Golden State

by Michelle Richmond

  For so long I believed that we needed a child of our own. After we lost Ethan, having a baby seemed like an essential measure of our love—the ability to combine our DNA and pass it on to another person, who would carry that imprint forward into the world; the ability to completely join our two selves together. But I failed to see the truth: Tom is a part of me already.

  I think of the cross-eyed stranger that summer in Mississippi, the one who urged me to get into his car. I think of all the chances I had to try something different, to do something totally unplanned, but didn’t. How might the arc of my life have been altered if I had accepted his peculiar invitation, or any number of other invitations over the years? What if I had veered from my chosen path? I guess this could be the part where I lament my lack of adventure, the part where I wish I’d lived a different life. But I don’t wish any such thing. The straight and narrow suited me. I chose my path and took it. It led me to this particular life in this particular place, to a career I love and to a marriage I don’t regret.

  I never expected to find myself here, on the edge of the continent—forty, childless, possibly jobless, with broken bones and a broken marriage, citizen of a broken country. But here I am, and I must make something of it. That’s really the only choice one has: make something of it, or don’t—a choice my mother failed to make after my father died, a choice my sister has completely embraced.

  I picture my mother on the grocery store floor in Laurel, the baby in her arms. “She’ll be an ambitious one,” the store manager had said, to which my mother replied, “Lord, I hope not. There’s pain enough in this world without getting your hopes up.” But what if it turns out, instead, that the pain lies in not hoping—in refusing to believe that anything is possible?

  In the days before I first left for medical school, my mother walked around in a cloud of sadness. Although I knew it would never happen, one night I suggested that she and Heather come with me to San Francisco. I remember the look she gave me, as if I had said the most ridiculous thing in the world. “Sweetheart,” she said, “I could never leave this town, I could never leave your father.”

  I was confused, concerned for her. “Daddy’s not here.”

  “Yes, he is, silly. Every time I walk into the Arabian Theatre, where we had our first kiss, he’s there waiting. Every time I wander through Pinehurst Park, where we had our first fight, I sense him around me. He’s here for me sometimes when I need him, and sometimes when I don’t.”

  Years later, when Tom and I had flown in to help Heather out of another jam, I finally understood what she meant. We were in a rental car, driving in from the airport, when I saw the Barnette Dairyette up ahead, under the crackling neon lights. I asked Tom to pull over so I could pee, but at first, I couldn’t bring myself to get out of the car. “Is everything all right?” he asked. I couldn’t explain to him that this was the very essence of the life I had known, the very essence of awkward high school nights and happy childhood days. Hesitantly, I got out and headed inside. The bathroom key was in the same spot on the blue counter, still tied to the same big mixing spoon. I unlocked the door and stepped inside the tiny bathroom—same medicinal smell, same weird, dark lighting, probably the same graffiti. As the heavy door slammed behind me, I felt paralyzed; it was as if not a single day had gone by since I was last there. It was as if nothing had changed at all.

  “Remember whose you are,” my father used to say. And after he died, my mother said it, too—an admonishment to remember that my words and actions reflected on the parents who raised me, and on the God they raised me to believe in. Good advice, but it needs a simple addition: Remember who you are.

  Two nights ago, as I drifted in and out of sleep on the couch at the radio station, Tom leaned down and mumbled into my ear, “What are you dreaming about?”

  “The Barnette Dairyette.”

  “Oh, I remember that place,” he said, surprising me. “Great milk shakes.”

  When I left Mississippi, I believed that I could slice my life neatly down the middle. Between my past and my future, there would be a clean divide. But there is no such divide. I will always carry this inside me: the truth of my origins. Tom is a part of me, but so are my mother, my sister. I am a doctor, but I am also a teenager on Christmas Eve, staring into the charity box that contains the old, used sweater of a girl who never liked me.

  I have been a mother, a wife, a sister, a physician. The layers accumulate, the layers fall away. Not everything fits. Some things drift away. Others hold tightly.

  I don’t know if I still have a job. I don’t know what will happen to my state, my country. But I know I’m going to buy those tickets to Norway. I know now that I was the one who pushed Tom away, and it is my responsibility to try to bring us back together. I know that, through everything, he never stopped loving me. We’ll begin at the Grand Hotel in Oslo, where Ibsen often held court. We’ll take the Flåm Railway through the mountains, stop overnight at the tiny village of Aurland. We’ll take a boat through the fjords. And finally, we’ll drink hot chocolate in Bergen, just like we planned, all those years ago. We’ll begin there, and see where it leads.

  Eighteen years ago, alone and new to California, I wandered along the cliffs of Point Reyes in the freezing fog, and stood gazing out at the roaring Pacific. I followed a picket fence for several hundred yards, curious where it led. And then, without warning, the fence abruptly ended. A narrow ditch ran perpendicular to the fence, splitting the ground in two; on the other side, some distance away, the fence continued. A middle-aged man stood on one side of the ditch, a boy of about seven on the other. They held hands across the divide. I imagined the earth moving in one swift, startling motion, rearranging everything in an instant. You wake up one day, and you’re forty, and nothing is the way you’d planned. The ground shifts. It comes together, it pulls apart, and there’s nothing to do but dig in and grab hold of something, whatever is closest and best.

  I think of my infant niece, surely asleep in my sister’s arms. And now I know what it was that I wanted to say to her. There is a simple truth, and it is this: Somehow, we must move forward, always carrying with us who we are, always looking forward to who we might be.

  For Kevin and Oscar

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank my wonderful agent and friend, Valerie Borchardt, for her intelligence, persistence, great sense of humor, and ongoing faith in my work. I’m also indebted to my amazing editor, Kate Miciak, for pinpointing the heart of this story, encouraging me exactly when I needed it most, and shining a light in the labyrinth.

  Thanks to Caitlin Alexander, who read many early drafts of this novel, and to Bonnie Thompson and Janet Wygal. Thanks to the Random House family for providing a supportive home for my work, and to the amazing independent booksellers who make Northern California such a good place to be a writer and a reader.

  Gurpreet Dhaliwal, MD, graciously allowed me to shadow him and his residents at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. My friend Ted Morton provided insight into military life.

  The epigraph at the beginning of the book is from my former mentor John Balaban’s translation of “Spring-Watching Pavilion.” collected in Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hồ Xuân Hu’o’ng.

  For resources and information on issues affecting veterans, visit craigconnects.​org/​military-​families-​and-​veterans.

  As always, thanks to Kevin, for everything.

  BY MICHELLE RICHMOND

  The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress: Stories

  Dream of the Blue Room

  The Year of Fog

  No One You Know

  Golden State

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MICHELLE RICHMOND is the author of The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, Dream of the Blue Room, The Year of Fog, No One You Know, and Golden State. She is the recipient of the Hillsdale Award for Fiction and the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. A native of Alabama’s Gulf Coast, she makes her home with her husband and young son in Northern Californ
ia.

  michellerichmond.com

  GOLDEN STATE

  Michelle Richmond

  A READER’S GUIDE

  A CONVERSATION WITH MICHELLE RICHMOND

  Random House Reader’s Circle: Why did you decide to set the novel against the backdrop of a vote for secession?

  Michelle Richmond: I am fascinated by the fact that so often things that seem impossible are actually very much within the realm of possibility. Every day in the news, there’s something else that completely explodes our expectations. Tom’s radio show, Anything Is Possible, is a tribute to that notion, and I hope this novel is a tribute to that notion as well. Personally, to be clear, I don’t think that California should or will go anywhere, but there’s been so much secession talk on the fringes for years, from states as diverse as New York, Texas, Colorado, and California, that it seemed worth exploring what would happen if the concept of secession moved from the outermost fringes to the mainstream.

  I also am interested in the way characters live out their lives against the backdrop of the larger world, which is what every one of us does, every day. Only days after moving to California, I experienced my first tremor. I’d been in hurricanes and tornadoes, but this was the first time I’d felt the ground move beneath my feet. It sent a powerful message: that stability is an illusion, and that we have no way of knowing when everything is going to change.

  Fifteen years have passed since I felt that first tremor, and I’ve felt hundreds of them since then. I am accustomed to them, but I don’t imagine I’ll ever be immune: every time the house moves—whether it’s a quick jolt or a slow roll—I’m reminded that we live on a fault line. To me, this seems like an apt metaphor for marriage in particular and for life in general.

  RHRC: In Golden State, as in The Year of Fog, the couple is suffering from the loss of a child. Can you talk a bit about this theme and why you are drawn to it?

  MR: The worst thing I could imagine as a child was being separated from my parents. Now that I am an adult, I see this fear of separation from the other side. As a child, you fear the loss of protection, but as an adult, you fear the inability to protect a child who is in your care.

  In my mind, Julie is deeply in love with Tom, and always will be. But there is something about the love for a child that is very different and more fierce than romantic love—I believe it must have something to do with the need to care for those who are incapable of caring for themselves.

  RHRC: You have said in the past that you never outline, and that you don’t know where a book is going when you begin. How much did you know about this story when you began writing it?

  MR: Well, I knew from the start that it would be the story of a marriage. I am always intrigued by what holds a couple together, and by what it takes to sever the bonds that, at some point, were strong enough to justify a vow of lifelong commitment. For Julie and Tom, there is this deep love and passion and mutual respect that have kept them together for so long, but things happen, things largely beyond their control, to threaten that love. Will the center hold? That was the question I began with, and I had no idea when I started writing what the answer would be. But it was important to me that Julie and Tom both be characters as decent as they were flawed.

  I also knew, when I began writing the novel, that three relationships would be central to the novel: the marriage, Julie’s relationship with her sister, and the couple’s relationship to the lost child. It was only much later—years into the writing of the book—that Dennis became a strong force. He sort of took me by surprise and added a new element to the novel. This is where the author-editor relationship comes into play; in this case, my editor noticed a character that had been lurking fairly quietly on the sidelines and basically said, “What’s the deal with this guy?” It was a good question, one that forced me to look at the story from an entirely different angle.

  When I began exploring Dennis’s role in Julie’s life, I thought about all of the relationships we enter into sort of blindly over the course of our adult lives. And I thought about how much of ourselves we make known to people, and how easily we sometimes trust others with our deepest secrets and fears. What interested me about Dennis were the long-term repercussions of that trust.

  RHRC: There’s a lot of music in your book. Do you listen to music when you write?

  MR: I’ll sometimes listen to instrumentals, but I never listen to music with lyrics while I’m writing. It gets in my head. When I’m not sitting down writing, though, there’s always music in our house. My husband used to DJ at UCLA when he was in college, and he’s always on the lookout for new acts, or new albums by people you haven’t heard of in twenty years. In our house, I buy the books and he buys the albums, and then we share.

  RHRC: How did you research this book?

  MR: Well, I spent a lot of time driving, walking, and taking the bus up and down California Street! Most people in San Francisco never use the cable cars, and when I started writing this novel, I’d been living in San Francisco for years but hadn’t ridden a cable car since I was there on a family vacation when I was thirteen.

  Sometimes, some of the research happens before the idea of the book ever takes hold, and that was the case with this novel. At the time I began writing it, my little boy attended the preschool on the campus of the Veterans Administration Hospital in San Francisco. It’s this amazingly beautiful place, and I felt so fortunate to drop him off there every day. But I was also aware that the hospital served a population of veterans who had seen the very worst of war. This was also at a time when the patient population was beginning to change, and when many veterans were coming home with terrible wounds that would not have been survivable in previous wars.

  A general internist at the hospital generously allowed me to shadow him and his residents. I took copious notes, but it goes without saying that much of what I witnessed on rounds and in the lectures went over my layperson’s head. When it comes to the actual medical terminology of the book, I should emphasize that any failures in logic or procedure are, of course, entirely my own!

  I also read a lot of first-person accounts by veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and talked with friends in the military. We expect so much from our service members, and when they come home, I think we civilians sometimes feel awkward around them. There is this sense of not knowing quite what to say, of being curious but afraid to ask questions that would be intrusive or would force them to recount what they’ve been through. I tried to capture that in the relationship between Julie and her sister: Julie knows that Heather has been through a great deal, but she also knows that it’s something she will never entirely be able to understand.

  RHRC: If you hadn’t become an author, what career would you have pursued?

  MR: Well, I am endlessly fascinated by outer space. I spend a lot of time reading about newly discovered planets and the Martian atmosphere. I do weird things like attend the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) conference and stay in the hotel with all the Artificial Intelligence people just to soak up the conversation. I ask my son at least once a month, “Honey, do you think you might like to be an astronaut?” I’ve made my husband sit through the planetarium show at the California Academy of Sciences more times than I care to admit, and it has never once failed to move me to tears. So, I would love to say that I would have become a physicist had I not become a writer, but that simply would not have been possible. We are not always given the brains that we would choose. I am very, very happy to be a writer, and I am keenly aware that my gray matter supports the writing life quite well but would not be particularly well suited for a life observing the unknown universe. I must stick, then, with the known universe, and spend a lot of time staring at the stars.

  MICHELLE RICHMOND’S GOLDEN STATE PLAYLIST

  Golden State began with the idea for a single scene: a husband and wife at the end of their marriage, spending their final night together in a San Francisco radio station, where the husband works as a late-night d
eejay. As the story developed, the one thing that remained constant in my mind was the sound of the music from the radio station. Early drafts of the novel contained a number of songs that didn’t make it into the final draft. Here are the songs that, for me, capture the spirit of the novel and of the place that has become my home:

  Admiral Radley, “I Heart California” California has inspired many great songs over the years, and, like “California Dreaming,” this one is a personal favorite. The product of a one-off local California indie super-group combination, comprising members of Grandaddy and Earlimart, this song is an unapologetic celebration of the true spirit of California.

  Josh Rouse, “Sweetie” This one comes from Rouse’s 2007 record, Country Mouse City House. For me, the best love songs contain just a pinch of melancholy. When I picture Julie and Tom working through their complicated relationship, I always hear this song and think of Rouse’s great line “crooked couple standing side by side / Is that you? Is that me?”

  Tom Petty, “California” Like Julie, Tom Petty is a transplant to California from the South. For years, his identity was intertwined with his birthplace in Gainesville, Florida, and his stories seemed to emanate from there. Listening to his albums over the years, I’ve always been interested to hear how his southern identity has slowly evolved and reconciled itself with his adopted home. With the short, direct, and brilliant “California,” from 1996, the evolution seems complete. This song is highly personal for me. Like Petty, my roots are deeply southern, but I have made my home and my adult life on the West Coast.