The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  Building a house was a way to employ all this knowledge, but not only that. He seemed to be searching for a chance to express himself, and his taste, and his ideas about the world. It wasn’t just a house but a series of daring experiments—and both he and Ooee enjoyed how impossible it would be to pull off. They were like boys planning to build a fort or a tree house. They’d formed a club of two and seemed to speak in their own language. The structure would be “both transparent and hidden,” they said. Even the stone steps to the beach would be camouflaged by trees and shrubs. But they weren’t just stone steps. They were “a transition” and “a conduit of energy” and “an invisible passageway to nature.” And the stone steps had to be just right.

  Around Ooee my father was unguarded and passionate. But when old friends and colleagues—or, most of all, Marguerite—asked how the house was coming along (so much easier than inquiring about a computer), my father made the project sound effortless and routine. A simple thing. Just a little house across the bridge. “A cottage on the beach,” I heard him say to Aunt Julia, “almost Japanese and very small.” He was conspicuously modest and vague about his plans until he began trying to obtain licenses and permits to build next to state parkland, and then he became frustrated and irritable. “Who knows!” he’d say angrily if anybody asked how it was going, or “I’m pressing on! There’s nothing else to do.”

  I visited North Beach just once that winter. I was always batting away his offers and invitations in those days. I had lots of reasons—school events, parties, football games, and reports—but mostly, when I thought about heading to San Francisco for another weekend of wailing flamenco singers and being squeezed between the wilting Justine and the booming Ooee Lungo, I felt like dying.

  It was always more fun, and more relaxed, to meet up in Laguna. And in that familiar setting—breakfast at the Jolly Roger (“But is it fresh or frozen?”), tidal-pool explorations, walking to town, sailing around Newport Harbor in Uncle Drew’s old wooden boat, a movie at night and bitter arguments about the movie (now a family tradition), the late bedtime, the sleeping in, getting up for the JR breakfast again—the differences between my father’s life and mine seemed smaller. I had room to be myself. And, although inquisitive as ever (“Lizzie,” he asked my seventeen-year-old cousin one morning at the JR, “are you really still a virgin?”), my father was pleasantly muted at the beach. Even his rhapsodies about Justine, which were tediously frequent in the early days of their love affair, were dwindling in number. Now he rarely spoke of her.

  So that one visit to North Beach, on a cold weekend in February, I was treated like a visiting dignitary. Aside from a trip to the headlands—so he could proudly show me his vacant lot of land—the entire weekend unfolded like a production designed to please me. There were trips to Cost Plus and hippie shops to buy incense, candles, and an old army jacket. I was taken to the Gap for cords, Tower Records for the new Boz Scaggs album, and even indulged in my wish to see Barry Lyndon for a third time. Justine materialized with gifts: a string of pounded gold chain from Morocco, a bottle of scented bath water from Floris in London, a Buddhist mala of wooden prayer beads. In the past I’d always been just along for the ride, wedged into a social calendar and lifestyle that she and my father kept. Or wedged into Whitman’s ambitions. But Whitman was traveling that year, and away, and I wasn’t wedged into anything—not even the back of the MG. My father borrowed Ooee’s blue Saab to drive us around.

  On the second afternoon, when my father had “some work to do,” Justine asked if I’d like to come see her. She’d make me lunch, she said, and we’d have some tea. I rang the bell several times, and she finally appeared in the courtyard in a pair of baggy pants and an open linen shirt. Her blond hair was down, falling well past her shoulders.

  “Aren’t we about the same height?” she said in a gentle voice. Her blue eyes looked at me for a few seconds, then skidded away.

  She led me down the hall to her bedroom, where a king-size bed sat on a white platform. A wall of square windows on the other side of the room allowed some dusky sunlight to filter in. There was a round white table next to the bed—exactly the same table that my father had in his apartment. There was only one painting hanging on the wall, a rectangle of blue brushstrokes of water or sky.

  “I’m cleaning out my closet,” she said. “And before my sister picks over everything, you might want to take a look. There are some nice sweaters. A few wonderful coats. All kinds of things.”

  Justine pulled on a silver knob and opened a door. A gust of patchouli blew out. A light flickered on inside, automatically. “Isn’t that light great? Your father’s idea.”

  Her closet, like the rest of her town house, was orderly—sleeves fell in rows, the silks and linens so fine they seemed almost poignant. Toward the front there were blouses and some scarves folded on hangers. Toward the back there were coats and long sweaters, shawls and ponchos. Everything was soft or long or gauzy, like something Ophelia would have worn while she floated down the river and drowned.

  Why did I feel so nervous suddenly? Standing in Justine’s open closet, while seeming on the surface an easy thing to do, was intensely personal, as though I’d wandered into the woman’s most private unseen realm. “Take your time,” Justine said, backing away. I moved a few hangers along the sleek wooden pole, casually, as if I were in a department store and browsing the racks. Way in the back, I came upon some Moroccan robes and smocks and caftans, things she’d bought when she’d lived in Tangier.

  “That’s a djellaba,” Justine said, pointing to one long robe in pinky beige silk. “And that’s really more of a machzania.” She touched a creamy blue garment with a large hood. “It’s a robe that you wear on the outside, like a coat. The hood protects you from sandstorms and the sun.”

  Sandstorms? The sun?

  “See anything you might like?” Justine asked quietly.

  A brown cashmere poncho jumped into view. Just as I was about to reach for it, doubts filled my mind. Where would I wear such a thing? And why would I want Justine’s clothes anyway? Except…who knows, there might be a remote chance that I would become someday the sort of person—uh, woman—who could wear things like that. It was implausible, almost laughable. And seemed totally outrageous. But as I stared at the heartbreaking array of delicate and exotic clothes in the closet, I suddenly wanted to believe that it might be so. Desperately.

  “See anything you might want?” Justine asked again.

  “Oh,” I mumbled, embarrassed. I felt a surge of feeling that I couldn’t quite fathom or express. I suppose it was desire, followed by greed or possibly jealousy—under a shroud of confusion. I wanted everything, every single thing, very badly. Not just the clothes. I wanted to have long, pale hair like Justine’s, and a gentle refined voice. I wanted to ride motorcycles and smoke brown Sherman cigarettes in long ivory holders. Why had it taken me so long to see that? “It’s all so neat,” I said, my head cluttered with new thoughts. “I can’t decide.”

  She stepped away, as if sensing that I needed “some space,” as people said then. I heard a faucet in the bathroom turn on.

  I tried to picture my life ahead—and what clothes I might need someday. I felt a kind of panic, a sense that I might never have this chance again or be offered an array of free clothes as beautiful. What would I need in the future? The problem was, I couldn’t project myself into the future—see beyond my immediate circumstances. Graduation from junior high loomed. And over the summer I’d be riding my bike everywhere. In a caftan? I’d be swimming at the Verdugo pool. In a djellaba? I’d be away at horseback-riding camp—sort of a girls’ dude ranch in Colorado that Marguerite was paying for—but for that I’d probably need a flannel shirt and my paddock boots. But what about the fall? Van Dale Senior High would be starting. Maybe then I’d need some grown-up things.

  Just a few weeks before, a girl in art class had made a crack about my platform saddle shoes. “What are those?” she’d said in tones of ridicule. She was a
new girl who had arrived midyear from another part of Los Angeles, and I guess she’d never seen platform saddle shoes before. But Shelley Strelow—that was her name—was onto to something. She had style, knew how to tie a scarf. She had wavy, brown, shoulder-length hair that she kept off her face with a pair of sunglasses on top of her head. She wasn’t California-girl cute, but more exotic than that—giant eyes and a prominent nose, and she wore makeup like she knew what she was doing. And gold hoop earrings. Coming to a new school in the middle of ninth grade couldn’t have been easy. But she already seemed bored.

  “See anything?” Justine said.

  The brown cashmere poncho was short, above the knees. Would Shelley Strelow wear something like that? I stepped farther into the closet and pulled the poncho out. It was so thick and soft. The hood ruined it in about ten ways, but I had to take something. Marguerite had drilled this into me: Always take one thing. Don’t turn offers down; it’s rude. Always try one. And, once in my arms, the poncho felt like it belonged to me already.

  “That’s all you want?” Justine said. She hesitated for a moment, then walked back into the closet and picked out a sweater, then another and another—an armload of sweaters—things in browns, autumn colors and earth tones. She threw them on her bed. “There!” she said, holding a long chocolate V-neck in the air. “See how great this looks against your skin?” She turned me around so I faced a mirror on the inside of the closet door. “See how it works with your eyes?”

  I nodded and kept nodding. “Take all of these,” she said, pointing to the pile on the bed. “I have too much. And they look better on you! I insist.” She went back inside the closet and was studying a section of blouses—and then began lifting hangers of them and collecting them in her hand. I was flushed, excited, made anxious by her generosity. “But how am I going to get everything home?” I asked.

  Justine walked to another door and opened it, reemerging from this second closet with a large leather suitcase. “Here we go,” she said. “But first let’s see if we can fill it up!”

  I bought a notebook and started a journal that year—the word “journal” seemed so much more mature and important than “diary”—and into those fresh, clean notebook pages I jotted musings about life, fluctuating philosophies, and what seemed like crucial observations. It was written self-consciously, a little blandly, too carefully, as though Abuelita or my mother, or even God might be reading over my shoulder. I never wrote much about my parents, either of them. What they did—or neglected to do—didn’t seem worth recording. Maybe I wasn’t conscious enough, or sensitive. But when my father wouldn’t come to my graduation from E. J. Truppel because he didn’t want to spend two hours standing next to my mother and Coach Weeger, the journal contains no mention of it. When I walked in on Coach Weeger crying—my mother had refused to marry him—no mention. How I really felt about Abuelita, or Robbie, or Marguerite: nothing. Most of the notebook is taken up with accounts and descriptions of boys that I knew but barely remember now. Pat McClarty plays a central role during the first half of that year. I had learned that he was moving to the Midwest, and I poured out my anguish in poems about the sea, and ships lost, and people drowning. And then, on June 17 when school got out, Pat vanishes like one of the ships. Another name appears: Antonio. The notebook pages begin to steam.

  It was warm, oddly warm, that June. My father and Justine met me at the airport in Ooee’s Saab, and we drove through town, then over the Golden Gate Bridge, then into a tunnel. We followed a wide, twisting street, then bumped on a small dirt road, coming to the ridge of land in the Marin Headlands where my father’s house was being built. A foundation had been poured, and there were cement blocks, and white pipes, and holes where a sink would go, or a toilet. It was just a pit of cement, really, with green-wire rebar springing up like hairs. We stood around for a long time while my father described his plans. I remember that he seemed ridiculous and pretentious to me. He had a hushed voice when he talked, as though he were building a shrine. We stood where the living room would someday be, and waited for the sunset. At about eight-thirty, the sun dropped behind a row of lavender clouds that looked like bubbles, and nobody said a word.

  That night my father and Justine threw a party. It was an informal affair, mostly flamencos and a few gringos like Ooee Lungo and some of my father’s computer-world buddies that he’d dragged into the flamenco scene. It was the same party that I had been to a few times before—with varying degrees of interest.

  I was standing in the kitchen of my father’s apartment when Antonio entered the room—coming by the refrigerator for a beer. He was wearing a pair of tight jeans and a black shirt that was open to his bare chest. It was strange to see him out of the traditional stage getup. Manitas de plata. He seemed undressed. Too real. Too close. He stopped for a moment to speak with me. In the past I’d gone unnoticed, an invisible person.

  “Your father,” the young guitarist said, “is a good guy.” He leaned back against the frame of the kitchen door.

  “Yes,” I said, nodding. I thought he was talking about my father’s loyalty over the years to Alegrías and the ragtag group of guitarists and singers and dancers. But Antonio was looking at me as if there were a question in his mind, something unfinished. “Wait,” I said, “you mean his playing? It’s really good?”

  He laughed. The door of the refrigerator opened again, and I watched the light change on Antonio’s face. He bent his head to the flame of a match, and the light changed again. His skin was tawny. His nails were filed perfectly, the way my father kept his. Everything he did seemed in slow motion—the way he moved his hands to the match, the way he talked or shook his head. His shaggy black hair seemed weighted with something extra, dark and serious, a sleepy magic. “His playing? Your father…he’s okay for a—” He stopped himself. “But he looks like a gitano, no?”

  “Do you think so? He’d love to hear that, I’m sure,” I said, feeling glamorous with a cigarette and a brown beer bottle in my hand. “He’d love to not be a—”

  “And you—mexicana?”

  “Uh-huh.” I nodded, hesitant, suddenly worried he might want to speak Spanish, which I couldn’t do very well. “And my grandmother is from Peru.”

  Antonio didn’t seem to be listening to what I was saying. He just stared. “Peru,” he said. He pulled away from the doorframe and leaned his face closer to mine. “You like him. Yes?”

  “Like him?”

  “You are like him,” he corrected himself, and then gently ran his hand up and down my bare arm, from the edge of my T-shirt sleeve to my wrist. I remember struggling to breathe, and I felt a sensation, a buzzing of nerves, all the way into my feet. The flamencos were always touching each other, I told myself. It didn’t mean anything.

  “Ay!”

  It was Ooee. When he walked into the kitchen, Antonio drew his hand away from my arm and slipped it quickly, or the tips of his fingers at least, into the small front pocket of his jeans. Ooee hovered, crowded next to me. He patted my shoulder, almost stroked it. “You saw the house today, I heard. What did you think of—”

  “Inez!” my father called out, squeezing into the small kitchen. He stood between Ooee and Antonio. “Inez!” he said again, now in a Castilian accent, Ee-NETH.

  I smiled a little sheepishly and kept my cigarette and my beer low, almost behind me. He was looking at me—studying me.

  “Hija,” he said finally. He saw the beer, for sure. I watched his eyes for a flicker of disapproval. No sign.

  “Hija,” Antonio repeated with a chuckle. He looked over at my father, then back to me. Ooee was looking at me, too, and suddenly I felt a flutter of excitement in my chest, almost like a wave of sensation—embarrassment mixed with thrill. My father and Antonio and Ooee smiled, all big grins, wide and open, like they were waiting for me to say something, or do something, but at the same time it didn’t seem to matter what I did. Nothing was needed, except for me to stand still. Smile back. Just let them look. Something had changed—the
ir eyes had changed. They were looking at me in a new way. And there was something about them, these three men, a kind of silly shagginess, but underneath, a darkness, a nighttime intensity that seemed dangerous and undefined.

  My father ran his hand along Antonio’s black shirtsleeve. His hand stopped near the crook of the guitarist’s arm and stayed there for a while. He was about to say something when a cloud of patchouli blew into the kitchen.

  “Hey!” Justine was wearing a blue-gray sheath that looked almost Grecian. In a small gold clip in her hands, she held a joint—as skinny and round as a white birthday candle. “Cambodian,” she said, offering it to Antonio.

  “Ah,” Antonio said, smiling so that creases radiated from his eyes, warm creases, almost like rays of sunshine. My father was smiling, too—and studying me.

  “Inez?”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you put that beer in a glass, instead of drinking out of the bottle?”

  Ooee laughed.

  “Okay.” I said.

  “And one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “Are you up for a little dope?”