The Ruins of California (2 page)

I pulled out the airsickness bag, fascinated by how clean and sinister it was—and imagined having a vomiting spree next time the stewardess passed by. I tugged on my seat belt to make sure it was tight and checked the metal ashtrays at the end of the armrest for gems or coins. I looked at my ticket stub inside its pink-and-orange PSA folder. The stub said
CHILD
$15.00, and I returned it to my windbreaker pocket and then rested both my palms on the armrests—and looked out the window.

“Say hello for me,” my mom said at the gate. Her voice had gone soft. Her face was weird and dreamy. She had shifted into a new position. Her mind was like a sail, and a new breeze was blowing. It
wasn’t only her. My father had a way of doing that to a person. Just when you’d decided that he didn’t care about anybody but himself, he said something so sensitive and kind, or did something so generous, you couldn’t get over it. Just when you’d decided he was a rat and a fink—my mother’s words, not mine—it would dawn on you that he was a god and you loved him more than anybody. That’s how he made us all feel. Uncertain, off kilter. You wanted more of him—but, at the same time, you weren’t sure about that either.

I thought of him driving to meet me, the MG changing lanes all the way. I’d saunter down the aisle of my plane, disembark, and he’d be leaning against a wall near the arrival gate. Cool, elegant. That inky black hair. A crisp, starched white shirt. And when he’d smiled, it was a burst of fireworks—as if he had searched the world over and finally found a girl he liked most of all: me.

The takeoff was scary and loud but the shrieking engine calmed and the plane floated upward, toward the clouds. I watched the airport get smaller. Down below, the patch of parking lot where my
mother’s blue Mustang was, along with my mother, vanished from view.

It was a short flight to San Francisco, maybe thirty minutes. I studied the irregular checkerboard fabric of the seats—oranges and golds and pinks—in front of me. I looked at the sharp afternoon sunlight and noticed a small hole in the window, a round worm tunnel at the bottom. There were two windows, really, with an interior slice of space in between. Beads of dew, or rain, were leaking into that space and stretching in one direction like a tiny trail of spit or tears.

Marisa was his friend. One weekend, when my father and I were together, she appeared at the botanical garden inside Golden Gate Park. I assumed it was a coincidence, the way he and I had stumbled upon this stunning woman inside the hothouse, among the bromeliads and plumeria.
Hey, Daddy knows somebody here.
Marisa was around after that. Whether or not she was his girlfriend—“if you know what I mean” (but I didn’t)—she was, like him, a math person, a graduate student at the university where my father taught. She had wild curly hair and swimming-pool blue eyes and a kind of extreme figure like my mother’s, with giant boobs exploding out in front.

Marisa and my father got along. I imagined that they had math in common, or maybe just numbers and ideas about numbers, because a great deal of their conversation was loopy and incomprehensible. But Marisa was warm to me, and welcoming, and never told me what to do. She had a soft personality and a soft voice, and being with her was like sinking into a big down pillow. You just wanted to stay in her company forever. Once, the summer before, I’d even met her parents, been to their rambling house in Encino and
swum in their pool that hung over a canyon. Marisa’s father was a doctor of some kind. My father was a doctor of some kind, too, but not the same kind. Didn’t matter. Nobody talked about work. Everybody talked politics, made jokes about Ronald Reagan, our governor, and then my father did his Jerry Lewis impression and fell spastically into the pool. He wore his Polaroid wraparound sunglasses underwater and got more laughs—Marisa’s parents seemed to like him, and they seemed to like me, too, although I’m not sure if I actually spoke that day. (People were always nice to me, especially if I didn’t say anything.) At Christmas, Marisa had given me some beads and a
Get Smart
transistor wristwatch, which led me to believe that she wanted to be my mom someday, or maybe just my older sister.

I was missing a day of school this time. I’d taken the spelling test early, gotten an A (and I didn’t study). There was a Bluebirds meeting in the afternoon that I’d be missing, but Robbie would fill me in. Robyn Morrison was my best friend in Van Dale. She was a strawberry blonde with a husky laugh. She was Mormon, and her parents weren’t divorced or separated—nobody’s in Van Dale were, except mine—but for some reason, even though Robbie was blond and Mormon and her parents were married, she and I understood each other. I felt sure our connection was fated and meant to be.

Van Dale. I belonged there, like I belonged with Robbie. There were other places, other towns, but it was hard to imagine them. Van Dale stretched for miles—one way into Burbank, the other into Pasadena—and it was a safe slice of air in between. We moved into Abuelita’s house in the summer before second grade. We moved in a hurry and my mother talked like it was temporary, “until things get worked out,” but school started, and Robbie sat next to me in class and every time a discussion rose up that suggested another
change, or that we might get our own place, or move to New York, where my mother might be able to work, I grew silent. (My big trick.) Robbie and I were not going to be separated. Van Dale and I were not going to be separated. Unlike anywhere else, north or south, it was comprehensible. The summer was hot and dry and smoggy. The autumn was largely invisible, except for the slow disappearance of summer. The winter was temperate—you needed a jacket on some days. Spring showed up promptly in March with an arrival of balmy air, warm rains, brilliant green grass on the hills, and peeps of sharp sunlight in the late morning after the fog and haze had burned off. Van Dale seemed regular to me, and I wanted regular.

Nothing too large or too small. Modest expectations, predictable outcomes, a string of nice houses along the street, set back at exactly the same distance from the sidewalk. There were rows of arching trees, rectangles of lawn grass, the fanning of fairy-tale sprinklers in the late afternoon, and sunken cement alleyways where the L.A. River trickled by or dried up. There was silvery dew on the windshield of the blue Mustang in the morning when my mother drove me to the same elementary school where she herself had gone—how amazed people were by that—and later, as I walked home, there were black earthworms on the sidewalk, cooked flat by the sun. Robbie and I ascended the shady uphill streets and felt safe, without question or worry, in spite of my mother’s hysteria about a mentally disturbed man prowling the streets. She said too much, perhaps. We passed 31 Flavors and Hagen’s Pharmacy, where we bought Milk Duds or Necco Wafers, then passed quiet apartment buildings with dry fountains and perfectly mowed lawns with all the brown cuttings removed. We walked on, slowly, dislodging the cooked earthworms with a flick of our
shoe tips. (Clods were exquisitely good at this.) And at the top of Central Avenue, we checked the metal lamppost to make sure our initials were still painted in red nail polish.

Robbie and I liked to talk on the phone after dinner—usually about our third-grade teacher, Mrs. Craig, who was very strict and had a wooden leg. (A story had been passed down, through generations of Van Dale public-school children: A boy had once thrown a dart at that leg.) We discussed other girls in Bluebirds, focusing our critical attention on Julie Brownlee, who was stuck up and “acted big.” (Her father ran a barbecue pit.) We talked about Davy Mitchell or Pat McClarty—a natural athlete, tall, strong, funny, a couple of devastating moles on his neck. I liked how everybody’s phone number in Van Dale started with the same three numbers: 2 4 6. My mind tended to dwell on unifying features of things and gravitated toward symmetry and pairs—patterns never seemed random to me. I liked harmony and sameness. I felt good with even numbers, not odd, and although sometimes my heart quickened when I saw doubles, like 33 and 66 and 88, I didn’t dwell on the fact that there were no pairs in Abuelita’s house or that my mother wasn’t dancing anymore or that everybody in Van Dale seemed born with a religion except me.

On Sundays, Robbie was all busy with church. On Saturdays she was allowed to ride the bus into downtown and shop. This seemed to terrify my mother. It had taken an endless amount of time, weeks, before she consented to let me go downtown, too. My mother hated the bus, or seemed to, and said the word with the same tones of disapproval with which she said “bar” or “Las Vegas,” as though public transportation were a magnet for perverts and criminals and God’s castoffs, or the grown man in a garter belt whom the Van Dale police were trying to catch. But I finally ground
my mother down. She was halfway ground down to begin with, so it didn’t take much.

The business district of Van Dale was a stretch of several long blocks. There was Webb’s, a family-owned department store where my mother bought her huge bras and girdles and other lingerie. There was Skiffington’s Shoe Shop, where my shoes were special-ordered twice a year from a skinny shoe salesman with a big Adam’s apple that made him look like Super Chicken. There was an ancient Woolworth’s and two old-time movie theaters with big marquees that played strange pairings in the midday. (
Planet of the Apes / Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
.) When I came home, my fingernails dirty and my breath smelling like hot tamales, I showed my mother and Abuelita all my purchases, things like a yellow rabbit’s foot key chain, a bamboo back scratcher, Chapstick.

Abuelita asked about the bus in nostalgic tones. She knew all the lines, the stops, was eager to hear about the new fares. She drove to work in her own car now, a white Corvair, but she still kept bus schedules in her head. Sometimes when I was alone, like today when I was riding the plane, I thought about Abuelita traveling by herself to America all those years ago from her father’s house in Peru and then traveling to work all those years—she was a housekeeper for David Feinman, a recording-industry executive, in Los Feliz Hills—moving from one dimension to another, from her small one-story house with its turquoise linoleum and beat-up toaster and handmade Peruvian place mats and flimsy paper napkins into another world of swimming pools and heavy linen and large glass windows, a land of views, of canyons, of expansive space and a sense that horizons were unlimited and not daunting, just an open stretch of blue sky that you could soar into and eat.

Inez Garcia Ruin. I was traveling through that sky. I was gliding from
one zone of life to another. I was passing from mother to father, a baton of a girl flying in the distance between hands. I felt unburdened of my pink bedroom and my ceiling-tall stuffed giraffe, my Midge doll with its smooth nippleless breasts, the warm-biscuit smell of Dr. Guinea Pig and his cozy cage, the aquarium of translucent baby guppies, my diary with entries about the boys I had crushes on. I’d gotten engaged to Davy Mitchell in second grade. But when he used the word “ain’t” in class, I buried the engagement ring he gave me in the side yard under Abuelita’s avocado tree and near the fish graveyard area. I said it broke. He said he’d buy me another one. And I said, “Don’t bother.”

I felt unburdened of that ring now, and of Davy, and of the complications of living in a household of women where my mother was lost and loud, where my grandmother worked all the time, and where I was always wishing to stay forever and, at the same time, to be somewhere else. And alone on that small plane as it headed northward, I had a feeling I was on my way.

A
t the bottom of the jetway, I was ejected into a red-carpeted area of San Francisco Airport with its distant ceiling and cavernous spaces. A herd of fellow travelers was clumping near my arrival gate. They were untidy and un–Van Dale looking—wore beards, muttonchops, Afros, ethnic fabrics, shawls, beads, and bright colors. The smell of BO was everywhere, and people were pressing up against each other for incredibly long hugs and gazing into each other’s eyes. I kept wondered if these ragtag figures were hippies who hated the war and went to love-ins and were still consoling each other about the Kennedys or Martin Luther King Jr., like all those crying people I’d seen on TV.

I scanned the horizon of heads. Where was he? Then I heard a gentle voice that didn’t seem much older than my own.

“Inez?”

A girl bent down before me. She smelled like vanilla and cinnamon, like a bakery. Her straight, dark hair was parted in the middle and her face was flat like an Indian’s. When she smiled, her large mouth revealed two wide front teeth and a gap between them.

“Inez,” the girl said again. Her teeth were like a rabbit’s. The lashes of her brown eyes were coated in mascara. I stared at them for what seemed a long time, in silence, and then I realized there was a blue dot under each eye. A dot of blue eye paint. Almost like a clown.

Cookies,
I thought.
The girl smells like cookies, like vanilla wafers.

“I’m Cary,” she said, pausing for a moment. “I’m your father’s friend. He’s waiting downstairs. How was your trip?”

“Okay.”

“Did you sit at the window?”

I nodded.

“I love the window,” she cooed. “Did you look down and see all the tiny swimming pools? Were the farms like squares of a checkerboard?”

I nodded again, marveling at the girl’s face. The blue dots. The gap in her teeth. Her nose was so tiny.

“That’s so far out.” Cary took an inhalation of breath, as though she were captivated completely by the thought of my amazing journey through space. I looked at her mouth. She had an overbite, but there was something else about the angles, the curve of her tongue, and something about her lips that seemed familiar.