The Ruins of California (12 page)

This seemed to take forever. He was on his belly. He paddled and paddled. When he arrived at the place in the water where the waves first rose to break, he stopped paddling and repositioned himself on the board. Then, after another long wait, he swerved his board around to face the shore and began paddling quickly, sometimes looking back at the wave forming over his shoulder. He stretched out, flattened himself against the board, paddled harder and
faster, and tried to catch the wave as it began to curl. The wave was thick and moved slowly at first, then more and more quickly, and finally, as it collapsed, Whitman disappeared inside a cascade of white water and foam.

I waited to see his brown head bounce up to the top of the water again, but it didn’t. I looked for shadows, for the darkness of his wetsuit.

“Jesus, where’d he go?” my father called out. The wind was strong, and it was hard to hear him.

“I don’t—”

“Do you see…?”

“I don’t—”

My father looked at me kind of funny. He was trying not to get worked up. “Goddamn it, where is he?”

Down the beach we saw a dark head in the water. Whitman raised his arm over his head. We waved back.

Whitman tried to catch a few more waves, but his timing was off. Opportunities rose up, then were somehow never seized. Bored, I began to make circles in the dirt with my tennis shoes and practiced curling my tongue into a long tube and whistling through it. I pulled on my hair and wondered where we’d go for dinner and what movie we’d see, as I watched the gulls swooping down near the shoreline, felt the buffeting of wind on my numb face, and then became almost mesmerized, as though, surrendering to boredom, I had fallen into a kind of walking coma.

Whitman tried another wave—the quick turnaround, the rapid paddling, his body flattening down on the board. But in the glare of the morning sunlight, I lost sight of him. No sign of a head or dark wetsuit. My father must have lost sight, too, because he began pacing, back and forth, very close to the edge of the cliff. After another second
or two—how much time, I don’t know—he began to scramble down the bluff to the rocks.

“Paul!” Justine called out. Was she trying to stop him? The wild sage scratched my father’s face and his zip-up boots were sliding on the dirt. He disappeared for a minute under the cliff face and then reappeared on the rocks below us. He stopped momentarily and studied the horizon, covering his brows with his hands and looking for Whitman. And then he began to wade into cold ocean water in his jeans and big brown jacket with a kind of unsteady panic that I had never seen, in him or anybody else. His head was swiveling back and forth, almost crazily, scanning the water’s surface. His feet slipped on rocks. Why didn’t he take his boots off? By the time he was nearly up to his waist, the thick waves were breaking on him and the shearling coat looked heavy, so heavy, so cumbersome, that it seemed impossible he could swim.

Just then I heard a voice far away. It’s possible that I didn’t really hear anything. But I had a feeling of something—I knew something—and I turned to look down the beach and saw Whitman’s silhouette on a jetty. The glare was shimmering, almost blinding, but he was motionless—just standing and looking at the sea. The wind must have changed direction suddenly, for I thought I could hear him calling out, “Paul! Paul! Dad! Dad!”

“It’s Whitman!” I yelled, kind of hysterically, and I began scrambling down the cliff. The fur coat kept catching on things and dragging on the ground, slowing me. I couldn’t bear to look over my shoulder at Justine—just imagining her horror. “He’s gone in!” I screamed in Whitman’s direction, as if he would be able to hear me. “Dad’s gone in!”

Whitman couldn’t have heard me but must have seen me crawling down the cliff. He bent to set his board on the jetty, and then he ran
toward the water again, yelling—sounds that barely registered against the surges of wind and falling waves. All I could see was his mouth opening, again and again, as he called my father’s name, just as Paul was probably calling his.

My father was waist deep in the sea when there must have been another momentary ceasing of wind, a miraculous few seconds of quiet when he heard Whitman. He turned around suddenly, twisting to look back. Then his shoulders sank—an instant of relief, perhaps. A shrug. Then he threw his hands up in the air. Disbelief? Exasperation? Which was it? I remember studying every breath, every gesture and expression intently. He seemed to be acting as if a joke had been played on him, a cruel joke, on purpose.

The waves were breaking against his back as he approached the shore and fell to his knees a few times. He looked down at the water with disgust, as though he were angry at it, hating it. And he was still looking down at the ground of rocks when he reached Whitman and me on the jetty. He just kept going. He trudged, almost an overstated trudging. Like one of his gag walks.

“Wasn’t that weird?” I called out as he passed by. But he didn’t look up, just kept going—making his way up the cliff. And when he got to the top, he disappeared.

“He must be really mad,” I said.

Whitman shook his head. “Asshole.”

“Hey, it was really scary. He thought you were drowning, Whitman. He totally lost it.”

I imagined that my father had stopped at the top of the cliff—that he’d gone to Justine. But when Whitman and I reached the bluff, she was standing alone, too. “Where’d he go?” Whitman said.

Justine had a defeated look on her face, and pointed to the eucalyptus grove, making no sound except for an exhalation of breath.
He’d gone to the car. I remember wanting to run to him—to see how he was—but I hesitated, not wanting to face him either.

“What do we do now?” I said.

“This is ridiculous,” said Whitman. “He’s stoned. And he’s acting like a child.”

Justine had a look of disagreement on her face, but instead of saying anything, she began walking toward the grove. Whitman and I waited a few moments, then followed. About halfway, we heard Justine’s shriek and quickened our pace. She was bent over next to the car—at first I thought she was screaming, or swooning, or hysterical. But it wasn’t that. We drew closer and saw my father sitting in the driver’s seat of the MG. He was smoking one of Justine’s brown cigarettes in a long ivory holder. And he was completely nude, but for a road map over his lap.

“Hey, Whitman,” he said, with a witheringly dry delivery, “nice bit of surfing.”

L
ater on, after hot showers and lunch—and a special trip to Perignon Laundry to see if my father’s shearling coat could be saved—we all sat through a matinee of
Lawrence of Arabia
at the Bay Theatre on Stockton and ate so much popcorn we decided to skip dinner. By sunset Whitman and I were left alone in the apartment. My father had slipped next door to spend the night.

“So what do you think?” Whitman said, sitting down on the arm of the brown corduroy sofa.

“Of what?”

“How the weekend’s going so far.”

We both laughed.

“Complete disaster,” I said.

Whitman said nothing.

“Don’t you think?”

He shrugged. The goal in those days—or maybe it was just a California thing—was not to make a big deal out of anything.

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“It is what it is.”

“It is what it isn’t,” I said.

“You sound like a Zen monk.”

“You’re the hippie, not me.”

“I’m a hippie? Who says?”

“Dad.”

“Shit,
he’s
wearing the love beads, not me.”

I pulled at Whitman’s necklace.

“These are rhino horn,” he said, “for sexual power.”

“You went to that war protest,” I said, uneasy with the rhino-horn idea. “And you live on a commune.”

“I live on a commune?” he said, a little mockingly. “I guess you’re right, then. You’re always right, Mexicali Rose.
I’m a hippie.
Just don’t tell Marguerite.” He picked up an issue of
Playboy
magazine that was sitting on the low white table and began flipping the pages. He looked at a cartoon, chuckled, then flipped the pages again. He found the centerfold and turned the magazine on end.

“So how do you like Justine?” he asked, his eyes not looking away from the page. “She seems to have a big effect on him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like, what’s with the driving gloves?”

“Oh, God,” he groaned, closing the magazine. “I know. And
Lawrence of Arabia
again. Do you think every time he gets a new girlfriend he’ll make us watch it with her? I suppose it could be worse.”

“What happened to Cary?” I asked.

“That’s what I’m talking about.
Cary
.” Whitman rubbed his face, then sighed in a bored way. “Good riddance.”

I thought of Cary’s voice as she read aloud to us over the summer, or her smile, or the tarot cards in my suitcase that I’d brought for her to read in her kooky, amateurish way. Whitman had never liked her, I could see that now. But he and Justine—they had something. Hard to say what.

“Justine’s so old,” I said finally. “So grown up. So serious.”

“It’s about time,” Whitman said.

My father and Justine did seem like a pair—their lanky frames and handsomeness, their strange, unearthly elegance. They had the same pervasive feeling of gloom, the same silliness. Their motorcycles. Their ultraspare taste in décor. Even their cars were about the same size. And even though Justine had tried to be kind to me, and open, she made me uncomfortable. Instead of bringing me closer to my father, as Cary had done, she made me feel like a suburban rube with cheap clothes and a weird best friend. (“She’s really a Mormon?” Justine had asked in a breathy, incredulous voice. “Like ten wives sort of thing?”) Since meeting her, I’d felt further and further away from my father, as if he had drifted to sea and become an island that I couldn’t swim to anymore.

“Hey, don’t get glum,” Whitman said to me. “He’s really in love. I’ve never seen him like this before.”

Somehow I knew that—felt that—and it made everything worse.

“And anyway,” he went on, “she’s so rich, you know, and that might be fun.”

“Money isn’t fun,” I said.

“No?” he said. “Well, you’re wrong.”

SEVEN

Laguna Beach

T
his is my prevailing memory of Abuelita in my childhood: She made hot cereal in the morning and would leave the top of a double boiler full of congealing Roman Meal or Cream of Wheat for me when she left for work. I was supposed to have a bowl before school—no exceptions. Abuelita wasn’t that fussy about anything else. She made few demands, had very few edges. I made jokes about “cold gruel” and “mush,” but I ate it. Her belief in cooked cereal was something like my mother’s belief in Jack La Lanne or, later, Werner Erhard. Cooked cereal was a way of life, like exercise or awareness, that would fortify me for the perils ahead. I never really questioned this, the same way that I didn’t really think about who Abuelita was. Her existence seemed humdrum and practical to me, about working and saving money. I knew Abuelita—the smell of her hair, the smoothness of her hands, her round belly underneath her slick rayon dresses, the sound of her soft, muddled English—but my real knowledge of her, aside from her
role as my caretaker and all the Roman Meal she cooked over the years, was profoundly incomplete.

Was she happy? Had life met her expectations—or not? I didn’t wonder about such things until years later, when I began asking those questions of myself. Unlike the Ruins, who were complicated and self-indulgent and begged for your attention and analysis, Abuelita was modest and understated. She wasn’t larger than life; she never tried to be. She was just Adela Traba Garcia—rarely sick, never late, utterly without drama, and her energy was unflagging. She was disciplined and methodical. She knew how to strive but didn’t like to waste too much time on dreams. The Ruins were romantics—always finding ways to feel special about themselves and better than other people. Abuelita had a way of reducing everything to duty. She never mythologized or tried to beef up family ties with sentiment. She just left cooked cereal in the double boiler for me—and sometimes bacon rolled in a paper towel. She did my laundry, too, and cleaned the house, and picked avocados from the tree in the side yard and cut them into salads with a homemade lemony dressing. She did the household sewing—all hems and popped buttons. She made most of our meals, except when Coach Weeger came over and my mother wanted to demonstrate her abilities.

Aside from a few loved ones—and that would include her employer, who was like a god to her—people who lacked energy or discipline could come in for criticism from Abuelita. She was lenient and forgiving until an invisible line had been crossed. After that, people were expunged from her life. Her sister Rosa had been expunged. Her aunt and two cousins, who arrived in Van Dale and complained about America and then overstayed their welcome to the point of freeloading, not to mention ruining two green towels
with bleach spots, were expunged. And then, in a previously unexplored category of expungement, there was Carlos “Charles” Garcia.

I was thirteen when I finally heard—from two chatty cousins visiting from Peru—how Abuelita had come to be alone. A reference to “La Habra” was blurted out, followed by cries of disbelief over my ignorance. A long story ensued, which was sprinkled with colorful distortions. Even if only half the story were true, Abuelita was still made more alive to me. Not that she wasn’t real before, just mostly a composite person of my own creation—a pair of brown hands, a crusty double boiler of cereal, a pitcher of lemony salad dressing. Now she became something else: The story about her aloneness made her as big as the universe. If there was one story like this about Adela Traba Garcia, there must be others.