California: A Novel

by Edan Lepucki

  When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

  Morning Labor. Was that supposed to make her think of having a baby?

  No kids, Cal had pointed out. She didn’t want to talk, let alone think, about it. Because if these people couldn’t have kids, or if they didn’t allow them, what would that mean for her own child?

  Cal thought Micah knew about the pregnancy or, at the very least, that August did. He had no idea that there was a secret to keep, that she and Cal were the only two people on earth who knew about the tiny human inside of her. There was something beautiful about that kind of secret.

  She knew she’d have to tell her brother. That’s what Cal would advise. Maybe they did have a urine test here, and she could find out for sure. Oh, please, that was unnecessary. She was almost three weeks late, and that had never happened. She was pregnant; she just knew. Wasn’t that how it worked? Before long, smells would turn her stomach, as would certain foods. She might have to carry around a bucket, maybe a barf bag, which the Land no doubt had a box of. She’d need crackers to calm her belly; if they let her bake, she could prepare them as she preferred. By then, there’d be no hiding her malady. Not that being pregnant was an illness or a handicap.

  If she was pregnant, she’d raise the baby here, on the Land…if she survived the birth.

  Stop it, she told herself. Stop it. She was enjoying herself, and she didn’t want to ruin the morning with anxiety. It felt good to cook like this. So what if she was pregnant? So what if her brother had treated their reunion so casually and didn’t seem to want to be alone with her? She was back in a kitchen cooking with others, in a room with windows. She was grateful.

  Sometimes, a conversation would begin at one end of the kitchen and, just as quickly, extinguish like a match in the wind. A few would start giggling about something Frida couldn’t hear, and then Anika would announce something briskly to the whole group—an encouragement or a technical reminder about how to hold a knife—and the mood would turn serious again.

  She liked being part of the routine. It reminded her of the Canter’s kitchen at 4:00 a.m. when it was just her and the other bakers and a few prep cooks who would pass behind her warning, “Por detrás,” as they balanced cutting boards of sliced tomatoes, their slippery seeds sliding off the edges.

  As it had been back then, it was easy to focus on each rote task given to her. She didn’t mind that Anika eventually assigned others more complicated work: scaling and deboning fish that a man named Charles had caught in the nearby river and brought in through the back door, for instance, or conferring with Anika over the menu, discussing substitutions and portion sizes. She could tell them later about her skills; for now, she would bend over the table and cut cloves of garlic, one after another: like waking up to a new day, every day. Her fingertips were sticky.

  “You can relax a little, you know,” Fatima said from behind her, a tray of deboned trout in her hands.

  “I’m relaxed,” Frida said. “Just communing with my garlic.”

  “Sailor said you’ve worked in a kitchen before.”

  Feather guy looked up. “Oh yeah?” he said.

  Anika was across the room and didn’t seem to notice them talking.

  “I was a baker, at a deli in L.A.,” Frida said.

  “Bread? Can you do bread?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she replied.

  Fatima explained that they had a small bread operation in place. Their wheat harvest had turned out beautifully the last two years, but no one was really very good at baking.

  “The sourdough’s bland,” Feather Boy said.

  Fatima rolled her eyes. “Burke is very hard to please.”

  Burke shrugged like a dad in a sitcom, and Frida wished he or Fatima would call out to Anika and announce that the new girl, Mikey’s sister, was a professional, that she could bake, that she could do bread. She hadn’t baked in years, and the idea of using the woodstove made her nervous, but already she could smell the dough, hear it rising (it did have a sound, she swore it did, it was like a gathering of energy). The leave-it-alone mantra, coupled with that urge to knead, and the way the loaves felt just baked, warm as breathing bodies.

  If these people tasted her bread, they would definitely allow her to stay. If the fact that she was Micah’s sister didn’t give her special status, then her talents would.

  She’d been distracted by this little fantasy when her knife sliced into her finger. “Ow,” she said without wanting to, and brought her finger to her mouth.

  Anika was next to her in seconds. “You all right?” she asked.

  Frida nodded. She felt like a little girl, sucking on a lollipop. “Just a little cut,” she said. “I’ll live.” She showed Anika the wound—a torn flap of skin. “Thin as those potatoes,” she said, but Anika didn’t laugh.

  Blood seeped into the cut, a diagonal red line, and Anika turned away.

  “Do you have a rag or something?” Frida asked. She remembered the tin of Band-Aids the Millers had brought her, so long ago. She’d only used a couple of them.

  “You’d better just wash it out,” Anika said, not meeting her gaze. “And hurry.”

  Burke continued cutting his garlic as if he hadn’t even noticed what had happened. Fatima was now on the other side of the kitchen, doing something with her pile of fish. Everyone seemed too focused on their work, like they were acting in the same terrible play. It was as if they were embarrassed for her.

  Frida put her finger back into her mouth, as if she were plugging herself up, and walked to the trough. Anika stepped outside and came back with a bowl of water. “Here,” she said, and Frida began cleaning her finger. It stung when it hit the water.

  After she’d returned to the table where the mound of garlic awaited, her finger smarting but no longer bleeding, Burke leaned over and whispered, “It’s the blood.”

  “What?”

  “It bothers Anika.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Frida didn’t get any further explanation because Anika was announcing something else now, about how someone had evidently neglected to soak the beans last night, which meant they didn’t have enough protein for tonight’s dinner.

  Frida wished, suddenly, that Cal were here to witness what had just happened. She had barely thought of him all morning. Last night, before falling asleep, she’d entertained a flittering fear that without him with her during Morning Labor, she might totally lose it. They rarely separated, and when they did, it wasn’t to go off with strangers. Neither tried anything new anymore. There was too much at risk.

  The truth was, the morning had been wonderful. She could be apart from Cal for a couple of hours. She could say what she wanted and be chummy with Fatima, without his disapproving gaze following her. She and Cal had separated for a few hours, and she had survived.

  But now she wanted him with her. She felt purposeless without him. She tried to imagine what he was doing at this very moment. It was warm in the kitchen, but the sky outside was white and covered with gray clouds, and the trees beyond the Spikes were shuddering in the wind. It was probably cold, and Cal’s hands probably hurt as they mended a fence or hammered a nail into a plank of wood. Maybe he imagined he’d been transported back to college, to those morning assignments. Did he feel comforted, doing that work with others? She knew those two years at Plank had stuck with him and that he held the memories deep inside himself. He coveted them, even, as if they were just beyond his reach.

  Frida was glad when Anika told them they were almost finished. She wanted Cal.

  Fifteen minutes later, she sat in their room, eating a bowl of mushy carrots, waiting for him. The group had invited her to eat with them in the dining room, but she’d declined. She knew Cal would rush to the bedroom when he was finished.

  “You’re here,” he said as he entered. His shirt was dirty, his hair wet with sweat. He looked at her bowl of food. “Can I have some of that? I’m starving.”

  “What did they do to you?” she
asked, moving onto the bed so she could sit behind him.

  He’d been with a crew of about four others, dismantling the wall of bricks by the Bath. They needed to break it apart without damaging the bricks, and it was hard work.

  “They’re going to reuse them?” Frida asked.

  Cal nodded and took a bite of food. The carrots were cold and bland, and he wrinkled his nose as he chewed. After he’d swallowed, he said, “They need a new outdoor oven.” For the last few weeks there’d been a lot of debate about the oven, as it meant taking apart an original structure. “But I guess functionality trumps nostalgia.” He held up his hands, their palms dyed reddish brown, his fingers chapped. “All I know is that job was a bitch.”

  She pouted and kissed the back of his neck.

  “Aren’t you being sweet,” he said, turning around.

  “Is that hard to believe?”

  He raised an eyebrow and tried to hand the bowl back to her. She shook her head. “You eat it. I’ve been around food all day.”

  “Was it fun?” he asked.

  “It was. They might let me bake bread.”

  “Really? That’s great.”

  Did she hear a snag of mournfulness in his voice? Maybe he was thinking of the bread she used to bake him when they had first started dating, and the pizza bagels he’d beg for. “One of those and a blow job, pretty please,” he’d said once, when she asked him what he wanted for his birthday. Or maybe it wasn’t quite as precious as all that. Maybe Cal knew, as she did, that once she started making bread for the Land, she’d never want to leave.

  He set the bowl on the floor and then sat facing her on the bed. He put a hand on either side of her skull, cupping it. Frida had once seen an old man do that to a pregnant woman at a bus stop. Frida didn’t shake Cal off but let the weight of his palms rest there; maybe the brick dye would chalk off in her hair.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I cut my finger today.”

  She held out her index finger to show him, and he let her head fall so that he could take her hand. He kissed the wound.

  “Poor thing,” he said, and kissed her finger again, and then her wrist.

  “Can you believe we’re here?” she said then, her stomach growing warm. Even now, Cal could make her core heat up like she was the center of the earth.

  “I can’t,” he said, her finger in his fist.

  She moved toward him, and the smell of his sweat hit her. That, and the unfamiliar dust of the Land. She liked the surprise of this new smell; she wanted it. She bit her lip.

  Cal pushed her gently onto the bed and breathed into her neck, pushing his body against hers. In moments he had scooted her dress above her waist. The leggings she wore beneath belonged to Fatima, and Frida was afraid he’d say something, but he didn’t, he just grabbed at the elastic waistband with an urgency she hadn’t seen from him in a while. Maybe he liked the unfamiliarity. His eyes were closed; was he imagining someone else’s body beneath his own?

  She put a hand on his chest and said his name. He opened his eyes. She pushed him off of her. “Look at me,” she said, and began pulling off his shirt. Despite the strange room, and the awful uncomfortable bed, and the secrets they’d kept from each other, Frida felt her desire for Cal expand and expand.

  They didn’t bother with foreplay much anymore, those courtship niceties of kissing and petting before they were totally naked. If Cal was going to kiss her deeply, or put one of her breasts in his mouth, Frida wanted him inside of her as he did so. They were married, they were efficient: they’d done this dance dozens of times before, they both knew the song.

  As they moved together, it felt better than it ever had. This, she thought. She wanted to call out, but she bit her wrist instead, her whole body pushing. Cal had kept his eyes open, he was watching her, he was witnessing the pleasure she felt, and she knew he felt it, too.

  “My…,” she said, but she couldn’t finish the sentence, whatever it was going to be, she didn’t know.

  Cal nodded. “My…,” he whispered back.

  He had lifted her hips toward him, and they were right on the edge of the glorious cliff when she closed her eyes, and her mind flashed to the moment the knife cut into the skin of her finger. Maybe it had felt good, the blade breaking the skin the way a boat parts water. Maybe it had been beautiful and clean like that. Cal was pulling her body around his own.

  Suddenly she saw them yesterday. Micah was moving from the kitchen into the dining room, their first meal in there, and she couldn’t stop looking at him. That long beard, and that raw patch of scalp on his head she didn’t yet know about. Someone must have rubbed alcohol there first, right, before they sliced that piece of him away?

  Her brother was sitting at the table before that bowl of soup and then the knife was cutting through her finger, the blade smooth and sharp, and Cal was now heavy atop her, groaning. He was saying her name, and she felt a pang of pleasure so bright it almost blinded her insides. She saw the coyote, it was standing there in the dining room as they ate quietly, its mouth dripping with viscera, and she shot her eyes open. Look at Cal, she told herself. The pleasure was receding like a tide. She had to bring it back. Cal kissed her, and she held him to her lips, as if he could suck out the images in her mind. But he couldn’t.

  “My…,” Cal whispered as he came, but Frida said nothing.

  Afterward, still naked, they lay on the bed, breathing hard. After a moment, Cal sat up and began sifting through the bedsheets for his clothes.

  “I need my stuff,” he said. This morning he’d had enough of being the Official Pussy Inspector and broke down and asked Sailor (not Micah, Frida noticed) for a shirt. Sailor had actually pulled his own T-shirt over his head and handed it to Cal. “We’ll trade,” he said. Cal had been wearing Sailor’s slightly tight shirt ever since. It puckered at the armpits.

  “Why don’t you just let my brother give you some clothes? They’d fit you better.”

  “We have to go back home, Frida,” he said, placing a hand on her hip.

  “You mean to pick up more of our things?” She felt her body tense beneath his touch.

  “For now,” he replied, moving his hand. “But we can’t just not make a decision.”

  “They’re the ones voting,” she said.

  “But we have a choice, too.”

  She was silent.

  “Today, in the kitchen,” Cal said, “did you get an idea of where they’re getting all their food from? I mean, did you get to look at their gardens? Where are they storing everything? Did they have any out-of-season fruit or”—his voice tipped—“anything canned?”

  “I wasn’t on a recon mission, Cal.” She sat up. “God, could you please just let me have a few days to be here? With other people. With my brother?” She closed her eyes quickly; no doubt Cal had noticed that Micah had left Sailor to take care of them this morning.

  “Don’t,” he said. “I don’t want to argue.”

  He moved into a squatting position on the mattress. He was still naked, and it made her laugh. He almost tipped over, then righted himself, like a surfer.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Look out the window with me,” he said.

  They both perched on the scratchy mattress, hands against the wall and headboard for balance. Cal pulled the cheesecloth from the window, ripping it off its staples.

  “Cal!” Frida whispered, but she couldn’t help but laugh again.

  They looked through the square of window. The scent of animal shit—or was that human shit?—wafted into the room. The air outside was cool, but, judging from how sweaty Cal had been after Labor, she knew it had to be warm in the sun by now. Frida leaned back and stuck her arm through the window. She put her palm against the side of the building, which was hot to the touch and rough as a pier and gritty with dirt.

  Their room was on the north side of the Hotel, and from the window they could see beyond the main street to the areas Sailor and others had alluded to since their arr
ival, but which Frida hadn’t yet been curious about. Until now. The space was wide open as a meadow. It was mostly free of trees, except at the edge, where things grew wild and uninviting; a Spike rose menacingly above this patch of untended land and, next to it, another lookout Tower. Someone must be on duty, Frida thought. She wondered if they ever trained their binoculars in the other direction, toward the Land’s inhabitants.

  To the left was the showering and laundry area, where clothing hung like prayer flags on multiple lines stretched between four trees. Frida watched as a man walked naked from one of the shower stalls to the lines. He grabbed a pair of pants hanging there and put them on.

  Across the field was a structure that looked as if it had been recently constructed, perhaps out of materials collaged from various ghost-town buildings and whatever else the Land could get its hands on: the wood was both old and new looking and placed side by side; the planks gave the building stripes. The roof was made of corrugated metal and held secure with tires and wire, like their shed had been. The doors were tall and wide, like a barn’s, and a man came walking out with a goat on a rope. Along the outside of the building were animal pens.

  “Is that where August’s mare lives?” Frida asked.

  “I assume.”

  “Where is he, you think?”

  Cal shrugged. “You should ask Micah. He’d tell you.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “See if you can get him alone.”

  “I want him to come to me. He’s been so cavalier about seeing me, after all this time. He just left us with Sailor this morning.” Frida felt the tears coming, and she tried to laugh them away. “Jeez, I guess the hormones have arrived.”

  Cal leaned into her. “You deserve to spend time with him, Frida. He’s your brother. Just ask him.”

  “I’ll try.”

  It felt good, Frida thought, to be talking like this. They were plotting again; they were on the same side. They had returned to each other. They were something the world could understand. This had been how she’d imagined it, when Cal had first asked her to leave L.A.