Robbie acted as if the thing between my mother and Coach Weeger were as fantastic as something transpiring on All My Children, like when super aged Dr. Joe Martin fell in love with Ruth, the nurse with dentures on the seventh floor. It was interesting, as far as I was concerned, but not all that romantic. And when Robbie grew tired of asking me about it, she sometimes asked me about Whitman.
“How’s your brother?” She asked nonchalantly as we walked to 31 Flavors, like it didn’t matter. But I knew it did. “Have you heard from him?”
“Next weekend I’m seeing him. We’re flying up to San Francisco together.”
My brother loomed over our universe, mine and Robbie’s, like a figure of fantasy who might float in from HippieWorld at any moment. He and his mother lived in Santa Barbara for a couple years, in the guest cottage on some estate, before moving to a communal farm in Ojala. Patricia kept to herself, never came to San Benito, but Whitman liked to describe how she was overhauling the grounds and gardens of the Theosophical Society and attending teachings by Krishnamurti, an Indian mystic who drew crowds of followers—but not anybody in Van Dale from what I could tell. Whitman liked to play the mystic, too, in those days. He was always making predictions, like when another earthquake was supposed to strike California and make it fall into the ocean. He’d grown taller and darker, and his hair fell in a great shaggy disarray about his shoulders. It went perfectly with his ratty clothes, Jesus sandals, vegetarian diet, and a feminine-seeming Guatemalan pouch worn across his chest that drove Marguerite totally nuts. But you had to love him. Everybody did. He was friendly and liked people. He’d stayed at our house twice—just came and happily hung out, calling Abuelita “Mrs. G,” and my mother “Connie Mama.” Everybody got a nickname. I was always “Little Mexican” and Robbie was “The Latter-Day Morrison.”
Whitman brought something exciting into our lives—and made us feel, for a time anyway, like we were living in HippieWorld with him. One summer night, after he and Robbie and I had gone swimming up the street, at Christa Nixon’s house, we came back to Abuelita’s and turned off all the lights in the house. Whitman lit some incense. Then he brought my little portable stereo into the living room, put a Joni Mitchell album on the turntable, and made us listen to the songs in the dark.
Mostly, though, Whitman talked about surfing: the shape of waves, the direction of the wind, weather patterns, the creation of tropical storms, the pull of currents and riptides. I’m not sure why, but Robbie and I were enthralled. He laughed at our jokes, I guess, and told us we were cute. Despite what we must have looked like then—the acne flare-ups, the oily hair, and the unwanted budding of our breasts—whatever Whitman said, we believed.
“What are you getting?” Robbie asked when we were about a block away from the ice cream store. “Hot fudge sundae?”
“Hot fudge,” I said, “with two scoops of chocolate mint.”
Whitman had all kinds of surfboards—and equipment. Wax, wetsuits, racks for the car. He had stories about his surf heroes and famous surfing spots around the world. Over the summer I’d gotten a complete indoctrination to this world when we’d met up with our father for two weeks at Marguerite’s shingled house on Moss Cove. The house was crowded with cousins and other relatives who had also chosen the second half of June for a sandy and somewhat alcoholic Ruin family holiday. There were rounds of gin and tonics. Rounds of cribbage and bridge. There were packs of cigarettes smoked. There were dozens of ruby red grapefruit halves consumed at breakfast and bowls and bowls of cereal consumed with table cream before bed at night.
Whitman vanished early in the morning to surf at Big Corona or Salt Creek or sometimes the Wedge in Newport and didn’t reappear until late afternoon—the sleeves and top half of his wetsuit peeled off and curling below his skinny waist. My father spent his days philosophizing with an Irvine physics professor who lived nearby or locked in ugly debates about the war with his sister Ann, whose car was plastered with RE-ELECT NIXON bumper stickers. And I, who had long ago decided that my cousin Lisa was far better company than my gloomy and complicated father, spent mornings and afternoons with my body planted on the sand beside hers, greased up before the sun like a roasting chicken.
Each night I was torn away from Lisa and the family bridge game to attend the movies with my father and Whitman—made more bearable when a system for picking the films was established. We took turns choosing a movie, and no matter what it was, all three of us had to attend. For my father’s first two turns, he’d taken us to see an incredibly bloody movie, The French Connection, which I wasn’t allowed to tell Abuelita or my mother about, and three days later a documentary about Woodstock, which introduced me to full frontal nudity and frequent use of the word “balling.” When Whitman’s turns came, he picked a smattering of low-budget surf films—they looked like home movies and had no audio but for the dull strumming of a guitar. The soggy old cinema where they played was near the pier in Huntington Beach and had a distinct beach smell: mold, urine, and sour wine mingled with freshly lit marijuana.
When my nights came, I was excited to exercise my power. I took my father and Whitman to see The Sound of Music, a movie that rendered them speechless. (I assumed this was a positive sign.) Three nights later, during a hot spell, I chose a movie that I’d been longing to see: Gone with the Wind.
“Well?” my father said afterward in the car.
I was throbbing with feeling—and a strange ache, oddly enough, for the Civil War days. Those dresses! The dancing! And since the ending of the film, when Rhett Butler walks off—maybe the whole thing reminded me of my mom and how stupid she’d been, how could Scarlett possibly let him go?—I’d had to stifle a bout of open-mouthed sobbing.
“Awful,” Whitman proclaimed. “The worst movie I’ve ever seen.”
“Really, Whitman,” my father said dryly. He seemed amused. “You don’t think it’s the greatest romance of all time?”
“It makes Sound of Music look like a masterpiece,” Whitman said, speaking for the first time of my previous choice. “It was so artificial and racist—and disgusting. Plus, the whole thing takes place indoors. Oh, except maybe the burning of Atlanta—that was outside—and so phony. Inez, please don’t say you really liked that?”
“Inez?” my father asked.
He looked in the rearview mirror at me. I was brushing my bangs away from my face, but later on I wondered if he thought I was wiping my eyes.
“I mean,” Whitman continued, “what awful people, and that horrible bitch Scarlett O’—”
“Okay! We get it!” my father exploded. “You talk too much, Whitman! Do you know that? Just shut the hell up!”
My body was shaking—jangling, my heart pounding. The remainder of the ride back to Laguna was quiet, and the movie no longer seemed like a jewel of perfection that I was dying to see again with Robbie, but rather like something sick and wrong for having caused such a terrible rift.
My father parked the MG on the steep hillside next to Marguerite’s, and both he and Whitman quickly evacuated the car. While I sat in my little cavelike space on the back ledge, I heard footsteps up the stairs to the bungalow. The beach-house door opened with a rusty squeak, closed, and then opened again. When I got out of the car, I heard waves breaking on the rocks at Moss Cove a block away. I looked up at the clear night sky over my head and into a field of stars.
My father liked to complain about the way Marguerite had furnished the beach house, grousing that it was absurdly formal, everything upholstered in damasks and striped satins—“she’s from the East, where people still care about all that crap,” he’d say—but as I entered its yellow light and walked beneath its low beamed ceiling that night, smelled the peppery mold in the shadows, and saw the figurines on the mantel, I remember feeling warm suddenly, and better about everything. It was a cozy house, and old-fashioned, and done in a woman’s way—and that night I was tired of men.
I heard my father making a phone call from a tiny bedroom downstairs. Whitman was
in the galley kitchen, pouring shredded wheat into a bowl. All the Ruins ate sugary cereal with cream before bed, and even Whitman had once said, “it’s what killed off N.C.” But there were no jokes out of Whitman that night. From the doorway I saw his fallen face and realized that he wasn’t a boy anymore, exactly—broad shoulders, a beard growing on his cheeks and chin and upper lip.
“I don’t care if you hated it,” I said to him, under my breath. I pulled on the hem of my ragged cutoffs and smoothed my tank top. “You’re entitled to your opinion.”
Whitman watched me carefully—and the way I yanked at my clothes. His face was very still. He was holding the bowl of cereal in one large hand, a soup spoon hovering above it. “It’s not that,” he said.
I watched his mouth while he chewed, then caught his eyes, hard and lonely. He took a bite of cereal and looked like he was going to chew off the top of the spoon.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” And then he swallowed.
Cary arrived the next morning—a surprise—and was making pancakes before most of the house had come alive. One by one, as they straggled downstairs, she met our cousins, Newell and Amanda and Lisa and Lizzie. And she met Aunt Ann, when she returned from walking her dogs. After Whitman appeared, Cary asked him about Moss Cove and Barking Sands and other points of interest in Laguna, where she’d never been, and she found a way—as she usually did—to make things feel okay again. Effortlessly sunny and patient, a bit daffy, she had a presence that diluted the intensity of my father and made being with him bearable. Even Whitman returned to normal, as though he’d passed through the problems of the night, or beyond them, with a resiliency I wasn’t sure that I myself possessed. And when my father insisted he wasn’t interested in a trip to either Disneyland or the Sawdust Festival—“You’ll have a terrible time, I’m sure of it”—Cary took us anyway.
It was a short drive along the coast highway and then into the rolling hills of Laguna Canyon to the Sawdust Festival, an annual craft fair. The summer traffic slowed us down, and the air grew warm as we drove inland. Looking for a parking space in a yellow field, Whitman rolled a joint and smoked it with Cary. I sat on my ledge in the back of the MG and pretended not to notice.
Arriving inside the gates of the festival, we found ourselves in another world. Most of the vendors and tourists were dressed in heavy Renaissance-style clothing—ladies in peasant blouses, bodices, long velvet gowns, and peaked hats. There were men in medieval court costumes and black leather. There were jugglers in harlequin patterns. There were mimes in whiteface and black knit caps. The smell of sweat was everywhere, and ripe body odor. Cary was wearing a calico granny dress and brown boots which had seemed a little out of place at the Ruin cottage—neither yacht-clubby nor sporty—but now I found myself wishing I’d worn something more medieval and fanciful than a pair of white bell-bottom jeans and a loud purple top.
Cary stopped at a booth. “Hey, Inez, why don’t we have your cards read?”
“My cards?”
“Tarot cards.” Whitman sighed wearily, looking over at the willowy blonde who was running the booth. “She’s telling the future with them.”
Cary got in line at the booth, behind a man with a reddish Afro and tiny glasses. His pants were baggy and gathered with a drawstring around his thin waist. I stepped closer and tried to see over the frizz of the man’s hair. The willowy blonde had laid down six cards in the shape of a cross on the counter. Another four cards were arranged in a column down the right-hand side. Each card had an illustration and words below, in French: Le Magicien. L’Empress. Valet d’Epées. I stared at one card with naked figures precariously positioned on a spinning wheel.
“La Roue de Fortune,” the reader said in a lilting, otherworldly accent to the man with the Afro. “The Wheel of Fortune.” She pointed at the card with a thin finger weighed down with a huge ring. “The most recent sphere of action,” she said. “This is what is happening now. Very intense. Are things intense?”
The man nodded.
“Way out,” she said. “Inevitability. Fate. You are up against it, man. But it will also bring luck.”
“Heavy,” the man said.
“Yes,” said the willowy girl, nodding slowly—as though each nod were bringing her closer to the realization of an eternal truth. “Get your mind around it.”
I stepped up to the counter, and Cary pulled three dollars from a fabric pouch she was wearing over her shoulder. “Ask the cards a question,” the reader said to me while handing over a thick pile of cards. “Ask and shuffle.”
Wondering what to ask, I stopped for a moment and then shuffled the big cards clumsily. I handed them back, and the reader began to lay them down in the same cross configuration. When she was done, she pointed to a card on the left side. It was a queen who was standing with a long pole or staff in her hand. Reine de Bâtons, it said.
“Queen of Sticks,” Cary said.
“Wands,” the reader said, correcting her.
“Oh, right.”
“You’re going to encounter a powerful woman soon,” the reader continued, looking only at me. “A kind woman. A good heart. A woman you can trust.”
“That must be you!” I said to Cary.
“Yes!” Cary chirped merrily. “Don’t you love her crown?”
“No,” said the reader, her voice a bit grave. “I’m afraid it’s a fair lady. Light-haired and pale. Like me.”
Cary and I shared a look. Within seconds, Whitman appeared in a silly court jester’s hat, and the strange moment dissolved. “Hey,” he called out, “what’s going to happen to you, Inez? That’s the great mystery.”
My father was waiting at home that night—with presents he’d bought during his day alone. He’d taken Whitman’s van to the garage for an oil change. A bunch of peacock feathers had been found for Cary. He presented me with a paperback copy of Great Expectations that he’d gotten at a bookstore on the coast highway. We were alone in the beach house that night—the aunts and cousins at dinner or the movies or drinking at the neighbors’—and my father started reading my new book aloud. When his voice gave out, Whitman carried on, passing the book to Cary after a while.
As Cary read, my father and Whitman seemed okay with each other again—grievances repaired or forgotten. Tension gone. We were caught up in the book, the story of Pip, and we followed the boy from the windswept cemetery on the marsh to Miss Havisham’s cobwebbed estate, from the heat of the forge to the mannered company of Estella. Sitting in the yellow light of Marguerite’s living room, and on her taut damask chairs, listening to the sound of the waves and Cary’s soft, careful voice, I felt suddenly, all at once, a great rush of feeling—as if I were part of something special and wonderful and very small, as though twine as thin and fragile as smoke surrounded the four of us—and was pulling us closer and closer.
“What larks!” my father said. “What larks, good chap, old Pip!”
In late August a package arrived for my birthday—a deck of tarot cards in a purple velvet pouch. There was a brief note.
Happy Birthday, Inez.
You are the neatest girl I’ve ever known. And may your future be full of great kindnesses and grand magic.
I love you.
Cary.
Robbie and I stalled at 31 Flavors, hung around by the drinking fountain and talking, digging into our sundae cups of ice cream, until we realized it was growing dark—if not dark already. We decided to take a shortcut home, even though it was forbidden. It went through a slightly less manicured part of town, and the streets were less traveled and not well lit. But we’d arrive home a few minutes sooner.
We walked almost in the middle of the road. The houses were dark, except for a few lights. When we heard a car, Robbie and I moved to the edge of the street. A white Corvair went by, driving slowly—almost as though the driver were looking at us. Was it Abuelita? I threw my hand up to wave at her, thinking we’d get a ride home. The car slowed again and might have stoppe
d, I’m not sure. Then I noticed that it wasn’t Abuelita’s car at all. The black-and-yellow license plate was different, with different numbers and letters, and I quickly pulled my hand down to stop waving. I felt my heart thumping, a surge of embarrassment over a small mistake made.
“Who’s that?” Robbie said.
“I thought it was Abuelita.”
“They slowed down.”
“I know.”
“Probably because you waved.”
“I know.”
Robbie and I kept walking, engrossed in a discussion about split ends—we spent hours on this topic—and something my cousin Amanda had said. If you pulled on your hair in the shower, it grew out faster. That’s what women in France did, Amanda said.
Up ahead I noticed a white Corvair parked on the street. That’s weird, I remember thinking. Another one. As I drew closer, I looked at the license plate and realized it was same car that I’d seen a few minutes before, the one that had slowed down when I waved. My heart began beating quickly again. I was just about to grab Robbie’s arm when the door of the car swung open. Falling out of the driver’s seat and onto the street was a large, burly man wearing only a bra and a garter belt and stockings.
Robbie and I ran and ran, stumbling in our flip-flops. We went as fast as we could. We went as far as we could. I’m not sure if the Garter Belt Man, as we came to call him, even bothered to chase us. He seemed too fat for that—hadn’t he groaned as he fell to the street? And there was something theatrical and pathetic about the way he’d burst out of the little Corvair, something that made us feel sorry for him. (“Poor misfit,” Robbie said the next day.) For years afterward, in my dreams and nightmares, he’d turn up during times of anxiety and disquiet and change. Sometimes he chased me, this half-man/half-woman—this transforming person—but eventually I’d had the dream so many times that when he made an appearance, I’d laugh in my sleep. He seemed harmless, cartoonish. And he’d never really chased us, or appeared again. I’m not sure if the Van Dale police caught him or if he just moved on. But the night we finally saw him, Robbie and I ran all the way home, and just before arriving there, we made a pact we wouldn’t tell a soul. I’m not sure why.
The Ruins of California Page 6
