The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  Shelley and Ooee weren’t around when we got home from the movie. And in the morning, when I woke up in the living room, the smooth sheets and wool blanket on Shelley’s side of the sofa didn’t look touched. I stared at the ceiling for a few minutes, watched the bright sun coming in the windows. I heard the waves on the beach. And then I heard voices, some laughing.

  I went to the window and stepped over to the glass door that led to the deck. Shelley was coming up the stone steps from the beach. She was wearing a sweatshirt and pair of short shorts. My father was behind her, but instead of noticing me at the door, his eyes had steadied themselves on Shelley’s rear end.

  “Are those hot pants?” I heard him ask.

  “No!” she laughed, and turned around to him.

  “What buns you have, my dear! What buns!”

  He gave us a road map of California, with directions carefully highlighted in yellow marker. He went over all his instructions again, and the eccentricities of the car. On a cold morning, I needed to pull out the choke. Sometimes on the freeway, the car might seem to be out of gas, but it was just a finicky fuel pump—“and you can take this wrench and just give it a few whacks right here,” he said, bending over the side of the MG, “and it’ll work again.” He explained how the fog lamps operated and how to use a tire-pressure gauge. He wrote in the operating manual the fine grade of motor oil that he preferred and gave me a folder of receipts—a record of the MG’s every service call organized in chronological order. He handed me an AAA card and a gas card from Shell with INEZ GARCIA RUIN pressed into the plastic.

  I started it up. The rumble of the engine was so deep and low that I could almost feel it in my blood. I waved and backed the car around, then looked over at him again. He was standing in the driveway waving—it was a Ruin family tradition to keep waving until the departing family member was out of sight. His hand was stopped in midair. And then I noticed his face. It was crumpling, his features squeezing into the middle and his eyes getting small. He was just beginning to cry.

  I cranked down the window.

  “What’s the matter?” I yelled out.

  “Nothing!” he shouted back, with his hand still lingering over his head. He walked closer and bent down. “I’m just sad, that’s all. A beautiful kind of sadness. You look so damn wonderful in that car.”

  FIFTEEN

  Ooee’s Houseboat

  I wasn’t the only one who seemed skittish about sex. Whitman was twenty-one, and, as far as we knew, there’d never been a woman in his life. No talk of a woman. No signs of interest—aside from passing remarks and sometimes brutal criticisms about the girls my father brought home. They were “pathetic” or “way too young,” and he seemed utterly bewildered by the attraction these women had for our father, although this was never a mystery to me. “Dad always finds these sweet, passive women,” Whitman complained. “And then he trains them to become even sweeter and more passive. Don’t let him do that to you, Inez.”

  Whitman hung out with other guys—surfers, mostly—who lived in ramshackle beach houses where the bedrooms were rented out weekly. From his descriptions of South Africa, and New Zealand before that, it seemed like a rugged but strangely romantic existence. They lived from storm to storm, drifted from surf spot to surf spot, eating mushrooms and smoking dope during the lulls. When they ran out of money, they took small jobs in town, or bought run-down cars and got them going and sold them for a small profit. Maybe they sold some dope, too. God only knows. But Whitman didn’t work, as far as I could tell. Patricia’s family had left him with a trust, the amount of which was never discussed in precise terms. “It’s like Dad says,” Whitman had once explained to me. “It’s not enough to make my life and not enough to ruin it either.”

  In the middle of my junior year of high school, he’d moved permanently to Hawaii. He’d found a little house to buy in Haleiwa, on a narrow road of shacks and rentals where the surf pros lived during the winter competitions. It was on the beach, he told me, and as close as anybody could be to the heart of Oahu Island’s famous North Shore. Waimea Bay was a short ride in one direction, Sunset and Pipeline in the other. It was emerging as a popular year-round resort and beginning to boom with new hotels and developments, and Whitman planned to set up a gardening business there.

  “For all I know, he’s a fag,” my father joked a few times, but as soon as we’d laugh—because this couldn’t possibly be true—we’d grow silent, because maybe it was.

  “Maybe he’s like me,” I said one night at dinner during a visit. “Waiting for the right person.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?” my father asked. “Waiting for the right person?”

  I shrugged. That’s how it felt anyway.

  “That’s so interesting,” he said. This response, particularly his use of the word “interesting,” meant that a lecture was about to come. “I hope you’re not making the mistake of being too romantic, Inez,” he said. “Sometimes it’s not really like that. No right or wrong person. And hopefully, my dear, there will be lots of people—wrong and right and somewhere in between.”

  “I haven’t met anybody yet,” I said. “Not anybody I’d—”

  “Not one? You mean you haven’t—at all? There’s been nobody?”

  This flustered me. He seemed to want details and elaboration. But I wasn’t about to discuss any of my Van Dale experiences, the dozen or so drunken episodes of slobbery kisses and clumsy juvenile groping. “It’s not that I haven’t done anything—at all, as you put it,” I said. “I just haven’t…done, uh, everything.”

  “Gone all the way, you mean.” His face was dead serious.

  I tried very hard not to blanch, although I doubt it’s possible to control that sort of thing.

  “Don’t people still say that?” he went on. “‘Going all the way’? Makes me laugh. Makes the whole thing sound like an obstacle course. First base, second base, third…home run. The old ‘home run.’ What’s wrong with ‘balling?’”

  “Dad.”

  “What?”

  “Nobody says that anymore. Nobody says ‘balling.’”

  “They don’t?” He looked a little stricken—although this seemed like an act. “What do they say? ‘Bedding down’?”

  “‘Bedding down’? That’s like something from Shakespeare.”

  “Is it?”

  “You say ‘doing it’ or ‘sleeping with.’”

  “What ever happened to ‘making love’?”

  “Gross. No way.”

  “What? Is that just hopelessly saccharine? There’s a song on the radio, ‘I Feel Like Making Lovexp…’”

  “Nobody likes that song.”

  “It’s a huge hit.”

  “Anything like ‘love’ or ‘lover’ is bad news. You say, ‘We’re having sex.’”

  “‘Having sex’?”

  I shrugged.

  “Talk about lack of poetry. You might as well say ‘laying pipe.’”

  “What?” I laughed. “Laying what?”

  “Pipe. That’s an old expression. Laying pipe. It makes me laugh, too.”

  In those days my father seemed to be constantly slipping remarks about sex into our conversations as though it were a perfectly natural subject between a father and daughter. Maybe he was worried about Whitman, who didn’t appear to be staggering in his footsteps. To compensate, he began to work on me. He tried to be relaxed about it, and casual. But he brought up the joys of sex—its naturalness and beauty—every chance he got. It reminded me a little of the beach-house days, when he’d harp about my modesty and bra wearing and wanted to cure me with a trip to the nude beach in La Jolla. Now any opportunity to impart some of his philosophy about life and love and relationships with the opposite sex was leaped on with great glee.

  “The most delicate little Chinese girl was working the register at the Nam Yun Palace tonight,” my father said one evening over the winter when Ooee happened to be visiting. We were sitting at the kitchen table at Wolfback, eating takeout
from the city.

  “Young Oriental girls are so perfect,” said Ooee, his chopsticks carrying a ball of white rice into his mouth. “Such a mystery.”

  “Young girls are wonderful—period,” my father said. “Their hang-ups are so interesting.”

  Ooee gulped down the rice, excited to blurt out confirmation of this hard-won observation. “I know exactly what you mean!” he cried enthusiastically. “You always want to tell them not to worry so much—that in the long run all the stuff they think’s so important doesn’t matter.”

  “But they have to learn that for themselves,” my father said.

  “Learn what?” I asked.

  Ooee and my father looked at each other—as though silently deciding who between them might do a better job of explaining all this. Finally Ooee returned to his chopsticks and the piles of food on his plate. My father spoke up. “They just have to get things straightened out,” he said. “They have to sort through the fairy-tale indoctrination they get from their mothers and grandmothers—the ridiculous and shameful legacy of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. It’s still alive in Middle America, I’m sure. And probably thriving in Van Dale. Girls are told that if they sleep with somebody, they need to marry them. That’s the kind of dangerous information young girls are given. That’s what Shanti’s parents had told her. Can you imagine?”

  Ooee nodded slowly, in complete agreement. “A Catholic education is the most difficult to overcome,” he said. “The brainwashing is—”

  “But,” my father interrupted, “don’t you think, Ooee, that once they break free of expectations or fears—I really think the Catholics work the fear side of the street and the protestants work the life-isn’t-about-pleasure side—that most women are generally okay and much saner than men? This really seems so obvious to me. Once women are free of the indoctrination, they’re really free of almost everything. Particularly if they never marry and never have children. Now, that’s a recipe for a wonderful life.”

  Ooee was chewing and nodding but beginning to seem more into dinner than the conversation.

  My father continued on his roll. “Men have a whole other load of baggage—and a terrible need to dominate and compete and be aggressive. There’s always some poor rival in need of crushing. There’s always some war to fight. And chest beating. It’s so brutal and primitive—and behavior that’s much more difficult to dismantle and haul away. Practically impossible.”

  “Although a big, healthy midlife crisis,” Ooee said, “does wonders.”

  “Do you think so?” my father asked, as if he weren’t so sure. “I don’t remember you having a midlife crisis.”

  Ooee smiled with his mouth closed, then swallowed. “No,” he laughed. “I bypassed one completely by never bothering to grow up.”

  Ooee and I both laughed. My father seemed irritated, though, as if our lightheartedness weren’t in sync with some train of thought he was on. “I suppose I might have had one—once,” he said finally, “when I left Consuela.”

  Ooee stopped laughing.

  “I thought she left you,” I said.

  “Did she?” asked Ooee under his breath. “Still dying to meet her. I’ve heard she’s so damn gorgeous.”

  “Well, I suppose you could say that,” my father continued, looking only at me. “She did leave me at some point. She’d had enough—or something like that. I figured out a great deal during that period. It’s not that difficult or complicated. You just have to decide to be honest with yourself—and then make your best attempt at it. You have to admit what you’re after and where you want to go. How you want to wind up. And I suppose it helps to figure out what you’re avoiding—what you’re afraid might happen.

  “You know, Inez, things usually aren’t as black and white as we’d like. Whether your mother left me or I left her—”

  “Takes two to tango,” Ooee broke in. “Nobody is ever solely responsible for the end. Endings are inevitable. Everything ends. The better question to ask is—”

  “What keeps it going?” my father laughed. “Right?”

  “Right!” Ooee yelled out. After a little more laughter, he cracked open a fortune cookie and looked down at the slip of paper he’d extracted from the broken crumbs. At first I thought he was reading his fortune out loud, but then I realized he was just continuing the conversation. “Good sex,” he said, “is the key to everything.”

  “True,” my father said. “If the sex is good, things can’t be that bad.”

  “A perfect barometer.”

  My father got up to clear the table. As he started to rinse off the dishes, I noticed that Ooee was looking at me.

  His eyes were slightly beckoning. And, of course, it was hardly the first time. Years before, when he drank too much at one of my father’s flamenco parties and kissed my ear, he’d whispered, “I’m waiting for you.” I’m waiting for you. It was a phrase I found particularly haunting—and horrifying—and afterward Ooee’s hovering quality really bugged me. I’d look away when his eyes rested on mine for too long. But so many years had passed, and he’d never sucked on my earlobe again, or talked to me like that, or even touched me in a suggestive way, so he’d stopped being a threat—or a predator—to me. He’d become a benign character in my mind, almost impotent. Until he and Shelley wound up together.

  “Aren’t you dying to know?” Shelley had asked me, almost as soon as we’d driven off in the MG together, my father still waving in front of the drive. “I mean, aren’t you curious about what happened last night with Ooee?” A full report would come, I knew, whether I encouraged it or not. That’s how Shelley was.

  “He’s got kind of a big stomach,” she said.

  “Don’t tell me anything else,” I said. This remark would have the opposite effect, I knew.

  “No, I mean it’s kind of nice—having all that weight on top of you,” she recounted. “He’s so big and…I don’t know. Male. All that hair on his chest and back, like an older guy has. And that loose, older-guy skin. You know, it feels so different from a young guy’s skin. Softer. Not flabby, exactly, but…Anyway, he wasn’t on the top the whole time. He’s really into the oral stuff.”

  “He is?”

  “Like, he just couldn’t get enough of me down there.”

  “Really.” My mind swirled—disgusted, delighted.

  “God, it went on and on.” Shelley laughed and then smiled quietly for a long time, as if she were reliving an incredibly pleasant memory and she wasn’t going to speak again until it was over. “I don’t think he wanted to go all the way, because he was worried I wasn’t on the pill. ‘You’re not on the pill? Everybody’s on the pill.’”

  Ooee was newly empowered after that and, for a long time, a perpetually sexual presence in my mind. He wasn’t simply more masculine, but almost a superhuman embodiment of potency and know-how. Having been pretested and certified by Shelley—who was already eighteen and enormously picky about men—I began to fantasize that someday, when I took the plunge, Ooee might be the right candidate. He was ancient and kind of fat, and maybe his skin was loose and soft. But he was safe and fatherly, adorable and a little silly. All those years ago, he said he was waiting for me. Was he still?

  Sometime in the late spring, my father casually mentioned on the phone that Ooee was “back from Houston” and throwing a party on his houseboat the next weekend. I announced right away that I wanted to drive up in the MG and go. He got a kick out of that—the spontaneity, the desire to just show up and see him. In the past it had always been such a struggle to arrange dates for me to visit.

  “Bring Shelley!” he said.

  “She’s busy,” I said, lying.

  “Oh, too bad.”

  It wasn’t so much that I was jealous of Shelley, or jealous of my father’s flirtations with her. Mostly I was afraid that she would interfere with my plans for Ooee. Time was passing, and I was suddenly in a great hurry. My junior year of high school was almost over, and not only was I ready to experience a good pipe laying but la
gging behind—hopelessly behind. As Shelley had put it, “No girl who drives a car like that should be a virgin.” Indeed, if anything, I owed it to the MG.

  My father called the next day, insisting that I fly up—and not drive alone. He seemed buoyed tremendously by my imminent visit. And Ooee was “delighted” to learn that I’d be coming to his party, he reported. “He said to tell you that it was going to be a slightly dressy crowd—some of the museum board, I think—so you might want to bring an outfit.”

  An outfit. This seemed like an important sign, almost a directive. Ooee knew what I was coming for. Ooee knew. And he wanted me to be ready. I picked out a red dress that I’d gotten in a consignment shop in Burbank—a frock that didn’t look old and secondhand as much as it looked like something Ava Gardner might wear, but not for long. How would I feel when Ooee unbuttoned it? My mind swirled with fantasies, so much so that I found it difficult to sleep. And then, very early the next morning, without a word to Shelley, or anyone, I drove to a pharmacy at the edge of town and bought a box of contraceptive suppositories that I’d seen advertised in a woman’s magazine. They were encased in heavy silver foil and shaped like bullets.

  Ooee’s houseboat was so big it barely bobbed on Richardson Bay. The night was warm, and the moon rose in the sky, huge and luminous. People were spilling out of the main rooms of the boat and lingering outside on the decks. I didn’t recognize too many of Ooee’s friends. They were older and wore expensive clothes that—to my Van Dale eyes—seemed almost somber and funereal. And their voices were limber and confident and urbane. They made asides I didn’t understand and jokes that sounded jaded. “So I finally get to see Ooee’s Bachelor Barge,” I heard one woman say, and then laugh wickedly.

  Inside, Ooee was as charming and gregarious as ever, playing host to crowds of friends. He was behind the bar, recommending wines. He was passing around plates of food, urging people to try things that he’d made. And he was—no surprise—completely surrounded by a slew of women who all seemed prettier and more sophisticated than I. They were city women in their twenties and thirties, women with real jobs and real dresses and good, soft handbags—not stiff, thirdhand accessories from a consignment shop. Their hands held wineglasses at the stem like they’d had lots of wine, every kind of wine, and every kind of sex. “That dress is fantastic,” my father gushed, and Ooee did, too, but their compliments seemed more about the big effort I’d made than anything else. Now it seemed silly to have made an effort at all. What had I been thinking?