The Ruins of California
Read The Ruins of California Online
Authors: Martha Sherrill
“What elevates
The Ruins of California
from a fine novel to a unique work of art is the compassionate, intelligent portrait of a certain kind of boy-man, utterly starved for fun and beauty, orphaned in every way by the curse of his own inability to feel, to accept the inevitable imperfections of all life. As for Inez, after all those lessons on tea-pouring, riding your horse well, knowing that correct conduct is what counts in life, she acquits herself beautifully, rescuing—with the unexpected help of some of those wives and girlfriends—the family, her father, herself.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“A book about how relationships endure. Set in the 1970s, the novel is about a young girl growing up amid the messiness of her own fractured, somewhat potty family. Inez Garcia Ruin narrates this story in a voice filled with unflinching matter-of-factness and preternatural insight. One of Sherrill’s strengths as a novelist is how she makes use of all these very disparate and racially diverse characters as metaphors for the reality of life in California. Inez exists in a world of opposites. The Ruins remind us not only of what an eclectic place California has been but also of what a different time the 1970s were, and how easy it was to buy into the decade’s permissiveness.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Inez Garcia Ruin is a self-described ‘baton of a girl,’ passing from one divorced parent to the other—from her mother, Connie, a former flamenco dancer turned Realtor in Southern California, to her glamorous father, Paul, something of a fixture in San Francisco society and scion of the old-money Ruin family. Set in California in the 1970s, this jaunty, beautifully written coming-of-age story is packed with larger-than-life Ruins—not only rakish father Paul, but also half-brother Whitman, adventurous, resourceful, and perhaps doomed; redoubtable grandmother Marguerite, who teaches Inez how to ride, serve a proper tea, and understand that the way you do
one
thing is the way you do
every
thing; and a mob of Kennedyesque cousins swarming around the family beach house in Laguna. And then there is Inez herself, moving between two worlds and belonging to neither, trying to grow up at a time and in a place so laid-back the point is
not
to try. Sherrill’s re-creation of California in the seventies is impeccable, and her story of how a girl trapped in a theatrical family manages to transform herself from an observer into the star of her own life is absolutely irresistible.”
—
Booklist
(starred review)
“An eccentric coming-of-age story…an offbeat tale.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Martha Sherrill’s main character, Inez Ruin, is a narrator with an unlikely and irresistible combination of sweetness and authority. And, man, does Inez know California—reading her story is like coming home to everything I love about my home state.”
—Sean Wilsey, author of
Oh the Glory of It All
“An absolutely note-perfect portrayal of California in the seventies.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“A spot-on, detailed narrative of a decade of cultural contrasts. [
The Ruins of California
] is very much alive with sweetness and light.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Especially noteworthy among the many pleasures of this novel is the finely drawn character of Inez, whose emotional development over the years is subtly reflected in her changing assessments of the world. Sherrill ably captures the milieu of the seventies and eighties without seeming to reach for details. Her depiction of those decades—their fads, their politics, their slang, their colors, and foods—is both masterful and unassuming.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The vividness of the setting—California in the 1970s—makes
Ruins
read like a memoir. And that’s a good thing. A great deal of fun.”
—Willamette(Portland) Week
ALSO BY MARTHA SHERRILL
My Last Movie Star
The Buddha from Brooklyn
The Ruins of California
MARTHA SHERRILL
Riverhead Books
New York
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2006 by Martha Sherrill
Cover design by Rodrigo Corral
Cover photographs by Mike Slack
Book design by Stephanie Huntwork
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Penguin Press hardcover edition: January 2006
First Riverhead trade paperback edition: January 2007
ISBN: 978-1-101-11802-3
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Penguin Press hardcover edition as follows:
Sherrill, Martha.
The ruins of California / Martha Sherrill.
p. cm.
1. California—Fiction. 2. Girls—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.H469R85 2006
813’.6—dc22 2005049343
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
F
OR
P
ETER AND
N
ATHANIEL AND
L
IAM
—WITH LOVE AND EXASPERATION
CONTENTS
SIXTEEN
Dr. Lasso’s Office, Please Hold
TWENTY
What Marguerite Left Behind
PROSPERO
Be collected.
No more amazement. Tell your piteous heart There’s no harm done.
MIRANDA
O, woe the day!
PROSPERO
No harm.
—William Shakespeare,
The Tempest
, Act 1, Scene 2
ONE
Say Hello for Me
T
wo things always signaled that she was suffering: stage makeup worn during the day and loudness. She’d act too happy, like something was hiding beneath all her giddiness, something dank and unaired way down. My mother laughed, and sometimes she couldn’t stop. Over the summer it had gotten worse—the shrieking jollity, the nonstop hardy-har-har—and she was always slipping away to watch more bad news on TV, turning it off when I wandered into the den. When the television tube faded out, it made a weird vibrating sound that grew fainter and fainter, and then she would yell out, “That’s enough of that!”
Not listening was part of it. When she was upset, it seemed like a siren was blaring inside her head every few seconds and distracting her. She’d talk louder, over you. In June, after Bobby Kennedy was shot and that picture of him lying in a black pool of his own blood ran in a magazine (I looked at it for a very long time), it was as if a megaphone had attached itself to her mouth. She brayed. She bellowed. The walls of Abuelita’s house shook with my mother’s
giddy remorse and hysteria. She would fake that everything was all right—her big trick—and then, putting me to bed one night, she broke down and whimpered, “What kind of world have I brought you into?”
What kind of world? I stood in the parking lot at Burbank Airport and watched her unload my pink Samsonite suitcase from the trunk of the car and wasn’t inclined to ask. It’s probably not fair to say I was the passive type. But maybe I was. I was receptive and quiet. I stood around a lot—waiting for balls to be pitched, orders to be given, situations to arise. While I slept, things came together: My clothes were laid out on my bed, my white orthopedic shoes polished, and in the morning plates of food appeared on the table before me. I ate everything on them. Hard to imagine now, but I was almost fat in those days—thick arms and legs, a belly that swelled where my waist would someday appear. Not that I paid much attention. My traveling outfit could be boiled down to three haphazard moves: a thin purple windbreaker, blue knee socks, and a pair of my special white shoes, which Doug Daley, one of the dumber boys at school, had recently called “clodhoppers.” I was wild about the purple windbreaker. As for my belly, or the clods (a cure for a duck waddle), in my mind I was arrestingly beautiful and really quite grown up.
What kind of world? One of mystery and magic and endless possibilities for romance. My new pink Samsonite suitcase was packed with Coco, my deteriorating baby blanket, and everything else. Why, it was almost like I was running away.
Dearest Inez,
Did I tell you that I had a wonderful time with you at Christmas? Well, I did. I felt like your father and your friend,
and I enjoyed that so much I wanted to laugh and yell at the same time—have you ever had that feeling?
All my love,
F.G. (or, the Friendly Giant)
On board I was a small figure at the front of the plane, but I felt large and super noticeable, almost famous. The stewardess kept turning up—shooing away a tired guy in a business suit who sat down next to me. She fussed about my jumper, which wasn’t worth fussing over, and she used a baby voice, the kind of voice that always put me on edge because nobody in my family spoke to me like that—nobody—and suddenly everything about the stewardess seemed completely fake and hammy. Her orange-and-pink Pacific Southwest Airlines uniform with the hot-air-balloon cap was ridiculous. The way she spoke into the airplane microphone was like a fake person on TV. Everybody knew how to lock and unlock seat belts, so why did she have to stand in the aisle with a set of them—little belts attached to nothing—and demonstrate fastening and unfastening?