The Ruins of California
Page 1
“What elevates The Ruins of California from a fine novel to a unique work of art is the compassionate, intelligent portrait of a certain kind of boy-man, utterly starved for fun and beauty, orphaned in every way by the curse of his own inability to feel, to accept the inevitable imperfections of all life. As for Inez, after all those lessons on tea-pouring, riding your horse well, knowing that correct conduct is what counts in life, she acquits herself beautifully, rescuing—with the unexpected help of some of those wives and girlfriends—the family, her father, herself.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“A book about how relationships endure. Set in the 1970s, the novel is about a young girl growing up amid the messiness of her own fractured, somewhat potty family. Inez Garcia Ruin narrates this story in a voice filled with unflinching matter-of-factness and preternatural insight. One of Sherrill’s strengths as a novelist is how she makes use of all these very disparate and racially diverse characters as metaphors for the reality of life in California. Inez exists in a world of opposites. The Ruins remind us not only of what an eclectic place California has been but also of what a different time the 1970s were, and how easy it was to buy into the decade’s permissiveness.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Inez Garcia Ruin is a self-described ‘baton of a girl,’ passing from one divorced parent to the other—from her mother, Connie, a former flamenco dancer turned Realtor in Southern California, to her glamorous father, Paul, something of a fixture in San Francisco society and scion of the old-money Ruin family. Set in California in the 1970s, this jaunty, beautifully written coming-of-age story is packed with larger-than-life Ruins—not only rakish father Paul, but also half-brother Whitman, adventurous, resourceful, and perhaps doomed; redoubtable grandmother Marguerite, who teaches Inez how to ride, serve a proper tea, and understand that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything; and a mob of Kennedyesque cousins swarming around the family beach house in Laguna. And then there is Inez herself, moving between two worlds and belonging to neither, trying to grow up at a time and in a place so laid-back the point is not to try. Sherrill’s re-creation of California in the seventies is impeccable, and her story of how a girl trapped in a theatrical family manages to transform herself from an observer into the star of her own life is absolutely irresistible.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“An eccentric coming-of-age story…an offbeat tale.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Martha Sherrill’s main character, Inez Ruin, is a narrator with an unlikely and irresistible combination of sweetness and authority. And, man, does Inez know California—reading her story is like coming home to everything I love about my home state.”
—Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of It All
“An absolutely note-perfect portrayal of California in the seventies.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“A spot-on, detailed narrative of a decade of cultural contrasts. [The Ruins of California] is very much alive with sweetness and light.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Especially noteworthy among the many pleasures of this novel is the finely drawn character of Inez, whose emotional development over the years is subtly reflected in her changing assessments of the world. Sherrill ably captures the milieu of the seventies and eighties without seeming to reach for details. Her depiction of those decades—their fads, their politics, their slang, their colors, and foods—is both masterful and unassuming.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The vividness of the setting—California in the 1970s—makes Ruins read like a memoir. And that’s a good thing. A great deal of fun.”
—Willamette(Portland) Week
ALSO BY MARTHA SHERRILL
My Last Movie Star
The Buddha from Brooklyn
The Ruins of California
MARTHA SHERRILL
Riverhead Books
New York
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2006 by Martha Sherrill
Cover design by Rodrigo Corral
Cover photographs by Mike Slack
Book design by Stephanie Huntwork
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Penguin Press hardcover edition: January 2006
First Riverhead trade paperback edition: January 2007
ISBN: 978-1-101-11802-3
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Penguin Press hardcover edition as follows:
Sherrill, Martha.
The ruins of California / Martha Sherrill.
p. cm.
1. California—Fiction. 2. Girls—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.H469R85 2006
813’.6—dc22 2005049343
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR PETER AND NATHANIEL AND LIAM
—WITH LOVE AND EXASPERATION
CONTENTS
1969
ONE Say Hello for Me
TWO Telegraph Hill
THREE Thanksgiving
1972
FOUR Seventh Grade
FIVE Justine
SIX The White Tent
1973
SEVEN Laguna Beach
EIGHT Tea with Marguerite
1975
NINE Wolfback
TEN The Ojala Valley
ELEVEN Shelley Strelow
TWELVE Neeplus Erectus
THIRTEEN If a Tree Fell
1977
FOURTEEN Just Some Playboy
FIFTEEN Ooee’s Houseboat
SIXTEEN Dr. Lasso’s Office, Please Hold
1978
SEVENTEEN Haleiwa
EIGHTEEN Madam X
1980
NINETEEN Big Bang
TWENTY What Marguerite Left Behind
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROSPERO Be co
llected.
No more amazement. Tell your piteous heart There’s no harm done.
MIRANDA O, woe the day!
PROSPERO No harm.
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2
ONE
Say Hello for Me
Two things always signaled that she was suffering: stage makeup worn during the day and loudness. She’d act too happy, like something was hiding beneath all her giddiness, something dank and unaired way down. My mother laughed, and sometimes she couldn’t stop. Over the summer it had gotten worse—the shrieking jollity, the nonstop hardy-har-har—and she was always slipping away to watch more bad news on TV, turning it off when I wandered into the den. When the television tube faded out, it made a weird vibrating sound that grew fainter and fainter, and then she would yell out, “That’s enough of that!”
Not listening was part of it. When she was upset, it seemed like a siren was blaring inside her head every few seconds and distracting her. She’d talk louder, over you. In June, after Bobby Kennedy was shot and that picture of him lying in a black pool of his own blood ran in a magazine (I looked at it for a very long time), it was as if a megaphone had attached itself to her mouth. She brayed. She bellowed. The walls of Abuelita’s house shook with my mother’s giddy remorse and hysteria. She would fake that everything was all right—her big trick—and then, putting me to bed one night, she broke down and whimpered, “What kind of world have I brought you into?”
What kind of world? I stood in the parking lot at Burbank Airport and watched her unload my pink Samsonite suitcase from the trunk of the car and wasn’t inclined to ask. It’s probably not fair to say I was the passive type. But maybe I was. I was receptive and quiet. I stood around a lot—waiting for balls to be pitched, orders to be given, situations to arise. While I slept, things came together: My clothes were laid out on my bed, my white orthopedic shoes polished, and in the morning plates of food appeared on the table before me. I ate everything on them. Hard to imagine now, but I was almost fat in those days—thick arms and legs, a belly that swelled where my waist would someday appear. Not that I paid much attention. My traveling outfit could be boiled down to three haphazard moves: a thin purple windbreaker, blue knee socks, and a pair of my special white shoes, which Doug Daley, one of the dumber boys at school, had recently called “clodhoppers.” I was wild about the purple windbreaker. As for my belly, or the clods (a cure for a duck waddle), in my mind I was arrestingly beautiful and really quite grown up.
What kind of world? One of mystery and magic and endless possibilities for romance. My new pink Samsonite suitcase was packed with Coco, my deteriorating baby blanket, and everything else. Why, it was almost like I was running away.
Dearest Inez,
Did I tell you that I had a wonderful time with you at Christmas? Well, I did. I felt like your father and your friend, and I enjoyed that so much I wanted to laugh and yell at the same time—have you ever had that feeling?
All my love,
F.G. (or, the Friendly Giant)
On board I was a small figure at the front of the plane, but I felt large and super noticeable, almost famous. The stewardess kept turning up—shooing away a tired guy in a business suit who sat down next to me. She fussed about my jumper, which wasn’t worth fussing over, and she used a baby voice, the kind of voice that always put me on edge because nobody in my family spoke to me like that—nobody—and suddenly everything about the stewardess seemed completely fake and hammy. Her orange-and-pink Pacific Southwest Airlines uniform with the hot-air-balloon cap was ridiculous. The way she spoke into the airplane microphone was like a fake person on TV. Everybody knew how to lock and unlock seat belts, so why did she have to stand in the aisle with a set of them—little belts attached to nothing—and demonstrate fastening and unfastening?
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.
Sweet Inez,
Thank you, darling, for your letter and the beautiful drawing. I put it up on my bulletin board for important messages, and I look at it a lot. Since Marisa is not “my girlfriend”—if you know what I mean—I don’t have a picture of a beautiful girl for my desk. Why don’t you send me your picture, and then I’ll have a girl’s picture to put up?
All my love,
Daddy
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.