The Ruins of California (21 page)

She knew full well who Shelley was. (Maybe she just wanted to forget.) Before they’d met face-to-face, I said that my new friend liked to hike. My mother got the impression that Shelley was an outdoorsy type, like an older Camp Fire girl—or maybe a kid who had grown up doing all kinds of outdoorsy things with her family, like scuba diving or sailing. Los Angeles was full of those families. They camped on weekends, or went diving, or took overnight sailing trips to Catalina Island. They drove to Mammoth and skied for the holidays. That seemed healthy to my mother. She’d gone to high school with kids like that and always felt left out.

“She looks like Joan Crawford,” my mother said after meeting Shelley for the first time. “The young Joan Crawford.
Her eyes.
” They weren’t innocent eyes, she was saying. They were cynical and worldly eyes. Over the summer Shelley had gotten a different nose—it had been cut down into a bob, a classic California nose like Cheryl Tiegs’s or Christie Brinkley’s—and this made her eyes seem almost too big and bulgy. Her eyes were intense and angling for something. She’d had sex already. Definitely. You knew that. It was in her eyes and walk and the way she held herself, and in her incredibly short cutoffs with the white denim strings that hung down her thighs and looked like Tampax pull cords, and in all her opinions that she shared with such magnificent confidence. She had moved to Van Dale from Los Feliz Hills, where David Feinman lived and all those movie people with spoiled brats who had nannies like
Abuelita. Shelley was more of a city kid, and not docile and trusting and sweet like Robbie. She used the word “dick” in conversation. What more did you need to know? She had no sweetness. She’d been a Sears catalog model as a girl, and I guess that impressed me, too.

Mom liked the hiking—and she hung on to that for a while. Some things in life had to be introduced early on: camping, skiing, scuba diving, horseback riding. It was programming. That’s why she was so high on me going off with Marguerite on the weekends, to ride.
Everything was programming, and people were just machines,
like Werner Erhard said. My mother was full of Werner talk in those days. He was the mysterious figure behind est and all the est philosophy, and he had pretty much replaced Arthur Ashe and Björn Borg. And after taking the est training, she’d become talkative and almost strident. She was openly reflective, too, but she was bad at it. Introspection was so new to her. She exploded with revelations—some of them totally stupid—and being around her felt like a demolition derby. I kept my head down, went about my business. No way was I going to ask her about being pregnant when she married my dad. All that would come out anyway, since she was reviewing her whole life like a movie she’d never seen before.

She danced because she needed love, she said. She danced because her father liked dancers. That was obvious, she said. Abuelita was a hard worker. Charles Garcia was a dancer. And so my mother, needing something she called “confirmation,” became a hardworking dancer. All other aspects of life that might interest an adolescent—clothes shopping, boyfriends, crushes on pop singers—were approached with a psychic frugality that bordered on masochism. She excelled at tap—both buck-and-wing and soft shoe—by ten. She began ballet at eleven and ascended quickly, her
body deemed perfect for classical dance: small head; large eyes; broad back and shoulders; long, shapely arms and legs; a high instep. Her teachers urged her to continue. But her breasts grew, and grew and by fourteen, after two years on pointe, my mother despaired at her own lack of
ballon
—she couldn’t seem to linger in the air. Eventually she wandered away to study flamenco with Cinco Sais, a well-known instructor with a small dance studio in Verdugo Hills.

“Cinco Sais. I used to think that was an accident,” she said one night after dinner when I was trying to do my history homework. “But it was a choice. Cinco was a choice, and flamenco was a choice.” And then she grew quiet.

Life was a bunch of choices—one of the many helpful things est taught. You weren’t a powerless victim if you interpreted your life that way. You chose your parents. You chose your husbands. And if you chose to take an airplane to New York and it crashed and you died, you needed to see how it had been a choice. When you got on a plane, you took responsibility for the possibility that it might crash. If you didn’t want to die in a plane crash, then you shouldn’t get on a plane. It was really that simple. You were in control. And with this new approach in mind, my mother started to look back on everything and began to take responsibility for lots of iffy decisions. Did she really care about dancing at all? Was it really in her blood—or was it just neediness and programming?

At Cinco’s studio, for hours each day, she worked on learning the varying rhythms, or
campas,
of the flamenco songs—hammering out the complex beats with her feet. Her back arched. Her arms floated over her head. Her hands took the shape of doves in flight. She learned to make her face proud, almost haughty—and, at other times, fierce. There were so many
palos
in flamenco, so
many rhythms and moods. She mastered the mournful
taranta,
the sensual tango, the exuberant
alegría
, the raucous
bulerías.
The music released something deep and wild and unexpected within her—extremes of feeling, the sorrow, the joy, the delirium that Abuelita had never allowed inside her orderly house. Flamenco took hold of her, pulled and stretched her. It freed her.

“It was all I wanted in life—meant more to me than school or my friends,” she said in a rare moment of poetic feeling. “Flamenco called to me, and I followed. But then something else came along.”

She was touring with the José Greco Dance Company in New York City and coming out of the cramped dressing room at the Marcus Aurelius Theater on Forty-seventh Street, expecting to meet up with an old friend from high school, when she looked across the hallway and saw a tall, dark-haired man leaning against a backstage wall and staring at her. Who was he?

“Connie!” she heard a voice call out behind her. It was Steve Huth, her old friend from Van Dale High. Steve was a gregarious guy—valedictorian and former student-body president—who had been trying to date my mother for so long that it had become a joke between them. He rushed over to her side, full of praise for her performance. My mother smiled. She was feeling particularly good that evening, wearing a new red coat and her cheeks flushed from performing, and she couldn’t help continuing to notice the tall man against the wall. He was so handsome and his face so tight, almost severe. He wore a long blue-black wool overcoat that matched the color of his hair.

Steve was saying something about a friend of his—he’d brought along a fellow mathematician from Caltech, a friend who played flamenco guitar.

“Really?” my mother asked, looking over the top of Steve’s head. A
mathematician? Ugh. She had never cared for guitarists either. Her mind was still at the wall. “You have a friend who plays flamenco?”

“Paul!” Steve yelled out into the crowd. Then he turned toward the hallway wall and yelled again. “Paul! Come on! This is my famous friend Connie I’ve told you so much about.”

My father straightened himself, parted with the surface of the wall, and as he walked toward her, my mother watched a wide smile appear on his face. She’d never seen such a smile, she said. It was like a current of energy that made her giddy and short of breath. And suddenly she felt alone with that smile, as if all the stagehands and crew,
flamencos
and their families and their equipment—their chairs, guitar cases, heavy shoes, trunks of clothing, boxes of thin wooden matches and blue-and-white packs of Ducados cigarettes, their clouds of smoke and clanking bottles of beer, as well as poor Steve Huth—had become a blur of flesh-pale motion, a soft fluttering of sound and dim light. The smile grew larger and more powerful as it came closer, and to my mother it seemed to generate the effect of an immeasurably vast theater crowded with people who were all jumping to their feet and applauding.

“And I remember feeling,” my mother said, “that maybe the only reason I’d danced at all was so I could meet
him
.”

S
helley and I started hiking in late September, after Whitman had taken off for Cape Town. The first day of class, we’d discovered each other in Ceramics 101, and something clicked right away. Shelley was irreverent and funny—made terrible fun of people—and I’d never really had a friend like that. A few weeks into school, we decided to get together on the weekend, and Shelley suggested
hiking. I bounced out of the house that morning in shorts and tennis shoes, sweatshirt and bandanna, carrying a little knapsack on my back that held a thermos of water and some Wheat Thins. That seemed pretty wonderful to my mother. How healthy. And, like horseback riding, it made me outdoorsy, and she was glad about that.

The next week Shelley came over to the house after school one day. She was sixteen already and had a car—a blood-red Volkswagen Karmann Ghia convertible that didn’t appear particularly safe—and my mother looked at Shelley, and she looked at that Karmann Ghia, and it was as if she were waking up from a long sleep. Her head cocked to the side. And suddenly she was paying attention to me in a whole new way. I’d always been a good kid, responsible, like a cactus that didn’t need much watering. I didn’t go overboard or have huge, overwrought passions. I had a head on my shoulders, my mother thought. But then she saw Shelley and the Karmann Ghia, and my mother started to act like maybe the head on my shoulders had fallen off.

Fresh from est, she tried out her new head-shrinking techniques on me. She would sit me down on the sofa, or on her bed, for long heart-to-hearts. She wanted honesty, she said. She wanted real feelings. She kept the analysis going while we shopped for new underwear or went to the grocery store. She always dragged the conversation to the subject of Shelley. “You don’t need to go along with the crowd,” my mother said. “What crowd?” I asked, in resistant and adversarial tones.

My mother suggested that maybe I was full of fear, the way she’d always been full of fear. She’d danced out of fear, she told me. She’d played tennis out of fear. She’d sold houses out of fear. “In est I got clear about that,” she said. “I really
got it.
” Looking
back, she knew she’d made mistakes. She wanted to make sure that I didn’t make the same ones.

I was desperate to stop her from squeezing est thinking into my head. In the past she’d worried about me in spurts, like when the Garter Belt Man was running around town exposing himself and kept eluding the Van Dale police. But in general, over the years, I’d tried to give her little to worry about. She’d never found out about my crush on Antonio—or how Ooee, drunk, had sucked my earlobe after the flamenco party and said he was waiting for me. I never told her about how great Kenny Frank’s callused hands felt as they rubbed my breasts, and my stories about Ojala had contained no mention of Ross or skinny-dipping or Whitman’s grove of marijuana. Mostly I’d talked about how fantastic Patricia was—and I hadn’t guessed that that would drive her craziest of all.

Oh, there’d been a few times when I was making the transition to junior high and asked to pierce my ears or wanted to wear pantyhose—but that hadn’t been difficult for my mother to squash. It was normal girl stuff, and not troubling to her. She’d been a little concerned about a pile of D. H. Lawrence books in my bedroom—
Women in Love
and
Sons and Lovers
—and then, later in the summer, Dostoyevsky’s
Notes from Underground.
She had a strange worry that I was bookish—“reading too much”—and not outdoorsy. But now, when she compared me to Shelley, all those books seemed healthy. TV seemed healthy. For God’s sake, ten hours a day of TV was better than Shelley Strelow.

Robbie Morrison, I began to realize, was a human shield that had protected me against my mother—and all her fears. Whatever I did, wherever I went, it was okay because I spent all my time in the company of Robbie. I had lots of other friends from Camp Fire Girls and saw my cousins in Laguna, but if you drew concentric
circles around me, arranging other people like planets around my sun, it was really only Robbie who was orbiting nearby. Whitman was a faint Pluto. As long as I was best friends with Robbie, my mother never had to worry. I got A’s in school. I participated in team sports, returned my library books on time, usually made my bed in the morning. All along, my mother assumed that I did those things and didn’t get into trouble because I was “square” in a good way, the way people used the word when my mother was a girl. But after Shelley turned up, my mother began to suspect that maybe it was Robbie Morrison who was a good kid and a square—her most outrageous act of rebellion was joining a Presbyterian youth group on Wednesday nights instead of doing something Mormon.

I guess, before Shelley Strelow, the only thing my mother had to worry about was whether I was becoming a Jesus freak or born again. My mother wasn’t too wild about that youth group, or with my spiritual conversion to Jesus at camp. She seemed in a chilly mood when she had to drive Robbie and me to Van Dale Pres at night with our New Testament Bibles under our arms. Looking back, she should have been incredibly thankful, instead of mortified, when those church elders came to pray with me in the living room one night after dinner. It happened when I was fourteen. They just showed up. Out of the blue.

“What is it, Mom?” I asked from the floor of the den.

“Some church people are here,” she said. She was wearing a very short white tennis skirt and a super-tight top that made her breasts look like missiles about to launch. “Did you invite anybody over?”

“What?” I was still embarrassed by everything in those pre-Ojala days. “I didn’t invite them!” I blurted, almost hysterically, then lowered my voice. “I just filled out this card a few Sundays ago when Robbie and I went to the service.”

“What card?”

The card was white and had said
ARE YOU A VISITOR?
at the top. It looked a little like one of those scorecards at a miniature-golf course. And next to the card—in the wooden pocket of the pew where the hymnals were kept—was a small brown pencil, just like those miniature-golf pencils. The combination was irresistible. So I filled out my name: Inez Ruin, 314 Ardmore Road, Van Dale, Calif. 91202.