The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  “What card?”

  The card was white and had said ARE YOU A VISITOR? at the top. It looked a little like one of those scorecards at a miniature-golf course. And next to the card—in the wooden pocket of the pew where the hymnals were kept—was a small brown pencil, just like those miniature-golf pencils. The combination was irresistible. So I filled out my name: Inez Ruin, 314 Ardmore Road, Van Dale, Calif. 91202.

  A few weeks later, three somber-looking people were standing in the yellow no-bug light of Abuelita’s porch.

  “Inez? Inez Ruin?”

  My mother shook her head. They’d said my name “EYE-nez,” which meant they didn’t know me too well.

  “We’re from the ministry of Van Dale Presbyterian Church,” said one lean woman with plain gray hair and a cardigan sweater.

  “Oh.”

  “We’ve come at Inez’s request,” said a man with a square jaw and a crew cut. “We hope you don’t mind.”

  “Just a moment,” my mother said, closing the front door partway and heading down the hall to extract me from Beacon Hill, a new show about Irish maids and butlers working in a mansion in Boston.

  I was wearing school clothes, a skirt and V-neck sweater that was dotted with lint from the green-and-yellow shag carpeting in our den. I tried to compose myself and not laugh nervously. My heart was pounding as I wandered fake-sleepily toward the front door.

  “Hello, Inez. I’m Mrs. Potter,” the tall woman said, “and this is Mr. Edwards and Miss Ryan. We’re from the ministry of Van Dale Presbyterian and just stopped by to pay a call. May we come in?”

  The theme song of M*A*S*H was starting up in the den. How I longed to be back there. Instead the churchwomen had surrounded me on the sofa and everybody’s head was bowed. “We ask for your guidance, dear Lord, and your mercy….”

  Their eyes were closed. Everybody’s eyes were closed. And heads lowered. My hair was hanging in my face like a waterfall of darkness and limp reeds.

  “Inez has asked Jesus into her heart….”

  I was dying inside, or wishing to be dead—I wasn’t sure which. Down the hallway I could hear my mother in the den chuckling. Knowing the pain and humiliation I was going through, she must have found that episode of M*A*S*H hilarious.

  After about twenty or thirty minutes of prayer—an eternity—I walked the church elders to the front door with a promise that I’d be seeing them at the fellowship hall after the service on Sunday, a complete lie.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “Oh-God,” I went on. “Oh-God-oh-God. Ohhhhhhh.”

  “Who were they, honey?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “Please. Really.” Seeing the clock on the wall, I made a groan of despair. “I practically missed the whole show.”

  Was she slipping into my bedroom to spy? I’d started wondering about that. The wallpaper was peeling off in one corner of the room, and there were marks next to the bed, slashes in blue ink, where I was counting something. By Christmas, just three months after Shelley Strelow appeared in my life, there were three dozen slashes on the wall. Did my mother see them? Did she assume they were some kind of accident with a ballpoint pen?

  My mother was suddenly picking up clothes from the floor of my bedroom, too—unprecedented. It felt like years since she’d been in there, years since she’d really noticed me or wanted my complete and utter attention. Oh, she’d put me to bed when I was younger. Or she’d arrive with a new blotter for my desk, or a wastepaper can, or a new pair of tights. But, for the most part, I picked up after myself, and Abuelita did the rest. Abuelita ran the house, really. So it was odd when I walked in and found my mother neatly arranging my underwear and sweater drawers. Was she checking for cigarette smoke?

  She talked about “taking responsibility” for everything in her life now—so I guessed she’d be taking responsibility for my cigarette smoke, too, and everything else about me. Since est she had sorted her memories and experiences into a pyramid of moments that were entirely her responsibility. Something she had “created.” (She’d created me, hadn’t she?) The other new development in those days was her reliance on the word “asshole” when explaining her new philosophical approach to life. She talked about needing to assume responsibility and quit being a victim and “an asshole.” In est everybody who didn’t “get it” was an asshole. It was a word that my mother had never liked—and Abuelita was completely scandalized by it. But, as my mother had explained to me, whatever you didn’t like about a word, any word, it was just a quality that you had assigned to the word—and nothing more. If your experience of the word “asshole” was a negative one, that was just your experience and nothing more.

  “As Werner says, ‘Everything you experience doesn’t exist unless you experience it,’” my mother said during one of the mini–est seminars she tried to give me at home. (She’d offered to pay me a hundred dollars to attend a real seminar, but I’d refused.) So whatever was ugly and disgusting and vulgar about the word “asshole” was only something ugly and disgusting and vulgar that was lodged in your mind. I got that. I really did. I got that we were all carrying ugly, disgusting stuff around with us, like bad luggage, and that word “a-s-s-h-o-l-e” was just a word like any other. As Charlene, the est trainer in my mother’s first basic training, had said to her, “‘Asshole’ is just seven letters assembled in a particular way, and you’ve assigned vulgar thoughts to them. It’s just seven letters, or, to be exact, it’s six letters, which are really quite beautiful, if you look at it another way. You are creating what it is. Consuela, do you get that?”

  “I get it!” my mother said she said. The roomful of 249 other basic trainees broke out into wild applause.

  Applause. Maybe she still liked that. Mom went on to take the advanced training, a special course on “commitments,” another on “clarity,” an all-nighter called “As Werner Says,” and she’d redone basic three times. She’d been transformed by est, changed the way she did everything. She saw her life in a new way and saw all the things she needed to take responsibility for. She had a daughter, a mother, and a relationship with Coach Weeger that she needed to take responsibility for. And my father—how to explain that? He was smart, handsome, charming. But mostly she had married her father, the way all women marry their fathers, hadn’t she? That’s what Charlene had said. I kept wondering if it was really all that simple.

  And she’d driven my father away, she said, exactly as Abuelita had driven away Charles Garcia. “I really got that,” my mother said. She didn’t seem sad about it. Just certain—with an edge. She talked about wanting to wake up to her life and see how she was creating all her misgivings and her doubts, too. She helped other people buy houses but couldn’t decide whether to buy one of her own. She saw other people in happy marriages but couldn’t make a decision about Coach. She was stuck there, too. The reason she didn’t want to marry him, as she carefully explained to me—in great, tedious detail one afternoon—was the marrying-her-father thing. Coach Weeger was a nice, decent guy and not a ladies’ man (or “wandering eye,” as Abuelita used to say). He was a steady, true-blue type, but he bored my mother to death, because he wasn’t enough like my father or her father. He was such a nice guy! And that was the problem.

  My mother didn’t know where she stood with a really nice guy, she said. It was almost as if there wasn’t enough to react against, nothing to play ball with. No wall or backdrop. It was like dancing without a partner. When she was with a man like my father or her father, whom she remembered as a long, lean, dark man with rigid tastes in everything, particularly music, and a kind of meticulous silence that he brought home with him every night like a twisted, knotted rope—a kind of angry misery—she knew who she was every second. “I knew who I was and where I stood,” she explained one night while we were doing the dishes, “because he was so angry. It was like an energy force. You really knew he was in the room. And because of that, I knew who I was and where I stoo
d. His anger centered me. Cinco Sais. Same thing. My old dancing teacher—wait, isn’t it funny that I used to call him my dancing coach?—he put his hand down my pants when I was fifteen. Did I ever tell you that? He molested me! But he was so angry, and I felt centered around him. I was just a passive receptacle of that energy.” The way she described it, being a “passive receptacle,” made it sound like she was just a sponge that absorbed anger. And then eventually, if you squeezed her, she’d produce tears.

  Coach didn’t present an energy force that my mother could feel, she said. He produced lots of kindness and love—he was the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet, but lacking something, which, after est, she suspected was just misery and anger. Coach wasn’t an angry person. He was actually pretty happy and settled in his life and not all that complicated. The only thing that made him unhappy, or angry, was the fact that he wanted to be married to my mother and live with her—and she couldn’t decide. That was the one spark of excitement in his eyes, the spark of passion and anger which reminded her of her father, but if she married him, that would go, too.

  She talked about Coach a great deal in those days—much more than about Dad. That puzzled me, because as far as I could see, what had happened to all of us, our family, was worth a lot of talk and confusion. Why did she leave him? Was he already seeing Marisa or not? But she skipped over that. She acted like he didn’t exist anymore. He wasn’t Paul Ruin. He was just a surrogate. A shadow. A stand-in for her dad.

  Where was Charles Garcia anyway? A few months into her est phase, we were watching The Merv Griffin Show one afternoon, and my mother said, “I wonder where he is.”

  “Who?”

  “My dad.”

  She needed to take responsibility for not being in touch with him. In the past she’d felt numb when she thought about him, she said. He hadn’t written or called in thirty years. The real “picture” that my mother “needed to look at” was how she’d allowed him to do that for thirty years—and never tracked him down. If she wanted a father, he was probably still out there somewhere. So it was her decision not to have a father. Right?

  TWELVE

  Neeplus Erectus

  It was weird winter weather, day after day of streaming sunshine, nights so cold everybody needed a down jacket at the last high school football game. Not that I went to the game or had any signs of school spirit. I couldn’t have cared less. Besides, it was embarrassing, almost painful, to watch Robbie shouting and jumping around in front of the huddled stadium crowd in her little kick-pleat skirt and purple sweater with a big silver VD in the middle of her chest. I stayed home and watched Serpico, flipping over to The Rockford Files, Chico and the Man, Sanford & Son, and for laughs, Donny and Marie.

  I slept late the next morning and was still in bed when our doorbell started ding-donging. Through the open curtains of my bedroom windows, I could see Shelley Strelow standing on our front porch. She was wearing a pair of cutoffs and a T-shirt with studs and rhinestones circling the neckline. Shelley’s mother had gotten the T-shirt in Westwood, where a glitzy old Hollywood look was resurfacing. I guess it was only a matter of time—after five years of brown beads and billowy Gypsy dresses—that tailored jackets and satin and rhinestones would come back.

  “Ready for a hike?” Shelley asked as soon as I opened the door. Our hair was the same reddish brown color since we’d mixed powdered henna and water into a stinky vegetal mud and plastered it on each other’s head. We wore it shoulder length, and Shelley had badgered me into getting feathered bangs. After that, she’d pierced my ears. She put a cold apple behind my lobes and just jammed a sewing needle in. I heard the layers of skin popping, and Shelley didn’t even flinch. Not even a little gasp.

  “Where is everybody?” Shelley looked around the dark ranch house.

  “Out.”

  “Out?” She smiled. “Really? For a while?”

  “Come on back to my room,” I said. “I’ve gotta change.” On the way I pulled my tank top over my head, wadded it into a ball, and then, arriving in my room, tossed the top in the direction of the hamper but missed. It fell onto a pile of other clothes that hadn’t made it into the hamper either. “Oops.”

  Shelley dropped onto one of the twin beds. “The curtain’s open,” she said. “You’re putting on a great show.”

  “Oh, yeah!” I yelled out, scooting my pajama bottoms down. “Hey, I’m flashing the street.”

  “Look! Isn’t that Kenny Frank—”

  “Ha. Ha. Very funny.”

  I closed the curtains, and the room grew dark. I yanked my bottoms to the floor, grabbed them with my toes, and flung them in the direction of the hamper. “Oops.”

  “You have the best nipples,” Shelley said.

  “No I don’t,” I said, looking down. “They stick out.”

  “That’s a good thing, you fool,” Shelley said with her trademark acidity. “Mine are so flat. Look.” She lifted up her T-shirt and pinched her thumbs and index fingers together, tweaking her nipples. “This is the only way I get EN—or is it called NE? Unless it’s super cold outside.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nipple erectus,” she said. “It’s Latin.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I know, that’s all.” Sometimes when I was with Shelley, I started talking like her—my voice became lower and dripped with sarcasm. “The Latin word for nipple is something like ‘aorta’ or ‘oriole.’”

  “It’s neeplus. Neeplus erectus.”

  We both laughed, repeated our new word, “nee-plus,” half a dozen times. Then Shelley stopped laughing. “I brought some,” she said.

  I was searching through my underwear drawer for a pair of purple bikini bottoms that were grown up enough for Shelley to see. She always made fun of my white cotton ones, calling them “Baggies.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Reefer,” Shelley said. “Do you wanna?”

  “Oooooh, I can’t,” I said with a sinking feeling. Sometimes if you disappointed Shelley, the fun was really over. “I’m spending the day with Marguerite.”

  “Hey, I want to meet her,” Shelley said. “And I’m dying to see that house. Is her driver coming for you?”

  “He’s not a driver.”

  “He drives, doesn’t he?”

  “He’s a gardener. A handyman guy. He runs errands.”

  I turned my attention to the other leg hole of my underwear. Shelley sort of scared me—the way she encroached on my life. My days with Robbie had been centered entirely on Van Dale, aside from summer camp and overnights in Frazier Park with the Camp Fire Girls. I’d never imagined bringing Robbie to Marguerite’s house in San Benito, or even introducing them. But Shelley was exploratory, adventurous—and demanding. She had this attitude that everything about me was open for business, like I was a giant supermarket she could peruse. At first she was curious about Whitman—when I said that I had an older brother who was cute and surfed and was living in a hut on the beach in Madagascar. Then she wanted to know all about Justine. I’d told her about Justine’s clothes and apartment and car. When I came back from a trip to San Francisco, she wanted precise details—and descriptions of every meal. Lately she’d developed a thing for my grandmother.

  “Let me come today,” she said in a taunting tone.

  “Not today,” I said, opening my closet door. “We’re just meeting up at the Arroyo and riding. Sorry.”

  “You’re a poop. A big party poop—”

  “And I’m not getting stoned. No way.”

  There were marks on the wall next to my bed where I counted all the times I’d gotten stoned with Shelley so far. I had a compulsion to count things; I’m not sure why. If I’d been having sex with one of the many guys that I dreamed about having sex with—but I wasn’t—I’d probably be counting that, too. With Shelley, I had once smoked ten dark brown Sherman cigarettes in a night. I had once consumed five screwdrivers—we mixed the vodka and OJ in a
n old mayonnaise jar at her mother’s house. And on eleven Sunday afternoons, after hiking to our dope-smoking spot in the Van Dale hills, we sat down on the grass at Logo Park and watched all the guys gravitate to us like sad, hungry dogs.

  “Why are you just standing there?”

  “I can’t decide what to wear,” I said.

  “Don’t you lay stuff out?”

  “Lay out what?”

  Shelley pulled herself off the bed and stood next to me. We were about the same height, but our bodies were different, in terms of proportion and general maturity. She was all breasts and hips—and seemed older, more cooked, like a loaf of bread that had finished baking.

  “Don’t you decide what you’re going to wear the night before?” she asked.

  “No way,” I said. “I never think about that. Do you?”

  “Every night,” Shelley said, reaching into the closet and starting to move the hangers around. “I pick out my entire outfit for the day. Even if I have several changes, I think about all the things I’m doing and all the places I’m going, and I come up with outfits for them. That way, when I wake up in a bad mood, like I always do, it’s all done.”

  “I never do that,” I said. “And besides, I always wake up in a good mood.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “I do. I wake up singing. Ever since I was little.”

  “You do not.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Let me pick out something,” Shelley said. She found a short, white wraparound skirt with navy piping. It was purchased, excitedly, during the tennis-lesson phase that Robbie and I had gone through. “Oh, God, what is this? Please don’t tell me these are culottes.”

  “That’s old. Leave it.” I slapped her hand away and took the hanger.

  “Let me pick out something really nice for you to wear to Granny’s house,” she said, chuckling. “Hey, where are your boots?”

  “In the back.”

  My riding boots had a special hold on her. Right from the beginning, when I had mentioned in ceramics class that I rode horses on weekends, she took a kind of predatory interest in me. “English?” she had asked. And it seemed to matter that it wasn’t western. “Do you have those pants, those jodhpur things or whatever they’re called?”