but deadly-looking teeth.

Linda stopped kicking and floated silently, hanging on to the pot warp. She couldn’t tell if the shark was eyeing her or her lobsters. It was a dark-eyed silent creature, its intentions all mystery, and if Linda hadn’t been so frightened she would have recognized the shark’s sleek, dangerous beauty; she would have pondered the fast fury that ran electrically through its brain. She knew she should try to escape, but she didn’t know how; she was transfixed. She and the shark floated in the ocean, as if suspended from something above, its fins paddling, her lungs aching for air. She thought about the party that was about to arrive on the beach looking for her. A part of her was already resigned to the fact that the shark would devour her, nudging up its snout and flinging open its mouth and snapping those teeth into her thigh, penetrating her flesh. She would release an underwater scream, one that only she and the shark would share, and her blood would seep as slowly as ink clouds, staining the sheets of the ocean. And later, when Edmund arrived on the beach and couldn’t find her, he would shrug his shoulders and say, “Where’d she get to now?” She thought of the story her death would provide Charlotte’s pen: a girl disappeared, stolen away as if by a large, cruel hand. Linda hoped that Charlotte would notice her clothes on the beach and piece together the facts, and Linda wrote the final sentence for Charlotte: “Did Linda Stamp drown, or was she eaten alive?”

The shark’s eyes were the size of sand dollars, with a gelatinous sheen. They didn’t seem to have eyelids—they were simply two dark, oily disks staring into the still world of the ocean and finding Linda. All of it—her desperate need for air, the winter current, the threat of the mouth curving prehistorically beneath the blue snout—made Linda think of her life at Condor’s Nest, with its surrounding thicket of hottentot figs blooming with yellow flowers; of Dieter, still in Europe, even though the newspaper pinned to Margarita’s bulletin board indicated that peace had arrived and that Wilson himself had gone to France to sweep things up; of Valencia, who had recently pulled Linda aside and told her a few shocking secrets of the world, most of which involved womanhood; of Edmund, her Siegmund, who had recently complained to Valencia that he no longer wanted to sleep in the same cottage as his sister. She thought of them all, but mostly of her brother, his face invading her mind: and she felt the urgency to make a final choice, a choice of devotion, to settle her heart upon one single thing
before it was too late. Linda chose Edmund: If I can think of only one, I shall think of you. She wondered what the shark was thinking of, what it
—he?
—had chosen. And just as she was about to go limp and offer herself, the shark whipped its tail and turned around, its snout leading the long dark hunting way.

As she broke the surface, Linda was crying and gulping for air. She started for shore; in front of her waited the pitched bedsheet and the bonfire pit and, above, Condor’s Nest. She thought she saw someone moving in the garden on the bluff, but she couldn’t tell who it was. Someone in a white shirt—was it Edmund? Would he believe her when she told him of the blue shark? She could hardly believe it herself—those shallow black eyes the most evil thing she had ever seen! Her satchel was heavy with lobster and water as she paddled on. There’d be time to dry off and rehook the buttons of her dress and run up the bluff to the kitchen to fetch a deep pot. She would pull Edmund aside and describe the snout and the dorsal fin and how frightened she’d been, and she wanted him to know that he had been in her mind as those teeth gleamed in the dusky water. It was he she’d been thinking about, only Edmund, dear Edmund; everything else had fallen away. And she didn’t care what he would say, didn’t care if this would embarrass him or lead him to call her a stupid girl—because this was the truth, and Linda Stamp had faced a grinning blue shark, and so what if it was little more than a baby, its teeth made Linda’s puma trap look like a nutcracker. She had to tell him, she had to take Edmund’s hand and tell him what really ran through her mind during the moments that mattered most: that she would always think of him first and last, that she was his, and
Oh please Edmund tell me that you are mine
. She reached the shallows, the waves crashing around her, and she stood, the water reaching her waist. She had made it to shore, and despite her fear she knew that she would return to the ocean floor; either the shark would come for her or it wouldn’t. Linda’s optimism set in, and just as she began to emerge from the water, naked except for her satchel and a stalk of kelp across her shoulders, Linda saw a man appear on the beach, followed by someone else, and Edmund trailing behind.

“Linda!” her father called. “Is it really you?” He was waving his arms over his pointy head, and he began running toward the water. He was skinnier than she remembered, and his beard was like a bib across his chest and over his green wool jacket.

Linda stopped, crouching and covering herself in the tide. She waved demurely. Something in her had assumed she’d never see her father again. And something in the expression on Edmund’s face—a face that had turned hard and old as he became a young man—told Linda that he too hadn’t expected to see Dieter again. He’d come to believe that the farm was his, and he’d begun to dig his toes into the windswept land.