by Vendela Vida
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my childhood friends and teachers,
who will immediately recognize that this is a work of fiction.
Epigraph
Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?
—Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1984–1985
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
2019
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Vendela Vida
Copyright
About the Publisher
1984–1985
1
We are thirteen, almost fourteen, and these streets of Sea Cliff are ours. We walk these streets to our school perched high over the Pacific and we run these streets to the beaches, which are cold, windswept, full of fishermen and freaks. We know these wide streets and how they slope, how they curve toward the shore, and we know their houses. We know the towering brick house where the magician Carter the Great lived; he had a theater inside and his dining-room table rose up through a trapdoor. We know that Paul Kantner from Jefferson Starship lived or maybe still does live in the house with the long swing that hangs above the ocean. We know that the swing was for China, the daughter he had with Grace Slick. China was born the same year we were, and whenever we pass the house we look for China on the swing. We know the imposing salmon-colored house that had a party at which masked robbers appeared; when a female guest wouldn’t relinquish her ring, they cut off her finger. We know where our school tennis instructor lives (dark blue tudor decorated with cobwebs every Halloween), where the school’s dean of admissions lives (white house with black gate)—both are women, both are wives. We know where the doctors and lawyers live, and where the multi-generation San Franciscans live, the kind of people whose family names are associated with mansions and hotels in other parts of the city. And most important, because we are thirteen and attend an all-girls’ school, we know where the boys live.
We know where the tall boy with webbed feet lives. Sometimes we watch Bill Murray movies with him and his friends at his house on Sea View Terrace and marvel at the way the boys can recite all the lines the way we know every word of The Outsiders. We know where the boy lives who breaks my necklace one day by the beach—it’s a silver chain my mother gave me and he pulls it violently and I run from him. We know where the boy lives who comes to my house the day I get a canopy bed and, mistaking it for a bunk bed, climbs up and breaks it. It’s never properly fixed and from then on the four posts tilt west. We suspect this boy and his friends are responsible for writing in the wet cement outside our school, the Spragg School for Girls. “Spragg is for girls who like to bragg,” the cement says. It’s hard to tell if the words were traced with a finger or a stick, but the imprint is deep. Ha! we say. They don’t even know how to spell “brag.”
We know where the cute boy whose father is in the Army lives. He just moved to San Francisco and he wears short-sleeve plaid shirts that were the style in the Great Lakes town he came from. We know his father must have a position that’s fairly high up because otherwise why wouldn’t he live in the Presidio where most people in the Army live? We spend little time thinking about Army hierarchy because their haircuts are so sad. We know where the boy with one arm lives, though we don’t know how he lost it. He often plays tennis at the park on 25th Avenue or badminton in the alleyway behind his house, which is the alleyway that leads to my house. Many of the blocks in Sea Cliff have alleyways so the cars can park in the garages in the back, so the cars don’t interfere with the view of the ocean, of the Golden Gate Bridge. Everything in Sea Cliff is about the view of the bridge. It was one of the first neighborhoods in San Francisco to have underground power lines because above-ground power lines would obstruct the view. Everything ugly is hidden.
We know the high school boy who lives next door to me. He comes from a family that was prominent in the Gold Rush—I learned that from my California history textbooks. Photos of his parents frequently appear in the society pages of the Nob Hill Gazette that’s delivered to our doorstep every month, free of charge. The boy is blond and often has a group of his high school friends over to watch football in his living room. From my garden I can see when they’re watching a game. There’s a three-foot gap between the edge of our property and his house and sometimes I leap through his open window and land on the floor of his living room. I am that daring. I am a daring enigma. I fantasize that one of them will invite me to the prom. And then one afternoon one of the boys grabs the waistband of my Guess? jeans. I try to get away, and I run in place for a moment like a cartoon character. The boys all laugh; I’m upset for days. I know that this gesture and their laughter mean they think of me as a little girl and not as a prospective prom date. After that their window is kept closed.
Then there are the Prospero boys, the sons of a doctor, who lived in my house before my family bought it. They are legendary. They are a cautionary tale. When my parents toured the house, the floor of what would become my bedroom was littered with beer bottles and needles. The windows were broken. When I talk to older boys and tell them I live in the Prospero boys’ old house I get attention, and, I imagine, momentary respect. No one can believe what lunatics those boys were. Moms will shake their heads and say how sad it was, those boys, their father being a doctor and all.
The Prospero boys are the reason my parents were able to buy the house for the price they did. It was destroyed by these boys. No one else wanted to think their children would grow up to have parties and use needles and spray-paint obscenities on the walls of their own home. My father has always been able to look past the damaged lives a house has witnessed. That is his secret power. He grew up in a rented third-floor apartment on an alleyway in the Mission and, like many of his friends, had multiple jobs by the time he was fifteen. Newspaper-delivery boy, grocery-store employee, doorman at the Haight Theatre. He tore tickets six nights a week and on his day off he’d go see movies. When he was in middle school he biked all the way to Sea Cliff to go to the beach and he saw the majestic houses and said to his friends, “One day I will live in this neighborhood.” One day he did. My mother grew up without money, too (she grew up in a large, happy family on a farm in rural Sweden), and together they are a thrifty pair—no meals out at restaurants, no heat turned on unless there’s company, and sometimes no heat even then, just the strong smell of fish. My sister, Svea, who is ten, is the only one in our family who likes fish, but it is served weekly because we are Swedish.
In the front room of my house there are five large windows that look out on the Golden Gate Bridge. On foggy days the bridge is blanketed in white, no trace of it visible. On days like this, my father used to tell me that robbers had stolen the bridge. “Don’t worry, Eulabee,” he’d say to m
e, “the police are after them—they’ve been working all night.” By midmorning when the fog began to burn off, he’d say, “Look, they got em! They’re putting the bridge back.” It was a story I never tired of, and reinforced two lessons that reigned over my childhood:
Hard work conquers all obstacles.
Good triumphs over evil (which is always lurking).
There are alerts, of course, and warnings, and in Sea Cliff these warnings come in the form of foghorns. First one foghorn, and in the distance, another. The deep bellowing foghorns are the soundtrack to my childhood. When we go to the beaches, which we often do, huddled in sweaters and with mist on our faces, the foghorns are even louder than they are in our houses. They punctuate our confessions, our laughter. We laugh a lot.
When I say “we,” I sometimes mean the four of us Sea Cliff girls who are in the eighth grade at the Spragg School for Girls. But when I say “we,” I always mean Maria Fabiola and me. Maria Fabiola is the oldest of three children—the youngest ones are twin boys. She moved to Sea Cliff the year we started kindergarten. Nobody knew much about her family. Sometimes she says she’s part Italian. Other times she says she’s not, why would you think that? Other times she says her grandfather was the prime minister of Italy. Or could have been prime minister. Or she was related to the mayor of Florence or could have been. She has long dark brown hair and light green eyes—even in black and white photos you can see their ethereal color. There are dozens of photos in her home of her and her cousins sitting atop horses, or on the edges of swimming pools surrounded by grass. The photos are taken by professionals and displayed in identical silver frames.
Maria Fabiola is a noticer, but also a laugher. She has a laugh that starts in her chest and comes out like a flute. She is known for her laugh because it’s what people call a contagious laugh, but it’s not contagious in the usual way. Hers is a laugh that makes you laugh because you don’t want her to laugh alone. And she’s beautiful. An older boy wearing corduroy OP shorts near Kezar Stadium once said she was hot and with any other girl we would call bullshit but with her we believe it—the compliment, the boy, the corduroy OP shorts.
She wears a thick stack of thin silver bracelets on her arm. We all wear these bracelets, which we buy on Haight Street (three for a dollar) or on Clement Street (five for a dollar) but she wears more of them. When she laughs her hair falls in front of her face and she sweeps it out of her eyes with her fingers, causing her bracelets to cascade up and down her arm. The sound of her bracelets is like her laughter: high-pitched and delicate, a waterfall of notes. She has perfect hair and always will.
When we were in kindergarten Maria Fabiola and I began walking to school together with older girls who went to Spragg. These girls would pick up Maria Fabiola at her house at the top of China Beach and wind their way up El Camino del Mar and collect me. Together, we’d walk the wide, well-paved street to pick up another girl who lives in the house that looks like a castle (it has a turret) and then continue to school. The older girls passed down their knowledge of houses to us, and we combine this with the information we have from our parents. When we become the older girls at Spragg, we teach the younger girls about the houses, about who lives where, about which gardeners are pervy. From grades kindergarten until fourth we wear plaid green jumpers over white blouses with Peter Pan collars. In fifth grade through eighth grade we wear pleated blue skirts that stop right above the knee, and white sailor middies. It is the see-through white middies that provoke the gardeners’ comments. “You are not so little anymore,” they say, staring at our chests.
When we are thirteen Maria Fabiola and I walk with two other girls: Julia and Faith. Julia used to live a few houses up the street from me, in a home that looked like it could fall into the ocean. Her mom is a retired professional ice-skater with a wall of medals so Julia skates, too. Julia has shoulder-length light brown hair that shines blond in the sun and has blue eyes that she insists on calling “cobalt.” She briefly dated a boy from Pacific Heights until one night on the phone she asked him what color her eyes were and he said “blue,” and he was done for. Julia’s half sister, Gentle, is seventeen. She’s the daughter of Julia’s father and his first wife, who was a hippie. Then Julia’s father made money and the first wife couldn’t stand the hypocrisy, so she left him and Gentle and moved to India. That’s when Gentle’s father married the ice-skater.
It’s hard for Julia to have a half sister like Gentle. Gentle used to attend the Spragg School for Girls until she got kicked out. She goes to Grant, the public high school, which makes her one of the only people we know who goes there. The kids who go to Grant look huge and their coats are enormous. They give the finger to cops and even firemen. She used to babysit for me and Svea sometimes until my parents found out that one night, when I was eleven and she was fifteen, she taught me how to smoke.
Gentle has long tangled mouse-brown hair and wears bell-bottoms. She used to have hippie friends but now we usually see her alone. She’s often drunk, stoned, on acid. Once we were at the playground by the golf course next to Spragg and we saw a crowd gathering and laughing at something. Julia, Maria Fabiola, and I went to see what it was and there was Gentle, naked and swinging from the monkey bars. Julia was furious. She ran home to tell her mom and didn’t come to school the next day.
After a business scandal that was on the front page of the Chronicle, Julia’s family had to move to a small house on the other side of California Street, beyond the border of Sea Cliff. They said they were only living there while doing construction on their main house, but I haven’t seen any workers at their old house and I overheard my father tell my mother that he read in a real-estate report that it had been sold. Now they have no view of the ocean. Now they use their garage for a spare room and park their cars on the street. Between the scandal and having to move, we all feel bad for Julia, but we mostly feel bad for her because nobody would want a half sister like Gentle. My mom says she respects Julia’s mom because it must be incredibly challenging to be a stepmother to such a lost girl. All the music Gentle likes is about drugs. Or the bands do drugs, or look like they do drugs. Everything about Gentle is grubby and unwashed but this is the eighties and the eighties are clean, and the colors are bright and separated.
Then there’s Faith. She’s one of us. Faith moved to San Francisco last year in seventh grade, and lives in a house that extends an entire block on Sea View. She has long red hair that on some days makes her look like Anne of Green Gables, and on other days like Pippi Longstocking. She plays goalie on the soccer team and is always diving for the ball, her hair streaming behind her like a flag. She has this air about her like she knows she’s special, and maybe it’s because she resembles famous literary characters or maybe it’s because she’s adopted. Her father is a lot younger than her mother. They had a daughter but she died and so they adopted Faith to replace her. The dead daughter’s name was Faith, too, which I think is strange and Julia thinks is horrendous because her favorite word is “horrendous.” But Faith doesn’t mind that she was named after the dead daughter. In fact, sometimes she says she feels like she’s twenty because the original Faith lived to be seven and Faith is now thirteen. I don’t know what Faith’s mom was like before the original Faith died, but she now acts like life is a large broken car she’s pushing down the road. She walks diagonally, as though she’s making her way through a rainstorm, even on the fairest of days.
The four of us—Maria Fabiola, Faith, Julia, and I—own these streets of Sea Cliff, but it’s Maria Fabiola and I who know the beaches the best. Maybe it’s because our houses are closest to the shore. Her house is situated above China Beach and mine is just up the street—a four-minute walk.
We take the boys from Sea View to the beach and under their gaze we see how agile we are. We can feel our power as we race on all fours over the cliffs—we know their crevices and footholds, their smooth inclines and their rugged patches. If there were an Olympic category for climbing these cliffs, we would enter i
t; we scale them as though we are in training. After an afternoon at the beach, the pads of our fingers are rough, and our palms smell of damp rock, and the boys are dazzled.
China Beach is adjacent to a bigger beach, Baker Beach, and they’re separated by a promontory, but Maria Fabiola and I know how to traverse between the two beaches at low tide. We know how to read the ocean, how to navigate the slippery rocks so that if we time it perfectly we can wait until the ocean starts to inhale its waves and, through a combination of climbing and scurrying, make our way to Baker Beach. Once, on a class outing to China Beach, we knew the tide was right to make a mad dash around the bluff and end up at Baker. Other classmates followed us. When our teachers yelled for us to come back, Maria Fabiola and I timed the waves and ran. Our classmates didn’t know the beach the way we did, hesitated, and got stuck on the other side. The teachers panicked. We assured them it would be okay. We climbed over the bluff and held our classmates’ hands, watched the ocean, and guided our classmates back to China Beach. We tried to remain humble but we were heroes.
2
Maria Fabiola and I have been best friends since we were in kindergarten at Spragg, and we have been placed in different homerooms almost every year. Separately we are good girls. We behave. Together, some strange alchemy occurs and we are trouble. This happens at school, and it happens when we’re not at school. Last year I got into trouble with my parents and with my neighbors for telling a lie that involved her. Maria Fabiola and I were selling lemonade. We weren’t getting many customers in front of my house, so we moved our stand in front of a bigger one on a corner. A Chevy full of teenage boys pulled up, and the boy in the passenger seat leaned out the window to talk to us. “If that’s your house, can we marry you when you’re older?”
Maria Fabiola and I looked at each other and laughed. We didn’t correct their assumption.
