Was she happy? Had life met her expectations—or not? I didn’t wonder about such things until years later, when I began asking those questions of myself. Unlike the Ruins, who were complicated and self-indulgent and begged for your attention and analysis, Abuelita was modest and understated. She wasn’t larger than life; she never tried to be. She was just Adela Traba Garcia—rarely sick, never late, utterly without drama, and her energy was unflagging. She was disciplined and methodical. She knew how to strive but didn’t like to waste too much time on dreams. The Ruins were romantics—always finding ways to feel special about themselves and better than other people. Abuelita had a way of reducing everything to duty. She never mythologized or tried to beef up family ties with sentiment. She just left cooked cereal in the double boiler for me—and sometimes bacon rolled in a paper towel. She did my laundry, too, and cleaned the house, and picked avocados from the tree in the side yard and cut them into salads with a homemade lemony dressing. She did the household sewing—all hems and popped buttons. She made most of our meals, except when Coach Weeger came over and my mother wanted to demonstrate her abilities.
Aside from a few loved ones—and that would include her employer, who was like a god to her—people who lacked energy or discipline could come in for criticism from Abuelita. She was lenient and forgiving until an invisible line had been crossed. After that, people were expunged from her life. Her sister Rosa had been expunged. Her aunt and two cousins, who arrived in Van Dale and complained about America and then overstayed their welcome to the point of freeloading, not to mention ruining two green towels with bleach spots, were expunged. And then, in a previously unexplored category of expungement, there was Carlos “Charles” Garcia.
I was thirteen when I finally heard—from two chatty cousins visiting from Peru—how Abuelita had come to be alone. A reference to “La Habra” was blurted out, followed by cries of disbelief over my ignorance. A long story ensued, which was sprinkled with colorful distortions. Even if only half the story were true, Abuelita was still made more alive to me. Not that she wasn’t real before, just mostly a composite person of my own creation—a pair of brown hands, a crusty double boiler of cereal, a pitcher of lemony salad dressing. Now she became something else: The story about her aloneness made her as big as the universe. If there was one story like this about Adela Traba Garcia, there must be others.
According to Ana and Alexita, my grandmother’s cousins from Trujillo who drank too much coffee one morning and became enormously talkative, Charles Garcia was a tall and rather suave Mexican—he knew classical music, could play the piano. (They raved about this ability, as if a monkey had been miraculously taught to play Chopin.) Abuelita met this incredible man in the backyard of Mr. Feinman’s house, where Charles was cleaning out a swimming-pool filter. He was dashing. He wore beautiful shirts. And he wiped his hands with a clean white handkerchief before he reached out to introduce himself. They were married several months later, during a brief window when Abuelita was susceptible to romance. My mother was born to great fanfare and excitement but soon became a source of concern and emotional distraction. Little Consuela never smiled—who heard of a baby that never smiled?—and my grandmother spent her days fixated on trying to make her daughter happy. When Consuela was five and started school, Charles began frequenting a Mexican social club in La Habra, often in the company of women who were not Abuelita. He was a flirt, an incorrigible playboy, and a fatally unserious person, according to the cousins. He lived to dance and drink—working was the lowest priority. Abuelita, who was consumed by productivity and breadwinning, let it go on, at first too busy to notice and later too proud to make demands. And then, about the time she took driving lessons and purchased her first car, a green Studebaker, Abuelita came to assemble in her mind a very pleasant future for herself without Charles Garcia. Not long after this vision felt complete, according to her two cousins, Abuelita prayed for her husband at Our Lady of Assumption Catholic Church on Kenneth Road, neatly packed his clothes in shopping bags, wrapping his shoes carefully in tissue—the way she’d been taught to pack for Mr. Feinman—and drove down to the pool-service company where he worked and placed the bags across the seat of his truck. She returned home just in time to greet the locksmith who was changing the locks and to double-check that the phone company had disconnected the line.
I never saw Abuelita naked. She dressed and undressed quietly in her room, which was bigger than mine or my mother’s. Her clothes were practical and old-fashioned, all dresses in dark rayons and cottons. She did not care for the beach or pool. She did not own a bathing suit. She did not have a T-shirt or shorts or even a pair of pants. She had no “play clothes” to speak of, or casual things. She did not play. Working was her main thing, and making deposits in her savings account. Aside from driving—she loved her car—her only hobbies were knitting and some occasional crocheting. That’s how she passed the idle hours at Mr. Feinman’s, when the house was clean and all the meals were cooked. She killed time with knitting. Her hands moved like a machine—a blur of motion, needles clacking, and the sleeve of a sweater would begin accumulating in her lap. When I was little, I liked Abuelita’s sweaters. I felt almost invincible in them. As I grew older, they filled me with shame and guilt, because I never wanted to wear them. They bore no resemblance to things in stores or things on TV.
My mother understood—one of the bonds we shared. Her relationship with Abuelita was fraught with similar strains of guilt and shame. Nobody in our lives would ever be as hardworking or selfless, or as innocuous, and this would prove to be achingly difficult to live with, which might explain why my mother and I never talked too much about Abuelita. There didn’t seem a point. And that’s why I waited until the gossipy cousins left for another part of California—for another relative’s house where they could colorize family secrets—before I asked my mother about Charles Garcia. I was nervous and thought it would be a big deal. But my mother had a blasé look on her face as she confirmed most of the story and denied a few other parts (that I’ve left out here) and then casually changed the subject.
“Did anybody call for me this afternoon?” she asked.
My mother was mainly interested—feverishly—in two subjects in those days: tennis and real estate. Mornings, she took clients around Van Dale and Burbank and La Crescenta in a lumbering white Lincoln Continental Mark III coupe that swung into the hills where the glassy houses were and down into the flatlands with their cheap bungalows. Afternoons, she headed to the Van Dale Community Center courts to play tennis, quite often with the clients she’d previously been driving from stucco house to stucco house. My mother’s discipline and athletic ability, which had been lying dormant for years, had finally found an outlet. The phone in our house was always ringing, and a notepad in our kitchen kept lists—court times, tournaments approaching, escrow news, closings. She registered for each Van Dale Community Center tennis tournament as soon as the clipboard went up—and quickly rose from solid C player to the top of the B’s in the round-robin pyramid.
On the subject of my father, she had relaxed. Maybe Coach Weeger had something to do with it. Or maybe my descriptions of Justine had detonated like a canister of nerve gas over all my mother’s remaining hopes and indecision. Now that my father was deemed unattainable, she didn’t need to worry about whether she was supposed to be with him or wonder if a terrible mistake had been made. Released from a kind of mental prison, she had become energized—and overflowing with drive and ambition. She acquired new listings with ease. She paid off the Lincoln early. She opened a stock account at Morgan Stanley and upgraded her tennis wardrobe to beautiful knife-pleated skirts and monogrammed sleeveless polos. The bottom of her closet was a clumpy landscape of white Tretorns in various states of newness. As for evenings, she spent most of them on Ardmore Road returning phone calls. Weekends, after the tournaments and open houses, she reserved time for Coach, who, like me, found himself playing second or third fiddle to my mother’s roaring new passion: her old
self.
Not that I noticed too much. The love that I was angling for in those days came in the form of Patrick McClarty or Doug Daley or Kenny Frank, boys who lingered in my shady driveway after school or turned up at Robbie’s to play tetherball. They didn’t really talk to me. They didn’t explain what they were doing in my driveway or at Robbie’s. They showed up like stray dogs—and punched each other repeatedly on the upper arm or back, gave each other head noogies with their knuckles, and sometimes wrestled one another to the grass. When offered a basketball—or any kind of ball—they drifted to the middle of Ardmore Road, where they tossed and dribbled, passed and faked, and continued to not talk to me. It was a performance, mostly, to be watched with aloof but patient eyes from the front steps of my house. I was beginning to realize the quiet reserves of power that I could release with the tossing back of my long dark hair or the smoldering (I thought) of my closed-mouth smile. And as much as I might be silently aching and unable to sleep due to my throbbing love for Patrick McClarty or Doug Daley or Kenny Frank, I certainly didn’t want that to show.
Even so, there were embarrassments and humiliations, like the time Patrick said my bangs looked “shaggy” and I cried in the shower so hard afterward that I bumped my head on the tile and bruised my forehead. A little dark egg appeared the next morning on my brow, surrounded by a sore spot, and Brenda Ross turned around in class and said, “Oh God, you’ve got the biggest zit coming.”
On another level of humiliation, many degrees worse to the point of being catastrophic, was the summer day that my period started and some of it, mixed with seawater, seeped out of the crotch of my bathing suit and dribbled down the insides of my thighs.
My father was at the beach that day. He liked to tan and had laid down two enormous towels into a cross, anointed his skin with Sea & Ski Dark Tanning Oil, and stretched his arms out like Jesus on the cross. When I emerged from the water and felt something warm on my thighs, I saw him lift his head. His wraparound sunglasses hid where his eyes were looking. Had he seen the mess on my thighs or not? It was hard to imagine that he hadn’t seen something. Then his head lowered again.
In general, my father seemed to enjoy making intrusions on my privacy. For a man who had loved many women and was canny about human nature, he was completely dumb to the delicate aspects of mine—either because he didn’t understand the sensitivities of a thirteen-year-old girl or because he simply found my mysteries too compelling to resist. He grilled me about my ice cream and candy consumption—and linked it to my intermittent acne. He’d been quick to notice the growth of hair under my arms and inquired about my methods of shaving. One morning in the beach-house kitchen, he said in a loud voice, “Is that a bra you’re wearing, Inez? Good God, are you really wearing a bra?”
When I cringed, he said, “Don’t you know that women all over the world are burning theirs?”
“The body is beautiful,” he persisted, whenever he had the chance. He disapproved of modesty and always zeroed in on signs of it, as if shyness and hesitancy could be drummed out of me. “It’s not healthy to breathe too much steam produced by tap water,” he said when I insisted on closing the bathroom door while I showered. He took to mentioning a nude bathing spot in La Jolla—it was called “Black’s Beach”—at dinner. He was thinking of driving us all down there to check it out. “What? You wouldn’t go to a nude beach, Inez? There’s no need to be so uptight.”
As if to demonstrate his own belief in the body beautiful, he paraded around the beach house after showering with only a white towel wrapped around his waist, sometimes for hours.
“The Ruins aren’t into modesty,” Whitman explained coolly when I made a passing observation that Dad was a “perv.” But Whitman was onto something. Aunt Julia was seen Windexing dog slobber off the sliding glass door one morning while wearing only a pair of yellow rubber gloves. Aunt Ann had no problem sitting on the toilet with the bathroom door wide open. Marguerite never seemed the least bit modest either—happy to air her elephant skin and old bones at Moss Cove and jumble up her skinny legs into all kinds of unfeminine sitting positions in order to play a round of honeymoon bridge on the sand. The cups of her white bathing suit always kept their shape, I had noticed, despite the fact nothing except a pinch of wrinkled flesh seemed to be inside them.
The Ruins—as I began to see with time—weren’t simply immodest. They were theatrical and outrageous and provocative. Strangers were often targets. Late one afternoon, following a long day of tanning, my father arrived at Moss Cove dressed as Lawrence of Arabia, his head and body draped in large beach towels. Another day he wrapped his face in Ace bandages, put on a suit, hat, gloves, sunglasses, and walked down to the beach as the Invisible Man. At the Jolly Roger, a coffee shop where the Ruin aunts and uncles and cousins went for breakfast in the summer—known to the family as “the JR”—my father insisted on a specific table in the back room. This table was waited on most mornings by a dark, fetching, and quite buxom young woman in a low-cut wench getup, like something from a pirate movie.
“Tell me, is the orange juice fresh this morning?” my father asked without fail.
“It’s fresh-frozen,” the wench would answer.
“But is it fresh or frozen?” my father would ask—in a tone that seemed both berating and flirtatious.
“Fresh-frozen,” she would respond with a chuckle.
“How can it be both, Kathleen?” he’d say, reading the nameplate that rested just above her cleavage. “It must be fresh or it must be frozen.”
Whitman and I were largely immune to our father’s charm in those days. We were sick of him, I suppose. He was mountainous and overshadowing—and his gags had become tedious. But that summer in Laguna, at the height of his awesome powers, he kept a breakfast table of teenagers—me and Whitman, three nieces, and one nephew—completely rapt. We gathered around him, laughed at all his jokes, even the old ones. He was dashing and gallant, and he wore jeans and cowboy boots around the beach town. He did deadly impressions of the milkman, the postman, and any poor stranger who wandered into our lives. He bought us grown-up books like Portnoy’s Complaint and Slaughterhouse-Five to read, brandished words like “twat” and “snatch” and “tit,” took us to R-rated movies full of untold bloodshed and nudity, and gave motorcycle rides on an ancient bike that Uncle Drew had stashed in Marguerite’s garage. At breakfast at the JR, he beguiled my Ruin cousins with his bachelor wisdom and outrageous probing questions.
“How do we feel about breasts these days?” he tossed out one morning while eyeing his fleshy waitress across the way. “Are you girls eager to have them—or not? Are they entirely out of fashion?”
“Dad…”
“I’ve already got them,” chirped Amanda, a peppy cheerleader type who was Whitman’s age. Like all of Aunt Ann and Uncle Drew’s children, she had grown up in Newport Beach and knew little else. “How could they ever go out of fashion?”
“But, Amanda, my dear,” my father said, “flat is in.”
“You don’t have breasts,” said her younger brother, Newell, a towhead with a sunburn and peeling lips. “You’re flat as a pancake.”
“Newell—” my father interjected.
“Flatsy.”
“Then I’m in,” said Amanda with a huff.
“Nobody’s got big boobs in our family, Uncle Paul,” said Lizzie, who had dark hair and Marguerite’s gray-blue eyes.
“No?”
“No.”
“All Ruin women are flat-chested,” Whitman observed. “Aunt Ann. Aunt Julia. Marguerite. Except, considering what Consuela’s carrying around, Inez might wind up okay.”
“You’re so lucky, Inez,” said Lisa.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want them,” I retorted. “They’re always in the way.”
“Sure,” said Newell.
“You should see Mom play tennis,” I said. “Her boobs stick out so much she has to swing around them.”
“Inez, be kind,” my father said.
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br /> “It’s the truth.”
“We’re just talking hypothetically,” my father continued in professorial tones, as if wanting to veer from the subject of my mother. “If you girls had them—big ones—would you wear a little blouse like our waitress’s—and show them off?”
“Yes!” Amanda cried out.
“Yes!” Lizzie yelled.
I looked across the way at Kathleen and felt sorry for her. “No way,” I said under my breath. “That’s so gross.”
“Someday you might feel different,” my father said to me.
“But,” Whitman replied, “she might not.”
My brother was my defender—and did this without disturbing any of my many (and various) delicate boundaries. When personal subjects were discussed, he displayed an overriding gentility and discretion that my father, and indeed most of the Ruin family, seemed to lack. He was capable of a diatribe against leg shaving, which he found bourgeois. He might remark that in England, where he had been partly raised, “people weren’t as hung up about their bodies.” But he would never have asked me, as my father did that summer afternoon when the brownish stains on my bathing suit didn’t come out, if I “needed anything at the Laguna pharmacy, like Kotex.” And Whitman would never have attempted to pry and poke his way into what could have been the most delicate territory of all, as my father did on the night the three of us went to La Dolce Vita at the Lido Theatre and I announced afterward (from my increasingly awkward perch in the back of the MG) that Marcello Mastroianni wasn’t my “type.”
“Did I hear that right?” my father asked with a weird tightness in his throat. “Mastroianni is not your type?” He chuckled and tried to make the discussion jolly, but I could tell that my revelation had struck him personally. Until then I hadn’t realized how much he looked like the Italian actor, or at least must have thought so.
The Ruins of California Page 10
