Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

“That’s just the way college kids are,” she said.

  My father didn’t seem to think so. He wanted Bobby out of bed and doing something. I heard my parents arguing about it.

  Sara said it was Bobby’s problem if he was unhappy at college.

  When I went to Girl Scout camp, Bobby wrote that he envied my sojourn in the wilderness. It was the first time he’d ever said he envied something about my life and I wanted camp to last all summer. In September, Bobby went back to college, Sara began her new life as cheerleader, and I started sixth grade.

  Two months later, Bobby came home.

  “It’s not Christmas,” I said to my mother. “It’s not any other holiday. How come Bobby’s home?” I should have been overjoyed, but instead I was cautious. Something was wrong with my big brother, and I didn’t understand why no else noticed.

  “He needs to rest,” my mother said.

  The next week, his belongings came in boxes in the mail.

  He stayed in his room all day. His door was closed to me, but I didn’t care as much as I once would have. I had my own life now. I hung out at the shopping center with my friends and wore lipstick behind my mother’s back. My mother was now someone I had to get around.

  Sara was hardly ever home. She was either at school, cheerleading, or going somewhere in a car driven by a boy.

  At night, Bobby ate with us silently, looking only at his plate. Other than Sara and me, no one in our family had ever done much arguing. Now Bobby and my father battled constantly, their voices loud and desperate.

  I argued with my mother about wearing makeup, about going places with my friends. We fought about my hair, the red hair I hated. Finally, I bought a six-pack of black dye capsules and used them all at once. I was on my way out the door with my new raven hair when my mother stopped me.

  “You’re not going anywhere until you wash that crap out of your hair.” She actually said crap.

  “It’s my hair,” I said. “You can’t stop me.”

  When she ordered me back upstairs, it drove me over the line.

  “You’re just jealous because your hair is gray and ugly. You look like Daddy’s mother.”

  It wasn’t true. My mother may have refused to dye her prematurely gray hair, but she was still young and beautiful. But there was something special about my father. His looks, his effortless glamour, had an immediate effect on women. They lit up for him. Even I had seen it.

  I’d wanted to hurt my mother, and I sensed I had. I blamed her for the changes in our family I couldn’t even see had taken place.

  chapter five

  I BURROWED DEEPER under the covers. Sunday meant I could sleep as late as I wanted, as the girls would permit. But there was so much to do. Christmas vacation was only a week away. I had to finish shopping, get started on the cards, order Lilly’s doll. I needed to firm up holiday plans with my mother. We might have let her back out of Thanksgiving, but there was no way she was getting out of Christmas.

  I heard Julia’s footsteps on our bedroom floor. She climbed in next to me. “Mom,” she said, touching my shoulder. Her voice was tremulous. I turned over, looked at her. She’d been crying. I asked what the matter was.

  “I wish I could still believe,” she said. “It’s so sad when it’s gone.”

  “When what’s gone?” I asked, brushing the hair from her face. My mother said we indulged the kids too much. I didn’t remember ever crawling in bed with my parents. That bedroom door was shut.

  “The magic,” she said.

  I wanted to laugh, but she looked so serious. I pulled her close, and said I understood, sensing she was going to keep this up for a while. No one could suffer a loss of faith like Julia. What she needed was an older sister like Sara to toughen her up. Sara once had told me every gift I was getting for Christmas. I don’t know how she knew. I’d had my hands over my ears but she couldn’t be stopped. At Julia’s age, I wore high heels to Christmas dinner, my father and brother in jackets, my mother and sister in dresses and pearls.

  I couldn’t remember the last Christmas my parents and the three of us kids had all been together. I must have been in college. The holiday wasn’t remarkable. I had no idea that my brother would soon stop coming, that I’d barely ever see him again. In the past fourteen years, I’d seen him just once, by accident, six years ago.

  My mother was still living in the house on Forty-Sixth Street, the house I thought she’d never sell. The girls had coveted these velvet Christmas dresses we’d seen at Macy’s. I’d wanted them, too. Holly red for two-year-old Lilly, midnight blue for nine-year-old Julia. The finery had led somehow to a visit with my mother. The girls and I drove from Berkeley to Sacramento, to the old house on a Saturday, just for the day, the kids decked out in their new dresses.

  We had lunch in the dining room where I’d eaten as a girl, a lady’s lunch with china, embossed silver, and white lace, Lilly eating without a spill. Afterward, we went into the living room. The girls banged on the piano. The doorbell rang, and suddenly there was my brother standing at the edge of the room, a slight man, stooped, in a threadbare jacket, his hair graying and wild.

  The girls stopped their banging to stare. I rose from the couch. Bobby and I hadn’t seen each other in years. He’d refused to come home even when our father was dying. It astonished me that he’d left his cabin in the wilderness to come here.

  He didn’t move from his spot beside the door. I couldn’t move either, but our mother was a frenzy of animation, her eyes crazy with joy. “Bobby, what a wonderful surprise,” she said. “You’re here, and Natalie and the children! Come in, come in.”

  Our mother, a dignified woman who did not laugh easily, was carrying on like a southern belle, giddy, flushed, scampering to the kitchen to gather refreshments. I went to my brother, throwing my arms around him. His clothes smelled of his unwashed life. His arms stayed at his side. As I pulled away, humiliated, terrified, he lightly touched the top of my hair.

  “Sit,” I said, pointing to the overstuffed easy chair. When he did, I realized he was in our father’s chair.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” I said. “What brings you? I mean to California,” I added too quickly. As far as I knew, he still lived three states away in Idaho on land none of us had seen, purchased with his share of the inheritance from Dad.

  “Research,” he said, as if he still were the assistant professor he once had been.

  I suspected he’d come to ask Mother for money.

  “Julia,” I said brightly, motioning to where she stood aloof, “come say hello to your uncle.” I didn’t add, although she knew, and godfather. She moved partway to stand beside me, a Victorian child in a fancy dress, long red hair down her back. She was clearly condemning, not of Bobby but of me. I hadn’t provided her with an uncle like the ones other girls had.

  “Hello,” she said, afraid to approach him.

  “Math is Julia’s favorite subject,” I chattered as if he were some friend of my mother’s who’d dropped by unannounced.

  “It is not,” she said.

  I turned to her. “You can watch TV in Gram’s room.”

  Lilly toddled over, a red velvet cherub. She planted herself in front of Bobby, stuck a finger up her nose, and studied him. She was trying to get a reaction. The finger thing always worked at home, but Bobby barely looked at her.

  “You my uncle?” she asked.

  “And take your sister with you,” I said to Julia, who hadn’t moved from my side. Lilly protested as she was carted off, the only one of us in the room who wanted to stay.

  I dropped to the couch across from him, my heart pounding. My brother gazed at the rug, his handsome face collapsed. I could see that his teeth hurt. His eyelashes were still long. I used to touch them. Make a butterfly, I used to say, and he would, batting them against my chubby fingers as I laughed.

  “Why haven’t you answered any of my letters?” My voice shook. I was afraid to hear him say he cared nothing about me, never had.

  When
he finally spoke, his voice surprised me. His answer took that long. “It’s better that you don’t write,” he said.

  I rubbed the face of my watch. Bobby had taught me to tell time. He let me wear his watch to school. Even then, the mechanics of hours and minutes meant nothing to him. He talked about trains in outer space, fathers younger than their children, the universe in the tip of a pencil.

  All I could say aloud was “It’s been so many years. Are you okay?”

  There was another silence before he said, “I’ve made my choices.”

  Finally, my mother returned, pushing a mahogany trolley with a glass top. My parents had served their cocktails on that cart. As much as I had ever wanted anything, I wanted a drink right then, but instead the trolley held my mother’s rose-patterned china coffeepot, the matching cups and saucers, and, incredibly, her three-tiered plate stuffed with cookies and chocolates.

  “Black?” my mother asked Bobby. He didn’t answer. “Black,” she repeated cheerfully. “I taught all my children to drink their coffee black.”

  Bobby reached for the cup, his hand shaking—the same hand that had drawn me a map of the United States, from memory, freehand, as I watched. Every state line perfect. Every capital named. He was fourteen, two years away from being a National Merit Scholar. I was eight. Forty years later, I still had that map in my dresser drawer.

  Bobby gulped his coffee as if he were freezing inside. My mother placed mine on the end table next to me, but I knew I could not lift the cup. I joined Bobby in staring at the rug as Mother kept on chattering. The rug was Oriental, large enough to fill the room, deep blue with black and red geometric flowers. We’d played trains on it, Bobby and I, his set handed down to me, with pieces of wood track that notched together, the trains going this way and that.

  “Do you remember the trains?” I asked, using my hands to describe them.

  When he didn’t answer, I said, “I loved those trains.” It was the closest I could get to telling him how I still felt, would always feel about him.

  He stared at his lap, saying nothing, a ghost with warm breath. I wanted to plead: tell me what happened to turn you into this strange person. Instead I looked away, my eyes and throat burning. I was afraid of not being able to rise to my feet, but then I was up. “We have to go,” I said.

  My mother looked stricken. I realized, a moment too late, as I stood there, that she’d just been saying she didn’t want Christmas presents from us, that this afternoon was her present, her oldest and youngest together, both of us visiting for no special reason.

  There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t stay. I collected the girls, who were more than ready to leave. We said good-bye to Gram, and made a show of saying good-bye to Uncle Bobby.

  I stood above the chair where Bobby sat, his hands on his bony thighs, my father’s chair. I leaned down, touched the side of his face, his gray stubble bristling my fingertips, and kissed him on the cheek.

  My arms still wrapped around Julia, now dozing beside me in bed, I counted back. That kiss on the cheek was the last thing my brother and I had shared in six years.

  Yet, Bobby was always in my life, in memory, in the waiting that I no longer recognized as waiting, in the dream of his return, my brother magically restored, everything as it should be.

  chapter six

  I WAS FIFTEEN MINUTES and two years late for a mammogram, flushed and breathing hard. My doctor’s office had called to inform me about my two-year tardiness. Cowed, I accepted the first available appointment. Two days before Christmas vacation, I took the morning off from work.

  I signed in at the reception desk and sat in a line of gray, padded armchairs. I tried to focus on all I had to do to get ready for Christmas. Lilly’s doll was on the way, and I’d taken care of Eric’s family, but I had nothing for Julia, Eric, or my mother. Sara and I no longer exchanged Christmas gifts since we’d given each other the exact same sweater four years ago and Sara said, “It’s a sign to cut the crap.” The last gift I had gotten Bobby was ten years ago. A flannel shirt. He’d sent it back unopened.

  A television tuned to a morning talk show hung from the ceiling. A pair of high-cheeked, short-skirted women who were probably never late for their mammograms chatted on the set. I turned to the pile of magazines on the table next to me, chose a Newsweek, and flipped through its wrinkled pages. I stopped at a story about the Cal Bomber. Over twelve years, this terrorist with a grudge against the modern world had killed three California academics and maimed sixteen others. Fingers, hands, whole arms, parts of faces, eyes, ears gone. His latest attack so close to where Julia had been. I couldn’t read any more. I put the magazine back.

  A nurse in a flower-printed smock opened the door and called my name.

  “Are you ready for Christmas?” she asked brightly as she squashed my right breast between the X-ray plates.

  My eyes watered from the pain.

  “Did everything look all right?” I asked when she was finished.

  “Your doctor will notify you,” she said.

  I walked toward the door, holding my paper smock to keep it around me. “No,” I said. “I’m not ready for Christmas.”

  It was ten thirty when I got home. I spooned chocolate ice cream from the carton. I didn’t have cancer. I’d be ready for Christmas.

  I thought of calling Eric just to hear his voice, to talk about nothing. We could plan dinner. But he was so busy. I had two hours before I had to be at work, just enough time to write some Christmas cards. I’d toss in a school picture of each girl. Everyone doing well, no big news. Tucked in with last year’s cards, the ones I’d kept to answer this year, was Bobby’s letter.

  It wasn’t addressed to me. My brother hadn’t written me in fourteen years. I doubted he ever even thought of me anymore. But at the end of last year, he’d sent my mother a six-page missive in a tiny, cramped scrawl, detailing his thoughts about the assault of technology and the desecration of the environment six years before the approaching millennium. My mother had xeroxed it and sent it to Sara and me as if it were a Christmas letter from a brother in the army. I hadn’t taken the time to more than glance it. All those nearly impossible-to-decipher words that told me nothing about how my brother was doing.

  I needed to get going on the Christmas cards. I don’t know why I started reading my brother’s letter instead. Maybe it was out of guilt that I hadn’t read it in the first place. Maybe it was out of the same old desire to find something I knew wasn’t going to be there, even in a glimmer.

  My brother began with complaints about his health, his creaky knees, his sensitive stomach, his failing eyesight. The inadequacy of drugstore eyeglasses. He moved on to the pettiness of daily life, his battle with the creatures who tried to eat his food, a chain that had broken on his bicycle. Halfway down the first page, possibly in response to something Mother had written him, he started to rant: The California that you and Father claimed to believe in has been largely destroyed by its avaricious embrace of technology at the expense of its people and its environment.

  Then he dropped any pretense of a mother on the receiving end of his letter.

  Modern society fueled by ever more rapid developing technology is killing the human race along with the planet we inhabit. While the actual demise of humankind is in the future, the psychological damage is already upon us. Technology does not serve us. It is our master.

  There was so much in this vein that it was hard to keep going. In a so-called classless society like America, socialization—following the orders of parents, teachers, bosses, and the like—is more insidious than in stratified societies. If you can’t make it in America or its apotheosis, California, the problem must be yours. You need a shrink, medication that dumbs you down to living on the street.

  In places, Bobby’s handwriting was impossible to read. He left out commas, any intimation of hope. He disdained politicians, the left and the right. He favored anything that made the world economy more fragile, more susceptible to meltdown.

>   He wrote that the entertainment industry was an arm of the power structure serving to keep modern man in a mindless stupor of television, movies, and video/computer games more numbing than drugs. He was convinced that the newest products of consumer technology were the most insidious—that home computers, the Internet, even car phones were poisoning our innermost lives.

  I read and reread paragraphs that hovered on the edge of coherence. His words sounded right for a political treatise. Maybe I might even have agreed with some of them. But I wasn’t interested in reading a discourse. What I wanted was Bobby.

  My brother lived in the wilderness, liberated from the technology he hated, but he didn’t sound free.

  I rubbed my breast, still aching from the mammogram. I had to get to work. My students would be getting antsy. Even a half day with a sub stretched their tolerance for change in their routine.

  I replaced my brother’s letter in its envelope, stacked it with last year’s cards, and put the whole heartbreaking mess away.

  *

  ON THE TWENTY-SECOND of December, Julia got her SAT scores in the mail. I hadn’t wanted her to take the test this early. She was only a sophomore. “Let up on yourself,” I’d said.

  “Mother, this isn’t the seventies,” she’d answered, pale with disgust, “when any idiot could get into college.”

  She opened the envelope in front of me, staring at her scores, her face unsmiling.

  “It’s only the first time you’ve taken the test,” I said. Julia was always so hard on herself.

  She thrust the report into my hand. “Thanks for your high opinion of me,” she snorted. I saw the 800, and the 790. I should have yelped with joy, scooped her into my arms, but I was suddenly furious. I handed her back her scores. “Don’t ever use that tone of voice with me again,” I said.

  Her eyes were huge, uncomprehending, filling with tears. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  I dropped into a chair at the dining table that was covered with the mess of Christmas wrap, red rolls, green.