California: A Novel (8 page)

“It’s safe if you mind your own business,” August had said suddenly to Cal. “Don’t kid yourself—they can’t be bothered with you.”

Before Cal could speak, Frida had returned, and August was back to hawking his wares as if nothing had happened in her absence. Cal would not ask August any more questions.

All these months later, he’d pretended he wasn’t curious about August and the territory the man canvassed. Cal had hoped Frida would follow his lead, keep her head down, and focus on survival, on being happy in whatever way they could. Didn’t she understand that safety was most important? Especially now, if there was going to be a baby.

He looked once more at his wife sitting across the table from him. Her plate was still full.

“Eat,” he said.

She didn’t reply, but she took a bite. Relief spun through him like a cure. She’d listened to him for once.

Cal knew it was settled: he would protect their family, whatever it took. He wouldn’t say a word to Frida about what August and Bo had told him. He couldn’t.

A
t dawn, Frida slipped out of the house before Cal could stir. She was headed to the creek to do laundry, a chore that now felt like a hobby.

By the time they’d gone to bed the night before, she no longer felt the Vicodin, but she still couldn’t recall a single fragment of dream. This morning it was like her entire nervous system was wrapped in layers of gauze. She felt empty. At fifteen, she’d smoke until she hallucinated, and the next day, she would awake sharp as fangs. Now she was older, and her body had grown too used to being sober. It couldn’t handle having fun, not like it used to.

She still enjoyed the walk to the creek: it was hard to be afraid this early in the day, when the world felt so new. In the woods, there were many mysteries: the cat’s cradle of trees, for instance, why some fell sideways, as if pushed, branches lodged in the bramble, and why some lost their leaves and turned black, as if dipped in shoe polish, even as the others remained perfectly healthy. The pine needles still made her think of shredded wheat, though she hadn’t had a bowl of that in almost twenty years. She loved the hushed quality of her steps along the path—Cal was religious about keeping it clear—and the sounds of the earth groaning. Even the rustling of small animals didn’t bother her. If she listened closely, she could make out all the different kinds of birdsong: the beseeching, the joyful, the forlorn.

She passed a patch of mushrooms—how could Cal have missed those?—and turned right at the big redwood. The creek was down the incline. She could hear it now.

She hadn’t spoken to Cal since yesterday’s dinner, when he made his stupid pronouncement that all he needed was her, that they would not go exploring. She hated that he made these decisions without her, as if they were his alone to make. And why had he made this choice? She knew he was hiding something.

If they spent some time apart, if Cal spent the day digging and she did all the chores, each might find forgiveness for the other, at least start talking again. She just hoped their land wouldn’t be riddled with dozens of holes by the time she returned. She didn’t want to step into one. But did Cal? It felt that way, the way he’d acted.

Frida wasn’t stupid. It was obvious he knew something, and that something was nailing him to their house, this tiny four-mile area. He was pretending to be content, but that was impossible. No one could eat sprouted beans in a dark house for days on end without complaint, without hatching an escape plan. They’d slept in Bo and Sandy’s bed for almost half a year now, and every day the mystery of their deaths deepened.

August must have told him something. Or Bo had. While she and Sandy had been discussing their menstrual cycles, or the best techniques for mushroom foraging—Pussy stuff, Frida thought wryly—the men must have mapped out the territories, whispered state secrets. Regardless of who gave Cal the information, he wasn’t sharing it with her.

Last night, once August had left, she’d gotten to thinking again about the outside world. Even after all she’d told him about Micah, what her brain kept returning to was the bra. They, whoever they were, would cut it open and use its parts. The butchery of necessity. She imagined women with pendulous, aching breasts, and their children with braces built of Maidenform wires and clasps. Everyone in the tribe would know how to rehab bras—a command from the king. How silly, she thought. They probably made weapons. They were probably geniuses.

She must have seemed like such a moron to August, getting so high she wept for her dead brother. As if August cared about her stupid family drama. Oh goody: one more whiny white girl! Boohoo, Frida. But he had listened, hadn’t he?

The creek would be stunning at this hour, and she moved faster to reach it. Sandy was the one to tell her that the morning was the best time to wash clothes, because it was cooler. That way, they would stay wet until she got home to hang them up. “No use waiting around here for your panties to dry,” she’d said, nodding at the water. But Sandy had never mentioned the dew on the grass surrounding the creek or the occasional deer, prancing carefree, or the coolness of the rocks at the water’s edge, which hadn’t yet had a chance to absorb the heat from the sun. Of course she wouldn’t have; Sandy was a practical woman. This morning, a bunch of dandelions gone to seed sprouted from the patch of grass, and for once, Frida was glad Sandy wasn’t around. She put down her bag of clothes, and plucked a fluffy white flower from the ground.
Make a wish,
she imagined her mother saying, and she closed her eyes. If Sandy were here, she wouldn’t approve, and if Jane were with them, Sandy might grab Frida’s fist and say,
Please don’t.

At least, when you were on your own, you made the rules. Frida closed her eyes and wished she knew more, then blew the fluff off the flower.

After high school, she used to scour the sidewalks for dandelions. That was when she was helping to support the family by working at Canter’s. She ran the deli’s ancient cash register, and on her walks home she’d seek out a dandelion so that she could make a wish. She’d recently charmed her way into the kitchen, and the head baker was letting Frida shadow her, teaching Frida how to make bagels and rugelach and that banana-chocolate cake with the word
BANANA
in yellow icing across the top. Ingredients were getting expensive and hard to keep in stock, and so she was also taught recipe substitutions, how to make a little go a long way. These lessons happened after Frida’s shift and didn’t pay, of course. Most of the time Frida was wishing on her dandelions for a permanent reprieve from her insipid register duties, a way into that kitchen for good, so that she could start a proper grown-up life. Not that she was in a hurry; things were tolerable at home, and it wasn’t like anyone her age was leaving the nest.

But most of the people her age weren’t like Micah, who was smart. Brilliant. A kid who needed to get out of L.A. so he could return to save it. The whole Ellis family, not just Hilda and Dada, but Frida, too, expected Micah to solve this mess the world was in. Her mother had met a Plank alum at a party. “A man so shy he was rude,” she said. But he was also very smart and successful. “He’s working to fix the water crisis,” she said. “You know, how to make sure we still have some in the years to come.” Their mother thought Micah could become a water man and solve the city’s problems. Plus, the college was free, and not so far away.

This was what Dada liked, that it didn’t cost anything to attend. There would be no other option for someone like Micah, who couldn’t afford the private colleges.
Scholarship
was an endangered word. Back then, some people were still getting into college, but fewer and fewer were going; it was becoming a path reserved for the very rich. When Frida had started her senior year, she told her parents she didn’t want to go to college, and they were relieved. Why bother with all that schooling if there wasn’t a job waiting for you when you finished? “You don’t need college,” Dada had said, which seemed like a compliment at the time.

Her brother, though, he was different. He
did
need it. By then, UCLA and Berkeley had shut down, as had all the other public universities worthy of Micah’s attendance. “Budget problems: the understatement of the decade,” he liked to say. He was fucking brilliant, and he’d been born at the wrong time.

It took a single Internet search to learn about Plank’s all-male student body. Frida was convinced her mother had kept this fact out of the story because it would scare Micah off. Girls liked Micah, and he liked them right back.

But then one night at dinner, her brother came to the table, his face held solemnly, and said, “I’m applying.” That was all. Frida realized then that his beard, which he’d just started to grow, and the books on homesteading and animal husbandry that he’d recently downloaded, were making him into the kind of man Plank would accept. That morning, he’d quoted Thoreau, and she hadn’t thought anything of it. But he was preparing. He was cunning, her brother.

It wasn’t until Micah moved to Plank that she realized he’d gotten away. She was still in L.A., still living with their parents. Meanwhile, her brother had gone to live a grown-up life.

Cal liked to describe Micah as a prankster at Plank, but Frida didn’t see him that way. She would say he took on dares, and with that bravery he defied you to take on your own. Plank was a dare. He would become a person who could live without women, who could work a farm, who could live in the past. “And you will give up that stupid deli job,” he told Frida, “or you’ll ask them to hire you in a different capacity. No more validating parking tickets at the register, for fuck’s sake.” Frida waited until Micah left for Plank, and then she took his advice. She asked to be put in the bakery, or she’d quit. To her surprise, they promoted her right away.

Frida smiled now at that tiny coup and from her bag brought out the laundry soap. The Millers had left it. She had a feeling its ingredients had come from August, but until they ran out, she wouldn’t ask. Frida actually looked forward to making detergent herself; she thought it might remind her of baking: the measuring and mixing. It made her heart ache a little. She had been so good at her job.

She remembered writing to Micah about her promotion. She had sent him a letter, because Plank didn’t allow email. In reply to her news he had said, “I knew you could do it, Freed. When I’m home this summer, can you give me a few lessons? Our head bread maker is graduating in June, and Cal says the position should be mine.”

That’s how she learned about Cal, through Micah’s anecdotes. In the beginning, she was jealous of this new roommate who seemed to take her place as Micah’s main confidant, recipient of his advice, and sounding board for all of his plans, both ridiculous and ingenious. But soon, she began to look forward to the Cal stories, as if he were a character in a soap opera she followed loyally. Cal had stayed up every night for a week, reading. Cal was so clean, Micah thought he might be psychotic. Cal knew how to fix a fence, “like a goddamned rancher,” Micah wrote. Frida could tell that her brother admired his roommate, which was strange, since Micah rarely admired anyone. That wasn’t how Cal saw it; he told Frida that Micah had underestimated him from day one. Perhaps that’s how things ended between them; but it wasn’t how they began.

The sky was turning from the purple of dawn to a dazzling blue. It would be warmer today than yesterday. Frida sighed; she should be drinking more water. If she were pregnant, she’d need to stay hydrated, and either way, she didn’t want a headache. Thank goodness the water around here was clean—or at least clean enough. She dipped her cupped hands to the creek and pulled the cold water to her lips. Out here, she often found herself dreading even the smallest physical discomfort. And now that she knew August could get her pills…well, that was just too dangerous. He’d told her such trades were a rarity. Was that true?

Frida brought her hand to her stomach. Did she want to be pregnant? She couldn’t keep a child out of danger. But she’d love him.

When she and Cal had first started dating, he’d told her, “The only reason to bring a kid into this godforsaken world is to give it a mother.” His own mom had died a few months earlier in that first awful snowstorm. It was a crazy thing for him to say, but Frida had loved it, had loved him, for being so mixed up. Cal. For a while after he moved to L.A., Frida couldn’t abide anyone but him. He wrote her poems and brought her vegetables grown in one of the community gardens he oversaw, and at night they made frenzied love on her narrow bed, sometimes rolling onto the floor because there just wasn’t enough space for this thing they needed from each other. If someone had told her then that the two of them would marry and come to the middle of nowhere to be alone—well, she would have smiled.

Like Jane and Garrett, their child would have no idea of the world he was missing. He’d think this, wringing out shirts in a babbling creek, was the height of entertainment. Her kid would grow hooves for feet like Garrett and Jane had, run through the woods with his eyes closed, and eat squirrel meat. The stories of Cal’s mother and father, the artist and the farmer, would be myth. Hilda and Dada, just a fairy tale. So would, too, the terrible things they’d left behind to come here. Sandy and Bo had tried to create a new world for their kids, but it had been flawed. It was nothing compared with what Cal and Frida would build.

She sank a pair of her leggings under the water and then rubbed soap onto the waistline, let it foam up. The creek was so cold it made the joints in her hands ache. She’d have to pull them out soon and rub them in the dirt, or else her fingers would get too numb to work. A small fish flitted across her wrist, and her heart sped up, pulling her out of her brain fog.

She had a sudden desire to go running. She should be in better shape if she was going to give birth. She spent hours doing manual labor but nothing that really worked her heart and built up her body’s stamina. She missed that.

In L.A., before it got too dangerous, and before the streets fell too badly into disrepair, Frida used to go jogging. On the first few attempts, her lungs had felt swampy, her breath at once sharp and shaky, and she had to stop every few feet to recover. It hurt. But she kept at it, and each time, she ran a little farther. Two weeks in, her body began to crave those miles.

She used to go with Toni, Micah’s girlfriend, who was also in the Group. Soon after the two women met, Toni enlisted Frida to join her on her runs. “It’s a great stress reliever,” she’d said, and added that she didn’t want to run with anyone in the Group because she was trying to deal with her “Jealousy Problem.”

“Sounds like a bad movie,” Frida had said.

“A juicy story, of love and loyalty. It would be quite good, actually,” Toni said.

Frida laughed, but she knew Toni had truly been hurt by the way the other girls fawned over Micah, and how Micah lapped it up like a kitten before a bowl of milk.

“It’s too bad I believe in the cause,” Toni said. “Otherwise, I’d just leave him.”

Frida remembered Toni’s remarkable ability to run and talk simultaneously. She was short and muscular, a woman who might have had a childhood in gymnastics if she hadn’t had such fucked-up parents and a grandmother who worried too much to let her do anything extracurricular. Toni wasn’t even sure where her parents lived. Maybe they were in a cult in Boulder or off somewhere in Mexico. She’d been raised by her Nana outside Seattle. Toni loved her grandmother, but it was obvious she resented her for being so strict, instead of placing the blame on her parents, where it belonged. At seventeen she had run away from home. Micah was convinced that Toni’s grandmother lived in a Community now; she’d told him her Nana had money. “Face it, Toni,” Micah liked to say, “you’re tony.” Toni didn’t appreciate Micah’s joke and what it implied: that she could return to that life of comfort and denial at any moment. That she might. That she was merely slumming.