The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  But then she must have felt herself listing and off balance, because she steadied herself with a firm push of her boots, dropping her weight into her stirrups and sinking into the saddle as if she were settling into one of those overstuffed down sofas in front of her fireplace.

  I made a clucking sound with my tongue and got Picasso to canter, then made the small jump. When his nose was behind Chameleon’s tail, I got a chance to say, “I think your girth might need adjusting, Marguerite. It looks loose from behind.”

  Marguerite said nothing. When she turned around, her face was shockingly white, almost yellow. And her eyes looked dizzy.

  “Your girth—” I began to repeat. But my voice was drowned out by a sharp cracking sound overhead, a huge branch breaking off a tree. Was it a real sound? At first I wasn’t sure.

  “Marguerite!” I shouted in a kind of hysteria. Chameleon swerved to the right and then reared. By the time he bolted and Marguerite had flown off him, I realized that her boot was caught in the stirrup. He dragged her for fifteen feet or so. When she slammed into a tree stump and came loose, suddenly it was so quiet.

  Sometimes in the past when I was riding with Marguerite, we’d come upon other equestrians. Marguerite would greet club members with a nod of her helmet, and sometimes, if she was in the mood, linger and chat. I had learned to nod my helmet when I was greeting a new person. It wasn’t something Marguerite had taught me specifically, but more of a response to the notion, as Marguerite had presented it, that a greeting required some kind of physical acknowledgment. You didn’t have to bow, exactly. You didn’t have to shake hands. But you just needed to do something. A nod of the helmet. A smile. A lingering of eye contact. If you were in a chair, you stood.

  I tried to keep myself alert to these things, particularly at the club. It was partly to please Marguerite—and also to erase certain impressions, and memories…. like the time I was sent to the Arroyo Cotillion.

  The dress I wore that night was my first mistake. Lacking any direction, except that I needed to wear “a long gown,” I arrived in a purple cotton-knit dress with thin straps—not realizing that cotton knit was a daytime fabric and too informal. I was thinking of the trend for old Hollywood-style glamour when I bought a small boa at a thrift store to wear over my shoulders. It wasn’t a big, fluffy boa—I couldn’t afford one of those—but what it lacked in fullness, it made up for in length. And I was thinking of my father and his cotillion days when I imagined that the young male members of the Arroyo would be rich sophisticates who’d appreciate my urbanity and my cotton dress, even though it kept gathering in a strange way under my armpits. Along with the boa, I carried a beaded bag, borrowed from my mother and smelling powdery and rancid, like old makeup. And, after great indecision and hand-wringing, I had decided to wear a pair of real dancer’s shoes, with a high, heavy sole and ankle straps. They weren’t flamenco shoes exactly, but like something you might see on the stage of a Broadway musical. Along with the boa, they were white.

  I wasn’t aware of my unusual appearance until, in the ballroom of the Arroyo, I noticed three boys staring at me.

  “Man,” one of them said. “Get a load of—”

  “Va-va-va-voom.”

  “What’s she got on her feet?”

  “Beaner boats.”

  “Mexican jumping shoes.”

  I didn’t realize that it might be intimidating to boys that I was several inches taller than any of them or that the absence of a bra might cause unrest. I didn’t realize that the other cotillion participants, all from the staid towns of San Benito and South Pasadena, might know each other—and be dressed according to the customs of those places, not in an eclectic mix of Van Dale and Telegraph Hill.

  Embarrassed but not defeated, I made small talk with a girl standing nearby in a romantic dress with a high Victorian neck. She had limp brown hair and large glasses and instantly began discussing the boys in the room—where they lived, how rich their families were, and what kinds of cars their older brothers drove.

  “Hanson’s got a Porsche. Can you imagine? That’s really too much for an eighteen-year-old boy. It’s so Marina del Rey, if you know what I mean. San Benito isn’t flashy like that. Even the richest people here drive old station wagons.”

  I saw no contribution that I could make to this conversation, and I gazed out at the other cotillion kids, none of whom seemed particularly happy to be there.

  “What about you?” the girl asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What kind of car are you getting?”

  Mrs. Musio, the cotillion directress, had strawberry hair that was swept and sprayed into a meringue. She greeted each young woman and man by name and with a nod of the head. She introduced “Inez Ruin, a new participant,” and then began searching for a suitably tall partner for me to dance with—a humiliatingly public effort. She finally located Donny Martin, a gangly blond youth with Germanic lips and crust in his eyelashes. He was the tallest boy in the ballroom. Even so, with my high heels, I looked out over the top of Donny’s pale hair and could see his glistening scalp. He had terrible flop sweats. And later, when we began dancing, I got a blast of sour earwax smell by the side of his face.

  The lesson for the day was the fox-trot. I could feel Donny’s hot, damp hand on my back.

  “One-two-three-four,” Mrs. Musio was saying. “One-two. Make a box with your feet. That’s it. That’s it. Donny Martin and Inez Ruin, please step to the edge!”

  My partner and I stopped dancing and walked to an X that had been created on the floor of the ballroom with beige masking tape. The music continued, another bouncy fox-trot. The other kids gathered along the wall.

  “Mr. Martin, please ask Miss Ruin for a dance!”

  He turned to me, pretending that we hadn’t just been dancing. And then he froze.

  “Speak, Marteen!” a boy called out.

  “Ask her, buddy.”

  Donny grimaced, and I looked at the ground. When I looked at his face again, his mouth was open but no words were coming out. Overcome with compassion, I smiled as hugely as I could, hoping it might give him confidence.

  “Go, Mar-ti-ni!” a boy shouted from the back of the ballroom. Mrs. Musio seemed not to care about the kibitzing, and when the boys realized this, their cries escalated.

  “Martini!”

  “Martini!”

  I kept smiling and nodding my head to provide more encouragement. Donny opened his fleshy lips. “Miss Ruin—”

  “Ask the Mexican jumping bean to dance, will ya?”

  A huge laugh broke out. Mrs. Musio was finally provoked into scowling, which seemed to make the outburst so much funnier. She walked over to me and Donny. “I’m awfully sorry,” she said. “I guess everybody’s impatient. Now let’s see if we can’t try a little dancing. Can you manage, Mr. Martin?”

  Donny nodded.

  “Miss Ruin?”

  “Yes.”

  Who knows what Marguerite was told, how it was described to her, but I came to believe that she knew everything—the white shoes, the purple dress, the droopy boa, the way I towered over poor Donny Martin and smelled his earwax but felt so much pity for him that it was almost like love. The ballroom broke into chants. The lonely fox-trot played with sour notes and false charm, and Donny and I clung to each other like shipwreck survivors, our limbs loose and gangly, drowning in shame. Marguerite never once mentioned it, never uttered the word “cotillion” again or talked about the importance of learning to dance or pouring tea or writing thank-you notes, except to say, once, after she’d seen me talking with Jose at the barn, a few weeks before our last ride together, “You know what, Inez? You have the best manners anybody can have. Because they aren’t manners—that’s why. It’s just who you are.”

  THIRTEEN

  If a Tree Fell

  I woke up when the grandfather clock tolled once. Saturday Night Live had ended. My father turned off the television and left the room, and I opened my eyes and saw him wander out in
to the dark hallway and vanish. A few minutes later, I followed after him. A dim light was coming from Aunt Julia’s room, and the door was ajar. I went in—he’d set up camp in there, since he had no bedroom of his own anymore—but her room was empty, somehow emptier than it had ever been.

  Tomorrow everybody would turn up—Aunt Ann, Uncle Drew, Lisa and Lizzie and Amanda and Newell. Aunt Julia would stay for weeks and weeks, looking after the house, hiring and firing appraisers, attorneys, and real estate brokers. But the night of the accident, it was just me and my father. He’d flown down late that afternoon in his three-piece San Benito suit. It was too heavy for Southern California, and the vest gave it a Gold Rush feeling. The doctors spoke to my father with an alert but casual feeling—he’d gone to high school with the surgeon—almost as if they were talking to another doctor. There was an impersonal familiarity between them, a levity that lacked any emotion. And afterward my father seemed relaxed, almost jolly. He flirted with a hospital nurse, Renee, by grilling her. He made a joke about how it was the first time he’d seen his mother in public without gloves. He disappeared down a corridor and returned in a wheelchair with a blanket over his lap, pretending to be an invalid. The nurses loved that one. He stood by Marguerite’s bedside and talked to her, like he’d just dropped in for tea. Of course her eyes never opened, or even fluttered. I can’t remember what he said, really. He was mostly being reassuring to her. Don’t worry, Mother. That kind of thing. I’m here. I’m here, and Inez is still here. I think he said, “We love you, and we’re looking after you,” but his voice never cracked, didn’t carry one hint of sadness or stress. Then we took his boxy rental car to dinner at the Pie ’n Burger on California Boulevard.

  Back at the San Benito house, I showered and found a pair of old flannel pajamas to change into. (“Hey,” my father said, “I think those used to be mine.”) I called my mother and Abuelita, both of them overwrought and reaching out, like they wanted to hug me and be emotional, but it was so unlike the tone that my father had established that I did my best to freeze them out. No Trespassing. That kind of freeze-out. Then my father called Whitman in Madagascar, where it was half a day later—and morning, or close—but got no answer. We settled into a night of TV watching upstairs, in my father’s old bedroom.

  “What’s this show about?” he asked when I put on The Jeffersons. “All these people do is yell.” We watched Mary Tyler Moore. “I’ve always had a crush on her,” he whispered. He seemed largely unfamiliar with the shows and what was popular, except a new program that somebody, a new friend, had told him about. It was called Saturday Night Live. “Gretchen says it’s great,” my father enthused. Obviously, it was live—and that seemed hard to fathom at first. Improvisational. Seat of the pants. My father was in heaven. An actor named Chevy Chase opened with a fireside chat from the Ford White House. John Belushi skated in Rockefeller Center dressed as a huge bee. Gilda Radner talked about how she’d overeaten the previous Christmas. (“Isn’t she incredible?” my father said.) The Stylistics performed, and I fell asleep—until the grandfather clock began to toll.

  I stood in Aunt Julia’s mirrored dressing room and looked at my father’s stuff. His black leather dop kit was opened: a small red can of shaving cream, a silver razor that opened with a twist of the handle, a white styptic pencil, a nail file, a tiny bottle of Listerine, a clear green GUM toothbrush. Everything so ordinary and yet imbued with a special kind of magic because they were his. I picked up his black address book and flipped around the pages. The names were written in tiny, perfect handwriting, mostly names I didn’t know. I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes weren’t bloodshot anymore, not really. But I still felt groggy and a little hesitant, as if each moment were so fascinating that I didn’t want to leave it for the next.

  That Marguerite might not come back—unimaginable. The house without her felt pointless. Aunt Julia’s room seemed like a storage area now, like a big faux-Chippendale set piece. The desk with its ink blotter and crystal inkwell and cabinet full of leather-bound books that were too small and precious to read. And the curtains—just the right heaviness of chintz, the right transparency of sheers, venetian blinds underneath. Marguerite had made every decision—the length of the bed skirts, the width of piping on the coverlets, exactly where to hang the Godey’s Lady’s Book prints. She’d worked to get everything just so. When she was a girl in New Bedford, she’d watched the contents of her family house being carried out and put onto carts—she’d seen her bedroom furniture taken away, and her mother’s dining room table and chairs. All sold, all gone. A family left destitute, taken in by relatives. She’d learned to do housework. She’d gotten jobs, later on, in New York. And once she’d married N.C., she spent the next fifty years accumulating things back, putting her house in order again, surrounding herself with all the things she’d lost. But in that moment, as I stood in Aunt Julia’s pristine bedroom, all Marguerite’s care and her meticulousness seemed absurd to me. What had she accomplished? What had it mattered?

  She lingered in Crocker Hospital with her smashed body. She didn’t really “linger,” I guess. It was just a matter of one night. There was brief talk about the possible removal of her leg and how it had been “ground to powder,” which had made me think of cigarette ash and body talc and Marguerite’s powdery world. A trauma specialist with a beard offered a theory as to why an expert equestrian would fall from her horse—not the falling branch, the bolting horse, or that her granddaughter was too stoned to say anything when she noticed the loose girth and slipping saddle. Perhaps Marguerite had had a stroke. Not uncommon, he said. Quite possible, really. Tests were being done—although they’d eventually yield inconclusive results. It was only uncertainty that lingered and, I guess, guilt and questions, all of which I kept to myself.

  I drifted into the back hallway, where the sconces on the wall were unlit, just chains of crystals dripping without purpose, and into the old nursery and maids’ rooms, which had been left institutional on purpose. Marguerite had thought it all out. The maids would come and go. The daughters-in-law would come and go, too, wouldn’t they? I imagined my mother—young, shining, still dancing, and happy to be a part of a fancy house and new world—bending over my crib or drawing my bath. And then I went down the back staircase, hoping to avoid the grandfather clock, which would be tolling on the half hour soon.

  The dark kitchen was cold—a window had been left open—and I heard crickets in the garden and smelled fresh cigarette smoke. It was coming from the veranda. My father was sitting there in an old heavy coat of N.C.’s that he must have found in the front hall closet. Everybody had always wondered when Marguerite was going to get rid of it.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  He looked a little bizarre in the coat, like a Depression-era hobo. His face was drawn. “God, it’s freezing,” I said, slipping back into the house, finding a lined Burberry raincoat of Marguerite’s, and squeezing my arms through the narrow sleeves until my forearms stuck out.

  On the veranda my father was lighting up another cigarette. There was a wooden box on the table, a carved cigarette box that was usually in the library. Marguerite was smoking Dorals now, a low-tar and -nicotine brand with a weird plastic filter that her regular GP had encouraged her to try when she refused to quit.

  I sat down in a squeaky wicker chair.

  “Hell-o,” my father said. He was cheerful in a strange way. It seemed fake. There was something going on. I could almost hear it, like background noise, and it made me wary.

  “Hello.”

  “I talked to Whitman,” he said. “Tried him again—and got him.”

  “Oh. How was he?”

  “He seemed fine. His usual laid-back self. Happy but, you know, exhibiting that surfed-out response toward life. The waves are lousy in Madagascar, apparently, so I can’t really figure out what he’s doing there. But it’s summer there now, and he has that summery sound. You know what I mean? Beyond that, I can’t really tell how he’s doing.

>   “Um.”

  “Marguerite thought he should have gone to college. That I blew it. Do you think I blew it?”

  I shrugged.

  “I wonder myself. Quite a lot.”

  He studied me while we talked, as though he were thinking about me in the future, imagining what he’d say when I didn’t want to go to college either. But Abuelita and my mother would make me, wouldn’t they?

  “What did he say about Marguerite?” I asked. “He must have been worried.”

  “Oh, yes. Sad, sorry. All that. But he seemed more worried about you.”

  “He did?”

  “He asked lots of questions. Many of them I couldn’t answer.”

  “Um.”

  “He thought it must have been hard for you. A tough day. Was it?”

  “I guess it was. Is he coming home?”

  “For this? No.”

  “He’s not?” I remember feeling shocked—or maybe just awfully sad, almost sick in my stomach. When people were ill, Marguerite was always getting on trains to see them. When people got married or died, she bought presents, wrote notes, sent flowers, called, made an appearance.

  “Twenty hours on a plane?” my father said. “He didn’t want to come. And I don’t really see the point.”

  “But didn’t the doctor say—”

  “Thirty hours of traveling so he can come to a funeral?”

  “You said twenty.”

  I couldn’t believe he’d said the word “funeral”—snapped it out, killing her off already. Like he didn’t care. He’d never cared about her, or anything she stood for, had he? His life had been a carefully planned rejection. When N.C. died, she’d made my father come back from Morón de la Frontera, where he’d been studying guitar and God-only-knows-what. She made everybody come to the funeral. She’d been proud of that. You were supposed to do that when somebody you loved died, weren’t you? You came home.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Today. What happened.”