The Ruins of California (6 page)

On the second floor, we flew down a long corridor and into a bedroom, then closed the door behind us. The bedroom had once been Aunt
Ann’s. It was decorated in floral chintz, matching curtains, spreads, chaise.

“Think anybody saw us?” Whitman asked, out of breath.

“No.”

“I felt like hiding,” he said.

“Me, too.”

“Every time I’m here, I feel like that.”

“You do?”

He shrugged, looked around. “So does our dad, you know. He’s hiding out somewhere, or gone for a walk. Marguerite’s been looking for the last hour—before you came.”

Whitman. I’d been hearing his name for so long. I’d seen his first-grade picture and another one, a year later, when his front teeth were missing. In my mind I’d sealed him there—no front teeth—and it hadn’t occurred to me that he’d be older than I. He’d lived in England and then Boston. His mother was an artist of some kind, designed gardens or painted gardens. Marguerite’s photo albums were pocked with missing pictures of her.

“Where do you live? Boston?” I wanted to show that I knew something.

“Not for long,” he said.

“What?”

“We’re moving.”

“Where?”

“Here.” He pointed to the ground.

“San Benito?”

“God, no.” He made a face—a grimace. “California somewhere. Not here. Are you kidding?” He shrugged again. “You’re Mexican, aren’t you?”

Just like that. I’ll never forget it.

“My mother’s half,” I said, “and half Peruvian.” He stared at me. And I must have been staring back, a little hard.

He shrugged. “It’s no big deal. You don’t have to look at me like that. I was just curious, that’s all. How long are you staying—overnight?”

“How long are you staying?” I asked.

“Until the end of the weekend.”

“I’m just here for dinner.”

“Your mom, too?”

I shook my head.

“Oh, that’s too bad. Marguerite was hoping she might stay. Have you ever seen his old room? Dad’s. It’s not really a bedroom anymore.”

I followed him down a long hallway to a smaller, much sunnier wing of the second floor. We walked past a small, utilitarian bathroom and a tiny maid’s room. “That’s where Fitzy used to live,” Whitman said. “Have you heard about her yet?” I shook my head. “Dad fell in love with her. Miss FitzWilliam. Marguerite didn’t want to fire her, so Dad was moved into a bedroom farther away. But here,” he said, pushing open a door, “is the bedroom that used to be his.”

We entered a large room that was decorated more like an upstairs library than a bedroom. The walls were lined with shelves of books. A small television with a V-shaped antenna sat in the corner. There was a twin bed covered in upholstery fabric and pushed against the wall like a sofa. Above the door there was a framed photograph of Albert Einstein.

“I can’t believe Marguerite allows that to stay,” Whitman said, pointing to the photograph.

Whitman’s things were tossed all over—clothes, sneakers, copies of
Surfer
magazine. An open duffel sat on the floor. He walked into a
closet and pulled open a drawer in a built-in chest. He wanted to show me something he’d found. A few old swimming medals skidded around, their gold tone peeling off. There was a pocketwatch with a smashed glass, a tarnished silver thimble, and a box of assorted campaign buttons, about half of which said
AU H
20 64
.

“These couldn’t be Dad’s,” he said. Digging deeper into the box of buttons, Whitman picked out two more. One button said,
NO MORE FIRESIDE CHATS.
Another said,
WE DON’T WANT ELEANOR EITHER.

“Who’s Eleanor?” I asked.

“Eleanor Roosevelt.
You’ve never heard of her?
N.C. hated the Roosevelts so much that he used to collect Roosevelt dimes to keep them out of circulation. My mother told me that. The Ruins are all knee-jerk.”

“What?”

He pulled out the drawer farther and reached deep into it, extracting a circle of small, dark, brassy keys and shaking them like a baby rattle. “Not Dad, though. You know what he says. ‘Don’t vote—’”

“‘It only encourages them,’” I said. We both laughed.

“Look here,” Whitman said, reaching down to the back of the closet. Some framed pictures were stacked and leaning against the wall—a few diplomas, an award of some kind. Behind these were two hand-tinted photographs of a nude girl. She was standing in a pond or lake, kind of hunched over. Her breasts were small, almost flat. The water was so blue. Her skin was so pink. “I discovered this last night,” Whitman said.

“Who is it?”

“Nobody,” Whitman said. “That’s the whole point. She’s a nude. Doesn’t matter who she is. Isn’t that funny?”

I wasn’t sure why it was funny—and there was something familiar about the girl. Who was she? But after a long look, my eyes left the naked girl and traveled around the bedroom. I studied the soft brown carpet, the heavy wooden blinds, the dark, solid feeling. Until that moment, as I stood there with Whitman, it had never occurred to me that my father had been a boy once. He’d been a boy in this very place. But aside from the shelves of books about card tricks and magic, the picture of Einstein, the diplomas, a few swimming medals I wasn’t even sure were his, and maybe the nude girl, there was no trace of that boy anymore. Only Whitman, and his scattered clothes, and his open, empty duffel.

“Do you know how your mother met him?” he asked.

“How?”

“Oh, I have no idea,” Whitman said. “Just wondering.”

“She was dancing in New York. He came backstage.”

“Oh,” he said with a strange distance, or insincerity, as if he didn’t believe anything I said. “Marguerite says your mother doesn’t dance anymore.”

“She does,” I said.

“She does?”

“She’s teaching.”

“That must be fun.”

“I lied,” I said, sinking down on a twin bed against the wall. “She tried teaching but didn’t like it. She couldn’t stand all the girls who weren’t any good, who didn’t have any talent. She hated that. Sometimes I think she hates my father—our father—too.”

“She’s still in love with him,” Whitman said.

“Really?”

“Mine, too. She told me.”

“Oh.” He understood everything. I could see that.

“Have you met Cary?” I asked, wanting to change the subject to something easier. “She’s neat.”

Whitman said nothing.

“Don’t you think she’s neat?”

He sat down on the bed and threw a gangly arm around my shoulders. “I think you’re neat, Little Mexican. I thought I wouldn’t like having a sister. But maybe I do. Now, come on, let’s go find everybody.”

M
y mother was standing by her blue Mustang, poised to climb inside. A small crowd of us were gathered around her. We’d already said good-bye, wished her well—
Come again, come again
, like she was still part of the family. And suddenly he appeared out of nowhere, bounding up the sidewalk of El Molino Avenue in a blousy shirt and a pair of paisley bell-bottoms. “Connie! Connie!” my father cried out. His hair looked long and shaggy. His mouth was open in a big, cunning smile.

“Where have you been?” Marguerite called, not too loudly. Her party voice.

My mother winced and then managed a courageous smile. It was hard to tell whether it was completely artificial or something pulled out from the depths. It was hopeful, that smile, and crumbling into a tremor. My father put his hand on her bare arm. Would they kiss hello?

“How can you stand it?” Whitman whispered in my ear. He grabbed my hand and we tore off down the service driveway, pulling at each other’s hands and yelling out, comically, “Good-bye, everybody! Good-bye, good-bye!”

“Good-bye!”

“Good-bye!”

There was a burst of laughter behind us, the Ruins all waving and shouting, a wild release of tension, almost uncontrollable hysteria, and our father’s booming theatrical laugh. When we got to the garage, Whitman stopped—out of breath.

“Wow! Your mother,” he said, gasping. “She’s so much prettier than mine.”

FOUR

Seventh Grade

R
obbie lived at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac on Valley View Road. No matter how hard I pedaled my orange ten-speed, it was a seven-minute ride from Abuelita’s—uphill all the way, near Van
Dale’s illustrious mountains, where the houses were glassy and quiet, except for the yowling of coyotes at night. The Morrison house wasn’t one of those, though. It was a cookie-cutter ranch with folksy Dutch flourishes—shiny white Dutch door, scalloped trim, a funny gambrel roof that looked as if a barn had fallen out of the sky and landed on some pimply stucco walls. Out front, where the cement sidewalk curved into a semicircle, dichondra grass grew in islands surrounded by a sea of white stones, and small sculpted topiaries sprang up from nowhere. All this was the creation of Dr. Morrison, an unassuming chiropractor with big bones and a gentle comb-over, who spent his Saturdays tenderly pruning and edging and mowing his enormous rectangle of lush lawn out back.

All together, there were seven Morrisons who varied in small degrees of blondness and ruddiness and girth. Boo and Bradford Morrison had spawned two sleepy-eyed boys who couldn’t run very fast and three cherubic girls who were destined to spend adolescence and adulthood swinging from one fad diet to the next. Brad Jr. was the oldest offspring at nineteen, a romantic figure to me, particularly as his mission neared and he spent the summer immersed in the study of Japanese. I wasn’t really sure what that meant—“Brad’s mission”—or what he was supposed to be doing in Hiroshima, but by the rules of the Mormon Church, he was allowed to call home only twice a year now, on Christmas and his mother’s birthday. All other contact was by mail.

Next in line of Morrison offspring was Brenda, a lumbering strawberry blonde with a machine-gun laugh and so many freckles that if you stood far away from her, she almost looked tan. Like Brad Jr., at summer’s end she had departed the house on Valley View Road—been packed up and driven across the deserts of California
and Nevada to Brigham Young University in Utah, where she had begun college.

After Brenda there’d been a lull in fertility, a span of five or six years during which Dr. and Mrs. Morrison prayed a great deal, consulted a specialist, and were on the verge of adopting—they’d always wanted a big family—when they discovered that another baby was on the way. A miracle. A godsend. That story about Robbie, which was recounted many times to me, always fit with the rest of her. She brought surprise and relief wherever she wandered. Not that Brad was sullen or Brenda disagreeable. But in a family of seemingly good-natured and uncomplicated pleasers, Robbie was, by far, the most exuberant. She shouted herself hoarse at football games, had trouble staying seated during spelling bee, and managed to avoid being mean to anybody but, at the same time, never seemed fake. And if she’d been troubled by anything in her life—her chubbiness, her paltry allowance, her wardrobe of clothes made from McCall’s and Butterick patterns, or her irritating younger brother and sister, whom she was forced to baby-sit weekday afternoons—no one but God could have known. She was upbeat, almost pathologically so.

Mornings we walked to school together, Robbie descending into the flats of Van Dale and ringing our doorbell. In the afternoons we were shuttled home by her mother, who routinely pulled up to Eleanor J. Trupple Junior High between twenty and thirty minutes late, a harried figure behind the wheel of a dented gold Impala.

“Hola!”
Mrs. Morrison shouted, the window of the Impala rolled down. She and Dr. Morrison had met in Guadalajara, on a church trip, and they continued to be great lovers of Mexico—and thrilled to
inflict their bad Spanish on me. “
Nos tienes arretos ahora! Dos o tres solamente.”

“Just a few stops today,” I whispered to Robbie.

“Oh,
Mommmm
,” Robbie whined as she got into the car, but even her adolescent moans had a joyful, half-serious sound. “Are we going to miss our show?”

There were always stops. And there were always a few more than Mrs. Morrison said there’d be. Pulling up to the no-parking zone of retail shops and craft stores, she was always in need of posterboard, some colored yarn, or collage glue. She drove crazily and made dangerous U-turns. She never seemed entirely in control of her destiny, as if some higher power were guiding her. Sometimes Robbie and I were squeezed in the back along with painted sets for an upcoming musical or cakes in wobbling Tupperware containers. Sometimes we were asked to pitch in—otherwise we might not get home in time for
General Hospital
, our obsession since midsummer.